I'm not saying it does. I'm saying the enforcement of those morals and ethics needs to rely more on the government than the company, because historically speaking, there are very few examples of companies willing to forestall profits for the sake of ethics and morality.
Well, it's mixed. It is true that large public companies tend to do this because everybody in the company can point at somebody else and say "they did it!" however it depends heavily on the ethics of the directors and founders. Scientists that have studied organizations have found that entire organizations are strongly influenced by the people at the top. It's not surprising; they're the ones that define the rules that the rest of the organization live by.
Maximizing profits isn't necessarily incompatible with ethical behavior - family firms are sometimes strongly ethical while still being profitable - however it is true that an unethical person always has the option of acting ethically when the occasion demands it however the ethical person doesn't have the option of acting unethically, meaning that an unethical person will have more options and "win" all else being equal if society as a whole doesn't gang up on unethical people. Complex, modern society unfortunately means that unethical people have more options since they're effectively less likely to meet the person they're dealing with again. That means that regulation is even more important as you noted.
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A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
MS Office is what it is because it is shaped by the requirements and traditions of clerical work that go back hundreds of years.
Then how come all the talk about "retraining costs" from the M$ astroturfers whenever anybody suggests moving an office from M$ to an alternative? It's not true of course but they do so love to go on and on.
That is why it is so very, very hard for projects like OpenOffice.org to come up with anything truly innovative -
That is why it is so very, very hard for any software package to come up with anything truly innovative -
Actually, there's innovation in office software all the time, most of it not at M$. e.g. LyX, GoogleDocs, gOffice or BuzzWord.
no matter how much money Big Daddy Sun pours into the bin.
Ah yes, marketing 101; if you can't make a decent argument try to throw the reader off with some emotive and selective associations. In reality Sun is not even remotely a "big daddy" compared to M$ and M$Office is not particularly innovative compared to OpenOffice (and earlier/other office software) as you try to imply.
Which in a world of 6,719,000,000+ is not in short supply. There is far more than enough to keep you busy for the rest of your life. Many different people can be entertained by a cheap copy of the same good song. Funny that.
The vast majority of creative and talented people in the current "IP" regime get almost nothing in payment. It's almost all going to the middlemen who give almost nothing in return and has been for hundreds of years. That is not an acceptable situation and the fact that you choose to support it says more about your naivety than any token "rewards" most creative and talented people might get.
In addition a basic problem with so-called "IP" markets in general and the music business in particular is the economic network effect. That is, it's always going to be n times as efficient to have one player produce and copy n copies of their "IP" than it is for n players to produce and copy 1/n copies of their "IP". This leads to unstable, winner-take-all markets with only a monopoly or an oligopoly remaining who can and do charge whatever they like for the "IP" they control. This has happened in pretty much every "IP" market you care to name. It's not a free market because real competition and commodity, cost-plus pricing with efficient production don't happen.
I would agree at least partially with your argument if we had IP law that allowed a true free market to arise where songs, videos and software cost cents/copy and not tens of dollars however until that happy day arises (and parasitic middlemen, marketers and their associated million dollar stars are a thing of the past) I will happily pirate all the "big media" content I can when the opportunity arises. Note that this argument does not apply to small players and I'm much more careful about making sure small players get a just reward for their work in entertaining me, though I don't use copyright and badly broken markets as my benchmark of how much they should be paid.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
No. Its the fact that its usability has been gimped.
Ha ha.
You're a zealot. Gimp can be learned in minutes. Gimp doesn't follow all the user interface conventions that it should but it follows most, has extensive online help and is more usable than most other programs, proprietary or otherwise. If gimp is difficult for you to use then I'd suggest you look in the mirror, not at gimp.
Life's not worth wasting one's efforts of the ideology of a fucking graphics chipset already!
You are every bit as ideological as the people you are claiming are ideological. Accepting proprietary software or hardware is an ideological choice whether you like it or not.
Your priorities are not everyone's. Other people make other choices that may not agree with yours but are just as sensible and may even be better long term, depending on your personal definition of "better". Personally, I'd like to live in a world where proprietary IP bullshit is at a minimum and try to make choices that will promote that world, for both myself and my children. Your generic, content free complaining is not helpful.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
They seem to have given up, more or less, on bad mouthing private copyright ignorers for now and are trying to direct discussion with self-serving nonsense about commercial copyright ignorers where they think they have have a chance of controlling opinion.
In this case selling hardware with games on them that should be public domain but because of bought law (by distributers, not creators), aren't.
Siemens sure isn't going to take a moral high ground here -- they're a business, and businesses should not be expected to have to make moral choices.
Sorry, but that's self-serving sociopathic nonsense. Companies are just groups of people working together. Each of the people in that company, whether employee, director or shareholder, make moral and ethical choices, including those that affect the moral and ethical direction of the company. They are damn well totally responsible.
Or to put it another way: WTF should forming a company give anybody a moral or ethical get-out-of-jail free card?
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I don't think anyone questions his credentials, but I think it does make for a slow news day to point out his 88th birthday. Is this an annual announcement that is made here? Were there front page stories for his 73rd, 68th, or what about 86th?
Probably a story planted by a marketer wanting to pep up Rad Bradbury book sales./. would be in their core demographic. Some of the/. posts in this story will be by fraudulent marketers also trying to encourage people to buy. All it takes is a very small percentage increase in sales in a million-people-sized audience to financially justify astroturfing like this.
my kids are not going to open a terminal window every time they want internet access and type cryptic commands.
Not needed. Learn a little about scripting and zenity. Just put the list of commands you want in a bash script, point to it with a desktop icon (in Gnome right-click on the desktop or menu bar and select "Add to Panel..."/"Create Launcher...") and you're done. No need for the kids to type any commands, cryptic or otherwise.
I really, truly believe that "Windows" is a form of the religion "virus" that infect brains with creator stories, only dressed up in a nice, marketing friendly suit.
Windows heavy blogs are forms of church.
Open source software is the original sin.
Bill Gates is the prophet who will save us from our sins
Intel Netbook is the marketing equivalent of a missionary spreading the gospel of Proprietary Software to the heathens in "you name it"
GNU licensing is the devil.
etc. etc.
I could go on but you get the idea. Your post is unmitigated bullshit. You obviously have an agenda and it isn't a nice one.
To others reading: M$ marketing parasites have focussed for a while on trying to make free software look like zealotry while making proprietary software look like a "sensible" alternative for "normal" people. The reality, not the propaganda they are promoting, is that open source is one more reasonable alternative appropriate for many people, even most people if you include the third world.
Most any accusation you can make of open source includes close source also. There are many sensible people who think open source is a good characteristic to include in the software they use. Or to put it another way; the license is part of the feature set of a piece of software. As in any free market different people regard different features as important. It has nothing to do with religion, just different priorities.
You can pretty much assume anybody pushing the "religion" meme is probably a scummy astroturfing "marketer" or somebody naive fooled by them.
Be very aware of the astroturfing on/. and elsewhere. It's much more widespread than many people realize. Next time some commercial propaganda piece comes up/. (sorry, "press release") have a look at how many "third-party" posters jump on even the slightest hint of criticism of anything in the propaganda. See how many content-free, repetitive commercial propaganda posts are mod'ed up, probably by sock puppets. When you see lots of content free, repetitive posts, particularly those promoting some commercial position (but more generally also) you can be reasonably sure marketers are involved. They're trying to drown out alternative points of view. Too much noise can compromise free speech just as much as too little signal.
The reality is that paid marketers are the worst zealots of all. Compared to those calling any form of software a "religion" is a joke.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
You seem to have missed the point entirely. The world could have 600 trillion people, and good music would still be in limited supply and high demand.
Only for a very silly definition of "good". The numbers say otherwise. The problem is not finding good music, the problem is filtering out the crap.
We live in a very information rich and music rich world where the marginal cost of music is close to zero. The RIAA's attempt to preserve their broken business model at the expense of everybody else's freedom just shows how out of touch they are.
I don't understand why people feel the need to add one-liner crap like this to their posts.
Like you just did? It was a direct reply to your so-called reason as to why you "pay for music". If you can't see that you've completely missed the point.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
And to reply to myself, firewalls wouldn't stop most of the attacks you describe either. These kind of attacks dont operate on the network level but the application level. They'd require the firewall to dig really deep into the packet to see what is up. That kind of digging requires what is now expensive hardware (expensive = more than $50)
Where did they say that firewalls will stop that type of attack? All I'm saying is the so-called protection provided by NAT, particularly NAT with automated punchthrough, is close to non-existent and is not a justification for it. You are consistently trying to ignore that.
Besides, we stand as much of a chance filtering them out of our networks as we do trying to block BitTorrent traffic on consumer broadband networks. They'll just invent better ways to hide their traffic.
Yup, and NAT is useless for protection.
Stateful routing (i.e. firewalls and NATs) filter out the obvious stuff. Kinda like using SSH doesn't stop people from breaking into your server, but if you "turned of" SSH, people would just sniff your traffic and get your password.
Like I said, you don't understand security. You can't sniff SSH, that's the whole point of it's use of public/private encryption.
You're either naive or trolling. If you're deliberately trolling I'd suggest you get a life, you need one. If you're just naive I'd suggest you learn a lot more about security before making any more posts about the subject. Bye.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
Only because I've taken the steps to plug up the obvious stuff like making it almost impossible to route *into* my network. Now the attacks have evolved to work around the firewall/NAT.
I'm sorry, but you've just demonstrated a poor understanding of computer security. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code versus the small number of ports open on a network interface with the small amount of associated code heavily audited? It's not even close.
Audited, yes, but all of my computers are wide open and password free to improve the human factors like, say, the lady getting her pictures off my computer from the laptop (vista does act smart about this, btw, it keeps tract of the network you are connect to and can let you open or shut your "doors" based on your access point).
Again, you have no understanding of security. Wide open still means your computers can positively identify each other with public/private keys, packets between them can be encrypted and not routed to the external net at all. No passwords or user interaction required.
Address translation or not, these are still gonna have to punch holes in my firewall (which would clearly be "default deny") and do it in a user friendly way that doesn't require me to log into my broadband router (which would still exist exactly to provide a firewall).
Read my post again. When no user intervention is required to punch through a firewall it's called "addressing" (albeit kludged addressing) and it's not firewalling at all.
...Speaking of, we'll have to improve our routing protocols to deal with provisioning entire subnets to each customer instead of lumping many customers onto a single subnet. Thats an engineering problem though.
Sounds like you want to go back to the bad old days of UUCP, where you had to specify all the intermediate nodes to get your file to the destination. Fortunately we've moved beyond that with global addressing, whether on computer networks with IPv6 or in the real world with postal addresses.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Well, I half agree with you - It doesn't work like photoshop. you just didn't go far enough - It doesn't work like anything else, except GIMP. that means it's not straightforward, because you don't have a point of reference to compare to and the interface doesn't give you enough visual clues to make things intuitive, which makes it a poorly designed one.
Gimp's interface can be learned in literally minutes. To complain about that just shows you're either a fanatic or an Adobe astroturfing parasite. While GIMP doesn't follow all the user interface conventions it should, it follows most of them, has extensive online help and has a user interface far better than many programs out there.
He will most likely be using apps that will be recognizable descendants of those first published for the Mac OS in 1984 and Win 3.1 in 1992 and Win 95 in 1995
In other words: "I never look at alternatives because I'm going to be running the same OS for the rest of eternity".
Yep, M$ loves it when schools subsidize M$ with free M$ product training. Typical M$ alley-cat ethics. No wonder M$ has so many enemies.
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DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
We should start encrypting all our data, no matter how "unsuspicious" or "ordinary" it may be. Everything from conversations between family and friends to financial records (though you should be already encrypting the latter anyway.)
Don't bother. They have access to everything they want via M$ update, and possibly other update as well. It's just too easy. Encryption does nothing when they have the keys to your computer. Find paedo's (won't somebody think of the children!)? No problem. Trawl for those with terrorist plans? No problem. Check the competition on a multi-billion dollar international defence contract? No problem. Just hook a keyword/image checker to the disk indexer that reports back a simple yes/no on the next update. If yes then next update downloads a more comprehensive spy package. Easy.
Think they wouldn't do it? Look at the track record of the major agencies on everything from COINTELPRO to Echelon. Even this. It'd be surprising if they didn't do it.
And if they get caught? Sorry, you must've been infected with a virus, here's an update to "fix" the problem.
This move (warrantless investigation) may simply be to retroactively make broad scale computer tapping "legal". They don't even need to do that for the hundreds of millions of non-US computers - those have no constitutional protections at all.
Particularly if you are a non-US entity competing in any way with US interests you should not trust any network connected computer running any mainstream US software at all.
To repeat: Encryption does not help if they have administrative access to your computer.
I agree. However many people think that that becomes an excuse to treat these people like garbage and that then says more about that person then the person doing the job.
These people's so-called "job" consists of stealing an hour of some stranger's time for every hour they "work". And the time of our life is the most important thing we have.
What these parasites do is incredibly rude and treating them like garbage is the bare minimum of what they should expect. I only wish we could get to the arseholes behind them.
Just so "Not interested" and hang up. Nobody forces you (in general) to keep talking. The moment you do anything that is impolite, it is you who is doing it, not the other person.
You mean, waste a minumum of their time so they can steal as much as possible of other people's time? I think not. These people are almost pure parasites. They prey on the vulnerable in the community and it's a public service to give them a hard time. Maybe they'll get a real job and not be a parasite. One can hope.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
But, if you're 32, and you can't program a VCR, then sorry... you're a retard.
You've just accused the majority of the population of being a retard. I think the problem is with the VCR, not the general population.
I'm even making a game out of testing how many obscure functions I find without the manual.
I explore interfaces too however we are not typical of the general population. The general population does not want to waste time learning interfaces that will almost certainly change on the next iteration. And it is not reasonable to expect them to do so anyway.
In the case of VCR "menu navigation" most have at least the following problems:
Way too many keys/buttons, most unused.
No clear labeling of most buttons or button sets.
Multiple arrow keys for each direction. Which works, and for what?
Completely non-standard exit-sub-menu key. ie. Esc, <-, <--, N, <<, |<-- WTF is it?
Wrapping at the top/bottom of menus, causing the naive user to get lost.
Only using arrows (which?) to specify time/date. What is the date/time order? What happens when start time is after end time?
Only using numbers to specify time/date. How to undo?
Cryptic prompts often written in engineering english, not real, common english.
Cryptic prompts often abbreviated to unintelligibility.
Cryptic prompts for those whose native language is not English.
Cryptic prompts for those who do not have 20/20 eyesight.
Cryptic prompts invisible in strong light.
Cryptic prompts that have no relation to what is on the TV screen. Naive users are frequently confused by the TV showing one program while they try to record a future program.
Often no clear way of telling when you're talking to VCR or to TV. Most users have no idea what a tuner is, why there's two of them and why the procedure for selecting a channel on TV, VCR and VCR-while-timed-recording is often completely different.
Keyboard routines that autorepeat in completely inappropriate contexts. (Incidentally, any interface that has a deliberate delay in it will almost certainly be wrong for a large percentage of the population - different people need different delays).
Keyboard bounce routines that do not give proper feedback on keypress, causing keys to be pressed too many/few times. Particularly bad on remotes that may be obscured.
No obvious undo facility, particularly bad with the previous keypress stuffup.
Non-obvious modal interfaces. eg. Why, when I press play (triangle), does nothing happen? The user doesn't know, and quite reasonably doesn't care, that the remote is in "TV" mode when it's one of the few buttons that are completely unambiguous and should actually do something.
etc. etc.
The general population expects menus to be a full white box (no scrolling) with black printing and black triangles to denote sub-menus. Everything else has to be learned.
The best VCR interface might be 3 dials and a button. Channel, start time, stop time and "do it" labeled properly and with full setting feedback. Failing that, one dial with push for each stage. Sony has something like this but the feedback is still poor.
Okay, if you mean buttons looking like icons, i can understand that.
Yes. To the vast majority of computer users an icon is just a symbol on a screen. The fact that it has a box around it (ie. is a button) is almost irrelevant until they are trained for it.
And the constant mousee-keyboard are even worse.
True. For both advanced and naive users though for different reasons.
The other two big no-nos are tiny buttons for the most used functions (like those ">" links for pagination on web sites), and mouseoveer-activation for tiny areas (lik
I don't believe this is a paid guerrilla advertising campaign from MS,
They've probably just subcontracted it. I've no doubt "ISV"'s (most are not independent in the slightest) have been getting lots of propaganda from M$ on "how to deal with competitors" and lots of under-the-table payments+toys for unethical and outright illegal marketing practices (MVP's anyone?).
Astroturfing is bad public relations if caught, so M$, with their alley cat morals, will try to keep it at arms length while still doing as much as they think they can get away with.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
... high demand, is the musician's creativity - writing melodies that people like, expressive lyrics, cool guitar solos, interesting arangements, new instruments used in a different genre, etc.
In a world of 6,718,000,000+ people that is not in short supply, not even a little bit, whatever the marketing parasites might tell you.
That's what I'm paying for when I buy music.
You need to become more numerically literate.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
The majority of the population is delusional? Actually, I think you're the one that's delusional.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying it does. I'm saying the enforcement of those morals and ethics needs to rely more on the government than the company, because historically speaking, there are very few examples of companies willing to forestall profits for the sake of ethics and morality.
Well, it's mixed. It is true that large public companies tend to do this because everybody in the company can point at somebody else and say "they did it!" however it depends heavily on the ethics of the directors and founders. Scientists that have studied organizations have found that entire organizations are strongly influenced by the people at the top. It's not surprising; they're the ones that define the rules that the rest of the organization live by.
Maximizing profits isn't necessarily incompatible with ethical behavior - family firms are sometimes strongly ethical while still being profitable - however it is true that an unethical person always has the option of acting ethically when the occasion demands it however the ethical person doesn't have the option of acting unethically, meaning that an unethical person will have more options and "win" all else being equal if society as a whole doesn't gang up on unethical people. Complex, modern society unfortunately means that unethical people have more options since they're effectively less likely to meet the person they're dealing with again. That means that regulation is even more important as you noted.
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A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
You're a zealot. Gimp can be learned in minutes.
Yeah! Hundreds of thousands of them!
Everybody's a comedian today.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
...
MS Office is what it is because it is shaped by the requirements and traditions of clerical work that go back hundreds of years.
Then how come all the talk about "retraining costs" from the M$ astroturfers whenever anybody suggests moving an office from M$ to an alternative? It's not true of course but they do so love to go on and on.
That is why it is so very, very hard for projects like OpenOffice.org to come up with anything truly innovative -
That is why it is so very, very hard for any software package to come up with anything truly innovative -
Actually, there's innovation in office software all the time, most of it not at M$. e.g. LyX, GoogleDocs, gOffice or BuzzWord.
no matter how much money Big Daddy Sun pours into the bin.
Ah yes, marketing 101; if you can't make a decent argument try to throw the reader off with some emotive and selective associations. In reality Sun is not even remotely a "big daddy" compared to M$ and M$Office is not particularly innovative compared to OpenOffice (and earlier/other office software) as you try to imply.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
Makes sense. The last half of this post is also relevant.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
I'm paying for creativity and talent.
Which in a world of 6,719,000,000+ is not in short supply. There is far more than enough to keep you busy for the rest of your life. Many different people can be entertained by a cheap copy of the same good song. Funny that.
The vast majority of creative and talented people in the current "IP" regime get almost nothing in payment. It's almost all going to the middlemen who give almost nothing in return and has been for hundreds of years. That is not an acceptable situation and the fact that you choose to support it says more about your naivety than any token "rewards" most creative and talented people might get.
In addition a basic problem with so-called "IP" markets in general and the music business in particular is the economic network effect. That is, it's always going to be n times as efficient to have one player produce and copy n copies of their "IP" than it is for n players to produce and copy 1/n copies of their "IP". This leads to unstable, winner-take-all markets with only a monopoly or an oligopoly remaining who can and do charge whatever they like for the "IP" they control. This has happened in pretty much every "IP" market you care to name. It's not a free market because real competition and commodity, cost-plus pricing with efficient production don't happen.
I would agree at least partially with your argument if we had IP law that allowed a true free market to arise where songs, videos and software cost cents/copy and not tens of dollars however until that happy day arises (and parasitic middlemen, marketers and their associated million dollar stars are a thing of the past) I will happily pirate all the "big media" content I can when the opportunity arises. Note that this argument does not apply to small players and I'm much more careful about making sure small players get a just reward for their work in entertaining me, though I don't use copyright and badly broken markets as my benchmark of how much they should be paid.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
No. Its the fact that its usability has been gimped.
Ha ha.
You're a zealot. Gimp can be learned in minutes. Gimp doesn't follow all the user interface conventions that it should but it follows most, has extensive online help and is more usable than most other programs, proprietary or otherwise. If gimp is difficult for you to use then I'd suggest you look in the mirror, not at gimp.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
Life's not worth wasting one's efforts of the ideology of a fucking graphics chipset already!
You are every bit as ideological as the people you are claiming are ideological. Accepting proprietary software or hardware is an ideological choice whether you like it or not.
Your priorities are not everyone's. Other people make other choices that may not agree with yours but are just as sensible and may even be better long term, depending on your personal definition of "better". Personally, I'd like to live in a world where proprietary IP bullshit is at a minimum and try to make choices that will promote that world, for both myself and my children. Your generic, content free complaining is not helpful.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
They seem to have given up, more or less, on bad mouthing private copyright ignorers for now and are trying to direct discussion with self-serving nonsense about commercial copyright ignorers where they think they have have a chance of controlling opinion.
In this case selling hardware with games on them that should be public domain but because of bought law (by distributers, not creators), aren't.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
Siemens sure isn't going to take a moral high ground here -- they're a business, and businesses should not be expected to have to make moral choices.
Sorry, but that's self-serving sociopathic nonsense. Companies are just groups of people working together. Each of the people in that company, whether employee, director or shareholder, make moral and ethical choices, including those that affect the moral and ethical direction of the company. They are damn well totally responsible.
Or to put it another way: WTF should forming a company give anybody a moral or ethical get-out-of-jail free card?
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
I don't think anyone questions his credentials, but I think it does make for a slow news day to point out his 88th birthday. Is this an annual announcement that is made here? Were there front page stories for his 73rd, 68th, or what about 86th?
Probably a story planted by a marketer wanting to pep up Rad Bradbury book sales. /. would be in their core demographic. Some of the /. posts in this story will be by fraudulent marketers also trying to encourage people to buy. All it takes is a very small percentage increase in sales in a million-people-sized audience to financially justify astroturfing like this.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Only the FSF would remove functionality and consider that to be a feature rather than a bug...
Only a fanatic would consider the license as not being part of the featureset/functionality of a piece of software.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
my kids are not going to open a terminal window every time they want internet access and type cryptic commands.
Not needed. Learn a little about scripting and zenity. Just put the list of commands you want in a bash script, point to it with a desktop icon (in Gnome right-click on the desktop or menu bar and select "Add to Panel..."/"Create Launcher...") and you're done. No need for the kids to type any commands, cryptic or otherwise.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
I really, truly believe that "Windows" is a form of the religion "virus" that infect brains with creator stories, only dressed up in a nice, marketing friendly suit.
etc. etc.
I could go on but you get the idea. Your post is unmitigated bullshit. You obviously have an agenda and it isn't a nice one.
To others reading: M$ marketing parasites have focussed for a while on trying to make free software look like zealotry while making proprietary software look like a "sensible" alternative for "normal" people. The reality, not the propaganda they are promoting, is that open source is one more reasonable alternative appropriate for many people, even most people if you include the third world.
Most any accusation you can make of open source includes close source also. There are many sensible people who think open source is a good characteristic to include in the software they use. Or to put it another way; the license is part of the feature set of a piece of software. As in any free market different people regard different features as important. It has nothing to do with religion, just different priorities.
You can pretty much assume anybody pushing the "religion" meme is probably a scummy astroturfing "marketer" or somebody naive fooled by them.
Be very aware of the astroturfing on /. and elsewhere. It's much more widespread than many people realize. Next time some commercial propaganda piece comes up /. (sorry, "press release") have a look at how many "third-party" posters jump on even the slightest hint of criticism of anything in the propaganda. See how many content-free, repetitive commercial propaganda posts are mod'ed up, probably by sock puppets. When you see lots of content free, repetitive posts, particularly those promoting some commercial position (but more generally also) you can be reasonably sure marketers are involved. They're trying to drown out alternative points of view. Too much noise can compromise free speech just as much as too little signal.
The reality is that paid marketers are the worst zealots of all. Compared to those calling any form of software a "religion" is a joke.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
You seem to have missed the point entirely. The world could have 600 trillion people, and good music would still be in limited supply and high demand.
Only for a very silly definition of "good". The numbers say otherwise. The problem is not finding good music, the problem is filtering out the crap.
We live in a very information rich and music rich world where the marginal cost of music is close to zero. The RIAA's attempt to preserve their broken business model at the expense of everybody else's freedom just shows how out of touch they are.
I don't understand why people feel the need to add one-liner crap like this to their posts.
Like you just did? It was a direct reply to your so-called reason as to why you "pay for music". If you can't see that you've completely missed the point.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
And to reply to myself, firewalls wouldn't stop most of the attacks you describe either. These kind of attacks dont operate on the network level but the application level. They'd require the firewall to dig really deep into the packet to see what is up. That kind of digging requires what is now expensive hardware (expensive = more than $50)
Where did they say that firewalls will stop that type of attack? All I'm saying is the so-called protection provided by NAT, particularly NAT with automated punchthrough, is close to non-existent and is not a justification for it. You are consistently trying to ignore that.
Besides, we stand as much of a chance filtering them out of our networks as we do trying to block BitTorrent traffic on consumer broadband networks. They'll just invent better ways to hide their traffic.
Yup, and NAT is useless for protection.
Stateful routing (i.e. firewalls and NATs) filter out the obvious stuff. Kinda like using SSH doesn't stop people from breaking into your server, but if you "turned of" SSH, people would just sniff your traffic and get your password.
Like I said, you don't understand security. You can't sniff SSH, that's the whole point of it's use of public/private encryption.
You're either naive or trolling. If you're deliberately trolling I'd suggest you get a life, you need one. If you're just naive I'd suggest you learn a lot more about security before making any more posts about the subject. Bye.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
Only because I've taken the steps to plug up the obvious stuff like making it almost impossible to route *into* my network. Now the attacks have evolved to work around the firewall/NAT.
I'm sorry, but you've just demonstrated a poor understanding of computer security. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code versus the small number of ports open on a network interface with the small amount of associated code heavily audited? It's not even close.
Audited, yes, but all of my computers are wide open and password free to improve the human factors like, say, the lady getting her pictures off my computer from the laptop (vista does act smart about this, btw, it keeps tract of the network you are connect to and can let you open or shut your "doors" based on your access point).
Again, you have no understanding of security. Wide open still means your computers can positively identify each other with public/private keys, packets between them can be encrypted and not routed to the external net at all. No passwords or user interaction required.
Address translation or not, these are still gonna have to punch holes in my firewall (which would clearly be "default deny") and do it in a user friendly way that doesn't require me to log into my broadband router (which would still exist exactly to provide a firewall).
Read my post again. When no user intervention is required to punch through a firewall it's called "addressing" (albeit kludged addressing) and it's not firewalling at all.
Sounds like you want to go back to the bad old days of UUCP, where you had to specify all the intermediate nodes to get your file to the destination. Fortunately we've moved beyond that with global addressing, whether on computer networks with IPv6 or in the real world with postal addresses.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Well, I half agree with you - It doesn't work like photoshop. you just didn't go far enough - It doesn't work like anything else, except GIMP. that means it's not straightforward, because you don't have a point of reference to compare to and the interface doesn't give you enough visual clues to make things intuitive, which makes it a poorly designed one.
Gimp's interface can be learned in literally minutes. To complain about that just shows you're either a fanatic or an Adobe astroturfing parasite. While GIMP doesn't follow all the user interface conventions it should, it follows most of them, has extensive online help and has a user interface far better than many programs out there.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
"idealism"? "starve"? I think I know who the fanatic is here.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
He will most likely be using apps that will be recognizable descendants of those first published for the Mac OS in 1984 and Win 3.1 in 1992 and Win 95 in 1995
In other words: "I never look at alternatives because I'm going to be running the same OS for the rest of eternity".
Yep, M$ loves it when schools subsidize M$ with free M$ product training. Typical M$ alley-cat ethics. No wonder M$ has so many enemies.
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DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
We should start encrypting all our data, no matter how "unsuspicious" or "ordinary" it may be. Everything from conversations between family and friends to financial records (though you should be already encrypting the latter anyway.)
Don't bother. They have access to everything they want via M$ update, and possibly other update as well. It's just too easy. Encryption does nothing when they have the keys to your computer. Find paedo's (won't somebody think of the children!)? No problem. Trawl for those with terrorist plans? No problem. Check the competition on a multi-billion dollar international defence contract? No problem. Just hook a keyword/image checker to the disk indexer that reports back a simple yes/no on the next update. If yes then next update downloads a more comprehensive spy package. Easy.
Think they wouldn't do it? Look at the track record of the major agencies on everything from COINTELPRO to Echelon. Even this. It'd be surprising if they didn't do it.
And if they get caught? Sorry, you must've been infected with a virus, here's an update to "fix" the problem.
This move (warrantless investigation) may simply be to retroactively make broad scale computer tapping "legal". They don't even need to do that for the hundreds of millions of non-US computers - those have no constitutional protections at all.
Particularly if you are a non-US entity competing in any way with US interests you should not trust any network connected computer running any mainstream US software at all.
To repeat: Encryption does not help if they have administrative access to your computer.
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Keep living the American DRM.
I agree. However many people think that that becomes an excuse to treat these people like garbage and that then says more about that person then the person doing the job.
These people's so-called "job" consists of stealing an hour of some stranger's time for every hour they "work". And the time of our life is the most important thing we have.
What these parasites do is incredibly rude and treating them like garbage is the bare minimum of what they should expect. I only wish we could get to the arseholes behind them.
Just so "Not interested" and hang up. Nobody forces you (in general) to keep talking. The moment you do anything that is impolite, it is you who is doing it, not the other person.
You mean, waste a minumum of their time so they can steal as much as possible of other people's time? I think not. These people are almost pure parasites. They prey on the vulnerable in the community and it's a public service to give them a hard time. Maybe they'll get a real job and not be a parasite. One can hope.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
But, if you're 32, and you can't program a VCR, then sorry... you're a retard.
You've just accused the majority of the population of being a retard. I think the problem is with the VCR, not the general population.
I'm even making a game out of testing how many obscure functions I find without the manual.
I explore interfaces too however we are not typical of the general population. The general population does not want to waste time learning interfaces that will almost certainly change on the next iteration. And it is not reasonable to expect them to do so anyway.
In the case of VCR "menu navigation" most have at least the following problems:
The general population expects menus to be a full white box (no scrolling) with black printing and black triangles to denote sub-menus. Everything else has to be learned.
The best VCR interface might be 3 dials and a button. Channel, start time, stop time and "do it" labeled properly and with full setting feedback. Failing that, one dial with push for each stage. Sony has something like this but the feedback is still poor.
Okay, if you mean buttons looking like icons, i can understand that.
Yes. To the vast majority of computer users an icon is just a symbol on a screen. The fact that it has a box around it (ie. is a button) is almost irrelevant until they are trained for it.
And the constant mousee-keyboard are even worse.
True. For both advanced and naive users though for different reasons.
The other two big no-nos are tiny buttons for the most used functions (like those ">" links for pagination on web sites), and mouseoveer-activation for tiny areas (lik
I don't believe this is a paid guerrilla advertising campaign from MS,
They've probably just subcontracted it. I've no doubt "ISV"'s (most are not independent in the slightest) have been getting lots of propaganda from M$ on "how to deal with competitors" and lots of under-the-table payments+toys for unethical and outright illegal marketing practices (MVP's anyone?).
Astroturfing is bad public relations if caught, so M$, with their alley cat morals, will try to keep it at arms length while still doing as much as they think they can get away with.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
In a world of 6,718,000,000+ people that is not in short supply, not even a little bit, whatever the marketing parasites might tell you.
That's what I'm paying for when I buy music.
You need to become more numerically literate.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
everyone pirating content is delusional.
The majority of the population is delusional? Actually, I think you're the one that's delusional.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.