You seem to forget/ignore that even free markets need regulation and cannot be completely free. History has shown for centuries that 100% free market without regulation leads to monopolies, syndicates and very damaging structures that in the end make the economy collapse.
MSFT has grown to the point where free market alone won't fix the problem anymore. Whether it is just or not, the problem needs to be fixed by the authorities or doom is upon us.
Your solution "do something yourself" is naive and doesn't work because of the nature of software and the need for compatability (for most people/companies) with the 'de facto' standard. Some exceptions (like you and myself, running Linux or FreeBSD) don't influence the major market consisting of people who hardly have a realistic alternative to MS-Windows at the moment. Unless the government interferes, this can hardly change. Especially if MSFT is allowed to go to new levels of customer-lock-in practices with new stuff such as.NET.
Error correction cannot be regarded as circumvention. The "normal" players have error correction too; error correction is part of audio-CD's.
Should the music industry claim that error correction on "approved" players is just what the word says, but on "non-approved" players it is circumvention, all they would do is show how stupid the notion of "circumvention device" in the DMCA is.
So what? Should one allow an evil company to continue with the next phase of eliminating all competition just because it is good for the industry at short term? Does the economy justify illegal actions?
I don't believe that what the story says will happen: The ISP paying for mass subscriptions for their paying customers. It just isn't logical, except for a very small number of services with a very large general demand (such as the electronic telephone book in Switzerland, which is paid for by this model).
For normal sites, the interests of ISP's customers vary way too much. The ISP can't possibly subscribe to all services in the world, only for the
The customer subscribing himself to those sites that really interest him, independant of ISP makes much more sense. The only problem to be solved is the (micro)payment. Also having access via different ISP's and places (home and work) is only possible when the user subscribes himself.
No, the port will get an old version, it gets exactly the version it needs. Should the original site no longer have the older version, all original tarballs are cached on ftp.freebsd.org, which is used as a fallback to get the tarball from.
All ports are stable, there are no development versions of ports. This is possible since FreeBSD ports (unlike Debians apt) only cover add-ons to the operating system. The base operating system (including userland and kernel) is not built together of all little ports, but is one entity. The advantage is that any FreeBSD installation can expect to have at least a similar base everywhere (unlike Linux distros, that tend to be composed of zillions of small packages many of which are optional to install).
Trojan horses are no issue, since all source files are protected with an MD5 checksum (that is, the port includes the MD5 checksum of each source file, and checks them on downloading).
One of the nice things of the ports system is that it installs all add-ons in/usr/local, not in the standard/usr/lib,/usr/bin and/bin directories. I hate my bare standard operating system being filled with garbage of add-on or optional products. No UNIX does that, except for Linux.
Further it encourages source instead of binary based distribution, still makes using the sources just as easy as using binary distributions for other package systems. The advantages of that are:
Less chance for virii or trojan horses
Often smaller files to be sent
Updates to the package/port itself, not to the original application, only need tiny diffs to be sent.
Another plus (which it shared with debians apt) is automatic dependancies. A port that needs other ports/libraries will automatically get and install those as needed, you don't need to think about prerequisites as with rpm.
Yes, it may feel that different. This depends on the Linux distribution. When using Slackware, the overall look and feel won't be very different between Linux and FreeBSD. But when using Redhat, it is a different world.
I'm a long time UNIX user myself, and know many variants and usually feel "at home" quickly when I encounter a new one. But this weekend I installed Redhat (standard install with Gnome) and for the first time I really felt lost and didn't know where to start.
You really have to wade through layers of specific, non-standard GUI tools, modified directory structures (compared to most Unices), weird and very indirect/etc/rc.d startup files; finding out what the standard way is to to disable/enable some service at boot time is trivial on any Unix, but on Redhat you have to either 'just know' what GUI tool to use (there are scores and scores of tools), or you have to read through shell scripts calling shell scripts calling shell scripts to find out where to add settings/symlinks. Ugh...
Of course, below the surface of specific non-standard tools, config-files and paths all Linuxes are almost the same, and are quite similar to any UNIX. But the feel can, alas, be drastically different depending on the distribution that you use.
In some time the only relevant database access standard will be JDBC. Well, maybe it depends on your perspective, but where I work (the large Swiss banks, which are also the largest banks in the world and develop huge amounts of software to last for decennia) the only remaining programming language of importance is Java (and PL/1 on the mainframe.
ODBC, ADO, Oledb being de facto standards?!? Not in this world, they don't play even a tiny role. Only some client-side tools use ODBC via a JDBC-ODBC bridge, but such tools are highly discouraged (we rather generate CSV output from websites to push data into Excel, and don't want nor need ODBC. Writing back from a shaky product like Excel into a database of any importance is not allowed anyway).
The only things that count are DB2 on the mainframe (with Corba interfaces) and JDBC databases on the rest (some DBI too for Perl). Since SQL Server doesn't provide good JDBC support (and 3rd party JDBC drivers for SQL Server are extremely expensive) it doesn't have a chance. Some smaller projects used SQL Server, but because of difficult integration they must be replaced everywhere (with Oracle, but Postgresql could also be an option).
Then why compress at all? Why not just use the WAV files?
But of course it is important. It is always good to be able to store twice as much music on whatever device. Since the solid-state players still don't have more than 256MB usually, it would still mean an increase from 2 to 4 hours of music to take with you, quite significant IMO.
Even while subscribing the creed you described, it might be worthwhile to do an MBA and move into management. There are enough people just playing along with the management bullshit even though they don't believe in it, only in order to maximize income and career perspective. Kind of like a sect leader that is deceiving his followers for his own purposes.
At least a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda is not. There are still ways (disassembling the drive and analyzing the magnetic surface carefully) to retrieve old data written before a constant bit pattern was written, and I'm sure the Pentagon does take such possibilities (difficult, but it can be done) seriously. A real good erase must write several different bit patterns in a row to make sure the original bits have been changed several times. The story isn't as stupid as some might think.
Don't take OpenBSD as an representative for BSD please.
FreeBSD has a much larger userbase than NetBSD. FreeBSD is optimized for Intel, NetBSD is geared towards portability. OpenBSD is a quite recent splitoff from NetBSD, with an even smaller userbase as NetBSD. The split was because of personal differences between Theo de Raadt and the "rest of the world".
He is a difficult, undiplomatic person. Therefore, OpenBSD always generates a lot of news (just look at the overreaction w.r.t. ipfilter a week ago) and people, alas, get the impression that OpenBSD somehow is representative for the whole BSD community. In reality, OpenBSD really is the exception, and also from number of users is quite insignificant.
The other free BSD's, the two main ones, FreeBSD and NetBSD, are free for download, also in ISO form. Tracking FreeBSD is extremely easy, with various options (CVS, CTM - compressed patches by email, CVSUP - compressed online cvs-patch).
You only need to get a CD one time, and for years and years you can track the whole project with minimum bandwidth requirements. Even 9600 baud dial-up users don't need to order a CD at all. You can download the patches to keep the source tree up-to-date, and create an original ISO from this source tree for local redistribution if you like.
Even so, the FreeBSD project would like support in the form of sold CD's. But if you don't want to, there is absolutely nothing to make your life as a "freeloader" harder, on the contrary.
Of course the west doesn't have to decide for China or Japan. They can make their own judgement, and see for themselves whether it is worthwhile and cost-effective to maintain an old and complex character system today.
But those that don't have the need of daily reading/writing such characters shouldn't be forced to "suffer" in terms of waste of memory and processing speed (2 or even 4 bytes per character). In that sense UTF-8 (1-byte subset of Unicode, similar to the ISO-lating-1 encoding) is a reasonable alternative.
What I don't understand is why all possible characters of the world should be in 1 big character set. I know it simplifies some things, but it also costs a lot.
Why not use a system of multiple (standardized) character sets. This is extendable, you can always add new encodings/sets etc. The only really fixed mechanism needed is a way to specify a switch from one encoding to the other.
Same goes for the original classic texts of our 'western civilization' in Greek and Latin.
Does that mean that everyone should be able to read/write Greek and Latin? Or should everyone learn Hebrew to read the bible?
Reading classical texts IMO has no relevance for a character set of today. The waste (difficult input/output methods, waste of space and processing speed) in comparison with the occasional gain (being able to process classical texts on modern computers by everyone) just isn't worth it.
Well said. An "everyone else" Internet, i.e. a non-microsoft Internet could be very refreshing. Kind of like the old days before commerce took over the Internet/web and spoilt so much.
There have been ideas put up many times to split off a "good old days" Internet and start anew. Instead it might go differently where we don't split ourselves off, but are split off by an external (evil) force. The effect would be the same.
More and more people are "defecting" to IE. Some even leave their platform of choice (such as Solaris on the desktop) to be able to use a decent browser (purely from a user POV).
The longer it takes for a real and finished alternative, the longer this steady rise of IE market share will continue. This will make more and more websites "take the jump", and design their website for "IE only". For a long long time website designers have gone through great lengths to support both IE and NS, but with IE approaching a market share of 90% some (more and more) don't think it is worthwhile or necessary anymore to support anything else as IE.
Should Mozilla be too late, then when Mozilla is a finished and great product there will be no more website that it can view. All sites will simply require IE, especially with.NET coming up.
If the Mozilla people want to do something relevant and produce a product that is not only great, but also useful, they must give utmost priority to quickly releasing it, finishing the core product and forget about less important stuff such as the IRC client, newsreader, gopher etc.
I don't like codewords. For the uninitiated, it is completely unclear what release a codeword stands for (i.e. is it in the future or not. what is the order etc).
An example is the Sun JDK. They use codewords internally. In the bugtracking system you see messages like: "fixed in merlin". Wtf does that mean? Is that the next release, or a release that is already in the past?
If I have 1.4 now, and it says "fixed in 1.5" than I know it'll be fixed soon or even be in a release that I can already download. If it says "fixed in 1.3" than I know that I already have the fix. With codenames, there is no proper ordering.
ipfw is the standard firewall in FreeBSD (and it is more advanced than ipfilter, which is also in FreeBSD). See the latest release notes (search for ipfilter in this page). The FreeBSD Handbook doesn't even mention ipfilter, only ipfw.
All emissions of Diesel (CO2, NO) are much less. Only particle emissions are more, but they have come down tremendously too, and in the most modern motors can be almost completely eliminated.
You can't compare a truck motor with the diesel motor that goes into a TDI Golf (or Passat, which I happen to have), especially when it comes to particle emissions.
One problem is very low temperatures. Below -20 Celcius, Diesel can "flock" which prevents the engine from running (even with gas mixed for cold protections you don't get much lower than -20 celcius). Countries like Canada would require some external heating for the motor during winter.
What is also relatively new is that the TDI Diesels get as much horsepower per engine-volume, of course coupled with a much higher torque. My 2.5 V6 TDI has 310Nm torque, which is more than the 2.9 gasoline Passat.
X Windows? O horror, the old mistake, also induced by MSFT contamination.
It is X window (without s!!!, and it is short for the X Window System). See, for example, this news article (there are many many more).
To the other person w.r.t. what the difference between a service pack and a kernel patch: The patch simply takes your kernel up to the new level. In fact it is just a mechanism to get to the next (full) release.
The service pack doesn't take you to a new full release (you'll still see build 1395 or whatever while booting), when you buy NT 4 now you'll still get the original and have to apply service packs, hotfixes and the like. It is something completely different. Another big difference is that a service pack is a kind of permanent patch to the whole system, not only to the kernel.
Apart from the fact that a kernel release or patch is inherently different from MSFT's "service packs", I despise the fact and wonder why so may unix/linux users nowadays want to take over MSFT invented terminology.
The UNIX community has had its own slang for 25 years. I can think of no reason to submit to MSFT "culture" in adopting words like "service pack". Newcomers (many from the MSFT world) to LINUX should adapt to an older and richer culture; maybe take a look to the jargon file.
How strange that they only focus on price. What matters, IMHO, is the price/quality ratio; price alone says nothing.
Should the price be the same, but the quality less (which is often the case with region 2 encoded DVD's, lacking widescreen or good audio and other features, and also less and later availability) than I would say there is reason enough to intervene against regional coding.
An exact detailed copy of the TIVO would not be OK, and the exact details of how the TIVO is built is not obvious, true.
But the patent is much broader than that, and what is claimed in the patent is obvious.
Please read the patent text in detail, and you'll agree that anyone who wants to implement a PVR device in clean room conditions (i.e. without prior knowledge of the current TIVO implementation) would have a good chance to come up with a system that would violate the patent. For me that makes the patent claim, by definition, obvious and thus unjustified.
The point is that all of this is obvious, it was unavoidable to be "invented". All elements making up the "invention" (harddisk recording, multitasking, electronic program guide etc) are also prior art.
The goal of patents is to promote innovation, to make innovation worthwhile. Anything that is due to be implemented by combination of known elements in an obvious way, such as what TIVO does, doesn't need to be promoted by definition, and thus doesn't need nor deserve patent protection. Otherwise patents stifle innovation (because without competition there will be less incentive for further improvements) rather than promote it.
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MSFT has grown to the point where free market alone won't fix the problem anymore. Whether it is just or not, the problem needs to be fixed by the authorities or doom is upon us.
Your solution "do something yourself" is naive and doesn't work because of the nature of software and the need for compatability (for most people/companies) with the 'de facto' standard. Some exceptions (like you and myself, running Linux or FreeBSD) don't influence the major market consisting of people who hardly have a realistic alternative to MS-Windows at the moment. Unless the government interferes, this can hardly change. Especially if MSFT is allowed to go to new levels of customer-lock-in practices with new stuff such as .NET.
Should the music industry claim that error correction on "approved" players is just what the word says, but on "non-approved" players it is circumvention, all they would do is show how stupid the notion of "circumvention device" in the DMCA is.
So what? Should one allow an evil company to continue with the next phase of eliminating all competition just because it is good for the industry at short term? Does the economy justify illegal actions?
For normal sites, the interests of ISP's customers vary way too much. The ISP can't possibly subscribe to all services in the world, only for the The customer subscribing himself to those sites that really interest him, independant of ISP makes much more sense. The only problem to be solved is the (micro)payment. Also having access via different ISP's and places (home and work) is only possible when the user subscribes himself.
All ports are stable, there are no development versions of ports. This is possible since FreeBSD ports (unlike Debians apt) only cover add-ons to the operating system. The base operating system (including userland and kernel) is not built together of all little ports, but is one entity. The advantage is that any FreeBSD installation can expect to have at least a similar base everywhere (unlike Linux distros, that tend to be composed of zillions of small packages many of which are optional to install).
Trojan horses are no issue, since all source files are protected with an MD5 checksum (that is, the port includes the MD5 checksum of each source file, and checks them on downloading).
Further it encourages source instead of binary based distribution, still makes using the sources just as easy as using binary distributions for other package systems. The advantages of that are:
- Less chance for virii or trojan horses
- Often smaller files to be sent
- Updates to the package/port itself, not to the original application, only need tiny diffs to be sent.
Another plus (which it shared with debians apt) is automatic dependancies. A port that needs other ports/libraries will automatically get and install those as needed, you don't need to think about prerequisites as with rpm.I'm a long time UNIX user myself, and know many variants and usually feel "at home" quickly when I encounter a new one. But this weekend I installed Redhat (standard install with Gnome) and for the first time I really felt lost and didn't know where to start.
You really have to wade through layers of specific, non-standard GUI tools, modified directory structures (compared to most Unices), weird and very indirect /etc/rc.d startup files; finding out what the standard way is to to disable/enable some service at boot time is trivial on any Unix, but on Redhat you have to either 'just know' what GUI tool to use (there are scores and scores of tools), or you have to read through shell scripts calling shell scripts calling shell scripts to find out where to add settings/symlinks. Ugh...
Of course, below the surface of specific non-standard tools, config-files and paths all Linuxes are almost the same, and are quite similar to any UNIX. But the feel can, alas, be drastically different depending on the distribution that you use.
ODBC, ADO, Oledb being de facto standards?!? Not in this world, they don't play even a tiny role. Only some client-side tools use ODBC via a JDBC-ODBC bridge, but such tools are highly discouraged (we rather generate CSV output from websites to push data into Excel, and don't want nor need ODBC. Writing back from a shaky product like Excel into a database of any importance is not allowed anyway). The only things that count are DB2 on the mainframe (with Corba interfaces) and JDBC databases on the rest (some DBI too for Perl). Since SQL Server doesn't provide good JDBC support (and 3rd party JDBC drivers for SQL Server are extremely expensive) it doesn't have a chance. Some smaller projects used SQL Server, but because of difficult integration they must be replaced everywhere (with Oracle, but Postgresql could also be an option).
But please don't leave for Europe. Don't spoil the excellent market here :)
But of course it is important. It is always good to be able to store twice as much music on whatever device. Since the solid-state players still don't have more than 256MB usually, it would still mean an increase from 2 to 4 hours of music to take with you, quite significant IMO.
Even while subscribing the creed you described, it might be worthwhile to do an MBA and move into management. There are enough people just playing along with the management bullshit even though they don't believe in it, only in order to maximize income and career perspective. Kind of like a sect leader that is deceiving his followers for his own purposes.
At least a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda is not. There are still ways (disassembling the drive and analyzing the magnetic surface carefully) to retrieve old data written before a constant bit pattern was written, and I'm sure the Pentagon does take such possibilities (difficult, but it can be done) seriously. A real good erase must write several different bit patterns in a row to make sure the original bits have been changed several times. The story isn't as stupid as some might think.
FreeBSD has a much larger userbase than NetBSD. FreeBSD is optimized for Intel, NetBSD is geared towards portability. OpenBSD is a quite recent splitoff from NetBSD, with an even smaller userbase as NetBSD. The split was because of personal differences between Theo de Raadt and the "rest of the world".
He is a difficult, undiplomatic person. Therefore, OpenBSD always generates a lot of news (just look at the overreaction w.r.t. ipfilter a week ago) and people, alas, get the impression that OpenBSD somehow is representative for the whole BSD community. In reality, OpenBSD really is the exception, and also from number of users is quite insignificant.
The other free BSD's, the two main ones, FreeBSD and NetBSD, are free for download, also in ISO form. Tracking FreeBSD is extremely easy, with various options (CVS, CTM - compressed patches by email, CVSUP - compressed online cvs-patch).
You only need to get a CD one time, and for years and years you can track the whole project with minimum bandwidth requirements. Even 9600 baud dial-up users don't need to order a CD at all. You can download the patches to keep the source tree up-to-date, and create an original ISO from this source tree for local redistribution if you like.
Even so, the FreeBSD project would like support in the form of sold CD's. But if you don't want to, there is absolutely nothing to make your life as a "freeloader" harder, on the contrary.
But those that don't have the need of daily reading/writing such characters shouldn't be forced to "suffer" in terms of waste of memory and processing speed (2 or even 4 bytes per character). In that sense UTF-8 (1-byte subset of Unicode, similar to the ISO-lating-1 encoding) is a reasonable alternative.
What I don't understand is why all possible characters of the world should be in 1 big character set. I know it simplifies some things, but it also costs a lot.
Why not use a system of multiple (standardized) character sets. This is extendable, you can always add new encodings/sets etc. The only really fixed mechanism needed is a way to specify a switch from one encoding to the other.
Does that mean that everyone should be able to read/write Greek and Latin? Or should everyone learn Hebrew to read the bible?
Reading classical texts IMO has no relevance for a character set of today. The waste (difficult input/output methods, waste of space and processing speed) in comparison with the occasional gain (being able to process classical texts on modern computers by everyone) just isn't worth it.
There have been ideas put up many times to split off a "good old days" Internet and start anew. Instead it might go differently where we don't split ourselves off, but are split off by an external (evil) force. The effect would be the same.
The longer it takes for a real and finished alternative, the longer this steady rise of IE market share will continue. This will make more and more websites "take the jump", and design their website for "IE only". For a long long time website designers have gone through great lengths to support both IE and NS, but with IE approaching a market share of 90% some (more and more) don't think it is worthwhile or necessary anymore to support anything else as IE.
Should Mozilla be too late, then when Mozilla is a finished and great product there will be no more website that it can view. All sites will simply require IE, especially with .NET coming up.
If the Mozilla people want to do something relevant and produce a product that is not only great, but also useful, they must give utmost priority to quickly releasing it, finishing the core product and forget about less important stuff such as the IRC client, newsreader, gopher etc.
An example is the Sun JDK. They use codewords internally. In the bugtracking system you see messages like: "fixed in merlin". Wtf does that mean? Is that the next release, or a release that is already in the past?
If I have 1.4 now, and it says "fixed in 1.5" than I know it'll be fixed soon or even be in a release that I can already download. If it says "fixed in 1.3" than I know that I already have the fix. With codenames, there is no proper ordering.
ipfw is the standard firewall in FreeBSD (and it is more advanced than ipfilter, which is also in FreeBSD). See the latest release notes (search for ipfilter in this page). The FreeBSD Handbook doesn't even mention ipfilter, only ipfw.
You can't compare a truck motor with the diesel motor that goes into a TDI Golf (or Passat, which I happen to have), especially when it comes to particle emissions.
One problem is very low temperatures. Below -20 Celcius, Diesel can "flock" which prevents the engine from running (even with gas mixed for cold protections you don't get much lower than -20 celcius). Countries like Canada would require some external heating for the motor during winter.
What is also relatively new is that the TDI Diesels get as much horsepower per engine-volume, of course coupled with a much higher torque. My 2.5 V6 TDI has 310Nm torque, which is more than the 2.9 gasoline Passat.
It is X window (without s!!!, and it is short for the X Window System). See, for example, this news article (there are many many more).
To the other person w.r.t. what the difference between a service pack and a kernel patch: The patch simply takes your kernel up to the new level. In fact it is just a mechanism to get to the next (full) release.
The service pack doesn't take you to a new full release (you'll still see build 1395 or whatever while booting), when you buy NT 4 now you'll still get the original and have to apply service packs, hotfixes and the like. It is something completely different. Another big difference is that a service pack is a kind of permanent patch to the whole system, not only to the kernel.
The UNIX community has had its own slang for 25 years. I can think of no reason to submit to MSFT "culture" in adopting words like "service pack". Newcomers (many from the MSFT world) to LINUX should adapt to an older and richer culture; maybe take a look to the jargon file.
Should the price be the same, but the quality less (which is often the case with region 2 encoded DVD's, lacking widescreen or good audio and other features, and also less and later availability) than I would say there is reason enough to intervene against regional coding.
But the patent is much broader than that, and what is claimed in the patent is obvious. Please read the patent text in detail, and you'll agree that anyone who wants to implement a PVR device in clean room conditions (i.e. without prior knowledge of the current TIVO implementation) would have a good chance to come up with a system that would violate the patent. For me that makes the patent claim, by definition, obvious and thus unjustified.
The goal of patents is to promote innovation, to make innovation worthwhile. Anything that is due to be implemented by combination of known elements in an obvious way, such as what TIVO does, doesn't need to be promoted by definition, and thus doesn't need nor deserve patent protection. Otherwise patents stifle innovation (because without competition there will be less incentive for further improvements) rather than promote it.