But microsoft is also one of the largest facilitators of spam.. Almost all the spam i recieve comes from hacked windows machines, many of which are compromised via vulns in IE or RPC.. Many of these are compromised by vulnerabilities for which no patch exists. I have seen machines with automatic updates turned on, and which are totally up to date, being compromised with spam relaying bots.
Linux cutting and pasting isn't even done with the keyboard... Select with mouse, press middle button to paste... simple! When cutting and pasting i never move my hand off the mouse, that's why i find the windows method very clunky and RSI-inducing.. constantly moving my hands back and forth from mouse and keyboard.
So it IS price fixing, plain and simple... If they can afford to sell them at such a reduced rate in another country that it's actually beneficial for consumers to buy them in those countries and pay the cost of transporting them.. Then something is badly wrong with the prices in US and Europe, they must be making obscene profits on each copy sold and completely ripping the consumer off.
So, rather have a corporation who's primary concern is profit than a collection of hobbyists who are users just like yourself and who's primary concern is having a secure browser that they themselves can use. If there was no mozilla or opera etc, you can be sure ms would be far slower in fixing security problems in ie than they already are.. There would be no incentive to fix problems since users would have nowhere else to go anyway.
So, write a letter of complaint to your bank if they do that, and do the same for any other company which forces the use of IE. Tell them that they are encouraging an unsafe practice and assisting potential fraudsters or other evil doers.
You can remove ACCESS to it.. you can't remove the program itself, it will still be there clogging up your disk and wasting your ram, and is likely to get invoked or embedded into third party programs so your still not safe from it's many flaws.
Since when has microsoft EVER had a product that blew the competition out the water? The best they had was a product that was marginally better (IE) for a time than the competition they were doing their best to crush (netscape) and yet it wasn't the product superiority that won it for them, rather the fact it was already installed and was "good enough" IE came bundled with MacOS aswell... But consider the Solaris and HP-UX versions.. Neither were very widely used, most Solaris users stuck with netscape 4.x or later Mozilla
If i remember, windows 2000 was the first version to use the BSD stack.. Previous versions used their own massively inferior stack, which was absoloutely riddled with bugs that could be remotely exploited to crash the host. The fact that microsoft abandoned their own stack and chose to use the BSD one instead shows just how much faith they have in their own code.
Ps: it's a well known fact that all of microsoft's most successfull products were obtained from third parties and have often deteriorated since the initial acquisition.
The point is that microsoft will modify their propriatory version so that the free versions will no longer operate with it. In the end you will have no alternative but to buy the non free version and this is exactly what any commercial company, especially microsoft, would want..
Dont make a good product that people _WANT_, make a crap product that people _NEED_
The GPL does not discourage forking, but it does help prevent the problem of incompatible extensions.. If the sourcecode is available to all the extensions, then as soon as they get to a point people would want to use them, people are free to do so.. Someone will port the extensions to other distributions sooner or later and thats assuming they dont just compile out of the box, your not forcing someone to switch distributions in order to get these extensions.
But as it's your own code, your free to license it to any company under whatever terms you wish.. That's assuming other people haven't contributed to the code, in which case you need the permission of each contributor.
Media wears out with legitimate use, accidents happen, houses catch fire etc, thieves exist (yes thieves who actually steal the original, making a copy is not theft), kids can get hold of CD's and damage them quite easily. Not to mention the fact that many games demand you keep the cd inserted during gameplay, this increasing the wear and tear on the cd, and meaning if you let your kid play games he has to have access to the originals.
The problem is, that we currently in many cases have the ability to make copies, they are trying to take that away without compensating for the legitimate reasons to make copies... If they can nullify any legitimate reason for making a copy then it's much easier to justify copy protection. As for books, when i was in school we never had original books in class, we had photocopies of various pages
I wonder if software bugs would qualify as being unfit for purpose, or low quality... Many shops wont let you return software or any other copyable media, are they breaking the law? are they required by law to accept the return and give you a full refund?
So instead of buying a copy and having to deal with the hassle of the copy protection scheme, Joe Teenager pirates a copy that's already been cracked and still gives a copy to his friend Fred Teenager. My biggest gripe, and this comes from bitter experience, is the general low quality of games and the bribed reviews in magazines and such... As a teenager i didn't have much money, i couldn't afford to buy lots of games, and if i spent loads on games then i didn't have enough money to buy hardware to run it on... I did however buy many games, all of which had good reviews and pretty screenshots in the magazines.. However most of the games were pure crap, providing little or no lasting entertainment value, however one or two were genuinely awesome games.. Well, in the end i gave up buying games and started pirating them instead, and only if the game was actually good did i purchase a copy.. What about demo versions you say? I found the demo versions often better than the actual game, and many games had no demo versions atall
And many of the commercials on TV say "Own it now" etc.. or "Own it now on video and dvd" in the case of movies etc, so by their own admission you now own it having purchased it.
Being unable to copy the games wouldn't be so bad if the publishers would provide a free media replacement service, So that anyone with a proof of purchase of the original game can get replacement media if the original becomes damaged... But no, they would rather try and force you to buy another copy
Funny you should mention that... When DEC were developing the alpha processor, they approached commodore and offered to port the amigaos to the alpha architecture.. the amigaos was always very efficient, and that coupled with the fastest processors available at the time would have made for an awesome machine.
None of my unix machines have crashed on me in oh, 10 years or more? That includes Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, SunOS 4, IRIX, Digital OSF/1 etc.. An os not crashing in 2 years is not an achievement, that should be considered normal... An os that does crash is simply unacceptable.
It seems the masses believe this is normal and acceptable.. IT IS NOT... Unreliable cars get bad reputations and don't sell.. same for any other consumer items that are unreliable.. Why should we accept unreliable computers? It's only accepted because often there is no alternative, or no alternative is known. The general public need to be taught that unreliable computers are not acceptable, otherwise vendors will have no motivation to produce software of an acceptable standard.
If the API were open and free then anyone could implement it and sell/make available for free a compatible OS. microsoft would be forced to compete on quality and price with all the other vendors offering compatible solutions, look at the price/performance/quality of hardware in the last few years due to competing hardware makers. Users would be free to install whatever os they wanted, safe in the knowlege that all their apps would run the same under any of them. And, with people running different os's with different or less security holes, there would no longer be a single static target for exploits to target. Ofcourse this wouldn't fix good old human stupidity, but it would massively improve upon the situation which exists now.
Dependency hell is a redhat/suse/other rpm based distro problem... debian and gentoo don't suffer from these problems, all dependencies are automatically installed.
Gentoo is good in this respect, in that when you try to install a newer program it updates all the appropriate libraries aswell.. I believe debian does the same too. Unlike release-based distributions where your stuck with version X and a set of patches, once the patches stop your stuck with the old versions and can't upgrade without reinstalling the whole os. The difference between these linux distributions and windows however, is that the upgrade on linux costs nothing and won't reduce a modern machine to an unuseably slow speed.
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But microsoft is also one of the largest facilitators of spam.. Almost all the spam i recieve comes from hacked windows machines, many of which are compromised via vulns in IE or RPC.. Many of these are compromised by vulnerabilities for which no patch exists. I have seen machines with automatic updates turned on, and which are totally up to date, being compromised with spam relaying bots.
Linux cutting and pasting isn't even done with the keyboard...
Select with mouse, press middle button to paste... simple! When cutting and pasting i never move my hand off the mouse, that's why i find the windows method very clunky and RSI-inducing.. constantly moving my hands back and forth from mouse and keyboard.
So it IS price fixing, plain and simple...
If they can afford to sell them at such a reduced rate in another country that it's actually beneficial for consumers to buy them in those countries and pay the cost of transporting them.. Then something is badly wrong with the prices in US and Europe, they must be making obscene profits on each copy sold and completely ripping the consumer off.
The regioning scheme is totally immoral, and atleast in New Zealand is illegal, as it should be everywhere else.
So, rather have a corporation who's primary concern is profit than a collection of hobbyists who are users just like yourself and who's primary concern is having a secure browser that they themselves can use.
If there was no mozilla or opera etc, you can be sure ms would be far slower in fixing security problems in ie than they already are.. There would be no incentive to fix problems since users would have nowhere else to go anyway.
So, write a letter of complaint to your bank if they do that, and do the same for any other company which forces the use of IE. Tell them that they are encouraging an unsafe practice and assisting potential fraudsters or other evil doers.
You can remove ACCESS to it.. you can't remove the program itself, it will still be there clogging up your disk and wasting your ram, and is likely to get invoked or embedded into third party programs so your still not safe from it's many flaws.
Since when has microsoft EVER had a product that blew the competition out the water?
The best they had was a product that was marginally better (IE) for a time than the competition they were doing their best to crush (netscape) and yet it wasn't the product superiority that won it for them, rather the fact it was already installed and was "good enough"
IE came bundled with MacOS aswell... But consider the Solaris and HP-UX versions..
Neither were very widely used, most Solaris users stuck with netscape 4.x or later Mozilla
If i remember, windows 2000 was the first version to use the BSD stack..
Previous versions used their own massively inferior stack, which was absoloutely riddled with bugs that could be remotely exploited to crash the host.
The fact that microsoft abandoned their own stack and chose to use the BSD one instead shows just how much faith they have in their own code.
Ps: it's a well known fact that all of microsoft's most successfull products were obtained from third parties and have often deteriorated since the initial acquisition.
The point is that microsoft will modify their propriatory version so that the free versions will no longer operate with it. In the end you will have no alternative but to buy the non free version and this is exactly what any commercial company, especially microsoft, would want..
Dont make a good product that people _WANT_, make a crap product that people _NEED_
The GPL does not discourage forking, but it does help prevent the problem of incompatible extensions.. If the sourcecode is available to all the extensions, then as soon as they get to a point people would want to use them, people are free to do so.. Someone will port the extensions to other distributions sooner or later and thats assuming they dont just compile out of the box, your not forcing someone to switch distributions in order to get these extensions.
But the BSD license explicitely allows this, whereas the GPL does not.. Hence the reason many people prefer the GPL.
But as it's your own code, your free to license it to any company under whatever terms you wish.. That's assuming other people haven't contributed to the code, in which case you need the permission of each contributor.
Media wears out with legitimate use, accidents happen, houses catch fire etc, thieves exist (yes thieves who actually steal the original, making a copy is not theft), kids can get hold of CD's and damage them quite easily. Not to mention the fact that many games demand you keep the cd inserted during gameplay, this increasing the wear and tear on the cd, and meaning if you let your kid play games he has to have access to the originals.
The problem is, that we currently in many cases have the ability to make copies, they are trying to take that away without compensating for the legitimate reasons to make copies... If they can nullify any legitimate reason for making a copy then it's much easier to justify copy protection.
As for books, when i was in school we never had original books in class, we had photocopies of various pages
I wonder if software bugs would qualify as being unfit for purpose, or low quality...
Many shops wont let you return software or any other copyable media, are they breaking the law? are they required by law to accept the return and give you a full refund?
Or you could even run the whole OS in a virtualization environment like vmware and debug it from the host OS.
So instead of buying a copy and having to deal with the hassle of the copy protection scheme, Joe Teenager pirates a copy that's already been cracked and still gives a copy to his friend Fred Teenager.
My biggest gripe, and this comes from bitter experience, is the general low quality of games and the bribed reviews in magazines and such...
As a teenager i didn't have much money, i couldn't afford to buy lots of games, and if i spent loads on games then i didn't have enough money to buy hardware to run it on...
I did however buy many games, all of which had good reviews and pretty screenshots in the magazines.. However most of the games were pure crap, providing little or no lasting entertainment value, however one or two were genuinely awesome games..
Well, in the end i gave up buying games and started pirating them instead, and only if the game was actually good did i purchase a copy..
What about demo versions you say? I found the demo versions often better than the actual game, and many games had no demo versions atall
And many of the commercials on TV say "Own it now" etc.. or "Own it now on video and dvd" in the case of movies etc, so by their own admission you now own it having purchased it.
Being unable to copy the games wouldn't be so bad if the publishers would provide a free media replacement service, So that anyone with a proof of purchase of the original game can get replacement media if the original becomes damaged...
But no, they would rather try and force you to buy another copy
Funny you should mention that...
When DEC were developing the alpha processor, they approached commodore and offered to port the amigaos to the alpha architecture.. the amigaos was always very efficient, and that coupled with the fastest processors available at the time would have made for an awesome machine.
None of my unix machines have crashed on me in oh, 10 years or more? That includes Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, SunOS 4, IRIX, Digital OSF/1 etc..
An os not crashing in 2 years is not an achievement, that should be considered normal... An os that does crash is simply unacceptable.
It seems the masses believe this is normal and acceptable.. IT IS NOT...
Unreliable cars get bad reputations and don't sell.. same for any other consumer items that are unreliable.. Why should we accept unreliable computers? It's only accepted because often there is no alternative, or no alternative is known. The general public need to be taught that unreliable computers are not acceptable, otherwise vendors will have no motivation to produce software of an acceptable standard.
If the API were open and free then anyone could implement it and sell/make available for free a compatible OS.
microsoft would be forced to compete on quality and price with all the other vendors offering compatible solutions, look at the price/performance/quality of hardware in the last few years due to competing hardware makers.
Users would be free to install whatever os they wanted, safe in the knowlege that all their apps would run the same under any of them.
And, with people running different os's with different or less security holes, there would no longer be a single static target for exploits to target.
Ofcourse this wouldn't fix good old human stupidity, but it would massively improve upon the situation which exists now.
Dependency hell is a redhat/suse/other rpm based distro problem...
debian and gentoo don't suffer from these problems, all dependencies are automatically installed.
Gentoo is good in this respect, in that when you try to install a newer program it updates all the appropriate libraries aswell.. I believe debian does the same too.
Unlike release-based distributions where your stuck with version X and a set of patches, once the patches stop your stuck with the old versions and can't upgrade without reinstalling the whole os.
The difference between these linux distributions and windows however, is that the upgrade on linux costs nothing and won't reduce a modern machine to an unuseably slow speed.