So the idea of selling digital downloads of on-the-radio songs for 99 cents doesn't count?
You could do that without digital restrictions and should. If you try to restrict your customers, you will be dependent of M$ and or the RIAA majors to deliver your product. Those people are not known for fair competition and are both kings of repositories of stale, second rate junk pushed at monopoly rates. If you think you can make a "new" business in that kind of market, more power to you. I think you will be just another RIAA vassal station.
The surprise is how twisted this study is. The author ignored the opinion of authors to concentrate on email addresses and the main conclusion is that 65% of kernel developers have a job. That people able to contribute to the Linux kernel would have a job is not much of a surprise. Ignoring the opinion of those you are trying to study is.
So, let me quote all the relevent sections to back up what I have said.
Finding an answer to that question is somewhat trickier than looking at who wrote the patches, mostly because very few developers say "I wrote this on behalf of my employer."
Any patch whose author's given email address indicates a corporate affiliation is assumed to have been developed by an employee of that corporation. So any patch posted by somebody with an ibm.com email address is accounted as having been done by an IBM employee.
Either way, the results come out about the same: at least 65% of the code which went into 2.6.20 was created by people working for companies. If the entire "unknown" group turns out to be developers working on a volunteer basis - an unlikely result - then just over 1/3 of the 2.6.20 patch stream was written by volunteers.
The statistics are all very nice, but the conclusion is forced. I'd go with the opinion of the authors themselves, code is still not being written on behalf of companies.
That's an unfortunate conclusion and things are changing. When free software takes the place of non free, the entire mechanism now "supporting" M$ and others will switch to free software authorship. When that happens hardware makers will step up to the plate with free drivers and contribute significant code. Many already do this. User feedback will still be important and of high quality, so the actual distribution of "this code paid for by Broadcom" vrs, "this code from Broadcom fixed by 101 happy users" is still hard for someone like me to predict.
To the chagrin of many investors, the drop was indeed real.
I read the NYT article too. One of their sources denied that there was a computer problem. The truth may come out in a day or so, just as soon as all the market watch people quit selling everything they own.... AHHH!
The LSI controllers that ship with the PowerEdge 1950 are supported very well with either the megaraid2 driver (SCSI) or mptsas (SAS). You can get the array status by running mpt-status. NONE of this software is binary-only or available only from Dell.
That would be wonderful and Dell should advertise the fact and make sure it stays true. This is also known as certifying the hardware. If Dell would certify their hardware for free software, we would all be better off.
There isn't a shop, restaurant, bank, professional office, hospital, school, library or public facility of any kind within twenty miles of here that isn't running a Windows OS on a Dell PC.
Sure, there's been a boom... and the bust is going to be hard. The vast majority of users are fed up because M$ still does not work. They have spent the big bucks on a big brand name and It's still just as slow and buggy as it was in 1994. Then, Michael Dell tells them that 1/4 is controlled by a botnet. The future looks even worse because the new M$ OS won't work well on 94% of them. Hell, gnusense would do better than that and more established distros will work on better than 90%. With DRM, the expensive new machines may never work and they will always suck. The fanboys have bought their little Vista boxes and it's a letdown, now comes the big sales bust. Vendors who stick with M$ are going to fall flat on their faces.
Enter the Penguin. All the shiny new applications are already there and they take far fewer resources. Secure, stable, trustable and fun - free software has it all right now. All the bullies have is threats, restrictions and stuff that does not work.
Not to sound like a broken record around here, but why would Dell go out of their way to find components that work on an OS that is in direct competition with the one that ships with (currently) 100% of their hardware?
For three simple reasons:
Their users want it.
Their users want it.
Their users want it.
You sell what your users want or you go out of business. What they sell now, contrary to their claim, does not really work with any of their hardware. Indeed, M$ is the source of all bogus compatibility problems, the people who gave you Winmodems and destroyed Alpha (remember 64 bit computing ten years ago?), who trashed Netscape and gave you rampant botnets, who crapped out OpenGL and gave you DirectX version 1 through 10 in far fewer years. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Hardware and software makers like simple and stable interfaces, M$ has done everything in their power to thwart real standardization. Their users know this and want something else.
Something about not biting hands that feed you?
Yes, it's strange but it's really customers that feed Dell, not M$. The only reason Dell does not give their customers what they want is because they are afraid of M$ biting them in the ass, which is already sore from their mistaken loyalty to Intel. As Vista tanks and other vendors start doing well, you will see how backward your thinking was. The fact they are even mentioning gnu/linux means Dell knows where their friends really are.
Ask me again and I'll tell you the same until I see different.
Most of the previous posters are saying that certification is a waste of time or simple. It is not... the process of certification is not that simple.
Yeah, look at all the quality work that's gone into Vista drivers. HAAAaaaaaaaaa!
Michael Dell could ship hardware that has free software support today if he wanted to. It might even cost more than cheap junk Windoze machines, but it should not cost more than the same hardware with Windoze. Anything less is just FUD.
An open forum by such a large manufacturer may also put some pressure on chip and card manufacturers to open source their drivers.
Dell does not need to wait to chose hardware that already has free drivers. This would be a great service to their customers who will get hardware that's certified to work with free software. Right now Dell is a crap shoot for free software users, with more losers than winners and users have to do all the homework for themselves. If you go through all that trouble, you might as well build your own box from cheap parts.
Dell has already turned on the pressure. Just mentioning that they will do this will have vendors lining up.
Sadly there is trouble with Dell hardware/software even in their 'big business' server sales.... our group bought from Dell, and got machines with closed source, YOU CAN'T RELOAD THE OS WITHOUT OUR PROPRIETARY BINARIES software.
Ugh, $60,000 worth of disposable equipment.
Wouldn't it be nice if they had just picked some scsi cards that have free software drivers? How nice it would be if Dell used it's market might to ask for specifications or free drivers instead of how non free companies usually do it - asking the maker to keep things secret.
Funny, if I replace that "M$" with Google re Firefox, it seems to fit the same mould.... Like when my Firefox start page went from mozilla.com to google.com, you mean?
My homepage has never been changed by any gnu/linux distribution. I can't tell you what happens on Windoze.
When I make a typo in Konqueror I get the error message quoted before. Firefox gives the following:
Iceweasel can't find the server at www.poopydoo.com.
* Check the address for typing errors such as
ww.example.com instead of
www.example.com
* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network
connection.
* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
that Iceweasel is permitted to access the Web.
That is not a typo squat or selling of eyeballs, it's honest reporting of an error.
All IE7 does is go to the search page OF YOUR CHOICE if you misspell something. I have IE7 configured with Google as my default search engine...
Who cares if you can change your settings, this is just another sleazy way for M$ to sell eyeballs. The authors are angry because M$ both decries typo-squatting and practices it. The net result of their defaults is to violate the tradmarks of other companies by typo squatting, how's that for IP respect? Hypocrisy and sleaze are nothing new in Redmond. Nor are changes in defaults. I'm sure your next Windoze update will obliterate your defaults. They would not want all of the ppc revenue going to Google now would they? Of course it won't because the vast majority of Windoze users who use IE will just accept anything and everything M$ shovels at them until they finally give up computers all together.
An honest browser reports your error, "An error occurred while loading http://poopydoo.com/ Unknown host poopydoo.com." This prompts users to look again or maybee to use their Google bar with a reasonably worded search. Users confounded by a pile of advertisements are going to be confused more than anything else. IE7 is not an honest browser because M$ is not an honest company.
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
Live CDs laugh at Vista's bloat. The average gnu/linux distribution can fit into a 2GB file system that compresses down to 700 MB, and that's how you get live CDs. Those images usually contain everything - all the free drivers in existence, an auto configuration utility, the majority of the GNU stack, at least two window managers, two or three browsers, email clients, fonts, artwork, Open Office, gimp and several kitchen sinks. With 4 GB of RAM, you could cache everything uncompressed twice! A Linux system with that kind of memory would simply fly. A stripped down distro does most of the same things with lighter applications in 60 MB, but still has more GUI features than Vista does. How many DVDs do Vista and Office come on these days? How long do you think it will take M$ to have drivers that work?
Would you consider it tragic or ironic to discover that our iEchelon DSLAM monitoring devices run Linux?
I would not expect less. Big Brother wants to own his systems too. Free means free for any purpose, even a gross misuse of taxes like wire tapping by government officials. Risking vendor flaws and backdoors in such a situation would be extremely irresponsible.
The difficulty is being able to support every distro of Linux. It's impossible. I say that one is picked, say Ubuntu and support that with proper drivers and support.
You are telling me that Dell can't demand free Linux kernel support for any hardware they offer? First off, most hardware worth selling already has a free driver. Second any hardware maker would jump through the hoop for an order with Dell.
As for "support" for all the software on top... do they really offer that now? When someone buys Photoshop, do they expect Dell to help them out? How about games? At that point, what you want is someone like Red Hat which does provide support for applications. It really is beyond scope for a hardware provider to "support" software, but GNU/Linux is easier to support than stuff that has owners.
The bottom line is that they only need to make hardware that has free drivers available. If they do that, then anyone can install whatever distribution they want and they will depending on the sensitivity of the data stored on the machine. Non free drivers are not really what people asking for GNU/Linux are asking for. A Dell specific distribution is only moderately more trustable and flexible than Windoze. No one is going to want something they can't replace or upgrade.
Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
or anything that might be embarrassing out of context or anything that might clash with the feds current policy or visiting the doctor or talking to someone who might say something "inappropriate" or looking at the wrong web page or writing "I hate big brother" in your paper diary.
Or you could just use free software and encourage others to do the same before big brother can outlaw it along with the rest of your freedoms. Who on Earth is going to trust M$ with a life recorder?
First I worked for Microsoft, and now I'm jb.hl.com?
That you know which of those troll accounts claims to work for a grocery store, is pretty good evidence that you or a team you work with owns all of them. I don't bother to keep the fake personalities separate because they all deliver the same stupid message: Slashdot sucks, you suck and M$ rules. The message itself is good evidence of it's origin.
I wonder how RMS is going to spin this victory to his States-side detractors?
Look no further than the fine AP article for an explanation:
Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, [imagined non free software might contain bugs and backdoors and ] also noted that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates once described copyright reformers - including people who want to do away with proprietary software - as "some new modern-day sort of communists" - which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.
So, thank you Bill Gates for inspiring Cuba and many other countries. The disturbing part of this story is that citizens of the free world willingly give Bill Gates the authority that Fidel Castro will impose by force, and that's the real inspiration provided. I don't have any illusions that Fidel Castro will allow real software freedom anymore than he allows a free press, free association, free worship, so on and so forth. Fidel Castro and his party will be the owners of whatever Linux distribution he makes, just as Bill Gates is the owner of Windoze.
Whatever their motives, software freedom will be better for them. The government will own it's systems but their people using free software may also get a taste for real freedom and have better tools to persue it. Unless they use further M$ tricks like DRM, Cuban computers will work better with really free sotware.
So, how's a dose of reality for a spin? When you use non free software, someone else owns your computer. The non free way of "be so grateful for what my software does for you that you do as I say." When you look behind the rhetoric and lables, what you find is minds that think alike. You would never move to Cuba or China because they would strip you of many of your freedoms. Why willingly surrender your software freedom, with all of the dire implications for other freedom of speech, press, and what those freedoms safeguard?
I've never read a single word of documentation on iTunes, and yet I know how to do all kinds of weird stuff like tie it into multimedia presentations in Keynote or iPhoto, listen to the BBC,.... I don't actually do all those things,... I've also never read a single word of documentation on Amarok, but I have no idea whether it can do any of those things. The only thing I know how to do is Play All in random shuffle mode.
You should not say you can do something until you have tried and it worked.
With a little time, patience and curiosity you would have discovered many useful things Amarok does, without having to read a manual. First is the filter box above your music collection type "love" into it to get all your love songs. The next is the excellent sorting. Right click on the table above your collection and you get a remarkably large collection of useful choices that make it easier to find the music you want. Most distributions load up a bunch of radio stations in your playlists, but the people at Amarok can be held responsible if the station does something dumb and breaks Amarok. Everything is drag and drop, so managing your music playlists is just as intuitive as the above. Finally, a remote control is nice, but the whole point of programs like Amarok is to not have to fool with the music player. With Amarok it only takes a few minutes to set up days of music, so you can spend your days doing something other than pushing buttons.
An AC with a mouth foul enough to work for M$ claims:
You're so fucking stupid you couldn't even tell that was a joke. What a frothing prick you are.
I understand it was a joke, but it's not funny. A few media big heads have tried to make clever little jokes about vandalizing Wikipedia, but it's lame. In a few years, when more groups, like the CIA, make their own Wikis and everyone is used to them the novelty will wear off and vandalism will have all the wit, charm and taste as bathroom stall graffiti. Dumb shits will continue to do it, but they will all go to the same stupid places and make the same stupid stink. People with enough brains to do more damage will be hated like the spammers they are.
You might as well get used to the mindset now. If being called out for your bad behavior makes you angry, you will soon be angry often.
A frothy penis, by the way, can be a sign of a serious medical condition. You should have someone look at it before it rots your brain. It's not too late is it?
There are 52 work weeks in a year, if you don't take vacation. 40 hours/week x 52 weeks/year x 60 minutes/hour is 124,800 minutes, or 24,960 pages by your insane estimate of five minutes per page. Someone could read it in a three months or so, but it would be an exercise in cruelty with no reward much like reading the phone book.
You claim to be a grocery store employee. I hope you get a promotion to implement this.
I've heard that he pays people to write in Wikipedia. Perhaps he can pay some hosting fees seeing he's all interested in education and stuff. I'm sure he'd do it no strings attached.
I thought the main objection to OpenXML was that it fails to define a number of things, essentially saying "render like WordPerfect 1.0", making it an incomplete standard. Making it not impossible but very difficult for anyone other than Microsoft to implement it so it's fully compatible with the MS version.
The author dissmisses such concerns as "groundless":
Claims that the spec is impossible for third-parties to support have so far proven groundlessin fact, longtime rival Sun started working on an Excel Open XML import filter for OpenOffice.org's Calc program.
Sun is a big backer of Open Office which has been decoding M$'s secret formats for a decade, so their continuing is a non starter. How successful they will be is another matter and one M$ loses either way.
Slashdot pointed to a review that proved these issues back in July and Ars Technia forum members quickly pointed to other detailed and credible criticism Anyone who would confuse this as an IBM vrs. M$ story has taken the M$ party line without critical thought.
Slashdot Mirror
So the idea of selling digital downloads of on-the-radio songs for 99 cents doesn't count?
You could do that without digital restrictions and should. If you try to restrict your customers, you will be dependent of M$ and or the RIAA majors to deliver your product. Those people are not known for fair competition and are both kings of repositories of stale, second rate junk pushed at monopoly rates. If you think you can make a "new" business in that kind of market, more power to you. I think you will be just another RIAA vassal station.
The surprise is how twisted this study is. The author ignored the opinion of authors to concentrate on email addresses and the main conclusion is that 65% of kernel developers have a job. That people able to contribute to the Linux kernel would have a job is not much of a surprise. Ignoring the opinion of those you are trying to study is.
So, let me quote all the relevent sections to back up what I have said.
The statistics are all very nice, but the conclusion is forced. I'd go with the opinion of the authors themselves, code is still not being written on behalf of companies.
That's an unfortunate conclusion and things are changing. When free software takes the place of non free, the entire mechanism now "supporting" M$ and others will switch to free software authorship. When that happens hardware makers will step up to the plate with free drivers and contribute significant code. Many already do this. User feedback will still be important and of high quality, so the actual distribution of "this code paid for by Broadcom" vrs, "this code from Broadcom fixed by 101 happy users" is still hard for someone like me to predict.
I read the NYT article too. One of their sources denied that there was a computer problem. The truth may come out in a day or so, just as soon as all the market watch people quit selling everything they own .... AHHH!
The LSI controllers that ship with the PowerEdge 1950 are supported very well with either the megaraid2 driver (SCSI) or mptsas (SAS). You can get the array status by running mpt-status. NONE of this software is binary-only or available only from Dell.
That would be wonderful and Dell should advertise the fact and make sure it stays true. This is also known as certifying the hardware. If Dell would certify their hardware for free software, we would all be better off.
Dell is selling what their users want. That means Intel-based Win-servers(TM).
Is that why HP did better than Dell with AMD and Linux, despite big dumb scandals? Do you think Vista sales will even match XP's poor sales history?
There isn't a shop, restaurant, bank, professional office, hospital, school, library or public facility of any kind within twenty miles of here that isn't running a Windows OS on a Dell PC.
Sure, there's been a boom ... and the bust is going to be hard. The vast majority of users are fed up because M$ still does not work. They have spent the big bucks on a big brand name and It's still just as slow and buggy as it was in 1994. Then, Michael Dell tells them that 1/4 is controlled by a botnet. The future looks even worse because the new M$ OS won't work well on 94% of them. Hell, gnusense would do better than that and more established distros will work on better than 90%. With DRM, the expensive new machines may never work and they will always suck. The fanboys have bought their little Vista boxes and it's a letdown, now comes the big sales bust. Vendors who stick with M$ are going to fall flat on their faces.
Enter the Penguin. All the shiny new applications are already there and they take far fewer resources. Secure, stable, trustable and fun - free software has it all right now. All the bullies have is threats, restrictions and stuff that does not work.
Not to sound like a broken record around here, but why would Dell go out of their way to find components that work on an OS that is in direct competition with the one that ships with (currently) 100% of their hardware?
For three simple reasons:
You sell what your users want or you go out of business. What they sell now, contrary to their claim, does not really work with any of their hardware. Indeed, M$ is the source of all bogus compatibility problems, the people who gave you Winmodems and destroyed Alpha (remember 64 bit computing ten years ago?), who trashed Netscape and gave you rampant botnets, who crapped out OpenGL and gave you DirectX version 1 through 10 in far fewer years. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Hardware and software makers like simple and stable interfaces, M$ has done everything in their power to thwart real standardization. Their users know this and want something else.
Something about not biting hands that feed you?
Yes, it's strange but it's really customers that feed Dell, not M$. The only reason Dell does not give their customers what they want is because they are afraid of M$ biting them in the ass, which is already sore from their mistaken loyalty to Intel. As Vista tanks and other vendors start doing well, you will see how backward your thinking was. The fact they are even mentioning gnu/linux means Dell knows where their friends really are.
Ask me again and I'll tell you the same until I see different.
It will be just as long before I consider buying any of your computers.
Most of the previous posters are saying that certification is a waste of time or simple. It is not... the process of certification is not that simple.
Yeah, look at all the quality work that's gone into Vista drivers. HAAAaaaaaaaaa!
Michael Dell could ship hardware that has free software support today if he wanted to. It might even cost more than cheap junk Windoze machines, but it should not cost more than the same hardware with Windoze. Anything less is just FUD.
An open forum by such a large manufacturer may also put some pressure on chip and card manufacturers to open source their drivers.
Dell does not need to wait to chose hardware that already has free drivers. This would be a great service to their customers who will get hardware that's certified to work with free software. Right now Dell is a crap shoot for free software users, with more losers than winners and users have to do all the homework for themselves. If you go through all that trouble, you might as well build your own box from cheap parts.
Dell has already turned on the pressure. Just mentioning that they will do this will have vendors lining up.
Sadly there is trouble with Dell hardware/software even in their 'big business' server sales. ... our group bought from Dell, and got machines with closed source, YOU CAN'T RELOAD THE OS WITHOUT OUR PROPRIETARY BINARIES software.
Ugh, $60,000 worth of disposable equipment.
Wouldn't it be nice if they had just picked some scsi cards that have free software drivers? How nice it would be if Dell used it's market might to ask for specifications or free drivers instead of how non free companies usually do it - asking the maker to keep things secret.
Funny, if I replace that "M$" with Google re Firefox, it seems to fit the same mould. ... Like when my Firefox start page went from mozilla.com to google.com, you mean?
My homepage has never been changed by any gnu/linux distribution. I can't tell you what happens on Windoze.
When I make a typo in Konqueror I get the error message quoted before. Firefox gives the following:
That is not a typo squat or selling of eyeballs, it's honest reporting of an error.
Enjoy your favorite OS, it's enjoying you.
All IE7 does is go to the search page OF YOUR CHOICE if you misspell something. I have IE7 configured with Google as my default search engine ...
Who cares if you can change your settings, this is just another sleazy way for M$ to sell eyeballs. The authors are angry because M$ both decries typo-squatting and practices it. The net result of their defaults is to violate the tradmarks of other companies by typo squatting, how's that for IP respect? Hypocrisy and sleaze are nothing new in Redmond. Nor are changes in defaults. I'm sure your next Windoze update will obliterate your defaults. They would not want all of the ppc revenue going to Google now would they? Of course it won't because the vast majority of Windoze users who use IE will just accept anything and everything M$ shovels at them until they finally give up computers all together.
An honest browser reports your error, "An error occurred while loading http://poopydoo.com/ Unknown host poopydoo.com." This prompts users to look again or maybee to use their Google bar with a reasonably worded search. Users confounded by a pile of advertisements are going to be confused more than anything else. IE7 is not an honest browser because M$ is not an honest company.
And I say once again (as a NIX professional) that Vista's pretty damn good. Gone are the days when Windows was a toy. No longer. It has plenty of bullshit legacy cruft, but Vista is a BIG improvement.
Live CDs laugh at Vista's bloat. The average gnu/linux distribution can fit into a 2GB file system that compresses down to 700 MB, and that's how you get live CDs. Those images usually contain everything - all the free drivers in existence, an auto configuration utility, the majority of the GNU stack, at least two window managers, two or three browsers, email clients, fonts, artwork, Open Office, gimp and several kitchen sinks. With 4 GB of RAM, you could cache everything uncompressed twice! A Linux system with that kind of memory would simply fly. A stripped down distro does most of the same things with lighter applications in 60 MB, but still has more GUI features than Vista does. How many DVDs do Vista and Office come on these days? How long do you think it will take M$ to have drivers that work?
Would you consider it tragic or ironic to discover that our iEchelon DSLAM monitoring devices run Linux?
I would not expect less. Big Brother wants to own his systems too. Free means free for any purpose, even a gross misuse of taxes like wire tapping by government officials. Risking vendor flaws and backdoors in such a situation would be extremely irresponsible.
The difficulty is being able to support every distro of Linux. It's impossible. I say that one is picked, say Ubuntu and support that with proper drivers and support.
You are telling me that Dell can't demand free Linux kernel support for any hardware they offer? First off, most hardware worth selling already has a free driver. Second any hardware maker would jump through the hoop for an order with Dell.
As for "support" for all the software on top ... do they really offer that now? When someone buys Photoshop, do they expect Dell to help them out? How about games? At that point, what you want is someone like Red Hat which does provide support for applications. It really is beyond scope for a hardware provider to "support" software, but GNU/Linux is easier to support than stuff that has owners.
The bottom line is that they only need to make hardware that has free drivers available. If they do that, then anyone can install whatever distribution they want and they will depending on the sensitivity of the data stored on the machine. Non free drivers are not really what people asking for GNU/Linux are asking for. A Dell specific distribution is only moderately more trustable and flexible than Windoze. No one is going to want something they can't replace or upgrade.
Turn recording device off BEFORE committing crimes!
or anything that might be embarrassing out of context
or anything that might clash with the feds current policy
or visiting the doctor
or talking to someone who might say something "inappropriate"
or looking at the wrong web page
or writing "I hate big brother" in your paper diary.
Or you could just use free software and encourage others to do the same before big brother can outlaw it along with the rest of your freedoms. Who on Earth is going to trust M$ with a life recorder?
First I worked for Microsoft, and now I'm jb.hl.com?
That you know which of those troll accounts claims to work for a grocery store, is pretty good evidence that you or a team you work with owns all of them. I don't bother to keep the fake personalities separate because they all deliver the same stupid message: Slashdot sucks, you suck and M$ rules. The message itself is good evidence of it's origin.
I wonder how RMS is going to spin this victory to his States-side detractors?
Look no further than the fine AP article for an explanation:
So, thank you Bill Gates for inspiring Cuba and many other countries. The disturbing part of this story is that citizens of the free world willingly give Bill Gates the authority that Fidel Castro will impose by force, and that's the real inspiration provided. I don't have any illusions that Fidel Castro will allow real software freedom anymore than he allows a free press, free association, free worship, so on and so forth. Fidel Castro and his party will be the owners of whatever Linux distribution he makes, just as Bill Gates is the owner of Windoze.
Whatever their motives, software freedom will be better for them. The government will own it's systems but their people using free software may also get a taste for real freedom and have better tools to persue it. Unless they use further M$ tricks like DRM, Cuban computers will work better with really free sotware.
So, how's a dose of reality for a spin? When you use non free software, someone else owns your computer. The non free way of "be so grateful for what my software does for you that you do as I say." When you look behind the rhetoric and lables, what you find is minds that think alike. You would never move to Cuba or China because they would strip you of many of your freedoms. Why willingly surrender your software freedom, with all of the dire implications for other freedom of speech, press, and what those freedoms safeguard?
I've never read a single word of documentation on iTunes, and yet I know how to do all kinds of weird stuff like tie it into multimedia presentations in Keynote or iPhoto, listen to the BBC, .... I don't actually do all those things, ... I've also never read a single word of documentation on Amarok, but I have no idea whether it can do any of those things. The only thing I know how to do is Play All in random shuffle mode.
You should not say you can do something until you have tried and it worked.
With a little time, patience and curiosity you would have discovered many useful things Amarok does, without having to read a manual. First is the filter box above your music collection type "love" into it to get all your love songs. The next is the excellent sorting. Right click on the table above your collection and you get a remarkably large collection of useful choices that make it easier to find the music you want. Most distributions load up a bunch of radio stations in your playlists, but the people at Amarok can be held responsible if the station does something dumb and breaks Amarok. Everything is drag and drop, so managing your music playlists is just as intuitive as the above. Finally, a remote control is nice, but the whole point of programs like Amarok is to not have to fool with the music player. With Amarok it only takes a few minutes to set up days of music, so you can spend your days doing something other than pushing buttons.
An AC with a mouth foul enough to work for M$ claims:
You're so fucking stupid you couldn't even tell that was a joke. What a frothing prick you are.
I understand it was a joke, but it's not funny. A few media big heads have tried to make clever little jokes about vandalizing Wikipedia, but it's lame. In a few years, when more groups, like the CIA, make their own Wikis and everyone is used to them the novelty will wear off and vandalism will have all the wit, charm and taste as bathroom stall graffiti. Dumb shits will continue to do it, but they will all go to the same stupid places and make the same stupid stink. People with enough brains to do more damage will be hated like the spammers they are.
You might as well get used to the mindset now. If being called out for your bad behavior makes you angry, you will soon be angry often.
A frothy penis, by the way, can be a sign of a serious medical condition. You should have someone look at it before it rots your brain. It's not too late is it?
There are 52 work weeks in a year, if you don't take vacation. 40 hours/week x 52 weeks/year x 60 minutes/hour is 124,800 minutes, or 24,960 pages by your insane estimate of five minutes per page. Someone could read it in a three months or so, but it would be an exercise in cruelty with no reward much like reading the phone book.
You claim to be a grocery store employee. I hope you get a promotion to implement this.
Thanks a lot jerk. It took me three hours to do those.
How long does it take you to tear a page out of a library book? Thirty minutes?
Keep up the good work, tool.
I've heard that he pays people to write in Wikipedia. Perhaps he can pay some hosting fees seeing he's all interested in education and stuff. I'm sure he'd do it no strings attached.
OK, you can stop laughing now ... but I can't.
I thought the main objection to OpenXML was that it fails to define a number of things, essentially saying "render like WordPerfect 1.0", making it an incomplete standard. Making it not impossible but very difficult for anyone other than Microsoft to implement it so it's fully compatible with the MS version.
The author dissmisses such concerns as "groundless":
Sun is a big backer of Open Office which has been decoding M$'s secret formats for a decade, so their continuing is a non starter. How successful they will be is another matter and one M$ loses either way.
Slashdot pointed to a review that proved these issues back in July and Ars Technia forum members quickly pointed to other detailed and credible criticism Anyone who would confuse this as an IBM vrs. M$ story has taken the M$ party line without critical thought.