Why do people persist in insisting that GNU/Linux is only useful for the technically-oriented? I'm not even sure that the phrase "regular user" has any meaning, since there are so many kinds of regular users who are not necessarily techies. Once the install is over (and that seems to be the focus of these books, according to the review), the "regular user" is no less likely to be productive/satisfied using a Linux-based desktop than any other desktop platform-- unless they were looking to use a specific software package that doesn't exist for Linux.
I think the attraction of Linux is that it's Free (as in speech)-- meaning that a competitive market decides how much my next upgrade is going to cost and what features it will have. And even so, the market may be able to bear several distributions equally well so that there is always an option. Now if computers coming home from [large electronics store] were pre-installed with Linux and configured to start up in Gnome or KDE, the main complaint would be that I couldn't bring MS Office work home and work on it there (Oh, wait, that's not a complaint, that's a good reason to NOT have MS at home).
Um. How are the party platforms for the parties from which Gore and Bush come "not... important"? Those platforms dictate their behavior while in office. Those platforms are the basis upon which they build alliances and voter loyalty. If either candidate commits a serious breach of his respective platform, you can guess how much his own party is going to like that. A vote for Nader is really a vote for what Nader says he stands for, since he stands behind the Green platform.
The vague sense that I get from your post is that two choices are more than enough. And that you have been thoroughly convinced that those two choices are really different enough to merit having to choose between them. You seem to think that your incorrect spin on the whole "major party status" issue makes us voters more-well-informed. I don't see how. When one votes, it is because one wishes the candidate to win (and for many of us, we want that candidate to win because of what he/she stands for, as elucidated by their party platform), without regard to whether or not they "can win". Otherwise, how do you explain people who voted for Dukakis or Dole?
Um. I see where the story says Windows is compatible with more software, but I don't see where Linus says it's easier to use. Even the compatibility point is not attributed to him directly, although it may be inferred that the interview lead the author to believe that Linus' relatives chose their OS based on software compatibility issues. Also, the article is not very clear on what Linus means by "catch up"-- is this in market share, app share, mind share (whatever that is), feature share, bloat share, or criminal monopoly share?
Never mind that all but three of those result links are to personal home pages where a zealot of one type or another has written something like, "Damn, installing [windows|linux] was a goldarn headache, this is why I use [linux|windows]."
If you had actually read the ruling, or even to about page 50, you would have found repeatedly mentioned the fact that our beleaguered defendents here are on trial for trafficking in encryption circumvention technology, not for piracy, copyright infringement, or aiding and abetting such infringement. The specific section of the DMCA that is at question is noted several times both by reference and at least once in quotation. You would have also gotten to an entire portion of the essay devoted to this question. In fact, had you, Stary, invented DeCSS for your own personal use on a Linux system and decrypted every DVD you could buy, you would likely have found Kaplan's ruling in your favor, since he clearly seems to think this would have been acceptable.
The judge is convinced that the emergence of the decss.exe binary for Windows machines and it's "disease"-like spread (yes, I love where he compares internet file sharing to disease transmission) undermines any verity to the claim that this is a Fair Use issue at least for these defendents.
Personally I think the DMCA is a great reason to never vote for any Democrat or Republican again. I had gone to great trouble to find links to all the Congress members who voted for this, but the Senate link was session-based (it was a unanimous "yea", btw), and the House had a voice vote, which seems to have prevented a voting record from being made.
I'm sorry. I forgot to mention that I try to limit my paranoia to things worth worrying about, like flagrant Constitutional violations by the police, or home security, or public safety. The idea that some database geek would have the time or inclination to try and use purchase data for anything other than increasing the profitability of their store is odd to me. I mean, look at the line! That's way too many customers for any back office person to care much about any one of them distinctly. Most of the gathered information is likely to have identifiers like name and address mostly for the purpose of correctly aggregating and assigning third party data to it.
Based on the number of corporate sponshorships that the Olympics get, it's hard to believe any one of us is NOT contributing in some way. Firms spending money in this way can only be subsidized by sales revenue. Marketing dollars don't grow on trees. Money spent on advertising is ultimately skimmed from corporate profits, which means that to maintain that profit level and provide money to the Olympics, a corporation must work this into prices at some point. Furthermore, it seems odd to me that ESPN.com which is a subsidiary of Disney, and hence partnered with ABC, would be operating in a vacuum in trying to use the internet as a distribution method. If this is somehow injurious to prime-time TV, why is that the IOC's concern? It should be Disney's concern.
In fact, there would be tremendous revenue opportunity due to low marginal cost of increasing internet audiences, through use of things like pay-per-stream video of offbeat events, etc. Example: I am a fan of an offbeat sport, I would gladly pay to be able to select matches or athletes and watch those either in real-time or even after the fact. There is every opportunity for any major advertiser to put a banner across the bottom of a streamed video (and I'm surprised there isn't more of this already) as a way to further generate revenue.
I'm plenty paranoid, and I've come to the conclusion that I prefer stores that don't require loyalty programs to obtain discounts or rewards. I feel this is an underhanded way to obtain information about me and my buying habits.
On the other hand, a store can easily use the account numbers from your checks, debit, and credit cards as tracking symbols for you and your household, if they are interested in aggregating your purchase data. These same vehicles allow them to gather other information about you, like name and address. It is then trivial to link these various account symbols into a fairly complete picture of you and your household. But you can always pay cash for, um, sensitive purchases like alcohol, condoms, or excessive amounts of corn chips, if you are worried about either tracking method.
Convenience and privacy do not go well together. What I really don't understand is why the original poster cares at all whether they can attach the correct browser version to him/her, since they are going to have so much other information about him/her anyway.
This is my favorite comment so far. I mean, DUH. Isn't the beauty of the original benchmark that it shows on midrange systems that an Open Source database kicks ass? I think it would be obvious that there are certain drawbacks to MySQL. One of them is not the lack of popularity or available examples of it in action. Maybe it would be better if MySQL were allowed to focus on what it's good for and get even better at it and if postgreSQL were able to work on the things that it's doing well. Then, no matter what type of database need you had, there'd be an OS solution that was hands-down winner in that area.
I'm no lawyer, but I would have to wonder if there isn't a constitutionally protected right to free speech that prevents this sort of "license" from having any force.
I assume that a converter script will be available. Even so, you could easily convert to AIFF and then re-encode. Either way, the main cost is a few CPU cycles. Newly Vorbis-encoded tunes will supposedly have similar or better quality for less space. If I can fit more files into less space this is a format I would use. This is a format that will transfer over the net faster. The number of pure mp3 devices out there is extremely small compared to the number of people who don't have broadband and unlimited disk space. Eight ball says, "Looks Favorable."
I've paid for all the books in the Hitchiker Trilogy (albeit at a used bookstore). Do I now have right to go to a public website and download text files of that same information? I've already purchased a license to that information, right?
This analogy is not faulty because one is a book and one is software. Much abandonware, especially old C64 stuff, is not intended for use on original hardware, but to be used with an emulator on a more modern computer.
While I can support the notion that inspires abandonware distribution, I can't support the legality of same. It is indicative of the exploitive behavior of the larger software firms that they behave in this way. The solutions are to encourage lawlessness through unauthorized duplication (not a major threat to society, imho, but it is illegal), to change the laws (good luck), or to stop doing business with these firms by buying their software in the first place.
The last of these solutions is the only one that will actually force these companies to change their tune, since the first path gives them legal standing to prosecute the "good guys" and the second is unlikely given the Constitutional basis for copyright and the current trend in copyright legislation towards more rights for publisher's rather than less.
Not only that, even if the Windows players were the primary motivation behind the creation of DeCSS they do not diminish the fair use argument, since DeCSS provides users with a way to avoid using the "licensed" players that are on market-- and yeah, I know that usually DVD drives are bundled with player software, but this may not always be the case, nor is it necessarily the case with used drives. So DeCSS further serves fair use no matter what OS the source is compiled on. Open Source and GPL are not just for Linux.
Well, if they hadn't filed these lawsuits, there would be one less thing to keep us talking about Apple today, wouldn't there?
Every time a company can get it's name in a headline or a discussion this is likely a good thing for that company-- especially an internet/computer company. Name recognition is important. People going to the Apple site to see what all this G4 cube fuss is about are a lot more likely to see an Apple sales pitch than those who read an article about the latest web-enabled-wireless-toenail-clipper from Motorola.
The expense to companies the size of Apple for a legal team is relatively fixed. They have x number of lawyers, to whom they will pay $z each year no matter if those lawyers are very busy, or sitting in their offices reading slashdot. The incremental expense of these sorts of lawsuits is negligible for them, so they are able to use them to generate publicity.
Sure, they may also have legitimate complaints in some of these lawsuits, but there is actually an incentive here that favors legal activity.
Why do you keep posting the same thing over and over? Your point of view is incredibly myopic and serves to prevent the growth of computing. Rather than insist that we use your computing model of the itty bitty desktop, why not let us get on with the business of working from our lame terminals which hook up to the real machines?
So what about the person who has a little brother nagging him to let him play SimRoadKill while mom is telling him to hurry up so she can check her e-mail while dad is asking for the computer so he can check the prices of gizmos at buy.com... that person is not going to get his history paper written at all. And those other folks are going to have to wait... But I know! We'll buy them all PCs, we're RICH!
This device will not be a "bitch to upgrade". If you go to the site, you will see that there is no hard drive. The entire OS and all applications reside on the CD which must be mounted during use. If you think it is a "bitch" to change out one CD for another, I think you might want to avoid electronics altogether.
God forbid that we build machines specifically for gaming so that the rest of us can get back to computing.:)
This device is an excellent terminal/client device for real computers (i.e. not PCs). This is an affordable, well-configured client box. Creating a different CD with a modified OS might even be possible, opening the door for third party upgrades once the hardware is in place. Even so, upgrades are problem free, since the upgrade CD isn't an installer-- it is the upgrade.
As to the price of the "PC" going up? Even if this were true/likely, add together the price of the NIC and a Sega Dreamcast and tell me if your computer cost that much. As you will learn if you take any introductory economics class, specialization leads to efficiency-- which can lead to lower prices. Frankly, I'd rather spend less for two machines that did what I wanted, than more for just one. Special bonus: with two machines, your friends/family can use one, while you use the other.
I recall seeing Playboy at the libraries in my home town when I was a teen. No pictures sadly. Not sure if that was the result of them being removed by vandals or by librarians concerned about decency. The downtown library here (Minneapolis) also carried a copy of Madonna's "Sex" book. I have also borrowed copies of "Mein Kampf" from the library, vastly preferable to buying it. There is plenty of material in the library which contains potentially prurient iamges and/or sexually explicit materials. Please feel free to check the art and health sections, if you disbelieve this.
Also, content filtering where a librarian sits down and has to decide how to split their budget between which periodicals and book to purchase is different than a situation where providing filtering software is incrementally more expensive than not filtering. In the former case, they need to decide what is the most worthwile use of limited funds. In the latter, the only decision is whether to spend money on internet access or not. So, they could buy Penthouse and Hustler. But then they would have less money for Time or the local paper or all those offbeat trade and science journals. Also, libraries probably consider buying Penthouse and Hustler a risky investment. Either horny teens would steal the pictures or the morally uptight would vandalize them-- rendering that expense a complete waste of those funds.
With the case of internet access, you are not subsidizing hate speech nor porn when taxpayer money is used to provide internet access at libraries and schools. The incremental expense of viewing those pages as opposed to pages that your biases agree with is zero (increased bandwidth and workstation usage demands aside). The total cost of the computers and software does not change based on the content of the pages viewed. The total cost to taxpayers is actually increased when ineffective filtering software must be purchased and installed. This money is truly wasted since it does not achieve its stated goals and has numerous inappropriate side effects. Insult is added to this injury by the fact that most filtering software keeps its list of filtered sites secret, so they are not open for public review even by the public which is paying for them, and in the case of public schools and libraries, has every right to review the decisions about what was deemed appropriate content.
Finally, your optimism that filtering software will be improved because the size of the user base is improved is an unfounded assumption. Just look at any Microsoft product!:)
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Why do people persist in insisting that GNU/Linux is only useful for the technically-oriented? I'm not even sure that the phrase "regular user" has any meaning, since there are so many kinds of regular users who are not necessarily techies. Once the install is over (and that seems to be the focus of these books, according to the review), the "regular user" is no less likely to be productive/satisfied using a Linux-based desktop than any other desktop platform-- unless they were looking to use a specific software package that doesn't exist for Linux.
I think the attraction of Linux is that it's Free (as in speech)-- meaning that a competitive market decides how much my next upgrade is going to cost and what features it will have. And even so, the market may be able to bear several distributions equally well so that there is always an option. Now if computers coming home from [large electronics store] were pre-installed with Linux and configured to start up in Gnome or KDE, the main complaint would be that I couldn't bring MS Office work home and work on it there (Oh, wait, that's not a complaint, that's a good reason to NOT have MS at home).
Um. How are the party platforms for the parties from which Gore and Bush come "not ... important"? Those platforms dictate their behavior while in office. Those platforms are the basis upon which they build alliances and voter loyalty. If either candidate commits a serious breach of his respective platform, you can guess how much his own party is going to like that. A vote for Nader is really a vote for what Nader says he stands for, since he stands behind the Green platform.
The vague sense that I get from your post is that two choices are more than enough. And that you have been thoroughly convinced that those two choices are really different enough to merit having to choose between them. You seem to think that your incorrect spin on the whole "major party status" issue makes us voters more-well-informed. I don't see how. When one votes, it is because one wishes the candidate to win (and for many of us, we want that candidate to win because of what he/she stands for, as elucidated by their party platform), without regard to whether or not they "can win". Otherwise, how do you explain people who voted for Dukakis or Dole?
Um. I see where the story says Windows is compatible with more software, but I don't see where Linus says it's easier to use. Even the compatibility point is not attributed to him directly, although it may be inferred that the interview lead the author to believe that Linus' relatives chose their OS based on software compatibility issues. Also, the article is not very clear on what Linus means by "catch up"-- is this in market share, app share, mind share (whatever that is), feature share, bloat share, or criminal monopoly share?
Oh. That was a troll, wasn't it? D'oh!
Never mind that all but three of those result links are to personal home pages where a zealot of one type or another has written something like, "Damn, installing [windows|linux] was a goldarn headache, this is why I use [linux|windows]."
If you had actually read the ruling, or even to about page 50, you would have found repeatedly mentioned the fact that our beleaguered defendents here are on trial for trafficking in encryption circumvention technology, not for piracy, copyright infringement, or aiding and abetting such infringement. The specific section of the DMCA that is at question is noted several times both by reference and at least once in quotation. You would have also gotten to an entire portion of the essay devoted to this question. In fact, had you, Stary, invented DeCSS for your own personal use on a Linux system and decrypted every DVD you could buy, you would likely have found Kaplan's ruling in your favor, since he clearly seems to think this would have been acceptable.
The judge is convinced that the emergence of the decss.exe binary for Windows machines and it's "disease"-like spread (yes, I love where he compares internet file sharing to disease transmission) undermines any verity to the claim that this is a Fair Use issue at least for these defendents.
Personally I think the DMCA is a great reason to never vote for any Democrat or Republican again. I had gone to great trouble to find links to all the Congress members who voted for this, but the Senate link was session-based (it was a unanimous "yea", btw), and the House had a voice vote, which seems to have prevented a voting record from being made.
I'm sorry. I forgot to mention that I try to limit my paranoia to things worth worrying about, like flagrant Constitutional violations by the police, or home security, or public safety. The idea that some database geek would have the time or inclination to try and use purchase data for anything other than increasing the profitability of their store is odd to me. I mean, look at the line! That's way too many customers for any back office person to care much about any one of them distinctly. Most of the gathered information is likely to have identifiers like name and address mostly for the purpose of correctly aggregating and assigning third party data to it.
you're not contributing to the event at all
Based on the number of corporate sponshorships that the Olympics get, it's hard to believe any one of us is NOT contributing in some way. Firms spending money in this way can only be subsidized by sales revenue. Marketing dollars don't grow on trees. Money spent on advertising is ultimately skimmed from corporate profits, which means that to maintain that profit level and provide money to the Olympics, a corporation must work this into prices at some point. Furthermore, it seems odd to me that ESPN.com which is a subsidiary of Disney, and hence partnered with ABC, would be operating in a vacuum in trying to use the internet as a distribution method. If this is somehow injurious to prime-time TV, why is that the IOC's concern? It should be Disney's concern.
In fact, there would be tremendous revenue opportunity due to low marginal cost of increasing internet audiences, through use of things like pay-per-stream video of offbeat events, etc. Example: I am a fan of an offbeat sport, I would gladly pay to be able to select matches or athletes and watch those either in real-time or even after the fact. There is every opportunity for any major advertiser to put a banner across the bottom of a streamed video (and I'm surprised there isn't more of this already) as a way to further generate revenue.
I'm plenty paranoid, and I've come to the conclusion that I prefer stores that don't require loyalty programs to obtain discounts or rewards. I feel this is an underhanded way to obtain information about me and my buying habits.
On the other hand, a store can easily use the account numbers from your checks, debit, and credit cards as tracking symbols for you and your household, if they are interested in aggregating your purchase data. These same vehicles allow them to gather other information about you, like name and address. It is then trivial to link these various account symbols into a fairly complete picture of you and your household. But you can always pay cash for, um, sensitive purchases like alcohol, condoms, or excessive amounts of corn chips, if you are worried about either tracking method.
Convenience and privacy do not go well together. What I really don't understand is why the original poster cares at all whether they can attach the correct browser version to him/her, since they are going to have so much other information about him/her anyway.
Exactly. Now this will give their ported software something to do. :)
This is my favorite comment so far. I mean, DUH. Isn't the beauty of the original benchmark that it shows on midrange systems that an Open Source database kicks ass? I think it would be obvious that there are certain drawbacks to MySQL. One of them is not the lack of popularity or available examples of it in action. Maybe it would be better if MySQL were allowed to focus on what it's good for and get even better at it and if postgreSQL were able to work on the things that it's doing well. Then, no matter what type of database need you had, there'd be an OS solution that was hands-down winner in that area.
Why would you use 7.0, when they are up to 7.0.2? Surely a fatal bug in index handling has been fixed.
I'm no lawyer, but I would have to wonder if there isn't a constitutionally protected right to free speech that prevents this sort of "license" from having any force.
I dunno. Is there a MySQL book available as a free PDF from the MySQL website? There is at PostgreSQL's site.
I assume that a converter script will be available. Even so, you could easily convert to AIFF and then re-encode. Either way, the main cost is a few CPU cycles. Newly Vorbis-encoded tunes will supposedly have similar or better quality for less space. If I can fit more files into less space this is a format I would use. This is a format that will transfer over the net faster. The number of pure mp3 devices out there is extremely small compared to the number of people who don't have broadband and unlimited disk space. Eight ball says, "Looks Favorable."
I've paid for all the books in the Hitchiker Trilogy (albeit at a used bookstore). Do I now have right to go to a public website and download text files of that same information? I've already purchased a license to that information, right?
This analogy is not faulty because one is a book and one is software. Much abandonware, especially old C64 stuff, is not intended for use on original hardware, but to be used with an emulator on a more modern computer.
While I can support the notion that inspires abandonware distribution, I can't support the legality of same. It is indicative of the exploitive behavior of the larger software firms that they behave in this way. The solutions are to encourage lawlessness through unauthorized duplication (not a major threat to society, imho, but it is illegal), to change the laws (good luck), or to stop doing business with these firms by buying their software in the first place.
The last of these solutions is the only one that will actually force these companies to change their tune, since the first path gives them legal standing to prosecute the "good guys" and the second is unlikely given the Constitutional basis for copyright and the current trend in copyright legislation towards more rights for publisher's rather than less.
In other words, free lifetime supply of very shiny coasters.
Not only that, even if the Windows players were the primary motivation behind the creation of DeCSS they do not diminish the fair use argument, since DeCSS provides users with a way to avoid using the "licensed" players that are on market-- and yeah, I know that usually DVD drives are bundled with player software, but this may not always be the case, nor is it necessarily the case with used drives. So DeCSS further serves fair use no matter what OS the source is compiled on. Open Source and GPL are not just for Linux.
Best Slashdot comment I've seen this month. Thanks.
Well, if they hadn't filed these lawsuits, there would be one less thing to keep us talking about Apple today, wouldn't there?
Every time a company can get it's name in a headline or a discussion this is likely a good thing for that company-- especially an internet/computer company. Name recognition is important. People going to the Apple site to see what all this G4 cube fuss is about are a lot more likely to see an Apple sales pitch than those who read an article about the latest web-enabled-wireless-toenail-clipper from Motorola.
The expense to companies the size of Apple for a legal team is relatively fixed. They have x number of lawyers, to whom they will pay $z each year no matter if those lawyers are very busy, or sitting in their offices reading slashdot. The incremental expense of these sorts of lawsuits is negligible for them, so they are able to use them to generate publicity.
Sure, they may also have legitimate complaints in some of these lawsuits, but there is actually an incentive here that favors legal activity.
Why do you keep posting the same thing over and over? Your point of view is incredibly myopic and serves to prevent the growth of computing. Rather than insist that we use your computing model of the itty bitty desktop, why not let us get on with the business of working from our lame terminals which hook up to the real machines?
So what about the person who has a little brother nagging him to let him play SimRoadKill while mom is telling him to hurry up so she can check her e-mail while dad is asking for the computer so he can check the prices of gizmos at buy.com... that person is not going to get his history paper written at all. And those other folks are going to have to wait... But I know! We'll buy them all PCs, we're RICH!
This device will not be a "bitch to upgrade". If you go to the site, you will see that there is no hard drive. The entire OS and all applications reside on the CD which must be mounted during use. If you think it is a "bitch" to change out one CD for another, I think you might want to avoid electronics altogether.
God forbid that we build machines specifically for gaming so that the rest of us can get back to computing. :)
This device is an excellent terminal/client device for real computers (i.e. not PCs). This is an affordable, well-configured client box. Creating a different CD with a modified OS might even be possible, opening the door for third party upgrades once the hardware is in place. Even so, upgrades are problem free, since the upgrade CD isn't an installer-- it is the upgrade.
As to the price of the "PC" going up? Even if this were true/likely, add together the price of the NIC and a Sega Dreamcast and tell me if your computer cost that much. As you will learn if you take any introductory economics class, specialization leads to efficiency-- which can lead to lower prices. Frankly, I'd rather spend less for two machines that did what I wanted, than more for just one. Special bonus: with two machines, your friends/family can use one, while you use the other.
since when do printed bus schedule times and the actual arrival of the bus actually coincide?
anything like "Linux for Dummies" -- which comes in a box?
I recall seeing Playboy at the libraries in my home town when I was a teen. No pictures sadly. Not sure if that was the result of them being removed by vandals or by librarians concerned about decency. The downtown library here (Minneapolis) also carried a copy of Madonna's "Sex" book. I have also borrowed copies of "Mein Kampf" from the library, vastly preferable to buying it. There is plenty of material in the library which contains potentially prurient iamges and/or sexually explicit materials. Please feel free to check the art and health sections, if you disbelieve this.
:)
Also, content filtering where a librarian sits down and has to decide how to split their budget between which periodicals and book to purchase is different than a situation where providing filtering software is incrementally more expensive than not filtering. In the former case, they need to decide what is the most worthwile use of limited funds. In the latter, the only decision is whether to spend money on internet access or not. So, they could buy Penthouse and Hustler. But then they would have less money for Time or the local paper or all those offbeat trade and science journals. Also, libraries probably consider buying Penthouse and Hustler a risky investment. Either horny teens would steal the pictures or the morally uptight would vandalize them-- rendering that expense a complete waste of those funds.
With the case of internet access, you are not subsidizing hate speech nor porn when taxpayer money is used to provide internet access at libraries and schools. The incremental expense of viewing those pages as opposed to pages that your biases agree with is zero (increased bandwidth and workstation usage demands aside). The total cost of the computers and software does not change based on the content of the pages viewed. The total cost to taxpayers is actually increased when ineffective filtering software must be purchased and installed. This money is truly wasted since it does not achieve its stated goals and has numerous inappropriate side effects. Insult is added to this injury by the fact that most filtering software keeps its list of filtered sites secret, so they are not open for public review even by the public which is paying for them, and in the case of public schools and libraries, has every right to review the decisions about what was deemed appropriate content.
Finally, your optimism that filtering software will be improved because the size of the user base is improved is an unfounded assumption. Just look at any Microsoft product!