GNU/Linux is ready for preinstall by vendors and it would be better for most users. Your case, thankfully, represents a tiny intersection of niche interests. Your girlfriend represents better than 99% of all computer users. We would all be better off if those users were given a platform that does not have the security problems Microsoft has. They will be better off when they discover all of the good free tools available without cost. Who knows, they might learn to do more with their computers than consume that way. Dell, Asus and other vendors have realized this and are now shipping and making good money doing it. Everyone but Microsoft is going to be better off.
They won't win by sitting on their hands and had better get moving. They tried that back in US back in the 80s and lost big time. It has taken ATT the last 20 years to lie cheat and steal their way back to government protected monopoly status and they are about to lose it all again. Your government is not the only one feeling redfaced about the pathetic network capacity they got in return for $200 billion and a lot of promisses. The next monopoly break up is not going to leave pieces large enough to grasp - it's going to be spectrum liberation, and that will be the end of all traditional broadcast and telcos. The more they piss their customers off, the sooner customers will realize what a fraud traditional telco is.
Were those your PR firm office mates or your sockpuppets that "spent two mod points to bury a post that started out at -1 to begin with."? You people have no shame.
Things will get worse if Microsoft gets away with this. Vendors have agreed to limit their lines, this weakens their position considerably because they will be investing in things the Soft considers harmless. If it's not harmless enough, they can demand production quotas and further restrictions.
I wonder what they offered besides XP? It's not like Microsoft has a winner on its hands with Vista, aka the OS 90% of people do not want.
I'm using hate in the "cancer", "communist", "unamerican", "get the facts", SCO and patent lawsuit sense. Microsoft not only hates free software, they waste a lot of time and energy trying to convince others to act emotionally. They need that because free software has all of the business answers these days. Asking Microsoft about free software is a waste of time. Their goal is to keep you away from software freedom.
Oh sigh, its you again. You don't care about software freedom, so you are either here to harass someone you think is twitter or you are here to defend Microsoft. What a waste of my time.
Software Freedom is not complicated. There are only four freedoms that matter and it's easy enough to apply them to any software license. The only thing that's complicated is Microsoft's licensing terms because they don't want anyone to have software freedom. If your PHB is interested in software freedom, it would be easier to go GPL like everyone else than try to reinvent it or waste time talking to Microsoft about something they hate.
What matters is that vendor support of free software is here to stay. This is a direct break in the Microsoft monopoly, as the Intel graphics effort was, and others will follow. Via realized it's more their best interest to have hardware that works than it is to try to extract control over people.
Size has nothing to do with this. If the code is small and complete, it shows that Nvidia and ATI never had much to offer and we should all wonder why they never bothered to cooperate. If the code is incomplete, more has been promised and will be delivered. All of this is great news.
Thanks VIA. Good graphics joins good power efficiency in the VIA appeal.
Lawsuits and common sense should get rid of these devices. They are going to accuse people of horrible crimes with all the accuracy, security and correctness of Microsoft Windows. You might as well let Bill Gates brand people he does not like with a scarlet letter and that would spark an interesting class action lawsuit or two. Anyone who trusts such a device is a fool. Proper situational awareness is a better way to keep yourself safe. If you have to look at a device to determine people's intentions, your situational awareness should be diagnosed as autism.
The quick fix is to get rid of your Microsoft dependencies and Microsoft is suicidal to court that. Hotmail and MSN both suck compared to services offered by Google, Yahoo and many others. You would think Microsoft would be trying to make their services more attractive in order to promote Vista. Instead they pull a bone headed stunt like this. Instead of Vista being the OS that makes it easier to share your world, it's that slow hog of an OS that blocks the world's most popular video site and won't work well with iPod. What are they thinking?
If what you say were true, you would know how these things start and your relatives would be very nervous right now. Friends of mine are survivors/refugees of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Franco's Spain, Palestine, Vietnam and Guatemala. All of them that I'm in touch with are terrified of what they see. Which violations do you defend? Invasion of privacy, newspapers being raided, repression of opposition groups, rampant paranoia, torture and conquest, what do you think are appropriate for your new home? It can happen here and it will if we let it.
Less importantly, why do you hate Twitter so much? All he's ever done is stand up for people's rights? Why do you defend the RIAA and Microsoft? They are instruments of repression that inevitably feed into the theft of dignity you both take so seriously and are so contemptuous of at the same time.
The US invasion of Iraq has cost the US more than 4,000 servicemen and Iraq one million dead, 2.5 million refugees, an irreparable infrastructure and horrific civil war. If that's not bad enough for you, the advocacy and use of torture should be. Wake up! we are now a terrible abuser of human rights and we are doing it for oil, big fat "best year ever" oil. What we do to others we will do to ourselves sooner than later.
Don't forget other costs of non free software, like advertising, anti-competitive practices, the obscene wealth piled up by company CEO's and many other things that have nothing to do with developer time. As Microsoft is one of the prime proponents of H1-B imports and mostly buys "mature" code for a dime on the dollar of actual cost, you might reconsider your advocacy of that company as a friend of developers.
Finally, there is no good reason to buy second rate, non free code when there's plenty of good free code available. At this point, only the most legacy bound organizations, irrational fanboys and the hapless victims of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices use Windows. People who escape are happier than you think they are - the way you interpret responses as angry reflects your own state of mind more than it does that of others.
I think RMS summed up the current US relationship with China quite well:
Rather than conserve oil, Bush is launching a new Cold War against Russia and China for control of the dwindling supplies.
McCain has similar ideas. Unlike the first Cold War, in which countries that respected human rights most of the time opposed Communist dictatorships, this will be a contest between two groups of brutal tyrants, both of which deserve the opposition of all people of good will. I think these evil regimes will use this Cold War as an excuse to become even worse. Both sides will sponsor terrorists to attack the other side, and then both sides will use the "terrorist threat" as an excuse to further trample the human rights of their people.
The rise of "IP" and corporate interests over democracy in the US has never been clearer than in the last five years. Everything you own can be confiscated for suspicion of "making available" crappy RIAA music that can be found on any radio station. Your email, web browsing, phone conversations and church can all be monitored without a warrent. Those who object will be put on "non fly lists" that are used by banks, employers even the local gym, so the accused is essentially proscribed. The military is now authorized to act against US Citizens in "an emergency". Massive voter fraud has been proved in several major elections. In short, most of the bill of rights has been violated in the interest of government and corporate power. Trade with China has not made China more free, it has made us more like them.
It shows the difficulty of getting at non networked facilities of your enemy and the stupidity of trusting equipment made by them. Verifiable free software and hardware offer solutions to both of these problems and that's what the military should demand. Trusting the enemy with secrets you won't trust your customers with is insulting. It's insane when your client is the military.
The lesson applies to more than the military - if you can't verify it, you should not trust it. Using non free software on devices produced in Communist China might save you a few bucks but it will cost you much more in the long run.
The madness of the "IP" empire is most apparent in this specific case. Using machines produced by your enemy is stunning folly for any military.
Virtual desktops, multiple split tabs, ala Konqueror, and a nice database like Kbibtex blow paper research away. While a physical desk can hold five or six references, a virtual one can hold dozens. They can easily be moved around and compared side by side, even on a tiny laptop screen. Finally, you can text search and then cut and paste an electronic file. I now absolutely hate paper journals and texts because they are clumsy to store, hard to find and even harder to use.
I used to think like you until my last major paper. I was taught to do research papers with index cards and a typewriter. Databases have replaced the index cards and the things mentioned above make it easier to fill the database up with knowledge. Having the original source at such easy reach makes it possible to check your previous interpretations and make sure you don't get carried away. The sum of all these improvements is speedier, more relevant research and a better quality paper. Electronic publishing combined with good research tools are a vast improvement over dead trees.
Kindle and other ebook readers are expensive toys because they are so relatively limited. I envy the low powered display, that's about all. The device itself might be good for people with very long commutes but the restrictions placed on them are right out of the right to read dystopia. They can not be used for serious research are second rate as a textbook and should not be relied on for news. That leaves you with entertainment/faux news use and even those are not things most people want restricted by third parties.
Well maintained, redundant archives should last forever - the ability to copy reliably is equivalent to imortality. I have not lost a single file in the last eight years and I have all of my mail going back 20. Devices may and have failed me but my work, letters, photographs and music has survived and grown. They can be passed on to my kids but books will be too bulky for the same. Every library is overflowing with the result of estate overflow. Some put them on the shelf as a "free library" the majority goes to the paper mill to make TP. Such is the sad fate of your paper media and this is why public libraries are important repositories of culture. In the end, not even libraries last forever. All civilizations have their down time and public libraries are often torched. The entire library of the ancient western world, for example, now fits on a single six by twelve foot shelf because the vast majority of it was lost. The US Library of Congres itself is rotting as we speak. Digital libraries will be much hardier than this.
I'm sick of books and would gladly pay for non drm'd replacement pdfs. I have hundreds of textbooks, novels and paperback books and can think of several serious restrictions. I have to remember who I loan them to. They are a pain to move and an even bigger pain to put back on shelves. Eventually, almost all of them will rot. I'd much rather have them all stored on a hard drive that I can run away with when the next Katrina comes. I've been taking pictures of the books I use more frequently, but a pdf would be better.
Publishers don't really stand to lose much this way. If the price was right, most people will just buy their pdfs. Universities and other schools can put the cost of texts into tuition. Employers will keep buying reference material. Libraries could pay a special fee based on average circulation. The other stuff might be swapped but it's not something people would have bought anyway. Publishers that don't get it soon enough are going to be made irrelevant by things like Google text and free science journals.
I want it to use KPDF, USB and just work. Sell me the book/paper and let me read it with software that works the way I like it to work. If you make it free, people will figure out how to make it usefull.
This is about the most stooooopid way possible.This is about the most stooooopid way possible. [several good reasons this is not in Skype or Ebay's best interest.]
I can think of no better proof that Steve Balmer is behind the move. The SCO case, the Novel Deal, the patent threat, OOXML... all of these have two things in common, Microsoft and extreme stupidity. The dumber it is the harder they push it.
This post about anti-trust deserves to be at the top of this discussion. There is no "new" Microsoft and the world of computing still suffers monopoly pricing despite their being free replacements.
You know both are overpriced when Windows is cheaper. Buy OLPC, a used laptop or some other worthy competitor instead. Any money spent on a bad deal just encourages bad deals in the future. Let both Asus and Microsoft take a bath on this one.
Perhaps, without Microsoft interference, Asus would have a $400 12 GB model and a $500 20 GB model. That would more closely match the US prices and falling hardware prices.
Slashdot Mirror
GNU/Linux is ready for preinstall by vendors and it would be better for most users. Your case, thankfully, represents a tiny intersection of niche interests. Your girlfriend represents better than 99% of all computer users. We would all be better off if those users were given a platform that does not have the security problems Microsoft has. They will be better off when they discover all of the good free tools available without cost. Who knows, they might learn to do more with their computers than consume that way. Dell, Asus and other vendors have realized this and are now shipping and making good money doing it. Everyone but Microsoft is going to be better off.
They won't win by sitting on their hands and had better get moving. They tried that back in US back in the 80s and lost big time. It has taken ATT the last 20 years to lie cheat and steal their way back to government protected monopoly status and they are about to lose it all again. Your government is not the only one feeling redfaced about the pathetic network capacity they got in return for $200 billion and a lot of promisses. The next monopoly break up is not going to leave pieces large enough to grasp - it's going to be spectrum liberation, and that will be the end of all traditional broadcast and telcos. The more they piss their customers off, the sooner customers will realize what a fraud traditional telco is.
This person thinks that Android will significantly stunt Windows Mobil plans.
Were those your PR firm office mates or your sockpuppets that "spent two mod points to bury a post that started out at -1 to begin with."? You people have no shame.
Things will get worse if Microsoft gets away with this. Vendors have agreed to limit their lines, this weakens their position considerably because they will be investing in things the Soft considers harmless. If it's not harmless enough, they can demand production quotas and further restrictions.
I wonder what they offered besides XP? It's not like Microsoft has a winner on its hands with Vista, aka the OS 90% of people do not want.
I'm using hate in the "cancer", "communist", "unamerican", "get the facts", SCO and patent lawsuit sense. Microsoft not only hates free software, they waste a lot of time and energy trying to convince others to act emotionally. They need that because free software has all of the business answers these days. Asking Microsoft about free software is a waste of time. Their goal is to keep you away from software freedom.
Oh sigh, its you again. You don't care about software freedom, so you are either here to harass someone you think is twitter or you are here to defend Microsoft. What a waste of my time.
Software Freedom is not complicated. There are only four freedoms that matter and it's easy enough to apply them to any software license. The only thing that's complicated is Microsoft's licensing terms because they don't want anyone to have software freedom. If your PHB is interested in software freedom, it would be easier to go GPL like everyone else than try to reinvent it or waste time talking to Microsoft about something they hate.
What matters is that vendor support of free software is here to stay. This is a direct break in the Microsoft monopoly, as the Intel graphics effort was, and others will follow. Via realized it's more their best interest to have hardware that works than it is to try to extract control over people.
Size has nothing to do with this. If the code is small and complete, it shows that Nvidia and ATI never had much to offer and we should all wonder why they never bothered to cooperate. If the code is incomplete, more has been promised and will be delivered. All of this is great news.
Thanks VIA. Good graphics joins good power efficiency in the VIA appeal.
Lawsuits and common sense should get rid of these devices. They are going to accuse people of horrible crimes with all the accuracy, security and correctness of Microsoft Windows. You might as well let Bill Gates brand people he does not like with a scarlet letter and that would spark an interesting class action lawsuit or two. Anyone who trusts such a device is a fool. Proper situational awareness is a better way to keep yourself safe. If you have to look at a device to determine people's intentions, your situational awareness should be diagnosed as autism.
The quick fix is to get rid of your Microsoft dependencies and Microsoft is suicidal to court that. Hotmail and MSN both suck compared to services offered by Google, Yahoo and many others. You would think Microsoft would be trying to make their services more attractive in order to promote Vista. Instead they pull a bone headed stunt like this. Instead of Vista being the OS that makes it easier to share your world, it's that slow hog of an OS that blocks the world's most popular video site and won't work well with iPod. What are they thinking?
If what you say were true, you would know how these things start and your relatives would be very nervous right now. Friends of mine are survivors/refugees of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Franco's Spain, Palestine, Vietnam and Guatemala. All of them that I'm in touch with are terrified of what they see. Which violations do you defend? Invasion of privacy, newspapers being raided, repression of opposition groups, rampant paranoia, torture and conquest, what do you think are appropriate for your new home? It can happen here and it will if we let it.
Less importantly, why do you hate Twitter so much? All he's ever done is stand up for people's rights? Why do you defend the RIAA and Microsoft? They are instruments of repression that inevitably feed into the theft of dignity you both take so seriously and are so contemptuous of at the same time.
The US invasion of Iraq has cost the US more than 4,000 servicemen and Iraq one million dead, 2.5 million refugees, an irreparable infrastructure and horrific civil war. If that's not bad enough for you, the advocacy and use of torture should be. Wake up! we are now a terrible abuser of human rights and we are doing it for oil, big fat "best year ever" oil. What we do to others we will do to ourselves sooner than later.
Don't forget other costs of non free software, like advertising, anti-competitive practices, the obscene wealth piled up by company CEO's and many other things that have nothing to do with developer time. As Microsoft is one of the prime proponents of H1-B imports and mostly buys "mature" code for a dime on the dollar of actual cost, you might reconsider your advocacy of that company as a friend of developers.
Finally, there is no good reason to buy second rate, non free code when there's plenty of good free code available. At this point, only the most legacy bound organizations, irrational fanboys and the hapless victims of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices use Windows. People who escape are happier than you think they are - the way you interpret responses as angry reflects your own state of mind more than it does that of others.
I think RMS summed up the current US relationship with China quite well:
The rise of "IP" and corporate interests over democracy in the US has never been clearer than in the last five years. Everything you own can be confiscated for suspicion of "making available" crappy RIAA music that can be found on any radio station. Your email, web browsing, phone conversations and church can all be monitored without a warrent. Those who object will be put on "non fly lists" that are used by banks, employers even the local gym, so the accused is essentially proscribed. The military is now authorized to act against US Citizens in "an emergency". Massive voter fraud has been proved in several major elections. In short, most of the bill of rights has been violated in the interest of government and corporate power. Trade with China has not made China more free, it has made us more like them.
It shows the difficulty of getting at non networked facilities of your enemy and the stupidity of trusting equipment made by them. Verifiable free software and hardware offer solutions to both of these problems and that's what the military should demand. Trusting the enemy with secrets you won't trust your customers with is insulting. It's insane when your client is the military.
The lesson applies to more than the military - if you can't verify it, you should not trust it. Using non free software on devices produced in Communist China might save you a few bucks but it will cost you much more in the long run.
The madness of the "IP" empire is most apparent in this specific case. Using machines produced by your enemy is stunning folly for any military.
Virtual desktops, multiple split tabs, ala Konqueror, and a nice database like Kbibtex blow paper research away. While a physical desk can hold five or six references, a virtual one can hold dozens. They can easily be moved around and compared side by side, even on a tiny laptop screen. Finally, you can text search and then cut and paste an electronic file. I now absolutely hate paper journals and texts because they are clumsy to store, hard to find and even harder to use.
I used to think like you until my last major paper. I was taught to do research papers with index cards and a typewriter. Databases have replaced the index cards and the things mentioned above make it easier to fill the database up with knowledge. Having the original source at such easy reach makes it possible to check your previous interpretations and make sure you don't get carried away. The sum of all these improvements is speedier, more relevant research and a better quality paper. Electronic publishing combined with good research tools are a vast improvement over dead trees.
Kindle and other ebook readers are expensive toys because they are so relatively limited. I envy the low powered display, that's about all. The device itself might be good for people with very long commutes but the restrictions placed on them are right out of the right to read dystopia. They can not be used for serious research are second rate as a textbook and should not be relied on for news. That leaves you with entertainment/faux news use and even those are not things most people want restricted by third parties.
Well maintained, redundant archives should last forever - the ability to copy reliably is equivalent to imortality. I have not lost a single file in the last eight years and I have all of my mail going back 20. Devices may and have failed me but my work, letters, photographs and music has survived and grown. They can be passed on to my kids but books will be too bulky for the same. Every library is overflowing with the result of estate overflow. Some put them on the shelf as a "free library" the majority goes to the paper mill to make TP. Such is the sad fate of your paper media and this is why public libraries are important repositories of culture. In the end, not even libraries last forever. All civilizations have their down time and public libraries are often torched. The entire library of the ancient western world, for example, now fits on a single six by twelve foot shelf because the vast majority of it was lost. The US Library of Congres itself is rotting as we speak. Digital libraries will be much hardier than this.
I'm sick of books and would gladly pay for non drm'd replacement pdfs. I have hundreds of textbooks, novels and paperback books and can think of several serious restrictions. I have to remember who I loan them to. They are a pain to move and an even bigger pain to put back on shelves. Eventually, almost all of them will rot. I'd much rather have them all stored on a hard drive that I can run away with when the next Katrina comes. I've been taking pictures of the books I use more frequently, but a pdf would be better.
Publishers don't really stand to lose much this way. If the price was right, most people will just buy their pdfs. Universities and other schools can put the cost of texts into tuition. Employers will keep buying reference material. Libraries could pay a special fee based on average circulation. The other stuff might be swapped but it's not something people would have bought anyway. Publishers that don't get it soon enough are going to be made irrelevant by things like Google text and free science journals.
I want it to use KPDF, USB and just work. Sell me the book/paper and let me read it with software that works the way I like it to work. If you make it free, people will figure out how to make it usefull.
Here is the key phrase from a reputable source:
I can think of no better proof that Steve Balmer is behind the move. The SCO case, the Novel Deal, the patent threat, OOXML ... all of these have two things in common, Microsoft and extreme stupidity. The dumber it is the harder they push it.
It is true.
This post about anti-trust deserves to be at the top of this discussion. There is no "new" Microsoft and the world of computing still suffers monopoly pricing despite their being free replacements.
You know both are overpriced when Windows is cheaper. Buy OLPC, a used laptop or some other worthy competitor instead. Any money spent on a bad deal just encourages bad deals in the future. Let both Asus and Microsoft take a bath on this one.
Perhaps, without Microsoft interference, Asus would have a $400 12 GB model and a $500 20 GB model. That would more closely match the US prices and falling hardware prices.