Like most reviews, this review focuses on either using Linux as a server at work or using it as an alternative desktop at home.
But this whole focus misses out on what I think is going to be a big market for Linux: the complete Linux office. For example, a small office with a single server and 50 workstations would save a small fortune by going with Linux, and would save even more because of the ease of administering that network, not to mention the lack of downtime.
By ignoring which distributions make remote admin easier to set up, and which ones make automated installs simpler, cnet misses some of the main strengths of a Linux installation.
Eventually, small corporations are going to add up just how much money they lose by using unstable and hard-to-maintain software on the desktop. Which distribution is most suited to step into that void?
kde is a very good choice if you're trying to eliminate the mouse. There's keyboard access to just about everything in all the apps, and the wm pretty much allows everything from keystrokes as well.
But gnome will as well, as will most of the WM's. It's just that the wm's don't come configured that way usually. Learn a bit about xmodmap, spend some time configuring the tools you use, set up your default session the way you want, and you can pretty much forget about the mouse in X.
PS. The real key to all this is the whole 'alt key opens the menu' idea. Does anyone know who first did that in a bitmap display? Is it possible that it's actually an MS "innovation"?? (ISTR one of the early DOS char-mode GUIs did this, Geo-something???)
Linux as an OS certainly won't last forever, but in the long run Linus just might be remembered not for writing an OS but for creating a whole new kind of development process, one that isn't going away.
The whole idea of 'release early, release often', invite patches from everybody, and huge-team development was actually pretty different from the way even gnu worked at the time. Even now lots of open-source projects don't get it (look at gcc, or even, dare I say it, Mozilla).
It's funny, I stumbled across Linux (0.9x) because I had heard about Hurd, way back when. I figured I'd use Linux for the six months or so until Hurd got released. It will be great to finally be able to use it.
It's amazing how many people who should know better miss that simple point. I've worked at places that spent fortunes on security products, and yet all the workers wrote their login/passwords right on the monitor because it took the IT security staff so long to create new logins that everybody just shared the same ones.
NT workstation is one of those perfect examples of a decent product with an easy attack path. The basic security model is reasonable, but then they integrate the web browser and e-mail package with everything else on the system, allowing so many security holes that they'll never really be plugged.
Of course there's a margin of error. They're extrapolating to all web servers on the web, but they can only count the ones they know about. They're bound to miss some.
Also, remember that they count domain names, not machines. So a single-machine ISP hosting 20 sites gets counting 20 times, while multiple-machine sites like Yahoo generally only get counted once.
It's impossible to determine a margin of error, unless you actually decide what exactly "on the web" means, which is a tricky question. Is a ppp-connected box "on the web"?
And my DSL connection puts my Linux box on the Net 24/7. But it doesn't get counted by netcraft.
Netcraft bills this as a "survey of Internet connected computers". But in practice that's a very slippery concept.
Go ahead and moderate this one down if you want, but I think it needs to be said.
Lately,/. has done an awful lot of posts that are just fanning the flames, and what's really wrong is that this is generally done without looking into the issue at all.
/. used to be a small site, that basically gave 'sightings' rather than stories. But/. has grown, and grown huge, and with the growth should really come some responsibility.
When/. started, it was perfectly reasonable for Rob to just post some pointers to stories on other sites; it was more of a personal thing, like sending e-mail to friends. But now slashdot has really become a news service, but still refuses to adopt the responsibility that news services should have; the responsibility to at least try to independently verify a story before publishing it.
The last few weeks have seen a lot of stories that would have read very differently if/. had tried to contact the people involved before posting the story. And in many cases, the commentary on the/. posting has turned out to be plain ol' wrong.
It's easy to blame the flamers for getting out of control, but at some point slashdot has to accept the responsibility for what is posted here by the staff. When somebody like CNN posts a story without checking the facts, everyone here gets very upset. Slashdot has grown to the point where they should begin adopting the same kind of journalistic integrity they insist from others.
Nobody expects a full private investigation into stories from/. (at least I don't), but a minimal re-checking of the source is a pretty reasonable expectation.
If you really want the final frontier, think about kid's software. One of the best-selling software packages last year was a Barbie dress-up program. It's really hard to imagine Gnu 'Rugrats at the beach'.
And you couldn't even get started if you wanted to. Trademarks are so tightly entwined with the software in that field, that it's just about impossible to Open Source anything.
So, yes, there's plenty of room for proprietary software in the leaf nodes. It's funny, folks talk about the "desktop" as if the home market and the business workplace were similar markets. They're very different in many ways, but luckily much of the traditional home apps are moving to the web, where we can use them on decent operating systems.
As far as TurboTax goes, an open sourced Tax program would be a great thing, since stability and lack of error is one of the major goals. I don't think it will happen though. Accountants don't rush home after work to work on personal accounting projects in the way many programmers do.
The fact that MS, a software company moving very heavily in an e-commerce direction (look at the plans for web-based office), would prefer that e-commerce not be taxed isn't really too surprising, is it?
The current moratorium is a good thing right now, most gov'ts are so confused by the whole issue anything they tried to do would probably just be a mess. But in the longer run this stuff is going to be taxed, and it would be good for the WTO to start thinking about reasonable ways to handle the complexities involved.
We don't like to think about it very often, but the Net really re-enforces gaps between the haves and the have-nots. In the US, for example, e-commerce has become a way for many folks to avoid sales tax. The situation is similar globally.
This is a good thing, for now, but the rise of e-commerce is really going to play havoc with tax systems.
I see you've been corrected on the keystroke thing.
Finding a command is the purpose of the help system, whether that system is 'cmd --help', or a man page, or perldoc or a KDoc. And it's a tricky problem which, frankly, current *nix systems really make a mess of.
The KDE help system is at least an attempt to bring all of these together. And finding the 'mouse' command in the KDE system is much easier than 'apropos mouse', followed by searching over 100-page man pages.
Many of the concerns you have are being addressed in KDE, as far as I can tell. Honestly, though, it just sounds like you've never really used it, so many of your points are just way off the mark.
Help systems are a complex design issue. While I don't think KDE has the perfect answer at the moment, I do think they're moving in the right direction.
Anyway, much of this conversation seems to be not really directed at KDE, but rather directed at GUIs in general (and outdated notions of GUIs at that).
The idea that unix users are left out in the cold is a bit overstated, but let's take the original questions you had.
2. (keyboard interface). The kde style guide requires keyboard interfaces to everything. This is pretty much handled in the motif/windows way, with Meta key access to the menus.
3. (scripting): python is establishing itself as the standard script language for kde. You can write kde apps in it, and the interoperability between scripting and the individual kde apps is growing every day. I'm honestly not sure where that's going to wind up, but this is the area that holds the most promise for the long-time unix user.
5. (usability tests). I find the question kinda backwards. As in most OS projects, the main usability tests were no doubt on the programmers themselves. The idea that there's no feedback from longtime unix programmers seems misplaced: the grand majority of the kde programmers and the kde beta testers presumably fit into this category.
7. (searchable docs). The documentation is SGML-based, so it can go anywhere. The programming docs are *very* granular, based on a javadoc-like system, but admittedly like many (most?) OS projects, the docs tend to lag behind development.
Something more directly searchable, like perldoc, would be very nice, however. It's not part of kde core, but I'd be surprised if something didn't pop up as part of the kdevelop project.
1. (The big question): It's a good point, but there *are* no unix gui standards, really. I'm not really sure how the UI could be more "unix-like". And painting current standard GUI designs as "windows-like" is unfair, most of these standards were adopted by MS after having been tested and developed elsewhere.
It's a good question, and I'd be very interested to know what kinds of things you're thinking about here. No offence, but I think the Meta-/ idea is simply terrible; if you can't find a command quickly, then the app is poorly designed.
And I'd disagree that the GUI-standard menu design is slow, stupid and repetitious. It's basically a way to arrange keystroke prefixes, with immediate visual feedback and help. That's pretty useful actually. It's just wrong to state that things in a nested menu are multiple mouse-clicks away; they're also just a few keystrokes away.
As far as having to learn new mail progs, editors, etc. Of course not, everything's configurable; although you *do* need to configure kde for this (it's arguable whether it should pick up your current environment vars; personally I'd say no).
KDE doesn't seem like X, so I suppose heavy X users really are left out in the cold, somewhat. Personally, I don't see that as a bad thing.
The big gains are session management, more scriptable apps, easier configuration, and the beginnings of a scriptable GUI object model.
Admittedly, there's some anti-unixy things IMO. The file dialogs still suck (better than athena, though, of course), and Konq doesn't handle auto-completion, which annoys me.
What's in it for the hard-core unix programmer. Not much, probably, because the person you seem to be thinking of doesn't want much. What's in XEmacs under X that's not in a console Emacs. Not much. Not less, but for many users not much more. KDE is much like that in many ways.
The "unix mindset" doesn't have much to offer in GUI design, frankly. The extent of it is pretty much make everything configurable, make everything scriptable, keep configs in easy-to-read text format, and keep access to commands fast. I think KDE achieves this in most areas.
It's not that NT is easy to learn, it's that most people have already used the windows interface on the desktop. Also, standardizing on the same platform for both the desktop and the server really does lessen training costs, which is a significant factor for most places.
Slashdot readers tend to miss this because most of us learn a most of what we know on our own. But if you've ever worked in a big corporate help desk, you know that isn't true for most. Most people do their 9-to-5, and expect the company to provide training on new platforms.
Notice something important: NT is the market leader in the server market only when the server is tightly coupled with the desktop, for example File, print and login services for Windows desktop machines. When it's not (like for DB servers, or Web servers), NT never dominates the market.
Standardizing on a single platform is the big win for NT, and underlies most of their marketing statements about deployment and maintenance cost. The important lesson here is just how important desktop apps are for Linux. Standardizing on a single platform is a major desire for a lot of companies.
Basically just round-robin DNS, just like everyone else does. The difference is that their machines are geographically disparate, and apparently they do a few real-time heuristics on the requesting IP address, the current load of their machines, and presumably the current status of a few traceroute checks.
I'm not sure what they're handling for quake, but the www.quake3arena.com address is/.'ed at the moment, so one hopes they're not handling that one.
Posner is generally considered one of the leaders of the Chicago "Law and Economics" school of thinking, whose best-known "member" is probably Robert Bork (not that Posner and Bork are interchangable). But if MS had to choose a mediator, Posner just might be the person they'd most prefer.
In "Natural Monopoly and its Regulation", he came out pretty strongly against regulating monopolies, saying basically that the cure (i.e., regulation) was worse than the disease.
One of the standard tests of monopoly comes from one of Posner's decisions (Olympia Leasing vs. Western Union, though, where he says that illegal actions being when a company...
"Retaliates against customers who have the ternerity to compete with him by cutting such customers off...in order to discourage competition."
This speaks pretty directly to the IBM portion of the FoF. But a final quote from Olympia Leasing is a bit more worrisome...
"Most businessmen don't like their competitors, or for that matter competition. They want to make as much money as possible and getting monopoly is one way of making a lot of money. That is fine, however, so long as they do not use methods calculated to make consumers worse off in the long run."
The "...but we haven't hurt the consumers" argument is exactly what MS has been pushing all along.
The sentiment is correct - the danger of MS taking over the web via their dominance on the desktop is a very real danger - but the focus here is just wrong.
First, the action to limit connections to NTWS was outrageous, perhaps, but perfectly within the limits of reasonable action. Non-Unix OS's have charged per connection for quite some time. If they insist you need a more expensive license for unlimited connections, that seems perfectly within their rights.
The real danger from MS is using non-open protocols to run their browser. And they're making major inroads in that area right now. The web integration of MS Office with IIS and IE is the kind of thing that I'm really hoping Judge Jackson does something about.
IIS inherently gains certain advantages in the corporate area, since many places wish to standardize on a single OS (to lessen training costs for one thing). But directly using their desktop application advantage to force use of their server (through proprietary protocols, etc.) is exactly the kind of thing that this lawsuit was about.
Folks complain about vb, and it's really a pretty horrid language, but the dev environment fills a very distinct and useful niche, which is what makes it so popular.
If you need a quick GUI, say for a DB front-end, it can be tossed together in vb very quickly. Java's nice, but the gui stuff keeps changing. And, whatever you think about the COM/CORBA wars, there's an awful lot of useful COM objects out there, and vb makes a nice glue for them.
They don't own the name in perpetuity, but rather the site they've produced.
Think about it this way. Most recording contracts are bound to say that the company has the exclusive right to develop TV shows with the band's name in the title, and that they own that show even if the band moves on (think about the beatles cartoons, for example).
There's a real question here that's largely being ignored. Is a website like a TV show or like a soapbox. In fact, it's like both. Whether we like that or not.
Sony is basically marketing the name, and they expect to control the major markets, one of which is now the Net. In the same way you can't go on a concert tour under your own name without the Record company's OK, nor can you put out your own website without the company's OK. At this point, Sony is just recognizing that the web is another entertainment venue, just like TV or movies.
Now I'm not too thrilled about the whole large record company thing in general, but this move seems pretty reasonable to me. After all, the *name* is really what they market (it's seldom about the music), it makes sense for them to control it somewhat.
That's just about the same config that the folks at thinkgeek had when/. took them down last week.
Of course, the original question is just stated wrong. It's not the hardware config that matters so much, it's the software config, and especially how you serve up dynamic content. And most places that get/.ed don't crash, their bandwidth gets overrun. I'd imagine a webcam site would get clogged pretty quickly.
With all the annoyances of UPS deliveries, what I actually wish I could do is just walk into a store and buy a copy of RH. The official version seems to take forever to get distributed, and I haven't found anyone who just presses a bunch of copies off the ftp site and sells them.
I mean, I'm in a big city (NYC), you would think some little computer store would press a bunch of copies and sell them for $10. Does anyone know of a place in NY that does this?
Slashdot Mirror
Like most reviews, this review focuses on either using Linux as a server at work or using it as an alternative desktop at home.
But this whole focus misses out on what I think is going to be a big market for Linux: the complete Linux office. For example, a small office with a single server and 50 workstations would save a small fortune by going with Linux, and would save even more because of the ease of administering that network, not to mention the lack of downtime.
By ignoring which distributions make remote admin easier to set up, and which ones make automated installs simpler, cnet misses some of the main strengths of a Linux installation.
Eventually, small corporations are going to add up just how much money they lose by using unstable and hard-to-maintain software on the desktop. Which distribution is most suited to step into that void?
kde is a very good choice if you're trying to eliminate the mouse. There's keyboard access to just about everything in all the apps, and the wm pretty much allows everything from keystrokes as well.
But gnome will as well, as will most of the WM's. It's just that the wm's don't come configured that way usually. Learn a bit about xmodmap, spend some time configuring the tools you use, set up your default session the way you want, and you can pretty much forget about the mouse in X.
PS. The real key to all this is the whole 'alt key opens the menu' idea. Does anyone know who first did that in a bitmap display? Is it possible that it's actually an MS "innovation"?? (ISTR one of the early DOS char-mode GUIs did this, Geo-something???)
Linux as an OS certainly won't last forever, but in the long run Linus just might be remembered not for writing an OS but for creating a whole new kind of development process, one that isn't going away.
The whole idea of 'release early, release often', invite patches from everybody, and huge-team development was actually pretty different from the way even gnu worked at the time. Even now lots of open-source projects don't get it (look at gcc, or even, dare I say it, Mozilla).
It's funny, I stumbled across Linux (0.9x) because I had heard about Hurd, way back when. I figured I'd use Linux for the six months or so until Hurd got released. It will be great to finally be able to use it.
Security is not a product -- it's a process
It's amazing how many people who should know better miss that simple point. I've worked at places that spent fortunes on security products, and yet all the workers wrote their login/passwords right on the monitor because it took the IT security staff so long to create new logins that everybody just shared the same ones.
NT workstation is one of those perfect examples of a decent product with an easy attack path. The basic security model is reasonable, but then they integrate the web browser and e-mail package with everything else on the system, allowing so many security holes that they'll never really be plugged.
Of course there's a margin of error. They're extrapolating to all web servers on the web, but they can only count the ones they know about. They're bound to miss some.
Also, remember that they count domain names, not machines. So a single-machine ISP hosting 20 sites gets counting 20 times, while multiple-machine sites like Yahoo generally only get counted once.
It's impossible to determine a margin of error, unless you actually decide what exactly "on the web" means, which is a tricky question. Is a ppp-connected box "on the web"?
And my DSL connection puts my Linux box on the Net 24/7. But it doesn't get counted by netcraft.
Netcraft bills this as a "survey of Internet connected computers". But in practice that's a very slippery concept.
Go ahead and moderate this one down if you want, but I think it needs to be said.
/. has done an awful lot of posts that are just fanning the flames, and what's really wrong is that this is generally done without looking into the issue at all.
/. has grown, and grown huge, and with the growth should really come some responsibility.
/. started, it was perfectly reasonable for Rob to just post some pointers to stories on other sites; it was more of a personal thing, like sending e-mail to friends. But now slashdot has really become a news service, but still refuses to adopt the responsibility that news services should have; the responsibility to at least try to independently verify a story before publishing it.
/. had tried to contact the people involved before posting the story. And in many cases, the commentary on the /. posting has turned out to be plain ol' wrong.
/. (at least I don't), but a minimal re-checking of the source is a pretty reasonable expectation.
Lately,
/. used to be a small site, that basically gave 'sightings' rather than stories. But
When
The last few weeks have seen a lot of stories that would have read very differently if
It's easy to blame the flamers for getting out of control, but at some point slashdot has to accept the responsibility for what is posted here by the staff. When somebody like CNN posts a story without checking the facts, everyone here gets very upset. Slashdot has grown to the point where they should begin adopting the same kind of journalistic integrity they insist from others.
Nobody expects a full private investigation into stories from
If you really want the final frontier, think about kid's software. One of the best-selling software packages last year was a Barbie dress-up program. It's really hard to imagine Gnu 'Rugrats at the beach'.
And you couldn't even get started if you wanted to. Trademarks are so tightly entwined with the software in that field, that it's just about impossible to Open Source anything.
So, yes, there's plenty of room for proprietary software in the leaf nodes. It's funny, folks talk about the "desktop" as if the home market and the business workplace were similar markets. They're very different in many ways, but luckily much of the traditional home apps are moving to the web, where we can use them on decent operating systems.
As far as TurboTax goes, an open sourced Tax program would be a great thing, since stability and lack of error is one of the major goals. I don't think it will happen though. Accountants don't rush home after work to work on personal accounting projects in the way many programmers do.
The fact that MS, a software company moving very heavily in an e-commerce direction (look at the plans for web-based office), would prefer that e-commerce not be taxed isn't really too surprising, is it?
The current moratorium is a good thing right now, most gov'ts are so confused by the whole issue anything they tried to do would probably just be a mess. But in the longer run this stuff is going to be taxed, and it would be good for the WTO to start thinking about reasonable ways to handle the complexities involved.
We don't like to think about it very often, but the Net really re-enforces gaps between the haves and the have-nots. In the US, for example, e-commerce has become a way for many folks to avoid sales tax. The situation is similar globally.
This is a good thing, for now, but the rise of e-commerce is really going to play havoc with tax systems.
I see you've been corrected on the keystroke thing.
Finding a command is the purpose of the help system, whether that system is 'cmd --help', or a man page, or perldoc or a KDoc. And it's a tricky problem which, frankly, current *nix systems really make a mess of.
The KDE help system is at least an attempt to bring all of these together. And finding the 'mouse' command in the KDE system is much easier than 'apropos mouse', followed by searching over 100-page man pages.
Many of the concerns you have are being addressed in KDE, as far as I can tell. Honestly, though, it just sounds like you've never really used it, so many of your points are just way off the mark.
Help systems are a complex design issue. While I don't think KDE has the perfect answer at the moment, I do think they're moving in the right direction.
Anyway, much of this conversation seems to be not really directed at KDE, but rather directed at GUIs in general (and outdated notions of GUIs at that).
The idea that unix users are left out in the cold is a bit overstated, but let's take the original questions you had.
2. (keyboard interface). The kde style guide requires keyboard interfaces to everything. This is pretty much handled in the motif/windows way, with Meta key access to the menus.
3. (scripting): python is establishing itself as the standard script language for kde. You can write kde apps in it, and the interoperability between scripting and the individual kde apps is growing every day. I'm honestly not sure where that's going to wind up, but this is the area that holds the most promise for the long-time unix user.
5. (usability tests). I find the question kinda backwards. As in most OS projects, the main usability tests were no doubt on the programmers themselves. The idea that there's no feedback from longtime unix programmers seems misplaced: the grand majority of the kde programmers and the kde beta testers presumably fit into this category.
7. (searchable docs). The documentation is SGML-based, so it can go anywhere. The programming docs are *very* granular, based on a javadoc-like system, but admittedly like many (most?) OS projects, the docs tend to lag behind development.
Something more directly searchable, like perldoc, would be very nice, however. It's not part of kde core, but I'd be surprised if something didn't pop up as part of the kdevelop project.
1. (The big question): It's a good point, but there *are* no unix gui standards, really. I'm not really sure how the UI could be more "unix-like". And painting current standard GUI designs as "windows-like" is unfair, most of these standards were adopted by MS after having been tested and developed elsewhere.
It's a good question, and I'd be very interested to know what kinds of things you're thinking about here. No offence, but I think the Meta-/ idea is simply terrible; if you can't find a command quickly, then the app is poorly designed.
And I'd disagree that the GUI-standard menu design is slow, stupid and repetitious. It's basically a way to arrange keystroke prefixes, with immediate visual feedback and help. That's pretty useful actually. It's just wrong to state that things in a nested menu are multiple mouse-clicks away; they're also just a few keystrokes away.
As far as having to learn new mail progs, editors, etc. Of course not, everything's configurable; although you *do* need to configure kde for this (it's arguable whether it should pick up your current environment vars; personally I'd say no).
KDE doesn't seem like X, so I suppose heavy X users really are left out in the cold, somewhat. Personally, I don't see that as a bad thing.
The big gains are session management, more scriptable apps, easier configuration, and the
beginnings of a scriptable GUI object model.
Admittedly, there's some anti-unixy things IMO. The file dialogs still suck (better than athena, though, of course), and Konq doesn't handle auto-completion, which annoys me.
What's in it for the hard-core unix programmer. Not much, probably, because the person you seem to be thinking of doesn't want much. What's in XEmacs under X that's not in a console Emacs. Not much. Not less, but for many users not much more. KDE is much like that in many ways.
The "unix mindset" doesn't have much to offer in GUI design, frankly. The extent of it is pretty much make everything configurable, make everything scriptable, keep configs in easy-to-read text format, and keep access to commands fast. I think KDE achieves this in most areas.
It's not that NT is easy to learn, it's that most people have already used the windows interface on the desktop. Also, standardizing on the same platform for both the desktop and the server really does lessen training costs, which is a significant factor for most places.
Slashdot readers tend to miss this because most of us learn a most of what we know on our own. But if you've ever worked in a big corporate help desk, you know that isn't true for most. Most people do their 9-to-5, and expect the company to provide training on new platforms.
Notice something important: NT is the market leader in the server market only when the server is tightly coupled with the desktop, for example File, print and login services for Windows desktop machines. When it's not (like for DB servers, or Web servers), NT never dominates the market.
Standardizing on a single platform is the big win for NT, and underlies most of their marketing statements about deployment and maintenance cost.
The important lesson here is just how important desktop apps are for Linux. Standardizing on a single platform is a major desire for a lot of companies.
Basically just round-robin DNS, just like everyone else does. The difference is that their machines are geographically disparate, and apparently they do a few real-time heuristics on the requesting IP address, the current load of their machines, and presumably the current status of a few traceroute checks.
/.'ed at the moment, so one hopes they're not handling that one.
I'm not sure what they're handling for quake, but the www.quake3arena.com address is
Posner is generally considered one of the leaders of the Chicago "Law and Economics" school of thinking, whose best-known "member" is probably Robert Bork (not that Posner and Bork are interchangable). But if MS had to choose a mediator, Posner just might be the person they'd most prefer.
In "Natural Monopoly and its Regulation", he came out pretty strongly against regulating monopolies, saying basically that the cure (i.e., regulation) was worse than the disease.
One of the standard tests of monopoly comes from one of Posner's decisions (Olympia Leasing vs. Western Union, though, where he says that illegal actions being when a company...
"Retaliates against customers who have the ternerity to compete with him by cutting such customers off...in order to discourage competition."
This speaks pretty directly to the IBM portion of the FoF. But a final quote from Olympia Leasing is a bit more worrisome...
"Most businessmen don't like their competitors, or for that matter competition. They want to make as much money as possible and getting monopoly is one way of making a lot of money. That is fine, however, so long as they do not use methods calculated to make consumers worse off in the long run."
The "...but we haven't hurt the consumers" argument is exactly what MS has been pushing all along.
The sentiment is correct - the danger of MS taking over the web via their dominance on the desktop is a very real danger - but the focus here is just wrong.
First, the action to limit connections to NTWS was outrageous, perhaps, but perfectly within the limits of reasonable action. Non-Unix OS's have charged per connection for quite some time. If they insist you need a more expensive license for unlimited connections, that seems perfectly within their rights.
The real danger from MS is using non-open protocols to run their browser. And they're making major inroads in that area right now. The web integration of MS Office with IIS and IE is the kind of thing that I'm really hoping Judge Jackson does something about.
IIS inherently gains certain advantages in the corporate area, since many places wish to standardize on a single OS (to lessen training costs for one thing). But directly using their desktop application advantage to force use of their server (through proprietary protocols, etc.) is exactly the kind of thing that this lawsuit was about.
Folks complain about vb, and it's really a pretty horrid language, but the dev environment fills a very distinct and useful niche, which is what makes it so popular.
If you need a quick GUI, say for a DB front-end, it can be tossed together in vb very quickly. Java's nice, but the gui stuff keeps changing. And, whatever you think about the COM/CORBA wars, there's an awful lot of useful COM objects out there, and vb makes a nice glue for them.
They don't own the name in perpetuity, but rather the site they've produced.
Think about it this way. Most recording contracts are bound to say that the company has the exclusive right to develop TV shows with the band's name in the title, and that they own that show even if the band moves on (think about the beatles cartoons, for example).
There's a real question here that's largely being ignored. Is a website like a TV show or like a soapbox. In fact, it's like both. Whether we like that or not.
Sony is basically marketing the name, and they expect to control the major markets, one of which is now the Net. In the same way you can't go on a concert tour under your own name without the Record company's OK, nor can you put out your own website without the company's OK. At this point, Sony is just recognizing that the web is another entertainment venue, just like TV or movies.
Now I'm not too thrilled about the whole large record company thing in general, but this move seems pretty reasonable to me. After all, the *name* is really what they market (it's seldom about the music), it makes sense for them to control it somewhat.
That's just about the same config that the folks at thinkgeek had when /. took them down last week.
/.ed don't crash, their bandwidth gets overrun. I'd imagine a webcam site would get clogged pretty quickly.
Of course, the original question is just stated wrong. It's not the hardware config that matters so much, it's the software config, and especially how you serve up dynamic content. And most places that get
With all the annoyances of UPS deliveries, what I actually wish I could do is just walk into a store and buy a copy of RH. The official version seems to take forever to get distributed, and I haven't found anyone who just presses a bunch of copies off the ftp site and sells them.
I mean, I'm in a big city (NYC), you would think some little computer store would press a bunch of copies and sell them for $10. Does anyone know of a place in NY that does this?