The problem at least in the UK is that this act, if passed into law, is unlikely to be used against the professionals or the mythical Mr Big. They will continue as before from their foreign havens while some luckless amateur sadsack in a bedsit is busted to headlines and mucho self-satisfaction from the cops.
Things are only likely to change - anywhere - when a) there are more politicians who can tell a computer from a tennis racket, and b) the cost of computer crime is forcibly brought home to the politicians to the point where they will start hitting the safe havens with trade sanctions and the like. At the moment, much of that cost isn't above the surface, I would guess. Companies are reluctant to fess up les it reflect on them and computer crime is accorded a low priority compared to the various "wars" we are all meant to be fighting in these exciting, high-pressure times - the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on yobs, the war on binge-drinking, the war on obesity, etc., etc. Just my 2 cents, but I can't see computer crime receding till the present generation of politicians has retired or (some might hope) been locked up.
Nope, viral marketing, advertising, word of mouth kicked off by opinion-formers are not nonsense. They are highly effective. Sure the iPod is very good, but this topic isn't about that. It's whether sentiment is now turning to say the phenomenon is getting a little tacky. Imho, it is and in this sense the iPod is no different from any other fashion accessory. It may not have started as one or even been intended as one, but it became one. Show me some Apple advertising that says otherwise.
The articles won't be written by industry pundits whom no one outside of IT reads anyway, quite understandably in view of what most of them have to say. They will be written by lifestyle and fashion people, the same people who drove the adoption of the iPod in the first place among those who could afford one. Taking Apple's brand downmarket isn't necessarily good news for Apple. They are more likely to stick to the high ground and move on, letting other brands fight it out over the bargain counter in Chavco.
Yes, it's a fair charge. Fashion is fickle and every comment that the iPod phenomenon is turning tacky is a warning that no company can sit on its laurels for long. The iPod's leather posing pouch and the ghetto-blaster model are tacky, too.
During 2006, it's quite likely we'll see an increasing number of articles saying the iPod thing is over. When every kid on the block is toting one, it's time to get rid of it and buy something reassuringly "exclusive" instead. Never underestimate snob appeal.
If Albrecht's thoughts had been aired in, say, Tehran, they would be dismissed as the ravings of a fanatical mullah, unable to come to terms with the modern world and so bent on rejecting it as the devil's work, quoting an old, crude text from the pre-modern era as evidence that he was absolutely correct. But instead they come from downhome, primetime USA. Oh, the irony!
There's nothing new in this. Big business is always trying to beat down the small guy by saying that "You won't succeed without our money and expertise. Give up now and sell to us or you are doomed." Open source is just the latest arena to get the treatment. Sometimes true, but often corporate bureaucrats prove far less adept at running a concern than the small guy who's become tough and shrewd because he's had to live by his wits with sod-all in the bank. Corporate bureaucrats are very good at overpaying, though, and you can hardly blame anyone for taking a fabulously absurd sum if it's on offer.
As for Mr Ellison, he can't have it both ways. In the interview on which this article is based, he first paid homage to open source which these days is about as controversial as calling for fresh air and clean drinking water. He then affected to find Mysql to be so small as to be beneath his radar but curiously knew all about it. That Ellison should find a company a tiny percentage of Oracle's size such a thorn says more about his tender ego than anything else. There's absolutely no guarantee that Oracle's "aggressive" buying spree will do it any good. The moment they think they've plucked out one thorn, another will appear in its place.
Vista is going to suck all right. It's a huge, resource-hungry, monolithic 1990s idea launched just as we hit rocketing resource and energy costs. Small may be beautiful but if you're Vista then grossly fat is better, apparently.
For many folks, Vista will represent an expenditure they can ill afford. Vista is unlikely to be cheaper in real terms than WinXP; probably it will be more expensive. Then there will be the obligatory AV/spyware stuff for "only" XX bucks more. After that there will be hardware issues, with 1001 sites telling users that they'll need more, more more - more ram, a better monitor, more processing power, yes yes more. And if you've managed to get that far, there'll be the small, haha, matters of DRM and, very likely, an accelerated lack of real support for WinXP. It's boasting and bandwagoning from an industry that doesn't deserve it selling folks stuff they really don't need.
Dell are not a boutique. They want volume. If your order was big enough - millions of bucks big enough - they'd probably install your pet chipmunk as an OS. In the meantime, they do offer Linux for those who want it. However, this is for the few folks who want and need Linux for a reason, in the same way that some folks might need a Sun workstation. It is absolutely not about offering the same stuff cheaper just because it has Linux and not Windows. Hence I would imagine, RHEL in the equation rather than some geeky DIYish offering that would result in a tsunami of support calls.
This market is a niche and it's always going to be very particular. At present there is no hard evidence that a mass market for desktop Linux will even exist, since desktop Linux is still not good or widely available enough to allow Joe User a fair crack at making an informed decision. Just my 2 cents, but I'd choose a nice Sun Workstation with an Opteron inside it over a Dell offering any day, then put on the distro of my choice. And the Sun stuff at this level is, as they say, surprisingly affordable.
Jono Bacon is a highly intelligent guy but the moment I hit the word "lethargy" I despaired. Users have a perfect right to stick with Windows if they wish to and the term is too redolent of the stock Linux-user nonsense about Windows users being dumb and lazy. There is simply no logic in the notion that if only Windows users weren't lazy, dumb or perverse (in their choice of features, for example) they'd all see the light and switch to Linux. No they wouldn't. And they never will.
This is such a non-article. The same arguments have been going round and round the Linux camp for years and are no nearer a conclusion, imho. I like Linux and use it as my desktop, but there is an unhealthy whiff around desktop Linux now. It hasn't broken through in any meaningful way and is still stuck in feuding and the blame game. Just my 2 cents, but the BSDs or even OpenSolaris begin to sound preferable in order to escape the endless rowing and pointless noise that has come to characterize so much of the Linux "debate".
I think it was brave of Doctorow to say he found Ricky Gervais extremely entertaining. Gervais has been hugely oversold and cannot hold a candle to real comic greats, from Keaton to Sellars, Cook or Cleese. Truth to tell, Gervais really isn't very funny at all.
Second, Doctorow's views on the BBC and DRM are very oversimplified. The BBC buys in many of its programs, but it buys only the right to broadcast them in its territories not the right to distribute them for free world-wide. Second, the BBC reasonably expects to make money, sometimes a great deal of money, from selling successful programs abroad and in the form of all kinds of subsidiary rights. Clearly that after-market would abruptly cease if open streams were avaliable on the net. With it would cease quite a lot of jobs and the licence fee would probably go up.
I don't like DRM either, but the BBC isn't the right place to start reforming the West's foobared intellectual property system. On the whole the BBC is a force for good, which I doubt could be said of many US media moguls with their porno factories and shady deals with Chinese state bully boys.
If Spiggy Topes and the Turds were on Mindawn, I might be interested. But alas they aren't. I guess that as a "popular singing group" they could be too expensive for your average Linux user. Like Spinal Tap, really. I'm afraid that Mindawn doesn't conform to my free noise principles if they are not prepared to support the Turds or the Taps, and so I won't be using the service on moral grounds. However, I might make an exception if Mindawn invited RMS to make a two-hour speech at their billionth-download party which can surely be only a short time away.
Why not stay away from the entire HDTV thing? After all, by the time copyright suits have had their way HDTV might have been so neutered as to be a complete waste of time. For many folks, HDTV will probably mean a slightly better picture while watching football on a widescreen down the pub, but after a couple of pints of Dogbolter they really won't notice the difference. Until massive LCDs cost a couple of hundred bucks, it really isn't going to be on most folks' radar.
I thought HDTV sounded like a great way to part fools and their money when Paulie Walnuts tried to sell a crock box as "HDTV ready" to some chump on the Sopranos a few years ago. Seems like he may have been well ahead of the game.
Businesses that have moved to 24-hour operations, bosses who micromanage and longer commutes add to the problem, they said, while downsizing leaves fewer workers doing the work of those who left.... Finally, there's a trend among companies to measure job performance like never before.
These are key words in the article, if you put aside the technology which works no worse and probably better than a decade ago. You can squeeze the juice from an orange but at some point there is no juice left to squeeze. High property prices meaning you have to live miles away, increased pension and healthcare burdens, the hassle of just living in C21, absurd management gurus with onerous, people-hating theories eagery taken up by bonus-obsessed managers - these are more fundamental problems than technology. And all this before you even turn up for the job which in a modern corporation has increasing echoes of slavery, especially considering the stupendous earning gap between rich and poor. It's amazing most folks achieve as much as they do, and as tolerantly.
The idea that we should all be expected to understand the finer points of open source software licensing strkes me as rather optimistic. Most folks have to concentrate on trifles like how to pay the bills and bring up a family.
A few things. First off, we aren't told whether the outfit selling the Firefox disks was kosher or whether the disks had come to light as a result of the outfit getting into trouble for genuine offences, in which case Trading Standards would have been remiss not to have followed by all the leads. Second, the lady from Trading Standards had the decency to call and was prepared to listen. In my experience, many branches of government never do either.
Finally, it's rather narrow-minded saying that Trading Standards should have sorted it out themselves by reading the licence. Software licences are a complete maze and open source ones are a maze inside a maze. Even if you're up with the industry it's hard enough to figure them all out and keep track of them. What this probably suggests is that to anyone who isn't a geek open source licences are no different from proprietory ones. Both are incomprehensible, and most folks get a queasy, bad-news feeling at the sight of any kind of legal document.
At least Mr Markham was kinder to the lady from TS than a lot of Slashdot readers would have been. Perhaps some open source gurus could take time off from jetting around the world fulminating against DRM and conduct a few seminars for government agencies to explain exactly what open source licensing means.
I'm not a US citizen and I don't live in America. Some days I think "thank God". It is dismaying to see America's can-do spirit and open-minded, generous approach to life being wrecked by a never-ending avalanche of lawsuits, patent rows, legal opinionating and fuddish litigation threats, all egged on by "analysts" (the kind of fellows who were advising us all to buy stock the day before the dotcom bubble burst). There is nothing sane about setting fire to your own house.
I much prefer the approach taken by the government of Brazil. They decided to put in some support for open source, and when Microsoft objected they told Microsoft to go sling their hook. There was no chair-throwing or calling down of world war three, at least in public. Microsoft swallowed hard and started to behave themselves. Good to see that standing up to bullies can work.
DRM does have legitimate uses - would you like to get on a plane or use a bank whose computer systems had been raked over by HaX0r O'Wally and his pals? But it's hard not to have a gloomy sense of deja vu. The problem with DRM is that it can be used to destroy competition (competitors are literally locked out of the market), fix prices, invade privacy and withold legal entitlements such as fair use or in some cases any use of an encrypted document that just might happen to be your own. Overall, this adds up to a great way to build or reinforce monopolies. It's even worse when in practice these opportunities will be handed to an IT world where desktop PCs are already monopoly-controlled.
You'd have to be a hyper-optimist to think that IT corporations won't promptly try to take advantage of the situation. The deja vu is that we've been here before with things like Internet Explorer vs Netscape. By the time government or judiciary gets around to cleaning up abuses some years later, the losers have been left for dead and the "punishment" for the winner is a bargain - the fine is merely the cost of acquiring a licence to print money.
So I'm not really looking forward to DRM. Yes it's here and it's probably going to become darn near ubiquitous. For those with really sensitive information to protect it may well be a boon. But before the authorities wake up to the full implications of DRM and regulate it properly, a great deal of damage will be done.
It is a fascinating article, a kind of anti-CEBIT that must be played out in thousands of trailer parks and down-at-heel developments all over the world. No real surprises, though. Organized criminal activities are probably the same everywhere: long periods of boredom punctuated by brief spurts of intense activity, and all supported by lies of the "Naturally I wouldn't sink this low if my victims weren't so dumb they deserved it" kind.
I'd still like to see the CEO's of the top six IT companies put on a public platform and made to answer some tough questions. Like, with all their personal billions and access to hundreds of billions in corporate funds, what are they actually doing to track down guys like these and nail them? So far as I can see, the answer is "As little as we can get away with". And the Feds seem to be used as a get out: we've handed the matter over to the Feds so there's absoutely nothing we can do, nudge nudge wink wink, wanna buy Symantec Internet Security cheap to you squire?
Until the IT industry grows up enough to start dealing with some of the consequences it has created, I don't think it deserves anyone's support. And meanwhile Botmaster Dirtbags everywhere will continue to flourish. Just my two cents.
It's hard to see how there can be any half-way house with this. Given the nature of Google's business, you are either fully in this market or right out if it. None of the half-way house arguments given by Schrage really stand up. Each one could equally well be applied to dealing with plenty of other odious regimes, many worse. Is it more ethical to put a combination lock or a conventional padlock on the door? Discuss.
Given Microsoft's brutal corporatism and apparent relish for steamrollering anyone in their way, I'm not surprised they were in like Flynn with the Chinese government. I am surprised at Google, though, and I think it's a huge mistake for them. Their pitch is not serving up search results but being trusted with the world's information, a different proposition entirely. Statements like Schrage's only suggest how uncomfortably the whole venture must be sitting with them. Google are not going to be trusted very widely now.
What a clear and well-written article. And what a pleasant, unassuming statement from Dr Zhao:
"A non-Newtonian gravity theory is now fully specified on all scales by a smooth continuous function. It is ready for fellow scientists to falsify. It is time to keep an open mind for new fields predicted in our formula while we continue our search for Dark Matter particles."
Even if the theory turns out not to stand up, words like this take us back to what makes science interesting and important. That "falsify" is worlds away from the publicity hounds and egomaniacs who so often represent science to the lay reader.
These are good-looking shots, but as they are only mock-ups it's a moot point as to what the final dish will turn out to be like.
Half the posts on this thread are redundant. KDE is entirely voluntary: no one has to run it. If it doesn't do what you want, use another desktop environment, or no desktop environment. On Linux at least, we are spoiled for choice in this respect.
In addition, some of the comments about eye candy are misplaced. Good design is extremely important: good design helps me do what I want to do with elegance and simplicity but it is never intrusive. If good design is what the KDE4 team are after, which I think they are, then kudos to them. Criticizing something because it has "pretty colours" is just showing off. Plenty of folks want to run a modern, full-up Linux desktop and leave the 1970s where they belong - in the past.
The GPLv3 is a draft document. It is a document up for discussion and debate, after which it will may well be revised and then issued in final form.
What I find shocking is that attempts to treat this draft as a draft are promptly shouted down. Linus Torvalds is free to say whatever he wants about it, and he has already hinted that if some things were changed in the draft then most likely he wouldn't have a problem with a GPLv3.
A lot of this attempt to choke off debate in favour of take it or leave it is pretty rich - in fact, puke-making - coming from the alleged supporters of "freedom". If the attacks on Linus Torvalds continue then it won't be exactly difficult to conclude that the FSF's more rabid fans have a kind of Bolshevik agenda: force out Mr Torvalds by discrediting him and impose a new kernel on open-source Linux, and all in the name of "freedom". No thanks.
Maybe this new development from IBM will be of wide use to lots of folks. Hope so. But there are still a lot of "shoulds" in the mix and we've still to see how it all works in practice.
Intel don't just have a chip, they have lines of different chips and especially chipsets (and especially especially low-power and mobile chips and chipsets). It's also probably easier to deal with the Hollywood DRM greedmonsters if you say you're running an Intel platform. All told it's not just one thing but a while mix of things and only Intel was in a position to offer them, starting right now and not in a year or two. Besides, where else did Apple have to go?
Why should the GIMP or any other program be "enough for Linux users"? If Linux users don't think a program is up to snuff, they've a perfect right to say so. Linux is not a soup kitchen.
Every time the subject of GIMP vs Photoshop comes up (which is too often), it ends in a flamefest. All one can say is that the market seems to have voted solidly for Photoshop, but many of the voters may well be individual users who won't ever need Photoshop's wider ecosystem of plugins and who won't ever pony up several hundred bucks for Photoshop anyway. Wishful thinking, perhaps?
For me, the key passage in the article is this: "Photoshop really is a platform, not just an application. When you're buying into an entire system, as the graphics business clearly has, the upfront cost of a single application doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the buying decision." The same applies to dtp of the Quark/InDesign kind and no doubt plenty of other things. Porting a single program to Linux won't on its own bring in the pros, I guess, and you can't port an ecosystem come platform. That needs a real commitment and organic growth over many years. Way to go.
You're right, neither of us has a clue as to how or whether Google's activities in China will influence their government. But that's not the point. The core plank of Google's pitch is "Trust us to be the world's information provider". Not "We are the #1 search engine people" or "We do ads better than Microsoft or Yahoo" but "We are the folks you trust with your information". Well after the China business they aren't that any more. Big hole in Google's ozone layer, I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem at least in the UK is that this act, if passed into law, is unlikely to be used against the professionals or the mythical Mr Big. They will continue as before from their foreign havens while some luckless amateur sadsack in a bedsit is busted to headlines and mucho self-satisfaction from the cops.
Things are only likely to change - anywhere - when a) there are more politicians who can tell a computer from a tennis racket, and b) the cost of computer crime is forcibly brought home to the politicians to the point where they will start hitting the safe havens with trade sanctions and the like. At the moment, much of that cost isn't above the surface, I would guess. Companies are reluctant to fess up les it reflect on them and computer crime is accorded a low priority compared to the various "wars" we are all meant to be fighting in these exciting, high-pressure times - the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on yobs, the war on binge-drinking, the war on obesity, etc., etc. Just my 2 cents, but I can't see computer crime receding till the present generation of politicians has retired or (some might hope) been locked up.
Nope, viral marketing, advertising, word of mouth kicked off by opinion-formers are not nonsense. They are highly effective. Sure the iPod is very good, but this topic isn't about that. It's whether sentiment is now turning to say the phenomenon is getting a little tacky. Imho, it is and in this sense the iPod is no different from any other fashion accessory. It may not have started as one or even been intended as one, but it became one. Show me some Apple advertising that says otherwise.
The articles won't be written by industry pundits whom no one outside of IT reads anyway, quite understandably in view of what most of them have to say. They will be written by lifestyle and fashion people, the same people who drove the adoption of the iPod in the first place among those who could afford one. Taking Apple's brand downmarket isn't necessarily good news for Apple. They are more likely to stick to the high ground and move on, letting other brands fight it out over the bargain counter in Chavco.
Yes, it's a fair charge. Fashion is fickle and every comment that the iPod phenomenon is turning tacky is a warning that no company can sit on its laurels for long. The iPod's leather posing pouch and the ghetto-blaster model are tacky, too.
During 2006, it's quite likely we'll see an increasing number of articles saying the iPod thing is over. When every kid on the block is toting one, it's time to get rid of it and buy something reassuringly "exclusive" instead. Never underestimate snob appeal.
If Albrecht's thoughts had been aired in, say, Tehran, they would be dismissed as the ravings of a fanatical mullah, unable to come to terms with the modern world and so bent on rejecting it as the devil's work, quoting an old, crude text from the pre-modern era as evidence that he was absolutely correct. But instead they come from downhome, primetime USA. Oh, the irony!
There's nothing new in this. Big business is always trying to beat down the small guy by saying that "You won't succeed without our money and expertise. Give up now and sell to us or you are doomed." Open source is just the latest arena to get the treatment. Sometimes true, but often corporate bureaucrats prove far less adept at running a concern than the small guy who's become tough and shrewd because he's had to live by his wits with sod-all in the bank. Corporate bureaucrats are very good at overpaying, though, and you can hardly blame anyone for taking a fabulously absurd sum if it's on offer.
As for Mr Ellison, he can't have it both ways. In the interview on which this article is based, he first paid homage to open source which these days is about as controversial as calling for fresh air and clean drinking water. He then affected to find Mysql to be so small as to be beneath his radar but curiously knew all about it. That Ellison should find a company a tiny percentage of Oracle's size such a thorn says more about his tender ego than anything else. There's absolutely no guarantee that Oracle's "aggressive" buying spree will do it any good. The moment they think they've plucked out one thorn, another will appear in its place.
Vista is going to suck all right. It's a huge, resource-hungry, monolithic 1990s idea launched just as we hit rocketing resource and energy costs. Small may be beautiful but if you're Vista then grossly fat is better, apparently.
For many folks, Vista will represent an expenditure they can ill afford. Vista is unlikely to be cheaper in real terms than WinXP; probably it will be more expensive. Then there will be the obligatory AV/spyware stuff for "only" XX bucks more. After that there will be hardware issues, with 1001 sites telling users that they'll need more, more more - more ram, a better monitor, more processing power, yes yes more. And if you've managed to get that far, there'll be the small, haha, matters of DRM and, very likely, an accelerated lack of real support for WinXP. It's boasting and bandwagoning from an industry that doesn't deserve it selling folks stuff they really don't need.
Dell are not a boutique. They want volume. If your order was big enough - millions of bucks big enough - they'd probably install your pet chipmunk as an OS. In the meantime, they do offer Linux for those who want it. However, this is for the few folks who want and need Linux for a reason, in the same way that some folks might need a Sun workstation. It is absolutely not about offering the same stuff cheaper just because it has Linux and not Windows. Hence I would imagine, RHEL in the equation rather than some geeky DIYish offering that would result in a tsunami of support calls.
This market is a niche and it's always going to be very particular. At present there is no hard evidence that a mass market for desktop Linux will even exist, since desktop Linux is still not good or widely available enough to allow Joe User a fair crack at making an informed decision. Just my 2 cents, but I'd choose a nice Sun Workstation with an Opteron inside it over a Dell offering any day, then put on the distro of my choice. And the Sun stuff at this level is, as they say, surprisingly affordable.
Jono Bacon is a highly intelligent guy but the moment I hit the word "lethargy" I despaired. Users have a perfect right to stick with Windows if they wish to and the term is too redolent of the stock Linux-user nonsense about Windows users being dumb and lazy. There is simply no logic in the notion that if only Windows users weren't lazy, dumb or perverse (in their choice of features, for example) they'd all see the light and switch to Linux. No they wouldn't. And they never will. This is such a non-article. The same arguments have been going round and round the Linux camp for years and are no nearer a conclusion, imho. I like Linux and use it as my desktop, but there is an unhealthy whiff around desktop Linux now. It hasn't broken through in any meaningful way and is still stuck in feuding and the blame game. Just my 2 cents, but the BSDs or even OpenSolaris begin to sound preferable in order to escape the endless rowing and pointless noise that has come to characterize so much of the Linux "debate".
I think it was brave of Doctorow to say he found Ricky Gervais extremely entertaining. Gervais has been hugely oversold and cannot hold a candle to real comic greats, from Keaton to Sellars, Cook or Cleese. Truth to tell, Gervais really isn't very funny at all.
Second, Doctorow's views on the BBC and DRM are very oversimplified. The BBC buys in many of its programs, but it buys only the right to broadcast them in its territories not the right to distribute them for free world-wide. Second, the BBC reasonably expects to make money, sometimes a great deal of money, from selling successful programs abroad and in the form of all kinds of subsidiary rights. Clearly that after-market would abruptly cease if open streams were avaliable on the net. With it would cease quite a lot of jobs and the licence fee would probably go up.
I don't like DRM either, but the BBC isn't the right place to start reforming the West's foobared intellectual property system. On the whole the BBC is a force for good, which I doubt could be said of many US media moguls with their porno factories and shady deals with Chinese state bully boys.
If Spiggy Topes and the Turds were on Mindawn, I might be interested. But alas they aren't. I guess that as a "popular singing group" they could be too expensive for your average Linux user. Like Spinal Tap, really. I'm afraid that Mindawn doesn't conform to my free noise principles if they are not prepared to support the Turds or the Taps, and so I won't be using the service on moral grounds. However, I might make an exception if Mindawn invited RMS to make a two-hour speech at their billionth-download party which can surely be only a short time away.
Why not stay away from the entire HDTV thing? After all, by the time copyright suits have had their way HDTV might have been so neutered as to be a complete waste of time. For many folks, HDTV will probably mean a slightly better picture while watching football on a widescreen down the pub, but after a couple of pints of Dogbolter they really won't notice the difference. Until massive LCDs cost a couple of hundred bucks, it really isn't going to be on most folks' radar.
I thought HDTV sounded like a great way to part fools and their money when Paulie Walnuts tried to sell a crock box as "HDTV ready" to some chump on the Sopranos a few years ago. Seems like he may have been well ahead of the game.
Businesses that have moved to 24-hour operations, bosses who micromanage and longer commutes add to the problem, they said, while downsizing leaves fewer workers doing the work of those who left. ... Finally, there's a trend among companies to measure job performance like never before.
These are key words in the article, if you put aside the technology which works no worse and probably better than a decade ago. You can squeeze the juice from an orange but at some point there is no juice left to squeeze. High property prices meaning you have to live miles away, increased pension and healthcare burdens, the hassle of just living in C21, absurd management gurus with onerous, people-hating theories eagery taken up by bonus-obsessed managers - these are more fundamental problems than technology. And all this before you even turn up for the job which in a modern corporation has increasing echoes of slavery, especially considering the stupendous earning gap between rich and poor. It's amazing most folks achieve as much as they do, and as tolerantly.
The idea that we should all be expected to understand the finer points of open source software licensing strkes me as rather optimistic. Most folks have to concentrate on trifles like how to pay the bills and bring up a family.
A few things. First off, we aren't told whether the outfit selling the Firefox disks was kosher or whether the disks had come to light as a result of the outfit getting into trouble for genuine offences, in which case Trading Standards would have been remiss not to have followed by all the leads. Second, the lady from Trading Standards had the decency to call and was prepared to listen. In my experience, many branches of government never do either.
Finally, it's rather narrow-minded saying that Trading Standards should have sorted it out themselves by reading the licence. Software licences are a complete maze and open source ones are a maze inside a maze. Even if you're up with the industry it's hard enough to figure them all out and keep track of them. What this probably suggests is that to anyone who isn't a geek open source licences are no different from proprietory ones. Both are incomprehensible, and most folks get a queasy, bad-news feeling at the sight of any kind of legal document.
At least Mr Markham was kinder to the lady from TS than a lot of Slashdot readers would have been. Perhaps some open source gurus could take time off from jetting around the world fulminating against DRM and conduct a few seminars for government agencies to explain exactly what open source licensing means.
I'm not a US citizen and I don't live in America. Some days I think "thank God". It is dismaying to see America's can-do spirit and open-minded, generous approach to life being wrecked by a never-ending avalanche of lawsuits, patent rows, legal opinionating and fuddish litigation threats, all egged on by "analysts" (the kind of fellows who were advising us all to buy stock the day before the dotcom bubble burst). There is nothing sane about setting fire to your own house.
I much prefer the approach taken by the government of Brazil. They decided to put in some support for open source, and when Microsoft objected they told Microsoft to go sling their hook. There was no chair-throwing or calling down of world war three, at least in public. Microsoft swallowed hard and started to behave themselves. Good to see that standing up to bullies can work.
DRM does have legitimate uses - would you like to get on a plane or use a bank whose computer systems had been raked over by HaX0r O'Wally and his pals? But it's hard not to have a gloomy sense of deja vu. The problem with DRM is that it can be used to destroy competition (competitors are literally locked out of the market), fix prices, invade privacy and withold legal entitlements such as fair use or in some cases any use of an encrypted document that just might happen to be your own. Overall, this adds up to a great way to build or reinforce monopolies. It's even worse when in practice these opportunities will be handed to an IT world where desktop PCs are already monopoly-controlled.
You'd have to be a hyper-optimist to think that IT corporations won't promptly try to take advantage of the situation. The deja vu is that we've been here before with things like Internet Explorer vs Netscape. By the time government or judiciary gets around to cleaning up abuses some years later, the losers have been left for dead and the "punishment" for the winner is a bargain - the fine is merely the cost of acquiring a licence to print money.
So I'm not really looking forward to DRM. Yes it's here and it's probably going to become darn near ubiquitous. For those with really sensitive information to protect it may well be a boon. But before the authorities wake up to the full implications of DRM and regulate it properly, a great deal of damage will be done.
It is a fascinating article, a kind of anti-CEBIT that must be played out in thousands of trailer parks and down-at-heel developments all over the world. No real surprises, though. Organized criminal activities are probably the same everywhere: long periods of boredom punctuated by brief spurts of intense activity, and all supported by lies of the "Naturally I wouldn't sink this low if my victims weren't so dumb they deserved it" kind.
I'd still like to see the CEO's of the top six IT companies put on a public platform and made to answer some tough questions. Like, with all their personal billions and access to hundreds of billions in corporate funds, what are they actually doing to track down guys like these and nail them? So far as I can see, the answer is "As little as we can get away with". And the Feds seem to be used as a get out: we've handed the matter over to the Feds so there's absoutely nothing we can do, nudge nudge wink wink, wanna buy Symantec Internet Security cheap to you squire?
Until the IT industry grows up enough to start dealing with some of the consequences it has created, I don't think it deserves anyone's support. And meanwhile Botmaster Dirtbags everywhere will continue to flourish. Just my two cents.
It's hard to see how there can be any half-way house with this. Given the nature of Google's business, you are either fully in this market or right out if it. None of the half-way house arguments given by Schrage really stand up. Each one could equally well be applied to dealing with plenty of other odious regimes, many worse. Is it more ethical to put a combination lock or a conventional padlock on the door? Discuss.
Given Microsoft's brutal corporatism and apparent relish for steamrollering anyone in their way, I'm not surprised they were in like Flynn with the Chinese government. I am surprised at Google, though, and I think it's a huge mistake for them. Their pitch is not serving up search results but being trusted with the world's information, a different proposition entirely. Statements like Schrage's only suggest how uncomfortably the whole venture must be sitting with them. Google are not going to be trusted very widely now.
What a clear and well-written article. And what a pleasant, unassuming statement from Dr Zhao:
"A non-Newtonian gravity theory is now fully specified on all scales by a smooth continuous function. It is ready for fellow scientists to falsify. It is time to keep an open mind for new fields predicted in our formula while we continue our search for Dark Matter particles."
Even if the theory turns out not to stand up, words like this take us back to what makes science interesting and important. That "falsify" is worlds away from the publicity hounds and egomaniacs who so often represent science to the lay reader.
These are good-looking shots, but as they are only mock-ups it's a moot point as to what the final dish will turn out to be like.
Half the posts on this thread are redundant. KDE is entirely voluntary: no one has to run it. If it doesn't do what you want, use another desktop environment, or no desktop environment. On Linux at least, we are spoiled for choice in this respect.
In addition, some of the comments about eye candy are misplaced. Good design is extremely important: good design helps me do what I want to do with elegance and simplicity but it is never intrusive. If good design is what the KDE4 team are after, which I think they are, then kudos to them. Criticizing something because it has "pretty colours" is just showing off. Plenty of folks want to run a modern, full-up Linux desktop and leave the 1970s where they belong - in the past.
The GPLv3 is a draft document. It is a document up for discussion and debate, after which it will may well be revised and then issued in final form.
What I find shocking is that attempts to treat this draft as a draft are promptly shouted down. Linus Torvalds is free to say whatever he wants about it, and he has already hinted that if some things were changed in the draft then most likely he wouldn't have a problem with a GPLv3.
A lot of this attempt to choke off debate in favour of take it or leave it is pretty rich - in fact, puke-making - coming from the alleged supporters of "freedom". If the attacks on Linus Torvalds continue then it won't be exactly difficult to conclude that the FSF's more rabid fans have a kind of Bolshevik agenda: force out Mr Torvalds by discrediting him and impose a new kernel on open-source Linux, and all in the name of "freedom". No thanks.
Maybe this new development from IBM will be of wide use to lots of folks. Hope so. But there are still a lot of "shoulds" in the mix and we've still to see how it all works in practice.
Intel don't just have a chip, they have lines of different chips and especially chipsets (and especially especially low-power and mobile chips and chipsets). It's also probably easier to deal with the Hollywood DRM greedmonsters if you say you're running an Intel platform. All told it's not just one thing but a while mix of things and only Intel was in a position to offer them, starting right now and not in a year or two. Besides, where else did Apple have to go?
Why should the GIMP or any other program be "enough for Linux users"? If Linux users don't think a program is up to snuff, they've a perfect right to say so. Linux is not a soup kitchen.
Every time the subject of GIMP vs Photoshop comes up (which is too often), it ends in a flamefest. All one can say is that the market seems to have voted solidly for Photoshop, but many of the voters may well be individual users who won't ever need Photoshop's wider ecosystem of plugins and who won't ever pony up several hundred bucks for Photoshop anyway. Wishful thinking, perhaps?
For me, the key passage in the article is this: "Photoshop really is a platform, not just an application. When you're buying into an entire system, as the graphics business clearly has, the upfront cost of a single application doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the buying decision." The same applies to dtp of the Quark/InDesign kind and no doubt plenty of other things. Porting a single program to Linux won't on its own bring in the pros, I guess, and you can't port an ecosystem come platform. That needs a real commitment and organic growth over many years. Way to go.
You're right, neither of us has a clue as to how or whether Google's activities in China will influence their government. But that's not the point. The core plank of Google's pitch is "Trust us to be the world's information provider". Not "We are the #1 search engine people" or "We do ads better than Microsoft or Yahoo" but "We are the folks you trust with your information". Well after the China business they aren't that any more. Big hole in Google's ozone layer, I'd say.