This whole comparison is nuts. You can be 100% assurred that it is less expensive to use an unsupported open-source product than an unsupported closed-source product. That is the only thing open-source gives you.
If both the open and closed source products are "supported" it could go either way. It depends on the quality and the cost of the support.
Open source allows you to "support" it yourself. Whether this is cheaper, more expensive, or is better or worse, than the commercial support depends on you and also on the quality and cost of the commercial support.
The real point being made here is that supported software is cheaper than unsupported software, which is probably true if you assumme the support is better than nothing.
Then somebody made the false equivalents that OSS==unsupported and closed==supported. It has already been pointed out that this is false for Linux itself. It is false for many closed pieces of software as well (just try to get support on some of them, or sometimes the company goes out of business).
The answer is that OSS itself is not more expensive. unsupported software is more expensive.
True, but I still think that if Linus included something that did not allow binary modules, and then stated that binary modules are allowed, it really is him that is in trouble, not somebody who believed him and made a binary module.
In reality everybody is well aware of this, and Linus is now supporting people who don't want their code used by binary modules with the GPL headers that state for the C compiler what interfaces can be called. Therefore Linus has already fixed the problem and is safe.
Their plan is really stupid. They have just removed any incentive for anybody buying CD's that wants to copy them to their MP3 player. It is now a pain to do the transfer (using audio cables, finding the ends of their songs themselves, etc) so it is now infinitely easier to find somebody else who has already done this and download it. Congratulations, they have made people buy *fewer* CD's.
This is especially true if they cripple *ALL* CD's. Now there is zero incentive because there isn't even a chance the CD will work.
Also crippling *ALL* CD's, or even a majority, will mean hardware will appear that will read them, because of the demand. It will just read all the bits, including the error correction bits. This hardware will be impossible to fool without making the disk unplayable in the majority of CD players. They will thus defeat their entire scheme.
They should have stuck with placing *minor* noise into the data with bad error correction bits, so you get a usable copy but there is an incentive to buy the "clean" disk.
They could also have watermarked the data (not the "watermark" that prevents a player from playing, as that gives the ripper an easy test to see if they removed the watermark, but a watermark that affects sound very little but can be detected by their own software that they do not let anybody have), this would allow searches to immediately locate all "illegal copies" in any P2P system and thus give them some legal force because they can prove they are being used for copyright violations. You could even make a "legit" P2P system that checks all the data to see if it is watermarked, though this has to be done carefully so that nobody that shouldn't can get ahold of the testing software,
There are a lot of things they could do. Some good, some bad, but all a lot more effective than this. I think this is going to make things worse for them and reduce sales.
Of course this could be a plan. When this fails to stop "piracy" they may have the ammunition to get legal help and actually outlaw all recording devices. This will stop piracy, and conviently stop all competition to the established companies.
User space programs *ARE* "protected from the GPL".
All contributers of code to the kernel know that the kernel will be used to run proprietary programs. This knowledge implies that they consent to having their code used this way.
There are no useful libraries that are not LGPL or BSD or otherwise usable by your user-space program. Every time this comes up people say exactly the same one: readline. Yes that is GPL, but I think you will find it pretty useless for a driver. And that is a pretty pathetic example.
Seems like they would have to sue Linus, not NVidea. Linus may have changed the wording against their wishes when using the code. If they did not like the way the kernel was licensed they should not have contributed their code (they could fork it to a "pure GPL" one if they wanted).
That's what I meant. It was marketing. MicroSoft Word was #1 within months of it being introduced, despite all the competeitors being established and despite the fact that it had not advantages, apparently.
They included the MicroSoft mouse, I remember. And some very strange mouse driving software that worked by moving the cursor and thus broke any software that used the cursor to show where text would be inserted.
Seriously, if Windows was released as GPL (or otherwise GPL compatable) source, I would expect there to be a huge OSS effort to make it compatable with Linux, by basically making all the parts of Cygwin part of the system. I think there would be several dozen projects at first, but all would die except one main one. All commercial computer manufacturers, even MicroSoft, would have to base their system off this because otherwise too much software would not work.
Conversely, I don't see too much porting of stuff from Windows to Linux. It is quite likely there will remain a huge amount of software that is Windows-derivative-only, while the above changes would vastly reduce how much software is Linux-only.
I doubt they would ever merge. More likely a new system will arise that is designed to be clean but is capable of hosting a run-time "super Wine" that is really able to handle any Windows program. The necessary redesign needed to support this and also support Unix interfaces may lead to some clever new ideas nobody has thought of today. If successful, this system would likely replace both Windows and Linux.
To the average *CONSUMER* Windows is free. I guess you just don't understand how to read the posts.
How is it free? They look in the newspaper and see "I can buy this computer for $1295". They go to the store, and they buy a "computer". At no point whatsoever does it go through their mind that they are buying "a computer and Windows". They bring it home and turn it on. It is running Windows. At no point did the consumer ever think they were "buying Windows". At no point does the average consumer even have the tiniest smidgen of any concept of "I could save money by not buying Windows". For the average consumber Windows is FREE! in that it has no perceived cost!
If MicroSoft gave Windows away for free, *all* computers would go down a few hundred in price because of the elimination of the "MicroSoft Tax". The result would be about the same as it is now, to the end user Windows is just as free as before. The fact that a computer is cheaper may be noticed, but the percieved cost of Windows would remain zero.
While this might be hard for the kids to believe, Microsoft Office earned the position that it's in right now.
MicroSoft Office came out long after MicroSoft word was absolutely number one in the world. There was no other office suite that would work with MicroSoft Word.
MicroSoft Word itself competed with Word Perfect for a few months back in 1986 before wiping it out everywhere except the legal profession. It did have some advantages from what I heard. This was well before Windows.
The original author owns the copyright to the software, not the FSF (you can sign it over but I think most don't).
If the GPL is illegal then your rights to the software revert to those covered by copyright law. This lets you do far less with the software. It seems unlikely that it can be illegal in any way however, because it grants rights. It says "Normally it is against the law to do A to me, but I will allow you to do so. It is also against the law to do B to me but I don't grant you permission to do that". This is really what the GPL says, but a lot of people seem to have A and B confused and see it as some sort of taking of rights, they think it's more like "I'll let you do B. Wait I take some of B back and only leave you A".
Seriously, both the Mac and XP are starting to look like some of the more offensive WindowMaker things from 5 years ago. I thought these guys were professionals? It looks like a bunch of geeks from their mom's basement took over.
Win95 and 98 were very well designed. They cleaned up the interface a lot to avoid distraction from the task at had, made everything subdued and monochrome, and made everything *small*. They managed to fix mistakes that have existed in Windows/Unix/Mac for years (such as extra lines between the window "border" and the contents, complex decoration around menus, and relying on pictures instead of text to identify iconized windows). And in case nobody remembers, Windows 95 scared the s**t out of Unix vendors, who up until then were rather confident in their superiority of GUI design. Oddly enough, MicroSoft, despite their power, is not scaring anybody with design now.
I think to the average person, about to throw down over $1000 for this thing, that they want to see a professional looking and clean and efficient appearance. They don't want it to look like it was made by Fischer Price. MicroSoft has lost their mind, or has become way too complacent in their monopoly position.
This is a problem for *any* email filter. I think they are trying make better solutions for this very problem. Actually solving it is impossible, but this may approximate a solution better than any other filter.
Maybe so. Whatever it means, it is certainly a fact that the vast majority of Linux machines on the desktop (not in servers) are dual-boot. This means that a dual-boot machine is more valuable to most users today than a Linux-only machine. And it does appear that MicroSoft's rules were to disallow you from buying a dual-boot machine, because they know that that is the only possible competition they can get.
Of those millions of disks of Linux sold, I expect only a fraction of them have been installed (of course a fraction of that is installed so many times that they total is about ths same). Everybody complains about how hard it is to "install". Yet nobody complains much about the difficulty of "installing" Windows, when in fact it is probably harder (most apologists are comparing an update of Windows, where it reads from the previous installation, to an install of Linux, and don't take into account that users installing Windows rarely need to repartition their drives or preserve the previous os).
Dual-boot machines would go a long way to allowing more people to try Linux. I would expect it to be a rather common feature. I admit there will also be a user-friendly checkbox on startup that allows a user to wipe it and use it to store Windows files, but "includes new Linux operating system" would likely be a common checkmark in order to convince the masses that machine A is better than machine B.
Of course this is nothing compared to what would have happened if dual-boot was allowed 10 years ago. Most likely a good deal of the decision to buy a machine would be "what the other system is". There would probably be AOL system, and several "Game" systems that were designed more like the OS of a game console to deliver very fast graphics, and there would be various multimedia players. And by now things like Wine would be showing up for those systems and giving Bill Gates sleepless nights.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that capability systems have the ability to grant capabilities from one object onto another. A third party can do this. The entire design of Palladium is to insure that there is no third party.
All your "ideas" amount to there being more than 2 protected modes. Rest assurred that the idea of more levels or rings or splits in rings has been around for 30 years. This is nothing new, and people have already taken advantage of it. I believe that we don't need more than the kernel/user levels and the fact that all the user programs are protected from each other by virtual memory mapping and by all communication going through the kernel. All other solutions are equivalent to moving functions out of the kernel and into user space, a good idea that is only stopped by the annoying slowness of switching between the protected programs. You can be pretty certain that switching between Palladium processes is not going to be any faster.
When they added memory protection to the 386, you could write software that ran in the unprotected mode. Yes, you could write a system that would lock things up so that a branch of software was unable to switch to protected mode and unable to write outside it's own memory. But you could write that system!
The difference with Palladium is that it is explicitly designed so that nobody other than MicroSoft can write the unprotected mode part.
Come on, think a little bit before posting next time.
MicroSoft is far more worried about competition from "older Windows" than it is about Linux or even Apple (Linux has about 2%, Apple 4%, but I think "my Win98 machine works" is perhaps well over 50% of the market!)
So from that point of view, any competitive plans by MicroSoft are probably much more geared to finishing off this "competition". Getting rid of Linux is just a side effect.
Rest assurred that the old Windows machines will not read palladium-encrypted pages either.
There already is hardware support to protect programs from each other. In case you have been under a rock for the past 30 years, all modern machines have virtual memory mapping and kernel and protected mode (and perhaps some other modes). These have in fact been quite well debugged, I have never heard of a virus that works by fooling the processor microcode into switching into kernel mode.
For protecting from malicious (or more likely buggy) programs, everything Palladium promises is there right now. But machines are contuously hacked (Linux as well as Windows). Why? Because of a thing called bugs. Palladium is not going to stop bugs. It will instead sign bugs and say they are "trusted". Big deal!
Palladium's purpose is to make sure the owner of the computer can't insert "bugs", and the user cannot fix "bugs", no matter how hard they try or want to do it.
Why not always detect hardware on startup? It takes long enough to boot anyway, and if this works we could feel safe changing *any* hardware in our machines without worrying that it won't reboot.
If it screws up, then an advanced user could probably store some files that modify it (I guess this requires that it correctly detect the disk and file system these files are on...) Ideally the files should be of the form "If you are detecting xyz, well stop because you are wrong, the hardware really is this..." and not of the form "Don't try to detect xyz because really the hardware is this..." That way if the user pulls the misdetected hardware they can reboot because it will still check for the replacement hardware.
The original, and low number prints, and initial print runs, are often valued for lots more, even if thousands of prints are made. And I can go to the Getty and buy a postcard-sized VanGogh Sunflowers for 75 cents and for some reason that does not make the original worth less. I can even color-xerox that card for almost nothing, and I'm sure I can download an nice Sunflowers image from the net, yet somehow the original is worth a lot.
The difference with movies and music is that money is made from viewing the copies. I'm sure the original negative of that Chinese movie is worth a lot, but the pirate copies greately cut into the method used to generate income from the ownership of that original copy.
Perhaps a solution is to somehow make music and movies work like prints of art. Artists don't seem to be too worried that people can color-xerox or scan their work, and don't seem to be trying to make these devices illegal. Art pirates are only attacked when they try to make money by selling copies, they don't try to prosecute people using the office color xerox to make garage sale flyers.
It is much more telling that "open source" is the only competitor to MicroSoft. Although I like and use Linux, there is some truth to the joke that it is made by "teenagers in their parents basements". That is not very far from the truth. And that is, far more than anything else, proof that MicroSoft has an incredible and unstoppable monopoly on computer software and that some serious government action must be done.
The fact that Linux is written by a bunch of unwashed geeks, and is still the only MicroSoft competition, proves that: 1. everybody with money has decided that MicroSoft is too powerful to compete with. 2. that MicroSoft's products are so bad that anybody interested in computers feels it is worth wasting time replicating a better version of them. Those unwashed geeks could probably write some leet games using MicroSoft's software, but so hate it that they spend time trying to replace it, even though the result looks very similar and decidedly uncool! How else could a supposedly competitive company with billions of dollars worth of R&D produce something so bad that a guy in his basement feels he could do better? It is because they have absolutely *no* incentive to do a good job.
You are right that it is possible that some other for-profit competition could arise for MicroSoft. In a lot of ways this would be good for everybody, as long as the new company does not become a replacement monopoly. The fact that the two companies have to cooperate with each other would allow enough of the API to be revealed that free software could continue to be developed.
I however believe that it is too late for that. MicroSoft is way too powerful, so powerful that only "geeks in their parents basements" are willing to waste time to try to fight them. Every time you insult Linux you are adding proof to the fact that MicroSoft is a monopoly that has hurt the computer industry immesurably.
It does not matter how "user unfriendly" it is, I think you will find the majority of Linux desktops are dual-boot. This clearly shows that Linux (or any alternative system) is impractical unless the machine can run Windows as well. Therefore MicroSoft disallowing dual-boot eliminated any possible competing operating systems.
Dual-boot would allow daring users willing to reboot to use Linux, and from there it may be possible to make a user-friendly Linux-only system.
Slashdot Mirror
If both the open and closed source products are "supported" it could go either way. It depends on the quality and the cost of the support.
Open source allows you to "support" it yourself. Whether this is cheaper, more expensive, or is better or worse, than the commercial support depends on you and also on the quality and cost of the commercial support.
The real point being made here is that supported software is cheaper than unsupported software, which is probably true if you assumme the support is better than nothing.
Then somebody made the false equivalents that OSS==unsupported and closed==supported. It has already been pointed out that this is false for Linux itself. It is false for many closed pieces of software as well (just try to get support on some of them, or sometimes the company goes out of business).
The answer is that OSS itself is not more expensive. unsupported software is more expensive.
In reality everybody is well aware of this, and Linus is now supporting people who don't want their code used by binary modules with the GPL headers that state for the C compiler what interfaces can be called. Therefore Linus has already fixed the problem and is safe.
This is especially true if they cripple *ALL* CD's. Now there is zero incentive because there isn't even a chance the CD will work.
Also crippling *ALL* CD's, or even a majority, will mean hardware will appear that will read them, because of the demand. It will just read all the bits, including the error correction bits. This hardware will be impossible to fool without making the disk unplayable in the majority of CD players. They will thus defeat their entire scheme.
They should have stuck with placing *minor* noise into the data with bad error correction bits, so you get a usable copy but there is an incentive to buy the "clean" disk.
They could also have watermarked the data (not the "watermark" that prevents a player from playing, as that gives the ripper an easy test to see if they removed the watermark, but a watermark that affects sound very little but can be detected by their own software that they do not let anybody have), this would allow searches to immediately locate all "illegal copies" in any P2P system and thus give them some legal force because they can prove they are being used for copyright violations. You could even make a "legit" P2P system that checks all the data to see if it is watermarked, though this has to be done carefully so that nobody that shouldn't can get ahold of the testing software,
There are a lot of things they could do. Some good, some bad, but all a lot more effective than this. I think this is going to make things worse for them and reduce sales.
Of course this could be a plan. When this fails to stop "piracy" they may have the ammunition to get legal help and actually outlaw all recording devices. This will stop piracy, and conviently stop all competition to the established companies.
All contributers of code to the kernel know that the kernel will be used to run proprietary programs. This knowledge implies that they consent to having their code used this way.
There are no useful libraries that are not LGPL or BSD or otherwise usable by your user-space program. Every time this comes up people say exactly the same one: readline. Yes that is GPL, but I think you will find it pretty useless for a driver. And that is a pretty pathetic example.
Seems like they would have to sue Linus, not NVidea. Linus may have changed the wording against their wishes when using the code. If they did not like the way the kernel was licensed they should not have contributed their code (they could fork it to a "pure GPL" one if they wanted).
I'm sure Grandma will figure out regedit, right after she recompiles the kernel on her Linux box.
They included the MicroSoft mouse, I remember. And some very strange mouse driving software that worked by moving the cursor and thus broke any software that used the cursor to show where text would be inserted.
Conversely, I don't see too much porting of stuff from Windows to Linux. It is quite likely there will remain a huge amount of software that is Windows-derivative-only, while the above changes would vastly reduce how much software is Linux-only.
I doubt they would ever merge. More likely a new system will arise that is designed to be clean but is capable of hosting a run-time "super Wine" that is really able to handle any Windows program. The necessary redesign needed to support this and also support Unix interfaces may lead to some clever new ideas nobody has thought of today. If successful, this system would likely replace both Windows and Linux.
How is it free? They look in the newspaper and see "I can buy this computer for $1295". They go to the store, and they buy a "computer". At no point whatsoever does it go through their mind that they are buying "a computer and Windows". They bring it home and turn it on. It is running Windows. At no point did the consumer ever think they were "buying Windows". At no point does the average consumer even have the tiniest smidgen of any concept of "I could save money by not buying Windows". For the average consumber Windows is FREE! in that it has no perceived cost!
If MicroSoft gave Windows away for free, *all* computers would go down a few hundred in price because of the elimination of the "MicroSoft Tax". The result would be about the same as it is now, to the end user Windows is just as free as before. The fact that a computer is cheaper may be noticed, but the percieved cost of Windows would remain zero.
MicroSoft Office came out long after MicroSoft word was absolutely number one in the world. There was no other office suite that would work with MicroSoft Word.
MicroSoft Word itself competed with Word Perfect for a few months back in 1986 before wiping it out everywhere except the legal profession. It did have some advantages from what I heard. This was well before Windows.
If the GPL is illegal then your rights to the software revert to those covered by copyright law. This lets you do far less with the software. It seems unlikely that it can be illegal in any way however, because it grants rights. It says "Normally it is against the law to do A to me, but I will allow you to do so. It is also against the law to do B to me but I don't grant you permission to do that". This is really what the GPL says, but a lot of people seem to have A and B confused and see it as some sort of taking of rights, they think it's more like "I'll let you do B. Wait I take some of B back and only leave you A".
Win95 and 98 were very well designed. They cleaned up the interface a lot to avoid distraction from the task at had, made everything subdued and monochrome, and made everything *small*. They managed to fix mistakes that have existed in Windows/Unix/Mac for years (such as extra lines between the window "border" and the contents, complex decoration around menus, and relying on pictures instead of text to identify iconized windows). And in case nobody remembers, Windows 95 scared the s**t out of Unix vendors, who up until then were rather confident in their superiority of GUI design. Oddly enough, MicroSoft, despite their power, is not scaring anybody with design now.
I think to the average person, about to throw down over $1000 for this thing, that they want to see a professional looking and clean and efficient appearance. They don't want it to look like it was made by Fischer Price. MicroSoft has lost their mind, or has become way too complacent in their monopoly position.
This is a problem for *any* email filter. I think they are trying make better solutions for this very problem. Actually solving it is impossible, but this may approximate a solution better than any other filter.
Filtering out "
Of those millions of disks of Linux sold, I expect only a fraction of them have been installed (of course a fraction of that is installed so many times that they total is about ths same). Everybody complains about how hard it is to "install". Yet nobody complains much about the difficulty of "installing" Windows, when in fact it is probably harder (most apologists are comparing an update of Windows, where it reads from the previous installation, to an install of Linux, and don't take into account that users installing Windows rarely need to repartition their drives or preserve the previous os).
Dual-boot machines would go a long way to allowing more people to try Linux. I would expect it to be a rather common feature. I admit there will also be a user-friendly checkbox on startup that allows a user to wipe it and use it to store Windows files, but "includes new Linux operating system" would likely be a common checkmark in order to convince the masses that machine A is better than machine B.
Of course this is nothing compared to what would have happened if dual-boot was allowed 10 years ago. Most likely a good deal of the decision to buy a machine would be "what the other system is". There would probably be AOL system, and several "Game" systems that were designed more like the OS of a game console to deliver very fast graphics, and there would be various multimedia players. And by now things like Wine would be showing up for those systems and giving Bill Gates sleepless nights.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that capability systems have the ability to grant capabilities from one object onto another. A third party can do this. The entire design of Palladium is to insure that there is no third party.
When they added memory protection to the 386, you could write software that ran in the unprotected mode. Yes, you could write a system that would lock things up so that a branch of software was unable to switch to protected mode and unable to write outside it's own memory. But you could write that system!
The difference with Palladium is that it is explicitly designed so that nobody other than MicroSoft can write the unprotected mode part.
Come on, think a little bit before posting next time.
So from that point of view, any competitive plans by MicroSoft are probably much more geared to finishing off this "competition". Getting rid of Linux is just a side effect.
Rest assurred that the old Windows machines will not read palladium-encrypted pages either.
For protecting from malicious (or more likely buggy) programs, everything Palladium promises is there right now. But machines are contuously hacked (Linux as well as Windows). Why? Because of a thing called bugs. Palladium is not going to stop bugs. It will instead sign bugs and say they are "trusted". Big deal!
Palladium's purpose is to make sure the owner of the computer can't insert "bugs", and the user cannot fix "bugs", no matter how hard they try or want to do it.
If it screws up, then an advanced user could probably store some files that modify it (I guess this requires that it correctly detect the disk and file system these files are on...) Ideally the files should be of the form "If you are detecting xyz, well stop because you are wrong, the hardware really is this..." and not of the form "Don't try to detect xyz because really the hardware is this..." That way if the user pulls the misdetected hardware they can reboot because it will still check for the replacement hardware.
The original, and low number prints, and initial print runs, are often valued for lots more, even if thousands of prints are made. And I can go to the Getty and buy a postcard-sized VanGogh Sunflowers for 75 cents and for some reason that does not make the original worth less. I can even color-xerox that card for almost nothing, and I'm sure I can download an nice Sunflowers image from the net, yet somehow the original is worth a lot.
The difference with movies and music is that money is made from viewing the copies. I'm sure the original negative of that Chinese movie is worth a lot, but the pirate copies greately cut into the method used to generate income from the ownership of that original copy.
Perhaps a solution is to somehow make music and movies work like prints of art. Artists don't seem to be too worried that people can color-xerox or scan their work, and don't seem to be trying to make these devices illegal. Art pirates are only attacked when they try to make money by selling copies, they don't try to prosecute people using the office color xerox to make garage sale flyers.
I didn't know that New York Times writer worked for SlashDot!
The fact that Linux is written by a bunch of unwashed geeks, and is still the only MicroSoft competition, proves that: 1. everybody with money has decided that MicroSoft is too powerful to compete with. 2. that MicroSoft's products are so bad that anybody interested in computers feels it is worth wasting time replicating a better version of them. Those unwashed geeks could probably write some leet games using MicroSoft's software, but so hate it that they spend time trying to replace it, even though the result looks very similar and decidedly uncool! How else could a supposedly competitive company with billions of dollars worth of R&D produce something so bad that a guy in his basement feels he could do better? It is because they have absolutely *no* incentive to do a good job.
I however believe that it is too late for that. MicroSoft is way too powerful, so powerful that only "geeks in their parents basements" are willing to waste time to try to fight them. Every time you insult Linux you are adding proof to the fact that MicroSoft is a monopoly that has hurt the computer industry immesurably.
Dual-boot would allow daring users willing to reboot to use Linux, and from there it may be possible to make a user-friendly Linux-only system.