At what point would it be possible to quantify that 'yes, this IS the year!'... when there is 100,000 users? 500,000 users? 10,000,000 users?
It's hard to put your finger on, but all the relative pieces are in place. If you look back to the early 1990s and Dell, you can see the same thing for GNU/Linux today. It's good enough, it's cheaper than the alternatives and better in key ways due to sharp competition. GNU/Linux systems can deliver what people want from their computers and it's seeping in just like the WinTel monster did.
What happened in the early 90's? People got a box that worked when you turned it on and could be expanded. I had mine running for a good six years. I got better printers, scanners and "upgraded" to 95, and I never had to wipe and reload it until I decided it was time for GNU/Linux. This was very cool. People and small businesses jumped on it for writing their papers and basic organization. It slowly filtered into the corporate world.
M$ has fallen slowly since then. 95, 98, and finally XP each lost things. Split views got dropped from file browsers. There were odd configuration interface and file changes leading up to the ongoing registry disaster. Stability has suffered and has come to a sad point where people think they must wipe and reload their machines once a month. Most importantly, the platform lost it's competitive edge as M$ crushed smaller companies and their superior products. Word Perfect, Lotus, Netscape, QuatroPro, Peachtree and so on. Gaming got better, but so did dedicated consoles which are a lot cheaper.
Let's go down the GNU/Linux list today. Network, check. Printing - check. Media - check. Productivity is good enough. Games - well, there are some problems with accelerated graphics but it's there for real enthusiasts. The real killer feature is freedom, much like Windows 3.1 provided but real this time. It's already made a beach head at the biggest and brightest companies. With it people have jumped on it for writing their papers and basic organization. The year of GNU/Linux really is here.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) says more than 40% of bootlegged films in the US are secretly taped in New York cinemas.
and Canada does 50%, and we can be sure that China is responsible for another 50%, and Los Angeles another 40% and so on and so forth depending on who's nose they want to bloody today.
As far as I am concerned the NSA/CIA/FBI/??? can wiretap and monitor me to their hearts content I promise it will not only be useless but incredibly boring.
Would it be OK if a government clerk spied out your business decisions and passed them on to a competitor that could pay?
Would you mind if there was only one political party because it was able to identify and neutralize anyone who disagreed with them?
Would you mind doing some menial job for your new corporate masters for the rest of your life? Remember, though crime will result in relative economic hardships. The only thing more expensive then freedom is slavery.
I mind all of the above and resent paying for such abuse. If you want a life like that, pay for it yourself.
[I use Windows because] right tool for the right job... certain jobs need to quick and dirty. And that means not figuring out how to install a WiFi card for a day and a half.
That's the problem with OS sabotage, you end up with fewer and worse tools. What are you going to do with a wifi card if you can't google? You can thank Mr. Gates for the wifi mess too because he does the same things to hardware that he does to software.
I often wonder how fanboys come up with things like this:
I used to have respect for them [Google]. Their attitude towards MS seemed to be "bring it on!" I guess Steve Jobs is the only who is still willing to take on the giant in the market place without the government help.
Again and again you see the same thing but you still use the OS that sabotages everything else you like. Why?
They sacrificed ease of maintenance for battery life, size and robustness. It would have to be thicker to have these things and the same battery life. Contacts add resistance and heat build up. Doors that open increase device size and decrease case strength. They could have made things easier with screws, but even those would require a larger size.
I don't like the non standard battery size game that device makers play, but Apple is not special. They at least will support the device into the future, which will result in a lot fewer devices thrown out.
Defrauding the government and pension plans is probably easier than conering a market, so I don't think they are going to get away with their assaults on the GPL. Sooner or later they will have to use GPL3 code if they want to stay relevant. They won't be able to do that through proxies forever if they can at all.
You certainly have given no justification for your claim that Weather Underground tried to cripple free updates from the NWS. That's pretty much libel.
Being wrong is not libel. Rather than argue with you, I looked what you said up reported the result. It's easy to confuse actions of similar companies which all use the same business model and those other companies did indeed try to create special formats for government weather information so that they could sell it.
I'd like to believe that Weather Underground is still on the free side of things but that's something for you to prove in the face of an obvious conflict of interest. Masters is siding with a smear job. I don't know why he's doing it but it's paradoxical that he should come down on the side of a debate that would degrade weather data. None of the things he said really refutes the core argument, which is that hurricane prediction will be degraded and that will require the evacuation of larger areas. All he's saying is that the area might not be as large an opinion he's gatered by refuting a paper the rest of us can't read.
They claimed to be victims at the time, (and the article appears at archive.org so it's not a fake), but so what? One way they are appeasing their benefactor. The other way, they are under duress. Either way they can be manipulated.
If that were the only problem, it could be ignored, but the rest of the story is rotten too. Raids, posturing and gags are all made to cover up things that stink.
The larger pattern is an administration that's corrupt, abusive and thin skinned. I was willing to ignore early claims of favoritism for reporters, but the stories just keep piling up. People are being punished for doing their jobs and say things that are detrimental to some big dumb company. Instead of admitting their mistakes, they are making things worse by trying to hide the truth itself.
At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google."....
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
Are you trying to tell me they are interested in something other than the immigration laws they are complaining about, or that the driver for that is getting cheap labor? I don't really see it in your Candada is a great place and has better immigration laws spiel.
M$ has already opened shop in India. Opening an office in Canada while complaining about immigration is pure bullshit. The only advantage an office in Canada has for hiring foreign workers is that it's in a closer timezone. They want cheap labor close and under their thumb, nothing more.
M$ cares only about owning the code you write. When you are finished writing it, they are finished with you. US citizens, perma-temps and others previously doing this work will be shown the door.
The real reason they are going this way? Because it's almost game over for M$. A key piece of the M$ success story was their ability to pay workers in stock options based on perpetual growth. To do this, the options must gain value and M$ must always beat Wall Street expectations. Their growth leveled off a while ago and Vista is going to pull it into negative territory. They will no longer be able to offer people decent compensation and that will be it for them. They have also long been out of software to steal as people have avoided new Windows based software companies. Non free code has never really been competitive from a development perspective. Vista has demonstrated just how expensive and slow non free really is. Slave labor and foreign workers are temporary measures that won't save them from collapse.
This statement looks like Dell spreading is FUD to cover their tracks for another upcoming quarter where they will have poor financial results. They can then blame "slow adaptation of Vista" as a reason for slow hardware sales.
But Vista sales are slow. That would be the reason Dell switched back to selling XP and started selling GNU/Linux. Catering to AMD and GNU/Linux on servers is how HP stole the PC crown, and that's why Michael Dell is back in charge. The WinTel thing is over.
you sound a lot like those guys who say claim that Apple sucks because there's only one mouse button. I'm saying buy a 2 button mouse, and plug it in then. In short, you stopped at the problem and didn't bother looking for a solution.
Amarok is the solution. Microsoft has tried and failed to harm the free music movement by forbidding ogg on WMA players, pushing mtp and other nonsense. Things work well even with iPods, so I don't need to work around iTunes problems.
They have treated him to a pop inspection, kind of like they did Iraq before the invasion:
Federal officials are expected today to finish a surprise inspection of the hurricane center, to see if it can fulfill its mission under Bill Proenza.
Want to bet the result is a smear job?
The attacks on the integrity of his policy shows up the problems of scientific publishing more than it does anything else. Jeff Master's critiques look solid, but he points to a big problem:
It will probably appear in the October-November time frame, according to the publisher. This raises an immediate problem, since only a privileged few are able to read unpublished research. This limits the possibilities for an informed debate on the issue, and basing important policy decisions on unpublished research is thus normally to be avoided. However, making accurate hurricane forecasts is important enough that such considerations can be excused.
The article should be widely available so I don't have to take Master's opinion of it. Weather Underground, because of the Weather Service Scandal is a suspect source of information. They did their best to cripple free updates from the national weather service and I'm still angry at them for it. Even if Master's claims are valid, they don't warrent the attention Proenza is getting.
Really what you see here is a scientist being smeared and muzzled. It's not the first time scientists at the NOAA have been gagged. Only bad policy has to be defended by firing people and shutting up the rest.
Proenza's problems and forcasting are just the tip of the melting iceburg of this scandal. QuikSCAT provides information about storm intensity, a key point in global warming research. It looks like the Bush administration is willing to sacrifice forcasting accuracy in order to bury evidence of global warming. There's more where that came from.
What? You fill out your name and address, plug in a credit card number, pick a password.
Those are just the start of your restrictions. I'm not too keen on giving a non free application my credit card, just so I can run it. That sounds like a porn scam, but is a little less risky because you might trust Apple not to screw you. Other nasty, porn like tricks include saving all of your music in a way that you can't tell what it is. The music is renamed and stored in separate files from the tags. Then, Apple extends control beyond the reach of porn masters into copy protection so that the number of devices you can "sync" with is limited.
There are no such limitations with free music or normally ripped CDs. That is easier for me.
Ah, so what you're saying in a nutshell is that everyone you know are horrible thieves who don't care about the artists they are listening to or the music industry in general? Good to know.
There are plenty of artists who understand that making a copy is not theft. They have already provided more music than you could listen to with the rest of your life. See the internet archive's live music depositories and magnatune for a start.
I would rather have a tangible backup for when my hard drive crashes.... t may take time, but I'm going to be more than happy to re-rip 900 CDs than spend another $900 to buy the albums again.
That is one service the music publishers actually provide. Pressed CDs are tangible and durable. This small service is more than outweighed by predatory practices that screw everyone but a few executives at three big music companies. If you want to look for harm to artists, look no further than the monopoly distorted market for music. They are not doing well in a non-free market. The user is faced with the fact that CDs and albums are the only legal way to get your hands on the vast majority of recorded music history.
I'm not so happy about re-ripping. The beauty of free music is that you can copy your properly ripped and tagged archive as often as you like. My entire music collection is never more than an grsync away from another jukebox.
It seems to me that if the designers had stuck to the original 115m diameter, we wouldn't have called this thing a *compact* disc. Quite a typo to repeat twice in the document.
Remember, they were working with pumped ammonia masers! Instead of a diode, they had one of those horn shaped things you see on the old Bell towers. Those were brave days, when EE and Civil Engineers were both called on.
You don't want to know about the Hollerith version that really started it all as part of the Manhattan Project. I worked well but consumed more energy then the bombs released. To make the servos, the national silver supply was nearly depleted.
In 1978, Polygram, a division of Philips, decided polycarbonate as the material of choice for the CD. Many other decisions were made that year, such as the disc diameter (115m)
Tell me, where do you keep 115 meter disks? I can imagine them being immortal, impervious to dust and scratch proof but very heavy. The mechanism would also be next to immortal but would be loud and take a lot of power by today's standards.
The RIAA want to move to more locked down formats and pay per play. Despite iTunes, most people prefer CDs because it's DRM free and an excellent archive format. The leading reasons for the decrease in CD sales are closed stores and reduced floor space in places like Walmart.
That question is just dumb. It would not be possible at all with sprint because sprint is cdma/EVDO and At&t is GSM/edge,hsdpa.... [list of other non free trivia, failures and rudeness]
As if such a divide was reasonable and inevitable instead of anti-social and intentional. The spectrum belongs to everyone and things should just work. They would work if the spectrum were reasonably reallocated.
There will always be people like me who will carry on using Microsoft because we prefer it. It's just a bonus that it irritates people like you.
Classic fanboy.
AOL's web mail is probably the only way they can work with M$ mail clients, if anything from M$ ever works. Of course it's mediated by aol.com and none of those other sites or servers show up on the list, so what's your point again? That web use is dominated by M$ servers?
Also, your little M$ hosting service also has another tab called "hosting" which offers the same features for less money. I'm not sure how they can continue offering M$ servers where everyone else doing the same lost their ass.
Face it - non free is not competitive. M$ share is going to do nothing but shrink.
They policy is to unlock phones if the full retail price was paid for the phone. That policy may have changed as of a month ago but I doubt it. Why don't some of you people call in just ask them to do it.
So, you are telling me that ATT is going to tell me how to use a Sprint SIM in an iPhone?
Slashdot Mirror
numbers without context are just - well, numbers.
But context without numbers is - well, bullshit.
At what point would it be possible to quantify that 'yes, this IS the year!'... when there is 100,000 users? 500,000 users? 10,000,000 users?
It's hard to put your finger on, but all the relative pieces are in place. If you look back to the early 1990s and Dell, you can see the same thing for GNU/Linux today. It's good enough, it's cheaper than the alternatives and better in key ways due to sharp competition. GNU/Linux systems can deliver what people want from their computers and it's seeping in just like the WinTel monster did.
What happened in the early 90's? People got a box that worked when you turned it on and could be expanded. I had mine running for a good six years. I got better printers, scanners and "upgraded" to 95, and I never had to wipe and reload it until I decided it was time for GNU/Linux. This was very cool. People and small businesses jumped on it for writing their papers and basic organization. It slowly filtered into the corporate world.
M$ has fallen slowly since then. 95, 98, and finally XP each lost things. Split views got dropped from file browsers. There were odd configuration interface and file changes leading up to the ongoing registry disaster. Stability has suffered and has come to a sad point where people think they must wipe and reload their machines once a month. Most importantly, the platform lost it's competitive edge as M$ crushed smaller companies and their superior products. Word Perfect, Lotus, Netscape, QuatroPro, Peachtree and so on. Gaming got better, but so did dedicated consoles which are a lot cheaper.
Let's go down the GNU/Linux list today. Network, check. Printing - check. Media - check. Productivity is good enough. Games - well, there are some problems with accelerated graphics but it's there for real enthusiasts. The real killer feature is freedom, much like Windows 3.1 provided but real this time. It's already made a beach head at the biggest and brightest companies. With it people have jumped on it for writing their papers and basic organization. The year of GNU/Linux really is here.
and Canada does 50%, and we can be sure that China is responsible for another 50%, and Los Angeles another 40% and so on and so forth depending on who's nose they want to bloody today.
As far as I am concerned the NSA/CIA/FBI/??? can wiretap and monitor me to their hearts content I promise it will not only be useless but incredibly boring.
Would it be OK if a government clerk spied out your business decisions and passed them on to a competitor that could pay?
Would you mind if there was only one political party because it was able to identify and neutralize anyone who disagreed with them?
Would you mind doing some menial job for your new corporate masters for the rest of your life? Remember, though crime will result in relative economic hardships. The only thing more expensive then freedom is slavery.
I mind all of the above and resent paying for such abuse. If you want a life like that, pay for it yourself.
[I use Windows because] right tool for the right job ... certain jobs need to quick and dirty. And that means not figuring out how to install a WiFi card for a day and a half.
That's the problem with OS sabotage, you end up with fewer and worse tools. What are you going to do with a wifi card if you can't google? You can thank Mr. Gates for the wifi mess too because he does the same things to hardware that he does to software.
I often wonder how fanboys come up with things like this:
I used to have respect for them [Google]. Their attitude towards MS seemed to be "bring it on!" I guess Steve Jobs is the only who is still willing to take on the giant in the market place without the government help.
Again and again you see the same thing but you still use the OS that sabotages everything else you like. Why?
Exactly, what makes the iPhone different?
They sacrificed ease of maintenance for battery life, size and robustness. It would have to be thicker to have these things and the same battery life. Contacts add resistance and heat build up. Doors that open increase device size and decrease case strength. They could have made things easier with screws, but even those would require a larger size.
I don't like the non standard battery size game that device makers play, but Apple is not special. They at least will support the device into the future, which will result in a lot fewer devices thrown out.
Microsoft used stock options to avoid taxes for years. The tradition continues under his sham charity.
Defrauding the government and pension plans is probably easier than conering a market, so I don't think they are going to get away with their assaults on the GPL. Sooner or later they will have to use GPL3 code if they want to stay relevant. They won't be able to do that through proxies forever if they can at all.
You certainly have given no justification for your claim that Weather Underground tried to cripple free updates from the NWS. That's pretty much libel.
Being wrong is not libel. Rather than argue with you, I looked what you said up reported the result. It's easy to confuse actions of similar companies which all use the same business model and those other companies did indeed try to create special formats for government weather information so that they could sell it.
I'd like to believe that Weather Underground is still on the free side of things but that's something for you to prove in the face of an obvious conflict of interest. Masters is siding with a smear job. I don't know why he's doing it but it's paradoxical that he should come down on the side of a debate that would degrade weather data. None of the things he said really refutes the core argument, which is that hurricane prediction will be degraded and that will require the evacuation of larger areas. All he's saying is that the area might not be as large an opinion he's gatered by refuting a paper the rest of us can't read.
to encourage immigration and the American dream.
They claimed to be victims at the time, (and the article appears at archive.org so it's not a fake), but so what? One way they are appeasing their benefactor. The other way, they are under duress. Either way they can be manipulated.
If that were the only problem, it could be ignored, but the rest of the story is rotten too. Raids, posturing and gags are all made to cover up things that stink.
The larger pattern is an administration that's corrupt, abusive and thin skinned. I was willing to ignore early claims of favoritism for reporters, but the stories just keep piling up. People are being punished for doing their jobs and say things that are detrimental to some big dumb company. Instead of admitting their mistakes, they are making things worse by trying to hide the truth itself.
Sworn testimony.
Ask yourself, why are they moving to Canada and not India/China if low wages is all they are after?
Are you trying to tell me they are interested in something other than the immigration laws they are complaining about, or that the driver for that is getting cheap labor? I don't really see it in your Candada is a great place and has better immigration laws spiel.
M$ has already opened shop in India. Opening an office in Canada while complaining about immigration is pure bullshit. The only advantage an office in Canada has for hiring foreign workers is that it's in a closer timezone. They want cheap labor close and under their thumb, nothing more.
M$ cares only about owning the code you write. When you are finished writing it, they are finished with you. US citizens, perma-temps and others previously doing this work will be shown the door.
The real reason they are going this way? Because it's almost game over for M$. A key piece of the M$ success story was their ability to pay workers in stock options based on perpetual growth. To do this, the options must gain value and M$ must always beat Wall Street expectations. Their growth leveled off a while ago and Vista is going to pull it into negative territory. They will no longer be able to offer people decent compensation and that will be it for them. They have also long been out of software to steal as people have avoided new Windows based software companies. Non free code has never really been competitive from a development perspective. Vista has demonstrated just how expensive and slow non free really is. Slave labor and foreign workers are temporary measures that won't save them from collapse.
Good riddance.
This statement looks like Dell spreading is FUD to cover their tracks for another upcoming quarter where they will have poor financial results. They can then blame "slow adaptation of Vista" as a reason for slow hardware sales.
But Vista sales are slow. That would be the reason Dell switched back to selling XP and started selling GNU/Linux. Catering to AMD and GNU/Linux on servers is how HP stole the PC crown, and that's why Michael Dell is back in charge. The WinTel thing is over.
you sound a lot like those guys who say claim that Apple sucks because there's only one mouse button. I'm saying buy a 2 button mouse, and plug it in then. In short, you stopped at the problem and didn't bother looking for a solution.
Amarok is the solution. Microsoft has tried and failed to harm the free music movement by forbidding ogg on WMA players, pushing mtp and other nonsense. Things work well even with iPods, so I don't need to work around iTunes problems.
They have treated him to a pop inspection, kind of like they did Iraq before the invasion:
Want to bet the result is a smear job?
The attacks on the integrity of his policy shows up the problems of scientific publishing more than it does anything else. Jeff Master's critiques look solid, but he points to a big problem:
The article should be widely available so I don't have to take Master's opinion of it. Weather Underground, because of the Weather Service Scandal is a suspect source of information. They did their best to cripple free updates from the national weather service and I'm still angry at them for it. Even if Master's claims are valid, they don't warrent the attention Proenza is getting.
Really what you see here is a scientist being smeared and muzzled. It's not the first time scientists at the NOAA have been gagged. Only bad policy has to be defended by firing people and shutting up the rest.
Proenza's problems and forcasting are just the tip of the melting iceburg of this scandal. QuikSCAT provides information about storm intensity, a key point in global warming research. It looks like the Bush administration is willing to sacrifice forcasting accuracy in order to bury evidence of global warming. There's more where that came from.
What? You fill out your name and address, plug in a credit card number, pick a password.
Those are just the start of your restrictions. I'm not too keen on giving a non free application my credit card, just so I can run it. That sounds like a porn scam, but is a little less risky because you might trust Apple not to screw you. Other nasty, porn like tricks include saving all of your music in a way that you can't tell what it is. The music is renamed and stored in separate files from the tags. Then, Apple extends control beyond the reach of porn masters into copy protection so that the number of devices you can "sync" with is limited.
There are no such limitations with free music or normally ripped CDs. That is easier for me.
Ah, so what you're saying in a nutshell is that everyone you know are horrible thieves who don't care about the artists they are listening to or the music industry in general? Good to know.
There are plenty of artists who understand that making a copy is not theft. They have already provided more music than you could listen to with the rest of your life. See the internet archive's live music depositories and magnatune for a start.
I would rather have a tangible backup for when my hard drive crashes. ... t may take time, but I'm going to be more than happy to re-rip 900 CDs than spend another $900 to buy the albums again.
That is one service the music publishers actually provide. Pressed CDs are tangible and durable. This small service is more than outweighed by predatory practices that screw everyone but a few executives at three big music companies. If you want to look for harm to artists, look no further than the monopoly distorted market for music. They are not doing well in a non-free market. The user is faced with the fact that CDs and albums are the only legal way to get your hands on the vast majority of recorded music history.
I'm not so happy about re-ripping. The beauty of free music is that you can copy your properly ripped and tagged archive as often as you like. My entire music collection is never more than an grsync away from another jukebox.
It seems to me that if the designers had stuck to the original 115m diameter, we wouldn't have called this thing a *compact* disc. Quite a typo to repeat twice in the document.
Remember, they were working with pumped ammonia masers! Instead of a diode, they had one of those horn shaped things you see on the old Bell towers. Those were brave days, when EE and Civil Engineers were both called on.
You don't want to know about the Hollerith version that really started it all as part of the Manhattan Project. I worked well but consumed more energy then the bombs released. To make the servos, the national silver supply was nearly depleted.
from the fine article:
Tell me, where do you keep 115 meter disks? I can imagine them being immortal, impervious to dust and scratch proof but very heavy. The mechanism would also be next to immortal but would be loud and take a lot of power by today's standards.
The RIAA want to move to more locked down formats and pay per play. Despite iTunes, most people prefer CDs because it's DRM free and an excellent archive format. The leading reasons for the decrease in CD sales are closed stores and reduced floor space in places like Walmart.
That question is just dumb. It would not be possible at all with sprint because sprint is cdma/EVDO and At&t is GSM/edge,hsdpa. ... [list of other non free trivia, failures and rudeness]
As if such a divide was reasonable and inevitable instead of anti-social and intentional. The spectrum belongs to everyone and things should just work. They would work if the spectrum were reasonably reallocated.
Macthorpe reveals his motive for self torture:
There will always be people like me who will carry on using Microsoft because we prefer it. It's just a bonus that it irritates people like you.
Classic fanboy.
AOL's web mail is probably the only way they can work with M$ mail clients, if anything from M$ ever works. Of course it's mediated by aol.com and none of those other sites or servers show up on the list, so what's your point again? That web use is dominated by M$ servers?
Also, your little M$ hosting service also has another tab called "hosting" which offers the same features for less money. I'm not sure how they can continue offering M$ servers where everyone else doing the same lost their ass.
Face it - non free is not competitive. M$ share is going to do nothing but shrink.
it's not like the people who would have been caught by this were innocents.
Really? The MPAA is giving their movies away and you did not take one? Does this cost them their copyright?
They policy is to unlock phones if the full retail price was paid for the phone. That policy may have changed as of a month ago but I doubt it. Why don't some of you people call in just ask them to do it.
So, you are telling me that ATT is going to tell me how to use a Sprint SIM in an iPhone?