Slashdot Mirror
Transcript of CNN Linux bit
jeff sent us a link
to the transcripts
from the CNN Fortune special that was on wed. evening on
Open Source, Linux, Red Hat, Linus, Microsoft, Operating Systems,
and more. It was a pretty
standard fluff piece, but hey, it was 10 minutes of CNN
which never hurts.
I got a call from a guy the other day offering "MS Certification Programs" and I told him like 5 times that I wasn't interested, then he asked me if anyone else in the office would be interested and I said that I didn't think so because we're a UNIX shop... his reply was: "UNIX? what's that? does it run on NT?".... It figures....
You guys were watching this CNN report and were expecting them to lists all of its technical facts?? It's financial channel, They are not catoring to the slashdot people.. They are catering to all the finance people.. why do you think they singled out Redhat.. its a company to watch.
>
PHB watches CNN. PHB sees this 'linux' thing and might be disgrutnled about MS already. PHB realizes there might be an alternative to MS, despite was MS marketing drones tell him. PHB might actually listen to MIS people who have already said 'This sucks, give us more power cap
n'
PHB may actually consider it now, simply because it's on CNN, a 'reputable' (to the PHB) channel where this PHB get's their info.
Also, as pointed out by many, this was a BUSINESS piece... if you don't get a clue about that already, please go away and stop telling people about it. You're doing us all a dis-service.
Bad piece: go into store and say 'there's only four linux titles'. Well. . yo uwere holding LINUX the OS, nto a program for linux and all you have to do is goto a local RPM mirror to find some 34,000 rpms for linux, not to mention all the programs that aren't RPM'd! Tons of software out there, just that nobody is charging for them. That kind of frosted me a little....
Remember, publicity good. Giving a history lesson on Linux on a business show: bad. Showing how a company (redhat) is making tons of money from a product that's free... gee.. ya think that the PHB's might find that interesting? Product costs 0, sell for $50. That's a key thing for the PHB's to hear! Stop whining about the things that were not mentioned and be thankful for what WAS mentioned. Awareness. Awareness.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
I am the orignal poster of this section.
hmmm I believe custom programers will always be needed at bussinesses but other software industries like office apps will die rather quickly. They are dyeing anyway right now thanks to exclusive oem deals with ms. Freeware office suites will be available and all the companies who make apps for traditional office suites (like all the ones for office 97) will be hurt if not thrown out of bussiness.I think thousands upon thousands of jobs will be lost. I am both pro and now skeptic of linux. I was wrong about the oss that I stated earlier. I am for free code to whoever buys a product. What kind of car company would have a bomb that explodes when you peek under the hood and expect you tp pay for another car or upgrade if you have one little problem. Microsoft is bad but linux could be worse for individual programers. I am divided. Now since microsoft has a less then a 1/10th of a chance to win its case, it is actually likely that linux could enter mainstream real soon. I wish we had cheap unix's for pc's that had market share and many different version of windows all competing with different offices suites all split from ms. I just don't like progrmaers stealing codewarriors ideas and making it free. This is cutting their air supply just like ms did with netscape. However the other extreme is when the program companies will see what is happening and freak out and boycott linux and stop developing for it. However this would happen when ms is split and the appeal with linux will be more. I want linux to stay as a hacker os but I wish the mainstream computer users would have a windows not from ms but one based on a linux kernel but not under the gnu license.
Their is a saying. Watch your enemies because you might end up like them.
I hope that linux doesn't turn into the next ms coping every commercial product and gving it away.
enough said.
I was a big fan of linux and now I have doubts that the platform is any good. Technically its a great platform and I think its so stable and reliable but thats not what I mean when I say "very good". I am scared. I am scared that the apps I am writing are going to be copycated and used to throw me out of bussiness. I think the oss is good for people who can not afford software and want to learn aobut c or unix but is it really good for the programmer? The one who uh wants to put money and food on the table. I think Bill Gates is right now when he calls the silcon valley pc users group a bunch of thieves who are preventing innovation from programers who want to make money. Bill is the most gready bastard I have ever met and I think he is way too rich but thats no my point. I just read about 18 and 17 year old millionairs thanks to people wanting to buy their software but linux has the same software for free. Sh*t! This isn't fair. I want to make money. I had 2 cool ideas and I started coding and I found out that one of them just entered alpha in fresshmeat.org and another is just being started by abunch of hackers. This sucks.
:-)
wake up people. Linnux is not your friend but your enemy. IF you are angry at ms for including Ie for free in windows, you should also be really angry at oss and linux for hurting all you programmers who code of been millionairs. Free software will put us out of work and take away our social lives. If a kid could write software for free, then you all need new jobs and program when you get home after work and except to pay a legal fee for a divorce.
re: Linux is a threat to software developers
Maybe it is, but then, so is Microsoft. Think about it: on one hand, only programmers at cygnus and redhat making money; on the other hand, only programmers at Microsoft making money (and don't think that MS pays all that much better, just look at all the "permatemp" employee problems they've had.) Does it really matter which course we run? If MS sees a profitable market, it will enter it and "cut off the oxygen supply" of any competitor, so your idea would have simply been copied anyway.
Consolidation is happening. Either we're stuck with an open, free, stable OS, or we're stuck with a closed, expensive, buggy OS. Linux looks like a friend there.
yet another linux piece that points out the fact that Linux is only for the computer-31337, thus ensuring that the world will be in the throws of microsloth for the rest of eternity. The only thing the CNN piece did was attach the OS name 'Linux' to one distribution: Red Hat. No mention of GNU or the GPL, no mention of the billions of software packages for the OS. Eh, but it's exposure. I guess you can't complain.
Oh, and just on a side note, I hope that micro wins it's antitrust case. I have actual reasons for this, but mostly its becuase I want the to feel the pain when the world discovers that Linux can actually be a user-friendly OS.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
The internet is an integral part of the Linux culture, and it will take time before people get use to the idea that the Internet is also a primary (not secondary) source of software. The linux community knows this, the buisness world doesn't want to acknoledge this.
If linux is to be analyzed by the buisness world, it should be analized in other contexts, not the traditional one. Possable opertunities are things like a publication buisness. I know more people would be interested in buying a monthly "subscription" (for $5 a month?) to the most recent version of the top 200 GPL titles for Linux on CD insted of buying stuff off the shelf. People like Time/Warner and all the publishing giants are the ones who stand something to gain, with thier publication subscription machienary in place... So, analyzing Linux in the "traditional" buisness context is idotic, because linux and gpl software will never be a "New version every two years" market like Microsoft has made for thier OS and software.
I'd LOVE to have one!! :-)
(Yeah baby yeah!!!
Nokey (The one and only. Be ware of cheap imitations)
I'm sorry, but my kharma just ran over your dogma.
Cool way of describing who they reprazent:
BILL GATES, CEO, MICROSOFT
BOB YOUNG, LINUX
Except that they really didn't mention any other distributiions. Or they didn't mention any of the other gui projects or other attempts to make Linux easier to use. One of the big complaints is that fvwmX isn't that easy to configure. Showing how good KDE is would be important to businesses. However I agree interviewing RMS would've just turned way too many people off(I hope you're not offended RMS if you read this). It's just Linus is just a way better person to market.
Although they didn't give a complete overview of the Linux world with all the distributions and the GNU software, they really hammered away at what has been the main complaint of big corporations, lack of support. I can't honestly think that someone could walk away from the TV and think that there wasn't ANY support for Linux. Then again I'm sure lots of people walked away from the Juanita Broderick interview still thinking Bill Clinton has never lied, sorry had to mention that someplace
Man, after reading industry news on /., a CNN transcript is downright PAINFUL. It's amazing how disjoint and messy 8 second soundbytes are in text. Linux needs not such coverage. Reading that piece (of crap) was like playing 52 pickup in a rose garden.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I don't want world domination. I want the world to change.
Ah, that is not to be. People want one-size-fits-all; they want to look like everyone else. No-one wants to be different (except for a few nerds like those of us on Slashdot here and there).
Richard Stallman was never even mentioned. HELLO? He wrote the most critical piece of Linux-gcc, and his organisation has written almost everything else (pick any Unix utility).
Sigh,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
You don't have to use Disk Druid. Go right ahead and use fdisk! And just because redhat comes with one program that makes some potentially faulty assumptions, doesn't mean that the whole thing's buggy. It just means that disk druid is buggy. Also, if you bother to *read* the installation manual for redhat, you will notice that it *does* warn you that if you don't do the partitioning by hand, your existing partitions might get messed up.
-Cheetah
gates wrote 2 letters. One for pirates of microsoft basic and another for programmers who were making their own ticker tape programing languages and software that was absolutely free. Gates called them innovation stopers because in his mind the free programers would prevent the so called quality programs by giving away junkier stuff for free. He was afraid bussiness would make great software and then a hobbyist would come and make his own junk version for free and people would use the free version and the software industry would never be born. However the apple2 killed that whole idea and showed the bussiness world that commercial and freeware can co-exist. THen IBM killed freeware until linux showed up years later.
I've never received such stuff, though I do remember a very annoying Infoseek ad banner that appeared the summer before last whenever you visited with a Unix-variant machine. It was an ad for Windows NT claiming is was faster, more stable, and most of all more cost-efficient than Unix! A friend and I wrote angry letters to Infoseek and Microsoft threatening legal action for false advertizing on the latter point, since Linux is free. Soon, however, the ad banner went away, and I stopped avoiding Infoseek at all costs.
Rock on, brother. If you start prosecuting Microsoft under the new anti-spam law, be sure to send Slashdot an account of your adventures. However, keep in mind that you could get your ass seriously kicked by trying to take on Microsoft's cast of a thousand lawyers. In the end, it doesn't matter; we're winning anyway.
Whether or not Linux is or isn't as easy or easier to deal with than Windows is all a matter of luck when it comes to your hardware. Merely using Windows will NOT ensure that you have a better time of things just like Linux will not ensure that your installation is a royal PITA.
Windows has to it's benefit what the report said: aisles and aisles of shrinkwrap to throw at it.
I wonder how the msnopoly justifies raiding Linux shops with sales teams in attempts to get them hooked back on Windows. What kind of dirty tricks they will go to when they know NT is junk. Here was my favorite quote:
YOUNG: We've been aware that Microsoft sales teams have been going out to our key accounts and actually trying to switch them away from Linux to Microsoft products. Three years ago when we first became aware of this.
uhh.. lemme see if I understand you correctly...
:-(
You had two "cool ideas" for coding. Both ideas are already being coded by other programmers around the world.
How do you define "cool"? Technically cool that hackers would like? Or something that would make a real business plan?
I don't know what your ideas are, but they seem technically cool enough that other hackers think so too and have taken the initiative to write code.
As for a business plan, it seems your ideas were relatively simple enough that random programmers around the world started working on it in their own spare time. Seems like low barriers for your competiton. If OSS didn't exist, your idea would've been copycatted by either shareware writers or Microsoft. But you or your competitors could try patenting it. And bring lawyers into the picture. Or do marketing FUD. Not pretty.
Each revolution will change the balance of power and the economics of the marketplace. Programmers will continue to get paid, but they'll work on different things. And new business models will emerge.
I am hopeful that the free software revolution will make the software industry more honest about how it prices software products. Commoditizing fundamental software programs, like OS, will benefit consumers. Software companies will then focus their efforts (and competition) on more serious, complex problems like flight traffic control systems, streamlining health care, and other things that need real fixing and better benefit humanity.
No matter what they say, we all know CNN, this is an important even. It doesn't matter that they focused only on RH and Linus, the important thing is that on a enterprise-oriented program they gave a pretty good presentation of Linux. The imagery was also good, repeatedly showing the packaging and shipping of thousands of RH boxes, that's an image that says : "we are real and we are shipping to thousands of customers".
I believe this is a turning point, now, it's up to us to inform the people and CNN about the real story behind Linux.
If I've told you once, I've told you a BILLION times, never, ever exagerate! ;)
"What do you mean, invalid parameters? 9000Gigs of RAM and it can't answer a simple question!" -- Earthworm Jim
What's the act of distribution?
If you distribute a customized version of a GPL software you have to distribute all your new source code?
What if you make a software S that just calls GPL software but doesn't recompile any of it. You can distribute that without publishing the source if you want can't you? It's not required to publish the source code, it is just encouraged. Also you can publish it without comments, with variables auto renamed so as to be unreadable if you are required to do so, only making the parts you want people to be able to mess with well documented.
There will always be competing implementations of any idea that gets out there. A lot of these big arsed horizontal apps put out with free source by big companies are just being put out there to promote Linux don't you think? They don't care if it gets used by a competitor. That knock off competitor will probably not have support anyway. Also if it is big source code, and that source code is bad, lousy undocumented code from hell, well, then you are going to have to collude with the owners anyway to do anything with it. At least I would. Perhaps there are super brains out there who can decode anykind of mess. I sometimes think C programmers have this talent. But I can't.
Also you can start selling support.
You know I have been using windows for a long time now and am actually a MCSE. I'll tell you all this...I have now been using Red Hat's distribution for 2 months now and it's far less buggy then Windows anything. I'm very impressed with what has happened. I reciently got a consulting job with a company that wants to intall a 40 node network. They want a stable system that doesn't require much administration(once it's set up) and is cost effective. I sold them on linux instead of Windows and guess what....They love it and so do I. Plus I made a good profit on the deal. I'm a convert. Windows is good for certain enviroments but linux is the future!!!
Bill
I have the previous two older Red Hat versions, the first is in the back of a book, the second came from Egghead when they had physical stores. I now have a new cobbled together pentium 166 with Win95 on it & partitioned for a Linux install. I was thinking of the new Red Hat I saw on the shelf because it sounds like it might support my hardware.
- -------------------------------
- ---------------------------------------
The first Linux logical drive starts 100+Megs below the 500Meg barrier.
I read that the boot partition's got to start below the 500Meg barrier.
I was going to try to install Linux into a 250Meg initial
logical drive and a 500Meg logical drive and maybe one
or more smaller logical drives.
----------------------------------------------
?----> Any problems with that?
I think one of my Linuxes is version 4.2.
I have a Matrox MGA Millennium video card.
-----------------------------------------------
?----> Which Linux should I install? Buy RedHatLinux 5.2?
I plan on using an old copy of SystemCommander.
When I am more on the ball I will repartition my whole
disk using OS/2 so I can get Win95, OS/2 and Linux on my machine.
I still have room for another 10Gig HardDrive.
-----------------------------------------------
?----> What about having multiple versions of Linux on the same machine?
Can multiple versions of Linux share the same boot drive that starts below the 500Meg barrier?
Is this barrier still in effect?
no mention of the billions of software packages for the OS
Why don't you sit down and figure out what a billion is?
Wow. Not a very good troll. You came out with the 'dorks' line too fast. You should have built up to it, take your time. Considering many Linux users don't live with their parents, you lose a lot of points with several of the Flame bait judges. Overall, I give your post a 2.3 out of a possible 10.
You're going to have to practice more if you ever expect to take gold in the Flame Bait Olympics(tm)...
I want them to win too. Because I own shares. Does that paint all over me "I am an old geezer"? ( learn the ways of the markets o yea who want the next generation to work for the fun of it and not for the money. )
Wait a minute. My shares will be worth more if they break up. At least at first. Until people find out that without their Monopoly, maybe they won't do that good.
Without the Apps caluding with the OS. So if they break then wait a year or two and then sell? Or just hold if you have a big tax liability in it? Or start selling Calls on your shares? Yeah, start selling calls. That's the idea I like.
Keep looking in the tech news for advanced signs that they are suffering from not being able to calude and then start selling those covered calls. And be ready to put a big collar on if any really bad news comes out heavy on the short against the box.
So I don't really care what happens. But I hope they win. The cud chewing masses need them.
And heckba. The geeks don't really need the cud chewing masses as much as they think they do. Alls we really need is SystemCommander and a couple OSs that makes it easy for us to program-: like Linux and BeOS.
linux on tv is what it takes to get me to watch it cause tv sux.
"LINUS TORVALDS, LINUX CREATOR: Because their operating systems (windows) really
suck."
-- LINUS TORVALDS, (cnn): Because their operating systems (Windows) really suck.
Perhaps you were blinded by the fact that the focus of the piece was your favorite distribution, but let me point out some major BS that the CNN story put out last night:
1) Oracle did not invest in Red Hat along with Netscape. Intel did.
2) Bob Young made it sound like Red Hat is credited for defining how to make money on Linux. Funny, I seem to recall SLS and Slackware selling Linux long before Red Hat was an itch in Ewing's crotch.
3) The permits office in Seattle that's running Linux? They're running OpenLinux, NOT Red Hat. Anyone with a video taped copy of the piece will plainly see Looking Glass running on the desktop (I believe the announcement of this office running Linux appeared here a while back). CNN made it seem like it was all Red Hat's doing.
4) Microsoft harps on *OpenLinux* being its competition; MS lawyers only held up a Red Hat box maybe once in the courtroom, but all the "Halloween" stuff about Linux distributions was directly credited to OpenLinux. Even their video taped stuff (I believe) addresses OpenLinux. Besides, Caldera is the one suing Microsoft, not Red Hat.
5) As many others have pointed out here, the CNN crowd seems to have completely passed over the Free Software Foundation, crediting 100% of Linux to Linus and Bob Young. Sorry, I respect both for their accomplishments, but give me a break! Neither would be where they are today if it were not for the people around them. Maybe CNN just edited out all their comments (I can see at least Linus crediting the FSF for their contributions).
There is so much misdirected credit in that CNN story it isn't even funny. I sincerely hope they do a followup and cover the rest of the distributions (they'll hear from a lot of us if they don't).
In the mean time, try to be more objective and critical next time, okay? I'm sure if the story was on Pacific HiTech or Slackware you'd feel more free to criticize it...
Why is RMS always left out? I think it's simply because many perceive Linus as being more charasmatic, but I do think not mentioning GNU was a big screw up. Now the GNU Project has contributed more to the overall development of Free software, but It's not so bad having a poster child like Linus is a positive thing. If they show RMS on the screen raving about how it's immoral to use propriotary software, I think it's going to turn alot of people off. Now I know that RMS doesn't get all the credit he deserves, but if giving Linus more credit than he deserves in turn gives the public at large a positive view of Linux, then the net benefit to the free software community will be greater. The more Linux is pushed in to the mainstream, the more people it will bring in to the free software community, and the more cool toys we will have to play with :)
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Mostly I am curious to see if anyone else has had a similar experiance. I do a few packages that are very specialized (and, of course, GPL, though some of my earlier stuff was on a BSD license). Certainly I do not think any of what I have done is so important that I would be singled out for 'special attention' by anyone.
Actually, I have become very good at creating interesting stories when these jokers call on the phone, and happen to also ask what exactly I do. But I am also the sort that would provide deliberately misleading information to a junk phone callers looking to do market surveys.
I am sure the big boys can handle this or other kinds of annoyance (I recall something about Microsoft trying to hire Alen Cox, among others...). My real concern is for those either new to free software or on the edge of the community. Perhaps we could have a /. poll to resolve the question if this is a real problem or not...
How bout Alan Cox doing bong hits and talking to a stuffed penguin - that would make for good TV! :)
Then, hopefully, when you get out of school + stop living off Mommy & Daddy, read it again & you'll see how assinine it is.
First post.
I love the analogies the media and unknowing give stuff.
Evil is what I am. Death is what I bring.
Is there anyone who can produce such a gem? Reply by mail if you like!
Many thanks,
Quinn Weaver http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/Quinn
You know, in about 1994, a colleague of mine was
emphatically telling me about how this free little
operating system he was tinkering with was going
to pose a big threat to Microsoft. I looked at
him pretty incredulously as he described what we
all know as the open source model of development,
and the fact that linux is free.
In the intervening time, I became a convert during
my time as an MIS guy working with relatively
uncomplicated mix of Windows machines and Sun
boxes, because it did a lot of things we needed,
it didn't suck, and, hey, it's free.
To see linux go from nothing to a primetime slot
on CNN in less than 5 years is something to be
applauded--we shouldn't sit here like geeks at
a star trek convention nitpicking the broadcast,
because newspeople who view their computer as
just something to type up reports on won't
understand that one can just take any cheap
PC clone and turn it into a machine capable of
just about any task in hours. CNN's audience
isn't the slashdot audience (hm, maybe that night
it was--slashdot effect in Nielson ratings?).
Maybe next year, we'll see the penguins in the
background of the CNN newsroom.
RedHat??? That would explain it. RedHat ships with Disk Druid, a buggy piece of shit that does nothing but destroy partitions. It destroyed my partitions *twice*.
Since then I switched to Debian and never had any problems.
--
--
=8^
..is abacus.
You moron.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
That's exactly what happened to a friend and I...we borrowed a RedHat disk and turfed his partition table...But, being the geeks we are, we pushed on and installed the beast anyway...That's what backups are for. =)
That's the difference between the average consumer and geeks. We're willing to beat on something until it works. If it doesn't work out of the box, the average consumer wants their money back. Hell, making things work is half the fun of Linux and most of the fun of programming.
"What do you mean, invalid parameters? 9000Gigs of RAM and it can't answer a simple question!" -- Earthworm Jim
Yes... ZD seems to think so, too :)
d isplay/0,4436,2143338,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_smgraph_
-bill!
So? Your competitors, such as me, want to charge less money for their products then you want to charge for yours.
It's called a free market. It's why your standard of living keeps going up and up. Yes it is tough on the mercantilists of the world.
Adam Smith rules!
From what I read in the GPL if you make software that calls GPL programs but doesn't explicitly incorporate or modify those GPL programs then you don't have to distribute your source code.
Also for free coders can code on any platform not just Linux. There are GPL programs on Windows. Besides, there aren't that many for free programmers out there are there? They have to work for a living don't they? Where is this army of programmers?
Do you think the smart people doing Linux will be able to dumb down Linux to the point that it works on the desktop like Windows? I don't. Microsoft fills the needs of the dummies. That's what they do. All their competitors C are smart people trying to make software for smart people. That's why they C failed. That's why they C will always fail. That's why Linux will never take down Windows on the desktop. The people at MS know how to think dummy. They get it from the very top. It's their tradition. And I just don't think Linux programmers want to code for that audience. The Microsofties are the king at it. It's almost a hysterical anomaly. I don't think there are any companies as tyranically focused on the likes and dislikes of dummies because there aren't any companies that pay their employees squat and give them 2000 shares of ownership just for walking through the door. Just look at NT. NT = "For Dummies."( no: easy to install. Doesn't need an administrator. That was what got it its market share. )
Listen, anyone over the age of 30 who hasn't used a computer yet, forget it. They just want it to come fully loaded and have a single blue button on it that was pressed already at the factory. They don't want to know what a file is. They hate files. They just loose them. All the files attatched to e-mails they have receieved are all lost somewhere on their disks. They will never know where. They can't download anything because they just loose them. They will never find them again. And the directory explorer is some kind of alien monster set there completely just to confuse and abuse them. And they hate it and will never touch it. "It should just work." They all say. "It should just do what I want it to do." What they want is HAL, what they want is the Borg Queen. And that is what Microsoft is now trying to give to them.
And anyone over 40 who has never used a computer before? Forget it. That pointy thing running about on the screen completely baffles them. And anyone over 60? Forget it. You can tell them about the start button all you want. The machine will just sit there unused. And if you ask them what's the first thing they should do to get it running? They don't know. You can have them write it down: "Push the start button." They will just loose the paper and not be able to run the machine. Hekba they will just sit there looking at it and woundering how to get it turned on. It doesn't matter if you show them. You can show them 5 or 10 times and then ask them how to turn it on another day. They don't know. ( okay, I'm not talking about the geeks who are over 30 and just don't happen to know that they are geeks yet. I'm talking about the 80% of all people who never went to college. I'm talking about the subset of that group who are true dummies. )
They just want the thing to be installed. And then they want to touch it as little as possible. Maybe e-mail if your lucky. No, Microsoft has said that Windows is still 10 times too complicated. And AOL CEO has said that AOL is still 10 times too complicated. Will Linux be able to come not only down to the level of Windows but 10 times further down below that? I don't think so. And now the big push at Microsoft is to build up AI so that all these PHBs and dummies will just be attatched to their PCs like Borg drones. The Microsoft PCs will read people facial expressions and figure out for them what they want to do: "Here, Let me show you what you can do: Here, I'll do it for you. How is that? Isn't that nice?"
Microsoft wants to be the new TV. They want to suck all the dummies in like vacant potatoes and regiment them like regular treatments of crack cocaine. ( what do you think all this power in the new Intel CPUs is going to be used for? It's going to be used to make HAL. ) Will Linux be able to keep together that kind of single minded focus on the dummies? I think not. Okay, Linux may cut way into the server and may even become a monopoly there, but Microsoft owns and will always own the dummies.
When there are no more dummies. That's when Microsoft will go the way of the Beatles.
Also I wouldn't put money on any of your predictions. They are too all or nothing. Reality is usually stranger than fiction. And 99% of all prognosticators who put their money down on their own calls usually have their heads handed to them by God. (me too) Ask any trader.
I don't think it will turn out like you think.
That's what I want to know. I think maybe they meant Intel.
Over on Linuxtoday.com there is a post from an curious Windows user who saw the CNN story. He said he's never heard of Linux before but he wants to learn about it. This proves that, if nothing else, a mention on CNN is going to bring out at a few potential converts. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not at this juncture when Linux is very much less-than-user-friendly. To echo somebody who posted here about two months ago, get ready for the "Lunix DEestroyed My Hard Drvie!" posts. Don't doubt it--I already got that exact phone call after lending a Red Hat disk to a friend of mine.
Anyway, I wish the Windows user luck but honestly, I don't think he'll have much. I think he'll end up frustrated. But out of 10 guys like him, maybe 1 will.
First, I have to disagree. I don't know what the going definition of "fluff" is but I saw three major points:
1. Bob Young talks about how his company is making money off Linux, and how it keeps on selling over their expectations, filmed in front of hundreds and hundreds of Linux shrinkwraps.
2. The "Gates hometown switches to Linux" mention. I think this is an invaluable sell. I had this story bookmarked from a long time back, but it's nice to see it get some fresh attention.
3. The fact that Linux has commercial support from the Big Names (including IBM). If nothing else convinces people that yes, there is commercial support, this should be it.
For people who think RMS, GNU, etc. etc. were snubbed: GET A FUCKING CLUE. This is CNN Fortune. This is not for computer people. This is not "a history of Linux and the GNU project". This is a TV program for BUSINESS PEOPLE, you know. The PHBs. They don't CARE about RMS or the GNU or the bazaar or any of that. They want to find out what it can do for their business, and that it's not just some hacker toy.
To that end, I think the CNN piece served its purpose more than adequately.
Flame on.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
Did I miss something? Or was that an error?
ttyl
srw
Posted by Tr0ll3r:
Big deal.. linux on tv. Finally you dorks pull yourselves away from your computers and watch TV with your parents.
I saw the comment about sales teams trying to raid Linux shops and get them to switch, and it got me to thinking. In recent months, I have had literally hundreds of little junk e-mails from microsoft about their products, phone calls at home from "microsoft affiliated" certified training partners and affiliated companies offering to sell certification out of "concern for my career", and plenty of worthless free subsription offers to various ms development magazines.
Has this happened to anyone else? Being in Virginia, I wonder if I can make use of our wonderful new SPAM laws?
And more to the point, they got people to pay attention to the Linux phenomemon. CS majors who've never heard of it will learn about the new distributions. Prophets and mystics will discover the gurus RMS and ESR. Businesspeople will hear "big names support Linux" and glaze over. Not every single facet of the Linux experience can be explained in 10 minutes -- the fact that it got CNN coverage will cause people to investigate for themselves, and they WILL uncover the set of facts they're interested in.
"Do it yourself" is the lesson when working with free software. Maybe it's a lesson that applies to media research as well.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
Hmm... methinks m$ cronies made this report to
make RedHat Linux look like commercial monolithic
competition for m$. Good for their antitrust
defense. Notice how GNU was completely ignored?
Man, I wonder what RMS thinks.
Most people would rather drive a faster car instead of learning how to fly a friggin plane or being stuck with MS Yugo 2000
"So how do you make money doing that?"
Blah blah blah money money money. Linus? Who's he? Do you make royalties? Why, are you an idiot? This is a successful "product" you could be making money money money money!
This is a money money show, and we want to talk about Linux, but we won't talk much to the stupid hippie inventor. We'll talk to the RedHat guy, cause he's in the business of being in business and making money money money!
money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money
A pox on CNN.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Calm down.. do you think any of these finance people watching the show will give one shit or another about these details only a geek would scoff at? The only thing that matters now is that thousands of people have just learned a new word on wednesday night.. that word is 'Linux'
>
Would you rather have people forewarned that they might have to actually know something about their computer if they plan on using and maintaining Linux, or send them blindly towards Linux, have them learn the hard way, and turn them off of Linux forever?
Let's face it, Linux is not as easy to set up and use as Windows 9X. Some of that can be fixed, but some can't, because Linux is so much more robust than Windows, and gives a level of control that Windows can't. Think of it as flying a plane vs. driving a car. Lots of people can drive a car and be perfectly happy with that; but if you want to get there faster (and actually safer), then you can fly a plane, which takes alot more skill. In Linux's case, it just so happens that the plane is free and maintained by the community.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
Linux is a threat to that kind of development that shouldn't commerically exist.
Don't worry, once free software ousts everyone out of the dekstop and small server mass market, you will still be able to find plenty of work working on large, custom enterprise systems. I don't think that anyone will come out with an open source air traffic control system any time soon,
or an open source management system for large telecommunication newtorks, and the like.
On the smaller end of the scale, there will also be work on embedded systems which require custom programming, even if they are based on a freeware operating system.
Don't forget customization of the freeware itself. Free software doesn't always do the exact job that someone wants. If someone needs a special customizations or extensions, there are opportunities there.
Then there is business programming. Businesses are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition. This includes the use of new kinds of technological solutions. With free software, businesses can find cost effective to take an existing freeware application that they are using and hire programmers to customize it to do what they want. This is the sort of opportunity that doesn't exist with proprietary software, or exists to a limited extent only---through the kind of extensibility that the proprietary software exposes, which often serves the monopolistic aims commercial vendor more than the needs of the customer.
An easily overlooked fact about free software is that software which is under a free license doesn't have to be released. You can customize, say, a GNU application for some company under the agreement that the changes will not be made available to anyone outside of the company. Of course, if the changes leaked out, nobody could prevent the free copying and distributions in keeping with the license, but the license doesn't require that the changes *must* be published. It only states requirements that must be followed if the act of distribution takes place. By not publshing the changes, the organization can benefit from the use of the unique software, leveraging it go gain some sort of edge over its competitors.
That's not the point. The point is that it shouldn't have happened. They shouldn't have included such a buggy program that does such a vital task. (And it's been there since at least 5.0).
And this is just one of their screw-ups. Other screw-ups range from misconfigured scripts to unusable programs bundled in the *final* version of their distro. For example, in 5.1 glint was broken. You had to download a patch to get it to work. According to another poster, in the RH for Alpha ipfwadm was broken. And of course everyone agrees that 5.2 is nowhere near as stable as 4.2 was. This kind of behavior resembles Micro$oft more then a Linux distributor. I don't trust RedHat any more.
They don't get anything until it whallops them upside the head six or seven times. They're only paying attention because IBM is paying attention.
Expect to see more articles like these.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Did anyone manage to grab a copy of this into a mov/avi/mpeg/ram/whatever file?
BlackNova Traders
In my experience with news organizations, CNN did about average. Just mentally put a "For Entertainment Purposes Only" above all news you receive.
x
because freebsd will squash the linooks dog with impunity.
get ready for the next big thing: freebsd.
live it, love it.
You're not likely to see Linux in the CNN Newsroom anytime soon - for years, the newsroom had only VT100 terminals, and they're still converting over to Windows machines.
It's certainly possible that Linux may crop up somewhere behind the scenes, just as it has in lots of other large companies. But even that may take a while. I was talking to someone recently about some or another computer that supported the on-air side of the house. This computer runs a version of NT, but it's a special version; the companies that make this kind of gear won't let you touch the insides of these boxes and still certify that they will work in the real-time on-air environment.
The CNN.com/internet side of things is all Sun Solaris running Netscape Enterprise servers right now. That could change someday, but we're pretty conservative technically; you have to be when your site is subject to the kind of loads CNN.com can get. (Our newest record is over 500k hits/minute across the entire family of web sites - (cnn|cnnfn|cnnsi).com and misc other sites) We take some pride that our site usually stays up when others are crushed under the load, so we have to take care not to screw it up.
I'm gainfully employed, married, and haven't lived off Mum & Dad for about 12 years.
Oh I see. Only the youthful are idealistic, right? If I knew what the "real world" was like, I'd be a crusted humorless capitalist running-dog bastard like all you other sellouts.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Freedom matters more than money.
It may seem counterintuitive, but there will be more work for programmers as a result of the wide spread use of free software than would othewise be possible.
Why, you ask?
Because organizations will be able to trust their systems more with the stability that free software offers. Also they know that somebody will be able to fix bugs, even if the company that sold it to them disappears because they have the source code.
The most significant and interesting advances in the use of computers lie ahead of us, not behind us. Free software is the vehicle of innovation in the software industry. Proprietary forces are interested in selling "more of the same" more than shipping new software. Look at how M$ delayed NT5 for so many years.
We will give away the OS and most of the popular applications. But there will even more demand for higher level application generated by the benefits of using the free software. Years of uptime on a server will have to make pointy haired people want to stick with free software. Admins who have to get out of bed to reboot NT boxes in the middle of the night will migrate to the free software.
Game over man....
Tough sh*t! If your a decent programmer, it shouldn't be too hard to find a job (look in any classified). And Gates wasn't talking about the OSS community moron, he was talking about piraters. Completely different! You can't put food on your table coding? Then you must not be very skilled. Ask the guys at RHAD if you can make money writing free code.
Erik
This is surely great. One of our sales managers (you know, the type that spends ours flicking through the Wall Street Journal and swallowing everything CNN feeds him and who doesn't know the first thing about computing except to type his resume and e-mail it to all known headhunters) saw the RH installation guide on my desk and immediately recognized it. "Isn't that the software IBM is backing now?" he asked. "Sure." I said, "and thousands of other software companies as well."
The point is: they heard the name and they heard it together with the only computing name they remember from college. I think this did more for Linux than any printed article ever written about it.
Way to go, Penguin.
They completely glossed over the free aspect
That's the 64 dollar question. Why don't you read the transcript?
Interesting post. I put Redhat on my computer once, for 15 minutes or so, and have been a dedicated Slakware user since. So, wher does that leave us?
The piece wasn't a technical one, it was a financial one. Ther were errors, but I guarantee that some CEO or CIO doesn't give a squat about who wrote Linux. They are just scratching their haeds and saying '$50.00 for a networking OS with tech support?"
That was the most important part of the story. Name recognition, and the fact that there is a choice. Once they get the courage to actually install Redhat Linux, they'll discover that it sucks, and they'll learn about the other distro's. But the main thing is...they're not installing NT!
How to justify it? It's called a "free market" What do you think the Linux community has been doing trying to get corporations, who are already addicted to MS junk, to switch? We may not have sales teams, per se, but we're still trying to convince people to switch operating systems. It's kind of funny that MS feels it has to do the same.
The piece was directed at the business community
and not at geeks. Of course the didn't mention GNU
or open source, those are not the kind of things
the business types watching the show would be overly interested in. They want a quick overview
and if they like what they see then they'll do
some digging on their own. If CNN did a 30 or 60
minute story on Linux then GNU, open source and the entire Linux community should, of course, be
mentioned.
I suspect some of you were expecting too much from
a 15 minute sound byte.
MicroSoft is throwing some event called "Update 99" at the University of Davis, California. ( http://events.microsoft.com/isapi/events/event.asp ?s=332209 )
Well, the new local Linux user group, LU-GoD (the Linux User Group of Davis, http://www.lugod.org/ ) is going to be there passing out pamphlets and flyers pointing out that there ARE alternatives... for example Linux, and the many Office suites and other high-end apps. available for Linux.
Muhahahahah! >:^)
-bill!
"sys" (2nd in command)
LU-GoD
MS pulls _all_ sorts of dirty tricks, but this isn't one of them. This is just what salespeople do: go to someone who isn't using their product and try to get them to do so. It's certainly not wrong or immoral unless they use harrassment, coercion, or bribery. Some salespeople do. In some cases, I'm sure MS does, but that doesn't make it wrong for them to have a sales dept.
Does anyone have any links to anything where Linus has given any real credit to GNU or RMS? Without GNU, Linux would just be another CS student's toy OS. Linux seems more than happy to get all the credit, and give none where it is due. The guy's ego seems to be ballooning out of control!
they make $ off it because linux is so hard to use so they need more support. If linux was easy to use-who needs to pay anything?
I'm pretty sure that was Linus that said that. Not some unidentified person. I think this sort of publicity is good for Linux. Even though they didn't mention GPL stuff, it's still publicity, and most people don't care about that anyway. We're talking business people here, and they wanna see what it can do for them.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I figured out what linux could do for me several years ago. Saves my ass money, and doesn't keep me up all night like our sucky NT servers.
One things for sure, NT is *NOT* the way to go if you want stability and reliability. One of our linux webservers has been up for 367 days so far. Let's see a MS product do that, even if it's not doing anything, an MS product would still crash just sitting there way before 367 days.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's certainly a strong case for people really disliking Microsoft. Most of the is because their operating systems really suck.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...