RMS admits that GNU is not engineered for user-friendlyness
Nope, 100% wrong. Nothing could be more friendly than having 100% control of your computer.
The goal of GNU is to produce the world's best software and that includes ease of use. The current state of development for GPL'd software now includes several excellent mouse driven user interfaces, extensive help files, just as many examples and the easiest installs available anywhere. Is there a single piece of comercial software that you can point to that does not have a free analog that's just as easy to use and more powerful?
Now back to topic, which is that M$ has no security clue. If you have read this much, you deserve what follows.
Here is my favorite qoute from the technical details section of their silly warning about software other people put on your machine when they crack it:
Finding any backdoor Trojan indicates that the server is extremely vulnerable to privilege escalation and hacking.
What the hell is a "backdoor Trojan"?! Oh my God, they said that. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Is it more effective than M$ at preventing the spread of viruses? Is that all they got out of their monthlong security hug? Can you help me out Mr oyenstinker? Someone at the knowledge base is going to have a hard time getting his supervisor off his back after that gafe. Ahhh! Send more Trojans, fast.
What kind of privilege escalation is there on a userless OS?
There once was a game where a virus was designed to look like a popular OS. Reality has caught up with parody.
I brought my laptop with me on my last trip to store pictures. It was great, no wires, no drivers. I didn't lug a printer along and I doubt I'll bother to print any of the pictures when it's so much cheaper and better to ftp and burn them to CDs.
Throughput was great too. PCMCIA does 8 Mbyte/second. Woops, who needs wireless when you have something simple like compact flash? I
Actually, there's a big difference between a typeface - the set of curves that define the shape of a character - and a computer font - the code that draws those curves. The latter has full protection of law.
Would that be because some joker like Bill Gates made it possible to patent algorithms? What is Adobe up to here? How is it that they feel welcome to use someone else's IP but won't let others even talk about how crapy theirs is? Adobe, you suck. Yeah, you were an early adopter and comercializer of electronic formats, so what?
The real effectiveness lies in isolating those who know things. MOST people are not going to bother to cirumvent the filter and will continue to have their world shaped by the party. When and if you ever displease the party, "hacker" will be added to your list of crimes and no one will have any idea what you are talking about. You brought it on yourself your friends can say as they turn their back on you.
I see the same kind of thing right here in the good USA. I just got burnt for "excessive" personal internet usage at my engineering job. My peers don't know what a google search is much less slashdot. Trying to explain that this a software news site and that I read it in part to keep up programing skill would be futile. Other people listen to online music, read CNN and other less work related things with impunity.
As freedoms and personal dignity wane here, the rest of the world will suffer that much more.
Look for your ability to post anything that would require filtering anywhere to go away. As multinational publishers and telcoms continue to gobble up the web, your ability to publish uncensored pages goes away.
Anyone else want to build alternate networks? Think light and radio based backbone nodes with 811.b local distribution. No, I don't want to republish RIAA crap, swap porn or other Warez. What I want is the ability to publish MY content without AOL/McDisneySoft looking over my shoulder at my big five megs of advert wracked Geo Cities "web" pages.
When all the censors finish their work, what's left will be a serries of billboards not worth browsing.
yea you could call it a troll, but i have to say this isnt really like slashdot.
Posting a warez link on front pafe
Was someone siffing on your fafe when you saif that, or do you juff talf thif way? =:>
Currently slashdot is kind justyfying priracy and stealing in names of rights and all bull shit. This is not done. Free software and open source DO NOT EQUATE with piracy.
Get a sense of humor and logic please. No justification for the "theft" of Cisco's non-free technology is offered. This article simply states what can be done. It might make you wonder why big dumb companies shell out thousands of bucks for hardware that should cost about a hundred and hardware that has better free alternatives. It might also make you wonder why it's illegal to make a copy of machine only readable noise, especially code that's available off Cisco's tftp server. You might even research the mostly public University funded start up of Cisco. Naf, thaf woulf be insiful and infomatif.
A couple of days back you posted a zip file for crashing windows
You don't need a zip file to crash windows, silly troll, it does that all on it's own.
getting hold of flash for cisco is illegal. "Difficult to procure" thats what the article says. Well its plain illegal.
How about a link to that effect? Owning hardware illegal? Give me a break. What kind of silly laws do you live under?
This is a no brainer. Don't expect telcoms, music publishers, TV people, commercial software vendors, governments and any other large, entrenched and threatened industry to say that the web is good for anything but kiddie porn, bomb making and whatever horror is up for the day. I'm tired of hearing all the BS from the so called reputable news sources.
Advertising is in a slump because no one expects anyone to have any money soon. The NYT itself is in the same shitcan everyone else is in. Sorry, that's the way the cycle turns.
The problem for those interests is that people will get what they want without the helping hand of those who would control them. People want telcom services they don't have to pay by the minute for. They want news they can pull for themselves rather than the stream of push current media provides. They want feedback on that news, pure objective informed voices on the spot. They want to make their songs availble to others without the intervention of one of five big publishers. They will build what it takes to get those things and those that publish nonsense about it will simply fail. Their are more powerful motives than profit.
Some software is created just for fun. Other software is created to insure that you have control of your computer. Don't confuse "commercialism" with the evil practices of current commercial software vendors. They are stupid and will be replaced. Much software created just for fun is of great use to all of us becuse it was licensed as free. Go visit clarity to learn what why and how.
...proud that they've turned the TV off. It's as if they think it's a huge achievement that puts them above the common man.
...It's like being proud of no longer reading books, or no longer listening to music, or no longer going out to restaurants or movies.
Nope and nope. Not better than the common man, unless you define the common man as a passive lump that lives to suck down mindless dribble. Nor is turning off the boob tube like denying yourself of those other things. Those things you chose out of many things and only do once or twice a week. TV just rams crap down at you. The less of it you watch, the more time you have for those other good things.
I'm not proud of the fact that I don't waste my time watching TV, I'm proud of the things I've done instead. BS, most of a MS, got an excellent job, and competitive bike riding. Not bad eh? Some of them would have to go if I wasted an hour or two a night trying to get news and relaxation off the tube. I love to tell people that they should turn the damn thing off because I want others to have good things too. How unsatisfying a source of news and relaxation TV is can only be understood after two or three months of not watching it. After a year or so, TV looks like it's broadcast from another planet.
Orwell called it prolefeed and it was for everyone.
In a better world, people will continue to sing, act and entertain each other without the sponsorship of large and small corporate intersts. I'm looking forward to the death of advertising in general. Boycot advertisers when you can.
There's always one microturd pushing some goofey M$ junk around here. A technology is not a business model, nor is wise to advocate a solution before you know the problem. Medical records is probably the worst place to put NET.
NET? Thanks, but no thanks. The approach is flawed, the tool is redundant and the tool is from a source no one should trust. There may be a few places it will work, but there are free alternatives that should be used first.
What you have proposed is "freeware" with a leash. You "give" the client a piece of software that does NOTHING on it's own and charges per use of your services. When you go out of business, the customer is left with nothing, unless someone wants to reverse engineer your old system. Normal propriatory software did better than this. It might work for some things, like printing pictures on the internet, but that just won't do for medical records.
Moreover, there's nothing keeping you from providing these services with existing software, not that horrid !NET stuff. Yes, Microsoft is finally learning that the internet can do more. Slow, late, buggy, insecure, invasive, and now touted at the only "standard" way to do anything - how typical of them. Why not just set up a nice little Apache server and process requests through secure html?
I'd consider offering my services more as a consultant if I were to try to make a living at software these days. Give clients a nice open source solution with the GPL recomended. This way my work can be reviewed by others and ported to new hardware if I'm around or not. Because I'm good, I'm sure my clients will come back when they want more. The hard part is getting in to begin with. Once you are in, the results will be all the push you need to have more clients and make more money. The world is full of M$ junk that is not living up to it's promise. As full as the world is, so your market is wide. Doctors, scientists and engineers all appreciate the honesty inherent in open publications and peer review. In fact, few accept less than that for critical applications.
It may be legal to track my car, but it's not moral. The devices were distributed under false pretenses and the real use is reprehensible. Where I go is my business, not yours and not the police's. People who carry such devices are slaves. Those who advocate their involuntary use by others are worse. They should work on either limiting the tags to their proper uses or disabling them. This is not the kind of convienence that I pay taxes for. What do you expect your government to do for you today?
which is more controversial, "Linux and Windows both have their place" or
"Linux on the desktop is dead! Windows on the server is dead!"
You have three statements. Only the first is contraversial, the second and third are silly. You'll put M$ junk on my computers over my dead body, though you may want to. Linux works just fine on my desktop and generally lives much longer there than most other software on other desktops. Microsoft has never made a useful server platform. Controvery requires credibility. Credibility depends on knowledge and honesty.
I absolutly hate M$ interfaces which are trending towards your worst custom VB nighmare. Big 16 color butons with hieroghphs instead of words. Awfull tabed dialongs with scroll bars on the side. We are gettin a package like this where I work. Some kind of expensive proriatory Unix server with a nasty little OLE/VB/Access client. Barf. It looks so easy to break, bug and rip off, the company is going to loose money coming and going on it. First they will buy it, then people will break it and steal things, then M$ will break the clients and the cycle will repeat.
Why bother with a whole install? If you get access to a machine like that, why not just drop in a DOS root kit? The mahine's owner would never be the wiser.
When you get down to it, most crackers would be ashamed to have to WALK someplace. Surely you could just mail some Outlook crack and have access that way? Once you own one machine, you can own them all, and I suspect most corporate machines are indeed owned this way. Think M$ will ever get a clue? I don't.
Then again, by the XP license M$ has a root kit all their own. IEEEE! My desktop is not MY desktop! Nor is it my company's desktop. It belongs to M$.
I suppose I should have expected a bunch of silly IE trolls here but you are special:
Stop accepting things like they are, change the world (of software) now!
Can you be a little more specific? How wold you like your browser to look and act, besides like IE? The "cited usability problems" were that the thing did not act like IE. Here's what some constructive criticism looks like:
IE user interface problems noted under win2k:
"Favorites" can't have characters in their names that mess with old DOS conventions.
ftp, http, local files are remembered and treated sepearatly. This artificial division makes swithching between the different "zones" difficult to do and makes the history file much less useful.
User settings are poorly organized vary from version to version. Typically kept under multiple menue items and burried in a forrest of tabs in nonsensical dialogs, IE's user settings are both harder to find and less empowering when located.
Abomnible on off control of scripting, no image control. Adverts are impossible to turn off.
Fav icon suffers from typical M$ bugs. Often loads wrong image, takes forever to display. Gives user information away without asking.
ftp site browsing sucks. The psuedo Apple triangle file tree browsing is much much better than IE's stupid attempt to make ftp sites look like local folders. Confusion is not integration, Micro$oft. ftp site non response locks up entire interface. Talk about pathetic.
Those are some things off the top of my head. I rarely use IE at work, but sometimes I have to. When I do, I notice that kind of crap. If all of these problems were to be fixed, you would have something much closer to Mozilla. That's what the open source folks did - they changed the software they had available and made some new stuff bassed on user wants and best practices. This was done while M$ was bussy catching up to Netscape 4, and adding new hooks to their other software that no one wanted, and works wretchedly today. What kind of input do you think M$ got for IE? It took advice from content pushers and advert makers. Pthththt!
The fight against DRM is NOT a fight to reproduce comercial music or, worse, use multiple coppies of M$ junk in your house as some might believe. The fight against DRM is a fight to maintain control of your computer. It's a fight to be able to make your own software, and other content, and share it with your friends. DRM will end your ability to do these things as surely as the DMCA made DeCSS illegal and prevents you from using a freaking cue-cat bar code reader as you see fit. DRM can not work unless someone else is root on your computer. How else can unspecified files be "protected" against copy? This is as unAmerican as any other form of censorship and must not be allowed to pass without comment.
This fight is more imprortant than any previous civil rights battle since the US Delcaration of Independence. That someone who is root on all DRM encumbered machines will wield more raw power than any previous tyrant. Those that own the filters will be able to spy and deny copy on demand. This way DRM will end your rights to free speech, press and security of your personal papers and effects. With free speech and press go truth itself. Without security of your private papers effective opposition is impossible. Of course, a society like that will not prosper, but neither will it necessarily crumple on it's own. As the US government turns it's back on the Bill of Rights, hope for freedom in this world grows dim. There's no place left to run.
I hate USB. Born in 1993, USB I was about as fast and universal as the parallel port. While I can see my devices on USB I, I have no idea how to talk to them. I have all the respect in the world for people who heroically struggle to build interfaces to talk to old scanners, cameras and what not, in the face of OEM indifference and hostility. I'm afraid that USB II and the far superior IEEE 1394 (400 mbps currenet 800 mbps planned, can have multiple pc hosts, backported to 2.2 kernels already). might suffer the same fate. Someone tell me it's not so.
So nice of M$ to draw attention to the mechanism that it keeps splintered. The article phrases the situation as a model for Linux device compatiblity as if there were no other options and Linux development will alsways be broken and lagging. This is true, if you are talking about chasing M$'s broken tail. CSS has demonstrated that any device can be made impossible to talk to, regardless of technical skill.
My experience with M$ USB has been less than advertised. Windows 2000 has managed to make USB I not hot pluggable, and it manages to screw up one of my camera's flash card formating everytime I plug it in at work! At home, I tried to print out five plain text pages to a USB printer from win98. I got four pages, five error messages for lack of communications and one last message about "unknown system errors" requiring a reboot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. That's what happens when you screw around with "standards" too much.
On the other hand, pcmcia with a compact flash adaptor has worked very well. Compact flash registers itself as a new hard drive,/dev/hde in most cases, and this shows up in/var/log/messages when you plug it in. So long as your camera stores pictures unscrambled, you can get them without any silly interface software or device driver. Mount and coppy. Cannon S110 works great, Sipix has broken pictures. Yeah, pcmcia only goes 64 mbps, sigh. Too bad someone out there wants to make sure that:
1. You must use a propriatory driver to talk to your devices. This will enable DRM of the pictures you take - eventually you will have to pay per play to view or print your own pictures. That's progress!
2. That driver will not work forever and you will have to replace your device. Bitrot! more progress. My place of work is filled with old devices that stoped working due to "software upgrades". The vendors recomend, shocker, that we replace the devices.
I had the same problem. My solution was to use a 500 MB hard disk to boot. It might have worked if I simply partitioned a small boot device on a larger drive but I used the disk I had. The other disk is now a 2 GB, but it could just as well be 20 or 200 GB. The kernel does not use crusty old BIOS routines after boot and can see anything just as well on any machine.
Making the second drive the home directory was as easy as dropping the hard drive in, formatting it with cfdisk, adding a file system with mkext2fs, coppying my files and changing a single line in/etc/fstab and rebooting. Rebooting was optional. It took way less time than fooling around with a bios upgrade that might or might not work. If ever I need another IDE channel, I've got an old 16 bit card that supposedly gives me one, but two devices are enough for me for now.
Yep, the 66MHz 486 is still AOK as an ftp server. No GUI needed, never down for anything but power fails, always chugging along but always quiet. Thank you Debian.
Let me quote it again, along with the follower. I'd like to quote it all, as not one sentence lacks scandal.
n his June letter, Hamilton said that while the United States doesn't oppose the development of open-source software, it prefers to support a free market where the quality of the product can determine the issue.
He added that by excluding proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Peru would be hurting an industry that "has the potential to create 15,000" jobs in the local economy.
Well, what makes Hamilton (what an ironic name!) think that Peru has not made up it's mind about the quality of the software? I certianly have.
More, how is a GOVERNMENT spec for software purchases going to interfere with private purchases of software. What kind of "free market" is there in goverenment puchasing to begin with.
One more thing, who says that free software won't create jobs? It seems to me that free software has made more jobs here in the US than any single company ever will. Witness sendmail, Apatche, BSD, Linux, and others. What do Sun, Microsoft, HP, Compaq, IBM and other silly spellings have to compare to the thousands of jobs out there tending email, websites, company accounts and what not? Free software can do anything comercial software can and usualy does it better.
I'm disgraced. Our ambasador is meddling in an internal purchasing matter for reasons that don't make sense on their face for the sake of a few US companies. The decision is neither in the best intrests of the US as a whole nor even philisophicaly consistent. As Bill Gates goes in to buy government officials, our Government will be smeared with the corruption. Who will respect our wishes or opinions when we are so frivolous with them?
If the MPAA/RIAA tried to DoS every dinky Kazaa burdened PC they would shut down the entire net. Warez, we are told, already eats up disporportionate quantities of bandwith. How much bandwith would it take to disable each and every provider? It's unlimited! There is not way they could do this and not shut down the web.
Al Gore would weep for his child and GWB would think that Al Kie-Duh had destroyed the internet and all ecomerce. Better send a cruise missile at them right away!
And I thought their current DoS attacks, which fill the sharing databases with crap music, was bad. Then I turned on the radio and heard how bad it really was.
It's hardly a secret that these universities collude to set admisions standards, numbers of seats available and, of course, prices. What's interesting, and more than likely fictional, is that they had to go to any real trouble to get the information.
Nor do I know *exactly* how most of the stuff I own works.
That's too bad. At least you might trust one or two of the companies you buy things from. I don't trust a company that puts in extras like this, without telling me. You know that you have to pay for the things you buy.
how is the insurance company going to raise my rates? Are they going to sneak into my garage each and every night and download the data?
They will get it at break tag inspections, oil changes or what not. Insurance companies will pay for the data untill it's mandatory, then they will just put in a cell phone and make you pay for that too. More power to you if you never have to take your car to someone else's garage.
I'm hoping my next job is in bike riding distance, like my last one. Cars just suck more and more. Riding my bike to my office at the local university was so much more relaxing than my current dodge of road kill and pickup trucks.
In the real world, nobody ever drives the speed limit under good driving conditions. Realistic freeway speeds are at least 80 in nondeveloped areas, and cars going under that speed are actually at increased risk.
In the real world, I wave my gun around. People who walk in front of me are actually at increased risk.
I'd like to say that cars kill more Americans each year than the entire Vietnam war. I'd also like to say that cars kill more Amercians each year than handguns do, but I can't. Drivers do it.
People like you think that the left lane is for speeders. It's not. Tickets are for speeders because speeding is dangerous. People like you make people like me hate automobiles. People like you make me think that black boxes with certian publicly verifiable specifications should be mandatory.
I would assume that if anyone did want to get ahold of it against your will they would have to get a court order.
If these boxes become mandatory, and they will, you will not be allowed to withhold the evidence anymore than you can keep the police from examining the rest of your vehicle.
Frankly I'd like to have one of these babies in my car. It would remove a lot of uncertainty around what caused an accident: ("As you can see Judge, I was indeed stopped and my brake lights were working when the idiot rear ended me")
If the device were reliable, that might be right. But you can't read the box yourself so you can never verify it, can you? In fact, you have no idea what the evil little thing is collecting or how accurate it is, do you? When you get a letter from your insurace company informing you that your risk category has been changed how will you be able to defend yourself? You can't, you will simply suck it up and pay.
Nice talking to you again, little rodent. You are always so wrong headed.
...every single piece of technology is just another tool for The Man to spy on us, regardless of legitimate uses (sound familiar?) it might have.
What else would you call a device that collects personal information about you that only a vendor or law enforcement can read? A camera I mount in my car that does the same thing so I can share the information with who I please is a much different proposition from that kind of trash. It would be nice if I had control over the device, but I don't. It's like the fifth ammendment inverted.
Part of the reason Y2K happened nearly hitchless was due to the fact that so much hype was involved. By declaring "the sky is falling" they are preventing a problem through means of hype.
Bull. Hype and the labor of countless millions of IT folks turned into dumpster fillers did not solve y2k for us. It's more like y2k was a fraud. Funny how all my old equipment still works with no effort on my part at all. Systems not designed to be fail safe are flawed.
Never the less, it's a good thing you brought up y2k as it's the easiest way to fight the FUD:
Y2K and war are now perpetual. Right!
You will only suffer continuous computer failure if you use M$.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, 100% wrong. Nothing could be more friendly than having 100% control of your computer.
The goal of GNU is to produce the world's best software and that includes ease of use. The current state of development for GPL'd software now includes several excellent mouse driven user interfaces, extensive help files, just as many examples and the easiest installs available anywhere. Is there a single piece of comercial software that you can point to that does not have a free analog that's just as easy to use and more powerful?
Now back to topic, which is that M$ has no security clue. If you have read this much, you deserve what follows.
Here is my favorite qoute from the technical details section of their silly warning about software other people put on your machine when they crack it:
Finding any backdoor Trojan indicates that the server is extremely vulnerable to privilege escalation and hacking.
What the hell is a "backdoor Trojan"?! Oh my God, they said that. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Is it more effective than M$ at preventing the spread of viruses? Is that all they got out of their monthlong security hug? Can you help me out Mr oyenstinker? Someone at the knowledge base is going to have a hard time getting his supervisor off his back after that gafe. Ahhh! Send more Trojans, fast.
What kind of privilege escalation is there on a userless OS?
There once was a game where a virus was designed to look like a popular OS. Reality has caught up with parody.
Throughput was great too. PCMCIA does 8 Mbyte/second. Woops, who needs wireless when you have something simple like compact flash? I
Would that be because some joker like Bill Gates made it possible to patent algorithms? What is Adobe up to here? How is it that they feel welcome to use someone else's IP but won't let others even talk about how crapy theirs is? Adobe, you suck. Yeah, you were an early adopter and comercializer of electronic formats, so what?
I see the same kind of thing right here in the good USA. I just got burnt for "excessive" personal internet usage at my engineering job. My peers don't know what a google search is much less slashdot. Trying to explain that this a software news site and that I read it in part to keep up programing skill would be futile. Other people listen to online music, read CNN and other less work related things with impunity.
As freedoms and personal dignity wane here, the rest of the world will suffer that much more.
Look for your ability to post anything that would require filtering anywhere to go away. As multinational publishers and telcoms continue to gobble up the web, your ability to publish uncensored pages goes away.
Anyone else want to build alternate networks? Think light and radio based backbone nodes with 811.b local distribution. No, I don't want to republish RIAA crap, swap porn or other Warez. What I want is the ability to publish MY content without AOL/McDisneySoft looking over my shoulder at my big five megs of advert wracked Geo Cities "web" pages.
When all the censors finish their work, what's left will be a serries of billboards not worth browsing.
End Rant.
Posting a warez link on front pafe
Was someone siffing on your fafe when you saif that, or do you juff talf thif way? =:>
Currently slashdot is kind justyfying priracy and stealing in names of rights and all bull shit.
This is not done. Free software and open source DO NOT EQUATE with piracy.
Get a sense of humor and logic please. No justification for the "theft" of Cisco's non-free technology is offered. This article simply states what can be done. It might make you wonder why big dumb companies shell out thousands of bucks for hardware that should cost about a hundred and hardware that has better free alternatives. It might also make you wonder why it's illegal to make a copy of machine only readable noise, especially code that's available off Cisco's tftp server. You might even research the mostly public University funded start up of Cisco. Naf, thaf woulf be insiful and infomatif.
A couple of days back you posted a zip file for crashing windows
You don't need a zip file to crash windows, silly troll, it does that all on it's own.
getting hold of flash for cisco is illegal. "Difficult to procure" thats what the article says. Well its plain illegal.
How about a link to that effect? Owning hardware illegal? Give me a break. What kind of silly laws do you live under?
This is a no brainer. Don't expect telcoms, music publishers, TV people, commercial software vendors, governments and any other large, entrenched and threatened industry to say that the web is good for anything but kiddie porn, bomb making and whatever horror is up for the day. I'm tired of hearing all the BS from the so called reputable news sources.
Advertising is in a slump because no one expects anyone to have any money soon. The NYT itself is in the same shitcan everyone else is in. Sorry, that's the way the cycle turns.
The problem for those interests is that people will get what they want without the helping hand of those who would control them. People want telcom services they don't have to pay by the minute for. They want news they can pull for themselves rather than the stream of push current media provides. They want feedback on that news, pure objective informed voices on the spot. They want to make their songs availble to others without the intervention of one of five big publishers. They will build what it takes to get those things and those that publish nonsense about it will simply fail. Their are more powerful motives than profit.
Some software is created just for fun. Other software is created to insure that you have control of your computer. Don't confuse "commercialism" with the evil practices of current commercial software vendors. They are stupid and will be replaced. Much software created just for fun is of great use to all of us becuse it was licensed as free. Go visit clarity to learn what why and how.
...It's like being proud of no longer reading books, or no longer listening to music, or no longer going out to restaurants or movies.
Nope and nope. Not better than the common man, unless you define the common man as a passive lump that lives to suck down mindless dribble. Nor is turning off the boob tube like denying yourself of those other things. Those things you chose out of many things and only do once or twice a week. TV just rams crap down at you. The less of it you watch, the more time you have for those other good things.
I'm not proud of the fact that I don't waste my time watching TV, I'm proud of the things I've done instead. BS, most of a MS, got an excellent job, and competitive bike riding. Not bad eh? Some of them would have to go if I wasted an hour or two a night trying to get news and relaxation off the tube. I love to tell people that they should turn the damn thing off because I want others to have good things too. How unsatisfying a source of news and relaxation TV is can only be understood after two or three months of not watching it. After a year or so, TV looks like it's broadcast from another planet.
Orwell called it prolefeed and it was for everyone.
In a better world, people will continue to sing, act and entertain each other without the sponsorship of large and small corporate intersts. I'm looking forward to the death of advertising in general. Boycot advertisers when you can.
NET? Thanks, but no thanks. The approach is flawed, the tool is redundant and the tool is from a source no one should trust. There may be a few places it will work, but there are free alternatives that should be used first.
What you have proposed is "freeware" with a leash. You "give" the client a piece of software that does NOTHING on it's own and charges per use of your services. When you go out of business, the customer is left with nothing, unless someone wants to reverse engineer your old system. Normal propriatory software did better than this. It might work for some things, like printing pictures on the internet, but that just won't do for medical records.
Moreover, there's nothing keeping you from providing these services with existing software, not that horrid !NET stuff. Yes, Microsoft is finally learning that the internet can do more. Slow, late, buggy, insecure, invasive, and now touted at the only "standard" way to do anything - how typical of them. Why not just set up a nice little Apache server and process requests through secure html?
I'd consider offering my services more as a consultant if I were to try to make a living at software these days. Give clients a nice open source solution with the GPL recomended. This way my work can be reviewed by others and ported to new hardware if I'm around or not. Because I'm good, I'm sure my clients will come back when they want more. The hard part is getting in to begin with. Once you are in, the results will be all the push you need to have more clients and make more money. The world is full of M$ junk that is not living up to it's promise. As full as the world is, so your market is wide. Doctors, scientists and engineers all appreciate the honesty inherent in open publications and peer review. In fact, few accept less than that for critical applications.
It may be legal to track my car, but it's not moral. The devices were distributed under false pretenses and the real use is reprehensible. Where I go is my business, not yours and not the police's. People who carry such devices are slaves. Those who advocate their involuntary use by others are worse. They should work on either limiting the tags to their proper uses or disabling them. This is not the kind of convienence that I pay taxes for. What do you expect your government to do for you today?
"Linux on the desktop is dead! Windows on the server is dead!"
You have three statements. Only the first is contraversial, the second and third are silly. You'll put M$ junk on my computers over my dead body, though you may want to. Linux works just fine on my desktop and generally lives much longer there than most other software on other desktops. Microsoft has never made a useful server platform. Controvery requires credibility. Credibility depends on knowledge and honesty.
I absolutly hate M$ interfaces which are trending towards your worst custom VB nighmare. Big 16 color butons with hieroghphs instead of words. Awfull tabed dialongs with scroll bars on the side. We are gettin a package like this where I work. Some kind of expensive proriatory Unix server with a nasty little OLE/VB/Access client. Barf. It looks so easy to break, bug and rip off, the company is going to loose money coming and going on it. First they will buy it, then people will break it and steal things, then M$ will break the clients and the cycle will repeat.
Let me try to be helpful. Combinations of tar find and grep work well for me.
basic tar syntax:
tar cvx archive_name.tar file_path_1 file_path_2 ... to create archive_name.tar with all files in path.
tar xvf archive_name.tar to restore. the .tar is optional of course, but it helps me.
useful tar options:
-u, update to only add new or modified files.
-G, old style incrimental
-g, new style incrimental
-z, gzip files
Combined with find and grep and put into a chron job, this is a very powerful backup tool. For example something like:
tar cvu archive.tar `find | grep patern`
performed at regular intervals does a great job.
Tell me about dump.
When you get down to it, most crackers would be ashamed to have to WALK someplace. Surely you could just mail some Outlook crack and have access that way? Once you own one machine, you can own them all, and I suspect most corporate machines are indeed owned this way. Think M$ will ever get a clue? I don't.
Then again, by the XP license M$ has a root kit all their own. IEEEE! My desktop is not MY desktop! Nor is it my company's desktop. It belongs to M$.
Stop accepting things like they are, change the world (of software) now!
Can you be a little more specific? How wold you like your browser to look and act, besides like IE? The "cited usability problems" were that the thing did not act like IE. Here's what some constructive criticism looks like:
IE user interface problems noted under win2k:
"Favorites" can't have characters in their names that mess with old DOS conventions.
ftp, http, local files are remembered and treated sepearatly. This artificial division makes swithching between the different "zones" difficult to do and makes the history file much less useful.
User settings are poorly organized vary from version to version. Typically kept under multiple menue items and burried in a forrest of tabs in nonsensical dialogs, IE's user settings are both harder to find and less empowering when located.
Abomnible on off control of scripting, no image control. Adverts are impossible to turn off.
Fav icon suffers from typical M$ bugs. Often loads wrong image, takes forever to display. Gives user information away without asking.
ftp site browsing sucks. The psuedo Apple triangle file tree browsing is much much better than IE's stupid attempt to make ftp sites look like local folders. Confusion is not integration, Micro$oft. ftp site non response locks up entire interface. Talk about pathetic.
Those are some things off the top of my head. I rarely use IE at work, but sometimes I have to. When I do, I notice that kind of crap. If all of these problems were to be fixed, you would have something much closer to Mozilla. That's what the open source folks did - they changed the software they had available and made some new stuff bassed on user wants and best practices. This was done while M$ was bussy catching up to Netscape 4, and adding new hooks to their other software that no one wanted, and works wretchedly today. What kind of input do you think M$ got for IE? It took advice from content pushers and advert makers. Pthththt!
The fight against DRM is NOT a fight to reproduce comercial music or, worse, use multiple coppies of M$ junk in your house as some might believe. The fight against DRM is a fight to maintain control of your computer. It's a fight to be able to make your own software, and other content, and share it with your friends. DRM will end your ability to do these things as surely as the DMCA made DeCSS illegal and prevents you from using a freaking cue-cat bar code reader as you see fit. DRM can not work unless someone else is root on your computer. How else can unspecified files be "protected" against copy? This is as unAmerican as any other form of censorship and must not be allowed to pass without comment.
This fight is more imprortant than any previous civil rights battle since the US Delcaration of Independence. That someone who is root on all DRM encumbered machines will wield more raw power than any previous tyrant. Those that own the filters will be able to spy and deny copy on demand. This way DRM will end your rights to free speech, press and security of your personal papers and effects. With free speech and press go truth itself. Without security of your private papers effective opposition is impossible. Of course, a society like that will not prosper, but neither will it necessarily crumple on it's own. As the US government turns it's back on the Bill of Rights, hope for freedom in this world grows dim. There's no place left to run.
Thank you RMS for doing what you do. Good luck.
So nice of M$ to draw attention to the mechanism that it keeps splintered. The article phrases the situation as a model for Linux device compatiblity as if there were no other options and Linux development will alsways be broken and lagging. This is true, if you are talking about chasing M$'s broken tail. CSS has demonstrated that any device can be made impossible to talk to, regardless of technical skill.
My experience with M$ USB has been less than advertised. Windows 2000 has managed to make USB I not hot pluggable, and it manages to screw up one of my camera's flash card formating everytime I plug it in at work! At home, I tried to print out five plain text pages to a USB printer from win98. I got four pages, five error messages for lack of communications and one last message about "unknown system errors" requiring a reboot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. That's what happens when you screw around with "standards" too much.
On the other hand, pcmcia with a compact flash adaptor has worked very well. Compact flash registers itself as a new hard drive, /dev/hde in most cases, and this shows up in /var/log/messages when you plug it in. So long as your camera stores pictures unscrambled, you can get them without any silly interface software or device driver. Mount and coppy. Cannon S110 works great, Sipix has broken pictures. Yeah, pcmcia only goes 64 mbps, sigh. Too bad someone out there wants to make sure that:
1. You must use a propriatory driver to talk to your devices. This will enable DRM of the pictures you take - eventually you will have to pay per play to view or print your own pictures. That's progress!
2. That driver will not work forever and you will have to replace your device. Bitrot! more progress. My place of work is filled with old devices that stoped working due to "software upgrades". The vendors recomend, shocker, that we replace the devices.
M$ will never support a "universal" device.
Making the second drive the home directory was as easy as dropping the hard drive in, formatting it with cfdisk, adding a file system with mkext2fs, coppying my files and changing a single line in /etc/fstab and rebooting. Rebooting was optional. It took way less time than fooling around with a bios upgrade that might or might not work. If ever I need another IDE channel, I've got an old 16 bit card that supposedly gives me one, but two devices are enough for me for now.
Yep, the 66MHz 486 is still AOK as an ftp server. No GUI needed, never down for anything but power fails, always chugging along but always quiet. Thank you Debian.
n his June letter, Hamilton said that while the United States doesn't oppose the development of open-source software, it prefers to support a free market where the quality of the product can determine the issue.
He added that by excluding proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Peru would be hurting an industry that "has the potential to create 15,000" jobs in the local economy.
Well, what makes Hamilton (what an ironic name!) think that Peru has not made up it's mind about the quality of the software? I certianly have.
More, how is a GOVERNMENT spec for software purchases going to interfere with private purchases of software. What kind of "free market" is there in goverenment puchasing to begin with.
One more thing, who says that free software won't create jobs? It seems to me that free software has made more jobs here in the US than any single company ever will. Witness sendmail, Apatche, BSD, Linux, and others. What do Sun, Microsoft, HP, Compaq, IBM and other silly spellings have to compare to the thousands of jobs out there tending email, websites, company accounts and what not? Free software can do anything comercial software can and usualy does it better.
I'm disgraced. Our ambasador is meddling in an internal purchasing matter for reasons that don't make sense on their face for the sake of a few US companies. The decision is neither in the best intrests of the US as a whole nor even philisophicaly consistent. As Bill Gates goes in to buy government officials, our Government will be smeared with the corruption. Who will respect our wishes or opinions when we are so frivolous with them?
Al Gore would weep for his child and GWB would think that Al Kie-Duh had destroyed the internet and all ecomerce. Better send a cruise missile at them right away!
And I thought their current DoS attacks, which fill the sharing databases with crap music, was bad. Then I turned on the radio and heard how bad it really was.
It's hardly a secret that these universities collude to set admisions standards, numbers of seats available and, of course, prices. What's interesting, and more than likely fictional, is that they had to go to any real trouble to get the information.
That's too bad. At least you might trust one or two of the companies you buy things from. I don't trust a company that puts in extras like this, without telling me. You know that you have to pay for the things you buy.
how is the insurance company going to raise my rates? Are they going to sneak into my garage each and every night and download the data?
They will get it at break tag inspections, oil changes or what not. Insurance companies will pay for the data untill it's mandatory, then they will just put in a cell phone and make you pay for that too. More power to you if you never have to take your car to someone else's garage.
I'm hoping my next job is in bike riding distance, like my last one. Cars just suck more and more. Riding my bike to my office at the local university was so much more relaxing than my current dodge of road kill and pickup trucks.
In the real world, I wave my gun around. People who walk in front of me are actually at increased risk.
I'd like to say that cars kill more Americans each year than the entire Vietnam war. I'd also like to say that cars kill more Amercians each year than handguns do, but I can't. Drivers do it.
People like you think that the left lane is for speeders. It's not. Tickets are for speeders because speeding is dangerous. People like you make people like me hate automobiles. People like you make me think that black boxes with certian publicly verifiable specifications should be mandatory.
If these boxes become mandatory, and they will, you will not be allowed to withhold the evidence anymore than you can keep the police from examining the rest of your vehicle.
Frankly I'd like to have one of these babies in my car. It would remove a lot of uncertainty around what caused an accident: ("As you can see Judge, I was indeed stopped and my brake lights were working when the idiot rear ended me")
If the device were reliable, that might be right. But you can't read the box yourself so you can never verify it, can you? In fact, you have no idea what the evil little thing is collecting or how accurate it is, do you? When you get a letter from your insurace company informing you that your risk category has been changed how will you be able to defend yourself? You can't, you will simply suck it up and pay.
Nice talking to you again, little rodent. You are always so wrong headed.
What else would you call a device that collects personal information about you that only a vendor or law enforcement can read? A camera I mount in my car that does the same thing so I can share the information with who I please is a much different proposition from that kind of trash. It would be nice if I had control over the device, but I don't. It's like the fifth ammendment inverted.
Bull. Hype and the labor of countless millions of IT folks turned into dumpster fillers did not solve y2k for us. It's more like y2k was a fraud. Funny how all my old equipment still works with no effort on my part at all. Systems not designed to be fail safe are flawed.
Never the less, it's a good thing you brought up y2k as it's the easiest way to fight the FUD:
Y2K and war are now perpetual. Right!
You will only suffer continuous computer failure if you use M$.