Yes. Good article.
Thank you! It was fun writing it, too.
(Where is Part 2 BTW?)
Good question.. without a very good answer. I intended to write it long ago, but then life stepped in and said "Hey! You have a wedding to prepare for!" and "Hey! Your job needs you!". So I said "Life, you know.. there is only so much of me to go around!" and then I didn't have time to write the article.
Now I am back from my honeymoon, and am very excited about writing part 2. I think I'll do that... any time now. Just kidding! I'll get started on it:-)
I wrote an article that talks about this very thing!
Check it out at Open For Business.
The problem is..
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
..that they are putting non-free software in with the free software and restricting usage of the non-free software. This means that you cannot buy the software and redistribute it... you can only redistribute the free software that is included in their distribution, and I'm sure that they have made it so that it is not a working product sans the non-free software.
This is the business model for UnitedLinux, so you best get used to it. The days of freely copying linux CDs are numbered. Per seat licensing, here we come!
Use Gentoo or Debian. It's the only way to protect your freedom.
We are already seeing commercials at the beginning of a movie at the theater. We've paying a premium price to watch a movie, and they are forcing us to sit through three commercials as well?
Next thing we know, we'll be watching a movie that we paid $10 a peice to go see, and having to sit through advertisements for "refreshing Coca Cola and Popcorn at the snackbar"
Here's the problem, though -- most companies (Record Companies, Book Publishers, etc) will require the artist to sign away their copyrights to any works that they create to the company... and companies never die! So basically, a company, like Disney, can own the image of a rat for 50.. er.. 70 years.
When we start getting close to the time that the rat will go into the public domain, Disney will then fill the coffers of whoever happens to have lied their way into Congress, and *bamf* it'll be 90 or even 100 years.
What Lessig is arguing for is to put an end to these perpetual term extensions... for how can something ever go into the public domain if you can just pay Congress to keep extending the terms?
GNU/Linux runs very well on the server, yes... but what about DRM? DRM is only good for businesses, definitely not for users. M$ will be shoving it down their users throats, whether they like it or not.
What about stopping popup ads at the browser level? IE can't and won't -- too many businesses rely on revenue from popup ads. Case in point: AOL turned off that feature from Mozilla for precisely that reason.
These are only 2 things that applications under GNU/Linux do for users that Microsoft (and other companies, such as AOL) won't.
Just because M$ currently owns the desktop doesn't mean that they always will. It's things like DRM and Popups that will sway users to Free Software.
Linux is the exact opposite - it caters to people and not to businesses. Considering that businesses are outnumbered with people by a few hundred million to 1, I see this as their biggest problem. Granted, they are trying to buy legislation that will level the playing field (make it illegal not to be *for corporations*, and Linux will have to change), but for now, they're in deep trouble.
#2: The *need* to make even more money.
Overcharging their customers year after year will eventually catch up to them.. most likely within the next 2 years. Linux is becoming even more user friendly, and continues to gather mind share among college students (who can't afford the cost of (or won't pay for) Windows' systems, even at the student rates). Today's college grads are tomorrows CIOs.. and they will talk with the CFO's about the massive savings that Free Software brings to the table. This doesn't bode well for Microsoft.
I know that not having the actual MP3 is a strike against this service, but I thought to myself, "Self, give them 3 strikes", so that's what I aimed to do.
So I downloaded the software and created my free user account.
The first thing I did was to look at their catalog of music.
OH MY GOD! 223,000+ tracks?! You have GOT to be kidding me! Nope, they have over 17,000 albums, comprising over 223,000 tracks.
Then I thought, "Hrm... let's listen to something and see what kind of download speed I get, and if what I listen to has decent sound quality.".
So I did a search -- Van Halen -- and listened to a few songs.
The first thing that I noticed was that the song was downloading about 2x the speed that I was listening to it, and rapidly outrunning the little play bar. Cool.
The second thing that I noticed was that the sound was damned near CD quality! I'm listening to these songs in super high end Sennheiser head phones. I was expecting hissing, maybe some drop outs on the high end (Which is why I chose Van Halen -- Eddie loves his lead solos!), but none were to be found.
Then I looked for some Jazz stuff -- Sinatra, Cosby, Harry Connick Jr. -- all to be found and of excellent quality, immediately playable.
So then my mind turned to the "What don't I get with this service?" side of things.
One thing that stands out is that I can't burn a CD with my favorite tracks and play them in my car, because I don't have the MP3. Strike 1.
Anyone care to help me find a strike 2? So far, this is exactly what I said that I would pay for, minus the "having the MP3" part.
And I bet you are writing this email on company time, using a company supplied computer, company supplied software, and company supplied bandwidth. If reading slashdot on company time isn't wasting company resources, I don't know what is.
My point is, we're all guilty of doing personal "things" on company time, while using some company resources.
As far as I'm concerned, they are lucky to have employees who are as talented and hard working as we are. Letting us get a little down time here and there, while providing us with a little extra bandwidth for reading news sites, should be considered a part of our jobs.
"ABC News is reporting a bug in Palladium (now branded as "MSNPC") which causes the infected machine to launch the MSN Explorer web browser and bring up the Whitehouse.gov website."
Hell, they can't even get a set top box right... imagine what happens when they are in charge of a whole friggin PC!
Here are a couple of ideas, off of the top of my head.
1) Since you have a file server, create a batch job that runs in the wee hours of the morning. Its job is to copy data from the end user machines from their data directories (My Documents, etc), placing it in the appropriate sub directories on the server. This doesn't work if your users shut their machines off when they go home, and is the least likely candidate for implementation.
2) Use the "move" functionality of the "My Documents" folder to move their documents folders onto the file server itself. Be careful of permissions here.
3) Create shared folders on the file server for specific types of data. Accounting department documents go in g:\Accounting, Account Executive documents go in g:\AccountExecs, for instance. Get your users used to using those locations for their document storage.
Combine #2 and #3 and you have a pretty good storage system. If your office has a slow network (due to misconfiguration, old 10baseT network cards or lots of users), go for #1 and be thorough.
Last but not least, actually perform the backups! It is useless to implement any of these scenarios if you don't actually do the backups.
Here in Charlotte, NC, I can attest to Verizon Wireless' much better connection and clarity. I was at CompUSA with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and got a call on my SprintPCS phone. The connection was very poor and was quickly dropped. I tried to call the person back, and received a "Network is Busy" message.
My friend let me borrow his Verizon Wireless phone and I was able to call the person back and get perfect reception.
Also, my friend's Verizon Wireless phone works in the elevators at work, where as my SprintPCS phone reception is gone the second the elevator doors shut.
With Microsoft making programming easier and easier, won't medium to high paid corporate programmers working in the closed source Windows world soon be obsoleted by any high school age kid with a few dollars to buy the current version of Visual Studio who is willing to work for far less money?
There's only one place for the programmers to go, and that would be upwards to management positions.
If Microsoft continues to control the software industry, and is allowed to continue on their "our fair share is 100% of everything" path of destruction, there won't be enough jobs in the industry to continue with the growth that we've seen in the past 10 years.
When Microsoft has "full reign", they will buy as many politicians as it takes to make Open Source and Linux a "European Thing" (and then it will end up being a "wasn't that something like Amiga?" thing), and work with the entertainment industry to make everybody's computer system a micro-payment paradise of pay to hear/pay to see media content. AOL will fall, as Microsoft will just add a message box that says something like "AOL software is incompatible with your system, please visit our MSN site".
What the Judge needs to think about is that there isn't one company in the world that would create a consumer level operating system right now, as they would have absolutely no hope of ever being able to sell it. Apple doesn't count here, as they are "blessed" by Microsoft.
This case boils down to 1 thing:
'Someone' said something that 'someone else' takes offense at, and that 'someone else' is going to oppress the freedom of speech of 'someone', at any expense.
When Freenet fulfills its promise, this stuff won't even be possible, so the "someone else" will just have to suck it up.
I wonder if AOL will use the Mozilla Application Framework to recreate the entire AOL interface? The interface that I see in the webvertisements pretty much sucks.
Isn't this what OEOne did? I know that their interface looks pretty good.
... wouldn't an evil company just put a very very high price tag on the source code, to prohibitively keep people from having it?
Think about it -- Microsoft takes Linux, makes dozens of changes to it that we would love to have (this is a theoretical question.. stick with me here...) and then proceeds to charge 5 Billion dollars for access to the source code that they did. Noone can afford it, so it effectively remains closed.. right?
Kazaa is just a minute away from getting completely shut down. They've just admitted to the RIAA that it is possible to shut somebody out of their (nasty) proprietary network... putting them into the same boat as Napster, as far as a Judge will be concerned with them.
Mopheus, who is now using the restamped Gnucleus software, is on a true P2P network, and it would be next to impossible to shut them down.
I suspect that Morpheus will be around long after Kazaa is a footnote.
Interesting.. Sun just dedicated a bunch of resources (30-50 hackers, from the email) toward Gnome 2.0. With that many people dedicated to the project, I wonder if they will try to push it toward what/they/ want, rather than what/we/ want?
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film... it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states."
Ok, so I'm supposed to care about harm to their markets? What's better.. the government is supposed to care?! This seems like a whine to me, rather than a legitimate grievance.
As Ian Clarke once said [paraphrasing].. "If you make money by selling water in the dessert, and it starts to rain... it's time to find some other way to make money."
Well folks.. it's started to rain, and the studios are turning to the government to supply the umbrellas.
Slashdot Mirror
I called RoadRunner and asked them point blank:
Can I run a web or email server on my computer when I am connected to the Internet?
Their official response:
It is against our acceptable usage policy to run servers while connected to the internet.
My official response:
Where can I bring my cable modem back to?
I've since switched to DirectDSL, and am thoroughly enjoying the ability to run whichever servers I choose to, for the same cost per month as cable.
Yes. Good article. :-)
Thank you! It was fun writing it, too.
(Where is Part 2 BTW?)
Good question.. without a very good answer. I intended to write it long ago, but then life stepped in and said "Hey! You have a wedding to prepare for!" and "Hey! Your job needs you!". So I said "Life, you know.. there is only so much of me to go around!" and then I didn't have time to write the article.
Now I am back from my honeymoon, and am very excited about writing part 2. I think I'll do that... any time now. Just kidding! I'll get started on it
I wrote an article that talks about this very thing! Check it out at Open For Business.
..that they are putting non-free software in with the free software and restricting usage of the non-free software. This means that you cannot buy the software and redistribute it... you can only redistribute the free software that is included in their distribution, and I'm sure that they have made it so that it is not a working product sans the non-free software.
This is the business model for UnitedLinux, so you best get used to it. The days of freely copying linux CDs are numbered. Per seat licensing, here we come!
Use Gentoo or Debian. It's the only way to protect your freedom.
We are already seeing commercials at the beginning of a movie at the theater. We've paying a premium price to watch a movie, and they are forcing us to sit through three commercials as well?
Next thing we know, we'll be watching a movie that we paid $10 a peice to go see, and having to sit through advertisements for "refreshing Coca Cola and Popcorn at the snackbar"
This is absurd!
This is from the Microsoft Visual Studio 6 IDE, when double clicking on a keyword and pressing the "F1" key:
Help not available.
[OK] [Help]
Clicking on the Help button brought up the help system that wasn't available some 3 seconds prior.
Here's the problem, though -- most companies (Record Companies, Book Publishers, etc) will require the artist to sign away their copyrights to any works that they create to the company... and companies never die! So basically, a company, like Disney, can own the image of a rat for 50.. er.. 70 years.
When we start getting close to the time that the rat will go into the public domain, Disney will then fill the coffers of whoever happens to have lied their way into Congress, and *bamf* it'll be 90 or even 100 years.
What Lessig is arguing for is to put an end to these perpetual term extensions... for how can something ever go into the public domain if you can just pay Congress to keep extending the terms?
GNU/Linux runs very well on the server, yes... but what about DRM? DRM is only good for businesses, definitely not for users. M$ will be shoving it down their users throats, whether they like it or not.
What about stopping popup ads at the browser level? IE can't and won't -- too many businesses rely on revenue from popup ads. Case in point: AOL turned off that feature from Mozilla for precisely that reason.
These are only 2 things that applications under GNU/Linux do for users that Microsoft (and other companies, such as AOL) won't.
Just because M$ currently owns the desktop doesn't mean that they always will. It's things like DRM and Popups that will sway users to Free Software.
... that they cannot and will not change:
#1: They cater to businesses, not to people.
Linux is the exact opposite - it caters to people and not to businesses. Considering that businesses are outnumbered with people by a few hundred million to 1, I see this as their biggest problem. Granted, they are trying to buy legislation that will level the playing field (make it illegal not to be *for corporations*, and Linux will have to change), but for now, they're in deep trouble.
#2: The *need* to make even more money.
Overcharging their customers year after year will eventually catch up to them.. most likely within the next 2 years. Linux is becoming even more user friendly, and continues to gather mind share among college students (who can't afford the cost of (or won't pay for) Windows' systems, even at the student rates). Today's college grads are tomorrows CIOs.. and they will talk with the CFO's about the massive savings that Free Software brings to the table. This doesn't bode well for Microsoft.
I know that not having the actual MP3 is a strike against this service, but I thought to myself, "Self, give them 3 strikes", so that's what I aimed to do.
So I downloaded the software and created my free user account.
The first thing I did was to look at their catalog of music.
OH MY GOD! 223,000+ tracks?! You have GOT to be kidding me! Nope, they have over 17,000 albums, comprising over 223,000 tracks.
Then I thought, "Hrm... let's listen to something and see what kind of download speed I get, and if what I listen to has decent sound quality.".
So I did a search -- Van Halen -- and listened to a few songs.
The first thing that I noticed was that the song was downloading about 2x the speed that I was listening to it, and rapidly outrunning the little play bar. Cool.
The second thing that I noticed was that the sound was damned near CD quality! I'm listening to these songs in super high end Sennheiser head phones. I was expecting hissing, maybe some drop outs on the high end (Which is why I chose Van Halen -- Eddie loves his lead solos!), but none were to be found.
Then I looked for some Jazz stuff -- Sinatra, Cosby, Harry Connick Jr. -- all to be found and of excellent quality, immediately playable.
So then my mind turned to the "What don't I get with this service?" side of things.
One thing that stands out is that I can't burn a CD with my favorite tracks and play them in my car, because I don't have the MP3. Strike 1.
Anyone care to help me find a strike 2? So far, this is exactly what I said that I would pay for, minus the "having the MP3" part.
Their site is giving an "500 Internal Error"... Perhaps they should look into the next generation Operating System and Web Server as well.
And I bet you are writing this email on company time, using a company supplied computer, company supplied software, and company supplied bandwidth. If reading slashdot on company time isn't wasting company resources, I don't know what is.
My point is, we're all guilty of doing personal "things" on company time, while using some company resources.
As far as I'm concerned, they are lucky to have employees who are as talented and hard working as we are. Letting us get a little down time here and there, while providing us with a little extra bandwidth for reading news sites, should be considered a part of our jobs.
The year: 2006
"ABC News is reporting a bug in Palladium (now branded as "MSNPC") which causes the infected machine to launch the MSN Explorer web browser and bring up the Whitehouse.gov website."
Hell, they can't even get a set top box right... imagine what happens when they are in charge of a whole friggin PC!
Here are a couple of ideas, off of the top of my head.
1) Since you have a file server, create a batch job that runs in the wee hours of the morning. Its job is to copy data from the end user machines from their data directories (My Documents, etc), placing it in the appropriate sub directories on the server. This doesn't work if your users shut their machines off when they go home, and is the least likely candidate for implementation.
2) Use the "move" functionality of the "My Documents" folder to move their documents folders onto the file server itself. Be careful of permissions here.
3) Create shared folders on the file server for specific types of data. Accounting department documents go in g:\Accounting, Account Executive documents go in g:\AccountExecs, for instance. Get your users used to using those locations for their document storage.
Combine #2 and #3 and you have a pretty good storage system. If your office has a slow network (due to misconfiguration, old 10baseT network cards or lots of users), go for #1 and be thorough.
Last but not least, actually perform the backups! It is useless to implement any of these scenarios if you don't actually do the backups.
Good luck!
Here in Charlotte, NC, I can attest to Verizon Wireless' much better connection and clarity. I was at CompUSA with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and got a call on my SprintPCS phone. The connection was very poor and was quickly dropped. I tried to call the person back, and received a "Network is Busy" message.
.02.
My friend let me borrow his Verizon Wireless phone and I was able to call the person back and get perfect reception.
Also, my friend's Verizon Wireless phone works in the elevators at work, where as my SprintPCS phone reception is gone the second the elevator doors shut.
I'll be switching to Verizon Wireless very soon.
Anyways, just my
Have a great day!
With Microsoft making programming easier and easier, won't medium to high paid corporate programmers working in the closed source Windows world soon be obsoleted by any high school age kid with a few dollars to buy the current version of Visual Studio who is willing to work for far less money?
There's only one place for the programmers to go, and that would be upwards to management positions.
If Microsoft continues to control the software industry, and is allowed to continue on their "our fair share is 100% of everything" path of destruction, there won't be enough jobs in the industry to continue with the growth that we've seen in the past 10 years.
When Microsoft has "full reign", they will buy as many politicians as it takes to make Open Source and Linux a "European Thing" (and then it will end up being a "wasn't that something like Amiga?" thing), and work with the entertainment industry to make everybody's computer system a micro-payment paradise of pay to hear/pay to see media content. AOL will fall, as Microsoft will just add a message box that says something like "AOL software is incompatible with your system, please visit our MSN site".
What the Judge needs to think about is that there isn't one company in the world that would create a consumer level operating system right now, as they would have absolutely no hope of ever being able to sell it. Apple doesn't count here, as they are "blessed" by Microsoft.
This whole mess just makes me ill.
This is a 'case in point' for the freenet project.
This case boils down to 1 thing:
'Someone' said something that 'someone else' takes offense at, and that 'someone else' is going to oppress the freedom of speech of 'someone', at any expense.
When Freenet fulfills its promise, this stuff won't even be possible, so the "someone else" will just have to suck it up.
I wonder if AOL will use the Mozilla Application Framework to recreate the entire AOL interface? The interface that I see in the webvertisements pretty much sucks.
Isn't this what OEOne did? I know that their interface looks pretty good.
Well, its freedom because I can't do what I want to do with my computer without giving up my freedom.
No, you can't do what you want with your computer without giving up MONEY, not FREEDOM. You want the source code? Pay for it.
... wouldn't an evil company just put a very very high price tag on the source code, to prohibitively keep people from having it?
Think about it -- Microsoft takes Linux, makes dozens of changes to it that we would love to have (this is a theoretical question.. stick with me here...) and then proceeds to charge 5 Billion dollars for access to the source code that they did. Noone can afford it, so it effectively remains closed.. right?
Houston, we have a problem.
Kazaa is just a minute away from getting completely shut down. They've just admitted to the RIAA that it is possible to shut somebody out of their (nasty) proprietary network... putting them into the same boat as Napster, as far as a Judge will be concerned with them.
Mopheus, who is now using the restamped Gnucleus software, is on a true P2P network, and it would be next to impossible to shut them down.
I suspect that Morpheus will be around long after Kazaa is a footnote.
They've committed crimes...
They've been caught...
They've been charged...
They've been tried...
They've been found guilty. Twice.
Someone hang them. Please!
Interesting.. Sun just dedicated a bunch of resources (30-50 hackers, from the email) toward Gnome 2.0. With that many people dedicated to the project, I wonder if they will try to push it toward what /they/ want, rather than what /we/ want?
;-)
I'm glad I use KDE
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film ... it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states."
Ok, so I'm supposed to care about harm to their markets? What's better.. the government is supposed to care?! This seems like a whine to me, rather than a legitimate grievance.
As Ian Clarke once said [paraphrasing].. "If you make money by selling water in the dessert, and it starts to rain... it's time to find some other way to make money."
Well folks.. it's started to rain, and the studios are turning to the government to supply the umbrellas.
Let them get wet, I say!