This is way off-topic, but is anyone besides me having wacko problems with slashdot? OSDN bar not disappearing, cant log in, none of the perl seems to work, etc etc???
Freedom to be under Stallman's Power
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is probably posted too late to get much notice, but I think the point made by Stallman is not quite right. Choosing a license may be exercising power, but by advocating that no one choose any license but his own, he is putting you under his power (the optional "any later version" clause in the GPL that is the source of such conflict).
I think it sounds a bit ridiculous for him to say "I believe in the freedom to do anything you want with your software, except choose any license but my own".
Depending on how you define power, every design decision you make - from language to compilers to licenses - is exercising some form of power. You can explicitly exclude some users (using nonstandard GNU compiler extensions) or write code that can be used anywhere.
Stallman is NOT the god he believes himself to be. He seems to be more like a homeless man that knows how to code. Far too many people listen to his rantings.
I don't know about Linux, but FreeBSD has a config file (/etc/usbd.conf) that contains commands to be run when a device is attached. It should be easy enough for say, a Linux distributor to make a standard mount point such as/usbmnt and have it automount upon attachment.
Note - last I checked, I'm not 100% sure FreeBSD supports those drives:). It doesn't like my USB floppy or CDROM.
It's because Joe User doesn't understand enough to make a distinction between hardware and the OS. To him, Windows is part of the computer. Why else would they say "my computer crashed" instead of the truth: "my operating system crashed". To most people, computers don't "run windows", it is PART of the computer!
I e-mailed the fellow and he confirmed that both the MAXUSERS and kernel version listed in the article were misprints. He used 4.4-R and MAXUSERS was set at 200 (still too low for a high-volume server, IMO).
I believe that benchmarks have shown softupdates to have just as much speed as a journalling FS. 5.0 currently has background fsck'ing, meaning that except for the root partition all the filesystems are checked AFTER the system is completely up. So softupdates+background FSCK gives you everything a journaling fs does, without the risk of a corrupt journal, is probably faster than journaling, and doesn't require a new untested FS (or new, untested extensions to an FS).
Hi, you better be careful using softupdates and write caching. The write caching on most IDE drives screws up softupdates' logic and it will have an inconsistent state on disk.
You obviously have NO idea how anal the *BSD maintainers are. They won't let you commit if there is a SYTLISTIC problem with your code. And the man pages are spot-on up to date (texinfo sucks major wang, BTW).
Actually I have been told that Best Buy barely makes anything (or even loses) money on the CDs. They make their cash selling major appliances, electronics, etc.
You keep fuzzing your definition of "the market" to be an all-encompasing PC platform and simply an OS. This was a central issue of the trial. The "market" was defined as PC desktop operating systems. Microsoft has a monopoly here. What markets have they controlled the direction of? Web browsers. They leveraged their Desktop OS market to the browser market in their favor. This was the scope of the trial, and it remains true today.
The other markets you mention have not really been attacked yet. The classical "3.0 strategy" MS seems to employ is at work here. (IE 1 and 2 failed miserably, IE3 was where it hit home. Same with Windows). The MS strategy is more long-term than you are giving them credit for. We will see how well USB 2.0 does without native Windows support. I hope MS finds themselves backpedaling as quickly as they did with TCP.
But hardware does not interest MS. They are interested in things like Passport,.Net, and WMA. We have only begun to see their efforts in these field. So yes, their first feeble attempts have failed, but to quote... "ROUND 3... FIGHT!"
Pricing. Read the trial transcripts. I can't remember the exact example, but they had e-mail evidence of something along the lines of a study showing that charging $X for Win98 would give them $Y profit, but charging $X+20 would barely impact customer migration while ballooning profits. To me, this translates to directing the price of OS's. Plus, they refuse to sell their previous OS's at reduced prices. Would you buy a used car for as much as you could buy a new car for? I doubt it!
Compare hardware prices to OS prices. Today, I can buy 1000s of times the power for less money than I paid for my first 8088. But I still pay the same stinking price for an OS. I'm not asking for them to give Windows away, but to demand the same premiums year over year when the functionality of the OS remains only marginally increased? I don't think so! Tweaking the UI is not worth $100.
And I wouldnt call their licensing changes a fiasco, just a little egg on their face. The changes they wish to make will happen because they can make it happen. Their monopoly gives them that power. Simply raise OS and app costs so high that no organization (or consumer) can fiscally justify NOT using their new licenses. Stockholders are not very happy when their company's try to "make a stand" with their money, instead of making financially sound decisions (despite my agreement with you that it is better to make a stand now than in 10 years when most people pay $19.95 to rent Windows).
Credible alternatives. Put yourself in the shoes of the huddled masses that signed up for a 4-year, $400 MSN rebate. To them, the only credible alternative is OS X. But tell me how I get one besides going to apple.com. For a lot of users it is just too much trouble to learn an additional OS. Think about Joe 9-5. He gets up at 6am, wakes the kids, has some breakfast and takes them to school. If he is lucky, he spends 30 minutes to check his e-mail. Then at work, for at least 8 hours (does anyone work an 8 hour day any more) he is probably surrounded by Windows PCs. He goes home, and if he is anything like people I know, he doesn't spend more than 3 hours on his home PC. To this man, it is not worth learning another OS that he only uses for about 25% of his "PC Time". Plus if he takes work home, then he needs something compatible (funny how Mac Office is always just a little behind Windows Office). The deck is too stacked against alternatives. I sincerely wish it was not, but it is. The alternatives DO exist, but they have no credibility and are very unattainable (you mean I have to install a new OS to use these?!). The core Desktop OS monopoly ensures this. Remember, the courts defined the monopoly market to be Desktop OS's.
You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of Joe Windows User.
Since you are in the minority here, you need to prove to us that Microsoft is not a monopoly. If you can, be sure to forward a copy to MS's lawyers, I am sure they would love to see your arguments.
OGG is not going to become a major musical force until my Rio supports it. Microsoft has just as big of a stranglehold over PC OEMs today as they did before, and you will never see a PC billed as a "Linux PC" by the big 3 for years to come. And Linux does not rule the server room, it sits in the back corner gathering dust serving up information unbeknownst to anyone. Windows powers more high-profile websites than Linux has ever thought about. Submitting your @home "web server" to netcraft might increase the Apache share, but it is hardly a sound piece of statistics.
And as far as applications go, try finding the apps that run reliably enough to do what you want. GIMP is out of the ordinary, most OSS apps crash when you sneeze and never get out of beta stage. Just make sure that the next time you send out your resume, you use a simple ascii editor, with no fancy bullets, italics or bold. With the whole thing in 12pt Courier. Because that's all you will get with ASCII.
Wake up and smell the coffee. All the Windows alternatives have MILES to go before the developers can sleep.
Oh and for the record, I run FreeBSD on all my systems, including a laptop, with KDE as my window manager. I don't delude myself by looking at the world through slashdot-colored glasses, so don't make any assumptions about what I do and do not use.
Are you daft man? Microsoft has a monopoly. The courts say so. Computer OEMs say so. We all know so.
Can they control a market? Yes, demonstrably so with their OEM contracts regarding boot loaders. Can they create unduly high barriers to competition? Yes, through their restrictive OEM contracts again. The real meat of the licenses is probably so bad that no one would even dare mention it.
Do I have more choices for a desktop operating system? Theoretically yes, but in all practicality NO.
Until Microsoft adopts open file formats (like an XML schema) and never EVER adds proprietary (or patented) extensions will you be able to do away with them.
I always find that if I am testing for tons of possible errors deep in my code that what really needs to happen is some minor logic changes at a higher level that make the error conditions impossible to exist.
Nah, this is not a problem. Once Microsoft is the sole provider of authorization they will surely know which accounts were compromised. They will just cancel your GatesCard and reissue a you a new number (that is, if you subscribe to the premium Passport service with extra guaranteed protection).
Once we all get Microsoft-sponsored full frontal lobotomies, no one will care!
Why doesnt someone add a feature to Mozilla that will not block ads but simply not display them. Heck even make one that "clicks through" in a background process but doesnt display anything:). Change your user agent and then continue on destroying NET ad revenue models.
No you are wrong here. Microsoft has in the past releases a botched hotfix that caused problems. To maintain 99.999% uptime the vendor would have to do massive testing before approving your installation of such a fix. It could VERY easily end up taking you from 99.999% to 99% uptime.
Oh I do not disagree with you at all. But my point is that broadband will continue to exist, in one form or another, because it is backed by some people with deep pockets. It's just up to us geeks to figure out how to get around whatever they set up to lock us into their software. The guys who worked out the AOL protocol are off to a great start!
Sorry, but Microsoft is a huge proponent of broadband. If broadband fails, then.Net fails. "software as a service" will probably require broadband connections. Most businesses today are on a revolving "subscription" for MS software anyway, so getting consumers paying $19.95/month for MS.NET is what they want. I could see Microsoft buying up @Home to turn it into MSN@Home. Broadband is crucial to their plans.
On the other hand, if everyone drops broadband,.Net may fail and take a big chunk of Microsoft with it!:)
I think you are underestimating the impact CD burners in every cow box has had. I know people who are the dumbest red-necks you have ever seen that mix and burn their own CDs. Joe Public probably burns more CDs than the geeks do!
Maybe someone should tell Osama bin Laden that there is nothing any one person can do to change things. I am certainly not endorsing ANY of his actions, but if more American citizens were to be as dedicated to a cause as he is we could see some changes.
This trend is inevitable. It is driven by the continuing exponential increase in the performance of computing hardware. In any software project, there is a tradeoff between the amount of programming effort, the application functionality, and the resulting performance. Better hardware means that there is more performance available to be spent on increased functionality and reduced development cost.
This is more like Microsoft's entire vision of software, not just MS Research's! Reduce development costs by not caring how much resources your software requires.
Slashdot Mirror
That's when it started for me. Glad to know it wasnt a problem with my browser.
This is way off-topic, but is anyone besides me having wacko problems with slashdot? OSDN bar not disappearing, cant log in, none of the perl seems to work, etc etc???
This is probably posted too late to get much notice, but I think the point made by Stallman is not quite right. Choosing a license may be exercising power, but by advocating that no one choose any license but his own, he is putting you under his power (the optional "any later version" clause in the GPL that is the source of such conflict).
I think it sounds a bit ridiculous for him to say "I believe in the freedom to do anything you want with your software, except choose any license but my own".
Depending on how you define power, every design decision you make - from language to compilers to licenses - is exercising some form of power. You can explicitly exclude some users (using nonstandard GNU compiler extensions) or write code that can be used anywhere.
Stallman is NOT the god he believes himself to be. He seems to be more like a homeless man that knows how to code. Far too many people listen to his rantings.
I don't know about Linux, but FreeBSD has a config file (/etc/usbd.conf) that contains commands to be run when a device is attached. It should be easy enough for say, a Linux distributor to make a standard mount point such as /usbmnt and have it automount upon attachment.
:). It doesn't like my USB floppy or CDROM.
Note - last I checked, I'm not 100% sure FreeBSD supports those drives
It's because Joe User doesn't understand enough to make a distinction between hardware and the OS. To him, Windows is part of the computer. Why else would they say "my computer crashed" instead of the truth: "my operating system crashed". To most people, computers don't "run windows", it is PART of the computer!
I e-mailed the fellow and he confirmed that both the MAXUSERS and kernel version listed in the article were misprints. He used 4.4-R and MAXUSERS was set at 200 (still too low for a high-volume server, IMO).
I believe that benchmarks have shown softupdates to have just as much speed as a journalling FS. 5.0 currently has background fsck'ing, meaning that except for the root partition all the filesystems are checked AFTER the system is completely up. So softupdates+background FSCK gives you everything a journaling fs does, without the risk of a corrupt journal, is probably faster than journaling, and doesn't require a new untested FS (or new, untested extensions to an FS).
Thats funny. I'm running KDE2 on a thinkpad X20. Since IBM fixed the BIOS problem with freebsd a5 partitions, there are no issues.
Hi, you better be careful using softupdates and write caching. The write caching on most IDE drives screws up softupdates' logic and it will have an inconsistent state on disk.
You obviously have NO idea how anal the *BSD maintainers are. They won't let you commit if there is a SYTLISTIC problem with your code. And the man pages are spot-on up to date (texinfo sucks major wang, BTW).
Actually I have been told that Best Buy barely makes anything (or even loses) money on the CDs. They make their cash selling major appliances, electronics, etc.
You keep fuzzing your definition of "the market" to be an all-encompasing PC platform and simply an OS. This was a central issue of the trial. The "market" was defined as PC desktop operating systems. Microsoft has a monopoly here. What markets have they controlled the direction of? Web browsers. They leveraged their Desktop OS market to the browser market in their favor. This was the scope of the trial, and it remains true today.
.Net, and WMA. We have only begun to see their efforts in these field. So yes, their first feeble attempts have failed, but to quote... "ROUND 3... FIGHT!"
The other markets you mention have not really been attacked yet. The classical "3.0 strategy" MS seems to employ is at work here. (IE 1 and 2 failed miserably, IE3 was where it hit home. Same with Windows). The MS strategy is more long-term than you are giving them credit for. We will see how well USB 2.0 does without native Windows support. I hope MS finds themselves backpedaling as quickly as they did with TCP.
But hardware does not interest MS. They are interested in things like Passport,
Pricing. Read the trial transcripts. I can't remember the exact example, but they had e-mail evidence of something along the lines of a study showing that charging $X for Win98 would give them $Y profit, but charging $X+20 would barely impact customer migration while ballooning profits. To me, this translates to directing the price of OS's. Plus, they refuse to sell their previous OS's at reduced prices. Would you buy a used car for as much as you could buy a new car for? I doubt it!
Compare hardware prices to OS prices. Today, I can buy 1000s of times the power for less money than I paid for my first 8088. But I still pay the same stinking price for an OS. I'm not asking for them to give Windows away, but to demand the same premiums year over year when the functionality of the OS remains only marginally increased? I don't think so! Tweaking the UI is not worth $100.
And I wouldnt call their licensing changes a fiasco, just a little egg on their face. The changes they wish to make will happen because they can make it happen. Their monopoly gives them that power. Simply raise OS and app costs so high that no organization (or consumer) can fiscally justify NOT using their new licenses. Stockholders are not very happy when their company's try to "make a stand" with their money, instead of making financially sound decisions (despite my agreement with you that it is better to make a stand now than in 10 years when most people pay $19.95 to rent Windows).
Credible alternatives. Put yourself in the shoes of the huddled masses that signed up for a 4-year, $400 MSN rebate. To them, the only credible alternative is OS X. But tell me how I get one besides going to apple.com. For a lot of users it is just too much trouble to learn an additional OS. Think about Joe 9-5. He gets up at 6am, wakes the kids, has some breakfast and takes them to school. If he is lucky, he spends 30 minutes to check his e-mail. Then at work, for at least 8 hours (does anyone work an 8 hour day any more) he is probably surrounded by Windows PCs. He goes home, and if he is anything like people I know, he doesn't spend more than 3 hours on his home PC. To this man, it is not worth learning another OS that he only uses for about 25% of his "PC Time". Plus if he takes work home, then he needs something compatible (funny how Mac Office is always just a little behind Windows Office). The deck is too stacked against alternatives. I sincerely wish it was not, but it is. The alternatives DO exist, but they have no credibility and are very unattainable (you mean I have to install a new OS to use these?!). The core Desktop OS monopoly ensures this. Remember, the courts defined the monopoly market to be Desktop OS's.
You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of Joe Windows User.
Since you are in the minority here, you need to prove to us that Microsoft is not a monopoly. If you can, be sure to forward a copy to MS's lawyers, I am sure they would love to see your arguments.
OGG is not going to become a major musical force until my Rio supports it. Microsoft has just as big of a stranglehold over PC OEMs today as they did before, and you will never see a PC billed as a "Linux PC" by the big 3 for years to come. And Linux does not rule the server room, it sits in the back corner gathering dust serving up information unbeknownst to anyone. Windows powers more high-profile websites than Linux has ever thought about. Submitting your @home "web server" to netcraft might increase the Apache share, but it is hardly a sound piece of statistics.
And as far as applications go, try finding the apps that run reliably enough to do what you want. GIMP is out of the ordinary, most OSS apps crash when you sneeze and never get out of beta stage. Just make sure that the next time you send out your resume, you use a simple ascii editor, with no fancy bullets, italics or bold. With the whole thing in 12pt Courier. Because that's all you will get with ASCII.
Wake up and smell the coffee. All the Windows alternatives have MILES to go before the developers can sleep.
Oh and for the record, I run FreeBSD on all my systems, including a laptop, with KDE as my window manager. I don't delude myself by looking at the world through slashdot-colored glasses, so don't make any assumptions about what I do and do not use.
Are you daft man? Microsoft has a monopoly. The courts say so. Computer OEMs say so. We all know so.
Can they control a market? Yes, demonstrably so with their OEM contracts regarding boot loaders. Can they create unduly high barriers to competition? Yes, through their restrictive OEM contracts again. The real meat of the licenses is probably so bad that no one would even dare mention it.
Do I have more choices for a desktop operating system? Theoretically yes, but in all practicality NO.
Until Microsoft adopts open file formats (like an XML schema) and never EVER adds proprietary (or patented) extensions will you be able to do away with them.
No, Microsoft didn't get marketing until the first few threats to their monopoly arose -- DR-DOS, OS/2, and (arguably) the Mac.
I always find that if I am testing for tons of possible errors deep in my code that what really needs to happen is some minor logic changes at a higher level that make the error conditions impossible to exist.
Nah, this is not a problem. Once Microsoft is the sole provider of authorization they will surely know which accounts were compromised. They will just cancel your GatesCard and reissue a you a new number (that is, if you subscribe to the premium Passport service with extra guaranteed protection).
Once we all get Microsoft-sponsored full frontal lobotomies, no one will care!
Why doesnt someone add a feature to Mozilla that will not block ads but simply not display them. Heck even make one that "clicks through" in a background process but doesnt display anything :). Change your user agent and then continue on destroying NET ad revenue models.
No you are wrong here. Microsoft has in the past releases a botched hotfix that caused problems. To maintain 99.999% uptime the vendor would have to do massive testing before approving your installation of such a fix. It could VERY easily end up taking you from 99.999% to 99% uptime.
Oh I do not disagree with you at all. But my point is that broadband will continue to exist, in one form or another, because it is backed by some people with deep pockets. It's just up to us geeks to figure out how to get around whatever they set up to lock us into their software.
The guys who worked out the AOL protocol are off to a great start!
Sorry, but Microsoft is a huge proponent of broadband. If broadband fails, then .Net fails. "software as a service" will probably require broadband connections. Most businesses today are on a revolving "subscription" for MS software anyway, so getting consumers paying $19.95/month for MS.NET is what they want. I could see Microsoft buying up @Home to turn it into MSN@Home. Broadband is crucial to their plans.
.Net may fail and take a big chunk of Microsoft with it! :)
On the other hand, if everyone drops broadband,
I think you are underestimating the impact CD burners in every cow box has had. I know people who are the dumbest red-necks you have ever seen that mix and burn their own CDs. Joe Public probably burns more CDs than the geeks do!
2001-09-26 01:03:41 More 'protected' CDs (articles,news) (rejected)
Maybe someone should tell Osama bin Laden that there is nothing any one person can do to change things. I am certainly not endorsing ANY of his actions, but if more American citizens were to be as dedicated to a cause as he is we could see some changes.