I don't know if this shit came from Microsoft or not but one of the statements:
"Primary research results placed under the GPL are precluded from commercial use *TCP/IP example..."
I didn't realize that TCP/IP was GPL'd but the laughable part is that this suggests that we would all be better off if the TCP/IP protocol were proprietary. Can you imagine if Microsoft controlled this protocol?!
"They want money, moolah, cash, the greenbacks, dinero, Benjamins. And they want a lot of it." As opposed to Microsoft that only charges $250.00 + per incident?
"If you can figure out a (legal!) way of driving a car without buying it (maybe building your own?) and you can obtain fuel without buying it OTC (maybe looking at alcohol powered vehicles?) then you can drive without paying tax."
Hehe, well almost. You would still need to figure out a way to not have to license the vehicle.
The purposed law in Oregon is troubling. It would put a tax on the movement of vehicles within the State. I think it would make an interesting court challenge.
I also think that it would be disastrous for Oregon's economy. Any tax on transportation trickles every business sector. All goods must be moved and if moving them costs money that expense will find it's way to the consumer. That's the reason that oil prices can make a huge impact on our economy.
I wish I could say that you're flippin' wrong and write a nasty flame but the truth is that Linux is almost ready for the desktop. I feel that if the Linux community continues to push and improve we could have Linux ready in a few years.
However, when we say it's not ready for the desktop let's be clear about who are our target users. Are we talking about business or home use? Both have very different needs.
There are office packages for Linux that will do everything that a business needs and there are mail clients and web browsers and various financial packages both open source and proprietary that will do nicely.
No, I think that we are VERY close to being business desktop ready. It's the home user that I think will be harder to please. Mostly in the area of games. Linux has proven to be a vary capable gaming platform. Quake 3 is still very popular and has a native Linux port that has better frame rates than does the Windows version (See Tom's Hardware for benchmarks.) My point being that the lack of gaming support is not a technical issue but rather a financial issue. We are kind of in a catch 22. We need users (who are willing to pay for programs) to draw large software shops to write popular applications but we need large software shops to write popular applications to draw users who are willing to pay for applications.
I know that Linux has a ton of applications and a lot of them are very high quality. However without these application getting any publicity no one but us geeks know about them.
Microsoft is doing it's best to stop the spread of Linux and open source software but they will lose the battle eventually. With their enormous resources they may be dead and still twitching for a long, long time. If they were smart they would see the writing on the wall and adapt. But there are too many egos at stake and they are too entrench in the old style of control to do so. It would be better for them to bend like the reed instead to trying to stand like the oak. Oh well, it is for them to sort out.
Anyway, look for Linux to start taking the desktop within three to five years. Maybe not in the United States first but security issues will start to move other governments away from Redmond's OS and to open source. There is no other way that they can be sure that the software does not include backdoors mandated by the US for spying purposes. Any foreign leader who knows about the presidential jet that we sold to China knows that the US government will order companies to install spying devices. It would be foolish to believe that we would order these devices put on a jet but not order Microsoft to put spying abilities into the versions of their OS that gets sold out of country. (Or maybe even within the US also.)
Making it hard to create an email account isn't the point. They stop spam by using white lists. If I want to send you an email and I'm not on your white list my email does not get through. Instead the ISP automatically sends back a challenge that I must respond to once. If I pass the test then my name automatically gets put onto your white list. If I don't pass the test then my spam is held for a time and then dumped into the bit bucket.
Doesn't it seem like there should be an absolute limit on the amount of money that the Governments (State, Local and Federal) should be allowed to take from individuals?
Each Government should be able to set an amount of money that is required to provide the services for which they were formed. This is called a realistic budget.
It seems to me that the Government mission has become clouded. Maybe our officials need to sit down and define the scope of government in the context of our State and Federal constitutions. Just because the Constitution does not prohibit government from entering into a particular area does not mean that they are mandated to do so.
Why is it that every time a new technology surfaces that enables something to be measured, government feels the need to use it to extract more money from its citizens?
Taxing the use of our roads seems like a good idea except that whenever you tax an action that is a right you change that action from being a right to a privilege. For example: we have a right to free speech. If your local government made a law that required a permit to speak it would in effect be saying that you do not have a right to speech that speech is a privilege. Rights cannot be taken away without due process.
It has been successfully argued that driving a car is a privilege not a right even though one of our rights allows freedom to travel. The constitution obviously does not specify the method of travel so I guess that's deemed to mean that walking cannot be taxed. Personally I feel that it's very close to the constitutional line. But then what do I know.
Anyway to end this rant I would ask Oregon's Government to consider the question; Just because you may have the technology to use GPS to extract more money from your people, is it really the right thing to do?
"Being cracked isn't a unique experience, but it's not as common as the FUD-mongers would have us believe."
That would be your opinion. I watch my server logs and the number of attempted hacks are at an epidemic level. An unprotected, unpatched network is toast.
My Daughter uses a Windows OS. We are behind a NAT routing switch so I haven't been two concerned about exploits. However, I finally got around to installing virus protection software and sure enough she had two worms on her system!
I never would have known about it except for the anti-virus software.
You make a few good points but most of your rant does not. Sorry, but I call them as I see them.
In the US most of the people don't care if Linux is superior (and btw it is superior) to Windows. However, We (the geeks of the world) are not the only ones who care. The leaders of foreign countries like China, Denmark, India and others are passing pro-OSS laws because they clearly do care about finding the best overall solution to their needs.
Security is a BIG issue. I'm not talking about the plethora of viruses, worms and trojans that can be found for Microsoft platforms, although that is also an issue. I'm talking about the fear of deliberate planting of backdoors in Microsoft's products.
Remember that presidential aircraft that Boeing sold to China? The Boeing 767-300ER with all the trimmings? Well the trimmings included numerous spying devices.
It would be foolish for a foreign leader to believe that the US government would not insist that Microsoft provide ways to spy using Microsoft products sold overseas just as they insisted that Boeing include those spying devices in the 767-300ER. And remember we don't just spy on countries that we don't like. We spy on our allies too.
I think that as other countries wake up to this realization we will see mandatory open source software in foreign government use. Any leader who can't see the danger of closed source software in government use needs to wake up and smell the coffee; buy a vowel or something....
Well, I'm glad Microsoft based products are working for you. However, the point of the main story is that Linux is becoming very popular in other parts of the world.
It is my hope that if Linux becomes very popular that it will become a viable platform for proprietary products to be developed. One can only hope that the advancements in Linux that the article was talking about will allow this.
As far as Photoshop vs gimp goes, I have heard that gimp is as or nearly as powerful as Photoshop. I don't really know. I'm the only one out of my entire family that has no artistic ability. I'm kind of the black sheep of the family in that regard.:-)
I wouldn't be anti-Microsoft except that they continually piss me off by interfering with the growth of Linux and other non-Microsoft products. And what pisses me off the most is that they use their Monopoly power in illegal way to do so. I agree that products running on the Microsoft platform can be very powerful and if that's right for you then more power to you. It's just that I feel that Linux is the best platform for many reasons, some technical and some not.
Wireless networking is evolving. Although any encryption can be cracked if you have enough encrypted data to analyze the idea is to change the keys often enough that it won't happen. For example, say that it would take about 500MB of encrypted data in order for the key to be discovered. So after sending 300MB of data the key is automatically changed. That way there is never enough data that was encrypted under the same key to allow the key to be cracked.
Mono also implements parts of.NET that have NOT been submitted to ECMA and ISO standards. Those parts of Mono lack even the protection for IP infringement with re-implementation that ISO documentation licensing implies.
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA . Sun has also fully pened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP) . Even to the point of granting full open source re-implentations of J2EE such as JBoss...
JBoss received the green light last week, after Sun told ComputerWire that it would allow all of the APIs contained in J2EE 1.4 to be open sourced. Fleury had expressed concern that certain critical APIs, including Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.1, would be not be made available to open source organizations.
However, Java Community Process director Onno Kluyt said: "Sun's plan with 1.4 is that although it started before JCP 2.5, by the time it ships it will allow the creation of independent implementations. I don't think the APIs are that interesting, because the license that sits on top of J2EE will allow that [independent implementations]".
Microsoft want's to control.NET completely. If enough people write.NET code they wouldn't want Linux to benefit more than their own OS.
The bottom line is we can't trust Microsoft to do anything other than what they have always done. Use their monopoly power to crush anything that even has the slightest chance of competing.
McCain won't be as bad as Hollings. Hollings is the original "we must control your hardware" man and as such is one corporate flunky that I would love to see removed from politics.
The I think that many parts of the DMCA will be shot down in the Courts but Hollings is pushing for truly evil legislation that deals with us as consumers for the benefit of corporations. He seems to have forgotten that he is suppose to work for the good of the citizens not just the rich corporations.
They were claiming that JAVA would be the applications platform that would allow programmers to code once and complile on any OS Platform. Again, this is a far cry from saying that JAVA was going to kill Windows. You are compairing apples with oranges.
Most people ran Windows so they would run JAVA applications on their Windows OS platform.
To say that Microsoft was justified in doing what they did because JAVA would have reduced Microsoft's ability to use it's monopoly power to lock people into it's own OS is ludicrous.
Saying that Java will allow application independence is a far cry from saying that there was an attempt to kill Microsoft's OS. You are really stretching a lot with that statement. Let's not forget that most people already ran Microsoft's OS and therefore would run the Microsoft version of JAVA. Again, Microsoft's OS was in no danger.
The problem with bundling anything with an OS that has a monopoly presence is that it renders any competing product irrelevant. The average user will not surf out to SUN's web site, download and then install JAVA if Microsoft has bundled a competing product that gets installed automatically. This is also an abuse of Monopoly power and one that the courts need to revisit.
"Netscape and Sun banded together in an open attempt to make Windows obsolete. The entry point was the browser."
Even the browser runs on top of an OS. SUN and Netscape if allowed to proceed unfettered may have leveled the field for non-OS specific applications but Microsoft's OS was in no danger.
Slashdot Mirror
Ten years behind bars maybe??
I don't know if this shit came from Microsoft or not but one of the statements:
..."
"Primary research results placed under the GPL are precluded from commercial use *TCP/IP example
I didn't realize that TCP/IP was GPL'd but the laughable part is that this suggests that we would all be better off if the TCP/IP protocol were proprietary. Can you imagine if Microsoft controlled this protocol?!
"They want money, moolah, cash, the greenbacks, dinero, Benjamins. And they want a lot of it."
As opposed to Microsoft that only charges $250.00 + per incident?
"If you can figure out a (legal!) way of driving a car without buying it (maybe building your own?) and you can obtain fuel without buying it OTC (maybe looking at alcohol powered vehicles?) then you can drive without paying tax."
Hehe, well almost. You would still need to figure out a way to not have to license the vehicle.
The purposed law in Oregon is troubling. It would put a tax on the movement of vehicles within the State. I think it would make an interesting court challenge.
I also think that it would be disastrous for Oregon's economy. Any tax on transportation trickles every business sector. All goods must be moved and if moving them costs money that expense will find it's way to the consumer. That's the reason that oil prices can make a huge impact on our economy.
I wish I could say that you're flippin' wrong and write a nasty flame but the truth is that Linux is almost ready for the desktop. I feel that if the Linux community continues to push and improve we could have Linux ready in a few years.
However, when we say it's not ready for the desktop let's be clear about who are our target users. Are we talking about business or home use? Both have very different needs.
There are office packages for Linux that will do everything that a business needs and there are mail clients and web browsers and various financial packages both open source and proprietary that will do nicely.
No, I think that we are VERY close to being business desktop ready. It's the home user that I think will be harder to please. Mostly in the area of games. Linux has proven to be a vary capable gaming platform. Quake 3 is still very popular and has a native Linux port that has better frame rates than does the Windows version (See Tom's Hardware for benchmarks.) My point being that the lack of gaming support is not a technical issue but rather a financial issue. We are kind of in a catch 22. We need users (who are willing to pay for programs) to draw large software shops to write popular applications but we need large software shops to write popular applications to draw users who are willing to pay for applications.
I know that Linux has a ton of applications and a lot of them are very high quality. However without these application getting any publicity no one but us geeks know about them.
Microsoft is doing it's best to stop the spread of Linux and open source software but they will lose the battle eventually. With their enormous resources they may be dead and still twitching for a long, long time. If they were smart they would see the writing on the wall and adapt. But there are too many egos at stake and they are too entrench in the old style of control to do so. It would be better for them to bend like the reed instead to trying to stand like the oak. Oh well, it is for them to sort out.
Anyway, look for Linux to start taking the desktop within three to five years. Maybe not in the United States first but security issues will start to move other governments away from Redmond's OS and to open source. There is no other way that they can be sure that the software does not include backdoors mandated by the US for spying purposes. Any foreign leader who knows about the presidential jet that we sold to China knows that the US government will order companies to install spying devices. It would be foolish to believe that we would order these devices put on a jet but not order Microsoft to put spying abilities into the versions of their OS that gets sold out of country. (Or maybe even within the US also.)
"Sheesh, maybe Microsoft is good for some things..."
:-)
Yeah, they have pretty good fonts...
Making it hard to create an email account isn't the point. They stop spam by using white lists. If I want to send you an email and I'm not on your white list my email does not get through. Instead the ISP automatically sends back a challenge that I must respond to once. If I pass the test then my name automatically gets put onto your white list. If I don't pass the test then my spam is held for a time and then dumped into the bit bucket.
Doesn't it seem like there should be an absolute limit on the amount of money that the Governments (State, Local and Federal) should be allowed to take from individuals?
Each Government should be able to set an amount of money that is required to provide the services for which they were formed. This is called a realistic budget.
It seems to me that the Government mission has become clouded. Maybe our officials need to sit down and define the scope of government in the context of our State and Federal constitutions. Just because the Constitution does not prohibit government from entering into a particular area does not mean that they are mandated to do so.
Why is it that every time a new technology surfaces that enables something to be measured, government feels the need to use it to extract more money from its citizens?
Taxing the use of our roads seems like a good idea except that whenever you tax an action that is a right you change that action from being a right to a privilege. For example: we have a right to free speech. If your local government made a law that required a permit to speak it would in effect be saying that you do not have a right to speech that speech is a privilege. Rights cannot be taken away without due process.
It has been successfully argued that driving a car is a privilege not a right even though one of our rights allows freedom to travel. The constitution obviously does not specify the method of travel so I guess that's deemed to mean that walking cannot be taxed. Personally I feel that it's very close to the constitutional line. But then what do I know.
Anyway to end this rant I would ask Oregon's Government to consider the question; Just because you may have the technology to use GPS to extract more money from your people, is it really the right thing to do?
Just practicing...
"Being cracked isn't a unique experience, but it's not as common as the FUD-mongers would have us believe."
That would be your opinion. I watch my server logs and the number of attempted hacks are at an epidemic level. An unprotected, unpatched network is toast.
My Daughter uses a Windows OS. We are behind a NAT routing switch so I haven't been two concerned about exploits. However, I finally got around to installing virus protection software and sure enough she had two worms on her system!
I never would have known about it except for the anti-virus software.
You make a few good points but most of your rant does not. Sorry, but I call them as I see them.
In the US most of the people don't care if Linux is superior (and btw it is superior) to Windows. However, We (the geeks of the world) are not the only ones who care. The leaders of foreign countries like China, Denmark, India and others are passing pro-OSS laws because they clearly do care about finding the best overall solution to their needs.
Security is a BIG issue. I'm not talking about the plethora of viruses, worms and trojans that can be found for Microsoft platforms, although that is also an issue. I'm talking about the fear of deliberate planting of backdoors in Microsoft's products.
Remember that presidential aircraft that Boeing sold to China? The Boeing 767-300ER with all the trimmings? Well the trimmings included numerous spying devices.
It would be foolish for a foreign leader to believe that the US government would not insist that Microsoft provide ways to spy using Microsoft products sold overseas just as they insisted that Boeing include those spying devices in the 767-300ER. And remember we don't just spy on countries that we don't like. We spy on our allies too.
I think that as other countries wake up to this realization we will see mandatory open source software in foreign government use. Any leader who can't see the danger of closed source software in government use needs to wake up and smell the coffee; buy a vowel or something....
Well, I'm glad Microsoft based products are working for you. However, the point of the main story is that Linux is becoming very popular in other parts of the world.
:-)
It is my hope that if Linux becomes very popular that it will become a viable platform for proprietary products to be developed. One can only hope that the advancements in Linux that the article was talking about will allow this.
As far as Photoshop vs gimp goes, I have heard that gimp is as or nearly as powerful as Photoshop. I don't really know. I'm the only one out of my entire family that has no artistic ability. I'm kind of the black sheep of the family in that regard.
I wouldn't be anti-Microsoft except that they continually piss me off by interfering with the growth of Linux and other non-Microsoft products. And what pisses me off the most is that they use their Monopoly power in illegal way to do so. I agree that products running on the Microsoft platform can be very powerful and if that's right for you then more power to you. It's just that I feel that Linux is the best platform for many reasons, some technical and some not.
I don't agree that it means that spammers have won. It only means that they are enough of a pain in the ass to warrent holding a conference.
Let them attend. The only real solution is one that even if they are fully aware they still can't do anything about it.
Wireless networking is evolving. Although any encryption can be cracked if you have enough encrypted data to analyze the idea is to change the keys often enough that it won't happen. For example, say that it would take about 500MB of encrypted data in order for the key to be discovered. So after sending 300MB of data the key is automatically changed. That way there is never enough data that was encrypted under the same key to allow the key to be cracked.
Wireless will get there.
From the article:
.NET that have NOT been submitted to ECMA and ISO standards. Those parts of Mono lack even the protection for IP infringement with re-implementation that ISO documentation licensing implies.
...
Mono also implements parts of
In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA . Sun has also fully pened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP) . Even to the point of granting full open source re-implentations of J2EE such as JBoss
JBoss received the green light last week, after Sun told ComputerWire that it would allow all of the APIs contained in J2EE 1.4 to be open sourced. Fleury had expressed concern that certain critical APIs, including Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.1, would be not be made available to open source organizations.
However, Java Community Process director Onno Kluyt said: "Sun's plan with 1.4 is that although it started before JCP 2.5, by the time it ships it will allow the creation of independent implementations. I don't think the APIs are that interesting, because the license that sits on top of J2EE will allow that [independent implementations]".
Microsoft want's to control .NET completely. If enough people write .NET code they wouldn't want Linux to benefit more than their own OS.
The bottom line is we can't trust Microsoft to do anything other than what they have always done. Use their monopoly power to crush anything that even has the slightest chance of competing.
"This is a bad thing for opponents of the DMCA."
McCain won't be as bad as Hollings. Hollings is the original "we must control your hardware" man and as such is one corporate flunky that I would love to see removed from politics.
The I think that many parts of the DMCA will be shot down in the Courts but Hollings is pushing for truly evil legislation that deals with us as consumers for the benefit of corporations. He seems to have forgotten that he is suppose to work for the good of the citizens not just the rich corporations.
They need to put two of them on a small island along with Bill Gates.
"Okay Mr. Gates, you may switch one of them on... One is running Windows, the other Linux... Muhahahahaha...."
Let me elaborate.
They were claiming that JAVA would be the applications platform that would allow programmers to code once and complile on any OS Platform. Again, this is a far cry from saying that JAVA was going to kill Windows. You are compairing apples with oranges.
Most people ran Windows so they would run JAVA applications on their Windows OS platform.
To say that Microsoft was justified in doing what they did because JAVA would have reduced Microsoft's ability to use it's monopoly power to lock people into it's own OS is ludicrous.
"...THE platform'"
THE development platform for applications not THE OS platform.
Saying that Java will allow application independence is a far cry from saying that there was an attempt to kill Microsoft's OS. You are really stretching a lot with that statement. Let's not forget that most people already ran Microsoft's OS and therefore would run the Microsoft version of JAVA. Again, Microsoft's OS was in no danger.
The problem with bundling anything with an OS that has a monopoly presence is that it renders any competing product irrelevant. The average user will not surf out to SUN's web site, download and then install JAVA if Microsoft has bundled a competing product that gets installed automatically. This is also an abuse of Monopoly power and one that the courts need to revisit.
" Um, that contractual obligation was superceeded by a short-sighted settlement drafted by sun's lawyers bonehead."
I sense that you take this subject personally...
"Netscape and Sun banded together in an open attempt to make Windows obsolete. The entry point was the browser."
Even the browser runs on top of an OS. SUN and Netscape if allowed to proceed unfettered may have leveled the field for non-OS specific applications but Microsoft's OS was in no danger.