Yes. As I recall, they missed the 2 years of Win 3.0. Entirely.
I'm not sure about that, but they might also have missed win286 too. Did anyone but M$ have develpment specs for either?
Which, of course, wasn't influenced at all by your familiarity with WP and ability to help her get things done as compared to Word. Riiiiight.
Right. She was not my wife at the time she was forced to learn both at my parent's law firm. For Word Perfect, she had clear typographical terms in useful menues and a function key overlay for shortcuts. With word she had not such helpful help files and the "standard" menue system you refer to which was designed for the GUI not word processing.
Like I said, people who wrote for a living and knew their tools thought Word Perfect was better. M$ shoved it asside by dumping Word on MBA type twits, "bundles" for coroprate custormers and a host of other dirty tricks. I still know secrataries and business people who won't leave Word Perfect and it's still an accepted format for government offices, unlike all versions of unstable and crappy Word.
... claim that the example is not fictional, it's her. Hogwash.
Yep, there's no way she's using XP. No real writer would tollerate a word processor that auto corrects and auto formats, much less on that does it wrong every time and imposes itself as your email editor too. Ever see a list like this:
1, item 1
2, item 2? That's the only way to keep Word from making an auto list that forces you to start all over again. It's bad enough using that shit as an engineer. A person who's primary job is writing would never be able get anything done like that. What were they thinking?
"weed out" employees who did not live up to Microsoft's code of behaviour.
I'm told that drugs make people immoral, but I had no idea they could be that bad. Isn't it against federal law to distrubute that kind of stuff? Mr. Ballmer should report to fitness for duty right away.
Yes, she will be punished for doing what they told her to do. Nothing new here, I don't know anyone who made a living doing what M$ wanted them to do, do you? If nothing else, her improvement plan to actually use XP will so screw her up she will be terminated in six weeks.
So what's wrong with mailing software to people at no cost? I know, I know, better records keeping might help them cut down on the redundancy, but the concept is not evil.
Evil is making an operating system based on planned obsolescence. I've got a whole file cabinet full of useless floppies and CDs that I actually paid for. They all came with stupid restrictive liceneses and died with the OS they were designed for. If it were not for free software, I would have replaced each and every one of those programs multiple times by now. Instead, I have Debian with free mirrors everywhere so CDs are almost useless.
I encourage AOL to adopt the Debian distribution model for all of their software, but I'm not going to burden their landfill with my CDs. You might go to jail if you tried the same stupid stunt with lead sinkers. AOL's Mozilla project shows that they understand much and keeps them on my good side. No, you two don't get my CDs.
Asside, is the AOL server package in Debian really all you need to be an AOL ISP?
I can't believe no one has posted the "Let's Go" serries yet. It's written by Havard Students and is generally an excellent source of information for cultural travelers on a budget. The introduction to each of the books has suggestions for getting to the destination that have been used by the authors, such as courrier jobs. The books themselves are devided by region and city and contain what to see information, where to stay and how to get help. To find out how good it is, look up a city you are familiar with. For New Orleans they found Cafe Du Monde in the Quarter and Frankie and Johnny's uptown. The Frankie and Johny's find was excellent and the author obviously paired up with someone who knew where to go then shared the information. They have a web page, but the books are still all you need to see what most people consider the most intersting stuff in the world on a budget.
The only thing to add to the Let's go advice is to use the web to find people willing to walk you around where you are going. Hello to "Damian Veen" who was so nice as to show my wife and I Paris. My brother in law knew him from, of all things, music chat.
By the way, you can still see most of the nicer places in the world with a job, a wife and even an infant. If you can't live in Paris, a week there is nice.
WordPerfect was utter shit. It lost the market share because they didn't transition from DOS-based word processing to WYSIWYG GUI word processing fast enough. And when they finally did make the transition they released a crappy product that was full of bugs and missing features.
Uhhh, no, Word Perfect 5.2 was available soon after Win3.1 and it had a much better interface than M$ Word. To this day Word is frustrating to use as it adds codes without asking then conceals them. Word Perfect had a code view window where you could fix the few mistakes more complex routines might make. Asside from that, WP used standard typographical and typesetting terms and their menues reflected that order. M$ made up their own terms which were confusing and hide missing funtionality.
Despite some people's fear of "codes", WP was easier to learn too. My wife tried both of the programs side by side without much experience with either. After a few weeks of use her clear and unbiased opinion was that Word Perfect was easy to learn and use and M$ Word was difficult on both scores. The 5.2 interface was so good that secretaries refused to "upgrade" to more feature filled interfaces that Corel came up with to compete on the feature front. An excellent balance was struck between automation, ease of use and ability to manipulate tags.
Word users are pig headed fools. The average Word Fanatic moved from non-graphical WP or nothing to graphical Word and just learned to do things that way. M$ "won" the editor battle because they dumped Word on MBA dummies who made purchasing decisions later. Blind from the start, those who have strong feelings about using Word are the same suckers who think IE is great and get hit up for $500 every two years when Bill cranks the upgrade machine. Ego plays a large roll here because Bill keeps telling the folks handing him money just how smart and productive they are to be using "standard" software.
I gave up. Vi with HTML and generated graphs and scanned in equations work just fine for me. If I ever really really need it, I've got a copy of WP 8 for linux that works with Red Hat 6.2. If I ever become a typesetter, I'll learn LaTex. Word blows as a word processor and is unacceptable as a means of sharing information. If I can't open up someone's crap with KWord, I'll let them know about it. In the mean time little chips like this will keep that from happening as often. Word Perfect might come back if they export to real XML or HTML, PS or other published and recognized standards. Until then, who really cares? wp is just another format I can't read any more.
Nope, Clippy is watching and it's turned on. I was unfortunate enough to have it on win2k at work. If you actually push the help the silly thing in one of it's many stupid animated facades comes up. When you want to turn it off, the only option that does not produce an error message with a warning is "hide". So, Clippy is there stealing your clock cycles to do God knows what while it watches your every move. Yes, it's slow.
Ever heard of Compact Flash? Small is great. The prices are finally comming down to earth.
These folks missed the boat. Not even IBM can make a go of microdrives, that's why they sold the division. I want one of those 1G models. If these folks can make a compact flash drive that fits their disks, that would be cool. They have a big race to beat falling compact flash prices.
Users of these PCs can't dropkick the units or throw them out the window like regular PC users can.
Where's the stress relief when the damn thing Blue Screens?
Don't throw your desk out the window, throw Windows out of your desk.
The desk computer is the future of the computer. Imagine a screen big enough to be the suface of the desk with handwriting recongition everywere. Forms would be forms again, drawings could be ARC C size again and the paper mill would cry. Virtual desktop window managers would reduce the size of desk actually needed and still make for good project seperation and place keeping. You could still have your mechanical keyboard, and perhaps a small vertical screen for special purposes, but most people will end up not needing them. Displays will get cheap enough for this, it's just a matter of having software flexible enough to fit it. Free software obviously has the advantage.
It's funny someone at Time should feel that way. Time sent me a free copy of their magazine this month. It contained several adverts for tobaco companies, dated news and lame opinion on why we should blow up Iraq. It one found itself in the trash quickly and I felt sorry for the scrub trees that gave their all to make it happen. The Wall Street Journal, a daily publication, barely manages to stay relavent. Time and other monthly publications do not. Oh wait, it's an art critic! He must have been a mac person. Bob, you flamer, I'd say it was time for you to find another job. The era of monthly news magazines is far longer gone than that of dial up ISPs.
the good stuff, like the release of Visual Studio.NET, is ignored
What are you talking about?! M$ paid good money for all those banner ads here. What, you've got Slashdot images turned off so you don't have to see those ads? Shame on you for stealing from Slashdot. Be a good boy and buy an extra coppy of that silly compiler so you can tell me what's really good about it. Tell me when you can port it to anything but win32 and when it's hundreds of dollars better than gcc a year. The banner ads, though expensive, were not informative.
Whew, it took forever to find that image in that huge ugly page. I've never seen so much crap uploaded just to say "uspecified error." That include is a killer. They might not know what's wrong with it, but I do, it looks like an out of control VB of MSFC monster more than it does a web page. Is that what the.NET will be? Oh well, the picture is worth 1024 words and it takes up 11K of space. Nice work!
To the rest, HR5469 DOESN'T CHANGE ANYTHING. If it passes or fails, nothing changes for the smallest webcasters.
Others say, CARP is crap. If there is no change, it must still be crap.
Here's the ammount of money I'm willing to give the RIAA to broadcast/host/make available non RIAA music - 0 -. That's zero, zilch, nadda, nothing baby. That's the deal, you can keep your golden stream on the soon to be obsolete fixed frequency radio broadcasts with their $500,000/year fees. I'm not impressed with it and your long rant leaves me less than reassured. Oh yeah, if you would tell your friends over at COX Cable to get their thumb off my upload rates and quit blocking my ports, I might be able to support more than one listener. I'm not going to hold my breath and I'm looking into this neat not so new 802.11B stuff. Please don't get any ideas about charging me money for avoiding RIAA rip offs there. Go away now.
If you are refering to SMS, save it. I worked for a couple of years at _fortune_500_mess_ that had an extensive in house software develpment. The suff they made was awsome, but the SMS set up sucked eggs. It had to completely install the software almost everytime, and was plauged with issues of whole computer restart shortcuts being invalidated and other maddening problems. In the end, there was nothing custom about it. The company canned it's IT people and are spending more than ever on less useful than ever tools that don't fit their needs. All the M$ way.
Freedom to use the OS however you want to. I want to use my OS to get my daily work done. There isn't much beyond that that the OS has to do. This isn't really a clear argument, can you be more specific?
How about the freedom to study what your company's daily needs really are, roll up a custom distro that includes all the applications needed then roll it out over 1,000 machines? No, I suppose it's much better to pay M$ or Apple per seat for the GENERIC_DISTRO that imperfectly fits everyone from a blind grandmother to reactor enginners. Shesh! What is your work and what tools would you really like? Is M$ Internet Exploder and the Office really all anyone needs? OEM's have to beg permision to change the wallpaper! How flexible is that?
To be fair, the use of "our" in a piece such as this often signifies "the person this piece is about". When a writer says "our hero", she usually is not claiming ownership.
Trust me, when M$ says "our man", "our software", "our platform", and "our partners" they are claiming ownership, total complete and absolute. The mechanisms of ownership may elude honest people, but everyone feels it. M$ motto, "What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours too." What's not fair about that?
Oh, your heartplug? Everyone has one of those here.
The key to getting hardware to work with your computer is to have the correct drivers, the software that enables your PC to communicate with your hardware. Windows XP or your computer manufacturer will pre-install most of them. If not, go to the Web site of the company that makes the peripheral you want to attach to find the most current drivers.
OK , I just don't get it. How can I get my imac to run all that great software she's talking about? My personal computer has all the specs on the XP box, but it just does not seem to work. What am I doing wrong? Like, it just sits there.
He's not making that comparison at all. He says this flat out:
...it's understandable that Redmond would shut down a company making money off unlicensed Microsoft knockoffs...
and compares it to:
...the DMCA providing legal ammunition, companies are all too willing to clamp down on this unique-to-the-era form of customer loyalty.
As an investor, it's a matter of money to him. All he can see are $, and does not care that the SAME thing is done by the "knock off" company and the customer. He misses altogether the absurdity of outlawing modifications to one's own property because he has believes the DMCA was made so that big companies can make more money. Oh yeah, he's right about that. Your rights are not important to him.
You seem to have bought into that slavish logic too when you say, "a chip, that likely uses copyrighted code in the chip, that's primarily designed to allow pirating of games for the Xbox." First, likely is weak stuff even if you buy the whole copyright gig. Second, "pirate" is a silly word to use for copying your own games, even for mass publication of someone else's games. Copyright violation is not murder on the high seas. Third, suppose I did take M$ BIOS and put is a little patch that defeats M$'s silly "use dis box dis way or no way" code? If I were to sell it, would I really be violating M$ copyright by publishing it? Can you really compare this to a book or other human readable copyrightable works where both the modified and unmodified versions can NOT be used at the same time? In boat design, it's called a splash - you take your competitor's boat make a mold of it and then mod the mold - poof, it's your boat. Think about it! Copyright has gotten way out of hand when it's being applied to what is acutally a machine part so that other parts can not interact with the machine.
The DCMA is an evil and unAmerican extension of copyright. Outlawing tools that can be used to circumvent copyright protections makes the tools of publication illegal. Obviously, a printing press can be used to print other people's work. Yet protecting the rights of Americans to use printing presses is what the first amendment is all about. This whole business of "licensing" to do things to your own property or say things is outragous.
Security problems exists - it may or may not be worse in Linux than windows...keep your systems updated regardless.
If M$ security patches delivered security, M$ would not have a bad reputation for security. I'm tired of hearing this old saw because it is not true. M$ security "updates" are usually huge, hudreds of megabytes, and contain far more than security updates. It might even be argued that M$ patches create more exploits than they fix becuase M$ is so bussy trying to screw everyone out of playlists and other silly marketing data.
Aberdeen, extensively quoted, is obviously a paid whore and clueless. Anyone who would compare the security of the "not designed for security" M$ world to the peer reviewed world of multi user Linux and not see one as clearly superior to the other has loose screws. Their website states, "Unauthorized use or reproduction is forbidden." I'd say there were many things they don't get.
Somehow I doubt that a themometer will be allowed to shut down anything, in law or in practice.
Don't forget the practical implications of hardware and software enslavement. The author points out the practical considerations. You have pointed out the loss of a free press. The two are equivalent and one will invariably lead to the other.
Consider an automotive emmisions control computer. It may refuse to start your engine if it's last recorded information indicates that the engine will polute. Oh yeah, that might be codified in future laws to enforce exitsting laws on polution control so that break tags and inspections become redundant. Sounds good? The state, we can be sure, will continue to exact yearly fees to own such an automobile, perhaps to combate software "fraud" like fixing your car or examining it's computer without the appropriate licenses, certifications and equipment. Can you imagine a world where people used to just fix their cars in their garrage? Ah!
The code in such embeded systems will be designed to make you buy a new car every four years. It will invariably refuse to start if you miss a monthly oil change a yearly check up or you car is just older than five years old without a huge fee.
Right now so much as release of information on the correct interpretation of diagnostic codes is being debated by lawmakers. Do you think those folks have a clue as to what is comming? The people who gave you DMCA and are considering forced DRM have no clue about such implications. Continue to sound off while you can.
Content creation is important as it allows us to create free software that maintains user control over equipment. It also enables us to make our case for such things being a good thing to begin with. The second is an old and well know benifit of free press. The first is new, but vital for the second to be true as you point out.
... the idea that DRM code will "somehow" find its way into every IC / processor, even when such application is utterly useless and contrary to the design constraints (and adds substantial costs) is simply unfettered paranoia.... DRM -- In its present form it only protects the rights of the corporations, not the rights of the consumer.... However, this article furthers the same "idea taken to an extreme" paranoia that made people worry whether their car would start Y2K morning.
So why is it that every major chip maker is coming out with DRM when there is NO "consumer" demand? DRM is univerally loathed and no one wants to buy it. The reason is that it's being pushed by publishers, who have displayed their greed before, and the chip makers themselves who would love it if everyone had to constantly buy new equipment. It's not economic! It will cost more, it's performance will be poor by all measures and no one wants it. Yet it is hapening.
If the chip makers can get away with it on your PC they WILL get away with it elsewhre. History shows that todays big iron is tomorrows embeded system. If they can't, they will continue to push legislation that forces it. In the mean time, it's much easier to push DRM onto closed boxes that few people other than embeded systems designers ever examine or care about. EVIL. Cars, ironically, are a great example of demand for gimped up systems that defeat the end user. Yes, in the end those gimped up systems might refuse to start a perfectly sound engine. The author is entirely informed and correct.
Comparing this to Y2K hysteria is at best ignorant. The alarms should be loud and clear. "Digital Rights Management" IS and extreem concept on it's own. The whole idea of you being deprived of control of YOUR machine because you might "steal" a look at your entertainment without paying a fee to a publisher is a radical concept impossible to impliment in the past. Libraires will not be possible if DRM takes hold and is accepted. DRM will be used to impliment the DMCA's non reverse engineering clauses for embeded systems, regardless of performance because clueless executives make up for their ignorance with greed. The author's insight into performance issues for embeded systems and how it will happen is a useful thing to consider.
You must be right. 80% of computer users in China were disatisfied with their computer's performance. That matches up well with performance internationaly and also with M$ percentage of computer O$. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Ture. It's a research tool for security firms that can help provide data that will help sell security services
False. It's a research tool for security firms that can't provide security because their clients insist on using insecure software like Microsoft Windows TM. I imagine the silly thing will disrupt legitimate corporate communications and collect a bunch of usless "Valuable user at 192.168.1.1" information.
As you seem to suggest, the only way to secure your wireless network is to treat it as an external insecure network. The streams must be encryped (WEP no good) and the connections must be authenticated. If you don't do that you just might end up with half your NT admins in the park accross the street.
If you just hand out IP addresses and service to anyone who walks by, you can expect people to take it. They might as well put PCs on the street and then complain when people stop and surf or play solitair. Duh, what will they think of next, trying to secure bags of money in the lobby with nerve gas?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about that, but they might also have missed win286 too. Did anyone but M$ have develpment specs for either?
Which, of course, wasn't influenced at all by your familiarity with WP and ability to help her get things done as compared to Word. Riiiiight.
Right. She was not my wife at the time she was forced to learn both at my parent's law firm. For Word Perfect, she had clear typographical terms in useful menues and a function key overlay for shortcuts. With word she had not such helpful help files and the "standard" menue system you refer to which was designed for the GUI not word processing.
Like I said, people who wrote for a living and knew their tools thought Word Perfect was better. M$ shoved it asside by dumping Word on MBA type twits, "bundles" for coroprate custormers and a host of other dirty tricks. I still know secrataries and business people who won't leave Word Perfect and it's still an accepted format for government offices, unlike all versions of unstable and crappy Word.
Yep, there's no way she's using XP. No real writer would tollerate a word processor that auto corrects and auto formats, much less on that does it wrong every time and imposes itself as your email editor too. Ever see a list like this:
1, item 1
2, item 2?
That's the only way to keep Word from making an auto list that forces you to start all over again. It's bad enough using that shit as an engineer. A person who's primary job is writing would never be able get anything done like that. What were they thinking?
I'm told that drugs make people immoral, but I had no idea they could be that bad. Isn't it against federal law to distrubute that kind of stuff? Mr. Ballmer should report to fitness for duty right away.
Yes, she will be punished for doing what they told her to do. Nothing new here, I don't know anyone who made a living doing what M$ wanted them to do, do you? If nothing else, her improvement plan to actually use XP will so screw her up she will be terminated in six weeks.
Evil is making an operating system based on planned obsolescence. I've got a whole file cabinet full of useless floppies and CDs that I actually paid for. They all came with stupid restrictive liceneses and died with the OS they were designed for. If it were not for free software, I would have replaced each and every one of those programs multiple times by now. Instead, I have Debian with free mirrors everywhere so CDs are almost useless.
I encourage AOL to adopt the Debian distribution model for all of their software, but I'm not going to burden their landfill with my CDs. You might go to jail if you tried the same stupid stunt with lead sinkers. AOL's Mozilla project shows that they understand much and keeps them on my good side. No, you two don't get my CDs.
Asside, is the AOL server package in Debian really all you need to be an AOL ISP?
The only thing to add to the Let's go advice is to use the web to find people willing to walk you around where you are going. Hello to "Damian Veen" who was so nice as to show my wife and I Paris. My brother in law knew him from, of all things, music chat.
By the way, you can still see most of the nicer places in the world with a job, a wife and even an infant. If you can't live in Paris, a week there is nice.
Uhhh, no, Word Perfect 5.2 was available soon after Win3.1 and it had a much better interface than M$ Word. To this day Word is frustrating to use as it adds codes without asking then conceals them. Word Perfect had a code view window where you could fix the few mistakes more complex routines might make. Asside from that, WP used standard typographical and typesetting terms and their menues reflected that order. M$ made up their own terms which were confusing and hide missing funtionality.
Despite some people's fear of "codes", WP was easier to learn too. My wife tried both of the programs side by side without much experience with either. After a few weeks of use her clear and unbiased opinion was that Word Perfect was easy to learn and use and M$ Word was difficult on both scores. The 5.2 interface was so good that secretaries refused to "upgrade" to more feature filled interfaces that Corel came up with to compete on the feature front. An excellent balance was struck between automation, ease of use and ability to manipulate tags.
Word users are pig headed fools. The average Word Fanatic moved from non-graphical WP or nothing to graphical Word and just learned to do things that way. M$ "won" the editor battle because they dumped Word on MBA dummies who made purchasing decisions later. Blind from the start, those who have strong feelings about using Word are the same suckers who think IE is great and get hit up for $500 every two years when Bill cranks the upgrade machine. Ego plays a large roll here because Bill keeps telling the folks handing him money just how smart and productive they are to be using "standard" software.
I gave up. Vi with HTML and generated graphs and scanned in equations work just fine for me. If I ever really really need it, I've got a copy of WP 8 for linux that works with Red Hat 6.2. If I ever become a typesetter, I'll learn LaTex. Word blows as a word processor and is unacceptable as a means of sharing information. If I can't open up someone's crap with KWord, I'll let them know about it. In the mean time little chips like this will keep that from happening as often. Word Perfect might come back if they export to real XML or HTML, PS or other published and recognized standards. Until then, who really cares? wp is just another format I can't read any more.
Nope, Clippy is watching and it's turned on. I was unfortunate enough to have it on win2k at work. If you actually push the help the silly thing in one of it's many stupid animated facades comes up. When you want to turn it off, the only option that does not produce an error message with a warning is "hide". So, Clippy is there stealing your clock cycles to do God knows what while it watches your every move. Yes, it's slow.
ViGore, on the other hand, is honest.
Word Perfect needs no assistant.
These folks missed the boat. Not even IBM can make a go of microdrives, that's why they sold the division. I want one of those 1G models. If these folks can make a compact flash drive that fits their disks, that would be cool. They have a big race to beat falling compact flash prices.
Where's the stress relief when the damn thing Blue Screens?
Don't throw your desk out the window, throw Windows out of your desk.
The desk computer is the future of the computer. Imagine a screen big enough to be the suface of the desk with handwriting recongition everywere. Forms would be forms again, drawings could be ARC C size again and the paper mill would cry. Virtual desktop window managers would reduce the size of desk actually needed and still make for good project seperation and place keeping. You could still have your mechanical keyboard, and perhaps a small vertical screen for special purposes, but most people will end up not needing them. Displays will get cheap enough for this, it's just a matter of having software flexible enough to fit it. Free software obviously has the advantage.
It's funny someone at Time should feel that way. Time sent me a free copy of their magazine this month. It contained several adverts for tobaco companies, dated news and lame opinion on why we should blow up Iraq. It one found itself in the trash quickly and I felt sorry for the scrub trees that gave their all to make it happen. The Wall Street Journal, a daily publication, barely manages to stay relavent. Time and other monthly publications do not. Oh wait, it's an art critic! He must have been a mac person. Bob, you flamer, I'd say it was time for you to find another job. The era of monthly news magazines is far longer gone than that of dial up ISPs.
Those only work on windows, so what have you really lost?
What are you talking about?! M$ paid good money for all those banner ads here. What, you've got Slashdot images turned off so you don't have to see those ads? Shame on you for stealing from Slashdot. Be a good boy and buy an extra coppy of that silly compiler so you can tell me what's really good about it. Tell me when you can port it to anything but win32 and when it's hundreds of dollars better than gcc a year. The banner ads, though expensive, were not informative.
Whew, it took forever to find that image in that huge ugly page. I've never seen so much crap uploaded just to say "uspecified error." That include is a killer. They might not know what's wrong with it, but I do, it looks like an out of control VB of MSFC monster more than it does a web page. Is that what the .NET will be? Oh well, the picture is worth 1024 words and it takes up 11K of space. Nice work!
To the rest, HR5469 DOESN'T CHANGE ANYTHING. If it passes or fails, nothing changes for the smallest webcasters.
Others say, CARP is crap. If there is no change, it must still be crap.
Here's the ammount of money I'm willing to give the RIAA to broadcast/host/make available non RIAA music - 0 -. That's zero, zilch, nadda, nothing baby. That's the deal, you can keep your golden stream on the soon to be obsolete fixed frequency radio broadcasts with their $500,000/year fees. I'm not impressed with it and your long rant leaves me less than reassured. Oh yeah, if you would tell your friends over at COX Cable to get their thumb off my upload rates and quit blocking my ports, I might be able to support more than one listener. I'm not going to hold my breath and I'm looking into this neat not so new 802.11B stuff. Please don't get any ideas about charging me money for avoiding RIAA rip offs there. Go away now.
The more you use M$ the more you lose.
How about the freedom to study what your company's daily needs really are, roll up a custom distro that includes all the applications needed then roll it out over 1,000 machines? No, I suppose it's much better to pay M$ or Apple per seat for the GENERIC_DISTRO that imperfectly fits everyone from a blind grandmother to reactor enginners. Shesh! What is your work and what tools would you really like? Is M$ Internet Exploder and the Office really all anyone needs? OEM's have to beg permision to change the wallpaper! How flexible is that?
Trust me, when M$ says "our man", "our software", "our platform", and "our partners" they are claiming ownership, total complete and absolute. The mechanisms of ownership may elude honest people, but everyone feels it. M$ motto, "What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours too." What's not fair about that?
Oh, your heartplug? Everyone has one of those here.
OK , I just don't get it. How can I get my imac to run all that great software she's talking about? My personal computer has all the specs on the XP box, but it just does not seem to work. What am I doing wrong? Like, it just sits there.
and compares it to:
As an investor, it's a matter of money to him. All he can see are $, and does not care that the SAME thing is done by the "knock off" company and the customer. He misses altogether the absurdity of outlawing modifications to one's own property because he has believes the DMCA was made so that big companies can make more money. Oh yeah, he's right about that. Your rights are not important to him.
You seem to have bought into that slavish logic too when you say, "a chip, that likely uses copyrighted code in the chip, that's primarily designed to allow pirating of games for the Xbox." First, likely is weak stuff even if you buy the whole copyright gig. Second, "pirate" is a silly word to use for copying your own games, even for mass publication of someone else's games. Copyright violation is not murder on the high seas. Third, suppose I did take M$ BIOS and put is a little patch that defeats M$'s silly "use dis box dis way or no way" code? If I were to sell it, would I really be violating M$ copyright by publishing it? Can you really compare this to a book or other human readable copyrightable works where both the modified and unmodified versions can NOT be used at the same time? In boat design, it's called a splash - you take your competitor's boat make a mold of it and then mod the mold - poof, it's your boat. Think about it! Copyright has gotten way out of hand when it's being applied to what is acutally a machine part so that other parts can not interact with the machine.
The DCMA is an evil and unAmerican extension of copyright. Outlawing tools that can be used to circumvent copyright protections makes the tools of publication illegal. Obviously, a printing press can be used to print other people's work. Yet protecting the rights of Americans to use printing presses is what the first amendment is all about. This whole business of "licensing" to do things to your own property or say things is outragous.
If M$ security patches delivered security, M$ would not have a bad reputation for security. I'm tired of hearing this old saw because it is not true. M$ security "updates" are usually huge, hudreds of megabytes, and contain far more than security updates. It might even be argued that M$ patches create more exploits than they fix becuase M$ is so bussy trying to screw everyone out of playlists and other silly marketing data.
Aberdeen, extensively quoted, is obviously a paid whore and clueless. Anyone who would compare the security of the "not designed for security" M$ world to the peer reviewed world of multi user Linux and not see one as clearly superior to the other has loose screws. Their website states, "Unauthorized use or reproduction is forbidden." I'd say there were many things they don't get.
Don't forget the practical implications of hardware and software enslavement. The author points out the practical considerations. You have pointed out the loss of a free press. The two are equivalent and one will invariably lead to the other.
Consider an automotive emmisions control computer. It may refuse to start your engine if it's last recorded information indicates that the engine will polute. Oh yeah, that might be codified in future laws to enforce exitsting laws on polution control so that break tags and inspections become redundant. Sounds good? The state, we can be sure, will continue to exact yearly fees to own such an automobile, perhaps to combate software "fraud" like fixing your car or examining it's computer without the appropriate licenses, certifications and equipment. Can you imagine a world where people used to just fix their cars in their garrage? Ah!
The code in such embeded systems will be designed to make you buy a new car every four years. It will invariably refuse to start if you miss a monthly oil change a yearly check up or you car is just older than five years old without a huge fee.
Right now so much as release of information on the correct interpretation of diagnostic codes is being debated by lawmakers. Do you think those folks have a clue as to what is comming? The people who gave you DMCA and are considering forced DRM have no clue about such implications. Continue to sound off while you can.
Content creation is important as it allows us to create free software that maintains user control over equipment. It also enables us to make our case for such things being a good thing to begin with. The second is an old and well know benifit of free press. The first is new, but vital for the second to be true as you point out.
So why is it that every major chip maker is coming out with DRM when there is NO "consumer" demand? DRM is univerally loathed and no one wants to buy it. The reason is that it's being pushed by publishers, who have displayed their greed before, and the chip makers themselves who would love it if everyone had to constantly buy new equipment. It's not economic! It will cost more, it's performance will be poor by all measures and no one wants it. Yet it is hapening.
If the chip makers can get away with it on your PC they WILL get away with it elsewhre. History shows that todays big iron is tomorrows embeded system. If they can't, they will continue to push legislation that forces it. In the mean time, it's much easier to push DRM onto closed boxes that few people other than embeded systems designers ever examine or care about. EVIL. Cars, ironically, are a great example of demand for gimped up systems that defeat the end user. Yes, in the end those gimped up systems might refuse to start a perfectly sound engine. The author is entirely informed and correct.
Comparing this to Y2K hysteria is at best ignorant. The alarms should be loud and clear. "Digital Rights Management" IS and extreem concept on it's own. The whole idea of you being deprived of control of YOUR machine because you might "steal" a look at your entertainment without paying a fee to a publisher is a radical concept impossible to impliment in the past. Libraires will not be possible if DRM takes hold and is accepted. DRM will be used to impliment the DMCA's non reverse engineering clauses for embeded systems, regardless of performance because clueless executives make up for their ignorance with greed. The author's insight into performance issues for embeded systems and how it will happen is a useful thing to consider.
Is XP and DRM where you wanted to go yesterday?
Ture.
It's a research tool for security firms that can help provide data that will help sell security services
False. It's a research tool for security firms that can't provide security because their clients insist on using insecure software like Microsoft Windows TM. I imagine the silly thing will disrupt legitimate corporate communications and collect a bunch of usless "Valuable user at 192.168.1.1" information.
As you seem to suggest, the only way to secure your wireless network is to treat it as an external insecure network. The streams must be encryped (WEP no good) and the connections must be authenticated. If you don't do that you just might end up with half your NT admins in the park accross the street.
If you just hand out IP addresses and service to anyone who walks by, you can expect people to take it. They might as well put PCs on the street and then complain when people stop and surf or play solitair. Duh, what will they think of next, trying to secure bags of money in the lobby with nerve gas?