Germany was already a democracy... Adolf Hitler was democratically elected, and him being removed from power had a lot more to do with the USSR and the UK than it did the US.
By restricting these "evil" regimes, you just hurt the people... The ruling class have enough money to buy servers in other places and proxy them, or just rent blocks of ips from foreign companies and have them rerouted etc...
But it goes to show the dangers of using a proprietary closed service, you can be cut off easily... You couldn't do this so easily to an open service like XMPP or Email.
You can use non US based free webmail, such as mail.ru or mbox.bol.bg... There are tons of jabber servers located outside of the US which allow free accounts and will interoperate with google perfectly well.
It just goes to show the danger of using proprietary closed network services... This now means that anyone in these countries is unable to communicate with people using MSN anywhere else in the world...
On the other hand, with a freely federated service like email or jabber/xmpp the individual provider doesn't matter.
While the advantages of Linux are well known to most people on Slashdot, the average user has no idea... They want to buy software on a store, simply because they do not know they can select it for free from the package manager and install it automatically... Companies like Dell need to explain the advantages and differences to customers and make it easy for them to make an informed decision... And they should offer dual boot systems so that users, having read about the advantages of linux, can try them out without risking anything.
I'm all for Ubuntu gaining significant desktop share... If it forces companies to take notice and support linux and open standards... Making software designed for Ubuntu run on another linux distro or another unix like system such as freebsd is much easier than making windows software run.
The issue is that you need a certain level of market share before it becomes impossible to ignore you... MS have enough marketshare that they can push through proprietary technologies designed specifically to exclude competitors, which then make it painful to use anything else. If linux gains sufficient traction, then proprietary lockin crap like that will no longer fly and companies will be forced to follow standards. Linux currently has the greatest chance of gaining sufficient share to make this happen, at which time it will be perfectly feasible to use BSD or Solaris etc too... Until then, anyone who values choice should push Linux if only as a means to an end.
Yes, sell low spec hardware with linux designed specifically for just email/web, sell it very cheaply and in a small stylish box. Tout the low price, and the "green" aspect of using so little power.
I would say the embedded market trounces the desktop market in terms of size... The average family may have 1 or 2 desktops, and possibly use one at work... But they will have several TVs, phones, cable/satelite receivers/recorders, routers, games consoles and various other computer controlled appliances.
I see macs in public (laptops) all the time, it all depends wether you frequent places where people are sat down for extended periods of time, like trains, planes and stations/airports etc. I see lots of other laptops too, but unless you get a look at the screen it's hard to tell what's running on them... I have seen laptops running linux tho, mostly eee netbooks.
But if you release the source to that, someone could take it as a base and implement the remaining functionality. Wether you release it or not, it still scratches your itch, but it could potentially benefit someone else. Either they have the same itch to scratch, or it could just save them some work having less of the protocol to implement.
It's easier for manufacturers to release the specs and maybe donate a couple of units to oss developers, so that drivers will be written... Alternatively, they can follow existing standards, in the printing world that would be postscript, and then not need to write drivers at all.
Those tight fisted businesses are also perfect candidates for Linux, especially if the major distros improve their performance on lowend (read: old) hardware... If such businesses can't keep their existing old windows installs, and upgrading would also require new hardware, the option to run linux on the hardware they already have would look very attractive. Also older hardware is far more likely to work well, as the drivers have long since been written and thoroughly debugged.
It's extremely hard to quantify the server percentage... At our company, i guess percentage of Linux to other types of server is about 80% linux, but none of those installs were purchased, and none of the hardware came preinstalled.
I also have a number of embedded devices that came with linux, tv receivers/recorders, a nokia tablet, routers/access points, and some others.. Most of these devices don't even advertise that they run linux and most people who use them would be completely unaware.
As someone who's been using unix for years i can agree with that... I used to have a lot of time on my hands and enjoyed messing around with the system, tweaking every last thing... Nowadays i have Ubuntu and OSX as my workstation systems... They work out of the box and present very little hassle, but the underlying power and flexibility is there incase i need to do something obscure. I do find OSX's lack of package management extremely limiting tho, apple should port the iphone app store to desktop osx, but make it apt compatible so it's possible and easy to add third party repositories...
Many sites check the OS type reported by your banner, and will reject non windows systems, some often don't accept macos either... Linux users, being generally more technically capable are more likely to have changed their user-agent string, or have an install of wine or a vm handy for those incompatible sites. I had a conversation with a web developer once, who said he didn't bother making his site compatible with non ie browsers, because people using those browsers never went past the front page... The front page displayed a warning saying their browser wasn't supported (and wouldnt let them view the content), so why would they?
Not just Linux, we should have fully open specs for everything so that people are free to use whatever OS they want based on whatever factors are important to them.
Being locked to anything is bad, and has been extremely harmful to the industry for many years, just look at all the failed processor architectures which are almost universally better than x86 in many ways, yet failed because people were locked in to x86.
When will these devices become available in Europe? So far, i've only seen units designed for use in the US, which means they have a physically incompatible plug (and thus require a bulky adapter) and require 110V whereas european sockets provide 240V...
Build a server with asymmetric processors... Something like an Atom for idle use, and a bunch of quad cores that get activated when you actually do anything... Configure the disks to shut off when idle etc...
Those security questions are a pretty stupid idea, i always enter random information but then i tend to forget what i put in... I had a friend who was getting very annoyed that her brother kept breaking into her hotmail account... It turns out that the security question was the old "mothers maiden name" one, to which she had answered honestly, and to which her brother obviously knew the answer.
You don't need to look at code, you can do a black box method of saving containing known data and examining the output.
Many of those code samples may well be GPL, but the odf-converter is not only BSD licensed, but was originally sponsored by microsoft anyway... There is no reason they couldn't have reused that code.
Other applications may be imperfect, but they actually try to be compatible, they are not taking intentional steps to break compatibility.
No, they could break down how the odf-converter plugin does it... This plugin supports formulas in the same way openoffice does, is released under a bsd license and it's development has been sponsored by microsoft anyway.
They intentionally created a new incompatible way of storing the formulas, despite already having the details and code of how to store them in an interoperable way...
The ODF specifications are being improved in exactly the way you describe, version 1.2 is currently being worked on and it addresses the spreadsheet formula issues.
Now while it's true that the ODF spec lacks information on exactly how to store spreadsheet formulas, it does use almost the same syntax as excel... And it's also true that all the other ODF implementations, including the plugin microsoft created a couple of years back, handle formulas in the same way as openoffice.
The ODF spec was perhaps a bit naive in assuming that everyone implementing it would want to interoperate and not try to find loopholes in the spec.
Intentionally finding a loophole is actually an extremely unpleasant thing to do... There were plenty of other things they could have done, for instance copy the existing implementations (including their own), or working with the developers of the spec to improve it.
Think of it as a case of blackhat vs whitehat, a whitehat will find loopholes in software and report them to the authors, and then work with them to fix them... A blackhat on the other hand, will use those loopholes for their own selfish gain at the expense of everyone else.
So sell previous generation consoles, they are available used for virtually nothing and the components used to build them must be so outdated as to be extremely cheap these days, but there are a significant number of games available already... Plus the games will also be extremely cheap, and if they're not then all these older consoles have long since been cracked making it easy to copy the games.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany was already a democracy... Adolf Hitler was democratically elected, and him being removed from power had a lot more to do with the USSR and the UK than it did the US.
By restricting these "evil" regimes, you just hurt the people...
The ruling class have enough money to buy servers in other places and proxy them, or just rent blocks of ips from foreign companies and have them rerouted etc...
But it goes to show the dangers of using a proprietary closed service, you can be cut off easily... You couldn't do this so easily to an open service like XMPP or Email.
You can use non US based free webmail, such as mail.ru or mbox.bol.bg...
There are tons of jabber servers located outside of the US which allow free accounts and will interoperate with google perfectly well.
It just goes to show the danger of using proprietary closed network services... This now means that anyone in these countries is unable to communicate with people using MSN anywhere else in the world...
On the other hand, with a freely federated service like email or jabber/xmpp the individual provider doesn't matter.
While the advantages of Linux are well known to most people on Slashdot, the average user has no idea...
They want to buy software on a store, simply because they do not know they can select it for free from the package manager and install it automatically...
Companies like Dell need to explain the advantages and differences to customers and make it easy for them to make an informed decision... And they should offer dual boot systems so that users, having read about the advantages of linux, can try them out without risking anything.
I'm all for Ubuntu gaining significant desktop share... If it forces companies to take notice and support linux and open standards...
Making software designed for Ubuntu run on another linux distro or another unix like system such as freebsd is much easier than making windows software run.
The issue is that you need a certain level of market share before it becomes impossible to ignore you... MS have enough marketshare that they can push through proprietary technologies designed specifically to exclude competitors, which then make it painful to use anything else. If linux gains sufficient traction, then proprietary lockin crap like that will no longer fly and companies will be forced to follow standards. Linux currently has the greatest chance of gaining sufficient share to make this happen, at which time it will be perfectly feasible to use BSD or Solaris etc too... Until then, anyone who values choice should push Linux if only as a means to an end.
Yes, sell low spec hardware with linux designed specifically for just email/web, sell it very cheaply and in a small stylish box. Tout the low price, and the "green" aspect of using so little power.
I would say the embedded market trounces the desktop market in terms of size... The average family may have 1 or 2 desktops, and possibly use one at work... But they will have several TVs, phones, cable/satelite receivers/recorders, routers, games consoles and various other computer controlled appliances.
I see macs in public (laptops) all the time, it all depends wether you frequent places where people are sat down for extended periods of time, like trains, planes and stations/airports etc. I see lots of other laptops too, but unless you get a look at the screen it's hard to tell what's running on them... I have seen laptops running linux tho, mostly eee netbooks.
But if you release the source to that, someone could take it as a base and implement the remaining functionality. Wether you release it or not, it still scratches your itch, but it could potentially benefit someone else. Either they have the same itch to scratch, or it could just save them some work having less of the protocol to implement.
It's easier for manufacturers to release the specs and maybe donate a couple of units to oss developers, so that drivers will be written...
Alternatively, they can follow existing standards, in the printing world that would be postscript, and then not need to write drivers at all.
Those tight fisted businesses are also perfect candidates for Linux, especially if the major distros improve their performance on lowend (read: old) hardware...
If such businesses can't keep their existing old windows installs, and upgrading would also require new hardware, the option to run linux on the hardware they already have would look very attractive.
Also older hardware is far more likely to work well, as the drivers have long since been written and thoroughly debugged.
It's extremely hard to quantify the server percentage...
At our company, i guess percentage of Linux to other types of server is about 80% linux, but none of those installs were purchased, and none of the hardware came preinstalled.
I also have a number of embedded devices that came with linux, tv receivers/recorders, a nokia tablet, routers/access points, and some others.. Most of these devices don't even advertise that they run linux and most people who use them would be completely unaware.
As someone who's been using unix for years i can agree with that... I used to have a lot of time on my hands and enjoyed messing around with the system, tweaking every last thing... Nowadays i have Ubuntu and OSX as my workstation systems... They work out of the box and present very little hassle, but the underlying power and flexibility is there incase i need to do something obscure. I do find OSX's lack of package management extremely limiting tho, apple should port the iphone app store to desktop osx, but make it apt compatible so it's possible and easy to add third party repositories...
Many sites check the OS type reported by your banner, and will reject non windows systems, some often don't accept macos either... Linux users, being generally more technically capable are more likely to have changed their user-agent string, or have an install of wine or a vm handy for those incompatible sites.
I had a conversation with a web developer once, who said he didn't bother making his site compatible with non ie browsers, because people using those browsers never went past the front page... The front page displayed a warning saying their browser wasn't supported (and wouldnt let them view the content), so why would they?
Not just Linux, we should have fully open specs for everything so that people are free to use whatever OS they want based on whatever factors are important to them.
Being locked to anything is bad, and has been extremely harmful to the industry for many years, just look at all the failed processor architectures which are almost universally better than x86 in many ways, yet failed because people were locked in to x86.
When will these devices become available in Europe?
So far, i've only seen units designed for use in the US, which means they have a physically incompatible plug (and thus require a bulky adapter) and require 110V whereas european sockets provide 240V...
Build a server with asymmetric processors...
Something like an Atom for idle use, and a bunch of quad cores that get activated when you actually do anything... Configure the disks to shut off when idle etc...
Aparrently they've been selling for a lot of money, far more than they should be worth... You're in luck and might be able to make a decent profit.
Those security questions are a pretty stupid idea, i always enter random information but then i tend to forget what i put in...
I had a friend who was getting very annoyed that her brother kept breaking into her hotmail account... It turns out that the security question was the old "mothers maiden name" one, to which she had answered honestly, and to which her brother obviously knew the answer.
You don't need to look at code, you can do a black box method of saving containing known data and examining the output.
Many of those code samples may well be GPL, but the odf-converter is not only BSD licensed, but was originally sponsored by microsoft anyway... There is no reason they couldn't have reused that code.
Other applications may be imperfect, but they actually try to be compatible, they are not taking intentional steps to break compatibility.
No, they could break down how the odf-converter plugin does it...
This plugin supports formulas in the same way openoffice does, is released under a bsd license and it's development has been sponsored by microsoft anyway.
They intentionally created a new incompatible way of storing the formulas, despite already having the details and code of how to store them in an interoperable way...
The ODF specifications are being improved in exactly the way you describe, version 1.2 is currently being worked on and it addresses the spreadsheet formula issues.
Now while it's true that the ODF spec lacks information on exactly how to store spreadsheet formulas, it does use almost the same syntax as excel... And it's also true that all the other ODF implementations, including the plugin microsoft created a couple of years back, handle formulas in the same way as openoffice.
The ODF spec was perhaps a bit naive in assuming that everyone implementing it would want to interoperate and not try to find loopholes in the spec.
Intentionally finding a loophole is actually an extremely unpleasant thing to do... There were plenty of other things they could have done, for instance copy the existing implementations (including their own), or working with the developers of the spec to improve it.
Think of it as a case of blackhat vs whitehat, a whitehat will find loopholes in software and report them to the authors, and then work with them to fix them... A blackhat on the other hand, will use those loopholes for their own selfish gain at the expense of everyone else.
So sell previous generation consoles, they are available used for virtually nothing and the components used to build them must be so outdated as to be extremely cheap these days, but there are a significant number of games available already...
Plus the games will also be extremely cheap, and if they're not then all these older consoles have long since been cracked making it easy to copy the games.