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The Audio Home Recording Act only allows first-generation recordings - not making copies of copies of copies of copies. Look here.

The DMCA didn't outlaw making copies - it still allows fair use copies - see page 4 of this PDF.

Just in case you still think it's a coincidence, billg gave $35 million to Duke and Melinda got her trusteeship at the same time, in 1996. It's blatantly obvious that Melinda is just another of Bill's pawns. I'd love to see the details of her nuptial contract.

Do you have any more details on this?

It's called the Audio Home Recording Act, which basically said that you can make copies of things at home, but in return the **AA's collect a levy on all recording media and recorders sold, and you can only make a copy from a first-generation copy of something.

A good link is here.

The main problem is that the law was passed 10 years ago, and nobody had any idea that the Internet would take off so much, and if I read it correctly, it doesn't protect you if you download. I think the problem with downloading is that the downloaded music is not a first-generation recording, so you can't let someone else copy it. Although, I wonder what happens if you use one of those 99cents download services, and then let people download from your server. I think there are other issues in that computers aren't covered devices because they don't have the necessary !copying protection and don't pay royalties. It's a mess, but it appears that doing a CD->CD transfer with a CD player is ok.

Actually, the question is whether he's allowed to. It's pretty well established at this time that there is no right to first sale for Digital Phonorecord Deliveries (DPDs). See, for example, this Duke Law and Technology Review article, which is entitled "THE FIRST SALE DOCTRINE AND DIGITAL PHONORECORDS." It's two and a half years old, and its conclusion is, "While First Sale clearly allows an owner of a non-digital phonorecord format of this song, such as vinyl record and CD, to dispose of her copy through further distribution, First Sale is inapplicable to similar distributions of digital phonorecords because of the reproductions made during distribution and the ease in which infringing reproductions can be further distributed."

This isn't new, and it isn't groundbreaking. If this goes to court, he'll lose. He's either clueless about the law or looking for publicity (or conceivably both).

the relevant question is not what he considers to be copying, but what the law does.

106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works

Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
...

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

"Also, and I don't know the answer to this either, but did the life that exists on Earth around those heat sources evolve separately from all life on Earth? Or did it require some building blocks of life to sift down through the ocean over the years?"

Actually many people think that the origins of life started near deep ocean thermal vents. The bottom of the ocean was a far safer place to hang out during Earth's early years. Comet and astroiod impacts have very little influence on an ecosystem dependant on thermal vents 5 miles below water.

Users of rpm-based distros could try Yum, which will automatically determine neccessary updates and apply them.
You can also create a local repository and have client machines use that. Automatically via cron, even.

That was Seth Vidal who is too lazy to get a /. account. :)

thanx to an AC a few posts down:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

And more specifically:

severn-i386-disc1.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc2.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc3.iso.torrent

orAll severn Binary isos in one torrent directory

Theres torrent linx to the SRPMS there too.
Thanx AC!

thanx to an AC a few posts down:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

And more specifically:

severn-i386-disc1.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc2.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc3.iso.torrent

orAll severn Binary isos in one torrent directory

Theres torrent linx to the SRPMS there too.
Thanx AC!

thanx to an AC a few posts down:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

And more specifically:

severn-i386-disc1.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc2.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc3.iso.torrent

orAll severn Binary isos in one torrent directory

Theres torrent linx to the SRPMS there too.
Thanx AC!

thanx to an AC a few posts down:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

And more specifically:

severn-i386-disc1.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc2.iso.torrent
severn-i386-disc3.iso.torrent

orAll severn Binary isos in one torrent directory

Theres torrent linx to the SRPMS there too.
Thanx AC!

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

Just the Binary ISOs

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/

Just the Binary ISOs

Here is an interesting set of quotes from our era I stumbled on this whole paragraph while looking for a link to give you on the enclosure movement, but I can't resist passing them on, since they are so pertinent:

'And here is what a certain Bill Gates wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." I am sure that you all 100 percent agree with this. But for Gates, this is a problem. And he has an idea how to solve this problem: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established compa-nies have an interest in excluding future competitors." '

That is from this site: http://www.rosalux.de/engl/projects/international/ esf/landslides.htm

I have no idea what the site authors views are since I haven't read it in it's entirety, he does have some historical points on the enclosure movement(s) though. I'd love to get a more direct sourcing for those quotes.

Here is an even better source, with both Realplayer and MPEG videos and entire conference proceedings in PDF and text:

http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/realcast.htm

It is clear that a complex debate has been going on for a long time, at least since the invention of the printing press, about just what constitutes "property". Intellectual property (IP) is of far more importance these days than it was in Adam Smith's time. I know of no one that seriously wants all ideas, inventions or software to become public domain immediately upon publication.

In fact, and this is something you seem to miss entirely, OSS could not *exist* without strong IP laws. The ability of an author of software to designate the GNU license, or some other license for that matter is what IP laws are all about. No one is forcing Microsoft to give up its secrets. In fact, if developing software in a closed environment is such a great idea, then Microsoft's future is completely secure. Furthermore there is a common myth that Open and Closed software cannot commingle. In fact, nothing prevents Microsoft from developing a Windows front-end to run on top of Linux (which would save them a lot of development cost, fix a lot of their security problems and probably not eat into OS sales any more than Linux is going to do anyway).

For those of us who support Open Source the best way to settle the issue of which software should be Open Source and which should not is the marketplace. The only thing that can stop Open Source from succeeding, in my opinion, would be for it to be made illegal. Should that happen, a lot of our other freedoms will go along with it and I am afraid the apex of civilization will have been passed.

cpt kangarooski wrote:

Well, what if I deliver an extemporaneous speech orally? Is it fixed? Perhaps, if you consider that I am altering the configuration of air molecules in my vicinity in such a way that my words are fixed in it. It doesn't last, but then, what does? Even books and stone tablets wear out. My ice sculptures sure don't last too long, but they're copyrightable subject matter. And this configuration of air is perceivable by you, and you can understand the work that I've placed there.

But it's a stupid argument. Sound carried over the air is not enough to be fixed.

Well, when I copy information into volatile RAM, it lasts for a mere instant. Nanoseconds. The sounds in air actually last LONGER.

You misunderstand, I'm not talking about RAM, I'm talking about software installation.

Check out 17 USC 117, which makes copying software to a computer in any way necessary for its use, or for backup purposes as desired, perfectly legal and not an infringement at all.

Yes, I stand corrected, I forgot that that section was for more than just backup copies. This section should have eliminated shrinkwrap licenses alltogether. Sadly, it was added after the industry was already addicted to such licenses.

I'd argue that licenses generally are not [valid or enforcable], at least of the EULA variety.

I'd argue that any EULA, Clickwrap or other attached license that flies in the face of First Sale Doctorine, or goes beyond the limitations on Contracts of Adhesion is likely to be unenforcable, or at least the bad terms would be. Most EULA's would run afoul of one or both issues.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and as demonstrated above I have an imperfect memory of the law. The above is not legal advice. Even though I feel EULA's are unenforcable, don't violate them without advice of legal council.

Actually, Outlook Express is SSL-enabled. Googled "outlook express ssl" and found this: How to configure Outlook Express 5.X and 6.X to use SSL (Windows)

If we called "file sharing" and "file swapping" something more accurate, like File Stealing. Then people couldn't go around pretending to be ignorant of copyright issues.

You can argue that there are free things out there that people can swap, but I've never actually seen them personally.

Now BitTorrent, that's another matter, that's not really file swapping/file stealing. It's an infrastructure to redistribute data in a scalable way, and often you can get stuff like RedHat ISOs and things off it. Very handy.

Generally I have no sympathy for college students who cry about getting fines for stealing thousands and thousands of copyrighted works.

It is more imporant to lobby for less evil copyright laws and promote the rights of the public to have access to material and remove the focus on private ownership of everything. Oh no, I better be careful before I come off sounding like a communist!

Eric Eldred Act

Center for Study of Public Domain

PlanetLab won't help much with that. Most of the PlanetLab nodes are pretty well connected, certainly better than modems. It lets you test latency pretty realistically, given that the nodes span the globe.

Modelnet might be a better bet for emulating modem-dominated networks.

Here's some more mirrors I found:

http://ximian.dulug.duke.edu/pub/ximian/
http://ftp.dc.aleron.net/ximian/
http://ximian.oregonstate.edu/
http://open-systems.ufl.edu/mirrors/rsync.ximian.c om/
http://0-open-systems.ufl.edu.library.csuhayward.e du/mirrors/rsync.ximian.com/

The scariest thing here about this story is that both of these dim bulbs have law degrees. Are they giving degrees away when you get enough box tops!?

No, they're selling them for tons of cash, like they have for a long time. And please, don't tell me about people failing out. That only happens to the 'not fabulously wealthy.'

note: law school links just chosen at pseudorandom. Just making a point, not accusing any one school of being any worse than any other.

Ah, quite right, Linux support is important.

Of course, I do understand that Neuros *officially* supports Linux, in beta, while Apple hasn't; it's all be community stuff for the iPod.

Oh, and aac is a standard, though arguably not open, while ogg is open, but not a standard. Semantics are a bitch, aren't they?

So... why not get an iPod?

You're willing to spend a bit more, and you don't have to deal with any product design issues...

And it just works. FAT32 iPod.

DIY
GTKPod

-jdm

KDE and GNOME.

Is this really patentable? The concept of secure communications between two networked devices have been around for years.

I think there's a huge misconception on slashdot about what a patent is, exactly. You cannot patent a general concept. What you patent is a specific method of doing something. For example, there are several hundred patents issued for different types of can-openers. Obviously, the concept of opening a can has been around since cans were invented. But, not surprisingly the methods used to get at the contents of a can have been quite varied. In fact the thing we now recognize today as the canonical can-opener wasn't invented until 1925. Before then there were all kinds of crazy methods of opening cans that tended to spill stuff all over the place. For further reading on this subject I highly recommend The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski.

Does this mean Atari or Sony or Nintendo can't use encryption in their games?

No. They will either have to find a different method than that patented (which shouldn't be too hard, the MS patent is fairly specific in its claims), or license the technology from MS.

Your spamguard decoding skills are commendable. I'm guessing you are a product of one of the fine trade schools found outside the Northeast Corridor.

Okay idea; bad example. It is estimated by various* sources* that the annual death toll due to smoking in the United States is on the order of half a million per year.

The CDC estimates that of the six hundred thousand cancer deaths per year in the United States, one third are the direct result of cigarette smoking, costing $60 billion per year in direct health costs and loss of productivity.

How about a "war on smoking"? Tobacco use costs the United States almost as much each year as invading Iraq did--if we only count the costs of cancer care. You want to protect American lives? How about a Tomahawk or two for Philip Morris?

*PDF links.

/joeyo

Ahh, but the iPod does run Linux! (You can also sync iPod to Linux, which is less cool but more useful)

Or find one that already exists [logwatch.org], is well supported [gnu.org] and is widely used.

Or, if you have a large cluster of machines all logging to a centralized loghost, other tools may be more suitable.

Byrd, RC, 1988.
Southern Medical Journal 81(7): 826-829.

Krucoff, Mitchell, W., Suzanne W. Crater, et al, 2001.
American Heart Journal 142:760-767.

Kwang Y. Cha, Daniel P. Wirth, et al, 2001.
Journal of Reproductive Medicine 46:781-787.

Sicher, F.E., D. Targ, et al, 1998.
Western Journal of Medicine 169:356-363.

Check out this link for some convenient online references.

oh, you must be talking about scp

as with most of the other "ideas" on this thread, the thing you'd like to have already exists. all we have to do is use it.

...and therein lies the challenge.

I took a class a couple of years ago that had a similar theme. Ethics and the Internet

:) I think it works... there are many companies which have products for this purpose. Do a google search for "digital audio watermark" to find examples (including technical papers on citeseer). What is termed "robust" watermarks (as opposed to "fragile") can survive the usual audio processes (D/A, A/D, dsp, lossy compression, etc.).

e.g.:
a press release
verance
Overview of Felten's Attack on SDMI
Template Matching

IANAExpert. In some cases, you may be correct: if the watermark detection can be reverse engineered, it *may* be possible to remove it... the only question is how much damage must be done to the audio to obscure the watermark, and I think this is where the research is being emphasized.

Also, I don't think it is as simple as your secret key analogy: detection of the watermark does not necessarily mean you can properly remove it. As I understand it, there are many possible sources within the audio which aid in re-constructing the watermark and various tolerances for their recombination (all depending upon the particular algorithm), so there may be a google of ways to remove the known watermark, but only a few of the ways actually maintain reasonable audio quality (as compared to the original).

e.g. in some aspects, the original audio might already contribute to the watermark's existence, and so no modification of that aspect must occur when embedding the watermark. Hence, when attempting to remove the watermark, it is difficult to determine whether that aspect was originally part of the song or whether it was added by the watermarking technique.

On a side note, the other interesting possibility is the existence of multiple watermarks, wherein a second watermark (which is not detected or required for playback) is an ID which is unique to each copy of the song released, potentially allowing the distributor to track a "pirated" song back to the "pirate" (e.g. if it was legally purchased they might track records of its sale, and if it wasn't legally purchased, they could at least track it back to the last known legal distributor).

A couple of simple and brief pages I found using google "digital audio watermark":
a press release
Overview of Felten's Attack on SDMI

I agree that this is a good way to go -- using a update tool that can use mirrors, it's what YellowDog does, for the new version they have apt and yum.

Personally I use apt with RedHat and YellowDog, but I might try yum some time.

One of the best reasons for a distrubted, free, updates system is that it aviods the potential problems of people not updating.

In the medium term using P2P for ISO's and updates might make most sense, though I also think it's cool that people do want to pay for Linux :-)

Comparing the Apple/Microsoft case to the the Lotus/Paperback Software case is rather misleading. In the latter, the defendants copied every detail, unlike the independent development path that Borland and Microsoft pursued. In the former, the proven "prior art" of the general elements of a GUI were established, giving Apple no claim to the concepts despite any licensing agreement they may have had with Xerox.

I know the submitter found the link via Google News, but to say that it's "courtesy of" Google is misleading. The transcript comes from The News & Observer, the main newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. It documents a panel at Duke University.

I used to work at The N&O. Real people do produce these things, you know -- they don't just materialize out of the ether when Google aggregates them. If anything, this is the downside of Google News -- the increasing commodification of news production. But the Internet in general was doing that anyway.

this
or this

and of course my own desktop

There are a load more here.

Default gnome can have an ugly widget, but 2.2 goes quite a long way to addressing that with the metathemes system. And really, I think with only a smidgen of effort you can make it look better than anything else out there, including MacOS, which I find just to look too "fat" and stripey. GNOME2 feels clean in comparison.

this
or this

and of course my own desktop

There are a load more here.

Default gnome can have an ugly widget, but 2.2 goes quite a long way to addressing that with the metathemes system. And really, I think with only a smidgen of effort you can make it look better than anything else out there, including MacOS, which I find just to look too "fat" and stripey. GNOME2 feels clean in comparison.

Forgot to add one more link: Gnome 2.2 screenshots showing the artwork "in action".

This is actually how APT works.

Yes, and apt's method, while leaking *zero* information, is very expensive. It burns through tons of bandwidth. Had a single package updated? Download 2 megs of package listings again. That's just a complete drain on the people volunteering bandwidth for Debian, or for apt-rpm.

I like the rather impressive yum's approach much more (only for rpm users, though its approach could certainly be used by a .deb front end). It's *slightly* less private, but not by much.

It just grabs a list of all current packages and versions, and downloads metadata on each package (which is stored in a different file for each package) for which it doesn't have the latest metadata. End result? The most a spying main server could divine would be how up-to-date your current, local mirror of the package metadata is. I guess that might let them guess the last time you updated, but that's it. No huge bandwidth waste like apt, no knowledge of what you have installed like MS's current approach.

?

"None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago."

I think "last years Linux GUIs" would be more appropriate. Have you looked at the gnome 2 screenshots, for example?

The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer.

Err...yes, for some things a $1200 computer is insufficient. For other things, it's a very good deal. As a matter of fact, given the continuous and rapid increase in bang/buck, there's a reasonable argument that deviating too strongly from the increasing value curve (i.e. spending a relatively large amount of money on a computer when the value rapidly depreciates) is a bad idea.

Furthermore, simply because Apple does not cater to low-cost computer buyers (nothing wrong with that -- you don't hear me going after Porche or Rolex) does *not* imply that one cannot purchase a high-end x86 machine. There are very, very many systems builders that will be happy as a claim to throw as much money as you want to into a computer. Want three times as much power as you need, with redundant power supplies? Quad processors? A UPS? Hardware SCSI RAID, Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 ports, a GeForce 4, 2 gigs of RAM? Perhaps large plasma gas or projection display? Enormous speakers? Joysticks that are clones of their fighter-jet originals? Whatever demands you have can pretty much always be met.

Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.

You know, "inexpensive" does not necessarily imply "shoddy".

My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.

[shrug] So your parents made a choice that you feel was suboptimal for your situation. That may certainly be true, but it has little bearing on whether the product you want is ideal for everyone else.

Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform.

You *do* mean Windows, not "the PC", where I'm assuming that "PC" refers to "x86-based machine", right?

OpenOffice will help level the playing field. And Microsoft will have to compete more on price, features, and service more than it did, and give up some reliance on "compatibility".

I don't think that you can simply claim that OS X is the end-all and be all of desktop environments, disregarding Linux, BSD, and yes, even Windows. Apple's always had some good ideas and some completely stupid ideas (stupidity ratio increasing in recent years with many of their UIs (think Quicktime) and Jobs' insistence that people were *still* sufficiently unfamiliar with two-button mice to be allowed to purchase machines equipped with them).

I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation.

I hope so. OTOH, let's break this down:

OpenOffice is a major jump, and the beginning of a war on features more than comptibility. However, the onus will be on the OpenOffice folks to prevent Microsoft from successfully creating format compatibility issues, which they are *sure* to start doing.

Mono is a nice idea, but a long, long way away from where Microsoft is. Microsoft purchased some very good languages and compilers people, started design well before everyone else, and has been putting resources into .NET development for much longer than everyone else has been. MS has the jump here, and it will be tough to catch up in both performance and compatibility.

Java is interesting (and certainly useful against Microsoft in some areas), but has long since turned out to not be what it once was billed as -- a write once run anywhere solution for all applications, including desktop computing. There is a very obvious lack of horizontal-market Java applications, stemming from issues with the Java standard itself, including a lack of templated container classes, and poor performance and memory footprint. Remember that Corel spent a *huge* amount of money porting their suite to Java, and at the end (and I'm *sure* that after that kind of resource expenditure, this was not done without much agonizing consideration) the entire thing was scrapped.

As for Mozilla -- Mozilla is very nice. It was pushed into a production a bit early, but still a major strike against Microsoft. However, it is *not* the impossible-to-quash piece of software that some other projects are turning out to be. AOL/TW is undergoing a lot of upheaval, and funding and support for Mozilla may not be around forever. Apple has already distanced themselves from the Mozilla project and gone the way of KHTML (the cynic in me wants to think that this necessity was a result of Apple wasting so much memory and so many cycles on the basic UI that they needed to cut corners in the area of their browser).

What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs.

Ridiculous. A lack of Palladium support makes zero difference to the end user in an environment where it exists at all. It can be disabled by the end user. You feel that content will *require* Palladium to be used, and that content distribution companies will be comfortable leaving Palladium-disabled users out of things, perhaps? The same goes for the Mac. If such costs are deemed acceptable by content distribution companies (and Palladium *is* such a crucial issue), then the DRM-less Mac runs precisely the same risk -- of being ignored by said content distribution companies.

Frankly, I don't think Palladium will ever take off -- that's essentially a placebo to allow Microsoft better political positioning in the lucrative content distribution and management field with a horde of increasingly desperate content distributors. It only takes a single break in a Palladium-enabled system for *all* content distributed up until them to be redistributed in a DRMless manner. x86 architecture hardware has never been designed around being particularly secure. We will, of course, see, but my bets are that Palladium is going to be primarily useful from a political standpoint, not a technological one.

Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple?

Well, resource requirements generally increase so much over new releases of Microsoft software that one is required to purchase new hardware anyway. Such is life. A major difference is that Apple charges much more for their hardware than x86 manufacturers.

Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.

Do tell? Perhaps you'd like to explain the presence of the "Copy Protection" flag that Apple introduced *long* before MS was trying to do DRM. It was unpopular, and fell into disuse -- much as I feel Palladium will (and this is in a world where the company trying to impose DRM controls both the hardware and software platforms).

My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!"

Did you *really* explain this to them -- that by disabling Palladium, you have (at least from a DRM standpoint) nothing more and nothing less than a Mac? No?

Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have...I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti

Uh, huh. I don't see even the evil-mogul-looking Valenti trying to prevent *anyone* from listening to MP3s that they have. As a matter of fact, Phillips (frequently cited as a "good guy" in the DRM wars) did actually pursue this patch.

no less than 192kbps VBR.

Bit of a nitpick, but this makes no sense.

model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.

I'm sorry? The "classical liberal" system that you're talking about certainly does *not* give you ownership of said IP. Try running off 10,000 copies and selling them on the street tomorrow and see how far you get before getting handcuffed. That's nothing new at all.

It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft.

Yes, yes. Microsoft is full of hype and deliberately misleading when it comes to DRM. This is nothing at all new. Microsoft does this with *all* of their new products, and has for years. Most software companies do--heck, most *companies* do, though not as much.

And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.

I think you've got a few misconceptions. You can certainly use a non-Palladium-aware device in a system and use Palladium -- you just won't be able to use Palladium features with it. [shrug] Same was true for old PCI video cards (couldn't do AGP texturing), old sound cards (couldn't do digital output), old mice (no scrollwheel -- couldn't use scrollwheel features), yadda, yadda, yadda. This applies to every PC component I can think of.

If anything Apple's star is getting brighter.

Well...yeah. No kidding. They actually have a modern OS, after six years of false starts. They couldn't *possibly* be worse off than they were.

I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop

I'm not a tremendous fan of KDE. I do like a few things about OS X, but I really don't see the overwhelming advantages you're claiming. OS X's primary interesting feature is a significant amount of eye candy. While once I was deeply impressed with the HCI strictures Apple laid on their platform, more recent ones (one-button-mice only, Quicktime's interface, etc) are less impressive.

RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater.

Mmm...Apple's bundle packaging system is kind of interesting, though retrofitting it onto UNIX would be ugly. I personally wouldn't give up RPM, which offers a wider array of analysis and ease of automating tasks, but I can see how many less technically adept users would prefer the simpler UI to their package system Apple exposes. You are certainly right that I'm not a tremendous fan of Red Carpet, but that's a Ximian thing, not a Red Hat thing -- I believe you're thinking of up2date, which sucks very, very much. However, apt for rpm is available (try Freshrpms), and the even better yum is also available. And yum really *is* stupendously good.

Java on Linux compared to OSX?

I tend to feel that Apple's rather behind Linux in this field, actually. The best performing of all JRE/JDK implementations that I know of (*including* native code compilers, surprisingly) is IBM's JRE/JDK. This is not available for OS X, though it is freely downloadable for Linux. Cocoa is nice, though, I will give you that.

Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS.

[shrug] I know a bunch of UNIX geeks, and none of them are particularly interested in switching to OS X. As a matter of fact, I know very few technically oriented people on OS X (though I certainly expect plenty exist, they aren't present where I live).

There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another.

Oh, for Chrissake. A *Windows* user can do that. That's not much of a metric.

The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.

Uh, huh. Aside from the "what about the actually *mainstream* WMs you left out like metacity and kwin (forget the current KDE WM)" argument, what then is your criteria for a "real desktop platform"? A "genie minimize"?

Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop.

OpenBeOS is an interesting project. I kind of wish I had been able to play with BeOS at some point. It's also much, much farther away from being competitive than Linux native desktop environments.

Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop

Okay, now that is just ridiculous. From an application standpoint, and ignoring the fact that OS X generally runs on slower software, no, there is no hard restrictions. However, OS X has the heaviest GUI overhead of the three, in cycles and memory. If you're trying to sell OS X, resource usage is not a stance I'd try taking.

and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above.

Uh, huh. Ignoring the question of exactly *what* the relationship is between "architectural superiority" and "end user appeal", why do you like BeOS so much?

It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.

Well, it stands to be interesting, atthethethe least.

screenshots

Screenshots here

http://vhost.dulug.duke.edu/~louie/screenshots/2.2 /24.jpg looks JUST like gnome 2.0 on sun... (minus the debian/kde menu items :)

-Ralph Bonnell

here

Hey, I only run Linux at home,
but there is a growing trend to even less understandable, far to pretty icons. I havn't seen what XP looks like, don't really care either.

This is a nice tactile desktop though.