which is why the boycott is the correct response. Amazon's attempt to enforce this patent shows how far things have gone towards patents being a form of anti-competetive corporate welfare - they are used not to protect R&D budgets against parasites (the original intent of patents) but to stake a claim in a developing market in order to prevent anyone else from competing. No open market system can tolerate this.
How this state of affairs can be in the interests of capitalism, the economy, software consumers, software programmers, web developers, the government, or the general public is beyond the ability of any rational being to explain or defend. The fact that most are either to ignorant or too amoral to care is no excuse.
Corporate bootlickers and other sycophants may disagree, but I urge all who believe in the freedom to innovate *not* to buy the big lie, and not to buy Amazon until it becomes their *fiduciary duty* to rectify the situation by taking proper initiatives.
I've had no end of nightmares with them recently. In one case, they bounced back a request to change technical contact & DNS servers with an error that showed the email was getting piped to a process that was crapping out. So we resubmitted, only to find out that they sent us back some random technical information with our domain and authorization the top, meaning that for 24 hours, the domain got pointed to the wrong place entirely.
The updates to the whois database have dropped to an average 1.1 per day, but they keep claiming it's changed twice daily. Someone I spoke to there had no idea that this was happening.
I'm not sure I understand the point of all this disney schlock being written by Katz lately
Isn't it obvious? He's been smoking the wacky in the tomorrow tunnel and wants to justify his little trip to mouseworld as a business expense.
It seems that Walt wanted to create some sort of gleaming fascist utopian universe in Disney World, unfortuanetly for him the profiteers took over shortly after his death
What a pity! Now it's only a gleaming profiteering fascist uptopian vision!
What has to stop is every legal entity thinking that because they can afford a lawyer, they can bully on individuals whenever they please. Unfortunately, until the courts quit hiding from decisive rulings on this topic, anyone who can afford a lawyer.
Since purdueonline.com could just as easily apply to the chicken guy, it's pretty hard to imagine their basis for a trademark claim.
What a loser. He says that Packetstorm shut themselves down, which is clearly ludicrous. It's usally the kind of statement associated with blaming the victim; "Hey, she practically raped herself in that dress!": "They commited suicide by clinging to their counter-revolutionary beliefs." This kind of dishonest speech drives me nuts.
I'd have to say that your irrelevant quotes are not just grammatically incorrect, but rather telling - "Free". Your choice of metaphor - gasoline and natural gas - is of course perfect for proving the opposite of your point. Microsoft has used the "installed base" to manufacture a monopoly out of thin air - a monopoly on gasoline, in this case. Much like standard oil. So your comment that the goal of "capitolism [sic]" is to make as much money as possible stands out as particularly ignorant. That is not the goal of capitalism. The goal is to bring the greatest benefit to consumers by encouraging the reward of success. But when the market fails to sustain the balance of factors which promote competition, the government is obliged to step in and correct the market.
It's not that such companies are evil - corporations can't be evil any more than they can be moral. It's that they inevitably, as the writer John Raulston Saul once put it in his book "The Unconscious Civilization," cause us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as a free and dignified citizen in a given sphere, time or place. The pervasive effects of corporatism on the individual, warns Saul, are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don't.
Microsoft products are designed from the inside out to restrict the choices of the individual and to keep other companies from competing. What you promote is not capitalism, as noted above, but corporatism. The human instinct to kiss ass is behind it. It explains why the press can send themselves into a tizzy over any murder that can be described in a sentence with the work "Internet", and yet fail to report critically on Gates, ever. Ultimately, the corporatism of major news outlets has left them with a decade-long failure to notice or report on the darker side of Microsoft's success. Long live Slashdot!
Microsoft and its founder have stood not for innovation, but for the acquisition of other's innovations; not for the free dissemination of information but for domination of the market for information that's disseminated. Meanwhile, millions of computer users have struggled through mediocre and buggy software, paying significant sums for simple programs they may or may not need while being deprived of the incalculable benefits that might have come from silenced, bought out or intimidated innovators whose ideas never came to light.
This is an excellent description of why the DOJ has gotten involved. This is not capitalism except as understood by La Cosa Nostra
Those traits aren't unique to Microsoft. Corporatism is perhaps the dominant and most noxious ideology of our time. Confrontations between individualism and corporatism may well be the primary political struggles of the 21st century.
I believe this to be true. I wouldn't be worried about a robot-takeover, Matrix/Terminator style, except corporations have such disregard for inidviduals and the liberties of citizens that it's politically possible, if not technically. Otherwise, I expect that people will someday look back at us with the same pity we feel for medieval peasants, bound to the land as we are to our employers.
Congratulations. This is the best article I've yet to see on Slashdot, and the best article on the Microsoft case I've seen.
More and more sites use flash, but even that works for me (linux NN under FreeBSD). I use hushmail sometimes, and the java works fine, and is far from trivial.
So if there's a problem, it's incompetent programmers or sites designed by people who really don't understand the web at all. Watch out for them. They are the types who say "Can't you adjust the kerning in this text?" and then look at you suspiciously when you say no. It would be funny if it didn't happen so often.
Solution: Complain to the webmaster! Complain to customer service! Complain to the ad sales department!
The point, dingbat, TERMINATE was that if enough people did that COCAINE, they would simply KIDDIE PORN be overwhelmed with things AK-47 to watch. It's the RENDEVOUS only way to BULLION fight back against the NSA unseen enemy who may or may not be SUBMARINE watching us all.
And it's pretty clear that if enough FREEDOM FIGHTER people do it, even the COMMUNIST computers can't do enough processing to discard NSA messages based on the context being LSD nonsense, something that computers are not terribly good at these days anyway, unless the NSA nsa has some really good linguists to make some technology better in this regard than anyone else knows about. Gee, maybe CHOMSKY's lefty stuff is just a cover;-)
And for the record I do remember those days, just barely.
On FreeBSD, KDE seems to be better supported. I have found it to be faster and more stable, never mind much easier to configure. Unless you really want to spend a long time right now figuring out all the guts of these things and tweaking a million parts, just install KDE from the ports collection. There are FreeBSD build scripts in the KDE src, but it's a pain to get done.
I want to be a programmer, but I don't want to be, like, all "techy" and everything. 8-P
Well, it is true that you don't need to be much of a techy to learn VB. It was actually the first language I really learned. But it doesn't teach you very much or make for good programming. It does best at what it's designed to do; quick development for administrative, data crunching, low performance, non-technical programs with a GUI. Which often means that a bunch of poorly-thought out goals are being forced through without much planning. Good luck with it; cheap shoes don't last long and may cost you more in the long run than reasonably expensive ones.
This could be because Linux developers are often students or outside of mainstream MIS organizations.
Well, I have observed a fair amount of eye-candy-producing software (theme managers aren't really what I need) from the linux folks at times. Perhaps once it's been done, it'll stay done and some more practical work can get done.
The bottom line is that there's alot of tail chasing going on. By the time a "free" Office Suite gets to an acceptable function point and can import MS Office documents, it will already be irrelvant because those Office documents won't be "documents" any more, and instead will be locked up in Microsoft DNA-based network systems and will only be accessible by special network protocols and MS presentation software.
This point is RIGHT ON! It also shows that its author was one of the few who seems to have actually understood O'Reilly's point. Microsoft has been trying for years not so much to preserve their current monopoly, but to win the next round, and not let some company do to them what they did to IBM. To this explicit end they have spent vast sums on MSNBC and web properties, bought Hotmail, etc, and fought hard to keep their fingers in every little pie (cf AOL/IM battles). The risk of any company setting the standards for business-to-business data protocols on the web is that whoever holds the keys to those standards can effectively force adoption of specific client software and the operating systems that run them, impose new monopolies, and restrict the freedom of others to innovate.
While I do think he is right in emphasizing the scientific/academic nature of open source, something which isn't really addressed in CatB, he does clearly worry too much about fragmentation. People have a tendency to look for the "best" among equals and prefer it to the point of irrationality. This trait almost guarantees redhat's future success.
And he does fall in the FUD a little asserting that developers who work with Microsoft systems get to develop to a unified, known standard. Anyone who's worked with win APIs - and then found the bugs that erupt once an application is released into the wild - knows that this is a comforting delusion, but still a delusion. Microsoft has the blessing of being big enough to seem inevitable, which makes their flaws seem to most people like "Acts of God" rather than human SNAFUs.
While it would be preferable if the site announced in advance that your ISP/IP address would be revealed, it would also be nice if more people heeded the ancient wisdom of netiquette; if you post to ANY forum without knowing its rules first, your risk looking like a jackass and drawing 'unwanted attention'. This has been in the Netiquette FAQ for about the last 15 years. When I first started using the internet in 1989, the university sysadmins made you read it before they even gave you an account. In this particular instance, if you followed its advice, you would know that your location would be published.
As many have pointed out, ABCnews.com has always done this. This was technology inherited from Starwave years ago. GM Bernard Gershon has only been in this role for a couple months.
From proxy11.disney.com, tho my words and opinions are my own (boy are they ever) and do not represent the opinions or beliefs of rodents or frozen heads anywhere (now do you believe me?)
Of course it's not as groundbreaking as the Palm - but its exciting to many of us who haven't yet found a reason to get into the PDA thing. A lot of people (like me!) haven't jumped on the Palm wagon because of price - and also because recent versions haven't shown clear goals for the product line; new features are over-integrated and minor improvements at best.
Improving modularity is a quantum improvement, albeit not revolutionary.
Don't know if anyone has any evidence to support this, but I've heard that the ones that appear gold...
This reminds me of claims I heard about 10 years ago that if you colored the edges of CDs with permanent markers, you'd get better sound quality. This claim might be similarly mythical, or there could be some long-term color drift that affects the accuracy of readings due to color bias of the lasers themselves.
There were also rumors that the original CDs would decay and cease to work, but as far as I can see there's no failure rate of old CDs (15+ yrs) caused by aging. I don't doubt the author's claims, nor would I take them as gospel. It stands to reason that CD-R is more reliable than CD-RW in the long run, and that you shouldn't trust untested factors (lifespan of CD-Rs) in your long-range planning unless you have evidence to back it up.
The problem with this theory is that corporations have more rights than people.
If you want privacy go get a hotmail account
And that's not private either (egregious security holes aside), since it's the corporation's data pipe, so watch what you say, Ashley.
This kind of slave attitude is responsible for a long slow slide back into feudalism. "Hey, Lord Bumsenfock is all that stands between you and the Tartars, and this is his land, so actually he does have the right to steal your food, kill your son, and deflower your daughter." There is no logic and no honor in this.
Between bootlicking nonsense and creationism, I'm terrified of how Americans are rushing back to the dark ages.
Sorry, I once worked for an ISP that was particularly low on The List for some rather shady sales practices (among other things), and I used to get a dozen emails a day that would make a sailor blush and a soldier start looking over his shoulder. Anyone who has ever worked in a service position, from cops to secretaries, knows how many totally insane freaks are out there. You get used to dismissing lunatics; I doubt she's losing any sleep over a bunch of foul-mouthed kids not old enough to rent a car.
You also don't change anyone's mind by flipping about a policy that isn't even new. You want to change their minds? Use PNG wherever possible, and let people know.
Has everyone forgotten that the NSA et al might actually be able to break encryption commonly in use? If this were true, their fears re: encryption would not be the obviously illogical "criminals will use it". Perhaps they fear:
If most communications have mild encryption, the spook machine (cocaine *cough*, sorry, just feeding it) won't be able to keep up scanning ordinary traffic
If weaker encryption was common, terrorists, child porn peddlers, and other bogeymen might upgrade their encryption to something stronger just to keep up with the times, rendering their messages actually uncrackable.
If all or most traffic were even weakly encrypted, it would be very difficult to scan for messages using strong encryption. Every good police state knows that if you are hiding something, you must be guilty of something.
I don't have any evidence that the NSA and their panty-boy Clinton actually have the interests of the public in mind, but I see no reason to assume that they are actually stupid enough to think that encryption controls actually work the way they claim.
Having tried both freebsd and linux (ok, rh), I can honestly say that I use freebsd because the organization of nearly everything is much cleaner.
True, as Linus said, FreeBSD community has been much less evangelical than he about their cause, which creates a perception that they are less open than perhaps they actually are. But as my competence grows, I feel less and less that this is a drawback. It draws less noise - from mailing lists to actual development and chaos in system updates. It certainly results in fewer mailing lists a good admin would track for security-related updates:)
From installation to software management, I find that *BSD is more "unix-ey" - features that are frustrating at first become the things that you appreciate as you gain knowledge.
And yes, it takes none to post, but the lower standard of admission for linux users is why RedHat IPO'd. The only thing that bothers me is the rustling sound of many of FreeBSD-using admins trying to explain to their pointy-haired bosses why they aren't using linux...:-(
The same forces that drive the development of commercial operating systems -- including (and especially) Windows -- will now drive the development of Linux.
Gee, I'd bet you $10 greed gets its way.;)
Still, I'm not worried. The only real potential problem is if some Linux distributor tries to rip out their own piece of the market with a code fork. But remember, Linux has gotten to this point not by stealing plays from Bill's book, but by playing a different game. The costs of such a code fork to the forker would strip the forking company of the talent of the thousands of developers who drive the engine. They'd be roadkill - forked for sure.
Will the same motives that drive commercially developed systemd (greed) drum the dollar dance? Definitely. Will it make the OS crappy or take free software away from the peepulz? Only when coders quit coding. I can't think of any area where open source code has diminished its share of the market or given way to inferior for-pay, unfree junk.
It's far more likely that Unix literate IS staff and other techies have managed to use Linux is areas where "big Unix" is overkill and MS is acknowledged crap.
I can attest to this. Sometimes where Solaris would prevail, Linux and FreeBSD sneak in the back door via recycling of servers and other noble subterfuge. No askee manager, no spendee money. Server workee, happee happee.
Especially where web applications and tools are involved. Why beg to get another NT license and loads of M$ software when you can get it done, "no questions asked."? Ya know?
sorry for the coolee talk. sometimes an idiotic attitude helps you avoid negative attention from your superiors;-)
The industry has been trying this stuff for years. They effectively killed DAT in the US. DIVX was a failure because people don't want restrictions. They want to own it or give it back. MP3 caught them by surprise, and stood the challenge in court. Finally, as long as the computer is capable of reading the legitimate playback, there is always a way of recording it.
The cat's out of the bag, the genie's out of the bottle. When the Latin bible was translated and printed in lay languages, the monopoly on God was officially over. But there's still a Catholic Church, and home taping DIDN'T kill music.
I'm sure they are wringing their hands over the money they could be making in certain countries, but then again, maybe the only thing they are getting robbed of is the chance to lose REALLY big money by actually doing business in those kinds of places.
Slashdot Mirror
which is why the boycott is the correct response. Amazon's attempt to enforce this patent shows how far things have gone towards patents being a form of anti-competetive corporate welfare - they are used not to protect R&D budgets against parasites (the original intent of patents) but to stake a claim in a developing market in order to prevent anyone else from competing. No open market system can tolerate this.
How this state of affairs can be in the interests of capitalism, the economy, software consumers, software programmers, web developers, the government, or the general public is beyond the ability of any rational being to explain or defend. The fact that most are either to ignorant or too amoral to care is no excuse.
Corporate bootlickers and other sycophants may disagree, but I urge all who believe in the freedom to innovate *not* to buy the big lie, and not to buy Amazon until it becomes their *fiduciary duty* to rectify the situation by taking proper initiatives.
I've had no end of nightmares with them recently. In one case, they bounced back a request to change technical contact & DNS servers with an error that showed the email was getting piped to a process that was crapping out. So we resubmitted, only to find out that they sent us back some random technical information with our domain and authorization the top, meaning that for 24 hours, the domain got pointed to the wrong place entirely.
The updates to the whois database have dropped to an average 1.1 per day, but they keep claiming it's changed twice daily. Someone I spoke to there had no idea that this was happening.
Isn't it obvious? He's been smoking the wacky in the tomorrow tunnel and wants to justify his little trip to mouseworld as a business expense.
It seems that Walt wanted to create some sort of gleaming fascist utopian universe in Disney World, unfortuanetly for him the profiteers took over shortly after his death
What a pity! Now it's only a gleaming profiteering fascist uptopian vision!
What has to stop is every legal entity thinking that because they can afford a lawyer, they can bully on individuals whenever they please. Unfortunately, until the courts quit hiding from decisive rulings on this topic, anyone who can afford a lawyer.
Since purdueonline.com could just as easily apply to the chicken guy, it's pretty hard to imagine their basis for a trademark claim.
What a loser. He says that Packetstorm shut themselves down, which is clearly ludicrous. It's usally the kind of statement associated with blaming the victim; "Hey, she practically raped herself in that dress!": "They commited suicide by clinging to their counter-revolutionary beliefs." This kind of dishonest speech drives me nuts.
Hey, pop quiz! This rhetorical tactic is used by:
I'd have to say that your irrelevant quotes are not just grammatically incorrect, but rather telling - "Free". Your choice of metaphor - gasoline and natural gas - is of course perfect for proving the opposite of your point. Microsoft has used the "installed base" to manufacture a monopoly out of thin air - a monopoly on gasoline, in this case. Much like standard oil. So your comment that the goal of "capitolism [sic]" is to make as much money as possible stands out as particularly ignorant. That is not the goal of capitalism. The goal is to bring the greatest benefit to consumers by encouraging the reward of success. But when the market fails to sustain the balance of factors which promote competition, the government is obliged to step in and correct the market.
Microsoft products are designed from the inside out to restrict the choices of the individual and to keep other companies from competing. What you promote is not capitalism, as noted above, but corporatism. The human instinct to kiss ass is behind it. It explains why the press can send themselves into a tizzy over any murder that can be described in a sentence with the work "Internet", and yet fail to report critically on Gates, ever. Ultimately, the corporatism of major news outlets has left them with a decade-long failure to notice or report on the darker side of Microsoft's success. Long live Slashdot! This is an excellent description of why the DOJ has gotten involved. This is not capitalism except as understood by La Cosa Nostra I believe this to be true. I wouldn't be worried about a robot-takeover, Matrix/Terminator style, except corporations have such disregard for inidviduals and the liberties of citizens that it's politically possible, if not technically. Otherwise, I expect that people will someday look back at us with the same pity we feel for medieval peasants, bound to the land as we are to our employers.Congratulations. This is the best article I've yet to see on Slashdot, and the best article on the Microsoft case I've seen.
More and more sites use flash, but even that works for me (linux NN under FreeBSD). I use hushmail sometimes, and the java works fine, and is far from trivial.
So if there's a problem, it's incompetent programmers or sites designed by people who really don't understand the web at all. Watch out for them. They are the types who say "Can't you adjust the kerning in this text?" and then look at you suspiciously when you say no. It would be funny if it didn't happen so often.
Solution: Complain to the webmaster! Complain to customer service! Complain to the ad sales department!
The point, dingbat, TERMINATE was that if enough people did that COCAINE, they would simply KIDDIE PORN be overwhelmed with things AK-47 to watch. It's the RENDEVOUS only way to BULLION fight back against the NSA unseen enemy who may or may not be SUBMARINE watching us all.
And it's pretty clear that if enough FREEDOM FIGHTER people do it, even the COMMUNIST computers can't do enough processing to discard NSA messages based on the context being LSD nonsense, something that computers are not terribly good at these days anyway, unless the NSA nsa has some really good linguists to make some technology better in this regard than anyone else knows about. Gee, maybe CHOMSKY's lefty stuff is just a cover ;-)
And for the record I do remember those days, just barely.
On FreeBSD, KDE seems to be better supported. I have found it to be faster and more stable, never mind much easier to configure. Unless you really want to spend a long time right now figuring out all the guts of these things and tweaking a million parts, just install KDE from the ports collection. There are FreeBSD build scripts in the KDE src, but it's a pain to get done.
I want to be a programmer, but I don't want to be, like, all "techy" and everything. 8-P
Well, it is true that you don't need to be much of a techy to learn VB. It was actually the first language I really learned. But it doesn't teach you very much or make for good programming. It does best at what it's designed to do; quick development for administrative, data crunching, low performance, non-technical programs with a GUI. Which often means that a bunch of poorly-thought out goals are being forced through without much planning. Good luck with it; cheap shoes don't last long and may cost you more in the long run than reasonably expensive ones.
Yup. Far more so than I normally listen to Metallica.
And Bad Brains, too.
Well, I have observed a fair amount of eye-candy-producing software (theme managers aren't really what I need) from the linux folks at times. Perhaps once it's been done, it'll stay done and some more practical work can get done.
The bottom line is that there's alot of tail chasing going on. By the time a "free" Office Suite gets to an acceptable function point and can import MS Office documents, it will already be irrelvant because those Office documents won't be "documents" any more, and instead will be locked up in Microsoft DNA-based network systems and will only be accessible by special network protocols and MS presentation software.
This point is RIGHT ON! It also shows that its author was one of the few who seems to have actually understood O'Reilly's point. Microsoft has been trying for years not so much to preserve their current monopoly, but to win the next round, and not let some company do to them what they did to IBM. To this explicit end they have spent vast sums on MSNBC and web properties, bought Hotmail, etc, and fought hard to keep their fingers in every little pie (cf AOL/IM battles). The risk of any company setting the standards for business-to-business data protocols on the web is that whoever holds the keys to those standards can effectively force adoption of specific client software and the operating systems that run them, impose new monopolies, and restrict the freedom of others to innovate.
While I do think he is right in emphasizing the scientific/academic nature of open source, something which isn't really addressed in CatB,
he does clearly worry too much about fragmentation. People have a tendency to look for the "best" among equals and prefer it to the point of irrationality. This trait almost guarantees redhat's future success.
And he does fall in the FUD a little asserting that developers who work with Microsoft systems get to develop to a unified, known standard. Anyone who's worked with win APIs - and then found the bugs that erupt once an application is released into the wild - knows that this is a comforting delusion, but still a delusion. Microsoft has the blessing of being big enough to seem inevitable, which makes their flaws seem to most people like "Acts of God" rather than human SNAFUs.
As many have pointed out, ABCnews.com has always done this. This was technology inherited from Starwave years ago. GM Bernard Gershon has only been in this role for a couple months.
From proxy11.disney.com, tho my words and opinions are my own (boy are they ever) and do not represent the opinions or beliefs of rodents or frozen heads anywhere (now do you believe me?)
OK, I get this: /.'ed
handspring.com : the "no-hype" hype strategy
visor.net : "oops, this domain is available!"
palminfocenter.com:
I assume the latter is where people are claiming to spot this thing, and where the AP release claims you can buy it.
I guess the web *still* hasn't so matured that this kind of thing *doesn't* look like a raging success!
Of course it's not as groundbreaking as the Palm - but its exciting to many of us who haven't yet found a reason to get into the PDA thing. A lot of people (like me!) haven't jumped on the Palm wagon because of price - and also because recent versions haven't shown clear goals for the product line; new features are over-integrated and minor improvements at best.
Improving modularity is a quantum improvement, albeit not revolutionary.
Don't know if anyone has any evidence to support this, but I've heard that the ones that appear gold...
This reminds me of claims I heard about 10 years ago that if you colored the edges of CDs with permanent markers, you'd get better sound quality. This claim might be similarly mythical, or there could be some long-term color drift that affects the accuracy of readings due to color bias of the lasers themselves.
There were also rumors that the original CDs would decay and cease to work, but as far as I can see there's no failure rate of old CDs (15+ yrs) caused by aging. I don't doubt the author's claims, nor would I take them as gospel. It stands to reason that CD-R is more reliable than CD-RW in the long run, and that you shouldn't trust untested factors (lifespan of CD-Rs) in your long-range planning unless you have evidence to back it up.
The problem with this theory is that corporations have more rights than people.
If you want privacy go get a hotmail account
And that's not private either (egregious security holes aside), since it's the corporation's data pipe, so watch what you say, Ashley.
This kind of slave attitude is responsible for a long slow slide back into feudalism. "Hey, Lord Bumsenfock is all that stands between you and the Tartars, and this is his land, so actually he does have the right to steal your food, kill your son, and deflower your daughter." There is no logic and no honor in this.
Between bootlicking nonsense and creationism, I'm terrified of how Americans are rushing back to the dark ages.
Sorry, I once worked for an ISP that was particularly low on The List for some rather shady sales practices (among other things), and I used to get a dozen emails a day that would make a sailor blush and a soldier start looking over his shoulder. Anyone who has ever worked in a service position, from cops to secretaries, knows how many totally insane freaks are out there. You get used to dismissing lunatics; I doubt she's losing any sleep over a bunch of foul-mouthed kids not old enough to rent a car.
You also don't change anyone's mind by flipping about a policy that isn't even new. You want to change their minds? Use PNG wherever possible, and let people know.
Has everyone forgotten that the NSA et al might actually be able to break encryption commonly in use? If this were true, their fears re: encryption would not be the obviously illogical "criminals will use it". Perhaps they fear:
I don't have any evidence that the NSA and their panty-boy Clinton actually have the interests of the public in mind, but I see no reason to assume that they are actually stupid enough to think that encryption controls actually work the way they claim.
Congressional members, that's another matter.
Having tried both freebsd and linux (ok, rh), I can honestly say that I use freebsd because the organization of nearly everything is much cleaner.
True, as Linus said, FreeBSD community has been much less evangelical than he about their cause, which creates a perception that they are less open than perhaps they actually are. But as my competence grows, I feel less and less that this is a drawback. It draws less noise - from mailing lists to actual development and chaos in system updates. It certainly results in fewer mailing lists a good admin would track for security-related updates
From installation to software management, I find that *BSD is more "unix-ey" - features that are frustrating at first become the things that you appreciate as you gain knowledge.
And yes, it takes none to post, but the lower standard of admission for linux users is why RedHat IPO'd. The only thing that bothers me is the rustling sound of many of FreeBSD-using admins trying to explain to their pointy-haired bosses why they aren't using linux...
development of Linux.
Gee, I'd bet you $10 greed gets its way. ;)
Still, I'm not worried. The only real potential problem is if some Linux distributor tries to rip out their own piece of the market with a code fork. But remember, Linux has gotten to this point not by stealing plays from Bill's book, but by playing a different game. The costs of such a code fork to the forker would strip the forking company of the talent of the thousands of developers who drive the engine. They'd be roadkill - forked for sure.
Will the same motives that drive commercially developed systemd (greed) drum the dollar dance? Definitely. Will it make the OS crappy or take free software away from the peepulz? Only when coders quit coding. I can't think of any area where open source code has diminished its share of the market or given way to inferior for-pay, unfree junk.
I can attest to this. Sometimes where Solaris would prevail, Linux and FreeBSD sneak in the back door via recycling of servers and other noble subterfuge. No askee manager, no spendee money. Server workee, happee happee.
Especially where web applications and tools are involved. Why beg to get another NT license and loads of M$ software when you can get it done, "no questions asked."? Ya know?
sorry for the coolee talk. sometimes an idiotic attitude helps you avoid negative attention from your superiors ;-)
The industry has been trying this stuff for years. They effectively killed DAT in the US. DIVX was a failure because people don't want restrictions. They want to own it or give it back. MP3 caught them by surprise, and stood the challenge in court. Finally, as long as the computer is capable of reading the legitimate playback, there is always a way of recording it.
The cat's out of the bag, the genie's out of the bottle. When the Latin bible was translated and printed in lay languages, the monopoly on God was officially over. But there's still a Catholic Church, and home taping DIDN'T kill music.
I'm sure they are wringing their hands over the money they could be making in certain countries, but then again, maybe the only thing they are getting robbed of is the chance to lose REALLY big money by actually doing business in those kinds of places.
Your ignorance is really showing. But it's not showing on anything invented by that college dropout.