With the advent of the net the cost of distributing software is essentially zero, and there is a rapidly growing pool of high quality free software, developed without the aid of corporations and all the corporate overhead that goes with it, that will inevitably commoditize all general purpose software so that its effective cost to us will approach zero. Your not believing it, or believing it and thinking it's a bad thing, will do nothing to prevent it from happening.
Your us-versus-them approach is fallacious. Hollywood, like Slashdot, Microsoft, and the state of Alabama, is made up of people. Those people deserve to have jobs. If a major movie studio goes out of business, people lose their jobs, and that's a bad thing.
Likewise, when a software company goes out of business, it's a bad thing.
Some Slashdotters love to hop up and down on the us-versus-them, little-people-versus-evil-corporations thing, but they're wrong. The "evil corporations" are just groups of people, and when those people lose their jobs, it's had for everybody.
The fact that you could make exactly the same argument for Union Carbide or Enron should give you pause. *Obviously* there are larger issues involved than the financial success of corporations, regardless of their ethics or their effect on the well-being of others. The root of it is: what should the balance of power be between corporations and the overall good of the people? They are not the same thing.
Linux has never been able to pass the Mom test. This is as true today as ever was.
I'm not so sure this is true anymore. Have a look at redhat 8 one of these days. The install does a very good job of detecting and setting up the hardware, and there are nice gui configuration tools so arcane cli incantations are largely a thing of the past. It defaults to a very polished desktop with good quality applications (mozilla, openoffice, evolution, etc.). Descriptive icons are front and center, so it's obvious which does what. It's true that linux is different than windows, but I honestly don't think it's harder to use.
About Eazel. They put a huge amount of work into Nautilus, and it all would have been lost if it wasn't GPL. This happens all the time in the world of commercial software. It's obviously better for folks to be able to continue using and improving the software.
I'm not sure about the business-above-all tack you're taking. Are profits the only measure of goodness? Well then: Hollywood rakes in billions from selling overpriced junk, and they're trying to destroy our culture's open technical / legal framework to preserve their enormous profits. How is this good for anyone, except them?
This is a common misconception. If most end users were cheap, they'd build their own computers from parts instead of buying a Gateway or a Dell or a what-have-you.
It's a common misconception to think building computers is cheaper than simply buying Dells or Gateways. It isn't cheaper to build your own computers, and it hasn't been for a while.
Linux isn't as hard to use as you think; you should have a look at it sometime. And it doesn't need the handholding of a large corporation to become a viable alternative on the desktop. It's doing that on its own already.
The GPL is a good thing, as it prevents free software from being co-opted by commercial vendors. Recall the tanking of Nautilus. Because the code was GPL, development went on and users continued to use and improve the software. Compare that to PGP, which recently spent months in IP hell as the beancounters at Network Associates tried to figure out what to do with it.
Exactly what the more rational and less rabid of us have said all along. Linux has its place, which for most people is not the desktop.
Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not rabid or irrational. But I still think linux will eventually take over, even on the desktop.
Why? Because most end users are cheap. Imho they don't care what operating system they're using, as long as they can get it to do what they need: writing, finances, websurfing, etc. Free software is rapidly improving, and it'll soon be (if it isn't already) usable enough that even Aunt Betty will balk at paying hundreds of dollars extra for Windows and Office. Especially once she realizes that without the expense of these two fifty cent CDs, she can get a computer that will do everything she needs for a measly couple of hundred bucks.
Corporations looking to cut costs will lead the charge. But eventually all non-specialized software will be commoditized and general users will not pay big dollars for it. Imho.
Perhaps, but a lot of "new" linux admins have 10 years experience with Solaris or AIX. There are more competent people around than bought tco studies like this would like to admit.
And obviously, it's biased to start with the assumption that you have a 100% windows shop with absolutely no linux experience. It would be more revealing (too revealing...) to compare it to a 100% unix shop converting to windows.
But as you say, that would be uncomfortablly close to the hotmail debacle. Someone said in another thread that they're still using FreeBSD on some of their backend servers. This can't be true, can it?
That may be true, but nevertheless commercial interests have done so much less for us when it comes to spam. IE is absolutely useless: no pop-up blocking, no selective cookie blocking, no smart spam filters, etc. And consider the differences between Netscape and Mozilla. I think from the corporate perspective of Microsoft and others we're consumers, gullets meant to be profiled, analyzed and targeted. Why give us the tools to protect ourselves when it would make their job harder?
On the other hand, I have an old college email account from back in the days when hardly anyone knew what the internet was. This one got out everywhere because, before Canter and Seigel, there was no spam. So there are many people very concerned about the size of my penis, and even more worrisome, my breasts. But no matter! I use spamassassin, vipul's razor, procmail, et al, on my linux machine and I hardly ever see a one.
I set all this up months ago, and it just does its thing with minimal intervention. Every month or so I check my spam-file just to make sure no legitimate mail crept in, but none ever has. I have never seen a commercial offering that works nearly as well as free tools like spamassassin and vipul's razor.
So you'll basically never be able to update that box then?
If Internet Explorer (and for that matter, Media Player and all the other unnecessary and insecure Microsoft applications included with the base OS) was not bundled with the OS, there'd be much less in the way of security updates to install. Whatever was left, like upnp fixes and whathaveyou, I would be willing to update manually. After first making sure there are no EULAs giving Microsoft permission to have its way with any of my computers, of course.
I do not trust Microsoft to use Windows Update responsibly. Neither should you. They have a nasty habit of bundling critical security updates with invasive software such as the DRM system built into Media Player 9, and/or demanding the right to root access to your computer, such as the EULA in w2k sp3. Personally I think coercing people in this way should be against the law. Hell, it probably is. Not that that ever stops Microsoft.
Soon they'll kill off manual updates altogether to protect this channel into peoples' computers. Anyone who finds this as disagreeable as I do is encouraged to investigate linux. It has undergone massive improvements in the last couple of years and it rapidly becoming a viable alternative for most ordinary computer users.
As to extrapolation, I don't think I can agree with you there. [... ]
You mention the Trusted Computing Initiative(tm) as a sign that Microsoft could be changing its ways, and then say it may only be a smokescreen for their DRM plans. There are a lot of people who would agree, including myself. That's exactly what I meant by security via public relations, a common Microsoft tactic. Also, keep in mind that the Trusted Computing Initiative(tm) has another purpose: Microsoft's most recent anti-trust settlement allows them to withhold APIs that have security and/or DRM implications. Expect to learn very soon that the entire Windows operating system is a security and/or DRM system.
I personally don't really know what I want MicroSoft to do.
Myself, I'd love it if they stopped breaking the law. However, I believe that Microsoft's response to the increasing commoditization of software will be to try to exclude free variants from interoperating with its software (via patent abuse, further obfuscation of file formats, and buying anti-competitive legislation). In other words, not only will Microsoft continue to release buggy software, but they'll continue to illegally use their monopoly power to exclude competitors from the marketplace. Same old, same old.
It's perfectly possible for closed-source software to be more extensively audited than an open-source alternative.
Possible, yes. Likely, no. And anyway, the issue of peer review is a canard. I'm sure you will agree that the real issue is how secure programs are in actual use.
In actual use, Microsoft has a long history of sitting on serious security bugs, or using their PR department to deal with them, or attacking the people who report bugs. When you have a long tradition of being the least secure operating system in wide use, then imho yes you can reliably extrapolate as to the likely security of their future products. Which is to say, very poor.
But yes, I do agree with you that the pervasive use of single user mode in Windows is very bad, especially considering the deep integration of i.e. Deep integration is an effective strategy from an anti-trust fighting perspective, but auto-executing all these activex controls and mime attachments is a disaster for ordinary computer users. I do not think windows will ever be secure until they completely redesign it with a more unix-like philosophy of least privelege.
But single user mode can be avoided if you are aware of the dangers. More serious are design decisions that we can't change. Sticking the graphics layer in ring 0 is another fatal flaw, since now buggy video drivers can now crash the os. Not what you want in a supposedly stable and secure server.
I'm using mozilla with the internet explorer skin. It works great, though there's a little hack you have to do to get the home button back into the main toolbar.
Mozilla is a better browser than i.e. in a lot of ways (tabs, standards compliance, etc.), but the big one for me is that i.e. is essentially an ad delivery systerm. So there's not much we can do to selectively block cookies, or graphics from specific servers, or pop-ups, etc. And I don't like the prospect of being at the mercy of unscrupulous companies who wish to make changes without my knowledge or consent. (Actually, what I'd really like is a way to get rid of i.e. entirely on w2k/xp.)
That explains mozilla, but why the i.e. skin? Well, the default mozilla skins are not exactly beautiful. And my wife is highly resistant to change of any kind when it comes to her computer, and with the i.e. skin I was able to switch her w2k machine to mozilla without even a word of protest. Of course, at this point she's so used to tabbed browsing and the pop-up blocker that she wouldn't switch back anyway. And me, I don't have to worry about some exploit using i.e. to take her computer down.
Actually, I even use the i.e. skin on my linux box. Just for the perverse fun of it, I guess. I also have a nice wallpaper from w2k of a diver against a blue sky. It's very spiffy, though naturally I GIMPed out the little windows logo first:-).
Well, unless you know linux well enough to pick and choose every little detail of an install, all you really can do is pick "default install" and hope the disty knows what it's doing.
Disagree. Most installers will flag a dependency if there is one, and will work fine otherwise. Whenever I install redhat, for example, I always do a custom install and trim the stuff I don't want/need. I have never been bitten by doing this. Ever.
In general, the major distributions (redhat, mandrake, suse, etc.) do a very good job of installing the needed software and detecting and setting up the hardware. Even slackware, which I still use, allows great customizability in the install without blowing up.
I've read most of this thread, and you do seem to know your windows. But you're less familiar with linux. Try doing a custom install of redhat 8. Pick whatever software you want. Sort out whatever dependencies the installer finds (i.e. installing kde and not xfree86), and it'll run no problem.
The fact is, there's no great skill or luck needed for custom installs to work. Newbies do them every day.
This is when the U.S. began its slide from a representative republic towards a corporate plutocracy.
But a plutocracy is a government by and for the wealthy!! America is a democracy! I read it in civics class! Thoughcrime! Thoughtcrime! I'm phoning the TIPS line on you!
Seriously though, is it just me or is anyone else disturbed by the "yer either with us or agin' us" meme floating around these days? We can't say unpopular things, because we're all united against terrorism. It's the new McCarthyism, only without Edward R. Murrow.
It's inevitable. All free software has to be is good enough and it'll make massive inroads into MS's office and OS monopolies. XP and Office together retail for more that twice the price of a basic PC. The dam will burst when major OEMs start bundling non-MS OS and applications with their computers in order to boost their paper-thin margins. Naturally MS knows the value of being the default and gives massive discounts to OEMs, but even 10% of retail is a lot more than free.
I don't know about you guys, but OOo is more than good enough for my needs. So is Mozilla. So is Linux. Not even taking into account the traditional free software advantages (interoperability, stability, security, no spyware or excessive restrictions, etc.), it's a matter of time before free software becomes the standard.
If you can't run X on a Celeron box, either XFree86 doesn't support your card (unlikely), or something is hideously misconfigured.
Agreed. My main desktop computer has a good quality bx motherboard w/ celeron 433. It has never given me any trouble and I have no intention of getting rid of it. I'm not a windows user or a gamer, and nowadays so much of the perceived speed of a computer is actually the speed of the network connection. I just can't see how 4 or 5 times the speed would make any difference to the kinds of things I do every day.
One note though: sdram is cheep cheep cheep, so load up on it if you want to make the best use of an older cpu. It makes all the difference (I have 512mb).
I think the commercial software vendors are largely responsible for the massive increase in spam. IE is basically an ad delivery system; there's no way to control pop-ups, and no way to block images from ad servers. This is because from the corporate perspective our job as computer users is to view as many ads as humanly possible. Don't expect MS to be of any help. And don't expect any useful legislation either, as the DMA has a powerful and generous lobby in Washington.
But where proprietary software fails us, free software supplies the features that people actually want. Mozilla has built-in pop-up blocking and a great deal of work is going into spam filtering. On my linux box, I use spamassassin and vipul's razor for email, and filterproxy and mozilla to block ads and protect my privacy on the web. Very rarely does any spam make it into my inbox, and I almost never see ads of any kind online. However, it fills me with horror to use other peoples' computers. How can anyone stand all the flashing and blinking?
Conclusion: decent tools are the answer, not bug-eyed rants about the death of email.
Install the latest Mozilla (nightly build) and spam will become a non-issue...
Well I don't know about windows users, but I've seen very little spam on my linux system since I installed spamassassin. Every month or so I go through my spam mailbox to make sure nothing got misfiled, and so far nothing has. Now all I see in my inbox is legitimate mail, and I am a happy camper.
Well I know what's wrong with the debian installer--it doesn't work. A couple of years ago I got to reading the social contract and all the rest of it, and then I spent eight (8) frustrating hours trying to get potato installed on a vanilla k6 machine. It bombed in a different place every time, always with some lame error message like, "you shouldn't be here, this a bug," or words to that effect, and crashed. When I finally gave up and re-installed redhat 6.2, it went on with no trouble in about fifteen minutes.
Now you're probably thinking either I didn't know the hardware or didn't understand linux. Wrong on both counts. I built that machine myself and knew all the hardware, and at the time I had 7 or 8 years unix/linux experience. Fact: it was not possible to get even a base install onto a vanilla machine. Verdict: The installer is an instrument of the devil.
I agree with debian's philosophy as per the social contract and would would love to switch to it, but I think I'll stick with redhat and slackware until that awful installer gets replaced with something that works.
Why increase the cost of a rotating media player by also making it play other types of media?
Versatility is why. It already has a usb connector, and it would be cheaper and more useful to include a diskonkey. You wouldn't have to install any special software on your computer or try to burn a cd or anything like that, just copy a bunch of mp3s to the diskonkey drive.
I dunno, I think it would be useful. Especially if you were on someone else's computer or only had the key with you. Etc.
Sony owns the memory stick format. They're expensive and no one else uses them. Hell would freeze over before it happened, but I'd prefer something like a 128mb usb diskonkey dongle. You can use them on pretty well any computer without a separate reader. However, if my motherboard didn't have it built-in I'd want to get a usb 2.0 card before trying to burn CDs or transferring large files.
But save for those couple of issues, this seems like an incredibly versatile unit for 300 clams. I expect we'll see a lot more machines like this, and probably for a lot less cash once Samsung, et al, get in on it. And they'll probably come to market with a more useful replacement for memorystick, too.
Oh yeah: Does anyone know what, if anything, this unit has in the way of DRM support? One would not like to buy a device that was deliberately crippled in any way.
Am I, as the owner of the computer, going to have final say in what can and what can't run on my computer? Or am I going to have to get permission from some sort of "slavemaster" to be allowed to run some programs on my computer?
I think one good question is: How does MS plan to make money off Palladium?
Imho all software is about to become commoditized (i.e. free, or very close to it). MS is frogmarching its customer base toward a regime of involuntary software rentals, even as it cripples its products with DRM and other spyware. Eventually MS's increasingly onerous restrictions and high cost will start driving a critical mass of non-technical users to rapidly improving free (in both senses) operating systems like linux, and to application suites like mozilla and openoffice. Once large numbers of people adopt free software, Microsoft's monopoly will be broken.
So what to do if you're Microsoft and still enjoy a monopoly? Answer: You do your best to own the distribution of copyrighted material on the internet. You'll need windows servers to distribute such content, and windows clients to access it. Of course MS won't be able to completely exclude free clients, but you can be sure it is doing everything in its power to make participation more awkward for free software.
Rational people won't want to play along, so MS (and Hollywood) will try to help by removing any choice in the matter. It is leaning on vendors so all the hardware will be infected, and when the time comes it will use whatever laws happen to be handy to criminalize defeating Palladium.
That's the plan, anyway. But while we know that Palladium can be used for good ("it'll stop spam!"), we also know that in practice it will be used for the benefit of Big Media. And to succeed any regime has to have at least tacit consent of the governed, and I just don't believe anyone will buy the spin. What I do believe is that this struggle will get much bloodier before it is resolved.
For those who scoff at the idea that free software will become a viable alternative to MS products: have a look at rh8, and ask yourself if it's still too hard for aunt Betty. If so, compare it to rh6 of a couple of years ago, and imagine what rh10 will be like. Will rh10 also be too hard?
I have to say I agree with your assessment of the INS. I am a Canadian citizen with no criminal record ("Are you, or have you ever been, a prostitute or procurer of prostitutes?"), no medical problems, etc., and it took forever to get a simple K1 fiance visa to enter the US.
I was told by the American consulate in Canada that my application should only take a couple of months to process if it was the slam-dunk it appeared to be. Instead it took over a year. And my plaintive phone calls trying to figure out what was going on were met with unhelpful statements like, "you will be contacted at the appropriate time," by obviously bored bureaucrats who refused to even look into the matter.
The INS office here is even worse. I will spare everyone the gory details, but I will say that I was genuinely shocked at how rude consular employees are. It's the jail-guard syndrome, where jobs that give people power encourage the petty tyrant within.
I've mentioned my experiences with the INS to a couple of Americans, and they both told me I should have just flown down here and gotten married, as it was highly unlikely I'd get tossed out. I knew people did such things, but I figured I have nothing to hide and I'll just play by the rules. And look where it got me!
Obviously I have nothing against the United States, since I chose to move here (who knew winters could be so warm?). Seriously though, any system that keeps out the innocent while letting the criminals in must be in need of a serious overhaul.
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About Eazel. They put a huge amount of work into Nautilus, and it all would have been lost if it wasn't GPL. This happens all the time in the world of commercial software. It's obviously better for folks to be able to continue using and improving the software.
I'm not sure about the business-above-all tack you're taking. Are profits the only measure of goodness? Well then: Hollywood rakes in billions from selling overpriced junk, and they're trying to destroy our culture's open technical / legal framework to preserve their enormous profits. How is this good for anyone, except them?
Linux isn't as hard to use as you think; you should have a look at it sometime. And it doesn't need the handholding of a large corporation to become a viable alternative on the desktop. It's doing that on its own already.
The GPL is a good thing, as it prevents free software from being co-opted by commercial vendors. Recall the tanking of Nautilus. Because the code was GPL, development went on and users continued to use and improve the software. Compare that to PGP, which recently spent months in IP hell as the beancounters at Network Associates tried to figure out what to do with it.
Why? Because most end users are cheap. Imho they don't care what operating system they're using, as long as they can get it to do what they need: writing, finances, websurfing, etc. Free software is rapidly improving, and it'll soon be (if it isn't already) usable enough that even Aunt Betty will balk at paying hundreds of dollars extra for Windows and Office. Especially once she realizes that without the expense of these two fifty cent CDs, she can get a computer that will do everything she needs for a measly couple of hundred bucks.
Corporations looking to cut costs will lead the charge. But eventually all non-specialized software will be commoditized and general users will not pay big dollars for it. Imho.
And obviously, it's biased to start with the assumption that you have a 100% windows shop with absolutely no linux experience. It would be more revealing (too revealing...) to compare it to a 100% unix shop converting to windows.
But as you say, that would be uncomfortablly close to the hotmail debacle. Someone said in another thread that they're still using FreeBSD on some of their backend servers. This can't be true, can it?
...including a pack of whores publishing a "study" nearly identical to the spin excreted by your marketing department.
So what? How is this news?
That may be true, but nevertheless commercial interests have done so much less for us when it comes to spam. IE is absolutely useless: no pop-up blocking, no selective cookie blocking, no smart spam filters, etc. And consider the differences between Netscape and Mozilla. I think from the corporate perspective of Microsoft and others we're consumers, gullets meant to be profiled, analyzed and targeted. Why give us the tools to protect ourselves when it would make their job harder?
On the other hand, I have an old college email account from back in the days when hardly anyone knew what the internet was. This one got out everywhere because, before Canter and Seigel, there was no spam. So there are many people very concerned about the size of my penis, and even more worrisome, my breasts. But no matter! I use spamassassin, vipul's razor, procmail, et al, on my linux machine and I hardly ever see a one.
I set all this up months ago, and it just does its thing with minimal intervention. Every month or so I check my spam-file just to make sure no legitimate mail crept in, but none ever has. I have never seen a commercial offering that works nearly as well as free tools like spamassassin and vipul's razor.
I do not trust Microsoft to use Windows Update responsibly. Neither should you. They have a nasty habit of bundling critical security updates with invasive software such as the DRM system built into Media Player 9, and/or demanding the right to root access to your computer, such as the EULA in w2k sp3. Personally I think coercing people in this way should be against the law. Hell, it probably is. Not that that ever stops Microsoft.
Soon they'll kill off manual updates altogether to protect this channel into peoples' computers. Anyone who finds this as disagreeable as I do is encouraged to investigate linux. It has undergone massive improvements in the last couple of years and it rapidly becoming a viable alternative for most ordinary computer users.
In actual use, Microsoft has a long history of sitting on serious security bugs, or using their PR department to deal with them, or attacking the people who report bugs. When you have a long tradition of being the least secure operating system in wide use, then imho yes you can reliably extrapolate as to the likely security of their future products. Which is to say, very poor.
But yes, I do agree with you that the pervasive use of single user mode in Windows is very bad, especially considering the deep integration of i.e. Deep integration is an effective strategy from an anti-trust fighting perspective, but auto-executing all these activex controls and mime attachments is a disaster for ordinary computer users. I do not think windows will ever be secure until they completely redesign it with a more unix-like philosophy of least privelege.
But single user mode can be avoided if you are aware of the dangers. More serious are design decisions that we can't change. Sticking the graphics layer in ring 0 is another fatal flaw, since now buggy video drivers can now crash the os. Not what you want in a supposedly stable and secure server.
I'm using mozilla with the internet explorer skin. It works great, though there's a little hack you have to do to get the home button back into the main toolbar.
:-).
Mozilla is a better browser than i.e. in a lot of ways (tabs, standards compliance, etc.), but the big one for me is that i.e. is essentially an ad delivery systerm. So there's not much we can do to selectively block cookies, or graphics from specific servers, or pop-ups, etc. And I don't like the prospect of being at the mercy of unscrupulous companies who wish to make changes without my knowledge or consent. (Actually, what I'd really like is a way to get rid of i.e. entirely on w2k/xp.)
That explains mozilla, but why the i.e. skin? Well, the default mozilla skins are not exactly beautiful. And my wife is highly resistant to change of any kind when it comes to her computer, and with the i.e. skin I was able to switch her w2k machine to mozilla without even a word of protest. Of course, at this point she's so used to tabbed browsing and the pop-up blocker that she wouldn't switch back anyway. And me, I don't have to worry about some exploit using i.e. to take her computer down.
Actually, I even use the i.e. skin on my linux box. Just for the perverse fun of it, I guess. I also have a nice wallpaper from w2k of a diver against a blue sky. It's very spiffy, though naturally I GIMPed out the little windows logo first
In general, the major distributions (redhat, mandrake, suse, etc.) do a very good job of installing the needed software and detecting and setting up the hardware. Even slackware, which I still use, allows great customizability in the install without blowing up.
I've read most of this thread, and you do seem to know your windows. But you're less familiar with linux. Try doing a custom install of redhat 8. Pick whatever software you want. Sort out whatever dependencies the installer finds (i.e. installing kde and not xfree86), and it'll run no problem.
The fact is, there's no great skill or luck needed for custom installs to work. Newbies do them every day.
Seriously though, is it just me or is anyone else disturbed by the "yer either with us or agin' us" meme floating around these days? We can't say unpopular things, because we're all united against terrorism. It's the new McCarthyism, only without Edward R. Murrow.
I think I need another drink.
It's inevitable. All free software has to be is good enough and it'll make massive inroads into MS's office and OS monopolies. XP and Office together retail for more that twice the price of a basic PC. The dam will burst when major OEMs start bundling non-MS OS and applications with their computers in order to boost their paper-thin margins. Naturally MS knows the value of being the default and gives massive discounts to OEMs, but even 10% of retail is a lot more than free.
I don't know about you guys, but OOo is more than good enough for my needs. So is Mozilla. So is Linux. Not even taking into account the traditional free software advantages (interoperability, stability, security, no spyware or excessive restrictions, etc.), it's a matter of time before free software becomes the standard.
It's simple economics: Money talks, bulls**t walks.
Ah, America the beautiful.
You understand too much.
You must self-medicate immediately.
Will that be paxil, or prozac?
Actually netcraft says it's running linux/apache. You didn't honestly expect windows, did you?
One note though: sdram is cheep cheep cheep, so load up on it if you want to make the best use of an older cpu. It makes all the difference (I have 512mb).
I think the commercial software vendors are largely responsible for the massive increase in spam. IE is basically an ad delivery system; there's no way to control pop-ups, and no way to block images from ad servers. This is because from the corporate perspective our job as computer users is to view as many ads as humanly possible. Don't expect MS to be of any help. And don't expect any useful legislation either, as the DMA has a powerful and generous lobby in Washington.
But where proprietary software fails us, free software supplies the features that people actually want. Mozilla has built-in pop-up blocking and a great deal of work is going into spam filtering. On my linux box, I use spamassassin and vipul's razor for email, and filterproxy and mozilla to block ads and protect my privacy on the web. Very rarely does any spam make it into my inbox, and I almost never see ads of any kind online. However, it fills me with horror to use other peoples' computers. How can anyone stand all the flashing and blinking?
Conclusion: decent tools are the answer, not bug-eyed rants about the death of email.
Well I know what's wrong with the debian installer--it doesn't work. A couple of years ago I got to reading the social contract and all the rest of it, and then I spent eight (8) frustrating hours trying to get potato installed on a vanilla k6 machine. It bombed in a different place every time, always with some lame error message like, "you shouldn't be here, this a bug," or words to that effect, and crashed. When I finally gave up and re-installed redhat 6.2, it went on with no trouble in about fifteen minutes.
Now you're probably thinking either I didn't know the hardware or didn't understand linux. Wrong on both counts. I built that machine myself and knew all the hardware, and at the time I had 7 or 8 years unix/linux experience. Fact: it was not possible to get even a base install onto a vanilla machine. Verdict: The installer is an instrument of the devil.
I agree with debian's philosophy as per the social contract and would would love to switch to it, but I think I'll stick with redhat and slackware until that awful installer gets replaced with something that works.
I dunno, I think it would be useful. Especially if you were on someone else's computer or only had the key with you. Etc.
Sony owns the memory stick format. They're expensive and no one else uses them. Hell would freeze over before it happened, but I'd prefer something like a 128mb usb diskonkey dongle. You can use them on pretty well any computer without a separate reader. However, if my motherboard didn't have it built-in I'd want to get a usb 2.0 card before trying to burn CDs or transferring large files.
But save for those couple of issues, this seems like an incredibly versatile unit for 300 clams. I expect we'll see a lot more machines like this, and probably for a lot less cash once Samsung, et al, get in on it. And they'll probably come to market with a more useful replacement for memorystick, too.
Oh yeah: Does anyone know what, if anything, this unit has in the way of DRM support? One would not like to buy a device that was deliberately crippled in any way.
So what to do if you're Microsoft and still enjoy a monopoly? Answer: You do your best to own the distribution of copyrighted material on the internet. You'll need windows servers to distribute such content, and windows clients to access it. Of course MS won't be able to completely exclude free clients, but you can be sure it is doing everything in its power to make participation more awkward for free software.
Rational people won't want to play along, so MS (and Hollywood) will try to help by removing any choice in the matter. It is leaning on vendors so all the hardware will be infected, and when the time comes it will use whatever laws happen to be handy to criminalize defeating Palladium.
That's the plan, anyway. But while we know that Palladium can be used for good ("it'll stop spam!"), we also know that in practice it will be used for the benefit of Big Media. And to succeed any regime has to have at least tacit consent of the governed, and I just don't believe anyone will buy the spin. What I do believe is that this struggle will get much bloodier before it is resolved.
For those who scoff at the idea that free software will become a viable alternative to MS products: have a look at rh8, and ask yourself if it's still too hard for aunt Betty. If so, compare it to rh6 of a couple of years ago, and imagine what rh10 will be like. Will rh10 also be too hard?
I have to say I agree with your assessment of the INS. I am a Canadian citizen with no criminal record ("Are you, or have you ever been, a prostitute or procurer of prostitutes?"), no medical problems, etc., and it took forever to get a simple K1 fiance visa to enter the US.
I was told by the American consulate in Canada that my application should only take a couple of months to process if it was the slam-dunk it appeared to be. Instead it took over a year. And my plaintive phone calls trying to figure out what was going on were met with unhelpful statements like, "you will be contacted at the appropriate time," by obviously bored bureaucrats who refused to even look into the matter.
The INS office here is even worse. I will spare everyone the gory details, but I will say that I was genuinely shocked at how rude consular employees are. It's the jail-guard syndrome, where jobs that give people power encourage the petty tyrant within.
I've mentioned my experiences with the INS to a couple of Americans, and they both told me I should have just flown down here and gotten married, as it was highly unlikely I'd get tossed out. I knew people did such things, but I figured I have nothing to hide and I'll just play by the rules. And look where it got me!
Obviously I have nothing against the United States, since I chose to move here (who knew winters could be so warm?). Seriously though, any system that keeps out the innocent while letting the criminals in must be in need of a serious overhaul.