Now please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying I think Truecrypt is untrustworthy. Far from it, I use and trust it. I am just saying that there is the false warm fuzzy myth about OSS that tends to get thrown around on/. a lot. That the code is open doesn't mean anything because 99.999+% of people can't "easily look at the source" since it won't be meaningful to them. A source audit is only useful if the person doing it is an expert and does a thorough job.
The whole point is that with open source the people who can understand the complexity can audit the code (and with crypto 99.999% is probable several orders of magnitude too low). The key factor the differentiates this from closed source is that the people doing the audit have no stake in the success of software. As a mater of fact they generally have a stake in finding a flaw since doing so would improve their reputation and likely get them some notoriety.
Well, while that certainly can, and does, happen with OSS, it can happen with closed software as well.
So your claim is that an audit by people who have a financial stake in the software is as good as an audit by disinterested parties. I would say that goes against human nature
Being open doesn't make it inherantly secure, and doesn't mean a normal person can tell.
Again, the idea isn't that everyone should be able to check the software but that disinterested qualified parties can.
For that matter, to really check crypto software you don't just need a code audit, it is even more important to do a results audit. Basically you take data, you encrypt it, and then you look at the result and see if it is good. You treat the software like a black box because the question isn't "Is it producing the correct result based on the code," the question is "Is it producing the correct result based on the cryptosystem." If I wanted to audit Truecrypt I wouldn't so much be interested in how it did things internally. Heck, even if I was an expert it might easily have a bug I'd miss (since after all other experts had written it and missed said bug). What I'd be interested in is having it do encryption, then comparing the result against controls. Maybe another AES implementation I knew to be good, maybe one I wrote, maybe a bit of a test worked out by pen and paper, maybe just trying to do cryptographic attacks against the ciphertext.
While I agree with this, this type of audit is orders of magnitude easier and more thorough with access to the source.
Regardless of the method, what I'd want to do is verify operation, not design. I imagine that's what they did in this case. Drive claims "this is AES encryption" so they do a little compare and contrast and, what do you know, it isn't.
But if they had the source it would have only taken a fairly quick glance at it to find they were lying idiots, as opposed to significant time and testing it likely took in this case.
Actually the original purpose was to reward and protect technological innovators.
In the US at least your wrong and the GP is correct. Go read the Constitution. It doesn't say or imply anywhere about "reward and protect technological innovators".
It sounds like maybe the banks got themselves into this mess and perhaps deserve what is coming to them.
You would have to be an idiot not to see this idea as the most obvious thing to anyone with even half a wit. This idea was inevitable and the idiot that got the patent didn't "invent" anything. It was simply an idea waiting for the cost of the technology and the legal system to catch up with it. That this patent was upheld pretty proves the USPTO is run by morons who would think tying your shoe with a double knot is original enough to be patentable. Digitally scanning documents and using the scans as legal instruments, yeah that took a genius to think up. The banks didn't steal this guy's idea they just took the obvious next step probably oblivious that anyone even talked to the shyster with the patent. I come up with 100's of more original ideas every month in my daily work.
but that doesn't give you the right to go around glamorizing, or even normalizing, overtly sexual behavior in places you could reasonably expect to find a preschooler.
Yeah, because we all know that any kind of sexual behavior is abnormal and only perverted sickos think otherwise. Now hurry up so I can get home and watch my Rambo V rental video.
Why is it sex is sick and perverted while glamorization of mayhem and violence is accepted as good and normal. A video game company makes a game in which the objective is murder and mayhem of every form but when it comes out that is has a hidden scene depicting consensual sex it becomes a major scandal. A nipple slipping out during halftime of a game dedicated to violently slamming people to the ground turns into a national crisis. I just don't get it.
With what proof? An IP address? The RIAA lawsuit carpet-bombing are civil issues and simply don't have to hassle with the burden of proof a criminal case would have.
Hell, they don't even have to hassle with the burden of proof of a typical civil case. Proof of actual damages is a critical element of any civil case except copyright. They've had the law changed so they don't have to present any evidence of actual damages. Make one song "available" and you're automatically liable for tens of thousands in damages whether or not anyone downloaded the song at all. Anyone who sues the record companies has to show actual monetary damages (and legal fees don't count as damages) to have a case. If someone sues the record companies back, the record companies just drop the original case thus mitigating or eliminating any damages suffered by the people who fight back thus undermining their case.
But you can see by that post why Microsoft still has nothing to fear from Linux...even "user-friendly" Ubuntu. "get the latest beta driver"?? "install by hand in text mode"?? "start sshd and do it remotely"?
You realize the irony in that your claiming Microsoft's primacy because the Microsoft OS that was sold to him on the computer doesn't work and installing an older version of Microsoft's OS is "fraught with troubles" while Linux sucks because he would have to resort to typing a few commands in the evil command line to get Ubuntu to work. Why does this Microsoft fanboy crap consistently get modded up. The command line isn't evil and you don't go to hell for using it despite what people like you try to imply. Oh, and it's not that difficult for someone of average intelligence to use with a little help. Try talking someone through something gui based over the phone. I'll take telling them to open a shell and type what I tell them every time. But gee, I don't even have to do that. I can usually just set it up so I can ssh in and do it myself. It's amazing how having options makes life easier than living by Bill Gate's rules.
You might as well ask the typical user to perform brain surgery on himself.
Yeah but with Windows they have to perform brain surgery on themselves with a butter knife. At least Linux supplies you the proper tools and the option for a doctor to do it robotically from a remote location.
If the universe is to make sense at all (not Alice in Wonderland) then it works according to symmetries of logic and reason, hence mathematical in structure.
That doesn't mean it has to work "according to symmetries of logic and reason" that we humans can comprehend. Any technology sufficiently advance appears to be magic to the uninitiated. I think things like string theory appears like magic even to the initiated.
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued. That's just about the craziest reasoning I've seen on slashdot.
So by your definition something is innovative only if it is 100% completely in all aspects new and no part of it has ever been tried before. In the world I live in innovation often, I dare say most often, involves small changes made over a period time by a number of people. The patent system would work in your world's type of innovation but in my world it means everyone one of people who make each of those little changes files a patent and suddenly innovation becomes financially impossible because you have to pay some of your money to each and every person who patented their little change.
And, there is no system of patents that guarantees payment in perpetuity. Once you consider the fact that it takes years to get through the patent office, in many fields the lifetime of a patent is relatively short in business terms.
Are you kidding. In the tech world 17 years is more than forever. Think about the state of word possessors in 1991 or hardware. You're talking about a 1000's of incremental changes since then. If someone had patented each one of those changes we still be using that old split screen word perfect crap.
Thus you have rendered all "reasonable" people unable to take anything you say seriously.
Why? You feel that just because someone makes a song they should be rendered rich for the rest of their lives? How much does cost to record a song now? Surely less than $1000. How long does it take? Distribution cost is $0. Sell 10,000 copies and you make $4000 net. I think that's a pretty reasonable profit for one song. I think most reasonable people would agree with that. Add to that, most musicians who contract with a record company don't make that much for their music distributed under the current system and it's even more reasonable. There's thousands more that don't ever come close to that.
We just moved from Backup Exec 9.1 to Backup Exec 11d (We had starting using when it was Veritas), mainly for tape encryption capabilities. Of course, it is working fairly well, unless I do something crazy Like try to encrypt our backups to tape. I sat on hold for 45 minutes yesterday, and gave up.. They just bought Altiris, which is who we were looking at to switch to from Ghost. GRRR.. They just buy companies, and then raise prices..
You know, with the price of disk space what it is today I find it hard to come up with any reason to use tapes for backup anymore. 2 backup servers, one offsite over VPN or ssh, with encrypted RAID hard drives on LVM, rsync with hardlinks and compressed dump for archiving is much cheaper and more reliably than tapes especially with offsite storage. This can even allow automated background backup of laptops when they're connected. What am I missing? What do tapes add that would justify the added expense and pain?
You're assuming that there are paying customers. Given the number of people who seem to think they're entitled to free music, I'd expect to see much longer lines at the backdoor than the ticket office.
I don't think anyone thinks they're "entitled" to free music. I think people would gladly pay the creator of said music a reasonable amount, say a nickel a song, for the music if it was made easily attainable and useful (no DRM). What the RIAA members want is for people to pay a huge amount the majority of which goes to a bunch of leaches and bums who in no way, shape or form contribute anything to the music while enslaving and controlling anyone who has the audacity to step into the realm that they have ruled with an iron fist for the last 80 years. You see the difference there.
I don't get your point. That they were hypocrites does nothing to change the facts of the societal norms at that time. Slaughter, rape, pillage and plunder were a normal part of their society 1000 years ago (even if against the declared rules of some part of the Christian religious cult). Thankfully it's largely frowned upon in ours.
having a lock on my door is stupid because somebody can just kick in a window
Your missing his point completely. He's not saying don't put a lock on your door. He saying spending $100,000 on a titanium door with 12 1" think locking pins and three biometric + keycode unlocking mechanism is stupid because they can just kick in the window.
And I doubt this guy will have a job much longer if he's going around claiming that 100% security isn't the goal and that he only tries to keep out the 11 year old script kiddies
You missed his whole point. He didn't say anything about 100% security. He said spending exorbitant amounts getting a single aspect of your security working perfectly is a bad idea. For example spending $1,000,000 getting a patch system set up that is 100% effective in keeping every one of your computers up to the minute on patches isn't cost effective. The expense curve goes up exponentially as any given process approaches 100% effectiveness. Think in terms of uptime. You could spend $100,000 on a patch system that is 90% effective and spend the other $900,000 on other aspects of security. This results in a much more effective overall security level for likely a much cheaper cost. Oh, and 100% security is impossible unless you lock your computers in an electromagnetically isolated vault in Ft. Knox with a random vault key that no one knows. Any security experts who doesn't know this should be out of a job. Hmmm... even then someone would probably talk there way past the security somehow.
Yeah, save the NINE "official" crusades (aka wars) and the ten or so un-numbered ones. Most of which were to stamp out other religious groups.
It's rather disingenuous to compare actions that were the social norm in one period of time to similar actions taken in a time when they are way outside the societal norm. 1000 years ago slaughter, rape, pillage and plunder were like cheering for your favorite ball team is today.
Let's talk about what's going on in the modern world. And in the modern world it's indisputable that Muslim extremism is claiming more lives/doing more damage then Christian extremism. This problem isn't going away until the moderates step up and silence the extremists. We can do our part to help them out (being less one-sided with our foreign policy would be a good start) but at the end of the day it's THEIR job to clean up their house, not ours.
You should also point out that much of what was done in the name of Christ 1000 years ago was the social norm in those times. The social norm for violence, rape and pillaging is somewhat different in these times so applying a social norm from 1000 years ago to today doesn't quite work (I just know some idiot is going to try top bring Iraq up as a counterpoint).
Patent granters should pay for damage done by granting frivolous patents.
No. The person being granted the monopoly should be responsible for it's validity. Why the hell should I have to pay for determining if someone elses patent is valid? The one who stands to benefit should be held responsible for any and all damages of any kind caused by an invalid patent plus punitive fines the amount of which is determined by how egregious the patent idiocy is. This would stop patent trolls and idiotically obvious patents overnight without causing any harm to existing or future valid patents. Patent fights would be much more amicable since both sides stand to lose significant amounts.
Then they challenge OO to do the same with.doc, and we all know how well that works. How long till people see the folly of relying on anything with open in the name and go back to MS "cause it works".
Yeah, I know, because no one's ever had a Microsoft Office document that wasn't compatible with their current version of MS Office. Strangely on a number of occasions I've resorted to OO to fix those kind of problems.
"[Mandating open standards in government] is a new way to compete. They are using government intervention as a way to compete. It's competing through regulation, because you couldn't compete technically."
Reminds me of this:
Software salesman to purchasing droid: "You don't want to get locked into open standards."
Interesting - Googling "kosher nostra" gives 9,270 hits.
Ah, the wonder of the Internet, allowing me to discover just how unoriginal my "original" jokes are...
Better be careful. The CIAA (ComediansIAA) will come after you for copyright infring^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h joke theft. I can hear the (copyrighted) subpoena heading for slashdot now.
That's pretty much what turns a lot of people away as they want ONE choice, ONE easy, simple choice. Windows offers that as they already know it.
Ahhh, but this is wherein the dichotomy arises. You see, Microsoft's marketing sells you on the idea that selecting Microsoft provides this 'easy, simple choice'. But unfortunately experience tells one that Microsoft's marketing department is required to take reality altering drugs to start their work day. Microsoft products couldn't be farther from this "easy, simple choice" if that were their actual objective.
It's everywhere. No need to explore in order to open a Word Document,
Where do we start. I've been using Linux exclusively for years now and I have never had to explore to open a word document. Open Office was right there installed for free by default. You buy a Windows computer, you had better of selected the $200-$300 (even on a PC you're only paying $500 for) option of buying Microsoft Office when you bought it or you're going to being doing a lot of exploring, traveling and paying (way more than $300) for a non-OEM version of Microsoft Office. Not only that but amazingly my Linux computer comes equipped with (free) software to for reading a whole host of different document types. I'm not even going to get started on having to buy and install anti-virus, anti-spyware, backup software, etc, etc, etc just to get a reasonable safe functionable computer. Strangely this stuff is never mentioned by Microsoft marketing. We can also get into the number of people I know who have had their Windows PC crash, took it in for repairs and have been told that either it required a complete reinstall (what a nightmare, starting from scratch installing all your apps), a new hard drive or expensive hardware repairs all of which entailed loss of all data. I know, you'll say they were idiots for not taking regular backups but do you realize how difficult it is to set up reliable regular backups on Windows (strangely never metioned by their marketing department either)? In a number of these cases I booted a Linux Live CD and was able in the worse case recover their data and in most cases I installed Linux which ran fine on the severely damaged hardware where it is still running just fine and cheaply I might add. It's amazing how much time and money that "easy, simple choice" cost people that no one ever seems to mention.
make games work, etc.
This is the only reason I keep Windows installed on one of my computers. But a couple points. First, there are several games I have installed that require.Net for some aspect of the game to function. I know from Microsoft marketing and the droids they've manage to brainwash that this is the current culmination of Microsoft's "simple and easy". One game apparently requires.Net 1.1 and was working with that installed and the new one I was installing asked for the "latest version" in the error message it popped up. I installed the latest version (3.? or something) and it both broke the one that was working and new one refused to work. After some research I determined the new one required.Net 2.? so I uninstalled 3.? and installed 2.?. Keep in mind that after each of these events I have to install further stuff through the rather insistent Windows updater and reboot after each and every action. Now the old one broke but the new one worked. I have yet to figure out a way to get both working at the same time. Yes, this is the "easy, simple choice". Second, I installed Ubuntu on my mother's computer after it crashed and she was charged ~$100 to be told by the repair people (from a well known Windows support company) that they couldn't even get their diagnostics to run and it had to be an expensive hardware problem that would cost several hundred for them to even diagnose and her only choice for recovering her data was a specialized data recovery company that they could recommend for only several th
Not that I'm defending MS for it, but it's easy to expect as much when a software company expands into the services market. Both Google and Yahoo have been services companies from the beginning.
Microsoft, OTOH, started as a software company. Their business model, like that of any other software company, relies on getting people to use that software.
Just a nit pick but Microsoft's business model relies on getting people to buy their software. Through various methods, given their control of certain software markets, a significant number of people buy their products and then don't even use what they bought (or in many cases realize they paid for it).
And the key factor here, I think, is that business model is going the way of the music CD and movie DVD. The business model of software companies should be service companies these days. That's one reason most software you buy sucks so bad. It's sold to you by high pressure, lying, cheating marketing and sales people who's only goal is to make the sale and will violate any morales to achieve that goal. If keeping the customer happy was the goal your products would be much higher quality. I think (hope) people are starting to realize this shift in the market. Microsoft's goal is to sell you something and they could care less about you once they have your money. The product they sell you sucks so bad thier primary pitch for selling you the next one is to alleviate the suffering from the last piece of crap they sold you. Google's business model is based on making you happy ever day and they make products with this focus in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point is that with open source the people who can understand the complexity can audit the code (and with crypto 99.999% is probable several orders of magnitude too low). The key factor the differentiates this from closed source is that the people doing the audit have no stake in the success of software. As a mater of fact they generally have a stake in finding a flaw since doing so would improve their reputation and likely get them some notoriety.
Well, while that certainly can, and does, happen with OSS, it can happen with closed software as well.So your claim is that an audit by people who have a financial stake in the software is as good as an audit by disinterested parties. I would say that goes against human nature
Being open doesn't make it inherantly secure, and doesn't mean a normal person can tell.Again, the idea isn't that everyone should be able to check the software but that disinterested qualified parties can.
For that matter, to really check crypto software you don't just need a code audit, it is even more important to do a results audit. Basically you take data, you encrypt it, and then you look at the result and see if it is good. You treat the software like a black box because the question isn't "Is it producing the correct result based on the code," the question is "Is it producing the correct result based on the cryptosystem." If I wanted to audit Truecrypt I wouldn't so much be interested in how it did things internally. Heck, even if I was an expert it might easily have a bug I'd miss (since after all other experts had written it and missed said bug). What I'd be interested in is having it do encryption, then comparing the result against controls. Maybe another AES implementation I knew to be good, maybe one I wrote, maybe a bit of a test worked out by pen and paper, maybe just trying to do cryptographic attacks against the ciphertext.While I agree with this, this type of audit is orders of magnitude easier and more thorough with access to the source.
Regardless of the method, what I'd want to do is verify operation, not design. I imagine that's what they did in this case. Drive claims "this is AES encryption" so they do a little compare and contrast and, what do you know, it isn't.But if they had the source it would have only taken a fairly quick glance at it to find they were lying idiots, as opposed to significant time and testing it likely took in this case.
In the US at least your wrong and the GP is correct. Go read the Constitution. It doesn't say or imply anywhere about "reward and protect technological innovators".
You would have to be an idiot not to see this idea as the most obvious thing to anyone with even half a wit. This idea was inevitable and the idiot that got the patent didn't "invent" anything. It was simply an idea waiting for the cost of the technology and the legal system to catch up with it. That this patent was upheld pretty proves the USPTO is run by morons who would think tying your shoe with a double knot is original enough to be patentable. Digitally scanning documents and using the scans as legal instruments, yeah that took a genius to think up. The banks didn't steal this guy's idea they just took the obvious next step probably oblivious that anyone even talked to the shyster with the patent. I come up with 100's of more original ideas every month in my daily work.
Yes. Without Apple Microsoft's anti-trust issues would be significantly worse.
Yeah, because we all know that any kind of sexual behavior is abnormal and only perverted sickos think otherwise. Now hurry up so I can get home and watch my Rambo V rental video.
Why is it sex is sick and perverted while glamorization of mayhem and violence is accepted as good and normal. A video game company makes a game in which the objective is murder and mayhem of every form but when it comes out that is has a hidden scene depicting consensual sex it becomes a major scandal. A nipple slipping out during halftime of a game dedicated to violently slamming people to the ground turns into a national crisis. I just don't get it.
Hell, they don't even have to hassle with the burden of proof of a typical civil case. Proof of actual damages is a critical element of any civil case except copyright. They've had the law changed so they don't have to present any evidence of actual damages. Make one song "available" and you're automatically liable for tens of thousands in damages whether or not anyone downloaded the song at all. Anyone who sues the record companies has to show actual monetary damages (and legal fees don't count as damages) to have a case. If someone sues the record companies back, the record companies just drop the original case thus mitigating or eliminating any damages suffered by the people who fight back thus undermining their case.
You realize the irony in that your claiming Microsoft's primacy because the Microsoft OS that was sold to him on the computer doesn't work and installing an older version of Microsoft's OS is "fraught with troubles" while Linux sucks because he would have to resort to typing a few commands in the evil command line to get Ubuntu to work. Why does this Microsoft fanboy crap consistently get modded up. The command line isn't evil and you don't go to hell for using it despite what people like you try to imply. Oh, and it's not that difficult for someone of average intelligence to use with a little help. Try talking someone through something gui based over the phone. I'll take telling them to open a shell and type what I tell them every time. But gee, I don't even have to do that. I can usually just set it up so I can ssh in and do it myself. It's amazing how having options makes life easier than living by Bill Gate's rules.
You might as well ask the typical user to perform brain surgery on himself.Yeah but with Windows they have to perform brain surgery on themselves with a butter knife. At least Linux supplies you the proper tools and the option for a doctor to do it robotically from a remote location.
That doesn't mean it has to work "according to symmetries of logic and reason" that we humans can comprehend. Any technology sufficiently advance appears to be magic to the uninitiated. I think things like string theory appears like magic even to the initiated.
So by your definition something is innovative only if it is 100% completely in all aspects new and no part of it has ever been tried before. In the world I live in innovation often, I dare say most often, involves small changes made over a period time by a number of people. The patent system would work in your world's type of innovation but in my world it means everyone one of people who make each of those little changes files a patent and suddenly innovation becomes financially impossible because you have to pay some of your money to each and every person who patented their little change.
And, there is no system of patents that guarantees payment in perpetuity. Once you consider the fact that it takes years to get through the patent office, in many fields the lifetime of a patent is relatively short in business terms.Are you kidding. In the tech world 17 years is more than forever. Think about the state of word possessors in 1991 or hardware. You're talking about a 1000's of incremental changes since then. If someone had patented each one of those changes we still be using that old split screen word perfect crap.
Why? You feel that just because someone makes a song they should be rendered rich for the rest of their lives? How much does cost to record a song now? Surely less than $1000. How long does it take? Distribution cost is $0. Sell 10,000 copies and you make $4000 net. I think that's a pretty reasonable profit for one song. I think most reasonable people would agree with that. Add to that, most musicians who contract with a record company don't make that much for their music distributed under the current system and it's even more reasonable. There's thousands more that don't ever come close to that.
So now forging TCP packets is called traffic shaping and is an industry standard. Yeah right, maybe for the Russian mafia.
You know, with the price of disk space what it is today I find it hard to come up with any reason to use tapes for backup anymore. 2 backup servers, one offsite over VPN or ssh, with encrypted RAID hard drives on LVM, rsync with hardlinks and compressed dump for archiving is much cheaper and more reliably than tapes especially with offsite storage. This can even allow automated background backup of laptops when they're connected. What am I missing? What do tapes add that would justify the added expense and pain?
I don't think anyone thinks they're "entitled" to free music. I think people would gladly pay the creator of said music a reasonable amount, say a nickel a song, for the music if it was made easily attainable and useful (no DRM). What the RIAA members want is for people to pay a huge amount the majority of which goes to a bunch of leaches and bums who in no way, shape or form contribute anything to the music while enslaving and controlling anyone who has the audacity to step into the realm that they have ruled with an iron fist for the last 80 years. You see the difference there.
I don't get your point. That they were hypocrites does nothing to change the facts of the societal norms at that time. Slaughter, rape, pillage and plunder were a normal part of their society 1000 years ago (even if against the declared rules of some part of the Christian religious cult). Thankfully it's largely frowned upon in ours.
Your missing his point completely. He's not saying don't put a lock on your door. He saying spending $100,000 on a titanium door with 12 1" think locking pins and three biometric + keycode unlocking mechanism is stupid because they can just kick in the window.
You missed his whole point. He didn't say anything about 100% security. He said spending exorbitant amounts getting a single aspect of your security working perfectly is a bad idea. For example spending $1,000,000 getting a patch system set up that is 100% effective in keeping every one of your computers up to the minute on patches isn't cost effective. The expense curve goes up exponentially as any given process approaches 100% effectiveness. Think in terms of uptime. You could spend $100,000 on a patch system that is 90% effective and spend the other $900,000 on other aspects of security. This results in a much more effective overall security level for likely a much cheaper cost. Oh, and 100% security is impossible unless you lock your computers in an electromagnetically isolated vault in Ft. Knox with a random vault key that no one knows. Any security experts who doesn't know this should be out of a job. Hmmm... even then someone would probably talk there way past the security somehow.
It's rather disingenuous to compare actions that were the social norm in one period of time to similar actions taken in a time when they are way outside the societal norm. 1000 years ago slaughter, rape, pillage and plunder were like cheering for your favorite ball team is today.
You should also point out that much of what was done in the name of Christ 1000 years ago was the social norm in those times. The social norm for violence, rape and pillaging is somewhat different in these times so applying a social norm from 1000 years ago to today doesn't quite work (I just know some idiot is going to try top bring Iraq up as a counterpoint).
No. The person being granted the monopoly should be responsible for it's validity. Why the hell should I have to pay for determining if someone elses patent is valid? The one who stands to benefit should be held responsible for any and all damages of any kind caused by an invalid patent plus punitive fines the amount of which is determined by how egregious the patent idiocy is. This would stop patent trolls and idiotically obvious patents overnight without causing any harm to existing or future valid patents. Patent fights would be much more amicable since both sides stand to lose significant amounts.
No, but the fact that it's free does make it better.
Yeah, I know, because no one's ever had a Microsoft Office document that wasn't compatible with their current version of MS Office. Strangely on a number of occasions I've resorted to OO to fix those kind of problems.
Reminds me of this:
Software salesman to purchasing droid: "You don't want to get locked into open standards."
Better be careful. The CIAA (ComediansIAA) will come after you for copyright infring^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h joke theft. I can hear the (copyrighted) subpoena heading for slashdot now.
That's pretty much what turns a lot of people away as they want ONE choice, ONE easy, simple choice. Windows offers that as they already know it.
Ahhh, but this is wherein the dichotomy arises. You see, Microsoft's marketing sells you on the idea that selecting Microsoft provides this 'easy, simple choice'. But unfortunately experience tells one that Microsoft's marketing department is required to take reality altering drugs to start their work day. Microsoft products couldn't be farther from this "easy, simple choice" if that were their actual objective.
It's everywhere. No need to explore in order to open a Word Document,
Where do we start. I've been using Linux exclusively for years now and I have never had to explore to open a word document. Open Office was right there installed for free by default. You buy a Windows computer, you had better of selected the $200-$300 (even on a PC you're only paying $500 for) option of buying Microsoft Office when you bought it or you're going to being doing a lot of exploring, traveling and paying (way more than $300) for a non-OEM version of Microsoft Office. Not only that but amazingly my Linux computer comes equipped with (free) software to for reading a whole host of different document types. I'm not even going to get started on having to buy and install anti-virus, anti-spyware, backup software, etc, etc, etc just to get a reasonable safe functionable computer. Strangely this stuff is never mentioned by Microsoft marketing. We can also get into the number of people I know who have had their Windows PC crash, took it in for repairs and have been told that either it required a complete reinstall (what a nightmare, starting from scratch installing all your apps), a new hard drive or expensive hardware repairs all of which entailed loss of all data. I know, you'll say they were idiots for not taking regular backups but do you realize how difficult it is to set up reliable regular backups on Windows (strangely never metioned by their marketing department either)? In a number of these cases I booted a Linux Live CD and was able in the worse case recover their data and in most cases I installed Linux which ran fine on the severely damaged hardware where it is still running just fine and cheaply I might add. It's amazing how much time and money that "easy, simple choice" cost people that no one ever seems to mention.
make games work, etc.
This is the only reason I keep Windows installed on one of my computers. But a couple points. First, there are several games I have installed that require .Net for some aspect of the game to function. I know from Microsoft marketing and the droids they've manage to brainwash that this is the current culmination of Microsoft's "simple and easy". One game apparently requires .Net 1.1 and was working with that installed and the new one I was installing asked for the "latest version" in the error message it popped up. I installed the latest version (3.? or something) and it both broke the one that was working and new one refused to work. After some research I determined the new one required .Net 2.? so I uninstalled 3.? and installed 2.?. Keep in mind that after each of these events I have to install further stuff through the rather insistent Windows updater and reboot after each and every action. Now the old one broke but the new one worked. I have yet to figure out a way to get both working at the same time. Yes, this is the "easy, simple choice". Second, I installed Ubuntu on my mother's computer after it crashed and she was charged ~$100 to be told by the repair people (from a well known Windows support company) that they couldn't even get their diagnostics to run and it had to be an expensive hardware problem that would cost several hundred for them to even diagnose and her only choice for recovering her data was a specialized data recovery company that they could recommend for only several th
Just a nit pick but Microsoft's business model relies on getting people to buy their software. Through various methods, given their control of certain software markets, a significant number of people buy their products and then don't even use what they bought (or in many cases realize they paid for it).
And the key factor here, I think, is that business model is going the way of the music CD and movie DVD. The business model of software companies should be service companies these days. That's one reason most software you buy sucks so bad. It's sold to you by high pressure, lying, cheating marketing and sales people who's only goal is to make the sale and will violate any morales to achieve that goal. If keeping the customer happy was the goal your products would be much higher quality. I think (hope) people are starting to realize this shift in the market. Microsoft's goal is to sell you something and they could care less about you once they have your money. The product they sell you sucks so bad thier primary pitch for selling you the next one is to alleviate the suffering from the last piece of crap they sold you. Google's business model is based on making you happy ever day and they make products with this focus in mind.