You know, in the world of marketing, any press is good press most of the time. It's a good possibility that by the posting of this story, here and elsewhere, it is going to help MS. I can see some people now, "Wow, Boss, I just saw this article on Slashdot. I just mention Linux, and I can get that copy of XP server we haven't been able to afford for 50% off"
I've been an avid user of Linux for 8 years now. I've always loved it as a server environment, but as a user/desktop environment, It's been a bittersweet relationship. This has kept me using windows for day to day tasks (minus pine of course, because pine RULES). However, many distros, including redhat, mandrake, Lindows, etc, have been including the very mature Gnome and KDE environments. In another attempt to move myself away from MS's products, I decided to try Redhat 7.3. Great install, found all of my hardware (none of which I had chosen from Linux compatibility lists), and the new KDE 3.0 desktop is great! I have almost fully moved away from Windows. Really, my Windows box is just a file server, via SMB/Samba, and there are a couple of games I have that I play on there. That's it. A viable workstation environment, and difficult install, in my opinion, has been what's held Linux back. I am glad to see this to be changing, and even happier to see that Linux is promoting competitive strategies in the OS market. Granted, this is one very small example, but it's nice to see a HUGE power like MS taking note of all of the hard work that the developers involved with GNU software, the Linux kernel, and other open source efforts have put forth.
Unfortunately, Spammers like this will continue to make gobs of money. All one can do is block as much spam as he/she can to try to make one's email experience better. People will continue to buy from spammers, and also continue to get taken by their schemes. And as long as that happens, spam will be around. Has anyone thought that maybe there is a big spam lobby? I mean, think about it, spam is a serious problem, many of us have contacted our legislators about it. And there is no federal law against it or regulating it, and the state laws that are in place, for the most part, suck. Spammers are making *millions*. It stands to reason they could be swaying the powers that be to table spam legislation.
While the statement about joe user not needing a faster PC to read email and type the occasional letter is true, I'm amazed at the number of average users that have to have the newest, biggest thing. It's a keeping up with the Joneses type of thing. I run an ISP, and all the time, I'm getting new users signing up that brag to me about the specs of their computers. "Yep, I got me a Pentium XV 5 billion megahurts w/ 9000 megabites in the hard drive, and 3000 GBs of RAM, er wait, flip that there around. My next door neighbor just got one from Dell, so I had to upgrade. Got great financing, just $10 per month fer the next 50 years. It's great for playin' ma new Deer Huntin' game. It's a great game, it's called "Redneck Christmas" and came out on the first day of Deer Huntin' season. Minimum requirements is a 1024 MB video card so it can render them pretty 16-point bucks.
Seems odd to me that so much Microsoft bashing goes on on this site, and yet, they still get free advertising from Taco, et al. You secretly working for Gates, Taco? Are you his "Under the Table" Exec? *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
Most of us don't give a shit what the new MS Desktop looks like...
If the video content is in mpeg, that's enough cross-platform for me. It's when the content is only in.exe files that I have a problem with. If it's video, and is in a standard format of some type, such as mpeg, it's still viewable. Quicktime isn't the best format, but is still possible for Linux users.
I agree with you totally on the idea of the album. I buy albums for good music, and artwork, and the idea of having that album. I also buy them to support the artist. Honestly, buying albums from large record labels these days really doesn't do all that much for the artist, in comparison to what it does for the record company. Which, is another motivation for my boycott. I, however, am not boycotting smaller record labels. The smaller labels are quite a bit different from that. A friend of mine just signed with Polyvinyl records, and I pimp his CDs as much as I can, because I know that he and his band are getting a very fair share of the record sales. (shameless plug: The Red Hot Valentines )
There are many pirates out there that just want music for free, and I think that sucks. But, if CDs weren't so horribly overpriced, and actually contained more than one or two good songs, honest people wouldn't be so quick to pirate them.
As far as the extra content you speak of above, what platform is it developed for? Most CDs only include Mac/Windows enhancement. Just a word of advice, Linux is growing in popularity. That's all I use for my desktop. Include Linux-viewable content on your CDs please:D Is there a website for your company?
Does anyone remember the beatles "White Album"? All kinds of nifty little inserts. Owning that album is very cool because the packaging itself is very cool. Anyone seen Tool's new album "Lateralus"? That was the last CD I bought because it's my favorite band...but, the packaging is awesome on that album. Those kinds of things make me much happier when paying $20 for a CD.
I understand the concerns of wanting to copy protect CDs. The thing that this industry doesn't understand is, the ability to copy CDs doesn't make their records sell less. In fact, I've bought more CDs because of mp3s, oggs, and copied CDs that people have given me, than from any other introduction method ever. However, this is getting rediculous. It's gone away from copy-protection, and turned into a serious violation of fair use. I haven't bought a CD from a national distributor in over a year out of protest of the RIAA. And I plan on keeping it that way. The music industry can suck it. Unless they relax their copy protection, and lower their prices, they can kiss my ass. I urge the rest of you to boycott as well.
Re:David Weber is a $cientologist
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 1
Either of you guys want to provide proof either way here?
Super Off-Topic: Man, Timothy sux.
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Hmm. I'm curious as to what trouble you had. Our company was started on $30,000 capital, and has broken even or been in the black ever since, now being a $1 Million company. This is in a very small population area, too...
I am the Network Administrator for an ISP in Mount Vernon Illinois (http://www.mvn.net/). We currently provide dialup in the local calling area, ISDN, T1/Leased Lines, and wireless broadband. What I've seen from the three years that I've worked here is that yes, the services and QoS that you offer is important, but equally, and certainly no less, important is customer service. People still are not highly educated on using computers, and when they have a problem, 90% of the time they are going to blame you, the ISP, even when the problem is NOTHING to do with you. It takes a high level of person to person skill to overcome this obstacle. You can have all the routers, firewalls, servers, RAS units, etc, that you want, but if you don't have technical support people that can teach someone how to double-click over the phone, and not piss them off trying, you're going to go down pretty quickly. That's my main word of advice. Oh yeah, and get your blood pressure medicine ready, the phone company will give you hypertension if you don't already have it!
Unfortunately, "the law" is an intangible. It is only made tangible by enforcement. Enforcement only comes when everyone involved in enforcing the law uses ethics. If no one enforces international law on the FBI, then they have jurisdiction anywhere they choose, because "the law" no longer exists. Now, even though I don't think that it's cool that it is this way, who do you think is actually going to enforce law on the the FBI? The KGB? The NSA? NATO? NAFTA? NAMBLA? Nope. None of them. So the FBI will probably continue doing this to its heart's (or lack thereof) content.
Yes, this is very bad. Centralizing all of this information, and of course letting the government have a backdoor is anything but private. I really think that there should be a publicly run safe haven for data. Actually, I've heard of a few, but none come to mind right now. Heavy encryption, no back-door entry by the government, or anyone else. Completely private. Well, as private as data can be, anyway. There's always crackers. Anyone know of any such services? I'm drawing a complete blank.
Ahh. No problem. I could see how my pun comment may make some things seem a joke and others not. I hadn't had my coffee yet when I wrote the "fuckhead" comment. My apologies:D
We run a network that covers a town, and stay within the FCC regs. We amplify well below the one watt EIRP rule, and we're still able to cover a 4 mile radius with no problem, and have seen even more distance. It is possible to do networks across small towns within the current FCC regulations using unlicensed 2.4Ghz equipment. However, you are very right about long distance stuff. Licensed freqs are the only way to go. DMC Stratex has some good long-distance, high bandwidth, licensed equipment.
Yes. But the same trends. Everyone wants something for free. They want other people to pay for the stuff, and then let them use it for free. And if they don't let them use it for free, the lusers hack into it anyway. But, it's human nature. I've, unfortunately, gotten used to it being in the ISP business.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no need to argue, robots just don't understand...
It's funny.....laugh...
While way off topic, I thought this was kind of amusing :D
You know, in the world of marketing, any press is good press most of the time. It's a good possibility that by the posting of this story, here and elsewhere, it is going to help MS. I can see some people now, "Wow, Boss, I just saw this article on Slashdot. I just mention Linux, and I can get that copy of XP server we haven't been able to afford for 50% off"
I've been an avid user of Linux for 8 years now. I've always loved it as a server environment, but as a user/desktop environment, It's been a bittersweet relationship. This has kept me using windows for day to day tasks (minus pine of course, because pine RULES). However, many distros, including redhat, mandrake, Lindows, etc, have been including the very mature Gnome and KDE environments. In another attempt to move myself away from MS's products, I decided to try Redhat 7.3. Great install, found all of my hardware (none of which I had chosen from Linux compatibility lists), and the new KDE 3.0 desktop is great! I have almost fully moved away from Windows. Really, my Windows box is just a file server, via SMB/Samba, and there are a couple of games I have that I play on there. That's it. A viable workstation environment, and difficult install, in my opinion, has been what's held Linux back. I am glad to see this to be changing, and even happier to see that Linux is promoting competitive strategies in the OS market. Granted, this is one very small example, but it's nice to see a HUGE power like MS taking note of all of the hard work that the developers involved with GNU software, the Linux kernel, and other open source efforts have put forth.
Unfortunately, Spammers like this will continue to make gobs of money. All one can do is block as much spam as he/she can to try to make one's email experience better. People will continue to buy from spammers, and also continue to get taken by their schemes. And as long as that happens, spam will be around. Has anyone thought that maybe there is a big spam lobby? I mean, think about it, spam is a serious problem, many of us have contacted our legislators about it. And there is no federal law against it or regulating it, and the state laws that are in place, for the most part, suck. Spammers are making *millions*. It stands to reason they could be swaying the powers that be to table spam legislation.
maybe...
While the statement about joe user not needing a faster PC to read email and type the occasional letter is true, I'm amazed at the number of average users that have to have the newest, biggest thing. It's a keeping up with the Joneses type of thing. I run an ISP, and all the time, I'm getting new users signing up that brag to me about the specs of their computers. "Yep, I got me a Pentium XV 5 billion megahurts w/ 9000 megabites in the hard drive, and 3000 GBs of RAM, er wait, flip that there around. My next door neighbor just got one from Dell, so I had to upgrade. Got great financing, just $10 per month fer the next 50 years. It's great for playin' ma new Deer Huntin' game. It's a great game, it's called "Redneck Christmas" and came out on the first day of Deer Huntin' season. Minimum requirements is a 1024 MB video card so it can render them pretty 16-point bucks.
Seems odd to me that so much Microsoft bashing goes on on this site, and yet, they still get free advertising from Taco, et al. You secretly working for Gates, Taco? Are you his "Under the Table" Exec? *slurp* *slurp* *slurp*
Most of us don't give a shit what the new MS Desktop looks like...
If the video content is in mpeg, that's enough cross-platform for me. It's when the content is only in .exe files that I have a problem with. If it's video, and is in a standard format of some type, such as mpeg, it's still viewable. Quicktime isn't the best format, but is still possible for Linux users.
Yes, I may be offtopic, or trolling, but that still doesnt' change the fact that timothy sux a big one!
See subject
I agree with you totally on the idea of the album. I buy albums for good music, and artwork, and the idea of having that album. I also buy them to support the artist. Honestly, buying albums from large record labels these days really doesn't do all that much for the artist, in comparison to what it does for the record company. Which, is another motivation for my boycott. I, however, am not boycotting smaller record labels. The smaller labels are quite a bit different from that. A friend of mine just signed with Polyvinyl records, and I pimp his CDs as much as I can, because I know that he and his band are getting a very fair share of the record sales. (shameless plug: The Red Hot Valentines )
:D Is there a website for your company?
There are many pirates out there that just want music for free, and I think that sucks. But, if CDs weren't so horribly overpriced, and actually contained more than one or two good songs, honest people wouldn't be so quick to pirate them.
As far as the extra content you speak of above, what platform is it developed for? Most CDs only include Mac/Windows enhancement. Just a word of advice, Linux is growing in popularity. That's all I use for my desktop. Include Linux-viewable content on your CDs please
Does anyone remember the beatles "White Album"? All kinds of nifty little inserts. Owning that album is very cool because the packaging itself is very cool. Anyone seen Tool's new album "Lateralus"? That was the last CD I bought because it's my favorite band...but, the packaging is awesome on that album. Those kinds of things make me much happier when paying $20 for a CD.
hehehehe....that's funny!
I understand the concerns of wanting to copy protect CDs. The thing that this industry doesn't understand is, the ability to copy CDs doesn't make their records sell less. In fact, I've bought more CDs because of mp3s, oggs, and copied CDs that people have given me, than from any other introduction method ever. However, this is getting rediculous. It's gone away from copy-protection, and turned into a serious violation of fair use. I haven't bought a CD from a national distributor in over a year out of protest of the RIAA. And I plan on keeping it that way. The music industry can suck it. Unless they relax their copy protection, and lower their prices, they can kiss my ass. I urge the rest of you to boycott as well.
Either of you guys want to provide proof either way here?
See subject.
Hmm. I'm curious as to what trouble you had. Our company was started on $30,000 capital, and has broken even or been in the black ever since, now being a $1 Million company. This is in a very small population area, too...
I am the Network Administrator for an ISP in Mount Vernon Illinois (http://www.mvn.net/). We currently provide dialup in the local calling area, ISDN, T1/Leased Lines, and wireless broadband. What I've seen from the three years that I've worked here is that yes, the services and QoS that you offer is important, but equally, and certainly no less, important is customer service. People still are not highly educated on using computers, and when they have a problem, 90% of the time they are going to blame you, the ISP, even when the problem is NOTHING to do with you. It takes a high level of person to person skill to overcome this obstacle. You can have all the routers, firewalls, servers, RAS units, etc, that you want, but if you don't have technical support people that can teach someone how to double-click over the phone, and not piss them off trying, you're going to go down pretty quickly. That's my main word of advice. Oh yeah, and get your blood pressure medicine ready, the phone company will give you hypertension if you don't already have it!
Unfortunately, "the law" is an intangible. It is only made tangible by enforcement. Enforcement only comes when everyone involved in enforcing the law uses ethics. If no one enforces international law on the FBI, then they have jurisdiction anywhere they choose, because "the law" no longer exists. Now, even though I don't think that it's cool that it is this way, who do you think is actually going to enforce law on the the FBI? The KGB? The NSA? NATO? NAFTA? NAMBLA? Nope. None of them. So the FBI will probably continue doing this to its heart's (or lack thereof) content.
Yes, this is very bad. Centralizing all of this information, and of course letting the government have a backdoor is anything but private. I really think that there should be a publicly run safe haven for data. Actually, I've heard of a few, but none come to mind right now. Heavy encryption, no back-door entry by the government, or anyone else. Completely private. Well, as private as data can be, anyway. There's always crackers. Anyone know of any such services? I'm drawing a complete blank.
Ahh. No problem. I could see how my pun comment may make some things seem a joke and others not. I hadn't had my coffee yet when I wrote the "fuckhead" comment. My apologies :D
It was a joke. Lighten up fuckhead.
We run a network that covers a town, and stay within the FCC regs. We amplify well below the one watt EIRP rule, and we're still able to cover a 4 mile radius with no problem, and have seen even more distance. It is possible to do networks across small towns within the current FCC regulations using unlicensed 2.4Ghz equipment. However, you are very right about long distance stuff. Licensed freqs are the only way to go. DMC Stratex has some good long-distance, high bandwidth, licensed equipment.
Yes. But the same trends. Everyone wants something for free. They want other people to pay for the stuff, and then let them use it for free. And if they don't let them use it for free, the lusers hack into it anyway. But, it's human nature. I've, unfortunately, gotten used to it being in the ISP business.
I found it:
(1) For frequency hopping systems operating in the 2400-2483.5 MHz or 5725-5850 MHz band and for all direct sequence systems: 1 watt.