It's only a ripoff if you don't consider the whole picture. Consider that soft drink for $1 a bottle is easily 10x the cost of the materials (mostly sugar and water). But what you're paying for is the FRIDGE at the store that keep it cold and the CONVENIENCE from not lugging around a bottle of water until you needed it. Convenience has a price. You can't simply look at the raw materials to determine value.
Look at it this way, there is 2c worth of wheat and yeast and water in a loaf of bread. They charge $2 for it. Where did the other $1.98 go? Into the cost of preparing and cooking and packaging and marketting and transporting and storage and the sales clerks salary. So what if there is 0.01c worth of water in a $1 bottle? You've still gotta pay for all the other costs including a much more expensive storage cost (refrigerated).
Heh, I know what you mean. Where I work, I supervise a couple of techs who each generally have to do at least 2-3 installs per day of Windows 2000. We don't use imaging because, frankly, we find that it sucks - - quicker to do straight loads of the OS as well as our company apps. Anyway, I or my techs can have four units on a KVM at one time, and we can knock those out in a little over an hour for the whole bunch. I don't know why Linux people seem to have so much trouble with it.;)
It's not just the Linux people. The Windows support people around here have similar troubles. They don't even like Linux. Building a Windows machine from scratch, installing all the drivers, loading the "company apps"; that can all take the better part of a day for these guys. I don't know much about Windows but they don't look like they're stuffing around or being lazy. It simply looks like a lot of hard work. Of course, they then use imaging software (Ghost?) to quickly make other machines using the same hardware.
However the real reason I replied was to warn you about your current method of reinstallation. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Especially as you're also loading the "company apps" by hand. You are better off automating the build process; even Win2k can do this. Lower risk of mistakes, less work involved, doesn't require expertise or knowledge for each build, self-documenting and repeatable process, etc. Imagine a programmer who retyped compilation commands instead of using makefiles. It's not a good idea.
The idea that "sharing" people won't buy has been debunked so many times, it's not even worth my time to look up the links for you.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think that was ever debunked. Sure, there were plenty of opinions and rants and carefully selected sample sets that supported specific agendas, but I don't recall a single decent debunking. Not from either side of the fence.
Reverse engineering is nothing more than the common theft of intelectual property. When yo look at someone's compiled code, you are seeing that which you were not meant to see. There's a reason all these companies have NDA's. They don't want people to see their code. And then to have their competitor down the street disassemble the shipped product. Well, it's pure theft, and nothing more or less. The only reason the competitor could possibly have for dissassembling the binary code would be to copy it for their own benefit.
No! It's not theft. It's fraud!
No! It's not fraud. It's murder!
No! It's not murder. It's embezzlement!
Oh, sorry, I thought we were playing the "use the wrong word" game.
I'm going to go murder an MP3 or two before I embezzle Windows XP.
Really? So you should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in your favour the huge success of JK Rowling's work to boost the acceptability and profit potential of your derivative?
I don't see why not. But whether it's legal or not has nothing to do with "should".
A character and a setting are VERY specific intellectual property or expressions. Although the fantasy and science fiction genres are HUGE, nearly every renowned work has immediately recognisable and distinguishable characters and settings. Middle Earth, Dune, Narnia, the Nautilus, Jedi, Discworld, Gandalf, Vimes, Paul Atreides - what makes you think that you can merely take the VAST amount of "development time" these authors spent on their creations and use it in a novel of your own?
I daresay this is a gray area and it takes a judge to know when the line has been crossed.
You can prattle on about "should" and "shouldn't" all you like, but this IS the state of Copyright, this IS how it works, and in my not particularly humble opinion you are not only WRONG but a leech that doesn't understand the true source of value or just wants to sit on your arse and have society give you everything you deserve for being such a magnificent gift to this planet.
Wow, you certainly have the sharp tongue.
Need I point out your own use of the word "should".
Ahhh, and now you've uncovered the secret of Mensa. Their criteria for selecting members is just as arbitrary as any other club. Mensa's is simply more pretentious.
If you needed any further proof that the USA is in the grip of copyright hysteria, then this case does nicely. You can kill somebody and get out in 4 years with your duty "paid" to society. But if you copy the latest Britney Spears song or unscramble cable television then you're in gaol for 5 years and then financially crippled for life.
To somebody on the outside, looking in, the USA is insane. Land of Hope and Glory? Only if you're rich. I suggest you all emigrate.
Sort of like a lot of people want to believe that 2 + 2 is 4. But its 5. Only our limited understanding of the laws of arithmetic keep believing that 2+2 is 4. It might be 7. We just don't know.
Don't be silly. Mathematics is a formal system that humans have invented. We can *define* 2+2=4. The laws of thermodynamics aren't derived or defined; they were observed. The only reason we claim that "the entropy in a closed system always increases" is because we've never found the counterexample. We don't know why that law is "true". We don't even know that law *is* "true". We just think that law is true because everything we've observed so far points in that direction.
Science is not a precise system. It is a bunch of observations written in a way that scientists can argue over the specifics.
I beg to differ. Real world material DO follow Ohms law exactly.
Actually, they don't. Laws are only ever approximations.
It is only our inability to make scientific measurements with infinite precision that results in a certain margin of error.
As our measurements improve we typically need to find new laws. For example, Newtonian physics was replaced by Einstein's physics purely because improvements in measurements started turning up things that didn't match the previous model. In other words, you've got it exactly backwards.
Wrong. A perpetual motion machine is impossible only if the laws of thermodynamics are correct. Unfortunately the laws of thermodynamics are based on human observation and humans make mistakes.
Of course, there's plenty of supporting evidence for the current laws. So it's not very likely that they're wrong and subsequently it's not very likely that perpetual motion machines exist, but a good scientist never says never.
A more correct statement would have been "a perpetual motion machine would destroy the laws of thermodynamics, cast doubt on thousands of experiments, and undermine physics as we know it, though that doesn't mean it's impossible".
In point of fact, Ritchie created Unix to run a chess program, not for telecommunications. Only later, when AT&T discoverd that Unix was a very creditable OS, was it used for more prosaic, business related work.
Actually, Ritchie *and* Thompson created UNIX to play Space Travel. You can read all about it in the definitive history of UNIX written by Ritchie himself... here.
Further history (can't find a reference) is that Ritchie and Thompson were later asked to justify what they'd just built. They hurriedly reworked Unix to be used by the trademark office for document typesetting (eg, multiple users on dumb terminals with text editors). So the first practical use of Unix was... yes... a desktop!
The ultimate failure of "open source" is this: everybody wants to have it his own way. Consequently, we have ten individuals or groups working on their own variations on X, instead of cooperating on X itself.
Yeah, I see similar failures all the time.
I go to the book store and there's hundreds of books. Different plots and different stories and different covers. Wouldn't it be better if there was just One Book!
I go to the movie theatre and there's a new movie every week! Different plots and different actors and different meanings. Wouldn't it be better if there was just One Movie!
Choice is a failure! I can't wait until we all wear the same drab clothes and live in the same box-like houses doing the same boring things and living the same unoriginal lives.
Seriously... we know that not all GPL stuff is actually "GNU", so how much of the GPL'd stuff that comes with Unix actually *IS* part of GNU? Can anyone actually itemize what official parts of GNU are actually included with Linux? And what percentage of a typical Linux distro does that actually come out to?
There are over 2000+ official GNU packages. Those are packages that the authors have signed over to the GNU project. That's a significant chunk of change in any distro.
But percentage isn't the right way to measure it. The right way to measure it is to consider what constitutes an OS. In my mind, having used UNIX for one-and-a-half decades, a UNIX is the kernel, the shell, the C library, the compiler, some essentials like ls/cp/mv/sed/awk, and a traditional editor like vi/ed/emacs. Everything else is an application as far as I'm concerned; including Apache, XFree86, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and so on.
GNU provides non-UNIX replacements for the *entire* UNIX operating system *except* for the kernel. That's why RMS says GNU/Linux. He is giving credit to Linux for being such a useful piece of the puzzle. He doesn't mention other software packages because those components aren't part of the OS.
Now perhaps some other people think that GUI desktops are an essential OS component these days and GNU/Linux/KDE is required. Perhaps they would agree with Microsoft that a web browser is a part of the OS so they'd say GNU/Linux/KDE/Mozilla. That's their own choice to make.
So I guess I should call the OS on my Linux box. GNU/XWindows/Apache/KDE/OpenOffice/Mozilla/LINUX?
Perhaps you should. The media circus is confusing the crap out of non-technical managers. SCO has been claiming "Linux stole that" and "Linux is tainted". SCO is specifically talking about Linux-the-kernel. Managers think that SCO is talking about Linux-the-everything. They think SCO is claiming taint across ALL free software; KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, GNU, Apache, etc. People such as yourself have stupidly confused "Linux" with "free software" in the eyes of the general public. Now the public thinks all free software is at risk of being yanked by SCO. I *have* been asked whether Apache is at risk because we run Apache on Solaris. That's how confused the management is.
RMS has been trying to clear up this confusion for years and spastics like yourself have been lambasting him for it. It's terrible that it took something like SCO's claims to prove RMS right.
Well, it's not exactly the same. Unfortunately, Windows and Linux are not directly compatible. So it's NOT like choosing one carpet over another...if you've got programs that run on one, they won't run on another.
Except we're not talking about carpet vs another carpet. We're talking about carpet vs *no* carpet.
So you're asking manufacturers to do more work, to possibly confuse people by giving them a immense decision when they're first buying their machine, all so that a very, very small segment of the market (less than 5% installed, probably even less of new sales) can save $50?
No, I'm not asking for anything. I'm showing you how the original analogy is flawed. My analogy was more accurate.
This is what I really like about Linux: targetted audiences.
Back when I started with Linux there were a few distros. I started with SLS (I think) and later used Slackware. Redhat came out a little while after that (in the Infomagic bundle) and I moved to Redhat because of the package management. But what struck me back then was that though they all fiddled with filesystem layout and configuration files, they were basically the same. There was very little differentiation in terms of what you received in the system.
Now we're seeing a much wider range of product differentiation. Lindows is obviously aiming at preloaded systems, ease of use, customer service, newbie-oriented tutorials, bundled applications, etc. Redhat is aiming (I think) at large desktop rollouts and backend servers with a focus on the core server products (RHAS) and management tools (eg, Kickstart). Debian is aimed at hobbyists so there's no real focus but a strong committment to keeping the distribution free. There are niche products like Smoothwall (firewalls) and Swelltech (proxies) where Linux has been "hidden" from the user with single-purpose GUIs.
If this was the UNIX market from the 80s then I'd be freaking out about now, because this product differentiation basically killed UNIX. But thanks to the GPL the Linux market is holding together incredibly well. Distributions are *sharing* their code! Despite the specialisation there's no sense of "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine" from any of the vendors. I hope it stays this way because Linux is well-poised to win *all* markets by simple attrition. Linux attacks on all fronts at once. It's like watching an army of angry ants!
You think you jest... Here in France, the drive-thru didn't exist before McDonalds came, so they called it a "McDrive" and trademarked the name...
Drive throughs are similar to mouse traps but instead of mice they catch idiots. There's a drive through near my local supermarket (I think it's a Kompletely Fucked Chicken store). The idiots queue for their drive through onto the road, around the corner, and block the entrance to the supermarket car parking lot. This is pretty stupid in itself, but what's more incredible is that you can clearly see through the plate glass windows that there are NO CUSTOMERS inside the damn store. If these nitwits parked their cars and used their legs they'd have their congealed fat blobs... I mean chicken... without having to wait in a line of cars like a bunch of USA wannabes.
Um, that happens all the time man. When I bought my house it had a bunch of carpet over the hardwood floors, I had to pay to have it removed. There was a bunch of peeling paint I had to strip and redo. There was a broken water supply system.
Your analogy is not quite right. Consider instead that you buy a brand new house with hardwood floors but a condition of sale is you have to buy brand new carpets from a specific company. You have no choice in colour nor weave and the carpets are poorly laid over your new hardwood floors. You then have to pay additional money to have the carpets removed and the floors sanded and sealed. You complain to the real-estate agent that this isn't fair but he informs you that all real-estate agents do this and it's perfectly fair because otherwise some people will steal carpets. Somebody tells you that you should have bought from a different real-estate agent, one that isn't bound by this carpet-scam, but that's not very helpful when you wanted THAT particular house not some OTHER crappy house. In the end you simply bear the cost of carpets you didn't want, you tear them out, you chuck them on the tip, and you contribute to the coffers of a carpet company who then uses sales figures to proclaim that 95% of the world prefers carpets instead of hardwood floors.
You see, in the real world, things aren't always as cheap as we want them to be,
It's nothing to do with being "as cheap as we want them to be". It's about being forced to pay for something you didn't want and didn't need.
There's no value in me complaining because I'm from a different country and have very little code in there. I was just using myself as an example of the legal issues involved here; it's not a simple case of SCO owning *all* of the Linux kernel. There are a number of copyright holders. People with more code and US citizenship can do the suing. I'll enjoy the spectacle from where I sit.
I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.
Because we're talking about audiophiles here (who else would *complain* about the previous audio format on the Phish site). You know. These are the people who think they can hear the difference between a CD and a CD with green ink on it. The same people who insist that vinyl has higher fidelity than CD. The same people who compare the dry tonality of different digital interconnects.
Even supposedly decent sites make so many mistakes when discussing digital audio that they'd fail an undergrads signals course. "No information is lost" my arse. And what sort of nonsense is that idiot trying to pass off as a digital signal; don't these "experts" know what low-pass filtering means?
Audiophilia. It's a disease. Kill it before it spreads.
Though, I really had to work to make Debian work in the first place. No anti-aliasing in X, ugly fonts in Mozilla, troubles (dependencies) when installing mplayer and a lot of other things.
I agree Linux can be bad if you try and stay bleeding edge. But if you wait, it's easy as pie.
For example, I tried to get anti-aliased fonts in Mozilla on my home machine as soon as I heard it was possible. It took an afternoon and had me tearing my hair out.
At work I just waited until the packages were in apt. It Just Worked. Took 6 months longer than my home machine but required no effort.
I've been with Linux since 1992 (possibly '91 but my memory isn't perfect). I remember writing my own modelines for XFree86. I remember writing menu entries into FVWM config files. I remember compiling a kernel to get my netcard to work. I found it difficult back then and I came from a UNIX background! I'd used Microport, Interactive and 386BSD before I started with Linux. DOS and Windows didn't make much noise in my house.
These days that stuff Just Works out of the box. I haven't seen a window manager config file in years. Modern XFree86 doesn't need modelines (it's all DDC). And netcards are all modularised and configured with GUIs. It's soooo much easier today than it ever was before. All the problems you're having with today's distros will be fixed by the next release. Of this, I am very sure.
How many games are purchased after reading reviews? 5%? 10%? How many are purchased on a whim, or by parents who figure if the kids like superman they gotta like the game, or just because it's got a 2-player mode and you kids can play together and quit kicking your brother and leave me the hell alone I'm trying to drink?
True, but I reckon a huge number of games are bought based on word-of-mouth. At work the parents buy games for their kids (or so they say; I think they play the games too) and word-of-mouth usually means a good game is bought by every parent, but bad games get a single sale and are then insulted over morning-tea.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 3 copies? From Slashdot I'd expect at least 6 copies spread over a 2 week period.
It's only a ripoff if you don't consider the whole picture. Consider that soft drink for $1 a bottle is easily 10x the cost of the materials (mostly sugar and water). But what you're paying for is the FRIDGE at the store that keep it cold and the CONVENIENCE from not lugging around a bottle of water until you needed it. Convenience has a price. You can't simply look at the raw materials to determine value.
:-)
Look at it this way, there is 2c worth of wheat and yeast and water in a loaf of bread. They charge $2 for it. Where did the other $1.98 go? Into the cost of preparing and cooking and packaging and marketting and transporting and storage and the sales clerks salary. So what if there is 0.01c worth of water in a $1 bottle? You've still gotta pay for all the other costs including a much more expensive storage cost (refrigerated).
PS: I don't buy bottled water, I prefer juice
It's not just the Linux people. The Windows support people around here have similar troubles. They don't even like Linux. Building a Windows machine from scratch, installing all the drivers, loading the "company apps"; that can all take the better part of a day for these guys. I don't know much about Windows but they don't look like they're stuffing around or being lazy. It simply looks like a lot of hard work. Of course, they then use imaging software (Ghost?) to quickly make other machines using the same hardware.
However the real reason I replied was to warn you about your current method of reinstallation. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Especially as you're also loading the "company apps" by hand. You are better off automating the build process; even Win2k can do this. Lower risk of mistakes, less work involved, doesn't require expertise or knowledge for each build, self-documenting and repeatable process, etc. Imagine a programmer who retyped compilation commands instead of using makefiles. It's not a good idea.
No, because 75% of Americans wouldn't know the answer.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think that was ever debunked. Sure, there were plenty of opinions and rants and carefully selected sample sets that supported specific agendas, but I don't recall a single decent debunking. Not from either side of the fence.
No! It's not theft. It's fraud!
No! It's not fraud. It's murder!
No! It's not murder. It's embezzlement!
Oh, sorry, I thought we were playing the "use the wrong word" game.
I'm going to go murder an MP3 or two before I embezzle Windows XP.
I don't see why not. But whether it's legal or not has nothing to do with "should".
I daresay this is a gray area and it takes a judge to know when the line has been crossed.
Wow, you certainly have the sharp tongue.
Need I point out your own use of the word "should".
Ahhh, and now you've uncovered the secret of Mensa. Their criteria for selecting members is just as arbitrary as any other club. Mensa's is simply more pretentious.
If you needed any further proof that the USA is in the grip of copyright hysteria, then this case does nicely. You can kill somebody and get out in 4 years with your duty "paid" to society. But if you copy the latest Britney Spears song or unscramble cable television then you're in gaol for 5 years and then financially crippled for life.
To somebody on the outside, looking in, the USA is insane. Land of Hope and Glory? Only if you're rich. I suggest you all emigrate.
Don't be silly. Mathematics is a formal system that humans have invented. We can *define* 2+2=4. The laws of thermodynamics aren't derived or defined; they were observed. The only reason we claim that "the entropy in a closed system always increases" is because we've never found the counterexample. We don't know why that law is "true". We don't even know that law *is* "true". We just think that law is true because everything we've observed so far points in that direction.
Science is not a precise system. It is a bunch of observations written in a way that scientists can argue over the specifics.
Actually, they don't. Laws are only ever approximations.
As our measurements improve we typically need to find new laws. For example, Newtonian physics was replaced by Einstein's physics purely because improvements in measurements started turning up things that didn't match the previous model. In other words, you've got it exactly backwards.
Wrong. A perpetual motion machine is impossible only if the laws of thermodynamics are correct. Unfortunately the laws of thermodynamics are based on human observation and humans make mistakes.
Of course, there's plenty of supporting evidence for the current laws. So it's not very likely that they're wrong and subsequently it's not very likely that perpetual motion machines exist, but a good scientist never says never.
A more correct statement would have been "a perpetual motion machine would destroy the laws of thermodynamics, cast doubt on thousands of experiments, and undermine physics as we know it, though that doesn't mean it's impossible".
PS: I took tertiary level thermodynamics courses.
Actually, Ritchie *and* Thompson created UNIX to play Space Travel. You can read all about it in the definitive history of UNIX written by Ritchie himself... here.
Further history (can't find a reference) is that Ritchie and Thompson were later asked to justify what they'd just built. They hurriedly reworked Unix to be used by the trademark office for document typesetting (eg, multiple users on dumb terminals with text editors). So the first practical use of Unix was... yes... a desktop!
Yeah, I see similar failures all the time.
I go to the book store and there's hundreds of books. Different plots and different stories and different covers. Wouldn't it be better if there was just One Book!
I go to the movie theatre and there's a new movie every week! Different plots and different actors and different meanings. Wouldn't it be better if there was just One Movie!
Choice is a failure! I can't wait until we all wear the same drab clothes and live in the same box-like houses doing the same boring things and living the same unoriginal lives.
There are over 2000+ official GNU packages. Those are packages that the authors have signed over to the GNU project. That's a significant chunk of change in any distro.
But percentage isn't the right way to measure it. The right way to measure it is to consider what constitutes an OS. In my mind, having used UNIX for one-and-a-half decades, a UNIX is the kernel, the shell, the C library, the compiler, some essentials like ls/cp/mv/sed/awk, and a traditional editor like vi/ed/emacs. Everything else is an application as far as I'm concerned; including Apache, XFree86, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and so on.
GNU provides non-UNIX replacements for the *entire* UNIX operating system *except* for the kernel. That's why RMS says GNU/Linux. He is giving credit to Linux for being such a useful piece of the puzzle. He doesn't mention other software packages because those components aren't part of the OS.
Now perhaps some other people think that GUI desktops are an essential OS component these days and GNU/Linux/KDE is required. Perhaps they would agree with Microsoft that a web browser is a part of the OS so they'd say GNU/Linux/KDE/Mozilla. That's their own choice to make.
Perhaps you should. The media circus is confusing the crap out of non-technical managers. SCO has been claiming "Linux stole that" and "Linux is tainted". SCO is specifically talking about Linux-the-kernel. Managers think that SCO is talking about Linux-the-everything. They think SCO is claiming taint across ALL free software; KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, GNU, Apache, etc. People such as yourself have stupidly confused "Linux" with "free software" in the eyes of the general public. Now the public thinks all free software is at risk of being yanked by SCO. I *have* been asked whether Apache is at risk because we run Apache on Solaris. That's how confused the management is.
RMS has been trying to clear up this confusion for years and spastics like yourself have been lambasting him for it. It's terrible that it took something like SCO's claims to prove RMS right.
Except we're not talking about carpet vs another carpet. We're talking about carpet vs *no* carpet.
No, I'm not asking for anything. I'm showing you how the original analogy is flawed. My analogy was more accurate.
This is what I really like about Linux: targetted audiences.
Back when I started with Linux there were a few distros. I started with SLS (I think) and later used Slackware. Redhat came out a little while after that (in the Infomagic bundle) and I moved to Redhat because of the package management. But what struck me back then was that though they all fiddled with filesystem layout and configuration files, they were basically the same. There was very little differentiation in terms of what you received in the system.
Now we're seeing a much wider range of product differentiation. Lindows is obviously aiming at preloaded systems, ease of use, customer service, newbie-oriented tutorials, bundled applications, etc. Redhat is aiming (I think) at large desktop rollouts and backend servers with a focus on the core server products (RHAS) and management tools (eg, Kickstart). Debian is aimed at hobbyists so there's no real focus but a strong committment to keeping the distribution free. There are niche products like Smoothwall (firewalls) and Swelltech (proxies) where Linux has been "hidden" from the user with single-purpose GUIs.
If this was the UNIX market from the 80s then I'd be freaking out about now, because this product differentiation basically killed UNIX. But thanks to the GPL the Linux market is holding together incredibly well. Distributions are *sharing* their code! Despite the specialisation there's no sense of "what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine" from any of the vendors. I hope it stays this way because Linux is well-poised to win *all* markets by simple attrition. Linux attacks on all fronts at once. It's like watching an army of angry ants!
Drive throughs are similar to mouse traps but instead of mice they catch idiots. There's a drive through near my local supermarket (I think it's a Kompletely Fucked Chicken store). The idiots queue for their drive through onto the road, around the corner, and block the entrance to the supermarket car parking lot. This is pretty stupid in itself, but what's more incredible is that you can clearly see through the plate glass windows that there are NO CUSTOMERS inside the damn store. If these nitwits parked their cars and used their legs they'd have their congealed fat blobs... I mean chicken... without having to wait in a line of cars like a bunch of USA wannabes.
Your analogy is not quite right. Consider instead that you buy a brand new house with hardwood floors but a condition of sale is you have to buy brand new carpets from a specific company. You have no choice in colour nor weave and the carpets are poorly laid over your new hardwood floors. You then have to pay additional money to have the carpets removed and the floors sanded and sealed. You complain to the real-estate agent that this isn't fair but he informs you that all real-estate agents do this and it's perfectly fair because otherwise some people will steal carpets. Somebody tells you that you should have bought from a different real-estate agent, one that isn't bound by this carpet-scam, but that's not very helpful when you wanted THAT particular house not some OTHER crappy house. In the end you simply bear the cost of carpets you didn't want, you tear them out, you chuck them on the tip, and you contribute to the coffers of a carpet company who then uses sales figures to proclaim that 95% of the world prefers carpets instead of hardwood floors.
It's nothing to do with being "as cheap as we want them to be". It's about being forced to pay for something you didn't want and didn't need.
There's no value in me complaining because I'm from a different country and have very little code in there. I was just using myself as an example of the legal issues involved here; it's not a simple case of SCO owning *all* of the Linux kernel. There are a number of copyright holders. People with more code and US citizenship can do the suing. I'll enjoy the spectacle from where I sit.
Because we're talking about audiophiles here (who else would *complain* about the previous audio format on the Phish site). You know. These are the people who think they can hear the difference between a CD and a CD with green ink on it. The same people who insist that vinyl has higher fidelity than CD. The same people who compare the dry tonality of different digital interconnects.
Even supposedly decent sites make so many mistakes when discussing digital audio that they'd fail an undergrads signals course. "No information is lost" my arse. And what sort of nonsense is that idiot trying to pass off as a digital signal; don't these "experts" know what low-pass filtering means?
Audiophilia. It's a disease. Kill it before it spreads.
I agree Linux can be bad if you try and stay bleeding edge. But if you wait, it's easy as pie.
For example, I tried to get anti-aliased fonts in Mozilla on my home machine as soon as I heard it was possible. It took an afternoon and had me tearing my hair out.
At work I just waited until the packages were in apt. It Just Worked. Took 6 months longer than my home machine but required no effort.
I've been with Linux since 1992 (possibly '91 but my memory isn't perfect). I remember writing my own modelines for XFree86. I remember writing menu entries into FVWM config files. I remember compiling a kernel to get my netcard to work. I found it difficult back then and I came from a UNIX background! I'd used Microport, Interactive and 386BSD before I started with Linux. DOS and Windows didn't make much noise in my house.
These days that stuff Just Works out of the box. I haven't seen a window manager config file in years. Modern XFree86 doesn't need modelines (it's all DDC). And netcards are all modularised and configured with GUIs. It's soooo much easier today than it ever was before. All the problems you're having with today's distros will be fixed by the next release. Of this, I am very sure.
True, but I reckon a huge number of games are bought based on word-of-mouth. At work the parents buy games for their kids (or so they say; I think they play the games too) and word-of-mouth usually means a good game is bought by every parent, but bad games get a single sale and are then insulted over morning-tea.
I don't give a flying fuck whether Jim-Bob uses Linux or not.