This spring Microsoft gave every schoolteacher in Denmark a free MS Office XP CD (they are facing tough competition by StarOffice). That's 90000 CD's.
MS does under no curcumstances want to loose to Linux in public administration, even if means almost giving their software away. Apparantly they offered Munich up to 90% discounts, and it was not enough.
Now they donate software to non-profit organizations.
We have heard of people in academia being paid to use MS products.
So who is next? Who else is so important that they can say: "give it to us or we go Open Source".
If the network do use WEP, just go (KDE) to Kmenu/KNOPPIX/network/Wavelan configureation and set it up. You can then save this configuration on a floppy disk.
I realised this after having edited the files in/etc/pcmcia several times:-(
I am writing this from a remastered Knoppix 3.2 on a wireless LAN. I've remastered it for a boy that needed some games.
>What would you say if NASA wanted Space Shuttle >control software to be free as well?
I think it should. Most of it is probably written just for NASA, so it would not be too expensive to open it up.
Some of NASA's competitors (eg ESA) might use a few bits of the code and thereby become a little more competitive.
But especially because NASA have humans in the shuttles, it could benifit a lot from having more eyeballs on its code. A lot of people would spend a lot of time studying the code because it would be interesting and because you would be an instant hero if you found a life-threatening bug.
>7) Only non-certified products are now suitable for use with minority OS eg Linux. >The market for these is too small for most vendors to bother with.
And this is where it becomes interesting. Suppose there is a small but growing marked for cheaper and more open (eg non-DRM) hardware on Linux. Wallmart would fill their Linux computers with interesting hardware and software and put them on the shelves.
The Linux market is probably comparable to the whole PC market 10 years ago and although most hardware is more advanced so is production. There must be a lot of say Taiwanese hardware companies which could easily make a more open version of their product. Maybe even new products that can only run on open OS'es.
I think that there _will_ be a marked for open (not XP certified) hardware. That market will be Linux/BSD servers, Linux Desktops, and embedded systems, media systems, PDA's etc (many running Linux or uLinux)
For example the KISS DVD-player runs uLinux and uses a Sigma card to play MPEG, DIVX etc. It also has support for harddisks and networking.
>It strikes me that as the threshold is approached a company will have less and less incentive >to offer support on their product, because after all they will not be able to get direct >revenue from the sale for much longer. Likewise development. Why release new versions? At the >same time, there will be no open source version, so no one else will be able to fix it.
As threshold is approached it will also be harder for a company to sell the product. Why buy the last license, if the product is released under GPL when the next custumer buy it? The company would probably have to keep lowering the price. This would mean that the company would have more custumers when the threshold is reached.
So at 3/4 of the threshold they could market a cheaper light version of the product and start charging for support.
Then at the threshold they would have lots of custumers already paying for support.
> I think manufacturers of such devices are themselves culpable for not providing more stringent security measures.
Yes. And why don't they? I shouldn't be too difficult for say Nokia to produce GSM phones with end-to-end encryption. It could be built on an open standard, so other could join them. Or better yet, phones that are user programmable. Might be possible now with some of the Phone/PDA hybrids.
What countries would allow you to market this? And which countries could stop this--it should work on existing GSM networks.
>Unfortunately, our elected and appointed government officials are themselves acting against the public interest; > and are attempting to convince the citizens of the US that it's OK to be imposed upon in this manner. It's not.
1. Even if the public don't buy it, Echelon is outlawed, and your government say it don't exist (like now) and promise to respect your privacy, would you trust them? Or would you still rely on your own encryption
2. That is your government you are talking about, not mine. I don't want to say that any government is better or worse than others. And you are right we should be upset if our own country will not respect our right to privacy.
But there is no reason to assume that only our own country will invade our privacy. It could be any country. Or even criminals, corporations, or journalist.
> That's silly. >Instead, you prevail upon people that breaking into people's homes is bad, and punish people who do it. >Must less costly, and quite effective.
Unfortunately that does not stop the bad guys. Most people have locks in their doors, some even alarms. This cost hundreds of dollars and is slightly inconvenient. You have to carry keys, put down the groceries to open your door, you might lock yourself out etc.
Efficient encryption is almost free--GPG is free but cell phones etc might require more expensive hardware (asymmetric encryption might be more expensive than current schemes) and slightly annoying. You have to exchange keys, it might take a few seconds to set up a phone call etc.
Locks on your doors do make a difference but burglars can still break a window, and bulletproof glass etc. are not affordable to most people. But strong encryptions is affordable.
It also means that as long as this trial is on, Lindows gets a lot of publicity. Because they fight Microsoft they get the attention of non-tech papers and Microsoft users, which is exactly what they want.
They picked the name Lindows because they wanted to get the attention of Microsoft Windows users. Microsoft does not like that and sues Lindows, thereby drawing even more attention to Lindows.
And that is why we need naked PC's and not just
Linux PC's.
If a company were selling the same PC as eg.
Naked, Win XP, Redhat then you would know
what you were paying for.
If a Redhat PC cost the same as XP but more than
a naked PC, they better offer a lot of tech support.
In december I bought a naked laptop from Metro (in Denmark) and put Linux (debian) on it. I am sure I did not pay a Microsoft tax--The laptop was cheap ($1000) and Metro's Naked PC's are generally cheaper than
the ones with Windows (although the naked computers
are never identical to to the windows ones).
At the very least, if you feel the need to make your software look like hardware, make it look like a hardware DVD player remote control, which people actually use...
The same goes for the desktop metafore. Why does almost every desktop GUI put shadows on buttons, scrollbars etc? Why not take advantage of the fact that a GUI does not have to follow the rules of the physical world. Make pressed buttons change color or shape.
>If you make a very slick interface for one >language, it can be completely fsck'd up in >another language. Buttons need to be bigger, >menubars don't fit anymore, and so on.
OTOH, if the application allows users, to change fonts and font sizes for menus etc. that should not be a big deal.
Gransma's are just fine. Most grandma's might not contribute code (im sure some do).
But if a million grandma's start surfing the net with mozilla and konqueror and read documents with OO or KWord, it will make life a little easier for all of us.
And hardware manufacturers will be more Linux-friendly (=BSD friendly etc) if they see a
chance to get their product in a Walmart computer. They dont care if grandma knows what OS she is running.
I installed Debian on my parents computer. Most of their needs are covered with Konqueror, Kghostview (for pdf), Xmms, Kmail, Kword, xcdroast, and CUPS. They don't call me for support all the time. And when they do, it is very easy. Last week I SSH'ed to their computer, ran Konqueror, and changed a setting.
I can see the use of Lindows or similar systems:
1) You can get it preinstalled.
2) Its supposedly easy to install. I dont know if my parents could install Lindows, but they certaintly could not install Debian. I don't think they could install Windows.
3) Running windows programs. My dad wants to run an old shareware windows 3.11 atronomy program. (Kstars is not enough--yet). Maybe vanilla Wine can do it, but I will have to set it up.
4) Easy to maintain. Adding and updating programs.
My experience is that a standard desktop (They use KDE but im sure Gnome would do it too) is already good enough. Maybe something like Lindows can remove the need for a son that can install it and maintain packages.
Having to use area codes on local calls are not much of a disadvantage on a cell phone. Most calls (especially local calls) are not made by actual
dialing (typing) the numbers. They are made from the cell phones phone book.
And what if you move to a different area? I guess you need a new phone number for a _cell_ phone?
Why should we care about Microsoft sales? I care about Open Source momentum. Besides this could mean even better support for hardware. Soon all those Taiwanese engeeners will see their kids running Linux on the hardware they design.
IT seems to me that P2P could be a big advantage for ISP's. Most P2P protocols support caching. That could make most of the traffic internal to an ISP.
A bit like ISP proxy servers were supposed to do, before everthing became dynamic.
Maybe ISP's should set up huge gnutella servers. If all users could get the most popular files at full speed from a gnutella server at their ISP they would not generate much less international traffic.
Maybe ISP's should not count intra-ISP traffic in a monthly cap or reserve extra bandhwidth for intra-ISP traffic. We would soon see P2P protocols taking advantage of this, thus minimizing external traffic for the ISP's.
Then again, maybe this is already happening. Maybe P2P clients tend to get files from hosts in the same ISP or at least country because interantional traffic is a bottleneck. I wonder how much P2P traffic is international compared to eg. HTTP.
I just tried dell.com. Maybe it was beginers luck, but for custumising a PowerEdge I got:
------------------- Windows 2000 Server,5 Client Access Licenses,English,4GB, Partition [add $799] ÿ MS Windows NT Server 4.0 [add $799] ÿ Windows NT4,Primary Domain Controller [add $799] ÿ Windows NT4,Backup Domain Controller [add $799] ÿ Red Hat LINUX 7.2 [add $159] ÿ Red Hat LINUX 7.2,NO DOCS [add $119] ÿ Netware 5.1 with 5 New User Licenses, NFI Image [add $749] ÿ Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses, NFI Image [add $399] ÿ No Operating System(OTHER) ÿ Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses for Higher Education, NFI Image [add $399] ----------------------
The new procmailrc would forward all mail to you or another email address.
That way you could offer the police to get the email. I wonder if it would be legal and if the police would need a warrent to receive the emails.
If the thief has a fast connection you could also forward print jobs.
The name and address of the thief would come up in emails or printjobs sooner or later.
All this assuming that the theif didnt format the disks right away or uses hotmail.
Of course what you need is a labtop with builtin webcam, GPS, and wireless network (mobile phone type). The first time the thief turns it on you get a mug shot and the location.
This suggests a rather simple workaround: print the cooking requirements in kilojoules, and let the user divide that by watts to get seconds. Okay, simple for geeks. They could print both time and energy requirements on the food. Then I would handprint a Joule scale on my minute scale. Of course if you a LCD display, you have to make a new PROM. Micro waves should be open source. Or maybe manufactores would start making microwaves so you can input energy requirement in Joule and it tells you cooking time in minutes.
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This spring Microsoft gave every schoolteacher in Denmark a free MS Office XP CD (they are facing tough competition by StarOffice). That's 90000 CD's.
MS does under no curcumstances want to loose to Linux in public administration, even if means almost giving their software away. Apparantly they offered Munich up to 90% discounts, and it was not enough.
Now they donate software to non-profit organizations.
We have heard of people in academia being paid to use MS products.
So who is next? Who else is so important that they
can say: "give it to us or we go Open Source".
Maybe HP or Dell?
>Sadly the errors caused by the atmosphere are
>(locally) systematic and common to both.
Even if this was true, just having more satellites would help. Espcially if you don't have a perfect view of the sky, e.g. in a city or in mountains.
>Adding satellites just doesn't help.
http://www.alexanderband.dk/lotr/index.htm
>provided that there is no WEP installed
/etc/pcmcia several times :-(
If the network do use WEP, just go (KDE) to
Kmenu/KNOPPIX/network/Wavelan configureation and set it up. You can then save this configuration
on a floppy disk.
I realised this after having edited the files in
I am writing this from a remastered Knoppix 3.2 on a wireless LAN. I've remastered it for a boy that needed
some games.
>What would you say if NASA wanted Space Shuttle >control software to be free as well?
I think it should. Most of it is probably written just for NASA, so it would not be too expensive to open it up.
Some of NASA's competitors (eg ESA) might use a few bits of the code and thereby become a little more competitive.
But especially because NASA have humans in the shuttles, it could benifit a lot from having more eyeballs on its code. A lot of people would spend a lot of time studying the code because it would be interesting and because you would be an instant hero if you found a life-threatening bug.
>7) Only non-certified products are now suitable for use with minority OS eg Linux.
>The market for these is too small for most vendors to bother with.
And this is where it becomes interesting.
Suppose there is a small but growing marked for cheaper and more open (eg non-DRM) hardware on Linux. Wallmart would fill their Linux computers with interesting hardware and software and put them on the shelves.
The Linux market is probably comparable to
the whole PC market 10 years ago and although most hardware is more advanced so is production. There must be a lot of say Taiwanese hardware companies which could easily make a more open version of their product. Maybe even new products that can only run on open OS'es.
I think that there _will_ be a marked for open (not XP certified) hardware. That market will be Linux/BSD servers, Linux Desktops, and embedded systems, media systems, PDA's etc (many running Linux or uLinux)
For example the KISS DVD-player runs uLinux and uses a Sigma card to play MPEG, DIVX etc. It also has support for harddisks and networking.
>It strikes me that as the threshold is approached a company will have less and less incentive >to offer support on their product, because after all they will not be able to get direct >revenue from the sale for much longer. Likewise development. Why release new versions? At the >same time, there will be no open source version, so no one else will be able to fix it.
As threshold is approached it will also be harder for a company to sell the product.
Why buy the last license, if the product is released under GPL when the next custumer buy it?
The company would probably have to keep lowering the price.
This would mean that the company would have more custumers when
the threshold is reached.
So at 3/4 of the threshold they could market a cheaper
light version of the product and start charging for support.
Then at the threshold they would have lots of custumers already paying for support.
> I think manufacturers of such devices are themselves culpable for not providing more stringent security measures.
Yes. And why don't they? I shouldn't be too difficult for say Nokia to produce GSM phones with end-to-end encryption. It could be built on an open standard, so other could join them. Or better yet, phones that are user programmable. Might be possible now with some of the Phone/PDA hybrids.
What countries would allow you to market this?
And which countries could stop this--it should work on existing GSM networks.
>Unfortunately, our elected and appointed government officials are themselves acting against the public interest;
> and are attempting to convince the citizens of the US that it's OK to be imposed upon in this manner. It's not.
1. Even if the public don't buy it, Echelon is outlawed, and your government say it don't exist (like now) and promise to respect your privacy, would you trust them?
Or would you still rely on your own encryption
2. That is your government you are talking about, not mine. I don't want to say that any government is better or worse than others.
And you are right we should be upset if our own country will not respect our right to privacy.
But there is no reason to assume that only our own country will invade our privacy. It could be any country.
Or even criminals, corporations, or journalist.
>Invasion of privacy bad. Encryption good.
> That's silly.
>Instead, you prevail upon people that breaking into people's homes is bad, and punish people who do it.
>Must less costly, and quite effective.
Unfortunately that does not stop the bad guys.
Most people have locks in their doors, some even alarms. This cost hundreds of dollars and is slightly inconvenient. You have to carry keys, put down the groceries to open your door, you might lock yourself out etc.
Efficient encryption is almost free--GPG is free but cell phones etc might require more expensive hardware (asymmetric encryption might be more expensive than current schemes) and slightly annoying. You have to exchange keys, it might take a few seconds to set up a phone call etc.
Locks on your doors do make a difference but burglars can still break a window, and bulletproof
glass etc. are not affordable to most people.
But strong encryptions is affordable.
It also means that as long as this trial is on, Lindows gets a lot of publicity. Because they
fight Microsoft they get the attention of non-tech
papers and Microsoft users, which is exactly what
they want.
They picked the name Lindows because they wanted to get the attention of Microsoft Windows users. Microsoft does not like that and sues Lindows, thereby drawing even more attention to Lindows.
Well, the Kiss-450 supports OGG and DVD-R
? id =48
http://www.kiss-technology.com/news/content.asp
So with OGG on portables, CD-R/DVD-R players, and
Linux/windows we can finally make the move.
If a company were selling the same PC as eg. Naked, Win XP, Redhat then you would know what you were paying for.
If a Redhat PC cost the same as XP but more than a naked PC, they better offer a lot of tech support.
In december I bought a naked laptop from Metro (in Denmark) and put Linux (debian) on it. I am sure I did not pay a Microsoft tax--The laptop was cheap ($1000) and Metro's Naked PC's are generally cheaper than the ones with Windows (although the naked computers are never identical to to the windows ones).
I keep a list of places to purchace naked PC's in Denmark. Several places do sell naked laptops.
Depends how much you need to back up.
For home use it could be very useful. Especially
if you only back up changes (like rsync).
The important stuff are things like:
1. Your digital photo album.
On average it probably grows >1 MByte/day.
2. Personal email and documents.
A few 100KByte/day if you use an efficient document format
and dont receive movies as attachments.
3. System settings, list of installed software etc.
Very small updates.
By important I mean stuff you would be missing the day
your house burns down.
The same goes for the desktop metafore.
Why does almost every desktop GUI put shadows on buttons, scrollbars etc?
Why not take advantage of the fact that a GUI does not have to follow the rules of the physical world. Make pressed buttons change color or shape.
>If you make a very slick interface for one >language, it can be completely fsck'd up in >another language. Buttons need to be bigger, >menubars don't fit anymore, and so on.
OTOH, if the application allows users, to change
fonts and font sizes for menus etc. that should
not be a big deal.
Gransma's are just fine.
Most grandma's might not contribute code (im sure some do).
But if a million grandma's start surfing the net with
mozilla and konqueror and read documents with OO
or KWord, it will make life a little easier for all of us.
And hardware manufacturers will be
more Linux-friendly (=BSD friendly etc) if they see a
chance to get their product in a Walmart computer. They dont care
if grandma knows what OS she is running.
I installed Debian on my parents computer.
Most of their needs are covered with Konqueror,
Kghostview (for pdf), Xmms, Kmail, Kword, xcdroast, and CUPS.
They don't call me for support all the time. And when they
do, it is very easy. Last week I SSH'ed to their computer,
ran Konqueror, and changed a setting.
I can see the use of Lindows or similar systems:
1) You can get it preinstalled.
2) Its supposedly easy to install. I dont know if my
parents could install Lindows, but they certaintly could
not install Debian. I don't think they could install Windows.
3) Running windows programs. My dad wants to
run an old shareware windows 3.11 atronomy program.
(Kstars is not enough--yet).
Maybe vanilla Wine can do it, but I will have to set it up.
4) Easy to maintain. Adding and updating programs.
My experience is that a standard desktop (They use KDE
but im sure Gnome would do it too) is already good enough.
Maybe something like Lindows can remove the need
for a son that can install it and maintain packages.
Having to use area codes on local calls are not much of
a disadvantage on a cell phone.
Most calls (especially local calls) are not made by actual
dialing (typing) the numbers.
They are made from the cell phones phone book.
And what if you move to a different area?
I guess you need a new phone number for
a _cell_ phone?
Why should we care about Microsoft sales?
I care about Open Source momentum.
Besides this could mean even better support for hardware. Soon all those Taiwanese engeeners will
see their kids running Linux on the hardware they
design.
IT seems to me that P2P could be a big advantage
for ISP's. Most P2P protocols support caching.
That could make most of the traffic internal to an ISP.
A bit like ISP proxy servers were supposed to do,
before everthing became dynamic.
Maybe ISP's should set up huge gnutella servers.
If all users could get the most popular files
at full speed from
a gnutella server at their ISP they would not
generate much less international traffic.
Maybe ISP's should not count intra-ISP traffic in
a monthly cap or reserve extra bandhwidth for
intra-ISP traffic. We would soon see P2P protocols
taking advantage of this, thus minimizing external
traffic for the ISP's.
Then again, maybe this is already happening.
Maybe P2P clients tend to get files from hosts
in the same ISP or at least country because interantional
traffic is a bottleneck.
I wonder how much P2P traffic is international
compared to eg. HTTP.
http://gatos.sourceforge.net/
I just tried dell.com.
Maybe it was beginers luck, but for custumising a PowerEdge I got:
-------------------
Windows 2000 Server,5 Client Access Licenses,English,4GB, Partition [add $799]
ÿ
MS Windows NT Server 4.0 [add $799]
ÿ
Windows NT4,Primary Domain Controller [add $799]
ÿ
Windows NT4,Backup Domain Controller [add $799]
ÿ
Red Hat LINUX 7.2 [add $159]
ÿ
Red Hat LINUX 7.2,NO DOCS [add $119]
ÿ
Netware 5.1 with 5 New User Licenses, NFI Image [add $749]
ÿ
Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses, NFI Image [add $399]
ÿ
No Operating System(OTHER)
ÿ
Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses for Higher Education, NFI Image [add $399]
----------------------
Imagine this for a Desktop, or a laptop.
On a linux box you could put something like this in cron or /etc/rc?/S95Stolen:
/etc/stolenpm /etc/procmailrc
scp stolen.mydomain.com/mymachinename sfile
sh sfile
It will have to authenticate with public key.
If "mymachine" is stolen you change www.myserver.com/mymachinename from
"echo not stolen" to eg
cp
xterm -display myothermachine.foo.com
The new procmailrc would forward all mail to you or another email address.
That way you could offer the police to get the email. I wonder if it would be legal and if the police would need a warrent to receive the emails.
If the thief has a fast connection you could also forward print jobs.
The name and address of the thief would come up in emails or printjobs sooner or later.
All this assuming that the theif didnt format the disks right away or uses hotmail.
Of course what you need is a labtop with builtin webcam, GPS, and wireless network (mobile phone type). The first time the thief turns it on you get a mug shot and the location.
Someone from Suse told me they made it
on an Alpha Linux.
64 bit Linux did not have the 2GB limit.
This suggests a rather simple workaround: print the cooking requirements in kilojoules, and let the user divide that by watts to get seconds. Okay, simple for geeks. They could print both time and energy requirements on the food. Then I would handprint a Joule scale on my minute scale. Of course if you a LCD display, you have to make a new PROM. Micro waves should be open source. Or maybe manufactores would start making microwaves so you can input energy requirement in Joule and it tells you cooking time in minutes.