twitter run himself silly keeping up with kernel "patches", point released updates and other completely ineffective "products" sold to them by slashdot posters who'd like to keep him in the dark about real security.
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
Done, no need to reboot. A managed GNU/Linux desktop is even easier. Free software is easy because it lacks restrictions. The end result for the user is a system that incorporates the best security practices with next to no effort. Effort for the developer is also reduced by code sharing, each is free to concentrate on the thing they enjoy while the rest takes care of itself.
Silly Microturd AC, no one believes your bullshit. Bill Gates can spend ALL of his money making Slashdot carry his message, but no one will believe it. The game is over because the lies are so transparent. Windoze can't win the security, features or ease of use race. Hardware makers have realized that and the M$ domination is ending. Soon it will be over and your favorite OS will sink to the market share it deserves. If you think Vista lacks improvements and features a normal person would expect from five years of development, just wait till you see what M$ comes up with when they lose their monopoly rent revenue. Non free is dead.
Perhaps I should have spelled it out and ended my first sentence with "if you run Windows" but I thought that goes without saying in a community like Slashdot.
I can only read what you write. Mind reading is something I gave up long ago, it just never worked.
While I will agree with you that Windows is fundamentally less secure than GNU/Linux||BSD haven't you ever heard of "Defense in Depth"?
Sure, and that's what's needed. The easiest way to start it to throw the Windoze out and end the monoculture. Defense in depth starts with a diverse OS install that makes the whole 0wnership game that much more difficult and less profitable.
Most of the Windoze problems are problems of obnoxious non free software that get in the way of real security. Complex licensing and install mechanisms, bloat and ancient codebases are all detrimental. M$ admins run themselves silly keeping up with "patches" AV updates and other completely ineffective "products" sold to them by people who'd like to keep them in the dark about real security. Even if they could get their heads out of that, applying reasonable tools in a M$ shop is next to impossible. Vista takes up 15 GB of disk space, before you add anything useful to it, most of it designed to keep the user from "stealing" songs. How the hell do you audit that? We all know that hype about improved performance and security is going to be worth just as much as the XP hype was - the non free codebase remains as crusty as it ever was. Recovery in the non free world, thanks to licensing and install methods are a huge pain. In the free world, you can use A/V on detection to disinfect user files and simply wipe the binaries out often remotely. People in the non free world are screwed from start to finish. Even if the had the tools to identify all of the spyware and viruses, they don't have manpower to fix the problem or the time to learn how.
Saying that GNU/Linux and Mac have the same problems Windoze does is a serious insult. I'm tired of hearing people tell me how much my OS needs an antivirus and spyware checker.
It's bullshit anyway. The pros can get through anything. Starting off with an OS that 99% of script kiddies can't own is a much better option than dragging down your computer's performance with snake oil. An OS like Debian, without Flash and other useless and insecure junk, is more appropriate for an office than Windoze with it's IE, Outlook and WMP burden. After that, AV can be done for mail servers and intrusion detection at the network level. Everything else is just so much busy work and waste of money.
... unlike you I don't feel the need to make shit up about things I've never used.
I do wish I could claim I never had to use M$ Office. I was happy enough without it, then I took a job with a Fortune 100 company, where Office was considered a "standard". Opening more than one or two M$ documents would bring their desktops to a disk thrashing crawl. People would literally drum their fingers on their desks waiting for the shit to work. They considered floppies more reliable than their desktops or the servers. They made us boot daily, so every morning I'd go get coffee while the poor thing booted. That kind of performance was the best money could buy.
Windoze and Office are pigs. They always were and they always will be.
Years later, I own one of those very machines and my wife uses it daily. It's an 800 MHz PIII and guess what, Mepis out of the box runs it very well. It does Amarok just fine too.
Comparing XP to Vista security is kind of like having a SUV milage competition, except SUV's are sometimes useful and that utility is destroyed by poor fuel economy.
iRiver devices come with PlayForSure DRM. You need to update the firmware on the device to get rid of it. Use the UMS version of the firmware. You won't be able to buy music with the device on WMP but you will be able to mount it as a SCSI drive in linux
Most cheap players have M$'s crappy and now abandoned DRM but it's harmless and updating it won't remove it. I have heard that the update will remove your ability to play OGG. Because of this, most iRiver players will do either ogg or USBFS but not both and I won't own one. If you have one of the first iRivers, you should use RockBox, which is much better than any iRiver firmware.
[Amarok] resource requirements are brutal. It eats memory, is painfully slow to startup and regularly spikes the processor at 100% even when it's doing nothing.
It's a little slow on a 400 MHz K6/2, but that's only because the IDE on that ancient machine blows. Amarok is snappy on any 1GHz class CPU or better.
Finding a contemporary IBM PC to do the same performance test would be more appropriate and interesting,
My first "real" computer was a PC running DOS 6.2 and I kept it running until 2000 or so. It was fast because it used a character display. Word Perfect had good printer drivers and could give GUI previews if you wanted. Later versions ran WSWYG, but most people preferred character display. I still have a preference for the function key menu system.
It was faster than Mac and the "modern" winDOS by extension. Lag times were low. The same softare is nearly instantaneous on more modern hardware or dosbox. Before you go running out to buy old stuff, you should look into emacs which does the same things just as quickly and is free.
Only a person who's never had to use a typewriter could think of it the way they think of a word processor. People dedicated their lives to typing and made careers out of doing it well. The average person gave their hand written manuscripts to secretaries who typed them, if and only if it had to be published. Word processing is much faster, if you have reasonable software. This is why people spent thousands of dollars on computers that did little more than spell check and print.
The authors fairly compare user experience. Things like typing and scrolling lag matter. If you have too much of either, a typewriter might be faster. Of course it takes a lot of lag to make up the time it takes liquid paper to dry.
Did you forget about Liquid Paper? You might have if you used IBM's correctable type ribbons.
You are right about legibility though. OCR can eat typed pages and then your typed manuscript can be modified and duplicated like any other electronic document.
Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done.
Yeah, I think that "blown TCP/IP" is a M$ thing. Mac plus can run a TCP/IP stack, I've seen a website run from a Lisa2.
DSL, feather and 40 MB GNU/Linux live CDs make it all look bloated. The nifty thing about free software is that you can still run the older less bloated versions on new hardware and there are whole distributions tuned to do just that with improvements. Free software has "it never goes away" long term credibility. Non free does not. This is why free software users are happy with old hardware and why low power devices can be used for normal tasks without sacrificing much.
while few would disagree with "when you control the pipe you should be able to draw profit from it"
I can dissagree with that two ways. First, a "controlled" network is inefficient and only profitable in a non free economy. Second, rigging laws so to give that kind of control and profit to select companies is FUCKING UNAMERICAN. This kind of talk is pure bullshit because the telco market is not free. Anyone realistically proposing a free telco market will be doing exactly the opposite of proping up the incumbents.
I think that services should be bandwidth neutral but I think the government should keep their hands out of it.
Ask your local Bell representative what they think of opening up the public servitude to any and all who would lay fiber. He'll choke. Until then, they don't own the network, you do. The person getting their monopoly investment back is supposed to be you. Funny how monopolies never bring the returns they should.
I am still waiting (more than a year) for Palm to support Treo syncing with Windows XP Media Center Edition. It will be a cold day in hell before I buy any more Palm products, lest I be left in the lurch again.
Ah, the Windoze advantage, things just work like that. No one but M$ ever wins when they deal with M$.
automatically replace the user id field with "sjobs@mac.com" on all outgoing files?
Will you get the watermarks with the same information? I don't think so.
You just can't trust non free software, not even a little. Imagine iPod or WMP was ported to GNU/LInux. It could watermark all of your files as a background process without changing size and date information. Digital restrictions are the ultimate expression of non free software. From the very beginning, it's owners have sought to keep it's users divided and helpless. The end game is money and that requires ownership of your news and culture.
the only restriction is that you can't illegally share it online. It's focusing on punishing people who share music illegally, while at the same time not hassling the end users who just want to use their music. This is exactly what DRM should be.
Ah, but why should sharing be against the law? What do you think of public libraries? Why doesn't every library have a large collection of songs and movies? Why shouldn't those libraries distribute that content digitally? As much as you might want it to be, a song is not property.
What no one thought of is that if you lose your iPod, without much effort you will become the RIAA's brand new Public Enemy Number One..
The RIAA seeded the file sharing networks with watermarked files from the beginning. They could not admit it because it's hard to say you have been violated when you put the content on the sharing network yourself but you can be sure they used it to track down some of the earlier "pirates".
It's only a mater of time before people realize that the "pirates" were right. It's wrong to keep people from sharing.
Wasn't the deal that DRM be replaced with some kind of watermark? Kinda nasty that with the plaintext name and e-mail though...
It's worse than you think. You should expect the invisible watermark to contain the same information on both the DRM'd and non DRM'd versions. The text tag has made their intentions clear, so you should expect them to use all means available to carry out those intentions. Digital Restrictions suck life, deal or no deal, because the penalty for sharing is outrageous. The ultimate deal is given to you in "FBI" warnings everytime you play a movie: share and you can lose your life's savings, spend time in jail and have your career wrecked. The draconian measures are required because laws against sharing are immoral and people have to be cowed into obeying them.
I don't see what the problem is. In fact this issue seems like a good way to distinguish between those who are against DRM because it restricts their rights to legally use their music, and those who actually just want to pirate music but use rights-based DRM arguments as a cover
You don't see what's wrong because you have your head shoved too far up the MAFIAA's lie. The question you should ask yourself is why you pay taxes to "protect" this content. The RIAA and MPAA have made it virtually impossible for non members to proffit from broadcast media, so copyright reduces to simple extortion. It's unnatural and immoral to keep people from sharing but digital restrictions will do that forever. The extreme lengths the industry has gone to protect their government imposed monopoly only highlight how wrong the laws are to begin with. You would be hard pressed to find anyone, let alone a majority of any population, who would jail their neighbor and confiscate their house because their neighbor gave them coppies of movies and songs. Yet that's what the law prescribes, $500,000 per offense and jail time. How can you fail to see what's wrong with that? Do you think libraries should be burnt before they go digital?
Slashdot Mirror
my pedantry is limitted.
The average user won't notice. There's a threshold for everything, beyond which limits are meaningless.
twitter run himself silly keeping up with kernel "patches", point released updates and other completely ineffective "products" sold to them by slashdot posters who'd like to keep him in the dark about real security.
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
Done, no need to reboot. A managed GNU/Linux desktop is even easier. Free software is easy because it lacks restrictions. The end result for the user is a system that incorporates the best security practices with next to no effort. Effort for the developer is also reduced by code sharing, each is free to concentrate on the thing they enjoy while the rest takes care of itself.
Silly Microturd AC, no one believes your bullshit. Bill Gates can spend ALL of his money making Slashdot carry his message, but no one will believe it. The game is over because the lies are so transparent. Windoze can't win the security, features or ease of use race. Hardware makers have realized that and the M$ domination is ending. Soon it will be over and your favorite OS will sink to the market share it deserves. If you think Vista lacks improvements and features a normal person would expect from five years of development, just wait till you see what M$ comes up with when they lose their monopoly rent revenue. Non free is dead.
Perhaps I should have spelled it out and ended my first sentence with "if you run Windows" but I thought that goes without saying in a community like Slashdot.
I can only read what you write. Mind reading is something I gave up long ago, it just never worked.
While I will agree with you that Windows is fundamentally less secure than GNU/Linux||BSD haven't you ever heard of "Defense in Depth"?
Sure, and that's what's needed. The easiest way to start it to throw the Windoze out and end the monoculture. Defense in depth starts with a diverse OS install that makes the whole 0wnership game that much more difficult and less profitable.
Most of the Windoze problems are problems of obnoxious non free software that get in the way of real security. Complex licensing and install mechanisms, bloat and ancient codebases are all detrimental. M$ admins run themselves silly keeping up with "patches" AV updates and other completely ineffective "products" sold to them by people who'd like to keep them in the dark about real security. Even if they could get their heads out of that, applying reasonable tools in a M$ shop is next to impossible. Vista takes up 15 GB of disk space, before you add anything useful to it, most of it designed to keep the user from "stealing" songs. How the hell do you audit that? We all know that hype about improved performance and security is going to be worth just as much as the XP hype was - the non free codebase remains as crusty as it ever was. Recovery in the non free world, thanks to licensing and install methods are a huge pain. In the free world, you can use A/V on detection to disinfect user files and simply wipe the binaries out often remotely. People in the non free world are screwed from start to finish. Even if the had the tools to identify all of the spyware and viruses, they don't have manpower to fix the problem or the time to learn how.
Saying that GNU/Linux and Mac have the same problems Windoze does is a serious insult. I'm tired of hearing people tell me how much my OS needs an antivirus and spyware checker.
It's bullshit anyway. The pros can get through anything. Starting off with an OS that 99% of script kiddies can't own is a much better option than dragging down your computer's performance with snake oil. An OS like Debian, without Flash and other useless and insecure junk, is more appropriate for an office than Windoze with it's IE, Outlook and WMP burden. After that, AV can be done for mail servers and intrusion detection at the network level. Everything else is just so much busy work and waste of money.
I do wish I could claim I never had to use M$ Office. I was happy enough without it, then I took a job with a Fortune 100 company, where Office was considered a "standard". Opening more than one or two M$ documents would bring their desktops to a disk thrashing crawl. People would literally drum their fingers on their desks waiting for the shit to work. They considered floppies more reliable than their desktops or the servers. They made us boot daily, so every morning I'd go get coffee while the poor thing booted. That kind of performance was the best money could buy.
Windoze and Office are pigs. They always were and they always will be.
Years later, I own one of those very machines and my wife uses it daily. It's an 800 MHz PIII and guess what, Mepis out of the box runs it very well. It does Amarok just fine too.
Amarok positively blows on my 1.0GHz PIII (Ubuntu).
and you think "Microsoft Office is lighting fast on just about any hardware, and that has been true for every release cycle the site has had so far after Office 95." That's rich.
You must be bored with your Slashdot troll job and want to be fired to write such transparently false nonsense.
Comparing XP to Vista security is kind of like having a SUV milage competition, except SUV's are sometimes useful and that utility is destroyed by poor fuel economy.
I read a rumor at the link I gave above that MS has done much to make Ogg Vorbis unavailable in the US.
It's not a rumor, it's a court admitted fact. See The Register story. Microsoft "deals" are always like that.
MTP is another wonderful thing they pushed. It's slower and less reliable than USBFS which better players use.
iRiver devices come with PlayForSure DRM. You need to update the firmware on the device to get rid of it. Use the UMS version of the firmware. You won't be able to buy music with the device on WMP but you will be able to mount it as a SCSI drive in linux
Most cheap players have M$'s crappy and now abandoned DRM but it's harmless and updating it won't remove it. I have heard that the update will remove your ability to play OGG. Because of this, most iRiver players will do either ogg or USBFS but not both and I won't own one. If you have one of the first iRivers, you should use RockBox, which is much better than any iRiver firmware.
[Amarok] resource requirements are brutal. It eats memory, is painfully slow to startup and regularly spikes the processor at 100% even when it's doing nothing.
It's a little slow on a 400 MHz K6/2, but that's only because the IDE on that ancient machine blows. Amarok is snappy on any 1GHz class CPU or better.
The article summary made me think Bill Gates said something about loving his customers. Silly me, no such thought ever ran through that man's head.
Finding a contemporary IBM PC to do the same performance test would be more appropriate and interesting,
My first "real" computer was a PC running DOS 6.2 and I kept it running until 2000 or so. It was fast because it used a character display. Word Perfect had good printer drivers and could give GUI previews if you wanted. Later versions ran WSWYG, but most people preferred character display. I still have a preference for the function key menu system.
It was faster than Mac and the "modern" winDOS by extension. Lag times were low. The same softare is nearly instantaneous on more modern hardware or dosbox. Before you go running out to buy old stuff, you should look into emacs which does the same things just as quickly and is free.
Only a person who's never had to use a typewriter could think of it the way they think of a word processor. People dedicated their lives to typing and made careers out of doing it well. The average person gave their hand written manuscripts to secretaries who typed them, if and only if it had to be published. Word processing is much faster, if you have reasonable software. This is why people spent thousands of dollars on computers that did little more than spell check and print.
The authors fairly compare user experience. Things like typing and scrolling lag matter. If you have too much of either, a typewriter might be faster. Of course it takes a lot of lag to make up the time it takes liquid paper to dry.
Did you forget about Liquid Paper? You might have if you used IBM's correctable type ribbons.
You are right about legibility though. OCR can eat typed pages and then your typed manuscript can be modified and duplicated like any other electronic document.
Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done.
Yeah, I think that "blown TCP/IP" is a M$ thing. Mac plus can run a TCP/IP stack, I've seen a website run from a Lisa2.
DSL, feather and 40 MB GNU/Linux live CDs make it all look bloated. The nifty thing about free software is that you can still run the older less bloated versions on new hardware and there are whole distributions tuned to do just that with improvements. Free software has "it never goes away" long term credibility. Non free does not. This is why free software users are happy with old hardware and why low power devices can be used for normal tasks without sacrificing much.
This has absolutly nothing to do with open source, at all.
Free softare will never do things you don't know about, so sure, Apple's underhand tagging has nothing to do with free software.
while few would disagree with "when you control the pipe you should be able to draw profit from it"
I can dissagree with that two ways. First, a "controlled" network is inefficient and only profitable in a non free economy. Second, rigging laws so to give that kind of control and profit to select companies is FUCKING UNAMERICAN. This kind of talk is pure bullshit because the telco market is not free. Anyone realistically proposing a free telco market will be doing exactly the opposite of proping up the incumbents.
I think that services should be bandwidth neutral but I think the government should keep their hands out of it.
Ask your local Bell representative what they think of opening up the public servitude to any and all who would lay fiber. He'll choke. Until then, they don't own the network, you do. The person getting their monopoly investment back is supposed to be you. Funny how monopolies never bring the returns they should.
I am still waiting (more than a year) for Palm to support Treo syncing with Windows XP Media Center Edition. It will be a cold day in hell before I buy any more Palm products, lest I be left in the lurch again.
Ah, the Windoze advantage, things just work like that. No one but M$ ever wins when they deal with M$.
the files might be watermarked in other ways, obviously more difficult to detect.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons you should never trust non free software.
automatically replace the user id field with "sjobs@mac.com" on all outgoing files?
Will you get the watermarks with the same information? I don't think so.
You just can't trust non free software, not even a little. Imagine iPod or WMP was ported to GNU/LInux. It could watermark all of your files as a background process without changing size and date information. Digital restrictions are the ultimate expression of non free software. From the very beginning, it's owners have sought to keep it's users divided and helpless. The end game is money and that requires ownership of your news and culture.
the only restriction is that you can't illegally share it online. It's focusing on punishing people who share music illegally, while at the same time not hassling the end users who just want to use their music. This is exactly what DRM should be.
Ah, but why should sharing be against the law? What do you think of public libraries? Why doesn't every library have a large collection of songs and movies? Why shouldn't those libraries distribute that content digitally? As much as you might want it to be, a song is not property.
What no one thought of is that if you lose your iPod, without much effort you will become the RIAA's brand new Public Enemy Number One..
The RIAA seeded the file sharing networks with watermarked files from the beginning. They could not admit it because it's hard to say you have been violated when you put the content on the sharing network yourself but you can be sure they used it to track down some of the earlier "pirates".
It's only a mater of time before people realize that the "pirates" were right. It's wrong to keep people from sharing.
Wasn't the deal that DRM be replaced with some kind of watermark? Kinda nasty that with the plaintext name and e-mail though...
It's worse than you think. You should expect the invisible watermark to contain the same information on both the DRM'd and non DRM'd versions. The text tag has made their intentions clear, so you should expect them to use all means available to carry out those intentions. Digital Restrictions suck life, deal or no deal, because the penalty for sharing is outrageous. The ultimate deal is given to you in "FBI" warnings everytime you play a movie: share and you can lose your life's savings, spend time in jail and have your career wrecked. The draconian measures are required because laws against sharing are immoral and people have to be cowed into obeying them.
I don't see what the problem is. In fact this issue seems like a good way to distinguish between those who are against DRM because it restricts their rights to legally use their music, and those who actually just want to pirate music but use rights-based DRM arguments as a cover
You don't see what's wrong because you have your head shoved too far up the MAFIAA's lie. The question you should ask yourself is why you pay taxes to "protect" this content. The RIAA and MPAA have made it virtually impossible for non members to proffit from broadcast media, so copyright reduces to simple extortion. It's unnatural and immoral to keep people from sharing but digital restrictions will do that forever. The extreme lengths the industry has gone to protect their government imposed monopoly only highlight how wrong the laws are to begin with. You would be hard pressed to find anyone, let alone a majority of any population, who would jail their neighbor and confiscate their house because their neighbor gave them coppies of movies and songs. Yet that's what the law prescribes, $500,000 per offense and jail time. How can you fail to see what's wrong with that? Do you think libraries should be burnt before they go digital?