Inexcusable, /. should use open cache or .torrents
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3D Modelling From a Sketch
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It was a 48 megabyte AVI file! Nobody got a chance to see it.
That really is inexusable on slashdot's part. They should have at least posted a.torrent, or used open cache. Now none of us can see the video, and the poor guy has probably had his site shut down by his providor (at least temporarilly).
Don't get me wrong, I think Linux has a very bright future and has a good chance of dominating over Windows someday. But the fact is, Windows is the still the most usable OS out there for the time being.
Not according to my mother, who switched from Windoze and now runs linux.
Not according to my girlfriend, who switched from Windoze and now runs Apple OS X.
Not according to my nieces and nefews (ages 2-14), who all run (at home) and prefer Linux over the windows systems they use at school, and who prefer open office over microsoft office.
Indeed, not according to a lot of people who are not particularly computer literate, are not at all idealogical with respect to software and digital freedom, and who still, once exposed to alternatives to Microsoft, never go back despite Microsoft's best efforts at lockin and petty harrassment via IE specific web pages, broken MS-only java implimentations, and the like.
Microsoft may be the most usable system for you. This may reflect your personal preferences, or it may reflect an idealogical, financial, or personal stake you have in Windows vs. other alternatives. Or it may be a function of unfamiliarity with the alternatives and a mind closed to them. Quite possibly the latter, as describing the crash prone, virus prone, digital-rights-mangled heap of buggy code that is Windows as more usable than Apple OS X, a system which even most Windows, Linux and FreeBSD enthusiasts will happilly admit is the easiest for non-clueful users to learn, certainly flies in the face of objective facts.
Indeed, emperical evidence suggests Windows is no longer easier to use than Linux (just more familiar), indeed, its propensity for worm and virus infestation, its continueing instability make it quite the opposite for those non-techie computer users I've exposed its alternatives to. (Even windows 2k dies for no good reason from time to time...not the daily reboots we once knew, but monthly reboots remain, something my OS X and Linux boxes do not suffer from).
Now quit being the jerk you are and go help your wife with her computer problems.
He is, by weaning her away from the source of those problems (shoddy Microsoft software), and using tough love where it is appropriate.
No new motions have been made since SCO's defeat in the last hearing
No new hearings have been scheduled or held
No new orders have been issued by the court
The existing protective order was mutually drafted and agreed upon by IBM, the court, and SCO.
It protects trade secrets, but not "code" per se.
Showing that any code distributed by SCO as a part of GNU/Linux is not a trade secret is trivial to do, and we can expect IBM to do so quite quickly
Non-trade secrets have no such protection, and will be available in open court documents
In other words, this is typical SCO FUD and misrepresentation of the facts, and in this case, facts that are already old and well known to those following the case. SCO has not won any victory here; quite the contrary. The alleged code (if it exists at all) will almost certainly be available after some very standard legal procedures.
There is truly nothing to see here; zdnet got suckered by a SCO press release. Regrettable, as they should have known better by now, but aside from allowing Darl et. al. to defraud some day traders and invenstors for another few days, it really doesn't amount to anything at all.
I've I've always wondered about the fascination metric people have with base 10. Sure we have 10 fingers, but for ever other use 10 is a bad number system, it doesn't divide 3 or 4 easially, and you often need to do that in the real world.
Because our numerical system and arithmatic is base 10, so using base ten units means conversion between units is simply a matter of moving the decimal point.
This is extremely useful, and works for every unit of measure EXCEPT time, which we have foolishly left in its archaic, hybrid form (base 12 hours, base 60 divisions thereof). Units of time, not to be confused with the calendar. The calendar will likely never be coherent, as planets, moons, and other celestial bodies rarely if ever choose orbits that are convinient to any human numbering system. But units of time that are typically used for calculating speed, acceleration, or duration of phenomena, are certainly amenable to a sensible approach, and one very elegant approach that scales to human sensibilities and biological cycles, and yet can be scaled to most measures of interest, is the day (or sol, if it is extraterrestrial).
When doing numerical calculations with standard units, one can move the decimal around (in ones head, if one is so inclined) to convert to or from any standard metric unit. This isn't true when switching from kph to kps, where instead of a sensible base 10 approach LIKE EVERY OTHER UNIT bar none, we have to use a base 60 multiplier, resulting in a multiplication by 3600.
Base 10 is more convinient, and dividing by 3 or 4 is no more difficult than for anything else in our decimal system.
Now, if you'd like to change the entire numerical system from base ten to base 12 or base 60, fine (I even postulate such a move in one of my novels), but as long as our numerical and arithmatic system is base 10, so too should be our units, including our basic units of time. This archaic, hybrid crap needs to go, and mapping that crap to another planet when there are far more elegant approaches (such as the one I outlined, not to mention numerous others) goes beyond absurd.
They should have used metric divisions of "sols"
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Living on Mars Time
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree.
Frankly, given that we do all of our other work in base 10, I'm surprised scientists haven't used this as an opportunity to introduce a base-10 time system for mars (and the other planets as well).
Convert between Martian time, Jupiter Time, Calliston Time, etc. via a simple coefficient (perhaps defined such that 1.0 yields earth standard time in base-10). Indeed, such a system could even be backported to the earth, should we ever have the desire. Given that the rest of our units of measure are in base 10, this makes perfect sense.
Of course, calendars do not lend themselves to base 10, but neither do they lend themselves to base 12 or base 60. In any event, that is no reason that basic temporal units, such as are used in physics (meters/second^2, etc) shouldn't be in the same base as the rest of our scientific units.
In addition to the easier kitchen-math of using base 10 over base 60, this approach would have had the added advantage of not being so easilly confusing: no one is going to confuse a second with a microsol, be it a microsol on Mars, on Jupiter, on Io, or even on Earth, while a 'martian second' vs. a 'terran second' is bound to sow all kinds of confusion over the next few generations.
Is it possible to be racist against your own race? Is it possible to discriminate against your own "people"? I don't really think so.
Then you ignore most of history and are woefully mistaken. Some of the most anti-semetic people in history have been Jewish, either in full or in part (I reject Godwin's so-called law, so I will mention in passing that Hitler was 1/8th Jewish, though far more commonly Jewish run firms in the US discriminated in their hiring practices against Jews back in the bad old anti-semetic days of this country).
There are plenty of white liberals who will say incredibly bigoted and inaccurate things about their own 'race' (and I say this as a liberal myself), including one white commentator's assertion that anyone with white skin had to be racist "by definition" and apparently irrespective of that person's upbringing or opinions WRT race, equality, or anything else. Guilty by reason of skin color, out of the mouth of one of the same, would fit any reasonable person's definition of racism.
Finally, and perhaps most pervasively, there are women too numerous to count who are actively compaigning for a reversal of women's rights today (and in some cases even a return to the kitchen, barefoot, pregnant, and all, and even more extremely, there are those who still advocate female castration here in America, in this the 21st century). Their training at being "good girls" and their desire to accomodate men outweigh their own self-interest to such a degree that they will engage in sexism and discrimination against their own sex, and lobby against their own intersts loudly, vehemently, and very publicly. That these people do not represent the mainstream views of their respective groups is not particularly relevant, though of course in general they do not. The point is that they exist.
In other words, it is quite possible to be racist against one's own race, and throughout history it has quite often been the case that people have discriminated against their own. If you are voting against candidates based upon their race (or voting for candidates based upon their race), then you are in fact engaging in a racist act, your attempt to spin it otherwise nothwithstanding. Doing so is not only despicable, it is quite destructive to your community and your country. Just look at the near election of David Duke, or the reelection of convicted crack-smoker Mayor M. Barry of Washington D.C. as reasons why race should not play any rolling in chosing one's candidate.
I would rename Lindows fonster (or whatever the Swedish plural is) in Sweden, and ikkuna (or whatever the Finnish plural is) in Finland and be done with it.
Hint: both are the literal translation of 'window' into each langauge. Comply with the court order, and fuck Microsoft where it counts, hard, in one fell swoop.:-)
for paypal where there are so many redirect scams.
Yeah, for some reason I was reluctant to reenter my credit card information when I noticed the IP traffic going to identitytheft.com. Of course, running mozilla helps one notice such things.:-)
Glad to see Microsoft supporting the largest growing industry in America, on-line or otherwise, so proactively (identitytheft). It is about time one of the large corporate players started playing a proactive role in our recovery (NOT).
I had the link in the original reply (which Republican supporters of Orrin Hatch have modded into oblivion), but forgot to include it in my recap above.
Since Republican supporters of Orrin Hatch have modded my other reply to your question down, I'll repeat my answer here.
When will the people of Utah wake up and see that he does our state no good and harms our nation as well. Anti-trust laws are there for a reason. To keep companies from running rampant and having ultimate power to do as they will without regard. Nice move Orrin how much money did you take to get this law written?
To answer your question, Orrin Hatch whored himself [opensecrets.org] out to the entertainment industry for $150,000 or so. Interestingly enough, he is brazen enough to take $100,000 from the computer industry at the same time (one wonders if that isn't Microsoft priming the pump for TCPA/DRM... they are the only ones in the industry who would support this atrocity).
I am ashamed to have Orrin Hatch as my congressional representative.
And well you should be. As an American, I am ashamed of virtually everyone congress and the presidency, and a number of Supreme Court justices. It is appalling how deep the rot is... I do not have any optomism whatsoever that our government will ever recover from its current despicable state without a descent into revolution and chaos, and I do not have much optomism that our society will survive such a descent. In other words, I think it likely that our culture and our political system is about to consume itself and collapse utterly, and I am of two minds as to whether or not that will, ultimately, be a good thing or not.
When will the people of Utah wake up and see that he does our state no good and harms our nation as well. Anti-trust laws are there for a reason. To keep companies from running rampant and having ultimate power to do as they will without regard. Nice move Orrin how much money did you take to get this law written?
To answer your question, Orrin Hatch whored himself out to the entertainment industry for $150,000 or so. Interestingly enough, he is brazen enough to take $100,000 from the computer industry at the same time (one wonders if that isn't Microsoft priming the pump for TCPA/DRM... they are the only ones in the industry who would support this atrocity).
I upgraded to module-init and after that 2.4 wouldn't boot. grr.
Is there a way to have both installed so I could dual boot 2.4 and 2.6?
Gentoo GNU/Linux supports this, and I believe Source Mage does as well.
I run 2.6.0-test10 and 2.6.0-test9-mm5 on numerous Gentoo boxes with no problem, and occasionally switch back to 2.4.22 without difficulties.
I'm not sure how they do it exactly. A quick perusal of module-init-tools and modutils revealed that, for example, bot install/sbin/modinfo, and numerous symlinks to things like lsmod.old exist. There is probably a boot script that detects the kernel version on boot, creates the appropriate links, and then loads up the modules, but nothing in/etc/init.d jumped out at me as the culprit.
In any event, it is certainly possible have both installed and functional, and to seemlessly move between 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
In keeping with other solaris upgrade traditions, such as the replacement of vi with the venerable ed as the default editor, Sun Microsystems has announced several additional improvements to their core Solaris unix tools.
ed will be downb-graded to version 1.0.1. New features in the current are viewed to be too advanced for most users, and this move will simplify the interface. In particular, the confusing ">" prompt will be replaced with the vastly simplified "" (empty) prompt.
tar is being down-graded to version 0.55.1, removing numerous confusing command line arguments.
gzip is being removed in favor of compress.
ssh will be replaced by the much-streamlined 'crypt' command.
Package mangement is being further upgraded, with even more byzantine options for installing those binary packages in/opt. As with solaris 9, the tools necessary to remove packages once they have been installed will not be installed by default. Their use is depricated, and not-documented accordingly.
To compensate for the added complexity of the next revision of Sun's package management tools, the overall Solaris 10 environment will be further simplified by the immediate removal of ls, more, nad grep. These archaic commands are deemed extraneous and detractiving from the core performance improvements and ease-of-use enhancements of the Solaris 10 operating system.
Administrators who feel the need for these redundant tools can download their GNU equivelents from the usual locations, provided they have first paid Sun the $10,500 developers fee (per seat)...compiler not included.
In keeping with other solaris upgrade traditions, such as the replacement of vi with the venerable ed as the default editor, Sun Microsystems has announced several additional improvements to their core Solaris unix tools.
ed will be downb-graded to version 1.0.1. New features in the current are viewed to be too advanced for most users, and this move will simplify the interface. In particular, the confusing ">" prompt will be replaced with the vastly simplified "" (empty) prompt.
tar is being down-graded to version 0.55.1, removing numerous confusing command line arguments.
gzip is being removed in favor of compress.
ssh will be replaced by the much-streamlined 'crypt' command.
Package mangement is being further upgraded, with even more byzantine options for installing those binary packages in/opt. As with solaris 9, the tools necessary to remove packages once they have been installed will not be installed by default. Their use is depricated, and not-documented accordingly.
To compensate for the added complexity of the next revision of Sun's package management tools, the overall Solaris 10 environment will be further simplified by the immediate removal of ls, more, nad grep. These archaic commands are deemed extraneous and detractiving from the core performance improvements and ease-of-use enhancements of the Solaris 10 operating system.
Administrators who feel the need for these redundant tools can download their GNU equivelents from the usual locations, provided they have first paid Sun the $10,500 developers fee (per seat)...compiler not included.
If you don't like it, let them know and take your money somewhere else. If you're not paying for it, then you don't have anything to complain about.
Bullshit. Zero cost does not give someone license to behave in a despicable manner. If someone offered a free cleaning service for your home or office and then used their access to rape your spouse, you would be perfectly in your rights to complain bitterly and have them arrested (hell, if you catch them in the act, you have the right to shoot them dead in most states, and rightly so). If someone offered a free food service and fed you bad food that put you in the hospital, you could bring them up on charges of violating safe food laws, and sue for civil damages.
Someone offering a free web service or free email service does not entitle them to no complaints when they use that service to abuse their customers. SPAM, by any sensible definition, is abuse, and while it may not be as abusive as, say, rape or contaminated food, it is abuse nevertheless.
What is really appalling is how Yahoo abuses the resources of others. This isn't SPAM going to yahoo mailboxes exclusively (or even mostly), it is SPAM going to everyone who ever used their online clubs, whoever browsed a web page they required one to register for (clubs, etc.) even in passing...most of whome pay for email service, storage, and bandwidth elsewhere, only to have it abused by Yahoo (and, of course, other similiar low lifes peddling Penis extentions, Viagra, child pornography, and bulk mailing software).
Worse, most of these people signed up and made their preferences known, and were offered the "service" under those conditions and that understanding. Yahoo is once again, retroactively, changing their side of the bargain, and doing so at the financial expense of the recipients.
They deserve to be treated no differently than any other spammer, free service or no.
I can't help but think, if the process has to be started by someone, it isn't automatic, is it? And if it's so damned important, why wasn't it started automatically?
Seems to me the stupidity predates the technician.
I'd have to agree with you there.
If it was a decent UNIX system it would almost certainly have cron capabilities, and the job should have been cronned up. Unless of course the application was written poorly (e.g. back and front-end in one application that includes an X gui component and was therefor unamenable to cron)... or the UNIX system was so crippled as to not have cron, and the company's policies so defunct and crippling as to disallow downloading any of the numerous free and portable cron alternatives (or the platform so obscure it isn't supported... $CO, perhaps?)
It was obviously legacy in any event, and poorly implemented, at whatever level.
Alas, as Microsoft apologists are wont to point out (even in the many cases where the crash or security flaw doesn't stem from mismanagement or configuration errors), a misconfigured system ins't going to work regardless of what OS it is running.
In this particular case, quoth the article
One of MISO's monitoring systems required technical repairs that afternoon, but the technician who fixed it forgot to turn on an automatic feature that updated information every five minutes, preventing it from operating normally, the report said. "Thinking the system had been successfully restored, the analyst went to lunch."
The technician forgot to restart the monitoring software. Oops.
Following in $CO's illustrious footsteps, I think perhaps it is time we sued the poor schmuck who forgot to restart the monitoring program. Or better yet, the company dumb enough to hire him, the electrical company. After all, according to Our Lord and Master Darl McBride, End Users should pay (and pay heavilly).
don't exonerate yourself; given the situation, we're all guilty
Um, no. Given the situation, most of us will go along to get along, because we have been thoroughly conditioned from childhood on, particularly in our schools, then later to an even greater degree in much of our "corporate training" (ever attend business "bonding" camps or "motivational speaker" conferences? They are almost all exclusively designed to undermine one's individuality and replace one's ego with a virtually mindless loyalty to "the group"...all the while telling you the opposite, and making you out to be a coward if you have the courage to stand up and say "No, I won't conform to this idiocy!"), to do precisely that.
But not all of us succumb completely to that conditioning.
There were a sizeable number of people in Nazi Germany who stood up and resisted the Nazis. In every group, from students, artists, intellectuals to low-wage workers there were those who resisted the Nazis, who helped Jews and other persecuted minorities flee the authorities, and who actively tried to get the word out about the atrocities to the apathetic German public of the day.
Many were caught, and most of them murdered, but that in no way negates the fact that they stood up and were NOT guilty, despite the untenable situation in which they found themselves. If you check the last study you cite, you'll find that while the vast majority did indeed press the button to inflict pain per the Doctor's orders, there were those (an admittedly small number) who did not.
Indeed, if more of us could find such courage, be it in the workplace or in our political lives, our society wouldn't be in nearly as appalling a position as we find ourselves in today.
Winners may write the history books, but that doesn't mean what they say isn't true, or is fundamentally deceitful (or designed to be), and tendencies in that regard tend to be mitigated by both diverse sources, diverse points of view, and an application of scientific methodology and rigor by historians. This doesn't mean we have a precisely accurate view of history (we don't), nor does it mean we do not have bias (we do), but it does mean that the simplistic notion of "the winners wrote the history, therefor it isn't true" is a fallacious assumption to make at best. Skepticism of history is important (just as skepticism in any scientific endeavor is important), but an assumption of the negative without solid evidence is just as erroneous as an assumption of the positive, particularly when the positive is supported by available evidence.
I have access to my own employer's purchasing data. I can easily browse the GNU/Linux fora and get a good notion of how many IBM laptop users have post-installed Linux. The number is certainly not negligable, despite the fact that Microsoft proponents would have it be otherwise.
Sorry, I think IBM probably has a pretty good feel for how many machines get linux post-install. After all they take all the hardware tech-support calls.
Be as sorry as you like. That does not alter the fact that you offer absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion, beyond an appeal to authority ("The Great IBM[tm] magically knows more than lowly you, even if there is clear evidence they do not include the most common Linux deployment methodology in their sales statistic."), whereas I possess real word evidence of real world deployments that are clearly missing from their data, as a direct result of a non-negligable systemic flaw in how that data is gathered and correlated (IBM does not have any mechanism whatsoever for tracking the number of Linux post-installs on Windows laptops they have sold).
Hardware tech support is unrevealing in these cases. Many systems dual boot (in order to keep IBM utilities around for just such situations), and in other cases (such as our own), the original hard drive is removed and Linux installed on a replacement. Any warranty service results in the original hard drive being placed back in the laptop, to insure prompt (and uncomplicated) service.
It is very clear, at least from our purchasing behavior, that IBM has not in any way shape or form factored our Linux use into their purchase/usage statistic. We are hardly unique in this, and this demonstrates that IMBs data is in fact deceptive, significantly understating the deployment of Linux and (where applicable) FreeBSD.
Indeed, if web and download statistics are any guide (and in a very general sense they can be), there are one hell of a lot of people who have deployed Linux on their IBM/Wintel laptops... none of whome show up in IBM's sales statistics.
The assertion that a million OSS programmers would be able to make an AutoCAD-quality CAD program in a matter of years is a classic fallacy with respect to software project efficiency. (See: The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks.)
The mythical man month presumes a top-down, managed approach. It has not only not been shown to be applicable to free software and open source development, the history of numerous free software projects demonstrate its inapplicability. Proprietary, top-down management isn't terribly scalable, any more than top-down, managed economies are. OTOH the decentralized, self-organizing approach to software development employed in the free software world is quite scalable, as demonstrated by the success of GNU and in particular Linux, which was able in a few short years to achieve greater quality and portability in the creation of a free UNIX-like operating system than its commercial competitors (including the original SCO) were able to do in two decades.
The difference is very analogouos to that of centrally planned economies vs. those which are self-organizing (be thay capitalist, socialist, or in one case... in Spain... communist). Self-organizing systems, whether they are economies or large software development efforts, are vastly more scalable than centrally planned and top-down managed systems.
Developing a complete UNIX-like operating system was certainly more complex than developing a CAD system... and that has already been achieved with greater success in far less time than the commercial equivelents. There is absolutely no reason not to expect similiar results if and when the demand for a free CAD system and the number of qualified programmers capabable of creating such reach critical mass.
The reality is that (a) Brazil isn't the trendsetter (other countries have already made the move) and (b) the savings and strength afforded to the local IT economy by adopting a policy of software freedom vastly outweigh the conversion costs, which are a one-time-only expense.
Not only is it NOT a catch-22, converting to free and open software is something Brazil, and other countries, have learned they CANNOT afford NOT to do.
Unlike many such countries, Brazil is fortunate enough to have leadership enlightened enough to recognize this and courageous enough to stand up to Microsoft and their Washington, D.C. subsidiary (the US Government) and actually impliment it.
The problem with your argument is that the Brazilian government does not have the capability to represent much of a demand.
First, as local and regional expertise rises (an inevitable result of widespread adoption, even by "just" the government), of free software, the level of demand required to create a particular product (e.g. a free and open Autocad system) will go down. This is simple economics... the more supply one has, the less demand required for that supply to be disseminated. A market with a million qualified free and open source programmers looking for a market will produce far more niche products (products which by definition have a lower level of demand than non-niche products) of far higher quality than a market of only a thousand such programmers (though the latter will produce less-niche oriented software of excellent quality, as we have seen in the early days of many free and open projects... this quality being a function of the peer review and public criticism inherent in the free software and open source development models).
So, at the end of the day, Autodesk may not be required for the creating of an excellent open source AutoCAD.
Second, I believe you underestimate the demand a government of a large country, even a large third world country like Brazil, can create. We are still dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars... enough to spur plenty of innovation and development, even if it is a mere pittance to the revinues of monopolists like Microsoft
Third, even if your assertion of Brazil's limited ability to create demand were true, your argument clearly breaks down when one considers the broader picture, namely the adoption of free software by numerous governments throughout South America and the world, including China, Germany, and others. When taken together, the demand generated by those countries which have already begun their migration away from Microsoft and toward free and open source software is already more than sufficient to create significant demand, and Brazil certainly adds signficantly to that.
Which is probably why Microsoft and its apologists are so concerned... the fact of the matter is that these governnments are already large contractors, their 'thirt world' status notwithstanding, and their adoption of free software will be more than sufficient to generate the demand needed for even more outstanding open source and free software project development.
Which, at the end of the day, is what they fear even more than the immediate losses in revinue from these countries. This is the one way the rest of the world can get out from under the technological heel of Microsoft and the United States, and frankly the only way Microsoft and its Washington, D.C. subsidiary (the Bush Administration) can prevent this is through massive deception (which, alas for them, doesn't seem to be working), buying off corrupt politicians (Microsoft has been there, done that, and found they don't stay bought for long), draconian laws (that will harm the local economies of the US and other such countries far more than they will help by propping up monopolies such as Microsoft), or military invasion (which isn't practical for reasons too numerous to mention here).
In other words, the demand is already present, is already having an impact and spurring widespread development of exactly these tools, and is clearly growing geometricly in magnitude, and all Microsoft apologist rhetoric aside, it will only be stopped through the use of the government gun, either via legislation banning the entire free software paradigm outright (good luck keeping any kind of competative marketplace in tact in the context of such legislation), or military force.
Deception isn't working, draconian laws are already sabatoging the very economies they were intended to prop up, and, frankly, the rest of the world is sick and tired of being pushed around by the United States, so more direct coercion is unlikely. Buying off politicians through corruption works occasionally, but as Microsoft has recently learned in Peru, bought of politicians seldom remain bought-off, nor do they tend to remain in power indefinitely.
1. the number of buyers for thinkpads with linux is tiny. IBM has in fact shipped some models with linux pre-installed but as a general move, linux on laptops is still pretty chancy, why should they put all that effort into somthing that obviously will generate no return.
That number however is quite deceptive. I work in a Linux shop, and we run GNU/Linux on virtually every machine we own, including our IBM laptops.
However, Linux only shipped on a few low to medium end models, and of course we wanted the best model available at the time. Furthermore, those models which came with Linux preinstalled did not have my company's distribution of choice installed (Gentoo isn't exactly a likely choice for commercial vendors just yet), so there really wasn't an advantage to buying Linux preinstalled.
Net result: we've bought half a dozen or more IBM laptops solely for GNU/Linux use, each and every one of them with Windows preinstalled. Despite the fact that Windows was removed forthwith and Gentoo GNU/Linux installed in its place (and in use ever since), the purchase shows up in IBM's sales statistic as a Windows laptop.
Linux users tend to be power users. It is very unlikely that a significant proportion of them bought low-to-medium end machines with Red Hat preinstalled when they could buy nicer machines and install their own distro anyway.
This isn't to say Linux users aren't a minority group of purchasers of IBM laptops... we almost certainly are... but it is important to realize that, despite offering a particular model with Linux preinstalled, IBM's own marketing statistics significantly understate the number of hardware purchases made with the intention of running Linux and not Windows.
BSD, while an even smaller market segment, is almost certainly similiarly understated in their data.
In general, I'm okay with making it illegal to share pre-release videos/music...after all, that goes after personal acts, not technology, which is an appropriate use for law.
What if it is MY prerelease for MY movie that I'm trying to get into the hands of critics so that it sees the light of day despite my not being part and parcel of the MPAA?
This is as much an attack on Indie film makers trying to break into the market as it is copyright violators... indeed, the fact that one explicitly does not have to violate copyright in order to run afoul of this law is rather telling. I suspect non-MPAA film makers and potential competitors are the primary target of this legislation, and that, as usual, copyright violators are merely a convinient pretext for passing fundamentally anticompetative legislation.
Legislation attempts like this, and the intellectually bankrupt philosophies that engender it, lead me to believe that we will soon be little more than an economy of monopolies and trusts, with all of the worst traits of capitalism combined with all of the worst traits of a planned, noncompetative economy. Welcome to Our Brave New Future: more of the same on a much tighter budget, without the distractions of human rights or human respect.
The iPods are very cool, but I consider the non-replacable battery to be a showstopper design flaw. As the article points out, these batteries will lose their ability to store a charge in a few years (all rechargable batteries do so), and buying a replacement battery (as one does for one's camcorder or discman every few years) isn't an option.
Instead one has to throw away the ipod and buy a new one, and while one may argue that the technological changes in 5 years will be such that one would want to do this anyway (and perhaps most people would), I do not like buying a product with built in obsolescence in the form of "it will stop working properly in time X" when "it will be outdated in time X" is sufficient. I do have old technology I still use well beyond its end-of-life date, because it still works, and any ogg/mp3/wma/aac player should work until I decide I'm done with it.
Build an iPod with a changable battery and I'll seriously consider buying one. Add ogg and wma support, and any remaining question would vanish. But expect me to rerip my extensive collection in aac or mp3 format and... well, an ipod with exchangable battery MIGHT persuade me, but with a neuros as an option (albeit a less polished one) is, quite frankly, more likely to win on that front.
In short, the article's criticims are quite valid. The iPod is a very nice machine, but let's not kid ourselves about its limitations, which are non-neglibable to a great many of us.
Mind you, some conspiracy theorists also claim that the world is ruled by alien lizards, so I think it's fair to take what they say with a pinch of salt.
Yes, but they aren't the same conspiracy theorists.:-)
On a serious note, folks on slashdot (and indeed, people in general) tend to equate all types of conspiracies (and conspiracy theories) and lump them together...somehow equating Enron with the X-Files, at least until Enron is exposed publicly (then, for some reason, people are able to grasp the difference). This is a real problem, because it means that people will live in denial of real-world conspiracies that are taking place (e.g. Monsanto's conspiracy to dump toxic waste into the rural groundwater of the deep American south in the 1990s, or the current SCO conspiracy to defraud their investors and steal the copyright of thousands of software developers around the world) by dismissing them in their minds as no more likely than alien invasion, UFOs in storage at area 51, or silent black helicopters hovering overhead.
We do know conspiracies exist, therefor, it logically follows that some conspiracy theories are likely to be not out in left field, but rather quite correct.
We know as a matter of historical record that the Nazis conspired to stage a "terrorist" act against the Reichstag as a prelude to a coup d'tate, however, listening to the "conspiracy theorists" of the time would have been like listening to a conspiracy theorist today claiming that 9/11 was staged by Baby Bush (it obviously wasn't... but it has certainly been exploited in analogous ways by the FBI and the secret service to grab unprecidented power in the United States).
Microsoft has a history of conspiring to do dishonest and disingenuous things that directly (and illegally) harm and coerce their customers and their competitors, indeed, they have been convicted of doing so on numerous occasions (the DOJ anti-trust trial and subsequent sell-out being only the latest example). A conspiracy theorist pointing out a economic or tactical political advantage Microsoft might gain through ill-behavior toward its customers is not out in left field... their theory, while quite possibly false, is certainly worthy of consideration, particularly given the amount of historical fact that illuminates similiar behavior by Microsoft in the past.
So IMHO it is a mistake (and disingenuous) to equate actions by Microsoft and the copyright cartels that directly threaten our digital freedoms, and the conspiracies that do in fact drive these agendas (even if said conspiracies have the most banal of motivations: greed for cold, hard cash), with tin-foil hats, ghosts, and UFO sightings, as is so often done by the apologists of such groups.
Expressing concern about corporate or government malfeasance (conspired or not) isn't even remotely analogous to X-Files-like nonsense, and it is time we stopped allowing sceptics to use dishonest means (equating suspicion of the Reichstag burning ^H^H^H Microsoft's exploitation of their woeful security record to political advantage, with suspicion of Alien Lizard ruling the earth) to denigrate those who do express such concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a 48 megabyte AVI file! Nobody got a chance to see it.
.torrent, or used open cache. Now none of us can see the video, and the poor guy has probably had his site shut down by his providor (at least temporarilly).
That really is inexusable on slashdot's part. They should have at least posted a
Indeed, not according to a lot of people who are not particularly computer literate, are not at all idealogical with respect to software and digital freedom, and who still, once exposed to alternatives to Microsoft, never go back despite Microsoft's best efforts at lockin and petty harrassment via IE specific web pages, broken MS-only java implimentations, and the like.
Microsoft may be the most usable system for you. This may reflect your personal preferences, or it may reflect an idealogical, financial, or personal stake you have in Windows vs. other alternatives. Or it may be a function of unfamiliarity with the alternatives and a mind closed to them. Quite possibly the latter, as describing the crash prone, virus prone, digital-rights-mangled heap of buggy code that is Windows as more usable than Apple OS X, a system which even most Windows, Linux and FreeBSD enthusiasts will happilly admit is the easiest for non-clueful users to learn, certainly flies in the face of objective facts.
Indeed, emperical evidence suggests Windows is no longer easier to use than Linux (just more familiar), indeed, its propensity for worm and virus infestation, its continueing instability make it quite the opposite for those non-techie computer users I've exposed its alternatives to. (Even windows 2k dies for no good reason from time to time...not the daily reboots we once knew, but monthly reboots remain, something my OS X and Linux boxes do not suffer from).
Now quit being the jerk you are and go help your wife with her computer problems.
He is, by weaning her away from the source of those problems (shoddy Microsoft software), and using tough love where it is appropriate.
In other words, this is typical SCO FUD and misrepresentation of the facts, and in this case, facts that are already old and well known to those following the case. SCO has not won any victory here; quite the contrary. The alleged code (if it exists at all) will almost certainly be available after some very standard legal procedures.
There is truly nothing to see here; zdnet got suckered by a SCO press release. Regrettable, as they should have known better by now, but aside from allowing Darl et. al. to defraud some day traders and invenstors for another few days, it really doesn't amount to anything at all.
I've I've always wondered about the fascination metric people have with base 10. Sure we have 10 fingers, but for ever other use 10 is a bad number system, it doesn't divide 3 or 4 easially, and you often need to do that in the real world.
Because our numerical system and arithmatic is base 10, so using base ten units means conversion between units is simply a matter of moving the decimal point.
This is extremely useful, and works for every unit of measure EXCEPT time, which we have foolishly left in its archaic, hybrid form (base 12 hours, base 60 divisions thereof). Units of time, not to be confused with the calendar. The calendar will likely never be coherent, as planets, moons, and other celestial bodies rarely if ever choose orbits that are convinient to any human numbering system. But units of time that are typically used for calculating speed, acceleration, or duration of phenomena, are certainly amenable to a sensible approach, and one very elegant approach that scales to human sensibilities and biological cycles, and yet can be scaled to most measures of interest, is the day (or sol, if it is extraterrestrial).
When doing numerical calculations with standard units, one can move the decimal around (in ones head, if one is so inclined) to convert to or from any standard metric unit. This isn't true when switching from kph to kps, where instead of a sensible base 10 approach LIKE EVERY OTHER UNIT bar none, we have to use a base 60 multiplier, resulting in a multiplication by 3600.
Base 10 is more convinient, and dividing by 3 or 4 is no more difficult than for anything else in our decimal system.
Now, if you'd like to change the entire numerical system from base ten to base 12 or base 60, fine (I even postulate such a move in one of my novels), but as long as our numerical and arithmatic system is base 10, so too should be our units, including our basic units of time. This archaic, hybrid crap needs to go, and mapping that crap to another planet when there are far more elegant approaches (such as the one I outlined, not to mention numerous others) goes beyond absurd.
I agree.
Frankly, given that we do all of our other work in base 10, I'm surprised scientists haven't used this as an opportunity to introduce a base-10 time system for mars (and the other planets as well).
1000 "metric seconds" (microsols) = 1 "metric minute" (millisol)
100 millisols = 1 "metric hour" (decisol)
10 decisols = 1 sol.
Convert between Martian time, Jupiter Time, Calliston Time, etc. via a simple coefficient (perhaps defined such that 1.0 yields earth standard time in base-10). Indeed, such a system could even be backported to the earth, should we ever have the desire. Given that the rest of our units of measure are in base 10, this makes perfect sense.
Of course, calendars do not lend themselves to base 10, but neither do they lend themselves to base 12 or base 60. In any event, that is no reason that basic temporal units, such as are used in physics (meters/second^2, etc) shouldn't be in the same base as the rest of our scientific units.
In addition to the easier kitchen-math of using base 10 over base 60, this approach would have had the added advantage of not being so easilly confusing: no one is going to confuse a second with a microsol, be it a microsol on Mars, on Jupiter, on Io, or even on Earth, while a 'martian second' vs. a 'terran second' is bound to sow all kinds of confusion over the next few generations.
Is it possible to be racist against your own race?
Is it possible to discriminate against your own "people"?
I don't really think so.
Then you ignore most of history and are woefully mistaken. Some of the most anti-semetic people in history have been Jewish, either in full or in part (I reject Godwin's so-called law, so I will mention in passing that Hitler was 1/8th Jewish, though far more commonly Jewish run firms in the US discriminated in their hiring practices against Jews back in the bad old anti-semetic days of this country).
There are plenty of white liberals who will say incredibly bigoted and inaccurate things about their own 'race' (and I say this as a liberal myself), including one white commentator's assertion that anyone with white skin had to be racist "by definition" and apparently irrespective of that person's upbringing or opinions WRT race, equality, or anything else. Guilty by reason of skin color, out of the mouth of one of the same, would fit any reasonable person's definition of racism.
Finally, and perhaps most pervasively, there are women too numerous to count who are actively compaigning for a reversal of women's rights today (and in some cases even a return to the kitchen, barefoot, pregnant, and all, and even more extremely, there are those who still advocate female castration here in America, in this the 21st century). Their training at being "good girls" and their desire to accomodate men outweigh their own self-interest to such a degree that they will engage in sexism and discrimination against their own sex, and lobby against their own intersts loudly, vehemently, and very publicly. That these people do not represent the mainstream views of their respective groups is not particularly relevant, though of course in general they do not. The point is that they exist.
In other words, it is quite possible to be racist against one's own race, and throughout history it has quite often been the case that people have discriminated against their own. If you are voting against candidates based upon their race (or voting for candidates based upon their race), then you are in fact engaging in a racist act, your attempt to spin it otherwise nothwithstanding. Doing so is not only despicable, it is quite destructive to your community and your country. Just look at the near election of David Duke, or the reelection of convicted crack-smoker Mayor M. Barry of Washington D.C. as reasons why race should not play any rolling in chosing one's candidate.
I would rename Lindows fonster (or whatever the Swedish plural is) in Sweden, and ikkuna (or whatever the Finnish plural is) in Finland and be done with it.
:-)
Hint: both are the literal translation of 'window' into each langauge. Comply with the court order, and fuck Microsoft where it counts, hard, in one fell swoop.
for paypal where there are so many redirect scams.
:-)
Yeah, for some reason I was reluctant to reenter my credit card information when I noticed the IP traffic going to identitytheft.com. Of course, running mozilla helps one notice such things.
Glad to see Microsoft supporting the largest growing industry in America, on-line or otherwise, so proactively (identitytheft). It is about time one of the large corporate players started playing a proactive role in our recovery (NOT).
Orrin Hatch's sellout detailed here (FIXED LINK).
I had the link in the original reply (which Republican supporters of Orrin Hatch have modded into oblivion), but forgot to include it in my recap above.
Since Republican supporters of Orrin Hatch have modded my other reply to your question down, I'll repeat my answer here.
... they are the only ones in the industry who would support this atrocity).
When will the people of Utah wake up and see that he does our state no good and harms our nation as well. Anti-trust laws are there for a reason. To keep companies from running rampant and having ultimate power to do as they will without regard. Nice move Orrin how much money did you take to get this law written?
To answer your question, Orrin Hatch whored himself [opensecrets.org] out to the entertainment industry for $150,000 or so. Interestingly enough, he is brazen enough to take $100,000 from the computer industry at the same time (one wonders if that isn't Microsoft priming the pump for TCPA/DRM
I am ashamed to have Orrin Hatch as my congressional representative.
... I do not have any optomism whatsoever that our government will ever recover from its current despicable state without a descent into revolution and chaos, and I do not have much optomism that our society will survive such a descent. In other words, I think it likely that our culture and our political system is about to consume itself and collapse utterly, and I am of two minds as to whether or not that will, ultimately, be a good thing or not.
... they are the only ones in the industry who would support this atrocity).
And well you should be. As an American, I am ashamed of virtually everyone congress and the presidency, and a number of Supreme Court justices. It is appalling how deep the rot is
When will the people of Utah wake up and see that he does our state no good and harms our nation as well. Anti-trust laws are there for a reason. To keep companies from running rampant and having ultimate power to do as they will without regard. Nice move Orrin how much money did you take to get this law written?
To answer your question, Orrin Hatch whored himself out to the entertainment industry for $150,000 or so. Interestingly enough, he is brazen enough to take $100,000 from the computer industry at the same time (one wonders if that isn't Microsoft priming the pump for TCPA/DRM
I upgraded to module-init and after that 2.4 wouldn't boot. grr.
/sbin/modinfo, and numerous symlinks to things like lsmod.old exist. There is probably a boot script that detects the kernel version on boot, creates the appropriate links, and then loads up the modules, but nothing in /etc/init.d jumped out at me as the culprit.
Is there a way to have both installed so I could dual boot 2.4 and 2.6?
Gentoo GNU/Linux supports this, and I believe Source Mage does as well.
I run 2.6.0-test10 and 2.6.0-test9-mm5 on numerous Gentoo boxes with no problem, and occasionally switch back to 2.4.22 without difficulties.
I'm not sure how they do it exactly. A quick perusal of module-init-tools and modutils revealed that, for example, bot install
In any event, it is certainly possible have both installed and functional, and to seemlessly move between 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
FOR IMMEDIATE RE-RELEASE
/opt. As with solaris 9, the tools necessary to remove packages once they have been installed will not be installed by default. Their use is depricated, and not-documented accordingly.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC, SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
(Press Release: 11/25/2003)
In keeping with other solaris upgrade traditions, such as the replacement of vi with the venerable ed as the default editor, Sun Microsystems has announced several additional improvements to their core Solaris unix tools.
ed will be downb-graded to version 1.0.1. New features in the current are viewed to be too advanced for most users, and this move will simplify the interface. In particular, the confusing ">" prompt will be replaced with the vastly simplified "" (empty) prompt.
tar is being down-graded to version 0.55.1, removing numerous confusing command line arguments.
gzip is being removed in favor of compress.
ssh will be replaced by the much-streamlined 'crypt' command.
Package mangement is being further upgraded, with even more byzantine options for installing those binary packages in
To compensate for the added complexity of the next revision of Sun's package management tools, the overall Solaris 10 environment will be further simplified by the immediate removal of ls, more, nad grep. These archaic commands are deemed extraneous and detractiving from the core performance improvements and ease-of-use enhancements of the Solaris 10 operating system.
Administrators who feel the need for these redundant tools can download their GNU equivelents from the usual locations, provided they have first paid Sun the $10,500 developers fee (per seat)...compiler not included.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
/opt. As with solaris 9, the tools necessary to remove packages once they have been installed will not be installed by default. Their use is depricated, and not-documented accordingly.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC, SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
(Press Release: 11/25/2003)
In keeping with other solaris upgrade traditions, such as the replacement of vi with the venerable ed as the default editor, Sun Microsystems has announced several additional improvements to their core Solaris unix tools.
ed will be downb-graded to version 1.0.1. New features in the current are viewed to be too advanced for most users, and this move will simplify the interface. In particular, the confusing ">" prompt will be replaced with the vastly simplified "" (empty) prompt.
tar is being down-graded to version 0.55.1, removing numerous confusing command line arguments.
gzip is being removed in favor of compress.
ssh will be replaced by the much-streamlined 'crypt' command.
Package mangement is being further upgraded, with even more byzantine options for installing those binary packages in
To compensate for the added complexity of the next revision of Sun's package management tools, the overall Solaris 10 environment will be further simplified by the immediate removal of ls, more, nad grep. These archaic commands are deemed extraneous and detractiving from the core performance improvements and ease-of-use enhancements of the Solaris 10 operating system.
Administrators who feel the need for these redundant tools can download their GNU equivelents from the usual locations, provided they have first paid Sun the $10,500 developers fee (per seat)...compiler not included.
If you don't like it, let them know and take your money somewhere else. If you're not paying for it, then you don't have anything to complain about.
Bullshit. Zero cost does not give someone license to behave in a despicable manner. If someone offered a free cleaning service for your home or office and then used their access to rape your spouse, you would be perfectly in your rights to complain bitterly and have them arrested (hell, if you catch them in the act, you have the right to shoot them dead in most states, and rightly so). If someone offered a free food service and fed you bad food that put you in the hospital, you could bring them up on charges of violating safe food laws, and sue for civil damages.
Someone offering a free web service or free email service does not entitle them to no complaints when they use that service to abuse their customers. SPAM, by any sensible definition, is abuse, and while it may not be as abusive as, say, rape or contaminated food, it is abuse nevertheless.
What is really appalling is how Yahoo abuses the resources of others. This isn't SPAM going to yahoo mailboxes exclusively (or even mostly), it is SPAM going to everyone who ever used their online clubs, whoever browsed a web page they required one to register for (clubs, etc.) even in passing...most of whome pay for email service, storage, and bandwidth elsewhere, only to have it abused by Yahoo (and, of course, other similiar low lifes peddling Penis extentions, Viagra, child pornography, and bulk mailing software).
Worse, most of these people signed up and made their preferences known, and were offered the "service" under those conditions and that understanding. Yahoo is once again, retroactively, changing their side of the bargain, and doing so at the financial expense of the recipients.
They deserve to be treated no differently than any other spammer, free service or no.
I can't help but think, if the process has to be started by someone, it isn't automatic, is it? And if it's so damned important, why wasn't it started automatically?
... or the UNIX system was so crippled as to not have cron, and the company's policies so defunct and crippling as to disallow downloading any of the numerous free and portable cron alternatives (or the platform so obscure it isn't supported ... $CO, perhaps?)
Seems to me the stupidity predates the technician.
I'd have to agree with you there.
If it was a decent UNIX system it would almost certainly have cron capabilities, and the job should have been cronned up. Unless of course the application was written poorly (e.g. back and front-end in one application that includes an X gui component and was therefor unamenable to cron)
It was obviously legacy in any event, and poorly implemented, at whatever level.
heh!
Alas, as Microsoft apologists are wont to point out (even in the many cases where the crash or security flaw doesn't stem from mismanagement or configuration errors), a misconfigured system ins't going to work regardless of what OS it is running.
In this particular case, quoth the article
The technician forgot to restart the monitoring software. Oops.
Following in $CO's illustrious footsteps, I think perhaps it is time we sued the poor schmuck who forgot to restart the monitoring program. Or better yet, the company dumb enough to hire him, the electrical company. After all, according to Our Lord and Master Darl McBride, End Users should pay (and pay heavilly).
don't exonerate yourself; given the situation, we're all guilty
Um, no. Given the situation, most of us will go along to get along, because we have been thoroughly conditioned from childhood on, particularly in our schools, then later to an even greater degree in much of our "corporate training" (ever attend business "bonding" camps or "motivational speaker" conferences? They are almost all exclusively designed to undermine one's individuality and replace one's ego with a virtually mindless loyalty to "the group"...all the while telling you the opposite, and making you out to be a coward if you have the courage to stand up and say "No, I won't conform to this idiocy!"), to do precisely that.
But not all of us succumb completely to that conditioning.
There were a sizeable number of people in Nazi Germany who stood up and resisted the Nazis. In every group, from students, artists, intellectuals to low-wage workers there were those who resisted the Nazis, who helped Jews and other persecuted minorities flee the authorities, and who actively tried to get the word out about the atrocities to the apathetic German public of the day.
Many were caught, and most of them murdered, but that in no way negates the fact that they stood up and were NOT guilty, despite the untenable situation in which they found themselves. If you check the last study you cite, you'll find that while the vast majority did indeed press the button to inflict pain per the Doctor's orders, there were those (an admittedly small number) who did not.
Indeed, if more of us could find such courage, be it in the workplace or in our political lives, our society wouldn't be in nearly as appalling a position as we find ourselves in today.
Winners may write the history books, but that doesn't mean what they say isn't true, or is fundamentally deceitful (or designed to be), and tendencies in that regard tend to be mitigated by both diverse sources, diverse points of view, and an application of scientific methodology and rigor by historians. This doesn't mean we have a precisely accurate view of history (we don't), nor does it mean we do not have bias (we do), but it does mean that the simplistic notion of "the winners wrote the history, therefor it isn't true" is a fallacious assumption to make at best. Skepticism of history is important (just as skepticism in any scientific endeavor is important), but an assumption of the negative without solid evidence is just as erroneous as an assumption of the positive, particularly when the positive is supported by available evidence.
You have access to IBM's data?
... none of whome show up in IBM's sales statistics.
I have access to my own employer's purchasing data. I can easily browse the GNU/Linux fora and get a good notion of how many IBM laptop users have post-installed Linux. The number is certainly not negligable, despite the fact that Microsoft proponents would have it be otherwise.
Sorry, I think IBM probably has a pretty good feel for how many machines get linux post-install. After all they take all the hardware tech-support calls.
Be as sorry as you like. That does not alter the fact that you offer absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion, beyond an appeal to authority ("The Great IBM[tm] magically knows more than lowly you, even if there is clear evidence they do not include the most common Linux deployment methodology in their sales statistic."), whereas I possess real word evidence of real world deployments that are clearly missing from their data, as a direct result of a non-negligable systemic flaw in how that data is gathered and correlated (IBM does not have any mechanism whatsoever for tracking the number of Linux post-installs on Windows laptops they have sold).
Hardware tech support is unrevealing in these cases. Many systems dual boot (in order to keep IBM utilities around for just such situations), and in other cases (such as our own), the original hard drive is removed and Linux installed on a replacement. Any warranty service results in the original hard drive being placed back in the laptop, to insure prompt (and uncomplicated) service.
It is very clear, at least from our purchasing behavior, that IBM has not in any way shape or form factored our Linux use into their purchase/usage statistic. We are hardly unique in this, and this demonstrates that IMBs data is in fact deceptive, significantly understating the deployment of Linux and (where applicable) FreeBSD.
Indeed, if web and download statistics are any guide (and in a very general sense they can be), there are one hell of a lot of people who have deployed Linux on their IBM/Wintel laptops
The assertion that a million OSS programmers would be able to make an AutoCAD-quality CAD program in a matter of years is a classic fallacy with respect to software project efficiency. (See: The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks.)
... in Spain ... communist). Self-organizing systems, whether they are economies or large software development efforts, are vastly more scalable than centrally planned and top-down managed systems.
... and that has already been achieved with greater success in far less time than the commercial equivelents. There is absolutely no reason not to expect similiar results if and when the demand for a free CAD system and the number of qualified programmers capabable of creating such reach critical mass.
The mythical man month presumes a top-down, managed approach. It has not only not been shown to be applicable to free software and open source development, the history of numerous free software projects demonstrate its inapplicability. Proprietary, top-down management isn't terribly scalable, any more than top-down, managed economies are. OTOH the decentralized, self-organizing approach to software development employed in the free software world is quite scalable, as demonstrated by the success of GNU and in particular Linux, which was able in a few short years to achieve greater quality and portability in the creation of a free UNIX-like operating system than its commercial competitors (including the original SCO) were able to do in two decades.
The difference is very analogouos to that of centrally planned economies vs. those which are self-organizing (be thay capitalist, socialist, or in one case
Developing a complete UNIX-like operating system was certainly more complex than developing a CAD system
The reality is that (a) Brazil isn't the trendsetter (other countries have already made the move) and (b) the savings and strength afforded to the local IT economy by adopting a policy of software freedom vastly outweigh the conversion costs, which are a one-time-only expense.
Not only is it NOT a catch-22, converting to free and open software is something Brazil, and other countries, have learned they CANNOT afford NOT to do.
Unlike many such countries, Brazil is fortunate enough to have leadership enlightened enough to recognize this and courageous enough to stand up to Microsoft and their Washington, D.C. subsidiary (the US Government) and actually impliment it.
The problem with your argument is that the Brazilian government does not have the capability to represent much of a demand.
... the more supply one has, the less demand required for that supply to be disseminated. A market with a million qualified free and open source programmers looking for a market will produce far more niche products (products which by definition have a lower level of demand than non-niche products) of far higher quality than a market of only a thousand such programmers (though the latter will produce less-niche oriented software of excellent quality, as we have seen in the early days of many free and open projects ... this quality being a function of the peer review and public criticism inherent in the free software and open source development models).
... enough to spur plenty of innovation and development, even if it is a mere pittance to the revinues of monopolists like Microsoft
... the fact of the matter is that these governnments are already large contractors, their 'thirt world' status notwithstanding, and their adoption of free software will be more than sufficient to generate the demand needed for even more outstanding open source and free software project development.
First, as local and regional expertise rises (an inevitable result of widespread adoption, even by "just" the government), of free software, the level of demand required to create a particular product (e.g. a free and open Autocad system) will go down. This is simple economics
So, at the end of the day, Autodesk may not be required for the creating of an excellent open source AutoCAD.
Second, I believe you underestimate the demand a government of a large country, even a large third world country like Brazil, can create. We are still dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars
Third, even if your assertion of Brazil's limited ability to create demand were true, your argument clearly breaks down when one considers the broader picture, namely the adoption of free software by numerous governments throughout South America and the world, including China, Germany, and others. When taken together, the demand generated by those countries which have already begun their migration away from Microsoft and toward free and open source software is already more than sufficient to create significant demand, and Brazil certainly adds signficantly to that.
Which is probably why Microsoft and its apologists are so concerned
Which, at the end of the day, is what they fear even more than the immediate losses in revinue from these countries. This is the one way the rest of the world can get out from under the technological heel of Microsoft and the United States, and frankly the only way Microsoft and its Washington, D.C. subsidiary (the Bush Administration) can prevent this is through massive deception (which, alas for them, doesn't seem to be working), buying off corrupt politicians (Microsoft has been there, done that, and found they don't stay bought for long), draconian laws (that will harm the local economies of the US and other such countries far more than they will help by propping up monopolies such as Microsoft), or military invasion (which isn't practical for reasons too numerous to mention here).
In other words, the demand is already present, is already having an impact and spurring widespread development of exactly these tools, and is clearly growing geometricly in magnitude, and all Microsoft apologist rhetoric aside, it will only be stopped through the use of the government gun, either via legislation banning the entire free software paradigm outright (good luck keeping any kind of competative marketplace in tact in the context of such legislation), or military force.
Deception isn't working, draconian laws are already sabatoging the very economies they were intended to prop up, and, frankly, the rest of the world is sick and tired of being pushed around by the United States, so more direct coercion is unlikely. Buying off politicians through corruption works occasionally, but as Microsoft has recently learned in Peru, bought of politicians seldom remain bought-off, nor do they tend to remain in power indefinitely.
1. the number of buyers for thinkpads with linux is tiny. IBM has in fact shipped some models with linux pre-installed but as a general move, linux on laptops is still pretty chancy, why should they put all that effort into somthing that obviously will generate no return.
... we almost certainly are ... but it is important to realize that, despite offering a particular model with Linux preinstalled, IBM's own marketing statistics significantly understate the number of hardware purchases made with the intention of running Linux and not Windows.
That number however is quite deceptive. I work in a Linux shop, and we run GNU/Linux on virtually every machine we own, including our IBM laptops.
However, Linux only shipped on a few low to medium end models, and of course we wanted the best model available at the time. Furthermore, those models which came with Linux preinstalled did not have my company's distribution of choice installed (Gentoo isn't exactly a likely choice for commercial vendors just yet), so there really wasn't an advantage to buying Linux preinstalled.
Net result: we've bought half a dozen or more IBM laptops solely for GNU/Linux use, each and every one of them with Windows preinstalled. Despite the fact that Windows was removed forthwith and Gentoo GNU/Linux installed in its place (and in use ever since), the purchase shows up in IBM's sales statistic as a Windows laptop.
Linux users tend to be power users. It is very unlikely that a significant proportion of them bought low-to-medium end machines with Red Hat preinstalled when they could buy nicer machines and install their own distro anyway.
This isn't to say Linux users aren't a minority group of purchasers of IBM laptops
BSD, while an even smaller market segment, is almost certainly similiarly understated in their data.
In general, I'm okay with making it illegal to share pre-release videos/music...after all, that goes after personal acts, not technology, which is an appropriate use for law.
... indeed, the fact that one explicitly does not have to violate copyright in order to run afoul of this law is rather telling. I suspect non-MPAA film makers and potential competitors are the primary target of this legislation, and that, as usual, copyright violators are merely a convinient pretext for passing fundamentally anticompetative legislation.
What if it is MY prerelease for MY movie that I'm trying to get into the hands of critics so that it sees the light of day despite my not being part and parcel of the MPAA?
This is as much an attack on Indie film makers trying to break into the market as it is copyright violators
Legislation attempts like this, and the intellectually bankrupt philosophies that engender it, lead me to believe that we will soon be little more than an economy of monopolies and trusts, with all of the worst traits of capitalism combined with all of the worst traits of a planned, noncompetative economy. Welcome to Our Brave New Future: more of the same on a much tighter budget, without the distractions of human rights or human respect.
The iPods are very cool, but I consider the non-replacable battery to be a showstopper design flaw. As the article points out, these batteries will lose their ability to store a charge in a few years (all rechargable batteries do so), and buying a replacement battery (as one does for one's camcorder or discman every few years) isn't an option.
... well, an ipod with exchangable battery MIGHT persuade me, but with a neuros as an option (albeit a less polished one) is, quite frankly, more likely to win on that front.
Instead one has to throw away the ipod and buy a new one, and while one may argue that the technological changes in 5 years will be such that one would want to do this anyway (and perhaps most people would), I do not like buying a product with built in obsolescence in the form of "it will stop working properly in time X" when "it will be outdated in time X" is sufficient. I do have old technology I still use well beyond its end-of-life date, because it still works, and any ogg/mp3/wma/aac player should work until I decide I'm done with it.
Build an iPod with a changable battery and I'll seriously consider buying one. Add ogg and wma support, and any remaining question would vanish. But expect me to rerip my extensive collection in aac or mp3 format and
In short, the article's criticims are quite valid. The iPod is a very nice machine, but let's not kid ourselves about its limitations, which are non-neglibable to a great many of us.
Mind you, some conspiracy theorists also claim that the world is ruled by alien lizards, so I think it's fair to take what they say with a pinch of salt.
:-)
... but it has certainly been exploited in analogous ways by the FBI and the secret service to grab unprecidented power in the United States).
... their theory, while quite possibly false, is certainly worthy of consideration, particularly given the amount of historical fact that illuminates similiar behavior by Microsoft in the past.
Yes, but they aren't the same conspiracy theorists.
On a serious note, folks on slashdot (and indeed, people in general) tend to equate all types of conspiracies (and conspiracy theories) and lump them together...somehow equating Enron with the X-Files, at least until Enron is exposed publicly (then, for some reason, people are able to grasp the difference). This is a real problem, because it means that people will live in denial of real-world conspiracies that are taking place (e.g. Monsanto's conspiracy to dump toxic waste into the rural groundwater of the deep American south in the 1990s, or the current SCO conspiracy to defraud their investors and steal the copyright of thousands of software developers around the world) by dismissing them in their minds as no more likely than alien invasion, UFOs in storage at area 51, or silent black helicopters hovering overhead.
We do know conspiracies exist, therefor, it logically follows that some conspiracy theories are likely to be not out in left field, but rather quite correct.
We know as a matter of historical record that the Nazis conspired to stage a "terrorist" act against the Reichstag as a prelude to a coup d'tate, however, listening to the "conspiracy theorists" of the time would have been like listening to a conspiracy theorist today claiming that 9/11 was staged by Baby Bush (it obviously wasn't
Microsoft has a history of conspiring to do dishonest and disingenuous things that directly (and illegally) harm and coerce their customers and their competitors, indeed, they have been convicted of doing so on numerous occasions (the DOJ anti-trust trial and subsequent sell-out being only the latest example). A conspiracy theorist pointing out a economic or tactical political advantage Microsoft might gain through ill-behavior toward its customers is not out in left field
So IMHO it is a mistake (and disingenuous) to equate actions by Microsoft and the copyright cartels that directly threaten our digital freedoms, and the conspiracies that do in fact drive these agendas (even if said conspiracies have the most banal of motivations: greed for cold, hard cash), with tin-foil hats, ghosts, and UFO sightings, as is so often done by the apologists of such groups.
Expressing concern about corporate or government malfeasance (conspired or not) isn't even remotely analogous to X-Files-like nonsense, and it is time we stopped allowing sceptics to use dishonest means (equating suspicion of the Reichstag burning ^H^H^H Microsoft's exploitation of their woeful security record to political advantage, with suspicion of Alien Lizard ruling the earth) to denigrate those who do express such concerns.