I thought the fact that the "Google Declares War on Microsoft" specifically mentioned Sun's OpenOffice was a dead give-away. As one poster commented, OpenOffice.org is OSS software, Sun owns Star Office.
You don't actually know that much about viruses, do you? A lot of people make the assumption that the only way Windows gets a virus is for the user to install it. WRONG. Even the script-kiddies know how to code a better virus than that. Many viruses download themselves straight into Windows, even going through firewalls like Sygate and ZoneAlarm, without the user ever clicking any "ok" or even knowing when it happens. How? Because Windows is set up that way - anyone on another computer somewhere can do a great deal to any Windows computer. Using an alternate browser like Mozilla (and disabling software installation) helps, but the real problem is, Windows is coded in such a way that it's easy to affect changes to it from outside the operating system. It was all written so that the user has no real control over the operating system, unlike, say, Linux and BSD.
Most Window users are more of alternate operating systems such as Linux than they are of alternatives to Norton's antivirus. So many computers come with Norton's that the vast majority have never used anything else and aren't aware of alternative AV programs, such as AVG, Avast, NOD32, etc. The only other antivirus software I've seen being sold at Wal-Mart (the biggest store chain in the US) is McAffee's.
Seems to me that Symantec has more of a monopoly on AV applications than Microsoft does on operating systems - Microsoft could easily turn around and sue them for the exact same reason. Isn't that what Symantec is doing, trying to keep their near-monopoly on the AV market?
But that has changed. MS keeps jacking up their prices. Windows XP Pro with SP2 integrated costs about $300. I don't know how much Office cost now, but I can guess it's pretty expensive. MS products are no longer much cheaper than their competitors' prices, if at all. If being the cheapest that worked was how they won, they've obviously abandoned that strategy in favor of elitism. They're going to start losing to new competitors who offer decent software for less than theirs. And the more they keep raising their prices, the more such competitors will appear - even MS won't be able to get rid of them all as they've been doing so far, simply because there will be just too many of them.
Funny thing, considering that was how they broke Apple's dominance on the dekstop computer market you'd think they would know better. Microsoft was a lesson in arrogant business practices - Apple aimed their products at the well-to-do, Microsoft aimed theirs at everybody. Microsoft won. They seem to have forgotten the marketing lesson they were such a shining example of.
As to this particular article, I'd say it's pretty iffy. But Google will have to compete more with MS, simply because MS keeps trying to compete withe them. Will Google take the initiative and aim a product in full competition against MS? Very likely. But how soon is the real question.
I actually like fantasy quite a bit myself, but I agree with the rest of your post. Here's my list of the biggest flaws with almost all SF (and especially Star Trek), as I see it:
1. They seem to think that the point of life developing at all is for a species to develop our kind of intelligence.
2. They seem to think that the point of intelligent life developing must be to develop technology.
3. Most SF authors show a terrible ignorance about other cultures and anthropology when they attempt to show how alien some non-terrestial society is, or else adapt human cultures to aliens and then pretend that it' still alien ("today is a good day to die" is a millenium-old cliche).
4. They also have an unfortunate tendency to simply take our future to extremes; we're all goody two-shoes with an "evolved sensibility", or either the future is really, really bad, man. Yet the people are somehow pretty much the same. What about simple change in beliefs and customs?
5. Characterization; I'm so tired of cookie-cutter humans who are deliberately bland to make the aliens look more alien. It has the opposite effect - the aliens wind up looking more human, and the humans wind up looking like a species of school pincipals, nannies and lawyers. (The cool thing about some fantasy stories, and some SF too, is when the author shows us what a truly different and new human culture might be like.)
6. Big animals, whether from a different planet or from our own prehistory, don't exist just to eat us. Predators do not pursue prey contiually for hours or days at a time. That's in the realm of the so-called "intelligent" creatures, such as humans.
7. Many SF stories revolve around things going very wrong with computers, and thus the author reveals his or her ignorance about the computers we have now. Come on, writers, read a little about Unix and then you'll realize why half of the computer freakout stories should be infeasible if they have a decent OS with any security built-in.
8. Technobabble. New ideas are great, but it's just nonsense when you use a bunch of tech-sounding doubletalk to solve the big problem.
9. Technobabble that's utter nonsense. Antimatter radiation; if you're nerdy enough to know which series and episode I mean, then I'm sure you get the point. If you're going to use technobabble at all, don't make up stuff that we know isn't true *now*.
10. Psionic powers that are like magic. Psionics, yes, but a little research into the subject quickly reveals that no one has ever been known to be so incredibly powerful as in a lot of the SF about it.
Unfortunately most SF has one or more of the above themes in the story, so there's not that much SF out there I like anymore. The time is long past to break away from these cliched plot conventions and imagine something new. Once upon a time, all the cliches and conventions were new, so it can be done.
Perfect examples: to set up a dsl connection on Slackware, the command is "adsl-setup"; on Debian it's "pppoeconf". "Sndconfig" only works on a few distros. Some distros -Slack, Suse, RH- can install to more than one hard drive, while others -College Linux, Libranet- won't, even though Windows 98 (!) could use more than one hard drive.
Of course, the huge thing is drivers. How many people give up on a distro because it doesn't support something important, like the graphics card, even though another distro that's 6 months older does support it?
Frankly, none of this would be a problem if the developers would be a bit more considerate of the users. Why can't you have both "adsl-setup" and "pppoeconf" as valid commands on your system? Why can't you have the "sndconfig" command bring up the utility to configure the sound? If there's no driver for the graphics card in the distro itself, such as for a Nvidia card, why can't it use the nv server until you install the driver? Answer: they obviously don't care.
...then you're just screwed? Figures. Hell with that; if it's in my car it's getting the hell out, one way or another. And, no, I don't drive drunk; in fact, I don't even drink, period. But I'm not going to be putting up with that crap.
Should be suing SCO for extortion and racketeering.
Since SCO has *blatantly* committed extortion I'm completely mystified as to why they haven't been sued for exactly that.
But can the RIAA be held for extortion? Maybe, but it's not as out-and-out obviously extortion like SCO has been doing. Both the RIAA's case and this lady's suit have "legal wrangling" written all over them.
That said, if the RIAA wins even half of all these cases, what's their next step? How much farther will they go? This could set a bad precedent, effectively giving them the green light to do whatever they want.
This has been going on for 2-3 years with Wizards of the Coast. Called the Open Game License, it's not the same as the GPL, but it's easy to see that they got the idea from it.
The OGL boils down to: if it's designated open game content in a book, it can be reprinted in another book freely as long as credit is given. This includes incorporating someone's open content rules into another, different rules book, and various other stuff a non-rpger couldn't care less about.
Amusingly enough, many rpgers are mystified by the OGL and don't understand that they can still use closed content in their own games. But there's hope for them: I'm willing to sell them closed content openers at very reasonable prices, and I'm honest enough to tell them that they're not allowed to republish closed content material.;-)
To summarize, the basic OSS idea is indeed catching on, albeit slowly, and in rather surprising places.
That way, everyone has plenty of choices, and fully viable choices at that instead of just Windows, Mac, Linux/BSD and a few OSes for which very little hardware and software support exists. As much as I love Linux, I do wish there were more well-supported OSes out there. That way anyone could surely find the one they like best instead of struggling with one they don't like so well or being stuck on Windows due to hardware incompatibility.
And I hope the RIAA falls. Why? Because they've been legally ripping people off for years now. Legal, illegal, a rip-off is a rip-off. Buy a whole cd of crap to get one decent song? The price of making cds has dropped by more than half (which was the original justification for them costing so much) but the price of the cds hasn't dropped by a penny. Not to mention the copy protection so I can't even make a back-up in case the cd is damaged.
Music services to download a song for a $1? Not all of them are available to people using anything but Windows & IE. Fortunately, there does seem to be progress in that regard, but it's not complete yet. It'll be complete when you can go to any such service using the OS and the browser of your choice, whatever that may be, and be able to buy your downlaod and get it. Forcing the OS and/or browser of their choice down people's throats is not an excuse for how their trying to stop music piracy.
Also these music service tend to cater to those with tastes in currently popular music. What about the rest of us? When I was filesharing months ago, the songs I downloaded were ones (mostly old blues and some classic rock) I literally couldn't find elsewhere. In other words, the music services seem to only feature music by artists who are still alive.
And why the hell was the parent post modded "insightful"? It's deliberately insulting and hateful; that's called trolling.
Ah, but for the old days before the RIAA, when musicians realized they couldn't actually own a song and made their money through performances - actually working for a living, and good ones made more than enough to be considered well-off. Now, they only want to record a few songs, give an occasional tour and become instant millionaires while doing nothing in particular the rest of the time.
...but the article doesn't say anything about the source code. Too bad if that's not availalble. GEOS may be outdated, but I can imagine how it could be turned into a modern OS by hackers who use it as a base. That would take a lot of work, but if there were several talented people who care about it enough to start with, we could have another quality OS to consider having on our computers in a year or two.
Btw, the download site specifically says it's down due to the slashdot effect,
This is just the same stuff they tell Windows-users everyday and it's not quite correct.
Actually, that "never open email attachments from someone you don't know" is a myth to a great extent. If you're in someone's address book, possibly your best friend, and they get a worm, you'll be on it's hit list.
No, the way to avoid worms and virii is to not use Windows with the ineternet. Believe me, I used Windows for 2 years, and no matter how careful I was, it had a virus or worm almost once every month, not to mention spyware every week. Now I don't let my Windows partition online at all. Love or hate Linux, it's worth the extra effort just for that.
Yes, it is. But there's a difference between releasing technology as open source for all and it being used that way, and purposely selling technology to a government that you know will use it to abuse human rights. It would be same if, say, RH Enterprise were being used to abuse human rights and RH sold it to them knowing that's what they'd use it for.
What I find amusing is that they're so sure that these impoverished people will prefer their cut-rate Windows over Linux. Really now? Windows comes with practically nothing as it is; a calculator, paint, 4 little games, a cd player, WMP and the worst browser in existence. How much of that is going to be cut out? Same goes with their cut-rate Office.
Compare that to the average 2- or 3-cd distro of Linux, where you get open office, not one but several media apps, the gimp, at least 20 games, and a bunch of other programs, keeping in mind that most people in these countries can't afford even what we consider cheap software.
Sure, there's free software for Windows to download online, but most of it sucks next to what Linux-users take for granted (I know from experience), and what kind of internet connection will be available in these places anyway? A 3-cd distro like Mandrake can be downloaded even though it'll take a long time, and then passed around - or maybe someone from elsewhere can give a few copies to people there. After that, they don't need to be hunting for stuff online to download and acquiring a ton of spyware and viruses while doing so. Think about it - if they have Windows and don't download stuff, then about all their computer will be useful for is playing solitaire; assuming that's not one of the programs that gets cut out, of course.
I'm kind of wondering when the companies they've sent "pay us for copyright now" letters to might start suing them for extortion. If they're copyright claims fall apart, they can add fraud to the list of crimes as well.
Sometimes it still is. I've seen "such-and-such depends such-and-such but is not going to be installed" about 30 times or so. There's also the times apt wants to uninstall 300 packages to install 14. This was on Debian. Obviously, you've been lucky.
Now I use yum on RH. The only error it's ever given me is occasionally it can't find a package I want. Otherwise it works perfectly.
Seriously. A whole porn movie is a huge file. But most of the movie porn (as opposed to home-brewed) on p2p are clips from the movies. So if someone downloads a clip of the imaginary "Butt Knockers 2" and likes it, they'll probably go buy a copy rather than download it for 3-4 days, hoping it's not a corrupted or bogus file when the download is finished.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the fact that the "Google Declares War on Microsoft" specifically mentioned Sun's OpenOffice was a dead give-away. As one poster commented, OpenOffice.org is OSS software, Sun owns Star Office.
new Mysterious Out-Of-Space Alien cat overlords
New? But they've been here forOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!! I'm sorry! I won't tell again, I promise!/p>
You don't actually know that much about viruses, do you? A lot of people make the assumption that the only way Windows gets a virus is for the user to install it. WRONG. Even the script-kiddies know how to code a better virus than that. Many viruses download themselves straight into Windows, even going through firewalls like Sygate and ZoneAlarm, without the user ever clicking any "ok" or even knowing when it happens. How? Because Windows is set up that way - anyone on another computer somewhere can do a great deal to any Windows computer. Using an alternate browser like Mozilla (and disabling software installation) helps, but the real problem is, Windows is coded in such a way that it's easy to affect changes to it from outside the operating system. It was all written so that the user has no real control over the operating system, unlike, say, Linux and BSD.
Most Window users are more of alternate operating systems such as Linux than they are of alternatives to Norton's antivirus. So many computers come with Norton's that the vast majority have never used anything else and aren't aware of alternative AV programs, such as AVG, Avast, NOD32, etc. The only other antivirus software I've seen being sold at Wal-Mart (the biggest store chain in the US) is McAffee's.
Seems to me that Symantec has more of a monopoly on AV applications than Microsoft does on operating systems - Microsoft could easily turn around and sue them for the exact same reason. Isn't that what Symantec is doing, trying to keep their near-monopoly on the AV market?
But that has changed. MS keeps jacking up their prices. Windows XP Pro with SP2 integrated costs about $300. I don't know how much Office cost now, but I can guess it's pretty expensive. MS products are no longer much cheaper than their competitors' prices, if at all. If being the cheapest that worked was how they won, they've obviously abandoned that strategy in favor of elitism. They're going to start losing to new competitors who offer decent software for less than theirs. And the more they keep raising their prices, the more such competitors will appear - even MS won't be able to get rid of them all as they've been doing so far, simply because there will be just too many of them.
Funny thing, considering that was how they broke Apple's dominance on the dekstop computer market you'd think they would know better. Microsoft was a lesson in arrogant business practices - Apple aimed their products at the well-to-do, Microsoft aimed theirs at everybody. Microsoft won. They seem to have forgotten the marketing lesson they were such a shining example of.
As to this particular article, I'd say it's pretty iffy. But Google will have to compete more with MS, simply because MS keeps trying to compete withe them. Will Google take the initiative and aim a product in full competition against MS? Very likely. But how soon is the real question.
I actually like fantasy quite a bit myself, but I agree with the rest of your post. Here's my list of the biggest flaws with almost all SF (and especially Star Trek), as I see it:
1. They seem to think that the point of life developing at all is for a species to develop our kind of intelligence.
2. They seem to think that the point of intelligent life developing must be to develop technology.
3. Most SF authors show a terrible ignorance about other cultures and anthropology when they attempt to show how alien some non-terrestial society is, or else adapt human cultures to aliens and then pretend that it' still alien ("today is a good day to die" is a millenium-old cliche).
4. They also have an unfortunate tendency to simply take our future to extremes; we're all goody two-shoes with an "evolved sensibility", or either the future is really, really bad, man. Yet the people are somehow pretty much the same. What about simple change in beliefs and customs?
5. Characterization; I'm so tired of cookie-cutter humans who are deliberately bland to make the aliens look more alien. It has the opposite effect - the aliens wind up looking more human, and the humans wind up looking like a species of school pincipals, nannies and lawyers. (The cool thing about some fantasy stories, and some SF too, is when the author shows us what a truly different and new human culture might be like.)
6. Big animals, whether from a different planet or from our own prehistory, don't exist just to eat us. Predators do not pursue prey contiually for hours or days at a time. That's in the realm of the so-called "intelligent" creatures, such as humans.
7. Many SF stories revolve around things going very wrong with computers, and thus the author reveals his or her ignorance about the computers we have now. Come on, writers, read a little about Unix and then you'll realize why half of the computer freakout stories should be infeasible if they have a decent OS with any security built-in.
8. Technobabble. New ideas are great, but it's just nonsense when you use a bunch of tech-sounding doubletalk to solve the big problem.
9. Technobabble that's utter nonsense. Antimatter radiation; if you're nerdy enough to know which series and episode I mean, then I'm sure you get the point. If you're going to use technobabble at all, don't make up stuff that we know isn't true *now*.
10. Psionic powers that are like magic. Psionics, yes, but a little research into the subject quickly reveals that no one has ever been known to be so incredibly powerful as in a lot of the SF about it.
Unfortunately most SF has one or more of the above themes in the story, so there's not that much SF out there I like anymore. The time is long past to break away from these cliched plot conventions and imagine something new. Once upon a time, all the cliches and conventions were new, so it can be done.
Perfect examples: to set up a dsl connection on Slackware, the command is "adsl-setup"; on Debian it's "pppoeconf". "Sndconfig" only works on a few distros. Some distros -Slack, Suse, RH- can install to more than one hard drive, while others -College Linux, Libranet- won't, even though Windows 98 (!) could use more than one hard drive.
Of course, the huge thing is drivers. How many people give up on a distro because it doesn't support something important, like the graphics card, even though another distro that's 6 months older does support it?
Frankly, none of this would be a problem if the developers would be a bit more considerate of the users. Why can't you have both "adsl-setup" and "pppoeconf" as valid commands on your system? Why can't you have the "sndconfig" command bring up the utility to configure the sound? If there's no driver for the graphics card in the distro itself, such as for a Nvidia card, why can't it use the nv server until you install the driver? Answer: they obviously don't care.
...then you're just screwed? Figures. Hell with that; if it's in my car it's getting the hell out, one way or another. And, no, I don't drive drunk; in fact, I don't even drink, period. But I'm not going to be putting up with that crap.
Ohhhhhhhh... thanks for the headache, dude. Which way is up, again?
Since SCO has *blatantly* committed extortion I'm completely mystified as to why they haven't been sued for exactly that.
But can the RIAA be held for extortion? Maybe, but it's not as out-and-out obviously extortion like SCO has been doing. Both the RIAA's case and this lady's suit have "legal wrangling" written all over them.
That said, if the RIAA wins even half of all these cases, what's their next step? How much farther will they go? This could set a bad precedent, effectively giving them the green light to do whatever they want.
This has been going on for 2-3 years with Wizards of the Coast. Called the Open Game License, it's not the same as the GPL, but it's easy to see that they got the idea from it.
The OGL boils down to: if it's designated open game content in a book, it can be reprinted in another book freely as long as credit is given. This includes incorporating someone's open content rules into another, different rules book, and various other stuff a non-rpger couldn't care less about.
Amusingly enough, many rpgers are mystified by the OGL and don't understand that they can still use closed content in their own games. But there's hope for them: I'm willing to sell them closed content openers at very reasonable prices, and I'm honest enough to tell them that they're not allowed to republish closed content material. ;-)
To summarize, the basic OSS idea is indeed catching on, albeit slowly, and in rather surprising places.
My husband only got me a 120 gig external hard drive for Valentine's Day! What a gyp!
No, no no! We need it to look like this:
Linux & BSD - 32%
Mac - 32%
An OS that is not Microsoft - 10%
Another that isn't Microsoft - 10%
And another that isn't Microsoft - 10%
And another - 8%
That way, everyone has plenty of choices, and fully viable choices at that instead of just Windows, Mac, Linux/BSD and a few OSes for which very little hardware and software support exists. As much as I love Linux, I do wish there were more well-supported OSes out there. That way anyone could surely find the one they like best instead of struggling with one they don't like so well or being stuck on Windows due to hardware incompatibility.
And I hope the RIAA falls. Why? Because they've been legally ripping people off for years now. Legal, illegal, a rip-off is a rip-off. Buy a whole cd of crap to get one decent song? The price of making cds has dropped by more than half (which was the original justification for them costing so much) but the price of the cds hasn't dropped by a penny. Not to mention the copy protection so I can't even make a back-up in case the cd is damaged.
Music services to download a song for a $1? Not all of them are available to people using anything but Windows & IE. Fortunately, there does seem to be progress in that regard, but it's not complete yet. It'll be complete when you can go to any such service using the OS and the browser of your choice, whatever that may be, and be able to buy your downlaod and get it. Forcing the OS and/or browser of their choice down people's throats is not an excuse for how their trying to stop music piracy.
Also these music service tend to cater to those with tastes in currently popular music. What about the rest of us? When I was filesharing months ago, the songs I downloaded were ones (mostly old blues and some classic rock) I literally couldn't find elsewhere. In other words, the music services seem to only feature music by artists who are still alive.
And why the hell was the parent post modded "insightful"? It's deliberately insulting and hateful; that's called trolling.
Ah, but for the old days before the RIAA, when musicians realized they couldn't actually own a song and made their money through performances - actually working for a living, and good ones made more than enough to be considered well-off. Now, they only want to record a few songs, give an occasional tour and become instant millionaires while doing nothing in particular the rest of the time.
...but the article doesn't say anything about the source code. Too bad if that's not availalble. GEOS may be outdated, but I can imagine how it could be turned into a modern OS by hackers who use it as a base. That would take a lot of work, but if there were several talented people who care about it enough to start with, we could have another quality OS to consider having on our computers in a year or two.
Btw, the download site specifically says it's down due to the slashdot effect,
This is just the same stuff they tell Windows-users everyday and it's not quite correct.
Actually, that "never open email attachments from someone you don't know" is a myth to a great extent. If you're in someone's address book, possibly your best friend, and they get a worm, you'll be on it's hit list.
No, the way to avoid worms and virii is to not use Windows with the ineternet. Believe me, I used Windows for 2 years, and no matter how careful I was, it had a virus or worm almost once every month, not to mention spyware every week. Now I don't let my Windows partition online at all. Love or hate Linux, it's worth the extra effort just for that.
Yes, it is. But there's a difference between releasing technology as open source for all and it being used that way, and purposely selling technology to a government that you know will use it to abuse human rights. It would be same if, say, RH Enterprise were being used to abuse human rights and RH sold it to them knowing that's what they'd use it for.
What I find amusing is that they're so sure that these impoverished people will prefer their cut-rate Windows over Linux. Really now? Windows comes with practically nothing as it is; a calculator, paint, 4 little games, a cd player, WMP and the worst browser in existence. How much of that is going to be cut out? Same goes with their cut-rate Office.
Compare that to the average 2- or 3-cd distro of Linux, where you get open office, not one but several media apps, the gimp, at least 20 games, and a bunch of other programs, keeping in mind that most people in these countries can't afford even what we consider cheap software.
Sure, there's free software for Windows to download online, but most of it sucks next to what Linux-users take for granted (I know from experience), and what kind of internet connection will be available in these places anyway? A 3-cd distro like Mandrake can be downloaded even though it'll take a long time, and then passed around - or maybe someone from elsewhere can give a few copies to people there. After that, they don't need to be hunting for stuff online to download and acquiring a ton of spyware and viruses while doing so. Think about it - if they have Windows and don't download stuff, then about all their computer will be useful for is playing solitaire; assuming that's not one of the programs that gets cut out, of course.
I'm kind of wondering when the companies they've sent "pay us for copyright now" letters to might start suing them for extortion. If they're copyright claims fall apart, they can add fraud to the list of crimes as well.
Bad comparison - not all of us call SCO names in public, but the BBC presented all of us as OSS zealots who attacked SCO's site.
Sometimes it still is. I've seen "such-and-such depends such-and-such but is not going to be installed" about 30 times or so. There's also the times apt wants to uninstall 300 packages to install 14. This was on Debian. Obviously, you've been lucky.
Now I use yum on RH. The only error it's ever given me is occasionally it can't find a package I want. Otherwise it works perfectly.
So when might they come out with a MyDoom that targets spammers' websites?
Not that I'm trying to give anyone ideas for something like that. Mercy, no! Shame on you for even thinking that!
Seriously. A whole porn movie is a huge file. But most of the movie porn (as opposed to home-brewed) on p2p are clips from the movies. So if someone downloads a clip of the imaginary "Butt Knockers 2" and likes it, they'll probably go buy a copy rather than download it for 3-4 days, hoping it's not a corrupted or bogus file when the download is finished.
Lol, I was thinking the same thing.