As for the "last GPL version"... nice... a Linux desktop for which you cannot write closed-source software.
If QT goes propietary (as I believe has been intended all along, they are backed by Canopy, and they were reluctant to change to a dual licensing system) then it will be forked, and this new fork will take most of the current development and worthwhile apps with it. No need to remain compliant with new versions of (a propietary) QT that nobody (except maybe SCO and Microsoft) is using.
Face it, "fucknugget", you weren't gonna get rich off of programming either. Microsoft already saw to it that they own the propietary software feild, and the only people who get to play there better ask Mr Bill if it's OK.
The only people that're getting burnt by the GPL are those who thought they could use thier current market position and/or IP ownership to fuck anybody new that came along.
Most people who wriote Free Software are not doing so in order to get hired by a large, dominant software company. Most authors of free software are writting thier software because it interests them, they need something that works in a certain way that the companies are not providing, or because they enjoy facing technical challenges without the interference of a project manager/marketing expert telling them what tools to use or what "features" are needed. Let them do thier thing, and perhaps you should consider another line of work if the only excuse you can find for your not being rich is that the violunteers happen to make a better product than you were capable of imagining.
And thats generally a good thing, unless you're one of those idiots who think that the computer industry will continue to be driven by heavier and heavier app/OS combos that take away any possible advantage the latest chipsets and CPUs give us.
I don't see any reason to eliminate something that works well, is easy to program for, and is usable even when the rest of your system is gone to shit (although that should never happen).
Sorry about my stupid assumption about who I was responding to, it's just that you were echoing an argument I've mostly heard from Windows and Mac devotees that do not have the same expirience that you have. They are usually the people who argue that capabilities be scrapped for no other reason than they've been around for a while.
but aren't there also systems that might not have text mode? (used to be the case for Sun work stations?
Just because you don't know where the console is doesn't mean it's not there. (hint, serial ports are not just for modems and mice.)
Text mode is a weird legacy component of modern PC graphics cards
I guess this is why the folks at Redmond have decided to include a reasonably featured shell in thier next OS. Face it, text modes are going to exist in the hardware whether or not your OS is using them.
just do everything via normal bitmap graphics?
becayuse you are now requiring more programming and a larger minimum OS in order to do a job that is better handled in the hardware.
Your assumptions are those of a person who has not spent much time in a console, which is a legitimate choice, and thus does not understand that not only is this an inexpensive "feature" for the graphics card vendors, but that there is (and will contue to be) a demand for it from users. If there was no text mode to access, then how would you troubleshoot your faulty graphics driver and how would you interact with your bios configuration? Where would your "post" messages be printed, or do you think that your bios should have a full featured windowing system using bitmapped graphics as well?
"Average consumers" could care less if the install is "graphical" (I'll assume you mean "X11-based"), what "average consumers" want is an install that does everything itself without asking them very many questions, and I've yet to find one (including on Windows) that doesn't ask at least one question that your "average consumer" is unable to answer correctly the first time.
What would be nice addition to the Debian installer is an ai that can look at your disk resources, ask if you want to keep your previous OS for double booting, and then partition according to some reasonable assumptions based on the resources available.
just about everyone except those installing a headless server would prefer to use the GUI
Again, you are assuming too much of the users, most every one designing installers is making this assumption, but the truth is that most everyone would prefer to not interact with the computer at all until it is time to decide what applications they want installed. Building a cli installer that can accept an "assume_yes" option to get you through most of the initial install is a hell of a lot closer to this than "Click here to continue".
Now you're telling me that they'd actually like one really, they just haven't gotten around to doing it yet?
Of course the Debian Developers and users would like a graphical instal environment, but it's just not a reasonable priority. It's not that a graphical (X11 based) installer is a "crime", it's just that it's a waste of time until you have everything working without it.
It is much more sensible to create an install that works efficiently with the lowest possible number of resources available, and to later make a graphical inteface available for systems that have what's necessary for it.
These decisions are not being made by zealots, they are being made by some of the best OS integrators that can be found who happen to have no pressure to place market concerns before coding practices, system design and best practices.
Not being a commercial vendor is one of the Debian Project's greatest strengths.
I'm not claiming that these are reasonable fears, but that they are based on assumptions that are born out of thier thier expirience and out of recent (last 30 years) history.
Media corporations? Like who? Like the movie studios that are moving to free software?
DRM, and tnhe inevitable bypassing of which that Free Software enables. Tivo and other products that use Free Software to enable viewers to bypass commercials. Media production software that enables talented but uncontracted persons to make high quality productions. Distribution products and metods that remove the controls over media distribution that have been in place since the growth of television.
Wall street? That during the dot crom frenzy poured enormous amounts of cash in companies based in OS projects?
And then proceded to destroy the business model of every potentially proftable OSS company that IPO'ed. Not that they did this intentionally, but through a misunderstanding of what the product actually was. The best example I can think of is VA Research (now VA Linux) before thier IPO, the most promissing portion of thier business was thier line of servers and workstations. Thier software involvement supported the sale of these machines not through sales of software, but through changes to the code that ensured that every hardware option they offered was well supported by Linux software. After the IPO, thier main investors pressured and succeeded in convincing the company to drop the hardware line in favor of a pure publication and software development support business model.
That save millions by using free software as a development
It's the employees who are afraid for thier jobs. The companies have already demonstrated that they are afraid for thier products.
since most programming work is in in-house applications
Agreed, but the common misconception among programmers and CS majors is that they will make more money working for a company that is producing a "killer app", or working for the top dog OS vendor. They see the large incomes that were enjoyed by IT personel in the past and rightly fear that the commoditization of software will lower the potential for riches. Most of them entered the CS feild under the assumption that there were still opportunities for riches to be made but, like during the Alaska gold rush, by the time they got there, so had everybody else.
Retirees? Tell me why please. I need to be amused.
A huge amount of retirement account investment is made up of Microsoft and America online investments. Many private investors invested in these companies as well because they are companies that have a both a strong appearance and good stock performance. These are not investors who like to monitor the stock market, but are people who are lookng for (and believe they had found) high return, low risk investments.
Investment bankers? Ha,ha,ha. I work with one. We have a standard Linux environment. Next.
What is good for the company is not always seen as good for the customer. For the very reason I mentioned in my above answer, investment bankers fear that the spread of free software to the general public will damage the stock value of companies that have traditionally been a "easy sell".
Intelligence agencies? Because they can check all the code?
Because you can check the code. Free Software limits the opportunities for future "Magic Lantern" type projects, makes effective encryption available to anyone, and enables users to have control of thier own computers and networks.
This doesn't exactly apply to IBM, because IBM is a hardware manufacturer who needs software (Free or otherwise) to runnon thier hardware, and it deffinatyely does not apply to Linux, because Linux is the software itself, not a company that sells it.
If a hardware company is able to demonstrate that spending a few millions on Free Software instead of spending tens of millions will help them sell thier hardware, there is no unfair competition.
It's not just microsoft that doesn't like Open Source.
Media corporations, Wall Street, politicians, non-profit administrators, millions of employees of propietary software companies, advertising firms, patent attorneys, retirees, investment bankers, venture capitolists and intelligence agencies dislike Open Source and Free Software as much as anyone in Redmond.
Open Source Software is seen as a threat by all of the groups I have listed (and likely several I have left out) for various reasons. They see the SCO lawsuit as part of a larger battle against a force that threatens to remofve the traditionally solid controls over the economy and information that has enabled the institutions we all know and rely upon to be founded, grow and to support our way of life. Companies are afraid of losing thier incomes, investors are afraid for thier portfolios, non-proffits are afraid of losing the flow of donations and media is afraid of losing thier advertising dollars.
These are all very influential forces that would like nothing better than to know that they will have to pay through the nose when it comes time to upgrade, and that they will have to pay top-dollar for third party support even though they already paid for support from the vendor, because they know then that others are doing the same and that is what they believe is neccessary for the economy to keep running.
They wrongly equate the willing gifting of ones own work to the community with "communism" and are seeking a way, any way, to alieve thier fears and make this phenomenon go away.
A lot of people who aren't geeks, per se, still like to fiddle with computers.
Alot of people who are geeks may not have a "geek degree", but they are still geeks and are likely to fiddle with just about any machine they can get thier hands into.
The funny part is that today, there are more people who have the "geek degree" that are not geeks than there are geeks who don't.
The best programmers I've met are not the ones who learned it in school, nor are they necessarily the ones who were given a computer early in life, but the ones who happened upon computing almost randomly and simply took to it due to unspecified interest. They have a drive to implement thier ideas that is not dependant on a paycheck or notariety, but rather springs from thier natural curiosity and a strong belief in doing things the way they see as best (which often makes them nearly unemlpoyable).
That Microsoft sure is offering something different, I guess I'll have to change my mind about them looking like they're re-implementing Unix (rather poorly). And now they are offering a usable CLI (not yet released) that offers more of what Unix does, but different.
Microsoft is not a horrible operating system, but it is not, has never been, and most likely never will be capable of all that a Unix like OS is (unless they decide to replace most of thier code with BSD). This is partly (mostly) due to thier design philosophy being partly (mostly) determined by market studies and considerations.
Or they are assuming that they can get an account on a machine if they want this enough.
Or in mono.
It is (somewhat) obvious that whoever planted this was being very careful not to set off too many alarm bells and was seeking to become root on any Linux platform after they had already gained access to it (from a legitimate or stolen account, backdoor, server exploit, etc). Thier intended route into a non-root account may already exist and would be a difficult one to find as there are many more places it could be hiding.
How much time is spent looking for non-root exploits (remote and otherwise). With the possibility of local root exploits being executed after access is already gained to the machine the danger presented by non-root exploits is much greater than many might think.
There seems to be a dearth of comments about the censorship possibilities mentioned in sethf's article, but it is a reality that is clearly in the works.
The DRM technology promoted by Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and our legislators (in the U.S.) are all that is needed to implement a network wide censorship of content on the web, in our email, and on any document or media file that traverses the web.
People asking Congress to regulate email, usually using spam as a justification, are asking Congress to assume the right to regulate the content of our private communications. The Patriot Act has already given the government the "right" to monitor it.
If Microsoft's DRM facilities are capable of the user control that they claim they are, then it would also be possible to block the transfer of any document that was not made with that technology, to track the origin of any document to the users computer and userid, and to filter traffic at the router for any specific document. Palladium would enable similar "features" to be implemented as well.
I believe that this is and always has been the motivation behind DRM, and that the censorship will be implemented not only to protect the media giants that currently enjoy monopolies on entertainment, but also to ensure that the message put forth by these companies as "news" will be able to continue unchallenged by smaller sources who are either more concerned for the factuality of what they are reporting, or are unfettered by the necessary allaiances between government and our large corporations and are thus not obligated to report only the sanctioned viewpoint.
Before anyone recommends the tinfoil hat, I'd just like to ask you to consider:
Is it a safe enough bet to allow to chance?
Can we assume that despite this capability being built into the network and our software it will not go unused?
Is a government that seems desiring to curtail our rights (while promissing the payoff of lower taxes) going to show enough restraint to not censor once it is capable?
Are the software and media companies actually idealistic enough to prevent this? or would they willingly participate with an opressive government as long as that government promisses to protect thier market position in the face of growing competition?
Am I overly paranoid for considering this to be a possibility?
I understand that there are advertisers who most certainly deserve respect, such the guy who came up with the idea of putting product names on the side of coffee mugs (Hi Peter!), but to respect advertisers just because they are advertisers has got to be the most asinine suggestion I have ever heard. This would be like respecting the creators of "The Mullets" because television writers deserve respect, or the creator of vegimite (apologies to anyone here who actually likes the stuff) because makers of food spreads deserve respect, etc.
look at the ad at the top of this very page,
What ad? Oh, you must be using IE, but that's hardly the point.
The point is that there are advertisers who make ads that work because they are interesting, informative, and do not in anyway disrupt the use of the medium that is carrying thier advertising. If a television advertiser wants peole to watch his ad instead of going to the bathroom, he better make that ad entertaining enough to get the target viewers to hold it in for thirty seconds. If a newsper advertiser wants people to read his ad, he better make it interesting enough to catch a few eyballs as they scan past and informative enough to get the suckers to continue reading. Why on earth is the internet considered different than other mediums. If the advertising is making people want to block ads there must be a problem with the advertising, not the medium. If the ads are good (not chasing away viewers), but the products are not selling, there must be a problem with the demand (as in there isn't any) and the product won't sell well no matter how many advertisements are out there.
Here we have a medium that allows the users to adjust thier habits and thier software to the quality and effectiveness of the advertisements. the adjustments in advertising techniques are going to have to come from the advertisers in the form of ajustments to the content, delivery technique, quality, and apropriateness of the advertisement. The advertising industry is going to have to get used to this. There will always be a way around ads on the internet, and if their ads are bugging the shit out people, they sure as hell have no obligation to view them.
When the shoe is on the other foot, does it still fit?
It's not the same thing.
Blocking ads is like going to the bathroom during the comercials.
Blocking all useragents except IE6 is like only allowing GM products to park in your "public" parking garage.
And the reality of useragent blocking is rather sad as well, I've yet to encounter an "IE6 only" site that doesn't work with Mozilla if I've changed the useragent ID.
If they don't want users to block thier ads, they should use ads that don't make users want to block them. It's like the SuperBowl vs the rest of the TV programing year. During the SuperBowl, people would rather miss some of the game than miss the well made advertising, but during the rest of the year, the advertisers don't seem too concerned about people liking thier work.
NAT is difficult if you have two hosts behind two NAT gateways on two seperate networks and you want them talk to each other.
Set a tunnel. (Encrypt it even.) Use port forwarding on high ports. Use one of the many vpn solutions available. Use a proxy firewall. Multi-home your firewall if necessary
Just don't front a machine onto the internet unless you absolutely have to.
NAT is unnecessary and a pain.
NAT is usefull and rather easy. How much could your ISP be charging for an additional IP anyway? $5.00? $7.00? That much! In order to save a few bucks, you're gonna front each and every machine you have onto routable addresses. Great Idea! 'Cause we all know that every machine in the universe needs to be accessable.
Get whatever IPv6 software you need for your OS, and install Freenet6 on your gateway. Start using it now, don't bother waiting for your ISP to catch up. Works fine, but if you're behind a firewall... Let's not get into that one again.
We've got a VOIP phone on our network that works with no problems at all behind NAT (not to mention the fact that your analogy doesn't really apply, the telephone interchange system bears very little resemblance to IP).
Videoconferencing, bittorrent and netgaming all work best with direct connections.
I don't know about Videoconferencing, or netgaming, but I'm behind NAT and I've never had a problem with participating in bittorrent. It works fine in both directions.
If two machines are NATed (and on different networks), they can't talk directly to each other.
[sarcasm] Yep, and we all know what a good idea it is to have every single machine connected to a public interface. In fact, the very goal of the internet is so that anybody can connect to any machine at all. At least any authorized person, such as your employees, your boss, your neighbor, your neighbors kids, law enforcement, the RIAA, the MPAA, the Thought Police, etc. Nat is damaging the safety and freedom of the common man with it's ability to hide computers from those who exist to protect us, our rights and our privacy (see above list). Hell, perhaps NAT should be outlawed! I'm only thinking of the children! [/sarcasm]
If you want your machine to be public, get a public IP address, if you want it hidden, use an RFC 1918 addy. Much of the "shortage" of IP4 addys is due to the large netblock owners using public addresses for networks and machines that are not accessable and have no reason to use be accessable from the internet. The rest of the "shortage" is due to large netblock owners that do not use the majority of thier addresses, but hold on to them anyway.
The more I poke around at the RH website, and Google around for stats on RH usage, I get the impression that thier $60/year/machine service was profitable, but apparently that is not the issue.
It is more likely that RH is taking the bet that enough of the subscribers to the $60/yr/machine service will chose to migrate to thier "Enterprise" solution that they can afford to lose the income from those who don't. In other words, it's about ROI.
Personally, I don't know enough about RedHat's business model and expense structure to judge a move like this one way or the other, but if they fail to entice enough users over to RHE, then it's a bad move, as much of the fixed expenses involved are likely shared between the RHE and RH dists. OTOH, if there are a large number of RH (business) users who will switch to RHE if support for the RH dist is withdrawn, RedHat would be foolish if they did not make this move.
I guess I'm just falling victem to the tendancy to believe that this patent is overly general. Or that the method of embeding or linking an executable in a document to be downloaded and executed on a users computer encompasses much of the potential of sharing content over a network.
I do realize that there are many more possibilities for sharing information and over the network that do not resemble this, and that there may be methods of replicating the user experience that plugins enable without encuontering the methods covered by this patent.
But I do believe, quite confidently, that even though there are "better" methods than the web that are going to be crossing our desktops in the (possibly near) future, the enforcement of the Eolas patent is a threat to much of the current web technology, and that the expirience of the web (and network content publishing) will be much poorer if this patent makes plugins and related methods exorbitantly expensive to implement, deploy, and use.
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Composer is a wysiwyg design tool.
I believe it was included along with Netscape 3.0, but it could have been around earlier.
Netscape Composer?
You never even looked at anything but IE back then, did you?
As for the "last GPL version"... nice... a Linux desktop for which you cannot write closed-source software.
If QT goes propietary (as I believe has been intended all along, they are backed by Canopy, and they were reluctant to change to a dual licensing system) then it will be forked, and this new fork will take most of the current development and worthwhile apps with it. No need to remain compliant with new versions of (a propietary) QT that nobody (except maybe SCO and Microsoft) is using.
Face it, "fucknugget", you weren't gonna get rich off of programming either. Microsoft already saw to it that they own the propietary software feild, and the only people who get to play there better ask Mr Bill if it's OK.
The only people that're getting burnt by the GPL are those who thought they could use thier current market position and/or IP ownership to fuck anybody new that came along.
Most people who wriote Free Software are not doing so in order to get hired by a large, dominant software company. Most authors of free software are writting thier software because it interests them, they need something that works in a certain way that the companies are not providing, or because they enjoy facing technical challenges without the interference of a project manager/marketing expert telling them what tools to use or what "features" are needed. Let them do thier thing, and perhaps you should consider another line of work if the only excuse you can find for your not being rich is that the violunteers happen to make a better product than you were capable of imagining.
inexpensive = "requires very few resources"
And thats generally a good thing, unless you're one of those idiots who think that the computer industry will continue to be driven by heavier and heavier app/OS combos that take away any possible advantage the latest chipsets and CPUs give us.
I don't see any reason to eliminate something that works well, is easy to program for, and is usable even when the rest of your system is gone to shit (although that should never happen).
Sorry about my stupid assumption about who I was responding to, it's just that you were echoing an argument I've mostly heard from Windows and Mac devotees that do not have the same expirience that you have. They are usually the people who argue that capabilities be scrapped for no other reason than they've been around for a while.
Because pressing the enter key is not that much harder than clicking a mouse button
Actually it's much easier. The enter key does not need to be aligned with a button to work.
but aren't there also systems that might not have text mode? (used to be the case for Sun work stations?
Just because you don't know where the console is doesn't mean it's not there. (hint, serial ports are not just for modems and mice.)
Text mode is a weird legacy component of modern PC graphics cards
I guess this is why the folks at Redmond have decided to include a reasonably featured shell in thier next OS. Face it, text modes are going to exist in the hardware whether or not your OS is using them.
just do everything via normal bitmap graphics?
becayuse you are now requiring more programming and a larger minimum OS in order to do a job that is better handled in the hardware.
Your assumptions are those of a person who has not spent much time in a console, which is a legitimate choice, and thus does not understand that not only is this an inexpensive "feature" for the graphics card vendors, but that there is (and will contue to be) a demand for it from users. If there was no text mode to access, then how would you troubleshoot your faulty graphics driver and how would you interact with your bios configuration? Where would your "post" messages be printed, or do you think that your bios should have a full featured windowing system using bitmapped graphics as well?
Average consumers.
"Average consumers" could care less if the install is "graphical" (I'll assume you mean "X11-based"), what "average consumers" want is an install that does everything itself without asking them very many questions, and I've yet to find one (including on Windows) that doesn't ask at least one question that your "average consumer" is unable to answer correctly the first time.
What would be nice addition to the Debian installer is an ai that can look at your disk resources, ask if you want to keep your previous OS for double booting, and then partition according to some reasonable assumptions based on the resources available.
just about everyone except those installing a headless server would prefer to use the GUI
Again, you are assuming too much of the users, most every one designing installers is making this assumption, but the truth is that most everyone would prefer to not interact with the computer at all until it is time to decide what applications they want installed. Building a cli installer that can accept an "assume_yes" option to get you through most of the initial install is a hell of a lot closer to this than "Click here to continue".
Now you're telling me that they'd actually like one really, they just haven't gotten around to doing it yet?
Of course the Debian Developers and users would like a graphical instal environment, but it's just not a reasonable priority. It's not that a graphical (X11 based) installer is a "crime", it's just that it's a waste of time until you have everything working without it.
It is much more sensible to create an install that works efficiently with the lowest possible number of resources available, and to later make a graphical inteface available for systems that have what's necessary for it.
These decisions are not being made by zealots, they are being made by some of the best OS integrators that can be found who happen to have no pressure to place market concerns before coding practices, system design and best practices.
Not being a commercial vendor is one of the Debian Project's greatest strengths.
Let me humor you, iam such a nice chap.
Thanks, you are ever so kind.
I'm not claiming that these are reasonable fears, but that they are based on assumptions that are born out of thier thier expirience and out of recent (last 30 years) history.
Media corporations? Like who? Like the movie studios that are moving to free software?
DRM, and tnhe inevitable bypassing of which that Free Software enables. Tivo and other products that use Free Software to enable viewers to bypass
commercials. Media production software that enables talented but uncontracted persons to make high quality productions. Distribution products and metods that remove the controls over media distribution that have been in place since the growth of television.
Wall street? That during the dot crom frenzy poured enormous amounts of cash in companies based in OS projects?
And then proceded to destroy the business model of every potentially proftable OSS company that IPO'ed. Not that they did this intentionally, but through a misunderstanding of what the product actually was. The best example I can think of is VA Research (now VA Linux) before thier IPO, the most promissing portion of thier business was thier line of servers and workstations. Thier software involvement supported the sale of these machines not through sales of software, but through changes to the code that ensured that every hardware option they offered was well supported by Linux software. After the IPO, thier main investors pressured and succeeded in convincing the company to drop the hardware line in favor of a pure publication and software development support business model.
That save millions by using free software as a development
It's the employees who are afraid for thier jobs. The companies have already demonstrated that they are afraid for thier products.
since most programming work is in in-house applications
Agreed, but the common misconception among programmers and CS majors is that they will make more money working for a company that is producing a "killer app", or working for the top dog OS vendor. They see the large incomes that were enjoyed by IT personel in the past and rightly fear that the commoditization of software will lower the potential for riches. Most of them entered the CS feild under the assumption that there were still opportunities for riches to be made but, like during the Alaska gold rush, by the time they got there, so had everybody else.
Retirees? Tell me why please. I need to be amused.
A huge amount of retirement account investment is made up of Microsoft and America online investments. Many private investors invested in these companies as well because they are companies that have a both a strong appearance and good stock performance. These are not investors who like to monitor the stock market, but are people who are lookng for (and believe they had found) high return, low risk investments.
Investment bankers? Ha,ha,ha. I work with one. We have a standard Linux environment. Next.
What is good for the company is not always seen as good for the customer. For the very reason I mentioned in my above answer, investment bankers fear that the spread of free software to the general public will damage the stock value of companies that have traditionally been a "easy sell".
Intelligence agencies? Because they can check all the code?
Because you can check the code. Free Software limits the opportunities for future "Magic Lantern" type projects, makes effective encryption available to anyone, and enables users to have control of thier own computers and networks.
This doesn't just apply to IBM and Linux
This doesn't exactly apply to IBM, because IBM is a hardware manufacturer who needs software (Free or otherwise) to runnon thier hardware, and it deffinatyely does not apply to Linux, because Linux is the software itself, not a company that sells it.
If a hardware company is able to demonstrate that spending a few millions on Free Software instead of spending tens of millions will help them sell thier hardware, there is no unfair competition.
It's not just microsoft that doesn't like Open Source.
Media corporations, Wall Street, politicians, non-profit administrators, millions of employees of propietary software companies, advertising firms, patent attorneys, retirees, investment bankers, venture capitolists and intelligence agencies dislike Open Source and Free Software as much as anyone in Redmond.
Open Source Software is seen as a threat by all of the groups I have listed (and likely several I have left out) for various reasons. They see the SCO lawsuit as part of a larger battle against a force that threatens to remofve the traditionally solid controls over the economy and information that has enabled the institutions we all know and rely upon to be founded, grow and to support our way of life. Companies are afraid of losing thier incomes, investors are afraid for thier portfolios, non-proffits are afraid of losing the flow of donations and media is afraid of losing thier advertising dollars.
These are all very influential forces that would like nothing better than to know that they will have to pay through the nose when it comes time to upgrade, and that they will have to pay top-dollar for third party support even though they already paid for support from the vendor, because they know then that others are doing the same and that is what they believe is neccessary for the economy to keep running.
They wrongly equate the willing gifting of ones own work to the community with "communism" and are seeking a way, any way, to alieve thier fears and make this phenomenon go away.
A lot of people who aren't geeks, per se, still like to fiddle with computers.
Alot of people who are geeks may not have a "geek degree", but they are still geeks and are likely to fiddle with just about any machine they can get thier hands into.
The funny part is that today, there are more people who have the "geek degree" that are not geeks than there are geeks who don't.
The best programmers I've met are not the ones who learned it in school, nor are they necessarily the ones who were given a computer early in life, but the ones who happened upon computing almost randomly and simply took to it due to unspecified interest. They have a drive to implement thier ideas that is not dependant on a paycheck or notariety, but rather springs from thier natural curiosity and a strong belief in doing things the way they see as best (which often makes them nearly unemlpoyable).
NTFS had symbolic links since W2K ...
Wow, three years now! Almost four!
That Microsoft sure is offering something different, I guess I'll have to change my mind about them looking like they're re-implementing Unix (rather poorly). And now they are offering a usable CLI (not yet released) that offers more of what Unix does, but different.
Microsoft is not a horrible operating system, but it is not, has never been, and most likely never will be capable of all that a Unix like OS is (unless they decide to replace most of thier code with BSD). This is partly (mostly) due to thier design philosophy being partly (mostly) determined by market studies and considerations.
(buried elsewhere in the source)
Or in an server app.
Or they are assuming that they can get an account on a machine if they want this enough.
Or in mono.
It is (somewhat) obvious that whoever planted this was being very careful not to set off too many alarm bells and was seeking to become root on any Linux platform after they had already gained access to it (from a legitimate or stolen account, backdoor, server exploit, etc). Thier intended route into a non-root account may already exist and would be a difficult one to find as there are many more places it could be hiding.
How much time is spent looking for non-root exploits (remote and otherwise). With the possibility of local root exploits being executed after access is already gained to the machine the danger presented by non-root exploits is much greater than many might think.
My bittorrent uplaod speeds are aproximately 2/3 my download speeds, which seems reasonable.
;-)
I'm not quite sure why I always seem to be able to do the things that "you can't do" behind NAT.
Perhaps my configuration is wrong.
The DRM technology promoted by Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and our legislators (in the U.S.) are all that is needed to implement a network wide censorship of content on the web, in our email, and on any document or media file that traverses the web.
People asking Congress to regulate email, usually using spam as a justification, are asking Congress to assume the right to regulate the content of our private communications. The Patriot Act has already given the government the "right" to monitor it.
If Microsoft's DRM facilities are capable of the user control that they claim they are, then it would also be possible to block the transfer of any document that was not made with that technology, to track the origin of any document to the users computer and userid, and to filter traffic at the router for any specific document. Palladium would enable similar "features" to be implemented as well.
I believe that this is and always has been the motivation behind DRM, and that the censorship will be implemented not only to protect the media giants that currently enjoy monopolies on entertainment, but also to ensure that the message put forth by these companies as "news" will be able to continue unchallenged by smaller sources who are either more concerned for the factuality of what they are reporting, or are unfettered by the necessary allaiances between government and our large corporations and are thus not obligated to report only the sanctioned viewpoint.
Before anyone recommends the tinfoil hat, I'd just like to ask you to consider:
Is it a safe enough bet to allow to chance?
Can we assume that despite this capability being built into the network and our software it will not go unused?
Is a government that seems desiring to curtail our rights (while promissing the payoff of lower taxes) going to show enough restraint to not censor once it is capable?
Are the software and media companies actually idealistic enough to prevent this? or would they willingly participate with an opressive government as long as that government promisses to protect thier market position in the face of growing competition?
Am I overly paranoid for considering this to be a possibility?
Is paranoia justified in situations such as this?
Because we should respect advertisers...
Why?
I understand that there are advertisers who most certainly deserve respect, such the guy who came up with the idea of putting product names on the side of coffee mugs (Hi Peter!), but to respect advertisers just because they are advertisers has got to be the most asinine suggestion I have ever heard. This would be like respecting the creators of "The Mullets" because television writers deserve respect, or the creator of vegimite (apologies to anyone here who actually likes the stuff) because makers of food spreads deserve respect, etc.
look at the ad at the top of this very page,
What ad? Oh, you must be using IE, but that's hardly the point.
The point is that there are advertisers who make ads that work because they are interesting, informative, and do not in anyway disrupt the use of the medium that is carrying thier advertising. If a television advertiser wants peole to watch his ad instead of going to the bathroom, he better make that ad entertaining enough to get the target viewers to hold it in for thirty seconds. If a newsper advertiser wants people to read his ad, he better make it interesting enough to catch a few eyballs as they scan past and informative enough to get the suckers to continue reading. Why on earth is the internet considered different than other mediums. If the advertising is making people want to block ads there must be a problem with the advertising, not the medium. If the ads are good (not chasing away viewers), but the products are not selling, there must be a problem with the demand (as in there isn't any) and the product won't sell well no matter how many advertisements are out there.
Here we have a medium that allows the users to adjust thier habits and thier software to the quality and effectiveness of the advertisements. the adjustments in advertising techniques are going to have to come from the advertisers in the form of ajustments to the content, delivery technique, quality, and apropriateness of the advertisement. The advertising industry is going to have to get used to this. There will always be a way around ads on the internet, and if their ads are bugging the shit out people, they sure as hell have no obligation to view them.
When the shoe is on the other foot, does it still fit?
It's not the same thing.
Blocking ads is like going to the bathroom during the comercials.
Blocking all useragents except IE6 is like only allowing GM products to park in your "public" parking garage.
And the reality of useragent blocking is rather sad as well, I've yet to encounter an "IE6 only" site that doesn't work with Mozilla if I've changed the useragent ID.
If they don't want users to block thier ads, they should use ads that don't make users want to block them. It's like the SuperBowl vs the rest of the TV programing year. During the SuperBowl, people would rather miss some of the game than miss the well made advertising, but during the rest of the year, the advertisers don't seem too concerned about people liking thier work.
NAT is difficult if you have two hosts behind two NAT gateways on two seperate networks and you want them talk to each other.
Set a tunnel. (Encrypt it even.) Use port forwarding on high ports. Use one of the many vpn solutions available. Use a proxy firewall. Multi-home your firewall if necessary
Just don't front a machine onto the internet unless you absolutely have to.
NAT is unnecessary and a pain.
NAT is usefull and rather easy. How much could your ISP be charging for an additional IP anyway? $5.00? $7.00? That much! In order to save a few bucks, you're gonna front each and every machine you have onto routable addresses. Great Idea! 'Cause we all know that every machine in the universe needs to be accessable.
BTW, here's a link you might be interested in:
Freenet6.
Get whatever IPv6 software you need for your OS, and install Freenet6 on your gateway. Start using it now, don't bother waiting for your ISP to catch up. Works fine, but if you're behind a firewall... Let's not get into that one again.
mindlessly complex,
WTF is so difficult about NAT?
We've got a VOIP phone on our network that works with no problems at all behind NAT (not to mention the fact that your analogy doesn't really apply, the telephone interchange system bears very little resemblance to IP).
Videoconferencing, bittorrent and netgaming all work best with direct connections.
I don't know about Videoconferencing, or netgaming, but I'm behind NAT and I've never had a problem with participating in bittorrent. It works fine in both directions.
If two machines are NATed (and on different networks), they can't talk directly to each other.
[sarcasm]
Yep, and we all know what a good idea it is to have every single machine connected to a public interface. In fact, the very goal of the internet is so that anybody can connect to any machine at all. At least any authorized person, such as your employees, your boss, your neighbor, your neighbors kids, law enforcement, the RIAA, the MPAA, the Thought Police, etc. Nat is damaging the safety and freedom of the common man with it's ability to hide computers from those who exist to protect us, our rights and our privacy (see above list). Hell, perhaps NAT should be outlawed! I'm only thinking of the children!
[/sarcasm]
If you want your machine to be public, get a public IP address, if you want it hidden, use an RFC 1918 addy. Much of the "shortage" of IP4 addys is due to the large netblock owners using public addresses for networks and machines that are not accessable and have no reason to use be accessable from the internet. The rest of the "shortage" is due to large netblock owners that do not use the majority of thier addresses, but hold on to them anyway.
The more I poke around at the RH website, and Google around for stats on RH usage, I get the impression that thier $60/year/machine service was profitable, but apparently that is not the issue.
It is more likely that RH is taking the bet that enough of the subscribers to the $60/yr/machine service will chose to migrate to thier "Enterprise" solution that they can afford to lose the income from those who don't. In other words, it's about ROI.
Personally, I don't know enough about RedHat's business model and expense structure to judge a move like this one way or the other, but if they fail to entice enough users over to RHE, then it's a bad move, as much of the fixed expenses involved are likely shared between the RHE and RH dists. OTOH, if there are a large number of RH (business) users who will switch to RHE if support for the RH dist is withdrawn, RedHat would be foolish if they did not make this move.
I guess I'm just falling victem to the tendancy to believe that this patent is overly general. Or that the method of embeding or linking an executable in a document to be downloaded and executed on a users computer encompasses much of the potential of sharing content over a network.
I do realize that there are many more possibilities for sharing information and over the network that do not resemble this, and that there may be methods of replicating the user experience that plugins enable without encuontering the methods covered by this patent.
But I do believe, quite confidently, that even though there are "better" methods than the web that are going to be crossing our desktops in the (possibly near) future, the enforcement of the Eolas patent is a threat to much of the current web technology, and that the expirience of the web (and network content publishing) will be much poorer if this patent makes plugins and related methods exorbitantly expensive to implement, deploy, and use.