Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.
Will I need to upgrade my RAM memory? I'll have to stop at an ATM machine on my way to Fry's...
I suspect so -- be sure to get "Random Access" RAM. That's the kind GNU's GCC Collection tends to suck down when it's building ATA Attachment drivers into the kernel, which you'll probably need if you want to get the extra source off of your distro's CD Disc and store it on your HDD Drive if your devices aren't connected through a SCSI Interface. On the other hand, you could try to find an RPM Package of the driver on the internet. Make sure you read all the FAQ Questions you can get your hands on, though, as messing around with the OS System kernel can make the LILO Loader very unhappy. You could end up with errors all over your CRT Tube.
This HOWTO will describe the steps necessary to build support into Slackware Linux 9.0 for [...] RAID redundant drive array.
...or even a RAID redundant independent drive array, or a RAID redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) drives (or disks). Hey, that's getting a little long...maybe an acronym would be useful here. How about: RAID RAID!
Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.
It doesn't lock down anything, it is basically just a way to encrypt/decrypt data without having the keys on a local file system [...] With TCPA, *you* would hold all the keys
Nope. Not only does it not do any kind of really meaningful hardware crypto acceleration (it only performs operations using the RSA system, and doesn't support _any_ symmetric algorithms), it also hides the keys from you. They're generated in the trusted platform module and stay there for all time. It also comes with an endorsement key built-in, which is what makes it really dangerous.
Make no mistake. TCPA is just as damaging as Palladium to your freedom, if not moreso now that large portions of the tech community have been convinced otherwise.
"We thought it was important to get some independent answers on some of these concerns," Tom Allanson, senior vice president of Intuit's TurboTax Division, told CNET News.com. "There's a lot of noise out there--we want people to be able to come to one place and get the facts and make up their own minds."
More like, we want people to come to one place, get facts that aren't relevant, and go back to being consumer sheep.
Customers have complained in online discussion groups, shopping sites and other forums that SafeCast runs continually in the background on computers with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, even when TurboTax isn't running, thus consuming memory and other resources. The PCTest results show that SafeCast consumes less than 1MB of memory on a typical Windows XP machine, according to Intuit.
"In all the test systems they set up, they didn't find any appreciable deterioration in performance for any of the computer systems they tested," Allanson said.
What about an appreciable deterioration in privacy?
Complaints have also targeted SafeCast's mechanism of storing its activation code on an unused portion of the PC hard drive--known as track zero--where it can't be viewed or altered by the customer.
It can't be viewed or altered by the customer, unless the customer gets a virus that is normally nondestructive but stores data on track zero, or the customer accidentally runs other software that erases or overwrites this _totally unprotected storage area_.
Allanson said that although neither of those mechanisms should be a problem for consumers, Intuit will remove them in next year's version of TurboTax.
Can anyone say "backpedaling"?
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
They didn't want it to eat up disk space? I hate to sound like I'm in favor of bloat-ware, but a single extra sector's worth of data on the filesystem isn't going to make a difference -- especially considering that it would be protected from accidental erasure.
Easier to restore from a backup? What about backup programs that don't save data that's hiding where there shouldn't be any data in the first place? It would be just as easy to put it in a regular file where a backup program would be sure to copy it.
The PCTest results also show that SafeCast does not collect or transmit any information on the PC it's installed on, contrary to frequent mischaracterizations of the program as "spyware."
[...]
Allanson acknowledged that customer support surrounding activation issues was spotty during the first month or so after TurboTax went on sale, with some customers receiving conflicting or erroneous information on common issues such as installing TurboTax on a new hard drive.
Spyware isn't the issue. If there were spyware included in the product, that would be completely unacceptable and consumers should have been made aware of the product's deficiency before they were given the opportunity to make a purchase.
The real issue is that product activation itself is not acceptable. There is no legitimate reason for a company to force each and every consumer to have post-sale contact with the company to get the software to work as advertized beyond preventing piracy, and even with post-sale contact that's not possible when the consumer has total physical control over their own hardware.
"I think we might have missed the general goal by upsetting the number of customers we upset--we certainly missed the mark on that one," he said. "We've learned a lot, and were going to do it differently next year.
[...]
Intuit executives said during the company's second-quarter earnings call earlier this month that the TurboTax flap has had a negligible effect on the company's business.
Translation: "We didn't realize how many people are committed to protecting their privacy, and we certainly didn't expect anyone to discover we weren't playing straight. Next year, we'll make sure to dress it up as a plus to quell consumer fears. It's a relief to know, though, that the general population is so technically illiterate that our bad behavior didn't affect our profit margins.
Not everyone reloads slashdot every few seconds to start reading stories when they're first posted. Also, I tend to enjoy sleeping for at least part of each night.;)
Chapter 1: The idea of "intellectual property" is broken down into two components.
1. Right of sale. If someone has an idea, that person can sell a copy of it to someone else. If someone makes a copy of it and the originator hasn't agreed to sell it, legal action can be taken. Example: An aspiring screenwriter sends a copy of his latest script to a famous director. The director likes it so much that he makes a movie out of it -- without having first acquired the right to use the script's contents. The script's author could sue the director in this case.
2. Intellectual monopoly. The originator of information can decide what others can do with that information once sold. Shrinkwrap software licenses/EULAs are a great example of this.
They argue that right of sale is a good thing because it gives creative people an incentive to produce and some amount of legal protection. They also argue that while intellectual monopoly gives them even more incentive to produce, controlling what people do with information after they have bought it (including making copies for other people) cannot be done without terrible social consequences:
Take the case of slavery. Why should people not be allowed to sign private contracts binding them to slavery? In fact, economists have consistently argued against slavery -- during the 19th century David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill engaged in a heater public debate with literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens -- with the enconomists opposing slavery, and the literary giants arguing in favor. The fact is that our labor cannot be separated from ourselves. For someone else to own our labor requires them to engage in intrusive and costly supervision. Such transaction costs are socially damaging as they imply violation of privacy and essential civil liberties. Hence they are commonly rejected on economic, not just moral, grounds. Moreover, there is no economic reason to allow slavery. With well functioning markets, renting labor is a good substitute for owning it. And so we allow the rental of labor, but not the permanant sale.
For intellectual property we are proposing the reverse: allowing the permanent sale, but not rental. For with intellectual property, posession belongs to the buyer and not to the seller. If you sell me an idea, I now have that idea embodied either in me or an object I own. For you to control the idea requires intrusive and costly supervision. Similarly if you sell me a book, a CD or a computer file. In each case, I have physical control of the item, and you can control its use only through intrusive measures.
I haven't read all of chapter 2 yet, but I'm trying to compromise between providing a decent summary of what's obviously a very insightful text in the hope that people will read it, and not getting buried on the second page where nobody will see the post.
From what I've read so far, this is really good stuff.
Suppose we pass a law that make forging Received or From headers illegal, and makes it illegal to send a message that is substantially similar to 50 or more people, but requires that at least 50 people receiving the message complain to the FCC in order for any prosecution to occur. With such a law in place, it would actually help to have people forward spam to the FCC. They could collect those messages and work to prosecute people who send spam.
I like the idea, but I don't think this method would work. Law enforcement would have to trust spammers to not munge the headers in order to give investigators the ability to track down and prosecute violators.
Your post gave me another idea, though. What if, in addition to legally mandating bulk mail tags and correct headers, the government were to set up 'spam sting' operations. The idea would be to advertise the presence of an unprotected open relay hosted at a (financially compensated) university or business. All spam sent through that server would be checked for compliance with spam laws, and offenders would be prosecuted.
The idea would be to make illegal spamming not impossible, but so risky as to not be worth trying (because spammers would not know which servers were sting traps and which were merely poorly-administrated). Of course, this would only curb annoying spam sent from within the jurisdiction of the government implementing the spam laws/stings, but it's a mostly harmless step in the right direction.
I don't use P2P software and I rarely play games, yet I have a broadband connection because it's actually a better deal than POTS. Why? Because I would have to pay $25/month for the actually phone line (I only use cellphone right now), and then another $20/month for services from a decent local ISP. Right now I'm paying $45/month for about 1.8mbps connection through cable modem.
That's a nice setup, but I don't think it's typical. Cell phones are useful, but most people (who have internet service) already have a telephone line which they use on a regular enough basis to justify its cost.
Yes, I want webpages to load faster because I actually do research and I don't want to waste time for pages to load. I also need to download PDF documents often and I don't have time to wait 5 minutes every time I want to just skim through a document. I also download the occasional movie trailer or software download and that help.
So, here's a question: Supposing you didn't have a cell phone and you already had a pots line, would you be more likely to pay $45/month for broadband or $10-$20/month for 56k service? Is a speedier web page load time and occasional faster access to pdf documents, movie trailers, and software (free, of course) worth a more than doubled communications bill at the end of the month?
For me it is (also because I use matlab via vnc from my college, and that's invaluable for someone who can't afford a license), but is it the same for the majority of p2p users?
Everyone downloads something sizable once in a while. Maybe it's a few MP3s, maybe it's a movie, maybe it's their Windows XP Auto-Updater doing it for them. That's when broadband is convenient for the home user.
Well, I don't think many people are paying for broadband to get faster auto-updates. As for the mp3/movie downloading, that's probably done through a p2p service and almost definitely illegal. (Yes, I am definitely aware that there is quite a bit of good public domain/free content out there. Most people, on the other hand, aren't.)
So that means you're leaning towards the 'heavy p2p user'/'light p2p user' categorization system? Interesting. What about people who don't use p2p at all? Specifically, what percentage of broadband subscribers do you think don't run a p2p servent at all?
Actually it's a mozilla thing (IE might support it too). A bookmarklet is a little javascript doodad in bookmark form that sits in your button bar (along with Home in mozilla).
Or, just register for an account, using a throwaway address - then you don't have to mess with any crap anymore.
That's exactly what the script does, but I assume you mean check the 'remember me' option to prevent future login hassles. That's certainly one way to avoid future work, and people who want to take that route are free to do so. On the other hand, if you don't want NYTimes setting unique ID cookies on your machine, or you don't want to spend 15 seconds filling in bogus data every time you visit the site after clearing out your cookies, then this script is for you.
From a business perspective, this seems like a smart move. If 10% of the customers are using 90% of the resources (adjust the numbers to your liking), then either reaming that 10% with unbelievable fees or disconnecting them all together is a great way to increase profits. Now, from there, I could guess that the 10% mentioned are the users who run p2p software, and since 99% of the users running p2p software are violating copyright on a fairly regular basis, they can't really complain too loudly.
Here's what puzzles me: why do most broadband users pay for broadband service, which typically costs more than twice as much as regular POTS service, if not to pirate content on p2p networks? I know there are gamers out there that love the decreased latency, but what percentage of broadband users do they represent? I'm occasionally part of that demographic, but I only know a few other people that fit into that category. Some people like downloading and sharing uncopyrighted content (again, I'm one of those people [project gutenberg is awesome;)]), but I would bet the majority of broadband users don't know that uncopyrighted content exists on the internet (after all, due to copyright industry lobbying, no new content has come under public domain within the majority of internet users's lifetimes).
So, really, I'm at a loss as to why people get broadband. Could it be that people really want web pages to load a split second faster enough to pay more than double price for internet access? If not, then what's going on? Clearly ISPs wouldn't disconnect or overcharge (too much;) ) their customers as a group -- they wouldn't have a source of income. Maybe there are 'heavy' and 'light' p2p users, or perhaps 'sharers' and 'leeches'?
p2p is broadband''s killer app. Are broadband ISPs killing the killer app?
Maybe it's just that I'm under the weather and my brain's been in a low gear the past few days, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Well, I just finished perusing the article, and I partially disagree with Gleick. His proposed two-part solution is: 1) Forging Internet headers should be made illegal. The system depends on accurate information about senders and servers and relays; no one needs a right to falsify this information.
2) Unsolicited bulk mail should carry a mandatory tag. That alone would put consumers back in control; all the complex technological challenge of identifying the spam would vanish.
First, I don't think part 1 will really help. Sure, it would be nice if all email contained accurate headers, but I think he's specifically referring to the headers that document the path the email took to reach a victim's inbox. The problem is that, as long as spammers continue to forge headers, they can evade prosecution. It's like saying that bank robbers should not be allowed to wear ski masks while committing the crime. Sure, tellers can still remember the approximate height/weight/build of the robber, and might even be able to get a peek at the getaway car, but such a law would only increase penalties for spammers that are identified and prosecuted, not make indentifying and prosecuting them easier. And that's what part 1 is really for -- identifying and prosecuting spammers who violate part 2.
I don't think that will work either. Of course, I would have supported part 2 at least before I read the article, but Gleick makes some interesting comments with regards to licensing agreements. What about all the people that go to web sites, fill out forms (a la NY Times), and click "I agree" to get access to the content they wanted in the first place? MS uses licensing agreements for critical updates to give them the legal right to access any windows user's machine and delete programs they don't like. There's no reason to believe that web sites (or other entities) wouldn't use "terms of service" agreements to get "permission" from web users to send commercial email.
If part 2 were implemented, all internet users would get (in addition to the forged headers we receive now) would be a bunch of emails without the UCE flag claiming that we signed up to get the email when we clicked "I Agree" at i-dont-remember-visiting-this-site-but-it-could-ha ve-been-a-long-time-ago.com.
Here's another idea:
1. Contact and educate sysadmins who run email servers that are spam-friendly. To qualify as "spam-unfriendly", an email server must add a header to every message passing through with the IP address of the machine from which it received the email. If every mail server were "spam-unfriendly", recipients would be able to positively identify the IP address of a given emal, and the ISP in turn would be able to identify the person who sent the email (if the need were there).
2. Create a double opt-in/opt-out system. That is, in order for one person to legally send a commercial email message to another person, the recipient must have _opted in_ to receive that message. In addition, anyone may _opt out_ of future messages at any time. This would protect those who accidentally opted in to receiving spam by clicking "I Agree" on a web site by letting them undo their mistakes.
Of course, this system would never work. At its core, every system for combating spam is based on making either the act of spamming or employing someone to spam less profitable. This scheme, along with many others, rely upon US law to do this by associating a legal, financial penalty to bothering people with spam. Spammers can evade the system by going off-shore and continuing their business.
One system that I think has a lot of promise is creating a mail client that sends 50KB (or more) of data to every web site mentioned in an email that the user marks as spam. If everyone were to use such a client, spammers would effectively end up DDoSing their own e-commerce site. Performing the act that bothers so many people (sending out batch emails when 99%+ of the target audience is not interested) would be directly and unbreakably bound to suffering a denial of service attack thus preventing the less than 1% of victims who end up responding from being able to make a purchase. In a system like this, spammers have two options:
1. Send "spam" only to those people who they have a good reason to believe would be interested.
2. Give up.
I'll deal with two possible objections right now:
Well, if everybody used a spam filter like spamassassin, spamming would become unprofitable and spammers would stop. Also, ISPs networks wouldn't be taxed by all that extra traffic being sent.
Nope. Spamassassin is good for now, but its fundamental effectiveness relies upon there being detectable differences between spams and legitimate emails. For example, the email:
Hey dude, what's up? How was the boating trip? Hey, I know you've been shopping around for DVD players lately, and I saw a sale on them over at amazon.com. You should check it out -- they have some awesome deals on multi-disc boxes.
could be from a legitimate source. It could also be a spam. If you can't categorize this email, how can you expect a computer to do it?
As for the end effect on ISPs networks, there's not much that could be done about that as far as I can see, since the whole system is based on using all of the bandwidth available to the spammer's (or the spammer's client's) web site, or at least using enough of it to cost them a bundle.
Could malicious users take advantage of this system to lauch DDoS attacks against innocent web sites? In other words, doesn't it provide black hats with 100:1 bandwidth multiplication (1/2KB email results in 50KB directed at the target web site)?
Yes, yes it does. This is the only reason why I think the system, as described, shouldn't be implemented. I've thought of various ways around that (e.g. combining the spam-unfriendly email server concept with this system so that spam-friendly email servers (if there are any in the message path) or the spammers themselves take the beating, or limiting the maximum 'punishment payload' size to the size of the spam to prevent bandwidth multiplication), but none of them have struck be as being The Best Solution yet.
That doesn't mean I'm going to stop chewing on the problem, though.;)
There shouldn't be any spaces in there, so cut them out if slashdot inserts them. When you get to the NYTimes "you must register" page, click the bookmarklet. It's not the most beautiful solution, but it does the job.
This law sounds like it's consumer-friendly, perhaps creating some much-needed balance, but it really isn't. In fact, it's a broad expansion of current law that's bad for everyone that uses any kind of p2p, for legitimate reasons or otherwise.
Copyright infringement would still be a civil crime so the content industries could still go after consumers on their own, just like they can now -- the proposed legislation would change criminal law. Also (obviously) the existing law covers copyright infringement for profit as copyright infringement for profit is still copyright infringement.
So what's the point of the new law? Read closely:
Peer-to-peer file-sharing services that encourage copyright infringement and make money from advertising are commercial, according to the Commission. "That is illegal and should be stopped," the Commission said. Examples of file sharing services are Kazaa and Morpheus.
Got it yet?
What they're saying: "Criminal sanctions only apply when copyright infringement is carried out intentionally and for commercial purposes."
What they want to dupe the public into hearing: "You can download all you want as long as no money is involved."
What they mean: "Copyright infringement through p2p services hurts the profits of companies that make large campaign contributions. P2P companies produce highly functional p2p software which has a primary function of facilitating copyright infringement because there is a financial incentive to do so (adware/spyware). This aspect of the p2p business can be used to legitimate government attacks in order to shut down those businesses."
What this means for you: Say goodbye to KaZaA and other useful (meaning large, meaning commercially-supported) networks.
Encode your porn into SVCD format (the most popular format for getting porn and being able to watch it in a standalone player). Pick a suitable quality level for both the audio and video and you'll quickly see that a 1 hour high quality porn should need approximately 4 700MB CD-Rs for distribution over Direct Connect.
I think the maximum bitrate for standards-compliant SVCDs is ~2600Kb/sec.
(2600Kbits/sec) * (1byte/8bits) * (60sec/min) * (60min/hour) = 1.170GB/hour. That's less than two cds.
If the SVCD peaks over that bitrate then it becomes a non-standard XSVCD and there are compatibility risks. Not every 480x480 29.97 or 23.976*fps (or 480x576 25fps if you're in PAL-land) mpeg2 file is an SVCD.
*For everyone that's thinking that should be 29.97002997 or 23.97602398fps, or even (30000/1001) or (4/5)*(30000/1001)fps, there's a nit on your keyboard. You'd better go pick it before it gets away!;)
It doesn't look like Sprint charges me extra for the duplicates, so it doesn't bother me too terribly much, though I'd prefer it if my phone would just suppress the dupes altogether rather than showing them with "Duplicate!" warnings.
Heck, I'd settle for slashdot editors supressing dupes rather than reading all the "Duplicate!" comments, but the failure rate on that kind of system is awful.
I don't think we can expect honest answers from AMI, or any other company pushing Pd. In response to a comment warning about the unfriendly nature of TCPA/Pd on a listserv, an MS employee had this to say: Scarey, maybe. Correct, not:-).
There is a lot of speculation here which is not based on facts. PD will give you the capability to protect some subsets of your system from damage. Imagine having a fire proof safe in your house. Your house can still burn down and your safe will still protect your documents that are stored in there. Having the safe does not enable the people who sold you the safe know what is stored in there. And if you don't want to have the said safe, then don't use it! Same is true of PD.
As to the original comment regarding privacy, you are seeing our attempt to document any and all aspects of the system that could concern anyone. So you are going to see us telling a lot more about the capabilities of the player and this can appear overwhelming at first. The good news is that you have full knowledge of what we do and the choice to turn one or more of these off if your privacy is more important than the functionality. Competitors probably do the same thing but fail to warn you explicitly about them (and burry the detail in long EULAs).
Here is a write-up from CNET on our privacy approach in media player: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955514.html . As you see, it is being seen as a very positive move and not negative at all. Here is one quote:
"If the final build looks like the software (that CNET News.com) described, the implication is that Microsoft is taking consumer privacy very seriously indeed and marks a big change for the company," said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg."
****** Microsoft
The "product" and "player" referenced above are the Windows Media Player. This came from a WM-centric listserv.
I expect similarly placating (and untrue) answers from AMI. It is my opinion that the best course of action in this case is to punish AMI as severely as possible for even taking the first step towards creating a component that conforms to either TCPA or Pd. There are two simple things any computer literate person can do to hurt AMI:
1. Don't buy their products.
2. Let them know you bought from a competitor because they dared support TCPA/Pd.
3. Let their competitors know that you're not buying AMI because of their unacceptable actions.
TCPA/Pd requires hardware and software to work. I don't think anyone is going to be convinced to stop using windows because it takes away his or her freedom (at least any more than they have in the past), and I don't think MS is going to be convinced to leave Pd out of its OSs. As I see it, the most effective way to prevent TCPA/Pd from advancing is by setting up a business environment in which hardware manufacturers are terrified at the prospect of producing TCPA/Pd compliant hardware. That, and user education, are the two things that I think have a hope of stopping TCPA/Pd.
I wrote a rather long response to the above comment, so I won't paste it here (Mozilla chokes if I try to paste 18KB into a text box), but I do plan on submitting it to the Pd faq maintainer as there are some important oportunity for MS to abuse it's power in a TCPA/Pd system that aren't covered. (e.g. MS not signing drivers for hardware devices that support competing technologies [OpenGL v. Direct3D, MPEG4 v. WM].)
Downloaded it. Tried it. I found it to be fairly crashy, but I like the idea.
Anyway, for those who like an XP desktop environment and window manager but want their apps to look like they do in XP, check out the TrueBlue gtk+ theme; it's not an exact replica, but it captures the feel. Also, if you like the puffy "Luna" window decorations, you might want to check out the Lunatic theme for sawfish.
This is too scary. I am now ready for a little less convenience and a little more privacy. How about you?
As much as I would like to, I don't think there's anything really new to say here. We have the way out -- it's called donating to and becoming a member of the EFF. Writing lengthy and important-sounding posts is just preaching to the choir at this point.
You really want to tell me that just one measly group of classes is as hard to implement as the whole Win32 API? This just illustrates my point: Mono is much easier at succeeding than Wine.
Also, as I said the projects are in right from the beginning. If some.NET application gains wide acceptance (which I don't really see happening BTW,.NET is moving much slower than MS would like) Mono et al will make sure it will work on Linux very soon. They can concentrate on one app at a time.
It's not going to be as difficult, chiefly for 2D apps, just because most of the work has already been done in wine. The problem is that, unlike Java,.Net "leaks" into the host OS -- C# is a portable language, but the apps themselves can be OS dependent. MS is free to "embrace and extend" it as much as it wants to to make sure that compatibility is always an inch or two away, at least for the latest apps. (Or would it just be "extend" because it's their own product?) But as you said originally, this isn't going to do much good unless.Net takes off, and it doesn't look like that's happening.
-Users will be even more at the mercy of MS, to the point where MS could charge them for access to their own files.
Which hits a nerve. Users will not accept that. Users want their pirated mp3, porn and videos and be left alone. They don't want MS knowing what they do on their own computer. People are not as dumb as you think they are.
I was pretty freaked out when I saw the first ad in PC World (side note: I recently did a page count. More than half of the pages are full-size ads.) for an IBM laptop with built-in security hardware -- there's only one thing that could be considering it's built on a P4 which has already implemented LaGrande technology. Anyway, they were billing it as an eliminator of viruses and spam, not freedom. People may not want to be so tightly bound by MS, but I don't think they're going to be aware of what's happening until MS hits the "on" switch one day and they're prompted to buy another year's MS Office license.
-It's unclear as to whether or not hardware that boots non-MS OSs will continue to be manufactured.
Well all concepts I have seen are backwards-compatible, that means while Linux may not run in TCPA-mode, it will run in non-TCPA-mode
Well, it's just that -- unclear. The TCPA specs define what the behavior of trusted hardware must be when it is requested to load a signed OS (it must load it), but it doesn't say whether or not it will load an unsigned OS even when it's in inactive mode. It's a mystery from that point of view or up to the hardware vendors (take your pick). Add to that that one of the features that I've seen asked for numerous times on anti-TCPA sites is the ability to "totally turn off" the technology, and it's not clear how much of it will actually be an option.
But actually, there is a huge anti-TCPA movement[...]
How many people?
guaranteed TCPA-free hardware will stay very popular and will be sold because the demand is there.
Who's demanding it? What percent of the market specifically wants TCPA-free hardware?
Intel and AMD will not sacrifice themselves for the RIAA.
They already have. Intel has included support for "trusted mode" in its P4 chips that are currently being manufactured -- they're calling it "LaGrande Technology". AMD has committed to including support for it in its Hammer line of CPUs.
TCPA-hardware will be more expensive [...]
I agree, and this could be a deterrent. However, eventually everything will be integrated into a single chip. Besides, people buy antivirus software (which costs money) to add to their unprotected system. From a consumer's point of view, doesn't it make sense to spend a little more money now and buy a system that is (heh heh, yeah right) spam-proof and virus-proof from the start?
The average consumer might not know right now what TCPA or Palladium is, but the average consumer has at least 20 Gigs of mp3s, porn and/or videos on his harddrive (or on CDs) he doesn't want to lose. Just look at how big Napster, Kazaa etc. are/were, we are talking about millions of people here - the majority of home users.
You know how a radio ad were for a DSL-vendor around here? I'll tell you:
male voice: I'd like to show you my big music collection. female voice: You have a music collection? male voice: Well, I could just download one anytime... narrator: Download music and videos in real time - company name
That's right: The main selling point for DSL is piracy. This is not a niche application for geeks, it's the killer app. Something interfering with that won't be accepted in the market.
First, TCPA/Pd will not stop piracy. No DRM system is unbreakable, and if it really gets in the way it will be broken. Even if there were no solution to TCPA/Pd for a year, the..AA won't dare stop selling CDs and DVDs which can always be ripped on a non-TCPA/Pd system and floated out on the net. The way that it pretends to combat piracy is by allowing media companies to impose iron-clad DRM on downloaded media files, and I guess the long-term goal is to get away from physical distribution entirely. Media companies don't want KaZaA to crash or refuse to run; they want your search results to slowly dwindle over time until they always number 0.
Also did you know the absence of TCPA in future CPUs? TCPA will not get into AMD's Hammer. The way I see it, TCPA will stay the "technology that will get into all chips not now but in a couple of years" forever - No chip maker dares to actually do it. The outrage and absymnal sales would be terrible.
Nope, AMD has committed. Have you seen a significant slump in P4 sales lately? It's already there. People aren't outraged because they're ignorant.
Only few people need to upgrade. If a system is twice as fast but cannot play pirated mp3/videos/software, it is worth less than the old system for the majority of people - People just won't upgrade.
Pirated files will play in TCPA/Pd systems because a "trusted" player app is not required to play them. The goal is to stop the creation of new files, which won't succeed.
Anyway, a merry christmas for you!
I'm not celebrating Christmas this year; I'm celebrating Postmas. That's the holiday where you show your friends and family how much you really care about them by getting a better deal on a present they'll enjoy more by shopping after the post-christmas price drop.(*) There are still festivities and food on the 24th and 25th, but Santa is going to be a little late this year at my house.;)
Happy holidays.
(*) Note this isn't about being cheap. The idea is gift giver spends the same amount of money that they probably would have (or possibly less), while getting something the receiver will enjoy more.
Other than that, presenting different "groups of free space" as different icons or "drives"
KDE does exactly that.
Cool!
Well, OK so instead of an Autorun, the user has to click on the "CD-ROM" icon in KDE and select the install-script. While I agree that some Autorun mechanism would be nice, it's certainly not a prerequesite, even for home users. Clicking on a CD-ROM is not really rocket science.
Let me ask you a question to clarify. When you were talking about the process you go through to install software, does clicking on the CD provide, for instance, a popup hierarchical menu system that allows the user to select software to install from what is available on the CD, or does the system provide that hierarchical menu of software compiled from what is available on the CDs and DVDs that came with the distro. If the latter, what is the procedure to install packages that did not come with the distro?
So we finally agree that the major selling point of Windows is Win32-compatibility.
Win32 compatibility is the major "selling point" of windows in that if you were to ask a user if win32 compatibility makes or breaks the deal in terms of OS choice the average user would say yes. However, that's not to say that win32 compatibility is the only positive thing about windows.
Actually, I think perfect.NET compatibility is far easier than perfect Win32 compatibility, first because the Mono and other projects are in the game right from the start and second because.NET's bytecode structure should make it easier.
Windows.Forms:(
What UI-issues? Why merging distros? What's the point of that?
Having too many UIs and too many distros divides...well, I already wrote it a couple times. (see OSS competition in previous post)
Wrong, we need apps, apps, apps. Nobody cares about package management. Some users may curse (if it were so bad which it isn't) at install-time, but in day to-day work, only the apps count. No Photoshop on Linux = no Linux for many people. So we need apps, either through ports or through Win32 compatibility.
That would be great, I agree. The classic, enduring problem is that market share for linux is too low to merit porting photoshop (although OSX -> linux is a lot easier than win32 -> linux or classic mac -> linux), and market share for linux isn't going to get the huge boost it needs until there are apps available (like photoshop). Beyond writing letters to Adobe, there's not much that can be done about that. We can, however, create an environment that doesn't scare away newbies so that when linux usage creeps past the "critical mass" point for porting photoshop, photoshop will not be a lure to pull newbies into a scary and otherwise intolerable environment, but an extra app that makes a sweet deal even sweeter.
Actually, I think Palladium is the best thing that can happen to Linux.
You really want to tell me that users are supposed to stop pirating mp3s and Videos? You got to be kidding me. Most home users would go back to DOS with all the IRQ conflicts if they could avoid copy protection.
Palladium won't be a successful implementation of DRM because there is no such thing; users won't have to go back to dos. The real problems with palladium are:
-Users will be even more at the mercy of MS, to the point where MS could charge them for access to their own files. and -It's unclear as to whether or not hardware that boots non-MS OSs will continue to be manufactured.
Actually, TCPA is already so unpopular that the members no longer publicly admit that they are members in TCPA (the member list got removed from the website)....which means TCPA members don't want people who are _checking to see if they are TCPA members_ to know that they're TCPA members. As for the almost infinitely larger, ignorant section of the population, they are totally unaware. If you were to go out onto the street and ask people what palladium is, I predict you'd get these answers (from most to least frequent):
1. I have no idea. 2. A transition metal. 3. A wooden statue of Athena from greek mythology. 4. A copy-stopper chip from MS that's going to put an end to piracy...I think. 5. A DRM system that's going to take away our rights.
Also, TCPA is designed very stupidly, for example if you have a TCPA-enabled computer, you just have to run *one single* non-TCPA approved app and the computer will shut down all TCPA-contents and apps. There goes your backwards compatibility.
Not true. Unsigned apps cannot trap to trusted mode, access certain new TCPA-only system calls, or access any data stored in the TPM. Since unsigned, non-TCPA apps aren't programmed to do any of those things, they'll run fine in conjunction with TCPA apps on the same system.
About half the servers run Linux/BSD, in Europe about 2/3. More than half of all new embedded systems projects are using Linux. There is a market for Linux-hardware and companies will sell it.
Server and embedded market penetration is not desktop market penetration and that's what's really needed to defeat palladium.
Most package managers are able to manage hundreds of packages well because they are organized hierarchically, why make them as crippled as Windows' with it's linear list of installed software?
That would be a step backwards. While I agree that you could have an option to hide system packages for morons, it's certainly no showstopper.
GNU/Linux can have package grouping without losing its hierarchical layout. Example: make mozilla uninstallable as one group rather than 8+ individual packages, like the add/remove programs applet in windows.
While I agree that you could have an option to hide system packages for morons [...]
It's hard to have a low opinion of users and try to see technology from their perspective. Their talents may lie outside the realm of technology.
You have the major delusion that Windows is perfect and that if something is like Windows, it will be a success. That is both wrong. Windows is not perfect, it is not intuitive, it is not user-friendly (for example newbies have big trouble with single vs. double click. It's just not consistent, while KDE (at default settings) is. Newbies will have much less problems picking up KDE than picking up Windows.
Who said I thought things were perfect just because they were a part of windows? IE. Outlook. The registry. *gag*
You also have drive letters and a lot of other cruft you don't notice because you are used to it.
The _letters_ part sucks as it imposes artificial limitations. Other than that, presenting different "groups of free space" as different icons or "drives" (where a drive could be a tape drive, a stripe set, a cd, etc...) is a useful feature in a visual interface -- it allows users to have a useful mental concept of data transfer and what it means to copy a file from one location to another. This can be implemented while still keeping the "mount point"/VFS low layer design which gives knowledgable script-writers a boost to functionality.
2. Make software installation work by selecting the software, not the software installer.
Did you even read what I wrote?
Yes, but I don't think my response was clear enough. From a high-level point of view, the user should indicate that he wants to install new software by bringing that software to the computer, not by instructing the computer to absorb software which will be brought to it when prompted.
nstall an apache rpm on a debian system, startup scripts and all. No tweaking.
Why should I do that? Every distro supplies the appropriate packages. Commercial packages (like Loki's games or VMWare) can be made to run on all distros easily and without any problems.
You shouldn't because you can't. That's my point. Different, incompatible package management systems and filesystem layouts force the "packaging" stage of distribution to be done an unnecessary and wasteful number of times. Yes, you can use custom installers like many commercial packages do, but that defeats the purpose of having a package management system.
Run a binary from a distro that's still using last year's libwhatever on a distro that uses the incompatible this year's libwhatever.
Run a game that requires DirectX8 on a system with only DirectX6.
A simple upgrade to DX8 lets DX8 games work while keeping compatibility with DX6 apps. Not all gnu/linux important packages are backwards compatible (e.g. libc5/libc6).
Newbie overall (but intermediate KDE) users cannot jump into GNOME and do everything exactly the same way. The opposite is also true. Config files are important.
Why should anybody want to jump into Gnome?
*shrug* Dunno. I don't have a strong preference for one environment over the other - they both have their strong and weak points. My point was that 1 desktop environment is better than 2 from the point of view of linux adoption (see previous post re: OSS competition).
All commercial distros except RedHat install KDE by default so they look quite similar. The only differences are config stuff, but that's different between Windows versions, too.
how could XP have become so widespread so quickly?
Again: - BECAUSE IT IS PREINSTALLED ON COMPUTERS - BECAUSE IT IS PREINSTALLED ON COMPUTERS - BECAUSE IT IS PREINSTALLED ON COMPUTERS -
Microsoft could sell any version of Windows, everything would become widespread quickly. The only thing it has to do is run most Win32 programs and it will be widespread quickly. They could sell Win95 again and most people would buy it because the computer maker don't give them another choice of software that will run Win32 apps. (And the computer maker wouldn't get any other version of Windows)
Microsoft could not sell any version of Windows and expect it to become widespread quickly if that version of windows were not backwards compatible with older versions of windows. (Yes, I know 2K had problems with this. They were few and far between. After SP3 they are virtually nil, barring some very old dos games.) The idea is that if backwards compatibility were as bad between XP and previous versions of windows as backwards compatibility is with linux on a comparable timescale, XP wouldn't have had nearly the level of success it did.
Yes, MS does have a stranglehold on the market. That means nothing if new products don't work. What do you do with a blender that doesn't blend? Take it back to the store.
Linux is ready, although it's not absolutely perfect in every way. GNU/Linux distros are not quite ready yet.
Yes, of course it's not perfect in every way. For example I think the whole CD mounting is a bit awkard.
But those are little things, not showstoppers.
Too many little things add up to become a "showstopper". What would you change about CD mounting?
The problems are Win32-compatibility [...]
I agree totally. Perfect win32 compatibility would put linux on every desktop in a heartbeat -- computer manufacturers don't like paying the microsoft tax any more than consumers do. Perfect win32 compatibility is not an attainable goal. Even running supposedly "portable".Net apps targetted at windows under linux would require a working wine implementaion; MS can "innovate" contorted new API additions faster than they can be reverse-engineered and reimplemented perfectly.
Depending on win32 compatibility to make gnu/linux mainstream is not going to get anyone anywhere. Instead, UI issues need to be fixed, a standard packge management system must be deployed across all distros, very minor distros much be feature-merged into significant ones or eliminated entirely, and other changes must be made.
know two people who use Windows NT at home and they're both old, male computer geeks with degrees in tech fields. The rest use 98SE, 2000, or XP -- the ones that are less stable but with good UIs.
Exactly, NT started as a business and geek OS, then became a home OS for non-gamers (Win2000), then became a home OS for everybody (XP).
NT4 did _not_ become a "home OS" for non-gamers or anyone at all. New versions of windows that fixed (or adequately changed) problems with NT4 were created, based on NT4, and then sold after they were made suitable for the mainstream market. In the same sense, GNU/Linux needs to metamorphose from an NT4 caterpillar into a Win2K butterfly. It's a stupid metaphor, but it conveys the idea.
Most of your wanted improvements are readily available in SuSE
[...]
No matter how great Linux is, Joe Average will not notice when it's not preinstalled.
I don't agree. I seriously doubt that if SuSE were really the jewel of usability that you say it is that it would be such a well-kept secret. Of course, that's not proof, it's an educated guess so I'll have to try out SuSE for myself before I can comment on it directly. I also gather from what you said about usability that while you may consider SuSE to be a wonderful, perfect distro that just needs marketing and preinstallation, I would probably disagree. But again, the only way to be sure is to try it.
Of course this doesn't happen overnight, but it happens. With PCs becoming cheaper and cheaper, Windows and MS Office is taking a larger and larger part out of total system costs. So the incentive to switch to Linux becomes bigger and bigger every year (Especially under the new licensing regime) and with more and more software available, the hurdles in switching become lower and lower.
I can be optimistic with you on this point. I think evolving windows APIs are pushing this goal further away nearly as fast as the gnu/linux community is chasing it, but we're getting closer all the time.
It's really just a matter of time.
But now we have a deadline: palladium. Linux is no good if nobody's making hardware that will boot it. Of course, the DRM component of palladium will fail, as conditional or metered access to information on hardware to which the consumer has unrestricted physical access is impossble, but it will leave the tech industry in a situation where MS has so much power it could charge users for access to their own documents and get away with it. As I said, DRM is always breakable, but this doesn't make breaking it legal, even if breaking it means being able to access your own documents in an unrestricted format. GNU/Linux doesn't have time to rest on its laurels while wine crawls forward and the TCPA comes racing toward us.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's all try to be funny and make some comment about how the slashdot effect DDoS has melted the distributed computing project's servers.
Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.
Will I need to upgrade my RAM memory? I'll have to stop at an ATM machine on my way to Fry's...
I suspect so -- be sure to get "Random Access" RAM. That's the kind GNU's GCC Collection tends to suck down when it's building ATA Attachment drivers into the kernel, which you'll probably need if you want to get the extra source off of your distro's CD Disc and store it on your HDD Drive if your devices aren't connected through a SCSI Interface. On the other hand, you could try to find an RPM Package of the driver on the internet. Make sure you read all the FAQ Questions you can get your hands on, though, as messing around with the OS System kernel can make the LILO Loader very unhappy. You could end up with errors all over your CRT Tube.
This HOWTO will describe the steps necessary to build support into Slackware Linux 9.0 for [...] RAID redundant drive array.
...or even a RAID redundant independent drive array, or a RAID redundant array of independent (or inexpensive) drives (or disks). Hey, that's getting a little long...maybe an acronym would be useful here. How about: RAID RAID!
Tune in next week when the poster describes how to set up NIC Cards on your PC Computer using only OSS Software from the FSF Foundation.
It doesn't lock down anything, it is basically just a way to encrypt/decrypt data without having the keys on a local file system [...] With TCPA, *you* would hold all the keys
Nope. Not only does it not do any kind of really meaningful hardware crypto acceleration (it only performs operations using the RSA system, and doesn't support _any_ symmetric algorithms), it also hides the keys from you. They're generated in the trusted platform module and stay there for all time. It also comes with an endorsement key built-in, which is what makes it really dangerous.
Make no mistake. TCPA is just as damaging as Palladium to your freedom, if not moreso now that large portions of the tech community have been convinced otherwise.
Sheesh. Has anyone actually read the cnet story?
"We thought it was important to get some independent answers on some of these concerns," Tom Allanson, senior vice president of Intuit's TurboTax Division, told CNET News.com. "There's a lot of noise out there--we want people to be able to come to one place and get the facts and make up their own minds."
More like, we want people to come to one place, get facts that aren't relevant, and go back to being consumer sheep.
Customers have complained in online discussion groups, shopping sites and other forums that SafeCast runs continually in the background on computers with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, even when TurboTax isn't running, thus consuming memory and other resources. The PCTest results show that SafeCast consumes less than 1MB of memory on a typical Windows XP machine, according to Intuit.
"In all the test systems they set up, they didn't find any appreciable deterioration in performance for any of the computer systems they tested," Allanson said.
What about an appreciable deterioration in privacy?
Complaints have also targeted SafeCast's mechanism of storing its activation code on an unused portion of the PC hard drive--known as track zero--where it can't be viewed or altered by the customer.
It can't be viewed or altered by the customer, unless the customer gets a virus that is normally nondestructive but stores data on track zero, or the customer accidentally runs other software that erases or overwrites this _totally unprotected storage area_.
Allanson said that although neither of those mechanisms should be a problem for consumers, Intuit will remove them in next year's version of TurboTax.
Can anyone say "backpedaling"?
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
They didn't want it to eat up disk space? I hate to sound like I'm in favor of bloat-ware, but a single extra sector's worth of data on the filesystem isn't going to make a difference -- especially considering that it would be protected from accidental erasure.
Easier to restore from a backup? What about backup programs that don't save data that's hiding where there shouldn't be any data in the first place? It would be just as easy to put it in a regular file where a backup program would be sure to copy it.
The PCTest results also show that SafeCast does not collect or transmit any information on the PC it's installed on, contrary to frequent mischaracterizations of the program as "spyware."
[...]
Allanson acknowledged that customer support surrounding activation issues was spotty during the first month or so after TurboTax went on sale, with some customers receiving conflicting or erroneous information on common issues such as installing TurboTax on a new hard drive.
Spyware isn't the issue. If there were spyware included in the product, that would be completely unacceptable and consumers should have been made aware of the product's deficiency before they were given the opportunity to make a purchase.
The real issue is that product activation itself is not acceptable. There is no legitimate reason for a company to force each and every consumer to have post-sale contact with the company to get the software to work as advertized beyond preventing piracy, and even with post-sale contact that's not possible when the consumer has total physical control over their own hardware.
"I think we might have missed the general goal by upsetting the number of customers we upset--we certainly missed the mark on that one," he said. "We've learned a lot, and were going to do it differently next year.
[...]
Intuit executives said during the company's second-quarter earnings call earlier this month that the TurboTax flap has had a negligible effect on the company's business.
Translation: "We didn't realize how many people are committed to protecting their privacy, and we certainly didn't expect anyone to discover we weren't playing straight. Next year, we'll make sure to dress it up as a plus to quell consumer fears. It's a relief to know, though, that the general population is so technically illiterate that our bad behavior didn't affect our profit margins.
Sheesh indeed.
Not everyone reloads slashdot every few seconds to start reading stories when they're first posted. Also, I tend to enjoy sleeping for at least part of each night. ;)
Chapter 1: The idea of "intellectual property" is broken down into two components.
1. Right of sale. If someone has an idea, that person can sell a copy of it to someone else. If someone makes a copy of it and the originator hasn't agreed to sell it, legal action can be taken. Example: An aspiring screenwriter sends a copy of his latest script to a famous director. The director likes it so much that he makes a movie out of it -- without having first acquired the right to use the script's contents. The script's author could sue the director in this case.
2. Intellectual monopoly. The originator of information can decide what others can do with that information once sold. Shrinkwrap software licenses/EULAs are a great example of this.
They argue that right of sale is a good thing because it gives creative people an incentive to produce and some amount of legal protection. They also argue that while intellectual monopoly gives them even more incentive to produce, controlling what people do with information after they have bought it (including making copies for other people) cannot be done without terrible social consequences:
Take the case of slavery. Why should people not be allowed to sign private contracts binding them to slavery? In fact, economists have consistently argued against slavery -- during the 19th century David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill engaged in a heater public debate with literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens -- with the enconomists opposing slavery, and the literary giants arguing in favor. The fact is that our labor cannot be separated from ourselves. For someone else to own our labor requires them to engage in intrusive and costly supervision. Such transaction costs are socially damaging as they imply violation of privacy and essential civil liberties. Hence they are commonly rejected on economic, not just moral, grounds. Moreover, there is no economic reason to allow slavery. With well functioning markets, renting labor is a good substitute for owning it. And so we allow the rental of labor, but not the permanant sale.
For intellectual property we are proposing the reverse: allowing the permanent sale, but not rental. For with intellectual property, posession belongs to the buyer and not to the seller. If you sell me an idea, I now have that idea embodied either in me or an object I own. For you to control the idea requires intrusive and costly supervision. Similarly if you sell me a book, a CD or a computer file. In each case, I have physical control of the item, and you can control its use only through intrusive measures.
I haven't read all of chapter 2 yet, but I'm trying to compromise between providing a decent summary of what's obviously a very insightful text in the hope that people will read it, and not getting buried on the second page where nobody will see the post.
From what I've read so far, this is really good stuff.
Suppose we pass a law that make forging Received or From headers illegal, and makes it illegal to send a message that is substantially similar to 50 or more people, but requires that at least 50 people receiving the message complain to the FCC in order for any prosecution to occur. With such a law in place, it would actually help to have people forward spam to the FCC. They could collect those messages and work to prosecute people who send spam.
I like the idea, but I don't think this method would work. Law enforcement would have to trust spammers to not munge the headers in order to give investigators the ability to track down and prosecute violators.
Your post gave me another idea, though. What if, in addition to legally mandating bulk mail tags and correct headers, the government were to set up 'spam sting' operations. The idea would be to advertise the presence of an unprotected open relay hosted at a (financially compensated) university or business. All spam sent through that server would be checked for compliance with spam laws, and offenders would be prosecuted.
The idea would be to make illegal spamming not impossible, but so risky as to not be worth trying (because spammers would not know which servers were sting traps and which were merely poorly-administrated). Of course, this would only curb annoying spam sent from within the jurisdiction of the government implementing the spam laws/stings, but it's a mostly harmless step in the right direction.
I don't use P2P software and I rarely play games, yet I have a broadband connection because it's actually a better deal than POTS. Why? Because I would have to pay $25/month for the actually phone line (I only use cellphone right now), and then another $20/month for services from a decent local ISP. Right now I'm paying $45/month for about 1.8mbps connection through cable modem.
That's a nice setup, but I don't think it's typical. Cell phones are useful, but most people (who have internet service) already have a telephone line which they use on a regular enough basis to justify its cost.
Yes, I want webpages to load faster because I actually do research and I don't want to waste time for pages to load. I also need to download PDF documents often and I don't have time to wait 5 minutes every time I want to just skim through a document. I also download the occasional movie trailer or software download and that help.
So, here's a question: Supposing you didn't have a cell phone and you already had a pots line, would you be more likely to pay $45/month for broadband or $10-$20/month for 56k service? Is a speedier web page load time and occasional faster access to pdf documents, movie trailers, and software (free, of course) worth a more than doubled communications bill at the end of the month?
For me it is (also because I use matlab via vnc from my college, and that's invaluable for someone who can't afford a license), but is it the same for the majority of p2p users?
Everyone downloads something sizable once in a while. Maybe it's a few MP3s, maybe it's a movie, maybe it's their Windows XP Auto-Updater doing it for them. That's when broadband is convenient for the home user.
Well, I don't think many people are paying for broadband to get faster auto-updates. As for the mp3/movie downloading, that's probably done through a p2p service and almost definitely illegal. (Yes, I am definitely aware that there is quite a bit of good public domain/free content out there. Most people, on the other hand, aren't.)
So that means you're leaning towards the 'heavy p2p user'/'light p2p user' categorization system? Interesting. What about people who don't use p2p at all? Specifically, what percentage of broadband subscribers do you think don't run a p2p servent at all?
No, really. It must be an IE thing.
Actually it's a mozilla thing (IE might support it too). A bookmarklet is a little javascript doodad in bookmark form that sits in your button bar (along with Home in mozilla).
Or, just register for an account, using a throwaway address - then you don't have to mess with any crap anymore.
That's exactly what the script does, but I assume you mean check the 'remember me' option to prevent future login hassles. That's certainly one way to avoid future work, and people who want to take that route are free to do so. On the other hand, if you don't want NYTimes setting unique ID cookies on your machine, or you don't want to spend 15 seconds filling in bogus data every time you visit the site after clearing out your cookies, then this script is for you.
From a business perspective, this seems like a smart move. If 10% of the customers are using 90% of the resources (adjust the numbers to your liking), then either reaming that 10% with unbelievable fees or disconnecting them all together is a great way to increase profits. Now, from there, I could guess that the 10% mentioned are the users who run p2p software, and since 99% of the users running p2p software are violating copyright on a fairly regular basis, they can't really complain too loudly.
;)]), but I would bet the majority of broadband users don't know that uncopyrighted content exists on the internet (after all, due to copyright industry lobbying, no new content has come under public domain within the majority of internet users's lifetimes).
;) ) their customers as a group -- they wouldn't have a source of income. Maybe there are 'heavy' and 'light' p2p users, or perhaps 'sharers' and 'leeches'?
Here's what puzzles me: why do most broadband users pay for broadband service, which typically costs more than twice as much as regular POTS service, if not to pirate content on p2p networks? I know there are gamers out there that love the decreased latency, but what percentage of broadband users do they represent? I'm occasionally part of that demographic, but I only know a few other people that fit into that category. Some people like downloading and sharing uncopyrighted content (again, I'm one of those people [project gutenberg is awesome
So, really, I'm at a loss as to why people get broadband. Could it be that people really want web pages to load a split second faster enough to pay more than double price for internet access? If not, then what's going on? Clearly ISPs wouldn't disconnect or overcharge (too much
p2p is broadband''s killer app. Are broadband ISPs killing the killer app?
Maybe it's just that I'm under the weather and my brain's been in a low gear the past few days, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Well, I just finished perusing the article, and I partially disagree with Gleick. His proposed two-part solution is:
a ve-been-a-long-time-ago.com.
;)
1) Forging Internet headers should be made illegal. The system depends on accurate information about senders and servers and relays; no one needs a right to falsify this information.
2) Unsolicited bulk mail should carry a mandatory tag. That alone would put consumers back in control; all the complex technological challenge of identifying the spam would vanish.
First, I don't think part 1 will really help. Sure, it would be nice if all email contained accurate headers, but I think he's specifically referring to the headers that document the path the email took to reach a victim's inbox. The problem is that, as long as spammers continue to forge headers, they can evade prosecution. It's like saying that bank robbers should not be allowed to wear ski masks while committing the crime. Sure, tellers can still remember the approximate height/weight/build of the robber, and might even be able to get a peek at the getaway car, but such a law would only increase penalties for spammers that are identified and prosecuted, not make indentifying and prosecuting them easier. And that's what part 1 is really for -- identifying and prosecuting spammers who violate part 2.
I don't think that will work either. Of course, I would have supported part 2 at least before I read the article, but Gleick makes some interesting comments with regards to licensing agreements. What about all the people that go to web sites, fill out forms (a la NY Times), and click "I agree" to get access to the content they wanted in the first place? MS uses licensing agreements for critical updates to give them the legal right to access any windows user's machine and delete programs they don't like. There's no reason to believe that web sites (or other entities) wouldn't use "terms of service" agreements to get "permission" from web users to send commercial email.
If part 2 were implemented, all internet users would get (in addition to the forged headers we receive now) would be a bunch of emails without the UCE flag claiming that we signed up to get the email when we clicked "I Agree" at i-dont-remember-visiting-this-site-but-it-could-h
Here's another idea:
1. Contact and educate sysadmins who run email servers that are spam-friendly. To qualify as "spam-unfriendly", an email server must add a header to every message passing through with the IP address of the machine from which it received the email. If every mail server were "spam-unfriendly", recipients would be able to positively identify the IP address of a given emal, and the ISP in turn would be able to identify the person who sent the email (if the need were there).
2. Create a double opt-in/opt-out system. That is, in order for one person to legally send a commercial email message to another person, the recipient must have _opted in_ to receive that message. In addition, anyone may _opt out_ of future messages at any time. This would protect those who accidentally opted in to receiving spam by clicking "I Agree" on a web site by letting them undo their mistakes.
Of course, this system would never work. At its core, every system for combating spam is based on making either the act of spamming or employing someone to spam less profitable. This scheme, along with many others, rely upon US law to do this by associating a legal, financial penalty to bothering people with spam. Spammers can evade the system by going off-shore and continuing their business.
One system that I think has a lot of promise is creating a mail client that sends 50KB (or more) of data to every web site mentioned in an email that the user marks as spam. If everyone were to use such a client, spammers would effectively end up DDoSing their own e-commerce site. Performing the act that bothers so many people (sending out batch emails when 99%+ of the target audience is not interested) would be directly and unbreakably bound to suffering a denial of service attack thus preventing the less than 1% of victims who end up responding from being able to make a purchase. In a system like this, spammers have two options:
1. Send "spam" only to those people who they have a good reason to believe would be interested.
2. Give up.
I'll deal with two possible objections right now:
Well, if everybody used a spam filter like spamassassin, spamming would become unprofitable and spammers would stop. Also, ISPs networks wouldn't be taxed by all that extra traffic being sent.
Nope. Spamassassin is good for now, but its fundamental effectiveness relies upon there being detectable differences between spams and legitimate emails. For example, the email:
Hey dude, what's up? How was the boating trip? Hey, I know you've been shopping around for DVD players lately, and I saw a sale on them over at amazon.com. You should check it out -- they have some awesome deals on multi-disc boxes.
could be from a legitimate source. It could also be a spam. If you can't categorize this email, how can you expect a computer to do it?
As for the end effect on ISPs networks, there's not much that could be done about that as far as I can see, since the whole system is based on using all of the bandwidth available to the spammer's (or the spammer's client's) web site, or at least using enough of it to cost them a bundle.
Could malicious users take advantage of this system to lauch DDoS attacks against innocent web sites? In other words, doesn't it provide black hats with 100:1 bandwidth multiplication (1/2KB email results in 50KB directed at the target web site)?
Yes, yes it does. This is the only reason why I think the system, as described, shouldn't be implemented. I've thought of various ways around that (e.g. combining the spam-unfriendly email server concept with this system so that spam-friendly email servers (if there are any in the message path) or the spammers themselves take the beating, or limiting the maximum 'punishment payload' size to the size of the spam to prevent bandwidth multiplication), but none of them have struck be as being The Best Solution yet.
That doesn't mean I'm going to stop chewing on the problem, though.
Copy and paste this into a bookmarklet:
; nu mbers="0123456789";document.forms[1].login.value=" ";document.forms[1].passwd1.value="";document.form s[1].passwd2.value="";document.forms[1].email.valu e="";document.forms[1].birth_year.value="";documen t.forms[1].zip.value="";while(document.forms[1].lo gin.value.length1)document.forms[1].gender_check[1 ].checked=true;document.forms[1].birth_year.value+ =numbers.substring(strindex=Math.round(Math.random ()*9),strindex+1);document.forms[1].birth_year.val ue+=numbers.substring(strindex=Math.round(Math.ran dom()*9),strindex+1);document.forms[1].zip.value+= numbers.substring(strindex=Math.round(Math.random( )*9),strindex+1);document.forms[1].zip.value+=numb ers.substring(strindex=Math.round(Math.random()*9) ,strindex+1);document.forms[1].zip.value+=numbers. substring(strindex=Math.round(Math.random()*9),str index+1);document.forms[1].zip.value+=numbers.subs tring(strindex=Math.round(Math.random()*9),strinde x+1);document.forms[1].zip.value+=numbers.substrin g(strindex=Math.round(Math.random()*9),strindex+1) ;document.forms[1].country.selectedIndex=Math.roun d(Math.random()*236);document.forms[1].income_sele ct.value=Math.round(Math.random()*10)+1;document.f orms[1].industry_select.value=Math.round(Math.rand om()*36)+1;document.forms[1].title_select.value=Ma th.round(Math.random()*36)+1;document.forms[1].fun ction_select.value=Math.round(Math.random()*16)+1; document.forms[1].paper_select.value=Math.round(Ma th.random()*3)+1;document.forms[1].submit();
javascript:letters="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
There shouldn't be any spaces in there, so cut them out if slashdot inserts them. When you get to the NYTimes "you must register" page, click the bookmarklet. It's not the most beautiful solution, but it does the job.
This law sounds like it's consumer-friendly, perhaps creating some much-needed balance, but it really isn't. In fact, it's a broad expansion of current law that's bad for everyone that uses any kind of p2p, for legitimate reasons or otherwise.
Copyright infringement would still be a civil crime so the content industries could still go after consumers on their own, just like they can now -- the proposed legislation would change criminal law. Also (obviously) the existing law covers copyright infringement for profit as copyright infringement for profit is still copyright infringement.
So what's the point of the new law? Read closely:
Peer-to-peer file-sharing services that encourage copyright infringement and make money from advertising are commercial, according to the Commission. "That is illegal and should be stopped," the Commission said. Examples of file sharing services are Kazaa and Morpheus.
Got it yet?
What they're saying: "Criminal sanctions only apply when copyright infringement is carried out intentionally and for commercial purposes."
What they want to dupe the public into hearing: "You can download all you want as long as no money is involved."
What they mean: "Copyright infringement through p2p services hurts the profits of companies that make large campaign contributions. P2P companies produce highly functional p2p software which has a primary function of facilitating copyright infringement because there is a financial incentive to do so (adware/spyware). This aspect of the p2p business can be used to legitimate government attacks in order to shut down those businesses."
What this means for you: Say goodbye to KaZaA and other useful (meaning large, meaning commercially-supported) networks.
Encode your porn into SVCD format (the most popular format for getting porn and being able to watch it in a standalone player). Pick a suitable quality level for both the audio and video and you'll quickly see that a 1 hour high quality porn should need approximately 4 700MB CD-Rs for distribution over Direct Connect.
;)
I think the maximum bitrate for standards-compliant SVCDs is ~2600Kb/sec.
(2600Kbits/sec) * (1byte/8bits) * (60sec/min) * (60min/hour) = 1.170GB/hour. That's less than two cds.
If the SVCD peaks over that bitrate then it becomes a non-standard XSVCD and there are compatibility risks. Not every 480x480 29.97 or 23.976*fps (or 480x576 25fps if you're in PAL-land) mpeg2 file is an SVCD.
*For everyone that's thinking that should be 29.97002997 or 23.97602398fps, or even (30000/1001) or (4/5)*(30000/1001)fps, there's a nit on your keyboard. You'd better go pick it before it gets away!
It doesn't look like Sprint charges me extra for the duplicates, so it doesn't bother me too terribly much, though I'd prefer it if my phone would just suppress the dupes altogether rather than showing them with "Duplicate!" warnings.
Heck, I'd settle for slashdot editors supressing dupes rather than reading all the "Duplicate!" comments, but the failure rate on that kind of system is awful.
I don't think we can expect honest answers from AMI, or any other company pushing Pd. In response to a comment warning about the unfriendly nature of TCPA/Pd on a listserv, an MS employee had this to say:
:-).
l . As you see, it is being seen
Scarey, maybe. Correct, not
There is a lot of speculation here which is not based on facts. PD will
give you the capability to protect some subsets of your system from
damage. Imagine having a fire proof safe in your house. Your house can
still burn down and your safe will still protect your documents that are
stored in there. Having the safe does not enable the people who sold
you the safe know what is stored in there. And if you don't want to
have the said safe, then don't use it! Same is true of PD.
As to the original comment regarding privacy, you are seeing our attempt
to document any and all aspects of the system that could concern anyone.
So you are going to see us telling a lot more about the capabilities of
the player and this can appear overwhelming at first. The good news is
that you have full knowledge of what we do and the choice to turn one or
more of these off if your privacy is more important than the
functionality. Competitors probably do the same thing but fail to warn
you explicitly about them (and burry the detail in long EULAs).
Here is a write-up from CNET on our privacy approach in media player:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955514.htm
as a very positive move and not negative at all. Here is one quote:
"If the final build looks like the software (that CNET News.com)
described, the implication is that Microsoft is taking consumer privacy
very seriously indeed and marks a big change for the company," said
Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg."
******
Microsoft
The "product" and "player" referenced above are the Windows Media Player. This came from a WM-centric listserv.
I expect similarly placating (and untrue) answers from AMI. It is my opinion that the best course of action in this case is to punish AMI as severely as possible for even taking the first step towards creating a component that conforms to either TCPA or Pd. There are two simple things any computer literate person can do to hurt AMI:
1. Don't buy their products.
2. Let them know you bought from a competitor because they dared support TCPA/Pd.
3. Let their competitors know that you're not buying AMI because of their unacceptable actions.
TCPA/Pd requires hardware and software to work. I don't think anyone is going to be convinced to stop using windows because it takes away his or her freedom (at least any more than they have in the past), and I don't think MS is going to be convinced to leave Pd out of its OSs. As I see it, the most effective way to prevent TCPA/Pd from advancing is by setting up a business environment in which hardware manufacturers are terrified at the prospect of producing TCPA/Pd compliant hardware. That, and user education, are the two things that I think have a hope of stopping TCPA/Pd.
I wrote a rather long response to the above comment, so I won't paste it here (Mozilla chokes if I try to paste 18KB into a text box), but I do plan on submitting it to the Pd faq maintainer as there are some important oportunity for MS to abuse it's power in a TCPA/Pd system that aren't covered. (e.g. MS not signing drivers for hardware devices that support competing technologies [OpenGL v. Direct3D, MPEG4 v. WM].)
Well, to be honest, I don't really enjoy spending my free time "experiencing the scent" of nitrous oxide.
Downloaded it. Tried it. I found it to be fairly crashy, but I like the idea.
Anyway, for those who like an XP desktop environment and window manager but want their apps to look like they do in XP, check out the TrueBlue gtk+ theme; it's not an exact replica, but it captures the feel. Also, if you like the puffy "Luna" window decorations, you might want to check out the Lunatic theme for sawfish.
Happy theming!
This is too scary. I am now ready for a little less convenience and a little more privacy. How about you?
As much as I would like to, I don't think there's anything really new to say here. We have the way out -- it's called donating to and becoming a member of the EFF. Writing lengthy and important-sounding posts is just preaching to the choir at this point.
You really want to tell me that just one measly group of classes is as hard to implement as the whole Win32 API? This just illustrates my point: Mono is much easier at succeeding than Wine.
.NET application gains wide acceptance (which I don't really see happening BTW, .NET is moving much slower than MS would like) Mono et al will make sure it will work on Linux very soon. They can concentrate on one app at a time.
.Net "leaks" into the host OS -- C# is a portable language, but the apps themselves can be OS dependent. MS is free to "embrace and extend" it as much as it wants to to make sure that compatibility is always an inch or two away, at least for the latest apps. (Or would it just be "extend" because it's their own product?) But as you said originally, this isn't going to do much good unless .Net takes off, and it doesn't look like that's happening.
..AA won't dare stop selling CDs and DVDs which can always be ripped on a non-TCPA/Pd system and floated out on the net. The way that it pretends to combat piracy is by allowing media companies to impose iron-clad DRM on downloaded media files, and I guess the long-term goal is to get away from physical distribution entirely. Media companies don't want KaZaA to crash or refuse to run; they want your search results to slowly dwindle over time until they always number 0.
;)
Also, as I said the projects are in right from the beginning. If some
It's not going to be as difficult, chiefly for 2D apps, just because most of the work has already been done in wine. The problem is that, unlike Java,
-Users will be even more at the mercy of MS, to the point where MS could charge them for access to their own files.
Which hits a nerve. Users will not accept that. Users want their pirated mp3, porn and videos and be left alone. They don't want MS knowing what they do on their own computer. People are not as dumb as you think they are.
I was pretty freaked out when I saw the first ad in PC World (side note: I recently did a page count. More than half of the pages are full-size ads.) for an IBM laptop with built-in security hardware -- there's only one thing that could be considering it's built on a P4 which has already implemented LaGrande technology. Anyway, they were billing it as an eliminator of viruses and spam, not freedom. People may not want to be so tightly bound by MS, but I don't think they're going to be aware of what's happening until MS hits the "on" switch one day and they're prompted to buy another year's MS Office license.
-It's unclear as to whether or not hardware that boots non-MS OSs will continue to be manufactured.
Well all concepts I have seen are backwards-compatible, that means while Linux may not run in TCPA-mode, it will run in non-TCPA-mode
Well, it's just that -- unclear. The TCPA specs define what the behavior of trusted hardware must be when it is requested to load a signed OS (it must load it), but it doesn't say whether or not it will load an unsigned OS even when it's in inactive mode. It's a mystery from that point of view or up to the hardware vendors (take your pick). Add to that that one of the features that I've seen asked for numerous times on anti-TCPA sites is the ability to "totally turn off" the technology, and it's not clear how much of it will actually be an option.
But actually, there is a huge anti-TCPA movement[...]
How many people?
guaranteed TCPA-free hardware will stay very popular and will be sold because the demand is there.
Who's demanding it? What percent of the market specifically wants TCPA-free hardware?
Intel and AMD will not sacrifice themselves for the RIAA.
They already have. Intel has included support for "trusted mode" in its P4 chips that are currently being manufactured -- they're calling it "LaGrande Technology". AMD has committed to including support for it in its Hammer line of CPUs.
TCPA-hardware will be more expensive [...]
I agree, and this could be a deterrent. However, eventually everything will be integrated into a single chip. Besides, people buy antivirus software (which costs money) to add to their unprotected system. From a consumer's point of view, doesn't it make sense to spend a little more money now and buy a system that is (heh heh, yeah right) spam-proof and virus-proof from the start?
The average consumer might not know right now what TCPA or Palladium is, but the average consumer has at least 20 Gigs of mp3s, porn and/or videos on his harddrive (or on CDs) he doesn't want to lose. Just look at how big Napster, Kazaa etc. are/were, we are talking about millions of people here - the majority of home users.
You know how a radio ad were for a DSL-vendor around here? I'll tell you:
male voice: I'd like to show you my big music collection.
female voice: You have a music collection?
male voice: Well, I could just download one anytime...
narrator: Download music and videos in real time - company name
That's right: The main selling point for DSL is piracy. This is not a niche application for geeks, it's the killer app. Something interfering with that won't be accepted in the market.
First, TCPA/Pd will not stop piracy. No DRM system is unbreakable, and if it really gets in the way it will be broken. Even if there were no solution to TCPA/Pd for a year, the
Also did you know the absence of TCPA in future CPUs? TCPA will not get into AMD's Hammer. The way I see it, TCPA will stay the "technology that will get into all chips not now but in a couple of years" forever - No chip maker dares to actually do it. The outrage and absymnal sales would be terrible.
Nope, AMD has committed. Have you seen a significant slump in P4 sales lately? It's already there. People aren't outraged because they're ignorant.
Only few people need to upgrade. If a system is twice as fast but cannot play pirated mp3/videos/software, it is worth less than the old system for the majority of people - People just won't upgrade.
Pirated files will play in TCPA/Pd systems because a "trusted" player app is not required to play them. The goal is to stop the creation of new files, which won't succeed.
Anyway, a merry christmas for you!
I'm not celebrating Christmas this year; I'm celebrating Postmas. That's the holiday where you show your friends and family how much you really care about them by getting a better deal on a present they'll enjoy more by shopping after the post-christmas price drop.(*) There are still festivities and food on the 24th and 25th, but Santa is going to be a little late this year at my house.
Happy holidays.
(*) Note this isn't about being cheap. The idea is gift giver spends the same amount of money that they probably would have (or possibly less), while getting something the receiver will enjoy more.
Other than that, presenting different "groups of free space" as different icons or "drives"
.NET compatibility is far easier than perfect Win32 compatibility, first because the Mono and other projects are in the game right from the start and second because .NET's bytecode structure should make it easier.
:(
...which means TCPA members don't want people who are _checking to see if they are TCPA members_ to know that they're TCPA members. As for the almost infinitely larger, ignorant section of the population, they are totally unaware. If you were to go out onto the street and ask people what palladium is, I predict you'd get these answers (from most to least frequent):
KDE does exactly that.
Cool!
Well, OK so instead of an Autorun, the user has to click on the "CD-ROM" icon in KDE and select the install-script. While I agree that some Autorun mechanism would be nice, it's certainly not a prerequesite, even for home users. Clicking on a CD-ROM is not really rocket science.
Let me ask you a question to clarify. When you were talking about the process you go through to install software, does clicking on the CD provide, for instance, a popup hierarchical menu system that allows the user to select software to install from what is available on the CD, or does the system provide that hierarchical menu of software compiled from what is available on the CDs and DVDs that came with the distro. If the latter, what is the procedure to install packages that did not come with the distro?
So we finally agree that the major selling point of Windows is Win32-compatibility.
Win32 compatibility is the major "selling point" of windows in that if you were to ask a user if win32 compatibility makes or breaks the deal in terms of OS choice the average user would say yes. However, that's not to say that win32 compatibility is the only positive thing about windows.
Actually, I think perfect
Windows.Forms
What UI-issues? Why merging distros? What's the point of that?
Having too many UIs and too many distros divides...well, I already wrote it a couple times. (see OSS competition in previous post)
Wrong, we need apps, apps, apps. Nobody cares about package management. Some users may curse (if it were so bad which it isn't) at install-time, but in day to-day work, only the apps count. No Photoshop on Linux = no Linux for many people. So we need apps, either through ports or through Win32 compatibility.
That would be great, I agree. The classic, enduring problem is that market share for linux is too low to merit porting photoshop (although OSX -> linux is a lot easier than win32 -> linux or classic mac -> linux), and market share for linux isn't going to get the huge boost it needs until there are apps available (like photoshop). Beyond writing letters to Adobe, there's not much that can be done about that. We can, however, create an environment that doesn't scare away newbies so that when linux usage creeps past the "critical mass" point for porting photoshop, photoshop will not be a lure to pull newbies into a scary and otherwise intolerable environment, but an extra app that makes a sweet deal even sweeter.
Actually, I think Palladium is the best thing that can happen to Linux.
You really want to tell me that users are supposed to stop pirating mp3s and Videos? You got to be kidding me. Most home users would go back to DOS with all the IRQ conflicts if they could avoid copy protection.
Palladium won't be a successful implementation of DRM because there is no such thing; users won't have to go back to dos. The real problems with palladium are:
-Users will be even more at the mercy of MS, to the point where MS could charge them for access to their own files.
and
-It's unclear as to whether or not hardware that boots non-MS OSs will continue to be manufactured.
Actually, TCPA is already so unpopular that the members no longer publicly admit that they are members in TCPA (the member list got removed from the website).
1. I have no idea.
2. A transition metal.
3. A wooden statue of Athena from greek mythology.
4. A copy-stopper chip from MS that's going to put an end to piracy...I think.
5. A DRM system that's going to take away our rights.
Also, TCPA is designed very stupidly, for example if you have a TCPA-enabled computer, you just have to run *one single* non-TCPA approved app and the computer will shut down all TCPA-contents and apps. There goes your backwards compatibility.
Not true. Unsigned apps cannot trap to trusted mode, access certain new TCPA-only system calls, or access any data stored in the TPM. Since unsigned, non-TCPA apps aren't programmed to do any of those things, they'll run fine in conjunction with TCPA apps on the same system.
About half the servers run Linux/BSD, in Europe about 2/3. More than half of all new embedded systems projects are using Linux. There is a market for Linux-hardware and companies will sell it.
Server and embedded market penetration is not desktop market penetration and that's what's really needed to defeat palladium.
Most package managers are able to manage hundreds of packages well because they are organized hierarchically, why make them as crippled as Windows' with it's linear list of installed software?
.Net apps targetted at windows under linux would require a working wine implementaion; MS can "innovate" contorted new API additions faster than they can be reverse-engineered and reimplemented perfectly.
That would be a step backwards. While I agree that you could have an option to hide system packages for morons, it's certainly no showstopper.
GNU/Linux can have package grouping without losing its hierarchical layout. Example: make mozilla uninstallable as one group rather than 8+ individual packages, like the add/remove programs applet in windows.
While I agree that you could have an option to hide system packages for morons [...]
It's hard to have a low opinion of users and try to see technology from their perspective. Their talents may lie outside the realm of technology.
You have the major delusion that Windows is perfect and that if something is like Windows, it will be a success. That is both wrong. Windows is not perfect, it is not intuitive, it is not user-friendly (for example newbies have big trouble with single vs. double click. It's just not consistent, while KDE (at default settings) is. Newbies will have much less problems picking up KDE than picking up Windows.
Who said I thought things were perfect just because they were a part of windows? IE. Outlook. The registry. *gag*
You also have drive letters and a lot of other cruft you don't notice because you are used to it.
The _letters_ part sucks as it imposes artificial limitations. Other than that, presenting different "groups of free space" as different icons or "drives" (where a drive could be a tape drive, a stripe set, a cd, etc...) is a useful feature in a visual interface -- it allows users to have a useful mental concept of data transfer and what it means to copy a file from one location to another. This can be implemented while still keeping the "mount point"/VFS low layer design which gives knowledgable script-writers a boost to functionality.
2. Make software installation work by selecting the software, not the software installer.
Did you even read what I wrote?
Yes, but I don't think my response was clear enough. From a high-level point of view, the user should indicate that he wants to install new software by bringing that software to the computer, not by instructing the computer to absorb software which will be brought to it when prompted.
nstall an apache rpm on a debian system, startup scripts and all. No tweaking.
Why should I do that? Every distro supplies the appropriate packages. Commercial packages (like Loki's games or VMWare) can be made to run on all distros easily and without any problems.
You shouldn't because you can't. That's my point. Different, incompatible package management systems and filesystem layouts force the "packaging" stage of distribution to be done an unnecessary and wasteful number of times. Yes, you can use custom installers like many commercial packages do, but that defeats the purpose of having a package management system.
Run a binary from a distro that's still using last year's libwhatever on a distro that uses the incompatible this year's libwhatever.
Run a game that requires DirectX8 on a system with only DirectX6.
A simple upgrade to DX8 lets DX8 games work while keeping compatibility with DX6 apps. Not all gnu/linux important packages are backwards compatible (e.g. libc5/libc6).
Newbie overall (but intermediate KDE) users cannot jump into GNOME and do everything exactly the same way. The opposite is also true. Config files are important.
Why should anybody want to jump into Gnome?
*shrug* Dunno. I don't have a strong preference for one environment over the other - they both have their strong and weak points. My point was that 1 desktop environment is better than 2 from the point of view of linux adoption (see previous post re: OSS competition).
All commercial distros except RedHat install KDE by default so they look quite similar. The only differences are config stuff, but that's different between Windows versions, too.
how could XP have become so widespread so quickly?
Again: - BECAUSE IT IS PREINSTALLED ON COMPUTERS - BECAUSE IT IS PREINSTALLED ON COMPUTERS - BECAUSE IT IS PREINSTALLED ON COMPUTERS -
Microsoft could sell any version of Windows, everything would become widespread quickly. The only thing it has to do is run most Win32 programs and it will be widespread quickly. They could sell Win95 again and most people would buy it because the computer maker don't give them another choice of software that will run Win32 apps. (And the computer maker wouldn't get any other version of Windows)
Microsoft could not sell any version of Windows and expect it to become widespread quickly if that version of windows were not backwards compatible with older versions of windows. (Yes, I know 2K had problems with this. They were few and far between. After SP3 they are virtually nil, barring some very old dos games.) The idea is that if backwards compatibility were as bad between XP and previous versions of windows as backwards compatibility is with linux on a comparable timescale, XP wouldn't have had nearly the level of success it did.
Yes, MS does have a stranglehold on the market. That means nothing if new products don't work. What do you do with a blender that doesn't blend? Take it back to the store.
Linux is ready, although it's not absolutely perfect in every way. GNU/Linux distros are not quite ready yet.
Yes, of course it's not perfect in every way. For example I think the whole CD mounting is a bit awkard.
But those are little things, not showstoppers.
Too many little things add up to become a "showstopper". What would you change about CD mounting?
The problems are Win32-compatibility [...]
I agree totally. Perfect win32 compatibility would put linux on every desktop in a heartbeat -- computer manufacturers don't like paying the microsoft tax any more than consumers do. Perfect win32 compatibility is not an attainable goal. Even running supposedly "portable"
Depending on win32 compatibility to make gnu/linux mainstream is not going to get anyone anywhere. Instead, UI issues need to be fixed, a standard packge management system must be deployed across all distros, very minor distros much be feature-merged into significant ones or eliminated entirely, and other changes must be made.
know two people who use Windows NT at home and they're both old, male computer geeks with degrees in tech fields. The rest use 98SE, 2000, or XP -- the ones that are less stable but with good UIs.
Exactly, NT started as a business and geek OS, then became a home OS for non-gamers (Win2000), then became a home OS for everybody (XP).
NT4 did _not_ become a "home OS" for non-gamers or anyone at all. New versions of windows that fixed (or adequately changed) problems with NT4 were created, based on NT4, and then sold after they were made suitable for the mainstream market. In the same sense, GNU/Linux needs to metamorphose from an NT4 caterpillar into a Win2K butterfly. It's a stupid metaphor, but it conveys the idea.
Most of your wanted improvements are readily available in SuSE
[...]
No matter how great Linux is, Joe Average will not notice when it's not preinstalled.
I don't agree. I seriously doubt that if SuSE were really the jewel of usability that you say it is that it would be such a well-kept secret. Of course, that's not proof, it's an educated guess so I'll have to try out SuSE for myself before I can comment on it directly. I also gather from what you said about usability that while you may consider SuSE to be a wonderful, perfect distro that just needs marketing and preinstallation, I would probably disagree. But again, the only way to be sure is to try it.
Of course this doesn't happen overnight, but it happens. With PCs becoming cheaper and cheaper, Windows and MS Office is taking a larger and larger part out of total system costs. So the incentive to switch to Linux becomes bigger and bigger every year (Especially under the new licensing regime) and with more and more software available, the hurdles in switching become lower and lower.
I can be optimistic with you on this point. I think evolving windows APIs are pushing this goal further away nearly as fast as the gnu/linux community is chasing it, but we're getting closer all the time.
It's really just a matter of time.
But now we have a deadline: palladium. Linux is no good if nobody's making hardware that will boot it. Of course, the DRM component of palladium will fail, as conditional or metered access to information on hardware to which the consumer has unrestricted physical access is impossble, but it will leave the tech industry in a situation where MS has so much power it could charge users for access to their own documents and get away with it. As I said, DRM is always breakable, but this doesn't make breaking it legal, even if breaking it means being able to access your own documents in an unrestricted format. GNU/Linux doesn't have time to rest on its laurels while wine crawls forward and the TCPA comes racing toward us.