It's overpriced because 1) Microsoft is a monopoly, and 2) monopolies can charge more than the market rate. He can download and use a copied version (and millions of people do) with little or no impact to anyone because there is no cost to producing that copy. Employers don't regularly treat their employees the same way (although many of them would) because they can't yet force employees to work with no pay.
In their own way, these 'disruptive trolls' you mention are really just learning about your lifestyle and what kind of people you are. They are 'testing the boundaries', so to speak. Not everyone grows up with a gay uncle to learn sufficient tolerance and/or respect for cultures different from theirs.
The response of your community can either reinforce whatever prejudices these people already have or work to negate them. It's your decision.
You are more than welcome to maintain private membership of your site, and there are myriad ways to do that. However, it doesn't sound like that's your ultimate goal. Without enforcing strict membership rules, you and your community can either work to educate/debunk those 'disruptive users', one troll at a time, or you can simply ban anyone who displays hints of disagreement with whatever the prevailing views of your community are.
It sounds to me like you want it both ways: privacy and publicity. I'm sure there are some DRM companies working on that problem as we speak, but I tend to think they'll ultimately fail.
If you really want to be accepted openly in a free society, you must learn to defend and explain your views/lifestyle/whatever to the less informed. Hang out here for a couple of months and you'll see some good (and bad) examples of what I'm talking about.
There is little to no difference between a file server and a web server.
In fact, if there were a difference, it would be that a file server is capable of giving you little bits and pieces of documents in addition to whole ones.
I manage and use Linux on several desktops. Most of these are businesses doing basic desktop tasks, internet browsing, word processing, etc. I'm including updates in all these estimates, and logging off every day isn't really enforced so users can keep sessions and apps running for weeks at a time.
A distro like Debian Stable will literally stay up and work fine for months at a time. In fact I can't say I've ever seen either a crash or slowdown. Using Debian Stable means you're using a 3 year old desktop, though, which, in OSS, is *ancient*. This isn't a good choice for your new Dell P4. Hardware support aside, though, even Woody with KDE 2.x is comparable in desktop features to Windows 98/2000.
Fedora needs to go down for kernel updates more often, and mine have an average uptime of around two weeks. I'd like to think this is mainly due to wine running Word/Excel, but it probably leaky video drivers that are just exacerbated by wine. Fedora is the desktop of choice for me at the moment, though, because KDE 3.x has far surpassed anything available in Windows.
So uptime in Linux has as much to do with the version used as it does in Windows. Although I've never used either, I'd guess distros like RedHat Enterprise or SuSe would be a "best of both worlds" solution for recent software with all of the bugs worked out.
How pedestrian. Hydroelectric power changes *nothing* horribly.
Oh, and wind power will have significant effects. It already does. It affects the trade gap, the national debt, and unemployment. It will affect the local environment, the Ozone layer, and global warming. It may even affect things such as long-term health, medicine and (of all things) farming.
Wind power will definitely also affect national and global politics. Won't that be great? Depends on who you are, I guess...
At one time, Gecko was the creme de la creme of fast rendering engines. Now it's just the most compatible as well as being damn fast. Look how times have changed.
The KDE project takes a lot of flack for the way they integrate applications. Most people call it 'bloat'. Some call it 'Microsoftesque'. As the conventional OSS wisdom goes, apps that live outside the KDE project are usually better. But, as we see in the Windows (and Mac) world, integration and consistency is what sells. Fortunately, KPart has emerged as the best of both worlds.
Thesis: small applications doing specific tasks. Antithesis: large applications that do everything. Synthesis: apps seamlessly integrated via an open framework.
For years we witnessed proprietary software get more and more bloated and more and more expensive. That was due in no small part to the monopolies created by proprietary formats and standards. Now, with OSS, we are witnessing capitalism in action. Choice and open standards lead to constant improvement.
The next time you think about removing choice, think "where would OSS be without this competition?" Would we have KPart if it weren't for Gnome? Would we have great, cross-platform Gnome apps if it weren't for KDE? Many people look at these projects and see redundancy. I look at them and I see innovation.
The argument that someone needs to "manage developer resources" in OSS is completely bunk. OSS didn't get where it is today by forming a central economy of software projects. OSS is about freedom and fair competition. A defining quality of Open Source has been: there are no managers! The downside is that you may not get to tell a developer what to work on unless you're willing to pay her. The upside, though, is that we all reap the benefits of creative freedom.
Sorry to seem persistent, but this is what I was referring to. There are actually three support tickets on your public website that ask for UPS Worldship. I used it as an example because I have some experience with it. It is by no means a popular app, and, as you said, you will probably never have fanatical customers banging down your doors asking Codeweavers to support it. An app such as this, however, could be just as important to the future of Linux on the business desktop as something like Office.
Notably absent in your description of Codeweavers' main focus is the small/medium business market. I can't imagine why this is. These are the types of companies that *most* need a product like Crossover to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux. These are also companies that will probably never consider Linux without a product such as Crossover. They are also the types of customers that never post on Linux websites asking for special treatment. They are literally the silent majority of businesses.
What I'm saying is that, as a consultant who has direct access to small businesses and what they want and need, I tend to shake my head much of the time at the decisions that Linux support companies make. I realize that you are "following the money" so to speak and working on the applications that you are commissioned to do. But I also realize that focusing work on proprietary, in-house apps for large companies will never get Linux into the vast majority of businesses. There is often only a small window of opportunity for Linux and Open Source adoption in many of these small businesses. This opportunity comes at moments like these, when major competitors to OSS are busy playing catch-up on security and pricing (and even features) and breaking all compatibility with Open Source in the process.
I also realize that pushing Linux adoption in businesses, small businesses in particular, is very much a "one machine at a time" and "one company at a time" process. Quickbooks is a great example of "one company at a time" because, as you pointed out, there are literally thousands of small businesses in the US alone that cannot or will not switch to Linux because of that one last application, which most often is Quickbooks. To me, UPS Worldship seems to perfectly fit the "one machine at a time" paradigm of Linux adoption. Putting Linux on a standalone, single-purpose PC in a business filled with Windows desktops could give a new perspective to both users and administrators as to the benefits in reliability and manageability of Linux and OSS.
When my clients can't copy and paste in Word or the wrong document prints with multiple documents open, or something like prelink still isn't properly disabled by cxoffice after having been in use by major Linux desktop distributions for almost a year, I sometimes wonder how making iTunes work, regardless of the benefits in speed, is anything but a distraction for a company that got it's start making Office work on Linux.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm doing my best to support Codeweavers, but it's hard sometimes. I get especially frustrated when I see them concentrating an entire release on making iTunes work instead of something like Quickbooks.
I noticed in their bug list the other day somebody asked them to support UPS Worldship, which is a *simple* app that would be perfect for running on Linux. Their response was "no" without even considering it. A similar request for iTunes was greeted with "hellz yeah". *sigh*
software companies are buying up or being bought out by internet service providers. Until that happens, the goals of each industry are at odds.
It is now in the best interests of ISPs to support OSS. Currently, Open Source has massive bandwidth requirements and ISPs stand as the only real barrier to access to free software. It is better for them to support OSS, through mirroring/etc, than to support software subscriptions, which have equal bandwidth requirements yet also take some proceeds from the consumer that could instead be going to the ISPs.
When consolidation starts to happen, though, the combined companies will be able to build-out network infrastructure as an investment in future software 'services' income.
Are you just saying that the name returned by a reverse lookup should resolve to the correct ip address?
If so, how does this increase the trustworthiness of the server? You know that they could just reverse-map to mail.hotmail.com or some valid name instead. Would you then perform a lookup on mail.hotmail.com and check this against the original ip address or what? Besides spammers just being too lazy to add the necessary reverse entries, how does this identify rogue sites or help block them?
Although I hope you're correct, it's incredibly naive to believe so.
The truth is, proprietary 'standards' are all over the place. They are especially effective when directly-marketed to consumers, cutting out all the middle-men who might say "whoah there, that isn't a good deal" and replacing them with glossy print ads full of half-truths.
And, let's face it, Windows itself is the greatest direct-marketing tool ever created. I'm not looking forward to the direction this is going.
(B) distributing any dissemination technology that incorporates reasonably effective measures to prevent or halt dissemination that constitutes infringement within the meaning of this subsection;
Reasonably effective is incredibly vague. If we can be as slightly effective as some copy protection crap, that would be simple.
"Reasonably effective" to a lawyer/judge means something completely different from what it means to the average English-speaker.
You assume it means 'somewhat' effective or 'something less than totally' effective. It doesn't. It means, first of all, 'effective'. But the standard to be used to judge how effective is a 'reasonable' standard, which basically means 'that which a reasonable person thinks'. So, rather than asking, "how effective is it?" the legal system asks "does a reasonable person think it is effective?" These concepts are completely different.
This is, first of all, an incredibly deceptive way to word a law that is already on shaky ground. Secondly, it means that there is no clear way to assure that you have complied with this requirement until after you have created and disseminated your software, and the results of it's 'effectiveness' in preventing copying are established. It's a textbook ex post facto law. Your guilt or innocence has only tenuous connection to your actions, and is much more dependent on the actions of others.
This definitely doesn't mean you can add something that doesn't work and expect it to fly. This also means that the end results justify the means, and are the judge of them. If it doesn't work and they can show it doesn't work, it can't fall under the category of 'reasonably effective'.
Here's the (much more amusing) full quote (emphasis mine):
What would you say to a mom who wants to make a backup of her kids? DVD movies?
When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn?t give you two backup copies. Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever.
Fire it up and try for yourself. Actually OOo does a great job with.doc compatibility, some say better than Word itself even.
The real problem with OpenOffice isn't that it isn't as compatible, it's that it isn't as *usable*. People are really accustomed to a lot of the minor things Word does, and even more accustomed to the *way* it does them. The barrier to use of OpenOffice is that lots of things are done in a *completely* different way. AbiWord may fare better, but it's audience is somewhat more limited at the moment.
I decided to do a little googling instead: How this relates to quantum computing: When a single photon is split by a beam splitter, its two `halves' can entangle two distant atoms into an EPR pair.
How to entangle a photon pair:There are certain nonlinear (BBO) crystals, such as are used in optical parametric oscillators, that will supply entangles photon pairs.
Slashdot Mirror
the large number of white collar workers
The what?
If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards... checkmate.
So, what, like a day? A week maybe?
It's overpriced because 1) Microsoft is a monopoly, and 2) monopolies can charge more than the market rate. He can download and use a copied version (and millions of people do) with little or no impact to anyone because there is no cost to producing that copy. Employers don't regularly treat their employees the same way (although many of them would) because they can't yet force employees to work with no pay.
Maybe you should learn how economics works?
In their own way, these 'disruptive trolls' you mention are really just learning about your lifestyle and what kind of people you are. They are 'testing the boundaries', so to speak. Not everyone grows up with a gay uncle to learn sufficient tolerance and/or respect for cultures different from theirs.
The response of your community can either reinforce whatever prejudices these people already have or work to negate them. It's your decision.
You are more than welcome to maintain private membership of your site, and there are myriad ways to do that. However, it doesn't sound like that's your ultimate goal. Without enforcing strict membership rules, you and your community can either work to educate/debunk those 'disruptive users', one troll at a time, or you can simply ban anyone who displays hints of disagreement with whatever the prevailing views of your community are.
It sounds to me like you want it both ways: privacy and publicity. I'm sure there are some DRM companies working on that problem as we speak, but I tend to think they'll ultimately fail.
If you really want to be accepted openly in a free society, you must learn to defend and explain your views/lifestyle/whatever to the less informed. Hang out here for a couple of months and you'll see some good (and bad) examples of what I'm talking about.
There is little to no difference between a file server and a web server.
In fact, if there were a difference, it would be that a file server is capable of giving you little bits and pieces of documents in addition to whole ones.
I manage and use Linux on several desktops. Most of these are businesses doing basic desktop tasks, internet browsing, word processing, etc. I'm including updates in all these estimates, and logging off every day isn't really enforced so users can keep sessions and apps running for weeks at a time.
A distro like Debian Stable will literally stay up and work fine for months at a time. In fact I can't say I've ever seen either a crash or slowdown. Using Debian Stable means you're using a 3 year old desktop, though, which, in OSS, is *ancient*. This isn't a good choice for your new Dell P4. Hardware support aside, though, even Woody with KDE 2.x is comparable in desktop features to Windows 98/2000.
Fedora needs to go down for kernel updates more often, and mine have an average uptime of around two weeks. I'd like to think this is mainly due to wine running Word/Excel, but it probably leaky video drivers that are just exacerbated by wine. Fedora is the desktop of choice for me at the moment, though, because KDE 3.x has far surpassed anything available in Windows.
So uptime in Linux has as much to do with the version used as it does in Windows. Although I've never used either, I'd guess distros like RedHat Enterprise or SuSe would be a "best of both worlds" solution for recent software with all of the bugs worked out.
How pedestrian. Hydroelectric power changes *nothing* horribly.
Oh, and wind power will have significant effects. It already does. It affects the trade gap, the national debt, and unemployment. It will affect the local environment, the Ozone layer, and global warming. It may even affect things such as long-term health, medicine and (of all things) farming.
Wind power will definitely also affect national and global politics. Won't that be great? Depends on who you are, I guess...
That is one of the saddest, yet hilarious, comments on the contemporary American job market that I've seen. Thank you.
At one time, Gecko was the creme de la creme of fast rendering engines. Now it's just the most compatible as well as being damn fast. Look how times have changed.
The KDE project takes a lot of flack for the way they integrate applications. Most people call it 'bloat'. Some call it 'Microsoftesque'. As the conventional OSS wisdom goes, apps that live outside the KDE project are usually better. But, as we see in the Windows (and Mac) world, integration and consistency is what sells. Fortunately, KPart has emerged as the best of both worlds.
Thesis: small applications doing specific tasks.
Antithesis: large applications that do everything.
Synthesis: apps seamlessly integrated via an open framework.
For years we witnessed proprietary software get more and more bloated and more and more expensive. That was due in no small part to the monopolies created by proprietary formats and standards. Now, with OSS, we are witnessing capitalism in action. Choice and open standards lead to constant improvement.
The next time you think about removing choice, think "where would OSS be without this competition?" Would we have KPart if it weren't for Gnome? Would we have great, cross-platform Gnome apps if it weren't for KDE? Many people look at these projects and see redundancy. I look at them and I see innovation.
The argument that someone needs to "manage developer resources" in OSS is completely bunk. OSS didn't get where it is today by forming a central economy of software projects. OSS is about freedom and fair competition. A defining quality of Open Source has been: there are no managers! The downside is that you may not get to tell a developer what to work on unless you're willing to pay her. The upside, though, is that we all reap the benefits of creative freedom.
Sorry to seem persistent, but this is what I was referring to. There are actually three support tickets on your public website that ask for UPS Worldship. I used it as an example because I have some experience with it. It is by no means a popular app, and, as you said, you will probably never have fanatical customers banging down your doors asking Codeweavers to support it. An app such as this, however, could be just as important to the future of Linux on the business desktop as something like Office.
Notably absent in your description of Codeweavers' main focus is the small/medium business market. I can't imagine why this is. These are the types of companies that *most* need a product like Crossover to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux. These are also companies that will probably never consider Linux without a product such as Crossover. They are also the types of customers that never post on Linux websites asking for special treatment. They are literally the silent majority of businesses.
What I'm saying is that, as a consultant who has direct access to small businesses and what they want and need, I tend to shake my head much of the time at the decisions that Linux support companies make. I realize that you are "following the money" so to speak and working on the applications that you are commissioned to do. But I also realize that focusing work on proprietary, in-house apps for large companies will never get Linux into the vast majority of businesses. There is often only a small window of opportunity for Linux and Open Source adoption in many of these small businesses. This opportunity comes at moments like these, when major competitors to OSS are busy playing catch-up on security and pricing (and even features) and breaking all compatibility with Open Source in the process.
I also realize that pushing Linux adoption in businesses, small businesses in particular, is very much a "one machine at a time" and "one company at a time" process. Quickbooks is a great example of "one company at a time" because, as you pointed out, there are literally thousands of small businesses in the US alone that cannot or will not switch to Linux because of that one last application, which most often is Quickbooks. To me, UPS Worldship seems to perfectly fit the "one machine at a time" paradigm of Linux adoption. Putting Linux on a standalone, single-purpose PC in a business filled with Windows desktops could give a new perspective to both users and administrators as to the benefits in reliability and manageability of Linux and OSS.
When my clients can't copy and paste in Word or the wrong document prints with multiple documents open, or something like prelink still isn't properly disabled by cxoffice after having been in use by major Linux desktop distributions for almost a year, I sometimes wonder how making iTunes work, regardless of the benefits in speed, is anything but a distraction for a company that got it's start making Office work on Linux.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm doing my best to support Codeweavers, but it's hard sometimes. I get especially frustrated when I see them concentrating an entire release on making iTunes work instead of something like Quickbooks.
I noticed in their bug list the other day somebody asked them to support UPS Worldship, which is a *simple* app that would be perfect for running on Linux. Their response was "no" without even considering it. A similar request for iTunes was greeted with "hellz yeah". *sigh*
You have missed the entire point of general computing.
software companies are buying up or being bought out by internet service providers. Until that happens, the goals of each industry are at odds.
It is now in the best interests of ISPs to support OSS. Currently, Open Source has massive bandwidth requirements and ISPs stand as the only real barrier to access to free software. It is better for them to support OSS, through mirroring/etc, than to support software subscriptions, which have equal bandwidth requirements yet also take some proceeds from the consumer that could instead be going to the ISPs.
When consolidation starts to happen, though, the combined companies will be able to build-out network infrastructure as an investment in future software 'services' income.
Are you just saying that the name returned by a reverse lookup should resolve to the correct ip address?
If so, how does this increase the trustworthiness of the server? You know that they could just reverse-map to mail.hotmail.com or some valid name instead. Would you then perform a lookup on mail.hotmail.com and check this against the original ip address or what? Besides spammers just being too lazy to add the necessary reverse entries, how does this identify rogue sites or help block them?
I'm not criticizing, just wondering.
Although I hope you're correct, it's incredibly naive to believe so.
The truth is, proprietary 'standards' are all over the place. They are especially effective when directly-marketed to consumers, cutting out all the middle-men who might say "whoah there, that isn't a good deal" and replacing them with glossy print ads full of half-truths.
And, let's face it, Windows itself is the greatest direct-marketing tool ever created. I'm not looking forward to the direction this is going.
(B) distributing any dissemination technology that incorporates reasonably effective measures to prevent or halt dissemination that constitutes infringement within the meaning of this subsection;
Reasonably effective is incredibly vague. If we can be as slightly effective as some copy protection crap, that would be simple.
"Reasonably effective" to a lawyer/judge means something completely different from what it means to the average English-speaker.
You assume it means 'somewhat' effective or 'something less than totally' effective. It doesn't. It means, first of all, 'effective'. But the standard to be used to judge how effective is a 'reasonable' standard, which basically means 'that which a reasonable person thinks'. So, rather than asking, "how effective is it?" the legal system asks "does a reasonable person think it is effective?" These concepts are completely different.
This is, first of all, an incredibly deceptive way to word a law that is already on shaky ground. Secondly, it means that there is no clear way to assure that you have complied with this requirement until after you have created and disseminated your software, and the results of it's 'effectiveness' in preventing copying are established. It's a textbook ex post facto law. Your guilt or innocence has only tenuous connection to your actions, and is much more dependent on the actions of others.
This definitely doesn't mean you can add something that doesn't work and expect it to fly. This also means that the end results justify the means, and are the judge of them. If it doesn't work and they can show it doesn't work, it can't fall under the category of 'reasonably effective'.
Is 'Section 2C' vague enough to include *any* network with incentives, such as bittorrent?
Of course you're missing the point! You're concentrating on the technical value of such a design.
You should be concentrating on the marketing bullshit value instead.
Well, with your friendly-neighborhood-screw-you-in-the-pants-telco -monopoly, SBC, the answer is "of course"!
Although I've noticed Cox Cable has recently made having cable service optional for internet users.
Fire it up and try for yourself. Actually OOo does a great job with .doc compatibility, some say better than Word itself even.
The real problem with OpenOffice isn't that it isn't as compatible, it's that it isn't as *usable*. People are really accustomed to a lot of the minor things Word does, and even more accustomed to the *way* it does them. The barrier to use of OpenOffice is that lots of things are done in a *completely* different way. AbiWord may fare better, but it's audience is somewhat more limited at the moment.
With no single owner, the closest thing it (Linux) has to a central authority is the Open Source Development Lab
Why would anyone need *both* StarOffice and Crossover ?
I decided to do a little googling instead:
How this relates to quantum computing:
When a single photon is split by a beam splitter, its two `halves' can entangle two distant atoms into an EPR pair.
How to entangle a photon pair: There are certain nonlinear (BBO) crystals, such as are used in optical parametric oscillators, that will supply entangles photon pairs.