On the other hand the truly paranoid could make a case for the idea that they are testing the waters, and will soon be busting Cygnus for porting the GNU toolset to XP.
I had the same idea but was thinking about Samba. THAT particular piece of software riles them to no end. See the Kerberos fiasco. I now have no doubt that their ultimate goal is to completely eliminate AND OUTLAW use of any software except theirs.
I think that they are doomed to fail as a mainstream "PC replacement" for a reason I haven't seen anyone else cite. That reason is; PCs are cheap.
Another reason: there's a BIG difference between a LAN (which basically is the niche you mentioned) and the Internet. MS's solution amount to trusting every bit you have to Uncle Bill. Bad. On the other hand, having a LAN in your office and lightweight PCs (aka NC) does make a lot of sense.
And it's even less original than the article says: remember those "boot ROMs" for diskless Novell workstations? Windows 3.x installed in the server? That worked, and worked REAL good. I am/used to be a CNE, and did gazillions of installations like that. Everyone was happy. Office ran exactly as fast as in HD installations. It had everything a NC has except buzzword compliance.
And what killed that? The bloat that was Windows 95. Can't have it executed from the server. Bugger.
I actually like that idea. Wanna start a business on that?;)
Worse than globalization of law enforcement...
on
Harm From The Hague
·
· Score: 2
What it boils down to is, "in case of conflict between two countries' laws, the most severe one takes precedence". This is absolutely insane, and will only contribute to widespread contempt of the very concept of Law.
Bandwidth is expensive. Local hard disks (and CD-Rs and Zips and DATs etc.) are cheap. Third-party startups are unreliable. YOUR computer is as reliable as YOU make it, which is potentially a lot.
I can only see one reason why people would use remote storage: "because it's cool! See, I have a drive letter mapped to a server in Hong Kong! 133t!"
And the control thing. The Powers That Be see the PC as an object that gives people much more power than they'd like it to. So they push "solutions" that put users back in a state of dependency. Evil.
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again."
"Again"? When did music companies stop making money?
"AMD Anytime" sounds better. Consider this a modest gift from me to the marketing department of AMD. Use at will. Trademark it. Create dancing funny-clad people to go along with it. No strings attached.
1) ICANN, AlterNIC, and other alternate root servers make up the "Root Server Pool". New entities may join in as long as they meet some QA requirements.
2) Each of these entities, in round robin fashion is asked every N months (12?) for a NEW TLD which isn't part of the system yet (less than N letters -- 8, maybe?)
3) This turn's entity gets control over the chosen TLD and administers it according to its own policies.
4) N months later, the next entity in the pool is asked the same question, and it has to come up with a new name or loose the turn.
Big Corporation: Sirs, we want... Regulatory Body: You got it. Big Corporation: But... Regulatory Body: You got it. Big Corporation: Heh, we didn't even say what is it we want. Regulatory Body: Whatever it is, you got it. We're here to please you. Do you want a blow job too? Big Corporation: Hm, er... yes, that would be nice. Regulatory Body: (cracking whip) Joe Consumer! Give Big Corporation a blow job. NOW, or I'll cut your ration again! Joe Consumer: Arf! Arf!
Gimme a break. There is no such thing as absolute freedom. The most that can be expected, in any aspect of society, is maximize everybody's freedom while keeping its alloting more or less egalitarian. That's what the GPL aims to do (prety successfully IMHO).
Give this book as a surprise gift to a lawyer you know. Yes, spend the $20 + s&h. If the lawyer in question does IP-related work, all the better. And bug them later to make sure they read it.
Barnes & Noble allows you to ship a book to an address of your choosing, gift-wrapped. Probably Amazon does that too. I don't know for sure because I don't do business with them.
Personally, I won't be getting cable TV either - for that matter, I don't see much of a reason to get a TV at all. I'll be spending my time at libraries and bookstores.
Libraries. Used bookstores. Yum yum. Scavenging for oddities in print. You can almost feel your soul getting close to Nirvana by the minute. Why don't I do that more often? Lazy bastard, I am. Damn.
People confuse those two concepts. RMS's positions are not really that extreme (lots of people would have copyright abolished; he wouldn't); but he is inflexible in those positions, as in "not giving an inch". Big difference.
Of course the other problem with Creationists is that they only think science is crazy in this reguard and freely accept our rather crazy ideas of light and radation. They still use microwaves.
Ooooh, but God, in His infinite Mercy, allows some of the evil inchantations known as Science to work by infusing the Holy Spirit onto otherwise worthless pieces of metal and rock (else we'd starve and have lots of diseases). When His patience runs out, your microwave won't work unles you pray at it.;-P
YES! Beware of the alarmists! They are the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world! We can't be paranoid enough about these people! When they finally grab power THE WORLD WILL COME TO AN END!!! AAAAAAA!!!!!!!
I suppose he had to TAKE 3 quasi-simultaneous pictures of each scene too, each one already with a red/green/blue filter over the lens. Otherwise, if we have a gray box lying on the ground, how the hell are we supposed to know what color it was?
In the self-portrait by the river, the water, unlike everything else in the picture, seems... blurry, oily, I can't quite get it, but it doesn't look like a normal river. This might be evidence of three pictures taken in quick sucession from the same spot.
I imagine them switching cameras somehat like modern Formula 1/CART/Indy pitcrews change tyres. Have to be quick so the scenery changes the least.
More sinister than file format hoarding: Hardware. Follow me:
Popular hardware maker A makes new whiz-bang peripheral/chipset/whatever.
Out of laziness (or some under-the-hood incentive by M$) they only release drivers for WinYY.
Now, if you want your machine to have new whiz-bang hardware (or if you're buying a new machine -- maybe your company is growing) you are forced to use WinYY or later.
Result 1: you are forced to use WinYY.
Hypothesis: Versions of Office < YY will somehow not work correctly under WinYY.
Result 2: you are forced to use Office YY.
I won't even get into hardware that is technologically or legally prevented from being usd by Free OSs. There's too many ugly developments coming from there already.
I only want to point out that they are going after people that are STEALING movies.
No, they're after everybody.
If you buy the DVD they are not trying to punish you.
I'll tell you what I did just today.
My 5-year-old daughter has a CD of kiddie songs she loves to listen to. I noticed the CD wasn't going to survive much longer, so I ripped everything as MP3 into the PC and created an el neato desktop icon for the asociated playlist. Now, when the CD gets scratched beyond redemption she'll still be able to hear it. (I do the same thing with my own CDs of course; the wear and tear is considerably less but there is some)
They want to prevent such a thing, so I keep buying the same product over and over again. For movies, for music (they want to make unrippable CDs too, or migrate music distribution to the DVD format), heck, even for books.
So, can you still say I won't be punished if I buy the media?
I get the feeling that in the future the only way I can be free is by eschewing electronic entertainment altogether and only read books and play music with instruments (unles thay mandate "secure guitars" or something). Might be a healthier life, too. Fahrenheit 451 anyone?
This has an obvious flaw: the light emission from the monitor to user is unencrypted. I look forward to a future enhancement which embeds a content protection chip in each user's brain.
You can be ABSOLUTELY sure they will try that eventually, as soon as the needed technology becomes available, and not 0.0000000000001 seconds later. Okay, it's sci-fi level so it's unlikely to happen in the next 100 years. No problem, when it can happen it WILL happen. Corporations are essentially immortal; they can wait.
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I had the same idea but was thinking about Samba. THAT particular piece of software riles them to no end. See the Kerberos fiasco. I now have no doubt that their ultimate goal is to completely eliminate AND OUTLAW use of any software except theirs.
Another reason: there's a BIG difference between a LAN (which basically is the niche you mentioned) and the Internet. MS's solution amount to trusting every bit you have to Uncle Bill. Bad. On the other hand, having a LAN in your office and lightweight PCs (aka NC) does make a lot of sense.
And it's even less original than the article says: remember those "boot ROMs" for diskless Novell workstations? Windows 3.x installed in the server? That worked, and worked REAL good. I am/used to be a CNE, and did gazillions of installations like that. Everyone was happy. Office ran exactly as fast as in HD installations. It had everything a NC has except buzzword compliance.
And what killed that? The bloat that was Windows 95. Can't have it executed from the server. Bugger.
I actually like that idea. Wanna start a business on that? ;)
What it boils down to is, "in case of conflict between two countries' laws, the most severe one takes precedence". This is absolutely insane, and will only contribute to widespread contempt of the very concept of Law.
If a company plans to go Echelon on me, it'll have to get man-hours from someone else. Free market, baby!
I can only see one reason why people would use remote storage: "because it's cool! See, I have a drive letter mapped to a server in Hong Kong! 133t!"
And the control thing. The Powers That Be see the PC as an object that gives people much more power than they'd like it to. So they push "solutions" that put users back in a state of dependency. Evil.
...they essentially legalized gambling in the entire frikkin' planet?
"Again"? When did music companies stop making money?
"AMD Anytime" sounds better. Consider this a modest gift from me to the marketing department of AMD. Use at will. Trademark it. Create dancing funny-clad people to go along with it. No strings attached.
2) Each of these entities, in round robin fashion is asked every N months (12?) for a NEW TLD which isn't part of the system yet (less than N letters -- 8, maybe?)
3) This turn's entity gets control over the chosen TLD and administers it according to its own policies.
4) N months later, the next entity in the pool is asked the same question, and it has to come up with a new name or loose the turn.
Makes sense?
Big Corporation: Sirs, we want...
Regulatory Body: You got it.
Big Corporation: But...
Regulatory Body: You got it.
Big Corporation: Heh, we didn't even say what is it we want.
Regulatory Body: Whatever it is, you got it. We're here to please you. Do you want a blow job too?
Big Corporation: Hm, er... yes, that would be nice.
Regulatory Body: (cracking whip) Joe Consumer! Give Big Corporation a blow job. NOW, or I'll cut your ration again!
Joe Consumer: Arf! Arf!
Gimme a break. There is no such thing as absolute freedom. The most that can be expected, in any aspect of society, is maximize everybody's freedom while keeping its alloting more or less egalitarian. That's what the GPL aims to do (prety successfully IMHO).
Barnes & Noble allows you to ship a book to an address of your choosing, gift-wrapped. Probably Amazon does that too. I don't know for sure because I don't do business with them.
News of Mark Twain's resurrection have been greatly exaggerated.
Libraries. Used bookstores. Yum yum. Scavenging for oddities in print. You can almost feel your soul getting close to Nirvana by the minute. Why don't I do that more often? Lazy bastard, I am. Damn.
I hope they don't outlaw that anytime soon...
Ah, it's nice to know you support giving 13 year olds the right to vote, drive and drink alcohol (not at the same time of course!).
People confuse those two concepts. RMS's positions are not really that extreme (lots of people would have copyright abolished; he wouldn't); but he is inflexible in those positions, as in "not giving an inch". Big difference.
Ooooh, but God, in His infinite Mercy, allows some of the evil inchantations known as Science to work by infusing the Holy Spirit onto otherwise worthless pieces of metal and rock (else we'd starve and have lots of diseases). When His patience runs out, your microwave won't work unles you pray at it. ;-P
YES! Beware of the alarmists! They are the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world! We can't be paranoid enough about these people! When they finally grab power THE WORLD WILL COME TO AN END!!! AAAAAAA!!!!!!!
On the other hand, I wonder what "Bluto" means. Why not "Brutus"?
Damn, it wasn't like that at all. He had a three-eyed camera. Should've browsed the entire site first.
In the self-portrait by the river, the water, unlike everything else in the picture, seems... blurry, oily, I can't quite get it, but it doesn't look like a normal river. This might be evidence of three pictures taken in quick sucession from the same spot.
I imagine them switching cameras somehat like modern Formula 1/CART/Indy pitcrews change tyres. Have to be quick so the scenery changes the least.
- Result 2: you are forced to use Office YY.
I won't even get into hardware that is technologically or legally prevented from being usd by Free OSs. There's too many ugly developments coming from there already.No, they're after everybody.
If you buy the DVD they are not trying to punish you.
I'll tell you what I did just today.
My 5-year-old daughter has a CD of kiddie songs she loves to listen to. I noticed the CD wasn't going to survive much longer, so I ripped everything as MP3 into the PC and created an el neato desktop icon for the asociated playlist. Now, when the CD gets scratched beyond redemption she'll still be able to hear it. (I do the same thing with my own CDs of course; the wear and tear is considerably less but there is some)
They want to prevent such a thing, so I keep buying the same product over and over again. For movies, for music (they want to make unrippable CDs too, or migrate music distribution to the DVD format), heck, even for books.
So, can you still say I won't be punished if I buy the media?
I get the feeling that in the future the only way I can be free is by eschewing electronic entertainment altogether and only read books and play music with instruments (unles thay mandate "secure guitars" or something). Might be a healthier life, too. Fahrenheit 451 anyone?
You can be ABSOLUTELY sure they will try that eventually, as soon as the needed technology becomes available, and not 0.0000000000001 seconds later. Okay, it's sci-fi level so it's unlikely to happen in the next 100 years. No problem, when it can happen it WILL happen. Corporations are essentially immortal; they can wait.