So I am torn on this topic. I love Linux and free open source software and I want M$ to die a fast death, yet I want U.S. exports to remain high.
Eventually, you can only make money by providing a real service. The chips are still Intel, so where there is US excellence, there is US income. There might be more if it were not for M$ proping up Intel at the expense of other US companies like AMD and IBM. Remember DEC and DR? They had some nice export income too. The US might be more competitive at electronics assembly if we could convince the world not to use Chinese slave labor, but we can't so that market has gone.
Money made based on the Windoze monopolies is a pipe dream. M$ really thought they could corner the word's market for something as ethereal as software? Give me a break. The only thing that's interesting about the M$ story is that they pulled off their little scam for so long. It's over because others can and will do better.
would the fanboys like you also praise satan for adopting FOSS/linux to control the fuel delivery and batch-processing of the new arrivals?
Why not? Don't you M$ fanboys preach respect for Mr. Gate's business methods? Just think of this as "cutting off the oxygen" and admire the removal of the M$ tax from one of the richest countries in Latin America.
The rest of us will praise self help and reason where we see it. Is there any good reason people around the world should pay Dell to assemble parts made in China? Free software also has ports to more appropriate hardware, cheap and low power consumption, instead of the eight core monsters M$ is moving towards.
You completely ignore the possibility that Kaplan didn't want to have to involve lawyers and the expense thereof when he felt that the judgements that small claims court can award would be sufficient to satisfy him.
No I didn't, I said it was foolish of him and backfired. He's got the money and should have used it to get the result he really wanted. If it was such a plain case, it would have been settled quickly by any competent opposing attorney and would not have cost substantially more. What he really wanted was to shut up the blogger, what he got was $7,500. What the blogger got was more publicity than a full page advert in the New York Times could buy.
My conclusion that there's no merit to his case comes from reading the blogs themselves. Nothing I saw constituted libel. There were things that might not be true, and there were things that were malicious, but I did not see anything that was both. Both of these nutballs believe the things they are saying. Kapplan, however, has been caught in several intentional lies and that's what this is all about. Kapplan is embarrassed and wants a shut down.
The GP post was concise, informative, and very convincing.
Care to tell me more? The superbanana's 500 word praise of small claims court as good for the common man is off topic and anything but concise. Then he contradicted himself to tell us how the same court's lax requirements are used to screw debtors. Mostly, I'd like to know what he managed to convince you of.
There are half a dozen comments already in the story, along the lines of "man, what a scumbag, suing in small claims!" or "small claims court sucks, OMG, NO RIGHTS USA SUXORS!"
I'm not going to defend your strawmen or answer your other flambait.
I'm just going to note, again, that it was in Kapplan's best interest to take this beyond small claims court and that makes the case stink. Small claims court is a fine place for... small claims, you know, damage less than $10,000. It's not a very good place to defend your reputation or to sue for liable, unless you consider those things so cheaply. It's also not a place to decide free speech issues. If Kapplan had a real case, he would have made it in a real court that could take the blog down. Nothing kept him from doing that, except perhaps for a complete lack of a case.
Kapplan's little scheme could not have backfired any bigger than this. The blogger is going to look back at the $7,500 he just lost as money well spent. There is no other way he could have gotten this kind of coverage for his cause.
Maybe on the merits? Mr. Salahi's website describes Mr. Kaplan as a "fraudulent journalist," which is another way of alleging he's incompetent to do his job, which the law calls "libel per se."
If the case were really so cut and dried, Kaplan would have eaten this guy alive in a real court instead of fooling around with small claims. I have a feeling that we will hear more about this.
The file manager did as did most competing file managers of the day. You could split it horizontally or vertically and subdivide the result, then drag and drop files and directories around your system and over the primitive networks of the day. For some reason, this was dropped by the replacement in windows 95 and beyond.
The equivalent capability was not dropped from free software and the KDE people seem to have generalized it into almost all KDE software.
The fact that they manage to work around the problem in a large number of cases doesn't mean there isn't an underlying problem being worked around.
Yes, but the problem can be fixed because the underlying software is free. This is not something that can be done in the non free world. What little can be done is a matter of configuration tweaks that must be duplicated by each and every user. As a free software user, the issue does not exist.
As a developer, the issue is trivial. Improvements to gcc, fftw, libgd and other packages have not been a problem for me. I can compare this to changes on M$'s platform. While some APIs did not change much, the toolkits changed a lot. By the time you get to the abstraction layer of VB not.net, your code is broken with every release.
Don't worry, they will know who's car and phone are in use. By RFID's they can be reasonably certain it's you, unless someone borrows all of your clothes, ha ha. If that's not enough, the 300 times a day your picture will be taken can trace exactly where you are. So don't worry about getting tickets because your passenger makes a call, worry that you are a cow - numbered, observed, medicated and stripped of all ability to protest and learn anything real about the world around them. Total Information Awareness of them means total control and oblivion for you.
Konqueror though... Well, it even renders Slashdot funny, when Safari doesn't. It cuts off the ends of posts constantly, and things like the reply links don't appear quite often. No other browser has this problem.
I have not noticed those problems on Etch. There were some minor issues with discussion 2, but those cleared up long ago.
It takes months to discover the KDE way of doing things, but it's almost always easier. Simple things, like split panes, go a long way in many situations but people who have not used them since Win3.1 will take a while to discover how useful they are.
You do realize that the unified nature of Konqueror, for which you give it such high praise, would be present with IE had Microsoft not been accused of monopolistic practices for doing that sort of thing?
No, M$ was convicted of monopolistic practices for systematically undermining competition, not for adding features. Changing defaults against user preferences, handing other developers SDKs and APIs that are second rate, outright sabotage and vendor manipulation are the things that got them in trouble along with dumping. It's not that they made a browser and integrated it, it's that they forbid retailers from installing alternatives, and sabotaged those alternatives.
Anti-trust concerns are a lame excuse for not having features, but they clearly don't care about monopoly practices. They are currently screwing anti-virus and security software makers like they did Netscape. The Plays for Sure digital restrictions fiasco has been called one of the largest vendor betrayals in history. The reason M$ does not have a nicely integrated desktop is because they are wasting their time and money on sabotage and digital restrictions.
You know, it's really open source software that's known for making arbitrary upgrades that break backwards compatibility...
That makes no sense and contradicts experience. I've been using PCs since 1989 and have no attachment to any tech company outside of using their stuff. Non free software is more jerky and harder on the user by far than free software.
In six years of Debian desktop use, this has hardly been an issue for me. I've done dist-upgrades for three different releases and they all worked. The last two times, from Woody to Sarge and then from Sarge to Etch, were perfect. All along the software has played nice - Gnome works well under KDE, KDE under Gnome, everything under Window Maker, Enlightenment etc. I can not only cut and paste across applications, I can do it across the network, through multiple hops.
I can compare that to more than ten years of Windoze desktop use before XP and what people tell me about it since, but there's really no comparing the two. The M$ upgrade train is effective. Everything you have degrades, even if you are able to use it, and the effort required to keep things up forces you to buy new shit which breaks your old work. The platform itself has been devastated by M$ and is now basically M$ only. M$ has driven all competition away whenever there's a buck to be made and they do it at everyone else's expense, especially the poor end user who ends up having to redo all of their work.
The only problems I have with free software is when I try to mix it up with non free. The non free people are unable to co-operate and their shit gets broken when changes are made. It's brittle and the more of it you have, the closer you get to the M$ experience.
A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.
I agree, but the IE 7 story shows that you don't have to worry much anymore. Despite being a forced upgrade on most Windoze platforms, IE 7 still has less than 20% market share even for tech markets. Design to real standards and everyone wins.
The only stuff that still sucks is video, but the average windoze user can't see it either. Patented and restricted junk works that way and will be ignored by the vast majority of people for the duration.
These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 will become another large competitor on Windows.
KDE 4 on Windoze would be a large competitor for every class of program. Konqueror, through kioslaves and kparts, is the amazing unified desktop environment that Bill Gates was dreaming about ten years ago but never delivered. All kinds of documents can be opened with ease in tabs and split panes. All kinds of connections, from file to sftp work seemlessly and fish figures it out for you. But all of that is also available in every other program from KDE and KDE has just about every kind of program. I'm not sure how they will port all of that onto something as ugly as Windoze, but that's one of their goals.
It all works better, of course, with free software. Xorg has network transparency, can run multiple instances, makes virtual desktops easier, and won't go thunk in the night when Bill Gates "upgrades" things to break your work. I'm not going to even think about the restriction laden world of Vista, except to note the evil direction and futility of porting to Windoze. As soon as you are there, those jerks have moved the gaolposts again.
someone brought Knoppix. How else did they get boot and communications? Too bad no one had one of those back when Lexington had to be towed back to port.
I live next door to you. Well, I don't but there won't be any difference between the mailboxes.
I actually live in a late 20th century American neighborhood, which uses the dispersion strategy for protection. Big lots make a target poor environment for theives, fires and nuclear weapons. Stay at home moms are a further deterrent to theives. It's less work and risk to rob hundreds of mail boxes at a time in apartment buildings. The male and female worker bees who live there are never home during the day.
Similarly, tooth clacks or finger clicks could be interpreted by a receiver to activate, say, functions in a phone.
Behind the nauggahide door, the implications are sinking in, "Get that Vinnie, breaking duhr legs might really get em to pay up. Uhh, har har har." Vinnie does not get it, but laughs anyway.
... from billboards in the future could be just what you fear.
Depending on which medical uses people have for this "new" acoustic network, the results can be more serious than funny. If I had disabilities, M$ is the last company I'd want helping me out.
f Microsoft pay any attention to your (quite frankly) insignificant life existence on here it's to congratulate you on doing more for them than any amount of money they could spend on here ever would. Regardless, it would cheaper for them to have you killed than spend good money on employing people to mod you down.
Ding, another death threat. If ever your account is traced back to M$, I'll be happy to provide a link to the parrent as evidence of something less legal than the usual anti-competitive PR blitz Bill pays loser like you to do all day. You should be fired for fuck ups like that.
Using the stolen keys, Lodrick believes, Nelson made off with an unsolicited mailing from the bank. Lodrick said it contained two debit/credit cards she had not requested and, worse, a statement for a certificate of deposit that included her Social Security number. Personal identification numbers for the cards were in a separate envelope.
I don't even have a lock on my mail box and banks send me this crap all the time. Besides being a massive waste of everyone's money, it only takes a few days of intercepting the mail to rob someone.
Slashdot Mirror
So I am torn on this topic. I love Linux and free open source software and I want M$ to die a fast death, yet I want U.S. exports to remain high.
Eventually, you can only make money by providing a real service. The chips are still Intel, so where there is US excellence, there is US income. There might be more if it were not for M$ proping up Intel at the expense of other US companies like AMD and IBM. Remember DEC and DR? They had some nice export income too. The US might be more competitive at electronics assembly if we could convince the world not to use Chinese slave labor, but we can't so that market has gone.
Money made based on the Windoze monopolies is a pipe dream. M$ really thought they could corner the word's market for something as ethereal as software? Give me a break. The only thing that's interesting about the M$ story is that they pulled off their little scam for so long. It's over because others can and will do better.
would the fanboys like you also praise satan for adopting FOSS/linux to control the fuel delivery and batch-processing of the new arrivals?
Why not? Don't you M$ fanboys preach respect for Mr. Gate's business methods? Just think of this as "cutting off the oxygen" and admire the removal of the M$ tax from one of the richest countries in Latin America.
The rest of us will praise self help and reason where we see it. Is there any good reason people around the world should pay Dell to assemble parts made in China? Free software also has ports to more appropriate hardware, cheap and low power consumption, instead of the eight core monsters M$ is moving towards.
You completely ignore the possibility that Kaplan didn't want to have to involve lawyers and the expense thereof when he felt that the judgements that small claims court can award would be sufficient to satisfy him.
No I didn't, I said it was foolish of him and backfired. He's got the money and should have used it to get the result he really wanted. If it was such a plain case, it would have been settled quickly by any competent opposing attorney and would not have cost substantially more. What he really wanted was to shut up the blogger, what he got was $7,500. What the blogger got was more publicity than a full page advert in the New York Times could buy.
My conclusion that there's no merit to his case comes from reading the blogs themselves. Nothing I saw constituted libel. There were things that might not be true, and there were things that were malicious, but I did not see anything that was both. Both of these nutballs believe the things they are saying. Kapplan, however, has been caught in several intentional lies and that's what this is all about. Kapplan is embarrassed and wants a shut down.
The GP post was concise, informative, and very convincing.
Care to tell me more? The superbanana's 500 word praise of small claims court as good for the common man is off topic and anything but concise. Then he contradicted himself to tell us how the same court's lax requirements are used to screw debtors. Mostly, I'd like to know what he managed to convince you of.
He may have a bad reputation ...
That's news to me.
There are half a dozen comments already in the story, along the lines of "man, what a scumbag, suing in small claims!" or "small claims court sucks, OMG, NO RIGHTS USA SUXORS!"
I'm not going to defend your strawmen or answer your other flambait.
I'm just going to note, again, that it was in Kapplan's best interest to take this beyond small claims court and that makes the case stink. Small claims court is a fine place for ... small claims, you know, damage less than $10,000. It's not a very good place to defend your reputation or to sue for liable, unless you consider those things so cheaply. It's also not a place to decide free speech issues. If Kapplan had a real case, he would have made it in a real court that could take the blog down. Nothing kept him from doing that, except perhaps for a complete lack of a case.
Kapplan's little scheme could not have backfired any bigger than this. The blogger is going to look back at the $7,500 he just lost as money well spent. There is no other way he could have gotten this kind of coverage for his cause.
Maybe on the merits? Mr. Salahi's website describes Mr. Kaplan as a "fraudulent journalist," which is another way of alleging he's incompetent to do his job, which the law calls "libel per se."
If the case were really so cut and dried, Kaplan would have eaten this guy alive in a real court instead of fooling around with small claims. I have a feeling that we will hear more about this.
Win 3.1 had split window panes?
The file manager did as did most competing file managers of the day. You could split it horizontally or vertically and subdivide the result, then drag and drop files and directories around your system and over the primitive networks of the day. For some reason, this was dropped by the replacement in windows 95 and beyond.
The equivalent capability was not dropped from free software and the KDE people seem to have generalized it into almost all KDE software.
The fact that they manage to work around the problem in a large number of cases doesn't mean there isn't an underlying problem being worked around.
Yes, but the problem can be fixed because the underlying software is free. This is not something that can be done in the non free world. What little can be done is a matter of configuration tweaks that must be duplicated by each and every user. As a free software user, the issue does not exist.
As a developer, the issue is trivial. Improvements to gcc, fftw, libgd and other packages have not been a problem for me. I can compare this to changes on M$'s platform. While some APIs did not change much, the toolkits changed a lot. By the time you get to the abstraction layer of VB not.net, your code is broken with every release.
Don't worry, they will know who's car and phone are in use. By RFID's they can be reasonably certain it's you, unless someone borrows all of your clothes, ha ha. If that's not enough, the 300 times a day your picture will be taken can trace exactly where you are. So don't worry about getting tickets because your passenger makes a call, worry that you are a cow - numbered, observed, medicated and stripped of all ability to protest and learn anything real about the world around them. Total Information Awareness of them means total control and oblivion for you.
Konqueror though... Well, it even renders Slashdot funny, when Safari doesn't. It cuts off the ends of posts constantly, and things like the reply links don't appear quite often. No other browser has this problem.
I have not noticed those problems on Etch. There were some minor issues with discussion 2, but those cleared up long ago.
It takes months to discover the KDE way of doing things, but it's almost always easier. Simple things, like split panes, go a long way in many situations but people who have not used them since Win3.1 will take a while to discover how useful they are.
You do realize that the unified nature of Konqueror, for which you give it such high praise, would be present with IE had Microsoft not been accused of monopolistic practices for doing that sort of thing?
No, M$ was convicted of monopolistic practices for systematically undermining competition, not for adding features. Changing defaults against user preferences, handing other developers SDKs and APIs that are second rate, outright sabotage and vendor manipulation are the things that got them in trouble along with dumping. It's not that they made a browser and integrated it, it's that they forbid retailers from installing alternatives, and sabotaged those alternatives.
Anti-trust concerns are a lame excuse for not having features, but they clearly don't care about monopoly practices. They are currently screwing anti-virus and security software makers like they did Netscape. The Plays for Sure digital restrictions fiasco has been called one of the largest vendor betrayals in history. The reason M$ does not have a nicely integrated desktop is because they are wasting their time and money on sabotage and digital restrictions.
You know, it's really open source software that's known for making arbitrary upgrades that break backwards compatibility ...
That makes no sense and contradicts experience. I've been using PCs since 1989 and have no attachment to any tech company outside of using their stuff. Non free software is more jerky and harder on the user by far than free software.
In six years of Debian desktop use, this has hardly been an issue for me. I've done dist-upgrades for three different releases and they all worked. The last two times, from Woody to Sarge and then from Sarge to Etch, were perfect. All along the software has played nice - Gnome works well under KDE, KDE under Gnome, everything under Window Maker, Enlightenment etc. I can not only cut and paste across applications, I can do it across the network, through multiple hops.
I can compare that to more than ten years of Windoze desktop use before XP and what people tell me about it since, but there's really no comparing the two. The M$ upgrade train is effective. Everything you have degrades, even if you are able to use it, and the effort required to keep things up forces you to buy new shit which breaks your old work. The platform itself has been devastated by M$ and is now basically M$ only. M$ has driven all competition away whenever there's a buck to be made and they do it at everyone else's expense, especially the poor end user who ends up having to redo all of their work.
The only problems I have with free software is when I try to mix it up with non free. The non free people are unable to co-operate and their shit gets broken when changes are made. It's brittle and the more of it you have, the closer you get to the M$ experience.
A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.
I agree, but the IE 7 story shows that you don't have to worry much anymore. Despite being a forced upgrade on most Windoze platforms, IE 7 still has less than 20% market share even for tech markets. Design to real standards and everyone wins.
The only stuff that still sucks is video, but the average windoze user can't see it either. Patented and restricted junk works that way and will be ignored by the vast majority of people for the duration.
These statistics make me wonder if Konqueror 4 will become another large competitor on Windows.
KDE 4 on Windoze would be a large competitor for every class of program. Konqueror, through kioslaves and kparts, is the amazing unified desktop environment that Bill Gates was dreaming about ten years ago but never delivered. All kinds of documents can be opened with ease in tabs and split panes. All kinds of connections, from file to sftp work seemlessly and fish figures it out for you. But all of that is also available in every other program from KDE and KDE has just about every kind of program. I'm not sure how they will port all of that onto something as ugly as Windoze, but that's one of their goals.
It all works better, of course, with free software. Xorg has network transparency, can run multiple instances, makes virtual desktops easier, and won't go thunk in the night when Bill Gates "upgrades" things to break your work. I'm not going to even think about the restriction laden world of Vista, except to note the evil direction and futility of porting to Windoze. As soon as you are there, those jerks have moved the gaolposts again.
Is there something I'm just not getting here?
Get with the program, comrade, the party also invented the helicopter. All progress and innovation come from the company.
This is cool, yes, but the emphasis on "first" seems a bit off.
The vague, hyped up and imageless press release is typical of the new management's style. The Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation signed an unconditional surrender to M$ in May. I found those pictures when I visited the official media release and saw Steve Ballmer instead of scram jets in the image gallery. It's almost like they did this on purpose, just to show you that Vista is being accepted by any government agency.
harassment bot dedazo writes:
Oh, wait. You are going with that meme that Windows NT caused the ship to fail. HAHAHAHA! Wow, I get it. Very clever.
Yes, even a PR drone can develop a sense of humor. It's easier being on the paid side of the dying empire isn't it?
Twitter - on location, deep in the dark and blinking reaches of the compUSA. I do hope your next job is like this dedazo.
someone brought Knoppix. How else did they get boot and communications? Too bad no one had one of those back when Lexington had to be towed back to port.
Wonderful! What was your address again?
I live next door to you. Well, I don't but there won't be any difference between the mailboxes.
I actually live in a late 20th century American neighborhood, which uses the dispersion strategy for protection. Big lots make a target poor environment for theives, fires and nuclear weapons. Stay at home moms are a further deterrent to theives. It's less work and risk to rob hundreds of mail boxes at a time in apartment buildings. The male and female worker bees who live there are never home during the day.
Jolly old pirate, thegnu, says
Arrrrrr! Shiver me timbers!
And so the DVD shook him all night long, again and again.
Behind the nauggahide door, the implications are sinking in, "Get that Vinnie, breaking duhr legs might really get em to pay up. Uhh, har har har." Vinnie does not get it, but laughs anyway.
... from billboards in the future could be just what you fear.
Depending on which medical uses people have for this "new" acoustic network, the results can be more serious than funny. If I had disabilities, M$ is the last company I'd want helping me out.
f Microsoft pay any attention to your (quite frankly) insignificant life existence on here it's to congratulate you on doing more for them than any amount of money they could spend on here ever would. Regardless, it would cheaper for them to have you killed than spend good money on employing people to mod you down.
Ding, another death threat. If ever your account is traced back to M$, I'll be happy to provide a link to the parrent as evidence of something less legal than the usual anti-competitive PR blitz Bill pays loser like you to do all day. You should be fired for fuck ups like that.
The thief took advantage of bank spam:
I don't even have a lock on my mail box and banks send me this crap all the time. Besides being a massive waste of everyone's money, it only takes a few days of intercepting the mail to rob someone.