Sure, I had $30,000 worth of pirate software when I was in college, and I went legit after my student discount was up

And there you have it boys and girl. The exact reason why the vast majority of commercial software approve of violating the terms and conditions of using their software. You will in all likelihood become their customer.

And what about the other users who don't go legit? Well, you certainly don't want them to use your competitor's software, right?

Now, how does the evil BSA figure into this? Like the RIAA, they make an example out of an individual/organization to instill fear. Again, the idea is to discourage the violations, not actually prevent them from happening.

What Canon can do?

-With current available models nothing
-With future models blah... blah... blah...
-Hire people who really understands security

Having been on that side of the industry, there's no way Canon's putting a smart card chip in camera. Why? Cost mostly. And then there's the significant problem of communicating from the camera OS to the smart card chip. And then there's the significant increase in the cost of manufacturing.

They aren't going to hire anyone either. This decision was made long ago and the constraints are still cost and calendar. Both extraordinarily tight.

Canon will generally defame Skylarov to any agency that feigns interest and be generally dishonest about the whole thing.

So not only are you battening down the hatches for the present when you lay them off, you're mortgaging your future by destroying the core intellectual base for the stuff you have.

The buyers in this case and most others are not planning for a future. They are extracting as much wealth as possible as quickly as possible with no regard for a future that will never be. If it blows up in 2, 3, or five years is only a matter of finding more suckers to take money from while Novell's business prospects end.

People with a mindset like yours are not valued because you are not looking to extract maximum value today with only a pretty presentation and pro-forma statements. You might add a little value to a pillager's target that is with certainty headed to bankruptcy and dissolution, but that's about it.

Hot news for you: Linux is many more places than Microsoft's products. You just don't know it. Millions of electronic devices use it. Yes, millions. Mostly invisible to you because it just works. When it **has** to work, there's some kind of Unix used.

Windows has a niche and does a good job defending it. It's an "okay" desktop. Mostly they use the desktop like a cancer that bores into an office environment. Straight server applications? Expensive in most ways and comparably weak. It's below average-ness doesn't stop it from being sold because Microsoft knows the customer is not the geek, but the boss of the geek's boss who doesn't know anything about the geek's job.

It looks like this deal keeps NetWare customers going for sure and forces the SuSe business to pay for itself. That will likely chop the head count of the group working on SuSe.

Flame on!

I think sometimes the geeks forget the Marketing adage that most enduring products are functionally "just okay." Typically a successful product uses lots of cash to drown their competitors. Might makes right.

Someone somewhere said "Early to bed. Early to rise. Advertise Advertise Advertise"

I've admined SuperMicro, Dell, and HP at this point and would strongly recommend a second hand HP. Lots of parts availability, *excellent* management software, while the servers themselves are practically ready to run with all kinds of redundancy. Cheap supermicro doesn't work out to be low-cost.

Serversupply.com has tons of second-hand Proliants. You'll pay more than Craigslist, but less than new. Unless you *really* need tons of cpu horsepower, make sure the server has gigabit ethernet and Bob's yer Uncle. Get an old HP ultra320 SCSI storage array and load it up with 75+ GB drives for your storage. Yer bottleneck is always the network. Dead simple, cheap and reliable.

On the coast of California is a whole lotta military real estate some of it pretty secret judging by the number of ways to be discouraged from getting too close to the boundaries.

Of course the military will deny it. 50 years from now a FOIA request might be interesting, but doubtful.

A rocket launched off the California coast isn't special. Neither is something secret happening at one of the bases. Put the two together and it's a non-event.

And if you ask them to wade that sea of ridiculousness they'll swiftly be lured back to the comort of the tried and true.

Which is the precise reason why they are not good candidates for switching to Linux. There is no urgent need to switch. Leave them alone.

Oracle and Microsoft to name *just* two companies piss off enough customers you'll have enough people desperately wanting to be rid of both to pay you well for an entire career.

No. A thousand times no.

Most of your rant is incoherent middle Marketing management hyperbole.

- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
So, how would GUI's get done? Really. Because IDE's have tried over the decades and none has succeeded. Zero. There's another toolkit that inevitably follows the last big thing in GUI's.

If you say something along the lines of "a gui should be as simple as scripting" I agree, and KDE4, XFCE4 have it. Your bash script magically appears as a nice gui in some cases. winetricks.sh comes to mind.

Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered
Done. ATI, Nvidia, Epson and HP(networking driver) are three examples that have binary drivers and the distros have done a good job at integrating them. The companies behind them have been pretty good to the Free software community too. (Epson exception. Epson printers work, only sort-of compared to HP's full featureset)
Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
I know this industry and I don't see any of this for software. Apple? Briefly. Adobe? cha-ching! Oracle? Microsoft? More money for support. If you need it, just look around and you'll find it. The AOL of Linux, Ubuntu will hold your hand for a reasonable fee. Red Hat will hold your hand for an Enterprise contract. HP? IBM? They all got it.

- Real, complete documentation
I don't accept this. Most apps have great man pages. Certainly as good as what passes for documentation included in a Microsoft OS release. Not as good as some of the commercial UNIXes, but great in most cases. Man pages are certainly enough in most cases. Please, do not take this as an opportunity to tell me about the ONE app you downloaded from who knows where having nothing to do with the distro you used. It's not a legitimate complaint.

If you want to wail and moan about how it shouldn't be necessary to dig through man pages, then you are applying a completely wrong standard to general purpose desktop operating systems.

If they got rid of most of the screws from these things, it would solve so many problems.

Except most of the screws are a *critical* structural features.

The advertisement is a buzzword masterpiece. You only mentioned one of many flaws.

The goal in this team's Ivy League education is to learn how to string buzzwords together to generate interest in fundamentally flawed ideas.

Good to know the ruling class is staying busy.

It's an Auto*desk advertisement and more Ivy League B.S.

If a team at a State College did this, then it would be an Auto*Desk advert that would be discarded. But because it's an unworkable idea from STANFORD it deserves consideration?

-Thin, light and modular assembly are conflicting demands in portable computers.
-Multi-purpose, generally powerful portable computers with modular assembly would resemble a 10 year old laptop.

... is it took a meta review to bring this forward. What do you think will happen when University research funding sources are corporations with very specific short term interests?

The social phenomena described is quite common. People in general trust the messages coming from some sources more than others. Being high on the trust ladder is what Marketing people are hoping to achieve with their efforts. My favorite example in the "trust the messenger" department is Microsoft. How many times over how many years does it take before people will disregard their "yeah, we've got that feature" a year or more out from a product release? Lots. Doesn't matter though. The same people that trust Microsoft after being routinely mislead then defend Microsoft. They trust Microsoft. Pharma does the same thing.

chip to check for digital signatures to prove the code is "authorized"

Which is exactly what Tivo did with their Linux stack. Modify the Linux stack in a Tivo and the device is broken due to some kind of hashing.

I think the FSF is on the right track, but the inexorable problems of clever people circumventing the GPL will turn a good idea into an unpleasant situation.

If the FSF made the essence of the label basically GPL friendly hardware with no binary software blobs with some limited backward kernel version support, then I think they'd have a winner. BSD could potentially leverage off the FSF work of making sure the device is open enough to write drivers. A better revenue opportunity for the FSF would be if they did the testing so the hardware manufacturers don't have to acquire the people to do meet the FSF label requirements.

Where the FSF might get into trouble is attempting to shut out Apple and Microsoft. Just ignore them. The more Microsoft and Apple restrain/monetize personal use, the more Free software will be in use. It's the only way forward.

If it "Works with Windows", is "Made for Macs", and is "FSF Compatible" no sane manufacturer is not going to want to mention all three.

Disagree. Device manufacturers look at the cost (time and money) of the process required to license the logo/badge and decide that way. If the FSF have a sensible cost and process, then a little more testing to attract a growing segment is worth it.

The FSF is 100% wrong if they attempt to exclude Microsoft and Apple compatibility logos. Hardware can be simultaneously GPL friendly and proprietary at the same time. Look at HP printers as an example. Binary blobless source code for the operating system part of their devices is available in Linux. They have traditional IP restricted binaries for Apple and Microsoft.