But the fact of the matter is that you don't need movies, TV, or music to live. You could completely unplug from conventional media, and chances are that your quality of living isn't going to decrease by very much.
I did this earlier in the year. I haven't watched a TV show or movie in months. I listen to the radio occasionally, and I have DSL and a computer - and this wonderful thing called 'the real world.' I'm very, very happy with the change.
If the MPAA and the RIAA DO 'take their ball and go home' then it seems to me the mass media might become something I want to see again. But as long as they control, it seems very unlikely there will be much I want to see anyway.
So please, Mr. Glickman, throw us in that there briar patch. We're begging you.
Let's lose the emotive language. The movie industry isn't a monopoly, and nor is it a cartel.
Agreed it's not a monopoly. The MPAA sure looks like a cartel to me though. Care to substantiate your statement? Explain how the MPAA differs from a cartel?
You can still make plenty of money writing software.
What's becoming harder and harder to do is to make money as what you so accurately called 'a shrink wrap house.'
So what's the problem? There isn't much of a market for horse-drawn carriages anymore either.
Either your company will adapt to the market or it will die. Either way, there's still plenty of demand for programmers. Just under the umbrella of different business models.
No, you should go right ahead and use the off the shelf solution for now.
But that will change. Maybe next year, maybe the year after, maybe five years from now - but the OSS solutions improve all the time, and the pool of developers qualified to customise them for you is only getting bigger. So keep an eye on it, and the moment that you can gain a competitive advantage by switching, do it quick.
Like it or not there is no single fork of the GNU OS using the Linux kernel. There are many dozens of them.
You can claim that this is what Linux means all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that Linux is simply a kernel, and that there is no referrent for the reference you wish to ascribe to the word anyway.
You hit the nail on the head, but allow me to add a little contest.
Glickman is president of the MPAA. The MPAA is a cartel.
What you're describing is the way free markets deal with cartels. The cartel itself will almost certainly be smart enough to back away from this position if they aren't able to buy a law requiring it, just as, for instance, OPEC has backed away on several occasions from positions that would have broken their cartel if they had been held.
Of course, I personally would prefer it if the MPAA held their position to the bitter end, I'd rather see them destroyed entirely, but that's just me. Either way, Glickmans argument is nothing but hot air and bluff, as you point out very accurately.
But the big danger here is that the cartel will be able to buy a law extending their monopoly. The more they can use that bluff and bluster to get anyone, any measurable percentage of the public fooled into agreeing with their position, the cheaper that law will be to buy. So let's not sit by smug in our analysis - rather it's an important time to write letters to the editor and to speak with friends and family members and explain the issues involved here.
I almost didn't reply, since so many others have, but scanning them I realised none of them have actually posted the right answer.
Yes, you can 'uninstall' IE but, that doesn't actually remove the core of the POS, just some of the outer fluff.
To actually get rid of it completely, you have to get 98lite, and install from scratch using 98lite. This way, you can actually avoid installing the IE components in the first place. This is the only way to the best of my knowledge to ever get a clean windows install.
If you ever install IE, you have to format and do a reinstall from scratch to get rid of it again.
Of course, a clean install does mean that a lot of very poorly written programs won't run, but in the grand scheme of things, that's an advantage.
A port scan isn't an attack or a theft of services. It could be a prelude to one, of course, but reaching into my pocket could be a prelude to shooting you too. You still won't find the cops are really happy about being called just because I reached into my pocket, however.
I don't think it's funny, no, it's serious.
What the heck do you have against consenting adults making, distributing, and viewing erotic imagery and texts? To the point you classify it with spam and trojans, cite it as worse than those things in fact, and think you get to BLOCK IT AT THE ROUTER?
Just what have you been smoking?
From what I've read, it sounds like the issue is very close to that. I'm told they modified the kernel to do some black magic when loading programs, and aren't releasing those modifications - so if you compile and install a kernel from the sources provided it won't work anymore.
If that's accurate, they still aren't in compliance with the GPL, and they made a very poor architectural decision that's left them with the choice of totally blowing their own security system or else continuing copyright infringements. Ugh. Hope they didn't do that. It's just hearsay at this point, but it sounds like something stupid enough to be credible.
They're ok legally if they aren't linking the code - just communicating through socket calls, etc. No different than running, say WordPerfect or Oracle on Linux - as long as the proprietary stuff is stand-alone and not linked it's not a legal problem.
However, if they are correct that installing binaries compiled from this code release will cause their PVR to stop functioning, that sounds to me like they aren't actually in compliance. If the proprietary stuff really isn't linked, and the code they released really is the code for the free software in the system, then binaries compiled from it (assuming the same compiler and settings) would be byte for byte identical with what's already on the PVR.
So, it seems to me they're lying about one thing or the other.
This letter has already been emailed to the people involved:
Dear Fuat and SYS-CON,
I am writing this letter to tender my resignation. I have worked hard on LinuxWorld Magazine since its inception, and really don't want to walk away from it as it continues
to build up a good head of steam, but given recent events I just cannot continue to be associated with SYS-CON. The complete (and public) lack of understanding of why O'Gara's maelstrom article was wrong, among other things, suggests to me that my sense of ethics is simply too divergent from SYS-CONs and there will be further heated clashes in the future.
It goes on a bit, and of course the entry before it was interesting too. One thing - despite Turners announcement that the entire senior staff was going, it appears that he may have stepped out on a limb, as several of the other editors have not, at this time, announced their resignation. Just Turner and Blanc, so far. I'm hoping to see Walker, Winslow, and Taylor follow suit soon.
Much as I hate to get personal, what you said makes me sick as well.
People that think like you do are the reasons decent law abiding citizens go to gaol for defending themselves. And the reason that criminals are allowed to run free and terrorise us in so many areas.
You're right, if you aren't willing to use a weapon you shouldn't carry it. And if you're unwilling to use one and don't carry one, still obviously expect and take for granted the benefits you derive from the fact that some of us do, AND on top of that turn around and look at us like we're doing something wrong??? that last part puts it over the line for me. Really sickening.
Building your own engine requires a massive amount of specialised equipment, and a great deal of technical knowledge and skill. Compiling a kernel is so easy it's not even funny - and it's getting easier.
Umm no. The financial sector uses mainframes, minicomputers, serious database applications... and in many cases even the clients are on OS/2. You may see excel on the desktop of some mid-level folks in the sector, but claiming that 'the entire financial sector bases it's existance[sic] on Excel' is ludicrous in the extreme.
The stereotype/gratuitous insult about 'smelly nerds' just adds confirmation - you haven't a clue what you're talking about.
Of course he improvised. So what? There are lots of people that can sit down with a recording and transcribe it accurately, and many of them have empty larders as we speak.
Yes, IE in Wine or VPC is great fun. And yes, there's been some excellent programming in IE and it shows.
I know any of you that recognise me are having heart attacks now, I'm praising IE!?!??!
Well yeah, sort of. IE is full of bugs. But let's be specific about what type of bugs. They're mostly bugs in the design, not implementation errors. IE has an incredibly robust engine, much higher quality than Gecko (as demonstrated by how much more difficult it is to crash with malformed HTML.) The coding has been top notch. The problem is that the specs from marketing and management are buggy - and no amount of good coding can change that.
The differences are significant becase a phrase like "Die Jews Die" essentially amounts to a threat.
Yes, which is why I wouldn't have chosen those particular words to make my point. The possibility of it being a threat makes it more complicated. Substitute 'Jews suck' and you can see my point without the complication.
My experience with teenage vandals leads me to suspect, when I see 'Die Jews Die' that it's not a threat, just an attempt to feel important by getting a reaction from someone, like most such vandalism. But you're absolutely correct, without knowing more of the circumstances, we can't judge that for certain.
Now as I go on through your post, however, the agreement ends. Killing and mutilating a person randomly is a threat to EVERYONE, in the same way that killing a Jew and cutting a swastika into his chest is a threat to all Jews. If we treat the latter as more serious than the former we simply give idiot racists ammunition. Racism isn't somethign you can fight this way - at least not effectively. You can try, but the honest truth is it's counterproductive and stupid. And you repeat this meme that keeps coming up in this thread, in finer words and better phrasing, but the though is the same - you want a law to keep people from making others feel a certain way. You can't make anyone feel a certain way. The notion that we are helpless beings that are just forced to feel angry, or frightened, or belittled, or whatever by someone else speech is a very poisonous meme that needs to be killed. I'm not responsible for your feelings, and you're not responsible for mine, and objective law cannot be based on feelings.
If you call me and annoy me, it could possibly be harassment. If you call me and tell me that you're going to kill me, it's a threat. The punishment is far more severe.
Absolutely correct. Note that the distinction is one based on factual issues that can be resolved objectively. If I call you and don't actually threaten you, but yet you decide to feel threatened anyway, and externalise that and claim I somehow made you feel threatened... it's still not, and should not be, assault. On the other hand, I could threaten you, and you might not feel threatened at all. You might be quite confident that I haven't the guts to carry through, that you could easily stop me if I tried anything, and feel only amused at my antics. They would still be assault, however.
What we have with 'hate crime' legislation is the institutionalisation of the exact opposite situation - I can threaten you, I can beat the crap out of you in fact, and it's not taken seriously - unless there is evidence that I did it for one of the politically incorrect reasons.
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I did this earlier in the year. I haven't watched a TV show or movie in months. I listen to the radio occasionally, and I have DSL and a computer - and this wonderful thing called 'the real world.' I'm very, very happy with the change.
If the MPAA and the RIAA DO 'take their ball and go home' then it seems to me the mass media might become something I want to see again. But as long as they control, it seems very unlikely there will be much I want to see anyway.
So please, Mr. Glickman, throw us in that there briar patch. We're begging you.
Agreed it's not a monopoly. The MPAA sure looks like a cartel to me though. Care to substantiate your statement? Explain how the MPAA differs from a cartel?
Mod parent up. Please.
You can still make plenty of money writing software.
What's becoming harder and harder to do is to make money as what you so accurately called 'a shrink wrap house.'
So what's the problem? There isn't much of a market for horse-drawn carriages anymore either.
Either your company will adapt to the market or it will die. Either way, there's still plenty of demand for programmers. Just under the umbrella of different business models.
No, you should go right ahead and use the off the shelf solution for now.
But that will change. Maybe next year, maybe the year after, maybe five years from now - but the OSS solutions improve all the time, and the pool of developers qualified to customise them for you is only getting bigger. So keep an eye on it, and the moment that you can gain a competitive advantage by switching, do it quick.
Like it or not there is no single fork of the GNU OS using the Linux kernel. There are many dozens of them. You can claim that this is what Linux means all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that Linux is simply a kernel, and that there is no referrent for the reference you wish to ascribe to the word anyway.
You hit the nail on the head, but allow me to add a little contest.
Glickman is president of the MPAA. The MPAA is a cartel.
What you're describing is the way free markets deal with cartels. The cartel itself will almost certainly be smart enough to back away from this position if they aren't able to buy a law requiring it, just as, for instance, OPEC has backed away on several occasions from positions that would have broken their cartel if they had been held.
Of course, I personally would prefer it if the MPAA held their position to the bitter end, I'd rather see them destroyed entirely, but that's just me. Either way, Glickmans argument is nothing but hot air and bluff, as you point out very accurately.
But the big danger here is that the cartel will be able to buy a law extending their monopoly. The more they can use that bluff and bluster to get anyone, any measurable percentage of the public fooled into agreeing with their position, the cheaper that law will be to buy. So let's not sit by smug in our analysis - rather it's an important time to write letters to the editor and to speak with friends and family members and explain the issues involved here.
Uhh no. Debian is an OS. Linux is a kernel. Comparing Debian to OSX is apples to apples. Comparing Linux to OSX is not. Compare Linux to XNU.
I'm protected by Smith and Wesson.
No, you're still opening it in IE, only in another skin.
I almost didn't reply, since so many others have, but scanning them I realised none of them have actually posted the right answer.
Yes, you can 'uninstall' IE but, that doesn't actually remove the core of the POS, just some of the outer fluff.
To actually get rid of it completely, you have to get 98lite, and install from scratch using 98lite. This way, you can actually avoid installing the IE components in the first place. This is the only way to the best of my knowledge to ever get a clean windows install.
If you ever install IE, you have to format and do a reinstall from scratch to get rid of it again.
Of course, a clean install does mean that a lot of very poorly written programs won't run, but in the grand scheme of things, that's an advantage.
If they passed a law declaring elephants to be ostriches they still woudn't lay eggs, my man.
A port scan isn't an attack or a theft of services. It could be a prelude to one, of course, but reaching into my pocket could be a prelude to shooting you too. You still won't find the cops are really happy about being called just because I reached into my pocket, however.
I don't think it's funny, no, it's serious. What the heck do you have against consenting adults making, distributing, and viewing erotic imagery and texts? To the point you classify it with spam and trojans, cite it as worse than those things in fact, and think you get to BLOCK IT AT THE ROUTER? Just what have you been smoking?
MSIE qualifies on 2 and 3 at the very least as well. Somehow though, I doubt the new law will be used against it's sponsor MS.
Now if it's used even handedly like that, then I'll get excited. Till then, I'm guessing it's just a public relations bluff.
From what I've read, it sounds like the issue is very close to that. I'm told they modified the kernel to do some black magic when loading programs, and aren't releasing those modifications - so if you compile and install a kernel from the sources provided it won't work anymore.
If that's accurate, they still aren't in compliance with the GPL, and they made a very poor architectural decision that's left them with the choice of totally blowing their own security system or else continuing copyright infringements. Ugh. Hope they didn't do that. It's just hearsay at this point, but it sounds like something stupid enough to be credible.
They're ok legally if they aren't linking the code - just communicating through socket calls, etc. No different than running, say WordPerfect or Oracle on Linux - as long as the proprietary stuff is stand-alone and not linked it's not a legal problem.
However, if they are correct that installing binaries compiled from this code release will cause their PVR to stop functioning, that sounds to me like they aren't actually in compliance. If the proprietary stuff really isn't linked, and the code they released really is the code for the free software in the system, then binaries compiled from it (assuming the same compiler and settings) would be byte for byte identical with what's already on the PVR.
So, it seems to me they're lying about one thing or the other.
Dee-Ann Blanc has posted.
This letter has already been emailed to the people involved:
Dear Fuat and SYS-CON,
I am writing this letter to tender my resignation. I have worked hard on LinuxWorld Magazine since its inception, and really don't want to walk away from it as it continues to build up a good head of steam, but given recent events I just cannot continue to be associated with SYS-CON. The complete (and public) lack of understanding of why O'Gara's maelstrom article was wrong, among other things, suggests to me that my sense of ethics is simply too divergent from SYS-CONs and there will be further heated clashes in the future.
It goes on a bit, and of course the entry before it was interesting too. One thing - despite Turners announcement that the entire senior staff was going, it appears that he may have stepped out on a limb, as several of the other editors have not, at this time, announced their resignation. Just Turner and Blanc, so far. I'm hoping to see Walker, Winslow, and Taylor follow suit soon.
Head shot. Then call housekeeping to take care of the splatter.
Much as I hate to get personal, what you said makes me sick as well.
People that think like you do are the reasons decent law abiding citizens go to gaol for defending themselves. And the reason that criminals are allowed to run free and terrorise us in so many areas.
You're right, if you aren't willing to use a weapon you shouldn't carry it. And if you're unwilling to use one and don't carry one, still obviously expect and take for granted the benefits you derive from the fact that some of us do, AND on top of that turn around and look at us like we're doing something wrong??? that last part puts it over the line for me. Really sickening.
Building your own engine requires a massive amount of specialised equipment, and a great deal of technical knowledge and skill. Compiling a kernel is so easy it's not even funny - and it's getting easier.
Umm no. The financial sector uses mainframes, minicomputers, serious database applications... and in many cases even the clients are on OS/2. You may see excel on the desktop of some mid-level folks in the sector, but claiming that 'the entire financial sector bases it's existance[sic] on Excel' is ludicrous in the extreme.
The stereotype/gratuitous insult about 'smelly nerds' just adds confirmation - you haven't a clue what you're talking about.
Of course he improvised. So what? There are lots of people that can sit down with a recording and transcribe it accurately, and many of them have empty larders as we speak.
Yes, IE in Wine or VPC is great fun. And yes, there's been some excellent programming in IE and it shows.
I know any of you that recognise me are having heart attacks now, I'm praising IE!?!??!
Well yeah, sort of. IE is full of bugs. But let's be specific about what type of bugs. They're mostly bugs in the design, not implementation errors. IE has an incredibly robust engine, much higher quality than Gecko (as demonstrated by how much more difficult it is to crash with malformed HTML.) The coding has been top notch. The problem is that the specs from marketing and management are buggy - and no amount of good coding can change that.
Yes, which is why I wouldn't have chosen those particular words to make my point. The possibility of it being a threat makes it more complicated. Substitute 'Jews suck' and you can see my point without the complication.
My experience with teenage vandals leads me to suspect, when I see 'Die Jews Die' that it's not a threat, just an attempt to feel important by getting a reaction from someone, like most such vandalism. But you're absolutely correct, without knowing more of the circumstances, we can't judge that for certain.
Now as I go on through your post, however, the agreement ends. Killing and mutilating a person randomly is a threat to EVERYONE, in the same way that killing a Jew and cutting a swastika into his chest is a threat to all Jews. If we treat the latter as more serious than the former we simply give idiot racists ammunition. Racism isn't somethign you can fight this way - at least not effectively. You can try, but the honest truth is it's counterproductive and stupid. And you repeat this meme that keeps coming up in this thread, in finer words and better phrasing, but the though is the same - you want a law to keep people from making others feel a certain way. You can't make anyone feel a certain way. The notion that we are helpless beings that are just forced to feel angry, or frightened, or belittled, or whatever by someone else speech is a very poisonous meme that needs to be killed. I'm not responsible for your feelings, and you're not responsible for mine, and objective law cannot be based on feelings.
Absolutely correct. Note that the distinction is one based on factual issues that can be resolved objectively. If I call you and don't actually threaten you, but yet you decide to feel threatened anyway, and externalise that and claim I somehow made you feel threatened... it's still not, and should not be, assault. On the other hand, I could threaten you, and you might not feel threatened at all. You might be quite confident that I haven't the guts to carry through, that you could easily stop me if I tried anything, and feel only amused at my antics. They would still be assault, however.
What we have with 'hate crime' legislation is the institutionalisation of the exact opposite situation - I can threaten you, I can beat the crap out of you in fact, and it's not taken seriously - unless there is evidence that I did it for one of the politically incorrect reasons.