Since OpenVPN wasn't working on the Intel Macs (and this was about a year ago - yes it works fine now) we went with the Cisco VPN.
Did it end up being harder to support the Cisco VPN for the Linux guys than it would have been to simply run two VPN solutions?
(Also, I think there is a Linux server that will talk to what Windows and Macs consider a "VPN" -- there is some feature of the OS that allows you to setup a VPN connection.)
Getting an 802.1x network to work was a pain - they were annoyed that they had to install and configure a supplicant.
Must've been awhile ago. When I installed Kubuntu for a friend recently, they just right-click on the networking icon in the system tray and choose to connect to a network, and they get all the config options right there (including WEP/WPA). I have no doubt the supplicant is still under the hood, but it's been made at least as transparent and easy to use as on Windows, and maybe as much as Macs.
Now, I have more problems with hardware that blatantly isn't supported, but even there, the biggest problem has been Broadcom, and it's now at the point where you just need to slice out some firmware. Took awhile to figure out the first time, and I'm sure it would be a headache for you, too, but at this point, I can do it in about two minutes from a LiveCD, even.
Anyway, it sounds like it'd be a great place for me to work, so long as you're at least aware of it. If you use a Samba or IPP printer, I'm fine, but if you use some vendor-specific network printing protocol (they do exist!), and I have problems (Linux supports some of them anyway!), I'm definitely going to come to you. But of course, if I can't get something to work because my Beryl is crashing, I'll fix it myself.
At least I can fix it myself. On Windows, the best I can do if something goes wrong is a format.
i'm bloody sick of these articles submitted by linux geeks
It's relatively easy to change your preferences so you won't even see anything from the Linux section.
Alternatively, you could skim the headline and move on to the next story, instead of coming here and trolling about it.
(i'm one, so if you take this personal, go fsck yourself)
Then it wouldn't have killed you to actually read TFA and see that it's got nothing to do with hating Windows or Microsoft. Someone tried Linux, looks like it worked for them.
If your complaint is about a particular elitist Slashdot comment, go reply to that. Otherwise, shut the fsck up.
There is GOOD support out there for groupware systems other than Exchange, and some of those (I think) can interoperate with Outlook. But there's not complete Exchange interaction.
Still, I think it's included on the Kubuntu LiveCD -- or if not that, I can probably find a LiveCD that has it -- so you could try it out for a day, see how well it works? Then again, it probably takes a bit of tech savvy to get it working right, especially on a LiveCD...
I'm not sure, but I think this is a solved problem. I don't know if Kontact can connect to Exchange itself, but it can certainly connect to an open alternative, so we've got to be close, right?
Can't help you with Nortel VPN, though there are more than a few VPN projects for Linux. You may or may not be able to make Linux talk to it. You certainly could (in theory) create an OpenVPN server (there is a Windows client), but that would probably not go over well with management, especially given your other comment:
Not to mention the application I'm working on is strictly for Windows (despite being written in Java, go figure).
Sounds like a project in need of a managerial kick in the ass. Or is there actually a good reason for using Java instead of C# or something else Windows-centric?
I mean, probably too late now, but I have to wonder what Java has going for it other than WORA, or if you're actually planning to port it later.
I'd say you're less of a pain. You've got a secure system, so the admin doesn't have to worry about patching you -- you'll patch yourself if necessary, easily enough. You won't have spyware issues or program conflicts, meaning he won't have to come over to your computer to clean up the mess you've made.
And if you convince enough co-workers to switch, he'll have to learn a bit, but then he gets to admin Linux as well as Windows -- at a certain point, the extra work of knowing Linux is offset by how much less work it actually still is to manage a Linux network.
You can be the black sheep and avoid MS stuff, but look: you STILL have to synch with that MS server, STILL have to produce documents in MS format, STILL have to synch with MS print servers... And so on and so forth.
So by your reasoning, it would be a win for open source if the sysadmin switched the fileservers, print servers, auth servers, and so on over to Linux, and had people install the ODF plugin on their copies of Office?
I mean, I call that a win, but we've been doing shit like that for the past decade. The argument is never whether Linux is ready for the server -- Linux owns the server.
The argument is whether Linux is ready for the desktop.
Not only that, but you completely and utterly defeat the purpose of using OSS if you are forced to adapt to MS on every single turn.
Oh really?
So what is your brilliant alternative? Should this guy refuse to adapt to MS, and really be a black sheep in the office, so they force him to switch his computer back to Windows?
Besides, who's "slave" to whom? I'd say if you can completely avoid buying MS products for one workstation, without losing any functionality (including talking to MS products), that's forcing the MS products to work for you, not the other way around.
What's the advantage in open document format if you have to produce all documents in Word format anyways?
Because if the documents are anything you care about preserving, you still have them archived in ODF when Word support is dropped. In fact, you'll be able to read them 10 or 100 years from now with a new version of OpenOffice (or any number of other open word processors), and even export them to Word 2107, while your co-workers won't be able to read any of theirs.
Also, because then you prove that ODF can, in fact, replace Word as a storage format, which might inspire your co-workers, bosses, etc, to use the plugin to MS Office which stores documents as ODF.
And because even if the above don't happen right away, because you prove that you can interoperate, your co-workers will also be able to interoperate, so maybe one by one, you'll get people to switch, until the PHBs realize that it's possible to switch entirely -- at which point your department, or even the whole company, will be using Linux on the desktop, and only converting to Word when sharing with the outside world.
And finally, because to suggest anything else is to be just as arrogant and asinine as Microsoft is about their software. Basically, you're saying it would be better to insist everyone use OpenOffice than to include MS Office format support in OpenOffice. I want you to back up a bit and think about that.
And while you're at it, should we remove NTFS support from Linux?
As much as MS formats are bad, even you have to admit that MS software does a better job at following THEIR OWN formats than you can do at following THEIRS.
Not necessarily. In fact, OpenOffice does a much better job at reading very old formats than new versions of Word do -- and also does a good job at exporting for very old versions of Word, so if someone doesn't have Word2007, you can save the document as Word95 or Word6.0 for them.
the reason why Linux doesn't have a wide user base is because even though it is supposed to be the distro for noobs, it's still not user-friendly enough for the mass market.
You say this because you couldn't get partitioning to work. WTF?
Tell you what -- if you want to compare apples to apples, buy a Dell with Ubuntu pre-loaded. Or, if you're cheap, borrow a Geek to install it for you on a spare computer.
Then actually try it out -- yes, USE it, don't just try to install it. Actually, if you got as far as the partitioner, you could have done that anyway, as you're already in a LiveCD at that point.
And before you're done, borrow a Windows install CD -- any Windows, even Vista -- and see if it's any easier to repartition a Linux drive to make room for dual-boot Windows. I guarantee it will be harder, more frightening, more confusing, and probably not even possible.
if 100% compatibility with Excel macros is required, you're going to run Microsoft Excel, no matter what.
Is OpenOffice not 100% compatible with Excel macros?
I ask because I remember hearing that it (or some other open source project) was 100% feature-complete, compared to Excel.
Anyway, 100% compatibility is never required, because you don't use 100% of the capabilities of Excel macroes. What you want is 100% of the features I need (be they parts of Excel macroes or otherwise), and as OpenOffice gets better, more and more people are finding that threshold has been crossed for them.
Even if you have 95% compatibility, it can be enough. Consider if you had to use a spreadsheet once a day or once a month for a few minutes that didn't quite work properly in OpenOffice. I realize many people would instantly abandon ship for MS Office at the slightest sign of trouble, but if it was just the one spreadsheet, you could probably fix it to work in OpenOffice -- or, worst case, you run one copy of Microsoft Office on a terminal server somewhere, and let everyone run Linux on the desktop for everything else.
Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility.
Well, fucking DUH. I bet Windows is still far behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux when it comes to Linux compatibility, huh, Sherlock?
Last I checked, the RIAA has never ever gone after downloaders, only people sharing songs.
With most P2P networks, you share by default. With BitTorrent, you cannot download without sharing. So that distinction is swiftly becoming irrelevant.
For that purpose it doesn't matter much where the songs came from, since you certainly didn't buy the right to distribute them.
Fair enough, assuming they already know you were distributing. But first, no one's told me what evidence they had prior to this subpoena.
And second, if they're going after someone for merely having files on their hard drive, that's neither downloading nor sharing. The only way they can possibly make a case of this is if they have some other evidence which shows that the person did, in fact, download and/or share that media -- and if they have this evidence, they shouldn't need to subpoena the guy's hard drive, since they should already have enough to win.
you need something that'll negate their weak evidence.
I would have to see that evidence first. Often the "evidence" is a screenshot of a log in some program that may or may not work (but isn't made available to the court), and the digital version of that log has since been deleted, so we're left with one easily-photoshopped screenshot from a program we know nothing about (which might've been wrong).
In light of that:
a) It's not the song you claim it to be (most P2P networks have hash checks though)
In order to prove it's the song they claim it to be, they must have downloaded it themselves, which could be seen as a form of entrapment -- obviously whoever they are downloading it from commits a crime by uploading the file to the RIAA goon doing this, which they might not otherwise have committed.
b) It's not the correct IP address (the ISP must have made a mistake)
Doesn't have to be the ISP. It could be the hired goon who found the IP. Could have been the ISP. Could have been a bug in the software which was used. And the evidence could have been deliberately falsified in probably a dozen ways (photoshop, etc) -- really, it should count as somewhat less substantial than exactly one eyewitness account, and usually one eyewitness account isn't enough -- you want two or three, and some circumstantial evidence...
So, does reasonable doubt exist in civil cases? I think there's some pretty clear doubt here.
c) It's not any of my computers (open WiFi, guest using my network)
That works well enough, although I don't like to keep an open WiFi anyway.
d) I wasn't in control of the computer, a trojan must have done it
I'm not sure whether I want this to work or not. I guess all I really want is a consistant position, or at least a solid legal one.
People have been tried and convicted for crimes (cracking) they didn't commit, but rather, someone committed through their machine (a honeypot). At the same time, blame usually rests with ISPs when it's something like spam -- the whole ISP is added to a blacklist unless they start disconnecting the users who they're getting complaints about. Yet people seem to have no problem with ISPs deliberately intercepting traffic to shut down a botnet, or doing virus scanning on every incoming email, so that users don't have to be responsible to keep their computers clean.
What I would like is for us to decide once and for all whether a user is or is not responsible for what their computer does. If you assume they are responsible, stop holding their hand at the network level. If you assume people can't police their own computers, start believing it when someone tells you they didn't do it, and "some hacker" must have.
e) I wasn't in control of the computer, my friends/family/guests must have done it
I know I'm late to the discussion, and these have probably all been addressed somewhere, but I thought I'd bring them together, just combing TFA point by point:
iPod libraries: I don't know if iTunes allows you to do this, but it seems trivial to me to keep a music collection well sorted. It doesn't have to be separate, either, as there are certainly going to be things you both like. But when throwing together a playlist for jogging -- well, there's your answer, throw together a playlist, don't just throw it on shuffle through everything.
Screensaver: Simple solution, disable the screensaver and set your monitor to turn off after awhile. I can't actually think of a time when screensavers made more sense than simply turning the monitor off and saving power, and I'm not sure LCDs can burn in anyway.
Last name -- work this out on your own. It's not like this is something you'll be arguing about for years to come -- you knew about it before you said "I do."
Joint bank account just makes sense. Cheaper, and you have a combined credit rating. If you don't trust each other enough at least with money, you have bigger problems.
Email addresses -- I never got the point of a combined email address here. It only really made sense when only one member of the family knew how to use email. If you really have that many people wanting to send things to both of you, it's easy enough to set up a combined email address and have it forwarded to your personal accounts.
Online calendars -- I guess it depends on the calendar suite. I'm used to the iCal format and programs like Apple's iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, and KDE's KOrganizer. Here, you can simply have four calendars: his shared, his private, hers shared, hers private. So he would see his private, along with his & hers shared.
Blogs -- start a new combined blog if you like, but leave your old personal ones alone. Or link between all of them.
Closet space -- who cares? Let her have as much as she wants, and pack the guy's things away in storage. (Unless the guy is metro, in which case, I can't help you.)
TiVo space -- Buy more space for the TiVo, buy two, or better, setup a MythTV DVR that can burn DVDs. Then, if you need space for something, look through what's on there, delete some of yours, or archive some you don't think anyone will watch soon. That's assuming you really need to keep things for that long anyway.
Separate sign-ons, but a shared folder... Please. Both Windows and OS X come with some sort of shared folder setup by default, for logins on the same machine. I don't get how it could be any less complicated. Or, if one of you is tech savvy enough, setup that MythTV box as a fileserver, and put your photos on there.
Netflix -- Either have separate Netflix accounts, or split it 50/50 -- Netflix actually allows separate queues now, basically doing that for you. Or better, start watching some of each other's DVDs. You might be surprised.
Automatic sign-ons to Amazon and such, resulting in you accidentally using your spouse's account for something -- easy as having separate accounts, or even separate computers. Computers are cheap nowdays, and it's nice to not have to wait to get online.
Catching cheating by reading logs and emails? That wasn't a marriage to begin with, then. Sharing anything won't help, anyway -- what's to stop your spouse from having their own secret Gmail address, for instance?
Granting access to each others email as a way of showing trust? Maybe. I've always found that even among people who are reasonably competent with computers, and who I trust implicitly, it's best to not grant access -- or if I have access, to not use it. But I'm not sure I've ever reacted well to the "but don't you trust me?" question.
Lack of intimacy? The suggestion here is that tastes are kept locked in a computer, instead of visible on a bookshelf. It's lunacy -- like I said, nothing's stopping you from watching that Netflix rental together, or
Could the FSF possibly have done better than they did?
I'm not sure we'd want them to have it retroactively apply, but for her to say "it's not going to be an effective strategy" sort of implies that there might be an effective strategy somewhere.
What evidence (if any) does the RIAA have on this person?
(None? Yeah, I thought so. Wouldn't exactly be uncommon.)
But really, it just strikes me as bizarre the amount of work they're requiring the defendant to do -- they are basically asking the defendant to investigate themself.
Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn't be worried. I'd simply turn in a bunch of sound files and say I don't remember where I ripped them from, or where the physical CD went. Because under ordinary US law, it would then be the burden of the plaintiff to prove that those particular files did not belong to me. But this isn't ordinary US law, this is bought-and-paid-for RIAA law.
I'm certainly happy to not have to be paying for Windows. I'm not happy that others are being robbed blind for something I get for free. I'm especially not happy when I end up paying for that indirectly -- when I buy a laptop, for instance (it's only in the past year or two that it's started to get easy to buy a Linux laptop, or at least one without Windows or OS X). Or when I go to a university which gives me a free copy of Windows, Visual Studio, etc -- that has to be costing them something, which means it's either coming out of my tuition or my tax dollars.
In any case, your statement is nonsensical. Suppose I really hated Linux, but was driven to it because of the price tag. In that case, I'd say I'd be losing. Kind of like someone who can't afford to eat properly ends up living on ramen -- I like ramen, but most people consider that a lose.
As it is, I'm driven to Linux for many reasons other than price, and if it's cheaper, so much the better, but that's just me.
Could Micorosft sustain what it is currently doing if the price of Vista were the same everywhere as it is in China?
I think they could.
Especially given that they do, on new computers. Oh sure, most of them are Home Basic, but most people don't care -- they have to figure they're going to be making most of their money off of Home Basic anyway, at least as far as the end-user is concerned.
Irrelevant. My 200 mhz Linux server would have smoke pouring out of it from the spellchecking alone. It wouldn't even be able to think about the contextual ads.
Again, I don't think SSL is a huge performance issue compared to everything else they're doing, especially when you can so easily throw hardware at the problem -- it actually doesn't cost that much to buy a device which is dedicated to crypto. I know there's at least one network card which does ipsec at the hardware level.
I'm a bit confused as to why it's OK to go from one device to one device (copying), but not from one device to many, even when they are all owned by the same person.
I mean, is it just me, or is this really damned obvious...
It's not about the devices, it's about the people. One person to many people is not allowed. Devices don't even need to be mentioned in that debate.
All you have to do is forget to type it manually just once and bam, plaintext.
Or you could bookmark it, but yeah, I agree.
At the very least, they could have the first view not actually show the contents of the inbox, so when you log in insecurely by mistake, you can switch to secure without actually compromising anything.
Nobody sniffed an email being written. What they did was sniff the session cookie, and then proceed to hijack his session. This means that if you login insecurely by mistake, and someone grabs that cookie, it doesn't matter if you switch to secure, because they can still use that cookie to pretend to be you.
Think of it like this: It's not like looking over someone's shoulder while they're using Gmail. It's like grabbing their username and password with a keylogger, and then checking out their account in your own sweet time.
However, if you're quick, you can probably logoff and back on before they get anything. Also, it's not as bad as if they actually had your password, because if they had that, they could actually change your password.
People continue to use Windows based on the user-base: there are more programs written for Windows than for any other operating system, and these programs are both advanced and user-friendly.
Right. And this is a monopoly.
No one will use any other OS unless they can be sure all of their needs are met by programs running on that OS. And even then, said alternative OS must be enough better than Windows to convince them to train a bit (or eliminate that training), and to overcome that feeling of dread that someday, there will be some program that they absolutely can't live without that only runs on Windows.
I suppose my question should be something along the lines of, why hasn't more been done about Microsoft and Windows? I know why people use Windows, but the free market alone is not enough here, because as you've demonstrated, Windows could really, really suck (and did, until XP or so) and people would still use it, because for many people, alternatives simply don't exist.
We could accept Microsoft as a monopoly, but I do believe monopolies need to be regulated as such. We don't allow utility companies to charge insanely high rates, because they have a monopoly -- you can't easily switch to another utility company. Even though the post office has competition, its rates are fixed, because it has the blessing of the US government to be the one true postal service.
Linux on the desktop is much better than it was even 2 years ago, but for the average consumer...
If you said this even 2 years ago, it might have been true. Not anymore.
At least, I'd challenge you to come up with one major problem that the average consumer will run into that isn't directly a result of Microsoft's dominance.
...it is much more difficult to overcome even simple problems than with Windows.
Wrong again -- for the average consumer, it is impossible to overcome even simple problems. The difference is, with Windows, you take your simple problems to the local GeekSquad, or to a friend -- and if it's GeekSquad, it'll cost you. With Linux, you take them online, to a forum or a chatroom, and get them solved for free.
Yes, I know about support contracts with, for instance, Dell. But that doesn't really apply either -- the Ubuntu machines Dell sells come with support contracts also.
Also, the Linux marketing team...well, there really isn't one. At least not one that pays for TV timeslots which is where the masses would end up seeing it.
Maybe not anymore...
But really, where have you been? I seem to remember that Firefox got a New York Times ad. I know that Linux itself had a whole ad campaign from IBM, including a couple during the Superbowl.
The thing is, I don't think blind advertising works as well as word-of-mouth. If I randomly hand out fliers about Linux, people might download it, try it, run into a problem, and give up. If I actually talk to some friends about it, I can be there as tech support if something goes wrong -- hell, I will be anyway, but at least I can solve Linux problems, whereas with Windows, I help them find their serial number or something so they can call Dell.
Subscriptions? Sure. That's what cable is (though honestly, for the 3 shows I watch, I'd just as soon pay by the episode).
I wouldn't mind either paying by the episode or paying a subscription, I just want the same level of service I already get from pirated movies and TV shows.
Specifically:
Downloads. I'd like to rent things, too, but often, I'd rather just click a few places, and have it by the next day, no need to go anywhere or remember to send it back.
Once it's mine, it's mine, as long as I care to keep backups. If I don't keep a backup, I can download it again, but no fee for downloading the same thing twice. Subscriptions? Fine, but I can tape TV shows and watch
Novels are all about letting the user interpret he prose, in fact they rely upon it.
Novels are also about expression. They are about expressing a setting, a mood, a philosophy, or a character -- or any number of other things. And certainly, most novels are intended to be interpreted in more or less the same way -- 1984 is meant to make us fear a totalitarian government, and take steps to prevent one. Neuromancer and Snow Crash show us what a high-tech future might look like. And so on.
And there are novels which are never interpreted the same way, and are perhaps difficult or impossible to interpret at all -- Slaughterhouse Five, for instance.
The web is not a distribution channel for prose however at least not in it's entirety. Attention spans are way too short for using words to communicate on the web.
I suppose it depends what you want to communicate.
For example, Myspace allows people to communicate with colors and music. Many pages instantly scream "I'm a pathetic attention-whoring emo. Friend me! Please?"
But the vast majority of content I actually want to look at is either pure text, or text and pictures (or video, or something). It's not big, bold, orange text, or gentle, flowing fuschia text, or clean, rounded borders with crisp brushed-metal buttons. Those are nice decorations, to be sure, but they are NOT the content.
And if I don't have the particular font you need, or I'm running on a display too small for your borders to look clean and rounded, you should degrade gracefully -- I should still be able to read your prose, or look at your pictures. Otherwise, I'm going somewhere else.
They simply won't take the time to read a lengthy document unless they have first been captivated by a first impression that grabs their interest.
I'm unusual, but a first impression that grabs my interest is a headline that says something interesting. It also helps to have decent grammar (know the difference between its and it's), and in general, to sound like a moron.
FYI, bold brightly color text may not be appealing to you but it does grab your attention (though with a negative impact)
Yes, it does. And especially if it's animated in any way.
But you can have normal-sized black text on a normal white background, and be saying something interesting, and I might actually notice -- for example, look in the lower-right of Slashdot and there's a one-line fortune cookie. You can also have the biggest and best design in the world, but if you start out with "omg lol we rulez", it's just that much more annoying.
And the first time I see a particular animated web ad is always the last, because I adblock it. Getting my attention is good, but forceably and annoyingly grabbing my attention and CPU cycles buys you nothing. Recently I've come across a firm called "ad-trusion", which pretty much sums up my distaste of traditional advertising.
The Betamax case established that time-shifting is fair use. We've since established a concept of space-shifting as well.
It's still technically decided on a case-by-case basis, but I do think there's enough precedent to say that if copying a CD you own to your iPod is fair use, then copying said CD to your computer, then to another computer, and then to your stereo system (yes, some plug directly into the network) is also fair use.
I think the only real legal argument against such use is that in some cases (think DVDs here), you must crack the copy-protection first. But at this point, common sense does show that there's an ulterior motive for preventing that -- Sony wants to be able to sell UMDs, so you're not legally allowed to rip a DVD, put it on a memory stick, and play it on your PSP. It doesn't take much of a conspiracy theory to point out that either the motive was always to restrict in order to charge more, or that the recording/movie industry is a bunch of morons, and probably both -- DRM cannot work, and VCRs actually helped the industry more than it hurt.
Well, it's called MobileTerminal.app, and the iPhone runs a Darwin kernel. So, just guessing, but it would seem to be a mobile version of Terminal.app on normal OS X.
Meaning, it's "a console window for the iPhone's operating system", yes.
Which also means that if the iPhone had a serial port, you could talk to that with MobileTerminal. Or if you want SSH or Telnet, those clients will run in MobileTerminal.
What I'd like to see is people relax a little bit. The reality is that, even if the tech was there to could charge people per media exchange, you likely wouldn't be earning any more money: you'd be out of customers.
First, the tech is there now, and has been for several years. There's just no real way to make it interoperable.
Second, this is a Libertarian philosophy, and it doesn't really hold up. The free market does not always sort itself out. If it did, why does everyone still use Windows?
In any case, my examples of CDs and DVDs are pretty clear: Customers are, in fact, willing to put up with ridiculous DRM schemes that prevent them from watching the movie, because they expect technology to not work all the time. Their expectations actually are that low, and their tolerance is even higher with new tech -- HDMI should, by all respects, be more reliable than DVI or RCA. But it isn't, because of HDCP. But nobody cares, because it's new, and you expect this sort of thing, so they just wait for it to be "fixed".
If they change the rules, talk to someone who can change them back, or stop using their product.
Again, I'd really, really like to.
But ultimately, this means I have to stop using all legitimate media, and only use pirated media (or nothing at all). This is because I have no reasonable way to distinguish between actual CDs and CDs that are designed not to play properly in computers (and some car stereo systems), or actual DVDs and DVDs that are designed not to play in computers (and some more expensive DVD players) other than to actually buy the product (or rent it), bring it home, and try it. At which point they already have my money, even if it doesn't work.
Pirated media, however, always works. I'm far more likely to have trouble playing a physical DVD due to copy protection bullshit than I am to be caught for copyright infringement, and any movie I download is pretty much guaranteed to play every time. The only time I haven't been able to get one to play was that my computer was too slow to actually play 1080p HD in realtime, so I re-encoded it.
If I could pay for a better experience, I would. Unfortunately, the "free market" doesn't allow me to.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough. The question I'd have about Automatix is, does it actually provide those links for you?
Not saying that I agree that providing links alone should be a criminal act, but it's certainly a step farther than Firefox or wget.
Did it end up being harder to support the Cisco VPN for the Linux guys than it would have been to simply run two VPN solutions?
(Also, I think there is a Linux server that will talk to what Windows and Macs consider a "VPN" -- there is some feature of the OS that allows you to setup a VPN connection.)
Must've been awhile ago. When I installed Kubuntu for a friend recently, they just right-click on the networking icon in the system tray and choose to connect to a network, and they get all the config options right there (including WEP/WPA). I have no doubt the supplicant is still under the hood, but it's been made at least as transparent and easy to use as on Windows, and maybe as much as Macs.
Now, I have more problems with hardware that blatantly isn't supported, but even there, the biggest problem has been Broadcom, and it's now at the point where you just need to slice out some firmware. Took awhile to figure out the first time, and I'm sure it would be a headache for you, too, but at this point, I can do it in about two minutes from a LiveCD, even.
Anyway, it sounds like it'd be a great place for me to work, so long as you're at least aware of it. If you use a Samba or IPP printer, I'm fine, but if you use some vendor-specific network printing protocol (they do exist!), and I have problems (Linux supports some of them anyway!), I'm definitely going to come to you. But of course, if I can't get something to work because my Beryl is crashing, I'll fix it myself.
At least I can fix it myself. On Windows, the best I can do if something goes wrong is a format.
It's relatively easy to change your preferences so you won't even see anything from the Linux section.
Alternatively, you could skim the headline and move on to the next story, instead of coming here and trolling about it.
Then it wouldn't have killed you to actually read TFA and see that it's got nothing to do with hating Windows or Microsoft. Someone tried Linux, looks like it worked for them.
If your complaint is about a particular elitist Slashdot comment, go reply to that. Otherwise, shut the fsck up.
It's being worked on.
There is GOOD support out there for groupware systems other than Exchange, and some of those (I think) can interoperate with Outlook. But there's not complete Exchange interaction.
Still, I think it's included on the Kubuntu LiveCD -- or if not that, I can probably find a LiveCD that has it -- so you could try it out for a day, see how well it works? Then again, it probably takes a bit of tech savvy to get it working right, especially on a LiveCD...
I'm not sure, but I think this is a solved problem. I don't know if Kontact can connect to Exchange itself, but it can certainly connect to an open alternative, so we've got to be close, right?
Can't help you with Nortel VPN, though there are more than a few VPN projects for Linux. You may or may not be able to make Linux talk to it. You certainly could (in theory) create an OpenVPN server (there is a Windows client), but that would probably not go over well with management, especially given your other comment:
Sounds like a project in need of a managerial kick in the ass. Or is there actually a good reason for using Java instead of C# or something else Windows-centric?
I mean, probably too late now, but I have to wonder what Java has going for it other than WORA, or if you're actually planning to port it later.
I'd say you're less of a pain. You've got a secure system, so the admin doesn't have to worry about patching you -- you'll patch yourself if necessary, easily enough. You won't have spyware issues or program conflicts, meaning he won't have to come over to your computer to clean up the mess you've made.
And if you convince enough co-workers to switch, he'll have to learn a bit, but then he gets to admin Linux as well as Windows -- at a certain point, the extra work of knowing Linux is offset by how much less work it actually still is to manage a Linux network.
So by your reasoning, it would be a win for open source if the sysadmin switched the fileservers, print servers, auth servers, and so on over to Linux, and had people install the ODF plugin on their copies of Office?
I mean, I call that a win, but we've been doing shit like that for the past decade. The argument is never whether Linux is ready for the server -- Linux owns the server.
The argument is whether Linux is ready for the desktop.
Oh really?
So what is your brilliant alternative? Should this guy refuse to adapt to MS, and really be a black sheep in the office, so they force him to switch his computer back to Windows?
Besides, who's "slave" to whom? I'd say if you can completely avoid buying MS products for one workstation, without losing any functionality (including talking to MS products), that's forcing the MS products to work for you, not the other way around.
Because if the documents are anything you care about preserving, you still have them archived in ODF when Word support is dropped. In fact, you'll be able to read them 10 or 100 years from now with a new version of OpenOffice (or any number of other open word processors), and even export them to Word 2107, while your co-workers won't be able to read any of theirs.
Also, because then you prove that ODF can, in fact, replace Word as a storage format, which might inspire your co-workers, bosses, etc, to use the plugin to MS Office which stores documents as ODF.
And because even if the above don't happen right away, because you prove that you can interoperate, your co-workers will also be able to interoperate, so maybe one by one, you'll get people to switch, until the PHBs realize that it's possible to switch entirely -- at which point your department, or even the whole company, will be using Linux on the desktop, and only converting to Word when sharing with the outside world.
And finally, because to suggest anything else is to be just as arrogant and asinine as Microsoft is about their software. Basically, you're saying it would be better to insist everyone use OpenOffice than to include MS Office format support in OpenOffice. I want you to back up a bit and think about that.
And while you're at it, should we remove NTFS support from Linux?
Not necessarily. In fact, OpenOffice does a much better job at reading very old formats than new versions of Word do -- and also does a good job at exporting for very old versions of Word, so if someone doesn't have Word2007, you can save the document as Word95 or Word6.0 for them.
You say this because you couldn't get partitioning to work. WTF?
Tell you what -- if you want to compare apples to apples, buy a Dell with Ubuntu pre-loaded. Or, if you're cheap, borrow a Geek to install it for you on a spare computer.
Then actually try it out -- yes, USE it, don't just try to install it. Actually, if you got as far as the partitioner, you could have done that anyway, as you're already in a LiveCD at that point.
And before you're done, borrow a Windows install CD -- any Windows, even Vista -- and see if it's any easier to repartition a Linux drive to make room for dual-boot Windows. I guarantee it will be harder, more frightening, more confusing, and probably not even possible.
Is OpenOffice not 100% compatible with Excel macros?
I ask because I remember hearing that it (or some other open source project) was 100% feature-complete, compared to Excel.
Anyway, 100% compatibility is never required, because you don't use 100% of the capabilities of Excel macroes. What you want is 100% of the features I need (be they parts of Excel macroes or otherwise), and as OpenOffice gets better, more and more people are finding that threshold has been crossed for them.
Even if you have 95% compatibility, it can be enough. Consider if you had to use a spreadsheet once a day or once a month for a few minutes that didn't quite work properly in OpenOffice. I realize many people would instantly abandon ship for MS Office at the slightest sign of trouble, but if it was just the one spreadsheet, you could probably fix it to work in OpenOffice -- or, worst case, you run one copy of Microsoft Office on a terminal server somewhere, and let everyone run Linux on the desktop for everything else.
Well, fucking DUH. I bet Windows is still far behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux when it comes to Linux compatibility, huh, Sherlock?
With most P2P networks, you share by default. With BitTorrent, you cannot download without sharing. So that distinction is swiftly becoming irrelevant.
Fair enough, assuming they already know you were distributing. But first, no one's told me what evidence they had prior to this subpoena.
And second, if they're going after someone for merely having files on their hard drive, that's neither downloading nor sharing. The only way they can possibly make a case of this is if they have some other evidence which shows that the person did, in fact, download and/or share that media -- and if they have this evidence, they shouldn't need to subpoena the guy's hard drive, since they should already have enough to win.
I would have to see that evidence first. Often the "evidence" is a screenshot of a log in some program that may or may not work (but isn't made available to the court), and the digital version of that log has since been deleted, so we're left with one easily-photoshopped screenshot from a program we know nothing about (which might've been wrong).
In light of that:
In order to prove it's the song they claim it to be, they must have downloaded it themselves, which could be seen as a form of entrapment -- obviously whoever they are downloading it from commits a crime by uploading the file to the RIAA goon doing this, which they might not otherwise have committed.
Doesn't have to be the ISP. It could be the hired goon who found the IP. Could have been the ISP. Could have been a bug in the software which was used. And the evidence could have been deliberately falsified in probably a dozen ways (photoshop, etc) -- really, it should count as somewhat less substantial than exactly one eyewitness account, and usually one eyewitness account isn't enough -- you want two or three, and some circumstantial evidence...
So, does reasonable doubt exist in civil cases? I think there's some pretty clear doubt here.
That works well enough, although I don't like to keep an open WiFi anyway.
I'm not sure whether I want this to work or not. I guess all I really want is a consistant position, or at least a solid legal one.
People have been tried and convicted for crimes (cracking) they didn't commit, but rather, someone committed through their machine (a honeypot). At the same time, blame usually rests with ISPs when it's something like spam -- the whole ISP is added to a blacklist unless they start disconnecting the users who they're getting complaints about. Yet people seem to have no problem with ISPs deliberately intercepting traffic to shut down a botnet, or doing virus scanning on every incoming email, so that users don't have to be responsible to keep their computers clean.
What I would like is for us to decide once and for all whether a user is or is not responsible for what their computer does. If you assume they are responsible, stop holding their hand at the network level. If you assume people can't police their own computers, start believing it when someone tells you they didn't do it, and "some hacker" must have.
I know I'm late to the discussion, and these have probably all been addressed somewhere, but I thought I'd bring them together, just combing TFA point by point:
Could the FSF possibly have done better than they did?
I'm not sure we'd want them to have it retroactively apply, but for her to say "it's not going to be an effective strategy" sort of implies that there might be an effective strategy somewhere.
What evidence (if any) does the RIAA have on this person?
(None? Yeah, I thought so. Wouldn't exactly be uncommon.)
But really, it just strikes me as bizarre the amount of work they're requiring the defendant to do -- they are basically asking the defendant to investigate themself.
Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn't be worried. I'd simply turn in a bunch of sound files and say I don't remember where I ripped them from, or where the physical CD went. Because under ordinary US law, it would then be the burden of the plaintiff to prove that those particular files did not belong to me. But this isn't ordinary US law, this is bought-and-paid-for RIAA law.
I gain, others lose.
I'm certainly happy to not have to be paying for Windows. I'm not happy that others are being robbed blind for something I get for free. I'm especially not happy when I end up paying for that indirectly -- when I buy a laptop, for instance (it's only in the past year or two that it's started to get easy to buy a Linux laptop, or at least one without Windows or OS X). Or when I go to a university which gives me a free copy of Windows, Visual Studio, etc -- that has to be costing them something, which means it's either coming out of my tuition or my tax dollars.
In any case, your statement is nonsensical. Suppose I really hated Linux, but was driven to it because of the price tag. In that case, I'd say I'd be losing. Kind of like someone who can't afford to eat properly ends up living on ramen -- I like ramen, but most people consider that a lose.
As it is, I'm driven to Linux for many reasons other than price, and if it's cheaper, so much the better, but that's just me.
I think they could.
Especially given that they do, on new computers. Oh sure, most of them are Home Basic, but most people don't care -- they have to figure they're going to be making most of their money off of Home Basic anyway, at least as far as the end-user is concerned.
Businesses are another thing, though.
Irrelevant. My 200 mhz Linux server would have smoke pouring out of it from the spellchecking alone. It wouldn't even be able to think about the contextual ads.
Again, I don't think SSL is a huge performance issue compared to everything else they're doing, especially when you can so easily throw hardware at the problem -- it actually doesn't cost that much to buy a device which is dedicated to crypto. I know there's at least one network card which does ipsec at the hardware level.
I'm a bit confused as to why it's OK to go from one device to one device (copying), but not from one device to many, even when they are all owned by the same person.
I mean, is it just me, or is this really damned obvious...
It's not about the devices, it's about the people. One person to many people is not allowed. Devices don't even need to be mentioned in that debate.
And you really think the "most severe punishment" would never change?
Or you could bookmark it, but yeah, I agree.
Nobody sniffed an email being written. What they did was sniff the session cookie, and then proceed to hijack his session. This means that if you login insecurely by mistake, and someone grabs that cookie, it doesn't matter if you switch to secure, because they can still use that cookie to pretend to be you.
Think of it like this: It's not like looking over someone's shoulder while they're using Gmail. It's like grabbing their username and password with a keylogger, and then checking out their account in your own sweet time.
However, if you're quick, you can probably logoff and back on before they get anything. Also, it's not as bad as if they actually had your password, because if they had that, they could actually change your password.
Right. And this is a monopoly.
No one will use any other OS unless they can be sure all of their needs are met by programs running on that OS. And even then, said alternative OS must be enough better than Windows to convince them to train a bit (or eliminate that training), and to overcome that feeling of dread that someday, there will be some program that they absolutely can't live without that only runs on Windows.
I suppose my question should be something along the lines of, why hasn't more been done about Microsoft and Windows? I know why people use Windows, but the free market alone is not enough here, because as you've demonstrated, Windows could really, really suck (and did, until XP or so) and people would still use it, because for many people, alternatives simply don't exist.
We could accept Microsoft as a monopoly, but I do believe monopolies need to be regulated as such. We don't allow utility companies to charge insanely high rates, because they have a monopoly -- you can't easily switch to another utility company. Even though the post office has competition, its rates are fixed, because it has the blessing of the US government to be the one true postal service.
If you said this even 2 years ago, it might have been true. Not anymore.
At least, I'd challenge you to come up with one major problem that the average consumer will run into that isn't directly a result of Microsoft's dominance.
Wrong again -- for the average consumer, it is impossible to overcome even simple problems. The difference is, with Windows, you take your simple problems to the local GeekSquad, or to a friend -- and if it's GeekSquad, it'll cost you. With Linux, you take them online, to a forum or a chatroom, and get them solved for free.
Yes, I know about support contracts with, for instance, Dell. But that doesn't really apply either -- the Ubuntu machines Dell sells come with support contracts also.
Maybe not anymore...
But really, where have you been? I seem to remember that Firefox got a New York Times ad. I know that Linux itself had a whole ad campaign from IBM, including a couple during the Superbowl.
The thing is, I don't think blind advertising works as well as word-of-mouth. If I randomly hand out fliers about Linux, people might download it, try it, run into a problem, and give up. If I actually talk to some friends about it, I can be there as tech support if something goes wrong -- hell, I will be anyway, but at least I can solve Linux problems, whereas with Windows, I help them find their serial number or something so they can call Dell.
I wouldn't mind either paying by the episode or paying a subscription, I just want the same level of service I already get from pirated movies and TV shows.
Specifically:
Fair enough, but that's nitpicking.
What I mean, of course, is that I can buy a movie (while checking that the label calls it a 'DVD'), and it will play on anything.
Novels are also about expression. They are about expressing a setting, a mood, a philosophy, or a character -- or any number of other things. And certainly, most novels are intended to be interpreted in more or less the same way -- 1984 is meant to make us fear a totalitarian government, and take steps to prevent one. Neuromancer and Snow Crash show us what a high-tech future might look like. And so on.
And there are novels which are never interpreted the same way, and are perhaps difficult or impossible to interpret at all -- Slaughterhouse Five, for instance.
I suppose it depends what you want to communicate.
For example, Myspace allows people to communicate with colors and music. Many pages instantly scream "I'm a pathetic attention-whoring emo. Friend me! Please?"
But the vast majority of content I actually want to look at is either pure text, or text and pictures (or video, or something). It's not big, bold, orange text, or gentle, flowing fuschia text, or clean, rounded borders with crisp brushed-metal buttons. Those are nice decorations, to be sure, but they are NOT the content.
And if I don't have the particular font you need, or I'm running on a display too small for your borders to look clean and rounded, you should degrade gracefully -- I should still be able to read your prose, or look at your pictures. Otherwise, I'm going somewhere else.
I'm unusual, but a first impression that grabs my interest is a headline that says something interesting. It also helps to have decent grammar (know the difference between its and it's), and in general, to sound like a moron.
Yes, it does. And especially if it's animated in any way.
But you can have normal-sized black text on a normal white background, and be saying something interesting, and I might actually notice -- for example, look in the lower-right of Slashdot and there's a one-line fortune cookie. You can also have the biggest and best design in the world, but if you start out with "omg lol we rulez", it's just that much more annoying.
And the first time I see a particular animated web ad is always the last, because I adblock it. Getting my attention is good, but forceably and annoyingly grabbing my attention and CPU cycles buys you nothing. Recently I've come across a firm called "ad-trusion", which pretty much sums up my distaste of traditional advertising.
The Betamax case established that time-shifting is fair use. We've since established a concept of space-shifting as well.
It's still technically decided on a case-by-case basis, but I do think there's enough precedent to say that if copying a CD you own to your iPod is fair use, then copying said CD to your computer, then to another computer, and then to your stereo system (yes, some plug directly into the network) is also fair use.
I think the only real legal argument against such use is that in some cases (think DVDs here), you must crack the copy-protection first. But at this point, common sense does show that there's an ulterior motive for preventing that -- Sony wants to be able to sell UMDs, so you're not legally allowed to rip a DVD, put it on a memory stick, and play it on your PSP. It doesn't take much of a conspiracy theory to point out that either the motive was always to restrict in order to charge more, or that the recording/movie industry is a bunch of morons, and probably both -- DRM cannot work, and VCRs actually helped the industry more than it hurt.
Well, it's called MobileTerminal.app, and the iPhone runs a Darwin kernel. So, just guessing, but it would seem to be a mobile version of Terminal.app on normal OS X.
Meaning, it's "a console window for the iPhone's operating system", yes.
Which also means that if the iPhone had a serial port, you could talk to that with MobileTerminal. Or if you want SSH or Telnet, those clients will run in MobileTerminal.
Could you explain this "interoperability exemption"?
It doesn't seem to be allowing anyone to legally ship a Linux distro with libdvdcss...
First, the tech is there now, and has been for several years. There's just no real way to make it interoperable.
Second, this is a Libertarian philosophy, and it doesn't really hold up. The free market does not always sort itself out. If it did, why does everyone still use Windows?
In any case, my examples of CDs and DVDs are pretty clear: Customers are, in fact, willing to put up with ridiculous DRM schemes that prevent them from watching the movie, because they expect technology to not work all the time. Their expectations actually are that low, and their tolerance is even higher with new tech -- HDMI should, by all respects, be more reliable than DVI or RCA. But it isn't, because of HDCP. But nobody cares, because it's new, and you expect this sort of thing, so they just wait for it to be "fixed".
Again, I'd really, really like to.
But ultimately, this means I have to stop using all legitimate media, and only use pirated media (or nothing at all). This is because I have no reasonable way to distinguish between actual CDs and CDs that are designed not to play properly in computers (and some car stereo systems), or actual DVDs and DVDs that are designed not to play in computers (and some more expensive DVD players) other than to actually buy the product (or rent it), bring it home, and try it. At which point they already have my money, even if it doesn't work.
Pirated media, however, always works. I'm far more likely to have trouble playing a physical DVD due to copy protection bullshit than I am to be caught for copyright infringement, and any movie I download is pretty much guaranteed to play every time. The only time I haven't been able to get one to play was that my computer was too slow to actually play 1080p HD in realtime, so I re-encoded it.
If I could pay for a better experience, I would. Unfortunately, the "free market" doesn't allow me to.