Are you sure you can scrape even 10,000 developers from those three million federal employees? I don't think so, and the free software community has continued to grow exponentially. Sourceforge alone has almost two million registered users.
Even the Federal Government is not as big as the free software community. If they are not free to modify the source for any purpose and share those modifications with everyone else in a free way, they lose the benefits of freedom and become an unpaid bug fixer for Cisco. Malice can slip through in obfuscated form, they can't make it do what they want and they will have a hard time being sure what they audit is what they run.
Walter Bender has finally spoken on his resignation from One Laptop Per Child. In an email to me, he says he doesn't know about any plans for Windows XP on the XO laptop, so my fears of a Microsoft take-over of OLPC may be unfounded.
and only someone so perversely flexible will ever be able to confrom to M$XML. The Gnome foundation might get there one day but the ISO spec is doomed to a life of disrespect, much like rich text format before it. There's really no point in trying because the Soft is out of gas.
Microsoft can exterminate commercial vendors but they will always crop up faster than they go down. Community developed distributions will continue, with or without commercial help and there will always be a market for customizing that free software for particular clients. Customization is what most IT work is and most IT workers would prefer to have restrictionless raw material.
It's doubtful anyone will be able to corrupt the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project. Too many people understand the practical uses of freedom for Microsoft to ever be able to put the genie back in the bottle. Microsoft and Novell can play silly games in non free countries, no one cares.
You can say the same kind of thing about what constitutes "Windows". What Microsoft provides is a rather sparse framework for the non free community to fill in with drivers and applications that do useful things. This is natural because there are far more of us than there are people working for Bill Gates directly.
The difference, of course, is freedom. In the free software world, there's no central tyrant to extract tolls for every little piece of information or SDK. It is true that a lot of work is now coming from companies, and not just for the kernel, but none of that grants real control when the code is copyleft. Just as in the world of Windows, no single company contributes a very large share on it's own and they can't.
This is all bad news for Microsoft because they are being replaced. They go their revenue from controlling a few central and critical pieces of the hardware and software world. Free software can do the same things, why would anyone go back to paying the Microsoft tax when they can get everything done by simply cooperating?
Isn't it odd that I would not know about something that you think I wrote, especially when you look at all of the effort that obviously went into it? Don't you think that I would have simply linked to the article if I were those other people? Here's a clue, lots of people read Richard Stallman's political notes.
The level of effort you ACs exhibit without learning anything is amazing. Do you keep a database of all the things you think twitter writes or do you just keep all of it in your obsessively hateful little mind? Do you read every comment of every discusion looking for new versions of twitter? Why is it that the love expressed in my writing does not sink into your soul?
How about wireless network chipsets and ACPI? I agree that hardware support these days is almost a given but you never know what kind of surprise a Dibold may have left you with in their $3,000 computer. These are special machines.
The more common wifi chipsets require binary blobs. It might be better to have these things unplugged. others might want them hooked up all the time and not having to roll out an ethernet network every time you set up for voting would be a real time saver. Sooner or later, you have to plug the things in to get votes out.
ACPI is a notorious minefield. Just the other week there was yet another device, a Western Digital hard drive I think, that was made specifically to thwart free software by power management by not spinning back up the normal way.
You can't tell until you get there, which is what non free software has given us instead of the promissed commodity hardware. X86 has lots of nasty quirks and it's only the power of free software that can really hide those problems. Non free software users have all sorts of hardware burps they can't fix and can be sure their hardware will stop working one day just like Creative audio cards.
Westerners in the Olympic Village will see something very open and free but it's all a put on. The Atlantic had a good article about this not long ago. The great firewall of China is extensive and fine grained enough to block individual page views at random. It's enough to eliminate public discussion on many topics and it's enough to round up potential subversives. Information in China is not free because people in China are not free.
There's no good reason for evoting machines to cost between $15,000 and $30,000 per precinctper precinct because the "booths" cost $3,000 each. The equipment costs are now one tenth that and the difference represents the tremendous overhead cost of doing things the non free way. For all of that, I've read that Dibold never made much money of these things and wants out of the business.
Who's going to pay your buck-o-five? You are, multiple times.The larger costs are security and reliability problems that's gotten these overpriced machines banned despite sunken costs. Voters were willing to pay the price when they were lied to and they are willing to lick their wounds and get rid of the things now. It would be nice if the same machines could be fixed with free software.
Good point. A voter verified paper trail is an important safety system for electronic voting. It should be possible for local election committees to count votes by hand if they suspect a problem. I suspect rolls of paper would be cheaper than carefully prepared forms but these two things could cancel each other.
What I worry about is that the existing hardware was "Designed for Windows" so that it might not be possible to fix with free software. System hardware should be chosen based on the availability of free software driver support. The smallest binary blob should be rejected because it can conceal malice.
The highest cost of non free electronic voting is an easily thrown election.
The real shame of this is that electronic voting should be cheaper and more secure but Dibold's flawed equipment and business model has given a bad name to the whole concept. While it's true that electronic voting requires more equipment, this equipment should be cheaper. Ten $200 terminals should cost less to purchase and maintain than one specialty machine. Yes, $200 is a reasonable price if free software was used and a free software for voting can easily be written if it's not already available. Instead, Dibold passed on the "commodity" software model, complete with the upgrade treadmill, insecurity and lack of transparency.
You might have heard of this little thing called GNU/Linux that's been able to do everything XP and Vista can but with far fewer resources. No? Oh well, run your 7 year old OS and wait for Windows 7. The 7 to 7, or 7up should match the Coke classic upgrade very well, complete with a corn syrup obesity epidemic. Where did you want to go yesterday?
This stuff is here and can not be stopped, but you can hide and this is the only way to minimize abuse. Governments and companies have a huge advantage over the rest of us in this because they own your currency, create you ID cards and supply things you will have to buy unless you are very rich. You could exterminate everyone in power today but their replacements will do the same things.
The people behind The RFID Privacy Guard saw all of this coming a long way off. When it comes to RFIDs you can't trust other people to do what they should. Even if reasonable laws are passed over violent industry opposition, any store clerk can make a mistake. Recent ISP behavior, the choice point scandal and the still active TIA program all show that government and big dumb companies are able and willing to break the law. Anyone who wants to guard their privacy will be forced to monitor themselves.
The obvious things to block are drivers licenses, credit cards and other identifiers. Less obvious things are inventory tags for clothes and gadgets. Even if RFID tags are made less than unique, more like ordinary barcodes, the combination of things you carry will be unique.
Laws should be passed to eliminate things like ChoicePoint and greatly reduce ISP snooping and point of sale records. Even if you have nothing to hide you will suffer when those who would stand up for your rights are identified and neutralized.
"despite their objection"? who are these people who "object" to using free software and why? No one objects to email and the web, but they are largely run by free software, as is pointed out in the fine article by Taylor. This position and the way they take it for granted is baffling. Do the majority of people really care what business model their software is developed under? Are there really people who would pick up their pitchforks if confronted with Firefox? Do non free software companies really enjoy such mass support that people would never bother to look at options that could save them hundreds of dollars up front and all sorts of pain down the road?
"technical skill required to use it"? My two year old can click a mouse and my whole family uses GNU/Linux without missing a beat and has for years. Our TCO has been far lower thanks to free software - we use hardware much longer, don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for fundamental software like text editors and things just work.
Gartner people understand things are on the way but really the tone is hostile.
Why don't you nut cases take your insane twitter hate and moderation abuse someplace else? I'm not very interested in modpoints but the blatant knockdown of this thread is clearly abusive. People were intersted in what I had to say but you people buried it because you think I'm someone you hate. That's not helping the discussion here.
Fair use does include educational purposes, which is why professors are free to copy sections of text into "their" notes. These notes are sold exclusively to students. That might be covered. The whole point of the educational exemption was to make sure students get the best notes possible.
The other issue is who really owns the notes. I can be sure that I own my homework solutions and essays even though they are "derived" from my notes. My lecture notes are something else but they are generally as variable as homework is. No two people's notebooks ever look alike. There are differences in layout and emphasis. More astute students will put in things from their texts and other sources. We're not talking about Gilbert and Sullivan productions here where the words and notes must be perfect, we're talking about an interpretation of a lecture.
Everyone's got their favorite experts and they are often a shortcut to lots of research you don't have time for. He's an independent expert who cares more about your rights than other things, happens to be an expert in OS design who's been working since the early 70s and knows something about networking as well. Finally, he likes to answers email.
I don't think it is unreasonable to give lower priority to large data transfers, when the net is loaded, as long as that is done fairly for all large data transfers.
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Are you sure you can scrape even 10,000 developers from those three million federal employees? I don't think so, and the free software community has continued to grow exponentially. Sourceforge alone has almost two million registered users.
Even the Federal Government is not as big as the free software community. If they are not free to modify the source for any purpose and share those modifications with everyone else in a free way, they lose the benefits of freedom and become an unpaid bug fixer for Cisco. Malice can slip through in obfuscated form, they can't make it do what they want and they will have a hard time being sure what they audit is what they run.
Summary and original speculation were complete BS.
To keep in the spirit of the thread, XP smells worse than your shiny metal ass.
They should be afraid of the genuine article too. Only free software can be audited, modified and trusted.
and only someone so perversely flexible will ever be able to confrom to M$XML. The Gnome foundation might get there one day but the ISO spec is doomed to a life of disrespect, much like rich text format before it. There's really no point in trying because the Soft is out of gas.
Microsoft can exterminate commercial vendors but they will always crop up faster than they go down. Community developed distributions will continue, with or without commercial help and there will always be a market for customizing that free software for particular clients. Customization is what most IT work is and most IT workers would prefer to have restrictionless raw material.
It's doubtful anyone will be able to corrupt the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project. Too many people understand the practical uses of freedom for Microsoft to ever be able to put the genie back in the bottle. Microsoft and Novell can play silly games in non free countries, no one cares.
You can say the same kind of thing about what constitutes "Windows". What Microsoft provides is a rather sparse framework for the non free community to fill in with drivers and applications that do useful things. This is natural because there are far more of us than there are people working for Bill Gates directly.
The difference, of course, is freedom. In the free software world, there's no central tyrant to extract tolls for every little piece of information or SDK. It is true that a lot of work is now coming from companies, and not just for the kernel, but none of that grants real control when the code is copyleft. Just as in the world of Windows, no single company contributes a very large share on it's own and they can't.
This is all bad news for Microsoft because they are being replaced. They go their revenue from controlling a few central and critical pieces of the hardware and software world. Free software can do the same things, why would anyone go back to paying the Microsoft tax when they can get everything done by simply cooperating?
Would they really block Apple and GNU/Linux users as "unsafe"?
That's a very nice summary of the Atlantic article you found.
Isn't it odd that I would not know about something that you think I wrote, especially when you look at all of the effort that obviously went into it? Don't you think that I would have simply linked to the article if I were those other people? Here's a clue, lots of people read Richard Stallman's political notes.
The level of effort you ACs exhibit without learning anything is amazing. Do you keep a database of all the things you think twitter writes or do you just keep all of it in your obsessively hateful little mind? Do you read every comment of every discusion looking for new versions of twitter? Why is it that the love expressed in my writing does not sink into your soul?
How about wireless network chipsets and ACPI? I agree that hardware support these days is almost a given but you never know what kind of surprise a Dibold may have left you with in their $3,000 computer. These are special machines.
The more common wifi chipsets require binary blobs. It might be better to have these things unplugged. others might want them hooked up all the time and not having to roll out an ethernet network every time you set up for voting would be a real time saver. Sooner or later, you have to plug the things in to get votes out.
ACPI is a notorious minefield. Just the other week there was yet another device, a Western Digital hard drive I think, that was made specifically to thwart free software by power management by not spinning back up the normal way.
You can't tell until you get there, which is what non free software has given us instead of the promissed commodity hardware. X86 has lots of nasty quirks and it's only the power of free software that can really hide those problems. Non free software users have all sorts of hardware burps they can't fix and can be sure their hardware will stop working one day just like Creative audio cards.
Westerners in the Olympic Village will see something very open and free but it's all a put on. The Atlantic had a good article about this not long ago. The great firewall of China is extensive and fine grained enough to block individual page views at random. It's enough to eliminate public discussion on many topics and it's enough to round up potential subversives. Information in China is not free because people in China are not free.
There's no good reason for evoting machines to cost between $15,000 and $30,000 per precinctper precinct because the "booths" cost $3,000 each. The equipment costs are now one tenth that and the difference represents the tremendous overhead cost of doing things the non free way. For all of that, I've read that Dibold never made much money of these things and wants out of the business.
Who's going to pay your buck-o-five? You are, multiple times.The larger costs are security and reliability problems that's gotten these overpriced machines banned despite sunken costs. Voters were willing to pay the price when they were lied to and they are willing to lick their wounds and get rid of the things now. It would be nice if the same machines could be fixed with free software.
Good point. A voter verified paper trail is an important safety system for electronic voting. It should be possible for local election committees to count votes by hand if they suspect a problem. I suspect rolls of paper would be cheaper than carefully prepared forms but these two things could cancel each other.
What I worry about is that the existing hardware was "Designed for Windows" so that it might not be possible to fix with free software. System hardware should be chosen based on the availability of free software driver support. The smallest binary blob should be rejected because it can conceal malice.
The highest cost of non free electronic voting is an easily thrown election.
The real shame of this is that electronic voting should be cheaper and more secure but Dibold's flawed equipment and business model has given a bad name to the whole concept. While it's true that electronic voting requires more equipment, this equipment should be cheaper. Ten $200 terminals should cost less to purchase and maintain than one specialty machine. Yes, $200 is a reasonable price if free software was used and a free software for voting can easily be written if it's not already available. Instead, Dibold passed on the "commodity" software model, complete with the upgrade treadmill, insecurity and lack of transparency.
You might have heard of this little thing called GNU/Linux that's been able to do everything XP and Vista can but with far fewer resources. No? Oh well, run your 7 year old OS and wait for Windows 7. The 7 to 7, or 7up should match the Coke classic upgrade very well, complete with a corn syrup obesity epidemic. Where did you want to go yesterday?
This stuff is here and can not be stopped, but you can hide and this is the only way to minimize abuse. Governments and companies have a huge advantage over the rest of us in this because they own your currency, create you ID cards and supply things you will have to buy unless you are very rich. You could exterminate everyone in power today but their replacements will do the same things.
The people behind The RFID Privacy Guard saw all of this coming a long way off. When it comes to RFIDs you can't trust other people to do what they should. Even if reasonable laws are passed over violent industry opposition, any store clerk can make a mistake. Recent ISP behavior, the choice point scandal and the still active TIA program all show that government and big dumb companies are able and willing to break the law. Anyone who wants to guard their privacy will be forced to monitor themselves.
The obvious things to block are drivers licenses, credit cards and other identifiers. Less obvious things are inventory tags for clothes and gadgets. Even if RFID tags are made less than unique, more like ordinary barcodes, the combination of things you carry will be unique.
Laws should be passed to eliminate things like ChoicePoint and greatly reduce ISP snooping and point of sale records. Even if you have nothing to hide you will suffer when those who would stand up for your rights are identified and neutralized.
"despite their objection"? who are these people who "object" to using free software and why? No one objects to email and the web, but they are largely run by free software, as is pointed out in the fine article by Taylor. This position and the way they take it for granted is baffling. Do the majority of people really care what business model their software is developed under? Are there really people who would pick up their pitchforks if confronted with Firefox? Do non free software companies really enjoy such mass support that people would never bother to look at options that could save them hundreds of dollars up front and all sorts of pain down the road?
"technical skill required to use it"? My two year old can click a mouse and my whole family uses GNU/Linux without missing a beat and has for years. Our TCO has been far lower thanks to free software - we use hardware much longer, don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for fundamental software like text editors and things just work.
Gartner people understand things are on the way but really the tone is hostile.
Why don't you nut cases take your insane twitter hate and moderation abuse someplace else? I'm not very interested in modpoints but the blatant knockdown of this thread is clearly abusive. People were intersted in what I had to say but you people buried it because you think I'm someone you hate. That's not helping the discussion here.
Fair use does include educational purposes, which is why professors are free to copy sections of text into "their" notes. These notes are sold exclusively to students. That might be covered. The whole point of the educational exemption was to make sure students get the best notes possible.
The other issue is who really owns the notes. I can be sure that I own my homework solutions and essays even though they are "derived" from my notes. My lecture notes are something else but they are generally as variable as homework is. No two people's notebooks ever look alike. There are differences in layout and emphasis. More astute students will put in things from their texts and other sources. We're not talking about Gilbert and Sullivan productions here where the words and notes must be perfect, we're talking about an interpretation of a lecture.
Everyone's got their favorite experts and they are often a shortcut to lots of research you don't have time for. He's an independent expert who cares more about your rights than other things, happens to be an expert in OS design who's been working since the early 70s and knows something about networking as well. Finally, he likes to answers email.
I have been told that the ability to do this has been around since the 1970s. Don't all equipment makers have some version?
The right link. Sorry about that.
He seems to agree. This surprised me but it seems that equipment can do this fairly.