Keepin things in sync when they are stored in a distributed fashion is a bitch. Still, if you merely want to save bandwidth, you may want to give Mojo Nation a try, which works quite well already.
First, although it may seem like it, the COE has nothing to do with the European Union. The "Cybercrime Convention" has received some attention, but I hope that it is not as relevant as people claim it is. Similar to other such international treaties, signatory nations can basically disregard certain provisions or all of it without any further effect. That means that the battle against some of this specific convention's provisions mostly needs to be fought on a national level, although it would of course be better if these things were not ratified in the first place.
There's a very real danger of conventions like this to grow into a "meta-government" only within reach of lobbyists, especially if additional meta-government enforcement measures are provided, e.g. through the WTO in the case of certain WIPO treaties. But in this specific case, as in the Hague Convention, it should be possible for Europeans to lobby effectively against blatant violations of free speech and new privacy-violationg laws on a national level. Just don't be fooled by politicians telling you that they have to obey "international treaties". Tell them what you think these treaties, signed without any prior democratic discourse whatsoever, are really worth.
I forgot: One of the areas where WINE really matters for the end user, IMHO, is gaming, because games will probably take the longest to mature on Linux. And from what I hear WineX seems to be decently fast.
Also, thanks to OSNews for the interview -- I really enjoy reading their site, it is quite frequently updated.
I'm not trying to troll -- CW are doing a great job with WINE and it's nice that the project keeps getting better. I also think they have a fairly decent business model: Given the fact that Linux will soon replace Windows in all small companies;-), there will be lots of of legacy apps that need to be ported painlessly (or, even better, run out of the box). Of course, they are competing with the hardware emulation guys, whose stuff is likely more compatible, and with some good programming tricks could possibly also become impressively fast.
However, for the average Linux user, WINE shouldn't matter much. After all, what's the reason he uses Linux? Certainly not running Win32 apps, but trying to find free, open alternatives. We should not try to run MS Office but rather improve Open Office & Co. (and agree on a common document standard, damnit). Instead of investing time and money in getting PhotoShop to run on Linux, how about investing time or money in GIMP instead? Etc. etc.
Add to this the fact that WINE has taken on a pretty large challenge. Given the speed with which Microsoft can (and possibly will) change their APIs in the future (and possibly make their own apps incompatible with WINE if it becomes a threat), I don't know if running common applications is really feasible. Again, hardware emulation looks like the more viable approach to me.
Let's also not forget that, were it not for Microsoft's OEM contracts, most PCs would probably come with a running, easy-to-use, well-configured Linux configuration by now, so new users could try both systems separately without ever having to touch Win32.
DR-DOS would be a better example. And in Caldera v. Microsoft, the actual danger for projects like WINE became visible: "We are supposed to give the user the option of continuing after the warning; however, we should surely crash at some point shortly later..." -- David Cole, head of Windows development, e-mail from 1991 regarding the detection of DR-DOS when running Windows 3.1
It's good to know that people are always paid correctly when they write proprietary software. Thanks also for the study with a control group showing the statistically significant difference between the two. Too bad the postercomment filter ate it, but we can imagine it is there!
The problem with REBOL, IIRC, is its license. The professional interpreter is commercially sold, which means that you have to license it even for distributing your apps, since REBOL does not generate executables. At least the standard version is free beer. But this probably makes it more expensive than VB, where you only pay for the platform once. So it can't compete on Win32, and without being OSS, it will hardly be able to compete on non-mainstream platforms.
That's a real shame, because other than that, it is really quite impressive. They should think about a Transgaming-like business model, where users subscribe and the code becomes free when there are enough subscribers.
Competitors always make such claims. Anything to make the competition look bad, usually phrased in such a way so that their words aren't slanderous or libellous
Exactly. Gassee was quite precise in his columns, clear enough to be sued if he was wrong. He also offered to testify against MS on the dual-boot issue.
Hmm. If these deals are infrequent and don't seem to apply to large OEMs (witness Dell's adventures into Linux land)
Incorrect. The issue here is dual-boot, not separate installs. Dual-boot (or triple, or whatever) is not allowed as per the OEM contracts of large manufacturers.
It's yet to be shown that these contracts actually exist
thanks for posting the link. I can't say that my short report was really "thorough", since much of it is quotes from Hacker and Gassee, but that's partly because of its subject. Since the kind of OEM deals it discusses are certainly not frequent (and possibly organized in a clever contractual hierarchy), it is quite easy to cover them up.
But I think the evidence for their existence was already overwhelming before my own search (you don't have the CEO of a major competitor making such factual claims if there's nothing behind them), and at the point where one manufacturer told me quite straight-forwardly "Yes, we can't create dual-boot machines under our OEM contract, but please don't quote me on that" I decided to do what is called a cut in Prolog and not investigate further. It is really up to the anti-trust authorities now to subpoena these contracts and to then examine them in detail. If I am not mistaken, this was already done by the US regarding the "modification of icons on the desktop" question.
Interesting: In the K5 article, there were quite a few vocal Microsoft supporters who argued that this is a non-issue, either because the contracts don't exist or because they are not relevant -- in the attached poll, however, ~85% said that the OEM pratice should be investigated and quite possibly forbidden. So the silent majority seems to agree that this is a major issue.
Don't be fooled into passivity by a vocal minority: If you agree it's an issue, do something about it -- fax or write the EC in support of my report, or e-mail your own legislators (wherever you are, this seems to be an issue everywhere). Don't let MS get away with this.
where are they going to go? Add an AI to write your papers?
Not quite, but I hear that, on popular demand as determined by market research, they are planning to add a feature to automatically send the documents you are working on to your friends to ask for their advice. They call it "viral intelligence".
I think the main reason shareware is a popular development model on the Windows platform is that the Windows platform does not come with free development tools -- there is a distinct layer of separation between developers and users, much stronger than on an open source platform, where many users are also developers. So for a shareware programmer it makes little sense to release his software as open source software, since he doesn't get much back for it. In fact, there are development and literature costs which he has to recoup.
I believe that the shareware funding model would work just as well for open source software, it is just usually not used (almost no shareware for Linux). True shareware, IMHO, doesn't limit functionality in any significant fashion anyway. What we really need is wide-spread, super-easy secure electronic micropayments. Then we can implement greater reciprocity in the already existing gift culture.
Therefore, I think that freeing GPL-type software from royalties would be a good thing and not negatively impact shareware authors, only motivate many of them to change their development model (and possibly their OS).
First, I know about the problem of "submarine patents", so disclosure is generally a good idea, but open-source advocates want to make sure that patents don't become so common-place by being "officially" allowed as to be inevitable.
It seems to me that most opponents of the current proposal would be satisfied if there was some guarantee that all non-free specs could be implemented in free software without paying royalties. Free software would require an irreversible license like the GPL, so that code cannot be turned into proprietary products which would escape the royalty radar. This would easily allow implementations of all new W3C-coordinated specifications in open-source software, while you would have to pay royalties for closed-source, commercial software.
I can see no reason not to do that, other than hidden interests. So why don't you do it?
Why do you believe that, as the amount of user input is increased, the noise level increases, when users also act as moderators, via votes and comments? I believe the opposite, that such a system could scale very well, with a frequently visited "Top Bugs" and "Top Features" page, a "Hall of Fame" with the best bughunters and best reporters (reporters who have reported bugs which have been frequently fixed), massive user input on submitted bugs (if you can't properly filter dupes with machines, use humans instead -- here the kind of editorial pedants who frequent sites like K5 would actually be useful) etc. etc. Learn from SETI@Home: Build motivation factors into the system. Learn from weblogs: Improve usability and compensate noise through collaborative moderation.
Re:Can Slashdot help them stop adding features?
on
Mouse Gestures in Mozilla
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You make valid points. I am not very familiar with the Bugzilla interface. But I tend to think that interfaces mean a lot, and with slight changes there often come great increases in productivity and changes in direction.
The problem that important bugs remain unfixed seems to stem from a lack of knowledge and motivation for developers to concentrate on the important stuff. All bugs are considered equal. So when everything is equal, it seems to be logical to do what looks "cool" to you instead of what may actually be important. On the other hand, if fixing important bugs increases your status in the Mozilla community more than adding features, the problems you describe are likely to go away soon.
I notice that Bugzilla already has a voting system. That is good. However, it seems to be mostly unused. That is bad. Why is that so? Probably because the voting interface is deeply integrated into the complex Bugzilla interface, which most end users will never access directly (let alone create an account for, which is necessary to vote) but only through the templates -- but you need the end users to vote on the most annoying bugs. How can that be changed? Perhaps all reported bugs should also be automatically submitted to a collaborative weblog like Kuro5hin. Scoop, the K5 engine, is open source. It allows users to vote on "stories" submitted, either to the front page or to a page section. In this specific application, users would have to decide which bugs and feature suggestions are very important, which ones are relatively important, and which ones are irrelevant.
This seems to be the simplest solution -- many others are possible, from improving the Bugzilla interface to integrating Bugzilla bugs into an existing weblog. You could also create a new native interface to report and rate bugs (and to rate the users who rate bugs), but that is the most time-intensive approach (if the most promising).
In general, I think that the current state of Mozilla reveals a clear weakness in the development model, one which is likely to only show up in very large projects. Improving the interface(s) to rate bugs and feature suggestions and to find the bugs that really matter should be a priority -- and the tools to do that could be useful to others, as well.
The tears have come in the kitchen, the car and the shower, too.
Like many Americans, Phil Zimmermann, a stocky,
47-year-old computer programmer,
has been crying every day since last
week's terrorist attacks. He has
been overwhelmed with feelings of
guilt.
Phil is right that "overwhelmed with feelings of guilt" is the critical passage, however, it becomes even more manipulative because of the context in which it is placed. It suggests that Phil's grief was not caused by the attacks themselves, but by his belief that he was somehow responsible for the death of ~7000 people. What Phil is doing now seems more to me like a "Clarify that I don't regret doing it, while not pissing off the WP" strategy (in order to avoid hurting his business). But the truth is, the WP article was extremely manipulative (whether because of sensationalism or malicious intent is irrelevant), and Slashdot was right in pointing that out.
Now, I don't know what kind of letters people have written, and I'm sure some of them were immature, but certainly harsh criticism was and remains warranted. The only thing that is worth emphasizing is that Ariana Eunjung Cha, the author of the piece, likely did not have any bad intentions -- it was the WP editors that made the critical change. As a journalist, I have often experienced that articles by me were manipulated in a way to fundamentally change their meaning, or downplay the importance of certain issues, without giving me any notice of it (in one case of an article dealing with child porn hysteria, the whole article was watered down). So the WP deserves much criticism for doing that -- perhaps just a little more focused on the real problem (editors taking liberties to manipulate the essential message of an article) than it likely was.
btw, I found the article amazing shallow incomplete and lacking in any technical merit, it appeared that the author copy and pasted the PR release then added a sentence or two about what his 30 second impression was.
Incorrect, if you check my prior reviews, you will realize that I have tested these programs quite in-depth. The article was supposed to be a summary though, and not a repetition of what I have written earlier. Not a single sentence in my reviews is copied from a press release, feature list or any other statement by the developers.
I have tested all public releases of Freenet and reported even about the most exotic client developments on infoanarchy. I am well aware of it and have talked about its shortcomings several times with the developers. Currently, content availability is unsatisfactory, so it is only mentioned in the review together with Mojo Nation.
Second he seemed in the dark about the level of decentralization that many of the apps had
Read the article. I write about different degrees of decentralization. eDonkey is a client-server based network, and I have pointed out that anyone can run the server (which is also possible in the case of Napster thanks to OpenNap, BTW) - the network is not as decentralized as Gnutella, where every client is also a network server that routes queries, pings, pongs and query results. In that respect, eDonkey etc. can only be called "semi-centralized".
You're also incorrect in that I had not mentioned Fasttrack's multi-source downloading -- I have, but to my knowledge Fasttrack does not download files while they are still being downloaded by other users, because searches return only files that are completely available. Regarding Gnutella, I have discussed its history and the discussions to improve it in great deal elsewhere, that was not the point of that review.
Please, if you want to criticize an article, at least try to understand it first.
The article misses the point. The point is not functionality. The point is
FREEDOM.
Freedom is the reason you should check out OpenOffice, K Office, Evolution, Gnumeric etc.. Remember: Sun has GPL'd Star Office's source code. That means that everyone can peek at it and change it -- that means you don't have to worry that the next version of the product will fuck with you because if it will, enough developers will be pissed off enough to fork and fix it. You don't have to worry about Passport,.NET, talking paperclips, proprietary file formats or "Smart Tags", or whatever Microsoft's current strategy of becoming Big Brother is.
This is relevant not only for individuals and for corporations. Choosing OpenOffice now is reasonable long term thinking, something most individuals seem incapable of. Yes, Sun would behave just as badly as Microsoft in Microsoft's shoes, but with OpenOffice under the GPL, there's not really much that can go wrong. The file format is also open, XML-based and documented and can be legally implemented by anyone.
Freedom is not just an ideological point. If you trust all your critical documents to a closed source software corporation, you are dependent on them and on their decisions, which will hurt your bottom line -- and, in the long term, hurt you much more than training your personnel to use an alternative.
The bottom line is that if you care about freedom, you shouldn't have to go to China -- you have to look at the alternatives. If you don't do that, you have no right whatsoever to complain that you have none later.
Compare http://www.washtech.com/news/software/12296-1.html
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A431 45-2001Sep4.html
- the former says $1 billion, the latter $1 million.
And International Business Machines Corp. pledged $1 million to help research and develop the free Linux operating system, an alternative to Microsoft Windows.
Um, wow, $1 million, I guess that shows they really care about Linux. Fortunately, it's really $1 billion:-)
Making money with SuSE would be desirable for IBM, but it is not the reason they have invested in them. It is a strategic investment, with the goal of keeping a good European Linux distribution alive. IBM's business with Linux will be in the system-making, everything from the hardware to the software (proprietary applications on the basis of an open-source OS) to the support. From their perspective, promoting Linux as a platform is much better than promoting Windows since, if Linux takes off, they cannot be forced to accept any Microsoft standards or solutions (especially since Microsoft can basically kill any IBM software solution by bundling it with their OS). On the other hand, should Windows take over the server market, IBM might face a grim future under Microsoft rule. So their engagement for Linux is strategically very clever, and has nothing to do with SuSE in particular, although IBM would obviously not allow certain decisions by SuSE where their own markets are concerned. Expect products that compete with IBM solutions to disappear from the distro.
China already publically shredders warez CDs as part of their efforts to become a good WTO member country. This public CD destruction is shown on national TV to "educate" the people about the importance of intellectual property.
Re:I'll get hammered, but Internet Explorer 6 is o
on
KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
You make the mistake to assume that Microsoft will implement its strategy with just one software release. Instead, they will gradually try to introduce more and more extensions without causing too much media attention. First these will be "optional" (such as IE was initially), then they will be bundled, but switchable, then they will be bundled and deeply integrated. This has been true for IE, for Windows Media Player, for Messenger, for IIS, and it will be true for DRM, for censorship standards, for Smart Tags and all similar technologies as well.
Regarding security, it is true that only a small minority of users examine code. This percentage is much larger on Linux, and not only because Linux has bigger appeal to technical users -- also because it comes with all the necessary development tools. The only development tools that Microsoft bundles with Windows are QBASIC and VBScript. Coincidence?
Regarding IE on the Mac, Microsoft sees the Mac as a "Rolls Royce" PC, and so does Apple -- no serious competition to Windows, a high-end system for a small margin of users. MS invested $150M in Apple when Apple was down -- in order to make sure that Microsoft's standards and applications would also run on the Apple platform. From this point, they can ignore Apple. They may have a silent or secret agreement that Apple doesn't port to x86, but that isn't even necessary -- if Apple gets cheeky, MS will simply withdraw all support from the OS. So yes, when MS controls everything that is relevant, they don't need an OS monoculture. In fact, they can use the Apple product line to easily test new features for their market acceptance, and it strengthens their position in court.
Microsoft is not a charity. They have a sophisticated business strategy that is focused on completely dominating all aspects of PC technology. This is NOT a conspiracy. Microsoft acts solely in the interests of its shareholders -- if they wouldn't do everything to maximize profits, they could even be sued. Microsoft is not evil, it is, like any corporation, amoral. To give another example: The insurance industry is the largest lobbying group for car security -- not out of altruism, but out of pure business interest. At the same time, the insurance industry is also a large motor of the erosion of privacy -- to exclude those from health insurance coverage who need it. Highly immoral and highly moral behavior can both be very profitable. It is only the government (with reasonable democratic control) that can make this distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
Keepin things in sync when they are stored in a distributed fashion is a bitch. Still, if you merely want to save bandwidth, you may want to give Mojo Nation a try, which works quite well already.
Thanks, I take your copying as a compliment. Please repost this in other forums, too.
There's a very real danger of conventions like this to grow into a "meta-government" only within reach of lobbyists, especially if additional meta-government enforcement measures are provided, e.g. through the WTO in the case of certain WIPO treaties. But in this specific case, as in the Hague Convention, it should be possible for Europeans to lobby effectively against blatant violations of free speech and new privacy-violationg laws on a national level. Just don't be fooled by politicians telling you that they have to obey "international treaties". Tell them what you think these treaties, signed without any prior democratic discourse whatsoever, are really worth.
Also, thanks to OSNews for the interview -- I really enjoy reading their site, it is quite frequently updated.
However, for the average Linux user, WINE shouldn't matter much. After all, what's the reason he uses Linux? Certainly not running Win32 apps, but trying to find free, open alternatives. We should not try to run MS Office but rather improve Open Office & Co. (and agree on a common document standard, damnit). Instead of investing time and money in getting PhotoShop to run on Linux, how about investing time or money in GIMP instead? Etc. etc.
Add to this the fact that WINE has taken on a pretty large challenge. Given the speed with which Microsoft can (and possibly will) change their APIs in the future (and possibly make their own apps incompatible with WINE if it becomes a threat), I don't know if running common applications is really feasible. Again, hardware emulation looks like the more viable approach to me.
Let's also not forget that, were it not for Microsoft's OEM contracts, most PCs would probably come with a running, easy-to-use, well-configured Linux configuration by now, so new users could try both systems separately without ever having to touch Win32.
DR-DOS would be a better example. And in Caldera v. Microsoft, the actual danger for projects like WINE became visible: "We are supposed to give the user the option of continuing after the warning; however, we should surely crash at some point shortly later..." -- David Cole, head of Windows development, e-mail from 1991 regarding the detection of DR-DOS when running Windows 3.1
It's good to know that people are always paid correctly when they write proprietary software. Thanks also for the study with a control group showing the statistically significant difference between the two. Too bad the postercomment filter ate it, but we can imagine it is there!
That's a real shame, because other than that, it is really quite impressive. They should think about a Transgaming-like business model, where users subscribe and the code becomes free when there are enough subscribers.
.. SafeSurf has changed their old SS-style logo, which was quite reminiscent of the nazi SS logo. Their new logo, however, still looks pretty creepy.
Exactly. Gassee was quite precise in his columns, clear enough to be sued if he was wrong. He also offered to testify against MS on the dual-boot issue.
Hmm. If these deals are infrequent and don't seem to apply to large OEMs (witness Dell's adventures into Linux land)
Incorrect. The issue here is dual-boot, not separate installs. Dual-boot (or triple, or whatever) is not allowed as per the OEM contracts of large manufacturers.
It's yet to be shown that these contracts actually exist
What can be shown, has been shown.
thanks for posting the link. I can't say that my short report was really "thorough", since much of it is quotes from Hacker and Gassee, but that's partly because of its subject. Since the kind of OEM deals it discusses are certainly not frequent (and possibly organized in a clever contractual hierarchy), it is quite easy to cover them up.
But I think the evidence for their existence was already overwhelming before my own search (you don't have the CEO of a major competitor making such factual claims if there's nothing behind them), and at the point where one manufacturer told me quite straight-forwardly "Yes, we can't create dual-boot machines under our OEM contract, but please don't quote me on that" I decided to do what is called a cut in Prolog and not investigate further. It is really up to the anti-trust authorities now to subpoena these contracts and to then examine them in detail. If I am not mistaken, this was already done by the US regarding the "modification of icons on the desktop" question.
Interesting: In the K5 article, there were quite a few vocal Microsoft supporters who argued that this is a non-issue, either because the contracts don't exist or because they are not relevant -- in the attached poll, however, ~85% said that the OEM pratice should be investigated and quite possibly forbidden. So the silent majority seems to agree that this is a major issue.
Don't be fooled into passivity by a vocal minority: If you agree it's an issue, do something about it -- fax or write the EC in support of my report, or e-mail your own legislators (wherever you are, this seems to be an issue everywhere). Don't let MS get away with this.
Thanks,
Erik
Not quite, but I hear that, on popular demand as determined by market research, they are planning to add a feature to automatically send the documents you are working on to your friends to ask for their advice. They call it "viral intelligence".
I believe that the shareware funding model would work just as well for open source software, it is just usually not used (almost no shareware for Linux). True shareware, IMHO, doesn't limit functionality in any significant fashion anyway. What we really need is wide-spread, super-easy secure electronic micropayments. Then we can implement greater reciprocity in the already existing gift culture.
Therefore, I think that freeing GPL-type software from royalties would be a good thing and not negatively impact shareware authors, only motivate many of them to change their development model (and possibly their OS).
It seems to me that most opponents of the current proposal would be satisfied if there was some guarantee that all non-free specs could be implemented in free software without paying royalties. Free software would require an irreversible license like the GPL, so that code cannot be turned into proprietary products which would escape the royalty radar. This would easily allow implementations of all new W3C-coordinated specifications in open-source software, while you would have to pay royalties for closed-source, commercial software.
I can see no reason not to do that, other than hidden interests. So why don't you do it?
Why do you believe that, as the amount of user input is increased, the noise level increases, when users also act as moderators, via votes and comments? I believe the opposite, that such a system could scale very well, with a frequently visited "Top Bugs" and "Top Features" page, a "Hall of Fame" with the best bughunters and best reporters (reporters who have reported bugs which have been frequently fixed), massive user input on submitted bugs (if you can't properly filter dupes with machines, use humans instead -- here the kind of editorial pedants who frequent sites like K5 would actually be useful) etc. etc. Learn from SETI@Home: Build motivation factors into the system. Learn from weblogs: Improve usability and compensate noise through collaborative moderation.
The problem that important bugs remain unfixed seems to stem from a lack of knowledge and motivation for developers to concentrate on the important stuff. All bugs are considered equal. So when everything is equal, it seems to be logical to do what looks "cool" to you instead of what may actually be important. On the other hand, if fixing important bugs increases your status in the Mozilla community more than adding features, the problems you describe are likely to go away soon.
I notice that Bugzilla already has a voting system. That is good. However, it seems to be mostly unused. That is bad. Why is that so? Probably because the voting interface is deeply integrated into the complex Bugzilla interface, which most end users will never access directly (let alone create an account for, which is necessary to vote) but only through the templates -- but you need the end users to vote on the most annoying bugs. How can that be changed? Perhaps all reported bugs should also be automatically submitted to a collaborative weblog like Kuro5hin. Scoop, the K5 engine, is open source. It allows users to vote on "stories" submitted, either to the front page or to a page section. In this specific application, users would have to decide which bugs and feature suggestions are very important, which ones are relatively important, and which ones are irrelevant.
This seems to be the simplest solution -- many others are possible, from improving the Bugzilla interface to integrating Bugzilla bugs into an existing weblog. You could also create a new native interface to report and rate bugs (and to rate the users who rate bugs), but that is the most time-intensive approach (if the most promising).
In general, I think that the current state of Mozilla reveals a clear weakness in the development model, one which is likely to only show up in very large projects. Improving the interface(s) to rate bugs and feature suggestions and to find the bugs that really matter should be a priority -- and the tools to do that could be useful to others, as well.
The tears have come in the kitchen, the car and the shower, too. Like many Americans, Phil Zimmermann, a stocky, 47-year-old computer programmer, has been crying every day since last week's terrorist attacks. He has been overwhelmed with feelings of guilt.
Phil is right that "overwhelmed with feelings of guilt" is the critical passage, however, it becomes even more manipulative because of the context in which it is placed. It suggests that Phil's grief was not caused by the attacks themselves, but by his belief that he was somehow responsible for the death of ~7000 people. What Phil is doing now seems more to me like a "Clarify that I don't regret doing it, while not pissing off the WP" strategy (in order to avoid hurting his business). But the truth is, the WP article was extremely manipulative (whether because of sensationalism or malicious intent is irrelevant), and Slashdot was right in pointing that out.
Now, I don't know what kind of letters people have written, and I'm sure some of them were immature, but certainly harsh criticism was and remains warranted. The only thing that is worth emphasizing is that Ariana Eunjung Cha, the author of the piece, likely did not have any bad intentions -- it was the WP editors that made the critical change. As a journalist, I have often experienced that articles by me were manipulated in a way to fundamentally change their meaning, or downplay the importance of certain issues, without giving me any notice of it (in one case of an article dealing with child porn hysteria, the whole article was watered down). So the WP deserves much criticism for doing that -- perhaps just a little more focused on the real problem (editors taking liberties to manipulate the essential message of an article) than it likely was.
Incorrect, if you check my prior reviews, you will realize that I have tested these programs quite in-depth. The article was supposed to be a summary though, and not a repetition of what I have written earlier. Not a single sentence in my reviews is copied from a press release, feature list or any other statement by the developers.
I have tested all public releases of Freenet and reported even about the most exotic client developments on infoanarchy. I am well aware of it and have talked about its shortcomings several times with the developers. Currently, content availability is unsatisfactory, so it is only mentioned in the review together with Mojo Nation.
Second he seemed in the dark about the level of decentralization that many of the apps had
Read the article. I write about different degrees of decentralization. eDonkey is a client-server based network, and I have pointed out that anyone can run the server (which is also possible in the case of Napster thanks to OpenNap, BTW) - the network is not as decentralized as Gnutella, where every client is also a network server that routes queries, pings, pongs and query results. In that respect, eDonkey etc. can only be called "semi-centralized".
You're also incorrect in that I had not mentioned Fasttrack's multi-source downloading -- I have, but to my knowledge Fasttrack does not download files while they are still being downloaded by other users, because searches return only files that are completely available. Regarding Gnutella, I have discussed its history and the discussions to improve it in great deal elsewhere, that was not the point of that review.
Please, if you want to criticize an article, at least try to understand it first.
here. Postercomment compression filter? WTF?
FREEDOM.
Freedom is the reason you should check out OpenOffice, K Office, Evolution, Gnumeric etc.. Remember: Sun has GPL'd Star Office's source code. That means that everyone can peek at it and change it -- that means you don't have to worry that the next version of the product will fuck with you because if it will, enough developers will be pissed off enough to fork and fix it. You don't have to worry about Passport, .NET, talking paperclips, proprietary file formats or "Smart Tags", or whatever Microsoft's current strategy of becoming Big Brother is.
This is relevant not only for individuals and for corporations. Choosing OpenOffice now is reasonable long term thinking, something most individuals seem incapable of. Yes, Sun would behave just as badly as Microsoft in Microsoft's shoes, but with OpenOffice under the GPL, there's not really much that can go wrong. The file format is also open, XML-based and documented and can be legally implemented by anyone.
Freedom is not just an ideological point. If you trust all your critical documents to a closed source software corporation, you are dependent on them and on their decisions, which will hurt your bottom line -- and, in the long term, hurt you much more than training your personnel to use an alternative.
The bottom line is that if you care about freedom, you shouldn't have to go to China -- you have to look at the alternatives. If you don't do that, you have no right whatsoever to complain that you have none later.
Compare http://www.washtech.com/news/software/12296-1.html
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A431 45-2001Sep4.html
- the former says $1 billion, the latter $1 million.
Um, wow, $1 million, I guess that shows they really care about Linux. Fortunately, it's really $1 billion :-)
Making money with SuSE would be desirable for IBM, but it is not the reason they have invested in them. It is a strategic investment, with the goal of keeping a good European Linux distribution alive. IBM's business with Linux will be in the system-making, everything from the hardware to the software (proprietary applications on the basis of an open-source OS) to the support. From their perspective, promoting Linux as a platform is much better than promoting Windows since, if Linux takes off, they cannot be forced to accept any Microsoft standards or solutions (especially since Microsoft can basically kill any IBM software solution by bundling it with their OS). On the other hand, should Windows take over the server market, IBM might face a grim future under Microsoft rule. So their engagement for Linux is strategically very clever, and has nothing to do with SuSE in particular, although IBM would obviously not allow certain decisions by SuSE where their own markets are concerned. Expect products that compete with IBM solutions to disappear from the distro.
China already publically shredders warez CDs as part of their efforts to become a good WTO member country. This public CD destruction is shown on national TV to "educate" the people about the importance of intellectual property.
Regarding security, it is true that only a small minority of users examine code. This percentage is much larger on Linux, and not only because Linux has bigger appeal to technical users -- also because it comes with all the necessary development tools. The only development tools that Microsoft bundles with Windows are QBASIC and VBScript. Coincidence?
Regarding IE on the Mac, Microsoft sees the Mac as a "Rolls Royce" PC, and so does Apple -- no serious competition to Windows, a high-end system for a small margin of users. MS invested $150M in Apple when Apple was down -- in order to make sure that Microsoft's standards and applications would also run on the Apple platform. From this point, they can ignore Apple. They may have a silent or secret agreement that Apple doesn't port to x86, but that isn't even necessary -- if Apple gets cheeky, MS will simply withdraw all support from the OS. So yes, when MS controls everything that is relevant, they don't need an OS monoculture. In fact, they can use the Apple product line to easily test new features for their market acceptance, and it strengthens their position in court.
Microsoft is not a charity. They have a sophisticated business strategy that is focused on completely dominating all aspects of PC technology. This is NOT a conspiracy. Microsoft acts solely in the interests of its shareholders -- if they wouldn't do everything to maximize profits, they could even be sued. Microsoft is not evil, it is, like any corporation, amoral. To give another example: The insurance industry is the largest lobbying group for car security -- not out of altruism, but out of pure business interest. At the same time, the insurance industry is also a large motor of the erosion of privacy -- to exclude those from health insurance coverage who need it. Highly immoral and highly moral behavior can both be very profitable. It is only the government (with reasonable democratic control) that can make this distinction.