In other words, trying to feed my family using the skills I was born with. Nothing personal, but I like paying rent every month and my life would not be possible without paid software.
I make a living writing software for small businesses. They pay me for my time, but they generally don't care what I do with the software once I'm done. In fact, they like the idea of GPL-ing it, because then they get the advantage of improvements from the community.
Don't you see they only want to leverage linux as a way to upsell expensive hardware and AIX?
Whatever their reasons, IBM has found a way in which they can make a profit, while employing people full-time to work on Linux.
Not only that, but do you ever wonder who pays Linus' rent? He's a millionaire by now... But here, take a look. If there was no money to be made in open source, why are these companies literally giving money to the main Linux developers?
I have to eat and tech support sucks.
Even in a business model based around supporting an open source project, there's plenty of room for developers and innovation.
People telling me I'm unethical or "antisocial" are borderline evil and are a much worse threat to humankind than any jackasses at the RIAA.
So it's worse to tell you something insulting about yourself than to sue your ass into oblivion for no reason? That's not unethical, that's just stupid.
I actually don't have any problem with your ethics, except the part where you apparently can't or won't read my post. I did address every single issue you had, and you proceeded to ignore that and rehash the same arguments... except, oh, "tech support sucks" may have been a reference to support-driven business models.
Probably. But if you're a (smallish) business owner, do you want to go that route and spend time and money tied up in court proceedings or just pay the man a few bucks to go bother somebody else?
If I'm any kind of a business owner, yes. Because it makes me money.
Because they get to pay all my legal fees for their lawsuit, plus any lost profits while I was away from my business, plus random amounts more that I'd sue them for, constituting "emotional trauma", assuming I can get away with it. Thus, the only reason I wouldn't want to do this is if I don't like money, or I have a paranoid fear of courtrooms.
And in response to another poster, than only marks you as an easy touch if the details get out.
It does, however, make me an easy mark for the same patent troll later on.
In your world, it would be the FSF trying to sue instead.
No, they would sue if you actually did something not allowed -- which would be defined as making something proprietary, which is a MUCH more lenient approach.
The flaw in the plan is that in the "all software is free" world there would be no good software because it would be impossible to make a living.
You're about 20 years too late for that argument -- Bill Gates already tried with his "Letter to Hobbyists". The flaw is that we are living proof that it is possible to make good, free software for a living. It's possible to do this even in many situations (IBM, Google, Canonical, Redhat, etc) where you don't dual-license it.
Same goal, the rest is a technicality. Your example is what happens when you turn that technicality into a religion.
My example was to make a point. As I've said repeatedly, I don't want the entire world to be free. It's just that if I had to choose between an entirely free world and an entirely proprietary one, I'll take free every time.
But sure, go ahead. Hitler's goal was the betterment of mankind. I bet you and I share that goal. Does it make us Nazis?
No, it doesn't. That doesn't even pass the "duh" test. It's not Hitler's goal we disagree with, when you reduce it that far, it's his means -- by eliminating races he saw as bad influences.
I would very much like to think that anyone reading Slashdot has a very different worldview than Hitler, and that it's not just a technicality. And if you accept that, you must, by the same logic, accept that the goals of the FSF and the MPAA are very different, on more than just a technicality.
Isn't this exactly the kind of situation where they are so obviously a patent troll that they'd be required to pay the legal fees of the defendant? Can't you bring a ridiculous countersuit of your own, charging them for the "emotional trauma" of bringing you to court on such a BS charge?
The FSF believes that stealing is bad, but chooses to enforce that with purely legal means, not technological. Furthermore, their means put power back in the consumer's hands, taking it from the developer -- the MPAA/BSA/etc take power from the consumer, and brings it back to the developer/producer.
The MPAA, however, will use all of the means available to them -- technological, current legal, drafting new legislation, and completely pointless and unfounded lawsuits -- to achieve their goald of preventing people from stealing.
Think about that, for a second.
Think about the broader implications, too. I don't want free software to take over the world, but if it did, would it be so bad? You'd still be able to do anything you want with the code, including fork off projects of your own, so long as you kept the same license -- that license which forces you to redistribute your code, and keep the same license.
Compare that to a world run by the MPAA -- we'd all be running Tivos, Xboxes, etc. Computers would be outlawed, or they'd essentially be the same thing. And if you so much as think about doing anything you're not supposed to, we'll sue you.
I think we can all agree that killing is bad, and that murderers should be removed from society. But consider two ways of dealing with this: In one, anyone actually caught killing or attempting to kill someone is put in prison for life. In another, anyone caught with a gun, or even anything slightly pointy that could conceivably be a weapon, is shot on sight.
I don't run around telling people they are unethical for trying to make a living.
Neither does RMS. He tells people they are unethical for writing proprietary software.
There are all kinds of ways of making a living, even in software, without going proprietary. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he's not as extreme as you're painting him here.
I don't run around trying to dictate how the world should be using software.
Neither do I. Neither does Linus.
I, however, can and do dictate how the world should be using my software. Just like you do, with your proprietary stuff you think you need to do to make a living.
What I am pissed off about is that a bunch of religious zealots peed in what used to be a nice place swimming pool.
You're a half-empty guy, right?
You may as well be saying that a bunch of religious zealots ruined Unix, and you can't use BSD either, for the same reason.
Cut the bullshit metaphors and tell me what problems you actually have with Linux licenses today.
You even get the source code to/dev/tivo. It says "fill this block of RAM with data, and then call OUT port 6 with the value 27. Then do IN port 7 to get a status value."
My understanding of the GPLv3 is, you can do that as much as you like, so long as the modified code can still work exactly the same way with/dev/tivo. In other words, if I use my own yum repository, or if I repackage the whole thing for apt so I can run Ubuntu,/dev/tivo should still work exactly as before -- I shouldn't suddenly get static because I dared recompile.
If it's that open, I really don't mind as much. It still leaves me most of the system to hack around with, I just can't rip streams. I still wouldn't buy such a system, when I can rip streams just as easily with my MythTV box. But at least I wouldn't accuse TiVo of getting a free ride -- the TiVo UI could, in fact, be modified on a TiVo system, or ported to other, more open systems.
It would probably even let me use a TiVo to play media from other sources -- YouTube, for instance, or a ripped DVD. Just feed the unencrypted, un-DRM'd stream to/dev/tivo, and it plays it as normal. It would also let me add storage that's not something TiVo thought of -- I could store those encrypted streams on my desktop when I ran out of space on the tivo's hard drive, and stream them back over the network to play. Not as nice as having no DRM and just watching them anywhere, but a lot better than having a completely locked-down system.
Although I admit, you do seem to have answered my challenge -- there would still be a point to using Linux, and it looks like it could be done in such a way that we couldn't easily crack the DRM.
FOr example, "Yes, there is a spiffy network card. It is an alias for the Loopback Adapter!"
or
"There is a TV channel like that. Oops it is all static."
...So what?
Once again, I don't think it defeats the purpose here, which is to prevent them from distributing a GPL'd binary in such a way that I can't upload my own, nearly-identical GPL'd binary and expect it to work.
To be GPLv3 compliant, I expect they'd have to have that channel exist, and provide exactly the same data to the GPL'd program, no matter what code is actually running inside that program. In other words, the API should be consistent/modular -- if I call 'get_chunk_of_data_from_channel(3, *buffer)' from within any program running on that system, I should get the same result, no matter what the program.
You're not allowed to take a checksum of the running program, and use that as a basis for deciding if I get static or not. However, if you really want to deliver static to everyone, including your own GPL'd software, go right ahead.
Or how about hiding specific tools behind or inside the hypervisor so that the code can run unaltered but the code doesn't do as much that is interesting. So instead of storing tv shows, it can only essentially script the storage of the tv show, the rest is handled underneath through encrypted connections, drm, etc. In short, the software is simply not trusted any more than a router on the internet is trusted with your credit card number. No analog hole.
That is true. It also means they gain less by using GPL'd code -- they now can't use it to handle IO, which Linux is very good at. They also can't use GPL'd decoders, meaning they have to license a proprietary one. And they can't use a GPL'd network stack, they need a BSD one.
Eventually, it means that they can only use GPL'd code for the UI; they have to implement the equivalent of a kernel underneath it. At this point, I don't think there's really any point to doing the hypervisor -- just do some BSD-derived kernel and run your GPL code under that.
Read the summary again -- it's a company that makes hypervisors. They obviously have a vested interest in selling hypervisors, and if they can sell them as a way to break GPLv3, so much the better.
Personally, I don't see this as "breaking" the GPLv3 at all. I don't mind that there are closed parts of a system, as long as I'm free to modify the open ones, and the open ones are sufficiently isolated from the closed ones.
It's a bit like porting Firefox to Windows. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
Of course, to me, it means not buying a PS3, and not bothering to put Linux on it if I did. What's the point, if it's restricted from touching anything interesting? But it is nice to know that, unlike the pathetic PS2 "linux", I can run any distro that's bothered to port itself.
Do they really think software these days isn't slow and bloated enough without the additional burden of context-switching, just to circumvent the licensing problems?
Y'know, you could just choose not to circumvent the licensing problems. You could just use code which you can get under a license that lets you do what you want with it. Or you could *gasp* write your own code! What a concept!
And at the risk of sounding petty, they started it. The root of this problem is not the GPLv3, it's DRM and Tivoization. I run a Linux machine, and I use it to view plenty of media which is either un-DRM'd or easily cracked (DVDs) -- and I require absolutely no VMs to do this.
To be perfectly honest, the legalese does not have to dictate the engineering choice here. You could simply make an engineering choice to use an open platform. No engineer in their right mind would use DRM as an engineering choice -- we all know it doesn't work, doesn't even slow the real pirates down much. If you're forced to implement something like this, realize that it is, in fact, a legal choice that someone made to force DRM on you.
For most people we liked Open Source because we didn't need to reinvent the wheel just tweek what was working and just as long as we gave the code back to the community and let the community to do the same with your code is one thing.
That is what GPL does. Nothing more, nothing less.
The only difference is, GPLv3 closes some loopholes in which people could take GPLv2 and not actually give back to the community. They would give you the code, but you couldn't actually do anything with it.
The goal of GPL isn't to prevent TiVo from implementing DRM, or to release it to the community. (I'm not even sure what you mean by "release their DRM" -- do you have the slightest clue what you're talking about?)
The goal of the GPL is to prevent TiVo from getting a free ride with our code that we pour blood, sweat, and tears into.
If you want to write DRM, fine. If you want to write code that murders children, go right ahead. I don't agree with it, but I certainly can't stop you with a license.
But if you think I'm going to write the code for you, for free, to enable you to do something I disagree with so strongly, you're dumber than I thought.
For this to be GPLv3 compliant, the hypervisor must either allow the spiffy network card to whatever kernel is running, or deny it to all -- or allow/deny based on something other than a checksum of the actual code running.
It's a bit like Linux on the PS3. Fine, but what can you do with it?
RMS is the one out to destroy all proprietary software. I'm not. I don't want to destroy TiVo.
But anywhere TiVo gets to use my code, I get to go in and make changes. That's the deal.
So, I dare you, come up with a possible use for GPL code here that doesn't either let us easily circumvent DRM, or completely defeat the point of TiVo using GPL'd code in the first place.
No *nix desktop runs Exchange + Outlook, nor runs Word.
Not true. You can, in fact, get Office to run on a *nix desktop. You'd just be much better off retraining people for OpenOffice or KOffice.
Word should be trivial to replace, but it isn't. It is hard to make people change, and most managers aren't willing to listen to complains just to save a few thousand (yet most should).
Put that few thousand into a training program. Done.
It would be a much more valid argument if there were still really critical features that either office suite doesn't have, but the reality is, for 99% of what you need to do with an office suite, KOffice is fine. Then, for maybe.9%, OpenOffice will cover you. That leaves.01% that you need Office for, so just make one XP machine and turn RDP on, for those very rare cases.
Exchange + Outlook is even harder, because it not only has a calendar system but also make it available to the network
Trust me, Exchange + Outlook is a solved problem. If anything, the irony here is that I haven't been able to implement any of these at work, as there's not really any other good groupware clients for Windows, other than Outlook -- although most of the open servers can probably talk to Outlook. But if you can get them on Linux, I'd suggest Kontact and probably Kolab as the server.
It's even possible that KDE will be ported to Windows wholesale at some point, from what I've been reading. If that happens, just standardize on Kontact.
Does this mean that I have to log every bit ever stored in RAM, just in case a court wants some information I didn't think to log?
I hope it only means they can require me to start logging things, not that I can be guilty of destruction of evidence or some such crap for neglecting to log something they consider important.
Let's also consider that just because something is in RAM doesn't mean it's reasonable to read. Every bit of DRM'd media is, at some point, stored unencrypted in RAM. That doesn't mean it's easy to get at. Suppose Torrentspy was using a webserver that didn't support logging? Suppose they never logged to physical media anyway -- suppose the entire webserver was run off a livecd?
I realize none of the above is relevant to the current case. I'm just trying to figure out exactly what implications this ruling has in a broader sense.
It seems everyone here is assuming they have a physical monopoly over you, that you should sue them. While I think they deserve a class action lawsuit as much as anyone, I have to wonder, is there anyone else you can switch to?
If that happened to me, and I had any choice in the matter, I'd do both: Switch to another ISP, and sue Comcast for bait-and-switch. Suing them and then continuing to pay your bill every month seems a bit hypocritical...
Of course, it's possible I missed it and there is no alternative; you did mention "monopolies such as this"...
And furthermore, personally I think it would be very wise if I left the user to decide their username of the day. If I create an app i do not trust user input. So I am not going to let him tell what his name is and where his home dir is located. It is going to break things far to easily. It even has security implications.
I really, really fail to see how any of this has a security implication when we are talking about Skype learning where to store its ~/.skype dir or whatever.
I mean, yes, there are cases where you should not touch the environment. Accessing config files is not one of them; in fact, plenty of apps deliberately include commandline switches to change that kind of thing. Having the user change their name doesn't seem to be a security implication either, unless there's any parts of Skype that are setuid root, which would be pretty stupid.
However, good job for missing the point (like the other guy, who actually did give me a/. ID...)
Here is what I said:
Note also that I said "it could be innocent." I didn't even say that environment variables was a better or easier way. I just said that nobody has to read/etc/passwd to find the user's home directory, which is true.
You may be a programmer, but you really need to work on that reading comprehension. Why is it that every time I post an alternate way of doing something, everyone assumes I'm advocating it?
If I understand it, simply deleting the dependency information is enough to force Excel to recalculate it. But it always seems to get more complicated, somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
I make a living writing software for small businesses. They pay me for my time, but they generally don't care what I do with the software once I'm done. In fact, they like the idea of GPL-ing it, because then they get the advantage of improvements from the community.
Whatever their reasons, IBM has found a way in which they can make a profit, while employing people full-time to work on Linux.
Not only that, but do you ever wonder who pays Linus' rent? He's a millionaire by now... But here, take a look. If there was no money to be made in open source, why are these companies literally giving money to the main Linux developers?
Even in a business model based around supporting an open source project, there's plenty of room for developers and innovation.
So it's worse to tell you something insulting about yourself than to sue your ass into oblivion for no reason? That's not unethical, that's just stupid.
I actually don't have any problem with your ethics, except the part where you apparently can't or won't read my post. I did address every single issue you had, and you proceeded to ignore that and rehash the same arguments... except, oh, "tech support sucks" may have been a reference to support-driven business models.
If I'm any kind of a business owner, yes. Because it makes me money.
Because they get to pay all my legal fees for their lawsuit, plus any lost profits while I was away from my business, plus random amounts more that I'd sue them for, constituting "emotional trauma", assuming I can get away with it. Thus, the only reason I wouldn't want to do this is if I don't like money, or I have a paranoid fear of courtrooms.
It does, however, make me an easy mark for the same patent troll later on.
No, they would sue if you actually did something not allowed -- which would be defined as making something proprietary, which is a MUCH more lenient approach.
You're about 20 years too late for that argument -- Bill Gates already tried with his "Letter to Hobbyists". The flaw is that we are living proof that it is possible to make good, free software for a living. It's possible to do this even in many situations (IBM, Google, Canonical, Redhat, etc) where you don't dual-license it.
My example was to make a point. As I've said repeatedly, I don't want the entire world to be free. It's just that if I had to choose between an entirely free world and an entirely proprietary one, I'll take free every time.
But sure, go ahead. Hitler's goal was the betterment of mankind. I bet you and I share that goal. Does it make us Nazis?
No, it doesn't. That doesn't even pass the "duh" test. It's not Hitler's goal we disagree with, when you reduce it that far, it's his means -- by eliminating races he saw as bad influences.
I would very much like to think that anyone reading Slashdot has a very different worldview than Hitler, and that it's not just a technicality. And if you accept that, you must, by the same logic, accept that the goals of the FSF and the MPAA are very different, on more than just a technicality.
Isn't this exactly the kind of situation where they are so obviously a patent troll that they'd be required to pay the legal fees of the defendant? Can't you bring a ridiculous countersuit of your own, charging them for the "emotional trauma" of bringing you to court on such a BS charge?
The FSF believes that stealing is bad, but chooses to enforce that with purely legal means, not technological. Furthermore, their means put power back in the consumer's hands, taking it from the developer -- the MPAA/BSA/etc take power from the consumer, and brings it back to the developer/producer.
The MPAA, however, will use all of the means available to them -- technological, current legal, drafting new legislation, and completely pointless and unfounded lawsuits -- to achieve their goald of preventing people from stealing.
Think about that, for a second.
Think about the broader implications, too. I don't want free software to take over the world, but if it did, would it be so bad? You'd still be able to do anything you want with the code, including fork off projects of your own, so long as you kept the same license -- that license which forces you to redistribute your code, and keep the same license.
Compare that to a world run by the MPAA -- we'd all be running Tivos, Xboxes, etc. Computers would be outlawed, or they'd essentially be the same thing. And if you so much as think about doing anything you're not supposed to, we'll sue you.
I think we can all agree that killing is bad, and that murderers should be removed from society. But consider two ways of dealing with this: In one, anyone actually caught killing or attempting to kill someone is put in prison for life. In another, anyone caught with a gun, or even anything slightly pointy that could conceivably be a weapon, is shot on sight.
Same goal, but the means make all the difference.
Neither does RMS. He tells people they are unethical for writing proprietary software.
There are all kinds of ways of making a living, even in software, without going proprietary. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he's not as extreme as you're painting him here.
Neither do I. Neither does Linus.
I, however, can and do dictate how the world should be using my software. Just like you do, with your proprietary stuff you think you need to do to make a living.
You're a half-empty guy, right?
You may as well be saying that a bunch of religious zealots ruined Unix, and you can't use BSD either, for the same reason.
Cut the bullshit metaphors and tell me what problems you actually have with Linux licenses today.
Well, there are actually technical reasons. DOS is fucking stable as a rock, but it's kind of lacking in the features department...
The biggest reason for me, on the surface of it, is apt. Last I looked at BSD, you're still source-based.
As for documentation, there's also the Internet -- and what is condescending about info?
But to each his own. I will say that your reasons are likely at least as religious as mine -- can't stand the look on RMS' face or something.
My understanding of the GPLv3 is, you can do that as much as you like, so long as the modified code can still work exactly the same way with /dev/tivo. In other words, if I use my own yum repository, or if I repackage the whole thing for apt so I can run Ubuntu, /dev/tivo should still work exactly as before -- I shouldn't suddenly get static because I dared recompile.
If it's that open, I really don't mind as much. It still leaves me most of the system to hack around with, I just can't rip streams. I still wouldn't buy such a system, when I can rip streams just as easily with my MythTV box. But at least I wouldn't accuse TiVo of getting a free ride -- the TiVo UI could, in fact, be modified on a TiVo system, or ported to other, more open systems.
It would probably even let me use a TiVo to play media from other sources -- YouTube, for instance, or a ripped DVD. Just feed the unencrypted, un-DRM'd stream to /dev/tivo, and it plays it as normal. It would also let me add storage that's not something TiVo thought of -- I could store those encrypted streams on my desktop when I ran out of space on the tivo's hard drive, and stream them back over the network to play. Not as nice as having no DRM and just watching them anywhere, but a lot better than having a completely locked-down system.
Although I admit, you do seem to have answered my challenge -- there would still be a point to using Linux, and it looks like it could be done in such a way that we couldn't easily crack the DRM.
...So what?
Once again, I don't think it defeats the purpose here, which is to prevent them from distributing a GPL'd binary in such a way that I can't upload my own, nearly-identical GPL'd binary and expect it to work.
To be GPLv3 compliant, I expect they'd have to have that channel exist, and provide exactly the same data to the GPL'd program, no matter what code is actually running inside that program. In other words, the API should be consistent/modular -- if I call 'get_chunk_of_data_from_channel(3, *buffer)' from within any program running on that system, I should get the same result, no matter what the program.
You're not allowed to take a checksum of the running program, and use that as a basis for deciding if I get static or not. However, if you really want to deliver static to everyone, including your own GPL'd software, go right ahead.
That is true. It also means they gain less by using GPL'd code -- they now can't use it to handle IO, which Linux is very good at. They also can't use GPL'd decoders, meaning they have to license a proprietary one. And they can't use a GPL'd network stack, they need a BSD one.
Eventually, it means that they can only use GPL'd code for the UI; they have to implement the equivalent of a kernel underneath it. At this point, I don't think there's really any point to doing the hypervisor -- just do some BSD-derived kernel and run your GPL code under that.
Read the summary again -- it's a company that makes hypervisors. They obviously have a vested interest in selling hypervisors, and if they can sell them as a way to break GPLv3, so much the better.
Personally, I don't see this as "breaking" the GPLv3 at all. I don't mind that there are closed parts of a system, as long as I'm free to modify the open ones, and the open ones are sufficiently isolated from the closed ones.
It's a bit like porting Firefox to Windows. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
A working example of what this means.
Of course, to me, it means not buying a PS3, and not bothering to put Linux on it if I did. What's the point, if it's restricted from touching anything interesting? But it is nice to know that, unlike the pathetic PS2 "linux", I can run any distro that's bothered to port itself.
Y'know, you could just choose not to circumvent the licensing problems. You could just use code which you can get under a license that lets you do what you want with it. Or you could *gasp* write your own code! What a concept!
And at the risk of sounding petty, they started it. The root of this problem is not the GPLv3, it's DRM and Tivoization. I run a Linux machine, and I use it to view plenty of media which is either un-DRM'd or easily cracked (DVDs) -- and I require absolutely no VMs to do this.
To be perfectly honest, the legalese does not have to dictate the engineering choice here. You could simply make an engineering choice to use an open platform. No engineer in their right mind would use DRM as an engineering choice -- we all know it doesn't work, doesn't even slow the real pirates down much. If you're forced to implement something like this, realize that it is, in fact, a legal choice that someone made to force DRM on you.
That is what GPL does. Nothing more, nothing less.
The only difference is, GPLv3 closes some loopholes in which people could take GPLv2 and not actually give back to the community. They would give you the code, but you couldn't actually do anything with it.
It would still be "hippocracy". We don't call it "democraticy", do we?
Maybe it has something to do with doctors, though? The Hippocratic oath?
So why would that bother you? I certainly think "do no harm" is a noble goal, and not incompatible with the goals of the GPL!
Read my sig.
The goal of GPL isn't to prevent TiVo from implementing DRM, or to release it to the community. (I'm not even sure what you mean by "release their DRM" -- do you have the slightest clue what you're talking about?)
The goal of the GPL is to prevent TiVo from getting a free ride with our code that we pour blood, sweat, and tears into.
If you want to write DRM, fine. If you want to write code that murders children, go right ahead. I don't agree with it, but I certainly can't stop you with a license.
But if you think I'm going to write the code for you, for free, to enable you to do something I disagree with so strongly, you're dumber than I thought.
For this to be GPLv3 compliant, the hypervisor must either allow the spiffy network card to whatever kernel is running, or deny it to all -- or allow/deny based on something other than a checksum of the actual code running.
It's a bit like Linux on the PS3. Fine, but what can you do with it?
RMS is the one out to destroy all proprietary software. I'm not. I don't want to destroy TiVo.
But anywhere TiVo gets to use my code, I get to go in and make changes. That's the deal.
So, I dare you, come up with a possible use for GPL code here that doesn't either let us easily circumvent DRM, or completely defeat the point of TiVo using GPL'd code in the first place.
Not true. You can, in fact, get Office to run on a *nix desktop. You'd just be much better off retraining people for OpenOffice or KOffice.
Put that few thousand into a training program. Done.
It would be a much more valid argument if there were still really critical features that either office suite doesn't have, but the reality is, for 99% of what you need to do with an office suite, KOffice is fine. Then, for maybe .9%, OpenOffice will cover you. That leaves .01% that you need Office for, so just make one XP machine and turn RDP on, for those very rare cases.
Gosh, that's never been done before.
Now, if only we had a way to share them...
Trust me, Exchange + Outlook is a solved problem. If anything, the irony here is that I haven't been able to implement any of these at work, as there's not really any other good groupware clients for Windows, other than Outlook -- although most of the open servers can probably talk to Outlook. But if you can get them on Linux, I'd suggest Kontact and probably Kolab as the server.
It's even possible that KDE will be ported to Windows wholesale at some point, from what I've been reading. If that happens, just standardize on Kontact.
The Steam version does, in fact, come with the same SecuROM bullshit that the physical game does. In fact, even the demo comes with it.
Does this mean that I have to log every bit ever stored in RAM, just in case a court wants some information I didn't think to log?
I hope it only means they can require me to start logging things, not that I can be guilty of destruction of evidence or some such crap for neglecting to log something they consider important.
Let's also consider that just because something is in RAM doesn't mean it's reasonable to read. Every bit of DRM'd media is, at some point, stored unencrypted in RAM. That doesn't mean it's easy to get at. Suppose Torrentspy was using a webserver that didn't support logging? Suppose they never logged to physical media anyway -- suppose the entire webserver was run off a livecd?
I realize none of the above is relevant to the current case. I'm just trying to figure out exactly what implications this ruling has in a broader sense.
Stop giving them ideas!
It seems everyone here is assuming they have a physical monopoly over you, that you should sue them. While I think they deserve a class action lawsuit as much as anyone, I have to wonder, is there anyone else you can switch to?
If that happened to me, and I had any choice in the matter, I'd do both: Switch to another ISP, and sue Comcast for bait-and-switch. Suing them and then continuing to pay your bill every month seems a bit hypocritical...
Of course, it's possible I missed it and there is no alternative; you did mention "monopolies such as this"...
First, let's address your issue:
I really, really fail to see how any of this has a security implication when we are talking about Skype learning where to store its ~/.skype dir or whatever.
I mean, yes, there are cases where you should not touch the environment. Accessing config files is not one of them; in fact, plenty of apps deliberately include commandline switches to change that kind of thing. Having the user change their name doesn't seem to be a security implication either, unless there's any parts of Skype that are setuid root, which would be pretty stupid.
However, good job for missing the point (like the other guy, who actually did give me a /. ID...)
Here is what I said:
You may be a programmer, but you really need to work on that reading comprehension. Why is it that every time I post an alternate way of doing something, everyone assumes I'm advocating it?
If I understand it, simply deleting the dependency information is enough to force Excel to recalculate it. But it always seems to get more complicated, somehow.
Here, let me highlight it for you, so you don't have to read the whole thing:
Cite me something out of the Qur'An that excuses any of what you just said. Or cite me something out of the Gospels that justifies the Crusades.