It will be fun watching people make asses out of themselves over this.
You only have to look at all the loony beliefs in the world to know that people will leap to the most ridiculous conclusions at the drop of a hat.
"We can identify that flying object so therefore it must be an advanced alien scout ship!" etc.
It's sad really. No doubt when the mundane reason for this story becomes clear (e.g. hoax, sensational reporting or whatever), there will be another bunch of loons accusing the Italian government of a 'coverup'.
I don't see that either of those things need be true.
1) A Windows app. It doesn't use ANY special features of Linux/Unix
So some #ifdef statements are in order? A hybrid approach is entirely feasible - Mozilla on the Mac OS X uses a Carbon front-end and a Unix backend. WP is not constrained to use Win32 exclusively and could go off and do its own thing for drag & drop and other interactions if it wanted. I'm not saying that WP does do this, just that it could.
2) Still slower than GTK+ for many things because it's abstracting the Windows API to the X11 one and has to do many things in an inefficient manner to duplicate Windows behaviors.
But GTK, QT, wxWindows and VCL (openoffice) are all abstractions too. While Win32 isn't going to be an exact fit for the X environment, most of the time it's not going to make a significant difference to performance. The biggest problem is not the API, but how optimal Wine is in its implementation. You'd have to ask a Wine guru that, but it seems to work alright to me. The biggest issue with native apps using Wine is you might be on very dodgy legal ground if you need to compile MFC / ATL on Linux to do it.
Presumably though you could build a Win32 app against the Wine libs. It would still be a native Linux application (not emulated), just that it would use the Win32 API, instead of GTK for example.
I think Bray has a good point. I think the vast majority of people who own 'modded' consoles have had them modded so they can hire a game from Blockbuster and pirate it.
But as a percentage of users, how many modded machines are there? And if you say the majority are pirating games from Blockbuster it also requires the modders possess a DVD burner and other equipment. While I'm sure such people exist I find it hard to accept that the number is anything but background noise.
While piracy is wrong etc., clearly Sony et al are prepared to accept it rather than do something constructive such as lower the price point for games. After all, a major reason that piracy exists is because games are so ludicrously expensive in the first place. Here in Ireland, a new PS/2 game cost 60 euros which is 15 more than even most PC games.
I've had MS Office in one form or another running on Windows for a number of years. When I bought a Dell in 2002 it shipped with an MS Works bundled with MS Word and some other miscellaneous MS packages.
So rather than bother getting the latest MS Office just for the spreadsheet and the occasional slideshow I started to use OpenOffice more and more. Since 1.1 I haven't hit any brick wall in terms of functionality. It really does all I need to do for my home / work requirements. It also has some brilliant features of its own such as being able to print straight to PDF which is just awesome.
I was pretty nervous of it to begin with, but now I don't know any reason to switch back to MS Office. I submit timesheets with OpenOffice, I write letters with OpenOffice. It works, it's free and MS is 450 out of pocket. Good riddance.
Besides, MS Office seems to double in disk space with each release for a barely discernable functionality improvements. I suppose someone somewhere needs whatever that bloat is there to provide but I suspect most people don't. OpenOffice takes a mere fraction of the space and provides nearly the same functionality and certainly enough for mere mortals.
Now I do have some criticisms. The first is the OpenOffice UI looks lousy. It looks like it was designed for Windows 95 and has never changed. Some of the icons are very confusing - maybe the Ximian ones should be used. And certain buttons such as the text colour / highlight dropdown buttons have a counter-unintuitive behaviour, where clicking on certain bits of the button make it popup but other parts don't. I'm assuming also that future versions will make use of theme engines that most OS's provide to ensure a native look & feel.
Secondly, the OO people must recognize that nearly all of their 'business' is ex-MS Office users. The easiest way to spread the word about OO is to offer new users an experience (toolbars, menus and keybindings) that closely resembles MS Office but for free. This would also make OO considerably easier to pick up and use and could mean the difference between OO being dismissed entirely as too difficult and the user raving about it to all his / her friends.
Finally I do miss outline mode in MS Word. Does OO have this functionality? I've searched and searched but have seen nothing like it. Now this would be a useful feature, especially for writing long documents.
Not an albatross but an incredibly short sighted and stupid company.
Witness their capitulation in tbe browser wars. Here is a company that is still using their rival's browser engine to power their content, despite developing their own engine in-house that was more than its equal. How fucking stupid can you get? I've said it before, but the decision was like entrusting your genitals to a mental patient with a pair of scissors.
They had the perfect opportunity to dump IE forever by using Gecko but instead they cast it off for some MS pocket change. Gecko had amply demonstrated that it could replace IE (in AOL for Mac OS X, Compuserve, AOL Communicator and elsewhere), it was cross platform, it was serviced by an army of volunteers and promised to tilt the market dramatically away from their leading competitor.
But apparantly that was too sensible. After all MS gave them a few hundred million from the lawsuit and promised to support IE for free for a few years. We can see how great that deal turned out, after all I can count the innovations that have gone into IE in the last three years on a single hand using the middle finger - NONE. I'm sure all requests by AOL for enhancements to IE are assigned to Top Men and then promptly ignored. The consequence of which is any money they may have saved now goes to Macromedia, Real and Microsoft to fix their shotcomings in their arcane browser engine. The situation is the same on Apple too, where they'll have to go grovelling with $$$ to Steve Case to fix Safari in some way because they've killed their own engine.
What is the point of a C which presumably has been stripped of low level control, pointers etc. to run on.NET? You don't even benefit from any speed advantage because you're running through an interpretter / JIT.
Having seen side by side comparisons of J#, C# & VB running on.NET it's hard to see why multiple languages exist at all. Any reason for using one language over another has just about disappeared. It is the same code using the same assemblies, with slightly different syntax. The language itself has become an irrelevance.
Another neat feature would be inline expansion of arguments.
At the moment if you hit TAB on the command line it will autocomplete a file name. For example if I type "more/etc/pr" and hit TAB it expands out to "more/etc/profile". But TAB doesn't help if I'm typing in other arguments.
Now imagine the TAB behaviour was smart and used the command context to that. For example, it might know that if I type "ls -" and hit TAB, that it should list the most common flags with a brief description for each. If I type "cd a" and hit TAB I want the first directory beginning with 'a' not, the first file. If I type "gpg --list" and TAB it presents me with "--list-keys", "--list-secret-keys" as possible choices, so I type "gpg --list-s" and hit TAB again and it correctly fills out it out to "--list-secret-keys". And so on.
How would it do this? Well a command could ship with command template file that says how to expand the argument the cursor is on when TAB is hit. Bash would use that template to determine what to do and if there were no template it would fall back to its default file expansion behaviour.
It would make using the shell a hell of a lot easier and more interactive than it is now.
The thing is that univeristies, libraries both expect freebies too. I'm not saying that some organisations wouldn't be prepared stump up cash, but is it enough to be profitable?
Britannica offered a free online service. It was very useful, and the articles were 1st rate but then they started to charge for it. That's understandable in some ways, but in a web where most stuff is free, who is going to fork out for something they look at once in a while? I don't know if another model would have worked, but obviously a free site (with deals with AOL, Yahoo! etc.) and banner ads might attract enough people for them to profit from advertising alone.
I haven't used the DVD version, but I assume the articles are as good. By comparison MS Encarta is a joke. It has a lot of articles but they're half the length of Britannica's at best. The atlas is good though and is probably the killer feature in the 'Deluxe' version and it's the reason I own it.
I guess the ultimate encyclopedia would combine the articles from Britannica with the atlas from Encarta.
Still, neither of them is free. Happily Wikipedia has filled that vacuum quite nicely. I'm sure some of the content is pretty dodgy (or pointless), but it does benefit from a great breadth of articles and a keen team of volunteer editors to keep it going.
That supposes that Microsoft will offer updates this time around. Even in the days of MSDOS6.22 there were plenty of ways they could have distributed updates (magazine floppies for example or Simtel CDs) but never once bothered as far as I can recall. If McAfee managed it (and remember it was small fry shareware at the time), then I'm sure a monopoly like Microsoft could have.
What's to say the situation has changed? And even if they did are we more likely to see something akin to Stinger which fixes a handful of virii but allows any 'below the radar' to molest your machine with impunity?
I wonder how long before this virus checker becomes the target of attacks itself. It happened in MS DOS, so I don't see any reason it shouldn't happen again. A crafted virus could probably lobotomize the virus checker but still give it the semblance that it is functioning correctly.
MSDOS 6 had a virus scanner and it was such a pointless, easily circumventable, obsolete, watered down piece of shit that anyone wanting a real scanner had to pay for a real product anyway.
And of course because MSDOS shipped with a broken virus scanner, it meant users got a false sense of security and plenty more viruses did the rounds despite of it.
So while it might seem that shipping a scanner is a good idea for security, in practice it will probably make the situation even worse than it is now.
... is a large sack that people can step into and tie up to their necks so they can hop around the store without all and sundry snooping on any RFIDs that might be about their person.
But seriously I doubt RSA has anyone's interest at heart here. This sounds more like a firm with a vested interest in RFID producing a sop to all those unreasonable, revenue eating objections that politicians and normal people might have about erosion of privacy, big brother, etc. After all, they have an anti RFID bag!
Something much more effective that would give stores pause for though would be a reasonably priced, pocket sized device that created a wall of static for any RFID in the vicinity. Or better yet, something that fried RFIDs in situ. I wonder how keen they'd be for the tech if the RFIDs in their goods were frazzled by persons unknown even before they reached the checkout.
That about sums up the market for Bluetooth - it's a replacement for infrared / cables and that's about it. I use it to copy tunes & pictures to my phone from my laptop and I agree it's useful. But I could easily make do without it - IR or a simple cable would do the same for barely any more effort.
It's a niche product that will eventually oust IR but it's certainly not worthy of all the hype.
And to cap it all, X is pretty much irrelevant (or at least it should be) from a desktop application's perspective. After all, if I build an app against GNOME/GTK or KDE/QT I shouldn't give a damn if its running on top of X, the framebuffer, or something else entirely. Now in practice I suppose quite a few apps are 'tainted' in some way, but it would be worthy goal now to make them completely agnostic with regard to what is several layers down.
Come the revolution we'll be glad for it.
Now obviously some people do run applications remotely, but most don't. Therefore I wonder if X (or Y) shouldn't be run rootless on top of a fast local desktop rather than drag the whole desktop down by running underneath it.
OSS software for most parts was never written with the objective to form a free alternative to propritory software.
Well that argument just about falls apart when you examine Apache, Mozilla, MySQL, OpenOffice, GNOME, KDE, xmms, Xfree86 and no doubt many more complex components that are found in modern Linux and BSDs distributions. Some of these started life as commercial products and some were clearly founded in order to offer a free alternative to commercial or licence products. For example Mozilla started off as Netscape (purged of a few 3rd party licenced parts), OpenOffice as StarOffice, XFree86 as an open source implementation of X11 and the likes of GNOME / KDE were created as something analogous and better than CDE / Motif.
In fact this even applies to many of the GNU base tools. They were made to replace / improve upon the original and commercial versions that shipped with the OS or sold for $$$$. e.g. gcc (for cc), tar, ls, bash (for sh / ksh), gzip (for compress) and so forth.
Linus never wrote the linux kernel , so that it can topple the microsoft empire, much as most of you like to belive. neither was he interested in fighting the big Unix vendors at that time. He just wanted his own version of Unix to tinker with and Minix wouldn't allow him to do just that.
And neither I suspect did he write it for philosophical OSS reasons as you imply. It seems clear it was started as a hobby to build something analogous to the (commercial) Minix. And since then it has taken off to be analogous to traditional Unix kernels. The reason Linux has been success is because it favours practicality and 'getting stuff done' over the enthusiasm dampening OSS issues that some FSF projects get bogged down in. It may be GPL but this is applied in a healthy way rather than some philosophical exercise that stamps out all of the fun. But come what may, it is a fact that large and vital chunks of the Linux kernel from 2.0.x onward were expressly written with the funding and the behest of commercial entities. Suse, Red Hat, HP, Sun, IBM, SGI, SCO and others all threw a ton of money and developers into making a kernel that runs on anything from wristwatches all the way up to mainframes.
If you want to imagine what OSS would look like without commercial interests, think of GNU/Hurd running twm and emacs. That really would be the state of it. But by then the world would be running MS boxes on the MS universal subscription net and OSS community would a few beards in their basement. So hooray for providing a free alternative to proprietary software I say.
It doesn't matter if it's only 10% of users who bother to buy the boxed set. That is still (0.10 * 150 * N) users dollars in revenue. And some people who bought the boxed set and even some who didn't would generate even more revenue by subscribing to up2date or becoming RHCEs.
Whatever the figure was, I bet it ran into millions if not tens of millions of revenue. That amounts to money for R&D, wages and so forth that no longer exists.
And where is the brand awareness with Fedora? If you have a good brand name you exploit it, rather than replace it with an obscure name. The Royal Mail (in the UK) did an equally dumb thing by replacing its universally recognized brand with Consignia (or some other dumb generated name) and a crappy logo and lost millions for its efforts.
Even if Fedora were called Red Hat Tester or something, it would still be the foot in the door for many corporate deployments - someone in IT installs it on a few machines as a stopgap for a licence shortage, it works as designed and leads to actual business when the next forced MS upgrade cycle arrives.
I really don't see that happening with Fedora. Nor do I see any chance that home enthusiasts will stump up $$$ for RH WS when there are plenty of cheaper alternatives.
Now I don't have anything against Fedora - I'm looking forward to seeing the 2.6.x release and the GUI is one of the best there is - but I do think that Red Hat have done a very, very dumb thing.
Looks like a cool project, but I don't have Linux on my laptop either:) I was kind of thinking of something like Basilisk / VMWare but that emulates the PPC instruction set / hardware. I think I'm probably dreaming - it would have the performance of a slug without having special display drivers and the like. Bochs is in a similar conundrum - the quality of emulation seems reasonable enough but the display speed is horrid.
Yeah but running on x86 means supporting all that awkward hardware that Windows, Linux have to support. Can you see Apple doing that, especially seeing as they didn't make any of it?
I can't.
And if for some bizarre reason they did port to x86 they would simultaneously enrage their army of zealots and negate any possible reason for buying a Mac in the first place.
In other words, it would be suicide. With that said, I wish someone would produce a Mac OS X emulator for PCs. I have a Mac so getting the ROMs would be no problem, but it would be handy to be able to fire it up from time from my laptop.
People who shop in upper market designer stores (i.e. assholes) think it's all about 'me! me! me!'. So they'll probably love this technology.
Their fragile egos will convince them that the staff are fawning with faux familiarty because they're just so wonderful and not because a computer says they're loaded and stupid.
Keeping a Linux box up to date over a slow link is next to impossible. It would be great if binary diffs could be produced that meant a 3 line change to XFree or wherever meant just a 100k download instead of a 40Mb one.
The binary diff would look for the existing files matching some checksum and patch them up with the changes rather than uninstalling replacing old files with substantially identical new ones.
Slashdot Mirror
You only have to look at all the loony beliefs in the world to know that people will leap to the most ridiculous conclusions at the drop of a hat.
"We can identify that flying object so therefore it must be an advanced alien scout ship!" etc.
It's sad really. No doubt when the mundane reason for this story becomes clear (e.g. hoax, sensational reporting or whatever), there will be another bunch of loons accusing the Italian government of a 'coverup'.
Or use VideoLan and never have to put up with Macrovision / regional encoding shit ever again.
1) A Windows app. It doesn't use ANY special features of Linux/Unix
So some #ifdef statements are in order? A hybrid approach is entirely feasible - Mozilla on the Mac OS X uses a Carbon front-end and a Unix backend. WP is not constrained to use Win32 exclusively and could go off and do its own thing for drag & drop and other interactions if it wanted. I'm not saying that WP does do this, just that it could.
2) Still slower than GTK+ for many things because it's abstracting the Windows API to the X11 one and has to do many things in an inefficient manner to duplicate Windows behaviors.
But GTK, QT, wxWindows and VCL (openoffice) are all abstractions too. While Win32 isn't going to be an exact fit for the X environment, most of the time it's not going to make a significant difference to performance. The biggest problem is not the API, but how optimal Wine is in its implementation. You'd have to ask a Wine guru that, but it seems to work alright to me. The biggest issue with native apps using Wine is you might be on very dodgy legal ground if you need to compile MFC / ATL on Linux to do it.
Presumably though you could build a Win32 app against the Wine libs. It would still be a native Linux application (not emulated), just that it would use the Win32 API, instead of GTK for example.
But as a percentage of users, how many modded machines are there? And if you say the majority are pirating games from Blockbuster it also requires the modders possess a DVD burner and other equipment. While I'm sure such people exist I find it hard to accept that the number is anything but background noise.
While piracy is wrong etc., clearly Sony et al are prepared to accept it rather than do something constructive such as lower the price point for games. After all, a major reason that piracy exists is because games are so ludicrously expensive in the first place. Here in Ireland, a new PS/2 game cost 60 euros which is 15 more than even most PC games.
So rather than bother getting the latest MS Office just for the spreadsheet and the occasional slideshow I started to use OpenOffice more and more. Since 1.1 I haven't hit any brick wall in terms of functionality. It really does all I need to do for my home / work requirements. It also has some brilliant features of its own such as being able to print straight to PDF which is just awesome.
I was pretty nervous of it to begin with, but now I don't know any reason to switch back to MS Office. I submit timesheets with OpenOffice, I write letters with OpenOffice. It works, it's free and MS is 450 out of pocket. Good riddance.
Besides, MS Office seems to double in disk space with each release for a barely discernable functionality improvements. I suppose someone somewhere needs whatever that bloat is there to provide but I suspect most people don't. OpenOffice takes a mere fraction of the space and provides nearly the same functionality and certainly enough for mere mortals.
Now I do have some criticisms. The first is the OpenOffice UI looks lousy. It looks like it was designed for Windows 95 and has never changed. Some of the icons are very confusing - maybe the Ximian ones should be used. And certain buttons such as the text colour / highlight dropdown buttons have a counter-unintuitive behaviour, where clicking on certain bits of the button make it popup but other parts don't. I'm assuming also that future versions will make use of theme engines that most OS's provide to ensure a native look & feel.
Secondly, the OO people must recognize that nearly all of their 'business' is ex-MS Office users. The easiest way to spread the word about OO is to offer new users an experience (toolbars, menus and keybindings) that closely resembles MS Office but for free. This would also make OO considerably easier to pick up and use and could mean the difference between OO being dismissed entirely as too difficult and the user raving about it to all his / her friends.
Finally I do miss outline mode in MS Word. Does OO have this functionality? I've searched and searched but have seen nothing like it. Now this would be a useful feature, especially for writing long documents.
Witness their capitulation in tbe browser wars. Here is a company that is still using their rival's browser engine to power their content, despite developing their own engine in-house that was more than its equal. How fucking stupid can you get? I've said it before, but the decision was like entrusting your genitals to a mental patient with a pair of scissors.
They had the perfect opportunity to dump IE forever by using Gecko but instead they cast it off for some MS pocket change. Gecko had amply demonstrated that it could replace IE (in AOL for Mac OS X, Compuserve, AOL Communicator and elsewhere), it was cross platform, it was serviced by an army of volunteers and promised to tilt the market dramatically away from their leading competitor.
But apparantly that was too sensible. After all MS gave them a few hundred million from the lawsuit and promised to support IE for free for a few years. We can see how great that deal turned out, after all I can count the innovations that have gone into IE in the last three years on a single hand using the middle finger - NONE. I'm sure all requests by AOL for enhancements to IE are assigned to Top Men and then promptly ignored. The consequence of which is any money they may have saved now goes to Macromedia, Real and Microsoft to fix their shotcomings in their arcane browser engine. The situation is the same on Apple too, where they'll have to go grovelling with $$$ to Steve Case to fix Safari in some way because they've killed their own engine.
A very stupid company.
Having seen side by side comparisons of J#, C# & VB running on
At the moment if you hit TAB on the command line it will autocomplete a file name. For example if I type "more /etc/pr" and hit TAB it expands out to "more /etc/profile". But TAB doesn't help if I'm typing in other arguments.
Now imagine the TAB behaviour was smart and used the command context to that. For example, it might know that if I type "ls -" and hit TAB, that it should list the most common flags with a brief description for each. If I type "cd a" and hit TAB I want the first directory beginning with 'a' not, the first file. If I type "gpg --list" and TAB it presents me with "--list-keys", "--list-secret-keys" as possible choices, so I type "gpg --list-s" and hit TAB again and it correctly fills out it out to "--list-secret-keys". And so on.
How would it do this? Well a command could ship with command template file that says how to expand the argument the cursor is on when TAB is hit. Bash would use that template to determine what to do and if there were no template it would fall back to its default file expansion behaviour.
It would make using the shell a hell of a lot easier and more interactive than it is now.
The thing is that univeristies, libraries both expect freebies too. I'm not saying that some organisations wouldn't be prepared stump up cash, but is it enough to be profitable?
I haven't used the DVD version, but I assume the articles are as good. By comparison MS Encarta is a joke. It has a lot of articles but they're half the length of Britannica's at best. The atlas is good though and is probably the killer feature in the 'Deluxe' version and it's the reason I own it.
I guess the ultimate encyclopedia would combine the articles from Britannica with the atlas from Encarta.
Still, neither of them is free. Happily Wikipedia has filled that vacuum quite nicely. I'm sure some of the content is pretty dodgy (or pointless), but it does benefit from a great breadth of articles and a keen team of volunteer editors to keep it going.
What's to say the situation has changed? And even if they did are we more likely to see something akin to Stinger which fixes a handful of virii but allows any 'below the radar' to molest your machine with impunity?
I wonder how long before this virus checker becomes the target of attacks itself. It happened in MS DOS, so I don't see any reason it shouldn't happen again. A crafted virus could probably lobotomize the virus checker but still give it the semblance that it is functioning correctly.
MSDOS 6 had a virus scanner and it was such a pointless, easily circumventable, obsolete, watered down piece of shit that anyone wanting a real scanner had to pay for a real product anyway.
And of course because MSDOS shipped with a broken virus scanner, it meant users got a false sense of security and plenty more viruses did the rounds despite of it.
So while it might seem that shipping a scanner is a good idea for security, in practice it will probably make the situation even worse than it is now.
But seriously I doubt RSA has anyone's interest at heart here. This sounds more like a firm with a vested interest in RFID producing a sop to all those unreasonable, revenue eating objections that politicians and normal people might have about erosion of privacy, big brother, etc. After all, they have an anti RFID bag!
Something much more effective that would give stores pause for though would be a reasonably priced, pocket sized device that created a wall of static for any RFID in the vicinity. Or better yet, something that fried RFIDs in situ. I wonder how keen they'd be for the tech if the RFIDs in their goods were frazzled by persons unknown even before they reached the checkout.
It's a niche product that will eventually oust IR but it's certainly not worthy of all the hype.
Come the revolution we'll be glad for it.
Now obviously some people do run applications remotely, but most don't. Therefore I wonder if X (or Y) shouldn't be run rootless on top of a fast local desktop rather than drag the whole desktop down by running underneath it.
Well that argument just about falls apart when you examine Apache, Mozilla, MySQL, OpenOffice, GNOME, KDE, xmms, Xfree86 and no doubt many more complex components that are found in modern Linux and BSDs distributions. Some of these started life as commercial products and some were clearly founded in order to offer a free alternative to commercial or licence products. For example Mozilla started off as Netscape (purged of a few 3rd party licenced parts), OpenOffice as StarOffice, XFree86 as an open source implementation of X11 and the likes of GNOME / KDE were created as something analogous and better than CDE / Motif.
In fact this even applies to many of the GNU base tools. They were made to replace / improve upon the original and commercial versions that shipped with the OS or sold for $$$$. e.g. gcc (for cc), tar, ls, bash (for sh / ksh), gzip (for compress) and so forth.
Linus never wrote the linux kernel , so that it can topple the microsoft empire, much as most of you like to belive. neither was he interested in fighting the big Unix vendors at that time. He just wanted his own version of Unix to tinker with and Minix wouldn't allow him to do just that.
And neither I suspect did he write it for philosophical OSS reasons as you imply. It seems clear it was started as a hobby to build something analogous to the (commercial) Minix. And since then it has taken off to be analogous to traditional Unix kernels. The reason Linux has been success is because it favours practicality and 'getting stuff done' over the enthusiasm dampening OSS issues that some FSF projects get bogged down in. It may be GPL but this is applied in a healthy way rather than some philosophical exercise that stamps out all of the fun. But come what may, it is a fact that large and vital chunks of the Linux kernel from 2.0.x onward were expressly written with the funding and the behest of commercial entities. Suse, Red Hat, HP, Sun, IBM, SGI, SCO and others all threw a ton of money and developers into making a kernel that runs on anything from wristwatches all the way up to mainframes.
If you want to imagine what OSS would look like without commercial interests, think of GNU/Hurd running twm and emacs. That really would be the state of it. But by then the world would be running MS boxes on the MS universal subscription net and OSS community would a few beards in their basement. So hooray for providing a free alternative to proprietary software I say.
The GPL has its share of vanity too - specifically the whole 'call it GNU/Linux, not Linux' nonsense.
Dildos has a nice ring to it.
Whatever the figure was, I bet it ran into millions if not tens of millions of revenue. That amounts to money for R&D, wages and so forth that no longer exists.
And where is the brand awareness with Fedora? If you have a good brand name you exploit it, rather than replace it with an obscure name. The Royal Mail (in the UK) did an equally dumb thing by replacing its universally recognized brand with Consignia (or some other dumb generated name) and a crappy logo and lost millions for its efforts.
Even if Fedora were called Red Hat Tester or something, it would still be the foot in the door for many corporate deployments - someone in IT installs it on a few machines as a stopgap for a licence shortage, it works as designed and leads to actual business when the next forced MS upgrade cycle arrives.
I really don't see that happening with Fedora. Nor do I see any chance that home enthusiasts will stump up $$$ for RH WS when there are plenty of cheaper alternatives.
Now I don't have anything against Fedora - I'm looking forward to seeing the 2.6.x release and the GUI is one of the best there is - but I do think that Red Hat have done a very, very dumb thing.
Looks like a cool project, but I don't have Linux on my laptop either :) I was kind of thinking of something like Basilisk / VMWare but that emulates the PPC instruction set / hardware. I think I'm probably dreaming - it would have the performance of a slug without having special display drivers and the like. Bochs is in a similar conundrum - the quality of emulation seems reasonable enough but the display speed is horrid.
I can't.
And if for some bizarre reason they did port to x86 they would simultaneously enrage their army of zealots and negate any possible reason for buying a Mac in the first place.
In other words, it would be suicide. With that said, I wish someone would produce a Mac OS X emulator for PCs. I have a Mac so getting the ROMs would be no problem, but it would be handy to be able to fire it up from time from my laptop.
Didn't IE build on Unix at one point (via a Win32 layer)? Could be a vestige of that.
Their fragile egos will convince them that the staff are fawning with faux familiarty because they're just so wonderful and not because a computer says they're loaded and stupid.
The binary diff would look for the existing files matching some checksum and patch them up with the changes rather than uninstalling replacing old files with substantially identical new ones.