"Unfortunately, what the leaders of the Western world are looking at is moving all material production to low-labor-cost countries and building their entire economies based on IP."
This is precisely my own view of the matter. The problem is that now that we have learned the low cost labour countries how to manufacture stuff they dont need our IP anymore. As they rise in development they will surpass us in the west and even if they would respect our IP they will just be ahead of us in a couple of years and will not need it in any way, shape or form.
Short sighted greed dismantled our own western economy and the idiots at the helm is trying to replace it with fictional goods like patents, copyrights and other fantasies. Sadly its Joe Bob westerner that will hurt and not the people running the show.
Much of todays science really sounds more like philosophy than hard earned science. I want logic and data supporting scientific work and not just some coct up crazy theories thats more about debating skills than really proving something.
Encryption dont help much. The snooping makes it possible to map your entire social network. Not just who you talk to but when and from where. If you use a mobile phone you can even be tracked in real time. While encryption can help protect the message it wont help protect much of your privacy. It really makes Stasi and KGB look like a bunch of amatuers.
The really sad part about this is that it do look like a foreign idea. Sweden can very well be doing this to please another country and their want for private communications. Like always they bend over and take it in the poop shute for uncle sam.
"The evidence gathered can (supposedly) not be used in regular criminal investigations for copyright infringement."
When the US put pressure on Sweden for ThePirateBay Swedish authorities happily broke multiple laws and smiled about it. I have no doubts that any information about petty things like small time copyright infringement will be handed over.
This has more to do with being able to help forieign surveilance than any domestic spying. When an ally calls for help sweden will use this to be able to bend over properly and hand over any domestic information about the targets living in sweden. Swedish domestic security has never been self-sustained but rather a help organization for ally interests like the US.
I dont particulary like OpenOffice since i have never liked how MS Office works. They both tend to be everything instead of doing one task and doing it good and flexible.
Personally id rather have it that spreadsheets, databases and presentations became uncoupled. Someone confused being able to copy data between formats to be able to edit a spreadsheet in a word document in a presentation that lies in a word document.
I dont think anybody is stupid enough to think that Yahoo would last that long after a Microsoft takeover. As soon as the assets (its users) was migrated to Windows Live or whatever brand is up for the day it would have been dismantled and chopped up to pieces. The only thing Microsoft wanted was a quick way to get some users to its online services since they cannot get anyone to come by themselves.
Its far better from Yahoos point to get together with Google in the long run. A good partnership could generate new revenues that they themselves cant get alone. For example they together have enough of the online sphere to use as a lever in phones, smartphones and UMPC's and get a real firm foothold in those.
Killing a company is not in any way in the shareholders best interest. The only interest it serves is those who dont hold them but merely buys and sells them on a daily basis. If companies should take that as their prime interest all a company needs to do is to fire all the staff and sell out all the assets to be successful. It would make China very happy but it wouldnt be fun to be an american for very long.
Its as platform independant as Windows applications is with Wine. That some lunatic tries in vain to make a plugin in Mono does not make it platform independant. The current implementation, Moonlight, do not work in its current alpha state and lags heavily behind Silverlight. Note that Moonlight will probably never be able to render silverlight content properly. The other bad thing for Moonlight is that it has a huge patent threat hanging over it so nobody in their right mind touches it with a ten foot pole.
Is Word platform independant because you can run it through Wine? Is MSN an open protocol because people have succeeded reverse engineering it?
I fail to see how virtualization can take substantial work away from any sane it department. From my own experiences it can add quite a bit of work you didnt have before. For in my work as an admin very little work has with the physical machines to do. Installing the OS takes no time at all theese days, its configuring the services that takes time. Managing SAN and a virtual enviroments takes quite some work and adds a fair bit of work you didnt have before. Virtualization is an answer if you have many small lightly loaded machines or want a test enviroment. For a heavily loaded server its just insane and a complete waste of resources. What use is a 10% saving in electricity when you loose 30% efficiency on the virtualization?
The virtualization fad will probably level out when enough people have tried it and seen what areas it fits into and not.
I think Microsoft got burnt after the faliure with developing Vista, the first try that they had to scrap and start over. This and their spaghetti codebase has made them very reluctant to do other than minor adjustments of the current codebase.
Windows 7 looks to be just Vista with some new icons and some bolted on userspace applications. A new theme^wservicepack is all we get.
In a sane society you should get a medal for standing up for principles. Since there is no monetary reward for doing right there needs to be some other incentive to do things that benefit the community as a whole.
Having a society that only rewards big bucks and regardless how they are made is counterproductive and will undoubtfully lead to it imploding on itself.
If you are thinking only in the short run, ie today you could just as well buy and rip Windows.
If you on the other hand care about competition, drivers, compability and Linux you should take on another approach.
Computers with Linux are cheaper to sell, the problem is that OEMs pay for Windows regardless if they ship Linux or windows. It has nothing to do with bundled products. If vendors find that Linux is a business opportunity they will tell Microsoft to stuff it. When you buy a computer with windows and replace it with Linux you are saying "I dont want Linux" to those OEM's.
Award thos who give you what you want and punish the ones who dont. There are things besides money that counts.
I do not believe in intellectual properties at all. From my point of view its just an artificial market that has no connection with real life at all.
I can find that it can be of some use with a very limited monopoly but if its not very short; like a couple of years, its doing more harm than good. Todays protection are so heavily slanted towards the IP owner. There has to be a balance for it to be beneficiary to the public because most new innovations and media builds on previous work. Just think about where Disney had been if they hadnt been able to rip off Grimm and all the other folklore? Where would Lucas and Star Wars be without Akira Kurosawa to rip blatantly from? Where would Microsoft/Apple/Linux stand had Xerox Parc patented their GUI? What if IBM had excerted patent and IP rights on the PC?
The world of today is full of people who have their predecessors to think for their success still they so desperately want to exclude others from doing the same in the future. IP is just a wet dream about replacing factories outsorced in endless greed and short sightedness with selling ideas and thoughts instead of actually doing something. Like a stock market of brains.
This is a slope, its not nearly finished yet and the tilt is the wrong way. Most evil governments are believed benevolent by their own people up until thay are already toast and the train has left the station years ago.
ISO has lost all meaning since its just a place to buy an approval stamp without really conforming to anything. I think the ISO will disappear and be replaced with another entity because a standards organisation nobody takes serious has lost all value both to the ones getting the standards and for those using them.
Its the guesture i think is important, not the money. The more people that see that someone thinks their work is worthwhile the better. As for what projects to donate to i cant say anything, follow your heart but dont forget those that you never think about but greatly benefits you. Im thinking of those that always just works and so good that you very rarely touch them or see them.
"Right, I wasn't going to say anything but it sounds like this guy has no idea how to manage SUSE or RedHat systems and blames his ignorance on the distro instead of himself."
I have very long experience with all the major distros and see myself as a pretty decent admin. I have rarely seen this kind of issues with RedHat until i have introduced other repos to get other packages. In Ubuntu/Debian i have had pages of repos without any problems.
"I mean if apt-get is what makes ubuntu better then he really has alot to learn about the systems he's managing."
Apt is what makes my life easier as an admin and saves me time. I have no education at all on Debian/Ubuntu but have taken several ones on the others.
"I hope he reads on RHN, Satellite, yum, YaSt and RPM if he's being paid as an expert."
I really do not understand how me reading up on those would make dependancy solving better. Closing your eyes and calling everybody an idiot do not solve this problem.
"I have little modern experience with SuSE but an RPM system using appropriate repositories should never need to be forced, period."
Well thats exactly my view on the matter. One of the stinkier messes i had to solve was when one upgraded package had been split into several smaller ones. Needless to say hilarity didnt ensue. I did try to solve it the right way but it was not possible in many cases because many times i found myself in moment 22 where i had no choice whatsoever. Files that a package didnt touch was flagged as owned by some other package etc. Not funny.
I manage SUSE, RedHat, Ubuntu and Windows server boxes at work and i can concur. Ubuntu is by far easier to manage and keep running. When i need something or want to test something out its just an apt-get away on Ubuntu while it can take many hours on the others. Package management is where Ubuntu (or debian to be true) really shines. That coupled with the enormous repositories with most packages known to man makes it a very handy tool for me. I tried to use SUSE for a terminal server but i had enormous problems with it. For every new package i introduced i had conflicts all over and had to resolve them by endless sessions with "--force".
Debian should be very proud of Ubuntu. It just works and the biggest part of that in my view is that it got a package management system that really shines above everybody else. If it works because of hard work or technical merits i don't know but i do know it saves me endless of hours in the end.
I think Ubuntu chose the right way when they start at the desktops and then go for the servers. Even my boss runs Ubuntu at home and at work. When he run it at home chances are much greater he wants me to use it at work for our servers. Novell/SUSE must be out of their mind when they drop the desktop and gives it away freely to Microsoft. Why go for the enterprise market where competition already are fierce when you can go for a desktop market and the small company market? You can never take a market top down, it has to start from the bottom.
If Ubuntu do a real push for servers with easier setup of services and more or less key ready solutions they will make a real dent in the Linux server market. All that is needed is some polishing on the configuration procedures of some key components like OpenLDAP, SAMBA, Cups and some Groupware.
I have had an enormous help when working with various Linux servers at work from my Gentoo experiences. Gentoo forces an insight into the inner workings of a Gnu/Linux system that is reusable on all the other distributions. I have to Gentoo installer to thank for my career even if i at the time thought it must have been written by a sadist.
"Who would choose a licence based on how much Microsoft dislikes it?"
Because the most likely entity that will smite you if you becomes successful with any open source project is Microsoft, thats why. The GPL is something they cant easily get around.
To put it the other way, would you rather choose a license that Microsoft likes, knowing that they would love nothing better than to take your code, thumb their nose and make it incompatible with all the work you just put into it, then sell it back to you for a hefty license?
Its not ok to abuse a monopoly but for the sake of Microsoft apologists its always nice to end the discussion about if MS has abused their monopoly or not by pointing out it has been convicted repeatedly for it. Kind of ends that part of any debate pretty good.
Steve Jobs would be even happier if you could point to that monopoly he doesnt know he has so he could start abusing it.
On one hand its bad if you are being monitored wherever you go on the net. Sadly thats taking place right now regardless of what you want by echelon and countless other snooping activities.
On the other hand freedom of speech should imply you can say almost whatever you want without fear of being prosecuted. The need for anonymity is more alarming than that people who run sites want to know you is who you say you are. If people are very worried to post on sites if people can find out who they are there are much bigger problems than anonymity to take care of. Anonymous sources are something else and should be protected just like with printed media.
I can see many benefits if people has to stand for their word on the net. Astroturfing would probably dissapear rather quickly and that alone would be worth it.
>>They aren't buying Yahoo to take them out of the picture. They're buying Yahoo to combine market share, technology, and resources so that they can compete with Google as one team.
I strongly doubt the whole team thing. Yahoo is the one who would loose the most out of this deal because they would just be cannonfodder to Microsoft. Im pretty sure Microsoft would not fail to screw Yahoo up by dotnetifying it and trying to take its users over to MSN. Microsoft axing MSN and replacing it with something built on open source and not their superior stuff?
My fealing is that Google helps Yahoo out to be nice, not just to keep Microsoft down. If i was an evil google id let Microsoft ruin Yahoo and then feast on the remains, getting plenty of good developers wanting a more sane working enviroment for cheap and a big stream of pissed of users.
Its also funny that Microsoft has been convicted in multiple courts for abusing their monopoly while many other companies that holds monopoly in their markets has not. The key here is abuse of a monopoly, not just that you have a monopoly. Add to that all their other shoddy activities like funding the whole SCO-idiocy, bribing their way into ISO, stacking panels, astroturfing and any borderline activity you can think of and yes, they are more evil than any other company in the tech sector i can think of. In my personal view Microsoft arent really evil but rather psychopatic. They have no moral, feelings, compassion or pride. Money is all that rules and how you get them is irrelevant, could just as well be drugs.
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"Unfortunately, what the leaders of the Western world are looking at is moving all material production to low-labor-cost countries and building their entire economies based on IP."
This is precisely my own view of the matter. The problem is that now that we have learned the low cost labour countries how to manufacture stuff they dont need our IP anymore. As they rise in development they will surpass us in the west and even if they would respect our IP they will just be ahead of us in a couple of years and will not need it in any way, shape or form.
Short sighted greed dismantled our own western economy and the idiots at the helm is trying to replace it with fictional goods like patents, copyrights and other fantasies. Sadly its Joe Bob westerner that will hurt and not the people running the show.
Much of todays science really sounds more like philosophy than hard earned science. I want logic and data supporting scientific work and not just some coct up crazy theories thats more about debating skills than really proving something.
Encryption dont help much. The snooping makes it possible to map your entire social network. Not just who you talk to but when and from where. If you use a mobile phone you can even be tracked in real time. While encryption can help protect the message it wont help protect much of your privacy. It really makes Stasi and KGB look like a bunch of amatuers.
The really sad part about this is that it do look like a foreign idea. Sweden can very well be doing this to please another country and their want for private communications. Like always they bend over and take it in the poop shute for uncle sam.
"The evidence gathered can (supposedly) not be used in regular criminal investigations for copyright infringement."
When the US put pressure on Sweden for ThePirateBay Swedish authorities happily broke multiple laws and smiled about it. I have no doubts that any information about petty things like small time copyright infringement will be handed over.
This has more to do with being able to help forieign surveilance than any domestic spying. When an ally calls for help sweden will use this to be able to bend over properly and hand over any domestic information about the targets living in sweden. Swedish domestic security has never been self-sustained but rather a help organization for ally interests like the US.
I dont particulary like OpenOffice since i have never liked how MS Office works. They both tend to be everything instead of doing one task and doing it good and flexible.
Personally id rather have it that spreadsheets, databases and presentations became uncoupled. Someone confused being able to copy data between formats to be able to edit a spreadsheet in a word document in a presentation that lies in a word document.
I dont think anybody is stupid enough to think that Yahoo would last that long after a Microsoft takeover. As soon as the assets (its users) was migrated to Windows Live or whatever brand is up for the day it would have been dismantled and chopped up to pieces. The only thing Microsoft wanted was a quick way to get some users to its online services since they cannot get anyone to come by themselves.
Its far better from Yahoos point to get together with Google in the long run. A good partnership could generate new revenues that they themselves cant get alone. For example they together have enough of the online sphere to use as a lever in phones, smartphones and UMPC's and get a real firm foothold in those.
Killing a company is not in any way in the shareholders best interest. The only interest it serves is those who dont hold them but merely buys and sells them on a daily basis. If companies should take that as their prime interest all a company needs to do is to fire all the staff and sell out all the assets to be successful. It would make China very happy but it wouldnt be fun to be an american for very long.
Its as platform independant as Windows applications is with Wine. That some lunatic tries in vain to make a plugin in Mono does not make it platform independant. The current implementation, Moonlight, do not work in its current alpha state and lags heavily behind Silverlight. Note that Moonlight will probably never be able to render silverlight content properly. The other bad thing for Moonlight is that it has a huge patent threat hanging over it so nobody in their right mind touches it with a ten foot pole.
Is Word platform independant because you can run it through Wine? Is MSN an open protocol because people have succeeded reverse engineering it?
I fail to see how virtualization can take substantial work away from any sane it department. From my own experiences it can add quite a bit of work you didnt have before. For in my work as an admin very little work has with the physical machines to do. Installing the OS takes no time at all theese days, its configuring the services that takes time. Managing SAN and a virtual enviroments takes quite some work and adds a fair bit of work you didnt have before. Virtualization is an answer if you have many small lightly loaded machines or want a test enviroment. For a heavily loaded server its just insane and a complete waste of resources. What use is a 10% saving in electricity when you loose 30% efficiency on the virtualization?
The virtualization fad will probably level out when enough people have tried it and seen what areas it fits into and not.
I think Microsoft got burnt after the faliure with developing Vista, the first try that they had to scrap and start over. This and their spaghetti codebase has made them very reluctant to do other than minor adjustments of the current codebase.
Windows 7 looks to be just Vista with some new icons and some bolted on userspace applications. A new theme^wservicepack is all we get.
In a sane society you should get a medal for standing up for principles. Since there is no monetary reward for doing right there needs to be some other incentive to do things that benefit the community as a whole.
Having a society that only rewards big bucks and regardless how they are made is counterproductive and will undoubtfully lead to it imploding on itself.
If you are thinking only in the short run, ie today you could just as well buy and rip Windows.
If you on the other hand care about competition, drivers, compability and Linux you should take on another approach.
Computers with Linux are cheaper to sell, the problem is that OEMs pay for Windows regardless if they ship Linux or windows. It has nothing to do with bundled products. If vendors find that Linux is a business opportunity they will tell Microsoft to stuff it. When you buy a computer with windows and replace it with Linux you are saying "I dont want Linux" to those OEM's.
Award thos who give you what you want and punish the ones who dont. There are things besides money that counts.
I do not believe in intellectual properties at all. From my point of view its just an artificial market that has no connection with real life at all.
I can find that it can be of some use with a very limited monopoly but if its not very short; like a couple of years, its doing more harm than good. Todays protection are so heavily slanted towards the IP owner. There has to be a balance for it to be beneficiary to the public because most new innovations and media builds on previous work. Just think about where Disney had been if they hadnt been able to rip off Grimm and all the other folklore? Where would Lucas and Star Wars be without Akira Kurosawa to rip blatantly from? Where would Microsoft/Apple/Linux stand had Xerox Parc patented their GUI? What if IBM had excerted patent and IP rights on the PC?
The world of today is full of people who have their predecessors to think for their success still they so desperately want to exclude others from doing the same in the future. IP is just a wet dream about replacing factories outsorced in endless greed and short sightedness with selling ideas and thoughts instead of actually doing something. Like a stock market of brains.
This is a slope, its not nearly finished yet and the tilt is the wrong way. Most evil governments are believed benevolent by their own people up until thay are already toast and the train has left the station years ago.
ISO has lost all meaning since its just a place to buy an approval stamp without really conforming to anything. I think the ISO will disappear and be replaced with another entity because a standards organisation nobody takes serious has lost all value both to the ones getting the standards and for those using them.
Its the guesture i think is important, not the money. The more people that see that someone thinks their work is worthwhile the better. As for what projects to donate to i cant say anything, follow your heart but dont forget those that you never think about but greatly benefits you. Im thinking of those that always just works and so good that you very rarely touch them or see them.
"Right, I wasn't going to say anything but it sounds like this guy has no idea how to manage SUSE or RedHat systems and blames his ignorance on the distro instead of himself."
I have very long experience with all the major distros and see myself as a pretty decent admin. I have rarely seen this kind of issues with RedHat until i have introduced other repos to get other packages. In Ubuntu/Debian i have had pages of repos without any problems.
"I mean if apt-get is what makes ubuntu better then he really has alot to learn about the systems he's managing."
Apt is what makes my life easier as an admin and saves me time. I have no education at all on Debian/Ubuntu but have taken several ones on the others.
"I hope he reads on RHN, Satellite, yum, YaSt and RPM if he's being paid as an expert."
I really do not understand how me reading up on those would make dependancy solving better. Closing your eyes and calling everybody an idiot do not solve this problem.
"I have little modern experience with SuSE but an RPM system using appropriate repositories should never need to be forced, period."
Well thats exactly my view on the matter. One of the stinkier messes i had to solve was when one upgraded package had been split into several smaller ones. Needless to say hilarity didnt ensue. I did try to solve it the right way but it was not possible in many cases because many times i found myself in moment 22 where i had no choice whatsoever. Files that a package didnt touch was flagged as owned by some other package etc. Not funny.
I manage SUSE, RedHat, Ubuntu and Windows server boxes at work and i can concur. Ubuntu is by far easier to manage and keep running. When i need something or want to test something out its just an apt-get away on Ubuntu while it can take many hours on the others. Package management is where Ubuntu (or debian to be true) really shines. That coupled with the enormous repositories with most packages known to man makes it a very handy tool for me. I tried to use SUSE for a terminal server but i had enormous problems with it. For every new package i introduced i had conflicts all over and had to resolve them by endless sessions with "--force".
Debian should be very proud of Ubuntu. It just works and the biggest part of that in my view is that it got a package management system that really shines above everybody else. If it works because of hard work or technical merits i don't know but i do know it saves me endless of hours in the end.
I think Ubuntu chose the right way when they start at the desktops and then go for the servers. Even my boss runs Ubuntu at home and at work. When he run it at home chances are much greater he wants me to use it at work for our servers. Novell/SUSE must be out of their mind when they drop the desktop and gives it away freely to Microsoft. Why go for the enterprise market where competition already are fierce when you can go for a desktop market and the small company market? You can never take a market top down, it has to start from the bottom.
If Ubuntu do a real push for servers with easier setup of services and more or less key ready solutions they will make a real dent in the Linux server market. All that is needed is some polishing on the configuration procedures of some key components like OpenLDAP, SAMBA, Cups and some Groupware.
I have had an enormous help when working with various Linux servers at work from my Gentoo experiences. Gentoo forces an insight into the inner workings of a Gnu/Linux system that is reusable on all the other distributions. I have to Gentoo installer to thank for my career even if i at the time thought it must have been written by a sadist.
"Who would choose a licence based on how much Microsoft dislikes it?"
Because the most likely entity that will smite you if you becomes successful with any open source project is Microsoft, thats why. The GPL is something they cant easily get around.
To put it the other way, would you rather choose a license that Microsoft likes, knowing that they would love nothing better than to take your code, thumb their nose and make it incompatible with all the work you just put into it, then sell it back to you for a hefty license?
Its not ok to abuse a monopoly but for the sake of Microsoft apologists its always nice to end the discussion about if MS has abused their monopoly or not by pointing out it has been convicted repeatedly for it. Kind of ends that part of any debate pretty good.
Steve Jobs would be even happier if you could point to that monopoly he doesnt know he has so he could start abusing it.
On one hand its bad if you are being monitored wherever you go on the net. Sadly thats taking place right now regardless of what you want by echelon and countless other snooping activities.
On the other hand freedom of speech should imply you can say almost whatever you want without fear of being prosecuted. The need for anonymity is more alarming than that people who run sites want to know you is who you say you are. If people are very worried to post on sites if people can find out who they are there are much bigger problems than anonymity to take care of. Anonymous sources are something else and should be protected just like with printed media.
I can see many benefits if people has to stand for their word on the net. Astroturfing would probably dissapear rather quickly and that alone would be worth it.
>>They aren't buying Yahoo to take them out of the picture. They're buying Yahoo to combine market share, technology, and resources so that they can compete with Google as one team.
I strongly doubt the whole team thing. Yahoo is the one who would loose the most out of this deal because they would just be cannonfodder to Microsoft. Im pretty sure Microsoft would not fail to screw Yahoo up by dotnetifying it and trying to take its users over to MSN. Microsoft axing MSN and replacing it with something built on open source and not their superior stuff?
My fealing is that Google helps Yahoo out to be nice, not just to keep Microsoft down. If i was an evil google id let Microsoft ruin Yahoo and then feast on the remains, getting plenty of good developers wanting a more sane working enviroment for cheap and a big stream of pissed of users.
Its also funny that Microsoft has been convicted in multiple courts for abusing their monopoly while many other companies that holds monopoly in their markets has not. The key here is abuse of a monopoly, not just that you have a monopoly. Add to that all their other shoddy activities like funding the whole SCO-idiocy, bribing their way into ISO, stacking panels, astroturfing and any borderline activity you can think of and yes, they are more evil than any other company in the tech sector i can think of. In my personal view Microsoft arent really evil but rather psychopatic. They have no moral, feelings, compassion or pride. Money is all that rules and how you get them is irrelevant, could just as well be drugs.