They're two very different things. One is the open source PART of the chrome browser, the other is a browser binary, built in part on the Chromium source, that reports usage information back to Google, one subset of this being non-optional. Please don't get these two confused, no matter how much clueless reporting there is on the relationship between the two. The latter is, in my opinion, a privacy leakage too far.
Good grief! Looking at the rest of these comments akin to "let the corporations shaft everyone else or they'll all pack up and leave," this was almost on-topic!
Known as a Trust Anchor Repository, the alternative was announced by ICANN last week and has been in testing since October.
Ah, so the other alternative, look-aside validation, currently run by the ISC and something I've been using for ages isn't a solution? OK, I'll stop using it right now...
Clues. Isle nine. I'd get one, were I you. ICANN ain't the only game in town.
...using rumour, extrapolation and second-hand information. Sooo, can we please not call it "slippage" when your hopes and dreams are shattered when it doesn't appear in October? Because it seems bashing Millisoft on here for things they never promised is a very popular pastime. And no, I'm not new here. Bashing for letdowns is one thing, but when you're making up release dates for something you're not involved in, well, work it out for yourself. I'm not suggesting it makes you look foolish or anything.
Oh, and can you people bashing too much UAC or not enough UAC make your bloody minds up, please? Or, you know, use something else other than Windows? I'm not particularly fond of MS, but this constant pissing and moaning is getting rather old now.
PROVIDING they unbundle Google from Firefox. To be quite honest, I'm sick and tired of disinfecting my systems of Google and their insidious bloody software. Toolbars, "safe"browsing, default search boxes et. al. Rein those bastards in at the same time and I'll believe you're treating all comers fairly. Until such time, I'll continue to believe that the EU and Google are in bed together to own/restrict/"monetize" (I hate that word, but it is the only one that fits) the Internet in Europe to the detriment of European users. Don't be evil my left knacker!
You don't roll out half baked software over the top of working software.
They didn't. Some distros did. For example, the BSDs still have 3.5.10 available. Nobody is forcing you to 4.1.4, which can also be installed in tandem with 3.5.10 in FreeBSD at least. The KDE team have said from 4.0's appearance that these versions are more akin to early adopter tech previews than polished releases. No, if you're looking for someone to blame, blame the distributions for making poor choices about their default packages.
Besides, it hardly matters what Linus or anyone else says or uses. This is open source. You have choice. If the distro you use removes that choice, change it.
I can't help thinking there's a larger issue at play here. It seems that governments the world over have suddenly realised that we were serious about a space beyond government control and are taking steps to "rectify" this and using the likes of the MPAA/RIAA as their diversion. I wonder if the various industry associations know they're being used? Let's look at what we've got so far:
Filesharing being rapidly beaten down by oppressive and draconian laws
Filtering and censorship akin to that of China's great firewall in supposedly "free" countries
Wiretaps, supposedly illegal, being inserted into ISPs and backbone nodes
Encryption becoming dangerous by dint of the UK's stupid RIPA which will throw you in prison if you can't decrypt something for the police
And that's just off the top of my head. Are the governments becoming threatened by the Internet's open architechture? More to the point, how far are they going to go to destroy it before we decide enough is enough? The biggest problem for them, as I see it, is that the Internet, with millions of people in open and free contact, has the power to keep them honest. They don't seem to like that, do they?
...at which point random malicious Internet users would have an ideal instant-revenge plan for whichever company they don't like very much today. You don't want me to post that response form, do you? You know:
Your method specifically fails to take into consideration: [x] Douchebags [x] Assholes [x] Wastes of oxygen
On the contrary: freedom should be the first thing on your mind in such case, and it will be if you're running anything other than x86.
Hmm, let's see...
~ $ uname -s FreeBSD ~ $ uname -m amd64 Yes, I'm aware of uname -a. There's a reason I didn't use it that has nothing to do with the current discussion.
I also got to see The Poopsmith break his vow of silence, this is a single-OS machine and has been on amd64 for quite a while. Linux, I believe, has native Flash 10 on amd64. You were saying?
Look, seriously, Flash is a pain. I would rejoice if Flash were to go away overnight, along with Silverlight, Adobe AIR and all the other proprietary crap that has infested the web over the past few years. A life crammed full of reality tells me this just isn't going to happen. Having come to that conclusion, I just make the best of what I have. To me, freedom means being able to get shit done with the minimum of hassle, not some abstract theory of doing the "right thing" and "sticking it to the proprietary heathens" as if I have nothing better to do with my time. I have computers to work for me, not the other way around. RMS is entitled to his opinions and beliefs. I'll use an open alternative if it is available (and works without shitting core files all over my FS or bringing my poor browser to a groaning standstill while consuming 100% CPU. Gnash, I'm looking at you) and I'll always support a hardware vendor thoughtful enough to take into consideration my OS of choice, but I have no qualms whatsoever about installing a piece of software, free or not, that removes obstacles from my path or the paths of my users. That's not to say I'll blindly install any old piece of random crapware, but once tested, proven trustworthy and I'm sure that it isn't going to be used to create vendor lock-in (Flash locks me in to nothing. It simply enables me to see content created by people who have already fallen victim to vendor lock-in, about which I can do nothing), it's fair game regardless of its licence.
Oh, and MP3 is feeble compared to FLAC or even Ogg Vorbis, even at reasonable bitrates. As I said before, I'll use free software in preference to proprietary if it works and works well. These two exceed the capabilities of the MP3 format.
I agree with him on this one (I'm sure that will come as a great relief to RMS {/sarcasm}). MP3 is a proprietary codec and is riddled with patent liability (is it Lucent that own most of it now?) and so forth. More and more media players support FLAC and Vorbis and the need to use MP3 is shrinking by the day. If only the Shoutcast mob would stop using it exclusively.
Exactly my point, but worded in a far better way. I tend to use FLAC or Vorbis instead of MP3 and I try to choose my hardware with an eye to various HCLs. I use ATi or Intel graphics where possible (sorry, Via, your S3 offerings are simply not compatible enough, although you do try to be open) due to things like GEM and AMD's R6/700 information release. This goes to pieces when purchasing notebooks, naturally.
However, I am in the enviable position of being the final arbiter of what goes into the machines I have to use and I can justify the choices based on other, non-free software issues.
I note you mention Fedora. IMHO Red Hat have the balance just right: The base is untainted but there are methods to install what you need should you find it necessary. It's the same with FreeBSD: The base is pure free software (I can say that now since the Atheros HAL is fully open and the Intel wireless stuff requires a licence ack to activate). The ports, on the other hand, point to all sorts of non-free, possibly binary-only code (RMS has criticised OpenBSD's ports system for this publicly) which you may install if you feel the need. Note that ports/pkgsrc does not distribute the actual binary or source code, just provides a pointer to it. Quite how this is wrong I fail to see. As you so rightly said, getting some things to work can be a total PITA and anything that eases this workload has to be a good thing for free software in general. I think the bottom line we both agree on is that we have to be able to interoperate with non-free formats while we're in the minority. This may put us at odds with some people's version of "freedom" but still remains necessary to function properly in the current IT ecosystem.
Whilst I respect Stallman enormously, I still believe that absolutes and extreme ideals are damaging to any cause. For example, how many of us can say with hand on heart that we don't use an MP3 decoder? A nVidia graphics card? Firmware for the Intel wireless cards? In RMS's eyes we've tainted our freedom, but in reality these compromises allow us MORE freedom of choice, not less.
I'm a great believer in the BSD way of doing things: Here's some code, it's free, use it however you like as long as you don't claim it's yours and we're not going to treat you like a second-class citizen if you install Flash because, quite frankly, you need to make compromises such as this these days. Idealism is all well and good in the abstract, but when you need a piece of information that's hiding inside a Flash-covered web site, freedom should really be the last thing on your mind; making your life more difficult for an ideal is not going to change anyone's minds whilst the majority are accepting the status quo. It just makes you look ridiculous and you end up with rather less freedom, realistically speaking, than you started out with.
OPL for a start. It was a surprisingly robust language back in the day, although when I created a stock control reporting app (the Psion dumped its data to a CSV file that was read into dBase for DOS - high tech shit indeed) in OPL on the Psion II (yeah, yeah, get off my lawn you damned kids) access to a UV EPROM eraser was almost mandatory...:o)
OK, I'm joking. I think it's more likely to be "not pretending it's something it isn't." Small sub-notebooks (and these are not a new idea- the Tosh Libretto was a fair example of the genre, although "cheap" from the SCC acronym was never something you could apply to a Libretto) are either woefully inadequate for anything more than a little web surfing, e-mailing and putzing around with a few productivity apps or just too small to be thermally stable and have decent battery life. I think the reason for the popularity of these devices right now has little to do with the form-factor, as we've established it is not new, but more the parallel proliferation of affordable mobile connectivity. Who the hell wants to lug about a full 7 or 8 lb notebook just to check the twits on twitter?
Psions were presented as a small, neat form-factor with a small, neat embedded OS that was useful for a small subset of what a larger machine could do and, more importantly, were ready for use right after you hit that power button and only required another press to go into almost full off (the RTC remained powered, the memory was, if I recall, non-volatile). They also had battery life that wipes the floor with anything about today; a Psion 3 ran for what seemed like ever on two AAs - providing the battery cover didn't fall off, the sight of batteries rolling off being a familiar one to Psion 3 users. Not sure about the 5mx as I never was fortunate enough to own one. The Psions, however, never pretended to be fully featured machines in small cases, something some of these "netbook" manufacturers are guilty of portraying their wares as and I think that was the GP's point. Why do we need a full Windows or Linpus install when something like the Asus ExpressGate (Splashtop) with a bit of storage would do just as well and be available far faster and less power hungry to boot? That's the sort of thing Psion (the original version) would have been more than likely to come up with had they progressed logically with what they were so good at and "netBook" would have been an ideal name for the thing as that's what you'd do with it: Open it, tweet on the bus describing the liver spots (one of which looks like Australia) on the back of the bald guy's head sitting in front of you, close it and get on with getting to wherever you're going. Sadly, (or, perhaps, luckily for the rest of us) it was not to be.
That said, this does sound to me more like "we missed the boat, so let's get some money off these bastards" chagrin than Psion actually wanting to use the mark again. They should be used to it by now; if The Register is to be believed, they missed quite a few boats.
I probably didn't make it clear that the tangible item that I present is the original CD/Jewel case and receipt, not a burned-to-disk copy. The only other copy is the set of FLAC files that reside on my music partition.
Quite right, I agree fully with the selective buying of music that we actually enjoy, although Theaetetus has a point. You're quite right that I don't create a second tangible copy of a CD. However, as the law stands right now in the UK it is still technically (and technicalities are the soul of UK law) illegal to format shift. However, there are changes coming which will hopefully rectify this amazingly stupid situation and I haven't heard of a single prosecution of someone buying a CD to rip. Indeed, the police advise people to make backups of their CDs for use in the car as they are seen by thieves as less valuable.
What you actually get when you buy a CD is a licence to reproduce the audio. The polycarbonate frizbee is simply a device that allows you to exercise the privilege the licence bestows upon you. Hopefully, UK lawmakers will soon remove the disparity between the advice of the police, the format-shifting necessity given the proliferation of personal media players and current UK copyright law. It is probably the first sensible review that the current UK legislators have undertaken in their entire time in office.
But what if the recipients reject the education? One response I regularly come across with the norms is "This really doesn't matter to me at all. Why should I need to be aware of an issue that I couldn't care less about?" This generally appears on topics such as this, along with net neutrality, Phorm, Nebuad and the likes and just how much power and information Google has. Really, hardly anyone cares.
The bottom line is that some of us will eschew DRM because it limits our rights. That's our group and we can realistically only change OUR behaviour and decisions because we're a minority and, the way things are going, we will remain such. Then there will be those that protest against DRM because they think it makes piracy more difficult. This is the hardest of the three groups to understand because DRM does not make piracy harder, it simply restricts the rights of those who try to play fair. The norms will consume without a thought simply because they don't care. That's the vast (and, looking around me, I really do mean VAST) majority of people. There are advantages to both of the sane points of view, most notably that we tend to have lower blood pressure despite the stress of trying to swim upstream;o)
My solution to DRM is and probably always will be to buy polycarbonate frizbees and rip to FLAC for my music collection. Not only do I get a very acceptable quality recording, I also have something tangible to wave at the copyright policeman when he starts giving me hassle. I really don't see a better alternative despite the Internet's potential to revolutionise music distribution. I either put up with a crap recording on a lossy, proprietary codec and pay nearly the same as I would have for DRM-free, lossless audio with a nice master backup if I lose my collection, regardless of whether it's DRM free MP3 or not, or put a little effort in to do it this way. The advantages are clear. I also refuse to use P2P applications and share the results. Sorry, I paid for these. You want them, you know how to get them: The same way I did.
Before anyone points out that audio CDs are mostly copy protected these days, not when you don't use Windows and autorun, they're not. A track is still a track on a standards-compliant CD. There are also some rather nice FLAC enabled, inexpensive personal media players coming out of the Far East right now, for example this is a rather nice little gadget if you're more interested in quality audio than being seen with white earbuds on the bus...
In other words, the revolution that replaces the current music industry will probably not be based around the Internet at all unless some folks change their ideas. Piracy is NOT acceptable, regardless of the Robin Hood wannabe crowd. Accepting low quality crap that removes your fair-use rights is also not acceptable. People need to realise these facts. The likelihood of that happening, as the GP poster suggests, is slim.
general purpose computer and my sysadmin chooses the software appropriate for the job. I'm one of the most powerful and versatile electronic devices ever conceived by humankind and, providing my owner isn't blindly sworn to a corporate entity or software movement (commonly referred to as a "fanboi"), there is almost nothing I cannot do.
I have to agree with that comment (except for schools; until such time as they concentrate on knowledge rather than stripping the individuality and ability to think from our children and forcing them to all look the same, they can take their own chances). That, and the bloody "Arts Council" which has leeched the lottery fund dry, yet we still have homeless people on the streets and people living in poverty. One "Angel of the North" (which looks like a rusty satellite has crashed near Newcastle, doing £500,000 worth of improvements) could have funded 10 or 12 drop-in centres or a few hostels (numbers from my arse, but you get the general idea).
This country is screwed up. As long as the top 5% can keep going to the bank with all the money nobody cares, it seems.
Indeed. I'm surprised more people don't just use this instead. Oh, and about:config is your friend if you're concerned about privacy at all. Fx isn't privacy-safe by default. It leaks all manner of personal information. Open source, it seems, no longer means the developers have your best interests at heart. My first thought when reading the synopsis was "Fx does this by default and removal of the associated Google URLs is non-trivial." so I can see exactly what you're saying about Moz vs Apple.
As for Apple being Evil? ALL corporations have one goal: Make their shareholders money on their investments. That includes Google, Microsoft, Novell, Apple et al. None of these companies exist to make you happy or give you free shit without some strings attached and the sooner some people realise this the better off we'll all be. Then we can start discussing ways to mitigate these breaches of privacy and security instead of whining constantly that they're there. It's not going away. Corporations will never stop trying to "monetize" the web. In my opinion, Google are the worst of the lot, yet they're still everyone's blue eyed boy. Do we actually care about privacy or do we just want to stiff one company and tolerate another? Duplicity is no way to say "I have principles."
You sound like Judge "They created a monster!!" Patel. Don't bash Napster for somehow being especially adept at encouraging copyright violations. If Napster and the Internet hadn't been first, others would've made another way to share. It's not hard. You may as well bash technological progress. That's the real enabler behind all this sharing, not the Internet and not Napster alone.
OK, all good points, especially that quoted above. I'm just pissed at seeing ordinary people having years of their lives ruined over something that, in the grand scheme of things, is simply not that important to anyone but those making money out of it and certainly not worth the penalties some people are paying.
Anyway, you're right: Putting obstacles in the way of progress and making blinkered rules up, especially with regard to the Internet, is likely to destroy the very things that make the Internet unique. Thanks for the thought provoking reply and I withdraw my overly-broad comment on P2P.
I imagine many of the accused are indeed guilty. Jammie Thomas, for instance.
But even in that case, the damages awarded are totally disproportionate to the act. I suspect we wouldn't be having this conversation if the end result was "What's the retail price for a copy of that album? OK, judgment for the plaintiff for the sum of $15.99. Defendant ordered not to use P2P software for the purposes of obtaining copyrighted works."
But that's not what's happening, is it? What I'd also like to know is how MediaSentry validate the time of their "discoveries." They're using, mostly, dynamic IPs and ISP logs to "prove" their cases. Now, I may be a little picky, but if I've been assigned an IP for ten minutes and the watch that you glanced at when someone with that IP was downloading some track by Men Without Testicles isn't accurate, where's the damned proof? How does the ISP validate its logs?
Basically, what we have here is a virtual map+pin and the threat of huge damages just to scare the crap out of people. I don't agree with ripping off music on the Internet, if only for the fact that we all get tarred with the same brush, helping the RIAA state that everyone's guilty and they don't need to prove anything, just catch them in the act. However, what they do to people is destroy them as an example. Regardless of guilt, the end result, especially for people like Thomas who have hardly anything to start with, is a portion of their lives devastated over what amounts to a few bucks for a CD. Most of it is crap, anyway, and *this* is the real reason their sales are tanking.
Can I also say a big thanks to the P2P software houses, with a special "fuckwit of the century" mention to the original Napster, who have lured these easily led people into considering these activities in the first place, leaving people like Thomas in financial ruin and stressed for years on end? If anyone deserves a good kick in the pants over "piracy," it's these knob-ends. Yes, Thomas was stupid. As far as I know, regardless of my own feelings about removing the labels on dangerous things and letting Darwinism run its course, being stupid isn't an offense. Advertising software as being able to access music and such when the company doing so knows fuck well that it's illegal and will probably end up with some poor schmuck having to take out a mortgage to pay the poor, poor RIAA who desperately need these enormous amounts of single parents', dead folks', computerless people, students' and children's money bloody well ought to be. I suspect they're left alone simply because doing this to ordinary people is so lucrative that the P2P software is actually seen as a good thing within the various Asses of America.
Only time I ever got a virus on the PC was about nine years ago when the virus program I used was running in the background, and let the CIH virus through.
I'm almost positive I hinted up there in my original post that AV suites are fallible, unless "Avira's detection rate, last I looked, was slightly better than Avast's" means Avast couldn't find my keys one morning and made me late for work. As I clearly stated, a false sense of security is worse than no security at all. One's users still need liberal application of cluebat once in a while or all the AV scanners in the world aren't going to make a difference.
Of course, whether to use an AV suite was not the question posed, so this discussion is moot. I'm assuming oahazmatt has looked at this question himself and decided that his wife does need AV software. FWIW, I don't use an AV suite either, but that is a combination of having a sandboxed network environment for Windows machines (routable IP, power, Windows, pick any two), AV scanning on the mailserver and proxy for those that do prefer using Redmondware, MS-RPC, CIFS, the messenger service et al blocked, locked and jailed to the local net and a real, bi-directional firewall with a proper ruleset to enforce all this. For everything else, waste of resources or not, there's an AV suite as users will not stop being users simply because some of us don't need to run a virus scanner. Those I mentioned are the ones I consider safest to let your average user loose with and not spend money. The one above all I would recommend on performance and detection is NOD32 from Eset, but that is pay-for and oahazmatt specified open source or free to use.
Slashdot Mirror
They're two very different things. One is the open source PART of the chrome browser, the other is a browser binary, built in part on the Chromium source, that reports usage information back to Google, one subset of this being non-optional. Please don't get these two confused, no matter how much clueless reporting there is on the relationship between the two. The latter is, in my opinion, a privacy leakage too far.
Good grief! Looking at the rest of these comments akin to "let the corporations shaft everyone else or they'll all pack up and leave," this was almost on-topic!
Lube or we sell indeed.
Known as a Trust Anchor Repository, the alternative was announced by ICANN last week and has been in testing since October.
Ah, so the other alternative, look-aside validation, currently run by the ISC and something I've been using for ages isn't a solution? OK, I'll stop using it right now...
Clues. Isle nine. I'd get one, were I you. ICANN ain't the only game in town.
...DropBear as the default SSH. Should have been called "Killer Koala."
...using rumour, extrapolation and second-hand information. Sooo, can we please not call it "slippage" when your hopes and dreams are shattered when it doesn't appear in October? Because it seems bashing Millisoft on here for things they never promised is a very popular pastime. And no, I'm not new here. Bashing for letdowns is one thing, but when you're making up release dates for something you're not involved in, well, work it out for yourself. I'm not suggesting it makes you look foolish or anything.
Oh, and can you people bashing too much UAC or not enough UAC make your bloody minds up, please? Or, you know, use something else other than Windows? I'm not particularly fond of MS, but this constant pissing and moaning is getting rather old now.
PROVIDING they unbundle Google from Firefox. To be quite honest, I'm sick and tired of disinfecting my systems of Google and their insidious bloody software. Toolbars, "safe"browsing, default search boxes et. al. Rein those bastards in at the same time and I'll believe you're treating all comers fairly. Until such time, I'll continue to believe that the EU and Google are in bed together to own/restrict/"monetize" (I hate that word, but it is the only one that fits) the Internet in Europe to the detriment of European users. Don't be evil my left knacker!
You don't roll out half baked software over the top of working software.
They didn't. Some distros did. For example, the BSDs still have 3.5.10 available. Nobody is forcing you to 4.1.4, which can also be installed in tandem with 3.5.10 in FreeBSD at least. The KDE team have said from 4.0's appearance that these versions are more akin to early adopter tech previews than polished releases. No, if you're looking for someone to blame, blame the distributions for making poor choices about their default packages.
Besides, it hardly matters what Linus or anyone else says or uses. This is open source. You have choice. If the distro you use removes that choice, change it.
It's on its way, but with the awful moniker "usb2". There's much willy-waving going on on current@ about it becoming default in 8.x.
I can't help thinking there's a larger issue at play here. It seems that governments the world over have suddenly realised that we were serious about a space beyond government control and are taking steps to "rectify" this and using the likes of the MPAA/RIAA as their diversion. I wonder if the various industry associations know they're being used? Let's look at what we've got so far:
And that's just off the top of my head. Are the governments becoming threatened by the Internet's open architechture? More to the point, how far are they going to go to destroy it before we decide enough is enough? The biggest problem for them, as I see it, is that the Internet, with millions of people in open and free contact, has the power to keep them honest. They don't seem to like that, do they?
...at which point random malicious Internet users would have an ideal instant-revenge plan for whichever company they don't like very much today. You don't want me to post that response form, do you? You know:
Your method specifically fails to take into consideration:
[x] Douchebags
[x] Assholes
[x] Wastes of oxygen
On the contrary: freedom should be the first thing on your mind in such case, and it will be if you're running anything other than x86.
Hmm, let's see...
~ $ uname -s
FreeBSD
~ $ uname -m
amd64
Yes, I'm aware of uname -a. There's a reason I didn't use it that has nothing to do with the current discussion.
I also got to see The Poopsmith break his vow of silence, this is a single-OS machine and has been on amd64 for quite a while. Linux, I believe, has native Flash 10 on amd64. You were saying?
Look, seriously, Flash is a pain. I would rejoice if Flash were to go away overnight, along with Silverlight, Adobe AIR and all the other proprietary crap that has infested the web over the past few years. A life crammed full of reality tells me this just isn't going to happen. Having come to that conclusion, I just make the best of what I have. To me, freedom means being able to get shit done with the minimum of hassle, not some abstract theory of doing the "right thing" and "sticking it to the proprietary heathens" as if I have nothing better to do with my time. I have computers to work for me, not the other way around. RMS is entitled to his opinions and beliefs. I'll use an open alternative if it is available (and works without shitting core files all over my FS or bringing my poor browser to a groaning standstill while consuming 100% CPU. Gnash, I'm looking at you) and I'll always support a hardware vendor thoughtful enough to take into consideration my OS of choice, but I have no qualms whatsoever about installing a piece of software, free or not, that removes obstacles from my path or the paths of my users. That's not to say I'll blindly install any old piece of random crapware, but once tested, proven trustworthy and I'm sure that it isn't going to be used to create vendor lock-in (Flash locks me in to nothing. It simply enables me to see content created by people who have already fallen victim to vendor lock-in, about which I can do nothing), it's fair game regardless of its licence.
Oh, and MP3 is feeble compared to FLAC or even Ogg Vorbis, even at reasonable bitrates. As I said before, I'll use free software in preference to proprietary if it works and works well. These two exceed the capabilities of the MP3 format.
I'll just let RMS himself answer that one.
I agree with him on this one (I'm sure that will come as a great relief to RMS {/sarcasm}). MP3 is a proprietary codec and is riddled with patent liability (is it Lucent that own most of it now?) and so forth. More and more media players support FLAC and Vorbis and the need to use MP3 is shrinking by the day. If only the Shoutcast mob would stop using it exclusively.
Exactly my point, but worded in a far better way. I tend to use FLAC or Vorbis instead of MP3 and I try to choose my hardware with an eye to various HCLs. I use ATi or Intel graphics where possible (sorry, Via, your S3 offerings are simply not compatible enough, although you do try to be open) due to things like GEM and AMD's R6/700 information release. This goes to pieces when purchasing notebooks, naturally.
However, I am in the enviable position of being the final arbiter of what goes into the machines I have to use and I can justify the choices based on other, non-free software issues.
I note you mention Fedora. IMHO Red Hat have the balance just right: The base is untainted but there are methods to install what you need should you find it necessary. It's the same with FreeBSD: The base is pure free software (I can say that now since the Atheros HAL is fully open and the Intel wireless stuff requires a licence ack to activate). The ports, on the other hand, point to all sorts of non-free, possibly binary-only code (RMS has criticised OpenBSD's ports system for this publicly) which you may install if you feel the need. Note that ports/pkgsrc does not distribute the actual binary or source code, just provides a pointer to it. Quite how this is wrong I fail to see. As you so rightly said, getting some things to work can be a total PITA and anything that eases this workload has to be a good thing for free software in general. I think the bottom line we both agree on is that we have to be able to interoperate with non-free formats while we're in the minority. This may put us at odds with some people's version of "freedom" but still remains necessary to function properly in the current IT ecosystem.
Whilst I respect Stallman enormously, I still believe that absolutes and extreme ideals are damaging to any cause. For example, how many of us can say with hand on heart that we don't use an MP3 decoder? A nVidia graphics card? Firmware for the Intel wireless cards? In RMS's eyes we've tainted our freedom, but in reality these compromises allow us MORE freedom of choice, not less.
I'm a great believer in the BSD way of doing things: Here's some code, it's free, use it however you like as long as you don't claim it's yours and we're not going to treat you like a second-class citizen if you install Flash because, quite frankly, you need to make compromises such as this these days. Idealism is all well and good in the abstract, but when you need a piece of information that's hiding inside a Flash-covered web site, freedom should really be the last thing on your mind; making your life more difficult for an ideal is not going to change anyone's minds whilst the majority are accepting the status quo. It just makes you look ridiculous and you end up with rather less freedom, realistically speaking, than you started out with.
OPL for a start. It was a surprisingly robust language back in the day, although when I created a stock control reporting app (the Psion dumped its data to a CSV file that was read into dBase for DOS - high tech shit indeed) in OPL on the Psion II (yeah, yeah, get off my lawn you damned kids) access to a UV EPROM eraser was almost mandatory... :o)
OK, I'm joking. I think it's more likely to be "not pretending it's something it isn't." Small sub-notebooks (and these are not a new idea- the Tosh Libretto was a fair example of the genre, although "cheap" from the SCC acronym was never something you could apply to a Libretto) are either woefully inadequate for anything more than a little web surfing, e-mailing and putzing around with a few productivity apps or just too small to be thermally stable and have decent battery life. I think the reason for the popularity of these devices right now has little to do with the form-factor, as we've established it is not new, but more the parallel proliferation of affordable mobile connectivity. Who the hell wants to lug about a full 7 or 8 lb notebook just to check the twits on twitter?
Psions were presented as a small, neat form-factor with a small, neat embedded OS that was useful for a small subset of what a larger machine could do and, more importantly, were ready for use right after you hit that power button and only required another press to go into almost full off (the RTC remained powered, the memory was, if I recall, non-volatile). They also had battery life that wipes the floor with anything about today; a Psion 3 ran for what seemed like ever on two AAs - providing the battery cover didn't fall off, the sight of batteries rolling off being a familiar one to Psion 3 users. Not sure about the 5mx as I never was fortunate enough to own one. The Psions, however, never pretended to be fully featured machines in small cases, something some of these "netbook" manufacturers are guilty of portraying their wares as and I think that was the GP's point. Why do we need a full Windows or Linpus install when something like the Asus ExpressGate (Splashtop) with a bit of storage would do just as well and be available far faster and less power hungry to boot? That's the sort of thing Psion (the original version) would have been more than likely to come up with had they progressed logically with what they were so good at and "netBook" would have been an ideal name for the thing as that's what you'd do with it: Open it, tweet on the bus describing the liver spots (one of which looks like Australia) on the back of the bald guy's head sitting in front of you, close it and get on with getting to wherever you're going. Sadly, (or, perhaps, luckily for the rest of us) it was not to be.
That said, this does sound to me more like "we missed the boat, so let's get some money off these bastards" chagrin than Psion actually wanting to use the mark again. They should be used to it by now; if The Register is to be believed, they missed quite a few boats.
I probably didn't make it clear that the tangible item that I present is the original CD/Jewel case and receipt, not a burned-to-disk copy. The only other copy is the set of FLAC files that reside on my music partition.
Quite right, I agree fully with the selective buying of music that we actually enjoy, although Theaetetus has a point. You're quite right that I don't create a second tangible copy of a CD. However, as the law stands right now in the UK it is still technically (and technicalities are the soul of UK law) illegal to format shift. However, there are changes coming which will hopefully rectify this amazingly stupid situation and I haven't heard of a single prosecution of someone buying a CD to rip. Indeed, the police advise people to make backups of their CDs for use in the car as they are seen by thieves as less valuable.
What you actually get when you buy a CD is a licence to reproduce the audio. The polycarbonate frizbee is simply a device that allows you to exercise the privilege the licence bestows upon you. Hopefully, UK lawmakers will soon remove the disparity between the advice of the police, the format-shifting necessity given the proliferation of personal media players and current UK copyright law. It is probably the first sensible review that the current UK legislators have undertaken in their entire time in office.
But what if the recipients reject the education? One response I regularly come across with the norms is "This really doesn't matter to me at all. Why should I need to be aware of an issue that I couldn't care less about?" This generally appears on topics such as this, along with net neutrality, Phorm, Nebuad and the likes and just how much power and information Google has. Really, hardly anyone cares.
The bottom line is that some of us will eschew DRM because it limits our rights. That's our group and we can realistically only change OUR behaviour and decisions because we're a minority and, the way things are going, we will remain such. Then there will be those that protest against DRM because they think it makes piracy more difficult. This is the hardest of the three groups to understand because DRM does not make piracy harder, it simply restricts the rights of those who try to play fair. The norms will consume without a thought simply because they don't care. That's the vast (and, looking around me, I really do mean VAST) majority of people. There are advantages to both of the sane points of view, most notably that we tend to have lower blood pressure despite the stress of trying to swim upstream ;o)
My solution to DRM is and probably always will be to buy polycarbonate frizbees and rip to FLAC for my music collection. Not only do I get a very acceptable quality recording, I also have something tangible to wave at the copyright policeman when he starts giving me hassle. I really don't see a better alternative despite the Internet's potential to revolutionise music distribution. I either put up with a crap recording on a lossy, proprietary codec and pay nearly the same as I would have for DRM-free, lossless audio with a nice master backup if I lose my collection, regardless of whether it's DRM free MP3 or not, or put a little effort in to do it this way. The advantages are clear. I also refuse to use P2P applications and share the results. Sorry, I paid for these. You want them, you know how to get them: The same way I did.
Before anyone points out that audio CDs are mostly copy protected these days, not when you don't use Windows and autorun, they're not. A track is still a track on a standards-compliant CD. There are also some rather nice FLAC enabled, inexpensive personal media players coming out of the Far East right now, for example this is a rather nice little gadget if you're more interested in quality audio than being seen with white earbuds on the bus...
In other words, the revolution that replaces the current music industry will probably not be based around the Internet at all unless some folks change their ideas. Piracy is NOT acceptable, regardless of the Robin Hood wannabe crowd. Accepting low quality crap that removes your fair-use rights is also not acceptable. People need to realise these facts. The likelihood of that happening, as the GP poster suggests, is slim.
general purpose computer and my sysadmin chooses the software appropriate for the job. I'm one of the most powerful and versatile electronic devices ever conceived by humankind and, providing my owner isn't blindly sworn to a corporate entity or software movement (commonly referred to as a "fanboi"), there is almost nothing I cannot do.
I have to agree with that comment (except for schools; until such time as they concentrate on knowledge rather than stripping the individuality and ability to think from our children and forcing them to all look the same, they can take their own chances). That, and the bloody "Arts Council" which has leeched the lottery fund dry, yet we still have homeless people on the streets and people living in poverty. One "Angel of the North" (which looks like a rusty satellite has crashed near Newcastle, doing £500,000 worth of improvements) could have funded 10 or 12 drop-in centres or a few hostels (numbers from my arse, but you get the general idea).
This country is screwed up. As long as the top 5% can keep going to the bank with all the money nobody cares, it seems.
Indeed. I'm surprised more people don't just use this instead. Oh, and about:config is your friend if you're concerned about privacy at all. Fx isn't privacy-safe by default. It leaks all manner of personal information. Open source, it seems, no longer means the developers have your best interests at heart. My first thought when reading the synopsis was "Fx does this by default and removal of the associated Google URLs is non-trivial." so I can see exactly what you're saying about Moz vs Apple.
As for Apple being Evil? ALL corporations have one goal: Make their shareholders money on their investments. That includes Google, Microsoft, Novell, Apple et al. None of these companies exist to make you happy or give you free shit without some strings attached and the sooner some people realise this the better off we'll all be. Then we can start discussing ways to mitigate these breaches of privacy and security instead of whining constantly that they're there. It's not going away. Corporations will never stop trying to "monetize" the web. In my opinion, Google are the worst of the lot, yet they're still everyone's blue eyed boy. Do we actually care about privacy or do we just want to stiff one company and tolerate another? Duplicity is no way to say "I have principles."
You sound like Judge "They created a monster!!" Patel. Don't bash Napster for somehow being especially adept at encouraging copyright violations. If Napster and the Internet hadn't been first, others would've made another way to share. It's not hard. You may as well bash technological progress. That's the real enabler behind all this sharing, not the Internet and not Napster alone.
OK, all good points, especially that quoted above. I'm just pissed at seeing ordinary people having years of their lives ruined over something that, in the grand scheme of things, is simply not that important to anyone but those making money out of it and certainly not worth the penalties some people are paying.
Anyway, you're right: Putting obstacles in the way of progress and making blinkered rules up, especially with regard to the Internet, is likely to destroy the very things that make the Internet unique. Thanks for the thought provoking reply and I withdraw my overly-broad comment on P2P.
I imagine many of the accused are indeed guilty. Jammie Thomas, for instance.
But even in that case, the damages awarded are totally disproportionate to the act. I suspect we wouldn't be having this conversation if the end result was "What's the retail price for a copy of that album? OK, judgment for the plaintiff for the sum of $15.99. Defendant ordered not to use P2P software for the purposes of obtaining copyrighted works."
But that's not what's happening, is it? What I'd also like to know is how MediaSentry validate the time of their "discoveries." They're using, mostly, dynamic IPs and ISP logs to "prove" their cases. Now, I may be a little picky, but if I've been assigned an IP for ten minutes and the watch that you glanced at when someone with that IP was downloading some track by Men Without Testicles isn't accurate, where's the damned proof? How does the ISP validate its logs?
Basically, what we have here is a virtual map+pin and the threat of huge damages just to scare the crap out of people. I don't agree with ripping off music on the Internet, if only for the fact that we all get tarred with the same brush, helping the RIAA state that everyone's guilty and they don't need to prove anything, just catch them in the act. However, what they do to people is destroy them as an example. Regardless of guilt, the end result, especially for people like Thomas who have hardly anything to start with, is a portion of their lives devastated over what amounts to a few bucks for a CD. Most of it is crap, anyway, and *this* is the real reason their sales are tanking.
Can I also say a big thanks to the P2P software houses, with a special "fuckwit of the century" mention to the original Napster, who have lured these easily led people into considering these activities in the first place, leaving people like Thomas in financial ruin and stressed for years on end? If anyone deserves a good kick in the pants over "piracy," it's these knob-ends. Yes, Thomas was stupid. As far as I know, regardless of my own feelings about removing the labels on dangerous things and letting Darwinism run its course, being stupid isn't an offense. Advertising software as being able to access music and such when the company doing so knows fuck well that it's illegal and will probably end up with some poor schmuck having to take out a mortgage to pay the poor, poor RIAA who desperately need these enormous amounts of single parents', dead folks', computerless people, students' and children's money bloody well ought to be. I suspect they're left alone simply because doing this to ordinary people is so lucrative that the P2P software is actually seen as a good thing within the various Asses of America.
Real men don't back up anything, they let the world mirror it.
Only time I ever got a virus on the PC was about nine years ago when the virus program I used was running in the background, and let the CIH virus through.
I'm almost positive I hinted up there in my original post that AV suites are fallible, unless "Avira's detection rate, last I looked, was slightly better than Avast's" means Avast couldn't find my keys one morning and made me late for work. As I clearly stated, a false sense of security is worse than no security at all. One's users still need liberal application of cluebat once in a while or all the AV scanners in the world aren't going to make a difference.
Of course, whether to use an AV suite was not the question posed, so this discussion is moot. I'm assuming oahazmatt has looked at this question himself and decided that his wife does need AV software. FWIW, I don't use an AV suite either, but that is a combination of having a sandboxed network environment for Windows machines (routable IP, power, Windows, pick any two), AV scanning on the mailserver and proxy for those that do prefer using Redmondware, MS-RPC, CIFS, the messenger service et al blocked, locked and jailed to the local net and a real, bi-directional firewall with a proper ruleset to enforce all this. For everything else, waste of resources or not, there's an AV suite as users will not stop being users simply because some of us don't need to run a virus scanner. Those I mentioned are the ones I consider safest to let your average user loose with and not spend money. The one above all I would recommend on performance and detection is NOD32 from Eset, but that is pay-for and oahazmatt specified open source or free to use.