All of this is a direct result of M$ advert driven development policy. Why, pray tell, would you have to fear your employees walking out with your precious data if it were not for the lame softare that lets them do it. Reasonable software CAN safegaurd sensitive data. Follow these easy steps:
1. Use software with real users and permissions.
2. The company is root, the employee is a user.
3. The company's safeguards information is kept on a carefully controlled set of locked up computers that serve encrypted data. The rest is free.
While this might sound draconian, it's just the opposite. Easing the company's fears is good for employees. The employee won't have to be subject to humiliating email monitoring, personal searches and all that bad news. The employee can bring as many toys and as much personal information to share with others as they wish. Made right, you can even give your employees compilers, encrypted email and other dignity protecting software. Good control prevents abuses. Bad control makes them needed.
Compare this with some systems where third parties can install listeners, aka "upgraders", and other spyware without the user or company's knowledge. How broken. The future of portable memory devices is here and growing. Companies must learn to live with it. Those that don't will end up x-raying their emplyee's teeth every day before it's over. Why can't your employees bring in USB keychains? It's because you can't tell your sensitive data from Britany Spears, much less control it.
user@reason:~$ mount/dev/usb0/tmp
mount: only root can do that
user@reason:$
60 boxes saving $600 each is $36,000. I doubt the roll out would take more than a month or so, but then again I don't know how long it takes to set up win2k uglies. At the $5.00/hr a MSCE is worth, the company should be a winner unless it takes more than 45 of them to do it.
Revenues for the quarter increased 4% over the same period in 2001 to $9.8 billion. Subscription revenues increased 14% to $4.7 billion, reflecting strong subscriber growth in the Company's AOL and Cable businesses. Content and Other revenues were essentially flat at $3.2 billion, primarily because of robust theatrical results in the current year, offset by strong prior-year syndication sales. Advertising and Commerce revenues declined 13% to $1.8 billion, reflecting weakness in the overall advertising market and difficult comparisons against last year.
So, duh, the cable business is growing while the traditional entertainment is dying. No news here, exept trolls like to call it a "dot com bubble burst" and other stupid shit like that. Nope, sorry, the internet subscription is doing well, the rest is flat or sagging. When was the last time you read Time or any other monthly print magazine without wondering what kind of clueless hermit would consider any of it news? Is it any supprise that assets like that might lose value?
Where did the money go? It was "good will" overpayment for those "crown jewels", Time Warner. Enetertainment is not an easy business to be in, especially right before a small recession. The internet business, however, is a good bet. When things get tough what are you going to axe, Time, cable TV or your internet connection? I don't have the first two and I'm doing well.
Dead trees is dead business. Pththth-fit! Good riddance, now those trees can be used on things like houses that don't fill up landfills as fast. Books are doing well, and that is nice but the mags sag. Here, read it for yourself:
Publishing's EBITDA grew 14% in the quarter on revenue gains of 3%. Revenue growth reflected increases in Advertising and Commerce as well as Content and Other revenues, which were partially offset by a decline in Subscription revenues.
The Marketing/Sales organization always had access to Technicians who really understood the product. Engineers tend to blow smoke about the capabilities and shortcomings of the products. Sales could also tap the best Tech Support people for pre-sales technical support.
Huh? Marketing people never blow smoke and we all know how much they understand. They understand things like sales, markups, flattery and, "have you tried rebooting your computer? Oh, I see. We don't support that product anymore, the new version only costs $250." But I suppose it's better to put tech support under people you say are dishonest than it is to put them with people who can answer questions when they have to. What the heck, the sales people try to be polite, that's good in tech support when they can't tell you how to fix the problem or tell someone who can.
Tech support needs to be it's own organization with heavy ties to engineering and lots of good advice for marketing. A good tech support group can educate marketing like it does the real users of software. It can also make nice bug reports and helpful suggestions of what customers want from their sofware. Marketing people need to be concerned with the sofwares cost and capability relative to competing software. They might contribute to sofware design by making reports on why people prefer other software and what they like.
This really makes me laugh:
Sales/Marketing was intensely interested in these areas as it helped them design products.
Did your company have an engineering group? What did they do? The other problem with that company you used to work for is that it might have been driven entirely by marketing.
The whole problem with propriatory software is that things other than performance and suitability to a particular purpose can be trumped by marketing concerns. That's how you end up with a ten year old OS that STILL has bugs and always will but will also always lack basic funtionality like grep. If it did not break, no one would ever buy a new one says marketing. Hmmmm, gotta spend a billion dollars on XP cause it sucks? Ha, ha. When you have honest engineers in control the company may stay small but it will produce an honest, useful and continuously improved set of programs. Do a quick Slashdot search on ID Software for how things should work. Just look at MicroShaft to understand what happens when greedy morons with MBA behind their names run things. Or think of how bad things got when that dope from Pepsi took over Apple.
If you put Tech Support under an Engineering organization then the best Tech Support people always get moved into Engineering before long, leaving only script readers manning the phones.
If you don't give tech support a place to go, they will work for someone else. If your training sucks that bad, and it's driven by marketing, and it does not encourage and reward personal growth, it will fail and you will be working somewhere else. Oh wait, you don't work there anymore do you?
Have you ever seen how many different calculator brands and models there were in the former USSR? There are even multiple brands of Soviet synthesizers.
Yep, you can see them too at the Museum of Soviet Calculators, a way cool web site. Mostly, they were junky knock offs of Japaneese models. You had to be special to have one. I also remember reading about their failed efforts to keep up with the growing US PC market by making poor quality Apple II clones. Duh, you don't think a country that put gaurds around photo coppiers would make other means of publication available would you? Thanks for pointing it out for us!
Oh well, with the demise of the old devils our friends in Washington are free to clamp down and act just like the old USSR. Hopefully, the good people of Europe and Asia can get their acts togeter enough to provide US citezens with alternate places to live. Sheesh. As our government eliminates the Bill of Rights so that they can tax us all to hell, there's less practical difference between here, Canada, England and France. Competition, my friend, is a good thing.
1. get Debian CD.
2. boot result of step 1
3. follow directions and liberate XP, w2k, w9x encumbered machine.
4. enjoy a virus free, ad free computing environment.
The original programs WERE trojans. Who knows what the hacked versions have. It's so much better to use software you can trust and we all know that the only sofware you can really trust is free software. People who are out to make a buck with restrictive licenses like:
Kazaa's agreement, for example, states: "Except as expressly permitted in this License, you agree not to reverse engineer, de-compile, disassemble, alter, duplicate, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, make copies, create derivative works from, distribute or provide others with the KaZaA Media Desktop Software in whole or part or transmit the application over a network."
It's absolutely impossible for a company to deprive you of any rights simply because they used code in their proprietary product.
Oh, like winsock?
How about the near death experience of XFree86?
Hell, Bill Gates got his start by stealing a version of BASIC from dumpsters. Wanna bet he didn't later step on the toes of the real authors?
As Microsoft is a major supporter of evil laws like DMCA, every penny that M$ makes selling other people's code goes to oppress all of us. Release your code anyway you like, but don't pretend it can't be used by those who would strip you of your rights. Every user of M$ software has been stripped of their rights to use, modify and distribute modifications of the software they have. The GPL prevents the abuse of others with your code.
M$ could use GPL'd code if they wanted to, but then they would not be able to screw others. There is a pattern here. I'm not in favor of the government funding it, especially after declaring M$ an illegal monopoly in restraint of free trade.
BTW RMS has said things to me in person that are way wierder than anything in the article, anything Gates has said to me personaly and for that matter stupider than anything said or attributed to Dan Quayle or GWB.
Hmmm, how often do you have these personal conversations? Have you been taking your pills?
It makes the code that was taxpayer-funded inaccessable to the businesses and proprietary software developers who also paid for its creation.
Government funding of software development should mandate public domain release so that the code is completely unencumbered. Making it GPL or allowing the sponsored developer to keep it closed are equally undesireable alternatives that only serve to block some people from using it.
I suppose that this is the gist of Mr. Gates argument, and it is wholly false. Nothing is keeping ANYONE from using GPL software, modifying it to suit their purposes and redistributing their changes. Businesses can, are and will continue to chose GPL software when it's appropriate. Peopel will take government funded GPL'd software and improve and develop it. Most GPL's software is superior to closed source software for this very reason. The size and quality of Debian shows that the GPL does just as well or better than BSD as a developement model. The only businesses that won't be able to use governement funded GPL software are those who wish to deprive the rest of us of our rights to do what we want with our computers. Those kinds of people desrve to lose out this way. In the mean time, they are just as free as you and me to use GPL'd software.
The goal of government sposnsored research is to develop technology that people can use. It's not to create a franchise that one or two companies can use to screw the rest of the word and impeed the use of that research.
Your argument about standards and compliance sounds like those linguists who are upset about slang destroying the "purity" of whatever language they study.
What a concept, Microsoft embraces and extends the English language! M$ embracement is always half done, and the missing functionality is crammed into strange extentions. Imagine that the M$English does not include any past tense construtions but instead has an "enhancement" to the future perfect tense that does the job. NT_English has the same problems, but a real korny sound to it that's popular with want to be's for years after free alternatives made the NT replacement unneeded. Engliz2000 has all the same problems but is based on New Technology Technology that is undone by mergence with the older M$English that has been enhanced to autocomplete thoughts and has had most of the logic filters removed so that adverts can be pushed into your head easier. EnglizXP is completely incomprehsible to speakers of Standard English and changes continuously. EnglizXP is then made the standard language of all MBA thesis and dissertation work, flooding the world with management that speaks only in buzword phrases.
Hell, a huge percentage of AOL users never leave the confines of AOL's system to even get real internet content.
AOL's confines on M$ platforms are the one's that Bill Gates creates for all M$ users. That's because the current AOL client software uses IE as it's browser.
I know this because my mom uses AOL as her only ISP, so I use it when I'm at her house, and because I encourage her to get pictures from my ftp site. She only uses the browser that AOL has for her surfing, and it behaves excactly as IE does. It lists her as IE_user for anonymous logins and exibits the same abominal ftp behavior, such as opening multiple sessions and not closing them until the sever overflows the number of concurent user allowed, and locking the entire GUI while the ftp site does not respond. Nice, eh? Oh yeah, you can open up IE with all it's shiney junk and it knows all your AOL browsing history and vice versa. Once code, two faces.
IE's poor performance is only the begining of the limits IE puts on it's users. File format problems and the forced downloads of adverts are more serious agrivations, that amount M$ to leverage it's power into the web. That's why it's so important to M$
It becomes apparent to all where the souce of incompatibility is when the user has nothing but M$ crap and it does not talk to itself and crashes anyway. That's the way things are at work, and everybody there knows.
9,000 people working for eight weeks is not equivalent to one person working for 72,000 weeks, but let's just say that it is. If there are 52 working weeks in a year, then M$ just put in 1,385 man years. That may sound like a lot, but it's trivial. If we loosly define "programer" the same way this article does, and we only consider Slashdot posters as software developers (the world is of course, larger) then every year, Slashdot's 500,000 programers outdo M$ by two orders of magintude.
Ther is no way that M$ can keep up with free software. Even if their intent were not sullied by considerations like pushing adverts on their users and denying users the ability to copy files, Microsoft's honest efforts would be quickly overtaken. It shows in their 10 year old window manager that limits users to a single virtual screen and multitasks about as well as a calculator. But Microsoft is not honest, and they are wasting their resources on stupid things. The astonishing thing is that Lipner and friends can keep a strait face when they say things like this.
"You are not an assasin, you are just a grocery boy running an errand."
Kazaa is not a virus, it's just a billboard on an isecure platoform. It may do damage, but it's all due to incompetence and greed.
The biggest threat to the security of the web is Windoze XP. At it's very best, it strains the public net and bombard the happless user with Adverts and other garbage not requested. At it's very worst, the backdoors that are used for all of that shoving will be exploited by porn masters and other nasties. Just hope and pray that the public wrath will turn on those responsible. After 15 years, they give us this and do their best to prevent all other options? Great.
But what if a Lawyer made an argument along the lines of: "Slashdot intentionally posted a link to their site knowing that an overwhelming increase of traffic would hit my client's servers."?
That's called public discourse! Do something wrong, people will talk about you. Make a real monster out of yourself and they might stop and stare. People are free to say and think what they might. It's part of what free speech is all about.
If you don't want the public entering your web site, or building for that matter, you had better not make it public. If it's public, we might presume that you want visitors.
If your layer can't tell the difference between many people visiting a site and an attack of broken Windoze machines, they don't know the difference between a protest and rolling a bus into a building. They might not know their ass from a hole in the ground either. Find another one.
It's the type of attack I've never understood: it doesn't gain the attacker anything.
Sure it does! Can't make Hotmail work right? Well, just blast away everything else from AOL to Yahoo with spam. Don't like what Slashdot is saying about your "product"? Just sign up 100 troll accounts and flood the comments with enough highly moderated garbage to try a saint. Denial of someone else's service is good when you are a twisted greedhead that wants to own everything and tell everyone what to do.
I'm not saying don't be concerned or take action. I just think that this dark vision of the future is a bit much.
Not to mention it completely leaves out the advances that will be made in the circumvention of these laws.
DCMA, circumvention is illegal. Do it and go to jail.
What's wrong with this picture? I don't listen to radio, watch TV much less have cable, and hardly go to the movies. The advertising/content ratio passed my threshold years ago. 4 of 5 calls to my house are by agressive salespeople. I'd like to chop my land line, but I know the same people will find my cell phone. My snail mail is composed entirely of junk mail and bills. I can't do so much as walk down the street without being assaulted by a 30 foot tall pop star billboard. Oh, that's right, people are making all means of communications useless with comercial agression. Oh yes, I pay handsomly for all of it. The phone bill is outrageous, the cable modem bill is a joke for a "service" with blocked ports and a ToS that is essentially, browse at our descresion, and we all pay for those billboards and those adverts on TV and Radio in the price of basic living needs. Even the electric company puts adverts on TV, what a waste of public money!
Have you used a Microsoft platform lately? It's just like the article describes, less some of the cost. You will, of course, provide a credit card for for your unilaterally modifiable license to browse, to subscribe to your favorite news site, etc ad nauseum. If Hollings has his way and kills free software, we will all suffer this. Remember paying money to the cable company for advert free entertainment? Here we are now! The lowest of the publishers are trying to set the rules for all future publication including what you type on your computer.
No, see, Windows Update has security signatures on all of its packages.
That's so comforting! Err, no it's not.
This whole scam is possible because MicroShaft designed an operating system they could push on. You know, no real user accounts, IE and Outlook running as "Administrator" and other stupid stuff like that. Everyone told them it was wrong to connect machines of that nature to the internet and that they should change their practices to the best available. They chose to sell adverts instead, so they made sure they own your machine. The results are that any interested third party can own your M$ machine at anytime.
What part of the M$ EULA don't you understand? The intent is clear enough with revocation possible at anytime. All else beyond that is lagnape.
Wrong, you can charge for redistribution of BSD licensed software. Link [opensource.org]
Well, you can charge as much as you like for GPL'd software too, see this. Consultants charge an arm and a leg for freely available information, what's new? The GPL simply makes sure that the end user can use their software as they please, modify their software as they please and redistribute their software as well as their changes (better stated here.
MicroShit threw that language in to confuse people about the GPL. Too bad for them that simple and honest licenses are so easy to read and interpret. All of their nonsense comes to an end when people simply look at the source. Ah, so simple it's been the same since 1991 or so. Can you think of any MicroShit license that has remained so stable? You could fill a phone book with all the small print M$ has put out in the last ten years. Confusion is nothing new to them.
Well, it is. Now, whethor or not a threat to capitalism is a good or bad thing is left to the reader to determine. The bottom line is, there is still no proven way for coders to make money off of GPL's software. Red Hat makes money, true, but little of that money makes it to the major contributers of Linux. Capitalism is about making money. The GPL is about programming for fun and community innovation. They are logical opposites.
The GPL is not something invented to keep people from making money. Comercial use of code is part of your software rights. It is your right to use your softwar in anyway you see fit, so long as it does not infring on the rights of others. There is plenty of money being made configuring, servicing and making software. Making that software free will not stop people from making money that way. Doctors, lawyers and engineers make a living without selling a restrictively licensed "product" and programers can too. In fact, most programers do this.
Yes, some of them might even have fun doing it, and others like me might not ever expect a dime from their efforts. If Corel can't make money the M$ way, who stands a chance? Better to jump on the new superior model and have good software than to try and be an ass for no reward. As free software becomes better known and more widely deployed there may be less of a chance even for M$ to make money selling closed source binaries that spy on you, blare adverts at you and suck in general. Microsoft has disgraced themselves and all closed source companies by association. A free market eliminates waste like that and M$ is on it's way to the trash can. How should M$ open their code? Fully and imediatly! The longer they wait, the further behind it gets. I won't use their crap as is, and it will take years to make it suck less.
Now for a few words in the defense of Red Hat. While, I'm not versed in all of the nice things they do, besides WRITE and DISTRIBUTE FREE SOFTWARE for everyone to use, they also provide a home for the GCC project. If that's not Red Hat's money finding it's way to major coders and contributors to free software, then sure Red Hat keeps all it's money to itself. Hmmmm.
Oh, I see. That 115 section is bothersom. I kind of wish someone would enforce 113 decency requirements on comercial broadcasters! Hopefully, the FCC might recognize packet protocall as an intelligent monitor which meets the need for continuous monitoring of equipment. Keeping comercial broadcasters out of amature bands is a good thing, and those bands should be expanded. I'm not going to hold my breath, so I'm afraid you are right about packet radio being limited. The FCC is way behind the times on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Use software with real users and permissions.
2. The company is root, the employee is a user.
3. The company's safeguards information is kept on a carefully controlled set of locked up computers that serve encrypted data. The rest is free.
While this might sound draconian, it's just the opposite. Easing the company's fears is good for employees. The employee won't have to be subject to humiliating email monitoring, personal searches and all that bad news. The employee can bring as many toys and as much personal information to share with others as they wish. Made right, you can even give your employees compilers, encrypted email and other dignity protecting software. Good control prevents abuses. Bad control makes them needed.
Compare this with some systems where third parties can install listeners, aka "upgraders", and other spyware without the user or company's knowledge. How broken. The future of portable memory devices is here and growing. Companies must learn to live with it. Those that don't will end up x-raying their emplyee's teeth every day before it's over. Why can't your employees bring in USB keychains? It's because you can't tell your sensitive data from Britany Spears, much less control it.
user@reason:~$ mount /dev/usb0 /tmp
mount: only root can do that
user@reason:$
60 boxes saving $600 each is $36,000. I doubt the roll out would take more than a month or so, but then again I don't know how long it takes to set up win2k uglies. At the $5.00/hr a MSCE is worth, the company should be a winner unless it takes more than 45 of them to do it.
So, duh, the cable business is growing while the traditional entertainment is dying. No news here, exept trolls like to call it a "dot com bubble burst" and other stupid shit like that. Nope, sorry, the internet subscription is doing well, the rest is flat or sagging. When was the last time you read Time or any other monthly print magazine without wondering what kind of clueless hermit would consider any of it news? Is it any supprise that assets like that might lose value?
Where did the money go? It was "good will" overpayment for those "crown jewels", Time Warner. Enetertainment is not an easy business to be in, especially right before a small recession. The internet business, however, is a good bet. When things get tough what are you going to axe, Time, cable TV or your internet connection? I don't have the first two and I'm doing well.
Dead trees is dead business. Pththth-fit! Good riddance, now those trees can be used on things like houses that don't fill up landfills as fast. Books are doing well, and that is nice but the mags sag. Here, read it for yourself:
Publishing's EBITDA grew 14% in the quarter on revenue gains of 3%. Revenue growth reflected increases in Advertising and Commerce as well as Content and Other revenues, which were partially offset by a decline in Subscription revenues.
Huh? Marketing people never blow smoke and we all know how much they understand. They understand things like sales, markups, flattery and, "have you tried rebooting your computer? Oh, I see. We don't support that product anymore, the new version only costs $250." But I suppose it's better to put tech support under people you say are dishonest than it is to put them with people who can answer questions when they have to. What the heck, the sales people try to be polite, that's good in tech support when they can't tell you how to fix the problem or tell someone who can.
Tech support needs to be it's own organization with heavy ties to engineering and lots of good advice for marketing. A good tech support group can educate marketing like it does the real users of software. It can also make nice bug reports and helpful suggestions of what customers want from their sofware. Marketing people need to be concerned with the sofwares cost and capability relative to competing software. They might contribute to sofware design by making reports on why people prefer other software and what they like.
This really makes me laugh:
Sales/Marketing was intensely interested in these areas as it helped them design products.
Did your company have an engineering group? What did they do? The other problem with that company you used to work for is that it might have been driven entirely by marketing.
The whole problem with propriatory software is that things other than performance and suitability to a particular purpose can be trumped by marketing concerns. That's how you end up with a ten year old OS that STILL has bugs and always will but will also always lack basic funtionality like grep. If it did not break, no one would ever buy a new one says marketing. Hmmmm, gotta spend a billion dollars on XP cause it sucks? Ha, ha. When you have honest engineers in control the company may stay small but it will produce an honest, useful and continuously improved set of programs. Do a quick Slashdot search on ID Software for how things should work. Just look at MicroShaft to understand what happens when greedy morons with MBA behind their names run things. Or think of how bad things got when that dope from Pepsi took over Apple. If you put Tech Support under an Engineering organization then the best Tech Support people always get moved into Engineering before long, leaving only script readers manning the phones.
If you don't give tech support a place to go, they will work for someone else. If your training sucks that bad, and it's driven by marketing, and it does not encourage and reward personal growth, it will fail and you will be working somewhere else. Oh wait, you don't work there anymore do you?
Yep, you can see them too at the Museum of Soviet Calculators, a way cool web site. Mostly, they were junky knock offs of Japaneese models. You had to be special to have one. I also remember reading about their failed efforts to keep up with the growing US PC market by making poor quality Apple II clones. Duh, you don't think a country that put gaurds around photo coppiers would make other means of publication available would you? Thanks for pointing it out for us!
Oh well, with the demise of the old devils our friends in Washington are free to clamp down and act just like the old USSR. Hopefully, the good people of Europe and Asia can get their acts togeter enough to provide US citezens with alternate places to live. Sheesh. As our government eliminates the Bill of Rights so that they can tax us all to hell, there's less practical difference between here, Canada, England and France. Competition, my friend, is a good thing.
1. get Debian CD. 2. boot result of step 1 3. follow directions and liberate XP, w2k, w9x encumbered machine. 4. enjoy a virus free, ad free computing environment.
Kazaa's agreement, for example, states: "Except as expressly permitted in this License, you agree not to reverse engineer, de-compile, disassemble, alter, duplicate, modify, rent, lease, loan, sublicense, make copies, create derivative works from, distribute or provide others with the KaZaA Media Desktop Software in whole or part or transmit the application over a network."
are NOT your friends.
I'm told it will push a winmodem at 55 kbs.
In Louisiana, the last words are, "Hold my beer for a second, Beaudreaux."
Oh, like winsock?
How about the near death experience of XFree86?
Hell, Bill Gates got his start by stealing a version of BASIC from dumpsters. Wanna bet he didn't later step on the toes of the real authors?
As Microsoft is a major supporter of evil laws like DMCA, every penny that M$ makes selling other people's code goes to oppress all of us. Release your code anyway you like, but don't pretend it can't be used by those who would strip you of your rights. Every user of M$ software has been stripped of their rights to use, modify and distribute modifications of the software they have. The GPL prevents the abuse of others with your code.
M$ could use GPL'd code if they wanted to, but then they would not be able to screw others. There is a pattern here. I'm not in favor of the government funding it, especially after declaring M$ an illegal monopoly in restraint of free trade.
Hmmm, how often do you have these personal conversations? Have you been taking your pills?
Government funding of software development should mandate public domain release so that the code is completely unencumbered. Making it GPL or allowing the sponsored developer to keep it closed are equally undesireable alternatives that only serve to block some people from using it.
I suppose that this is the gist of Mr. Gates argument, and it is wholly false. Nothing is keeping ANYONE from using GPL software, modifying it to suit their purposes and redistributing their changes. Businesses can, are and will continue to chose GPL software when it's appropriate. Peopel will take government funded GPL'd software and improve and develop it. Most GPL's software is superior to closed source software for this very reason. The size and quality of Debian shows that the GPL does just as well or better than BSD as a developement model. The only businesses that won't be able to use governement funded GPL software are those who wish to deprive the rest of us of our rights to do what we want with our computers. Those kinds of people desrve to lose out this way. In the mean time, they are just as free as you and me to use GPL'd software.
The goal of government sposnsored research is to develop technology that people can use. It's not to create a franchise that one or two companies can use to screw the rest of the word and impeed the use of that research.
What a concept, Microsoft embraces and extends the English language! M$ embracement is always half done, and the missing functionality is crammed into strange extentions. Imagine that the M$English does not include any past tense construtions but instead has an "enhancement" to the future perfect tense that does the job. NT_English has the same problems, but a real korny sound to it that's popular with want to be's for years after free alternatives made the NT replacement unneeded. Engliz2000 has all the same problems but is based on New Technology Technology that is undone by mergence with the older M$English that has been enhanced to autocomplete thoughts and has had most of the logic filters removed so that adverts can be pushed into your head easier. EnglizXP is completely incomprehsible to speakers of Standard English and changes continuously. EnglizXP is then made the standard language of all MBA thesis and dissertation work, flooding the world with management that speaks only in buzword phrases.
Oh wait, it did happen! It was called Word.
AOL's confines on M$ platforms are the one's that Bill Gates creates for all M$ users. That's because the current AOL client software uses IE as it's browser.
I know this because my mom uses AOL as her only ISP, so I use it when I'm at her house, and because I encourage her to get pictures from my ftp site. She only uses the browser that AOL has for her surfing, and it behaves excactly as IE does. It lists her as IE_user for anonymous logins and exibits the same abominal ftp behavior, such as opening multiple sessions and not closing them until the sever overflows the number of concurent user allowed, and locking the entire GUI while the ftp site does not respond. Nice, eh? Oh yeah, you can open up IE with all it's shiney junk and it knows all your AOL browsing history and vice versa. Once code, two faces.
IE's poor performance is only the begining of the limits IE puts on it's users. File format problems and the forced downloads of adverts are more serious agrivations, that amount M$ to leverage it's power into the web. That's why it's so important to M$
It becomes apparent to all where the souce of incompatibility is when the user has nothing but M$ crap and it does not talk to itself and crashes anyway. That's the way things are at work, and everybody there knows.
Ther is no way that M$ can keep up with free software. Even if their intent were not sullied by considerations like pushing adverts on their users and denying users the ability to copy files, Microsoft's honest efforts would be quickly overtaken. It shows in their 10 year old window manager that limits users to a single virtual screen and multitasks about as well as a calculator. But Microsoft is not honest, and they are wasting their resources on stupid things. The astonishing thing is that Lipner and friends can keep a strait face when they say things like this.
"You are not an assasin, you are just a grocery boy running an errand."
Kazaa is not a virus, it's just a billboard on an isecure platoform. It may do damage, but it's all due to incompetence and greed.
The biggest threat to the security of the web is Windoze XP. At it's very best, it strains the public net and bombard the happless user with Adverts and other garbage not requested. At it's very worst, the backdoors that are used for all of that shoving will be exploited by porn masters and other nasties. Just hope and pray that the public wrath will turn on those responsible. After 15 years, they give us this and do their best to prevent all other options? Great.
That's called public discourse! Do something wrong, people will talk about you. Make a real monster out of yourself and they might stop and stare. People are free to say and think what they might. It's part of what free speech is all about.
If you don't want the public entering your web site, or building for that matter, you had better not make it public. If it's public, we might presume that you want visitors.
If your layer can't tell the difference between many people visiting a site and an attack of broken Windoze machines, they don't know the difference between a protest and rolling a bus into a building. They might not know their ass from a hole in the ground either. Find another one.
Sure it does! Can't make Hotmail work right? Well, just blast away everything else from AOL to Yahoo with spam. Don't like what Slashdot is saying about your "product"? Just sign up 100 troll accounts and flood the comments with enough highly moderated garbage to try a saint. Denial of someone else's service is good when you are a twisted greedhead that wants to own everything and tell everyone what to do.
Bastian: I don't knooooowwWWWWWW, AAAHHhhhhhh! Bastian is trown from the clif by an an invisible hand.
Those struck by lightening and survive fear tingling sensations.
Not to mention it completely leaves out the advances that will be made in the circumvention of these laws.
DCMA, circumvention is illegal. Do it and go to jail.
What's wrong with this picture? I don't listen to radio, watch TV much less have cable, and hardly go to the movies. The advertising/content ratio passed my threshold years ago. 4 of 5 calls to my house are by agressive salespeople. I'd like to chop my land line, but I know the same people will find my cell phone. My snail mail is composed entirely of junk mail and bills. I can't do so much as walk down the street without being assaulted by a 30 foot tall pop star billboard. Oh, that's right, people are making all means of communications useless with comercial agression. Oh yes, I pay handsomly for all of it. The phone bill is outrageous, the cable modem bill is a joke for a "service" with blocked ports and a ToS that is essentially, browse at our descresion, and we all pay for those billboards and those adverts on TV and Radio in the price of basic living needs. Even the electric company puts adverts on TV, what a waste of public money!
Have you used a Microsoft platform lately? It's just like the article describes, less some of the cost. You will, of course, provide a credit card for for your unilaterally modifiable license to browse, to subscribe to your favorite news site, etc ad nauseum. If Hollings has his way and kills free software, we will all suffer this. Remember paying money to the cable company for advert free entertainment? Here we are now! The lowest of the publishers are trying to set the rules for all future publication including what you type on your computer.
That's so comforting! Err, no it's not.
This whole scam is possible because MicroShaft designed an operating system they could push on. You know, no real user accounts, IE and Outlook running as "Administrator" and other stupid stuff like that. Everyone told them it was wrong to connect machines of that nature to the internet and that they should change their practices to the best available. They chose to sell adverts instead, so they made sure they own your machine. The results are that any interested third party can own your M$ machine at anytime.
What part of the M$ EULA don't you understand? The intent is clear enough with revocation possible at anytime. All else beyond that is lagnape.
It would be easier to forgive him if he had not used Front Page for his web site. For that, I damb him to hell.
Well, you can charge as much as you like for GPL'd software too, see this. Consultants charge an arm and a leg for freely available information, what's new? The GPL simply makes sure that the end user can use their software as they please, modify their software as they please and redistribute their software as well as their changes (better stated here.
MicroShit threw that language in to confuse people about the GPL. Too bad for them that simple and honest licenses are so easy to read and interpret. All of their nonsense comes to an end when people simply look at the source. Ah, so simple it's been the same since 1991 or so. Can you think of any MicroShit license that has remained so stable? You could fill a phone book with all the small print M$ has put out in the last ten years. Confusion is nothing new to them.
The GPL is not something invented to keep people from making money. Comercial use of code is part of your software rights. It is your right to use your softwar in anyway you see fit, so long as it does not infring on the rights of others. There is plenty of money being made configuring, servicing and making software. Making that software free will not stop people from making money that way. Doctors, lawyers and engineers make a living without selling a restrictively licensed "product" and programers can too. In fact, most programers do this.
Yes, some of them might even have fun doing it, and others like me might not ever expect a dime from their efforts. If Corel can't make money the M$ way, who stands a chance? Better to jump on the new superior model and have good software than to try and be an ass for no reward. As free software becomes better known and more widely deployed there may be less of a chance even for M$ to make money selling closed source binaries that spy on you, blare adverts at you and suck in general. Microsoft has disgraced themselves and all closed source companies by association. A free market eliminates waste like that and M$ is on it's way to the trash can. How should M$ open their code? Fully and imediatly! The longer they wait, the further behind it gets. I won't use their crap as is, and it will take years to make it suck less.
Now for a few words in the defense of Red Hat. While, I'm not versed in all of the nice things they do, besides WRITE and DISTRIBUTE FREE SOFTWARE for everyone to use, they also provide a home for the GCC project. If that's not Red Hat's money finding it's way to major coders and contributors to free software, then sure Red Hat keeps all it's money to itself. Hmmmm.
Oh, I see. That 115 section is bothersom. I kind of wish someone would enforce 113 decency requirements on comercial broadcasters! Hopefully, the FCC might recognize packet protocall as an intelligent monitor which meets the need for continuous monitoring of equipment. Keeping comercial broadcasters out of amature bands is a good thing, and those bands should be expanded. I'm not going to hold my breath, so I'm afraid you are right about packet radio being limited. The FCC is way behind the times on this one.