"Other people's software" being sold by Bill Gates? I'd ask for a citation
It's a well known fact that M$ does not enter a "market" until it's ready to make money for them and that they almost always enter it by acquiring other people's software. At least that's what they tell their investors. The acquisition is always done under threat of destruction or by actually putting the company out of business. It's not a question of what "market" they have entered this way, but what market they have not entered and what's actually left on their platform. Browsers? Office Suits? Yes, that's old but the Anti-virus virus take over is on and ugly right now.
Then I checked out the Wayback Machine's links to the site. The "this is sold as a backup only" bit is nowhere to be found on the main page of the site -- it only pops up as section 9 of the lengthy terms and conditions page.
Yeah, that's what it looks like. The only caveat is the rate at which his site was defaced recently. It's hard to tell if part of the battle against him was hacking his site.
Like I said, all non free software has the same stink to me. The snake oil vendors he defrauded set themselves up for it by making backups very difficult. The difference between him making money off other people's non free software and what Bill Gates does with other people's software is marginal. Both have stolen other people's works and both have broken laws to make a buck and neither has any respect for the end user. Nathan was a little more blatant about it and will pay a heavy price. You would think that some of the M$ officers, who have taken far more from everyone else, might have had a similar penalty at the anti-trust trials.
Way to sound like a douchebag. Once again, it's MS, not M$. Second of all, he's comparing a Pentium M on the Sony Vaio to the vastly superior Core Duo chip, not to mention that the M is a single core while the Core Duo is, oh, I don't know, a dual core machine.
Yeah, call me names. That proves something.
Power management is broken under Vista for cool hardware and probably poor as well, there's no way you can make that look good for M$. They helped write the spec, they get help from all the vendors and in six years of developing Vista, they can't get it right. It would not matter that Core Duo is new if the power management specs were sane. As it is, this problem has been known about for months, and widely noticed and is still unfixed. Sarcasm, name calling and other M$ tricks won't fix the problem.
Now get your ass back to Redmond and ask Bill to spend some of those 6.2 billion Vista marketing bucks on fixing his problems. You've both got time because people are not going to be buying it soon.
Yeah, I know I'm a sucker for thinking proprietary software is ever worth anything. The GIMP is so much better than Photoshop, right? Can you really claim with a straight face that Audacity is better than SoundForge?
I can tell you with a straight face that only a few professionals actually need the one or two tweaks found in non free software and that even they would be better off if software patents and device makers games did not make things that way. Given the choice between a free and non free program that do the same things, the one with less restrictions is the obvious winner. Given the choice between software costing $100s of dollars and a free, restrictionless program that does everything you need or want, the choice is also obvious.
I see lots of people saying things like, "He deserves it and death!" but no one bothering to report exactly what ibackups.net actually did. According to this, the guy was selling "backup coppies" of software that people claimed they already owned. The business model, presumably, was made to fill the very real service gap in commercial software for people who manage to lose their original distribution media. As far as M$ and many other companies, people like that are out of luck and have to buy the software all over again. This happens much more often than you would think. Unlike MP3.com, it was not possible to check if the customer had a copy by asking them to insert it though he could have asked for product activation keys. In any case, this guy was not simply pressing CDs and selling them, he depended on the honesty of his customers.
It's no surprise that this guy got slapped down after the demise of MP3.com's similar backup scheme.
I don't really understand the vindictiveness of the responses. Once again, using free software avoids all of this monkey business. Why give money to people who throw people in jail for trying to help you? It's not like the guy actually hurt anything but the bottom line of some of the country's most wealthy companies. Seeing as those companies are still doing just fine selling software to complete suckers, I don't see where this person hurt anyone. Financial ruin should be punishment enough. I don't want my government wasting law enforcement resources on nonsense like this.
No, but it's funny that Vista works better on some half hearted "boot" camp than it does on other similar hardware made by M$ Partners and "Designed for Winblows". The obvious conclusion is that Vista is still a train wreck with random performance, if you can get it to run at all.
You would think that a company that gets all the specs and drivers from their vendors would be able to do better than that by the magic of cross licensing. Hell, M$ helped to write the APM and APCI non standard "standards". Apparently, the "traditional" approach to software writing is broken. Vista is six years and counting, and still does not have fundamental issues like power management licked. That's shocking.
More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers.
This is not an Apple or CoreDuo problem. It was predicted and admitted and now, months later, they still have not fixed it.
None of this matters to me, but it's amusing. As a free software user I'm used to power management that works, faster turn around and don't have a need for much more than 1GHz class performance which is very cheap these days. Watching M$ apologists do the as they do since the days when M$ broke Win3.1 for DrDOS and then blamed DrDOS gets old but it's never dull.
Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio
So we can conclude that Apple's second best effort beats out M$'s best effort? Is carefully caged the best way to run Vista? Make me laugh.
The reason that the hot issue is of concern is that it was predicted from problems with power management on other core duo platforms. M$ apologists tried to pin the blame on the chipset and it was postulated that the problem was with Vista and that a Mac would prove the case by not having power problems. This article seems to have proved out that prediction. It was reported here by another user just 11 days ago, and ultimately M$ admitted to it. Again the apologists rushed in with sarcasm, insults and bad humor. The bottom line, as usual, is that M$ is second rate and can't keep up despite their tremendous monopoly advantage.
Sure, M$ might fix the problem one day. Just like Windoze 98 fixed Win95 USB problems but then W2K and XP fixed them again, sort of. I'm not holding my breath for Vista provide reliable power management.
In the mean time, like forever, you are better off with other software. Nothing new here.
At least one [former] board member has publically called for her to step down. I'm surprised she did not resign along with anyone else who knew of this and can only wonder what the phone conversation was like. If she did not step down, it's amazing.
The market for iPods might be out of steam but it's is no where near saturated for portable music players. Think about it, every car has one. The transition from Radio/CD player has just begun that's a market that can be measured in hundreds of millions. iTunes requires too much effort for that market and DRM will likely keep them from filling it. No one wants to press "I agree" or install special software for their car radio. The bigger market demands "works out of the box" ease. Neither Apple nor Microsoft will be able to fill the bill.
That some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user. A player that needs special softare because it does not use a published mass storage interface is at a disadvantage.
Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special, non free client to load it. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.
Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away and people are going to sell whole systems using them. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from. Remember the cassette tape market? The CD player market is still here. Both of those where huge and rich because openly published standards were employed. iPod and Zune represent an ecosystem that's more like two sharks on a barren reef. Free players based on open standards are calling for device makers to come and make tons of money.
The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.
In your excitement to declare the king is dead you should be more careful about your accuracy or face being dismissed as an untrustworthy voice motivated more by spite than knowledge.
I wish people would concentrate on the positive rather than the negative things I present. TrekStore has made the simple player so many people want and I expect there's much more where that came from. It's got MP3 for those who ripped to that format before license and royalty free ogg. License encumbered formats are not something I really care for and expect device makers feel the same way when pressed for fees and threatened with lawsuits, like Sandisk recently was. The free future is not about killing the non free kings it's about liberating all of us non free serfs.
Having been mod bombed again, I'm going to re post with controversial portions edited out. That iPod might play an MP3 without transcoding or that Amarok and others might have reverse engineered the interface so that you don't absolutely positively have to use iTunes are trivial details in a non free clusterfuck. iPod is nice hardware, but it's owned and run in a very non free way that will ultimately be viewed as cumbersome.
No, it will load AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV and Apple Lossless files.
Without transcoding or software modification? I understand people with Rockbox can do all sorts of nice things, but none of that is Apple's doing. What does it do out of the box?
The majority of iPod users use MP3s, which aren't affected by DRM. And DRM isn't anything at all new to iPod, either. There's no reason to assume the correlation that you take as a given.... you should put in the extra work and have it at least make some kind of sense.
I think his pointing to the fact that some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user.
Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.
Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from.
The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.
The summary is not as much fun as the article, which declares Microsoft's future dependent on FUD, sabotage, intentional waste and dumping rather than code quality. The whole summary reasoning boils down to, "It will be like this tomorrow because it's like this today." Even M$ knows that's not true. What M$ and IBM did to DEC used to keep Bill Gates up at night, and still might despite all of his ill gotten wealth. The authors have much more interesting things to say and do not really conclude M$ will always be around. The authors, while they do overplay the importance of an undefined "network effect" don't make such a gross error.
The authors don't really understand free software development but they do understand what M$ must do to stay alive. They understand the M$ network effect, which is difficulty working with people who don't have the latest and greatest M$ crap, but completely miss the free software networking effect and much of free software's social benefit. The more free software does, the more it will be used and the more it will grow. It's a power function, not dependent on large organizations and we are still at the very start of the curve.
One of the key flaws I found in the author's reasoning was this:
However, with a monopoly, the efforts to develop new software and improve the platform are directed towards one system only and this may turn out to be better from a social welfare perspective.
That's seriously flawed for two reasons. First there is no such thing as a "Linux Monopoly". It's only freely publish standards that make it look like a coherent whole and it's only M$ intentional ignorance of those standards that keeps both systems from interacting freely. The second, they seriously underestimate the size of the free software community and it's growth potential. The free developer community is and will allways be larger than the non free community. The whole point of the non free monopoly is to charge people money to participate. Free participation will never cost more than time and effort. GCC comes with most GNU/Linux distributions and there is a fantastic library of source code for every purpose no further than a network request away. The cost of a full version of M$ Visual Studio is close to $800, after you have paid the OS tax, and you need to buy a new one for each programmer every year or so. How economists could miss such a basic part of their model as cost of raw materials is beyond me, but part of it is a flawed assumption that free software is dependent on government and business support:
This questions the social desirability of policies aimed at guaranteeing Linux's survival.... This [corporate] support is important because there are tedious portions of the code that would rarely be developed spontaneously by members of the Linux-developer community.
Wile corporate and government participation are welcome, studies don't bear out the necessity of their involvement. Companies and governments are going to increasingly use free software because of the tremendous flexibility and cost savings. There are hosts of things you just can't do with non free softare and most programmers spend all of their time making things work. Most programmers would be just as happy or happier with free software as long as it does the job.
Recognition of all the evil things M$ must do, while common here, are welcome from economists and business types. Formal recognition of the SCO and other FUD attacks, dumping by "piracy", the Halloween Documents, even sabotage of free software by "encouraging forks" are nice to see in print from a "respectable" organization. Remarkably, nowhere is there a statement that M$ has or must improve the quality of their code. Their conclusion is telling:
We conjecture that there are multiple equilibria and that the use of FUD to mold perceptions about future value becomes crucial.
Essentially, M$'s future is depends on lies. That's not a very bright future. Admission to that fact is all it takes for them and all of their intentional waste to dissapear.
Uhh... ever install anything that's GPL or similar? You almost always have to click "I Agree" to something.
I install things like that all the time and NEVER see any "I agree". You don't have to agree to anything simply to use GPL'd software. It's been so long since I've seen an "I agree" pop up that I consider it offensive and will click "no" before looking elsewhere.
from a purely commercial point of view, if a company is considering using your source code, it might help them not to reveal that they do, much less their contributions to the code.
What are you saying? That they do what? Write code? Contribute to someone else's code?
if you consider the place you work, your friend's business, etc to be 'neighbors', than your statement would be a double standard.
I'm not going to help my friends do something wrong to other people any more than I'm going to do something wrong on my own. It does not matter, really, because very few people actually make a living writing non free code for distribution. The chances of my working for M$, Adobe or any of the other 1980's crew of companies is about zero and I would refuse the NDA if offered. If someone wants me to help them solve a problem and they never want to release the code to anyone else because it would put them at a disadvantage, that's OK because they are not going to use my work to abuse others.
I'd hate for some dork like Bill Gates to use my software to make money and prop up his little Windoze empire.
So, you, the author, want people with your code to do as you say in one way or another?
Yes, I make that one tiny demand: if people distribute free software I write it remains free. Other than that, they can do whatever they want. I do not want Bill Gates or anyone else using my work to make anyone else check a box saying "I agree" to not helping their neighbor. I'd consider than an abuse and because of that I'll use the same copyright laws others use for same. They can't have it both ways and everyone can have free software because of it.
Dateline, Nighmare in Redmond: Microsoft Declares Victory Over World Wide Web.
Putting their best spin on recent web news, Microsoft spokesvole Andy Nonymous told reporters gathered at a press conference about M$'s radical new Interweb.
"For years we've been telling the free software terrorists that they were bad for business and their work was hurting disabled people and killing puppies, this drives the point home."
"We stood silent as Sendmail replaced the far more disable friendly US Post Office, but formulated a plan." At this he cackled like a fiend. "We made M$ Word the default editor for email, though most people rejected this. It really hurt us to see the demise of 3m word attachments as a means of conveying 1k of text."
"As Apache on Linux took over the world wide web, we were stunned and shaken that people who wanted to stay in business avoided our IIS unless we paid them to use it."
"It was in Mass. that we finally realized that our email strategy right all along. M$ Word is the only blind free format in existence and we are now pressing for it's use as a standard for all interweb pages! This is indeed the cheap and easy solution the good people at Mindcraft are talking about. Victory at last."
A stunned silence settled on the conference. One or two hands came up but and Nonymous nodded off stage.
A huge, sweaty, bald man with a chair then danced onto the stage carrying a $2,000, 75lb office chair raised over his head. "Any questions?" he asked through a truly demented grin. And there were none. He had fucking killed them.
None of this liberal 'think about her feelings, criminals have rights too' bullshit here. The article was totally on target.
We shall see who is convicted, right now it's just an embarrassingly well documented accusation that the AG and most sensible people believe. It's only on conviction, when guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, that your rights end and only in a manner prescribed by law. That said, shame on Forbes.
You can go to the MBA porn glossy, Forbes, where Tom Van Ripper writes an unabashed defense of witch hunt. Without really naming the content of the "leaks" or debating the morals of bringing information to the public, he cries and calls for more "oversight" and "information security." They even go so far as to blame the victim for "an atmosphere of distrust". It's a sickening endorsement of all the wrong kind of behavior.
The whole affair stinks like punishment of a whistle blower. That's unambiguously immoral and illegal.
In this case, Ms. Dunn may have had a moral duty to stop the leaking of proprietary HP information.
That is a meaningless statement. WTF is "proprietary HP information"? Without specifics we can't say who's wrong. If the leak was about Fiona's $21,000,000 severance package, the leaker followed their moral judgement to inform stockholders against the will of a corrupt board. Lying to get phone records to punish a whistle blower is both immoral and against the law. When the AG gets finished with this case, we will know just how corrupt the board was. Kudos to the member who resigned.
Is Bill Gates planning an invasion of Canada? I know his "Trusted Computing" initiative is designed to eliminate choices, but will that junk really work?
Slashdot Mirror
"Other people's software" being sold by Bill Gates? I'd ask for a citation
It's a well known fact that M$ does not enter a "market" until it's ready to make money for them and that they almost always enter it by acquiring other people's software. At least that's what they tell their investors. The acquisition is always done under threat of destruction or by actually putting the company out of business. It's not a question of what "market" they have entered this way, but what market they have not entered and what's actually left on their platform. Browsers? Office Suits? Yes, that's old but the Anti-virus virus take over is on and ugly right now.
Then I checked out the Wayback Machine's links to the site. The "this is sold as a backup only" bit is nowhere to be found on the main page of the site -- it only pops up as section 9 of the lengthy terms and conditions page.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050207063857/www.ib ackups.net/index.php?main=company&sub=about
Yeah, that's what it looks like. The only caveat is the rate at which his site was defaced recently. It's hard to tell if part of the battle against him was hacking his site.
Like I said, all non free software has the same stink to me. The snake oil vendors he defrauded set themselves up for it by making backups very difficult. The difference between him making money off other people's non free software and what Bill Gates does with other people's software is marginal. Both have stolen other people's works and both have broken laws to make a buck and neither has any respect for the end user. Nathan was a little more blatant about it and will pay a heavy price. You would think that some of the M$ officers, who have taken far more from everyone else, might have had a similar penalty at the anti-trust trials.
Way to sound like a douchebag. Once again, it's MS, not M$. Second of all, he's comparing a Pentium M on the Sony Vaio to the vastly superior Core Duo chip, not to mention that the M is a single core while the Core Duo is, oh, I don't know, a dual core machine.
Yeah, call me names. That proves something.
Power management is broken under Vista for cool hardware and probably poor as well, there's no way you can make that look good for M$. They helped write the spec, they get help from all the vendors and in six years of developing Vista, they can't get it right. It would not matter that Core Duo is new if the power management specs were sane. As it is, this problem has been known about for months, and widely noticed and is still unfixed. Sarcasm, name calling and other M$ tricks won't fix the problem.
Now get your ass back to Redmond and ask Bill to spend some of those 6.2 billion Vista marketing bucks on fixing his problems. You've both got time because people are not going to be buying it soon.
Yeah, I know I'm a sucker for thinking proprietary software is ever worth anything. The GIMP is so much better than Photoshop, right? Can you really claim with a straight face that Audacity is better than SoundForge?
I can tell you with a straight face that only a few professionals actually need the one or two tweaks found in non free software and that even they would be better off if software patents and device makers games did not make things that way. Given the choice between a free and non free program that do the same things, the one with less restrictions is the obvious winner. Given the choice between software costing $100s of dollars and a free, restrictionless program that does everything you need or want, the choice is also obvious.
I see lots of people saying things like, "He deserves it and death!" but no one bothering to report exactly what ibackups.net actually did. According to this, the guy was selling "backup coppies" of software that people claimed they already owned. The business model, presumably, was made to fill the very real service gap in commercial software for people who manage to lose their original distribution media. As far as M$ and many other companies, people like that are out of luck and have to buy the software all over again. This happens much more often than you would think. Unlike MP3.com, it was not possible to check if the customer had a copy by asking them to insert it though he could have asked for product activation keys. In any case, this guy was not simply pressing CDs and selling them, he depended on the honesty of his customers.
It's no surprise that this guy got slapped down after the demise of MP3.com's similar backup scheme.
I don't really understand the vindictiveness of the responses. Once again, using free software avoids all of this monkey business. Why give money to people who throw people in jail for trying to help you? It's not like the guy actually hurt anything but the bottom line of some of the country's most wealthy companies. Seeing as those companies are still doing just fine selling software to complete suckers, I don't see where this person hurt anyone. Financial ruin should be punishment enough. I don't want my government wasting law enforcement resources on nonsense like this.
So MS bought out Sony and is now making Vaios ?
No, but it's funny that Vista works better on some half hearted "boot" camp than it does on other similar hardware made by M$ Partners and "Designed for Winblows". The obvious conclusion is that Vista is still a train wreck with random performance, if you can get it to run at all.
You would think that a company that gets all the specs and drivers from their vendors would be able to do better than that by the magic of cross licensing. Hell, M$ helped to write the APM and APCI non standard "standards". Apparently, the "traditional" approach to software writing is broken. Vista is six years and counting, and still does not have fundamental issues like power management licked. That's shocking.
Don't they still come with a crappy "Designed for Windoze Version of the Decade" sticker on them still?
More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers.
This is not an Apple or CoreDuo problem. It was predicted and admitted and now, months later, they still have not fixed it.
None of this matters to me, but it's amusing. As a free software user I'm used to power management that works, faster turn around and don't have a need for much more than 1GHz class performance which is very cheap these days. Watching M$ apologists do the as they do since the days when M$ broke Win3.1 for DrDOS and then blamed DrDOS gets old but it's never dull.
Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio
So we can conclude that Apple's second best effort beats out M$'s best effort? Is carefully caged the best way to run Vista? Make me laugh.
The reason that the hot issue is of concern is that it was predicted from problems with power management on other core duo platforms. M$ apologists tried to pin the blame on the chipset and it was postulated that the problem was with Vista and that a Mac would prove the case by not having power problems. This article seems to have proved out that prediction. It was reported here by another user just 11 days ago, and ultimately M$ admitted to it. Again the apologists rushed in with sarcasm, insults and bad humor. The bottom line, as usual, is that M$ is second rate and can't keep up despite their tremendous monopoly advantage.
Sure, M$ might fix the problem one day. Just like Windoze 98 fixed Win95 USB problems but then W2K and XP fixed them again, sort of. I'm not holding my breath for Vista provide reliable power management.
In the mean time, like forever, you are better off with other software. Nothing new here.
The market for iPods might be out of steam but it's is no where near saturated for portable music players. Think about it, every car has one. The transition from Radio/CD player has just begun that's a market that can be measured in hundreds of millions. iTunes requires too much effort for that market and DRM will likely keep them from filling it. No one wants to press "I agree" or install special software for their car radio. The bigger market demands "works out of the box" ease. Neither Apple nor Microsoft will be able to fill the bill.
That some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user. A player that needs special softare because it does not use a published mass storage interface is at a disadvantage.
Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special, non free client to load it. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.
Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away and people are going to sell whole systems using them. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from. Remember the cassette tape market? The CD player market is still here. Both of those where huge and rich because openly published standards were employed. iPod and Zune represent an ecosystem that's more like two sharks on a barren reef. Free players based on open standards are calling for device makers to come and make tons of money.
The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.
In your excitement to declare the king is dead you should be more careful about your accuracy or face being dismissed as an untrustworthy voice motivated more by spite than knowledge.
I wish people would concentrate on the positive rather than the negative things I present. TrekStore has made the simple player so many people want and I expect there's much more where that came from. It's got MP3 for those who ripped to that format before license and royalty free ogg. License encumbered formats are not something I really care for and expect device makers feel the same way when pressed for fees and threatened with lawsuits, like Sandisk recently was. The free future is not about killing the non free kings it's about liberating all of us non free serfs.
Having been mod bombed again, I'm going to re post with controversial portions edited out. That iPod might play an MP3 without transcoding or that Amarok and others might have reverse engineered the interface so that you don't absolutely positively have to use iTunes are trivial details in a non free clusterfuck. iPod is nice hardware, but it's owned and run in a very non free way that will ultimately be viewed as cumbersome.
Very few people are both rich enough to throw away new items unopened, and stupid enough to buy things they don't even want.
Ah, but lots of people receive gifts they did not ask for. If you have to install software for it, it's too much work for many people.
No, it will load AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV and Apple Lossless files.
Without transcoding or software modification? I understand people with Rockbox can do all sorts of nice things, but none of that is Apple's doing. What does it do out of the box?
The majority of iPod users use MP3s, which aren't affected by DRM. And DRM isn't anything at all new to iPod, either. There's no reason to assume the correlation that you take as a given. ... you should put in the extra work and have it at least make some kind of sense.
I think his pointing to the fact that some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user.
Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.
Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from.
The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.
Two Vs do not make a W. The above is a troll account designed to annoy Twitter.
My thoughts on this subject can be found here. T"v""v"itter is not Twitter.
The summary is not as much fun as the article, which declares Microsoft's future dependent on FUD, sabotage, intentional waste and dumping rather than code quality. The whole summary reasoning boils down to, "It will be like this tomorrow because it's like this today." Even M$ knows that's not true. What M$ and IBM did to DEC used to keep Bill Gates up at night, and still might despite all of his ill gotten wealth. The authors have much more interesting things to say and do not really conclude M$ will always be around. The authors, while they do overplay the importance of an undefined "network effect" don't make such a gross error.
The authors don't really understand free software development but they do understand what M$ must do to stay alive. They understand the M$ network effect, which is difficulty working with people who don't have the latest and greatest M$ crap, but completely miss the free software networking effect and much of free software's social benefit. The more free software does, the more it will be used and the more it will grow. It's a power function, not dependent on large organizations and we are still at the very start of the curve.
One of the key flaws I found in the author's reasoning was this:
However, with a monopoly, the efforts to develop new software and improve the platform are directed towards one system only and this may turn out to be better from a social welfare perspective.
That's seriously flawed for two reasons. First there is no such thing as a "Linux Monopoly". It's only freely publish standards that make it look like a coherent whole and it's only M$ intentional ignorance of those standards that keeps both systems from interacting freely. The second, they seriously underestimate the size of the free software community and it's growth potential. The free developer community is and will allways be larger than the non free community. The whole point of the non free monopoly is to charge people money to participate. Free participation will never cost more than time and effort. GCC comes with most GNU/Linux distributions and there is a fantastic library of source code for every purpose no further than a network request away. The cost of a full version of M$ Visual Studio is close to $800, after you have paid the OS tax, and you need to buy a new one for each programmer every year or so. How economists could miss such a basic part of their model as cost of raw materials is beyond me, but part of it is a flawed assumption that free software is dependent on government and business support:
This questions the social desirability of policies aimed at guaranteeing Linux's survival. ... This [corporate] support is important because there are tedious portions of the code that would rarely be developed spontaneously by members of the Linux-developer community.
Wile corporate and government participation are welcome, studies don't bear out the necessity of their involvement. Companies and governments are going to increasingly use free software because of the tremendous flexibility and cost savings. There are hosts of things you just can't do with non free softare and most programmers spend all of their time making things work. Most programmers would be just as happy or happier with free software as long as it does the job.
Recognition of all the evil things M$ must do, while common here, are welcome from economists and business types. Formal recognition of the SCO and other FUD attacks, dumping by "piracy", the Halloween Documents, even sabotage of free software by "encouraging forks" are nice to see in print from a "respectable" organization. Remarkably, nowhere is there a statement that M$ has or must improve the quality of their code. Their conclusion is telling:
We conjecture that there are multiple equilibria and that the use of FUD to mold perceptions about future value becomes crucial.
Essentially, M$'s future is depends on lies. That's not a very bright future. Admission to that fact is all it takes for them and all of their intentional waste to dissapear.
Uhh... ever install anything that's GPL or similar? You almost always have to click "I Agree" to something.
I install things like that all the time and NEVER see any "I agree". You don't have to agree to anything simply to use GPL'd software. It's been so long since I've seen an "I agree" pop up that I consider it offensive and will click "no" before looking elsewhere.
from a purely commercial point of view, if a company is considering using your source code, it might help them not to reveal that they do, much less their contributions to the code.
What are you saying? That they do what? Write code? Contribute to someone else's code?
if you consider the place you work, your friend's business, etc to be 'neighbors', than your statement would be a double standard.
I'm not going to help my friends do something wrong to other people any more than I'm going to do something wrong on my own. It does not matter, really, because very few people actually make a living writing non free code for distribution. The chances of my working for M$, Adobe or any of the other 1980's crew of companies is about zero and I would refuse the NDA if offered. If someone wants me to help them solve a problem and they never want to release the code to anyone else because it would put them at a disadvantage, that's OK because they are not going to use my work to abuse others.
Putting their best spin on recent web news, Microsoft spokesvole Andy Nonymous told reporters gathered at a press conference about M$'s radical new Interweb.
"For years we've been telling the free software terrorists that they were bad for business and their work was hurting disabled people and killing puppies, this drives the point home."
"We stood silent as Sendmail replaced the far more disable friendly US Post Office, but formulated a plan." At this he cackled like a fiend. "We made M$ Word the default editor for email, though most people rejected this. It really hurt us to see the demise of 3m word attachments as a means of conveying 1k of text."
"As Apache on Linux took over the world wide web, we were stunned and shaken that people who wanted to stay in business avoided our IIS unless we paid them to use it."
"It was in Mass. that we finally realized that our email strategy right all along. M$ Word is the only blind free format in existence and we are now pressing for it's use as a standard for all interweb pages! This is indeed the cheap and easy solution the good people at Mindcraft are talking about. Victory at last."
A stunned silence settled on the conference. One or two hands came up but and Nonymous nodded off stage.
A huge, sweaty, bald man with a chair then danced onto the stage carrying a $2,000, 75lb office chair raised over his head. "Any questions?" he asked through a truly demented grin. And there were none. He had fucking killed them.
None of this liberal 'think about her feelings, criminals have rights too' bullshit here. The article was totally on target.
We shall see who is convicted, right now it's just an embarrassingly well documented accusation that the AG and most sensible people believe. It's only on conviction, when guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, that your rights end and only in a manner prescribed by law. That said, shame on Forbes.
You can go to the MBA porn glossy, Forbes, where Tom Van Ripper writes an unabashed defense of witch hunt. Without really naming the content of the "leaks" or debating the morals of bringing information to the public, he cries and calls for more "oversight" and "information security." They even go so far as to blame the victim for "an atmosphere of distrust". It's a sickening endorsement of all the wrong kind of behavior.
The whole affair stinks like punishment of a whistle blower. That's unambiguously immoral and illegal.
It's not buggy and neither are the dev kits.
Except for melting, right? No, I don't live in a hole but I think it would be cool.
In this case, Ms. Dunn may have had a moral duty to stop the leaking of proprietary HP information.
That is a meaningless statement. WTF is "proprietary HP information"? Without specifics we can't say who's wrong. If the leak was about Fiona's $21,000,000 severance package, the leaker followed their moral judgement to inform stockholders against the will of a corrupt board. Lying to get phone records to punish a whistle blower is both immoral and against the law. When the AG gets finished with this case, we will know just how corrupt the board was. Kudos to the member who resigned.
Is Bill Gates planning an invasion of Canada? I know his "Trusted Computing" initiative is designed to eliminate choices, but will that junk really work?