we need the regulatory institution because the cable providers have a monopoly,
No no no; we don't need more regulation. This whole problem is caused by excess regulation. See the only business model allowed is the cable TV model of delivering signal to the home. Obviously the first one to get their gets the network effect and wins. Now if the corporations were allowed to round up their customers and bring them to their corporate office, more competitors would be able to even up the market. Alternatively, if they were allowed to bomb competitors customers they would be able to persuade some to use a newly built network elsewhere.
You see, as ever, the only reason we need more regulation is because there was already too much bad regulation which limits the freedom of the market to find the right way.
[..] a lot of distros make their own tweaks to Xorg, KDE or Gnome, and the drivers they include. Most desktop-oriented distros, like Fedora and Ubuntu, also include their own tools for configuring displays.
In this case the only tool I use is called "gnome-display-properties" and it's apparently a completely standard gnome component (see a picture here). That's nice because it means that it will be around in future.
two most common graphics cards (ATI and nVidia) both include manufacturer-made setup tools which are greatly superior to the ones included with most distros.
Noooooo don't do that. Seriously; if you can avoid cards that need manufacturer specific configuration you'll find it's much easier to upgrade to a new distro/release/etc. later. It's worth boycotting both ATI and NVIDEA simply because of the extra hassle and security risks induced by the binary blobs they add to your system. Having selected an Intel system for the first time in my life because of this (I used to use ATI when they had the best support for open source X drivers), I really have to say I'm really happy with the choice. The performance is even fine for the limited 3D gaming I do.
I just use the autogenerated Xorg.conf, and then run the config tool from the manufacturer.
Actually, Fedora takes this one stage further. There is no X11 configuration at all (/etc/X11/xorg.conf is simply not there unless you create it specially). Everything is dynamically created at server start up. When it works, this is great because you can completely change your monitor over with no need to change anything. This means I haven't ever installed Fedora's X configuration generating system.
Oh well, if it works for ONE person using ONE particular distro and ONE particular brand of video card, then certainly it must be a completely solved problem [...]
Actually, in some sense, yes. Once you know which distro on which brand, what you do is go out and buy that. Lots of the problem with Linux hardware support is that people buy computers which are designed for Windows and then find out that Linux doesn't work properly on them. It's a bit like buying a Subaru and being surprised a Volvo roof rack doesn't fit.
To add another data point (the plural of anecdote is...) I bought my Intel graphics hardware specifically because I read it was supported. The default Fedora install just seems to magically detect all connected monitors and provides a really nice tool for adjusting the settings and position of each one. I can even set up a projector, view a film on it and continue working on the other screen with no visible loss of performance. I guess if you bought a system from a Linux dedicated reseller like System76 you would have everything fully supported in a trivial way.
I'm not sure if it's right or not, but that's the first clear explanation of the difference between Farsi and Persian. Please mod parent interesting, if nothing else to bait the knowledgable into responding.
GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free
you are making the parent's point perfectly. If you actually read the GPL carefully, you'd see that anybody can use GPL software for anything even if they don't agree with the GPL or the principles of free software or anything. The GPL is an ideal license for giving software away to everybody.
The restrictions of the GPL come in for people who want to distribute GPL code and only really matter for those who want to distribute derivatives of GPL code mixed with code which under a different license. Even Microsoft can safely use GPL software without ever agreeing to any of the terms of the GPL whatsoever.
Since these things are explicitly and simply spelled out in the text of the license, it's a perfect example of how assuming things about the GPL just because you read them in an internet forum somewhere isn't the best way to go about understanding the GPL. The great grandparent should just simply go and read the license himself.
Of course they would. A company wants more customers. So Interix "was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX" in the same way that any company tries to make their products better than competing products.
No; in this case MS would add equivalent features such as fork to their Win32 API. The point is that they made these features available in a way which is specifically designed to entice UNIX customers away. Once again there's nothing wrong with that as such.
Netscape was closed source and commercial for a long time. By the time the Mozilla project was started/Netscape was open sourced, IE (another closed source browser) had already gained significant market share and Mosaic had long been irrelevant.
Mosaic is still, in a sense, in existence. IE was based on Mosaic and Netscape was developed by the Mosaic developers. The reason why Mosaic as a product failed is because it was never copylefted so it didn't get back contributions from it's community.
Er, how about normal media file streaming? How about "all of the above"? How about just letting normal media companies stream themselves? There are so many better ways. Hell, if you are willing to go with an experimental media system like Silverlight where you're going to do development work anyway, you could use OGG Theora and distribute players free to anyone who needs them.
[The only] problem is that MS didn't create Interix, they bought it
The thing I "seemed to imply" is hardly exactly the key point in my comment. In fact if I was completely wrong about it, it would not even slightly distiurb my point. However, Interix was aquired from Softway Systems in 1999 at version 3.0. It's now at version 6.0 and it's key feature, total integration as a first class citizen in the Windows environment, is only possible for MS to deliver. Interix as delivered now is created by MS as surely as Solaris (which is based on SYSV) is created by SUN.
For one, the BSA aren't Microsoft's enforcers anymore than the RIAA are the Bee Gees' enforcers.
The Bee Gees are effectively employees of the record companies. Microsoft is the actual software producer. To compare the situations is silly. I would say that the RIAA are, for example, EMI or Sony's enforcers.
They are a group that exists to enforce copyright and software licences, and while I don't agree with much of their policy or their actions in enforcing it, suggesting they are some puppet of Microsoft's is just absurd.
Microsoft is one of the founding members. Microsoft products are by far the most common ones to be enforced. When the BSA does a raid and finds MS products, MS can call them off or let the leash off. If I'm not to use puppet, what should I say? Pony? Bondage slave? Attack dog? Puppet seems the best option to me.
Further, military style raids might be a slight exaggeration, like calling the GPL communist or anti-capitalist for example.
"Military style" does not mean tanks, so when we have a hail of bullets I think I will claim that I actually understated.
Where's your proof? What leads you to this conclusion?
The rest was easily answered in my other post with excerpts from an MS press release. If you think it's inaccurate please take it up with them.
The clever thing about ChromeOS is that it's completely useless. That is to say as a stand alone independent system. ChromeOS without Google will be less than Windows without applications. None of the source code for the Google apps hosted on their servers is available to you, so your proposal will only do you good as far as Google allows you to use their services. Nobody knows, yet, what that will be.
Do you think that your developer mode system will be allowed into their key services where they have content they wish to protect? When they start DRMing things they will lock you out of those services.
For the most part I find Wikileaks to be nothing but tabloid press at it's worst. They have a right to freedom of the press but they are not knight in shinning armor that many people on slashdot hold them up to be. Frankly they seem to miss the difference between secret and private.
I think the point here is that the boundary between secret and private is somewhere completely different from where most people think it is. Most people don't understand the privacy of their email or their pager message. They think that a) they have nothing interesting to say and so their privacy is safe and b) their messages are safe from people that would like to do them harm. What they don't understand is that a) lots of people who work in the ISP/Teleco could want to do them harm by breaking into their house when they go out and that b) those people can use mass scanning to find the data they want.
This breakdown of privacy barriers is not something which has grown up through accidental private action and the "free market" or whatever. It's something which has been deliberately created by people such as the NSA stopping the wide availability of crypto systems. This is a story which needs to be told, and only by mass availability of mass data can anyone begin to undersand it.
IMHO These people's privacy was broken when the paging messages were sent out to the whole country unencrypted. Not when Wikileaks posted them. You should be investigating the people responsible. E.g. the pager company or, for example, the NSA.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX
It allows users with UNIX environments to take advantage of the benefits of the Windows environment without having to rewrite critical applications. In addition, users can immediately use the full Windows-based application development environment to develop native Win32® API-based applications.
In other words we'd like UNIX customers to move to Windows and abandon UNIX.
from the same MS press release:
Interix 2.2 brings Microsoft customers one step closer to its vision of a single desktop computer for all uses by providing a complete enterprise platform to run all Windows-based, UNIX and Internet applications.
In other words, we'd like you to only use Windows.
In fact there is nothing wrong with this as such. The normal way the free market works is by competition in which one company tries to destroy another companies products by getting people to use their own. What could easily be wrong is if they were, for example, ensuring some of their own software in a market where they had used illegal tactics to become a dominant player were only available on their own platform so that their competitors could not try to do the same to them.
It interests me why the MS astroturfers are so touchy about this topic? Could it be that MS has something to hide on this topic?
People who are neither working for the good of the "Open Source Community" nor Microsoft? Possibly, in part, Useful idiots? People who would be better to spend their time improving Debian or CentOS? Is Microsoft contributing or not? I know little of this and would be honestly interested to analyse it.
I think this is the target audience: organizations who want to run UNIX applications on Windows in a supported way. It's probably not indented for people who want a complete GNU system. (Recent packages ship with GCC and GDB, but otherwise come with BSD or SVR4-derived utilities.)
Agreed.
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
That is what many people say. However the SCO probably lawsuit hasn't really had that much influence on Linux. I'm not convinced that it's true. Certainly this doesn't apply to Minix or many of the other BSD situations. It certainly doesn't explain the success of Mozilla (copyleft) over Mosaic (not).
[...] But some organizations that do use Linux and GNU software don't contribute much back - consider many of the consumer electronics devices that run GPL software, such as consumer broadband routers. Some provide the source as required by the GPL, but not much else - for example, the Linux source used might be available, but the wifi driver might be a binary module.
The source they do provide means that any major feature they implement in Linux its self is available to others. That's key. That means that competitors who release features into Linux can do so with the knowledge that major improvements to their features will be available to copy back.
As far as the binary module thing goes; this is an exce
Well, the server equivalent of dual booting is virtualisation and there is some wisdom in first deciding which application and then taking the best OS for that. If the question was "which server OS should be standardise on Solaris or FreeBSD" in which case the answer is "neither; use CentOS/RedHat; CentOS for development and staff home computers and RedHat in production". Since the question is about learning, probably the best answer is OpenBSD since that's more different from Linux than the others. Since the original question is between FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, I guess I would have to finally say start with FreeBSD since it's more BSD like and more likely to have the hardware support. Alternatively, try one and if it doesn't work, try the other.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If this weren't moderated as interesting, I'd be afraid to answer for fear of feeding stupid trols, but since it is, lets go ahead.
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
There's a certain stupidity in modern "soundbite" thinking that seems to think that by labelling something you thereby make it bad. This leads people to stuipdly stretch those labels as far as they think they can make them stick. Here is a perfect example. The GPL requires certain actions to avoid restrictions in copying. Microsoft's licenses restrict all copying with small exceptions. The FSF occasionally goes to court to try to get organisations to follow their license. The BSA, Microsoft's enforcers, regularly carry out military style raids on their customers searching for violations, let alone what they do to actual pirates. If you believe that this makes the FSF, the free software movement or whatever communist then you must believe that commercial software producers are all ultra communists and Microsoft is Comintern its self. If you really did believe that and weren't just making a debating point, you could easily find yourself being declared clinically insane.
[...] There has been some effort to get Gentoo's portage or NetBSD's pkgsrc working on it, but it never got off the ground. It seems like the open source community is ostracising Interix for purely irrational anti-capitalist reasons, and that's really a shame [...]
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX; I think you will find that the "open source community" is completely rational for not working on it. Your complaint is like a person wanting to know why turkeys don't do volunteer work to spread the thanksgiving message. However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.
[...] (Yes, there's also Cygwin, but it's embarrassingly slow, buggy, and incomplete.)
Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time. It's not something anyone sane would base their future on.
As Stallman's economic fallacies become ever more evident, I expect ever-more developer time to shift to 100% free (non-copyleft)
This is the funniest and most ironic statement of your entire post. Stallman never claimed to be an economist and from the beginning said "do this because it's the moral thing even though it will lose you money". The irony comes from the fact that he was wrong. In fact the GPL is an excellent choice as part of a commercial strategy. Either dual license model for sofware with narrow developer interest or through the free (as in beer) software + expensive support model.
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS. This leads to continual weakening of the community. Compare with
So you are complaining that Microsoft changes too much. Another commenter in this story is complaining that Microsoft is complaining that the world is changing too fast and MS can't keep up.
These things are not contradictory. In fact one causes the other. The fact that MS spends it's entire time dreaming up ways to inconvenience users of other products means that it seldom has time to do the needed improvements to it's own software. It also means that their products become Byzantinely complex slowing down their own development.
That may well be true; the Olympics committe doesn't feel it is responsible to anybody and will do anything for money. However; if we judge from history the complaints and problems this will raise will help set back Silverlight acceptance. After the way it was done last time nobody sensible would use silverlight for anything. In fact I'd suggest everybody get ready; set up a system which doesn't work with silverlight and then complain about it, but most of us on Slashdot probably already have several and it really isn't needed anyway.
Nope; Actually I hope "some loon" specifically and in a court of law demands that Microsoft release "all their code". Trust me, Microsoft will loudly and clearly and successfully defend themselves, creating a very clear answer to all the people trying to claim that the GPL forces you to do such a thing.
Why do people like you insist on raising the fallacy that if we can't achieve perfect enforcement we must do nothing at all?
C'mon you can do better than that. I post saying that enforcement will cause people who have the right to treatment not to get it. You answer me by asking why I insist on perfect enforcement.
Next time, why not just accuse me of demanding human rights for piranhas and say that my argument is ridiculous because people should not be forced to dive into water pools just because the fish are hungry. It would make more sense and
Is there some reason you quoted citizens?
I was talking about the risk of citizens not getting treated. Citizens will not always "know their social security number", especially when unconscious. Anyway "Illegals" are perfectly capable of quoting other people's social security data and claiming to have lost their wallets, so such a check is not just imperfect enforcement, it's a useless waste of money. This means that checks will be have to be stricter and if you refuse emergency treatment when the check fails, sometimes you will kill a citizen and more often you will kill an innocent traveller who just happens to have lost his wallet.
The great thing about enforcement with illegals is that in many cases they are ignorant of our laws, especially when they have only just arrived.
As are legal immigrants; business travellers and many others including some citizens and most people in shock after a car crash. This is not the basis for a sensible system of justice and is not a good idea to have anywhere near emergency care. I know of a family that lost a son because they didn't understand that in emergency you call the fire-brigade and not the ambulance. You've already stated yourself that the ER is not providing medical care; just the minimum to make sure that people are not dying. What's do you have against just leaving it at that? The alternative is throwing people into the street to die. They will not always be able to get to care. What you are saying sounds pretty sick.
So lift requirements for the ER to care for illegal aliens. It isn't like they'll voluntarily do so. All they have to do to avoid dying due to an emergency medical condition is stay home.
Why is it so impossible for people like you to just think through consequences before you spout off? If you "lift requirements for the ER to care for illegal aliens" then there will be people who are mistaken for illegal aliens. Do you think "illegal aliens" come in with a sign stamped on their head? They aren't stupid, and if they are dying will do, just as they should, what it takes to get care, even if that means they have to claim they lost their driving license.
What that means is that either your statement is completely empty (a form saying "are you an illegal alien (n.b. if you select yes you will not be entitled to care" given out to all patients) or will mean that people who can't prove their status end up dying in the USA. These people will include "citizens" and people legally travelling in the US. If you think that's okay then you are sick.
If 30% less patients die within a year
in the placebo group than in the non-treatment group.
This means that the placebo group is the "treated" group in the grandparent's experiment.
in your experiment you measured the the effect of medicine, not the effect of the placebo.
The biggest problem with the grandparent's design is that it measures only one placebo. Different placebos can have different effects. For example, a placebo given by a shifty looking junior doctor might actually make you sicker, whilst a convincing senior consultant might make you well very effectively. That's the reason why every medical study has to have both placebos and test drugs and use a "double blind" experimental design.
Correct of course; For any result that needs to be verified, there is a scientist out there bad enough to design an experiment which can fail to test it for any possible reason.
Slashdot Mirror
we need the regulatory institution because the cable providers have a monopoly,
No no no; we don't need more regulation. This whole problem is caused by excess regulation. See the only business model allowed is the cable TV model of delivering signal to the home. Obviously the first one to get their gets the network effect and wins. Now if the corporations were allowed to round up their customers and bring them to their corporate office, more competitors would be able to even up the market. Alternatively, if they were allowed to bomb competitors customers they would be able to persuade some to use a newly built network elsewhere.
You see, as ever, the only reason we need more regulation is because there was already too much bad regulation which limits the freedom of the market to find the right way.
According to a two second quick Google(TM) search since about 2006.
[..] a lot of distros make their own tweaks to Xorg, KDE or Gnome, and the drivers they include. Most desktop-oriented distros, like Fedora and Ubuntu, also include their own tools for configuring displays.
In this case the only tool I use is called "gnome-display-properties" and it's apparently a completely standard gnome component (see a picture here). That's nice because it means that it will be around in future.
two most common graphics cards (ATI and nVidia) both include manufacturer-made setup tools which are greatly superior to the ones included with most distros.
Noooooo don't do that. Seriously; if you can avoid cards that need manufacturer specific configuration you'll find it's much easier to upgrade to a new distro/release/etc. later. It's worth boycotting both ATI and NVIDEA simply because of the extra hassle and security risks induced by the binary blobs they add to your system. Having selected an Intel system for the first time in my life because of this (I used to use ATI when they had the best support for open source X drivers), I really have to say I'm really happy with the choice. The performance is even fine for the limited 3D gaming I do.
I just use the autogenerated Xorg.conf, and then run the config tool from the manufacturer.
Actually, Fedora takes this one stage further. There is no X11 configuration at all (/etc/X11/xorg.conf is simply not there unless you create it specially). Everything is dynamically created at server start up. When it works, this is great because you can completely change your monitor over with no need to change anything. This means I haven't ever installed Fedora's X configuration generating system.
Oh well, if it works for ONE person using ONE particular distro and ONE particular brand of video card, then certainly it must be a completely solved problem [...]
Actually, in some sense, yes. Once you know which distro on which brand, what you do is go out and buy that. Lots of the problem with Linux hardware support is that people buy computers which are designed for Windows and then find out that Linux doesn't work properly on them. It's a bit like buying a Subaru and being surprised a Volvo roof rack doesn't fit.
To add another data point (the plural of anecdote is ...) I bought my Intel graphics hardware specifically because I read it was supported. The default Fedora install just seems to magically detect all connected monitors and provides a really nice tool for adjusting the settings and position of each one. I can even set up a projector, view a film on it and continue working on the other screen with no visible loss of performance. I guess if you bought a system from a Linux dedicated reseller like System76 you would have everything fully supported in a trivial way.
Most fun to do to people coming out of (the staff entrance of) KGB/Party/Army headquarters I imagine.
I'm not sure if it's right or not, but that's the first clear explanation of the difference between Farsi and Persian. Please mod parent interesting, if nothing else to bait the knowledgable into responding.
GPL licenses give your software away only to people who agree to also give their software away for free
you are making the parent's point perfectly. If you actually read the GPL carefully, you'd see that anybody can use GPL software for anything even if they don't agree with the GPL or the principles of free software or anything. The GPL is an ideal license for giving software away to everybody.
The restrictions of the GPL come in for people who want to distribute GPL code and only really matter for those who want to distribute derivatives of GPL code mixed with code which under a different license. Even Microsoft can safely use GPL software without ever agreeing to any of the terms of the GPL whatsoever.
Since these things are explicitly and simply spelled out in the text of the license, it's a perfect example of how assuming things about the GPL just because you read them in an internet forum somewhere isn't the best way to go about understanding the GPL. The great grandparent should just simply go and read the license himself.
Apart from the fact that it allows access to non-google web apps.
Which MS Windows does too (since as we know IE is not an "application" it's an "integral" part of the operating system :-)
Of course they would. A company wants more customers. So Interix "was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX" in the same way that any company tries to make their products better than competing products.
No; in this case MS would add equivalent features such as fork to their Win32 API. The point is that they made these features available in a way which is specifically designed to entice UNIX customers away. Once again there's nothing wrong with that as such.
Netscape was closed source and commercial for a long time. By the time the Mozilla project was started/Netscape was open sourced, IE (another closed source browser) had already gained significant market share and Mosaic had long been irrelevant.
Mosaic is still, in a sense, in existence. IE was based on Mosaic and Netscape was developed by the Mosaic developers. The reason why Mosaic as a product failed is because it was never copylefted so it didn't get back contributions from it's community.
Er, how about normal media file streaming? How about "all of the above"? How about just letting normal media companies stream themselves? There are so many better ways. Hell, if you are willing to go with an experimental media system like Silverlight where you're going to do development work anyway, you could use OGG Theora and distribute players free to anyone who needs them.
[The only] problem is that MS didn't create Interix, they bought it
The thing I "seemed to imply" is hardly exactly the key point in my comment. In fact if I was completely wrong about it, it would not even slightly distiurb my point. However, Interix was aquired from Softway Systems in 1999 at version 3.0. It's now at version 6.0 and it's key feature, total integration as a first class citizen in the Windows environment, is only possible for MS to deliver. Interix as delivered now is created by MS as surely as Solaris (which is based on SYSV) is created by SUN.
For one, the BSA aren't Microsoft's enforcers anymore than the RIAA are the Bee Gees' enforcers.
The Bee Gees are effectively employees of the record companies. Microsoft is the actual software producer. To compare the situations is silly. I would say that the RIAA are, for example, EMI or Sony's enforcers.
They are a group that exists to enforce copyright and software licences, and while I don't agree with much of their policy or their actions in enforcing it, suggesting they are some puppet of Microsoft's is just absurd.
Microsoft is one of the founding members. Microsoft products are by far the most common ones to be enforced. When the BSA does a raid and finds MS products, MS can call them off or let the leash off. If I'm not to use puppet, what should I say? Pony? Bondage slave? Attack dog? Puppet seems the best option to me.
Further, military style raids might be a slight exaggeration, like calling the GPL communist or anti-capitalist for example.
"Military style" does not mean tanks, so when we have a hail of bullets I think I will claim that I actually understated.
Where's your proof? What leads you to this conclusion? The rest was easily answered in my other post with excerpts from an MS press release. If you think it's inaccurate please take it up with them.
The clever thing about ChromeOS is that it's completely useless. That is to say as a stand alone independent system. ChromeOS without Google will be less than Windows without applications. None of the source code for the Google apps hosted on their servers is available to you, so your proposal will only do you good as far as Google allows you to use their services. Nobody knows, yet, what that will be.
Do you think that your developer mode system will be allowed into their key services where they have content they wish to protect? When they start DRMing things they will lock you out of those services.
For the most part I find Wikileaks to be nothing but tabloid press at it's worst. They have a right to freedom of the press but they are not knight in shinning armor that many people on slashdot hold them up to be. Frankly they seem to miss the difference between secret and private.
I think the point here is that the boundary between secret and private is somewhere completely different from where most people think it is. Most people don't understand the privacy of their email or their pager message. They think that a) they have nothing interesting to say and so their privacy is safe and b) their messages are safe from people that would like to do them harm. What they don't understand is that a) lots of people who work in the ISP/Teleco could want to do them harm by breaking into their house when they go out and that b) those people can use mass scanning to find the data they want.
This breakdown of privacy barriers is not something which has grown up through accidental private action and the "free market" or whatever. It's something which has been deliberately created by people such as the NSA stopping the wide availability of crypto systems. This is a story which needs to be told, and only by mass availability of mass data can anyone begin to undersand it.
IMHO These people's privacy was broken when the paging messages were sent out to the whole country unencrypted. Not when Wikileaks posted them. You should be investigating the people responsible. E.g. the pager company or, for example, the NSA.
You ask as if I was accusing Microsoft of being especially evil. This isn't another big secret like the the way they carefully arrange APIs to disadvantage other companies that develop for Windows. In fact let's just ask them.
from an MS press release>:
It allows users with UNIX environments to take advantage of the benefits of the Windows environment without having to rewrite critical applications. In addition, users can immediately use the full Windows-based application development environment to develop native Win32® API-based applications.
In other words we'd like UNIX customers to move to Windows and abandon UNIX.
from the same MS press release:
Interix 2.2 brings Microsoft customers one step closer to its vision of a single desktop computer for all uses by providing a complete enterprise platform to run all Windows-based, UNIX and Internet applications.
In other words, we'd like you to only use Windows.
In fact there is nothing wrong with this as such. The normal way the free market works is by competition in which one company tries to destroy another companies products by getting people to use their own. What could easily be wrong is if they were, for example, ensuring some of their own software in a market where they had used illegal tactics to become a dominant player were only available on their own platform so that their competitors could not try to do the same to them.
It interests me why the MS astroturfers are so touchy about this topic? Could it be that MS has something to hide on this topic?
People who are neither working for the good of the "Open Source Community" nor Microsoft? Possibly, in part, Useful idiots? People who would be better to spend their time improving Debian or CentOS? Is Microsoft contributing or not? I know little of this and would be honestly interested to analyse it.
Agreed.
That is what many people say. However the SCO probably lawsuit hasn't really had that much influence on Linux. I'm not convinced that it's true. Certainly this doesn't apply to Minix or many of the other BSD situations. It certainly doesn't explain the success of Mozilla (copyleft) over Mosaic (not).
The source they do provide means that any major feature they implement in Linux its self is available to others. That's key. That means that competitors who release features into Linux can do so with the knowledge that major improvements to their features will be available to copy back.
As far as the binary module thing goes; this is an exce
Well, the server equivalent of dual booting is virtualisation and there is some wisdom in first deciding which application and then taking the best OS for that. If the question was "which server OS should be standardise on Solaris or FreeBSD" in which case the answer is "neither; use CentOS/RedHat; CentOS for development and staff home computers and RedHat in production". Since the question is about learning, probably the best answer is OpenBSD since that's more different from Linux than the others. Since the original question is between FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, I guess I would have to finally say start with FreeBSD since it's more BSD like and more likely to have the hardware support. Alternatively, try one and if it doesn't work, try the other.
If this weren't moderated as interesting, I'd be afraid to answer for fear of feeding stupid trols, but since it is, lets go ahead.
There's a certain stupidity in modern "soundbite" thinking that seems to think that by labelling something you thereby make it bad. This leads people to stuipdly stretch those labels as far as they think they can make them stick. Here is a perfect example. The GPL requires certain actions to avoid restrictions in copying. Microsoft's licenses restrict all copying with small exceptions. The FSF occasionally goes to court to try to get organisations to follow their license. The BSA, Microsoft's enforcers, regularly carry out military style raids on their customers searching for violations, let alone what they do to actual pirates. If you believe that this makes the FSF, the free software movement or whatever communist then you must believe that commercial software producers are all ultra communists and Microsoft is Comintern its self. If you really did believe that and weren't just making a debating point, you could easily find yourself being declared clinically insane.
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX; I think you will find that the "open source community" is completely rational for not working on it. Your complaint is like a person wanting to know why turkeys don't do volunteer work to spread the thanksgiving message. However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.
Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time. It's not something anyone sane would base their future on.
This is the funniest and most ironic statement of your entire post. Stallman never claimed to be an economist and from the beginning said "do this because it's the moral thing even though it will lose you money". The irony comes from the fact that he was wrong. In fact the GPL is an excellent choice as part of a commercial strategy. Either dual license model for sofware with narrow developer interest or through the free (as in beer) software + expensive support model.
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS. This leads to continual weakening of the community. Compare with
So you are complaining that Microsoft changes too much. Another commenter in this story is complaining that Microsoft is complaining that the world is changing too fast and MS can't keep up.
These things are not contradictory. In fact one causes the other. The fact that MS spends it's entire time dreaming up ways to inconvenience users of other products means that it seldom has time to do the needed improvements to it's own software. It also means that their products become Byzantinely complex slowing down their own development.
That may well be true; the Olympics committe doesn't feel it is responsible to anybody and will do anything for money. However; if we judge from history the complaints and problems this will raise will help set back Silverlight acceptance. After the way it was done last time nobody sensible would use silverlight for anything. In fact I'd suggest everybody get ready; set up a system which doesn't work with silverlight and then complain about it, but most of us on Slashdot probably already have several and it really isn't needed anyway.
Nope; Actually I hope "some loon" specifically and in a court of law demands that Microsoft release "all their code". Trust me, Microsoft will loudly and clearly and successfully defend themselves, creating a very clear answer to all the people trying to claim that the GPL forces you to do such a thing.
Why do people like you insist on raising the fallacy that if we can't achieve perfect enforcement we must do nothing at all?
C'mon you can do better than that. I post saying that enforcement will cause people who have the right to treatment not to get it. You answer me by asking why I insist on perfect enforcement.
Next time, why not just accuse me of demanding human rights for piranhas and say that my argument is ridiculous because people should not be forced to dive into water pools just because the fish are hungry. It would make more sense and
Is there some reason you quoted citizens?
I was talking about the risk of citizens not getting treated. Citizens will not always "know their social security number", especially when unconscious. Anyway "Illegals" are perfectly capable of quoting other people's social security data and claiming to have lost their wallets, so such a check is not just imperfect enforcement, it's a useless waste of money. This means that checks will be have to be stricter and if you refuse emergency treatment when the check fails, sometimes you will kill a citizen and more often you will kill an innocent traveller who just happens to have lost his wallet.
The great thing about enforcement with illegals is that in many cases they are ignorant of our laws, especially when they have only just arrived.
As are legal immigrants; business travellers and many others including some citizens and most people in shock after a car crash. This is not the basis for a sensible system of justice and is not a good idea to have anywhere near emergency care. I know of a family that lost a son because they didn't understand that in emergency you call the fire-brigade and not the ambulance. You've already stated yourself that the ER is not providing medical care; just the minimum to make sure that people are not dying. What's do you have against just leaving it at that? The alternative is throwing people into the street to die. They will not always be able to get to care. What you are saying sounds pretty sick.
So lift requirements for the ER to care for illegal aliens. It isn't like they'll voluntarily do so. All they have to do to avoid dying due to an emergency medical condition is stay home.
Why is it so impossible for people like you to just think through consequences before you spout off? If you "lift requirements for the ER to care for illegal aliens" then there will be people who are mistaken for illegal aliens. Do you think "illegal aliens" come in with a sign stamped on their head? They aren't stupid, and if they are dying will do, just as they should, what it takes to get care, even if that means they have to claim they lost their driving license.
What that means is that either your statement is completely empty (a form saying "are you an illegal alien (n.b. if you select yes you will not be entitled to care" given out to all patients) or will mean that people who can't prove their status end up dying in the USA. These people will include "citizens" and people legally travelling in the US. If you think that's okay then you are sick.
If 30% less patients die within a year
in the placebo group
than
in the non-treatment group.
This means that the placebo group is the "treated" group in the grandparent's experiment. in your experiment you measured the the effect of medicine, not the effect of the placebo.
The biggest problem with the grandparent's design is that it measures only one placebo. Different placebos can have different effects. For example, a placebo given by a shifty looking junior doctor might actually make you sicker, whilst a convincing senior consultant might make you well very effectively. That's the reason why every medical study has to have both placebos and test drugs and use a "double blind" experimental design.
Correct of course; For any result that needs to be verified, there is a scientist out there bad enough to design an experiment which can fail to test it for any possible reason.