What's "stolen" is B's sole right to produce copies.
Again incorrect. First rights cannot be stolen, only violated, but second and much more important, B has no right to force A not to make copies. This is not a right, it's a privilege - a monopoly grant from the state.
So the correct formulation would be:
"What's violated is B's grant of privilege to a monopoly on the production of copies."
For a short time?
BS. It's been true ever since. New exploits are found and exploited regularly and that's been the rule, not the exception, ever since.
MS software in general is insecure by design, and while they run out and patch holes when they're forced to, they refuse steadfastly to fix the underlying design flaws.
As someone who was doing the same thing even before Winsock, I have to correct you.
It's true there were viruses in the wild before Windows. You either got one by downloading warez, or by rebooting with an infected floppy disk in the drive.
However the notion of getting a virus *simply by opening an email* was a ridiculous impossibility before MicroSoft made it reality with Outhouse. I used to get 5 or 6 inquiries about this a week - chain letters went from one clueless user to the next quite regularly - but anyone with a half a clue new at a glance it was BS.
Then came Outhouse and suddenly one of the most hilarious and baseless internet myths of all time was true.
So dont tell me MicroSoft doesnt bear a large portion of the blame for the current virus problem.
Not all of them fought for the Union, not by any means.
Large numbers served in the Confederate army protecting their homeland against the invaders. And unlike the northern armies, in the south they were not always serving in segregated units, with all black soldiers (but white officers) - some served side by side with their white neighbours in the same units.
Those all-black (but white officered!) northern units were deliberately placed in suicidal positions over and over again (to save white yankee lives) while blacks generally served either side by side with whites on the front lines, or else in all-black home guard units (particularly in LA) which were formed to keep order after all the white men of good health had already left for those lines.
The truth is there was tons of racism on both sides of the mason-dixon line - the essential inferiority of black people was one thing the majority on both sides agreed on. But blacks were more accepted in the south - and this very fact led to northern hatred and accusations of degeneracy in the region! Free blacks certainly faced an uphill battle in the south - but in northern states they were liable to be flogged publically and run out of town, while in the south at least some of them managed to do quite well. At the time of the war several FMCs (Free Men of Colour, the term used at the time) in the south even owned plantations and slaves themselves.
Remember that the yankee states never freed any of 'their' slaves when they outlawed slavery - they always gave plenty of warning for the owners to 'sell them south' and the laws outlawing slavery also typically outlawed residence of FMCs within the state as well. One of the main gripes in the south (beyond the disproportionate weight of taxation imposed on the south, and the use of that revenue to build northern industry) was the use of so-called 'free state' statutes to prohibit southron blacks from entering the western states, either as slave or free.
There was plenty of racism on both sides, but the winners manage to whitewash their own sins and blame it all on the losers of the war - even though at the time they were, in fact, quite openly planning not what we would call 'freedom' for the southron black population but something we today would call 'ethnic cleansing' instead - they intended to declare all the slaves free and immediately put them on boats to Liberia. Only the hideous expense and immense logistics problems of such an operation saved the black american population from the fate Lincoln intended.
I dont care in the slightest if it comes with IE AS LONG AS I CAN REMOVE IT.
And yes, I mean remove it completely. It's an uninvited intruder on my system, a trojan horse.
As late as Windows 98 and NT 4 this was trivial to do, for the technically minded or those who at least knew how to use google and didnt mind to drop $20 or so on a quality third-party product.
Since then MS has gone to a lot of trouble to build the worthless POS so deep into the OS that this can no longer be done, as well as 'encouraging' developers to rely on this and make tools that will break spectacularly if the trojan is removed. Dont help them by being that developer.
It was a contradiction. You argued that it is not a security problem sitting on the disk, which clearly makes sense only if you assume it will never run. (And this is shoddy thinking, good security practise recognises that if it's on the disk that increases the chance of it being run, obviously, and thus mandates complete removal. Sure, I can keep thousands of virus samples on my disk with no problems arising as long as they are not executed - but security has dropped a level because someone only needs to execute the code already on my disk, rather than add code to the system THEN execute it.)
Then you turn around and point out that many (atrociously coded programs) likely to be encountered WILL run that code if it's on the disk. This fact (and yeah, it's very true) is exactly why having the code on the disk is a clear and present security risk - contradicting the first half of your argument very neatly.
As another poster already pointed out, this isnt really true. Windows NT booted on other architectures, but never really provided working systems on them for most purposes. This was a consequence of the unfree characteristics of the Windows ecosystem - the vast majority of the assortment of third party tools that need to be added to Windows to actually do most things never ported over to NT on other archs. The companies that made them had no motivation to allocate resources to port them, because the markets were not large enough, and the markets never grew because the apps werent ported. If you were lucky enough to have an Alpha machine at the time, for instance, you could boot NT on it and run a mean game of solitaire, but precious little more. MS tried to solve this with an emulator, but this worsened the problem - now you could boot NT and run an app, but once you started the app the emulated performance was comparable to an x86 machine you could have gotten at a fraction of the price, while the app makers were even less motivated to make a proper port because they could just tell you to use the emulator.
THIS is one huge advantage a Free OS with Free ecosystem has - the manufacturer doesnt have to allocate resources to port to new and promising architectures. Enthusiasts who use the apps can pitch in unbidden and do it themselves. This allows a promising new arch a chance to grow to critical mass without getting caught in an unsolvable chicken and egg problem.
One can only assume if you install.NET, you might actually want to run.NET apps, and some of them are deployed using ClickOnce. The FF extension is a convenience.
Very poor assumption. I run firefox specifically to avoid making it so easy to install arbitrary code on my machine behind my back. I installed.net because one program I wanted to run (and purposefully installed) required it. As soon as I remember which one that was I'm going to start looking for an alternative, directly as a result of this hijacking in fact I'll be looking carefully for alternatives to ANY.net program, and whenever possible refusing to run.net programs EVEN IF THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES WITHOUT IT.
If you want to add an extension to MY copy of firefox, you need to ask my permission and respect my answer, whether it's yes or no. Leveraging their control of the OS to install it without even asking was a criminal attack they should be prosecuted for. (Yes, I know they wont, they're above the law, but if some 15 year old kid had done the same thing we both know he'd be risking gaol for it.) Doing this in such a way as to disable the uninstall button is just adding insult to injury.
A significant question here: If it wasn't Microsoft, would anyone be nearly as angry?
Absolutely. Other commenters have claimed Sun is doing the same thing with Java. If they are, it hasnt bit me yet, and it's possible that the posters are just reflexive MS shills - but if Sun is doing this, and they try to do it on my machine, it'll piss me off just as bad as this did.
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train. They did nothing to solve the problem. They threw up their hands and gave up because the problem was entirely beyond them - and the world today would be a better place if more governments would follow their lead in that.
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.
Yes, but the fact is, they arent starving due to a global food shortage as predicted.
They're starving due to politics. There is more than enough food being produced on earth to feed everyone on it. And the predictions we're referencing were clearly based on the idea that enough food could simply not be produced on this planet for the number of people now living on it. Advances in agricultural efficiency have dramatically increased the effective carrying capacity of the planet. The problem we're actually facing is not a lack of food - food is going to waste in some areas while people starve in other areas.
"Document-centric windows" as the article refers to them actually makes this easier for the most part. If you have a document (or a graphic or whatever) open in one window, look at the top bar of the window, there's a little document icon. You dont need to select all-copy-paste, just grab that little document and drop it where you want it.
However it can seem slightly cludgy if you have say 4 documents open in application X and you want to drop one to the single window of application Y, as you have to get the windows arranged so that the two you want are visible and the other 3 arent. When you hit app X on the dock, or use ctrl-tab to raise it, this will raise all unminimised windows of that application, and almost certainly between the 4 they will cover every square millimeter of application Y. The obvious thing to do is minimise the other 3 windows of application X - which works fine, but is a tiny little pain in the butt.
There's another keystroke to just raise the document window, or you can right-click (or click-hold) the dock icon to bring up the list of windows that application owns, either of which gets around this nicely, but neither of which is obvious to a windows refugee of course.
Apparently it relies on surface tension and would not, therefore, be very useful on a submersible vehicle.:((
Might be nice for whale-watching and the like, at least. Engine noise scares off a lot of creatures that would otherwise be observable. But sailing ships are already quiet enough for that, so I'm not sure I see a real viable purpose for it at the moment.
If this works as advertised it could be very useful for submarine propulsion. The Red October relied on complicated and only partially effective baffling to minimise cavitation IIRC. This method would eliminate cavitation entirely.
Those can usually be dealt with by installing a decent AV and having them use webmail instead of OE.
Any tips on how to get these people to accept the switch though? I'm trying my hardest with a guy I work with, he just cant seem to handle the transition. I got him a gmail account, set it up to retrieve his other accounts mail, explained the benefits (considerable, considering he pays way too much for metred internet access and is constantly receiving large attachments he usually doesnt need to open but Outhouse downloads them anyway... which really hits him in the wallet, not to mention that he works on multiple machines and is constantly needing an email downloaded on the other machine and gone from the server.) He understands all this, wants the better system, but still somehow just cant handle changing interfaces:( he knows how to do his work in Outhouse and becomes paralysed like a deer in the headlights looking at gmail. It's horribly sad, but I just dont know how to help him anymore, every idea I've tried comes to nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Again incorrect. First rights cannot be stolen, only violated, but second and much more important, B has no right to force A not to make copies. This is not a right, it's a privilege - a monopoly grant from the state.
So the correct formulation would be:
"What's violated is B's grant of privilege to a monopoly on the production of copies."
For a short time? BS. It's been true ever since. New exploits are found and exploited regularly and that's been the rule, not the exception, ever since. MS software in general is insecure by design, and while they run out and patch holes when they're forced to, they refuse steadfastly to fix the underlying design flaws.
As someone who was doing the same thing even before Winsock, I have to correct you.
It's true there were viruses in the wild before Windows. You either got one by downloading warez, or by rebooting with an infected floppy disk in the drive.
However the notion of getting a virus *simply by opening an email* was a ridiculous impossibility before MicroSoft made it reality with Outhouse. I used to get 5 or 6 inquiries about this a week - chain letters went from one clueless user to the next quite regularly - but anyone with a half a clue new at a glance it was BS.
Then came Outhouse and suddenly one of the most hilarious and baseless internet myths of all time was true.
So dont tell me MicroSoft doesnt bear a large portion of the blame for the current virus problem.
Not all of them fought for the Union, not by any means.
Large numbers served in the Confederate army protecting their homeland against the invaders. And unlike the northern armies, in the south they were not always serving in segregated units, with all black soldiers (but white officers) - some served side by side with their white neighbours in the same units.
Those all-black (but white officered!) northern units were deliberately placed in suicidal positions over and over again (to save white yankee lives) while blacks generally served either side by side with whites on the front lines, or else in all-black home guard units (particularly in LA) which were formed to keep order after all the white men of good health had already left for those lines.
The truth is there was tons of racism on both sides of the mason-dixon line - the essential inferiority of black people was one thing the majority on both sides agreed on. But blacks were more accepted in the south - and this very fact led to northern hatred and accusations of degeneracy in the region! Free blacks certainly faced an uphill battle in the south - but in northern states they were liable to be flogged publically and run out of town, while in the south at least some of them managed to do quite well. At the time of the war several FMCs (Free Men of Colour, the term used at the time) in the south even owned plantations and slaves themselves.
Remember that the yankee states never freed any of 'their' slaves when they outlawed slavery - they always gave plenty of warning for the owners to 'sell them south' and the laws outlawing slavery also typically outlawed residence of FMCs within the state as well. One of the main gripes in the south (beyond the disproportionate weight of taxation imposed on the south, and the use of that revenue to build northern industry) was the use of so-called 'free state' statutes to prohibit southron blacks from entering the western states, either as slave or free.
There was plenty of racism on both sides, but the winners manage to whitewash their own sins and blame it all on the losers of the war - even though at the time they were, in fact, quite openly planning not what we would call 'freedom' for the southron black population but something we today would call 'ethnic cleansing' instead - they intended to declare all the slaves free and immediately put them on boats to Liberia. Only the hideous expense and immense logistics problems of such an operation saved the black american population from the fate Lincoln intended.
I certainly hope so.
I dont care in the slightest if it comes with IE AS LONG AS I CAN REMOVE IT.
And yes, I mean remove it completely. It's an uninvited intruder on my system, a trojan horse.
As late as Windows 98 and NT 4 this was trivial to do, for the technically minded or those who at least knew how to use google and didnt mind to drop $20 or so on a quality third-party product.
Since then MS has gone to a lot of trouble to build the worthless POS so deep into the OS that this can no longer be done, as well as 'encouraging' developers to rely on this and make tools that will break spectacularly if the trojan is removed. Dont help them by being that developer.
It was a contradiction. You argued that it is not a security problem sitting on the disk, which clearly makes sense only if you assume it will never run. (And this is shoddy thinking, good security practise recognises that if it's on the disk that increases the chance of it being run, obviously, and thus mandates complete removal. Sure, I can keep thousands of virus samples on my disk with no problems arising as long as they are not executed - but security has dropped a level because someone only needs to execute the code already on my disk, rather than add code to the system THEN execute it.)
Then you turn around and point out that many (atrociously coded programs) likely to be encountered WILL run that code if it's on the disk. This fact (and yeah, it's very true) is exactly why having the code on the disk is a clear and present security risk - contradicting the first half of your argument very neatly.
Wow, the kernel has a media player built-in now? Who'd a thunk it? :P
OOo does suck, but NOTHING sucks as bad as MS Office. Seriously.
As another poster already pointed out, this isnt really true. Windows NT booted on other architectures, but never really provided working systems on them for most purposes. This was a consequence of the unfree characteristics of the Windows ecosystem - the vast majority of the assortment of third party tools that need to be added to Windows to actually do most things never ported over to NT on other archs. The companies that made them had no motivation to allocate resources to port them, because the markets were not large enough, and the markets never grew because the apps werent ported. If you were lucky enough to have an Alpha machine at the time, for instance, you could boot NT on it and run a mean game of solitaire, but precious little more. MS tried to solve this with an emulator, but this worsened the problem - now you could boot NT and run an app, but once you started the app the emulated performance was comparable to an x86 machine you could have gotten at a fraction of the price, while the app makers were even less motivated to make a proper port because they could just tell you to use the emulator.
THIS is one huge advantage a Free OS with Free ecosystem has - the manufacturer doesnt have to allocate resources to port to new and promising architectures. Enthusiasts who use the apps can pitch in unbidden and do it themselves. This allows a promising new arch a chance to grow to critical mass without getting caught in an unsolvable chicken and egg problem.
The word you are looking for is gratis. Not open source, and certainly not free.
Yeah. They definitely should have asked, and they definitely annoyed me.
But it's nowhere near as bad as this, because with Adobes plugin I can go into preferences and control the behaviour like any other plugin.
Very poor assumption. I run firefox specifically to avoid making it so easy to install arbitrary code on my machine behind my back. I installed .net because one program I wanted to run (and purposefully installed) required it. As soon as I remember which one that was I'm going to start looking for an alternative, directly as a result of this hijacking in fact I'll be looking carefully for alternatives to ANY .net program, and whenever possible refusing to run .net programs EVEN IF THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES WITHOUT IT.
If you want to add an extension to MY copy of firefox, you need to ask my permission and respect my answer, whether it's yes or no. Leveraging their control of the OS to install it without even asking was a criminal attack they should be prosecuted for. (Yes, I know they wont, they're above the law, but if some 15 year old kid had done the same thing we both know he'd be risking gaol for it.) Doing this in such a way as to disable the uninstall button is just adding insult to injury.
Meh, Slackware is the OS. And I'll believe HURD is ready when Patrick says it is.
Absolutely. Other commenters have claimed Sun is doing the same thing with Java. If they are, it hasnt bit me yet, and it's possible that the posters are just reflexive MS shills - but if Sun is doing this, and they try to do it on my machine, it'll piss me off just as bad as this did.
Which, by the way, is quite a bit.
For the same reason they went to so much trouble to wire IE too deeply into the system to remove it.
No. The HURD, like Linux, is a kernel. NOT an Operating System.
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train. They did nothing to solve the problem. They threw up their hands and gave up because the problem was entirely beyond them - and the world today would be a better place if more governments would follow their lead in that.
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.
Yes, but the fact is, they arent starving due to a global food shortage as predicted.
They're starving due to politics. There is more than enough food being produced on earth to feed everyone on it. And the predictions we're referencing were clearly based on the idea that enough food could simply not be produced on this planet for the number of people now living on it. Advances in agricultural efficiency have dramatically increased the effective carrying capacity of the planet. The problem we're actually facing is not a lack of food - food is going to waste in some areas while people starve in other areas.
Some of us have access to a GUI but are smart enough to use a better tool anyway.
Sure you can. No one's holding a gun to your head and making you stick with fedora. I'd rather be drawn and quartered, personally.
As usual, Slackware is doing the sensible thing - slack 12.2 comes with KDE 3.5.10.
"Document-centric windows" as the article refers to them actually makes this easier for the most part. If you have a document (or a graphic or whatever) open in one window, look at the top bar of the window, there's a little document icon. You dont need to select all-copy-paste, just grab that little document and drop it where you want it.
However it can seem slightly cludgy if you have say 4 documents open in application X and you want to drop one to the single window of application Y, as you have to get the windows arranged so that the two you want are visible and the other 3 arent. When you hit app X on the dock, or use ctrl-tab to raise it, this will raise all unminimised windows of that application, and almost certainly between the 4 they will cover every square millimeter of application Y. The obvious thing to do is minimise the other 3 windows of application X - which works fine, but is a tiny little pain in the butt.
There's another keystroke to just raise the document window, or you can right-click (or click-hold) the dock icon to bring up the list of windows that application owns, either of which gets around this nicely, but neither of which is obvious to a windows refugee of course.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the concept of a sail? Hard to get lower energy than that.
Err scratch that. Teach me to post in this heat.
Apparently it relies on surface tension and would not, therefore, be very useful on a submersible vehicle. :((
Might be nice for whale-watching and the like, at least. Engine noise scares off a lot of creatures that would otherwise be observable. But sailing ships are already quiet enough for that, so I'm not sure I see a real viable purpose for it at the moment.
Still, just as pure research, it's pretty cool.
If this works as advertised it could be very useful for submarine propulsion. The Red October relied on complicated and only partially effective baffling to minimise cavitation IIRC. This method would eliminate cavitation entirely.
Any tips on how to get these people to accept the switch though? I'm trying my hardest with a guy I work with, he just cant seem to handle the transition. I got him a gmail account, set it up to retrieve his other accounts mail, explained the benefits (considerable, considering he pays way too much for metred internet access and is constantly receiving large attachments he usually doesnt need to open but Outhouse downloads them anyway... which really hits him in the wallet, not to mention that he works on multiple machines and is constantly needing an email downloaded on the other machine and gone from the server.) He understands all this, wants the better system, but still somehow just cant handle changing interfaces :( he knows how to do his work in Outhouse and becomes paralysed like a deer in the headlights looking at gmail. It's horribly sad, but I just dont know how to help him anymore, every idea I've tried comes to nothing.