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2) Piracy is a pain in the ass. Paying a few dollars for content is far easier, so that's what most people will do.

#2 has been the case for nearly two decades now, in spite of technology and bandwidth advancements. The only real difference between then and now is that getting legit content by way of streaming or for-purchase services (iTunes, Amazon, whatever) is drop-easy and dirt-cheap for most folks... so, as you said, most folks don't bother.

Then again, the MP/RIAA have to remain relevant *somehow*, no?

Found this this tutorial recently, where you may find the installation of a Ubuntu 16.04 minimal server step by step. The purpose of the guide is to show the basic installation of Ubuntu 16.04 that can be used as basis for our other Ubuntu tutorials here at howtoforge like our perfect server guides. However, server control panel is a question, but not in this case (I use ServerSuit).

Exactly. It used to be Apple who dictated what was taught in high school computer science courses, but it looks like they let Microsoft take over.

Umm, yes and no.

I did the teaching thing for a living (HS and Collegiate-level CS, no less), and here's how it really works:

Option A: Write your own curriculum, your own syllabus, your own tests, your own labs, select your own textbooks (within an approved list, from state-approved vendors), insure your classroom and your school both have the budget for it (doubly so if any of it relies on equipment such as desktops, servers, networking gear, etc), insure that it all tracks with state education standards for your subject matter and level of competence, get it all approved by the state office of education... And then maybe next year you can start teaching it, but note that you'll have to do it all over again as soon as newer information and technologies come out. Also note that anyone in the bureaucratic morass can (and sometimes often will) happily veto the whole thing with a long list of objections, causing you to spend countless hours and metric tons of paper in justifying it.

--or--

Option B: Have $megacorp arrive and provide all the syllabi, curricula, tests, labs, and in some cases even the textbooks - for free! Hell, they'll even give you a massive discount on the equipment. The state board of education (never known for their technical acumen) has already rubber-stamped approval for it, and as a bonus you, your managers, your principals/administrators... they're all salivating at the massive PR (and potential career) boost they'll get when they present it to the public with lots of pomp and circumstance. Oh, and the school board will just love you to death - maybe even give you a plaque for your wall at home, calling you an 'innovator' or suchlike.

Now... throw in the fact that most (not all, but disturbingly "most") teachers are career-oriented folks (to be too charitable about it), and they are inherently averse to either rocking the boat, or to doing more work than they already do.

So, in light of those facts, guess which option gets chosen the most? Note that I've done Option A, and I gotta tell you; it's not the class-side grunt work that's so intensive - it's the bureaucracy that sucks down all your time (and your soul, etc). But then, a labor of love is exactly that, so I don't regret it... however, way too may teachers out there, sadly, think differently on the subject.

Here you go, in his own words:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/infr...

If you had any actual interest at all in learning this instead of trying to use it as a bat of some kind, you would already know the answer. But for the edification not of you, dear AC, but of anyone who might stumble on this:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/infr...

How do you feel about the fact that Darl McBride said that SCO owns C++?

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
Source 4

linux.softpedia.com

osnews.com

Linux Today

Linux Weekly News

The "free software community" had quite a bit to say on gtk vs qt.

The design of KDE was based on a fundamental mistake: use of the Qt library, which at the time was non-free software. Despite the good intentions of the KDE developers, and despite the fact that the code of KDE itself was free software, KDE could never be part of a completely free operating system as long as it needed a non-free program to function.

With all the ups and downs in the industry, are you still surprised? http://www.linuxtoday.com/infr...

Looks like Nagios Plugins was a community project to provide plugins for Nagios, with little to no input by Nagios themselves.

They were a community project to develop plugins. The guy who originally developed the Nagios core software, eventually went on to create Nagios enterprises.

The NetSaint plugins project was renamed to the Nagios plugins project in ~2001; The nagios-plugins repo has content going back 9 years.

Nagios Enterprises company was first founded in 2007. The Nagios Trademark was registered in 2007.

The Nagios plugins project pre-dated the existence of the corporate entity or any trademark registrations, by at least 5 years.

Linus on Debuggers:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2000090700221OSCYKN

Nearly exactly 10 years ago, the GNOME community also lost a young member, Chema Celorio, in a Skydiving accident which was very similar unfortunately (low height, high speed turn).

You're thinking of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which didn't come about until June 1998 (source). It was under a GPL-incompatible license until Qt/X11 was released sometime in 2000. (The archived press release appears to have vanished in the transition from Nokia to Digia.) GNOME began in August 1997, and this article from September 2000 states that it was explicitly to work around the non-free status of Qt at the time.

"FOSSie Faction"

That was by far one of the more ignorant things I have ever seen on Slashdot by the way.

Here's a good history by RMS: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2000090500121OPLFKE. Note that since then, Qt is now under the GPL v2.1; however, because of the history, I think most developers fear tight integration with it. "Will they ever remove the GPL in a new version one day?" is the thought in some people's minds. A lot of F/OSS may sound ridiculous and like paranoia, but it's paranoia that keeps companies like Microsoft out of the OS that we geeks love so much. Having said all of this, my personal opinion is that Qt is fine now and that the paranoia is unwarranted, but it still exists.

The only reason GNOME exists is exactly because the FSF objected to the Qt license. See Stallman on Qt for some history there.

1) So what if it's older. They get huge bushels of cash from Google and the Brin foundation today. And so they dance like any hired gun. http://boingboing.net/2011/12/10/give-to-eff-today-and-your-do.html 2) Maybe the reason you don't know this is because your invite got lost: https://www.eff.org/event/eff-mixer-google 3) DRM is secure communication. The pirates are the eavesdroppers. Get a frickin clue. And Torvalds's logic is solid. Locking up my love letter so only my spouse can read it is the exact technological challenge as locking up my artistic creation so only the non-pirates can view it. http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2003042401126OSKNLL http://news.cnet.com/Torvalds-says-DRM-isnt-necessarily-bad/2100-7344_3-6034964.html Quit being a sap for leeching business models. The EFF and Google just want to manipulate you into hating DRM so the money will keep flowing to them. DRM doesn't break the Internet, it breaks Google's business model. They're not the same thing.

What ever happend to the Open source NetWare ? I was never clear if it was a clone or not.

Now the other question I have is, why would anyone run it?

Gnome has always been on the wrong track from day 1. It was a political response to KDE's use of Qt (which was QPL back then) and always a mishmash of libraries and utility applications rather than a fundamentally solid desktop environment. That it might have been usable at some point is more luck than anything.

I don't use KDE (or GNOME, I prefer RiscOS On X because it's insanely fast and powerful), but at least KDE has had a solid vision from the get-go, if sometimes flawed.

they tried to advertise Windows and .NET with one of their "studies" years ago when the London Stock Exchange started using their products for it's trading system and they even made a nice video about it:

Get the Facts: The London Stock Exchange
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSM55bsCrM

but it looks like it didn't turn out that well..

London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux
http://www.linuxtoday.com/high_performance/2009100702835NWDPSV

The London Stock Exchange moves to Novell Linux
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-london-stock-exchange-moves-to-novell-linux/8285

maybe they learned their lesson now

He's the owner/editor of LinuxToday e-zine
http://www.linuxtoday.com/

They've been around since about as long as slashdot.
.

Maybe you should get your facts right.

According to the LGP blog the Loki bankruptcy almost took Tux Games down with them since they could no longer buy product on credit.

No U.

The founder of Linux games publisher Loki Software, Inc., says he hopes that his company's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection will allow it to remain in business.

If his only issue was the Qt license he could have started his own implementation of Qt rather than making a whole new desktop based on GTK+

Back pre-Y2K, The FSF/GNU project did start their own implementation of Qt (called Project Harmony) because at the time Qt used a proprietary non-free license which violated freedom 3: the freedom to redistribute modifications.)

The FSF took a two-tiered approach, the creation of Harmony and GNOME, to counter the at-the-time non-free Qt in order to maximize the likelihood of success in case one approach should fail.

I've been a user of GNU/Linux since the late '90s and I do agree with you that GNOME needs to stop breaking their own code and settle on a feature set and API. I find myself often frustrated when using GNOME 3, so much that I've been considering moving to the MATE fork of GNOME.

Five last-minute gifts for open source fans (Dec 23, 2011)

10 Last-Minute Gift Ideas For Linux Geeks (Dec 21, 2010)

12 Ubuntu Derivatives You Should Consider (Nov 22, 2010)

Fact or Fiction? Top 8 Linux Myths Debunked (Sep 10, 2010)

Top 5 Mistakes Made by Linux First-Timers (Oct 14, 2010)

Linux Barbies Battle the Command Line (Mar 28, 2009)

I *did* cherry pick a little bit, but generally speaking, I've seen cotton candy less fluffy than this.

I was wondering that myself? This may start to become just like the CPU Serial Number fiasco with the Pentium III that was envisioned again by MSFT. So, fundamentally I think that market pressure like back in the 90s will take care of this dumb situation.

As always the most important benefits of open source software is not highlighted. It is not always about the money saved. The more important issues are: Peruvian Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft

• Free access to public information by the citizen.
• Permanence of public data.
• Security of the State and citizens.

It can't be the norm that government's IT infrastructure is depending on a foreign firm, with is subject to foreign laws. Especially with laws like the Patriot Act in place and laws like the SOPA and PIPA in discussions.

What gave you THAT idea?
Blaster worm infected anyone connected directly to the internet(i.e.not going through a router- which ussually runs linux)with RPC active

Sure it is that nearly NOBODY uses Linux (on PC's & Desktops especially vs. Windows)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116787/Wikipedia_simplifies_IT_infrastructure_by_moving_to_one_Linux_vendor
http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2010072300835NWHESV
etc. etc.

I did even better in posting ones regarding:
1.found and fixed before exploited in the wild.
2.Froyo = 2.2, now on 3.2

->I still do NOT "get" HOW you can say I relied on Linux

When you use the internet, you use much more than just the sinngle machine you are sat on. LAMP is the backbone of the modern internet.
The main reason for this is the security of linux systems. Facebook, for example, is a much higher profile target than you and your worthless windows machine with anything usefull disabled. IIS just never made the grade.

J6P uses windows, because its easy to support by vendors, and easy for the non tech savvy to use. But anyone who cares about security uses linux - and by default anyone who uses the services of those companies uses and relies on linux. This may be "transparent" (i.e. the lowly user never knows they used linux), but then same lowly user is unlikely to know where microsoft stops and where activivsion starts when they fire up that latest game they got for Christmas.

I'm not quite sure where the "BSD licensed CUPS" myth started... The very early beta releases (back in 1999) of CUPS were under the Aladdin Free Public License (you can read about Michael Sweet talking about the AFPL license choice in a comment) , a licence that is more similar to the GPL than to a BSD-esque licence. However, in version 1.0b3, CUPS switched from the AFPL to the GPL and has been distributed under the GPL ever since (and you can read Michael Sweet saying the CUPS API is under the GPL but perhaps this changed later?).

This does not refute your point that Apple did _not_ fork the project closed after they obtained the copyright (CUPS always required copyright assignment so it was always possible for people to negotiate for it to be provided under terms other than the GPL).

Wordperfect was originally written for a DataGeneral minicomputer back in 1979. It was hugely popular on minicomputers and Unix long before there was an Amiga. It was popular in the legal profession even back then.

For many years WordPerfect 5.1 was the most portable word processing document in the world.

Wordperfect fell from popularity many believe mainly because Microsoft engineered Windows beginning with W95 to prevent it from functioning correctly, particularly with printing. Novell sued in 2004, and seven years later the case is still winding through the courts. It's suspected that Novell's new owner Attachmate will accept a quiet settlement and let the WordPerfect lawsuit die. Attachmate is a privately held corporation and no information about the composition of their ownership is available.

Though Novell/Attachmate still own the lawsuit, Novell sold the product on to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect is still available in WordPerfect Office X5 from Corel, who bought the app in 1996. Microsoft invested in Corel in October of 2000. The last native Linux version, 8.1 released in 2004, didn't sell well as Linux adoption at that time was still very low. The last Linux version, 9.0, was released in 2000. Relying on Wine, performance was unsat. Some diehards still use the application. Novell also retained rights and merged the product into their own productivity suite, GroupWise, which is widely regarded as best avoided.

Way back when WordPerfect was good for its day. Since 1995 it's been an application that is uniformly rejected by its main host OS. To this day printing in WordPerfect in Windows is unreliable and quirky. Despite this, it's no longer a cross-platform application. Current versions run only on Windows now. Some think that Microsoft's investment of $135M in 2000 in a nearly-bankrupt Corel in October of 2000 might have influenced this decision somewhat. At that time Corel's founder Michael Cowpland was accused of insider trading and theft in August of 2000, an issue that was later disproved and settled when his trades were proved to be extremely ill-advised. A suspicious person might even think the accusation were an application of extreme leverage, given a decade of hindsight.

Michael Cowpland deserves his own post - an alumni of precursors to Bell Labs, Nortel Networks and others he cofounded Mitel Networks, founded Corel (which originally stood for COwpland REsearch Labs) and bought control of ZIM Labs. He did a lot of cool stuff.

I don't know what this has to do with the fine article though. WordPerfect was always a commercial application and is still. Source code has never been available, or it would have been fixed long ago.

I just quote some Peruvian Congressman on this issue:
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-05-06-012-26-OS-SM-LL
"It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:

Free access to public information by the citizen.
Permanence of public data.
Security of the State and citizens.

To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.

To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.

To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. "

No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.

-- -- Linux user #520758

You remind me a bit of this

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-01-11-002-20-OP-0038

When I get an attachment I can't open, I respond with something like this.

I'm sorry, but I can't open the Word document you sent as I don't use Word. Would you mind saving the file in RTF format (under the File menu, choose "Save as.." and select "Rich Text" in the drop-down box) and sending me that as an attachment. In the future, it would be easiest if you would send me documents in that way because, as I said, I and others who don't use Word can't read them in the default format.

This has the advantages of a) explaining what I want to a secretary or supplier who doesn't realize that you can save documents in different file formats, instead of confusing them with some political badgering about monopolies, bytes, GNU/Linux and Kenya, b) not reinforcing the stereotype that Linux users are rabid, socially dysfunctional pricks and c) not being a jerk to someone who doesn't know any better.

For that to stick, your audience has to have a modicum of intelligence, social skills, professionalism and plain common sense. Unfortunately, this is /.

No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.

--
-- Linux user #520758

You remind me a bit of this

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-01-11-002-20-OP-0038

When I get an attachment I can't open, I respond with something like this.

I'm sorry, but I can't open the Word document you sent as I don't use Word. Would you mind saving the file in RTF format (under the File menu, choose "Save as.." and select "Rich Text" in the drop-down box) and sending me that as an attachment. In the future, it would be easiest if you would send me documents in that way because, as I said, I and others who don't use Word can't read them in the default format.

  This has the advantages of a) explaining what I want to a secretary or supplier who doesn't realize that you can save documents in different file formats, instead of confusing them with some political badgering about monopolies, bytes, GNU/Linux and Kenya, b) not reinforcing the stereotype that Linux users are rabid, socially dysfunctional pricks and c) not being a jerk to someone who doesn't know any better.

It is really surprising that someone who stands to make money from an IPO would hype it. I can't seem someone in that position being wrong.

My recollection of the "rise of iPod" is a bit different.

Yes, the actual release events are as you said. The significant rise in sales did happen in 2004. But I don't see it being because of the iTunes Music Store. All the signs pointing to success came much earlier.

But by the 2nd Gen release in 2002, it was already beating out most other MP3 players in popularity. Not in sales, but popularity. People talked about it much as people talked about the iPhone being locked to AT&T, when no SDK was available.

In fact, as an early firewire advocate, I was already amazed at the effect the firewire-only iPods had on the market.
I started seeing Dell, Gateway, HP, and Toshiba laptops with firewire in 2002, which is completely unexpected in the PC market because of the costs associated with adding the chipsets and in buying the products that use it. Most people who wanted firewire weren't using it for hard drives, but video editing. And many of those back then would use cardbus cards. It was rare, unless you had a Sony, to see an integrated Firewire port on a PC.

You'd see in the comments in the Apple Store that some people even went out of the way to buy a cheap iMac/eMac in order to run iTunes for their iPod. It was bizarre. MusicMatch and various open source clients for Linux and Windows were out.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2002123002126PSHLSW

Napster had risen as the king and fallen as it got hit by legality issues; people had relatively massive repositories of music. Gnutella/Limewire was the next place. Direct Connect networks were popular in colleges.

Stories of people getting mugged for white earphones already hit the news.

All of this was well before the iTunes Music Store. All of this was well before the iPod had USB2.0 as an option.

You're right that sales didn't really take off until the release of the music store. But I'm inclined to believe that it wasn't the music store that was compelling. It was that the iPod got USB2.0 and that Windows got iTunes. To me, it was more likely that the Music Store was helped by the iPod than the iPod helped by the Music Store.

(In 2001-2003, I was enrolled in a university, working part time for the university to help people fix their computers and obtain an internet connection. In appointments in August 2002, I'd see ~80 computers per day for the first 2 weeks of school (weekend overtime pay was awesome), many of them laptops. There exists a picture from that week where you'd see my coworkers and I running antivirus scans or windows installers on about 18 laptops in one room. So my sample size is small on the grand scheme of things, but unusually large for a single person's experience. I purchased my 1st iPod, a 2nd Gen 10GB, exactly 2 weeks after launch, on the last day of my internship at Apple, and the first day it was available for employee discount. It replaced my MiniDisc player.)

Actually no; speaking as a person responsible for licensing Ubuntu for a large corporate, this guy, their COO Matt Assay started mouthing off about OpenCore. I wanted to arrange Ubuntu as a platform for our developers who mostly target RHEL but want to work well with the rest of the office. Assay's idiocy seriously affected their credibility and suggests that, unlike people like RedHat they planned to take other people's contribution OpenCore I didn't want to find out six months down the line that the developers are deliberately ignoring us (they are allowed to use whatever they want; I have to sell to them not tell them what they use). Now that he's left I'm waiting to see if there is some change in policy.

Sorry for posting AC; I know that affects credibility, but I'm not willing to put the company name up. Canonical needs to make it clear that they won't put other people's contributions into OpenCore and I'll be back like a shot. I'm not willing to have them attempting to trick their way in through another route.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to start a Linux Distro which has a) proper back end support like RedHat has and Canonical was beginning to have and b) long term credibility that they will stay committed to F/OSS so that our developers will be happy to work with them then I'm seriously interested. I guess the best hope for this is RedHat, but there are other companies that have the capability and patents to do it (IBM; I'm looking at you). Alternatively a bunch of serious looking (yes I'm talking guys with suits) Debian consultants with a single company name, at least a 5-10 kernel hackers, 20 app developers including strong presence in OpenOffice and presence in each continent and the ability to sell support based on things that look like product licenses would also be worth considering. Think about it.

As a former teacher (and one who has done his fair share of fighting to get the right thing done ), I can tell you that it ain't fun to buck trends, even if you're not messing with political hot potatoes. I say this for two reasons:

* In nearly any school district, a primary or secondary teacher can lose his/her job by bucking curriculum "recommendations" from the district, period.

* Trying to enact change by yourself, and especially without public knowledge or support, is an exercise in pure frustration. I lucked out when getting Linux put in to replace UNIX (and to displace a good share of Windows coursework). Why? Because Novell was headquartered in Utah at the time and was a HUGE donation source for the schools, and because the school districts were still fairly agnostic about OS preferences (Microsoft hadn't really gone out of their way at the time to lavish 'gifts' on Utah schools). In spite of all these factors, I still had to explain to a number of school districts *why* Linux (and not, say, AIX, Tru64, Solaris, BSD etc... you know, the "useful UNIX versions"). Hell, I even spent a summer week on and off the phone (and fax) with the Utah state Attorney General's office trying to explain the frickin' GPL to them! There are nooks and crannies of influence who must be satisfied, and all of them will amaze, astound, and make you tear your hair out. Now if it's that much of a pain in the ass to do this for a technical subject, imagine what kind of roadblocks have to be knocked down to get something political pushed through. ...and if you think I'm kidding, Google for the Scopes Trial... it seems rather relevant, no?

Sorry man, but seeing what most teachers get paid, and what they have to put up with? I wouldn't blame them, especially in this economy, for not wanting to "man-up" about it. Hell, most of them are, sadly, too busy counting the days until retirement anyway.

Now if you want to cultivate a vigorous group of folks who will push the boundaries of their craft and actually enlighten kids? First you're going to have to pay them what they're worth, and then you're going to have to take a machete to the unholy bureaucracy that public education has become. Good luck convincing taxpayers to help with the former, and doubly so when it comes to trying at the latter. Oh, and then you get to weed out the dead wood and the Unions. On those fronts, you'd have an easier time accomplishing World Peace. :/

The article too says just that.

How many companies even HAVE a Chief Privacy Strategist?

On the same line: how many companies use evanghelist warriors either? (just look in slightly other directions for increased employment chances, without diminishing too much the chances to have a six figures salary/year).

There does seem to be some sort of a relationship between Rick Wagner and Packt, as he's reviewed, blogged and commented on reviews of several of their products. There ought to be some sort of a disclaimer on this posting.

But he specifically asked about .doc, .ppt, etc, and I thought LibreOffice was gonna seriously push "free as in freedom" in their fork? Because as we have seen in the past with the way RMS reacts to .doc and other MSFT formats if they truly go for the "free as in freedom" manifesto it really wouldn't surprise me to see in the future any attempt to open a .doc met with "This format takes away your freedoms. Please ask the person who gave this to you to respect freedom and send an ODF".

So while I agree that ATM OO.o and LibreOffice is virtually the same, have they said ANYTHING about MS Office compatibility on their roadmap? How much effort is someone who is pushing ODF gonna invest in supporting a MSFT format? Because like it or not if the office suite can't do MSFT formats for a good 90% of the population who have friends or coworkers using MS Office it'll be useless.

I think Linus will include DRM in the next kernel.

Bad analogy: That's not baseless. In addition, there's already DRM in the standard Linux kernel.

In the highly unlikely even that you are correct (they would literally have to rewrite OSX from the ground up to make it into the kind of locked sown system you're talking about)

Not exactly. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later is already capable of checking the signature of an executable to know whether elevated privileges granted to an old version of an app should propagate to the new version of the same app. (See Code Signing Guide.) Currently, it works on a key continuity management basis: privileges from one version of an app propagate to another version if and only if they are signed with the same key. But this infrastructure could easily implement a policy to deny execution if the CA chain doesn't go up to Apple.

then I won't buy it. Problem solved.

Then what would you buy instead? I'm a fan of small form factor; what make and model of PC running Windows or Linux do you recommend to replace a Mac mini?

Yeah, he really doesn't want to link to http://linuxtoday.com/

By the way, it's intentional for me not to link to them from Slashdot directly.

You mean you don't want to link to http://www.linuxtoday.com ?

A lot of countries consumer protection laws provide for protection that devices should operate as advertised. Sony advertised the "Other OS" option and many purchased PS3's instead of Wii because it could run Linux. Sony pulling that feature retroactively after the purchase is worse than a bait-and-switch, which is also illegal.

Sony has always had a slightly dodgy rep, but given the popularity of the "Run Other [Linux] OS" feature, it is possible that they have rats or cockroaches in their larder: "Find and Lean on your insider friend, 'the fox' Having a trusted MS friend in the account is critical. Some people (unix Bigots) can think of lots of reasons not to have a MS solution. MS folks may not be the strongest voice but they are true believers (Protect them, make them look good)". Sony can gain a lot of goodwill, and thus cash, by cleaning house if these are present. Yahoo's is not the only company Microsofters have worked at destroying through entryism.

I give the guy credit for his mea culpa, which is more than we got from some of the other "journalists" that covered SCO. They all thought it was the bee's knees when it presented no evidence at all and then expected IBM to pay it $1B ... no, $3B! ... no, $5B! ... all while giving lame non-excuses for why they couldn't reveal their evidence. Dan Lyons was a valid target of our criticism at the time, but admitting he was wrong changed my impression of him. I actually read his articles.

Now, there are plenty of journalists we can still make fun of for their evidence-free SCO cheerleading. First in line: Maureen O'Gara. She not only hasn't admitted she was wrong like Lyons did, but was recently revealed to have got an e-mail from the SCO brass asking her to trash PJ of Groklaw. This came out in court documents and might get interesting. No need to keep harping on Lyons.

On the bright side, these paper millions did result in one of the most unintentionally hilarious essays ever written. So, it wasn't a total loss.

To each their own. I won't use Gnome because Gnome doesn't give me enough options to run the desktop I want. I want configuration options.

That being said, almost every single app in KDE 4 land was redesigned to clean up the interface and make every menu and dialog look simpler. In most cases, they accomplished this without losing functionality. In many cases, they expanded functionality.

LinuxToday.com had some articles recently breaking down the system settings for KDE 4.3. If you haven't used KDE since 3, you should at least give it a look.

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020300135OSKE
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020800735OSKE
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020802435OSHLKE

I don't keep the defaults with the KDE desktop. With a fresh install I change my desktop containment/activity to Folder View, and then move on to customizing the panel. I could scream about the defaults, but I'm content having the freedom to customize it exactly how I want it. I assume other users prefer different settings. Why force them into the defaults I want?

The fact that KDE allows for different containments/activities for your desktop shell is in and of itself pretty amazing.

To each their own. I won't use Gnome because Gnome doesn't give me enough options to run the desktop I want. I want configuration options.

That being said, almost every single app in KDE 4 land was redesigned to clean up the interface and make every menu and dialog look simpler. In most cases, they accomplished this without losing functionality. In many cases, they expanded functionality.

LinuxToday.com had some articles recently breaking down the system settings for KDE 4.3. If you haven't used KDE since 3, you should at least give it a look.

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020300135OSKE
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020800735OSKE
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020802435OSHLKE

I don't keep the defaults with the KDE desktop. With a fresh install I change my desktop containment/activity to Folder View, and then move on to customizing the panel. I could scream about the defaults, but I'm content having the freedom to customize it exactly how I want it. I assume other users prefer different settings. Why force them into the defaults I want?

The fact that KDE allows for different containments/activities for your desktop shell is in and of itself pretty amazing.

To each their own. I won't use Gnome because Gnome doesn't give me enough options to run the desktop I want. I want configuration options.

That being said, almost every single app in KDE 4 land was redesigned to clean up the interface and make every menu and dialog look simpler. In most cases, they accomplished this without losing functionality. In many cases, they expanded functionality.

LinuxToday.com had some articles recently breaking down the system settings for KDE 4.3. If you haven't used KDE since 3, you should at least give it a look.

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020300135OSKE
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020800735OSKE
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010020802435OSHLKE

I don't keep the defaults with the KDE desktop. With a fresh install I change my desktop containment/activity to Folder View, and then move on to customizing the panel. I could scream about the defaults, but I'm content having the freedom to customize it exactly how I want it. I assume other users prefer different settings. Why force them into the defaults I want?

The fact that KDE allows for different containments/activities for your desktop shell is in and of itself pretty amazing.