we're talking about obscure little bits of code that allows people WHO LOOK FOR THEM to exploit whatever the poorly-written code allows them to do.
It is precisely because Microsoft keeps its precious source code under wraps that this sort of thing happens. If it were out in the open, the good guys {who outnumber the bad guys} would be more likely to be able fix things before the bad guys could exploit them. It's a simple matter of probability.
You really should have a separate switch for all "open" network ports {i.e. ones that don't have a machine plugged into them all the time}, firewalled off from the main switches. If an infected machine gets plugged into an "open" port, only other machines on "open" ports are compromised. If you have many "open" ports, you should consider using separately-firewalled switches, but don't distribute them geographically {one switch for east wing, one for west wing}: put half the open ports in each room into one switch, and the other half into the other. And hoik out the cable on mere suspicion. That's just one of the ways CAT5 is better than thin co-ax - more robust in the face of disconnection.
Or just ban anyone from using Windows within the building. That's our next goal:-)
Microsoft's new ad campaign is strongly recommending that everyone run a virus scanner.
To me, that sounds rather like a kitchen installer recommending that everyone should get a bucket to put under their u-bend, or a car manufacturer recommending customers to get an alarm / immobiliser..... i.e., an admission that they haven't done their job properly.
If Linux enjoyed the sort of desktop ubiquity that M$ has right now, we'd not be bitching about the latest exploit/virus/worm, because thanks to Privilege Separation, the most damage a virus could do would be to compromise one user's filespace. We would just run our mailreader application as an unprivileged user, back up anything important into superuser filespace beyond the reach of most exploits, and be quite contented.
Stop being an apologist for Bill Gates. When he pays for clean water and sanitation for every human being on the planet {and he wouldn't even notice it} or performs some similar act for the greater human good {this would not include hara-kiri - given the mess he would be leaving behind, that would be too much like a coward's way out} then he'll have earned a little of my respect.
The internet is literally held together by three pieces of software: Apache httpd {which sends out web pages}, Sendmail {which send email} and BIND {which turns addresses in words, such as slashdot.org, into addresses in figures, such as 66.35.250.150}. All are open source with, to all intents and purposes, no serious closed-source alternative. They Just Work. Anytime a security hole does appear, it gets patched, sometimes by the person who discovered it. It isn't a big deal. Having a bug discovered in code you wrote is like shitting your pants: it's excruciatingly embarrassing, there's no way to hide the fact that you've done it, but almost everybody does it at some time in their life and most people end up having a laugh about it later.
Microsoft's whole way of being offends a great many people. Many people believe their abuse of proprietary code close to extortion. Well, IMHO if you walk into a vegetarian restaurant wearing a fur coat, you deserve what will happen to you.
Open source developers haven't offended as many people as Microsoft have. Therefore, they have fewer enemies. As a side effect of the way the open source development model works, it ends up producing software whose robustness varies directly with the size of its user base.
But Microsoft, by the twin prongs of customer alienation and arrogant denial that anything could be wrong, have walked into that vegetarian restaurant in a fur coat with nothing underneath.
Microsoft have illegally forced manufacturers to ship Windows with PCs for so long that customers often don't realise that there are alternatives. Windows also lets you get away for too long with a broken configuration. {At least if you mess up the settings on a Linux box, it just sits there waiting for you to get them right!} Windows users don't have to learn the few basic facts that, if everyone knew and stuck to them, would make the Internet run smoother for everyone. In that respect, I think that they must take some of the blame for the mess themselves.
When I buy a CD, the price I pay is broken down roughly as follows:
retailer's profit
record company's profit
cost of manufacturing CD
band's royalty fee
The retailer and the record company are middlemen, and as such can be lived without. If there was a way I could send off a postal order to the band for the exact same amount as they would have got if I bought the CD, I would be quite prepared to do that. The band, after all, did something I couldn't: they wrote and performed the songs. What I resent is having to pay a recording company to prepackage that material for me and charge an extortionate amount for doing so. The band has, using the same copyright law that makes the GPL work, granted permission for the record company to manufacture and sell CDs of their work, in return for a payment from the record company for each CD sold. There is no reason why they should not grant me permission, in return for the same monetary recompense. As far as they are concerned, the effect is the same: I get my songs, they get their pennies.
In a previous discussion, I asked whether baking my own double chocolate muffins at
home was the same as stealing from a bakery? And the most intelligent response I got
was that maybe I owed someone money for thinking up the recipe. {Actually, I had
reverse-engineered it from the ingredients and nutritional analysis. With the counts
of protein, starch, sugar and fat, I got four simultaneous equations giving me the
quantities of the four principal ingredients. Doesn't everybody hack food?}
To which I could say nothing better than "Probably, but they aren't being to keen to
chase me for it." {And anyway, I had managed to make some improvements of my own.}
So my solution comes in two parts.
If, as a copyright holder, you give permission for a person, company, group
or entity to exceed their statutory fair use rights over your work, possibly in return
for some form of compensation, then you must licence everybody to do the same for
the same price. {All should stand equal before your licence}.
CD manufacturers must provide details permitting anyone to pay the royalty fee directly to the band - i.e. to include a contact address and a monetary amount. This amount, according to {1} above, would have to be no more than the band would have received from the sale of a CD {subject to rounding to whole coin amounts to avoid anyone owing fractions of a cent / penny}.
Anybody wanting to offer songs for paid download would be obliged to pass on royalty fees to the copyright holder, notify users that
the licence fee would be included in the download fee - and expected, upon reasonable notice, to be able to produce logs showing downloads, fees collected and fees paid {though no personally identifying details} in order to prove that all was fair. Anyone offering music for free download would be obliged to notify users of the need to pay a fee to the copyright holder, the
amount to send, the address to send it to and a warning that the server owners could not protect users from the force of the law.
This also would have two side effects that might not go down too well with the record
industry cartels, but that would certainly benefit the general public who pay the wages of said cartels. People would know exactly how much bands were making out of each CD sold -- and by extension, how much the recording companies were making, after allowing for retail overheads. And organisations such as the RIAA would have no excuse to demand thousands of dollars per song downloaded, because the exact amount owed would be
widely publicised.
It won't stop everyone copying music illegally - as long as you can point a mic at a
speaker, nothing ever will - but it certainly won't make the situation any worse. I for one would be prepared to give it a go.
While I like the fact that my ports 20, 21 [ftp], 22 [ssh], 80 [apache], 110 [pop], 443 [apache-ssl] and 3306 [sql] are open, any others might well be too many.
I used to get many connection attempts on port 135; but not having any active daemon on it, not much happened {though invariably the far end would be listening on that port}.
I cannot think of a single reason why anybody would want to expose ports specific to a Microsoft LAN to the outside world. Sometimes I wish there was a "networthiness" test for computers like the roadworthiness test for cars.
Obviously, someone's read "Towards a Citizen's Militia"! I'd have put a link but the text isn't available online. Pity really, it's interesting reading.
Linux users also have a handy way to check for stability: compile and attempt to install a kernel. One bit in one byte will send it spiralling off into oblivion. Don't actually change your configuration, though. Just keep recompiling the same source as you are already using, so if the installation part messes up, you can slow down, boot from CD and try again.
If you're running a stock kernel, you should customise that first before you try overclocking. You wouldn't want to waste that improvement!
What exactly makes you think the GPL is invalid? As far as I can see - and I've read it several times and agree with it - it is just a letter of permission, granted by the copyright holder, authorising the recipient to perform certain actions over and above the fair use provisions of copyright law {aka "your statutory rights"}.
Only the copyright holder can grant those rights until the copyright expires. That is the whole point of copyright law. So how exactly is the GPL invalid? And if the GPL is invalid, how is any other licence valid?
The problem I have with the BSD licence is that, unlike the GPL, it does not oblige developers to share alike. If you release code under a BSD licence, someone can take it, make a tiny modification, and they don't have to share their modifications - in fact, they can make it closed-source. How is that fair?!
I will finish by repeating my question. Without making an ad hominem attack, what makes you think that the GPL is invalid?
Wouldn't a script whose only fuction is to point apt to non-free repositories, hence facilitating the installation of non-free software, preclude Debian from being "100% Free Software?" Is the script any more "free" than free packages that depend on non-free software to run?
That's a bit like saying vegetarian food isn't actually suitable for vegetarians if the vegetables used to make it were grown on a farm that raises animals; or someone who works in the factory that made it, or the shop assistant who took your money, eats m**t. And there really are people who believe stuff like that. I've even heard of people who won't eat food grown with certain kinds of fertiliser, i.e. animal shit, blood and crushed-up bones; and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that in some little cemetery somewhere are the mortal remains of someone who believed that it was wrong to kill even germs.
The thing is, if you're a realist, you can't be anything else but a realist: realism is by definition incompatible with any other doctrine. RMS and friends have very high ideals, but it's lonely up there. Me being a realist doesn't mean I don't dream of the day when there is no such thing as non-free software. Till then, some of us have to compromise a little, but understand that we all suffer for it.
Actually, the most severe obstacle to anyone writing a really-free PINE clone is that "_inp" {being the end of the acrynym for "... Is Not Pine"} doesn't spell the end of anything related to trees, disinfectant fragrances or suffering for want of someone/thing {which would be necessary to form a pun on "pine"}, and isn't euphonic enough. {For reasons to do with mouth movement, you can't actually pronounce an "n" followed by a "p" - it always comes out as either _ntp_ or _mp_.}
If you use closed source software, then you are getting shafted by being deprived of the right to inspect, modify, improve and distribute the source code. Which, not coincidentally, is why Windows vulnerabilities only ever come to light after exploits have been discovered.
Now, you may not think it's a big deal. You may well have no interest in what goes on under the bonnet. But many people do. If you run a business and you want to be sure that your internal e-mails are secure, reading the source code of your mail server application might well be the only way to be certain. If "they" won't show it to you, then maybe "they" have something to hide?
You won't start to feel really shafted, though, till you try to forward on an e-mail and it gets refused, just in case youy were breaching someone else's copyright or confidence. Or you come to listen to your music and find it's unplayable because you've listened to it too many times already. Maybe you'll have become so brainwashed by then that you won't even realise it isn't being done for your benefit.
The most insidious kind of oppression is always the sort that people think they can live with - "Well, I'd rather be made to do foo than risk bar happening." They nibble away at your rights, starting with the ones you didn't know you had, until you become a mere functionary. It's the thin end of the wedge..... they drive it in imperceptibly, and by the time you notice it, it's already too late.
And not every computer is bought as a replacement! Some people are buying their first machine. They won't have any "old software" to not work. My guess is they will do what people already do now, and stick with whatever came with the machine when they bought it. Except that that will be open source, and they will be able to exercise the rights that Microsoft is currently denying them.
How about someone making an Ogg Vorbis portable, with proper standards compliant USB mass storage emulation so it works with all platforms?
Of course, it would have to have stereo analogue inputs and outputs. Preferably on separate audio sockets too - those 3.5mm mini-jacks are too unreliable - and voice-activated recording, a 10" pre-record and tweakable start point to compensate for the short interval before the first threshhold crossing, and manually-overridable, automatic track splitting. For all those copy-prevented CDs the companies are foisting on us that only play properly on hi-fis.....
So what do you do - lie down like good little martyrs while they shaft you up the arsehole, and then condemn whoever comes to your rescue for hurting your erstwhile oppressor? Or do you fight back yourself?
I never said it was ideal, just less bad than what they currently have. Sometimes the end justifies the means. Really, it's not much different than what happened in this country when the telecomms market was deregulated: there were some things that BT, as a former monopoly holder, was barred from doing until its market share had fallen below a certain point. Otherwise, BT could have misused its position to destroy the competition. Once the market was a little more even, the restrictions were lifted.
This move is going to put pressure on developers to knock off the rough edges and improve the desktop {though I for one fail to see the problem - I prefer my Linux desktop at home to my Windows desktop at work, and I'll be dual-booting my work box when the HDD packs up. IMHO the differences are vastly overstated anyway}. It will also put pressure on games developers to get their shit together to put out Linux versions.
KDE has a graphical package manager that provides a common frontend for deb, rpm and tgz packages, an office suite that is more than up to the simple memos and spreadsheets most people need, and the only thing wrong with Xine and Mplayer is the insidious consequence of proprietary codecs - if people stuck to open standards for media content, or {better IMHO} all closed standards were banned outright, then the out-of-the-box configuration would work fine.
The sad fact is, the reason why almost nobody uses Linux is that almost nobody uses Linux. If more people used Linux, then more people beside those people would use Linux.
The hardware was already broken. It was given a perfectly innocuous command to flush its buffer and instead it began writing its flash PROM. That behaviour is non-standard by anyone's definition.
If a car has a fault that makes it go faster when you press the brake pedal, you can hardly blame somebody who does not know about the fault for running someone over while trying to attempt an emergency stop.
But is it any more wrong than, say, the death penalty for murderers? Desperate situations call for desperate remedies. A drowning man can't be expected just to drink his way out of it. A few people will get hurt when you fight back, which is sad; but the facts are that {1} if you didn't have to fight back, then they wouldn't have got hurt; and {2} more people will get hurt even worse if you don't fight back.
It is better to die standing than to live on your knees.
By this sort of logic, if you save 60 pence by walking behind the bus, you could save four quid by walking behind a taxi. Well, I walk everywhere and I haven't seen a penny of that money.
The choice is not "Pirate Microsoft or buy Microsoft". The choice is "Pirate Microsoft, buy Microsoft or do without Microsoft altogether." Most people, if they did not have the option to pirate, would do without - whether that means open source or non-computerised practises.
Good point about Mandrake. In defence of the RPM distros, though, they were compiled with the intention of showing off the latest testosterone-fuelled multi-gigabyte overclocked turbo express motherboards with more processing power in their fancy graphics cards than your old system.
If you want something that will work well on older hardware, try Slackware. I used to like Debian, but their insistence on keeping everything back in the dark ages has slipped from endearing to annoying. Slack, with its simplicity and purity, has grown on me. You'll have to be prepared to spend some time tweaking, compiling kernels and so forth, but that goes without saying. And beside which, it'll make you more of a hacker. What you are trying to do is feasible; I used to use a '486 for my main server till recently. A DX4/100 will manage to run X with a lightweight window manager.
Besides which, fair trade is more important than free trade. Other people's right to expect not to be treated unfairly overrides your right to carry on treating them unfairly.
Sure, it's only Vietnam. But it's the beginning. As I said elsewhere, if you know people are going to copy software, you might as well make sure that they aren't going to be doing so illegally.
It's a laugh to see the Microsoft fanboys bleating about "freedom of choice" being compromised. The words "dose of one's own medicine" spring to mind. After years of not being able to buy a laptop without Windows pre-installed, now the tide is going to turn. The components used in the construction of this computer have been carefully selected to work well with Linux; but nobody is stopping anyone from wiping the pre-installed Linux and installing another operating system of their own choosing. Provided they are duly authorised to do so, of course.
Microsoft should be freaking grateful that Vietnam didn't simply make software non-copyrightable, which would equally have the effect of stopping the illegal copying of software.
Slashdot Mirror
Download Squid and set it up to block all advert sites. I did and it makes the internet an altogether much more bearable experience.
You really should have a separate switch for all "open" network ports {i.e. ones that don't have a machine plugged into them all the time}, firewalled off from the main switches. If an infected machine gets plugged into an "open" port, only other machines on "open" ports are compromised. If you have many "open" ports, you should consider using separately-firewalled switches, but don't distribute them geographically {one switch for east wing, one for west wing}: put half the open ports in each room into one switch, and the other half into the other. And hoik out the cable on mere suspicion. That's just one of the ways CAT5 is better than thin co-ax - more robust in the face of disconnection.
:-)
Or just ban anyone from using Windows within the building. That's our next goal
If Linux enjoyed the sort of desktop ubiquity that M$ has right now, we'd not be bitching about the latest exploit/virus/worm, because thanks to Privilege Separation, the most damage a virus could do would be to compromise one user's filespace. We would just run our mailreader application as an unprivileged user, back up anything important into superuser filespace beyond the reach of most exploits, and be quite contented.
Stop being an apologist for Bill Gates. When he pays for clean water and sanitation for every human being on the planet {and he wouldn't even notice it} or performs some similar act for the greater human good {this would not include hara-kiri - given the mess he would be leaving behind, that would be too much like a coward's way out} then he'll have earned a little of my respect.
The internet is literally held together by three pieces of software: Apache httpd {which sends out web pages}, Sendmail {which send email} and BIND {which turns addresses in words, such as slashdot.org, into addresses in figures, such as 66.35.250.150}. All are open source with, to all intents and purposes, no serious closed-source alternative. They Just Work. Anytime a security hole does appear, it gets patched, sometimes by the person who discovered it. It isn't a big deal. Having a bug discovered in code you wrote is like shitting your pants: it's excruciatingly embarrassing, there's no way to hide the fact that you've done it, but almost everybody does it at some time in their life and most people end up having a laugh about it later.
Microsoft's whole way of being offends a great many people. Many people believe their abuse of proprietary code close to extortion. Well, IMHO if you walk into a vegetarian restaurant wearing a fur coat, you deserve what will happen to you.
Open source developers haven't offended as many people as Microsoft have. Therefore, they have fewer enemies. As a side effect of the way the open source development model works, it ends up producing software whose robustness varies directly with the size of its user base.
But Microsoft, by the twin prongs of customer alienation and arrogant denial that anything could be wrong, have walked into that vegetarian restaurant in a fur coat with nothing underneath.
Microsoft have illegally forced manufacturers to ship Windows with PCs for so long that customers often don't realise that there are alternatives. Windows also lets you get away for too long with a broken configuration. {At least if you mess up the settings on a Linux box, it just sits there waiting for you to get them right!} Windows users don't have to learn the few basic facts that, if everyone knew and stuck to them, would make the Internet run smoother for everyone. In that respect, I think that they must take some of the blame for the mess themselves.
- retailer's profit
- record company's profit
- cost of manufacturing CD
- band's royalty fee
The retailer and the record company are middlemen, and as such can be lived without. If there was a way I could send off a postal order to the band for the exact same amount as they would have got if I bought the CD, I would be quite prepared to do that. The band, after all, did something I couldn't: they wrote and performed the songs. What I resent is having to pay a recording company to prepackage that material for me and charge an extortionate amount for doing so. The band has, using the same copyright law that makes the GPL work, granted permission for the record company to manufacture and sell CDs of their work, in return for a payment from the record company for each CD sold. There is no reason why they should not grant me permission, in return for the same monetary recompense. As far as they are concerned, the effect is the same: I get my songs, they get their pennies.In a previous discussion, I asked whether baking my own double chocolate muffins at home was the same as stealing from a bakery? And the most intelligent response I got was that maybe I owed someone money for thinking up the recipe. {Actually, I had reverse-engineered it from the ingredients and nutritional analysis. With the counts of protein, starch, sugar and fat, I got four simultaneous equations giving me the quantities of the four principal ingredients. Doesn't everybody hack food?}
To which I could say nothing better than "Probably, but they aren't being to keen to chase me for it." {And anyway, I had managed to make some improvements of my own.}
So my solution comes in two parts.
- If, as a copyright holder, you give permission for a person, company, group
or entity to exceed their statutory fair use rights over your work, possibly in return
for some form of compensation, then you must licence everybody to do the same for
the same price. {All should stand equal before your licence}.
- CD manufacturers must provide details permitting anyone to pay the royalty fee directly to the band - i.e. to include a contact address and a monetary amount. This amount, according to {1} above, would have to be no more than the band would have received from the sale of a CD {subject to rounding to whole coin amounts to avoid anyone owing fractions of a cent / penny}.
Anybody wanting to offer songs for paid download would be obliged to pass on royalty fees to the copyright holder, notify users that the licence fee would be included in the download fee - and expected, upon reasonable notice, to be able to produce logs showing downloads, fees collected and fees paid {though no personally identifying details} in order to prove that all was fair. Anyone offering music for free download would be obliged to notify users of the need to pay a fee to the copyright holder, the amount to send, the address to send it to and a warning that the server owners could not protect users from the force of the law.This also would have two side effects that might not go down too well with the record industry cartels, but that would certainly benefit the general public who pay the wages of said cartels. People would know exactly how much bands were making out of each CD sold -- and by extension, how much the recording companies were making, after allowing for retail overheads. And organisations such as the RIAA would have no excuse to demand thousands of dollars per song downloaded, because the exact amount owed would be widely publicised.
It won't stop everyone copying music illegally - as long as you can point a mic at a speaker, nothing ever will - but it certainly won't make the situation any worse. I for one would be prepared to give it a go.
Or viri. -us -> -i. Not -ii unless the singular ended in -ius.
While I like the fact that my ports 20, 21 [ftp], 22 [ssh], 80 [apache], 110 [pop], 443 [apache-ssl] and 3306 [sql] are open, any others might well be too many.
I used to get many connection attempts on port 135; but not having any active daemon on it, not much happened {though invariably the far end would be listening on that port}.
I cannot think of a single reason why anybody would want to expose ports specific to a Microsoft LAN to the outside world. Sometimes I wish there was a "networthiness" test for computers like the roadworthiness test for cars.
Not sharing your source code with others is theft, pure and simple. See sig. So how can something which enforces sharing be encouraging theft?
Obviously, someone's read "Towards a Citizen's Militia"! I'd have put a link but the text isn't available online. Pity really, it's interesting reading.
Linux users also have a handy way to check for stability: compile and attempt to install a kernel. One bit in one byte will send it spiralling off into oblivion. Don't actually change your configuration, though. Just keep recompiling the same source as you are already using, so if the installation part messes up, you can slow down, boot from CD and try again.
If you're running a stock kernel, you should customise that first before you try overclocking. You wouldn't want to waste that improvement!
What exactly makes you think the GPL is invalid? As far as I can see - and I've read it several times and agree with it - it is just a letter of permission, granted by the copyright holder, authorising the recipient to perform certain actions over and above the fair use provisions of copyright law {aka "your statutory rights"}.
Only the copyright holder can grant those rights until the copyright expires. That is the whole point of copyright law. So how exactly is the GPL invalid? And if the GPL is invalid, how is any other licence valid?
The problem I have with the BSD licence is that, unlike the GPL, it does not oblige developers to share alike. If you release code under a BSD licence, someone can take it, make a tiny modification, and they don't have to share their modifications - in fact, they can make it closed-source. How is that fair?!
I will finish by repeating my question. Without making an ad hominem attack, what makes you think that the GPL is invalid?
The thing is, if you're a realist, you can't be anything else but a realist: realism is by definition incompatible with any other doctrine. RMS and friends have very high ideals, but it's lonely up there. Me being a realist doesn't mean I don't dream of the day when there is no such thing as non-free software. Till then, some of us have to compromise a little, but understand that we all suffer for it.
Actually, the most severe obstacle to anyone writing a really-free PINE clone is that "_inp" {being the end of the acrynym for "... Is Not Pine"} doesn't spell the end of anything related to trees, disinfectant fragrances or suffering for want of someone/thing {which would be necessary to form a pun on "pine"}, and isn't euphonic enough. {For reasons to do with mouth movement, you can't actually pronounce an "n" followed by a "p" - it always comes out as either _ntp_ or _mp_.}
If you use closed source software, then you are getting shafted by being deprived of the right to inspect, modify, improve and distribute the source code. Which, not coincidentally, is why Windows vulnerabilities only ever come to light after exploits have been discovered.
..... they drive it in imperceptibly, and by the time you notice it, it's already too late.
Now, you may not think it's a big deal. You may well have no interest in what goes on under the bonnet. But many people do. If you run a business and you want to be sure that your internal e-mails are secure, reading the source code of your mail server application might well be the only way to be certain. If "they" won't show it to you, then maybe "they" have something to hide?
You won't start to feel really shafted, though, till you try to forward on an e-mail and it gets refused, just in case youy were breaching someone else's copyright or confidence. Or you come to listen to your music and find it's unplayable because you've listened to it too many times already. Maybe you'll have become so brainwashed by then that you won't even realise it isn't being done for your benefit.
The most insidious kind of oppression is always the sort that people think they can live with - "Well, I'd rather be made to do foo than risk bar happening." They nibble away at your rights, starting with the ones you didn't know you had, until you become a mere functionary. It's the thin end of the wedge
And not every computer is bought as a replacement! Some people are buying their first machine. They won't have any "old software" to not work. My guess is they will do what people already do now, and stick with whatever came with the machine when they bought it. Except that that will be open source, and they will be able to exercise the rights that Microsoft is currently denying them.
How about someone making an Ogg Vorbis portable, with proper standards compliant USB mass storage emulation so it works with all platforms?
.....
Of course, it would have to have stereo analogue inputs and outputs. Preferably on separate audio sockets too - those 3.5mm mini-jacks are too unreliable - and voice-activated recording, a 10" pre-record and tweakable start point to compensate for the short interval before the first threshhold crossing, and manually-overridable, automatic track splitting. For all those copy-prevented CDs the companies are foisting on us that only play properly on hi-fis
So what do you do - lie down like good little martyrs while they shaft you up the arsehole, and then condemn whoever comes to your rescue for hurting your erstwhile oppressor? Or do you fight back yourself?
I never said it was ideal, just less bad than what they currently have. Sometimes the end justifies the means. Really, it's not much different than what happened in this country when the telecomms market was deregulated: there were some things that BT, as a former monopoly holder, was barred from doing until its market share had fallen below a certain point. Otherwise, BT could have misused its position to destroy the competition. Once the market was a little more even, the restrictions were lifted.
This move is going to put pressure on developers to knock off the rough edges and improve the desktop {though I for one fail to see the problem - I prefer my Linux desktop at home to my Windows desktop at work, and I'll be dual-booting my work box when the HDD packs up. IMHO the differences are vastly overstated anyway}. It will also put pressure on games developers to get their shit together to put out Linux versions.
KDE has a graphical package manager that provides a common frontend for deb, rpm and tgz packages, an office suite that is more than up to the simple memos and spreadsheets most people need, and the only thing wrong with Xine and Mplayer is the insidious consequence of proprietary codecs - if people stuck to open standards for media content, or {better IMHO} all closed standards were banned outright, then the out-of-the-box configuration would work fine.
The sad fact is, the reason why almost nobody uses Linux is that almost nobody uses Linux. If more people used Linux, then more people beside those people would use Linux.
The hardware was already broken. It was given a perfectly innocuous command to flush its buffer and instead it began writing its flash PROM. That behaviour is non-standard by anyone's definition.
If a car has a fault that makes it go faster when you press the brake pedal, you can hardly blame somebody who does not know about the fault for running someone over while trying to attempt an emergency stop.
But is it any more wrong than, say, the death penalty for murderers? Desperate situations call for desperate remedies. A drowning man can't be expected just to drink his way out of it. A few people will get hurt when you fight back, which is sad; but the facts are that {1} if you didn't have to fight back, then they wouldn't have got hurt; and {2} more people will get hurt even worse if you don't fight back.
It is better to die standing than to live on your knees.
By this sort of logic, if you save 60 pence by walking behind the bus, you could save four quid by walking behind a taxi. Well, I walk everywhere and I haven't seen a penny of that money.
The choice is not "Pirate Microsoft or buy Microsoft". The choice is "Pirate Microsoft, buy Microsoft or do without Microsoft altogether." Most people, if they did not have the option to pirate, would do without - whether that means open source or non-computerised practises.
Good point about Mandrake. In defence of the RPM distros, though, they were compiled with the intention of showing off the latest testosterone-fuelled multi-gigabyte overclocked turbo express motherboards with more processing power in their fancy graphics cards than your old system.
If you want something that will work well on older hardware, try Slackware. I used to like Debian, but their insistence on keeping everything back in the dark ages has slipped from endearing to annoying. Slack, with its simplicity and purity, has grown on me. You'll have to be prepared to spend some time tweaking, compiling kernels and so forth, but that goes without saying. And beside which, it'll make you more of a hacker. What you are trying to do is feasible; I used to use a '486 for my main server till recently. A DX4/100 will manage to run X with a lightweight window manager.
Besides which, fair trade is more important than free trade. Other people's right to expect not to be treated unfairly overrides your right to carry on treating them unfairly.
Sure, it's only Vietnam. But it's the beginning. As I said elsewhere, if you know people are going to copy software, you might as well make sure that they aren't going to be doing so illegally.
It's a laugh to see the Microsoft fanboys bleating about "freedom of choice" being compromised. The words "dose of one's own medicine" spring to mind. After years of not being able to buy a laptop without Windows pre-installed, now the tide is going to turn. The components used in the construction of this computer have been carefully selected to work well with Linux; but nobody is stopping anyone from wiping the pre-installed Linux and installing another operating system of their own choosing. Provided they are duly authorised to do so, of course.
Microsoft should be freaking grateful that Vietnam didn't simply make software non-copyrightable, which would equally have the effect of stopping the illegal copying of software.