Makes me wonder if they could be had under some sort of entrapment laws - "I'm not liable for downloading this stuff because the copyright holders flooded the forum with this stuff"
I'm not a lawyer, and I'd ot reccommend anyone try it, but I'd love to see it happen. They could get dne for spam and incitement in the same day:D
That used to be true of IBM twenty years ago.
Big blue dominated the software market then and used the same sort of vendor tie-in tricks that microsoft are so fond of to maintain their edge.
Then they got blindsided by this mickey-mouse outfit calling itself Microsoft...
I don't suppose many people get fired for buying IMB today. They're a solid stable company delivering good solutions for a certain set of problems. But it's not automatic anymore. Things changed for IBM, as they are changing for Billy-Boy's outfit.
So it'd be foolish to rely too much on MS as a "safe" purchase. wonder who'll be the first to find themselves unexpectedly unemployed...
We've covered forged headers, the death of mailing lists, problems with internation jurisdiction and spiralling tax levels once govts get a taste of the revenue.
Anyone think the tax levels will stay set to exempt the provate individual at the expense of the corporations? Given that corps have more money than individuals, I'd guess the converse would be the case.
And then there's another international aspect. Govt's charging tariffs on email - anyone say "trade war?"
Really the only thing this has going for it is a plausible excuse for the government to find another way of extorting money from us. Spammers will continue to spam and the public will continue to pay and the governemt will sound ever more rightous on the subject.
Anyone else thinking "transparent government shill" by this stage?
The sad thing is that this "Gnu/Linux" silliness is damaging.
To see the damage that he does to himself, just look at the hideous slagging he's getting by some of the posters here. Here, on Slashdot, most of the folk can reasonably be assumed to be pro free software and the GPL, yet still we get this internecine war evertime RMS is mentioned. And it all comes down to his attitude over "Gnu/Linux".
Stallman doesn't seem to see how petty this makes him look. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that linked as he is with the free software movement, it reflects badly on the movement as a whole. Given RMS' skills as a publicist, I find myself wondering whether he is unaware of this effect, or if he simply places a higher priority on having first billing.
I think that's what is known as an "graceful climbdown" - the mozilla crew back away from an unpopular (and poorly thought out, IMO) descision without losing face.
Of course, it could have genuinely been a misunderstanding. Throwing away the all good publicity mozilla-the-browser has gathered by choosing a new name always did seem an odd sort of move.
As long as we're solving the problems of the universe, lets not forget the truth-in-advertising aspect of this. The "Up-to" part of "up to 10x faster" is why I don't trust most of the UK ISP broadband packages. At least Demon promise a 0.5M connection. "Up to 10x faster" lets them say "you got 60K - thats better than 56l - now sut up"
We're a large corporation and, while that sounds like a bad word to many people, it means we have the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble.
Not that we will of course. We'll charge you money for the help and give you something that doesn't actually help but further limits the use you can get from your system. If yur lucky we might move the problem around so you don't notice for a week or two.
'Rosen's departure comes as the organization sought to soften its image among Internet consumers
You'll notice nothing was said about chainging
their actual policy. They just want a new face in there in the hope that they can buy some short-term credibility.
We need both.
Diversification gives Linux its creativity. Diversification allows competing models.
Standardisation pulls the divergent threads back together.
Standardisation prevents the framentation of the OS.
Linux needs both. If standards are too strong, Linux stagrates.
If standards are absent, the distros diverge into separate OSes, if such is possible with a largely common kernel
Actually, I firmly believe that it'd make no difference. The corporate culture at MS is so corrupt that I don't think these guys would be allowed to write anything useful or innovative.
They might be put in charge of finding new ways to disable competitors' products or shaft thier customers though - that's the only sort of innovation Redmond are interested in
Slashdot is probably not the best place to get advice. It's great for ideas, but I would definitely recommend posting to a few newsgroups and getting involved in a few mailing lists as well. My experience is that the/. crowd has a lot of great ideas, but those ideas are usually not backed by a lot of practical experience.
...and this being slashdot, you'll probably get meta-commented to death before anyone gives says anything useful!
My two hap'orth on the subject: Do some early prototyping.
Don't be afraid to junk and restart a few times. You're planning on a heavily modularised configurable app, so much of your code
should be reusable, and the overhead on rewrites should be minimal. If its not then your design has problems, ad it's better if you discover this early rather than late.
Remember: Any clear and unambiguous specification is in fact code, and code is the only complete specification. Unless you need a paper trail to cover your behind, there is a limit to how much early design you can usefully do.
It's probably not a popular view, but its worked for me for a long time now.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a lawyer, and I'd ot reccommend anyone try it, but I'd love to see it happen. They could get dne for spam and incitement in the same day:D
Then they got blindsided by this mickey-mouse outfit calling itself Microsoft...
I don't suppose many people get fired for buying IMB today. They're a solid stable company delivering good solutions for a certain set of problems. But it's not automatic anymore. Things changed for IBM, as they are changing for Billy-Boy's outfit.
So it'd be foolish to rely too much on MS as a "safe" purchase. wonder who'll be the first to find themselves unexpectedly unemployed...
Anyone think the tax levels will stay set to exempt the provate individual at the expense of the corporations? Given that corps have more money than individuals, I'd guess the converse would be the case.
And then there's another international aspect. Govt's charging tariffs on email - anyone say "trade war?"
Really the only thing this has going for it is a plausible excuse for the government to find another way of extorting money from us. Spammers will continue to spam and the public will continue to pay and the governemt will sound ever more rightous on the subject.
Anyone else thinking "transparent government shill" by this stage?
To see the damage that he does to himself, just look at the hideous slagging he's getting by some of the posters here. Here, on Slashdot, most of the folk can reasonably be assumed to be pro free software and the GPL, yet still we get this internecine war evertime RMS is mentioned. And it all comes down to his attitude over "Gnu/Linux".
Stallman doesn't seem to see how petty this makes him look. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that linked as he is with the free software movement, it reflects badly on the movement as a whole. Given RMS' skills as a publicist, I find myself wondering whether he is unaware of this effect, or if he simply places a higher priority on having first billing.
I think that's what is known as an "graceful climbdown" - the mozilla crew back away from an unpopular (and poorly thought out, IMO) descision without losing face.
Of course, it could have genuinely been a misunderstanding. Throwing away the all good publicity mozilla-the-browser has gathered by choosing a new name always did seem an odd sort of move.
As long as we're solving the problems of the universe, lets not forget the truth-in-advertising aspect of this. The "Up-to" part of "up to 10x faster" is why I don't trust most of the UK ISP broadband packages. At least Demon promise a 0.5M connection. "Up to 10x faster" lets them say "you got 60K - thats better than 56l - now sut up"
We're a large corporation and, while that sounds like a bad word to many people, it means we have the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble.
Not that we will of course. We'll charge you money for the help and give you something that doesn't actually help but further limits the use you can get from your system. If yur lucky we might move the problem around so you don't notice for a week or two.So, yeah. MS sucks.
I don't see anyone falling for it around here...
We need both. Diversification gives Linux its creativity. Diversification allows competing models. Standardisation pulls the divergent threads back together. Standardisation prevents the framentation of the OS. Linux needs both. If standards are too strong, Linux stagrates. If standards are absent, the distros diverge into separate OSes, if such is possible with a largely common kernel
They ain't making that assumption at all - they're just hoping that others will draw the inference, and believe it.
The truth of matter is of no importance to thses people. This is about control of the media, pure and simple.
Actually, I firmly believe that it'd make no difference. The corporate culture at MS is so corrupt that I don't think these guys would be allowed to write anything useful or innovative.
They might be put in charge of finding new ways to disable competitors' products or shaft thier customers though - that's the only sort of innovation Redmond are interested in
internet.junkbuster.com
More flexible than just modding your hosts file.
My two hap'orth on the subject: Do some early prototyping.
Don't be afraid to junk and restart a few times. You're planning on a heavily modularised configurable app, so much of your code should be reusable, and the overhead on rewrites should be minimal. If its not then your design has problems, ad it's better if you discover this early rather than late.
Remember: Any clear and unambiguous specification is in fact code, and code is the only complete specification. Unless you need a paper trail to cover your behind, there is a limit to how much early design you can usefully do.
It's probably not a popular view, but its worked for me for a long time now.