Wow, and you people wonder why Linux hasn't taken hold for the average consumer.
I agree. It's all ATI and NVidia's fault.
Let's tell consumers to stop buying their low-quality buggy hardware that require special installation procedures, and maybe they'll stop dragging down the consumers idea of the Linux Desktop.
I have an intel-based graphics setup that works just fine with beryl- no special install voodoo necessary. It might not get quite as many FPS as my coworkers' firegl board, but it never crashes, and never freezes up on me.
He's convinced all he needs to do is tweak some underclocking or somethingrather I don't really understand, but at this point I'm pretty sure a big part of his efforts are there to justify his purchase and vindicate his decision, and that the ATI board really wasn't worth it even to him- an otherwise very technical person.
Maybe after we get ATI/NVidia to stop hurting Linux with their inferior hardware and software, we can get some OEMs- besides TiVO- to actually ship with Linux desktops...
It can never work because the attacker is the same person as the recipient.
That's why TPM is being pushed by DRM proponents: TPM means your computer no longer trusts you (its owner). It means that someone that can convince Verisign to sign their key will be able to have access to all your secrets- including the ones that you do not. It already happened.
Forget all that jibber-jabber about whether they have a right to protect their "copyrights", or even if you have any rights to copy: they clearly cannot be trusted with your secrecy and your privacy.
With that much money coming in, a single person or even a couple could afford to eat better.
How much money coming in do you think 3 jobs gets you?
When its said someone works three jobs doesn't mean they're working 40+40+40 hours a week. They're probably only working about 60-70 hours a week. If they make minimum wage, they're probably barely scraping together 1000$ a month.
That's not a lot of money, but it's significantly higher than the poverty limit. It's barely enough for an extremely modest mortgage, utilities, toiletries, 90 or so "2 dollar cheese pizzas", and 30 gallons of gasoline. They even have some money left to splurge and buy a book once in a while.
Did these 'working poor' get raped on a mortgage because they really couldn't afford to own a home but wanted one anyway?
A mortgage should always be cheaper than renting: why would you possibly think your landlord's mortgage was higher than your rent?
Did these 'working poor' simply not get educated on how to eat affordably? Buy a whole freakin' chicken. Buy the 30lb bag of rice. Buy the huge bags of frozen store-brand veggies. There you go.
Check prices on those things. The cheese pizzas are actually cheaper per-meal- and likewise- so are the TV dinners.
Did these 'working poor' have children when they couldn't afford to have children?
Maybe, or maybe they lost their jobs when the President gave tax credits to companies who outsourced American jobs overseas. Maybe they lost their jobs when their office building was blown up by an airplane. Only a fool would pretend to know.
Minimum wage is supposed to be the minimum necessary allowence to have an "acceptable" standard of living, and at minimum wage it takes quite a bit more than 40 hours of work, but you seem to think that's okay.
Just exactly how many hours a week does someone need to work in order to afford a house? Healthy food? Clean water? A child?
Or do you really believe the definition of capitalism intends for people to degrade themselves below the acceptable standards of living when someone wants to buy a book?
Just download a patch so that your purchased software will run on your purchased hardware.
Given that cases such as Galoob v. Nintendo, 780 F. Supp 1283 (N.D. Cal. 1991), 22 U.S.P.Q.2d 1587 (9th Cir. 1992), and see also Foresight v. Pfortmiller, 719 F. Supp 1006 (D. Kan. 1989) for examples where it is ruled, and it is law that you have the right to do this.
They may say that they have "licensed" it to you; ask them to show you the contract and signature, for you can only give rights away through a signed contract, and a "meeting of the minds". See Vault v. Quaid, 847 F.2d 255 (5th Cir. 1988).
(As a side note, those of you that are paying attention will note this is exactly why the GPL works: You do not [by default] have the right to copy GPL'd software, but the author will give you the right to copy if you satisfy some conditions. As a result, you do not have to sign anything in order to be "bound" to the GPL: you simply wouldn't have the right to copy.)
According to NVIDIA, some 90-95% of their driver code is identical across all their platforms -- and they support an impressive number of platforms.
Windows, Quartz, Xorg and BREW is not an impressive number because it does not impress me. NVIDIA's drivers are amongst the lowest-quality binary-only drivers I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. NVIDIA has a long way to go before their hardware even comes close to the stability and performance of Intel's hardware (esp. the 3D interfaces).
Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, with 32-bit and 64-bit support on Linux and (for most cards) Solaris. I dislike binary blobs as much as the next guy, especially in kernel space, but this is some impressive engineering.
Xorg is one platform- the one used by the unixes you mention. Quartz is another. Windows is another. The one you missed is called BREW and represents their mobile offerings (on Qualcomm systems).
at the moment, would be to either kill performance (think FUSE for cross-platform filesystems)
The reason FUSE is slow is because it's a terrible API, not because message passing is slow. MacOSX uses a interface like FUSE for drivers.
And that's why nobody hosts with you. GoDaddy isn't the police, nor the Law.
If someone sold you a stereo, then broke into your house and took it back, you'd call them a criminal. You wouldn't say they "did the right thing to the point", so besides the fact that GoDaddy sold virtual property, then broke into your virtual house and stole virtual property, how is this so different, it requires a completely different attitude?
Would you prefer your information be displayed for hours if the hosting provider could not get a hold of Google for the next seven hours
It's not up to me. It's not up to you either. It's up to a court of law so that rational and impartial minds find justice. Godaddy decided they were the judge and jury, and decided that they still are. I will never do business with Godaddy and I'd never do business with such a treacherous antiamerican hatemonger like yourself either.
Or to put it a way your simple little mind might grasp: My friend got his car reposessed so he couldn't get to work, so he lost his job, so he couldn't pay his rent, so he got kicked out of his house all because his bank decided that regular automatic payment that had been going on for every month for a full year suddenly looked very suspicious, and rather than pay it, or contact anyone, they decided it must be fraudulent and locked his account.
I think that Myspace could've fixed their bug, and turned their site off if Myspace had the bug. Asking Godaddy as they did was stupid and idiotic, but Godaddy actually doing it was downright criminal.
You might trust Godaddy with your house, your car, your job, and your family, but I don't.
Because there is a C++ compiler for my target platform and not a Java virtual machine.
GNU CC targets almost every platform, and it may be easier to port it to your target than you think. GCJ can compile to native code so a separate virtual machine isn't required.
I've seen, and written, a lot of complex C++ that didn't use pointers directly. I try to avoid pointers in general - any case where I use pointers is carefully hidden behind abstraction.
I hate asking, but why are you using C++ if you use a level of indirection that makes it almost as slow as Java (gcj)?
I'm of the opinion that there's nothing inherently wrong with pointers and that really the whole world went to shit the moment people started trusting that code actually does what the comments say it does.
Therefore I say comments are bad for security as it _discourages_ review, instead of encouraging it.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
As you mentioned, you're not a serious UNIX or Ubuntu user, so why did you do a custom install?
The defaults worked fine.
2) A lot of software I as a.NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
I feel the same way: My favorite software (Epiphany, Evolution, Beryl, Panel) just doesn't run on Windows. The fact that most of my software (GNU, Gaim, VIM) works on Windows seems a testament to my software, and not to Windows.
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
Chances are, its because of the custom install you did, or something wrong with your hardware. The defaults are certainly much faster on each and every one of my systems.
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
My laptop required no configuration on Linux. On Windows, I needed to install some driver, THEN plug in the device, then run some setup tool, unplug the device, replug it in, and then tell it about my AP.
Sounds to me like you didn't buy a supported WIFI device either.
5) Windows has far more good software options.
Like most of your other "points" this seems heavily dependant on your knowledge base and your capabilities, instead of the capabilities of the software you're examining/reviewing.
For me the final straw was when I tried playing the high def trailer...choppy as hell
Does it even bother you even for a minute that you simply cannot play the video at all on Windows?
If you have an OEM computer, or one with a DVD burner, chances are someone paid for your MPEG decoder for you, but Microsoft surely didn't.
Regarding why your video is choppy, changes are your video driver, or video mode isn't overlay-capable. Video isn't choppy at all on my thinkpad 600e (a 300mhz laptop) simply because of good XV support. I will say that if your custom install had you set 24bpp mode, most video cards (or their drivers) don't support overlays at that depth, and that either 16bpp or 32bpp would be better. It'd also be faster (for other reasons). The exception I know of is the firegl drivers that are made by ATI, but I don't recommend anyone buy one of those cards simply because ATI hates its customers.
By the way, mplayer isn't "minimal gui with windows codecs", and your problems aren't codec-related at all. VLC and mplayer likely use the same mpeg decoder (FFmpeg) on your system- the fact that you're using "linux codecs with your windows" (when using VLC) says a lot more about Linux's software support than it does about Windows.
He says that he thinks KDE and Gnome are "amateurish" but doesn't bother to explain his reasoning behind the assertion
They are amateurish! Almost every rough edge in KDE and GNOME can be attributed to the fact that nonprofessionals have made significant UI decisions.
GNOME is at the very least attempting to change that, but if you've ever used a professional user interface (such as NeXT/OpenSTEP, CDE, or OS/2's WPS) you'd see just how lacking it can be to use something else.
Note that this isn't the same thing as approachable- you'll note the examples I gave are often considered relatively unapproachable interfaces- but they are extremely user friendly.
I find his "business speak" patronising, transparent and meaningless.
The smartest and dumbest thing the GNUstep people did was start GNUstep: It made an excellent developer framework, and using it means they get access to one of the best workflow systems ever (the kind that Microsoft has been playing catchup with their Cairo product- announced in 1989 still hasn't made good on), but it also means that the uninformed don't really have all that much to do.
You see, because GNOME and KDE aren't designed yet, anyone can offer a suggestion on what needs to be done. With GNUstep, the number of people who can offer productive suggestions is much smaller- and up until recently was comprised almost exclusively of programmers. After all, if anyone needed to wonder what GNUstep needed next- it was just a matter of picking one of the OpenStep headers that had implement-me markers all over it.
o me, this implies that he doesn't actually have a reason behind the assertion and that the whole silly blog is propaganda
This is obvious. You don't use GNUstep, or OpenStep, and you don't know anything about either, so this is a horrible way for you to find out about them. The story editor and submitter chose very poorly when putting this up here on slashdot, and as a result, you have very strong negative feelings about GNUstep.
And I doubt very much there's anything the GPLv3 could do about it.
Why? Are you a lawyer?
The GPL forbids distribution that is patent encumbered; from the preamble:
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. This means that if those programs are patent-encumbered, then Novell doesn't have a right to redistribute them, no matter what Microsoft says. In order for Novell to have the right to redistribute GPL software, then Microsoft cannot have the right to use anyone (not Novells' customers, not anybody) for those patents.
Now ordinarily, we could simply agree to disagree- and wait for a Judge to say if Microsoft is right or not, but the problem here is that Novell is saying that these files are encumbered with patents and so therefore Novell is saying expressly that Novell is violating copyright law.
Of course, it's possible that contract isn't legally binding, and that neither Microsoft nor Novell had the right to offer what they did in the contract, but you seem to forget that the parent poster was asking why anyone is bothered about this and here it is: Either Novell is an asshole to GPL developers and sold something Novell didn't own, or Novell is an asshole to GPL developers and violated their copyright.
Nothing prohibits any Novell customer from giving any non-Novell customer the source code and binaries to any GPL product contained in that distribution. Nothing in the GPL even begins to deal with things outside of the boundaries of Copyright law. That is to say, Copyright normally takes your rights away and the GPL allows you certain freedoms in contradiction to Copyright should you agree to uphold those ideals.
From the Preamble to the GPL:
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
You may not be able to transfer any additional warrantee Novell gives you w.r.t. Microsoft lawsuits that may or may not ever happen, but you wouldn't have had that without the agreement either.
I'd say that the GPL just said otherwise.
You do realize that's all this is right? -- a warrantee agreement between Novell and its customers with permission from Microsoft.
Because Novell is licensing thse patents for the use of their customers (presumably with SUSE), they are denying their customers the rights to use the software for any purpose (they can only use it on machines with paid-up SUSE licenses). They can't give someone else the rights to use the software (assuming the patents are valid), so if Linux really does contain patented algorithms that aren't freely licensed for everyone's use, Novell loses the right to distribute Linux at all since the recipients cannot transfer those rights to others.
Please, informed replies only. Flames are not helpful.
You accuse someone of drug use "but in the nicest possible way", lecture an argument on a single broken assumption, and then say, "only people who agree with me can reply-"
Software and its use is supposed to be Free: Free to run, Free to change, Free to share, and Free to improve. US Copyright law guarantees the first two, so the GPL really is about Free to share the software, and improved versions of that software. Anything that produces inequalities in its users, or its use is contrary to the spirit of the GPL, and I really do think anyone informed about Free Software knows this.
The real question is whether a Judge will honor the spirits of the GPL, and the authors of Free Software, or the twisted freedom hating interpretation of Microsoft.
How is Novell violating your copyright because of something another company said?
They're violating it regardless of what Microsoft says.
I've RTFA and I think the guy is saying he feels marginalized by the community because the company he worked for 'made a deal with the devil'.
You're right, that's Jeremy's problem with Novell, but parent said they didn't understand the problem, so here it is:
Novell made a deal that promises protection for their customers. That's a big part of why they made it, and along comes Microsoft and says as much. Novell could say You know, we really meant that to protect our customers for Novell products, not for third-party products and yet they didn't. They said trust us, we're the good guys remember?
The simple fact is that Novell doesn't have the right to enter into that deal with Microsoft using SUSE because Novell doesn't have the right to guarantee their customers those rights (under the deal with Microsoft). If they did, Microsoft probably wouldn't have entered into the deal.
* Microsoft says it will not file any lawsuits against developers over any patent issues
Maybe this is where you're confused.
Microsoft says it will sue users of Samba, but not if they give Microsoft money by being a customer of Novell (because a portion of the SUSE warantee agreement goes to Microsoft directly).
By doing this, Novell is violating my copyright and the copyright of every contributor to free software by redistributing my software to people who do not have the ability to redistribute my software (with all rights they received therein). The GPL expressly forbids this, both in intent and in letter.
Novell is now saying that when I said anyone they distribute my software to must be given the same rights to redistribute that Novell has, and be told as such, that I really didn't mean it. While the GPL says this means Novell no longer has the right to redistribute my software, I strongly suspect they think it doesn't say that either.
NTFS ACLs are confusing. As useful as they may be, real human beings don't know about them or care about them. You know, the kinds of real human beings that use workstations.
I do think they're easier for a novice to understand than Unix's extra/user/group/other permissions.
I don't think so.
I think novices have an easier time clicking buttons randomly and getting a wrong (but working!) ACL set, than they do picking random numbers to feed into chmod, but I wouldn't say for a minute either novice really understands them.
Besides, novices aren't really exposed to ACLs all that often. If they are, something else is wrong, because on a personal computer, there are no other "entities" that need access to files, so ACLs aren't terribly used anyway, unless of course your novices know what changing the rights for IWAM_DS261841 might do, and in the workgroup environment, if you have a novice managing your fileserver security, you deserve whatever comes of it.
In practice, I've taught users to share files on unix and to share files on windows, and believe it or not, you can tell novices "to share a file with everyone type ``ln filename/public''" and they'll get it right 100% of the time, but you say "now open//files/public in a new window, now resize them so they're not fullscreen, okay, now hold alt and drag from one to the other, and then stop using the original and only edit on the server" (etc), and you'll find them holding shift, or trying all kinds of other things.
They get confused easily, not just because it's not their job, but because explaining spatial tasks is harder than telling them what to type.
Now, novices tend to feel more comfortable exploring spatially on their own, that doesn't really mean they understand it, nor are translating what they want to do into the actions to perform any more effectively. Maybe exploration is what people mean by "easy to use", but in the real workplace, I don't want my users to explore- they've got work to do.
On a side note, I've read a lot about how ZFS is supposed to be reliable and flexible as hell. Nowhere, however, have I found information about read/write performance. I guess it's a great filesystem for huge mission-critical datasets, but for anybody else? I have my doubts.
It's not really that slow. Writing to the disk sounds bad, but when you understand that writing can occur less frequently with ZFS, it actually ends up feeling faster.
It of course, doesn't hurt that HFS and UFS are both painfully slow to begin with...
I've never found plain-Jane posix permissions to be all that useful on anything other than the most basic of server environments.
And what kind of expert are you exactly?
What I'd really like to see is both that kind of functionality along with NTFS's really excellent ACL permission system implemented.
NTFS ACLs are confusing. As useful as they may be, real human beings don't know about them or care about them. You know, the kinds of real human beings that use workstations.
Never mind that ZFS actually does support the expressive power of NT's ACL format, but like most modern POSIXish filesystems, allows you to use those "plain-jane posix permissions" that are simpler, and more apparent (and therefore much less error-prone) when they will be satisfactory.
NTFS also has a great deal of capacity for meta-data, although not to the same level as HFS.
What time warp did you fall out of? NTFS has many more places to smuggle metadata away than HFS. The problem with metadata on NTFS is that nothing on Windows supports the concept of sharing metadata. Your NTFS has had streams for years and you never even knew it (more than the "two" streams that HFS supports no less!). Streams and metadata are useless if nobody uses it.
The best thing about HFS is Apple, encouraging everyone by example to make excellent applications and provide the best possible experience to the user. Technical expertise aside, NTFS's streams support is actually a security risk simply because nobody knows about them (so nobody knows that file.exe::hidden-secret-data is a real file!).
If you had real complaints about ZFS, they might be that growing still sucks, so having to simulate quotas still sucks.
... I assume that these can be made to work with ZFS by making hidden files.
I saved this for last because it's important: The real difference between resource/data forks, and hidden files isn't a technical one, but a practical one. If every mac administrator knows how to use resedit to look for metadata, then metadata is an unlikely place to hide things. But if nobody running windows knows about named streams, the only thing that'll be in a named stream is evil- so one day, people simply decide that all named streams are evil and ban them forever. Once this occurs, virus scanners "quarantine" named streams, and even start scaring the pants off the user about them.... and at this point, it's too late: named streams are useless because nobody can use them anymore.
NTFS is one of the few worthwhile things that's ever come out of Redmond. I wish more people would spend a bit learning from it without throwing it away simply because it's MS bloat.
The best parts of NTFS are the parts that are exactly the same as HPFS386. The parts they absolutely needed to fulfil their grandious claims of the CAIRO project are what's worthless.
How about the rest of my questions? How bad does it have to be to be illegal, how good to be legal, and what law sets the standards?
I strongly suspect you're looking for a nutshell, and unfortunately there isn't one. The general spirit of antitrust law is that consumers can be hurt by unlimited free-trade, and that it is more important to protect consumers where they are being hurt by unlimited free-trade. In practice, it seems to be invoked when the state-of-the-art is ahead of the monopoly and yet is still not being progressivly introduced into the market. BeOS could be demonstrated (in on of the MS complaints) to be state-of-the-art where the comparable MS offering was not, and as it turns out, MS was using its monopoly to prevent BeOS from gaining entry into the market at all. Consumers simply could not choose something better, and as a result, the market was closed to Be. Antitrust in general is about creating open markets (as opposed to free markets) where anyone with a product can enter the market. It might not always work this way, but that's the general hope.
That is, what's the name of the law? Sherman?
You're thinking of the Shrman Antitrust Act. It doesn't talk about illegal monopolies in terms of products however, but in terms of restraint and consumers.
Simply having a monopoly in some market IS NOT ILLEGAL.
Where did I say it was?
Are you reading more into this:
Microsoft isn't the only company to break these laws:
Than I intended?
Wal-Mart has been accused of illegally using their market dominance, but mainly just by workers unions who are upset that they won't hire union workers. There has not been a single court decision against them to my knowledge.
Why would your knowledge be authoritative, and why do people keep saying "to my knowledge" like that's supposed to be the line drawn in the sand?
If you're a monopoly holder and you're not producing the best possible product, you are hurting the consumer.
Seriously, this is about "if both google and microsoft have a monopoly, why is microsoft bad" and the simple answer is that they (microsoft) hurt the consumer. Wal*Mart hurts the consumer. Toys R' US hurts the consumer. They all do so in different ways, but they are all indeed hurting consumers.
I have no argument with that, but what does it have to do with how good the product is? If a monopoly produces a great product it's OK, but if it produces a crappy product it's illegal?
That's pretty much it.
When a monopoly exists, consumers no longer have the choice, and a better product simply cannot come along unless the monopoly holder in its own good graces decides to produce it. So long as consumers aren't hurt by its "crappiness", the monopoly is legal.
Sometimes it takes a government to regulate the monopoly, and other times it takes transparency. So far it looks like having "don't be evil" be your mission statement can also do the trick.
I am sorry, but this makes no sense as an arguement. MS produced a product that gained such wide appeal that it earned the largest market share.
Well no kidding it makes no sense to you! You're assuming that because Microsoft had wide appeal, it MUST have been good!
Google "Windows sucks", and you'll see why this is a faulty assumption.
ong after that they used their position to include things like IE by default,
Did anyone even bother to READ the FTC's report on Microsoft?
Microsoft's illegal activities began in the late 1970s, and they were repetedly slapped with lawsuit after lawsuit. It wasn't just in 1995 that they were breaking the law.
The laws they broke allowed them to get a monopoly. Once they had the monopoly, they used it to hurt consumers. That's what the DOJ said. That's what the FTC report indicates.
You cannot say they forced anyone into using their software ever, since there has always been a choice (Mac and Linux come to mind).
You're living in a fantasy land. Show me how to buy a Dell without windows. Show me how to read a.docx file that my municipal sent as my "bill" with Linux?
Or did you mean that I could go without a computer and without internet access, so therefore I wasn't being forced to buy Windows?
Did you know that taxes in some contries have to be filed using a.NET application?
Did you know my mobile phone only came with drivers for Windows?
Or did you mean that I could choose not to run a business or backup my address book, so therefore I wasn't being forced to buy Windows?
Seriously, Bill has 50 billion dollars, what makes you think he needs you either?
Slashdot Mirror
Meditate on that for now, and then see if you can figure out why.
Let's tell consumers to stop buying their low-quality buggy hardware that require special installation procedures, and maybe they'll stop dragging down the consumers idea of the Linux Desktop.
I have an intel-based graphics setup that works just fine with beryl- no special install voodoo necessary. It might not get quite as many FPS as my coworkers' firegl board, but it never crashes, and never freezes up on me.
He's convinced all he needs to do is tweak some underclocking or somethingrather I don't really understand, but at this point I'm pretty sure a big part of his efforts are there to justify his purchase and vindicate his decision, and that the ATI board really wasn't worth it even to him- an otherwise very technical person.
Maybe after we get ATI/NVidia to stop hurting Linux with their inferior hardware and software, we can get some OEMs- besides TiVO- to actually ship with Linux desktops...
Forget all that jibber-jabber about whether they have a right to protect their "copyrights", or even if you have any rights to copy: they clearly cannot be trusted with your secrecy and your privacy.
When its said someone works three jobs doesn't mean they're working 40+40+40 hours a week. They're probably only working about 60-70 hours a week. If they make minimum wage, they're probably barely scraping together 1000$ a month.
That's not a lot of money, but it's significantly higher than the poverty limit. It's barely enough for an extremely modest mortgage, utilities, toiletries, 90 or so "2 dollar cheese pizzas", and 30 gallons of gasoline. They even have some money left to splurge and buy a book once in a while.A mortgage should always be cheaper than renting: why would you possibly think your landlord's mortgage was higher than your rent?Check prices on those things. The cheese pizzas are actually cheaper per-meal- and likewise- so are the TV dinners.Maybe, or maybe they lost their jobs when the President gave tax credits to companies who outsourced American jobs overseas. Maybe they lost their jobs when their office building was blown up by an airplane. Only a fool would pretend to know.
Minimum wage is supposed to be the minimum necessary allowence to have an "acceptable" standard of living, and at minimum wage it takes quite a bit more than 40 hours of work, but you seem to think that's okay.
Just exactly how many hours a week does someone need to work in order to afford a house? Healthy food? Clean water? A child?
Or do you really believe the definition of capitalism intends for people to degrade themselves below the acceptable standards of living when someone wants to buy a book?
Just download a patch so that your purchased software will run on your purchased hardware.
Given that cases such as Galoob v. Nintendo, 780 F. Supp 1283 (N.D. Cal. 1991), 22 U.S.P.Q.2d 1587 (9th Cir. 1992), and see also Foresight v. Pfortmiller, 719 F. Supp 1006 (D. Kan. 1989) for examples where it is ruled, and it is law that you have the right to do this.
No matter what Microsoft says on the subject, you do not have to purchase another copy of Windows XP. It should be criminal for them to suggest otherwise, and it may very well be (at least in some states).
They may say that they have "licensed" it to you; ask them to show you the contract and signature, for you can only give rights away through a signed contract, and a "meeting of the minds". See Vault v. Quaid, 847 F.2d 255 (5th Cir. 1988).
(As a side note, those of you that are paying attention will note this is exactly why the GPL works: You do not [by default] have the right to copy GPL'd software, but the author will give you the right to copy if you satisfy some conditions. As a result, you do not have to sign anything in order to be "bound" to the GPL: you simply wouldn't have the right to copy.)
If someone sold you a stereo, then broke into your house and took it back, you'd call them a criminal. You wouldn't say they "did the right thing to the point", so besides the fact that GoDaddy sold virtual property, then broke into your virtual house and stole virtual property, how is this so different, it requires a completely different attitude? It's not up to me. It's not up to you either. It's up to a court of law so that rational and impartial minds find justice. Godaddy decided they were the judge and jury, and decided that they still are. I will never do business with Godaddy and I'd never do business with such a treacherous antiamerican hatemonger like yourself either.
Or to put it a way your simple little mind might grasp: My friend got his car reposessed so he couldn't get to work, so he lost his job, so he couldn't pay his rent, so he got kicked out of his house all because his bank decided that regular automatic payment that had been going on for every month for a full year suddenly looked very suspicious, and rather than pay it, or contact anyone, they decided it must be fraudulent and locked his account.
I think that Myspace could've fixed their bug, and turned their site off if Myspace had the bug. Asking Godaddy as they did was stupid and idiotic, but Godaddy actually doing it was downright criminal.
You might trust Godaddy with your house, your car, your job, and your family, but I don't.
I hope Fyodor sues Godaddy for all they're worth.
I'm of the opinion that there's nothing inherently wrong with pointers and that really the whole world went to shit the moment people started trusting that code actually does what the comments say it does.
Therefore I say comments are bad for security as it _discourages_ review, instead of encouraging it.
The defaults worked fine.
I feel the same way: My favorite software (Epiphany, Evolution, Beryl, Panel) just doesn't run on Windows. The fact that most of my software (GNU, Gaim, VIM) works on Windows seems a testament to my software, and not to Windows.
Chances are, its because of the custom install you did, or something wrong with your hardware. The defaults are certainly much faster on each and every one of my systems.
My laptop required no configuration on Linux. On Windows, I needed to install some driver, THEN plug in the device, then run some setup tool, unplug the device, replug it in, and then tell it about my AP.
Sounds to me like you didn't buy a supported WIFI device either.
Like most of your other "points" this seems heavily dependant on your knowledge base and your capabilities, instead of the capabilities of the software you're examining/reviewing.
Does it even bother you even for a minute that you simply cannot play the video at all on Windows?
If you have an OEM computer, or one with a DVD burner, chances are someone paid for your MPEG decoder for you, but Microsoft surely didn't.
Regarding why your video is choppy, changes are your video driver, or video mode isn't overlay-capable. Video isn't choppy at all on my thinkpad 600e (a 300mhz laptop) simply because of good XV support. I will say that if your custom install had you set 24bpp mode, most video cards (or their drivers) don't support overlays at that depth, and that either 16bpp or 32bpp would be better. It'd also be faster (for other reasons). The exception I know of is the firegl drivers that are made by ATI, but I don't recommend anyone buy one of those cards simply because ATI hates its customers.
By the way, mplayer isn't "minimal gui with windows codecs", and your problems aren't codec-related at all. VLC and mplayer likely use the same mpeg decoder (FFmpeg) on your system- the fact that you're using "linux codecs with your windows" (when using VLC) says a lot more about Linux's software support than it does about Windows.
GNOME is at the very least attempting to change that, but if you've ever used a professional user interface (such as NeXT/OpenSTEP, CDE, or OS/2's WPS) you'd see just how lacking it can be to use something else.
Note that this isn't the same thing as approachable- you'll note the examples I gave are often considered relatively unapproachable interfaces- but they are extremely user friendly.
The smartest and dumbest thing the GNUstep people did was start GNUstep: It made an excellent developer framework, and using it means they get access to one of the best workflow systems ever (the kind that Microsoft has been playing catchup with their Cairo product- announced in 1989 still hasn't made good on), but it also means that the uninformed don't really have all that much to do.
You see, because GNOME and KDE aren't designed yet, anyone can offer a suggestion on what needs to be done. With GNUstep, the number of people who can offer productive suggestions is much smaller- and up until recently was comprised almost exclusively of programmers. After all, if anyone needed to wonder what GNUstep needed next- it was just a matter of picking one of the OpenStep headers that had implement-me markers all over it.
This is obvious. You don't use GNUstep, or OpenStep, and you don't know anything about either, so this is a horrible way for you to find out about them. The story editor and submitter chose very poorly when putting this up here on slashdot, and as a result, you have very strong negative feelings about GNUstep.
The GPL forbids distribution that is patent encumbered; from the preamble: Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. This means that if those programs are patent-encumbered, then Novell doesn't have a right to redistribute them, no matter what Microsoft says. In order for Novell to have the right to redistribute GPL software, then Microsoft cannot have the right to use anyone (not Novells' customers, not anybody) for those patents.
Now ordinarily, we could simply agree to disagree- and wait for a Judge to say if Microsoft is right or not, but the problem here is that Novell is saying that these files are encumbered with patents and so therefore Novell is saying expressly that Novell is violating copyright law.
Of course, it's possible that contract isn't legally binding, and that neither Microsoft nor Novell had the right to offer what they did in the contract, but you seem to forget that the parent poster was asking why anyone is bothered about this and here it is: Either Novell is an asshole to GPL developers and sold something Novell didn't own, or Novell is an asshole to GPL developers and violated their copyright.
Because Novell is licensing thse patents for the use of their customers (presumably with SUSE), they are denying their customers the rights to use the software for any purpose (they can only use it on machines with paid-up SUSE licenses). They can't give someone else the rights to use the software (assuming the patents are valid), so if Linux really does contain patented algorithms that aren't freely licensed for everyone's use, Novell loses the right to distribute Linux at all since the recipients cannot transfer those rights to others.
You accuse someone of drug use "but in the nicest possible way", lecture an argument on a single broken assumption, and then say, "only people who agree with me can reply-"
Software and its use is supposed to be Free: Free to run, Free to change, Free to share, and Free to improve. US Copyright law guarantees the first two, so the GPL really is about Free to share the software, and improved versions of that software. Anything that produces inequalities in its users, or its use is contrary to the spirit of the GPL, and I really do think anyone informed about Free Software knows this.
The real question is whether a Judge will honor the spirits of the GPL, and the authors of Free Software, or the twisted freedom hating interpretation of Microsoft.
You're right, that's Jeremy's problem with Novell, but parent said they didn't understand the problem, so here it is:
Novell made a deal that promises protection for their customers. That's a big part of why they made it, and along comes Microsoft and says as much. Novell could say You know, we really meant that to protect our customers for Novell products, not for third-party products and yet they didn't. They said trust us, we're the good guys remember?
The simple fact is that Novell doesn't have the right to enter into that deal with Microsoft using SUSE because Novell doesn't have the right to guarantee their customers those rights (under the deal with Microsoft). If they did, Microsoft probably wouldn't have entered into the deal.
Microsoft says it will sue users of Samba, but not if they give Microsoft money by being a customer of Novell (because a portion of the SUSE warantee agreement goes to Microsoft directly).
By doing this, Novell is violating my copyright and the copyright of every contributor to free software by redistributing my software to people who do not have the ability to redistribute my software (with all rights they received therein). The GPL expressly forbids this, both in intent and in letter.
Novell is now saying that when I said anyone they distribute my software to must be given the same rights to redistribute that Novell has, and be told as such, that I really didn't mean it. While the GPL says this means Novell no longer has the right to redistribute my software, I strongly suspect they think it doesn't say that either.
I think novices have an easier time clicking buttons randomly and getting a wrong (but working!) ACL set, than they do picking random numbers to feed into chmod, but I wouldn't say for a minute either novice really understands them.
Besides, novices aren't really exposed to ACLs all that often. If they are, something else is wrong, because on a personal computer, there are no other "entities" that need access to files, so ACLs aren't terribly used anyway, unless of course your novices know what changing the rights for IWAM_DS261841 might do, and in the workgroup environment, if you have a novice managing your fileserver security, you deserve whatever comes of it.
In practice, I've taught users to share files on unix and to share files on windows, and believe it or not, you can tell novices "to share a file with everyone type ``ln filename
They get confused easily, not just because it's not their job, but because explaining spatial tasks is harder than telling them what to type.
Now, novices tend to feel more comfortable exploring spatially on their own, that doesn't really mean they understand it, nor are translating what they want to do into the actions to perform any more effectively. Maybe exploration is what people mean by "easy to use", but in the real workplace, I don't want my users to explore- they've got work to do.
But the real question is, does iobench show performance loss as the result of that fragmentation?
It of course, doesn't hurt that HFS and UFS are both painfully slow to begin with...
NTFS ACLs are confusing. As useful as they may be, real human beings don't know about them or care about them. You know, the kinds of real human beings that use workstations.
Never mind that ZFS actually does support the expressive power of NT's ACL format, but like most modern POSIXish filesystems, allows you to use those "plain-jane posix permissions" that are simpler, and more apparent (and therefore much less error-prone) when they will be satisfactory.
What time warp did you fall out of? NTFS has many more places to smuggle metadata away than HFS. The problem with metadata on NTFS is that nothing on Windows supports the concept of sharing metadata. Your NTFS has had streams for years and you never even knew it (more than the "two" streams that HFS supports no less!). Streams and metadata are useless if nobody uses it.
The best thing about HFS is Apple, encouraging everyone by example to make excellent applications and provide the best possible experience to the user. Technical expertise aside, NTFS's streams support is actually a security risk simply because nobody knows about them (so nobody knows that file.exe::hidden-secret-data is a real file!).
If you had real complaints about ZFS, they might be that growing still sucks, so having to simulate quotas still sucks.
I saved this for last because it's important: The real difference between resource/data forks, and hidden files isn't a technical one, but a practical one. If every mac administrator knows how to use resedit to look for metadata, then metadata is an unlikely place to hide things. But if nobody running windows knows about named streams, the only thing that'll be in a named stream is evil- so one day, people simply decide that all named streams are evil and ban them forever. Once this occurs, virus scanners "quarantine" named streams, and even start scaring the pants off the user about them.
The best parts of NTFS are the parts that are exactly the same as HPFS386. The parts they absolutely needed to fulfil their grandious claims of the CAIRO project are what's worthless.
You're thinking of the Shrman Antitrust Act. It doesn't talk about illegal monopolies in terms of products however, but in terms of restraint and consumers.
Microsoft hurt the market and the consumer. Badly. As a result, they simply are not allowed to play "free market" anymore.
That's all there is to it.
Are you reading more into this:
Than I intended?
Why would your knowledge be authoritative, and why do people keep saying "to my knowledge" like that's supposed to be the line drawn in the sand?
If you're a monopoly holder and you're not producing the best possible product, you are hurting the consumer.
Seriously, this is about "if both google and microsoft have a monopoly, why is microsoft bad" and the simple answer is that they (microsoft) hurt the consumer. Wal*Mart hurts the consumer. Toys R' US hurts the consumer. They all do so in different ways, but they are all indeed hurting consumers.
When a monopoly exists, consumers no longer have the choice, and a better product simply cannot come along unless the monopoly holder in its own good graces decides to produce it. So long as consumers aren't hurt by its "crappiness", the monopoly is legal.
Sometimes it takes a government to regulate the monopoly, and other times it takes transparency. So far it looks like having "don't be evil" be your mission statement can also do the trick.
Google "Windows sucks", and you'll see why this is a faulty assumption.
Did anyone even bother to READ the FTC's report on Microsoft?
Microsoft's illegal activities began in the late 1970s, and they were repetedly slapped with lawsuit after lawsuit. It wasn't just in 1995 that they were breaking the law.
The laws they broke allowed them to get a monopoly. Once they had the monopoly, they used it to hurt consumers. That's what the DOJ said. That's what the FTC report indicates.
You're living in a fantasy land. Show me how to buy a Dell without windows. Show me how to read a
Or did you mean that I could go without a computer and without internet access, so therefore I wasn't being forced to buy Windows?
Did you know that taxes in some contries have to be filed using a
Did you know my mobile phone only came with drivers for Windows?
Or did you mean that I could choose not to run a business or backup my address book, so therefore I wasn't being forced to buy Windows?
Seriously, Bill has 50 billion dollars, what makes you think he needs you either?