For now, Wikipedia is a pretty good source of information. Ironically, even though the information in the Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, it's also usually pretty good/accurate.
However, I still worry that spammers will figure out ways to game Wikipedia so that every article will ask you if you want a bigger penis.
Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's how the internet turned out. Using the internet is inherently an exercise in filtering, sifting through, and blocking unwanted crap advertisements.
I think it's absurd that we can't build an informational network or communications infrastructure without having it jammed pack full of ads and scam-artists, but apparently that's the world we live in.
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft,...
I really think that's begging the question. They state several times that blocking ads is theft, and if we all accepted that, then we would all agree that AdBlock was unethical. However, people in general don't agree with that.
... the real problem is Ad Block Plus's unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in.
Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of AdBlock? I mean, if websites could just put in a command, "do not block my advertising" and AdBlock would honor that, then what ads would AdBlock block?
It follows that if Adblock was not available, I would ignore ads and not click on them. If they are particularly irritating, I would complain to the webmaster, so Adblock actually does them a favor.
This is actually supported by their idea that people who use Firefox are less likely to make purchases. So the people who choose to use Firefox are those who would ignore your ads anyway, and therefore the use of Firefox+Adblock is not really causing them to be much less more likely to follow the ads. In addition, the use of Adblock prevents the browser from downloading the image, thereby reducing the bandwidth needs of the servers providing the ads. There is no real loss.
Of course, that's not the way these people see things. There's bannar ad for "Splunk" right now at the top of this page, as I type this. Has viewing this page obligated me to view that ad, click on it, and make a purchase wherever the ad sends me? Some people seem to think so.
Personally, I only noticed the ad because, while typing this, I went looking to see if there was an ad on the page in order to help me make my point. Being inundated with advertising all day long, my brain has basically learned to filter them out, and so I would never bother to click on one. Sometimes I use Firefox and when I do, I use Adblock. All that does is remove a little bit of extra aggravated brainwork of filtering out useless information. It's no loss to any website operators.
What if pirates get ahold of multiple MP3s? Why bother? Pirates can hijack the ships that carry CDs across the sea and rip the CDs themselves, making MP3s that don't contain watermarks.
Yeah, there's a joke in there, but I have a serious point. It's likely that someone with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to remove watermarks, it's also true that a person with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to bypass DRM. Someone who's serious about distributing copyrighted material will be able to find a loophole somewhere, and the only realistic purpose of a DRM scheme or watermarking scheme is to discourage casual sharing.
Even though people will find a way to remove this watermarking, most people won't bother to figure out how to do it. It might succeed at discouraging casual file sharing without impeding customers from using the content they've purchased.
In that sense, watermarking is really no better or worse for musicians/labels than DRM. People will always find a way to remove DRM, too, and it will also only impact those people who still buy music.
The difference is that the impact watermarking has on legal customers will be lessened. A watermarked audio file won't constrain customers to follow ridiculous artificial rules. Overall, it's an improvement.
If a car that you bought is used in a bank robbery, that won't be enough for a conviction. It will just be a place for police to start looking. They can go question you. If you had already sold your car to someone else, if your car was stolen, or if someone else had the keys and might have borrowed it, than it's unlikely that you'd be charged with a crime.
Why should it be any different with copyright infringement? It might be demonstrated that someone has made unauthorized copies of a CD that you purchased, but that doesn't make you the guilty party.
As silly as this might sound to you, software is capable of getting better and more refined. Many old systems "do the job", and many even "run well" considering the year in which they were released. That doesn't make them good by current standards.
There are many cases where UI design has made progress, technology has been improved, and even coding techniques have been advanced. Maybe you're some nut who insists on trying to install a 10 year old version of FreeBSD on the new computer built from computer-show parts because you are teh awesome h4xx0r!!1!
Yeah, desktop software today is generally better than desktop software was 10 and 20 years ago. Just because Microsoft hasn't bothered to improve their software in the past 7 years doesn't mean that newer software shouldn't be better than old software.
I used Appleworks. It was pretty good for its time, but that time is long gone.
Well, yeah. Appleworks hadn't really seen a significant update in, what, more than 5 years? I was always surprised to learn that it was still being sold.
I'd see it on the shelf at BestBuy and think, "Really?! Appleworks? Do people still buy that, and if they do, are they really pissed off when they figure out how out-of-date it is?"
Right. People have a tendency to think that Microsoft and Apple are the big competitors because Apple is producing an OS, but I think Adobe is in many ways a potential competitor to both Apple and Microsoft. If I were running Adobe, one of my big fears would be Apple and Microsoft developing their own in-house competitors to my software. It's already happened in some cases, with Apple producing Final Cut, and Microsoft trying to produce competitors to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the PDF file format.
Of course, it can be hard to compete with an application that is somehow tied to the OS. I also have seen many situations where people would be willing to switch to Linux except for the fact that they needed a particular Adobe application. Therefore, if I were running Adobe, I would probably have a top-secret project for making my own OS and DE, perhaps based on Linux/Gnome. If Adobe could produce their own platform that offered Adobe apps, an office suite, e-mail, and other generic stuff that people need, it would provide them with an independence from Apple/Microsoft that they don't currently have.
I don't know that they want this publicity for being "above the law". If enough people see them as "above the law", then people might actually get pissed off enough to do something to change the laws.
I doubt the issue is really about the money, either. They probably just don't want to admit defeat, since it would encourage others to fight them in court.
Errr... Ok, if you don't believe that Novell employees worked on anything the past few years, I don't know what to say to that. Perhaps a Novell employee could respond and describe all the non-work they've been doing?
In any case, they are a functioning business with a business plan, which was my only claim. Even if we assume that they've written no code and engineered no product, they were at least hiring people, which is a sign that they intended to.
what would Windows Vista bring to the party that Windows XP wouldn't?
And what does Vista bring to the party, in general, that Windows XP doesn't? Pro-Microsoft people tend to suggest that the benefits of Vista include increased stability, performance, and security-- Many of the "under the hood" changes to Vista were in favor of those aims. Wouldn't the Olympics want those things?
It seems to me that the problem with Vista, in general, is that it doesn't bring anything new to the party that most people will care about.
To use a car analogy, Windows XP has been around the block, been put through its paces, had its engine tuned and is humming nicely, whilst Windows Vista has barely had more than its tyres kicked in the dealer's forecourt. If you were taking a 5,000 mile road trip across a continent, which would you go with?
So you're acknowledging that part of the problem with Vista is that, after a year of being on the market, Vista still isn't reliable and trustworthy?
I wouldn't blame the popularity of XP as much as I would blame the god-awfulness of Vista
I wouldn't either. It's just common sense that if Vista were generally better, and with no drawbacks, people wouldn't hesitate to use it. It's not as though Windows XP is a perfect OS, either. I have a lot of problems with Windows XP. Vista just doesn't really fix any of them for me.
Throughout my career in IT, I've had countless problems with Verizon T1s. This is spanning about 8 years, between NY and DC.
I've actually called an ISP when a T1 went out and had them say, "That's funny, I have a record that Verizon just fixed a T1 on your street!" That's right, they broke my T1 while fixing another person's T1.
And now that I have a couple bonded T1s, I've seen it happen more directly. I've actually had problems with one T1, and right when it goes up, another goes down. Then I call back and ask them to fix it again, and bringing up the second one brings down the first one again. It's like they're children.
Right now I'm having a problem with errors on 2 totally different T1s, and the problem keeps getting bumped back and forth between my ISP and Verizon. My ISP does a complete test and says the circuit is showing errors, and then Verizon does a less comprehensive tests and says it's fine.
Anyway, once Caldera started all the layoffs after the dot-com boom and SCO merge, a good chunk of engineering ended up at Novell.
I think that one phrase tells you a lot about why SCO sued people and Novell won't: Novell is a functioning business with a business plan.
The reason SCO sued, apparently, is because they were failing as a business and they went into meltdown-mode. The people running the show seemed to give up on any prospect of maintaining a sustainable business, and instead focussed on getting whatever they could as soon as they could, future of the company be damned. They made a deal with the devil and started attacking their own potential customers.
You can tell a business is in trouble if they start attacking their own customers. Even the most retarded businessman doesn't want his own customers to hate him.
That sounds pretty retarded. Most IT staffs I've been a part of tend to be frustrated at their own inability to use Linux, either because of the lack of a specific application or technical inexperience with anything but Windows. I've never been at a company with an anti-Linux policy.
That's what I was thinking. Did anyone actually cease using Linux or put off Linux adoption because they were afraid of SCO? I wasn't aware that people were taking SCO's claims that seriously.
Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening.
Ok, so why not do that? You just say, "this is not happening," but you don't say why you can't make it happen.
Problems like these tend to depend a bit on the context. The best solution depends on what your needs are. I don't typically have Windows laptops these days-- luckily the laptops at my current company are much more likely to be Macs. So I put an rsync script to copy everyone's home directly over SFTP to a backup server, and then encrypt the whole thing with FileVault. If I need to, I exclude certain sorts of files (iTunes library and such), and all that's really needed is an internet connection with SFTP ports open. I feel relatively good about the solution. It's simple, it works, and as long as users remember to log out of their laptops (admittedly, a big "if") the data is pretty secure.
I wonder about Sun's stance towards StarOffice/OpenOffice. Are there really many people who buy StarOffice? For what reasons?
I assume that Sun runs OpenOffice in order to provide people with a means to move off of Windows, as well as earning good will in the open source community and marketing benefits (brand recognition and whatnot). So I guess it seems weird to me that they simultaneously split themselves between the OpenOffice brand and StarOffice brand, which is likely to confuse some people. The only benefit that I can imagine is a slight increase in purchases of StarOffice licenses by people who think they're substantially different software. However, I assume that StarOffice doesn't make massive numbers of sales, and given a small number of sales and a cheap ($70) price tag, I wonder whether the money raised by selling licenses is enough to pay for the poor branding.
Re:Standing to bring suit
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 1
I'm sure IBM wants to win on the merits. Not just a technicality that SCO does not have standing to sue. But the standing issue is enough to dismiss the SCO vs. IBM (and the world) suit.
IANAL, but I don't think the "standing issue" should be considered a technicality. It seems like an awfully big deal.
Pirates hijack seafaring ships. You're thinking of copyright infringers. The people ripping off iPhone devices are probably patent and trademark infringers. Totally different things.
Slashdot Mirror
For now, Wikipedia is a pretty good source of information. Ironically, even though the information in the Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, it's also usually pretty good/accurate.
However, I still worry that spammers will figure out ways to game Wikipedia so that every article will ask you if you want a bigger penis.
Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's how the internet turned out. Using the internet is inherently an exercise in filtering, sifting through, and blocking unwanted crap advertisements.
I think it's absurd that we can't build an informational network or communications infrastructure without having it jammed pack full of ads and scam-artists, but apparently that's the world we live in.
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, ...
I really think that's begging the question. They state several times that blocking ads is theft, and if we all accepted that, then we would all agree that AdBlock was unethical. However, people in general don't agree with that.
Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of AdBlock? I mean, if websites could just put in a command, "do not block my advertising" and AdBlock would honor that, then what ads would AdBlock block?
It follows that if Adblock was not available, I would ignore ads and not click on them. If they are particularly irritating, I would complain to the webmaster, so Adblock actually does them a favor.
This is actually supported by their idea that people who use Firefox are less likely to make purchases. So the people who choose to use Firefox are those who would ignore your ads anyway, and therefore the use of Firefox+Adblock is not really causing them to be much less more likely to follow the ads. In addition, the use of Adblock prevents the browser from downloading the image, thereby reducing the bandwidth needs of the servers providing the ads. There is no real loss.
Of course, that's not the way these people see things. There's bannar ad for "Splunk" right now at the top of this page, as I type this. Has viewing this page obligated me to view that ad, click on it, and make a purchase wherever the ad sends me? Some people seem to think so.
Personally, I only noticed the ad because, while typing this, I went looking to see if there was an ad on the page in order to help me make my point. Being inundated with advertising all day long, my brain has basically learned to filter them out, and so I would never bother to click on one. Sometimes I use Firefox and when I do, I use Adblock. All that does is remove a little bit of extra aggravated brainwork of filtering out useless information. It's no loss to any website operators.
What if pirates get ahold of multiple MP3s? Why bother? Pirates can hijack the ships that carry CDs across the sea and rip the CDs themselves, making MP3s that don't contain watermarks.
Yeah, there's a joke in there, but I have a serious point. It's likely that someone with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to remove watermarks, it's also true that a person with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to bypass DRM. Someone who's serious about distributing copyrighted material will be able to find a loophole somewhere, and the only realistic purpose of a DRM scheme or watermarking scheme is to discourage casual sharing.
Even though people will find a way to remove this watermarking, most people won't bother to figure out how to do it. It might succeed at discouraging casual file sharing without impeding customers from using the content they've purchased.
In that sense, watermarking is really no better or worse for musicians/labels than DRM. People will always find a way to remove DRM, too, and it will also only impact those people who still buy music.
The difference is that the impact watermarking has on legal customers will be lessened. A watermarked audio file won't constrain customers to follow ridiculous artificial rules. Overall, it's an improvement.
If a car that you bought is used in a bank robbery, that won't be enough for a conviction. It will just be a place for police to start looking. They can go question you. If you had already sold your car to someone else, if your car was stolen, or if someone else had the keys and might have borrowed it, than it's unlikely that you'd be charged with a crime.
Why should it be any different with copyright infringement? It might be demonstrated that someone has made unauthorized copies of a CD that you purchased, but that doesn't make you the guilty party.
As silly as this might sound to you, software is capable of getting better and more refined. Many old systems "do the job", and many even "run well" considering the year in which they were released. That doesn't make them good by current standards.
There are many cases where UI design has made progress, technology has been improved, and even coding techniques have been advanced. Maybe you're some nut who insists on trying to install a 10 year old version of FreeBSD on the new computer built from computer-show parts because you are teh awesome h4xx0r!!1!
Yeah, desktop software today is generally better than desktop software was 10 and 20 years ago. Just because Microsoft hasn't bothered to improve their software in the past 7 years doesn't mean that newer software shouldn't be better than old software.
I used Appleworks. It was pretty good for its time, but that time is long gone.
Well, yeah. Appleworks hadn't really seen a significant update in, what, more than 5 years? I was always surprised to learn that it was still being sold.
I'd see it on the shelf at BestBuy and think, "Really?! Appleworks? Do people still buy that, and if they do, are they really pissed off when they figure out how out-of-date it is?"
Right. People have a tendency to think that Microsoft and Apple are the big competitors because Apple is producing an OS, but I think Adobe is in many ways a potential competitor to both Apple and Microsoft. If I were running Adobe, one of my big fears would be Apple and Microsoft developing their own in-house competitors to my software. It's already happened in some cases, with Apple producing Final Cut, and Microsoft trying to produce competitors to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the PDF file format.
Of course, it can be hard to compete with an application that is somehow tied to the OS. I also have seen many situations where people would be willing to switch to Linux except for the fact that they needed a particular Adobe application. Therefore, if I were running Adobe, I would probably have a top-secret project for making my own OS and DE, perhaps based on Linux/Gnome. If Adobe could produce their own platform that offered Adobe apps, an office suite, e-mail, and other generic stuff that people need, it would provide them with an independence from Apple/Microsoft that they don't currently have.
I don't know that they want this publicity for being "above the law". If enough people see them as "above the law", then people might actually get pissed off enough to do something to change the laws.
I doubt the issue is really about the money, either. They probably just don't want to admit defeat, since it would encourage others to fight them in court.
It really has. Microsoft might still be doing well, but customer distrust and anger costs them.
Well they've always done a good job at their Macintosh ports and keeping them up to date...
Oh, hold on a second while I minimize this window of IE5 for OSX. I have to open Outlook for OS9 to reply to an e-mail.
In any case, they are a functioning business with a business plan, which was my only claim. Even if we assume that they've written no code and engineered no product, they were at least hiring people, which is a sign that they intended to.
what would Windows Vista bring to the party that Windows XP wouldn't?
And what does Vista bring to the party, in general, that Windows XP doesn't? Pro-Microsoft people tend to suggest that the benefits of Vista include increased stability, performance, and security-- Many of the "under the hood" changes to Vista were in favor of those aims. Wouldn't the Olympics want those things?
It seems to me that the problem with Vista, in general, is that it doesn't bring anything new to the party that most people will care about.
To use a car analogy, Windows XP has been around the block, been put through its paces, had its engine tuned and is humming nicely, whilst Windows Vista has barely had more than its tyres kicked in the dealer's forecourt. If you were taking a 5,000 mile road trip across a continent, which would you go with?
So you're acknowledging that part of the problem with Vista is that, after a year of being on the market, Vista still isn't reliable and trustworthy?
I wouldn't blame the popularity of XP as much as I would blame the god-awfulness of Vista
I wouldn't either. It's just common sense that if Vista were generally better, and with no drawbacks, people wouldn't hesitate to use it. It's not as though Windows XP is a perfect OS, either. I have a lot of problems with Windows XP. Vista just doesn't really fix any of them for me.
Out of curiosity, why has your employer decided to migrate from Win2k to WinXP?
Throughout my career in IT, I've had countless problems with Verizon T1s. This is spanning about 8 years, between NY and DC.
I've actually called an ISP when a T1 went out and had them say, "That's funny, I have a record that Verizon just fixed a T1 on your street!" That's right, they broke my T1 while fixing another person's T1.
And now that I have a couple bonded T1s, I've seen it happen more directly. I've actually had problems with one T1, and right when it goes up, another goes down. Then I call back and ask them to fix it again, and bringing up the second one brings down the first one again. It's like they're children.
Right now I'm having a problem with errors on 2 totally different T1s, and the problem keeps getting bumped back and forth between my ISP and Verizon. My ISP does a complete test and says the circuit is showing errors, and then Verizon does a less comprehensive tests and says it's fine.
Anyway, once Caldera started all the layoffs after the dot-com boom and SCO merge, a good chunk of engineering ended up at Novell.
I think that one phrase tells you a lot about why SCO sued people and Novell won't: Novell is a functioning business with a business plan.
The reason SCO sued, apparently, is because they were failing as a business and they went into meltdown-mode. The people running the show seemed to give up on any prospect of maintaining a sustainable business, and instead focussed on getting whatever they could as soon as they could, future of the company be damned. They made a deal with the devil and started attacking their own potential customers.
You can tell a business is in trouble if they start attacking their own customers. Even the most retarded businessman doesn't want his own customers to hate him.
That sounds pretty retarded. Most IT staffs I've been a part of tend to be frustrated at their own inability to use Linux, either because of the lack of a specific application or technical inexperience with anything but Windows. I've never been at a company with an anti-Linux policy.
That's what I was thinking. Did anyone actually cease using Linux or put off Linux adoption because they were afraid of SCO? I wasn't aware that people were taking SCO's claims that seriously.
Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening.
Ok, so why not do that? You just say, "this is not happening," but you don't say why you can't make it happen.
Problems like these tend to depend a bit on the context. The best solution depends on what your needs are. I don't typically have Windows laptops these days-- luckily the laptops at my current company are much more likely to be Macs. So I put an rsync script to copy everyone's home directly over SFTP to a backup server, and then encrypt the whole thing with FileVault. If I need to, I exclude certain sorts of files (iTunes library and such), and all that's really needed is an internet connection with SFTP ports open. I feel relatively good about the solution. It's simple, it works, and as long as users remember to log out of their laptops (admittedly, a big "if") the data is pretty secure.
I wonder about Sun's stance towards StarOffice/OpenOffice. Are there really many people who buy StarOffice? For what reasons?
I assume that Sun runs OpenOffice in order to provide people with a means to move off of Windows, as well as earning good will in the open source community and marketing benefits (brand recognition and whatnot). So I guess it seems weird to me that they simultaneously split themselves between the OpenOffice brand and StarOffice brand, which is likely to confuse some people. The only benefit that I can imagine is a slight increase in purchases of StarOffice licenses by people who think they're substantially different software. However, I assume that StarOffice doesn't make massive numbers of sales, and given a small number of sales and a cheap ($70) price tag, I wonder whether the money raised by selling licenses is enough to pay for the poor branding.
I'm sure IBM wants to win on the merits. Not just a technicality that SCO does not have standing to sue. But the standing issue is enough to dismiss the SCO vs. IBM (and the world) suit.
IANAL, but I don't think the "standing issue" should be considered a technicality. It seems like an awfully big deal.
Pirates copy DVD's
Pirates hijack seafaring ships. You're thinking of copyright infringers. The people ripping off iPhone devices are probably patent and trademark infringers. Totally different things.