This seems like the standard response of people trying to justify cracking.
The correct smart-ass statement would be: "Ah, I get it. So if someone puts up a lock that can be broken by using a simple credit card, I can prosecute the punks for breaking and entering?"
Of course you can. Just because something is easy to break into does not justify breaking in.
If you break into a computer system, that system HAS to be taken down. It has to be ritually cleansed so that you are sure there are no backdoors inserted somewhere, and that the data is actually correct, which often involves restoring from backups. It might be the administrators fault that you actually succeeded in breaking in, it is NOT his fault that all this cleanup has to be done on a successful breakin.
If you break into a bank to take a leak, it is still a crime. The bank has to go over all of their routines, and they have to make sure all you did was take a leak. They surely cannot just take your word for it.
The bank should have improved their security, but what you did is still a crime.
The people in this settlement are not paid in money, they are paid in $25 worth of software. How much software do you get for $25 from Microsoft? Possibly a computer game.
Since most people may not want a computer game from Microsoft, and instead opt for using this as a discount for say Microsoft Office or Windows XP. Since the margins for these products are HUGE, Microsoft may actually end up earning money from this settlement.
It will certainly not cost Microsoft as much as a pure monetary settlement would. It will also end up INCREASING Microsofts market share.
This is peanuts for Microsoft, and may actually end up hurting their competitors more than them.
It only works for software that is a platform for other software, which quite frankly is not the majority of software out there.
For this to be sustainable, you need lots of other companies that like your platform but wants to create proprietary software. This also means that the Free Software Foundation might not like it too much, but that is probably something absolutely everyone cares about.
There is normally a reason why drives have a 1 year warranty instead of a 3 year warranty.
Yes, RAID will help you improve your reliability a lot, but there are plenty of businesses where RAID really isn't the right solution. Besides, the cost of the drives is not at all the only cost involved here either.
My point is that this is NOT simple maths. If a drive costs $500 and has a mean time between failure of 4 years, it is often a much better solution than a $100 drive with 1.5 years of mean time between failure.
The warranty the company offers is of course not necessarily equivalent with reliability but it can be an indication.
As opposed to the millions of graves capitalism has created. Possibly not in the US, but in all the countries that Western Capitalist countries exploit for profit.
Besides. "Kill counts" are almost always exaggerated when presented from a "communist country" as part of common propaganda. When Ceucescu was overthrown in Rumania he was presented as a communist dictator, when in fact he was largely supported by the west, and was much more of a facist than a communist. The kill numbers where presented in the scale of 50.000 when in fact they were less than 1000.
At the same time USA attacked Panama in a "clean, precision attack to take down an evil communist dictator", when in fact he came to power supported by the US, and the kill numbers (civilians) where actually larger than in the revolt in Rumenia.
I would not trust for instance CNN, NBC or CBS to give you an objective view on communism.
Red Khmer in Cambodia was supported by the west until he got troublesome.
Communism in it's basic idea is "provide what you can, and receive what you need" and the idea that the people shall own the means of production.
I'm not saying that it has been a raging success so far, although Cuba seems to work pretty well right now, apart from the ridiculous ban by their biggest potential market (USA). The implementation of Communism has so far been flawed. Their are lots of elements to change in the idea, but it has not at all been proven that the basic idea is evil. Perhaps it is not a good idea to give too much power to a leader, that can be changed.
The notion that "capitalism works" is equally ridiculous. It might work for you, but there are huge masses of people being hurt by capitalism every day.
I'm just "nearly" a communist, and I think there is a better way than capitalism. If you disagree, that is fine, but the whole "communism is evil" mantra of Western Capitalism is basically flawed and makes arguments useless.
"Who in the mainstream is going to align themselves with us, if we give them the impression that we're anarchists and commies?"
Speak for yourself! I might not be an anarchist, but I'm pretty close to a commie! Are Free Software and communism related? At least not closely. I'm actually more concerned with people (especially it seems in the US) having the notion that communism is evil. Thus I object to the idea of seeing Free Software as communism is also seeing it as evil.
Although I have to admit that it is easier for me to promote free software if I do not mention that I'm a socialist/communist.
You can decide wether promoting free software is just part of my sinister plot to introduce communism in the western world, or if this is all (or mostly) unrelated.
.. majorly in the PC-business. As it is, Microsoft is trying to take over the console-business, something Sony is not prepared to see happen. At the same time Sony is putting lots and lots of dollars into Microsofts warchest by selling PCs with Microsoft Windows preinstalled.
Sony is not alone here, IBM is another company in a similiar situation.
I think it would be in both companies interest to subsidize development of Linux desktop systems.
"This is what most people are so pissed about. It's the commercial outsourcing of GNOME on the back of free volunteers."
And it is just total BS. If someone wants to direct the development they just have to contribute instead of bitching that a lot of GNOME-developers have accepted a nice paycheck instead of doing it all for free.
The argument about this being commercial usage on the "back of free volunteers" is also crap. Most of more famous people being employed doing GNOME-work for companies are actually the same volunteers that built GNOME in the first place. Besides, this is what free software is about. The Free Software Foundation has never opposed commercial interests as long as they also play by the rules laid out by the GPL. The major GNOME-companies have a very, very good history of playing by these rules.
There is no evidence AT ALL that commercially employed GNOME-development step on the other developers of GNOME any more than in any other projects. The development is open and mostly consensus-driven and there is always a round of discussion about any major change.
The complaints come from some users that do not like the direction GNOME is taking. In contrast there are also users that LOVE the direction GNOME is taking.
If you want to influence the direction, you have to contribute or at the very least show very good arguments in each round of design choice. Bitching about it afterwards gets you nothing at all. That is the "sad" reality.
My experience is that the developers are very willing to listen to reasonable and sane argumentation. They will however totally ignore stuff like "please do this, because GNOME is useless if you don't". Back up your opinion with good arguments or you get nowhere, and this is how it works in just about any part of the world.
Besides, KDE is also driven by commercial companies like SuSE, Mandrake, Trolltech etc.
Whenever SUN and GNOME is brought up, there are always someone suggesting they should have used KDE instead. I'm a GNOME-user and I do not want to get into a discussion about quality here, so lets assumed that the (biased) assumption that KDE is better than GNOME is correct.*
The main issue is control. GTK+ and most GNOME-libraries are based on a LGPL-license, while Qt is based on GPL. This is all fine and dandy for free software, and this is certainly not a question of morality. Qt is free software.
For closed source development however things look different. For GTK+/GNOME you can develop closed apps without problems, with Qt/KDE you have to obtain a license from Trolltech. This could be fine for SUN themselves, but:
SUN would not like to be held totally at ransom by Trolltech for all third-party developers. If Trolltech wanted to, they could cease giving out commercial licenses for the SUN Solaris platform at ANY TIME. Do you think any OS-developer would be boneheaded enough to let someone else control the platform? Do you think Microsoft would form the next Windows using Qt?`
The question for SUN is: "Do we use a platform that is in direct control by another company for third-party development, or do we use a platform that is not?"
This is an easy question to answer wether or not you like KDE or GNOME better.
(*) It might be. I like GNOME better, but this might be my biased opinion. I just wanted to state that this was irrelevant.
Really? Things are really not the same around the western world.
I do not know a single adult person in Norway that do not have either a VISA or a mastercard or both. Almost all VISAs are however debet cards instead of credit cards. Is there nothing like this in the US?
"Bags make groceries go 'round. That's why the store throws them in for free, and usually tries to put someone there who can supply the service of stuffing them."
Oh.. we're far beyond that in other parts of the world (not necessarily positive). In Norway all plastic bags cost money (0.50 kroner or around 8 cents) and there are NEVER someone around to stuff your bags. That you have to do yourself.
The only difference with this new system is that you won't need as many cashiers. You'll still need someone to take and change cash and to see that things go smoothly.
I'm not even sure this is such a great idea. Sure, the goods might become cheaper, and the owners will get richer, but is this really a benefit to the society?
If you want to try out GNOME, I suggest installing Red Hat 8. By far the easiest and most integrated GNOME-desktop out there. The speed is very, very nice because of GCC 3.2 (which also benefits KDE).
SuSE is a fine distribution, but just like there is better alternatives for KDE-users than Red Hat, there are better alternatives for GNOME-users than SuSE.
Gnomemeeting is included in RH8 and works out of the box.
Evolution is a _great_ e-mail client, heavily inspired by Outlook. It even works with Exchange for calendar-services with a plugin. It is also included in RH8.
It is based on Debian, and works fine with apt-get from what I hear.
I've never been able to try it as it costs $99, and I'm not about to shell out that amount for something I'm not even sure I'm going to like.
Basically it is a stripped down and purely KDE-driven Debian desktop. Seems like a reasonable thingie, which I'm pretty sure I wouldn't stick with myself, mainly because I do not like KDE all that much.
I'm thinking about smugly stating that "it will never work"
What difference does that really make? Some people will find out what they want, but the problem with taking away rights DOES have an impact wether or not it truly works. If some people can get around the blockage, there are still lots of people who do not have the knowledge to do so.
The same goes for taking away fair-use rights with copy-protected CDs and the like. The fact that they with lots of effort can be circumvented is besides the point.
Please... almost all distributions have a sane way of doing security upgrades.. at least the common ones. I'm not talking about Linux From Scratch here.
I still hate that snide comment about the three service packs though. It's just childish and moronic.
Because x86 Linux is more widespread and important than PowerPC-linux.
WINE is not an emulator, it's just an implentation of the WIN32-api. Running Office X would also require emulating a totally different processor architecture.
Running OSX-apps on PowerPC-Linux might be possible if someone implement all the APIs necessary (perhaps GNUStep might work in the future to run cocoa-apps).
There are however LOADS more developers for Linux/BSD on x86 than on PowerPC.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like the standard response of people trying to justify cracking.
The correct smart-ass statement would be:
"Ah, I get it. So if someone puts up a lock that can be broken by using a simple credit card, I can prosecute the punks for breaking and entering?"
Of course you can. Just because something is easy to break into does not justify breaking in.
If you break into a computer system, that system HAS to be taken down. It has to be ritually cleansed so that you are sure there are no backdoors inserted somewhere, and that the data is actually correct, which often involves restoring from backups. It might be the administrators fault that you actually succeeded in breaking in, it is NOT his fault that all this cleanup has to be done on a successful breakin.
If you break into a bank to take a leak, it is still a crime. The bank has to go over all of their routines, and they have to make sure all you did was take a leak. They surely cannot just take your word for it.
The bank should have improved their security, but what you did is still a crime.
The people in this settlement are not paid in money, they are paid in $25 worth of software. How much software do you get for $25 from Microsoft? Possibly a computer game.
Since most people may not want a computer game from Microsoft, and instead opt for using this as a discount for say Microsoft Office or Windows XP. Since the margins for these products are HUGE, Microsoft may actually end up earning money from this settlement.
It will certainly not cost Microsoft as much as a pure monetary settlement would. It will also end up INCREASING Microsofts market share.
This is peanuts for Microsoft, and may actually end up hurting their competitors more than them.
It only works for software that is a platform for other software, which quite frankly is not the majority of software out there.
For this to be sustainable, you need lots of other companies that like your platform but wants to create proprietary software. This also means that the Free Software Foundation might not like it too much, but that is probably something absolutely everyone cares about.
There is normally a reason why drives have a 1 year warranty instead of a 3 year warranty.
Yes, RAID will help you improve your reliability a lot, but there are plenty of businesses where RAID really isn't the right solution. Besides, the cost of the drives is not at all the only cost involved here either.
My point is that this is NOT simple maths. If a drive costs $500 and has a mean time between failure of 4 years, it is often a much better solution than a $100 drive with 1.5 years of mean time between failure.
The warranty the company offers is of course not necessarily equivalent with reliability but it can be an indication.
That is something you can only say if the data is not valuable to you.
In a business, saving $140 over three years for choosing the cheaper drive is going to make you look very stupid when that drive fails.
One single extra day of lost work for one single employee might very well cost more than what you saved.
Simple maths? I don't think so.
Comparing future products against real shipping products is not very fair without at least keeping this in mind. This article barely mentions it.
ATI might very well ship an improved version around the time GeForce FX ships.
I don't know a single person that does not pirate some software.
DVDs are mostly relevant for home users and not corporate use, and home users do not care about this at all.
Yes. At least Xine (and thereby everything that uses Xinelib, like Totem) supports menus just fine.
As opposed to the millions of graves capitalism has created. Possibly not in the US, but in all the countries that Western Capitalist countries exploit for profit.
Besides. "Kill counts" are almost always exaggerated when presented from a "communist country" as part of common propaganda. When Ceucescu was overthrown in Rumania he was presented as a communist dictator, when in fact he was largely supported by the west, and was much more of a facist than a communist. The kill numbers where presented in the scale of 50.000 when in fact they were less than 1000.
At the same time USA attacked Panama in a "clean, precision attack to take down an evil communist dictator", when in fact he came to power supported by the US, and the kill numbers (civilians) where actually larger than in the revolt in Rumenia.
I would not trust for instance CNN, NBC or CBS to give you an objective view on communism.
Red Khmer in Cambodia was supported by the west until he got troublesome.
Communism in it's basic idea is "provide what you can, and receive what you need" and the idea that the people shall own the means of production.
I'm not saying that it has been a raging success so far, although Cuba seems to work pretty well right now, apart from the ridiculous ban by their biggest potential market (USA). The implementation of Communism has so far been flawed. Their are lots of elements to change in the idea, but it has not at all been proven that the basic idea is evil. Perhaps it is not a good idea to give too much power to a leader, that can be changed.
The notion that "capitalism works" is equally ridiculous. It might work for you, but there are huge masses of people being hurt by capitalism every day.
I'm just "nearly" a communist, and I think there is a better way than capitalism. If you disagree, that is fine, but the whole "communism is evil" mantra of Western Capitalism is basically flawed and makes arguments useless.
"Who in the mainstream is going to align themselves with us, if we give them the impression that we're anarchists and commies?"
Speak for yourself! I might not be an anarchist, but I'm pretty close to a commie!
Are Free Software and communism related? At least not closely. I'm actually more concerned with people (especially it seems in the US) having the notion that communism is evil. Thus I object to the idea of seeing Free Software as communism is also seeing it as evil.
Although I have to admit that it is easier for me to promote free software if I do not mention that I'm a socialist/communist.
You can decide wether promoting free software is just part of my sinister plot to introduce communism in the western world, or if this is all (or mostly) unrelated.
.. majorly in the PC-business. As it is, Microsoft is trying to take over the console-business, something Sony is not prepared to see happen. At the same time Sony is putting lots and lots of dollars into Microsofts warchest by selling PCs with Microsoft Windows preinstalled.
Sony is not alone here, IBM is another company in a similiar situation.
I think it would be in both companies interest to subsidize development of Linux desktop systems.
"This is what most people are so pissed about. It's the commercial outsourcing of GNOME on the back of free volunteers."
And it is just total BS. If someone wants to direct the development they just have to contribute instead of bitching that a lot of GNOME-developers have accepted a nice paycheck instead of doing it all for free.
The argument about this being commercial usage on the "back of free volunteers" is also crap. Most of more famous people being employed doing GNOME-work for companies are actually the same volunteers that built GNOME in the first place. Besides, this is what free software is about. The Free Software Foundation has never opposed commercial interests as long as they also play by the rules laid out by the GPL. The major GNOME-companies have a very, very good history of playing by these rules.
There is no evidence AT ALL that commercially employed GNOME-development step on the other developers of GNOME any more than in any other projects. The development is open and mostly consensus-driven and there is always a round of discussion about any major change.
The complaints come from some users that do not like the direction GNOME is taking. In contrast there are also users that LOVE the direction GNOME is taking.
If you want to influence the direction, you have to contribute or at the very least show very good arguments in each round of design choice. Bitching about it afterwards gets you nothing at all. That is the "sad" reality.
My experience is that the developers are very willing to listen to reasonable and sane argumentation. They will however totally ignore stuff like "please do this, because GNOME is useless if you don't". Back up your opinion with good arguments or you get nowhere, and this is how it works in just about any part of the world.
Besides, KDE is also driven by commercial companies like SuSE, Mandrake, Trolltech etc.
Whenever SUN and GNOME is brought up, there are always someone suggesting they should have used KDE instead. I'm a GNOME-user and I do not want to get into a discussion about quality here, so lets assumed that the (biased) assumption that KDE is better than GNOME is correct.*
The main issue is control. GTK+ and most GNOME-libraries are based on a LGPL-license, while Qt is based on GPL. This is all fine and dandy for free software, and this is certainly not a question of morality. Qt is free software.
For closed source development however things look different. For GTK+/GNOME you can develop closed apps without problems, with Qt/KDE you have to obtain a license from Trolltech. This could be fine for SUN themselves, but:
SUN would not like to be held totally at ransom by Trolltech for all third-party developers. If Trolltech wanted to, they could cease giving out commercial licenses for the SUN Solaris platform at ANY TIME. Do you think any OS-developer would be boneheaded enough to let someone else control the platform? Do you think Microsoft would form the next Windows using Qt?`
The question for SUN is:
"Do we use a platform that is in direct control by another company for third-party development, or do we use a platform that is not?"
This is an easy question to answer wether or not you like KDE or GNOME better.
(*) It might be. I like GNOME better, but this might be my biased opinion. I just wanted to state that this was irrelevant.
Really? Things are really not the same around the western world.
I do not know a single adult person in Norway that do not have either a VISA or a mastercard or both. Almost all VISAs are however debet cards instead of credit cards. Is there nothing like this in the US?
Your information is actually out of date. The new ATI-drivers recently released DO support S3 and DO support UT-2003.
"Bags make groceries go 'round. That's why the store throws them in for free, and usually tries to put someone there who can supply the service of stuffing them."
Oh.. we're far beyond that in other parts of the world (not necessarily positive). In Norway all plastic bags cost money (0.50 kroner or around 8 cents) and there are NEVER someone around to stuff your bags. That you have to do yourself.
The only difference with this new system is that you won't need as many cashiers. You'll still need someone to take and change cash and to see that things go smoothly.
I'm not even sure this is such a great idea. Sure, the goods might become cheaper, and the owners will get richer, but is this really a benefit to the society?
If you want to try out GNOME, I suggest installing Red Hat 8. By far the easiest and most integrated GNOME-desktop out there. The speed is very, very nice because of GCC 3.2 (which also benefits KDE).
SuSE is a fine distribution, but just like there is better alternatives for KDE-users than Red Hat, there are better alternatives for GNOME-users than SuSE.
Gnomemeeting is included in RH8 and works out of the box.
Evolution is a _great_ e-mail client, heavily inspired by Outlook. It even works with Exchange for calendar-services with a plugin. It is also included in RH8.
It is based on Debian, and works fine with apt-get from what I hear.
I've never been able to try it as it costs $99, and I'm not about to shell out that amount for something I'm not even sure I'm going to like.
Basically it is a stripped down and purely KDE-driven Debian desktop. Seems like a reasonable thingie, which I'm pretty sure I wouldn't stick with myself, mainly because I do not like KDE all that much.
Only if EULAs are valid where you live. I do not know any european countries where they are valid.
I'm thinking about smugly stating that "it will never work"
What difference does that really make? Some people will find out what they want, but the problem with taking away rights DOES have an impact wether or not it truly works. If some people can get around the blockage, there are still lots of people who do not have the knowledge to do so.
The same goes for taking away fair-use rights with copy-protected CDs and the like. The fact that they with lots of effort can be circumvented is besides the point.
What was the bug and what was the response?
I'm not trying to troll, but knowing this helps when I'm trying to form an opinion about who I'm going to side with.
Please... almost all distributions have a sane way of doing security upgrades.. at least the common ones. I'm not talking about Linux From Scratch here.
I still hate that snide comment about the three service packs though. It's just childish and moronic.
Because x86 Linux is more widespread and important than PowerPC-linux.
WINE is not an emulator, it's just an implentation of the WIN32-api. Running Office X would also require emulating a totally different processor architecture.
Running OSX-apps on PowerPC-Linux might be possible if someone implement all the APIs necessary (perhaps GNUStep might work in the future to run cocoa-apps).
There are however LOADS more developers for Linux/BSD on x86 than on PowerPC.
He is talking about Microsoft stopping this the same way as RIAA shut down Napster.
I'm stating that the two cases are not related at all, and that Microsoft have to have totally different grounds to shut down this.
I was replying _because_ of his comparison with Napster.
No I am not. Try reading the post I was replying to:
"What is to stop MS attacking open source in the same way as RIAA attacked - and closed - napster?"
This situation has nothing to do with Napster, and I'm not the one suggestion it .