There are lots of languages that have comparison operators that are different from assignment operators (IS NOT LTE for example). I think most use = for assignment. Using:= like Pascal does seems odd to me. Those that do use = for both usually prefer something like "set x=1". So I'd bet "==" came out of a desire to reduce keystrokes.
"until they lost the battle by losing ownership of UNIX"
Those are all the words you needed to read. You cannot loose ownership of that which you never did own. SCOs gambit was to gain ownership by bamboozling everyone. You know when one party is blowing smoke in these issues when they refuse to point to the infringing code outside of court. If the quote included is to be believed, they lost on appeal and now that they have filed yet another appeal they are suddenly going to show us all the holy grail of "infringing" code. In each case where they've brought up "infringing" code, it was either released by themselves, or was code they didn't own in the first place.
The OP sounds like a coded attempt to slander one OS because he's using the wrong tool on an install that will not support it while claiming it can be done on the other OS (assuming that you use the right tool on an install that will support it.)
Isn't that really the double standard you are referring to?
He's not being pedantic. It may or may not be true that "Every virus and trojan I've run across in the last year has carried some kind of spyware payload." The reverse of that is not true.
So someone saying "OS X has little need for anti-virus software due to there being a disproportionate(?) lack of spyware" may actually be thinking spyware only comes from SPAM. People like that are less likely to adopt safe surfing practices and contribute to the spread of malware.
There IS value in being accurate here.
Technically the militarization of the Internet began in the '70s: "in July 1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet#ARPANET_to_several_federal_wide_area_networks:_MILNET.2C_NSI.2C_and_NSFNet). Also technically nobody CAN own the Internet. Finally, everyone has a right to defend their part of the network. If you think it hasn't been militarized until now then you should go back to playing with your Lincoln Logs.
1. Much has changed since your last experience including a new career field and tech school.
2. Referring to folks in the military as warriors reflects a major change in how everyone is thought of/used. There is now greater focus on in field readiness.
3. No insult taken, but you should temper your cynicism with some good old up-to-date information every now and then.
It seems that a number of companies focus on long term profits as opposed to short term (like Amazon for example) so it doesn't surprise me that the last five years have not been chiefly about profit. I doubt they had their eyes on the cloud as a promising revenue stream back when they started up so the chance they are taking by adding it doesn't seem that great. I'd bet that they still have a longer view of how they could reach full profitability since they seem to have favored using their Ubuntu project to grow both the platform and the user base. That still seems to have potential payoffs deep into the future. They've gotten close but still need to grow the platform quite a bit in order to earn a large enough user base to make a difference. I know many people don't think it will happen but I would bet there is room for a third player in the OS market.
So I would say a company of around 200 employees is small enough still that meager profits are sustainable for some time, as long as the vision and potential hold promise.
Those aren't answers, but then my investment is only in time, and hobbies don't have to pay off.
"I'm curious as to why a company would spend a lot of money making something that other people will give away for free."
You don't understand it because you look at it as if they would be giving it away for free. (Idealistically perhaps) they would be outsourcing development and maintenance for the price of having access and free use of the source code. Obviously there would be no money in giving away everything. Many FOSS projects have commercial cousins that have more "enterprise" features. Look at Canonical (http://www.canonical.com/) as one modern example. I don't intend to posit that they are wildly profitable, but that there is a path to profit using a community of developers who each have some skin in the game, as well as those who work on the code with other motivations. Companies like Canonical presumably spend less managing that community than they would if they were developing and maintaining the OS all on their own. They pay their hired developers to work on their enterprise products which sit on top of the community developed Linux distro.
FTA: "One can say quite a lot in legal filings, and get away with it, but there is a line where it becomes libel, when it is gratuitous, and that language is gratuitous."
That looks like a shot across the bow.
If taking these things to court would solve the problem then that is where they must go--I have my doubts. Also FTA "[...] the then-publisher apologized to me publicly, but she [Maureen O'Gara] says in the deposition she's not sorry a bit.]"
This is why our public dialog is so toxic these days. PJ is the honest broker in this. She has offered criticisms of SCO, their lawyers and the case--who hasn't. But she has also posted verbatim every public document she could get a hold of. That a presumed journalist would get so nasty and feel no remorse for the drivel she wrote to try to destroy an honest broker is telling. Anyone who hires her does so with full knowledge of her character and deserves to be tarred by this episode as much as she does.
The problem is that it is rarely profitable over the short term, because the cost of the energy conversion devices (turbines, solar panels, etc.) are very expensive right now.
There fixed that for you. The real problem is the same one faced with any new technology/idea--only the politics and the level of understanding on how we solve the problems keeps it from achieving any velocity toward cost savings.
"Green" policies conserve so if green policies don't make good business decisions then conservative policies don't either. It is just a matter of time and value mixed in with politics. Remove the politics and in time business will see value in "green" conservative policies.
If you want reliability, why don't you stick with the LTS releases? I know lots have been added to 9.04 and 9.10 but they are intended to be more cutting edge as a means to drive the LTS releases forward.
What exactly does the media it is "distributed" on have anything to do with GPL? As pointed out above, there is plenty of GPL'd software written for Windows and yes the license is OS agnostic as it should be. So what exactly is your point here?
If security is not part of the equation (and if they are still on IE6 then it isn't) then staying on XP seems a good choice.
As a military contractor I can tell you that we spent a fair amount of money to upgrade systems for Vista. Most if it was to allow systems to run comfortably and was based on what we were told was the minimum footprint. Some of that money wasn't really all that necessary, but the video cards had to be changed. Thats a cost that can be avoided by staying on XP. Couple that with the cost of upgrading specialized apps that depend on IE6 and it seems like staying with XP is a no brainer--at least for those who had the brains to tie their app to IE6.
if the criticism's were constructive then perhaps you should get away with calling the post a differing opinion. It is not. It is instead just another in a long line of similar derisions offered by people who see this as a competition between MS and Linux, or between closed and open source, and they've decided (or been paid) to champion closed source. These people exist for open source as well and they like their closed source cousins mostly fail to add value to the discussion.
You are correct not to use obscurity as the sole excuse. The rest of the picture is likely fewer users running in an administrative role and fewer opportunities to install something if the user isn't in that role.
Actually the real problem is that you start with "Linux sucks because" not because you are criticizing someone for Linux not being open to your specific criticism.
Understanding the depth of the issue is a big problem for Linux users, and that means it is a huge problem for anyone supporting an application or distribution. The paradigm shift necessary to offer criticism is a barrier to understanding--even amongst enthusiasts. I've seen discussions get mired in one developer not understanding the basic concerns of another for his reputation.
“I simply believe the problem is that users' requests should be driving the development. Some way has to be found to make this feasible for Linux to be successful.”
I often wonder why my experience has been so different from others and then I read things like “Here is a simple question, why on earth when I have multiple applications that need the sound card have problems sharing the sound card? Who on freaken earth thought that one out...”
To be sure, I've encountered the attitude experienced above--most of the time I was partially responsible. Thats not an excuse for the pompous twit that treated me that way--I was only asking a question about Windows version numbers.
We all know these people exist--and they exist wherever we go.
In the mid 90s there was a widespread belief among Linux people that GUIs were a bad thing. A better approach to computing was simple window management + graphical apps. The KDE movement and later Gnome changed that attitude.
No it didn't really change that attitude, it just allowed more people into the club.
X was not then what it is today and was part of the problem. Whether window management is a better approach to computing is at best questionable--it is for desktop users who don't want or need CLI power.
People do get listened to, and change does happen.
Quite to the point here is the approach that Ubuntu has brought to this argument. People would do well to note that developers are not the only people who are making changes to Linux in general these days. The days of the technician centric approach to desktop Linux are largely being pushed behind us.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of languages that have comparison operators that are different from assignment operators (IS NOT LTE for example). I think most use = for assignment. Using := like Pascal does seems odd to me. Those that do use = for both usually prefer something like "set x=1". So I'd bet "==" came out of a desire to reduce keystrokes.
"until they lost the battle by losing ownership of UNIX" Those are all the words you needed to read. You cannot loose ownership of that which you never did own. SCOs gambit was to gain ownership by bamboozling everyone. You know when one party is blowing smoke in these issues when they refuse to point to the infringing code outside of court. If the quote included is to be believed, they lost on appeal and now that they have filed yet another appeal they are suddenly going to show us all the holy grail of "infringing" code. In each case where they've brought up "infringing" code, it was either released by themselves, or was code they didn't own in the first place.
The OP sounds like a coded attempt to slander one OS because he's using the wrong tool on an install that will not support it while claiming it can be done on the other OS (assuming that you use the right tool on an install that will support it.)
Isn't that really the double standard you are referring to?
He's not being pedantic. It may or may not be true that "Every virus and trojan I've run across in the last year has carried some kind of spyware payload." The reverse of that is not true. So someone saying "OS X has little need for anti-virus software due to there being a disproportionate(?) lack of spyware" may actually be thinking spyware only comes from SPAM. People like that are less likely to adopt safe surfing practices and contribute to the spread of malware. There IS value in being accurate here.
Technically the militarization of the Internet began in the '70s: "in July 1975, the network had been turned over to the Defense Communications Agency, also part of the Department of Defense." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet#ARPANET_to_several_federal_wide_area_networks:_MILNET.2C_NSI.2C_and_NSFNet). Also technically nobody CAN own the Internet. Finally, everyone has a right to defend their part of the network. If you think it hasn't been militarized until now then you should go back to playing with your Lincoln Logs.
1. Much has changed since your last experience including a new career field and tech school. 2. Referring to folks in the military as warriors reflects a major change in how everyone is thought of/used. There is now greater focus on in field readiness. 3. No insult taken, but you should temper your cynicism with some good old up-to-date information every now and then.
It seems that a number of companies focus on long term profits as opposed to short term (like Amazon for example) so it doesn't surprise me that the last five years have not been chiefly about profit. I doubt they had their eyes on the cloud as a promising revenue stream back when they started up so the chance they are taking by adding it doesn't seem that great. I'd bet that they still have a longer view of how they could reach full profitability since they seem to have favored using their Ubuntu project to grow both the platform and the user base. That still seems to have potential payoffs deep into the future. They've gotten close but still need to grow the platform quite a bit in order to earn a large enough user base to make a difference. I know many people don't think it will happen but I would bet there is room for a third player in the OS market. So I would say a company of around 200 employees is small enough still that meager profits are sustainable for some time, as long as the vision and potential hold promise. Those aren't answers, but then my investment is only in time, and hobbies don't have to pay off.
"I'm curious as to why a company would spend a lot of money making something that other people will give away for free." You don't understand it because you look at it as if they would be giving it away for free. (Idealistically perhaps) they would be outsourcing development and maintenance for the price of having access and free use of the source code. Obviously there would be no money in giving away everything. Many FOSS projects have commercial cousins that have more "enterprise" features. Look at Canonical (http://www.canonical.com/) as one modern example. I don't intend to posit that they are wildly profitable, but that there is a path to profit using a community of developers who each have some skin in the game, as well as those who work on the code with other motivations. Companies like Canonical presumably spend less managing that community than they would if they were developing and maintaining the OS all on their own. They pay their hired developers to work on their enterprise products which sit on top of the community developed Linux distro.
FTA: "One can say quite a lot in legal filings, and get away with it, but there is a line where it becomes libel, when it is gratuitous, and that language is gratuitous." That looks like a shot across the bow. If taking these things to court would solve the problem then that is where they must go--I have my doubts. Also FTA "[...] the then-publisher apologized to me publicly, but she [Maureen O'Gara] says in the deposition she's not sorry a bit.]" This is why our public dialog is so toxic these days. PJ is the honest broker in this. She has offered criticisms of SCO, their lawyers and the case--who hasn't. But she has also posted verbatim every public document she could get a hold of. That a presumed journalist would get so nasty and feel no remorse for the drivel she wrote to try to destroy an honest broker is telling. Anyone who hires her does so with full knowledge of her character and deserves to be tarred by this episode as much as she does.
Sure but the question is more about when routers, switches and so on will be converted to USB.
The problem is that it is rarely profitable over the short term, because the cost of the energy conversion devices (turbines, solar panels, etc.) are very expensive right now. There fixed that for you. The real problem is the same one faced with any new technology/idea--only the politics and the level of understanding on how we solve the problems keeps it from achieving any velocity toward cost savings.
"Green" policies conserve so if green policies don't make good business decisions then conservative policies don't either. It is just a matter of time and value mixed in with politics. Remove the politics and in time business will see value in "green" conservative policies.
Where do you get that half at? Developers who rely on hover for content are what is broken here. Mystery meat navigation is as stupid as this excuse.
If you want reliability, why don't you stick with the LTS releases? I know lots have been added to 9.04 and 9.10 but they are intended to be more cutting edge as a means to drive the LTS releases forward.
How many software developers have a background in any sport let alone Rugby?
What exactly does the media it is "distributed" on have anything to do with GPL? As pointed out above, there is plenty of GPL'd software written for Windows and yes the license is OS agnostic as it should be. So what exactly is your point here?
If security is not part of the equation (and if they are still on IE6 then it isn't) then staying on XP seems a good choice. As a military contractor I can tell you that we spent a fair amount of money to upgrade systems for Vista. Most if it was to allow systems to run comfortably and was based on what we were told was the minimum footprint. Some of that money wasn't really all that necessary, but the video cards had to be changed. Thats a cost that can be avoided by staying on XP. Couple that with the cost of upgrading specialized apps that depend on IE6 and it seems like staying with XP is a no brainer--at least for those who had the brains to tie their app to IE6.
Better security.
if the criticism's were constructive then perhaps you should get away with calling the post a differing opinion. It is not. It is instead just another in a long line of similar derisions offered by people who see this as a competition between MS and Linux, or between closed and open source, and they've decided (or been paid) to champion closed source. These people exist for open source as well and they like their closed source cousins mostly fail to add value to the discussion.
You are correct not to use obscurity as the sole excuse. The rest of the picture is likely fewer users running in an administrative role and fewer opportunities to install something if the user isn't in that role.
He didn't say he installed in on his Mom!
Actually the real problem is that you start with "Linux sucks because" not because you are criticizing someone for Linux not being open to your specific criticism.
Understanding the depth of the issue is a big problem for Linux users, and that means it is a huge problem for anyone supporting an application or distribution. The paradigm shift necessary to offer criticism is a barrier to understanding--even amongst enthusiasts. I've seen discussions get mired in one developer not understanding the basic concerns of another for his reputation.
“I simply believe the problem is that users' requests should be driving the development. Some way has to be found to make this feasible for Linux to be successful.”
It isn't as if that isn't happening.
I often wonder why my experience has been so different from others and then I read things like “Here is a simple question, why on earth when I have multiple applications that need the sound card have problems sharing the sound card? Who on freaken earth thought that one out...”
To be sure, I've encountered the attitude experienced above--most of the time I was partially responsible. Thats not an excuse for the pompous twit that treated me that way--I was only asking a question about Windows version numbers.
We all know these people exist--and they exist wherever we go.
In the mid 90s there was a widespread belief among Linux people that GUIs were a bad thing. A better approach to computing was simple window management + graphical apps. The KDE movement and later Gnome changed that attitude.
No it didn't really change that attitude, it just allowed more people into the club.
X was not then what it is today and was part of the problem. Whether window management is a better approach to computing is at best questionable--it is for desktop users who don't want or need CLI power.
People do get listened to, and change does happen.
Quite to the point here is the approach that Ubuntu has brought to this argument. People would do well to note that developers are not the only people who are making changes to Linux in general these days. The days of the technician centric approach to desktop Linux are largely being pushed behind us.
And thats why it is hasn't changed one bit over the years. Sarcasm intended.