I bought The Sims on the day it came out, installed it, and my wife, usually at best indifferent about computer games, proceeded to kick me out of my chair and not be seen for the next month. She still plays, though of course not as intensely. It's like a doll house, only seamier. She's bought all the expansion packs, and there's been a bunch of them.
Will Wright's a friggin' genius. And like many geniuses, he just realizes the obvious about human nature. Wake up developers. Be more willing to foray off the fantasy/space reservation, get away from the combat ethos a little, and you might find that women really will play and get addicted to video games.
$40 for StarOffice was the price for the deluxe edition quoted to ZDNet by Sun. Hit the site & look it up before you assume I'm wrong. I do my homework.
Cost of Mandrake Club & StarOffice 6 when in s
on
Sizing Up StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Cost to Join Mandrake Club at Silver Level to download StarOffice 6: $120.00
Cost to upgrade initial membership to Silver Level to get StarOffice 6: $60.00
Cost of a copy of StarOffice 6, Deluxe Version with documentation from local retailer: $40.00
Damn, thanks for proving my point. As I said in my previous post and if you'll choose to read what you linked, those doctors used the Qwest high-speed network, not the internet, and it was only an assist (advice given while watching an actual doctor perform the procedure), not real surgery being done by robotics over a high-speed connection, no matter how much ABC news wants to hype it as "internet surgery". Such a thing is still so distant as to be well ignorable for quite a while.
And I'll capitalize internet when we start capitalizing dog & cat.
I bet you are one of those people that goes out on the road when there's 3 feet of snow on it, when they specifically told you it was a level 99 snow alert or something, and that you can be ticketed for driving, or if your car gets stuck, you'll be towed and fined. Afterall, you getting to your buddies to play PS2 is a lot more important than an EMS getting somewhere, but they couldn't since you blocked the snowplow.
No, I'm not. And your point, analogizing the net to a snow-blocked street, is a poor one for many reasons. A better one would be the government being able to allow select people to ignore all traffic rules to get from one place to another for certain emergencies. This is certainly allowed for gov't officials/police/fire, but in limited cases, and the reason being that the streets get clogged alot easier than the network we're really talking about. And if the police/fire/gov't aren't currently using the network like that or if the network's never really clogged when they do use it, why create a special privelege?
Consider the case where the doctor was performing surgery over the Internet or something (I forget the specifics of that case.) But I sure hope to hell that in an emergency something like that would have priority over your pr0n. They have the same systems set up on all public transportation and communication mediums, why should the Internet be any different?
As opposed to your theoretical case of a doctor doing surgery over the internet, let's look at what happens in real-time videoconferencing, which we could argue is much less important. For such a situation, companies contract through a provider like Quest or (previously) Global Crossing. They guarantee secure, consistent high-speed networking for these sorts of purposes over proprietary high-speed fiber networks. Any medical work being done, even just real-time advice during surgery, would have to be provided over these sorts of networks to truly be reliable. If I were going under the knife, I wouldn't want my innerds subject to the vagaries of the internet. I'd want a tightly controlled, proprietary connection that can't suffer from a DoS attack. Your theoretical surgery case, a common one seen, presupposes that the net should be all things to all people when that's simply not the case. For true life & death situations like surgery, or situations where security is paramount like corporate conferences or military communications, owned and controlled solutions are still the best answer. This is why proprietary fiber and MILnet exist - because for some purposes the internet is simply not appropriate, or not yet ready.
I'm simply arguing that before we start creating "important people only" lanes on our information superhighway, we consider how that closes off other avenues of innovation for the network.
As I see it, preserving the end to end, nondiscriminatory nature of the internet backbone is more important than any current concern about national security or natural disaster response. Creating preferences for any group, no matter how worthy the group or the motive, undermines the essence of what makes the internet a good network and creates opportunities for abuse. Just to touch on a couple points & questions:
Is There Even A Problem? After our most recent large-scale disaster, 9/11, the internet was one of the networks that had absolutely no problem coping with increased data traffic. Both the POTS and wireless phone systems were overloaded quickly, but the 'net kept chugging along with all due speed. So if everyone's being served quickly even during that large disaster, what's the problem you're providing this solution for? Also, what has been the magnitude increase in state & federal government internet traffic during 9/11 and previous disasters? Is the internet even a minor source of emergency communications? In the face of existing priority access to the phone network, is it even necessary?
Potential For Abuse. Nevermind the local/state/federal flunkies who suddenly realize their goatsec.x is too precious to travel on the non-expedited internet. What I'm worried about are the 3133t HAXX04S out there who're going to have this preferred network busted in a matter of days. All this internet Red Phone system would do is create a federally funded cracking competition, grand prize being superfast uploads.
Feature Creep. It starts out being just for emergencies. Then it's just so damn convenient, the state/local gov't uses it all the time. Next, it gets to where everyone down to your city alderman has preferential net access, for no other reason than they've got a gov't job. I know, it sounds funny, but I don't doubt the possibility of it occuring. It eventually becomes one connection speed for important people (as determined by your friendly neighborhood Federal Bureaucrat) and one speed for the rest of us. And why? Refer to point 1 above.
In the future we'll see lots of this. We'll see people coming to us or to the gov't with lots of good reasons for discriminating content on the net. National security. Preserving copyright. Stopping kiddie porn. All putatively good motives, but nobody's seeing that the cure, perfect network control, is worse than the disease. It puts innovation in a box and lets our current interests and concerns block what can be done with the internet in the future, and in return all we get is a network that's little more than a fancy mail-order catalog.
...'cause I'm never going to get all the drool out of my current keyboard.
It's torture to sit across the pond & watch those damn Euros get to play with all those toys while I slave away. May they all choke on Nutella sandwiches.
Yes, I'm aware of that. Just thought I'd throw out another problem in another part of the government to show that security issues tend to be systemic across the gov't.
And with the DoI being in charge of federal agencies like the Natl Park Service, the Forest Service, Fish & Wildlands, federal payroll & accounting, farm issues, etc etc etc, it's silly to argue that the preservation of the integrity of our country's internal assets is more or less important than the military's responsibilities. Wildfires, hurricanes, crop failures - lives are in the balance in those situations too, no?
The Dep't of the Interior's networks & web sites are now just coming back up, after being shut down for over 2 months by court order due to an almost complete lack of security on the network that allowed virtually anyone with a port sniffer to get into the Indian Trust Database -- a terrible failure of their IT, and a wonderful example of how exposed & poorly run many government networks are. CNN has a short summary.
The interesting story here is that my mom (a Nat'l Park Service employee) was recently given a service award for letting the accounting people go to her house & use her computer at home (which I set up, and is secure, running WinXP behind a Linksys BFSR41 routed switch w/ firewall) to install software to make payments to contractors, do office supply, etc.
Interior deserved what they got & should have had their shit together, but the result was over 2 months of torture for almost every DoI employee. It's fearsome, though, that a firewalled home connection could be more secure than government and military networks. I dunno about the military, but Interior is apparently desperate for decent IT support.
1. The CIA, including its precursors, has only existed since WWII.
2. It's the JOB of our elected congressional officials to oversee & regulate the functions of ALL the government, including the intelligence agencies. You don't have to be a veteran spook to see a waste when the CIA spends tens of thousands of dollars for information that's published in some Pakistani daily paper.
You met someone once whose job it was to search the net for the CIA? Congratulations.
Mundie succeeds in jamming his foot into his mouth every time he speaks. This is the "Chief Technical Officer" of MS? The only buzz this guy is part of is that of the vibrator stuck up his arse. Almost EVERYTHING he's quoted as saying here is wrong on its face.
"The problem with general public license advocates is that they don't understand that people need the opportunity to commercialize software," Mundie said, attacking the notion of open-source software.
*in my best McNeil voice* WRONG! It is MS that feels that need, but they shouldn't include all of us in their desires. The GPL is just one of millions of licences that allows the creator(s) to control the future use of their creation. If MS gets to license its works on whatevere terms they wish, why not Torvalds & Stallman? Do they have less rights to regulate their products through a license simply because they are not a public company and choose to work for the good of their community rather than for profit? Nobody is forced to release software under the GPL who hasn't already decided to incorporate GPLed products into their own works. The Linux kernel is a creation, initially at least, of Linus Torvalds. Apparently he felt no need to commercialize his software, or he would not have utilized the GPL.
"If there is not commercialization there, a company can only exist based on ancillary manufacturing or services. If commercialization was cut down, investors would not support research and development in the IT sector, less projects would be developed, less taxes paid and the government would have less money to run universities, and all the other things that governments do," said Mundie.
Again, Craig, the GPL is voluntary. If you don't like the restraints it places on commercializing someone else's work, then don't use their work, man! I know, I know, you're not talking to anyone who reads Slashdot. You're a smart cookie. You're talking to governments, mostly conservative folks, trying to make the GPL sound like the technological equivalent of a hippie colony. But it's not. It's just another license. If you don't like the GPL, don't use it and don't incorporate software that exists under it in your products. All your words begin to sound more and more like your complaining about how a certain license is preventing you from "embracing & extending" Apache/Linux/Samba/KDE. Again, if you don't like the license all our stuff is released under, then go & WRITE YOUR OWN SOFTWARE, instead of complaining about how you can't take ours & make money off it.
And that last comment about taxes is cheap and manipulative and any elected official worth his salt should be insulted by it. The last consideration of any decent government in deciding whether people have rights to control the uses of the things they create should be whether or not it fills the government coffers.
"Rather than form a federation with Microsoft and work with what we had already created, there was this notion that the world should be offered an alternative," Mundie said.
Heh heh. Thanks Craig, but we've known for quite a while how Microsoft feels about alternatives.
"What we have done with PCs so far is not natural. In the future we will be moving towards technologies which allow us to capture the things we do in our lives," Mundie said, forecasting a wider dissemination of stylus-based computing equipment.
"Increasingly we will be writing on our computers like we write on paper," he said.
And, in the anthropological sense, writing is somehow "more natural" than pointing & clicking with a mouse? I know we all can't go back & ask the first person who grabbed a stick, dipped it in the latest kill's blood & started making marks on the wall, but considering the years needed to teach people how to read & write and comparing that to the hour or two it takes for a person to learn to use a keyboard & mouse to do the same thing with a PC, this statement just looks like more advertising. I wonder how many words per minute Mr. Mundie can write on his tablet? I can do about 90 on a keyboard myself. Scads of people have come out with tablets before -- what makes you think you're going to change the world with yours?
You are NOT the nexus of this site. The idea that your feelings/opinions/rants are the reason people come here is, while correct in a narrow sense, wrongheaded in scope as far as costs are concerned. You're only providing Slashdot content inasmuch as they're providing you with an opportunity to state your opinion and be part of a community, so call it even on that score. How much you decide to use that opportunity is your concern, not theirs.
But the fact that you've decided to stand on the Slashdot soapbox to state your views creates no requirement for Slashdot to give you any concern or compensation. And in a social sense, I think that just the fact that we get to put our opinions in front of 300 THOUSAND readers is benefit enough to us, no? My point: stop bitching about wanting discounts or a cut of the pie because you fscking post here. So do a few hundred thousand other people.
Slashdot content, through news events and user posts about those events, has always been free, and is going to stay free, with more (and more intrusive) ads. The tech expertise, hardware, software development, content control, and power costs have never been free. VA's been shouldering that from the get-go for ALL OF YOU. God forbid they ask you ungrateful bitches, "Please, please, let us remain solvent so we can provide you this service!?!?". How repugnant of someone to seek to cover the costs, no less get some profit, from a forum that's obviously popular as one of the widest-read tech/geek forums in the world.
Discounts for highly moderated posts? Whiny flames about how 'net ads don't work? Fsck all of you.
Sorry to pull a Johnny Cochran, but if they can't make it pay, it's gonna go away. Me, I'll be paying as soon as they get a credit card account going. If you, the internet user, want the internet to thrive you need to realize that the content you're interested in has value and is worth paying for. If you can't put up for what you want to see, then don't expect anything of value for you to look at on this fancy info superhighway thingie. Go on, be a cheapskate. Go ahead & leave it to MS, AOL & Amazon to become one big high-tech fscking mail-order catalog. For you cheap bastards out there you'll just be getting what you deserve.
The states' call for an open-source version of Internet Explorer would destroy "any incentive for Microsoft to invest in the creation of such new versions," Microsoft said.
Um, if IE were open-sourced they wouldn't HAVE to invest in jack. Those who use it and are interested in improving it themselves would develop it. It's that MS wouldn't get to control its development that is the problem for them.
It's hilarious that MS can be convicted of being a monopolist and still face such nonexistent regulations. It's as if you convicted a man of murder & robbery, let him off with a warning, then let him keep the gun because, after all, it is his gun and how's he going to earn money without it in the future? Back in the days of Standard Oil you could really get punished if you abused your monopoly. Ah, but this is the "information age". You can have it if you ask me.
Sure, this is a good thing for the kid, but is it ethical for a doc to help a woman who's likely to be senile by the time her kids are in elementary school overcome such disadvantages and give birth, by any means?
Well, guess it's her choice, bad though it may be. Just 10 years ago she might've just gotten a hysterectomy, adopted, and moved on. Personally, I just don't understand the NEED to have your own kids. In a world where needy kids need to be adopted, it strikes me as more than a little self-centered to see high-tech IVF methods as NEEDED so you can have YOUR baby.
It's like the sow in the midwest that had 7 kids, half of them retarded. They weren't a sign from God, sweetie. The infertility was the sign from God. Whatever though. Do what you like. Just don't ever expect my insurance payments to cover it.
I'm going to disagree here, not necessarily with your conclusion (that RIAA companies are dinosaurs) but with your rationale that it's because CDs are a thing of the past.
Note that, in the story here, RIAA companies sold almost $14 BILLION in CDs. People are buying these things, and by the truckloads. Not only that, the net has not yet even begun to be able to handle mass-scale trading & purchase of uncompressed (or very low-compressed) audiophile-quality music. I use Morpheus & yet still buy many CDs because MP3, though a nice format, isn't perfect, either for audio quality or portability (yet). The CD, I would project, still has at least 20 years life ahead of itself as a popular format, and probably 50-100 years as an archival format - hell, look at records, considered by many audiophiles to be the way to go for recordings because of their analog nature.
Where I agree with your conclusion that the music industry as a corporate entity is eventually doomed is in the fact that the net provides a group of musicians and a small management team to work independantly on creation & promotion of its music, allowing the market (us) to decide what we like. Huzzah for technology! We lose the middlemen, and their need to take their fat cut right out of the musician's livelihood. It'll happen when the musicians get smart enough about the technology and the marketing to do it themselves. If RIAA companies think they have problems now, they haven't seen anything until musicians realize they don't need them, their bloated costs, or their slave-like contracts.
Due to the continual evolution of SBC/Pacific Bell as the leading (and now only) carrier of DSL services in the region, it is necessary to adjust your rate to the current market standard (which we now set) to retain profitability (the definition of which is controlled by our board).
Your new rate, as of June 2002 will be *insert whatever I pay now, doubled*. Rest assured that through our attempts to fleece you for all you're worth now that we're the only game in town, you can *ahem* rely *ahem* on SBC's current standard of *ahem* service *ahem*.
Yours Sincerely,
Ben Dover Vice President of Broadband Services SBC / Pacific Bell, Inc.
They're pointing out to the judge that both systems (the internet and the Morpheus system running on the net) allow anonymous, back & forth sharing of files with absolutely no control over IP at any point in the transactions. This point along with the fact that it's the action in using such a tool that's illegal (not the tool itself) are both arguments that, despite reversals in the DeCSS & Napster cases, still have not received proper attention from the court or responses from the plaintiffs. If people can use VCRs to copy TV shows or CD-R drives to copy CDs and it's OK, why can't I download music I already own from Morpheus? I've done it dozens of times -- it's easier than ripping it from CD if I only want to listen to a song or two from something I own. Not even Morpheus is aware of the extent or lack thereof of a legal use for their product. As long as one exists and appears to be being exercised though, they should be allowed to remain in business.
WHY would Morpheus/Gnutella/Grokster/etc or Napster be illegal? The companies do nothing to promote violations of the law other than provide a forum in which you can share data. The net does the same thing -- people provide HTML & other sorts of files & people download them. People do all sorts of illegal things on the net -- scam others, put up child porno, etc, and they should be pursued. We shouldn't shut down the net -- of course not. If I did any of those things I'd be breaking the law, just as I would be if I pirated music over the net. Yet with the net it's me that's performing an illegal act and on Morpheus it's the program's (and the company's) fault. Why the difference? If one is illegal then the other must be, right? Maybe my argument's simplistic, I don't know. But I think they have a point.
I do agree with it being nice if they could use old computers in the schools, and I also agree that Linux is what cost-conscious schools should be doing (if they can) or at least looking into. However, anyone who's ever supported a large-scale network of computers (not me, but I know those who do) knows that standardization and knowing, at least to some exent, what to expect with each box is critical to providing decent support, and without decent support you end up with dozens of refurbished paperweights for teacher's desks.
Where I disagree is that somehow teachers, making about $30k a year mind you and not necessarily as familiar with a saudering iron or a computer's innards as you & I, should be expected to work with old hardware & make it do something.
If your school is full of teachers who aren't willing or competent enough to do something productive with 5 or 6 year old PCs - then maybe you need to start asking if they're competent enough to teach your kids other subjects?
Where do you get this? Ms. Brown the english teacher should know how to cobble together a good PC from 2-3 broken ones, then install Linux on it? She majored in English & got a credential. She's qualified to do that, not fix computers. The comment above is a great example of the anti-teacher rhetoric that the uninformed love to sling at the public schools. You expect them to be everything from social workers to personal mentors to substitute parents for your kids, but you don't want to pay them more than $40K a year.
Sure, sure, maybe the computer class teachers (probably no more than 2-3 in a normal high school) might be able to do something with some machines, but do you expect them, on their own time in the evenings at home, to work on PCs constantly? They want personal lives too. Or do you only think that personal lives are reserved for those who work in the private sector?
It's a much more complicated problem than "lazy teachers", and alienating the group of people you want to help do their job is never a good way to go about solving it.
The job of Freddy J. Bumfuck High School down the street is to teach things like reading, writing, math, history, biology, physics, chemistry, etc, not to make dozens of computers, all different mind you, function. It's a high school for God's sake, not ITT Tech. 99% of schools have enough trouble with the basics to bother teaching kids how to be computer repair people. The idea that you can throw your useless piles of 10+ year-old hardware their way and have them do something with it is idealistic to the point of silliness.
I'm amazed at the naivete of this. You're computer people dammit, doesn't "Garbage In Garbage Out" mean anything to you?
Slashdot Mirror
EOM
Ditto Ditto Ditto.
I bought The Sims on the day it came out, installed it, and my wife, usually at best indifferent about computer games, proceeded to kick me out of my chair and not be seen for the next month. She still plays, though of course not as intensely. It's like a doll house, only seamier. She's bought all the expansion packs, and there's been a bunch of them.
Will Wright's a friggin' genius. And like many geniuses, he just realizes the obvious about human nature. Wake up developers. Be more willing to foray off the fantasy/space reservation, get away from the combat ethos a little, and you might find that women really will play and get addicted to video games.
$40 for StarOffice was the price for the deluxe edition quoted to ZDNet by Sun. Hit the site & look it up before you assume I'm wrong. I do my homework.
Cost to Join Mandrake Club at Silver Level to download StarOffice 6: $120.00
Cost to upgrade initial membership to Silver Level to get StarOffice 6: $60.00
Cost of a copy of StarOffice 6, Deluxe Version with documentation from local retailer: $40.00
And I should join or upgrade my membership why?
Damn, thanks for proving my point. As I said in my previous post and if you'll choose to read what you linked, those doctors used the Qwest high-speed network, not the internet, and it was only an assist (advice given while watching an actual doctor perform the procedure), not real surgery being done by robotics over a high-speed connection, no matter how much ABC news wants to hype it as "internet surgery". Such a thing is still so distant as to be well ignorable for quite a while.
And I'll capitalize internet when we start capitalizing dog & cat.
getting to your buddies to play PS2
And when my buddies come over we network our PCs & play Age of Kings, thank you very much. Pbbbt.
Peyna bloviated:
I bet you are one of those people that goes out on the road when there's 3 feet of snow on it, when they specifically told you it was a level 99 snow alert or something, and that you can be ticketed for driving, or if your car gets stuck, you'll be towed and fined. Afterall, you getting to your buddies to play PS2 is a lot more important than an EMS getting somewhere, but they couldn't since you blocked the snowplow.
No, I'm not. And your point, analogizing the net to a snow-blocked street, is a poor one for many reasons. A better one would be the government being able to allow select people to ignore all traffic rules to get from one place to another for certain emergencies. This is certainly allowed for gov't officials/police/fire, but in limited cases, and the reason being that the streets get clogged alot easier than the network we're really talking about. And if the police/fire/gov't aren't currently using the network like that or if the network's never really clogged when they do use it, why create a special privelege?
Consider the case where the doctor was performing surgery over the Internet or something (I forget the specifics of that case.) But I sure hope to hell that in an emergency something like that would have priority over your pr0n. They have the same systems set up on all public transportation and communication mediums, why should the Internet be any different?
As opposed to your theoretical case of a doctor doing surgery over the internet, let's look at what happens in real-time videoconferencing, which we could argue is much less important. For such a situation, companies contract through a provider like Quest or (previously) Global Crossing. They guarantee secure, consistent high-speed networking for these sorts of purposes over proprietary high-speed fiber networks. Any medical work being done, even just real-time advice during surgery, would have to be provided over these sorts of networks to truly be reliable. If I were going under the knife, I wouldn't want my innerds subject to the vagaries of the internet. I'd want a tightly controlled, proprietary connection that can't suffer from a DoS attack. Your theoretical surgery case, a common one seen, presupposes that the net should be all things to all people when that's simply not the case. For true life & death situations like surgery, or situations where security is paramount like corporate conferences or military communications, owned and controlled solutions are still the best answer. This is why proprietary fiber and MILnet exist - because for some purposes the internet is simply not appropriate, or not yet ready.
I'm simply arguing that before we start creating "important people only" lanes on our information superhighway, we consider how that closes off other avenues of innovation for the network.
As I see it, preserving the end to end, nondiscriminatory nature of the internet backbone is more important than any current concern about national security or natural disaster response. Creating preferences for any group, no matter how worthy the group or the motive, undermines the essence of what makes the internet a good network and creates opportunities for abuse. Just to touch on a couple points & questions:
In the future we'll see lots of this. We'll see people coming to us or to the gov't with lots of good reasons for discriminating content on the net. National security. Preserving copyright. Stopping kiddie porn. All putatively good motives, but nobody's seeing that the cure, perfect network control, is worse than the disease. It puts innovation in a box and lets our current interests and concerns block what can be done with the internet in the future, and in return all we get is a network that's little more than a fancy mail-order catalog.
if face == spite (nose = 0);
...'cause I'm never going to get all the drool out of my current keyboard.
It's torture to sit across the pond & watch those damn Euros get to play with all those toys while I slave away. May they all choke on Nutella sandwiches.
Yes, I'm aware of that. Just thought I'd throw out another problem in another part of the government to show that security issues tend to be systemic across the gov't.
And with the DoI being in charge of federal agencies like the Natl Park Service, the Forest Service, Fish & Wildlands, federal payroll & accounting, farm issues, etc etc etc, it's silly to argue that the preservation of the integrity of our country's internal assets is more or less important than the military's responsibilities. Wildfires, hurricanes, crop failures - lives are in the balance in those situations too, no?
Um, that would be the point in having all those open sockets behind a firewall.
Not about the Air Force or MS, but related.
The Dep't of the Interior's networks & web sites are now just coming back up, after being shut down for over 2 months by court order due to an almost complete lack of security on the network that allowed virtually anyone with a port sniffer to get into the Indian Trust Database -- a terrible failure of their IT, and a wonderful example of how exposed & poorly run many government networks are. CNN has a short summary.
The interesting story here is that my mom (a Nat'l Park Service employee) was recently given a service award for letting the accounting people go to her house & use her computer at home (which I set up, and is secure, running WinXP behind a Linksys BFSR41 routed switch w/ firewall) to install software to make payments to contractors, do office supply, etc.
Interior deserved what they got & should have had their shit together, but the result was over 2 months of torture for almost every DoI employee. It's fearsome, though, that a firewalled home connection could be more secure than government and military networks. I dunno about the military, but Interior is apparently desperate for decent IT support.
1. The CIA, including its precursors, has only existed since WWII.
2. It's the JOB of our elected congressional officials to oversee & regulate the functions of ALL the government, including the intelligence agencies. You don't have to be a veteran spook to see a waste when the CIA spends tens of thousands of dollars for information that's published in some Pakistani daily paper.
You met someone once whose job it was to search the net for the CIA? Congratulations.
Mundie succeeds in jamming his foot into his mouth every time he speaks. This is the "Chief Technical Officer" of MS? The only buzz this guy is part of is that of the vibrator stuck up his arse. Almost EVERYTHING he's quoted as saying here is wrong on its face.
"The problem with general public license advocates is that they don't understand that people need the opportunity to commercialize software," Mundie said, attacking the notion of open-source software.
*in my best McNeil voice* WRONG! It is MS that feels that need, but they shouldn't include all of us in their desires. The GPL is just one of millions of licences that allows the creator(s) to control the future use of their creation. If MS gets to license its works on whatevere terms they wish, why not Torvalds & Stallman? Do they have less rights to regulate their products through a license simply because they are not a public company and choose to work for the good of their community rather than for profit? Nobody is forced to release software under the GPL who hasn't already decided to incorporate GPLed products into their own works. The Linux kernel is a creation, initially at least, of Linus Torvalds. Apparently he felt no need to commercialize his software, or he would not have utilized the GPL.
"If there is not commercialization there, a company can only exist based on ancillary manufacturing or services. If commercialization was cut down, investors would not support research and development in the IT sector, less projects would be developed, less taxes paid and the government would have less money to run universities, and all the other things that governments do," said Mundie.
Again, Craig, the GPL is voluntary. If you don't like the restraints it places on commercializing someone else's work, then don't use their work, man! I know, I know, you're not talking to anyone who reads Slashdot. You're a smart cookie. You're talking to governments, mostly conservative folks, trying to make the GPL sound like the technological equivalent of a hippie colony. But it's not. It's just another license. If you don't like the GPL, don't use it and don't incorporate software that exists under it in your products. All your words begin to sound more and more like your complaining about how a certain license is preventing you from "embracing & extending" Apache/Linux/Samba/KDE. Again, if you don't like the license all our stuff is released under, then go & WRITE YOUR OWN SOFTWARE, instead of complaining about how you can't take ours & make money off it.
And that last comment about taxes is cheap and manipulative and any elected official worth his salt should be insulted by it. The last consideration of any decent government in deciding whether people have rights to control the uses of the things they create should be whether or not it fills the government coffers.
"Rather than form a federation with Microsoft and work with what we had already created, there was this notion that the world should be offered an alternative," Mundie said.
Heh heh. Thanks Craig, but we've known for quite a while how Microsoft feels about alternatives.
"What we have done with PCs so far is not natural. In the future we will be moving towards technologies which allow us to capture the things we do in our lives," Mundie said, forecasting a wider dissemination of stylus-based computing equipment.
"Increasingly we will be writing on our computers like we write on paper," he said.
And, in the anthropological sense, writing is somehow "more natural" than pointing & clicking with a mouse? I know we all can't go back & ask the first person who grabbed a stick, dipped it in the latest kill's blood & started making marks on the wall, but considering the years needed to teach people how to read & write and comparing that to the hour or two it takes for a person to learn to use a keyboard & mouse to do the same thing with a PC, this statement just looks like more advertising. I wonder how many words per minute Mr. Mundie can write on his tablet? I can do about 90 on a keyboard myself. Scads of people have come out with tablets before -- what makes you think you're going to change the world with yours?
OK Slashdot Children, it's like this:
You are NOT the nexus of this site. The idea that your feelings/opinions/rants are the reason people come here is, while correct in a narrow sense, wrongheaded in scope as far as costs are concerned. You're only providing Slashdot content inasmuch as they're providing you with an opportunity to state your opinion and be part of a community, so call it even on that score. How much you decide to use that opportunity is your concern, not theirs.
But the fact that you've decided to stand on the Slashdot soapbox to state your views creates no requirement for Slashdot to give you any concern or compensation. And in a social sense, I think that just the fact that we get to put our opinions in front of 300 THOUSAND readers is benefit enough to us, no? My point: stop bitching about wanting discounts or a cut of the pie because you fscking post here. So do a few hundred thousand other people.
Slashdot content, through news events and user posts about those events, has always been free, and is going to stay free, with more (and more intrusive) ads. The tech expertise, hardware, software development, content control, and power costs have never been free. VA's been shouldering that from the get-go for ALL OF YOU. God forbid they ask you ungrateful bitches, "Please, please, let us remain solvent so we can provide you this service!?!?". How repugnant of someone to seek to cover the costs, no less get some profit, from a forum that's obviously popular as one of the widest-read tech/geek forums in the world.
Discounts for highly moderated posts? Whiny flames about how 'net ads don't work? Fsck all of you.
Sorry to pull a Johnny Cochran, but if they can't make it pay, it's gonna go away. Me, I'll be paying as soon as they get a credit card account going. If you, the internet user, want the internet to thrive you need to realize that the content you're interested in has value and is worth paying for. If you can't put up for what you want to see, then don't expect anything of value for you to look at on this fancy info superhighway thingie. Go on, be a cheapskate. Go ahead & leave it to MS, AOL & Amazon to become one big high-tech fscking mail-order catalog. For you cheap bastards out there you'll just be getting what you deserve.
The states' call for an open-source version of Internet Explorer would destroy "any incentive for Microsoft to invest in the creation of such new versions," Microsoft said.
Um, if IE were open-sourced they wouldn't HAVE to invest in jack. Those who use it and are interested in improving it themselves would develop it. It's that MS wouldn't get to control its development that is the problem for them.
It's hilarious that MS can be convicted of being a monopolist and still face such nonexistent regulations. It's as if you convicted a man of murder & robbery, let him off with a warning, then let him keep the gun because, after all, it is his gun and how's he going to earn money without it in the future? Back in the days of Standard Oil you could really get punished if you abused your monopoly. Ah, but this is the "information age". You can have it if you ask me.
Why is it, on Slashdot, that when I get moderated as both insightful AND flamebait, that flamebait is what get's shown next to the post?
Sure, this is a good thing for the kid, but is it ethical for a doc to help a woman who's likely to be senile by the time her kids are in elementary school overcome such disadvantages and give birth, by any means?
Well, guess it's her choice, bad though it may be. Just 10 years ago she might've just gotten a hysterectomy, adopted, and moved on. Personally, I just don't understand the NEED to have your own kids. In a world where needy kids need to be adopted, it strikes me as more than a little self-centered to see high-tech IVF methods as NEEDED so you can have YOUR baby.
It's like the sow in the midwest that had 7 kids, half of them retarded. They weren't a sign from God, sweetie. The infertility was the sign from God. Whatever though. Do what you like. Just don't ever expect my insurance payments to cover it.
I'm going to disagree here, not necessarily with your conclusion (that RIAA companies are dinosaurs) but with your rationale that it's because CDs are a thing of the past.
Note that, in the story here, RIAA companies sold almost $14 BILLION in CDs. People are buying these things, and by the truckloads. Not only that, the net has not yet even begun to be able to handle mass-scale trading & purchase of uncompressed (or very low-compressed) audiophile-quality music. I use Morpheus & yet still buy many CDs because MP3, though a nice format, isn't perfect, either for audio quality or portability (yet). The CD, I would project, still has at least 20 years life ahead of itself as a popular format, and probably 50-100 years as an archival format - hell, look at records, considered by many audiophiles to be the way to go for recordings because of their analog nature.
Where I agree with your conclusion that the music industry as a corporate entity is eventually doomed is in the fact that the net provides a group of musicians and a small management team to work independantly on creation & promotion of its music, allowing the market (us) to decide what we like. Huzzah for technology! We lose the middlemen, and their need to take their fat cut right out of the musician's livelihood. It'll happen when the musicians get smart enough about the technology and the marketing to do it themselves. If RIAA companies think they have problems now, they haven't seen anything until musicians realize they don't need them, their bloated costs, or their slave-like contracts.
Jeez don't piss yourself, man. It was just my .sig. See?
Dear Mr. Dyas,
Due to the continual evolution of SBC/Pacific Bell as the leading (and now only) carrier of DSL services in the region, it is necessary to adjust your rate to the current market standard (which we now set) to retain profitability (the definition of which is controlled by our board).
Your new rate, as of June 2002 will be *insert whatever I pay now, doubled*. Rest assured that through our attempts to fleece you for all you're worth now that we're the only game in town, you can *ahem* rely *ahem* on SBC's current standard of *ahem* service *ahem*.
Yours Sincerely,
Ben Dover
Vice President of Broadband Services
SBC / Pacific Bell, Inc.
Dubya's techno, glitter-paint, party animal alter-ego.
I think it's brilliant.
They're pointing out to the judge that both systems (the internet and the Morpheus system running on the net) allow anonymous, back & forth sharing of files with absolutely no control over IP at any point in the transactions. This point along with the fact that it's the action in using such a tool that's illegal (not the tool itself) are both arguments that, despite reversals in the DeCSS & Napster cases, still have not received proper attention from the court or responses from the plaintiffs. If people can use VCRs to copy TV shows or CD-R drives to copy CDs and it's OK, why can't I download music I already own from Morpheus? I've done it dozens of times -- it's easier than ripping it from CD if I only want to listen to a song or two from something I own. Not even Morpheus is aware of the extent or lack thereof of a legal use for their product. As long as one exists and appears to be being exercised though, they should be allowed to remain in business.
WHY would Morpheus/Gnutella/Grokster/etc or Napster be illegal? The companies do nothing to promote violations of the law other than provide a forum in which you can share data. The net does the same thing -- people provide HTML & other sorts of files & people download them. People do all sorts of illegal things on the net -- scam others, put up child porno, etc, and they should be pursued. We shouldn't shut down the net -- of course not. If I did any of those things I'd be breaking the law, just as I would be if I pirated music over the net. Yet with the net it's me that's performing an illegal act and on Morpheus it's the program's (and the company's) fault. Why the difference? If one is illegal then the other must be, right? Maybe my argument's simplistic, I don't know. But I think they have a point.
I do agree with it being nice if they could use old computers in the schools, and I also agree that Linux is what cost-conscious schools should be doing (if they can) or at least looking into. However, anyone who's ever supported a large-scale network of computers (not me, but I know those who do) knows that standardization and knowing, at least to some exent, what to expect with each box is critical to providing decent support, and without decent support you end up with dozens of refurbished paperweights for teacher's desks.
Where I disagree is that somehow teachers, making about $30k a year mind you and not necessarily as familiar with a saudering iron or a computer's innards as you & I, should be expected to work with old hardware & make it do something.
If your school is full of teachers who aren't willing or competent enough to do something productive with 5 or 6 year old PCs - then maybe you need to start asking if they're competent enough to teach your kids other subjects?
Where do you get this? Ms. Brown the english teacher should know how to cobble together a good PC from 2-3 broken ones, then install Linux on it? She majored in English & got a credential. She's qualified to do that, not fix computers. The comment above is a great example of the anti-teacher rhetoric that the uninformed love to sling at the public schools. You expect them to be everything from social workers to personal mentors to substitute parents for your kids, but you don't want to pay them more than $40K a year.
Sure, sure, maybe the computer class teachers (probably no more than 2-3 in a normal high school) might be able to do something with some machines, but do you expect them, on their own time in the evenings at home, to work on PCs constantly? They want personal lives too. Or do you only think that personal lives are reserved for those who work in the private sector?
It's a much more complicated problem than "lazy teachers", and alienating the group of people you want to help do their job is never a good way to go about solving it.
The job of Freddy J. Bumfuck High School down the street is to teach things like reading, writing, math, history, biology, physics, chemistry, etc, not to make dozens of computers, all different mind you, function. It's a high school for God's sake, not ITT Tech. 99% of schools have enough trouble with the basics to bother teaching kids how to be computer repair people. The idea that you can throw your useless piles of 10+ year-old hardware their way and have them do something with it is idealistic to the point of silliness.
I'm amazed at the naivete of this. You're computer people dammit, doesn't "Garbage In Garbage Out" mean anything to you?