Irrelevant. If the ISP starts trying to prevent people from downloading encrypted data of any kind, that ISP is going out of business.
And they can "flag" anybody they want - it's "what are they gonna do about it" that matters. Most ISPs can't even manage their clients as it is.
Oh, sure, I can imagine all sorts of Federal laws requiring this crap - and I have no doubt the Feds are going to pass them. They probably will entirely outlaw P2P of ANY kind, whether it has commercial uses or not.
It's irrelevant. Unless they make the entire Internet illegal OR so totally open that every piece of data on it must be examined and tracked by the Feds, it's not going to stop file sharing. It's that simple. There's always going to be a way around it and DRM is the least of our worries.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose it, but it's not going to matter one way or the other, because the government is this country no longer listens to ANYBODY who isn't a big campaign contributor or other form of corporate or wealthy influence. It's that simple.
The bottom line is: sooner or later this government is going to have to be trashed totally - either by a Second American Revolution (not likely, since none of the morons today have any clue about the first one) or by someone simply having enough and nuking Washington with a smuggled nuke "borrowed" from Russia or the Israelis - very likely, in my view.
Anybody who thinks everything is going to be tied down so tightly you can't do anything just doesn't understand human history. It has NEVER worked that way, and it never will - until we Transhumans fry the lot of you and remove the issue entirely.
For everybody who runs Windows 2000 on old machines, as a recent/. article discussed, you have ten people who buy their machines with Windows on it, get it loaded up with spyware, then throw out the machine and buy a new, cheaper machine to load up with spyware.
So I'd say Windows, old or new, is definitely contributing to buying new PCs.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I love it when two/. articles come together!
Let's see it boot in ten seconds WITHOUT hibernation.
Jesus, some people think everybody but them is an idiot that can't read or doesn't know as much as they do.
Ten MB of RAM to run apps in.
Wow. I'm so thrilled. My text editor might actually work. Certainly Notepad will.
This guy has WAY too much time on his hands. Obviously a sixteen-year-old/. nerdboy living with his parents.
Actually I appreciate knowing the tweaks to help Windows 2000 run on old hardware. It's knowledge that might come in handy when working on some client's old POS - and I get a lot of those idiots trying to make a Libretto their main desktop machines. I had one guy try to install Comcast cable on one - Comcast won't even install with less than 64MB.
If you think a US prison is better, you haven't been in one.
I have. Oh, yeah, you get TV and the like. Piss a guard off and you get worse than "water-boarding".
Where do you think these asshole MPs that run the military prisons come from? Most of them are US prison guards and US cops. And the prison system in Iraq was designed by US prison administrators whose prisons have been sued repeatedly for cruel and inhumane conditions.
There's no way unauthorized distribution is going to be prevented by US laws of any kind. That's a pipe dream by people who don't understand the nature of black markets and who have masochistic complexes where they like being subjected to oppression by their "leaders."
So you're saying encryption is bad because it isn't open to the world.
Brilliant./. really needs some sort of intelligence filter.
Speaking of "trusted data from a trusted source", do you remember the virus Microsoft shipped to South Korea one time? Just because it's DRM'd doesn't mean it wasn't subject to being hacked before being signed. THAT's proper security thinking.
What part of "there's NO problem", don't you understand, genius?
Some Windows shill babbles nonsense about Linux that hasn't been true in three years, and I'm supposed to take that seriously?
As for the Mac community not comparing itself to Microsoft, excuse me, I seem to recall a series of ads that did exactly that. Not to mention the fact that the Mac is such an insular community, it took an act of Congress damn near to get them to put a UNIX derivative under their desktop.
And now they act like that UNIX derivative is so much better than Linux that they could easily put Microsoft out of business if they just ran on Intel.
Well, now's your chance, Macnut. Put up or shut up. If Apple doesn't have a ten percent market share within five years after the year they switch to Intel, shut up.
I have over three hundred videos of the Corrs. They are not produced by studios or companies like Real or Apple, they're produced by people using whatever encoder happened to be in their video software. And there are probably a hundred of those.
Windows Media Player will NOT play half of these videos. This includes MANY AVI and even ASF formats which WMP supposedly supports.
Video Lan Client, which has most codecs embedded, will play most of them. MPlayer will play most of them. Winamp will play them if I download a half dozen codec packages and install them.
"I rarely hear Exchange customers complain about unstable service"
You haven't opened your ears. Exchange has a ton of problems syncing with Outlook, losing mail, double-delivering mail, locking users out of mail, etc, which makes the "Windows is integrated" comments look silly. Do a Google and learn.
When was the last time you saw SAW or even HEARD of a corrupted text file? (Not including typos made by the configurer which are avoided by having a editing GUI front-end - which Linux has.) When was the last time you had to "rollback" a text file?
"Text config files makes it harder to use advanced techniques such as AI, don't you think?"
No - although XML or some other more structured, self-defining form would be better. But the Windows Registry damn sure isn't it. If you broke the Windows Registry out into specific configuration files for each service, and didn't allow programmers to stuff all kinds of pointless crap in there totally out of system control, it might be usable. As it is, it's a joke.
I don't see why this is modded "Redundant", he has a perfectly good point.
Companies are psychologically conditioned to buy COTS, even if COTS sucks.
Marcus Ranum's rant about software accountability touches on this. It's a problem with dumb management (as virtually every other corporate problem is.)
It's a real problem for Linux, but it can be overcome once more companies start using Linux (and other OSS) because of their overwhelming advantages and more consultants and VARS start touting Linux and OSS because of the cost (including reliability and security as cost issues) advantages to both them and their clients.
"X is to Linux as Win 3.1 was to Dos." Not even close. X is a display server. Win 3.1 was a shell on DOS. X can run remote displays. Try that with Windows 3.1. (Not to say X doesn't have its problems, but they're being debated and addressed as we speak, supposedly.)
"But it's still there."
You've never looked at your Windows boot log, have you?
"it's no registry."
Thank God, the Windows Registry is the dumbest fucking idea Microsoft ever had. A nightmare single point of failure with no documentation and apparently no rules.
Text config files are infinitely to be preferred over such a thing. Especially when there are now numerous GUI tools that front-end them and do vetting of your choices so you don't have to worry about typos.
"It would be an almost impossible task to write a GUI to manage all the disparate Linux components as elegantly as Mac OS X or Windows does."
Never heard of Webmin, have you?
And since when is Windows "elegant" in handling its component configuration? You've never used Windows Server 2003, have you?
"I use Linux every day, and I can tell you, I fully understand why people hesitate to adopt it - despite the fact it's free."
No, you're a Windows astroturfer trying to convince people that Linux has fatal flaws and covering your ass with that lame remark.
This is the latest gambit from Windows trolls - pretend to be Linux users "dissatisfied" with Linux or only wanting to suggest "improvements" to Linux. You see it everywhere now on the Linux boards. They give themselves away by their lack of real knowledge about what is available on Linux and how Linux works.
If for no other reason than the vast majority of businesses are NOT "sticking with Windows", they simply don't have a clue about Linux.
Probably ninety percent of businesses only have a vague notion that Linux exists as some sort of geek software. Certainly ninety percent of users don't know what Linux is and have never heard of it. They barely know what an operating system is in the first place.
None of which means anything as far as whether Linux can replace Windows.
As I've said, the only thing holding Linux back is a lack of enterprise applications and application developers, and a lack of VARs able to support large corporation mass migrations and migration of the scores of thousands of small businesses. It's simply a matter of manpower and economics which will sort itself out over the next ten years.
It took ten years for Java to get hundreds of thousands of developers and enterprise level capabilities and that was a language controlled by one company. It should not be surprising that Linux isn't able to produce hundreds of thousands of sys admins and consultants in the same time frame, particularly when it had to take ten years to get to the point where it was feasible to replace Windows. Give it another ten years and it WILL replace Windows given enough people who see money in it.
Yeah, right - and Windows Media Player can play everything out there out of the box.
NOT.
If you don't install more codecs and plugins, you aren't going to see half the media content available.
Your problem is quite simple: you don't want to train anybody, you don't want to change anything, you just want to stumble along with the same old crap.
So you're right - who gives a shit about you? Your people are old, about to retire, and are obsolete. Your organization is undoubtedly the same.
If you don't want to migrate to what is better, stick with crap. Nobody cares. Deal with it.
Personally I see a vast industry for moving companies from crappy Windows to less crappy Linux emerging.
Reminds me of the days when IBM sold the small business system System/32 with a bunch of lame office apps, claiming that nobody needed to hire programmers any more.
Started a huge cottage industry of System/32 consultants and application developers.
There are more and more job and contract openings for Linux developers, consultants and sys admins every year.
The Windows-to-Linux migration is going to make some people rich - well, earn a living any way.
"if my ISP would provide the same kind of support, for Linux, that my ISP provides for Window, I would switch my AMD-powered desktop over to Linux"
And what exactly would that support be?
Everybody who uses Linux has Internet connectivity. Linux is a network OS from the ground up. What doesn't work on Linux concerning the Internet that you need ISP support for?
Are you saying your ISP doesn't provide help desk support for Linux? So what? When have you or anyone else ever needed that?
Any current Linux distro will connect via dial-up/DSL/cable in a matter of minutes (once you figure out the stupid little connector app with the cable plugin icon in the System Tray, which seems to be a really stupid interface that I wish they'd fucking get rid of since it's brain-dead.) After that, I've never needed any sort of ISP support for Windows or Linux.
Sorry - Mac is a niche OS and will remain so regardless of what hardware platform it runs on. No proprietary OS is going to overtake Windows, neither is it going to rein in an OSS OS like Linux.
You might want to read Cringely's latest column on the Mac move as well. It's not as simple as Jobs made it out to be.
I think he refers to the fact that you can't run Windows 2003 Server on your Windows CE PDA just by stripping out parts you don't want, tweaking it and recompiling.
Apparently not even Microsoft can do that since they didn't.
I believe there ARE several Exchange alternatives available for Linux at this point.
I don't think any of them are free, though.
Still, if you compare the cost of Exchange to the alternatives, you might as well switch as the alternatives are likely to be more stable and secure, so the license cost is just break-even.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody interested in starting a pool?
I say this story gets duped AGAIN by Friday. Any takers?
Somebody submit this story again - prove me wrong.
Irrelevant. If the ISP starts trying to prevent people from downloading encrypted data of any kind, that ISP is going out of business.
And they can "flag" anybody they want - it's "what are they gonna do about it" that matters. Most ISPs can't even manage their clients as it is.
Oh, sure, I can imagine all sorts of Federal laws requiring this crap - and I have no doubt the Feds are going to pass them. They probably will entirely outlaw P2P of ANY kind, whether it has commercial uses or not.
It's irrelevant. Unless they make the entire Internet illegal OR so totally open that every piece of data on it must be examined and tracked by the Feds, it's not going to stop file sharing. It's that simple. There's always going to be a way around it and DRM is the least of our worries.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose it, but it's not going to matter one way or the other, because the government is this country no longer listens to ANYBODY who isn't a big campaign contributor or other form of corporate or wealthy influence. It's that simple.
The bottom line is: sooner or later this government is going to have to be trashed totally - either by a Second American Revolution (not likely, since none of the morons today have any clue about the first one) or by someone simply having enough and nuking Washington with a smuggled nuke "borrowed" from Russia or the Israelis - very likely, in my view.
Anybody who thinks everything is going to be tied down so tightly you can't do anything just doesn't understand human history. It has NEVER worked that way, and it never will - until we Transhumans fry the lot of you and remove the issue entirely.
For everybody who runs Windows 2000 on old machines, as a recent
So I'd say Windows, old or new, is definitely contributing to buying new PCs.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I love it when two
Gee, that's brilliant...
Let's see it boot in ten seconds WITHOUT hibernation.
Jesus, some people think everybody but them is an idiot that can't read or doesn't know as much as they do.
Ten MB of RAM to run apps in.
Wow. I'm so thrilled. My text editor might actually work. Certainly Notepad will.
This guy has WAY too much time on his hands. Obviously a sixteen-year-old
Actually I appreciate knowing the tweaks to help Windows 2000 run on old hardware. It's knowledge that might come in handy when working on some client's old POS - and I get a lot of those idiots trying to make a Libretto their main desktop machines. I had one guy try to install Comcast cable on one - Comcast won't even install with less than 64MB.
Never heard of such nonsense.
Obviously time to dump your ISP.
If SBC DSL doesn't have any such requirement, even though they don't support Linux either, obviously you're using a lame ISP.
Oh, wait, MSN - well, that explains it, doesn't it?
You actually called MSN and told them you were using Linux? How curious...
If you think a US prison is better, you haven't been in one.
I have. Oh, yeah, you get TV and the like. Piss a guard off and you get worse than "water-boarding".
Where do you think these asshole MPs that run the military prisons come from? Most of them are US prison guards and US cops. And the prison system in Iraq was designed by US prison administrators whose prisons have been sued repeatedly for cruel and inhumane conditions.
There's no way unauthorized distribution is going to be prevented by US laws of any kind. That's a pipe dream by people who don't understand the nature of black markets and who have masochistic complexes where they like being subjected to oppression by their "leaders."
Punks, in other words.
Oh, a brilliant remark.
So you're saying encryption is bad because it isn't open to the world.
Brilliant.
Speaking of "trusted data from a trusted source", do you remember the virus Microsoft shipped to South Korea one time? Just because it's DRM'd doesn't mean it wasn't subject to being hacked before being signed. THAT's proper security thinking.
"If there's a problem in Linux, FIX THE PROBLEM"
What part of "there's NO problem", don't you understand, genius?
Some Windows shill babbles nonsense about Linux that hasn't been true in three years, and I'm supposed to take that seriously?
As for the Mac community not comparing itself to Microsoft, excuse me, I seem to recall a series of ads that did exactly that. Not to mention the fact that the Mac is such an insular community, it took an act of Congress damn near to get them to put a UNIX derivative under their desktop.
And now they act like that UNIX derivative is so much better than Linux that they could easily put Microsoft out of business if they just ran on Intel.
Well, now's your chance, Macnut. Put up or shut up. If Apple doesn't have a ten percent market share within five years after the year they switch to Intel, shut up.
I have news for you, pal.
I have over three hundred videos of the Corrs. They are not produced by studios or companies like Real or Apple, they're produced by people using whatever encoder happened to be in their video software. And there are probably a hundred of those.
Windows Media Player will NOT play half of these videos. This includes MANY AVI and even ASF formats which WMP supposedly supports.
Video Lan Client, which has most codecs embedded, will play most of them. MPlayer will play most of them. Winamp will play them if I download a half dozen codec packages and install them.
"I rarely hear Exchange customers complain about unstable service"
You haven't opened your ears. Exchange has a ton of problems syncing with Outlook, losing mail, double-delivering mail, locking users out of mail, etc, which makes the "Windows is integrated" comments look silly. Do a Google and learn.
And Register rollbacks?
When was the last time you saw SAW or even HEARD of a corrupted text file? (Not including typos made by the configurer which are avoided by having a editing GUI front-end - which Linux has.) When was the last time you had to "rollback" a text file?
"Text config files makes it harder to use advanced techniques such as AI, don't you think?"
No - although XML or some other more structured, self-defining form would be better. But the Windows Registry damn sure isn't it. If you broke the Windows Registry out into specific configuration files for each service, and didn't allow programmers to stuff all kinds of pointless crap in there totally out of system control, it might be usable. As it is, it's a joke.
I don't see why this is modded "Redundant", he has a perfectly good point.
Companies are psychologically conditioned to buy COTS, even if COTS sucks.
Marcus Ranum's rant about software accountability touches on this. It's a problem with dumb management (as virtually every other corporate problem is.)
It's a real problem for Linux, but it can be overcome once more companies start using Linux (and other OSS) because of their overwhelming advantages and more consultants and VARS start touting Linux and OSS because of the cost (including reliability and security as cost issues) advantages to both them and their clients.
"between GUI world and Console/Kernel world."
And Windows has this integration exactly how?
"X is to Linux as Win 3.1 was to Dos." Not even close. X is a display server. Win 3.1 was a shell on DOS. X can run remote displays. Try that with Windows 3.1. (Not to say X doesn't have its problems, but they're being debated and addressed as we speak, supposedly.)
"But it's still there."
You've never looked at your Windows boot log, have you?
"it's no registry."
Thank God, the Windows Registry is the dumbest fucking idea Microsoft ever had. A nightmare single point of failure with no documentation and apparently no rules.
Text config files are infinitely to be preferred over such a thing. Especially when there are now numerous GUI tools that front-end them and do vetting of your choices so you don't have to worry about typos.
"It would be an almost impossible task to write a GUI to manage all the disparate Linux components as elegantly as Mac OS X or Windows does."
Never heard of Webmin, have you?
And since when is Windows "elegant" in handling its component configuration? You've never used Windows Server 2003, have you?
"I use Linux every day, and I can tell you, I fully understand why people hesitate to adopt it - despite the fact it's free."
No, you're a Windows astroturfer trying to convince people that Linux has fatal flaws and covering your ass with that lame remark.
This is the latest gambit from Windows trolls - pretend to be Linux users "dissatisfied" with Linux or only wanting to suggest "improvements" to Linux. You see it everywhere now on the Linux boards. They give themselves away by their lack of real knowledge about what is available on Linux and how Linux works.
That's true.
It's also true about all the old companies.
Read Marcus Ranum's rant about "accountability". There is no such thing.
If for no other reason than the vast majority of businesses are NOT "sticking with Windows", they simply don't have a clue about Linux.
Probably ninety percent of businesses only have a vague notion that Linux exists as some sort of geek software. Certainly ninety percent of users don't know what Linux is and have never heard of it. They barely know what an operating system is in the first place.
None of which means anything as far as whether Linux can replace Windows.
As I've said, the only thing holding Linux back is a lack of enterprise applications and application developers, and a lack of VARs able to support large corporation mass migrations and migration of the scores of thousands of small businesses. It's simply a matter of manpower and economics which will sort itself out over the next ten years.
It took ten years for Java to get hundreds of thousands of developers and enterprise level capabilities and that was a language controlled by one company. It should not be surprising that Linux isn't able to produce hundreds of thousands of sys admins and consultants in the same time frame, particularly when it had to take ten years to get to the point where it was feasible to replace Windows. Give it another ten years and it WILL replace Windows given enough people who see money in it.
"multimedia has to 'just work'"
Yeah, right - and Windows Media Player can play everything out there out of the box.
NOT.
If you don't install more codecs and plugins, you aren't going to see half the media content available.
Your problem is quite simple: you don't want to train anybody, you don't want to change anything, you just want to stumble along with the same old crap.
So you're right - who gives a shit about you? Your people are old, about to retire, and are obsolete. Your organization is undoubtedly the same.
If you don't want to migrate to what is better, stick with crap. Nobody cares. Deal with it.
"Close source innovation"?
What "innovation" would that be? Clippy?
Personally I see a vast industry for moving companies from crappy Windows to less crappy Linux emerging.
Reminds me of the days when IBM sold the small business system System/32 with a bunch of lame office apps, claiming that nobody needed to hire programmers any more.
Started a huge cottage industry of System/32 consultants and application developers.
There are more and more job and contract openings for Linux developers, consultants and sys admins every year.
The Windows-to-Linux migration is going to make some people rich - well, earn a living any way.
"if my ISP would provide the same kind of support, for Linux, that my ISP provides for Window, I would switch my AMD-powered desktop over to Linux"
And what exactly would that support be?
Everybody who uses Linux has Internet connectivity. Linux is a network OS from the ground up. What doesn't work on Linux concerning the Internet that you need ISP support for?
Are you saying your ISP doesn't provide help desk support for Linux? So what? When have you or anyone else ever needed that?
Any current Linux distro will connect via dial-up/DSL/cable in a matter of minutes (once you figure out the stupid little connector app with the cable plugin icon in the System Tray, which seems to be a really stupid interface that I wish they'd fucking get rid of since it's brain-dead.) After that, I've never needed any sort of ISP support for Windows or Linux.
Sorry - Mac is a niche OS and will remain so regardless of what hardware platform it runs on. No proprietary OS is going to overtake Windows, neither is it going to rein in an OSS OS like Linux.
You might want to read Cringely's latest column on the Mac move as well. It's not as simple as Jobs made it out to be.
I think he refers to the fact that you can't run Windows 2003 Server on your Windows CE PDA just by stripping out parts you don't want, tweaking it and recompiling.
Apparently not even Microsoft can do that since they didn't.
I believe there ARE several Exchange alternatives available for Linux at this point.
I don't think any of them are free, though.
Still, if you compare the cost of Exchange to the alternatives, you might as well switch as the alternatives are likely to be more stable and secure, so the license cost is just break-even.
Buggy device drivers.
Until this is solved, Windows will be an unstable, unreliable, completely useless POS.
Not to mention the massive security holes problem, which is something different but even more serious.
Not to mention massive usability issues, which are an even more serious problem.
Not to mention Bill's pure greed, which is an even more costly problem.
There's a reason
Being smart-ass assholes is only ONE reason.
Besides, who says Transhumanists don't get laid?
Have you ever seen Max More's wife, Natasha?
Or Gina Miller, who does "The NanoGirl News" Usenet newsletter?