...founded on something as silly as a good amber monitor from them. Used it for ten years, exclusivly and it still works. Samsung does make some good stuff.
If you don't believe that even the most repressive measures will fail, just ask yourself how Palestinians manage to make bombs and kill people from within concentration camps. Ethinic profiling, strip searches, x-ray machines, superman and 3.5 billion dollars of US aid per year can not stop a determined group of men.
The only solution is to treat all inocent men as equals and remove the guilty from society. Injustice is self defeating.
Go ahead and tell your grandmother that she has to go into a shell (a what?) and type this:
cp/etc/printcap.old/etc/printcap.local
/etc/init.d/lpd restart
Oh sure, I suppose we should tell her how to hack her binary registry instead? Perhaps granny should just have a backdoored system so that the helpful ISP admin can fix it for her, and everyone else can use her as a warez site? Granny is going to need help, and I'm not going to chase that Windoze crap for her. Man files, text configs and what not that don't change each time M$ needs additional income or wants to break some other program are so much easier.
Oh yeah, my wife calls the shell "the foot" because Red Hat gave her a button for gnome terminal emulator. She has come to understand the concept of a root account. Forced to do a little for herself, she is getting good at it. Neither of us can make 98 work our printer anymore, but it works just fine under Red Hat. The rest of my machines run Debian. Nothing could be finer or easier. Be gone, Troll.
Well at least the part saying multiple OS's can be installed on one machine, and Microsoft can do nothing.
Nothing? Right. Like using NTFS and then stupid laws to make sure that no one but M$ can read/write the file system? Like having a virus scan delete the alternate OS or the bootloader? Dude, M$ can make trouble anywhere it is used.
The good news is that people are starting to understand that M$ is the root of their computer problems. Get away from it for a while and you forget just how BAD it was. People around me talk about reformating their hard drives once every two months and starting all over again like they have to. Gahhh! All I have to tell them is that I've got PC's that run stable until the power fails. They know something is wrong and that things have been getting worse not better.
You would think they would have made something a little more flexible, like a palm by now. Oh yeah, my Visor does have a calculator that does unit conversions and what not. It replaced my $17 sharp calculator from 1990 last year for about what I'd have to pay for an HP.
Composites owe much to textiles. Just think about all the work that goes into turning the feedstocks of panty hose and cigarette butts into epoxy matrix carbon fiber composites. The same can be said for all other woven fabric fibers.
Now think how nice it would be for your aircraft to have hundreds of data paths to all of it's insturments and controls. Is that practical enough for you? Talk about USB buttons and CPU rips is cute and all, but this is useful. The wing is the wire. If you put holes in it, it will still work. If you blow the wing off, you have other problems.
Another nice combination of technologies was hinted at in the article when they mentioned parachutes. It would be really cool if intelligence, power and electro static materials were combined to guide the parachute. Think of object avoidance, soft landings on target, for an unconcious or dead trooper.
In the center of military flight flow charts is one box with one word in it, "kill". Yike!
And also more CPUs can't = bad either, can it? I mean, that's the next marketing blitz campaign once MHz stops working.
More is better, provided you can use it. Posted from a 150 MHz, 20 meg RAM, laptop with Mozilla running on a 650MHz Athlon thanks to SSH -X and Debian. Kind of nice to only have to install things on one machine. 66MHz 486 keeps the gate, 180MHz serves http, ftp and dns, 500MHz K6/2 and Red Hat drives a printer and makes the wife happy. There you have it, five freaking computers and it's only the beginning. Kerbos authentication would be nice, and I have a box that could do it if the mailbox gets slowed down. A box dedicated to voice recognition that had the authority to command would be excellent. A radio gateway to help eliminate the last mile rape is planned. A wireless hub for inside would be nice too. This hundred foot cable to the laptop can be a drag. None of this has cost that much. I've simply been collecting other people's trash and buying a hundred buck mobo from time to time over the last five years. My largest single expenditure was this $450 laptop.
Like you, I know M$ will get around or ignore all of this.
Let them go, straight to their demise. The more power they have to tax and annoy their users the faster their users will leave. They've alread run off their developers. Now they can run off their users. What are companies going to do when Java and Samba don't work for them? Switch to activeX and IIS with all their security holes? No, they are going to be fed up with it all. The true cost of M$ greed is apparent as more users and companies jump ship and brag about it. Bad practices will undo them and the end is closer than they think.
It's amazing how little people know about alternatives to M$. They are unaware of what it even looks like. "Gee, that looks very windows like", is a comment I get when people at work get a glimps at my laptop, or see pictures from home. It bothers many of them because they were encouraged to buy M$ stock as part of our company's "empowerment". Before I knew that, I made the mistake of answering the question, "Why is M$ stock rising today?", shouted across the cubicles with, "Because people are stupid? I don't know." Oh my, stunned silence. Yet they know, because they suffer.
Linus, BSD, Apple, Sun and the US govrnment won't beat M$, M$ will ruin themselves. The harder they make it for others to develop, "compete" they call it, the more trouble they put their users through, and the more expensive they make it all, the faster they will change or die. I don't think they can change. They have already created a huge potential. As users learn the new path of least resistance, the current trickle of user conversions will become a flood that will make the early 90s adoption of Win3.1 look slow and small.
Heh, no doubt. And you have not yet even been tortured by my finnish accent.
=:>
OSS is just as good a start to a consulting firm as civil engineering, but the timing is better. The money now flowing to Redmond will soon be available.
Red herring, it's funny you should use that phrase to describe LWN's response to the M$ red herring of OSS scale and innovation problems. LWN correctly pointed out that closed source does not always do well when it get's large, but they did not stop there. They also try to remind us of just how innovative and fast moving OSS can be by citing Mozilla, KDE, Open Office and the kernel itself. Managing large projects is difficult, LWN just thinks OSS does it better. The reasons those projects work better are detailed in other parts of the article. The results are clear to anyone who's ever used the programs cited. They are especially clear to those of us who must suffer M$ junk at work.
Sitting here, I know which model works better. I have several awsome window managers (each of which blows away the M$ GUI), dozens of good editors, three web browsers, great image manipulation software at my disposal. I can run it from any of my machines through secure shell to this laptop I have sitting on me here in bed. No, this is not just theory, I'm doing it now. Goodies are compiling on an Athlon while my P150 laptop with 24 megs of ram handles this silly post. A mailbox is dealing with DNS, FTP and mail behind a 486 firewall. Remote administration is secure and easy thanks to apt and friends. Most of these convinences run counter to the M$ business model. How well that has worked out is painfully obvious when I go to work.
Am I some sort of computer God? Far from it. I've got a little C and FORTRAN. Debian is taking care of the rest of things for me. Yes, it's all free. Yes, it's getting easy enough for a boneheaded engineer to get things done. Something is working well here, and I'm glad to help if I can.
The only thing that LWN got wrong was thinking that M$ has laid off the FUD. GPL virus? Naked PC? Information Anarcy? Make it stop! I laugh at it, but others are taken in all day long.
Opensource is not the complete answer for a company strategy unless you are planning to eat rice for the lest of your life.
Well, it's not a bad start for a consulting firm.
Lou lust leek lith a lisp, "Lopen soulce is not the complete answel fah a compny stlategy unless you ah planning to leet lice fah the REST of yah life." Is is Boston or Tokyo? I say better English is spoken in Tokyo. You be the judge.
But the web sites would not be allowed to match that information with individual identities. They could still gather statistics, monitor actions, and anything else cookies are useful for, but not for targetting individuals.
Sure. How do you verify that?
The whole idea of usning visitor's computers to track them from one site to another without asking is outrageous. Just asking would be nice. Compulsory publication of just what and how cookies are used by a site would be better. No bullshit cryptic binary dropped on my machine, please. Put up a page that tells me exactly what the thing does and how, or shove off. Where else do you have to sign a blank check before services are rendered?
I've always resented the way some people think that they can use a visitor's hardware to track them without asking. A cookie use page, giving detailed information about what the company has done with all that information should be considered a requirement for "well informed". Companies caught with their hand in the jar should be slapped.
It's about time laws for elctronic communications caught up with laws for other insecure communications like mail and phone. It takes zero ability to tap a phone or violate the post. These activities were made illegal for the common good. It would be impossible to persue business or live with dignity without such protections. We need to think of our personal computers as the replacement for the post and phone that they are. People who violate communications from personal computers are just as repulsive as common mail theives. Take that, John Ashcroft. Great shame should fall on makers (M$) of software (all M$ OS) that allows and encourages such gross invasion of privacy.
Tighten up! Encryption now for everyone! I want it at home, where my wife surfs. I want it on my desk at work, so pesky admins don't filter what I have to say to my wife. Yes, I want it for slashdot too. The internet is a public resource not a corporate possesion.
Say goodbye to UNIX support. It's expensive to develop for UNIX compared to Windows. VB programmers are a dime a dozen and can be hired for $30k a year, so why would a software company want to hire anyone else? The former "LNUX" will soon be in bed with Microsoft before we know it.
This is stupid stuff. Do you really know what the cost of using Windoze junk is? I work at a company that M$ is deep into. The productivity lost is astounding. We have spent fortunes on closed source junk that can never cross comunicate, never works that well and sits on a crippled OS. VB apps that get broken with every change in M$ Office, IE and service pack are the least of our problems. At least we can throw co-ops at maintaining that junk. A larger problem comes from custom applications that never talk to each other, much less the M$ Office the company delcared "standard". Consultants and new hires are astounded at the Byzantine complexity of the tools we are expected to use to get our jobs done. In the end, you find your workers hanging around the printers for jobs that may or may not come through. VA can die, but that won't make closed source junk any better. The alternatives to free software are less and less atractive.
As much as I'd like to see more games ported to linux, so that I might
be able to give up my MS habit completely, you have to agree that
economically it just doesn't make sense.
Huh? Ignoring the most enthusiastic 10% of
computer world makes sense? Did it ever occur
to you that honesty and integrity are part of the
reason so many people are switching over to free
software? I'm not using Debian so I can
distribute other people's work, I'm using it
so I can make fair use of the things I own.
I'll buy the $30 CD to play a game. Warez loosers, who don't mind putting backdoors on their machines won't spend a dime. Sheesh.
It was a sweet interface
and all the old folks wished it well
but you took that upgrade
and now you fell like hell.
The CLI you so loved, isnt there
It was bad for Bill Gates
and now its gone away.
It just goes to show,
you never can tell.
The true solution to avoiding applications of technologies we don't like is to ignore and discourage the development of the technologies that make said (unliked) application possible. Then we will all be happy.
What technophobic hubris! It's almost too good to be true.
If all you ever think of are the bad uses of new tools, you will never develop new tools. This is technophobia, pure and simple. Every tool, right down to nuclear explosives (see project plowshears), has it's good uses.
It is a mistake to think that things will not be developed because you deny their positive uses. Someone, somewhere is working on everything. Even if you are the best, you are never the only.
Misbehavior from M$ is everyone's bussines, until the world gets over them. M$, in case you forgot, makes more than a crummy "network" called MSN. They make an even crummier OS or two, that they force large computer vendors to carry through various monopoly tricks and large advertising budgets. Remember the 90% "market share" their PR folks like to brag about?
This is another demonstration of M$ using that monopoly to embrace, extend and extinguish yet another area. The target is the web. They are distributing a crummy browser with lots of "extended" features that only their OSs users are privalidged to see. They are also putting that kind of code into their own web servers and turning them on by default so that those who use them must turn them off to avoid upsetting their customers. That they were willing to do this on their own site makes you think they will turn such a switch on for all IIS in the future. It's an old game, make everything non M$ a pain on an M$ OS. Their administrators, who already say ignorant things about other browsers, will have more work to do and harbor more hate about free or alternate software.
This also furthers SSSCA type legislation. The more hate they can generate, the less likely people are to really care when the time comes. "Why should we care about those dumb wierdos that use that perverted non M$ standards complient software?", they will ask. "Freedom? You are free to write anything you want on an M$ system, what's wrong with you?" Ahhhhh! The ignorance compounds itself.
For $100 you can get a new one and mother board at Tigerdirect and elsewhere. Hell, for $300 you can get a 1.4 GHz Athlon and a Soyo DDR motherboard with sound built in. My question is, why risk another motherboard to test out a fried processor?
Expect the price of these things to continue to fall as the 64 bit machines finally roll in. It's kind of hard to believe that we are still using 32 bit stuff when Alpha has been around at least six years. Oh well, cheap is cool.
You've got it backwards - this does not raise revenue for private companies, it raises revenue for governments that sell it.
The government is only a tool, though I'm sure they enjoy recieving the $500,000 per year a comercial radio liscense costs. Why should I bite into the hideous comercial music troll? Because it's a good example of high fees being used to artificially limit the use of a public resource. How else are they going to raise that kind of money and pay their staffs and buy loudspeakers, advert vans and all the rest of that ugly noise? How else can five publishing companies dominate the music industry? The rules have been bent to benifit a few companies at the public expense.
There really is plenty of bandwith to go around. Check out the 72 empty TV channels on an old tuner dial. Why is it that only a few broadcasters owned by GE, Westinghouse and Disney use it? Do you really think a free market dully regulated for the public interest would have all that redundant commercial noise, but mostly empty spectrum? How many reruns do you need to see before you go buy that soap? Great use, a productive use you say. Barf, I say.
The price of broadcasting and computing equipment has come down to the point that a member supported digital network is possible. What barriers really exist? Most US suburbanites can afford antena towers, directional broadcasting equipment and multiple computers. We've seen plenty of implimentations right here on Slashdot. Trolls, who wish to fill up such broadcasts with adverts could be taken down under a proper leagal framework and pull based networking. People can co-operate to help themselves, without paying absorbadent fees to useless and annoying third parties. The physical devices are cheap and getting cheaper.
Networking bliss seems right arount the corner, but then I hear from folks like you. If such a network does not emerge, it will only be because tellephony, publication and entertainment interests are able to control the airwaves for their own benefit. They do that through government regulation and soothing talk that comforts and leads silly cows to the milking stalls.
Communication over such distances requires relatively high-power transmissions, and, because of that, a license for a specific frequency band. Typically, carriers pay a fee for a license to transmit at certain power levels in a particular frequency spectrum.
Or so some would have it. Is anyone else getting sick of fees to do anything marginally useful? The ariwaves are public property and should be used for the public good, not simply to raise revenue for private companies. Whatever "standards" are adopted, let's see to it that the air itself is free.
As long as big companies can buy laws to support their monopolies, they can legislate their way out of any situation where normal capitalist forces would stop them.
You know, that's right! In this case, however, the entertianment folks and M$ look like tin horn prawns next to some big boys who are tired of paying through the nose for IT services provided by desktop PCs. Think GE, Westinghouse, Coke, Archer Daniel, and other giants are going to let M$ tell them what backdoored buggy junk they have to run on their thousands of desktops? Not a snowballs chance in hell. Oh yeah, they will suck up all of M$'s punny one billion dollar advert campaign, then stuff them. The owners of CBS and ABC will figure out where their break even point is. As soon as they figure out that free software can not be held over their heads and that it will save them money, security and trouble, M$ will vanish.
Step back and think about this for a while. What exactly is the purpose of copyright law, and how is that purpose furfilled by these actions?
In traditional publishing, US copyright was inteded to promote publications by a temprorary franchise on books, articles and what not. These laws were not translated into non human readable forms such as piano player rolls.
Applications to mass distributed binary files does not make sense. AiboPet coppied a section or sections or the whole enchalada of a mass produced and mass distributed binary file. He's done a little work, but it only reveals what exists in thousands of places already. He's not reproducing Aibos, he has simply read one he owns and told the rest of us how it works. Anyone who wanted to clone Aibos could without any help from AiboPet, so the protection is non existent.
What Sony wants is an exclusive franchise to all things Aibo. They don't want anything made for Aibo that does not make money for them.
The extension of copyright into non human readable forms was a mistake to begin with. Think player piano rolls and cam profiles, where the so called art was unprotected and considered specific to certian machines and of little value outside of them. The greed principle is at work here and it is self defeating.
As for your Windows boxes, I can't imagine functioning without admin.
I can't imagine developing on an M$ crippled box at all anymore. Win 3.1 and 95 version 1 were not so bad to work with. But things have been getting worse instead of better. Sure, some things worked and still do but broken printer shit is what ruins real world applications. Linux and BSD make that whole ass pain unneeded.
Free the folks outside development, if you can. Getting them off M$ would make everything so much more secure than any of this stupid lock down stuff. Regular users don't need root access but have much more power and convenience in their hands with normal *nix accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
...founded on something as silly as a good amber monitor from them. Used it for ten years, exclusivly and it still works. Samsung does make some good stuff.
The only solution is to treat all inocent men as equals and remove the guilty from society. Injustice is self defeating.
cp
/etc/init.d/lpd restart
Oh sure, I suppose we should tell her how to hack her binary registry instead? Perhaps granny should just have a backdoored system so that the helpful ISP admin can fix it for her, and everyone else can use her as a warez site? Granny is going to need help, and I'm not going to chase that Windoze crap for her. Man files, text configs and what not that don't change each time M$ needs additional income or wants to break some other program are so much easier.
Oh yeah, my wife calls the shell "the foot" because Red Hat gave her a button for gnome terminal emulator. She has come to understand the concept of a root account. Forced to do a little for herself, she is getting good at it. Neither of us can make 98 work our printer anymore, but it works just fine under Red Hat. The rest of my machines run Debian. Nothing could be finer or easier. Be gone, Troll.
Nothing? Right. Like using NTFS and then stupid laws to make sure that no one but M$ can read/write the file system? Like having a virus scan delete the alternate OS or the bootloader? Dude, M$ can make trouble anywhere it is used.
The good news is that people are starting to understand that M$ is the root of their computer problems. Get away from it for a while and you forget just how BAD it was. People around me talk about reformating their hard drives once every two months and starting all over again like they have to. Gahhh! All I have to tell them is that I've got PC's that run stable until the power fails. They know something is wrong and that things have been getting worse not better.
You would think they would have made something a little more flexible, like a palm by now. Oh yeah, my Visor does have a calculator that does unit conversions and what not. It replaced my $17 sharp calculator from 1990 last year for about what I'd have to pay for an HP.
Now think how nice it would be for your aircraft to have hundreds of data paths to all of it's insturments and controls. Is that practical enough for you? Talk about USB buttons and CPU rips is cute and all, but this is useful. The wing is the wire. If you put holes in it, it will still work. If you blow the wing off, you have other problems.
Another nice combination of technologies was hinted at in the article when they mentioned parachutes. It would be really cool if intelligence, power and electro static materials were combined to guide the parachute. Think of object avoidance, soft landings on target, for an unconcious or dead trooper.
In the center of military flight flow charts is one box with one word in it, "kill". Yike!
More is better, provided you can use it. Posted from a 150 MHz, 20 meg RAM, laptop with Mozilla running on a 650MHz Athlon thanks to SSH -X and Debian. Kind of nice to only have to install things on one machine. 66MHz 486 keeps the gate, 180MHz serves http, ftp and dns, 500MHz K6/2 and Red Hat drives a printer and makes the wife happy. There you have it, five freaking computers and it's only the beginning. Kerbos authentication would be nice, and I have a box that could do it if the mailbox gets slowed down. A box dedicated to voice recognition that had the authority to command would be excellent. A radio gateway to help eliminate the last mile rape is planned. A wireless hub for inside would be nice too. This hundred foot cable to the laptop can be a drag. None of this has cost that much. I've simply been collecting other people's trash and buying a hundred buck mobo from time to time over the last five years. My largest single expenditure was this $450 laptop.
Yes, I share with my frinds.
Let them go, straight to their demise. The more power they have to tax and annoy their users the faster their users will leave. They've alread run off their developers. Now they can run off their users. What are companies going to do when Java and Samba don't work for them? Switch to activeX and IIS with all their security holes? No, they are going to be fed up with it all. The true cost of M$ greed is apparent as more users and companies jump ship and brag about it. Bad practices will undo them and the end is closer than they think.
It's amazing how little people know about alternatives to M$. They are unaware of what it even looks like. "Gee, that looks very windows like", is a comment I get when people at work get a glimps at my laptop, or see pictures from home. It bothers many of them because they were encouraged to buy M$ stock as part of our company's "empowerment". Before I knew that, I made the mistake of answering the question, "Why is M$ stock rising today?", shouted across the cubicles with, "Because people are stupid? I don't know." Oh my, stunned silence. Yet they know, because they suffer.
Linus, BSD, Apple, Sun and the US govrnment won't beat M$, M$ will ruin themselves. The harder they make it for others to develop, "compete" they call it, the more trouble they put their users through, and the more expensive they make it all, the faster they will change or die. I don't think they can change. They have already created a huge potential. As users learn the new path of least resistance, the current trickle of user conversions will become a flood that will make the early 90s adoption of Win3.1 look slow and small.
=:>
OSS is just as good a start to a consulting firm as civil engineering, but the timing is better. The money now flowing to Redmond will soon be available.
Sitting here, I know which model works better. I have several awsome window managers (each of which blows away the M$ GUI), dozens of good editors, three web browsers, great image manipulation software at my disposal. I can run it from any of my machines through secure shell to this laptop I have sitting on me here in bed. No, this is not just theory, I'm doing it now. Goodies are compiling on an Athlon while my P150 laptop with 24 megs of ram handles this silly post. A mailbox is dealing with DNS, FTP and mail behind a 486 firewall. Remote administration is secure and easy thanks to apt and friends. Most of these convinences run counter to the M$ business model. How well that has worked out is painfully obvious when I go to work.
Am I some sort of computer God? Far from it. I've got a little C and FORTRAN. Debian is taking care of the rest of things for me. Yes, it's all free. Yes, it's getting easy enough for a boneheaded engineer to get things done. Something is working well here, and I'm glad to help if I can.
The only thing that LWN got wrong was thinking that M$ has laid off the FUD. GPL virus? Naked PC? Information Anarcy? Make it stop! I laugh at it, but others are taken in all day long.
Well, it's not a bad start for a consulting firm.
Lou lust leek lith a lisp, "Lopen soulce is not the complete answel fah a compny stlategy unless you ah planning to leet lice fah the REST of yah life." Is is Boston or Tokyo? I say better English is spoken in Tokyo. You be the judge.
Sure. How do you verify that?
The whole idea of usning visitor's computers to track them from one site to another without asking is outrageous. Just asking would be nice. Compulsory publication of just what and how cookies are used by a site would be better. No bullshit cryptic binary dropped on my machine, please. Put up a page that tells me exactly what the thing does and how, or shove off. Where else do you have to sign a blank check before services are rendered?
It's about time laws for elctronic communications caught up with laws for other insecure communications like mail and phone. It takes zero ability to tap a phone or violate the post. These activities were made illegal for the common good. It would be impossible to persue business or live with dignity without such protections. We need to think of our personal computers as the replacement for the post and phone that they are. People who violate communications from personal computers are just as repulsive as common mail theives. Take that, John Ashcroft. Great shame should fall on makers (M$) of software (all M$ OS) that allows and encourages such gross invasion of privacy.
Tighten up! Encryption now for everyone! I want it at home, where my wife surfs. I want it on my desk at work, so pesky admins don't filter what I have to say to my wife. Yes, I want it for slashdot too. The internet is a public resource not a corporate possesion.
Say goodbye to UNIX support. It's expensive to develop for UNIX compared to Windows. VB programmers are a dime a dozen and can be hired for $30k a year, so why would a software company want to hire anyone else? The former "LNUX" will soon be in bed with Microsoft before we know it.
This is stupid stuff. Do you really know what the cost of using Windoze junk is? I work at a company that M$ is deep into. The productivity lost is astounding. We have spent fortunes on closed source junk that can never cross comunicate, never works that well and sits on a crippled OS. VB apps that get broken with every change in M$ Office, IE and service pack are the least of our problems. At least we can throw co-ops at maintaining that junk. A larger problem comes from custom applications that never talk to each other, much less the M$ Office the company delcared "standard". Consultants and new hires are astounded at the Byzantine complexity of the tools we are expected to use to get our jobs done. In the end, you find your workers hanging around the printers for jobs that may or may not come through. VA can die, but that won't make closed source junk any better. The alternatives to free software are less and less atractive.
be able to give up my MS habit completely, you have to agree that
economically it just doesn't make sense.
Huh? Ignoring the most enthusiastic 10% of
computer world makes sense? Did it ever occur
to you that honesty and integrity are part of the
reason so many people are switching over to free
software? I'm not using Debian so I can
distribute other people's work, I'm using it
so I can make fair use of the things I own.
I'll buy the $30 CD to play a game. Warez loosers, who don't mind putting backdoors on their machines won't spend a dime. Sheesh.
It was a sweet interface
and all the old folks wished it well
but you took that upgrade
and now you fell like hell.
The CLI you so loved, isnt there
It was bad for Bill Gates
and now its gone away.
It just goes to show,
you never can tell.
What technophobic hubris! It's almost too good to be true.
If all you ever think of are the bad uses of new tools, you will never develop new tools. This is technophobia, pure and simple. Every tool, right down to nuclear explosives (see project plowshears), has it's good uses.
It is a mistake to think that things will not be developed because you deny their positive uses. Someone, somewhere is working on everything. Even if you are the best, you are never the only.
This is another demonstration of M$ using that monopoly to embrace, extend and extinguish yet another area. The target is the web. They are distributing a crummy browser with lots of "extended" features that only their OSs users are privalidged to see. They are also putting that kind of code into their own web servers and turning them on by default so that those who use them must turn them off to avoid upsetting their customers. That they were willing to do this on their own site makes you think they will turn such a switch on for all IIS in the future. It's an old game, make everything non M$ a pain on an M$ OS. Their administrators, who already say ignorant things about other browsers, will have more work to do and harbor more hate about free or alternate software.
This also furthers SSSCA type legislation. The more hate they can generate, the less likely people are to really care when the time comes. "Why should we care about those dumb wierdos that use that perverted non M$ standards complient software?", they will ask. "Freedom? You are free to write anything you want on an M$ system, what's wrong with you?" Ahhhhh! The ignorance compounds itself.
Expect the price of these things to continue to fall as the 64 bit machines finally roll in. It's kind of hard to believe that we are still using 32 bit stuff when Alpha has been around at least six years. Oh well, cheap is cool.
The government is only a tool, though I'm sure they enjoy recieving the $500,000 per year a comercial radio liscense costs. Why should I bite into the hideous comercial music troll? Because it's a good example of high fees being used to artificially limit the use of a public resource. How else are they going to raise that kind of money and pay their staffs and buy loudspeakers, advert vans and all the rest of that ugly noise? How else can five publishing companies dominate the music industry? The rules have been bent to benifit a few companies at the public expense.
There really is plenty of bandwith to go around. Check out the 72 empty TV channels on an old tuner dial. Why is it that only a few broadcasters owned by GE, Westinghouse and Disney use it? Do you really think a free market dully regulated for the public interest would have all that redundant commercial noise, but mostly empty spectrum? How many reruns do you need to see before you go buy that soap? Great use, a productive use you say. Barf, I say.
The price of broadcasting and computing equipment has come down to the point that a member supported digital network is possible. What barriers really exist? Most US suburbanites can afford antena towers, directional broadcasting equipment and multiple computers. We've seen plenty of implimentations right here on Slashdot. Trolls, who wish to fill up such broadcasts with adverts could be taken down under a proper leagal framework and pull based networking. People can co-operate to help themselves, without paying absorbadent fees to useless and annoying third parties. The physical devices are cheap and getting cheaper.
Networking bliss seems right arount the corner, but then I hear from folks like you. If such a network does not emerge, it will only be because tellephony, publication and entertainment interests are able to control the airwaves for their own benefit. They do that through government regulation and soothing talk that comforts and leads silly cows to the milking stalls.
Or so some would have it. Is anyone else getting sick of fees to do anything marginally useful? The ariwaves are public property and should be used for the public good, not simply to raise revenue for private companies. Whatever "standards" are adopted, let's see to it that the air itself is free.
You know, that's right! In this case, however, the entertianment folks and M$ look like tin horn prawns next to some big boys who are tired of paying through the nose for IT services provided by desktop PCs. Think GE, Westinghouse, Coke, Archer Daniel, and other giants are going to let M$ tell them what backdoored buggy junk they have to run on their thousands of desktops? Not a snowballs chance in hell. Oh yeah, they will suck up all of M$'s punny one billion dollar advert campaign, then stuff them. The owners of CBS and ABC will figure out where their break even point is. As soon as they figure out that free software can not be held over their heads and that it will save them money, security and trouble, M$ will vanish.
Step back and think about this for a while. What exactly is the purpose of copyright law, and how is that purpose furfilled by these actions?
In traditional publishing, US copyright was inteded to promote publications by a temprorary franchise on books, articles and what not. These laws were not translated into non human readable forms such as piano player rolls.
Applications to mass distributed binary files does not make sense. AiboPet coppied a section or sections or the whole enchalada of a mass produced and mass distributed binary file. He's done a little work, but it only reveals what exists in thousands of places already. He's not reproducing Aibos, he has simply read one he owns and told the rest of us how it works. Anyone who wanted to clone Aibos could without any help from AiboPet, so the protection is non existent.
What Sony wants is an exclusive franchise to all things Aibo. They don't want anything made for Aibo that does not make money for them.
Bill Gates, you freaking looser, I OWN your BIOS.
I can't imagine developing on an M$ crippled box at all anymore. Win 3.1 and 95 version 1 were not so bad to work with. But things have been getting worse instead of better. Sure, some things worked and still do but broken printer shit is what ruins real world applications. Linux and BSD make that whole ass pain unneeded.
Free the folks outside development, if you can. Getting them off M$ would make everything so much more secure than any of this stupid lock down stuff. Regular users don't need root access but have much more power and convenience in their hands with normal *nix accounts.