It does, however, force you to PAY for getting that software that you may or may not use. Last time I checked, none of the censorware vendors were non-profit organizations -- all their products cost money, and even if they didn't (or even if 'evaluation versions' were used), the added costs of supporting the censorware and installing the censorware would increase the price of the computer system. This is intentionally driving up the cost of personal computers even for customers who would have no need for such things (corporate customers, for example). The only reason it passed was the sacred reason of "protecting the children". If they really wanted to make a difference to this, forcing creators of adult websites to use RSAC/ICRA tags would've probably been a more effective measure.
Actually, I think the point is that many Microsoft products now require that you use that product in conjunction with a properly licensed copy of a Microsoft Windows operating system. I don't know if they could defend this in court or not, but it is a part of all their EULA's. Since Wine isn't a licensed copy of a Microsoft Windows operating system, it would be a violation of that EULA.
Despite thousands of geeks clamoring about how obvious the idea was, nobody has been able to produce a usage of one-click shopping prior to Amazon's patent? This strikes me as interesting, to say the least.
Yeah, and no one has been able to produce a good reason why anyone would really WANT one-click purchasing. It strikes me as potentially very dangerous and not something I'd ever want. I'm not even very happy about amazon.com keeping a record of my credit card number after my transaction with them has completed.
On a different note, the fact that many people find this patent offensive is the fact that it really didn't involve the 'invention' of any new technology but rather just a different use for existing technology. There's nothing new or novel about using the same database that stores your users information to store credit card information and automatically process an order when a particular page is requested. Another problem is the fact that even the finished patent doesn't help anyone trying to implement a competitive implementation -- it's writen by lawyers for lawyers for the most part. And to make things worse, they have a monopoly on this technology for twenty-one years, an eternity in the computer industry.
The multiple distributions aren't hurting Linux. What's really hurting Linux is the fact that the Linux Standards Base and Filesystem Hierarchy Standard isn't yet complete. The LSB and FHS, along with it's package format, and guidelines on what libraries must exist and where should make it possible for distribution independent programs. Right now, frankly, things are a mess. Every distribution has different package formats and different methods for getting daemons to start up on boot/runlevel, different dependencies, etc.
It's easy to mistake the symptom for the problem, but in this case, the problem is not that there's too many distributions, but rather that there is too few standards. In all fairness, the main differences between most distributions is more cosmetic than anything else. Nearly all use standard kernels (a few apply non-standard patches to the kernel to add features that Linus maintains are not ready for introduction into the mainstream kernel), almost all use glibc-2.1 as the standard (a few use glibc-2.2, but still include 2.1 for backwards compatibility), you're likely to find the GNU fileutils and GCC 2.95 in almost all cases, etc.
Once these standards are finalized, then we need object sharing (Gnorba vs KParts), widget theme and generic UI preference stanards.
The MSIL instruction set is designed as a target for compilers, but it is not designed as a traditional interpreted byte code or tree code. Converting MSIL to native code requires some per-method analysis, so it is truly a compiler intermediate language. A compiler back-end that accepts MSIL as input and produces native code is called, for historical reasons, a Just-In-Time Compiler or JITter. There is a standard interface between a JITter and the EE.
So, it's really just an intermediate format that can be either precompiled or JIT compiled to the native platform. It uses Windows standard PE and COFF files. But none of this makes it native code on Windows and interpreted everywhere else. Although I think the reason Microsoft points out that it's not bytecode is to intentionally distance themselves from the percieved slowness of Java and it's bytecode interpreters.
Or perhaps more "Computer Science" courses should mandate courses in User Interface design, because there are just too many BAD DESIGNS out there. The problem isn't that interface design is a difficult concept to understand, but rather that it's not considered a priority.
Compared to the price tag the equivelant product from Microsoft or Novell, the price of RedHat's enterprise offerings is peanuts. For example, look at RedHat Linux Enterprise Edition with OpenMail versus Exchange 2000:
1 server, 25-client licenses for Exchange 2000: $2,374.00 (approx.)
1 server, 25-client licenses for Exchange 2000 Enterprise Edition: $6,999.00
RedHat Linux Enterprise Edition with 50-client OpenMail: $2,995.00
Red Hat Linux 6.2 Lotus Domino Bundle (25 client licenses): $3,699.00
Groupwise v5.5 25-user: $3,480.00
Now that's not even the entire story. If you want Exchange 2000, you also need Windows 2000, and the client access licenses for that. If you want Groupwise v5.5, you need to buy either Windows NT 4.0 (and CALs) or Novell Netware 3.11 or later (and user licenses).
However, it should be noted that the true pricetag of any of these products is not the initial cost of purchasing it, but rather the costs involved in maintaining it. If your servers are constantly down because either the administrator doesn't understand how to fix them or they're just broken by design, that's a whole lot more costly than the initial purchase price.
Note: The price on the Exchange 2000 server with 25 CALs might be off by about +/- $300 (Microsoft's pricing information on Exchange 2000 seems rather difficult to make sense of -- for example, according to the site, it'd be cheaper to buy Exchange 2000 without CALs and add 5 CALs, than to buy Exchange 2000 with 5 CALs by about $265).
Do you really know what you're talking about?.NET is just like Java in that it makes use of bytecode, which means INTERPRETED EVERYWHERE. Just-in-time compilers will likely be used in the same capacity they are now with Java to make.NET bytecode run at acceptable speeds. Most.NET applications will end up distributed at MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) which can be converted to native code by a JIT compiler. The only advantage MS platforms will have is the various undocumented/poorly documented API calls that are part of.NET. However, even those can be considered native code. Look at Wine, for example. It's not emulating the API calls, it's native reimplementation of the Win32 API calls for X11 and Linux/BSD.
Even though there are a number of Microsoft-ism function calls as part of the.NET framework, the majority are pretty generic. The parts that implementors of.NET on other platforms will have problems with are the System.WinForms set of classes. However, even for this, much of the code that was developed as part of the Wine project could be used, since Winelib isn't as platform specific as the Wine standalone executable is.
The problem being is there's two forms of filtering software. The stupid kind that uses lists of banned websites that you can't access, which just happen to end up populated with sites that criticise the company or it's products. Users of such software will never be able to research the failure rates of filtering software, or even access groups that are opposed or write articles that are opposed to them. See The Register's saga with Cyber Patrol blocking them. The only reason was because they had a story run about peacefire.exe that killed filtering software. So, CyberPatrol added them to the sex, drugs, and "gross depictions" categories.
Then there's the stupider kind that filters out key words. You'll never do research on cucumbers (embeded bad word, c-u-m), names like Dick Sexton would trigger the filter, and the list goes on. And heaven forbid you should want to know anything about Matsushita or Essex. My favorite, however, is from one of the people at peacefire:
Peacefire's Bennett Haselton takes the prize for his fun with Cybersitter. Bennett started with this phrase: "Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-homosexual conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure fascism and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest terror."
After Cybersitter's keen filters attacked it, here's what came out: "Gary Bauer is a staunch anti-conservative who sees the gay movement as absolutely pure and thinks movies of men with men are the greatest."
The ISN in Linux appears a little weaker in 2.2.x than it was in 2.0.x. Most nmap scans on 2.0.x returned difficulty of 9999999.
NT4 prior to a post-SP5/6 hotfix reported a difficulty of 0-8. NT4 SP6a + hotfix ranks about the same as Windows 2000. Win9x upto and including 98SE had a difficulty of 0. I'm not sure what WinME reports.
There are a number of reasons why people are opposed to software patents. For one, it increases the barrier to entry into the software market. Instead of just being able to hire a programmer to write a program, you may have to hire a dozen lawyers to go over intentionally vaguely worded patents to determine if you might have to try to license the technology from another company. Most patent offices no longer require a sample of the patented device, so determining if you've violated a patent in software is difficult to say the least.
The second reason there's a lot of opposition to patents is the fact they last 21 years, and in the computer industry, the landscape can drastically change in 6 months. In that light, software patents that last 21 years seems like overkill. Even the timespan it takes to get a patent approved -- sometimes several years, makes software patents hard to defend.
Another reason is a far more recent approach to patents -- that is the dishonesty some organizations have in suggesting something to a standards organization without disclosing that they have a patent that affects that same area. The most recent indication of this seems to be Rambus, Inc and the JEDEC forum, where Rambus didn't feel it was nessecary to inform participants of their pending patent on SDRAM, and DDR technologies.
The most frustrating part, however, is the fact that patents aren't usually used to help independent inventors. In most cases, patents are obtained by big businesses to either cripple their competition, or to raise the barrier to entry to prevent new competitors. Just look at the Unisys and LZW patent to see how this can be abused. They didn't bother to mention the patent until after it gained wide use. To dispel some of the fears of using the technology, they said they wouldn't seek royalties from free products using the technology. Later, when the patent was geting close to expiration, they decided it was time to try and extort $5,000 payments from people unfortunate enough to have LZW compressed GIF files on their site. To make things worse, they were completely within their rights to do all of this.
Re:American Television - Killed by commerce
on
15 Minutes
·
· Score: 2
In Canada, we (unfortunately) have a similar channel -- CBC. However, unlike the UK, it's not paid for by a TV license, but rather just from funds from the Canadian government. On average, there's two CBC affiliate television stations in a province. About the only programmes worth watching on CBC would be the local news and weather forecast, Hockey Night in Canada and perhaps one of the two Canadian comedy shows they produce. Most of the other programming on the station consists of little more than American stereotypes of Canadians with bad acting. And programmes that don't fall into that category, usually end up being set in the States with actors who have strong Toronto accents, and Canadian license plates on all the vehicles.
The rest of the show is either purchased programs from either the BBC or old US Television shows. Personally, I prefer watching either CTV or Global. They're both privately owned stations, who are required by CRTC regulations to show a certain amount of 'Canadian Content'. The result is a mixture of US and Canadian programming, with these stations funding well produced Canadian television shows.
Actually, they mentioned 4Kbps, which is kilobit, not kilobytes. If you can't pull 4Kb/sec over your dial-up, I feel bad for you (approximately 0.5KB/sec), since the average 14.4Kbps modem should be able to pull over 3 of those streams. I don't think the point of this is to preclude a local GUI, but rather make it possible for applications that are too large to run locally be available to be run remotely.
Actually, it depends. Some mail servers (MS Exchange, for example) have a 'single instance' store of messages, so that each unique message only exists once in the database. Adding encryption means it must be encrypted for each recipient, which means that single instance just isn't possible. Granted, this is a rather poor excuse for trying to get a small group of people to stop using PGP.
Yes, but no where does Microsoft SMS 2.0 state that it needs that updated version of MDAC. It simply tells you to install SP4 and IE4 when MDAC is missing. Only searching the MS Knowledgebase will reveal what the error REALLY means.
It is. X takes a lot of RAM, and while KDE and GNOME are growing slimmer by the second, they do too. Office 97 and Windows 95 will run on a P133 w/ 32 Mb of RAM. Not great, but okay. KDE (itself) will take 4 minutes between logon and desktop.
Why do people continually say X takes a lot of RAM. It doesn't. The only reason you'd see top report that X has 30-40 MB of RAM in the size column is because that's all the memory it has maped, including video RAM (possibly several times depending on video card), shared memory, etc. If you've got a 64MB video card, you can expect the size of the X server to be at least 64MB. All the parts of Gnome or KDE that make up the desktop probably account for more used RAM than anything else.
There's complexity in installing Windows apps, but the above comments are completely out of touch. NT and 2K Administrators touch the registry quite often. Regular users don't. Very few apps require driver upgrades.
One word: Games. Nothing requires tweaking, driver upgrades and system upgrades like games do. And what a coincidence that this just happens to be one of the major things people do with their computers.
ESR has the same beliefs as this guy, and the B&B emphasises making stable, useable released as frequently as possible (and treating those who give feedback with respect as well, by the way).
What free software authors seem to have a real problem with is deciding on when their program is good enough to call a 1.0 release. Some people just don't know when it's time to just compile out the features that don't yet work, and deliver a useful program out of the parts that do work.
But anyway, I see no problem with her feedback and these are all valid criticisms in my opinion.
Her criticisms are valid, but I'm far more worried about the more technical ones. The Linux Standard Base specification is moving at an alarmingly slow pace, and not even because the people developing the standards don't agree, it's that the important questions that will affect everyone's lives haven't even been discussed yet. Package format, for example, was a mushy decision to use RPM v3, with intent to replace it later. If I were a developer looking at the LSB for guidance, this is pretty worthless. Do I target the sub-1.0 spec and risk incompatibility later, or hold off on packaging and use the old standy-by binary.tar.gz files that later need fixing up to suit the resident distribution, or what? Personally I prefer Debian's three state packaging (installed, removed [retain existing configuration], and purged [no configuration]) to RPM's two state (installed, not installed), and the fact that.debs can be decomposed with compeltely standard tools. I would hope that companies like RedHat and Mandrake would want to position the LSB as a critical element and try to devote some resources in getting it finished. Microsoft and the computer media have been saying for the longest time that Linux will fragment, and the finalization LSB would prove that it won't happen. And then, just maybe, they can take on more ambitious (and dangerous) projects like standardizing the GUI and object sharing frameworks.
Re:outlook is actually pretty horrible....
on
Bad News from Yahoo
·
· Score: 3
I'd say that's a rather alamist take on the situation. It's unlikely that the chaos of the 1930s depression will be repeated if for no other reason that there were a number of other factors that severely contributed to it, including the massive droughts. Banking insitutions have changed drastically since then, and measures were put into place long ago to make sure that it doesn't happen like that again. Improved agricultural methods have increased the likelyhood that even in a drought that food can be harvested because of hardier crops, less damaging pesticides and the various automated farming implements. Regardless of what you think of engineered crops, pesticides, etc, few can argue that they haven't improved the efficiency of agriculture.
Personally, I think (or perhaps "hope" is a better word) this entire tech stock crash is more or less an evening out of the stocks to the level they should be at. Tech stocks have traditionally been far overvalued, even before the internet and dot-com madness. A market that was volitile by nature was being treated as if it was a sure thing.
Since I'm a Canadian, it doesn't really matter what I think of your politicians, my country's economy gets affected either way.
That's only because Windows 2000 is still new and the driver set in it hasn't had quite enough time to stagnate. Windows ME is largely the same. But look at Windows NT 4.0, and the pain that inflicts. The installer is the least of the problems. At work, all the systems have ATI RageIIC video cards, and 3COM 3c905b-TX network cards. In order to install it properly, I need to have disk 2 of the three diskette set for the NIC driver and insert it at the appropriate time in the installer, and then to install the video card, I have to wait for the installer to finish, apply service pack 6a, install the video driver, reapply service pack 6a, install all the applications, reapply service pack 6a, and then finalize various network settings. If by chance, I happen to forget to install the service pack before installing the video driver, the install has to be redone because the system files end up incorrectly versioned, and there's no way to fix this.
*phew* And that's not even dealing the Intel server NIC problem I've been hit with more than once.
Realistically, installing Windows is no easier than installing Linux, if for no other reason than those damn drivers that either refuse to install because you're installing a driver for a 3C905B-TX and you have a 3C905C-TX instead, or that some other driver just happens to conflict with this one. The only reason people really need to be concerned with how difficult Linux is to install is the hope to win over existing Windows users.
I'm personally far more concerned about the other issues, like the fact that the divide between KDE and Gnome loyals is getting wider. Utterly silly things such as instead of working to allow me to integrate a picture created in the GTK+ application, The Gimp, into something like KWord, they're all focusing on replicating the functionality of The Gimp in their very own QT clone. I'm not against them reinventing the wheel, so to speak, but the fact that everyone seems to miss the obvious thing that would help NOW -- allowing complete interoperability. There's no reason why I need two different configurations for silly things like file associations, widget theme, and colours, etc.
That's like the difference between a VCR (illegally) ignoring Macrovision, and simply recording a copy of something that was never Macrovision-protected in the first place.
Ignoring Macrovision is far from being illegal. My rather old 4-head VHS VCR is quite immune to the effects of Macrovision, and even if it wasn't I could legally purchase a video stabilizer (also known as Macrovision scrubbers) to erase the macrovision signal from the output. It's just not in the best intrest of most of these companies that make VCRs to build devices that don't fail when macrovision is introduced, since most have fairly strong ties to the those same media companies. Macrovision originally relied on a flaw in most VCRs to cause the distortion you'd normally see on such a work, however most VCRs now intentionally simulate the flaw when they detect Macrovision encoding.
You're incorrectly assuming that CPRM will instantly interfere with all those things you might want to do with your system. Not so. It'll only start interfereing when a program that uses the CPRM facilities is introduced to the system. On systems without CPRM, such a program is likely to just blatently fail and tell you to get different hardware if you want to use it. For a file to be encrypted with CPRM, a program must explicitly make calls directly to the hard drive to recieve a key for use and then encrypt the contents. The drive itself won't automagically encrypt MP3s and all other digital media files by itself.
CPRM was intended as sort of a trojan horse. They'd secretly slip it into millions of personal computers dormant until the day that the music and movie industries decide to release products dependant on it. Until that time, damn near everyone would've been ignorant of it, and after that point, there'd be virtually nothing anyone could do. Sinister plan if I do say so myself. Thankfully, these standards boards are still comprised with a few people with morals and without a corporate agenda.
The only way that these companies will succeed in making the pay-per-use dream come true is if people turn a blind eye to it. We need all the public backlash that's possible to make sure we're not trapped into a situation that we don't want to be in. The fight's not over yet, and I don't intend to lose, but then again, neither do the media industries.
I think part of this is the fact that most of these internet startups got into the same kind of problems. Like Amazon, they've branched out into all kinds of unrelated directions, and as such, each branch costs a lot more to operate as a part of the entire company that it would individually. Amazon, for example, stopped being a specialty book store, and turned into a general anything-you-want store. Unfortunately, the book selection, the REASON you'd normally shop at Amazon.com suffered. Yahoo has become the same. They have Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Actions, Yahoo Stores, Yahoo News, Yahoo Instant Messanger, and of course, the Yahoo Index and search engine.
Diversity is a great for many things, but as a business plan, it usually stinks. Both Yahoo and Amazon would've been further ahead to partner with someone else to provide those services instead of providing them themselves.
Not to mention that you may well also have to upgrade/fix whatever application you use with the SQL server, since there's usually enough differences/bugs in each new version that you need to rewrite or fix the affected parts.. There could be a lot of different reasons why you'd want to use MS SQL 7 with Windows 2000. If there's a legitimate performance problem with MS SQL 7 with Windows 2000, Microsoft should fix it instead of telling people that they should be using SQL Server 2000 instead. In some cases, it's just not possible.
Microsoft has made a lot of noise about how Windows 2000 is faster than Windows NT 4.0 in their efforts to sell it to businesses that don't really want to upgrade. Denying that this exists without generating some proof that it doesn't won't help them.
It's been said that there are three types of lies.. Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. For some strange reason, though, people have always put far too much faith in the results of benchmarks. There's all sorts of different tradeoffs with each product. Even a product with the worst raw performance can have many other factors that make it the only real choice.
Slashdot Mirror
It does, however, force you to PAY for getting that software that you may or may not use. Last time I checked, none of the censorware vendors were non-profit organizations -- all their products cost money, and even if they didn't (or even if 'evaluation versions' were used), the added costs of supporting the censorware and installing the censorware would increase the price of the computer system. This is intentionally driving up the cost of personal computers even for customers who would have no need for such things (corporate customers, for example). The only reason it passed was the sacred reason of "protecting the children". If they really wanted to make a difference to this, forcing creators of adult websites to use RSAC/ICRA tags would've probably been a more effective measure.
More likely the bus guy would sue you for libel and you'd be forced to remove the picture.
Actually, I think the point is that many Microsoft products now require that you use that product in conjunction with a properly licensed copy of a Microsoft Windows operating system. I don't know if they could defend this in court or not, but it is a part of all their EULA's. Since Wine isn't a licensed copy of a Microsoft Windows operating system, it would be a violation of that EULA.
On a different note, the fact that many people find this patent offensive is the fact that it really didn't involve the 'invention' of any new technology but rather just a different use for existing technology. There's nothing new or novel about using the same database that stores your users information to store credit card information and automatically process an order when a particular page is requested. Another problem is the fact that even the finished patent doesn't help anyone trying to implement a competitive implementation -- it's writen by lawyers for lawyers for the most part. And to make things worse, they have a monopoly on this technology for twenty-one years, an eternity in the computer industry.
It's easy to mistake the symptom for the problem, but in this case, the problem is not that there's too many distributions, but rather that there is too few standards. In all fairness, the main differences between most distributions is more cosmetic than anything else. Nearly all use standard kernels (a few apply non-standard patches to the kernel to add features that Linus maintains are not ready for introduction into the mainstream kernel), almost all use glibc-2.1 as the standard (a few use glibc-2.2, but still include 2.1 for backwards compatibility), you're likely to find the GNU fileutils and GCC 2.95 in almost all cases, etc.
Once these standards are finalized, then we need object sharing (Gnorba vs KParts), widget theme and generic UI preference stanards.
From MSDN:
So, it's really just an intermediate format that can be either precompiled or JIT compiled to the native platform. It uses Windows standard PE and COFF files. But none of this makes it native code on Windows and interpreted everywhere else. Although I think the reason Microsoft points out that it's not bytecode is to intentionally distance themselves from the percieved slowness of Java and it's bytecode interpreters.Or perhaps more "Computer Science" courses should mandate courses in User Interface design, because there are just too many BAD DESIGNS out there. The problem isn't that interface design is a difficult concept to understand, but rather that it's not considered a priority.
1 server, 25-client licenses for Exchange 2000: $2,374.00 (approx.)
1 server, 25-client licenses for Exchange 2000 Enterprise Edition: $6,999.00
RedHat Linux Enterprise Edition with 50-client OpenMail: $2,995.00
Red Hat Linux 6.2 Lotus Domino Bundle (25 client licenses): $3,699.00
Groupwise v5.5 25-user: $3,480.00
Now that's not even the entire story. If you want Exchange 2000, you also need Windows 2000, and the client access licenses for that. If you want Groupwise v5.5, you need to buy either Windows NT 4.0 (and CALs) or Novell Netware 3.11 or later (and user licenses).
However, it should be noted that the true pricetag of any of these products is not the initial cost of purchasing it, but rather the costs involved in maintaining it. If your servers are constantly down because either the administrator doesn't understand how to fix them or they're just broken by design, that's a whole lot more costly than the initial purchase price.
Note: The price on the Exchange 2000 server with 25 CALs might be off by about +/- $300 (Microsoft's pricing information on Exchange 2000 seems rather difficult to make sense of -- for example, according to the site, it'd be cheaper to buy Exchange 2000 without CALs and add 5 CALs, than to buy Exchange 2000 with 5 CALs by about $265).
Even though there are a number of Microsoft-ism function calls as part of the .NET framework, the majority are pretty generic. The parts that implementors of .NET on other platforms will have problems with are the System.WinForms set of classes. However, even for this, much of the code that was developed as part of the Wine project could be used, since Winelib isn't as platform specific as the Wine standalone executable is.
Then there's the stupider kind that filters out key words. You'll never do research on cucumbers (embeded bad word, c-u-m), names like Dick Sexton would trigger the filter, and the list goes on. And heaven forbid you should want to know anything about Matsushita or Essex. My favorite, however, is from one of the people at peacefire:
http://dfn.org/focus/censor/contest.htm has a nice list of humourous censorware failures.NT4 prior to a post-SP5/6 hotfix reported a difficulty of 0-8. NT4 SP6a + hotfix ranks about the same as Windows 2000. Win9x upto and including 98SE had a difficulty of 0. I'm not sure what WinME reports.
The second reason there's a lot of opposition to patents is the fact they last 21 years, and in the computer industry, the landscape can drastically change in 6 months. In that light, software patents that last 21 years seems like overkill. Even the timespan it takes to get a patent approved -- sometimes several years, makes software patents hard to defend.
Another reason is a far more recent approach to patents -- that is the dishonesty some organizations have in suggesting something to a standards organization without disclosing that they have a patent that affects that same area. The most recent indication of this seems to be Rambus, Inc and the JEDEC forum, where Rambus didn't feel it was nessecary to inform participants of their pending patent on SDRAM, and DDR technologies.
The most frustrating part, however, is the fact that patents aren't usually used to help independent inventors. In most cases, patents are obtained by big businesses to either cripple their competition, or to raise the barrier to entry to prevent new competitors. Just look at the Unisys and LZW patent to see how this can be abused. They didn't bother to mention the patent until after it gained wide use. To dispel some of the fears of using the technology, they said they wouldn't seek royalties from free products using the technology. Later, when the patent was geting close to expiration, they decided it was time to try and extort $5,000 payments from people unfortunate enough to have LZW compressed GIF files on their site. To make things worse, they were completely within their rights to do all of this.
The rest of the show is either purchased programs from either the BBC or old US Television shows. Personally, I prefer watching either CTV or Global. They're both privately owned stations, who are required by CRTC regulations to show a certain amount of 'Canadian Content'. The result is a mixture of US and Canadian programming, with these stations funding well produced Canadian television shows.
Actually, they mentioned 4Kbps, which is kilobit, not kilobytes. If you can't pull 4Kb/sec over your dial-up, I feel bad for you (approximately 0.5KB/sec), since the average 14.4Kbps modem should be able to pull over 3 of those streams. I don't think the point of this is to preclude a local GUI, but rather make it possible for applications that are too large to run locally be available to be run remotely.
Actually, it depends. Some mail servers (MS Exchange, for example) have a 'single instance' store of messages, so that each unique message only exists once in the database. Adding encryption means it must be encrypted for each recipient, which means that single instance just isn't possible. Granted, this is a rather poor excuse for trying to get a small group of people to stop using PGP.
Yes, but no where does Microsoft SMS 2.0 state that it needs that updated version of MDAC. It simply tells you to install SP4 and IE4 when MDAC is missing. Only searching the MS Knowledgebase will reveal what the error REALLY means.
Why do people continually say X takes a lot of RAM. It doesn't. The only reason you'd see top report that X has 30-40 MB of RAM in the size column is because that's all the memory it has maped, including video RAM (possibly several times depending on video card), shared memory, etc. If you've got a 64MB video card, you can expect the size of the X server to be at least 64MB. All the parts of Gnome or KDE that make up the desktop probably account for more used RAM than anything else.
There's complexity in installing Windows apps, but the above comments are completely out of touch. NT and 2K Administrators touch the registry quite often. Regular users don't. Very few apps require driver upgrades.
One word: Games. Nothing requires tweaking, driver upgrades and system upgrades like games do. And what a coincidence that this just happens to be one of the major things people do with their computers.
ESR has the same beliefs as this guy, and the B&B emphasises making stable, useable released as frequently as possible (and treating those who give feedback with respect as well, by the way).
What free software authors seem to have a real problem with is deciding on when their program is good enough to call a 1.0 release. Some people just don't know when it's time to just compile out the features that don't yet work, and deliver a useful program out of the parts that do work.
But anyway, I see no problem with her feedback and these are all valid criticisms in my opinion.
Her criticisms are valid, but I'm far more worried about the more technical ones. The Linux Standard Base specification is moving at an alarmingly slow pace, and not even because the people developing the standards don't agree, it's that the important questions that will affect everyone's lives haven't even been discussed yet. Package format, for example, was a mushy decision to use RPM v3, with intent to replace it later. If I were a developer looking at the LSB for guidance, this is pretty worthless. Do I target the sub-1.0 spec and risk incompatibility later, or hold off on packaging and use the old standy-by binary .tar.gz files that later need fixing up to suit the resident distribution, or what? Personally I prefer Debian's three state packaging (installed, removed [retain existing configuration], and purged [no configuration]) to RPM's two state (installed, not installed), and the fact that .debs can be decomposed with compeltely standard tools. I would hope that companies like RedHat and Mandrake would want to position the LSB as a critical element and try to devote some resources in getting it finished. Microsoft and the computer media have been saying for the longest time that Linux will fragment, and the finalization LSB would prove that it won't happen. And then, just maybe, they can take on more ambitious (and dangerous) projects like standardizing the GUI and object sharing frameworks.
Personally, I think (or perhaps "hope" is a better word) this entire tech stock crash is more or less an evening out of the stocks to the level they should be at. Tech stocks have traditionally been far overvalued, even before the internet and dot-com madness. A market that was volitile by nature was being treated as if it was a sure thing.
Since I'm a Canadian, it doesn't really matter what I think of your politicians, my country's economy gets affected either way.
*phew* And that's not even dealing the Intel server NIC problem I've been hit with more than once.
Realistically, installing Windows is no easier than installing Linux, if for no other reason than those damn drivers that either refuse to install because you're installing a driver for a 3C905B-TX and you have a 3C905C-TX instead, or that some other driver just happens to conflict with this one. The only reason people really need to be concerned with how difficult Linux is to install is the hope to win over existing Windows users.
I'm personally far more concerned about the other issues, like the fact that the divide between KDE and Gnome loyals is getting wider. Utterly silly things such as instead of working to allow me to integrate a picture created in the GTK+ application, The Gimp, into something like KWord, they're all focusing on replicating the functionality of The Gimp in their very own QT clone. I'm not against them reinventing the wheel, so to speak, but the fact that everyone seems to miss the obvious thing that would help NOW -- allowing complete interoperability. There's no reason why I need two different configurations for silly things like file associations, widget theme, and colours, etc.
CPRM was intended as sort of a trojan horse. They'd secretly slip it into millions of personal computers dormant until the day that the music and movie industries decide to release products dependant on it. Until that time, damn near everyone would've been ignorant of it, and after that point, there'd be virtually nothing anyone could do. Sinister plan if I do say so myself. Thankfully, these standards boards are still comprised with a few people with morals and without a corporate agenda.
The only way that these companies will succeed in making the pay-per-use dream come true is if people turn a blind eye to it. We need all the public backlash that's possible to make sure we're not trapped into a situation that we don't want to be in. The fight's not over yet, and I don't intend to lose, but then again, neither do the media industries.
Diversity is a great for many things, but as a business plan, it usually stinks. Both Yahoo and Amazon would've been further ahead to partner with someone else to provide those services instead of providing them themselves.
Microsoft has made a lot of noise about how Windows 2000 is faster than Windows NT 4.0 in their efforts to sell it to businesses that don't really want to upgrade. Denying that this exists without generating some proof that it doesn't won't help them.
It's been said that there are three types of lies.. Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. For some strange reason, though, people have always put far too much faith in the results of benchmarks. There's all sorts of different tradeoffs with each product. Even a product with the worst raw performance can have many other factors that make it the only real choice.