It's not much of a study. All they did was take any of the latest Vista business uptake studies and substitute GPL3. EndJoke. There are enough copyright clauses that say "Current version of GPL" for me to not take this study seriously or to think they did not ask enough or the right developers. One of the questions was answered:
Lack of skills in an organization was the greatest barrier to a migration from Windows to Linux
Whatever the study was, it's been spun into pure FUD and should not be confused with either news or research.
The the real world, a 35% profit margin isn't outrageous. Lots of companies have margins approaching 50-60%.
No, only Exxon, Coke, M$ and other monopoly problems have margins like that. No one has 50%. 35% is insane enough, because most of the money should be put back into the business and it's employees. Unless the industry is fiercely cyclical most of the profits should go to shareholders.
The subscription services do what they do very well for a certain portion of the music listening audience.
The market has to be bigger than your mom for the service to really work. Really, most people would take $15 a month and buy a CD, but no one is really spending that kind of money and that's why these services continue to fail. The music industry would be very happy indeed if they could convince people to spend ten times what they currently do, give them nothing better than broadcast radio and keep them hooked into it with restrictions that hork their computer and music at the same time.
The money is not there and digital restrictions are not going to wring it out of people, get over it. The point of the RIAA is to promote music and they have always done so by giving people "free" samples via commercial radio. The public expects more, not less for their money. Pandora is a nice substitute but the RIAA is going to have to make room for competition because the internet is not the scarce commodity broadcast media was and the RIAA is not going to be able to own it the same way.
When did hardware manufacturers start making hardware for not just Windows only but for specific versions of Windows? If that is truly what is happening now then it must be the next step above Winmodems to force consumers to purchase a product they don't want and they don't need.
Since day 1. This is the point of non free drivers. Some makers are better than others at "supporting" new and "legacy" Windoze, but you will never get everything you need unless you buy everything new every three years and throw away the old. It's intentional waste and that's what non free software is all about.
Non free software companies aim to keep users helpless and divided. They are helpless because the vendor won't tell them what they need to know to make things work. That keeps them buying non free software. NDAs, EULAs and social and technical measures are used to keep users divided so that they remain helpless. When users cooperate they soon find they no longer need software owners.
It's all very expensive. There are hoards of self supporting lies that have to be told to maintain user helplessness. M$ spends almost a billion dollars a month in advertising, astroturf and other nonsense to tell these lies. You and I pay for it as the cost of M$'s outrageous 35% profit margin are pushed through the economy. We also pay for it in terms of lost efficiency, the intentional use mentioned above and network pollution.
No one wants disappearing music. If it were otherwise, Virgin would not be closing. Not even M$ could sell it and everyone who bought into it is either evil or a fool.
Fee services are greedy and won't work. According to this BBC story, people spend about $25/year on music. Plans that ask for this amount per month or multiples of it per year are doomed to fail.
The industry and the law itself has been harmed by the Copyright extremists. Laws that transparently guard the interest of a few at the expense of many have bred contempt. The theft of thousands of people's life savings by bogus prosecutions have only made things worse. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
this sounds like nothing but a win for Monsoon.... there's no mention of any cash payout, and number two, they get a shit-ton of free advertising
It's another win for software freedom. We get their changes or they get hammered. The thing being advertised is that free software can be and is used for business. No one had to waste money on lawyers and everyone is happy.
For their reputation, it's a wash. Monsoon's reputation has been damaged by their original behavior but the settlement goes a long way to repairing that. The reputation enhancement they get from using free software is well deserved because free software has a well earned reputation for quality.
Every single machine I use (3 desktops, 1 laptop) has to be forced down on a nearly daily basis if not more, in order to keep the memory available for other applications.
Daily reboots are a Windows problem, not FF. I've got a real clunker of a laptop, 256 MB RAM PIII, that runs FF with Flash and all that but does not have your problem because because I'm using Mepis instead of Windoze. It's nice of Mozilla to make things better.
You know the trolls are out of control when the IE is teh best posts predominate the conversation.
Don't get caught up in the hype here. Algorithms are nothing special on their own. These articles are trying to make them look important, like inventions or physical objects, to further pump up the notion of software patents. It's not algorithms that are evil in GWB's great internet filters, it's the machinery that's been built on top of an otherwise dumb network and free internet that's evil.
Without algorithms, there can be no computing but there's nothing really special about any one in particular. Algorithms are just instructions, and there are many ways of achieving the same result. Algorithms can stand alone or be combined into programs that do things users want. The net result is just another set of instructions that can be considered a larger algorithm. Without modern computing equipment, most of these instructions are useless. Like the article say, "try doing this at home." No problem, if you have a computer but a real pain if you only have pen and paper. Medical imaging devices take advantage of mathematics that was little more than a curiosity when it was first published in 1917. The inventors of the device reinvented the math without knowing it some forty years later but it was not until the 1980s that the devices became practical due to the lower cost of computing.
This article is pumping up the value and utility of business methods. Common sense is a valuable thing, but it's not always an invention and business methods never are.
It's just about apparent market share.... Including the XP disc will not show in their numbers when figuring their deployment of Vista.
I can see them doing that, but everyone knows it's a lie. Thanks to WGA, M$ knows exactly how many and if not who is running any of their newer software. Next to that, sales and web figures are total bullshit. The fact that everone knows they are lying has not kept them from lying in the past, though.
DHS is going to "monitor" your local government network. Bin Laden is a bogeyman, the goal is Total Information Awareness. They already have taps on domestic phone and internet, now they will get their taps into local networks. This is just another turn of the collection and enlargement of federal power. No real information security will be gained as they add yet another channel to leak information.
This is just M$ offering the same thing to other vendors, who are probably losing a lot of business to people who want XP and can only get it from Dell.
I thought business users with "Software Assurance" had "downgrad rights" all along, so that this only really has an effect on SMB and the vendors themselves - people hate Vista and sales are down all around where people have no choice. Oh wait, the downgrade rights were just theoretical, not practical:
Under Microsoft's licensing terms for Vista, buyers of Vista Business and Vista Ultimate Edition have always had the right to downgrade to XP, but in practice this could be challenging.
Anyway, this little consession seems extremely limited. It only applies to the most outrageously expensive versions of Vista and XP comes as a disk, not installed most if not all the time:
The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. [as if they were not demanding this!]... In June, Microsoft changed its practices to allow computer makers that sell pre-activated Vista machines to order Windows XP discs that could be included inside the box with PCs, or shipped to customers without requiring additional activation.... "customers can configure their systems to include the XP Pro restore disc for little or no charge," HP
The terms are confusing but my guess is that they are trying to drum up interest and sales, not really make things easier.
They arrested her at gunpoint, which I don't anyone would think is unreasonable given an unresponsive subject potentially carrying a bomb.
I've read that they sent a man with a sub machine gun. Who do they think they were going to protect with that? At that rate, the bomb would have done less harm if there was one. Everyone is lucky some 19 year old TSA agent did not gun down the whole crowd.
When you consider the fact that most bombs have dead man switches, pointing a gun is both useless and stupid if the bomber is not walking to a place where they can hurt more people.
I'm shocked and appalled that somebody would wear such a device to the airport. We had someone with a submachine gun at the airport go right to the scene.
No, I'm not making that up, I got it from Boing Boing.
Imagine a crowded airport and you are in charge. There's a bomb! Do you:
A. Order an evacuation, delay and restrain bomber, send snipers and demand surrender.
B. Send in the A team, guns a-blazing!
The only lucky thing here is that she was given the time to take her shirt off before everyone was gunned down.
A machine gun. Afuckingmachineguninthegoddamnedairport! That's not protection, it's intimidation and terror. Who needs bombers with "friends" like that.
The Boing Boing page has the other half of the "shocked and appalled" quote:
I'm shocked and appalled that somebody would wear such a device to the airport. We had someone with a submachine gun at the airport go right to the scene."
I'm shocked and appalled that they thought a submachine gun would be a good way to prevent a bomb in a crowded room. A sniper, maybe, but a submachine gun? Is there ever a situation at an airport where that's a good idea? What were those idiots thinking?
If you search BBC for CCTV, what you find is nothing favorable. Law enforcement figures consistently say the money would be better spent on normal police work. Studdies never show a real decrease in crime. Demographics don't matter because the cameras are everywhere.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the cameras are not really about crime.
A significant part of my law practice is advising clients about what they need to do to comply with a bunch of open source code that has, somehow, made its way into their software.
So how many people really need to worry about this? I was under the impression that the vast majority of IT work is implementation that will never be distributed. That would make "Open Source" planning is mostly FUD.
For the few companies that do need to consider the issue, things should be much easier than what they are used to. Yes, they should understand things up front, but that should take all of five minutes.
I can provide examples, but that won't satisfy you.
Browser history, if not the web itself, and symbolic manipulation are good places to start. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing you can do with a computer that someone has not used for their PhD and created a free, working copy. Often, there will be a great big pool of public domain code from government sponsored research, but some of that has been stolen and given to private interests. The great wave of source code theft that happened in the 1980s was the exception, not the rule.
I did not imply that free software is inherently superior for every person. It is mostly is if value performance. It's always superior if you value freedom and flexibility. I value freedom and have not given up much to have it. There are a few cases where you might have to keep a Windows machine around, but most people can do without it and be better off.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, so I can't help you anymore than that.
Driver has no idea what a fanatic he is. Commercial software developers have used BSD and other free software all along, yet he imagines a rational person would be afraid of such things. He then constructs this strawman:
Open source, more than anything else in the industry, has a large set of proponents who border on zealots, he said. Its the guy who says, 'Windows sucks, it doesnt work. Lets throw it out and use Linux.
I wonder if he had to wipe the drool off his chin when he said that.
It's never been a bad idea to consider freedom and there have always been trade offs. Businesses that ignored freedom have been yanked along with the upgrade train, suffered intentional waste and incompetent security. Now that free software has gained a large feature and performance advantage in many areas, non free proponents are abandoning the "best tool for the job" mantra and erecting FUD barriers.
Only a real zealot would think it's impossible, impractical or extreme to replace Windows. Windows itself has always been second rate. Rational people used it because it was cheap, "good enough" and there were useful applications. Many large companies have already done it and rational people now realize that Windows should only be kept around for legacy and specialized niches.
Making an "open source strategy" is silly. No one has an "EULA" planning session where they try to make general guidelines for what kind of non free screwing they will and won't take. They consider the options available and take the best. This is a panic by non free software vendors and their pawns. The same people who used to tell you to always use the "best" tool for the job realize that the best tool is often a free one. Open Software planning sessions are a waste of time designed to heap FUD on free software. The time waste itself will put you at a competitive disadvantage, using the wrong tools will too.
It's never been rational to ignore free software. Every significant non free program has roots in some kind of free software. The people telling you to ignore free software have been plundering it themselves all along.
It's only in your head (and, it seems, theirs) that this appears malicious. If this was really happening, don't you think that Slashdot emails to MSN addresses would be blocked too?
It's hard to tell if Slashdot emails are being blocked or not, but that's just more cause to advocate free software and a free internet. The only way to prevent abuse is to outlaw involuntary filtering. The right to use bandwith as you please should be legally protected. Restrictions for harmless activity with what you have paid and own is unAmerican.
It's already happening to your email. Big brother does not want you to share stories about how you got locked away and tortured for five years without charges, so the free internet must die. You will not be allowed to run a server of anykind. When you do, ATT will drop it on the floor. ATT and friends are dependent on government protection of their racket and will be happy to treat you the way AOL, Yahoo and M$ have treated people in China. Oppressive governments can not tolerate truth.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not much of a study. All they did was take any of the latest Vista business uptake studies and substitute GPL3. EndJoke. There are enough copyright clauses that say "Current version of GPL" for me to not take this study seriously or to think they did not ask enough or the right developers. One of the questions was answered:
Whatever the study was, it's been spun into pure FUD and should not be confused with either news or research.
The the real world, a 35% profit margin isn't outrageous. Lots of companies have margins approaching 50-60%.
No, only Exxon, Coke, M$ and other monopoly problems have margins like that. No one has 50%. 35% is insane enough, because most of the money should be put back into the business and it's employees. Unless the industry is fiercely cyclical most of the profits should go to shareholders.
The subscription services do what they do very well for a certain portion of the music listening audience.
The market has to be bigger than your mom for the service to really work. Really, most people would take $15 a month and buy a CD, but no one is really spending that kind of money and that's why these services continue to fail. The music industry would be very happy indeed if they could convince people to spend ten times what they currently do, give them nothing better than broadcast radio and keep them hooked into it with restrictions that hork their computer and music at the same time.
The money is not there and digital restrictions are not going to wring it out of people, get over it. The point of the RIAA is to promote music and they have always done so by giving people "free" samples via commercial radio. The public expects more, not less for their money. Pandora is a nice substitute but the RIAA is going to have to make room for competition because the internet is not the scarce commodity broadcast media was and the RIAA is not going to be able to own it the same way.
When did hardware manufacturers start making hardware for not just Windows only but for specific versions of Windows? If that is truly what is happening now then it must be the next step above Winmodems to force consumers to purchase a product they don't want and they don't need.
Since day 1. This is the point of non free drivers. Some makers are better than others at "supporting" new and "legacy" Windoze, but you will never get everything you need unless you buy everything new every three years and throw away the old. It's intentional waste and that's what non free software is all about.
Non free software companies aim to keep users helpless and divided. They are helpless because the vendor won't tell them what they need to know to make things work. That keeps them buying non free software. NDAs, EULAs and social and technical measures are used to keep users divided so that they remain helpless. When users cooperate they soon find they no longer need software owners.
It's all very expensive. There are hoards of self supporting lies that have to be told to maintain user helplessness. M$ spends almost a billion dollars a month in advertising, astroturf and other nonsense to tell these lies. You and I pay for it as the cost of M$'s outrageous 35% profit margin are pushed through the economy. We also pay for it in terms of lost efficiency, the intentional use mentioned above and network pollution.
No one wants disappearing music. If it were otherwise, Virgin would not be closing. Not even M$ could sell it and everyone who bought into it is either evil or a fool.
Fee services are greedy and won't work. According to this BBC story, people spend about $25/year on music. Plans that ask for this amount per month or multiples of it per year are doomed to fail.
The industry and the law itself has been harmed by the Copyright extremists. Laws that transparently guard the interest of a few at the expense of many have bred contempt. The theft of thousands of people's life savings by bogus prosecutions have only made things worse. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
this sounds like nothing but a win for Monsoon. ... there's no mention of any cash payout, and number two, they get a shit-ton of free advertising
It's another win for software freedom. We get their changes or they get hammered. The thing being advertised is that free software can be and is used for business. No one had to waste money on lawyers and everyone is happy.
For their reputation, it's a wash. Monsoon's reputation has been damaged by their original behavior but the settlement goes a long way to repairing that. The reputation enhancement they get from using free software is well deserved because free software has a well earned reputation for quality.
Every single machine I use (3 desktops, 1 laptop) has to be forced down on a nearly daily basis if not more, in order to keep the memory available for other applications.
Daily reboots are a Windows problem, not FF. I've got a real clunker of a laptop, 256 MB RAM PIII, that runs FF with Flash and all that but does not have your problem because because I'm using Mepis instead of Windoze. It's nice of Mozilla to make things better.
You know the trolls are out of control when the IE is teh best posts predominate the conversation.
Ha ha, that's funny.
Don't get caught up in the hype here. Algorithms are nothing special on their own. These articles are trying to make them look important, like inventions or physical objects, to further pump up the notion of software patents. It's not algorithms that are evil in GWB's great internet filters, it's the machinery that's been built on top of an otherwise dumb network and free internet that's evil.
Without algorithms, there can be no computing but there's nothing really special about any one in particular. Algorithms are just instructions, and there are many ways of achieving the same result. Algorithms can stand alone or be combined into programs that do things users want. The net result is just another set of instructions that can be considered a larger algorithm. Without modern computing equipment, most of these instructions are useless. Like the article say, "try doing this at home." No problem, if you have a computer but a real pain if you only have pen and paper. Medical imaging devices take advantage of mathematics that was little more than a curiosity when it was first published in 1917. The inventors of the device reinvented the math without knowing it some forty years later but it was not until the 1980s that the devices became practical due to the lower cost of computing.
This article is pumping up the value and utility of business methods. Common sense is a valuable thing, but it's not always an invention and business methods never are.
It's just about apparent market share. ... Including the XP disc will not show in their numbers when figuring their deployment of Vista.
I can see them doing that, but everyone knows it's a lie. Thanks to WGA, M$ knows exactly how many and if not who is running any of their newer software. Next to that, sales and web figures are total bullshit. The fact that everone knows they are lying has not kept them from lying in the past, though.
DHS is going to "monitor" your local government network. Bin Laden is a bogeyman, the goal is Total Information Awareness. They already have taps on domestic phone and internet, now they will get their taps into local networks. This is just another turn of the collection and enlargement of federal power. No real information security will be gained as they add yet another channel to leak information.
This is just M$ offering the same thing to other vendors, who are probably losing a lot of business to people who want XP and can only get it from Dell.
I thought business users with "Software Assurance" had "downgrad rights" all along, so that this only really has an effect on SMB and the vendors themselves - people hate Vista and sales are down all around where people have no choice. Oh wait, the downgrade rights were just theoretical, not practical:
Anyway, this little consession seems extremely limited. It only applies to the most outrageously expensive versions of Vista and XP comes as a disk, not installed most if not all the time:
The terms are confusing but my guess is that they are trying to drum up interest and sales, not really make things easier.
Had you bothered to read the article, you would have seen that she was apprehended outside.
Spraying bullets outside an airport is not much better than spraying them inside.
They arrested her at gunpoint, which I don't anyone would think is unreasonable given an unresponsive subject potentially carrying a bomb.
I've read that they sent a man with a sub machine gun. Who do they think they were going to protect with that? At that rate, the bomb would have done less harm if there was one. Everyone is lucky some 19 year old TSA agent did not gun down the whole crowd.
When you consider the fact that most bombs have dead man switches, pointing a gun is both useless and stupid if the bomber is not walking to a place where they can hurt more people.
No, I'm not making that up, I got it from Boing Boing.
Imagine a crowded airport and you are in charge. There's a bomb! Do you:
A. Order an evacuation, delay and restrain bomber, send snipers and demand surrender.
B. Send in the A team, guns a-blazing!
The only lucky thing here is that she was given the time to take her shirt off before everyone was gunned down.
A machine gun. Afuckingmachineguninthegoddamnedairport! That's not protection, it's intimidation and terror. Who needs bombers with "friends" like that.
TSA - Terrorist Success Agency.
The Boing Boing page has the other half of the "shocked and appalled" quote:
I'm shocked and appalled that they thought a submachine gun would be a good way to prevent a bomb in a crowded room. A sniper, maybe, but a submachine gun? Is there ever a situation at an airport where that's a good idea? What were those idiots thinking?
If you search BBC for CCTV, what you find is nothing favorable. Law enforcement figures consistently say the money would be better spent on normal police work. Studdies never show a real decrease in crime. Demographics don't matter because the cameras are everywhere.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the cameras are not really about crime.
A significant part of my law practice is advising clients about what they need to do to comply with a bunch of open source code that has, somehow, made its way into their software.
So how many people really need to worry about this? I was under the impression that the vast majority of IT work is implementation that will never be distributed. That would make "Open Source" planning is mostly FUD.
For the few companies that do need to consider the issue, things should be much easier than what they are used to. Yes, they should understand things up front, but that should take all of five minutes.
I can provide examples, but that won't satisfy you.
Browser history, if not the web itself, and symbolic manipulation are good places to start. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing you can do with a computer that someone has not used for their PhD and created a free, working copy. Often, there will be a great big pool of public domain code from government sponsored research, but some of that has been stolen and given to private interests. The great wave of source code theft that happened in the 1980s was the exception, not the rule.
I did not imply that free software is inherently superior for every person. It is mostly is if value performance. It's always superior if you value freedom and flexibility. I value freedom and have not given up much to have it. There are a few cases where you might have to keep a Windows machine around, but most people can do without it and be better off.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, so I can't help you anymore than that.
Driver has no idea what a fanatic he is. Commercial software developers have used BSD and other free software all along, yet he imagines a rational person would be afraid of such things. He then constructs this strawman:
I wonder if he had to wipe the drool off his chin when he said that.
It's never been a bad idea to consider freedom and there have always been trade offs. Businesses that ignored freedom have been yanked along with the upgrade train, suffered intentional waste and incompetent security. Now that free software has gained a large feature and performance advantage in many areas, non free proponents are abandoning the "best tool for the job" mantra and erecting FUD barriers.
Only a real zealot would think it's impossible, impractical or extreme to replace Windows. Windows itself has always been second rate. Rational people used it because it was cheap, "good enough" and there were useful applications. Many large companies have already done it and rational people now realize that Windows should only be kept around for legacy and specialized niches.
Making an "open source strategy" is silly. No one has an "EULA" planning session where they try to make general guidelines for what kind of non free screwing they will and won't take. They consider the options available and take the best. This is a panic by non free software vendors and their pawns. The same people who used to tell you to always use the "best" tool for the job realize that the best tool is often a free one. Open Software planning sessions are a waste of time designed to heap FUD on free software. The time waste itself will put you at a competitive disadvantage, using the wrong tools will too.
It's never been rational to ignore free software. Every significant non free program has roots in some kind of free software. The people telling you to ignore free software have been plundering it themselves all along.
It's only in your head (and, it seems, theirs) that this appears malicious. If this was really happening, don't you think that Slashdot emails to MSN addresses would be blocked too?
It's hard to tell if Slashdot emails are being blocked or not, but that's just more cause to advocate free software and a free internet. The only way to prevent abuse is to outlaw involuntary filtering. The right to use bandwith as you please should be legally protected. Restrictions for harmless activity with what you have paid and own is unAmerican.
It's not funny
Political Filtering of Email by Hotmail and AOL. M$ seems to be better at suppressing the news here than the MAFIAA is at suppressing the Media Defender story, but it won't last long.
It's already happening to your email. Big brother does not want you to share stories about how you got locked away and tortured for five years without charges, so the free internet must die. You will not be allowed to run a server of anykind. When you do, ATT will drop it on the floor. ATT and friends are dependent on government protection of their racket and will be happy to treat you the way AOL, Yahoo and M$ have treated people in China. Oppressive governments can not tolerate truth.