I agree, I'm not trying to intimate that it could be. But there are four players right now, SCO, IBM, NOVELL and the court system. One wants to destroy FOSS (SCO), two expect to develop revenue streams (IBM, Novell) and one is the impartial arbiter (the courts).
Where is the party defending Linux for Linux's own sake? This is the thrust of my question. A plea more to the OSDLs, OSIs, and FSFs to get off their asses, work together, and start providing that role.
Anyone consider that the GPL has no weight in China?
Why should the Chinese conform to the GPL? No reason, will they? Who can tell. I suggest that China is not a good example of another market.
Next market please. I'm pretty confident your scenario won't work out as planned. Any given market is liable to come down to one of three cases. First markets in countries which we have no reason to believe that the spirit or text of the GPL will not be adhered to. Or they are developing countries over which the US (and other devlopped countries) have a great deal of influence. Lastly, the market in question has laws in place, or are contemplating legislation which could allow SCO to repeat the process in their courts. If they win the first one, they can go court to court to court where necessary, they'll have the cash to do it.
But, lastly, ever actually look at the warnings on those tapes/DVDs you rent? Don
t they specifically state that INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS exist which protect copyrighted works? Don't you think it possible for countries to further strengthen those agreements?
Any lawyer who tells you that he can predict the outcome of any given case with 100% accuracy is at best irresponsibly optomistic. I leave the worst case scenario as an exercise for the reader.
If lawyers in general could perform such prognostication, there would be no need for the courts would there, no, two lawyers would sit down, and with faultless powers of prognostication, would have to agree on how things will turn out.
Please. not even your Columbia law professor believes that.
I think you are probably right. I was aware of both, but neither really fits the entire bill. I also thought of the OSDL, which indicated they were covering Linus' bills. But this just higlights more of the problem, we've got lots of orgs, but none fulfill the total role, as you point out...
I think the question I really despair of finding the answer to is how to get these organizations to co-operate meaningfully. I find it a stinging indictment that in view of WRGO, that we, the rank and file, haven't seen from any of these is the leadership role, which could provide cohesive resistance in times like these. Rather it is individuals like ESR, RMS and Linus who go out, off their own hook and take the role. At least someone is doing it, but each of these gentlemen is one man with one mans resources.
Personally, for a binding thing like a quote, I'd use fax.
Fax leaves a good paper trail, is transmitted over a private network, not nearly as liable to interception, with legally mandated service requirements. There is no amibguity with faxing, you feed the sheet and it goes or doesn't, you know right away.
For B2B, I'd say this is the safer solution. B2C you probably aren;t sending quotes back and forth like this. They pay, or they buy elsewhere.
Just how vulnerable Linux really is, at least from a legal point of view.
Really, is anyone satisfied that the legal future of Linux rests in the hands of SCO, IBM, Novell and the US legal system? We've all been waxing rhapsodic over IBM, and it looks like this news is going to make us do the same for Novell. But really, hasn't IBM wielded the big stick of IP enough to at least make us a little nervous? What about Novell, they signed an agreement which opened the door to this particular nightmare, not a glowing review of their due diligence, after all, one should at least contingency plan for this kind of suit when making such deals...
Nor are their motives quite the same as the grass roots. I wouldn't even try to defend the thesis that IBM and Novell are not in it for their own best interests. I also don't see any reason to believe that their best interests are necesarilly Linux's.
It's nice to see these guys in the white (or maybe just real light gray) hats, but it is trivial to change your hat. The enemy of my enemy != my friend, ally - perhaps, confederate - okay, but friend, I don't think so.
The problem is none of the players have a mandated interest in promoting and protecting Linux, both are in it for financial motivations, when the wind starts blowing profits another way, both will jump ship as quick as they are able.
What to do? I confess I don't know. It'd be nice for Linux/FOSS to maybe have an associated legal entity tasked with promoting Linux/FOSS in the market and protecting Linux/FOSS in the law. Ideally, a not-for profit organization. (A honest to goodness charity would be better, at least your legal defense contributions would be a tax deduction...)
Ultimately, the nature of Linux/FOSS to not be beholden to anything/one has been one of the greatest strengths. It is part and parcel of the success we have seen since Linus released our obsession on the world. However, this lack has now come full circle as we are essentially forced to watch the legal fate of Linux/FOSS be placed in the hands of one company who wishes to smash it, two which seek to exploit it, and the US legal system.
Joseph Stalin once said, "How many divisions does the pope have?" I can easily see Darl Mcbride saying, "How many lawyers does Linus have?" way back before this mess all started.
Okay, I admit it, I've just been waiting for a reason to compare Joseph Stalin and Darl McBride.
Really the thing I think we all should be taking from this is that Dell has some real morons making some rather important decisions...
Why anyone would choose to use a Word document for the purpose Dell used it is completely beyond me. Are they so brainwashed over there that there was no exploration of the alternatives? Particularly in view of the fact that the app vendor (M$) specifically does not promote the use of that feature for securitys sake.
Really Dell, STFU, your precious relationship with Microsoft does not preclude using your brains when making software selections for sensitive processes like binding quotes...
On the plus side, I'm sure I've got a Dell quote somewhere in the office... Hmmm, laptop for $15 anyone?
I suspect that you are correct, eliminate CI, and nothing changes, on its own... I think the point I probably should have been making is that as long as CI continues there is no reason to believe that any of the situations I mentioned will get better. Only if CI is brought back to pre-internet music sharing potentials will there be enough manuvering room for there to be even the possibility of undoing any of the described effects. You can't ask radio stations to reduce ad times when to do so would be to cut their financial throat. Eliminate that condition, and no, the ad volumes don't go down in and of themselves, but it is pretty obvious just from/. reactions that ad volume is a problem with the industry. If you are a radio exec, it seems pretty obvious that people will listen to the channel that gives more of what they want, and less of what they don't. If you have the space in the budget to reduce the volume of adds you cater to the will of your potential clients, increasing your listener base, making your reduced volume of adds more effective, possibly justifying an increase in the prices charged for ads...
The problem is certainly not simple, or straightforward, but I suggest that until CI is reduced to levels consistent with tape dubbing, RIAA will never relent, and will further exacerbate the problem.
To go with your analogy, CI is equivalent to getting around the toll both by driving on the shoulder. Folks never did that when the tolls were going to pay off the roads, folks still don't do it even though the roads are paid off. So obviously the only reason CI continues is because people assess the chances and consequences of getting caught as lower, well that and greed.
Bottom line, CI has contributed to the problem. Given, making CI go away isn't going to undo anything that has been done, but as long as CI continues, it precludes any ability to rollback any of these changes...
I was addressing however the responsible portion of the the/. audience, the ones who are introspective enough to be able to identify with the individuals whose rights are being violated when music is copied unlawfully. I was addressing folk who have developed sufficient moral fibre to be able to see that regardless of the wrongs RIAA has propogated on the world, that two wrongs don't make a right.
I suggest sir, that the load of bunk you are referring to is the position so oft quoted in these parts that because RIAA is evil and corrupt that it is okay to unlawfully copy music. That sir, _IS_ bunk. That sir, is something we all learned as children. However, the sad fact is, that while we may learn that as children, we are generally incapable of applying it in the real world until we grow up.
Now, I'm not saying RIAA is good, it isn't, but unlawfully copying and distributing their member organization's copyrighted material is not an effective way of expressing that discontent. I specifically said that I doubted RIAA would resicnd recent royalty increases, but there is no need to put pressures on them which militate further raises of these royalties. Nor do I think royalty relief, in and of itself will cause radio stations to lower ad content.
However, radio stations will never lower ad content while to do so would jeopardize the bottom line, which in view of the royalty load, is likely. Likewise RIAA will never reduce the royalty load, and in fact will continue to raise it, while they feel they are being deprived of revenues due to large scale unlawful copying and distribution. RIAA will never feel that such a condition exists until people start respecting their member organizations rights to the material.
I suspect the same condition which prevents you from being able to correctly apply the 2 wrongs != 1 right principle is the same condition preventing you from seeing the relationship between all these items. In spite of this, I'll point out that there are certainly other factors which have gotten involved, and other new factors which will complicate the equation. This isn't simple cause and effect (which may be another source of the problem for you) and I'm not trying to quantify the effect, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the costs to buy music, and use music (lawfully by paying royalties) has gone up consitently, and rather drastically, since the advent of on-line music sharing (which in the vast majority of cases is unlawfull distribution...)
As I have repeatedly pointed out, RIAA perceives lost revenues due to file sharing, I generally take RIAA's positions with a huge grain of salt (I'm a musician, and several RIAA members have at various times tried to put us over the turntable as it were) but this one is plausible. As long as RIAA continues to have that perception it will act agreessively to protect the revenue streams of it's member organizations. Simple really. So, rather than promote defrauding RIAA by unlawful copying and distribution, why not send a real message, boycott. If we all boycott RIAA members, that sends a clear message. And, don't bother trying to insinuate that they would just view this as a more evidence of illegal filesharing further pushing their revenues down. That won't wash, we all know that they are watching that traffic to aid in their demographics collection.
Only in such a case will you be sending the message you want to send clearly. So long as you don't respect the rights of RIAA member orgs to the material they own, why would you expect them to ever make the reforms you want them to make? If however, you send a clear message, that doesn;t involve abrogating their rights, that creates a different situation.
Put it this way, as long as you are unlawfully copying RIAA member property, you are sending the message that regardless of your complaint with RIAA, that you value their property. So long as they are convinced that this property has value, they will continue as they have. If,
No-one sees the point of buying HD radio, after all who wants to hear 25 out of every 60 minutes listening to HD commercials. Better to just get an MP3 player, since we all have all the music we want on our hard drives anyways.
But wait, if we all stopped unlawfully copying music to our hard drives, perhaps RIAA would stop trying to reclaim the lost revenues from other sources (read: increasing radio royalties), which would in turn allow the radio stations to reduce the ad content to bearable levels. (Okay, so the royalties aren't likely to come down in the near future, but no need to drive them higher...)
Or alternatively you could go with satelite radio, but that has subscription costs, because they don't have commercials, but the subscription costs are pretty high, because they have to pay those same royalties, because RIAA perceives that they are losing money to our hard drives.
So, before you pan radio for the problems, think about how much you have contributed to the sources of those problems.
Oh, so staffing is one of those big savings areas for Windows shops is it?
What a crock! The only way that assertion could possibly be true is if the Windows shops staff with nothing other than dime a dozen MCSEs. In a linux shop your staff actually has to know something...
(Light goes on) - Gee, I never even considered that, but this seems likely to have some effect on the frequency and impact of Windows Security issues. After all, your damn MCSE probably didn't take the specific course which gave him a regurgitatable step by step plan to deal with exploits (I think it used to be called NT in the enterprise;0)
In any case, this is fluff, the whole category is pretty much fluff. TCO is the single most misinterpreted statistic in modern computing. TCO is only a valid comparison between products that have comparable capabilities. IE doing TCO analysis on brown eggs and white eggs is valid, doing the TCO analysis on brown eggs and dishwasher detergent is not.
Until M$ puts up a product comparable to Linux, doing TCO comparisons are misleading. After all, your lower TCO isn't much of a comfort when the latest malware offering has your data center on its knees.
But, since I was poking fun, using the actual length of the bio, which incidentally I knew was longer than 255, allthough not exactly how long, would have decreased the audience for the joke. Since the form states 255 characters, and most folk with any familiarity with that section of their Preferences are more likely to know the stated length, not the actual.
My bad though, obviously I overlooked the large anal-retentive block of/.ers who have nothing better to do than find out the discrepancies in the/. site. Damn, after all that work to avoid the speeling and grammar, Nazis to fall to someone who is still socially at the level of potty training. My apologies.
I went to University looking to get a $DISCIPLINE degree, prior to even registering for classes I started hunting through the scholarships. What I found is that any shcolarship offered to students who intend to major in $DISCIPLINE has some pretty tough competition. I found that out by using the best resource I ever found for the poor student:
The University Student Panhandling Advisor
Seriously, a lot of schools will have staff whose sole professional purpose is to keep track of scholarships which students of that institution could compete for. Makes sense, the U doesn't care who pays the bills, just so long as they get paid, so helping economically disadvantaged students to find funding is a win-win.
My personal experience was that there were literally hundreds of scholarships available to me, once I stopped focusing on $DISCIPLINE.
So stop worrying about tech scholarships, start worrying about scholarships, period. If that youth-tap-dance-zealot scholarship pays the bills, put on those shoes baby, just put on those shoes...
Users cannot be free while using a non-free program.
Hey RMS, didn't they offer intorductory logic at MIT?
Seriously, there is no logic to the above statement, it is totally bereft of value as a supporting argument. Particularly since it is patently false.
What should have been said is:
Users cannot be free until the M$'s and RMS's of the world let them make their own software choices free of obfuscation and misrepresentation.
Do you really seek to abridge the rights of end users to use the product which does the job best for them? Do you seek to abridge the rights of developers to dispose of their work as they see fit?
This argument is more akin to religious extremism than reasoned argument. I do not debate your right to have strong (and wrong) opinions. I will hotly debate the conclusions you would have people draw from your opinions.
Your assertion about the Invidious Video Driver Et. Al demonstrates this clearly. Your position seems to indicate that using any non-free software to resolve a problem is somehow wrong. Nothing can be further from the truth. Given two pieces of software X and Y where X is non-free but conforms to the requirements, and Y is free but does not satisfy all requirements, that users should select Y over X, despite the fact that X performs the required job and Y does not. This is where the argument gets it's religious flavor. What other term can I apply to a position which exhorts users to deny the evidence of their senses in the pursuit of some (likely unattainable) Xanadu?
As for those who create software, who has the right to determine how they dispose of their property? Your position on this is merely the antithesis of the Microsoft/SCO position. Nor is your position any more tenable than theirs. Microsoft/SCO assert that free software is somehow immoral, and you assert the opposite. I suggest that neither of your opinions matter a hill of beans.
It is unseemly for anyone who purports to support Free, as in freedom, to seek to villify developers for exercising their freedoms.
The simple fact of the matter is that your extremist position is no more valid than the extremist positions of your antagonists. Like most such positions, it has no place in the real world. In the real world, you seek solutions which work, regardless of their dogmatic purity. Several times in the last century people tried superimposing dogma over reality, by and large those experiments failed. Those that still are with us have had to yield to reality to continue to exist.
There is no one "right" answer in the free v. non-free software debate. The "right" answer is not blanket dogma, but the result of an unbiased analysis of the situation, and a choice based on that analysis and the constraints of the real world we live in, wether you are a producer or a consumer of software.
Great! Now open up the document I just sent you without rebooting, and without invoking explorer or another complete shell replacement.
What's wrong? Apparently explorer is the shell, which was my point. This straw man attack is complete fluff.
In any case, try doing exactly what you suggested. Okay, now, type exit in cmd, press CTRL-ALT-DEL and select task manager. Well, lo and behold, no cmd there either. In point of fact, Winlogon.exe is the responsible program at that point, but we don't confuse winlogon as being the shell do we...
That M$ includes shell-like capabilities to other programs via the same libraries that explorer uses does not nullify explorer as the shell, nor is it necessarily good programming practice.
You don't like that single assertion, fine, I admit it isn't the most accurate statement I've ever uttered, but if you are pretending that your argument in any way impinges on my assertion that cmd is not the shell and explorer is, there is a law firm in Utah which could make use of your talents in the straw man attack.
Regardless of the merits of any arguments I or any other put forward, it is rather compelling when Microsoft themselves refer to explorer.exe as the shell. Then the argument becomes is M$ right to call explorer a shell. In any case, M$ pretty clearly means for explorer.exe to be your shell, not cmd.exe.
Beyond that, there is pretty conclusive evidence that cmd.exe exists for no other reason than to provide backwards compability for some applications. After all the program in that namespace harkens back to NT. It was quite clear to me using it on those early NT boxes that cmd was not DOS, but sufficiently DOS-like to keep most apps happy. Throughout that products life, and it's direct descendants we did not see development of cmd.exe into a real shell either. Rather, those shell functions which were missing were built into explorer or other new programs, like WSH.
In point of fact, you can change your default shell from explorer to any executable, typically this is referred to a shell replacement, indicating that the common use of the term co-incides with Microsoft's use of the term, which is that explorer.exe is the shell. None of the people writing Windows shell replacements provide you an alternative to cmd.exe, and they are right not to do so, because CMD is not the shell.
Go ahead and try replacing your default shell (explorer.exe) with cmd.exe. I will suggest you will not be able to accomplish any of the tasks you routinely do with that machine. Because you speicifed a program which was not meant to be a shell, it cannot fulfill all the tasks which M$ expects a shell to provide. The semantic difference of wether cmd acesses explorer directly or accesses the same function directly is moot, cmd can not provide complete shell services for a Windows machine, at best it could be used to invoke a full blown version of explorer, or another complete shell. Functionally it is a CLI interface, maybe not directly to explorer, but a limited subset of the indetical functions as explorer. While conceptually, it is not an interface to explorer, functionally, it may as well be.
Then why when folk refer to Shell Replacement for Windoze that explorer is allways the targeted executable?
I think a pretty strong case can be made for explorer over cmd as the default windows shell. CMD.exe is really nothing more than a command line interface to explorer. It implements only a narrow subset of explorers capabilities, relies on explorer much like any other called program for process control, filesystem access, etc. etc. etc.
As for WSH, forget it, same paradigm, different implementation.
Now if you want a real shell...
this is about as close as you're going to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is the party defending Linux for Linux's own sake? This is the thrust of my question. A plea more to the OSDLs, OSIs, and FSFs to get off their asses, work together, and start providing that role.
Anyone consider that the GPL has no weight in China?
Why should the Chinese conform to the GPL? No reason, will they? Who can tell. I suggest that China is not a good example of another market.
Next market please. I'm pretty confident your scenario won't work out as planned. Any given market is liable to come down to one of three cases. First markets in countries which we have no reason to believe that the spirit or text of the GPL will not be adhered to. Or they are developing countries over which the US (and other devlopped countries) have a great deal of influence. Lastly, the market in question has laws in place, or are contemplating legislation which could allow SCO to repeat the process in their courts. If they win the first one, they can go court to court to court where necessary, they'll have the cash to do it.
But, lastly, ever actually look at the warnings on those tapes/DVDs you rent? Don t they specifically state that INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS exist which protect copyrighted works? Don't you think it possible for countries to further strengthen those agreements?
If lawyers in general could perform such prognostication, there would be no need for the courts would there, no, two lawyers would sit down, and with faultless powers of prognostication, would have to agree on how things will turn out.
Please. not even your Columbia law professor believes that.
I think the question I really despair of finding the answer to is how to get these organizations to co-operate meaningfully. I find it a stinging indictment that in view of WRGO, that we, the rank and file, haven't seen from any of these is the leadership role, which could provide cohesive resistance in times like these. Rather it is individuals like ESR, RMS and Linus who go out, off their own hook and take the role. At least someone is doing it, but each of these gentlemen is one man with one mans resources.
Fax leaves a good paper trail, is transmitted over a private network, not nearly as liable to interception, with legally mandated service requirements. There is no amibguity with faxing, you feed the sheet and it goes or doesn't, you know right away.
For B2B, I'd say this is the safer solution. B2C you probably aren;t sending quotes back and forth like this. They pay, or they buy elsewhere.
Really, is anyone satisfied that the legal future of Linux rests in the hands of SCO, IBM, Novell and the US legal system? We've all been waxing rhapsodic over IBM, and it looks like this news is going to make us do the same for Novell. But really, hasn't IBM wielded the big stick of IP enough to at least make us a little nervous? What about Novell, they signed an agreement which opened the door to this particular nightmare, not a glowing review of their due diligence, after all, one should at least contingency plan for this kind of suit when making such deals...
Nor are their motives quite the same as the grass roots. I wouldn't even try to defend the thesis that IBM and Novell are not in it for their own best interests. I also don't see any reason to believe that their best interests are necesarilly Linux's.
It's nice to see these guys in the white (or maybe just real light gray) hats, but it is trivial to change your hat. The enemy of my enemy != my friend, ally - perhaps, confederate - okay, but friend, I don't think so.
The problem is none of the players have a mandated interest in promoting and protecting Linux, both are in it for financial motivations, when the wind starts blowing profits another way, both will jump ship as quick as they are able.
What to do? I confess I don't know. It'd be nice for Linux/FOSS to maybe have an associated legal entity tasked with promoting Linux/FOSS in the market and protecting Linux/FOSS in the law. Ideally, a not-for profit organization. (A honest to goodness charity would be better, at least your legal defense contributions would be a tax deduction...)
Ultimately, the nature of Linux/FOSS to not be beholden to anything/one has been one of the greatest strengths. It is part and parcel of the success we have seen since Linus released our obsession on the world. However, this lack has now come full circle as we are essentially forced to watch the legal fate of Linux/FOSS be placed in the hands of one company who wishes to smash it, two which seek to exploit it, and the US legal system.
Joseph Stalin once said, "How many divisions does the pope have?" I can easily see Darl Mcbride saying, "How many lawyers does Linus have?" way back before this mess all started.
Okay, I admit it, I've just been waiting for a reason to compare Joseph Stalin and Darl McBride.
Why anyone would choose to use a Word document for the purpose Dell used it is completely beyond me. Are they so brainwashed over there that there was no exploration of the alternatives? Particularly in view of the fact that the app vendor (M$) specifically does not promote the use of that feature for securitys sake.
Really Dell, STFU, your precious relationship with Microsoft does not preclude using your brains when making software selections for sensitive processes like binding quotes...
On the plus side, I'm sure I've got a Dell quote somewhere in the office... Hmmm, laptop for $15 anyone?
A reasoned argument, at last.
I suspect that you are correct, eliminate CI, and nothing changes, on its own... I think the point I probably should have been making is that as long as CI continues there is no reason to believe that any of the situations I mentioned will get better. Only if CI is brought back to pre-internet music sharing potentials will there be enough manuvering room for there to be even the possibility of undoing any of the described effects. You can't ask radio stations to reduce ad times when to do so would be to cut their financial throat. Eliminate that condition, and no, the ad volumes don't go down in and of themselves, but it is pretty obvious just from /. reactions that ad volume is a problem with the industry. If you are a radio exec, it seems pretty obvious that people will listen to the channel that gives more of what they want, and less of what they don't. If you have the space in the budget to reduce the volume of adds you cater to the will of your potential clients, increasing your listener base, making your reduced volume of adds more effective, possibly justifying an increase in the prices charged for ads...
The problem is certainly not simple, or straightforward, but I suggest that until CI is reduced to levels consistent with tape dubbing, RIAA will never relent, and will further exacerbate the problem.
To go with your analogy, CI is equivalent to getting around the toll both by driving on the shoulder. Folks never did that when the tolls were going to pay off the roads, folks still don't do it even though the roads are paid off. So obviously the only reason CI continues is because people assess the chances and consequences of getting caught as lower, well that and greed.
Bottom line, CI has contributed to the problem. Given, making CI go away isn't going to undo anything that has been done, but as long as CI continues, it precludes any ability to rollback any of these changes...
I suggest sir, that the load of bunk you are referring to is the position so oft quoted in these parts that because RIAA is evil and corrupt that it is okay to unlawfully copy music. That sir, _IS_ bunk. That sir, is something we all learned as children. However, the sad fact is, that while we may learn that as children, we are generally incapable of applying it in the real world until we grow up.
Now, I'm not saying RIAA is good, it isn't, but unlawfully copying and distributing their member organization's copyrighted material is not an effective way of expressing that discontent. I specifically said that I doubted RIAA would resicnd recent royalty increases, but there is no need to put pressures on them which militate further raises of these royalties. Nor do I think royalty relief, in and of itself will cause radio stations to lower ad content.
However, radio stations will never lower ad content while to do so would jeopardize the bottom line, which in view of the royalty load, is likely. Likewise RIAA will never reduce the royalty load, and in fact will continue to raise it, while they feel they are being deprived of revenues due to large scale unlawful copying and distribution. RIAA will never feel that such a condition exists until people start respecting their member organizations rights to the material.
I suspect the same condition which prevents you from being able to correctly apply the 2 wrongs != 1 right principle is the same condition preventing you from seeing the relationship between all these items. In spite of this, I'll point out that there are certainly other factors which have gotten involved, and other new factors which will complicate the equation. This isn't simple cause and effect (which may be another source of the problem for you) and I'm not trying to quantify the effect, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the costs to buy music, and use music (lawfully by paying royalties) has gone up consitently, and rather drastically, since the advent of on-line music sharing (which in the vast majority of cases is unlawfull distribution...)
As I have repeatedly pointed out, RIAA perceives lost revenues due to file sharing, I generally take RIAA's positions with a huge grain of salt (I'm a musician, and several RIAA members have at various times tried to put us over the turntable as it were) but this one is plausible. As long as RIAA continues to have that perception it will act agreessively to protect the revenue streams of it's member organizations. Simple really. So, rather than promote defrauding RIAA by unlawful copying and distribution, why not send a real message, boycott. If we all boycott RIAA members, that sends a clear message. And, don't bother trying to insinuate that they would just view this as a more evidence of illegal filesharing further pushing their revenues down. That won't wash, we all know that they are watching that traffic to aid in their demographics collection.
Only in such a case will you be sending the message you want to send clearly. So long as you don't respect the rights of RIAA member orgs to the material they own, why would you expect them to ever make the reforms you want them to make? If however, you send a clear message, that doesn;t involve abrogating their rights, that creates a different situation.
Put it this way, as long as you are unlawfully copying RIAA member property, you are sending the message that regardless of your complaint with RIAA, that you value their property. So long as they are convinced that this property has value, they will continue as they have. If,
No-one sees the point of buying HD radio, after all who wants to hear 25 out of every 60 minutes listening to HD commercials. Better to just get an MP3 player, since we all have all the music we want on our hard drives anyways.
But wait, if we all stopped unlawfully copying music to our hard drives, perhaps RIAA would stop trying to reclaim the lost revenues from other sources (read: increasing radio royalties), which would in turn allow the radio stations to reduce the ad content to bearable levels. (Okay, so the royalties aren't likely to come down in the near future, but no need to drive them higher...)
Or alternatively you could go with satelite radio, but that has subscription costs, because they don't have commercials, but the subscription costs are pretty high, because they have to pay those same royalties, because RIAA perceives that they are losing money to our hard drives.
So, before you pan radio for the problems, think about how much you have contributed to the sources of those problems.
Lindon, with the rest of the fakes.
What a crock! The only way that assertion could possibly be true is if the Windows shops staff with nothing other than dime a dozen MCSEs. In a linux shop your staff actually has to know something...
(Light goes on) - Gee, I never even considered that, but this seems likely to have some effect on the frequency and impact of Windows Security issues. After all, your damn MCSE probably didn't take the specific course which gave him a regurgitatable step by step plan to deal with exploits (I think it used to be called NT in the enterprise ;0)
In any case, this is fluff, the whole category is pretty much fluff. TCO is the single most misinterpreted statistic in modern computing. TCO is only a valid comparison between products that have comparable capabilities. IE doing TCO analysis on brown eggs and white eggs is valid, doing the TCO analysis on brown eggs and dishwasher detergent is not.
Until M$ puts up a product comparable to Linux, doing TCO comparisons are misleading. After all, your lower TCO isn't much of a comfort when the latest malware offering has your data center on its knees.
Yeah but, while all of that may be true, I still want one NOW!
However, this post, which I aknowledge to be be WTFOT will not be modified.
Ah life on /..
(rimshot)
But, since I was poking fun, using the actual length of the bio, which incidentally I knew was longer than 255, allthough not exactly how long, would have decreased the audience for the joke. Since the form states 255 characters, and most folk with any familiarity with that section of their Preferences are more likely to know the stated length, not the actual.
My bad though, obviously I overlooked the large anal-retentive block of /.ers who have nothing better to do than find out the discrepancies in the /. site. Damn, after all that work to avoid the speeling and grammar, Nazis to fall to someone who is still socially at the level of potty training. My apologies.
Damn RMS
Except that the coffee and toast are virtually guaranteed not to be backwards compatible with your current version of Gastrointestinal Tract.
The University Student Panhandling Advisor
Seriously, a lot of schools will have staff whose sole professional purpose is to keep track of scholarships which students of that institution could compete for. Makes sense, the U doesn't care who pays the bills, just so long as they get paid, so helping economically disadvantaged students to find funding is a win-win.
My personal experience was that there were literally hundreds of scholarships available to me, once I stopped focusing on $DISCIPLINE.
So stop worrying about tech scholarships, start worrying about scholarships, period. If that youth-tap-dance-zealot scholarship pays the bills, put on those shoes baby, just put on those shoes...
Hey RMS, didn't they offer intorductory logic at MIT?
Seriously, there is no logic to the above statement, it is totally bereft of value as a supporting argument. Particularly since it is patently false.
What should have been said is: Users cannot be free until the M$'s and RMS's of the world let them make their own software choices free of obfuscation and misrepresentation.
Do you really seek to abridge the rights of end users to use the product which does the job best for them? Do you seek to abridge the rights of developers to dispose of their work as they see fit?
This argument is more akin to religious extremism than reasoned argument. I do not debate your right to have strong (and wrong) opinions. I will hotly debate the conclusions you would have people draw from your opinions.
Your assertion about the Invidious Video Driver Et. Al demonstrates this clearly. Your position seems to indicate that using any non-free software to resolve a problem is somehow wrong. Nothing can be further from the truth. Given two pieces of software X and Y where X is non-free but conforms to the requirements, and Y is free but does not satisfy all requirements, that users should select Y over X, despite the fact that X performs the required job and Y does not. This is where the argument gets it's religious flavor. What other term can I apply to a position which exhorts users to deny the evidence of their senses in the pursuit of some (likely unattainable) Xanadu?
As for those who create software, who has the right to determine how they dispose of their property? Your position on this is merely the antithesis of the Microsoft/SCO position. Nor is your position any more tenable than theirs. Microsoft/SCO assert that free software is somehow immoral, and you assert the opposite. I suggest that neither of your opinions matter a hill of beans.
It is unseemly for anyone who purports to support Free, as in freedom, to seek to villify developers for exercising their freedoms.
The simple fact of the matter is that your extremist position is no more valid than the extremist positions of your antagonists. Like most such positions, it has no place in the real world. In the real world, you seek solutions which work, regardless of their dogmatic purity. Several times in the last century people tried superimposing dogma over reality, by and large those experiments failed. Those that still are with us have had to yield to reality to continue to exist.
There is no one "right" answer in the free v. non-free software debate. The "right" answer is not blanket dogma, but the result of an unbiased analysis of the situation, and a choice based on that analysis and the constraints of the real world we live in, wether you are a producer or a consumer of software.
What's wrong? Apparently explorer is the shell, which was my point. This straw man attack is complete fluff.
In any case, try doing exactly what you suggested. Okay, now, type exit in cmd, press CTRL-ALT-DEL and select task manager. Well, lo and behold, no cmd there either. In point of fact, Winlogon.exe is the responsible program at that point, but we don't confuse winlogon as being the shell do we...
That M$ includes shell-like capabilities to other programs via the same libraries that explorer uses does not nullify explorer as the shell, nor is it necessarily good programming practice.
You don't like that single assertion, fine, I admit it isn't the most accurate statement I've ever uttered, but if you are pretending that your argument in any way impinges on my assertion that cmd is not the shell and explorer is, there is a law firm in Utah which could make use of your talents in the straw man attack.
Beyond that, there is pretty conclusive evidence that cmd.exe exists for no other reason than to provide backwards compability for some applications. After all the program in that namespace harkens back to NT. It was quite clear to me using it on those early NT boxes that cmd was not DOS, but sufficiently DOS-like to keep most apps happy. Throughout that products life, and it's direct descendants we did not see development of cmd.exe into a real shell either. Rather, those shell functions which were missing were built into explorer or other new programs, like WSH.
In point of fact, you can change your default shell from explorer to any executable, typically this is referred to a shell replacement, indicating that the common use of the term co-incides with Microsoft's use of the term, which is that explorer.exe is the shell. None of the people writing Windows shell replacements provide you an alternative to cmd.exe, and they are right not to do so, because CMD is not the shell.
Go ahead and try replacing your default shell (explorer.exe) with cmd.exe. I will suggest you will not be able to accomplish any of the tasks you routinely do with that machine. Because you speicifed a program which was not meant to be a shell, it cannot fulfill all the tasks which M$ expects a shell to provide. The semantic difference of wether cmd acesses explorer directly or accesses the same function directly is moot, cmd can not provide complete shell services for a Windows machine, at best it could be used to invoke a full blown version of explorer, or another complete shell. Functionally it is a CLI interface, maybe not directly to explorer, but a limited subset of the indetical functions as explorer. While conceptually, it is not an interface to explorer, functionally, it may as well be.
I think a pretty strong case can be made for explorer over cmd as the default windows shell. CMD.exe is really nothing more than a command line interface to explorer. It implements only a narrow subset of explorers capabilities, relies on explorer much like any other called program for process control, filesystem access, etc. etc. etc.
As for WSH, forget it, same paradigm, different implementation.
Now if you want a real shell... this is about as close as you're going to come.