Re:Who cares about this battle?
on
The Case for FreeBSD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Advocacy in open source is important because it indirectly affects the speed of development and ultimately the survival of the project.
If hardly anyone were using FreeBSD because they thought it "sucked", then there would be far fewer people willing to develop FreeBSD.
Those who are developing it would find their efforts less fruitful, because fewer people would exist to fix bugs and improve on their work... eventually FreeBSD would go the way of the Amiga... a few diehard users stll existing, but essentially dead.
Not to imply that that isn't already the case. (I'm kidding... I'm kidding!)
I don't see a need for Fedora anymore, and I think Red Hat sees this. They are just now realizing that if they don't up their PR efforts to seem like a good citizen of the open source world... they will lose all the free coding and beta testing that they thought they could count on from Fedora users.
Linux users now have a truly free distribution, backed up by a real community, which is user-friendly and based on debian.
A state normally does not have jurisdiction to subpoena something from another state. They can only do so when a company has sufficient minimum contacts with them.
Amazon has minimum contacts with 2 or 3 states at most (headquarters and distribution centers). They are probably already charging sales tax to customers in those states.
Furthermore, a sales tax is normally something that a business pays. The business charges the customer, but the government taxes the business. If the state has jurisdiction to subpoena the company, then it has jurisdiction to sue the company.
It would be backwards if they subpoenaed the company for sales tax records so they could sue the purchasers.
I agree with this. What I don't understand is how this means that Napster can succeed. The above has nothing to do with Napster's business model.
Apparently, you missed the second paragraph, in which I explained why the Napster model is a reasonable alternative that serves a different market . By succeed, I don't mean that it will destroy iTunes... just that it may be a successful business model.
You don't subscribe to iTunes.
You register and then purchase songs. The point is that if you want to download popular songs from an online music service, you have to decide which service to use BEFORE you buy a music player. You have to "subscribe" to a particular way of doing things in advance.
I almost agree with the Napster CEO... Why buy music from iTunes when you can buy the same music, with a non-DRMed hard copy (used cd) for less?
If you like to listen to lots and lots of music and you don't want to bother with managing a large collection of CDs or iTunes files, then Napster makes sense.
It actually promotes something that Apple is thought to have a monopoly on: simplicity.
On the other hand... it also hurts simplicity by forcing a choice. Do I buy an iPod and subscribe to iTunes or do I buy a Napster compatible device and subscribe to it? For me the answer is neither, I don't need a glorified walkman.
Unfortunately for Napster, the answer for a huge number of other people is "iPod's are soooooooo cool, my friends have one, my dog has one, I want one!"
If he hadn't finished his work, it would have caused a rip in the space time continuum... birds would fly upside down and cars would move vertically instead of horizontally.
Retirement of Online Services for older versions of Quicken
In an ongoing effort to provide reliable high-quality products and services, Intuit periodically retires (also known as "sunsets") older versions of Quicken, thereby discontinuing Online Services & Live Technical Support for these versions.
Under this policy, the most current version of Quicken (currently Quicken 2005), plus the prior two versions, will be supported, subject to certain exceptions. Sunsetting older versions of Quicken allows us to focus resources on enhancing our products and providing support for more current versions, which are used by the vast majority of Quicken customers. The result: a better customer experience for millions of Quicken users.
They're making it sound like some sort of political decision... "for the greater good!"
What a bunch of assholes. You're a business. You sold a product. Now you're trying to take it back by disabling features that people have already paid for. You just can't polish that kind of turd.
I have Quicken 2005 (bought before I knew about this crap). And it no longer supports importing QIFs from my credit union. I asked my credit union about it, and they said Intuit wants somewhere around $50,000 to enable the new format.
Mr. McGrath speaks of accountability... just how many of MS's customers have been able to hold Microsoft accountable for the billions of dollars lost through security flaws in Microsoft programs???
"In Microsoft's world customers are confidant that we take responsibility. They know that they will get their upgrades and patches."
OH! He's just talking about upgrades and patches? That's accountability??? Show me a major Linux distribution that doesn't provide upgrades and patches... next show me one that is slower than Microsoft at doing it.
The only one I can think of might be Slackware, but I'm not even sure about that.
For Windows and Mac users it's important to stick with something they already have installed. Those users are less likely to go and install some newfangled codec just to watch a video on your site, so stick with wmv for them.
For Linux users, it's a different story. The average Linux user is much more willing to install something like xvid. For most distros it is already prepackaged.
I would just add an xvid format of your videos. That way, the Linux users can use an open source codec that provides high quality... and isn't any harder for them to install than anything else.
Now that the largest member of both the RIAA and MPAA no longer has a stake in usenet, AOL can participate in a campaign to break it up, or at least to more heavily police it.
A great feature of usenet for copyright violating is that you can leech all you want and noone will ever know except you and your usenet server.
But that won't matter if they convince Congress to place burdensome requirements on companies that maintain usenet servers.
Of course, there are plenty of good Constitutional and practical arguments against doing that. But who is going to make them. More importantly, who is going to have the kind of clout that's necessary to fight a lobbying effort by these people?
wrt54g is a router made by Linksys. It runs a version of Linux, and several third parties have made their own versions of its firmware, adding various features... one of which is apparently the Asterisk PBX.
VOIP is voice over internet protocol, which means any way of having a voice conversation over the internet. The sipura voip adapter is one way of making voice calls on the internet.
Can your PDA access an exchange server? Blackberry's can.
Not sure. My provider (T-Mobile) charges extra for accessing those ports. Instead, I get regular POP3 or IMAP email, plus unlimited browsing of HTML and WAP pages over GPRS for $4.99 a month.
I also use Putty for Symbian to SSH to my home computer over the open POP3 port. That's outside of the service agreement though, so if T-Mobile wanted to prevent it they would be within their rights.
I don't have a qwerty keyboard like the Blackberry's have. That would be nice (especially for writing emails and logging in via SSH).
But so far, the ONLY thing I have found that can work with it is Mobical, which is a great site for saving your contacts.
I really want to be able to sync my contacts with Mozilla Address Book or Evolution. But so far, MS Outlook (running on my Windows laptop) is the only app I can sync with... and that's without using SyncML. The Nokia PC Suite Software (a Windows) app lets me sync with Outlook, and a few other legacy programs.
I look forward to the day that SyncML becomes the accepted standard, but right now very little seems to be compatible with it (or at least its implementation in the 3650).
I have already tried Sync4j and Multisync, and could neither get them to work, nor find anyone else who got one of them to work with a 3650 (or similar Symbian based phone). If you know of something that might work, I'm all ears.
Lawmakers often put in vague language to avoid having to commit to anything specific, but make it look like they are doing something.
Yes, and this is usually allowable, but in the case of a criminal statute that carries jail time as a penalty, it is not.
The Constitution itself is a pretty vague document if you read it. Finer points are left up to the courts or to Congress to decide later on. That's why after almost 200 years, people still argue about what exactly is meant by Free Speech, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of the Press, etc etc etc.
If passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take "reasonable care" in preventing the use of their software to swap copyrighted music or movies--or child pornography.
How is one to ensure that he is using "reasonable care" in order to comply with the statute? You can't. It's impossible to know what they mean by "reasonable care".
It seems pretty obvious that the people writing the bill don't know even know what they mean by reasonable care.
If noone can figure out what it is that a statute makes illegal, then it violates Due Process and is unconstitutional.
What is truly sad is the way in which these people--who consider themselves religious--have focused on this very materialistic argument.
The argument itself betrays a misunderstanding of spirituality. It assumes that if we are seeking spiritual fulfillment, that we must all believe the same thing... that somehow if we believe the WRONG thing, that we will be unable to attain spiritual fulfillment.
It is a very flawed approach to understanding the world. If you want to seek happiness, oneness with God... whatever you want to call it. The origin of humanity should be the least of your concerns. And what other people believe about it should be even less of a concern.
We are humans. The point is to get used to it, and not to fret about how it happened or didn't happen. It is an interesting question, but not one that religion should be involved in.
Maybe it's the difference between "official exchange rates" and actual ones.
In Soviet Russia (no, this is not the beginning of a joke) as a tourist, you could get rubles for the official rate from the government exchange offices (a ripoff). Or you could get about twice as many rubles per dollar from someone off the street.
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Advocacy in open source is important because it indirectly affects the speed of development and ultimately the survival of the project.
If hardly anyone were using FreeBSD because they thought it "sucked", then there would be far fewer people willing to develop FreeBSD.
Those who are developing it would find their efforts less fruitful, because fewer people would exist to fix bugs and improve on their work... eventually FreeBSD would go the way of the Amiga... a few diehard users stll existing, but essentially dead.
Not to imply that that isn't already the case. (I'm kidding... I'm kidding!)
Microsoft today announced that it is beginning development on a new suite of educational applications to be known as MSHighSchool 2.0.
Does this mean I have to keep paying my mortgage?
I don't see a need for Fedora anymore, and I think Red Hat sees this. They are just now realizing that if they don't up their PR efforts to seem like a good citizen of the open source world... they will lose all the free coding and beta testing that they thought they could count on from Fedora users.
Linux users now have a truly free distribution, backed up by a real community, which is user-friendly and based on debian.
I just thought it was a bit off topic...
but I myself have been modded -1 off-topic...
Oh the irony!
why am I reading this on Slashdot?
Thank you for explaining that...
A state normally does not have jurisdiction to subpoena something from another state. They can only do so when a company has sufficient minimum contacts with them.
Amazon has minimum contacts with 2 or 3 states at most (headquarters and distribution centers). They are probably already charging sales tax to customers in those states.
Furthermore, a sales tax is normally something that a business pays. The business charges the customer, but the government taxes the business. If the state has jurisdiction to subpoena the company, then it has jurisdiction to sue the company.
It would be backwards if they subpoenaed the company for sales tax records so they could sue the purchasers.
Apparently, you missed the second paragraph, in which I explained why the Napster model is a reasonable alternative that serves a different market . By succeed, I don't mean that it will destroy iTunes... just that it may be a successful business model.
You don't subscribe to iTunes.
You register and then purchase songs. The point is that if you want to download popular songs from an online music service, you have to decide which service to use BEFORE you buy a music player. You have to "subscribe" to a particular way of doing things in advance.
I almost agree with the Napster CEO... Why buy music from iTunes when you can buy the same music, with a non-DRMed hard copy (used cd) for less?
If you like to listen to lots and lots of music and you don't want to bother with managing a large collection of CDs or iTunes files, then Napster makes sense.
It actually promotes something that Apple is thought to have a monopoly on: simplicity.
On the other hand... it also hurts simplicity by forcing a choice. Do I buy an iPod and subscribe to iTunes or do I buy a Napster compatible device and subscribe to it? For me the answer is neither, I don't need a glorified walkman.
Unfortunately for Napster, the answer for a huge number of other people is "iPod's are soooooooo cool, my friends have one, my dog has one, I want one!"
If he hadn't finished his work, it would have caused a rip in the space time continuum... birds would fly upside down and cars would move vertically instead of horizontally.
And everyone would think Macs were lame.
In ten years, we will probably be using that quote the way we use the "640k of ram ought to be enough for anyone" quote.
In an ongoing effort to provide reliable high-quality products and services, Intuit periodically retires (also known as "sunsets") older versions of Quicken, thereby discontinuing Online Services & Live Technical Support for these versions.
Under this policy, the most current version of Quicken (currently Quicken 2005), plus the prior two versions, will be supported, subject to certain exceptions. Sunsetting older versions of Quicken allows us to focus resources on enhancing our products and providing support for more current versions, which are used by the vast majority of Quicken customers. The result: a better customer experience for millions of Quicken users.
They're making it sound like some sort of political decision... "for the greater good!"
What a bunch of assholes. You're a business. You sold a product. Now you're trying to take it back by disabling features that people have already paid for. You just can't polish that kind of turd.
I have Quicken 2005 (bought before I knew about this crap). And it no longer supports importing QIFs from my credit union. I asked my credit union about it, and they said Intuit wants somewhere around $50,000 to enable the new format.
Intuit needs to die.
"In Microsoft's world customers are confidant that we take responsibility. They know that they will get their upgrades and patches."
OH! He's just talking about upgrades and patches? That's accountability??? Show me a major Linux distribution that doesn't provide upgrades and patches... next show me one that is slower than Microsoft at doing it.
The only one I can think of might be Slackware, but I'm not even sure about that.
For Windows and Mac users it's important to stick with something they already have installed. Those users are less likely to go and install some newfangled codec just to watch a video on your site, so stick with wmv for them.
For Linux users, it's a different story. The average Linux user is much more willing to install something like xvid. For most distros it is already prepackaged.
I would just add an xvid format of your videos. That way, the Linux users can use an open source codec that provides high quality... and isn't any harder for them to install than anything else.
I do wonder if this is a sign.
Now that the largest member of both the RIAA and MPAA no longer has a stake in usenet, AOL can participate in a campaign to break it up, or at least to more heavily police it.
A great feature of usenet for copyright violating is that you can leech all you want and noone will ever know except you and your usenet server.
But that won't matter if they convince Congress to place burdensome requirements on companies that maintain usenet servers.
Of course, there are plenty of good Constitutional and practical arguments against doing that. But who is going to make them. More importantly, who is going to have the kind of clout that's necessary to fight a lobbying effort by these people?
wrt54g is a router made by Linksys. It runs a version of Linux, and several third parties have made their own versions of its firmware, adding various features... one of which is apparently the Asterisk PBX. VOIP is voice over internet protocol, which means any way of having a voice conversation over the internet. The sipura voip adapter is one way of making voice calls on the internet.
What the fuck is an "F-Bomb"?????
Not sure. My provider (T-Mobile) charges extra for accessing those ports. Instead, I get regular POP3 or IMAP email, plus unlimited browsing of HTML and WAP pages over GPRS for $4.99 a month.
I also use Putty for Symbian to SSH to my home computer over the open POP3 port. That's outside of the service agreement though, so if T-Mobile wanted to prevent it they would be within their rights.
I don't have a qwerty keyboard like the Blackberry's have. That would be nice (especially for writing emails and logging in via SSH).
But so far, the ONLY thing I have found that can work with it is Mobical, which is a great site for saving your contacts.
I really want to be able to sync my contacts with Mozilla Address Book or Evolution. But so far, MS Outlook (running on my Windows laptop) is the only app I can sync with... and that's without using SyncML. The Nokia PC Suite Software (a Windows) app lets me sync with Outlook, and a few other legacy programs.
I look forward to the day that SyncML becomes the accepted standard, but right now very little seems to be compatible with it (or at least its implementation in the 3650).
I have already tried Sync4j and Multisync, and could neither get them to work, nor find anyone else who got one of them to work with a 3650 (or similar Symbian based phone). If you know of something that might work, I'm all ears.
Um, how is the Blackberry different from any other PDA/mobile phone combination that accesses email? Pardon me, but I've never used one.
Yes, and this is usually allowable, but in the case of a criminal statute that carries jail time as a penalty, it is not.
The Constitution itself is a pretty vague document if you read it. Finer points are left up to the courts or to Congress to decide later on. That's why after almost 200 years, people still argue about what exactly is meant by Free Speech, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of the Press, etc etc etc.
If passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take "reasonable care" in preventing the use of their software to swap copyrighted music or movies--or child pornography.
How is one to ensure that he is using "reasonable care" in order to comply with the statute? You can't. It's impossible to know what they mean by "reasonable care".
It seems pretty obvious that the people writing the bill don't know even know what they mean by reasonable care.
If noone can figure out what it is that a statute makes illegal, then it violates Due Process and is unconstitutional.
What is truly sad is the way in which these people--who consider themselves religious--have focused on this very materialistic argument.
The argument itself betrays a misunderstanding of spirituality. It assumes that if we are seeking spiritual fulfillment, that we must all believe the same thing... that somehow if we believe the WRONG thing, that we will be unable to attain spiritual fulfillment.
It is a very flawed approach to understanding the world. If you want to seek happiness, oneness with God... whatever you want to call it. The origin of humanity should be the least of your concerns. And what other people believe about it should be even less of a concern.
We are humans. The point is to get used to it, and not to fret about how it happened or didn't happen. It is an interesting question, but not one that religion should be involved in.
Let the Canadians and the Europeans have their fancy "Newton Week". We follow tradition down here!
In Soviet Russia (no, this is not the beginning of a joke) as a tourist, you could get rubles for the official rate from the government exchange offices (a ripoff). Or you could get about twice as many rubles per dollar from someone off the street.
Perhaps there is a similar situation in China.