I'm pretty sure I haven't had my computer on for 71+ days, but there's no point in wasting electricity if one doesn't need to have it on overnight as my gaming rig isn't a server, if it was, I'd be running linux.
The reasons for leaving your computer on are place keeping and time savings. The typical Windoze using "information worker" will go get coffee while their computer boots. It won't be finished scanning for viruses and loading all the other utilities by the time the user comes back to a clean slate they will have to fill with all of their work. Me, I open a screen and move a mouse and everything I was working on is right where I left it. A system with functional power management takes care of saving electricity without bothering the user. Laptops have been able to do this for a decade with APM, unless they are crippled by buggy M$ software. Desktop support is not as good because the dominant OS does not work. I've moved almost all of my computing to laptops and left the desktop machines as servers. They use less power and boot times are a distant memory.
... if you just turn on your computer and let it sit there running a torrent, it's perfectly stable. However, when you do stuff that gets the processor hot and uses up all the RAM and some swap space for hours on end, it's going to crash from time to time...unless you've got some really expensive hardware.
No, I've had both expensive Fortune 100 maintained hardware and from the trash hardware, the difference was software. Windoze requires a daily reboot and even then can have problems, regardless of activity. Free software stays up forever, regardless of activity. Besides the rare case of failed fans, the only difference for me has been software.
An installer that installs the GNUstep core package binaries for Windows is available at the GNUstep ftp site in the windows subdirectory. The current release is base-1.11.1/gui-0.10.1. Note this package only includes the libraries necessary to start running applications. No applications (like file managers, etc) are included. You will need to compile those yourself.
Why do that when you could have a nice stable GNU/Linux installed in twenty minutes? Does anyone really go through all of that torture just to customize a Windoze box? Why does Slashdot have these mindless "I want to do something that's easy with free software but freaking impossible in Windoze XP" stories?
The only people still interested in developing anything on Windoze are a handful of legacy program owners
Aside from the obvious problems with this, it follows that by presenting "us" with that fait acompli of sorts you're also being insulting. Correct? Or do you assert that the phrase above came from someone other than your feverish imagination?
The only "problem" is that you see reality as insulting. Microsoft has screwed the people they depended on and are left all alone in the world. That will be their undoing and the results are visible.
While it seems obvious to anyone running any kind of M$ platform that nothing new has happened in eight years or so, and M$'s anti-competitive practices are so blatant that ordinary people and the US Federal Government noticed, technical insiders can tell you much more if you look into it. A nice, concise statement of all of the problems can be found here. It states the obvious and well known, but M$'s massive propaganda effort tends to confuse many people. I can quote some of my favorite parts for you,
Microsoft has a habit of killing off competitors by either buying them or their technologies.... a recurring habit of reaping the rewards for other peoples' work which started way back in the beginning when Bill Gates bought DOS (no, Microsoft didn't even create the product that was the seed for their entire monopoly).... Microsoft's fierce competitive nature has alienated everybody in the industry to the point where voluntary supporters are virtually nonexistent. For quite some time Microsoft has resorted to buying public endorsements and there have been documented incidents of Microsoft employees posing as normal software users in public settings...
All of that was obvious years ago. The only thing more rare than voluntary supporters is programmers who think that M$ has a future or that making Windoze do what they want is anything but an expensive waste of time. It's easier and cheaper to do things with free software. The lack of programmers working on the M$ platform is the reason Vista has taken six years to develop. M$ has been forced to make their own tools for a change and they chose to waste all of their effort on DRM. Vista is going to suck and it's market failure will be the end of M$.
Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
Oh yeah, there's always someone claiming "solid" system stability for Windoze. Keep telling yourself that and I'll keep using the perfectly good computers folks like you throw away. Putting any distribution of GNU/Linux on the thing magically fixes 90% of the problems, which is amazing given how sorry home electronics really are. Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
And that's on a laptop that IS faulty. I bought it used and crucial structural members have failed, so it flexes if you carry it around much but it works great as a desktop replacement. Laptops stay up longer because they are not dependent on the power grid, which is the limiting factor in most of my uptime.
Everyone I know who runs any version of M$ has routine crashes and crapouts, despite rebooting daily. There's about zero chance that all of their hardware is faulty.
Please, tell us why this insults you. I'm actually interested.
A "Slashdot Paradox" of false choices is a way of calling you, the Slashdot reader, stupid. That's insulting, unless you think there's something good about being stupid.
... the problem here is the hiring of a private security company to obtain personal phone records from someone's home lines. That's not OK, ever.
Justify, in twenty words or less, the existence of choicepoint and the information it shares. Companies like that are just the tip of the iceberg. The Fortune 1,000 that share information with choicepoint probably includes every company you do business with right down to your grocery store and pharmacy. It's not OK.
The umbral blot once again tried to overshadow intelligent conversation with a false and insulting choice:
MS' security team was made of good people who were doing the best they could for such a large project with such a large user base and extensive backwards compatibility, and thus that Windows security was the best it could have been (even if that wasn't so good).
Or Mozilla's security is going to go down the tubes.
Of course the answer has more to do with the differences between free and non free software development than the people involved. In the non free world your resources are limited to the few people you can pay and coerce into signing a NDA. Free world resources are comparatively infinite. Non free software is subject to what's euphemistically called "marketing decisions" which restrict features and waste resources on breaking a competitor. Free software projects are guided by what people want to see in the project and forks can happen if a project ever stalls or becomes less than free. Features that people want multiply and everyone's a winner with free software. Non free software stagnates as marketing types decide how to spend their precious resources on such obvious things as a Mac port.
There is only one person to blame for Microsoft's security failings and that is Bill Gates. He has championed and created the legal framework for non free software and steadfastly refuses to deviate from it. Until recently, every decision was his.
What's amazing is how "data mining" is accepted by so many big companies. So it's OK for them to know where I shop, what I buy, where I go and who I talk to but not OK for others to know the same about them? They think it's OK to read through employee email and listen in on their phone calls but God help the poor slob who does it to a member of the board? Welcome to the reality of Big Brother: Lawless power is not collective, it always concentrates to a single person and that single person never lasts very long because they are subject to the same abuse everone else is. It's better to have respect for everyone up front.
When you put it that way, it sounds like electronic textbooks WON'T overtake traditional publications, in the exact way that free software hasn't even begun to overtake non-free.
I'm talking about features, performance, quality and price, not market share but that shall come to both. The advance of free software is based on those advantages and is remarkable given the intense efforts by a few convicted monopolists to stop it. As the rise of Google and Wikipedia show, there are fewer barriers for excellent services than for excellent software.
... their primitive, reactive hindbrain to lash out at every post about Microsoft with such aggression and hatred.
Let's talk about irrational hatred and Microsoft, they go hand in hand. Microsoft hates just about everyone. They hate Google, iPod, Korn and most of all they hate free software. Microsoft hates just about everything cool that's been done in computing that they don't own. People realize this and that's why there are fewer and fewer people willing to ensnare themselves in a business model that includes Microsoft dependency. When Microsoft does own something they hate the people who use it. Do you know of any other company that has bothered to sue public schools? Is there any other industry that treats it's users as hostile criminals who want nothing more than to steal their precious IP? When you treat your customers like criminals and drive all the cool stuff off your platform you will be left with a bare platform that no one uses. Non free software is built on anti-social principles that will ultimately be out competed and rejected.
My promotion of free sotware is not based on a hatred of Microsoft. I do hate that company because of the evil things they have done to promote their second rate software, but that's a shallow and short term motivator. I promote free software because it works and it's moral. Those are things that will not change.
"Broken hands" and "fired teachers" comments are joke comments made to disrupt useful conversation about the real failings of paper texts and the academic publishers. While some greed heads at my University might have a cow at the thought of anyone giving away their precious "intellectual property", the vast majority of professors remember that part of their mission is education. Collaborative, electronic textbooks are sure to overtake traditional publications in the same way free software has overtaken non free. In the end, wiki texts are just a more efficient way to do the job.
I like you class notes. Have you seen or thought about using them as the basis for a wikibook?
how would you reference the texts? Would the editors have finalized 'editions' that go into an uneditable archive mode, and only the 'latest' editions are wiki-able?
That would at least be managable from a referencing point of view, but would detract a bit of the credibility from the 'work in progress' copies.
If only dead tree publishers had that kind of credibility for text books. The rate of minor and meaningless changes to create new "editions" is outrageous. I'm looking forward to wikibooks being an island of stability in the academic publishing world.
Dammit, twitter. Every time I stumble on one of your posts, it's like an icepick in my ear.
Truth hurts? Sorry, most people don't have that problem. Microsoft is a shrinking legacy. Talk to IBM, Lowe's, Chrysler or any of the many big companies tired of wasting money on software that does not work. One day, the message will get past all the built up wax down those ears of yours, but I'm not sure there's anything left on the other side.
... its kneejerk posts like yours that make Slashdot a diminishing resource for all things Microsoft.
No, it's not. The Astroturfers will be sure to post all the left handed tricks you need to make Windoze do what little it does. The problem, for you, is that all things M$ are diminishing. M$ has not played nice and has driven out all of the people who did anything innovative on their platform. The only people still interested in developing anything on Windoze are a handful of legacy program owners, malware and DRM weenies. They can't keep up without everyone else`s help. Everyone else ran to free software a decade ago and that's where the action still is. You might notice that fact when you read non M$ related articles.
It's [ogg] fine on a desktop with a high powered general purpose processor, but less so in a hardware implementation.
I've heard that before, but not seen it. What exactly is the trade off? How do people like this do it? How does ogg compare to AAC or AAC with unFairPlay? How is it that my dinky ARM Zaurus plays ogg without a problem, just like the 233 MHz PII it's roughly equivalent to? Why don't I see the difference between ogg and mp3 on any of the devices I use besides the one cheap player I own that won't play ogg? It has a reasonable battery life, but this ogg player goes for 25 hours.
Most importantly, is the performance trade off something worth paying licensing fees and putting up with extortion threats?
IFA Show? IFA is the world's largest Consumer Electronics trade fair, the most important international exhibition for electronic entertainment, communications and...
From the article:
SanDisk's IFA stall was left almost empty... Giustino de Sanctis, head of Sisvel's US-based subsidiary Audio MPEG, SanDisk's refusal to purchase an MP3 licence leaves them out of step with some 600 other manufacturers and software developers.... "We have 600 licensees and we have to protect their rights, and the rights of the patent holders,"
Protect their "right" to pay you for an audio compression algorithm by embarrassing a competitor at the show? That's some kind of protection alright.
Even if it's obfuscated somehow, we should be able to see how much information is, in fact, being transmitted, and thence deduce if any useable audio could be derived thereof, free or not free, source or no source.
I've got better things to do than learn how to look for such things, especially when the results will be meaningless. As others have pointed out, if speech to text is used and only keywords are sent back as hashes or codes, what you see will just be an unidentifiable nothing. With free software, there is no such monkey business.
See how silly it sounds to suggest that all closed source software is evil spyware?
I said it could be. If you have something you'd like to keep to yourself, you need to convince yourself that none of it is spyware. The easiest way to do that is to use nothing but free software. Some companies, like M$ have proved themselves less than trustworthy, but non free software all has the potential to betray and none of it has respect for the user.
bullying witnesses into perjury! How many times has this happened? What did they say to perjure themselves?
It only has to happen once to put the stink on your organization. If you follow the links you find RIAA representatives threatening a teen to make her lie in court. If you follow the other link where the RIAA tried to bully their media partners into ignoring due process, you find another outrageous violation. When you look at the big picture you see an organization that has bought a lot of crappy laws and then abused them beyond their limits so that they can threaten a lot of innocent people with ruin. The whole thing reeks of abuse.
The US Constitution established copyright to promote the usefull arts. What the RIAA is doing has little to do with that.
All rules of evidence allow an expert witness of the own parties choosing. If there is confidential information then what the Judge will do is just issue a protective order noting that information cannot be used in the suit or released.
That's why in everyone's favorite civil case the litigants get to pay "experts" of their choosing to trash each other's houses, right? I mean, everyone knows that it is absolutely vital in a divorce to get to the bottom of everything so that search warrents are issued for both residences. Who knows, diamond rings could be hidden in the mayo so you gotta dump it out on the floor. The expert had better dig through all their papers too, so they can find those letters where the low life confesses to treating em wrong. Pharmacy records can really be incriminating, better issue warrents to their doctors. To be effective, these searches have to come at a surprising time, like three in the morning and include full strip searches and tissue samples.
What, that does not happen? It's amazing how innocent parties in civil disputes are treated with respect in most cases isn't it? We have yet to descend to the level of big company love where we are all treated like criminals and subjected to humiliating searches for potential publishing violations. The RIAA has proven itself untrustworthy and right thinking judges are going to proceed with that in their minds.
Perhaps legislators who want to keep their jobs will look into copyright again and decide how it would be best to encourage the useful arts. 100 year copyrights have suppressed older content more than it has encouraged it's publication depriving us all of our parent's culture not to mention our own. The current set up of government franchises on radio space and anti-circumvention laws seem to have produced two large music publishing companies that are more interested in harassing the public than finding and promoting talented musicians. At some legislators might realize that there's more money to be taxed if there are more players providing more people with more of what they want. The big publishers are being circumvented but they still have a lock on 100 years of the past, which is all recorded media.
Remember OnStar? Not only was the service listening, the company gladly allowed the FBI to listen in even though it disabled the device's actual safety function. Notice that the ruling which forbade such things, even with a court order, would not apply to M$, Macromedia, your ISP, your cell phone provider or any other non free "service" you subscribe to. Given the current US propensity for illegal, warrantless searches every non free device you own and every non free software you install is a potential government spy and is almost certainly acting as a private industry spy.
The people doing these things think they are smart. What they are counting on is that people won't be able to tell them apart from more honest companies like Google, which bothered to tell you up front. A bad mouth here, a bad mouth there and tons of advert money and distribution channel extortion and all will be well, they think. It's called "screwing the pooch." Free software is going to make them feel really stupid soon enough.
People avoid damaged goods. Do you want this kind of thing running at your place of work? I don't, and that's where the transition has started. It's if non free is going to be replaced it's when you are going to get around to it yourself.
It's non free software, right? Why are you surprised? The non free extortion has always been, "Do as I say or your computer will not do what you want."
A note to self: make sure the Google toolbar is uninstalled on every family computer ASAP.
The difference between this and other spyware that does this is that Google told you up front and you can remove it later if you change your mind. Chances are that Macromedia Flash or something already has your microphone turned on. Turning it off is going to be like trying to turn off the Vista start up noise if it's not already. When you use non free software, you hand control of your computer to someone else. It's never a good idea but some companies are less trustworthy than others. Google is the least of your problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure I haven't had my computer on for 71+ days, but there's no point in wasting electricity if one doesn't need to have it on overnight as my gaming rig isn't a server, if it was, I'd be running linux.
The reasons for leaving your computer on are place keeping and time savings. The typical Windoze using "information worker" will go get coffee while their computer boots. It won't be finished scanning for viruses and loading all the other utilities by the time the user comes back to a clean slate they will have to fill with all of their work. Me, I open a screen and move a mouse and everything I was working on is right where I left it. A system with functional power management takes care of saving electricity without bothering the user. Laptops have been able to do this for a decade with APM, unless they are crippled by buggy M$ software. Desktop support is not as good because the dominant OS does not work. I've moved almost all of my computing to laptops and left the desktop machines as servers. They use less power and boot times are a distant memory.
No, I've had both expensive Fortune 100 maintained hardware and from the trash hardware, the difference was software. Windoze requires a daily reboot and even then can have problems, regardless of activity. Free software stays up forever, regardless of activity. Besides the rare case of failed fans, the only difference for me has been software.
Here are the instructions for that.
Why do that when you could have a nice stable GNU/Linux installed in twenty minutes? Does anyone really go through all of that torture just to customize a Windoze box? Why does Slashdot have these mindless "I want to do something that's easy with free software but freaking impossible in Windoze XP" stories?
Aside from the obvious problems with this, it follows that by presenting "us" with that fait acompli of sorts you're also being insulting. Correct? Or do you assert that the phrase above came from someone other than your feverish imagination?
The only "problem" is that you see reality as insulting. Microsoft has screwed the people they depended on and are left all alone in the world. That will be their undoing and the results are visible.
While it seems obvious to anyone running any kind of M$ platform that nothing new has happened in eight years or so, and M$'s anti-competitive practices are so blatant that ordinary people and the US Federal Government noticed, technical insiders can tell you much more if you look into it. A nice, concise statement of all of the problems can be found here. It states the obvious and well known, but M$'s massive propaganda effort tends to confuse many people. I can quote some of my favorite parts for you,
Microsoft has a habit of killing off competitors by either buying them or their technologies. ... a recurring habit of reaping the rewards for other peoples' work which started way back in the beginning when Bill Gates bought DOS (no, Microsoft didn't even create the product that was the seed for their entire monopoly). ... Microsoft's fierce competitive nature has alienated everybody in the industry to the point where voluntary supporters are virtually nonexistent. For quite some time Microsoft has resorted to buying public endorsements and there have been documented incidents of Microsoft employees posing as normal software users in public settings ...
All of that was obvious years ago. The only thing more rare than voluntary supporters is programmers who think that M$ has a future or that making Windoze do what they want is anything but an expensive waste of time. It's easier and cheaper to do things with free software. The lack of programmers working on the M$ platform is the reason Vista has taken six years to develop. M$ has been forced to make their own tools for a change and they chose to waste all of their effort on DRM. Vista is going to suck and it's market failure will be the end of M$.
Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
Oh yeah, there's always someone claiming "solid" system stability for Windoze. Keep telling yourself that and I'll keep using the perfectly good computers folks like you throw away. Putting any distribution of GNU/Linux on the thing magically fixes 90% of the problems, which is amazing given how sorry home electronics really are. Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
twitter@gift:~$ uptime08:37:14 up 71 days, 16:53, 6 users, load average: 0.28, 0.50, 0.38
twitter@gift:~$
And that's on a laptop that IS faulty. I bought it used and crucial structural members have failed, so it flexes if you carry it around much but it works great as a desktop replacement. Laptops stay up longer because they are not dependent on the power grid, which is the limiting factor in most of my uptime.
Everyone I know who runs any version of M$ has routine crashes and crapouts, despite rebooting daily. There's about zero chance that all of their hardware is faulty.
A "Slashdot Paradox" of false choices is a way of calling you, the Slashdot reader, stupid. That's insulting, unless you think there's something good about being stupid.
Justify, in twenty words or less, the existence of choicepoint and the information it shares. Companies like that are just the tip of the iceberg. The Fortune 1,000 that share information with choicepoint probably includes every company you do business with right down to your grocery store and pharmacy. It's not OK.
Ivan Arce
n Avarice
Oh well, the world is strange.
Of course the answer has more to do with the differences between free and non free software development than the people involved. In the non free world your resources are limited to the few people you can pay and coerce into signing a NDA. Free world resources are comparatively infinite. Non free software is subject to what's euphemistically called "marketing decisions" which restrict features and waste resources on breaking a competitor. Free software projects are guided by what people want to see in the project and forks can happen if a project ever stalls or becomes less than free. Features that people want multiply and everyone's a winner with free software. Non free software stagnates as marketing types decide how to spend their precious resources on such obvious things as a Mac port.
There is only one person to blame for Microsoft's security failings and that is Bill Gates. He has championed and created the legal framework for non free software and steadfastly refuses to deviate from it. Until recently, every decision was his.
What's amazing is how "data mining" is accepted by so many big companies. So it's OK for them to know where I shop, what I buy, where I go and who I talk to but not OK for others to know the same about them? They think it's OK to read through employee email and listen in on their phone calls but God help the poor slob who does it to a member of the board? Welcome to the reality of Big Brother: Lawless power is not collective, it always concentrates to a single person and that single person never lasts very long because they are subject to the same abuse everone else is. It's better to have respect for everyone up front.
My biggest fan mindlessly taunts:
When you put it that way, it sounds like electronic textbooks WON'T overtake traditional publications, in the exact way that free software hasn't even begun to overtake non-free.
I'm talking about features, performance, quality and price, not market share but that shall come to both. The advance of free software is based on those advantages and is remarkable given the intense efforts by a few convicted monopolists to stop it. As the rise of Google and Wikipedia show, there are fewer barriers for excellent services than for excellent software.
Let's talk about irrational hatred and Microsoft, they go hand in hand. Microsoft hates just about everyone. They hate Google, iPod, Korn and most of all they hate free software. Microsoft hates just about everything cool that's been done in computing that they don't own. People realize this and that's why there are fewer and fewer people willing to ensnare themselves in a business model that includes Microsoft dependency. When Microsoft does own something they hate the people who use it. Do you know of any other company that has bothered to sue public schools? Is there any other industry that treats it's users as hostile criminals who want nothing more than to steal their precious IP? When you treat your customers like criminals and drive all the cool stuff off your platform you will be left with a bare platform that no one uses. Non free software is built on anti-social principles that will ultimately be out competed and rejected.
My promotion of free sotware is not based on a hatred of Microsoft. I do hate that company because of the evil things they have done to promote their second rate software, but that's a shallow and short term motivator. I promote free software because it works and it's moral. Those are things that will not change.
"Broken hands" and "fired teachers" comments are joke comments made to disrupt useful conversation about the real failings of paper texts and the academic publishers. While some greed heads at my University might have a cow at the thought of anyone giving away their precious "intellectual property", the vast majority of professors remember that part of their mission is education. Collaborative, electronic textbooks are sure to overtake traditional publications in the same way free software has overtaken non free. In the end, wiki texts are just a more efficient way to do the job.
I like you class notes. Have you seen or thought about using them as the basis for a wikibook?
how would you reference the texts? Would the editors have finalized 'editions' that go into an uneditable archive mode, and only the 'latest' editions are wiki-able?
Yes. Wikibooks makes PDFs for "completed" texts.
That would at least be managable from a referencing point of view, but would detract a bit of the credibility from the 'work in progress' copies.
If only dead tree publishers had that kind of credibility for text books. The rate of minor and meaningless changes to create new "editions" is outrageous. I'm looking forward to wikibooks being an island of stability in the academic publishing world.
Dammit, twitter. Every time I stumble on one of your posts, it's like an icepick in my ear.
Truth hurts? Sorry, most people don't have that problem. Microsoft is a shrinking legacy. Talk to IBM, Lowe's, Chrysler or any of the many big companies tired of wasting money on software that does not work. One day, the message will get past all the built up wax down those ears of yours, but I'm not sure there's anything left on the other side.
No, it's not. The Astroturfers will be sure to post all the left handed tricks you need to make Windoze do what little it does. The problem, for you, is that all things M$ are diminishing. M$ has not played nice and has driven out all of the people who did anything innovative on their platform. The only people still interested in developing anything on Windoze are a handful of legacy program owners, malware and DRM weenies. They can't keep up without everyone else`s help. Everyone else ran to free software a decade ago and that's where the action still is. You might notice that fact when you read non M$ related articles.
It's [ogg] fine on a desktop with a high powered general purpose processor, but less so in a hardware implementation.
I've heard that before, but not seen it. What exactly is the trade off? How do people like this do it? How does ogg compare to AAC or AAC with unFairPlay? How is it that my dinky ARM Zaurus plays ogg without a problem, just like the 233 MHz PII it's roughly equivalent to? Why don't I see the difference between ogg and mp3 on any of the devices I use besides the one cheap player I own that won't play ogg? It has a reasonable battery life, but this ogg player goes for 25 hours.
Most importantly, is the performance trade off something worth paying licensing fees and putting up with extortion threats?
IFA Show? IFA is the world's largest Consumer Electronics trade fair, the most important international exhibition for electronic entertainment, communications and ...
From the article:
SanDisk's IFA stall was left almost empty ... Giustino de Sanctis, head of Sisvel's US-based subsidiary Audio MPEG, SanDisk's refusal to purchase an MP3 licence leaves them out of step with some 600 other manufacturers and software developers. ... "We have 600 licensees and we have to protect their rights, and the rights of the patent holders,"
Protect their "right" to pay you for an audio compression algorithm by embarrassing a competitor at the show? That's some kind of protection alright.
Just use ogg.
Even if it's obfuscated somehow, we should be able to see how much information is, in fact, being transmitted, and thence deduce if any useable audio could be derived thereof, free or not free, source or no source.
I've got better things to do than learn how to look for such things, especially when the results will be meaningless. As others have pointed out, if speech to text is used and only keywords are sent back as hashes or codes, what you see will just be an unidentifiable nothing. With free software, there is no such monkey business.
See how silly it sounds to suggest that all closed source software is evil spyware?
I said it could be. If you have something you'd like to keep to yourself, you need to convince yourself that none of it is spyware. The easiest way to do that is to use nothing but free software. Some companies, like M$ have proved themselves less than trustworthy, but non free software all has the potential to betray and none of it has respect for the user.
bullying witnesses into perjury! How many times has this happened? What did they say to perjure themselves?
It only has to happen once to put the stink on your organization. If you follow the links you find RIAA representatives threatening a teen to make her lie in court. If you follow the other link where the RIAA tried to bully their media partners into ignoring due process, you find another outrageous violation. When you look at the big picture you see an organization that has bought a lot of crappy laws and then abused them beyond their limits so that they can threaten a lot of innocent people with ruin. The whole thing reeks of abuse.
The US Constitution established copyright to promote the usefull arts. What the RIAA is doing has little to do with that.
All rules of evidence allow an expert witness of the own parties choosing. If there is confidential information then what the Judge will do is just issue a protective order noting that information cannot be used in the suit or released.
That's why in everyone's favorite civil case the litigants get to pay "experts" of their choosing to trash each other's houses, right? I mean, everyone knows that it is absolutely vital in a divorce to get to the bottom of everything so that search warrents are issued for both residences. Who knows, diamond rings could be hidden in the mayo so you gotta dump it out on the floor. The expert had better dig through all their papers too, so they can find those letters where the low life confesses to treating em wrong. Pharmacy records can really be incriminating, better issue warrents to their doctors. To be effective, these searches have to come at a surprising time, like three in the morning and include full strip searches and tissue samples.
What, that does not happen? It's amazing how innocent parties in civil disputes are treated with respect in most cases isn't it? We have yet to descend to the level of big company love where we are all treated like criminals and subjected to humiliating searches for potential publishing violations. The RIAA has proven itself untrustworthy and right thinking judges are going to proceed with that in their minds.
Perhaps legislators who want to keep their jobs will look into copyright again and decide how it would be best to encourage the useful arts. 100 year copyrights have suppressed older content more than it has encouraged it's publication depriving us all of our parent's culture not to mention our own. The current set up of government franchises on radio space and anti-circumvention laws seem to have produced two large music publishing companies that are more interested in harassing the public than finding and promoting talented musicians. At some legislators might realize that there's more money to be taxed if there are more players providing more people with more of what they want. The big publishers are being circumvented but they still have a lock on 100 years of the past, which is all recorded media.
The people doing these things think they are smart. What they are counting on is that people won't be able to tell them apart from more honest companies like Google, which bothered to tell you up front. A bad mouth here, a bad mouth there and tons of advert money and distribution channel extortion and all will be well, they think. It's called "screwing the pooch." Free software is going to make them feel really stupid soon enough.
People avoid damaged goods. Do you want this kind of thing running at your place of work? I don't, and that's where the transition has started. It's if non free is going to be replaced it's when you are going to get around to it yourself.
What data? Each 5-second chunk is represented by a 4-byte number. Google says the transformation is irreversible.
If it's not free software, you have no way of knowing. This is true of all non free software you put on your computer.
WTF happened to "Don't Be Evil", Google?
It's non free software, right? Why are you surprised? The non free extortion has always been, "Do as I say or your computer will not do what you want."
A note to self: make sure the Google toolbar is uninstalled on every family computer ASAP.
The difference between this and other spyware that does this is that Google told you up front and you can remove it later if you change your mind. Chances are that Macromedia Flash or something already has your microphone turned on. Turning it off is going to be like trying to turn off the Vista start up noise if it's not already. When you use non free software, you hand control of your computer to someone else. It's never a good idea but some companies are less trustworthy than others. Google is the least of your problems.