It would be nice to have Windows act in a modular fashion. Think of being able to extend the ability of your computer one function at a time! If Windows were truly a general purpose OS with an well documented API, we could load binary modules to add user demanded functions like web browsing or media playing. What a wonderful future these "modules" could provide. Cue singing birds, butterfly flapping and fluffy white clouds over grassy knolls.
Ripppppp..... what bullshit.
Microsoft's promise of modules is no different from what an ordinary program is already supposed to do and calling it a module won't make any difference. If you need a WMP module to play media and Microsoft sabotages all other modules, nothing has changed. If you need an IE module to browse the web and many other programs are dependent on it, your favorite browser will be sabotaged just the same or harder because Microsoft can "unify" browsing preferences into the IE "module".
This is not a good way to make money. Vista is a failure and Windows 7 will be an even bigger failure. At a minimum, the next three years belong to GNU/Linux. Users and hardware makers alike know better than to buy into Vista now and people looking for new hardware and software are going to go Linux. By 2010, Microsoft's base will be erroded. The Microsoft game, at long last, is over.
Exploded in the 90s! Those were dangerous days.
on
The Death of Windows XP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
FTFA:
For most of the '90s, Microsoft couldn't bring out new products fast enough to satisfy customers. Computing technology was exploding, and Windows exploded along with it...
Booom, that was a 486. BOOOM, that was a PI. BABOOMBA, that was a PII with a chrome-spoiler VGA card. How we lived through all that, no one knows.
TFA goes on about Microsoft's problems supporting "a tangle of versions and upgrades" which is almost as funny given when you consider how well DOSBox, Wine and virtual machines deals with all the same problems with none of the inside information. No, it's not new because IBM did Win3.1 inside OS/2 very well. Me thinks the "support" issue is created rather than natural.
The point is that those things should be cheap or free but are expensive. Everyone would be better served by the internet than by broadcast. Imagine if your $20 cell phone had no provider charges because is just works out of the box or that your sub $100 tablet gave you the best public library remote classroom and entertainment available. That is what Open Spectrum promises and it's what the telco/publishing incumbents are scared to death of.
There is nothing modest about broadcast power requirements and antennas. They are some of the tallest structures built by man and they require hundreds of kilowatts. They also require special technical knowledge to operate. Now compare that to the cost and ubiquity of wifi. All radio could be like that.
These issues and more are well covered in the link I provided and it's author knows what he's talking about.
Your ISP, cable, phone and cell phone all charge you monopoly prices each month. A $200 car radio with a $500 install service is cheap next to that but the real cost will be more like $50 at Walmart after a real conversion to rational spectrum allocation. You will still get your daily Rush if you want it.
This will ruin Christmas for the rest of us but it's worth it. If your favorite AM DJ has any sense, they will package everything up so you can have archive copies and share them with your friends. Oh, the joy of that kind of sharing.
There is no technical excuse for spectrum regulation in it's current form. If wimax has faults, the cause is poor spectrum allocation. Why is it that we still have broadcast TV and AM radio? Nothing short of spectrum liberation is just or acceptable.
Why do people think that hotspots will die because of increased cell phone coverage? Does anyone really think that the winners of the most expensive spectrum fraud ever want to do more than charge you every nickel and dime they can per byte? I don't and as long as the same players are not allowed to dominate the wired network, hotspots will be a cheaper and more convenient way to get on line when you travel.
The FCC is no longer needed, only open spectrum will give you the service you want.
You are right to fear the FBI. Now they have a one click way to harass, smear and jail the political and economic opposition they have spent the last few years identifying. Detention centers have been built and police have been practicing mass arrests. Arbitrary arrest and torture of opposition, this is how democracy dies. The FBI program is so obviously flawed that it can only be useful for crushing opposition.
I'd be packing my bags if I thought there was a place to run. The only option is to crank up resistance and vote these evil bastards out of office. It's time to dismantle the police state.
You should not fault yourself when others do bad things.
Do you think that you could have kept M$ from infiltrating and corrupting OSI? The idea, if I understand it, was to promote software freedom without all of the scary political and moral stuff, to emphasize the performance benefits of peer review and labor savings from collaboration. I have to admit that this undoes a lot of non free propaganda but doesn't it leave the door open for M$ to do what they are doing? Is a definition that's based on procedure instead of principles and rights good enough? Is even a definition based on principles enough to fight off a concentrated and well funded attack?
Unless you condem the central wrong of non free software, the use of secrets to exert control, how can you avoid endorsing it? "Surely it's OK for you to give up a little control so I can make a buck and provide you this great service," is the lie they've used all along. We know that they compound this wrong by anti-competitive practices, but that's an issue linked only by their lack of morals. What concerns me is how to keep the same thing from happening to Debian or GNU as might happen to OSI. I'd like to think the strong moral stance taken by those organizations will prevent monkey business.
Really, I'm an optimist. I don't think M$ is going to fool anyone if they could assimilate OSI. People will continue to demand their software freedom. People come and go but ideas last. Then again, I'm just an armchair revolutionary and I'd like see what you think. Perhaps I'm asking you how you think you can counterbalance $20 billion dollars worth of bullshit.
You have been removed from your code by someone who may have done it deliberately and Microsoft is trying to corrupt the open source organization you founded. These must be like twin dissasters to you and I'm both sorry and angry. Bill Gates could not pay to treat you so badly, or could he?
These are exactly the kinds things an evil company like M$ would pull to create division in the community. ESR warned us of this kind of attack about five years ago. I hope it steels you to deal with them.
It's not going to work for M$. They can create rancor. They can steal code. They can corrupt organizations. None of it will eliminate the common desire for freedom and make people go back to the non free way. The worse they act, the faster people will run away. I don't know how anyone can stand working for them now.
Anyone at OSI who values freedom will resign if Microsoft gains a seat on the board. Microsoft is an enemy of free and open software. Organizations that recognize or endorse Microsoft are also enemies. Good luck, Bruce.
Someone at the CIA got really offended when he was told that 1984 was a comedy not a blueprint and decided to get even. This is why the BBC has produced great comedy like "Benny Hill" and why the UK is always on the cutting edge of police state technology. He proved both that people in the UK really do have a good sense of humor and that 1984 is serious political science, then he defected to the Soviet Union. The program, unfortunately, has a life of it's own.
People in power really don't have as much to hide. Political dissidents, on the other hand, have to watch out for reprisals. Would you risk having anything to do with an opposition group if you knew your affiliation would be noted? Symmetry of information is not always the same as symmetry of power.
The best way to oppose this is to note that there's no real law enforcement benefit.
Laws should follow morals not the other way around but both seem to be against the requested change here. Try reading the EU directives and tell me why ISPs should be forced to violate their customers privacy because some MediaSentry group suspects the customer of making an unauthorized copy. In this case both laws and morals are against the change.
Shame on Wired for repeating the propaganda phrases, "illegal file sharing" and "piracy". It's not against the law in many countries and sharing should not be considered damaging or wrong anywhere. Giving someone a copy of a book is not the same thing as feeding them to the fish. I'm used to better things from Wired than this.
Would you consider it moral for someone to tell you "Don't sing other people's music?" or "Don't share other people's music with your friends"? No, the AC is an ass.
You say that as if duplicating your CDs was ever against the law, here or in Canada. Copyright is supposed to be a civil matter between private parties about the right to commercially publish works. Applying that to personal coppies has always been a stretch.
I expect ISP fees to be exactly like that. In effect, they will outlaw what's already allowed and steer yet more money to an industry that has long ago ceased to perform a useful function.
It's really the US branch of ISO that's gotten snubbed and for good reason. Microsoft stacked the committee and the US ISO group let them get away with it, so the US ISO group's opinion is that OOXML is AOK. Besides the technical issues raised, there's that little fundamental issue of having two standards that do exactly the same thing. Microsoft's manipulation of the US group is a tremendous shame and ISO needs to protect it's reputation by doing something about it.
While it may be obvious that OOXML is incomplete, Microsoft will tell you otherwise. It's what their new Office suite uses by default. Everyone with any sense turns it off but it's "in the wild".
See, Reed, Bose, and The Prometheus Project for a sensible way to end government control of a public resource that's not really scarce.
That should not relieve incumbents from their regulatory burdens. The money and power they have was gained by government protection and for the last 20 years it's been done against better technical advice. At the very least the public servitude should be protected from vandalism and other crimes. At best, their infrastructure should be considered public so that others can connect to it without fear. Open spectrum will kill the economic advantages of land lines but we must not allow incumbents to continue owning those few places there's a good business case for it.
It's funny how companies that benefit from past and present public servitude and spectrum exclusive franchises only complain about regulation that requires them to live up to obligations they accepted to gain advantages. Ask them about open spectrum and public servitude and you will see some interesting changes in skin tone.
The MPAA, of course, is an enemy of all kinds of freedom. They enjoy government protection in the form of patents, copyright and cable regulations. Exclusivity is not about the promotion of excellence, as anyone can see by watching the high grossing films of last year's best year ever for the MPAA, it's about locking others out. Network and software freedom will destroy their ability to lock competition out. Cost of production has vastly declined in the last 20 years. You have to ask yourself why there's only one or two film companies begging for yet more government protection.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is Vista's poor sales and Microsoft's imploding cash reserves. No cash, no control, end of story.
It would be nice to have Windows act in a modular fashion. Think of being able to extend the ability of your computer one function at a time! If Windows were truly a general purpose OS with an well documented API, we could load binary modules to add user demanded functions like web browsing or media playing. What a wonderful future these "modules" could provide. Cue singing birds, butterfly flapping and fluffy white clouds over grassy knolls.
Ripppppp ..... what bullshit.
Microsoft's promise of modules is no different from what an ordinary program is already supposed to do and calling it a module won't make any difference. If you need a WMP module to play media and Microsoft sabotages all other modules, nothing has changed. If you need an IE module to browse the web and many other programs are dependent on it, your favorite browser will be sabotaged just the same or harder because Microsoft can "unify" browsing preferences into the IE "module".
Once again, Microsoft is making fantastic promisses that have little to do with their last set. I wonder how many current features will evaporate.
This is not a good way to make money. Vista is a failure and Windows 7 will be an even bigger failure. At a minimum, the next three years belong to GNU/Linux. Users and hardware makers alike know better than to buy into Vista now and people looking for new hardware and software are going to go Linux. By 2010, Microsoft's base will be erroded. The Microsoft game, at long last, is over.
FTFA:
Booom, that was a 486. BOOOM, that was a PI. BABOOMBA, that was a PII with a chrome-spoiler VGA card. How we lived through all that, no one knows.
TFA goes on about Microsoft's problems supporting "a tangle of versions and upgrades" which is almost as funny given when you consider how well DOSBox, Wine and virtual machines deals with all the same problems with none of the inside information. No, it's not new because IBM did Win3.1 inside OS/2 very well. Me thinks the "support" issue is created rather than natural.
But yeah, Windows is dying.
The point is that those things should be cheap or free but are expensive. Everyone would be better served by the internet than by broadcast. Imagine if your $20 cell phone had no provider charges because is just works out of the box or that your sub $100 tablet gave you the best public library remote classroom and entertainment available. That is what Open Spectrum promises and it's what the telco/publishing incumbents are scared to death of.
There is nothing modest about broadcast power requirements and antennas. They are some of the tallest structures built by man and they require hundreds of kilowatts. They also require special technical knowledge to operate. Now compare that to the cost and ubiquity of wifi. All radio could be like that.
These issues and more are well covered in the link I provided and it's author knows what he's talking about.
Your ISP, cable, phone and cell phone all charge you monopoly prices each month. A $200 car radio with a $500 install service is cheap next to that but the real cost will be more like $50 at Walmart after a real conversion to rational spectrum allocation. You will still get your daily Rush if you want it.
This will ruin Christmas for the rest of us but it's worth it. If your favorite AM DJ has any sense, they will package everything up so you can have archive copies and share them with your friends. Oh, the joy of that kind of sharing.
There is no technical excuse for spectrum regulation in it's current form. If wimax has faults, the cause is poor spectrum allocation. Why is it that we still have broadcast TV and AM radio? Nothing short of spectrum liberation is just or acceptable.
Why do people think that hotspots will die because of increased cell phone coverage? Does anyone really think that the winners of the most expensive spectrum fraud ever want to do more than charge you every nickel and dime they can per byte? I don't and as long as the same players are not allowed to dominate the wired network, hotspots will be a cheaper and more convenient way to get on line when you travel.
The FCC is no longer needed, only open spectrum will give you the service you want.
You are right to fear the FBI. Now they have a one click way to harass, smear and jail the political and economic opposition they have spent the last few years identifying. Detention centers have been built and police have been practicing mass arrests. Arbitrary arrest and torture of opposition, this is how democracy dies. The FBI program is so obviously flawed that it can only be useful for crushing opposition.
I'd be packing my bags if I thought there was a place to run. The only option is to crank up resistance and vote these evil bastards out of office. It's time to dismantle the police state.
You should not fault yourself when others do bad things.
Do you think that you could have kept M$ from infiltrating and corrupting OSI? The idea, if I understand it, was to promote software freedom without all of the scary political and moral stuff, to emphasize the performance benefits of peer review and labor savings from collaboration. I have to admit that this undoes a lot of non free propaganda but doesn't it leave the door open for M$ to do what they are doing? Is a definition that's based on procedure instead of principles and rights good enough? Is even a definition based on principles enough to fight off a concentrated and well funded attack?
Unless you condem the central wrong of non free software, the use of secrets to exert control, how can you avoid endorsing it? "Surely it's OK for you to give up a little control so I can make a buck and provide you this great service," is the lie they've used all along. We know that they compound this wrong by anti-competitive practices, but that's an issue linked only by their lack of morals. What concerns me is how to keep the same thing from happening to Debian or GNU as might happen to OSI. I'd like to think the strong moral stance taken by those organizations will prevent monkey business.
Really, I'm an optimist. I don't think M$ is going to fool anyone if they could assimilate OSI. People will continue to demand their software freedom. People come and go but ideas last. Then again, I'm just an armchair revolutionary and I'd like see what you think. Perhaps I'm asking you how you think you can counterbalance $20 billion dollars worth of bullshit.
You have been removed from your code by someone who may have done it deliberately and Microsoft is trying to corrupt the open source organization you founded. These must be like twin dissasters to you and I'm both sorry and angry. Bill Gates could not pay to treat you so badly, or could he?
These are exactly the kinds things an evil company like M$ would pull to create division in the community. ESR warned us of this kind of attack about five years ago. I hope it steels you to deal with them.
It's not going to work for M$. They can create rancor. They can steal code. They can corrupt organizations. None of it will eliminate the common desire for freedom and make people go back to the non free way. The worse they act, the faster people will run away. I don't know how anyone can stand working for them now.
That is nasty. I am sorry.
Anyone at OSI who values freedom will resign if Microsoft gains a seat on the board. Microsoft is an enemy of free and open software. Organizations that recognize or endorse Microsoft are also enemies. Good luck, Bruce.
Didn't he show up in a Jerry episode called, "My dad is evil and want's to take over the world?"
You are not as crazy as Bill Gates. That's a good thing.
When you start to lose sleep because people are not giving you money and that's the only way a hobby computer won't be wasted, seek help.
Someone at the CIA got really offended when he was told that 1984 was a comedy not a blueprint and decided to get even. This is why the BBC has produced great comedy like "Benny Hill" and why the UK is always on the cutting edge of police state technology. He proved both that people in the UK really do have a good sense of humor and that 1984 is serious political science, then he defected to the Soviet Union. The program, unfortunately, has a life of it's own.
People in power really don't have as much to hide. Political dissidents, on the other hand, have to watch out for reprisals. Would you risk having anything to do with an opposition group if you knew your affiliation would be noted? Symmetry of information is not always the same as symmetry of power.
The best way to oppose this is to note that there's no real law enforcement benefit.
Laws should follow morals not the other way around but both seem to be against the requested change here. Try reading the EU directives and tell me why ISPs should be forced to violate their customers privacy because some MediaSentry group suspects the customer of making an unauthorized copy. In this case both laws and morals are against the change.
How can they call this a legitimate request, given the recent outrages by the companies involved?
Shame on Wired for repeating the propaganda phrases, "illegal file sharing" and "piracy". It's not against the law in many countries and sharing should not be considered damaging or wrong anywhere. Giving someone a copy of a book is not the same thing as feeding them to the fish. I'm used to better things from Wired than this.
Would you consider it moral for someone to tell you "Don't sing other people's music?" or "Don't share other people's music with your friends"? No, the AC is an ass.
You say that as if duplicating your CDs was ever against the law, here or in Canada. Copyright is supposed to be a civil matter between private parties about the right to commercially publish works. Applying that to personal coppies has always been a stretch.
I recall some controversy about artists never got their cut of the digital media tax, not even RIAA signed artists, and it hurt local artists. Looks like it never got better.
I expect ISP fees to be exactly like that. In effect, they will outlaw what's already allowed and steer yet more money to an industry that has long ago ceased to perform a useful function.
It's really the US branch of ISO that's gotten snubbed and for good reason. Microsoft stacked the committee and the US ISO group let them get away with it, so the US ISO group's opinion is that OOXML is AOK. Besides the technical issues raised, there's that little fundamental issue of having two standards that do exactly the same thing. Microsoft's manipulation of the US group is a tremendous shame and ISO needs to protect it's reputation by doing something about it.
While it may be obvious that OOXML is incomplete, Microsoft will tell you otherwise. It's what their new Office suite uses by default. Everyone with any sense turns it off but it's "in the wild".
See, Reed, Bose, and The Prometheus Project for a sensible way to end government control of a public resource that's not really scarce.
That should not relieve incumbents from their regulatory burdens. The money and power they have was gained by government protection and for the last 20 years it's been done against better technical advice. At the very least the public servitude should be protected from vandalism and other crimes. At best, their infrastructure should be considered public so that others can connect to it without fear. Open spectrum will kill the economic advantages of land lines but we must not allow incumbents to continue owning those few places there's a good business case for it.
It's funny how companies that benefit from past and present public servitude and spectrum exclusive franchises only complain about regulation that requires them to live up to obligations they accepted to gain advantages. Ask them about open spectrum and public servitude and you will see some interesting changes in skin tone.
The MPAA, of course, is an enemy of all kinds of freedom. They enjoy government protection in the form of patents, copyright and cable regulations. Exclusivity is not about the promotion of excellence, as anyone can see by watching the high grossing films of last year's best year ever for the MPAA, it's about locking others out. Network and software freedom will destroy their ability to lock competition out. Cost of production has vastly declined in the last 20 years. You have to ask yourself why there's only one or two film companies begging for yet more government protection.