Don't forget the ones there by design. You know, like the remote kill switch for too many hardware modifications, and others to make sure you don't rip M$ off. Ha ha ha. If M$ can do it, you can be sure others will figure it out and be doing it.
Also, don't forget the ones that are there by poor implimentation. You know, like sound files in email that get executed without warning.
Also, don't forget the ones that are there due to poor design. You know, like an email client that runs as root because there are no real user accounts and the underlying file system will not support that and....
Don't forget to combine all of the above with poor judgement. Well, running M$ with anything but in single user non networked air gap protected mode is poor judgement. Worse judgement is attatching a camera and an always on high speed internet connection in your freaking bedroom, ha-ha(banned in Saudi Arabia).
What we need is a computer with a single user file, on a single desktop, manipulated with a mouse that has a single button! What will it do? I'm not sure, but I imagine it would look a lot like a TV set.
I will also give you an example that doesn't involve any Microsoft product at all. Our General Ledger software is running on AIX. We had to update to an interim release to correct an issue (that happened to be new to the latest version). Unfortunately, with that release they have minimum requirements in order to receive support. To meet those requirements we had to update AIX and Oracle. So not only did we have to update their product because of a mistake that appeared in their latest release but we also had to update the OS and the Database so that we could continue to receive support from them. I am sure that other people have other non-MS stories.
I don't see any mention of frequency in there. What kind of General Ledger software needs an update every year? An M$ Access front end?
I think it is time you stop wasting your efforts bashing Microsoft and start looking at the deceipt and corruption that is in all companies. Profit and Customer Satisfaction are two diverging paths and every company will err towards the profit side.
I'd agree with you if that were true, but it's not.
(Shit. This is what I get for being a professional writer, and over-editing my submissions. I should know better by now.)
In the third draft of my answers, I mentioned that the reason for the annual cycle of commercial software stems from the wish of the software industry to keep revenue going even in a saturated marketplace, the changes in government regulations that manage to touch a huge number of business applications, and the yearly Battle of the Budget when IT departments have to "justify" their requests for the coming year by spending every dime in this year's budget.
Let's consider some others:
IBM
Sun
Apple
You will forgive me if I find software on the above platforms more stable than M$. x86 hardware has been very stable, why is it that M$ software has not? Don't all of the above companies exist in the same market, under the same pressures?
Don't some companies simply give their software away and depend on advertising for revenue?
JASC
Eudora
Netscape
Why is it that they "upgrade" their M$ product so frequently? How is it that old versions start to rot in time? Where is the incentive for that?
Techincal improvements and business model can only explain so much. What you are left with are M$ tricks. Emulation of such tricks by other companies does little to reasure me that M$ is not root cause of other disturbances on M$ OS.
It just means that Joe Programmer doesn't have to wade through a court fight in order to learn how to interface with some arcane corner of Windows XP in order to get his product out the door.
It's funny you should mention XP with contious upgrade capacity. Suppose Joe is perfectly informed? He's still screwed at will, isn't he?
The effective sales life of a version of commercial software is now one year. The time required to get redress for grievance via lawsuit is around four years. Four years is more than enough time for a commercial software company to crash, die, crumble to dust, and blow away so that there is absolutely nothing left of it. Even if the software company wins its case against Microsoft, it's a Pyrrhic victory because the company will have lost where it counts most, in the marketplace.
This was part of the answer given to the question of how any "regulation" of M$ could ever work. Does anyone else see the problem with this reasoning?
I would say that the one and only reason "comercial" software only last one year is because of the games M$ plays as a monopolist. There is no technical reason for the bit rot seen on M$ platforms. Other OS do not have this problem at all.
So why should we trust someone who will not own up to as much? The answer, that informal resolution will be speedier than formal litigation leaves much to be desired. If a formal court order holds no weight, why would M$ listen to some little TRC? Were are the teeth?
When you consider the strength of the free software movement and it's focus on comunity benifit, helping your neighbor and what not this is natural. Is it any wonder that children brought up thinking this way would do better than those with the strange and perverse model of squeezing as much money as possible over each closed source line of code?
Oh wait, that's autism... Oh well, I suppose the press thinks anything that's not selfish is retarted. They will catch up one day.
I don't even want to think about what MS could retaliate with...
Well that's good, because that's not the thinking behind the project as others have pointed out.
At the same time, don't get to comfortable with your head in the sand. M$ is already up to those kinds of tricks. Heard about the DRM OS? I'm sure it has a BIOS component to check the OS for complience. Less speculatively, I've got a motherboard that uses a Norton utility that identifies LILO as a boot sector virus. Very annoying but I can turn it off, for now. Also you should not forget all the work M$ has done to make things non standard and impossible to write drivers to: WinModems, the death of OpenGL, Sound board wierdness, and the list goes on and on.
Don't think of hardware with Open/Free standards as anti M$. Think of it as something that will simply work that M$ can use if they want. If M$ chooses to go their own way and keeps making things difficult for for their users, too bad. That's no reason to give in and have things difficult for yourself all the time.
Apple has contributed back TONS of software to the community. The BSD license said they didn't have to give anything back at all, but Apple did. The opened up their entire base OS. They have provided patches, fixes and enhancements to BSD. They work with BSD developers on a daily basis. But all you can do is complain that it isn't Debian. Go crawl back in your hole.
Let's stick to the facts instead of name calling. They have not opened their entire base, and they continue to punish anyone who would violate their "look and feel". If they had really opened everything up, every Linux distro would come with Quicktime, DVD recording software and many other Apple goodies. The choice of underlying OS is not the issue, it's all the extra effort they go through to protect their goofey little IP. If they took advantage of FreeBSD, fine. My preference is for OpenBSD, but so what? The idea is that they should just concentrate on what they think is so important, look, feel, backwards compatibility issues, and and not the rest of it.
Is it so absurd to think of them pooling their resources to make Debian or some specific BSD better? Why don't they tap into a nice pre existing user community instead of going it alone all the time? I mention Debian because it's distrobution method is superior.
Oh yeah, they might put their central reporting requirments where they put their termination clause.
but what will really help Apple prove a real challenge to Microsoft is the conscious effort by Open Source developers to port applications to Apple hardware so seamlessly, that the average user won't even have to know that The Gimp was actually a unix application.
Why should anyone bother to help Apple? I kind of expect it to go the other way. If Apple wants my respect they can drop their little IP insecurities and really open things up. I suggest they develop a nice window manager for X and put it on top of Debian as the default software that ships with their nice hardware. The GIMP is just as easy to use under Debian as it is under Red Hat, as I suppose it would be under what ever. When I feel like I own it, I might want to contribute. Until then I'll stick to much cheaper x86 hardware.
No inconsistency here. Does anyone think this patch will really make M$ any harder to crack? Is anyone here less than amazed by all the shit M$ consumers have to go through to continue to be screwed? All the insane and evershifting versioning and names for their "products" Is it possible to see three steps happen the same way on that upgrade train? Why do people keep doing it to themselves?
you're nuts if you put a Windows box directly on the Internet
And you are nuts if you put one behind the firewall where any old Outlook or MSIE flaw will put a keylogger, sniffer or what ever. What's the point of a nice little firewall when some goon can soap his way through the browser?
I suppose you just have to be wild and crazy to use M$ at all. Look at what your money buys: a poor security model with intentional bypasses, monthly crashes, Magic Lantern, WMP sound, Digital Rights Management (now patented!), remote kill switches, and the opertunity to pay again and again. What a bargain, but spending is good for someone else's economy so party on, fanboy!
Posted using Mozilla, running through a secure shell from a 650MHz Athlon to my punny little 150 MHz Pentium laptop on my lap in my bed. Try that with M$ garbage. What MSIE won't run in 24MB RAM? What Billy G won't let you run coppies of it on more than one machine at once? Where did you want to go yesterday?
High profile raids like this are made more to make a point than to stop an activity. Bill Clinton had his Waco raid to make a point about fire arms. It was pointless violence, as Koresh could have been taken quietly on a visit to town. Clinton wanted to make a point, that the Fed is biger than you and will shoot your ass if you fight. Fighting religious fringe groups played well to Clinton's constituents. It was not intended nor did it hope to eliminate illegal firearms.
So did John Ashcroft want to send a signal here? If he did it's muddy. You would think that DeCSS would have been mentioned explicitly as a reason for the raid. The reasons given were music and M$ junk, and other coppied cracked comercial software. Also, if he wanted the public to confuse thak kind of trash with banned free software he would have mentioned it as an "encryption circumvention device".
He might have wanted the news to filter up through the community through some kind of Mad_Quacker.... Ahhhh! the conspiracy theorists are the conspirators.
Disinformation Nation: where the un fettered flow of non peer moderated publications has exactly the opposite effect of free speech.
Eris said:You seemed to have missed the whole point of free software, that superior software comes from sharin
g the development of common tasks.
Otter said:Nope, that's the Open Source people. You might want to read the FSF site a little more carefully, especially the stuff distinguishing "Free" from "Open Source"
Not a problem. I love reading FSF pages.
Implicit in all free speech is the public good. In the clasic case of speech, free publication is frank and honest discource. Without it truth does not emerge. In the software case, freedom is the ability to modify and distribute improved code for any purpose. Without it software can not improve. The goal is better software, freedom is the means. It can be argued that freedom is a goal in and of itself, but it's more sensible to see it as it is. Freedom is not cheap, it is not easy, but it is the only way to assure the public good. Let's have a look at some of the things the FSF has to say:
How about RMS's clasic
Why sofware should be free
"The existence of software inevitably raises the question of how decisions about its use should be made.... I would like to consider the same question using a different criterion: the prosperity and freedom of the public in general."
and " In other words, we should perform a cost-benefit analysis on behalf of society as a whole, taking account of individual freedom as well as production of material goods. In this essay, I will describe the effects of having owners, and show that the results are detrimental. My conclusion is that programmers have the duty to encourage others to share, redistribute, study and improve the software we write: in other words, to write ``free'' software.(1)"
From "Why software should not have owners". "What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate."
It seems that they only way to get the software you want, which we will call "best", is to have free software. Software optimization is a FSF goal as well. Indeed "bad" software part of the material harm non free software and bogus laws cause us all.
Now go jump in a lake with a raft the size of your UID.
ATT owned a 25% chunk of excite. Did they use it to make excite suck? Are they now acting nice to fool you? Do you really trust the one true telco that charges by the second for voice communication and would like to keep it that way? I don't trust them any further than I can regulate them.
Really, I hope you are right but I'm afraid they are all a bunch of greedheads looking to stick it to you every way they can. Find me the words, "public interest" in any of the contracts.
People really need to vote with their feet, and stop agreeing to put on their Internet provider's straightjackets.
I'd love to dump my port 80 and 25 blocked cable "provider".
My alternatives? DSL? No, they all get screwed by the local Bell which has no interest in anything but owning it all and making sure it never ever competes with it's telco services. Dial up? Sure I could step down like that to someone else being bullied by large ISPs. I wold get to pay more for less that way.
The two real alternatives are to do what I want anyway and to agitate for reasonable regulation of telco services. If the local cable company wants to do without my $50/month, that's their problem. I'm not going to be hogging up the bandwith with anything stupid like M$ whole desktop exported as a bitmap trash, or "Planet of the Apes". If they chose to toss me off for sharing baby pictures over ftp or port forwarded http, I'll have more time and motivation for agitating.
I imagine that differential telco rates are a legacy of regulation. Once upon a time it would have made sense to subsidize residential service by charging profitable activities more. Fair enough, you knew about it up front, the charges were capped and it was used to support a public network.
The model no longer applies. First, there is no valid regulation. This is evident from the unilteral change clauses in TOS, which essentially say, "We have the right to screw you at will. Pay up or go away." Second, the private companies in question have no intention to subsidize anything. They are simply squeezing what they can from who they can. We no longer have regulated public telcos.
What we have is a cartel of rapists. In the best of all worlds, competition would come to the rescue and drive all of the greedheads out. In this world a small number of private interests have been given control of access to publically built networks and do not allow competition. The variable TOS are proof of their dishonesty and the high cell phone, long distance, cable and local phone bills you pay each month are the result.
What the fools don't realize is that regulation can return and that it can be made reasonable. They think they have been given this magic tollbox that they can squeeze and squeeze. The electric utility deregulation effort should sober them up. That they are pulling tricks like this shows that they are total fools. In time the public will get fed up, just like it did over Ma Bell's policies. People's expectations will change.
All that being said, I'd love to see the cable companies ban M$'s brand of bandwith hogging "VPN". Their tools are so sad. The IT folks tried one of those "services" on my machine a month ago. It was so slow that it was unusable. Bandwith capping would do this, as the goofey stuff uses megabytes of useless tranfers each second. The dinky little cable gets clogged up fast when people start using that trash.
If you're a company that has 7 different login and authentication systems for their wide array of services, and you could centralize that for cost savings, wouldn't you do it? I would.
Really? Do you want one key to open all your doors. Do you need the same level of security for advert laden email as you do for real identity protection? Sometimes seperation is a good idea. Sometimes it happens because you bought everyone and were too dumb to fix things as you did it.
Logic asside, if they do it you would hope that they could use something that worked (what is it, Kerebos?). They has proven incapable of protecting anything, from credit card info to Hotmail to individual PCs. Who would trust them as they move all their services to the system first used for Hotmail that has been broken already? They should realize that this is just one more reason not to do business with Micro~.
M$ is evil but, as usual, they are not very good at it.
Otter:Then there are the free software whackos who think that they're owed the world on a silver platter. But that's a whole other issue...
Gee, thanks for that and all the talk about "Zelots" "spewing". You must get a kick out of abusing the whole free software movement at Slashdot's expense. You even seem to enjoy abusing slashdot itself.
Otter again:I accept that dealing with a desktop Linux installation is a hobby in its own right and that you have to spend time to make it work and deal with some things that justa aren't there.
How insightful. You seemed to have missed the whole point of free software, that superior software comes from sharing the development of common tasks. I'll have to point people who might be misled by you to the free software foundation where they can mull freedom for themselves.
Your comment expresses the existance of something I'm not aware of. Just what is missing from Abi Word, Star Office, KDE Word, or vi/ispell/Latex, for that matter? I use M$ Word everyday because the company forces it on me. Of it's vast capability, 90% is useless fluff that gets broken at each "upgrade", 5% is anoying and must be turned off again at each "upgrade", and the remaining 5% produces spellchecked text with funny characters in a disgusting binary format that gets broken with each "upgrade". I used to use Word Perfect, until M$ broke it ruining their platform. Comercial software has mostly provide me with headaches, and their adverts are bad jokes. I'd like to see the comercial OS that does all that you imply Linux should do before it's ready for the desktop.
Sheldon now:I think you've hit upon the fundamental problem with Open Source. It's not that Open Source is a bad thing, it can actually be quite good. But it's ridiculous to assume it will ever completely replace the commercial software market.
Oh my, there's an echo in this room. Thanks for the recomendation. Now I know just how to get my work done. I'd better throw all that good free software I have at home away fast.
You two virtual people need to get real jobs. I'm really sick of running into you two bullshitters while I'm trying to catch up on news.
I can't get too worked up about this... as long as the consumer knows when he buys a Microsoft TV product that it 'comes with' this kind of monitoring. That, to me, is the key -- full and open disclosure, and a consumer educated enough to know what that means.
Bingo! The article was made to make sure you know and have a valid reference, not to get your worked up. Most people who read Slashdot knew that M$ would be doing this. Now we have a place to point because the brazen bitches have admitted what they are going to do. Don't look to M$ to make anyone aware of what they will do with the information. 99.99% (If they manage to sell 10,000, heh!) of people who buy this will have no idea.
Strangely enough, this is much closer to the grocery store card than you might think. I've never, ever seen a grocery store card contract that says, "we will collect infomation on your buying habbits to sell to advertisers, the FBI or anyone else who will pay, and the information will be passed on to creditors in case of chapter 11 filing by this company." I have, however, lived in a place where there were NO grocery stores that did not REQUIRE one of their stupid cards to buy groceries with a check. "Security" against bad checks is the only reason I've ever heard. The alternatives were to carry cash (inconvienent) or use a credit card (even more invasive).
What these companies are abusing is your image for comercial gain without your consent. While a collection of buying habbits, credit records and contact information may not look like a photograph or other traditional likeness, it is a model of your person. Just like that photograph, it is built entirely at the expense of the abuser. In the US, at least, use of your image for comercial purposes without express written consent is against the law.
I'll ingnore the stupid drug component in your post. The software issues can and should stand alone.
The campus internets are the last bastions of the internet as it was supposed to be. Peer computers and subnets operating as equals. All else in the US is now firmly in large corporate hands. Whose your ISP? ATT eventually.
I fear that this stupid Warez trash and September 11th will be used as a cover issue to kill freedom. Who here really wants a copy of "Planet of the Apes" or M$ Office? Such stuff is garbage and I'll be happy when there's less of it flowing on the net. But I'm much more concerned about the levels of proof used for these raids and newer dumber laws like USA and Patriot acts. Away go the computers to sit for months or years while "experts" try to extract "evidence" of your wrongdoing. Speedy trial, right.
I'll be very pissed if my favorite Debian mirrors go away.
Couldn't someone notice this by looking at the source for the compiler?
No they could not as the instruction could be removed from the source without the compiler forgeting. The compiler can be instructed to copy parts of itself that are missing from the source. The only way to tell is to compile with a non corrupted version of the same compiler and get a different sized output.
Sure if it's removable then you're probably mostly OK, but if some power accident fries your box, and your backup hard drive is in there, oh well.
Another principle of good backups is to have another copy in another location, since having an extra hard drive won't help you if your house burns down.
OK, so buy more than one back up HD for each application and don't leave it in the box. If you want, take the extra copy home or put it in a safe deposit box. His point is that the extra HD is still cheaper than removable media for most people right now.
This is all lost on me right now. The largest projects I have easily fit on a CD, source executable and data files uncompressed. My photos are largely segregated by where and when they were taken and are archived that way. The one or two home movies I've made are no more than 10 minutes long and of such pathetic quality that they are less than 100MB each. This may change in time, but right now the 10 cent CD and a central FTP server are more than adequate. Thingy goes to FTP, then gets CDed several times and removed.
I doubt I'll ever pay to have someone else paw through^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H store my data.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just whine about it instead of moving on. Way to fill the page up with trash.
Hypocracy, see above.
Also, don't forget the ones that are there by poor implimentation. You know, like sound files in email that get executed without warning.
Also, don't forget the ones that are there due to poor design. You know, like an email client that runs as root because there are no real user accounts and the underlying file system will not support that and ....
Don't forget to combine all of the above with poor judgement. Well, running M$ with anything but in single user non networked air gap protected mode is poor judgement. Worse judgement is attatching a camera and an always on high speed internet connection in your freaking bedroom, ha-ha(banned in Saudi Arabia).
Alah-Akbar. It's true you know.
What we need is a computer with a single user file, on a single desktop, manipulated with a mouse that has a single button! What will it do? I'm not sure, but I imagine it would look a lot like a TV set.
Sure I did, did you?
I will also give you an example that doesn't involve any Microsoft product at all. Our General Ledger software is running on AIX. We had to update to an interim release to correct an issue (that happened to be new to the latest version). Unfortunately, with that release they have minimum requirements in order to receive support. To meet those requirements we had to update AIX and Oracle. So not only did we have to update their product because of a mistake that appeared in their latest release but we also had to update the OS and the Database so that we could continue to receive support from them. I am sure that other people have other non-MS stories.
I don't see any mention of frequency in there. What kind of General Ledger software needs an update every year? An M$ Access front end?
I think it is time you stop wasting your efforts bashing Microsoft and start looking at the deceipt and corruption that is in all companies. Profit and Customer Satisfaction are two diverging paths and every company will err towards the profit side.
I'd agree with you if that were true, but it's not.
In the third draft of my answers, I mentioned that the reason for the annual cycle of commercial software stems from the wish of the software industry to keep revenue going even in a saturated marketplace, the changes in government regulations that manage to touch a huge number of business applications, and the yearly Battle of the Budget when IT departments have to "justify" their requests for the coming year by spending every dime in this year's budget.
Let's consider some others:
IBM
Sun
Apple
You will forgive me if I find software on the above platforms more stable than M$. x86 hardware has been very stable, why is it that M$ software has not? Don't all of the above companies exist in the same market, under the same pressures?
Don't some companies simply give their software away and depend on advertising for revenue?
JASC
Eudora
Netscape
Why is it that they "upgrade" their M$ product so frequently? How is it that old versions start to rot in time? Where is the incentive for that?
Techincal improvements and business model can only explain so much. What you are left with are M$ tricks. Emulation of such tricks by other companies does little to reasure me that M$ is not root cause of other disturbances on M$ OS.
It's funny you should mention XP with contious upgrade capacity. Suppose Joe is perfectly informed? He's still screwed at will, isn't he?
This was part of the answer given to the question of how any "regulation" of M$ could ever work. Does anyone else see the problem with this reasoning?
I would say that the one and only reason "comercial" software only last one year is because of the games M$ plays as a monopolist. There is no technical reason for the bit rot seen on M$ platforms. Other OS do not have this problem at all.
So why should we trust someone who will not own up to as much? The answer, that informal resolution will be speedier than formal litigation leaves much to be desired. If a formal court order holds no weight, why would M$ listen to some little TRC? Were are the teeth?
Oh wait, that's autism... Oh well, I suppose the press thinks anything that's not selfish is retarted. They will catch up one day.
Well that's good, because that's not the thinking behind the project as others have pointed out.
At the same time, don't get to comfortable with your head in the sand. M$ is already up to those kinds of tricks. Heard about the DRM OS? I'm sure it has a BIOS component to check the OS for complience. Less speculatively, I've got a motherboard that uses a Norton utility that identifies LILO as a boot sector virus. Very annoying but I can turn it off, for now. Also you should not forget all the work M$ has done to make things non standard and impossible to write drivers to: WinModems, the death of OpenGL, Sound board wierdness, and the list goes on and on.
Don't think of hardware with Open/Free standards as anti M$. Think of it as something that will simply work that M$ can use if they want. If M$ chooses to go their own way and keeps making things difficult for for their users, too bad. That's no reason to give in and have things difficult for yourself all the time.
I obviously have more respect for their hardware than you do. It's too bad that they do software the way they do.
Let's stick to the facts instead of name calling. They have not opened their entire base, and they continue to punish anyone who would violate their "look and feel". If they had really opened everything up, every Linux distro would come with Quicktime, DVD recording software and many other Apple goodies. The choice of underlying OS is not the issue, it's all the extra effort they go through to protect their goofey little IP. If they took advantage of FreeBSD, fine. My preference is for OpenBSD, but so what? The idea is that they should just concentrate on what they think is so important, look, feel, backwards compatibility issues, and and not the rest of it.
Is it so absurd to think of them pooling their resources to make Debian or some specific BSD better? Why don't they tap into a nice pre existing user community instead of going it alone all the time? I mention Debian because it's distrobution method is superior.
Oh yeah, they might put their central reporting requirments where they put their termination clause.
Why should anyone bother to help Apple? I kind of expect it to go the other way. If Apple wants my respect they can drop their little IP insecurities and really open things up. I suggest they develop a nice window manager for X and put it on top of Debian as the default software that ships with their nice hardware. The GIMP is just as easy to use under Debian as it is under Red Hat, as I suppose it would be under what ever. When I feel like I own it, I might want to contribute. Until then I'll stick to much cheaper x86 hardware.
No inconsistency here. Does anyone think this patch will really make M$ any harder to crack? Is anyone here less than amazed by all the shit M$ consumers have to go through to continue to be screwed? All the insane and evershifting versioning and names for their "products" Is it possible to see three steps happen the same way on that upgrade train? Why do people keep doing it to themselves?
And you are nuts if you put one behind the firewall where any old Outlook or MSIE flaw will put a keylogger, sniffer or what ever. What's the point of a nice little firewall when some goon can soap his way through the browser?
I suppose you just have to be wild and crazy to use M$ at all. Look at what your money buys: a poor security model with intentional bypasses, monthly crashes, Magic Lantern, WMP sound, Digital Rights Management (now patented!), remote kill switches, and the opertunity to pay again and again. What a bargain, but spending is good for someone else's economy so party on, fanboy!
Posted using Mozilla, running through a secure shell from a 650MHz Athlon to my punny little 150 MHz Pentium laptop on my lap in my bed. Try that with M$ garbage. What MSIE won't run in 24MB RAM? What Billy G won't let you run coppies of it on more than one machine at once? Where did you want to go yesterday?
So did John Ashcroft want to send a signal here? If he did it's muddy. You would think that DeCSS would have been mentioned explicitly as a reason for the raid. The reasons given were music and M$ junk, and other coppied cracked comercial software. Also, if he wanted the public to confuse thak kind of trash with banned free software he would have mentioned it as an "encryption circumvention device".
He might have wanted the news to filter up through the community through some kind of Mad_Quacker.... Ahhhh! the conspiracy theorists are the conspirators.
Disinformation Nation: where the un fettered flow of non peer moderated publications has exactly the opposite effect of free speech.
Otter said:Nope, that's the Open Source people. You might want to read the FSF site a little more carefully, especially the stuff distinguishing "Free" from "Open Source"
Not a problem. I love reading FSF pages.
Implicit in all free speech is the public good. In the clasic case of speech, free publication is frank and honest discource. Without it truth does not emerge. In the software case, freedom is the ability to modify and distribute improved code for any purpose. Without it software can not improve. The goal is better software, freedom is the means. It can be argued that freedom is a goal in and of itself, but it's more sensible to see it as it is. Freedom is not cheap, it is not easy, but it is the only way to assure the public good. Let's have a look at some of the things the FSF has to say:
How about RMS's clasic Why sofware should be free ... I would like to consider the same question using a different criterion: the prosperity and freedom of the public in general."
"The existence of software inevitably raises the question of how decisions about its use should be made.
and " In other words, we should perform a cost-benefit analysis on behalf of society as a whole, taking account of individual freedom as well as production of material goods. In this essay, I will describe the effects of having owners, and show that the results are detrimental. My conclusion is that programmers have the duty to encourage others to share, redistribute, study and improve the software we write: in other words, to write ``free'' software.(1)"
From "Why software should not have owners".
"What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens---for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate."
It seems that they only way to get the software you want, which we will call "best", is to have free software. Software optimization is a FSF goal as well. Indeed "bad" software part of the material harm non free software and bogus laws cause us all.
Now go jump in a lake with a raft the size of your UID.
Really, I hope you are right but I'm afraid they are all a bunch of greedheads looking to stick it to you every way they can. Find me the words, "public interest" in any of the contracts.
I'd love to dump my port 80 and 25 blocked cable "provider".
My alternatives? DSL? No, they all get screwed by the local Bell which has no interest in anything but owning it all and making sure it never ever competes with it's telco services. Dial up? Sure I could step down like that to someone else being bullied by large ISPs. I wold get to pay more for less that way.
The two real alternatives are to do what I want anyway and to agitate for reasonable regulation of telco services. If the local cable company wants to do without my $50/month, that's their problem. I'm not going to be hogging up the bandwith with anything stupid like M$ whole desktop exported as a bitmap trash, or "Planet of the Apes". If they chose to toss me off for sharing baby pictures over ftp or port forwarded http, I'll have more time and motivation for agitating.
The model no longer applies. First, there is no valid regulation. This is evident from the unilteral change clauses in TOS, which essentially say, "We have the right to screw you at will. Pay up or go away." Second, the private companies in question have no intention to subsidize anything. They are simply squeezing what they can from who they can. We no longer have regulated public telcos.
What we have is a cartel of rapists. In the best of all worlds, competition would come to the rescue and drive all of the greedheads out. In this world a small number of private interests have been given control of access to publically built networks and do not allow competition. The variable TOS are proof of their dishonesty and the high cell phone, long distance, cable and local phone bills you pay each month are the result.
What the fools don't realize is that regulation can return and that it can be made reasonable. They think they have been given this magic tollbox that they can squeeze and squeeze. The electric utility deregulation effort should sober them up. That they are pulling tricks like this shows that they are total fools. In time the public will get fed up, just like it did over Ma Bell's policies. People's expectations will change.
All that being said, I'd love to see the cable companies ban M$'s brand of bandwith hogging "VPN". Their tools are so sad. The IT folks tried one of those "services" on my machine a month ago. It was so slow that it was unusable. Bandwith capping would do this, as the goofey stuff uses megabytes of useless tranfers each second. The dinky little cable gets clogged up fast when people start using that trash.
Really? Do you want one key to open all your doors. Do you need the same level of security for advert laden email as you do for real identity protection? Sometimes seperation is a good idea. Sometimes it happens because you bought everyone and were too dumb to fix things as you did it.
Logic asside, if they do it you would hope that they could use something that worked (what is it, Kerebos?). They has proven incapable of protecting anything, from credit card info to Hotmail to individual PCs. Who would trust them as they move all their services to the system first used for Hotmail that has been broken already? They should realize that this is just one more reason not to do business with Micro~.
M$ is evil but, as usual, they are not very good at it.
Gee, thanks for that and all the talk about "Zelots" "spewing". You must get a kick out of abusing the whole free software movement at Slashdot's expense. You even seem to enjoy abusing slashdot itself.
Otter again:I accept that dealing with a desktop Linux installation is a hobby in its own right and that you have to spend time to make it work and deal with some things that justa aren't there.
How insightful. You seemed to have missed the whole point of free software, that superior software comes from sharing the development of common tasks. I'll have to point people who might be misled by you to the free software foundation where they can mull freedom for themselves.
Your comment expresses the existance of something I'm not aware of. Just what is missing from Abi Word, Star Office, KDE Word, or vi/ispell/Latex, for that matter? I use M$ Word everyday because the company forces it on me. Of it's vast capability, 90% is useless fluff that gets broken at each "upgrade", 5% is anoying and must be turned off again at each "upgrade", and the remaining 5% produces spellchecked text with funny characters in a disgusting binary format that gets broken with each "upgrade". I used to use Word Perfect, until M$ broke it ruining their platform. Comercial software has mostly provide me with headaches, and their adverts are bad jokes. I'd like to see the comercial OS that does all that you imply Linux should do before it's ready for the desktop.
Sheldon now:I think you've hit upon the fundamental problem with Open Source. It's not that Open Source is a bad thing, it can actually be quite good. But it's ridiculous to assume it will ever completely replace the commercial software market.
Oh my, there's an echo in this room. Thanks for the recomendation. Now I know just how to get my work done. I'd better throw all that good free software I have at home away fast.
You two virtual people need to get real jobs. I'm really sick of running into you two bullshitters while I'm trying to catch up on news.
Bingo! The article was made to make sure you know and have a valid reference, not to get your worked up. Most people who read Slashdot knew that M$ would be doing this. Now we have a place to point because the brazen bitches have admitted what they are going to do. Don't look to M$ to make anyone aware of what they will do with the information. 99.99% (If they manage to sell 10,000, heh!) of people who buy this will have no idea.
Strangely enough, this is much closer to the grocery store card than you might think. I've never, ever seen a grocery store card contract that says, "we will collect infomation on your buying habbits to sell to advertisers, the FBI or anyone else who will pay, and the information will be passed on to creditors in case of chapter 11 filing by this company." I have, however, lived in a place where there were NO grocery stores that did not REQUIRE one of their stupid cards to buy groceries with a check. "Security" against bad checks is the only reason I've ever heard. The alternatives were to carry cash (inconvienent) or use a credit card (even more invasive).
What these companies are abusing is your image for comercial gain without your consent. While a collection of buying habbits, credit records and contact information may not look like a photograph or other traditional likeness, it is a model of your person. Just like that photograph, it is built entirely at the expense of the abuser. In the US, at least, use of your image for comercial purposes without express written consent is against the law.
The campus internets are the last bastions of the internet as it was supposed to be. Peer computers and subnets operating as equals. All else in the US is now firmly in large corporate hands. Whose your ISP? ATT eventually.
I fear that this stupid Warez trash and September 11th will be used as a cover issue to kill freedom. Who here really wants a copy of "Planet of the Apes" or M$ Office? Such stuff is garbage and I'll be happy when there's less of it flowing on the net. But I'm much more concerned about the levels of proof used for these raids and newer dumber laws like USA and Patriot acts. Away go the computers to sit for months or years while "experts" try to extract "evidence" of your wrongdoing. Speedy trial, right.
I'll be very pissed if my favorite Debian mirrors go away.
No they could not as the instruction could be removed from the source without the compiler forgeting. The compiler can be instructed to copy parts of itself that are missing from the source. The only way to tell is to compile with a non corrupted version of the same compiler and get a different sized output.
Another principle of good backups is to have another copy in another location, since having an extra hard drive won't help you if your house burns down.
OK, so buy more than one back up HD for each application and don't leave it in the box. If you want, take the extra copy home or put it in a safe deposit box. His point is that the extra HD is still cheaper than removable media for most people right now.
This is all lost on me right now. The largest projects I have easily fit on a CD, source executable and data files uncompressed. My photos are largely segregated by where and when they were taken and are archived that way. The one or two home movies I've made are no more than 10 minutes long and of such pathetic quality that they are less than 100MB each. This may change in time, but right now the 10 cent CD and a central FTP server are more than adequate. Thingy goes to FTP, then gets CDed several times and removed.
I doubt I'll ever pay to have someone else paw through^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H store my data.