agreed.. SAP is a huge, enormous database that tends to become alive sometimes... so you got to be able to control it and to use it ONLY for what you need. SAP people wants you to use it for e-mail, agenda, notebook, PDM, whatever. If you keep it tight it is really useful. If you let it blow, you're fucked up.
real advantage of linux on desktop? (in no particular order) 1. can be tweaked once to suit exactly your needs and then copied over and over again over different machines (even "old" and "slow" ones) 2. you know what's happening, where, and how to fix it 3. costs 4. it's tough for regular users to install their crappy applications and then ask YOU to fix them 5. viruses 6. happyness and joy over the entire universe:)
I don't trust XP because I'm not confident on what it's going to do, what is it doing, and HOW. Win2k is pretty settled down - with the microsoft's kb, websites, tweaks and some experience with microsoft operating systems you know more or less what's happening inside the machine. Plus, win2k has been around for enough time to let people develop some useful applications that runs on it.
Now, XP has a fairly new approach to the concept of "operating system"; users, even users who wants to, have little chances to understand what's happening. I'm not talking about those "errors" that can be fixed by XP itself - I'm talking about strange behaviors that let the system usable, sure, but MAY give complications later on. IMHO, XP it's an OS that doesn't leave enough free space to the user to be considered "affordable" for business use.
Let me explain in another way: I have a quite big amount of machines and users under my Power. With such a quantity of machines, troubles are going to arise much more often than if I had only a couple of dUh-SERS. It's statistic: the more users you have, the more stupid problems that you almost never encountered before are going to arise.
Now, with XP the amount of time you have to spend to "hack" around and inside it to learn where the problem was and how to avoid it, well, it's just not affordable, given the amount of machines I have in my Kingdom. Unless I make my company hire other IT guys, either very well trained (and expensive) or I'd have to train them - and still waste part of my precious time, that I could use in better ways, say, reading their mail.
Using microsoft OS at work is not just like at home when you can click the 'ok' button and forget about what the problem was. in a business you NEED to know why the error did arise, and how to avoid it, and probably how not to make it happen again on another machine - unless you want to go and check each and every machine you have in your business and fix that thing before the CEO hits it. It's a matter of experience (ah! pun): if a window box is configured perfectly, it's not going to give you troubles at all. If you leave even some stupid thing back, well, sooner or later you'll have to spend a great bunch of time fixing it - and trying to understand where the problem is.
Dunno if I made myself clear about that, let me know. The topic here is much more a matter of "feelings": windows's behavior is not scientific, sometimes cannot be predicted.
wait.. I did some work on XP, but nothing that I would call "enough" for me to say "I know where to put my hands if something goes wrong" like I do in win2k. But I've had the definitive impression that it would take too much time and resources to tweak it to make it work smoothly for MY purposes. Also, once that 'tweaking' is done, well, it looks almost like a win2k box, and does the same thing. So - why bother, damnit? why do I have to waste time and energy to work on something that will give me the same thing I already have? What does XP offer to a business users that win2k doesn't? free spyware? [just kidding on that last one]
I know users are stupid. But I think that if they are taught to "click there" to type a letter and to "click there" to go online, well, they will do it and don't complain. users don't have to anything strange. my users were used to use an old as/400 with the black/green dumb-terminal, and didn't complained.
poor users, they won't be able to install their desktop ladies that dance naked. I'm so sorry.
ps: I know linux isn't easy to use as a desktop. But they don't need to use linux - just few, preconfigured, working, easy-to-use apps. Nothing else. They'll play on their PC at home.
mine it's more than "I don't like it and don't even want to try it". I had enough bad times trying to make all our win2k work together and I was lucky because I didn't have to tweak EVERY SINGLE installation of win2k I did. I know that I can manage something by using active directory to tweak at a registry-level every machine that logs into the domain, BUT - doing that requires a lot of time to plan, try, test and develop the tweaking - after the tweaking, basically all the xp machines will 1. look 2. be more ore less...like regular win2k boxen. So why bother? win2k is more than enough.
PLUS: office XP is REALLY bad. I mean, we have an application (SAP) that is CERTIFIED to give back some results as an.xls spreadsheet. Works perfectly in office2000. Doesn't work AT ALL in office XP. Office XP is not fully compatible with office 2000.
So why bother, again? I'm more than happy with win2k. I don't have time, resource AND enough interest to TRY to LEARN windows XP, not even for myself. I've had enough of that crap, and I realized that if I had spent that same much time that I've wasted on microsoft product on Linux instead, we all in our company would have linux desktops with openoffice working smoothly. And I wouldn't be writing those angry slashdot posts:)
No way I'm going to run XP within my company. It's an OS that I don't trust, and haven't had the chance to learn well (and don't want to).
So either I'm going to buy a couple dozen licenses of win2k soon,
OR
I'm going to use the existing licenses and don't care at all about licensing (call it non-violent resistance, whatever)
OR
I'm going to start spreading linux on desktop OSes.
Plus, I don't want to upgrade to the Software Assurance thing, 'cause it's going to cost much more and it's not worthed (office 2000 is WAY better than office XP, and I don't want to upgrade - same for win2k/winXP) if you don't want to upgrade.
In any way, Microsoft will lose one of its customers. And I think I won't be the only one.
Anyone else taking care of a network of more than a couple dozen PCs does think like me?
"Next thing you know they'll want to force customers to upgrade periodically."
Am I wrong or this is the purpose of the new Microsoft Software Assurance licensing program? Not that they force you to upgrade. But when you pay for a year subscription, most businesses will want to upgrade not to waste the money they spent in the Software Assurance, practically forcing their users to update.
Now forgive me if I didn't understand the new Microsoft licensing program, that is just an opinion. Cheers.
I'd rather buy as much hardware as I can right now, before those computers will be mandatory, so I'll be happy for the next 30 years with my 120-old-PC cluster....and probably in 30 years they'll barely play my 3d ripped movies:)
palladium CAN definitively be circumvented. Maybe a mod chip will be required to avoid querying the palladium chip, but it's just hardware. A few days ago I posted a comment here on slashdot, which generated a nice amount of discussion about that.
I understand now that if it's about public key cryptography on the chip it will definitively be a tough job to circumvent it. But it has to be done, no matter if it's illegal under the DMCA.
Some 30 years ago it was illegal for people with skin color different from white to sit in front of a bus. It was the law. Was it right to obey that law?
Mod me down as a troll, mod me down as useless. But I say that it is time to embrace our cyber weapons, our mind, our smartness, and fight out all those absurd laws - by disobeying it. No reason to fight back, definitively not in a court. The best ways to do that are:
don't buy motherboards with palladium chips on it
advise your company not to buy any more microsoft products; instead, to donate a tenth of what they would pay microsoft to open source developers to improve GPL-based software.
boycott Microsoft: don't buy their products, or if they are required, give them away for free. USE COPIES, make them loss revenue on that. Yes it's illegal. But they cannot be stopped legally.
use your brain to find new, better ways to circumvent their protections: being that an 'activation code' or any authoritative chip itself
I know I do sound trollish, but I do firmly think it's time to fight back against that. A law is supposed to protect the people - not the corporations!
last thought - if Palladium gets introduced in the US, and all vendors apply it, and the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent it... do you, GNU users in the United States of America, really want those laws to block your creativity and your freedom? Do you know that other countries will probably not introduce anything like the DMCA, nor implement Palladium? Do you really want to be left alone in a world that will improve GNU systems, stuck on stupid law questions?
interesting explanation. maybe I missed something... I need to further search around and see. I still feel there's something missing here, something that we're missing.
For example, the access to the chip must be controlled by the cpu. There has to be a way to tell the cpu not to check the public certificate (like a JMP, to be clear), or to ignore the response (again, I don't know anything about assembler code, but still you can make the cpu jump a certain part of the code, even if you had to inject it in real-time). I doubt that the binaries will be encrypted.
It's like reading an e-mail that is signed but the signature is wrong. You can read it anyway, it's up to you to believe it or not. Couldn't the same thing be made for CPUs? After all, it's your cpu...
Ok I'll go study it. Thanks for pointing me that, I appreciated a lot.
I doubt internal policies change in less than 24-hrs. But whats more likely is that there is no massive MS conspiracy to use MSNBC to discredit the competition. Whats more likely is that MSNBC has reporters who have the normal biases, and who report accordingly.
Watch out - the writer of the article is John Schoen, "MSNBC Sr. Producer". Do you think that from now on we'll see many pro-linux articles over there?
The article presents numerous *actual* facts: Linux company stock prices have been destroyed; few if any Linux only companies are profitable; many Linux companies have gone out of business. Linux is the number #2 selling server operating system.
Just like saying something like: hey, you're number 2 because (no matter if you are gaining popularity and credibility day by day) more people have my stuff. I think that here MSNBC is making confusion between what GNU/linux (not to mention other free OSes) can give to users, and what the industry is expecting. Surely the article makes some good points, but still MSNBC was supposed to be a news company - not a "Partial News" company.
My point is, again, that what MSNBC did here is *not* lying: they just told part of the truth, and made it seem as they know what they are talking about. Average Joe won't bother go and check out other things. MSNBC is such a big and powerful company that they must have got it right, right?
wait wait - I know that as long as the keys are stored on different locations and cannot be accessed they are safe. But you didn't read my point - what about DISCONNECTED machines?
sure it did. But I don't trust them as the single source of information. Internal policies do change, with time. No matter if they talked badly against Microsoft before... people forget quickly. The article can have some legitimate points itself, but given the source it makes me feel dizzy. Just like reading a bloat against microsoft on a linux magazine counts like nothing to me.
My point was that it should not be such a big new, and surely won't be the only one.
so how do they manage the fact that a computer can be put offline? Do they expect that all computers must be online to run their apps? It's ok to me, if they're going to pay for my broadband line... Seriously, though: IF the key is inside the computer, it can be taken. If not, something won't work. I guess...
do any of you expect that a company like MSNBC partially sponsored/owned/whatever by Microsoft will openly admit that linux is gaining popularity? Come on folks!:)
however, the important thing is that - Microsoft has made its first, big, noticeable step into the media. What's next,
"Linux Users are Demonstrated to be All Criminals; the Word 'Hacking' Appears Even in the Linux Kernel, the Core of the Operating Systems"
Let us not forget that the media are those who forge a public opinion, and a public opinion can push a law or elect certain politics that -guess what?- are sponsored by the same sponsor of the media. And the DMCA is just the beginning.
Lobbying must be made illegal. But it's impossible because those who would make it illegal are those who benefit most of it. Cool, the dog has eaten his own tail.
you know what...? yes, it might be a real issue. And somehow it can be a good thing if that happens. By the time palladium will become established, gnu/linux and the other 'free' (as in speech) operating systems will be at the same time rock stable and full of applications to suit almost all needs. It will never be eradicated away.
Probably, IF the whole palladium thing is real, the IT world will become like "users who USE their computer" and "users who don't know what a computer is (and use palladium)". Which would be a great way to avoid all those clueless boring users out there, begging for more colorful icons on their GNU/linux desktop.
the open source will never be completely eradicated. Even in the worst case scenario, if the US government will make open source illegal because it won't comply with DRM, there will be plenty of places on Earth that will support it.
So I'm not that worried about that - yes, it may be a risk, but I think there are bigger risks around right now (talking about the Patriot Act, or if you want to stay in the software world the patenting issues....)
you have a chip ON THE mobo that tells you if you can run an application. what if you're disconnected from any network? the chip must have some key that, applied to the application, will make it usable. Or will decrypt the application. Or will act as a general key to allow the cpu to run some code.
Still, it is something you have ON YOUR MOTHERBOARD. Like the CSS key... it's there, it will be just a matter of time before those evil linux users will find a way to bypass it, fake it, and run whatever they want. Bringing havoc on the pristine, certified, public-key signed microsoft world. Like a cancer...
....or at least I hope so. I have much more trust in a 15-years old linux north-european user, than in any chunk of Microsoft Engineers that live in their golden world, without Windows (hah! pun!) on the outside world.
However, this palladium-thing looks like the whole.NET thing. Just marketing hypes, nothing else. We've all seen what.NET has become... bugs even before it was launched. Palladium is just a way to scare vendors which would like to try linux.
Those guys at Microsoft are just playing the scary-announcement thing: to scare people before they make the next move. Then make them wait, then provide them a lot of useless marketing, then -before they will realize it- they have been embraced. And the empire extends itself.
Whops! sorry folks, I don't believe a word of this palladium thing until I see a working chip, and I see that it works better than current systems. THEN we can start talking about that, and hacking it. Unless the new DMCA won't make it illegal and punisheable by death;)
cool. if it is all made in the name of profit, I guess that Microsoft could start DoSsing IBM or Walmart if they supply linux on their customers computers, thus 'stealing' profits from Microsoft.
I wonder 1. how much does that thing heat up 2. how in hell I'm going to back up a terabyte from my laptop. I already have there too many things that I care about (I do backups on cd-rw), but with a terabyte of data I'd better have two of them and go with raid.....
...who had a speech last weekend in Italy at the hackmeeting 02
"...for every CD sold only few major artists get 1$. All other artists and musicians do get less than a dollar, if they get any money at all. They say that the rest of the money is spent on advertising the cd; but what if the artists would decide to use the internet as their advertising media? We could develop a system that permits any user to donate a dollar to the author of the song, if the user wants. Actually, a dollar is what an artist already gets..."
And I like to add:
if somebody doesn't like the song, he wouldn't have bought the CD anyway.
a dollar is a very small amount of money; there's a bigger chance that a user is more inclined on donating 20 single dollars to 20 different artists, instead of 20 dollars to a recording company (to have a cd where he likes only a song over 20 songs)
I think also that this will cause more money to go around; and a bigger cash flow will mean more money for a lot of people (but I was sleeping during my world-economics-110 class)
So let's start spreading the word, especially to the music artists we know. Maybe it will change something...
Oh yea, I forgot: I have no ideas on how much can a CD cost in the US. Here in Europe they cost like 20 euros each (which is more or less 20 dollars..). And please forgive me for my bad English, I hope you got the point and won't start bitching me around for spelling. Cheers.
Slashdot Mirror
agreed.. SAP is a huge, enormous database that tends to become alive sometimes... so you got to be able to control it and to use it ONLY for what you need. SAP people wants you to use it for e-mail, agenda, notebook, PDM, whatever. If you keep it tight it is really useful. If you let it blow, you're fucked up.
:)
it's fun
yes, that's exactly what I meant. thanks for clarifying, sometimes my english is not enough to translate all the ideas I got to tell.
cheers
[btw, I agree with what you said, completely]
office XP itself runs "ok" on win2k. but it has severe compatibility issues with office2k.
more than enough for me to avoid it, thus avoiding winXP, and so on.
real advantage of linux on desktop? :)
(in no particular order)
1. can be tweaked once to suit exactly your needs and then copied over and over again over different machines (even "old" and "slow" ones)
2. you know what's happening, where, and how to fix it
3. costs
4. it's tough for regular users to install their crappy applications and then ask YOU to fix them
5. viruses
6. happyness and joy over the entire universe
thanks, you got the point. seems like moving to XP is not only a matter of trusting the OS - it's a matter of time wasted.
:)
..."features" with microsoft :)
good to see I'm not the only one out there
thanks for sharing your
cheers
I don't trust XP because I'm not confident on what it's going to do, what is it doing, and HOW. Win2k is pretty settled down - with the microsoft's kb, websites, tweaks and some experience with microsoft operating systems you know more or less what's happening inside the machine. Plus, win2k has been around for enough time to let people develop some useful applications that runs on it.
Now, XP has a fairly new approach to the concept of "operating system"; users, even users who wants to, have little chances to understand what's happening. I'm not talking about those "errors" that can be fixed by XP itself - I'm talking about strange behaviors that let the system usable, sure, but MAY give complications later on.
IMHO, XP it's an OS that doesn't leave enough free space to the user to be considered "affordable" for business use.
Let me explain in another way: I have a quite big amount of machines and users under my Power. With such a quantity of machines, troubles are going to arise much more often than if I had only a couple of dUh-SERS. It's statistic: the more users you have, the more stupid problems that you almost never encountered before are going to arise.
Now, with XP the amount of time you have to spend to "hack" around and inside it to learn where the problem was and how to avoid it, well, it's just not affordable, given the amount of machines I have in my Kingdom. Unless I make my company hire other IT guys, either very well trained (and expensive) or I'd have to train them - and still waste part of my precious time, that I could use in better ways, say, reading their mail.
Using microsoft OS at work is not just like at home when you can click the 'ok' button and forget about what the problem was. in a business you NEED to know why the error did arise, and how to avoid it, and probably how not to make it happen again on another machine - unless you want to go and check each and every machine you have in your business and fix that thing before the CEO hits it. It's a matter of experience (ah! pun): if a window box is configured perfectly, it's not going to give you troubles at all. If you leave even some stupid thing back, well, sooner or later you'll have to spend a great bunch of time fixing it - and trying to understand where the problem is.
Dunno if I made myself clear about that, let me know. The topic here is much more a matter of "feelings": windows's behavior is not scientific, sometimes cannot be predicted.
wait.. I did some work on XP, but nothing that I would call "enough" for me to say "I know where to put my hands if something goes wrong" like I do in win2k. But I've had the definitive impression that it would take too much time and resources to tweak it to make it work smoothly for MY purposes.
Also, once that 'tweaking' is done, well, it looks almost like a win2k box, and does the same thing.
So - why bother, damnit? why do I have to waste time and energy to work on something that will give me the same thing I already have?
What does XP offer to a business users that win2k doesn't? free spyware? [just kidding on that last one]
I know users are stupid. But I think that if they are taught to "click there" to type a letter and to "click there" to go online, well, they will do it and don't complain. users don't have to anything strange. my users were used to use an old as/400 with the black/green dumb-terminal, and didn't complained.
poor users, they won't be able to install their desktop ladies that dance naked. I'm so sorry.
ps: I know linux isn't easy to use as a desktop. But they don't need to use linux - just few, preconfigured, working, easy-to-use apps. Nothing else. They'll play on their PC at home.
mine it's more than "I don't like it and don't even want to try it". I had enough bad times trying to make all our win2k work together and I was lucky because I didn't have to tweak EVERY SINGLE installation of win2k I did. ...like regular win2k boxen. So why bother? win2k is more than enough.
.xls spreadsheet. Works perfectly in office2000. Doesn't work AT ALL in office XP. Office XP is not fully compatible with office 2000.
:)
I know that I can manage something by using active directory to tweak at a registry-level every machine that logs into the domain, BUT
- doing that requires a lot of time to plan, try, test and develop the tweaking
- after the tweaking, basically all the xp machines will
1. look
2. be more ore less
PLUS: office XP is REALLY bad. I mean, we have an application (SAP) that is CERTIFIED to give back some results as an
So why bother, again? I'm more than happy with win2k. I don't have time, resource AND enough interest to TRY to LEARN windows XP, not even for myself. I've had enough of that crap, and I realized that if I had spent that same much time that I've wasted on microsoft product on Linux instead, we all in our company would have linux desktops with openoffice working smoothly. And I wouldn't be writing those angry slashdot posts
No way I'm going to run XP within my company. It's an OS that I don't trust, and haven't had the chance to learn well (and don't want to).
So either I'm going to buy a couple dozen licenses of win2k soon,
OR
I'm going to use the existing licenses and don't care at all about licensing (call it non-violent resistance, whatever)
OR
I'm going to start spreading linux on desktop OSes.
Plus, I don't want to upgrade to the Software Assurance thing, 'cause it's going to cost much more and it's not worthed (office 2000 is WAY better than office XP, and I don't want to upgrade - same for win2k/winXP) if you don't want to upgrade.
In any way, Microsoft will lose one of its customers. And I think I won't be the only one.
Anyone else taking care of a network of more than a couple dozen PCs does think like me?
yes, probably it was sarcasm.... so I'm the one who looks stupid right now :)
Am I wrong or this is the purpose of the new Microsoft Software Assurance licensing program? Not that they force you to upgrade. But when you pay for a year subscription, most businesses will want to upgrade not to waste the money they spent in the Software Assurance, practically forcing their users to update.
Now forgive me if I didn't understand the new Microsoft licensing program, that is just an opinion. Cheers.
...a beowulf cluster of those? No? Neither do I.
...and probably in 30 years they'll barely play my 3d ripped movies :)
I'd rather buy as much hardware as I can right now, before those computers will be mandatory, so I'll be happy for the next 30 years with my 120-old-PC cluster.
palladium CAN definitively be circumvented. Maybe a mod chip will be required to avoid querying the palladium chip, but it's just hardware. A few days ago I posted a comment here on slashdot, which generated a nice amount of discussion about that.
I understand now that if it's about public key cryptography on the chip it will definitively be a tough job to circumvent it. But it has to be done, no matter if it's illegal under the DMCA.
Some 30 years ago it was illegal for people with skin color different from white to sit in front of a bus. It was the law. Was it right to obey that law?
Mod me down as a troll, mod me down as useless. But I say that it is time to embrace our cyber weapons, our mind, our smartness, and fight out all those absurd laws - by disobeying it. No reason to fight back, definitively not in a court. The best ways to do that are:
I know I do sound trollish, but I do firmly think it's time to fight back against that. A law is supposed to protect the people - not the corporations!
last thought - if Palladium gets introduced in the US, and all vendors apply it, and the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent it... do you, GNU users in the United States of America, really want those laws to block your creativity and your freedom? Do you know that other countries will probably not introduce anything like the DMCA, nor implement Palladium? Do you really want to be left alone in a world that will improve GNU systems, stuck on stupid law questions?
Now flame me.
interesting explanation. maybe I missed something... I need to further search around and see. I still feel there's something missing here, something that we're missing.
For example, the access to the chip must be controlled by the cpu. There has to be a way to tell the cpu not to check the public certificate (like a JMP, to be clear), or to ignore the response (again, I don't know anything about assembler code, but still you can make the cpu jump a certain part of the code, even if you had to inject it in real-time). I doubt that the binaries will be encrypted.
It's like reading an e-mail that is signed but the signature is wrong. You can read it anyway, it's up to you to believe it or not. Couldn't the same thing be made for CPUs? After all, it's your cpu...
Ok I'll go study it. Thanks for pointing me that, I appreciated a lot.
I doubt internal policies change in less than 24-hrs. But whats more likely is that there is no massive MS conspiracy to use MSNBC to discredit the competition. Whats more likely is that MSNBC has reporters who have the normal biases, and who report accordingly.
Watch out - the writer of the article is John Schoen, "MSNBC Sr. Producer". Do you think that from now on we'll see many pro-linux articles over there?
The article presents numerous *actual* facts: Linux company stock prices have been destroyed; few if any Linux only companies are profitable; many Linux companies have gone out of business. Linux is the number #2 selling server operating system.
Just like saying something like: hey, you're number 2 because (no matter if you are gaining popularity and credibility day by day) more people have my stuff. I think that here MSNBC is making confusion between what GNU/linux (not to mention other free OSes) can give to users, and what the industry is expecting. Surely the article makes some good points, but still MSNBC was supposed to be a news company - not a "Partial News" company.
My point is, again, that what MSNBC did here is *not* lying: they just told part of the truth, and made it seem as they know what they are talking about. Average Joe won't bother go and check out other things. MSNBC is such a big and powerful company that they must have got it right, right?
wait wait - I know that as long as the keys are stored on different locations and cannot be accessed they are safe. But you didn't read my point - what about DISCONNECTED machines?
sure it did. But I don't trust them as the single source of information. Internal policies do change, with time. No matter if they talked badly against Microsoft before... people forget quickly.
The article can have some legitimate points itself, but given the source it makes me feel dizzy. Just like reading a bloat against microsoft on a linux magazine counts like nothing to me.
My point was that it should not be such a big new, and surely won't be the only one.
so how do they manage the fact that a computer can be put offline? Do they expect that all computers must be online to run their apps? It's ok to me, if they're going to pay for my broadband line...
Seriously, though: IF the key is inside the computer, it can be taken. If not, something won't work.
I guess...
do any of you expect that a company like MSNBC partially sponsored/owned/whatever by Microsoft will openly admit that linux is gaining popularity? Come on folks! :)
however, the important thing is that - Microsoft has made its first, big, noticeable step into the media. What's next,
Let us not forget that the media are those who forge a public opinion, and a public opinion can push a law or elect certain politics that -guess what?- are sponsored by the same sponsor of the media. And the DMCA is just the beginning.
Lobbying must be made illegal. But it's impossible because those who would make it illegal are those who benefit most of it. Cool, the dog has eaten his own tail.
Frustrating.
you know what...? yes, it might be a real issue. And somehow it can be a good thing if that happens. By the time palladium will become established, gnu/linux and the other 'free' (as in speech) operating systems will be at the same time rock stable and full of applications to suit almost all needs. It will never be eradicated away.
Probably, IF the whole palladium thing is real, the IT world will become like "users who USE their computer" and "users who don't know what a computer is (and use palladium)". Which would be a great way to avoid all those clueless boring users out there, begging for more colorful icons on their GNU/linux desktop.
the open source will never be completely eradicated. Even in the worst case scenario, if the US government will make open source illegal because it won't comply with DRM, there will be plenty of places on Earth that will support it.
So I'm not that worried about that - yes, it may be a risk, but I think there are bigger risks around right now (talking about the Patriot Act, or if you want to stay in the software world the patenting issues....)
cheers.
you have a chip ON THE mobo that tells you if you can run an application. what if you're disconnected from any network? the chip must have some key that, applied to the application, will make it usable. Or will decrypt the application. Or will act as a general key to allow the cpu to run some code.
.NET thing. Just marketing hypes, nothing else. We've all seen what .NET has become... bugs even before it was launched. Palladium is just a way to scare vendors which would like to try linux.
;)
Still, it is something you have ON YOUR MOTHERBOARD. Like the CSS key... it's there, it will be just a matter of time before those evil linux users will find a way to bypass it, fake it, and run whatever they want. Bringing havoc on the pristine, certified, public-key signed microsoft world. Like a cancer...
....or at least I hope so. I have much more trust in a 15-years old linux north-european user, than in any chunk of Microsoft Engineers that live in their golden world, without Windows (hah! pun!) on the outside world.
However, this palladium-thing looks like the whole
Those guys at Microsoft are just playing the scary-announcement thing: to scare people before they make the next move. Then make them wait, then provide them a lot of useless marketing, then -before they will realize it- they have been embraced. And the empire extends itself.
Whops! sorry folks, I don't believe a word of this palladium thing until I see a working chip, and I see that it works better than current systems. THEN we can start talking about that, and hacking it. Unless the new DMCA won't make it illegal and punisheable by death
cheers.
hard disks get bigger and faster, spinning around with more and more rpm - thus generating heat.
a 2Tb data will have to be FAST... accessing 2tb with actual speeds will be a pain.. I suppose.
cool. if it is all made in the name of profit, I guess that Microsoft could start DoSsing IBM or Walmart if they supply linux on their customers computers, thus 'stealing' profits from Microsoft.
welcome in the age of the Netstrike!. Have fun.
I wonder
1. how much does that thing heat up
2. how in hell I'm going to back up a terabyte from my laptop. I already have there too many things that I care about (I do backups on cd-rw), but with a terabyte of data I'd better have two of them and go with raid.....
And I like to add:
So let's start spreading the word, especially to the music artists we know. Maybe it will change something...
Oh yea, I forgot: I have no ideas on how much can a CD cost in the US. Here in Europe they cost like 20 euros each (which is more or less 20 dollars..). And please forgive me for my bad English, I hope you got the point and won't start bitching me around for spelling. Cheers.