Yeah, this is frightening news, but I'd be curious how a person could steal money out of an account if they were an online criminal.
I mean, the only things you can do on an online account is transfer money or cause a check to be sent to you via checkfree. Each of these leaves a "paper" trail where the money goes.
The best I can come up with with my non-criminal mind is to cause havoc by transfering money into my favorite charity's accounts.
What libc libraries,
X libraries, KDE, Gnome, MS-Linux-Extensions, what? Is there some sort of
"standard" configuration that one should have so that most of these ports will work?
"In order to bring the product to the linux market faster, Sonique will require a special modified version of WINE to run in, and will have a memory footprint of 37.5 megs and require at least a P3-500..."
Libertarians scare me too. It's not that minimal government is not a good idea in theory, it is. Government is evil. But it's also a necessary evil.
Face it, people on the whole are stupid uneducated easily-influenced idiots. Take away controlling influences and they'll "educate" themselves from TV. The end result will be corporations having even more power over us.
"Parents know what's best for their children?" Give me a fucking break. Look who is pumping out children. The uneducated idiots. Anyone with an education tends to breed in low numbers, if at all. You know the kind, you see them in the store and when the kid picks up some candy and mommy "bitch slaps" the kid in public and screams "PUT THE FUCKING CANDY DOWN NOW."
And this is not about race. White Trash are just as bad. Poor people are in an economic jail. Yes, anyone can aspire and lift themselves out of it, but only if they ain't STUPID and don't have STUPID parents. Otherwise odds are against them. Face it, poor beget poor, middle class begets middle class and rich beget rich. How many rich people end up with kids that are poor? How many poor people have children that become rich? So, since Blacks started out economically with nothing dozens of years ago, sure, their kids have followed in their footsteps and so will there's.
A lot of White people started out in the U.S. rich or well off. Not a single Black in the U.S. can say this. You see an educated well-off Black person in the U.S. and you don't have to look hard in their family to see a real hero, someone who had to overcome overwhelming odds against them to better themselves.
Getting back to the point, remove government mandates for local public schooling, for example. Sounds good. Parents should be able to pick the best school for their child and pay for it, not blow school taxes on a school that they have no choice in. But that breaks down when it comes to the poor idiot. They can't afford to send their kid to a good school so they don't, or go cheap. Their kid ends up stupid just like Mommy and Daddy. School vouchers? Yet another government program trying to fix a good idea on paper yet it ends up being as much of a mess as the original problem.
Without Government regulations, how far do you think Microsoft would be today? Would the auto companies have ever decided to make cars cleaner burning if they didn't have to? Would that plant a few miles away voluntarily put scrubbers on its stacks to clean out most of the toxins if it didn't have to?
Capitalism means you do whatever it takes to earn the biggest money. Being socially responsible and doing the right thing is often counter to that. If, for example, manufacturer "A" decided to install the more expensive stack scrubbers for environmental purposes and manufacturer "B" decided to not spend the money, the market would punish "A" and drive it out of business since the IDIOTS in the world are too STUPID to care about anything but saving a buck or two on their collect calls (whoops, see the power of advertising!). I mean save a buck or two on what they buy, irregardless of how it was produced, etc...
As for the original article, it's plausible. Big change is best done a wee bit at a time. Take away a little here and a little there. Insert a tad bit here and a tad bit there. Before you know it, you've lost all your rights and freedoms. How? Because PEOPLE ARE STUPID IDIOTS.
Weave's closing thoughts...
Remember:
People are stupid idiots
The real heros in this world are the poor persons who struggle to get an education, get a skill, and become just moderately successful.
People are stupid idiots
Vote early, vote often
People are stupid idiots
Thank you for this opportunity to whore for kharma!
You might want to ask a lawyer from your college, but Microsoft is on very shaky ground when they demand you have proper LICENSES... They can demand you have enough legit copies for all your machines, but being that it's all the same thing and if you buy fifty CDs, it's fifty identical copies, they can't claim that they're trying to sell a different version for each one, they hurt their case a bit.
That's not how the Select program works. You get a box full of every product microsoft sells every 45 days and no legal rights to install any of them unless you buy paper licenses for what you intall.
So when I buy 400 copies of Office 2000, all I get is one certificate that says we can install 400 copies of it on 400 separate computers. That's it.
To their credit, it's a nice program. I can actually install it right away as long as I get the license purchased within 30 days. This is good for a business who often has immediate needs. No need to wait for a product to ship. Also, no need to register the products (e.g., the annoying consumer office 2000 50-tries then you can't run it hassle).
What I am upset about is having to pay for the OEM copy of Windows 98 which is never used, just reformatted and a Select CD copy of NT is installed (and appropriate license and CLient Access License purchased...)
At the college I work at, we get the new PCs in by the dozens, order NT workstation and CAL via our select agreement, reformat windows 98 off of it, then apply NT.
It's cheaper for us to buy via Select than to allow the computer vendor to pre-load NT on the box, but we are still buying two OSes for each box. Windows 98 which is never booted (the tax) and then NT 4.0.
You know those SPA studies that claim loses from software piracy? They should conduct a study about how much companies waste on software licenses that are never used.
Along those lines, it's often really hard to keep track of various upgrade paths for different software packages (not limited to Microsoft) so large companies usually just don't bother. Need a new version, just buy it at regular pricing... More waste...
That's the biggest reason I love Linux stuff and use it whenever I can. One less licensing headache and administrative nightmare to worry about...
Ah, a world where I am not liable for my user's actions, where I don't have to run around and conduct audits on PC desktops to ensure license compliance...
This is especially true when one realizes that Bruce Perens and RMS are currently in the process of updating the GPL so that even internally distributed software may count as software being distributed and hence should be Opened
Are you sure?
I attended a lecture by RMS in July at H2K and he specifically stated that he has absolutely no problem with companies and organizations taking GPL source, modifying it for internal use only, and not releasing the changes.
RMS is probably the most mis-quoted person next to Jesus Himself in the history of this planet -- (and yes, I'm doing the same, I know...)
Every member of the WAP forum and especially phone.com folks should be lined up against a wall a shot for crimes against the net..
For the love of "standards", first it was HDML, then WML, and now finally they decide to go with real open standards.
You know, you just can't download a new browser to your phone. You're stuck with it. There are still phones being sold today that have the UP.Browser 3.0 in them which only supports HDML. Then there's UP.Browser 3.1 which has some support for WML and UP.Browser 4.0 which I'm not even sure any phones have that one in it yet.
So now we are finally going to go with XHTML and all us sorry web developers who try to hack together a page that supports WAP devices have to develop the same content for even more languages.
It's just frustration, that's all. For example, Apache has nice content-negotiation features but they are all but useless because every browser has to advertise that it can handle everything. My Motorola 7868W when hitting web sites via the verizon wap gateway, sends out an Accept: string that includes text/html as accepted with no quality value associated with it, as in "I prefer X-HDML or WML but I'll take text/html if you have absolutely nothing else."
No, can't do that I guess. So one has to hack together a script to parse the browser string for UP.browser, get the correct version number out of it, then decide on your own what content to serve the browser....
Such simple ideas that would make the world a better place interopably and they are never done.
For example, for chrissakes, damn Internet Explorer still says it's Mozilla... And they ALL say they accept */* with no q= qualifier...:(
...the Commission was given the legislative mandate to fund connections to every one of two million classrooms in all 100,000 schools in our country.
As someone who sweated bricks bringing my employer, a community college, onto the Internet in 1993, I knew first hand that it takes a lot more to bring Internet access to students than just bringing it to the front door, including internal wiring, computer purchases, and the biggest part, local desktop computer management.
So when the initiative to wire up every classroom came down, I wondered if they'd also hire the army of techs to take care of it all.
Of course, they didn't.
Instead, locally, we have some poor underpaid state sod who runs around to a dozen or so schools under his watch and re-ghosts the labs and goes away, which makes the computers usable for about half a day until various students, both intentional and accidental, re-trash the install so the computers sit unused again until the poor sod gets back there in a few weeks.
Yeah, there are better ways to do it. We install NT on our classroom desktops with strict ACLs and policies to prevent local changes as much as possible. Of course, NT by design is pretty braindead in this area so you have to have system directories with change access to everyone else it won't work at all (imagine/bin as 1777) so problems do happen, but not as often.
But that's the point, these schools everywhere don't have the resources to develop better solutions to net use in the classroom, so they rely on limited techs doing the impossible while the computers sit unusable for most of the time.
And don't get me started about how the teachers themselves often never got the training to use it.
In a lot of poorer areas, their school's Internet connection is a few PCs in the library and that's it.
But hey, literally it may be true. Every school has Internet access. So we can call it a "success" I guess...:-(
It's been a long while since I mucked in the Mac universe, but this will probably bring me back.
But I am curious. What about the file system? Do Macs still have separate resource and data forks with each file? Will this be supported by the file system in OS X? What about the app and creator 4-byte codes (which are actually in the resource fork). Will that be used, or will they move to the horrible filename extension crap that UNIX and DOS world suffers under?:-(
The demographics for Napster are far wider than what the RIAA has been claiming, 50% of the users are over 40 according to some reports. This is a group that did not, in general, consider music a vital part of their lives anymore. Napster has re-awakened their interest in music.
I'm 41 and my interest in music is still a vital part of my life, so I take exception to that. The problem here is that us older folk just don't have anytime to discover new music, so we listen to boring-ass classic rock stations playing the same ole shit from the Doors and the Rolling Stones over and over...
So how does one get to listen to new stuff, say "Hey, that rocks", and go buy it? I don't have time to watch MTV (although when I try to watch, they never are playing music videos anyway). The radio anymore is either classic rock or hip hop. I don't get to clubs anymore. All that us old folk do is work, go home, fall asleep. The only radio I can receive where I work is WJBR, easy listening crap.
While I've also never had the patience to use Napster, I've certainly had friends and co-workers ICQ me mp3s of Rage Against the Machine, Kitie, and Dream Theater. I load them into Sonique on loop, listen a few times while doing other work in the office, say "Wow, this shit is great" and I go out and have purchased the CDs. In the case of Dream Theater, I've even went to see their concerts. (RIAA better sue AOL/ICQ I guess for allowing files to be transfered thru it...)
I can honestly say, ALL of my CD purchases in the past few years were the direct result of listening to ripped mp3s.
Does it make it right? Probably not. But the music industry still has their heads up their ass and if they were smart, they'd figure out someway to adapt and profit from this new era. This is not going to go away. They better adapt or they can die.
It's not that I hate fighting these battles per se, it's that I keep having to fight them, over and over and over again, regardless of how many times I try to put my foot down.
What makes it even more difficult is when you fight the battle, then some web weenie with FrontPage in hand "designs" a web page that does exactly what they want (on *their* monitor/computer) and then they treat that person like he's an expert and assume you don't know jack.
And the weenies are winning every time. For example, I sent e-mail to msnbc.com saying I could not get to the sub-catagories using Opera. They throw up an annoying ad, and then it redirects to the SAME ad. I got e-mail back saying I should use IE or Netscape to view their site.:(
The GPL has not been really tested in court. If it ever was and lost, and others could take GPL code, embrace, extend, and extinguish it, nothing could be done.
Imagine a world where....
Microsoft announces a Linux distro
A few months later, Microsoft announces they are bringing the award-wining Windows GUI to Linux.
In order to have graphic programs work under the new Linux/Windows GUI, developers are encouraged to port their Linux programs to Linux/MFC. MFC is currently not open source due to IP issues.
Users begin to demand stuff run under the Windows GUI on Linux, developers comply
In order to improve performance of the wildly successful Microsoft/Linux Windowing system, Microsoft announces that they are integrating the GUI with a customized and optomized version of the Linux kernel. Microsoft refuses to release changes to the kernel due to their Intellectual Property being included in it.
Microsoft gets sued by the only group that still cares, FSF and loses.
Entire Linux environment now runs under a GUI, if you want a shell prompt, you can still open a window as a child process of the environment
Microsoft Linux has 90% of the Linux market.
Microsoft insists that the press refer to Microsoft Linux as Microsoft/Linux and not just Linux to avoid confusion with those other minor distros. No one thinks this is unreasonable.
Microsoft releases Windows 2005 and says that Windows 2005 is better suited to the business market and Microsoft Linux 2003 is for computer hobbyists only.
Development of the remaining "free" linux distros has stalled and not progressed for years because everyone is writing code for Microsoft Linux since it owns 90% of the market.
The FSF continues to try to develop a free version of MFC libraries that uses the Hurd Kernel, which still loses files once in a while due to kernel bugs (had to add some humor in this!) FSF gets sued by Microsoft and wins.
Microsoft abandons Microsoft Linux and concentrates on its core OS development branch.
In this world, it pays to be paranoid. Stallman "forgiving" code linked to Qt is a legal move to ensure in the future in court he isn't cornered and asked why he never objected to past GPL license violations...
So what if he doesn't have the social graces of a well-oiled PR machine. He's a geek after all! Look past the personality and concentrate on the importance of not losing sight of the main issues...
Businesses like dealing with other businesses. When things fuck up (and they do),
it's nice to have someone to blame, someone who has a responsibility to back up their product.
I keep hearing this but I just don't get it. Say your business depends on Microsoft software and it abends or fails to perform as you expected. What's there to do? Sue Microsoft? Go to them and ask them to fix it for you by the next business day?
Now commercial UNIX vendors, that's a different ball game. I've had experience with DG/UX (Data General) for example. On the rare occasion a system panics, it "phones home" and sends diag packets to them, they call me, tell me what caused the panic, and then issue an STR for it. I then get a patch a day or so later.
We pay a pretty penny for it too, and there's no reason why that level of support can not be had for free-source OSes either.
But Microsoft, you call them for high-end support, some tech searches the KB for you (big deal) and ends up telling you to reboot and see if it happens again...
In short, it doesn't matter if the OS is closed or free, it's the support and what you're willing to pay for that matters...
Now, getting back to topic... Metcalfe has a horrible track record when it comes to him and his predictions. He'll be eating these words as well eventually!
RMS just thinks that he is entitled to handouts and freebies for eternity without giving anything back to those who support him financially.
Come again? He hasn't given anything back? That's ridiculous. Linux wouldn't exist today if RMS hadn't helped develop the tools required for Linus to create the kernel in the first place. A Linux kernel would have been a bit useless without a shell, C compiler, not to mention, awk, sed, etc...
Then again, from reading your post history, I think you have trouble understanding the motivation in the first place. Capitalism is work exchanged for some sort of consideration. Usually it means money, but for some it's the desire to persue a cause, achieve some sort of recognition among peers, or purely for one's own self interest.
The reason socialist societies fail is because of central planning where one HAS to do a certain task for the good of the people and not to get any consideration in return.
You might be surprised to learn that I heard RMS in person say that governments that dabble in "central planning" are not good.
And if, in return for his time he wants to ensure that his code isn't moved from some free to non-free state, that's his perfect right, as well as to try and convince others to follow along.
And if you don't like the philosphy, you're perfectly free to chose to use 100% non GPLed software or develop it yourself and license it under any terms you want.
Do you know why RMS started the FSF? Because he saw previously free (beer) software go proprietary. A lot of people at MIT worked hard on X-windows many moons ago, had no restrictions on its use, saw commercial UNIX vendors take it, tweak it a bit, and then release it as a closed-source commercial program only and prohibited any copying, modifications, etc...
Hence, the GPL. As a developer, you can release something as free source, and have reasonable assurance that someone else won't take your hard work, add a few proprietary things to it, release it as closed source, charge big bucks for it, make a fortune, and the user community get squat.
RMS would rather not have to have the GPL (he says so in his standard guest lecture he gives out on a regular basis). The GPL is a necessary evil.
As far as QT and Troll Tech goes, because it was not GPL (they initially wanted money if it was used in commercial settings apparently), a lot of people who believe in Free software devoted time and energy to developing Gnone. And now we have a splintered *NIX desktop world.
If Qt was GPL from the start, if KDE developers chose not to use Qt, then instead of a wasted effort duplicating and re-inventing the wheel, dedicated developers could have been working on a single desktop system.
People who believe in Free software have put a lot of effort into Gnone so it would still be possible to have a totally free (speech) platform to work on. It's no wonder that Gnone developers don't want to just throw out Gnome just because Trolltech finally decided to make Qt GPL....
Imagine if Linux was not GPLed. Red Hat could leverage it's current market share and resources, decide that the enhancements it makes to Linux can't be shared with "competitors" and then prohibit installation unless you have a Red Hat license for each computer you install on.
(Just picking on Red Hat because they are the largest and I needed a hypothetical example. Nothing personal guys!:)
I am in charge of a 25-person computer support department at a large 2-year college..
So I'm playing away at d2 and set my ICQ away message saying what server I am in.
So in pops one of my staff that is two levels of supervision below me, walks up to me, and out comes flying a whole lotta great shit. 40,000 gold pieces, great armor, weapons, gems, etc, etc... It was a shower of goodies just pouring out from his character!
What a PERFECT way to brown nose the big boss! I always have hated it when staff tries to talk to me like they care and roll on the BS compliments and all. But THIS dude, yeah baby. It worked.
Then again, he still ain't getting a raise, but I *was* appreciative!:-):-)
Here you are, going out into all kinds of shit, and risking your ass, to save those pathetic villagers.
And are they grateful? Oh yeah, maybe giving you a trinket or something or a whopping 10% discount in their shops. Oh boy...
I mean, like, I retrieve a tool for the blacksmith in act 1 and she imbues it and that's it. Just once. Oh, thanks a lot. Er, how about making me whatever I want so I can save your friends and family while you sit here nice and comfy in your village, eh??
Oh, and gee wiz. My stash is a bit small so I'm forced to sell all the great stuff I find at rip-off prices. Nice of you to profit from me almost getting myself killed and hauling this great loot back. How about allowing me to rent a PS Storage Shed for my loot for free?!
But seriously, what a GREAT game. I mean, who really needs logic? Without having it the way it is, it wouldn't be the same!
More and more book publishers are also including CD-ROMs with text books. The problem here is 1) It requires Windows 2) It requires loading of software to make it work.
The latter is a real problem for those of us who have to administer computer labs. We lock down lab stations with restrictive NT workstation settings that prevent program installs, so when students get CD-ROMs they must use in labs, they don't work unless we go through and pre-install the stupid software for them.
These days, it's stupid to not have autoplay run the program from the CD without the need for an install anyway. If they just did that, people could just insert and run. No hassle.
But, as another poster said, why even bother in the first place? This stuff should be on a web page somewhere anyway.
Andover needs to sue the guy, and anyone that links to his site, and the program that copied the GIFs, as well as Apache Foundation, PHP authors, Mandrake, and the authors of fastcgi for providing him the tools that allowed him to do this.
We must protect their Intellectual Property rights. They must not stop. Contact the heads of Texas A&M and demand the page be removed. If they don't comply, firewall them at the backbone, at ISPs. This must not be allowed to continue...
Well, the U.S. market is far from the saturation point. The problem is the wireless carriers are still gouging the market place.
Wireless penetration in other countries is larger than in the U.S. The price per minute in the U.S. is still around 25/cents/minute unless you buy a very large bulk of minutes each month in advance and use or lose them. I've heard in Israel, for example, airtime is around a U.S. penny a minute.
It's also difficult for existing customers to upgrade their phones without paying through the nose. The carriers should realize the old model of trying to give away the phone to get customers doesn't work unless you are trying to jump start a market. It's already there. Lower your air rates across the board and charge a higher fee for the phone itself.
I mean, just try going into a cell store and tell them you want to buy a phone without activation and see what kind of looks you get...
HP has horrible driver support for NT and Windows 2000 in their printers and scanners. It's like they think that everyone runs Windows 9x, even businesses. Many of their products don't have NT drivers, and those that do don't have anywhere near the features of their corresponding Win 98 drivers...
.edu.us -- OH! an even better idea than.edu! And people *MUST* be an educational institution!
At least.edu is not polluted. In fact, it has become MORE restrictive. You must be an accredited 4-year degree granting institution to get a.edu address. My employer, a community college, was lucky they got there's in 1993 and was grandfathered, else we'd be dtcc.co.de.us instead of dtcc.edu - - -
A good thing too. My boss wanted me to help him register a friends tech school in PA. He wanted a.edu to make it sound "proper." I told him that could not happen. He was not happy!:)
Just don't ask me to code a complex table by hand and expect it to be done within thirty minutes.
Who said anything about "by hand." I use Perl and CGI.pm to output pages all the time, whether they be dynamically generated or just run from a job to create a "static" page.:)
It also forces you to structure the table correctly so you don't miss any end tags or nest them wrong.
Example...
print table(TR(td("1"),td("2")));
btw, you *are* using tables to display tabular data and not for element positioning, right?!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, the only things you can do on an online account is transfer money or cause a check to be sent to you via checkfree. Each of these leaves a "paper" trail where the money goes.
The best I can come up with with my non-criminal mind is to cause havoc by transfering money into my favorite charity's accounts.
"In order to bring the product to the linux market faster, Sonique will require a special modified version of WINE to run in, and will have a memory footprint of 37.5 megs and require at least a P3-500..."
Only kidding.... I hope....
Libertarians scare me too. It's not that minimal government is not a good idea in theory, it is. Government is evil. But it's also a necessary evil.
Face it, people on the whole are stupid uneducated easily-influenced idiots. Take away controlling influences and they'll "educate" themselves from TV. The end result will be corporations having even more power over us.
"Parents know what's best for their children?" Give me a fucking break. Look who is pumping out children. The uneducated idiots. Anyone with an education tends to breed in low numbers, if at all. You know the kind, you see them in the store and when the kid picks up some candy and mommy "bitch slaps" the kid in public and screams "PUT THE FUCKING CANDY DOWN NOW."
And this is not about race. White Trash are just as bad. Poor people are in an economic jail. Yes, anyone can aspire and lift themselves out of it, but only if they ain't STUPID and don't have STUPID parents. Otherwise odds are against them. Face it, poor beget poor, middle class begets middle class and rich beget rich. How many rich people end up with kids that are poor? How many poor people have children that become rich? So, since Blacks started out economically with nothing dozens of years ago, sure, their kids have followed in their footsteps and so will there's.
A lot of White people started out in the U.S. rich or well off. Not a single Black in the U.S. can say this. You see an educated well-off Black person in the U.S. and you don't have to look hard in their family to see a real hero, someone who had to overcome overwhelming odds against them to better themselves.
Getting back to the point, remove government mandates for local public schooling, for example. Sounds good. Parents should be able to pick the best school for their child and pay for it, not blow school taxes on a school that they have no choice in. But that breaks down when it comes to the poor idiot. They can't afford to send their kid to a good school so they don't, or go cheap. Their kid ends up stupid just like Mommy and Daddy. School vouchers? Yet another government program trying to fix a good idea on paper yet it ends up being as much of a mess as the original problem.
Without Government regulations, how far do you think Microsoft would be today? Would the auto companies have ever decided to make cars cleaner burning if they didn't have to? Would that plant a few miles away voluntarily put scrubbers on its stacks to clean out most of the toxins if it didn't have to?
Capitalism means you do whatever it takes to earn the biggest money. Being socially responsible and doing the right thing is often counter to that. If, for example, manufacturer "A" decided to install the more expensive stack scrubbers for environmental purposes and manufacturer "B" decided to not spend the money, the market would punish "A" and drive it out of business since the IDIOTS in the world are too STUPID to care about anything but saving a buck or two on their collect calls (whoops, see the power of advertising!). I mean save a buck or two on what they buy, irregardless of how it was produced, etc...
As for the original article, it's plausible. Big change is best done a wee bit at a time. Take away a little here and a little there. Insert a tad bit here and a tad bit there. Before you know it, you've lost all your rights and freedoms. How? Because PEOPLE ARE STUPID IDIOTS.
Weave's closing thoughts...
Remember:
- People are stupid idiots
- The real heros in this world are the poor persons who struggle to get an education, get a skill, and become just moderately successful.
- People are stupid idiots
- Vote early, vote often
- People are stupid idiots
Thank you for this opportunity to whore for kharma!That's not how the Select program works. You get a box full of every product microsoft sells every 45 days and no legal rights to install any of them unless you buy paper licenses for what you intall.
So when I buy 400 copies of Office 2000, all I get is one certificate that says we can install 400 copies of it on 400 separate computers. That's it.
To their credit, it's a nice program. I can actually install it right away as long as I get the license purchased within 30 days. This is good for a business who often has immediate needs. No need to wait for a product to ship. Also, no need to register the products (e.g., the annoying consumer office 2000 50-tries then you can't run it hassle).
What I am upset about is having to pay for the OEM copy of Windows 98 which is never used, just reformatted and a Select CD copy of NT is installed (and appropriate license and CLient Access License purchased...)
It's cheaper for us to buy via Select than to allow the computer vendor to pre-load NT on the box, but we are still buying two OSes for each box. Windows 98 which is never booted (the tax) and then NT 4.0.
You know those SPA studies that claim loses from software piracy? They should conduct a study about how much companies waste on software licenses that are never used.
Along those lines, it's often really hard to keep track of various upgrade paths for different software packages (not limited to Microsoft) so large companies usually just don't bother. Need a new version, just buy it at regular pricing... More waste...
That's the biggest reason I love Linux stuff and use it whenever I can. One less licensing headache and administrative nightmare to worry about...
Ah, a world where I am not liable for my user's actions, where I don't have to run around and conduct audits on PC desktops to ensure license compliance...
Never happen... :(
Are you sure?
I attended a lecture by RMS in July at H2K and he specifically stated that he has absolutely no problem with companies and organizations taking GPL source, modifying it for internal use only, and not releasing the changes.
RMS is probably the most mis-quoted person next to Jesus Himself in the history of this planet -- (and yes, I'm doing the same, I know...)
For the love of "standards", first it was HDML, then WML, and now finally they decide to go with real open standards.
You know, you just can't download a new browser to your phone. You're stuck with it. There are still phones being sold today that have the UP.Browser 3.0 in them which only supports HDML. Then there's UP.Browser 3.1 which has some support for WML and UP.Browser 4.0 which I'm not even sure any phones have that one in it yet.
So now we are finally going to go with XHTML and all us sorry web developers who try to hack together a page that supports WAP devices have to develop the same content for even more languages.
It's just frustration, that's all. For example, Apache has nice content-negotiation features but they are all but useless because every browser has to advertise that it can handle everything. My Motorola 7868W when hitting web sites via the verizon wap gateway, sends out an Accept: string that includes text/html as accepted with no quality value associated with it, as in "I prefer X-HDML or WML but I'll take text/html if you have absolutely nothing else."
No, can't do that I guess. So one has to hack together a script to parse the browser string for UP.browser, get the correct version number out of it, then decide on your own what content to serve the browser....
Such simple ideas that would make the world a better place interopably and they are never done.
For example, for chrissakes, damn Internet Explorer still says it's Mozilla... And they ALL say they accept */* with no q= qualifier... :(
As someone who sweated bricks bringing my employer, a community college, onto the Internet in 1993, I knew first hand that it takes a lot more to bring Internet access to students than just bringing it to the front door, including internal wiring, computer purchases, and the biggest part, local desktop computer management.
So when the initiative to wire up every classroom came down, I wondered if they'd also hire the army of techs to take care of it all.
Of course, they didn't.
Instead, locally, we have some poor underpaid state sod who runs around to a dozen or so schools under his watch and re-ghosts the labs and goes away, which makes the computers usable for about half a day until various students, both intentional and accidental, re-trash the install so the computers sit unused again until the poor sod gets back there in a few weeks.
Yeah, there are better ways to do it. We install NT on our classroom desktops with strict ACLs and policies to prevent local changes as much as possible. Of course, NT by design is pretty braindead in this area so you have to have system directories with change access to everyone else it won't work at all (imagine /bin as 1777) so problems do happen, but not as often.
But that's the point, these schools everywhere don't have the resources to develop better solutions to net use in the classroom, so they rely on limited techs doing the impossible while the computers sit unusable for most of the time.
And don't get me started about how the teachers themselves often never got the training to use it.
In a lot of poorer areas, their school's Internet connection is a few PCs in the library and that's it.
But hey, literally it may be true. Every school has Internet access. So we can call it a "success" I guess... :-(
But I am curious. What about the file system? Do Macs still have separate resource and data forks with each file? Will this be supported by the file system in OS X? What about the app and creator 4-byte codes (which are actually in the resource fork). Will that be used, or will they move to the horrible filename extension crap that UNIX and DOS world suffers under? :-(
I'm 41 and my interest in music is still a vital part of my life, so I take exception to that. The problem here is that us older folk just don't have anytime to discover new music, so we listen to boring-ass classic rock stations playing the same ole shit from the Doors and the Rolling Stones over and over...
So how does one get to listen to new stuff, say "Hey, that rocks", and go buy it? I don't have time to watch MTV (although when I try to watch, they never are playing music videos anyway). The radio anymore is either classic rock or hip hop. I don't get to clubs anymore. All that us old folk do is work, go home, fall asleep. The only radio I can receive where I work is WJBR, easy listening crap.
While I've also never had the patience to use Napster, I've certainly had friends and co-workers ICQ me mp3s of Rage Against the Machine, Kitie, and Dream Theater. I load them into Sonique on loop, listen a few times while doing other work in the office, say "Wow, this shit is great" and I go out and have purchased the CDs. In the case of Dream Theater, I've even went to see their concerts. (RIAA better sue AOL/ICQ I guess for allowing files to be transfered thru it...)
I can honestly say, ALL of my CD purchases in the past few years were the direct result of listening to ripped mp3s.
Does it make it right? Probably not. But the music industry still has their heads up their ass and if they were smart, they'd figure out someway to adapt and profit from this new era. This is not going to go away. They better adapt or they can die.
What makes it even more difficult is when you fight the battle, then some web weenie with FrontPage in hand "designs" a web page that does exactly what they want (on *their* monitor/computer) and then they treat that person like he's an expert and assume you don't know jack.
And the weenies are winning every time. For example, I sent e-mail to msnbc.com saying I could not get to the sub-catagories using Opera. They throw up an annoying ad, and then it redirects to the SAME ad. I got e-mail back saying I should use IE or Netscape to view their site. :(
Imagine a world where....
In this world, it pays to be paranoid. Stallman "forgiving" code linked to Qt is a legal move to ensure in the future in court he isn't cornered and asked why he never objected to past GPL license violations...
So what if he doesn't have the social graces of a well-oiled PR machine. He's a geek after all! Look past the personality and concentrate on the importance of not losing sight of the main issues...
I keep hearing this but I just don't get it. Say your business depends on Microsoft software and it abends or fails to perform as you expected. What's there to do? Sue Microsoft? Go to them and ask them to fix it for you by the next business day?
Now commercial UNIX vendors, that's a different ball game. I've had experience with DG/UX (Data General) for example. On the rare occasion a system panics, it "phones home" and sends diag packets to them, they call me, tell me what caused the panic, and then issue an STR for it. I then get a patch a day or so later.
We pay a pretty penny for it too, and there's no reason why that level of support can not be had for free-source OSes either.
But Microsoft, you call them for high-end support, some tech searches the KB for you (big deal) and ends up telling you to reboot and see if it happens again...
In short, it doesn't matter if the OS is closed or free, it's the support and what you're willing to pay for that matters...
Now, getting back to topic... Metcalfe has a horrible track record when it comes to him and his predictions. He'll be eating these words as well eventually!
Come again? He hasn't given anything back? That's ridiculous. Linux wouldn't exist today if RMS hadn't helped develop the tools required for Linus to create the kernel in the first place. A Linux kernel would have been a bit useless without a shell, C compiler, not to mention, awk, sed, etc...
Then again, from reading your post history, I think you have trouble understanding the motivation in the first place. Capitalism is work exchanged for some sort of consideration. Usually it means money, but for some it's the desire to persue a cause, achieve some sort of recognition among peers, or purely for one's own self interest.
The reason socialist societies fail is because of central planning where one HAS to do a certain task for the good of the people and not to get any consideration in return.
You might be surprised to learn that I heard RMS in person say that governments that dabble in "central planning" are not good.
And if, in return for his time he wants to ensure that his code isn't moved from some free to non-free state, that's his perfect right, as well as to try and convince others to follow along.
And if you don't like the philosphy, you're perfectly free to chose to use 100% non GPLed software or develop it yourself and license it under any terms you want.
Hence, the GPL. As a developer, you can release something as free source, and have reasonable assurance that someone else won't take your hard work, add a few proprietary things to it, release it as closed source, charge big bucks for it, make a fortune, and the user community get squat.
RMS would rather not have to have the GPL (he says so in his standard guest lecture he gives out on a regular basis). The GPL is a necessary evil.
As far as QT and Troll Tech goes, because it was not GPL (they initially wanted money if it was used in commercial settings apparently), a lot of people who believe in Free software devoted time and energy to developing Gnone. And now we have a splintered *NIX desktop world.
If Qt was GPL from the start, if KDE developers chose not to use Qt, then instead of a wasted effort duplicating and re-inventing the wheel, dedicated developers could have been working on a single desktop system.
People who believe in Free software have put a lot of effort into Gnone so it would still be possible to have a totally free (speech) platform to work on. It's no wonder that Gnone developers don't want to just throw out Gnome just because Trolltech finally decided to make Qt GPL....
Imagine if Linux was not GPLed. Red Hat could leverage it's current market share and resources, decide that the enhancements it makes to Linux can't be shared with "competitors" and then prohibit installation unless you have a Red Hat license for each computer you install on.
(Just picking on Red Hat because they are the largest and I needed a hypothetical example. Nothing personal guys! :)
No shit. If you can't see the intentional humour in my post, you need to lighten up...
So I'm playing away at d2 and set my ICQ away message saying what server I am in.
So in pops one of my staff that is two levels of supervision below me, walks up to me, and out comes flying a whole lotta great shit. 40,000 gold pieces, great armor, weapons, gems, etc, etc... It was a shower of goodies just pouring out from his character!
What a PERFECT way to brown nose the big boss! I always have hated it when staff tries to talk to me like they care and roll on the BS compliments and all. But THIS dude, yeah baby. It worked.
Then again, he still ain't getting a raise, but I *was* appreciative! :-) :-)
And are they grateful? Oh yeah, maybe giving you a trinket or something or a whopping 10% discount in their shops. Oh boy...
I mean, like, I retrieve a tool for the blacksmith in act 1 and she imbues it and that's it. Just once. Oh, thanks a lot. Er, how about making me whatever I want so I can save your friends and family while you sit here nice and comfy in your village, eh??
Oh, and gee wiz. My stash is a bit small so I'm forced to sell all the great stuff I find at rip-off prices. Nice of you to profit from me almost getting myself killed and hauling this great loot back. How about allowing me to rent a PS Storage Shed for my loot for free?!
But seriously, what a GREAT game. I mean, who really needs logic? Without having it the way it is, it wouldn't be the same!
The latter is a real problem for those of us who have to administer computer labs. We lock down lab stations with restrictive NT workstation settings that prevent program installs, so when students get CD-ROMs they must use in labs, they don't work unless we go through and pre-install the stupid software for them.
These days, it's stupid to not have autoplay run the program from the CD without the need for an install anyway. If they just did that, people could just insert and run. No hassle.
But, as another poster said, why even bother in the first place? This stuff should be on a web page somewhere anyway.
We must protect their Intellectual Property rights. They must not stop. Contact the heads of Texas A&M and demand the page be removed. If they don't comply, firewall them at the backbone, at ISPs. This must not be allowed to continue...
Wireless penetration in other countries is larger than in the U.S. The price per minute in the U.S. is still around 25/cents/minute unless you buy a very large bulk of minutes each month in advance and use or lose them. I've heard in Israel, for example, airtime is around a U.S. penny a minute.
It's also difficult for existing customers to upgrade their phones without paying through the nose. The carriers should realize the old model of trying to give away the phone to get customers doesn't work unless you are trying to jump start a market. It's already there. Lower your air rates across the board and charge a higher fee for the phone itself.
I mean, just try going into a cell store and tell them you want to buy a phone without activation and see what kind of looks you get...
HP has horrible driver support for NT and Windows 2000 in their printers and scanners. It's like they think that everyone runs Windows 9x, even businesses. Many of their products don't have NT drivers, and those that do don't have anywhere near the features of their corresponding Win 98 drivers...
At least .edu is not polluted. In fact, it has become MORE restrictive. You must be an accredited 4-year degree granting institution to get a .edu address. My employer, a community college, was lucky they got there's in 1993 and was grandfathered, else we'd be dtcc.co.de.us instead of dtcc.edu - - -
A good thing too. My boss wanted me to help him register a friends tech school in PA. He wanted a .edu to make it sound "proper." I told him that could not happen. He was not happy! :)
Who said anything about "by hand." I use Perl and CGI.pm to output pages all the time, whether they be dynamically generated or just run from a job to create a "static" page. :)
It also forces you to structure the table correctly so you don't miss any end tags or nest them wrong.
Example...
print table(TR(td("1"),td("2")));
btw, you *are* using tables to display tabular data and not for element positioning, right?! ;-)
Whatever! :)