FUD is pretending that bit torrent is NOT used mostly for piracy.
No, FUD is when you blame a protocol or software for the way people are using them.
"TCP is used mostly for piracy." There. It's probably true, too. Kinda sounds silly when you pick on TCP, doesn't it, and yet so righteous when you pick on BT. Why is that?
Must be that whole OSI model nepotism thing, playing favorites with lower levels, damn you ISO!
If you want to see where this may be headed, take a look at the DirectConnect situation, or many other popular P2P protocols.
DC is also a popular P2P protocol and it started as a closed application whose protocol was reverse engineered. Later attempts to retake control were futile and nowadays there's no such thing as an "official" DC protocol, only several different client software making it on sheer popularity. Just like BT, some of them add new features and sometimes they're borrowed by the others and so on.
Think of IRC too. It also doesn't have an "official" specification, there are all these servers and clients and so on. At least there were some RFC's at some point, which is more than can be said of other P2P protocols.
So it seems to be a "normal" situation with P2P to not have a standard protocol and for it to evolve on server/client software popularity alone.
...and you shouldn't bother with schools. No, really. Apple tried that (might still be trying it, for all I know), and it didn't make any difference.
There's one fatal flaw to this argument. This time around we're not talking different platforms (PC vs Mac), we're talking OS's competing for the same platform (PC). Kids and young people will grow up with a PC at home and PC's at school. The question is, what OS will they use? At home they have a choice, and they are very likely to follow what they learn at school.
Microsoft got this a long time ago. They are everywhere, pushing Windows into schools and universities left and right, catch them at all age levels.
I guess we're still hoping that Novell will come to its senses at some point and break up with Microsoft. Whether it can be done it's another story.
God knows that SuSE desktop edition and Ubuntu are pretty much the only established Linux desktop distributions -- I mean, really solid, end-user oriented through and through. Red Hat is focused on the server and Fedora, let's face it, is not polished enough for the desktop, not like the other two. Mandrake used to be a good choice and they still hang in there, but the desktop distro they get out is iffy, it never really convinced me personally. What else is there? I'm not even going to consider Linspire (although perhaps Microsoft hopes someone will). MEPIS? Small operation, perhaps good enough, but will any big vendor pick them up? Will smaller ones?
I'm not sure. You're assuming that PC vendors need to pack a new OS (or release) periodically, just like a software house, which is not true IMHO. They just need a well-working OS, which is in demand by the public.
Obviously, Vista is a wobbly contender. Linux is good, but why turn to it all of a sudden? Did it finally become "good enough", pass some invisible threshold? My guess is no; rather, something happened to XP, which used to be a solid all around good choice: MS happened to it, decided to pull the plug and force migration to Vista.
It's ironic, really. MS dealt a blow to XP by themselves and drove the PC packagers into a corner, forced them to look for something else, anything, as a backup, and Linux was the only other solid alternative out there.
How about a slap on the wrist? Come on, given Carmack's contributions to free software, it's an even more silly blunder. Especially nowadays that everybody's wound up about the GPL. He's gotta bear at least a token chide.
How this plays out depends on id/Valve's reaction, I guess. A simple apology is all it takes for this to be forgotten in no time.
I'll grant you that: given the opportunity, we're all freebie whores.:) And with this you've also wrapped up nicely the rebuttal to the GGP's claim that "they" have more power over the people in this respect in the US than elsewhere.
Depends on how much more expensive than regular drives they'll be. In the situation you presented I'd much rather buy an Asus router with an internal HDD or external HDD in a USB/FireWire rack. Always on, saves on both power and noise. Sure, not so cool, but the heat is within normal levels. Beats keeping the whole computer running all the time.
But you and I are geeks. We're not representative. I'm talking about the kind of Joe user who thinks that computers run on smoke. When they are exposed to the new and strange concept that their fridge-lookalike aka computer needs more than just electricity to run ie. this strange thing called "software"... Some people will turn to their local *Mart by default. Some will turn to everything [i]but[/i] a boxed legit copy. And the proportion of these types of people in some countries vastly outnumbers the others.
In the USA, Microsoft has the stick firmly in hand (in the form of lawsuits, the BSA, politicians, and law enforcement) and only occassionaly dangles carrots (in the form of discounts to specific groups).
I don't see it like that. They don't control the stick in the USA anymore than they do in China. It's simplay about very different end user mindsets.
Think about it. As far as businesses are concerned, OK, it's not nice to live in fear of a BSA raid. But who the heck is gonna raid an individual's home? Who's gonna know he's not using a legit copy of Windows? The most they can do is guess people are pirating by watching the legal sales drop, that's all. It's not like infringing on music/movies, which involves active sharing, which can be detected.
The difference between US and China in this respect is simply the way people came to use software. In US you grow up brainwashed by Microsoft et al into thinking Windows is the only OS around. Also, picking up a copy of software from a store is as normal and common as picking up groceries, and for regular Joe it's pretty much as awkward to pick up an Internet copy as it would be to shoplift. Even if you don't get caught, it's... disturbing.
By contrast, in China and other countries with a similar infringement problem, software was seen as free from day one. There, you grew up swapping software on floppies, then CDROM's and Internet is just a convenient extra step. Buying boxed software from a store is as strange as buying gold-coated toilet paper. Why on Earth would you spend your money on something as immaterial as software when it's free and just an Internet connection away (or a friend's CD collection, or a helpful man at a street corner)?
It happens all over the world, for various reasons. Take this example, for one. I found it to be a fascinating (for a Westerner) insight into how people in a "wild" ex-Soviet block country think about software. It may also help show you that there are more than one side to every story and that cutting prices sometimes is about more than just piracy.
Just wondering, but what brain-dead IM service allows connections that don't go via SSL?
Umm, all of the most-used ones? AFAIK, Google Talk is the only one of the popular networks that does it, and that's because it's based on XMPP (Jabber).
Yahoo, MSN, AIM/ICQ, none of them have encryption. Whenever I find someone using Pidgin/Gaim I can convince them to install a plugin like gaim-encryption, but my buddies who use the official clients are sitting ducks (and me along with them).
Not even that, here in Germany the company that owned and now rebranded the european wal-mart stores is every now and then selling 300 euro boxes with lindows or something of that kind, simple celeron, 500 GB disks, full multimedia etc.
But it doesn't necessarily mean anything. It is quite possible not a pro-Linux move, just a lower-the-total-cost move.
AFAIK, in the UE there's generally a law implemented in many member countries, saying you must sell retail PC's with a "working" OS on them. So some retailers make the cost a bit more attractive to buyers by slapping Linux (doesn't matter which one), or even FreeDOS, on the machines. It doesn't matter, most people will never even run them, will override with a Windows install ASAP.
So they get to slash the cost of Vista/Office/antivirus licenses, which makes for 100-200. Many buyers will already have copies of their own they can move over to the new computer, albeit with a little hassle with Microsoft activation and such.
I'm not saying "most buyers", it's not a trend or anything, it's just an occasional method of price cutting that appeals to some people. So you can't necessarily read a Linux trend in it.
They still screw themselves if they start introducing modifications to the terms now. Who's gonna take them seriously after that? Gotta ask yourself, who wants to make business with someone who changes deal terms to suit themselves whenever they feel like it?
It takes more then use to trigger copyright protections.
Technically, that's not right. They are a select few ways of use that will NOT trigger copyright protection. Almost everything else is the author's right to decide how it happens.
It's not as simple as saying, "fine, we'll just ditch anything GPLv3". Who's gonna maintain the fork? 'Cause you gotta maintain it, you can't just fork it and let it rot. Will Microsoft pick up the fork? Will any of the Linux distro's that made a deal with Microsoft? Will they fork and maintain all projects that go GPLv3?
See, it's not just a matter of forking the code. The license still sticks. OK, it's not GPLv3, it's good old GPLv2, but I think they'll have a lot of trouble dealing with just GPLv2 too. Remember, v3 made patent protection explicit and took it globally. But the stuff was still there, albeit implicit and USA-centric.
All in all, I absolutely love seeing Microsoft publicly stating it won't touch GPLv3 with a ten foot pole. This is it, folks, this is THE shit. FSF got the holy Grail. It tells the corporate assholes "take it or leave it", and they gotta choose. And neither option comes easy.
I think it's a knee-jerk reaction of Microsoft's to simply dismiss everything GPLv3, but they're probably frantic to get out of the Novell deal with clean face. It turned worse that they could've ever dreamed.
Please give it a rest. If this old argument carried some water when used with Opera, it's silly to use it with Firefox. Common sense dictates that there's far too little to gain by simply changing the UA string, and even so there are far too few people knowledgeable enough to attempt it to make a sizable difference.
How relevant would the Slashdot figure would be, anyway? Of course a bunch of geeks worth their salt wouldn't use IE unless somehow forced (work computer, office policy and such).
You know, it's funny how people will blame everything but themselves when it comes to stuff they don't really want to get rid of, but instead expect to magically turn better somehow.
We don't want to give up smoking, we expect someone to make tobacco healthy somehow. We don't want to give up cars, we expect engines to magically become completely non-polluting and the packed city streets to clear miraculously. We don't want to save power, someone will figure out how to stop and reverse global warming. We don't want to give up stuffing our faces, it's the damn fructose's fault, they should make a better fructose.
And as proof to your point, the most convenient form of storage I use is a laptop HDD in an USB rack. The storage capacity and the speed are great. The read/write access and portability is a breeze because most computers around today have a USB connector. I can upgrade the HDD to bigger and faster whenever I want, with much better cost per GB than anything else around. A well thought case will protect the HDD fairly well, and it's not like I purposely throw it around anyway. The size and weight are small enough to make it practical to carry around.
I don't see ANYTHING on the market today that can beat this. The next best thing are USB flash sticks which handle shocks better and are small enough to be even more practical, but the price per GB is not nearly as nice.
That's IT as far as practical everyday storage is concerned. These are the things that have finally reached the level of practical use once enjoyed by the floppy disc and never surpassed. This is my opinion as an end user, who values ease of use, work-everywhere and $$/GB ratio.
Anybody still insisting on researching optical discs for anything other than R/O stuff or long term storage is IMHO loopy in the head.
I'm going to have to go with the latter. Open source is nice, open source is not really better.
Well, some congratulations are probably in order.:) Not enough people realize that open source and free software are not the answer to everything. Open source is a developement technique, just like agile programming, for instance. It's useful in certain circumstances. Free software is a philosophy on its idealist side and a license based on the copy right laws, on its pragmatic side. As for the voluntary communities, they are hobbyists doing what they like in their spare time.
Make use of them, but respect the work and the licenses and don't forget what they are and what they aren't.
To get rid of XSS you need to get rid of the injection agent. Which is HTML. Period. As long as a webmail program insists on rendering HTML, eventually someone finds a new way to piggyback JavaScript on it. No matter how much they try to filter the crap out of JS. JS/ECMAScript/HTML and the browsers' support for them evolve all the time. It's a doomed effort from the start. Witness Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail and so on get hit by XSS time and time again.
Right on. He has to find something else that's extra and only him can provide. Here are a few ideas:
1. Technical support. He is automatically the ultimate guru on the subject of his software. He can sell that. Depends on the complexity of the software or the integration whether other people can grok the code well enough to be able to offer support as well.
2. Open up and give away a simpler version, sell the version with more features or the one that scales to more users etc. No sane businessman will say no to this deal. End users can make do with the free version and at the same time they can improve it as a hobby, since the code is libre. And people who really need the bigger version will pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, FUD is when you blame a protocol or software for the way people are using them.
"TCP is used mostly for piracy." There. It's probably true, too. Kinda sounds silly when you pick on TCP, doesn't it, and yet so righteous when you pick on BT. Why is that?
Must be that whole OSI model nepotism thing, playing favorites with lower levels, damn you ISO!
If you want to see where this may be headed, take a look at the DirectConnect situation, or many other popular P2P protocols.
DC is also a popular P2P protocol and it started as a closed application whose protocol was reverse engineered. Later attempts to retake control were futile and nowadays there's no such thing as an "official" DC protocol, only several different client software making it on sheer popularity. Just like BT, some of them add new features and sometimes they're borrowed by the others and so on.
Think of IRC too. It also doesn't have an "official" specification, there are all these servers and clients and so on. At least there were some RFC's at some point, which is more than can be said of other P2P protocols.
So it seems to be a "normal" situation with P2P to not have a standard protocol and for it to evolve on server/client software popularity alone.
There's one fatal flaw to this argument. This time around we're not talking different platforms (PC vs Mac), we're talking OS's competing for the same platform (PC). Kids and young people will grow up with a PC at home and PC's at school. The question is, what OS will they use? At home they have a choice, and they are very likely to follow what they learn at school.
Microsoft got this a long time ago. They are everywhere, pushing Windows into schools and universities left and right, catch them at all age levels.
I guess we're still hoping that Novell will come to its senses at some point and break up with Microsoft. Whether it can be done it's another story.
God knows that SuSE desktop edition and Ubuntu are pretty much the only established Linux desktop distributions -- I mean, really solid, end-user oriented through and through. Red Hat is focused on the server and Fedora, let's face it, is not polished enough for the desktop, not like the other two. Mandrake used to be a good choice and they still hang in there, but the desktop distro they get out is iffy, it never really convinced me personally. What else is there? I'm not even going to consider Linspire (although perhaps Microsoft hopes someone will). MEPIS? Small operation, perhaps good enough, but will any big vendor pick them up? Will smaller ones?
I'm not sure. You're assuming that PC vendors need to pack a new OS (or release) periodically, just like a software house, which is not true IMHO. They just need a well-working OS, which is in demand by the public.
Obviously, Vista is a wobbly contender. Linux is good, but why turn to it all of a sudden? Did it finally become "good enough", pass some invisible threshold? My guess is no; rather, something happened to XP, which used to be a solid all around good choice: MS happened to it, decided to pull the plug and force migration to Vista.
It's ironic, really. MS dealt a blow to XP by themselves and drove the PC packagers into a corner, forced them to look for something else, anything, as a backup, and Linux was the only other solid alternative out there.
How about a slap on the wrist? Come on, given Carmack's contributions to free software, it's an even more silly blunder. Especially nowadays that everybody's wound up about the GPL. He's gotta bear at least a token chide.
How this plays out depends on id/Valve's reaction, I guess. A simple apology is all it takes for this to be forgotten in no time.
I'll grant you that: given the opportunity, we're all freebie whores. :) And with this you've also wrapped up nicely the rebuttal to the GGP's claim that "they" have more power over the people in this respect in the US than elsewhere.
Depends on how much more expensive than regular drives they'll be. In the situation you presented I'd much rather buy an Asus router with an internal HDD or external HDD in a USB/FireWire rack. Always on, saves on both power and noise. Sure, not so cool, but the heat is within normal levels. Beats keeping the whole computer running all the time.
But you and I are geeks. We're not representative. I'm talking about the kind of Joe user who thinks that computers run on smoke. When they are exposed to the new and strange concept that their fridge-lookalike aka computer needs more than just electricity to run ie. this strange thing called "software"... Some people will turn to their local *Mart by default. Some will turn to everything [i]but[/i] a boxed legit copy. And the proportion of these types of people in some countries vastly outnumbers the others.
I don't see it like that. They don't control the stick in the USA anymore than they do in China. It's simplay about very different end user mindsets.
Think about it. As far as businesses are concerned, OK, it's not nice to live in fear of a BSA raid. But who the heck is gonna raid an individual's home? Who's gonna know he's not using a legit copy of Windows? The most they can do is guess people are pirating by watching the legal sales drop, that's all. It's not like infringing on music/movies, which involves active sharing, which can be detected.
The difference between US and China in this respect is simply the way people came to use software. In US you grow up brainwashed by Microsoft et al into thinking Windows is the only OS around. Also, picking up a copy of software from a store is as normal and common as picking up groceries, and for regular Joe it's pretty much as awkward to pick up an Internet copy as it would be to shoplift. Even if you don't get caught, it's... disturbing.
By contrast, in China and other countries with a similar infringement problem, software was seen as free from day one. There, you grew up swapping software on floppies, then CDROM's and Internet is just a convenient extra step. Buying boxed software from a store is as strange as buying gold-coated toilet paper. Why on Earth would you spend your money on something as immaterial as software when it's free and just an Internet connection away (or a friend's CD collection, or a helpful man at a street corner)?
It happens all over the world, for various reasons. Take this example, for one. I found it to be a fascinating (for a Westerner) insight into how people in a "wild" ex-Soviet block country think about software. It may also help show you that there are more than one side to every story and that cutting prices sometimes is about more than just piracy.
Umm, all of the most-used ones? AFAIK, Google Talk is the only one of the popular networks that does it, and that's because it's based on XMPP (Jabber).
Yahoo, MSN, AIM/ICQ, none of them have encryption. Whenever I find someone using Pidgin/Gaim I can convince them to install a plugin like gaim-encryption, but my buddies who use the official clients are sitting ducks (and me along with them).
But it doesn't necessarily mean anything. It is quite possible not a pro-Linux move, just a lower-the-total-cost move.
AFAIK, in the UE there's generally a law implemented in many member countries, saying you must sell retail PC's with a "working" OS on them. So some retailers make the cost a bit more attractive to buyers by slapping Linux (doesn't matter which one), or even FreeDOS, on the machines. It doesn't matter, most people will never even run them, will override with a Windows install ASAP.
So they get to slash the cost of Vista/Office/antivirus licenses, which makes for 100-200. Many buyers will already have copies of their own they can move over to the new computer, albeit with a little hassle with Microsoft activation and such.
I'm not saying "most buyers", it's not a trend or anything, it's just an occasional method of price cutting that appeals to some people. So you can't necessarily read a Linux trend in it.
Already tried that with Vista. Didn't go so well from what I hear.
*blink*
They still screw themselves if they start introducing modifications to the terms now. Who's gonna take them seriously after that? Gotta ask yourself, who wants to make business with someone who changes deal terms to suit themselves whenever they feel like it?
Technically, that's not right. They are a select few ways of use that will NOT trigger copyright protection. Almost everything else is the author's right to decide how it happens.
It's not as simple as saying, "fine, we'll just ditch anything GPLv3". Who's gonna maintain the fork? 'Cause you gotta maintain it, you can't just fork it and let it rot. Will Microsoft pick up the fork? Will any of the Linux distro's that made a deal with Microsoft? Will they fork and maintain all projects that go GPLv3?
See, it's not just a matter of forking the code. The license still sticks. OK, it's not GPLv3, it's good old GPLv2, but I think they'll have a lot of trouble dealing with just GPLv2 too. Remember, v3 made patent protection explicit and took it globally. But the stuff was still there, albeit implicit and USA-centric.
All in all, I absolutely love seeing Microsoft publicly stating it won't touch GPLv3 with a ten foot pole. This is it, folks, this is THE shit. FSF got the holy Grail. It tells the corporate assholes "take it or leave it", and they gotta choose. And neither option comes easy.
I think it's a knee-jerk reaction of Microsoft's to simply dismiss everything GPLv3, but they're probably frantic to get out of the Novell deal with clean face. It turned worse that they could've ever dreamed.
Please give it a rest. If this old argument carried some water when used with Opera, it's silly to use it with Firefox. Common sense dictates that there's far too little to gain by simply changing the UA string, and even so there are far too few people knowledgeable enough to attempt it to make a sizable difference.
How relevant would the Slashdot figure would be, anyway? Of course a bunch of geeks worth their salt wouldn't use IE unless somehow forced (work computer, office policy and such).
You know, it's funny how people will blame everything but themselves when it comes to stuff they don't really want to get rid of, but instead expect to magically turn better somehow.
We don't want to give up smoking, we expect someone to make tobacco healthy somehow. We don't want to give up cars, we expect engines to magically become completely non-polluting and the packed city streets to clear miraculously. We don't want to save power, someone will figure out how to stop and reverse global warming. We don't want to give up stuffing our faces, it's the damn fructose's fault, they should make a better fructose.
Self-delusion, the greatest show on Earth.
And as proof to your point, the most convenient form of storage I use is a laptop HDD in an USB rack. The storage capacity and the speed are great. The read/write access and portability is a breeze because most computers around today have a USB connector. I can upgrade the HDD to bigger and faster whenever I want, with much better cost per GB than anything else around. A well thought case will protect the HDD fairly well, and it's not like I purposely throw it around anyway. The size and weight are small enough to make it practical to carry around.
I don't see ANYTHING on the market today that can beat this. The next best thing are USB flash sticks which handle shocks better and are small enough to be even more practical, but the price per GB is not nearly as nice.
That's IT as far as practical everyday storage is concerned. These are the things that have finally reached the level of practical use once enjoyed by the floppy disc and never surpassed. This is my opinion as an end user, who values ease of use, work-everywhere and $$/GB ratio.
Anybody still insisting on researching optical discs for anything other than R/O stuff or long term storage is IMHO loopy in the head.
Well, some congratulations are probably in order.
Make use of them, but respect the work and the licenses and don't forget what they are and what they aren't.
No need to pick at it, it's obviously idiotic.
To get rid of XSS you need to get rid of the injection agent. Which is HTML. Period. As long as a webmail program insists on rendering HTML, eventually someone finds a new way to piggyback JavaScript on it. No matter how much they try to filter the crap out of JS. JS/ECMAScript/HTML and the browsers' support for them evolve all the time. It's a doomed effort from the start. Witness Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail and so on get hit by XSS time and time again.
Right on. He has to find something else that's extra and only him can provide. Here are a few ideas:
1. Technical support. He is automatically the ultimate guru on the subject of his software. He can sell that. Depends on the complexity of the software or the integration whether other people can grok the code well enough to be able to offer support as well.
2. Open up and give away a simpler version, sell the version with more features or the one that scales to more users etc. No sane businessman will say no to this deal. End users can make do with the free version and at the same time they can improve it as a hobby, since the code is libre. And people who really need the bigger version will pay for it.
Now now, don't put yourself down, it's perfectly possible to be both!