As of yet you can't get the "Back to the Future" series on DVD... a popular movie. You can't even buy the orginal on VHS anyplace (even online) so I ended up digging it up at a used book & record store (Half Price Books).
Now, here's a dose of reality. How many people here can get their mothers to switch to Linux and Mozilla.
My wife has, and she's about as un PC savvy as they come. As long as she can shop online with it and send & receive e-mail (using evolution) then she is happy. Both applications work as well as their MS counterparts.
Security updates don't instantly appear. Moreover, IE4 is no longer supported and IE5 is going the way of the dodo already. If you want to be secure, and you're still on IE4 or less, you must therefore upgrade.
This is a key point, I recently got a new laptop with Windows 98 and IE 5.0 sp2 on it and ended up having to download over 25MB of updates between IE 5.5 sp2 and all the patches on top of it. So no, IE is not free unless you don't care about security
So from my point of view Mozilla is just as free as IE once you download all the fixes, and I love the tabbed browsing, the ability to limit life of all cookies to the current session, and the ability to conrol pop-ups in mozilla. Our next batch of systems we roll out to end users will have Mozilla 1.0 on them and with any luck OpenOffice.org on.
Yeah the commercial density seems to be getting higher and higher... it almost seems sometimes like there are more commercials than show.
Frankly it would be a feature I would love in a VCR. Of course there are times I would like the opposite feature... so I can record the CDW "Fred" commercials.
The idea of the automatic Commercial skip is nothing new. I know somebody that worked at Magnavox during the 80s and apparently they were working on adding such a feature to their VCRs.
They were looking at the black level, information during the vertical retrace period, and the sound level (commercials are louder than regular programs). When it would detect a commercial it would stop rewind the tape and wait a period of time before it started recording again. If it started recording again and the signature was still there it would repeat the process.
He was not sure as to why the feature never made it to market. His opinion was that it was just difficult to get it work consistently with the technology of the day.
If they can do this to blizzard, they can do this to your company too..
Well, most likely the company I work for would not get such a letter. I personally slap-up any user that installs such software at work. I'm sorry sucking up our limited bandwidth to swap music with your 5 million closest friends is not acceptable behavior.
Bring in a CD-R with all your favorite tunes downloaded at home, that's perfectly fine. Where I work we can't afford enough bandwidth for everybody to download crap. We actually need pretty much it all for running our buisness so we hopefully can make money and keep everyone employed.
I agree that the author of this article seems to be a more than a bit slanted. I happen to agree that the change to LGPL is a good thing since I don't see Lindows contributing back and that is a bad thing for the Wine project.
Yes the GPL/LGPL is almost a religion, but I beleive that it's the right of all computer users to not be forced into software serfdon to a single vendor. The GPL & LGPL does this where the X11 and BSD licences don't ensure this. Both allow fot the Microsoftesque embrade & extend which is a very bad thing.
I don't think there is anything wrong with Transgaming wanting to swap code with the Wine group. Both sides gain from the trade.
This does bring up a bad side effect, though: If microsoft modularizes windows, what's to keep them from charging $20 a pop for each of the additional modules?
Big Reason#1: Under the states plan the OEM & Wholesales price of the the stripped down version of windows would be 25% less than the full version. UNLESS Microsoft starts charging for the components, then the price is Full Version Price less the cost of all the components sold seperately.
So if Microsoft started charging $20 each for IE, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, etc then the price of the stripped version of windows would be closer to $0... so what would the OEM's install do you think??
Basically MS will be forced to licence "Window XP Lite" and then give away the add-ons in hopes of keeping market share in Internet Technologies. Otherwise we will be back to when Windows 95 was first released and it was possible to make money selling a web browser, media player, etc and compete with MS on price. Thwarting all MS attemps to corner all online media formats.
Could Redhat do what the people at CodeWeavers do with their CrossOffice product? Microsoft does not allow redistribution of the free web fonts, but what they do is allow the user after installation to automatically download and install the free web fonts so the system has the "standard windows" fonts available for windows applications.
I would think you could do the same thing with JDK and just ship a simple downloader and installer program to automatically download and install Sun's JDK.
Thank you for correcting me... it must have been Chile that I was thinking of. In my old age my memory seems to be going, but what you say rings true.
Everybody in the 3rd world wants to skip the industrial revolution and go strait to an information economy. I don't know if the situation is the same in Peru.
The trouble is that while the information economy is nice, you need some other good paying work for the remaining 60-80% of the population, and that can only be provided by traditinal industries. Without traditinal industries you don't have a functional economy at all... at least this is my probably ill-formed opinion.
If I remember correctly, Peru was one of the first countries in south america to go from socialist government controlled economy to an open free-market economy. The reason for the change was that the country that was on the virge of bankrupcy with 1600% per month inflation.
In the following decade pretty much all of South America followed Peru's example because the sucess they had in stablizing the economy. Hopefully this will be a similar domino situation.
The reason they can't do this is because of the middle men.
In the music industry it's they would be pissing of the distributors that make a significant cut of the record sales. For mastercard it would piss of the banks that make a good chunk of change off the merchant accounts.
This is also why many brick and mortar retailer chains were slow to get online. The franchise holders basically told them that they would jump ship if they started selling online. So it took alot of negotations to come up with a sceme acceptable to the current francise holders.
So alot of old buisness is in a catch 22 situation... they need to keep the current middle men happy so they keep making money off their current market. But need to figure a way to get them out of the system longer term so they can be more efficcent and make it online.
This is why you see some old francises moving to franchise controlled stors... they can't gripe about getting a cut unlike the independents.
A Linux distribution from Redmond WA?? One wonders if Microsoft has a hand in it somehow, I've been wondering how long it would take Microsoft to adopt Linux so they can kill it.
Corporations serve several purposes and are very crucial to our economy. It's amazing how few demagogues realize this. I, as an author want the ability to sell my copyrights for money - to corporations. When you take away my ability to do that you're taking away some of the value of my creation to me. The bottomline is that artists will get shittier contracts and compensations because they can give less away.
Corporations not being able to hold copyrights does not prevent you from licencing your work to them and them paying you money.
Patents I belive can only be held by individual inventors. This does not prevent an inventor from licencing his patent exclusively to some company.
Really though if a company still can be exclusivly licenced then they still effectivly "own" the copyright on a work. Really there is no way to prevent this other than making exclusive licences illeagal, which I don't see happening.
I'm a user of 98lite and found it works wonderful and when IE crashes my desktop doesn't. At work almost all our systems are running win95 OSR 2 without windows and they work fine. The problem comes now when we install new software it Assumes that IE is always installed and so won't run or crashes when you try to run it.
Microsoft has in effect made IE part of the OS because application developers us mshtml.dll and other parts of IE and so have forced it to be part of the OS thanks to encouragement from MS.
So IE is now part of the OS in practical terms, so there is nothing to be gained by forcing them to release a version without IE. The only practical solution is to force MS to liscence all technolgies & protocols currently used in MS products or developted in the next 5 years for Free to all developters. This stands a chance of restoring the market.
I would suggest you get a Radeon 7500 or possibly 8500 and use open shource drivers in XF86 4.2.0. This is what I've done since I could never get nVidia's Binary drivers to work with my old TNT card that I've had for years.
The 7500 works with 3D acceleration under XF 4.2.0 if you don't mind building your own drivers since it's hard to find a binary release for many distros yet. The 8500 although a better card, does not currently have accelerated 3D support under XF86.
DVD's are a storage medium. They are what someone makes them to be (ie. Movie DVD's, Software DVD's, etc).
Trying to classify Movie DVD's as software is sort of... dumb.
My reply is DUH give Wheatly18 a dunce hat.
The court case was not about DVD in general, but about Movie DVDs in particular. WB was trying to say that because a miniscule part of a nomal movie DVD is software for menus and such that the whole this should be considered software. This has nothing to do with DVDs in general.
The court basically said that the reason people by DVD Movies is to watch the movie, and not use the software, and so Movies on DVD should not be considered software.
Wheatly, get a brain, read the story and give the moderators who modded him up some anti-depressants so they may have a clue.
Modify that to comment to worlds best compiler for the intel platform and I would agree with the flame bait. Intel has been working for decades to optimize their compiler for their processor so of course it is probably the best one for their achitecture. GCC's strength is that is will generate good code for dozens of different procs.
Linux not only crashes and has bugs, but some of them are caused by ego clashing and political tension... AND there are zealots who will try and cover them up.
Nope, Linux is not perfect, neither is W2K or XP from MS or IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, or Solaris. No OS is perfect, but I or anybody else can take Linux and make of it what we want, and that is Unique. You can take Linux and strip it down to it's bare essentials for PDA/Embedded use or bulk it up for mid-range multi-proc servers. Linux is not perfect, but it's FREE and it works as good as any commercial solutions.
Mozilla (the shining jewel of Open Source) is years late and many dollars short of beating IE.
I've never worked on a commercial software project that went over time or budget in my life... YEAH RIGHT. Few commercial project that I've been involved in or know of have come in under budget and on time. Win XP is over a year late... MS was saying it would be ready "a couple months after 2k".... that was a pretty long couple months.
Fight tyranny and repression.... read/. at -1!
Pure flame bait... I don't bother moderating down comments, fankly though there are few worth moderating up.
- subsolar
subsolar - briging stupid comments to slashdot for far too long.
The same could have been said for Corel's products -- there is nothing else comparable to Corel Draw for Linux or Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, but both have been discontinued due to nonexistent sales. I'm lucky enough to own both, but people who want to buy WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux today are out of luck, because Corel won't sell it to you and neither will anyone else.
I unfortuneatly bought WPO 2000 before I converted to Linux and was waiting for them to release 2001 for Linux because I could not see buying software again for a computer that I already had.
I'm in a similar situation as far a games go... Loki makes ports of my favorite games, but I bought them before I switched to linux, so I don't want to pay double.
I am willing to buy commercial software for linux, but I can't the market is either not perceived as viable (Corel) or it takes way to long to get a Linux version of the application (Loki). Maybe I should have made the switch two years ago and then I would have bought the product, but the desktop was still pretty primitive and not really usuable.
I just hope that a few more develpers brave the Linux market. I probably will pay for StarOffice 6.0 when it comes out, and hope StarOffice 6.0 imports WP files under Linux halfway decent, 5.2 sucks under Windows, and the Linux version works not at all. Cool Edit would be really nice... another reason I boot windows from time to time. A music traker would be nice too, but don't expect a commercial one to ever develop.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife has, and she's about as un PC savvy as they come. As long as she can shop online with it and send & receive e-mail (using evolution) then she is happy. Both applications work as well as their MS counterparts.
So from my point of view Mozilla is just as free as IE once you download all the fixes, and I love the tabbed browsing, the ability to limit life of all cookies to the current session, and the ability to conrol pop-ups in mozilla. Our next batch of systems we roll out to end users will have Mozilla 1.0 on them and with any luck OpenOffice.org on.
Frankly it would be a feature I would love in a VCR. Of course there are times I would like the opposite feature ... so I can record the CDW "Fred" commercials.
- subsolar
They were looking at the black level, information during the vertical retrace period, and the sound level (commercials are louder than regular programs). When it would detect a commercial it would stop rewind the tape and wait a period of time before it started recording again. If it started recording again and the signature was still there it would repeat the process.
He was not sure as to why the feature never made it to market. His opinion was that it was just difficult to get it work consistently with the technology of the day.
- subsolar
Bring in a CD-R with all your favorite tunes downloaded at home, that's perfectly fine. Where I work we can't afford enough bandwidth for everybody to download crap. We actually need pretty much it all for running our buisness so we hopefully can make money and keep everyone employed.
Yes the GPL/LGPL is almost a religion, but I beleive that it's the right of all computer users to not be forced into software serfdon to a single vendor. The GPL & LGPL does this where the X11 and BSD licences don't ensure this. Both allow fot the Microsoftesque embrade & extend which is a very bad thing.
I don't think there is anything wrong with Transgaming wanting to swap code with the Wine group. Both sides gain from the trade.
Big Reason#1: Under the states plan the OEM & Wholesales price of the the stripped down version of windows would be 25% less than the full version. UNLESS Microsoft starts charging for the components, then the price is Full Version Price less the cost of all the components sold seperately.
So if Microsoft started charging $20 each for IE, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, etc then the price of the stripped version of windows would be closer to $0
Basically MS will be forced to licence "Window XP Lite" and then give away the add-ons in hopes of keeping market share in Internet Technologies. Otherwise we will be back to when Windows 95 was first released and it was possible to make money selling a web browser, media player, etc and compete with MS on price. Thwarting all MS attemps to corner all online media formats.
I would think you could do the same thing with JDK and just ship a simple downloader and installer program to automatically download and install Sun's JDK.
Everybody in the 3rd world wants to skip the industrial revolution and go strait to an information economy. I don't know if the situation is the same in Peru.
The trouble is that while the information economy is nice, you need some other good paying work for the remaining 60-80% of the population, and that can only be provided by traditinal industries. Without traditinal industries you don't have a functional economy at all ... at least this is my probably ill-formed opinion.
In the following decade pretty much all of South America followed Peru's example because the sucess they had in stablizing the economy. Hopefully this will be a similar domino situation.
And what about people that don't have eyes??
In the music industry it's they would be pissing of the distributors that make a significant cut of the record sales. For mastercard it would piss of the banks that make a good chunk of change off the merchant accounts.
This is also why many brick and mortar retailer chains were slow to get online. The franchise holders basically told them that they would jump ship if they started selling online. So it took alot of negotations to come up with a sceme acceptable to the current francise holders.
So alot of old buisness is in a catch 22 situation ... they need to keep the current middle men happy so they keep making money off their current market. But need to figure a way to get them out of the system longer term so they can be more efficcent and make it online.
This is why you see some old francises moving to franchise controlled stors ... they can't gripe about getting a cut unlike the independents.
subsolar
You could try my favorite rendition of the tune at http://www.chiptune.com/files/mp3/maybebop-05-mul
I'm having a horrible time trying to pull up the article ... first time I've heard of MSNBC being slashdotted.
Kidding of course. :^).
Corporations not being able to hold copyrights does not prevent you from licencing your work to them and them paying you money.
Patents I belive can only be held by individual inventors. This does not prevent an inventor from licencing his patent exclusively to some company.
Really though if a company still can be exclusivly licenced then they still effectivly "own" the copyright on a work. Really there is no way to prevent this other than making exclusive licences illeagal, which I don't see happening.
Microsoft has in effect made IE part of the OS because application developers us mshtml.dll and other parts of IE and so have forced it to be part of the OS thanks to encouragement from MS.
So IE is now part of the OS in practical terms, so there is nothing to be gained by forcing them to release a version without IE. The only practical solution is to force MS to liscence all technolgies & protocols currently used in MS products or developted in the next 5 years for Free to all developters. This stands a chance of restoring the market.
The 7500 works with 3D acceleration under XF 4.2.0 if you don't mind building your own drivers since it's hard to find a binary release for many distros yet. The 8500 although a better card, does not currently have accelerated 3D support under XF86.
The court case was not about DVD in general, but about Movie DVDs in particular. WB was trying to say that because a miniscule part of a nomal movie DVD is software for menus and such that the whole this should be considered software. This has nothing to do with DVDs in general.
The court basically said that the reason people by DVD Movies is to watch the movie, and not use the software, and so Movies on DVD should not be considered software.
Wheatly, get a brain, read the story and give the moderators who modded him up some anti-depressants so they may have a clue.
- subsolar
Modify that to comment to worlds best compiler for the intel platform and I would agree with the flame bait. Intel has been working for decades to optimize their compiler for their processor so of course it is probably the best one for their achitecture. GCC's strength is that is will generate good code for dozens of different procs.
Nope, Linux is not perfect, neither is W2K or XP from MS or IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, or Solaris. No OS is perfect, but I or anybody else can take Linux and make of it what we want, and that is Unique. You can take Linux and strip it down to it's bare essentials for PDA/Embedded use or bulk it up for mid-range multi-proc servers. Linux is not perfect, but it's FREE and it works as good as any commercial solutions.
I've never worked on a commercial software project that went over time or budget in my life
Pure flame bait
- subsolar
subsolar - briging stupid comments to slashdot for far too long.
I'm really sick of it!!
None of this is a big secret and not terribly insightful at all.
- subsolar
subsolar - brigning stupid comments to slashdot for way too long.
I'm in a similar situation as far a games go ... Loki makes ports of my favorite games, but I bought them before I switched to linux, so I don't want to pay double.
I am willing to buy commercial software for linux, but I can't the market is either not perceived as viable (Corel) or it takes way to long to get a Linux version of the application (Loki). Maybe I should have made the switch two years ago and then I would have bought the product, but the desktop was still pretty primitive and not really usuable.
I just hope that a few more develpers brave the Linux market. I probably will pay for StarOffice 6.0 when it comes out, and hope StarOffice 6.0 imports WP files under Linux halfway decent, 5.2 sucks under Windows, and the Linux version works not at all. Cool Edit would be really nice ... another reason I boot windows from time to time. A music traker would be nice too, but don't expect a commercial one to ever develop.
- subsolar