As an outsider, I felt that Gore actually was a better choice. For starters, his actual comment about the internet was fairly legitimate. The way he was misquoted by the press, out of context, was criminal.
Gore has a few brain cells to rub together, and as a democrat, would have been struggling against the people who want to lead the US to a military assault on the world. (Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the other members of the Project for a New American Century.) Even if the first point turned out to be false, the second would have likely led him to an innefectual presidency that wouldn't have threatened the rest of the world. Bush, on the other hand, was hand-selected to take that position and push forward with aggressive regime change.
If for no other reason, Bush was a worse choice simply because he has the support of the people running Washington. The whole WORLD has suffered extensively from his stupidity already, and Helen Thomas (a woman with some insight, intelligence, and experience) has called him "the worse president in American history."
There are no worse choices that anyone could have written in. Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Jackson, and David Duke would all have been better than Bush.
Does anyone else feel that this is the beginning of the end?
The RIAA and MPAA are spreading their filth outwards from the US, and trying to make it legally mandatory to implement DRM at the hardware level. The big companies only product anymore is profit, and they're trying to maximise it by elimating cash-sinks like manufacturing and employees. The biggest governments are trying to restrict the movements, actions, and tongues of their citizens in any way they can, and are starting to use those sabres they've been rattling for decades. They also don't seem to believe that their lies even have to be believable or verifiable anymore.
For nearly a quarter century (when I started following current events), I've been of the attitude that it's no worse than it's always been--that it only seems horrific because we're living through it. Now though, I don't know. Every citizen in the "Free Western World" is facing the prospect of being made a criminal, and subject to any punishment their government(s) feel like doling out that day--regardless of any of the things that have been established as basic undeniable human rights.
Frankly, I'm scared for the first time since the Iranian Hostage crisis. I'm afraid the world WILL go out, not with a bang but with a whimper.
Hmm. Do you know if that law has been tested in court? And does it have any exemptions for the porn that's obviously catering to the pedophile market ("young girls raped by their fathers") with explicit disclaimers ("All models were at least 18 years of age when filmed")? I'm curious about how the law would work in a practical sense on these things.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that glorifying (which you do) does nothing to fix the situation. YOU are part of the PROBLEM, and you're using that as an excuse to piss away your responsibilities.
YOU are the fault that Bush got in, and that Gore was the best alternative. Not "the system," not "the blind sheep," but YOU!
Now grow up and fix your country before you destroy the rest of the world.
On behalf of Ms. Russell, let me address your points.
Other states: She lists Arizona and Maine.
" The death penalty kills innocent people and costs the state more money than life imprisonment. These are the inescapable facts that make this Californian legacy not just questionable on moral grounds, but bad policy as well." Seems pretty clear to me.
As for the/. effect, her system got bogged down heavily and came back up within five minutes. How exactly do you deal with HUGE traffic spikes, withoug leasing a pipe 10-20x fatter (and more expensive) than you need 95+% of the time?
In other words, do some fucking research before flaming!
Oh, great. So you're a lazy useless fuck who can't be bothered to get off his ass, but if you could you'd vote for a candidate you didn't agree with because he's cool.
Worse, when someone comes along and wants to work intelligently to reform the system and make democracy work, you tell them to quit wasting their time. After all, our hero Arnie will save the day. (Do you honestly think Arafat gives a fuck about some actor??!)
No wonder your country is so messed up. Please stay away from elections. The fewer people like you who vote, the better.
One important point is this: Child porn is treated as a separate case in most countries. It is not protected under 'freedom of speech' acts, there is no safe haven. Posession of bomb-making instructions is protected; posession of child porn isn't. (but spreading bomb-making instructions with encouragement to use said bombs against people isn't)
This is the crux of how/why people downloading kiddy porn can be charged.
Canada has been wrestling with this stuff a lot lately, because of charges against people writting kiddy-porn fiction. Sick, twisted, horrific, but there's no actual victim. Should it be protected? Should it be treated differently than Pat Califia's writing?
In the next three years, I think we'll see the beginnings of computer-generated kiddy porn. This will open the floodgates to a whole new level of legal review. People who are charged with posession of virtual kiddy porn (i.e. material that never actually used children) may be considered as 'charged for future potential crimes.' It's going to be an interesting and difficult time.
Currently though, charging people for downloading kiddy porn is comparable to arresting johns.
I saw the article, and was going to make the same point. I am SICK of people not comprehending that kph is a non-measure, and nothing more than a carry-over of a mistake (mph).
Of course these are the same people who confuse metre and meter.
I have been looking for one of these things for ages. I keep thinking I'll have to make one eventually, because I couldn't find a commercial one.
I searched for watt meters. I searched for power consumption devices. I searched for everything under the sun that might come up with these things, and came up blank every time. Now I plug in the brand name, and about fifty hits come up.
Thanks. Going to see if anyone locally carries them, and get one ASAP.
Heh. They allow this in the UK, and they have problems galore with it in the UK.
Re:Super offtopic: reason was not oil
on
RIAA Quashed
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Interesting!
While I agree with the facts and the implications, I don't think that was the primary reason the US invaded Iraq. Or rather, the real reason was a broader one that includes that particular bit of action.
The people calling the shots--Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al., have been planning this since before Iraq announced its intention of switching to the Euro. The "Project for a New American Century" stated in 1997(!), that one of their goals was regime change as a means of extending the US sphere of influence. They intended the US to be the global benevolent dictator, and started by selecting George W. Bush as the Republican presidential candidate.
Think this is conspiracy? Check out the PNAC website to find out just how proud they are of their plans and execution so far. Also read this CBC article on the PNAC.
Oil? Currency trading? These are all part of what the current administration really wants: Complete military and economic control over the planet. Unfortunately, the only people in any position to stop them now are the American people.
I've seen a few posts about the possibility of collateral damage--deliberately targetting someone else's server as the target of an auto-DDOS. Someone also mentioned hijacking a server, and then bringing it down.
The thing is, it's no easier to do it with this proposed system than anything that's currently available. In this case you have to download (buy?!) a copy of spamming software, get a list, and then run a DDOS that's actually traceable back to you. Good plan? Not by my thinking.
Now the nice thing about this is that it will end up costing an inordinate amount of money for the spammer, take down their servers, and really piss off their ISP. (Watch the pink contracts dissappear!) This is a fairly drastic measure that might actually get rid of many spammers for good.
Basically, it's either this or a crowbar to the head.
"...having a little basic knowledge would be helpful."
Helpful? Absolutely. The more the person on the other end knows, the better. I have the good fortune of taking service/tech support calls from mid-to-high-end Unix shops, and they tend to be along the lines of, "We need you to analyse this core dump to find out what part is bad," or "One of our NIS slaves isn't getting updates."
(Sorry, was I bragging? I love my job.:-)
Nonetheless, users with problems having basic knowledge is immensely helpful. It does NOT, however, give the tech support people the right to walk around with a chip on our shoulders, whining about how stupid the users are and how it's their own fault we can't fix their problems.
Look at it this way: Two weeks ago, I was standing at the corner, listening to a couple of elevator repairmen, while waiting for the light to change. The one guy said to the other, "So I got a call that the elevator door doesn't close. What kind of a call is that! There must be at least 50 reasons for the door not closing, and they couldn't tell me anything more than that!!!"
Hello? What the hell else am I SUPPOSED to know about how elevators work? The doors open, I go in, they shut, and then the elevator takes me to the floor I want. This guy had become so blase and arrogant about his job that he was blaming the riders for not being able to do his job.
This is a true story. Gave me pause for thought about ANYONE doing tech support though.
" Because it is important to the open source community that you have the proper attitude."
Oh, this is so cute I want to pat you on the head.
The proper attitude? The proper attitude is to run your business and make a profit within the laws. The ONLY attitude a company (or anyone else) has to have is one that doesn't land them in court.
That may or not be moral, but that's irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant.
I mean, if a developer is going to write code and release it under the GPL (or any other free-ish license), then they have to accept that it will be used by whoever wants to use it, and for their own best interests. There was a discussion about open source software being used by governments for military purposes (often very violent and death-related), and the answer was the same: If you release it, then shut up and deal with it.
Now as far as praising Sun (or not), I would ask you the following questions:
1) What proprietary features has Sun added to Linux on the desktop (or anywhere else)? 2) Where did Linux come from in the first place? (stealing concepts and functionality is OK, but stealing code isn't?) 3) What is preventing the (free) developers from reproducing every proprietary feature that Sun has added, and GPLing the code? 3a) Worded differently, how can Sun "ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you?" 4) If you don't like it, why not release code under a different license?
You seem to be under the misaprehension that releasing GPL'ed code somehow puts a moral responsiblity on all users of that code to put their contributions back into the community. In fact, all it really does is revoke bitching rights from the developers when their code is used in ways they don't like. (but within the terms of the license)
There is no requirement for users to know a great amount about how their computer works. It is not their JOB, it is not what they get PAID for! Their computer is usually a tool, and they need to know enough about it to do their work--period.
Tech support are PAID to know how to fix things with the computer when they go wrong. It is their JOB, and if they don't like it, then they can leave, rather than blame the end user. Yeah, we all roll our eyes about being called out to turn off someone's caps lock key (same person two days in a row), but can I do the company accounting? No. Can I do the geophysical mapping/modelling for oil development? No.
So to the author of the rebuttal: don't blame the users for not knowing stuff they don't HAVE to know. Just do your job.
Re:Typical Sun Quote
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh yeah, Sun and their skewed idea of "free." They came up with crazy ideas like Free-as-in-NFS, and free-as-in-NIS. Evil dirty proprietary bastards!
Sun wants to sell stuff (hardware and software), make money, and solve problems. They don't give a shit about the proper attitude to hold when approaching Linux--and they SHOULDN'T! There's nothing sacred about it.
Re:Mad Hatter = Red Hat Distribution
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 1
Not necessarily. Sun has announced marketing/co-branding/co-development agreements with both RedHat and SuSE.
Every time I read an article about spam, I see a bunch of people promoting the spam filters on their system, or their ISP, or some other way of dealing with spam at the destination.
The only way to deal with spam is at the source. The only way to stop spammers is to keep them from sending their shite in the first place. As soon as it leaves their computer, it becomes an arms race--we get better filters, they figure out a new way around them, we tweak our filters again. Eventually the entire email system worldwide becomes one big armed camp, and that's BAD! Worse yet, I see people proposing we go straight to that end right now, as a solution.
We have to stop spammers from being able to spam, not stop the spam from reaching us.
Don't know if the ads are static or dynamic, but the one I got, in the middle of an article about sleazy tactics and spammers, was a "CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE GREEN CARD LOTTERY!!!!!"
First of all, there's nothing inherently pricy about closed source software. Pegasus Mail (Windows stuff) is free and proprietary.
Secondly, you're right: There IS NO ADVANTAGE TO OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE for a user! In fact, there's a substantial DISadvantage, as long as the developers keep using the feature of open code as an excuse to not fix it themselves. I am sick and tired of broken projects where the developer says, "Oh, I don't have time. You have the source code, it's not my responsibilty anymore."
This knee-jerk, juvenile, INFANTILE attitude is doing more damage to the development progress of Linux than any legal threats thrown up by SCO, Microsoft, and the US government combined!
I WILL PAY FOR SOFTWARE if it works, is supported, and does what I want it to do! I will happily use free and/or open source software if possible, but if the developer figures it's my responsibility to repair and maintain it, then fuck him. My time is better spent working than learning to be a programmer.
This bugs me. Why does Linux suddenly get all the credit for "the great new paradigm in thinking" when it's been here longer than Microsoft?
NFS. DNS. Sendmail. Usenet. The bloody infrastructure of the internet as it stands right now was based on similar principles. The biggest difference is that those developers didn't have the same blindly inflated sense of grandeur and importance that many Linux developers/zealots have.
Linux ready for the desktop? Sure--it's finally catching up to Solaris, which has been on the desktop for decades!
Seriously, developers are the people who run Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and so help me AIX on their workstations. As often as not, they've got a PC running Windows so they can read their corporate email, but for nearly 20 years, developers in Unix app shops have had Unix workstations on their desk. Putting Linux there says nothing about Linux's readiness for the "desktop" in the general sense.
Slashdot Mirror
As an outsider, I felt that Gore actually was a better choice. For starters, his actual comment about the internet was fairly legitimate. The way he was misquoted by the press, out of context, was criminal.
Gore has a few brain cells to rub together, and as a democrat, would have been struggling against the people who want to lead the US to a military assault on the world. (Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the other members of the Project for a New American Century.) Even if the first point turned out to be false, the second would have likely led him to an innefectual presidency that wouldn't have threatened the rest of the world. Bush, on the other hand, was hand-selected to take that position and push forward with aggressive regime change.
If for no other reason, Bush was a worse choice simply because he has the support of the people running Washington. The whole WORLD has suffered extensively from his stupidity already, and Helen Thomas (a woman with some insight, intelligence, and experience) has called him "the worse president in American history."
There are no worse choices that anyone could have written in. Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Jackson, and David Duke would all have been better than Bush.
Does anyone else feel that this is the beginning of the end?
The RIAA and MPAA are spreading their filth outwards from the US, and trying to make it legally mandatory to implement DRM at the hardware level. The big companies only product anymore is profit, and they're trying to maximise it by elimating cash-sinks like manufacturing and employees. The biggest governments are trying to restrict the movements, actions, and tongues of their citizens in any way they can, and are starting to use those sabres they've been rattling for decades. They also don't seem to believe that their lies even have to be believable or verifiable anymore.
For nearly a quarter century (when I started following current events), I've been of the attitude that it's no worse than it's always been--that it only seems horrific because we're living through it. Now though, I don't know. Every citizen in the "Free Western World" is facing the prospect of being made a criminal, and subject to any punishment their government(s) feel like doling out that day--regardless of any of the things that have been established as basic undeniable human rights.
Frankly, I'm scared for the first time since the Iranian Hostage crisis. I'm afraid the world WILL go out, not with a bang but with a whimper.
Hmm. Do you know if that law has been tested in court? And does it have any exemptions for the porn that's obviously catering to the pedophile market ("young girls raped by their fathers") with explicit disclaimers ("All models were at least 18 years of age when filmed")? I'm curious about how the law would work in a practical sense on these things.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that glorifying (which you do) does nothing to fix the situation. YOU are part of the PROBLEM, and you're using that as an excuse to piss away your responsibilities.
YOU are the fault that Bush got in, and that Gore was the best alternative. Not "the system," not "the blind sheep," but YOU!
Now grow up and fix your country before you destroy the rest of the world.
On behalf of Ms. Russell, let me address your points.
/. effect, her system got bogged down heavily and came back up within five minutes. How exactly do you deal with HUGE traffic spikes, withoug leasing a pipe 10-20x fatter (and more expensive) than you need 95+% of the time?
Other states: She lists Arizona and Maine.
" The death penalty kills innocent people and costs the state more money than life imprisonment. These are the inescapable facts that make this Californian legacy not just questionable on moral grounds, but bad policy as well." Seems pretty clear to me.
As for the
In other words, do some fucking research before flaming!
Pardon me! An OS/2 server is NOT a shameful thing at all! It's a point of pride and stature.
Now being an MCSE, especially a recent one, I can't argue that.
Thank god!
Glad to see some of you still exist down there. Keep up the odd fight
Oh, great. So you're a lazy useless fuck who can't be bothered to get off his ass, but if you could you'd vote for a candidate you didn't agree with because he's cool.
Worse, when someone comes along and wants to work intelligently to reform the system and make democracy work, you tell them to quit wasting their time. After all, our hero Arnie will save the day. (Do you honestly think Arafat gives a fuck about some actor??!)
No wonder your country is so messed up. Please stay away from elections. The fewer people like you who vote, the better.
It's an interesting and tough issue.
One important point is this: Child porn is treated as a separate case in most countries. It is not protected under 'freedom of speech' acts, there is no safe haven. Posession of bomb-making instructions is protected; posession of child porn isn't. (but spreading bomb-making instructions with encouragement to use said bombs against people isn't)
This is the crux of how/why people downloading kiddy porn can be charged.
Canada has been wrestling with this stuff a lot lately, because of charges against people writting kiddy-porn fiction. Sick, twisted, horrific, but there's no actual victim. Should it be protected? Should it be treated differently than Pat Califia's writing?
In the next three years, I think we'll see the beginnings of computer-generated kiddy porn. This will open the floodgates to a whole new level of legal review. People who are charged with posession of virtual kiddy porn (i.e. material that never actually used children) may be considered as 'charged for future potential crimes.' It's going to be an interesting and difficult time.
Currently though, charging people for downloading kiddy porn is comparable to arresting johns.
YES YES YES!!!
I saw the article, and was going to make the same point. I am SICK of people not comprehending that kph is a non-measure, and nothing more than a carry-over of a mistake (mph).
Of course these are the same people who confuse metre and meter.
"Power supplies tend to be one of those forgotten, but ever so important parts of machine construction."
/. every ten days or so.
That's why they make an appearance on
THANK YOU!
I have been looking for one of these things for ages. I keep thinking I'll have to make one eventually, because I couldn't find a commercial one.
I searched for watt meters. I searched for power consumption devices. I searched for everything under the sun that might come up with these things, and came up blank every time. Now I plug in the brand name, and about fifty hits come up.
Thanks. Going to see if anyone locally carries them, and get one ASAP.
Heh. They allow this in the UK, and they have problems galore with it in the UK.
Interesting!
While I agree with the facts and the implications, I don't think that was the primary reason the US invaded Iraq. Or rather, the real reason was a broader one that includes that particular bit of action.
The people calling the shots--Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al., have been planning this since before Iraq announced its intention of switching to the Euro. The "Project for a New American Century" stated in 1997(!), that one of their goals was regime change as a means of extending the US sphere of influence. They intended the US to be the global benevolent dictator, and started by selecting George W. Bush as the Republican presidential candidate.
Think this is conspiracy? Check out the PNAC website to find out just how proud they are of their plans and execution so far. Also read this CBC article on the PNAC.
Oil? Currency trading? These are all part of what the current administration really wants: Complete military and economic control over the planet. Unfortunately, the only people in any position to stop them now are the American people.
I've seen a few posts about the possibility of collateral damage--deliberately targetting someone else's server as the target of an auto-DDOS. Someone also mentioned hijacking a server, and then bringing it down.
The thing is, it's no easier to do it with this proposed system than anything that's currently available. In this case you have to download (buy?!) a copy of spamming software, get a list, and then run a DDOS that's actually traceable back to you. Good plan? Not by my thinking.
Now the nice thing about this is that it will end up costing an inordinate amount of money for the spammer, take down their servers, and really piss off their ISP. (Watch the pink contracts dissappear!) This is a fairly drastic measure that might actually get rid of many spammers for good.
Basically, it's either this or a crowbar to the head.
"...having a little basic knowledge would be helpful."
:-)
Helpful? Absolutely. The more the person on the other end knows, the better. I have the good fortune of taking service/tech support calls from mid-to-high-end Unix shops, and they tend to be along the lines of, "We need you to analyse this core dump to find out what part is bad," or "One of our NIS slaves isn't getting updates."
(Sorry, was I bragging? I love my job.
Nonetheless, users with problems having basic knowledge is immensely helpful. It does NOT, however, give the tech support people the right to walk around with a chip on our shoulders, whining about how stupid the users are and how it's their own fault we can't fix their problems.
Look at it this way: Two weeks ago, I was standing at the corner, listening to a couple of elevator repairmen, while waiting for the light to change. The one guy said to the other, "So I got a call that the elevator door doesn't close. What kind of a call is that! There must be at least 50 reasons for the door not closing, and they couldn't tell me anything more than that!!!"
Hello? What the hell else am I SUPPOSED to know about how elevators work? The doors open, I go in, they shut, and then the elevator takes me to the floor I want. This guy had become so blase and arrogant about his job that he was blaming the riders for not being able to do his job.
This is a true story. Gave me pause for thought about ANYONE doing tech support though.
" Because it is important to the open source community that you have the proper attitude."
Oh, this is so cute I want to pat you on the head.
The proper attitude? The proper attitude is to run your business and make a profit within the laws. The ONLY attitude a company (or anyone else) has to have is one that doesn't land them in court.
That may or not be moral, but that's irrelevant. Utterly irrelevant.
I mean, if a developer is going to write code and release it under the GPL (or any other free-ish license), then they have to accept that it will be used by whoever wants to use it, and for their own best interests. There was a discussion about open source software being used by governments for military purposes (often very violent and death-related), and the answer was the same: If you release it, then shut up and deal with it.
Now as far as praising Sun (or not), I would ask you the following questions:
1) What proprietary features has Sun added to Linux on the desktop (or anywhere else)?
2) Where did Linux come from in the first place? (stealing concepts and functionality is OK, but stealing code isn't?)
3) What is preventing the (free) developers from reproducing every proprietary feature that Sun has added, and GPLing the code?
3a) Worded differently, how can Sun "ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you?"
4) If you don't like it, why not release code under a different license?
You seem to be under the misaprehension that releasing GPL'ed code somehow puts a moral responsiblity on all users of that code to put their contributions back into the community. In fact, all it really does is revoke bitching rights from the developers when their code is used in ways they don't like. (but within the terms of the license)
There is no requirement for users to know a great amount about how their computer works. It is not their JOB, it is not what they get PAID for! Their computer is usually a tool, and they need to know enough about it to do their work--period.
Tech support are PAID to know how to fix things with the computer when they go wrong. It is their JOB, and if they don't like it, then they can leave, rather than blame the end user. Yeah, we all roll our eyes about being called out to turn off someone's caps lock key (same person two days in a row), but can I do the company accounting? No. Can I do the geophysical mapping/modelling for oil development? No.
So to the author of the rebuttal: don't blame the users for not knowing stuff they don't HAVE to know. Just do your job.
Oh yeah, Sun and their skewed idea of "free." They came up with crazy ideas like Free-as-in-NFS, and free-as-in-NIS. Evil dirty proprietary bastards!
Sun wants to sell stuff (hardware and software), make money, and solve problems. They don't give a shit about the proper attitude to hold when approaching Linux--and they SHOULDN'T! There's nothing sacred about it.
Not necessarily. Sun has announced marketing/co-branding/co-development agreements with both RedHat and SuSE.
Every time I read an article about spam, I see a bunch of people promoting the spam filters on their system, or their ISP, or some other way of dealing with spam at the destination.
The only way to deal with spam is at the source. The only way to stop spammers is to keep them from sending their shite in the first place. As soon as it leaves their computer, it becomes an arms race--we get better filters, they figure out a new way around them, we tweak our filters again. Eventually the entire email system worldwide becomes one big armed camp, and that's BAD! Worse yet, I see people proposing we go straight to that end right now, as a solution.
We have to stop spammers from being able to spam, not stop the spam from reaching us.
Don't know if the ads are static or dynamic, but the one I got, in the middle of an article about sleazy tactics and spammers, was a "CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE GREEN CARD LOTTERY!!!!!"
Heh.
First of all, there's nothing inherently pricy about closed source software. Pegasus Mail (Windows stuff) is free and proprietary.
Secondly, you're right: There IS NO ADVANTAGE TO OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE for a user! In fact, there's a substantial DISadvantage, as long as the developers keep using the feature of open code as an excuse to not fix it themselves. I am sick and tired of broken projects where the developer says, "Oh, I don't have time. You have the source code, it's not my responsibilty anymore."
This knee-jerk, juvenile, INFANTILE attitude is doing more damage to the development progress of Linux than any legal threats thrown up by SCO, Microsoft, and the US government combined!
I WILL PAY FOR SOFTWARE if it works, is supported, and does what I want it to do! I will happily use free and/or open source software if possible, but if the developer figures it's my responsibility to repair and maintain it, then fuck him. My time is better spent working than learning to be a programmer.
Bah!!!
This bugs me. Why does Linux suddenly get all the credit for "the great new paradigm in thinking" when it's been here longer than Microsoft?
NFS. DNS. Sendmail. Usenet. The bloody infrastructure of the internet as it stands right now was based on similar principles. The biggest difference is that those developers didn't have the same blindly inflated sense of grandeur and importance that many Linux developers/zealots have.
Linux ready for the desktop? Sure--it's finally catching up to Solaris, which has been on the desktop for decades!
Seriously, developers are the people who run Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and so help me AIX on their workstations. As often as not, they've got a PC running Windows so they can read their corporate email, but for nearly 20 years, developers in Unix app shops have had Unix workstations on their desk. Putting Linux there says nothing about Linux's readiness for the "desktop" in the general sense.