Corporation exist to make money, and for no other reason.
Corporations exist at the whim of the communities who charter them.
in a captialist society, with competition both for the companies and the employees, you've got a few choices:
-Accept your current working conditions -Work out new ones with your employer -Leave and find new sources of work
Good thing we don't live in a capitalist society, eh? Corporate welfare keeps bad companies from dying and keeps labor cheap by taking steps to depress wages every time workers get too uppity.
Eh comrade?
Re:It's called "remedy" for monopolization
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
As long as you don't violate their trademark, you are allowed to resell it. It's explicitly allowed by the GPL and all GPL-compatible free software licenses.
Re:You are not taking the long view
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
at the end of the day, MS and all its works is perceived as the least bad option.
Are you sure it's not because they use closed binary file types that refuse to interoperate properly with other programs, and abuse their monopoly position to ensure that even if people don't like them they still have to use them?
At the end of the day, people have no other choice because the government has no spine for real anti-trust enforcement. Perhaps things are different in Europe, but that's the way things are here.
Re:It's called "remedy" for monopolization
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
Redhat has a monopoly on the supply of Redhat 8.
Um, no they don't. They allow you to freely redistribute it.
The only thing they claim ownership of is the trademark, so they can make it clear what is officially supported redhat and what is not.
I admit I can't keep up with the rapidity with which you're posting here, so as far as my thread here you're going to get the last word. Good luck with the EU version of the DMCA when it hits, I'm sure your Holy Market Forces will save you, and if they fail we've always got China, land of the free.
Re:It's called "remedy" for monopolization
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
the anti-trust ideas proposed for MS seem to boil down to stopping the customer from buying what he wants.
Just like the anti-trust actions against Standard Oil stopped consumers from purchasing the oil they wanted, right? Because they were all buying it, not having any other real choice.
Most people I talk to don't actually want more than one browser. They certainly don't want to have to choose which browser to use on the basis of the site they want to look at.
Nor do they want the hoods on their cars welded shut. You've just made an argument for open standards compliance, not for a closed-source monopoly.
Jeez.
Anyway, my point a few postings ago was that if MS does go for a radically new product in 2004, this significantly weakens their advantage as a monopoly, so it should be good news for other operating systems, providing the other operating systems can compete.
And what everyone's afraid of is that MS's market dominance is going to make it difficult in practice for any non-DRM hardware maker to survive even if there's a few holdouts, and that their ownership of the legislative process (Which we can certainly expect to grow over the next two years as the Republicans gut the campaign finance reform laws and give them a nice buffer against any real antitrust action) will ensure that the manufacture of modern non-DRM hardware will become illegal.
I don't like pinning my hopes of computing freedom on the likelihood of China flooding the market with competing products. I don't like it one bit.
Re:You are not taking the long view
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
Ok, we're kind of off the topic you originally suggested, that DRM won't happen because the old versions of windows will compete with it- in fact, you seem to concede my point that in the long run (by 2006-8), DRM *will* be a serious problem, and Microsoft is willing and able to wait that long to bring their monopoly force to bear. It's a seven year-old product: why should they keep fixing it? If I post a bug in a seven year-old version of emacs to a newsgroup, I'm going to get flamed
The reason for the difference is that emacs doesn't lock you into a forced pay-for-upgrade cycle. And they certainly won't lock you into an "accept-DRM-or-face-obsolesence" scheme. Most importantly, if you'd like to fork the old version and fix the problems with it you can. No such luck with non-free software.
so I wouldn't even start to worry until 2006-2008
Again, this is my point. You are not willing to imagine that 2006 will actually come someday. I feel it's likely, and in fact I think we're less than 4 years away from it. Forced to use Windows in every job
Nonsense, you just picked the wrong jobs. It's either a life and death issue or it isn't.
Again, your lack of subtlety amazes me. There is quite a bit of middle ground. The jobs I could have taken that didn't require windows would not have enabled me to pay both my rent and my student loans. It's reasonable to expect a certain degree of choice in the economy, but in terms of operating systems I have had none.
If it is a life and death issue, make not using Windows the first criterion for choosing an employer and live with the consequences. If it isn't, take the money and stop complaining.
So no complaining if you don't like your situation? You must be great fun at parties. The ability to not use windows is actually very high on my list, but slightly below subsistence. In a fair economy I wouldn't be forced to choose between them. In this economy, just getting a job that pays my bills is tough enough.
I've never used Windows in any job at any point, which might be why I probably earn less than you do.
I applaud your ability to navigate the job market so capably. I assure you that most of us are not so talented. And I'd be surprised if you made much less than me.
You are not taking the long view
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
or even the medium term view. If win9x is competing with win04, what do you do? Two things:
1. Stop fixing win95 problems when they pop up (yes they do pop up, as certain as the sun rising every day). Eventually retire the OS so that users of this ancient operating system become software renegades, but first make it even more difficult to use than it was when it first came out so that there won't be much fuss when it's eventually retired.
2. Use those billions in the bank to pay a few companies to make software that requires features in newer versions of windows, i.e., not backwards-compatible with win98/ME any more. Microsoft has the money to play this waiting game, and they face no threat from the courts, so every day their influence grows. X-Files indeed- I think you're the one living in the imaginary world.
You say it's just an operating system, why have I been *forced* to use it at every job I've had since at least 1997? They are a *monopoly* and they abuse their power in ways that make life miserable for the rest of us.
Yeah, but to do this I have to have each computer that I'm dealing with get approval from a separate administration to install this software, and with the administration where I work they'll insist on purchasing something, and waiting for someone to mail a physical box to each site. You don't get it.
This is BRAINDEAD. A file is a list of numbers. I want a utility that splits them into smaller lists of numbers, then reassembles them. It's one of the most obvious things you'd ever want to do, especially in a world where 1.44M floppies still get some use. WHY do so-called "modern" operating systems not come with such a tool?
Well, relatively so. I had a palm-pilot pro in 1998, and a Casio proprietary-os crapstravaganza before that. The palm pro had a modem, and I was able to telnet into my university and check my email remotely on this device I had picked up for $100 used- it was pretty sweet since I travelled a lot of time and couldn't afford/didn't want to carry my own laptop.
Eventually sold it out of a desperate need for cash, but soon after bought a IIIe. It met my needs and was great for taking notes in class and I even used it to do some of my SICP homework using LispMe. Also played lots of games on it:) Zap!2000 and Dragonbane were pretty sweet ways to spend time on the T. Also got the NYT front page articles and the regular suck.com essays through Avantgo for a while, but suck is gone now and the NYT stuff was just a little too insubstantial.
The display on that one finally gave out after 2+ years of faithful use, so I picked up a used m100 on half.com for about $60, and it's the best palm I've had so far, because it has all the features of the palm pro and palm III, but most importantly it gets the hell out of my way- it actually fits comfortably in a shirt pocket, where the others (especially after adding a faux leather case) were just far too bulky. The only downside is that the graffiti area seems to be smaller and as a result I make a lot more errors, meaning less wpm.
But I use it all the time, especially as a nag machine to keep me on time for appointments and project deadlines. Plus I still play some games (bejeweled and pocketchess 1.0 - if you can still find it - come highly recommended). But I can't imagine giving up battery life for features on my electric planner- palmOS has really not been improved on since palm pro, it's just been gussied up to keep pace with wince. And I especially can't imagine not being able to replace my batteries with a fresh pair of AAA's on the road- the systems with the built-in batteries may save you money on batteries (unless you're using the same 2 pairs of rechargeables you bought 3 years ago like I am), but when you're on the road and your batteries are drained there's just nothing you can do.
Just because you can't get them from MS doesn't mena you can't get them.
But it does mean you can't expect them to be on any random windows computer.
Do you have any idea what a pain in my ass it is that windows installations don't come with anything like the "split" command that is a standard part of linux textutils? I mean, once in a while you have a file that is just too big for some purpose (e.g., a 1gig file on a non-networked computer with a cd-rw drive, a 110M mpeg on a non-networked machine with a zip drive, etc.) and it's not convenient to install new software to cut it into pieces then reassemble it.
An OS without a split command is like a toolshed without a saw.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is: Radio is _not_ free. Your fee is being paid by someone else.
Well, when you download from someone, the person you download ripped the mp3's from a cd, so they have paid the license fee, or perhaps it was who they downloaded from - *someone* paid the license fee. Maybe they recorded the song from the radio, and so the radio station paid the license. But someone paid.
Not a fair analogy. A better one would be "Why go out hunting with a bow and arrow when you could chase squirrels, beat them senseless with your plastic Outlook cd case, then eat their brains?"
Just offer to pay your irc buddies whatever microsoft support costs you, and I'm sure you'll no longer be flamed or insulted, but thanked and perhaps even worshipped a little.
There's not much more to say about that, if it fits in my shirt pocket and I can listen to it in the car without fiddling with wires, that's very convenient. I'm intrigued.
Not to mention you don't have to spend the extra $30 at radio shack.
I'm so torn. I agree with everything you say, and I think RMS may be the most important and influential thinker of our generation.
But here's why I'm torn- if people didn't bash RMS all the time with such petty hatred , that joke wouldn've been pretty funny, like a teasing joke between friends. When taken in the context of the other posts that show up here however, I fear that you are exactly right.
Alas, people hate him because his ideas threaten the deeply buried contradictions that lay beneath the surface of people's conception of the world.
... igaborf says it's not true, everyone believes her.
The dear editor's point was that a retraction of a story about espionage is at least as likely to be caused by pressure as by error, and probably more so since there could be serious consequences to making up such a story, so it's not something one enters into lightly.
It's called plausible deniability.
Re:Fritz Hollings out as commerce committee chair!
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yeah, then we'd get some of those anti-corporate republican types in there. That'll show 'em.
The problem with "my ball, my rules" is that there's usually only one ball.
Here there are n balls.
A better metaphor has to do with attribution (which is at stake here), not ownership (which Linus makes clear everyone is individually entitled to). So it would be like if you played for the Penguins and insisted that every time you shoot a goal, Mario Lemieux has to get an assist.
Slashdot Mirror
"Knoppix."
Corporation exist to make money, and for no other reason.
Corporations exist at the whim of the communities who charter them.
in a captialist society, with competition both for the companies and the employees, you've got a few choices:
-Accept your current working conditions
-Work out new ones with your employer
-Leave and find new sources of work
Good thing we don't live in a capitalist society, eh? Corporate welfare keeps bad companies from dying and keeps labor cheap by taking steps to depress wages every time workers get too uppity.
Eh comrade?
As long as you don't violate their trademark, you are allowed to resell it. It's explicitly allowed by the GPL and all GPL-compatible free software licenses.
at the end of the day, MS and all its works is perceived as the least bad option.
Are you sure it's not because they use closed binary file types that refuse to interoperate properly with other programs, and abuse their monopoly position to ensure that even if people don't like them they still have to use them?
At the end of the day, people have no other choice because the government has no spine for real anti-trust enforcement. Perhaps things are different in Europe, but that's the way things are here.
Redhat has a monopoly on the supply of Redhat 8.
Um, no they don't. They allow you to freely redistribute it.
The only thing they claim ownership of is the trademark, so they can make it clear what is officially supported redhat and what is not.
I admit I can't keep up with the rapidity with which you're posting here, so as far as my thread here you're going to get the last word. Good luck with the EU version of the DMCA when it hits, I'm sure your Holy Market Forces will save you, and if they fail we've always got China, land of the free.
the anti-trust ideas proposed for MS seem to boil down to stopping the customer from buying what he wants.
Just like the anti-trust actions against Standard Oil stopped consumers from purchasing the oil they wanted, right? Because they were all buying it, not having any other real choice.
Most people I talk to don't actually want more than one browser. They certainly don't want to have to choose which browser to use on the basis of the site they want to look at.
Nor do they want the hoods on their cars welded shut. You've just made an argument for open standards compliance, not for a closed-source monopoly.
Jeez.
Anyway, my point a few postings ago was that if MS does go for a radically new product in 2004, this significantly weakens their advantage as a monopoly, so it should be good news for other operating systems, providing the other operating systems can compete.
And what everyone's afraid of is that MS's market dominance is going to make it difficult in practice for any non-DRM hardware maker to survive even if there's a few holdouts, and that their ownership of the legislative process (Which we can certainly expect to grow over the next two years as the Republicans gut the campaign finance reform laws and give them a nice buffer against any real antitrust action) will ensure that the manufacture of modern non-DRM hardware will become illegal.
I don't like pinning my hopes of computing freedom on the likelihood of China flooding the market with competing products. I don't like it one bit.
Ok, we're kind of off the topic you originally suggested, that DRM won't happen because the old versions of windows will compete with it- in fact, you seem to concede my point that in the long run (by 2006-8), DRM *will* be a serious problem, and Microsoft is willing and able to wait that long to bring their monopoly force to bear.
It's a seven year-old product: why should they keep fixing it? If I post a bug in a seven year-old version of emacs to a newsgroup, I'm going to get flamed
The reason for the difference is that emacs doesn't lock you into a forced pay-for-upgrade cycle. And they certainly won't lock you into an "accept-DRM-or-face-obsolesence" scheme. Most importantly, if you'd like to fork the old version and fix the problems with it you can. No such luck with non-free software.
so I wouldn't even start to worry until 2006-2008
Again, this is my point. You are not willing to imagine that 2006 will actually come someday. I feel it's likely, and in fact I think we're less than 4 years away from it.
Forced to use Windows in every job
Nonsense, you just picked the wrong jobs. It's either a life and death issue or it isn't.
Again, your lack of subtlety amazes me. There is quite a bit of middle ground. The jobs I could have taken that didn't require windows would not have enabled me to pay both my rent and my student loans. It's reasonable to expect a certain degree of choice in the economy, but in terms of operating systems I have had none.
If it is a life and death issue, make not using Windows the first criterion for choosing an employer and live with the consequences. If it isn't, take the money and stop complaining.
So no complaining if you don't like your situation? You must be great fun at parties. The ability to not use windows is actually very high on my list, but slightly below subsistence. In a fair economy I wouldn't be forced to choose between them. In this economy, just getting a job that pays my bills is tough enough.
I've never used Windows in any job at any point, which might be why I probably earn less than you do.
I applaud your ability to navigate the job market so capably. I assure you that most of us are not so talented. And I'd be surprised if you made much less than me.
or even the medium term view. If win9x is competing with win04, what do you do? Two things:
1. Stop fixing win95 problems when they pop up (yes they do pop up, as certain as the sun rising every day). Eventually retire the OS so that users of this ancient operating system become software renegades, but first make it even more difficult to use than it was when it first came out so that there won't be much fuss when it's eventually retired.
2. Use those billions in the bank to pay a few companies to make software that requires features in newer versions of windows, i.e., not backwards-compatible with win98/ME any more. Microsoft has the money to play this waiting game, and they face no threat from the courts, so every day their influence grows. X-Files indeed- I think you're the one living in the imaginary world.
You say it's just an operating system, why have I been *forced* to use it at every job I've had since at least 1997? They are a *monopoly* and they abuse their power in ways that make life miserable for the rest of us.
Don't delete the articles, just create a duplicates section.
Here's a few of suggestions for possible icons:
duplicates icon 1
duplicates icon 2
duplicates icon 3
it wouldn't do any good to the end user. The code would be way to complex for 99.9% of all users to understand
:)
So I can't use all the patches everyone else wrote for apache?
I thought that was all apache was
Bruce,
You rock.
I would have just said "open your darn code, quit trying to steal from the commons of ideas", but your diplomacy shames me.
Yeah, but to do this I have to have each computer that I'm dealing with get approval from a separate administration to install this software, and with the administration where I work they'll insist on purchasing something, and waiting for someone to mail a physical box to each site. You don't get it.
This is BRAINDEAD. A file is a list of numbers. I want a utility that splits them into smaller lists of numbers, then reassembles them. It's one of the most obvious things you'd ever want to do, especially in a world where 1.44M floppies still get some use. WHY do so-called "modern" operating systems not come with such a tool?
Well, relatively so. I had a palm-pilot pro in 1998, and a Casio proprietary-os crapstravaganza before that. The palm pro had a modem, and I was able to telnet into my university and check my email remotely on this device I had picked up for $100 used- it was pretty sweet since I travelled a lot of time and couldn't afford/didn't want to carry my own laptop.
:) Zap!2000 and Dragonbane were pretty sweet ways to spend time on the T. Also got the NYT front page articles and the regular suck.com essays through Avantgo for a while, but suck is gone now and the NYT stuff was just a little too insubstantial.
:)
Eventually sold it out of a desperate need for cash, but soon after bought a IIIe. It met my needs and was great for taking notes in class and I even used it to do some of my SICP homework using LispMe. Also played lots of games on it
The display on that one finally gave out after 2+ years of faithful use, so I picked up a used m100 on half.com for about $60, and it's the best palm I've had so far, because it has all the features of the palm pro and palm III, but most importantly it gets the hell out of my way- it actually fits comfortably in a shirt pocket, where the others (especially after adding a faux leather case) were just far too bulky. The only downside is that the graffiti area seems to be smaller and as a result I make a lot more errors, meaning less wpm.
But I use it all the time, especially as a nag machine to keep me on time for appointments and project deadlines. Plus I still play some games (bejeweled and pocketchess 1.0 - if you can still find it - come highly recommended). But I can't imagine giving up battery life for features on my electric planner- palmOS has really not been improved on since palm pro, it's just been gussied up to keep pace with wince. And I especially can't imagine not being able to replace my batteries with a fresh pair of AAA's on the road- the systems with the built-in batteries may save you money on batteries (unless you're using the same 2 pairs of rechargeables you bought 3 years ago like I am), but when you're on the road and your batteries are drained there's just nothing you can do.
Wow, I didn't think I had that much to say
Just because you can't get them from MS doesn't mena you can't get them.
But it does mean you can't expect them to be on any random windows computer.
Do you have any idea what a pain in my ass it is that windows installations don't come with anything like the "split" command that is a standard part of linux textutils? I mean, once in a while you have a file that is just too big for some purpose (e.g., a 1gig file on a non-networked computer with a cd-rw drive, a 110M mpeg on a non-networked machine with a zip drive, etc.) and it's not convenient to install new software to cut it into pieces then reassemble it.
An OS without a split command is like a toolshed without a saw.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is: Radio is _not_ free. Your fee is being paid by someone else.
Well, when you download from someone, the person you download ripped the mp3's from a cd, so they have paid the license fee, or perhaps it was who they downloaded from - *someone* paid the license fee. Maybe they recorded the song from the radio, and so the radio station paid the license. But someone paid.
Not a fair analogy. A better one would be "Why go out hunting with a bow and arrow when you could chase squirrels, beat them senseless with your plastic Outlook cd case, then eat their brains?"
Just offer to pay your irc buddies whatever microsoft support costs you, and I'm sure you'll no longer be flamed or insulted, but thanked and perhaps even worshipped a little.
n/t
All the robots I've bought from this company have had bad motivators.
What are they trying to push on us?
Because nobody with money wants it to happen. Duh.
What, did you think you lived in a democracy?
Captain America indeed.
There's not much more to say about that, if it fits in my shirt pocket and I can listen to it in the car without fiddling with wires, that's very convenient. I'm intrigued.
Not to mention you don't have to spend the extra $30 at radio shack.
I'm so torn. I agree with everything you say, and I think RMS may be the most important and influential thinker of our generation.
But here's why I'm torn- if people didn't bash RMS all the time with such petty hatred , that joke wouldn've been pretty funny, like a teasing joke between friends. When taken in the context of the other posts that show up here however, I fear that you are exactly right.
Alas, people hate him because his ideas threaten the deeply buried contradictions that lay beneath the surface of people's conception of the world.
... igaborf says it's not true, everyone believes her.
The dear editor's point was that a retraction of a story about espionage is at least as likely to be caused by pressure as by error, and probably more so since there could be serious consequences to making up such a story, so it's not something one enters into lightly.
It's called plausible deniability.
Yeah, then we'd get some of those anti-corporate republican types in there. That'll show 'em.
Gawd.
The problem with "my ball, my rules" is that there's usually only one ball.
:)
Here there are n balls.
A better metaphor has to do with attribution (which is at stake here), not ownership (which Linus makes clear everyone is individually entitled to). So it would be like if you played for the Penguins and insisted that every time you shoot a goal, Mario Lemieux has to get an assist.
Or something.
Really, it's not that good of an analogy