Vista uses substantially more hardware resources than previous versions of Windows but that has also been true for every preceeding verion of Windows
Windows 2000 didn't use substantially more resources than NT4.0 and for most machines in use in 1999 it ran better than any of the Windows 9x versions... it didn't run on pre-pentium hardware and did need more base RAM but once you actually ran non-trivial programs you needed similar resources, and 2000 was snappier than 9x.
Windows 2000 was, in a lot of ways, the last real improvement in Windows. XP is just 2000 with a flashy theme and a few extra components (mostly the crippled version of Citrix terminal server, and a bluetooth stack) bundled. Vista? Most of the changes in Vista are for the benefit of the RIAA and MPAA, not you or me.
The new findings are in stark contrast to controversies sparked by the advent of technologies of the past such as nuclear power and genetically modified foods, which scientists perceived as having lower risks than did the public
I think that's revisionist history.
At a similar point in time (don't forget, we're a long way from real nanotech), the public was similarly clueless and complacent about both of these. It was scientists, like these ones, who first started talking about dangers, and it wasn't until a few populists (some scientists, some with other backgrounds) really started pushing the issues that the public noticed. The massive overreaction phase won't hit until there's a big splashy problem.
Another problem is that license servers (including Windows client licenses) don't always work reliably, or if they work they don't actually match the license you're actually using (either because they don't support it, or you can't figure out how to configure it, or they won't let you reconfigure it if you get it wrong).
So even if you're in compliance with the license, the servers think you aren't... so you either buy more licenses or you bypass it.
That's the version of Vista they left out - the "Vista Professional" version, go back and take a second look at Windows 2000, leave out the XP theme and Aero eye candy, leave out all the RIAA-friendly performance-killing DRM, and only include a stripped down version of Windows Media Player without the themes... something that just plays unencrypted files with a standard Windows look-and-feel like the WMP 2 I miss from Windows 2000. Include Interix and the full Active Directory support, of course, and if you have time strip down the control panel applets so they run without using the MS HTML control... that's not a huge problem, but I have had a couple of users I had to reinstall Windows on because some slugware messed up HTML and broke Add/Remove programs.
Or, alternatively, bring back Windows 2000 Professional and update the drivers. Maybe toss in the crippled version of Citrix you added to XP. Because, now I think of it, once you get rid of the DRM and chrome what's left of Vista... or even XP? The only things an actual professional needs from Windows that Windows 2000 doesn't provide are remote desktop and the Microsoft bluetooth stack.
This is the kind of thing that was going through my mind when I watched that scene, back in 1977:
Look, Luke, you're in a frigging starship, you've got a bloody warp drive behind your seat. Plus, your best friend is a robot, and your most treasured possession is a frigging laser sword. You're embedded in so many layers of high tech that you make the lunar lander look like a housboat. You're not shooting "womp rats" in "beggar's canyon" and your fighter isn't a souped up flying pickup and you're not waving a gun or even a light saber around: you're using a fly-by-wire control system with god knows what kinds of control software just to keep from augering in every time you twitch that joystick... that's your "targeting computer".
I was 16 years old and my bedroom was full of model planes and I was into the technology. I mean totally into it. I was identifying the hell out of the movie, and I was Luke Skywalker... and as soon as he turned off his targeting computer and I just knew he was gonna blow that thing up just like it was a big old womp rat (with lasers)...
Totally blew my suspension of disbelief.
Man, it was a good two or three minutes before I got totally back into the mindless special effects action movie mode. And for a 16 year old with ADD, that's a long time.
The price of allofmp3 was fair to me and is possibly enought to compensate the artists.
Whether it's enough or not is not your decision nor AllOfMP3's decision to make. It's the artists and their representatives.
The question of whether the major label system is adequate representation or not is a separate issue, and it's down to the artists to decide to sign or not.
If you want to encourage artists to bypass the majors then you should support distributors and labels that give the artists a better deal.
But going with a service that doesn't, in practice, compensate the artists at all (and the fact is that they don't, outside Russia) is not doing anything to support the artists nor independent labels and distributors who are more artist-friendly.
As for the WTO, it's the WTO that make the legal loophole that AllOfMP3 uses to sell outside Russia possible. Yeh, the WTO's been caught with their pants down, they accidentally globalized music more than they planned on, but that doesn't justify AllOfMP3 selling outside Russia either, nor does it justify supporting them.
The bottom line is, as far as artists outside Russia are concerned, the only difference to them between AllOfMP3 and Kazaa is academic. They don't get anything from it. It's MORE honest and ethical of you if you rip them off directly using one of the peer-to-peer networks than paying the Russian Mafia to do it for you.
We all understand the legal jujitsu that allofmp3 used to find a loophole in the law. The fact that soemthing is legal doesn't make it ethical. It's no more ethical for allofmp3 to bypass copyright law than for the RIAA to abuse it. If you want to be consistent, you should approve of both or neither.
I can't really fault them for playing the system to its full extent; if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have.
And if someone else did, I'd fault them too.
You can't say "the system allows crooks to get away with this, so it's not the crooks' fault". The fact that something happens to be legal doesn't make it acceptable.
1. Is this your first eBook device? 2. If so, why did this one attract you? 3. If not, what are you doing with your existing eBooks? 4. What's your monthly 'toy' budget, to the nearest $100?
if you want to convert your.doc and.html and.txt files over, amazon charges $0.10 per file.
Speaking as someone who's had a number of service-supported devices made useless because the service provider quit providing the service, this is a deal killer.
For $400, I expect something better than a $100 PDA, not something worse.
I entirely agree... forks most often happen when a project has become unresponsive.
That's one of Linus Torvalds strengths. He's a genuinely nice guy, but not a pushover, and he's got strong opinions and passions but (except for a few blind spots) is entirely able to keep them under control. So Linux is responsive but focussed, and thus doesn't get forked.
I would have to disagree that the way to trump a fork is always to do something bigger and better. Sometimes you may just need to find the 20% of the extra functionality that covers 80% of the use cases, or provide a hook that the extra functionality can be tied in to, so you don't have to absorb the whole thing.
Also... *any* open source license is "the ability to fork". That's what makes it open. If you can't fork, it's not really open source.
Forks can also be used to convince the main trunk of a project to change direction, or to kick a stalled project into gear again. When Tcl was stagnating at one point, we started working on a fork... and Ousterhout started developing and releasing new code again, and we ended up turning the fork into an extensions package. Which was a good thing, Ousterhout's one of the best programmers I know, his code is a pure joy to work on.
The GNU GPL actively prevents forks by removing the point of forking.
The point of forking is to deal with a project that is going a direction you don't like, or that has an absentee maintainer. The goal of a fork may be to become a new trunk, to create a new project with different goals, or to apply pressure to the trunk to become responsive to your goals. The GPL has little to do with this, and as evidence I'll note that GCC itself has had at least one major fork and a couple of minor ones.
Nobody forks the Linux kernel because the Linux team, lead by Linus, are responsive and responsible enough to remove the need for forking. That's what prevents forks, not the license.
Firstly, the FSF can "extend their definition" of derived work all they want, but that doesn't change the law.
They claim that they are not extending their definition, but that a program that calls an API that's implemented only in a GPLed work must be distributed under the GPL because the definition of a derived work, in law, includes works that are *intended* to use the API of the GPLed program. This seems to me to be an endorsement of interface copyrights, which the FSF's twin organization the LPF are adamantly opposed to.
The AGPL depends on the common legal fiction that making a derived work is creating a new copy of the work, and thus is forbidden under copyright law except as permitted by the AGPL. This is of course the "internal necessary copy" hook that EULAs and copy protection technology depended on for their legal defense before the DMCA explicitly made provision for them.
If I have time I'll try a recent version of K-Meleon, and see if it's improved.
I've gone into the XPI security issue at some length in a separate message. The fact that XUL isn't the native UI isn't a security issue, it's a quality of implementation issue... XUL without the XPI installer model may not have security issues, but it's still not native.
Extensions are what gives Firefox it's usefulness.
On OS X, where there are a plethora of wrappers around Gecko and Webkit/KHTML available, yes, I suppose that's its distinguishing mark.
if I'm going to use Firefox without the extensions, then I might as well be using IE or Opera.
On Windows though, where you might be considering using IE, Firefox is about the only alternative. Opera isn't that small these days, and its MDI-based user interface belongs in the '80s. I used Opera instead of Firefox on my Toshiba Libretto, but I'd have loved something similar to Camino instead.
But... IE? OK, OK, I was getting on Firefox's case about security earlier. But really, Firefox's design problems are at the "not washing your hands after you go to the restroom" level. IE is like running barefoot through the "Hot Ward" and snogging all the E-Bola patients by comparison. The idea of allowing any random native code module run if it's had the trust dog piddle on it so it smells right? What maniac thought that was a good idea?
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It's the DVD that's demanding it, not you.
Vista uses substantially more hardware resources than previous versions of Windows but that has also been true for every preceeding verion of Windows
Windows 2000 didn't use substantially more resources than NT4.0 and for most machines in use in 1999 it ran better than any of the Windows 9x versions... it didn't run on pre-pentium hardware and did need more base RAM but once you actually ran non-trivial programs you needed similar resources, and 2000 was snappier than 9x.
Windows 2000 was, in a lot of ways, the last real improvement in Windows. XP is just 2000 with a flashy theme and a few extra components (mostly the crippled version of Citrix terminal server, and a bluetooth stack) bundled. Vista? Most of the changes in Vista are for the benefit of the RIAA and MPAA, not you or me.
The new findings are in stark contrast to controversies sparked by the advent of technologies of the past such as nuclear power and genetically modified foods, which scientists perceived as having lower risks than did the public
I think that's revisionist history.
At a similar point in time (don't forget, we're a long way from real nanotech), the public was similarly clueless and complacent about both of these. It was scientists, like these ones, who first started talking about dangers, and it wasn't until a few populists (some scientists, some with other backgrounds) really started pushing the issues that the public noticed. The massive overreaction phase won't hit until there's a big splashy problem.
Another problem is that license servers (including Windows client licenses) don't always work reliably, or if they work they don't actually match the license you're actually using (either because they don't support it, or you can't figure out how to configure it, or they won't let you reconfigure it if you get it wrong).
So even if you're in compliance with the license, the servers think you aren't... so you either buy more licenses or you bypass it.
That's the version of Vista they left out - the "Vista Professional" version, go back and take a second look at Windows 2000, leave out the XP theme and Aero eye candy, leave out all the RIAA-friendly performance-killing DRM, and only include a stripped down version of Windows Media Player without the themes... something that just plays unencrypted files with a standard Windows look-and-feel like the WMP 2 I miss from Windows 2000. Include Interix and the full Active Directory support, of course, and if you have time strip down the control panel applets so they run without using the MS HTML control... that's not a huge problem, but I have had a couple of users I had to reinstall Windows on because some slugware messed up HTML and broke Add/Remove programs.
Or, alternatively, bring back Windows 2000 Professional and update the drivers. Maybe toss in the crippled version of Citrix you added to XP. Because, now I think of it, once you get rid of the DRM and chrome what's left of Vista... or even XP? The only things an actual professional needs from Windows that Windows 2000 doesn't provide are remote desktop and the Microsoft bluetooth stack.
This is the kind of thing that was going through my mind when I watched that scene, back in 1977:
Look, Luke, you're in a frigging starship, you've got a bloody warp drive behind your seat. Plus, your best friend is a robot, and your most treasured possession is a frigging laser sword. You're embedded in so many layers of high tech that you make the lunar lander look like a housboat. You're not shooting "womp rats" in "beggar's canyon" and your fighter isn't a souped up flying pickup and you're not waving a gun or even a light saber around: you're using a fly-by-wire control system with god knows what kinds of control software just to keep from augering in every time you twitch that joystick... that's your "targeting computer".
I was 16 years old and my bedroom was full of model planes and I was into the technology. I mean totally into it. I was identifying the hell out of the movie, and I was Luke Skywalker... and as soon as he turned off his targeting computer and I just knew he was gonna blow that thing up just like it was a big old womp rat (with lasers)...
Totally blew my suspension of disbelief.
Man, it was a good two or three minutes before I got totally back into the mindless special effects action movie mode. And for a 16 year old with ADD, that's a long time.
The price of allofmp3 was fair to me and is possibly enought to compensate the artists.
Whether it's enough or not is not your decision nor AllOfMP3's decision to make. It's the artists and their representatives.
The question of whether the major label system is adequate representation or not is a separate issue, and it's down to the artists to decide to sign or not.
If you want to encourage artists to bypass the majors then you should support distributors and labels that give the artists a better deal.
But going with a service that doesn't, in practice, compensate the artists at all (and the fact is that they don't, outside Russia) is not doing anything to support the artists nor independent labels and distributors who are more artist-friendly.
As for the WTO, it's the WTO that make the legal loophole that AllOfMP3 uses to sell outside Russia possible. Yeh, the WTO's been caught with their pants down, they accidentally globalized music more than they planned on, but that doesn't justify AllOfMP3 selling outside Russia either, nor does it justify supporting them.
The bottom line is, as far as artists outside Russia are concerned, the only difference to them between AllOfMP3 and Kazaa is academic. They don't get anything from it. It's MORE honest and ethical of you if you rip them off directly using one of the peer-to-peer networks than paying the Russian Mafia to do it for you.
We all understand the legal jujitsu that allofmp3 used to find a loophole in the law. The fact that soemthing is legal doesn't make it ethical. It's no more ethical for allofmp3 to bypass copyright law than for the RIAA to abuse it. If you want to be consistent, you should approve of both or neither.
If only Lucas had stopped trying to write SF at the end of THX-1138.
I'm with David Brin here, Star Wars was screwed up with Lucas' elitism right from the start.
I can't really fault them for playing the system to its full extent; if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have.
And if someone else did, I'd fault them too.
You can't say "the system allows crooks to get away with this, so it's not the crooks' fault". The fact that something happens to be legal doesn't make it acceptable.
1. Is this your first eBook device?
2. If so, why did this one attract you?
3. If not, what are you doing with your existing eBooks?
4. What's your monthly 'toy' budget, to the nearest $100?
if you want to convert your .doc and .html and .txt files over, amazon charges $0.10 per file.
Speaking as someone who's had a number of service-supported devices made useless because the service provider quit providing the service, this is a deal killer.
For $400, I expect something better than a $100 PDA, not something worse.
Once there is a way to buy all music without DRM, I'll use it because I want the artists to get paid for their work.
Buy the music without DRM that you can buy. If the options are DRM or nothing (or unauthorised copies) then you can always go with "nothing".
You can get legal DRM-free music from iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon.
Don't forget, these days "an honest politician" means one that stays bought. :p
I'm not sure what the point of this is.
If the project is truly open source, then there's nothing to protect it from.
I entirely agree... forks most often happen when a project has become unresponsive.
That's one of Linus Torvalds strengths. He's a genuinely nice guy, but not a pushover, and he's got strong opinions and passions but (except for a few blind spots) is entirely able to keep them under control. So Linux is responsive but focussed, and thus doesn't get forked.
I would have to disagree that the way to trump a fork is always to do something bigger and better. Sometimes you may just need to find the 20% of the extra functionality that covers 80% of the use cases, or provide a hook that the extra functionality can be tied in to, so you don't have to absorb the whole thing.
Also... *any* open source license is "the ability to fork". That's what makes it open. If you can't fork, it's not really open source.
Forks can also be used to convince the main trunk of a project to change direction, or to kick a stalled project into gear again. When Tcl was stagnating at one point, we started working on a fork... and Ousterhout started developing and releasing new code again, and we ended up turning the fork into an extensions package. Which was a good thing, Ousterhout's one of the best programmers I know, his code is a pure joy to work on.
The GNU GPL actively prevents forks by removing the point of forking.
The point of forking is to deal with a project that is going a direction you don't like, or that has an absentee maintainer. The goal of a fork may be to become a new trunk, to create a new project with different goals, or to apply pressure to the trunk to become responsive to your goals. The GPL has little to do with this, and as evidence I'll note that GCC itself has had at least one major fork and a couple of minor ones.
Nobody forks the Linux kernel because the Linux team, lead by Linus, are responsive and responsible enough to remove the need for forking. That's what prevents forks, not the license.
I wouldn't go as far as that, but really if it can't be forked, it's not open source.
I didn't say K-Meleon wasn't native.
The GNU MP incident seems to pretty much do the trick there.
Firstly, the FSF can "extend their definition" of derived work all they want, but that doesn't change the law.
They claim that they are not extending their definition, but that a program that calls an API that's implemented only in a GPLed work must be distributed under the GPL because the definition of a derived work, in law, includes works that are *intended* to use the API of the GPLed program. This seems to me to be an endorsement of interface copyrights, which the FSF's twin organization the LPF are adamantly opposed to.
The AGPL depends on the common legal fiction that making a derived work is creating a new copy of the work, and thus is forbidden under copyright law except as permitted by the AGPL. This is of course the "internal necessary copy" hook that EULAs and copy protection technology depended on for their legal defense before the DMCA explicitly made provision for them.
If I have time I'll try a recent version of K-Meleon, and see if it's improved.
I've gone into the XPI security issue at some length in a separate message. The fact that XUL isn't the native UI isn't a security issue, it's a quality of implementation issue... XUL without the XPI installer model may not have security issues, but it's still not native.
Extensions are what gives Firefox it's usefulness.
On OS X, where there are a plethora of wrappers around Gecko and Webkit/KHTML available, yes, I suppose that's its distinguishing mark.
if I'm going to use Firefox without the extensions, then I might as well be using IE or Opera.
On Windows though, where you might be considering using IE, Firefox is about the only alternative. Opera isn't that small these days, and its MDI-based user interface belongs in the '80s. I used Opera instead of Firefox on my Toshiba Libretto, but I'd have loved something similar to Camino instead.
But... IE? OK, OK, I was getting on Firefox's case about security earlier. But really, Firefox's design problems are at the "not washing your hands after you go to the restroom" level. IE is like running barefoot through the "Hot Ward" and snogging all the E-Bola patients by comparison. The idea of allowing any random native code module run if it's had the trust dog piddle on it so it smells right? What maniac thought that was a good idea?
I'm assuming that's sarcasm. I hope that's sarcasm. Truly. :)