Just looking at the quality of much Linux code and the vast variety of features implemented therein will tell you that this ain't some system thrown together by some idiots who still live with their parents.
You are right, they might be very smart 12 year old programmers. That's rare as the average age was between 22 and 37 the last time FOSS looked things. Still, I know one very good 13 year old perl guy. In the free software world, what you do and make is more important than where you live or who you are. That's in sharp contrast to the commercial world where turds like Bill Gates had enough money at birth to bully dummies into dumpsters for code or buy it for his vaults.
The statement "Stuart goes on to explode the myth of renegade prgrammers by saying, 'Sure, it represents a new way to create software, but the actual process looks a lot like how enterprise software has been made for decades." Is an interesting turn of events if true. Just a few years ago these were the numbers:
While 50% were IT professionals, 47% of free programmers expected no financial reward for their work. The overwhelming reason was to gain experience, teach and learn how to do things. The actual motivating factors did not change much between those paid and those not paid to make software.
40% spent less than five hours a week on their software. I might spend that much time reading the news.
Most projects have few members. Not everything is like Mozilla or the Linux kernel. Most don't even have the 90 or so programmers the GNU debugger has. With projects like KDE making it easy to produce beautiful and functional GUI programs, it's likely that more small projects will come into popular use.
The bottom up nature of free software is a very real and welcome departure from "traditional," 1980s, NDA encumbered, commercial software development. While it's great to have companies supporting various projects, I doubt seriously they will be able to match the creativity of the world at large in numbers or range of applications. The best thing that companies can do is to free their people and let them solve their problems as they please. Free software environments are far richer, more pleasing and of higher quality than those put together traditionally. The "renegade" programmer sharing his information and scratching itches is what makes this possible and that's what free software is all about.
The myth discussed in this article is really intended for a bunch of PHBs and people who aren't that technically inclined, who believe that Linux is a toy used by rogue hackers to break into peoples' Windoze boxes and steal their social security numbers...
Well then, I'm not so worried by the DDoS on the article that's kept me from reading it.
Your SD card sounds like it is fubared and or some serious bug with the SD driver. I remember on most ROMs that there are problems trying to partition and format an SD card, and it might be that which is causing your problem.
My SD acts weird, but I thought that was because of some kind of crummy DRM, the "secure" in Secure Digital. Yep, that's the problem. In any case, I make use of the gadget with a pc card adaptor. Cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did and I've had no data problems yet. With DRM built into it, however, there's no telling what it may do. I prefer the CF format and use it when I can.
People who run servers but can't afford to qualify them much should probably stick with "stable". "Testing" is for desktop users who don't like much churn, but it's still more stable than Windows, IMHO. "Unstable" is for the bleeding edge who want someone else to do the compiling.
I've been running unstable for about a year now and it's been very robust and remarkably reliable. The easy route was to install Mepis and upgrade. The install is smooth, lasting about twenty minutes. The upgrade can be more or less smooth, so long as you have good download speeds for the 500 MB of new libraries and programs you get. Every now and then big chunks would go away for a while, but they always came back in a month or so. Major functions, networking, printing, X, console, and all that never stop working and the system as a whole remains stable. Upgrades once a month take some work, but it's doable. Current uptimes on the two machines I abuse this way are both over, Balmer's "insane" goal of 60 days and I don't expect them to go down unless the power fails.
Windows was way more trouble and I got much less out of it.
I would not recomend doing much with these PDAs if you want to add much software that does not come with it.
I'm not sure what that means, but Open Zaurus has more software than you can shake a stick at. About three weeks ago, they released 3.5.3, the second release using Bit Bake. Even GPE works well now, though Opie is better developed.
if you are thinking about the wonderful linux stability and versitility, you may have to think again.
Some of the commercial software that comes with Zaurus may not be the best. As a Debian user, crashes are a shock. OZ, when things are working, does much better. I can say for sure that 3.5.3 is working. If your choice of three platforms, the ability to compile your own applications, multiple input and output and linux fs and mount flexibility is not good enough for you, I'd like to know what you consider better. Do you know of any other PDA you can ssh into and export X sessions?
The company offering these is obviously a solution provider. They have picked a good tool for the job.
Sure, nothing works for everone. The "average user" may not need this but that's because they don't need a PDA. The average corporate drone and my wife are happy with Palm. That and the utter uslessness of Winblows based PDAs are why PDA sales are down in the dirt. Those who lug around an eight pound laptop simply to text message, web browse, email, text edit and spreedsheet, would do well with one of these.
How about innovative company using available hardware and software to meet customer needs?
I won't buy one -- because it's discontinued. (support is important, or we'd still have TI/994As running Parsec between meetings)
Support for a $250 pocket gadget? What's that? Why do you need it?
I don't get your negative attitude. My personal needs are satisfied by an original handspring visor. A Zaurus 5500 is lots of fun, especially with the release of OZ GPE 3.5.3. It is indeed a near laptop replacement and beats the hell out of any silly Wince or Pocket Peeee Ceeee. A 5600 or 6000 would rock.
It's scary because the law does not provide protection for the possible creation. Imagine yourself trapped in a sheep's body. You were litterally raised in a barn, never clothed and left to sleep in your own shit. While you can never articulate your feelings, you might be very upset. You would certainly be upset to know that your owner could kill and eat you.
It's one thing to grow human bones, muscles and organs. That can get creepy enough if done by harvesting and supressing what would have otherwise grown into a whole person. Growing human brains is something that's always creepy unless it's done in a free and legally protected body. It would also be cruel to create a limited, crippled or painful body such as a sheep for that human brain. It is unethical to take risks for others you would not be willing to take yourself or without their consent.
The cold war is over and with it has gone the rhetoric of freedom. Now we see that those who claimed there was little difference between our Federal tyrants and Soviet tyrants were correct. Compared to the real evil empire, the war on terror is a pathetic excuse for violations of liberty. Yet daily we allow and some even demand such things. The rhetoric was right and we need to remember it.
The war between free and closed software is as important a fight as we have today. Every day, people sign over their privacy for the privilege of running expensive, second rate software. Some of this software, like Macromedia Flash, turns on your microphone and grants it's owners the ability to listen in on your conversations. Others, such as M$ OS demand the ability to inspect your files. Phone tapping is trivial next to such violations because your computer is also your filing system, your post and no phones worked when hung up the way a computer microphone can.
These violations are against company and individual alike, yet the bigger dumber companies continue to be suckered into massive information leaks by promises of employee monitoring. Such is the folly of manipulative people. The same site also point out that almost half of big dumb companies monitor their employee's email, here. Want to bet that 100% of those big dumb companies use M$ on their desktops? They have no idea what's leaking out of their networks from non-free shit, spyware and malware.
Ascath, user 522,428, gets a big smart ass laugh with:
Obviously it is because of linux!
But he may be on to something. Let's read the article:
[Microsoft] cites a greater-than-expected decline in commercial and retail licensing for its business selling Windows operating systems for PCs, and a drop in currency exchange rates from when the company projected its earlier numbers.
Fewer people are buying Winblows, I wonder why?
Finally the giant is beginning to fall!!! hmmm, only 9.6 billion left to go.
That money won't last four quarters at Microsoft's current spending rate if their revenues go down the tubes. Remember DEC? Wang? They failed quickly and they actually had something worth buying.
The Microsoft game is closer to over than you think:
Microsoft can't maintain it's current code much less develop new code but they never did that anyway.
No one is dumb enough to think they can make a fortune developing for Microsoft anymore, so Microsoft is left without a pool of "loss leaders" to buy new code from.
When Microsoft's earnings stop growing, their compensation packages, which include stock options, stop growing and they end up with even less to develop with.
With falling market share, M$ losses it's ability to bully hardware and software developers. They are then free to build to open and free standards.
No product, no revenue, no earnings, no development, no user, no power, no product.
The feedback on their fall is all positive. The results will be that way too.
Slashdot user 669,365 laments, It's almost as if there's some bias or something... and tries to prove it by quoting lame headlines:
Google News:
Microsoft profits jump to US$ 2.56 billion this quarter (Earthtimes.org) - Yawn. Microsoft Third-Quarter Profits Double (Yahoo News) - Double over what? A seasonal low? Microsoft: The Cash Machine (Motley Fool) - A fool and his money are soon parted. See here to trade some of your money for something you can get free as in speech and beer.
Slashdot:
Microsoft Misses Quarterly Revenue Projection
Me: Holy shit, something that's never happened before! How did that happen? What does it mean? Sounds like NEWs to me, I suppose that's why Business Week wrote the article that way. Reading the article is a good idea. Wow, it's because M$ did not sell as many versions of it's OS as it though. Could it be that people are tired of buying second rate software?
Astrotrufers will never know. They are too busy with the following dumb questions:
How can we act like nothing has changed?
What can we say to insult our competition?
How fast can we fill up and self mod Slashdot's coverage.
When people ask me for professional advice, I recommend that they use the right tool for the right job. In some cases, for some people, that's Open Source and in other cases, it isn't.
That's nuts. For the average person that only wants to browse, read email and type out papers, free software is far better. Something like Mepis, which installs in minutes, is a much easier way to fix a broken Winblows box than a reinstall. Once fixed this way, it won't break. Only a tiny percentage of users NEED M$ junk. They have it by default, due to anti-competitive practices, and we all pay the price of their stuff not working, botnets and spam.
Why do I care? Because I care about me and you. Watching people fumble around jopups and BSoD on M$'s single screen desktop, no tab browser and rape me mail client without a spell checker is like watching someone eat over priced, radioactive Uncle Ben's rice with chopsticks. It's not only the wrong tool for the job, any job, it shits on everyone else.
What exactly can you do better with non free software than you can do with free? In those very few situations, you might recommend a dual boot, win4lin, crossover office or a distro like Xandros that has most of it built in.
Doctorow was right about Microsoft, but you should not equate "Works for Sure" with IPod. Most of the complaints are not problems on IPod, they are problems with M$, their inferior file format and their software simply not working. These are not problems I've heard of from IPod users and the comments are full of people defending their and Microsoft's favorite player and the software that comes with it. IPod should not be punished for the problems with the new Napster, WMA, M$ Media Player and all that junk that does not work. Fair play has done an admirable job working with a disgusting bunch of greed heads, music publishers, while looking out for their users.
That being said, I'm not buying an IPod or any rent-a-tunes and hope the whole scheme fails. It's better to live in freedom than comfortable slavery. The one condition I have for music players is that I can load them using free software. It must let me copy music via usbfs or firewire equivalent. It must also play music that I rip with free software, ogg or non-patent encumbered mp3. These days, I get music from places like Magnatune or local artist CDs. I refuse to give money to people like the RIAA who want to restrict my rights so that they can continue to rape musicians like it was 1929. I wish more people would come to the same conclusions, but I'm afraid they are happy with Apple's comfortable slavery. That they hate WMF is good but not good enough.
What I want to know is why do the computers controlling the train system in Japan need antivirus.... connecting a control system like that? Running it on windows? Silly.
I agree and wonder if the ensuing chaos had anything to do with this unusual and fatal accident. The engineer, of course, is being blamed for speeding. You have to wonder what was making him speed. Japanese trains usually run like clockwork.
Fifty two people died and hundreds were injured. You can see the pictures here.
They got caught with their pants down in 1993-4 with the internet and TCPIP revolution... They pulled that one off and came out of it smelling like roses.
They got caught with their pants down AGAIN in 1997 with the widespread acceptance of Java... and came out of it smelling like roses.
Put your glasses on, you are looking at a sphincter not a rose. Sometime in 2007, with the release of Longhorn, they will have a root user. It won't be your account, of course, but their bowser, email client and other userland programs will still have the ability to install malware for you. It's all part of the, "you only have a non transferable right to use this unless we think otherwise" mentality. M$ smells like ass today and will tomorrow.
I'm pretty sure that improving a product to maintain one's marketshare, even if it is the vast majority, is in fact competition already.
A vaporware announcement is not an improved product. It's not beta and what's announced is not as good as freely available alternatives. If if were a fifth, I'd be drunk all the time.
During the browser wars I used Explorer instead of Netscape because I really did like it better. Certainly they have the hackers and the resources to make the best browser if they want to.
Some people sleep on nails, go figure. They have the money for a mattress but prefer the pain of broken CSS, PNG, no tabs, with all the ease of 0wnership Winblows brings.
With stuff like Mepis which installs on any hardware in twenty minutes, is there any reason to run Winblows?
If Microsoft really does release a product better than Firefox, it will be sad to see the underdog lose, but really the consumers will win.
Microsoft has never released anything better than anyone else and that's not about to be changed by another silly promise. Their stated business plan is to buy into, "mature" to avoid development costs and being a "loss leader." Do you really think M$ will deliver next year what you can enjoy right now in free software? The developers left long ago so there are no more "loss leaders" for M$ to fuck over. They may have hired a few extra people last year to try and make up for it, but that's like pissing into the free software tsunami. If Sun and AOL were to pull the plug on OO and Mozilla, Microsoft would still be wiped out by the thousands of developers working on KDE, Gnome and dozens of other alternatives.
Microsoft should put their resources into making one killer browser.
Then you woke up, looked at IE and realized it has not changed much since 1993 and the invention of the WWW when M$ bought a browser. My ass would be perfect if beer came out of it. If I were microsoft, I'd tell you to eat my shit anyway. Wake up and smell the coffee. Some things will always stink. People still using Winblows will pay money for them.
Doesn't Microsoft realize they could easily make the end-all browser that'll end up running on almost every palmtop, cell phone, set-top-box, automobile, and personal computer?
So could you. You have Mozilla, konqueror, dillo, links and dozens of others as models. Versions of them already run on all of the above mentioned hardware. You also don't have to sign a NDA or buy some stinking SDK to compile.
Why do you care about IE? It's like paying for water at a beer fest.
"Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know.
If I were the guy on stage, I would be very tempted to reply with "Why should we open this up to you anyway?"
That's easy to answer - because free alternatives that work better don't force you to sign anything and don't turn off your computer on a whim. If Microsoft want to take people's money for the ability to stand between me and government documents, they are going to have to prove they are better at document storage than those free alternatives. Lame and arrogant statements about "innovation" do not constitute proof of superiority or worth. Microsoft's position, where they expect people to pay to be owned, is really weird. They can keep their junk to themselves, no one needs it.
The defenders of MS Office always make me smile... Invariably 90% of them have never paid for their copy... I wonder how many of the same people would be so vocal if they had to shell out £200 for a copy?
I'd smile too, but those morons continue to advocate use of those expensive, flawed and restricted formats for government archives. It's one thing for them to not know how to do things right. It's another for them to demand that I be stupid just to make their life easier. Who wants to beg Bill Gates just to be able to read government archives, laws and instructions? There are alternatives to M$ formats that anyone can use and many programs are freely available - even on Winblows. There's nothing M$ can do that the alternatives can't, so advocacy of M$ formats is ignorant belligerence. It's easy to forgive the ignorant but fanboys are a tiresome pain that make me smile.
I hate to break it to all of you - but here in Finland.. the cellphones actually (99.99% of time) DO work in normal cellars and elevators
Despite an opposing reputation, my Sprint phone has much better reception than my Cingular one did. I also did not have to agree to let Sprint periodically inspect my credit record to hook up either. Baby Bells have the worst of all service and are dumb enough to tell you so while filling every advertising space with a different message.
Do you like your quasi-futuristic clothes Mr. Powers? I designed them myself.
He would be the designer. He had a ritualistically shaved scrotum which would not be harmed by a spray on second skin. Looks like a TBHW (Total Body Hot Wax) for every one else.
A thin layer of biomaterial may be sufficient for protecting you from the vacuum of space if they get around the engineering considerations, but I for one would not want a "second skin" as my only protection from radiation and cosmic rays.
That's a real problem, but current space ships offer little protection, much less current 250lb+ space suits. No suit is really going to help you, so you need a shelter. Some ideas are lithium shields and crew quarters inside fuel tanks!
These suits are being designed mostly for places like mars which has a partial pressure. They offer protection against dust, which would foul up current joints.
Gaurddog makes setting up a firewall trivial. It comes with reasonable defaults, and an excellently intuitive GUI interface. Guiddog, a similar program, makes port forwarding easy. These packages are as easy to install as using apt-get, dselect or synaptic. Many newbie type distros install guarddog by default, so they are running a firewall without even knowing it. This is so much better than exposing newbies to the web with machines that listen to EVERYTHING without them knowing.
Gaurdog is a great learning tool. It clearly organizes the ports by what they provide, such as file transfer or chat. A firewall can be annoying for the newbie when they take their first tenative steps because many local services, like ssh, are blocked. When the newbie is ready for that, it is much easier for them to run the GUI than it is for them to learn everything about IPtables. Then, when they are ready to learn about IPtables, they have nice example files ready to hack.
But, to be fair [and I'm no MS apologist - they need to be taken to task all over the place for lots of reasons], even if you run a MacOS X, Linux or even an OpenBSD system, there are implicit costs associated with maintaining those systems, too.
You will need about 1/5 the manpower windoze requires to maintain any flavor of Unix. You can mix and match the flavors without adding too much to your costs.
What you do with the manpower is up to you but you can save money anyway you slice it. You can shitcan your people and have an improved level of performance for much less money. You can keep them on, without overtime and have much better performace and custom applications and still spend less money.
The above applies regardless of how large or small your company is. You can get more out of your single computer expert, employee or consultant, for the same money with free software or commercial Unix. At the other end of the extreem, Google has shown the world all about free goodness. The results are the same between the extreems, though it is difficult for me to say where the sweet spot is. You will always spend more money, one way or another, with M$ crap.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, they might be very smart 12 year old programmers. That's rare as the average age was between 22 and 37 the last time FOSS looked things. Still, I know one very good 13 year old perl guy. In the free software world, what you do and make is more important than where you live or who you are. That's in sharp contrast to the commercial world where turds like Bill Gates had enough money at birth to bully dummies into dumpsters for code or buy it for his vaults.
The statement "Stuart goes on to explode the myth of renegade prgrammers by saying, 'Sure, it represents a new way to create software, but the actual process looks a lot like how enterprise software has been made for decades." Is an interesting turn of events if true. Just a few years ago these were the numbers:
The bottom up nature of free software is a very real and welcome departure from "traditional," 1980s, NDA encumbered, commercial software development. While it's great to have companies supporting various projects, I doubt seriously they will be able to match the creativity of the world at large in numbers or range of applications. The best thing that companies can do is to free their people and let them solve their problems as they please. Free software environments are far richer, more pleasing and of higher quality than those put together traditionally. The "renegade" programmer sharing his information and scratching itches is what makes this possible and that's what free software is all about.
The myth discussed in this article is really intended for a bunch of PHBs and people who aren't that technically inclined, who believe that Linux is a toy used by rogue hackers to break into peoples' Windoze boxes and steal their social security numbers...
Well then, I'm not so worried by the DDoS on the article that's kept me from reading it.
My SD acts weird, but I thought that was because of some kind of crummy DRM, the "secure" in Secure Digital. Yep, that's the problem. In any case, I make use of the gadget with a pc card adaptor. Cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did and I've had no data problems yet. With DRM built into it, however, there's no telling what it may do. I prefer the CF format and use it when I can.
I've been running unstable for about a year now and it's been very robust and remarkably reliable. The easy route was to install Mepis and upgrade. The install is smooth, lasting about twenty minutes. The upgrade can be more or less smooth, so long as you have good download speeds for the 500 MB of new libraries and programs you get. Every now and then big chunks would go away for a while, but they always came back in a month or so. Major functions, networking, printing, X, console, and all that never stop working and the system as a whole remains stable. Upgrades once a month take some work, but it's doable. Current uptimes on the two machines I abuse this way are both over, Balmer's "insane" goal of 60 days and I don't expect them to go down unless the power fails.
Windows was way more trouble and I got much less out of it.
I'm not sure what that means, but Open Zaurus has more software than you can shake a stick at. About three weeks ago, they released 3.5.3, the second release using Bit Bake. Even GPE works well now, though Opie is better developed.
if you are thinking about the wonderful linux stability and versitility, you may have to think again.
Some of the commercial software that comes with Zaurus may not be the best. As a Debian user, crashes are a shock. OZ, when things are working, does much better. I can say for sure that 3.5.3 is working. If your choice of three platforms, the ability to compile your own applications, multiple input and output and linux fs and mount flexibility is not good enough for you, I'd like to know what you consider better. Do you know of any other PDA you can ssh into and export X sessions?
The company offering these is obviously a solution provider. They have picked a good tool for the job.
Sure, nothing works for everone. The "average user" may not need this but that's because they don't need a PDA. The average corporate drone and my wife are happy with Palm. That and the utter uslessness of Winblows based PDAs are why PDA sales are down in the dirt. Those who lug around an eight pound laptop simply to text message, web browse, email, text edit and spreedsheet, would do well with one of these.
How about innovative company using available hardware and software to meet customer needs?
I won't buy one -- because it's discontinued. (support is important, or we'd still have TI/994As running Parsec between meetings)
Support for a $250 pocket gadget? What's that? Why do you need it?
I don't get your negative attitude. My personal needs are satisfied by an original handspring visor. A Zaurus 5500 is lots of fun, especially with the release of OZ GPE 3.5.3. It is indeed a near laptop replacement and beats the hell out of any silly Wince or Pocket Peeee Ceeee. A 5600 or 6000 would rock.
It's one thing to grow human bones, muscles and organs. That can get creepy enough if done by harvesting and supressing what would have otherwise grown into a whole person. Growing human brains is something that's always creepy unless it's done in a free and legally protected body. It would also be cruel to create a limited, crippled or painful body such as a sheep for that human brain. It is unethical to take risks for others you would not be willing to take yourself or without their consent.
The cold war is over and with it has gone the rhetoric of freedom. Now we see that those who claimed there was little difference between our Federal tyrants and Soviet tyrants were correct. Compared to the real evil empire, the war on terror is a pathetic excuse for violations of liberty. Yet daily we allow and some even demand such things. The rhetoric was right and we need to remember it.
The war between free and closed software is as important a fight as we have today. Every day, people sign over their privacy for the privilege of running expensive, second rate software. Some of this software, like Macromedia Flash, turns on your microphone and grants it's owners the ability to listen in on your conversations. Others, such as M$ OS demand the ability to inspect your files. Phone tapping is trivial next to such violations because your computer is also your filing system, your post and no phones worked when hung up the way a computer microphone can.
These violations are against company and individual alike, yet the bigger dumber companies continue to be suckered into massive information leaks by promises of employee monitoring. Such is the folly of manipulative people. The same site also point out that almost half of big dumb companies monitor their employee's email, here. Want to bet that 100% of those big dumb companies use M$ on their desktops? They have no idea what's leaking out of their networks from non-free shit, spyware and malware.
I would consider it a waste of my time to work for a company that had something to hide and treated me as a potential whistle blower all the time.
I honestly cannot blame [companies for not trusting their employees]
You must have things to hide, so I no longer trust you. Thanks for the warning.
Obviously it is because of linux!
But he may be on to something. Let's read the article:
[Microsoft] cites a greater-than-expected decline in commercial and retail licensing for its business selling Windows operating systems for PCs, and a drop in currency exchange rates from when the company projected its earlier numbers.
Fewer people are buying Winblows, I wonder why?
Finally the giant is beginning to fall!!! hmmm, only 9.6 billion left to go.
That money won't last four quarters at Microsoft's current spending rate if their revenues go down the tubes. Remember DEC? Wang? They failed quickly and they actually had something worth buying.
The Microsoft game is closer to over than you think:
The feedback on their fall is all positive. The results will be that way too.
Google News:
Microsoft profits jump to US$ 2.56 billion this quarter (Earthtimes.org) - Yawn.
Microsoft Third-Quarter Profits Double (Yahoo News) - Double over what? A seasonal low?
Microsoft: The Cash Machine (Motley Fool) - A fool and his money are soon parted. See here to trade some of your money for something you can get free as in speech and beer.
Slashdot:
Microsoft Misses Quarterly Revenue Projection
Me: Holy shit, something that's never happened before! How did that happen? What does it mean? Sounds like NEWs to me, I suppose that's why Business Week wrote the article that way. Reading the article is a good idea. Wow, it's because M$ did not sell as many versions of it's OS as it though. Could it be that people are tired of buying second rate software?
Astrotrufers will never know. They are too busy with the following dumb questions:
How can we act like nothing has changed?
What can we say to insult our competition?
How fast can we fill up and self mod Slashdot's coverage.
That's nuts. For the average person that only wants to browse, read email and type out papers, free software is far better. Something like Mepis, which installs in minutes, is a much easier way to fix a broken Winblows box than a reinstall. Once fixed this way, it won't break. Only a tiny percentage of users NEED M$ junk. They have it by default, due to anti-competitive practices, and we all pay the price of their stuff not working, botnets and spam.
Why do I care? Because I care about me and you. Watching people fumble around jopups and BSoD on M$'s single screen desktop, no tab browser and rape me mail client without a spell checker is like watching someone eat over priced, radioactive Uncle Ben's rice with chopsticks. It's not only the wrong tool for the job, any job, it shits on everyone else.
What exactly can you do better with non free software than you can do with free? In those very few situations, you might recommend a dual boot, win4lin, crossover office or a distro like Xandros that has most of it built in.
That being said, I'm not buying an IPod or any rent-a-tunes and hope the whole scheme fails. It's better to live in freedom than comfortable slavery. The one condition I have for music players is that I can load them using free software. It must let me copy music via usbfs or firewire equivalent. It must also play music that I rip with free software, ogg or non-patent encumbered mp3. These days, I get music from places like Magnatune or local artist CDs. I refuse to give money to people like the RIAA who want to restrict my rights so that they can continue to rape musicians like it was 1929. I wish more people would come to the same conclusions, but I'm afraid they are happy with Apple's comfortable slavery. That they hate WMF is good but not good enough.
MindStalker asks and states:
What I want to know is why do the computers controlling the train system in Japan need antivirus. ... connecting a control system like that? Running it on windows? Silly.
I agree and wonder if the ensuing chaos had anything to do with this unusual and fatal accident. The engineer, of course, is being blamed for speeding. You have to wonder what was making him speed. Japanese trains usually run like clockwork.
Fifty two people died and hundreds were injured. You can see the pictures here.
They got caught with their pants down AGAIN in 1997 with the widespread acceptance of Java ... and came out of it smelling like roses.
Put your glasses on, you are looking at a sphincter not a rose. Sometime in 2007, with the release of Longhorn, they will have a root user. It won't be your account, of course, but their bowser, email client and other userland programs will still have the ability to install malware for you. It's all part of the, "you only have a non transferable right to use this unless we think otherwise" mentality. M$ smells like ass today and will tomorrow.
A vaporware announcement is not an improved product. It's not beta and what's announced is not as good as freely available alternatives. If if were a fifth, I'd be drunk all the time.
During the browser wars I used Explorer instead of Netscape because I really did like it better. Certainly they have the hackers and the resources to make the best browser if they want to.
Some people sleep on nails, go figure. They have the money for a mattress but prefer the pain of broken CSS, PNG, no tabs, with all the ease of 0wnership Winblows brings.
With stuff like Mepis which installs on any hardware in twenty minutes, is there any reason to run Winblows?
If Microsoft really does release a product better than Firefox, it will be sad to see the underdog lose, but really the consumers will win.
Microsoft has never released anything better than anyone else and that's not about to be changed by another silly promise. Their stated business plan is to buy into, "mature" to avoid development costs and being a "loss leader." Do you really think M$ will deliver next year what you can enjoy right now in free software? The developers left long ago so there are no more "loss leaders" for M$ to fuck over. They may have hired a few extra people last year to try and make up for it, but that's like pissing into the free software tsunami. If Sun and AOL were to pull the plug on OO and Mozilla, Microsoft would still be wiped out by the thousands of developers working on KDE, Gnome and dozens of other alternatives.
Then you woke up, looked at IE and realized it has not changed much since 1993 and the invention of the WWW when M$ bought a browser. My ass would be perfect if beer came out of it. If I were microsoft, I'd tell you to eat my shit anyway. Wake up and smell the coffee. Some things will always stink. People still using Winblows will pay money for them.
Doesn't Microsoft realize they could easily make the end-all browser that'll end up running on almost every palmtop, cell phone, set-top-box, automobile, and personal computer?
So could you. You have Mozilla, konqueror, dillo, links and dozens of others as models. Versions of them already run on all of the above mentioned hardware. You also don't have to sign a NDA or buy some stinking SDK to compile.
Why do you care about IE? It's like paying for water at a beer fest.
If I were the guy on stage, I would be very tempted to reply with "Why should we open this up to you anyway?"
That's easy to answer - because free alternatives that work better don't force you to sign anything and don't turn off your computer on a whim. If Microsoft want to take people's money for the ability to stand between me and government documents, they are going to have to prove they are better at document storage than those free alternatives. Lame and arrogant statements about "innovation" do not constitute proof of superiority or worth. Microsoft's position, where they expect people to pay to be owned, is really weird. They can keep their junk to themselves, no one needs it.
I'd smile too, but those morons continue to advocate use of those expensive, flawed and restricted formats for government archives. It's one thing for them to not know how to do things right. It's another for them to demand that I be stupid just to make their life easier. Who wants to beg Bill Gates just to be able to read government archives, laws and instructions? There are alternatives to M$ formats that anyone can use and many programs are freely available - even on Winblows. There's nothing M$ can do that the alternatives can't, so advocacy of M$ formats is ignorant belligerence. It's easy to forgive the ignorant but fanboys are a tiresome pain that make me smile.
Despite an opposing reputation, my Sprint phone has much better reception than my Cingular one did. I also did not have to agree to let Sprint periodically inspect my credit record to hook up either. Baby Bells have the worst of all service and are dumb enough to tell you so while filling every advertising space with a different message.
He would be the designer. He had a ritualistically shaved scrotum which would not be harmed by a spray on second skin. Looks like a TBHW (Total Body Hot Wax) for every one else.
That's a real problem, but current space ships offer little protection, much less current 250lb+ space suits. No suit is really going to help you, so you need a shelter. Some ideas are lithium shields and crew quarters inside fuel tanks!
These suits are being designed mostly for places like mars which has a partial pressure. They offer protection against dust, which would foul up current joints.
You tell me. The idea is obvious but the implementation might not be.
Gaurdog is a great learning tool. It clearly organizes the ports by what they provide, such as file transfer or chat. A firewall can be annoying for the newbie when they take their first tenative steps because many local services, like ssh, are blocked. When the newbie is ready for that, it is much easier for them to run the GUI than it is for them to learn everything about IPtables. Then, when they are ready to learn about IPtables, they have nice example files ready to hack.
You will need about 1/5 the manpower windoze requires to maintain any flavor of Unix. You can mix and match the flavors without adding too much to your costs.
What you do with the manpower is up to you but you can save money anyway you slice it. You can shitcan your people and have an improved level of performance for much less money. You can keep them on, without overtime and have much better performace and custom applications and still spend less money.
The above applies regardless of how large or small your company is. You can get more out of your single computer expert, employee or consultant, for the same money with free software or commercial Unix. At the other end of the extreem, Google has shown the world all about free goodness. The results are the same between the extreems, though it is difficult for me to say where the sweet spot is. You will always spend more money, one way or another, with M$ crap.
A liability?
TCL.