I wonder how much of that is because firefox is so popular with geeks. I don't know of any geek that doesn't use it as their primary browser. Chances are very high that whoever developed the site was using firefox (with the awesome web developer extension) to test it all along.
"It seems more and more like we have a double standard when it comes to "computer trespass" laws."
It's not limited to computer trespass and it's not "more and more". We have always had two different legal systems in the US. One for the rich, one for everybody else.
American legal system is the best legal system money can buy.
VB is great for application you don't have to maintain. Especially as the applications get larger. If you need to maintain an application five years down the road then use something with inheritance for gods sake.
Yes I hear things like inheritance real important these days in a language.
All kidding aside, if you boss insists on VB then quit. You don't want to waste your career building expertise in a dead language. Go get a job someplace where you can do some Java coding. Trust me maintaining VB apps is like sticking needles in your eyes. I have been there, done that.
"You can mix and match all you want. Just create a library of C# classes and you can use them in any of the.NET languages. "
Yes, just like COM. Remember how you used to be able write activex objects in any language and call them from any other language. It's just like that except it doesn't support all languages, only languages that are.NET ready or have been modified to run on.NET.
Oh and it's a little slower and eats more memory. That too.
Well it certainly hasn't lost much value. It's right about where it was more or less compared to the yen, pound and most other currencies. What you are experiencing in Europe is a very strong euro, not a weak dollar.
Economics is junk science. I hesitate to use that phrase because it has the word science in it. Economics is just voodoo. Has anything come out of this so called experiments? Have they proven anything yet? Can they boldly make predictions that when a country blows its surplus, spend hundreds of billions on an unproductive war, runs insane trade deficits, runs insane budget deficits, expands the size of the government the results will be a stonger dollar, a stronger stock market, higher wages and lower unemployment?
Cos that's what's happened despite all the so called economic theories.
"You can't tell me that basic economics is "rash and dogmatic.""
I can because economics is mostly an ideology driven system and not one driven by testable hypothesis and rigorous proof. Economics is closer to a religion then a science. I don't remember who but an ex president is quoted as saying "get me a one armed economist so I never hear the word "on the other hand" again".
"DRM can be misused. The fact that it has been only demonstrates that this is true. I never said that it could not or would not. What I am saying is that just because technology can be misused is no reason to forbid that technology from being used. "
Who is going to forbid the use of DRM? Are you under some impression that the FSF is capable of doing such a thing?
" What I am saying is that just because technology can be misused is no reason to forbid that technology from being used. ""
What I am saing is that the technology IS being misused.
"Don't get me wrong. Keeping consumers informed about DRM is a good thing. Advocating the abolition of a way of doing business just because it could be misused, however, is precisely what TFA claims - rash and dogmatic."
What do you mean "could be misused". Don't we already have a stack of cases of DRM (and DMCA) being misused? Exactly how much evidence do you need anyway?
What's rash and dogmatic to me is the blind and unquestioning acceptance of the myth that corporations will not abuse their power, will not rip off consumers, will not harm their customers, and will treat everybody fairly.
"Yes, and that's a worthwhile message. However, there are those among the FSF that are telling people that they won't be given the choice to give up certain of their freedoms voluntarily, even if (for some reason, such as substantial discounts, or insanity) they want to. And that can be the beginning of a dangerous mentality."
There will certainly be cases where people will have DRM shoved down their throat whether they want it or not. It's a simple matter of consumer protection (although I get the feeling you don't care much for consumer protection laws either).
There will be bait and switch tactics, there will be situations where your computer will refuse to let you install linux or some other open source software because it doesn't have DRM etc.
You are pretending that somehow all parties in a transaction will be equally informed and equal in power and that's just not true. One party will hold all the cards the other party will be forced to submit.
Time to fight is now before the party holding power is omnipotent.
Yes except that in this case the zealot is the author of this article who believes that people who don't agree with him should just shut up and sit down. He is annoyed that the FSF (and other people) are getting uppity. He says "the market will solve the problem" as if the "market" didn't inlclude people he doesn't like. The "market" includes the FSF, the "open source zealots" as you like to smear them, you, me and everybody else. FSF putting up a fight is just much a part of the market as he is.
He is telling the people who disagree with him to shut the fuck up. You are telling the people who disagree with you that they are zealots. The FSF is telling people they should fight DRM. It's all a part of the "market".
Lack of development effort due to lack of possible profit. Open source stands that on it's ear. No lack of development effort, the developers don't care about profit.
"The only thing I think might slow it down isn't price, obviously. It's usability. "
In the corporate world if things get borked you wipe and re-install. Linux is especially handy in this regard because you can mount the home directories and the/usr/local from a central server and mark them read only for everybody except staff.
You can give away all the cheap or free copies you want. If you are forcing your customers to keep track of licenses then it's still costing them lots of money in manpower to make sure they are not out of compliance. In fact it add even more of a burden because the company needs to keep track of which licences were full price, which came with computers, which they got for free and which they got at a discount for accounting purposes.
It's a nightmare and one mistake can trigger an audit.
The article summary is a bit of a flamebait. In order for a product to fork there must be two forces in action. 1) Licensing that allows a fork. 2) Frustrated users who feel like they can't shape the future of the product via existing channels.
This is why there are at least three forks of java and none of perl. I suppose one could argue that the forks of Java are not true forks but attempts at re-engineering but the end result is the same.
Will linux fork like Unix? Well in a way it already has, there is real time kernel, different kernels for devices etc but not in the way the article talks about it. The article isn't talking about forks per se it's talking about distros. The author seems to have missed the point that the Unix forks were actual forks in the kernel not "just" distros.
"Indeed. I'll be mighty surprised to see any corp that's not already using Macs to replace thier PCs with them. Now on top of the increased cost of Apple, there's the cost of retraining."
Err no you missed the point. Here let me explain again.
Throughout the eighties and the nineties MS products were much worse then all competitors. Windows was worse then the mac or OS/2, word was worse then wordperfect, excel was worse then quattro pro, sql server was worse then oracle etc.
MS came up with a clever markething scheme, I will summarise as follows "Our products are good enough to do most of what you need and cost less then those other clearly superior products. You will probably never use any of those fancy features anyway so you might as well save money".
Now Linux is making the same claim. It's good enough, it's cheaper. The pitch worked wonders for MS, there is no reason to think it won't work as well for linux. Corporations are not stupid, they are not going to pay for products and features they don't need. So they won't switch to Mac, they will switch to linux. Then joe blow will also install linux at home so he can take his work home. Then game and hardware makers will port their stuff over to linux.
Hey moron. Any information Google can collect MS can collect. You know because the browser run inside windows. IE can keep track of every site you visit and every form you fill out. Ooops it already does that. All it has to do is to send it to MS.
"Difference is the US doesn't deny this to its citizens."
Do you think that difference is worth a hill of beans?
"You guys even re-elected Dubya knowing full well all of the BS that he's pulled."
Still scratching my head over that one. You see we americans are a funny bunch. For a lot of us making sure the gays never got married was more important then torture.
The Mozilla was re-licensed to be more compatible with the GPL. CDDL was very carefully written so as to prevent their code to be migrated to GPLed software. Sun is deathly afraid that their software will fork under a GPL license and that they won't be able to keep up with the GPLed coders.
They wanted to make sure the no extra features of Solaris made it into Linux.
Looks like it's not going to work though. My guess is that there is already a port of dtrace happening in Linux and if they get stuck there is all the BSD code that can be used.
"Microsoft wants you to buy their software and they try to give you little choice in this. That can be annoying, but at least it's straightforward and obvious."
They also have a fantastic track record of stabbing virtually all of the parners in the back, playing loose and fast with the law, acting in an anti-consumer manner, lying, cheating and stealing. Clearly morals, ethics, and general goodness is not a high priority at MS.
"Suddenly Google has knowledge of which ads not only lead to clicks, but lead to purchases. But it gets even better. Because they are able to identify you when you make the purchase, they can tie all the information they have on you to both the click-through and the purchase. Right now they can charge more for selling ad words that are more likely to generate searches, but imagine if they could charge more for advertising to people who are more likely to click-through and make purchases. They're not just selling the words anymore, they're selling you! "
MS is already selling you on their desktop. Ms knows your name, address and phone number if you registered using your real name. Ms can track you personally using passport and they can force you to use passport to update windows.
"Of course the people at Google are very smart. So smart that they're actual plan for how to use this data could be far more sinister than what I've come up with in five minutes."
The question is will they use it in a sinister manner. We know Ms has a long and storied history of sinister behavior, we know that google so far has not acted in such a sinister manner.
"A Mac is no more intuitive to someone who's never used one than Windows is. (I tried looking at a mini a few months back.) But I think you'll find the real reasons that more people aren't on macs are the same as they've always been."
Bullshit. More then bullshit but an out and out lie. When windows 3.1 was out Mac was plug and play, it was easy, it was stable (compared to windows), it was easy, it was slick, it was integrated etc. And yet people didn't buy it because they could not take their work home. The floppies didn't work, they could not run lotus 123 on it.
"A) They want to run Software Package X (and not necessarily because their job does)"
The reason they didn't buy a mac was because the mac didn't run lotus 123. The reason software X wasn't written for the mac was because people were running windows at home.
"B) They don't want to pay the Apple Tax amounting to a 50-100% increase in price/pc. (Which could explain why fewer business use Apple, leading to A.)"
Corporations are slowly realizing they don't have to pay the MS tax. Watch this space.
"They want to use their computer like they use a hammer. Very few people will actually take the time to learn how a computer functions beyond the bare minimum of what they need to get whatever it is they want to do, done. Windows does this extremely well. They point, they click. When is the last time you had to use the CLI on a Modern Windows Box?"
If that was true then everybody would be using a Mac. That's not true. People don't use windows because it's easy (because it's not easy, never was, never will be). People use windows because that's what their company uses and they want to take work home.
Everything else (hardware support, gaming, etc) comes after corporate adoption. Corporate adoption is the tail that wags the dog. Corporations adopt an OS, people adopt the same OS at home, everybody else builds devices and games. That's the order.
Corporations are slowly starting to adopt linux, first at the server level and slowly on the desktop. Just watch and see.
I don't see how it could suck more or be more evil then paypal. If MS ends up buying paypal/ebay as it's rumored then all the more so reason to use Google.
As a corporation I trust google much more then I trust ebay/paypal or MS or even Visa for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much of that is because firefox is so popular with geeks. I don't know of any geek that doesn't use it as their primary browser. Chances are very high that whoever developed the site was using firefox (with the awesome web developer extension) to test it all along.
"It seems more and more like we have a double standard when it comes to "computer trespass" laws."
It's not limited to computer trespass and it's not "more and more". We have always had two different legal systems in the US. One for the rich, one for everybody else.
American legal system is the best legal system money can buy.
VB is great for application you don't have to maintain. Especially as the applications get larger. If you need to maintain an application five years down the road then use something with inheritance for gods sake.
Yes I hear things like inheritance real important these days in a language.
All kidding aside, if you boss insists on VB then quit. You don't want to waste your career building expertise in a dead language. Go get a job someplace where you can do some Java coding. Trust me maintaining VB apps is like sticking needles in your eyes. I have been there, done that.
"You can mix and match all you want. Just create a library of C# classes and you can use them in any of the .NET languages. "
.NET ready or have been modified to run on .NET.
Yes, just like COM. Remember how you used to be able write activex objects in any language and call them from any other language. It's just like that except it doesn't support all languages, only languages that are
Oh and it's a little slower and eats more memory. That too.
Well it certainly hasn't lost much value. It's right about where it was more or less compared to the yen, pound and most other currencies. What you are experiencing in Europe is a very strong euro, not a weak dollar.
Economics is junk science. I hesitate to use that phrase because it has the word science in it. Economics is just voodoo. Has anything come out of this so called experiments? Have they proven anything yet? Can they boldly make predictions that when a country blows its surplus, spend hundreds of billions on an unproductive war, runs insane trade deficits, runs insane budget deficits, expands the size of the government the results will be a stonger dollar, a stronger stock market, higher wages and lower unemployment?
Cos that's what's happened despite all the so called economic theories.
"You can't tell me that basic economics is "rash and dogmatic.""
I can because economics is mostly an ideology driven system and not one driven by testable hypothesis and rigorous proof. Economics is closer to a religion then a science. I don't remember who but an ex president is quoted as saying "get me a one armed economist so I never hear the word "on the other hand" again".
"DRM can be misused. The fact that it has been only demonstrates that this is true. I never said that it could not or would not. What I am saying is that just because technology can be misused is no reason to forbid that technology from being used. "
Who is going to forbid the use of DRM? Are you under some impression that the FSF is capable of doing such a thing?
" What I am saying is that just because technology can be misused is no reason to forbid that technology from being used. ""
What I am saing is that the technology IS being misused.
"Don't get me wrong. Keeping consumers informed about DRM is a good thing. Advocating the abolition of a way of doing business just because it could be misused, however, is precisely what TFA claims - rash and dogmatic."
What do you mean "could be misused". Don't we already have a stack of cases of DRM (and DMCA) being misused? Exactly how much evidence do you need anyway?
What's rash and dogmatic to me is the blind and unquestioning acceptance of the myth that corporations will not abuse their power, will not rip off consumers, will not harm their customers, and will treat everybody fairly.
"Yes, and that's a worthwhile message. However, there are those among the FSF that are telling people that they won't be given the choice to give up certain of their freedoms voluntarily, even if (for some reason, such as substantial discounts, or insanity) they want to. And that can be the beginning of a dangerous mentality."
There will certainly be cases where people will have DRM shoved down their throat whether they want it or not. It's a simple matter of consumer protection (although I get the feeling you don't care much for consumer protection laws either).
There will be bait and switch tactics, there will be situations where your computer will refuse to let you install linux or some other open source software because it doesn't have DRM etc.
You are pretending that somehow all parties in a transaction will be equally informed and equal in power and that's just not true. One party will hold all the cards the other party will be forced to submit.
Time to fight is now before the party holding power is omnipotent.
The FSF is telling people that they don't have to and should not give up their freedoms voluntarily.
Yes except that in this case the zealot is the author of this article who believes that people who don't agree with him should just shut up and sit down. He is annoyed that the FSF (and other people) are getting uppity. He says "the market will solve the problem" as if the "market" didn't inlclude people he doesn't like. The "market" includes the FSF, the "open source zealots" as you like to smear them, you, me and everybody else. FSF putting up a fight is just much a part of the market as he is.
He is telling the people who disagree with him to shut the fuck up. You are telling the people who disagree with you that they are zealots. The FSF is telling people they should fight DRM. It's all a part of the "market".
"Why werent Lotus, dBase, etc... on Mac then?"
/usr/local from a central server and mark them read only for everybody except staff.
Lack of development effort due to lack of possible profit. Open source stands that on it's ear. No lack of development effort, the developers don't care about profit.
"The only thing I think might slow it down isn't price, obviously. It's usability. "
In the corporate world if things get borked you wipe and re-install. Linux is especially handy in this regard because you can mount the home directories and the
You can give away all the cheap or free copies you want. If you are forcing your customers to keep track of licenses then it's still costing them lots of money in manpower to make sure they are not out of compliance. In fact it add even more of a burden because the company needs to keep track of which licences were full price, which came with computers, which they got for free and which they got at a discount for accounting purposes.
It's a nightmare and one mistake can trigger an audit.
It's better not to have that headache at all
The article summary is a bit of a flamebait. In order for a product to fork there must be two forces in action.
1) Licensing that allows a fork.
2) Frustrated users who feel like they can't shape the future of the product via existing channels.
This is why there are at least three forks of java and none of perl. I suppose one could argue that the forks of Java are not true forks but attempts at re-engineering but the end result is the same.
Will linux fork like Unix? Well in a way it already has, there is real time kernel, different kernels for devices etc but not in the way the article talks about it. The article isn't talking about forks per se it's talking about distros. The author seems to have missed the point that the Unix forks were actual forks in the kernel not "just" distros.
Weird article really. Kind of pointless too.
"And why didn't they run them at work?"
Lotus 123, wordperfect, dbase III.
"Indeed. I'll be mighty surprised to see any corp that's not already using Macs to replace thier PCs with them. Now on top of the increased cost of Apple, there's the cost of retraining."
Err no you missed the point. Here let me explain again.
Throughout the eighties and the nineties MS products were much worse then all competitors. Windows was worse then the mac or OS/2, word was worse then wordperfect, excel was worse then quattro pro, sql server was worse then oracle etc.
MS came up with a clever markething scheme, I will summarise as follows "Our products are good enough to do most of what you need and cost less then those other clearly superior products. You will probably never use any of those fancy features anyway so you might as well save money".
Now Linux is making the same claim. It's good enough, it's cheaper. The pitch worked wonders for MS, there is no reason to think it won't work as well for linux. Corporations are not stupid, they are not going to pay for products and features they don't need. So they won't switch to Mac, they will switch to linux. Then joe blow will also install linux at home so he can take his work home. Then game and hardware makers will port their stuff over to linux.
Hey moron. Any information Google can collect MS can collect. You know because the browser run inside windows. IE can keep track of every site you visit and every form you fill out. Ooops it already does that. All it has to do is to send it to MS.
"Difference is the US doesn't deny this to its citizens."
Do you think that difference is worth a hill of beans?
"You guys even re-elected Dubya knowing full well all of the BS that he's pulled."
Still scratching my head over that one. You see we americans are a funny bunch. For a lot of us making sure the gays never got married was more important then torture.
Wow that looks like a lot of fun. Let's all make up arguments for other people and then shoot the arguments down with nonsensical rhetoric.
You should get a patent on that idea.
The Mozilla was re-licensed to be more compatible with the GPL. CDDL was very carefully written so as to prevent their code to be migrated to GPLed software. Sun is deathly afraid that their software will fork under a GPL license and that they won't be able to keep up with the GPLed coders.
They wanted to make sure the no extra features of Solaris made it into Linux.
Looks like it's not going to work though. My guess is that there is already a port of dtrace happening in Linux and if they get stuck there is all the BSD code that can be used.
"Microsoft wants you to buy their software and they try to give you little choice in this. That can be annoying, but at least it's straightforward and obvious."
They also have a fantastic track record of stabbing virtually all of the parners in the back, playing loose and fast with the law, acting in an anti-consumer manner, lying, cheating and stealing. Clearly morals, ethics, and general goodness is not a high priority at MS.
"Suddenly Google has knowledge of which ads not only lead to clicks, but lead to purchases. But it gets even better. Because they are able to identify you when you make the purchase, they can tie all the information they have on you to both the click-through and the purchase. Right now they can charge more for selling ad words that are more likely to generate searches, but imagine if they could charge more for advertising to people who are more likely to click-through and make purchases. They're not just selling the words anymore, they're selling you! "
MS is already selling you on their desktop. Ms knows your name, address and phone number if you registered using your real name. Ms can track you personally using passport and they can force you to use passport to update windows.
"Of course the people at Google are very smart. So smart that they're actual plan for how to use this data could be far more sinister than what I've come up with in five minutes."
The question is will they use it in a sinister manner. We know Ms has a long and storied history of sinister behavior, we know that google so far has not acted in such a sinister manner.
Would you let a child molester babysit your kids?
Would you let a thief house sit for you?
Isn't it illegal to transport guns across state lines?
"A Mac is no more intuitive to someone who's never used one than Windows is. (I tried looking at a mini a few months back.) But I think you'll find the real reasons that more people aren't on macs are the same as they've always been."
Bullshit. More then bullshit but an out and out lie. When windows 3.1 was out Mac was plug and play, it was easy, it was stable (compared to windows), it was easy, it was slick, it was integrated etc. And yet people didn't buy it because they could not take their work home. The floppies didn't work, they could not run lotus 123 on it.
"A) They want to run Software Package X (and not necessarily because their job does)"
The reason they didn't buy a mac was because the mac didn't run lotus 123. The reason software X wasn't written for the mac was because people were running windows at home.
"B) They don't want to pay the Apple Tax amounting to a 50-100% increase in price/pc. (Which could explain why fewer business use Apple, leading to A.)"
Corporations are slowly realizing they don't have to pay the MS tax. Watch this space.
"They want to use their computer like they use a hammer.
Very few people will actually take the time to learn how a computer functions beyond the bare minimum of what they need to get whatever it is they want to do, done. Windows does this extremely well. They point, they click. When is the last time you had to use the CLI on a Modern Windows Box?"
If that was true then everybody would be using a Mac. That's not true. People don't use windows because it's easy (because it's not easy, never was, never will be). People use windows because that's what their company uses and they want to take work home.
Everything else (hardware support, gaming, etc) comes after corporate adoption. Corporate adoption is the tail that wags the dog. Corporations adopt an OS, people adopt the same OS at home, everybody else builds devices and games. That's the order.
Corporations are slowly starting to adopt linux, first at the server level and slowly on the desktop. Just watch and see.
I don't see how it could suck more or be more evil then paypal. If MS ends up buying paypal/ebay as it's rumored then all the more so reason to use Google.
As a corporation I trust google much more then I trust ebay/paypal or MS or even Visa for that matter.