Re:Bought and Paid For
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think we need to remind our congresscritters
Unfortunately, they aren't my congresscritters. I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US either.
Unfortunately (and more and more unfortunate it is as time goes on) the US technology industry has a large effect on the technology industry worldwide and this sort of stupidity in the States will have at least some spill-over effect in other countries. Don't think for a second that the MPAA and so on won't be pushing everyone's local politicians in name-your-country to do the same thing because "it's good for the US, so it's good for you too."
And there doesn't seem to be any obvious way for a non-US citizen to get a voice in this until long after the fact and until it starts to "bite" at home.
And many millions (billions, I suppose) of dollars of computer infrastructure and custom programming and so on at large companies and small will have to be scrapped and replaced.
Alaska and South Carolina?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
The senators pushing this nonsense are from South Carolina and Alaska.
Has anyone ever challenged these guys to provide a reason why they are so concerned about Hollywood and the entertainment industry? I don't think there is much entertainment industry in Alaska and South Carolina. Aren't senators supposed to represent the interests of THEIR constituents, not the interests of a constituency on the other side of the country?
Where are the senators from California and so on? They should be pushing this, if anyone, not some chap from Alaska and another guy from South Carolina.
"What's your interest in this?" is a question that should be very publicly asked.
A few years ago someone broke into my then-current office through the skylight in the roof. The person really hurt himself coming in as the roof was about 20 feet above the floor and when I came in the door the following morning I found the electronic equipment that had been sitting on the counter under that skylight completely smashed and there was a trail of blood on the counter and along the floor and out the back fire exit door. In fact, I thought there might be someone laying dead in the office, that's how bad it looked.
I phoned the police and they came and then went to the hospital to check on who had been admitted the previous night with severe injuries. No dice. The hospital would not provide any information to the police as to who, if anyone, had come to the hospital with that type of injury.
It's difficult for someone to think up a radically new approach to a concept. Adding artificial "may-not-be-circumvented" restrictions to the number of approaches that you can take to a given problem makes it exponentially more difficult.
You do get access to the source code when software is released under the GPL. But the copyright owner (usually the fellow who wrote the software) is free to release the same software, or an enhancement, or whatever, under any other license the he chooses. Note that folks other than then copyright owner (meaning you and me when we download the GPL software) doesn't have the same right to re-license the software; we're stuck with the GPL unless we can strike some kind of a deal with the copyright owner.
Every half-competent IT staffer in the country understands the value in free products
But said half-competent IT staffer doesn't get to determine what Mary (the CEO's private secretary and coffee-carrier) will use to type the boss's very important letters.
I agree, completely. I "live" in front of my computer, but I detest online documentation for anything that requires more than two or three screens (pages) of instruction.
If I run into a problem, I like to be able to grab the manual and walk across the room and flop onto the couch to look up the required syntax (or whatever). Can't do that with on-screen documentation.
Sun still has a vested interest in making Solaris on Sparc the preferred platform.
This, I don't understand.
Sun is flogging their hardware! Is their operating system also a cash-cow of some kind? I had always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that the softare was just an add-in and they wanted to sell you their machines. If that is the case, then what would they care if you run Linux on it or write an emulator for DOS 3.11 instead of Solaris. Either way, you're still forking out the bux for a shiny Sun computin' machine, so they're getting their cash.
It's quite possible (though I don't know for sure - I never bothered to download it) that the Star Office beta will "drop dead". A lot of beta versions of various things are made with a built-in drop-dead date after which they will stop working.
Why don't all the major PC manufacturers make a deal to each sell PC's with other operating systems. They would all get hit my microsoft, but no company would gain an advantage.
That's collusion, and possibly price-fixing. And that could get them into more trouble than Microsoft is in now.
While interesting, your question is somewhat off-side when discussing Linux and BSD.
It is my considered opinion that Linux and BSD have a different basic mind-set (for want of a better term) than Windows. This mind-set is best exemplified by stating that the answer to your question is, Linux and BSD developers don't have to make a conscious choice as to whether they wish to write secure program, or whether security is an after-thought. The operating system itself tends to enforce a particular security model and, therefore, applications tend to be secure by default rather than insecure by default. In other words, given no particular attention, a given Linux/BSD application will generally tend to be more secure than a given Windows application. Simply due to the design of the operating system underlying the whole thing.
From the point of view of warranty and "warranty support", the customer's data is completely irrelevant. The computer is guaranteed to work "as it was on the date it was sold". Once the computer has been re-imaged (or whatever) and it boots up to the initial screen, that's it. That's the way it was when it was initially sold, and that is the way that it is guaranteed to work for x period of time.
In real life, the average customer's data (assuming that he does more than play Quake) is or should be more important to the customer than the fact that he has a working operating system; you can find a working operating system anywhere, as it were, but you can't find a new copy of Aunt Minnie's last email to the kids or your last six months worth of financial statements. Too bad, though, as none of that is covered by warranty; it wasn't "there" when the computer was sold.
So many motherboard bios update utilities require that you boot DOS to run 'em. It would be grand if the bios folks would start making bootable update disks available, with FreeDOS all ready to go so we don't have to try to find a dusty old copy of DOS 5.0 or 3.2 to update the bios on a shiny new P4 motherboard.
a grocery store or a restaurant you're not specifically requested to comment on the quality of the service.
I don't think that makes much of a difference. Many restaurants have a "suggestion box" with little cards to fill out, either on the tables or beside the till. "Tell us how our service was!" I doubt many people bother to fill out a card unless they either have a negative experience of some kind or their girlfriend is the waitress.
Not intended as a flame or snide remark, but a genuine question: Since corporations in their modern form, at least, did not exist at the time that the US Constitution was written, can you explain how, exactly, the constitutions applies to the relationships between people and corporations in the USA? I'm neither a citizen or a resident of the USA so I didn't get educated or "indoctrinated" (depending on your point of view) by your education system and don't understand this.
How about a (really good) pinball game made to advertise a brand of beer. It's available for Linux and Windows here: http://www.medialab.lostboys.nl/projects/madewith/ pinball/pinballgame.html
And yes, it's worth your while to download. It's very good!
i got w/ my gf to see LOTR the other night and guess what i have to endure for 30 minutes before the movie.. Pepsi ads! All shapes and sizes of them!
Did you complain? Perhaps you went to the wrong theatre.
I'm playing LOTR in my theatre right now, as a matter of fact. Know how many ads of any kind you see before the actual film starts? Zero. Lights go down, film starts rolling, "New Line Cinema.. yadda yadda yadda.. Lord of the Rings".
The absolute worst (or at least, most) product placement I've ever seen was in Josie and the Pussycats. There were products on display everywhere! In fact, there were so many that it really showed that the set designers were desperate for places to put stuff. They even had little plastic shelves stuck on the walls of the band's "private jet" with boxes of Bounce fabric softener and you-name-it on display.
(No, I didn't pay to see Josie and the Pussycats. I run a theatre.)
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I think we need to remind our congresscritters
Unfortunately, they aren't my congresscritters. I'm not a US citizen and don't live in the US either.
Unfortunately (and more and more unfortunate it is as time goes on) the US technology industry has a large effect on the technology industry worldwide and this sort of stupidity in the States will have at least some spill-over effect in other countries. Don't think for a second that the MPAA and so on won't be pushing everyone's local politicians in name-your-country to do the same thing because "it's good for the US, so it's good for you too."
And there doesn't seem to be any obvious way for a non-US citizen to get a voice in this until long after the fact and until it starts to "bite" at home.
Truly tragic.
And many millions (billions, I suppose) of dollars of computer infrastructure and custom programming and so on at large companies and small will have to be scrapped and replaced.
The senators pushing this nonsense are from South Carolina and Alaska.
Has anyone ever challenged these guys to provide a reason why they are so concerned about Hollywood and the entertainment industry? I don't think there is much entertainment industry in Alaska and South Carolina. Aren't senators supposed to represent the interests of THEIR constituents, not the interests of a constituency on the other side of the country?
Where are the senators from California and so on? They should be pushing this, if anyone, not some chap from Alaska and another guy from South Carolina.
"What's your interest in this?" is a question that should be very publicly asked.
A few years ago someone broke into my then-current office through the skylight in the roof. The person really hurt himself coming in as the roof was about 20 feet above the floor and when I came in the door the following morning I found the electronic equipment that had been sitting on the counter under that skylight completely smashed and there was a trail of blood on the counter and along the floor and out the back fire exit door. In fact, I thought there might be someone laying dead in the office, that's how bad it looked.
I phoned the police and they came and then went to the hospital to check on who had been admitted the previous night with severe injuries. No dice. The hospital would not provide any information to the police as to who, if anyone, had come to the hospital with that type of injury.
And the case was never solved.
unless you use opera which you don't have to pay for either, as a matter of fact.
Reasearch won't be overly affected
I beg to differ.
It's difficult for someone to think up a radically new approach to a concept. Adding artificial "may-not-be-circumvented" restrictions to the number of approaches that you can take to a given problem makes it exponentially more difficult.
You do get access to the source code when software is released under the GPL. But the copyright owner (usually the fellow who wrote the software) is free to release the same software, or an enhancement, or whatever, under any other license the he chooses. Note that folks other than then copyright owner (meaning you and me when we download the GPL software) doesn't have the same right to re-license the software; we're stuck with the GPL unless we can strike some kind of a deal with the copyright owner.
You can download StarOffice 6.0 Beta here
Which will soon drop dead due to a built-in expiration date (apparently).
Every half-competent IT staffer in the country understands the value in free products
But said half-competent IT staffer doesn't get to determine what Mary (the CEO's private secretary and coffee-carrier) will use to type the boss's very important letters.
I agree, completely. I "live" in front of my computer, but I detest online documentation for anything that requires more than two or three screens (pages) of instruction.
If I run into a problem, I like to be able to grab the manual and walk across the room and flop onto the couch to look up the required syntax (or whatever). Can't do that with on-screen documentation.
Sun still has a vested interest in making Solaris on Sparc the preferred platform.
This, I don't understand.
Sun is flogging their hardware! Is their operating system also a cash-cow of some kind? I had always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that the softare was just an add-in and they wanted to sell you their machines. If that is the case, then what would they care if you run Linux on it or write an emulator for DOS 3.11 instead of Solaris. Either way, you're still forking out the bux for a shiny Sun computin' machine, so they're getting their cash.
It's quite possible (though I don't know for sure - I never bothered to download it) that the Star Office beta will "drop dead". A lot of beta versions of various things are made with a built-in drop-dead date after which they will stop working.
Why don't all the major PC manufacturers make a deal to each sell PC's with other operating systems. They would all get hit my microsoft, but no company would gain an advantage.
That's collusion, and possibly price-fixing. And that could get them into more trouble than Microsoft is in now.
While interesting, your question is somewhat off-side when discussing Linux and BSD.
It is my considered opinion that Linux and BSD have a different basic mind-set (for want of a better term) than Windows. This mind-set is best exemplified by stating that the answer to your question is, Linux and BSD developers don't have to make a conscious choice as to whether they wish to write secure program, or whether security is an after-thought. The operating system itself tends to enforce a particular security model and, therefore, applications tend to be secure by default rather than insecure by default. In other words, given no particular attention, a given Linux/BSD application will generally tend to be more secure than a given Windows application. Simply due to the design of the operating system underlying the whole thing.
My opinion only, as I said.
But what about the customer's data?
From the point of view of warranty and "warranty support", the customer's data is completely irrelevant. The computer is guaranteed to work "as it was on the date it was sold". Once the computer has been re-imaged (or whatever) and it boots up to the initial screen, that's it. That's the way it was when it was initially sold, and that is the way that it is guaranteed to work for x period of time.
In real life, the average customer's data (assuming that he does more than play Quake) is or should be more important to the customer than the fact that he has a working operating system; you can find a working operating system anywhere, as it were, but you can't find a new copy of Aunt Minnie's last email to the kids or your last six months worth of financial statements. Too bad, though, as none of that is covered by warranty; it wasn't "there" when the computer was sold.
So many motherboard bios update utilities require that you boot DOS to run 'em. It would be grand if the bios folks would start making bootable update disks available, with FreeDOS all ready to go so we don't have to try to find a dusty old copy of DOS 5.0 or 3.2 to update the bios on a shiny new P4 motherboard.
a grocery store or a restaurant you're not specifically requested to comment on the quality of the service.
I don't think that makes much of a difference. Many restaurants have a "suggestion box" with little cards to fill out, either on the tables or beside the till. "Tell us how our service was!" I doubt many people bother to fill out a card unless they either have a negative experience of some kind or their girlfriend is the waitress.
Please show me where I can purchase an x86 computer WITHOUT paying for Windows.
Most small mom-and-pop white-box compuer assembly shops.
Now if you want a laptop or a "brand name" pre-assembly then that's a different story....
I don't know what a "proponderence" is, so I don't know if this is wrong or right.
The burden in criminal court is "beyond a reasonable doubt". The burden in civil court is "more likely than not."
This, I am familiar with.
Not intended as a flame or snide remark, but a genuine question: Since corporations in their modern form, at least, did not exist at the time that the US Constitution was written, can you explain how, exactly, the constitutions applies to the relationships between people and corporations in the USA? I'm neither a citizen or a resident of the USA so I didn't get educated or "indoctrinated" (depending on your point of view) by your education system and don't understand this.
they could block all referals from any site they wish
Unless the client is running something like Junkbuster (http://www.junkbuster.com) which can "delete" referer headers.
most of my web lag is from ad servers
http://www.junkbuster.com will fix that for you.
and aggressive Flash animations
And this too, if it's flash included in the ads.
Even on my DSL connection, Junkbuster makes most pages on news sites and such load literally twice as fast as they would otherwise.
How about a (really good) pinball game made to advertise a brand of beer. It's available for Linux and Windows here: http://www.medialab.lostboys.nl/projects/madewith/ pinball/pinballgame.html
And yes, it's worth your while to download. It's very good!
i got w/ my gf to see LOTR the other night and guess what i have to endure for 30 minutes before the movie.. Pepsi ads! All shapes and sizes of them!
Did you complain? Perhaps you went to the wrong theatre.
I'm playing LOTR in my theatre right now, as a matter of fact. Know how many ads of any kind you see before the actual film starts? Zero. Lights go down, film starts rolling, "New Line Cinema.. yadda yadda yadda.. Lord of the Rings".
The absolute worst (or at least, most) product placement I've ever seen was in Josie and the Pussycats. There were products on display everywhere! In fact, there were so many that it really showed that the set designers were desperate for places to put stuff. They even had little plastic shelves stuck on the walls of the band's "private jet" with boxes of Bounce fabric softener and you-name-it on display.
(No, I didn't pay to see Josie and the Pussycats. I run a theatre.)