Sure you hear testosterone charged flamers from every camp spreading all sorts of garbage about every platform.
However, only one major corporation has a totally consistant, comprehensive, systematic, high profile, high budget machine of FUD and lies against anything that looks like it might compete with their product.
It is this aspect of Microsoft that is so damn disgusting!
That's a quote from one of the section headers of the article.
The author also states: "it is not sufficient for us to simply bad mouth Linux and dismiss it. (Let Microsoft do that.) To do so makes us just as ignorant and stupid as the Best Buy salesmen who keep repeating the litany that Apple is dead or the PC idiots who seem to get everything wrong when they write about the iMac."
Have you noticed that one and only one software maker consitantly spreads FUD, lies and misinformation about the competetion?
Damnit there are hundreds and hundreds of different automobile models to choose from, yet they all are profitable and they all share enough traits and characteristics in common so that once you learn how to drive, you can drive any model.
There's no reason why several OS's can't simultaneously be successfull. There's also no reason why standards can't be open enough for several OS's to co-exist and transparently talk to one another and share data.
The biggest problem in the entire world of software is that one company, Microsoft, cannot tolerate the idea of anyone on the face of planet earth producing software except them.
If Microsoft would compete on an honest and decent level and on the merits of their own product, without using dishonest and sleezy tactics to try to undermine honest competition, I would have nothing against them.
Yet, it is these sleezy tactics that undermine and stifle innovation in the software world.
The author of this article shows a very mature and well reasoned position on the coexistance of platforms.
He has elevated my opinion of the Mac community.
Here's a Friday afternoon beer bottle toast to John Martellaro, Lucy Linux, and Miss Mac!
That's exactly what I thought when reading the article.
This is really scary to me. This is one way that Microsoft might hurt genuinely open source software.
Throw the term around, applying their own goofy and conflicting definitions to it until it is utterly meaningless to the masses.
They did it to Java. They did it to the term "open standards". (Every f***ing closed proprietry standard they come up with they hang the term "open" on.)
Our only defense is to educate the unwashed masses. Counter Microsofts misinformation with well spoken, clear correct information. We must not let them get away with the spreading of misinformation any longer!
There is a HUGE difference between serial numbers and encryption.
Furthermore, mass produced CD's are injection molded. They are all identical. Catalog number, yes, unique serial number, no.
Even Windows-95 and 98 CDs of the same pressing are all identical. That serial number you have to input? There is simply an alogrithm on the disk that determines if the serial number you input is a legitimate one. You can use the serial number printed on the package of ANY windows-98 CD to unlock any other from the same pressing.
Anyway, audio CD's are unencrypted (and NOT serial numbered). Ripping a digital copy of them is trivial. (Well, not according to "Monty", the author of CD-Paranoia;-).
These Memory Sticks would be ENCRYPTED, implying a marrage to a specific player (or smart card or some such) for DECRYPTION. Not unlike Divx, except, presumably, without any "pay per play" requirements. But, with an encrypted system, this would be trivial to impliment later.
If I post something on my site, does that give ZDNet the right to post parts of it on their site without my permission ... HELL NO!
Just as an exercise... take some of ZDNet's articles and repost them on your site. You'll be contacted by their lawyers real soon.
You would be in violation of copyright if you posted whole articles outright without permission.
However, quoting a sentence or two from one of their articles in something you write (and giving them credit) is a textbook example of "fair use". It's 100% legal and you would not be contacted by any lawyers.
Hell, posting links to and breif quotes from copyrighted news articles is the reason for/.'s existance for cryin' out loud!
Remember those early Saturday Night Live sketches where Dan Aykroyd would play the sleezy CEO of a shady toy company defending it's horrendously dangerous toys?
I don't think SNL came up with anything funnier than that sonic blaster in any of these sketches.
Just wanted to clarify... lest my previous post sound too mean...
It's a helluva High School Project.
I'd have definately given them an "A".
It's just that Wired DID gush like this was completely unheard of technology. Wired should be a little more cluefull, especially since these guys got their idea from WIRED in the first place!
When I was at CMU, a pissant snotnosed freshman in an introductory programming class wrote a shell script to endlessly append a file to itself. Two line freeking shell script. (The year was 1981 BTW, oops... just dated myself.)
Anyway, it filled up the entire file system and caused big trouble (early UNIX, no disk quotas).
The instructor called the kid into his office, and pointed out to him that "malicious or destructive use of computing resources" was an expelable offense. He let him off with a verbal warning not to do it again.
The kid does it again the next day.
He is expelled.
He runs to a local TV station. The entire news media in Pittsburgh (TV stations and newspaper) spin the story so as to paint the little snot as an unbelievable computer super-genius who developed an amazing hitherto unconcived computer alogrithm and Carnegie-Mellon expelled him because his godlike intellect embarrased its faculty.
His amazing algorithm?
Something along the lines of:
while [ 1 ] do cat flip >>flop cat flop >>flip done
18 years later and the news media can STILL be rather clueless about computers.
Companies like Dell weren't so much willingly in bed with Microsoft so much as Microsoft had their backs to the wall.
(To further the "in bed" analaogy, Microsoft had made Dell (and Compaq and Gateway, et. al.) it's bitches!)
Dell realises that Microsoft won't have the guts to punish them for Linux friendliness while in the midst of an anti-trust suit. And they're becoming Linux-friendly because it makes econimic sense for them to. Linux represents a serious market!
Heaven help Dell, Compaq, Gateway and all the other big PC makers who have shown some Linux friendliness during the MS anti-trust suit if Microsoft wins the suit.
If MS wins, they're gonna stomp on these PC makers but hard!
It's very very difficult to underestimate the inteligence of the uwashed drooling masses, but Circuit City actually managed to do it!
It increases my faith in the future of mankind to learn that John Q. Public is indeed NOT stupid enough to fall for this.
I've read articles that talk about how about 25% (1/4 for cryin' out loud!) of all the Divx players sold have been RETURNED once the buyer got it home and realised just what it was that he had actually puchased, Divx having been, of course, severely mis-represented by the Circuit City salesman.
Immagining these poor consumers in my mind's eye as they read the manual on their new Divx player causes me to be reminded of the reaction of Kelly Bundy on Married With Children when she is just starting to get a clue about something:
Unlike the "Linux Riot", which is rather blatently obvious (gas masks made out of garbage bags, work goggles, and pocket protectors), this one, if indeed an April Fools joke, is a damn good one.
The notice on the site looks so official and austere, it's a brilliant April foolie if that's what it is.
Me, I have no clue.
I'm gonna have to reserve judgement on this one until tomorrow. Then, if the page has a big "April Fool" at the top of it, my hat will have to be off to Illiad for a really good one!
Suppose the sysadmins for whitehouse.gov discovered an "about to be successfull" cracking attempt in progress. (Perhaps they caught a web page being replaced with a modified one. They might even run a deamon that emails a sysadmin if any online page gets modified without pre-authorization.)
They might have deliberately shut the server down while they figured out how to plug the security hole that the crackers were exploiting.
BTW: my opinion of the credibility of the whitehouse varies depending on the subject matter.
In this case, if whitehouse.gov was cracked, or ALMOST cracked. There's NO WAY IN HELL I think the whitehouse would openly admit to it.
While he may have seen a few Linux machines, and be a Linux expert, it's quite possible he's never seen StarOffice running, or at least not played with it at any length.
While I'm not a huge fan of StarOffice, it's about as full featured as MicroSoft Office. Hardly "rudimentary".
I find this a big yawn anyway. Several decent office suites allready exist for Linux (StarOffice, Applixware, Corel) all of which read and write in MS file formats if desired.
Who really cares if they ever port Office to Linux!
When I first read the Ed Muth interview, I was most struck by his statement that he didn't believe that the world's best programmers would give their best work away for free.
I have two reactions to this:
1) That code which I have written and released as open source WAS written for my employer while on the company clock.
Why was my company willing to let me GPL code they paid me to write?
Obvious!
- We find Linux of value and the best way to ensure that it *remains* valuable is to pitch in and contribute to the effort.
-The most effective way to debug *MY* code is to let as many hackers as possible beat it up to find the bugs and weaknesses (and send me fixes)! How can you beat that!
2) What Ed Muth doesn't understand is that it's not 5 or 6 super-duper brilliant genius programmers giving away their work for free (although some of the worlds most brilliant programmers *are* involved in writing open source software). What it is is tens of thousands of reasonably competent programmers (with a few brilliant ones thrown into the mix) colaberating, finding each others bugs and working together to improve and expand the code.
Microsoft remains blind to this in spite of how many times it has been publically explained in forums like this, and by organisations like opensource.org.
This myopia on their part will be MS's ultimate undoing.
What's so evil about Cyrix chips?
on
The $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
The only trick to using the early 6x86 chips that ran hot was to be sure to use the Cyrix appoved fan.
I have an early 6x86 150+ that's been running without any problems for over two years now.
It's high time for an upgrade. I'm gonna replace it soon and give the Cyrix machine to my 5 year old who's becoming very computer savy!
Absolutely RedHat 5.2 includes PCMCIA drivers, and all available during the install process.
I'm with you, had I been there, that sucker'd be up and running, even if I had to resort to installing from the hard drive and sort out the PCMCIA details later.
One point I make to people over and over is that installing an operating system from scratch on a PC, ANY operating system, is difficult. It requires knowledge of the hardware that very few ordinary users have.
I have done over 100 Linux installs from scratch on various hardware, and have done several dozen installs of Win 95/98. I run into puzzeling stuff at least as often during windows installs as during Linux installs.
Those of us with experience installing *operating systems* (which probably includes a majority of those reading this) know that Plug-n-Play is a bad joke, "auto detection" often doesn't, etc.
While most users can install an *application* the majority of people when faced with the proposition of breaking open the shrink wrap on that OEM Windows 95/98 CD that came with their computer because their hard drive got hosed and they are facing installing windows from scratch are totally in over their heads.
These same people couldn't install Linux either.
This means that the writer has a very good point that the availability of computers with Linux pre-installed is essential for it to ever become a major player. Fortunately, this is happeining.
"I find it hard to believe that some of the best computer scientists in the world will want to do their work for free," he said. "Without a long-term technical road map, without multimillion-dollar test labs, someone wants me to believe these visionary programmers and developers will want to do the best work of their lives and then give it away. I do not believe in that vision of the future."
This is MS's most exploitable misunderstanding of the open source model.
Slashdot Mirror
The key word in that sentence was consistantly.
Sure you hear testosterone charged flamers from every camp spreading all sorts of garbage about every platform.
However, only one major corporation has a totally consistant, comprehensive, systematic, high profile, high budget machine of FUD and lies against anything that looks like it might compete with their product.
It is this aspect of Microsoft that is so damn disgusting!
The news media has absolutely no concept of win-win, win-neutral, neutral-neutral, or big win-smaller win.
If it's not win-lose, or victor-vanquished it's not news.
This is a largely clueless one, to be ignored...
That's a quote from one of the section headers of the article.
The author also states: "it is not sufficient for us to simply bad mouth Linux and dismiss it. (Let Microsoft do that.) To do so makes us just as ignorant and stupid as the Best Buy salesmen who keep repeating the litany that Apple is dead or the PC idiots who seem to get everything wrong when they write about the iMac."
Have you noticed that one and only one software maker consitantly spreads FUD, lies and misinformation about the competetion?
Damnit there are hundreds and hundreds of different automobile models to choose from, yet they all are profitable and they all share enough traits and characteristics in common so that once you learn how to drive, you can drive any model.
There's no reason why several OS's can't simultaneously be successfull. There's also no reason why standards can't be open enough for several OS's to co-exist and transparently talk to one another and share data.
The biggest problem in the entire world of software is that one company, Microsoft, cannot tolerate the idea of anyone on the face of planet earth producing software except them.
If Microsoft would compete on an honest and decent level and on the merits of their own product, without using dishonest and sleezy tactics to try to undermine honest competition, I would have nothing against them.
Yet, it is these sleezy tactics that undermine and stifle innovation in the software world.
The author of this article shows a very mature and well reasoned position on the coexistance of platforms.
He has elevated my opinion of the Mac community.
Here's a Friday afternoon beer bottle toast to John Martellaro, Lucy Linux, and Miss Mac!
That's exactly what I thought when reading the article.
This is really scary to me. This is one way that Microsoft might hurt genuinely open source software.
Throw the term around, applying their own goofy and conflicting definitions to it until it is utterly meaningless to the masses.
They did it to Java. They did it to the term "open standards". (Every f***ing closed proprietry standard they come up with they hang the term "open" on.)
Our only defense is to educate the unwashed masses. Counter Microsofts misinformation with well spoken, clear correct information. We must not let them get away with the spreading of misinformation any longer!
There is a HUGE difference between serial numbers and encryption.
;-).
Furthermore, mass produced CD's are injection molded. They are all identical. Catalog number, yes, unique serial number, no.
Even Windows-95 and 98 CDs of the same pressing are all identical. That serial number you have to input? There is simply an alogrithm on the disk that determines if the serial number you input is a legitimate one. You can use the serial number printed on the package of ANY windows-98 CD to unlock any other from the same pressing.
Anyway, audio CD's are unencrypted (and NOT serial numbered). Ripping a digital copy of them is trivial. (Well, not according to "Monty", the author of CD-Paranoia
These Memory Sticks would be ENCRYPTED, implying a marrage to a specific player (or smart card or some such) for DECRYPTION. Not unlike Divx, except, presumably, without any "pay per play" requirements. But, with an encrypted system, this would be trivial to impliment later.
... HELL NO!
Just as an exercise
lawyers real soon.
You would be in violation of copyright if you posted whole articles outright without permission.
However, quoting a sentence or two from one of their articles in something you write (and giving them credit) is a textbook example of "fair use". It's 100% legal and you would not be contacted by any lawyers.
Hell, posting links to and breif quotes from copyrighted news articles is the reason for
The article is short on technical details, but it mentions that the music will be encrypted.
I suppose that the plan will be to sell music over the internet that you will download into your "memory stick."
For this to stop piracy, apparently it would have to be encoded to work on one and only one "netman" player.
You can't play the same music program in a portable deck, car deck, and home deck without buying 3 identical Memory Sticks of music?
You can't take your memory sticks to a friends house?
If your "netman" breaks all your memory sticks become useless? (How many walkmans accidentially get splattered on the pavement?)
And what's to stop them from eventually using this technology to enforce a "pay per listen" system?
Yeah right!
Sony, get a clue!
Remember those early Saturday Night Live sketches where Dan Aykroyd would play the sleezy CEO of a shady toy company defending it's horrendously dangerous toys?
I don't think SNL came up with anything funnier than that sonic blaster in any of these sketches.
This was just TOO MUCH! What a hoot!
Just wanted to clarify... lest my previous post sound too mean...
It's a helluva High School Project.
I'd have definately given them an "A".
It's just that Wired DID gush like this was completely unheard of technology. Wired should be a little more cluefull, especially since these guys got their idea from WIRED in the first place!
PC/104 based.
By definition: "Pretty big".
Yawn...
Speaking of poor journalism:
When I was at CMU, a pissant snotnosed freshman in an introductory programming class wrote a shell script to endlessly append a file to itself. Two line freeking shell script. (The year was 1981 BTW, oops... just dated myself.)
Anyway, it filled up the entire file system and caused big trouble (early UNIX, no disk quotas).
The instructor called the kid into his office, and pointed out to him that "malicious or destructive use of computing resources" was an expelable offense. He let him off with a verbal warning not to do it again.
The kid does it again the next day.
He is expelled.
He runs to a local TV station. The entire news media in Pittsburgh (TV stations and newspaper) spin the story so as to paint the little snot as an unbelievable computer super-genius who developed an amazing hitherto unconcived computer alogrithm and Carnegie-Mellon expelled him because his godlike intellect embarrased its faculty.
His amazing algorithm?
Something along the lines of:
while [ 1 ]
do
cat flip >>flop
cat flop >>flip
done
18 years later and the news media can STILL be rather clueless about computers.
I've got a slightly different spin/take on it.
Companies like Dell weren't so much willingly in bed with Microsoft so much as Microsoft had their backs to the wall.
(To further the "in bed" analaogy, Microsoft had made Dell (and Compaq and Gateway, et. al.) it's bitches!)
Dell realises that Microsoft won't have the guts to punish them for Linux friendliness while in the midst of an anti-trust suit. And they're becoming Linux-friendly because it makes econimic sense for them to. Linux represents a serious market!
Heaven help Dell, Compaq, Gateway and all the other big PC makers who have shown some Linux friendliness during the MS anti-trust suit if Microsoft wins the suit.
If MS wins, they're gonna stomp on these PC makers but hard!
But not to worry, they're gonna loose.
It's very very difficult to underestimate the inteligence of the uwashed drooling masses, but Circuit City actually managed to do it!
...HEAAYYY!.....
It increases my faith in the future of mankind to learn that John Q. Public is indeed NOT stupid enough to fall for this.
I've read articles that talk about how about 25% (1/4 for cryin' out loud!) of all the Divx players sold have been RETURNED once the buyer got it home and realised just what it was that he had actually puchased, Divx having been, of course, severely mis-represented by the Circuit City salesman.
Immagining these poor consumers in my mind's eye as they read the manual on their new Divx player causes me to be reminded of the reaction of Kelly Bundy on Married With Children when she is just starting to get a clue about something:
Hey....
Unlike the "Linux Riot", which is rather blatently obvious (gas masks made out of garbage bags, work goggles, and pocket protectors), this one, if indeed an April Fools joke, is a damn good one.
The notice on the site looks so official and austere, it's a brilliant April foolie if that's what it is.
Me, I have no clue.
I'm gonna have to reserve judgement on this one until tomorrow. Then, if the page has a big "April Fool" at the top of it, my hat will have to be off to Illiad for a really good one!
However,
Suppose the sysadmins for whitehouse.gov discovered an "about to be successfull" cracking attempt in progress. (Perhaps they caught a web page being replaced with a modified one. They might even run a deamon that emails a sysadmin if any online page gets modified without pre-authorization.)
They might have deliberately shut the server down while they figured out how to plug the security hole that the crackers were exploiting.
BTW: my opinion of the credibility of the whitehouse varies depending on the subject matter.
In this case, if whitehouse.gov was cracked, or ALMOST cracked. There's NO WAY IN HELL I think the whitehouse would openly admit to it.
(lets try this again). Does that mean you can't run Microsoft Office, Microsoft Explorer, Microsoft Bob?
Coming from Microsoft's lips, that's exactly what it means.
An app isn't an app unless it came from MS, in their view of the world.
While he may have seen a few Linux machines, and be a Linux expert, it's quite possible he's never seen StarOffice running, or at least not played with it at any length.
Really...
While I'm not a huge fan of StarOffice, it's about as full featured as MicroSoft Office. Hardly "rudimentary".
I find this a big yawn anyway. Several decent office suites allready exist for Linux (StarOffice, Applixware, Corel) all of which read and write in MS file formats if desired.
Who really cares if they ever port Office to Linux!
When I first read the Ed Muth interview, I was most struck by his statement that he didn't believe that the world's best programmers would give their best work away for free.
I have two reactions to this:
1) That code which I have written and released as open source WAS written for my employer while on the company clock.
Why was my company willing to let me GPL code they paid me to write?
Obvious!
- We find Linux of value and the best way to ensure that it *remains* valuable is to pitch in and contribute to the effort.
-The most effective way to debug *MY* code is to let as many hackers as possible beat it up to find the bugs and weaknesses (and send me fixes)! How can you beat that!
2) What Ed Muth doesn't understand is that it's not 5 or 6 super-duper brilliant genius programmers giving away their work for free (although some of the worlds most brilliant programmers *are* involved in writing open source software). What it is is tens of thousands of reasonably competent programmers (with a few brilliant ones thrown into the mix) colaberating, finding each others bugs and working together to improve and expand the code.
Microsoft remains blind to this in spite of how many times it has been publically explained in forums like this, and by organisations like opensource.org.
This myopia on their part will be MS's ultimate undoing.
The only trick to using the early 6x86 chips that ran hot was to be sure to use the Cyrix appoved fan.
I have an early 6x86 150+ that's been running without any problems for over two years now.
It's high time for an upgrade. I'm gonna replace it soon and give the Cyrix machine to my 5 year old who's becoming very computer savy!
Absolutely RedHat 5.2 includes PCMCIA drivers,
and all available during the install process.
I'm with you, had I been there, that sucker'd be up and running, even if I had to resort to installing from the hard drive and sort out the PCMCIA details later.
The Linux Laptop home page
has no less than 6 different pages about installing on an IBM 560*.
One point I make to people over and over is that installing an operating system from scratch on a PC, ANY operating system, is difficult. It requires knowledge of the hardware that very few ordinary users have.
I have done over 100 Linux installs from scratch on various hardware, and have done several dozen installs of Win 95/98. I run into puzzeling stuff at least as often during windows installs as during Linux installs.
Those of us with experience installing *operating systems* (which probably includes a majority of those reading this) know that Plug-n-Play is a bad joke, "auto detection" often doesn't, etc.
While most users can install an *application* the majority of people when faced with the proposition of breaking open the shrink wrap on that OEM Windows 95/98 CD that came with their computer because their hard drive got hosed and they are facing installing windows from scratch are totally in over their heads.
These same people couldn't install Linux either.
This means that the writer has a very good point that the availability of computers with Linux pre-installed is essential for it to ever become a major player. Fortunately, this is happeining.
On that point:
This article almost reads like it was written a year or two ago, judging from the MS' "view of the world" that it expresses.
Has MS's view of the world really not changed at all in the last year or so, or is this just an example of desperate thrashing on their part?
A little of both, maybe?
This will be their eventual undoing.
Just watch.
This guy is MS's veritable Mauna Loa of FUD.
I simply chuckled.