And not only are you trusting your business data to a third party, I see numerous companies trusting their entire web presence based on some flaky business models of third parties.
Perhaps Gmail won't vanish in the next month, but do you really want to trust some brand X hosting site that says they can make enough money to maintain and run your website based on a couple google ads running on your site? How long before they ad more and more ads... how long before they just give up can close their doors with no notice.
Not only are you opening yourself up to the cost of making changes to your site ("oh, sure we can rescale images on upload, but that will cost an extra $2000 to write the handful of lines of code to invoke ImageMagick, and we'll have to bill you more each month to handle the immense CPU overhead! That will of course mean some CSS changes to move stuff around on the page to fit the smaller images, so that will be another $2000..."
Outsourcing some "services" may be fine: companies trust ADP with their payroll... but they are also aware of the risks. "Do we want to give ADP our payroll? What happens if they go out of business? (again, not likely with ADP, but with a smaller payroll company? It could be a real risk.)
This is all very obvious, though, and RMS is spot on. In cases where you have an alternative: Do It Yourself or hire someone local to provide as much as possible and insist on Open Source and ownership of data so if he sucks he can be replaced with someone else that knows the platform. In cases like Payroll, bite the bullet, grumble a lot, and hope that some day you won't be trapped into a contract because "well, we have no choice... if they raise their rates 20%, well, we will just have to eat that loss."
I once saw a website that was not only stupidly expensive for what it did, the code was encrypted, the data formats undocumented, and even better: the contract allowed the software company sole authority to place ads in the web page and collect all the revenue.
They went under a year later, leaving the site owner with... nothing.
I bought a 6' power strip for the kitchen (got tired of looking for outlets, so now I have one every 5 inches...) The UPS driver noted that the box itself was bent and insisted I open it to make sure it was okay... it wasn't, it was damaged, so he took it away and marked damaged on his computer.
I had Amazon call me about it, and they not only had received the UPS damage report, they shipped out a replacement that day. I had it the next day.
Even their third party sales, Amazon backs up the sales: I've had them refund me for CD's that were never shipped by the seller, I've had them provide receipts for warranty repair... in all they have always been very effecient to deal with.
If I can wait a few days for a purchase, I almost always get it from Amazon.
Indeed, and I just spent this morning setting up an internal IM server for my employer, using the mysql database they use for their intranet server as the authentication (yay for one password) and it talks to googletalk just fine and dandy.
The hardest part was finding a package with the feature set I wanted (um, mysql authentication)
Now our employees can chat with each other in real time (double-secure... SSL connections and not going offsite) or with customers (still SSL, but have to trust their server).
If AOL was serious, they would just implement a Jabber gateway on their end.
The record labels want variable pricing (more than $.99 for some songs, presumably, and hopefully something like $.01 for things like Britney Spears's new crap but that's too optimistic)
No, optimistic would be $20 per track for Britney Spears, and real music for $.01. Use the obscene profits from the crap to fund real music.
Re:EA doesn't own square, idiot.
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 1
Um, Bullshit.:)
"Square-EA" is owned, um, 70% by Square, 30% by EA. (There's a similar joint venture in Japan with the percentages reversed that EA uses to release their games in Japan.
This is all public information from the Squaresoft Annual Report available on the web (much of it is even in English).
Since you're claiming something that contradicts regulated financial reports, please cite a source for this.
And I love mine too. It's a LOT smaller than the Nomad (it literally fits into my shirt pocket), lighter and has a better battery life. 10hr playtime is just about ideal for taking to work.
I've got a 20G drive on order for it, which should be here next week (my Christmas present to myself:)) and then I'll be completely content.
I'm still using the command line tools from Compaq: they work great, and any 'tweaking' of the playslist and such I can do in vi without a lot of hassle.
I bought mine from Thinkgeek, who seem to have a better prices than the vendors listed on pjbox.com, but things may have changed in the past few months.
The 'marketing' side of the pjbox sucks: it comes in an ugly box, it has a manual that looks like a rush job... but the engineering side of the box is slick: tiny, great battery life, great headphones, comes with all the cables (including a power supply with changeable 'pins' for US or Euro use and that takes 100-240VAC at 50/60hz happily). It certainly increased my respect for Compaq engineers who designed it. Since the engineering side of the box is so nice, I'll forgive the ugly box and silly manual. (I -did- love the 1 page "okay, you probably won't read the manual" thing and that it came pre-loaded with some tunes so I could play with it before I got it loaded with tunes.:))
It -is- more expensive than the Nomad... which is the only 'real' drawback. But, hell, decent scotch is more expensive than fire water, and it's worth it, too.:)
All in all? It's the finest portable mp3 player around. Especially since last I checked the Nomad didn't have any Linux support at all: for me, that would make it a paperweight.
More like selling a house without furniture bolted to the floor.
(Original analogy stolen from RMS, I believe)
Remember, you're not allowed to resell the 'furniture' (or Windows CD) at a yard sale. You're not even allowed to stick it in the microwave without the consent of Microsoft.
Because it's an OEM install, you can't take the 'furniture' to your next home when you move or the house burns down.
What you get in the download is a kernel module (which, according to Linus does NOT have to be GPL'd) and some userland code to upload files to the PJBOX, get the table-of-contents from it, etc.
All of that is completely within the terms Linus has said are acceptable even if Compaq had a completely bizarre license on it...
But to make this even more silly, once you undo the.zip file you download, you'll see that the actual license on all the above is GPL.
Yes, the kernel module includes source, the API library, the demo software... all include source and ALL are GPL'd.
The only thing that is broken is that Compaq's silly web page will show you their weird license agreement for -anything- you download even if it's not really the proper license.
I've asked their webmaster to please fix that and not scare people, but it's hardly a crime and it's hardly a GPL violation: it's just "we had this download cgi thing and used it without checking to see if it really fit the license".
Agreed on the ASL recommendation. I've got two personal machines from them, which I love, a new 1U rack mount machine which is amazingly well built (I had to take off the cover first thing...very well put together) and am waiting for a couple 2U machines that should be here next week.
They do install Mandrake (or RH or SuSE) if that turns you on. I managed to leave RH on one of my personal machines for 6 months before debianizing it. The new machiness didn't last 10 minutes before getting formatted. (Nothing wrong with ASL's install... I just like systems I install myself better.:))
I haven't used their support either, but damn, they make nice machines, and they're quite affordable. If their sales folks are any indication, their tech staff should be excellent.
I just hope as people discover them, ASL is able to keep up their quality.
(And, nope, I don't have any relation to ASL other than being a very happy customer.:))
"I'm hoping people will write some interesting applications with this."
You just nailed down the 'true spirit of open source'. Thanks for the news. The Pjbox is a cool toy that I want really badly, but it's not worth running Windows for it... but if I can upload a week's worth of listening and some "oh, what the hell, maybe I'll want to hear this" to it, life is peachy.
It'll be a bit before I can justify another chunk of money from my 'toy budget', but I know what's now next on the list.:)
A couple weeks ago, someone mailed me that the code existed but "was being reviewed by legal". I'm glad my guess to what that meant was right.
There are interesting cross-overs here, such as the legality of reverse-engineering (and that even using a commercial product to do that... and the Playstation manual says you are not allowed to reverse engineer it). Likewise, there's a bit about Sony's desire to control all Playstation-capable devices, but that was not protected by copyright.
Looks to me (IANAL) like there could be interesting precedent in this decision for the EFF in their fight to protect the rights of the DeCSS posters. (This should be applicable as it's the same Circuit as the MPAA case so should be usable as precedent.)
I was pleased to see WP8 for Linux at the local Office Depot. (Even though I already have it, I considered buying at just to make them order more...)
One of the unique things that Corel can bring to Linux is very good distribution channels. Are there plans to work with other Linux companies (like, say, Loki) to help get their products on store shelves, too?
I said I thought about buying WP8 even though I have it just to send a "keep this stocked" signal to Office Depot... but if there were Linux games on the shelf, I'd have bought them on the spot.:)
Indeed, the power that closed source has is astonishing: especially considering that the government traditionally has insisted on multiple sources for products for "national security" reasons.
Add in the economic damage that takes place when countries like Brasil import billions of dollars worth of software -- the trade imbalance is a serious problem for countries like Brasil and their money could be put to much better use at home than in Redmond.
If this bill passes it will help their economy immensely and should be a good model for a lot of other countries with a large support base for Linux users (India, for example, could benefit in much the same way that Brasil could).
Then there's the savings per system -- making computers more affordable for home users ("I need to get the same thing we have at work") will contribute to education and computer literacy...
Linus, Alan and the rest of the kernel developers certainly do own the copyright (ie, the "right, title and interest") in the kernel. XFree86 owns the copyright on much of the X code, The Open Group owns the copyright on a bunch more of the X code. All of them fit in the "others" category above.
And most importantly, the rights of all of them (and all the other individuals and organizations contributing to Linux) -are- protected by copyright.
One of the ironies of the copyleft is that it acheives its power because of copyright law. Were it not for the protections of copyrights, the GPL would not be enforcable.
Corel did not specify an age. They merely stated that one must not be a minor. Legally, a minor is someone that has not attained an age of consent: the specific age can vary.
For example, in my state (and probably most in the US), if you are under 21 the citation for being caught with alcohol is "Minor in possession". But for "contributing to the deliquency of a minor" the usual age of consent is 18.
A minor is someone that has attained the age of consent for the act in question (in this case, the ability to enter contracts). Attaching a specific age to that is incorrect, but, then, it wasn't Corel that did that, but slashdot.
Hrrrm? I've upgrade from glibc2.0 to 2.1 many times. (Without a proper 'base' set for potato, you have to install the slink base, then point apt-get at potato and do a dist-upgrade.... I also moved from the Corel beta back to potato and still haven't bothered rebooting...)
It's trivial.
I find keeping packages current on potato to generally be trivial (even when potato is constantly changing). When I'm bored I do an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" and I get to watch my stuff do its thing.
And, yes, I'm on a plain old 28.8k dialup. Start it, and let it do its thing while you have lunch.
Let apt-get do the dependencies: if you insist on using dpkg alone, then you may as well stick with rpms.
(Plenty of your slink stuff will not need to be upgraded -- so it would be silly to download everything you've installed, and likewise some libraries have been replaced or split -- again, apt-get is your friend: let it manage the dependencies and it's a no-brainer to upgrade to potato.)
Corel hasn't said what license they will release their own code under. They have promised source and I believe have promised that it will be DFSG-compliant. As I understand things, they have some legal issues to wrangle around dealing with Qt, but what do I know? (IANAL)
Corel has said that they will be porting the rest of their office suite to Linux (well, not really porting, but linking with libwine... hence their involvement in the WINE project) next year. I don't know what the actual ship date of Corel Linux will be.
I haven't used CorelDraw or PhotoPaint, but if their quality is like that of WP, I'll be impressed. WP screams.
Bah, you left out "the debian developers don't know or care about marketing, or the boring work of having CD's pressed, placed into pretty boxes and gotten onto retail shelves but the Corel folks know this quite well".
I think it's a fine match of abilities and interests. The more stacks of Linux (and especially Debian) I see at book stores the happier I will be.
Corel can do the grunt work of pressing the CDs and schmoozing the folks from Ingram Micro and the other nonsense needed to get stuff on shelves.
Slashdot Mirror
Not happening here in Oregon, either.
CBS Records that published Michael Jackson's Off the Wall is NOT the same company as CBS records that published the NCIS soundtrsck.
RIAARader's database does not know this.
CBS sold off their recording labels 20 some years ago.
CBS Records was "resurrected" to sell TV show soundtracks... specifically NCIS.
It has no relation at all to Columbia or CBS/EPIC etc etc. NONE.
So your link to RIAARadar points out mostly records owned by Sony, not CBS...
Wrong.
Columbia Records is not part of CBS any more: they are owned by Sony.
CBS owns TV and Radio stations and networks, and a variety of websites.
But not records.
And not only are you trusting your business data to a third party, I see numerous companies trusting their entire web presence based on some flaky business models of third parties.
Perhaps Gmail won't vanish in the next month, but do you really want to trust some brand X hosting site that says they can make enough money to maintain and run your website based on a couple google ads running on your site? How long before they ad more and more ads... how long before they just give up can close their doors with no notice.
Not only are you opening yourself up to the cost of making changes to your site ("oh, sure we can rescale images on upload, but that will cost an extra $2000 to write the handful of lines of code to invoke ImageMagick, and we'll have to bill you more each month to handle the immense CPU overhead! That will of course mean some CSS changes to move stuff around on the page to fit the smaller images, so that will be another $2000..."
Outsourcing some "services" may be fine: companies trust ADP with their payroll... but they are also aware of the risks. "Do we want to give ADP our payroll? What happens if they go out of business? (again, not likely with ADP, but with a smaller payroll company? It could be a real risk.)
This is all very obvious, though, and RMS is spot on. In cases where you have an alternative: Do It Yourself or hire someone local to provide as much as possible and insist on Open Source and ownership of data so if he sucks he can be replaced with someone else that knows the platform. In cases like Payroll, bite the bullet, grumble a lot, and hope that some day you won't be trapped into a contract because "well, we have no choice... if they raise their rates 20%, well, we will just have to eat that loss."
I once saw a website that was not only stupidly expensive for what it did, the code was encrypted, the data formats undocumented, and even better: the contract allowed the software company sole authority to place ads in the web page and collect all the revenue.
They went under a year later, leaving the site owner with... nothing.
I bought a 6' power strip for the kitchen (got tired of looking for outlets, so now I have one every 5 inches...) The UPS driver noted that the box itself was bent and insisted I open it to make sure it was okay... it wasn't, it was damaged, so he took it away and marked damaged on his computer. I had Amazon call me about it, and they not only had received the UPS damage report, they shipped out a replacement that day. I had it the next day. Even their third party sales, Amazon backs up the sales: I've had them refund me for CD's that were never shipped by the seller, I've had them provide receipts for warranty repair... in all they have always been very effecient to deal with. If I can wait a few days for a purchase, I almost always get it from Amazon.
As a high earner, I pay 22% income tax for the first £34,800 (~$54800), and 40% for anything above that. Your 60% claim is false.
Income tax is your only tax? No GST/Sales tax? No property tax? The 60% number may be errant, but so is your refutation of it.
You mean the Coburn-Obama-Carper-McCain bill?
Obama didn't write the bill, he didn't introduce it, he was just a co-sponsor. So says Thomas
Indeed, and I just spent this morning setting up an internal IM server for my employer, using the mysql database they use for their intranet server as the authentication (yay for one password) and it talks to googletalk just fine and dandy.
The hardest part was finding a package with the feature set I wanted (um, mysql authentication)
Now our employees can chat with each other in real time (double-secure... SSL connections and not going offsite) or with customers (still SSL, but have to trust their server).
If AOL was serious, they would just implement a Jabber gateway on their end.
What "security folks" believe that a telnet client should be removed?
No, you shouldn't run in.telnetd on port 23, but that is not the same as 'telnet.exe' in Windows, nor is /usr/bin/telnet a risk.
No, optimistic would be $20 per track for Britney Spears, and real music for $.01. Use the obscene profits from the crap to fund real music.
Um, Bullshit. :)
"Square-EA" is owned, um, 70% by Square, 30% by EA. (There's a similar joint venture in Japan with the percentages reversed that EA uses to release their games in Japan.
This is all public information from the Squaresoft Annual Report available on the web (much of it is even in English).
Since you're claiming something that contradicts regulated financial reports, please cite a source for this.
And I love mine too. It's a LOT smaller than the Nomad (it literally fits into my shirt pocket), lighter and has a better battery life. 10hr playtime is just about ideal for taking to work.
:)) and then I'll be completely content.
:))
:)
I've got a 20G drive on order for it, which should be here next week (my Christmas present to myself
I'm still using the command line tools from Compaq: they work great, and any 'tweaking' of the playslist and such I can do in vi without a lot of hassle.
I bought mine from Thinkgeek, who seem to have a better prices than the vendors listed on pjbox.com, but things may have changed in the past few months.
The 'marketing' side of the pjbox sucks: it comes in an ugly box, it has a manual that looks like a rush job... but the engineering side of the box is slick: tiny, great battery life, great headphones, comes with all the cables (including a power supply with changeable 'pins' for US or Euro use and that takes 100-240VAC at 50/60hz happily). It certainly increased my respect for Compaq engineers who designed it. Since the engineering side of the box is so nice, I'll forgive the ugly box and silly manual. (I -did- love the 1 page "okay, you probably won't read the manual" thing and that it came pre-loaded with some tunes so I could play with it before I got it loaded with tunes.
It -is- more expensive than the Nomad... which is the only 'real' drawback. But, hell, decent scotch is more expensive than fire water, and it's worth it, too.
All in all? It's the finest portable mp3 player around. Especially since last I checked the Nomad didn't have any Linux support at all: for me, that would make it a paperweight.
More like selling a house without furniture bolted to the floor.
(Original analogy stolen from RMS, I believe)
Remember, you're not allowed to resell the 'furniture' (or Windows CD) at a yard sale. You're not even allowed to stick it in the microwave without the consent of Microsoft.
Because it's an OEM install, you can't take the 'furniture' to your next home when you move or the house burns down.
No, the device does NOT run Linux at all.
.zip file you download, you'll see that the actual license on all the above is GPL.
:)
What you get in the download is a kernel module (which, according to Linus does NOT have to be GPL'd) and some userland code to upload files to the PJBOX, get the table-of-contents from it, etc.
All of that is completely within the terms Linus has said are acceptable even if Compaq had a completely bizarre license on it...
But to make this even more silly, once you undo the
Yes, the kernel module includes source, the API library, the demo software... all include source and ALL are GPL'd.
The only thing that is broken is that Compaq's silly web page will show you their weird license agreement for -anything- you download even if it's not really the proper license.
I've asked their webmaster to please fix that and not scare people, but it's hardly a crime and it's hardly a GPL violation: it's just "we had this download cgi thing and used it without checking to see if it really fit the license".
-b.,
waiting for his pjbox to show up.
Agreed on the ASL recommendation. I've got two personal machines from them, which I love, a new 1U rack mount machine which is amazingly well built (I had to take off the cover first thing...very well put together) and am waiting for a couple 2U machines that should be here next week.
:))
They do install Mandrake (or RH or SuSE) if that turns you on. I managed to leave RH on one of my personal machines for 6 months before debianizing it. The new machiness didn't last 10 minutes before getting formatted. (Nothing wrong with ASL's install... I just like systems I install myself better.:))
I haven't used their support either, but damn, they make nice machines, and they're quite affordable. If their sales folks are any indication, their tech staff should be excellent.
I just hope as people discover them, ASL is able to keep up their quality.
(And, nope, I don't have any relation to ASL other than being a very happy customer.
"I'm hoping people will write some interesting applications with this."
:)
You just nailed down the 'true spirit of open source'. Thanks for the news. The Pjbox is a cool toy that I want really badly, but it's not worth running Windows for it... but if I can upload a week's worth of listening and some "oh, what the hell, maybe I'll want to hear this" to it, life is peachy.
It'll be a bit before I can justify another chunk of money from my 'toy budget', but I know what's now next on the list.
A couple weeks ago, someone mailed me that the code existed but "was being reviewed by legal". I'm glad my guess to what that meant was right.
There are interesting cross-overs here, such as the legality of reverse-engineering (and that even using a commercial product to do that... and the Playstation manual says you are not allowed to reverse engineer it). Likewise, there's a bit about Sony's desire to control all Playstation-capable devices, but that was not protected by copyright.
Looks to me (IANAL) like there could be interesting precedent in this decision for the EFF in their fight to protect the rights of the DeCSS posters. (This should be applicable as it's the same Circuit as the MPAA case so should be usable as precedent.)
Comments from those who are lawyers?
I was pleased to see WP8 for Linux at the local Office Depot. (Even though I already have it, I considered buying at just to make them order more...)
:)
:)
One of the unique things that Corel can bring to Linux is very good distribution channels. Are there plans to work with other Linux companies (like, say, Loki) to help get their products on store shelves, too?
I said I thought about buying WP8 even though I have it just to send a "keep this stocked" signal to Office Depot... but if there were Linux games on the shelf, I'd have bought them on the spot.
Linux Games do matter...
Indeed, the power that closed source has is astonishing: especially considering that the government traditionally has insisted on multiple sources for products for "national security" reasons.
Add in the economic damage that takes place when countries like Brasil import billions of dollars worth of software -- the trade imbalance is a serious problem for countries like Brasil and their money could be put to much better use at home than in Redmond.
If this bill passes it will help their economy immensely and should be a good model for a lot of other countries with a large support base for Linux users (India, for example, could benefit in much the same way that Brasil could).
Then there's the savings per system -- making computers more affordable for home users ("I need to get the same thing we have at work") will contribute to education and computer literacy...
How is this a problem?
Linus, Alan and the rest of the kernel developers certainly do own the copyright (ie, the "right, title and interest") in the kernel. XFree86 owns the copyright on much of the X code, The Open Group owns the copyright on a bunch more of the X code. All of them fit in the "others" category above.
And most importantly, the rights of all of them (and all the other individuals and organizations contributing to Linux) -are- protected by copyright.
One of the ironies of the copyleft is that it acheives its power because of copyright law. Were it not for the protections of copyrights, the GPL would not be enforcable.
You're correct, but what's the point?
Corel did not specify an age. They merely stated that one must not be a minor. Legally, a minor is someone that has not attained an age of consent: the specific age can vary.
For example, in my state (and probably most in the US), if you are under 21 the citation for being caught with alcohol is "Minor in possession". But for "contributing to the deliquency of a minor" the usual age of consent is 18.
A minor is someone that has attained the age of consent for the act in question (in this case, the ability to enter contracts). Attaching a specific age to that is incorrect, but, then, it wasn't Corel that did that, but slashdot.
You suppose wrong.
Hrrrm? I've upgrade from glibc2.0 to 2.1 many times. (Without a proper 'base' set for potato, you have to install the slink base, then point apt-get at potato and do a dist-upgrade.... I also moved from the Corel beta back to potato and still haven't bothered rebooting...)
It's trivial.
I find keeping packages current on potato to generally be trivial (even when potato is constantly changing). When I'm bored I do an "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" and I get to watch my stuff do its thing.
And, yes, I'm on a plain old 28.8k dialup. Start it, and let it do its thing while you have lunch.
Let apt-get do the dependencies: if you insist on using dpkg alone, then you may as well stick with rpms.
(Plenty of your slink stuff will not need to be upgraded -- so it would be silly to download everything you've installed, and likewise some libraries have been replaced or split -- again, apt-get is your friend: let it manage the dependencies and it's a no-brainer to upgrade to potato.)
Corel hasn't said what license they will release their own code under. They have promised source and I believe have promised that it will be DFSG-compliant. As I understand things, they have some legal issues to wrangle around dealing with Qt, but what do I know? (IANAL)
Corel has said that they will be porting the rest of their office suite to Linux (well, not really porting, but linking with libwine... hence their involvement in the WINE project) next year. I don't know what the actual ship date of Corel Linux will be.
I haven't used CorelDraw or PhotoPaint, but if their quality is like that of WP, I'll be impressed. WP screams.
Bah, you left out "the debian developers don't know or care about marketing, or the boring work of having CD's pressed, placed into pretty boxes and gotten onto retail shelves but the Corel folks know this quite well".
I think it's a fine match of abilities and interests. The more stacks of Linux (and especially Debian) I see at book stores the happier I will be.
Corel can do the grunt work of pressing the CDs and schmoozing the folks from Ingram Micro and the other nonsense needed to get stuff on shelves.