As soon as a structure usable to make money has been found, so many people exploit it that it instantaneously disappear. This is especially true when such structures are explained to the public and not kept ultra-secret in some bank basement.
The problem with the market is that the knowledge humans have about it modifies it.
As far as I see it, the main problem under MS-Windows is that software manufacturers want to "own" your computer.
Each time I interact with an MS-Windows machine, I am simply amazed by the number of splash screens which dont want to leave, of browsers which want to become my browser of choice, of ISP installation packages who just ignore the standard procedure and comes with some silly one, usually accompanied by an ugly non-standard interface with a "high-tech" look.
It really feels like they fight for a share of the PC. This is extremely annoying.
More generally I would say that non-Open-Source lead to sub-optimal softwares, result of the optimization of a cost function which includes not only the user interest but also the company's one. This has an impact not only in term of stupid DRM schemes, activation keys, forced update or striped features, but also in term of "invasion" of your desktop.
But all this, in fact, is not directly due to MS, but to the specificity of the Windows software-sphere I would say (which includes freewares, usually as annoying as commercial ones)
It may be a great news, but I wonder what a vote means then. I will not feel secure in the future if the same can happen when some GOOD decisions have been made. Does it mean that at any moment some heavy lobbying can change any vote ?
I have to admit I understand nothing to the EU system...
If you accept to denote real numbers with an infinity of 9 you have to face that the same number can be denoted in two different ways. It's why it is forbidden.
There is no more paradoxe in 0.999999... = 1 than in 0.33333... = 1/3
That's an excellent idea to protect the consumers from those low-quality divx encoded from a recorded movie. Soon, thanks to the MPAA, only excellent digital versions stolen directly in the studio will spread around. No more desappointing downloads!
Those guys have solved what I was personnaly considering as the only remaining weakness of p2p. Good.
I was amazed to see here in Switzerland a full page MS commercial claiming (in a nutshell) "Migration to Linux cost as much as upgrading to XP", with a couple of bar charts.
I can imagine the executive amazed, thinking "damn, one *can* migrate to Linux ?!"
What would be interesting is the volume per year since 1993, so that we could see if the growth rate has changed since BK. If I remember well, the volume has always increased a lot.
1/ Preventing a user from playing a song he bought on the device he wants is just unacceptable. Discussing with Apple here would be like discussing with people trying to steal you to keep your passeport and enough money for a cab. And what is this Fair use bullshit ?! YOU BOUGHT THE SONG FOR GOD'S SAKE !
2/ There is no "loop-hole". The infamous DMCA has no effect in India, period.
Isn't there all over the world laws that allow to study protocoles and write softwares required to inter-operate ? If I remember well even the DMCA in the US and the DMCA-like laws in the EU allow such things.
How can you prevent someone from writing the software required to use the hard-disks on a GNU/Linux box from a Windows machine ? Then, how can you ask for money for that ?
I do not know about the % of the world. But you are pessimistic beyond reason if you think that a majority of MS-Windows user have not heard of Linux.
They may not know precisely that it can replace windows, they may not know how a recent linux with KDE or Gnome look like a civilized computer (do not yell at me, I still use fvwm2), but they have definitely heard of Linux the crypto-anarcho-leftist operating system which bothers MS.
Despite being a very technical subject, Linux still has some political and ideological dimensions which makes journalists (at least in France) write about it.
Hopefully if you were manipulating serious figures, you'd be using serious tools and serious techniques, starting with redundant cross-checking of any calculations.
For many people, MS stuff is serious.
If the bug's been known for years and you still let your business depend on its non-existence, it's your own fault if you kill the business. Risk management is a key skill in running any commercial organisation, and you failed at step one: doing your homework.
And if the bug has been known by people who sells and make software, not by me ? Am I supposed to be competent in everything ? I guess that from that line of reasonning, if tomorrow we learn that there is rat poison in coca cola and people making soda have been knowing it for years, I can't complain neither ?
Doing correct computations seems to me to be a huge benefit.
If I had to use MS-Excel to manipulate serious figures, for instance huge budgets, I wonder how well I would sleep. And if I had people under my responsability who manipulate serious numbers, I would ask them to prefere accuracy to spectacular pie-charts. Am I that weird ?
By the way, if your business goes into troubles because of MS-Excel bugs which have been well known for years, can you sue MS ? Of course, the EULA tells you you can't, but in the real world?
The odds to get caught when puting backdoors in auditable code are far higher than the odds to get caught when hiding backdoors in closed softwares. Thus, the potential gains are lower. This is why I want auditable code. This has nothing to do with *me* auditing it.
I know, it's subtle, don't feel ashame not to have got it at first.
There is no doubt it may help someone to break into your system if he has the source code or your OS and various deamons. Fortunately, when it's open-source, we can hope bugs allowing bad guys to break in may have been spotted by nice guys before and patched.
The real problem would be if only bad guys had your source code.... that would really suck. If for instance there was a leak of your source code on the internet, and of course only bad guys would look at it (because others do not give a shit) and thus you would get only the bad part of the opennes...
As far as I understand, the global idea is to add in the DNS (which is 'trustable' ?) a field to publish what IPs are legitimate mail-senders ? Won't DNS collapse if we statr to stuff them with this sort of information ? And is it really their role ? Or is the spam phenomenon so dramatic that this is considered as an exceptionnal measure ?
One can think IBM is "good" from a behaviorist point of view, even if the behavior is motivated not by ethic but by pragmatism (in that case, as far as I understand, IBM makes money selling hardware, not software, and preferes by far to rely on open-source which provides them with an incredible freedom).
My only concern in that context is the X-Box like hardwares which refuse to run non-signed softwares. With such schemes, IBM could just profit from open-source without giving back anything.
4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience
In term of irritativness, maybe. But I can't help thinking speakers who know their talk "by heart" tend to forget the critical points where they may lose their auditory.
I just wonder... Let's make the assumption that the SCO stock completely collapses right now. How many billion $ Darl and his friends would have won in this pathetic affair ? (putting aside the send-to-jail-with-their-enron-friends hypothesis)
I never understood why companies are so reluctant to provide the source codes. The reason I hear usually is that such source codes would help competitors to design similar hardwares. Is this just urban legend and the real reason is more an habit of secret, or does this argument is real (i.e. seeing APIs implementation helps you design hardware) ?
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as a structure usable to make money has been found, so many people exploit it that it instantaneously disappear. This is especially true when such structures are explained to the public and not kept ultra-secret in some bank basement.
The problem with the market is that the knowledge humans have about it modifies it.
As far as I see it, the main problem under MS-Windows is that software manufacturers want to "own" your computer.
Each time I interact with an MS-Windows machine, I am simply amazed by the number of splash screens which dont want to leave, of browsers which want to become my browser of choice, of ISP installation packages who just ignore the standard procedure and comes with some silly one, usually accompanied by an ugly non-standard interface with a "high-tech" look.
It really feels like they fight for a share of the PC. This is extremely annoying.
More generally I would say that non-Open-Source lead to sub-optimal softwares, result of the optimization of a cost function which includes not only the user interest but also the company's one. This has an impact not only in term of stupid DRM schemes, activation keys, forced update or striped features, but also in term of "invasion" of your desktop.
But all this, in fact, is not directly due to MS, but to the specificity of the Windows software-sphere I would say (which includes freewares, usually as annoying as commercial ones)
Cheers,
--
Go Debian!
You have to read Milgram's "Obedience to authority" more than any other book. You can read this online article too.
It may be a great news, but I wonder what a vote means then. I will not feel secure in the future if the same can happen when some GOOD decisions have been made. Does it mean that at any moment some heavy lobbying can change any vote ?
I have to admit I understand nothing to the EU system...
--
Go Debian!!!
If you accept to denote real numbers with an infinity of 9 you have to face that the same number can be denoted in two different ways. It's why it is forbidden.
There is no more paradoxe in 0.999999... = 1 than in 0.33333... = 1/3
Cheers!
--
Go Debian!
That's an excellent idea to protect the consumers from those low-quality divx encoded from a recorded movie. Soon, thanks to the MPAA, only excellent digital versions stolen directly in the studio will spread around. No more desappointing downloads!
Those guys have solved what I was personnaly considering as the only remaining weakness of p2p. Good.
--
Go Debian!
I was amazed to see here in Switzerland a full page MS commercial claiming (in a nutshell) "Migration to Linux cost as much as upgrading to XP", with a couple of bar charts.
I can imagine the executive amazed, thinking "damn, one *can* migrate to Linux ?!"
--
Go Debian!
They are going to screw up the standards once more. And that's bad.
What would be interesting is the volume per year since 1993, so that we could see if the growth rate has changed since BK. If I remember well, the volume has always increased a lot.
--
Go Debian!
1/ Preventing a user from playing a song he bought on the device he wants is just unacceptable. Discussing with Apple here would be like discussing with people trying to steal you to keep your passeport and enough money for a cab. And what is this Fair use bullshit ?! YOU BOUGHT THE SONG FOR GOD'S SAKE !
2/ There is no "loop-hole". The infamous DMCA has no effect in India, period.
--
Go Debian!
Isn't there all over the world laws that allow to study protocoles and write softwares required to inter-operate ? If I remember well even the DMCA in the US and the DMCA-like laws in the EU allow such things.
How can you prevent someone from writing the software required to use the hard-disks on a GNU/Linux box from a Windows machine ? Then, how can you ask for money for that ?
--
Go Debian!!!
95% of the world doesn't even know Linux exists.
I do not know about the % of the world. But you are pessimistic beyond reason if you think that a majority of MS-Windows user have not heard of Linux.
They may not know precisely that it can replace windows, they may not know how a recent linux with KDE or Gnome look like a civilized computer (do not yell at me, I still use fvwm2), but they have definitely heard of Linux the crypto-anarcho-leftist operating system which bothers MS.
Despite being a very technical subject, Linux still has some political and ideological dimensions which makes journalists (at least in France) write about it.
--
Go Debian!!!
Hopefully if you were manipulating serious figures, you'd be using serious tools and serious techniques, starting with redundant cross-checking of any calculations.
For many people, MS stuff is serious.
If the bug's been known for years and you still let your business depend on its non-existence, it's your own fault if you kill the business. Risk management is a key skill in running any commercial organisation, and you failed at step one: doing your homework.
And if the bug has been known by people who sells and make software, not by me ? Am I supposed to be competent in everything ? I guess that from that line of reasonning, if tomorrow we learn that there is rat poison in coca cola and people making soda have been knowing it for years, I can't complain neither ?
--
Go Debian!
Doing correct computations seems to me to be a huge benefit.
If I had to use MS-Excel to manipulate serious figures, for instance huge budgets, I wonder how well I would sleep. And if I had people under my responsability who manipulate serious numbers, I would ask them to prefere accuracy to spectacular pie-charts. Am I that weird ?
By the way, if your business goes into troubles because of MS-Excel bugs which have been well known for years, can you sue MS ? Of course, the EULA tells you you can't, but in the real world?
--
Go Debian!
The odds to get caught when puting backdoors in auditable code are far higher than the odds to get caught when hiding backdoors in closed softwares. Thus, the potential gains are lower. This is why I want auditable code. This has nothing to do with *me* auditing it.
I know, it's subtle, don't feel ashame not to have got it at first.
--
Go Debian!!!
I do not want to execute code I can not audit.
There is no doubt it may help someone to break into your system if he has the source code or your OS and various deamons. Fortunately, when it's open-source, we can hope bugs allowing bad guys to break in may have been spotted by nice guys before and patched.
.... that would really suck. If for instance there was a leak of your source code on the internet, and of course only bad guys would look at it (because others do not give a shit) and thus you would get only the bad part of the opennes ...
The real problem would be if only bad guys had your source code
Yeah, that would suck. That would really suck.
--
Go Debian!!!
I can understand 'windows' to be trademarked in non-english speaking countries, as it is not a word in the first place.
As far as I understand, the global idea is to add in the DNS (which is 'trustable' ?) a field to publish what IPs are legitimate mail-senders ? Won't DNS collapse if we statr to stuff them with this sort of information ? And is it really their role ? Or is the spam phenomenon so dramatic that this is considered as an exceptionnal measure ?
--
Go Debian!!!
One can think IBM is "good" from a behaviorist point of view, even if the behavior is motivated not by ethic but by pragmatism (in that case, as far as I understand, IBM makes money selling hardware, not software, and preferes by far to rely on open-source which provides them with an incredible freedom).
My only concern in that context is the X-Box like hardwares which refuse to run non-signed softwares. With such schemes, IBM could just profit from open-source without giving back anything.
--
Go Debian!!!
4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience
In term of irritativness, maybe. But I can't help thinking speakers who know their talk "by heart" tend to forget the critical points where they may lose their auditory.
--
Go Debian!!!
In another news, MS corps sues a french reseller and asks for 150,000 euros see (in french) this linuxfr article.
Actually I can understand a bit more this procedure in non-english speaking countries where "windows" is more a brand name than a common word.
--
Go Debian!
I just wonder ... Let's make the assumption that the SCO stock completely collapses right now. How many billion $ Darl and his friends would have won in this pathetic affair ? (putting aside the send-to-jail-with-their-enron-friends hypothesis)
--
Go Debian!!!
I never understood why companies are so reluctant to provide the source codes. The reason I hear usually is that such source codes would help competitors to design similar hardwares. Is this just urban legend and the real reason is more an habit of secret, or does this argument is real (i.e. seeing APIs implementation helps you design hardware) ?
--
Go Debian!
Are there some more technical and less marketing informations somewhere ?
--
Go Debian!