Second, you have excess bandwidth usage. This is really simple: Charge the students a reasonable fee for bandwidth overages
Students already pay to maintain their network. I don't think it will wear out sooner because people use it. What would you suggest as a "reasonable" fee for a public network other than a flat fee that covers the cost of repair and upgrade?
It's almost always cheaper to fix bandwith problems by building up your network. Money spent limiting traffic is pure waste. The social costs of limiting publications are a bigger waste still.
It's about controlling bandwidth costs that have soared as a result of the explosive growth of p2p traffic.
P2P is more efficient than traditional internet protocols because most of the traffic is local. Blaming P2P for network costs is like blaming roads for traffic jams.
If deciding who can share and publish is not a free speech issue, I'm not sure what is. You might read the relevent sections of the Bill of Rights again, you seem to have forgotten than government laws against publishing violates the first amendment to the US Constitution.
"Left unchecked, P2P applications can consume all available network bandwidth,"
The bandwidth is an ok reason.
You have to ask yourself why they have bandwith before you decide it's use is bad. From what I remember, the network was built to share information. P2P does that more efficiently than other services do, so suppressing P2P is not OK. Copyrights exist to spread knowledge and advance the state of the art. This is a clear example of copyright laws being used against both of those goals. The social costs outweigh the gains.
Second guessing the administrators is pointless. They are violating your rights, so you should complain no matter how they justify it. The profits of publishing companies are not worth your freedom and security.
Responding to properly submitted legal papers is a requirement of such an organization. Even if it turns out that the RIAA ends up unable to make their case, the university still has to bear the cost of responding to subpoenas.
Caving into extortion is disgraceful. An appropriate response is silence. The RIAA has no case and should be made to pay. Caving in and attacking the rights of those your serve is the wrong response.
A university blocking file sharing/file theft is not curtailing freedom, they are protecting their resources.
And Stalin was protecting forests by preventing publication of unauthorized newspapers.
How about reading the US Bill of Rights again? It is beautifully clear.
Amendment 1, the first and most important
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
In an age of electronic publication, interfering with network traffic violates every part of this but establishment of religion.
Amendment 4
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
ISP who read and share your email and track your web browsing violate this every day. This is done for both industry and government and is one of the most abusive faces of any tryany.
Amendment 5
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,... , nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
It is all the more outrageous that this violation of your security and free speech is being done on behalf of companies engaged in a reign of terror, where suspected copyright infringers are threatened with the loss of their life savings and livelyhoods. A common refrain among the industry apologists is that the price of a song is much less than the consequences of sharing with your friends. My answer to that is that the price of that song is indeed much to great and that our entire system of values is being perverted to support it. My freedom and security are much too high a price to pay to support obsolete business models.
It is also outrageous that all of recorded cultural history is owned by these greedy companies, but I can live without out that. What I demand is my ownership and control my own culture. File sharing gives me that, without infringing on anyone. It is competition for the old media companies and and outlet of truth around government censorship.
The first step in regaining control of your culture and rights is to reject non free software. The second step is to scream out loud at the violation of your rights. Voting is another form of screaming.
If college kids have to pay a bit for their own connection.
Like Time/Warner or ATT are going to have friendlier offerings? This is not about sharing the latest pop crap, it's about free speech and press. Your rights and privacy are being attacked in ways previously impossible.
What you see here is the final attack on the last segments of free internet. This is particularly egregious at public universities, where the network is truly built and owned by you and me and should remain open and free. Through many bad laws and FCC decisions, "broadband" internet competition in the US is limited to no more than two providers in any given area. Those providers have been coerced into wiretapping provisions for Total Information Awareness, despite the explicit condemnation of that program by Congress. The same providers are guilty of worse abuses for proffit and at the behest of the big publishers. Port blocks, crimped uploads, dynamic addresses, traffic monitoring and reporting, email violations and other abuses are universally practiced and are considered acceptable behavior by these greedy companies. Now the same greedy bastards are pushing their agendas onto the last surviving public networks. The goal is to spy and suppress publishing competition.
All of the above is a complete outrage, possible only where government prevents real competition and neglects it's regulatory duty. The only thing worse than government sponsored monopolies is unregulated government sponsored monopolies.
It's time to turn these greed heads out. A future without free publications is just too awful to contemplate but that's what you will have if we allow the big publishers to do to the internet what they did to broadcast and cable.
Vacuum tubes are expensive because its hard to make a vacuum tube that has any degree of reliability. The fact that transistors do the same job and cost dirt has little impact on the difficulty or cost of making vacuum tubes.
So that's why just about every American house had a vacuum tube radio or three before they were obsoleted by transistors? Vacuum tubes were not expensive.
T1s are expensive for the same reason. The 15 meg FiOS service at my house actually costs Verizon a lot less to build and maintain than the multiply repeated 1.5 meg T1 that preceeded it.
With that attitude you might actually start making money.
Oh sure, I'm not up to IBM standards so I'll never make money (five billion dollars a year) like they do. I'm a flunky that needs insane licensing, hard to maintain and featureless code that is somehow "easy to use." I'm tempted to say something snide about how rich I'd get shopping at outrageously expensive department stores, but many of them actually provide a service for their money so the comparison would not be fair.
That's what wins in the long term. It's not raw freedom and choice, it's making intelligent choices and then sticking with them.
Does this somehow rule out free software? I'm not sure what kind of point you are trying to work through but I remember hearing a lot of "right tool for the job" back when there were not enough excellent free software tools for all jobs like there are now. Today the line is "there's too much choice and it's too confusing, hard to glue together and maintain."
Good choices for me will never include M$ toy languages that break your work every two or three years when they push out a new version and never do very well between. I don't care how easy it looks, it's always a loser.
For instance, the only reason we've not released a port to linux - a free version, of course, we'd like to give back to the community - is because there is no standard GUI layer. It's a hodgepodge of these widgets and those widgets, this license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.) Windows provides all that. Free. Built in.
Sure, everone knows that M$ licensing and development is far less complicated or expensive than gpl code. Why, you should see how much I have to pay my accountants and lawyers to keep track of the terms on gcc, kde, gnome and so on and so forth. The burden this passes on to my users is just unimaginable. I'm going to give all of that up right now and buy OSX, Vista, Visual Studio and half a dozen software packages that I need to get real work done on these real platforms. Apt-getting is just too complicated. I give up, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, I am truly sorry that I have deprived your companies of well earned revenues over the last seven years that I've been without your spiffy, easy to use, license, develop and distribute software. What was I thinking as I simply did my work without worry or cost?
The day the linux core gets BUILT-IN windowing and graphics, and I do NOT mean just xwindows or xwindows plus yet another sometimes-there and restrictively licensed widget set, is the day we make a port that we will release to the community.
apt-get install kdevelop. Pay attention to the recommended and suggested packages and go. It's that easy. There are others that may be easier, but KDE's package will be more familiar to you. Hope to see your work soon, Happy hacking!
"M$" is getting nailed by the very system you claim they enjoy.
They not only enjoy patent nonsense, they helped make it so awefull to begin with. M$, though freely violating other people's work, has been a major backer of laws like the DMCA. Vista and the genuine disadvantage of XP should be enough to show you where they want things to go. Why you want to be dragged along and defend them at every step is beyond me. Like so many non free software schemes, software patents are so toxic and anti-social that they also harm those who sought to use them in the first place.
I'd really appreciate it if you showed us a single instance of Microsoft (oh, "M$") using a patent offensively.
I'd say the above linked rants of Mr. Balmer are terribly offensive. The SCO lawsuits are an example of M$ abusing copyrights by proxy. In the patent case, I can agree with some of the things a younger M$ said about patents and losers. They may not have meant those things when they said them, but they were fine words all the same. Those that can't innovate, litigate before they go out of business.
but fragmentation and a hundred different ways of doing things makes it hard to find the information you're looking for online, makes it hard to support (Helpdesk workers complain about having to support more than 3 versions of Windows!), and makes it hard for the user to choose.
Do you know someone who's actually done Linux support to verify these unfounded fears? The only problem gnu/linux helpdesk people have is trying to look busy.
There's one huge difference between free and non free software when it comes to support: free software all works together. Your buddies complain about 3 versions of Windoze because they don't work together - each has it's own arbitrary and insane limitations of a sort not found in the free software world. Different applications do or don't work with each in a nightmare of choices that don't work. I run KDE and Gnome applications on Enlightenment, they mix and match just fine. I can use perl, bash scripts and C together with other people's precompiled code without problem and they all port across distributions and platforms. This is how Mepis, Ubunto and many others are all able to build themselves out of the Debian, Red Hat and upstream repositories. Free software works because it's free.
I've been hearing this FUD about "confusion of choice" for a while. As usual, it's designed for people who've never taken so much as a peak outside their favorite non free OS. Anyone who's run free software for more than six months knows it's nonsense.
Open Source software maintains its momentum as long as there is an itch to scratch. As soon as that itch is satisfied, the work stops. Even if the code is unsuitable for your average joe. Technically, this is where the commercial distributions are supposed to pick up the slack and do the rest of the work.
Oh yeah, like Gnome and KDE are so stagnant and the commercial vendors have better polish. Get real, only Sun has managed virtual desktops yet. Mac is intersting but the free desktops just blow it away. KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment and many others have more polish than any non free desktop.
Dipping down to polish shows just how far free software has come. The deniers used to say that free software could never make an easy to use GUI because they had no clue about Joe average. The above is a pathetic variant on that theme because many well documented free desktops that a 5 year old could use have been made. Before that, it was that free software can't make a well documented userland, a kernel, a compiler an editor and so on and so forth.
I dare you to compare the experience of installing Mepis to Vista, XP or OSX. Mepis is autoconfiguring and does everything in about 20 minutes, while the other systems force the user shuffling CDs for basic productivity software, drivers and other nonsense that should just come with the computer. The collapse of Vista sales is going to force Dell and others to ship gnu/linux and that will be the end of M$ - preconfigured easy to use and maintain gnu/linux systems will catch on and leave the legacy systems in the dirt.
... it is good news, that the buyers of ideas are well funded.
Such is the confusion of Intellectual Property. You can't talk intelligently about all of the specific protections created by government for Trademarks, Patents and Copyright at the same time, though each embodies original "ideas". Each protection is created to encourage a specific part of the economy and each has strict limits.
In the Patent case, what you are seeing is exactly the opposite of the intent of patent laws. Patents are granted so that people will share their inventions! People will always improve their craft in a free society. Patents grant an exclusive franchise to specific inventions - non obvious techniques for doing specific things. It's not just an idea and it should always be practical for it to be granted. Without the franchise grant, people would keep their improvements to themselves and the state of the art would stagnate. In theory, paptens encourage people to share what they know, so everyone is more productive. Patent trolls are taking out franchises on obvious inventions, or even methods, often with prior art to rob others. At the very least, they will encourage people to keep their methods secret. People abusing patents rob real inventors of their livelyhoods and cost all of us. At wost, they will destroy what's left of US industry and convert the country into a parasitic empire.
Ownership of ideas is a very dangerous and oppressive thing.
Newsflash: investments flow to companies that stand a chance at making money. The problem is with current patent laws and the incompetence of the Patent Office...
People who invest in greed are more often robbed than the intended victim.
so purely intellectual goods will replace tangible goods. I predict just the opposite of parent. As China and India develop research regimes, they'll want the same IP protections that the US and Europe demand; they are violating IP now because it is expedient. As long as there is scarcity at all in our economy, IP will be with us.
"IP" laws are designed to create scarcity and the laws enforcing them will always be oppressive. A country that tries to build an economy on, "you can't do that because I say I thought of it first" is doomed. There will always be morally repugnant cases like life saving medicines that other nations will use as an excuse to exercise their freedoms. The "IP" nation will be forced to ever more hysterical and anti-social enforcement. Don't even bother with China and India as examples, first world nations want their freedom too.
The easiest example is software. M$ and other US companies would like to shut down or tax every other software company on Earth. They intend to do this with bogus patents and DRM'd hardware. If you think the rest of the world will allow themselves to be subjugated that way, you need to think some more. The US can threaten trade embargo and other measures, but it's not going to work.
Even in the most cynical case, where every country has it's own oligarchies, the competition between companies and industries will ruin any kind of "IP" empire. Such an arrangement would be devastating to the world economy and I can only hope we go towards free competition and away from government granted monopolies. The IP world you envision will be a dark age, where news is censored, history lost and technology stagnates for centuries. Taken to it's limit, you get a Byzantine system where everything is obsessively regulated but utterly lawless and a few constantly squabble for control of an ever shrinking pie. It is the death of civilization.
You don't just count the people being sued, you have to also consider the great many Slashdotters who believe that any expectation that you pay anything at all for any media that can be digitized equates to misery.
It's more like the 125 million US citizens with an ISP connection that might be wrongly accused and threatened with the loss of all their life savings.
That they be denied the ability to obtain, free of charge, the latest pop music in a format that not only plays on any conceivable device but was also developed by people who share their particular political and philosophical leanings with regard to software....that is truly misery for them.
Yes, I'd like my music to play on restrictionless devices. If you like having to beg permission to play and copy your files or keep running your OS. I'm not sure why anyone would prefer that but to each his own. Perhaps you would like one of Mr. Gates' bed o'nails and pillow full-o-thorns to sleep on?
I guess I'm not quite understanding what the "situation" is.
A windows user would not understand, so I'll explain carefully. Yes, ACPI can be made to work but it's buggy. While a Windows user might be used to that kind of quality, I'm not. The easiest way to fix most ACPI bugs is to turn it off and use APM instead. The reason ACPI is buggy is because Bill Gates wanted to be Windoze only, so he made it complicated, software dependent and "extensible" as most M$ non standards are. He does this because he's rightly afraid that other people's software will work better than his own despite the tremendous licensing advantages his company enjoys. The added complications are a thorn in the side of all developers but are especially painful for free software developers who must wade through booby trap after booby trap to make their hardware work. That power management works against Bill Gates wishes is a testament to the power of free software development. That, in short, is the situation.
My laptops work well with APM, and some work OK with ACPI. Now go see if Vista can do the same yet. Watch out for buggy video drivers! When Vista fails on you, blame your buddy Bill Gates.
If an email from Bill Gates himself saying "screw Linux power management over" is not good enough for you to understand the situation, I'm not sure what is. I can say it again if you like.
If you RTFA, it says they raided his place and found CDs of child porn. Now it also says he had a roommate and that the IM that got them in trouble was sent from his roommate's account. Which should have made them investigate him as well, but that's another story.
Actually, the roomate is the whole story though it's difficult to get out of the Ars Technia article. Had the police searched everyone in the house, their probable cause argument would make sense - but they did not, focusing instead on the person identified by the ISP who was different from the person who committed the original offense. The evidence which should be questioned is that provided by the ISP, a name and address associated with a specific IP address and time. The original intent of the warrent was to find the person who sent a rude picture to a woman in New York, not to go on a digital fishing expedition. When the names did not match up, further investigation or blanket approval from the judge was required.
All I want it compatibility with other OSs (i.e., fewest things that have to be installed on a base OS to use it). For that, I'd have to say Zip and/or gzip wins.
Sure, but there's also the issue of finding the files you really want to share and there KDE has very nice front ends. There's a nice find in Konqueror, with switches for everything including click and drool regular expressions. Krename coppies or links files with excellent renaming. Finally, Konqueror has an archive button. The slick interface does not preclude the use of command line tools because the rename and archive programs will take piped input. The GUI is nice for review of the output and easy further processing.
Yes, like all M$ defined "extensible" non standards, APM is shit. It's older, less complicated and better fixed shit but shit none the less. It relied on finding a DOS partition for hibernating, and was different on each laptop. APCI is much the same, but screws up even more of your motherboard. LinuxBIOS or other free software implementations are much better.
Would you like to point me to the follow up email from Eric Rudder that says "Hi Bill - As you requested, we've made the ACPI extensions specific to Windows so no one else can implement them. Cheers!" I can't seem to find it.
I'm surprised Bill was dumb enough to document his intent. I'd be very surprised to find follow ups other than the 600 page ACPI non specification. If an email from Bill Gates himself saying "screw Linux power management over" is not good enough for you to understand the situation, I'm not sure what is.
that will now cry that their computer _has_ to be on, 24/7 (because otherwise, they couldnt improve their epenis, er, i mean uptime).
Uptime is something M$ can't deliver, but they have done a nice job of making sure systems with good uptime can't do power management easily. ACPI is sabotaged. I'd love to be able to have all my systems hibernate AND be network accessable, but I have not had the time to see that it does or does not work on my system yet.
From what I've heard, M$ has also unable to deliver when it come to applications data and power savings. Programs like Word used to barf and corrupt your open files on resume. I suppose that's what happens when you make spend your time making things complicated to harm the competition instead of making thins simple so your own stuff works.
Oh, yeah about uptime. I booted my laptop at 90 days because I wanted a new kernel. Other than that, all my work was always where I left, neatly spread out across virtual desktops, it whenever I lifted the lid. That's 90 days without a loss of placekeeping or the pain of booting.
Anyone who has not Bill Gate's memo about this should. Anything M$ touches is shit: winmodems, wifi, ACPI, APM and the list goes on and on. They can't make their own stuff work, so they have to break everyone else's.
Despite his efforts, power management can be made to work. It's not easy and you can't expect the latest and greatest to work. The closer a company's working relationship to M$ is, the harder it will be to make things work. For example, Dell is more difficult and Thinkpad is easier. As with most free software, if it's going to work the live distros will auto configure it and it will work almost out of the box.
I still use APM for the most part and have ignored conveniences like WoL.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, you have excess bandwidth usage. This is really simple: Charge the students a reasonable fee for bandwidth overages
Students already pay to maintain their network. I don't think it will wear out sooner because people use it. What would you suggest as a "reasonable" fee for a public network other than a flat fee that covers the cost of repair and upgrade?
It's almost always cheaper to fix bandwith problems by building up your network. Money spent limiting traffic is pure waste. The social costs of limiting publications are a bigger waste still.
It's about controlling bandwidth costs that have soared as a result of the explosive growth of p2p traffic.
P2P is more efficient than traditional internet protocols because most of the traffic is local. Blaming P2P for network costs is like blaming roads for traffic jams.
If deciding who can share and publish is not a free speech issue, I'm not sure what is. You might read the relevent sections of the Bill of Rights again, you seem to have forgotten than government laws against publishing violates the first amendment to the US Constitution.
"Left unchecked, P2P applications can consume all available network bandwidth," The bandwidth is an ok reason.
You have to ask yourself why they have bandwith before you decide it's use is bad. From what I remember, the network was built to share information. P2P does that more efficiently than other services do, so suppressing P2P is not OK. Copyrights exist to spread knowledge and advance the state of the art. This is a clear example of copyright laws being used against both of those goals. The social costs outweigh the gains.
Second guessing the administrators is pointless. They are violating your rights, so you should complain no matter how they justify it. The profits of publishing companies are not worth your freedom and security.
Responding to properly submitted legal papers is a requirement of such an organization. Even if it turns out that the RIAA ends up unable to make their case, the university still has to bear the cost of responding to subpoenas.
Caving into extortion is disgraceful. An appropriate response is silence. The RIAA has no case and should be made to pay. Caving in and attacking the rights of those your serve is the wrong response.
A university blocking file sharing/file theft is not curtailing freedom, they are protecting their resources.
And Stalin was protecting forests by preventing publication of unauthorized newspapers.
How about reading the US Bill of Rights again? It is beautifully clear.
Amendment 1, the first and most important
In an age of electronic publication, interfering with network traffic violates every part of this but establishment of religion.
Amendment 4
ISP who read and share your email and track your web browsing violate this every day. This is done for both industry and government and is one of the most abusive faces of any tryany.
Amendment 5
It is all the more outrageous that this violation of your security and free speech is being done on behalf of companies engaged in a reign of terror, where suspected copyright infringers are threatened with the loss of their life savings and livelyhoods. A common refrain among the industry apologists is that the price of a song is much less than the consequences of sharing with your friends. My answer to that is that the price of that song is indeed much to great and that our entire system of values is being perverted to support it. My freedom and security are much too high a price to pay to support obsolete business models.
It is also outrageous that all of recorded cultural history is owned by these greedy companies, but I can live without out that. What I demand is my ownership and control my own culture. File sharing gives me that, without infringing on anyone. It is competition for the old media companies and and outlet of truth around government censorship.
The first step in regaining control of your culture and rights is to reject non free software. The second step is to scream out loud at the violation of your rights. Voting is another form of screaming.
If college kids have to pay a bit for their own connection.
Like Time/Warner or ATT are going to have friendlier offerings? This is not about sharing the latest pop crap, it's about free speech and press. Your rights and privacy are being attacked in ways previously impossible.
What you see here is the final attack on the last segments of free internet. This is particularly egregious at public universities, where the network is truly built and owned by you and me and should remain open and free. Through many bad laws and FCC decisions, "broadband" internet competition in the US is limited to no more than two providers in any given area. Those providers have been coerced into wiretapping provisions for Total Information Awareness, despite the explicit condemnation of that program by Congress. The same providers are guilty of worse abuses for proffit and at the behest of the big publishers. Port blocks, crimped uploads, dynamic addresses, traffic monitoring and reporting, email violations and other abuses are universally practiced and are considered acceptable behavior by these greedy companies. Now the same greedy bastards are pushing their agendas onto the last surviving public networks. The goal is to spy and suppress publishing competition.
All of the above is a complete outrage, possible only where government prevents real competition and neglects it's regulatory duty. The only thing worse than government sponsored monopolies is unregulated government sponsored monopolies.
It's time to turn these greed heads out. A future without free publications is just too awful to contemplate but that's what you will have if we allow the big publishers to do to the internet what they did to broadcast and cable.
Vacuum tubes are expensive because its hard to make a vacuum tube that has any degree of reliability. The fact that transistors do the same job and cost dirt has little impact on the difficulty or cost of making vacuum tubes.
So that's why just about every American house had a vacuum tube radio or three before they were obsoleted by transistors? Vacuum tubes were not expensive.
T1s are expensive for the same reason. The 15 meg FiOS service at my house actually costs Verizon a lot less to build and maintain than the multiply repeated 1.5 meg T1 that preceeded it.
A false reason and analogy is as good as any for Verizon and friends. They've already spent $200,000,000 of your money without delivering what they promissed.
With that attitude you might actually start making money.
Oh sure, I'm not up to IBM standards so I'll never make money (five billion dollars a year) like they do. I'm a flunky that needs insane licensing, hard to maintain and featureless code that is somehow "easy to use." I'm tempted to say something snide about how rich I'd get shopping at outrageously expensive department stores, but many of them actually provide a service for their money so the comparison would not be fair.
That's what wins in the long term. It's not raw freedom and choice, it's making intelligent choices and then sticking with them.
Does this somehow rule out free software? I'm not sure what kind of point you are trying to work through but I remember hearing a lot of "right tool for the job" back when there were not enough excellent free software tools for all jobs like there are now. Today the line is "there's too much choice and it's too confusing, hard to glue together and maintain."
Good choices for me will never include M$ toy languages that break your work every two or three years when they push out a new version and never do very well between. I don't care how easy it looks, it's always a loser.
For instance, the only reason we've not released a port to linux - a free version, of course, we'd like to give back to the community - is because there is no standard GUI layer. It's a hodgepodge of these widgets and those widgets, this license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.) Windows provides all that. Free. Built in.
Sure, everone knows that M$ licensing and development is far less complicated or expensive than gpl code. Why, you should see how much I have to pay my accountants and lawyers to keep track of the terms on gcc, kde, gnome and so on and so forth. The burden this passes on to my users is just unimaginable. I'm going to give all of that up right now and buy OSX, Vista, Visual Studio and half a dozen software packages that I need to get real work done on these real platforms. Apt-getting is just too complicated. I give up, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, I am truly sorry that I have deprived your companies of well earned revenues over the last seven years that I've been without your spiffy, easy to use, license, develop and distribute software. What was I thinking as I simply did my work without worry or cost?
The day the linux core gets BUILT-IN windowing and graphics, and I do NOT mean just xwindows or xwindows plus yet another sometimes-there and restrictively licensed widget set, is the day we make a port that we will release to the community.
apt-get install kdevelop. Pay attention to the recommended and suggested packages and go. It's that easy. There are others that may be easier, but KDE's package will be more familiar to you. Hope to see your work soon, Happy hacking!
"M$" is getting nailed by the very system you claim they enjoy.
They not only enjoy patent nonsense, they helped make it so awefull to begin with. M$, though freely violating other people's work, has been a major backer of laws like the DMCA. Vista and the genuine disadvantage of XP should be enough to show you where they want things to go. Why you want to be dragged along and defend them at every step is beyond me. Like so many non free software schemes, software patents are so toxic and anti-social that they also harm those who sought to use them in the first place.
I'd really appreciate it if you showed us a single instance of Microsoft (oh, "M$") using a patent offensively.
I'd say the above linked rants of Mr. Balmer are terribly offensive. The SCO lawsuits are an example of M$ abusing copyrights by proxy. In the patent case, I can agree with some of the things a younger M$ said about patents and losers. They may not have meant those things when they said them, but they were fine words all the same. Those that can't innovate, litigate before they go out of business.
but fragmentation and a hundred different ways of doing things makes it hard to find the information you're looking for online, makes it hard to support (Helpdesk workers complain about having to support more than 3 versions of Windows!), and makes it hard for the user to choose.
Do you know someone who's actually done Linux support to verify these unfounded fears? The only problem gnu/linux helpdesk people have is trying to look busy.
There's one huge difference between free and non free software when it comes to support: free software all works together. Your buddies complain about 3 versions of Windoze because they don't work together - each has it's own arbitrary and insane limitations of a sort not found in the free software world. Different applications do or don't work with each in a nightmare of choices that don't work. I run KDE and Gnome applications on Enlightenment, they mix and match just fine. I can use perl, bash scripts and C together with other people's precompiled code without problem and they all port across distributions and platforms. This is how Mepis, Ubunto and many others are all able to build themselves out of the Debian, Red Hat and upstream repositories. Free software works because it's free.
I've been hearing this FUD about "confusion of choice" for a while. As usual, it's designed for people who've never taken so much as a peak outside their favorite non free OS. Anyone who's run free software for more than six months knows it's nonsense.
Open Source software maintains its momentum as long as there is an itch to scratch. As soon as that itch is satisfied, the work stops. Even if the code is unsuitable for your average joe. Technically, this is where the commercial distributions are supposed to pick up the slack and do the rest of the work.
Oh yeah, like Gnome and KDE are so stagnant and the commercial vendors have better polish. Get real, only Sun has managed virtual desktops yet. Mac is intersting but the free desktops just blow it away. KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment and many others have more polish than any non free desktop.
Dipping down to polish shows just how far free software has come. The deniers used to say that free software could never make an easy to use GUI because they had no clue about Joe average. The above is a pathetic variant on that theme because many well documented free desktops that a 5 year old could use have been made. Before that, it was that free software can't make a well documented userland, a kernel, a compiler an editor and so on and so forth.
I dare you to compare the experience of installing Mepis to Vista, XP or OSX. Mepis is autoconfiguring and does everything in about 20 minutes, while the other systems force the user shuffling CDs for basic productivity software, drivers and other nonsense that should just come with the computer. The collapse of Vista sales is going to force Dell and others to ship gnu/linux and that will be the end of M$ - preconfigured easy to use and maintain gnu/linux systems will catch on and leave the legacy systems in the dirt.
Such is the confusion of Intellectual Property. You can't talk intelligently about all of the specific protections created by government for Trademarks, Patents and Copyright at the same time, though each embodies original "ideas". Each protection is created to encourage a specific part of the economy and each has strict limits.
In the Patent case, what you are seeing is exactly the opposite of the intent of patent laws. Patents are granted so that people will share their inventions! People will always improve their craft in a free society. Patents grant an exclusive franchise to specific inventions - non obvious techniques for doing specific things. It's not just an idea and it should always be practical for it to be granted. Without the franchise grant, people would keep their improvements to themselves and the state of the art would stagnate. In theory, paptens encourage people to share what they know, so everyone is more productive. Patent trolls are taking out franchises on obvious inventions, or even methods, often with prior art to rob others. At the very least, they will encourage people to keep their methods secret. People abusing patents rob real inventors of their livelyhoods and cost all of us. At wost, they will destroy what's left of US industry and convert the country into a parasitic empire.
Ownership of ideas is a very dangerous and oppressive thing.
Newsflash: investments flow to companies that stand a chance at making money. The problem is with current patent laws and the incompetence of the Patent Office ...
People who invest in greed are more often robbed than the intended victim.
so purely intellectual goods will replace tangible goods. I predict just the opposite of parent. As China and India develop research regimes, they'll want the same IP protections that the US and Europe demand; they are violating IP now because it is expedient. As long as there is scarcity at all in our economy, IP will be with us.
"IP" laws are designed to create scarcity and the laws enforcing them will always be oppressive. A country that tries to build an economy on, "you can't do that because I say I thought of it first" is doomed. There will always be morally repugnant cases like life saving medicines that other nations will use as an excuse to exercise their freedoms. The "IP" nation will be forced to ever more hysterical and anti-social enforcement. Don't even bother with China and India as examples, first world nations want their freedom too.
The easiest example is software. M$ and other US companies would like to shut down or tax every other software company on Earth. They intend to do this with bogus patents and DRM'd hardware. If you think the rest of the world will allow themselves to be subjugated that way, you need to think some more. The US can threaten trade embargo and other measures, but it's not going to work.
Even in the most cynical case, where every country has it's own oligarchies, the competition between companies and industries will ruin any kind of "IP" empire. Such an arrangement would be devastating to the world economy and I can only hope we go towards free competition and away from government granted monopolies. The IP world you envision will be a dark age, where news is censored, history lost and technology stagnates for centuries. Taken to it's limit, you get a Byzantine system where everything is obsessively regulated but utterly lawless and a few constantly squabble for control of an ever shrinking pie. It is the death of civilization.
You don't just count the people being sued, you have to also consider the great many Slashdotters who believe that any expectation that you pay anything at all for any media that can be digitized equates to misery.
It's more like the 125 million US citizens with an ISP connection that might be wrongly accused and threatened with the loss of all their life savings.
That they be denied the ability to obtain, free of charge, the latest pop music in a format that not only plays on any conceivable device but was also developed by people who share their particular political and philosophical leanings with regard to software....that is truly misery for them.
Yes, I'd like my music to play on restrictionless devices. If you like having to beg permission to play and copy your files or keep running your OS. I'm not sure why anyone would prefer that but to each his own. Perhaps you would like one of Mr. Gates' bed o'nails and pillow full-o-thorns to sleep on?
Bands make money from touring. ... blah blah blah
You don't have a real job do you?
I guess I'm not quite understanding what the "situation" is.
A windows user would not understand, so I'll explain carefully. Yes, ACPI can be made to work but it's buggy. While a Windows user might be used to that kind of quality, I'm not. The easiest way to fix most ACPI bugs is to turn it off and use APM instead. The reason ACPI is buggy is because Bill Gates wanted to be Windoze only, so he made it complicated, software dependent and "extensible" as most M$ non standards are. He does this because he's rightly afraid that other people's software will work better than his own despite the tremendous licensing advantages his company enjoys. The added complications are a thorn in the side of all developers but are especially painful for free software developers who must wade through booby trap after booby trap to make their hardware work. That power management works against Bill Gates wishes is a testament to the power of free software development. That, in short, is the situation.
My laptops work well with APM, and some work OK with ACPI. Now go see if Vista can do the same yet. Watch out for buggy video drivers! When Vista fails on you, blame your buddy Bill Gates.
If an email from Bill Gates himself saying "screw Linux power management over" is not good enough for you to understand the situation, I'm not sure what is. I can say it again if you like.
If you RTFA, it says they raided his place and found CDs of child porn. Now it also says he had a roommate and that the IM that got them in trouble was sent from his roommate's account. Which should have made them investigate him as well, but that's another story.
Actually, the roomate is the whole story though it's difficult to get out of the Ars Technia article. Had the police searched everyone in the house, their probable cause argument would make sense - but they did not, focusing instead on the person identified by the ISP who was different from the person who committed the original offense. The evidence which should be questioned is that provided by the ISP, a name and address associated with a specific IP address and time. The original intent of the warrent was to find the person who sent a rude picture to a woman in New York, not to go on a digital fishing expedition. When the names did not match up, further investigation or blanket approval from the judge was required.
All I want it compatibility with other OSs (i.e., fewest things that have to be installed on a base OS to use it). For that, I'd have to say Zip and/or gzip wins.
Sure, but there's also the issue of finding the files you really want to share and there KDE has very nice front ends. There's a nice find in Konqueror, with switches for everything including click and drool regular expressions. Krename coppies or links files with excellent renaming. Finally, Konqueror has an archive button. The slick interface does not preclude the use of command line tools because the rename and archive programs will take piped input. The GUI is nice for review of the output and easy further processing.
Is that [APM] standard "shit" as well?
Yes, like all M$ defined "extensible" non standards, APM is shit. It's older, less complicated and better fixed shit but shit none the less. It relied on finding a DOS partition for hibernating, and was different on each laptop. APCI is much the same, but screws up even more of your motherboard. LinuxBIOS or other free software implementations are much better.
Would you like to point me to the follow up email from Eric Rudder that says "Hi Bill - As you requested, we've made the ACPI extensions specific to Windows so no one else can implement them. Cheers!" I can't seem to find it.
I'm surprised Bill was dumb enough to document his intent. I'd be very surprised to find follow ups other than the 600 page ACPI non specification. If an email from Bill Gates himself saying "screw Linux power management over" is not good enough for you to understand the situation, I'm not sure what is.
that will now cry that their computer _has_ to be on, 24/7 (because otherwise, they couldnt improve their epenis, er, i mean uptime).
Uptime is something M$ can't deliver, but they have done a nice job of making sure systems with good uptime can't do power management easily. ACPI is sabotaged. I'd love to be able to have all my systems hibernate AND be network accessable, but I have not had the time to see that it does or does not work on my system yet.
From what I've heard, M$ has also unable to deliver when it come to applications data and power savings. Programs like Word used to barf and corrupt your open files on resume. I suppose that's what happens when you make spend your time making things complicated to harm the competition instead of making thins simple so your own stuff works.
Oh, yeah about uptime. I booted my laptop at 90 days because I wanted a new kernel. Other than that, all my work was always where I left, neatly spread out across virtual desktops, it whenever I lifted the lid. That's 90 days without a loss of placekeeping or the pain of booting.
Windows XP will often times not give s3 suspend as an option even when turned on in BIOS. But with Microsofts dumppo.exe utility you can
How typical, a DOS only power tool to manipulate your hardware and everyone else is out of luck. Yeah, that stinks. Thanks, Bill.
Anyone who has not Bill Gate's memo about this should. Anything M$ touches is shit: winmodems, wifi, ACPI, APM and the list goes on and on. They can't make their own stuff work, so they have to break everyone else's.
Despite his efforts, power management can be made to work. It's not easy and you can't expect the latest and greatest to work. The closer a company's working relationship to M$ is, the harder it will be to make things work. For example, Dell is more difficult and Thinkpad is easier. As with most free software, if it's going to work the live distros will auto configure it and it will work almost out of the box.
I still use APM for the most part and have ignored conveniences like WoL.