Everything that has free specifications has a free implementation. One follows the other like day follows dawn. The only thing that prevents people from interacting is when people keep secrets or threaten others with software patents.
People have made free software for obnoxious things too, like Microsoft's networking protocol or DeCSS. The EU's directives were helpful to Samba but the Samba people did an adequate job of reverse engineering the specs themselves. I think that the EU has gone a step further and made Microsoft release changes to the specs that Microsoft made to break Samba. Microsoft's networking protocols are inferior, so I don't keep up with it. DeCSS has, of course, had nothing but trouble from the DVD conspiracy/consortium.
Certification is yet another way to waste free software effort. If reverse engineering a sabotaged and constantly changing OS was not difficult enough, they now offer the chance to lick boots and pay for a certificate of Microsoft appreciation. Real interoperability is easy, liberate the code and follow reasonable standards. The more Microsoft does, the more transparent their motives are.
They can also use it for fear mongering at companies that continue to run Windows. What do you want to bet Microsoft creates a mechanism to not run "uncertified" code and link it into UAC with a default of deny? This can then be used as a threat to all free software projects.
Just say no. Don't take their money, don't do as they say, just ignore the whole thing and we will all be better off.
There are many people who share your taste but you should not deny others their fun. The amazing thing about free software is that there's always someone who wants to do specific tasks no matter how obscure. There are lots of people who would be very happy if Microsoft gave them software freedom for Windows. The code has leaked several times but it's worthless if it can't be used for any purpose, modified for specific purposes and shared in both modified and unmodified forms. No one wants to do Microsoft's dirty work for free, they want to have the freedom to make their computers work for them. This is why GNU/Linux is everywhere and why it's so much more fun.
People who mock freedom genreally don't have what it takes to keep their own.
Microsoft is welcome to liberate their code but they would rather try to "stay in front of open source crowds" with chances to sell your freedom. Interoperability is as simple as releasing specs and source code without obligation. Anything less is mockery.
We don't really know what the Soft plans to do, do we? Will they really do what Apple did and help themselves to a new round of BSD injections or are they just going to shuffle their own cards into new piles? There's not technical information in the fanboy blog post that somehow made Slashdot's front page.
Please don't try to blame those "lazy" "third party" developers again. That's a double insult to anyone who's been sold a Vista SDK now and projects like Wine prove where the problem really comes from. The design decisions you talk about are things that Microsoft should be transparent about but are not, as usual. People thought the "Plays for Sure" licensing turn around was a big knife in the back but Vista and now Windows 7 have taught everyone new lessons. Meanwhile, Wine and ReactOS make steady strides in running legacy applications in a way that Vista can't. The only explanations for Vista's lack of backward compatibility are incompetence or malice. The new Windows 7 plans point toward malice because others can do what Microsoft claims is impossible. You can be sure that people are going to port Wine, dosbox and others to Windows 7 and that will still be the preferred way to run legacy applications.
You have to be off your rocker if you think that Microsoft does not view the ability to run legacy applications as a competitive threat. The easier it is for people to get away from Microsoft, the faster the customers will flow. Steps taken to thwart virtual machine running of their own code point back to their fear of competition.
We can sit and arm chair direct Microsoft in to all sorts of fun things, but why bother when we could just pick up some free software codebase and do better for ourselves? Hopefully hardware makers will start thinking like this rather than going down whatever SDK path Microsoft tries to sell them next.
With this announcement of total backwards break, Microsoft has declared complete defeat for their business model. It would be nicer if they would fly the white flag and be good sports about it. The free software community will welcome them if they just GPL their code and act nice. Hell, XP would survive longer than 2010 if they GPL'd it because the community could really make what they want. They don't seem ready to do that, so they can sink for all I care.
Microsoft is always promising the next Windows will be built new from the ground up so not much is really new this time. The only difference here is the promise to break backward compatibility. Thebetaguy contradicts himself about that by having the balls to promise, "This should allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly," while Vista provided less than 60% of the same.
There are lots of other contradictions because thebetaguy does not really want to admit several things and he's angry about the few he's given in to. The Microsoft way of doing things was inadequate, but the change is blamed on legal challenges that competitors strangely don't have. He cites some of Vista's insane processes but fails to mention digital restrictions or the last minute elimination of XP drivers as reasons for poor performance. It's funny to watch a fanboy admit Microsoft is following Apple, but it would be nice for him to also admit that Apple followed free software and Unix practices.
Like I said, there's not much to this article. It's mostly a fanboy making excuses and casting blame for the failure of his favorite operating system. No real details have been announced and the game plan will, as usual, change before release - a sure sign that there's nothing really open about the "new" Microsoft. They are going to keep their secrets and continue to mess with anyone who's got any revenue potential.
Artists who conspire with Apple to screw listeners with digital restrictions will be no better off in the future than artists who conspired with the RIAA in the past. When the competition is gone, everyone is screwed again.
It's hard to tell who screwed up here but it looks like the typical IT train wreck. When you follow the links, you find that the field trials produced some 417 new or improved specifications. This means the original request was inadequate or that neither party was able to forsee all of the problems. Government contracting seems to go like this, just look at the mess electronic voting is.
Hmmm, yes I did provide something useful. It's amazing how people like reading informed opinion and how often people who know what they are talking about recommend free software and transparency. The US census is not incompetent but it can be improved. Improved processes and informed opinion are some of the better things you can get from Slashdot when tools like you don't fill the place up with bullshit.
Making as much of the data as possible available will help you and others determine what's up to snuff. The route taken by enumerators will make it easier to tell what's been counted and what has not. GPS data can be held up to any map or satellite imaging and it can be checked on foot by people who have a problem. That kind of information is not verifiable now. Better, more verifiable data is better for everyone.
I've done a census and think GPS enabled devices would greatly increase accuracy but it will also greatly increase costs. A sad fact is that people don't really go all the places they are supposed to go and honest enumerators don't last long in places that stick to quotas. GPS and time tracking devices will prove that the enumerator actually visted each and every place they should have. A mashup with something like Google maps will show if areas have been neglected. An honest census will take significantly more manpower than the one we have now.
There are, of course, the same kinds of risks we have seen with electronic voting. The only solution is to be as transparent as possible. Non free software is a no-no.
I thought about this for a while and don't like it. Replacing the RIAA with Apple is not the equivalent of creating a free market for music. With digital restrictions, Apple will be in charge in a way that the RIAA was but worse. You say:
Apple will sell just about anything. Several talk radio hosts have regular iTunes paid downloads, and none of them have RIAA contracts.
It sounds good, but I can replace the words like this:
Future_monopoly will sell just about anything. Several talk radio hosts have regular future_Tunes paid downloads, and none of them have Apple contracts
It's the concentration of power that's evil and leads to abuse.
If the CD and other restrictionless media goes away we will all be media poor again. It will be like going back to pre taping life where only special people with expensive equipment could make and sell recordings.
It's nice to see RIAA power fading but Apple is still a digital restrictions enabler. We shall see what they do with their power. Right now, the artist still gets the RIAA shaft from Apple the same as they do any other music store money wise. Has Apple even been able to break the RIAA, "our way or the highway" rule and sell both RIAA music and independent music?
They threaten the US and it's allies. No, I don't mean those quaint nation state things from WWII, I mean MSTF, GM, Coke, GE, Walmart, Disney, Warner Brothers, Exxon and so on.
HPC is pretty much Linux dominated and you need some serious horsepower to do 1000 angle sinogram backprojection of cm sized volumes with micron sized beams. A cubic cm would have 10E4 x 10E4 x 10E4 voxels, each with 10E3 angles. Hubba, hubba. They will also have to apply some kind of filtering to each sinogram and probably have to tweak that filter multiple times on lower resolution scans to get it right, and they want to do several a day. I've seen Microsoft clusters choke on networking problems for much less challenging work.
But I could be wrong and don't have a way to verify right now. Perhaps I misread the result when I did a df -h months ago. One things for sure, all of the file systems were well below 80% utilization, which is better for ext2 and ext3 filesystem performance.
A 2GB install is not very impressive for a GNU/Linux distribution. GPE and Oppie distributions fit in 64 MB and the world is swarming with 50 MB distributions like Puppy. These are admittedly less functional than a 2GB install and get there by lacking fonts, helpfiles and other stuff. DSL and others like it ride between the extremes and but are aimed at much less capable hardware. 2GB is pretty much a standard Debian install and I expected better of Xandros.
Of course, 2 GB it's still 1/2 to 1/4 of what a Windows system will want to eat up, so the GP post is a good warning. Windows users should wait until larger capacity units are out. They will get better price and selection anyway.
Why bother when you could just use Google Docs? Opps, I mean uhhh, you just can't do "serious office work" with an ultraportable unless you use Open Office. No! That sounds even worse, I'm sorry. Just use the Xandros version. Oh, I give up this comment is such a Microsoft bash. I'm a hater, sob, a biggot who wants the baby Balmer to cry.
These devices work better with GNU/Linux, so I hope the Windows version flops. Asus is unable to supply the GNU/Linux version as it is, so they must have lost their minds to roll out the XP version on hardware that only works when you stuff up SD card with binary crap.
The full featured Xandros OS fits in about 200MB. It includes open office, flash, firefox, Google mail and chat links, Skype and other software that can use the webcam and a reasonable media player. This way, the 4GB model is a good convergence device providing movie playback, music, business software and a video phone. Movies? Yes, they play great off USB thumb drives and you might be able to stream them to yourself with kmplayer. In other words, it does everything the other thin laptops want to do and does it with 1/4 the hardware and power use. Sweet isn't it?
The upshot is that you can get the XP version and have a hard time keeping it working or the Linux version that works today, but the price will come down eventually. Right now Asus is having trouble delivering 1/3 of demand due to battery shortages. Other hardware makers are sure to rush into the gap and prices will fall. If you think Steve Ballmer is shitting bricks now, just imagine him when these devices hit the projected $200 mark. Xandros and Asus have handed him his ass.
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Everything that has free specifications has a free implementation. One follows the other like day follows dawn. The only thing that prevents people from interacting is when people keep secrets or threaten others with software patents.
People have made free software for obnoxious things too, like Microsoft's networking protocol or DeCSS. The EU's directives were helpful to Samba but the Samba people did an adequate job of reverse engineering the specs themselves. I think that the EU has gone a step further and made Microsoft release changes to the specs that Microsoft made to break Samba. Microsoft's networking protocols are inferior, so I don't keep up with it. DeCSS has, of course, had nothing but trouble from the DVD conspiracy/consortium.
Certification is yet another way to waste free software effort. If reverse engineering a sabotaged and constantly changing OS was not difficult enough, they now offer the chance to lick boots and pay for a certificate of Microsoft appreciation. Real interoperability is easy, liberate the code and follow reasonable standards. The more Microsoft does, the more transparent their motives are.
They can also use it for fear mongering at companies that continue to run Windows. What do you want to bet Microsoft creates a mechanism to not run "uncertified" code and link it into UAC with a default of deny? This can then be used as a threat to all free software projects.
Just say no. Don't take their money, don't do as they say, just ignore the whole thing and we will all be better off.
There are many people who share your taste but you should not deny others their fun. The amazing thing about free software is that there's always someone who wants to do specific tasks no matter how obscure. There are lots of people who would be very happy if Microsoft gave them software freedom for Windows. The code has leaked several times but it's worthless if it can't be used for any purpose, modified for specific purposes and shared in both modified and unmodified forms. No one wants to do Microsoft's dirty work for free, they want to have the freedom to make their computers work for them. This is why GNU/Linux is everywhere and why it's so much more fun.
People who mock freedom genreally don't have what it takes to keep their own.
Microsoft is welcome to liberate their code but they would rather try to "stay in front of open source crowds" with chances to sell your freedom. Interoperability is as simple as releasing specs and source code without obligation. Anything less is mockery.
We don't really know what the Soft plans to do, do we? Will they really do what Apple did and help themselves to a new round of BSD injections or are they just going to shuffle their own cards into new piles? There's not technical information in the fanboy blog post that somehow made Slashdot's front page.
Please don't try to blame those "lazy" "third party" developers again. That's a double insult to anyone who's been sold a Vista SDK now and projects like Wine prove where the problem really comes from. The design decisions you talk about are things that Microsoft should be transparent about but are not, as usual. People thought the "Plays for Sure" licensing turn around was a big knife in the back but Vista and now Windows 7 have taught everyone new lessons. Meanwhile, Wine and ReactOS make steady strides in running legacy applications in a way that Vista can't. The only explanations for Vista's lack of backward compatibility are incompetence or malice. The new Windows 7 plans point toward malice because others can do what Microsoft claims is impossible. You can be sure that people are going to port Wine, dosbox and others to Windows 7 and that will still be the preferred way to run legacy applications.
You have to be off your rocker if you think that Microsoft does not view the ability to run legacy applications as a competitive threat. The easier it is for people to get away from Microsoft, the faster the customers will flow. Steps taken to thwart virtual machine running of their own code point back to their fear of competition.
We can sit and arm chair direct Microsoft in to all sorts of fun things, but why bother when we could just pick up some free software codebase and do better for ourselves? Hopefully hardware makers will start thinking like this rather than going down whatever SDK path Microsoft tries to sell them next.
With this announcement of total backwards break, Microsoft has declared complete defeat for their business model. It would be nicer if they would fly the white flag and be good sports about it. The free software community will welcome them if they just GPL their code and act nice. Hell, XP would survive longer than 2010 if they GPL'd it because the community could really make what they want. They don't seem ready to do that, so they can sink for all I care.
Microsoft is always promising the next Windows will be built new from the ground up so not much is really new this time. The only difference here is the promise to break backward compatibility. Thebetaguy contradicts himself about that by having the balls to promise, "This should allow the majority of legacy applications to run perfectly," while Vista provided less than 60% of the same.
There are lots of other contradictions because thebetaguy does not really want to admit several things and he's angry about the few he's given in to. The Microsoft way of doing things was inadequate, but the change is blamed on legal challenges that competitors strangely don't have. He cites some of Vista's insane processes but fails to mention digital restrictions or the last minute elimination of XP drivers as reasons for poor performance. It's funny to watch a fanboy admit Microsoft is following Apple, but it would be nice for him to also admit that Apple followed free software and Unix practices.
Like I said, there's not much to this article. It's mostly a fanboy making excuses and casting blame for the failure of his favorite operating system. No real details have been announced and the game plan will, as usual, change before release - a sure sign that there's nothing really open about the "new" Microsoft. They are going to keep their secrets and continue to mess with anyone who's got any revenue potential.
Boot time does not count!
Artists who conspire with Apple to screw listeners with digital restrictions will be no better off in the future than artists who conspired with the RIAA in the past. When the competition is gone, everyone is screwed again.
It's hard to tell who screwed up here but it looks like the typical IT train wreck. When you follow the links, you find that the field trials produced some 417 new or improved specifications. This means the original request was inadequate or that neither party was able to forsee all of the problems. Government contracting seems to go like this, just look at the mess electronic voting is.
That's too bad because there's a lot of promise in GPS enabled enumeration and electronic voting.
Hmmm, yes I did provide something useful. It's amazing how people like reading informed opinion and how often people who know what they are talking about recommend free software and transparency. The US census is not incompetent but it can be improved. Improved processes and informed opinion are some of the better things you can get from Slashdot when tools like you don't fill the place up with bullshit.
Making as much of the data as possible available will help you and others determine what's up to snuff. The route taken by enumerators will make it easier to tell what's been counted and what has not. GPS data can be held up to any map or satellite imaging and it can be checked on foot by people who have a problem. That kind of information is not verifiable now. Better, more verifiable data is better for everyone.
I've done a census and think GPS enabled devices would greatly increase accuracy but it will also greatly increase costs. A sad fact is that people don't really go all the places they are supposed to go and honest enumerators don't last long in places that stick to quotas. GPS and time tracking devices will prove that the enumerator actually visted each and every place they should have. A mashup with something like Google maps will show if areas have been neglected. An honest census will take significantly more manpower than the one we have now.
There are, of course, the same kinds of risks we have seen with electronic voting. The only solution is to be as transparent as possible. Non free software is a no-no.
I know the candy factory I toured in 5th grade would have been much better if we went to the cannabis college first.
No it would not have been. Falling into that groovy taffy pulling machine, for example, would have sucked.
I thought about this for a while and don't like it. Replacing the RIAA with Apple is not the equivalent of creating a free market for music. With digital restrictions, Apple will be in charge in a way that the RIAA was but worse. You say:
Apple will sell just about anything. Several talk radio hosts have regular iTunes paid downloads, and none of them have RIAA contracts.
It sounds good, but I can replace the words like this:
Future_monopoly will sell just about anything. Several talk radio hosts have regular future_Tunes paid downloads, and none of them have Apple contracts
It's the concentration of power that's evil and leads to abuse.
If the CD and other restrictionless media goes away we will all be media poor again. It will be like going back to pre taping life where only special people with expensive equipment could make and sell recordings.
It's nice to see RIAA power fading but Apple is still a digital restrictions enabler. We shall see what they do with their power. Right now, the artist still gets the RIAA shaft from Apple the same as they do any other music store money wise. Has Apple even been able to break the RIAA, "our way or the highway" rule and sell both RIAA music and independent music?
They threaten the US and it's allies. No, I don't mean those quaint nation state things from WWII, I mean MSTF, GM, Coke, GE, Walmart, Disney, Warner Brothers, Exxon and so on.
HPC is pretty much Linux dominated and you need some serious horsepower to do 1000 angle sinogram backprojection of cm sized volumes with micron sized beams. A cubic cm would have 10E4 x 10E4 x 10E4 voxels, each with 10E3 angles. Hubba, hubba. They will also have to apply some kind of filtering to each sinogram and probably have to tweak that filter multiple times on lower resolution scans to get it right, and they want to do several a day. I've seen Microsoft clusters choke on networking problems for much less challenging work.
Problems? That's what digital restrictions are for!
Microsofts statement hailed the appearance of extremely broad support for the standard at the end of the ISO voting process.
Broad? I think they mispelled bold faced fraud.
But I could be wrong and don't have a way to verify right now. Perhaps I misread the result when I did a df -h months ago. One things for sure, all of the file systems were well below 80% utilization, which is better for ext2 and ext3 filesystem performance.
A 2GB install is not very impressive for a GNU/Linux distribution. GPE and Oppie distributions fit in 64 MB and the world is swarming with 50 MB distributions like Puppy. These are admittedly less functional than a 2GB install and get there by lacking fonts, helpfiles and other stuff. DSL and others like it ride between the extremes and but are aimed at much less capable hardware. 2GB is pretty much a standard Debian install and I expected better of Xandros.
Of course, 2 GB it's still 1/2 to 1/4 of what a Windows system will want to eat up, so the GP post is a good warning. Windows users should wait until larger capacity units are out. They will get better price and selection anyway.
They will first have to make the mistake of recognizing the standard despite so many irregularities and allegations of fraud.
Why bother when you could just use Google Docs? Opps, I mean uhhh, you just can't do "serious office work" with an ultraportable unless you use Open Office. No! That sounds even worse, I'm sorry. Just use the Xandros version. Oh, I give up this comment is such a Microsoft bash. I'm a hater, sob, a biggot who wants the baby Balmer to cry.
These devices work better with GNU/Linux, so I hope the Windows version flops. Asus is unable to supply the GNU/Linux version as it is, so they must have lost their minds to roll out the XP version on hardware that only works when you stuff up SD card with binary crap.
The full featured Xandros OS fits in about 200MB. It includes open office, flash, firefox, Google mail and chat links, Skype and other software that can use the webcam and a reasonable media player. This way, the 4GB model is a good convergence device providing movie playback, music, business software and a video phone. Movies? Yes, they play great off USB thumb drives and you might be able to stream them to yourself with kmplayer. In other words, it does everything the other thin laptops want to do and does it with 1/4 the hardware and power use. Sweet isn't it?
The upshot is that you can get the XP version and have a hard time keeping it working or the Linux version that works today, but the price will come down eventually. Right now Asus is having trouble delivering 1/3 of demand due to battery shortages. Other hardware makers are sure to rush into the gap and prices will fall. If you think Steve Ballmer is shitting bricks now, just imagine him when these devices hit the projected $200 mark. Xandros and Asus have handed him his ass.