Until they need to debug because their program seg faults (so printfs don't help) and promptly try to kill you.
So they can use gdb or kgdb. The pain of not being able to x forward easily will drive them to a better platform, or to master gdb from the command line.
I'm not sure what the question means, but a government agency publishing things in a format that's owned by one company is pushing that company's fortune at the expense of all others. Why should governments cede control of their media and who watches it to a private company, especially a foreign one? People who pay their taxes deserve to be able to watch the results without having to pay the M$ tax.
If there's a problem with software patents involved here, the problem should be taken care of directly. Software patents lead to nonsense like this and should be abolished. There's no justifying the social cost of business method patents, which is what software patents ultimately are.
I also run on Linux and, I have to say, it still has problems resuming from the fucking screensaver if I close the lid. PATHETIC. Sometimes I can fix it by logging in remotely and killing the screensaver process[es]. Sometimes I have to log in remotely and kill X. If networking is not configured, I often have to power-cycle. Consequently I don't close the lid much.
It's a shame, but ACPI was intentionally sabotaged by M$. It's hit and miss, but the same machine won't do much better under M$ because their other software can't deal with power management and uptimes blow anyway. APM works well and is more like power management should be, so use it if your laptop has it by the kernel options "noacpi acpi=off".
Of course, this has nothing to do with any kind of security. You are not going to become part of the botnet and your data will survive power cycling, especially if you use a journalling file system like ext3.
This is such a shame when so-called "professors" actually hinder your learning experience.
It's strange that they don't teach them on GCC. The easiest way to make sure your students spend their time learning programming is to set them up with shell accounts and let them log on. This is the way I've seen it done.
The article I read trashed M$'s sorry analysis and told me to expect more of the same from Vista as we've seen with every other M$ OS. M$ again counts things incorrectly and fails to include all the problem children their sorry architecture encourages along with the gaping flaws they produce themselves:
He published the data in an effort to show how Microsoft's software development methodology, called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is yielding dividends. But his method of comparing Windows to Linux and Mac OS X is problematic, according to some.
"This is an apples-to-oranges comparison," said HD Moore, one of the hackers behind the popular Metasploit penetration testing toolkit. "If you want a more accurate view, try comparing the number of flaws between Microsoft-developed software and vendor-X-developed software. Most Linux vendors don't actually write the majority of the packages they include," he said via e-mail.
"Alternatively, force Microsoft to include all vulnerabilities in common third-party software," he added. "For example, the thousands of exploitable ActiveX controls that... vendors include with a Windows system."
So, the end user experience is likely to be unchanged, if they can even get Vista to work. As is always the case for a new Windoze release, the drivers are not there. Worse, new digital restrictions schemes make for poor performance even if they do get work. "Trip bits" and other nonsense make Vista a poor performer by design.
The article I read trashed M$'s sorry analysis and told me to expect more of the same from Vista as we've seen with every other M$ OS:
He published the data in an effort to show how Microsoft's software development methodology, called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is yielding dividends. But his method of comparing Windows to Linux and Mac OS X is problematic, according to some.
"This is an apples-to-oranges comparison," said HD Moore, one of the hackers behind the popular Metasploit penetration testing toolkit. "If you want a more accurate view, try comparing the number of flaws between Microsoft-developed software and vendor-X-developed software. Most Linux vendors don't actually write the majority of the packages they include," he said via e-mail.
"Alternatively, force Microsoft to include all vulnerabilities in common third-party software," he added. "For example, the thousands of exploitable ActiveX controls that... vendors include with a Windows system."
So, the end user experience is likely to be unchanged, if they can even get Vista to work. As is always the case for a new Windoze release, the drivers are not there. Worse, new digital restrictions schemes make for poor performance even if they do get work. "Trip bits" and other nonsense make Vista a poor performer by design.
No, this is not Slashdot spin. It's a direct report of the original source, Security World:
A Microsoft Corp. security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP.
So that's the journalist's opinion.
You can also note the direct carry over of M$'s laughable position that Vista is doing better than XP. Windoze has never been and never will be a safe and secure place for your data and this shows, even if you accept the M$ numbers. They've wasted all their effort making life suck for the end user with digital restrictions and competitor sabotage instead of addressing fundamental security issues. Vista is more of the same from a company that does not care and lies through it's teeth about it every time. There can't be more than fifty people in the world ready to believe Vista is going to be any better than any other version of Windoze.
Did you honestly forget this whole thing where you made exactly this point,
No, and I'm still willing to project M$'s behavior towards DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, Palm, Netscape, anti-virus makers and others right into the Google present. There's a clear pattern of behavior there that makes Google's claim all the more believable. Google has competent programmers who know the difference between intentional sabotage and accident, as did each of those other companies. Most of them came forth in anti-trust cases, and M$'s own internal email backed them up.
As usual, M$ has amped up the blame for the victim through Astroturfers like you, who can offer nothing but insults as a reason to think M$ has changed. This whole thread is riddled with highly moderated "Google is Evil" posts and other nonsense proclaiming M$'s "right to improve their platform" as if Google had done anything wrong or impeding a competitor's product by sabotaging the end user's computer could help anyone. M$'s behavior was and is premeditated and ultimately harms the user. Their current blame game and refusal to act on behalf of the user is documented by Ars:
We inspected Microsoft's joint filing and found that Microsoft is not going to allow a complete override of the default search service in all Explorer windows, and that the company also rejects Google's concerns about performance.
At the end of the day, Windoze users are the losers. They get a sabotaged platform that used to have cool programs but is now deserted. It's amazing that anyone still wastes their time programming for Windoze. M$ has demonstrated time and time again that they will steal any profitable market by sabotaging the competition. Who wants to use a platform like that? It entirely negates vendor and hardware advantages M$ still enjoys because you never know when your favorite toy is going to be the next M$ victim that sends your computer into time wasting loops.
ILuxRamen would taunt Google with obviously false blather.
If you think your product is better, don't complain that something like it comes with Vista cuz it won't matter.
No one can really be oblivious to the actual problem here: M$ has sabotaged yet another competitor on "their" OS. It does not matter how good your program is when you try to port it to Winblows and M$ decides they want your "market". Remember DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape and non M$ antivirus programs? All of them were far better than the M$ junk that eventually triumphed due to sabotage and vendor manipulation. Their demise has been meticulously documented in several anti-trust trials. This is no longer a matter of partisan bickering or fanboy ranting, it's court proven fact.
Protecting real competition is what antiturst is all about. The judgement and findings of fact against M$ were supposed to take care of these problems but did not because they left M$ intact. Their attack on Google, iPod anti-virus makers and even Wikipedia is more of the same. All of these other companies are just as legitimate and important as M$ and all of them are going to be slaughtered if things go as they did before. That's people who lose their jobs so that M$ can rack up more monopoly rent. Government action has failed miserably.
Fortunately, the market is correcting itself. People are avoiding Vista even though that means using ancient software on aging hardware. Dell is still selling XP, despite M$'s wishes, because people just don't want Vista. It's hurt hardware sales and everyone who trusted the usual business predictions are feeling the burn. Businesses and government offices continue to look for escape and they are finding it in Mac and free software that runs their existing equipment. With vendors like Dell selling free software, the dam has burst on M$. There's a reliable hardware path out of the mess. People who want what competition really has to offer are going to steer clear of M$ for the forseeable future.
All M$ can do is advertise, but that's not working like it used to. They can't polish the Vista turd. After six years, they can't produce much better, so it's all downhill from here. Everyone knows it too. Bye Bye M$.
Priorities seem to be stealing oil and ramping up the Homeland Defense required to do so. Fear, loathing, theft. So much for exploration and making a bigger pie for everyone.
For photos, let somebody else handle the headache at a cheap price: Wal-mart (or whatever floats your boat.
That works out well, actually. There are very few pictures most people actually want to print, but then you get good quality for a fraction of what ink costs, let alone the printer. Add in a few gimp edits and you have nice holiday cards.
For regular stuff, there's the printer at work. Who else wants print anymore anyway? The digital copy is more portable and durable.
We are all on one big curve where the ratio of material we read and use, paper/electronic, goes from infinity to zero. Paper, though cheap, is the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the US. It's demise is welcome.
You, perhaps, need to research stuff before shooting your mouth off. In some cases it's justified, but you have just libeled Microsoft for no apparent reason.
Uh, no. First, I asked IF it was true. Second, that money is not the reason Google ends up as the boxed search engine because Firefox, Konqeror and friends are free software and the choice can be changed at any step of the way from Mozilla.org to my desktop.
This Gadzuki character was trying to make a big deal out of nothing, much like Barkto would. It's all noise and bullshit when M$ is involved.
Wait, yuore telling me the Mozilla foundation does not get money (72 million) from google to make it the default search AND I'm paid by MS because I mentioned this fact? Are you just stupid or crazy and stupid?
I think you might be paid by M$ because you sound like they do. Anyone who could doubt the supremacy of Google as a search engine is insane. Also, your bad manners and basic misunderstanding of free software can only come from Redmond.
You happen to be right about Google giving money to Mozilla, though I can't vouch for the amount because the ZDNet (Wintel Rag) contradicts you.
Still, this does not matter because Firefox is free software as is Konqueror. Every distribution's choice of Google and ultimately every user's choice is indeed a mater of merit. If there's not an actual setting, anyone of those distributions could recompile the browser to include whatever search engine they want. The idea that teh Evil Google is buying influence in the free software world does not hold water like it would in the non free world where people don't really have software control or choices.
You can sit here and rain all day but it won't do you any good. You can call me stupid and crazy. You can say Google is evil and sucks. None of that will give M$ what it needs: product and sales. The end of the M$ gravy train is here.
Right, by paying firefox (and others) to default to google search.
If this is false and you know it and M$ paid you to put it here, you have just libled Google on M$'s behalf. That's nothing new to M$, which is a good reason to take a large grain of salt along when anyone starts defending M$ about anything.
I mean, really. Does Google pay KDE to make them the default search engine in Konqueror? Do they then pay Debian to do the same thing to Iceweasel and Konqueror? Do they pay me? No, I just know that Google rocks and no one is even close when it comes to quick and accurate searches. The same logic walks back up the free software chain though distributions to the actual coders. When a better search engine comes along, it's going to replace Google as the default or it will be easier to chose between them.
As practical as locate is, it only matches your search to the list of names in the database; I cannot search for a document containing some word.... I can teach my father how to use Beagle. I cannot teach him how to grep.
There are dozens of GUI front ends to grep that deliver most of the functionality. One of the easiest to use is the KDE find utility, which can search by content, file dates and all of that. Used in conjunction with a reasonable directory structure, you can get most of the benefits of an indexing search engine witout the performance hit. Real data mining this way is tedious, however, so I'd expect there are already free tools that someone has or will make a KDE interface for.
At the end of the day the real question is if you trust Google or M$ to mine your files for you. M$ will sell you for a nickel and Google can be forced by governments. This is why free software is the answer where you are doing anything you care about.
If I ever installed a Linux box at work, it had better have 24/7 tech support.... "Business use" means that it *has* to work.
If it works, why do you need 24/7 tech support? Red Hat does tech support to help you with changes, but really once a GNU/Linux box is up it stays that way.
It's amazing how people like you will put up with all sorts of M$ breakage and weirdness, then project even greater problems onto something you have never used and know nothing about.
The rub is not the burning of the trolls but the lack of anonymity for whistle blowers and others actually reporting news that might embarrass the powers that be.
So you might as well burn the trolls. Those other bad things are happening and cases like this and worse have already been used as excuses to violate your privacy. The rest of us might as well get something good out of it while we work to restore real privacy on the internet.
Might also have something to do with $12++ million dollar salaries for CEO. My bet is a Chinese CEO makes less than the cleaning staff at your US office and actually works for the company full time.
Party big wigs in China clean up just like US executives do but that does not matter. If they were free, their wages would rise just like they have in Japan and every other part of the free, industrialized world. Both US and Chinese executives are exploiting non free Chinese work. That exploitation has cheapened everyone else.
It's funny how M$ people like to blame their fans when M$ fails. No other OS has the M$ security problem - it's not popularity and it's not the user's fault. No other OS has such poor stability, despite M$'s overwhelming power over hardware makers - once again, it's not something the users are doing. Owners of other OS don't have to throw their computes away as frequently - once again, not the users. At the end of the day, if your users are "rabid wolves" it's something you have done and the sum total of what you have done, sucks life like nothing else.
Acceptance of IE, Word and M$ itself is proof that intermittent positive reinforcement is the most powerful and addictive motivator. It's like a Casino, you put your money in though you know you will lose. The few times it works makes you feel very good, but it's only because you've lost so much. But hey, the beer is free, right? M$ people are the most loyal users ever. The rabid part is usually reserved for those who would intervene in their bad habits.
You know, the biggest ripoff of all has got to be ever extending copyright. Everytime recorded media is about to loose it's "protection" the industry buys an extention from congress. Movies and music that were made with copyright protection of 25 years is still protected 100 years later. Each time the industry does this, they rob the public of what the public was due when the material was produced. When copyright is extended beyond average life spans, the public domain is never enriched with relevant material.
A more insidious issue is one of cultural control. It's not even done because studios think the old material is a revenue maker, they are afraid of competition that can take away their control. The older material could compete for mindshare and it carries it's message with it. That message can be jarring to someone locked inside the broadcast monopoly box, and that disturbance is the start of independent thought. It does not happen when all of the messages you get are consistent. Broadened taste is something industry and government abhor. Concentrated production can't keep up with real popular taste and government can't control distributed production.
This has already happened, to a small extent with net flicks and to a larger extent for those willing to risk punishment for file swapping. Netflicks circulation numbers show that people will take choices when offered. Something goofey, like 90%, of their titles are in circulation at any given time - people want it all, not just the blockbusters.
A free market for movies and music will emerge, but the broadcast monopolies are doing everything they can to thwart it. Physical distribution can't really keep up and electronic distribution will end their monopoly. Anyone can put a movie on the internet. This is why Disney would rather you not download Steamboat Willy and why all the studios are desperate to end network neutrality. YouTube is killing them. Not because people are watching their old crap, because people are watching what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Until they need to debug because their program seg faults (so printfs don't help) and promptly try to kill you.
So they can use gdb or kgdb. The pain of not being able to x forward easily will drive them to a better platform, or to master gdb from the command line.
Oddly named bittrollent asks:
Is this really your idea of freedom?
I'm not sure what the question means, but a government agency publishing things in a format that's owned by one company is pushing that company's fortune at the expense of all others. Why should governments cede control of their media and who watches it to a private company, especially a foreign one? People who pay their taxes deserve to be able to watch the results without having to pay the M$ tax.
If there's a problem with software patents involved here, the problem should be taken care of directly. Software patents lead to nonsense like this and should be abolished. There's no justifying the social cost of business method patents, which is what software patents ultimately are.
I also run on Linux and, I have to say, it still has problems resuming from the fucking screensaver if I close the lid. PATHETIC. Sometimes I can fix it by logging in remotely and killing the screensaver process[es]. Sometimes I have to log in remotely and kill X. If networking is not configured, I often have to power-cycle. Consequently I don't close the lid much.
It's a shame, but ACPI was intentionally sabotaged by M$. It's hit and miss, but the same machine won't do much better under M$ because their other software can't deal with power management and uptimes blow anyway. APM works well and is more like power management should be, so use it if your laptop has it by the kernel options "noacpi acpi=off".
Of course, this has nothing to do with any kind of security. You are not going to become part of the botnet and your data will survive power cycling, especially if you use a journalling file system like ext3.
This is such a shame when so-called "professors" actually hinder your learning experience.
It's strange that they don't teach them on GCC. The easiest way to make sure your students spend their time learning programming is to set them up with shell accounts and let them log on. This is the way I've seen it done.
The article I read trashed M$'s sorry analysis and told me to expect more of the same from Vista as we've seen with every other M$ OS. M$ again counts things incorrectly and fails to include all the problem children their sorry architecture encourages along with the gaping flaws they produce themselves:
So, the end user experience is likely to be unchanged, if they can even get Vista to work. As is always the case for a new Windoze release, the drivers are not there. Worse, new digital restrictions schemes make for poor performance even if they do get work. "Trip bits" and other nonsense make Vista a poor performer by design.
the fact that your Macs have never been compromised (that you know of) to the their actual security. This is an invalid equation.
The fact that only M$ machines get screwed and die along with your work is a good reason to avoid the platform.
I would expect that when Vista deployments outnumber XP, the situation will reverse itself. So where's the story here?
Even if you buy the demonstrably false "popularity argument" for poor M$ performance, the real story here is that nothing has changed for the user.
The article I read trashed M$'s sorry analysis and told me to expect more of the same from Vista as we've seen with every other M$ OS:
No, this is not Slashdot spin. It's a direct report of the original source, Security World:
So that's the journalist's opinion.
You can also note the direct carry over of M$'s laughable position that Vista is doing better than XP. Windoze has never been and never will be a safe and secure place for your data and this shows, even if you accept the M$ numbers. They've wasted all their effort making life suck for the end user with digital restrictions and competitor sabotage instead of addressing fundamental security issues. Vista is more of the same from a company that does not care and lies through it's teeth about it every time. There can't be more than fifty people in the world ready to believe Vista is going to be any better than any other version of Windoze.
Did you honestly forget this whole thing where you made exactly this point,
No, and I'm still willing to project M$'s behavior towards DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, Palm, Netscape, anti-virus makers and others right into the Google present. There's a clear pattern of behavior there that makes Google's claim all the more believable. Google has competent programmers who know the difference between intentional sabotage and accident, as did each of those other companies. Most of them came forth in anti-trust cases, and M$'s own internal email backed them up.
As usual, M$ has amped up the blame for the victim through Astroturfers like you, who can offer nothing but insults as a reason to think M$ has changed. This whole thread is riddled with highly moderated "Google is Evil" posts and other nonsense proclaiming M$'s "right to improve their platform" as if Google had done anything wrong or impeding a competitor's product by sabotaging the end user's computer could help anyone. M$'s behavior was and is premeditated and ultimately harms the user. Their current blame game and refusal to act on behalf of the user is documented by Ars:
At the end of the day, Windoze users are the losers. They get a sabotaged platform that used to have cool programs but is now deserted. It's amazing that anyone still wastes their time programming for Windoze. M$ has demonstrated time and time again that they will steal any profitable market by sabotaging the competition. Who wants to use a platform like that? It entirely negates vendor and hardware advantages M$ still enjoys because you never know when your favorite toy is going to be the next M$ victim that sends your computer into time wasting loops.
ILuxRamen would taunt Google with obviously false blather.
If you think your product is better, don't complain that something like it comes with Vista cuz it won't matter.
No one can really be oblivious to the actual problem here: M$ has sabotaged yet another competitor on "their" OS. It does not matter how good your program is when you try to port it to Winblows and M$ decides they want your "market". Remember DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape and non M$ antivirus programs? All of them were far better than the M$ junk that eventually triumphed due to sabotage and vendor manipulation. Their demise has been meticulously documented in several anti-trust trials. This is no longer a matter of partisan bickering or fanboy ranting, it's court proven fact.
Protecting real competition is what antiturst is all about. The judgement and findings of fact against M$ were supposed to take care of these problems but did not because they left M$ intact. Their attack on Google, iPod anti-virus makers and even Wikipedia is more of the same. All of these other companies are just as legitimate and important as M$ and all of them are going to be slaughtered if things go as they did before. That's people who lose their jobs so that M$ can rack up more monopoly rent. Government action has failed miserably.
Fortunately, the market is correcting itself. People are avoiding Vista even though that means using ancient software on aging hardware. Dell is still selling XP, despite M$'s wishes, because people just don't want Vista. It's hurt hardware sales and everyone who trusted the usual business predictions are feeling the burn. Businesses and government offices continue to look for escape and they are finding it in Mac and free software that runs their existing equipment. With vendors like Dell selling free software, the dam has burst on M$. There's a reliable hardware path out of the mess. People who want what competition really has to offer are going to steer clear of M$ for the forseeable future.
All M$ can do is advertise, but that's not working like it used to. They can't polish the Vista turd. After six years, they can't produce much better, so it's all downhill from here. Everyone knows it too. Bye Bye M$.
Anyone surprised?
Priorities seem to be stealing oil and ramping up the Homeland Defense required to do so. Fear, loathing, theft. So much for exploration and making a bigger pie for everyone.
For photos, let somebody else handle the headache at a cheap price: Wal-mart (or whatever floats your boat.
That works out well, actually. There are very few pictures most people actually want to print, but then you get good quality for a fraction of what ink costs, let alone the printer. Add in a few gimp edits and you have nice holiday cards.
For regular stuff, there's the printer at work. Who else wants print anymore anyway? The digital copy is more portable and durable.
We are all on one big curve where the ratio of material we read and use, paper/electronic, goes from infinity to zero. Paper, though cheap, is the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the US. It's demise is welcome.
You, perhaps, need to research stuff before shooting your mouth off. In some cases it's justified, but you have just libeled Microsoft for no apparent reason.
Uh, no. First, I asked IF it was true. Second, that money is not the reason Google ends up as the boxed search engine because Firefox, Konqeror and friends are free software and the choice can be changed at any step of the way from Mozilla.org to my desktop.
This Gadzuki character was trying to make a big deal out of nothing, much like Barkto would. It's all noise and bullshit when M$ is involved.
can only be used by Monkey boy Steve Ballmer.
It may one day be possible to do this with human beings. Until then animal testing is in order.
Wait, yuore telling me the Mozilla foundation does not get money (72 million) from google to make it the default search AND I'm paid by MS because I mentioned this fact? Are you just stupid or crazy and stupid?
I think you might be paid by M$ because you sound like they do. Anyone who could doubt the supremacy of Google as a search engine is insane. Also, your bad manners and basic misunderstanding of free software can only come from Redmond.
You happen to be right about Google giving money to Mozilla, though I can't vouch for the amount because the ZDNet (Wintel Rag) contradicts you.
Still, this does not matter because Firefox is free software as is Konqueror. Every distribution's choice of Google and ultimately every user's choice is indeed a mater of merit. If there's not an actual setting, anyone of those distributions could recompile the browser to include whatever search engine they want. The idea that teh Evil Google is buying influence in the free software world does not hold water like it would in the non free world where people don't really have software control or choices.
You can sit here and rain all day but it won't do you any good. You can call me stupid and crazy. You can say Google is evil and sucks. None of that will give M$ what it needs: product and sales. The end of the M$ gravy train is here.
Right, by paying firefox (and others) to default to google search.
If this is false and you know it and M$ paid you to put it here, you have just libled Google on M$'s behalf. That's nothing new to M$, which is a good reason to take a large grain of salt along when anyone starts defending M$ about anything.
I mean, really. Does Google pay KDE to make them the default search engine in Konqueror? Do they then pay Debian to do the same thing to Iceweasel and Konqueror? Do they pay me? No, I just know that Google rocks and no one is even close when it comes to quick and accurate searches. The same logic walks back up the free software chain though distributions to the actual coders. When a better search engine comes along, it's going to replace Google as the default or it will be easier to chose between them.
As practical as locate is, it only matches your search to the list of names in the database; I cannot search for a document containing some word. ... I can teach my father how to use Beagle. I cannot teach him how to grep.
There are dozens of GUI front ends to grep that deliver most of the functionality. One of the easiest to use is the KDE find utility, which can search by content, file dates and all of that. Used in conjunction with a reasonable directory structure, you can get most of the benefits of an indexing search engine witout the performance hit. Real data mining this way is tedious, however, so I'd expect there are already free tools that someone has or will make a KDE interface for.
At the end of the day the real question is if you trust Google or M$ to mine your files for you. M$ will sell you for a nickel and Google can be forced by governments. This is why free software is the answer where you are doing anything you care about.
If I ever installed a Linux box at work, it had better have 24/7 tech support. ... "Business use" means that it *has* to work.
If it works, why do you need 24/7 tech support? Red Hat does tech support to help you with changes, but really once a GNU/Linux box is up it stays that way.
It's amazing how people like you will put up with all sorts of M$ breakage and weirdness, then project even greater problems onto something you have never used and know nothing about.
I am dedazo.
The rub is not the burning of the trolls but the lack of anonymity for whistle blowers and others actually reporting news that might embarrass the powers that be.
So you might as well burn the trolls. Those other bad things are happening and cases like this and worse have already been used as excuses to violate your privacy. The rest of us might as well get something good out of it while we work to restore real privacy on the internet.
Might also have something to do with $12++ million dollar salaries for CEO. My bet is a Chinese CEO makes less than the cleaning staff at your US office and actually works for the company full time.
Party big wigs in China clean up just like US executives do but that does not matter. If they were free, their wages would rise just like they have in Japan and every other part of the free, industrialized world. Both US and Chinese executives are exploiting non free Chinese work. That exploitation has cheapened everyone else.
It's funny how M$ people like to blame their fans when M$ fails. No other OS has the M$ security problem - it's not popularity and it's not the user's fault. No other OS has such poor stability, despite M$'s overwhelming power over hardware makers - once again, it's not something the users are doing. Owners of other OS don't have to throw their computes away as frequently - once again, not the users. At the end of the day, if your users are "rabid wolves" it's something you have done and the sum total of what you have done, sucks life like nothing else.
Acceptance of IE, Word and M$ itself is proof that intermittent positive reinforcement is the most powerful and addictive motivator. It's like a Casino, you put your money in though you know you will lose. The few times it works makes you feel very good, but it's only because you've lost so much. But hey, the beer is free, right? M$ people are the most loyal users ever. The rabid part is usually reserved for those who would intervene in their bad habits.
You know, the biggest ripoff of all has got to be ever extending copyright. Everytime recorded media is about to loose it's "protection" the industry buys an extention from congress. Movies and music that were made with copyright protection of 25 years is still protected 100 years later. Each time the industry does this, they rob the public of what the public was due when the material was produced. When copyright is extended beyond average life spans, the public domain is never enriched with relevant material.
A more insidious issue is one of cultural control. It's not even done because studios think the old material is a revenue maker, they are afraid of competition that can take away their control. The older material could compete for mindshare and it carries it's message with it. That message can be jarring to someone locked inside the broadcast monopoly box, and that disturbance is the start of independent thought. It does not happen when all of the messages you get are consistent. Broadened taste is something industry and government abhor. Concentrated production can't keep up with real popular taste and government can't control distributed production.
This has already happened, to a small extent with net flicks and to a larger extent for those willing to risk punishment for file swapping. Netflicks circulation numbers show that people will take choices when offered. Something goofey, like 90%, of their titles are in circulation at any given time - people want it all, not just the blockbusters.
A free market for movies and music will emerge, but the broadcast monopolies are doing everything they can to thwart it. Physical distribution can't really keep up and electronic distribution will end their monopoly. Anyone can put a movie on the internet. This is why Disney would rather you not download Steamboat Willy and why all the studios are desperate to end network neutrality. YouTube is killing them. Not because people are watching their old crap, because people are watching what they want.