Oh, now the whole thing has been out of context? Riiiiiight...
I'm out of this discussion now, as it's crystal clear that your "whole operating system" vs. "trial software" comparison is broken due to entirely different proportions which should never be compared. If a user doesn't adjust their expectations properly to the differently complex types of activities (exactly by buying compatible hardware if it somehow turned out to be necessary), then it's their own loss.
"stupid things like driver support for common products should be a given"
Problem is that those things aren't "stupid" (well, they are "stupid" / "irrelevant" / "little" issues for endusers, but for driver developers not really, since WLAN driver development is damn hard - especially without any chipset documentation).
Blame the manufacturers mostly, their support is abysmal sometimes.
Eeeexcuse me, but what kind of reaction did you expect to this kind of entirely non-sensical comparison you made? Go for a hunt after the rotten corpse in your *own* backyard, please.
"So I will ask again, because for all the stated dumbness of my remark, you've still not answered it: from an end-user POV, what is so special about Linux that they should spend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of trial software?"
It's completely obvious and logical that a very limited piece of "trial software" is usually(!) much easier to get accustomed to than a full-blown, entirely new environment with entirely new features and capabilities. Nothing to see here, move along. Or, pray tell me: have you managed to grasp *all* of Windows' features, quirks and maintenance issues in 45 minutes instead of >= 10 years? Too many people all too easily forget that they have more than 10 years of experience with Windows-based systems and specific software there, but somehow always assume that checking out Linux should magically make everything work in a couple of hours... (IOW they're DEAD WRONG about judging platforms, but often don't know it)
Sure, probably people don't care about Linux e.g. because with XP they now have a moderately well-working system (which sadly seems to alleviate the need for checking out alternatives like Linux for many people), but that still doesn't change one iota the fact that your comparison comment was bunk, and I did properly answer your comment anyway (it's absolutely not comparable, much higher functionality/scope than a single piece of software etc.).
"What's so special about linux from an and-user POV that they should expend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of free trial software?"
OH MY FRIGGIN' GOD!!
This is Linux, it's a WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM WORLD with TENS OF GIGABYTES/THOUSANDS of freely available software packages and a certain amount of complexity that goes with such a hugely large offer, not your lame friggin' small trial/freeware text editor or photo management tool which has not the slightest amount of system requirements or dependencies on hardware device compatibility etc..
This has got to be one of the dumbest remarks in the context of perceived Linux (un)usability I've heard in a while.
If people *really* thought of how stupid some Windows behaviour/risk is and how much inconvenience it brings and *really* properly evaluated alternatives (measured in weeks at least, not hours) and *the huge advantages it brings with it* (plus the disadvantages it brings, largely due to migrating from a proprietary system with closed formats/protocols) before ranting stupidly, then... oh well, nevermind, if pigs could fly...
"I can crash Linux (NLD 9) in a matter of minutes with a small program (just while(fork()); and see how happy YOUR computer gets:-))."
See "man ulimit". IOW PEBKAC or admin error.;) Whether there should be restrictive default limits of process counts established in common Linux distributions is another question, though...
This reflects much more on your CRAPTASTIC bank than on the wide distribution of Firefox. Any bank that still has been restricting access to IE only during the last two years (many would say even longer than that) should be beaten unconscious and shot, given IEs widely known rather big insecurity issues (sure, Firefox also has its share of issues, but it's nowhere near as severe, often and unpatched as is IE).
I'm astonished that with such a specific Motorola OSS topic, the #1 OSS website about all this hasn't been mentioned yet: http://www.openezx.org.nyud.net:8090/
The OpenEZX project seems to be quite active, with Harald Welte (of GPL-Violations fame) doing a lot of 2.6.x kernel porting and hardware support. Join the mailing list if you are interested in helping out with this rapidly progressing project!
Unfortunately several people say that Motorola has been less helpful with OSS development than they could have been, but let's hope that this site will change this in a very positive way.
> And, where is the incentive for starting a company if some group can say "You're too successful, we're bringing you down!"
Boy, did you make this comment in the full intention of publishing the Dumbest Comment Of The Year? Listen, there are about 0.00005% of all companies which earn more than $100000000/year (a possible very coarse definition of "too successful"). Yet most other companies that are not as wildly fortunate as those are doing just fine despite not earning such obscene amounts of money, thank you very much (you *can* persist as a company doing only $100k/year, after all). Talking about a non-incentive to *even start* a company based on such a thing as "termination if too successful" is just very stupid.
A veeery looooong time ago (1995, internet bronze age, to be exact) in Germany we had a nice friendly provider called germany.net (later renamed nexgo.de, then bought by large provider arcor.de) which actually offered FREE internet access (minus phone dialin costs, of course) at a time when other providers were still charging ~ $5/hour! (I first went on the internet when Compuserve Germany went below $15/hour, since that was my magical pain limit when I was a pupil) "Problem" was that this germany.net internet access was exactly what the name said - Germany-only. Which was ok initially since there were obscure ways to access foreign-national content (FTP mail,...). Later on IIRC they offered non-German content to premium users and soon freed it up entirely. germany.net was a real pioneer at that time, I'm still very, very thankful for their service!
I don't remember too many details about the limitations of Germany-only service, but with large file servers in Germany offering many international things (full-scale mirroring) it wasn't too painful actually.
Now if a modern OS could provide disc drive priorities, I'd be very happy. I'd like to be able to renice my virus scanner so it only gets to read a sector when the hard drive is already there because an interactive process requested it. As is, it gets the same priority as things I need to use to get my job done.
Let me guess, you've been hiding in a cave and thus not been able to follow Linux CFQ I/O scheduler development, have you?;-)
Also, I really don't understand what's the problem with a 100% CPU process as stated by the original poster.
With a modern interactive scheduler such as in the -ck kernel you hardly even notice any delay anywhere;)
(ok, exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea...)
But of course the problem with a good scheduler is that it's a bit annoying to find out 20 minutes later (once you look at it again, since otherwise you didn't notice anything) that some process hogged your CPU for prolonged amounts of time, thus increasing power requirements and heat and...
Isn't it "weird" that it's just this very piece of DRM-decrypting code that has been found inside?
I'm wondering what they're actually trying to achieve here...
I'd guess that they may have wanted to crack DRM'd Apple media wide open in order to phone home *exact internal details* of what a user is listening to regarding their competitor's products.
Together with the slightly older news that this software has been discovered to phone home secretly, it makes quite some sense.
If this software is really doing such sophisticated, non-trivial and specific operations, then it's quite likely that those Sony BMG criminals were fully informed about what this software would be doing for them!
(and thus it will be very hard for them to blame any and all illegal activities on the first4internet guys alone!!)
Suddenly the thought of committing Seppuku becomes more and more enticing...
Hmm, very interesting. This is most likely because it's not a general-purpose system. Desktop Linux is a much larger threat to them, that's probably why they didn't grant licenses.
Oh, and why is it that all companies making a deal with the devil are quite soon no longer in business?;-) (here's hope you managed to find a good job thereafter!)
Well, yes, WMA DOES exclude Linux: Michael Robertson (Linspire) wrote in an article that he had actually contacted Microsoft about WMA licensing, yet Microsoft actively REFUSED to license it to his Linux distribution (ok, well, it seems WMA was allowed, but not the Digital Restrictions Management component).
By now I'd have thought that every government knew to NOT provide Windows-only services anymore, after that nice ELSTER fiasco in Germany.
(ELSTER is ELektronische STeuer-ERklaerung, and it's exactly the same thing in Germany)
AFAIK ELSTER is compulsory for businesses, as a Windows-only service (well, AFAIK some Linux programs now support it, but in contrast to the main government thing, they're not free).
This issue went as far as allowing affected people to turn in their stuff in paper form again, since they couldn't be bothered to use exPAINsive and insecure windows to do that.
People protesting against this new Windows-only "offer" might be wise to include this fact of a previous German fiasco in their protest statement, as this indicates sloppy research of Australia's government (hah, as if they'd want to research and properly plan their projects...).
Lindows = $40something
Cedega = $44.95
Game X = $40-50
Total = $120-135
Windows Home = $100~
Windows Pro = $130~
Windows Longhorn = Unknown
Antivirus = $0-$100
Firewall = $0-$100
Windows "Repair" tool = $0-$100
HDD Imaging tool = $0-$50
Total = $100-$480
(and that's not even listing that very important word processor and so on...)
So you'd better leave me the h*ll alone with your "facts"...
In case of such a slightly oldish desktop machine having a secret life as a server, make sure to install a Con Kolivas kernel which adds SCHED_BATCH (*full* background processing!!) and SCHED_ISO support and install schedtoold plus schedtool to adjust process priorities after startup. That way you can ensure that processes which really SHOULDN'T interrupt your sisters desktop experience (updatedb, cron, scp, cp, mv, Samba,...) won't do that. Plus you can ensure that processes which are critical (mplayer, xine, xmms) will get SCHED_ISO almost-realtime scheduling.
BTW, I am doing kernel (device driver) development and I am using a lowly P3/700 machine (which seems to get faster and faster as time goes by;-) I don't really see the need for a faster machine (well, minus some compile time issues, obviously).
Just a "don't do this at home, kids!" clarification: You can NOT assume Germany to have unlimited speed on all highways, in fact on many sections it's now limited to e.g. 120 or even 100 KPH. That doesn't mean that there is no unlimited highway section any more, but there are many more limits than there used to be. (which probably has to do with insanely increased traffic, worsened road conditions,...)
And the obligatory notice: unlimited speed doesn't mean you can go as fast as you want, but as fast as your current driving environment safely allows for...
No, Wine is developed for x86 systems that use X11. That includes Linux, BSD, Solaris, HURD, and possibly even Windows! (I don't know of anyone who's tried to get Wine to work under Windows, but I suspect it could be done, using, e.g. Cygwin.)
Well, Wine is currently quite actively doing just that: porting various sub-DLLs over to Windows. http://www.reactos.com/, you know...;-)
Nope, YaST doesn't deserve any credit whatsoever.
In SUSE 9.0 it failed completely at setting up a PRISM54 based card (WG311 or so). The forums are full of complaints about YaST's wireless setup.
Not even fiddling with YaST's network config template files helped, took almost 3 hours to get that card set up even marginally (by far not all YaST's fault). I know what I'm talking about - I'm the project leader of http://acx100.sf.net...
I'm willing to give up most of my Linux development activities for organizing a TCPA/DRM information website which will:
- inform about current DRM activities
- list DRM'd hardware and non-DRM hardware (buyers' recommendation)
- properly organize 24/7 demonstrations in larger cities against DRM, e.g. in front of electronics chains selling DRM hardware,...
(would need a large database sorted by region, city, user registration, time frame,...)
I simply cannot bear the increasing flood of DRM activated hardware announcements. Preventing wide-spread DRM adoption is MUCH more important than working on a tiny negligible piece of Linux software. If the HW/SW vendors are able to push their stuff through, there probably won't be any Linux or other free "non-certified" software running any more anyway...
If YOU want to truly help me in this effort, then please let me know so that we can coordinate something!
Thanks!
I'm afraid you don't have a f***kin' clue about that stuff: AMD has been a FOUNDING MEMBER of the TCPA board! (repeat: FOUNDING, FOUNDING, FOUNDING MEMBER)
In other words, better don't hold your breath too much that AMD will do what's in the interests of consumers...
TCPA unfortunately really seems to be an almost industry-wide initiative by hardware vendors (and, of course, certain software vendors who are scared of the new-gained freedom of PC users...).
It looks like they're really about to establish a locked-down IT environment like we were all afraid they would do. That's why I suggest that instead of talking and talking, we should actually get something done about it.
The most problematic aspect of the OSS community is that it doesn't have a single entity which decides how to react. Instead, we're millions of very diverse voices which tend to get drowned in the flood rather fast if they don't react in union. Witness the DMCA, the recent outrageous European Software Patents legislation process, the even more recent equally problematic European new copyright regulation, and of course, TCPA activities. All of those have met strong anger from the community, but nobody was actually organized enough to demonstrate against it properly (i.e.: with a sufficient amount of people for the lazy mainstream media to take notice!).
I suggest we build a big platform which would essentially be a big server with a web portal and a huge database where hundreds of thousands of people could sign up for activities (and activate a personal portfolio of activity types that the user is interested in). Whenever a new problematic regulation that seems to have been pushed through by interests of evil corporations appears on the horizon, an admin could add a new event to the database. All users that registered to be interested in such an event type would then get a short notice that a new event was being planned with demonstrations in many medium to big cities. They could then visit the site and set a boolean flag that indicates whether they plan to participate in that activity (and add further data as to when and where they plan to participate).
Such a database may have the following features (and many more that I haven't thought of yet, of course): - register a user (nick, name, location + coordinates, activities of interest) - submission of new activity places - search for nearby activity places - flagging "yes, I'll participate" - notification email 4 hours before activity takes place - grouping of users according to local groups (with local admins?) - local communities to be able to discuss and plan local events properly
I'm SICK of the continually increasing amount of legislational crimes and bribery committed by influential companies! Let's do something about it, goddammit! Simply resorting to talking is a sure way to lose all our influence and freedom!!
If we manage to get such a setup going properly, then that should actually enable us to establish PERMANENT (0.5 * 24/7) demonstrations in front of shops selling DRM hardware or software once we have an enormous number of people registered!! That'd be quite a feat, huh? Well it's all just a matter of proper management!
The very least we should do for now is set up a mailing list somewhere to discuss further activities. To start such a project, I would be interested in people skilled with web server maintenance, database design (remember, it will be a quite complicated database) and people who can contribute new interesting ideas.
If you want to take part in such a mailing list or can offer advice or a useful server infrastructure, then please send a mail to andi AT lisas.de in order for us to get more organized.
Again, problematic corporations keep thumbing their noses at us, so it's bloody time for us to organize some counter force!
Wine DOES support DirectX, up to 8.1 (I guess even parts of 9 are implemented). In fact I've heard (sorry, not too active a contributor any more) that several games now work even BETTER than on WineX with its "special" DirectX support. In fact Wine ALWAYS had DirectX, what it didn't have was the Direct3D part of DirectX, but even that hasn't been true any more for a looong time now (much more than a year). Right now even the D3D part is pretty good, AFAIK.
The non-commercial Wine version still isn't exactly a plug-n-play thing, though (more like plug-n-pray:). CXOffice still has many issues, too (it's got much easier configuration and much higher success rate, though).
Riiight. And two years later they will announce that "for reasons of X* product Y will no longer be supported." I can see how your method makes sense. Really. NOT.
Let's face it, if I had to work on a project that requires long-term operability, then I'd make DAMN sure that I won't choose a proprietary solution that can wither and die any day. And that usually makes a lot of sense for the not-so-critical projects as well...
*) insert ANY reason whatsoever, e.g. company merging or closing a business unit or anything else...
Slashdot Mirror
Excessive AC power in his home...
SCNR
Oh, now the whole thing has been out of context? Riiiiiight...
I'm out of this discussion now, as it's crystal clear that your "whole operating system" vs. "trial software" comparison is broken due to entirely different proportions which should never be compared.
If a user doesn't adjust their expectations properly to the differently complex types of activities (exactly by buying compatible hardware if it somehow turned out to be necessary), then it's their own loss.
"stupid things like driver support for common products should be a given"
Problem is that those things aren't "stupid" (well, they are "stupid" / "irrelevant" / "little" issues for endusers, but for driver developers not really, since WLAN driver development is damn hard - especially without any chipset documentation).
Blame the manufacturers mostly, their support is abysmal sometimes.
"A typically hysterical Linuxite response..."
Eeeexcuse me, but what kind of reaction did you expect to this kind of entirely non-sensical comparison you made?
Go for a hunt after the rotten corpse in your *own* backyard, please.
"So I will ask again, because for all the stated dumbness of my remark, you've still not answered it: from an end-user POV, what is so special about Linux that they should spend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of trial software?"
It's completely obvious and logical that a very limited piece of "trial software" is usually(!) much easier to get accustomed to than a full-blown, entirely new environment with entirely new features and capabilities. Nothing to see here, move along.
Or, pray tell me: have you managed to grasp *all* of Windows' features, quirks and maintenance issues in 45 minutes instead of >= 10 years?
Too many people all too easily forget that they have more than 10 years of experience with Windows-based systems and specific software there, but somehow always assume that checking out Linux should magically make everything work in a couple of hours...
(IOW they're DEAD WRONG about judging platforms, but often don't know it)
Sure, probably people don't care about Linux e.g. because with XP they now have a moderately well-working system (which sadly seems to alleviate the need for checking out alternatives like Linux for many people), but that still doesn't change one iota the fact that your comparison comment was bunk, and I did properly answer your comment anyway (it's absolutely not comparable, much higher functionality/scope than a single piece of software etc.).
"What's so special about linux from an and-user POV that they should expend more time, effort, and money on it than any other piece of free trial software?"
OH MY FRIGGIN' GOD!!
This is Linux, it's a WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM WORLD with TENS OF GIGABYTES/THOUSANDS of freely available software packages and a certain amount of complexity that goes with such a hugely large offer, not your lame friggin' small trial/freeware text editor or photo management tool which has not the slightest amount of system requirements or dependencies on hardware device compatibility etc..
This has got to be one of the dumbest remarks in the context of perceived Linux (un)usability I've heard in a while.
If people *really* thought of how stupid some Windows behaviour/risk is and how much inconvenience it brings and *really* properly evaluated alternatives (measured in weeks at least, not hours) and *the huge advantages it brings with it* (plus the disadvantages it brings, largely due to migrating from a proprietary system with closed formats/protocols) before ranting stupidly, then... oh well, nevermind, if pigs could fly...
"I can crash Linux (NLD 9) in a matter of minutes with a small program (just while(fork()); and see how happy YOUR computer gets :-))."
;)
See "man ulimit". IOW PEBKAC or admin error.
Whether there should be restrictive default limits of process counts established in common Linux distributions is another question, though...
This reflects much more on your CRAPTASTIC bank than on the wide distribution of Firefox.
Any bank that still has been restricting access to IE only during the last two years (many would say even longer than that) should be beaten unconscious and shot, given IEs widely known rather big insecurity issues (sure, Firefox also has its share of issues, but it's nowhere near as severe, often and unpatched as is IE).
What, online banking, using IE? Eeeeeeckck!!
http://www.openezx.org.nyud.net:8090/
The OpenEZX project seems to be quite active, with Harald Welte (of GPL-Violations fame) doing a lot of 2.6.x kernel porting and hardware support. Join the mailing list if you are interested in helping out with this rapidly progressing project!
Unfortunately several people say that Motorola has been less helpful with OSS development than they could have been, but let's hope that this site will change this in a very positive way.
> And, where is the incentive for starting a company if some group can say "You're too successful, we're bringing you down!"
Boy, did you make this comment in the full intention of publishing the Dumbest Comment Of The Year?
Listen, there are about 0.00005% of all companies which earn more than $100000000/year (a possible very coarse definition of "too successful"). Yet most other companies that are not as wildly fortunate as those are doing just fine despite not earning such obscene amounts of money, thank you very much (you *can* persist as a company doing only $100k/year, after all).
Talking about a non-incentive to *even start* a company based on such a thing as "termination if too successful" is just very stupid.
A veeery looooong time ago (1995, internet bronze age, to be exact) in Germany we had a nice friendly provider called germany.net (later renamed nexgo.de, then bought by large provider arcor.de) which actually offered FREE internet access (minus phone dialin costs, of course) at a time when other providers were still charging ~ $5/hour! (I first went on the internet when Compuserve Germany went below $15/hour, since that was my magical pain limit when I was a pupil) ...). Later on IIRC they offered non-German content to premium users and soon freed it up entirely. germany.net was a real pioneer at that time, I'm still very, very thankful for their service!
"Problem" was that this germany.net internet access was exactly what the name said - Germany-only. Which was ok initially since there were obscure ways to access foreign-national content (FTP mail,
I don't remember too many details about the limitations of Germany-only service, but with large file servers in Germany offering many international things (full-scale mirroring) it wasn't too painful actually.
Let me guess, you've been hiding in a cave and thus not been able to follow Linux CFQ I/O scheduler development, have you? ;-)
Also, I really don't understand what's the problem with a 100% CPU process as stated by the original poster. With a modern interactive scheduler such as in the -ck kernel you hardly even notice any delay anywhere ;)
(ok, exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea...) ...
But of course the problem with a good scheduler is that it's a bit annoying to find out 20 minutes later (once you look at it again, since otherwise you didn't notice anything) that some process hogged your CPU for prolonged amounts of time, thus increasing power requirements and heat and
I'd guess that they may have wanted to crack DRM'd Apple media wide open in order to phone home *exact internal details* of what a user is listening to regarding their competitor's products. Together with the slightly older news that this software has been discovered to phone home secretly, it makes quite some sense.
If this software is really doing such sophisticated, non-trivial and specific operations, then it's quite likely that those Sony BMG criminals were fully informed about what this software would be doing for them!
(and thus it will be very hard for them to blame any and all illegal activities on the first4internet guys alone!!)
Suddenly the thought of committing Seppuku becomes more and more enticing...
Hmm, very interesting. This is most likely because it's not a general-purpose system. Desktop Linux is a much larger threat to them, that's probably why they didn't grant licenses.
;-)
Oh, and why is it that all companies making a deal with the devil are quite soon no longer in business?
(here's hope you managed to find a good job thereafter!)
Thank you for this interesting information!
Well, yes, WMA DOES exclude Linux:
6 6/44566.html?Ad=1
Michael Robertson (Linspire) wrote in an article that he had actually contacted Microsoft about WMA licensing, yet Microsoft actively REFUSED to license it to his Linux distribution (ok, well, it seems WMA was allowed, but not the Digital Restrictions Management component).
See it mentioned at
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/445
(cannot find the original Michael's Minutes article easily, so I gave up)
But seriously, did you expect anything else from a convicted criminal predatory monopolist?
AFAIK ELSTER is compulsory for businesses, as a Windows-only service (well, AFAIK some Linux programs now support it, but in contrast to the main government thing, they're not free). This issue went as far as allowing affected people to turn in their stuff in paper form again, since they couldn't be bothered to use exPAINsive and insecure windows to do that.
People protesting against this new Windows-only "offer" might be wise to include this fact of a previous German fiasco in their protest statement, as this indicates sloppy research of Australia's government (hah, as if they'd want to research and properly plan their projects...).
Pointing out the WHAT? "facts"!?
Well, the Facts (tm) are:
Lindows = $40something
Cedega = $44.95
Game X = $40-50
Total = $120-135
Windows Home = $100~
Windows Pro = $130~
Windows Longhorn = Unknown
Antivirus = $0-$100
Firewall = $0-$100
Windows "Repair" tool = $0-$100
HDD Imaging tool = $0-$50
Total = $100-$480
(and that's not even listing that very important word processor and so on...)
So you'd better leave me the h*ll alone with your "facts"...
In case of such a slightly oldish desktop machine having a secret life as a server, make sure to install a Con Kolivas kernel which adds SCHED_BATCH (*full* background processing!!) and SCHED_ISO support and install schedtoold plus schedtool to adjust process priorities after startup. ...) won't do that. Plus you can ensure that processes which are critical (mplayer, xine, xmms) will get SCHED_ISO almost-realtime scheduling.
;-)
That way you can ensure that processes which really SHOULDN'T interrupt your sisters desktop experience (updatedb, cron, scp, cp, mv, Samba,
BTW, I am doing kernel (device driver) development and I am using a lowly P3/700 machine (which seems to get faster and faster as time goes by
I don't really see the need for a faster machine (well, minus some compile time issues, obviously).
Just a "don't do this at home, kids!" clarification: ...)
You can NOT assume Germany to have unlimited speed on all highways, in fact on many sections it's now limited to e.g. 120 or even 100 KPH.
That doesn't mean that there is no unlimited highway section any more, but there are many more limits than there used to be.
(which probably has to do with insanely increased traffic, worsened road conditions,
And the obligatory notice: unlimited speed doesn't mean you can go as fast as you want, but as fast as your current driving environment safely allows for...
Well, Wine is currently quite actively doing just that: porting various sub-DLLs over to Windows. ;-)
http://www.reactos.com/, you know...
Nope, YaST doesn't deserve any credit whatsoever. In SUSE 9.0 it failed completely at setting up a PRISM54 based card (WG311 or so). The forums are full of complaints about YaST's wireless setup. Not even fiddling with YaST's network config template files helped, took almost 3 hours to get that card set up even marginally (by far not all YaST's fault). I know what I'm talking about - I'm the project leader of http://acx100.sf.net ...
I'm willing to give up most of my Linux development activities for organizing a TCPA/DRM information website which will: - inform about current DRM activities - list DRM'd hardware and non-DRM hardware (buyers' recommendation) - properly organize 24/7 demonstrations in larger cities against DRM, e.g. in front of electronics chains selling DRM hardware, ...
(would need a large database sorted by region, city, user registration, time frame, ...)
I simply cannot bear the increasing flood of DRM activated hardware announcements. Preventing wide-spread DRM adoption is MUCH more important than working on a tiny negligible piece of Linux software. If the HW/SW vendors are able to push their stuff through, there probably won't be any Linux or other free "non-certified" software running any more anyway...
If YOU want to truly help me in this effort, then please let me know so that we can coordinate something!
Thanks!
I'm afraid you don't have a f***kin' clue about that stuff:
AMD has been a FOUNDING MEMBER of the TCPA board!
(repeat: FOUNDING, FOUNDING, FOUNDING MEMBER)
In other words, better don't hold your breath too much that AMD will do what's in the interests of consumers...
TCPA unfortunately really seems to be an almost industry-wide initiative by hardware vendors (and, of course, certain software vendors who are scared of the new-gained freedom of PC users...).
We will have to fight it tooth and nail.
It looks like they're really about to establish a locked-down IT environment like we were all afraid they would do.
That's why I suggest that instead of talking and talking, we should actually get something done about it.
The most problematic aspect of the OSS community is that it doesn't have a single entity which decides how to react. Instead, we're millions of very diverse voices which tend to get drowned in the flood rather fast if they don't react in union.
Witness the DMCA, the recent outrageous European Software Patents legislation process, the even more recent equally problematic European new copyright regulation, and of course, TCPA activities. All of those have met strong anger from the community, but nobody was actually organized enough to demonstrate against it properly (i.e.: with a sufficient amount of people for the lazy mainstream media to take notice!).
I suggest we build a big platform which would essentially be a big server with a web portal and a huge database where hundreds of thousands of people could sign up for activities (and activate a personal portfolio of activity types that the user is interested in).
Whenever a new problematic regulation that seems to have been pushed through by interests of evil corporations appears on the horizon, an admin could add a new event to the database. All users that registered to be interested in such an event type would then get a short notice that a new event was being planned with demonstrations in many medium to big cities. They could then visit the site and set a boolean flag that indicates whether they plan to participate in that activity
(and add further data as to when and where they plan to participate).
Such a database may have the following features
(and many more that I haven't thought of yet, of course):
- register a user (nick, name, location + coordinates, activities of interest)
- submission of new activity places
- search for nearby activity places
- flagging "yes, I'll participate"
- notification email 4 hours before activity takes place
- grouping of users according to local groups (with local admins?)
- local communities to be able to discuss and plan local events properly
I'm SICK of the continually increasing amount of legislational crimes and bribery committed by influential companies! Let's do something about it, goddammit! Simply resorting to talking is a sure way to lose all our influence and freedom!!
If we manage to get such a setup going properly,
then that should actually enable us to establish PERMANENT (0.5 * 24/7) demonstrations in front of shops selling DRM hardware or software once we have an enormous number of people registered!!
That'd be quite a feat, huh?
Well it's all just a matter of proper management!
The very least we should do for now is set up a mailing list somewhere to discuss further activities.
To start such a project, I would be interested in people skilled with web server maintenance, database design (remember, it will be a quite complicated database) and people who can contribute new interesting ideas.
If you want to take part in such a mailing list or can offer advice or a useful server infrastructure, then please send a mail to
andi AT lisas.de in order for us to get more organized.
Again, problematic corporations keep thumbing their noses at us, so it's bloody time for us to organize some counter force!
Thanks for listening!
God, so much misinformation in so few postings!
:). CXOffice still has many issues, too (it's got much easier configuration and much higher success rate, though).
Wine DOES support DirectX, up to 8.1 (I guess even parts of 9 are implemented).
In fact I've heard (sorry, not too active a contributor any more) that several games now work even BETTER than on WineX with its "special" DirectX support.
In fact Wine ALWAYS had DirectX, what it didn't have was the Direct3D part of DirectX, but even that hasn't been true any more for a looong time now (much more than a year).
Right now even the D3D part is pretty good, AFAIK.
The non-commercial Wine version still isn't exactly a plug-n-play thing, though (more like plug-n-pray
Riiight. And two years later they will announce that "for reasons of X* product Y will no longer be supported."
I can see how your method makes sense. Really.
NOT.
Let's face it, if I had to work on a project that requires long-term operability, then I'd make DAMN sure that I won't choose a proprietary solution that can wither and die any day.
And that usually makes a lot of sense for the not-so-critical projects as well...
*) insert ANY reason whatsoever, e.g. company merging or closing a business unit or anything else...