No it isn't, because the more work is done, the more the overall wealth of an economy - each unit of currency is merely a share of this wealth - exists. This shows up as real prices falling - for example MFlops/dollar falls all the time. It's not so long ago that merely subsisting took almost all of a family's income, nowadays in the developed economy, it's a fraction of income and it's falling all the time. The amount of "stuff" that can be bought for a given amount of "real money" goes up and up. That is why it's not zero-sum.
In what way is that camera better than my mother's old 35mm Leica, which still operates as good as it did in the 1950's?
Well, letting aside the economic advantages digital has over film for the amateur (for example, you don't need to pay for the shots that don't come out) the wider trend is, anything that a capitalist economy produces gets cheaper over time. A camera you can afford is better than one you can't, if all you want to do is take some pictures.
That's what capitalism gives you -- a consume-and-dispose society, with total disregard to quality or long term satisfaction.
You can still get "better" if you want to pay more, of course, but the alternative does exist if you don't. A Nikon camera is still a quality product that will last, for example. You can buy a disposable film camera now for about GBP 5 - that's two or three cups of coffee in a high street cafe. What was the coffee:camera ratio in the 1950s, even at the entry level?
Do you care how your stocks will be doing 20 years down the road, as long as you make a profit now, and get a chance to sell the stock before it goes bad?
Well, I tend to care about my portfolio rather more than individual stocks in it - if one's a performer, I'd happily keep it for 20 years, and if I didn't think it was a good long term bet, I wouldn't buy it. My personal strategy is that dividends are what matter, capital growth comes second. I'd only get involved in short-term share prices if I had time (and inclination) to be a daytrader.
in the end what counts is that someone made money by charging you more for it than they paid someone else for it
You are assuming a zero-sum - it doesn't work like that in the real world. Example: a loaf of bread is worth more than the cost of the flour in it, because the baker's time adds value. A car is worth more than a ton of raw iron, because of the labour that's gone into it.
That's where the "profit" comes from - people buying something, adding value through working on it, then selling the end results.
in a capitalist world those who care and are willing to sacrifice their own needs-fulfillment for the needs-fulfillment of another should lose and die.
What are you talking about? In capitalism the only way to get ahead is to fulfill the needs of others, by selling them goods and services. They'll do the same for you.
Why do you think that famine is practically unheard of in capitalist countries? It's because the farmers want to make MONEY! Why do you think that in non-capitalist countries starvation is widespread - like say North Korea? Because their farmers work for "the good of society".
Just because it's always been this way means its the best way.
Absolutely correct. Things that work outlast things that don't. That's true in technology, it's true in economics and it's true in evolution. That principle is baked into our very DNA. If something better comes along, you won't have to worry about whether it will supplant that which presently exists. It inevitably will.
Capitalism is a powerful economic system precisely because this concept of competition is harnessed. Economic systems that attempt to suppress competition are unable to deal with it when it eventually confronts them. Capitalist entities, whether individuals or corporations, face competition every day, and have become very, very good at it.
As the wealth of nations increases, those who have lost jobs or had to accept menial ones over the past three years are left with only a wealth of culprits to blame: financial scandals, wars, tax cuts, stagnation, etc.
For a start, a 3-year sample isn't big enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. We're just in the down phase of the economic cycle, that's all. Smart people salted away some of the high salaries and bonuses that were easy to come by in the recent boom years, when shortness of staff drove up the price of labour. Now, some people look for blame - but it's hard to see how some of these can be blamed. Wars and conflict drive up employment in the engineering and aerospace sectors. Tax cuts can't increase unemployment except amongst government workers, and there have been no reports of government layoffs - if anything, the government is busily hiring.
Let me make this clear: wealth is not created by governments. It's created by risk-taking entrepreneurs. Right now, the markets need to recover from excessive risk-taking in the late 90s. This is perfectly natural. When sufficient capital has become amassed, the cycle will begin again and there will be another boom.
But capitalism is atrocious at distributing the fruits of innovation
I was in a store the other day, I saw a 3-megapixel digital camera for GBP 99, a DVD players for GBP 49. 5 years ago, these products cost hundreds of pounds. That's what capitalism delivers: more and better for everyone. The "poor" in a capitalist society are far better off than the "poor" in any other system - and capitalism generates the surpluses that fund the entire welfare system.
Each labor-saving device means the idling of thousands of people, wasting their years of experience, rigorous training, and practical insights.
Yawn, they said exactly the same things when the car started to replace the horse drawn carriage, when mechanical looms replaced hand-operated looms, when automation was introduced to farming, in fact whenever any technology has revolutionized an industry. Getting laid off is always a little disconcerting (yes, it has happened to me so I know what I'm talking about) but unemployment is what you make of it.
And meanwhile governments, businesses, venture capitalists (what are you doing with all that money your pets in Congress and the White House brought you, tails all awagging?),
Ah, now we see the author's real agenda - I should have realized when I saw the words "tax cuts". I will merely point out that the dotcom bubble economy was created under a Democrat president and began declining in mid 2000 - there is nothing Bush or Greenspan could have done to prevent it bursting.
Interesting - according to MetaLink the platforms on which Oracle is available are:
Data General Intel Unix Fujitsu-Siemens BS2000/OSD Fujitsu-Siemens RM200-600E Reliant Unix HP Alpha OpenVMS HP Tru64 UNIX HP-UX Itanium HP-UX PA-RISC IBM AIX -Based Systems IBM NUMA-Q DYNIX/ptx IBM S/390 based Linux IBM z/OS (OS/390) Linux x86 Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows NT for Intel Microsoft Windows XP NEC UX/4800 Novell NetWare SGI Unix Solaris Operating Environment (SPARC) Solaris Operating Environment x86 UnixWare (SCO)
Maybe the OSX edition is development-only, not supported in production.
Are you talking about how much money people spend at an e-commerce web sites?
Yup. One Dell (running Win2K) or eBay (NT4) is worth more than 100,000 personal homepages of the sort you might find on "myhosting". Of course, Myhosting Inc itself might be worth some money, but in that case you would count it as one site, not thousands and thousands. Numbers of individual web sites hosted per OS isn't a good measure of how useful that OS is, without taking into consideration the complexity of those sites.
With only 0.4% of sites in the first 6 months after release, Windows2003 has already failed.
But who cares about serving "myhosting" sites? They are the entry level, mostly very simple static pages. Windows Server 2003 target market is a) high end e-commerce web sites and b) intranet applications. It's about choosing the right tool for the job and not letting ideology instead of intelligence make decisions for you.
Now, if you have figures for "dollars per day transacted on the web by OS" I think you will find that Linux comes very far behind commercial Unix and Windows. Which goes to show, you can prove anything you like by careful selection of statistics.
Do you have a reference for the assertion that Oracle is available? I've checked Metalink, and there's no reference to it at all. I've seen Sybase on OSX tho'.
... if a sysadmin used his privs to play a "prank" on my PC, I'd have his sorry ass fired. It's as bad as slashing a co-workers tyres for a "joke". PCs are not toys, they are tools for getting work done.
A more pertinent question is why isn't MSN supervising it's channels? AOL does it, so why not them? If I were a parent I would take this as an implicit admission from MSN that kids are not safe using their service. I would see it as a recommendation to use another ISP that does try and provide a kid safe environment.
Microsft is supervising the subscriber channels - but not the free channels. They are (or were) after all, free. Employing people to supervise channels costs money, and obviously cannot be done on channels that people aren't paying for. Paid subscribers are also traceable - if someone misbehaves, you've got their real name and address. They can't hide these from you if they paid by credit card.
MSN could make their chatrooms safer but have chosen not to.
Yes, and Slashbots could get all the facts before hysterical anti-MS ranting, but they don't, do they?
Wouldn't that encourage people to blow all their money rather than invest or save it?
Maybe - but spent money has to go somewhere, so it would be put to productive use in providing good and services for the money to be blown on. It would still have to be worthwhile to invest, just as it is still worthwhile to earn more now even tho' you'll pay a higher rate of tax.
None of these people could have conceivably done more useful work than the entire lifetimes work of thousands of people.
You are wrong because intelligence doesn't scale like that. 1000 ordinary people does not equal one Benjamin Franklin or Leonardo da Vinci or Isaac Newton or Ludwig van nce that one person can do more useful work than "thousands of people". So, your entire argument is based on faulty assumptions.
Re:You too can be a millionare
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Somewhat related is how amusing it is to hear people talking about "tax cuts for the (rich | poor | etc)," when they're actually talking about "tax cuts for the (high income | low income | etc)," which is more accurate. Just because someone has a high salary or a low salary does not mean they have a high net worth or low net worth.
Exactly right. Politicians are busy trying to buy the votes of the elderly and convince the rest of the voters to let them get away with it by saying the elderly are on "low incomes". But they completely ignore that the elderly have masses of capital - owning their homes outright, share portfolios, etc, etc. If taxation is to be progressive, it should be based on wealth not income.
How can a stripper complain about her employer during the *interview*. She's not employed, yet.
Clearly you are completely ignorant of the law. There are many things you cannot ask in an interview. For example, if you ask if someone has children, then don't offer them they job, there is a legal case for discrimination there: you can be sued for discriminating against people with families on the grounds that they won't work as hard. You cannot ask if someone is homosexual during an interview. The fact that they aren't an employee doesn't matter.
Whether you agree with this or not is irrelevant: it's the law.
You could have found it yourself, if you weren't so fucking imbecilic.
As for oracle, I dunno. Larry is getting older and probably won't pull one of his "crazy ivans" again for a good long time if ever again. He appears to be backing a winning horse at the moment and making a killing doing it. I'd call it an infatuation if it wasn't for the fact that they have replaced a majority of their desktops with it and they have signed partnership agreements with RedHat and HP.
I have customers who have been running Oracle 10g betas for months now. It's a slick product, and the arguments for blade/grid/thin client are compelling in theory...
But (and this is a big butt, like J-Lo's) to truly benefit from grids requires a complete overhaul of IT infrastructure. Back in the day host-based systems were all the rage, then client-server, then middleware - grid architecture requires that the assumptions of the past 3 generations be discarded. If I were building a network and applications from scratch, I'd definitely go down the grid route - but people aren't, they have a hell of a lot of the previous 3 generations still around. Try to mix modern grid apps with thick client/server, and you open a whole big can of worms. It requires enormously detailed planning, and a deep understanding of the applications and the business - you need to know before you start what resources can be pooled from where at what times, for example, and if you get it wrong, you can bring the business grinding to a halt. The jump from 9i to 10g is as big as the jump from 7.3 to 8i, if not bigger. And another thing I've found: blades save space and are easy to manage (if you have good tools) but in terms of compute power per dollar, 1U's still come out ahead, by a long way. And even if you deploy blades, you still need something on the back end to handle storage - it's often the right economic choice just to buy a big Sun and use it for both compute and storage.
What I'm saying is, migrating to grids requires a lot of upfront spending. Those who master or manufacture the tech will be very well paid in the next IT boom. Those who roll out 10g as if it's just another patch are completely missing the point. And the blade scene - right now - is full of hype, and people need to take a good hard look before they commit to it.
This practice was rampant at British Airways, so the management introduced time clocks, with cards to swipe in and out. Swiping for a friend was explicitly banned.
In response, the union went on strike and stranded 80,000 passengers. Kinda makes you think what they were trying to protect, doesn't it? Honest employees would never have been afraid of the new rules.
Imagine if a contract said "in this job you will be sexually harrassed and you can't complain about it". Not legal. Any contract that violates the law isn't binding.
The existance of the pr0n/sex industry tends to invalidate your assertion. Do you think say a stripper could complain of sexual harassment if an employer asked take her clothes off in an interview? No, contracts can require obligations above the minimum the law requires.
Seeing as you are an sql type person I'm sure you know that Oracle is pretty much pushing RedHat + Oracle9i as it's premier solution for small to midsized businesses. Might not be a bad idea to learn it?
*grin* The first time I deployed Linux in a commercial setting was in... '96. I'm quite familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. I consider myself to be an engineer, not a partisan, and I always pick their right tool for the job without letting my personal opinions get in the way. In the games market, the odds are heavily stacked against Linux: it doesn't have the hardware support that Windows does, it's a much, much smaller fraction of the market than Windows, it has a "something for nothing" culture associated with it (rightly or wrongly), etc etc. As I said in another post, Linux might make a fine console OS, but Linux on PC is not a good gaming platform.
I wouldn't read too much into Oracle's current infatution with Red Hat - remember their Raw Iron project? Exactly.
They didn't read anything. If redhat had approached them with a huge bundle of cash, they would have put a friggin' penguin in the game. Valve simply doesn't care about linux, accept to run dedicated servers for their products.
This may be hard for you to understand, but outside of the "geeks" no-one cares about Linux except as a way to make money.
And get this: even Red Hat doesn't. They're a corporation just like Valve.
You expect everyone to pay again for a ported binary?
Loki's business model (license a game then port it) required that people did pay for the Linux version. If people had waited, not buying the Windows version and onyl buying the Linux version, it may have worked. But what people expected was that Loki would do the port for free. Loki got no revenue from the original publisher, remember.
Slashdot Mirror
It IS zero sum.
No it isn't, because the more work is done, the more the overall wealth of an economy - each unit of currency is merely a share of this wealth - exists. This shows up as real prices falling - for example MFlops/dollar falls all the time. It's not so long ago that merely subsisting took almost all of a family's income, nowadays in the developed economy, it's a fraction of income and it's falling all the time. The amount of "stuff" that can be bought for a given amount of "real money" goes up and up. That is why it's not zero-sum.
In what way is that camera better than my mother's old 35mm Leica, which still operates as good as it did in the 1950's?
Well, letting aside the economic advantages digital has over film for the amateur (for example, you don't need to pay for the shots that don't come out) the wider trend is, anything that a capitalist economy produces gets cheaper over time. A camera you can afford is better than one you can't, if all you want to do is take some pictures.
That's what capitalism gives you -- a consume-and-dispose society, with total disregard to quality or long term satisfaction.
You can still get "better" if you want to pay more, of course, but the alternative does exist if you don't. A Nikon camera is still a quality product that will last, for example. You can buy a disposable film camera now for about GBP 5 - that's two or three cups of coffee in a high street cafe. What was the coffee:camera ratio in the 1950s, even at the entry level?
Do you care how your stocks will be doing 20 years down the road, as long as you make a profit now, and get a chance to sell the stock before it goes bad?
Well, I tend to care about my portfolio rather more than individual stocks in it - if one's a performer, I'd happily keep it for 20 years, and if I didn't think it was a good long term bet, I wouldn't buy it. My personal strategy is that dividends are what matter, capital growth comes second. I'd only get involved in short-term share prices if I had time (and inclination) to be a daytrader.
in the end what counts is that someone made money by charging you more for it than they paid someone else for it
You are assuming a zero-sum - it doesn't work like that in the real world. Example: a loaf of bread is worth more than the cost of the flour in it, because the baker's time adds value. A car is worth more than a ton of raw iron, because of the labour that's gone into it.
That's where the "profit" comes from - people buying something, adding value through working on it, then selling the end results.
If we had more small businesses, we might have a more stable economy in the long run, with people less tied to major corporations in dependency.
Possibly - but writing small business software "for free" won't get us there, anymore than "free pencils for small business" would.
in a capitalist world those who care and are willing to sacrifice their own needs-fulfillment for the needs-fulfillment of another should lose and die.
What are you talking about? In capitalism the only way to get ahead is to fulfill the needs of others, by selling them goods and services. They'll do the same for you.
Why do you think that famine is practically unheard of in capitalist countries? It's because the farmers want to make MONEY! Why do you think that in non-capitalist countries starvation is widespread - like say North Korea? Because their farmers work for "the good of society".
Just because it's always been this way means its the best way.
Absolutely correct. Things that work outlast things that don't. That's true in technology, it's true in economics and it's true in evolution. That principle is baked into our very DNA. If something better comes along, you won't have to worry about whether it will supplant that which presently exists. It inevitably will.
Capitalism is a powerful economic system precisely because this concept of competition is harnessed. Economic systems that attempt to suppress competition are unable to deal with it when it eventually confronts them. Capitalist entities, whether individuals or corporations, face competition every day, and have become very, very good at it.
As the wealth of nations increases, those who have lost jobs or had to accept menial ones over the past three years are left with only a wealth of culprits to blame: financial scandals, wars, tax cuts, stagnation, etc.
For a start, a 3-year sample isn't big enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. We're just in the down phase of the economic cycle, that's all. Smart people salted away some of the high salaries and bonuses that were easy to come by in the recent boom years, when shortness of staff drove up the price of labour. Now, some people look for blame - but it's hard to see how some of these can be blamed. Wars and conflict drive up employment in the engineering and aerospace sectors. Tax cuts can't increase unemployment except amongst government workers, and there have been no reports of government layoffs - if anything, the government is busily hiring.
Let me make this clear: wealth is not created by governments. It's created by risk-taking entrepreneurs. Right now, the markets need to recover from excessive risk-taking in the late 90s. This is perfectly natural. When sufficient capital has become amassed, the cycle will begin again and there will be another boom.
But capitalism is atrocious at distributing the fruits of innovation
I was in a store the other day, I saw a 3-megapixel digital camera for GBP 99, a DVD players for GBP 49. 5 years ago, these products cost hundreds of pounds. That's what capitalism delivers: more and better for everyone. The "poor" in a capitalist society are far better off than the "poor" in any other system - and capitalism generates the surpluses that fund the entire welfare system.
Each labor-saving device means the idling of thousands of people, wasting their years of experience, rigorous training, and practical insights.
Yawn, they said exactly the same things when the car started to replace the horse drawn carriage, when mechanical looms replaced hand-operated looms, when automation was introduced to farming, in fact whenever any technology has revolutionized an industry. Getting laid off is always a little disconcerting (yes, it has happened to me so I know what I'm talking about) but unemployment is what you make of it.
And meanwhile governments, businesses, venture capitalists (what are you doing with all that money your pets in Congress and the White House brought you, tails all awagging?),
Ah, now we see the author's real agenda - I should have realized when I saw the words "tax cuts". I will merely point out that the dotcom bubble economy was created under a Democrat president and began declining in mid 2000 - there is nothing Bush or Greenspan could have done to prevent it bursting.
Interesting - according to MetaLink the platforms on which Oracle is available are:
Data General Intel Unix
Fujitsu-Siemens BS2000/OSD
Fujitsu-Siemens RM200-600E Reliant Unix
HP Alpha OpenVMS
HP Tru64 UNIX
HP-UX Itanium
HP-UX PA-RISC
IBM AIX -Based Systems
IBM NUMA-Q DYNIX/ptx
IBM S/390 based Linux
IBM z/OS (OS/390)
Linux x86
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows NT for Intel
Microsoft Windows XP
NEC UX/4800
Novell NetWare
SGI Unix
Solaris Operating Environment (SPARC)
Solaris Operating Environment x86
UnixWare (SCO)
Maybe the OSX edition is development-only, not supported in production.
Are you talking about how much money people spend at an e-commerce web sites?
Yup. One Dell (running Win2K) or eBay (NT4) is worth more than 100,000 personal homepages of the sort you might find on "myhosting". Of course, Myhosting Inc itself might be worth some money, but in that case you would count it as one site, not thousands and thousands. Numbers of individual web sites hosted per OS isn't a good measure of how useful that OS is, without taking into consideration the complexity of those sites.
With only 0.4% of sites in the first 6 months after release, Windows2003 has already failed.
But who cares about serving "myhosting" sites? They are the entry level, mostly very simple static pages. Windows Server 2003 target market is a) high end e-commerce web sites and b) intranet applications. It's about choosing the right tool for the job and not letting ideology instead of intelligence make decisions for you.
Now, if you have figures for "dollars per day transacted on the web by OS" I think you will find that Linux comes very far behind commercial Unix and Windows. Which goes to show, you can prove anything you like by careful selection of statistics.
Oracle, Sybase, MySQL all available natively
Do you have a reference for the assertion that Oracle is available? I've checked Metalink, and there's no reference to it at all. I've seen Sybase on OSX tho'.
... if a sysadmin used his privs to play a "prank" on my PC, I'd have his sorry ass fired. It's as bad as slashing a co-workers tyres for a "joke". PCs are not toys, they are tools for getting work done.
A more pertinent question is why isn't MSN supervising it's channels? AOL does it, so why not them? If I were a parent I would take this as an implicit admission from MSN that kids are not safe using their service. I would see it as a recommendation to use another ISP that does try and provide a kid safe environment.
Microsft is supervising the subscriber channels - but not the free channels. They are (or were) after all, free. Employing people to supervise channels costs money, and obviously cannot be done on channels that people aren't paying for. Paid subscribers are also traceable - if someone misbehaves, you've got their real name and address. They can't hide these from you if they paid by credit card.
MSN could make their chatrooms safer but have chosen not to.
Yes, and Slashbots could get all the facts before hysterical anti-MS ranting, but they don't, do they?
Wouldn't that encourage people to blow all their money rather than invest or save it?
Maybe - but spent money has to go somewhere, so it would be put to productive use in providing good and services for the money to be blown on. It would still have to be worthwhile to invest, just as it is still worthwhile to earn more now even tho' you'll pay a higher rate of tax.
None of these people could have conceivably done more useful work than the entire lifetimes work of thousands of people.
You are wrong because intelligence doesn't scale like that. 1000 ordinary people does not equal one Benjamin Franklin or Leonardo da Vinci or Isaac Newton or Ludwig van nce that one person can do more useful work than "thousands of people". So, your entire argument is based on faulty assumptions.
Somewhat related is how amusing it is to hear people talking about "tax cuts for the (rich | poor | etc)," when they're actually talking about "tax cuts for the (high income | low income | etc)," which is more accurate. Just because someone has a high salary or a low salary does not mean they have a high net worth or low net worth.
Exactly right. Politicians are busy trying to buy the votes of the elderly and convince the rest of the voters to let them get away with it by saying the elderly are on "low incomes". But they completely ignore that the elderly have masses of capital - owning their homes outright, share portfolios, etc, etc. If taxation is to be progressive, it should be based on wealth not income.
Mostly, wealthy people give their money away. Heard of Carnegie Hall?
How can a stripper complain about her employer during the *interview*. She's not employed, yet.
Clearly you are completely ignorant of the law. There are many things you cannot ask in an interview. For example, if you ask if someone has children, then don't offer them they job, there is a legal case for discrimination there: you can be sued for discriminating against people with families on the grounds that they won't work as hard. You cannot ask if someone is homosexual during an interview. The fact that they aren't an employee doesn't matter.
Whether you agree with this or not is irrelevant: it's the law.
You could have found it yourself, if you weren't so fucking imbecilic.
No my friend, it is you who are the imbecile.
As for oracle, I dunno. Larry is getting older and probably won't pull one of his "crazy ivans" again for a good long time if ever again. He appears to be backing a winning horse at the moment and making a killing doing it. I'd call it an infatuation if it wasn't for the fact that they have replaced a majority of their desktops with it and they have signed partnership agreements with RedHat and HP.
I have customers who have been running Oracle 10g betas for months now. It's a slick product, and the arguments for blade/grid/thin client are compelling in theory...
But (and this is a big butt, like J-Lo's) to truly benefit from grids requires a complete overhaul of IT infrastructure. Back in the day host-based systems were all the rage, then client-server, then middleware - grid architecture requires that the assumptions of the past 3 generations be discarded. If I were building a network and applications from scratch, I'd definitely go down the grid route - but people aren't, they have a hell of a lot of the previous 3 generations still around. Try to mix modern grid apps with thick client/server, and you open a whole big can of worms. It requires enormously detailed planning, and a deep understanding of the applications and the business - you need to know before you start what resources can be pooled from where at what times, for example, and if you get it wrong, you can bring the business grinding to a halt. The jump from 9i to 10g is as big as the jump from 7.3 to 8i, if not bigger. And another thing I've found: blades save space and are easy to manage (if you have good tools) but in terms of compute power per dollar, 1U's still come out ahead, by a long way. And even if you deploy blades, you still need something on the back end to handle storage - it's often the right economic choice just to buy a big Sun and use it for both compute and storage.
What I'm saying is, migrating to grids requires a lot of upfront spending. Those who master or manufacture the tech will be very well paid in the next IT boom. Those who roll out 10g as if it's just another patch are completely missing the point. And the blade scene - right now - is full of hype, and people need to take a good hard look before they commit to it.
You could have a buddy clock you in or something.
This practice was rampant at British Airways, so the management introduced time clocks, with cards to swipe in and out. Swiping for a friend was explicitly banned.
In response, the union went on strike and stranded 80,000 passengers. Kinda makes you think what they were trying to protect, doesn't it? Honest employees would never have been afraid of the new rules.
Imagine if a contract said "in this job you will be sexually harrassed and you can't complain about it". Not legal. Any contract that violates the law isn't binding.
The existance of the pr0n/sex industry tends to invalidate your assertion. Do you think say a stripper could complain of sexual harassment if an employer asked take her clothes off in an interview? No, contracts can require obligations above the minimum the law requires.
Seeing as you are an sql type person I'm sure you know that Oracle is pretty much pushing RedHat + Oracle9i as it's premier solution for small to midsized businesses. Might not be a bad idea to learn it?
*grin* The first time I deployed Linux in a commercial setting was in... '96. I'm quite familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. I consider myself to be an engineer, not a partisan, and I always pick their right tool for the job without letting my personal opinions get in the way. In the games market, the odds are heavily stacked against Linux: it doesn't have the hardware support that Windows does, it's a much, much smaller fraction of the market than Windows, it has a "something for nothing" culture associated with it (rightly or wrongly), etc etc. As I said in another post, Linux might make a fine console OS, but Linux on PC is not a good gaming platform.
I wouldn't read too much into Oracle's current infatution with Red Hat - remember their Raw Iron project? Exactly.
Loki didn't go out of business because there wasn't a market. Loki went out of business because the upper management was utterly clueless.
I don't work in the games industry, but my friends that do assure me that all games companies are managed by idiots!
They didn't read anything. If redhat had approached them with a huge bundle of cash, they would have put a friggin' penguin in the game. Valve simply doesn't care about linux, accept to run dedicated servers for their products.
This may be hard for you to understand, but outside of the "geeks" no-one cares about Linux except as a way to make money.
And get this: even Red Hat doesn't. They're a corporation just like Valve.
You expect everyone to pay again for a ported binary?
Loki's business model (license a game then port it) required that people did pay for the Linux version. If people had waited, not buying the Windows version and onyl buying the Linux version, it may have worked. But what people expected was that Loki would do the port for free. Loki got no revenue from the original publisher, remember.