I guess you figure MS and Adobe own your computer and it's their right to stop you from using software you actually paid for because you wanted to do nothing more than get rid of a nag screen.
Er, no. That isn't what he's saying. He's questioning whether this early report is what it seems as do I. I'm no lover of MS by any means but I'm not going to seriously credit this report until I see others confirm its assertions. I recall the DRM of Vista being somewhat Chicken Littled as well. As it turned out, a fully DRMed WMA file can be a nasty thing indeed but nobody reported being unable to play their MP3 collection on Vista.
Others have already pointed out that apps can create exceptions for themselves even in the XP firewall and that the Stereo Mix functionality behaves like that on Vista but can be re-enabled. The consequences of DLL diddling may have only revealed a bug of some kind. So I can wait a bit to see if Win7 is going to be any worse than Vista on the DRM front.
Oh, and I'm a Linux user too but being a Linux user doesn't mean I automatically believe any negative thing about MS just because they are MS.
I won't call you a troll but I do wonder just exactly how this everything-will-work-the-same-everywhere Linux is to be achieved. What we call "Linux" is the Linux kernel integrated with a large number of FOSS projects with the odd bit of proprietary code sprinkled on here and there. Just exactly how do posters of "The Truth" propose to make businesses and people who create these systems for their own reasons serve the Great Cause Of The Truth?
The market is causing it to slowly happen in a de-facto way anyway. Most people use one of a limited number of major distributions which appear to be slowly converging on a way to let this happen. Everyone using x86 Linux who wants Flash doesn't seem to have a lot of trouble with it. I've been using unchanged installs of games like Unreal Tournament and Return To Castle Wolfenstein across different machines and OS upgrades for years now.
Since anyone can make a Linux distro then "All Distros" will never support this goal. But then most of the "300 distros" alarmists like to cite are specialty tools like forensics and recovery discs anyway.
Then again look at the Wine project. There is a class of developers that is content with attribution at most and no other conditions and those tend use licenses of the MIT/BSD/X ilk. There are others who are more prone to feeling taken advantage of and these people tend want more rules so feel comfortable contributing only some rules are stated. The amount of this comfort needed varies hence things like the LGPL.
IMHO there is an implicit fallacy here. The fallacy is if the copyleft licenses didn't exist then all FOSS developers would be content or at least have to be content with super permissive licenses. I think it more likely such developers wouldn't make their code available at all save perhaps under the only remaining option which is PMITA Federal Prison If You Flout The EULA.
Speaking as someone who is an end user most of the time, I find the terms of most any FOSS license to be "fair enough" and find most arguing over "The True Nature Of Code Freedom" to be so much mental masturbation and flamebait.
Parent's post is the practical reality even if it isn't the legal reality. There are no practical means to stop anyone from using uploaded information in any way they see fit. Sure you can sic lawyers on them but that is dicey enough in your own country much less any other.
Firefox appears to be using an inefficient method to render the content to the screen. If a load up a page in Firefox and drag the window around fast, the content inside the window tears and blurs and stays that way for a second after I stop whipping the window around. Konqueror and Opera don't do this.
I have a copy of Unreal Tournament from 2000 or 2001. It was originally installed on Mandrake and has been through a number of Debian and Ubuntu installs. I fired it up last week just fine. The main reason it continues to work without tweakage on my part is that it appears to be linked with it's own versions of critical libraries like SDL that were supplied with the game. So if an app developer knows what they are doing then yes you can supply a binary-that-will-run-for-damn-near-ever for Linux systems as well.
Ths typical Mac user likes MacOS because all the software and hardware is beautifully integrated and consistent, and everything Just Works. The last thing on earth that type of person is going to do is switch to Linux, but then insist on trying to run some kludged-together version of a Mac application that wasn't really designed to run on Linux.
I use Windows, OS X, and Linux on a daily basis and can find warts and things that don't Just Work in all of them. I'll allow that OS X does a better job of enforcing it's conventions for consistency's sake and if the drivers and software exist then a novice will have an easier time with hardware than Windows or Linux. Nonetheless, I don't drink the OS X-Is-Nirvana Kool-Aid.
Your mistake is assuming that everyone who uses OS X does. There's been the odd app or two on OS X I wouldn't mind seeing on Linux. GNUStep as a porting environment means that selected apps could gain some cross platform capability without sacrificing anything on OS X. That doesn't mean hordes of OS X users switching to oogy old Linux. It means some nominally OS X apps may gain Linux and BSD users or that Linux and BSD devs may bring some apps to OS X.
And I really would like to see GNUStep be a viable porting environment but I wouldn't want it to be OS X' Wine. I couldn't see that working well at all.
Does most malware actually execute a command shell? It seems to me that malware need only to be able to make syscalls. OS 9 certainly wouldn't have been terribly secure in that regard. Everything had system level privileges.
If you have a problem where the fix isn't as simple as clicking a checkbox then yes Windows can be much more difficult to administer. Case in point, I once had a problem where one of the directories holding some of the AD files was misnamed by one character and the logs weren't terribly informative. This caused quite a few random seeming problems at the client's office. Equivalent problems on Linux and BSD tend to be quite easy to trace.
Things like locks, vaults, and safes are rated in terms of the time it takes for competent thieves to break in. For that matter, they probably derive those ratings by actually turning safecrackers loose on them. Vaults and safes aren't intended to be impregnable security in and of themselves. If a vault has an 8 hour rating and the bank is never left unattended for longer than that then it is doing it's job.
As for tunneling, I wouldn't be surprised if large institutions with very valuable things don't employ sensors against that.
I have to wonder if Microsoft decides to bash Linux, i.e. Ubuntu via advertising would it reach more customers who may not know too much about Ubuntu?
Linux is garnering enough buzz on its own that MS can't just ignore it. What you say would have been true five years ago for the desktop but even five years ago Linux was a sufficient threat on the server that that they couldn't ignore it then either. MS is a mature company with some degree of presence on every country on Earth. They have no direction to go but down. Linux/FOSS is an ever improving ecosystem that has nowhere to go but up and mainly at MS' expense now that FOSS has eaten all of the proprietary UNIX lunch that it can.
Was Woz the Right Genius at the Right Time, or is he a straight-up Hacker's Hacker, who just needs the right operational conditions for his genius to manifest?
I'd guess he's the Right Genius who needs a good manager checking his work. Woz' great talent is distilling a problem to it's practical essence then implementing it with a very low part count design. The problem is that he's been known to design things that only he groks. He designs hardware the way some Perl coders will cram a very complicated program into a 2048 character string of line noise. Case in point was Atari's Breakout arcade game in the Seventies. Video games in the mid seventies didn't have CPUs for the most part. They were implemented with discreet logic. Pull a board out of one of these things and it may have hundreds of 16 pin DIP chips on it. Woz reduced a 100 chip design to a 30 chip design. The problem was that he and Jobs moved on to found Apple and nobody could finish debugging the game so they had to start over.
Office for Mac lacks Access as well and the oversight is deliberate I think. An oft overlooked thing about Office is that it is used as a API for business apps. So MS supplies a suite that can work with Office docs (mostly) on a Mac but leaves out core pieces that preclude porting any of that business logic to OS X.
What "annual license fee"? I bought Windows XP in 2001 and that's the last time MS got any money out of me for Windows XP. I've been using it for 8 years now and have not given MS another dime for using it. So then, where's the "annual license fee" I was supposed to be paying?
His point is that MS may not be content with selling you something and then letting you use it for eight years anymore. So they make it unviable to use one of XP's successors for that long by either switching to some sort of annual licensing fee or EOLing releases sooner so that you have to pay to stay on a supported OS.
I think it will get there but KDE on Windows doesn't work very well yet. Or at least it doesn't for me. Apps are very slow to start and run and have glaring bugs like Konqueror not rendering most of the graphics. This is what I've seen in an XP guest on VirtualBox.
It's good that KDE's crossplatform efforts are coming along but I wouldn't go showing it off to your Windows using friends yet.
Try rolling it out to OS X machines where the users are not administrators. Acrobat always wants to write the browser plugins to a system directory on first run even if they're already installed so end users get pestered to enter an administrative password even though all of this has been installed.
And yes there are things that Preview won't work well for.
Why should you have access to the playground? You still have your shovel. Nobody took that from you.
You should if that was a condition for loaning the shovel. Using the shovel anyway then complaining about the GPL kids "forcing" you is lame especially since one can borrow the BSD shovel.
If you want to argue that the GPL imposes more conditions than the BSD license then I'll agree with you though I'd just as soon stay away from semantic games around the word "free". I do find both licenses fair and will happily use software licensed under either.
Fusion as in "create a fusion reaction that produces more energy that you spend creating the reaction" is fucking hard. Which is why we do #2 at all, and why you don't have unmetered power.
It is indeed fucking hard but has been pulled off a time or two for VERY short amounts of time. What's stupendously fucking hard is maintaining such a reaction in a continuous state then actually using the surplus energy to do work. What will then be ridiculously fucking hard is doing it in an economical fashion. Once a practical design is achieved the capital and startup costs are apt to be stupendous. If the design generates neutrons then there will be a waste problem as well since weakened radioactive parts will have to be replaced though I doubt in the quantities LWRs generate.
So what will I see after mooning some of these ads? Scarier thought: What would Goatse Man see after mooning the ad? What if I piss on the All Seeing Ad? Or hurl explosive diarrhea at it?
It's gonna suck to be poor marketdroid saps who collect customer feedback.
I tried the last 4.2 beta that is available for Windows in VirtualBox on XP. Konqueror basically would render maybe one out of ten graphics. I don't know what the state of the OS X port is but I doubt it is much better. When they get their code and build system debugged enough that KDE4 basically works on all three platforms is when I'll make the jump. Until then I'll just run the occasional KDE4 app on 3.5.10.
I heard of another one from the Soviet days that something like this:
A man dies and his soul appears before the Afterlife Commissar. "Your qualifications are such that you will not be permitted to enter Heaven. However they suffice to permit a choice between Capitalist Hell and Socialist Hell."
"What's the difference?"
"In Capitalist Hell, the demons will pound one nail into your ass each and every day of the month with ruthless efficiency. In Socialist Hell it is supposed to be much the same except the Devil likes to get drunk with the demons and they often forget to pound your nail in."
"In that case, I'll take Socialist Hell!"
"You may make that choice, Comrade but I must warn you: On the last day of the month, each and every one of those nails will be pounded into your ass."
What's needed now is a sub $150 netbook that only does the web and light document reading on an architecture like MIPS or ARM. And the more sub $150 the better. Picking an arch like that gets the price and power consumption down and all but MS proofs the machine. Sure MS can make sweet noises about WinCE but WinCE doesn't run J. Random x86 XP application.
The trend in netbooks has been bigger screens, faster procs, and more storage. You basically wind up with a small laptop that uses flash and lacks an optical drive but is otherwise indistinguishable from a low-end laptop and includes price and battery life. I want see things closer to original EEE PC 701 in a blister pack at Walmart with an impulse purchase price on it. And even if a super low price super power efficient x86 comes along so MS can compete in that space then their margins will have to go even lower.
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Er, no. That isn't what he's saying. He's questioning whether this early report is what it seems as do I. I'm no lover of MS by any means but I'm not going to seriously credit this report until I see others confirm its assertions. I recall the DRM of Vista being somewhat Chicken Littled as well. As it turned out, a fully DRMed WMA file can be a nasty thing indeed but nobody reported being unable to play their MP3 collection on Vista.
Others have already pointed out that apps can create exceptions for themselves even in the XP firewall and that the Stereo Mix functionality behaves like that on Vista but can be re-enabled. The consequences of DLL diddling may have only revealed a bug of some kind. So I can wait a bit to see if Win7 is going to be any worse than Vista on the DRM front.
Oh, and I'm a Linux user too but being a Linux user doesn't mean I automatically believe any negative thing about MS just because they are MS.
I won't call you a troll but I do wonder just exactly how this everything-will-work-the-same-everywhere Linux is to be achieved. What we call "Linux" is the Linux kernel integrated with a large number of FOSS projects with the odd bit of proprietary code sprinkled on here and there. Just exactly how do posters of "The Truth" propose to make businesses and people who create these systems for their own reasons serve the Great Cause Of The Truth?
The market is causing it to slowly happen in a de-facto way anyway. Most people use one of a limited number of major distributions which appear to be slowly converging on a way to let this happen. Everyone using x86 Linux who wants Flash doesn't seem to have a lot of trouble with it. I've been using unchanged installs of games like Unreal Tournament and Return To Castle Wolfenstein across different machines and OS upgrades for years now.
Since anyone can make a Linux distro then "All Distros" will never support this goal. But then most of the "300 distros" alarmists like to cite are specialty tools like forensics and recovery discs anyway.
Then again look at the Wine project. There is a class of developers that is content with attribution at most and no other conditions and those tend use licenses of the MIT/BSD/X ilk. There are others who are more prone to feeling taken advantage of and these people tend want more rules so feel comfortable contributing only some rules are stated. The amount of this comfort needed varies hence things like the LGPL.
IMHO there is an implicit fallacy here. The fallacy is if the copyleft licenses didn't exist then all FOSS developers would be content or at least have to be content with super permissive licenses. I think it more likely such developers wouldn't make their code available at all save perhaps under the only remaining option which is PMITA Federal Prison If You Flout The EULA.
Speaking as someone who is an end user most of the time, I find the terms of most any FOSS license to be "fair enough" and find most arguing over "The True Nature Of Code Freedom" to be so much mental masturbation and flamebait.
Parent's post is the practical reality even if it isn't the legal reality. There are no practical means to stop anyone from using uploaded information in any way they see fit. Sure you can sic lawyers on them but that is dicey enough in your own country much less any other.
If the system has a gui then distinct instances can be started on multiple VTs and switched betweeen by a keystroke.
Firefox appears to be using an inefficient method to render the content to the screen. If a load up a page in Firefox and drag the window around fast, the content inside the window tears and blurs and stays that way for a second after I stop whipping the window around. Konqueror and Opera don't do this.
I have a copy of Unreal Tournament from 2000 or 2001. It was originally installed on Mandrake and has been through a number of Debian and Ubuntu installs. I fired it up last week just fine. The main reason it continues to work without tweakage on my part is that it appears to be linked with it's own versions of critical libraries like SDL that were supplied with the game. So if an app developer knows what they are doing then yes you can supply a binary-that-will-run-for-damn-near-ever for Linux systems as well.
I use Windows, OS X, and Linux on a daily basis and can find warts and things that don't Just Work in all of them. I'll allow that OS X does a better job of enforcing it's conventions for consistency's sake and if the drivers and software exist then a novice will have an easier time with hardware than Windows or Linux. Nonetheless, I don't drink the OS X-Is-Nirvana Kool-Aid.
Your mistake is assuming that everyone who uses OS X does. There's been the odd app or two on OS X I wouldn't mind seeing on Linux. GNUStep as a porting environment means that selected apps could gain some cross platform capability without sacrificing anything on OS X. That doesn't mean hordes of OS X users switching to oogy old Linux. It means some nominally OS X apps may gain Linux and BSD users or that Linux and BSD devs may bring some apps to OS X.
And I really would like to see GNUStep be a viable porting environment but I wouldn't want it to be OS X' Wine. I couldn't see that working well at all.
Does most malware actually execute a command shell? It seems to me that malware need only to be able to make syscalls. OS 9 certainly wouldn't have been terribly secure in that regard. Everything had system level privileges.
If you have a problem where the fix isn't as simple as clicking a checkbox then yes Windows can be much more difficult to administer. Case in point, I once had a problem where one of the directories holding some of the AD files was misnamed by one character and the logs weren't terribly informative. This caused quite a few random seeming problems at the client's office. Equivalent problems on Linux and BSD tend to be quite easy to trace.
Things like locks, vaults, and safes are rated in terms of the time it takes for competent thieves to break in. For that matter, they probably derive those ratings by actually turning safecrackers loose on them. Vaults and safes aren't intended to be impregnable security in and of themselves. If a vault has an 8 hour rating and the bank is never left unattended for longer than that then it is doing it's job.
As for tunneling, I wouldn't be surprised if large institutions with very valuable things don't employ sensors against that.
Linux is garnering enough buzz on its own that MS can't just ignore it. What you say would have been true five years ago for the desktop but even five years ago Linux was a sufficient threat on the server that that they couldn't ignore it then either. MS is a mature company with some degree of presence on every country on Earth. They have no direction to go but down. Linux/FOSS is an ever improving ecosystem that has nowhere to go but up and mainly at MS' expense now that FOSS has eaten all of the proprietary UNIX lunch that it can.
I'd guess he's the Right Genius who needs a good manager checking his work. Woz' great talent is distilling a problem to it's practical essence then implementing it with a very low part count design. The problem is that he's been known to design things that only he groks. He designs hardware the way some Perl coders will cram a very complicated program into a 2048 character string of line noise. Case in point was Atari's Breakout arcade game in the Seventies. Video games in the mid seventies didn't have CPUs for the most part. They were implemented with discreet logic. Pull a board out of one of these things and it may have hundreds of 16 pin DIP chips on it. Woz reduced a 100 chip design to a 30 chip design. The problem was that he and Jobs moved on to found Apple and nobody could finish debugging the game so they had to start over.
Office for Mac lacks Access as well and the oversight is deliberate I think. An oft overlooked thing about Office is that it is used as a API for business apps. So MS supplies a suite that can work with Office docs (mostly) on a Mac but leaves out core pieces that preclude porting any of that business logic to OS X.
His point is that MS may not be content with selling you something and then letting you use it for eight years anymore. So they make it unviable to use one of XP's successors for that long by either switching to some sort of annual licensing fee or EOLing releases sooner so that you have to pay to stay on a supported OS.
I think it will get there but KDE on Windows doesn't work very well yet. Or at least it doesn't for me. Apps are very slow to start and run and have glaring bugs like Konqueror not rendering most of the graphics. This is what I've seen in an XP guest on VirtualBox.
It's good that KDE's crossplatform efforts are coming along but I wouldn't go showing it off to your Windows using friends yet.
Try rolling it out to OS X machines where the users are not administrators. Acrobat always wants to write the browser plugins to a system directory on first run even if they're already installed so end users get pestered to enter an administrative password even though all of this has been installed.
And yes there are things that Preview won't work well for.
You should if that was a condition for loaning the shovel. Using the shovel anyway then complaining about the GPL kids "forcing" you is lame especially since one can borrow the BSD shovel.
If you want to argue that the GPL imposes more conditions than the BSD license then I'll agree with you though I'd just as soon stay away from semantic games around the word "free". I do find both licenses fair and will happily use software licensed under either.
http://www.setileague.org/articles/meat.htm
It is indeed fucking hard but has been pulled off a time or two for VERY short amounts of time. What's stupendously fucking hard is maintaining such a reaction in a continuous state then actually using the surplus energy to do work. What will then be ridiculously fucking hard is doing it in an economical fashion. Once a practical design is achieved the capital and startup costs are apt to be stupendous. If the design generates neutrons then there will be a waste problem as well since weakened radioactive parts will have to be replaced though I doubt in the quantities LWRs generate.
So what will I see after mooning some of these ads? Scarier thought: What would Goatse Man see after mooning the ad? What if I piss on the All Seeing Ad? Or hurl explosive diarrhea at it?
It's gonna suck to be poor marketdroid saps who collect customer feedback.
I tried the last 4.2 beta that is available for Windows in VirtualBox on XP. Konqueror basically would render maybe one out of ten graphics. I don't know what the state of the OS X port is but I doubt it is much better. When they get their code and build system debugged enough that KDE4 basically works on all three platforms is when I'll make the jump. Until then I'll just run the occasional KDE4 app on 3.5.10.
I hope your friends are using light beer. If you play that with Vodka or heaven help us Tequila you're going to the hospital.
I heard of another one from the Soviet days that something like this:
A man dies and his soul appears before the Afterlife Commissar. "Your qualifications are such that you will not be permitted to enter Heaven. However they suffice to permit a choice between Capitalist Hell and Socialist Hell."
"What's the difference?"
"In Capitalist Hell, the demons will pound one nail into your ass each and every day of the month with ruthless efficiency. In Socialist Hell it is supposed to be much the same except the Devil likes to get drunk with the demons and they often forget to pound your nail in."
"In that case, I'll take Socialist Hell!"
"You may make that choice, Comrade but I must warn you: On the last day of the month, each and every one of those nails will be pounded into your ass."
What's needed now is a sub $150 netbook that only does the web and light document reading on an architecture like MIPS or ARM. And the more sub $150 the better. Picking an arch like that gets the price and power consumption down and all but MS proofs the machine. Sure MS can make sweet noises about WinCE but WinCE doesn't run J. Random x86 XP application.
The trend in netbooks has been bigger screens, faster procs, and more storage. You basically wind up with a small laptop that uses flash and lacks an optical drive but is otherwise indistinguishable from a low-end laptop and includes price and battery life. I want see things closer to original EEE PC 701 in a blister pack at Walmart with an impulse purchase price on it. And even if a super low price super power efficient x86 comes along so MS can compete in that space then their margins will have to go even lower.