It's nothing new, but I stumbled across the BadVista page and realized just how much of an idiotic stance the FSF has taken on Vista. I don't think they really know what DRM is.

I do not see how the stance is idiotic. Care to explain your reasoning?

The FSF tends to be pretty extreme in its views, but I do not see a problem with their campaign against Vista.

Oh yes. Vista is evil because it dares to tell innocent users 'Yeah, um, we didn't write this software and have never verified it or anything, so if you run it anyway and it ****s up your computer, it's not our problem.'

Oh, and lets not forget, 'Like, what the ****, dude? You totally stole that copy of photoshop!'

I mean, how dare Microsoft try and stop people from stealing software! Don't they know that it's a victimless crime, just like stealing cable??

hahah

The problem is that forcing restrictions only hurts legitimate users, not the ones that actually "steal" the software.

The FSF is not promoting rampant copyright infringement, they just feel that you should be able to do whatever you damn well please with your machine. Furthermore, they believe that users should boycott the use of the restricted software and switch to an alternative, as opposed to promoting the theft of software. Perhaps if you read their page, you would have gleaned that much from it instead of an uninformed opinion.

I think you mean gleaned. Sorry, pet peeve.

That place is a den of retarded.

Care to tell me what Vista prevents me from doing with my machine?

Yeah, so far it's been NOTHING for me.

And it's not like I don't have questionable content lying around. I've played DVD images I ripped YEARS AGO on here onto my TV at full HD quality.

PS, you know how many times Vista has crashed since I've had it?

It hasn't.

Somebody's been listening to a little bit too much Rage Against the Machine

As Wolfy said earlier in chat "I didn't know Brian runs TWO websites."

well duh, it prevents you from running that funny_jokes.txt.exe thing you got in your email without being harassed by a popup first.

Thanks, I missed that.


I haven't a clue; I don't run Vista.

They, on the other hand, feel that it restricts their rights. The discuss their rationale here: http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista

Do I need to illustrate this for you?

For example, if I want to reinstall my copy of Photoshop CS on my single machine, I have to call Adobe up to reactivate it. While not the most terrible thing in the world, it is still a nuisance that I have to put up with, but someone who cracked their version doesn't. That is one of the problems that the FSF is complaining about. If you don't feel that it is a problem, then good for you. I don't use the software anymore, so it doesn't bother me. However, it does irk plenty of other people, so it seems like a legitimate complaint to me.

I wonder if any one on this planet has actually bought photo shop. It servers Adobe right though for have increasingly invasive but eequally ineffective DRM.

Most companies and universities that use the software purchase a site license. I have a legal copy of it too, since I used to have an interest in doing serious graphic design work.

Unfortunately for Adobe, removing the DRM from their software won't garner them any more customers. Some people will pay for it and some people won't; you really can't do that much about it.

What?!


Something in life is inconveineint! THIS IS A TOTAL TRAGEDY:tinfoil:

Windows XP, Vista, Office XP, 2003, 2007 and Adobe Creative Suite 2 all contain notices on the package that the product requires activation. You are additionally informed of the activation requirement prior to installing the software and product activation is a stipulation of the End-User Licensing Agreement.

I do have to phone the company when I reinstall my LEGAL copies of Windows or CS2. But I don't mind. Do you know why? Because I agreed to it. Because it was printed on the box, and frankly I think I can spare 6 minutes a year (or more). Furthermore, I have never once been denied reactivation, even though I've reinstalled a lot of times. Hell, sometimes they'll even give you a new CD key if you've hit their install cap.

In short, everybody who complains about this - Linux neckbeards, Brian, Malus, whoever - should shut the hell up. You didn't make these programs, you don't sell them. Nobody's forcing you to use them and judging by your statements on these forums you don't use them anyway. Your rights are not being infringed upon because running Windows Vista isn't a right. Suck it up, move along, spend all the time you would spend whining about DRM to write an opensource Photoshop competitor or something. Build it and they will come. Use those neckbeards for Good and not, you know... being really annoying.

This is the internet.

Inconvenience is something for jocks and people without our highly developed brains. Let us forget their superior trapezius muscles....

That's exactly why the DRM is totally unnecessary. It doesn't help them at all.

All they do is toss around words like "DRM" and say it takes away your rights and gives power to big business, but it doesn't actually tell you how.

Also, things like this:
Are downright lies. Vista does not constantly monitor what you do. Vista uses more memory because it aggressively caches to increase performance, it's called SuperFetch, and ironically enough, modern Linux distros do it too.

According to the FSF, the 128 MB, PS2.0 capable video card you need for Aero is actually to enforce DRM and restrict what you do!

jon, the 'you choose to you it' argument only applies to a free market economy where competitors to turn to actually exist

what operating system do you use?

Linux, OpenOffice, The GIMP, are not alternatives? How about OS X?

The reason the best apps, especially games, are on Windows, is because Windows is favored by developers since it's easy to work with. Here's something to think about...the best application development framework for Linux is Mono, which is an implementation of .NET, which is a Microsoft technology.

no no no. I think what's he's saying is that they aren't good alternatives.

Maybe he only uses Linux because his pirated copy of XP quit working.

edit:


MonoDevelop is the only good Linux IDE, too. With all due respect to the developers of KDevelop and Anjuta, those two are complete trash. The interface is laid out poorly, the default settings are unreasonable (and it's difficult to get font sizes set reasonably), most of the time the package managers don't set up the toolchain right (I swear I have to run libtoolize every time I make a project in KDevelop. Why?), and the autotabbing is absolutely and completely atrocious.

To make matters even worse, APIs in the opensource world are still brutally fragmented -- and they really don't need to be! The whole reason we have Gnome and KDE competing against each other is because a couple of neckbeards got sand up their special place. GTK+ which was invented for writing one goddamn program (the GIMP), Qt which is actually really good but sorta only works in C++ and requires a custom preprocessing step. I think it speaks volumes when the only reasonable/guaranteed GUI framework for Linux is Winforms which was goddamn invented by Microsoft. And how about sound? OSS? ALSA? ESD? aRTs? The only promising one out of the bunch is OpenAL which is just a wrapper for ALSA. Not that you can use any interesting hardware acceleration features in Linux anyway.

How about multimedia frameworks? Input devices? Every goddamn desktop manager has its own API for just about everything, and you practically have to install the whole desktop environment to get those APIs working on another one. The only stable and uniform API - that wasn't written in the 1960s, at least - is CUPS. CUPS for Christ's sake. I guess X protocol is fairly standardized too (as absolutely retarded as the standard is), but nobody uses straight X. You also have a myriad of smaller issues that are still completely annoying for anybody using Linux as a desktop OS. Basic, basic tasks that have been solved in every other OS as early as the original Macintosh - things like copy+paste/system clipboard and drag and drop - are hopelessly broken in Linux in spite of the efforts of groups like freedesktop.org.

And then you have OpenGL. Oh, hoo boy could I write about OpenGL. I won't go into all of my complaints, but I will say this: the fact that OpenGL does not allow you to poll it for device capabilities (beyond using GLX to request an extension function pointer and then checking the pointer to see if it's valid) means it is not reasonably useful for serious game development. In order for the latest and greatest OpenGL engine - Doom 3 - to function it needed to have half a dozen different codepaths to handle half a dozen potential graphics cards. This is not reasonable. This is not acceptable, but it's what you have to do in order to write an OpenGL game.

You have a billion extensions, scripts and modules to make up for Linux's shortcomings (like HAL/DBUS, a couple of services which constantly poll block devices and USB -- contrasted against the way Windows handles device polling and filesystem monitoring which is through the kernel). And then there's the fact that NT is a hybrid microkernel which handles message IPC at the kernel level, which means Windows can more intelligently allocate timeslices to UI applications allowing for a greater degree of responsiveness. In contrast, X handles IPC over a network loopback device and all applications are allocated timeslices "equally" (regardless of whether the situation calls for more processor time or not). Great for servers, awful for desktops.

OSX has its own foibles too, but - again - at least its API is stable across all versions of OSX. If you develop a Linux app you aren't stuck to the 1-2% desktop market penetration of Linux, you're stuck to the 0.5-1% market share of whatever desktop environment you target. And even then they'd never pay for the program, they'd just pirate it. Basically the whole thing is a goddamn mess and pretty much every programmer who has ever used Visual Studio and Microsoft APIs (myself included) would rather engage in genital intercourse with a running blender than write a non-trivial application for Linux.

what i use doesn't matter much

the market is locked into windows

...except it's not.

You could argue that individual companies are locked into Windows. Alright, I'll bite. The reason they're "locked in" is because Microsoft's salespeople did their job well, sold the companies on those products and now it's too expensive to migrate away.

I'll take it a step further, though: The reason companies haven't switched to Linux for the desktop is because it's not as good. Seriously. In spite of how zealots characterize opensource software I have yet to use an opensource desktop environment that is as stable and reliable as Windows. OpenOffice is not stable, it is slow, and it is buggy. It is only more secure because nobody targets it. Linux also has no reasonable replacement for Exchange Servers or NT domain servers. Novell's solution to the problem? Write an exchange client for Linux.


There is no grand conspiracy to lock the world into using Windows. There are no general computing tasks you cannot perform on OSX - office, desktop publishing, graphics editing, 3D modelling - it's all there. A lot of people would even argue that OSX is better for these tasks.

Windows is the king of gaming for one reason: DirectX. If you brought DirectX or a DirectX-like API to the other operating systems, the games would follow. But nobody in the OSS world seems to get the damn hint that their APIs suck and are broken. LOL LET'S USE SDL :downs:


And, like I said in my edit in the post above, nobody's ever going to bring major commercial software packages (like creative suite) to Linux because it would cost too much, it would make no money and you'd have to make 50 versions for all of the different configurations. Oh, and six different installers, none of them graphical (hope you don't like options :v:). ...are you starting to get the picture I'm painting here?

I just threw Linux onto this very machine for the purposes of experimenting with Mono. It literally stayed on my machine for hours.

First reason: Sound. Ok, so I apparently left my onboard audio enabled in BIOS. Linux automatically defaults to that device and I can't hear jack **** coming out of the speakers. Ok. So I look around for an option to switch devices. I'm not finding it. ****. So I reboot, disable the onboard audio and then boot back into Linux. Awesome! Now I hear sound....just in my subwoofer. Why can't I hear the other speakers? So I look for a volume option. I still can find it. So I abandon that idea.

Second reason: Ok I have two monitors. Only one turns on. Oookay. How do I enable the 2nd monitor? Again, I look for the quick-and-dirty way. I do not find it. So I double-click a random Massassian who might know how to solve this dilemna (CoolMatty). He tells me that I have to do some nice Xorg.conf fiddlin' for my 2nd monitor. Angrily at this notion, I still look for a way to fix this. I find it after having to download a program which allows me to set for two monitors. Ok so I can finally set two monitors. So I enable that, restart the X server. No 2nd monitor. So I double check my settings again. Restart X server. No 2nd monitor. I'm getting pissed. So I run the sodding app as sudo and change my settings. No second monitor.

I reboot to windows and the first task I did was to utterly annihilate the Linux partition I had made. A half day of heartache is not worth it. I have not looked back since. Seriously, I do and should not have to download programs, do extra work just for simple tasks as these. These should be built straight into the OS and readily available.

Pffft.

You aren't leet enough for linux. And because it is such a smart operating system for smart people it smartly decided to reject you and perform like ***.

Don't feel bad. It also does this to 99.99% of the entire population of the world trying to use it for a desktop OS.

I use it. It works fine. Not that I haven't had any problems/annoyances, but nothing insurmountable. I don't ask a lot out of it, but it seems to provide what I need (except for JK lol).

i, and MANY companies, employ glunix as a unix replacement. It's GREAT, mostly because it's essentially all bell lab's design. If you're really lucky you're even using plan9

a small number of confused people attempt to employ glunix to emulate windows. It's no wonder they have trouble trying to do something so uninspired, written by equally uninspired programmers. They are really better off using a mac

but those people are a minority. The majority of the market can't just use a mac, because it's constituents are locked into some late `90s crap windows program