Mostly because I worked there for 7 years is where it came from.
That's interesting. Another person (AC) posting in this thread claims to work at Comcast and says they're using Exchange internally, for employees, but currently have a different closed solution to host e-mail accounts for customers.
Exchange can scale that far for POP/IMAP and small email accounts, and it does so fairly well.
How far is that, exactly? How many in use e-mail accounts does Comcast support? Most people I know, even non-technical people, ignore their ISP provided account in favor of one of the popular and portable Web mail solutions. I'm just curious how far Comcast has managed to scale Exchange and the reasoning for it. It seems to me that if I was designing a huge e-mail service, going with the expensive and business focused Exchange with its extra features and licensing costs and lack of reputation would be a non-starter, but then I've never heard of a large public facing deployment before. If Comcast really has run it in that way and for a significant numebr of people, I'd be really interested to hear details.
What about inability to interoperate with a color printing press?
Again, that is not at all inherent in OSS. An OSS project or company creating it can license the PANTONE algorithms. Alternately a partially open and partially closed project, such as one that uses plug-ins can incorporate a closed version of the algorithm. Let me stress again, however, that nothing is inherent in OSS that prevents interoperability. That is simply an issue of licensing with the creators of the color scheme.
What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of copyrighted entertainment works?
That is also not inherent in OSS. The fact that the cartels have not licensed content to any OSS project does not mean they cannot or will not in the future. In fact an OSS DRM scheme that relies upon standards may well be the compromise the industry settles upon in the next decade or so.
There's no way in heck that the DVD CCA would license CSS for use in a copylefted software product.
That is an issue to take up with the licensor and/or the government. You'll notice that in many countries there are OSS DVD players because the government has not passed silly laws trying to restrict who can develop what. In any case, that is again not inherent in OSS, but simply a matter of what so called standards are in common use and what laws are in place in the US.
What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of set-top entertainment hardware?
No one except a few people can currently interoperate with set top entertainment hardware through a reliable channel (MythTV does support IR interfaces). This differs from the above examples only in that the situation is questionably legal and the FCC is right now looking into forcing compliance with their interoperability rules via Firewire and Cablecard.
Let me ask you a question. Apple refuses to license thier Fairplay DRM scheme to anyone other than themselves and a few Cell phone providers. Is it therefore fair to say that it is an inherent limitation of operating systems with blue user interfaces that they cannot play iTunes music, or is that simply a correlative factor? Would you think it useful to discuss this limitation of OS's with Blue UI's or do you think it more circumstantial that it is simply an effect of the current market and maybe it is possible that someone will convince Apple to license their DRM to a company selling an OS with a blue UI?
Can someone point me at a single Open sourced project that offers the same, or at least equivalent, service as the closed source version?
Sure, take a look at Linux. You can buy support for an embedded Linux project from the same company that will sell you support for several closed source embedded OS's. There are plenty of projects with commercial backers who will sell you support and service contracts including taking on legal liabilities.
Just because we as informed users are able to make use of equivalent FUNCTIONALITY it does not mean that it is an equivalent good in terms of the commercial world.
No two of anything will ever be equivalent in every way. OSS tends to have restrictions attached to redistribution of the code, while it also provides a guarantee of competition in future bidding and an emergency exit strategy.
Note that I'm not saying open source is bad, or that closed source is better, merely that the two tend to be completely different when you look at all sides.
Actually, open source code is simply a feature of software. There is nothing inherent in OSS that gives it any negatives compared to closed source software, although a given offering from a given company or organization may well have negatives compared to other open and closed source offerings. They are inherently different, but only in that OSS has a feature that closed source offerings do not.
MadPenguin.org is highlighting the lack of competition between open and closed source applications.
Umm, no it isn't. The article talks about the difference between the amount of competition among closed source applications versus the amount of competition among open source applications. It doesn't really mention competition between open and closed source applications.
With that cleared up, I had a hard time understanding exactly what the article was supposed to be saying. It seemed like a "Rah! Rah! Linux is Cool!" piece, but without any really well defined thesis. There were statements like "Appealing to the 'Home-sumer.' Hate them or love them, Linspire has proven that OEM can be a sustainable business model for their Linspire OS, based on the Debian code base " in a section entitled "Forget Windows and OS X: Just Try Linux." The weird part of this being, it doesn't mention anything about why a person should try Linux instead of Windows or OS X, just that it is profitable for the company selling it. I'd almost think it was intended as a comment for the OEM crowd, but OEMs have no option to purchase OS X, so that doesn't make sense.
I'd say that was my major problem with this article. It didn't make sense. Sure it made a statement or two that made sense and included some facts, but as a whole it just didn't add up to anything. What was the author trying to prove and to whom?
If someone builds their own bridge they can spray paint it all they want.
Actually, this is not true in most of the US. Try building a structure on your own property and then spray painting a nude image on it. A whole lot of places have laws forbidding you from that type of expression. Technically, it isn't even legal for me to paint "Bush Sucks" on the front of my house because I happen to live in a "historic" district of town.
However, when it comes to audio, the sources for audio (mp3s for the majority) are worse quality now, then at any other point.
Don't you think this comment is a little weird in an article about Apple offering a higher quality audio than they have in the past? The truth of the matter is, increased audio quality is not all that important. The vast majority of people listen to low quality headphones and car speakers with road noise overlaid. They listen to mediocre quality speakers, indifferently placed in their homes, which also have background noise going on. For most people in these conditions, they won't even be able to tell they are listening to a higher bitrate rip.
Or is it just that the jump to HDTV from non-HDTV video is so great that it's an easy sell?
Aside from the sales guys at bestbuy, I think you'll find that the adoption rate for HDTV has been lower than even the most pessimistic sales estimates. At least most people can see the quality difference there, but it is not like people absolutely have to have higher definition TV. A few high end, early adopters want higher quality everything, but that is not the general trend.
Well, my post clearly is offtopic with the comment about the editing, but it also has information about the topic in question, so a lot of moderators may have held off giving it an offtopic rating simply because some of it was on topic. I'm not sure what about my post could be considered insightful, but different people have different opinions about that. If I came across a post like my own when moderating, I'd probably leave it be, but I can understand an offtopic or and informative or both. (Mind you, both your post and this one are clearly only discussing moderation and are offtopic.)
There must be something huge in this that Exchange can not do or meet.
Maybe you're barking up the wrong tree completely. Do you actually think Comcast is using Exchange to supply mail service to all their customers? I'm one of those customers and I know they instructed me to use POP/IMAP for the protocols. I can't even imagine trying to scale an Exchange server up to that number of users. Maybe it is possible, but it seems highly unlikely.
I strongly suspect Comcast is migrating from Sendmail or some other common e-mail server that is built to scale well. I don't know where the idea that they are moving from Exchange come from though.
Original:
Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to really be challenging Microsoft in a area that Exchange has been dominated in. Fixed:
Zimbra has been picking up steam for a while now, and appears to be challenging Microsoft in an area that Exchange has dominated.
I'm not so sure about this. The last I looked at the numbers, Exchange had about 40% of the total e-mail server market, and only a tiny fraction of the commercial e-mail service to end user market; seeing as Exchange's stronghold has been within medium and large business operations. Maybe the original was more correct than your version.
...if they are willing to loose the DRM, he'd be willing to...
loose? I don't normally point out spelling or grammar errors in comments, but come on, this is the article summary. Isn't an editor supposed to at least read these?
As for the rest of this, is this supposed to be something new? He already made statements that said he'd offer all comers the same deal as EMI. I'm pretty sure the price was implied to be part of that deal.
This article is complete and utter rubbish. It makes random claims with no support. For example, "How would life without Microsoft be different? It wouldn't be in any meaningful way for those in charge of network security; there would just be a different vendor peddling the dominant operating system. " makes the assertion that it would not be any different and makes the implicit statement that there would be a single dominant operating system, all completely without any support for either of those statements. First, why would there be a single dominant OS and second, why, if that OS was Linux, would the same problems that occur with MS's monopoly not be completely undermined by Linux's licensing?
Networks in a world in which Apple had won the operating systems wars would still be insecure.
Sure it would, but that's again assuming someone had to "win" and establish a monopoly. No evidence that this is the case has been provided. I know it is hard to imagine a world with multiple OS's and vendors that interoperate via these crazy things called "standards" but that is how most markets operate. Yeah if someone else had an abusive monopoly we'd still have a broken market, that's why we want to restore the market to a non-monopolized state.
If you put computers on a network and open that network to the outside world via the Internet, you're going to have security problems, regardless of whether you're running Windows, Mac OS, Linux or an operating system you created in your spare time.
Except right now if you do that with Linux or MacOS you have a whole lot fewer problems, to the point where it takes no significant time.
User errors have long been the bane of security.
No they're not. Most malware infections by number are still the result of automated attacks with no user interaction. Such malware is harder to write, but it spreads faster and further than other malware. As for user error, sure it will always be an issue, that is no reason to ignore other aspects of security or to implement ways of mitigating user error. You seem to think (like MS) that the user element should be isolated from the security mechanisms. You cannot ignore the user when planning security and the examples you point out are where that is exactly what failed. If the Nazis had planned realistically for what their users would do, they would have built a system that verified which keys were used and that they were unique.
So, what needs to be done? You must require users to attend formal information security training and awareness programs.
Sure if you want to spend the money, go for it. It won't help very much though. Until the security of OS's is up to snuff and simple enough, the training will be mostly ineffective. What is a user supposed to do if they have a binary and aren't sure if it is safe? Windows has basically no mechanism for determining the trust level or for running it in a sandbox if it is not trusted enough. Until it does and it is brought to the user in a functional way, education will help very little. The OS actually has to have an easy way to let the user do what they want, or they will take risks out of laziness.
Education is the last step, but first we need to fix the OS and fix the market to motivate the fixing of the OS's. Right now you need the equivalent of a 4 year degree to have a good chance of safely running a Windows box and accomplishing all the tasks you want to. That is simply not good enough. It needs to be down to a couple hours or training before we will see a widespread difference.
No one, but capitalizing upon the greed inherent in human nature has resulted in better products and more innovation than relying upon altruism. See capitalism versus extreme socialism.
The whole corporate structure would change for the better. They wouldn't be able to claim whatever an employee made as theirs exclusively. Who cares how secretive they get?
Before copyrights and patents it was perfectly normal for important advances to be lost because the only person or group who understood them was wiped out and they never openly published their knowledge. Picture this. You're looking to make your fortune and you invent a new surgical technique that is revolutionary and can save lives. Currently you can profit by publishing a book about it or by patenting it, both of which will pretty much insure that it will be known to future generation. Without those artificial restrictions, however, you can still make money by keeping it secret and charging large sums to make use of it for the very wealthy. Maybe you never tell anyone, or maybe you train a few people with an instruction manual you're written, but which you keep hidden in your office. Then, your hospital burns down and you and the instructions are incinerated. Humanity has just taken a step backwards.
That is how copyright promotes useful arts and sciences. The problem currently is that it has been extended in ways that quite obviously do not promote useful arts and sciences. Once an author is dead, nothing will incite them to create more works. If a work is not for sale, stopping it from being distributed hurts the arts and sciences, not helps.
Many people come up with the same ideas, so being secretive won't matter.
Many people don't come up with a great play, or the concepts of astro-physics.
Copyright simply screws everybody who didn't think of it first.
But without it, many people would not be able to make money from a given endeavor, so they would not do it, and progress would slow.
And it has set us back probably over a hundred years, if not much more.
Current copyright (and patent which you seem to be referring to here) laws are certainly setting us back in terms of progress, but before that they helped us move forward more rapidly. Abolishing the current copyright laws would, in my opinion, be an improvement. Reforming them, however, would be better yet.
I'd argue that the 1909 act was not unreasonable, for the types of works and the delivery mechanism used at the time. At the same time, I'd argue that it is still absurdly long today. 56 years from today, will any of the hardware needed to run a current console game still exist? Will any copies of it still exist? Will anyone remember it ever existed? Take a look even at the more traditional book or movie industry of today. Almost all works make a profit for the first 5 years or less. Then they go out of publication and are unavailable.
I'd argue that 10-15 years is plenty of time to make money off of a work, but more importantly, I'd argue that any work not currently for sale at a reasonable market price should go out of copyright within 1 year. The whole point of copyright is to motivate the creation of great works and their distribution to the people. If a work is not available to the people I can think of no justification for granting it special protections from being copied freely.
The question the copyright lawyers of 1976-2006 have to explain is how all these extensions encouraged the promotion of
arts and sciences. How does it encourage the creation of new works to grant extensions to estates and corporations?
Take a look at the landmark challenge to the Bono Act. The supreme court ruled that the copyright law extensions were not promoting arts and sciences, but since what will and will not promote arts and sciences is questionable, Congress could simply be incompetent and not be violating the law. They ruled that in their opinion the laws were wrong, but that it was not the place of the court to decide specifically. So long as Congress claims their intention is to promote arts and sciences, they have a blank check.
....Apple could (and would) give a big finger to BSD...
Umm, Apple already goes above and beyond what they need to with regard to the BSD license. If they wanted, they could close the source to their fork of it to avoid giving back any changes they did not want to. The only thing the BSD license is topping them from doing is removing credit to the original authors of some of the code, and they've never been shy about crediting people even peripherally related to their code improvements.
That is GAIM, version 1.5 of this project. We're talking about Pidgen, version 2.0 of the same. I don't think there is any version of Pidgen yet available. In any case, yeah it would be nice if it supported all three major desktop OS's with their native UIs.
Just an FYI: KDE already provides spiffy central spellchecking, available for apps to take advantage of.
Yeah, that is about halfway there, but KParts (the feature you're talking about) still doesn't cut it because the application developer specifically has to know about and include the feature (spell checking for example) before it becomes accessible to the user.
For example, KDE and OS X both ship with a spellchecking service. In KDE developers can opt to include it in their apps. With OS X, unless the develop uses some funky non-standard API for text, it simply works. Now I have a Kubuntu desktop and an OS X desktop in front of me right now and spellchecking works fine in the included IM clients (Kopete and iChat). What about grammar checking? Neither ships with a built in grammar checker that works with the IM client. With OS X, I just downloaded a third party one and it applies to ichat. With Kopete I have to copy and paste between it and an app that does support that feature. What about other features? With OS X, services can also be offered by other programs. For example, I have a program that has the ability to calculate checksums, and it offers that ability to everything else, so if I wanted (for some reason) to calculate the checksum of some text sent via IM, I could. So maybe you don't care about checksums, or grammar checking. Is there any functions you do care about? Who knows better which functions you will use, you or the application developer? I have some language services to translate between English and German, which is useful for looking at some German Websites, and chatting with German clients. I have a service that automatically takes a URL or book info and formats it into a bibliography reference. I have a service that just looks at text and provides a character/word/paragraph count. The people who coded my chat client would probably never have considered that I would want those functions and even if they knew they existed would not take the time to add them into an IM client or my text editor, or my browser.
The ability for applications and services to easily share functionality with no knowledge or work on the part of the application developer whose application will be using the the functionality is, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked features of OS X and one reason I would have a hard time using Linux or Windows as my primary workstation these days.
Implementing spell checking as a standard library, ala KParts is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough anymore.
GTKSpell works on Windows? They probably wasted a small amount of time integrating these, but you're right, probably not a whole lot because of reuse of other, open code.
So you want an ugly GTK+ interface vs. Cocoa (or whatever the OSX is using) ?
Why do you assume multi-platform programs would use the same UI? Does AOL instant messenger on Mac and Windows use the same UI?
Well, if you are talking about encapsulating with any program, it means that your gripe is not with the pidgin devs.
Yes it is. It is functionality that should be built in to the chat client. I don't want to have to go hunting for a plug-in or run my own proxy server. I want to double click on the icon and and have it just plain work out of the box. I want it to be used by default by all users of the client where it is supported on both ends, so that I don't have to talk people through setting it up on their end when I'm chatting with co-workers about work. Encryption should be the default for IM and it does not and should not matter which protocol you are using.
This is an incorrect assumption in several ways. First Yahoo has 28% of Web searching, not 38%. The 38% number was for Yahoo and MS's combined share. The other way it is incorrect is the assumption that all Yahoo or Google or MS does is search, which is of course not true. The value of $50B was for the company, not for their Web search service.
Yeah, along with other programs. That's not really relevant though for those of us working on multiple OS's. Lack of OS X support means 90% of the time, I would not even consider using this.
Encryption is not something that should be built in for multi protocol IM.
Why would you think that? I'd rather have one encryption system and set of keys, which I can encapsulate within any program, than one encryption system and set of keys for each protocol. Is it so hard to integrate something like Off The Record which provides encryption for a variety of IM protocols and clients?
Spellcheck is not built in. What is built in is the support for aspell, a multiplatform oss app. So nobody neglected the "important" things for it.
Well, I imagine it took a small amount of work to make that happen, but the point is taken. I mostly mention this because the current design of Windows and Linux has fallen so far behind in this regard and I hope by being a little vocal about it I can make more users and developers aware of what we are all missing on those OS's. But that is truly a gripe with Linux and Windows, not with the Pidgin project.
Give me *one* example of some code that 'pipes' something into photoshop. Surely it isn't 'cat/tmp/img.png | photoshop', and I would love to see what the hell you are talking about.
I think what you're missing is "usr/bin/open." It has a man page.
I've always rather liked GAIM and it has been a while since there have been real improvements, so I thought I'd take a look and see how far they've managed to come.
I liked
Interface looks better, if not perfect.
Nicer plug-in system
I disliked:
No Mac OS X support
No built in encryption or support for OTR
No support for voice or video.
One thing that annoys me is they took the time to add spell checking for both OS's. I love having spell checking in my IM client, but it is not a function that every single program should have to supply by itself. I'm already running a spell checker in my text editor and my layout application and my e-mail client, and pretty much everything else. This is one of several functions that should be provided at the OS level to all applications that want it, not by each application individually. Will they waste time adding grammar checking next? How about translations between languages? What about dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia lookups?
Calling all Windows and Linux developers. It is time to catch up and make universal services a built in function of the OS so developers stop wasting time re-implementing things and concentrate on features specific to their program, like encryption and VoIP support.
If you truly object, meet with someone in HR and let them know you are being told to do something illegal and, therefore, against your moral principles.
Forget HR. Send an e-mail to someone in the legal department asking them to advise you, in their official capacity, that it is not your legal responsibility to keep track of the licensing for those software items and that if the company is turned into the BSA, that it is the responsibility of your boss that the company lost all that money, not your own responsibility. Make sure to outline the financial and legal liability this poses including the fact that the license you signed for the other copies gives them a right to perform an audit and an estimate of how much the company will have to pay if the copyright violation is discovered.
Make sure you use e-mail not the phone, as lawyers know very well the difference between a phone conversation that is not backed up by default and an e-mail record which may come back to haunt them. That should cover your own ass, since it is a civil issue and you are an agent of the company. The chances are the legal department will also take care of the issue for you.
"Bad" is a subjective term. You can interpret greed as good or bad as you like, but don't attribute your perspective to me.
You say greed, a negative word, but really they are being selfish, which is good.
See my previous comment, replacing "greed" with "selfishness." Do you know what a negativity index is with regard to sociology? It is an interesting concept. Basically you map a number to a given term to measure how negatively people view that term. Looking at the negativity ratings for various synonyms within a culture can provide some interesting revelations about it.
If everyone really did do what was best for them at all times (morally and ethically mind you) the world we be a great place.
Morals are subjective by nature. Some people find greed or selfishness or stealing or torture to be good and some to be evil and other place no inherent value on those concepts. Ethics, on the other hand are objective, but do not place value on anything. They only are rules for assigning responsibility. They leave the interpretation of what that responsibility means to the the individual or group doing the evaluation. Perhaps you mean that if everyone did what was best for them, but following your moral beliefs, then the world would be a great place according to your perspective.
I totally agree, we cannot rely on others personal set of ethics and morals to be in line with ours. That is governments job should be, to protect people from infringing on others peoples liberty. We will never be able to rely on a person doing the right thing just because we trust in our fellow man... we cant trust everyone, nor should you.
From this I imagine that you have a pretty good handle on the topics as I just presented them. I just thought it was important to make the clarification between idealism and practical application of rules and laws.
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That's interesting. Another person (AC) posting in this thread claims to work at Comcast and says they're using Exchange internally, for employees, but currently have a different closed solution to host e-mail accounts for customers.
Exchange can scale that far for POP/IMAP and small email accounts, and it does so fairly well.How far is that, exactly? How many in use e-mail accounts does Comcast support? Most people I know, even non-technical people, ignore their ISP provided account in favor of one of the popular and portable Web mail solutions. I'm just curious how far Comcast has managed to scale Exchange and the reasoning for it. It seems to me that if I was designing a huge e-mail service, going with the expensive and business focused Exchange with its extra features and licensing costs and lack of reputation would be a non-starter, but then I've never heard of a large public facing deployment before. If Comcast really has run it in that way and for a significant numebr of people, I'd be really interested to hear details.
Again, that is not at all inherent in OSS. An OSS project or company creating it can license the PANTONE algorithms. Alternately a partially open and partially closed project, such as one that uses plug-ins can incorporate a closed version of the algorithm. Let me stress again, however, that nothing is inherent in OSS that prevents interoperability. That is simply an issue of licensing with the creators of the color scheme.
What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of copyrighted entertainment works?That is also not inherent in OSS. The fact that the cartels have not licensed content to any OSS project does not mean they cannot or will not in the future. In fact an OSS DRM scheme that relies upon standards may well be the compromise the industry settles upon in the next decade or so.
There's no way in heck that the DVD CCA would license CSS for use in a copylefted software product.That is an issue to take up with the licensor and/or the government. You'll notice that in many countries there are OSS DVD players because the government has not passed silly laws trying to restrict who can develop what. In any case, that is again not inherent in OSS, but simply a matter of what so called standards are in common use and what laws are in place in the US.
What about inability to interoperate with the major providers of set-top entertainment hardware?No one except a few people can currently interoperate with set top entertainment hardware through a reliable channel (MythTV does support IR interfaces). This differs from the above examples only in that the situation is questionably legal and the FCC is right now looking into forcing compliance with their interoperability rules via Firewire and Cablecard.
Let me ask you a question. Apple refuses to license thier Fairplay DRM scheme to anyone other than themselves and a few Cell phone providers. Is it therefore fair to say that it is an inherent limitation of operating systems with blue user interfaces that they cannot play iTunes music, or is that simply a correlative factor? Would you think it useful to discuss this limitation of OS's with Blue UI's or do you think it more circumstantial that it is simply an effect of the current market and maybe it is possible that someone will convince Apple to license their DRM to a company selling an OS with a blue UI?
Sure, take a look at Linux. You can buy support for an embedded Linux project from the same company that will sell you support for several closed source embedded OS's. There are plenty of projects with commercial backers who will sell you support and service contracts including taking on legal liabilities.
Just because we as informed users are able to make use of equivalent FUNCTIONALITY it does not mean that it is an equivalent good in terms of the commercial world.No two of anything will ever be equivalent in every way. OSS tends to have restrictions attached to redistribution of the code, while it also provides a guarantee of competition in future bidding and an emergency exit strategy.
Note that I'm not saying open source is bad, or that closed source is better, merely that the two tend to be completely different when you look at all sides.Actually, open source code is simply a feature of software. There is nothing inherent in OSS that gives it any negatives compared to closed source software, although a given offering from a given company or organization may well have negatives compared to other open and closed source offerings. They are inherently different, but only in that OSS has a feature that closed source offerings do not.
Umm, no it isn't. The article talks about the difference between the amount of competition among closed source applications versus the amount of competition among open source applications. It doesn't really mention competition between open and closed source applications.
With that cleared up, I had a hard time understanding exactly what the article was supposed to be saying. It seemed like a "Rah! Rah! Linux is Cool!" piece, but without any really well defined thesis. There were statements like "Appealing to the 'Home-sumer.' Hate them or love them, Linspire has proven that OEM can be a sustainable business model for their Linspire OS, based on the Debian code base " in a section entitled "Forget Windows and OS X: Just Try Linux." The weird part of this being, it doesn't mention anything about why a person should try Linux instead of Windows or OS X, just that it is profitable for the company selling it. I'd almost think it was intended as a comment for the OEM crowd, but OEMs have no option to purchase OS X, so that doesn't make sense.
I'd say that was my major problem with this article. It didn't make sense. Sure it made a statement or two that made sense and included some facts, but as a whole it just didn't add up to anything. What was the author trying to prove and to whom?
Actually, this is not true in most of the US. Try building a structure on your own property and then spray painting a nude image on it. A whole lot of places have laws forbidding you from that type of expression. Technically, it isn't even legal for me to paint "Bush Sucks" on the front of my house because I happen to live in a "historic" district of town.
Don't you think this comment is a little weird in an article about Apple offering a higher quality audio than they have in the past? The truth of the matter is, increased audio quality is not all that important. The vast majority of people listen to low quality headphones and car speakers with road noise overlaid. They listen to mediocre quality speakers, indifferently placed in their homes, which also have background noise going on. For most people in these conditions, they won't even be able to tell they are listening to a higher bitrate rip.
Or is it just that the jump to HDTV from non-HDTV video is so great that it's an easy sell?Aside from the sales guys at bestbuy, I think you'll find that the adoption rate for HDTV has been lower than even the most pessimistic sales estimates. At least most people can see the quality difference there, but it is not like people absolutely have to have higher definition TV. A few high end, early adopters want higher quality everything, but that is not the general trend.
Well, my post clearly is offtopic with the comment about the editing, but it also has information about the topic in question, so a lot of moderators may have held off giving it an offtopic rating simply because some of it was on topic. I'm not sure what about my post could be considered insightful, but different people have different opinions about that. If I came across a post like my own when moderating, I'd probably leave it be, but I can understand an offtopic or and informative or both. (Mind you, both your post and this one are clearly only discussing moderation and are offtopic.)
Maybe you're barking up the wrong tree completely. Do you actually think Comcast is using Exchange to supply mail service to all their customers? I'm one of those customers and I know they instructed me to use POP/IMAP for the protocols. I can't even imagine trying to scale an Exchange server up to that number of users. Maybe it is possible, but it seems highly unlikely.
I strongly suspect Comcast is migrating from Sendmail or some other common e-mail server that is built to scale well. I don't know where the idea that they are moving from Exchange come from though.
I'm not so sure about this. The last I looked at the numbers, Exchange had about 40% of the total e-mail server market, and only a tiny fraction of the commercial e-mail service to end user market; seeing as Exchange's stronghold has been within medium and large business operations. Maybe the original was more correct than your version.
Actually I was responding to the comparison about the Nazis in the original article. The article author beat me to an instantiation of Godwin's law.
...if they are willing to loose the DRM, he'd be willing to...loose? I don't normally point out spelling or grammar errors in comments, but come on, this is the article summary. Isn't an editor supposed to at least read these?
As for the rest of this, is this supposed to be something new? He already made statements that said he'd offer all comers the same deal as EMI. I'm pretty sure the price was implied to be part of that deal.
This article is complete and utter rubbish. It makes random claims with no support. For example, "How would life without Microsoft be different? It wouldn't be in any meaningful way for those in charge of network security; there would just be a different vendor peddling the dominant operating system. " makes the assertion that it would not be any different and makes the implicit statement that there would be a single dominant operating system, all completely without any support for either of those statements. First, why would there be a single dominant OS and second, why, if that OS was Linux, would the same problems that occur with MS's monopoly not be completely undermined by Linux's licensing?
Networks in a world in which Apple had won the operating systems wars would still be insecure.Sure it would, but that's again assuming someone had to "win" and establish a monopoly. No evidence that this is the case has been provided. I know it is hard to imagine a world with multiple OS's and vendors that interoperate via these crazy things called "standards" but that is how most markets operate. Yeah if someone else had an abusive monopoly we'd still have a broken market, that's why we want to restore the market to a non-monopolized state.
If you put computers on a network and open that network to the outside world via the Internet, you're going to have security problems, regardless of whether you're running Windows, Mac OS, Linux or an operating system you created in your spare time.Except right now if you do that with Linux or MacOS you have a whole lot fewer problems, to the point where it takes no significant time.
User errors have long been the bane of security.No they're not. Most malware infections by number are still the result of automated attacks with no user interaction. Such malware is harder to write, but it spreads faster and further than other malware. As for user error, sure it will always be an issue, that is no reason to ignore other aspects of security or to implement ways of mitigating user error. You seem to think (like MS) that the user element should be isolated from the security mechanisms. You cannot ignore the user when planning security and the examples you point out are where that is exactly what failed. If the Nazis had planned realistically for what their users would do, they would have built a system that verified which keys were used and that they were unique.
So, what needs to be done? You must require users to attend formal information security training and awareness programs.Sure if you want to spend the money, go for it. It won't help very much though. Until the security of OS's is up to snuff and simple enough, the training will be mostly ineffective. What is a user supposed to do if they have a binary and aren't sure if it is safe? Windows has basically no mechanism for determining the trust level or for running it in a sandbox if it is not trusted enough. Until it does and it is brought to the user in a functional way, education will help very little. The OS actually has to have an easy way to let the user do what they want, or they will take risks out of laziness.
Education is the last step, but first we need to fix the OS and fix the market to motivate the fixing of the OS's. Right now you need the equivalent of a 4 year degree to have a good chance of safely running a Windows box and accomplishing all the tasks you want to. That is simply not good enough. It needs to be down to a couple hours or training before we will see a widespread difference.
No one, but capitalizing upon the greed inherent in human nature has resulted in better products and more innovation than relying upon altruism. See capitalism versus extreme socialism.
The whole corporate structure would change for the better. They wouldn't be able to claim whatever an employee made as theirs exclusively. Who cares how secretive they get?Before copyrights and patents it was perfectly normal for important advances to be lost because the only person or group who understood them was wiped out and they never openly published their knowledge. Picture this. You're looking to make your fortune and you invent a new surgical technique that is revolutionary and can save lives. Currently you can profit by publishing a book about it or by patenting it, both of which will pretty much insure that it will be known to future generation. Without those artificial restrictions, however, you can still make money by keeping it secret and charging large sums to make use of it for the very wealthy. Maybe you never tell anyone, or maybe you train a few people with an instruction manual you're written, but which you keep hidden in your office. Then, your hospital burns down and you and the instructions are incinerated. Humanity has just taken a step backwards.
That is how copyright promotes useful arts and sciences. The problem currently is that it has been extended in ways that quite obviously do not promote useful arts and sciences. Once an author is dead, nothing will incite them to create more works. If a work is not for sale, stopping it from being distributed hurts the arts and sciences, not helps.
Many people come up with the same ideas, so being secretive won't matter.Many people don't come up with a great play, or the concepts of astro-physics.
Copyright simply screws everybody who didn't think of it first.But without it, many people would not be able to make money from a given endeavor, so they would not do it, and progress would slow.
And it has set us back probably over a hundred years, if not much more.Current copyright (and patent which you seem to be referring to here) laws are certainly setting us back in terms of progress, but before that they helped us move forward more rapidly. Abolishing the current copyright laws would, in my opinion, be an improvement. Reforming them, however, would be better yet.
I'd argue that the 1909 act was not unreasonable, for the types of works and the delivery mechanism used at the time. At the same time, I'd argue that it is still absurdly long today. 56 years from today, will any of the hardware needed to run a current console game still exist? Will any copies of it still exist? Will anyone remember it ever existed? Take a look even at the more traditional book or movie industry of today. Almost all works make a profit for the first 5 years or less. Then they go out of publication and are unavailable.
I'd argue that 10-15 years is plenty of time to make money off of a work, but more importantly, I'd argue that any work not currently for sale at a reasonable market price should go out of copyright within 1 year. The whole point of copyright is to motivate the creation of great works and their distribution to the people. If a work is not available to the people I can think of no justification for granting it special protections from being copied freely.
The question the copyright lawyers of 1976-2006 have to explain is how all these extensions encouraged the promotion of arts and sciences. How does it encourage the creation of new works to grant extensions to estates and corporations?Take a look at the landmark challenge to the Bono Act. The supreme court ruled that the copyright law extensions were not promoting arts and sciences, but since what will and will not promote arts and sciences is questionable, Congress could simply be incompetent and not be violating the law. They ruled that in their opinion the laws were wrong, but that it was not the place of the court to decide specifically. So long as Congress claims their intention is to promote arts and sciences, they have a blank check.
....Apple could (and would) give a big finger to BSD...Umm, Apple already goes above and beyond what they need to with regard to the BSD license. If they wanted, they could close the source to their fork of it to avoid giving back any changes they did not want to. The only thing the BSD license is topping them from doing is removing credit to the original authors of some of the code, and they've never been shy about crediting people even peripherally related to their code improvements.
That is GAIM, version 1.5 of this project. We're talking about Pidgen, version 2.0 of the same. I don't think there is any version of Pidgen yet available. In any case, yeah it would be nice if it supported all three major desktop OS's with their native UIs.
Yeah, that is about halfway there, but KParts (the feature you're talking about) still doesn't cut it because the application developer specifically has to know about and include the feature (spell checking for example) before it becomes accessible to the user.
For example, KDE and OS X both ship with a spellchecking service. In KDE developers can opt to include it in their apps. With OS X, unless the develop uses some funky non-standard API for text, it simply works. Now I have a Kubuntu desktop and an OS X desktop in front of me right now and spellchecking works fine in the included IM clients (Kopete and iChat). What about grammar checking? Neither ships with a built in grammar checker that works with the IM client. With OS X, I just downloaded a third party one and it applies to ichat. With Kopete I have to copy and paste between it and an app that does support that feature. What about other features? With OS X, services can also be offered by other programs. For example, I have a program that has the ability to calculate checksums, and it offers that ability to everything else, so if I wanted (for some reason) to calculate the checksum of some text sent via IM, I could. So maybe you don't care about checksums, or grammar checking. Is there any functions you do care about? Who knows better which functions you will use, you or the application developer? I have some language services to translate between English and German, which is useful for looking at some German Websites, and chatting with German clients. I have a service that automatically takes a URL or book info and formats it into a bibliography reference. I have a service that just looks at text and provides a character/word/paragraph count. The people who coded my chat client would probably never have considered that I would want those functions and even if they knew they existed would not take the time to add them into an IM client or my text editor, or my browser.
The ability for applications and services to easily share functionality with no knowledge or work on the part of the application developer whose application will be using the the functionality is, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked features of OS X and one reason I would have a hard time using Linux or Windows as my primary workstation these days.
Implementing spell checking as a standard library, ala KParts is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough anymore.
GTKSpell works on Windows? They probably wasted a small amount of time integrating these, but you're right, probably not a whole lot because of reuse of other, open code.
Why do you assume multi-platform programs would use the same UI? Does AOL instant messenger on Mac and Windows use the same UI?
Well, if you are talking about encapsulating with any program, it means that your gripe is not with the pidgin devs.Yes it is. It is functionality that should be built in to the chat client. I don't want to have to go hunting for a plug-in or run my own proxy server. I want to double click on the icon and and have it just plain work out of the box. I want it to be used by default by all users of the client where it is supported on both ends, so that I don't have to talk people through setting it up on their end when I'm chatting with co-workers about work. Encryption should be the default for IM and it does not and should not matter which protocol you are using.
This is an incorrect assumption in several ways. First Yahoo has 28% of Web searching, not 38%. The 38% number was for Yahoo and MS's combined share. The other way it is incorrect is the assumption that all Yahoo or Google or MS does is search, which is of course not true. The value of $50B was for the company, not for their Web search service.
Yeah, along with other programs. That's not really relevant though for those of us working on multiple OS's. Lack of OS X support means 90% of the time, I would not even consider using this.
Encryption is not something that should be built in for multi protocol IM.Why would you think that? I'd rather have one encryption system and set of keys, which I can encapsulate within any program, than one encryption system and set of keys for each protocol. Is it so hard to integrate something like Off The Record which provides encryption for a variety of IM protocols and clients?
Spellcheck is not built in. What is built in is the support for aspell, a multiplatform oss app. So nobody neglected the "important" things for it.Well, I imagine it took a small amount of work to make that happen, but the point is taken. I mostly mention this because the current design of Windows and Linux has fallen so far behind in this regard and I hope by being a little vocal about it I can make more users and developers aware of what we are all missing on those OS's. But that is truly a gripe with Linux and Windows, not with the Pidgin project.
I think what you're missing is "usr/bin/open." It has a man page.
I've always rather liked GAIM and it has been a while since there have been real improvements, so I thought I'd take a look and see how far they've managed to come.
I liked
I disliked:
One thing that annoys me is they took the time to add spell checking for both OS's. I love having spell checking in my IM client, but it is not a function that every single program should have to supply by itself. I'm already running a spell checker in my text editor and my layout application and my e-mail client, and pretty much everything else. This is one of several functions that should be provided at the OS level to all applications that want it, not by each application individually. Will they waste time adding grammar checking next? How about translations between languages? What about dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia lookups?
Calling all Windows and Linux developers. It is time to catch up and make universal services a built in function of the OS so developers stop wasting time re-implementing things and concentrate on features specific to their program, like encryption and VoIP support.
Forget HR. Send an e-mail to someone in the legal department asking them to advise you, in their official capacity, that it is not your legal responsibility to keep track of the licensing for those software items and that if the company is turned into the BSA, that it is the responsibility of your boss that the company lost all that money, not your own responsibility. Make sure to outline the financial and legal liability this poses including the fact that the license you signed for the other copies gives them a right to perform an audit and an estimate of how much the company will have to pay if the copyright violation is discovered.
Make sure you use e-mail not the phone, as lawyers know very well the difference between a phone conversation that is not backed up by default and an e-mail record which may come back to haunt them. That should cover your own ass, since it is a civil issue and you are an agent of the company. The chances are the legal department will also take care of the issue for you.
"Bad" is a subjective term. You can interpret greed as good or bad as you like, but don't attribute your perspective to me.
You say greed, a negative word, but really they are being selfish, which is good.See my previous comment, replacing "greed" with "selfishness." Do you know what a negativity index is with regard to sociology? It is an interesting concept. Basically you map a number to a given term to measure how negatively people view that term. Looking at the negativity ratings for various synonyms within a culture can provide some interesting revelations about it.
If everyone really did do what was best for them at all times (morally and ethically mind you) the world we be a great place.Morals are subjective by nature. Some people find greed or selfishness or stealing or torture to be good and some to be evil and other place no inherent value on those concepts. Ethics, on the other hand are objective, but do not place value on anything. They only are rules for assigning responsibility. They leave the interpretation of what that responsibility means to the the individual or group doing the evaluation. Perhaps you mean that if everyone did what was best for them, but following your moral beliefs, then the world would be a great place according to your perspective.
I totally agree, we cannot rely on others personal set of ethics and morals to be in line with ours. That is governments job should be, to protect people from infringing on others peoples liberty. We will never be able to rely on a person doing the right thing just because we trust in our fellow man... we cant trust everyone, nor should you.From this I imagine that you have a pretty good handle on the topics as I just presented them. I just thought it was important to make the clarification between idealism and practical application of rules and laws.