Some other comments have alluded to this, but to make it explicitly clear, these guys aren't strictly the first to do this. The beauty of SIP (which is the protocol in question) is that it is interoperable with any of these platforms already, as long as the user has a SIP client, they can make voice and video calls to other platforms. I'm not sure about each mobile phone, but PDAs definitely already have this capability using SJPhone. Still, anything to make people aware of SIP is a good thing, cause it is confusing at first, but once you look into it it becomes clear that SIP, or something similarly open, is the future of both fixed and likely mobile communication.
Perhaps not - but users shouldn't have to pay in order to license a copy that was copied for free. Valid forms of payment are things like paying for support services, paying for development under contract, donations, and possibly government grants, though that sort of falls under contract work.
I think I'll feed the troll (either troll, or just plain wrong, sorry): off the top of my head, look up Croquet (the 3D operating environment, if there's any confusion). Look at tabbed browsing, which originated from Mozilla, any of a bunch of other innovation courtesy of Firefox, a bunch of features present in Gnome and KDE that were there before Windows and Mac OS X, though some of those come from earlier software if you'd like to nit pick (like virtual desktops), and kioslaves (not sure about OS X there). Look at Bittorrent, you may have forgetten that, but it accounts for most of the internet's bandwidth (a feature! lol), and it is of free software origins.
Besides, the "going completely OSS" wouldn't remove funding from commercial software, people would still be free to spend/waste their money on it, the idea is that the government would commit to using it, because it is the only way they would have the freedom and access to be able to assure support for the the things they use the software for. Going proprietary gives up some control of this stuff, once a company decides to stop supporting you, you can't support yourself, you don't have a license to modify the software.
A third point is that FOSS does the opposite of stifling innovation, by allowing people to build on other people's ideas without having to reimplement closed source software, or wait 20 years for a patent to expire. Complaints about DRM restricting copyright expiration also apply to software. There are plenty of old games and other applications that people can no longer use because the source isn't available, and either the game itself is unavailable, or the game runs on a platform that is also unavailable. This is analogous to old music that the copyright has expired, but, hypothetically, the music is locked behind DRM and thus not freely available, even though it is in the public domain. Closed source software is in the same situation, only the "DRM" in this case is the destruction of information when source code is compiled. The irony about patents is that they are designed to promote innovation by putting ideas out in the open, yet that seems lost on today's politicians. The free software philosophy puts everything out in the open, allowing anyone to contribute ideas and coding, which then are available to anyone with a computer (and supported platform;). It sounds to me like that's software communism, only it's all the good stuff about communism, with none of that icky dictatorship stuff. Amazing how greed will cause people to argue that FOSS is anything but beneficial to society.
Um, no, he said they only need to be available on request, which implies that if there is no request, then they aren't available. The GPL states they the sources must be available, end of story. So, either the grandparent post doesn't make sense, or it's wrong.
Sure, being able to run the software on a different machine is great, but RMS wants computing to be free, not strictly software. My understanding is that what bugs him is people having computers, and not being free to use, modify, and distribute the software that runs on them. So I don't think that being able to buy some other computer to run the software quite cuts it for him, and the GPL is a legal codification of those ideals, so you'd expect the GPLv3 to take that into account.
I understood the FA to be saying that they'd be backing up data, as in docs and homework and stuff, and that they would be able to restore the data while connected to their school, not that the data would get involuntarily pushed to their computers. Some (or all) of the people designing and implementing this stuff are Linux enthusiasts, I don't think any of them are going to want to implement features that take away the user's control of the machine. In fact, the context for that backup feature was that they would like children to be able to take an interest and start tinkering with their systems, which is the opposite of taking away control, they want to put control in their hands, giving them with a real computer they can mess with, rather than some locked down education appliance. The FUD from MS and Intel calling these devices "gadgets" especially disgusts me, because it couldn't possibly be further from the truth, and they're deriding a good cause out of their own selfishness.
Sure, or if you used free software, you just wouldn't have to deal with all of that licensing crap. Money should be paid for support, not licensing, and efforts like this are crude attempts to fix a broken business model. The only pro-MS argument people can come up with here is that it's not that bad, but there's no way anyone can construe "Reduced Functionality Mode" as a feature.
Indeed. People seem to forget how stubborn established companies are when their core business starts to become irrelevant. You definitely don't need to get into the kernel to implement on-create/on-modify virus scanning, and ensuring that code can't mess with the kernel in unsupported ways should hardly be seen as a bad thing. Of couse, the same can't be said for usage of Windows, I would hate to depend on such an untrustworthy company for my desktop computing needs.. but then again, in (some parts of) the business world, people don't seem to mind bleeding money for IT services/software.
The parent and grandparent posts were talking about more foolproof ways to eavesdrop that also don't cost 40 bucks, and then you came in and made a pretty much unrelated post about parenting in general. I definitely agree that the amount of supervision you mention is the only realistic step up from no supervision at all. however. Of course, wrt to the GP, whatever you set up, make sure you take into account Tor and other proxies, they render eavesdropping useless, especially the encrypted ones (like Tor).
I don't understand why this is even a serious debate here, the answer is a no brainer. Skype is a closed protocol, closed source app, you can only call other Skype users, and only using a softphone. SIP is an open standard that lets you use a variety of different services to provide an address for the calls, depending on the service you can usually call people with a SIP address at any other service, not just people at your own, and you can use whatever client you want to make the call. This can be a softphone, a physical IP phone that resembles regular PSTN phones, or you can use a regular phone to dial into an adapter that will connect the call over SIP, and some of these can fallback to the PSTN when applicable as well. So, in my humble opinion, Skype is a joke, and this is like comparing go-karts to automobiles. There's no contest here.
This attitude of not trusting these patches cause they might somehow slow down your system suggests that your Windows install likes to slow down on a whim.
I totally agree with this, most, if not all, of my experience is problems like this that can be clearly diagnosed and then fixed. Any other problems are also almost always related to hardware/drivers.
In response to the original request for the "one CD switch", Ubuntu is definitely what you're looking for, you burn the one liveCD, boot off the CD into an Ubuntu that is very similar to what will be on your hard drive, and then you run the installer using a shortcut on the desktop. 6 (I think) separate pages to fill in (keyboard layout, time zone, partitioning, what to use each partition for, user name, and confirmation of the whole thing), and then it installs, asks you if you want to put grub in your Master boot record, you say yes, and you have a shiny new dual booting system. Say no, and you end up with Ubuntu on your drive but no way to boot it until you set up a bootloader to boot it up. You're asked to give you a chance to verify that the installer correctly detected the other OS on your drive.
Thing is, the old compy can still be put to use as some kind of server box, or something. Of course, Windows will NEVER try to remove the stigma that Joe user associates with this, they are in the business of selling crippleware, so that they can charge businesses a few hundred bucks more for an "enterprise-grade" server OS. I guess they have a simple interface for file and print sharing, but for any other features, they want to charge you more.
buy a new computer? It really irks me when people cite this as a solution. You most definitely did NOT fix the problem, you are just avoiding it. At the very least, you can install another OS. This isn't a hard process, you just have to download an image, burn it to a CD, boot off the CD, and follow simple instructions.
This is complete bullshit. The *AA will never, ever "pull their material", because if they did, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot, and not be making money. If you mean pull just the internet sales, don't forget, the CD fallback has no copy protection at all. Imagine MS complaining that it's going to pull Windows from the market. Oh no, are they really? At the expense of huge market share? I think not. Also, if any of these lobbies (RIAA, MPAA, MS) actually followed through with such a threat, it would be great for consumers, because the resulting market vacuum would open the way for lots of competition and innovation as people try to fill it. Why do people take any of the lobbyists' arguments seriously? They lie through their teeth!
I can see it now:"Are you google-eyed with confusion over your rights? No wonder. It's all just clever mumbo jumbo. Your rights are nothing more than a scheme by the multi-billion dollar silicon valley tech companies to get you, the consumer, to pay more for their services. Forget all the mumbo jumbo, your rights simply mean you pay."
That's the thing, I don't really shepherd. I just set it up, and then I don't have to do much. I've answered questions if one of said users needs to know how to rip a CD or something, they'd have asked no matter what OS it was, and it was already set up, since it was much easier to pull in these apps on Ubuntu than it would be on Windows (don't even try to argue that marking a bunch of apps on a list, hitting apply, and then waiting a while is harder or more complicated than surfing to a website for each one, downloading a bunch of unsigned installers, and running them manually one by one). I did the dist-upgrade from Breezy to Dapper on both machines as well, but that was just so I'd be around in case of problems, and to save them the trouble. The update manager has a one-click dist-upgrade process that automates everything. Other than that, and one filesystem issue with ext3 which I'd prefer didn't occur but must honestly mention anyway, I haven't had to touch their systems since setup, and they've been using them for over 8 months.
This is true, they're using it cause of me, but my point wasn't that they chose to use it, my point was that they use it and don't have problems, which is counter to the post that said that a successful desktop Linux is going to have to be somehow fundamentally different to the one that I'm using right now. It really isn't, it's just going to have to market itself better.
What do you mean by no built in modem support? If you already own the hardware you speak of, either you already have an external modem for use with windows, or the laptop has a modem built in, but you have reason to believe that it won't be supported under Linux.
And does your i-opener have a mouse and printer built into its small footprint? if not, then it is unfair to say that a laptop isn't a good replacement for the appliance just because it will no longer have a small footprint with a mouse and printer hooked up. The i-opener isn't any better here.
Another thing, if you use the latest release of Ubuntu, it's gonna be supported for 3 years, the only updates are security related, and the update utility is pretty easy to use (to the point where parents can use it). So if that were set up and working, it wouldn't be a bad internet appliance, although you'd need more than 64 MB of RAM to pull it off. The only thing I don't feel comfortable doing with people who need tech support is putting them on Windows.
Don't knock it till you've tried it. Linux has a majority (75%) share in my immediate family, and other than me, the other two users aren't computer geeks at all, by any stretch.
You and your spouse were on separate ISPs? Don't married people live together? Maybe this occurred before they were your spouse?
On topic though, malware is evil and I despise it..
Um, by saying you think it's reverse psychology, you're implying that it's pro net-neutrality. So, no, this isn't reverse psychology, it's blatant lying.
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Some other comments have alluded to this, but to make it explicitly clear, these guys aren't strictly the first to do this. The beauty of SIP (which is the protocol in question) is that it is interoperable with any of these platforms already, as long as the user has a SIP client, they can make voice and video calls to other platforms. I'm not sure about each mobile phone, but PDAs definitely already have this capability using SJPhone. Still, anything to make people aware of SIP is a good thing, cause it is confusing at first, but once you look into it it becomes clear that SIP, or something similarly open, is the future of both fixed and likely mobile communication.
Perhaps not - but users shouldn't have to pay in order to license a copy that was copied for free. Valid forms of payment are things like paying for support services, paying for development under contract, donations, and possibly government grants, though that sort of falls under contract work.
I think I'll feed the troll (either troll, or just plain wrong, sorry): off the top of my head, look up Croquet (the 3D operating environment, if there's any confusion). Look at tabbed browsing, which originated from Mozilla, any of a bunch of other innovation courtesy of Firefox, a bunch of features present in Gnome and KDE that were there before Windows and Mac OS X, though some of those come from earlier software if you'd like to nit pick (like virtual desktops), and kioslaves (not sure about OS X there). Look at Bittorrent, you may have forgetten that, but it accounts for most of the internet's bandwidth (a feature! lol), and it is of free software origins.
Besides, the "going completely OSS" wouldn't remove funding from commercial software, people would still be free to spend/waste their money on it, the idea is that the government would commit to using it, because it is the only way they would have the freedom and access to be able to assure support for the the things they use the software for. Going proprietary gives up some control of this stuff, once a company decides to stop supporting you, you can't support yourself, you don't have a license to modify the software.
A third point is that FOSS does the opposite of stifling innovation, by allowing people to build on other people's ideas without having to reimplement closed source software, or wait 20 years for a patent to expire. Complaints about DRM restricting copyright expiration also apply to software. There are plenty of old games and other applications that people can no longer use because the source isn't available, and either the game itself is unavailable, or the game runs on a platform that is also unavailable. This is analogous to old music that the copyright has expired, but, hypothetically, the music is locked behind DRM and thus not freely available, even though it is in the public domain. Closed source software is in the same situation, only the "DRM" in this case is the destruction of information when source code is compiled. The irony about patents is that they are designed to promote innovation by putting ideas out in the open, yet that seems lost on today's politicians. The free software philosophy puts everything out in the open, allowing anyone to contribute ideas and coding, which then are available to anyone with a computer (and supported platform ;). It sounds to me like that's software communism, only it's all the good stuff about communism, with none of that icky dictatorship stuff. Amazing how greed will cause people to argue that FOSS is anything but beneficial to society.
Hahaha, mod parent funny!
Um, no, he said they only need to be available on request, which implies that if there is no request, then they aren't available. The GPL states they the sources must be available, end of story. So, either the grandparent post doesn't make sense, or it's wrong.
Sure, being able to run the software on a different machine is great, but RMS wants computing to be free, not strictly software. My understanding is that what bugs him is people having computers, and not being free to use, modify, and distribute the software that runs on them. So I don't think that being able to buy some other computer to run the software quite cuts it for him, and the GPL is a legal codification of those ideals, so you'd expect the GPLv3 to take that into account.
I understood the FA to be saying that they'd be backing up data, as in docs and homework and stuff, and that they would be able to restore the data while connected to their school, not that the data would get involuntarily pushed to their computers. Some (or all) of the people designing and implementing this stuff are Linux enthusiasts, I don't think any of them are going to want to implement features that take away the user's control of the machine. In fact, the context for that backup feature was that they would like children to be able to take an interest and start tinkering with their systems, which is the opposite of taking away control, they want to put control in their hands, giving them with a real computer they can mess with, rather than some locked down education appliance. The FUD from MS and Intel calling these devices "gadgets" especially disgusts me, because it couldn't possibly be further from the truth, and they're deriding a good cause out of their own selfishness.
Sure, or if you used free software, you just wouldn't have to deal with all of that licensing crap. Money should be paid for support, not licensing, and efforts like this are crude attempts to fix a broken business model. The only pro-MS argument people can come up with here is that it's not that bad, but there's no way anyone can construe "Reduced Functionality Mode" as a feature.
Indeed. People seem to forget how stubborn established companies are when their core business starts to become irrelevant. You definitely don't need to get into the kernel to implement on-create/on-modify virus scanning, and ensuring that code can't mess with the kernel in unsupported ways should hardly be seen as a bad thing. Of couse, the same can't be said for usage of Windows, I would hate to depend on such an untrustworthy company for my desktop computing needs.. but then again, in (some parts of) the business world, people don't seem to mind bleeding money for IT services/software.
The parent and grandparent posts were talking about more foolproof ways to eavesdrop that also don't cost 40 bucks, and then you came in and made a pretty much unrelated post about parenting in general. I definitely agree that the amount of supervision you mention is the only realistic step up from no supervision at all. however. Of course, wrt to the GP, whatever you set up, make sure you take into account Tor and other proxies, they render eavesdropping useless, especially the encrypted ones (like Tor).
I don't understand why this is even a serious debate here, the answer is a no brainer. Skype is a closed protocol, closed source app, you can only call other Skype users, and only using a softphone. SIP is an open standard that lets you use a variety of different services to provide an address for the calls, depending on the service you can usually call people with a SIP address at any other service, not just people at your own, and you can use whatever client you want to make the call. This can be a softphone, a physical IP phone that resembles regular PSTN phones, or you can use a regular phone to dial into an adapter that will connect the call over SIP, and some of these can fallback to the PSTN when applicable as well. So, in my humble opinion, Skype is a joke, and this is like comparing go-karts to automobiles. There's no contest here.
This attitude of not trusting these patches cause they might somehow slow down your system suggests that your Windows install likes to slow down on a whim.
I totally agree with this, most, if not all, of my experience is problems like this that can be clearly diagnosed and then fixed. Any other problems are also almost always related to hardware/drivers. In response to the original request for the "one CD switch", Ubuntu is definitely what you're looking for, you burn the one liveCD, boot off the CD into an Ubuntu that is very similar to what will be on your hard drive, and then you run the installer using a shortcut on the desktop. 6 (I think) separate pages to fill in (keyboard layout, time zone, partitioning, what to use each partition for, user name, and confirmation of the whole thing), and then it installs, asks you if you want to put grub in your Master boot record, you say yes, and you have a shiny new dual booting system. Say no, and you end up with Ubuntu on your drive but no way to boot it until you set up a bootloader to boot it up. You're asked to give you a chance to verify that the installer correctly detected the other OS on your drive.
Thing is, the old compy can still be put to use as some kind of server box, or something. Of course, Windows will NEVER try to remove the stigma that Joe user associates with this, they are in the business of selling crippleware, so that they can charge businesses a few hundred bucks more for an "enterprise-grade" server OS. I guess they have a simple interface for file and print sharing, but for any other features, they want to charge you more.
Run the updates at night then, when the computers won't be getting rebooted..
buy a new computer? It really irks me when people cite this as a solution. You most definitely did NOT fix the problem, you are just avoiding it. At the very least, you can install another OS. This isn't a hard process, you just have to download an image, burn it to a CD, boot off the CD, and follow simple instructions.
This is complete bullshit. The *AA will never, ever "pull their material", because if they did, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot, and not be making money. If you mean pull just the internet sales, don't forget, the CD fallback has no copy protection at all. Imagine MS complaining that it's going to pull Windows from the market. Oh no, are they really? At the expense of huge market share? I think not. Also, if any of these lobbies (RIAA, MPAA, MS) actually followed through with such a threat, it would be great for consumers, because the resulting market vacuum would open the way for lots of competition and innovation as people try to fill it. Why do people take any of the lobbyists' arguments seriously? They lie through their teeth! I can see it now:"Are you google-eyed with confusion over your rights? No wonder. It's all just clever mumbo jumbo. Your rights are nothing more than a scheme by the multi-billion dollar silicon valley tech companies to get you, the consumer, to pay more for their services. Forget all the mumbo jumbo, your rights simply mean you pay."
I know! WTF? I'm incredulous..
That's the thing, I don't really shepherd. I just set it up, and then I don't have to do much. I've answered questions if one of said users needs to know how to rip a CD or something, they'd have asked no matter what OS it was, and it was already set up, since it was much easier to pull in these apps on Ubuntu than it would be on Windows (don't even try to argue that marking a bunch of apps on a list, hitting apply, and then waiting a while is harder or more complicated than surfing to a website for each one, downloading a bunch of unsigned installers, and running them manually one by one). I did the dist-upgrade from Breezy to Dapper on both machines as well, but that was just so I'd be around in case of problems, and to save them the trouble. The update manager has a one-click dist-upgrade process that automates everything. Other than that, and one filesystem issue with ext3 which I'd prefer didn't occur but must honestly mention anyway, I haven't had to touch their systems since setup, and they've been using them for over 8 months.
This is true, they're using it cause of me, but my point wasn't that they chose to use it, my point was that they use it and don't have problems, which is counter to the post that said that a successful desktop Linux is going to have to be somehow fundamentally different to the one that I'm using right now. It really isn't, it's just going to have to market itself better.
What do you mean by no built in modem support? If you already own the hardware you speak of, either you already have an external modem for use with windows, or the laptop has a modem built in, but you have reason to believe that it won't be supported under Linux. And does your i-opener have a mouse and printer built into its small footprint? if not, then it is unfair to say that a laptop isn't a good replacement for the appliance just because it will no longer have a small footprint with a mouse and printer hooked up. The i-opener isn't any better here. Another thing, if you use the latest release of Ubuntu, it's gonna be supported for 3 years, the only updates are security related, and the update utility is pretty easy to use (to the point where parents can use it). So if that were set up and working, it wouldn't be a bad internet appliance, although you'd need more than 64 MB of RAM to pull it off. The only thing I don't feel comfortable doing with people who need tech support is putting them on Windows.
Don't knock it till you've tried it. Linux has a majority (75%) share in my immediate family, and other than me, the other two users aren't computer geeks at all, by any stretch.
I read it as robocops, lol..
You and your spouse were on separate ISPs? Don't married people live together? Maybe this occurred before they were your spouse? On topic though, malware is evil and I despise it..
Um, by saying you think it's reverse psychology, you're implying that it's pro net-neutrality. So, no, this isn't reverse psychology, it's blatant lying.