Oh, that's right. It wouldn't deter me in the slightest.
All it would do is make me ignore the ruling and sell whatever the hell I wanted on Craigslist anyway, and wait the two weeks it would take Congress to create new law that gets around this stupidity. Let those corporations try and sue everybody. Local LEOs and prosecutors are not going to waste their limited budgets on this shit.
Unenforceable. One of the keys to knowing a law or ruling is bad is when it is unenforceable and criminalizes everyday behavior. War on drugs, prohibition, gun laws etc....all more or less unenforceable laws that create a criminal class out of common citizens who are otherwise law abiding. Bah.
It's like a crazy-enclave. I think the easiest way to make these people realize that they are suffering from mental illness or delusional thoughts is to explain to them how many waves and what type pass through them every day, even in a radio-free enclave.
I just don't get this kind of irrational behavior. I think it has to be an illness similar to germaphobia.
Useability issues, hostile support community and general lack of hardware support (desktop) all contribute to Linux being an unpopular desktop.
Really, support is the kicker, not acquisition cost. The industry has been turning PC support folks into the equivalent of data janitors for years now, both in prestige and pay. If you are dedicated enough to get *good* at supporting Linux, you are going to get a much-better paying admin job, not keep on schlepping desktops for minimal cash. Supporting Linux desktops creates more costs than it saves in Windows licenses in both ongoing issues (doing business with MS-Office using partners, etc) and cost of support personnel.
The Windows world churns out people good enough to do desktop support constantly. They are easier to find and will accept a smaller compensation package. Some of them are even lifers at desktop support, not good enough for data center admin jobs.
It's too bad really. I would have liked to see a good Linux desktop. For myself, I've always ended up removing any Linux desktops I've installed. I want to do things, not mess with the OS, which is what I end up doing every damn time. Thus, Windows and OSX for me.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Indeed. The comparison between the desktop grade Athlon 64 and the server grade Xeon is meaningless. It never comes down to those two when buying a server. A comparison with the Opteron would have been sensible.
I can't write cursive anymore either, and it was required of us all through grammer school. I know how, but it's been so long that even I have trouble reading it. If it's necessary to write, I have to print everything other than my signature, which is unreadable anyway.
I am cautiously optomistic, but frankly I think the lesson that companies will learn is that good Level 1 tech support for Linux is hard to come by.
Companies will have to double their support costs to support both Windows and Linux (regardless of distro flavor).
Having worked in the deep past at a Best Buy, I can tell you that many of their customers are unprepared for Linux, in any form. They can't handle the Windows boxes they have.
Plus, super-cheap systems ALWAYS come with some kind of messed up non-standard hardware. Remember Packard Bell's soundcard/modem combos? This kind of thing will put tremendos pressure on manufacturers in both customer support and driver creation/updates.
Consumer grade PCs at a Best Buy are loss leaders to get you into the store and buy a printer and accessories to go with it.
Margins on this kind of product are incredibly thin. As much as I would LIKE to be able to get Linux (pick your distro flavor) on a machine like that, I think that the economics of the situation will be a significant barrier to entry.
The Pavillion line of consumer grade boxes from HPQ is NOT the corporate workstations they sell. There is a clear division between the consumer line and the corporate line. (this is true of IBM in the past, Compaq, and Dell.)
I see no such division with the Lindows OS and there was no such division at Commodore.
As far as trailers go, I was taken home from the hospital when I was born it was to a trailer home. I occasionally shop at Wal-Mart. I don't like to because their stores are dirty and disorganized, not because of the caliber of shopper there with me.
It's not intended as a slam on Wally-Mart shoppers.
You do have to admit, however, that Wally Mart isn't what you would call "upscale" or "Corporate".
"i didn't see if there's a project to build a public database of showtimes/channels for people to get."
I see that as an issue too. I am not sure what hoops one has to jump through to get more than what TV Guide offers. I don't know if services like TIVO and pubs like TV Guide have to pay for that. Big burden on someone if it's not automated in some way. Cool project, though.
Ahh, yes, I sometimes forget that BSD is licenced differently. Many of the NAS vendors use stripped BSD for their kernel OS as a foundation to build on. I wonder exactly how many licences are actually affected.
Many manufacturers of NAS (Network Attached Storage) use GPLed OS that have been modified or reduced to their basic components to NAS appliances. I have seen many instances of Linux NAS devices, BSD NAS devices, and yes, NAS devices bases on Windows 2000 for appliances.
A little background:
A NAS device is an appliance dedicated to providing storage on the IP network. It's basically a stripped standard server with ease-of-use features added, and form-fitted into a smaller box. Extremely easy to set up, extremely easy to use.
Companies that make them:
Quantum Snap! www.quantum.com Maxtor www.maxtor.com Network Appliance www.netapp.com IOMEGA www.iomega.com Blue Arc www.bluearc.com and the list goes on and on.
They all provide CIFS and NFS shares, some of the also provide Apple shares, and Novell shares. The point here is that many of them are based on GPLed OS. While their final product may be commercial, this development may restrict their use of CIFS. These products RELY on CIFS. Frankly this may be a ploy by Microsoft to sell more copies of Windows 2000 for Appliances, and take a heavy swipe at the Open Source community.
If NAS vendors can't use CIFS, and the latest CIFS has changed to mess up connectivity, they are dead in two years, as the OS upgrades catch up.
If there is a somebody who could clear that up a bit, that would be great.
I, for one, hope that continued compatibility for the CIFS standard continues in the Samba package. For Linux to lose that functionality, it would kill a lot of possible server implementations.
"...why the hell was I reading the WSJ for a technology product review... talk about mismatch between product and end user."
Actually in many ways you are completley wrong on this point. The end user is a guy who travels, does a lot of appointments, etc. That means CEOs, salesdorks, CFOs, and the like.
A bad review like this in the WSJ, means the when Joe Techie walks up to the CEO or CFO with a purchase order for 50 of the little Sharp Zaurus PDAs, he is going to be told NO.
Thats the thing that the Journal does. It reaches the non-techies, and guess what, they hold the purse strings. If you can't come up with a killer reason (other than Linux) to own a Zaurus over a Palm or other more mainstream PDA, your NOT going to get approval to buy the device.
Corporate purchase and acceptance of a PDA is what is necessary for a company to make money. If every active slashdot poster bought a Zaurus, it still would be a loss for Sharp. They need the corporate sales, and a review in the WSJ saying it sucks kills a lot of corporate sales.
Wow, the term "real world user" doesn't have much impact on you does it?
Turn off the Linux miopia, and realize that 95+% of the world doesn't care about OS. They just want it to work, and if that's Linux, fine. If that's Windows, fine. They REALLY don't care about this. They want their stuff to work and to have tons of cool programs to run. (And no, Nethack, and encryption programs are not "cool" for the real world user) The Zaurus doesn't fit that bill, and the fact that it runs Linux is incidental to the entire issue.
The zealotry shown here always amazes me. I like Linux. I like competition. But I tell you what, Linux is not the magical peg that fits every shape hole.
A review like that in the WSJ is almost a death sentance for a PDA.
I know all you Linux users are geeked out by the fact that it runs Linux, but PDAs are about simplicity of use, and compatability. If this unit from Sharp (who, in my opinion has always been a third rate electronics manufacturer) is as big and as clumsy as the reviewer says it is, it has almost zero chance of adoption.
This is a PalmOS and (God help us) WindowsCE market.
Think about the corporate buyer. These guys are conservative. They don't want something not mainstream, and a PDA not running PalmOS or WINCE is NOT mainstream. Nobody wants to get crap from his CEO about the PDA choice. Guess what else, the CEO doesn't give a crap that it runs Linux. All he knows is that his other CEO buddies have WINCE and PalmOS PDAs and wants to know why his company isn't doing what everybody else is.
This market simply doesn't and shouldn't care all that much about what OS the PDA is running. Its a big geek factor to run Linux, but was it really a good choice? Probably not.
I think this genre is a natural place to start this kind of thing, because unless I am mistaken, most of this kind of music is in the public domain. Mind you, I could be completely off base about that.
Specifically in the area of digital music, if this had been done right this would not be a problem. Music companies offering their catalogs for say.25 or.50 cents a song with a fat pipe and guaranteed quality would have been popular. I would have considered it myself. I would have download from them regardless of the availability of other sources such as the Gnutella network. I would have been happily legal, with clean, correct copies of my music. I think that many people would have also.
Sure, there would be quite a few people still pirating the content, but for audiophiles it would have been a no-brainer. Legal, fast, and clean would have been the watchwords. How many MP3s have you downloaded only to find out that it's a bad rip that took you an hour to get? Misnamed songs, misnamed authors, and things like that would have been things of the past. But no, we have to have paranoia, fear, and mistrust.
A company that would trust its customers a little bit could reap huge rewards. There will be piracy regardless of what they do. If it was created by man, it can be broken by man.
The first company to engender a little trust and lay on a little guilt "If one of your friends wants this song, send them to us so we can continue to offer you this premium service" would have made them money.
I saw a somebody post higher up that "jeez it is a cult hit, just like Star Trek...."
C'mon folks. I watched a few episodes of Futurama and while occasionally good, it just wasn't consistantly funny. It was a bit tired from the get go, just like the Simpsons is now. All they need to do now is put the Simpsons to rest. Its getting long in the tooth too. Groenig needs a new schtick, something fresh. Shock cartoons on prime time TV are, thanks to his programs, done to death. Let them die quietly.
Trillian Rocks and AOL can go suck eggs
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1
I was turned on to the Trillian client a couple of weeks ago and it rocks. Stable, fast and well-thought out it reduced my two, and occasionally three IMs to one nice one. The stupid part of AOL blocking Trillian, is that once you have this product installed, it doesn't much matter which service you use.
From a Trillian standpoint, AIM, Y!, MSN, and ICQ all look much the same. They all act much the same. All they will be doing is increasing Y! and MSN's client base.
I also have to wonder about the thinking at AOL/TW. They own ICQ too, but never pull this kind of stuff with that. Why dick with AIM and then leave ICQ alone? I mean, if you really wanted to make it a long day at Ceurlean Studios, break both at the same time. It's all pretty stupid.
The differance, is that they generally don't do it with widely interoperable standards like POP.
Show me a company that makes a POP3 product that won't send mail to OUTLOOK, delibratly. There are none, because it doesn't serve a purpose.
I would also ask, exactly what moral principles is this this guy defending? Some kind of "Microsoft is evil" or "Outlook contains exploitable technology holes, and isn't coded very well"?
Excuse me, but I don't think that God inscribed those words on a stone tablet anywhere. This is just elitism, pure and simple. It is the whip of the technology purist on the wool covered backs of the uniformed masses. The only thing that the uninformed masses are going to learn from this is that there are too many radicals in the Linux community, and that perhaps they shouldn't be trusted.
A waste of time, and an unfortunate loss of faith for public.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that's right. It wouldn't deter me in the slightest.
All it would do is make me ignore the ruling and sell whatever the hell I wanted on Craigslist anyway, and wait the two weeks it would take Congress to create new law that gets around this stupidity. Let those corporations try and sue everybody. Local LEOs and prosecutors are not going to waste their limited budgets on this shit.
Unenforceable. One of the keys to knowing a law or ruling is bad is when it is unenforceable and criminalizes everyday behavior. War on drugs, prohibition, gun laws etc....all more or less unenforceable laws that create a criminal class out of common citizens who are otherwise law abiding. Bah.
Please. Nobody in the post-911 era believes that the government is refraining from spying on American citizens.
What a disgrace.
A fair assessment.
It's like a crazy-enclave. I think the easiest way to make these people realize that they are suffering from mental illness or delusional thoughts is to explain to them how many waves and what type pass through them every day, even in a radio-free enclave.
I just don't get this kind of irrational behavior. I think it has to be an illness similar to germaphobia.
I would agree.
Useability issues, hostile support community and general lack of hardware support (desktop) all contribute to Linux being an unpopular desktop.
Really, support is the kicker, not acquisition cost. The industry has been turning PC support folks into the equivalent of data janitors for years now, both in prestige and pay. If you are dedicated enough to get *good* at supporting Linux, you are going to get a much-better paying admin job, not keep on schlepping desktops for minimal cash. Supporting Linux desktops creates more costs than it saves in Windows licenses in both ongoing issues (doing business with MS-Office using partners, etc) and cost of support personnel.
The Windows world churns out people good enough to do desktop support constantly. They are easier to find and will accept a smaller compensation package. Some of them are even lifers at desktop support, not good enough for data center admin jobs.
It's too bad really. I would have liked to see a good Linux desktop. For myself, I've always ended up removing any Linux desktops I've installed. I want to do things, not mess with the OS, which is what I end up doing every damn time. Thus, Windows and OSX for me.
Get out your masks.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent
To blow up King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Indeed. The comparison between the desktop grade Athlon 64 and the server grade Xeon is meaningless. It never comes down to those two when buying a server. A comparison with the Opteron would have been sensible.
Your on crack. Used laptops in cop cars? PCs in cop cars? They needed the equipment they got, not crappy used HP and Dell laptops. Jesus.
Open source is a nice thing, but it's not the end all and be all. Try not to drink SO MUCH of the open source kool-aid.
I can't write cursive anymore either, and it was required of us all through grammer school. I know how, but it's been so long that even I have trouble reading it. If it's necessary to write, I have to print everything other than my signature, which is unreadable anyway.
I don't know that this is really a problem.
I am cautiously optomistic, but frankly I think the lesson that companies will learn is that good Level 1 tech support for Linux is hard to come by.
Companies will have to double their support costs to support both Windows and Linux (regardless of distro flavor).
Having worked in the deep past at a Best Buy, I can tell you that many of their customers are unprepared for Linux, in any form. They can't handle the Windows boxes they have.
Plus, super-cheap systems ALWAYS come with some kind of messed up non-standard hardware. Remember Packard Bell's soundcard/modem combos? This kind of thing will put tremendos pressure on manufacturers in both customer support and driver creation/updates.
Consumer grade PCs at a Best Buy are loss leaders to get you into the store and buy a printer and accessories to go with it.
Margins on this kind of product are incredibly thin. As much as I would LIKE to be able to get Linux (pick your distro flavor) on a machine like that, I think that the economics of the situation will be a significant barrier to entry.
The Pavillion line of consumer grade boxes from HPQ is NOT the corporate workstations they sell. There is a clear division between the consumer line and the corporate line. (this is true of IBM in the past, Compaq, and Dell.)
I see no such division with the Lindows OS and there was no such division at Commodore.
As far as trailers go, I was taken home from the hospital when I was born it was to a trailer home. I occasionally shop at Wal-Mart. I don't like to because their stores are dirty and disorganized, not because of the caliber of shopper there with me.
It's not intended as a slam on Wally-Mart shoppers.
You do have to admit, however, that Wally Mart isn't what you would call "upscale" or "Corporate".
That was the point, apologies if I offended.
If I remember my ancient history properly, Commodore thought a good way to get to the masses was to sell product through K-Mart.
All that got them was the same reputation that Kame-Apart's crappy TVs had.
It made them a non-business option for whole legions of companies when they were still considered a viable option for businesses.
Are you going to install Lindows based PCs in your Fortune 500 enterprise when Wal-Mart sells them? Probably not.
Wally-Mart could very well be a kiss of death for Lindows as a viable OS for any kind of professional.
When you stain your product with "low class" like that, it's very hard to remove.
A risky choice, all around, IMHO.
"i didn't see if there's a project to build a public database of showtimes/channels for people to get."
I see that as an issue too. I am not sure what hoops one has to jump through to get more than what TV Guide offers. I don't know if services like TIVO and pubs like TV Guide have to pay for that. Big burden on someone if it's not automated in some way. Cool project, though.
Ahh, yes, I sometimes forget that BSD is licenced differently. Many of the NAS vendors use stripped BSD for their kernel OS as a foundation to build on. I wonder exactly how many licences are actually affected.
Thanks!
Hmm...since CIFS is already built into Windows, why would they WANT to use Samba code?
Thats not a knock on Samba, just an observation. Nothing saved if they have CIFS code already, and they do, plus a lengthy conversion to Windows.
Am I missing something?
This has some far reaching effects.
Many manufacturers of NAS (Network Attached Storage) use GPLed OS that have been modified or reduced to their basic components to NAS appliances. I have seen many instances of Linux NAS devices, BSD NAS devices, and yes, NAS devices bases on Windows 2000 for appliances.
A little background:
A NAS device is an appliance dedicated to providing storage on the IP network. It's basically a stripped standard server with ease-of-use features added, and form-fitted into a smaller box. Extremely easy to set up, extremely easy to use.
Companies that make them:
Quantum Snap! www.quantum.com
Maxtor www.maxtor.com
Network Appliance www.netapp.com
IOMEGA www.iomega.com
Blue Arc www.bluearc.com
and the list goes on and on.
They all provide CIFS and NFS shares, some of the also provide Apple shares, and Novell shares. The point here is that many of them are based on GPLed OS. While their final product may be commercial, this development may restrict their use of CIFS. These products RELY on CIFS. Frankly this may be a ploy by Microsoft to sell more copies of Windows 2000 for Appliances, and take a heavy swipe at the Open Source community.
If NAS vendors can't use CIFS, and the latest CIFS has changed to mess up connectivity, they are dead in two years, as the OS upgrades catch up.
If there is a somebody who could clear that up a bit, that would be great.
I, for one, hope that continued compatibility for the CIFS standard continues in the Samba package. For Linux to lose that functionality, it would kill a lot of possible server implementations.
"...why the hell was I reading the WSJ for a technology product review... talk about mismatch between product and end user."
Actually in many ways you are completley wrong on this point. The end user is a guy who travels, does a lot of appointments, etc. That means CEOs, salesdorks, CFOs, and the like.
A bad review like this in the WSJ, means the when Joe Techie walks up to the CEO or CFO with a purchase order for 50 of the little Sharp Zaurus PDAs, he is going to be told NO.
Thats the thing that the Journal does. It reaches the non-techies, and guess what, they hold the purse strings. If you can't come up with a killer reason (other than Linux) to own a Zaurus over a Palm or other more mainstream PDA, your NOT going to get approval to buy the device.
Corporate purchase and acceptance of a PDA is what is necessary for a company to make money. If every active slashdot poster bought a Zaurus, it still would be a loss for Sharp. They need the corporate sales, and a review in the WSJ saying it sucks kills a lot of corporate sales.
Wow, the term "real world user" doesn't have much impact on you does it?
Turn off the Linux miopia, and realize that 95+% of the world doesn't care about OS. They just want it to work, and if that's Linux, fine. If that's Windows, fine. They REALLY don't care about this. They want their stuff to work and to have tons of cool programs to run. (And no, Nethack, and encryption programs are not "cool" for the real world user) The Zaurus doesn't fit that bill, and the fact that it runs Linux is incidental to the entire issue.
The zealotry shown here always amazes me. I like Linux. I like competition. But I tell you what, Linux is not the magical peg that fits every shape hole.
A review like that in the WSJ is almost a death sentance for a PDA.
I know all you Linux users are geeked out by the fact that it runs Linux, but PDAs are about simplicity of use, and compatability. If this unit from Sharp (who, in my opinion has always been a third rate electronics manufacturer) is as big and as clumsy as the reviewer says it is, it has almost zero chance of adoption.
This is a PalmOS and (God help us) WindowsCE market.
Think about the corporate buyer. These guys are conservative. They don't want something not mainstream, and a PDA not running PalmOS or WINCE is NOT mainstream. Nobody wants to get crap from his CEO about the PDA choice. Guess what else, the CEO doesn't give a crap that it runs Linux. All he knows is that his other CEO buddies have WINCE and PalmOS PDAs and wants to know why his company isn't doing what everybody else is.
This market simply doesn't and shouldn't care all that much about what OS the PDA is running. Its a big geek factor to run Linux, but was it really a good choice? Probably not.
Cool. I will check this out.
I think this genre is a natural place to start this kind of thing, because unless I am mistaken, most of this kind of music is in the public domain. Mind you, I could be completely off base about that.
Specifically in the area of digital music, if this had been done right this would not be a problem. Music companies offering their catalogs for say .25 or .50 cents a song with a fat pipe and guaranteed quality would have been popular. I would have considered it myself. I would have download from them regardless of the availability of other sources such as the Gnutella network. I would have been happily legal, with clean, correct copies of my music. I think that many people would have also.
Sure, there would be quite a few people still pirating the content, but for audiophiles it would have been a no-brainer. Legal, fast, and clean would have been the watchwords. How many MP3s have you downloaded only to find out that it's a bad rip that took you an hour to get? Misnamed songs, misnamed authors, and things like that would have been things of the past. But no, we have to have paranoia, fear, and mistrust.
A company that would trust its customers a little bit could reap huge rewards. There will be piracy regardless of what they do. If it was created by man, it can be broken by man.
The first company to engender a little trust and lay on a little guilt "If one of your friends wants this song, send them to us so we can continue to offer you this premium service" would have made them money.
The best from my family to yours, Rob!
I saw a somebody post higher up that "jeez it is a cult hit, just like Star Trek...."
C'mon folks. I watched a few episodes of Futurama and while occasionally good, it just wasn't consistantly funny. It was a bit tired from the get go, just like the Simpsons is now. All they need to do now is put the Simpsons to rest. Its getting long in the tooth too. Groenig needs a new schtick, something fresh. Shock cartoons on prime time TV are, thanks to his programs, done to death. Let them die quietly.
I was turned on to the Trillian client a couple of weeks ago and it rocks. Stable, fast and well-thought out it reduced my two, and occasionally three IMs to one nice one. The stupid part of AOL blocking Trillian, is that once you have this product installed, it doesn't much matter which service you use.
From a Trillian standpoint, AIM, Y!, MSN, and ICQ all look much the same. They all act much the same. All they will be doing is increasing Y! and MSN's client base.
I also have to wonder about the thinking at AOL/TW. They own ICQ too, but never pull this kind of stuff with that. Why dick with AIM and then leave ICQ alone? I mean, if you really wanted to make it a long day at Ceurlean Studios, break both at the same time. It's all pretty stupid.
Large companies are trying to compete.
The differance, is that they generally don't do it with widely interoperable standards like POP.
Show me a company that makes a POP3 product that won't send mail to OUTLOOK, delibratly. There are none, because it doesn't serve a purpose.
I would also ask, exactly what moral principles is this this guy defending? Some kind of "Microsoft is evil" or "Outlook contains exploitable technology holes, and isn't coded very well"?
Excuse me, but I don't think that God inscribed those words on a stone tablet anywhere. This is just elitism, pure and simple. It is the whip of the technology purist on the wool covered backs of the uniformed masses. The only thing that the uninformed masses are going to learn from this is that there are too many radicals in the Linux community, and that perhaps they shouldn't be trusted.
A waste of time, and an unfortunate loss of faith for public.