I suggest you get 2-5 distros together, for a new user
Linux System Labs has a neat package like this specifically for this purpose ("tri-linux"), 11 CDs and four distros for 17.99 US$. I seem to remember they also had a 17-CD set but I don't see it now, so its possible I remember wrong.
I would recommend RedHat over Mandrake simply because the installation process is more stable. I'm no newbie, but I recently installed Mandrake 8 (four times, urgh), and had a number of problems with the installation. The first time I installed, I selected nearly all packages (why don't they have a "select all" like RH?), and the installation was, well, screwed. X didn't work at all, nor did telnet, there was some problem relating to sockets or something. Anyway, try as I might I couldn't fix it, so I reinstalled, this time letting Mandrake install the default packages. The install ran fine, except for the fact that the system just hung right at the end of installation, instead of rebooting like its supposed to. Mandrake has a very conservative default package selection - many of the things I use daily simply aren't installed.
The third time I tried to install was because I got a new hard disk. Once again I sat for about an hour selecting hundreds of additional packages. Once again, the installation flaked out - it got about as far as the X config and then screwed up. So once again, re-install. This time I let Mandrake use default packages again, and installed additional packages after it was installed. Things went smoother this time, except for a few things. For one thing, my network card fails to configure on startup, because it keeps reconfiguring itself with the incorrect module information for the card - I have to manually insert the correct module with insmod and do a "/etc/rc.d/init/network restart" after each reboot to get the network card to work. Another problem I've had with it is the Samba configuration - smb.conf has been moved to/etc/samba/smb.conf, which is fine, except that a number of components and scripts are still configured to look for it in/etc/smb.conf. Stupid. My final problem is that the arial font looks stuffed up. This affects a number of applications, including Mozilla, and its horrible.
I really like what Mandrake has attempted to do, but its just too buggy - I wouldn't let a newbie near Mandrake, simply because of all the issues, you need to be experienced to fix them.
Overall I would recommend RedHat, the installation process has always been very stable and solid for me (plus I like to select to install everything). I'll give Mandrake another try in another six months or so, I expect that by then most of the probs will be sorted out.
How can this post have been modded as redundant?!?? Its the THIRD POST in the thread, and none of the two that preceded it were saying the same thing? Come on moderators, THINK.
I enjoyed TMCM a lot, especially the comic book series.. I also enjoyed Bob the Angry Flower. There are some very good comics online that I'm sure I would never have known about were it not for the Internet (comics are not very big in the country I live, most people here have a direct mental association between "comics" and "young children".)
I beg to differ, I have a stinking 28.8 modem, and I don't use my floppy drive at all. These things are a waste of money, I really with people would just stop using them. Yet I still can't see new PCs being sold without them. Sure the drives might be relatively cheap, but the disks are not. Not only are the disks expensive but they're damn unreliable, damn slow, and have way too little capacity to store anything useful. On my computer at work, to my memory I've only ever used the floppy drive once, and it was because some network card driver came on a floppy disk.
I wouldn't dare back up important data on a floppy disk, they're way too unreliable.
This isn't the 80's anymore, its about time people just let these things go the way of the dinosaur, so that we can all move on and standardise on something a little more advanced.
Also remember its not just the drive you're paying for - you're paying for all that obsolete circuitry, components and wiring on the motherboard too. And you're paying a little extra in installation costs. Sure, its not much, but its still something. And those damn FDC ribbons clutter up the inside of the PC making it even more annoying that it already is to do any sort of work inside the computer, I struggly to get hard disks in and out every time I want to because the ribbon cable and power cable to the stupid floppy drive get in the way.
I would differ that they're a "commonly used medium". I don't know anyone who uses them. These things still seem to be bundled dutifully with all new PCs though. Its like some sort of culture, everyone just assumes that the floppy drive "should be there", its just something a PC needs. I think if everyone threw all of them away today, most people wouldn't even miss them, and the few who might would simply adjust.
The only possible use I can think for them is diskless systems (e.g. simple X terminal) actually.
Learn how the technology works before you post (and get moderated up so quickly, sheesh - moderators, do some research first too). Its not as simplistic as you imply, watermarks can be embedded that are not perceptible by the human ear, yet will still be detectable even after one or more generations of loss (e.g. creating an mp3 from the original, or going Digital -> Analog and re-recording to digital). Its called steganography, and similar techniques can be used for images, e.g. allowing image watermarks that can still be detected even when images are saved in horribly lossy formats such as JPEG (see for example http://www.outguess.org/)
Watermarking should be taken seriously, this is not something you should just brush aside with one hand, this is something that (I think) is going to start being used a LOT within the next 10 years by the media cartels looking to protect their IP. Should it become common to purchase music online (which is a very likely scenario eventually, even though the RIAA is currently fighting this to protect their current monopolising of distribution channels), it should be very easy to embed a unique watermark in each individual song purchased (not unlike the Intel PIII CPU ID); while this alone would not prevent piracy directly, it does provide a very handy powerful facility for tracking pirated music - a pirated MP3 could always be tracked right back down to the specific individual who purchased it. It wouldn't take too many legal threats/fines/arrests before people became too scared to pirate music.
Of course this isn't necessarily entirely "bad" if you assume that piracy is wrong, but there is potential for abuse (and American companies have proven time and again that if there is potential for abuse, there'll be abuse).
Odd. Today I converted about 30 gifs on my web site to pngs. In every single case the PNG was smaller, on average about probably about 30% smaller. Perhaps you should check the software you're using to generate the PNG's? I use ImageMagick "convert". I remember having problems with older software (I think it was Photoshop 5) generating PNGs that were larger than the GIFs. I find your comment strange that you went back to GIF "for file size". For JPEG/PNG I can understand, JPEGs are usually smaller than the same 24-bit PNG, being lossy. But for GIF's you should get better results with PNG.
I don't use transparency or animation in my gifs, which helps to prevent compatibility problems with stupid browsers that can't render with alpha channels properly.
I remember having exactly the same problem with some older software (I think one of the progs was Photoshop 5 if i remember correctly.) (Back then I thought it was the PNG format itself that was the problem). Photoshop 6 seems to generate almost optimal PNG's, except they add a "Adobe.ImageReady" header indicated it was generated by them, something which I disagree with. So I use ImageMagick for all my PNG needs, which makes the smallest files I've seen. I recently converted a whole lot of GIF's on my web site to PNGs (today actually, after reading this thread:), and in every single case the PNG was smaller, by on average probably about 30 - 40%.
The PNG format has five standard compression filters, and a different compression filter can be chosen for each scanline in the image. Thus software that generates PNGs should check which filter produces the best results when saving. I think some older software didn't do this very well.
See this for some stats on PNG usage. It looks very low, but one should also keep in mind the shape of the technology adoption curve, it has a long run-in time, but once it hits the upward slope it climbs quickly.
Also, GIF has been around a lot longer than PNG - wait until PNG is as old as GIF is now, I think you'll see a lot less one-sided picture then.
Keep in mind that viewers for most platforms have only really become widely available in the past year or two. So in the next year or two we'll start to see an upswing in PNG usage. GIF and JPEG both have their place (jpeg files are still smaller for, uh, "natural" images where a certain amount of loss is acceptable to most people) and will no doubt be around a looong time, but I think in three or four years those securityspace figures will probably be looking more like 40/40/20 for GIF/JPG/PNG. If you look at the general trend there over the past eight months, PNG has been slowly climbing, while GIF slowly dropping. I don't see PNG replacing jpeg though as the dominant format for, uh, "natural" photographic type images anytime in the next five years - not until bandwidth and disk space really become "non-issues", at which time people might start looking for a bit more quality. I doubt it though, people have shown time and again that they don't give a crap for quality (just look at the popularity of Windows, boyzone, TV sitcoms, MacDonalds etc). Depressing, but thats the way it is.
I'm guessing they don't want to give the message that perhaps the DMCA is wrong after all. Remember, Adobe is still backing the DMCA, so their "official" position is that they have been in the right all along.
Are you incapable of thinking long-term? Just because something is voluntary now doens't mean it will always be. New Microsoft features are almost always voluntary - they're usually voluntary only until people have gotten used to the idea. Then either they become involuntary, or the process of opting out is made overly-complicated and obscure, so that most people just give in anyway. Think man.
You don't see the problem? Its Microsoft doing this. Here are a few questions for you:
(1) Has Microsoft's behaviour, in the past, shown that we can reasonably expect that we can trust Microsoft to NOT abuse this feature to diss or shut out competition?
(2) Looking at the general trend that this feature is most likely to go, can we expect that a similar feature could, in future, be used to block competing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, uh, I mean, unstable applications?
(3) In the case of Linux, not only can we most likely expect the entire process to be open and transparent (i.e. so we'll know who is getting blocked and why), but with Linux you can always just rebuild the source with the 'feature' disabled. Now, in the case of Microsoft, can we expect fully open and transparent access to the database of blocked drivers (and in future applications), and can we expect to always be able to disable this feature easily?
Not everything is black and white. Just because the same feature is there, doesn't make it the same issue.
I heard a saying once, "Locks are made to keep honest people out".
Wasn't that more like, "Locks are made to keep honest people honest"?
The message therein is that if you use locks, only the people who REALLY want to get in will try to, and prevent 'casual passersby' from trying. A padlock is like weak encryption, if someone really wants to get in, they'll get in, but people who are not that serious won't bother to try. If you don't encrypt at all though, many of those same people would then try to eavesdrop, even if just out of curiosity - same as for padlocks, curious passersby will wonder "whats behind this gate?" if there is no padlock on it.
Its not a 'black-and-white' thing. People often make the argument "if someone really wants to crack this, they'll crack this, so why bother even trying to protect this software" (some people I work with:(). That annoys me. Its not binary (yes/no, black/white) - the number of people who will crack something follow a non-linear curve based on how much protection you put in. E.g., if you have say no protection, you'll have say 70% cracking. With 10% encryption, that'll drop automatically to say 35%. With 20% protection, it'll drop to say 17%. With 50% protection, it'll be around 2%. These figures are obviously just example figures.. but thats the idea. You can, of course, never reach 100% protection of anything (because as you say if someone really wants to get into something, they will), but if you have 95% protection, then you'll only have to worry about 0.01% of people, instead of 70%. I agree with you though, if you're going to encrypt, use strong encryption.
Artistic license. Technically, an optimizing "English compiler" would change "Dimitry's wife's husband" to just "Dimitry", and it would be just the same thing. The people on slashdot mostly analyze everything technically. But this is not the same as seeing "if (!(!(i==3)))" in source code.. this is something that is meant to be read by people, and as such, "Dimitry's wife's husband" not only provides additional information that would otherwise not be conveyed (i.e. he is married), but in the context of human emotions and compassion, that extra information also helps readers to realise that this is just another regular human like them, and that he also has loved ones that will be feeling pain now. So it evokes more empathy and/or sympathy and compassion than just (for example) "a Russian hacker", which is a very anonymous term.
Stop thinking so technically.. the human brain isn't a compiler, human behaviour and reasoning involve many fuzzy, illogical constructs.
This guys complaining that QoS costs so much today because you basically have to rig private networks. Personally I think that QoS will always be expensive, because I think the majority of people will be more than happy with low-priority packets for the vast majority of data transfer. People have very low standards (just look at the success of Windows) - and quite frankly, who is going to pay double to ensure their email gets to the other side of the planet in 2 seconds instead of 8 seconds? And sure, the web would feel a little more responsive with QoS packets, but most people I think wouldn't pay much extra to get that. As for streaming video, I doubt the majority of streaming video on the Internet means enough to people to want to pay extra to ensure they get it smoothly (e.g. some random news clip from cnn.com, who cares if it breaks up a bit?)
I might be dead wrong here. Perhaps streaming entire movies etc might be a different story.
They won't do that because they know it wouldn't work. Consumers don't want "biznet", they want "Internet". As long as their is ANY media distribution channel that the media conglomerates can't monopolize, they will fight to control or destroy it. The RIAA understands that the best way to make money is to monopolise all distribution channels.
The complaint charges that MS ties support to product registration. Yeah, so does my toaster warranty, and my VCR, and my TV, and my washer and dryer, etc
You are misinformed. Legally, your toaster, VCR, TV, washer AND dryer are ALL under warrany whether you "register" or not. The law provides something called an "implied warranty", which means that an item you buy must be fit for the purpose for which it was sold. Specific duration warranties are provided for different types of products. The only way that a manufacturer can circumvent the implied warranty is by making a specific deal with the buyer - the customer must KNOW that he/she is making such a deal. Manufacturers would all like to circumvent the implied warranty in order to further their bottom line, but the only way they can do this is - you guessed it - product "registration". The "registration" is usually set up to sound like a good deal, it normally sounds like you are getting a good warranty when you "sign up", but if you do research, 9 out of 10 times you just signed yourself into a more limited warranty than you already had under law. So as long as you didn't make any specific warranty arrangement with your dealer, the dealer is legally required to exchange your product if it has manufacturing defects.
Why is this very different from Microsoft's passport arrangement? Because when you install XP, you've no doubt clicked on an "I agree" somewhere, which means that you're agreeing to an alternate warranty arrangement, under which you MUST supply personal information in order to have manufacturing defects repaired.
This is just one part of Microsoft's attempt to turn the Internet into a huge Microsoft proprietary network, like the Compuserves of yesteryear. Smart tags, Passport etc are all just parts of the plan - and by and large, they are succeeding.
Why not simply let your competitors pay for development, and you could simply scoop up the project when it was finished
Only one problem with this reasoning - the software is opensource, so you end up with exactly the same software that your competitor (and the rest of the world for that matter) has. So what advantage does that give your competitor? Or even you for that matter? Your potential "customers" can download the software for free, they wouldn't have to go to you OR your competitor. The way you tell it, you'd think the competitor ends up with the only copy of the software.
So much for "zero administration" networking. Funny you never hear MS pushing that buzzword anymore. Of course technical people no doubt realised all along that it was just marketing BS, you have to know what you're doing and keep up to date to run servers, but now millions of not-so-clued-up people have fallen for the hype, they were led to believe that a few mouse clicks is all you need and you can sit back and relax while your server runs itself. Thanks to this attitude things like "code red" can flourish. Marketing people are quick to push terms like "zero administration" but won't readily mention "service packs", since that implies "non-zero-administration".
A corrupt legal system is one of the main things that keeps Russia a third world nation
You're kidding right? There are SOOO many more other factors involved than just "a corrupt legal system". Your statement demonstrates a lot of ignorance/naivety.. remember, Russia hasn't even been a capitalist democracy for more than a few years.. you somehow expect that they should already just magically match the USA economically? That sort of damage takes decades of undoing before results start to be seen. How can you say anything at this stage about why they are "kept" a third-world nation?
Well for one thing, steganographic signatures can be overlayed on the music which, while not discernable by the human ear, can be detected by analysis, even after a sample has been "degraded" by the analog conversion. Expect steganographic signatures to become very widespread on music distribution media soon. MP3's would be traceable to the source they were copied from.
I'm tired of hearing the same old tired argument of "so what if they implement stuff like this, somebody will just crack it anyway". The implicit message is that it is acceptable behaviour for companies to implement any level of copy "protection" that they want. It isn't - the message that consumers should be sending is "it is not acceptable IN THE FIRST PLACE", not "it is acceptable, go ahead, somebody will crack it". The former approach deems the RIAA's behaviour "good" and the crackers' behaviour "bad". The latter approach deems the RIAA's behaviour "bad". This is a very important distinction. Whether or not someone will crack it, "somebody" shouldn't have to crack it in the first place.
And I don't disagree that recording companies should be allowed to protect their IP - those who push this argument are missing the real motives of the recording companies, which is not just to protect their IP, but to monopolize content creation and distribution channels, as well as to eventually implement pay-per-view ubiquitously (with elimination of fair rights use being a side-effect).
McNealy seems to forget that while some people (such as himself) may not mind too much having no or limited privacy, OTHERS DO, and that each individual should be able to choose. He is essentially arguing that nobody should have the right to choose their own level of privacy, simply because it may sometimes be beneficial for others to have your information. Individuals should be in complete control of what happens to their own information and who should get it. He is saying 'give up the control, give the control to us big businesses, and then just trust us, because so far "the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself"'. This is complete BS. He seems to want to thrust his own personal views onto everyone, and it sure as hell isn't for everyone elses good, as he implies it is.
I don't want some corporations software making reservations at restaurants for me supposedly based on my tastes (more likely, in reality, based on what the restaurant paid the corporation to ensure that his/her restaurant always comes up top of the list) - and I don't see why I should be subjected to systems like this simply because Mr. McNealy liked the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you get 2-5 distros together, for a new user
Linux System Labs has a neat package like this specifically for this purpose ("tri-linux"), 11 CDs and four distros for 17.99 US$. I seem to remember they also had a 17-CD set but I don't see it now, so its possible I remember wrong.
I would recommend RedHat over Mandrake simply because the installation process is more stable. I'm no newbie, but I recently installed Mandrake 8 (four times, urgh), and had a number of problems with the installation. The first time I installed, I selected nearly all packages (why don't they have a "select all" like RH?), and the installation was, well, screwed. X didn't work at all, nor did telnet, there was some problem relating to sockets or something. Anyway, try as I might I couldn't fix it, so I reinstalled, this time letting Mandrake install the default packages. The install ran fine, except for the fact that the system just hung right at the end of installation, instead of rebooting like its supposed to. Mandrake has a very conservative default package selection - many of the things I use daily simply aren't installed.
The third time I tried to install was because I got a new hard disk. Once again I sat for about an hour selecting hundreds of additional packages. Once again, the installation flaked out - it got about as far as the X config and then screwed up. So once again, re-install. This time I let Mandrake use default packages again, and installed additional packages after it was installed. Things went smoother this time, except for a few things. For one thing, my network card fails to configure on startup, because it keeps reconfiguring itself with the incorrect module information for the card - I have to manually insert the correct module with insmod and do a "/etc/rc.d/init/network restart" after each reboot to get the network card to work. Another problem I've had with it is the Samba configuration - smb.conf has been moved to /etc/samba/smb.conf, which is fine, except that a number of components and scripts are still configured to look for it in /etc/smb.conf. Stupid. My final problem is that the arial font looks stuffed up. This affects a number of applications, including Mozilla, and its horrible.
I really like what Mandrake has attempted to do, but its just too buggy - I wouldn't let a newbie near Mandrake, simply because of all the issues, you need to be experienced to fix them.
Overall I would recommend RedHat, the installation process has always been very stable and solid for me (plus I like to select to install everything). I'll give Mandrake another try in another six months or so, I expect that by then most of the probs will be sorted out.
How can this post have been modded as redundant?!?? Its the THIRD POST in the thread, and none of the two that preceded it were saying the same thing? Come on moderators, THINK.
I enjoyed TMCM a lot, especially the comic book series .. I also enjoyed Bob the Angry Flower. There are some very good comics online that I'm sure I would never have known about were it not for the Internet (comics are not very big in the country I live, most people here have a direct mental association between "comics" and "young children".)
I beg to differ, I have a stinking 28.8 modem, and I don't use my floppy drive at all. These things are a waste of money, I really with people would just stop using them. Yet I still can't see new PCs being sold without them. Sure the drives might be relatively cheap, but the disks are not. Not only are the disks expensive but they're damn unreliable, damn slow, and have way too little capacity to store anything useful. On my computer at work, to my memory I've only ever used the floppy drive once, and it was because some network card driver came on a floppy disk.
I wouldn't dare back up important data on a floppy disk, they're way too unreliable.
This isn't the 80's anymore, its about time people just let these things go the way of the dinosaur, so that we can all move on and standardise on something a little more advanced.
Also remember its not just the drive you're paying for - you're paying for all that obsolete circuitry, components and wiring on the motherboard too. And you're paying a little extra in installation costs. Sure, its not much, but its still something. And those damn FDC ribbons clutter up the inside of the PC making it even more annoying that it already is to do any sort of work inside the computer, I struggly to get hard disks in and out every time I want to because the ribbon cable and power cable to the stupid floppy drive get in the way.
I would differ that they're a "commonly used medium". I don't know anyone who uses them. These things still seem to be bundled dutifully with all new PCs though. Its like some sort of culture, everyone just assumes that the floppy drive "should be there", its just something a PC needs. I think if everyone threw all of them away today, most people wouldn't even miss them, and the few who might would simply adjust.
The only possible use I can think for them is diskless systems (e.g. simple X terminal) actually.
Learn how the technology works before you post (and get moderated up so quickly, sheesh - moderators, do some research first too). Its not as simplistic as you imply, watermarks can be embedded that are not perceptible by the human ear, yet will still be detectable even after one or more generations of loss (e.g. creating an mp3 from the original, or going Digital -> Analog and re-recording to digital). Its called steganography, and similar techniques can be used for images, e.g. allowing image watermarks that can still be detected even when images are saved in horribly lossy formats such as JPEG (see for example http://www.outguess.org/)
Watermarking should be taken seriously, this is not something you should just brush aside with one hand, this is something that (I think) is going to start being used a LOT within the next 10 years by the media cartels looking to protect their IP. Should it become common to purchase music online (which is a very likely scenario eventually, even though the RIAA is currently fighting this to protect their current monopolising of distribution channels), it should be very easy to embed a unique watermark in each individual song purchased (not unlike the Intel PIII CPU ID); while this alone would not prevent piracy directly, it does provide a very handy powerful facility for tracking pirated music - a pirated MP3 could always be tracked right back down to the specific individual who purchased it. It wouldn't take too many legal threats/fines/arrests before people became too scared to pirate music.
Of course this isn't necessarily entirely "bad" if you assume that piracy is wrong, but there is potential for abuse (and American companies have proven time and again that if there is potential for abuse, there'll be abuse).
With Mozilla you must apply a patch or wait for the next milestone
Or just grab one of the nightly builds from the ftp server or from a mirror.
I haven't tried this myself though, so forgive me if its not quite as simple as that.
Odd. Today I converted about 30 gifs on my web site to pngs. In every single case the PNG was smaller, on average about probably about 30% smaller. Perhaps you should check the software you're using to generate the PNG's? I use ImageMagick "convert". I remember having problems with older software (I think it was Photoshop 5) generating PNGs that were larger than the GIFs. I find your comment strange that you went back to GIF "for file size". For JPEG/PNG I can understand, JPEGs are usually smaller than the same 24-bit PNG, being lossy. But for GIF's you should get better results with PNG.
I don't use transparency or animation in my gifs, which helps to prevent compatibility problems with stupid browsers that can't render with alpha channels properly.
I remember having exactly the same problem with some older software (I think one of the progs was Photoshop 5 if i remember correctly.) (Back then I thought it was the PNG format itself that was the problem). Photoshop 6 seems to generate almost optimal PNG's, except they add a "Adobe.ImageReady" header indicated it was generated by them, something which I disagree with. So I use ImageMagick for all my PNG needs, which makes the smallest files I've seen. I recently converted a whole lot of GIF's on my web site to PNGs (today actually, after reading this thread :), and in every single case the PNG was smaller, by on average probably about 30 - 40%.
The PNG format has five standard compression filters, and a different compression filter can be chosen for each scanline in the image. Thus software that generates PNGs should check which filter produces the best results when saving. I think some older software didn't do this very well.
See this for some stats on PNG usage. It looks very low, but one should also keep in mind the shape of the technology adoption curve, it has a long run-in time, but once it hits the upward slope it climbs quickly.
Also, GIF has been around a lot longer than PNG - wait until PNG is as old as GIF is now, I think you'll see a lot less one-sided picture then.
Keep in mind that viewers for most platforms have only really become widely available in the past year or two. So in the next year or two we'll start to see an upswing in PNG usage. GIF and JPEG both have their place (jpeg files are still smaller for, uh, "natural" images where a certain amount of loss is acceptable to most people) and will no doubt be around a looong time, but I think in three or four years those securityspace figures will probably be looking more like 40/40/20 for GIF/JPG/PNG. If you look at the general trend there over the past eight months, PNG has been slowly climbing, while GIF slowly dropping. I don't see PNG replacing jpeg though as the dominant format for, uh, "natural" photographic type images anytime in the next five years - not until bandwidth and disk space really become "non-issues", at which time people might start looking for a bit more quality. I doubt it though, people have shown time and again that they don't give a crap for quality (just look at the popularity of Windows, boyzone, TV sitcoms, MacDonalds etc). Depressing, but thats the way it is.
I'm guessing they don't want to give the message that perhaps the DMCA is wrong after all. Remember, Adobe is still backing the DMCA, so their "official" position is that they have been in the right all along.
Are you incapable of thinking long-term? Just because something is voluntary now doens't mean it will always be. New Microsoft features are almost always voluntary - they're usually voluntary only until people have gotten used to the idea. Then either they become involuntary, or the process of opting out is made overly-complicated and obscure, so that most people just give in anyway. Think man.
You don't see the problem? Its Microsoft doing this. Here are a few questions for you:
(1) Has Microsoft's behaviour, in the past, shown that we can reasonably expect that we can trust Microsoft to NOT abuse this feature to diss or shut out competition?
(2) Looking at the general trend that this feature is most likely to go, can we expect that a similar feature could, in future, be used to block competing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, uh, I mean, unstable applications?
(3) In the case of Linux, not only can we most likely expect the entire process to be open and transparent (i.e. so we'll know who is getting blocked and why), but with Linux you can always just rebuild the source with the 'feature' disabled. Now, in the case of Microsoft, can we expect fully open and transparent access to the database of blocked drivers (and in future applications), and can we expect to always be able to disable this feature easily?
Not everything is black and white. Just because the same feature is there, doesn't make it the same issue.
I heard a saying once, "Locks are made to keep honest people out".
Wasn't that more like, "Locks are made to keep honest people honest"?
The message therein is that if you use locks, only the people who REALLY want to get in will try to, and prevent 'casual passersby' from trying. A padlock is like weak encryption, if someone really wants to get in, they'll get in, but people who are not that serious won't bother to try. If you don't encrypt at all though, many of those same people would then try to eavesdrop, even if just out of curiosity - same as for padlocks, curious passersby will wonder "whats behind this gate?" if there is no padlock on it.
Its not a 'black-and-white' thing. People often make the argument "if someone really wants to crack this, they'll crack this, so why bother even trying to protect this software" (some people I work with :(). That annoys me. Its not binary (yes/no, black/white) - the number of people who will crack something follow a non-linear curve based on how much protection you put in. E.g., if you have say no protection, you'll have say 70% cracking. With 10% encryption, that'll drop automatically to say 35%. With 20% protection, it'll drop to say 17%. With 50% protection, it'll be around 2%. These figures are obviously just example figures .. but thats the idea. You can, of course, never reach 100% protection of anything (because as you say if someone really wants to get into something, they will), but if you have 95% protection, then you'll only have to worry about 0.01% of people, instead of 70%. I agree with you though, if you're going to encrypt, use strong encryption.
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Artistic license. Technically, an optimizing "English compiler" would change "Dimitry's wife's husband" to just "Dimitry", and it would be just the same thing. The people on slashdot mostly analyze everything technically. But this is not the same as seeing "if (!(!(i==3)))" in source code .. this is something that is meant to be read by people, and as such, "Dimitry's wife's husband" not only provides additional information that would otherwise not be conveyed (i.e. he is married), but in the context of human emotions and compassion, that extra information also helps readers to realise that this is just another regular human like them, and that he also has loved ones that will be feeling pain now. So it evokes more empathy and/or sympathy and compassion than just (for example) "a Russian hacker", which is a very anonymous term.
Stop thinking so technically .. the human brain isn't a compiler, human behaviour and reasoning involve many fuzzy, illogical constructs.
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This guys complaining that QoS costs so much today because you basically have to rig private networks. Personally I think that QoS will always be expensive, because I think the majority of people will be more than happy with low-priority packets for the vast majority of data transfer. People have very low standards (just look at the success of Windows) - and quite frankly, who is going to pay double to ensure their email gets to the other side of the planet in 2 seconds instead of 8 seconds? And sure, the web would feel a little more responsive with QoS packets, but most people I think wouldn't pay much extra to get that. As for streaming video, I doubt the majority of streaming video on the Internet means enough to people to want to pay extra to ensure they get it smoothly (e.g. some random news clip from cnn.com, who cares if it breaks up a bit?)
I might be dead wrong here. Perhaps streaming entire movies etc might be a different story.
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They won't do that because they know it wouldn't work. Consumers don't want "biznet", they want "Internet". As long as their is ANY media distribution channel that the media conglomerates can't monopolize, they will fight to control or destroy it. The RIAA understands that the best way to make money is to monopolise all distribution channels.
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The complaint charges that MS ties support to product registration. Yeah, so does my toaster warranty, and my VCR, and my TV, and my washer and dryer, etc
You are misinformed. Legally, your toaster, VCR, TV, washer AND dryer are ALL under warrany whether you "register" or not. The law provides something called an "implied warranty", which means that an item you buy must be fit for the purpose for which it was sold. Specific duration warranties are provided for different types of products. The only way that a manufacturer can circumvent the implied warranty is by making a specific deal with the buyer - the customer must KNOW that he/she is making such a deal. Manufacturers would all like to circumvent the implied warranty in order to further their bottom line, but the only way they can do this is - you guessed it - product "registration". The "registration" is usually set up to sound like a good deal, it normally sounds like you are getting a good warranty when you "sign up", but if you do research, 9 out of 10 times you just signed yourself into a more limited warranty than you already had under law. So as long as you didn't make any specific warranty arrangement with your dealer, the dealer is legally required to exchange your product if it has manufacturing defects.
Why is this very different from Microsoft's passport arrangement? Because when you install XP, you've no doubt clicked on an "I agree" somewhere, which means that you're agreeing to an alternate warranty arrangement, under which you MUST supply personal information in order to have manufacturing defects repaired.
This is just one part of Microsoft's attempt to turn the Internet into a huge Microsoft proprietary network, like the Compuserves of yesteryear. Smart tags, Passport etc are all just parts of the plan - and by and large, they are succeeding.
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Sorry, I think I had it the wrong way round there. Doesn't matter, argument applies regardless of the side from which you apply it.
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Why not simply let your competitors pay for development, and you could simply scoop up the project when it was finished
Only one problem with this reasoning - the software is opensource, so you end up with exactly the same software that your competitor (and the rest of the world for that matter) has. So what advantage does that give your competitor? Or even you for that matter? Your potential "customers" can download the software for free, they wouldn't have to go to you OR your competitor. The way you tell it, you'd think the competitor ends up with the only copy of the software.
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So much for "zero administration" networking. Funny you never hear MS pushing that buzzword anymore. Of course technical people no doubt realised all along that it was just marketing BS, you have to know what you're doing and keep up to date to run servers, but now millions of not-so-clued-up people have fallen for the hype, they were led to believe that a few mouse clicks is all you need and you can sit back and relax while your server runs itself. Thanks to this attitude things like "code red" can flourish. Marketing people are quick to push terms like "zero administration" but won't readily mention "service packs", since that implies "non-zero-administration".
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A corrupt legal system is one of the main things that keeps Russia a third world nation
You're kidding right? There are SOOO many more other factors involved than just "a corrupt legal system". Your statement demonstrates a lot of ignorance/naivety .. remember, Russia hasn't even been a capitalist democracy for more than a few years .. you somehow expect that they should already just magically match the USA economically? That sort of damage takes decades of undoing before results start to be seen. How can you say anything at this stage about why they are "kept" a third-world nation?
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Well for one thing, steganographic signatures can be overlayed on the music which, while not discernable by the human ear, can be detected by analysis, even after a sample has been "degraded" by the analog conversion. Expect steganographic signatures to become very widespread on music distribution media soon. MP3's would be traceable to the source they were copied from.
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I'm tired of hearing the same old tired argument of "so what if they implement stuff like this, somebody will just crack it anyway". The implicit message is that it is acceptable behaviour for companies to implement any level of copy "protection" that they want. It isn't - the message that consumers should be sending is "it is not acceptable IN THE FIRST PLACE", not "it is acceptable, go ahead, somebody will crack it". The former approach deems the RIAA's behaviour "good" and the crackers' behaviour "bad". The latter approach deems the RIAA's behaviour "bad". This is a very important distinction. Whether or not someone will crack it, "somebody" shouldn't have to crack it in the first place.
And I don't disagree that recording companies should be allowed to protect their IP - those who push this argument are missing the real motives of the recording companies, which is not just to protect their IP, but to monopolize content creation and distribution channels, as well as to eventually implement pay-per-view ubiquitously (with elimination of fair rights use being a side-effect).
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McNealy seems to forget that while some people (such as himself) may not mind too much having no or limited privacy, OTHERS DO, and that each individual should be able to choose. He is essentially arguing that nobody should have the right to choose their own level of privacy, simply because it may sometimes be beneficial for others to have your information. Individuals should be in complete control of what happens to their own information and who should get it. He is saying 'give up the control, give the control to us big businesses, and then just trust us, because so far "the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself"'. This is complete BS. He seems to want to thrust his own personal views onto everyone, and it sure as hell isn't for everyone elses good, as he implies it is.
I don't want some corporations software making reservations at restaurants for me supposedly based on my tastes (more likely, in reality, based on what the restaurant paid the corporation to ensure that his/her restaurant always comes up top of the list) - and I don't see why I should be subjected to systems like this simply because Mr. McNealy liked the idea.
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