"Who are environmentalists kidding themselves to say potential global warming is a greater threat than other natural disasters, malaria, and poverty in general?"
On the one hand: short-term losses from natural disasters, poverty-related population shifts, etc.
On the OTHER hand: the loss of whole percentage points of life on Earth (who can say how many, and do we really want to bet *against* this happening?)... remember the dinosaurs?
People are not the only form of life that matters. Seems that the best approach is to attempt to incorporate short-term problems and solutions into long-term outlook. Short-term wealth does not for long-term security and growth make.
And as an aside -- I defy you to to show me statstics that support your argument that third-world countries pollute more per capita or per area than, say, the U.S. And add to that the disparity in resource-consumption that exists between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Get real. First-world, industrialized nations do not equal cleanliness or sustainability, regardless of their wealth or growth.
I didn't say that all installs had the firewall configurable at boot. I did some looking around, and the easiest one to find was, of course, Red Hat. RH 7.1 was the first edition to have the firewall configurable at install time.
But during any of these installs, for a long time and across a wide variety of Linux distros, iptables or ipchains have been available, and people reading in the forums were recommended to use them. Documentation existed for configuration from early on.
The best you can say here is that the most user-friendly Linux distro has had default, install-time firewall configuration from 2001, while it took XP until 2004.
Considering the generalized weaknesses of a Windows system versus a GNU/Linux system, it seems that Red Hat, at least, was way ahead of the ball.
And the original point still stands -- firewalls have been widely available and recommended for Linux systems for a long time now. It is hardly an admission of defeat, as the parent suggests, to enable a firewall for security purposes. My essential point is that, while SP2 is a band-aid, at least *something* is covering the wound.
I uninstalled FC2 after 2 days because of 2 things:
1) No synaptics touchpad support (for Dell Latitude c400). That there is an existant driver to add this support, and that this driver was not included, was insane to me.
2) Still no wireless support out-of-the-box (at least for my card, a Belkin card that uses the atmel chipset (for which there are current drivers)).
I am happy to report that both these problems are fixed in FC3. Wireless card is detected and works correctly with no post-install configuration, and the touchpad driver is installed by default, though some tweaking of the xorg.conf file is necessary to get it running to user specs (I expected this).
With most of the OS and DE(s) meeting or exceeding other systems (Windows, Solaris, etc), cleaning up these little problems goes along way towards drawing a userbase.
I, for one, welcome our red commie wacko monster overlords...
Seriously, though. If you and others feel threatened by an image which is obviously a satirical take on Socialist propganda, and which, if you step back off of the leftwing vs. rightwing toadstool, also seems to be saying something about people worshipping a large red Godzilla-clone.... then I dunno.
I suppose it would be better and more freedom-loving if we had a gif of the mozilla monster inside a Star of David or hanging from a cross or riding on the back of an elephant, against a waving american flag.
It's a joke.
Or maybe the wackos really are coming. They want our internets.
/feeding the troll, but this same kind of thought is appearing too regularly when discussing Fedora
Dude, chill.
As has been mentioned many, many times, and is explicitly stated on fedora's homepage, fedora is not in any way an enterprise-ready distribution. It's not meant to be. It's meant to be a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux.
This comes with all appropriate caveats. No one is forcing you to continually install the most bleeding edge software, and if you are doing so in anything other than a troubleshooting/hobbiest/dick-in-the-wind environment, you are asking for a lot of trouble.
Don't blame Red Hat for your obsession with having the absolute latest software installed all the time./feed
Dennis Kucinich (D,OH) didn't support the PATRIOT Act, and if he is elected he will repeal it. He has been the most out-spoken critic (certaintly of the current candidates) of the Bush policies, and was the only one of the candidates to vote against the Iraq "war". He has my vote, and if I had some cash, I'd definitely offer it to his campaign.
By the way, at this point it's not true that the vote for either Democrat or Republican is meaningless... right now there are some substantial differences between the candidates. It'll be after the primaries that all the lines blur, when the more extreme/progressive candidates are out-voted in favor of right-leaning quasi-moderates.
Go check out Kucinich's site... it's worth looking at: www.kucinich.us
I don't know about anyone else (and from the amount of Linux vs. Windows articles here, it seems I'm in the minority), but I am getting sick and tired of having Linux compared to Windows. I'm tired of the "battle for the desktop"; I'm tired of "Linux needs to be able to be used by my grandma". I'm tied of "Linux needs a single desktop so it's more friendly to new converts".
From the beginning, Linux has been about choice. That is one of the main, major features of the free software movement. I hate it when people constantly say, "well, we need to make it easier for people who use Windows to switch to Linux..." No we don't. I used to use Windows. I got sick of it. I switched. I wasn't all that tech-savvy... I didn't even know about the different desktops. I just picked one, tried it, look at another, tried it... went back to the first one. Along the way, I've learned about all of this stuff, but at the beginning it was the idea that something was out there that did things *differently* from Windows that was appealing.
Linux, the whole free software movement, has come this far on the merits of stability, cost, scalability, and user *choice*. We don't have to bribe people from Windows by making Linux look and feel the same way--I hate how Windows looks and feels. This community just has to keep on with what got it here in the first place, and people will continue to switch.
And if they don't, well, fine. Because it's a choice. And, frankly, I couldn't care less if your grandma can use Linux or not. Same with Joe Sixpack, whoever that moron is.
Stop with the articles that try to tell the free software community that it's better to be like Windows, that it's better to unify this and unify that and make everything all even-keeled and solidified. The antithesis of a single answer, the opposite track of Windows is what started it off on the road upon which it has come so far.
Of course, without rms none of this 'free software' crap would be around today and all this would be a moot point.
How pretentious and ignorant of you to just pass rms' thoughts of as off-topic and pathetic! As if this is nothing more than a "name agenda". There is an entire philosophy behind the GNU system and the GNU GPL that has been cast aside by OSS in their pragmatism. And I think his article was pointing out that it is clearly partially the result of not taking the difference between Linux and GNU seriously that has lead SCO to make some unjustified claims about the system as a whole.
rms deserves a lot more respect than he is given. Without all of his work, we'd all be stuck in Windows land with no other viable alternatives.
It seems, though, that you probably *are* still stuck.
Why is this being modded up? Even *if* windows was being compared to the extent that UnitedLinux and Red Hat were, which it wasn't, if someone is running the same tests on the same machine using different OSes that are designed to do the same thing, then who cares how many or which OSes they choose to compare? You really are saying that, in a race between between cheetahs and turtles, if you add more turtles, they have a better chance of winning. Ugh.
Ahh, the sweet sweet smell of innocence protected.
Kudos to those who support censorship and who are policed by fear and shame. It makes me so proud!
Thank you for trying so very hard to clamp your hands over the eyes, ears, and mouths of our tender youth... it's a good thing that saying that something is bad stifles curiousity!
It's so caring to uphold the belief that children should be led blindfolded into the world and only exposed to the reality of the people around them in bite-sized pieces... it's easier on the digestion!
I for one am thankful that the Supreme Court has my future children's vigin minds on the top of their priority list.
Time to check that banned book list, too! Banning, burning... whatever. Maybe the Nazi's weren't crazy after all!
This is because the beta is compiled against gcc3.2. It's the first sun release to be compiled as such. I'm using the beta right now and it works perfectly.
It should be noted that this version of Moz is not meant for universal public use. 1.3 is still the 'default' public version. So what's the harm of requiring a development version of java if you're running a development version of the browser?
What I meant by 'monopoly' was what she implied... the illegal sort that, for instance, MS was convicted of being--she is implying in her article that, though different in appearance, in substance the GPL creates a monopoly comparable to that held by MS, which was the company most broadly attacked in rms' original article.
I hold that line of thought to be utter nonsense. I don't care if its abusive or non-abusive (a curious term anyway, since, at least in my understanding, all monopolies are abusive--it's just whether or not they've been granted the rights (say, by the feds) to be so). The GPL is a license like any other license... it provides the rules under which you may use, copy, distribute, and change the original software. The GPL, however, in no way leads to any kind of stifling of competition in the marketplace, and on the contrary leads directly to an increase of innovation by keeping the source code open at all times, for all to see.
How this can be said to be, in substance, similar or identical to the licenses used by closed-source companies is beyond me, and that's why I am saying her statement does not hold.
I agree with you that the choice to use software is true of Windows as well, though you could argue effectively that because MS is a monopolist, they have revoked product choice from the marketplace and forced people to use their products, or products specifically approved by them for specific tasks.
With respect to the public domain being totally free, I'd agree, with the exception that there is nothing about the public domain that ensures the continuance of that total freedom. Something in the public domain is totally free until someone uses that total freedom to copyright it.
We have an obligation to legislate not just for one section of the software industry who seeks to impose its business model on the rest of industry, which moreover is not "free", but is actually a different form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users.
Interesting... this seems to be saying that, through the use of the GPL, the FSF is, perhaps unwittingly, attempting to create a monopoly. I'm not sure her statement holds water... how does the GPL stifle competition and innovation? I mean, releasing software under the GPL is the choice of the developer... and as for "imposing" the license on users, aren't *all* licenses imposed on users? Isn't that really part of the definition of a license? It's still the user's choice whether or not to *use* the software. Simply because they can't take GPL'd software and package it without the source and sell it doesn't mean that the software is part of a monopoly... geez! The GPL certainly is another form of *contract*... but monopoly? Give me a break.
This is slightly skewed from the topic at hand, but I just can't help it.
I just realized tonight that I actually feel now that AOL and MS users actively *deserve* what they get from these companies. How many years now have people been trodden over and acted like they enjoy it? I think maybe they actually *do*, but I just don't care anymore, and at this point, if I'm sitting near someone who is trying to open a corrupted word document or wrangling with AOL tech support I just sort of laugh inwardly. I used to feel sorry and identify with those problems. Now it feels like justice.
I know it's elitist and all, but I seriously wonder sometimes if many of the people out there using MS and AOL are the kinds of people the Free Software Movement should be wooing. I work in a menial tech support job (where I'm forced to actually help, and not just smirk) at the moment, and the amount of stupidity out there in the user population is staggering. These are people studying and teaching at a major university, some of whom are involved in incredibly complex subjects... and they don't "get" what a file is versus a folder, or what an email "address" is. And part of this stems from the watering down of the tech world by companies like this to the point now where everyone bases their idea of what a Killer App (tm) is on the abilities of either the mythical "Joe User" or someone's grandma. And I've got to say, if I ever run into either of those two people, the stupidity confronting me will probably be my end.
How does this relate to the MS/AOL/IE/Netscape/$$$/Free Speech/Beer topic? Well, I'm not sure, except that I think maybe it's not such a bad thing that 90 % of people use Windows. After all the years of dumbing-down, it suits most of them.
I agree with you about names of applications (gawk, sodipodi, sed, gcombust, etc) and documentation, however, this is, to a certain extent, the historical nature of the beast. Whereas, for example, Windows has had to cater to the computer-illiterate masses in order to increase its market share and profitability, and therefore had to come up with ridiculously simple naming schemes (My Network Places, My Pictures, Internet Explorer, etc etc), the UNIX world developed by-and-large on a guru basis, with the servers running all the enterprise software that no one but the geeks knew about anyway.
This is the same deal with documentation. The administrators of the enterprise software were more often than not also the developers, or closely related thereto, and so had less worries about getting to know new software. They were and are already inside.
Of course, as this kind of paradigm becomes more popular, this will have to change. And, if you watch any of the desktop projects, things have come a long way in a very short time. Documentation is still the big issue, though... but the beauty of the system, which of course you know, is that anyone who is familiar with it can write the documentation and offer it to the knowledge-pool.
On the OpenOffice topic, for still being a 1.0 series, I think the developers have done an amazing job. Which iteration of MSOffice do we use now? They ran out of meaningful numbers! OOo already fully supports XML, as well as being able to read and write (okay, this is not perfect, but evolving) many other document types.
Exciting times, and maybe not only if you're a geek.
The leader of the world's most populous democratic (as far as that term goes, anyway) nation advocates the development (and thus the use) of open-source software. Completely excellent.
With this announcement following the Munich decision, it will be interesting to see if any further cities/states begin to take a closer look at open-source alternatives. If these increasingly influential parties have some success with this decision, then I would think that this could be quite the spur to others who are getting fed up with being strangluated by the ever-more restrictive licensing and lowest-common-denominator quality of many proprietary products.
The culture of fear is just sickening, and the fact that the government and state agencies are exacerbating the 'terrorist' buzzword is repulsive. As if it wasn't bad enough, the major media outlets are constantly trying to one-up each other with hysterical reporting.
All of this serves to show how gullible, how willing most people are to accept all of this as fact. It brings out the frightened-herd metaphor in all of its glory. And it makes one wonder what happens when the world's greatest superpower is also the world's most terrified nation. What happens when animals are backed into corners?
This is not likely to end soon. Things are going to get worse before they get better... that is, if there is a chance for things to get better.
I used to play a lot of jazz sax, and knew people who could improv like mad, and one of the common techniques was to start from somewhere in the score in front of you, then move off to somewhere new, then to bring in some other themes from different artists, and to use those themes then to color your own variations... and to move away again into something creative, and finally back to the original score. It was a circular thing that was extremely satisfying to listen to, and it couldn't exist without sampling, though of course this was actually *playing* what was played before and not just ripping it, but in principle it's the same, especially if the improv session is being recorded.
It's a dark day when creativity is stifled because someone 'owns' the 'patent' on a 4-bar riff.
I'm a big hockey fan, so it would be great to see games broadcast in widescreen on a high-res machine... not only can you actually *see* the puck, but you can see the whole of the ice instead of getting motion sick as the camera operator swings the camera around to follow the action.
Not just hockey, but soccer, football, all the others...
I see a few posts below saying things to the effect that '...this isn't really like 1984 because it doesn't go that far...' and '...this is only to protect sensitive areas, not your neighborhood, get over it!'
While I'm sure that this is true, it's completely irresponsible to base an argument on those premises. It infuriates me when people have no idea of how dangerous just getting one foot inside the door really is.
So it's not 1984 yet. Who cares? Either we have privacy, or we have a culture of systematic monitoring. Once it becomes okay to have joe-internet-user watching a power plant, the idea of monitoring becomes a *little* more okay... a little more acceptable. And then we move on to the next thing. This is called a slippery slope, and I can't understand why people can't or don't want to see it.
The USA PATRIOT Act is a lot like this. People say, '...well, damn, we *were* attacked... this *is* a time of crisis, and so it's *okay* to let the government increase its ability to watch us and those who might do this kind of thing again. We can understand... it's necessary. We'll deal with it." We think it's okay if it only impedes our constitutional rights *a little*, *just for now*. But it really just creates a climate of acceptance, in which every further act is just that much easier to push through in the mind of the public.
Once you open the door, it's damn hard to go back. There's a reason it's called a 'slippery' slope. So it may not be 1984 yet, but if people start using these ways of thinking, if we actually start believing these steps are *good* for us, and that we can sacrifice *a little* of our rights, we've cast off the entire set of our freedoms, even if the effects of that cast-off aren't visible for a long time to come.
We need to stop thinking of ways to keep everyone out, and start finding ways of letting them in. The culture of fear only makes things worse.
Jesus man, how can you compare them? Did you not notice at all that when you registered for RH update you can PICK AND CHOOSE SPECIFICALLY WHICH PACKAGES YOU WANT TO REGISTER? If you don't want them to know which kernel you have, UNCHECK IT.
This is such a ridiculous non-issue that completely misses the point. If what this article says turns out to be true, it means that MS is spying on you and offering you NO CHOICE to avoid that spying. On TOP of charging an arm and a leg for PROPRIETARY, SECURITY-FUCKED software.
Another difference is that if you downloaded Red Hat Linux, you got all the software on there from Red Hat. If you add third-party software, it will only register with Red Hat if Red Hat releases a version of it. This is not the case, if this article is correct, with Microsoft. It will record your software whether it can be updated by MS or not. And that is pointless, unless there is a sinister motive.
Google's have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Paul McFedries, creator of the famous Word Spy site
I can't believe this is being called a "cease and desist" letter. What is the deal with this bottom-sucking sensationalism? The letter simply said, look, that's our trademark, and we want you to either reference it adequately or remove it. It's since been referenced. Now, if Google doesn't think it's been referenced adequately enough, you might expect a second letter, which, if not followed up properly, might turn into a future cease and desist letter... but geez, this one was hardly threatening, and, as far as I know about copyright law, it was well within Google's rights to request that he reference their trademark.
I suppose it's too much to ask for the submissions to not always have the aura of inane paranoia...
Slashdot Mirror
Just had to post a quickie response:
"Who are environmentalists kidding themselves to say potential global warming is a greater threat than other natural disasters, malaria, and poverty in general?"
On the one hand: short-term losses from natural disasters, poverty-related population shifts, etc.
On the OTHER hand: the loss of whole percentage points of life on Earth (who can say how many, and do we really want to bet *against* this happening?)... remember the dinosaurs?
People are not the only form of life that matters. Seems that the best approach is to attempt to incorporate short-term problems and solutions into long-term outlook. Short-term wealth does not for long-term security and growth make.
And as an aside -- I defy you to to show me statstics that support your argument that third-world countries pollute more per capita or per area than, say, the U.S. And add to that the disparity in resource-consumption that exists between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Get real. First-world, industrialized nations do not equal cleanliness or sustainability, regardless of their wealth or growth.
I didn't say that all installs had the firewall configurable at boot. I did some looking around, and the easiest one to find was, of course, Red Hat. RH 7.1 was the first edition to have the firewall configurable at install time.
But during any of these installs, for a long time and across a wide variety of Linux distros, iptables or ipchains have been available, and people reading in the forums were recommended to use them. Documentation existed for configuration from early on.
The best you can say here is that the most user-friendly Linux distro has had default, install-time firewall configuration from 2001, while it took XP until 2004.
Considering the generalized weaknesses of a Windows system versus a GNU/Linux system, it seems that Red Hat, at least, was way ahead of the ball.
And the original point still stands -- firewalls have been widely available and recommended for Linux systems for a long time now. It is hardly an admission of defeat, as the parent suggests, to enable a firewall for security purposes. My essential point is that, while SP2 is a band-aid, at least *something* is covering the wound.
B
An admission of defeat to install a firewall by default?
Every linux distro I've installed in the past 8 years has come with a firewall on by default, and most of them were configurable during the install.
I guess it isn't only MS that's defeated.
Bummer.
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Just a quick comment here at work:
I uninstalled FC2 after 2 days because of 2 things:
1) No synaptics touchpad support (for Dell Latitude c400). That there is an existant driver to add this support, and that this driver was not included, was insane to me.
2) Still no wireless support out-of-the-box (at least for my card, a Belkin card that uses the atmel chipset (for which there are current drivers)).
I am happy to report that both these problems are fixed in FC3. Wireless card is detected and works correctly with no post-install configuration, and the touchpad driver is installed by default, though some tweaking of the xorg.conf file is necessary to get it running to user specs (I expected this).
With most of the OS and DE(s) meeting or exceeding other systems (Windows, Solaris, etc), cleaning up these little problems goes along way towards drawing a userbase.
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I, for one, welcome our red commie wacko monster overlords...
Seriously, though. If you and others feel threatened by an image which is obviously a satirical take on Socialist propganda, and which, if you step back off of the leftwing vs. rightwing toadstool, also seems to be saying something about people worshipping a large red Godzilla-clone.... then I dunno.
I suppose it would be better and more freedom-loving if we had a gif of the mozilla monster inside a Star of David or hanging from a cross or riding on the back of an elephant, against a waving american flag.
It's a joke.
Or maybe the wackos really are coming. They want our internets.
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I'm not sure that needs any kind of qualification, or even comment.
/feeding the troll, but this same kind of thought is appearing too regularly when discussing Fedora
/feed
Dude, chill.
As has been mentioned many, many times, and is explicitly stated on fedora's homepage, fedora is not in any way an enterprise-ready distribution. It's not meant to be. It's meant to be a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux.
This comes with all appropriate caveats. No one is forcing you to continually install the most bleeding edge software, and if you are doing so in anything other than a troubleshooting/hobbiest/dick-in-the-wind environment, you are asking for a lot of trouble.
Don't blame Red Hat for your obsession with having the absolute latest software installed all the time.
B.
Dennis Kucinich (D,OH) didn't support the PATRIOT Act, and if he is elected he will repeal it. He has been the most out-spoken critic (certaintly of the current candidates) of the Bush policies, and was the only one of the candidates to vote against the Iraq "war". He has my vote, and if I had some cash, I'd definitely offer it to his campaign.
By the way, at this point it's not true that the vote for either Democrat or Republican is meaningless... right now there are some substantial differences between the candidates. It'll be after the primaries that all the lines blur, when the more extreme/progressive candidates are out-voted in favor of right-leaning quasi-moderates.
Go check out Kucinich's site... it's worth looking at: www.kucinich.us
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I don't know about anyone else (and from the amount of Linux vs. Windows articles here, it seems I'm in the minority), but I am getting sick and tired of having Linux compared to Windows. I'm tired of the "battle for the desktop"; I'm tired of "Linux needs to be able to be used by my grandma". I'm tied of "Linux needs a single desktop so it's more friendly to new converts".
From the beginning, Linux has been about choice. That is one of the main, major features of the free software movement. I hate it when people constantly say, "well, we need to make it easier for people who use Windows to switch to Linux..." No we don't. I used to use Windows. I got sick of it. I switched. I wasn't all that tech-savvy... I didn't even know about the different desktops. I just picked one, tried it, look at another, tried it... went back to the first one. Along the way, I've learned about all of this stuff, but at the beginning it was the idea that something was out there that did things *differently* from Windows that was appealing.
Linux, the whole free software movement, has come this far on the merits of stability, cost, scalability, and user *choice*. We don't have to bribe people from Windows by making Linux look and feel the same way--I hate how Windows looks and feels. This community just has to keep on with what got it here in the first place, and people will continue to switch.
And if they don't, well, fine. Because it's a choice. And, frankly, I couldn't care less if your grandma can use Linux or not. Same with Joe Sixpack, whoever that moron is.
Stop with the articles that try to tell the free software community that it's better to be like Windows, that it's better to unify this and unify that and make everything all even-keeled and solidified. The antithesis of a single answer, the opposite track of Windows is what started it off on the road upon which it has come so far.
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Of course, without rms none of this 'free software' crap would be around today and all this would be a moot point.
How pretentious and ignorant of you to just pass rms' thoughts of as off-topic and pathetic! As if this is nothing more than a "name agenda". There is an entire philosophy behind the GNU system and the GNU GPL that has been cast aside by OSS in their pragmatism. And I think his article was pointing out that it is clearly partially the result of not taking the difference between Linux and GNU seriously that has lead SCO to make some unjustified claims about the system as a whole.
rms deserves a lot more respect than he is given. Without all of his work, we'd all be stuck in Windows land with no other viable alternatives.
It seems, though, that you probably *are* still stuck.
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Why is this being modded up? Even *if* windows was being compared to the extent that UnitedLinux and Red Hat were, which it wasn't, if someone is running the same tests on the same machine using different OSes that are designed to do the same thing, then who cares how many or which OSes they choose to compare? You really are saying that, in a race between between cheetahs and turtles, if you add more turtles, they have a better chance of winning. Ugh.
B
Ahh, the sweet sweet smell of innocence protected.
Kudos to those who support censorship and who are policed by fear and shame. It makes me so proud!
Thank you for trying so very hard to clamp your hands over the eyes, ears, and mouths of our tender youth... it's a good thing that saying that something is bad stifles curiousity!
It's so caring to uphold the belief that children should be led blindfolded into the world and only exposed to the reality of the people around them in bite-sized pieces... it's easier on the digestion!
I for one am thankful that the Supreme Court has my future children's vigin minds on the top of their priority list.
Time to check that banned book list, too! Banning, burning... whatever. Maybe the Nazi's weren't crazy after all!
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This is because the beta is compiled against gcc3.2. It's the first sun release to be compiled as such. I'm using the beta right now and it works perfectly.
It should be noted that this version of Moz is not meant for universal public use. 1.3 is still the 'default' public version. So what's the harm of requiring a development version of java if you're running a development version of the browser?
B
I hold that line of thought to be utter nonsense. I don't care if its abusive or non-abusive (a curious term anyway, since, at least in my understanding, all monopolies are abusive--it's just whether or not they've been granted the rights (say, by the feds) to be so). The GPL is a license like any other license... it provides the rules under which you may use, copy, distribute, and change the original software. The GPL, however, in no way leads to any kind of stifling of competition in the marketplace, and on the contrary leads directly to an increase of innovation by keeping the source code open at all times, for all to see.
How this can be said to be, in substance, similar or identical to the licenses used by closed-source companies is beyond me, and that's why I am saying her statement does not hold.
I agree with you that the choice to use software is true of Windows as well, though you could argue effectively that because MS is a monopolist, they have revoked product choice from the marketplace and forced people to use their products, or products specifically approved by them for specific tasks.
With respect to the public domain being totally free, I'd agree, with the exception that there is nothing about the public domain that ensures the continuance of that total freedom. Something in the public domain is totally free until someone uses that total freedom to copyright it.
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Interesting... this seems to be saying that, through the use of the GPL, the FSF is, perhaps unwittingly, attempting to create a monopoly. I'm not sure her statement holds water... how does the GPL stifle competition and innovation? I mean, releasing software under the GPL is the choice of the developer... and as for "imposing" the license on users, aren't *all* licenses imposed on users? Isn't that really part of the definition of a license? It's still the user's choice whether or not to *use* the software. Simply because they can't take GPL'd software and package it without the source and sell it doesn't mean that the software is part of a monopoly... geez! The GPL certainly is another form of *contract*... but monopoly? Give me a break.
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This is slightly skewed from the topic at hand, but I just can't help it.
I just realized tonight that I actually feel now that AOL and MS users actively *deserve* what they get from these companies. How many years now have people been trodden over and acted like they enjoy it? I think maybe they actually *do*, but I just don't care anymore, and at this point, if I'm sitting near someone who is trying to open a corrupted word document or wrangling with AOL tech support I just sort of laugh inwardly. I used to feel sorry and identify with those problems. Now it feels like justice.
I know it's elitist and all, but I seriously wonder sometimes if many of the people out there using MS and AOL are the kinds of people the Free Software Movement should be wooing. I work in a menial tech support job (where I'm forced to actually help, and not just smirk) at the moment, and the amount of stupidity out there in the user population is staggering. These are people studying and teaching at a major university, some of whom are involved in incredibly complex subjects... and they don't "get" what a file is versus a folder, or what an email "address" is. And part of this stems from the watering down of the tech world by companies like this to the point now where everyone bases their idea of what a Killer App (tm) is on the abilities of either the mythical "Joe User" or someone's grandma. And I've got to say, if I ever run into either of those two people, the stupidity confronting me will probably be my end.
How does this relate to the MS/AOL/IE/Netscape/$$$/Free Speech/Beer topic? Well, I'm not sure, except that I think maybe it's not such a bad thing that 90 % of people use Windows. After all the years of dumbing-down, it suits most of them.
Flame away... it's just my mood tonight.
B
I agree with you about names of applications (gawk, sodipodi, sed, gcombust, etc) and documentation, however, this is, to a certain extent, the historical nature of the beast. Whereas, for example, Windows has had to cater to the computer-illiterate masses in order to increase its market share and profitability, and therefore had to come up with ridiculously simple naming schemes (My Network Places, My Pictures, Internet Explorer, etc etc), the UNIX world developed by-and-large on a guru basis, with the servers running all the enterprise software that no one but the geeks knew about anyway.
This is the same deal with documentation. The administrators of the enterprise software were more often than not also the developers, or closely related thereto, and so had less worries about getting to know new software. They were and are already inside.
Of course, as this kind of paradigm becomes more popular, this will have to change. And, if you watch any of the desktop projects, things have come a long way in a very short time. Documentation is still the big issue, though... but the beauty of the system, which of course you know, is that anyone who is familiar with it can write the documentation and offer it to the knowledge-pool.
On the OpenOffice topic, for still being a 1.0 series, I think the developers have done an amazing job. Which iteration of MSOffice do we use now? They ran out of meaningful numbers! OOo already fully supports XML, as well as being able to read and write (okay, this is not perfect, but evolving) many other document types.
Exciting times, and maybe not only if you're a geek.
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The leader of the world's most populous democratic (as far as that term goes, anyway) nation advocates the development (and thus the use) of open-source software. Completely excellent.
With this announcement following the Munich decision, it will be interesting to see if any further cities/states begin to take a closer look at open-source alternatives. If these increasingly influential parties have some success with this decision, then I would think that this could be quite the spur to others who are getting fed up with being strangluated by the ever-more restrictive licensing and lowest-common-denominator quality of many proprietary products.
Are we perhaps watching the pebble begin to roll?
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The culture of fear is just sickening, and the fact that the government and state agencies are exacerbating the 'terrorist' buzzword is repulsive. As if it wasn't bad enough, the major media outlets are constantly trying to one-up each other with hysterical reporting.
All of this serves to show how gullible, how willing most people are to accept all of this as fact. It brings out the frightened-herd metaphor in all of its glory. And it makes one wonder what happens when the world's greatest superpower is also the world's most terrified nation. What happens when animals are backed into corners?
This is not likely to end soon. Things are going to get worse before they get better... that is, if there is a chance for things to get better.
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It's a dark day when creativity is stifled because someone 'owns' the 'patent' on a 4-bar riff.
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I'm a big hockey fan, so it would be great to see games broadcast in widescreen on a high-res machine... not only can you actually *see* the puck, but you can see the whole of the ice instead of getting motion sick as the camera operator swings the camera around to follow the action.
Not just hockey, but soccer, football, all the others...
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While I'm sure that this is true, it's completely irresponsible to base an argument on those premises. It infuriates me when people have no idea of how dangerous just getting one foot inside the door really is.
So it's not 1984 yet. Who cares? Either we have privacy, or we have a culture of systematic monitoring. Once it becomes okay to have joe-internet-user watching a power plant, the idea of monitoring becomes a *little* more okay... a little more acceptable. And then we move on to the next thing. This is called a slippery slope, and I can't understand why people can't or don't want to see it.
The USA PATRIOT Act is a lot like this. People say, '...well, damn, we *were* attacked... this *is* a time of crisis, and so it's *okay* to let the government increase its ability to watch us and those who might do this kind of thing again. We can understand... it's necessary. We'll deal with it." We think it's okay if it only impedes our constitutional rights *a little*, *just for now*. But it really just creates a climate of acceptance, in which every further act is just that much easier to push through in the mind of the public.
Once you open the door, it's damn hard to go back. There's a reason it's called a 'slippery' slope. So it may not be 1984 yet, but if people start using these ways of thinking, if we actually start believing these steps are *good* for us, and that we can sacrifice *a little* of our rights, we've cast off the entire set of our freedoms, even if the effects of that cast-off aren't visible for a long time to come.
We need to stop thinking of ways to keep everyone out, and start finding ways of letting them in. The culture of fear only makes things worse.
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(hint: the above was sarcasm)
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This is such a ridiculous non-issue that completely misses the point. If what this article says turns out to be true, it means that MS is spying on you and offering you NO CHOICE to avoid that spying. On TOP of charging an arm and a leg for PROPRIETARY, SECURITY-FUCKED software.
Another difference is that if you downloaded Red Hat Linux, you got all the software on there from Red Hat. If you add third-party software, it will only register with Red Hat if Red Hat releases a version of it. This is not the case, if this article is correct, with Microsoft. It will record your software whether it can be updated by MS or not. And that is pointless, unless there is a sinister motive.
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I can't believe this is being called a "cease and desist" letter. What is the deal with this bottom-sucking sensationalism? The letter simply said, look, that's our trademark, and we want you to either reference it adequately or remove it. It's since been referenced. Now, if Google doesn't think it's been referenced adequately enough, you might expect a second letter, which, if not followed up properly, might turn into a future cease and desist letter... but geez, this one was hardly threatening, and, as far as I know about copyright law, it was well within Google's rights to request that he reference their trademark.
I suppose it's too much to ask for the submissions to not always have the aura of inane paranoia...
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