Word spreads reasonably fast in well, any modern market. If Halo won't run well on the Xbox2, then most people will know that by day 2 of general release, and I think a fair amount would know well before. So any sellthrough capability providing by advertising backwards compatibilty would be pretty quickly negated. I know that Sony made an effort to make sure the Gran Turismos ran well on the PS2, for instance.
Also, a lot of console customers don't think of their consoles like computers, but appliances. If Halo looked and ran like crap on the Xbox2, but still ran, there would be an awful lot of people who'd just generalize that to "The Xbox2 looks and runs like crap."
But why did (the collective) you choose to push RedHat over, say, Debian?
I think it's somewhat unfair to say that the "community" is responsible for RedHat the name's perceived value. The OSS community in general is notorious for being very harsh with any corporate interests whatsoever. In fact, even in stories like this one, browse low enough and you'll find tons of "Red(s)Hat sucks anyhow, I use Gentoo/Debian/Knoppix/Slackware/whoever." Sure, many of them TODAY are saying its because of this license issue, but 'yesterday' it was because it wasn't as stable, or 'only for those corporate types' or not as optimized, or didn't provide a "lame" binary by default, or up2date didn't use the same color of text as apt did, or any number of valid and invalid excuses.
In the end, what RedHat did was produce a product that people perceived had value, and they spread word of that value to their associates. RedHat initially did this for free or cheap. Now they've realized that this isn't going to keep their heads above water, or make them the kind of money they expect, so they've decided to change things, banking on the fact that the name they use has value (and at the end of the day THEY did the work, THEY produced the distribution, THEY did the work of backporting, THEY spent the money, and all "YOU" (again, collective you) did was tell people they were good.)...
Its a risk, no doubt, because maybe enough people really will say like you "they hurt me, and stole my good will and I'm going elsewhere" but in the end, its not a huge risk for a few reasons that have already been mentioned:
1) They weren't making money the old way, or at least, they figured they weren't going to make money. (And I'm sure they've looked at THAT part of things very closely) 2) People that just wanted to use the name but not pay the costs were the people costing them money anyhow.
RedHat turned Linux from a hobbiest platform into something that people could "use" (not singlehandedly by a LONG shot, but I still remember the day I installed RedHat 3.03 after having dealt with downloaded Slackware and SLS up to that point and thinking: Wow, these guys have something here)... That's the value they provided, along with a workmanlike approach to Linux that produced a distribution that appealed to enough people to make it one of the most popular. THATS what built their name.
Yeah, maybe if they'd charged from the very beginning like this they'd never have become what they are today, but I don't see that as particularly applicable of an argument. It was a very different "market" back then.
But its their trademark, and they can do what they want to. If it fails (and I don't really think it will) then I'm sure that, in order to make a profit, they will adapt. But I definitely don't buy the argument that they "owe it to us" to keep the RedHat name free for anyone to use because "we made them who they are." That takes entitlement to a level that makes no sense to me.
Uh, console games are the ultimate in time sensitivity. A game that runs "slow" will probably be considered "unplayable"... Either the Xbox 2 will have near perfect compatibility for a specified set of games (remember that the PS2 backwards PSOne compatibility isn't for EVERY game, I have a few which a PS2 refuses to run) or they'll just forgo backwards compatibility.
Basically, my arguement is it'll either be "Runs Halo, MechAssault, Crimson Skies nearly exactly the same" or "sorry, no backwards compatiblity, but the new Xboxlite, at the low low price of 100 bucks, is half the size of the old Xbox and plays all Xbox 1 titles, oh, but BTW, its made out of dixie plates, so don't beat on it too hard."
On an extremely stripped down RHEL 3 system (hardened quite a bit, and limited to about 150 RPMs), there is one 'non-freeish" RPM, which is the redhat-logos package.
If you can change/strip that out, and change all the various/etc/issue, elsewheres where it reports "RedHat Enterprise Linux" then you're perfectly free to use the same distribution tree as you see fit, including redistributing it.
So, basically you're saying the brand name has value, but you want to continue to get that value for essentially "free"? And you think RedHat should feel bad that they are no longer making it easy to do this?
I'm afraid I don't understand. Obviously, given the amount of "Yeah, but it won't be 'RedHat' Linux" complaints posted here, people are identifying some sort of basic value attached to the RedHat name. It makes perfect sense for a corporation to attempt to receive revenue for providing something of value. And at the end of the day, RedHat Inc is trying to make a profit.
I'll probably be running Fedora Core at home (or I could install from a base the same as RHEL v3 but compiled at home and missing the few copyrighted pieces, I don't need support anyhow) but for work I'm more than comfortable paying for RHEL, for the stable base, the backports, etc.
Of course, I was the person who always bought the boxed copy of a RedHat system when it came out, and paid for each RHN access license for each machine running RedHat.
...and the decoder ring, and the "Top Sekret: No girlz allowd" sign to put on the clubhouse?
Note that I'm leaving the above sentence unvarnished and open for the obvious jokes for the rest of you wags to come in and riff off of at your convenience.
Well, at least I'll be able to play Capcom's Alien vs Predator with a clear conscience. I have a set of the hardware that long ago succumbed to the battery-backup "death" where when the battery dies, the key is lost for the unit, and the whole unit is useless. Back in the day, you'd ship it back to Capcom, they'd upload the key again, fix the battery, ship it back. Obviously, they can't be bothered to do that anymore...
The plurality of voting Americans, by a margin of a few hundred thousand, voted for Gore. Note that this was not the majority. Al Gore received 48% of the popular vote. It would be fair, if misleading, to say that the majority of America voted for anyone other than Al Gore. The same could be said of George W Bush.
According to records: 50,996,116 people voted for Gore. 50,456,169 voted for Bush. And 3,874,040 voted for "somebody else" of which a good portion was Nader, but a fair amount also was Buchannan, so while there MAY have been a spoiler factor introduced by Nader (and Naderites still dispute this) it's effects are too small to really shift the "mandate of the people" to anything truly significant.
These are just facts. Another set of facts to include is that the Constitution rather explicity does not have majority vote electing the president, but instead has the electoral college, and thus under the current rule of law, the plurality vote has no legal weight behind it to say who "should be" President. Historically, you can make several arguements as to why this was done, but in my opinion, certainly a large part of it had to do with retaining a distinctly state level character to the election, and to allow lower population states to contribute to the electoral decision, in similar fashion as to why we have a Senate as the upper house in our legislature.
And now, the opinion part of my post: Ultimately, my analysis is that nobody had a real mandate coming either into or out of the 2000 election, and thus any attributions of the "will of the American People(TM)" are of little real worth. I also, largely, don't believe that the economy would be substantially different today if Al Gore was in office. You can interpret this as praise/damnation/fatalism of the effects of the current administration as you see fit, but the cards for our current economic situation were in place long before the election. Note that I don't really think it was the "Clinton's fault" either.
Actually, my suspicion is that it'll find its way into the 64 bit Windows XP/Longhorn release. There are so many apps that won't work under it so far, and a emulated 32 bit installation might fix many of those problems, at least temporarily.
This product had nothing to do with the anti-trust suit. They're under no actual legal obligation to make it work. Sure, if they want to have a useful product, they should, but somehow I think they're in the VM game to mostly kill it.
How about un-MIMEed UUENCODED text conversion of the picture in the general body of the email? Sure, average Joe may not be able to do this, or at least, not till he's shown.... once.
and power concerns are entirely due to platter size and rotational speed, and not the drive electronics involved (or, at least the difference is negligible compared to the physical mechanics)...
a 5400 RPM SCSI 1.5 inch drive wouldn't use significantly more power than a 5400 RPM IDE 1.5 inch drive.
Well, we already know the techies hold the MBAs in contempt. It fairly oozes here all the time. THAT kind of attitude is inevitably reciprocated to the point its hard to tell who started it first.
And funny how I've found every single one of these imported concepts to be vapid, uninteresting, and quite unwatchable. In original OR "Americanized" form.
The reaction I used to get when I trotted out the "you don't HAVE to reboot it" is "But I WANT to turn it off when I'm done with it."
Mostly people don't want their computers running 24/7, but DO want to "just turn it on and use it."
Fast boot speed is important. Why do you think MS does all those tricks for XP to get it to boot as quickly as possible.
Quite a few home users I know, use the computer for maybe 5-10 minutes for email, and that's it. Perhaps they'll check twice in a day, or every once in a while spend another 10 minutes checking out a website.
This isn't about a bunch of admins getting into a race to see who's mail server will boot first.
In the end, I can't understand why people, authors especially, should worry about the "death of this or that genre"... An author should be primarily concerned with what he his writing and how well it tells what he wants it to, and a reader should be primarily concerned that he is getting a good book.
I think we can all agree (wait, no, this is Slashdot... better restate that.)-- I believe that just because something is "hard science fiction" (Greg Bear, people! Somebody mention Greg Bear) doesn't necessarily make it a good book, or that just because something is "general fantasy" makes it completely lacking in worth.
But for anyone to worry that "in X years, there will be no more sci-fi, and then we're all DOOOMED!" seems silly to me, one, because I don't believe that sci-fi is going away, two, because I think its more of the "sci-fi as I am able to define and understand it" meme, and three, because its roughly equivalent to "oh no, Gregorian chant is dying out as a form of expression! Soon it will all be gone, and we'll never be able to hear it again!" ( Not that I think sci-fi is in a similar state to chant, but you get the picture.
Tell him you don't understand how to run that software, or get confused and report the help window information to him, or say you lost the disk that had the diagnostic software on it, or tell him that the Web isn't sending you the diagnostical feedbacks like it used to.
Heck, you ARE pretending to be a Windows user after all.
Pete from Sluggy recently had to basically BEG for money to keep going, and he's definitely one of the most popular webcomics, so I don't think that merchandising thing is working out too well.
I know there is plenty of bad manga. I've read a fair amount of it. And as it becomes more popular, a fair amount of it is making its way to America. There are plenty of titles I've seen lately put out that I wonder who they could possibly appeal to, or that I personally judged as somewhat lacking in quality (either artistic or subject matter.)
And while I very much like all 38 volumes of Ranma, calling it "coherent" is a bit optomistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Word spreads reasonably fast in well, any modern market. If Halo won't run well on the Xbox2, then most people will know that by day 2 of general release, and I think a fair amount would know well before. So any sellthrough capability providing by advertising backwards compatibilty would be pretty quickly negated. I know that Sony made an effort to make sure the Gran Turismos ran well on the PS2, for instance.
Also, a lot of console customers don't think of their consoles like computers, but appliances. If Halo looked and ran like crap on the Xbox2, but still ran, there would be an awful lot of people who'd just generalize that to "The Xbox2 looks and runs like crap."
But why did (the collective) you choose to push RedHat over, say, Debian?
I think it's somewhat unfair to say that the "community" is responsible for RedHat the name's perceived value. The OSS community in general is notorious for being very harsh with any corporate interests whatsoever. In fact, even in stories like this one, browse low enough and you'll find tons of "Red(s)Hat sucks anyhow, I use Gentoo/Debian/Knoppix/Slackware/whoever." Sure, many of them TODAY are saying its because of this license issue, but 'yesterday' it was because it wasn't as stable, or 'only for those corporate types' or not as optimized, or didn't provide a "lame" binary by default, or up2date didn't use the same color of text as apt did, or any number of valid and invalid excuses.
In the end, what RedHat did was produce a product that people perceived had value, and they spread word of that value to their associates. RedHat initially did this for free or cheap. Now they've realized that this isn't going to keep their heads above water, or make them the kind of money they expect, so they've decided to change things, banking on the fact that the name they use has value (and at the end of the day THEY did the work, THEY produced the distribution, THEY did the work of backporting, THEY spent the money, and all "YOU" (again, collective you) did was tell people they were good.)...
Its a risk, no doubt, because maybe enough people really will say like you "they hurt me, and stole my good will and I'm going elsewhere" but in the end, its not a huge risk for a few reasons that have already been mentioned:
1) They weren't making money the old way, or at least, they figured they weren't going to make money. (And I'm sure they've looked at THAT part of things very closely)
2) People that just wanted to use the name but not pay the costs were the people costing them money anyhow.
RedHat turned Linux from a hobbiest platform into something that people could "use" (not singlehandedly by a LONG shot, but I still remember the day I installed RedHat 3.03 after having dealt with downloaded Slackware and SLS up to that point and thinking: Wow, these guys have something here)... That's the value they provided, along with a workmanlike approach to Linux that produced a distribution that appealed to enough people to make it one of the most popular. THATS what built their name.
Yeah, maybe if they'd charged from the very beginning like this they'd never have become what they are today, but I don't see that as particularly applicable of an argument. It was a very different "market" back then.
But its their trademark, and they can do what they want to. If it fails (and I don't really think it will) then I'm sure that, in order to make a profit, they will adapt. But I definitely don't buy the argument that they "owe it to us" to keep the RedHat name free for anyone to use because "we made them who they are." That takes entitlement to a level that makes no sense to me.
Uh, console games are the ultimate in time sensitivity. A game that runs "slow" will probably be considered "unplayable"... Either the Xbox 2 will have near perfect compatibility for a specified set of games (remember that the PS2 backwards PSOne compatibility isn't for EVERY game, I have a few which a PS2 refuses to run) or they'll just forgo backwards compatibility.
Basically, my arguement is it'll either be "Runs Halo, MechAssault, Crimson Skies nearly exactly the same" or "sorry, no backwards compatiblity, but the new Xboxlite, at the low low price of 100 bucks, is half the size of the old Xbox and plays all Xbox 1 titles, oh, but BTW, its made out of dixie plates, so don't beat on it too hard."
On an extremely stripped down RHEL 3 system (hardened quite a bit, and limited to about 150 RPMs), there is one 'non-freeish" RPM, which is the redhat-logos package.
/etc/issue, elsewheres where it reports "RedHat Enterprise Linux" then you're perfectly free to use the same distribution tree as you see fit, including redistributing it.
If you can change/strip that out, and change all the various
So, basically you're saying the brand name has value, but you want to continue to get that value for essentially "free"? And you think RedHat should feel bad that they are no longer making it easy to do this?
I'm afraid I don't understand. Obviously, given the amount of "Yeah, but it won't be 'RedHat' Linux" complaints posted here, people are identifying some sort of basic value attached to the RedHat name. It makes perfect sense for a corporation to attempt to receive revenue for providing something of value. And at the end of the day, RedHat Inc is trying to make a profit.
I'll probably be running Fedora Core at home (or I could install from a base the same as RHEL v3 but compiled at home and missing the few copyrighted pieces, I don't need support anyhow) but for work I'm more than comfortable paying for RHEL, for the stable base, the backports, etc.
Of course, I was the person who always bought the boxed copy of a RedHat system when it came out, and paid for each RHN access license for each machine running RedHat.
...and the decoder ring, and the "Top Sekret: No girlz allowd" sign to put on the clubhouse?
Note that I'm leaving the above sentence unvarnished and open for the obvious jokes for the rest of you wags to come in and riff off of at your convenience.
Well, at least I'll be able to play Capcom's Alien vs Predator with a clear conscience. I have a set of the hardware that long ago succumbed to the battery-backup "death" where when the battery dies, the key is lost for the unit, and the whole unit is useless. Back in the day, you'd ship it back to Capcom, they'd upload the key again, fix the battery, ship it back. Obviously, they can't be bothered to do that anymore...
The plurality of voting Americans, by a margin of a few hundred thousand, voted for Gore. Note that this was not the majority. Al Gore received 48% of the popular vote. It would be fair, if misleading, to say that the majority of America voted for anyone other than Al Gore. The same could be said of George W Bush.
According to records: 50,996,116 people voted for Gore. 50,456,169 voted for Bush. And 3,874,040 voted for "somebody else" of which a good portion was Nader, but a fair amount also was Buchannan, so while there MAY have been a spoiler factor introduced by Nader (and Naderites still dispute this) it's effects are too small to really shift the "mandate of the people" to anything truly significant.
These are just facts. Another set of facts to include is that the Constitution rather explicity does not have majority vote electing the president, but instead has the electoral college, and thus under the current rule of law, the plurality vote has no legal weight behind it to say who "should be" President. Historically, you can make several arguements as to why this was done, but in my opinion, certainly a large part of it had to do with retaining a distinctly state level character to the election, and to allow lower population states to contribute to the electoral decision, in similar fashion as to why we have a Senate as the upper house in our legislature.
And now, the opinion part of my post: Ultimately, my analysis is that nobody had a real mandate coming either into or out of the 2000 election, and thus any attributions of the "will of the American People(TM)" are of little real worth. I also, largely, don't believe that the economy would be substantially different today if Al Gore was in office. You can interpret this as praise/damnation/fatalism of the effects of the current administration as you see fit, but the cards for our current economic situation were in place long before the election. Note that I don't really think it was the "Clinton's fault" either.
I wonder if Stardock is going to have issues with the name?
Actually, my suspicion is that it'll find its way into the 64 bit Windows XP/Longhorn release. There are so many apps that won't work under it so far, and a emulated 32 bit installation might fix many of those problems, at least temporarily.
This product had nothing to do with the anti-trust suit. They're under no actual legal obligation to make it work. Sure, if they want to have a useful product, they should, but somehow I think they're in the VM game to mostly kill it.
How about un-MIMEed UUENCODED text conversion of the picture in the general body of the email? Sure, average Joe may not be able to do this, or at least, not till he's shown.... once.
and power concerns are entirely due to platter size and rotational speed, and not the drive electronics involved (or, at least the difference is negligible compared to the physical mechanics)...
a 5400 RPM SCSI 1.5 inch drive wouldn't use significantly more power than a 5400 RPM IDE 1.5 inch drive.
Well, we already know the techies hold the MBAs in contempt. It fairly oozes here all the time. THAT kind of attitude is inevitably reciprocated to the point its hard to tell who started it first.
As far as I know, and I live in the middle of one of the largest collections of them on earth I'm sure, the SDA doesn't proselytize.
Either that, or I'm already on their "going to hell in a handbasket" list.
And funny how I've found every single one of these imported concepts to be vapid, uninteresting, and quite unwatchable. In original OR "Americanized" form.
The reaction I used to get when I trotted out the "you don't HAVE to reboot it" is "But I WANT to turn it off when I'm done with it."
Mostly people don't want their computers running 24/7, but DO want to "just turn it on and use it."
Fast boot speed is important. Why do you think MS does all those tricks for XP to get it to boot as quickly as possible.
Quite a few home users I know, use the computer for maybe 5-10 minutes for email, and that's it. Perhaps they'll check twice in a day, or every once in a while spend another 10 minutes checking out a website.
This isn't about a bunch of admins getting into a race to see who's mail server will boot first.
Roughly, this seems to boil down to "wouldn't it be great if I get to play kingmaker in the browser war?!"
That I'm not so sure about.
If it isn't steam-powered, I don't want to use it!
In the end, I can't understand why people, authors especially, should worry about the "death of this or that genre"... An author should be primarily concerned with what he his writing and how well it tells what he wants it to, and a reader should be primarily concerned that he is getting a good book.
I think we can all agree (wait, no, this is Slashdot... better restate that.)-- I believe that just because something is "hard science fiction" (Greg Bear, people! Somebody mention Greg Bear) doesn't necessarily make it a good book, or that just because something is "general fantasy" makes it completely lacking in worth.
But for anyone to worry that "in X years, there will be no more sci-fi, and then we're all DOOOMED!" seems silly to me, one, because I don't believe that sci-fi is going away, two, because I think its more of the "sci-fi as I am able to define and understand it" meme, and three, because its roughly equivalent to "oh no, Gregorian chant is dying out as a form of expression! Soon it will all be gone, and we'll never be able to hear it again!" ( Not that I think sci-fi is in a similar state to chant, but you get the picture.
Tell him you don't understand how to run that software, or get confused and report the help window information to him, or say you lost the disk that had the diagnostic software on it, or tell him that the Web isn't sending you the diagnostical feedbacks like it used to.
Heck, you ARE pretending to be a Windows user after all.
Yeah, that LVM1 gone gotcha could hurt a few people, unless Device Mapper "just works". :)
Does it "just work?"
Pete from Sluggy recently had to basically BEG for money to keep going, and he's definitely one of the most popular webcomics, so I don't think that merchandising thing is working out too well.
I know there is plenty of bad manga. I've read a fair amount of it. And as it becomes more popular, a fair amount of it is making its way to America. There are plenty of titles I've seen lately put out that I wonder who they could possibly appeal to, or that I personally judged as somewhat lacking in quality (either artistic or subject matter.)
And while I very much like all 38 volumes of Ranma, calling it "coherent" is a bit optomistic.
No, not cute as in "attractive"...
Cute as in "ah, what a bunch of silly little boys!"
The difference is unmistakable. Or if it isn't, I humbly tender that this might be a problem for you.