This is actually good news. The biggest problem with the Internet is its anonymous nature.
If you want things like junk e-mail and DoS attacks to finally end, then you're going to have to get used to an Internet that has accountability and identifiability built in. It's the only real solution.
there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an invasive and destructive trespass.
Well, then there's also no plausibly protected constitutional interest that the judge can assert that outweighs my right to sodomize him repeatedly with a rusty spork for being a clueless ass hole. I've got an "invasive and destructive trespass" for him!
Stupid ignorant motherfucker. How do idiots like this ever become judges? We need a good ol-fashioned lynching...
I've never coded in Java, but I've used a lot of programs that were. In my experience, the vast majority of them had dog-slow and butt-ugly UI.
Java might be capable of generating very responsive, pretty UI, but it must not be very conducive to it. Otherwise the vast majority of Java apps wouldn't have such atrocious UI.
If the language isn't designed in such as way so as to encourage good program design and implementational practice, then it's not designed well, IMHO.
Legally, yes. Ethically, no. The way things should work is that all spam and telemarketing should be a federal crime, and the official punishment for violators should be crucifiction (for both the slow-and-painful-death factor and the public humiliation factor).
Open source software (OSS) and free software (FS) enthusiasts have always cited stability as an advantage if GNU/Linux/BSD over Windows/Mac.
It just hasn't rung true for several years now. Since the releases of Mac OS X and Windows 2000, uptimes of months or years on Mac and Wintel systems are commonplace, and the only blue screens or lockups I've seen were due to buggy device drivers or failing hardware, which are things GNU/Linux is generally no more robust in handling.
As for application quality, commercial applications have always been (and continue to be) far more stable and robust. OSS/FS application developers don't seem to understand or value thorough, robust, graceful error handling. They think that dumping some incoherent trace output to a console window and letting the application crash is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in scenario they consider to be unimportant. They code only (or primarily) for the assumed success cases, and do nothing to handle the failure cases.
The reality is that most OSS/FS enthusiasts would rather defensively argue than code, and meanwhile the points they argue are being made obsolete by rapid improvements in commercial software.
It's pathetically difficult to install, configure, and use, and it lacks robustness.
Apache, Ogg Vorbis, The Gimp, and a few other open-source success stories exist. I'm glad that they do exist, because I believe strongly in the principles behind open-source and free software. But it seems that only the relatively small, focused OSS projects end up being successful (due to their minimal management and coordination requirements), whereas anything much larger quickly becomes a chaotic sloppy mess of unneeded technical complexity and poor architecture.
But the vast majority of OSS is crappy, and the various existing GNU/Linux or BSD systems (even the commercially-developed ones like Red Hat) lack the complete top-down development approach necessary to produce a coherent, easy-to-use system.
I'm tired of all these "prophets" proclaiming what will or what won't happen. Everyone should shut the hell up and work on what interests them. If you want OSS and free software to succeed, quit talking about it and start working on the things it so badly needs (ease of installation, ease of use, standardizard user interface, more robustness, more hardware support). If you work on things with conviction, you'll make your desired outcome happen, and then you won't have to waste your time prophetizing.
And no, this is not a troll. This is an objective and genuine opinion, and I stand by it. Feel free to disagree with me or reply with disgust or hatred, but don't be an immature jackass and moderate the post as a "Troll" just because you disagree.
While you are all bickering about whether the triplicate posts are a joke or not, you're missing out on the fact that the RFC itself is a complete joke!
3. Setting the Evil Bit. There are a number of ways in which the evil bit may be set. Attack applications may use a suitable API to request that it be set. Systems that do not have other mechanisms MUST provide such an API; attack programs MUST use it.
Wait a minute... as a virus author, it is my duty to make sure my virus sets the EVIL bit so as to clearly identify itself as harmful? LOL... yeah, THAT's clearly real.
When you pirate their music, you are stealing money from them
No I'm not. Didn't you read my posting at all? I wouldn't buy their stuff anyway. It costs too much and has unreasonable restrictions on its use. So I'm not depriving them of anything, because I wouldn't buy it anyway.
You're an idiot. You obviously don't understand the difference between the legality of something and the ethics of something. There are many things that are illegal but which are not wrong. There are also many wrong things that are perfectly legal.
Don't fix things. Make them fix it.
on
Family Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime."
The biggest mistake people make is that they simply fix a person's computer problem. The person remains completely clueless and uneducated.
Whenever a CU (clueless user) says they are thinking about buying a computer, tell them that they really don't want one. Tell them that a computer is kinda of like a car, only a thousand times worse. It requires daily maintenance, learning insanely complex technical details, frequent hardware breakdowns, and throwing heaps of money at it regularly. Spook the hell out of them. Only go down the route of actually helping them purchase a machine if they still demonstrate a consistent, committed desire to truly invest the time to learn and maintain a computer. Once they've been thoroughly spooked and they've gotten a computer, then you at least know they're willing to learn, and you can hold the lecture over their head if they start getting impatient or agitated over a problem later.
Then, whenever a problem does occur, don't fix it for them. Always refuse to assist with any computer problem over the phone -- it always has to be handled in person, with both of you in front of the offending machine. Don't drive the PC -- make them drive it. You can guide them through steps and teach things as you go through the fix together, but at each step of the way, you need to ask them to repeat things back to you so they can demonstrate actual understanding. No student driver ever learned by having the instructor drive the car for them while they watched.
This all takes painstaking patience. But if you stick to it, you'll find that the person will eventually become the "solve their own problems" type, capable and motivated enough to teach themselves, tinker on their own, and bail themselves out of trouble. Then you're off the hook. Unless the person is one of these morons incapable of learning, in which case you should probably just beat them senseless with an old Compaq "portable" lug-along.
Or, you can avoid all that and just never help anyone with their computer issues, ever, period. Personally, I consider computers a personal, individual matter. I take care of my own, and so should you, the end.
But most people don't think piracy is wrong, and they are correct. Piracy is the one method consumers have at their disposal to balance a market tightly controlled by a small handful of large producers. In the absence of true competition among a plethora of producers, piracy is the only way for consumer needs to factor into the equation.
Many people who put down pirates often say, "If you don't like the prices/terms/whatever that the producers are offering, then just don't buy their products!" Unfortunately, that only works when viable alternative products are being offered by other producers at different prices/terms. Consumers still want or need to obtain the goods, so if there's only one producer (or one small group of producers all colluding together), then piracy is the only viable solution.
Also, it should be noted that piracy and theft are not the same. Piracy does not remove a physical unit of good from the producer, and piracy does not usually deprive the producer of a unit of sale, since that person receiving the pirated copy wouldn't have bought the product anyway (that's why they're out there trying to pirate it -- they can't afford to purchase it legitimately).
This isn't a new issue, either. It's been debated in the software industry for years. Adobe Photoshop is priced at several hundred dollars, which is well beyond the means of most people who need the product for personal use. Since Adobe (stupidly) fails to offer the same product at a more reasonable price to individual consumers for non-profit use, but the need for the product still exists, people pirate it. And this is a good thing, because it allows the people who need it but obviously can't afford it to still get it -- without physically detracting from the producer's goods, and without creating a "lost sale" for the producer (since the consumer wouldn't have purchased it anyway).
Linux is Unix. Even Windows NT is based in large part on Unix. Mac OS-X is based on Unix. Until we've all migrated to something other than BSD/Linux/Windows/MacOS, Unix is still very much alive, unfortunately.
...and then they recorded it and mass-produced it themselves instead of going through a studio, then they would be making a fuck of a lot more money, wouldn't they?
"promising Linux users what they have been waiting for, like NTFS resizing(which is a first), Automatic Network config(zeroconf), Supermount,"
Um... that's not what I want. I'm still waiting for an installer that handles failure cases well, doesn't foul up package dependencies, and properly sets up X-Windows so the desktop doesn't start up in a flickering mode that would kill an epilleptic. Give me something that actually works without hassle, or give me Windows.
Re:Too bad the author is no good
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 1
The whole dot-com boom & bust phenomena (which so many/. posters bought into) is deserving of much more thought and research...
You really think so? Because frankly, the entire dot-com fallout was incredibly stupid and incredibly simple: if you don't make profits as you go along, you'll surely fail. I don't know what else can or should be said about it.
What in the living fuck is this shit?
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 1
Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important US aerospace contractors?
Neither! NASA is a multi-billion-dollar program that tackles the most difficult engineering problems known to man. When you're specifically in the business of doing things that have never been done before in the history of mankind, and every project is its own new engineering nightmare of complexity, and the human safety matter is thrown in making the entire thing have to be perfect without exception, then yes, it's going to cost tons of money, and yes, it's going to be absolutely impossible to correctly estimate the work involved. That's why I don't understand everyone who bitches about NASA cost overruns or timetable slips -- that's just an unavoidable part of exploring the unknown.
A lot of us here are software developers. Imagine for a moment that you had to GUARANTEE with KNOWN, STATISTICALLY VERIFIABLE CERTAINTY that your application was defect-free. I would love to see you achieve that level of quality right on an original estimated budget or timeline even 50% of the time. It's simply not realistic. It's very possible (and especially important in space applications) to do the "we won't release it until it's right" thing, but that by its very nature means accepting that you're gonna have to deal with unforeseeable problems and not stick to estimates.
If anything, NASA should simply learn to stop making promises in the first place. If you know a project can't possibly be delivered to perfection on a timetable or on a budget, then don't promise to. Say, "We can do this, but the nature of the problem makes it impossible to estimate budget or deadline. Still want to do it?" Then if the project gets approved, no one has any right to bitch about it being "too late" or "too expensive". Ahh, there's nothing like honesty:-)
Everyone seems to assume that TCPA/Palladium will become commonplace, and that in that world all consumer/user rights will be lost. That's a really big assumption.
What makes any of these hardware makers (or even Microsoft) think that these egregious violations and restrictions on consumer/user rights will simply be happily adopted by the general public? Why do people on Slashdot assume this will be the case?
In general, the public is willing to accept getting reamed when they are deriving more benefit than pain from the experience. Such is the case with DVD movies -- customers get better quality picture and sound, more special features, longer-life media, etc, etc, which for most people outweighs the minor irritation of having region encodings or being forced to sit through the intro/preview/ad tracks.
But the whole Palladium and TCPA movement won't fly, in my estimation, because it holds absolutely zero appeal to any average person. The only people who derive any benefit from it at all are the hardware and software makers, not the consumers/users. When there's no benefit to be had, then it doesn't even matter if you stop offering current-generation technology completely and offer the public no new alternative but your DRM-managed crap -- people just won't buy it. They'll keep using what they've already got, because it already does what they want and even does it WITHOUT all the ridiculous restrictions.
In short, I think all this panic and paranoia is misplaced. The general public may be composed mostly of ignorant sheep, but when something bad enough is done on a large enough scale, people notice and they don't tolerate it, and it fails pretty darn quickly.
Windows (even as old as Windows 95) will install on basically any PC hardware and will at least boot up into a usable state. You'll at least get a clear picture on your monitor, and your CD-ROM and mouse and keyboard will at least work.
The same cannot be said for any Linux distribution I've ever tried. Every Linux distribution is limited by the fact that it uses the Linux kernal and the X-Windows graphical server. The Linux kernal simply doesn't autodetect or work with a vast array of hardware devices, and X-Windows is notoriously difficult for an average person to configure. Most distro installers take a really piss-poor stab at getting monitor refresh rates right for X, but if it doesn't work out on the first try on your video card and monitor, then tough luck--you're left with a freshly installed system that just puts up a rolling flickering picture every time it boots X.
To fix it, you have to be enough of a guru to know that there is such a thing as an XF86Config file, and you have to know where in this huge arcane directory hierarchy it is located, and you have to know how to use a text editor and how to invoke it (pico? vi? yeah, those are intuitive names), and then you have to study a four-part course in mathematics and CRT engineering to figure out how to write modelines for your video system that MIGHT work.
Then, you have to recompile your kernal several times to finally get the alpha-quality drivers for your hardware compiled in so that you can actually use your stuff. But of course, along the way, you discover that it won't compile without dumping a few errors because you don't have the latest libBLAH package or the latest autoconf or whatever, so you have to go download and compile all of those... but in the process of doing that, you discover that they won't compile either because of something ELSE that you need.
Strangely, I don't consider something "user friendly" when it says "installation successful" and yet half my hardware doesn't work and my picture rolls and flickers. I don't consider an OS installer complete if I have to recompile the world just to make something work that ought to work right from the start. There's far more to usability than just desktop environments or GUI-based installers. You've got to get the fundamental things right first.
You didn't read what I wrote, or else you misinterpreted the issue.
I never said that Verizon was prohibited from providing its own ISP service, for instance. What I did say is that the physical line provider and the IP provider are required by federal law to be distinct companies even if they are owned by the same parent company. That's why "Verizon DSL" is (and has to be) a separate company from "Verizon" the phone company: the phone company provides the physical DSL connectivity, while "Verizon DSL" is just the ISP.
They might both be owned ultimately by Verizon, but they are not permitted to share customer records or to physically or operationally be part of the same organization. That's why when you call DSL customer support, they never know who's really responsible for the problem you're having (is it a physical line problem, or maybe an ISP problem, or maybe both?), and you have to get transfered back and forth across the divide and re-explain your situation and all your customer identification all over again from scratch.
There is no analagous restriction on cable internet providers, which is why the setup time and support are both lightyears better for cable modem, despite it being an inferior technology.
It is? Why? Microsoft thought of this a long time and has it in the works for Longhorn.
And the bottom line is that neither you NOR Microsoft have bothered presenting your creation to real users to see if they actually like that approach. Instead, you've just unleashed it on the world without bothering to measure the real demand for it.
Typical engineering bravado: if we build it, they will come. The real smart engineers are the ones who bother to assess the need for something before building it, and get feedback about the design via prototypes, etc, before building anything.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually good news. The biggest problem with the Internet is its anonymous nature.
If you want things like junk e-mail and DoS attacks to finally end, then you're going to have to get used to an Internet that has accountability and identifiability built in. It's the only real solution.
there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an invasive and destructive trespass.
Well, then there's also no plausibly protected constitutional interest that the judge can assert that outweighs my right to sodomize him repeatedly with a rusty spork for being a clueless ass hole. I've got an "invasive and destructive trespass" for him!
Stupid ignorant motherfucker. How do idiots like this ever become judges? We need a good ol-fashioned lynching...
I've never coded in Java, but I've used a lot of programs that were. In my experience, the vast majority of them had dog-slow and butt-ugly UI.
Java might be capable of generating very responsive, pretty UI, but it must not be very conducive to it. Otherwise the vast majority of Java apps wouldn't have such atrocious UI.
If the language isn't designed in such as way so as to encourage good program design and implementational practice, then it's not designed well, IMHO.
Should spammers get some privacy protection too?
Legally, yes. Ethically, no. The way things should work is that all spam and telemarketing should be a federal crime, and the official punishment for violators should be crucifiction (for both the slow-and-painful-death factor and the public humiliation factor).
Open source software (OSS) and free software (FS) enthusiasts have always cited stability as an advantage if GNU/Linux/BSD over Windows/Mac.
It just hasn't rung true for several years now. Since the releases of Mac OS X and Windows 2000, uptimes of months or years on Mac and Wintel systems are commonplace, and the only blue screens or lockups I've seen were due to buggy device drivers or failing hardware, which are things GNU/Linux is generally no more robust in handling.
As for application quality, commercial applications have always been (and continue to be) far more stable and robust. OSS/FS application developers don't seem to understand or value thorough, robust, graceful error handling. They think that dumping some incoherent trace output to a console window and letting the application crash is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in scenario they consider to be unimportant. They code only (or primarily) for the assumed success cases, and do nothing to handle the failure cases.
The reality is that most OSS/FS enthusiasts would rather defensively argue than code, and meanwhile the points they argue are being made obsolete by rapid improvements in commercial software.
So we are all 90% full of shit? :-P
Most OSS is crap. Sorry, but it's true.
It's pathetically difficult to install, configure, and use, and it lacks robustness.
Apache, Ogg Vorbis, The Gimp, and a few other open-source success stories exist. I'm glad that they do exist, because I believe strongly in the principles behind open-source and free software. But it seems that only the relatively small, focused OSS projects end up being successful (due to their minimal management and coordination requirements), whereas anything much larger quickly becomes a chaotic sloppy mess of unneeded technical complexity and poor architecture.
But the vast majority of OSS is crappy, and the various existing GNU/Linux or BSD systems (even the commercially-developed ones like Red Hat) lack the complete top-down development approach necessary to produce a coherent, easy-to-use system.
I'm tired of all these "prophets" proclaiming what will or what won't happen. Everyone should shut the hell up and work on what interests them. If you want OSS and free software to succeed, quit talking about it and start working on the things it so badly needs (ease of installation, ease of use, standardizard user interface, more robustness, more hardware support). If you work on things with conviction, you'll make your desired outcome happen, and then you won't have to waste your time prophetizing.
And no, this is not a troll. This is an objective and genuine opinion, and I stand by it. Feel free to disagree with me or reply with disgust or hatred, but don't be an immature jackass and moderate the post as a "Troll" just because you disagree.
While you are all bickering about whether the triplicate posts are a joke or not, you're missing out on the fact that the RFC itself is a complete joke!
3. Setting the Evil Bit. There are a number of ways in which the evil bit may be set. Attack applications may use a suitable API to request that it be set. Systems that do not have other mechanisms MUST provide such an API; attack programs MUST use it.
Wait a minute... as a virus author, it is my duty to make sure my virus sets the EVIL bit so as to clearly identify itself as harmful? LOL... yeah, THAT's clearly real.
When you pirate their music, you are stealing money from them
No I'm not. Didn't you read my posting at all? I wouldn't buy their stuff anyway. It costs too much and has unreasonable restrictions on its use. So I'm not depriving them of anything, because I wouldn't buy it anyway.
You're an idiot. You obviously don't understand the difference between the legality of something and the ethics of something. There are many things that are illegal but which are not wrong. There are also many wrong things that are perfectly legal.
"Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime."
The biggest mistake people make is that they simply fix a person's computer problem. The person remains completely clueless and uneducated.
Whenever a CU (clueless user) says they are thinking about buying a computer, tell them that they really don't want one. Tell them that a computer is kinda of like a car, only a thousand times worse. It requires daily maintenance, learning insanely complex technical details, frequent hardware breakdowns, and throwing heaps of money at it regularly. Spook the hell out of them. Only go down the route of actually helping them purchase a machine if they still demonstrate a consistent, committed desire to truly invest the time to learn and maintain a computer. Once they've been thoroughly spooked and they've gotten a computer, then you at least know they're willing to learn, and you can hold the lecture over their head if they start getting impatient or agitated over a problem later.
Then, whenever a problem does occur, don't fix it for them. Always refuse to assist with any computer problem over the phone -- it always has to be handled in person, with both of you in front of the offending machine. Don't drive the PC -- make them drive it. You can guide them through steps and teach things as you go through the fix together, but at each step of the way, you need to ask them to repeat things back to you so they can demonstrate actual understanding. No student driver ever learned by having the instructor drive the car for them while they watched.
This all takes painstaking patience. But if you stick to it, you'll find that the person will eventually become the "solve their own problems" type, capable and motivated enough to teach themselves, tinker on their own, and bail themselves out of trouble. Then you're off the hook. Unless the person is one of these morons incapable of learning, in which case you should probably just beat them senseless with an old Compaq "portable" lug-along.
Or, you can avoid all that and just never help anyone with their computer issues, ever, period. Personally, I consider computers a personal, individual matter. I take care of my own, and so should you, the end.
Piracy is illegal. Almost everyone knows that.
But most people don't think piracy is wrong, and they are correct. Piracy is the one method consumers have at their disposal to balance a market tightly controlled by a small handful of large producers. In the absence of true competition among a plethora of producers, piracy is the only way for consumer needs to factor into the equation.
Many people who put down pirates often say, "If you don't like the prices/terms/whatever that the producers are offering, then just don't buy their products!" Unfortunately, that only works when viable alternative products are being offered by other producers at different prices/terms. Consumers still want or need to obtain the goods, so if there's only one producer (or one small group of producers all colluding together), then piracy is the only viable solution.
Also, it should be noted that piracy and theft are not the same. Piracy does not remove a physical unit of good from the producer, and piracy does not usually deprive the producer of a unit of sale, since that person receiving the pirated copy wouldn't have bought the product anyway (that's why they're out there trying to pirate it -- they can't afford to purchase it legitimately).
This isn't a new issue, either. It's been debated in the software industry for years. Adobe Photoshop is priced at several hundred dollars, which is well beyond the means of most people who need the product for personal use. Since Adobe (stupidly) fails to offer the same product at a more reasonable price to individual consumers for non-profit use, but the need for the product still exists, people pirate it. And this is a good thing, because it allows the people who need it but obviously can't afford it to still get it -- without physically detracting from the producer's goods, and without creating a "lost sale" for the producer (since the consumer wouldn't have purchased it anyway).
Linux is Unix. Even Windows NT is based in large part on Unix. Mac OS-X is based on Unix. Until we've all migrated to something other than BSD/Linux/Windows/MacOS, Unix is still very much alive, unfortunately.
"Code size matters. Price matters. Real world matters. And ia-64... falls flat on its face on ALL of these."
Ease of use matters. Ease of installation matters. Hardware support matters. Linux falls flat on its face on ALL of these.
...and then they recorded it and mass-produced it themselves instead of going through a studio, then they would be making a fuck of a lot more money, wouldn't they?
"promising Linux users what they have been waiting for, like NTFS resizing(which is a first), Automatic Network config(zeroconf), Supermount,"
Um... that's not what I want. I'm still waiting for an installer that handles failure cases well, doesn't foul up package dependencies, and properly sets up X-Windows so the desktop doesn't start up in a flickering mode that would kill an epilleptic. Give me something that actually works without hassle, or give me Windows.
The whole dot-com boom & bust phenomena (which so many /. posters bought into) is deserving of much more thought and research...
You really think so? Because frankly, the entire dot-com fallout was incredibly stupid and incredibly simple: if you don't make profits as you go along, you'll surely fail. I don't know what else can or should be said about it.
What in the living fuck is this shit?
Thank god, some common sense finally prevailed.
Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important US aerospace contractors?
Neither! NASA is a multi-billion-dollar program that tackles the most difficult engineering problems known to man. When you're specifically in the business of doing things that have never been done before in the history of mankind, and every project is its own new engineering nightmare of complexity, and the human safety matter is thrown in making the entire thing have to be perfect without exception, then yes, it's going to cost tons of money, and yes, it's going to be absolutely impossible to correctly estimate the work involved. That's why I don't understand everyone who bitches about NASA cost overruns or timetable slips -- that's just an unavoidable part of exploring the unknown.
A lot of us here are software developers. Imagine for a moment that you had to GUARANTEE with KNOWN, STATISTICALLY VERIFIABLE CERTAINTY that your application was defect-free. I would love to see you achieve that level of quality right on an original estimated budget or timeline even 50% of the time. It's simply not realistic. It's very possible (and especially important in space applications) to do the "we won't release it until it's right" thing, but that by its very nature means accepting that you're gonna have to deal with unforeseeable problems and not stick to estimates.
If anything, NASA should simply learn to stop making promises in the first place. If you know a project can't possibly be delivered to perfection on a timetable or on a budget, then don't promise to. Say, "We can do this, but the nature of the problem makes it impossible to estimate budget or deadline. Still want to do it?" Then if the project gets approved, no one has any right to bitch about it being "too late" or "too expensive". Ahh, there's nothing like honesty :-)
Everyone seems to assume that TCPA/Palladium will become commonplace, and that in that world all consumer/user rights will be lost. That's a really big assumption.
What makes any of these hardware makers (or even Microsoft) think that these egregious violations and restrictions on consumer/user rights will simply be happily adopted by the general public? Why do people on Slashdot assume this will be the case?
In general, the public is willing to accept getting reamed when they are deriving more benefit than pain from the experience. Such is the case with DVD movies -- customers get better quality picture and sound, more special features, longer-life media, etc, etc, which for most people outweighs the minor irritation of having region encodings or being forced to sit through the intro/preview/ad tracks.
But the whole Palladium and TCPA movement won't fly, in my estimation, because it holds absolutely zero appeal to any average person. The only people who derive any benefit from it at all are the hardware and software makers, not the consumers/users. When there's no benefit to be had, then it doesn't even matter if you stop offering current-generation technology completely and offer the public no new alternative but your DRM-managed crap -- people just won't buy it. They'll keep using what they've already got, because it already does what they want and even does it WITHOUT all the ridiculous restrictions.
In short, I think all this panic and paranoia is misplaced. The general public may be composed mostly of ignorant sheep, but when something bad enough is done on a large enough scale, people notice and they don't tolerate it, and it fails pretty darn quickly.
You're completely wrong.
Windows (even as old as Windows 95) will install on basically any PC hardware and will at least boot up into a usable state. You'll at least get a clear picture on your monitor, and your CD-ROM and mouse and keyboard will at least work.
The same cannot be said for any Linux distribution I've ever tried. Every Linux distribution is limited by the fact that it uses the Linux kernal and the X-Windows graphical server. The Linux kernal simply doesn't autodetect or work with a vast array of hardware devices, and X-Windows is notoriously difficult for an average person to configure. Most distro installers take a really piss-poor stab at getting monitor refresh rates right for X, but if it doesn't work out on the first try on your video card and monitor, then tough luck--you're left with a freshly installed system that just puts up a rolling flickering picture every time it boots X.
To fix it, you have to be enough of a guru to know that there is such a thing as an XF86Config file, and you have to know where in this huge arcane directory hierarchy it is located, and you have to know how to use a text editor and how to invoke it (pico? vi? yeah, those are intuitive names), and then you have to study a four-part course in mathematics and CRT engineering to figure out how to write modelines for your video system that MIGHT work.
Then, you have to recompile your kernal several times to finally get the alpha-quality drivers for your hardware compiled in so that you can actually use your stuff. But of course, along the way, you discover that it won't compile without dumping a few errors because you don't have the latest libBLAH package or the latest autoconf or whatever, so you have to go download and compile all of those... but in the process of doing that, you discover that they won't compile either because of something ELSE that you need.
Strangely, I don't consider something "user friendly" when it says "installation successful" and yet half my hardware doesn't work and my picture rolls and flickers. I don't consider an OS installer complete if I have to recompile the world just to make something work that ought to work right from the start. There's far more to usability than just desktop environments or GUI-based installers. You've got to get the fundamental things right first.
A law is something that can never be violated.
Moore's Law isn't a "law" at all.
It's a prediction, a hypothesis, theory, or postulate. It's a damn good one. But it's not a law.
You didn't read what I wrote, or else you misinterpreted the issue.
I never said that Verizon was prohibited from providing its own ISP service, for instance. What I did say is that the physical line provider and the IP provider are required by federal law to be distinct companies even if they are owned by the same parent company. That's why "Verizon DSL" is (and has to be) a separate company from "Verizon" the phone company: the phone company provides the physical DSL connectivity, while "Verizon DSL" is just the ISP.
They might both be owned ultimately by Verizon, but they are not permitted to share customer records or to physically or operationally be part of the same organization. That's why when you call DSL customer support, they never know who's really responsible for the problem you're having (is it a physical line problem, or maybe an ISP problem, or maybe both?), and you have to get transfered back and forth across the divide and re-explain your situation and all your customer identification all over again from scratch.
There is no analagous restriction on cable internet providers, which is why the setup time and support are both lightyears better for cable modem, despite it being an inferior technology.
This is a testament to the power of free software
It is? Why? Microsoft thought of this a long time and has it in the works for Longhorn.
And the bottom line is that neither you NOR Microsoft have bothered presenting your creation to real users to see if they actually like that approach. Instead, you've just unleashed it on the world without bothering to measure the real demand for it.
Typical engineering bravado: if we build it, they will come. The real smart engineers are the ones who bother to assess the need for something before building it, and get feedback about the design via prototypes, etc, before building anything.