Name one other thing that people produce that can be used and copied for free.
A teacher should know that ideas are free. Songs, stories, facts, concepts, associations, recipes, laws and software programs are all things that can be coppied and used without cost to the creator. The means of conveying those ideas have been more and less expensive but electronic publishing brings the cost close to zero. The only reason a teacher would miss that is because publishers have tried to convince people that ideas are property, complete with ownership and limitations that defy common sense.
... it no doubt sounded too good to be true, so she felt that she had to make sure that she hadn't missed something.
People immersed in non free propaganda are trained to act with that suspicion. The phrases "you get what you pay for" and "too good to be true" are favorites truisms designed to eliminate thought. Combined with sabotage of "competing" software on "their" platform, this is one of the most effective weapons they have.
The cure is to explain the economics of free software form eveyone's vantage point along with the history of that development. The ordinary user has an obvious gain. Without effort they get tools better than they can buy. People who make software to solve their company's problems also get a good deal, all of the tools required to solve the problems are provided without cost other than assembling and modifying them. Those modified programs are what everyone else sees as the prize so things only grow when a copyleft license is used. Some people do it for fun. Some people do it because they are angry that their work or publically funded work like Maxsyma, was stolen by an "owner". You can also point out that Microsoft, Apple and everyone else has helped themselves to free software released under licenses that let them close that work off and behave anti-socially. For whatever reason, free software has snowballed to the point where anyone wanting to do anything with a computer would be a fool to ignore free software.
Teachers should understand these things intuitively because the free software world acts as an ideal school. It's free, everyone is welcome, the best examples are easy to find and peer review comes with use. Teachers only with their math classes worked that way, and maybee they will. Western thought and education started with interested people scratching lines in the sand at public markets. Everything since has been extra.
This is true but charging the biodiesel user hardly "levels the playing field" and the punishment is silly. Big oil people have far greater resources for figuring taxes owed and paying them. If the state wanted to be fair, they could have figured the taxes for him and demanded payment. Slapping him with a fine in excess of what's owed is only something that should be done if he used the kind of scam accounting big oil companies use.
Where are you pulling you $1 billion a month figure from?
From Microsoft. They spent 2,191,000,000 in three months according to the quarterly report filed September 30, 2006. More recent reports have more and that's what I remember, nearly a billion dollars a month in sales and marketing. Spending more on marketing than anything else! That's insane unless you are selling carbonated sugar water.
All M$ reports are kind of slushy. The sited report has a strange 1.6 billion for "cost of revenue" and a further 1.8 billion in "research", much of which we can assume lands in "get the facts" reports. It sure did not put new features into Vista.
In reality, the software will very likely require the same amount of support as other software (which many times Adobe or MS will give gratis or close to gratis). In any case, sysadmins and tech support people cost more than software
What ever gave you that idea? Non free software cost more in every way. The hardware is always more expensive and you have to replace it more often. It always takes more time to keep up, so you get less for the money spent on staff. Staff that's not busy with the patch time of the month, rolling out "upgrades" and fighting virus infections have time to work on tools the school actually wants. Finally, licensing costs are an issue no matter how "good" a deal you get. All of the issues you mention, easy roll out, fewer "upgrades", and local spending are cost and convenience issues in free software's favor. It's hard to imagine free software will ever be as expensive and inconvenient as non free software and experience is making the case clear.
A nasty little AC troll shows their ignorance of software creation by taunting:
Do YOU work full time on F/OSS projects? Do you get paid for it? Do you actually have another job to put food on your table and subsidize the F/OSS project(s) you work on?
Everyone has a job to put food on the table except people who are independently wealthy.
I do not work full time on free software but no one needs to. Free software provides tools for all jobs so it will be used everywhere and improved as a byproduct. The vast majority of programmers make general tools work for specific clients. They don't care who made those tools and would be just as happy if other people could use the results of their work. This especially true in education and research, where education is the mission. All of the software I'm writing for my research is free. I'm not a CS person, so it's not the best code in the world but it works. Because all of the tools I used to make it are free, I can actually share it with anyone who's interested. When tools can be improved and shared everyone is better off. There are more than enough companies willing to support basic work on the tools that run their business to keep all of the tools working well. That's why free software has grown without corporate sponsorship and will always be around and it's why I have at my disposal first class software from a stable desktop to a bug free compiler.
The basic stand against free software is selfish and morally corrosive. If you and your friends could help themselves, you would not need people who own software. They seek to ruin your trust in your neighbor and yourself so that you will be helpless and divided. 22 years of GNU prove they are simply wrong.
The following is a typical frustration for free software advocates:
Recently I gave a conference presentation about the benefits of F/OSS for educators -- how all teachers and students could use these tools and that they were free and would remain so. I distributed copies of TheOpenCD and talked about the F/OSS programs that it includes. Near the end of the hour-long presentation, a participant raised her hand and asked, "So I can use this software for free?" Even after an hour, F/OSS still did not quite make sense to her.
Every other source of information teachers have is full of non free propaganda. Don't copy that floppy (flash warning) is an annoying classic. The basic tenants were laid out by Bill Gates in his famous 1976 whine which says, "if you don't pay me, your computer won't work". Broadcasters and publishers justify their existence with a similar but more realistic story that reinforces the software lie. The lie is reinforced with confusing language, bogus arguments and, ultimately, name calling. The tactics are covered in detail here. Microsoft spends a billion dollars a month on marketing and each piece of that marketing conveys their propaganda.
It's very effective and can only be eliminated by free software use. The idea that software can be shared and improved is so completely foreign to them, so much that you can perform almost any demonstration with free software and they still won't understand, as evidenced above. It's only after they use free software, like Mozilla, that they can see that it is not only good enough, it's what they want and that's what free software is all about. At that point, the rest of the lies start falling down and they get very angry.
It's entirely reasonable to presume that all music and movies that were being sold were copyrighted by *an entity other than the sellers* who had *not authorized that sale*, and the work was not in the public domain.
How do you know that it's not Creative Commons or public domain material? One of these cases was tipped off by an angry girlfriend.
So because you think something shouldn't be a criminal matter, it isn't
Democracies are supposed to work that way. Laws should follow morals rather than morals following law. People are put in jail when they outrage the public. I'll settle for repealing retroactive copyright extensions instead of retroactively jailing executives of the MAFIAA companies. Those caught bribing public officials don't get off so easy. Deal?
but you can't deny that the replication machine itself would be strong circumstantial evidence against the perpetrator, and would serve alongside other evidence if/when that person is brought to trial.
If a person has been caught violating copyright by selling large quantities of material, then the machine is evidence of how they did it but I don't see how that matters. I have stacks of CDs and a CD burner, but I've never violated copyright. You have to do better than proving someone has a press to prove they were counterfitting and society should never fault someone for publishing legitimate materials. The whole point of copyright law is to encourage people to publish, not to make them afraid of police raids.
It's criminals like this who provide justifications for DRM and other annoyance.
No, the MAFIAA companies want digital restrictions to prevent competition. Digital restrictions won't do anything to prevent wholesale copy unless general purpose computing is outlawed.
There is also principled stand that can be made against copyright as it exists. Copyright is anything but perfect and it's not having it's intended effect. The rights to free speech and privacy you will have to give up to make digital restrictions work are far more valuable than those created by copyright.
While what they did was scarry, its pretty well justified. They were indeed selling counterfit CDs and DVDs for sale. NOT personal use.
The first problem with your justification is that you assume guilt. That's not hard to do when you presume all music and movies are owned by the MAFIAA, but this is not the case. When and if these people are convicted, we will know they violated copyright.
The second problem is that copyright is a civil matter. You don't need to drag the police into it any more than you need to drag them into a divorce. Evidence can be collected without police help and courts can slap a lien on the income of the guilty party. Oh, I know, there's now criminal copyright violation - but it's wrong and should be repealed.
A third problem, related to the first and second, is justifying the cost of copyright enforcement. Would society go to bat for anyone but the MAFIAA companies? If not, the public cost of this nation wide enforcement is strictly for the benefit of a very small number of private companies. It's hard to justify that kind of spending to protect a created right that few really enjoy. The point of copyright law is to grow the public domain and encourage publication, not to protect the profits of a few large monopoly providers.
The country should be covered in small shops publishing media that people want. There is talent and equipment everywhere and it's as big and diverse as the US itself. It is an abject failure of copyright laws to have not encouraged such a market but has instead favored the central production of uniform crap which is then sold in equally repugnant chain stores.
since windows isnt secure, you shouldnt even bother using secure file transfer, and instead use regular ftp. is that what you're getting at?
If you care for information security, you should not let it onto windoze. If you let it onto Windoze, you should avoid using passwords because that will compromise other data you care about. Data security is only as strong as it's weakest link.
filezilla... I typically install cygwin on every windows system I use, just so I can log in remotely through ssh, and use sftp. It's a nice end-run around the windows domain stupidity.
Yes, but that brings all the insecurity of Windoze to your file server. If you care enough to use sftp, you should not let a Windoze box touch it. To share with Windoze users, Samba, http and regular ftp are better.
The only thing that matters is using real standards, not M$ fakes which will burn you because they churn so often and are split into several minor sub categories. Show your PHB this one day.
May 2007
IE7 19.2%
IE6 38.1%
IE5 1.5%
Fx 33.7%
Moz 1.3%
S 1.5%
O 1.6%
After you get past the browser divisions, you start to see plug-in differentiation which is always worse in the haves and have not world of non free software. There is no 90%, not even a 50%. Developing to a specific browser is worse than developing to a coin toss.
if they just want to expose Windows users to The Macintosh Experience, I'm not convinced that a (probably buggy) public beta of a Web browser is the way to do it.
It can't be too much worse than the buggy public beta that their OS is.
Nobody on windows would give a crap if iTunes wasn't the main way to get things onto an iPod.
I wanted to say that Windoze users would be happy with the KDE goodness that trickles through Safari but I just can't. Konqueror is an awesome file manager and web browser, virtually without peer. Safari is nice and should be fast but it lacks important features - split screens, sftp and so on. Sftp on windoze is... a chastity belt on a whore... padlock on a low rider... stupid and dangerous.
The bottom line is that anyone who really cares is going to GNU/Linux or Mac. People on PCs either don't care or are wearing some kind of M$ FUD blindfold.
KDE 4.0 will have exports to Windoze, if Windoze is still around when it comes out. I would not stop anyone from trying but porting more than a few applications to Windoze is a waste of time.
While it is great that the use of computers is becoming widespread and accessible to nearly all, what is not great is the fact that most of them will run windows.
They are not going to be buying Dell and other US rip-off brands, they are going to buy direct from the people who make the hardware. The makers are going to ramp up their capacity and sell as cheaply as they can, so long as they are making money. They will continue to do things like this to avoid licensing costs.
OLPC is not going to run Windows and it's a good example of what the future really will be like. M$ has a hard time porting to more than i386, so they are going to miss out on the platforms everyone else is going to use. Sure, there will still be premium hardware, but it's going to be more diverse and free software is better for it. Most of the world's hardware is going to look like OLPC.
There's also a language barrier M$ has never really overcome. Free software has already done a good job. As more people get their hands on computers and demand increases for native platforms, the disparity will only increase.
All of the M$ shortfalls are due to the rigidity of non free software. No one company, no matter how large, can compete with the free world.
You inflate the value of M$'s legacy code and misunderstand M$'s goals. This is evident when you say:
Microsoft simply can't sue individual OSS developers or users.
That's obvious, despite attempts to extort and control individuals by our slow learning, MAFIAA friends.
They hope to control distribution and make money that way. Don't believe me? Ask Novel and Xandros.
M$ is a patent troll and a very dangerous one. With M$, software has always been a tool to make money. They owned it, promoted it and charged for it. They want to do the same thing with all free software because they know that the world has changed and non free is out of gas. Back in 1993 when Gates realized how things worked, he knew which way his company would go and has worked to strengthen the very laws he decried. The dangerous part is how such notions have warped morals and US government policies. "Owners" have convinced a large portion of the US government that "IP" is the way to tax the world, to become some kind of thought and idea owners and make everyone else do the dirty work.
Getting rid of software patents takes care of a lot of problems. It forces M$ to compete as a normal software company. More importantly, it restores people's liberty to code. Liberty is something the US needs a lot more of if it's to regain it's former moral character. Software freedom is a small step in that direction but it enables much more. Patents are a huge threat to software freedom and without software freedom there will be no free press or ability to organize and otherwise enjoy every other freedom. With those freedoms, we can start pushing for other and better laws like competitive networks, competitive healthcare, reasonable public schools and so on and so forth. Without those freedoms, we will all eat the current bullies dog food.
... the incompetence would be on Google's side of this particular contretemps, I fail to see how 'Vista is a loser' when it comes out that Google were making the whole thing up to try and artificially gain marketshare through deceit.
Can you tell me how Google would gain market share by making up a problem? They did not want to report the problem to anyone but the Federal DOJ. We only know about it because the former M$ lawyer now in charge of the DOJ took the unusual step of telling State Governments not to persue the matter and one or two of them spilled the beans.
KDE and GNOME are never running at the same time, so how would it be possible to get them into a position where they could interfere with each other or not?
Of course you can run them both at the same time. The obvious way is to use either Gnome or KDE's "switch user" feature to start another display manager and log in and use the other system on a different virtual terminal. A less obvious way to do the same thing is to just start the different processes. I don't anticipate any more trouble with this than I had trouble running multiple older versions of the same softare via X forwarding from a 400 MHz machine. More modern hardware will do even better. Free software just works.
GDS does not work well on Vista. You can attribute it to malice, as the technically competent Google people did, or incompetence as you would. Either way, Vista is a loser.
if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Ignoring the fact that linux and other free laternatives divides your supposed monoculture by two, free software offers choice and modifications non free software will never match. Do you really think BSD, HURD and Linux are the same thing? How can you imagine a monoculture when all three of those choices will run on dozens of different hardware platforms? When you permutate these already dizzying choices by the number of distributions available with procompiled binaries, your monoculture starts to look like an old growth jungle. Compare that to the old i386 binary crap from M$ that loads exactly the same memory footprint on boot regardless of hardware, which looks more like a Soviet apartment block.
In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs.
This is something that will be repeated because free software is like that and the pioneering days are over.
Ferrie has nothing but praise for his staff for working through the conflict and learning new skills."Even the technicians who struggled a little bit initially are very good," Ferrie says. "They're phenomenal now. Once we really got through all the angst and the problems and sat down and did some serious planning for them, everything started to go great."
The beauty of free software is where it can take otherwise mediocre staff. One of the greatest motivators is a chance to make a difference, as proved by GE lighting experiments back in the 1920s. In the non free world, you do your job in a very limited box only to watch your work torn out by the next version in the upgrade train. In the free software world, you have all the tools everyone else does and what you do can stand on it's merit. Eventually, the picture that emerges is that there was nothing wrong with your people other than poor tools.
The very worst case, once most of the work is already done, is that you just use the software like any other non free shop. This still represents an improvement, because free software gives you more for your money.
Regarding OSX and Spotlight, GDS actually uses extensions of Spotlight to achieve some of it's indexing, so that's a fairly simple reason why they're not complaining. They don't do this with Windows Indexing because they can't... The fact that Linux's indexing does or does not 'suck life'... is also completely irrelevant.
So, everyone else gets the job done without stepping on each others toes but only M$ can do it on Vista. KDE and Gnome don't interfere with each other in the GNU/Linux world. GDS works great on OSX. Yet, for some reason only M$ works on Vista. This alone gives weight to Google's charges.
Besides common sense, we have reputation and history as a guide. Google knows it's platforms and has a sterling reputation. M$ has been proved guilty of sabotage in the DRDOS case above and Netscape. It's obvious you are on the M$ side, I just wonder why.
Except once again you haven't read a single thing on the thread and have jumped straight to the only conclusion we could have expected from you - 'MS am bad, lol'.
No, I had to wade through all the lame excuses and "I'm with Microsoft Astroturf before I found a remotely reasonable question. If history is any guide, Googles claims are true. If what you are saying is true, tell me why Mac users don't have the same problem with OSX and GDS on the same box and why Linux search utilities also don't suck life. The point of M$'s sabotage is to say that GDS is slow and buggy, but that does not work when there are other implementations that work outside of M$'s reach. As usual, all you have is namecalling and nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Name one other thing that people produce that can be used and copied for free.
A teacher should know that ideas are free. Songs, stories, facts, concepts, associations, recipes, laws and software programs are all things that can be coppied and used without cost to the creator. The means of conveying those ideas have been more and less expensive but electronic publishing brings the cost close to zero. The only reason a teacher would miss that is because publishers have tried to convince people that ideas are property, complete with ownership and limitations that defy common sense.
People immersed in non free propaganda are trained to act with that suspicion. The phrases "you get what you pay for" and "too good to be true" are favorites truisms designed to eliminate thought. Combined with sabotage of "competing" software on "their" platform, this is one of the most effective weapons they have.
The cure is to explain the economics of free software form eveyone's vantage point along with the history of that development. The ordinary user has an obvious gain. Without effort they get tools better than they can buy. People who make software to solve their company's problems also get a good deal, all of the tools required to solve the problems are provided without cost other than assembling and modifying them. Those modified programs are what everyone else sees as the prize so things only grow when a copyleft license is used. Some people do it for fun. Some people do it because they are angry that their work or publically funded work like Maxsyma, was stolen by an "owner". You can also point out that Microsoft, Apple and everyone else has helped themselves to free software released under licenses that let them close that work off and behave anti-socially. For whatever reason, free software has snowballed to the point where anyone wanting to do anything with a computer would be a fool to ignore free software.
Teachers should understand these things intuitively because the free software world acts as an ideal school. It's free, everyone is welcome, the best examples are easy to find and peer review comes with use. Teachers only with their math classes worked that way, and maybee they will. Western thought and education started with interested people scratching lines in the sand at public markets. Everything since has been extra.
The tax is for road usage, not petrol usage.
This is true but charging the biodiesel user hardly "levels the playing field" and the punishment is silly. Big oil people have far greater resources for figuring taxes owed and paying them. If the state wanted to be fair, they could have figured the taxes for him and demanded payment. Slapping him with a fine in excess of what's owed is only something that should be done if he used the kind of scam accounting big oil companies use.
Something stinks and it's not biodiesel.
Where are you pulling you $1 billion a month figure from?
From Microsoft. They spent 2,191,000,000 in three months according to the quarterly report filed September 30, 2006. More recent reports have more and that's what I remember, nearly a billion dollars a month in sales and marketing. Spending more on marketing than anything else! That's insane unless you are selling carbonated sugar water.
All M$ reports are kind of slushy. The sited report has a strange 1.6 billion for "cost of revenue" and a further 1.8 billion in "research", much of which we can assume lands in "get the facts" reports. It sure did not put new features into Vista.
In reality, the software will very likely require the same amount of support as other software (which many times Adobe or MS will give gratis or close to gratis). In any case, sysadmins and tech support people cost more than software
What ever gave you that idea? Non free software cost more in every way. The hardware is always more expensive and you have to replace it more often. It always takes more time to keep up, so you get less for the money spent on staff. Staff that's not busy with the patch time of the month, rolling out "upgrades" and fighting virus infections have time to work on tools the school actually wants. Finally, licensing costs are an issue no matter how "good" a deal you get. All of the issues you mention, easy roll out, fewer "upgrades", and local spending are cost and convenience issues in free software's favor. It's hard to imagine free software will ever be as expensive and inconvenient as non free software and experience is making the case clear.
A nasty little AC troll shows their ignorance of software creation by taunting:
Do YOU work full time on F/OSS projects? Do you get paid for it? Do you actually have another job to put food on your table and subsidize the F/OSS project(s) you work on?
Everyone has a job to put food on the table except people who are independently wealthy.
I do not work full time on free software but no one needs to. Free software provides tools for all jobs so it will be used everywhere and improved as a byproduct. The vast majority of programmers make general tools work for specific clients. They don't care who made those tools and would be just as happy if other people could use the results of their work. This especially true in education and research, where education is the mission. All of the software I'm writing for my research is free. I'm not a CS person, so it's not the best code in the world but it works. Because all of the tools I used to make it are free, I can actually share it with anyone who's interested. When tools can be improved and shared everyone is better off. There are more than enough companies willing to support basic work on the tools that run their business to keep all of the tools working well. That's why free software has grown without corporate sponsorship and will always be around and it's why I have at my disposal first class software from a stable desktop to a bug free compiler.
The basic stand against free software is selfish and morally corrosive. If you and your friends could help themselves, you would not need people who own software. They seek to ruin your trust in your neighbor and yourself so that you will be helpless and divided. 22 years of GNU prove they are simply wrong.
The following is a typical frustration for free software advocates:
Every other source of information teachers have is full of non free propaganda. Don't copy that floppy (flash warning) is an annoying classic. The basic tenants were laid out by Bill Gates in his famous 1976 whine which says, "if you don't pay me, your computer won't work". Broadcasters and publishers justify their existence with a similar but more realistic story that reinforces the software lie. The lie is reinforced with confusing language, bogus arguments and, ultimately, name calling. The tactics are covered in detail here. Microsoft spends a billion dollars a month on marketing and each piece of that marketing conveys their propaganda.
It's very effective and can only be eliminated by free software use. The idea that software can be shared and improved is so completely foreign to them, so much that you can perform almost any demonstration with free software and they still won't understand, as evidenced above. It's only after they use free software, like Mozilla, that they can see that it is not only good enough, it's what they want and that's what free software is all about. At that point, the rest of the lies start falling down and they get very angry.
It's entirely reasonable to presume that all music and movies that were being sold were copyrighted by *an entity other than the sellers* who had *not authorized that sale*, and the work was not in the public domain.
How do you know that it's not Creative Commons or public domain material? One of these cases was tipped off by an angry girlfriend.
So because you think something shouldn't be a criminal matter, it isn't
Democracies are supposed to work that way. Laws should follow morals rather than morals following law. People are put in jail when they outrage the public. I'll settle for repealing retroactive copyright extensions instead of retroactively jailing executives of the MAFIAA companies. Those caught bribing public officials don't get off so easy. Deal?
but you can't deny that the replication machine itself would be strong circumstantial evidence against the perpetrator, and would serve alongside other evidence if/when that person is brought to trial.
If a person has been caught violating copyright by selling large quantities of material, then the machine is evidence of how they did it but I don't see how that matters. I have stacks of CDs and a CD burner, but I've never violated copyright. You have to do better than proving someone has a press to prove they were counterfitting and society should never fault someone for publishing legitimate materials. The whole point of copyright law is to encourage people to publish, not to make them afraid of police raids.
There's a lot wrong with copyright
Maybe because its a civil matter and not criminal?
ArchieBunker has said something I can agree with.
It's criminals like this who provide justifications for DRM and other annoyance.
No, the MAFIAA companies want digital restrictions to prevent competition. Digital restrictions won't do anything to prevent wholesale copy unless general purpose computing is outlawed.
There is also principled stand that can be made against copyright as it exists. Copyright is anything but perfect and it's not having it's intended effect. The rights to free speech and privacy you will have to give up to make digital restrictions work are far more valuable than those created by copyright.
While what they did was scarry, its pretty well justified. They were indeed selling counterfit CDs and DVDs for sale. NOT personal use.
The first problem with your justification is that you assume guilt. That's not hard to do when you presume all music and movies are owned by the MAFIAA, but this is not the case. When and if these people are convicted, we will know they violated copyright.
The second problem is that copyright is a civil matter. You don't need to drag the police into it any more than you need to drag them into a divorce. Evidence can be collected without police help and courts can slap a lien on the income of the guilty party. Oh, I know, there's now criminal copyright violation - but it's wrong and should be repealed.
A third problem, related to the first and second, is justifying the cost of copyright enforcement. Would society go to bat for anyone but the MAFIAA companies? If not, the public cost of this nation wide enforcement is strictly for the benefit of a very small number of private companies. It's hard to justify that kind of spending to protect a created right that few really enjoy. The point of copyright law is to grow the public domain and encourage publication, not to protect the profits of a few large monopoly providers.
The country should be covered in small shops publishing media that people want. There is talent and equipment everywhere and it's as big and diverse as the US itself. It is an abject failure of copyright laws to have not encouraged such a market but has instead favored the central production of uniform crap which is then sold in equally repugnant chain stores.
Nobody on windows would give a crap if iTunes wasn't the main way to get things onto an iPod. [so they don't care about Safari]
I thought you were right about this but BBC says other wise. It is currently the most read and emailed story in the most widely read English language newspaper. If most web browsers are Windoze, there's a lot of interest in Apple's browser on Windoze.
since windows isnt secure, you shouldnt even bother using secure file transfer, and instead use regular ftp. is that what you're getting at?
If you care for information security, you should not let it onto windoze. If you let it onto Windoze, you should avoid using passwords because that will compromise other data you care about. Data security is only as strong as it's weakest link.
filezilla ... I typically install cygwin on every windows system I use, just so I can log in remotely through ssh, and use sftp. It's a nice end-run around the windows domain stupidity.
Yes, but that brings all the insecurity of Windoze to your file server. If you care enough to use sftp, you should not let a Windoze box touch it. To share with Windoze users, Samba, http and regular ftp are better.
The only thing that matters is using real standards, not M$ fakes which will burn you because they churn so often and are split into several minor sub categories. Show your PHB this one day.
May 2007
IE7 19.2%
IE6 38.1%
IE5 1.5%
Fx 33.7%
Moz 1.3%
S 1.5%
O 1.6%
After you get past the browser divisions, you start to see plug-in differentiation which is always worse in the haves and have not world of non free software. There is no 90%, not even a 50%. Developing to a specific browser is worse than developing to a coin toss.
if they just want to expose Windows users to The Macintosh Experience, I'm not convinced that a (probably buggy) public beta of a Web browser is the way to do it.
It can't be too much worse than the buggy public beta that their OS is.
Nobody on windows would give a crap if iTunes wasn't the main way to get things onto an iPod.
I wanted to say that Windoze users would be happy with the KDE goodness that trickles through Safari but I just can't. Konqueror is an awesome file manager and web browser, virtually without peer. Safari is nice and should be fast but it lacks important features - split screens, sftp and so on. Sftp on windoze is ... a chastity belt on a whore ... padlock on a low rider ... stupid and dangerous.
The bottom line is that anyone who really cares is going to GNU/Linux or Mac. People on PCs either don't care or are wearing some kind of M$ FUD blindfold.
KDE 4.0 will have exports to Windoze, if Windoze is still around when it comes out. I would not stop anyone from trying but porting more than a few applications to Windoze is a waste of time.
While it is great that the use of computers is becoming widespread and accessible to nearly all, what is not great is the fact that most of them will run windows.
They are not going to be buying Dell and other US rip-off brands, they are going to buy direct from the people who make the hardware. The makers are going to ramp up their capacity and sell as cheaply as they can, so long as they are making money. They will continue to do things like this to avoid licensing costs.
OLPC is not going to run Windows and it's a good example of what the future really will be like. M$ has a hard time porting to more than i386, so they are going to miss out on the platforms everyone else is going to use. Sure, there will still be premium hardware, but it's going to be more diverse and free software is better for it. Most of the world's hardware is going to look like OLPC.
There's also a language barrier M$ has never really overcome. Free software has already done a good job. As more people get their hands on computers and demand increases for native platforms, the disparity will only increase.
All of the M$ shortfalls are due to the rigidity of non free software. No one company, no matter how large, can compete with the free world.
You inflate the value of M$'s legacy code and misunderstand M$'s goals. This is evident when you say:
Microsoft simply can't sue individual OSS developers or users.
That's obvious, despite attempts to extort and control individuals by our slow learning, MAFIAA friends.
They hope to control distribution and make money that way. Don't believe me? Ask Novel and Xandros.
M$ is a patent troll and a very dangerous one. With M$, software has always been a tool to make money. They owned it, promoted it and charged for it. They want to do the same thing with all free software because they know that the world has changed and non free is out of gas. Back in 1993 when Gates realized how things worked, he knew which way his company would go and has worked to strengthen the very laws he decried. The dangerous part is how such notions have warped morals and US government policies. "Owners" have convinced a large portion of the US government that "IP" is the way to tax the world, to become some kind of thought and idea owners and make everyone else do the dirty work.
Getting rid of software patents takes care of a lot of problems. It forces M$ to compete as a normal software company. More importantly, it restores people's liberty to code. Liberty is something the US needs a lot more of if it's to regain it's former moral character. Software freedom is a small step in that direction but it enables much more. Patents are a huge threat to software freedom and without software freedom there will be no free press or ability to organize and otherwise enjoy every other freedom. With those freedoms, we can start pushing for other and better laws like competitive networks, competitive healthcare, reasonable public schools and so on and so forth. Without those freedoms, we will all eat the current bullies dog food.
Can you tell me how Google would gain market share by making up a problem? They did not want to report the problem to anyone but the Federal DOJ. We only know about it because the former M$ lawyer now in charge of the DOJ took the unusual step of telling State Governments not to persue the matter and one or two of them spilled the beans.
KDE and GNOME are never running at the same time, so how would it be possible to get them into a position where they could interfere with each other or not?
Of course you can run them both at the same time. The obvious way is to use either Gnome or KDE's "switch user" feature to start another display manager and log in and use the other system on a different virtual terminal. A less obvious way to do the same thing is to just start the different processes. I don't anticipate any more trouble with this than I had trouble running multiple older versions of the same softare via X forwarding from a 400 MHz machine. More modern hardware will do even better. Free software just works.
GDS does not work well on Vista. You can attribute it to malice, as the technically competent Google people did, or incompetence as you would. Either way, Vista is a loser.
if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Ignoring the fact that linux and other free laternatives divides your supposed monoculture by two, free software offers choice and modifications non free software will never match. Do you really think BSD, HURD and Linux are the same thing? How can you imagine a monoculture when all three of those choices will run on dozens of different hardware platforms? When you permutate these already dizzying choices by the number of distributions available with procompiled binaries, your monoculture starts to look like an old growth jungle. Compare that to the old i386 binary crap from M$ that loads exactly the same memory footprint on boot regardless of hardware, which looks more like a Soviet apartment block.
In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs.
This is something that will be repeated because free software is like that and the pioneering days are over.
The beauty of free software is where it can take otherwise mediocre staff. One of the greatest motivators is a chance to make a difference, as proved by GE lighting experiments back in the 1920s. In the non free world, you do your job in a very limited box only to watch your work torn out by the next version in the upgrade train. In the free software world, you have all the tools everyone else does and what you do can stand on it's merit. Eventually, the picture that emerges is that there was nothing wrong with your people other than poor tools.
The very worst case, once most of the work is already done, is that you just use the software like any other non free shop. This still represents an improvement, because free software gives you more for your money.
Your admissions mostly make my point, thanks.
So Microsoft are in fact saying that there is no issue with GDS ...
Really? No argument there. That's what they always do.
Regarding OSX and Spotlight, GDS actually uses extensions of Spotlight to achieve some of it's indexing, so that's a fairly simple reason why they're not complaining. They don't do this with Windows Indexing because they can't ... The fact that Linux's indexing does or does not 'suck life' ... is also completely irrelevant.
So, everyone else gets the job done without stepping on each others toes but only M$ can do it on Vista. KDE and Gnome don't interfere with each other in the GNU/Linux world. GDS works great on OSX. Yet, for some reason only M$ works on Vista. This alone gives weight to Google's charges.
Besides common sense, we have reputation and history as a guide. Google knows it's platforms and has a sterling reputation. M$ has been proved guilty of sabotage in the DRDOS case above and Netscape. It's obvious you are on the M$ side, I just wonder why.
Ah, yes more of the same from mactrhope:
Except once again you haven't read a single thing on the thread and have jumped straight to the only conclusion we could have expected from you - 'MS am bad, lol'.
No, I had to wade through all the lame excuses and "I'm with Microsoft Astroturf before I found a remotely reasonable question. If history is any guide, Googles claims are true. If what you are saying is true, tell me why Mac users don't have the same problem with OSX and GDS on the same box and why Linux search utilities also don't suck life. The point of M$'s sabotage is to say that GDS is slow and buggy, but that does not work when there are other implementations that work outside of M$'s reach. As usual, all you have is namecalling and nonsense.
This is a very old and court exposed M$ game. They break a program then flood the lists with bullshit. When you see through it once you never listen to it again.