The advertiser's intent is actually not foiled at all.
Why not?
Well, let's first start with what a boycott is supposed to achieve. The intent of a boycott is to make a manufacturer, publisher, or other organization changes its practices by hurting it financially if it doesn't. If you remember the boycott against Nestle over baby formula advertising, you'll recall that people were upset that their advertising strongly implied (if not outright stated) that formula was better than breast milk for babies. Nestle was hardly alone in that, but as probably the biggest player in the market, they became the lightning rod for the criticism.
The trouble with that implying that formula is better, besides the fact that it's simply untrue, is that baby formula needs to be mixed with water. However, in many of the developing countries where they were aggressively marketing formula, both sources of adequately clean water and knowledge of basic practices like boiling the water to make it clean and then using it immediately, refrigerating mixed formula and how long it can be kept, etc., were very scarce. However, the advertising campaigns showing pictures of fat, healthy, smiling babies (in countries where skinny, undernourished babies with inadequate medical care were common) was highly effective. A lot of formula was being needlessly sold to poorly informed parents. The sale of formula is not in itself wrong, of course, nor is formula. Some mothers do not have their milk come on and could not feed their babies without formula. Others don't have enough milk, especially if they have twins or triplets. In those cases, formula is literally a life-saver.
However, because of the scarcity of proper information as to how to properly prepare and store formula, and of its relative value Vs. breast milk causing it to be bought needlessly, many babies were becoming sick, and quite a few dying, as a result of being fed on formula instead of breast milk. Not to mention, of course, that formula is expensive and many poor people were being led to buy it unnecessarily. I used to live in SE Asia and both my kids were born there. Imported, western-brand formula was about 1/3 the price it is here in the U.S., but the average national income where I was living is about $100/month. It was more in the large cities, of course, but that gives you some idea of the relative cost of baby formula.
Now, if you look at a can of baby formula in poor countires, it has instructions on how to prepare formula and boil water written in the local language, and it also states clearly on the can that breast milk is best for your baby.
The boycott worked because a lot of people refused to buy any Nestle product. This hurt Nestle financially and they modified their practices to satisfy their critics and the boycott was called off.
Now, let's relate this to your use of privoxy.
You never see the ad./. gets the money. Why do they get the money? B/c no one knows you never see the ad (unless they are paid on click-through, in which case they wouldn't get paid anyway unless you clicked the ad). That's problem one.
Problem two is that the ads aren't aimed at you. You are convinced. The ads are aimed at people who are on the fence or who are currently using Windows but are curious about alternatives such as Linux. You can rest assured that most of them are not using an ad blocker. So, they see the add, some may click through, and some of those will buy into the FUD and the advertiser's intent is achieved: a potential defector from Windows to Linux was stopped.
Now, the founder of Linux Today doesn't seem to get how to boycott, either. If you want to effectively boycott a publication (either Internet-based or paper-based, it doesn't matter), you need to do these things:
1) Write to them and tell them you are boycotting their publication and all of its advertisers, and tell them why;
2) Contact each of those advertisers and tell them the same thing, m
The second-to-last paragraph should read "they depend on experts to tell them if it's prior art or not, or if it's copyright-infringed UNIX code or not. Or sometimes (often, probably), they just find an expert who'll tell them whatever bolsters their client's case, in exchange for cash. The truth only intrudes if it is convenient to allow it to do so."
It's really bad, you're right. A large part of the problem, at least WRT fixing it, is that most of the people who recognize it as bad are people like us - IT workers. Your average person on the street doesn't even know what a software patent is, let alone why they are bad.
Just a couple weeks ago, I met up with a childhood friend whom I haven't seen in many years b/c we were living in different parts of the world. He told me (and you're going to think I'm making this up, but I promise I'm not) that he was really mad at the government for "Suing Bill Gates and accusing him of having a monopoly. He doesn't have any monopoly!"
Needless to say, after I got my breath back and looked at him closely to make sure he wasn't trolling me and checked my basement for pods, I explained a few things, starting with whether you love Microsoft or hate them (I being of the latter persuasion) there is no question that Microsoft enjoys a worldwide monopoly in desktop computers systems, by any reasonable and ordinary definition of monopoly. You may think that is a good thing or a bad thing, but there is no question that it exists.
He had utterly no idea that Microsoft has (mis)used its monopoly power many times over the years to crush competitors through unfair and anti-competitive means. It opened his eyes a bit, but I'm not sure he's exactly convinced.
When there are people that ignorant of the problems besetting the industry, it's not hard to see how it got this way. Most people just don't care and don't want to know, while those of us who know and care about the problems with software patents are not the people who make the rules, or even influential with them.
That situation, combined with the SCO debacle, brought forth in me a strong interest in IP law, especially as applied to IT. As a result, I plan to take the LSAT by the end of summer and apply to law school.
Insiders created this mess, if we want to fix it, some of us IT people need to cross over and become lawyers. We have to fix it from the inside. When I pass the bar, I want to practice in the area of IP law, work for reform, and do pro bono consulting for free software projects and help to educate people about the problems with the current patent system, DMCA, and that whole mess.
Let's face it: most lawyers are only experts at one thing - being lawyers. They wouldn't recognize prior art in IT if you hit them with it, or really copied UNIX code either. They depend BUT - if you're a lawyer who was a computer geek first! Then you've got something. You can look at something like a patent on well-known and long-practiced spam filtering techniques and recognize right off where the BS is, and *know* how to go about fighting it.
So, if you're a geek and you're mad and you're not gonna take it anymore, then take something else. Take the LSAT. Take a JD degree. Take the bar exam in your state, and get to work.
Maybe it's just the programmer in me, but there are many MANY device that I look at and think "wow, I could design such a better interface for that..".
It's not just the programmer in you, it's the "Hater of design so bad that it could have been pumped from a port-a-potty" in you:-)
For example, take my Nokia phone. Please. The hardware is OK, but the UI is horrible. I lived in Japan for years, and my first cell phone there, in 1996, had a better user interface than any Nokia I've seen since (never saw one in Japan, the Japanese brands own the market lock, stock, and two smoking Pringle's cans, and it's not just protectionism; they're *a lot* better than the competition).
My wife got a Samsung, and while I don't think it's as good as the Japanese domestic phones either, it beats the crap out of my Nokia on every point. I know what my next cell phone will be.
Japan is not known at all for UI design in PC software, but when it comes to UI design in gadgets, Japan is without peer.
That's a lot harder than spamming a few million people to give you some nitwits who go to your site to tell you all their secrets
Do tell. I work for a well-known security firm and we filter out most phishing scams. Of course, it's pretty much a daily even that someone reports one (or more) as ham that got filtered by mistake.
And then there are the dozens of daily reports of "Bill Gates will send you thousands of dollars if you forward this to everyone you know" as wrongly filtered mail.
Are people really that bad? Uh-huh. Oooooh yeah.
Re:Hang in there?...fP?
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If 3Com fails, it will be mostly from self-inflicted wounds. Anyone out there who works with Total Control gear and worked with it back when it was USR Total Control can tell you how badly service and support fell off after it became 3Com Total Control following the buyout of USR. My former employer (an ISP) was a 100% TC shop, but we switched to Cisco RAS gear instead, and the greatest (by far) factor in that decision was 3Com attitude.
We could hardly get anyone at 3Com to pay us the time of day, we went over two years without seeing out sales rep, and that was despite being an active customer during that period. When we started to evaluate Cisco, Cisco was all over it. If we had an issue of any kind during the test period, our vendor would take it straight to Cisco if their own engineers didn't have an answer. At one point, we were having some problems that would be solved by the latest code for our modem cards, and the Cisco engineer who wrote it personally brought it to our office on a CD-R.
Naturally enough, when it came time to make a buying decision, we were unanimous in favor of Cisco. That was about three years ago, so I can't comment on whether 3Com has changed for the better or worse, or is still that way, but the worst thing that ever happened to USR, IMO, was becoming part of 3Com.
I like 3Com gear - Total Control is great stuff - and I have a couple of Superstack II switches right here in my den, and 3Com NICs in a lot of my computers, but they shot themselves in the foot through greed and poor customer service.
WRT installing SuSE 9.1 on a 486 with 20 meg, I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't. What problems did you encounter?
WRT the review of Sun JDS, the reviewer's hardware was quite standard gear, stuff that you could probably randomly choose half a dozen distros and get a successful installs. It was all recent vintage high-end whitebox hardware, nothing proprietary to a single vendor. That being the case, if that equipment is so far outside of the HCL for JDS (and who knows, maybe it is, considering the historical pickiness of Solaris x86; I had to build several Solaris x86 boxes in 1999 or 2000 and it involved going shopping with a copy of the HCL in hand, because if you didn't do that you were just about guaranteed to have problems), then the criticism is still fully justified, because a lot of people have or will be getting hardware like that.
If I can run Fedora on it or run branded Red Hat products on it or run Debian on it (Woody might be iffy, but Sarge or Sid should have no problem) or run Slack, Gentoo, Arch, SuSE, or , can run Windows on it, but can't run Sun JDS on it, then there is a problem.
If the grandparent doesn't have a private pro-Sun agenda, it may be the case that he is one of the (many) people who take any criticism of any Linux product - even criticism from insiders, which that review was - as baseless, defamatory, and without doubt an outright lie. That is not at all helpful to the cause. To be sure, there is criticism that ought to be ignored- some people want Linux to be dumbed-down for the benefit of the computer-stupid, and I am quite opposed to that and want people to bring themselves up to our level rather than bringing our OS down to theirs. Sadly, this seems a minority opinion and that does not bode well for the future of Linux (IMO). Fortunately there are the safe havens of BSD and Plan 9.
However, to dismiss "This is broken; it won't even install" as bogus criticism, especially when coming from linux.com is, well, bogus.
So basically, you would like us to believe that because Sun is (with justification) not very popular with the Linux community these days, that a reviewer is going to fabricate a complete lie and put his name it? Not only a complete lie, but one that is easily disprovable because he gave his exact hardware configuration and said "It will not install on this." Anyone with the same hardware (and a lot of people have things like that) can try it and see. If they try it and he's shown to be lying, not only his own journalistic integrity but that of linux.com, is shot.
It's not that reporters don't sometimes stretch things, or even flat-out lie. But they do it in ways that they are not likely to be caught. What you're describing is like a reporter going on the news and saying "The Washington Monument was painted pink today by the National Park Service." That statement is easily verifiable as such by many people, and for that reason no reporter would make that claim, even if he had a private agenda that wanted the Washington Monument to be pink as a means of embarrassing the government or the National Park Service.
If you read the entire review, you would have also noticed that the author saved his non-technical criticism (licensing, etc.) to the end, and included with it some advice to Sun about how to improve those problems. Hardly the actions of a person with an anti-Sun agenda.
You seem to be asking us to believe that because Sun has little political capital in the Linux community these days, that any Linux-oriented publication that does a review of a Sun product and has negative things to say about it must be lying, that these negative things couldn't possibly be true or accurate. I wonder, what is your agenda for making such a ridiculous claim? Do you work for Sun? Own their stock? Or perhaps you're really a Windows booster out for a Saturday afternoon troll?
Your claim is foolish. The people who modded you Insightful, doubly so. A wild and totally unsupported conspiracy theory claim is hardly the stuff from which Insightful posts are made.
Debian backports all security fixes into stable, and the Debian security team does a great (and fast) job of backporting patches and making them available.
So what you're saying is that good or evil doesn't matter, only size matters?:-)
Seriously, though, if the little guy is evil and the big guy is good (even if he used to be bad too, but reformed himself) and the evil little guy foolish attacks the good big guy and the big guy, is forced to defend himself, then the big guy should have our support.
Now, the way out legal system is structured (and pretty much everyone else's, too, I think), it basically forces you to take no prisoners. You either obtain an out of court settlement or you go on to victory or defeat in court.
The real world comparison would be if the little guy is going to fight the big guy, and the rules of fighting, encoded in law, require that they both be locked in a cage and only one comes out alive, or neither ever comes out. Since the big guy didn't start the fight, which was wrongly called by the evil little guy, we can't really blame the big guy if he kills the little guy to get out of the cage.
So, IBM is likely to bankrupt SCO in this fight, and SCO will be destroyed. It's IP is likely to be bought by someone, probably IBM, or maybe a consortium of IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and others. SCO's few remaining employees will probably all wind up jobless, the innocent along with the guilty. IBM is not to blame for that. SCO is.
So, I'm openly rooting for IBM because they are the good guy, and I hope they utterly destroy the bad guy, necessary or not, even if they are a 600 pound gorilla and the bad guy is a 98 pound weakling.
You should *always* enjoy it when the bad guy gets his ass kicked, didn't you learn anything in the movies?:-)
If IBM weren't around, SCO still could (and almost certainly would) have picked on smaller players such as Red Hat, SuSE, etc. These small players don't have a great deal of money with which to defend themselves, and SCO could have probably bankrupted some of them before the fight was even over, and possibly even won one or more injunctions against the distribution use of Linux.
Fortunately, IBM was around, was promoting Linux in a big way, and SCO was foolish enough to take on the 600 pound gorilla and think it could win or at least be bought out at a handsome profit for its investors and executives. Too bad for SCO it turns out the 600 pound gorilla believes it can win and set a precedent and never have to worry about this again. As a result, IBM will seek to make an example of SCO, and make Darl rue the day he first heard the words "law suit."
Then, when it's over and SCO is in ruins, IBM may buy SCO anyway for pennies on the dollar and have both the court precedent and the IP in hand, rendering IBM and all of us safe from a repeat attack on Linux. It will probably also render IBM safe from being sued by anyone else, over anything, for a long time to come because they have demonstrated their willingness to fight instead of settle.
Ummmm, hellooooo, McMod! Reposting the article to help the rest of us read it (because the site is already/.ed and there were only three posts, including the FP, when I started writing this) cannot, by any reasonable person, be considered redundant.
Someone please mod the parents informative, and throw an Unfair to the moderator if you get this in M2.
I was a network engineer at an ISP for several years, and we (like almost every other ISP):
A) Prohibited sharing your connection with anybody else; an end-user is not a reseller;
B) Held end users responsible for their connection, including maintaining reasonable security over their password and physical security over their connection.
His actions completely disregard both points (and I bet his TOS says something like B, and probably A, too) and would have been enough for us to suspend or terminate his account at our discretion. We probably would have warned him once and terminated him the second time. Unless, of course, we went public with it on Salon, then there would be warning:-)
Whether or not the law can get him on intent, I don't know (but considering people could use his pipe to send and receive child pornography or commit various other crimes, he's a fool to make the assumption that he's safe) but I can tell you that his ISP most certainly can get him on intent: what's in the law doesn't matter; what's in their TOS is all that matters.
I work for a large spam-filtering service, and as a writer of filters, I'm one of the people who reads the spam report inbox and the false positive report inbox. We see a lot of phishing scams for Citibank, Paypal, eBay, Fleet Bank, etc. We are pretty good at filtering these things out, too.
As a consequence of our being pretty good at filtering them out, I also regularly find them reported as false positives, and every time I see one of those, I always wonder to myself "Did he click on the link and enter his userid and password before or after he reported this as a false positive?"
The first time I ever saw a phishing mail, just like the first time I ever saw a 419 mail, it was obvious just from looking at it that it was a scam. I find it kind of scary that so many people can look at something so ridiculous and have no idea at all that it's bogus. There truly are a lot of people who will believe just about anything.
There is nothing insightful about that post, it's just ignorant.
I lived in SE Asia, and I can tell you that the first thing that happens when people start going from poverty to prosperity is they start buying cars and scooters and things. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City are so choked with scooter traffic that if I had been riding a bicycle instead of a scooter myself, I probably would have been overcome by the exhaust fumes and collapsed (and no, I am not kidding).
China, as you may have noticed, is becoming fairly prosperous. Now, people are going to buy faster, more comfortable modes of transportation than bicycles. Which would you rather have them buy? Electric-assist bicycles, which are still pretty green and whose batteries can be recycled (and I'm sure they are; a lot of stuff from the G-7 gets sent to China for recycling, so they have a big recycling industry already in place), or would you rather have them buy a car or scooter and get around with an internal combustion engine driving a vehicle with a lot more parts in it?
You sound like a typical radical environmentalist: calling a good thing for the environment worthless because it's not perfect. By the way, do you use a vehicle with an internal combustion engine yourself? If you do, then you're also a hypocrite for criticizing China for not being perfectly green while they are still greener than you are.
You and the people who modded you insightful both need to get a tighter grasp on your clue before it all slips away.
His high moral elitist ass has probably never lived abroad, either. Maybe never even traveled abroad.
Unlike almost all Americans who weren't born outside the United States in the first place, I lived abroad for nearly ten years, in countries where English isn't really all that widely spoken, and English spoken proficiently is pretty rare. I speak the language of one of those countries well, and my wife is a native speaker in the other case. That means that I spent a lot of time speaking with people from those countries either directly in their native language, or through my wife as an interpreter.
One thing that I consistently found everywhere is that people were very interested in what life is like where I'm from, and enjoyed talking about what life is like in their country (and also, hearing a foreign resident's perspective on life in their country).
You're completely right, talking about what life is like in each other's country is a fundamental, and certainly isn't offensive. People usually enjoy talking about their country, and many people were delighted to learn that I knew various little things that not many foreigners knew, and some that not even many natives knew about very clearly.
Some people just don't get that "people are all the same" doesn't mean we were all made with the same cookie cutter; it means we all have the same fundamental human rights. The fact that we are not all the same in the cookie-cutter sense is what makes us interesting.
I've experienced the same thing, both on a 5.0 Mustang GT that I had some years ago, and the Mazda Protege that I have now: both vehicles consistently exceed the EPA estimate, both city and highway. My single-tank mileage record on the Mustang (with four-speed overdrive automatic, 2.73 axle) was 27.5 MPG on a long freeway trip. Typical freeway mileage was 25.5 - 26.5.
My Mazda (also an OD automatic, but with a 1.8 liter engine, and a lighter vehicle) gets 32 - 34 on the freeway. That 5 liter engine was under such light load at freeway speeds that it allowed it to produce mileage figures not all that far off from those of an engine a little over one-third its size (and of course, the axle ratio in this Mazda can't be anywhere near 2.73).
My path was FVWM95->Afterstep->Window Maker->Gnome->KDE3.0.
I liked Gnome better than the other things that were around at the time, and steered away from KDE partly because of the licensing issue with Qt that existed at the time, and partly because KDE prior to 3.0 was just so generally ugly and amateurish-looking that I couldn't stand to look at it. Who designed those icons? Blech!
Then KDE 3.0 came out. I tried it out of curiousity and found that it was *worlds* ahead of Gnome. Gnome up to and including 2.4 was nowhere near catching up. Whatever chance they might have had was buried by KDE 3.2.
I will take a look at Gnome 2.6, just to see how they've done, but I have my doubts. I read some of the ideas that were going into the design for Gnome 2.6 and all I could think was "That sounds really stupid."
So, while his review of Gnome 2.6 (or more accurately, of Nautilus in Gnome 2.6) may be written in rather inflamatory language, it should not be dismissed outright as being crap. Even if it's not as bad as he says, the idea of having every double-click open a new window and be so difficult to override is criminally stupid.
People tend to dis KDE by claiming it works too much like the Windows UI, but you can customize that any way you want, and so I do. It's something I like a lot about KDE.
If it has behaviors that are much like Windows by default, so what? That can help new users make the transition. Is that a bad thing? We also need to keep in mind that Microsoft does know a thing or two about UI design. Unlike most open source projects, MS does have UI specialists. Lots of them.
I have a laundry list of things I hate about Windows, but only two things on that list are UI-related:
1) You can't customize the UI much. It just works the way it works;
2) This is the bigger one: you get only one desktop. On my notebook, I have 8 virtual desktops. On my desktop machine, I have 10. This allows me to organize my work by assigning different types of tasks to different desktops, and I have a set pattern of where I put different types of things. Ctrl-F[1-10] takes me to the desktop I need. I cannot do this with Windows and it's a major PITA.
That's it. Those are the only two points of MS UI design that bother me, and the first one is pretry minor, really. If KDE copies some of their ideas from Windows (but don't forget that KDE has a lot of capabilities that the Windows GUI does not have), it could be that KDE developers just know how to recognize a good decision when they see it.
Unless you like to see shit on a girls face... don't click the link
Well, actually, this needs to be amended to "Unless you are using IE and want to see shit on a girl's face..." because if you're using some more advanced and secure browser[1] (or presumably, one of those browsers reporting itself as IE, but why would you want to do claim to be using IE?), all you'll see is:
"We're sorry, this site takes advantage of advanced technology only found in the award winning Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser for Windows."
This was fortunate for me, because I stupidly clicked it before seeing your warning. Saved by Konqueror yet again:-)
By "advanced technology," I can only wonder if they mean "This site exploits a security hole found only in IE to take control of your computer while distracting you with a disgusting image." IE not only doesn't support any advanced technology that other browsers don't support (No, ActiveX controls are not an advanced technology, they are just another way of doing what everyone else does, and doing so with less security), it has long been the only major browser to not support tabbed browsing. That makes it pretty hard to think of "Internet Explorer" and "advanced technology" in the same sentence.
[1] Defined as "Pretty much any browser other than Netscape 4.x, which has a security track record about as bad as IE versions below 6, or nearly so.
Just to clarify, what I mean by "doesn't fluctuate at all" is I have all my bandwidth, all the time. I downloaded the 4 GB DVD image of the latest Fedora Core 2, and it was solid at 240 kbps, give or take just a few kbps, from start to finish.
My dad has standard Roadrunner consumer service, and while I have seen speeds on his network far higher than mine (sometimes over 400 kbps, and often over 350, during off-peak hours), I have also seen speeds far lower.
While I suppose I could live with fluctuation (I've never seen a speed below 100 kbps down on his network, and even that is rare), I do also like having a global static IP and no restrictions (save those imposed by law) on what I do with my connection.
I use Roadrunner Business Class. It's not cheap - I pay 90 bucks/mo for 2 mbps down/512 kbps up with 1 global static IP, but:
A) Unlike consumer cable, the rate doesn't seem to fluctuate at all
B) Unlike consumer cable, I can do whatever I want. No port restrictions, etc. Not sure about reselling bandwidth, I'd have to check the TOS again, but I don't want to do that anyway, so to me it doesn't matter (it might to others)
C) In the odd even that you have a problem (the only one I ever had was the first router they gave me was defective and died the next day; they sent somebody out with a replacement, and I got a letter of apology from a vice-president), they have genuinely clued support people handling the RR Business Class customers. I can't say enough good about them. They are polite, professional, and if a problem needs to be escalated, they will escalate it without giving you any crap.
Is it worth 90 bucks for that? To me, yes. YMMV, of course, but if you want something approaching the service level of a leased line from a good provider but only want to pay 90 bucks for it, a Roadrunner Business Class connection looks like a pretty good deal.
I used to live in SE Asia. I have experience with the warez shops there. While I personally was running Linux (it took me over a week to download a set of Debian ISOs!), just about everything and everyone around me was running Warez. It's hard to find anyone in Viet Nam who can afford legitimate, licensed copies, and even harder to find anyone who sells them, unless you buy a new machine (Dell is there, IBM is there, I think HP is too) from a major foreign vendor.
The warez version of XP Pro for about a buck any software shop will install most XP patches, but will not install SP 1. SP 1 recognizes the key as bogus and refuses to install.
In any case, it hardly matters. People are on slow and unreliable dial-up connections. DSL is almost unknown. ISDN is not available at all, as far as I could tell. Hardly anyone has the bandwidth to actually patch their machines, and even fewer people have the knowledge or interest (even fewer than here). There are some really great programmers and admins in Viet Nam, but just like there, those highly knowledgeable people are a tiny minority. Most people with computers neither know nor care about anything like keeping them secure.
So even if MS made all patches available to warez versions of Windows, it would hardly matter in many parts of the world, because the people running them couldn't and/or wouldn't apply the patches anyway.
That's a fair description, I think. Reader's Digest carries a small amount of original content, and so does Slashdot (book reviews, that sort of thing), and anyone who reads a lot has probably seen much of it elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The advertiser's intent is actually not foiled at all.
/. gets the money. Why do they get the money? B/c no one knows you never see the ad (unless they are paid on click-through, in which case they wouldn't get paid anyway unless you clicked the ad). That's problem one.
Why not?
Well, let's first start with what a boycott is supposed to achieve. The intent of a boycott is to make a manufacturer, publisher, or other organization changes its practices by hurting it financially if it doesn't. If you remember the boycott against Nestle over baby formula advertising, you'll recall that people were upset that their advertising strongly implied (if not outright stated) that formula was better than breast milk for babies. Nestle was hardly alone in that, but as probably the biggest player in the market, they became the lightning rod for the criticism.
The trouble with that implying that formula is better, besides the fact that it's simply untrue, is that baby formula needs to be mixed with water. However, in many of the developing countries where they were aggressively marketing formula, both sources of adequately clean water and knowledge of basic practices like boiling the water to make it clean and then using it immediately, refrigerating mixed formula and how long it can be kept, etc., were very scarce. However, the advertising campaigns showing pictures of fat, healthy, smiling babies (in countries where skinny, undernourished babies with inadequate medical care were common) was highly effective. A lot of formula was being needlessly sold to poorly informed parents. The sale of formula is not in itself wrong, of course, nor is formula. Some mothers do not have their milk come on and could not feed their babies without formula. Others don't have enough milk, especially if they have twins or triplets. In those cases, formula is literally a life-saver.
However, because of the scarcity of proper information as to how to properly prepare and store formula, and of its relative value Vs. breast milk causing it to be bought needlessly, many babies were becoming sick, and quite a few dying, as a result of being fed on formula instead of breast milk. Not to mention, of course, that formula is expensive and many poor people were being led to buy it unnecessarily. I used to live in SE Asia and both my kids were born there. Imported, western-brand formula was about 1/3 the price it is here in the U.S., but the average national income where I was living is about $100/month. It was more in the large cities, of course, but that gives you some idea of the relative cost of baby formula.
Now, if you look at a can of baby formula in poor countires, it has instructions on how to prepare formula and boil water written in the local language, and it also states clearly on the can that breast milk is best for your baby.
The boycott worked because a lot of people refused to buy any Nestle product. This hurt Nestle financially and they modified their practices to satisfy their critics and the boycott was called off.
Now, let's relate this to your use of privoxy.
You never see the ad.
Problem two is that the ads aren't aimed at you. You are convinced. The ads are aimed at people who are on the fence or who are currently using Windows but are curious about alternatives such as Linux. You can rest assured that most of them are not using an ad blocker. So, they see the add, some may click through, and some of those will buy into the FUD and the advertiser's intent is achieved: a potential defector from Windows to Linux was stopped.
Now, the founder of Linux Today doesn't seem to get how to boycott, either. If you want to effectively boycott a publication (either Internet-based or paper-based, it doesn't matter), you need to do these things:
1) Write to them and tell them you are boycotting their publication and all of its advertisers, and tell them why;
2) Contact each of those advertisers and tell them the same thing, m
Oops, left out a part :-)
:-)
The second-to-last paragraph should read "they depend on experts to tell them if it's prior art or not, or if it's copyright-infringed UNIX code or not. Or sometimes (often, probably), they just find an expert who'll tell them whatever bolsters their client's case, in exchange for cash. The truth only intrudes if it is convenient to allow it to do so."
Then comes "BUT - if you're a lawyer who was..."
Sorry about that
It's really bad, you're right. A large part of the problem, at least WRT fixing it, is that most of the people who recognize it as bad are people like us - IT workers. Your average person on the street doesn't even know what a software patent is, let alone why they are bad.
Just a couple weeks ago, I met up with a childhood friend whom I haven't seen in many years b/c we were living in different parts of the world. He told me (and you're going to think I'm making this up, but I promise I'm not) that he was really mad at the government for "Suing Bill Gates and accusing him of having a monopoly. He doesn't have any monopoly!"
Needless to say, after I got my breath back and looked at him closely to make sure he wasn't trolling me and checked my basement for pods, I explained a few things, starting with whether you love Microsoft or hate them (I being of the latter persuasion) there is no question that Microsoft enjoys a worldwide monopoly in desktop computers systems, by any reasonable and ordinary definition of monopoly. You may think that is a good thing or a bad thing, but there is no question that it exists.
He had utterly no idea that Microsoft has (mis)used its monopoly power many times over the years to crush competitors through unfair and anti-competitive means. It opened his eyes a bit, but I'm not sure he's exactly convinced.
When there are people that ignorant of the problems besetting the industry, it's not hard to see how it got this way. Most people just don't care and don't want to know, while those of us who know and care about the problems with software patents are not the people who make the rules, or even influential with them.
That situation, combined with the SCO debacle, brought forth in me a strong interest in IP law, especially as applied to IT. As a result, I plan to take the LSAT by the end of summer and apply to law school.
Insiders created this mess, if we want to fix it, some of us IT people need to cross over and become lawyers. We have to fix it from the inside. When I pass the bar, I want to practice in the area of IP law, work for reform, and do pro bono consulting for free software projects and help to educate people about the problems with the current patent system, DMCA, and that whole mess.
Let's face it: most lawyers are only experts at one thing - being lawyers. They wouldn't recognize prior art in IT if you hit them with it, or really copied UNIX code either. They depend BUT - if you're a lawyer who was a computer geek first! Then you've got something. You can look at something like a patent on well-known and long-practiced spam filtering techniques and recognize right off where the BS is, and *know* how to go about fighting it.
So, if you're a geek and you're mad and you're not gonna take it anymore, then take something else. Take the LSAT. Take a JD degree. Take the bar exam in your state, and get to work.
It's not just the programmer in you, it's the "Hater of design so bad that it could have been pumped from a port-a-potty" in you
For example, take my Nokia phone. Please. The hardware is OK, but the UI is horrible. I lived in Japan for years, and my first cell phone there, in 1996, had a better user interface than any Nokia I've seen since (never saw one in Japan, the Japanese brands own the market lock, stock, and two smoking Pringle's cans, and it's not just protectionism; they're *a lot* better than the competition).
My wife got a Samsung, and while I don't think it's as good as the Japanese domestic phones either, it beats the crap out of my Nokia on every point. I know what my next cell phone will be.
Japan is not known at all for UI design in PC software, but when it comes to UI design in gadgets, Japan is without peer.
Do tell. I work for a well-known security firm and we filter out most phishing scams. Of course, it's pretty much a daily even that someone reports one (or more) as ham that got filtered by mistake.
And then there are the dozens of daily reports of "Bill Gates will send you thousands of dollars if you forward this to everyone you know" as wrongly filtered mail.
Are people really that bad? Uh-huh. Oooooh yeah.
If 3Com fails, it will be mostly from self-inflicted wounds. Anyone out there who works with Total Control gear and worked with it back when it was USR Total Control can tell you how badly service and support fell off after it became 3Com Total Control following the buyout of USR. My former employer (an ISP) was a 100% TC shop, but we switched to Cisco RAS gear instead, and the greatest (by far) factor in that decision was 3Com attitude.
We could hardly get anyone at 3Com to pay us the time of day, we went over two years without seeing out sales rep, and that was despite being an active customer during that period. When we started to evaluate Cisco, Cisco was all over it. If we had an issue of any kind during the test period, our vendor would take it straight to Cisco if their own engineers didn't have an answer. At one point, we were having some problems that would be solved by the latest code for our modem cards, and the Cisco engineer who wrote it personally brought it to our office on a CD-R.
Naturally enough, when it came time to make a buying decision, we were unanimous in favor of Cisco. That was about three years ago, so I can't comment on whether 3Com has changed for the better or worse, or is still that way, but the worst thing that ever happened to USR, IMO, was becoming part of 3Com.
I like 3Com gear - Total Control is great stuff - and I have a couple of Superstack II switches right here in my den, and 3Com NICs in a lot of my computers, but they shot themselves in the foot through greed and poor customer service.
If they can run after that, you must be using the 9 mm version :-)
WRT installing SuSE 9.1 on a 486 with 20 meg, I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't. What problems did you encounter?
WRT the review of Sun JDS, the reviewer's hardware was quite standard gear, stuff that you could probably randomly choose half a dozen distros and get a successful installs. It was all recent vintage high-end whitebox hardware, nothing proprietary to a single vendor. That being the case, if that equipment is so far outside of the HCL for JDS (and who knows, maybe it is, considering the historical pickiness of Solaris x86; I had to build several Solaris x86 boxes in 1999 or 2000 and it involved going shopping with a copy of the HCL in hand, because if you didn't do that you were just about guaranteed to have problems), then the criticism is still fully justified, because a lot of people have or will be getting hardware like that.
If I can run Fedora on it or run branded Red Hat products on it or run Debian on it (Woody might be iffy, but Sarge or Sid should have no problem) or run Slack, Gentoo, Arch, SuSE, or , can run Windows on it, but can't run Sun JDS on it, then there is a problem.
If the grandparent doesn't have a private pro-Sun agenda, it may be the case that he is one of the (many) people who take any criticism of any Linux product - even criticism from insiders, which that review was - as baseless, defamatory, and without doubt an outright lie. That is not at all helpful to the cause. To be sure, there is criticism that ought to be ignored- some people want Linux to be dumbed-down for the benefit of the computer-stupid, and I am quite opposed to that and want people to bring themselves up to our level rather than bringing our OS down to theirs. Sadly, this seems a minority opinion and that does not bode well for the future of Linux (IMO). Fortunately there are the safe havens of BSD and Plan 9.
However, to dismiss "This is broken; it won't even install" as bogus criticism, especially when coming from linux.com is, well, bogus.
So basically, you would like us to believe that because Sun is (with justification) not very popular with the Linux community these days, that a reviewer is going to fabricate a complete lie and put his name it? Not only a complete lie, but one that is easily disprovable because he gave his exact hardware configuration and said "It will not install on this." Anyone with the same hardware (and a lot of people have things like that) can try it and see. If they try it and he's shown to be lying, not only his own journalistic integrity but that of linux.com, is shot.
It's not that reporters don't sometimes stretch things, or even flat-out lie. But they do it in ways that they are not likely to be caught. What you're describing is like a reporter going on the news and saying "The Washington Monument was painted pink today by the National Park Service." That statement is easily verifiable as such by many people, and for that reason no reporter would make that claim, even if he had a private agenda that wanted the Washington Monument to be pink as a means of embarrassing the government or the National Park Service.
If you read the entire review, you would have also noticed that the author saved his non-technical criticism (licensing, etc.) to the end, and included with it some advice to Sun about how to improve those problems. Hardly the actions of a person with an anti-Sun agenda.
You seem to be asking us to believe that because Sun has little political capital in the Linux community these days, that any Linux-oriented publication that does a review of a Sun product and has negative things to say about it must be lying, that these negative things couldn't possibly be true or accurate. I wonder, what is your agenda for making such a ridiculous claim? Do you work for Sun? Own their stock? Or perhaps you're really a Windows booster out for a Saturday afternoon troll?
Your claim is foolish. The people who modded you Insightful, doubly so. A wild and totally unsupported conspiracy theory claim is hardly the stuff from which Insightful posts are made.
Debian backports all security fixes into stable, and the Debian security team does a great (and fast) job of backporting patches and making them available.
So what you're saying is that good or evil doesn't matter, only size matters? :-)
:-)
Seriously, though, if the little guy is evil and the big guy is good (even if he used to be bad too, but reformed himself) and the evil little guy foolish attacks the good big guy and the big guy, is forced to defend himself, then the big guy should have our support.
Now, the way out legal system is structured (and pretty much everyone else's, too, I think), it basically forces you to take no prisoners. You either obtain an out of court settlement or you go on to victory or defeat in court.
The real world comparison would be if the little guy is going to fight the big guy, and the rules of fighting, encoded in law, require that they both be locked in a cage and only one comes out alive, or neither ever comes out. Since the big guy didn't start the fight, which was wrongly called by the evil little guy, we can't really blame the big guy if he kills the little guy to get out of the cage.
So, IBM is likely to bankrupt SCO in this fight, and SCO will be destroyed. It's IP is likely to be bought by someone, probably IBM, or maybe a consortium of IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and others. SCO's few remaining employees will probably all wind up jobless, the innocent along with the guilty. IBM is not to blame for that. SCO is.
So, I'm openly rooting for IBM because they are the good guy, and I hope they utterly destroy the bad guy, necessary or not, even if they are a 600 pound gorilla and the bad guy is a 98 pound weakling.
You should *always* enjoy it when the bad guy gets his ass kicked, didn't you learn anything in the movies?
This is actually quite a wrong analysis.
If IBM weren't around, SCO still could (and almost certainly would) have picked on smaller players such as Red Hat, SuSE, etc. These small players don't have a great deal of money with which to defend themselves, and SCO could have probably bankrupted some of them before the fight was even over, and possibly even won one or more injunctions against the distribution use of Linux.
Fortunately, IBM was around, was promoting Linux in a big way, and SCO was foolish enough to take on the 600 pound gorilla and think it could win or at least be bought out at a handsome profit for its investors and executives. Too bad for SCO it turns out the 600 pound gorilla believes it can win and set a precedent and never have to worry about this again. As a result, IBM will seek to make an example of SCO, and make Darl rue the day he first heard the words "law suit."
Then, when it's over and SCO is in ruins, IBM may buy SCO anyway for pennies on the dollar and have both the court precedent and the IP in hand, rendering IBM and all of us safe from a repeat attack on Linux. It will probably also render IBM safe from being sued by anyone else, over anything, for a long time to come because they have demonstrated their willingness to fight instead of settle.
Ummmm, hellooooo, McMod! Reposting the article to help the rest of us read it (because the site is already /.ed and there were only three posts, including the FP, when I started writing this) cannot, by any reasonable person, be considered redundant.
Someone please mod the parents informative, and throw an Unfair to the moderator if you get this in M2.
I was a network engineer at an ISP for several years, and we (like almost every other ISP):
:-)
A) Prohibited sharing your connection with anybody else; an end-user is not a reseller;
B) Held end users responsible for their connection, including maintaining reasonable security over their password and physical security over their connection.
His actions completely disregard both points (and I bet his TOS says something like B, and probably A, too) and would have been enough for us to suspend or terminate his account at our discretion. We probably would have warned him once and terminated him the second time. Unless, of course, we went public with it on Salon, then there would be warning
Whether or not the law can get him on intent, I don't know (but considering people could use his pipe to send and receive child pornography or commit various other crimes, he's a fool to make the assumption that he's safe) but I can tell you that his ISP most certainly can get him on intent: what's in the law doesn't matter; what's in their TOS is all that matters.
I feel your pain.
I work for a large spam-filtering service, and as a writer of filters, I'm one of the people who reads the spam report inbox and the false positive report inbox. We see a lot of phishing scams for Citibank, Paypal, eBay, Fleet Bank, etc. We are pretty good at filtering these things out, too.
As a consequence of our being pretty good at filtering them out, I also regularly find them reported as false positives, and every time I see one of those, I always wonder to myself "Did he click on the link and enter his userid and password before or after he reported this as a false positive?"
The first time I ever saw a phishing mail, just like the first time I ever saw a 419 mail, it was obvious just from looking at it that it was a scam. I find it kind of scary that so many people can look at something so ridiculous and have no idea at all that it's bogus. There truly are a lot of people who will believe just about anything.
There is nothing insightful about that post, it's just ignorant.
I lived in SE Asia, and I can tell you that the first thing that happens when people start going from poverty to prosperity is they start buying cars and scooters and things. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City are so choked with scooter traffic that if I had been riding a bicycle instead of a scooter myself, I probably would have been overcome by the exhaust fumes and collapsed (and no, I am not kidding).
China, as you may have noticed, is becoming fairly prosperous. Now, people are going to buy faster, more comfortable modes of transportation than bicycles. Which would you rather have them buy? Electric-assist bicycles, which are still pretty green and whose batteries can be recycled (and I'm sure they are; a lot of stuff from the G-7 gets sent to China for recycling, so they have a big recycling industry already in place), or would you rather have them buy a car or scooter and get around with an internal combustion engine driving a vehicle with a lot more parts in it?
You sound like a typical radical environmentalist: calling a good thing for the environment worthless because it's not perfect. By the way, do you use a vehicle with an internal combustion engine yourself? If you do, then you're also a hypocrite for criticizing China for not being perfectly green while they are still greener than you are.
You and the people who modded you insightful both need to get a tighter grasp on your clue before it all slips away.
His high moral elitist ass has probably never lived abroad, either. Maybe never even traveled abroad.
Unlike almost all Americans who weren't born outside the United States in the first place, I lived abroad for nearly ten years, in countries where English isn't really all that widely spoken, and English spoken proficiently is pretty rare. I speak the language of one of those countries well, and my wife is a native speaker in the other case. That means that I spent a lot of time speaking with people from those countries either directly in their native language, or through my wife as an interpreter.
One thing that I consistently found everywhere is that people were very interested in what life is like where I'm from, and enjoyed talking about what life is like in their country (and also, hearing a foreign resident's perspective on life in their country).
You're completely right, talking about what life is like in each other's country is a fundamental, and certainly isn't offensive. People usually enjoy talking about their country, and many people were delighted to learn that I knew various little things that not many foreigners knew, and some that not even many natives knew about very clearly.
Some people just don't get that "people are all the same" doesn't mean we were all made with the same cookie cutter; it means we all have the same fundamental human rights. The fact that we are not all the same in the cookie-cutter sense is what makes us interesting.
I've experienced the same thing, both on a 5.0 Mustang GT that I had some years ago, and the Mazda Protege that I have now: both vehicles consistently exceed the EPA estimate, both city and highway. My single-tank mileage record on the Mustang (with four-speed overdrive automatic, 2.73 axle) was 27.5 MPG on a long freeway trip. Typical freeway mileage was 25.5 - 26.5.
My Mazda (also an OD automatic, but with a 1.8 liter engine, and a lighter vehicle) gets 32 - 34 on the freeway. That 5 liter engine was under such light load at freeway speeds that it allowed it to produce mileage figures not all that far off from those of an engine a little over one-third its size (and of course, the axle ratio in this Mazda can't be anywhere near 2.73).
I made that migration, too.
My path was FVWM95->Afterstep->Window Maker->Gnome->KDE3.0.
I liked Gnome better than the other things that were around at the time, and steered away from KDE partly because of the licensing issue with Qt that existed at the time, and partly because KDE prior to 3.0 was just so generally ugly and amateurish-looking that I couldn't stand to look at it. Who designed those icons? Blech!
Then KDE 3.0 came out. I tried it out of curiousity and found that it was *worlds* ahead of Gnome. Gnome up to and including 2.4 was nowhere near catching up. Whatever chance they might have had was buried by KDE 3.2.
I will take a look at Gnome 2.6, just to see how they've done, but I have my doubts. I read some of the ideas that were going into the design for Gnome 2.6 and all I could think was "That sounds really stupid."
So, while his review of Gnome 2.6 (or more accurately, of Nautilus in Gnome 2.6) may be written in rather inflamatory language, it should not be dismissed outright as being crap. Even if it's not as bad as he says, the idea of having every double-click open a new window and be so difficult to override is criminally stupid.
People tend to dis KDE by claiming it works too much like the Windows UI, but you can customize that any way you want, and so I do. It's something I like a lot about KDE.
If it has behaviors that are much like Windows by default, so what? That can help new users make the transition. Is that a bad thing? We also need to keep in mind that Microsoft does know a thing or two about UI design. Unlike most open source projects, MS does have UI specialists. Lots of them.
I have a laundry list of things I hate about Windows, but only two things on that list are UI-related:
1) You can't customize the UI much. It just works the way it works;
2) This is the bigger one: you get only one desktop. On my notebook, I have 8 virtual desktops. On my desktop machine, I have 10. This allows me to organize my work by assigning different types of tasks to different desktops, and I have a set pattern of where I put different types of things. Ctrl-F[1-10] takes me to the desktop I need. I cannot do this with Windows and it's a major PITA.
That's it. Those are the only two points of MS UI design that bother me, and the first one is pretry minor, really. If KDE copies some of their ideas from Windows (but don't forget that KDE has a lot of capabilities that the Windows GUI does not have), it could be that KDE developers just know how to recognize a good decision when they see it.
I'm running Konqueror 3.2.2 and saw only the "You don't have IE" message."
;-)
But thanks for confirming that it does indeed use IE's "advanced technology"
Well, actually, this needs to be amended to "Unless you are using IE and want to see shit on a girl's face..." because if you're using some more advanced and secure browser[1] (or presumably, one of those browsers reporting itself as IE, but why would you want to do claim to be using IE?), all you'll see is:
"We're sorry, this site takes advantage of advanced technology only found in the award winning Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser for Windows."
This was fortunate for me, because I stupidly clicked it before seeing your warning. Saved by Konqueror yet again
By "advanced technology," I can only wonder if they mean "This site exploits a security hole found only in IE to take control of your computer while distracting you with a disgusting image." IE not only doesn't support any advanced technology that other browsers don't support (No, ActiveX controls are not an advanced technology, they are just another way of doing what everyone else does, and doing so with less security), it has long been the only major browser to not support tabbed browsing. That makes it pretty hard to think of "Internet Explorer" and "advanced technology" in the same sentence.
[1] Defined as "Pretty much any browser other than Netscape 4.x, which has a security track record about as bad as IE versions below 6, or nearly so.
Just to clarify, what I mean by "doesn't fluctuate at all" is I have all my bandwidth, all the time. I downloaded the 4 GB DVD image of the latest Fedora Core 2, and it was solid at 240 kbps, give or take just a few kbps, from start to finish.
My dad has standard Roadrunner consumer service, and while I have seen speeds on his network far higher than mine (sometimes over 400 kbps, and often over 350, during off-peak hours), I have also seen speeds far lower.
While I suppose I could live with fluctuation (I've never seen a speed below 100 kbps down on his network, and even that is rare), I do also like having a global static IP and no restrictions (save those imposed by law) on what I do with my connection.
I use Roadrunner Business Class. It's not cheap - I pay 90 bucks/mo for 2 mbps down/512 kbps up with 1 global static IP, but:
A) Unlike consumer cable, the rate doesn't seem to fluctuate at all
B) Unlike consumer cable, I can do whatever I want. No port restrictions, etc. Not sure about reselling bandwidth, I'd have to check the TOS again, but I don't want to do that anyway, so to me it doesn't matter (it might to others)
C) In the odd even that you have a problem (the only one I ever had was the first router they gave me was defective and died the next day; they sent somebody out with a replacement, and I got a letter of apology from a vice-president), they have genuinely clued support people handling the RR Business Class customers. I can't say enough good about them. They are polite, professional, and if a problem needs to be escalated, they will escalate it without giving you any crap.
Is it worth 90 bucks for that? To me, yes. YMMV, of course, but if you want something approaching the service level of a leased line from a good provider but only want to pay 90 bucks for it, a Roadrunner Business Class connection looks like a pretty good deal.
I used to live in SE Asia. I have experience with the warez shops there. While I personally was running Linux (it took me over a week to download a set of Debian ISOs!), just about everything and everyone around me was running Warez. It's hard to find anyone in Viet Nam who can afford legitimate, licensed copies, and even harder to find anyone who sells them, unless you buy a new machine (Dell is there, IBM is there, I think HP is too) from a major foreign vendor.
The warez version of XP Pro for about a buck any software shop will install most XP patches, but will not install SP 1. SP 1 recognizes the key as bogus and refuses to install.
In any case, it hardly matters. People are on slow and unreliable dial-up connections. DSL is almost unknown. ISDN is not available at all, as far as I could tell. Hardly anyone has the bandwidth to actually patch their machines, and even fewer people have the knowledge or interest (even fewer than here). There are some really great programmers and admins in Viet Nam, but just like there, those highly knowledgeable people are a tiny minority. Most people with computers neither know nor care about anything like keeping them secure.
So even if MS made all patches available to warez versions of Windows, it would hardly matter in many parts of the world, because the people running them couldn't and/or wouldn't apply the patches anyway.
That's a fair description, I think. Reader's Digest carries a small amount of original content, and so does Slashdot (book reviews, that sort of thing), and anyone who reads a lot has probably seen much of it elsewhere.
I wonder if Reader's Digest has trolls?