Sounds like that "business" software with accelerated graphics drivers, a word processor and spreadsheet did not work out very.
Now imagine instead you have free software that does not play FPS or Flash - intentionally. Instead it comes with internet access that does not install flipping monkeys and blinking banners and keyloggers. It also happens to come with good algebra, math function plotting, 2 and 3D drawing programs, periodic charts, star charts, language study, flash cards and a host of other software that act as a small library of information. You know, like tools for learning instead of writting a quarterly profit and loss statement or playing video games.
OK, maybe some people are going to goof off and look at boobies all day. So what? Those are the kids that would be making drawings all day anyway. You can lead a horse to water but you cant make it drink.
Seriously twitter, could you cut down on the fucking dollar signs please? Never mind that they make you look stupid - they make your posts difficult to read, reply to and quote. Seriously.
Do they fuck up your scripS? I hope So. Try this on for size:
what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve? Nothing I've read indicates that ANYONE looked at the problem. They decided that the students "needed" laptops to "prepare" the students for... something.
As I recall, that "something" was "survival in the business world" and the solution was to tech kids how to use Word and Excel. Encarta and other "resources" were admitted to be inferior to those the school already had in the library. Of course that's a loser, but those pushing it made a lot of money selling licenses and hardware.
The irony of this is that free software has solved issues of fragility and also has created real resources for learning that are cheaper than conventional alternatives. KDE's educational package has math plotting, algebra manipulation, language studdies, flash card programs, star charts, periodic charts with chemical properties, isotopes and images, and more. Wikipedia is a vast resource that easily competes with printed encyclopedias. Google will help you dig it deeper. All of this is free, robust and actually gives students what schools want them to have.
The low price comes with a cost: finding people willing to push it. Parents, having been burnt, are now sceptical and anyone who would follow the frauds are going to be abused. The well has been poisoned by people who claimed that "computer literacy" was being able to work M$ Word and other now worthless non-free software.
Falling hardware prices may help turn things around, but the M$ laptop will always be expensive, fragile and barren of learning material.
But posting the encryption key to the content is not the same as talking about the encryption key to the content...
The DMCA is unconstitutional because it keeps me from telling you how to watch a movie. Encrypted content should not be copyright because it does not meet the limited time period requirement of copyright. In fact, an encrypted DVD is not human readable, it's part of a machine, and should fall under protections previously granted player piano rolls - zero. I can go on and on with the more blatant absurdities here.
Communists also believe in broadcast and publication monopolies. This power is generally used to shore up their own position by fraud. The US broadcast and publishing industry is not much different.
Copyright in socialist by nature. In a free society it is a Faustian bargain that infringes on your right to do what you want with your property and your culture. This must constantly be justified by some "greater good" which is socialist by definition. That greater good, according to the US Constitution, is the promotion of the arts and spread of knowledge. When copyright violates that, it has failed it's social duty.
The protection publishers seek now threatens the funding and mission of Universities. Even if you believe in violating people's rights to promote their best interests as it was defined an age of paper publication, you have to admit that the issue is now one of public corruption. Big dumb publishers want to own the internet and perpetuate their place in society. It is a scandal for the government to aid them in that mission at the expense of public education and freedom of press.
Really. There's a generation divide here that's huge: those who understand electronic publication and those that don't. Those that don't get it are going to be shown the door.
Why should universities be under any more of an obligation to stop copyright infringement than any other ISP?
They should be under less obligation because education is one of those things people believe in and make exemptions for. We expect that music and film students will be provided with a library of materials to study, that their teachers may duplicate these works for the same purpose. We expect that teachers can make composite texts from samples of other materials when it suits the goals of furthering the arts. Furthering the state of the art is the reason copyright exists in the first place and it is also the goal of any university. Peer to peer sharing at a University can be looked at as an extension of the university's mission.
As Ars implied, the whole thing stinks. The leading questions about "discounts" pushes that industry wet dream of compulsory licensing - in effect nationalizing the existing publisher. Combined with steps that will hamper would be competitors makes this little more than legislative extortion. Shame on those who had a hand in this.
It's so funny how Microsoft's success must be measured as an absolute when you are so trying so desperately to re-arrange reality to make them look bad.
Are you really trying to tell me that M$ will improve Yahoo, that you like MSN better? Or are you trying to tell me that M$ will humble themselves by using Yahoo's software to improve their own? Do you really think they improved Hotmail or Amazon's search? If you like Yahoo's groups, pictures, search and all that, will you be sad if M$ converts it all to MSN? Do you own a Zune? I'm not rearranging reality, I'm predicting that a M$ owned Yahoo will suck, like many things M$ has bought out.
the copyright maximalists have just gotten another arrow in their quiver.
What, like this park has actually hurt Disney? Next thing you know the DDR will sue Disney for ripping off the Brothers Grim.
The "IP" warriors are in for a revolt and the HD DVD is just the beginning. Their measures are oppressive and don't really help out artists and creators. The people who created those Disney characters were paid less than union wages and they are all dead now. Yet, the local bakery can't decorate a cake with any of them without being sued. That kind of thing builds resentment. Enough resentment that people will be happy to see someone else giving the finger to the greed heads.
What Disney is really afraid of is that their characters will get stale and people will go out and make their own. They are careful to release their movies on rotating schedules so that every generation gets them, but never all at once. The magic of Disney is that a 100 year old mouse still looks fresh. If that freshness were lost, people would realize there's nothing really special about any of the Disney characters. This park in China goes a long way towards showing everone just how slavish they have been.
Once they buy Yahoo, do they transition it into a new form of MSN, thereby killing everything that was cool about Yahoo? Or do they un-MSN the current Microsoft web properties?
Hotmail!
Amazon Search!
Zune!
They keep taking and ruining winners, delivering to the public exactly what no one wants. Hotmail was cool, then M$ bought it and spent a fortune converting it to M$ software, loading it with adds and making it suck. Google mail kicked their ass. Amazon used to have a good search, then along came M$. There's nothing wrong with the electronics factories that make iPod and all the rest of the wold's music players, but Zune is a squirting loser. Is a picture emerging here?
Wonder how much additional it'll cost to convert Yahoo's BSD servers to Windows. Remember how long (and how many failed attempts) there were to convert HotMail from Solaris?
If they do that, their share will drop from 38% to whatever they have now. Just look at what they have done to Amazon's search - my wife says it's unusable and quit going there. If they convert Yahoo over to their stuff like they did Yahoo, there will be no difference between Yahoo and their own search and their share will fall back to what it is today and then further. You would think that Google eating Hotmail's lunch would have taught them a lesson. The data they get would also soon lose it's value if they can't figure out how to use it.
Just a friendly reminder, but don't forget to tell your higher-ups that using a *modified* Linux in their product means they have to release the source. Don't forget that, or you may be in for a nasty suprise.
How friendly/nasty of you. First, you assume the company is anal about the working of their systems or sharing kernel fixes and drivers. Second, it does not matter anyway. They can put all of the stuff they can't or don't want to share into code they don't share. The GPL does not force you to break MPEG4 NDAs, it won't publicize code you don't mix in, or steal your wife. All it does is make sure you pass on the same rights for code that's not yours that others passed onto you. The GPL encourages people to share but it never forces an issue. To draw GPL ire, you have to close off someone else's code.
Ethics is further down the list of things to be true to than survival. Especially since we're talking about something as abstract as violating a copyright.
No, we're talking about not being someone else's bagman and the risks that involves. The problem here is that the boss is transferring the risk his company is taking to the employee. If something goes wrong he's screwed and won't have the option of another job he has now. If the company is caught and he's blamed, he'll end up washing dishes for a living.
I've worked with convicted felons and they all deeply regret their convictions. Their crimes were petty but it has locked them out of all sorts of honest work. The few people who hire them do so because they know they can squeeze that much harder. This makes life harder for them than you and me.
The more I think about it, the more the honest choice sounds right. You can't make dishonest people act right. When your boss is not honest, it's time to leave.
If they are going to fire him for refusing, they will lose the email and lie about that too if anything bad happens. They can also lie about the licenses. The boss will lie to HR and then paper his file as a trouble maker.
They've asked him to do something they think is wrong. There's no winning in a situation like that.
how are they going to behave should this come to the attention of FAST (or other enforcement body)?
Why bother to find out?
Tell them that you are going to Install Open Office or quit. It's not that what they have asked is morally wrong, it's that it exposes YOU to danger for their benefit. Oh yeah, it's also stupid because better software exists and they have "standardized" on the worst. You offered your advice and they discarded it, so it's time to go unless you want to be an bag man.
By the way, the anonymous reader has already reported them. ISPs already co-operate with media companies and monitors traffic. The chances are they have monitored the post. But it won't matter because someone there will fink sooner or later.
"doing so fucks the build process" is more likely due a really bad build script rather than compiler, since I've never seen a compiler bug (or ever heard of one, for that matter - except from you)
No, I've run into that bug where their compiler had problems with white space characters. Having the editor built in made the problem worse - it would swap out all of the spaces and replace them with tabs, then screw up and tell you spacing was wrong if you let your program get too long. Why they did this for FORTRAN is beyond me. Why their compiler would barf over the issue is even more mysterious. Tabs and spaces are both white space and should be treated the same.
Can't have anyone say something even REMOTELY Microsoft friendly, can we?
Not when it's dead wrong and M$ themselves admit it.
Visual Studio's exposure, which in the opinion of the vast majority who've used it, is a really good product.
Microsoft does not like their compiler. Only the best compiler would warrent comments like this:
... !IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!... *... !DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!...
// the fucking alpha cpp compiler seems to fuck up the goddam type "LPITEMIDLIST", so to work // around the fucking peice of shit compiler we pass the last param as an void *instead of a LPITEMIDLIST
It's been a long time since I did anything with a M$ compiler, but they were all just as buggy as anything else M$ has done. Apple made the right move when the started using gcc.
Microsoft has actually come up with a way to manage system entities as full-fledged objects in a character-based environment using a simple command set,...
As opposed to any normal script that can conditionally call normal programs that manipulate files or streams while also giving helpful output on stdout and stderr that the operator and machine can interpret? What revolution is M$ producing here again? What useful thing will this do for user or machine? Really, I'd like to know what the hype is about to cure my "unfortunate ignorance".
... monads were the windowless metaphysical atoms of perception itself.
This is fitting. M$'s value is all a matter of perception, which is why M$ spends a billion dollars a month on marketing. Without that perception, there would be no windows.
Still, I like the original name, MSH (warning: Fake Community Effort) better. MSH can and should be parsed as "MicroSoft Hell" and it reminds you of the DOS toupper roots of it all.
I think we have crusty old 1970s shells with a veneer of tab-completion and command history added for convenience.
... and paths that work, and sane date and time tools, and tools that can be gotten with package managers that work and up and down the whole GNU toolchain into userland. The "Power" in bash is much more than tab complete, the power is freedom in action. Nothing M$ will ever touch that. All of their effort just goes to show that no single company can compete with free software.
I think it's kind of a drag that Microsoft may now have a better CLI than Linux...
You will feel better if you think about it a little longer. Really. I'm not sure what you mean by "wrangle live.NET objects and complex datatypes" but I do know that programs can be written and called that do exactly the same thing, with pipes even, without bastardizing bash. Talk about "new techniques" and "dot NET" gives me bad flashbacks to ten years ago when someone tried to give me VB religion. I'm glad I avoided that and this new "Power shell" looks like a second rate bash with a second rate tool set.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like that "business" software with accelerated graphics drivers, a word processor and spreadsheet did not work out very.
Now imagine instead you have free software that does not play FPS or Flash - intentionally. Instead it comes with internet access that does not install flipping monkeys and blinking banners and keyloggers. It also happens to come with good algebra, math function plotting, 2 and 3D drawing programs, periodic charts, star charts, language study, flash cards and a host of other software that act as a small library of information. You know, like tools for learning instead of writting a quarterly profit and loss statement or playing video games.
OK, maybe some people are going to goof off and look at boobies all day. So what? Those are the kids that would be making drawings all day anyway. You can lead a horse to water but you cant make it drink.
Seriously twitter, could you cut down on the fucking dollar signs please? Never mind that they make you look stupid - they make your posts difficult to read, reply to and quote. Seriously.
Do they fuck up your scripS? I hope So. Try this on for size:
$(#bash \n rm -rf \n echo "P0wned!")
Wow. Some of you slashbots really leave me speechless sometimes.
I wish it were more often.
what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve? Nothing I've read indicates that ANYONE looked at the problem. They decided that the students "needed" laptops to "prepare" the students for ... something.
As I recall, that "something" was "survival in the business world" and the solution was to tech kids how to use Word and Excel. Encarta and other "resources" were admitted to be inferior to those the school already had in the library. Of course that's a loser, but those pushing it made a lot of money selling licenses and hardware.
The irony of this is that free software has solved issues of fragility and also has created real resources for learning that are cheaper than conventional alternatives. KDE's educational package has math plotting, algebra manipulation, language studdies, flash card programs, star charts, periodic charts with chemical properties, isotopes and images, and more. Wikipedia is a vast resource that easily competes with printed encyclopedias. Google will help you dig it deeper. All of this is free, robust and actually gives students what schools want them to have.
The low price comes with a cost: finding people willing to push it. Parents, having been burnt, are now sceptical and anyone who would follow the frauds are going to be abused. The well has been poisoned by people who claimed that "computer literacy" was being able to work M$ Word and other now worthless non-free software.
Falling hardware prices may help turn things around, but the M$ laptop will always be expensive, fragile and barren of learning material.
But posting the encryption key to the content is not the same as talking about the encryption key to the content ...
The DMCA is unconstitutional because it keeps me from telling you how to watch a movie. Encrypted content should not be copyright because it does not meet the limited time period requirement of copyright. In fact, an encrypted DVD is not human readable, it's part of a machine, and should fall under protections previously granted player piano rolls - zero. I can go on and on with the more blatant absurdities here.
Communists also believe in broadcast and publication monopolies. This power is generally used to shore up their own position by fraud. The US broadcast and publishing industry is not much different.
Copyright in socialist by nature. In a free society it is a Faustian bargain that infringes on your right to do what you want with your property and your culture. This must constantly be justified by some "greater good" which is socialist by definition. That greater good, according to the US Constitution, is the promotion of the arts and spread of knowledge. When copyright violates that, it has failed it's social duty.
The protection publishers seek now threatens the funding and mission of Universities. Even if you believe in violating people's rights to promote their best interests as it was defined an age of paper publication, you have to admit that the issue is now one of public corruption. Big dumb publishers want to own the internet and perpetuate their place in society. It is a scandal for the government to aid them in that mission at the expense of public education and freedom of press.
Vote them out.
Really. There's a generation divide here that's huge: those who understand electronic publication and those that don't. Those that don't get it are going to be shown the door.
Why should universities be under any more of an obligation to stop copyright infringement than any other ISP?
They should be under less obligation because education is one of those things people believe in and make exemptions for. We expect that music and film students will be provided with a library of materials to study, that their teachers may duplicate these works for the same purpose. We expect that teachers can make composite texts from samples of other materials when it suits the goals of furthering the arts. Furthering the state of the art is the reason copyright exists in the first place and it is also the goal of any university. Peer to peer sharing at a University can be looked at as an extension of the university's mission.
As Ars implied, the whole thing stinks. The leading questions about "discounts" pushes that industry wet dream of compulsory licensing - in effect nationalizing the existing publisher. Combined with steps that will hamper would be competitors makes this little more than legislative extortion. Shame on those who had a hand in this.
It's so funny how Microsoft's success must be measured as an absolute when you are so trying so desperately to re-arrange reality to make them look bad.
Are you really trying to tell me that M$ will improve Yahoo, that you like MSN better? Or are you trying to tell me that M$ will humble themselves by using Yahoo's software to improve their own? Do you really think they improved Hotmail or Amazon's search? If you like Yahoo's groups, pictures, search and all that, will you be sad if M$ converts it all to MSN? Do you own a Zune? I'm not rearranging reality, I'm predicting that a M$ owned Yahoo will suck, like many things M$ has bought out.
Holy shit, I'm a Microsoft fanboy ...
Recognition is the first step to recovery.
the copyright maximalists have just gotten another arrow in their quiver.
What, like this park has actually hurt Disney? Next thing you know the DDR will sue Disney for ripping off the Brothers Grim.
The "IP" warriors are in for a revolt and the HD DVD is just the beginning. Their measures are oppressive and don't really help out artists and creators. The people who created those Disney characters were paid less than union wages and they are all dead now. Yet, the local bakery can't decorate a cake with any of them without being sued. That kind of thing builds resentment. Enough resentment that people will be happy to see someone else giving the finger to the greed heads.
What Disney is really afraid of is that their characters will get stale and people will go out and make their own. They are careful to release their movies on rotating schedules so that every generation gets them, but never all at once. The magic of Disney is that a 100 year old mouse still looks fresh. If that freshness were lost, people would realize there's nothing really special about any of the Disney characters. This park in China goes a long way towards showing everone just how slavish they have been.
Once they buy Yahoo, do they transition it into a new form of MSN, thereby killing everything that was cool about Yahoo? Or do they un-MSN the current Microsoft web properties?
Hotmail!
Amazon Search!
Zune!
They keep taking and ruining winners, delivering to the public exactly what no one wants. Hotmail was cool, then M$ bought it and spent a fortune converting it to M$ software, loading it with adds and making it suck. Google mail kicked their ass. Amazon used to have a good search, then along came M$. There's nothing wrong with the electronics factories that make iPod and all the rest of the wold's music players, but Zune is a squirting loser. Is a picture emerging here?
Wonder how much additional it'll cost to convert Yahoo's BSD servers to Windows. Remember how long (and how many failed attempts) there were to convert HotMail from Solaris?
If they do that, their share will drop from 38% to whatever they have now. Just look at what they have done to Amazon's search - my wife says it's unusable and quit going there. If they convert Yahoo over to their stuff like they did Yahoo, there will be no difference between Yahoo and their own search and their share will fall back to what it is today and then further. You would think that Google eating Hotmail's lunch would have taught them a lesson. The data they get would also soon lose it's value if they can't figure out how to use it.
... except with people saying things like this:
Just a friendly reminder, but don't forget to tell your higher-ups that using a *modified* Linux in their product means they have to release the source. Don't forget that, or you may be in for a nasty suprise.
How friendly/nasty of you. First, you assume the company is anal about the working of their systems or sharing kernel fixes and drivers. Second, it does not matter anyway. They can put all of the stuff they can't or don't want to share into code they don't share. The GPL does not force you to break MPEG4 NDAs, it won't publicize code you don't mix in, or steal your wife. All it does is make sure you pass on the same rights for code that's not yours that others passed onto you. The GPL encourages people to share but it never forces an issue. To draw GPL ire, you have to close off someone else's code.
Why offer to quit? I'm pretty sure its illegal to fire someone because they won't break the law. Just offer to install Open Office or nothing at all.
You need to quit because the boss will blame you anyway.
Ethics is further down the list of things to be true to than survival. Especially since we're talking about something as abstract as violating a copyright.
No, we're talking about not being someone else's bagman and the risks that involves. The problem here is that the boss is transferring the risk his company is taking to the employee. If something goes wrong he's screwed and won't have the option of another job he has now. If the company is caught and he's blamed, he'll end up washing dishes for a living.
I've worked with convicted felons and they all deeply regret their convictions. Their crimes were petty but it has locked them out of all sorts of honest work. The few people who hire them do so because they know they can squeeze that much harder. This makes life harder for them than you and me.
Very easy to sit there and say "just quit your job", isn't it?
I've quit more than one dishonest employer and don't regret it. They never pay their would be bag men well anyway.
The more I think about it, the more the honest choice sounds right. You can't make dishonest people act right. When your boss is not honest, it's time to leave.
If they are going to fire him for refusing, they will lose the email and lie about that too if anything bad happens. They can also lie about the licenses. The boss will lie to HR and then paper his file as a trouble maker.
They've asked him to do something they think is wrong. There's no winning in a situation like that.
Sounds like a good idea, but he's screwed anyway. His boss will deny it and then paper his file. He'll be better off at an honest company.
get your objection in writing to cover your ass
Like his boss is going to sign something like that or own up to it later. Forget it, he needs to leave.
how are they going to behave should this come to the attention of FAST (or other enforcement body)?
Why bother to find out?
Tell them that you are going to Install Open Office or quit. It's not that what they have asked is morally wrong, it's that it exposes YOU to danger for their benefit. Oh yeah, it's also stupid because better software exists and they have "standardized" on the worst. You offered your advice and they discarded it, so it's time to go unless you want to be an bag man.
By the way, the anonymous reader has already reported them. ISPs already co-operate with media companies and monitors traffic. The chances are they have monitored the post. But it won't matter because someone there will fink sooner or later.
"doing so fucks the build process" is more likely due a really bad build script rather than compiler, since I've never seen a compiler bug (or ever heard of one, for that matter - except from you)
No, I've run into that bug where their compiler had problems with white space characters. Having the editor built in made the problem worse - it would swap out all of the spaces and replace them with tabs, then screw up and tell you spacing was wrong if you let your program get too long. Why they did this for FORTRAN is beyond me. Why their compiler would barf over the issue is even more mysterious. Tabs and spaces are both white space and should be treated the same.
Can't have anyone say something even REMOTELY Microsoft friendly, can we?
Not when it's dead wrong and M$ themselves admit it.
Visual Studio's exposure, which in the opinion of the vast majority who've used it, is a really good product.
Microsoft does not like their compiler. Only the best compiler would warrent comments like this:
*... !DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!
// around the fucking peice of shit compiler we pass the last param as an void *instead of a LPITEMIDLIST
It's been a long time since I did anything with a M$ compiler, but they were all just as buggy as anything else M$ has done. Apple made the right move when the started using gcc.
Microsoft has actually come up with a way to manage system entities as full-fledged objects in a character-based environment using a simple command set, ...
As opposed to any normal script that can conditionally call normal programs that manipulate files or streams while also giving helpful output on stdout and stderr that the operator and machine can interpret? What revolution is M$ producing here again? What useful thing will this do for user or machine? Really, I'd like to know what the hype is about to cure my "unfortunate ignorance".
This is fitting. M$'s value is all a matter of perception, which is why M$ spends a billion dollars a month on marketing. Without that perception, there would be no windows.
Still, I like the original name, MSH (warning: Fake Community Effort) better. MSH can and should be parsed as "MicroSoft Hell" and it reminds you of the DOS toupper roots of it all.
I think we have crusty old 1970s shells with a veneer of tab-completion and command history added for convenience.
I think it's kind of a drag that Microsoft may now have a better CLI than Linux ...
You will feel better if you think about it a little longer. Really. I'm not sure what you mean by "wrangle live .NET objects and complex datatypes" but I do know that programs can be written and called that do exactly the same thing, with pipes even, without bastardizing bash. Talk about "new techniques" and "dot NET" gives me bad flashbacks to ten years ago when someone tried to give me VB religion. I'm glad I avoided that and this new "Power shell" looks like a second rate bash with a second rate tool set.