The minimum wage in most Europe countries is double or more that of the US (e.g. 4.20 pounds in the UK), so tipping is not necessary except for exceptional instances. Strangely enough, this doesn't affect the quality of service perhaps because most people in Europe consider politeness to be something they should give and receive without needing to be paid for it.
That's not to say tipping doesn't happen, for example after a good meal, or rounding up in a taxi, but thankfully it happens nowhere near as much as in the US.
To be expected to pay an extra dollar after a round of drinks for example amounts to a hidden charge to me. Even worse are the things you can quite easily do for yourself (e.g. turn a tap on in a public lavatory) but must endure someone fawning to 'help' you for a tip.
Of the two ways, I much prefer the European way. I have an expectation of paying the price on the menu, not the considerably inflated one after various taxes and tips have been slapped on top of it. In other words prices are transparent. Some places do add a service charge, but they must state that on their menu. IMHO removing tipping from the equation actually makes friendly service more genuine and makes you feel more inclined to return to a place than a waitress putting on a fake smile for the dollars.
Yes, but if company A is on friendly terms with company B, C, D etc. then it's easy enough to build up that web of trust on a business level. And as I said, company A could go and buy themselves a sig from a proper CA if they wanted.
As I said, CAs can or could sign PGP keys, so there is no issue there. Individuals who don't care or need the bother of a worthless CA signature can do without, while business can go ahead and buy one. As for 'web of trust' being only useful for hax0rs, think again, since it would be easy enough to set up a key server in a company that issue PGP keys automatically signed (with built in expiration if need be) that bestowed trust.
The issue (and it is one) is to integrate PGP encryption into the existing certificate system, for example as an extension. I have no idea if something has done to do this already, but I don't see leading proponents such as RSA being too keen to push it.
Even if PKI were dumped or sidelined for email, it would still be a great leap forward. The format stinks and if you've ever tried to send a large attachment you'll know how painfully slow it is too.
I don't understand why OpenPGP is not being adopted here.
Individuals don't really give a damn about getting CA signature, since if you read the small print for 'personal certs' you'll see the trust bestowed by the signature is worthless anyway. So after a lot of screwing around, you end up with a cert which if you're lucky is free but otherwise costs $10, that carries no trust and expires in a year or six months anyway. Whoopee. That's even assuming you have enough of a clue to figure out how to get a cert in the first place.
OpenPGP is the perfect solution here since people can whip up a key in no time, for free and it effectively implies the same level of trustworthiness as the one from the CA which is to say none whatsoever. Over time however they can build more trust into the key by getting their friends and associates to sign it.
Now for businesses, PGP is fine too. There is nothing to stop a CA signing a PGP key, so if a company wants to buy real trust for their key, it is there to be had in the same way as you get from PKI.
Which begs the question why anyone bothers with PKI at all, or why OpenPGP is not being integrated into the x.509 standard. As it stands no email software integrates PKI seamlessly, it's too complicated, it's too slow (it uses RSA for the entire message unlike PGP), it's too hard to get a key and it offers no more trust that PGP.
But AOL is open, both by OSCAR and TOC protocols. Even if AOL shut off support in OSCAR for whatever reason, you can still fallback on the simpler protocol.
but refusing to do so hardly amounts to "fucking over" the non-MS clients
Sure it does. Up until they've been "Oh look us we're so nice while AOL is so mean" concerning access to their infrastructure. Now, that they're in a stronger position they're trying to shed those IM clients for very specious reasons which cast them in the same light as AOL.
That it's their network is understandable, but as I said, they could come to an arrangement where 3rd party IM clients can use their network in exchange for showing their ads, but will they I wonder? My opinion is they'll opine about 'security' and open source allowing ads to be circumvented and basically shut out all the open source IM clients unless they stump up a big amount of cash. This is just the thin edge of the wedge and if MS get away with it, perhaps we'll the AOL, Yahoo! etc. do the same.
As for Jabber being viable, no I do not think it is in its current form. The infrastructure is there, but the front end should be point and click - when you log into a Linux dist, it should ask you if you want to sign up for an account. There should be wizards and everything else to make the whole process idiot proof and attractive. There should be an incentive for Win32 / Mac users to use it too, which again means making it easy and loading it with neat features - perhaps the IM client could hook up to some blogging site so you can record your thoughts in realtime, or be notified of stock and news alerts, or when a new/. story appears, file sharing etc. In other words, put some innovation into the IM that makes people *want* to use it over proprietary versions.
Practically anyone who has MS Windows will use the official client, so as far as Microsoft is concerned, the remainder fall into two categories.
IM startups trying to capitalise on the MS network with their own offerings (with skins etc.), funded by their own advertising.
Open source and grassroots software running on (horrors!) non Microsoft operating systems.
The first group are making money off of Microsoft, while clearly the second group are not, although it could be said they're indirectly adding value to the likes of Red Hat Linux.
So it seems pretty obvious what MS is trying to do here. Kill the IMs and lump the open sourcers in too for good measure. Open source IM projects by definition are not likely to be able to pay, but MS does it under the guise of being fair and reasonable. It's funny that MS were the most vocal complainers when AOL told them to take a hike for pretty much the same thing.
Now, let's see how reasonable MS is prepared to be about this. If their stance is these third party apps are denying them revenue, how about suggesting that in order to use the network they must display MS adverts somewhere in the client and pay in that way? Although that would be disagreeable for open sourcers, it's better than being locked out altogether and it means you continue to benefit from their IM network even if it means a small increase of screen space.
Now, MS could turn around and say "open source allows people to remove the advert!", which is true. But even if someone produced a patch to hack the advert out, how many users would bother with it, and how many would use the one built and shipped with Red Hat, Suse etc? A few maybe, but the vast majority wouldn't be bothered as long as the ad was not obnoxious and perhaps used space that was blank anyway (e.g. the end of a toolbar). By way of comparison Netscape 7.x sticks adverts in its AIM client and the.jar files are easily modified to remove it yet how many people have bothered?
Still, I don't hold out much hope. This looks like an opening salvo for Microsoft to fuck over the Linux crowd good and proper. With that in mind, perhaps the Linux distributors, Jabber and other interested parties should get their act together and offer a viable alternative. You can bet it will still need advertising funding, but at least it wouldn't be going into Microsoft's pockets.
Yeah, I goofed on that one so thanks to all who pointed it out. Seriously I spent ages looking around and obviously didn't see the right place. On a related issue, Borland also give away (for free) a personal edition of JBuilder for Windows & Linux. It's cut down from the Enterprise edition but is surprisingly full featured and enough to knock apps together. I have to say it won me over to JBuilder.
I grabbed full copies of Oracle 9i (3 cds) last night so I'm just awaiting the opportunity to install and try them out.
Recently, I was applying for a job that needed some db skills so I thought I'd brush up on my SQL / database knowledge. My first port of call was Oracle because I thought they'd surely give out a free demo version I could play with and installation would be easy. Unfortunately I couldn't find such a beast - perhaps if you endure some sales drone they might give you one, but I wasn't ready for that.
So with some trepidation I used PostgreSQL instead. I was concerned with the setup time taking away from the time I learnt actual SQL but after a few hours of learning and tweaking I now have a spanking server running in RedHat and ODBC drivers so I can access it from Win32. I was thrown off to begin with because the 'postmaster' daemon was set to run without enabling TCP/IP support (-i option). But after I figured that out the rest was reasonably easy. I even installed a wonderful util called pgAdminIII which offers hierarchical configuration from a Windows box and was a doddle to use.
So now I have a nice DB that I can play with and pgAdmin has a nice user friendly GUI that I can type SQL in with.
What impressed me most was how *complete* support for SQL seemed to be. MySQL has a big list of gotchas but PostgreSQL seems to be aiming for completeness. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, especially if you want maximum speed but I appreciated the completeness - if something didn't work it was probably my fault! It also has a very complete and thorough manual which surprised me considering how shockingly awful most documentation is for open source.
Anyway, top marks to PostgreSQL. I have no idea if it sucks in a performance environment but it feels very slick to use on a casual basis. With what I know of it so far, I would be seriously consider using it instead of reaching for a commercial (and horribly expensive) option. I suspect for all but the most demanding applications, something like Oracle is just massive overkill.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that polish and choice are mutually exclusive.
Red Hat doesn't restrict choice. If you want to use KNotes, or Gedit, or Emacs, or XEmacs, or JOE, or Vim to pick editors as an example, then they're all there as RPMs. What it does do however is pick one or at most two of the best programs of any type to install by default. The rest are still available on the CD.
This makes the desktop cleaner and free of clutter. If you specifically want some tool then pick it during installation, but the majority people will be satisfied by what gets installed by default. You might like two or three of everything installed even if you'll only ever use one of them, but I doubt many others would. Personally I couldn't care what floppy formatter the system wished to use as long as it worked, the same for goes for other system tools.
That might not be the case if Red Hat sucked, but it doesn't. In fact, it's probably the slickest and most professional Linux around. It has faults that I don't like such as wireless configuration, but the UI is still a world apart from Mandrake's. And it's lost nothing for it.
If you knew what the fuck you were talking about, you would know that not only is it possible but Windows XP and OS X *already* do it.
Both have a theme engine, both are used by multiple GUI toolkits implemented in multiple languages. Mozilla & Java are examples of apps that use the native theme engine to render widgets in the native style, but doubtless wxWindows and QT could and possibly use them too.
Please read through again and point out where I said a single GUI toolkit.
For your benefit, I will clarify by saying KDE & GNOME should standardize around a theme engine binary interface. In other words, a dynamic lib with certain call points that render the graphical buttons, scroll bars etc. If they want to implement their own theme engines above that level then fine but a compatible API means a they can be made to share the same engine. And not only QT/GTK apps, but Java, Mozilla, and just about any other toolkit and all benefit from a consistent, unified appearance.
Existing versions of Norton require no serial number or whatever to install or to be updated. Any talk from Symantec that these 'counterfeits' wouldn't update properly is bullshit since they're straight digital copies of the original.
However, with that said it does seem odd that Symantec has no form of protection at all. Still, I doubt that even if they did add it that it would benefit consumers, unless Symantec are prepared to guarantee that all savings from this piracy are going to be passed on to the consumer. And somehow I doubt that.
No, Mozilla if 'looks like shit' it has nothing to do with its rendering since it is using the native engine. That's not to say it doesn't conform to OS X specs in other ways, but in general I like it just fine (I'm using it right now on OS X).
No it doesn't. It uses native windows for frames, but all the widgets within the frame and buttons are 'soft' - there is no native window behind them. It's much like JFC in that it regard. It uses CSS to render widgets and there are special rules that a theme can employ to to tell Moz to render an area using the native theme engine.
I have no idea what it does on Linux (it probably has various graphics to simulate the default GTK L&F), but on XP & OS X the theme engine is tied directly to the system specific implementations. This works very well on XP and OS X and means Mozilla still looks native even if you change the system theme.
I have Mandrake 9.1 running on my laptop and RH9 on my desktop. Mandrake 9.1 is a dogs breakfast by comparison. I appreciate it for other reasons, but Red Hat beats it to death for general polish and then some.
The issue is that they seem content to slap together a generic KDE with a bunch of homegrown tools and think that's enough. Consequently, you have a confusing clutter of apps in the menus with names that are Kompletely Kryptic and Konfusing, a "Mandrake Control Center" vs a "Control Center" (wtf?), duplicate apps that seem to do the same thing (e.g. two floppy disk formatters, multiple RPM management apps), a help system which offers help on KDE but not Mandrake, "Drak" tools that ask you if you want to apply the changes when you haven't done anything, and numerous other silly and slapdash faults.
By comparison, RH9 is a beautiful and simple desktop. BTW I'm not comparing the underlying KDE & GNOME here, I'm comparing the amount of effort that has gone in afterwards to clean and polish things up.
Ooops, "XP & OS X have this and it's"... why even apps like Mozilla can render themselves with a native look and feel despite not using native widgets.
It would be beneficial to both KDE & GNOME if they got together and sorted out a single standard things that both have in common.
A theme engine for rendering widgets, scrollbars etc. XP & OS X have this and it's
Icons for toolbars
Metrics
Usability guidelines
Menus and icon properties
At the end of the day, most people don't give a toss what the name of the thing running their desktop is, or why KDE is better than GNOME or vice versa. They just want a consistent desktop and a consistent set of apps running on top of it.
Of the distributions so far, Red Hat has clearly gotten the message. The RH9 desktop with bluecurve theme throughout is a wonderfully put together desktop. It's only when you contrast it with the slapdash Mandrake desktop for example that you appreciate the difference that consistency makes.
Hashing is used so you can download the same song simultaneously from multiple users. If everyone has different hash keys (e.g. by scewing with the ID tags), it defeats the point of most P2P.
I suppose that (if its possible) you would either want to swamp these guys with false positives, or distribute the hash keys and the files somehow to make it more difficult and protracted to discover who actually owns that file.
I suppose that one viable option in P2P would be a freenet model where downloading involves a number of encrypted hops between peers to search or get the data, and where peers cache popular data and indexes in encrypted form. It would be much, much harder to figure out who shared that file then.
Obviously there is a trade off going this route. You wouldn't want the sluglike performance of Freenet so it would not be as secure, but I'm sure you could reduce the number of hops and other measures and still make life massively more difficult for RIAA and their ilk to track down your activities.
Which represents a vast range of choice from hundreds if not thousands of different hardware and software vendors. Even at the CPU level, there are at least 3 or 4 chip makers that spring readily to mind, dozens of board makers and the choice gets bigger from there.
The only thing you are effectively locked into is the x86 instruction set but I doubt many people give a damn about even if you took the time to explain the alternatives and the supposed benefits of one instruction set over another.
When the kernel itself is declared "released" is irrelevant to most people. If you really want the latest and greated, you can always download whatever the current version is, whatever it's called, and use it.
Actually it's highly relevant. People (myself included to some extent) don't like running alpha/beta kernels on their everyday machines unless they have nothing of value if it all screws up. I'm sure I'll get the usual reassurances that -test1 "works fine for me" etc. but the point still stands.
Now I think it's close enough to release that I'll give it a spin myself as it has some drivers I want, but then I'm capable of building and configuring the kernel. A vast number of people are not capable or inclined to do that and are waiting for their favourite dists to ship with it.
Which comes to the second point. No distribution, be it Red Hat, Suse or even Mandrake is going to ship with a beta kernel by default. They're all waiting for 2.6.0 to be stamped and labelled, and possibly have a few more patches on top again before they'll bet the bank on it. Even if that means delaying their release, or having a 'backup plan' to ship a dual 2.4.x / 2.6.x system with support for the new kernel coming in the form of patches when it's ready. And believe me, 2.6.0 offers some extremely sexy stuff that dists and end users would dearly like, e.g. ALSA sound instead of the shitty OSS for one, but all kinds of improvements including general responsiveness tweaks. But only when its officially ready.
So the new kernel getting to 2.6.0 (and deserving that moniker because it is now production quality) is extremely relevant to lots of people. That doesn't stop people from diving in when they feel comfortable, but the tidal wave is not going to happen until 2.6.0 goes final.
Oh I'm sure it mentions him somewhere in the bit debunking another bunch of wackos who believe that Planet X was due to go past the earth a few months back. Needless to say it didn't!
It has to be said that Velikovsky was so completely wrong that it's a wonder anyone can quote him and keep a straight face!
Click here to see how much gravitational effect Mars will have. Basically, a neglible amount.
I bet that won't stop the wackos getting worked up into a lather. After all, astrologers and their ilk have never let facts, figures or even reality get in the way before now, so it's doubtful they'll start any time soon.
Weren't MSN whining about AOL banning them when they needed the subscribers? But now they have millions of subscribers, it's apparantly alright to ban others.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not to say tipping doesn't happen, for example after a good meal, or rounding up in a taxi, but thankfully it happens nowhere near as much as in the US.
To be expected to pay an extra dollar after a round of drinks for example amounts to a hidden charge to me. Even worse are the things you can quite easily do for yourself (e.g. turn a tap on in a public lavatory) but must endure someone fawning to 'help' you for a tip.
Of the two ways, I much prefer the European way. I have an expectation of paying the price on the menu, not the considerably inflated one after various taxes and tips have been slapped on top of it. In other words prices are transparent. Some places do add a service charge, but they must state that on their menu. IMHO removing tipping from the equation actually makes friendly service more genuine and makes you feel more inclined to return to a place than a waitress putting on a fake smile for the dollars.
Yes, but if company A is on friendly terms with company B, C, D etc. then it's easy enough to build up that web of trust on a business level. And as I said, company A could go and buy themselves a sig from a proper CA if they wanted.
The issue (and it is one) is to integrate PGP encryption into the existing certificate system, for example as an extension. I have no idea if something has done to do this already, but I don't see leading proponents such as RSA being too keen to push it.
Even if PKI were dumped or sidelined for email, it would still be a great leap forward. The format stinks and if you've ever tried to send a large attachment you'll know how painfully slow it is too.
Individuals don't really give a damn about getting CA signature, since if you read the small print for 'personal certs' you'll see the trust bestowed by the signature is worthless anyway. So after a lot of screwing around, you end up with a cert which if you're lucky is free but otherwise costs $10, that carries no trust and expires in a year or six months anyway. Whoopee. That's even assuming you have enough of a clue to figure out how to get a cert in the first place.
OpenPGP is the perfect solution here since people can whip up a key in no time, for free and it effectively implies the same level of trustworthiness as the one from the CA which is to say none whatsoever. Over time however they can build more trust into the key by getting their friends and associates to sign it.
Now for businesses, PGP is fine too. There is nothing to stop a CA signing a PGP key, so if a company wants to buy real trust for their key, it is there to be had in the same way as you get from PKI.
Which begs the question why anyone bothers with PKI at all, or why OpenPGP is not being integrated into the x.509 standard. As it stands no email software integrates PKI seamlessly, it's too complicated, it's too slow (it uses RSA for the entire message unlike PGP), it's too hard to get a key and it offers no more trust that PGP.
It seems to be somewhat of a lame duck really.
But AOL is open, both by OSCAR and TOC protocols. Even if AOL shut off support in OSCAR for whatever reason, you can still fallback on the simpler protocol.
Sure it does. Up until they've been "Oh look us we're so nice while AOL is so mean" concerning access to their infrastructure. Now, that they're in a stronger position they're trying to shed those IM clients for very specious reasons which cast them in the same light as AOL.
That it's their network is understandable, but as I said, they could come to an arrangement where 3rd party IM clients can use their network in exchange for showing their ads, but will they I wonder? My opinion is they'll opine about 'security' and open source allowing ads to be circumvented and basically shut out all the open source IM clients unless they stump up a big amount of cash. This is just the thin edge of the wedge and if MS get away with it, perhaps we'll the AOL, Yahoo! etc. do the same.
As for Jabber being viable, no I do not think it is in its current form. The infrastructure is there, but the front end should be point and click - when you log into a Linux dist, it should ask you if you want to sign up for an account. There should be wizards and everything else to make the whole process idiot proof and attractive. There should be an incentive for Win32 / Mac users to use it too, which again means making it easy and loading it with neat features - perhaps the IM client could hook up to some blogging site so you can record your thoughts in realtime, or be notified of stock and news alerts, or when a new
The first group are making money off of Microsoft, while clearly the second group are not, although it could be said they're indirectly adding value to the likes of Red Hat Linux.
So it seems pretty obvious what MS is trying to do here. Kill the IMs and lump the open sourcers in too for good measure. Open source IM projects by definition are not likely to be able to pay, but MS does it under the guise of being fair and reasonable. It's funny that MS were the most vocal complainers when AOL told them to take a hike for pretty much the same thing.
Now, let's see how reasonable MS is prepared to be about this. If their stance is these third party apps are denying them revenue, how about suggesting that in order to use the network they must display MS adverts somewhere in the client and pay in that way? Although that would be disagreeable for open sourcers, it's better than being locked out altogether and it means you continue to benefit from their IM network even if it means a small increase of screen space.
Now, MS could turn around and say "open source allows people to remove the advert!", which is true. But even if someone produced a patch to hack the advert out, how many users would bother with it, and how many would use the one built and shipped with Red Hat, Suse etc? A few maybe, but the vast majority wouldn't be bothered as long as the ad was not obnoxious and perhaps used space that was blank anyway (e.g. the end of a toolbar). By way of comparison Netscape 7.x sticks adverts in its AIM client and the
Still, I don't hold out much hope. This looks like an opening salvo for Microsoft to fuck over the Linux crowd good and proper. With that in mind, perhaps the Linux distributors, Jabber and other interested parties should get their act together and offer a viable alternative. You can bet it will still need advertising funding, but at least it wouldn't be going into Microsoft's pockets.
I grabbed full copies of Oracle 9i (3 cds) last night so I'm just awaiting the opportunity to install and try them out.
Still, I guess I learned a lot from going with PostgreSQL so I'm not too upset.
So with some trepidation I used PostgreSQL instead. I was concerned with the setup time taking away from the time I learnt actual SQL but after a few hours of learning and tweaking I now have a spanking server running in RedHat and ODBC drivers so I can access it from Win32. I was thrown off to begin with because the 'postmaster' daemon was set to run without enabling TCP/IP support (-i option). But after I figured that out the rest was reasonably easy. I even installed a wonderful util called pgAdminIII which offers hierarchical configuration from a Windows box and was a doddle to use.
So now I have a nice DB that I can play with and pgAdmin has a nice user friendly GUI that I can type SQL in with.
What impressed me most was how *complete* support for SQL seemed to be. MySQL has a big list of gotchas but PostgreSQL seems to be aiming for completeness. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, especially if you want maximum speed but I appreciated the completeness - if something didn't work it was probably my fault! It also has a very complete and thorough manual which surprised me considering how shockingly awful most documentation is for open source.
Anyway, top marks to PostgreSQL. I have no idea if it sucks in a performance environment but it feels very slick to use on a casual basis. With what I know of it so far, I would be seriously consider using it instead of reaching for a commercial (and horribly expensive) option. I suspect for all but the most demanding applications, something like Oracle is just massive overkill.
Red Hat doesn't restrict choice. If you want to use KNotes, or Gedit, or Emacs, or XEmacs, or JOE, or Vim to pick editors as an example, then they're all there as RPMs. What it does do however is pick one or at most two of the best programs of any type to install by default. The rest are still available on the CD.
This makes the desktop cleaner and free of clutter. If you specifically want some tool then pick it during installation, but the majority people will be satisfied by what gets installed by default. You might like two or three of everything installed even if you'll only ever use one of them, but I doubt many others would. Personally I couldn't care what floppy formatter the system wished to use as long as it worked, the same for goes for other system tools.
That might not be the case if Red Hat sucked, but it doesn't. In fact, it's probably the slickest and most professional Linux around. It has faults that I don't like such as wireless configuration, but the UI is still a world apart from Mandrake's. And it's lost nothing for it.
Both have a theme engine, both are used by multiple GUI toolkits implemented in multiple languages. Mozilla & Java are examples of apps that use the native theme engine to render widgets in the native style, but doubtless wxWindows and QT could and possibly use them too.
For your benefit, I will clarify by saying KDE & GNOME should standardize around a theme engine binary interface. In other words, a dynamic lib with certain call points that render the graphical buttons, scroll bars etc. If they want to implement their own theme engines above that level then fine but a compatible API means a they can be made to share the same engine. And not only QT/GTK apps, but Java, Mozilla, and just about any other toolkit and all benefit from a consistent, unified appearance.
However, with that said it does seem odd that Symantec has no form of protection at all. Still, I doubt that even if they did add it that it would benefit consumers, unless Symantec are prepared to guarantee that all savings from this piracy are going to be passed on to the consumer. And somehow I doubt that.
No, Mozilla if 'looks like shit' it has nothing to do with its rendering since it is using the native engine. That's not to say it doesn't conform to OS X specs in other ways, but in general I like it just fine (I'm using it right now on OS X).
I have no idea what it does on Linux (it probably has various graphics to simulate the default GTK L&F), but on XP & OS X the theme engine is tied directly to the system specific implementations. This works very well on XP and OS X and means Mozilla still looks native even if you change the system theme.
The issue is that they seem content to slap together a generic KDE with a bunch of homegrown tools and think that's enough. Consequently, you have a confusing clutter of apps in the menus with names that are Kompletely Kryptic and Konfusing, a "Mandrake Control Center" vs a "Control Center" (wtf?), duplicate apps that seem to do the same thing (e.g. two floppy disk formatters, multiple RPM management apps), a help system which offers help on KDE but not Mandrake, "Drak" tools that ask you if you want to apply the changes when you haven't done anything, and numerous other silly and slapdash faults.
By comparison, RH9 is a beautiful and simple desktop. BTW I'm not comparing the underlying KDE & GNOME here, I'm comparing the amount of effort that has gone in afterwards to clean and polish things up.
Ooops, "XP & OS X have this and it's"... why even apps like Mozilla can render themselves with a native look and feel despite not using native widgets.
At the end of the day, most people don't give a toss what the name of the thing running their desktop is, or why KDE is better than GNOME or vice versa. They just want a consistent desktop and a consistent set of apps running on top of it.
Of the distributions so far, Red Hat has clearly gotten the message. The RH9 desktop with bluecurve theme throughout is a wonderfully put together desktop. It's only when you contrast it with the slapdash Mandrake desktop for example that you appreciate the difference that consistency makes.
I suppose that (if its possible) you would either want to swamp these guys with false positives, or distribute the hash keys and the files somehow to make it more difficult and protracted to discover who actually owns that file.
I suppose that one viable option in P2P would be a freenet model where downloading involves a number of encrypted hops between peers to search or get the data, and where peers cache popular data and indexes in encrypted form. It would be much, much harder to figure out who shared that file then.
Obviously there is a trade off going this route. You wouldn't want the sluglike performance of Freenet so it would not be as secure, but I'm sure you could reduce the number of hops and other measures and still make life massively more difficult for RIAA and their ilk to track down your activities.
The only thing you are effectively locked into is the x86 instruction set but I doubt many people give a damn about even if you took the time to explain the alternatives and the supposed benefits of one instruction set over another.
Actually it's highly relevant. People (myself included to some extent) don't like running alpha/beta kernels on their everyday machines unless they have nothing of value if it all screws up. I'm sure I'll get the usual reassurances that -test1 "works fine for me" etc. but the point still stands.
Now I think it's close enough to release that I'll give it a spin myself as it has some drivers I want, but then I'm capable of building and configuring the kernel. A vast number of people are not capable or inclined to do that and are waiting for their favourite dists to ship with it.
Which comes to the second point. No distribution, be it Red Hat, Suse or even Mandrake is going to ship with a beta kernel by default. They're all waiting for 2.6.0 to be stamped and labelled, and possibly have a few more patches on top again before they'll bet the bank on it. Even if that means delaying their release, or having a 'backup plan' to ship a dual 2.4.x / 2.6.x system with support for the new kernel coming in the form of patches when it's ready. And believe me, 2.6.0 offers some extremely sexy stuff that dists and end users would dearly like, e.g. ALSA sound instead of the shitty OSS for one, but all kinds of improvements including general responsiveness tweaks. But only when its officially ready.
So the new kernel getting to 2.6.0 (and deserving that moniker because it is now production quality) is extremely relevant to lots of people. That doesn't stop people from diving in when they feel comfortable, but the tidal wave is not going to happen until 2.6.0 goes final.
It has to be said that Velikovsky was so completely wrong that it's a wonder anyone can quote him and keep a straight face!
I bet that won't stop the wackos getting worked up into a lather. After all, astrologers and their ilk have never let facts, figures or even reality get in the way before now, so it's doubtful they'll start any time soon.
Weren't MSN whining about AOL banning them when they needed the subscribers? But now they have millions of subscribers, it's apparantly alright to ban others.