So lucid and direct here yet in other cases (DRM) he seems to not see the threat looming
I think he sees the real threat: foreclosing your software from being interoperable with other components and products that distributors and customers want to use, and (in the process) making your offering less attractive than the opposition. GPLv2 works because of its fundamental simplicity and fairness combined with flexibility. A more complex license, that restricts that flexibility and provides greater scope for legal challenges, to cope with perceived problems that will probably never happen is not a good idea. Meanwhile, DRM is going to be killed by the market.
Really, the only difficult question that the Windows installer asks is about partitioning and formating. If a user can get past that one, they're in most cases home free.
To say most cases is definitely overstating things; often perhaps. Especially on notebooks, drivers can be a bear. Obviously, if you have an OEM Windows CD for the specific computer for which you are doing an install, there are unlikely to be problems. However, try taking a typical Sony VAIO and installing vanilla retail Windows. At best, you will be left with needing to find lots of drivers post install to get everything working. The last time I needed to install to a Sony VAIO, I had to create a slipstreamed CD to achieve a successful install at all. I should note that Ubuntu installs problem free on the same model.
Please take the time to examine all the available data and see if you can make sense out of it.
I have spent over 100 hours looking at the official explanations and the objections raised by the skeptics. My impressions are
the conspiracy implied by the skeptics is incredible: I refuse to believe it just based on the weakness of the official reports;
the explanations in the official reports are clearly flawed;
a proper investigation was not done: indeed, there appear to have been attempts to prevent a proper investigation which is mighty odd under the circumstances;
very, very few people have read the official reports critically, which may account for the limited criticism of their contents.
I would dearly like someone to explain why WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 collapsed; and why no proper investigation was allowed. I would like an explanation that does not imply that sections of the US establishment conspired to demolish downtown New York for financial and political gain.
To take your post seriously (though I think it is a troll) you seem to imply that the nice "family" demographic you cater to are predominantly pirates, who thus have no use for your store except when purchasing a cool disk that is not yet online. There are other possibilities. Perhaps some of your erstwhile customers find merit in being able to cheaply purchase the specific tracks they like online rather than purchase expensive albums full of dross, in which they have no interest, aggregated with the one or two tracks they actually want.
The initial realization of the scale of the problem came from an FBI study last year. You can start with Malware Trends. However, it is important to note matters are deteriorating faster than anticipated when that article was written last year.
The use of AV, anti spyware and personal firewall products is increasingly ineffective in preventing infection. If these products are fully up to date, the good ones will currently stop about 80% of the malware thrown at them, and the situation is becoming worse. The trend towards broadband routers with embedded NAT firewalls helps, but infections through email attachments and visiting malicious websites is not going to decrease: it is going to continue to increase. As the botnets become oriented primarily towards identity theft, industrial espionage and other kinds of high profit operations, you are also going to see these nets become more stealthy and harder to detect. By next year, they are going to be prevalent in corporate networks and often present for long periods without detection.
With profits already dwarfing that of the global drug business, there is every incentive for these tech savvy mafias to continue their heavy investment in improving their infrastructure. Most people in IT do not even yet realise the scope of the threat we are facing.
A lot of multinationals based in China are obliged to use properly licensed software. While virtually everyone else will pirate, I still find the number of 244 legit sales surprisingly low.
I assume everyone died a lot more often back then.
While I know of no evidence that people died more often than once each, we do know that they worshipped cats. Thus, you may be right. Perhaps they learned the secret and had nine lives each.
Based on my experience, Firefox often becomes unstable when too many extensions are included. The problem is that extensions can conflict with each other. This risk is low with a small number of extensions but increases as the number of extensions increases. Extensions are a great feature of Firefox, but it is best to select the 10 or so that really increase your productivity and let the rest go.
We can test this. Have gay sex with a dirty ape while gambling, drinking, and cussing and see if you get struck by lighting and hurricanes more often then those having Brady-Bunch-Mormon-style relationships.
Wouldn't the sample size be too small to deliver a significant result? (I am referring to the Brady-Bunch-Mormon sample, of course.)
The all powerful one is known to be against that nasty bahaviour known as "s*x" (except when used to go forth and multiply of course). He produced pubic lice as a punishment for those engaging in this disgusting activity.
Back in the 1995-96 timeframe, notebook computers with only 8MB of RAM were quite normal and generally came preloaded with Win 95. I agree performance was not stellar, but much depended on what you tried to run. I bought a high-end notebook early 1996 with 32MB of RAM and used to run Windows NT 4 Server as well as Window 95 on it. I continued to use the machine periodically until 2002.
Yes, the low temperature finding is most interesting. I have an hypothesis as to what might be going on. I suspect that absolute temperatures, within certain limits, are not important to drive reliability, but that temperature variation is. Drives that, because of their location and pattern of use, tend to fluctuate in temperature between, say, 20 and 35 degrees centigrade are being stressed more than those an a steady 40 degrees.
I say "Yay!" for keeping the courts out of it. If the courts became involved that is when freedom falls to the wayside.
Your post might just be a good troll, but I think you were serious.
I must say I now understand GWB's decision to avoid getting court orders to carry out surveillance on US citizens a lot better. Indeed, if the courts become involved, it is necessary to balance everyone's rights. It is far better just to ensure one's own interests are satisfied: the other guy's rights are unimportant. Right?
Actually, perhaps we could extend this to our treatment of criminals. Getting the courts involved is so messy. Why not just physically beat them or string them up on the spot, depending on how serious we feel the crimes are that they committed?
Half the posts above seem to be suggesting that this is some kind of nefarious plot by Google to brainwash their employees. I thought we only displayed that kind of paranoia here about Microsoft. I see no suggestion in the article that people are forced to read this material. It is just available for those who are interested, and mildly useful education for those who do.
Personally, I cannot be bothered to carry reading material to the pot. However, when the natural cycle is slow enough, I rather like the idea of having some interesting reading material conveniently available.
In the past, I can remember seeing special toilet paper that contained jokes, quotes or similar material. The main difference here is that the material is more useful and can be provided at lower cost.
I shall not comment on the likelihood of the patent being initially granted. Let's assume it is. Cox is then proposing to prevent anyone using DRM by refusing to license it to anyone on any terms. The trouble with that is such an action is grounds to cancel the patent. There are conditions in patent law designed to prevent anyone taking out patents with the objective of preventing the use of the embodied inventions. These were designed to prevent unfair competition, but will still apply.
'... meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.'
I feel his pain. I can remember, even in the early 1980's, travelling around Europe in a support role with an acoustic coupler (300 bps, sometimes less depending on line quality) to talk back to head office. Those who have never done it cannot imagine what 3270 eumulation across a line at this speed is like. Watching grass grow is exciting in comparison. It did have occasional advantages though: if you mess up the programming of your 3270 data streams, debugging by watching the data slowly paint on your screen is surprisingly useful!
Obviously something like won't have much of a chance to procreate.
While higher lifeforms will not readily use them, these DNA sequences might be quite handy for a mutating virus to latch onto. I hope they are very careful with their experiments.
If you are upgrading your desktop anyway, I would suggest a VMware (or possibly Xen: with modern hardware, Windows is a supported guest OS) solution rather than multiboot. Just make certain you have enough RAM. The host OS can be Windows or Linux with a virtual machine taking care of the other OS. Considerations on choice of host OS are
a Linux host will perform better, will be more malware resistant and, perhaps, be more robust;
if you are buying a brand new system, driver support may be better under Windows (Linux in a virtual machine will not care about the host hardware drivers);
if you go 64-bit, Linux is the best choice of host OS.
As others have suggested, Ubuntu is a sound choice of Linux distribution. I am going to blow my karma by noting that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is even better if you are willing to give Novell some money.
Part of what I do for a living is consult with small companies regarding their IT strategy. When appropriate, I advise them to move towards open source solutions, such as Open Office and Linux. An argument that says we should not support Windows file formats and APIs on Linux is a guarantee that there are going to be fewer companies that can make the transition. Small companies running Open Office under Linux can already move to Windows, still using Open Office. Those using IMAP under Linux can already move to Windows, still using IMAP (standards are good that way). The problem is going the other way: from proprietary products under Windows to open products under Linux.
Run that by me again. How does creating tools that make in easier to run Windows and MS Office applications under Linux encourage customers to move from Linux to Windows? Even if you believe Novell is lying through their teeth about the objective of the deal, I see absolutely nothing in it that facilitates migration from Netware, Linux or Unix to Windows.
I can (just about) understand a point of view that says that noone should deal with the Great Satan on principle, regardless of whether it is in the interests of your company and stockholders. I can even (while thinking it is stupid) comprehend the argument that there might be some legal strategy Microsoft could use against those that are not a party to the agreement that would otherwise be impossible. But, please do tell me: which part of the agreement provides a "migrate to windows" button in Linux?
it could go through the real booting process and save the results. Doing this would also give you instant restarts.
Interestingly enough, on IBM mainframes 30 years ago, booting OS/VS1 under VM/370 took over five minutes. VM, however, had a SAVESYS command that allowed the state of a virtual machine to be saved and later loaded at any time. We were able to freeze OS/VS1 close to the end of the boot process and save it. The same can, of course, be done with VMware today. I see no technical reason why an operating system should not be able to do this semi automatically for native booting.
Some will say hibernation gives the same facility, but (at least with Windows) a clean boot needs to be done fairly often (when using a Windows development box, I reboot it daily).
Solution if Verizon has Internet access
on
Verizon Can't Do Math
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
In your Internet browser (probably an icon with a big blue E in your case) type "www.google.com" (without the quotes) into your address bar (the area near the top of the screen with a funny string starting "http://"). Next type ".002 cents * 35893 in dollars" (without the quotes) press enter and look at the answer.
(In reality, this would not work as you would never be able to get someone this dim to understand what the address bar was, even with patient explanation.)
There is sometimes a legitimate use for lawyers in the US. This is one of them. Verizon must be forced to train their service staff sufficiently that others do not get burnt by this kind of problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I have spent over 100 hours looking at the official explanations and the objections raised by the skeptics. My impressions are
- the conspiracy implied by the skeptics is incredible: I refuse to believe it just based on the weakness of the official reports;
- the explanations in the official reports are clearly flawed;
- a proper investigation was not done: indeed, there appear to have been attempts to prevent a proper investigation which is mighty odd under the circumstances;
- very, very few people have read the official reports critically, which may account for the limited criticism of their contents.
I would dearly like someone to explain why WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 collapsed; and why no proper investigation was allowed. I would like an explanation that does not imply that sections of the US establishment conspired to demolish downtown New York for financial and political gain.To take your post seriously (though I think it is a troll) you seem to imply that the nice "family" demographic you cater to are predominantly pirates, who thus have no use for your store except when purchasing a cool disk that is not yet online. There are other possibilities. Perhaps some of your erstwhile customers find merit in being able to cheaply purchase the specific tracks they like online rather than purchase expensive albums full of dross, in which they have no interest, aggregated with the one or two tracks they actually want.
You might also read Bumper crop of malware expected in 2007 which starts with Gartner's prediction that
Unfortunately this is all too real and there are no quick fixes.With profits already dwarfing that of the global drug business, there is every incentive for these tech savvy mafias to continue their heavy investment in improving their infrastructure. Most people in IT do not even yet realise the scope of the threat we are facing.
A lot of multinationals based in China are obliged to use properly licensed software. While virtually everyone else will pirate, I still find the number of 244 legit sales surprisingly low.
Microsoft does not act to make desktop Linux more attractive.
While I know of no evidence that people died more often than once each, we do know that they worshipped cats. Thus, you may be right. Perhaps they learned the secret and had nine lives each.
Based on my experience, Firefox often becomes unstable when too many extensions are included. The problem is that extensions can conflict with each other. This risk is low with a small number of extensions but increases as the number of extensions increases. Extensions are a great feature of Firefox, but it is best to select the 10 or so that really increase your productivity and let the rest go.
The all powerful one is known to be against that nasty bahaviour known as "s*x" (except when used to go forth and multiply of course). He produced pubic lice as a punishment for those engaging in this disgusting activity.
Back in the 1995-96 timeframe, notebook computers with only 8MB of RAM were quite normal and generally came preloaded with Win 95. I agree performance was not stellar, but much depended on what you tried to run. I bought a high-end notebook early 1996 with 32MB of RAM and used to run Windows NT 4 Server as well as Window 95 on it. I continued to use the machine periodically until 2002.
Yes, the low temperature finding is most interesting. I have an hypothesis as to what might be going on. I suspect that absolute temperatures, within certain limits, are not important to drive reliability, but that temperature variation is. Drives that, because of their location and pattern of use, tend to fluctuate in temperature between, say, 20 and 35 degrees centigrade are being stressed more than those an a steady 40 degrees.
I must say I now understand GWB's decision to avoid getting court orders to carry out surveillance on US citizens a lot better. Indeed, if the courts become involved, it is necessary to balance everyone's rights. It is far better just to ensure one's own interests are satisfied: the other guy's rights are unimportant. Right?
Actually, perhaps we could extend this to our treatment of criminals. Getting the courts involved is so messy. Why not just physically beat them or string them up on the spot, depending on how serious we feel the crimes are that they committed?
Personally, I cannot be bothered to carry reading material to the pot. However, when the natural cycle is slow enough, I rather like the idea of having some interesting reading material conveniently available.
In the past, I can remember seeing special toilet paper that contained jokes, quotes or similar material. The main difference here is that the material is more useful and can be provided at lower cost.
I shall not comment on the likelihood of the patent being initially granted. Let's assume it is. Cox is then proposing to prevent anyone using DRM by refusing to license it to anyone on any terms. The trouble with that is such an action is grounds to cancel the patent. There are conditions in patent law designed to prevent anyone taking out patents with the objective of preventing the use of the embodied inventions. These were designed to prevent unfair competition, but will still apply.
- a Linux host will perform better, will be more malware resistant and, perhaps, be more robust;
- if you are buying a brand new system, driver support may be better under Windows (Linux in a virtual machine will not care about the host hardware drivers);
- if you go 64-bit, Linux is the best choice of host OS.
As others have suggested, Ubuntu is a sound choice of Linux distribution. I am going to blow my karma by noting that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is even better if you are willing to give Novell some money.Part of what I do for a living is consult with small companies regarding their IT strategy. When appropriate, I advise them to move towards open source solutions, such as Open Office and Linux. An argument that says we should not support Windows file formats and APIs on Linux is a guarantee that there are going to be fewer companies that can make the transition. Small companies running Open Office under Linux can already move to Windows, still using Open Office. Those using IMAP under Linux can already move to Windows, still using IMAP (standards are good that way). The problem is going the other way: from proprietary products under Windows to open products under Linux.
Yes, if you search for "QDEX search", you find a few links, but is is basically a plug for a specific search engine: Hakia Search Engine
I can (just about) understand a point of view that says that noone should deal with the Great Satan on principle, regardless of whether it is in the interests of your company and stockholders. I can even (while thinking it is stupid) comprehend the argument that there might be some legal strategy Microsoft could use against those that are not a party to the agreement that would otherwise be impossible. But, please do tell me: which part of the agreement provides a "migrate to windows" button in Linux?
Some will say hibernation gives the same facility, but (at least with Windows) a clean boot needs to be done fairly often (when using a Windows development box, I reboot it daily).
In your Internet browser (probably an icon with a big blue E in your case) type "www.google.com" (without the quotes) into your address bar (the area near the top of the screen with a funny string starting "http://"). Next type ".002 cents * 35893 in dollars" (without the quotes) press enter and look at the answer.
(In reality, this would not work as you would never be able to get someone this dim to understand what the address bar was, even with patient explanation.)
There is sometimes a legitimate use for lawyers in the US. This is one of them. Verizon must be forced to train their service staff sufficiently that others do not get burnt by this kind of problem.