Look, I lean pretty far to the left, but this list is bullshit.
I lean pretty far to the left too, and also detect bullshit. Cheney is murderous scum, and I don't buy that Haliburton doing so well when he holds the (theoretically) second-highest position in the Executive Branch is coincidence. But Cheney is getting the same deferred salary payments for his employment *prior* to being Vice President that he would have gotten anyway and his stock options have already been irrevocably given away, it's just up to an independent trust to decide when they get cashed out. You put enough Congressional committees together, and you'll get more definitions than you know what to do with, but I don't see an empirically verified increase in Dick Cheney's finances based on what happens with Haliburton. I suspect that Cheney's friends will make sure that he profits handsomely from the no-bid contracts that have been getting doled out, and I don't buy for a second that he's able to be so central to the war in Iraq yet stay out of anything involving the biggest private sector player in the whole operation. But that's suspicion and speculation. The real news story is just how fast and loose Haliburton plays with taxpayer money, with all the waste and fraud, but that has been reported.
Do not get me started on the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Seriously. Do not - I should be studying. However, those are the topics I'm familiar with. I don't know what's going on with the Congo. I have heard scattered reports of someone passing away during an "overzealous questioning" hear and there on NPR, but I've never heard anyone try to put a number to it. I can recall a little wrangling over the finer points of welfare-to-work and the official definition of "poverty" and just how well the economic "recovery" and "growth" benefited who, but you don't hear much about how much more or less widespread and bad poverty in the US is becoming these days, do you? Even if they were bullshit stories, every one of them, the media isn't doing a very good job of preparing us to be able to tell, are they? It's a pretty provocative list and it makes me wonder just what I might not know about what's going on out there.
I doubt it's possible to get living organisms to shorten the half-life of radioactive materials, but fungi that abosrb radioactive materials can be very useful. When radioactive waste contaminates the ground, fungi can extract and concentrate it. The mushrooms can then be harvested for disposal as radioactive waste, leaving the soil in the area less radioactive. Paul Stamets describes it in Mycelium Running (there're good facts in between the hippie/druggie/mystical stuff) describing this and other similar applications of fungi as "mycoremediation".
Re:Mark Shuttleworth take on the MS Linux lawsuit
on
Microsoft, Sue Me First
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They can't sit on the sidelines of the software game - they actually have to ship new products. And every time they do that, they risk stepping on a patent landmine.
That's not that big a risk. License a patent, pay some damages, buy the competition. They don't really hurt that badly in any of those scenarios. It's when some high-rolling PHB says "What do you have that can do the job of this other software that I heard about?" and they have to say "Nothing." that they really hurt. What keeps them filling their swimming pools with a fresh batch of c-notes every week is that the sheep don't have to know the name of more than one software company.
DDoS attacks were profitable for years. The author is citing challenges that have always been a part of the practice as the reason they turned to an older technique - as if the idea hadn't panned out. As far as the risk involved, everything I've heard about people responding to botnets was pretty much about people watching to see how big a problem it was. The only thing I've ever heard about someone fighting back was this guy, and unless there were a lot more like him over the following year than I heard, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that spam just got that much easier and more lucrative. Not that I expect Symantec to talk about how anti-virus and anti-spam software like the products they sell fails to stop millions of people from getting infected with malware that makes their computer send spam that isn't filtered out.
Whereas on Linux, once you're logger, you're logged and everything is ready to run.
My experience on Linux running KDE is that once I submit my login credentials there's a few seconds of starting KDE during which it displays a screen that tells me my desktop is loading, followed by my desktop and a few more seconds of loading kmix and knetstats, and if I were to set my newsreaders to start automatically, they might load before the desktop or after, but they would still need time. It kind of feels fast, what with a verbose system boot process that constantly updates instead of sitting there saying "Applying computer settings", a desktop load process that doesn't spend as much time teasing me with the sight of my desktop, and having seen the KDE load process on much slower machines. If I wanted to make a real determination, I would dual-boot and use my stopwatch. I don't care that much. I only reboot for kernel updates and lightning storms.
My real love of KDE is in the time it saves me after I've booted, with windows that snap into place when they get close to the edge of the screen instead of making it easier to move it off the edge than to get it right, or the way that if you maximize a window by dragging the borders the maximize/restore button will put it back (force of habit, that's why I don't just use the maximize button in the first place, and the KDE team was ready for that!), or giving you the option to set "keep above others" on any application, or letting you use the scroll wheel on your mouse by moving it over a window (without having to click it and bring the whole thing into the foreground). Try following a wikibook on programming in your browser with your text editor and your command shell open at the same time, and you'll see where Linux's real time-saving potential is.
They understand that they can't do it all... a vibrant third-party market means more people by Microsoft's platform.
The only thing remotely related to computers that I haven't seen Microsoft try to dominate is CAD software. There may be a wide variety of third party software and hardware, but it's not because microsoft has just yielded the field.
Stop. You're both right. Microsoft plays nice for a while, lets a lot of other players take all the risk of innovating to see what products keep their platform valuable, waits for the hard work of perfecting the design to be over, watches to see what features have the most to do with market appeal, and then swoops in with their version - shoddy, but universal to the platform. No sane IT department would want to vet IE as a safe and desirable application, but they don't have much choice ("I can't get on the Internet!" "What happens when you try?" "I can't. It's missing!" "What?" "The Internet! The blue 'E'! I think a virus ate it!"). Not many web application developers would want to code for IE, but it's a safe design assumption. They can't very well tell a potential corporate customer "To use all the features, you'd want to get Firefox or Opera", the company already has web filtering and proxy software, not to mention Windows group policies, that are only capable of locking down IE. Release some CRM software that doesn't suck (please, pretty please do that) and watch how quickly you get "embraced".
Apple would rather get bottom marks on a ranking than tell you anything about what it plans to do in 2009. These are the people who wanted a modern day Sacco-Venzetti trial over someone finding out what their service manual said on the subject of thermal grease. They will *not* be telling you about their manufacturing processes in advance - even when they get a letter warning them that the alternative is a little bad press. That's their call, let them live with the consequence. No one's going to care in three months anyway when the rumors of the 3-D Holographic iPod start floating around.
Oh, if only. Until recently I worked for a company that sells systems that perform credit card transactions for a particular segment of merchants (I don't want to say more than that for reasons that will become obvious soon enough. They went through a series of revisions in their product lines, but for the most part the systems are very hard to set up, configure, and troubleshoot, and if you were going to go looking for the most technically inept customer base their target industry would make the short list - so a means of remote access is a standard feature.
For a number of years, this meant that you have a Unix box with an "everyday" user - username: [name of vendor of system] password: [same as username or blank] - the root user, with one of four or five short dictionary words for the password (and pretty much the same one in any given region of the country) - and the "application" user with a password that I'm told was relatively secure, but who cares when you have a pretty good chance of getting root before your dictionary cracker gets through the "B's". These machines were just sitting there with a modem waiting for anyone who could "cu" to dial in. Once you were in, and you had root, about a week's worth of credit card transactions complete with everything that can be read off the magnetic stripe were waiting for you in plain text.
A few years down the road, they've gone Windows and they're ever so slightly too careful to have people telnetting in over the Internet, so they use PCAnywhere. Live modem, waiting for you to dial in (yes, dial-up remote administration of a Windows box - fun, fun, fun), username: [name of vendor] password: [name of vendor]. They got called on it, so they changed one of the two to a common word in English, I can't remember which. Once you're in, you're supposed to be signed in as a non-privileged user who's able to access the non-encrypted credit card data only because the permissions aren't always set very well, but usually the owner of the system just signs into their server as Administrator, makes sure that PCAnywhere is running in case the Help Desk needs to get in, and walks away. Their more security-conscious customers (they have a few) require a number of hoops to jump through that you won't be able to if you don't really work at the vendor. Their newest systems, they've encrypted the credit card data, and to decrypt it, you have to sign in to an application with a username that is not especially obvious but is one of the standard Windows users. The password used to be the vendor's name, but now (a few serivce packs down the road) its their name and the product number with some numbers substituted for letters and vice versa.
To their credit, they've started making recommendations like "turn off the modem when you're not actively using it" and "if you use PCAnywhere for TCP/IP, don't use the default ports". This lead to support exchanges like: "We don't have the modem turned on anymore" "So turn it back on" "I don't know how" "Who does?" "He doesn't work here anymore" "You'll have to wait for the dealer to come out on Monday" "I did mention my business is hemorrhaging cash as I contemplate the value of the fix-figure support contract, right?" "Yeah, I get that a lot."
My favorite would have to be the voice mail I got: "We set PC Anywhere to not use the default ports like you told us and now it doesn't work with our firewall, so you'll have to call when someone's here to use Webex." At least the company doesn't have a high turnover rate with lots of disgruntled employees who'd love to make them look bad. Oh wait a minute...
That piece makes it sound like sugar springs from the Earth and ethanol just flows right out of it (with greater efficiency in the near future!). And the whole thing manages to not cost anything, but produce lots of high-wage jobs. Tell me what the energy input of sugar cane ethanol production is - where does it come from, what is its rate of emissions. Even if it drove itself to the refinery and fermented itself, you wouldn't get more than 15% ethanol and the specific heat of aqueous solutions doesn't care what crop you used. And the slide mentions using anhydrous ethanol, have you been using benzene or cyclohexane as your entrainer? Or have you been that good with zeolite for the last 30 years?
Even if sugar cane ethanol is the bed of roses UNICA wants me to think it is (Sugar waters itself! We told them to stop burning the cane fields so they did!) I just don't buy Brazil meeting all of the US's fuel needs in addition to the needs of its own 188 million citizens. And Brazil might be living in sugar Shangri-La but things have a way of working differently here.
In normal operation, that's how it works. A sloppy package maintainer didn't bother to make sure it happened like that because there "was a workaround".
I just had to su change the permissions on a config file so I could change the settings on vegastrike to steer with the mouse. With your model (yes, I detected the humor) developers would design around the "they can just hit the button" principle, even when they are writing things to "just work" remotely. Security will happen when people learn:
This is a computer. You need to know how it works and what you're doing as you use it. Alternatively, you can wash dishes for a living and go outside and play when nothing is on TV.
Some people are your friends and give you a bunch of stuff for nothing. Some people are not your friends, but pretend to be.
Even your friends do not need to borrow your identity.
This is because the promise of Linux has been wasted by the lack of production of true killer applications, allowing both Microsoft and Apple to further embed their OS's among their faithful.
I remember sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for Linux's world domination, but I don't think that that was ever its promise. The whole concept of the "killer application", IMHO, runs contrary to the Linux way of doing things. In fact, the more obviously useful a "Linux" app tends to be to large numbers of people, the more likely you are to see Windows and OS X ports.
Linux let users run whatever machine they could get their hands on and have a stable, supported (as in patched and secure) system that would run current apps while the Mac and Windows worlds had people running to the store to replace perfectly good machines. Schools in under-funded districts and governments in poor countries slowly discover that proprietary software vendors hold them over a barrel while FLOSS just gives and gives. These aren't strategies that get you ahead by the next fiscal quarter, but they get you ahead of where you were four or five years ago.
MSFT and Apple fight for their share of consumers (and MSFT pretty much takes the business world for granted) while the FLOSS world makes sure to keep doing what they're doing and their share of developers, enterprise users, and savvy home users expands slowly but steadily. Linux isn't out to get people to come on board because it's got something you'll be deprived of if you don't, and it isn't out to attack or exploit how the other guys slip up. Hell, Linux isn't marching lock-step towards any single goal - it's fragmented, huge numbers of disparate groups and individuals working towards different ends, which Linus has said is exactly what he likes to see. Linux developers achieve a means to an end, polish up the rough edges when they've got something that's going to be around for a while and the users demand it, and let you get off the roller coaster of everyone else deciding what latest and greatest features you just have to have. You want Linux? Here it is. You want to wait a few years for it to improve some more? It will, and it will still be yours for the asking. [insert stream vs. boulder or similar Taoist metaphor]
Did you sleep through Econ 101? That's called Allocative_efficiency via the Free Price System.
Did you sleep through the 90's? The reason every geek on Earth was excited about the Internet and extolled its virtues to a critical-mass of non-geeks was that it delivered information and innovation to you as fast as it could be generated, and by anyone who could express it - not that "goods and services" were being delivered.
All it really tells us is that it will be one of these. I think you're probably right, but I have my doubts that they've even firmly decided on it yet. They've been holding off on announcing the How and When since May, and now they've announced the When.
Even if this hadn't been pointed out to be false an hour ago, the summary would have made me say "My God! That's insane! That can't be true! This I have to see for myself!"
FTMFA:
10. BACKUP COPY. You may make one backup copy of the media. You may use it only to reinstall the
software.
That's in the section of the license agreement that applies to all of the versions. Not only can you take a cd, rip it to an iso, and burn a disc off it, you can do that with the Windows Vista Installation Disc itself!! I seriously doubt it ever crossed their minds to tell you that you couldn't do that with some other disc they have no interest in, or that if you found yourself with a.iso file, that you couldn't copy and paste yourself a second copy on your HD (though God knows why you would want to, except maybe that you're feeling a little self-indulgent having yet to justify the cost of that multi-TB RAID 0 perpendicular storage setup).
Seriously folks, MSFT is a bunch of greedy, power-hungry sons of bitches, but they sit around thinking of ways to fuck with you for money, not for no reason.
Technical support hasn't been available for some time now. Microsoft has ended the "extended support" period - meaning stopped even issuing patches for publicly-known exploits that allow someone to execute arbitrary code with no interaction on your part whatsoever.
That was enough for me to inform my wife that the ME box (stop snickering, it came with the wife) was going off the 'net and the old hand-me-down 700Mhz grey box would be running Linux and would be the only available machine for Internet access.
I haven't had occasion to talk to any less-savvy individuals running Windows 9x, but I would explain to them what I just told you, so I imagine that a lot of people are getting an earful from the people who de-gunk their machines.
If you reduce the section you quoted to a formula, you have
n - 0 / infinity
Harping on him for specifying that the value of n was large doesn't change the fact that it makes for a bad profit equation for the beancounters at the corporations whose views on DRM you'd like to sway. When 80% of the target demographic that buys 80% of your product (like 63% of all statistics, those were made up) has the means and know-how to get your product for free if you do nothing, you will probably feel like doing something.
Oh, and most of the musicians that generate huge sales numbers don't see much money because the record company doesn't acknowledge having gone into profit. Not that that isn't as bogus as DRM is evil, but you're not likely to get them to open the debate with that concession.
You've clearly never taken an iPod support call. In iTunes, the super-duper brain-dead easy mode - where you plug in your iPod and it automatically updates the iPod to a perfect mirror image of your library - prevents you from dragging and dropping more stuff on there. This generates support calls. That often involve whining. And swearing. And demands to know why this is so hard. And sometimes crying.
It pops up a dialogue box...letting you press a big button that says 'allow'
Windows security model: Give the user a big button that says "allow" and trust them to read the accompanying message and make a rational decision (despite the fact that "Allow" appears to be highlighted in the picture there and you could just hit "Enter").
Mac security model: the big decisions can't be made by people who can't remember a password. And tech support can explain why this is necessary as they wait for the machine to boot from CD and prepare to talk them through the password reset procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
I lean pretty far to the left too, and also detect bullshit. Cheney is murderous scum, and I don't buy that Haliburton doing so well when he holds the (theoretically) second-highest position in the Executive Branch is coincidence. But Cheney is getting the same deferred salary payments for his employment *prior* to being Vice President that he would have gotten anyway and his stock options have already been irrevocably given away, it's just up to an independent trust to decide when they get cashed out. You put enough Congressional committees together, and you'll get more definitions than you know what to do with, but I don't see an empirically verified increase in Dick Cheney's finances based on what happens with Haliburton. I suspect that Cheney's friends will make sure that he profits handsomely from the no-bid contracts that have been getting doled out, and I don't buy for a second that he's able to be so central to the war in Iraq yet stay out of anything involving the biggest private sector player in the whole operation. But that's suspicion and speculation. The real news story is just how fast and loose Haliburton plays with taxpayer money, with all the waste and fraud, but that has been reported.
Do not get me started on the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Seriously. Do not - I should be studying. However, those are the topics I'm familiar with. I don't know what's going on with the Congo. I have heard scattered reports of someone passing away during an "overzealous questioning" hear and there on NPR, but I've never heard anyone try to put a number to it. I can recall a little wrangling over the finer points of welfare-to-work and the official definition of "poverty" and just how well the economic "recovery" and "growth" benefited who, but you don't hear much about how much more or less widespread and bad poverty in the US is becoming these days, do you? Even if they were bullshit stories, every one of them, the media isn't doing a very good job of preparing us to be able to tell, are they? It's a pretty provocative list and it makes me wonder just what I might not know about what's going on out there.
I doubt it's possible to get living organisms to shorten the half-life of radioactive materials, but fungi that abosrb radioactive materials can be very useful. When radioactive waste contaminates the ground, fungi can extract and concentrate it. The mushrooms can then be harvested for disposal as radioactive waste, leaving the soil in the area less radioactive. Paul Stamets describes it in Mycelium Running (there're good facts in between the hippie/druggie/mystical stuff) describing this and other similar applications of fungi as "mycoremediation".
That's not that big a risk. License a patent, pay some damages, buy the competition. They don't really hurt that badly in any of those scenarios. It's when some high-rolling PHB says "What do you have that can do the job of this other software that I heard about?" and they have to say "Nothing." that they really hurt. What keeps them filling their swimming pools with a fresh batch of c-notes every week is that the sheep don't have to know the name of more than one software company.
DDoS attacks were profitable for years. The author is citing challenges that have always been a part of the practice as the reason they turned to an older technique - as if the idea hadn't panned out. As far as the risk involved, everything I've heard about people responding to botnets was pretty much about people watching to see how big a problem it was. The only thing I've ever heard about someone fighting back was this guy, and unless there were a lot more like him over the following year than I heard, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that spam just got that much easier and more lucrative. Not that I expect Symantec to talk about how anti-virus and anti-spam software like the products they sell fails to stop millions of people from getting infected with malware that makes their computer send spam that isn't filtered out.
My experience on Linux running KDE is that once I submit my login credentials there's a few seconds of starting KDE during which it displays a screen that tells me my desktop is loading, followed by my desktop and a few more seconds of loading kmix and knetstats, and if I were to set my newsreaders to start automatically, they might load before the desktop or after, but they would still need time. It kind of feels fast, what with a verbose system boot process that constantly updates instead of sitting there saying "Applying computer settings", a desktop load process that doesn't spend as much time teasing me with the sight of my desktop, and having seen the KDE load process on much slower machines. If I wanted to make a real determination, I would dual-boot and use my stopwatch. I don't care that much. I only reboot for kernel updates and lightning storms.
My real love of KDE is in the time it saves me after I've booted, with windows that snap into place when they get close to the edge of the screen instead of making it easier to move it off the edge than to get it right, or the way that if you maximize a window by dragging the borders the maximize/restore button will put it back (force of habit, that's why I don't just use the maximize button in the first place, and the KDE team was ready for that!), or giving you the option to set "keep above others" on any application, or letting you use the scroll wheel on your mouse by moving it over a window (without having to click it and bring the whole thing into the foreground). Try following a wikibook on programming in your browser with your text editor and your command shell open at the same time, and you'll see where Linux's real time-saving potential is.
Stop. You're both right. Microsoft plays nice for a while, lets a lot of other players take all the risk of innovating to see what products keep their platform valuable, waits for the hard work of perfecting the design to be over, watches to see what features have the most to do with market appeal, and then swoops in with their version - shoddy, but universal to the platform. No sane IT department would want to vet IE as a safe and desirable application, but they don't have much choice ("I can't get on the Internet!" "What happens when you try?" "I can't. It's missing!" "What?" "The Internet! The blue 'E'! I think a virus ate it!"). Not many web application developers would want to code for IE, but it's a safe design assumption. They can't very well tell a potential corporate customer "To use all the features, you'd want to get Firefox or Opera", the company already has web filtering and proxy software, not to mention Windows group policies, that are only capable of locking down IE. Release some CRM software that doesn't suck (please, pretty please do that) and watch how quickly you get "embraced".
Apple would rather get bottom marks on a ranking than tell you anything about what it plans to do in 2009. These are the people who wanted a modern day Sacco-Venzetti trial over someone finding out what their service manual said on the subject of thermal grease. They will *not* be telling you about their manufacturing processes in advance - even when they get a letter warning them that the alternative is a little bad press. That's their call, let them live with the consequence. No one's going to care in three months anyway when the rumors of the 3-D Holographic iPod start floating around.
Oh, if only. Until recently I worked for a company that sells systems that perform credit card transactions for a particular segment of merchants (I don't want to say more than that for reasons that will become obvious soon enough. They went through a series of revisions in their product lines, but for the most part the systems are very hard to set up, configure, and troubleshoot, and if you were going to go looking for the most technically inept customer base their target industry would make the short list - so a means of remote access is a standard feature.
For a number of years, this meant that you have a Unix box with an "everyday" user - username: [name of vendor of system] password: [same as username or blank] - the root user, with one of four or five short dictionary words for the password (and pretty much the same one in any given region of the country) - and the "application" user with a password that I'm told was relatively secure, but who cares when you have a pretty good chance of getting root before your dictionary cracker gets through the "B's". These machines were just sitting there with a modem waiting for anyone who could "cu" to dial in. Once you were in, and you had root, about a week's worth of credit card transactions complete with everything that can be read off the magnetic stripe were waiting for you in plain text.
A few years down the road, they've gone Windows and they're ever so slightly too careful to have people telnetting in over the Internet, so they use PCAnywhere. Live modem, waiting for you to dial in (yes, dial-up remote administration of a Windows box - fun, fun, fun), username: [name of vendor] password: [name of vendor]. They got called on it, so they changed one of the two to a common word in English, I can't remember which. Once you're in, you're supposed to be signed in as a non-privileged user who's able to access the non-encrypted credit card data only because the permissions aren't always set very well, but usually the owner of the system just signs into their server as Administrator, makes sure that PCAnywhere is running in case the Help Desk needs to get in, and walks away. Their more security-conscious customers (they have a few) require a number of hoops to jump through that you won't be able to if you don't really work at the vendor. Their newest systems, they've encrypted the credit card data, and to decrypt it, you have to sign in to an application with a username that is not especially obvious but is one of the standard Windows users. The password used to be the vendor's name, but now (a few serivce packs down the road) its their name and the product number with some numbers substituted for letters and vice versa.
To their credit, they've started making recommendations like "turn off the modem when you're not actively using it" and "if you use PCAnywhere for TCP/IP, don't use the default ports". This lead to support exchanges like:
"We don't have the modem turned on anymore"
"So turn it back on"
"I don't know how"
"Who does?"
"He doesn't work here anymore"
"You'll have to wait for the dealer to come out on Monday"
"I did mention my business is hemorrhaging cash as I contemplate the value of the fix-figure support contract, right?"
"Yeah, I get that a lot."
My favorite would have to be the voice mail I got: "We set PC Anywhere to not use the default ports like you told us and now it doesn't work with our firewall, so you'll have to call when someone's here to use Webex." At least the company doesn't have a high turnover rate with lots of disgruntled employees who'd love to make them look bad. Oh wait a minute...
That piece makes it sound like sugar springs from the Earth and ethanol just flows right out of it (with greater efficiency in the near future!). And the whole thing manages to not cost anything, but produce lots of high-wage jobs. Tell me what the energy input of sugar cane ethanol production is - where does it come from, what is its rate of emissions. Even if it drove itself to the refinery and fermented itself, you wouldn't get more than 15% ethanol and the specific heat of aqueous solutions doesn't care what crop you used. And the slide mentions using anhydrous ethanol, have you been using benzene or cyclohexane as your entrainer? Or have you been that good with zeolite for the last 30 years?
Even if sugar cane ethanol is the bed of roses UNICA wants me to think it is (Sugar waters itself! We told them to stop burning the cane fields so they did!) I just don't buy Brazil meeting all of the US's fuel needs in addition to the needs of its own 188 million citizens. And Brazil might be living in sugar Shangri-La but things have a way of working differently here.
I was skeptical, but I seem to like most of his stuff.
In normal operation, that's how it works. A sloppy package maintainer didn't bother to make sure it happened like that because there "was a workaround".
I just had to su change the permissions on a config file so I could change the settings on vegastrike to steer with the mouse. With your model (yes, I detected the humor) developers would design around the "they can just hit the button" principle, even when they are writing things to "just work" remotely. Security will happen when people learn:
Couldn't find the excerpt, but you can get the whole Macworld 2004 Keynote at:i ve_2004/all_refs/mwsf_2004_250_100_56_ref.mov
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/macworld/l
I remember sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for Linux's world domination, but I don't think that that was ever its promise. The whole concept of the "killer application", IMHO, runs contrary to the Linux way of doing things. In fact, the more obviously useful a "Linux" app tends to be to large numbers of people, the more likely you are to see Windows and OS X ports.
Linux let users run whatever machine they could get their hands on and have a stable, supported (as in patched and secure) system that would run current apps while the Mac and Windows worlds had people running to the store to replace perfectly good machines. Schools in under-funded districts and governments in poor countries slowly discover that proprietary software vendors hold them over a barrel while FLOSS just gives and gives. These aren't strategies that get you ahead by the next fiscal quarter, but they get you ahead of where you were four or five years ago.
MSFT and Apple fight for their share of consumers (and MSFT pretty much takes the business world for granted) while the FLOSS world makes sure to keep doing what they're doing and their share of developers, enterprise users, and savvy home users expands slowly but steadily. Linux isn't out to get people to come on board because it's got something you'll be deprived of if you don't, and it isn't out to attack or exploit how the other guys slip up. Hell, Linux isn't marching lock-step towards any single goal - it's fragmented, huge numbers of disparate groups and individuals working towards different ends, which Linus has said is exactly what he likes to see. Linux developers achieve a means to an end, polish up the rough edges when they've got something that's going to be around for a while and the users demand it, and let you get off the roller coaster of everyone else deciding what latest and greatest features you just have to have. You want Linux? Here it is. You want to wait a few years for it to improve some more? It will, and it will still be yours for the asking. [insert stream vs. boulder or similar Taoist metaphor]
If there were a "+1 Obvious, but needed saying that badly" this would be the time
Did you sleep through the 90's? The reason every geek on Earth was excited about the Internet and extolled its virtues to a critical-mass of non-geeks was that it delivered information and innovation to you as fast as it could be generated, and by anyone who could express it - not that "goods and services" were being delivered.
...that that porn site was only using my credit card to verify I'm over 18. Sounds like I dodged a bullet.
Me, I was thinking how once upon a time, the Wayback Machine would have fixed every one of those broken links.
Actually, it nagged me enough about software piracy that I switched to Linux.
All it really tells us is that it will be one of these. I think you're probably right, but I have my doubts that they've even firmly decided on it yet. They've been holding off on announcing the How and When since May, and now they've announced the When.
Even if this hadn't been pointed out to be false an hour ago, the summary would have made me say "My God! That's insane! That can't be true! This I have to see for myself!"
FTMFA:
10. BACKUP COPY. You may make one backup copy of the media. You may use it only to reinstall the software.
That's in the section of the license agreement that applies to all of the versions. Not only can you take a cd, rip it to an iso, and burn a disc off it, you can do that with the Windows Vista Installation Disc itself!! I seriously doubt it ever crossed their minds to tell you that you couldn't do that with some other disc they have no interest in, or that if you found yourself with a .iso file, that you couldn't copy and paste yourself a second copy on your HD (though God knows why you would want to, except maybe that you're feeling a little self-indulgent having yet to justify the cost of that multi-TB RAID 0 perpendicular storage setup).
Seriously folks, MSFT is a bunch of greedy, power-hungry sons of bitches, but they sit around thinking of ways to fuck with you for money, not for no reason.
Technical support hasn't been available for some time now. Microsoft has ended the "extended support" period - meaning stopped even issuing patches for publicly-known exploits that allow someone to execute arbitrary code with no interaction on your part whatsoever.
That was enough for me to inform my wife that the ME box (stop snickering, it came with the wife) was going off the 'net and the old hand-me-down 700Mhz grey box would be running Linux and would be the only available machine for Internet access.
I haven't had occasion to talk to any less-savvy individuals running Windows 9x, but I would explain to them what I just told you, so I imagine that a lot of people are getting an earful from the people who de-gunk their machines.
Music is cheap to make.
If you reduce the section you quoted to a formula, you have
Harping on him for specifying that the value of n was large doesn't change the fact that it makes for a bad profit equation for the beancounters at the corporations whose views on DRM you'd like to sway. When 80% of the target demographic that buys 80% of your product (like 63% of all statistics, those were made up) has the means and know-how to get your product for free if you do nothing, you will probably feel like doing something.
Oh, and most of the musicians that generate huge sales numbers don't see much money because the record company doesn't acknowledge having gone into profit. Not that that isn't as bogus as DRM is evil, but you're not likely to get them to open the debate with that concession.
You've clearly never taken an iPod support call. In iTunes, the super-duper brain-dead easy mode - where you plug in your iPod and it automatically updates the iPod to a perfect mirror image of your library - prevents you from dragging and dropping more stuff on there. This generates support calls. That often involve whining. And swearing. And demands to know why this is so hard. And sometimes crying.
It pops up a dialogue box...letting you press a big button that says 'allow'
Windows security model: Give the user a big button that says "allow" and trust them to read the accompanying message and make a rational decision (despite the fact that "Allow" appears to be highlighted in the picture there and you could just hit "Enter").
Mac security model: the big decisions can't be made by people who can't remember a password. And tech support can explain why this is necessary as they wait for the machine to boot from CD and prepare to talk them through the password reset procedure.
Advantage: need I say it?