The original Civ was the best copy protection I've ever seen. As a n00b to the game there would be no way to know what given technology advancements could be the two prerequistes for a more advanced tech, but a seasoned player can answer the questions without any thought needed - it would not even slow you down. You could sort of fudge a guess though if torn between 2 choices, but even that was educational in a way - how many teenagers can appreciate that a solid grounding in mathematics is neccessary for an understanding of physics ; a study itself integral to the development of the steam engine, atomic theory, and rocketry in the distant future.. I love that game.
Another favorite copy-protection was the Espruar/Dethek rune codewheel things that were in the Pools of Radiance RPG and sequels. Kind of cool in itself, the dwarven runes were roughly equivalent to their namesake in the Tolkien world, and also those used in the massive Ultima franchise. To this day I can still read and write those darn things.
Copy protection thats educational and thought provoking? I wouldnt mind seeing more of it rather than the viruses and trojans that we have today.
Its a very Zen attitude that the journey is more important than the destination, and its a philosophy I personally agree with. If I logged onto WoW, I would likely spend weeks just exploring, chatting, discovering quirks of the UI and ways to use it, compiling notes and journals, etc rather than any power-levelling or 'grinding'.
But other people have other motivations besides fun. Sure the entertainment aspect may be significant to you or me, but is it 'sad' that a guy in Mozambique or Bolivia can support his family and put his kids through school by gold-farming? Or conversely, that someone with the dollars to spare can shortcut a process that many others here have described as boring, pointless drudgery?
Where there exists a need or vacuum of some kind, then its inevitable that something will appear to fill it.
Perhaps someone here can explain why $millions or $billions that go missing or magically appear in corporate bank accounts are not worthy of any attention by CEOs or law enforcement, but Joe Bloggs paying his amex off is a suspicious terrorist-type transaction.
The fact that $billions can still go missing when groups like Bechtel, Enron, Halliburton, etc are involved is pretty damning proof that the government is in bed with the big-league criminals.
As near as I can tell its a matter of simple economics. If it takes you 3 solid weeks of real time to acquire the ingame currency/items that you could spend $20 on and get instantly, then its a no brainer. Your time is worth more to you per hour than that. Perhaps you are too ignorant to have come to that realisation on your own, or you are utterly unskilled and talentless and your time is worthless.. theres really no valid real-world contrary position to take.
When at work in an affluent developed nation you can earn $ orders of magnitude faster working in the real world compared to how long it takes to earn the equivalent $ ( with currency conversion aka gold farming/selling deals in place ) in game. Hence it makes sense to maximise your time spent in the real world, by taking 'shortcuts' while online. In contrast, if you are in a relatively impoverished nation, you can likely earn real $ quicker in game than out.
Theres no mystery, no scandal, no 'just plain stupid'. Put together millions of people from all over the world doing whats best for them given their current situation, and its inevitable that the above situtation will arise, given the current inequality between economies.
If you want to debate EULAs, the 'spirit of the game', morality or whatever else, fine. Just realise that these subjects are irrelevant and perpendicular to the goal of optimising your playing style to crank out the maximum benefit ( in time or in $, they are essentially interchangable ) out of the game.
it is the job of the D.A. to file charges whenever it appears that the law has been broken
I guess the DA is failing in his job by not filing changes against Diebold,its partners and executives then. Why is he all over the little guy but conspicious in ignoring one of the seemingly greatest crimes to ever be committed inside the United States?
Thats the reason people are upset - the perception that the entire political and legal framework has been compromised and is now controlled wholly by criminals. Thats the reason he went to the media rather than 'the authorities', who are part of the problem.
I cant fault anything he did, it is the civic duty of citizens to perform exactly as he has done were they in the same position. The only mistake he made was not contributing the documents in an anonymous fashion.
By the force of every anti-collusion, anti-monopoly, and RICO-style law that exists, the MPAA, RIAA and related companies have been engaged in crimes against the people and the state for decades. This is just the latest piece of evidence in a long lineup of such pieces.
The very existence of the DMCA, UCITA, copy protection, devices that spy on and attack the users of said devices, etc are all examples of what happens when criminals are given free reign to subvert the free market, bribe lawmakers, and institute a technological form of serfdom in which traditional property ownership and the associated rights of said ownership are essentally outlawed.
If you were to look at the number of crimes committed against every citizen over the last 10 years, the number of criminal charges would probably number in the thousands or tens of thousands. Figure a fine of several thousand dollars per victim per offense, and you are looking at total damages in the order of $1x10^14 ( aka hundreds of trillions of dollars in common parlance ), if not much higher. Thats one hell of a class action, no?
The problem is that erring on the side of caution does not exempt them from laws against theft. The UK Trading Standards officer involved committed a felony, and should be prosecuted for this crime. Ignorance of the law, as they say, is neither an excuse nor a defense.
People run Linux on IBM, Dell, Toshiba, HP and Sun-branded x86 hardware, why would you be surprised that an Apple branded x86 will also be running Linux? It isnt really a 'Mac' in the traditional sense as its not constrained to use PPC-compatible OSes any more, the world of x86 windows, linux, bsd and other OSes are now available.
A better question might be how long can a proprietary x86 unix survive with the likes of Linux around. Seen how well SCO are doing these days?
They are a private body comprised of record companies. They have no granted powers beyond that of any other private entity ( less than citizens because they cant vote ), and in fact no right to even exist at all.
So you have greater authority than the RIAA. I suggest you exercise it and tell them how you feel.
The problem is that they have a collection of bribed lawmakers, senators, congressman, judges and other types that they use to get their way. "Their way" of course being the enslavement of the population ( demanding royalties and fees for everything you do ) and the outlawing of property rights ( do you truly own your DVD player when you can be jailed for its modification? ). The relationship is like the way the feudal barons enslave the serfs that labor on property they are forbidden to own for their whole lives just to enrich a wealthy few.
America, the land founded by radical liberals, the laws of which enshrine radical liberal concepts like freedom of speech, religion and political affiliation, equality among the races and genders, and other concepts that were almost unheard of in an era where monarchs, feudal dynasties and corrupt theocracies were the governmental standard worldwide.
And now these people who embody everything it means to be American are being attacked and stalked by brownshirted goose-stepping nutjobs who themselves are the spitting image of everything America has historically defied and opposed.
Free-Speech zones anyone? Being a member of the 'wrong' political party is an arrestable offense now judging by the past actions of police and the political forces who back them. This from the very same government who pour scorn upon the constition as just a 'goddamned piece of paper'. The America of 200 years ago would declare war against the modern America in a heartbeat, and judge the current administration as traitors and enemies of the state.
It was posted on slashdot and other tech news site and was covered in the main stream media as well, if I recall correctly there was a series of articles and the subject was debated fairly hotly on both sides of the pond. As you might well imagine would be the case if China for example demanded that it be given the ability to self-destruct all US military assets, in order to stop said military systems from being used in future terrorist attacks against them.
So what authority does any private group have to wake up one morning and decide to go steal hundreds of pounds from thousands of people? Isnt that basically criminal?
Lets say DJs make up a license that says record companies must pay them thousands of pounds per year, a 'digital music production and transfer license' or some such nonsense. Are they able to enforce this too?
Another problem being overlooked is that no legacy Microsoft software is legally available. How do you buy a new copy of Win95 OSR2 or WinNT4 workstation? You cant. And those are the only MS oses that have any reasonable chance of running well - Win3.x is not worth touching, for 386s / 286s you are better off sticking with FreeDOS with an addon tcpip stack if you absolutely have to run a Microsoft work-alike product.
In contrast, you can download and use ANY version of RedHat Linux, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD or any other Free OS that you care to. Want to try RedHat 2.1 with its 1.2.x kernel version on a 386-SX 25? Go ahead, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. The latest gcc series will probably take several months to bootstrap a usable system if you like compiling from source ( unless you have a spare modern box you can farm out the compiling to via distcc ), but there is no ( other ) reason to not use any modern source-based linux distribution either. Prune unneccessary bulk out of the latest 2.6 kernel and it may even run better than a kernel the same age as the hardware.
Ironic that software that looks increasingly like a legacy OS is unable to run on legacy hardware.
By SCO asking that copyright be transfered to themselves from Novell, they have implicitly admitted that they DO NOT currently hold copyright, and probably never did. Even though the case was 'Novell infringing opon our copyright' from the beginning.
Does this mean that SCO can be charged with perjury for lying to the court in their original claim, since now we have them admitting that their claims were false?
It also seems to me that this admission by SCO means the whole court case is irrelevant and and can be thrown out. I would like to see Novell sue SCO for breach of copyright as a followup ( since its now established that Novell holds the copyright trumps as it were ), preventing SCO from doing business, distributing its products, etc in exactly the same way that SCO tried to do to Novell and IBM.
That bit of poetic justice would be the end of SCO as we know it.
Bob Metcalfe has been posting anti-Linux articles that are dutifully reported here on/. for at least the last 7 years - witness this article from 1999.
Unfortunately for Bob, his theories are all still garbage, his trademark style of writing presents no real facts or intelligent commentary, but is essentially a very trollish means of gaining attention.
So you invented a networking protocol way back when, good for you, have a cookie! In the meantime, quit your whining and leave those who are the new face of technical innovation and cutting edge design to do their thing in peace. I mean, 'Open sores' ? I would be saddened to hear that cutting witicism from a five year old. Grow up Bob.
Any DVD drive which has a 'can only switch x times before the region is permanent and cannot be changed anymore' operation is defective. They are designed this way quite deliberately - made this way to frustrate consumers of DVD disks, forcing them to use specific suppliers ( who pay the required bribes aka 'licensing costs' to the DVD and movie cartels ) who sell them with large and uncompetitive price markups. You are unable to shop around for the best price/deals in the global market, as you can with essentially any other good or service. Its essentially criminals colluding together to remove competition and screw you over for money. This type of market manipulation and collusion is illegal in countries that have strong consumer-protection and antitrust laws in place.
Your drive can likely be repaired such that there are no restrictions on region. This is done with RPC1 firmware, it removes all switching retrictions, region restriction, and lets you play disks from any region, as well as region-less disks.
The Firmware Page probably can help repair your DVD unit and restore its full functionality.
On my side I still manage to switch a number of small companies ( 10 users) to Linux desktops on a fairly regular basis without much trouble. They are much more flexible than the large ones and understand the benefits much faster. They still need Windows for accounting though. Haven't found a way around that (and before someone suggests it, Wine isn't a way around that, neither is using a native but uncertified package).
The best way I have found to get around the hurdle of business software that needs windows ( whether a local package or an abomination written using ActiveX that needs IE ) is to use a single windows server with Citrix to serve the desktop / apps out to Linux/unix desktops via their native ICA clients. Yes, it involves paying the microsoft tax, installing non-Free ( as in speech, though free in the beer sense ) software on linux/unix systems ( ICA client ), and gives a more complex environment to support ( metaframe system resouces, licensing, regular windows crashing, viruses & security holes, etc ) but its the best compromise I've found.
From the users point of view they dont even need to know anything about citrix or windows - they launch the software by the desktop icon, which transparently establishes a citrix session, launches the app on the windows server, and directs its display to the local system.
That way the business can still move forward with the goal of replacing every other component with Free Software despite having the legacy windows apps to contend with. Once your linux environment has been in place and stable for some time, there should be a higher chance you can persuade the company to drop the last of the proprietary windows software and move to either a linux version of the same product ( likely to exist at some point even though it may not do so yet ), or a 100% Free Software equivalent with a data migration plan.
How the hell do we consider the Constitution a good thing, when it allows a person like Bush to be elected into power in the first place?
It didnt though, thats the thing. His 'election' was neither democratic nor constitutional. It was in every sense of the term a coup d'état, where the correct and legal processes were ignored and the 'president' siezed power by some criminal means. Many coups have the military taking control, arresting and executing dissidents, and appointing their own representive as President ( as was the case with Pakistan in October 1999 ), Bush though was granted the position via the Supreme Court who suspended the democratic electoral process, and 'awarded' the office of president to him.
The correct course of action to take in these circumstances were for Bush, his party members, and the Supremes to be placed under arrest on charges of High Treason ; obviously the law was not followed and hence America has suffered under a defacto dictatorship since that date.
If you still dont believe America to be a dictatorship then ask yourself why Bush is seemingly able to commit treasonous crimes against his countrymen with impunity, when previous democratically elected presidents would have been imprisoned for doing the merest fraction of what Bush has done.
And revise your understanding of what constitutes a dictatorship.
As another poster has said, Microsoft are bound by the restrictions on trademarking numbers, just as Intel are. On the other hand, MS are notorious for making legal threats with no factual legal basis against people who they believe can be intimidated into acquiescence, so I dare say they will try something underhanded if the Free60 project is successful in acheiving their goals of getting an open platform environment working on the Xbox 360.
Blizzard vs Freecraft is an utterly irrelevant example. Freecraft was independantly developed, and did not incorporate any Blizzard code or artwork, so was legally 100% pure. Nor was it infringing on a trademark basis, Blizzard have no hope in hell of claiming ownership over the word 'craft' and any or all permutations that it might morph into. That Blizzard won this case is testiment to the corruptability of courts and the legal process, and the criminality of Blizzard themselves. This decision was completely without precedent, and we have never seen the likes since that I'm aware of. Touch wood..
'Free' and 'Open' when used in the context that you are complaining about describes products that are both Free and/or Open. Is it so unreasonable or offensive that a product name tries to impart some indication of its nature, it being a libre piece of software?
Sony were knowingly distributing viruses and code in violation of its license - a practice known as copyright infringement by most people.
Both of these acts are criminal, and will result in a police raid, arrests, seizures of equipment, and so on if the group involved is a person. Corporations are apparently too sacred and important to be hindered by such laws.
But why not take a cue from the RIAA - arguably the most visible and outspoken copyright police in existance. The next time you get harrassed by law enforcement ( or the RIAA themselves ) for infringing copyright simply say that you have done nothing wrong. The RIAA says the copyright infringment of Sony is 'nothing wrong', so it must be true!
Thats a pretty pathetic comparison. Would you expect Mr & Mrs Joe Average to download a bunch of Visual Basic project files, fire up Visual Studio, compile and install the thing, _then_ run them? Is that user-friendly? Even ignoring the costs of licenses for the above, its an insanely difficult process compared to./configure'ing and make installing.
Most distributions these days have a one-command installer - 'urpmi openoffice', 'emerge mozilla-thunderbird', 'apt-get mplayer' and the like. All dependancies magically taken care of. No end-user effort needed. And one command to uninstall and rollback all changes. And one command to perform an update of software already installed. How much do you think that process can be improved?
And tell me, how the hell does that compare to scouring the web for the distributors page, finding the install package, downloading them ( from a single website which may be down or overloaded, not hundreds of mirrored servers around the world like Linux/BSD ), double clicking them, crossing your fingers and hoping the install doesnt kill a registry setting, clobber some DLL, come with spyware, viruses, rootkits or any other malware, etc?
Windows looks positively archaic and primitive compared to the state-of-the-art software install + distribution that Linux now offers.
Patching and support for OpenBSD installs isnt a process thats discouraging, or even time consuming. For the 6 month window during which OpenBSD 3.7 was the most recent stable release, there were just 5 patches released! Errata list for OpenBSD 3.7.
Only one of these was a kernel patch, so even if you are patching the system religiously ( as all security-aware admins should be ), only one reboot was needed in 6 months. Which wouldnt even cause an outage if you are using OpenBSD + CARP + pfsync. Enterprise-grade features in a free OS!
They dont need to support MacOS! Or Linux, AIX, Irix, NetBSD/68k, OpenBSD/Sparc64, or any other Unix/Arch combination for that matter. Its all open source, and a 'mac port' is merely a compile away now that Apple have gotten with the program and joined the inexorable march towards a unix & free software world.
If you're complaining that they wont support a one-platform proprietry GUI toolkit ( as opposed to X11 ), then thats too bad. You have the choice of an X11 interface ( which is more than sufficient for essentially all other *nix ), or you have the choice of expanding on the openoffice code via an API translator like Wine, or coding a purely native version if thats what you really want.
Developing for a closed and platform-limited API is contrary to the whole existance of the OpenOffice suite. And for a faster, less-bloated office environment koffice/abiword/gnumeric are killers - I use these to create and OOo to validate layout, pagination, perform document conversion, etc once done.
Slashdot Mirror
The original Civ was the best copy protection I've ever seen. As a n00b to the game there would be no way to know what given technology advancements could be the two prerequistes for a more advanced tech, but a seasoned player can answer the questions without any thought needed - it would not even slow you down. You could sort of fudge a guess though if torn between 2 choices, but even that was educational in a way - how many teenagers can appreciate that a solid grounding in mathematics is neccessary for an understanding of physics ; a study itself integral to the development of the steam engine, atomic theory, and rocketry in the distant future.. I love that game.
Another favorite copy-protection was the Espruar/Dethek rune codewheel things that were in the Pools of Radiance RPG and sequels. Kind of cool in itself, the dwarven runes were roughly equivalent to their namesake in the Tolkien world, and also those used in the massive Ultima franchise. To this day I can still read and write those darn things.
Copy protection thats educational and thought provoking? I wouldnt mind seeing more of it rather than the viruses and trojans that we have today.
Its a very Zen attitude that the journey is more important than the destination, and its a philosophy I personally agree with. If I logged onto WoW, I would likely spend weeks just exploring, chatting, discovering quirks of the UI and ways to use it, compiling notes and journals, etc rather than any power-levelling or 'grinding'.
But other people have other motivations besides fun. Sure the entertainment aspect may be significant to you or me, but is it 'sad' that a guy in Mozambique or Bolivia can support his family and put his kids through school by gold-farming? Or conversely, that someone with the dollars to spare can shortcut a process that many others here have described as boring, pointless drudgery?
Where there exists a need or vacuum of some kind, then its inevitable that something will appear to fill it.
Perhaps someone here can explain why $millions or $billions that go missing or magically appear in corporate bank accounts are not worthy of any attention by CEOs or law enforcement, but Joe Bloggs paying his amex off is a suspicious terrorist-type transaction.
The fact that $billions can still go missing when groups like Bechtel, Enron, Halliburton, etc are involved is pretty damning proof that the government is in bed with the big-league criminals.
As near as I can tell its a matter of simple economics. If it takes you 3 solid weeks of real time to acquire the ingame currency/items that you could spend $20 on and get instantly, then its a no brainer. Your time is worth more to you per hour than that. Perhaps you are too ignorant to have come to that realisation on your own, or you are utterly unskilled and talentless and your time is worthless.. theres really no valid real-world contrary position to take.
When at work in an affluent developed nation you can earn $ orders of magnitude faster working in the real world compared to how long it takes to earn the equivalent $ ( with currency conversion aka gold farming/selling deals in place ) in game. Hence it makes sense to maximise your time spent in the real world, by taking 'shortcuts' while online. In contrast, if you are in a relatively impoverished nation, you can likely earn real $ quicker in game than out.
Theres no mystery, no scandal, no 'just plain stupid'. Put together millions of people from all over the world doing whats best for them given their current situation, and its inevitable that the above situtation will arise, given the current inequality between economies.
If you want to debate EULAs, the 'spirit of the game', morality or whatever else, fine. Just realise that these subjects are irrelevant and perpendicular to the goal of optimising your playing style to crank out the maximum benefit ( in time or in $, they are essentially interchangable ) out of the game.
it is the job of the D.A. to file charges whenever it appears that the law has been broken
I guess the DA is failing in his job by not filing changes against Diebold,its partners and executives then. Why is he all over the little guy but conspicious in ignoring one of the seemingly greatest crimes to ever be committed inside the United States?
Thats the reason people are upset - the perception that the entire political and legal framework has been compromised and is now controlled wholly by criminals. Thats the reason he went to the media rather than 'the authorities', who are part of the problem.
I cant fault anything he did, it is the civic duty of citizens to perform exactly as he has done were they in the same position. The only mistake he made was not contributing the documents in an anonymous fashion.
By the force of every anti-collusion, anti-monopoly, and RICO-style law that exists, the MPAA, RIAA and related companies have been engaged in crimes against the people and the state for decades. This is just the latest piece of evidence in a long lineup of such pieces.
The very existence of the DMCA, UCITA, copy protection, devices that spy on and attack the users of said devices, etc are all examples of what happens when criminals are given free reign to subvert the free market, bribe lawmakers, and institute a technological form of serfdom in which traditional property ownership and the associated rights of said ownership are essentally outlawed.
If you were to look at the number of crimes committed against every citizen over the last 10 years, the number of criminal charges would probably number in the thousands or tens of thousands. Figure a fine of several thousand dollars per victim per offense, and you are looking at total damages in the order of $1x10^14 ( aka hundreds of trillions of dollars in common parlance ), if not much higher. Thats one hell of a class action, no?
The problem is that erring on the side of caution does not exempt them from laws against theft. The UK Trading Standards officer involved committed a felony, and should be prosecuted for this crime. Ignorance of the law, as they say, is neither an excuse nor a defense.
People run Linux on IBM, Dell, Toshiba, HP and Sun-branded x86 hardware, why would you be surprised that an Apple branded x86 will also be running Linux? It isnt really a 'Mac' in the traditional sense as its not constrained to use PPC-compatible OSes any more, the world of x86 windows, linux, bsd and other OSes are now available.
A better question might be how long can a proprietary x86 unix survive with the likes of Linux around. Seen how well SCO are doing these days?
They are a private body comprised of record companies. They have no granted powers beyond that of any other private entity ( less than citizens because they cant vote ), and in fact no right to even exist at all.
So you have greater authority than the RIAA. I suggest you exercise it and tell them how you feel.
The problem is that they have a collection of bribed lawmakers, senators, congressman, judges and other types that they use to get their way. "Their way" of course being the enslavement of the population ( demanding royalties and fees for everything you do ) and the outlawing of property rights ( do you truly own your DVD player when you can be jailed for its modification? ). The relationship is like the way the feudal barons enslave the serfs that labor on property they are forbidden to own for their whole lives just to enrich a wealthy few.
America, the land founded by radical liberals, the laws of which enshrine radical liberal concepts like freedom of speech, religion and political affiliation, equality among the races and genders, and other concepts that were almost unheard of in an era where monarchs, feudal dynasties and corrupt theocracies were the governmental standard worldwide.
And now these people who embody everything it means to be American are being attacked and stalked by brownshirted goose-stepping nutjobs who themselves are the spitting image of everything America has historically defied and opposed.
Free-Speech zones anyone? Being a member of the 'wrong' political party is an arrestable offense now judging by the past actions of police and the political forces who back them. This from the very same government who pour scorn upon the constition as just a 'goddamned piece of paper'. The America of 200 years ago would declare war against the modern America in a heartbeat, and judge the current administration as traitors and enemies of the state.
It was posted on slashdot and other tech news site and was covered in the main stream media as well, if I recall correctly there was a series of articles and the subject was debated fairly hotly on both sides of the pond. As you might well imagine would be the case if China for example demanded that it be given the ability to self-destruct all US military assets, in order to stop said military systems from being used in future terrorist attacks against them.
Link
So what authority does any private group have to wake up one morning and decide to go steal hundreds of pounds from thousands of people? Isnt that basically criminal?
Lets say DJs make up a license that says record companies must pay them thousands of pounds per year, a 'digital music production and transfer license' or some such nonsense. Are they able to enforce this too?
This seems to be regular criminal extortion.
Another problem being overlooked is that no legacy Microsoft software is legally available. How do you buy a new copy of Win95 OSR2 or WinNT4 workstation? You cant. And those are the only MS oses that have any reasonable chance of running well - Win3.x is not worth touching, for 386s / 286s you are better off sticking with FreeDOS with an addon tcpip stack if you absolutely have to run a Microsoft work-alike product.
In contrast, you can download and use ANY version of RedHat Linux, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD or any other Free OS that you care to. Want to try RedHat 2.1 with its 1.2.x kernel version on a 386-SX 25? Go ahead, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. The latest gcc series will probably take several months to bootstrap a usable system if you like compiling from source ( unless you have a spare modern box you can farm out the compiling to via distcc ), but there is no ( other ) reason to not use any modern source-based linux distribution either. Prune unneccessary bulk out of the latest 2.6 kernel and it may even run better than a kernel the same age as the hardware.
Ironic that software that looks increasingly like a legacy OS is unable to run on legacy hardware.
By SCO asking that copyright be transfered to themselves from Novell, they have implicitly admitted that they DO NOT currently hold copyright, and probably never did. Even though the case was 'Novell infringing opon our copyright' from the beginning.
Does this mean that SCO can be charged with perjury for lying to the court in their original claim, since now we have them admitting that their claims were false?
It also seems to me that this admission by SCO means the whole court case is irrelevant and and can be thrown out. I would like to see Novell sue SCO for breach of copyright as a followup ( since its now established that Novell holds the copyright trumps as it were ), preventing SCO from doing business, distributing its products, etc in exactly the same way that SCO tried to do to Novell and IBM.
That bit of poetic justice would be the end of SCO as we know it.
Bob Metcalfe has been posting anti-Linux articles that are dutifully reported here on /. for at least the last 7 years - witness this article from 1999.
Unfortunately for Bob, his theories are all still garbage, his trademark style of writing presents no real facts or intelligent commentary, but is essentially a very trollish means of gaining attention.
So you invented a networking protocol way back when, good for you, have a cookie! In the meantime, quit your whining and leave those who are the new face of technical innovation and cutting edge design to do their thing in peace. I mean, 'Open sores' ? I would be saddened to hear that cutting witicism from a five year old. Grow up Bob.
Any DVD drive which has a 'can only switch x times before the region is permanent and cannot be changed anymore' operation is defective. They are designed this way quite deliberately - made this way to frustrate consumers of DVD disks, forcing them to use specific suppliers ( who pay the required bribes aka 'licensing costs' to the DVD and movie cartels ) who sell them with large and uncompetitive price markups. You are unable to shop around for the best price/deals in the global market, as you can with essentially any other good or service. Its essentially criminals colluding together to remove competition and screw you over for money. This type of market manipulation and collusion is illegal in countries that have strong consumer-protection and antitrust laws in place.
Your drive can likely be repaired such that there are no restrictions on region. This is done with RPC1 firmware, it removes all switching retrictions, region restriction, and lets you play disks from any region, as well as region-less disks.
The Firmware Page probably can help repair your DVD unit and restore its full functionality.
On my side I still manage to switch a number of small companies ( 10 users) to Linux desktops on a fairly regular basis without much trouble. They are much more flexible than the large ones and understand the benefits much faster.
They still need Windows for accounting though. Haven't found a way around that (and before someone suggests it, Wine isn't a way around that, neither is using a native but uncertified package).
The best way I have found to get around the hurdle of business software that needs windows ( whether a local package or an abomination written using ActiveX that needs IE ) is to use a single windows server with Citrix to serve the desktop / apps out to Linux/unix desktops via their native ICA clients. Yes, it involves paying the microsoft tax, installing non-Free ( as in speech, though free in the beer sense ) software on linux/unix systems ( ICA client ), and gives a more complex environment to support ( metaframe system resouces, licensing, regular windows crashing, viruses & security holes, etc ) but its the best compromise I've found.
From the users point of view they dont even need to know anything about citrix or windows - they launch the software by the desktop icon, which transparently establishes a citrix session, launches the app on the windows server, and directs its display to the local system.
That way the business can still move forward with the goal of replacing every other component with Free Software despite having the legacy windows apps to contend with. Once your linux environment has been in place and stable for some time, there should be a higher chance you can persuade the company to drop the last of the proprietary windows software and move to either a linux version of the same product ( likely to exist at some point even though it may not do so yet ), or a 100% Free Software equivalent with a data migration plan.
Its true, behold the horrors that music piracy has wrought! Have you people no soul, no conscience, no compassion? Woe to all humanity!
Kid Rock dies of starvation like a filthy dog in the street
Gadzooks, you're absolutely right. This will spell certain success for my struggling business that sells special rocks that keep tigers away!
How the hell do we consider the Constitution a good thing, when it allows a person like Bush to be elected into power in the first place?
It didnt though, thats the thing. His 'election' was neither democratic nor constitutional. It was in every sense of the term a coup d'état, where the correct and legal processes were ignored and the 'president' siezed power by some criminal means. Many coups have the military taking control, arresting and executing dissidents, and appointing their own representive as President ( as was the case with Pakistan in October 1999 ), Bush though was granted the position via the Supreme Court who suspended the democratic electoral process, and 'awarded' the office of president to him.
The correct course of action to take in these circumstances were for Bush, his party members, and the Supremes to be placed under arrest on charges of High Treason ; obviously the law was not followed and hence America has suffered under a defacto dictatorship since that date.
If you still dont believe America to be a dictatorship then ask yourself why Bush is seemingly able to commit treasonous crimes against his countrymen with impunity, when previous democratically elected presidents would have been imprisoned for doing the merest fraction of what Bush has done.
And revise your understanding of what constitutes a dictatorship.
As another poster has said, Microsoft are bound by the restrictions on trademarking numbers, just as Intel are. On the other hand, MS are notorious for making legal threats with no factual legal basis against people who they believe can be intimidated into acquiescence, so I dare say they will try something underhanded if the Free60 project is successful in acheiving their goals of getting an open platform environment working on the Xbox 360.
Blizzard vs Freecraft is an utterly irrelevant example. Freecraft was independantly developed, and did not incorporate any Blizzard code or artwork, so was legally 100% pure. Nor was it infringing on a trademark basis, Blizzard have no hope in hell of claiming ownership over the word 'craft' and any or all permutations that it might morph into. That Blizzard won this case is testiment to the corruptability of courts and the legal process, and the criminality of Blizzard themselves. This decision was completely without precedent, and we have never seen the likes since that I'm aware of. Touch wood..
'Free' and 'Open' when used in the context that you are complaining about describes products that are both Free and/or Open. Is it so unreasonable or offensive that a product name tries to impart some indication of its nature, it being a libre piece of software?
Sony were knowingly distributing viruses and code in violation of its license - a practice known as copyright infringement by most people.
Both of these acts are criminal, and will result in a police raid, arrests, seizures of equipment, and so on if the group involved is a person. Corporations are apparently too sacred and important to be hindered by such laws.
But why not take a cue from the RIAA - arguably the most visible and outspoken copyright police in existance. The next time you get harrassed by law enforcement ( or the RIAA themselves ) for infringing copyright simply say that you have done nothing wrong. The RIAA says the copyright infringment of Sony is 'nothing wrong', so it must be true!
Thats a pretty pathetic comparison. Would you expect Mr & Mrs Joe Average to download a bunch of Visual Basic project files, fire up Visual Studio, compile and install the thing, _then_ run them? Is that user-friendly? Even ignoring the costs of licenses for the above, its an insanely difficult process compared to ./configure'ing and make installing.
Most distributions these days have a one-command installer - 'urpmi openoffice', 'emerge mozilla-thunderbird', 'apt-get mplayer' and the like. All dependancies magically taken care of. No end-user effort needed. And one command to uninstall and rollback all changes. And one command to perform an update of software already installed. How much do you think that process can be improved?
And tell me, how the hell does that compare to scouring the web for the distributors page, finding the install package, downloading them ( from a single website which may be down or overloaded, not hundreds of mirrored servers around the world like Linux/BSD ), double clicking them, crossing your fingers and hoping the install doesnt kill a registry setting, clobber some DLL, come with spyware, viruses, rootkits or any other malware, etc?
Windows looks positively archaic and primitive compared to the state-of-the-art software install + distribution that Linux now offers.
Patching and support for OpenBSD installs isnt a process thats discouraging, or even time consuming. For the 6 month window during which OpenBSD 3.7 was the most recent stable release, there were just 5 patches released! Errata list for OpenBSD 3.7.
Only one of these was a kernel patch, so even if you are patching the system religiously ( as all security-aware admins should be ), only one reboot was needed in 6 months. Which wouldnt even cause an outage if you are using OpenBSD + CARP + pfsync. Enterprise-grade features in a free OS!
They dont need to support MacOS! Or Linux, AIX, Irix, NetBSD/68k, OpenBSD/Sparc64, or any other Unix/Arch combination for that matter. Its all open source, and a 'mac port' is merely a compile away now that Apple have gotten with the program and joined the inexorable march towards a unix & free software world.
If you're complaining that they wont support a one-platform proprietry GUI toolkit ( as opposed to X11 ), then thats too bad. You have the choice of an X11 interface ( which is more than sufficient for essentially all other *nix ), or you have the choice of expanding on the openoffice code via an API translator like Wine, or coding a purely native version if thats what you really want.
Developing for a closed and platform-limited API is contrary to the whole existance of the OpenOffice suite. And for a faster, less-bloated office environment koffice/abiword/gnumeric are killers - I use these to create and OOo to validate layout, pagination, perform document conversion, etc once done.