And why do you think that MS is moving toward software-as-a-service type models?
Unlike the short-sighted music industry, MS is a technologicaly aware company. They see the writing on the wall. As bandwidth increases, the amount of 'intellectual property' that can be 'pirated' will increase.
It's only a matter of time before the end-user has enough bandwidth to download software as easily as music can be today. MS is being clever here, they are moving to protect themselves from this eventuality before it occurs, not when it becomes too late.
I have a domain coming up for renewal soon. In the last month, I have gotten snail mail from several domain registrars, written as to strongly imply that if I do not pay *them* I will lose my domain. Down to even calling themselves a "network solutions partner" and including a NetSol logo in the letter, all in an attempt to confuse an unsuspecting domain owner that the mail is from or on behalf of NetSol.
Now, if I was an "uneducated" domain owner (which many are, trust me, I used to work webhosting tech support) it would be easy to assume that the mail is legitimate. This is purely a blatant way to trick domain holders into switching away from NetSol.
You may not like NetSol, but the fact remains that tactics like this border on fraud. I'll transfer my domain if *I* want to, thank you. I actually think NetSol should go farther and sue the crap out of these companies.
I fully exepect to be moderated into oblivion for going against the party line here, but it doesn't change the fact that these companies are scum of the worst kind, and NetSol is completely in the right here.
Also, just because it's.edu doesn't make it invalid. I'd say what future IT professionals are using in school is rather relvant to this debate.
Point #2 is funny... Of course Windows was the #1 server being used and outnumbered Linux 2 to 1.:)
The point that was made is that Linux has signifgant market share. No. #2 is certainly pretty signifigant. Last I checked, Pepsi was considered pretty successful.
I especially love point #4... Gartner produced a survey that said Linux is hardly being deployed in data centers... But it's been widely discredited.
How has it been discredited? Well nothing really factual. Nobody really did any similar surveys to prove a counter-point. No instead 300 slobs living in their mothers basement posted to slashdot.org claiming it had to be made up.
Did you completely miss the part where he mentioned the IDC study that had strikeingly different results from the Garter study? I'd brush up on those reading comprehension skills.
But take this in conjunction with point #3. It's funny how readily the guy believes this despite the fact that it has also been widely discredited in exactly the same way as point #4. Well except the guys who discredited it live in apartments rather than momma's basement.:)
Here's an idea. How about some facts! If it's been so widely discredited, help the rest of us out with some links. Oh yeah, that would require actual *research*.
Oh then there is the wonderful Urban Legend of the Linux world told just after Point #4. I speak, of course, about the Navy ship failure. That's actually been discredited by 300 geeks who own their own homes rather than live in momma's basement.:)
That whole 'give us facts and research' thing again. Is it really that hard to support your arguments?
Then he goes on to compare IIS against Tux in terms of Performance after he just got done comparing IIS to Apache in terms of reliability. I love this! It is one of the fatal flaws of a similar paper written by Kirch and archived at unix-v-nt.org. Only he compares reliability of commercial Unix installations and then immediately extends this to claim Linux is equally as fast and reliable.:)
Complete strawman. There is nothing wrong with saying 'Apache is more reliable than IIS' and 'TUX is faster than IIS'. Now, if he tried to claim vice-versa w/o evidence, you'd have a point. But, you'd rather put words in his mouth than try to counter his actual arguement.
Oh in point #2 of the performance area he forgot to mention the "Free" Linux solution cost over twice what the "Forsale" Microsoft solution cost, and had slightly less than double the performance increase. He also didn't mention that the Microsoft software solution was almost a year older than the Linux one.
The one thing I'll give you is the cost issue. It's a valid point. However, bringing up the fact that the MS software is a year old is meaningless. Windows 2000 and SQL 2000 are their newest releases. Hardly the people who implemented the test's fault that MS hasn't come up with anything new since then. If XP was for sale right now, instead of in beta, you'd have a point.
Heh. Then he falls into Urban Legend #2. Mindcraft was biased... Oh yeah, despite the fact that similar results were obtained by other independent benchmarks that showed serious flaws in the Linux kernel.
Try reading. He mentioned the flaws in the Linux kernel, and that they have been fixed. Oh, and if you really think that a study commissioned by the party that *won* isn't biased, you are just the type of person I am looking for to sell a bridge to.
The TCO section had me on the floor laughing.:)
Why? Since you fail to bring up any actual points here, I am forced to conclude that you are unable to.
'for-profit organisation' is not specific enough. It is certainly *not* is Microsoft's best interest to promote Open Source software, since it's business model is based around selling software. However, it would certainly be in, say, Ford's best interest.
Ford could care less that it can't sell software for a profit. It wants software that fulfils it buisness needs, as cheaply as possible. If this can be accomplished by releasing something to the public, then it is in Ford's best interest to do so.
Open Source can be bad for business. *If* you are in the buisness of selling software. Since businesses that sell software would be a small minorty of all business, Microsoft's argument applies to very few.
Or, simply put, I (as well as any company) could care less about protecting Microsoft's interests. I care about my own. (I'll save the massive logical flaws in Objectivism for another time:-)
Since when does the first amendment give the right to anonymous speech?
One could just as easily argue that the first amendment gives the right to 'speech', and that it's status as anonymous or non-anonymous is irrelevent. If you are going to require that the 1st amendment specify "anonymous", then you are at odds with other amendments, like the 9th:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Of course, our (US, that is) legal system does distinguish between different types of speech, but there is no a priori reason as to why anonymity need be one of those considerations. All this court is saying, is that if you want to sue someone, for say, libel, you must first establish that you have a case (prima facie) before you can find out their identity. This protects anonymous posters from harrasment, since if the potential plantiff doesn't have a case, he/she has no legitimate reason to determine the poster's identity.
I used to work MCSNet (as in irc.mcs.net) and I remember during a period in spring of '99 we were getting attacked *constantly*. To the point where we had to delink for awhile because our bandwidth was so saturated the actual MCSNet customers were having problems doing much of anything on the 'net.
I just hopped on irc.mcs.net to see how they are doing through all of this. They're linked, but slow. Actually, I'm surprised they are there at all since they're parent company filed chapter 11 not too long ago.
Here's MY point. The more I learn, the more I learn how LITTLE I know. Hell, here lately, I've even found myself reading "man ls" and "man ps" at work looking for nuances...
Good idea. Reminds me of a policy an old employer of mine (a small, regional ISP) had. One of the steps you had to complete to get promoted was to read the man page for *everything* in/etc,/bin, and/usr/bin on the FreeBSD systems they were using to run the show. Yeah, tedious as hell, but you sure learned a lot. (including a number of neat options you'd never know exist. )
Interestingly enough, that company got bought out by a behemoth company, which wound up doing away with their entire promotion and hiering polcies. As a result, overall employee compentance decreased, the good people starting leaving. And the parent company filed for chapter 11 not that long ago. (I had been gone for almost two years at that point, but some good friends of mine were laid off when they closed that location with *zero* notice. Just showed up on a random Wednesday and told everyone it was their last day of work.)
Damn, that Solaris web-based installer is really annoying...
I normally just use the regular GUI installer, but by favorite OS install routine has to be OpenBSD's. I've gotten to the point where I can tear through that install routine in no time flat, and I *know* there aren't 8000 stupid things running I will never use. (I even have all the disklabel commands memorized I've done it so much)
Now, if someone can please explain to me why Sun has so much inane crap running out of inetd on a default install, I would really appreciate it. I recently got a Solaris admin job at a company who's servers had been set up by 'consultants' and the first thing I did was turn off the 87 useless things that run by default in Solaris. (from both inetd and the rc scripts) If it weren't for the fact that they actually had a good PIX config in place, they would have been h4X0r3d long ago.
In our free market economy, we all have the power to decide that we aren't going to purchase Microsoft products anymore.
Muhahaahahah..... Damn, that statement alone gets +234, Funny.
Try telling that to anyone who's ever been told that resumes are only accepted in MS Word format. Or companies that are stuck with MS to stay compatible with customers/suppliers. Or IBM, who was forced to *not* sell OS/2 preinstalled on their own computers by MS. Not to mention I still can't go into Best Buy and pick up a computer with Linux installed on it.
Yeah, now you will come back with that I can buy one online. But what about someone buying a first computer? That's the problem with unfettered free-market capitalism, it foolishly assumes all consumers have equal opportunities, and are perfectly informed about *every* buying decision. Something which is essentially impossible. Go look up "market failure" in an econ textbook sometime.
You are in the same market as AOL, with a similar product to what AOL produces. They are the market leader, and you took their product name and added a single letter to it. I simply cannot imagine a more straightforward example of why trademarks exist.
Wrong. They're not in a "market". They're not trying to compete with AOL. They're not using the name to build on AOL's "goodwill" so they can make money that should be rightfully AOL's
This world depresses me more every day. Here's someone with a completely altruistic motive, making good software that anyone who wants to can download and use, however they want, and yet we have people on this site actually defending a multibillion dollar company who is suing the poor guy cause the name of his program has the same three letters in it.
Do you actually beleive that GAIM is hurting AOL? Do you actually think that this program is causing AOL financial damages? Last I checked their stock was doing just fine thanks.
Hope it makes you feel better to support a megacorp walking all over someone who has to take donations over the Internet just to come up with enough money to pay a lawyer to send a letter. And God fobid we actually look at whether or not AOL is morally right here or not, "intellectual property" laws be dammed.
I'm sure Redhat, et al, are drooling over the prospects of people driven away by not getting it all for free ...
No, but they will get a lot of customers from Caldera that are more than willing to buy *one* copy, but don't want to deal with client licensing. No CALs are one of the reasons corps and governments are looking at Linux, especially with MS on a license compliance rampage lately.
This is no different than a free OS that restricts copying of ISO images (OpenBSD)
OpenBSD does not restrict providing ISOs. In fact, they couldn't if they wanted too, they use the BSD license. They *do* refuse to concider any ISO release "official" OpenBSD, which they are allowed to do. Plus, the majority of the OBSD community believes in contributing some money, so they buy CDs from openbsd.org anyway. Anyone asking about ISOs on the OBSD mailing lists tends to get flamed into next week, but no one has ever claimed you can't make them if you want.
Ahh, the wonders of competition, like we have in the LD market. Which gives us such great deals.
Then, there's local service. Where I get to choose from Ameritech, Ameritech, and, let's see, Ameritech.
Even my DSL line is still dependant on their whim, even though my service is not though them directly. Good thing I can fix a junction box on my own, rather than wait the week it was going to take for them to come look at it, even though I told them on the phone what the problem was.
When I used to do DSL provisioning, Ameritech would just skip appointments with our customers, which we would then have to explain with them. Yet, if someone signs up for DSL from them directly, they are always there with bells on. Hmm...
-Wintermute, yes I'm ranting about Ameritech, but these local monopolies drive me crazy sometimes.
That's one of the reasons why DSL is pretty strong in my city. We have a regional ISP that has an excellent reputation in the area, has steadfastly refused buyout offers from the national ISPs, and is stronly pushing DSL now.
Now, if the other three former indenpendants hadn't sold out, we'd have tons of competition for DSL here, thus low prices. However, instead we have two choices, the other being SBC/Ameriwreck, the telco with the worst customer service rating in the country.
Can I have my regulated telecom industry back? Please? All I want is that, and common carrier regulations for Cable providers. Then life would be good. I feel real bad for the people that don't even have three choices for broadband like I do. (And that's only within the last month did our cable company finally get off their ass)
Interesting that you say the only thing relvant to the problem is the demand for bandwidth, but the supply and price have no effect.
Actually, following basic enconomics, your assertions explain exactly why price is the problem. If supply of a product is high (fiber being wasted), but demand is low (people are not buying it), the natural price *must* be low.
Seems to me that basic microeconomics tells us the price is a very large part of the problem. Personally I would question your assertion that demand really is small. Everyone I know (personal and business) either:
1) Wants broadband, but it is not offered in their area.
or
2) Has broadband, but would like faster speeds. Those faster speeds are either not offered, or too expensive.
Granted, this is pure andecdotal evidence, and really isn't worth much.
Where I see the problem, is telecom companies would much rather sell expensive T1 lines to larger companies than actually sell fiber for the market price. I've worked for an ISP, the margins on T1s and DS-3s are *huge*. The margins on DSL are very small. (No, DSL is not fiber, but you see the point.)
All these people claming spam is free speech, and thereforce sacrosanct, need to go back and re-read the interview with Dan Ravicher. Allow me to quote:
The amount of protection given particular speech depends upon it's content. While some speech can easily be categorized as political, commercial, verbal acts or otherwise, First Amendment analysis often looks at the speech's expressiveness as opposed to its functionality to determine the corresponding level of protection. Purely expressive speech regarding public affairs, politics and government (think "F--- the draft!" on the back of a jacket worn by an individual with no intent to cause imminent lawlessness) gets heightened First Amendment protection, while purely functional speech (think "Do you have any drugs?" to an undercover police officer or "I accept" to a party which has offered a contract) gets little First Amendment protection. This leaves speech which is both expressive and functional, such as commercial speech (think "Eat at Joe's!"), lying somewhere in the middle. Further, indecent speech (think adult porn) gets very little protection while obscene speech (think child porn) gets no protection whatsoever.
That's the actual lawyer saying commerical speech does not have absolute 1st Amendment protections. Sorry, thanks for playing.
You agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it, just as you agree to accept ads by turning on a television set.
Is that true? Hope you remember you said that if you ever get DoS attacked, get a virus on your computer, or get your computer cracked. After all "the Internet is a public forum. You agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it.
Your right to "view a movie you purchased, with DeCSS" does not obligate "the movie industry" to provide you "hardware" on which to exercise that right.
You're right. They aren't required to provide me with "hardware" to do it with. But, that's not what the DeCSS case is about. It's about the right to create our own "hardware" with which to play it with.
The MPAA chose not to make a Linux player avaliable. They have that right. They should not have the right to prevent others from making a Linux player avaliable.
Right, so lets go censor things we don't want on television too, since they're 'invading' your home through the non-essential service you voluntarily use.
Wrong. First off, there are many people for whom email *is* an essential service. It would be awfully hard for my employer to function without it for example. Secondly, most TV is funded by commercials, therefore they are integral to the service. My email is *not* funded by spammers. In fact, their spam puts more burden on my ISP's backbone, thus increasing their costs, and trickling down to increase mine.
If I turn my TV on to the local Fox affiliate, I am choosing to watch that station, whatever they may show me. When I set up an email address, I am not implicitly consenting to being contacted by moronic companies I would never buy anything from anyway. Television commericals are much more like banner ads. I choose to go to the website, so I see banner ads. Companies certainly have a right to put what they want on *their* web page. Spammers want the right to put what they want in *my* mailbox.
If they get their right to free speech, then I get my right to property.
I'm charging $100,000/bit/millisecond for every piece of spam that hits my mailserver. After all it's taking up my disk space. That's the "rental fee" I'm going to charge them. Not to mention what I can tack on for the use of my processor to process the mail delivery. How about another $100,000/bit?
Yes, you have a right to free speech. No, you do not have a right to be heard. You can say whatever the hell you want, but you can't say it in my house, unless I let you in.
I'll admit there are some worthwhile MS products out there. But, please don't try to claim Exchange is one of them.
My company has attempted to upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 twice now. Both times, the mailserver became so corrupted we had restore the whole server from backups. We've contacted MS, and they had NO CLUE why this keeps happening.
One of the Unix machines on our network was erroneously sending error messages to the Exchange server, which would then cause a NDR, which stick in the mail queue *permanently*. (Unlike sendmail or qmail, where the delivery will eventually fail, and an error will be returned to the sender or the server admin.) On top of that, the actual NDR message wasn't accurate, which wound up being a bug in Exchange. Not to mention the total lack of compliance with the SMTP RFCs.
Meanwhile, qmail has been on version 1.03 for quite some time, with no problems. And Sendmail, while you do need to upgrade it fairly often, the procedure is completely painless compared to what we have experienced with Exchange.
I just finshed writing a perl program for my company to analyze server logfiles. (part of my job as a Unix Admin) It's completely customized to our setup, and useless to anyone else.
My roomate works as part of a development staff at his company. None of the software they write is sold, it's all for internal use. It's an insurance company, they aren't interested in selling software.
Have you ever bought something and not
understood the legal ramifications behind it?
I did when I bought my first computer that
had windows installed.
Of course he has never done anything like that. He's one of those perfectly educated consumers that the free market is dependant on. If you didn't do the research before you bought your computer, that's your fault for being an uneducated consumer. If you didn't know that $INCREDIBLY_COMPLEX_CHEMICAL causes cancer before you bought something that had that chemical in it, that's your own fault again.
Come on, don't you realize that you are supposed to know everything about anything? Anyone that doesn't research before they buy deserves what they get. And who cares if you have no other options. It's good for the enconomy!
Slashdot Mirror
And why do you think that MS is moving toward software-as-a-service type models?
Unlike the short-sighted music industry, MS is a technologicaly aware company. They see the writing on the wall. As bandwidth increases, the amount of 'intellectual property' that can be 'pirated' will increase.
It's only a matter of time before the end-user has enough bandwidth to download software as easily as music can be today. MS is being clever here, they are moving to protect themselves from this eventuality before it occurs, not when it becomes too late.
-Wintermute
I have a domain coming up for renewal soon. In the last month, I have gotten snail mail from several domain registrars, written as to strongly imply that if I do not pay *them* I will lose my domain. Down to even calling themselves a "network solutions partner" and including a NetSol logo in the letter, all in an attempt to confuse an unsuspecting domain owner that the mail is from or on behalf of NetSol.
Now, if I was an "uneducated" domain owner (which many are, trust me, I used to work webhosting tech support) it would be easy to assume that the mail is legitimate. This is purely a blatant way to trick domain holders into switching away from NetSol.
You may not like NetSol, but the fact remains that tactics like this border on fraud. I'll transfer my domain if *I* want to, thank you. I actually think NetSol should go farther and sue the crap out of these companies.
I fully exepect to be moderated into oblivion for going against the party line here, but it doesn't change the fact that these companies are scum of the worst kind, and NetSol is completely in the right here.
-Wintermute
I'm still stunned that everyone seems to have left out "The Shining".
-Wintermute
Point #2 is funny... Of course Windows was the #1 server being used and outnumbered Linux 2 to 1. :)
The point that was made is that Linux has signifgant market share. No. #2 is certainly pretty signifigant. Last I checked, Pepsi was considered pretty successful.
I especially love point #4... Gartner produced a survey that said Linux is hardly being deployed in data centers... But it's been widely discredited.
How has it been discredited? Well nothing really factual. Nobody really did any similar surveys to prove a counter-point. No instead 300 slobs living in their mothers basement posted to slashdot.org claiming it had to be made up.
Did you completely miss the part where he mentioned the IDC study that had strikeingly different results from the Garter study? I'd brush up on those reading comprehension skills.
But take this in conjunction with point #3. It's funny how readily the guy believes this despite the fact that it has also been widely discredited in exactly the same way as point #4. Well except the guys who discredited it live in apartments rather than momma's basement. :)
Here's an idea. How about some facts! If it's been so widely discredited, help the rest of us out with some links. Oh yeah, that would require actual *research*.
Oh then there is the wonderful Urban Legend of the Linux world told just after Point #4. I speak, of course, about the Navy ship failure. That's actually been discredited by 300 geeks who own their own homes rather than live in momma's basement. :)
That whole 'give us facts and research' thing again. Is it really that hard to support your arguments?
Then he goes on to compare IIS against Tux in terms of Performance after he just got done comparing IIS to Apache in terms of reliability. I love this! It is one of the fatal flaws of a similar paper written by Kirch and archived at unix-v-nt.org. Only he compares reliability of commercial Unix installations and then immediately extends this to claim Linux is equally as fast and reliable. :)
Complete strawman. There is nothing wrong with saying 'Apache is more reliable than IIS' and 'TUX is faster than IIS'. Now, if he tried to claim vice-versa w/o evidence, you'd have a point. But, you'd rather put words in his mouth than try to counter his actual arguement.
Oh in point #2 of the performance area he forgot to mention the "Free" Linux solution cost over twice what the "Forsale" Microsoft solution cost, and had slightly less than double the performance increase. He also didn't mention that the Microsoft software solution was almost a year older than the Linux one.
The one thing I'll give you is the cost issue. It's a valid point. However, bringing up the fact that the MS software is a year old is meaningless. Windows 2000 and SQL 2000 are their newest releases. Hardly the people who implemented the test's fault that MS hasn't come up with anything new since then. If XP was for sale right now, instead of in beta, you'd have a point.
Heh. Then he falls into Urban Legend #2. Mindcraft was biased... Oh yeah, despite the fact that similar results were obtained by other independent benchmarks that showed serious flaws in the Linux kernel.
Try reading. He mentioned the flaws in the Linux kernel, and that they have been fixed. Oh, and if you really think that a study commissioned by the party that *won* isn't biased, you are just the type of person I am looking for to sell a bridge to.
The TCO section had me on the floor laughing. :)
Why? Since you fail to bring up any actual points here, I am forced to conclude that you are unable to.
-WintermuteIt's too general.
:-)
'for-profit organisation' is not specific enough. It is certainly *not* is Microsoft's best interest to promote Open Source software, since it's business model is based around selling software. However, it would certainly be in, say, Ford's best interest.
Ford could care less that it can't sell software for a profit. It wants software that fulfils it buisness needs, as cheaply as possible. If this can be accomplished by releasing something to the public, then it is in Ford's best interest to do so.
Open Source can be bad for business. *If* you are in the buisness of selling software. Since businesses that sell software would be a small minorty of all business, Microsoft's argument applies to very few.
Or, simply put, I (as well as any company) could care less about protecting Microsoft's interests. I care about my own. (I'll save the massive logical flaws in Objectivism for another time
-Wintermute
Since when does the first amendment give the right to anonymous speech?
One could just as easily argue that the first amendment gives the right to 'speech', and that it's status as anonymous or non-anonymous is irrelevent. If you are going to require that the 1st amendment specify "anonymous", then you are at odds with other amendments, like the 9th:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Of course, our (US, that is) legal system does distinguish between different types of speech, but there is no a priori reason as to why anonymity need be one of those considerations. All this court is saying, is that if you want to sue someone, for say, libel, you must first establish that you have a case (prima facie) before you can find out their identity. This protects anonymous posters from harrasment, since if the potential plantiff doesn't have a case, he/she has no legitimate reason to determine the poster's identity.
-WintermuteBlackened was always one of my favorites too...
I used to work MCSNet (as in irc.mcs.net) and I remember during a period in spring of '99 we were getting attacked *constantly*. To the point where we had to delink for awhile because our bandwidth was so saturated the actual MCSNet customers were having problems doing much of anything on the 'net.
I just hopped on irc.mcs.net to see how they are doing through all of this. They're linked, but slow. Actually, I'm surprised they are there at all since they're parent company filed chapter 11 not too long ago.
-Wintermute
I've been there and I know people from there. I'm somehow not at all surprised. :-)
-Wintermute
Here's MY point. The more I learn, the more I learn how LITTLE I know. Hell, here lately, I've even found myself reading "man ls" and "man ps" at work looking for nuances ...
Good idea. Reminds me of a policy an old employer of mine (a small, regional ISP) had. One of the steps you had to complete to get promoted was to read the man page for *everything* in /etc, /bin, and /usr/bin on the FreeBSD systems they were using to run the show. Yeah, tedious as hell, but you sure learned a lot. (including a number of neat options you'd never know exist. )
Interestingly enough, that company got bought out by a behemoth company, which wound up doing away with their entire promotion and hiering polcies. As a result, overall employee compentance decreased, the good people starting leaving. And the parent company filed for chapter 11 not that long ago. (I had been gone for almost two years at that point, but some good friends of mine were laid off when they closed that location with *zero* notice. Just showed up on a random Wednesday and told everyone it was their last day of work.)
-WintermuteDamn, that Solaris web-based installer is really annoying...
I normally just use the regular GUI installer, but by favorite OS install routine has to be OpenBSD's. I've gotten to the point where I can tear through that install routine in no time flat, and I *know* there aren't 8000 stupid things running I will never use. (I even have all the disklabel commands memorized I've done it so much)
Now, if someone can please explain to me why Sun has so much inane crap running out of inetd on a default install, I would really appreciate it. I recently got a Solaris admin job at a company who's servers had been set up by 'consultants' and the first thing I did was turn off the 87 useless things that run by default in Solaris. (from both inetd and the rc scripts) If it weren't for the fact that they actually had a good PIX config in place, they would have been h4X0r3d long ago.
In our free market economy, we all have the power to decide that we aren't going to purchase Microsoft products anymore.
Muhahaahahah..... Damn, that statement alone gets +234, Funny.
Try telling that to anyone who's ever been told that resumes are only accepted in MS Word format. Or companies that are stuck with MS to stay compatible with customers/suppliers. Or IBM, who was forced to *not* sell OS/2 preinstalled on their own computers by MS. Not to mention I still can't go into Best Buy and pick up a computer with Linux installed on it.
Yeah, now you will come back with that I can buy one online. But what about someone buying a first computer? That's the problem with unfettered free-market capitalism, it foolishly assumes all consumers have equal opportunities, and are perfectly informed about *every* buying decision. Something which is essentially impossible. Go look up "market failure" in an econ textbook sometime.
-WintermuteYou are in the same market as AOL, with a similar product to what AOL produces. They are the market leader, and you took their product name and added a single letter to it. I simply cannot imagine a more straightforward example of why trademarks exist.
Wrong. They're not in a "market". They're not trying to compete with AOL. They're not using the name to build on AOL's "goodwill" so they can make money that should be rightfully AOL's
This world depresses me more every day. Here's someone with a completely altruistic motive, making good software that anyone who wants to can download and use, however they want, and yet we have people on this site actually defending a multibillion dollar company who is suing the poor guy cause the name of his program has the same three letters in it.
Do you actually beleive that GAIM is hurting AOL? Do you actually think that this program is causing AOL financial damages? Last I checked their stock was doing just fine thanks.
Hope it makes you feel better to support a megacorp walking all over someone who has to take donations over the Internet just to come up with enough money to pay a lawyer to send a letter. And God fobid we actually look at whether or not AOL is morally right here or not, "intellectual property" laws be dammed.
-WintermuteI'm sure Redhat, et al, are drooling over the prospects of people driven away by not getting it all for free . ..
No, but they will get a lot of customers from Caldera that are more than willing to buy *one* copy, but don't want to deal with client licensing. No CALs are one of the reasons corps and governments are looking at Linux, especially with MS on a license compliance rampage lately.
-WintermuteThis is no different than a free OS that restricts copying of ISO images (OpenBSD)
OpenBSD does not restrict providing ISOs. In fact, they couldn't if they wanted too, they use the BSD license. They *do* refuse to concider any ISO release "official" OpenBSD, which they are allowed to do. Plus, the majority of the OBSD community believes in contributing some money, so they buy CDs from openbsd.org anyway. Anyone asking about ISOs on the OBSD mailing lists tends to get flamed into next week, but no one has ever claimed you can't make them if you want.
-WintermuteAhh, the wonders of competition, like we have in the LD market. Which gives us such great deals.
Then, there's local service. Where I get to choose from Ameritech, Ameritech, and, let's see, Ameritech.
Even my DSL line is still dependant on their whim, even though my service is not though them directly. Good thing I can fix a junction box on my own, rather than wait the week it was going to take for them to come look at it, even though I told them on the phone what the problem was.
When I used to do DSL provisioning, Ameritech would just skip appointments with our customers, which we would then have to explain with them. Yet, if someone signs up for DSL from them directly, they are always there with bells on. Hmm...
-Wintermute, yes I'm ranting about Ameritech, but these local monopolies drive me crazy sometimes.
That's one of the reasons why DSL is pretty strong in my city. We have a regional ISP that has an excellent reputation in the area, has steadfastly refused buyout offers from the national ISPs, and is stronly pushing DSL now.
Now, if the other three former indenpendants hadn't sold out, we'd have tons of competition for DSL here, thus low prices. However, instead we have two choices, the other being SBC/Ameriwreck, the telco with the worst customer service rating in the country.
Can I have my regulated telecom industry back? Please? All I want is that, and common carrier regulations for Cable providers. Then life would be good. I feel real bad for the people that don't even have three choices for broadband like I do. (And that's only within the last month did our cable company finally get off their ass)
-Wintermute
Interesting that you say the only thing relvant to the problem is the demand for bandwidth, but the supply and price have no effect.
Actually, following basic enconomics, your assertions explain exactly why price is the problem. If supply of a product is high (fiber being wasted), but demand is low (people are not buying it), the natural price *must* be low.
Seems to me that basic microeconomics tells us the price is a very large part of the problem. Personally I would question your assertion that demand really is small. Everyone I know (personal and business) either:
1) Wants broadband, but it is not offered in their area.
or
2) Has broadband, but would like faster speeds. Those faster speeds are either not offered, or too expensive.
Granted, this is pure andecdotal evidence, and really isn't worth much.
Where I see the problem, is telecom companies would much rather sell expensive T1 lines to larger companies than actually sell fiber for the market price. I've worked for an ISP, the margins on T1s and DS-3s are *huge*. The margins on DSL are very small. (No, DSL is not fiber, but you see the point.)
-Wintermute
All these people claming spam is free speech, and thereforce sacrosanct, need to go back and re-read the interview with Dan Ravicher. Allow me to quote:
The amount of protection given particular speech depends upon it's content. While some speech can easily be categorized as political, commercial, verbal acts or otherwise, First Amendment analysis often looks at the speech's expressiveness as opposed to its functionality to determine the corresponding level of protection. Purely expressive speech regarding public affairs, politics and government (think "F--- the draft!" on the back of a jacket worn by an individual with no intent to cause imminent lawlessness) gets heightened First Amendment protection, while purely functional speech (think "Do you have any drugs?" to an undercover police officer or "I accept" to a party which has offered a contract) gets little First Amendment protection. This leaves speech which is both expressive and functional, such as commercial speech (think "Eat at Joe's!"), lying somewhere in the middle. Further, indecent speech (think adult porn) gets very little protection while obscene speech (think child porn) gets no protection whatsoever.
That's the actual lawyer saying commerical speech does not have absolute 1st Amendment protections. Sorry, thanks for playing.
-WintermuteYou agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it, just as you agree to accept ads by turning on a television set.
Is that true? Hope you remember you said that if you ever get DoS attacked, get a virus on your computer, or get your computer cracked. After all "the Internet is a public forum. You agreed to accept whatever it sends you the moment you connected to it.
-WintermuteYour right to "view a movie you purchased, with DeCSS" does not obligate "the movie industry" to provide you "hardware" on which to exercise that right.
You're right. They aren't required to provide me with "hardware" to do it with. But, that's not what the DeCSS case is about. It's about the right to create our own "hardware" with which to play it with.
The MPAA chose not to make a Linux player avaliable. They have that right. They should not have the right to prevent others from making a Linux player avaliable.
-WintermuteRight, so lets go censor things we don't want on television too, since they're 'invading' your home through the non-essential service you voluntarily use.
Wrong. First off, there are many people for whom email *is* an essential service. It would be awfully hard for my employer to function without it for example. Secondly, most TV is funded by commercials, therefore they are integral to the service. My email is *not* funded by spammers. In fact, their spam puts more burden on my ISP's backbone, thus increasing their costs, and trickling down to increase mine.
If I turn my TV on to the local Fox affiliate, I am choosing to watch that station, whatever they may show me. When I set up an email address, I am not implicitly consenting to being contacted by moronic companies I would never buy anything from anyway. Television commericals are much more like banner ads. I choose to go to the website, so I see banner ads. Companies certainly have a right to put what they want on *their* web page. Spammers want the right to put what they want in *my* mailbox.
-WintermuteIf they get their right to free speech, then I get my right to property.
I'm charging $100,000/bit/millisecond for every piece of spam that hits my mailserver. After all it's taking up my disk space. That's the "rental fee" I'm going to charge them. Not to mention what I can tack on for the use of my processor to process the mail delivery. How about another $100,000/bit?
Yes, you have a right to free speech. No, you do not have a right to be heard. You can say whatever the hell you want, but you can't say it in my house, unless I let you in.
-Wintermute
I'll admit there are some worthwhile MS products out there. But, please don't try to claim Exchange is one of them.
My company has attempted to upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 twice now. Both times, the mailserver became so corrupted we had restore the whole server from backups. We've contacted MS, and they had NO CLUE why this keeps happening.
One of the Unix machines on our network was erroneously sending error messages to the Exchange server, which would then cause a NDR, which stick in the mail queue *permanently*. (Unlike sendmail or qmail, where the delivery will eventually fail, and an error will be returned to the sender or the server admin.) On top of that, the actual NDR message wasn't accurate, which wound up being a bug in Exchange. Not to mention the total lack of compliance with the SMTP RFCs.
Meanwhile, qmail has been on version 1.03 for quite some time, with no problems. And Sendmail, while you do need to upgrade it fairly often, the procedure is completely painless compared to what we have experienced with Exchange.
-Wintermute
Some anecdotal examples:
I just finshed writing a perl program for my company to analyze server logfiles. (part of my job as a Unix Admin) It's completely customized to our setup, and useless to anyone else.
My roomate works as part of a development staff at his company. None of the software they write is sold, it's all for internal use. It's an insurance company, they aren't interested in selling software.
-Wintermute
Have you ever bought something and not understood the legal ramifications behind it?
I did when I bought my first computer that had windows installed.
Of course he has never done anything like that. He's one of those perfectly educated consumers that the free market is dependant on. If you didn't do the research before you bought your computer, that's your fault for being an uneducated consumer. If you didn't know that $INCREDIBLY_COMPLEX_CHEMICAL causes cancer before you bought something that had that chemical in it, that's your own fault again.
Come on, don't you realize that you are supposed to know everything about anything? Anyone that doesn't research before they buy deserves what they get. And who cares if you have no other options. It's good for the enconomy!
-Wintermute