Whichever law gave you the right to make a copy of material you own {in the UK, this would be a consequence of the fact that it is a necessary step in the process: for example, a home-taped cassette copy of an album you already own on CD is non-infringing provided your intention is to listen to it in a car which is not fitted with a CD player; in many other countries, there are specific legal exemptions} trumps the law that tries to make circumventing copy-prevention an offence -- because it cannot, by definition, be a criminal offence to do something which you already have a right to do. In fact, in some jurisdictions, copy prevention is itself technically illegal since it interferes with a consumer's legitimate exercise of their rights {but this has largely been unenforced to date}.
If you are unlucky enough to get taken to court over it, and you don't end up walking free with an apology, you need a better solicitor.
I have never had difficulty with cdparanoia. Just change to a directory, place the CD in the drive and # cdparanoia -B. You get a set of.wav files which are easily dealt with {for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done}. Note that you will have to download and compile lame yourself {from a server in a country where maths patents are unenforcible}.
Back in the days of 2.4 kernels, you had to muck about with SCSI emulation,/etc/modules and append statements in lilo.conf; but all that finally changed with the advent of 2.6.
For some discs, you might need a drive of 12X or slower speed. This is because older, slower drives seem not to read all TOCs as soon as the disc is inserted; so are immune to "protection" methods involving bogus TOC entries.
I once bought a copy-protected "CD" {Macrovision / Cactus CDS 200} just for the h4x0r challenge, and was so disappointed when it came through without problems that I have not even bothered to listen to it.
The UK is still part of the EU, where multi-region DVD players are completely legal {true single-region players are not illegal but are pretty rare anyway}. Most cheap, far-east-made DVD players are multi-region.
what their paying customers want, is in fact a way to circumvent the copy protection on the cd, whic because of the infinite intelligence that is the dmca, is illegal
NO, IT IS NOT ILLEGAL!
There is such a thing as "right of fair use", which is sacrosanct.
Furthermore, the intended recipient of an encrypted message always has the right to decrypt that message -- the right comes with the fact of being the intended recipient. This right also is sacrosanct.
If anything, the DMCA is illegal. Or at least so completely unenforcible, that the taxpayer would have grounds to sue the government that allowed it to get onto the statute books in the first place, for wasting their time and money.
When the grandparent said "Why any rationally thinking country would want to be at the mercy of a foreign owned commercial entity is beyond me", they were referring to Microsoft, not Sun.
Open Source projects never really die; if for any reason the maintainer stops working on a project, the next person to discover and repair a bug will become the de facto new maintainer. In fact, the only way that an author of Open Source code can ever possibly be forgotten is when the point is reached where there are no more bugs to fix and no more features to add!
On the other hand, if a closed source vendor goes los chichis para arriba, as they say in Madrid, you're in big trouble -- unless you can persuade a sufficiently high court to order the release of their source code into the public domain, which is certainly technically possible but highly unlikely in practice.
If you just want an OS with a decent ftp daemon and where everything can be configured from the command line, why are you bothering to stick with Windows?
Linux has good configurability and a stable ftp daemon. FreeBSD has good configurability and a stable FTP daemon. OpenBSD has good configurability, a stable FTP daemon and an excellent security track record.
My advice to you is to ditch Windows altogether, but not tell the management. Just use Apache and ProFTPD on FreeBSD or Linux. You can get patchsets to make them look sufficiently like IIS that a PHB will never notice the difference, and you will also achieve indispensability. All you need is the ability to cash the cheques that would have gone to the likes of Microsoft; there are many places that can help you, but they most probably won't be in the normal Yellow Pages.
Compiling your own kernel is the proper way to do it. You just need the sources from kernel.org -- Slackware does not rely on a patched-to-christ kernel like some distributions (*cough*) SuSE (*cough*). Then, if you get every one of the steps right, in the right order, it will Just Work. I mostly use Debian so I don't have to remember them {Debian has a funky tool that makes kernel images into a.deb package which you can just install}; but you should start with "make oldconfig" and "make menuconfig".
Final tip: don't go leaving loadable modules around for things you later compile right into the kernel. You will regret doing that. And don't put anything USB-related into the kernel -- it all wants to be in modules, so you can rmmod and modprobe the drivers for any appliances that misbehave.
Simple solution: Don't use Slackware's precompiled.tgz files. Just download the sources and compile them yourself, exactly the way you want them. Then,./configure will do all the necessary dependency checking for you. Just don't forget that, because it's Slackware, you need PREFIX=/usr and not/usr/local.
If you really must use Slackware.tgz files, use ldd on any binary that fails {it won't take the kernel down with it..... this is not Windows, you know} and see what libraries are missing. Then go back to the Slackware website, find the packages to which they belong, and download them.
I'd actually like to see someone adapt apt-get to work with source packages, but I've a feeling it's been done before somewhere.
The biggest reason I have heard from business people for not switching to Linux is the perceived high cost of retraining people to use something new. And it seems to be a reality for many computer users who even have trouble going from 98 to NT, or from 2000 to XP, or from Word 97 to Word 2000.
The amount of re-training required to go from Office 97 on Windows 98SE to Office 2003 on Windows XP is not much less than the amount of re-training required to go from any Office on any Windows to OpenOffice.org on any OS. And it should be precious little because
The typing keys are all still in the same places
The cursor keys are all still in the same places
The number keys are all still in the same places
Words are still spelled the same way, and still mean the same things
The mouse still works pretty much the same way
Although with Linux, you generally only have to click once to select something, and you only have to hover the pointer over a text area -- without clicking -- to type in it
The icons may not look exactly the same, but they obviously represent the same sorts of things
The menu items may not be in exactly the same order or have exactly the same names, but the effects of the operations they describe will be similar
Most office suite software is heavily customisable: the toolbars can be adjusted broadly to match what users are already familiar with {and, in the case of OO.o at least, it's just a case of copying a configuration file onto each machine}
Even if the migration from Microsoft to OpenOffice.org does require more re-training than staying with Microsoft Office would, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the re-training costs associated with a new OpenOffice.org version will be comparable to the re-training costs of migrating to a newer MS Office. And remember that having migrated to an Open Source solution, you will never, ever have to pay another penny in licencing costs, ever again -- and nor do you run the risk of being fined over some minor technicality. This future cash saving ought to offset the costs of the initial re-training.
Although it is a commonly-repeated meme, I think there is little to no supporting evidence for the claim that things are any worse today than they used to be.
As recently as thirty years ago, people worked in noisy factories, and often on machines without safety guards and/or interlocks. They didn't complain of premature deafness. If they lost a finger, their co-workers just had a whip-round.
We used to eat fried breakfasts every morning; there were no artificial sweeteners, we put sugar on our corn flakes, and beef was more common than chicken. Nobody complained about obesity {Indeed, with some people, it used to be considered a good sign if they put weight on}.
Benzodiazepines are less dangerous than the barbiturates that used to be prescribed, and heroin is less dangerous than morphine which in turn is less dangerous than crude opium.
Children's playgrounds are safer, almost to the point of boredom, than when we were kids {I remember open-seated swings, five metre high slides, and no soft surfacing -- unless of course it had just been raining}. We didn't sue the council if we fell off, all it took to make it better was a mother's kiss and a dollop of Savlon.
Telephones -- if you even had one, that is -- were big, ugly things, tethered to the wall in the hall; and no matter how desperate the situation, you never called anyone before six, nor spent longer than three minutes on the line.
Thatcher did a lot of damage, to be sure, but things aren't really getting any worse -- we're just getting easier to shock. It's human nature only to remember the good bits.
But their PCs will eventually need replacing; and if they stick with Microsoft, that will mean Vista. There won't be any choice in the matter -- just that "illusion of choice". Exactly like on a factory production line where the instructions tell you to "select a partially finished widget from the tray on your left hand side....." as though it makes any difference which one you select -- you'll be doing them all before you go home anyway.
And if these businesses interact with anybody else, people who are using the latest versions of everything, they are almost certain to find themselves caught in the "file format obsolescence" trap. That's going to be a PITA first time around; but once somebody big enough has had to do it, you can bet your arse that they will release the migration tools Open Source. If they're Public Sector, they may well be restricted as to what copyright provisions they can enforce over software written at the expense of the taxpayer. If they're private sector, there won't be any commercial competitive advantage -- and there might even be a slight disadvantage -- to keeping it closed.
Now, how about a Linux distro that comes on one DVD {server-end stuff, roll-your-own.deb kit, several megs of other command-line utilities for mundane stuff} and one CD {desktop stuff; one application per task à la k?ubuntu} for doing a whole business in one fell swoop? Migration might even be a matter of having a PC with power and IDE cables hanging out the old floppy slot..... you plug a HDD out of a Windows box, press the space bar and wait. Linux installed, Office files translated and backed up on file server. Put the HDD back in the machine it came from, plug in another and repeat.
The OpenOffice / OpenDocument format specification is missing some functionality alright -- but not a piece of functionality that any legitimate user or developer is ever likely to notice.
Closed document formats are how the likes of Microsoft introduce built-in obsolescence into a market where there is none. You can design a physical machine with moving parts, such as a VCR, car, printer, air conditioner, washing machine, hi-fi, gas boiler, garden strimmer or fridge to fail after a certain amount of time; and as long as it worked reasonably well up till then and you allowed a fair price per year of service, there is still a better-than-reasonable chance that the customer will buy another one off you. But you can't plant a time bomb in software: once a user has bought {or, even worse, pirated} it from you, then it will just work forever.
The only new feature in any version of Word since '97 {which was the last version I really used} seems to have been a new and incompatible document format. Sure there probably are one or two power user functions. But most people -- and I'm talking the kind who use spaces for doing page layout -- aren't going to notice any of them. All this kind of user will ever see is that they can't open files saved with their friends' newest versions of Word which came with their spanky new PCs, in their old version of Word. That's the only way in which Word 97 is "not good enough" for the overwhelming majority of users.
But the concept of an open and extensible document format, with graceful degradation, totally and unequivocally blows this plan out of the water. There is no way to hold customers' data to ransom if the format is open; and extensibility combined with graceful degradation makes the file format future-proof. Anyone could write an extension to an earlier version OpenOffice.org to support functionality introduced in a later version, or initially implemented in a closed-source derivative.
It's no wonder Microsoft don't like this. They must feel like someone who has managed to steal everything they needed to live on, since time immemorial; but then suddenly got caught and now has to pay for everything.
the main incentive was that AC series motors (AKA universal motors) worked better at lower frequencies.
Yes, AC motors work better at lower frequencies because the inductive reactance is lower at lower frequencies.
And train motors aren't series wound, they're compound wound. The field windings can be connected in various series and parallel combinations, to get maximum torque at various speeds. It's the equivalent of changing gears, just in the electrical domain rather than the mechanical domain.
You actually can implement MP3 encoding and decoding quite legally, with no requirement for a licence, in any country where mathematical processes are exempt from patents.
And it's not just the gauge, but the power supply. The Eurostar has to handle three different power supplies: 750V DC third rail {on the former Southern Electric lines in Britain}, 25kV 50 cycles overhead {in France and other parts of Britain} and 3kV DC overhead {in Belgium}.
Some countries even use 16.67 cycles for their railway power. Why the low frequency? Because it's harder to persuade a current to flow in a coil at high frequency {look up inductive reactance}; at one-third of the frequency you get three times the current without increasing the voltage, therefore three times the power. And also to make it so as if you try to steal power from the railways, your records will play at 11 and 15rpm and your clock will take an hour to move on 20 minutes:)
Do not forget that patents can be struck down. And if a standard is adopted by an official body with clout, especially a government department, then they probably will do exactly this; it is more important for the whole of society at large to be able to benefit from the existence of a standard, than for a corporation to be able to gouge money out of the rest of the population.
Standards sometimes have to be driven by government intervention. Telephony, for instance. I can take my phone almost anywhere in the world* and call or SMS anyone else on any network, wherever they are. {Of course, it will cane my credit, but.....} Most countries have tight regulations over the RF spectrum anyway. When everyone went with GSM, it made sense for manufacturers as then one product {or maybe two; there are 900 and 1800MHz variants} would suffice for many markets.
On the other hand, standards sometimes just happen apparently out of nowhere. Epson built the FX-80 printer, and suddenly it seemed every dot matrix used the same command set.
*Except for some countries that have barely progressed beyond cocoa tins and string.
I'm sorry, but I just don't "get" the point of touch-typing. Maybe it's something that dates back to the age of mechanical typewriters, where you really had to keep an eye on the printing quality {since it was directly related to how hard you struck the keys; and if you were really careless then you could get double character spacing or no spacing}.
I usually look at the keyboard when I'm typing, not at the screen. I know where all the keys are, it's not as though I have to search for them..... but IMHO it doesn't hurt to make sure. If the keyboard is any good, then the letter I pressed is the letter that will show up on the screen. And it's not as though pressing It's hardly a great effort to flick my eyes up to the monitor every once in awhile to check on progress.
Also, the layout of Das Keyboard looks wrong -- hardly surprising, as I counted one fewer key than usual. Looking at the cheating diagram, I noticed that there is no key between the left shift and the Z {the \ and | moving to a long key up above the return key, which has lost its traditional shape}; the @ sign is on shift+2 where the double speech marks should be, and there is no pound sign -- shift+3 gives you a comment mark instead {WTF? Comment marks are common enough characters to deserve not to need a modifier key, IMHO}. The ~ has moved to shift+backtick, and the daft graphic character is gone.
Mind you, at least there's an INSERT key..... one of my work colleagues has a new keyboard without an INSERT key, which means keyboard-shortcut copying {shift+cursor keys, then ctrl+insert} and pasting {shift+insert} now require extra taps of the NumLock before and after. That is a serious omission, and means it is almost as much effort as mouse-based copying and pasting.
But outside of a corporate intranet, you really can't trust the client end to do the validation. It's very convenient and it does save bandwidth, but ultimately it can be spoofed. Google for netcat.....
Your backend code really does still need to do some checking of its own. And if you haven't mucked around with the -T option in Perl, then you probably ought to.
That's not quite how I read it! Seriously, if someone has special needs, and those special needs are best served by using something other than Internet Explorer as a web browser {perhaps a "talking web browser" which pipes text through a voice synthesiser}, then discrimination against non-IE browsers is tantamount to discrimination on the grounds of disability.
Also, sites demanding IE are indirectly encouraging people to pirate Windows. If someone knew they could access any website using an Open Source browser on an Open Source operating system, as per W3C guidelines, then they should just do that. But they can't be sure, so they pirate Windows. I wonder if it would be acceptable as a defence in court, that you were forced to pirate Windows in order to access a particular website? {It might not look so good for you, if there were other things in your history.....}
If you make washing machines, you can design them so the bearings will wear out eventually and so your customers will have to buy a new one. If you make VCRs, you can design them so the heat rising from the electronics causes the rubber tyre on the idler wheel to perish eventually and so your customers will have to buy a new one. If you make cars, you can design them so they rust in certain places and so your customers will have to buy a new one. If you make gas boilers, you can design them so the heat exchanger eventually clogs up with limescale, or corrodes through and begins leaking, or the power supply circuit on the motherboard overheats, and so your customers will have to buy a new one.
And if you time it right, the customer probably won't even suspect that it was deliberate. They'll just come back to you and buy another one, again carefully designed to break down in future, and believe this one will last forever; just like those women who keep going back to husbands that beat them up, because this time he really has changed, he really means it.
But with software, there are no moving part or other bits to wear out: once a user has a copy of a piece of software, it's as good as the day they first got it, forever, and there is no chance to build in obsolescence..... or is there?
By changing the file format, so that files created with newer versions of the software cannot be loaded into older versions, Microsoft can create something akin to a built-in time bomb. You can stick with Word 97, say; it might serve your needs more than adequately, but sooner or later someone you know is going to get a new PC and that will have a newer version of Word on it. And while it can deal with your old Word 97 files, getting it to save files that Word 97 can read is deliberately made a royal PITA: the option is hard to find in the first place, and you get discouraging requesters with dire warnings of data loss &c. All of a sudden, the Word 97 with which you've been quite happily chugging along since the days of dot matrix printers, Britpop on LPs, movies on VHS cassettes and skinning up under a table upstairs in the Havana club is no good, just because it can't read your friend's documents which were created in a newer version of Word. A version which was deliberately designed to be incompatible with your copy, which in turn was deliberately designed to be incompatible with previous versions.
And the only thing allowing Microsoft to get away with this is the fact that their file formats are locked up. Otherwise you could write a few lines of perl {or whatever language they use on windows} just to strip out the bits Word 97 really can't handle, and not have to pay for a new copy of Microsoft Office. Or if the file formats were designed from the outset with graceful degradation in mind, you probably wouldn't need even to do that.
Even if they don't release a fully-polished Linux driver, it's my firm belief that they should be bound by law to release enough of the specifications, gratis and unencumbered, so that anybody could write one. Those details form part of the operating instructions, IMHO, and anyone who rightfully owns a piece of hardware is thereby entitled to make full use of it.
I am always highly suspicious of claims that this sort of thing "might give our competitors an unfair advantage". Since S3's competitors {who quite obviously don't have experts doing reverse-engineering at all, no way Pedro} would be under an identical obligation, the playing field would remain level. I tend to read such claims as "might reveal to customers that we have made outrageous bullshit claims about this product".
This is why I think everyone who falls victim to the Microsoft Tax and has to buy a copy of Windows that they do not want, should send in a "de-registration card", stating that they do not wish to be included in any statistics as a Windows purchaser or user, even if they don't go through the wearing process of seeking a refund.
If a particular model of microwave oven had a design fault which could cause the magnetron to turn on while the door was open, the manufacturer would have to deal with it straight away {and not in six months' time with users dropping like flies}. If a particular model of gas boiler had a design fault and could explode or leak water under exceptional circumstances, the manufacturer would have to do something about it {and not try to silence the person who tried to warn the world about it}. If a particular model of car had a design fault where the throttle would open wide or the brakes suddenly try to engage, the manufacturer would have to respond {and not try to pretend that the problem did not exist}.
It should be no different with computers. If there is a security flaw, the vendor should act immediately to do something about it -- first warn users that the problem exists, and then get to work on eliminating the problem. And this should be done as soon as possible.
The Open Source community generally responds immediately to security reports. Closed-source vendors should not be allowed to use secrecy to get away with selling an imperfect product. I believe that software suppliers should be held accountable for their products -- either by making the source code available for inspection {hence moving it more into the realm of goods supplied in kit form, where the purchaser has some input into the construction and therefore some responsibility for the eventual performance -- like using longer screws and adding extra bracing to a piece of flatpack furniture}, or by offering a guarantee of performance if they insist to keep it secret.
It's also important to remember that (1) good guys outnumber bad guys and (2) if you discover something, the chances are that someone else has already, or is about to discover it.
Slashdot Mirror
Whichever law gave you the right to make a copy of material you own {in the UK, this would be a consequence of the fact that it is a necessary step in the process: for example, a home-taped cassette copy of an album you already own on CD is non-infringing provided your intention is to listen to it in a car which is not fitted with a CD player; in many other countries, there are specific legal exemptions} trumps the law that tries to make circumventing copy-prevention an offence -- because it cannot, by definition, be a criminal offence to do something which you already have a right to do. In fact, in some jurisdictions, copy prevention is itself technically illegal since it interferes with a consumer's legitimate exercise of their rights {but this has largely been unenforced to date}.
If you are unlucky enough to get taken to court over it, and you don't end up walking free with an apology, you need a better solicitor.
I have never had difficulty with cdparanoia. Just change to a directory, place the CD in the drive and # cdparanoia -B. You get a set of .wav files which are easily dealt with {for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done}. Note that you will have to download and compile lame yourself {from a server in a country where maths patents are unenforcible}.
/etc/modules and append statements in lilo.conf; but all that finally changed with the advent of 2.6.
Back in the days of 2.4 kernels, you had to muck about with SCSI emulation,
For some discs, you might need a drive of 12X or slower speed. This is because older, slower drives seem not to read all TOCs as soon as the disc is inserted; so are immune to "protection" methods involving bogus TOC entries.
I once bought a copy-protected "CD" {Macrovision / Cactus CDS 200} just for the h4x0r challenge, and was so disappointed when it came through without problems that I have not even bothered to listen to it.
The UK is still part of the EU, where multi-region DVD players are completely legal {true single-region players are not illegal but are pretty rare anyway}. Most cheap, far-east-made DVD players are multi-region.
There is such a thing as "right of fair use", which is sacrosanct.
Furthermore, the intended recipient of an encrypted message always has the right to decrypt that message -- the right comes with the fact of being the intended recipient. This right also is sacrosanct.
If anything, the DMCA is illegal. Or at least so completely unenforcible, that the taxpayer would have grounds to sue the government that allowed it to get onto the statute books in the first place, for wasting their time and money.
When the grandparent said "Why any rationally thinking country would want to be at the mercy of a foreign owned commercial entity is beyond me", they were referring to Microsoft, not Sun.
Open Source projects never really die; if for any reason the maintainer stops working on a project, the next person to discover and repair a bug will become the de facto new maintainer. In fact, the only way that an author of Open Source code can ever possibly be forgotten is when the point is reached where there are no more bugs to fix and no more features to add!
On the other hand, if a closed source vendor goes los chichis para arriba, as they say in Madrid, you're in big trouble -- unless you can persuade a sufficiently high court to order the release of their source code into the public domain, which is certainly technically possible but highly unlikely in practice.
If you just want an OS with a decent ftp daemon and where everything can be configured from the command line, why are you bothering to stick with Windows?
Linux has good configurability and a stable ftp daemon. FreeBSD has good configurability and a stable FTP daemon. OpenBSD has good configurability, a stable FTP daemon and an excellent security track record.
My advice to you is to ditch Windows altogether, but not tell the management. Just use Apache and ProFTPD on FreeBSD or Linux. You can get patchsets to make them look sufficiently like IIS that a PHB will never notice the difference, and you will also achieve indispensability. All you need is the ability to cash the cheques that would have gone to the likes of Microsoft; there are many places that can help you, but they most probably won't be in the normal Yellow Pages.
Compiling your own kernel is the proper way to do it. You just need the sources from kernel.org -- Slackware does not rely on a patched-to-christ kernel like some distributions (*cough*) SuSE (*cough*). Then, if you get every one of the steps right, in the right order, it will Just Work. I mostly use Debian so I don't have to remember them {Debian has a funky tool that makes kernel images into a .deb package which you can just install}; but you should start with "make oldconfig" and "make menuconfig".
Final tip: don't go leaving loadable modules around for things you later compile right into the kernel. You will regret doing that. And don't put anything USB-related into the kernel -- it all wants to be in modules, so you can rmmod and modprobe the drivers for any appliances that misbehave.
Simple solution: Don't use Slackware's precompiled .tgz files. Just download the sources and compile them yourself, exactly the way you want them. Then, ./configure will do all the necessary dependency checking for you. Just don't forget that, because it's Slackware, you need PREFIX=/usr and not /usr/local.
.tgz files, use ldd on any binary that fails {it won't take the kernel down with it ..... this is not Windows, you know} and see what libraries are missing. Then go back to the Slackware website, find the packages to which they belong, and download them.
If you really must use Slackware
I'd actually like to see someone adapt apt-get to work with source packages, but I've a feeling it's been done before somewhere.
- The typing keys are all still in the same places
- The cursor keys are all still in the same places
- The number keys are all still in the same places
- Words are still spelled the same way, and still mean the same things
- The mouse still works pretty much the same way
- Although with Linux, you generally only have to click once to select something, and you only have to hover the pointer over a text area -- without clicking -- to type in it
- The icons may not look exactly the same, but they obviously represent the same sorts of things
- The menu items may not be in exactly the same order or have exactly the same names, but the effects of the operations they describe will be similar
- Most office suite software is heavily customisable: the toolbars can be adjusted broadly to match what users are already familiar with {and, in the case of OO.o at least, it's just a case of copying a configuration file onto each machine}
Even if the migration from Microsoft to OpenOffice.org does require more re-training than staying with Microsoft Office would, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the re-training costs associated with a new OpenOffice.org version will be comparable to the re-training costs of migrating to a newer MS Office. And remember that having migrated to an Open Source solution, you will never, ever have to pay another penny in licencing costs, ever again -- and nor do you run the risk of being fined over some minor technicality. This future cash saving ought to offset the costs of the initial re-training.- As recently as thirty years ago, people worked in noisy factories, and often on machines without safety guards and/or interlocks. They didn't complain of premature deafness. If they lost a finger, their co-workers just had a whip-round.
- We used to eat fried breakfasts every morning; there were no artificial sweeteners, we put sugar on our corn flakes, and beef was more common than chicken. Nobody complained about obesity {Indeed, with some people, it used to be considered a good sign if they put weight on}.
- Benzodiazepines are less dangerous than the barbiturates that used to be prescribed, and heroin is less dangerous than morphine which in turn is less dangerous than crude opium.
- Children's playgrounds are safer, almost to the point of boredom, than when we were kids {I remember open-seated swings, five metre high slides, and no soft surfacing -- unless of course it had just been raining}. We didn't sue the council if we fell off, all it took to make it better was a mother's kiss and a dollop of Savlon.
- Telephones -- if you even had one, that is -- were big, ugly things, tethered to the wall in the hall; and no matter how desperate the situation, you never called anyone before six, nor spent longer than three minutes on the line.
Thatcher did a lot of damage, to be sure, but things aren't really getting any worse -- we're just getting easier to shock. It's human nature only to remember the good bits.But their PCs will eventually need replacing; and if they stick with Microsoft, that will mean Vista. There won't be any choice in the matter -- just that "illusion of choice". Exactly like on a factory production line where the instructions tell you to "select a partially finished widget from the tray on your left hand side ....." as though it makes any difference which one you select -- you'll be doing them all before you go home anyway.
.deb kit, several megs of other command-line utilities for mundane stuff} and one CD {desktop stuff; one application per task à la k?ubuntu} for doing a whole business in one fell swoop? Migration might even be a matter of having a PC with power and IDE cables hanging out the old floppy slot ..... you plug a HDD out of a Windows box, press the space bar and wait. Linux installed, Office files translated and backed up on file server. Put the HDD back in the machine it came from, plug in another and repeat.
And if these businesses interact with anybody else, people who are using the latest versions of everything, they are almost certain to find themselves caught in the "file format obsolescence" trap. That's going to be a PITA first time around; but once somebody big enough has had to do it, you can bet your arse that they will release the migration tools Open Source. If they're Public Sector, they may well be restricted as to what copyright provisions they can enforce over software written at the expense of the taxpayer. If they're private sector, there won't be any commercial competitive advantage -- and there might even be a slight disadvantage -- to keeping it closed.
Now, how about a Linux distro that comes on one DVD {server-end stuff, roll-your-own
Microsoft Max? Pah! Going on Microsoft's past form, I can confidently say it will be more like Microsoft Bob!
The OpenOffice / OpenDocument format specification is missing some functionality alright -- but not a piece of functionality that any legitimate user or developer is ever likely to notice.
Closed document formats are how the likes of Microsoft introduce built-in obsolescence into a market where there is none. You can design a physical machine with moving parts, such as a VCR, car, printer, air conditioner, washing machine, hi-fi, gas boiler, garden strimmer or fridge to fail after a certain amount of time; and as long as it worked reasonably well up till then and you allowed a fair price per year of service, there is still a better-than-reasonable chance that the customer will buy another one off you. But you can't plant a time bomb in software: once a user has bought {or, even worse, pirated} it from you, then it will just work forever.
The only new feature in any version of Word since '97 {which was the last version I really used} seems to have been a new and incompatible document format. Sure there probably are one or two power user functions. But most people -- and I'm talking the kind who use spaces for doing page layout -- aren't going to notice any of them. All this kind of user will ever see is that they can't open files saved with their friends' newest versions of Word which came with their spanky new PCs, in their old version of Word. That's the only way in which Word 97 is "not good enough" for the overwhelming majority of users.
But the concept of an open and extensible document format, with graceful degradation, totally and unequivocally blows this plan out of the water. There is no way to hold customers' data to ransom if the format is open; and extensibility combined with graceful degradation makes the file format future-proof. Anyone could write an extension to an earlier version OpenOffice.org to support functionality introduced in a later version, or initially implemented in a closed-source derivative.
It's no wonder Microsoft don't like this. They must feel like someone who has managed to steal everything they needed to live on, since time immemorial; but then suddenly got caught and now has to pay for everything.
And train motors aren't series wound, they're compound wound. The field windings can be connected in various series and parallel combinations, to get maximum torque at various speeds. It's the equivalent of changing gears, just in the electrical domain rather than the mechanical domain.
You actually can implement MP3 encoding and decoding quite legally, with no requirement for a licence, in any country where mathematical processes are exempt from patents.
And it's not just the gauge, but the power supply. The Eurostar has to handle three different power supplies: 750V DC third rail {on the former Southern Electric lines in Britain}, 25kV 50 cycles overhead {in France and other parts of Britain} and 3kV DC overhead {in Belgium}.
:)
Some countries even use 16.67 cycles for their railway power. Why the low frequency? Because it's harder to persuade a current to flow in a coil at high frequency {look up inductive reactance}; at one-third of the frequency you get three times the current without increasing the voltage, therefore three times the power. And also to make it so as if you try to steal power from the railways, your records will play at 11 and 15rpm and your clock will take an hour to move on 20 minutes
Do not forget that patents can be struck down. And if a standard is adopted by an official body with clout, especially a government department, then they probably will do exactly this; it is more important for the whole of society at large to be able to benefit from the existence of a standard, than for a corporation to be able to gouge money out of the rest of the population.
Standards sometimes have to be driven by government intervention. Telephony, for instance. I can take my phone almost anywhere in the world* and call or SMS anyone else on any network, wherever they are. {Of course, it will cane my credit, but .....} Most countries have tight regulations over the RF spectrum anyway. When everyone went with GSM, it made sense for manufacturers as then one product {or maybe two; there are 900 and 1800MHz variants} would suffice for many markets.
On the other hand, standards sometimes just happen apparently out of nowhere. Epson built the FX-80 printer, and suddenly it seemed every dot matrix used the same command set.
*Except for some countries that have barely progressed beyond cocoa tins and string.
I'm sorry, but I just don't "get" the point of touch-typing. Maybe it's something that dates back to the age of mechanical typewriters, where you really had to keep an eye on the printing quality {since it was directly related to how hard you struck the keys; and if you were really careless then you could get double character spacing or no spacing}.
..... but IMHO it doesn't hurt to make sure. If the keyboard is any good, then the letter I pressed is the letter that will show up on the screen. And it's not as though pressing It's hardly a great effort to flick my eyes up to the monitor every once in awhile to check on progress.
..... one of my work colleagues has a new keyboard without an INSERT key, which means keyboard-shortcut copying {shift+cursor keys, then ctrl+insert} and pasting {shift+insert} now require extra taps of the NumLock before and after. That is a serious omission, and means it is almost as much effort as mouse-based copying and pasting.
I usually look at the keyboard when I'm typing, not at the screen. I know where all the keys are, it's not as though I have to search for them
Also, the layout of Das Keyboard looks wrong -- hardly surprising, as I counted one fewer key than usual. Looking at the cheating diagram, I noticed that there is no key between the left shift and the Z {the \ and | moving to a long key up above the return key, which has lost its traditional shape}; the @ sign is on shift+2 where the double speech marks should be, and there is no pound sign -- shift+3 gives you a comment mark instead {WTF? Comment marks are common enough characters to deserve not to need a modifier key, IMHO}. The ~ has moved to shift+backtick, and the daft graphic character is gone.
Mind you, at least there's an INSERT key
But outside of a corporate intranet, you really can't trust the client end to do the validation. It's very convenient and it does save bandwidth, but ultimately it can be spoofed. Google for netcat .....
Your backend code really does still need to do some checking of its own. And if you haven't mucked around with the -T option in Perl, then you probably ought to.
That's not quite how I read it! Seriously, if someone has special needs, and those special needs are best served by using something other than Internet Explorer as a web browser {perhaps a "talking web browser" which pipes text through a voice synthesiser}, then discrimination against non-IE browsers is tantamount to discrimination on the grounds of disability.
.....}
Also, sites demanding IE are indirectly encouraging people to pirate Windows. If someone knew they could access any website using an Open Source browser on an Open Source operating system, as per W3C guidelines, then they should just do that. But they can't be sure, so they pirate Windows. I wonder if it would be acceptable as a defence in court, that you were forced to pirate Windows in order to access a particular website? {It might not look so good for you, if there were other things in your history
If you make washing machines, you can design them so the bearings will wear out eventually and so your customers will have to buy a new one. If you make VCRs, you can design them so the heat rising from the electronics causes the rubber tyre on the idler wheel to perish eventually and so your customers will have to buy a new one. If you make cars, you can design them so they rust in certain places and so your customers will have to buy a new one. If you make gas boilers, you can design them so the heat exchanger eventually clogs up with limescale, or corrodes through and begins leaking, or the power supply circuit on the motherboard overheats, and so your customers will have to buy a new one.
..... or is there?
And if you time it right, the customer probably won't even suspect that it was deliberate. They'll just come back to you and buy another one, again carefully designed to break down in future, and believe this one will last forever; just like those women who keep going back to husbands that beat them up, because this time he really has changed, he really means it.
But with software, there are no moving part or other bits to wear out: once a user has a copy of a piece of software, it's as good as the day they first got it, forever, and there is no chance to build in obsolescence
By changing the file format, so that files created with newer versions of the software cannot be loaded into older versions, Microsoft can create something akin to a built-in time bomb. You can stick with Word 97, say; it might serve your needs more than adequately, but sooner or later someone you know is going to get a new PC and that will have a newer version of Word on it. And while it can deal with your old Word 97 files, getting it to save files that Word 97 can read is deliberately made a royal PITA: the option is hard to find in the first place, and you get discouraging requesters with dire warnings of data loss &c. All of a sudden, the Word 97 with which you've been quite happily chugging along since the days of dot matrix printers, Britpop on LPs, movies on VHS cassettes and skinning up under a table upstairs in the Havana club is no good, just because it can't read your friend's documents which were created in a newer version of Word. A version which was deliberately designed to be incompatible with your copy, which in turn was deliberately designed to be incompatible with previous versions.
And the only thing allowing Microsoft to get away with this is the fact that their file formats are locked up. Otherwise you could write a few lines of perl {or whatever language they use on windows} just to strip out the bits Word 97 really can't handle, and not have to pay for a new copy of Microsoft Office. Or if the file formats were designed from the outset with graceful degradation in mind, you probably wouldn't need even to do that.
Even if they don't release a fully-polished Linux driver, it's my firm belief that they should be bound by law to release enough of the specifications, gratis and unencumbered, so that anybody could write one. Those details form part of the operating instructions, IMHO, and anyone who rightfully owns a piece of hardware is thereby entitled to make full use of it.
I am always highly suspicious of claims that this sort of thing "might give our competitors an unfair advantage". Since S3's competitors {who quite obviously don't have experts doing reverse-engineering at all, no way Pedro} would be under an identical obligation, the playing field would remain level. I tend to read such claims as "might reveal to customers that we have made outrageous bullshit claims about this product".
This is why I think everyone who falls victim to the Microsoft Tax and has to buy a copy of Windows that they do not want, should send in a "de-registration card", stating that they do not wish to be included in any statistics as a Windows purchaser or user, even if they don't go through the wearing process of seeking a refund.
If a particular model of microwave oven had a design fault which could cause the magnetron to turn on while the door was open, the manufacturer would have to deal with it straight away {and not in six months' time with users dropping like flies}. If a particular model of gas boiler had a design fault and could explode or leak water under exceptional circumstances, the manufacturer would have to do something about it {and not try to silence the person who tried to warn the world about it}. If a particular model of car had a design fault where the throttle would open wide or the brakes suddenly try to engage, the manufacturer would have to respond {and not try to pretend that the problem did not exist}.
It should be no different with computers. If there is a security flaw, the vendor should act immediately to do something about it -- first warn users that the problem exists, and then get to work on eliminating the problem. And this should be done as soon as possible.
The Open Source community generally responds immediately to security reports. Closed-source vendors should not be allowed to use secrecy to get away with selling an imperfect product. I believe that software suppliers should be held accountable for their products -- either by making the source code available for inspection {hence moving it more into the realm of goods supplied in kit form, where the purchaser has some input into the construction and therefore some responsibility for the eventual performance -- like using longer screws and adding extra bracing to a piece of flatpack furniture}, or by offering a guarantee of performance if they insist to keep it secret.
It's also important to remember that (1) good guys outnumber bad guys and (2) if you discover something, the chances are that someone else has already, or is about to discover it.