the policy simply promises enormous and unnecessary migration costs to Massachusetts taxpayers. The mandate forces the entire state government to acquire new technologies, train personnel, and contract for new services and support
Like that does not happen every two years when M$ pushes out another must have version of Office that does little more than the last one did but save to a new format?
Open Office does what needs to be done, costs nothing and works just as well or better than Office. I'm hoping that this drives a wave of free software adoption in Mass and elsewhere. This Micro Turd can piss off, his FUD won't work when people use free software.
We all use the floppy disk. I don't care who you are (but more likely so if you're a government employee), you have a green floppy disk in your briefcase that has a masking-tape label on it written with pencil..
That label idea has merit, but I'm too lazy to follow through. Once upon a time, I labled one "transfer disk."
Yeah, I carry a floppy as a last resort in the world of pain. You need several layers of prophylactic to get anything off a windoze box. A boot CD may not always work well with Bill Gate's fucked up device specs (think winmodem, wep, etc) or idea of the interweb (aka LAN) where you are. I could email to gmail, but that would be followed by a stream of spam. Many big dumb companies take away your USB devices. Sometimes you are left with nothing but that 1.44 MB to do your job.
Most of the time, I just use my nice little Debian laptop. Konqueror's built in sftp support blows everything else away.
With the ability to push to my house from work at over 8 Mbps, I rarely worry about this
That's cool but I get by with 60KB/s download from my house. The local IP, Cox, has bowed to Windoze problems. If they did not crimp the upload, the botnet would soak up everyone's bandwith and no one would have anything. Curse you and your stupid OS, Bill Gates!
My main concern with work to home connections is also Windoze. Putting a secure shell client on Windoze is kind of like putting a pad lock on paper bag. With all the full auto Microsoft worms carrying keyloggers and the half life of windoze on a network being 12 minutes, it would not take long at all for my home box to get rooted out. I won't Windoze to do anything but connect to my http server so windoze communications are one way.
The cure is to use a bootable CD or laptop at work, if your employer is clueless enough to still be using windoze. Right now, you can use knoppix, mepis or even the FSF bootable ID card to get things back and forth. Then you boot off your employers choice of pain an suffer another long and unproductive day of single screen GUI, no place keeping reboot daily, BSoD hell. At least the data transfer will go well.
With Paladium or sufficiently stupid corporate policy, you won't even be able to do that. That's the way things go.
... have machines that cook along without me doing anything month after month after month. No BSDs, etc. Yes, patch = boot...
So you have uptimes of less than a month every month because you religiously and with great superstition observe Black Tuesday and Windoze update.
you'd think that the mythical "predictably, always crashing" Windows server would rear its ugly head at some point
I work in a hospital and I see it whereever Windoze is deployed. Yes, it's the best the vendors can do and they "fully support" the flaky pieces of shit with on site visits. It's in administration and machine operation and it sucks hard in every way.
The only FUD here is "unreliable Linux". I can contrast Windoze performance with systems put in by GE that never go down running... Linux and Solaris.
Cool, IBM on software. Add that to this hardware from a year ago and you are off to the races. Of course, you could just build the system as designed. Performance does not have to suck electricity and heat your home.
I'm wanting to build one of these, but I really don't need it. Time may change that.
You see, it only takes ONE person to crack the protection and distribute the file in an unprotected format, and then the genie is out of the bottle.... If Windows won't play unprotected music, I'll run Linux. Oh waaaaaaait, I already run Linux; I haven't owned a Windows box since 2003.
You are being short sighted both morally and technically. Honest people want to be able to do what's honest and right without having to fear legal retribution. I should not have to hunt around dark corners of the internet for "stolen music" just to share a song with my wife, brother or even myself. You can run free software all you want and that will still be true. More importantly, this kind of screwed up memory can keep you from being able to run a free operating system. You can be sure M$ is going to embrace this "protection" and that every Dell/CrapBox out there will soon be coming with it.
Try again. This memory won't work in a nuTrusted(TM) device. You might be able to rig up a recorder to your headphone jack, but you are going to get a really crappy copy. Worse, any computer capable of playing this trusted crap will then refuse to play your crappy copy. Welcome to the lock down.
What does `copied' mean? From the perspective of a storage device, the data being read and put on a CD, which is then duplicated a million times, is exactly the same as the data being read, decoded, passed through a DAC and fed into someone's ears. It seems that these constraints are either unenforceable or just plain silly.
Sure, it's silly, but that does not mean it won't work. If everything in the chain is non free, you won't be able to do what you think you will be able to do. There will be a difference between the CD and the DAC.
If you have been keeping up with "Trusted" nonsense, this memory falls right in line. It has a fritz chip in it and it's going to act more like an IPod than memory. It will ONLY copy to a "trusted" device. There will never be a legal linux reader and it won't work with 99% of existing devices. It will have the power to only send low quality audio to any device with an audio out, so that "recording" via a sound card will yield an "FM radio" quality copy. Your music will no longer be a hostage on a few devices, it will be held hostage in the memory itself.
Right now, you can avoid DRM insanity but that's not going to last. When the world's three music publishers only release in DRM form, you will buy it or not have current popular music. The hope of music executives is to drive the world back to music quality and distribution that existed before digital technology. You will only hear good quality music live. Everything else will be FM and no one but them will have the ability to sell caned music. You don't think windoze will play that nasty non-RIAA music do you? Tomorrow's computers will be like todays music stores, RIAA only or no RIAA at all.
"Vast" powers...but only over Canadians?... Ph33R!!
Your trust in what your government and constitution say are sadly mistaken. Carnivore and Echalon are already operational. You have no privacy on an untrusted network without encryption.
Microsoft's effort is, as others have pointed out, Plays for Sure. This is their DRM baby and they have managed to recruit music and hardware vendors in a money losing effort, which should be a run away success. They can't even sell it to Microsoft employees. It's such a dissaster that it threatens Microsoft's desktop monopoly and is a poster boy for all DRM information.
Everything is there for dominance. The hardware is cheaper and works great. Music publishers, such as the new Napster, have lined up with seemingly cheaper deals. They even have all you can eat plans. Vendors have been enticed to give away hardware and music to "influential" demographic target groups. And of course, there's the desktop monopoly which can be exploited to screw the competition's software and which comes with Windoze Media Player. It should be like Office or IE all over again.
The problem is that Microsoft sucks. The music goes away, from your computer and your device if you quit paying your subscription. You can't copy the files, and the first brush with the full power of DRM is truly shocking to users. "It's like someone else is in my computer," is how a fellow student described it to my yesterday. The reputation of Windows Media Player and Windows itself could not be lower and both have earned it with continued advertising assaults both intended and exploit driven. The result is something that's painful to use and liable to lose all of your music at any moment. The same cheap hardware works very nicely with Free software. I use my cheap little usbfs Walmart mp3 player with KDE software and it's an awesome, network aware solution that blows both DRM schemes out of the water.
Microsoft's failure to make entertainment systems that work is a tremendous opportunity. Everyone wants their computer to play music and movies without hassle and no one is ready to have textbooks and reference materials come the Microsoft way. Apple is using this screw up to crack the desktop monopoly. Ipod is the most popular music player even on Microsoft's campus, ha ha ha. You can bet that more than a few of them have bought Apple computers too. The free software community can also greatly benefit. If you know someone who's about to buy a $500 mini mac or $200 mp3 player, give them a Mepis CD and show them how they can use their current hardware and music collection without surrendering control of their digital future to anyone.
Now, I'm not that au fait with the low-level Windows or Linux processes, but I understood that they both used monolithic kernels (ie, drivers not in userland). Surely this means that Windows also has to "recompile" the kernel when the device drivers change? If so it might be hidden behind a pretty user-interface, but it's the same damn architecture and the same design problem.
They are not the same at all. Linux uses modules which makes things very easy. Winblows, even if it had the same mechanism, screws things up with intentional confusion like TWAIN, where hardware drivers and user interfaces are married. Take a quick tour of kernel modules sometimes and you will be impressed. As a sanity check, compare your experience with Knoppix to Windoze XP.
Debian kernels come with all free modules and they are not hard to use. They are placed in/lib/modules/kernel_number/. Distributions like Knoppix and Mepis use hotplug and other hardware recognition to configure devices on boot in a way that XP will never match.
It's not hard to use module utilities yourself. Just make yourself root and play. To see what modules your have try "lsmod". If it all flies by to fast, try "lsmod |less". If you want to manually install a module for a device that refuses to identify itself, use "modprobe name". To remove a module, "rmmod name". To see more about how your computer is set up, try manpages or poking around/proc. A quick google search will answer questions manpages don't.
Now compare that to having to run Winblows Update all the time, digging trough all manner of inconsistent GUIs for settings or that mother of all evils, The Registry.
At $49, Mighty Mouse features the revolutionary Scroll Ball that lets you move anywhere inside a document, without lifting a finger. And with touch-sensitive technology concealed under the seamless top shell, you get the programability of a four-button mouse in a single-button design.
Konqueror has offered the same functionality for years. They use vi style, hjkl motion for scrolling so you never have to take your fingers off the keyboard. Macros and shortcuts from the keyboard are, of course, more numerous. Between that and Thinkpad keyboard joystick / below the keyboard buttons, any mouse is a clumsy input device.
At home I use a Logitec ball mouse which can be picked up for $30 or so. It's not as nice as the Thinkpad input, but I don't have to drag it around.
What sort of parents do you have... for most "Dual Booting" infers putting some footwear on each foot before departing for a long walk in the hills.
My parents, who were not mentioned, are people who can read a Grub or Lilo boot menu and select between "Xandros" and "Windows". Most people can do this and that's how they operate computers.
The things that don't work are DirectX and some kinds of USB devices. While that takes out a distressingly large number of programs, the average person can live with it through dual booting or Win4Lin, which will work as well as Winblows ever did. Win4Lin can be bought right off the Xandros Networks and runs Winblows in an Xwindow easily enough for any new user.
More importantly, the kinds of applications that people "need" to run do work. Office, Outlook, IE and in house software will work. As in house software is 90% of what businesses pay people to write, you can say better than 90% of important winblows software will work. That's better than XP and Vista will give you. From a business perspective, Xandros has what you want. Only terminally closed junk like Autodesk and games will really give you trouble and those problems are overcome as mentioned above.
How do I know? These people told me, with step by step how-to instructions for Xandros migration, which included great Crossover Office, Win4lin, Wine and Dosbox instructions. Xandros makes it easy to migrate without losing email, contacts and other stuff that Microsoft makes to transfer even to other Microsoft machines. The support network Microsoft has traditionally relied on (that's you and me) is moving to Linux.
That is a few hundred thousand people who will eventually run into application support issues, driver issues, printing issues etc that they won't be able to turn to friends for help with.
Nonsense. Those people know the limitations and also know they can dual boot for whatever they think they still need. They also know that their old Winblows partition sucked to begin with, that's why they are taking the time and trouble to use something else. More importantly, they know that the root of their problems under Winblows or Linux is Microsoft and their greedy upgrade train.
Xandros is not my favorite distribution for home users, Mepis is. Home users typically have fewer legacy applications to run and are ready for a clean break. Xandros is better in a business setting where people have invested in accounting and other software that they want to keep using without having to buy new versions of Winblows, etc. Xandros does, however, offer the Windows savant much to make them feel at home and is not a bad choice for such "power users".
Being able to run legacy software is not a bad idea. The ability to run old Winblows shite was critical to winning Munich. People understand when Winblows junk won't run. Chances are that it won't run on Vista either. Efforts to run old software that you bought and paid for are just another exercise of the four software freedoms.
You can say that the Linux browsers are backward compatible but I would like to see you take modern versions of Firefox or KDE and the like and build/install it on a distribution from 1999/2000.
I'll bet you'd like me to play with a red hot poker too. I'll stick with running the latest software on my hardware from 1999, thank you. These things can and are done, after all you can get IE to run under wine on Linux.
Now, since you are charged for most of the commercial Linux distros when you are told to upgrade the distro for the sake of getting modern libraries you are in essence being told to upgrade to get a modern browser and modern versions of all of the software.
Hmmm, could be you are paying for a smooth upgrade path.
The problem, Deviant, is that it's hard to compare M$ shit with free software the way you just did. Mozilla and Konqueror, since about 2000, have both had more and better features than IE7 will have whenever it's "ready". There are more real changes between commercial linux releases than Microsoft could dream about making in ten years. Actually it was easy to compare the two systems, it just looks bad for M$.
You are not paying just for a browser upgrade but an upgrade to all of the latest versions of everyting in the OS and you are paying for the security and bug fix updates for years and years.
Oh, so you do understand the Linux side of things. It's too bad you think M$ actually improves things. That kind of naivete will keep you and your clients on a very crappy platform.
MS is a company
Wow, I thought it was Billy G's little pissing ground.
and they put out a good product in modern windows and office that is worth paying for.
Sure, I see, paying for all of that support up front so you can be dumped later when you could just download a zero cost OS and get better software. That's a no brain decision, really.
My only comments thus far is that if you "discard" a window (fold it all the way over so that it dissappears off the screen) there's no easy way to get it back without dropping the object your dragging first. Similarly, it's too easy to folder over too many windows, by accident.
Most of these issues don't appear in demo. The windows all fold back easily, and they interact like paper does so it's not all that confusing.
The issue you don't see in the demo is the one you have with a paper clutter. You have to start folding to begin with. The reason people love colapasable tree views is so they can see the details of their organized work that they are intersted in. No such organization exists for a pile of paper or windows confined to a dinky single interface GUI. The major problem is that most of your windows are covered by the one you see so you don't know which one to fold to start. Your chances of needing to move something from the one you see to the 10 you can't see are about 10:1.
Not a system for everyone, since many students will be more interested in the big names which tend to get pirated in the first place, but a nice enough system, and the artists certainly aren't hard done by.
So "Piracy" of big names goes on. Everyone knows the RIAA fucked them and is making all the money.
In the mean time, people have an incentive not to "pirate" this music. Anyone who's interested can check it out, you can easily give your friends a copy if you want, it's a reasonable price and you know the artist gets paid when you buy. That's very good reason to simply buy the music and not go through the trouble of setting up additional software to share something anyone can get on their own.
You realize, of course, what this means for "big names" don't you? There's a subtle shift in value where the "big name" looks cheap and dirty but paranoid and asinine while the new name looks Cool and easy. Eventually, you wonder why the big name was so greedy, threatening with their shit. You then wonder why you wanted the big name to begin with.
It's superior competition that's legal and won't be shut down. They just got a bookmark in my music Folder.
Sure, it's mac inspired looks are a little dated (a 1998 Johny come lately M$ ringer), but I prefer that simple look to the really ugly athletic shoe inspired junk. The folding case is good. Of course, the 1/3 to 1/10 price tag is something to be admired.
This is just a sign of things to come. With a MMC or CF card slot and less intentional crippling, this would be a better buy than a $80 stand alone music player. Cheap, multi function wireless devices based on free software will soon flood the market. Some of them might even look nice.
if you simply want to make closed-source software developers aware of open source software -- then what better approach is there than saying "here's some code; go ahead and use it" and waiting until they notice that the code is both useful and high quality?
You really want a better way? Just point out all of the competitors who are eating their lunch with GPL'd software.
Note that he still feels DRM is a necessary evil, just so long as there's a way to circumvent it...
Try:
Note that he still feels DRM is a necessary for you and me evil, just so long as there's a way for him to circumvent it...
Advocates of DRM imagine themselves in the position of power, never as the victim. They think they are special. The idiot obviously does not realize what a fool he just made of himself, choosing to blame the "implementation" without realizing what other people warned him of was true. Making people buy media again and again and restricting knowledge to "special people" is what DRM is about.
Someone else here seems to think along the same lines. They tell us things like, "This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable." They would probably be OK with being able to shoot the recipient if that would keep their precious dirty secret.
You can't have it both ways. If you share an idea, a song or clever phrase, it's not yours anymore. Other people are going to be able to enjoy it and that's what publication is all about. Don't publish your secrets and they will stay secrets. Don't try to treat publications as secrets.
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the policy simply promises enormous and unnecessary migration costs to Massachusetts taxpayers. The mandate forces the entire state government to acquire new technologies, train personnel, and contract for new services and support
Like that does not happen every two years when M$ pushes out another must have version of Office that does little more than the last one did but save to a new format?
Open Office does what needs to be done, costs nothing and works just as well or better than Office. I'm hoping that this drives a wave of free software adoption in Mass and elsewhere. This Micro Turd can piss off, his FUD won't work when people use free software.
That label idea has merit, but I'm too lazy to follow through. Once upon a time, I labled one "transfer disk."
Yeah, I carry a floppy as a last resort in the world of pain. You need several layers of prophylactic to get anything off a windoze box. A boot CD may not always work well with Bill Gate's fucked up device specs (think winmodem, wep, etc) or idea of the interweb (aka LAN) where you are. I could email to gmail, but that would be followed by a stream of spam. Many big dumb companies take away your USB devices. Sometimes you are left with nothing but that 1.44 MB to do your job.
Most of the time, I just use my nice little Debian laptop. Konqueror's built in sftp support blows everything else away.
That's cool but I get by with 60KB/s download from my house. The local IP, Cox, has bowed to Windoze problems. If they did not crimp the upload, the botnet would soak up everyone's bandwith and no one would have anything. Curse you and your stupid OS, Bill Gates!
My main concern with work to home connections is also Windoze. Putting a secure shell client on Windoze is kind of like putting a pad lock on paper bag. With all the full auto Microsoft worms carrying keyloggers and the half life of windoze on a network being 12 minutes, it would not take long at all for my home box to get rooted out. I won't Windoze to do anything but connect to my http server so windoze communications are one way.
The cure is to use a bootable CD or laptop at work, if your employer is clueless enough to still be using windoze. Right now, you can use knoppix, mepis or even the FSF bootable ID card to get things back and forth. Then you boot off your employers choice of pain an suffer another long and unproductive day of single screen GUI, no place keeping reboot daily, BSoD hell. At least the data transfer will go well.
With Paladium or sufficiently stupid corporate policy, you won't even be able to do that. That's the way things go.
So you have uptimes of less than a month every month because you religiously and with great superstition observe Black Tuesday and Windoze update.
you'd think that the mythical "predictably, always crashing" Windows server would rear its ugly head at some point
I work in a hospital and I see it whereever Windoze is deployed. Yes, it's the best the vendors can do and they "fully support" the flaky pieces of shit with on site visits. It's in administration and machine operation and it sucks hard in every way.
The only FUD here is "unreliable Linux". I can contrast Windoze performance with systems put in by GE that never go down running ... Linux and Solaris.
I'm wanting to build one of these, but I really don't need it. Time may change that.
You are being short sighted both morally and technically. Honest people want to be able to do what's honest and right without having to fear legal retribution. I should not have to hunt around dark corners of the internet for "stolen music" just to share a song with my wife, brother or even myself. You can run free software all you want and that will still be true. More importantly, this kind of screwed up memory can keep you from being able to run a free operating system. You can be sure M$ is going to embrace this "protection" and that every Dell/CrapBox out there will soon be coming with it.
Try again. This memory won't work in a nuTrusted(TM) device. You might be able to rig up a recorder to your headphone jack, but you are going to get a really crappy copy. Worse, any computer capable of playing this trusted crap will then refuse to play your crappy copy. Welcome to the lock down.
Sure, it's silly, but that does not mean it won't work. If everything in the chain is non free, you won't be able to do what you think you will be able to do. There will be a difference between the CD and the DAC.
If you have been keeping up with "Trusted" nonsense, this memory falls right in line. It has a fritz chip in it and it's going to act more like an IPod than memory. It will ONLY copy to a "trusted" device. There will never be a legal linux reader and it won't work with 99% of existing devices. It will have the power to only send low quality audio to any device with an audio out, so that "recording" via a sound card will yield an "FM radio" quality copy. Your music will no longer be a hostage on a few devices, it will be held hostage in the memory itself.
Right now, you can avoid DRM insanity but that's not going to last. When the world's three music publishers only release in DRM form, you will buy it or not have current popular music. The hope of music executives is to drive the world back to music quality and distribution that existed before digital technology. You will only hear good quality music live. Everything else will be FM and no one but them will have the ability to sell caned music. You don't think windoze will play that nasty non-RIAA music do you? Tomorrow's computers will be like todays music stores, RIAA only or no RIAA at all.
Those will still happen when the door refuses to open.
A bonus feature will be "spear mode" where the door pretends to open, then selectively closes one or two leaves. It's a tiger trap, I tell you.
Your trust in what your government and constitution say are sadly mistaken. Carnivore and Echalon are already operational. You have no privacy on an untrusted network without encryption.
Everything is there for dominance. The hardware is cheaper and works great. Music publishers, such as the new Napster, have lined up with seemingly cheaper deals. They even have all you can eat plans. Vendors have been enticed to give away hardware and music to "influential" demographic target groups. And of course, there's the desktop monopoly which can be exploited to screw the competition's software and which comes with Windoze Media Player. It should be like Office or IE all over again.
The problem is that Microsoft sucks. The music goes away, from your computer and your device if you quit paying your subscription. You can't copy the files, and the first brush with the full power of DRM is truly shocking to users. "It's like someone else is in my computer," is how a fellow student described it to my yesterday. The reputation of Windows Media Player and Windows itself could not be lower and both have earned it with continued advertising assaults both intended and exploit driven. The result is something that's painful to use and liable to lose all of your music at any moment. The same cheap hardware works very nicely with Free software. I use my cheap little usbfs Walmart mp3 player with KDE software and it's an awesome, network aware solution that blows both DRM schemes out of the water.
Microsoft's failure to make entertainment systems that work is a tremendous opportunity. Everyone wants their computer to play music and movies without hassle and no one is ready to have textbooks and reference materials come the Microsoft way. Apple is using this screw up to crack the desktop monopoly. Ipod is the most popular music player even on Microsoft's campus, ha ha ha. You can bet that more than a few of them have bought Apple computers too. The free software community can also greatly benefit. If you know someone who's about to buy a $500 mini mac or $200 mp3 player, give them a Mepis CD and show them how they can use their current hardware and music collection without surrendering control of their digital future to anyone.
They are not the same at all. Linux uses modules which makes things very easy. Winblows, even if it had the same mechanism, screws things up with intentional confusion like TWAIN, where hardware drivers and user interfaces are married. Take a quick tour of kernel modules sometimes and you will be impressed. As a sanity check, compare your experience with Knoppix to Windoze XP.
Debian kernels come with all free modules and they are not hard to use. They are placed in /lib/modules/kernel_number/. Distributions like Knoppix and Mepis use hotplug and other hardware recognition to configure devices on boot in a way that XP will never match.
It's not hard to use module utilities yourself. Just make yourself root and play. To see what modules your have try "lsmod". If it all flies by to fast, try "lsmod |less". If you want to manually install a module for a device that refuses to identify itself, use "modprobe name". To remove a module, "rmmod name". To see more about how your computer is set up, try manpages or poking around /proc. A quick google search will answer questions manpages don't.
Now compare that to having to run Winblows Update all the time, digging trough all manner of inconsistent GUIs for settings or that mother of all evils, The Registry.
At $49, Mighty Mouse features the revolutionary Scroll Ball that lets you move anywhere inside a document, without lifting a finger. And with touch-sensitive technology concealed under the seamless top shell, you get the programability of a four-button mouse in a single-button design.
Konqueror has offered the same functionality for years. They use vi style, hjkl motion for scrolling so you never have to take your fingers off the keyboard. Macros and shortcuts from the keyboard are, of course, more numerous. Between that and Thinkpad keyboard joystick / below the keyboard buttons, any mouse is a clumsy input device.
At home I use a Logitec ball mouse which can be picked up for $30 or so. It's not as nice as the Thinkpad input, but I don't have to drag it around.
My parents, who were not mentioned, are people who can read a Grub or Lilo boot menu and select between "Xandros" and "Windows". Most people can do this and that's how they operate computers.
More importantly, the kinds of applications that people "need" to run do work. Office, Outlook, IE and in house software will work. As in house software is 90% of what businesses pay people to write, you can say better than 90% of important winblows software will work. That's better than XP and Vista will give you. From a business perspective, Xandros has what you want. Only terminally closed junk like Autodesk and games will really give you trouble and those problems are overcome as mentioned above.
How do I know? These people told me, with step by step how-to instructions for Xandros migration, which included great Crossover Office, Win4lin, Wine and Dosbox instructions. Xandros makes it easy to migrate without losing email, contacts and other stuff that Microsoft makes to transfer even to other Microsoft machines. The support network Microsoft has traditionally relied on (that's you and me) is moving to Linux.
Nonsense. Those people know the limitations and also know they can dual boot for whatever they think they still need. They also know that their old Winblows partition sucked to begin with, that's why they are taking the time and trouble to use something else. More importantly, they know that the root of their problems under Winblows or Linux is Microsoft and their greedy upgrade train.
Xandros is not my favorite distribution for home users, Mepis is. Home users typically have fewer legacy applications to run and are ready for a clean break. Xandros is better in a business setting where people have invested in accounting and other software that they want to keep using without having to buy new versions of Winblows, etc. Xandros does, however, offer the Windows savant much to make them feel at home and is not a bad choice for such "power users".
Being able to run legacy software is not a bad idea. The ability to run old Winblows shite was critical to winning Munich. People understand when Winblows junk won't run. Chances are that it won't run on Vista either. Efforts to run old software that you bought and paid for are just another exercise of the four software freedoms.
I'll bet you'd like me to play with a red hot poker too. I'll stick with running the latest software on my hardware from 1999, thank you. These things can and are done, after all you can get IE to run under wine on Linux.
Now, since you are charged for most of the commercial Linux distros when you are told to upgrade the distro for the sake of getting modern libraries you are in essence being told to upgrade to get a modern browser and modern versions of all of the software.
Hmmm, could be you are paying for a smooth upgrade path.
The problem, Deviant, is that it's hard to compare M$ shit with free software the way you just did. Mozilla and Konqueror, since about 2000, have both had more and better features than IE7 will have whenever it's "ready". There are more real changes between commercial linux releases than Microsoft could dream about making in ten years. Actually it was easy to compare the two systems, it just looks bad for M$.
You are not paying just for a browser upgrade but an upgrade to all of the latest versions of everyting in the OS and you are paying for the security and bug fix updates for years and years.
Oh, so you do understand the Linux side of things. It's too bad you think M$ actually improves things. That kind of naivete will keep you and your clients on a very crappy platform.
MS is a company
Wow, I thought it was Billy G's little pissing ground.
and they put out a good product in modern windows and office that is worth paying for.
Sure, I see, paying for all of that support up front so you can be dumped later when you could just download a zero cost OS and get better software. That's a no brain decision, really.
Most of these issues don't appear in demo. The windows all fold back easily, and they interact like paper does so it's not all that confusing.
The issue you don't see in the demo is the one you have with a paper clutter. You have to start folding to begin with. The reason people love colapasable tree views is so they can see the details of their organized work that they are intersted in. No such organization exists for a pile of paper or windows confined to a dinky single interface GUI. The major problem is that most of your windows are covered by the one you see so you don't know which one to fold to start. Your chances of needing to move something from the one you see to the 10 you can't see are about 10:1.
So "Piracy" of big names goes on. Everyone knows the RIAA fucked them and is making all the money.
In the mean time, people have an incentive not to "pirate" this music. Anyone who's interested can check it out, you can easily give your friends a copy if you want, it's a reasonable price and you know the artist gets paid when you buy. That's very good reason to simply buy the music and not go through the trouble of setting up additional software to share something anyone can get on their own.
You realize, of course, what this means for "big names" don't you? There's a subtle shift in value where the "big name" looks cheap and dirty but paranoid and asinine while the new name looks Cool and easy. Eventually, you wonder why the big name was so greedy, threatening with their shit. You then wonder why you wanted the big name to begin with.
It's superior competition that's legal and won't be shut down. They just got a bookmark in my music Folder.
This is just a sign of things to come. With a MMC or CF card slot and less intentional crippling, this would be a better buy than a $80 stand alone music player. Cheap, multi function wireless devices based on free software will soon flood the market. Some of them might even look nice.
You really want a better way? Just point out all of the competitors who are eating their lunch with GPL'd software.
Try:
Note that he still feels DRM is a necessary for you and me evil, just so long as there's a way for him to circumvent it...
Advocates of DRM imagine themselves in the position of power, never as the victim. They think they are special. The idiot obviously does not realize what a fool he just made of himself, choosing to blame the "implementation" without realizing what other people warned him of was true. Making people buy media again and again and restricting knowledge to "special people" is what DRM is about.
Someone else here seems to think along the same lines. They tell us things like, "This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable." They would probably be OK with being able to shoot the recipient if that would keep their precious dirty secret.
You can't have it both ways. If you share an idea, a song or clever phrase, it's not yours anymore. Other people are going to be able to enjoy it and that's what publication is all about. Don't publish your secrets and they will stay secrets. Don't try to treat publications as secrets.