Mindshare gains are to not accomplished by wasting energy squabbling with your logical ally. AFTER sufficient mindshare has been won from closed source--then squabble and be stupid if you want to! But meanwhile--cooperate on the breakaway!!!! It makes for a better race!!
That's really inspiring and stuff, but, like all analogies, leaves some things out. This is why analogies are a tool for explaining things, not for coming to some logical conclusion (there is no Proof by Analogy in discrete math). Many of the OSI crowd just really don't care how close the dreaded "proprietary software" comes to competing with them, they just want to do their thing the best way they know how. Wiping out proprietary software is the goal of the FSF guys, it's a side effect for the OSI guys.
And what is all of this "wasted energy" nonsense? How is having ideological discussions wasted energy? These users of software, for the most part, don't really care what their software is licensed under. This is something that's really only discussed by the developers of software (and possibly their employers), and so maybe if the OSI and FSF were to join forces to get the proprietary software devs, this might make sense. But I don't see discussion of ideologies as something that hampers the use of F/OSS.
On top of this, I see most of the animosity from the FSF side; they are the ones who are all hung up on ideology and get angry when people *gasp* even explain how to install proprietary software. I know, it's not fair to equate RMS' ideology with that of the entire FSF organization, but he/is/ on/your/ side.
I understand your point about the OSI, but I'm not sure how it relates to this topic of corporations contributing back code. Sure, there may be less strict licenses that OSI approve of, but the GPL allows corporations to do the _exact same thing_.
Now we complain that these corporations are taking advantage of Open Source software in exactly the way the OSI told them they could?
The OSI _and_ the FSF.
But none of them will ever contribute back as much as they get
I'm not sure that's possible for anyone at this point.
This is what you get when you take a movement based on an ideal and pervert it to try and take "market share" for a free product. You get more people using the product, but you lose the ideal in the process.
Good riddance. I'm glad the OSI did what they did, and I'm glad because it allows the pragmatic OSS people to be disassociated with the FSF while still with them in some underlying principles. Now, I'm grateful for what the FSF has done, but they will usually stick to their ideals when it's impractical. I simply want people to use my code, and if they redistribute it, then they should give their changes back to me. That's all I want, not some dream about people using free software everywhere (although I have no problem with that either).
What other ideas are out there to keep news journalism profitable?
This is the web, it is difficult, as the newspapers are seeing, to charge your users directly. It is also hard to convince advertisers to fork over the dough that the newspapers need to sustain themselves. Instead, they need to start looking at ways of monetizing people's viewing patterns, much like google has done.
You see that idea? I prob came up with it on the shitter, I wasn't even paid to think about it. That's what's so sad, these newspaper fat cats aren't thinking outside of their old paper media; they are just trying to brute force the money out of people the way they have always been doing.
But they don't get it, and it's painfully obvious. It's like they have never even used the web before. I know, as a web user (and in this scenario, one that doesn't use adblock), if I visit a website and all of a sudden have nothing but a giant ad on my screen, or something following my cursor, I'm just going to leave or, at the very least, am going to be irritated. Check it out, go to the ajc and turn off your ad block. Ya... Seriously, wtf were they thinking? Now, go have a looksie at ajcexchange, their new craigslist knock-off. What I find hilarious is that it's free to post a classified on their site, but if you want the premium listing, the one that shows up in the paper that no one is getting anymore (they have stopped delivering in many places in GA), they charge you. They don't get it.
As if that wasn't the end of their worries, they also have content issues. Many people want local news and in-depth coverage about some scam that is going on (that's why they're reading the/local/ paper right?). Instead they get AP wire stories and other information they can get elsewhere.
It would go about as well as the money Congress gave telcos in the 90's to give everyone fast, cheap broadband service.
Not that I think you're lying, I've always found your posts to be insightful which is why I'm a fan, but do you have a link where I can read more about this? My google-fu is failing me.
This is very confusing to me. If websites don't want aggregators to compile all of their content for them and place it in a convenient (for the viewer) format and location then they should just make their robots.txt act accordingly.
It's worse. Members of AP (like the company I work for) actually compile all of their content and send it to Google,Yahoo, etc. themselves... The real complaint is that Google is supposedly going to start putting their own ads on Google News, and AP wants a piece of the action. Fair? I don't think so. In the current setup, AP members are the ones making the money; Google News drives traffic to their sites, which have ads (a LOT of them, actually a sickening amount of them, like I have flashbacks to geocities websites when I have to work on them).
It seems to me they need Google more than Google et al needs them, considering, you know, that Google is the one who/gets/ the internet.
Re:Let me be the first critic
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Sorry. Did I not suck enough ass before I told you how the real world works, rather than fairytale land?
Yes, please go suck more ass (wtf?).
Ya, that's it, you go and show everyone by not using Linux... Oh noes, please we needs you! We need the bitching about impossible problems. Config files? Are you fucking kidding?
And this is why the real world, and collective individuals like myself, despite trying to be accommodating when you shit-spewing retard monkeys say that your OS is "better", despite offering up a real critique in good faith about what it'll take to get more than a handful of social rejects using Linux, will eventually turn to shit-spewing retard monkeys like you and say SHUT THE FUCK UP because you weren't even paying attention to what we said before you went off on your standard boilerplate diatribe.
Entertaining! Read the news, entire countries are using Linux not to mention huge enterprises throughout the world. Oh noes! Don't call me a shit-spewing retard monkey, guy on the internet! pleease! You still don't get it, your critique is fucking impossible, and it amounts to nothing but bitching, and bitching at the wrong people no less. Man, this is really helpful. I'm going to talk to my boss tomorrow and see if he can hire a guy like you to sit on the sidelines and bitch bitch bitch. If he says we want insightful critiques, I'll tell him, "we're living in the real world bro, there's only crybabies der der der". Oh no, the barrier to entry involves me spending $20 on hardware that works!
I also think it's "double funny" (another wtf?), that you are stereotyping EVERY linux user because you couldn't get your POS capture card to work. Seriously man, I'll send you the tens of dollars to get working hardware. Wait, nevermind, I think it would be hilarious if you stick to your commitment of never using Linux again. Good luck, hope you enjoy Windows 7 (that costs more than it would to get a video capture card)! Oh you're gonna stick with XP, even funnier! We're livin in the REAL WORLD bro! lol...
The stated goal - at least from a large portion of the linux community - is to see as many people using Linux as possible. Even as "volunteers" and "freeloaders", it is to Linux's advantage to try to reach this goal.
That's great if that's your goal for Linux, it really is. That's great if it's Ubuntu's goal or whatever. But OSS devs do it for a large variety of reasons, and many really don't care if it's ready for average joe. But look at this from a developer's perspective. This is a community effort. We really do appreciate feedback, really. But yours goes a little farther than just feedback, almost demanding, and appearing to have some sort of deserving attitude. The OSS developers are trying, and you're sitting there telling them it's just not good enough, but then you add additional taunting like "linux will never be ready for the desktop". And then "threaten" to stick with Windows. It can be offensive, especially when a developer is defending his pet project. Linux needs constructive insightful critics, not crybabies.
Now, you seem to understand the problem, but not its implications. Hardware support, in some situations, is better in Windows than Linux (I find this to be less and less true at a FAST rate). Windows does not deserve credit for the drivers provided by the hardware manufacturers (HM). If some piece of hardware is not working in Linux, this is a hardware manufacturer problem. Linux devs are/begging/ for specs from HM's to make good drivers themselves, when really, this is something the HMs should be addressing. And we understand your point that we need to get over the hump in order to get HM's attention. But wouldn't you find it a little bit aggrevating as a developer to be trying very hard to get something accomplished when you have someone on the sidelines taunting you and blaming you for their problems? I can only imagine if my boss did that at work, and I'm getting paid in that case. Seriously, if you were working at some charity, and some homeless person came up to you and told you you were doing absolutely shit work wouldn't you just say, "eh, go fuck yourself", and go contribute to something where you will be appreciated? OSS devs appreciate each other prob more than anyone else, that is why Linux is sometimes seen as for devs by devs.
Not only this, but non-dev and non-contributing users are only good for adding a number to a count that needs to be so high in order to get HM support. It's an invisible bar; there isn't some set goal when this will happen. You aren't really bringing alot to the table, right? Why should a dev struggle so hard to get you to stay, when they can try to get a contributor to stay?
I guess what I'm trying to say is, no, it's really not our problem, it's your problem and you're trying to find someone to blame. Where as I would buy hardware that's supported by Linux, you will buy anything and then not even blame the manufacturer you bought it from! From a perspective of a trying to get more hardware support for linux, you're actually prob hurting more than helping because you aren't pushing HMs to release drivers, or specs, for Linux. Try installing Winders from scratch and see all the hardware of yours that it detects, it's hilarious. It's not our problem, because we don't have your problems, because we made wise buying decisions. Uh dude, you're trying to get a 10 year old card that prob costs less than $20 to work, from a notoriously unsporting manufacturer. And let me tell you, if I did have a hardware issue, I would work to fix it. At the very least I would not sit and bitch about how linux won't be ready for the desktop. That's not helping, trust me.
Wow. Thank you for proving my point so well with your vitriolic, hate-spewing post.
Aw, you're/such/ a victim. "All I wanted to do was bitch about my problems to try to force someone who doesn't care to fix it for me". You are the one making the offense, you a
If you want to see movies that arent on TV yet, buy the DVD. Or rent it. or borrow a friends DVD.
Don't think you are magically entitled to have every piece of entertainment delivered to your eyeballs for free the minute its finished.
Your last statement is just "everybody does it". Hardly an excuse. Is that how you judge how to behave in society? You just do what everyone else does, regardless of the harm your actions have on others?
There is more to this situation than simply buying or not buying. You can think of it simplistically as a black and white issue, but it's really not (very few things are). These organizations that exist on copyrighted works will use the money you give them to reduce your rights. They will extend copyright expirations, redefine fair-use, lobby to modify copyright law to benefit themselves, and charge inflated prices(multiple times, since you can't exercise your fair-use rights with DRM). In addition, they work to reduce artists' rights to their own work, which they can do because there are so many artists out there they must basically sell their souls.
You mentioned that a person does harm to others by downloading copyrighted works, can you provide an example of this? Simply downloading something does not have a direct affect on that downloaded content being sold to the person downloading it (because they obviously don't believe it's reasonable to buy the content). Is the harm you mention greater than the harm done to consumer rights, or the rights of the producers of the work? If you choose not to buy copyrighted content, how are your rights represented? There is this constant pushing by these organizations to change copyright law to benefit them against the consumer. There are also things, like DRM, that are used by these organizations to limit your fair-use rights. In many cases, it isn't possible for the consumer to "vote with their wallets" and by the non-DRM version.
There is also the bigger picture, like our culture and society. Do we really want our culture to be locked up by these organizations? Should a person not participate in our culture just because they feel the prices charged aren't reasonable? Should a producer (I use the term producer for the original content creator) not be able to contribute to our culture because they don't want to sell out to an organization? There are options the consumer and producer can take, which are even more obvious with the internet becoming more mainstream, but are these organizations hampering the development of these "independent" artists? Are these organizations hampering the development of our culture? I would say yes, in some ways, because these large industries have a lot of control over traditional outlets. They are trying to get control of the internet outlet. In a few countries they get royalties for things like blank CD sales. They really want to start a tax that everyone has to pay, blaming loss of sales on internet piracy. Oh, you thought you were "voting with you wallet" by not buying? Sorry consumer, you are a now a statistic under the "sales lost to piracy" column, and the industry will use that statistic to continue to take away your rights and try to get you to pay for something you were never consuming/pirating in the first place.
Your defense seems to rely on the fact that it's illegal to "steal" these copyrighted works. What about someone who thinks that there shouldn't be such a thing as copyright? Or a person who doesn't believe in the industries' definition of copyright? Or a person who doesn't want to contribute to the industry changing copyright? These are viewpoints that aren't represented by simply not buying the copyrighted material. Your suggestion to them is to simply not buy it. That's a solution because there are independent producers in all of these industries. However, it would have been nice if the original copyright law was still in place where they would also be able to consume copyrighted works from long dead or retired p
How can mozilla, a non-profit organization sue someone claiming they have a monopoly? They are not meant to make money but they are suing a company because that company does something that limits the amount of money they can make?
I seem to recall the American Revolution involved a bit of violence, didn't it, and we trumpet the success and worthiness of that violence in every classroom in the country, right?
What do you think happened during the American Revolution? Do you think we went to Britain and attacked them or something? All we did was make our own government and defend ourselves, we didn't shoot first. So, your example actually works against you, because Britain was the one who used violence, and you see how that worked out.
A second revolution in these not-so-entirely-United States seems a bit overdue.
I could agree with you here, but for different reasons. I mean, you are talking about spilling blood over some silly songs, right?
What sort of revolutionary vigilante violence might we visit upon the RIAA's clients and its sympathizers in Congress?
Yikes! The RIAA is doing a perfectly fine job hanging themselves as it is, let's just keep providing the rope.
No, you already have the reduced service. You can't download at max rate 24/7. The cap just presents itself in a different way - variable service quality, timeouts, hidden QOS and throttling, etc.
This is not ok with me either, and this doesn't make it right.
That really is the crux of this. You think your service is reduced when the ISP is really telling you accurately what you already had and making an official solution to the problem instead of hiding it.
Great, just wish that had happened before the contract was signed. Not much anyone can do about it either way is there?
History. Comcast has increased their bandwidth every year.
I'm so glad you live in an area where there has been progress, now only if it was like that everywhere. It doesn't even mean they have increased their bandwidth, maybe they are just more willing to oversell. Also, these things we're talking about weren't issues years ago, and the issues are going to get worse. People are going to want to use the internet for more things, like they are using it for more things than they were years ago.
No, you are ignoring my reasoning and resorting to ad hominem attacks. It comes down to this: either accept throttling and secret ISP code that drops packets -- or accept a cap. Your choice. I'll take the cap. It's fair, measurable, and network neutral. The only people who lose-out with the caps is the pirates running FTP sites all day.
You didn't bring up this reasoning at all in your previous posts, so I couldn't have ignored it. These are two different issues you are bringing up. ISPs throttling customers and dropping packets is bad ALSO. I don't want to accept the lesser of two evils, I don't want either one of them! Do you believe they have all of sudden stopped throttling customers and dropping packets? I sure don't. Now it seems it's going to get worst because they have they seemed to have teamed up with the RIAA. Not only this, but ISPs, like Comcast, also control other, competing, "entertainment" sources. There is a conflict of interest which will most likely also result in the throttling of connections.
P.S. As you pointed out, the government only paid for broadband at schools. The government did not pay anyone to give you broadband at your home. The old "the ISPs got government money, so I want infinite bandwidth and no caps" argument isn't reality.
I never said infinite bandwidth or even no caps, really. I just want what many other countries citizens have. We'll see what happens with the current bailout. If the ISPs aren't capable of doing these things themselves, and the free market isn't going to make them, then the government may need to step in to regulate. It's that or we keep playing these blame games and trying to divide up a shrinking bandwidth pool.
It became commercialized, and not only did ISPs get money from the government to help connect public schools, they were also given rights to lay the fiber and as you say the monopoly for the low low. You mentioned yourself that it costs hundreds of thousands for a business to get fiber layed for them . Thats prob hundreds of yards of fiber. Imagine a few of those going across the US and even to other countries.
I misspoke there, fiber didn't really start getting put down until the late 90's. Many of the ISPs that laid the fiber became bankrupt along with.coms that also owned fiber, to the benefit of our current ISPs. I also forgot to mention that ISPs are on the begging list for a fat gov bailout of 9 billion too...
Except that what they originally offered is physically impossible.
Indeed, the ISPs oversold.
So I'm willing to accept a reasonable compromise.
Of course! But the customer got no say in the "compromise", they got reduced service for the same costs.
Not sure what you want a citation on. So let me clarify: Home users don't use bandwidth constantly. Businesses do.
Citation doesn't mean that I want you to simply repeat yourself. I want to know why you assume that. I've certainly never heard of that. In my experience, they may not use the bandwidth constantly, but they do use their bandwidth when they aren't physically at the computer. This is also beginning to change with more people using IP phones, which is also degraded by poor ISP service. Business broadband doesn't mean you use teh internets all of the time, it means you are/guaranteed/ to get the agreed upon bandwidth.
Didn't the article say that the 60MBps tier has no cap? Seems like a pretty good option to me.
Sure that's what the article said, I'm referring to the current state of broadband around the US though. As it stands now, I can't even get a quarter of that and Comcast (the ISP monopoly in my area) doesn't offer one with no limit.
Overall, you seem to be assuming that 15Mbps with no caps is possible in a residential setting. If that was the case, then I would agree with you on most of these points. Since it is not possible (at least, not now) reasonable caps make sense. Those caps should increase as new bandwidth is rolled out. There is no reason to assume that won't happen, since bandwidth has gone up over the years - so the caps should too.
Assuming? Read the news; there are many countries out there (as I said) that already get so much more. You seem to assume that in the years to come ISPs will all of a sudden become generous. What are you basing that assumption on? They have a monopoly and are potentially abusing that monopoly. The problem is, consumers can't "vote with their wallets" because they have no other ISP to go to.
Also, I don't think that cable companies got money from the government. Maybe telephone companies did, I dunno. I don't think so though -- they don't get public funds -- they just get the monopoly privileges to lay the cables.
Not only was the whole idea and early implementation straight from the US government, they also helped fund big Universities that became interconnected. The whole internet was originally for non-commercial use. It became commercialized, and not only did ISPs get money from the government to help connect public schools, they were also given rights to lay the fiber and as you say the monopoly for the low low. You mentioned yourself that it costs hundreds of thousands for a business to get fiber layed for them . Thats prob hundreds of yards of fiber. Imagine a few of those going across the US and even to other countries.
Lastly, I'm flattered I now know enough about telecom that you think I work for an ISP. If you really want to know my resume, I'm not hard to find on the 'nets.
Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. You seemed almost pleased to have caps, with no real obvious advantage to yourself. The only thing I can conclude is that maybe you profited by it some other way.*shrugs*
The fact of the matter is, you asked for it, you got it
This reminds me of signs I used to see all over my university campus saying, "You demanded more used books!" No body wanted used books, they wanted books cheaper and used books were typically the way to do that. I'll go along with your point that maybe some people did want some type of limit (although I don't think that is true, and I'm not sure where you got that). But, they wanted limits with different pricing options to get what is best for them. What they got were limits that were best for the ISPs, very much like how the students at my uni got used books that were best for the uni book store (which had typically gone through 6 hands and were only 10s of dollars cheaper than their brand-new counterpart).
Anyone who needs more than that shouldn't expect to be paying what their neighbors are.
Totally agree, where are those options? I can pay ~$50 a month and then the next tier up we're talking thousands of dollars for business-class broadband...
For what it's worth, I'm paying over $100 for 1mb SDSL. If I were to top it out 24 hours a day and never reboot I could possibly get to 250gb.
I empathize with your situation. So, since your situation sucks, everyone else' situation should suck the same? What about improving everyone's situation?
You're glad you're getting less from your ISP even though you're paying them the same amount? Very suspicious.
The #1 thing I want is for the terms of service to state the service, not promise infinite speeds and infinite bandwidth.
Everybody would; that's the problem. Comcast et al have promised "unlimited" and that's what everyone expects. I'm kind of surprised that you would take a cap as apposed to Comcast providing what they originally offered. Or, Comcast could also re-evaluate the way they have been selling and offer a choice to their existing customers. Instead they simply change the contract. All within their rights, but I'm still shocked you're satisfied by that.
The caps they put in place are completely reasonable.
For you. For now.
That metric would only be relevant if you were using bandwidth constantly. Since home users do not do so, then this complaint is moot.
What? Citation needed. Have you seen the difference between business/residential rates for internet? I think if you did, you would stop considering this as a possibility for any home users. There needs to be a tier in-between that is reasonable.
If you have a few hundred thousand dollars, they will happily run a line to your house, and provide you with $5 per megabit/sec service.
Wow, so you do seem to know the difference. So you are totally unreasonable then. Great.
The government is to blame for the monopoly situation. So I place my anger there. The telecoms are actually starting to come around (hence the bandwidth caps).
This is what really gets me about your post, and why I think you probably work for some ISP. The government is to blame for giving them money to set up an infrastructure? Aww poor monopoly, you should be allowed to abuse it! As John Stossel would say, "Give me a break!"
If you don't work for a ISP, it's important that you understand that it's reasonable for the ISPs to use all of the money that has been given to them thus far and upgrade their infrastructure. Many countries are waay far ahead of us now as it relates to residential broadband. But instead of upgrading their infrastructure, they are choosing to spend money looking for ways to limit their customers. I don't know why you wouldn't want to join most other countries with their 100+Mbps broadband connections, but this is definitely putting up road blocks to us getting there. Please look a few years into the future and see the potential that such fat connections would have for the internet and see how ISPs are getting in the way of that. You may not need these fat connections now, but as people get them there will be more services that can saturate them.
Open source, when used to mean GPL style OSS, means that it will be free, like it or not. You are perfectly welcome to charge for it, however the first person who buys it can redistribute it freely. Thus you can't make money selling software.
What if that first person who buys it pays for the development of the whole product? For instance, if a company outsourced some app they needed, but instead of them paying the outsourcing company to support it, they simply bought the rights to the source and open sourced it (maybe the outsourcing company even has this in their terms). They could support the app themselves, but also open source it to possibly take away some of the support costs. You can even consider in-house open-sourced apps as the above scenario, but instead of paying a lump sum, they payed the developers to create it. That is different than simply supporting it, or even supporting it for other people. Companies like Nokia have done just this with the apps they payed developers to create for maemo (they had both in-house and outsourced dev teams).
The product is still being sold, but to a company/group, not the the end-user.
You guys should check out this NumberFox firefox extension. I think there are others with similar functionality. Konqueror has had something similar for the longest time enabled by default.
If you don't like it, go to another ISP have has bigger transit connections.
You keep saying this. Why do you assume that most people even have the option to switch and even switch to an ISP with "bigger transit connections"? I live north of Atlanta, GA and I have two options: Bellsouth DSL and Comcast cable. The highest plan I can get with DSL is 1.5Mbps, Cable 12Mbps. Oh ya, I can also choose to get a phoneline with Bellsouth and pay some third party for DSL over Bellsouth's lines (none of the 3rd parties will do naked/dry DSL). Guess which one I go with.
Not only this, but you somehow expect other companies to decide to lay down some expensive fiber of their own to compete with these ISPs, when the current ISPs had taxpayer money to help them. This is why we, the people, should be able to have a say in this or the invisible hand of the market is gonna bitch slap us all. The ISPs need to upgrade their stuff, with the money that we are all giving them, and stop wasting money on finding out solutions on throttling people. It's possible, other countries have 100Mbps+ connections for their citizens.
I'm saying yanking the battery doesn't always work
It's physically impossible for it not to work, do you understand that? The kind of memory used to keep those settings is volatile, which means it needs a power source in order to keep its contents. Your friend, if he even exists, needed to remove the laptops battery, the power cord, and the battery that is on the mobo. No power.
You can in fact restrict optical disc booting, target disk mode, and single user mode, etc. In fact the password also restricts resetting pram. It isn't selective so far as i can see, you cant ONLY restrict certain things making it less useful for situations like a school that wishes to simply lock down a machine but still allow use.
Yes, the password restricts resetting pram by using the keyboard at boot. I'm talking about resetting by removing all power. Notice how Apple doesn't mention this on the page you linked to.
You weren't trying to be polite at all, you responded to my original 3 sentence post with an attempt to fight about shit i never even said, and don't care about. You'd like to have a fight with someone about macs vs. pcs, but you're better off looking elsewhere.
Here is a copy of your post:
On a PC it might be futile to set passwords and try to prevent reinstallation, but a macbook is a bit different, they can't just be reset by hitting a switch like most PCs.
I'm saying this statement is wrong, that is what this is about. I'm not even fighting macs vs pcs, I don't even know where you got that from. I'm actually saying the opposite, I'm saying they're the same thing at the level we're talking about.
And yes, I take/. posts seriously. You're passing off information that simply is not correct and you're also making Mac users look ignorant and smug. If you just want to talk out of your ass and have a circle jerk with your posts, please, let me redirect you. Thanks.
You know what smug means right? If i come off that way its because you wanted to read it that way.
Sure.
*I'm* the smug one? Perhaps you are just waiting to have that argument with some Apple jackass, but i made no such arguments about Macs being technically superior or super-secure, i simple said they are a bit more secure than regular PCs, where yes, the CMOS jumper can usually wipe the firmware password.
You made no arguments that Macs are technically superior but you said they were a "bit more secure". I guess you see a difference there.
I'm well aware of the difference and similarities between macs and pcs, and there are in fact differences, especially talking about the firmware and the firmware password.
No, really, there isn't. Every modern mobo can have a "firmware password". In every modern mobo, that firmware password is kept in volatile memory that can be erased by removing the mobos backup battery.
As i already pointed out, Macbooks are similar to many PC laptops in that there isn't a simple way to yank the battery or hit a switch and reset the password, on PC laptops you can usually get a code from the OEM to reset it, Apple doesn't seem to do that, you have to send them the machine.
Why do you think there isn't a simple way to yank the battery? Do you ever wonder why Apple "doesn't seem to do that"? Maybe it's because they want their users living in blind ignorance and they simply do what I am saying when you send it to them.
Yes, i think, i typed from memory, this isn't a fucking research project.
You see, this is what I'm getting at here. You make these statements like you are some type of authority on computer hardware, yet you don't know what you're talking about and can't be bothered to actually learn what you are talking about. Hmm, maybe it's the aforementioned smugness getting in the way.
I'm well aware of single user mode, but single user mode can be restricted by the firmware. We aren't talking about root btw, we're talking about preventing the system from booting to any disc or partition but the one the stock OS was installed on, which as i pointed out yesterday can probably be circumvented by taking the drive out.
I'm sorry you ignored my last post and still think that single user mode can be restricted by the firmware. I fully understand you weren't originally talking about root. But guess what, if you have root, you have all of the above.
I tried to be somewhat polite in my first post, because it seemed like you were truly ignorant and maybe want to know how it really works. Now it seems you are ignorant and don't really care about learning these things. It's fine if you're ignorant and don't really care about learning how you're ignorant, but really, why even bother posting? When I first responded I was thinking, hmm, maybe this kid is right, maybe he knows something about Macs and what I know is wrong. But instead of correcting me on where I might have been wrong, you simply replied back with the same drivel from your first post.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really inspiring and stuff, but, like all analogies, leaves some things out. This is why analogies are a tool for explaining things, not for coming to some logical conclusion (there is no Proof by Analogy in discrete math). Many of the OSI crowd just really don't care how close the dreaded "proprietary software" comes to competing with them, they just want to do their thing the best way they know how. Wiping out proprietary software is the goal of the FSF guys, it's a side effect for the OSI guys.
/is/ on /your/ side.
And what is all of this "wasted energy" nonsense? How is having ideological discussions wasted energy? These users of software, for the most part, don't really care what their software is licensed under. This is something that's really only discussed by the developers of software (and possibly their employers), and so maybe if the OSI and FSF were to join forces to get the proprietary software devs, this might make sense. But I don't see discussion of ideologies as something that hampers the use of F/OSS.
On top of this, I see most of the animosity from the FSF side; they are the ones who are all hung up on ideology and get angry when people *gasp* even explain how to install proprietary software. I know, it's not fair to equate RMS' ideology with that of the entire FSF organization, but he
The OSI _and_ the FSF.
I'm not sure that's possible for anyone at this point.
Good riddance. I'm glad the OSI did what they did, and I'm glad because it allows the pragmatic OSS people to be disassociated with the FSF while still with them in some underlying principles. Now, I'm grateful for what the FSF has done, but they will usually stick to their ideals when it's impractical. I simply want people to use my code, and if they redistribute it, then they should give their changes back to me. That's all I want, not some dream about people using free software everywhere (although I have no problem with that either).
This is the web, it is difficult, as the newspapers are seeing, to charge your users directly. It is also hard to convince advertisers to fork over the dough that the newspapers need to sustain themselves. Instead, they need to start looking at ways of monetizing people's viewing patterns, much like google has done.
/local/ paper right?). Instead they get AP wire stories and other information they can get elsewhere.
You see that idea? I prob came up with it on the shitter, I wasn't even paid to think about it. That's what's so sad, these newspaper fat cats aren't thinking outside of their old paper media; they are just trying to brute force the money out of people the way they have always been doing.
But they don't get it, and it's painfully obvious. It's like they have never even used the web before. I know, as a web user (and in this scenario, one that doesn't use adblock), if I visit a website and all of a sudden have nothing but a giant ad on my screen, or something following my cursor, I'm just going to leave or, at the very least, am going to be irritated. Check it out, go to the ajc and turn off your ad block. Ya... Seriously, wtf were they thinking? Now, go have a looksie at ajcexchange, their new craigslist knock-off. What I find hilarious is that it's free to post a classified on their site, but if you want the premium listing, the one that shows up in the paper that no one is getting anymore (they have stopped delivering in many places in GA), they charge you. They don't get it.
As if that wasn't the end of their worries, they also have content issues. Many people want local news and in-depth coverage about some scam that is going on (that's why they're reading the
Not that I think you're lying, I've always found your posts to be insightful which is why I'm a fan, but do you have a link where I can read more about this? My google-fu is failing me.
It's worse. Members of AP (like the company I work for) actually compile all of their content and send it to Google,Yahoo, etc. themselves... The real complaint is that Google is supposedly going to start putting their own ads on Google News, and AP wants a piece of the action. Fair? I don't think so. In the current setup, AP members are the ones making the money; Google News drives traffic to their sites, which have ads (a LOT of them, actually a sickening amount of them, like I have flashbacks to geocities websites when I have to work on them).
/gets/ the internet.
It seems to me they need Google more than Google et al needs them, considering, you know, that Google is the one who
Yes, please go suck more ass (wtf?).
Ya, that's it, you go and show everyone by not using Linux... Oh noes, please we needs you! We need the bitching about impossible problems. Config files? Are you fucking kidding?
Entertaining! Read the news, entire countries are using Linux not to mention huge enterprises throughout the world. Oh noes! Don't call me a shit-spewing retard monkey, guy on the internet! pleease! You still don't get it, your critique is fucking impossible, and it amounts to nothing but bitching, and bitching at the wrong people no less. Man, this is really helpful. I'm going to talk to my boss tomorrow and see if he can hire a guy like you to sit on the sidelines and bitch bitch bitch. If he says we want insightful critiques, I'll tell him, "we're living in the real world bro, there's only crybabies der der der". Oh no, the barrier to entry involves me spending $20 on hardware that works!
I also think it's "double funny" (another wtf?), that you are stereotyping EVERY linux user because you couldn't get your POS capture card to work. Seriously man, I'll send you the tens of dollars to get working hardware. Wait, nevermind, I think it would be hilarious if you stick to your commitment of never using Linux again. Good luck, hope you enjoy Windows 7 (that costs more than it would to get a video capture card)! Oh you're gonna stick with XP, even funnier! We're livin in the REAL WORLD bro! lol...
I hope you don't expect anyone to fix your problems then.
Because those two points are not very compatible: wanting others to fix your problems but not doing anything about them yourselves.
That's great if that's your goal for Linux, it really is. That's great if it's Ubuntu's goal or whatever. But OSS devs do it for a large variety of reasons, and many really don't care if it's ready for average joe. But look at this from a developer's perspective. This is a community effort. We really do appreciate feedback, really. But yours goes a little farther than just feedback, almost demanding, and appearing to have some sort of deserving attitude. The OSS developers are trying, and you're sitting there telling them it's just not good enough, but then you add additional taunting like "linux will never be ready for the desktop". And then "threaten" to stick with Windows. It can be offensive, especially when a developer is defending his pet project. Linux needs constructive insightful critics, not crybabies.
/begging/ for specs from HM's to make good drivers themselves, when really, this is something the HMs should be addressing. And we understand your point that we need to get over the hump in order to get HM's attention. But wouldn't you find it a little bit aggrevating as a developer to be trying very hard to get something accomplished when you have someone on the sidelines taunting you and blaming you for their problems? I can only imagine if my boss did that at work, and I'm getting paid in that case. Seriously, if you were working at some charity, and some homeless person came up to you and told you you were doing absolutely shit work wouldn't you just say, "eh, go fuck yourself", and go contribute to something where you will be appreciated? OSS devs appreciate each other prob more than anyone else, that is why Linux is sometimes seen as for devs by devs.
Now, you seem to understand the problem, but not its implications. Hardware support, in some situations, is better in Windows than Linux (I find this to be less and less true at a FAST rate). Windows does not deserve credit for the drivers provided by the hardware manufacturers (HM). If some piece of hardware is not working in Linux, this is a hardware manufacturer problem. Linux devs are
Not only this, but non-dev and non-contributing users are only good for adding a number to a count that needs to be so high in order to get HM support. It's an invisible bar; there isn't some set goal when this will happen. You aren't really bringing alot to the table, right? Why should a dev struggle so hard to get you to stay, when they can try to get a contributor to stay?
I guess what I'm trying to say is, no, it's really not our problem, it's your problem and you're trying to find someone to blame. Where as I would buy hardware that's supported by Linux, you will buy anything and then not even blame the manufacturer you bought it from! From a perspective of a trying to get more hardware support for linux, you're actually prob hurting more than helping because you aren't pushing HMs to release drivers, or specs, for Linux. Try installing Winders from scratch and see all the hardware of yours that it detects, it's hilarious. It's not our problem, because we don't have your problems, because we made wise buying decisions. Uh dude, you're trying to get a 10 year old card that prob costs less than $20 to work, from a notoriously unsporting manufacturer. And let me tell you, if I did have a hardware issue, I would work to fix it. At the very least I would not sit and bitch about how linux won't be ready for the desktop. That's not helping, trust me.
Aw, you're /such/ a victim. "All I wanted to do was bitch about my problems to try to force someone who doesn't care to fix it for me". You are the one making the offense, you a
meh, tar intarweb is unreadable today
*shudder*
There is more to this situation than simply buying or not buying. You can think of it simplistically as a black and white issue, but it's really not (very few things are). These organizations that exist on copyrighted works will use the money you give them to reduce your rights. They will extend copyright expirations, redefine fair-use, lobby to modify copyright law to benefit themselves, and charge inflated prices(multiple times, since you can't exercise your fair-use rights with DRM). In addition, they work to reduce artists' rights to their own work, which they can do because there are so many artists out there they must basically sell their souls.
You mentioned that a person does harm to others by downloading copyrighted works, can you provide an example of this? Simply downloading something does not have a direct affect on that downloaded content being sold to the person downloading it (because they obviously don't believe it's reasonable to buy the content). Is the harm you mention greater than the harm done to consumer rights, or the rights of the producers of the work? If you choose not to buy copyrighted content, how are your rights represented? There is this constant pushing by these organizations to change copyright law to benefit them against the consumer. There are also things, like DRM, that are used by these organizations to limit your fair-use rights. In many cases, it isn't possible for the consumer to "vote with their wallets" and by the non-DRM version.
There is also the bigger picture, like our culture and society. Do we really want our culture to be locked up by these organizations? Should a person not participate in our culture just because they feel the prices charged aren't reasonable? Should a producer (I use the term producer for the original content creator) not be able to contribute to our culture because they don't want to sell out to an organization? There are options the consumer and producer can take, which are even more obvious with the internet becoming more mainstream, but are these organizations hampering the development of these "independent" artists? Are these organizations hampering the development of our culture? I would say yes, in some ways, because these large industries have a lot of control over traditional outlets. They are trying to get control of the internet outlet. In a few countries they get royalties for things like blank CD sales. They really want to start a tax that everyone has to pay, blaming loss of sales on internet piracy. Oh, you thought you were "voting with you wallet" by not buying? Sorry consumer, you are a now a statistic under the "sales lost to piracy" column, and the industry will use that statistic to continue to take away your rights and try to get you to pay for something you were never consuming/pirating in the first place.
Your defense seems to rely on the fact that it's illegal to "steal" these copyrighted works. What about someone who thinks that there shouldn't be such a thing as copyright? Or a person who doesn't believe in the industries' definition of copyright? Or a person who doesn't want to contribute to the industry changing copyright? These are viewpoints that aren't represented by simply not buying the copyrighted material. Your suggestion to them is to simply not buy it. That's a solution because there are independent producers in all of these industries. However, it would have been nice if the original copyright law was still in place where they would also be able to consume copyrighted works from long dead or retired p
Non-profit doesn't mean they can't make money.
What do you think happened during the American Revolution? Do you think we went to Britain and attacked them or something? All we did was make our own government and defend ourselves, we didn't shoot first. So, your example actually works against you, because Britain was the one who used violence, and you see how that worked out.
I could agree with you here, but for different reasons. I mean, you are talking about spilling blood over some silly songs, right?
Yikes! The RIAA is doing a perfectly fine job hanging themselves as it is, let's just keep providing the rope.
This is not ok with me either, and this doesn't make it right.
Great, just wish that had happened before the contract was signed. Not much anyone can do about it either way is there?
I'm so glad you live in an area where there has been progress, now only if it was like that everywhere. It doesn't even mean they have increased their bandwidth, maybe they are just more willing to oversell. Also, these things we're talking about weren't issues years ago, and the issues are going to get worse. People are going to want to use the internet for more things, like they are using it for more things than they were years ago.
You didn't bring up this reasoning at all in your previous posts, so I couldn't have ignored it. These are two different issues you are bringing up. ISPs throttling customers and dropping packets is bad ALSO. I don't want to accept the lesser of two evils, I don't want either one of them! Do you believe they have all of sudden stopped throttling customers and dropping packets? I sure don't. Now it seems it's going to get worst because they have they seemed to have teamed up with the RIAA. Not only this, but ISPs, like Comcast, also control other, competing, "entertainment" sources. There is a conflict of interest which will most likely also result in the throttling of connections.
I never said infinite bandwidth or even no caps, really. I just want what many other countries citizens have. We'll see what happens with the current bailout. If the ISPs aren't capable of doing these things themselves, and the free market isn't going to make them, then the government may need to step in to regulate. It's that or we keep playing these blame games and trying to divide up a shrinking bandwidth pool.
I misspoke there, fiber didn't really start getting put down until the late 90's. Many of the ISPs that laid the fiber became bankrupt along with .coms that also owned fiber, to the benefit of our current ISPs. I also forgot to mention that ISPs are on the begging list for a fat gov bailout of 9 billion too...
Indeed, the ISPs oversold.
Of course! But the customer got no say in the "compromise", they got reduced service for the same costs.
Citation doesn't mean that I want you to simply repeat yourself. I want to know why you assume that. I've certainly never heard of that. In my experience, they may not use the bandwidth constantly, but they do use their bandwidth when they aren't physically at the computer. This is also beginning to change with more people using IP phones, which is also degraded by poor ISP service. Business broadband doesn't mean you use teh internets all of the time, it means you are /guaranteed/ to get the agreed upon bandwidth.
Sure that's what the article said, I'm referring to the current state of broadband around the US though. As it stands now, I can't even get a quarter of that and Comcast (the ISP monopoly in my area) doesn't offer one with no limit.
Assuming? Read the news; there are many countries out there (as I said) that already get so much more. You seem to assume that in the years to come ISPs will all of a sudden become generous. What are you basing that assumption on? They have a monopoly and are potentially abusing that monopoly. The problem is, consumers can't "vote with their wallets" because they have no other ISP to go to.
Not only was the whole idea and early implementation straight from the US government, they also helped fund big Universities that became interconnected. The whole internet was originally for non-commercial use. It became commercialized, and not only did ISPs get money from the government to help connect public schools, they were also given rights to lay the fiber and as you say the monopoly for the low low. You mentioned yourself that it costs hundreds of thousands for a business to get fiber layed for them . Thats prob hundreds of yards of fiber. Imagine a few of those going across the US and even to other countries.
Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. You seemed almost pleased to have caps, with no real obvious advantage to yourself. The only thing I can conclude is that maybe you profited by it some other way.*shrugs*
This reminds me of signs I used to see all over my university campus saying, "You demanded more used books!" No body wanted used books, they wanted books cheaper and used books were typically the way to do that. I'll go along with your point that maybe some people did want some type of limit (although I don't think that is true, and I'm not sure where you got that). But, they wanted limits with different pricing options to get what is best for them. What they got were limits that were best for the ISPs, very much like how the students at my uni got used books that were best for the uni book store (which had typically gone through 6 hands and were only 10s of dollars cheaper than their brand-new counterpart).
Totally agree, where are those options? I can pay ~$50 a month and then the next tier up we're talking thousands of dollars for business-class broadband...
You're glad you're getting less from your ISP even though you're paying them the same amount? Very suspicious.
Everybody would; that's the problem. Comcast et al have promised "unlimited" and that's what everyone expects. I'm kind of surprised that you would take a cap as apposed to Comcast providing what they originally offered. Or, Comcast could also re-evaluate the way they have been selling and offer a choice to their existing customers. Instead they simply change the contract. All within their rights, but I'm still shocked you're satisfied by that.
For you. For now.
What? Citation needed. Have you seen the difference between business/residential rates for internet? I think if you did, you would stop considering this as a possibility for any home users. There needs to be a tier in-between that is reasonable.
Wow, so you do seem to know the difference. So you are totally unreasonable then. Great.
This is what really gets me about your post, and why I think you probably work for some ISP. The government is to blame for giving them money to set up an infrastructure? Aww poor monopoly, you should be allowed to abuse it! As John Stossel would say, "Give me a break!"
If you don't work for a ISP, it's important that you understand that it's reasonable for the ISPs to use all of the money that has been given to them thus far and upgrade their infrastructure. Many countries are waay far ahead of us now as it relates to residential broadband. But instead of upgrading their infrastructure, they are choosing to spend money looking for ways to limit their customers. I don't know why you wouldn't want to join most other countries with their 100+Mbps broadband connections, but this is definitely putting up road blocks to us getting there. Please look a few years into the future and see the potential that such fat connections would have for the internet and see how ISPs are getting in the way of that. You may not need these fat connections now, but as people get them there will be more services that can saturate them.
What if that first person who buys it pays for the development of the whole product? For instance, if a company outsourced some app they needed, but instead of them paying the outsourcing company to support it, they simply bought the rights to the source and open sourced it (maybe the outsourcing company even has this in their terms). They could support the app themselves, but also open source it to possibly take away some of the support costs. You can even consider in-house open-sourced apps as the above scenario, but instead of paying a lump sum, they payed the developers to create it. That is different than simply supporting it, or even supporting it for other people. Companies like Nokia have done just this with the apps they payed developers to create for maemo (they had both in-house and outsourced dev teams).
The product is still being sold, but to a company/group, not the the end-user.
Why would they have to buy it? They simply have to compile the sources that RH must give away (without the RH trademarks).
You guys should check out this NumberFox firefox extension. I think there are others with similar functionality. Konqueror has had something similar for the longest time enabled by default.
You keep saying this. Why do you assume that most people even have the option to switch and even switch to an ISP with "bigger transit connections"? I live north of Atlanta, GA and I have two options: Bellsouth DSL and Comcast cable. The highest plan I can get with DSL is 1.5Mbps, Cable 12Mbps. Oh ya, I can also choose to get a phoneline with Bellsouth and pay some third party for DSL over Bellsouth's lines (none of the 3rd parties will do naked/dry DSL). Guess which one I go with.
Not only this, but you somehow expect other companies to decide to lay down some expensive fiber of their own to compete with these ISPs, when the current ISPs had taxpayer money to help them. This is why we, the people, should be able to have a say in this or the invisible hand of the market is gonna bitch slap us all. The ISPs need to upgrade their stuff, with the money that we are all giving them, and stop wasting money on finding out solutions on throttling people. It's possible, other countries have 100Mbps+ connections for their citizens.
It's physically impossible for it not to work, do you understand that? The kind of memory used to keep those settings is volatile, which means it needs a power source in order to keep its contents. Your friend, if he even exists, needed to remove the laptops battery, the power cord, and the battery that is on the mobo. No power.
Yes, the password restricts resetting pram by using the keyboard at boot. I'm talking about resetting by removing all power. Notice how Apple doesn't mention this on the page you linked to.
Here is a copy of your post:
I'm saying this statement is wrong, that is what this is about. I'm not even fighting macs vs pcs, I don't even know where you got that from. I'm actually saying the opposite, I'm saying they're the same thing at the level we're talking about.
/. posts seriously. You're passing off information that simply is not correct and you're also making Mac users look ignorant and smug. If you just want to talk out of your ass and have a circle jerk with your posts, please, let me redirect you. Thanks.
And yes, I take
Sure.
You made no arguments that Macs are technically superior but you said they were a "bit more secure". I guess you see a difference there.
No, really, there isn't. Every modern mobo can have a "firmware password". In every modern mobo, that firmware password is kept in volatile memory that can be erased by removing the mobos backup battery.
Why do you think there isn't a simple way to yank the battery? Do you ever wonder why Apple "doesn't seem to do that"? Maybe it's because they want their users living in blind ignorance and they simply do what I am saying when you send it to them.
You see, this is what I'm getting at here. You make these statements like you are some type of authority on computer hardware, yet you don't know what you're talking about and can't be bothered to actually learn what you are talking about. Hmm, maybe it's the aforementioned smugness getting in the way.
I'm sorry you ignored my last post and still think that single user mode can be restricted by the firmware. I fully understand you weren't originally talking about root. But guess what, if you have root, you have all of the above.
I tried to be somewhat polite in my first post, because it seemed like you were truly ignorant and maybe want to know how it really works. Now it seems you are ignorant and don't really care about learning these things. It's fine if you're ignorant and don't really care about learning how you're ignorant, but really, why even bother posting? When I first responded I was thinking, hmm, maybe this kid is right, maybe he knows something about Macs and what I know is wrong. But instead of correcting me on where I might have been wrong, you simply replied back with the same drivel from your first post.