Consider a Kernel as a commodity. If my favorite browser works on Windows, Debian, Redhat, MacOSX or Solaris, then there is one less lock in. One less reason to be running Windows. So I do this for as many apps as I can, steadily porting them to as many platforms as I can.
All of a sudden things like "Value for money" and "reliability" and "security" become important. This beats the monopoly system whereby to do my job I MUST run an OS from Vendor A. I now have the freedom to use an OS for different reasons.
So whilst switching browsers in itself doesn't make a fig of difference, ponder switching office packages, groupware packages, ect. ect.
I wage war apon you with weapons of mass degrees and temperatureism. The good ole Faren of heit will be crushed under our superior decimalised thermometers. No more will people have to convert to an outdated imperialist measurement. We shall crush you.
Until the Kelvinists crush us.
Set up your internet proxy to block executable files. Also scripty files. Whilst you're at it, try getting your mail server to do similar things. Set up a dial up machine in the IT department for such things that are required to do the job. As for deployment between campuses, try setting up a VPN that would ignore the executeable ban.
I have found such policies to be a good thing in administering a similar sized environment to you. People will bitch and complain that they can't get some stuff, but what they are really blustering about is that they cannot download their favorite internet app. Explain that any work related executable can be downloaded by logging a job with your helpdesk, and that objection goes away, as does a whole bunch of complaints.
If it's any help, I'm a christian, won't be voting for these people, and consider anyone who does a fool. From my limited understanding of the teachings of Jesus, he never suggests that limiting peoples ability to communicate is a good thing. In fact he asks people to do lot's of communication. ("Go into all the world and make deciples.") If we are limiting the way people are communicating, surely this is going to backfire when I cannot tell you that Jesus loves you too.
You don't have to accept this position. With the freedom of speech is the implied freedom not to listen.
I also have no right to tell you how to live your life. If you wish to download porn, that is your perogative. By my moral code, it is wrong for ME to download porn, it is also wrong for me to force you to live by my moral code. If you are interested in the rest of my moral code, please ask.
Erm, I'd say it's important to have a few distros floating around. Each one with a speciality, and another to compete in that niche. I am probably going to be accused of trolling here, but what the hey.
Redhat/SuSE: have a lovely enterprise distro. Handy for big organisations and stuff.
Mandrake/Fedora: A very nice small business/home distro.
Debian: An ethical distribution. More interested in producing something that is free as in speech. This is not nessecarily a bad thing, but it does limit what I can get with apt.
gentoo/yoper: Bleeding edge always has a place amongst enthusiasts so they can reccomend latest functionality to more conservitive users.
Any amount of specialist distros that do one job well. I regularly use Ghost4Linux and memtest86 in my place of employ (an all windows shop) and they serve me well for what they do. I also use and reccomend smoothwall as a firewall.
I'd say there is probably a space in the market for a SOHO distro based on debian, and if it can be expanded to an Enterprise product and be profitable, there are definitely things to be said for having your business running on totally "Free" software. If you can get phone/email/consultant support with that in one place, even better. I wish them all the luck in the world. I think I shall download their ISO tonight to see if I can reccommend their services to friends. (astro turfing? possibly)
Sadly they need some gentle guidance. Take the scenario of my wife. We have a folder called "My Documents". After 3 months I find this folder contains three folders, labled "John's Work" "John's Uni" and "John's stuff" The rest is ALL my wifes work with very little order in naming conventions. So I created "Brons Work" "Brons project" "Finances" ect, ect. All of a sudden, because there is a place to put things, my wife puts things in an appropriate place. I have now gotten around 20 folders under "My documents" and none of them contain more than 30 files. Things can be found in two clicks rather than one click and 2 minutes scrolling.
I have recently started the process of weening my beloved off windows, and have created a similar directory structure on my debian box. The Windows box and the Debian box sync the My documents folder to each other once a day, and there is much rejoicing.
I believe the greatest problem with file systems is a lack of instructions on how to organize your files to best find them at a later date. Do this, and even FAT12 looks good. Fail to and ReiserFS4 cannot help you.
I think the plan with WinFS/OFS/REBADGEFS is to try to acheive this externally in software using some weird turing test on all files. This will not work. When it comes to being dumb, a smart computer cannot outdo a dumb user for sheer creativity. So the project will be delayed again until MS have finally discovered how stupid people are when organising their files.
Without getting too political, simply being pro the other side just replaces one mode of thinking with another reasonably similar mode of thinking. What is better than simply advertising the obvious opposing candidate is to get the electorate to THINK! A two party system breeds similar policies and corruption. True it is slower than a one party system to do so, ($SOVIETRUSSIAGAG) but it is inevitable. If negotiation is required to pass any law, rather than just a press of numbers, it lessens the likelyhood of corrupt laws getting through.
If an electorate thinks about alternatives, (Greens, Independants and others of that ilk) then corruption and self serving policy is reduced, and the People are served by the Government through neccesity.
Whew, that is a little too political for this time of the morning.
Yes we do. Vote Greens, vote Democrats (not the Amreican version.) Vote independant. It is not throwing away your vote to do so.
I object heartily to this philosophy that there are only two parties. The "minor" parties are responsible for more, and better reforms to laws than any other group I know.
Forever with any luck. What this means is that people who do not pay for a permanant IP address cannot use their computer as an SMTP server. This eliminates trojan traffic and small operators from sending UCE. My ISP (Bigpond in AU) did this recently and has managed to keep off the ORBS lists a little more of late.
If spammers are reduced to using permenant IP addresses, it makes filtering for known spammers nice and easy. My receiving server can quickly reference a list of known spam sending IPs and choose to reject incoming messages using nothing more complicated than a firewall rule. If more ISPs follow this practice till it is considered the "polite" thing to do, the spam problem will quickly evaporate, with an option for people to pay their ISP a couple of dollars more to be on the "nospam" mail server that blocks traffic from known or likely spammers.
This is a good thing for the freedom not to listen people, and the freedom of speech have my permission to set up an SMTP like network on port 6025 for all I care. I can ignore this port, and they can sell viagra to each other without making my bayesian filter more educated.
Nice simple question. Who provides the network? If it is the college, then they have a right, and perhapse a duty to protect their infrustructure. If you disagree with their monitoring policy, don't jack in. As long as the college makes you aware of what they choose to monitor using their equipment, I cannot see a problem.
This might be seen as a troll, but if someone lets a virus loose on the network I look after, I do not care who they are, I will do my utmost to look after the "common good".
I don't think ANYONE expected backwards compatibility, and it hasn't really been an industry standard. Playstation/Playstation 2 was THE major exception in U.S. console gaming.
But it proved that it is possible and good. Before Sony entered the market, back compatibility was not an event. Now because Sony became a major player in the market and was back compatible, the consumer expects the market to keep acting this way. Back compatibility was the reason why I upgraded my PSone to a PS2 and why I don't own an Xbox. Why would I want to have to repopulate my game library, when I can extend it?
Linux users do not have a God or country given right to watch American Wedding on their Linux box.
In fact nobody has a right to watch this woeful peice of crap. Nonetheless, I paid good money for a peice of hardware to play DVDs. I paid for the media with the movie encoded apon it. Now if it was a record player, that would be enough. If it was a stand alone DVD player, that would be enough. Because it happens to have a kernel writen by Saint Linus I am not allowed to use my hardware to do what my hardware is designed to do. That is to grab data off a disk and use this data in a legal manner.
If they didn't want me to watch my DVD (it became my DVD when I handed over the dosh, and whilst I am not depriving the manufacturers of revenue, I can use it as a frisbee for all they should care.) the way I wanted to, they should not have released it for public exhibition.
And for American Wedding, this would have been a Good Thing TM
Hmm. I would disagree. I think part of good administration of a system is automation of crappy tasks, so you are only alerted to important information. (like things going wrong) I beleive that a competant admin will always have a stable setup whereas an incompetant will always have problems. The trick is education, so Joe 6Pack user starts thinking. OK, I can't do this for a reason. Do i really want to sudo it or am I being tricked? Once Joe starts thinking like this, then he is a large step closer to being a good admin.
Once people start finding out that you have to put on a seatbelt before the ignition will start, they will accept the seatbelt dispite it's restrictions of movement. Windows provides seatbelts, (sometimes not correctly installed) but you have to do the course to learn how to use them. Linux tends to educate users during the install about seatbelts and their proper use.
We need more education about security as applied to Linux to be freely available. We have to make it easier for the average user to understand and work in a secure environment. We need to automate processes so users are alerted to potential breaches and given enough information to make an informed choice. All this can, and some of this has been, done. Joe 6Pack does not need a corporate network, but he does need just enough of a secure system so he does not get toasted and can think to himself in 6 months time, "Its been a while since I had a computer problem. Wow."
Try to pay attentin kiddies, I will only be ranting once on this topic.
As I write this paragraph I own it. I own the computer whose memory it resides in, I own the Hard disk it caches to, I own the screen that makes it easier to type. As soon as I hit the submit button and send this paragraph up to the beloved slashdot community, I loose control of it. I have a choice. Either I keep this comment to myself or I send it.
If I am an artist and create a song, and wish to have total control over it, I do not release it. As soon as I release the song to the public I relinquish control and rely on the honesty of people to receive dues.
The long and the short of it is Intelectual Property is not Physical Property. Trying to apply the same rules will not work. If I steal a CD from the record shop, they are short one CD. If I grab a copy of a song from the internet. The original people still have the data. There is no loss except in dues that authors and artists think they are owed.
Maybe it's time to rethink the value of knowledge in this age. Perhaps knowledge is not a commodity after all.
I am by no means a 500linesofcodeanhour pourjavadownmythroat code monkey, but I do dabble. Every time I try to play with visualisation of code, I struggle. I have a Visual Basic tutorial on my desk and I loose patience with it very quickly because it will not allow me to specify parameters for form elements in code. I have to negotiate a whole bunch of properties boxes. If Billie's idea is the right click on a component to configure an element, that would possibly make life easier, but I loose a lot of patience switching from keyboard to mouse to do simple jobs. I suspect this will continue to be the case until I get my third arm installed. The other example of visual programming that irritated me came with a lego mindstorms kit. I loved building the robots, but the interface they supplied to program the thing was horrible. If I wanted to do anything more complicated than really basic decision making it was nasty. I was relived to find out about NQC where text reigned supreme. Don't get me wrong. Diagrams are great tools to creating great software. The first thing I will do when coding databases and web front ends for them is to draw a picture of the whole system on the electronic whiteboard and hang the picture up in my cubicle. I will then build each of the icons in the diagram. Diagrams are a great place to start, but don't give the granularity of text. picture != word * 1000;
One place tried this on me, I simply pulled out a black texta, removed the section I did not like, initialed the changes, and signed the remainder of the contract. The HR girl signed off on the revised contract and there was much rejoicing.
I now work for an organization whose contract was so openly worded, I can do anything I like provided my boss approves
After all, if pre-emptive multi-tasking and protected memory are so important, everyone would have used OS/2 instead of Windows 3.1
I am of the firm beleif that people very rarely want the best. If they did, the SCSI bus on desktops, BETA videos and OS/2 would be more common. The best technologies are ignored in favor of cheaper nastier versions.
Apple time and time again have come out with brilliant peices of technology only to be pushed into the corner by the wintel market. The old funny, "where do you want to go today? Coz Apple was there 5 years ago" rings true again and again.
If people want a secure network, then they have to start thinking about the security of the medium. I have come to the conclusion that if you want security from your medium, then you get a secure medium. Copper tends to be reasonably secure, (requiring physical presence within a building to break in.) Fibre a little more so because of the relative problems of placing taps. Wireless should not be used for sending any information you don't want people to see.
If people were dumb enough to leave commercial secrets on the train, and then demanded no one read them, would there be an outcry? IF people stuck trade secrets to the windows of their office and asked people not to photograph the windows, would they have a moral position? If people broadcast their secrets in unencrypted or easy to unencrypt form, why do they have any moral rights?
Hmm. And the next gen OSs will slow it back down again to where we are today with cruft and bloat.
Just for fun, I installed windows3.11 on a P3 500 and had a boot up in 7 seconds from bios handover to loading up word. I suppose the bit that depresses me is that XP does very little more than 3.1 (more peripherals supported, but not too many more)
And Linux fans, get off your high horse, Mandrake and Redhat on modern hardware cannot compete with aincient distros of slackware for speed of bootage. Yes I know I can roll my own and an out of the box may not be considered "fair" but how many users in the real world do more optimization than is presented during install time?
So more grunt will be sacrificed once again at the alter of bloat.
"If a company had to release their code for products they sold, it wouldn't do any good to the end user. The code would be way to complex for 99.9% of all users to understand. The only users who would really understand it are the programmers, and even then they would need to spend a LOT of time analyzing it (Assuming it is a decent size program) before they could even start to understand it."
And thus we see the value of documenting your code. "Though a program be but three lines long, one day it will have to be maintained." The point of making source available to users is not so that they understand the program, but so that they can find out, should they desire, how a program works. Either way, an agreement would have to be entered into that the source would not handed on without the permission of the author.
Is your company going broke? Why not force your potential customers to sit through adds?
When they refuse and seek information from other companies who offer their information without sitting through your adds, and go elsewhere call them theives, set up an anti-anti-ad system.
Now for the fun bit, when someone comes up with an anti-anti-anti-ad system, hit them with a DCMA inspired litigation.
Will this make customers more or less friendly to you?
Ponders. Can I charge doubleclick for bandwidth usage?
There is a biscuit (cookies to the.us amongst us) firm in Australia who was bought out by a multinational, who did some unreasonable things to the employees (fired all of them and moved the factory a thousand miles away).
So the word went around, "Don't buy Arno##$ buscuits" And pretty soon this buscuit company was selling buscuits at very low prices to get the consumers back. Still they did not return. And other buscuit companies were filling the void. So I could still get my choccy biccy fix just with another logo.
The company has yet to go broke, but are selling buscuits at just above cost price.
I can't see any problem with doing the same thing to a record company.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a Kernel as a commodity. If my favorite browser works on Windows, Debian, Redhat, MacOSX or Solaris, then there is one less lock in. One less reason to be running Windows. So I do this for as many apps as I can, steadily porting them to as many platforms as I can.
All of a sudden things like "Value for money" and "reliability" and "security" become important. This beats the monopoly system whereby to do my job I MUST run an OS from Vendor A. I now have the freedom to use an OS for different reasons.
So whilst switching browsers in itself doesn't make a fig of difference, ponder switching office packages, groupware packages, ect. ect.
I wage war apon you with weapons of mass degrees and temperatureism. The good ole Faren of heit will be crushed under our superior decimalised thermometers. No more will people have to convert to an outdated imperialist measurement. We shall crush you. Until the Kelvinists crush us.
Set up your internet proxy to block executable files. Also scripty files. Whilst you're at it, try getting your mail server to do similar things. Set up a dial up machine in the IT department for such things that are required to do the job. As for deployment between campuses, try setting up a VPN that would ignore the executeable ban.
I have found such policies to be a good thing in administering a similar sized environment to you. People will bitch and complain that they can't get some stuff, but what they are really blustering about is that they cannot download their favorite internet app. Explain that any work related executable can be downloaded by logging a job with your helpdesk, and that objection goes away, as does a whole bunch of complaints.
I'd have thought this was obvious.
I'd rate the Natural Law party worse still.
If it's any help, I'm a christian, won't be voting for these people, and consider anyone who does a fool. From my limited understanding of the teachings of Jesus, he never suggests that limiting peoples ability to communicate is a good thing. In fact he asks people to do lot's of communication. ("Go into all the world and make deciples.") If we are limiting the way people are communicating, surely this is going to backfire when I cannot tell you that Jesus loves you too.
You don't have to accept this position. With the freedom of speech is the implied freedom not to listen.
I also have no right to tell you how to live your life. If you wish to download porn, that is your perogative. By my moral code, it is wrong for ME to download porn, it is also wrong for me to force you to live by my moral code. If you are interested in the rest of my moral code, please ask.
Erm, I'd say it's important to have a few distros floating around. Each one with a speciality, and another to compete in that niche. I am probably going to be accused of trolling here, but what the hey.
Redhat/SuSE: have a lovely enterprise distro. Handy for big organisations and stuff.
Mandrake/Fedora: A very nice small business/home distro.
Debian: An ethical distribution. More interested in producing something that is free as in speech. This is not nessecarily a bad thing, but it does limit what I can get with apt.
gentoo/yoper: Bleeding edge always has a place amongst enthusiasts so they can reccomend latest functionality to more conservitive users.
Any amount of specialist distros that do one job well. I regularly use Ghost4Linux and memtest86 in my place of employ (an all windows shop) and they serve me well for what they do. I also use and reccomend smoothwall as a firewall.
I'd say there is probably a space in the market for a SOHO distro based on debian, and if it can be expanded to an Enterprise product and be profitable, there are definitely things to be said for having your business running on totally "Free" software. If you can get phone/email/consultant support with that in one place, even better. I wish them all the luck in the world. I think I shall download their ISO tonight to see if I can reccommend their services to friends. (astro turfing? possibly)
Sadly they need some gentle guidance. Take the scenario of my wife. We have a folder called "My Documents". After 3 months I find this folder contains three folders, labled "John's Work" "John's Uni" and "John's stuff" The rest is ALL my wifes work with very little order in naming conventions. So I created "Brons Work" "Brons project" "Finances" ect, ect. All of a sudden, because there is a place to put things, my wife puts things in an appropriate place. I have now gotten around 20 folders under "My documents" and none of them contain more than 30 files. Things can be found in two clicks rather than one click and 2 minutes scrolling. I have recently started the process of weening my beloved off windows, and have created a similar directory structure on my debian box. The Windows box and the Debian box sync the My documents folder to each other once a day, and there is much rejoicing. I believe the greatest problem with file systems is a lack of instructions on how to organize your files to best find them at a later date. Do this, and even FAT12 looks good. Fail to and ReiserFS4 cannot help you. I think the plan with WinFS/OFS/REBADGEFS is to try to acheive this externally in software using some weird turing test on all files. This will not work. When it comes to being dumb, a smart computer cannot outdo a dumb user for sheer creativity. So the project will be delayed again until MS have finally discovered how stupid people are when organising their files.
Without getting too political, simply being pro the other side just replaces one mode of thinking with another reasonably similar mode of thinking. What is better than simply advertising the obvious opposing candidate is to get the electorate to THINK! A two party system breeds similar policies and corruption. True it is slower than a one party system to do so, ($SOVIETRUSSIAGAG) but it is inevitable. If negotiation is required to pass any law, rather than just a press of numbers, it lessens the likelyhood of corrupt laws getting through.
If an electorate thinks about alternatives, (Greens, Independants and others of that ilk) then corruption and self serving policy is reduced, and the People are served by the Government through neccesity.
Whew, that is a little too political for this time of the morning.
Yes we do. Vote Greens, vote Democrats (not the Amreican version.) Vote independant. It is not throwing away your vote to do so.
I object heartily to this philosophy that there are only two parties. The "minor" parties are responsible for more, and better reforms to laws than any other group I know.
Forever with any luck. What this means is that people who do not pay for a permanant IP address cannot use their computer as an SMTP server. This eliminates trojan traffic and small operators from sending UCE. My ISP (Bigpond in AU) did this recently and has managed to keep off the ORBS lists a little more of late.
If spammers are reduced to using permenant IP addresses, it makes filtering for known spammers nice and easy. My receiving server can quickly reference a list of known spam sending IPs and choose to reject incoming messages using nothing more complicated than a firewall rule. If more ISPs follow this practice till it is considered the "polite" thing to do, the spam problem will quickly evaporate, with an option for people to pay their ISP a couple of dollars more to be on the "nospam" mail server that blocks traffic from known or likely spammers.
This is a good thing for the freedom not to listen people, and the freedom of speech have my permission to set up an SMTP like network on port 6025 for all I care. I can ignore this port, and they can sell viagra to each other without making my bayesian filter more educated.
Nice simple question. Who provides the network? If it is the college, then they have a right, and perhapse a duty to protect their infrustructure. If you disagree with their monitoring policy, don't jack in. As long as the college makes you aware of what they choose to monitor using their equipment, I cannot see a problem.
This might be seen as a troll, but if someone lets a virus loose on the network I look after, I do not care who they are, I will do my utmost to look after the "common good".
But it proved that it is possible and good. Before Sony entered the market, back compatibility was not an event. Now because Sony became a major player in the market and was back compatible, the consumer expects the market to keep acting this way. Back compatibility was the reason why I upgraded my PSone to a PS2 and why I don't own an Xbox. Why would I want to have to repopulate my game library, when I can extend it?
Linux users do not have a God or country given right to watch American Wedding on their Linux box.
In fact nobody has a right to watch this woeful peice of crap. Nonetheless, I paid good money for a peice of hardware to play DVDs. I paid for the media with the movie encoded apon it. Now if it was a record player, that would be enough. If it was a stand alone DVD player, that would be enough. Because it happens to have a kernel writen by Saint Linus I am not allowed to use my hardware to do what my hardware is designed to do. That is to grab data off a disk and use this data in a legal manner.
If they didn't want me to watch my DVD (it became my DVD when I handed over the dosh, and whilst I am not depriving the manufacturers of revenue, I can use it as a frisbee for all they should care.) the way I wanted to, they should not have released it for public exhibition.
And for American Wedding, this would have been a Good Thing TM
Hmm. I would disagree. I think part of good administration of a system is automation of crappy tasks, so you are only alerted to important information. (like things going wrong) I beleive that a competant admin will always have a stable setup whereas an incompetant will always have problems. The trick is education, so Joe 6Pack user starts thinking. OK, I can't do this for a reason. Do i really want to sudo it or am I being tricked? Once Joe starts thinking like this, then he is a large step closer to being a good admin.
Once people start finding out that you have to put on a seatbelt before the ignition will start, they will accept the seatbelt dispite it's restrictions of movement. Windows provides seatbelts, (sometimes not correctly installed) but you have to do the course to learn how to use them. Linux tends to educate users during the install about seatbelts and their proper use.
We need more education about security as applied to Linux to be freely available. We have to make it easier for the average user to understand and work in a secure environment. We need to automate processes so users are alerted to potential breaches and given enough information to make an informed choice. All this can, and some of this has been, done. Joe 6Pack does not need a corporate network, but he does need just enough of a secure system so he does not get toasted and can think to himself in 6 months time, "Its been a while since I had a computer problem. Wow."
Try to pay attentin kiddies, I will only be ranting once on this topic.
As I write this paragraph I own it. I own the computer whose memory it resides in, I own the Hard disk it caches to, I own the screen that makes it easier to type. As soon as I hit the submit button and send this paragraph up to the beloved slashdot community, I loose control of it. I have a choice. Either I keep this comment to myself or I send it.
If I am an artist and create a song, and wish to have total control over it, I do not release it. As soon as I release the song to the public I relinquish control and rely on the honesty of people to receive dues.
The long and the short of it is Intelectual Property is not Physical Property. Trying to apply the same rules will not work. If I steal a CD from the record shop, they are short one CD. If I grab a copy of a song from the internet. The original people still have the data. There is no loss except in dues that authors and artists think they are owed.
Maybe it's time to rethink the value of knowledge in this age. Perhaps knowledge is not a commodity after all.
I am by no means a 500linesofcodeanhour pourjavadownmythroat code monkey, but I do dabble. Every time I try to play with visualisation of code, I struggle. I have a Visual Basic tutorial on my desk and I loose patience with it very quickly because it will not allow me to specify parameters for form elements in code. I have to negotiate a whole bunch of properties boxes. If Billie's idea is the right click on a component to configure an element, that would possibly make life easier, but I loose a lot of patience switching from keyboard to mouse to do simple jobs. I suspect this will continue to be the case until I get my third arm installed.
The other example of visual programming that irritated me came with a lego mindstorms kit. I loved building the robots, but the interface they supplied to program the thing was horrible. If I wanted to do anything more complicated than really basic decision making it was nasty. I was relived to find out about NQC where text reigned supreme.
Don't get me wrong. Diagrams are great tools to creating great software. The first thing I will do when coding databases and web front ends for them is to draw a picture of the whole system on the electronic whiteboard and hang the picture up in my cubicle. I will then build each of the icons in the diagram. Diagrams are a great place to start, but don't give the granularity of text.
picture != word * 1000;
One place tried this on me, I simply pulled out a black texta, removed the section I did not like, initialed the changes, and signed the remainder of the contract. The HR girl signed off on the revised contract and there was much rejoicing. I now work for an organization whose contract was so openly worded, I can do anything I like provided my boss approves
If people want a secure network, then they have to start thinking about the security of the medium. I have come to the conclusion that if you want security from your medium, then you get a secure medium. Copper tends to be reasonably secure, (requiring physical presence within a building to break in.) Fibre a little more so because of the relative problems of placing taps. Wireless should not be used for sending any information you don't want people to see.
If people were dumb enough to leave commercial secrets on the train, and then demanded no one read them, would there be an outcry? IF people stuck trade secrets to the windows of their office and asked people not to photograph the windows, would they have a moral position? If people broadcast their secrets in unencrypted or easy to unencrypt form, why do they have any moral rights?
Hmm. And the next gen OSs will slow it back down again to where we are today with cruft and bloat.
Just for fun, I installed windows3.11 on a P3 500 and had a boot up in 7 seconds from bios handover to loading up word. I suppose the bit that depresses me is that XP does very little more than 3.1 (more peripherals supported, but not too many more)
And Linux fans, get off your high horse, Mandrake and Redhat on modern hardware cannot compete with aincient distros of slackware for speed of bootage. Yes I know I can roll my own and an out of the box may not be considered "fair" but how many users in the real world do more optimization than is presented during install time?
So more grunt will be sacrificed once again at the alter of bloat.
Sand.
"If a company had to release their code for products they sold, it wouldn't do any good to the end user. The code would be way to complex for 99.9% of all users to understand. The only users who would really understand it are the programmers, and even then they would need to spend a LOT of time analyzing it (Assuming it is a decent size program) before they could even start to understand it."
And thus we see the value of documenting your code. "Though a program be but three lines long, one day it will have to be maintained." The point of making source available to users is not so that they understand the program, but so that they can find out, should they desire, how a program works. Either way, an agreement would have to be entered into that the source would not handed on without the permission of the author.
I'd be happy with that.
Is your company going broke? Why not force your potential customers to sit through adds?
When they refuse and seek information from other companies who offer their information without sitting through your adds, and go elsewhere call them theives, set up an anti-anti-ad system.
Now for the fun bit, when someone comes up with an anti-anti-anti-ad system, hit them with a DCMA inspired litigation.
Will this make customers more or less friendly to you?
Ponders. Can I charge doubleclick for bandwidth usage?
This tactic actually WORKS!!!
.us amongst us) firm in Australia who was bought out by a multinational, who did some unreasonable things to the employees (fired all of them and moved the factory a thousand miles away).
:)
There is a biscuit (cookies to the
So the word went around, "Don't buy Arno##$ buscuits" And pretty soon this buscuit company was selling buscuits at very low prices to get the consumers back. Still they did not return. And other buscuit companies were filling the void. So I could still get my choccy biccy fix just with another logo.
The company has yet to go broke, but are selling buscuits at just above cost price.
I can't see any problem with doing the same thing to a record company.