If you upgrade that rarely, I'd suggest you take a look at CentOS. CentOS 4 will be a far smaller leap (RHEL4 is close to FC3/FC4), and you'd be on a maintained platform again.
Or if he waited that long, why not wait for CentOS 5 (based on FC6), which is due out 2-3 months after RHEL5, which is due out before the end of February.
Microsoft has retracted their recent controversial patent application.
Only to apply for another (sorry, only in Swedish). According to the article, Microsoft has applied for a patent for modular operating system upgrades, which sound quite similar to the various package management schemes (Yum, Apt, etc) used in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
But suppose DRM was everywhere. How does this affect their freedom to distribute their stuff unencumbered with DRM? It won't.
Sorry, but you are just plain wrong. Exhibit A is the Zune. Any song transmitted to another Zune using the wireless connectivity will be wrapped in a DRM container that only allows a maximum of three playbacks. It will also expire the song after three days, regardless of whether it has been played at all. This not only happens to already DRM-restricted songs, but also to unrestricted content that you produced yourself or is distributed under e.g. a Creative Commons license. Some CC licenses do not allow any additional restrictions being applied to the content, but the Zune does this anyway, effectively violating the CC license.
DRM is about limiting the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
No, that's just the excuse. In fact, DRM does not stop the content from being pirated in any way, it ends up on the file-sharing networks anyway. DRM only works to inconvenience (penalize?) the paying customer for playing by the rules. It is mostly a way for the content producers to be able to force the customer into buying the same content multiple times if they want to keep enjoying their content. "Want to continue listening to your music on that damaged disc/HDD/etc? You can buy it here. Want a copy for your car stereo? You can buy it here. Want a copy for your cell phone? You can buy it here". Disabling format shifting is the key to this continued revenue stream.
I would be breaking the law if I were to use these cracks so I could continue using the media I've purchased.
Not where I live (Sweden). Circumventing technical protection measures (a.k.a. DRM) is illegal, except for the case where you want to use content that you acquired legally. In other words, circumventing DRM to share content on The Pirate Bay is illegal, but doing the same to enjoy your content in Linux is perfectly legal.
DRM is just software to enforce an agreement between producer of content and consumer. The agreement ensures both sides get a fair deal.
No, it ensures that you can only do what the producer wants. An agreement that ensures that both sides get a fair deal require negotiations. In the case of content, it is "Either accept our terms, or buzz off".
You think you should have stuff for free because copying can be done free?
This is really orthogonal to the discussion, since DRM by no means stops piracy. The content will find its way onto the file-sharing networks anyway. DRM is only an inconvenience to the paying customer.
Got legitimate reasons for copying content eg backup or to change format? You can't ask a painter to do run up a backup at no extra cost, or a cameo version you can admire "on the go".
Creating a backup of a painting takes time for the painter, and it is therefore fine for him to request money for it. Creating a backup copy of a music track, a movie or a computer program does not hurt the producer in any way (except that they may not be able to sell the same product to you more than once), making the situation quite different.
You don't need to do these things and there's no automatic right - they have to be negotiated as part of the deal.
You don't strictly need to do it, but it is a good insurance against media degradation. And I'm sorry, but backup copies are allowed through law in several countries, so there is an automatic right. This right cannot be signed away by license agreements.
But I don't live in the United States, where other laws may apply. I hope you enjoy paying through your nose again and again for the same content.
But I'll continue buying good DRM media - because I believe in reasonable precautions against piracy
DRM doesn't affect piracy, it only affects the paying customer. The content ends up on The Pirate Bay and the other file-sharing networks anyway. This realization is even coming to the music industry. Recently, CDON.com, a large Swedish online music store, set up a special section selling unprotected MP3 files, citing customer demand. The section is even prominently advertised on the download section main page.
DRM isn't inherantly anti-consumer as the success of the iTunes music store seems to show
Oh it is anti-consumer, the consumers just haven't realized this yet. When those same consumers try to do things not allowed by the "FairPlay" restrictions, they will feel the DRM. This does not mean that they will try to pirate their content, they could try to play it on non-iPod portable music players, or play it in other operating systems than Windows and Mac OS.
The more bad press DRM gets, the more chance the average consumer will reject it.
I also suggest good press for those that do the right thing, such as sell MP3 files without DRM. See my last post, about the Swedish mainstream online music store CDON.com that recently started selling unprotected MP3 files, citing customer demand for unprotected content, and noticing that DRM does not stop the music from ending up on The Pirate Bay, only making DRM an inconvenience for paying customers.
Personally, I think the CDON.com move is great. They have shown that they have understood that DRM does not stop the piracy, and that it only is a burden on those that actually buy their content. I think that it's almost worth a story itself.
Finally, I may be able to start buying music online. I just refuse to buy DRM-restricted content with al the annoyances it brings, such as incompatibility with different players. I have an iPod now, but nothing says that I will have an iPod for the rest of my life, so iTunes is out of question. All shops selling (restricted) WMA music is also out of question. No, MP3 is the way to go, as it is playable virtually everywhere.
No? Then what is this? The answer is that it is the downloads section of a large Swedish online music store. Recently they created a section for sale of unprotected MP3 files, found by clicking the link titled "Mp3 - DRM-fria filer", which means "Mp3 DRM-free files". This initiative was brought entirely by customer demand for unprotected content.
This clearly shows that you are wrong, and fighting against DRM and achieving the goal is possible.
Way three: Ignore the mainstream media. There are lots of bands giving their stuff away for free on their web sites. Some of them are awesome. Support groups like the Barenaked Ladies who are campaigning against DRM and stupid copyright laws. If you insist on going to blockbuster movies and buying Britney Spears music, you are supporting the RIAA and MPAA, both of which are evil.
Actually, one of the larger Swedish online music stores, CDON.com, has recently set up a section of its website selling unprotected MP3 files, and not only from unknown artists, several mainstream ones are available too. This happened because of customer demand of DRM-free music. Note that they don't sell MP3 versions of RIAA-controlled (american, that is) music yet, but they claim that this might happen in just a few months.
I can just say that I really appreciate this initiative.
comments like this really piss me off. How the hell do you apt-get install anything without network access?
Probably because few computers come with wlan but no wired ethernet connection. And I hear much fewer problems getting wired ethernet interfaces to work than wireless interfaces.
Then I suggest that you continue using the Microsoft products that you enjoy so much. Nobody is going to force you to switch to Linux, and since you demand that Linux becomes Windows for you to switch, then stay with Windows, since you like it so much.
If you, on the other hand, had been inconvenienced enough by the "shitty software ms produces", you might consider trying and learning a new operating system as a way to solve your problems. Either you stay in Windows and continue to use the "cruddy software", or you accept that you might have to learn a few things to set up and use Linux efficiently. You have obviously chosen to stay with the "cruddy software" rather than making an effort to learn a few new things and solve your problems. That's your choice.
Getting people to run random files from sites with names that suggest that they will trash your OS is not something to be encouraged.
You should be glad that the domain name suggests what will happen to Windows. Malware does not advertise as such.:) So I'd rather say that running random files from the internet is not something that should be encouraged, regardless of domain name.
... if somebody made an auto-installing version of this, i.e. installed the same way as spyware is?
I don't care about the Slashdot position. Such a thing would be great PR for Microsoft, who can now say what they have wanted to say for years: "See? You can't trust these communist Linux hippies. You can only trust big commercial software companies like Microsoft".
Linux would be set back for years, because people could no longer trust them. Instead of offering their software above, and in the open, they have to sneak it onto people's computers, like a common crimminal.
Sounds like something Microsoft would pay big bucks for.
They may give us 8 cores at 4 Ghz instead.. but that's cheap crap, you can bet the compilers and apps for it will be donkey inefficient. I hope a competitor realizes the importance of instructions per second.
I hope you realize that there are some physical limits and constraints that cannot be broken, or can be broken at a massive disadvantage for other parameters. If I don't remember wrong, power consumption and therefore heat emission is proportional to the square or even the cube (at least nonlinear) of the clock speed at a certain manufacturing process. So you might have a 33 GHz processor (10x speed increase compared to what we have today) but the power consumption would increase from about 100 watts to 10 kilowatts. Not only would this bring a hefty increase in your power bill, imagine the cooling system required and the noise output.
An additional problem would be leakage current, since it increases with clock speed (or I'd rather guess it increases with temperature, which is a function of the clock speed). Too much leakage current, and the processor will cease to function. Leakage means that charges will not only travel along conductors, but jump between nearby conductors. Leakage not only increases with clock speed and temperature, but also with line density on the chip. The smaller the components, the larger the leakage at the same clock speed and temperature output.
I might be wrong in the details, but I think most of it is right.
Assuming, however, that I want to use Linux as a home computer desktop and I'm not a power user, but an average user things change. Like it or not, typical home users use a lot more commercial software. I might install 5 programs over the entire course of my owning the computer, but those might be World of Warcraft, MS Office, AOL-Mozilla, Cisco VPN client, and Monopoly all from commercial vendors. None of them are in the repositories and I need to download them from Websites. Installing and uninstalling is a huge pain, in some cases requiring me to copy random files, but usually just running a stand-alone installer. Since I normally just use the program manager all of this is not normal behavior and what is different for average users is hard for average users. The software is also not kept up to date. Upgrading your system to a new machine may or may not copy the installed commercial applications over and they may or may not work on the new system. Finally, sharing programs becomes hard. You can't e-mail it or IM it to a friend easily, or even copy it to CD and walk it over to them. Most of these are non-issues when it comes to open source software from repositories, although sometimes software in those repositories does go away.
These problems all exist in Windows, except that there the standalone installer and the non-updating of third-party software is the default, so people are quite used to them. I cannot get why people moving from Windows suddenly would think that standalone installers, etc would be a huge pain.
I understand all these viewpoints, but they mean Linux will not be a good choice for home users and Linux on the desktop will be restricted to managed installs within corporations. It also means Windows will probably dominate the landscape for the foreseeable future.
Interesting opinion. You describe problems that both Linux and Windows has, and claims that if not Linux implements a Mac-style installation procedure, Windows will dominate the landscape for the forseable future. That does not really make sense.
Almost everyone knows how to use it, so it's easy to find somebody to help you if you can't figure out something
Only for mundane problems faced by those that are less than proficient in computer use. I have experienced a lot of problems on Windows that nobody I know, or could find, could figure out, such as:
One day, my graphics card driver refused to use acceleration. The only explanation Windows gave me was that "This device cannot start". I tried the card in other computers, and other cards in my computer, and both worked fine. It continued to refuse acceleration for the rest of the computer's life. When I built a new one, the old card worked flawlessly. This was with Windows XP.
Reinstalling Windows on my computer after getting a new harddrive worked fine once, but when I noticed that the drive letters where all in a strange order, with Windows installed on drive J (I have two harddrives), I chose to reinstall with only the new drive connected. This time, even though the drive was reformatted, suddenly it refused to copy a few critical files from the CD. I tried to reinstall probably five times with it always stopping on the same file. When I thought that I would try switching to FAT32 instead of NTFS on my Windows partition, it suddenly worked, even though it also worked with NTFS the first time around.
Conclusion: Windows surely behaves really, really strangely sometimes. And nobody, even knowledgeable Windows admins, could figure out why it was behaving like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Or if he waited that long, why not wait for CentOS 5 (based on FC6), which is due out 2-3 months after RHEL5, which is due out before the end of February.
Only to apply for another (sorry, only in Swedish). According to the article, Microsoft has applied for a patent for modular operating system upgrades, which sound quite similar to the various package management schemes (Yum, Apt, etc) used in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Since I don't hold that opinion, I'd like to know how you reached that conlusion.
I'd say parent is clearly a troll or a flamebait (not exactly sure where the line is drawn between troll and flamebait).
Sorry, but you are just plain wrong. Exhibit A is the Zune. Any song transmitted to another Zune using the wireless connectivity will be wrapped in a DRM container that only allows a maximum of three playbacks. It will also expire the song after three days, regardless of whether it has been played at all. This not only happens to already DRM-restricted songs, but also to unrestricted content that you produced yourself or is distributed under e.g. a Creative Commons license. Some CC licenses do not allow any additional restrictions being applied to the content, but the Zune does this anyway, effectively violating the CC license.
No, that's just the excuse. In fact, DRM does not stop the content from being pirated in any way, it ends up on the file-sharing networks anyway. DRM only works to inconvenience (penalize?) the paying customer for playing by the rules. It is mostly a way for the content producers to be able to force the customer into buying the same content multiple times if they want to keep enjoying their content. "Want to continue listening to your music on that damaged disc/HDD/etc? You can buy it here. Want a copy for your car stereo? You can buy it here. Want a copy for your cell phone? You can buy it here". Disabling format shifting is the key to this continued revenue stream.
Not where I live (Sweden). Circumventing technical protection measures (a.k.a. DRM) is illegal, except for the case where you want to use content that you acquired legally. In other words, circumventing DRM to share content on The Pirate Bay is illegal, but doing the same to enjoy your content in Linux is perfectly legal.
No, it ensures that you can only do what the producer wants. An agreement that ensures that both sides get a fair deal require negotiations. In the case of content, it is "Either accept our terms, or buzz off".
You think you should have stuff for free because copying can be done free?This is really orthogonal to the discussion, since DRM by no means stops piracy. The content will find its way onto the file-sharing networks anyway. DRM is only an inconvenience to the paying customer.
Got legitimate reasons for copying content eg backup or to change format? You can't ask a painter to do run up a backup at no extra cost, or a cameo version you can admire "on the go".Creating a backup of a painting takes time for the painter, and it is therefore fine for him to request money for it. Creating a backup copy of a music track, a movie or a computer program does not hurt the producer in any way (except that they may not be able to sell the same product to you more than once), making the situation quite different.
You don't need to do these things and there's no automatic right - they have to be negotiated as part of the deal.You don't strictly need to do it, but it is a good insurance against media degradation. And I'm sorry, but backup copies are allowed through law in several countries, so there is an automatic right. This right cannot be signed away by license agreements.
But I don't live in the United States, where other laws may apply. I hope you enjoy paying through your nose again and again for the same content.
DRM doesn't affect piracy, it only affects the paying customer. The content ends up on The Pirate Bay and the other file-sharing networks anyway. This realization is even coming to the music industry. Recently, CDON.com, a large Swedish online music store, set up a special section selling unprotected MP3 files, citing customer demand. The section is even prominently advertised on the download section main page.
Oh it is anti-consumer, the consumers just haven't realized this yet. When those same consumers try to do things not allowed by the "FairPlay" restrictions, they will feel the DRM. This does not mean that they will try to pirate their content, they could try to play it on non-iPod portable music players, or play it in other operating systems than Windows and Mac OS.
I also suggest good press for those that do the right thing, such as sell MP3 files without DRM. See my last post, about the Swedish mainstream online music store CDON.com that recently started selling unprotected MP3 files, citing customer demand for unprotected content, and noticing that DRM does not stop the music from ending up on The Pirate Bay, only making DRM an inconvenience for paying customers.
Personally, I think the CDON.com move is great. They have shown that they have understood that DRM does not stop the piracy, and that it only is a burden on those that actually buy their content. I think that it's almost worth a story itself.
Finally, I may be able to start buying music online. I just refuse to buy DRM-restricted content with al the annoyances it brings, such as incompatibility with different players. I have an iPod now, but nothing says that I will have an iPod for the rest of my life, so iTunes is out of question. All shops selling (restricted) WMA music is also out of question. No, MP3 is the way to go, as it is playable virtually everywhere.
DRM can't be fought, sorry.
There aren't enough people who know or care.
No? Then what is this? The answer is that it is the downloads section of a large Swedish online music store. Recently they created a section for sale of unprotected MP3 files, found by clicking the link titled "Mp3 - DRM-fria filer", which means "Mp3 DRM-free files". This initiative was brought entirely by customer demand for unprotected content.
This clearly shows that you are wrong, and fighting against DRM and achieving the goal is possible.
Actually, one of the larger Swedish online music stores, CDON.com, has recently set up a section of its website selling unprotected MP3 files, and not only from unknown artists, several mainstream ones are available too. This happened because of customer demand of DRM-free music. Note that they don't sell MP3 versions of RIAA-controlled (american, that is) music yet, but they claim that this might happen in just a few months.
I can just say that I really appreciate this initiative.
Probably because few computers come with wlan but no wired ethernet connection. And I hear much fewer problems getting wired ethernet interfaces to work than wireless interfaces.
Then I suggest that you continue using the Microsoft products that you enjoy so much. Nobody is going to force you to switch to Linux, and since you demand that Linux becomes Windows for you to switch, then stay with Windows, since you like it so much.
If you, on the other hand, had been inconvenienced enough by the "shitty software ms produces", you might consider trying and learning a new operating system as a way to solve your problems. Either you stay in Windows and continue to use the "cruddy software", or you accept that you might have to learn a few things to set up and use Linux efficiently. You have obviously chosen to stay with the "cruddy software" rather than making an effort to learn a few new things and solve your problems. That's your choice.
You should be glad that the domain name suggests what will happen to Windows. Malware does not advertise as such. :) So I'd rather say that running random files from the internet is not something that should be encouraged, regardless of domain name.
Doesn't everyone on Windows just use pirated software? Seems like that among my friends.
... if somebody made an auto-installing version of this, i.e. installed the same way as spyware is?I don't care about the Slashdot position. Such a thing would be great PR for Microsoft, who can now say what they have wanted to say for years: "See? You can't trust these communist Linux hippies. You can only trust big commercial software companies like Microsoft".
Sounds like something Microsoft would pay big bucks for.
"I told a neighbour recently that I did not use Windows. The reply was "What do use instead? Excel?"
That made my day.
Unfortunately, it is probably true.
I hope you realize that there are some physical limits and constraints that cannot be broken, or can be broken at a massive disadvantage for other parameters. If I don't remember wrong, power consumption and therefore heat emission is proportional to the square or even the cube (at least nonlinear) of the clock speed at a certain manufacturing process. So you might have a 33 GHz processor (10x speed increase compared to what we have today) but the power consumption would increase from about 100 watts to 10 kilowatts. Not only would this bring a hefty increase in your power bill, imagine the cooling system required and the noise output.
An additional problem would be leakage current, since it increases with clock speed (or I'd rather guess it increases with temperature, which is a function of the clock speed). Too much leakage current, and the processor will cease to function. Leakage means that charges will not only travel along conductors, but jump between nearby conductors. Leakage not only increases with clock speed and temperature, but also with line density on the chip. The smaller the components, the larger the leakage at the same clock speed and temperature output.
I might be wrong in the details, but I think most of it is right.
They didn't seem bandwith-intensive to me, but of course Adblock+ and NoScript helps a lot. :P
Now we know where all those spam-distributing botnets are located. Bring out teh bombers! :)
These problems all exist in Windows, except that there the standalone installer and the non-updating of third-party software is the default, so people are quite used to them. I cannot get why people moving from Windows suddenly would think that standalone installers, etc would be a huge pain.
I understand all these viewpoints, but they mean Linux will not be a good choice for home users and Linux on the desktop will be restricted to managed installs within corporations. It also means Windows will probably dominate the landscape for the foreseeable future.Interesting opinion. You describe problems that both Linux and Windows has, and claims that if not Linux implements a Mac-style installation procedure, Windows will dominate the landscape for the forseable future. That does not really make sense.
Only for mundane problems faced by those that are less than proficient in computer use. I have experienced a lot of problems on Windows that nobody I know, or could find, could figure out, such as:
Conclusion: Windows surely behaves really, really strangely sometimes. And nobody, even knowledgeable Windows admins, could figure out why it was behaving like this.