I see a few asertions there but I don't yet see how comparing media rights and the freedom of computers to that of racial/sexual rights is wrong.
It's more than just a matter of degrees. When we speak of civil rights for black Americans, we're talking about five generations-- more if you include the period before slavery was abolished-- of systematic, state-sponsored oppression of an entire class of people, based solely on the color of their skin. During that time, black people were denied franchise through schemes like poll taxes and grandfather clauses. They were denied jobs based solely on their race. They were widely denied justice in civil and criminal courts alike. In extreme cases, they were murdered at the hands of white mobs.
Even if you talk of the campaign for franchise rights for women, we can point to generations of women who were actively refused the right to vote, even though they may have been property owners in good standing in their communities. A woman could be Queen of England, but she couldn't vote for mayor of New York. That's not wholesale murder, but it's still a pretty grave social injustice.
But when we talk about what you called "media rights"-- as good a term as any, I suppose-- the worst harm I can think of is that you had to either play the DVD for your presentation with a proper DVD player-- which you were totally entitled to do as a part of your right to fair use-- or find another source of material.
It's not the same thing. Not by a long shot.
Comparing the current brouhaha over media rights to the hundred-year-long fight for civil rights for black people does an injustice to both.
And associating the term "piracy", the capturing of ships on the high seas usually accompanied by violence, with copying of software, a form of usually petty theft at most rather than piracy, isn't also a use of misleading terminology?
Well, I can't exactly take responsibility for that one; that one goes back pretty far. But yeah, it's basically the same idea. That's why I, personally, don't use the word "piracy" to describe the unauthorized copying of software or media. I call it what it is: theft. Whether it's petty or not depends on the circumstances. A former employer of mine made it a practice to give cracked copies of popular 3D animation software packages to favored customers. To me, that adds up to a bit more than petty theft. But in any case, "theft" is a better word for it than "piracy."
But see, the difference between one side's use of the word "piracy" and RMS's behavior is that RMS uses propaganda techniques in almost every paragraph. His favorite appears to be the "transfer" technique, in which he associates himself or his cause with something that's already accepted as inherently good. He calls it "free software" not because it's free in any meaningful sense of the word, but rather because the word "free" carries powerful positive connotations. That's also an example of a "glittering generality," because he uses a vague but meaningful word ("free") to describe what is actually a very complex and specific thing.
And I'll just ignore your snide remark about Microsoft, if you don't mind.
The whole point of banner ads-- of ads in general, I suppose-- is to attract attention. The study appears to show that banner-like things don't get user's attention even when the user is actively searching for information and that information is clearly visible in the banner-like thing. It's not a perfect line of reasoning, but the indication is strong that banners and banner-like things don't grab users' attention at all.
I was condescending only in direct relation to the condescension I was given.
I stand by my statement: there's no reason at all to throw away telnet in an environment where the added security of ssh is unnecessary. You're just going to have to take my word that it's unnecessary, because I don't feel like getting into a pissing contest over it.
Thanks very much for saying so. It's really encouraging to hear that there are some people out there who see it the same way I do, instead of just getting my post modded down to -1, Troll and being forgotten.
Now, quick, somebody archive those posts before I lose them!;-)
Okay, you caught me. You don't get a no-prize, though, because in addition to pointing out my mistakes, you're also supposed to come up with implausible and complex explanations for why I was right all along.;-)
Wasn't Mac OS X Server 1.0 basically NextStep with the classic Mac GUI? As distinct from the current combination of Darwin, Quartz, and so on that is Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. Or am I just nuts?
I'd like to see you develop these posts into a journal entry....
First, thanks for saying so. As for journals... does anybody read them? I have to admit that I've never really participated in them, although I do get the occasional message when one of my "friends" (in the SlashCode sense) posts a journal entry.
I'd like to develop my opinions further myself. It's taken me almost a year to get from, "there's something fishy about RMS and I can't put my finger on it," to what you read from me tonight.
I hope you don't lose too much karma from the Hmoderators who disagree with your argument.
Well, I'm not too worried about that. I used to be capped, but with the recent changes, who can tell? I just want to keep my +2 bonus so I can spread my message to a wider audience.;-)
That's some mighty nice inflammatory rhetoric you got there, Fuqtard. But... would you mind telling me, please, just what in God's creation you think you're talking about?
Which freedom, exactly, are you being denied? Which essential liberty has been taken from you? To which unjust law, precisely, do you take offense?
If you're deprived of property without due process, by all means, rise up! If you are imprisoned unjustly, take up arms! If your very life if taken from you, let there be rioting in the streets!
But if you're just whining about wanting to copy your music and your movies and not being allowed to, then kindly shut the fuck up.
Okay, you're a fuckin' AC, so nobody cares what you think anyway, but I just have to respond to this.
In this corner, we have tens of millions of people over five generations denied equal protection under law.
And in this corner, we have an upper-middle-class white kid from Great Neck, Long Island, who is still bitter about Napster's being shut down.
Nobody is trying to take away your intellectual property rights, okay?* They're trying to protect their own intellectual property rights. Nobody's oppressing anybody here. As long as you inflate the issue into more than it really is, we're not going to be able to have a reasoned discussion or come to an acceptable conclusion.
* Stallman can go straight back to the library on this one. Intellectual property has long been a part of the laws and proto-law cultural traditions of peoples around the world. The native Americans of the Pacific northwest, for example, had strong traditions of intellectual property; it was considered a crime to sing a song that belonged to another family or tribe without their permission. Intellectual property is a very mature and very useful idea. Deconstructing it just confuses the issue; it doesn't rob it of its relevance.
Far be it from me to tell you what to think, but I have personally had a different experience.
People talk about Steve Jobs's "reality distortion field." I think RMS has one, too. The difference is that Steve's field comes from his personal charisma and enthusiasm. RMS's reality distortion field comes from painstakingly crafted propaganda.
He's insidious, although whether it's on purpose or accidental is a question that I haven't answered for myself yet. You can see an example in his writing here, where he implicitly compares himself to black civil rights activists, pulling up his moral position by association.
It's downright creepy. I'll be reading or listening to something that RMS has said, and find myself nodding along, only to be pulled up short a few seconds later when I think to myself, "Wait a minute. He just said what??"
Be careful with Stallman. He has the ability to make his words sound truer than they are.
I disagree with much of what Stallman has said and written over the years. It wouldn't bother me so much were it not for his continued use of evocative propaganda in his writings. When I first encountered it, I was tempted to say that Stallman is just incredibly-- almost inhumanly-- arrogant. That may still be the case. But he makes such a pattern of that sort of passionate, irrational rhetoric that I have to wonder what his true agenda really is.
(...falling...)
This quote is an example of just that sort of propaganda:
I cannot deny Al3x's charge that I, and the rest of us, defied the rules of the meeting by refusing to be completely silent. If it is wrong to disobey an unfair system, I stand convicted, but I am not ashamed. However, in the scale of civil disobedience, ours was very mild. Women demanding the vote sometimes chained themselves to doorways, which might been inconvenient for some passersby. Blacks demanding an end to segregation sometimes broke rules, and even laws, by sitting in a Whites-only diner or at the front of a bus.
Here he tries to associate himself with civil rights protesters from the past, as if to say, "What we did is right because what they did was right." The association is horribly inapt, and in very poor taste. You're not a martyr, Richard. You're a political extremist. Nobody is dying for The Cause here, and I for one would appreciate it if you'd tone down your language a bit.
(...falling...)
Stallman used the same propaganda technique-- and some others-- in his writings on "free" software. I put the word free in quotes there because what he means by "free software" and what the word "free" actually means are two very different things. I won't go into detail on this here, because I don't want to get too far off topic, and also because I've already done it in depth here. If you have any opinion on this matter at all, Constant Reader, please have a look at the comment to which I linked. I'll welcome any sort of discourse on this matter, if for no other reason than to bring the debate to the attention of those who presently have no opinion at all.
Just to sum up, I think Stallman's politics are misguided and wrong, but that's not what really bothers me. What really bothers me-- what really leads me to think that he might actually be dangerous, subversive in the bad sense of the word-- is the way he presents his ideas so carefully. His message is so clearly meant to appeal to emotion at the expense of reason that it makes me wonder what it is he's trying to slip past me.
Man did everybody have their sarcasm filters installed over the weekend or something? Or, to quote Aliens, "Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?";-)
For the record, the part about Red Hat being insane for not enabling telnet was meant only to illustrate my point that various decisions make sense only under specific circumstances. Under other circumstances, those otherwise perfectly reasonable decisions seem completely nuts.
Like my decision to be facetious in my comment. That seemed like a good idea at the time....
If I was reading/. and a small, static, textual ad appeared related to the article, I'd probably click on it.
Ah, but you run the risk of blurring the line between content and advertising. Flip through a magazine, and chances are fair that you'll come to a sequence of pages that look like magazine content, and that seem to parse like magazine content, but that aren't magazine content. Look at the top of the page: SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION. It's in small type, but it's clearly marked.
There's a little bit of sleight-of-hand there, because I'm sure those ads are laid out specifically to look as much like magazine content as possible. But the magazine goes to the trouble of putting a small disclaimer on them anyway, so it's clear upon inspection what is and what isn't magazine content.
Web ads that look like site content may be more effective, but there still needs to be a clear dividing line.
Telnet is built in to Windows. So I can sit down at any machine in the building and telnet to my servers in the lab. This is a good thing.
Sorry to burst your bubble, bud, but no system administrator worth his salt discards a perfectly good tool in favor of a more trendy one without a good reason. You use what works best, and in that environment, telnet worked best.
Security and convenience are inversely proportional. Finding the right balance is a big part of a system administrator's job.
It seems like you're not a very good system administrator.
See, I have to wonder about this shit. I have information pertaining to the involvement of ivillage with the FBI.
Don't make me post it, it will fuck your world up.
You know, I've got karma to burn, so why not? I'll bite. Post it, fire-eyes. After your insightful comments, "I don't buy WD shit" and "Need some goddamn mirrors," I can't wait to hear what you have to say on this subject.
Just have to wave the flag here for OmniWeb. I've been using it for almost a year, and I've found it to be superior in every way to Mozilla. Only for Mac OS X, of course.
I think that's a legitimate question, but I personally have never done that. I'm of two minds, because it sounds like an okay idea, but on the other hand I really don't like web ads.
What really cheeses me off, though, is when I accidentally click an ad. I just hate the idea that I just gave somebody a click-through without really meaning to.
None of the participants in the study had any trouble moving from the home page to the page containing this item, but to our surprise, when they reached the training page almost every participant scrolled past this "Internet Courses" link and selected a small link labeled "courses" from a menu at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, the information on Internet courses wasn't available there, and the participants were forced to give up on the task. When the facilitator directed them back to the earlier page and showed them banner-style link, most participants showed extreme surprise that they could have missed it.
Similarly, Spool, Scanlon, Schroeder, Snyder & DeAngelo (1997) noted that a participant in a usability test overlooked an animated banner containing the information she was looking for. It may be that people searching for specific information on the web tend to ignore large, colorful items that are clearly distinguished from other items on the page.
There's more than just anecdotal evidence, too. These guys actually performed a double-blind study in which they constructed special web pages that included both regular links and large, "banneresque" links. The data shows that the subjects found the regular links almost all the time (94%), but only found the banner-like links a just over half the time (58%).
The conclusion of the paper pretty much sums it up:
One item separated visually from everything else on a web page may be completely ignored by web searchers, even by searchers who are deliberately searching for the information provided in that item. Designers should be cautious about following guidelines stating that increasing the visual distinction between "important" items and other items is desirable; the visual distinctiveness may actually make important items seem unimportant.
As I said elsewhere, that sort of decision is either good or bad depending on circumstances. If you want to put a freshly installed Red Hat box on the Internet, no firewall or anything, just bareback, then I guess having telnetd off makes a lot of sense. Under my circumstances-- on a secure LAN behind a couple of layers of firewall-- having it off was a royal pain in the ass, and made no sense.
I should have been more clear about this, because you're the second or third person to post a "correction" about it: decisions about default OS configurations will only make sense some of the time. The fact that the original poster didn't like MSN Messenger doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft was wrong to include it by default, but rather that the poster's needs differed from what Microsoft was prepared to provide by default.
I was just on my way to post something about this myself. I guess I'm just confused or something, but I classify "pop-up" and "pop-under" ads as the same thing: they open an unrequested browser window to display an ad.
I wonder how many people would object to pop-under ads if the survey in question had clearly asked about them?
So instead they're sending you physical junk-mail or having pop-unders.
I got the impression that they were talking about electronic newsletters and mailings. Bad, but not quite as bad as physical junk mail. At least they're not creating any garbage.
Yeah, I know about the telnet-isn't-secure thing, but that wasn't really my point. Under the conditions in which I was operating, having telnet running was not only appropriate, it was essential. Under other conditions, it wouldn't be a good idea. My point is that you can't draw conclusions about what the default installation ought to be from your own particular circumstances.
And as to networking: tell me about it. I once thought I would be clever and just bring a server up in DHCP, then change it to a static IP address later. Was that a pain in the ass. There are a lot of good things about Linux, but helpful documentation is not one of them.
I'm sure that a dozen people are going to slam me for saying this, but the process of adding a static default route to a Red Hat 7.1 system is not an easy one to figure out.
I don't disagree with you in principle, but I do think you have a different definition of "clean" than is really workable under these circumstances. I consider "clean" to be the configuration under which the system has been tested by the vendor. Microsoft wants you to have a Passport account. They want you to have MSN Messenger running in the background all the time. And so on. These are part of the default-- and tested, probably-- configuration of the OS. You don't like them; I don't like them. But that's how Microsoft intends for them to be.
So I define a "clean" installation of Windows XP as being one in which MSN Messenger is running in the background. Sucks, but there it is.
You, on the other hand, seem to define it as being the minimal system that can do what you need it to do. I don't think that's wrong, per se, but I do think that it's not a particularly useful viewpoint when talking about operating systems like XP.
And as for ripping a CD to MP3... what are you thinking? Get thee to an Apple storeright now and equip yourself with a Mac, and just use iTunes. Problem solved.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I will assume your ignorant as well. Since 9.0 was a pay update but 9.1 and 9.2 was free.
Don't get caught up in version numbers. Compare the feature list for 9.1 and 9.2 to the list of features added in 10.2. There's no comparison.
I see a few asertions there but I don't yet see how comparing media rights and the freedom of computers to that of racial/sexual rights is wrong.
It's more than just a matter of degrees. When we speak of civil rights for black Americans, we're talking about five generations-- more if you include the period before slavery was abolished-- of systematic, state-sponsored oppression of an entire class of people, based solely on the color of their skin. During that time, black people were denied franchise through schemes like poll taxes and grandfather clauses. They were denied jobs based solely on their race. They were widely denied justice in civil and criminal courts alike. In extreme cases, they were murdered at the hands of white mobs.
Even if you talk of the campaign for franchise rights for women, we can point to generations of women who were actively refused the right to vote, even though they may have been property owners in good standing in their communities. A woman could be Queen of England, but she couldn't vote for mayor of New York. That's not wholesale murder, but it's still a pretty grave social injustice.
But when we talk about what you called "media rights"-- as good a term as any, I suppose-- the worst harm I can think of is that you had to either play the DVD for your presentation with a proper DVD player-- which you were totally entitled to do as a part of your right to fair use-- or find another source of material.
It's not the same thing. Not by a long shot.
Comparing the current brouhaha over media rights to the hundred-year-long fight for civil rights for black people does an injustice to both.
And associating the term "piracy", the capturing of ships on the high seas usually accompanied by violence, with copying of software, a form of usually petty theft at most rather than piracy, isn't also a use of misleading terminology?
Well, I can't exactly take responsibility for that one; that one goes back pretty far. But yeah, it's basically the same idea. That's why I, personally, don't use the word "piracy" to describe the unauthorized copying of software or media. I call it what it is: theft. Whether it's petty or not depends on the circumstances. A former employer of mine made it a practice to give cracked copies of popular 3D animation software packages to favored customers. To me, that adds up to a bit more than petty theft. But in any case, "theft" is a better word for it than "piracy."
But see, the difference between one side's use of the word "piracy" and RMS's behavior is that RMS uses propaganda techniques in almost every paragraph. His favorite appears to be the "transfer" technique, in which he associates himself or his cause with something that's already accepted as inherently good. He calls it "free software" not because it's free in any meaningful sense of the word, but rather because the word "free" carries powerful positive connotations. That's also an example of a "glittering generality," because he uses a vague but meaningful word ("free") to describe what is actually a very complex and specific thing.
And I'll just ignore your snide remark about Microsoft, if you don't mind.
The whole point of banner ads-- of ads in general, I suppose-- is to attract attention. The study appears to show that banner-like things don't get user's attention even when the user is actively searching for information and that information is clearly visible in the banner-like thing. It's not a perfect line of reasoning, but the indication is strong that banners and banner-like things don't grab users' attention at all.
I was condescending only in direct relation to the condescension I was given.
I stand by my statement: there's no reason at all to throw away telnet in an environment where the added security of ssh is unnecessary. You're just going to have to take my word that it's unnecessary, because I don't feel like getting into a pissing contest over it.
Thanks very much for saying so. It's really encouraging to hear that there are some people out there who see it the same way I do, instead of just getting my post modded down to -1, Troll and being forgotten.
;-)
Now, quick, somebody archive those posts before I lose them!
Okay, you caught me. You don't get a no-prize, though, because in addition to pointing out my mistakes, you're also supposed to come up with implausible and complex explanations for why I was right all along. ;-)
Wasn't Mac OS X Server 1.0 basically NextStep with the classic Mac GUI? As distinct from the current combination of Darwin, Quartz, and so on that is Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. Or am I just nuts?
I'd like to see you develop these posts into a journal entry....
;-)
First, thanks for saying so. As for journals... does anybody read them? I have to admit that I've never really participated in them, although I do get the occasional message when one of my "friends" (in the SlashCode sense) posts a journal entry.
I'd like to develop my opinions further myself. It's taken me almost a year to get from, "there's something fishy about RMS and I can't put my finger on it," to what you read from me tonight.
I hope you don't lose too much karma from the Hmoderators who disagree with your argument.
Well, I'm not too worried about that. I used to be capped, but with the recent changes, who can tell? I just want to keep my +2 bonus so I can spread my message to a wider audience.
That's some mighty nice inflammatory rhetoric you got there, Fuqtard. But... would you mind telling me, please, just what in God's creation you think you're talking about?
Which freedom, exactly, are you being denied? Which essential liberty has been taken from you? To which unjust law, precisely, do you take offense?
If you're deprived of property without due process, by all means, rise up! If you are imprisoned unjustly, take up arms! If your very life if taken from you, let there be rioting in the streets!
But if you're just whining about wanting to copy your music and your movies and not being allowed to, then kindly shut the fuck up.
Thanks.
Also your spelling.
Okay, you're a fuckin' AC, so nobody cares what you think anyway, but I just have to respond to this.
In this corner, we have tens of millions of people over five generations denied equal protection under law.
And in this corner, we have an upper-middle-class white kid from Great Neck, Long Island, who is still bitter about Napster's being shut down.
Nobody is trying to take away your intellectual property rights, okay?* They're trying to protect their own intellectual property rights. Nobody's oppressing anybody here. As long as you inflate the issue into more than it really is, we're not going to be able to have a reasoned discussion or come to an acceptable conclusion.
* Stallman can go straight back to the library on this one. Intellectual property has long been a part of the laws and proto-law cultural traditions of peoples around the world. The native Americans of the Pacific northwest, for example, had strong traditions of intellectual property; it was considered a crime to sing a song that belonged to another family or tribe without their permission. Intellectual property is a very mature and very useful idea. Deconstructing it just confuses the issue; it doesn't rob it of its relevance.
Far be it from me to tell you what to think, but I have personally had a different experience.
People talk about Steve Jobs's "reality distortion field." I think RMS has one, too. The difference is that Steve's field comes from his personal charisma and enthusiasm. RMS's reality distortion field comes from painstakingly crafted propaganda.
He's insidious, although whether it's on purpose or accidental is a question that I haven't answered for myself yet. You can see an example in his writing here, where he implicitly compares himself to black civil rights activists, pulling up his moral position by association.
It's downright creepy. I'll be reading or listening to something that RMS has said, and find myself nodding along, only to be pulled up short a few seconds later when I think to myself, "Wait a minute. He just said what??"
Be careful with Stallman. He has the ability to make his words sound truer than they are.
(Karma level falling...)
I disagree with much of what Stallman has said and written over the years. It wouldn't bother me so much were it not for his continued use of evocative propaganda in his writings. When I first encountered it, I was tempted to say that Stallman is just incredibly-- almost inhumanly-- arrogant. That may still be the case. But he makes such a pattern of that sort of passionate, irrational rhetoric that I have to wonder what his true agenda really is.
(...falling...)
This quote is an example of just that sort of propaganda:
I cannot deny Al3x's charge that I, and the rest of us, defied the rules of the meeting by refusing to be completely silent. If it is wrong to disobey an unfair system, I stand convicted, but I am not ashamed. However, in the scale of civil disobedience, ours was very mild. Women demanding the vote sometimes chained themselves to doorways, which might been inconvenient for some passersby. Blacks demanding an end to segregation sometimes broke rules, and even laws, by sitting in a Whites-only diner or at the front of a bus.
Here he tries to associate himself with civil rights protesters from the past, as if to say, "What we did is right because what they did was right." The association is horribly inapt, and in very poor taste. You're not a martyr, Richard. You're a political extremist. Nobody is dying for The Cause here, and I for one would appreciate it if you'd tone down your language a bit.
(...falling...)
Stallman used the same propaganda technique-- and some others-- in his writings on "free" software. I put the word free in quotes there because what he means by "free software" and what the word "free" actually means are two very different things. I won't go into detail on this here, because I don't want to get too far off topic, and also because I've already done it in depth here. If you have any opinion on this matter at all, Constant Reader, please have a look at the comment to which I linked. I'll welcome any sort of discourse on this matter, if for no other reason than to bring the debate to the attention of those who presently have no opinion at all.
Just to sum up, I think Stallman's politics are misguided and wrong, but that's not what really bothers me. What really bothers me-- what really leads me to think that he might actually be dangerous, subversive in the bad sense of the word-- is the way he presents his ideas so carefully. His message is so clearly meant to appeal to emotion at the expense of reason that it makes me wonder what it is he's trying to slip past me.
(...gone.)
Man did everybody have their sarcasm filters installed over the weekend or something? Or, to quote Aliens, "Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?" ;-)
For the record, the part about Red Hat being insane for not enabling telnet was meant only to illustrate my point that various decisions make sense only under specific circumstances. Under other circumstances, those otherwise perfectly reasonable decisions seem completely nuts.
Like my decision to be facetious in my comment. That seemed like a good idea at the time....
If I was reading /. and a small, static, textual ad appeared related to the article, I'd probably click on it.
Ah, but you run the risk of blurring the line between content and advertising. Flip through a magazine, and chances are fair that you'll come to a sequence of pages that look like magazine content, and that seem to parse like magazine content, but that aren't magazine content. Look at the top of the page: SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION. It's in small type, but it's clearly marked.
There's a little bit of sleight-of-hand there, because I'm sure those ads are laid out specifically to look as much like magazine content as possible. But the magazine goes to the trouble of putting a small disclaimer on them anyway, so it's clear upon inspection what is and what isn't magazine content.
Web ads that look like site content may be more effective, but there still needs to be a clear dividing line.
Telnet is built in to Windows. So I can sit down at any machine in the building and telnet to my servers in the lab. This is a good thing.
Sorry to burst your bubble, bud, but no system administrator worth his salt discards a perfectly good tool in favor of a more trendy one without a good reason. You use what works best, and in that environment, telnet worked best.
Security and convenience are inversely proportional. Finding the right balance is a big part of a system administrator's job.
It seems like you're not a very good system administrator.
Because I don't want to have to dig up a monitor and keyboard and sit on the cold tile floor of a machine room every time I want to use the machine.
Duh.
See, I have to wonder about this shit. I have information pertaining to the involvement of ivillage with the FBI.
Don't make me post it, it will fuck your world up.
You know, I've got karma to burn, so why not? I'll bite. Post it, fire-eyes. After your insightful comments, "I don't buy WD shit" and "Need some goddamn mirrors," I can't wait to hear what you have to say on this subject.
Just have to wave the flag here for OmniWeb. I've been using it for almost a year, and I've found it to be superior in every way to Mozilla. Only for Mac OS X, of course.
I think that's a legitimate question, but I personally have never done that. I'm of two minds, because it sounds like an okay idea, but on the other hand I really don't like web ads.
What really cheeses me off, though, is when I accidentally click an ad. I just hate the idea that I just gave somebody a click-through without really meaning to.
The conclusion of the paper pretty much sums it up:
As I said elsewhere, that sort of decision is either good or bad depending on circumstances. If you want to put a freshly installed Red Hat box on the Internet, no firewall or anything, just bareback, then I guess having telnetd off makes a lot of sense. Under my circumstances-- on a secure LAN behind a couple of layers of firewall-- having it off was a royal pain in the ass, and made no sense.
I should have been more clear about this, because you're the second or third person to post a "correction" about it: decisions about default OS configurations will only make sense some of the time. The fact that the original poster didn't like MSN Messenger doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft was wrong to include it by default, but rather that the poster's needs differed from what Microsoft was prepared to provide by default.
I was just on my way to post something about this myself. I guess I'm just confused or something, but I classify "pop-up" and "pop-under" ads as the same thing: they open an unrequested browser window to display an ad.
I wonder how many people would object to pop-under ads if the survey in question had clearly asked about them?
So instead they're sending you physical junk-mail or having pop-unders.
I got the impression that they were talking about electronic newsletters and mailings. Bad, but not quite as bad as physical junk mail. At least they're not creating any garbage.
Yeah, I know about the telnet-isn't-secure thing, but that wasn't really my point. Under the conditions in which I was operating, having telnet running was not only appropriate, it was essential. Under other conditions, it wouldn't be a good idea. My point is that you can't draw conclusions about what the default installation ought to be from your own particular circumstances.
And as to networking: tell me about it. I once thought I would be clever and just bring a server up in DHCP, then change it to a static IP address later. Was that a pain in the ass. There are a lot of good things about Linux, but helpful documentation is not one of them.
I'm sure that a dozen people are going to slam me for saying this, but the process of adding a static default route to a Red Hat 7.1 system is not an easy one to figure out.
In sum: Windows bad. Windows very very bad.
;-)
;-)
Going for another "+1, Insightful," are we?
I don't disagree with you in principle, but I do think you have a different definition of "clean" than is really workable under these circumstances. I consider "clean" to be the configuration under which the system has been tested by the vendor. Microsoft wants you to have a Passport account. They want you to have MSN Messenger running in the background all the time. And so on. These are part of the default-- and tested, probably-- configuration of the OS. You don't like them; I don't like them. But that's how Microsoft intends for them to be.
So I define a "clean" installation of Windows XP as being one in which MSN Messenger is running in the background. Sucks, but there it is.
You, on the other hand, seem to define it as being the minimal system that can do what you need it to do. I don't think that's wrong, per se, but I do think that it's not a particularly useful viewpoint when talking about operating systems like XP.
And as for ripping a CD to MP3... what are you thinking? Get thee to an Apple store right now and equip yourself with a Mac, and just use iTunes. Problem solved.