isn't this a dream come true? now you can play star trek and have your computer react at your movements when you just smoothly touch the keyboard... wow:)
ALso, I can only imagine IF such keyboard becomes wide spread, how many beautiful UI would be designed in the free software community.. it's just a matter of adding new "meta" things to the "mouse" movements... (I want to kill -9 applications by closing my fist like the Emperor in Star Wars - the Return of the Jedi.. "we will kill them...")
why in the free software..? because I'm quite sure that a UI for a closed-source OS will take much longer time to spread - or just much more money.
I fear that public well-known associations like Google won't even try to ignore him... if so many lawsuits are filed, it means that a lot of them are looked at by judges.
what is the purpose of a lawsuit here? what do you feed on judges when they are kids, Common Sense or what?
I should tell you.. this is one of the best kind of stories that people from all over the world tell about Americans. This is what makes a country look stupid.
Seriously, now: what if Google just won't care about the lawsuit? Will they shut it down for that? What if google's workers won't shut it down? Will they go and kill them?
I think civil disobedience IS an option over here.. when Judges' Common Sense reeaches zero (just for listening to such a lawsuit!), something must be done.
I would be ashamed to live in such a country... really.. (Now I'll be modded down for that, I know. But I'll sue you:) )
seriously, Microsoft has enough resources to decide to *pay* 1000 people for 5 years to come up with something great, secure, smart, whatever. And just because they would work for Microsoft, it doesn't mean that they are incapable to work or that they are just dumb ignorants. People are people.
The point is: if the GNU/Linux and free software movement want to avoid a monopoly to take place, then new utilities, new standards and new concepts need to be invented. We need to use our resources, our mind, to *create*. The day that that community will stop chasing Microsoft because GNU/Linux and free software standards are *BETTER* than Microsoft's, then we will have improvement.
Microsoft philosophy is "embrace and extend".. and this leaves little space for new ideas developed for business reasons - sooner or later they'll show up with a paycheck and buy your company, your software, your ideas. They can. But they have a weak point: they are slaves of their own power. They cannot just stop everything and fix their mistakes. They need to sell more software to get more money to pay for the marketing/ads/media/White House financing/whatever. They are basically being eaten by their own stomach. No longer is to sell good and for-everyone software their goal. Now they have to sell - period. No matter what, no matter how, no matter the way to get their 'competitors' out of the way. Once they were the savers from IBM's monopoly. Now IBM is our "hero".. but the improvement of the Free Software community is their not-for-money-alone philosophy. This will break the cycle of monopolists that succeed every few years.
Right now 'we' (the free software community) are just trying to stay compatible with them - and this lets them having the steering wheel hold tight. Think about samba, openoffice that "can read and write microsoft word documents", instant messaging clients, file servers, authentication, protocols, and so on. Sure they are excellent applications. And I know that the concepts are standards, the protocols are well-defined, the files format is well-known.
Unfortunately, right now the trend in the GNU/Linux and free software community is just to be as compatible as possible with them. And this is *NOT* the way to go. It is ok as long as we just want to be number #2 or as long as they are harmless (like they were until now), but it is not ok when they can dictate the rules.
Now, Microsoft's position as a monopoly gives them the "right" to do whatever they can to "outsmart" or plain wipe out the independent software community. Palladium, the licensing of Windows, whatever else they'll come up with - all that is a sign of what is the new trend.
Microsoft doesn't consider the free software community as "kids" anymore. They understood that there is smart people in there. They understand that this will cause troubles to them if they don't act soon.
For example, how long will pass before they'll give software houses that develop software for Microsoft Windows draconian restrictions, for example the request to hire people that don't write "free software" even in their spare time? Scary? Impossible?...you sure? I fear that they'll soon try to crack down on the people that write free software. Those people need to eat and live. Few of them can sustain themselves with their free software - but they do it for fun, and maybe have a regular job as a closed source programmer. What happens when their private life will be threatened (like getting fired) by the fact that they contribute to the Free Software community?
Back on topic, I was digressing - sorry.
The point, again, is that the Free Software community needs to unite and join resources to come up with new ideas that are superior to those that circulate right now - and are monopolyzed by Microsoft.
Just an idea: do you know Microsoft Visio? It's an excellent software. Nothing _free_ like it is as powerful as Visio. Creating something like that would mean chase their standard, at the beginning. But, what then? Go on - create something like that and make it more useful. Join it with a web framework, design a new kind of office environment where the PCs have no hard disk but a flash ROM with linux on it, and all the rest is loaded from a central server. Make the spare CPU cycles and RAM in every idle PC act as a single, parallel-processing machine a-la-MOSIX (yes OpenMOSIX cannot share ram, it was just an example).
Then sell it. Sell assistance. Follow the GNU license, give the source code away. Teach it to young people. Create a no-profit and donate the spare money to free- software houses. Show how your idea IS superior and gives better performaces/value/whatever. It will take time, surely - better start as soon as possible.
Ok it may be a bad, naive idea, I do not even call myself a programmer. But I'm learning it. And I'm learning it for free (as education should be) thanks to the Free Software community.
This is - for now - my contribution.
Thanks to all the Free Software coders that helped my learning progress.
...probably there are no more than a couple hundred users using IRC at the same time around the world. All the others are bots, fake, trolls, IA trying to understand the human beings, and so on...
right now one p4 is enough. But if you have a couple dozen spare, in a year you'll need to use at least 2 of them together. Two years later you'll need to use 4 or maybe more. And so on. When the first one dies, you replace it.
Although I've never seen a processor 'die'... I still have 10-years old computers and processors running fine.
...and those evil linux 'hackers' in China will be prosecuted, then a joint-venture will pop up between China and the US to prosecute everything that has the word 'hacking' into it - expecially the linux kernel.
Damn, look at those linux guys, they have hacking also in the core of their operating system! thank god Palladium will save us.
I really hope that 'xbox hackers' will release their modifications and code under the GPL, thus crippling any effort Microsoft can do to 'embrace and extend' (a.k.a. 'steal') their code.
...and buy Microsoft Windows source code! I bet the GNU project can handle that.
No wait, they said it's too dangerous for national security to publish it. Whops.:)
a web-marketing company came to me...
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...and, among other (really) interesting services (plus a detailed analysis of a proposal website), slightly proposed me to start a 'marketing campaign'.
what they 'said' (they make me understand the concept, but they never explicitly said it) was something like:
"We could send information about your company to users that could potentially be interested in your product, using some lists of e-mail addresses..."
And they asked for a price. Which wasn't that big.
So here is how spammers get paid: by convincing marketers that spam "might" be poiting customer attention to a website/product. And marketers go trying to convince CEOs and those who buy their services.
After all, spammers gets a little amount of money: why not try that, if it will cost you only few hundred bucks? from a company point of view, that's nothing.
And here the spammers get more and more money.
What I think would be needed is an article on some business-oriented magazine (say, the Economist, the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal) that explicitly *tells* CEOs and other managers WHY AVOIDING SPAM MAKES YOU SAVE MONEY (sound like a spam mail, doesn't it?:) ) or something like that.
Like talking to them with their own language. No need to talk about bandwidth, e-mail, filtering, regexp. Just concepts.
Is anyone willing to help me write such an article? maybe someone with connections in such business-oriented newspapers...
same stuff. I am talking about USING AN EXISTING MIRROR, not setting up a new one. And I refuse to believe that NO MIRROR have enough bandwidth to handle it.
wouldn't be better to change the 'main' openbsd site to be one of its current mirror? I suppose that a mirror has better chances to be managed with motivation and skill, surely more than a solaris box in a university actually has.
I wonder what will happen if such mr. Perens refuses to pay the fine for the DMCA violation. What will happen? Will they put him in jail for civil disobedience?
I think an individual has the right to disobey to a law that he thinks it's not only useless, but also damaging to the community. If you think this is never true, think about that: 30 years ago black people could not sit in the front part of a bus. Was it right? No. It was a law that didn't affect anyone individually if it was not obeyed.
I know the issue is big, those are only my thoughts. I hope mr. Perens will take a stand against DMCA, and I hope that the media will farily cover this situation.
I also hope for my personal pig to start flying, but that's anoter story.
can Microsoft be sued if terrorits use holes in M$ operating systems to do cyberspace attacks that can cause real victims?..thinking about the death penality introduced for "hackers" guilty of death of people via computer attacks..
on the other hand, YES I KNOW that gnu/linux, BSDs, etc. have holes, but who're you going to sue for linux? the owner of the name 'linux'...? Or maybe m$ cannot be sued because of their EULA that denies any responsibiliy...?
...means that who does that (reducing technology use) is more toward a totalitarism than toward freedom? Could we say that going after customers with lawsuits or enforcing copyright protection on digital media is "going agains the free spread of technology"?
nah.. just a paper, just thoughts. I fear that nothing will change...
[this post will probably be modded as 'troll', anyway]
there's plenty of food for the entire human being (as reported by the recent FAO meeting) but people are starving because feeding the poor doesn't pay back.
there's plenty of money for the simputer but it has financial issues because, well, poor people won't put money into the economy of the internet.
1. I'd better cast() that $xxx into $x to persuade my CEO in doing that. [note: they look like variables... pun intended]
3. you're saying that users need to be sharp to click where they are told to? naah... they used dumb terminals for as/400 for ages over there.. THOSE were pretty nasty to use, and still "easy".
5. norton for 10$/user... do you have more than a couple thousand users? what I was allowed to do was just get a small number of licenses "to try".. and not to spend too much. oh well.
3. who needs to train users on linux? they just have to click there. and there.
4. you're lucky or you never had intense microsoft os use
5. mcafee 10$ per machine? in my dreams. Here (italy) mcafee enterprise costed us much more, like 60 euros per machine (license only).
but I think we're discussing about nothing.. I'm sure you managed to have cloned installation services, and that your XPs works great. but by reading other./ posts, I'm not assuming that's common behavior. you might be luckyer than you think:)
1. interesting. sure you can deploy windows xp installation around without, say, norton ghost..?
2. do you really know what's happening? excellent! I'm not talking about regular issues, anyway - I'm talking about those unpredictable things that sometimes happens. go read other comments on this thread.
3. who said 2500$ laptop? and, by the way - 300$ of saving over 500 machines are quite a nice amount of money
4. ever played with active directory? if yes, how many times you got lost and/or screwed up something?
5. mcafee - right. if money wasn't my primary issue, I wouldn't be talking about that at all:)
Slashdot Mirror
isn't this a dream come true? now you can play star trek and have your computer react at your movements when you just smoothly touch the keyboard... wow :)
ALso, I can only imagine IF such keyboard becomes wide spread, how many beautiful UI would be designed in the free software community.. it's just a matter of adding new "meta" things to the "mouse" movements...
(I want to kill -9 applications by closing my fist like the Emperor in Star Wars - the Return of the Jedi.. "we will kill them...")
why in the free software..? because I'm quite sure that a UI for a closed-source OS will take much longer time to spread - or just much more money.
cool.
I fear that public well-known associations like Google won't even try to ignore him... if so many lawsuits are filed, it means that a lot of them are looked at by judges.
..for designing the Internet.
:) )
what is the purpose of a lawsuit here? what do you feed on judges when they are kids, Common Sense or what?
I should tell you.. this is one of the best kind of stories that people from all over the world tell about Americans. This is what makes a country look stupid.
Seriously, now: what if Google just won't care about the lawsuit? Will they shut it down for that? What if google's workers won't shut it down? Will they go and kill them?
I think civil disobedience IS an option over here.. when Judges' Common Sense reeaches zero (just for listening to such a lawsuit!), something must be done.
I would be ashamed to live in such a country... really.. (Now I'll be modded down for that, I know. But I'll sue you
seriously, Microsoft has enough resources to decide to *pay* 1000 people for 5 years to come up with something great, secure, smart, whatever. And just because they would work for Microsoft, it doesn't mean that they are incapable to work or that they are just dumb ignorants. People are people.
...you sure?
The point is: if the GNU/Linux and free software movement want to avoid a monopoly to take place, then new utilities, new standards and new concepts need to be invented. We need to use our resources, our mind, to *create*. The day that that community will stop chasing Microsoft because GNU/Linux and free software standards are *BETTER* than Microsoft's, then we will have improvement.
Microsoft philosophy is "embrace and extend".. and this leaves little space for new ideas developed for business reasons - sooner or later they'll show up with a paycheck and buy your company, your software, your ideas. They can.
But they have a weak point: they are slaves of their own power. They cannot just stop everything and fix their mistakes. They need to sell more software to get more money to pay for the marketing/ads/media/White House financing/whatever. They are basically being eaten by their own stomach. No longer is to sell good and for-everyone software their goal. Now they have to sell - period. No matter what, no matter how, no matter the way to get their 'competitors' out of the way.
Once they were the savers from IBM's monopoly. Now IBM is our "hero".. but the improvement of the Free Software community is their not-for-money-alone philosophy. This will break the cycle of monopolists that succeed every few years.
Right now 'we' (the free software community) are just trying to stay compatible with them - and this lets them having the steering wheel hold tight.
Think about samba, openoffice that "can read and write microsoft word documents", instant messaging clients, file servers, authentication, protocols, and so on. Sure they are excellent applications. And I know that the concepts are standards, the protocols are well-defined, the files format is well-known.
Unfortunately, right now the trend in the GNU/Linux and free software community is just to be as compatible as possible with them. And this is *NOT* the way to go. It is ok as long as we just want to be number #2 or as long as they are harmless (like they were until now), but it is not ok when they can dictate the rules.
Now, Microsoft's position as a monopoly gives them the "right" to do whatever they can to "outsmart" or plain wipe out the independent software community. Palladium, the licensing of Windows, whatever else they'll come up with - all that is a sign of what is the new trend.
Microsoft doesn't consider the free software community as "kids" anymore. They understood that there is smart people in there. They understand that this will cause troubles to them if they don't act soon.
For example, how long will pass before they'll give software houses that develop software for Microsoft Windows draconian restrictions, for example the request to hire people that don't write "free software" even in their spare time? Scary? Impossible?
I fear that they'll soon try to crack down on the people that write free software. Those people need to eat and live. Few of them can sustain themselves with their free software - but they do it for fun, and maybe have a regular job as a closed source programmer. What happens when their private life will be threatened (like getting fired) by the fact that they contribute to the Free Software community?
Back on topic, I was digressing - sorry.
The point, again, is that the Free Software community needs to unite and join resources to come up with new ideas that are superior to those that circulate right now - and are monopolyzed by Microsoft.
Just an idea: do you know Microsoft Visio? It's an excellent software. Nothing _free_ like it is as powerful as Visio. Creating something like that would mean chase their standard, at the beginning. But, what then? Go on - create something like that and make it more useful. Join it with a web framework, design a new kind of office environment where the PCs have no hard disk but a flash ROM with linux on it, and all the rest is loaded from a central server. Make the spare CPU cycles and RAM in every idle PC act as a single, parallel-processing machine a-la-MOSIX (yes OpenMOSIX cannot share ram, it was just an example).
Then sell it. Sell assistance. Follow the GNU license, give the source code away. Teach it to young people. Create a no-profit and donate the spare money to free- software houses. Show how your idea IS superior and gives better performaces/value/whatever. It will take time, surely - better start as soon as possible.
Ok it may be a bad, naive idea, I do not even call myself a programmer. But I'm learning it. And I'm learning it for free (as education should be) thanks to the Free Software community.
This is - for now - my contribution.
Thanks to all the Free Software coders that helped my learning progress.
[and sorry for the over-long comment]
...probably there are no more than a couple hundred users using IRC at the same time around the world. All the others are bots, fake, trolls, IA trying to understand the human beings, and so on...
right now one p4 is enough. But if you have a couple dozen spare, in a year you'll need to use at least 2 of them together. Two years later you'll need to use 4 or maybe more. And so on. When the first one dies, you replace it.
Although I've never seen a processor 'die'... I still have 10-years old computers and processors running fine.
Nice try though.
..start buying 'old' processors and set up your own cluster.. you won't need new CPU for a while :)
.. is 42. But to understand that you'll have to project that flash of light to a surface, then you'll clearly see a fourty-two appearing.
[don't mod me if you haven't read the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy]...
[since Bandwidth it's a sort of new God..]
:) ... not to mention the RIAA coming to meet you in person while you're sharing.
It would be cool to hog bandwidth with cellphones
...and those evil linux 'hackers' in China will be prosecuted, then a joint-venture will pop up between China and the US to prosecute everything that has the word 'hacking' into it - expecially the linux kernel.
:)
Damn, look at those linux guys, they have hacking also in the core of their operating system! thank god Palladium will save us.
now let's see your sense of humour
I really hope that 'xbox hackers' will release their modifications and code under the GPL, thus crippling any effort Microsoft can do to 'embrace and extend' (a.k.a. 'steal') their code.
...and buy Microsoft Windows source code! I bet the GNU project can handle that.
:)
No wait, they said it's too dangerous for national security to publish it. Whops.
...and, among other (really) interesting services (plus a detailed analysis of a proposal website), slightly proposed me to start a 'marketing campaign'.
:) ) or something like that.
what they 'said' (they make me understand the concept, but they never explicitly said it) was something like:
"We could send information about your company to users that could potentially be interested in your product, using some lists of e-mail addresses..."
And they asked for a price. Which wasn't that big.
So here is how spammers get paid: by convincing marketers that spam "might" be poiting customer attention to a website/product. And marketers go trying to convince CEOs and those who buy their services.
After all, spammers gets a little amount of money: why not try that, if it will cost you only few hundred bucks? from a company point of view, that's nothing.
And here the spammers get more and more money.
What I think would be needed is an article on some business-oriented magazine (say, the Economist, the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal) that explicitly *tells* CEOs and other managers WHY AVOIDING SPAM MAKES YOU SAVE MONEY (sound like a spam mail, doesn't it?
Like talking to them with their own language. No need to talk about bandwidth, e-mail, filtering, regexp. Just concepts.
Is anyone willing to help me write such an article? maybe someone with connections in such business-oriented newspapers...
same stuff. I am talking about USING AN EXISTING MIRROR, not setting up a new one. And I refuse to believe that NO MIRROR have enough bandwidth to handle it.
wouldn't be better to change the 'main' openbsd site to be one of its current mirror?
I suppose that a mirror has better chances to be managed with motivation and skill, surely more than a solaris box in a university actually has.
also, the mirror should run openbsd itself...
...and you're asking this on slashdot? haha good one :))
[YES I'm ironic, don't bother mod me down if you didn't get it]
I wonder what will happen if such mr. Perens refuses to pay the fine for the DMCA violation. What will happen? Will they put him in jail for civil disobedience?
I think an individual has the right to disobey to a law that he thinks it's not only useless, but also damaging to the community. If you think this is never true, think about that: 30 years ago black people could not sit in the front part of a bus. Was it right? No. It was a law that didn't affect anyone individually if it was not obeyed.
I know the issue is big, those are only my thoughts. I hope mr. Perens will take a stand against DMCA, and I hope that the media will farily cover this situation.
I also hope for my personal pig to start flying, but that's anoter story.
can Microsoft be sued if terrorits use holes in M$ operating systems to do cyberspace attacks that can cause real victims? ..thinking about the death penality introduced for "hackers" guilty of death of people via computer attacks..
on the other hand, YES I KNOW that gnu/linux, BSDs, etc. have holes, but who're you going to sue for linux? the owner of the name 'linux'...? Or maybe m$ cannot be sued because of their EULA that denies any responsibiliy...?
funny..
...means that who does that (reducing technology use) is more toward a totalitarism than toward freedom? Could we say that going after customers with lawsuits or enforcing copyright protection on digital media is "going agains the free spread of technology"?
nah.. just a paper, just thoughts. I fear that nothing will change...
[this post will probably be modded as 'troll', anyway]
a slashdot post. what about you?
there's plenty of food for the entire human being (as reported by the recent FAO meeting) but people are starving because feeding the poor doesn't pay back.
there's plenty of money for the simputer but it has financial issues because, well, poor people won't put money into the economy of the internet.
so sad.
1. I'd better cast() that $xxx into $x to persuade my CEO in doing that. [note: they look like variables... pun intended]
:)
3. you're saying that users need to be sharp to click where they are told to? naah... they used dumb terminals for as/400 for ages over there.. THOSE were pretty nasty to use, and still "easy".
5. norton for 10$/user... do you have more than a couple thousand users? what I was allowed to do was just get a small number of licenses "to try".. and not to spend too much. oh well.
nice talking to you
1. hardware device = money
./ posts, I'm not assuming that's common behavior. you might be luckyer than you think :)
3. who needs to train users on linux? they just have to click there. and there.
4. you're lucky or you never had intense microsoft os use
5. mcafee 10$ per machine? in my dreams. Here (italy) mcafee enterprise costed us much more, like 60 euros per machine (license only).
but I think we're discussing about nothing.. I'm sure you managed to have cloned installation services, and that your XPs works great. but by reading other
heh that's fun
:)
1. interesting. sure you can deploy windows xp installation around without, say, norton ghost..?
2. do you really know what's happening? excellent! I'm not talking about regular issues, anyway - I'm talking about those unpredictable things that sometimes happens. go read other comments on this thread.
3. who said 2500$ laptop? and, by the way - 300$ of saving over 500 machines are quite a nice amount of money
4. ever played with active directory? if yes, how many times you got lost and/or screwed up something?
5. mcafee - right. if money wasn't my primary issue, I wouldn't be talking about that at all