I wouldn't say that it is easy to defend your rights now, considering the extraordinary amount of material currently available on P2P networks. Neither the RIAA's army of lawyers nor the DMCA have been effectively at preventing P2P filesharing. Notice that none of the RIAA's artists are in the poor house as a result, and notice that the RIAA is still turning profits -- record profits -- even while P2P usage was growing.
You can't really argue that Red Hat got to where it is because of an army of lawyers; the company started with no lawyers. Red Hat became big and gain that platoon of lawyers because they were producing higher quality software than their competitors, and because they had and continue to have a more flexible business model. I know amateur musicians who, while not millionaires, are making a decent amount of money on their music, through concerts, t-shirts, etc. More creative ways to make money on content are simply more effective than a slew of laws that people either aren't aware of, or are aware of but simply ignore.
Really? Because I can think of plenty of copyrighted material from the 80s that was produced by little guys (who eventually became big players, but still): the GNU project. In fact, all GPL'ed apps are protected by copyrights, and had the same level of protection before the DMCA was ratified. And don't claim that GPL'ed code isn't worth "as much as" some other copyrighted material; here is a list of companies that make a LOT of money from sales or support of GPL'ed code:
Red Hat
Canonical
Sun
Microsoft
Novell
IBM
And there are MANY more. In fact, all of the companies on the list got to where they are (with the exception of Canonical, they are all valued in the billions of dollars) without the DMCA. As an example, Red Hat is worth ~$4bn and has only ever marketed GPL'ed code, and was started by some guy in his basement. You can claim music is different, but it really isn't: there is probably more demand for software than there is for music, especially since so much software is involved in the production and playback of music.
No offense, but if you actually NEED to use the DMCA in order to make money on your content, then maybe you should spend more time trying to improve the content itself, or take a second look at how you are using the content to make money. You are right, copyrights protect content creators, but the DMCA hurts content consumers.
The DMCA does not protect copyrights, it simply expanded their scope to include things like copy restriction technologies. In fact, protecting copyrights with a law makes no sense anyway: copyrights are established by the law, and should be protected by the courts, as they were for decades before the DMCA was signed into law.
Go head; I'd like to hear about these features. I am personally very skeptical about web apps, but I do like to know what other people think is good about them.
Well, admittedly, we were talking about a feature that isn't in very high demand. That is what scripting is supposed to be used for -- special things like that. Really, I don't see this whole copy/paste problem as requiring more than a quick little script, but I just thought I would mention that the OOo developers care more about what their users ask for than the MS Office team.
Well, everyone's situation is different. If the locations you are working at do not have an office suite install, then I can see a need for Google Docs. In my situation, I have a laptop, and I also have several servers in various locations (one little personal one that I run for myself) that I can use to store some files and pick them up from another location. As you noted, everyone's situation is different.
"Most people I talk to are still skeptical of them."
Offline work? Yeah, you can make it with the Google app, then download it and work on it offline...but then, why bother to use the Google app? This is the problem with web-apps: you are relying on an internet connection, and we just don't have that kind of infrastructure here in America. Then there is the problem of putting your data in someone else's hands. And the lack of an actual AJAX standard. And the fact that Google apps don't support my browser of choice (forcing me to change the user agent...and have it work anyway. So why is it still unsupported?).
So get back to me when this stuff isn't a problem, and I'll look at Google apps again.
"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."
People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not. But I can think of a few things that OOo has that MS Office does not. People who have trouble with OOo seem to be people who were originally trained with MS Office, and so it should come as no surprise that they are having trouble. Yes, things are in different places. Yes, things have different names.
There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo, you would see much wider adoption.
KOffice needs a lot of work before I would call it a serious competitor. Right now, it has one advantage: it is light. It doesn't drain my battery as quickly as OOo does. But when it comes to serious document editing, I have to stick with OOo.
Big Blue has always designed top-notch software (I am not saying that all their software is top-notch, but they have a good record). They did virtualization with the VM operating system (now z/VM) years before anyone else was thinking about it. OS/2 was much more robust than Windows/NT, though it had a few issues that kept it from becoming as big. IBM research fueled many of the design decision that we now take for granted; for example, the need for <1s responsiveness to keystrokes (any higher latency and you cut into productivity).
And of course, their foray into the open source world is a very welcome move. Hopefully they can go far with this new office suite; even if it doesn't completely supplant MS Office, hopefully it becomes big enough that ODF use becomes more mainstream.
Big Blue has always design top-notch software (I am not saying that all their software is top-notch, but they have a good record). They did virtualization with the VM operating system (now z/VM) years before anyone else was thinking about it. OS/2 was much more robust than Windows/NT, though it had a few issues that kept it from becoming as big. IBM research fueled many of the design decision that we now take for granted; for example, the need for
And of course, their foray into the open source world is a very welcome move. Hopefully they can go far with this new office suite; even if it doesn't completely supplant MS Office, hopefully it becomes big enough that ODF use becomes more mainstream.
Well I agree with you on their software quality. If they were creating software that was worth the price they charge, compared to other systems, SCO wouldn't be in this mess. That was apparent the moment they started demanding IP royalties like some kind of patent troll.
Probably not as bad as it sounds. Companies go bankrupt all the time, and it is not the fault of the accountants (in most cases). It's not like, "Lost job due to largest security exploit in history," on a programmer's resume.
Now, if it were on one of the manager's resumes, that might be a little worse.
Yes. As someone commented in the last article about SCO (announcing their bankruptcy filing), they recently completed a large contract to some company somewhere. Whoever signed that deal must really hate themselves right now.
There are hundreds of different file dialogs on Windows also. Some apps were written with Win32/MFC and have that file dialog. Some Windows apps are GTK, and have the GTK file dialog. Some have their own custom written file dialogs (esp. photo and video editors). So don't start on the integration bent, because it is a load. I'll say this: if you stick with KDE and Qt apps, your *nix system has an integrated look-and-feel, integrated plugins, etc. If you stick with GNOME and GTK apps, your *nix system will have that same integration. If you stick with Microsoft and MFC/Win32/.NET/* apps, you get that integrated look and feel. If you stick with Apple and OSX apps, you get that look and feel.
But if you want to do something useful, you will lose that integration. Doesn't matter what system you are on, to have a useful computer you need to use software from different developers, and eventually, you will have software with a different look-and-feel from the rest of the system. This is inescapable, and anyone who thinks that they can make a system that will have an integrated look and feel and still be useful in the general case is simply wrong.
libc incompatibilities aren't something can be solved, because those are libraries on different operating systems. Just like it is almost impossible to get binary compatibility between Windows and Fedora, or Mac OS x86 and Solaris, it is difficult to get binary compatibility between Mandriva and Ubuntu. Some distros are optimized for Pentium 2, some for 386, some for Pentium 4, some for security. They may be using different alignment, or impose different limits. That's what the autoconf/automake system was meant to address. We need to get out of the mentality that "Linux" is an operating system. Linux distros are operating systems, and in many cases they differ as much from each other as they do from non-Linux systems.
I can think of a few compelling reasons to stay away from Windows. First of all, power consumption: the latest Linux kernel was re-engineered to use fewer CPU cycles, and on laptops, that is a HUGE plus, not to mention on virtualized servers. Then, there is KDE -- the latest version has also been fixed up to be more power efficient, and the upcoming release of KDE 4 should see continued improvements in this field. KDE is also very modular, much more so than Windows; I haven't had much experience with Vista, but in KDE, plugins will load in the ZIP archive file previewer, something that programs like Explorer and WinZIP just don't do. KDE is network transparent -- you can edit files on SFTP filesystems as if they were on your local machine. I know Windows has some capabilities for this, but it has never worked well for me, and the range of supported protocols is very limited. Most distros come with out-of-the-box support for zeroconf, which is particularly useful when working with people who don't know much about computing or networking (in this area, a particularly useful little KDE applet is the Personal File Server, which creates an HTTP interface to a chosen directory, then advertises with zeroconf, which is great for quickly sending files to people).
If Windows works for you, great. Personally speaking, I find that it is far too limited in terms of functionality for my taste, unless Vista is really all people claim it is. Why should I switch?
1.) Someone mod this AC up! 2.) Thanks for this clarification, I did not know that was the case. I always thought that is the way things SHOULD be, but it is somewhat rare in this country that the way things "should be" coincides with they way things "are."
I'm sorry, but Microsoft appears to disagree with you:
" "The Windows Update client is configured to automatically check for updates anytime a system uses the WU service, independent of the selected settings for handling updates. This has been the case since we introduced the Automatic Update feature in Windows XP. In fact, WU has autoupdated itself many times in the past," he (Nate Clinton) said." -- TFA
If you weren't following, Nate Clinton is the leader of the Windows Update team. So the guy who is basically responsible for this update just said that, independent of the selected settings WU installs updates for itself. How you are sitting there are claiming that OSS supporters on Slashdot are spreading FUD is a mystery to me, in light of what this man is saying. He makes it pretty clear that this sort of thing is consider pretty standard -- as he said, they've done it before, and there were no complaints.
If you aren't understanding the problem, let me spell it out for you (this is actual FUD, although...): a corrupt employee could slip some malicious code into a WU update, and in a flash, control millions upon millions of computers. The update is silently installed, so you as a user don't actually become aware that you are installing this code. And WU runs with elevated privileges in XP, allowing it to update parts of the kernel -- making it an obvious choice for rootkit installation.
Granted, it sounds somewhat far-fetched, and is legitimate FUD. Such a fiasco would be a disaster for Microsoft, and would kill any hopes they had of maintaining desktop dominance. But it serves to illustrate the problem with silent updates like this; you don't actually know what is happening. Like I said, I wouldn't call it a FUD or histeria if the guy who approved the update admits that, in fact, this particular sort of update can be installed regardless of the user-controlled configuration. I doubt that major corporate installations, like banks (and their ATMs, which are being phased from OS/2 to Windows at this very moment) would be very appreciative of this sort of behavior, and I wonder if there is a "corporate switch" that disables it.
I have wondered for a while what sort of warranty issues surround installing Linux. In the Microsoft mindset, software is considered part of the computer, and therefore replacing it would be analogous to replacing a hardware piece which would naturally void the warranty. Personally, I have always viewed installing Linux as being on the same level as installing any other software; saying it voids the warranty is, in my opinion, like saying that replacing a factory installed MS Office trial with some other office suite would void the warranty.
Also, this is evidence that Linux systems are gaining ground -- issues like this are "growing pains."
The point the poster was trying to make was that simply counting the number of physical servers in use is not an accurate measurement. His point was that there is more to it than physical servers; a single server could potentially be supporting thousands of users in an organization. There is also the question of, for a given hardware platform, how many users can be supported by one server system vs. another (Linux usually wins on this one, since the kernel has been tweaked to create processes very fast, even faster than Windows can create threads).
The problem with the update, from what I've read, is that it happened regardless of whether or not you set WU to ask before installing updates. It isn't a question of what they updated, it is a question of how they are able to simply bypass that configuration option. I used to think that no company would use that kind of capability to do something evil, but given the Sony rootkit fiasco, I am beginning to doubt that sentiment.
Of course, I don't use Windows, so this doesn't really affect me. Still, I think this should be a heads up that it is time to consider other systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say that it is easy to defend your rights now, considering the extraordinary amount of material currently available on P2P networks. Neither the RIAA's army of lawyers nor the DMCA have been effectively at preventing P2P filesharing. Notice that none of the RIAA's artists are in the poor house as a result, and notice that the RIAA is still turning profits -- record profits -- even while P2P usage was growing.
You can't really argue that Red Hat got to where it is because of an army of lawyers; the company started with no lawyers. Red Hat became big and gain that platoon of lawyers because they were producing higher quality software than their competitors, and because they had and continue to have a more flexible business model. I know amateur musicians who, while not millionaires, are making a decent amount of money on their music, through concerts, t-shirts, etc. More creative ways to make money on content are simply more effective than a slew of laws that people either aren't aware of, or are aware of but simply ignore.
And there are MANY more. In fact, all of the companies on the list got to where they are (with the exception of Canonical, they are all valued in the billions of dollars) without the DMCA. As an example, Red Hat is worth ~$4bn and has only ever marketed GPL'ed code, and was started by some guy in his basement. You can claim music is different, but it really isn't: there is probably more demand for software than there is for music, especially since so much software is involved in the production and playback of music.
No offense, but if you actually NEED to use the DMCA in order to make money on your content, then maybe you should spend more time trying to improve the content itself, or take a second look at how you are using the content to make money. You are right, copyrights protect content creators, but the DMCA hurts content consumers.
The DMCA does not protect copyrights, it simply expanded their scope to include things like copy restriction technologies. In fact, protecting copyrights with a law makes no sense anyway: copyrights are established by the law, and should be protected by the courts, as they were for decades before the DMCA was signed into law.
Go head; I'd like to hear about these features. I am personally very skeptical about web apps, but I do like to know what other people think is good about them.
Well, admittedly, we were talking about a feature that isn't in very high demand. That is what scripting is supposed to be used for -- special things like that. Really, I don't see this whole copy/paste problem as requiring more than a quick little script, but I just thought I would mention that the OOo developers care more about what their users ask for than the MS Office team.
Well, everyone's situation is different. If the locations you are working at do not have an office suite install, then I can see a need for Google Docs. In my situation, I have a laptop, and I also have several servers in various locations (one little personal one that I run for myself) that I can use to store some files and pick them up from another location. As you noted, everyone's situation is different.
Offline work? Yeah, you can make it with the Google app, then download it and work on it offline...but then, why bother to use the Google app? This is the problem with web-apps: you are relying on an internet connection, and we just don't have that kind of infrastructure here in America. Then there is the problem of putting your data in someone else's hands. And the lack of an actual AJAX standard. And the fact that Google apps don't support my browser of choice (forcing me to change the user agent...and have it work anyway. So why is it still unsupported?).
So get back to me when this stuff isn't a problem, and I'll look at Google apps again.
The beauty of option #2 is that it is open source, and the developers actually care about what you have to say (most of the time).
People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not. But I can think of a few things that OOo has that MS Office does not. People who have trouble with OOo seem to be people who were originally trained with MS Office, and so it should come as no surprise that they are having trouble. Yes, things are in different places. Yes, things have different names.
There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo, you would see much wider adoption.
KOffice needs a lot of work before I would call it a serious competitor. Right now, it has one advantage: it is light. It doesn't drain my battery as quickly as OOo does. But when it comes to serious document editing, I have to stick with OOo.
Big Blue has always designed top-notch software (I am not saying that all their software is top-notch, but they have a good record). They did virtualization with the VM operating system (now z/VM) years before anyone else was thinking about it. OS/2 was much more robust than Windows/NT, though it had a few issues that kept it from becoming as big. IBM research fueled many of the design decision that we now take for granted; for example, the need for <1s responsiveness to keystrokes (any higher latency and you cut into productivity).
And of course, their foray into the open source world is a very welcome move. Hopefully they can go far with this new office suite; even if it doesn't completely supplant MS Office, hopefully it becomes big enough that ODF use becomes more mainstream.
Big Blue has always design top-notch software (I am not saying that all their software is top-notch, but they have a good record). They did virtualization with the VM operating system (now z/VM) years before anyone else was thinking about it. OS/2 was much more robust than Windows/NT, though it had a few issues that kept it from becoming as big. IBM research fueled many of the design decision that we now take for granted; for example, the need for
And of course, their foray into the open source world is a very welcome move. Hopefully they can go far with this new office suite; even if it doesn't completely supplant MS Office, hopefully it becomes big enough that ODF use becomes more mainstream.
Well I agree with you on their software quality. If they were creating software that was worth the price they charge, compared to other systems, SCO wouldn't be in this mess. That was apparent the moment they started demanding IP royalties like some kind of patent troll.
I wonder what would happen if there were no employees left? What would the bankruptcy judge do?
Now, if it were on one of the manager's resumes, that might be a little worse.
Yes. As someone commented in the last article about SCO (announcing their bankruptcy filing), they recently completed a large contract to some company somewhere. Whoever signed that deal must really hate themselves right now.
Maybe they were banking on a victory over Linux users.
But if you want to do something useful, you will lose that integration. Doesn't matter what system you are on, to have a useful computer you need to use software from different developers, and eventually, you will have software with a different look-and-feel from the rest of the system. This is inescapable, and anyone who thinks that they can make a system that will have an integrated look and feel and still be useful in the general case is simply wrong.
libc incompatibilities aren't something can be solved, because those are libraries on different operating systems. Just like it is almost impossible to get binary compatibility between Windows and Fedora, or Mac OS x86 and Solaris, it is difficult to get binary compatibility between Mandriva and Ubuntu. Some distros are optimized for Pentium 2, some for 386, some for Pentium 4, some for security. They may be using different alignment, or impose different limits. That's what the autoconf/automake system was meant to address. We need to get out of the mentality that "Linux" is an operating system. Linux distros are operating systems, and in many cases they differ as much from each other as they do from non-Linux systems.
If Windows works for you, great. Personally speaking, I find that it is far too limited in terms of functionality for my taste, unless Vista is really all people claim it is. Why should I switch?
1.) Someone mod this AC up!
2.) Thanks for this clarification, I did not know that was the case. I always thought that is the way things SHOULD be, but it is somewhat rare in this country that the way things "should be" coincides with they way things "are."
" "The Windows Update client is configured to automatically check for updates anytime a system uses the WU service, independent of the selected settings for handling updates. This has been the case since we introduced the Automatic Update feature in Windows XP. In fact, WU has autoupdated itself many times in the past," he (Nate Clinton) said." -- TFA
If you weren't following, Nate Clinton is the leader of the Windows Update team. So the guy who is basically responsible for this update just said that, independent of the selected settings WU installs updates for itself. How you are sitting there are claiming that OSS supporters on Slashdot are spreading FUD is a mystery to me, in light of what this man is saying. He makes it pretty clear that this sort of thing is consider pretty standard -- as he said, they've done it before, and there were no complaints.
If you aren't understanding the problem, let me spell it out for you (this is actual FUD, although...): a corrupt employee could slip some malicious code into a WU update, and in a flash, control millions upon millions of computers. The update is silently installed, so you as a user don't actually become aware that you are installing this code. And WU runs with elevated privileges in XP, allowing it to update parts of the kernel -- making it an obvious choice for rootkit installation.
Granted, it sounds somewhat far-fetched, and is legitimate FUD. Such a fiasco would be a disaster for Microsoft, and would kill any hopes they had of maintaining desktop dominance. But it serves to illustrate the problem with silent updates like this; you don't actually know what is happening. Like I said, I wouldn't call it a FUD or histeria if the guy who approved the update admits that, in fact, this particular sort of update can be installed regardless of the user-controlled configuration. I doubt that major corporate installations, like banks (and their ATMs, which are being phased from OS/2 to Windows at this very moment) would be very appreciative of this sort of behavior, and I wonder if there is a "corporate switch" that disables it.
Also, this is evidence that Linux systems are gaining ground -- issues like this are "growing pains."
That was the grandparent's point.
Of course, I don't use Windows, so this doesn't really affect me. Still, I think this should be a heads up that it is time to consider other systems.