"But one with proper security controls put in place like a good virus scanner/firewall/IE settings/anti spyware and creating a non-admin user for web browsing will not be affected"
Right - and Granny isn't supposed to be able to run Linux, but she can do all that security stuff on Windows, right?
Well, I actually believe she can IF someone tells her she needs to...
And she can learn Linux, too, if she decides Windows is a piece of bloated, unreliable, unstable, expensive, insecure CRAP...
How many YEARS past the last "security initiative" from Microsoft are we now?
Why don't they just spend some of that $30 billion they pissed away on their stock prop PR stunt and just BUY the entire computer security INDUSTRY and integrate it?
Does anybody REALLY believe Longhorn is going to be secure?
I gotta tell ya, I get by with Windows with a LOT less juggling than you do - and I suspect I'll get by with Linux with a lot less juggling, too.
What you call a "usable state", I call fully loaded. When I say "usable", I mean the OS is loaded and running, and any critical security such as AV and firewall are up and running, oh, and Internet access is up and running, of course. And maybe my favorite browser, email client, music player and text editor are installed.
Anything else is for later.
Which is why one DOES image backups - you don't want to freakin' reinstall everything every time the OS gets hosed! Of course that takes days! Back when I was running Windows 98, I must have had fifty or more programs installed - and that was less than I probably will put on Linux since I have several GIG of programs sitting on the Linux side of my system now waiting to be checked out - not to mention 20 or 30 CD's full of Linux Format stuff to check out!
Reinstall all that once I get my Linux to what *I* call a "usable state" - no fraggin' way! There WILL be an image backup!
I am the one referring to the user getting it from the copy he owns. The parent apparently believes that OSS companies distribute illegal copies of Windows products, which is of course nonsense in most cases I am aware of.
And as I said above, if you own a copy of Windows, you can certainly use the DLLs under Linux - even if the Windows EULA prohibits it, which it may in some cases. The EULA does not remove my fair use rights.
This is even true under Windows open source. Bart's PE creates a bootable CD of a minimal Windows XP system which uses system objects from your own copy of Windows XP. If this were completely illegal, Bart would have been sued out of existence by Microsoft by now.
Your assumption is that there can be NO profit where intellectual property is not enforced.
Bullshit.
Your statement that one cannot sell above cost when someone else can replicate and distribute below your cost is not born out by existing markets. Cost is not the only factor in profitability as any merchant will tell you. There are other factors which contribute to the maintenance of profitability. Service is one simple example. Mere distribution is not necessarily sufficient to control a market.
The rest of your argument is irrelevant since your basic premise is bogus.
Look, moron, I was IN the Federal prison at Leavenworth. I know what is there.
My use of the term Leavenworth military prison was intended to describe WHATEVER detention facility was present at that location. If you can't handle that, that's your problem. I don't know what the thing is officially called and I couldn't care less. Obviously, from your response and your comments about Hersh, you are a nit-picker who glosses over facts with nits about terminology.
As far as my stating that Rumsfeld and Bush should be imprisoned for war crimes, it is irrelevant whether they COULD be sent to a military prison as civilians, they SHOULD be sent to one (as I'm told they're worse than even the Federal joints - and certainly they deserve to be sent to an Abu Ghraib-quality US military prison.)
As for my service record, I was inducted and served basic and advanced training at Fort Jackson from March 1967 to June 1967, went to Vietnam in July or August of 1967 and returned in late July IIRC 1968 (I can't remember exact dates forty years later - ah wait, my DD214 comes to the rescue - 6 Aug 67 to 5 Aug 68). I was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay for nine months as a clerk typist in the orderly room for a petroleum company, and then Vung Ro Bay south of Tuy Hoa for three months as a radio operator for a petroleum detachment - including during the attack on Vung Ro in June 1968, details of which you can find on the Net if you look hard enough. I served my remaining time at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in the AG offices as a clerk, specialty 71H20, Personnel Specialist. I was released from servitude on March 16, 1970.
My Service Number was RA 11 801 502, subsequently changed to my SSN.
that the rest of the ten or twenty or fifty thousand casualties to be coming from Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and North Korea) will all be able to look like Arnold...
Wonder if any of these devices are available to the hundred thousand Iraqi civilian casualties...or the million more to come...
Oh, and meanwhile we're not supposed to recommend Linux to "granny" because "granny doesn't know how to use it and can't learn"?
What's wrong with this picture?
"in all those years I have never once had it corrupt drives, catch a virus or become infested."
"By contrast, I can rebuild my entire XP box in about 3 hours."
Does one see a conflict between these two statements?
It takes you ten hours to install a recent Linux distro? It should take you less time than installing Windows XP.
Not to mention the fact that there is such a thing as image backups...
I will admit that I still use Windows more than I do Linux at the moment. This is because I started with Windows three years ago, and learned Linux shortly after. Mostly, it's because I haven't found the time to do the work needed to install and convert over to Linux equivalents to the Windows software I'm used to using (ALL of it freeware, by the way). In fact, during this winter break from City College, I intended to do that, but still haven't found the time yet.
But every time Windows drives me nuts, I swear it's time to drop-kick it and move over my daily non-Windows work. (I have to keep Windows on the machines because I do PC tech support.)
I KNOW Linux can do everything I do on Windows - and more easily. It's just the personal time and effort needed to totally convert. This IS a problem for home users (but not for corporate ones, since IT is in charge of that) and I think it's the ONLY REAL problem preventing most people from converting to Linux - not the ability to use Linux or even the ability to learn a new OS - it's just the TIME needed.
I think for most people, the time needed to do the INITIAL conversion outweighs the benefits.
But the bottom line is: it shouldn't.
It's like quitting smoking: do you endure the conversion or do you accept cancer?
Hell, it isn't even the viruses that eat up time if your machine is well-maintained (i.e., a simple free AV like AVG and a simple firewall like Kerio on my Windows side of the machine).
What eats up my time on Windows is fighting the software! I just spent SIX HOURS the other night fighting Winamp because my MP3s and music videos started sounding like they were playing underwater. Some freakin' codec must have hosed a Registry key or something.
I had to uninstall and reinstall Winamp plus a dozen codecs, then fight for which codec would run the music videos, THEN fight Winamp's lousy media library which insisted on putting all but the MOV videos in the audio view and the MOVs in the video view.
Winamp has seriously pissed me off, so I'm going to have to look around for some other player that can handle all the video formats I want to play.
But I am fairly sure that the ORIGINAL problem was that WINDOWS hosed some Registry key in the first place. I mean, why would a codec suddenly fail? It's a freakin' program, and programs don't just "fail". They fail when something outside themselves gets changed. And the Windows Registry is the dumbest goddamn idea Microsoft ever had!
I had to reinstall Windows 2000 TWICE within the first six weeks of using it when a third party software screwed up the Registry (the first ime) and then Windows did it all by itself the second time.
Then I had to reinstall Windows XP when it got hosed after a Windows 2000 program locked up and I had to hit the power button - and it wasn't even the OS that was running at the time!
Installing Linux can take a while, but once installed, even if application programs fail, they don't take down the OS. And that is a net savings of time!
Just saving time on update reboots is enough to justify drop-kicking Windows!
"nobody (except hard-core OSS zealots) is going to respect a thing you say when you say that"
Er, does this mean we OSS "zealots" are supposed to give a shit whether you Microsoft shills "respect" us? (Right - "I'll respect you in the morning" - does this ring a bell?)
Gates doesn't respect ANYONE, as any biography of him clearly shows. He wants to call us "commies"! So fuck him - and fuck Microsoft shills.
Despite being a Linux promoter, I have to admit that I could not install Linux one time.
The box was my old Compaq Deskpro 4000. The Linux OS's were Red Hat 7.3, Red Hat 8.0 and (IIRC) Mandrake 9.
The problem was that no matter how I created the partition table - inside Linux, outside Linux using Partition Magic, Ranish Partition Manager or whatever - none of those distros could recognize the partition table even after they themselves had created and initialized it. Obviously there was something about the Compaq BIOS that simply didn't report the geometry of the Maxtor 30GB drive I was using correctly as far as the Linux kernel was concerned.
HOWEVER...Red Hat 7.0 blows on the machine with absolutely no problem at all! Go figure...
Oh, and Knoppix 3.6 won't boot on my other machine without using the noapic option, whereas Knoppix 3.3 has no problem at all. I hate it when later versions have more problems than earlier versions...
I haven't installed Linux on much else so I can't comment on overall install success statistics but from what I read in the newsgroups, Linux can fail to install on occasion.
Once you GET it installed, however, it's also FAR more stable than Windows. I had to reinstall Windows 2000 TWICE in the first month of using it because of registry corruption problems - one introduced by a third party software, another all by Windows lonesome self... Then I had to reinstall Windows XP (same machine, dual boot) after it hosed itself from a power failure WHEN IT WASN'T EVEN THE OS RUNNING...
For centuries, people produced artifacts for trade. Other people saw those artifacts and reproduced them themselves. This is how stuff gets made and distributed throughout the species.
Protecting ANYTHING - specific or not - reduces the speed with which advances are distributed throughout the species.
NOT protecting anything does not in the slightest slow down the rate of advance of new ideas. There is absolutely NO evidence that the rate of introduction of new ideas is dependent on the protection of those ideas by the state.
In fact, the opposite is clearly the case. Protecting things slows the rate of production of new things because focus is then on the maximization of profit on the old things.
Paradoxically, while the maximization of profit is the motivation for the production of new things by individuals, the net benefit for the species - and thus all individuals - is the minimization of profit on EXISTING things via competition. File trading is merely competition - not theft.
Any form of intellectual property is damaging to the advancement of the species.
"Only on slashdot can Iranian censorship remind you of how evil the US is."
Why - because it reminds us that the neocons intend to attack Iran and create further chaos in the Middle East in order to gain oil revenues, prop up the failing US dollar, and outflank Russia (so they can start another war in the future to make Halliburton even more profitable)?
That's really funny, given the post by a Microsoft shill on his blog some time back that proclaimed FireFox was "insecure" because you had to download it from an "insecure" site.
Microsoft AntiSpyware has detected that Microsoft Windows is currently running. This operating system is sometimes used in corporate networks. However, this operating system has been a wide source for spam and viruses, and for most users should be turned off and disabled.
There's no way Ad-Aware and Spybot are going to miss FOUR THOUSAND files! (In fact, while I've seen a LOT of spyware on some clients' machines, I'd guess 90% of those 4,000 were just cookies.)
Unless they've been disabled by some previous spyware...
Which could just as easily happen to the Giant product if a spyware author bothers...
Slashdot Mirror
You're obviously either a troll or a moron.
Anybody reading Slashdot over the last year knows I'm been in the joint. I've posted info about it enough times.
"Not the words of a veteran"? Right, like you speak for all veterans. You're the liar - you've never been in the military, obviously.
Just another
"But one with proper security controls put in place like a good virus scanner/firewall/IE settings/anti spyware and creating a non-admin user for web browsing will not be affected"
Right - and Granny isn't supposed to be able to run Linux, but she can do all that security stuff on Windows, right?
Well, I actually believe she can IF someone tells her she needs to...
And she can learn Linux, too, if she decides Windows is a piece of bloated, unreliable, unstable, expensive, insecure CRAP...
How many YEARS past the last "security initiative" from Microsoft are we now?
Why don't they just spend some of that $30 billion they pissed away on their stock prop PR stunt and just BUY the entire computer security INDUSTRY and integrate it?
Does anybody REALLY believe Longhorn is going to be secure?
Gimme a break...
No, I think he's referring to Roseanne...
I gotta tell ya, I get by with Windows with a LOT less juggling than you do - and I suspect I'll get by with Linux with a lot less juggling, too.
What you call a "usable state", I call fully loaded. When I say "usable", I mean the OS is loaded and running, and any critical security such as AV and firewall are up and running, oh, and Internet access is up and running, of course. And maybe my favorite browser, email client, music player and text editor are installed.
Anything else is for later.
Which is why one DOES image backups - you don't want to freakin' reinstall everything every time the OS gets hosed! Of course that takes days! Back when I was running Windows 98, I must have had fifty or more programs installed - and that was less than I probably will put on Linux since I have several GIG of programs sitting on the Linux side of my system now waiting to be checked out - not to mention 20 or 30 CD's full of Linux Format stuff to check out!
Reinstall all that once I get my Linux to what *I* call a "usable state" - no fraggin' way! There WILL be an image backup!
I am the one referring to the user getting it from the copy he owns. The parent apparently believes that OSS companies distribute illegal copies of Windows products, which is of course nonsense in most cases I am aware of.
And as I said above, if you own a copy of Windows, you can certainly use the DLLs under Linux - even if the Windows EULA prohibits it, which it may in some cases. The EULA does not remove my fair use rights.
This is even true under Windows open source. Bart's PE creates a bootable CD of a minimal Windows XP system which uses system objects from your own copy of Windows XP. If this were completely illegal, Bart would have been sued out of existence by Microsoft by now.
Your assumption is that there can be NO profit where intellectual property is not enforced.
Bullshit.
Your statement that one cannot sell above cost when someone else can replicate and distribute below your cost is not born out by existing markets. Cost is not the only factor in profitability as any merchant will tell you. There are other factors which contribute to the maintenance of profitability. Service is one simple example. Mere distribution is not necessarily sufficient to control a market.
The rest of your argument is irrelevant since your basic premise is bogus.
Really - you can make an XP box run on IBM mainframes...or isn't that "useful"?
Nice. You must be making a lot of money as a system programmer then, I take it?
Your basic point is certainly valid - that if you don't want to learn new skills for the benefits, you won't.
I wouldn't brag about it.
Look, moron, I was IN the Federal prison at Leavenworth. I know what is there.
My use of the term Leavenworth military prison was intended to describe WHATEVER detention facility was present at that location. If you can't handle that, that's your problem. I don't know what the thing is officially called and I couldn't care less. Obviously, from your response and your comments about Hersh, you are a nit-picker who glosses over facts with nits about terminology.
As far as my stating that Rumsfeld and Bush should be imprisoned for war crimes, it is irrelevant whether they COULD be sent to a military prison as civilians, they SHOULD be sent to one (as I'm told they're worse than even the Federal joints - and certainly they deserve to be sent to an Abu Ghraib-quality US military prison.)
As for my service record, I was inducted and served basic and advanced training at Fort Jackson from March 1967 to June 1967, went to Vietnam in July or August of 1967 and returned in late July IIRC 1968 (I can't remember exact dates forty years later - ah wait, my DD214 comes to the rescue - 6 Aug 67 to 5 Aug 68). I was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay for nine months as a clerk typist in the orderly room for a petroleum company, and then Vung Ro Bay south of Tuy Hoa for three months as a radio operator for a petroleum detachment - including during the attack on Vung Ro in June 1968, details of which you can find on the Net if you look hard enough. I served my remaining time at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in the AG offices as a clerk, specialty 71H20, Personnel Specialist. I was released from servitude on March 16, 1970.
My Service Number was RA 11 801 502, subsequently changed to my SSN.
So fuck you very much.
that the rest of the ten or twenty or fifty thousand casualties to be coming from Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and North Korea) will all be able to look like Arnold...
Wonder if any of these devices are available to the hundred thousand Iraqi civilian casualties...or the million more to come...
In other words, because somebody encodes a media product using a closed source codec, then we must all abandon OSS?
And who says it's illegally copied if one owns said Windows distro?
Let's try this again.
Get rid of closed source codecs. Stop encoding media with same.
Now we can all be free.
Better, right?
"Because I know how to use it."
Oh, and meanwhile we're not supposed to recommend Linux to "granny" because "granny doesn't know how to use it and can't learn"?
What's wrong with this picture?
"in all those years I have never once had it corrupt drives, catch a virus or become infested."
"By contrast, I can rebuild my entire XP box in about 3 hours."
Does one see a conflict between these two statements?
It takes you ten hours to install a recent Linux distro? It should take you less time than installing Windows XP.
Not to mention the fact that there is such a thing as image backups...
I will admit that I still use Windows more than I do Linux at the moment. This is because I started with Windows three years ago, and learned Linux shortly after. Mostly, it's because I haven't found the time to do the work needed to install and convert over to Linux equivalents to the Windows software I'm used to using (ALL of it freeware, by the way). In fact, during this winter break from City College, I intended to do that, but still haven't found the time yet.
But every time Windows drives me nuts, I swear it's time to drop-kick it and move over my daily non-Windows work. (I have to keep Windows on the machines because I do PC tech support.)
I KNOW Linux can do everything I do on Windows - and more easily. It's just the personal time and effort needed to totally convert. This IS a problem for home users (but not for corporate ones, since IT is in charge of that) and I think it's the ONLY REAL problem preventing most people from converting to Linux - not the ability to use Linux or even the ability to learn a new OS - it's just the TIME needed.
I think for most people, the time needed to do the INITIAL conversion outweighs the benefits.
But the bottom line is: it shouldn't.
It's like quitting smoking: do you endure the conversion or do you accept cancer?
Hell, it isn't even the viruses that eat up time if your machine is well-maintained (i.e., a simple free AV like AVG and a simple firewall like Kerio on my Windows side of the machine).
What eats up my time on Windows is fighting the software! I just spent SIX HOURS the other night fighting Winamp because my MP3s and music videos started sounding like they were playing underwater. Some freakin' codec must have hosed a Registry key or something.
I had to uninstall and reinstall Winamp plus a dozen codecs, then fight for which codec would run the music videos, THEN fight Winamp's lousy media library which insisted on putting all but the MOV videos in the audio view and the MOVs in the video view.
Winamp has seriously pissed me off, so I'm going to have to look around for some other player that can handle all the video formats I want to play.
But I am fairly sure that the ORIGINAL problem was that WINDOWS hosed some Registry key in the first place. I mean, why would a codec suddenly fail? It's a freakin' program, and programs don't just "fail". They fail when something outside themselves gets changed. And the Windows Registry is the dumbest goddamn idea Microsoft ever had!
I had to reinstall Windows 2000 TWICE within the first six weeks of using it when a third party software screwed up the Registry (the first ime) and then Windows did it all by itself the second time.
Then I had to reinstall Windows XP when it got hosed after a Windows 2000 program locked up and I had to hit the power button - and it wasn't even the OS that was running at the time!
Installing Linux can take a while, but once installed, even if application programs fail, they don't take down the OS. And that is a net savings of time!
Just saving time on update reboots is enough to justify drop-kicking Windows!
How about MicroShaft? MicroShit? MicroSucks?
Does that help?
"nobody (except hard-core OSS zealots) is going to respect a thing you say when you say that"
Er, does this mean we OSS "zealots" are supposed to give a shit whether you Microsoft shills "respect" us? (Right - "I'll respect you in the morning" - does this ring a bell?)
Gates doesn't respect ANYONE, as any biography of him clearly shows. He wants to call us "commies"! So fuck him - and fuck Microsoft shills.
Have a nice day.
I nominate the new Trademarked name:
CSOD - Colored Screen of Death!
Or how about: WSOD - Windows Screen of Death!
Or how about: WMD - Windows Machine Death!
Oh, wait, the last one is taken...
Despite being a Linux promoter, I have to admit that I could not install Linux one time.
The box was my old Compaq Deskpro 4000. The Linux OS's were Red Hat 7.3, Red Hat 8.0 and (IIRC) Mandrake 9.
The problem was that no matter how I created the partition table - inside Linux, outside Linux using Partition Magic, Ranish Partition Manager or whatever - none of those distros could recognize the partition table even after they themselves had created and initialized it. Obviously there was something about the Compaq BIOS that simply didn't report the geometry of the Maxtor 30GB drive I was using correctly as far as the Linux kernel was concerned.
HOWEVER...Red Hat 7.0 blows on the machine with absolutely no problem at all! Go figure...
Oh, and Knoppix 3.6 won't boot on my other machine without using the noapic option, whereas Knoppix 3.3 has no problem at all. I hate it when later versions have more problems than earlier versions...
I haven't installed Linux on much else so I can't comment on overall install success statistics but from what I read in the newsgroups, Linux can fail to install on occasion.
Once you GET it installed, however, it's also FAR more stable than Windows. I had to reinstall Windows 2000 TWICE in the first month of using it because of registry corruption problems - one introduced by a third party software, another all by Windows lonesome self... Then I had to reinstall Windows XP (same machine, dual boot) after it hosed itself from a power failure WHEN IT WASN'T EVEN THE OS RUNNING...
"I think all products that do this in the beta stage should be, by law, withdrawn from development and sale/distribution."
I might agree with you about the distribution WITHOUT further development part...
Microsoft seems to forget that crashes mean "not ready for prime time"...
Not to mention the common sense part that betas should never be publicly demonstrated...you're just asking for trouble.
Of course, if hype and PR are running your company, it's no surprise when stupidly demonstrating a beta gets turned on you.
Lotus? LOTUS?
That's IBM's property!
Somebody call the Nazgul!
Oh, wait, I forgot - SCO owns all of IBM...
Oh, wait, the Nazgul are proving that's not true!
Call the Nazgul!
Irrelevant.
For centuries, people produced artifacts for trade. Other people saw those artifacts and reproduced them themselves. This is how stuff gets made and distributed throughout the species.
Protecting ANYTHING - specific or not - reduces the speed with which advances are distributed throughout the species.
NOT protecting anything does not in the slightest slow down the rate of advance of new ideas. There is absolutely NO evidence that the rate of introduction of new ideas is dependent on the protection of those ideas by the state.
In fact, the opposite is clearly the case. Protecting things slows the rate of production of new things because focus is then on the maximization of profit on the old things.
Paradoxically, while the maximization of profit is the motivation for the production of new things by individuals, the net benefit for the species - and thus all individuals - is the minimization of profit on EXISTING things via competition. File trading is merely competition - not theft.
Any form of intellectual property is damaging to the advancement of the species.
"No, the police come in."
With a warrant.
Issued by a judge.
Based (supposedly, but rarely) on sworn facts presented by the investigating officers.
And, yes, I know about "hot pursuit" - which doesn't apply to file trading...
"Slavery is illegal, Rape is illegal"
Unless you're a member of the US military in Iraq...
And Iran, eventually...
And Syria eventually...
And Saudi Arabia eventually...
Last I heard, distributing copyrighted materials over the Net hasn't given anyone a broken fingernail (except maybe from the keyboard)...
"Only on slashdot can Iranian censorship remind you of how evil the US is."
Why - because it reminds us that the neocons intend to attack Iran and create further chaos in the Middle East in order to gain oil revenues, prop up the failing US dollar, and outflank Russia (so they can start another war in the future to make Halliburton even more profitable)?
Oh, wait, this was flamebait...
Never mind...
That's really funny, given the post by a Microsoft shill on his blog some time back that proclaimed FireFox was "insecure" because you had to download it from an "insecure" site.
Wonder what the hypocrite has to say about this?
Microsoft AntiSpyware has detected that Microsoft Windows is currently running. This operating system is sometimes used in corporate networks. However, this operating system has been a wide source for spam and viruses, and for most users should be turned off and disabled.
Maybe it misinterpreted the word "cat" as "sex kitten" and decided it was a porn dialer...:-)
That about sounds like Microsoft, whose founder has decided OSS advocates are "communists"...
I don't buy that one at all.
There's no way Ad-Aware and Spybot are going to miss FOUR THOUSAND files! (In fact, while I've seen a LOT of spyware on some clients' machines, I'd guess 90% of those 4,000 were just cookies.)
Unless they've been disabled by some previous spyware...
Which could just as easily happen to the Giant product if a spyware author bothers...