What if the end user can produce what (s)he needs using excel to scrape some data off the web, integrate it with private data, crunch some numbers, finally put his/her results into the appropriate corporate database under their name. [VBA does this]
The user would be better off learning perl or having an IT guy just make them a perl plugin for gnumeric. Perl is one of several languages gnumeric can use to manipulate data. A M$ specific language is something to avoid.
Did'nt have ass scratching time reserved? You've got a problem,
I do have that kind of time. If you don't, it might have something to do with your choice of software. Access working for you these days? How's the VB to C# migration going? Virses and worms making things hard to manage? Are you ready for Vista? Nope, not my problem.
it's easy to forget what a complicated and powerful environment Excel is; even understanding what people _need_ to do in it (over what OO.o does) is hard, I guess.
As someone who's used Lotus, Excel 4 and up, Quatropro, OO, Kspread and Gnumeric, you would have a hard time explaining exactly what Excel has to offer that other software does not. A spreadsheet is something you make for simple, repetitive calculations and quick graphs. When you need to perform "complicated" analysis, you are always better off using a specialized, external tool. About the only advantage Excel has is in importing files made with tools that have been added in the wrong way, like Visio drawings. That advantage is one that does not survive many upgrade cycles, so you are better off using the less expensive and better designed alternatives. Mostly, the things "needed" by Excel users are an abuse of the spreadsheet concept that lead to errors and heartache.
Stewart said in an interview with eWEEK. Stewart, who is volunteering his reverse-engineering skills and time to ZERT in his private capacity, wrote an early version of the VML (Vector Markup Language) patch the group released Sept. 22 and worked closely with others to fine-tune the update to minimize potential glitches."
Very noble of him to volunteer, but we all know what happens in the movies to the character who mistakenly sacrifices themselves to defend the bad guy. At this moment, chairs are flying and the heavy weights at M$ are screaming things like, "This guy is making us look bad! Steve smash!" A much cooler arch villain grins a maniacally at his underling and contemplates co-opting as much of the work as possible before dropping both of them into a pool of red hot magma.
What will the real world fate be for poor Stew? DMCA suit? C&D for trade secret or patent infringement? Who knows! But none of it will really make windoze a place that's safe for your work.
This is really a moot issue.... just don't use WMP.
I agree, but it won't be long until the only way to avoid WMP is to not use M$ at all. This is a death by a thousand cuts kind of thing, but the goal is clear: universal control of all media. The choice given is between your freedom and your culture, but you will lose both. Let me outline the steps:
Establish anti-copy technology.
Buy yourself anti-circumvention laws like the DMCA, claiming they are benign and don't harm competition
Sweeten the DRM deal. Give away everything RIAA under subscription as long as the user agrees to the terms. The terms are no-circumvention, period. Joe Sixpacks happily adds another $20/month to the cable bill and drowns in crappy music.
Insist that all recording devices be corrupted by DRM to make "professional" recording equipment as expensive enough to eliminate most recording studios. See $27,000 DVD jukebox as a glaring example. This will take years.
Use Palladium to keep any "untrusted" software from running on new hardware.
Cripple playback of free media. Joe Sixpacks won't even notice by this point.
offer DRM "protection" to news agencies and corporate email.
Eliminate non DRM'd news from the "majors", spam the shit out of non DRM'd email and declare "unprotected" email inferior.
Claim that without DRM there would be no news and democratic society would cease to exist.
Declare public libraries obsolete, expensive and dangerous to a free society. Unrestricted access to information enables terrorists, drug manufacture and kills puppies not to mention promoting intellectual piracy.
Use the DMCA to sue the shit out of any free software that can exchange email with DRM'd systems or retrieve news.
Outlaw free software as an anti-circumvention device.
Congratulations, those who own DRM systems now have more power than broadcasters and publishers did in the 1960s. Opposition is now limited to corporate cloak and dagger.
The only way to avoid it is to continue to avoid DRM and to promote free culture. The sweet deal is a raw one for you, artists and a free society. Only the biggest of publishers will win anything and they will use the winnings to lock you out of your own culture. They will dictate what that culture is by controlling what is played, what news you hear, what advertisements you see even what mail gets through. If you don't want to play, you will be locked out of it all. Free culture gets around this by taking money and power from those who would enslave you.
It all starts with your computer, right now. It's your post, press, public library and entertainment, in short it's your link to the world and your culture. Everyone is on the same long curve that ends where your computer is the tool you use to enjoy and contribute to your culture. It's pretty obvious that most works are already composed on computers. Everyone of you needs to take control of that machine and never let it go. There is no better time to liberate your computer and own your culture. It's only going to get harder. People who provide you software you can't control or modify are the people who will strip you of that control and lock you out. They need you more than you need them.
What does you using Debian have to do with anything in the rest of your post? Were you just trying to name drop to look good?
I use Debian because it's easy and it works. Because of that AMD 64 looks like a cheap and practical platform for my next computer. I'll wait and see what things look like under core duo, but I doubt it will be a contender anytime soon for software and hardware reasons. New stuff is almost always a huge pain in the neck for me. It also costs more. Like I said, right now I can get into an AMD64 system for under $200 and reuse my existing components. Moving to core duo, right now, will cost me a whole new system. This might change as the older AMD 64 platforms sell out and become unavailable but by then the cost of AMD 64 two will have dropped and DDR2 memory is better.
I mentioned it because this test did not clearly establish any performance benefit that I might actually see. Tests performed with non free drivers don't mean anything to me.
Journalists are not supposed to advocate for either the ruling or the opposition party. That's a fundamental rule of journalistic ethics.
The author did not discharge their duty, but it had nothing to do with writing style or party politics. The journalist's first obligation's are to the truth, the reader and the publisher. Pointing out how DRM usurps the reader's rights is the only ethical thing anyone writing on the subject can do. DRM has the potential to curtail far more than entertainment and any research quickly shows how. Failure to frame the issue is a much greater failure than the use of colorful language in an entertainment article.
I don't need a huge program taking up system taskbar space, or screen space. I have relied on winamp classic for years, just because of this. It's got all the functions, it plays the music I like, and I don't have to deal with WMPs crap.
Sooner or later, M$ is going to restrict access of "third party" software to your audio device. When that happens, every program that plays music will just be another face on WiMP and all of the restrictions will apply. Just look at how AOL ended up using IE as their browser even though they owned Netscape. Windoze is M$'s platform and what they want will happen there.
The free software world has what you want now. You can run WinAmp's grand kids or several others just like it. KDE's got Noatun, Gnome has Rhythm box, even Enlightenment has a beautiful and simple media player. Noatun also gives you sftp access to files so you can share with yourself and it plays videos, so you can put your home movies in a random list to give you some distraction every so often. Nothing makes me smile like watching my little girl run around in the surf. Larger clients don't have to eat desk space either. Amarok, which rivals any music player for function, goes to single icon on your application bar. You right click it to pause or skip songs and left click it to get the full interface.
The sooner you migrate, the better off you are. If you can't, I'm sorry.
Since the Core 2 processor relies on the chipset for its memory controller, one's chipset choice can also have a much more profound impact on performance.
Since I'm not really a fanboy and don't have time to research memory controllers, I might end up with a dog system? Screw that. I'm not going to be playing chipset roulette, especially with a company that's infamous for not cooperating with the free software community outside of slower graphics chips. Hardware zealotry is almost as expensive as software folly, but I have a feeling that the two are linked.
I run Debian and have been thinking about moving to AMD 64. Prices on the AMD 64 one systems are very cheap. Yesterday I saw a mobo + processor for less than $200 and the mobo will use my crusty old DDR memory. I doubt core duo can touch that kind of price to performance ratio. I'm not really in a hurry because the five year old computer I have is still more than adequate. The biggest performance hit was disk latency, and I fixed that with an 80MB/s scsi drive mounted as/usr. I'll move when my current system dies. At that time, I'll look around to see where the bargain is.
Do you believe we never landed on the moon? Do you think horse-fucking is A-OK? Would you like to find someone to kill (with mutual consent) via erotic asphyxiation?... or worse, do you think sexually abusing little kids is acceptable behavior? No problem!
You forgot money laundering and drug dealing, but the rest of the things you think about are interesting. Who put those ideas into your head? What is a circle jerk? What does this really have to do with an electronic network?
The only person who'd know is me and the record store guy, and he cares less than some server somewhere
Sure, now your non free software vendors know you better than you know yourself. That's one of the reasons I don't use non free software. When Fry pushes the counter reset, Apple takes note that something bothered you about yourself. What books I read, where I go on the internet and what I read there, how much I paid in taxes, all of these things I'd rather keep to myself.
I'm currently digitizing my collection of old tabloid punk magazines from the 1970s.
That's hard to do but it's not what's required. Snapping legible pictures of a phone bill is not hard if all you want to do is get rid of your paper. Getting OCR is harder, but still not as difficult as making museum grade preservation of artwork.
Be sure to post the results on line some time after the copyright expires. In 2070, they will probably read like Elizabethan English but at long last the public domain will be served thanks to your efforts.
It's almost impossible to shoot a bill or a check stub dead on, at close rage, without fish-eye'ing, and without getting in your own shadow.
If his purpose is simply not to file paper a scanner is not required. A $200 Cannon from Walmart is all you need if you don't worry about OCR. You move the camera back and use the zoom and it works. I take 1600x1200 pictures of my classnotes and the results are perfectly legible. A good desk light saves your batteries by eliminating the need to flash. You move it to the side to avoid your shadow. The result might be fisheyed, but so what it's just your phone bill. Being able to OCR and text search would be like icing on the cake. The real prize is keeping your records without stuffing file cabinets with unimportant junk.
Wait twitter - when Microsoft goes five years without releasing an OS you do your nyuck, nyuck M$ Winblows is finished routine, but then you turn around and actually complain about the upgrade train? That's rich.
Yes, M$ can be both intentionally wasteful and incompetent. I know it's been a six year long time since they dumped XP on the world, but that's not for lack of trying. I read once that Vista would screw out something like 33% of the existing software base. It does this for what amounts to be a facelift to XP and 64bit port.
The free software world does better. In the same time period Debian has released three stable versions, Woody, Sarge and Etch, each with real improvements. Those improvements did not come at the price of hardware, data or software. My computers migrated flawlessly without loss of information. Instead of having to throw printers and other gadgets away, I was able to buy and use more hardware.
Microsoft is finished because they depend on the intentional waste of the upgrade train for revenue but their development model does not give them the ability to create the functionality that drives it. Use of XP has just gotten out of the 70% range, if you believe web OS stats that have the combined Mac and other at less than 10%. Now they are starting up the Vista train? It's going to be a wreck. Sales of Vista are going to be even lower than sales of XP were, which was bad news at the time. They won't be able to make up for it this time with Office sales.
Since I've never been able to get anything other than XFCE to run in 128MB, I'm sure as hell neither KDE or GNOME are going to like 128, never mind 64, unlike Windows 98/SE/ME which functioned just fine for the most part. Go ahead and prove me wrong. And running a custom haxx0rz version of FVWM doesn't count.
The first thing to note is that XFCE is just as good and better than a Windoze GUI. It gives you everything that Windoze does and virtual desktops.
The second thing to note is that 128 MB is enough for most distributions. The minimum required memory to run the Mepis Live CD, which uses a KDE desktop. Knoppix is even lighter and provides a little better performance. The default Etch install is Gnome 2. If you have not tried it in the last six months or so, you have missed some very impressive performance gains which make it very fast. A default Etch install will boot in less time than w2k and run with comparable speed.
Finally, I've see it done with less. For a year and a half I did all of my graduate classwork with a 233 MHz PII running Sarge. It started with 128 and I moved it to 196. I ran KDE but moved to Enlightenment. Uptime measured in months and it could run OO. I've seen Mepis run on a 133 MHz PI. It was slow, but it got the job done. With more memory it would have been fine. People who want to run OO should get 256MB for performance reasons. That's not hard to come by. People who want to run with even less hardware should look into Puppy, Feather, DSL or Xubunto which do all Win98 ever did for anyone.
If they are corporate running Win 98 or Win ME, then their IT department is in a really sore state.
Why, because they have not spent enough money?
At the worst, they should have NT and probably 2000. Home OS in a corporate environment is a huge mistake
Oh, now I see, you think NT or w2k are more stable and secure. Ha!
A small business that keeps the books and does basic correspondence may not have gained much from their Windoze computer but they will get nothing at all from a move to w2k or NT but broken applications and slower performance. If they have not been forced to upgrade, they are better off staying where they are or moving to free software.
The upgrade train is always like that and the only reason it happens for most people is the "network effect". Someone sends them some file they can't open. The new application won't work on the old OS, so they get a new OS, generally with a new computer. In the process they end up replacing ALL of their applications and a number of their gadgets, like a printer or bar code scanner because they are no longer "supported".
A person who has not been forced to upgrade is a great candidate for free software. They won't need new hardware and most of their devices will be supported by now. There's a good chance the application they were were running will work under Wine, so you won't have to worry about losing data history. That's rich because those applications might not work under XP or Vista. If the "network effect" has not gotten them by now, it probably won't so that FUD goes in the trash. Upgrading their RAM to 256M or better will make it so they can run Open Office, just in case.
Are there any tools that can be used to mask real browsing habits by randomly sampling and following links from sites like Google News or Wikipedia? It would be nice to have something like that going 24/7 so that your actual traffic would be drowned in a sea of noise. It would also considerably raise the cost of the invasion, required by law or not. I don't like my ISP looking over my shoulder to begin with. That big brother wants to share the view is disturbing but not much different from the existing corporate invasion.
I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a.2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods. Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day).... shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.
They were actually reporting a 0.02% change, which most people would consider noise. Claims of accuracy to the five places are silly, unless you have millions of hits.
w3schools.com OS index shows a growth in share for September of 0.2%, though they have a less generous estimate of 3.8% total share.
Everywhere I look, I see more people using Mac and Linux. It's hard to believe the combined share is less than 1 in 10.
Am I the only person who read the article or am I missing something? Were there two surveys?
When asked how important a "Consumer Bill of Rights" would be that prevented Internet Service Providers from blocking or degrading access to Internet sites and services, 78 percent indicated that such a bill would be important, with 59 percent of that group calling it "very important." The poll did not differentiate this "bill of rights" from net neutrality, but its findings make it clear that protecting the integrity of the Internet is indeed important to Americans, regardless of terminology.
Looks like people want Net Neutrality after all. 80% of the US population is about 100% of the US population with internet service. You could say that 100% of internet users think that it would suck to let ISPs throttle the internet.
You mean cars are not supposed to explode on impact?
Sometimes they burn but mostly they don't. You can go see for yourself on Ogrish. You will need nasty win32 codecs if you want to see more than the thumbnails but the thumbnails alone should be enough for you to answer your question.
I know you were joking, but Ogrish is a good example of the type of content you can expect from a free internet and it's good to contrast that with what non free broadcast gave you. Car wrecks are ugly, whether or not they burn up their victims, relatively common and completely random. It's not just the bad guy that gets toasted, it's someone that could have been you last Saturday night or someone who could have been your sister. That's not the message automobile makers want you to get when they spend billions on advertising.
What you propose would require people to add the likes of Slashdot and Hotmail to the 'Trusted Sites' zone to function correctly. This effectively gives such sites far more access than you would probably like, much more than without playing with your 'zones' at all.
My first question is, "Could it really be worse than it is?" Can an OS with a half life of 12 minutes on any network actually be exploited faster? I suppose it can with a little misdirection. The misdirection is based on a sane principle that is easy to implement on any current GNU/Linux distribution.
It's clearly worse than the user expects and it's a clear trap. "How bad can it be if I only trust one or two sites?" is exactly the trap M$ established. The list of sites would grow. If you multiply that by the number of unscrupulous advertisers on said sites, you end up with an even bigger problem. The user, as you point out, does not even know they've actually degraded their already flimsy security.
Getting Firefox is good, but the OS is still shit underneath. Hackers will make things that reach right past FF to things out of FF control like activeX controls.
Running Firefox on free software is better still, but most people want their non free flash and other junk. The easy solution to that is to use a reasonable browser, like Konqueror for everyday use and only right click open Firefox + non free junk for the one or two sites that demand it. There you have a sane and usable tiered browser approach.
... to have a public company say "Sure, violate DRM" is sort of flabberghasting, especially coming from Microsoft.
This is exactly what you should expect from M$. Yes, they are going to encourage people to "steal" other people's copyrighted material and break the laws they promoted. From their point of view, this is natural. M$ has been the primary benefactor of software "piracy" all along. They thought that DRM was the same thing, just another "speedbump" to keep "honest users" paying. Wink wink, "steal" Windoze, photoshop and autocad they want you to know how to use it! Sounds familiar? The problem for them here is that the primary rightsholders in this case, the RIAA, is bigger than anything M$ has been up against yet. They are also more important for media players. If they get away with it, it's only because they came to an agreement with big media.
I don't think that the RIAA is that smart. They demanded DRM to lock out competition and expand their little broadcast and physical media monopoly into cyberspace. The way they see it, Microsoft has just crossed the line between being a promoter of that monopoly and an a competitor making money by copying ancient recordings. The only worse thing M$ can do is promote "unsigned" bands and dilute the top 40 rip off.
None of this will be pleasant for users. DRM will be the pain it's supposed to be. Users will have to creep around "pirate" sites to find the software they need to do the conversion. What they find will be a cesspool booby trapped by the music industry and spammers. Then the RIAA might come and sue them too.
The best thing that can happen is for people to circumvent all of the greed heads. Musicians can go with less greedy promoters and users can buy unencumbered music from them and all this non free shit can die.
Whatever happened to the old saying that your credit card would more likely be ripped off by a waiter than someone off of the internet? Or are waiters taking hacking jobs these days?
That would be part of number 1, putting all the information on the magnetic stripe. Waiters might know how to do this too.
Then again, this is a paper about data security not fraud in general. If you want advice about that, visit the FTC site where crooked clerks are front and center.
This has been a main criticism of the internet since the first newsgroups began appearing years ago.
It's not a new issue, it only looks new because there used to be only three broadcasters who could misbehave. Remember the exploding gas tank fiasco?
Dateline's film showed a sample of a staged low speed accident with the fuel tank exploding. Dateline NBC did not disclose the fact that this accident was staged, or the fact that the only reason there was an explosion was that the vehicle contained planted explosives. The viewers were never told about it. It appeared to be a major discovery of investigative reporters.
They were busted but only because GM had the manpower and resources to sue them.
The internet itself has proved itself a more reliable source of information. The more sources of information you have the better off you are. Lies can only live when people who know the truth are silenced.
Book burnings are never a good sign. This is a deal between thieves and is hollow throughout. From the Article:
"If piracy can be controlled and more customers purchase our copyrighted products, we can provide more of these products for cheaper prices in return in the future," said Feng Hongtao, manager of Dongke Audio and Video Chain Store.
Translation: If you let us own your culture, despite all previous behavior and evidence to the contrary, we promise to be nice and sell it to you cheap.
You:
It is suicidal for America to not tie very strong IP enforcement to its trade agreements with countries like China. Most of what we produce domestically is IP from music to code to drug designs. We are at an inherent disadvantage then, if we allow them to dump tens of billions of dollars of cheap crap in our stores, but allow their locals to run wild with our IP.... If you want to reduce our dependency on IP and strong foreign IP laws, go start a manufacturing business that produces in America at rates that can replace China and Taiwan.
Any trade with China is immoral, impractical and threatens our freedom. It is impractical to compete with slave labor, which is what China has to offer. It is immoral and impractical to support trade which destroys your own free industrial base. It is further impractical to expect co-operation from leaders who enslave their own people. The more dependent we are, the more power they have. Unless the free nations agree that it's wrong to help China's leaders, we will all end up like China's people. Finally, there is no greater threat to your freedom than embracing "strong IP laws" as a substitute for moral government.
There is no such thing as IP and general statements are meaningless. To make sense, you must address the real issues of trademark, copyright and patents. The general urge to strengthen IP laws has given us disastrous legislation which has outlawed legitimate domestic competition. Even if China was free, their abuse of patents and trademark would put us at a tremendous disadvantage. Factories in China will continue to disregard patents and violate trademarks at peak efficiency because they have no respect for such things to begin with. This little DVD burning show only punishes the people forced to work in those factories who won't be able to afford US and European entertainment for a while because their masters don't pay them well enough. Copyright enforcement will not effect the balance of trade and can do more harm than good by eliminating a press that was reproducing US propaganda outside of government control.
Slashdot Mirror
The user would be better off learning perl or having an IT guy just make them a perl plugin for gnumeric. Perl is one of several languages gnumeric can use to manipulate data. A M$ specific language is something to avoid.
Did'nt have ass scratching time reserved? You've got a problem,
I do have that kind of time. If you don't, it might have something to do with your choice of software. Access working for you these days? How's the VB to C# migration going? Virses and worms making things hard to manage? Are you ready for Vista? Nope, not my problem.
it's easy to forget what a complicated and powerful environment Excel is; even understanding what people _need_ to do in it (over what OO.o does) is hard, I guess.
As someone who's used Lotus, Excel 4 and up, Quatropro, OO, Kspread and Gnumeric, you would have a hard time explaining exactly what Excel has to offer that other software does not. A spreadsheet is something you make for simple, repetitive calculations and quick graphs. When you need to perform "complicated" analysis, you are always better off using a specialized, external tool. About the only advantage Excel has is in importing files made with tools that have been added in the wrong way, like Visio drawings. That advantage is one that does not survive many upgrade cycles, so you are better off using the less expensive and better designed alternatives. Mostly, the things "needed" by Excel users are an abuse of the spreadsheet concept that lead to errors and heartache.
As long as they don't call me Stew... I really dislike that.
Sorry, cuts of meat simmering all day on the stove just seemed appropriate. It was not supposed to be insulting. Good luck.
Stewart said in an interview with eWEEK. Stewart, who is volunteering his reverse-engineering skills and time to ZERT in his private capacity, wrote an early version of the VML (Vector Markup Language) patch the group released Sept. 22 and worked closely with others to fine-tune the update to minimize potential glitches."
Very noble of him to volunteer, but we all know what happens in the movies to the character who mistakenly sacrifices themselves to defend the bad guy. At this moment, chairs are flying and the heavy weights at M$ are screaming things like, "This guy is making us look bad! Steve smash!" A much cooler arch villain grins a maniacally at his underling and contemplates co-opting as much of the work as possible before dropping both of them into a pool of red hot magma.
What will the real world fate be for poor Stew? DMCA suit? C&D for trade secret or patent infringement? Who knows! But none of it will really make windoze a place that's safe for your work.
This is really a moot issue. ... just don't use WMP.
I agree, but it won't be long until the only way to avoid WMP is to not use M$ at all. This is a death by a thousand cuts kind of thing, but the goal is clear: universal control of all media. The choice given is between your freedom and your culture, but you will lose both. Let me outline the steps:
The only way to avoid it is to continue to avoid DRM and to promote free culture. The sweet deal is a raw one for you, artists and a free society. Only the biggest of publishers will win anything and they will use the winnings to lock you out of your own culture. They will dictate what that culture is by controlling what is played, what news you hear, what advertisements you see even what mail gets through. If you don't want to play, you will be locked out of it all. Free culture gets around this by taking money and power from those who would enslave you.
It all starts with your computer, right now. It's your post, press, public library and entertainment, in short it's your link to the world and your culture. Everyone is on the same long curve that ends where your computer is the tool you use to enjoy and contribute to your culture. It's pretty obvious that most works are already composed on computers. Everyone of you needs to take control of that machine and never let it go. There is no better time to liberate your computer and own your culture. It's only going to get harder. People who provide you software you can't control or modify are the people who will strip you of that control and lock you out. They need you more than you need them.
I use Debian because it's easy and it works. Because of that AMD 64 looks like a cheap and practical platform for my next computer. I'll wait and see what things look like under core duo, but I doubt it will be a contender anytime soon for software and hardware reasons. New stuff is almost always a huge pain in the neck for me. It also costs more. Like I said, right now I can get into an AMD64 system for under $200 and reuse my existing components. Moving to core duo, right now, will cost me a whole new system. This might change as the older AMD 64 platforms sell out and become unavailable but by then the cost of AMD 64 two will have dropped and DDR2 memory is better.
I mentioned it because this test did not clearly establish any performance benefit that I might actually see. Tests performed with non free drivers don't mean anything to me.
I'm interested in AMD 64 because Debian has had a full port for a year now. When Etch goes stable, AMD 64 will be even more interesting.
Journalists are not supposed to advocate for either the ruling or the opposition party. That's a fundamental rule of journalistic ethics.
The author did not discharge their duty, but it had nothing to do with writing style or party politics. The journalist's first obligation's are to the truth, the reader and the publisher. Pointing out how DRM usurps the reader's rights is the only ethical thing anyone writing on the subject can do. DRM has the potential to curtail far more than entertainment and any research quickly shows how. Failure to frame the issue is a much greater failure than the use of colorful language in an entertainment article.
I don't need a huge program taking up system taskbar space, or screen space. I have relied on winamp classic for years, just because of this. It's got all the functions, it plays the music I like, and I don't have to deal with WMPs crap.
Sooner or later, M$ is going to restrict access of "third party" software to your audio device. When that happens, every program that plays music will just be another face on WiMP and all of the restrictions will apply. Just look at how AOL ended up using IE as their browser even though they owned Netscape. Windoze is M$'s platform and what they want will happen there.
The free software world has what you want now. You can run WinAmp's grand kids or several others just like it. KDE's got Noatun, Gnome has Rhythm box, even Enlightenment has a beautiful and simple media player. Noatun also gives you sftp access to files so you can share with yourself and it plays videos, so you can put your home movies in a random list to give you some distraction every so often. Nothing makes me smile like watching my little girl run around in the surf. Larger clients don't have to eat desk space either. Amarok, which rivals any music player for function, goes to single icon on your application bar. You right click it to pause or skip songs and left click it to get the full interface.
The sooner you migrate, the better off you are. If you can't, I'm sorry.
Since the Core 2 processor relies on the chipset for its memory controller, one's chipset choice can also have a much more profound impact on performance.
Since I'm not really a fanboy and don't have time to research memory controllers, I might end up with a dog system? Screw that. I'm not going to be playing chipset roulette, especially with a company that's infamous for not cooperating with the free software community outside of slower graphics chips. Hardware zealotry is almost as expensive as software folly, but I have a feeling that the two are linked.
I run Debian and have been thinking about moving to AMD 64. Prices on the AMD 64 one systems are very cheap. Yesterday I saw a mobo + processor for less than $200 and the mobo will use my crusty old DDR memory. I doubt core duo can touch that kind of price to performance ratio. I'm not really in a hurry because the five year old computer I have is still more than adequate. The biggest performance hit was disk latency, and I fixed that with an 80MB/s scsi drive mounted as /usr. I'll move when my current system dies. At that time, I'll look around to see where the bargain is.
Do you believe we never landed on the moon? Do you think horse-fucking is A-OK? Would you like to find someone to kill (with mutual consent) via erotic asphyxiation?... or worse, do you think sexually abusing little kids is acceptable behavior? No problem!
You forgot money laundering and drug dealing, but the rest of the things you think about are interesting. Who put those ideas into your head? What is a circle jerk? What does this really have to do with an electronic network?
The only person who'd know is me and the record store guy, and he cares less than some server somewhere
Sure, now your non free software vendors know you better than you know yourself. That's one of the reasons I don't use non free software. When Fry pushes the counter reset, Apple takes note that something bothered you about yourself. What books I read, where I go on the internet and what I read there, how much I paid in taxes, all of these things I'd rather keep to myself.
I'm currently digitizing my collection of old tabloid punk magazines from the 1970s.
That's hard to do but it's not what's required. Snapping legible pictures of a phone bill is not hard if all you want to do is get rid of your paper. Getting OCR is harder, but still not as difficult as making museum grade preservation of artwork.
Be sure to post the results on line some time after the copyright expires. In 2070, they will probably read like Elizabethan English but at long last the public domain will be served thanks to your efforts.
It's almost impossible to shoot a bill or a check stub dead on, at close rage, without fish-eye'ing, and without getting in your own shadow.
If his purpose is simply not to file paper a scanner is not required. A $200 Cannon from Walmart is all you need if you don't worry about OCR. You move the camera back and use the zoom and it works. I take 1600x1200 pictures of my classnotes and the results are perfectly legible. A good desk light saves your batteries by eliminating the need to flash. You move it to the side to avoid your shadow. The result might be fisheyed, but so what it's just your phone bill. Being able to OCR and text search would be like icing on the cake. The real prize is keeping your records without stuffing file cabinets with unimportant junk.
Wait twitter - when Microsoft goes five years without releasing an OS you do your nyuck, nyuck M$ Winblows is finished routine, but then you turn around and actually complain about the upgrade train? That's rich.
Yes, M$ can be both intentionally wasteful and incompetent. I know it's been a six year long time since they dumped XP on the world, but that's not for lack of trying. I read once that Vista would screw out something like 33% of the existing software base. It does this for what amounts to be a facelift to XP and 64bit port.
The free software world does better. In the same time period Debian has released three stable versions, Woody, Sarge and Etch, each with real improvements. Those improvements did not come at the price of hardware, data or software. My computers migrated flawlessly without loss of information. Instead of having to throw printers and other gadgets away, I was able to buy and use more hardware.
Microsoft is finished because they depend on the intentional waste of the upgrade train for revenue but their development model does not give them the ability to create the functionality that drives it. Use of XP has just gotten out of the 70% range, if you believe web OS stats that have the combined Mac and other at less than 10%. Now they are starting up the Vista train? It's going to be a wreck. Sales of Vista are going to be even lower than sales of XP were, which was bad news at the time. They won't be able to make up for it this time with Office sales.
Since I've never been able to get anything other than XFCE to run in 128MB, I'm sure as hell neither KDE or GNOME are going to like 128, never mind 64, unlike Windows 98/SE/ME which functioned just fine for the most part. Go ahead and prove me wrong. And running a custom haxx0rz version of FVWM doesn't count.
The first thing to note is that XFCE is just as good and better than a Windoze GUI. It gives you everything that Windoze does and virtual desktops.
The second thing to note is that 128 MB is enough for most distributions. The minimum required memory to run the Mepis Live CD, which uses a KDE desktop. Knoppix is even lighter and provides a little better performance. The default Etch install is Gnome 2. If you have not tried it in the last six months or so, you have missed some very impressive performance gains which make it very fast. A default Etch install will boot in less time than w2k and run with comparable speed.
Finally, I've see it done with less. For a year and a half I did all of my graduate classwork with a 233 MHz PII running Sarge. It started with 128 and I moved it to 196. I ran KDE but moved to Enlightenment. Uptime measured in months and it could run OO. I've seen Mepis run on a 133 MHz PI. It was slow, but it got the job done. With more memory it would have been fine. People who want to run OO should get 256MB for performance reasons. That's not hard to come by. People who want to run with even less hardware should look into Puppy, Feather, DSL or Xubunto which do all Win98 ever did for anyone.
If they are corporate running Win 98 or Win ME, then their IT department is in a really sore state.
Why, because they have not spent enough money?
At the worst, they should have NT and probably 2000. Home OS in a corporate environment is a huge mistake
Oh, now I see, you think NT or w2k are more stable and secure. Ha!
A small business that keeps the books and does basic correspondence may not have gained much from their Windoze computer but they will get nothing at all from a move to w2k or NT but broken applications and slower performance. If they have not been forced to upgrade, they are better off staying where they are or moving to free software.
The upgrade train is always like that and the only reason it happens for most people is the "network effect". Someone sends them some file they can't open. The new application won't work on the old OS, so they get a new OS, generally with a new computer. In the process they end up replacing ALL of their applications and a number of their gadgets, like a printer or bar code scanner because they are no longer "supported".
A person who has not been forced to upgrade is a great candidate for free software. They won't need new hardware and most of their devices will be supported by now. There's a good chance the application they were were running will work under Wine, so you won't have to worry about losing data history. That's rich because those applications might not work under XP or Vista. If the "network effect" has not gotten them by now, it probably won't so that FUD goes in the trash. Upgrading their RAM to 256M or better will make it so they can run Open Office, just in case.
Are there any tools that can be used to mask real browsing habits by randomly sampling and following links from sites like Google News or Wikipedia? It would be nice to have something like that going 24/7 so that your actual traffic would be drowned in a sea of noise. It would also considerably raise the cost of the invasion, required by law or not. I don't like my ISP looking over my shoulder to begin with. That big brother wants to share the view is disturbing but not much different from the existing corporate invasion.
I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods. Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). ... shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.
They were actually reporting a 0.02% change, which most people would consider noise. Claims of accuracy to the five places are silly, unless you have millions of hits.
w3schools.com OS index shows a growth in share for September of 0.2%, though they have a less generous estimate of 3.8% total share.
Everywhere I look, I see more people using Mac and Linux. It's hard to believe the combined share is less than 1 in 10.
Am I the only person who read the article or am I missing something? Were there two surveys?
Looks like people want Net Neutrality after all. 80% of the US population is about 100% of the US population with internet service. You could say that 100% of internet users think that it would suck to let ISPs throttle the internet.
You mean cars are not supposed to explode on impact?
Sometimes they burn but mostly they don't. You can go see for yourself on Ogrish. You will need nasty win32 codecs if you want to see more than the thumbnails but the thumbnails alone should be enough for you to answer your question.
I know you were joking, but Ogrish is a good example of the type of content you can expect from a free internet and it's good to contrast that with what non free broadcast gave you. Car wrecks are ugly, whether or not they burn up their victims, relatively common and completely random. It's not just the bad guy that gets toasted, it's someone that could have been you last Saturday night or someone who could have been your sister. That's not the message automobile makers want you to get when they spend billions on advertising.
What you propose would require people to add the likes of Slashdot and Hotmail to the 'Trusted Sites' zone to function correctly. This effectively gives such sites far more access than you would probably like, much more than without playing with your 'zones' at all.
My first question is, "Could it really be worse than it is?" Can an OS with a half life of 12 minutes on any network actually be exploited faster? I suppose it can with a little misdirection. The misdirection is based on a sane principle that is easy to implement on any current GNU/Linux distribution.
It's clearly worse than the user expects and it's a clear trap. "How bad can it be if I only trust one or two sites?" is exactly the trap M$ established. The list of sites would grow. If you multiply that by the number of unscrupulous advertisers on said sites, you end up with an even bigger problem. The user, as you point out, does not even know they've actually degraded their already flimsy security.
Getting Firefox is good, but the OS is still shit underneath. Hackers will make things that reach right past FF to things out of FF control like activeX controls.
Running Firefox on free software is better still, but most people want their non free flash and other junk. The easy solution to that is to use a reasonable browser, like Konqueror for everyday use and only right click open Firefox + non free junk for the one or two sites that demand it. There you have a sane and usable tiered browser approach.
This is exactly what you should expect from M$. Yes, they are going to encourage people to "steal" other people's copyrighted material and break the laws they promoted. From their point of view, this is natural. M$ has been the primary benefactor of software "piracy" all along. They thought that DRM was the same thing, just another "speedbump" to keep "honest users" paying. Wink wink, "steal" Windoze, photoshop and autocad they want you to know how to use it! Sounds familiar? The problem for them here is that the primary rightsholders in this case, the RIAA, is bigger than anything M$ has been up against yet. They are also more important for media players. If they get away with it, it's only because they came to an agreement with big media.
I don't think that the RIAA is that smart. They demanded DRM to lock out competition and expand their little broadcast and physical media monopoly into cyberspace. The way they see it, Microsoft has just crossed the line between being a promoter of that monopoly and an a competitor making money by copying ancient recordings. The only worse thing M$ can do is promote "unsigned" bands and dilute the top 40 rip off.
None of this will be pleasant for users. DRM will be the pain it's supposed to be. Users will have to creep around "pirate" sites to find the software they need to do the conversion. What they find will be a cesspool booby trapped by the music industry and spammers. Then the RIAA might come and sue them too.
The best thing that can happen is for people to circumvent all of the greed heads. Musicians can go with less greedy promoters and users can buy unencumbered music from them and all this non free shit can die.
Whatever happened to the old saying that your credit card would more likely be ripped off by a waiter than someone off of the internet? Or are waiters taking hacking jobs these days?
That would be part of number 1, putting all the information on the magnetic stripe. Waiters might know how to do this too.
Then again, this is a paper about data security not fraud in general. If you want advice about that, visit the FTC site where crooked clerks are front and center.
This has been a main criticism of the internet since the first newsgroups began appearing years ago.
It's not a new issue, it only looks new because there used to be only three broadcasters who could misbehave. Remember the exploding gas tank fiasco?
They were busted but only because GM had the manpower and resources to sue them.
The internet itself has proved itself a more reliable source of information. The more sources of information you have the better off you are. Lies can only live when people who know the truth are silenced.
Book burnings are never a good sign. This is a deal between thieves and is hollow throughout. From the Article:
"If piracy can be controlled and more customers purchase our copyrighted products, we can provide more of these products for cheaper prices in return in the future," said Feng Hongtao, manager of Dongke Audio and Video Chain Store.
Translation: If you let us own your culture, despite all previous behavior and evidence to the contrary, we promise to be nice and sell it to you cheap.
You:
It is suicidal for America to not tie very strong IP enforcement to its trade agreements with countries like China. Most of what we produce domestically is IP from music to code to drug designs. We are at an inherent disadvantage then, if we allow them to dump tens of billions of dollars of cheap crap in our stores, but allow their locals to run wild with our IP. ... If you want to reduce our dependency on IP and strong foreign IP laws, go start a manufacturing business that produces in America at rates that can replace China and Taiwan.
Any trade with China is immoral, impractical and threatens our freedom. It is impractical to compete with slave labor, which is what China has to offer. It is immoral and impractical to support trade which destroys your own free industrial base. It is further impractical to expect co-operation from leaders who enslave their own people. The more dependent we are, the more power they have. Unless the free nations agree that it's wrong to help China's leaders, we will all end up like China's people. Finally, there is no greater threat to your freedom than embracing "strong IP laws" as a substitute for moral government.
There is no such thing as IP and general statements are meaningless. To make sense, you must address the real issues of trademark, copyright and patents. The general urge to strengthen IP laws has given us disastrous legislation which has outlawed legitimate domestic competition. Even if China was free, their abuse of patents and trademark would put us at a tremendous disadvantage. Factories in China will continue to disregard patents and violate trademarks at peak efficiency because they have no respect for such things to begin with. This little DVD burning show only punishes the people forced to work in those factories who won't be able to afford US and European entertainment for a while because their masters don't pay them well enough. Copyright enforcement will not effect the balance of trade and can do more harm than good by eliminating a press that was reproducing US propaganda outside of government control.