Lost $150 on a cellular phone rebate. Sent all the documents in immediately and EXACTLY as requested. Still waiting for my rebate after a year.
Think about it though: What incentive do they have to be honest and pay you after they have received all that money from you. And if they were REALLY interested in offering you that savings, they would do so on the spot.
Don't fall for the advertising. Rebates are almost always a rip-off.
Only means what THEY can trust. It will surely have better security, but it is more in their interest than yours. Think of it this way: These corporations (Micro$oft in particular) are NOT on your side. Their only objective is to figure out ways to keep you trapped in their grasp, and, by so doing, capitalize on your dependence.
I have a good idea where they are going with this whole "Trusted" Computing move. Things like open hardware standards and Free Software give you the freedom (MOST IMPORTANT WORD) to have excellent commodity products, as well as competition which acts in the best interest of the consumer by keeping manufacturers honest. The problem is that it diminishes the ability of a company like Micro$oft to control you. Their ONLY option would be to actually *compete* and *innovate*. Considering the incredible pace of Free Software development, they don't stand much of a chance to continue to reap the profits they have in the past. They know this VERY WELL.
So, what do they do instead? Come up with the idea of Trusted Computing. Convince the public (the government especially) that Free/Open Software is somehow less secure (nice fat lie); Convince the government that Free Software is for terrorists (easy in this paranoid, self-righteous era); Convince the government to outlaw Free implementations and require proprietary ones provided by yours truly, Macro$haft.
"He who has ears, let him hear". The encroachment of Big Brother is very real. Security for Big Brother; Paranoia for you; The Almighty Buck for them.
They can never win unless we are ignorant enough to allow their FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) propaganda to become law. Be careful what you are made to believe. And be VERY careful WHAT and WHO you vote and pay for.
The fact that I am swapping files does NOT mean I am infringing on your bloody copyright. I have the right to share MY own data with whodahellever I want, with or without your approval.
We really need to stand up for our rights as consumers and tell the RIAA to take a hike with their cavemanish license agreements. The cost of sharing data is rapidly approaching zero, yet these anuses still want to charge $17 a CD AND rid you of any rights to share it. Imagine the nerve! The world is so full of people willing to rid you of any rights or liberty you have if you are in any way naive, trusting, or complacent. Nothing really changes. Human greed is everlasting. The powerful will always seek to oppress and capitalize upon the weak and meek.
It's high time we rejected these ridiculously ridiculous license agreements.
People died for your freedom.
Don't just give it away.
The problem is that the music industry, which makes it's money through the distribution of music, is trying to capitalize on a process, the cost of which as a result of technology, the Internet, and digitization, is next to nothing.
It costs next to nothing to send an entire album to everyone in the world, yet they want to charge $18 per CD, and still limit your rights to distribution.
What nonsense.
The only people who I feel for are the artists, NOT the industry. The artists should be compensated fairly, but, due to the ease of distribution, can now only guarantee significant returns by public performances.
But this, in my opinion, is still fair enough.
The distribution of music, specifically, is cheap, and not worth the price and the ridiculous restraints that are placed on the consumer by the RIAA. The RIAA knows that the only way they can protect and get away with the ridiculous system they impose on us is to use the law. They are also well aware that any law that gives them the upper hand will violate the liberties of the consumer.
Fact is, they couldn't give a shit about the rights of the consumer. By their reasoning, to hell with consumer rights, fair use, and the free market. All that matters to them is $$$, the only object they worship, by hook or by crook, NOT the rights of some Joe Shmoe in Idaho to share his music with his friends.
But our liberty is something worth fighting to the end. It's time we fought the ridiculous restrictions placed upon us by distribution licenses today. And there are indeed legitimate uses of P2P services like Kazaa, but of course they don't give a shit. The resolve of the RIAA goes as far as seeking to violate our rights to privacy and freedom, and this is where they must be stopped.
I can't believe the USPTO can be so ignorant considering all the prior art. This patent thing is getting really bad and spectacularly stupid.
Moves like these are only detrimental to society and nothing else. Instead of promoting development, they only foster stagnation and work against the common man which is simply spectacularly stupid.
You can thank Micro$oft's selfishness and secrecy for that. They refuse to open the specification for NTFS even though it has to deal with your data. That's why a lot of people hang on to the old FAT/FAT32/VFAT or just use SAMBA (an amazingly ingenious hack, I might add). Any support for NTFS has to be reverse-engineered from scratch. Presently, it is possible to read from NTFS, but writing to it may be buggy due to the difficulty in decifering the protocols. One more reason to keep anything from Micro$oft at arms length, and to continue weaning oneself off proprietary implementations.
"What an arrogant attitude. The kernel developers need to be reminded that widespread acceptance of Linux might very well require the support of big commercial enterprises, not just hobbiests and open source enthusiasts. Few companies are going to make major investments in Linux if they have to deal with prima donna programmers who love fucking with them."
Arrogance?! On who's part really? It's not like the code is for some major application software - It's a friggin' device driver, for a device you bought from them. If they can't give you the simple source code to make your device work, they can take a long walk for all I care.
"The P4 has a minimum mispredict penalty of 19 clock cycles for code that's in the L1 cache--that's the minimum; the damage can be much worse, especially if the correct branch can't be found in the L1 cache. (In such a scenario, the penalty is upwards of 30 cycles). The G4e's 7-stage pipeline doesn't pay nearly as high of a price for mispredict as the P4, but it does take more of a hit for one than its 4-stage predecessor, the G4. The G4e has a minimum mispredict penalty of 6 clock cycles, as opposed to the G4's minimum penalty of only 4 cycles.
"I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers."
After studying a number of processors indepthly and doing a research project with the Alpha, I came to the realization that the Alpha engineers were truly the best in the world. (My next favorites were the highly-scalable SPARC by Sun, and the PowerPC, another very smart RISC processor by IBM, Motorola, and Apple.) I had also read a book about the pains the Alpha engineers went through to design a processor so far ahead of its time. For some reason, however, DEC couldn't stay afloat and the company exchanged hands a number of times, and, presummably, lost a lot of their engineers. Compaq inherits the company, and merges with HP. Funny thing is HP was already in bed with Intel and helped design the 64-bit Itanium. Now, even though Alpha had gone 64-bit since around 1995, it doesn't make sense for HP to compete with Intel using the Alpha, after all its efforts to help Intel create the Itanium and monopolize the 64-bit market.
When something like this happens, there is always guaranteed to be a fall guy. Before you know it, Alpha, the most outstanding processor in the world, is history.
"So people stop using IE, then another browser (say, opera) takes over as the dominant browser, so spy/adware starts to be targetted at opera users.
Do we then avoid opera?
The problem is that there are morons out there developing spy / ad / malware, not which browser someone happens to use."
Not really true. The design of Windows and IE allow for such malicious alteration. This type of compromise is a lot more difficult to achieve in any Unix environment. Mozilla, for example, can be configured so that the malicious program will not have the ability or permissions to execute whatever it wants. And in Unix, even if the user is horrendously stupid, it is still extremely difficult to bring down the system as that would require much more than even all the user's permissions, but also root access.
"My prediction is that within three years time, Microsoft will `give away' its operating system to preserve its revenue in the applications business. Would Microsoft give away Windows to sell Office?"
"... Kernel developers also want to have him banned from the LKML for constantly spamming it with off-topic political discussions..."
Just in case you haven't realized it yet, everything in this life that deals with humans and their activities is inherently political.
And if you doubt me, ask yourself why you actually "waste" your time posting to/. when you have other more interesting things to do.
I hate politics too, but it's just another fact of life that everyone has a motive, many of which are less than honourable, and those that care for what is right always have to fight to keep the world from going to hell.
Oh, and before I forget, RMS has contributed orders of magnitude more to society than most of you snot-nosed punks combined. None of you disrespectful whupper-snappers out there can start anything close to his Free Software movement, or come anywhere close to his productivity and work ethic, to speak less of even touching his character.
Flame away for all I care. Then take a long hike when your done.
""Venter says he plans to offer the service, with the goal of burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs. It will cost about $500,000 per person, says the entrepreneurial scientist who helped decode the human genome."
Even though it's you, you know they will copyright it.
And even though it's you, you know they will prevent you from copying and sharing it.
"User-Mode Linux provides you with a virtual machine that offers 'a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup."
Everything starts out somewhat justifiably, but when the laws are passed to give those in government that power, you see the true color of those people in power. Yes, there are potential advantages to such a system - all activities will then be monitored. But this is also a *VERY* risky thing to just sign off on.
The problem comes in when the government starts requiring that number for essential livelihood, and monitoring all activities pertaining to every person in every activity. That gives them too much power. Power corrupts. Trust me. Look at history. Someday, when they make laws that are unfair, or against the rights of the individual (and trust me again, there are many that ARE out to get you, and are lobbying the government heavily to do so), enforcing these laws will become trivial, and attempting to reject them will be life-threatening. It would be naive to think that there isn't a lot to protect or lose, a lot of liberty in jeopardy, when the most powerful forces are so desperate to push such legislation. And it would be naive to think that the government is always working in the interest of the common man, and always on your side. (This is probably the most important point - That government itself is frequently untrustworthy.)
Take it or leave it. The future itself is in jeopardy. Beware what you are complacent about, who you vote for, and what you sign off on. A word is enough for the wise.
This is not about giving the consumer freedom. It is about controlling all facets of a consumer's computing life.
In order to achieve the power and control (which leads to money) that Microsoft relentlessly pursues, they need the cooperation of hardware manufacturers. Otherwise, if features we did not desire were implemented, we would simply go to Linux. We would have a choice. Choice is good for the consumer, but that takes away their power. Your ability to go somewhere else takes away from their ability to control you and the world. But if the hardware itself is designed to run their software and conform to their plan, it would be extremely difficult for the consumer to have any choice. There aren't too many hardware manufacturers. Software is easy and cheap to design and share. Hardware fabrication plants are extremely complex and expensive to design and run.
After they have gotten the hardware manufacturers to go along with their plan, the next step would be to get the politicians to support their cause and draft laws that would require "trustworthy" computing. In a post-September 11 world, with the political and media hype about terrorism and security, that would be very easy to accomplish.
We cannot afford to be ignorant. This really is about choice, freedom, and ultimately, livelihood. These are the things at risk. What they want is the ability to control our lives for their ulterior motives.
I'm sorry to say this but many of the strategies employed by Microsoft remind me of the Nazi's.
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler
There is some truth to what you say but not exactly because you are never forced to apply for a patent. You willingly apply for the patent through which you, in turn, can derive royalties for a limited amount of time, while society also benefits because the technology is now publicly specified.
Sun decided to start charging for Star Office (which I don't understand since it doesn't seem to me like they have such a huge market share yet). Of all Linux distributors, Mandrake probably ranks on top of my list for features, liberty, advancement, stability, and overall beauty, and, over time, they have come to earn my trust and respect. With their financial difficulties lately (hey, face it, it's very difficult to make money off free, though with Free Software, money is less of a priority than liberty and advancement), and with Sun now charging for Star Office, Mandrake has been stuck between a rock and a hard place. So I can't blame them. I would rather they stick to the liberty they have stood for all along, than follow the flock and become more proprietary. If you want non-free, no problem whatsoever, pay for it. If you REALLY want proprietary and non-Free, no problem, buy into Redmond and get shafted by code no one can check. I guess the best option for Mandrake would be to offer Open Office freely, and charge for Star Office, something I suspect they are on their way to doing. Other alternatives (KOffice, Gnome Office, Abiword,...) should also be promoted and given more support. For our own part, the best thing we can do is to directly support (by donation, purchase, or code) the cause of companies like Mandrake.
So don't be hard on Mandrake. They are on our side.
Why is it that when Windows XP came out, all we heard from/.ers is: "Ugh, it's so candy-coated I can't stand it."
But when a KDE theme does it 6 months later it's: "Oooh pretty. It is going to be a bright, bright future."
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but come on people, make up your minds.
We just hate Micro$oft, that's all.
They do frequently make some good products (otherwise there would be no argument whatsoever) but we hate them so much (for good reason, mind you - their selfish, monopolistic, deceive everybody, rule-the-world, screw-the-competition, screw-the-customer mentality) that it blinds us to whatever little good that might sometimes come out of Redmond.
"apple is a hardware company. You can do whatever you want software wise as long as you buy the hardware."
That's partly true, but I won't say completely. Otherwise, Apple would have supported Linux on PowerPC many years ago. This, however, was not the case even though the community would develope the software freely. In the beginning, they supported LinuxPPC. Soon after, they withdrew support. Then again, maybe it was because they planned on coming up with MacOS X. But then again, that would only go to show that they do indeed have software interests.
Slashdot Mirror
Lost $150 on a cellular phone rebate. Sent all the documents in immediately and EXACTLY as requested. Still waiting for my rebate after a year.
Think about it though: What incentive do they have to be honest and pay you after they have received all that money from you. And if they were REALLY interested in offering you that savings, they would do so on the spot.
Don't fall for the advertising. Rebates are almost always a rip-off.
Only means what THEY can trust. It will surely have better security, but it is more in their interest than yours. Think of it this way: These corporations (Micro$oft in particular) are NOT on your side. Their only objective is to figure out ways to keep you trapped in their grasp, and, by so doing, capitalize on your dependence.
I have a good idea where they are going with this whole "Trusted" Computing move. Things like open hardware standards and Free Software give you the freedom (MOST IMPORTANT WORD) to have excellent commodity products, as well as competition which acts in the best interest of the consumer by keeping manufacturers honest. The problem is that it diminishes the ability of a company like Micro$oft to control you. Their ONLY option would be to actually *compete* and *innovate*. Considering the incredible pace of Free Software development, they don't stand much of a chance to continue to reap the profits they have in the past. They know this VERY WELL.
So, what do they do instead? Come up with the idea of Trusted Computing. Convince the public (the government especially) that Free/Open Software is somehow less secure (nice fat lie); Convince the government that Free Software is for terrorists (easy in this paranoid, self-righteous era); Convince the government to outlaw Free implementations and require proprietary ones provided by yours truly, Macro$haft.
"He who has ears, let him hear". The encroachment of Big Brother is very real. Security for Big Brother; Paranoia for you; The Almighty Buck for them.
They can never win unless we are ignorant enough to allow their FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) propaganda to become law. Be careful what you are made to believe. And be VERY careful WHAT and WHO you vote and pay for.
hateddamntruth.
The fact that I am swapping files does NOT mean I am infringing on your bloody copyright. I have the right to share MY own data with whodahellever I want, with or without your approval.
We really need to stand up for our rights as consumers and tell the RIAA to take a hike with their cavemanish license agreements. The cost of sharing data is rapidly approaching zero, yet these anuses still want to charge $17 a CD AND rid you of any rights to share it. Imagine the nerve! The world is so full of people willing to rid you of any rights or liberty you have if you are in any way naive, trusting, or complacent. Nothing really changes. Human greed is everlasting. The powerful will always seek to oppress and capitalize upon the weak and meek.
It's high time we rejected these ridiculously ridiculous license agreements.
People died for your freedom.
Don't just give it away.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
The problem is that the music industry, which makes it's money through the distribution of music, is trying to capitalize on a process, the cost of which as a result of technology, the Internet, and digitization, is next to nothing.
It costs next to nothing to send an entire album to everyone in the world, yet they want to charge $18 per CD, and still limit your rights to distribution.
What nonsense.
The only people who I feel for are the artists, NOT the industry. The artists should be compensated fairly, but, due to the ease of distribution, can now only guarantee significant returns by public performances.
But this, in my opinion, is still fair enough.
The distribution of music, specifically, is cheap, and not worth the price and the ridiculous restraints that are placed on the consumer by the RIAA. The RIAA knows that the only way they can protect and get away with the ridiculous system they impose on us is to use the law. They are also well aware that any law that gives them the upper hand will violate the liberties of the consumer.
Fact is, they couldn't give a shit about the rights of the consumer. By their reasoning, to hell with consumer rights, fair use, and the free market. All that matters to them is $$$, the only object they worship, by hook or by crook, NOT the rights of some Joe Shmoe in Idaho to share his music with his friends.
But our liberty is something worth fighting to the end. It's time we fought the ridiculous restrictions placed upon us by distribution licenses today. And there are indeed legitimate uses of P2P services like Kazaa, but of course they don't give a shit. The resolve of the RIAA goes as far as seeking to violate our rights to privacy and freedom, and this is where they must be stopped.
I can't believe the USPTO can be so ignorant considering all the prior art. This patent thing is getting really bad and spectacularly stupid.
Moves like these are only detrimental to society and nothing else. Instead of promoting development, they only foster stagnation and work against the common man which is simply spectacularly stupid.
Yeah, and you're only allowed to look at my house with one eye.
You can thank Micro$oft's selfishness and secrecy for that. They refuse to open the specification for NTFS even though it has to deal with your data. That's why a lot of people hang on to the old FAT/FAT32/VFAT or just use SAMBA (an amazingly ingenious hack, I might add). Any support for NTFS has to be reverse-engineered from scratch. Presently, it is possible to read from NTFS, but writing to it may be buggy due to the difficulty in decifering the protocols. One more reason to keep anything from Micro$oft at arms length, and to continue weaning oneself off proprietary implementations.
"What an arrogant attitude. The kernel developers need to be reminded that widespread acceptance of Linux might very well require the support of big commercial enterprises, not just hobbiests and open source enthusiasts. Few companies are going to make major investments in Linux if they have to deal with prima donna programmers who love fucking with them."
Arrogance?! On who's part really? It's not like the code is for some major application software - It's a friggin' device driver, for a device you bought from them. If they can't give you the simple source code to make your device work, they can take a long walk for all I care.
"The P4 has a minimum mispredict penalty of 19 clock cycles for code that's in the L1 cache--that's the minimum; the damage can be much worse, especially if the correct branch can't be found in the L1 cache. (In such a scenario, the penalty is upwards of 30 cycles). The G4e's 7-stage pipeline doesn't pay nearly as high of a price for mispredict as the P4, but it does take more of a hit for one than its 4-stage predecessor, the G4. The G4e has a minimum mispredict penalty of 6 clock cycles, as opposed to the G4's minimum penalty of only 4 cycles.
Thank you very much.
"I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers."
After studying a number of processors indepthly and doing a research project with the Alpha, I came to the realization that the Alpha engineers were truly the best in the world. (My next favorites were the highly-scalable SPARC by Sun, and the PowerPC, another very smart RISC processor by IBM, Motorola, and Apple.) I had also read a book about the pains the Alpha engineers went through to design a processor so far ahead of its time. For some reason, however, DEC couldn't stay afloat and the company exchanged hands a number of times, and, presummably, lost a lot of their engineers. Compaq inherits the company, and merges with HP. Funny thing is HP was already in bed with Intel and helped design the 64-bit Itanium. Now, even though Alpha had gone 64-bit since around 1995, it doesn't make sense for HP to compete with Intel using the Alpha, after all its efforts to help Intel create the Itanium and monopolize the 64-bit market.
When something like this happens, there is always guaranteed to be a fall guy. Before you know it, Alpha, the most outstanding processor in the world, is history.
"So people stop using IE, then another browser (say, opera) takes over as the dominant browser, so spy/adware starts to be targetted at opera users.
Do we then avoid opera?
The problem is that there are morons out there developing spy / ad / malware, not which browser someone happens to use."
Not really true. The design of Windows and IE allow for such malicious alteration. This type of compromise is a lot more difficult to achieve in any Unix environment. Mozilla, for example, can be configured so that the malicious program will not have the ability or permissions to execute whatever it wants. And in Unix, even if the user is horrendously stupid, it is still extremely difficult to bring down the system as that would require much more than even all the user's permissions, but also root access.
"My prediction is that within three years time, Microsoft will `give away' its operating system to preserve its revenue in the applications business. Would Microsoft give away Windows to sell Office?"
Dream on.
How the government seems much more interested in protecting the rights of corporations than those of the common people.
"... Kernel developers also want to have him banned from the LKML for constantly spamming it with off-topic political discussions ..."
/. when you have other more interesting things to do.
Just in case you haven't realized it yet, everything in this life that deals with humans and their activities is inherently political.
And if you doubt me, ask yourself why you actually "waste" your time posting to
I hate politics too, but it's just another fact of life that everyone has a motive, many of which are less than honourable, and those that care for what is right always have to fight to keep the world from going to hell.
Oh, and before I forget, RMS has contributed orders of magnitude more to society than most of you snot-nosed punks combined. None of you disrespectful whupper-snappers out there can start anything close to his Free Software movement, or come anywhere close to his productivity and work ethic, to speak less of even touching his character.
Flame away for all I care. Then take a long hike when your done.
""Venter says he plans to offer the service, with the goal of burning individual human's entire DNA sequences onto shiny compact discs. It will cost about $500,000 per person, says the entrepreneurial scientist who helped decode the human genome."
Even though it's you, you know they will copyright it.
And even though it's you, you know they will prevent you from copying and sharing it.
Bad what people do for money.
"User-Mode Linux provides you with a virtual machine that offers 'a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup."
Man! That's just some cool shit!
Everything starts out somewhat justifiably, but when the laws are passed to give those in government that power, you see the true color of those people in power. Yes, there are potential advantages to such a system - all activities will then be monitored. But this is also a *VERY* risky thing to just sign off on.
The problem comes in when the government starts requiring that number for essential livelihood, and monitoring all activities pertaining to every person in every activity. That gives them too much power. Power corrupts. Trust me. Look at history. Someday, when they make laws that are unfair, or against the rights of the individual (and trust me again, there are many that ARE out to get you, and are lobbying the government heavily to do so), enforcing these laws will become trivial, and attempting to reject them will be life-threatening. It would be naive to think that there isn't a lot to protect or lose, a lot of liberty in jeopardy, when the most powerful forces are so desperate to push such legislation. And it would be naive to think that the government is always working in the interest of the common man, and always on your side. (This is probably the most important point - That government itself is frequently untrustworthy.)
Take it or leave it. The future itself is in jeopardy. Beware what you are complacent about, who you vote for, and what you sign off on. A word is enough for the wise.
Do not be deceived.
This is not about giving the consumer freedom. It is about controlling all facets of a consumer's computing life.
In order to achieve the power and control (which leads to money) that Microsoft relentlessly pursues, they need the cooperation of hardware manufacturers. Otherwise, if features we did not desire were implemented, we would simply go to Linux. We would have a choice. Choice is good for the consumer, but that takes away their power. Your ability to go somewhere else takes away from their ability to control you and the world. But if the hardware itself is designed to run their software and conform to their plan, it would be extremely difficult for the consumer to have any choice. There aren't too many hardware manufacturers. Software is easy and cheap to design and share. Hardware fabrication plants are extremely complex and expensive to design and run.
After they have gotten the hardware manufacturers to go along with their plan, the next step would be to get the politicians to support their cause and draft laws that would require "trustworthy" computing. In a post-September 11 world, with the political and media hype about terrorism and security, that would be very easy to accomplish.
We cannot afford to be ignorant. This really is about choice, freedom, and ultimately, livelihood. These are the things at risk. What they want is the ability to control our lives for their ulterior motives.
I'm sorry to say this but many of the strategies employed by Microsoft remind me of the Nazi's.
"One World, One Web, One Program"
- Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer"
- Adolf Hitler
A word is enough for the wise.
I see why, in this day and age, I am still dialing in with a friggin' modem.
There is some truth to what you say but not exactly because you are never forced to apply for a patent. You willingly apply for the patent through which you, in turn, can derive royalties for a limited amount of time, while society also benefits because the technology is now publicly specified.
Sell me software that expires, and it will be the last time I buy from you.
Sun decided to start charging for Star Office (which I don't understand since it doesn't seem to me like they have such a huge market share yet). Of all Linux distributors, Mandrake probably ranks on top of my list for features, liberty, advancement, stability, and overall beauty, and, over time, they have come to earn my trust and respect. With their financial difficulties lately (hey, face it, it's very difficult to make money off free, though with Free Software, money is less of a priority than liberty and advancement), and with Sun now charging for Star Office, Mandrake has been stuck between a rock and a hard place. So I can't blame them. I would rather they stick to the liberty they have stood for all along, than follow the flock and become more proprietary. If you want non-free, no problem whatsoever, pay for it. If you REALLY want proprietary and non-Free, no problem, buy into Redmond and get shafted by code no one can check. I guess the best option for Mandrake would be to offer Open Office freely, and charge for Star Office, something I suspect they are on their way to doing. Other alternatives (KOffice, Gnome Office, Abiword, ...) should also be promoted and given more support. For our own part, the best thing we can do is to directly support (by donation, purchase, or code) the cause of companies like Mandrake.
So don't be hard on Mandrake. They are on our side.
Why is it that when Windows XP came out, all we heard from /.ers is: "Ugh, it's so candy-coated I can't stand it."
But when a KDE theme does it 6 months later it's: "Oooh pretty. It is going to be a bright, bright future."
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but come on people, make up your minds.
We just hate Micro$oft, that's all.
They do frequently make some good products (otherwise there would be no argument whatsoever) but we hate them so much (for good reason, mind you - their selfish, monopolistic, deceive everybody, rule-the-world, screw-the-competition, screw-the-customer mentality) that it blinds us to whatever little good that might sometimes come out of Redmond.
"apple is a hardware company. You can do whatever you want software wise as long as you buy the hardware."
That's partly true, but I won't say completely. Otherwise, Apple would have supported Linux on PowerPC many years ago. This, however, was not the case even though the community would develope the software freely. In the beginning, they supported LinuxPPC. Soon after, they withdrew support. Then again, maybe it was because they planned on coming up with MacOS X. But then again, that would only go to show that they do indeed have software interests.