It is using a P2P system, kontiki.com appears to have details (those are the providers). From the pretty brief overview they give, it looks similar to BitTorrent.
The 'problem' is that the iTunes Music Store only supports iTunes, which only (officially) supports the iPod (though unoffically it's possible to use it with a number of devices using 3rd party plug-ins), NOT that the iPod is somehow 'locked in' to the iTMS, which it isn't.
It's locked in to iTMS as far as DRMed music stores go. eMusic is great, and the way forward, but a lot of major labels just won't contribute material to non-DRMed stores. The article is talking about popular, chart music. In this respect, you are locked in to iTMS, because you are locked into Apple's proprietary DRM technology.
Of course, personally I'd prefer if there was no DRM at all, but if you want to deal with companies who will not release their content without DRM, you're locked into iTMS (unless you particularly feel like transcoding DRMed Windows Media content).
This is the lock-in issue. It's a valid issue. DRM in general is a bigger issue, but in this case its presence, and the unwillingness of major labels to release content without it, absolutely locks one who wishes to get their content to iTMS.
Take a look at their technology provider's page — it looks like a similar system to BitTorrent, but with a specific content (and DRM) system built on top, as opposed to just being a networking system. It's certainly P2P, from what they describe.
I'm interested about this — the guy in the article said he was hoping the DRM was only for the duration of the trial, and in the iMP help, you find:
(This trial unfortunately does not support Apple Macs dues to the Digital Rights Management being Windows based)
Now, that either means that they're going to be using other DRM when the full system is released, or none at all. I'd really like to hope the latter (the likelihood is probably away from that though).
Open Source is the big revolution, and what is working wonders in the technology world today - not Google. Google is a company, and right now Google knows exactly how to serve and please its customers.
At this point the economists in the crowd step in to claim this as a victory for the Free Market, rather than Google or Open Source. And they'd be just about as justified in claiming it.
What powers Google? A bunch of Linux boxes clustered together. Point proven.
And who's proving the worth of Linux in a real-world situation, contributing to its popularity and development? Google. Counterpoint proven.
I think it's useless to try and compare one with the other. They're both helping. Let's not try to shove in our personal political preferences into these things.
You're missing the point of the original post, which is that the product is based on OpenOffice.Org, which is released (I believe) under the GPL.
Ah, I had missed that. Isn't StarOffice a different licence model? I'm not convinced that it's the point of the post I replied to, but it is a good point.
It took me a long time to appreciate why this was necessary, but with this latest announcement, I think it is.
I'm not convinced it is, but to stay in keeping with the original "gist" of the GPL it could be. Many authors may not mind derivatives of their systems being used as web services, and it's hardly the place of the GPL to stop them. Bad argument though, I know. The problem with the new GPL is that it's in serious danger of going too far — obviously people will still be able to use v2, but the FSF is going to have a hell of a time convincing people these changes are necessary (particularly when they're clearly only necessary in certain situations). I have a bad feeling that there'll be a significant amount of time between when the GPL3 comes out, and when people fully understand the ramifications of such new clauses.
Web services are a strange point. Actually, the concept of "derivative works" of software is impossibly fuzzy as it is (even the GPL, which tries to make this explicit, has had numerous different interpretations thrown around with roughly equal clout). I try to stay out of this debate though — since I'm not an OSS zealot of any kind (I use and very occasionally write OSS software, but it's not a political thing for me) I don't expect to understand all the ins and outs of this.
If the data is accessible in a standard format (it seems likely that this will save into OpenDocument, and GMail can be accessed through POP3), the underlying database is unimportant. I can see the problem with GMail, since its labels don't map onto a currently-standard protocol, though.
As for releasing source, Google's business model is based upon advertising, so it's not in their interest to release the source that would allow people to quickly create identical competitors. They spent the time and money on the development, it's theirs to apply their business model to. This does not make them evil. Not by a long way. They're conducting their business and systems in such a way that people can obtain their services for free, and that they can make a profit.
They have not acted in a way remotely resembling "evil" in this matter. They're not sucking your freedom — your data is accessible through open protocols. They're not sucking your privacy — your data is analysed by a computer system to provide targetted advertising. As much as spam filters are "stealing my privacy", I'm not convinced it's a serious issue.
Shortcuts can be used by client apps (MediaWiki is another one which has the ability to use keyboard shortcuts), but a big problem is that they can't really interfere with the shortcuts in the browser, and making sure they don't interfere with any shortcuts in any supported browser is non-trivial.
Having used both (although I have to say that the Debian one wasn't "officially" released when I last used it), I thought you could select "Advanced" in the Ubuntu install and get the same amount of control (insofar as Ubuntu's different choice of core packages would allow, anyway)?
It sounds just as bad an idea as compiling any kind of structured text into code. Except obviously C, because that doesn't count. Or Java. Or, in fact, any other programming language.
Actually, it's cool if you want an unstructured programming language. Go write an OS in binary. You seem capable. It'll be great.:)
You actually said "simple and efficient" and "XML" in the same sentence.
I'm led to believe that most of the time, it's compiled XML, it is compiled into code and hence reasonably efficient.
Microsoft is evil and Apple's Quartz is tons better.
Talking in broad terms about an organisation which is clearly not wholly evil, and comparing technologies when you haven't used one of them is a really good way to ruin your credibility.
Thank you. Since you have too I guess you know it's really easy when the design is made ground-up for this, and really hard to impose on an existing system.:)
Why would I want to go back to the bad old days of having to check separately for updates for every single software application I have, when I can do them all with SUSE/RH's online update service? This is just stupid.
I think the idea was that even if you have to, it can be done automatically with this software suite. The difference between SSH and other packages, clearly, is that it's specifically for security, so probably needs to (or at least should) be updated more frequently. The idea here being that over multiple platforms one can assure, with their system, that all of the systems on all of the platforms have the same, up-to-date version of the SSH system. As you point out (and as I mentioned in my post) package managers typically take on this role in Linux distributions, but there's more to the world than that, unfortunately.
To be clear though, I was just trying to clarify their argument, not advocate it.
Well, yes, you seem to be largely agreeing with me. I mentioned C#/Java simply because they are more suitable languages for the job than C, and yet it seems strange to most people to switch to them. From this it can be seen that switching to C probably isn't the wisest of moves.
Use of a period instead of a question mark.
That is a sentence fragment.
Poster was writing informally as one who is listing items. Correct usage, despite not being formal — but then again, this is not a dissertation.
Use of the aging term "Micro$oft."
Use of the aging term "Micro$oft". (Note location of period.)
Poster's original positioning of the full stop is correct in formal American English. Reference is available here. I'm not American, I've just come across this often enough to wonder what the deal with that is.
And a poorly constructed sentence that uses "it's" instead of "its."
That's another sentence fragment, and you misplaced the period a second time.
Both assertions are still wrong for the reasons listed above.
Linux works fine on those specification. Using something heavy like KDE is not to be recommended though. I have GNOME running very responsively on a 600/128Mb, and it's not like they couldn't use something more suitable for older machines like XFCE.
Slashdot Mirror
It is using a P2P system, kontiki.com appears to have details (those are the providers). From the pretty brief overview they give, it looks similar to BitTorrent.
It's locked in to iTMS as far as DRMed music stores go. eMusic is great, and the way forward, but a lot of major labels just won't contribute material to non-DRMed stores. The article is talking about popular, chart music. In this respect, you are locked in to iTMS, because you are locked into Apple's proprietary DRM technology.
Of course, personally I'd prefer if there was no DRM at all, but if you want to deal with companies who will not release their content without DRM, you're locked into iTMS (unless you particularly feel like transcoding DRMed Windows Media content).
This is the lock-in issue. It's a valid issue. DRM in general is a bigger issue, but in this case its presence, and the unwillingness of major labels to release content without it, absolutely locks one who wishes to get their content to iTMS.
Take a look at their technology provider's page — it looks like a similar system to BitTorrent, but with a specific content (and DRM) system built on top, as opposed to just being a networking system. It's certainly P2P, from what they describe.
I'm interested about this — the guy in the article said he was hoping the DRM was only for the duration of the trial, and in the iMP help, you find:
Now, that either means that they're going to be using other DRM when the full system is released, or none at all. I'd really like to hope the latter (the likelihood is probably away from that though).
Great. Now I need to find somewhere that sells Daffy Duck DVDs at half six. Thanks a lot.
Recursive argument. Counter(counter)*point proven. And my original point that it was a silly thing to argue about, by association. Hurrah!
I just realised I admitted I was wrong (in my sibling post to this one) on Slashdot. I realise this is an unforgivable faux pas, and I am sorry. :)
At this point the economists in the crowd step in to claim this as a victory for the Free Market, rather than Google or Open Source. And they'd be just about as justified in claiming it.
And who's proving the worth of Linux in a real-world situation, contributing to its popularity and development? Google. Counterpoint proven.
I think it's useless to try and compare one with the other. They're both helping. Let's not try to shove in our personal political preferences into these things.
Ah, I had missed that. Isn't StarOffice a different licence model? I'm not convinced that it's the point of the post I replied to, but it is a good point.
I'm not convinced it is, but to stay in keeping with the original "gist" of the GPL it could be. Many authors may not mind derivatives of their systems being used as web services, and it's hardly the place of the GPL to stop them. Bad argument though, I know. The problem with the new GPL is that it's in serious danger of going too far — obviously people will still be able to use v2, but the FSF is going to have a hell of a time convincing people these changes are necessary (particularly when they're clearly only necessary in certain situations). I have a bad feeling that there'll be a significant amount of time between when the GPL3 comes out, and when people fully understand the ramifications of such new clauses.
Web services are a strange point. Actually, the concept of "derivative works" of software is impossibly fuzzy as it is (even the GPL, which tries to make this explicit, has had numerous different interpretations thrown around with roughly equal clout). I try to stay out of this debate though — since I'm not an OSS zealot of any kind (I use and very occasionally write OSS software, but it's not a political thing for me) I don't expect to understand all the ins and outs of this.
If the data is accessible in a standard format (it seems likely that this will save into OpenDocument, and GMail can be accessed through POP3), the underlying database is unimportant. I can see the problem with GMail, since its labels don't map onto a currently-standard protocol, though.
As for releasing source, Google's business model is based upon advertising, so it's not in their interest to release the source that would allow people to quickly create identical competitors. They spent the time and money on the development, it's theirs to apply their business model to. This does not make them evil. Not by a long way. They're conducting their business and systems in such a way that people can obtain their services for free, and that they can make a profit.
They have not acted in a way remotely resembling "evil" in this matter. They're not sucking your freedom — your data is accessible through open protocols. They're not sucking your privacy — your data is analysed by a computer system to provide targetted advertising. As much as spam filters are "stealing my privacy", I'm not convinced it's a serious issue.
Shortcuts can be used by client apps (MediaWiki is another one which has the ability to use keyboard shortcuts), but a big problem is that they can't really interfere with the shortcuts in the browser, and making sure they don't interfere with any shortcuts in any supported browser is non-trivial.
Having used both (although I have to say that the Debian one wasn't "officially" released when I last used it), I thought you could select "Advanced" in the Ubuntu install and get the same amount of control (insofar as Ubuntu's different choice of core packages would allow, anyway)?
That's fair enough.
I must have forgotten that only experts were allowed to use computers, and making them accessible to people was a mistake. Sorry.
I think they did add heap protection at the same time, although I hear it's been "broken" (although in practical terms I've no idea).
Unfortunately, this is a perspective that MS can't really afford to have, although they probably want to.
It sounds just as bad an idea as compiling any kind of structured text into code. Except obviously C, because that doesn't count. Or Java. Or, in fact, any other programming language.
Actually, it's cool if you want an unstructured programming language. Go write an OS in binary. You seem capable. It'll be great. :)
I'm led to believe that most of the time, it's compiled XML, it is compiled into code and hence reasonably efficient.
Talking in broad terms about an organisation which is clearly not wholly evil, and comparing technologies when you haven't used one of them is a really good way to ruin your credibility.
Thank you. Since you have too I guess you know it's really easy when the design is made ground-up for this, and really hard to impose on an existing system. :)
I think the idea was that even if you have to, it can be done automatically with this software suite. The difference between SSH and other packages, clearly, is that it's specifically for security, so probably needs to (or at least should) be updated more frequently. The idea here being that over multiple platforms one can assure, with their system, that all of the systems on all of the platforms have the same, up-to-date version of the SSH system. As you point out (and as I mentioned in my post) package managers typically take on this role in Linux distributions, but there's more to the world than that, unfortunately.
To be clear though, I was just trying to clarify their argument, not advocate it.
Well, yes, you seem to be largely agreeing with me. I mentioned C#/Java simply because they are more suitable languages for the job than C, and yet it seems strange to most people to switch to them. From this it can be seen that switching to C probably isn't the wisest of moves.
Poster was writing informally as one who is listing items. Correct usage, despite not being formal — but then again, this is not a dissertation.
Poster's original positioning of the full stop is correct in formal American English. Reference is available here. I'm not American, I've just come across this often enough to wonder what the deal with that is.
Both assertions are still wrong for the reasons listed above.
I have a feeling that one of those anti-scratch coating kits you get would be more effective in this particular case.
Linux works fine on those specification. Using something heavy like KDE is not to be recommended though. I have GNOME running very responsively on a 600/128Mb, and it's not like they couldn't use something more suitable for older machines like XFCE.