Guess what: believe it or not, I agree with you. I've been saying this for years (albeit to a nonexistent audience) - Linux needs to learn the lesson of original Mac OS. And now that GConf is maturing, I also think that, eventually, the entire/etc directory should be merged into a gconf config file, and gconf moved to the kernel. Isn't it ironic that Mac OS 9 had a cleaner filesystem layout than Mac OS X? I guess NeXT isn't perfect after all.:D
What's really going to help is the Hurd's shadowfs. That way, filesystems can be transparently mounted on top of each other. You could mount a cdrom drive, and in/bin the entire OpenOffice tree would appear; you couldn't tell that it wasn't local. That will finally remove the only justification for the existing directory structure.
I'm quite adept with Linux in terms of administration; but unfortunately, I'm not a programmer. So what would be involved in creating a Linux distro based on this model? I can make the model just fine, but then what would I do with it? I think there would be more involved than just moving stuff around.
If you want, you can email me at wa 1e r@ at tb i. co m .
What do SuSE, Caldera, Conectiva, and TurboLinux have in common? Simple; those four distros are practically the only ones that continue to try to make a profit, and consistently fail. RedHat is profitable, and Mandrake is getting closer every day; Debian, Gentoo, and myriad others are noncommercial distros that have no profit incentive. But SuSE, Caldera, Conectiva, and TurboLinux all want to be the next RedHat, and outside of very small markets, they all failed.
SuSE is RedHat's biggest competitor in Europe, and has the greatest marketshare in Germany. Caldera was formerly RedHat's biggest competitor in the US (until Mandrake came along). Conectiva is RedHat's biggest competitor in Latin America. TurboLinux is RedHat's biggest competitor in Japan.
So, these four distros realized that in every market, there was generally three corporate competitors: RedHat, Mandrake, and one of them. They decided to merge, so that there would be a common distro with worldwide marketshare; but kept the companies separate, so that they could leverage their brand in each market - would Latin Americans suddenly buy a copy of SuSE? As it is, they might fully merge someday, if/when the UnitedLinux brand becomes stronger.
Mandrake knew that they were a strong competitor throughout a very large geographical area; as they said in this statement, their worldwide marketshare is larger than the four UnitedLinux companies combined. Mandrake would have nothing to gain if they had to pool their resources with four companies who are much weaker then they are, and declining all the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if UnitedLinux ends up in a full corporate merger, and later the whole thing goes bankrupt; after reading Mandrake's statement, I get the feeling that they wouldn't be either.
The largest cellular phone company in the US is Verizon. It is owned in part by various companies, but mostly by Vodafone Group (UK), which is the largest cellular company in the world, bigger even than NTT DoCoMo. Vodafone's wireless companies use GSM exclusively... except for its holdings in the US, Mexico, and China, where it uses CDMA. Sprint PCS is the other CDMA company in the US, probably soon to be bought out by Verizon.
VoiceStream/T-Mobile is the largest GSM-exclusive company in the US, though it also has the smallest marketshare of the six national providers. It has GSM in almost all major markets, California being a notable exception. To make matters worse, in the US, we use GSM 1900, incompatible with the rest of the world; one of the best features that GSM could advertise, "Free world roaming, one phone #", therefore doesn't work quite so well.
The second largest cellular phone company in the US is Cingular. SBC has a controlling stake in the company, and BellSouth owns the rest. Unlike Verizon, therefore, the entire company is American. In most markets, Cingular uses TDMA; that's as much digital (pardon my analogies) as Windows 95 is 32-bit. But GSM is available nationally. Any market where VoiceStream doesn't have a network, Cingular does.
Cingular is gradually converting its entire network to GSM, and will hopefully be providing all new customers with GSM by, IIRC, January 2003. Also, Cingular convinced VoiceStream to enter into a European-style shared network agreement, so that VoiceStream could provide service in California/Nevada, and Cingular could provide service in NYC/Northern New Jersey, without building any new towers.
There's also AT&T Wireless; there is a rumor that ATTWS will soon buy Cingular, and keep its 100%-GSM strategy for the new company, and all evidence (mainly financial) suggests that the rumor is true. And finally, there's Nextel. It uses a custom technology (iDEN) and caters to business users who use their cellphone enough to warrant a $150/mo plan and want to-the-second billing. It is essentially a niche carrier, with very loyal customers, and as many of those customers travel the world, it may soon switch to GSM itself.
Vodafone has repeatedly pressured Verizon to switch to GSM; its efforts have been unsuccessful so far.
So much for Europe coming in and making things better.
The reason the G4 has reached 700MHz is because Apple, feeling megahertz-envy, decided to jack up the G4's pipeline. The original G4 was only 4-stage, and could therefore get no faster than 500 MHz at a reasonable price. The new one has a 7-stage pipeline, allowing for faster clockspeed but not much better performance.
Graphics? Just as good as Sun's for most purposes; and if you're buying a computer to play games made by Microsoft and Vivendi, then you might as well just sell out and use Palladium. CD-RW? The Sun lacks, but $100 will buy you a Plextor, much faster than the Mac's, that you can throw in. 1394, USB, 802.11b? Present on the Sun, or if not easily expandable via PCI. Monitor? If CRTs are your thing, fine, but I want an LCD, which I can buy for the Sun for $350. Lots of 3rd party apps? More for Solaris.
But that's not the point. After all, for only $1600, you can get a computer that's truly competitive with the Sun, in the form of a tower G4. With its 40GB HD, CD-RW, and 256MB of memory, making the Sun up to spec would make their prices match.
More importantly is the company itself. Apple has staked its future on OS X; FreeBSD-based at the core, but proprietary all the way up. Sun, on the other hand, has essentially staked their future on open source. They have put an unprecedented amount of work into Linux and Linux software. In the end, if Linux users bolted to another platform, which company would I trust more to support us and give us the products we want? Sun, by a mile.
There's a computer available, that doesn't use AMD or Intel products, so it's immune from Palladium.
It's got a 500MHz processor, PGX64 graphics accelerator, 128MB of memory, a 20 GB 7200 HD, Ethernet, floppy, 48X CD, smart card reader, and... Solaris 8 Pre-loaded? All for $995. (Yes, that's a SPARC processor).
To me, it looks perfect. We get a high-speed 64-bit RISC processor, really the only RISC architecture that hasn't morphed into Itanium (poor Alpha); we get reasonable basic specs, and just about everything short of the proc/mobo can be upgraded with standard parts from Pricewatch; and finally, because Freedom is of the utmost concern, any version of Debian that you can run on x86, you can run just as well on Sparc.
And if that isn't enough, if you absolutely *need* to run Windows applications for some reason, in addition to using Bochs, there's another option. If you don't mind keeping Solaris on your computer alongside Linux, you can even buy a $500 PC-within-a-PC card, with a 733-MHz non-Intel x86 processor; because it lets you run Windows and Solaris apps side-by-side, it's essentially a perfect cross between VMware and Wine.
Don't know about you, but my next computer's a Sun.
I do wonder what Microsoft would think if large numbers of people did this. On the one hand, they might love it; if all the Linux users bolt to SPARC, then Microsoft is left with 99.999% control of their platform, complete control for computer built in the last 3 years, and the power to make hardware manufacturers do whatever they say. On the other hand, it means that their Windows-is-better-than-Linux arguments now have to account for the fact that Linux is running Sparc, and it becomes that much harder to get Linux users to switch back.:D
And for us, it means that the ugliest and slowest port of Linux, that for x86, is all but gone; and most time will be spent developing one of the cleanest, SPARC.
Cingular is not the world's best phone company. Nevertheless, they offer, for $30, a national plan (no roaming within the US, not even in Alaska or Hawaii) that has 250 included minutes and 1000 night/weekend minutes.
For $40, they offer a similar plan with 500 included minutes, and 3500 night/weekend minutes.
Plans with approximately the same price with slightly more minutes are available that are local-only, but which let you buy a plan, for $7/mo, that changes peak hours from 7PM to 7AM instead of the otherwise-standard 9-7.
These two plans are for GSM phones, in my opinion the best you can get right now. In other regions, Cingular offers similar plans for TDMA phones, soon to be upgraded to GSM.
Now, maybe 3500 minutes, or 1000 in your price range, isn't unlimited. But... 1000 minutes is 16 2/3 hours, and 3500 is 58 1/3. If anyone thinks 16 2/3 hours isn't enough, they can get rid of their landline. And if anyone thinks 58 1/3 hours, or about as much time as the average person *sleeps* in a week, isn't enough time... they need help.
What about Linux Company #2, the only one with a development lab comparable to RedHat - SuSE?
Search on the Internet. No matter how hard you look, you won't be able to find a downloadable current-version SuSE ISO. You can't buy one off Cheapbytes, either. The best you can do is download 7.2, two versions behind the current 8.0; or download an FTP bootdisk, something that only Linux experts will do and that doesn't work anyway if you have no net connection.
So if you want a copy of SuSE on CD, you have no choice but to buy a box set. Which generates income to pay programmers.
Open source isn't a business model period, so you can't say whether or not it's a viable one. It's simply a software development technology. You can have software libre that's not gratis, and make a company around it; essentially, Microsoft with far better corporate ethics and the GPL. That's a business model, and it works.
Is it really international? Do they have mirroring servers on both sides of the Atlantic; are they legally in the jurisdiction of both the United States and the European Union?
I'm completely in favor of having ip6.co.uk, or ip6.fr, or ip6.eu, or all three, in addition to ip6.us. I just don't think that a site subject to the legal jurisdiction of one country should be considered an "international" site.
Even these organizations are always headquartered in one country or another. Their websites are in English, so assuming their servers are located in the US, ip6.int and nato.int can move to ip6.org.us and nato.org.us.
Other countries can set up mirrors, so you could have nato.org.us in addition to nato.org.de, for example. Somebody living in Germany, a NATO country, would want a German version anyway.
ICANN is completely unnecessary. There's only one reform we need to make to the domain-name system, and then it never needs to be changed again.
Eliminate all TLDs except those for country codes.
There is no such thing as a global web site. Every website is headquartered somewhere. The BBC's website is www.bbc.co.uk. The Toronto Globe and Mail's website is www.globeandmail.ca Only the United States, by default really, has no strong country-code, so US websites are run at.com,.org,.net,.edu,.gov, and.mil.
ICANN's reform proposal only needs to accomplish three things. First, provide for the immediate migration of.com, etc. to.com.us, etc. Second, allow any.com domain created before 1 January 2003 under the old system to redirect to the new.com.us domain. Third and finally, provide for the dissolution of ICANN as of 1 January 2003, though it can stay around in a limited form to handle redirects until 1 January 2005 (after which all.com, etc. domains will stop working).
The only three-letter TLD not owned by the US is.int. And there's really only two groups that would use.int; the UN, and the EU. Both of those groups can be given country codes of their own. The new domains, including.museum and (chicken).coop, are useless anyway should be scrapped along with the other 6.
All of ICANN's old responsibilities can then be transferred to the owners of the country-code domains.
Want FreeBSD? Get it from the FreeBSD website. That's the only distro there is. Sure, people make modified distros for special use - Microsoft probably isn't using the stock distro for their Hotmail servers - but in general, all the distros are based on the same core.
The GNU/HURD kernel is supposed to be released Real Soon Now (maybe in the next 5 years, then). So whenever it is released, that means that GNU will, for the first time, offer a complete self-distributed GNU System. Undoubtedly, it will be based on Debian; so, quite possibly, when the Hurd is released, GNU might merge with Debian.
Once that happens, there will finally be a standard GNU System, and all vendors can standardize on it.RedHat can distribute a version that comes with extensive support and pre-loaded database software. Mandrake can distribute a version that by default installs 10x too much programs. Conectiva can distribute a version that by default is in Spanish/Portuguese. Even Gentoo can distribute a version that by default uses all source-debs instead of the standard binary ones.
And all of those distributions will support the same apt-get, have the same version of libraries, and put files in the same places.
Question: before I wrote this comment, how old did you think I was and where did you think I was from?
[Probably] needless to say, I'm also a teen living in the US, and I knew very well that my generalizations were incorrect. That's my point. Children do have rights, and it's absurd to say that they don't, or shouldn't. But that doesn't stop far too many people from thinking that people are evenly divided into the two categories of child and adult, and from thinking both that all children are equally immature and that all adults are equally mature.
They're not, of course; a certain 12-year-old might be able to make a far better informed decision about voting than a certain 30-year-old. That difference in maturity rate should be enshrined in law; better to err on the side of too many rights than on the side of too few.
What a sad day we live in, when American children are considered to have no rights. Are their brains surgically removed on their 18th birthday and replaced with adult ones? Are they locked in their houses, allowed to leave only to go to school; exposed to no TV programmes but "Teletubbies", no music but classical/gospel/Christian rock, no magazines but Weekly Reader, and no web sites but Disney?
Bush recently entered in a coalition with Iran, other fundamentalist Islamic nations, and the Vatican to oppose a treaty to protect children, arguing that "children have no rights" and that the treaty "promotes abortion" (it does, but what's wrong with that?) The US has a higher teen pregnancy rate than all developed countries and some developing ones; even China banned executing people for crimes they committed before the age of 18, but Texas and other states continue to do that.
How ironic it is, really, that American children are considered to have no rights, except the right to die. They're too "innocent" to have sexuality education, too "ignorant" to vote, but they're perfectly capable of committing a crime and getting tried as an adult.
A country that doesn't give all its citizens rights, including children, is not a free country.
First, no one's forcing you to watch the show. It simply appears as an option on the menu. You can ignore it as you wish. It's far less intrusive than the average banner ad; and ads don't stop you from viewing Slashdot. It's even less intrusive than Google text ads!
Second, the extra space on the Tivo was not something that you knew about when you bought it, and it did not affect your purchase of the Tivo in the least. When you buy one, you know that it's a sealed box. If someone wants to make a PVR libre, I'd be glad, but Tivo reserving a very small amount of space is completely normal for a corporation.
Finally, a number of people think it's bad that the program had "bad language" but that it overrode "parental controls". Talk about control. What gives you the right to decide what your children can watch? Tivo has a program downloaded to your box... but it doesn't override your schedule... but it doesn't record if you ask it not to... but it doesn't force you to watch it... but it doesn't take up any space... And you're outraged! But your children are being explicitly denied the right to watch a TV show, solely because it has some "bad language" (which isn't bad - would you rather your kids fist- or gun-fighting than swearing?), is completely fine. Listen to yourselves!
Well, I'm a bit more political than the average Slashdot reader. In addition to being a ultra-lefty (in contrast with most Slashdotters' libertarian views), I would, and do, boycott all Disney products because of the company's immorality, and assuming this new game isn't a joke, I'll be boycotting Square too.
Slashdot users seem to care more about the product than the politics. And that's fine, and I respect that, but in that case Slashdot isn't the forum for me.
One day, Slashdot publishes a story about the CBDTPA, saying how horrible it was, and how they hope that Senator Hollings gets voted out.
The next day, Slashdot publishes a story about a collaboration between Square and Disney, with Square everything except a Disney sense of humor and characters from both.
Now, I'm willing to give Taco the benefit of the doubt. Maybe both Disney and Square are in bed with Hollings, so it makes sense that they're working together. However, he then says, "Very positive review. Gotta admit, I'm intrigued." Aside from the fact that any game with a "Disney sense of humor" and Donald Duck as the court's chief magician is bound to suck, Taco is endorsing the very company who bought a senator to make a law to outlaw open-source!
<sarcasm>Maybe the CBDTPA isn't that bad after all. You won't have your PS2 Linux kit, or Linux anywhere for that matter, but you'll have all the Square-Disney collaborations you could ever want!</sarcasm>
Slashdot is "News for nerds, stuff that matters", right? Well, you're faced with a "difficult" decision. Which matters more: Linux or Disney?
Where's the "if" come from? Absolutely they should sue for damages (I mean, if they can afford to countersue, of course).
Where's the if come from, you say? I think you just answered your own question.
Yes, it's sad that the government wastes money on frivolous lawsuits, and the only companies who can countersue are the ones who actually committed illegal acts (tobacco in the US with advertising-to-minors, for example). Unfortunately, I think the only way to stop that is by voting the offending people out of office.
Of course I knew that "real soon now" means "within the next 5 years". That's why I put it in quotes. Still, whenever it happens, this could apply.
The completion of Hurd means not only that you can build a complete Unix-like distribution from only GNU, but that you'll be able to download it from the GNU website. If it turns out to be good software, then it will eventually establish a large userbase, the same way Linux did. Companies might ignore GNU because they don't have control over the distribution, but that hasn't stopped Yahoo and others from using FreeBSD on their servers. Or companies might ignore GNU because of the license and lack of non-free software, but nothing would stop a company from making an internal distribution with their own non-free software, and I'd rather see a company that wanted to use non-free software stay away from GNU anyway. Comparing a GNU with marginal marketshare that runs entirely on software libre with a GNU with huge marketshare that relies on closed software, such as Netscape or Motif, I'd rather the former.
No Linux company has been successful at the desktop yet, because most consumers don't care about software libre. They'd want software gratis, but when Windows is preloaded on any computer they buy, it's just as good (for them) as if Windows was free. When companies like Wal-Mart start selling computers without operating systems, or when Windows becomes so hard to use (or so invasive, i.e. WPA and worse) that consumers don't want to use it anymore, then they'll start buying the cheapest OS they can find on the shelf. In Wal-Mart, that's Mandrake.
Duplication of work isn't a problem for non-graphical apps. However, what about GNOME/KDE, and office productivity programs? There's two different desktops, multiple different word processors, and every distribution (besides Lycoris) comes with more than one. If GNOME and KDE (and Gnome Office and KOffice) could merge, then desktop Linux would be better off. If there's a standard GNU distribution, with only one desktop in it, then I think there would be an incentive for developers on the other project (probably KDE, but you never know) to try to adapt their code to work with both desktops, or to switch entirely.
OSNews recently ran a story in which Stallman claimed that the GNU system, with the HURD kernel, would be released "real soon now". What does this have to do with Linux? Well, if you can get a version of GNU directly from the GNU project, with the Debian package manager, then there's no longer a need for other workstation distributions. Just like there's only one version of FreeBSD, there will be only one version of GNU. Therefore, any Linux companies can focus on the desktop, so duplication of effort is avoided, and more actual coding gets accomplished. If GNU/Debian corners the high-end market, then SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, et al. can theoretically work together to focus exclusively on the desktop market.
Cable and DSL are technologies that are both dead and very much alive, depending on how you look at them. They're alive in the sense that there's no faster way for a home user to get an Internet connection (aside from business-priced lines, i.e. T3s and optical), but dead in the sense that there's far faster technologies available, like Ethernet, that work just as well for the last mile. The problem is, there is no Ethernet last mile.
So, towns, counties, and/or states should start investing in last-mile Ethernet, and let the ISPs provide service over the lines. That way, everyone can choose between any of the ISPs in America, instead of only choosing between their monopoly telco and monopoly cable company. I'd certainly pay $50 a month for municipal Ethernet, especially considering ATTBI just raised my rate to $45.95.
If you can convince the other person to move to the Netherlands instead of yourself moving to the USA, then this is a nonissue, with the added benefit that you don't have to worry about the DMCA, UCITA, SSSCA, or ATA (or illegality of DeCSS either).
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what: believe it or not, I agree with you. I've been saying this for years (albeit to a nonexistent audience) - Linux needs to learn the lesson of original Mac OS. And now that GConf is maturing, I also think that, eventually, the entire /etc directory should be merged into a gconf config file, and gconf moved to the kernel. Isn't it ironic that Mac OS 9 had a cleaner filesystem layout than Mac OS X? I guess NeXT isn't perfect after all. :D
/bin the entire OpenOffice tree would appear; you couldn't tell that it wasn't local. That will finally remove the only justification for the existing directory structure.
What's really going to help is the Hurd's shadowfs. That way, filesystems can be transparently mounted on top of each other. You could mount a cdrom drive, and in
I'm quite adept with Linux in terms of administration; but unfortunately, I'm not a programmer. So what would be involved in creating a Linux distro based on this model? I can make the model just fine, but then what would I do with it? I think there would be more involved than just moving stuff around.
If you want, you can email me at wa 1e r@ at tb i. co m .
What do SuSE, Caldera, Conectiva, and TurboLinux have in common? Simple; those four distros are practically the only ones that continue to try to make a profit, and consistently fail. RedHat is profitable, and Mandrake is getting closer every day; Debian, Gentoo, and myriad others are noncommercial distros that have no profit incentive. But SuSE, Caldera, Conectiva, and TurboLinux all want to be the next RedHat, and outside of very small markets, they all failed.
SuSE is RedHat's biggest competitor in Europe, and has the greatest marketshare in Germany. Caldera was formerly RedHat's biggest competitor in the US (until Mandrake came along). Conectiva is RedHat's biggest competitor in Latin America. TurboLinux is RedHat's biggest competitor in Japan.
So, these four distros realized that in every market, there was generally three corporate competitors: RedHat, Mandrake, and one of them. They decided to merge, so that there would be a common distro with worldwide marketshare; but kept the companies separate, so that they could leverage their brand in each market - would Latin Americans suddenly buy a copy of SuSE? As it is, they might fully merge someday, if/when the UnitedLinux brand becomes stronger.
Mandrake knew that they were a strong competitor throughout a very large geographical area; as they said in this statement, their worldwide marketshare is larger than the four UnitedLinux companies combined. Mandrake would have nothing to gain if they had to pool their resources with four companies who are much weaker then they are, and declining all the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if UnitedLinux ends up in a full corporate merger, and later the whole thing goes bankrupt; after reading Mandrake's statement, I get the feeling that they wouldn't be either.
Don't we wish. :D
The largest cellular phone company in the US is Verizon. It is owned in part by various companies, but mostly by Vodafone Group (UK), which is the largest cellular company in the world, bigger even than NTT DoCoMo. Vodafone's wireless companies use GSM exclusively... except for its holdings in the US, Mexico, and China, where it uses CDMA. Sprint PCS is the other CDMA company in the US, probably soon to be bought out by Verizon.
VoiceStream/T-Mobile is the largest GSM-exclusive company in the US, though it also has the smallest marketshare of the six national providers. It has GSM in almost all major markets, California being a notable exception. To make matters worse, in the US, we use GSM 1900, incompatible with the rest of the world; one of the best features that GSM could advertise, "Free world roaming, one phone #", therefore doesn't work quite so well.
The second largest cellular phone company in the US is Cingular. SBC has a controlling stake in the company, and BellSouth owns the rest. Unlike Verizon, therefore, the entire company is American. In most markets, Cingular uses TDMA; that's as much digital (pardon my analogies) as Windows 95 is 32-bit. But GSM is available nationally. Any market where VoiceStream doesn't have a network, Cingular does.
Cingular is gradually converting its entire network to GSM, and will hopefully be providing all new customers with GSM by, IIRC, January 2003. Also, Cingular convinced VoiceStream to enter into a European-style shared network agreement, so that VoiceStream could provide service in California/Nevada, and Cingular could provide service in NYC/Northern New Jersey, without building any new towers.
There's also AT&T Wireless; there is a rumor that ATTWS will soon buy Cingular, and keep its 100%-GSM strategy for the new company, and all evidence (mainly financial) suggests that the rumor is true. And finally, there's Nextel. It uses a custom technology (iDEN) and caters to business users who use their cellphone enough to warrant a $150/mo plan and want to-the-second billing. It is essentially a niche carrier, with very loyal customers, and as many of those customers travel the world, it may soon switch to GSM itself.
Vodafone has repeatedly pressured Verizon to switch to GSM; its efforts have been unsuccessful so far.
So much for Europe coming in and making things better.
The reason the G4 has reached 700MHz is because Apple, feeling megahertz-envy, decided to jack up the G4's pipeline. The original G4 was only 4-stage, and could therefore get no faster than 500 MHz at a reasonable price. The new one has a 7-stage pipeline, allowing for faster clockspeed but not much better performance.
Graphics? Just as good as Sun's for most purposes; and if you're buying a computer to play games made by Microsoft and Vivendi, then you might as well just sell out and use Palladium. CD-RW? The Sun lacks, but $100 will buy you a Plextor, much faster than the Mac's, that you can throw in. 1394, USB, 802.11b? Present on the Sun, or if not easily expandable via PCI. Monitor? If CRTs are your thing, fine, but I want an LCD, which I can buy for the Sun for $350. Lots of 3rd party apps? More for Solaris.
But that's not the point. After all, for only $1600, you can get a computer that's truly competitive with the Sun, in the form of a tower G4. With its 40GB HD, CD-RW, and 256MB of memory, making the Sun up to spec would make their prices match.
More importantly is the company itself. Apple has staked its future on OS X; FreeBSD-based at the core, but proprietary all the way up. Sun, on the other hand, has essentially staked their future on open source. They have put an unprecedented amount of work into Linux and Linux software. In the end, if Linux users bolted to another platform, which company would I trust more to support us and give us the products we want? Sun, by a mile.
Ah, MSNBC, who uncritically brought us Palladium.
To quote the ever-brilliant MSNBC: "A Linux-based open-source program called Evolution looks pretty much like a standard Windows desktop."
Do I need to say any more?
There's a computer available, that doesn't use AMD or Intel products, so it's immune from Palladium.
:D
It's got a 500MHz processor, PGX64 graphics accelerator, 128MB of memory, a 20 GB 7200 HD, Ethernet, floppy, 48X CD, smart card reader, and... Solaris 8 Pre-loaded? All for $995. (Yes, that's a SPARC processor).
To me, it looks perfect. We get a high-speed 64-bit RISC processor, really the only RISC architecture that hasn't morphed into Itanium (poor Alpha); we get reasonable basic specs, and just about everything short of the proc/mobo can be upgraded with standard parts from Pricewatch; and finally, because Freedom is of the utmost concern, any version of Debian that you can run on x86, you can run just as well on Sparc.
And if that isn't enough, if you absolutely *need* to run Windows applications for some reason, in addition to using Bochs, there's another option. If you don't mind keeping Solaris on your computer alongside Linux, you can even buy a $500 PC-within-a-PC card, with a 733-MHz non-Intel x86 processor; because it lets you run Windows and Solaris apps side-by-side, it's essentially a perfect cross between VMware and Wine.
Don't know about you, but my next computer's a Sun.
I do wonder what Microsoft would think if large numbers of people did this. On the one hand, they might love it; if all the Linux users bolt to SPARC, then Microsoft is left with 99.999% control of their platform, complete control for computer built in the last 3 years, and the power to make hardware manufacturers do whatever they say. On the other hand, it means that their Windows-is-better-than-Linux arguments now have to account for the fact that Linux is running Sparc, and it becomes that much harder to get Linux users to switch back.
And for us, it means that the ugliest and slowest port of Linux, that for x86, is all but gone; and most time will be spent developing one of the cleanest, SPARC.
She picked a bad plan.
Cingular is not the world's best phone company. Nevertheless, they offer, for $30, a national plan (no roaming within the US, not even in Alaska or Hawaii) that has 250 included minutes and 1000 night/weekend minutes.
For $40, they offer a similar plan with 500 included minutes, and 3500 night/weekend minutes.
Plans with approximately the same price with slightly more minutes are available that are local-only, but which let you buy a plan, for $7/mo, that changes peak hours from 7PM to 7AM instead of the otherwise-standard 9-7.
These two plans are for GSM phones, in my opinion the best you can get right now. In other regions, Cingular offers similar plans for TDMA phones, soon to be upgraded to GSM.
Now, maybe 3500 minutes, or 1000 in your price range, isn't unlimited. But... 1000 minutes is 16 2/3 hours, and 3500 is 58 1/3. If anyone thinks 16 2/3 hours isn't enough, they can get rid of their landline. And if anyone thinks 58 1/3 hours, or about as much time as the average person *sleeps* in a week, isn't enough time... they need help.
What about Linux Company #2, the only one with a development lab comparable to RedHat - SuSE?
Search on the Internet. No matter how hard you look, you won't be able to find a downloadable current-version SuSE ISO. You can't buy one off Cheapbytes, either. The best you can do is download 7.2, two versions behind the current 8.0; or download an FTP bootdisk, something that only Linux experts will do and that doesn't work anyway if you have no net connection.
So if you want a copy of SuSE on CD, you have no choice but to buy a box set. Which generates income to pay programmers.
Open source isn't a business model period, so you can't say whether or not it's a viable one. It's simply a software development technology. You can have software libre that's not gratis, and make a company around it; essentially, Microsoft with far better corporate ethics and the GPL. That's a business model, and it works.
Is it really international? Do they have mirroring servers on both sides of the Atlantic; are they legally in the jurisdiction of both the United States and the European Union?
I'm completely in favor of having ip6.co.uk, or ip6.fr, or ip6.eu, or all three, in addition to ip6.us. I just don't think that a site subject to the legal jurisdiction of one country should be considered an "international" site.
Even these organizations are always headquartered in one country or another. Their websites are in English, so assuming their servers are located in the US, ip6.int and nato.int can move to ip6.org.us and nato.org.us.
Other countries can set up mirrors, so you could have nato.org.us in addition to nato.org.de, for example. Somebody living in Germany, a NATO country, would want a German version anyway.
ICANN is completely unnecessary. There's only one reform we need to make to the domain-name system, and then it never needs to be changed again.
.com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and .mil.
.com, etc. to .com.us, etc. Second, allow any .com domain created before 1 January 2003 under the old system to redirect to the new .com.us domain. Third and finally, provide for the dissolution of ICANN as of 1 January 2003, though it can stay around in a limited form to handle redirects until 1 January 2005 (after which all .com, etc. domains will stop working).
.int. And there's really only two groups that would use .int; the UN, and the EU. Both of those groups can be given country codes of their own. The new domains, including .museum and (chicken).coop, are useless anyway should be scrapped along with the other 6.
Eliminate all TLDs except those for country codes.
There is no such thing as a global web site. Every website is headquartered somewhere. The BBC's website is www.bbc.co.uk. The Toronto Globe and Mail's website is www.globeandmail.ca Only the United States, by default really, has no strong country-code, so US websites are run at
ICANN's reform proposal only needs to accomplish three things. First, provide for the immediate migration of
The only three-letter TLD not owned by the US is
All of ICANN's old responsibilities can then be transferred to the owners of the country-code domains.
Want FreeBSD? Get it from the FreeBSD website. That's the only distro there is. Sure, people make modified distros for special use - Microsoft probably isn't using the stock distro for their Hotmail servers - but in general, all the distros are based on the same core.
The GNU/HURD kernel is supposed to be released Real Soon Now (maybe in the next 5 years, then). So whenever it is released, that means that GNU will, for the first time, offer a complete self-distributed GNU System. Undoubtedly, it will be based on Debian; so, quite possibly, when the Hurd is released, GNU might merge with Debian.
Once that happens, there will finally be a standard GNU System, and all vendors can standardize on it.RedHat can distribute a version that comes with extensive support and pre-loaded database software. Mandrake can distribute a version that by default installs 10x too much programs. Conectiva can distribute a version that by default is in Spanish/Portuguese. Even Gentoo can distribute a version that by default uses all source-debs instead of the standard binary ones.
And all of those distributions will support the same apt-get, have the same version of libraries, and put files in the same places.
Question: before I wrote this comment, how old did you think I was and where did you think I was from?
[Probably] needless to say, I'm also a teen living in the US, and I knew very well that my generalizations were incorrect. That's my point. Children do have rights, and it's absurd to say that they don't, or shouldn't. But that doesn't stop far too many people from thinking that people are evenly divided into the two categories of child and adult, and from thinking both that all children are equally immature and that all adults are equally mature.
They're not, of course; a certain 12-year-old might be able to make a far better informed decision about voting than a certain 30-year-old. That difference in maturity rate should be enshrined in law; better to err on the side of too many rights than on the side of too few.
What a sad day we live in, when American children are considered to have no rights. Are their brains surgically removed on their 18th birthday and replaced with adult ones? Are they locked in their houses, allowed to leave only to go to school; exposed to no TV programmes but "Teletubbies", no music but classical/gospel/Christian rock, no magazines but Weekly Reader, and no web sites but Disney?
Bush recently entered in a coalition with Iran, other fundamentalist Islamic nations, and the Vatican to oppose a treaty to protect children, arguing that "children have no rights" and that the treaty "promotes abortion" (it does, but what's wrong with that?) The US has a higher teen pregnancy rate than all developed countries and some developing ones; even China banned executing people for crimes they committed before the age of 18, but Texas and other states continue to do that.
How ironic it is, really, that American children are considered to have no rights, except the right to die. They're too "innocent" to have sexuality education, too "ignorant" to vote, but they're perfectly capable of committing a crime and getting tried as an adult.
A country that doesn't give all its citizens rights, including children, is not a free country.
First, no one's forcing you to watch the show. It simply appears as an option on the menu. You can ignore it as you wish. It's far less intrusive than the average banner ad; and ads don't stop you from viewing Slashdot. It's even less intrusive than Google text ads!
Second, the extra space on the Tivo was not something that you knew about when you bought it, and it did not affect your purchase of the Tivo in the least. When you buy one, you know that it's a sealed box. If someone wants to make a PVR libre, I'd be glad, but Tivo reserving a very small amount of space is completely normal for a corporation.
Finally, a number of people think it's bad that the program had "bad language" but that it overrode "parental controls". Talk about control. What gives you the right to decide what your children can watch? Tivo has a program downloaded to your box... but it doesn't override your schedule... but it doesn't record if you ask it not to... but it doesn't force you to watch it... but it doesn't take up any space... And you're outraged! But your children are being explicitly denied the right to watch a TV show, solely because it has some "bad language" (which isn't bad - would you rather your kids fist- or gun-fighting than swearing?), is completely fine. Listen to yourselves!
Well, I'm a bit more political than the average Slashdot reader. In addition to being a ultra-lefty (in contrast with most Slashdotters' libertarian views), I would, and do, boycott all Disney products because of the company's immorality, and assuming this new game isn't a joke, I'll be boycotting Square too.
Slashdot users seem to care more about the product than the politics. And that's fine, and I respect that, but in that case Slashdot isn't the forum for me.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 31, @12:50PM
But what if I set it to Japan time?
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday April 1, @2:50AM
Nice try.
Granted, it was posted to IGN on 27 March, but not Slashdot. I'll believe it when it's still there on 2 April.
Hmm...
One day, Slashdot publishes a story about the CBDTPA, saying how horrible it was, and how they hope that Senator Hollings gets voted out.
The next day, Slashdot publishes a story about a collaboration between Square and Disney, with Square everything except a Disney sense of humor and characters from both.
Now, I'm willing to give Taco the benefit of the doubt. Maybe both Disney and Square are in bed with Hollings, so it makes sense that they're working together. However, he then says, "Very positive review. Gotta admit, I'm intrigued." Aside from the fact that any game with a "Disney sense of humor" and Donald Duck as the court's chief magician is bound to suck, Taco is endorsing the very company who bought a senator to make a law to outlaw open-source!
<sarcasm>Maybe the CBDTPA isn't that bad after all. You won't have your PS2 Linux kit, or Linux anywhere for that matter, but you'll have all the Square-Disney collaborations you could ever want!</sarcasm>
Slashdot is "News for nerds, stuff that matters", right? Well, you're faced with a "difficult" decision. Which matters more: Linux or Disney?
Where's the if come from, you say? I think you just answered your own question.
Yes, it's sad that the government wastes money on frivolous lawsuits, and the only companies who can countersue are the ones who actually committed illegal acts (tobacco in the US with advertising-to-minors, for example). Unfortunately, I think the only way to stop that is by voting the offending people out of office.
Of course I knew that "real soon now" means "within the next 5 years". That's why I put it in quotes. Still, whenever it happens, this could apply.
The completion of Hurd means not only that you can build a complete Unix-like distribution from only GNU, but that you'll be able to download it from the GNU website. If it turns out to be good software, then it will eventually establish a large userbase, the same way Linux did. Companies might ignore GNU because they don't have control over the distribution, but that hasn't stopped Yahoo and others from using FreeBSD on their servers. Or companies might ignore GNU because of the license and lack of non-free software, but nothing would stop a company from making an internal distribution with their own non-free software, and I'd rather see a company that wanted to use non-free software stay away from GNU anyway. Comparing a GNU with marginal marketshare that runs entirely on software libre with a GNU with huge marketshare that relies on closed software, such as Netscape or Motif, I'd rather the former.
No Linux company has been successful at the desktop yet, because most consumers don't care about software libre. They'd want software gratis, but when Windows is preloaded on any computer they buy, it's just as good (for them) as if Windows was free. When companies like Wal-Mart start selling computers without operating systems, or when Windows becomes so hard to use (or so invasive, i.e. WPA and worse) that consumers don't want to use it anymore, then they'll start buying the cheapest OS they can find on the shelf. In Wal-Mart, that's Mandrake.
Duplication of work isn't a problem for non-graphical apps. However, what about GNOME/KDE, and office productivity programs? There's two different desktops, multiple different word processors, and every distribution (besides Lycoris) comes with more than one. If GNOME and KDE (and Gnome Office and KOffice) could merge, then desktop Linux would be better off. If there's a standard GNU distribution, with only one desktop in it, then I think there would be an incentive for developers on the other project (probably KDE, but you never know) to try to adapt their code to work with both desktops, or to switch entirely.
with a little genetic engineering, we can all go around floating?
OSNews recently ran a story in which Stallman claimed that the GNU system, with the HURD kernel, would be released "real soon now". What does this have to do with Linux? Well, if you can get a version of GNU directly from the GNU project, with the Debian package manager, then there's no longer a need for other workstation distributions. Just like there's only one version of FreeBSD, there will be only one version of GNU. Therefore, any Linux companies can focus on the desktop, so duplication of effort is avoided, and more actual coding gets accomplished. If GNU/Debian corners the high-end market, then SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, et al. can theoretically work together to focus exclusively on the desktop market.
Cable and DSL are technologies that are both dead and very much alive, depending on how you look at them. They're alive in the sense that there's no faster way for a home user to get an Internet connection (aside from business-priced lines, i.e. T3s and optical), but dead in the sense that there's far faster technologies available, like Ethernet, that work just as well for the last mile. The problem is, there is no Ethernet last mile.
So, towns, counties, and/or states should start investing in last-mile Ethernet, and let the ISPs provide service over the lines. That way, everyone can choose between any of the ISPs in America, instead of only choosing between their monopoly telco and monopoly cable company. I'd certainly pay $50 a month for municipal Ethernet, especially considering ATTBI just raised my rate to $45.95.
On the contrary, I think the introduction of the Handspring Treo will increase by one the number of gadgets people carry around.
If you can convince the other person to move to the Netherlands instead of yourself moving to the USA, then this is a nonissue, with the added benefit that you don't have to worry about the DMCA, UCITA, SSSCA, or ATA (or illegality of DeCSS either).