The PR release says one must ask for the source to a particular binary by name. To be in compliance, if I have say a BEFSR41 router and I send a SASE asking to the source for any GPLed binary in the router then they have to do it. I should not have to crawl around their firmware and figure it all out. As far as the GPL is concerned, having the router or a firmware update file entitles me to do this. This is no big deal, just roll up a tarball. They can even say "HERE!" in a surly voice.
I would say the guy is out of his mind, has no business sense, is unreasonable, or has an ego the size of Bill Gates Estate.
Let me tell you, that is one big ego.
A few days ago during the Jargon File discussion, someone proposed the ESR as the basic unit of ego. Much like the Farad, 1 ESR is a finite but impossibly huge number. I just wonder what the conversion factor is between a "Bill Gates Estate" sized ego and the ESR is. I'd guess about a 0.3 myself.
Assuming Boies is still on this case, I can only picture him beating his head on his desk every time McBride and Sontag flap their gaping holes. Civil or criminal, the advice from a lawyer is always the same: Shut up and don't say anything unless I tell you to. Boies will say very little until he is at a settlement table or a courtroom. I'm sure IBM will have alot to say then.
Say, has anyone else heard about Poland? It's very similar to Germany. They have to produce their proof or shut up.
Openoffice has always had multiuser install capabilities. I cribbed the following from here:
Official Installation Procedure
1. Get a tarball of the most recent build from OpenOffice.org and untar it with
tar xfvz.tar.gz
As root, install soffice using the/net option:
setup/net
2. Then, when a user runs soffice for the first time, the user will be prompted to run the setup program. The user should use the "network installation" option when prompted, rather than "local installation". The network installation will copy about 10 megs of files into the user's directory, i think. The "local install" will copy the whole gigantic program.
When I was a bench tech, we did the same thing with slightly used 9V batteries. We strung 30 of them together and series it with this strange 45V dry cell for good measure. A small neon lamp (NE-2 type) will glow white hot and VERY bright. We also had turbine pumps that could no longer pull their rated flow but still worked. These were small 12V motors in a cylindrical housing that drove a little plastic fan. The exhaust was powerful enough to make one crawl across the bench. The sound they made was great. The motor was screaming and you could hear the rush of air being forced through the housing. It was like a little jet engine on your bench. The commutators in the motors would glow red then white hot before failing completely. Another fun effect was that it would force the strands at the end of stranded wire apart into a porcupine shape, nice little demo of electrostatic repulsion. The arc was fun too.
Maybe humans are just plain tasty. We only had their word for it that they needed our planet to survive. We weren't invaded by an alien military force; we were invaded by gourmets with bad taste in fashion. I don't buy that Fifth Column crap either. There's just some other race they thought was much tastier and they couldn't get their buddies to buy it.
Yeah, yeah, you can catch a few humans and grow them in tanks but it just doesn't taste the same as Genuine Free-Range Organic Human. A nice tall glass of chilly East River water is the perfect aperitif. They like the way we flavor the water for them with fertilizer, algae, bacteria, and odd industrial chemicals. It's like alien Mountain Dew!
I would like to believe that it's solely FOSS thats beginning to put a hurt on MS but I'm not sure. At least, I don't think it's just FOSS. Where I work, the emphasis is on maintaining what we have. We can't afford to upgrade much of anything right now. We can keep what we have working and that is just about it. MS is very much the Only Solution in the minds of many here but any attempt to "increase revenue" from us could start changing that. And anyway, MS is their own worst competitor. Lots of people are still running 98. Heck there's still 95 users. Many businesses are just now completing 2000 rollouts that they expect to stay with for several years.
MS has gotten a free ride while every other sector of IT has taken the brunt of the post-boom collapse. I don't think FOSS is doing much more than making them feel their share of the pain everyone else has had.
This is just simple economics. When you're flush with cash then everything has to be expensive, flashy, and loaded with bells and whistles. When times are tough, less elaborate yet functional solutions start getting "good enough" in a hurry. If the "good enough" solutions in question are visibly improving then so much the better.
Many have already made the point that the bad economy could be good for FOSS. I think that is finally starting to play out.
The formats you mention are patent encumbered and full access to the official specs (MPEG4) are under fee and NDA. Yeah, you can use 'em and and even code implementations but those implementations exist under a shadow. Divx is basically MPEG4. Free implementations are legally gray at best.
The benefits are primarily legal. Ogg codecs are intended to be fully legal to implement and use freely.
I don't have to bother with adding my middle initial for "uniqueness". Anybody who can forge my crabbed little scrawl deserves a pat on the back for effort at least.
RTFA. That's $600 for enterprise level support for 5 clients. Granted, that leaves room to argue for RedHat but it's certainly competitive with Windows 2000 + 5 cals ($1000).
The source RPMS are downloadable. You would have to compile them and then bootstrap a running system. Of course, you'll also have a joyous time hacking up a custom installer for your handrolled binaries.
I'm not sure what applies to the CDs that come out of a RHAS box. I imagine that even if those CDs are redistributable, you don't get access to RH's update servers and incident lines which is most of the point of running it in the first place.
If you want a free Linux with a long lifecyle, just run Debian Stable. RHAS is probably just as staid and boring (and stable...I hope) as it is.
it's not like Linus could call Linksys up and revoke their license
Why not? He holds copyright to major portions of the kernel. He can do just that. The author of Busybox is ready to sic a lawyer on them and it appears that their firmware also uses something called Zebra. Zebra is FSF owned code. Linksys is attracting the interest of least three copyright holders. They won't be able to keep up the silent treatment much longer.
By not "not conforming" to terms of the license of the code their using, Linksys is committing copyright violation. If they somehow "get the GPL ruled invalid" then standard copyright law applies. Standard copyright law already stipulates that you have no license unless the the copyright holder grants you one. Is a copyright holder who's just been royally lawyered going to give you nice terms on a license? I don't think so.
Microsoft let the cat out of the bag by saying that if you menace them with Linux they will giver you their software for free. So expect a rising volume of incidents such as this while everybody negotiates them dry.
That's ultimately self-defeating. The more Linux is given away the better Linux does. Linux gains more mindshare, developers, and generates opportunities for small businesses as it propagates. This is not true of MS. When MS gives away licenses to maintain marketshare, it is at the expense of revenue. Sure they can threaten to take away the crackpipe if they aren't paid down the road but then the "feasibility studies" start up again. Mind and marketshare doesn't do them much good if it isn't making them money.
This feasibility study is not news. When Ballmer flies out to Britain with a briefcase full of free/deeply-discounted licenses, that will be news. It isn't a "loss" for Linux either. To MS, it'll be the equivalent of a played out one-crop field. Sure, nobody else will grow anything but they won't either.
MS faces a mature market for their only two moneymakers (Windows/Office). Palladium-style lockin strategies won't save them either. At best, they can hold the line a little while longer. They need new products and new business model that doesn't involve making legions of potential users and developers highly pissed at them.
Thereby depriving SCO of their revenue stream. They are trying to cast a cloud of FUD over the entire Linux and GNU codebase, to establish de facto ownership of the whole enchilada.
The instant they try it, they'll get shotgun blasted by the copyright holders of the portions of Linux they don't "own". They distributed Linux kernels for years under the GPL. Furthermore, they don't own what they didn't develop. Many of those owners will want legal relief for what SCO would steal from them. SCO is trying to commit a far larger theft than what they claim was done to them.
They can't keep what "infringes" a secret forever. Nor can they use that secret to take ownership of the kernel. Sooner or later, that secret will get out. They'll likely be forced to reveal it. At that point, the provenance of those lines will be established. What actually "infringes" at that point, you could probably count on your fingers. It won't take long to fix.
Email encryption is intended to keep third parties out of private communication. With PGP nothing stops the other side from divulging his end of the conversation to others. Sure some corporate mail clients may try to mark mails unprintable, unsaveable and what not but that won't defeat a digital camera or even a Bic and piece of paper. Encryption just allows Bob and Alice to have a conversation with reasonable assurance Eve isn't listening in.
DRM is something else altogether. DRM is intended to allow a sender to control what a recipient can do with information. In this case, Alice is trying to use encryption to mark information for Bob's eyes only (on Bob's Alice approved OS or Bob's Alice approved player) regardless of how Bob feels about it. This is absurd. If Bob can see it then Bob can copy it. DRM's only true effect is to create varying degrees of inconvienience for Bob.
Is not at all hypocritical to favor technological means for privacy while being opposed to technological means on control. Email encryption: Privacy. DRM: Control.
Here is why: They want to collect royalties. They cannot collect royalties if the code in question is removed and replaced with "clean" code, which is what will happen within minutes of them announcing exactly which lines of code are in violation.
Which the basis of another lawsuit itself. In effect, SCO would also get to charge royalties for the work the community did. Every other contributer to kernel (and whatever other software they want to extort money from) would probably have good reason to sue SCO. They would be committing a theft far larger than the one they allege was committed against them. If they don't step carefully, they're already staring the barrels of multiple countersuits for GPL violation. Attempted royalty collection would just throw more fuel on the fire.
"Death Spiral" is absurdly optimistic when speaking of a company that has $40B on tap. On the other hand, MS does seem to be facing stagnation due to having mature markets in both their flagship products. The only direction Windows and Office adoption can go is down.
I think they may be finding monolithic integration is starting to work against them. They chuck everything but the Kitchen Sink into either Office or Windows as needed. The idea being to take over third-party niche markets and own all the marbles. But then, people are only willing to pay so much for an OS even if it is loaded to the gills with features.
They need cash cows aside from Office and Windows. That means building less into Windows/Office and selling more separate products. But selling separate products causes small competitors to start swarming like ants. They're going to have to take that risk or find another way to diversify. In the long term, diversification may be the best bet.
To keep their current OS and Office monopolies, they have to be utterly ruthless to competitor and customer alike. This is already reaping them a harvest of mistrust. If they had a broader product base, then real competition need not be the fearful spector is to them now. They wouldn't need to be as heavy handed and even someone who loathes them as much as I do now might change his mind and throw a little cash their way.
It sounds like everything being asked for could be done with something like a customized Knoppix. As you say, a friendly set of utilities for lightly customizing the final disk would be nice. If the parent in question has a spare PC that meets a minimum set of requirements then chuck in a nice friendly "Permanent Install icon" on the desktop. That would sidestep the repartitioning issue pretty handily.
A less heavy handed approach would be something like those FOSS cds for Windows we heard about a few months ago. Put the Windows ports of some schoolwork relavent projects on some CDs and hand those out.
The object was not to spend days designing some uber piece of gear with hand rolled capacitors, WW II vintage tubes, oxygen-free gold wire, a rubber chicken, some flux capacitors, and pixie dust. The idea was to make a cheap piece of kit sound reasonably like an expensive piece of kit for some impromptu market research. Incidentally, I never saw one of these sitting next to someone's spanking new $300 home theatre.
You want a scientific reference? Then google for something called the "placebo effect". It turns up in more places than medicine and I guarantee you'll find loads for many contexts. The object of the exercise was to see if hard-core audiophiles could be tricked into thinking the sound coming out of a cheap amp was being made by an expensive one. Let me spell out the gag more explicitly: El cheapo amp was behind a curtain. The audience was told it a top-secret piece of experimental gear and he asked the audience how it sounded compared to a very expensive tube amp that was in plain view. Furthermore, El Cheapo was not under a demanding load. The scheme falls apart if any of it's little knobs get tweaked or it has enough time to drift out of the calibration imposed by the EQ. The latter may slip under the radar of the typical Absolute Sound staffer if he isn't allowed to look behind the curtain. Shades of the Great and Terrible Oz! You don't need a "computer driven fully automated I'm-more-leet-than-you" piece of gear to detect gullibility.
I'll spell it out even more clearly. There was no high end design taking place. There was no actual product being marketed. The speakers in use were high-end gear at the time. It was little experiment in tweak psychology.
As for Carver marketing to tweaks, I know that. I was suggesting something more subtle: Carver knows his market the way the P.T. Barnum knew his.
Since you don't like anecdotes, I'll include another one. This one happened to me personally. I wanted to digitize some vinyl (hey! This just got back on topic!) and had no need for exceptional quality. Reasonably clean audio from vinyl in various conditions for conversion to mp3 was the object. My turntable was lacking a cartridge and the Shack (I know, I know but convienience and affordability were the objectives) was out. I go to this place called Needle-In-A-Haystack and ask what they have in stock for P-Mount tonearms. You had to ask; it was all behind a (non-glassed in) counter. The first thing he showed me went for $150, "But it's very inferior. I've got some that are barely alright for $300. You can spend even more. The more expensive it is the better it sounds." I practically ran away screaming. What's worse, I don't this guy was scamming me. That little sermon was delivered in the flat tones of the True Believer. Yes, I know quality cartridges cost a bundle but it is not generally true that "more expensive is better". I don't think one has to be ultra-leet audio engineer with a pseudo-random generator to understand things like:
The law of diminishing returns The basic psycology of marketing Ditto for Placebo Effect Self Deception
And last but not least - There's a sucker born every minute.
As for my relative, you're right. He's no engineer but he's a great salesman. He had zero trouble selling the same illusion to another tweak....who was left rather speechless as my relative was cruel enough to raise the curtain and show what the speakers were really hooked up to.
I doubt you have the objectivity to carry this out but have some of your tweak friends over and see if you can fool them too.
Pink noise and spectrum analyzer? Why not tones and and a meter, which are more accurate for this purpose (and what mega-$$$ test gear such as the Audio Precision suite uses, and yes, IANEngineer)? Because it doesn't sound as mod-worthy as making shit up out of whole cloth as the above post did.
A relation of mine once met Bob Carver in the 70s and when he figured that he wasn't a Golden Ear tweak he showed him such a setup...at an electronics show well attended by tweaks. They did indeed ooh and ahh over the equivalent of a $100 Radio Shack amp. Of course, they thought it was $15,000 tube amp. Carver wanted to test something he starting to realize about so-called "Golden Ear" audiophiles. That is the genesis of my knowledge of this gag. No, it was not "made up". Secondly, by "spectrum analyzer" I was referring to the piece of kit that used to test radio and audio equipment under repair, not the cheezy bargraph device on flashy stereo equipment. The reason for pink noise is that it gives a continous curve on the display of the analyzer. That way, the effect of tweaking the EQ can be seen across the device's entire bandpass. Tones will not get you as close with a continous display of the amp's response. Thirdly, my relation later became a salesman of high end stereo equipment and had a tweak co-worker. He pulled the same stunt on him with the same results. If a "Golden Ear" thinks it's expensive uber gear and it doesn't blatantly sound like crap then yes they'll rave on and on about it like an Absolute Sound review.
Those guys are wankers - but valves do have a different sound. When valve amps clip, they have a nicer sound then transistor amps. This is thought to be caused by a more 'rounded' curve, caused by even order harmonics. see this page for more information.
Ok, so a tube amp sounds more pleasant when operated out of spec. The real problem is that headroom is expensive. A well designed tube amp that isn't clipping isn't going to sound any different from a well designed transistor amp. By well designed, I mean it has highly linear response from around 10Hz all the way up to 20Khz under a variety of inputs and listening levels. Even a cheapy amp can sound good if the volume is moderate and it's hooked up to good speakers.
This is the basis of gag that's been played on audiophiles numerous times. A cheap amp is EQed to an expensive amp with pink noise and a spectrum analyzer at low volume. They'll sound nearly identical as long as no one touches the volume knob. You then hide the cheap kit behind the expensive kit and laugh at them as they ooh and ahh. Of course, the mystical excuses will flow freely once the "Golden Ears" realize they've been had.
The point is that a good amp (of either tube or transistor design) shows it's quality when it's cranked. If it's clipping then you need to back off. The tube amp is just more forgiving to the listener who likes to turn it up to "11". This is a subtle point often lost on teenagers and college boys. High wattage speakers and amps aren't intended to be operated at "11" to win bigger uh equipment contests. They're intended to be louder without distortion. A 200W-RMS amp designed for wide headroom in a fairly small room is more expensive than a 500W-peak crank-em-up-contest amp for a reason.
On the other hand, I have no argument with guitar players who insist on tube amps or least a tube preamp stage. Some guitar preamps are even designed to exaggerate tube distortion. Sound production is an entirely different beast from sound re-production.
Another poster already mentioned Gnome Wave Cleaner. I intend to try it out myself but it looks pretty complete for this purpose. I've also been playing with a sound editor called rezound.
The Noatun player for KDE has a nifty plugin that gives you sliders for speed and pitch on playback. It's loads of fun.
They're basically laptops with no built-in keyboard and a touch screen.
Are features like the stylus and touch-sensitive screen supported?
Some touch screens are supported in X. It depends. The fancy stylus features would probably need some code written. I know of no FOSS handwriting recognition. Proprietary handwriting recognition may exist. Who knows.
What about the power management features? Those are almost certainly ACPI. 2.4 series kernels have some support. 2.6 should work just fine.
Will apt-get be supported?
You really are a Debian troll. If you got Debian installed in the first place then yes apt-get will work. You just need a decent net connection.
Overall, I would say Debian or any other Linux can be installed on these tablet PC's but it would just be a laptop with a weird form-factor. It's handwriting recognition and stylus feature that make these special. We'll see these supported better when more 'nix hackers get some to play with.
When it comes to corporate shenanigans in IT I usually bet on whoever's the biggest and most evil to win. In this case, IBM is the biggest but SCO is the most evil. Does big and evil cancel each other out leaving the outcome a tossup?
Slashdot Mirror
The PR release says one must ask for the source to a particular binary by name. To be in compliance, if I have say a BEFSR41 router and I send a SASE asking to the source for any GPLed binary in the router then they have to do it. I should not have to crawl around their firmware and figure it all out. As far as the GPL is concerned, having the router or a firmware update file entitles me to do this. This is no big deal, just roll up a tarball. They can even say "HERE!" in a surly voice.
I would say the guy is out of his mind, has no business sense, is unreasonable, or has an ego the size of Bill Gates Estate.
Let me tell you, that is one big ego.
A few days ago during the Jargon File discussion, someone proposed the ESR as the basic unit of ego. Much like the Farad, 1 ESR is a finite but impossibly huge number. I just wonder what the conversion factor is between a "Bill Gates Estate" sized ego and the ESR is. I'd guess about a 0.3 myself.
Assuming Boies is still on this case, I can only picture him beating his head on his desk every time McBride and Sontag flap their gaping holes. Civil or criminal, the advice from a lawyer is always the same: Shut up and don't say anything unless I tell you to. Boies will say very little until he is at a settlement table or a courtroom. I'm sure IBM will have alot to say then.
Say, has anyone else heard about Poland? It's very similar to Germany. They have to produce their proof or shut up.
Openoffice has always had multiuser install capabilities. I cribbed the following from here:
.tar.gz
/net option:
/net
Official Installation Procedure
1. Get a tarball of the most recent build from OpenOffice.org and untar it with
tar xfvz
As root, install soffice using the
setup
2. Then, when a user runs soffice for the first time, the user will be prompted to run the setup program. The user should use the "network installation" option when prompted, rather than "local installation". The network installation will copy about 10 megs of files into the user's directory, i think. The "local install" will copy the whole gigantic program.
When I was a bench tech, we did the same thing with slightly used 9V batteries. We strung 30 of them together and series it with this strange 45V dry cell for good measure. A small neon lamp (NE-2 type) will glow white hot and VERY bright. We also had turbine pumps that could no longer pull their rated flow but still worked. These were small 12V motors in a cylindrical housing that drove a little plastic fan. The exhaust was powerful enough to make one crawl across the bench. The sound they made was great. The motor was screaming and you could hear the rush of air being forced through the housing. It was like a little jet engine on your bench. The commutators in the motors would glow red then white hot before failing completely. Another fun effect was that it would force the strands at the end of stranded wire apart into a porcupine shape, nice little demo of electrostatic repulsion. The arc was fun too.
No one offered to try it out with their tongue.
Maybe humans are just plain tasty. We only had their word for it that they needed our planet to survive. We weren't invaded by an alien military force; we were invaded by gourmets with bad taste in fashion. I don't buy that Fifth Column crap either. There's just some other race they thought was much tastier and they couldn't get their buddies to buy it.
Yeah, yeah, you can catch a few humans and grow them in tanks but it just doesn't taste the same as Genuine Free-Range Organic Human. A nice tall glass of chilly East River water is the perfect aperitif. They like the way we flavor the water for them with fertilizer, algae, bacteria, and odd industrial chemicals. It's like alien Mountain Dew!
I would like to believe that it's solely FOSS thats beginning to put a hurt on MS but I'm not sure. At least, I don't think it's just FOSS. Where I work, the emphasis is on maintaining what we have. We can't afford to upgrade much of anything right now. We can keep what we have working and that is just about it. MS is very much the Only Solution in the minds of many here but any attempt to "increase revenue" from us could start changing that. And anyway, MS is their own worst competitor. Lots of people are still running 98. Heck there's still 95 users. Many businesses are just now completing 2000 rollouts that they expect to stay with for several years.
MS has gotten a free ride while every other sector of IT has taken the brunt of the post-boom collapse. I don't think FOSS is doing much more than making them feel their share of the pain everyone else has had.
This is just simple economics. When you're flush with cash then everything has to be expensive, flashy, and loaded with bells and whistles. When times are tough, less elaborate yet functional solutions start getting "good enough" in a hurry. If the "good enough" solutions in question are visibly improving then so much the better.
Many have already made the point that the bad economy could be good for FOSS. I think that is finally starting to play out.
The formats you mention are patent encumbered and full access to the official specs (MPEG4) are under fee and NDA. Yeah, you can use 'em and and even code implementations but those implementations exist under a shadow. Divx is basically MPEG4. Free implementations are legally gray at best.
The benefits are primarily legal. Ogg codecs are intended to be fully legal to implement and use freely.
I don't have to bother with adding my middle initial for "uniqueness". Anybody who can forge my crabbed little scrawl deserves a pat on the back for effort at least.
RTFA. That's $600 for enterprise level support for 5 clients. Granted, that leaves room to argue for RedHat but it's certainly competitive with Windows 2000 + 5 cals ($1000).
The source RPMS are downloadable. You would have to compile them and then bootstrap a running system. Of course, you'll also have a joyous time hacking up a custom installer for your handrolled binaries.
I'm not sure what applies to the CDs that come out of a RHAS box. I imagine that even if those CDs are redistributable, you don't get access to RH's update servers and incident lines which is most of the point of running it in the first place.
If you want a free Linux with a long lifecyle, just run Debian Stable. RHAS is probably just as staid and boring (and stable...I hope) as it is.
The mngs on the page you linked also worked in Mozilla Firebird (on a Debian PPC no less).
it's not like Linus could call Linksys up and revoke their license
Why not? He holds copyright to major portions of the kernel. He can do just that. The author of Busybox is ready to sic a lawyer on them and it appears that their firmware also uses something called Zebra. Zebra is FSF owned code. Linksys is attracting the interest of least three copyright holders. They won't be able to keep up the silent treatment much longer.
By not "not conforming" to terms of the license of the code their using, Linksys is committing copyright violation. If they somehow "get the GPL ruled invalid" then standard copyright law applies. Standard copyright law already stipulates that you have no license unless the the copyright holder grants you one. Is a copyright holder who's just been royally lawyered going to give you nice terms on a license? I don't think so.
Microsoft let the cat out of the bag by saying that if you menace them with Linux they will giver you their software for free. So expect a rising volume of incidents such as this while everybody negotiates them dry.
That's ultimately self-defeating. The more Linux is given away the better Linux does. Linux gains more mindshare, developers, and generates opportunities for small businesses as it propagates. This is not true of MS. When MS gives away licenses to maintain marketshare, it is at the expense of revenue. Sure they can threaten to take away the crackpipe if they aren't paid down the road but then the "feasibility studies" start up again. Mind and marketshare doesn't do them much good if it isn't making them money.
This feasibility study is not news. When Ballmer flies out to Britain with a briefcase full of free/deeply-discounted licenses, that will be news. It isn't a "loss" for Linux either. To MS, it'll be the equivalent of a played out one-crop field. Sure, nobody else will grow anything but they won't either.
MS faces a mature market for their only two moneymakers (Windows/Office). Palladium-style lockin strategies won't save them either. At best, they can hold the line a little while longer. They need new products and new business model that doesn't involve making legions of potential users and developers highly pissed at them.
Thereby depriving SCO of their revenue stream. They are trying to cast a cloud of FUD over the entire Linux and GNU codebase, to establish de facto ownership of the whole enchilada.
The instant they try it, they'll get shotgun blasted by the copyright holders of the portions of Linux they don't "own". They distributed Linux kernels for years under the GPL. Furthermore, they don't own what they didn't develop. Many of those owners will want legal relief for what SCO would steal from them. SCO is trying to commit a far larger theft than what they claim was done to them.
They can't keep what "infringes" a secret forever. Nor can they use that secret to take ownership of the kernel. Sooner or later, that secret will get out. They'll likely be forced to reveal it. At that point, the provenance of those lines will be established. What actually "infringes" at that point, you could probably count on your fingers. It won't take long to fix.
Email encryption is intended to keep third parties out of private communication. With PGP nothing stops the other side from divulging his end of the conversation to others. Sure some corporate mail clients may try to mark mails unprintable, unsaveable and what not but that won't defeat a digital camera or even a Bic and piece of paper. Encryption just allows Bob and Alice to have a conversation with reasonable assurance Eve isn't listening in.
DRM is something else altogether. DRM is intended to allow a sender to control what a recipient can do with information. In this case, Alice is trying to use encryption to mark information for Bob's eyes only (on Bob's Alice approved OS or Bob's Alice approved player) regardless of how Bob feels about it. This is absurd. If Bob can see it then Bob can copy it. DRM's only true effect is to create varying degrees of inconvienience for Bob.
Is not at all hypocritical to favor technological means for privacy while being opposed to technological means on control. Email encryption: Privacy. DRM: Control.
Here is why: They want to collect royalties. They cannot collect royalties if the code in question is removed and replaced with "clean" code, which is what will happen within minutes of them announcing exactly which lines of code are in violation.
Which the basis of another lawsuit itself. In effect, SCO would also get to charge royalties for the work the community did. Every other contributer to kernel (and whatever other software they want to extort money from) would probably have good reason to sue SCO. They would be committing a theft far larger than the one they allege was committed against them. If they don't step carefully, they're already staring the barrels of multiple countersuits for GPL violation. Attempted royalty collection would just throw more fuel on the fire.
"Death Spiral" is absurdly optimistic when speaking of a company that has $40B on tap. On the other hand, MS does seem to be facing stagnation due to having mature markets in both their flagship products. The only direction Windows and Office adoption can go is down.
I think they may be finding monolithic integration is starting to work against them. They chuck everything but the Kitchen Sink into either Office or Windows as needed. The idea being to take over third-party niche markets and own all the marbles. But then, people are only willing to pay so much for an OS even if it is loaded to the gills with features.
They need cash cows aside from Office and Windows. That means building less into Windows/Office and selling more separate products. But selling separate products causes small competitors to start swarming like ants. They're going to have to take that risk or find another way to diversify. In the long term, diversification may be the best bet.
To keep their current OS and Office monopolies, they have to be utterly ruthless to competitor and customer alike. This is already reaping them a harvest of mistrust. If they had a broader product base, then real competition need not be the fearful spector is to them now. They wouldn't need to be as heavy handed and even someone who loathes them as much as I do now might change his mind and throw a little cash their way.
It sounds like everything being asked for could be done with something like a customized Knoppix. As you say, a friendly set of utilities for lightly customizing the final disk would be nice. If the parent in question has a spare PC that meets a minimum set of requirements then chuck in a nice friendly "Permanent Install icon" on the desktop. That would sidestep the repartitioning issue pretty handily.
A less heavy handed approach would be something like those FOSS cds for Windows we heard about a few months ago. Put the Windows ports of some schoolwork relavent projects on some CDs and hand those out.
The object was not to spend days designing some uber piece of gear with hand rolled capacitors, WW II vintage tubes, oxygen-free gold wire, a rubber chicken, some flux capacitors, and pixie dust. The idea was to make a cheap piece of kit sound reasonably like an expensive piece of kit for some impromptu market research. Incidentally, I never saw one of these sitting next to someone's spanking new $300 home theatre.
You want a scientific reference? Then google for something called the "placebo effect". It turns up in more places than medicine and I guarantee you'll find loads for many contexts. The object of the exercise was to see if hard-core audiophiles could be tricked into thinking the sound coming out of a cheap amp was being made by an expensive one. Let me spell out the gag more explicitly: El cheapo amp was behind a curtain. The audience was told it a top-secret piece of experimental gear and he asked the audience how it sounded compared to a very expensive tube amp that was in plain view. Furthermore, El Cheapo was not under a demanding load. The scheme falls apart if any of it's little knobs get tweaked or it has enough time to drift out of the calibration imposed by the EQ. The latter may slip under the radar of the typical Absolute Sound staffer if he isn't allowed to look behind the curtain. Shades of the Great and Terrible Oz! You don't need a "computer driven fully automated I'm-more-leet-than-you" piece of gear to detect gullibility.
I'll spell it out even more clearly. There was no high end design taking place. There was no actual product being marketed. The speakers in use were high-end gear at the time. It was little experiment in tweak psychology.
As for Carver marketing to tweaks, I know that. I was suggesting something more subtle: Carver knows his market the way the P.T. Barnum knew his.
Since you don't like anecdotes, I'll include another one. This one happened to me personally. I wanted to digitize some vinyl (hey! This just got back on topic!) and had no need for exceptional quality. Reasonably clean audio from vinyl in various conditions for conversion to mp3 was the object. My turntable was lacking a cartridge and the Shack (I know, I know but convienience and affordability were the objectives) was out. I go to this place called Needle-In-A-Haystack and ask what they have in stock for P-Mount tonearms. You had to ask; it was all behind a (non-glassed in) counter. The first thing he showed me went for $150, "But it's very inferior. I've got some that are barely alright for $300. You can spend even more. The more expensive it is the better it sounds." I practically ran away screaming. What's worse, I don't this guy was scamming me. That little sermon was delivered in the flat tones of the True Believer. Yes, I know quality cartridges cost a bundle but it is not generally true that "more expensive is better". I don't think one has to be ultra-leet audio engineer with a pseudo-random generator to understand things like:
The law of diminishing returns
The basic psycology of marketing
Ditto for Placebo Effect
Self Deception
And last but not least - There's a sucker born every minute.
As for my relative, you're right. He's no engineer but he's a great salesman. He had zero trouble selling the same illusion to another tweak....who was left rather speechless as my relative was cruel enough to raise the curtain and show what the speakers were really hooked up to.
I doubt you have the objectivity to carry this out but have some of your tweak friends over and see if you can fool them too.
Pink noise and spectrum analyzer? Why not tones and and a meter, which are more accurate for this purpose (and what mega-$$$ test gear such as the Audio Precision suite uses, and yes, IANEngineer)? Because it doesn't sound as mod-worthy as making shit up out of whole cloth as the above post did.
A relation of mine once met Bob Carver in the 70s and when he figured that he wasn't a Golden Ear tweak he showed him such a setup...at an electronics show well attended by tweaks. They did indeed ooh and ahh over the equivalent of a $100 Radio Shack amp. Of course, they thought it was $15,000 tube amp. Carver wanted to test something he starting to realize about so-called "Golden Ear" audiophiles. That is the genesis of my knowledge of this gag. No, it was not "made up". Secondly, by "spectrum analyzer" I was referring to the piece of kit that used to test radio and audio equipment under repair, not the cheezy bargraph device on flashy stereo equipment. The reason for pink noise is that it gives a continous curve on the display of the analyzer. That way, the effect of tweaking the EQ can be seen across the device's entire bandpass. Tones will not get you as close with a continous display of the amp's response. Thirdly, my relation later became a salesman of high end stereo equipment and had a tweak co-worker. He pulled the same stunt on him with the same results. If a "Golden Ear" thinks it's expensive uber gear and it doesn't blatantly sound like crap then yes they'll rave on and on about it like an Absolute Sound review.
Those guys are wankers - but valves do have a different sound. When valve amps clip, they have a nicer sound then transistor amps. This is thought to be caused by a more 'rounded' curve, caused by even order harmonics. see this page for more information.
Ok, so a tube amp sounds more pleasant when operated out of spec. The real problem is that headroom is expensive. A well designed tube amp that isn't clipping isn't going to sound any different from a well designed transistor amp. By well designed, I mean it has highly linear response from around 10Hz all the way up to 20Khz under a variety of inputs and listening levels. Even a cheapy amp can sound good if the volume is moderate and it's hooked up to good speakers.
This is the basis of gag that's been played on audiophiles numerous times. A cheap amp is EQed to an expensive amp with pink noise and a spectrum analyzer at low volume. They'll sound nearly identical as long as no one touches the volume knob. You then hide the cheap kit behind the expensive kit and laugh at them as they ooh and ahh. Of course, the mystical excuses will flow freely once the "Golden Ears" realize they've been had.
The point is that a good amp (of either tube or transistor design) shows it's quality when it's cranked. If it's clipping then you need to back off. The tube amp is just more forgiving to the listener who likes to turn it up to "11". This is a subtle point often lost on teenagers and college boys. High wattage speakers and amps aren't intended to be operated at "11" to win bigger uh equipment contests. They're intended to be louder without distortion. A 200W-RMS amp designed for wide headroom in a fairly small room is more expensive than a 500W-peak crank-em-up-contest amp for a reason.
On the other hand, I have no argument with guitar players who insist on tube amps or least a tube preamp stage. Some guitar preamps are even designed to exaggerate tube distortion. Sound production is an entirely different beast from sound re-production.
Another poster already mentioned Gnome Wave Cleaner. I intend to try it out myself but it looks pretty complete for this purpose. I've also been playing with a sound editor called rezound.
The Noatun player for KDE has a nifty plugin that gives you sliders for speed and pitch on playback. It's loads of fun.
They're basically laptops with no built-in keyboard and a touch screen.
Are features like the stylus and touch-sensitive screen supported?
Some touch screens are supported in X. It depends. The fancy stylus features would probably need some code written. I know of no FOSS handwriting recognition. Proprietary handwriting recognition may exist. Who knows.
What about the power management features?
Those are almost certainly ACPI. 2.4 series kernels have some support. 2.6 should work just fine.
Will apt-get be supported?
You really are a Debian troll. If you got Debian installed in the first place then yes apt-get will work. You just need a decent net connection.
Overall, I would say Debian or any other Linux can be installed on these tablet PC's but it would just be a laptop with a weird form-factor. It's handwriting recognition and stylus feature that make these special. We'll see these supported better when more 'nix hackers get some to play with.
When it comes to corporate shenanigans in IT I usually bet on whoever's the biggest and most evil to win. In this case, IBM is the biggest but SCO is the most evil. Does big and evil cancel each other out leaving the outcome a tossup?