Let us remember that the design of both Windows and Linux are limited by the hardware of the PC. Hardware interrupts, Direct Memory Access, a menagerie of old hardware interface standards. Both systems are built upon a common design goal: making something useful out of cheap hardware.
If you are looking for a system that is designed from the ground up to handle all types of faults, buy a mainframe. Everything else was made on a budget and is a child of compromise.
Hey, in downtown Philadelphia we have had rolling power outages just a coincidence, I'm sure. A few items I can confirm, the police department had to take down all of the mobile terminals in squad cars for a good chunk of today. 3 guesses what their servers are running.
Here here. Whitebox is the way to go. I have 2 boxes at home, Iggy and Sparky.
Iggy is the desktop, our DVD player, and frame grabber for my Playstation.
Sparky is a box assembled with all the obsolete parts yanked out of Iggy. It's a file server, web server, and our firewall.
The only parts that have worn out are hard drives and power supplies.
I had an all-in-one motherboard before Sparky's present one. The all-in-one is presently my Mom's home computer. She gripes about the speed, but it still works.
We are a Dell shop at work for the servers and desktops. Our kiosks are all scratchbuilds though. We need to ensure we can keep an inventory of parts for years at a time.
There is a big difference. Lotus, Digital, Wordperfect and Netscape were all COMPANIES. GCC is a band of volunteer programmers. Linux is a band of volunteer programmers.
Please note the effectiveness of Microsoft's tactics on Open Source. Short of sending a good squad to every programmer's house, around the world mind you, there is precious little anyone can do to stop us from programming.
What will destroy us is trying to drive a wedge between ourselves and others within our community of developers.
And stopping GCC support isn't precisely "driving a stake through the heart." It's an annoyance that will affect the very people we want to court to our side the most: SCO's developers.
And you are assuming of course that they hadn't purchased SCO back when SCO was SCO not the rebadged Caldera.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone purchase SCO in the past. Even the present.
Beyond that, your mentality is more that of schoolyard bully. "See he's different, lets kick his ass." Your motivation is a feeling of power, not restitution.
You my friend are a bigot, a fool, or lack any training in elementary logic.
Has it entered your mind for a minute that there might be some open-source developers who do work under SCO? It was worth someone's time to develop a port of most software to SCO. Now if you are going to start claiming that its hard to document any cases of SCO users giving back to the community, I would like to point out that 99% of the linux community doesn't give back either.
Plan on exacting vengence from deadbeats? I think not. So shut up about SCO users. They are just like any other users of Free Software. We don't threaten to cut off RedHat users or FreeBSD users, or even Windows users.
Yes, but there is a difference between punching someone who punched you in the face, and punching someone who is wearing the same shirt as someone who punched a friend of yours in the face.
The hole in the bottom of SCO's boat is suing its own potential customers, and trying to start an IP protection racket.
People generally avoid doing business with lawsuit happy people. Their own behavior is a far better repellent than anything we could think up.
Trying to damage SCO by dropping support is a form of vigilanteism that can only get us into a moral quagmire. Fighting back only proves we take their claims seriously.
In a war there are tactics that bring victory or those that bring defeat. SCO's fight is with IBM. IBM is returning fire. That's the legal system.
The GCC issue on the other hand is one party, who has not been harmed in any way, pummeling the users of a maligned company instead of the company itself. This is foolish as it creates enemies from friends.
I hate SCO. But to throw a spanner into the works for every GCC user on SCO is evil. It would be like razing an entire town because the city council has a border dispute with you.
Your problem is with the officials, not the inhabitants. All you would achieve is to turn sympathetic users of GCC into your sworn enemy. At what gain?
Many companies use proprietary technology. Some misappropriate Free Software, others allow it to mingle with their own. When a misappropriation takes place, our action need to be litigation, not misguided populist sentiment.
Amen. Otherwise GCC support becomes a political issue with Ins and Outs. What is to keep someone from turning a spat with Microsoft into a severing of Cygwin development.
Indeed, it is a better knife in the back of SCO for everyone who uses it to see it is built upon open foundations.
You aren't damaging SCO by stripping support in GCC, you are damaging SCO's users. I do not subscribe to either notion of "My enemy's enemy is my friend" nor "My enemy's friend is my enemy."
We must take the higher ground and turn the other cheek, lest we threaten the very trust upon which Open Source is built.
I never would have figured the margins on desktops were that low. Did you ever sit back and just wonder who in the world though up that business model. Razor thin margins on bubble gum or sugar water, that I get. Candy and soda are cheap to make and are consumed by the millions of units.
Computers on the other hand are neither disposible, nor cheap, nor as easy to use as food. You have to imagine some marketing major our there with a spreadsheet saying "Hey, we can sell computer chips like potato chips!".
We are stuck in a never ending war of attrition, just like the airlines. None will unilaterally raise prices. All are running in the red. Consumers are hooked on artificially low prices. The industry will implode sooner or later.
Just look around, you have companies slitting their throats to have products manufactured for $1/hour instead of $20/hour. On an assembly line, each person is making thousands of dollars worth of product per hour. The difference in labor cost is negligible.
I recon it to adding a rice-boy tailpipe to a compact car. On paper, you get a few extra horses. In reality you are just loud, obnoxious, and easily dusted by anything more solidly built.
You are also assuming that your machine doesn't have to do some sort of dialback VPN. I've been screaming for years to get one particular box off of the public network, but a niche app requires it to replicate a database over VPN. Okay, not a problem, full NAT and I'm fine. Not really. I also need to leave the box open so the vendor can VPN in. Okay, just have them use our corporate VPN. No dice, their network security folks won't let them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let us remember that the design of both Windows and Linux are limited by the hardware of the PC. Hardware interrupts, Direct Memory Access, a menagerie of old hardware interface standards. Both systems are built upon a common design goal: making something useful out of cheap hardware.
If you are looking for a system that is designed from the ground up to handle all types of faults, buy a mainframe. Everything else was made on a budget and is a child of compromise.
Hey, in downtown Philadelphia we have had rolling power outages just a coincidence, I'm sure. A few items I can confirm, the police department had to take down all of the mobile terminals in squad cars for a good chunk of today. 3 guesses what their servers are running.
Great tips for making it look like you've taken over the world before you actually get your big break.
You would have to re-work tenure rules though. Putting up with a deadbeat is okay for a few decades. A few centuries WOULD be a drain on resources.
Iggy is the desktop, our DVD player, and frame grabber for my Playstation.
Sparky is a box assembled with all the obsolete parts yanked out of Iggy. It's a file server, web server, and our firewall.
The only parts that have worn out are hard drives and power supplies.
I had an all-in-one motherboard before Sparky's present one. The all-in-one is presently my Mom's home computer. She gripes about the speed, but it still works.
We are a Dell shop at work for the servers and desktops. Our kiosks are all scratchbuilds though. We need to ensure we can keep an inventory of parts for years at a time.
Damn, I was hoping for t-shirts, coffee mugs and toilet paper. All that site has is crummy news stories.
This thread is OVER!
Please note the effectiveness of Microsoft's tactics on Open Source. Short of sending a good squad to every programmer's house, around the world mind you, there is precious little anyone can do to stop us from programming.
What will destroy us is trying to drive a wedge between ourselves and others within our community of developers.
And stopping GCC support isn't precisely "driving a stake through the heart." It's an annoyance that will affect the very people we want to court to our side the most: SCO's developers.
Usually a Ron Jeremy film. No wait, that's the first scene...
There are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone purchase SCO in the past. Even the present.
Beyond that, your mentality is more that of schoolyard bully. "See he's different, lets kick his ass." Your motivation is a feeling of power, not restitution.
Has it entered your mind for a minute that there might be some open-source developers who do work under SCO? It was worth someone's time to develop a port of most software to SCO. Now if you are going to start claiming that its hard to document any cases of SCO users giving back to the community, I would like to point out that 99% of the linux community doesn't give back either.
Plan on exacting vengence from deadbeats? I think not. So shut up about SCO users. They are just like any other users of Free Software. We don't threaten to cut off RedHat users or FreeBSD users, or even Windows users.
One is retribution, the other is a brawl.
The hole in the bottom of SCO's boat is suing its own potential customers, and trying to start an IP protection racket.
People generally avoid doing business with lawsuit happy people. Their own behavior is a far better repellent than anything we could think up.
Trying to damage SCO by dropping support is a form of vigilanteism that can only get us into a moral quagmire. Fighting back only proves we take their claims seriously.
Suck it up and remember we are Ghandi here, not Hitler.
The GCC issue on the other hand is one party, who has not been harmed in any way, pummeling the users of a maligned company instead of the company itself. This is foolish as it creates enemies from friends.
This bluster on the part of the GCC developers serves only SCO. Cutting support would make them into a victim in the public eye.
Better to let them die on their own, and keep your own hand free from the blood.
Your problem is with the officials, not the inhabitants. All you would achieve is to turn sympathetic users of GCC into your sworn enemy. At what gain?
Many companies use proprietary technology. Some misappropriate Free Software, others allow it to mingle with their own. When a misappropriation takes place, our action need to be litigation, not misguided populist sentiment.
Indeed, it is a better knife in the back of SCO for everyone who uses it to see it is built upon open foundations.
We must take the higher ground and turn the other cheek, lest we threaten the very trust upon which Open Source is built.
Computers on the other hand are neither disposible, nor cheap, nor as easy to use as food. You have to imagine some marketing major our there with a spreadsheet saying "Hey, we can sell computer chips like potato chips!".
We are stuck in a never ending war of attrition, just like the airlines. None will unilaterally raise prices. All are running in the red. Consumers are hooked on artificially low prices. The industry will implode sooner or later.
Just look around, you have companies slitting their throats to have products manufactured for $1/hour instead of $20/hour. On an assembly line, each person is making thousands of dollars worth of product per hour. The difference in labor cost is negligible.
I recon it to adding a rice-boy tailpipe to a compact car. On paper, you get a few extra horses. In reality you are just loud, obnoxious, and easily dusted by anything more solidly built.
Sad it is.
Rinse, repeat, check want-ads...
Hey, half my staff check their email with Yahoo, MSN, and/or AOL in addition to their staff account. How, pray tell, can I defend against THAT too?
Nah. They are probably another party that would like to see Linux twisting in the blazing Sun.
"The way to the Egres", that was his. He had it plastered all over his freak show to keep people moving.