"Digital copiers (even digital color copiers) are not expensive anymore, so I just don't get why we don't see this."
When you are printing 20,000,000 books it is an order of magnitude cheaper to use a proper industrial printing system designed to print x,000,000 books than x,000,000 smaller printing systems. This is more than enough to overcome the cost of distribution.
Your system would be better for small runs of reasonably unpopular books, but wouldn't be cost effective for (say) Harry Potter. Because without Harry Poter et al the small decentralised model wouldn't sell enough to make money, the whole thing ends up back as a centralised system with one big printer that just (in large part) ignores the less popular books that only a few people want.
Given my pastexperiences dealing with Windows NT and 2000 as an admin you would get a _lot_ more sleep running a Linux server farm and/or desktops, not to mention considerably more help from the developers.
My current companies Windows support is now outsourced to CSC who charge us £50 a call, plus aditional costs if they need to do anything more complicated than change a password. I sure as hell want to know what the point in wasting money on Windows licenses was if we have to pay £50 to change a forgotten password and significantly more to deploy updates to the OS etc!
It's going to be crazy when in the 'Free World' (tm) the only way to get a computer system that doesn't spy on you or try and control your life is to purchase it from the Communists in China...
"Actually, since they're planning on implementing a software kernel (like a mini-OS) in a BIOS chip, you won't know what it's doing at all."
Well, since 99% of Windows systems get fitted with a r00t kit at the first possible oportunity, Microsoft have decided to fit their own by default for your convenience:o)
I'm betting on the fact that Sun, IBM or _someone_ (maybe the Chineese) will carry on making TCPA-free hardware for a while at least, which should give OSS types somewhere to go when all the rest have been influenced into not selling TCPA enabled systems.
Of course I don't think that MS have realise to what extent the backlash will be when copyright is overenforced - all those people currently using their rights (and the many millions more exceeding them) may well vote for a repaling of copyright law altogether. We can but hope.
Bulshit to you too, I am running Xine remote forwarded via SSH/X over the network (from a PC with a 250gb hard disk to a PC with a BFO screen) and it's consuming just 2mb/sec of bandwidth (on a 1.6mb/sec encoded file), and the thing is playing back very smoothly indeed.
X forwarding is very simple indeed to set up (just insert a couple of -X switches into SSH/SSHd) - only a complete fool could f^ck it up. You seem to fit the bill nicley.
"Can you honestly say that in this day and age, the entire country of South Korea is 'forced' to buy and use Microsoft Windows?"
To an extent, yes.
* They are locked in by bad document formats. * Marketing and lobbying against alternatives is very persistant. * Look elesewhere and suddenly you get huge anticompetative discounts thrown your way to make it impossible for the competition to stay profitable, a practice called 'dumping'. * Promoting product+1, telling you that 'brighter days are just around the corner, and all your problems will go away'. * Using APIs that are only available to other MS divisons to add more features to their products that competitors cannot replicate without serious performance penalties. * Using APIs that are closed to further lock in developers (as well as users) to their platform. (Like Direct X.) * Using legal measures to prevent the legitimate reverse engineering of APIs.
Obviously there are alternatives, but as a company Microsoft are especially good at persuading _companies_ that it would be an unsafe business desicion, no matter what evidence actually exists.
To some extent this is just how business conducts itself, but when you are in a monopoly position the line between promotion (especially crosspromotion) and abuse is very fine indeed.
"If they were suing Apple or Red Hat, you'd be singing a different tune, I bet."
I hope not, as if either company were to behave in such a manner I would stop supporting them like a shot. (Not that I will support Apple anyway, untill they will sell me a box without a MacOS license.)
"You buy the software, you choose to use it, YOU DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES."
For the less well educated we esentially lie in a software monoculture. If you are an average small business owner, what choice do you have _but_ Microsoft products? (Lack of information rather than lack of choice here, not helped by constant FUD from a certain company.)
Hence, they did not choose to use the product - they were, to a greater or lesser extent, forced.
In case you didn't notice, free software (being free and supplied at no charge) carries no warranty, expressed or implied.
This is all fine because they made no representation to you about what it could do. They never made any claims that it was fit for purpose.
Sure - Mandrake, RedHat et al might be in trouble, but open source software and especially the writers are legally in the clear.
Personally I believe that if someone impliments OpenSSL badly _in a way that I cannot check_ and requires me to trust my data to them then they _should_ be liable for damages. (So this would cover, say, implimentations of SSL where the host was cracked or traffic sniffed at a later point where it was in plain text, or the key was compromised.) However, this is not the fault of the OpenSSL developers, and so they should not be liable.
In contrast to this Slammer was caused (in part) by Microsoft making it very hard to install a critical security fix, and not properly notifying people of the peoblem (in their usual 'security fix language' it was described as a minor issue), when part of their responsibility in selling you SQL server was making it secure. Thus they should be at least partly responsible for the damages.
Oh come on, compared to an old IBM 286 (the one with the Warning! Lift carefully! 43kg! sticker on the back) games consoles are fragile. I bet that my 286 could survive a drop from the top of the empire state building - put your SNES in the way and all you will get returned is dust.
Mind you, mild steel tends to rust rather well, I suppose the plastic in a games console tends to make them last a bit better.
However, I really feel that you should be using the XBox as part of the Nintendo consoles for Laos programme - that way by buying them in bulk (and getting a discount that makes the sale even more of a loss for MS) then installing Linux you can help Laos and stamp out your number two competitior at the same time:o)
After all, if x86 is no longer a viable platform for open source users, we will all have to go back to our Sun boxes, just like in the early days of he open source movement.
The software industry _deserves_ to die. They haven't even kept pace with free software, and none of these new fangled games/programmes are original.
Remember the days of Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital? When was the last time you played a game that was genuinly new and exciting, that could keep your attention for days without getting repetative.
Remember when the release of a new word processor got you more than a few more animations for the little annoying paperclip?
At least with all of the big companies gone we might get some innovation back (something that free software seems to be pretty good at) - and there might be a few less illegalities and irregularities to worry about as well.
Best of all, it might kill off DRM/TCPA in one fell swoop. Yipee.
Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit
on
Who Needs XFree86?
·
· Score: 1
"In years past, I knew of someone who used emacs as his login shell:-)"
It all reminds me of 1984... the constant wars that were going on.
When they were at war with one power, they denied that they had ever been assisting them. Sort of like the US and Afghanistan, or the UK and Iraq.
(Iraq was once run by the RAF, believe it or not.)
Re:Why do "next gen" OSs have such GIANT interface
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 1
Bear in mind that Microsoft (and Apple) are essentially in the business of making interfaces for people too dumb to handle anything that lets you access the system more directly. As a result their UI designers go to town with the big easy to click buttons and bright primary colours strongly reminiscent of fisher price toys.
If you want a Window manager that just organises things nicley and otherwise gets the f^ck out of your way then one of the *box (blackbox, fluxbox etc) ones is probably for you. Even if Linux is not to your taste then I have seen a screen shot of BlackBox running on Windows 98 here.
I find that using Fluxbox (on top of Linux) gives me about as much space with a 1280x1024 display as most people seem to get on a 1600x1200 display.
This game came very close to making me fail Fluid Dynamics A.
As it was the game stopped working due to a Direct X foobar a week before my finals and I didn't have the inclination to reinstall. So, thank you Gates/Balmer for my 81%!
OTOH as far as great games goes, I think Dungeon Keeper wins every time. I played that one for about 60 hours straight until I fell asleep at my desk. Ahh, what great days.
"I'm not shy about criticizing MS when appropriate, but to come from Windows for Workgroups to XP in 10 years is pretty impressive, especially for a company of its size."
Not when free software has gone further, faster, and without obectionable and occasionally illegal business practices it isn't.
And what is wrong with not wanting guns on the premises? There are lots of ways (even ones that would be no fault of the trained woman) in which an accident could have happened.
I respect your right to own a gun, but you have to respect my right to have you leave it outside my house.
Some rather backwards and opressive countries force you to hand over your encryption keys on request.
If there is so much encrypted traffic the SnR ratio becomes too high for this to be useful, and your ability to communicate without the worry that you will be listened to is preserved.
Enlightened self interest would ensure that users would uncover most of the security holes and share the data, and apply enough pressure to get the problems fixed.
If MS denied that they existed (business as usual then) then it may well be time to move on.
Every time you use a closed source app for something critical you _are_ taking the vendors word that it is fit for purpose. If it is not, they should be liable.
IMO if a company is unwilling to supply you with the source code (under whatever license) to let you see and fix problems that exist they should have no possible exemption from litigation, no matter what POS EULA they persuade you to sign.
They are asking you to place your trust in them that their code is good enough to bet your business on. If their software is not all it's cracked up to be and you had no chance to check their claims (but instead had to take their word for it) then they clearly are responsible for breaking their word.
Unless they told you that it was a buggy product that you couldn't rely on in the first place... now that would make for amusing adverts.
(Can you imagine Windows boxes with cigarette-health-warning style labels on them saying "The Computer-General warns that this product may be bad for your business.")
Encryption is easy - KMail+GNUPG makes it easier to encrypt email than not to bother selectivly. You should already be signing all of your mail (especially a quote!) anyway.
In addition to this if you are going to encrypt anything you need to encrypt everything (or as much as is possible) as that way the stuff that you do send encrypted will not attract undue attention.
If you are sending confidential email unencrypted then you deserve everything you get. The chance of your plain text mail not being echoed _somewhere_ is essentially zero, and if you have PGP and/or VPN software installed what they do to port 25 is really none of your concern.
However, I am against blocking ports as I believe a much better solution would be to execute every stupid person on the planet. That should sort things out nicley.
Slashdot Mirror
"Digital copiers (even digital color copiers) are not expensive anymore, so I just don't get why we don't see this."
When you are printing 20,000,000 books it is an order of magnitude cheaper to use a proper industrial printing system designed to print x,000,000 books than x,000,000 smaller printing systems. This is more than enough to overcome the cost of distribution.
Your system would be better for small runs of reasonably unpopular books, but wouldn't be cost effective for (say) Harry Potter. Because without Harry Poter et al the small decentralised model wouldn't sell enough to make money, the whole thing ends up back as a centralised system with one big printer that just (in large part) ignores the less popular books that only a few people want.
Given my pastexperiences dealing with Windows NT and 2000 as an admin you would get a _lot_ more sleep running a Linux server farm and/or desktops, not to mention considerably more help from the developers.
My current companies Windows support is now outsourced to CSC who charge us £50 a call, plus aditional costs if they need to do anything more complicated than change a password. I sure as hell want to know what the point in wasting money on Windows licenses was if we have to pay £50 to change a forgotten password and significantly more to deploy updates to the OS etc!
It's going to be crazy when in the 'Free World' (tm) the only way to get a computer system that doesn't spy on you or try and control your life is to purchase it from the Communists in China...
Your 'diff' must be broken:
peu@elrsr-0 peu $ diff one two
1c1
Digital Restrictions Masochism
"Actually, since they're planning on implementing a software kernel (like a mini-OS) in a BIOS chip, you won't know what it's doing at all."
:o)
Well, since 99% of Windows systems get fitted with a r00t kit at the first possible oportunity, Microsoft have decided to fit their own by default for your convenience
I'm betting on the fact that Sun, IBM or _someone_ (maybe the Chineese) will carry on making TCPA-free hardware for a while at least, which should give OSS types somewhere to go when all the rest have been influenced into not selling TCPA enabled systems.
Of course I don't think that MS have realise to what extent the backlash will be when copyright is overenforced - all those people currently using their rights (and the many millions more exceeding them) may well vote for a repaling of copyright law altogether. We can but hope.
Bulshit to you too, I am running Xine remote forwarded via SSH/X over the network (from a PC with a 250gb hard disk to a PC with a BFO screen) and it's consuming just 2mb/sec of bandwidth (on a 1.6mb/sec encoded file), and the thing is playing back very smoothly indeed.
X forwarding is very simple indeed to set up (just insert a couple of -X switches into SSH/SSHd) - only a complete fool could f^ck it up. You seem to fit the bill nicley.
"Can you honestly say that in this day and age, the entire country of South Korea is 'forced' to buy and use Microsoft Windows?"
To an extent, yes.
* They are locked in by bad document formats.
* Marketing and lobbying against alternatives is very persistant.
* Look elesewhere and suddenly you get huge anticompetative discounts thrown your way to make it impossible for the competition to stay profitable, a practice called 'dumping'.
* Promoting product+1, telling you that 'brighter days are just around the corner, and all your problems will go away'.
* Using APIs that are only available to other MS divisons to add more features to their products that competitors cannot replicate without serious performance penalties.
* Using APIs that are closed to further lock in developers (as well as users) to their platform. (Like Direct X.)
* Using legal measures to prevent the legitimate reverse engineering of APIs.
Obviously there are alternatives, but as a company Microsoft are especially good at persuading _companies_ that it would be an unsafe business desicion, no matter what evidence actually exists.
To some extent this is just how business conducts itself, but when you are in a monopoly position the line between promotion (especially crosspromotion) and abuse is very fine indeed.
"If they were suing Apple or Red Hat, you'd be singing a different tune, I bet."
I hope not, as if either company were to behave in such a manner I would stop supporting them like a shot. (Not that I will support Apple anyway, untill they will sell me a box without a MacOS license.)
"You buy the software, you choose to use it, YOU DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES."
For the less well educated we esentially lie in a software monoculture. If you are an average small business owner, what choice do you have _but_ Microsoft products? (Lack of information rather than lack of choice here, not helped by constant FUD from a certain company.)
Hence, they did not choose to use the product - they were, to a greater or lesser extent, forced.
In case you didn't notice, free software (being free and supplied at no charge) carries no warranty, expressed or implied.
This is all fine because they made no representation to you about what it could do. They never made any claims that it was fit for purpose.
Sure - Mandrake, RedHat et al might be in trouble, but open source software and especially the writers are legally in the clear.
Personally I believe that if someone impliments OpenSSL badly _in a way that I cannot check_ and requires me to trust my data to them then they _should_ be liable for damages. (So this would cover, say, implimentations of SSL where the host was cracked or traffic sniffed at a later point where it was in plain text, or the key was compromised.) However, this is not the fault of the OpenSSL developers, and so they should not be liable.
In contrast to this Slammer was caused (in part) by Microsoft making it very hard to install a critical security fix, and not properly notifying people of the peoblem (in their usual 'security fix language' it was described as a minor issue), when part of their responsibility in selling you SQL server was making it secure. Thus they should be at least partly responsible for the damages.
Oh come on, compared to an old IBM 286 (the one with the Warning! Lift carefully! 43kg! sticker on the back) games consoles are fragile. I bet that my 286 could survive a drop from the top of the empire state building - put your SNES in the way and all you will get returned is dust.
:o)
Mind you, mild steel tends to rust rather well, I suppose the plastic in a games console tends to make them last a bit better.
However, I really feel that you should be using the XBox as part of the Nintendo consoles for Laos programme - that way by buying them in bulk (and getting a discount that makes the sale even more of a loss for MS) then installing Linux you can help Laos and stamp out your number two competitior at the same time
Is it really fair to stick all of those geeks at the end of the single 9600 baud modem feeding the 'innurnet' in Des Moins?
After all, if x86 is no longer a viable platform for open source users, we will all have to go back to our Sun boxes, just like in the early days of he open source movement.
The software industry _deserves_ to die. They haven't even kept pace with free software, and none of these new fangled games/programmes are original.
Remember the days of Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital? When was the last time you played a game that was genuinly new and exciting, that could keep your attention for days without getting repetative.
Remember when the release of a new word processor got you more than a few more animations for the little annoying paperclip?
At least with all of the big companies gone we might get some innovation back (something that free software seems to be pretty good at) - and there might be a few less illegalities and irregularities to worry about as well.
Best of all, it might kill off DRM/TCPA in one fell swoop. Yipee.
"In years past, I knew of someone who used :-)"
emacs as his login shell
Was his name RMS by any chance?
It all reminds me of 1984... the constant wars that were going on.
When they were at war with one power, they denied that they had ever been assisting them. Sort of like the US and Afghanistan, or the UK and Iraq.
(Iraq was once run by the RAF, believe it or not.)
Bear in mind that Microsoft (and Apple) are essentially in the business of making interfaces for people too dumb to handle anything that lets you access the system more directly. As a result their UI designers go to town with the big easy to click buttons and bright primary colours strongly reminiscent of fisher price toys.
If you want a Window manager that just organises things nicley and otherwise gets the f^ck out of your way then one of the *box (blackbox, fluxbox etc) ones is probably for you. Even if Linux is not to your taste then I have seen a screen shot of BlackBox running on Windows 98 here.
I find that using Fluxbox (on top of Linux) gives me about as much space with a 1280x1024 display as most people seem to get on a 1600x1200 display.
This game came very close to making me fail Fluid Dynamics A.
As it was the game stopped working due to a Direct X foobar a week before my finals and I didn't have the inclination to reinstall. So, thank you Gates/Balmer for my 81%!
OTOH as far as great games goes, I think Dungeon Keeper wins every time. I played that one for about 60 hours straight until I fell asleep at my desk. Ahh, what great days.
"I'm not shy about criticizing MS when appropriate, but to come from Windows for Workgroups to XP in 10 years is pretty impressive, especially for a company of its size."
Not when free software has gone further, faster, and without obectionable and occasionally illegal business practices it isn't.
"I used to consistently crash Mozilla on some Hotmail pages."
You must be lost - On Slashdot, Hotmail crashes Mozilla.
And what is wrong with not wanting guns on the premises? There are lots of ways (even ones that would be no fault of the trained woman) in which an accident could have happened.
I respect your right to own a gun, but you have to respect my right to have you leave it outside my house.
Some rather backwards and opressive countries force you to hand over your encryption keys on request.
If there is so much encrypted traffic the SnR ratio becomes too high for this to be useful, and your ability to communicate without the worry that you will be listened to is preserved.
There are how many users of NT?
Enlightened self interest would ensure that users would uncover most of the security holes and share the data, and apply enough pressure to get the problems fixed.
If MS denied that they existed (business as usual then) then it may well be time to move on.
Every time you use a closed source app for something critical you _are_ taking the vendors word that it is fit for purpose. If it is not, they should be liable.
IMO if a company is unwilling to supply you with the source code (under whatever license) to let you see and fix problems that exist they should have no possible exemption from litigation, no matter what POS EULA they persuade you to sign.
They are asking you to place your trust in them that their code is good enough to bet your business on. If their software is not all it's cracked up to be and you had no chance to check their claims (but instead had to take their word for it) then they clearly are responsible for breaking their word.
Unless they told you that it was a buggy product that you couldn't rely on in the first place... now that would make for amusing adverts.
(Can you imagine Windows boxes with cigarette-health-warning style labels on them saying "The Computer-General warns that this product may be bad for your business.")
Encryption is easy - KMail+GNUPG makes it easier to encrypt email than not to bother selectivly. You should already be signing all of your mail (especially a quote!) anyway.
In addition to this if you are going to encrypt anything you need to encrypt everything (or as much as is possible) as that way the stuff that you do send encrypted will not attract undue attention.
If you are sending confidential email unencrypted then you deserve everything you get. The chance of your plain text mail not being echoed _somewhere_ is essentially zero, and if you have PGP and/or VPN software installed what they do to port 25 is really none of your concern.
However, I am against blocking ports as I believe a much better solution would be to execute every stupid person on the planet. That should sort things out nicley.