However, many Slashdot pro-privacy people are indeed athiests, judging by their posts. I find it amusing that on this issue fundamentalists and athiests/agnostics are most likely united in spirit.
This is a wonderful idea, if for no other reason than we finally have an issue that unites the most atheistic, rabid Slashdot privacy fanatics squarely with the fundamentalist Christian religious right.
Seriously, the fundies are going to go apeshit if this even makes it into draft legislation - and the atheists and agnostic pro-privacy people can join them. The Christians have the grass roots political network to block this with a bit of help - I hope that both sides (athiest privacy advocates and Christian fundamentalists) can put aside their differeces long enough to defeat stupidity like this, and, perhaps learn a bit from each other.
Oh, yeah, it's not enough to stop this from becoming law - you also have to pass NEW laws banning insurance companies from discriminating against those who don't get the chip, which is most likely the real danger.
Hydrogen is a great storage medium for electricity. Batteries have a very finite lifetime, and existing cars can be retrofitted to run on hydrogen. Newer cars could use either hydrogen directly via internal combustion or electricity via batteries or fuel cells.
Photovolataic has come a long way, but the most powerful and efficent (in terms of dollars / energy spent to create them) way to create electricy via solar are Stirling engines - however get you get the solar power, you can generate it like mad during the day, split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn the hydrogen during nighttime to produce electricity.
No matter what, we're running out of oil. Total oil production will peak any time now - we've almost reached the point when we'll never be able to produce as much as we do and we'll start riding the downhill curve. Oil is necessary for plastics and other applications - it's planetary and economic suicide if we keep buring it for fuel until it's gone. Future generations are going to curse us if we don't save them enough oil.
Barrow's Neurological Institution in Phoenix occasionally uses what they call the "standstill" operation where they chill a person down to 60 degrees and replace some of their blood with some other solution so that they can read deeper areas of the brain - it's an extremely difficult operation, pioneered by Dr Robert Spetzler, and to the best of my knowledge Barrow's is the only place in the world that has had success with the operation - the patients tend to die everywhere else it's been tried. A more complete description can be found in the mid-90's book "The Healing Blase" that talks about many trends in brain surgery.
I am terribly disappointed...
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This is SLASHDOT, for God's sake, and no one has pointed out the obvious:
They just need to call up Scotty and get him to give them some transparent alumminum. That should stop the neighbors from complaining.
Sheesh. News for nerds? How can you call yourself nerds if you miss such an obvious, pathetic pun?
Yes, launched, in that although the movie says he launched / will launch from Montanna, the movie was actually FILMED in Tucson, at the Titan museum - so, if you refer to the making of the movie as the "launch", then the past tense is indeed correct.
Yeah, the govt didn't loan them the site - they filmed it in the Titan Missile Museum by Tucson - I posted the link in the article. A neat place. Everything's on springs to ride-out a nuclear near-miss.
But still, wouldn't it be cool having a whole academy full of disposible characters (students) to die at the hands of of their fellow classmates in horrible science experiments gone wrong, or fatal navigation errors while on internships, or in illegal flying stunts, or...
They do have something like that. It's called Harry Potter.
They called the State Department, who called someone else, and before they could contact the right people, it was too late. Without pre-existing channels, there's no way to evacuate people on only 2-3 hours notice.
As one news site that took the trouble to research it reported, "imagine you're the manager of a TV station and you get a strange phone call from an accented voice telling you that you have an hour before a giant wave of water wipes out your city - especially when it hasn't happened for over a century. What do you do?"
The sheer lack of precedence worked against them here. It didn't help that no one in the affected countries had any real idea of the magnitude of the threat. Anyone who has worked with a large organization knows how hard it is to communicate such an idea in only an hour or two - and have that communication translated into effective action.
Actually, Alvin has been modified so many times that there is nothing left of the original craft launched in the sixties - they were constantly upgrading it and changing it, and in the late eighties during a refit they realized that once they removed a certain component, there would be nothing left of the original Alvin, as all the other parts had slowly been upgraded and replaced.
Alvin is kind of like a living organism, I guess. It recycled all its parts from birth.
For mroe details, check out Charles Pellegrino's book Her Name, Titanic, where he talks about how Alvin was constantly being upgraded - especially after she sunk and spent a year at the bottom of the ocean.
However, since corporations seem to think that once something is created they should own it forever, make them subject to the same taxes everyone has to pay - if intellectual property is truly property, treat it as such.
In other words, we must all pay taxes if we own real property - it's called the property tax. If you own a vacant lot, you must pay tax every year on it, whether you use it or not.
I hate that. I think it's stupid. I think once you own a piece of real estate, you should own it forever. However, that is the way the world is.
Let's extend it. The MPAA, RIAA & company pretty much have Congress and the Supreme Court bought off one way or another. It's pretty clear we can't fight them directly. So, let's start a campaign to collect intellectual property tax. Force companies to register and maintain title to created works. Give them a twenty year window, from time of first publication, to own the IP free and clear of tax. After twenty years, charge 'em tax if they don't relinquish the copyright to the public domain.
It's drastic. It's yet another stupid tax. On the other hand, it's a potentially huge source of revenue and a way of bypassing the lobbyists and hacks who prevent enforcement of the LIMITED copyrights mentioned in the Constitution. Go to a politician and tell them that the campaign contributions they take in from the copyright holders can't match the goodwill generated by bringing home the pork money that this tax will bring in.
How much will a.5% tax on Mickey Mouse bring into the government till?
Let's do it. Anyone want to work with me to make it happen? It'd be difficult - copyright is usually a Federal issue, but there must be a way to get something done at the state level. Send me email if you're interested.
I'm a conservative Republican. The idea of working to create a new type of tax is hateful to me. Unfortunately, I must conclude the idea of turn the right to think and create freely over to corporations is even more hateful.
I am a conservative (ultra-conservative?) right-wing Republican, and proud of it.
I do not believe in coddling criminals.
However, I have yet to see one positive thing that this buffoon has done since being elected. He has one skill, and one skill only: telling the public what they want to hear.
Public records requests show that almost every day on his calendar is set for speaking events. Law enforcement? Who has time for that when you have to go and give a speech about how "tough" you are.
The Maricopa county jails are a disgrace. Prisoners are treated horribly. Being hard on crime does not mean you have to run a jail that a third-world country would be ashamed of. And Joe Arpaio has spent a tremendous amount of money "investigating" political opponents. More than one elected official has critisized the Sheriff, or asked for an accounting of funds, only to find themselves the target of an MCSO "investigation". These investigations are always long on publicity, long on smearing, and very expensive to defend against - although they rarely, if ever, result in actual charges.
Oh, yeah, Joe, where is all the money from the sale of jail products going? And where did you get the $800,000 in rental property that you own free and clear.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a strutting, egotisical maniac - and a disgrace to the Republican party. I thank God that it appears my fellow Republicans are wising up to his antics - my cynical side says it's just before he helped elect Democratic governor Janet Napolitano, but I prefer to think it's the traditional Republic respect for the rule of law that is fueling the Republican resentment of this man. I'm not even going to talk about the millions of dollars in lawsuits that this idiot has cost the county. There is a strong chance that Joe is going to get knocked off the ballot in the September 7th primary - if there's any other Republicans or Independants out there, be sure to vote!
I hate to put on the tinfoil hat, but CNN is a division of Time/Warner, one of the monstrously-huge media entities trying to get so-called "intellectual property" the same status as "real estate" - they want a piece of "intellectual property" to be eternal, like land, where it can be kept - and milked - forever, without any expiration.
They clearly want to profit forever off all works that are created, and they want to use technology to do it, and they want to force the use of technology through legal means. In short, they want to sell you a license to think.
Now, let's look at CNN: this is a gigantic news organization that is the main source of news for millions of Americans that seems to have yanked a relatively innoculous story about "intellectual property."
I've heard of CNN changing stories, and moving them, but I've never seen once totally removed - and a search of CNN for keywords in the original AP article finds nothing.
It is very clear that the MPAA, RIAA and other gigantic entities that want much more restrictive laws on copyright and viewing licenses would prefer to have these laws passed without reference to the American public.
They don't want people to know what they are doing until it is done.
Now, we have a relatively tame story about Olympics, but just interesting enough to perhaps make Joe Six-Pack think for a moment, "Hey, why to those Frogs and Brits get to see stuff that I have to pay for?"
Is it possible that this is why the story was removed?
Could CNN be filtering news that could irritate the American masses into seeing that the Fair Use Doctrine, Limited Copyrights and a cornucopia of other rights currently enjoyed by Americans are slipping away?
Can you also include the YEAR in the Date / Time posted section of the article? It's a pain to do a search on obscure stuff, find a slashdot article that seems relevant, but have no idea what year it was actually posted...
Compatibility with Exchange is wonderful, seriously.
The promise of exchange - integrated email & calendaring, locks a lot of companies in to MS software.
Say what you will, the ability for a clueless end-user to click "accept" on an email and automatically schedule themselves for a meeting is a Big Deal(tm).
Now, if only we had something affordable that could do that on the Linux server side, with clients on Linux, Windows and Mac platforms...and no, webmail doesn't cut it...
Last year, they made, what twenty thousand dollars of revenue on expendidures of something on the order of ten million dollars?
"It's all free publicity"? Huh? Yeah, and Michael Jackson is getting lots of "free publicity" right now for banging little boys. I don't see that "free publicity" helping his record sales, either.
Bill Gates and the Handheld TRS-80
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Don't forget, supposedly the last bit of code that Gates wrote largely by himself was the code that allowed the handheld Radio Shack TRS-80 to run - a massive thing so tough that you could skip it on concrete without it breaking, and that is STILL in use today in harsh industrial environments (oil rigs, etc) because A. it has an RS-232 port and B. the thing is TOUGH - and they use it to collect data from things and dump it into more powerful computers.
The guy wrote software for consumer-grade hardware that is still in use 20+ years later - he may be a putz, but he can hack.
I haven't seen an article yet about the MS Linux Business Unit programmers.
Oh, wait. That's because the Microsoft Linux Business Unit has no programmers - just a legal staff, and they are outsourced to some company based in Utah.
I lost money to a similar scam, except in my case the mail came in the form of a white envelope from the "Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service." Short verison, there were papers in there wanting to know my social security number, how much I made, what I spent it on, all of the same information from my wife...and then it ordered me to give a percentage of my income to them or else they would come and put me in jail!
I did a bit of research and found that this money had been taken from me from some group of thugs called the Congress of the United States. Apparently, they took my money and I'm told there's very little chance of getting it back. They've even got my employer in on the scam - now they are paying some of my paycheck directly to them.
The San Francisco City Council recently passed Ordinance 2002-11-78b, which prohibits the sale or manufacture of pinouts and connectors that are exclusively "male" or "female".
Apparently, there were those who felt that having seperate male and female connectors was somehow discriminitory. In the words of Douglas Fillmore, spokesperson of a citizen's group that endorse that ordinance, "Technology, and our terminology that describes it does not only mirror life - it also helps guide it. By creating devices that can only be used in one method, to the exclusion of others, and to further use such value-laden terminology to describe them, sends a clear message that "there is only one accepted way to mate." This metaphor can be very injurous to groups we wish to show our support for."
So, go into a Radio Shack in San Fran and as for a male db25 pin connector. They'll sell you a connector that comes with a seperate mating collar, just incase you choose to mate it with another male. Or, if they're out of stock, they'll refer you to the Fry's Electronics in Oakland.
It appears that RedHat has made the decision that its future is in RHEL. Desktop Redhat is all but abandoned - I don't want to use Fedora, which is not a stable product but rather a hobbyist / experimental toy. I need a desktop that WORKS.
Unfortunately, Redhat has been the leader in the Linux industry - which means many programs only work properly under Redhat.
My question is this: with the abandonment of the Linux desktop, are you not afraid the Microsoft will introduce a new "feature" into Internet Explorer that will make it very advantageous for companies to migrate to Windows on their server platforms. Let's face it: most web-using consumers are currently using Internet Explorer. If MS integrates a new feature into IE and ties it into Windows server functionality, and this feature is appealing enough (and, of course, copyrighted and patented) to become a de-facto standard, where does that leave Redhat? It seems to me that this is inevitable, unless the number of Linux/Mac systems (and other web browsers) surpass 15% market share. Is Redhat being shortsighted by abandoning the desktop?
You may think that Linux is not ready for the desktop. You are partially right; until I can get Mattel Barbie Playhouse or stuff like that to run on Linux, Linux will not enjoy significant home user penetration. However, Linux desktops ARE ready to be deployed in controlled, corporate environments, and lots of people surf from work, and buy stuff while doing so. Ultimately, Linux MUST gain a noticable presence on the desktop, or else Microsoft, with its de-facto monopoly on the browser, will find a way to exploit that monopoly (either by legalistic crap or introducing new "features" that require a genuine MS server). Have you thought about this?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, 100%.
However, many Slashdot pro-privacy people are indeed athiests, judging by their posts. I find it amusing that on this issue fundamentalists and athiests/agnostics are most likely united in spirit.
This is a wonderful idea, if for no other reason than we finally have an issue that unites the most atheistic, rabid Slashdot privacy fanatics squarely with the fundamentalist Christian religious right.
Seriously, the fundies are going to go apeshit if this even makes it into draft legislation - and the atheists and agnostic pro-privacy people can join them. The Christians have the grass roots political network to block this with a bit of help - I hope that both sides (athiest privacy advocates and Christian fundamentalists) can put aside their differeces long enough to defeat stupidity like this, and, perhaps learn a bit from each other.
Oh, yeah, it's not enough to stop this from becoming law - you also have to pass NEW laws banning insurance companies from discriminating against those who don't get the chip, which is most likely the real danger.
-Steve
Solar -> Hydrogren ->
Hydrogen is a great storage medium for electricity. Batteries have a very finite lifetime, and existing cars can be retrofitted to run on hydrogen. Newer cars could use either hydrogen directly via internal combustion or electricity via batteries or fuel cells.
Photovolataic has come a long way, but the most powerful and efficent (in terms of dollars / energy spent to create them) way to create electricy via solar are Stirling engines - however get you get the solar power, you can generate it like mad during the day, split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn the hydrogen during nighttime to produce electricity.
No matter what, we're running out of oil. Total oil production will peak any time now - we've almost reached the point when we'll never be able to produce as much as we do and we'll start riding the downhill curve. Oil is necessary for plastics and other applications - it's planetary and economic suicide if we keep buring it for fuel until it's gone. Future generations are going to curse us if we don't save them enough oil.
Barrow's Neurological Institution in Phoenix occasionally uses what they call the "standstill" operation where they chill a person down to 60 degrees and replace some of their blood with some other solution so that they can read deeper areas of the brain - it's an extremely difficult operation, pioneered by Dr Robert Spetzler, and to the best of my knowledge Barrow's is the only place in the world that has had success with the operation - the patients tend to die everywhere else it's been tried. A more complete description can be found in the mid-90's book "The Healing Blase" that talks about many trends in brain surgery.
This is SLASHDOT, for God's sake, and no one has pointed out the obvious:
They just need to call up Scotty and get him to give them some transparent alumminum. That should stop the neighbors from complaining.
Sheesh. News for nerds? How can you call yourself nerds if you miss such an obvious, pathetic pun?
Yes, launched, in that although the movie says he launched / will launch from Montanna, the movie was actually FILMED in Tucson, at the Titan museum - so, if you refer to the making of the movie as the "launch", then the past tense is indeed correct.
Yeah, the govt didn't loan them the site - they filmed it in the Titan Missile Museum by Tucson - I posted the link in the article. A neat place. Everything's on springs to ride-out a nuclear near-miss.
-Steve
Actually, it's last transmission was REALLY:
My God! It's full of mud!
But still, wouldn't it be cool having a whole academy full of disposible characters (students) to die at the hands of of their fellow classmates in horrible science experiments gone wrong, or fatal navigation errors while on internships, or in illegal flying stunts, or...
They do have something like that. It's called Harry Potter.
They called the State Department, who called someone else, and before they could contact the right people, it was too late. Without pre-existing channels, there's no way to evacuate people on only 2-3 hours notice.
As one news site that took the trouble to research it reported, "imagine you're the manager of a TV station and you get a strange phone call from an accented voice telling you that you have an hour before a giant wave of water wipes out your city - especially when it hasn't happened for over a century. What do you do?"
The sheer lack of precedence worked against them here. It didn't help that no one in the affected countries had any real idea of the magnitude of the threat. Anyone who has worked with a large organization knows how hard it is to communicate such an idea in only an hour or two - and have that communication translated into effective action.
Actually, Alvin has been modified so many times that there is nothing left of the original craft launched in the sixties - they were constantly upgrading it and changing it, and in the late eighties during a refit they realized that once they removed a certain component, there would be nothing left of the original Alvin, as all the other parts had slowly been upgraded and replaced.
Alvin is kind of like a living organism, I guess. It recycled all its parts from birth.
For mroe details, check out Charles Pellegrino's book Her Name, Titanic, where he talks about how Alvin was constantly being upgraded - especially after she sunk and spent a year at the bottom of the ocean.
I hate taxes.
.5% tax on Mickey Mouse bring into the government till?
However, since corporations seem to think that once something is created they should own it forever, make them subject to the same taxes everyone has to pay - if intellectual property is truly property, treat it as such.
In other words, we must all pay taxes if we own real property - it's called the property tax. If you own a vacant lot, you must pay tax every year on it, whether you use it or not.
I hate that. I think it's stupid. I think once you own a piece of real estate, you should own it forever. However, that is the way the world is.
Let's extend it. The MPAA, RIAA & company pretty much have Congress and the Supreme Court bought off one way or another. It's pretty clear we can't fight them directly. So, let's start a campaign to collect intellectual property tax. Force companies to register and maintain title to created works. Give them a twenty year window, from time of first publication, to own the IP free and clear of tax. After twenty years, charge 'em tax if they don't relinquish the copyright to the public domain.
It's drastic. It's yet another stupid tax. On the other hand, it's a potentially huge source of revenue and a way of bypassing the lobbyists and hacks who prevent enforcement of the LIMITED copyrights mentioned in the Constitution. Go to a politician and tell them that the campaign contributions they take in from the copyright holders can't match the goodwill generated by bringing home the pork money that this tax will bring in.
How much will a
Let's do it. Anyone want to work with me to make it happen? It'd be difficult - copyright is usually a Federal issue, but there must be a way to get something done at the state level. Send me email if you're interested.
I'm a conservative Republican. The idea of working to create a new type of tax is hateful to me. Unfortunately, I must conclude the idea of turn the right to think and create freely over to corporations is even more hateful.
-Steve Calabrese
Sheriff Joe is a disgrace.
I am a conservative (ultra-conservative?) right-wing Republican, and proud of it.
I do not believe in coddling criminals.
However, I have yet to see one positive thing that this buffoon has done since being elected. He has one skill, and one skill only: telling the public what they want to hear.
Public records requests show that almost every day on his calendar is set for speaking events. Law enforcement? Who has time for that when you have to go and give a speech about how "tough" you are.
The Maricopa county jails are a disgrace. Prisoners are treated horribly. Being hard on crime does not mean you have to run a jail that a third-world country would be ashamed of. And Joe Arpaio has spent a tremendous amount of money "investigating" political opponents. More than one elected official has critisized the Sheriff, or asked for an accounting of funds, only to find themselves the target of an MCSO "investigation". These investigations are always long on publicity, long on smearing, and very expensive to defend against - although they rarely, if ever, result in actual charges.
Oh, yeah, Joe, where is all the money from the sale of jail products going? And where did you get the $800,000 in rental property that you own free and clear.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a strutting, egotisical maniac - and a disgrace to the Republican party. I thank God that it appears my fellow Republicans are wising up to his antics - my cynical side says it's just before he helped elect Democratic governor Janet Napolitano, but I prefer to think it's the traditional Republic respect for the rule of law that is fueling the Republican resentment of this man. I'm not even going to talk about the millions of dollars in lawsuits that this idiot has cost the county. There is a strong chance that Joe is going to get knocked off the ballot in the September 7th primary - if there's any other Republicans or Independants out there, be sure to vote!
-Steve
And no, I'm not talking about the Olympic story.
Since when does a CNN story VANISH?
I hate to put on the tinfoil hat, but CNN is a division of Time/Warner, one of the monstrously-huge media entities trying to get so-called "intellectual property" the same status as "real estate" - they want a piece of "intellectual property" to be eternal, like land, where it can be kept - and milked - forever, without any expiration.
They clearly want to profit forever off all works that are created, and they want to use technology to do it, and they want to force the use of technology through legal means. In short, they want to sell you a license to think.
Now, let's look at CNN: this is a gigantic news organization that is the main source of news for millions of Americans that seems to have yanked a relatively innoculous story about "intellectual property."
I've heard of CNN changing stories, and moving them, but I've never seen once totally removed - and a search of CNN for keywords in the original AP article finds nothing.
It is very clear that the MPAA, RIAA and other gigantic entities that want much more restrictive laws on copyright and viewing licenses would prefer to have these laws passed without reference to the American public.
They don't want people to know what they are doing until it is done.
Now, we have a relatively tame story about Olympics, but just interesting enough to perhaps make Joe Six-Pack think for a moment, "Hey, why to those Frogs and Brits get to see stuff that I have to pay for?"
Is it possible that this is why the story was removed?
Could CNN be filtering news that could irritate the American masses into seeing that the Fair Use Doctrine, Limited Copyrights and a cornucopia of other rights currently enjoyed by Americans are slipping away?
That scares me.
Can you also include the YEAR in the Date / Time posted section of the article? It's a pain to do a search on obscure stuff, find a slashdot article that seems relevant, but have no idea what year it was actually posted...
Compatibility with Exchange is wonderful, seriously.
The promise of exchange - integrated email & calendaring, locks a lot of companies in to MS software.
Say what you will, the ability for a clueless end-user to click "accept" on an email and automatically schedule themselves for a meeting is a Big Deal(tm).
Now, if only we had something affordable that could do that on the Linux server side, with clients on Linux, Windows and Mac platforms...and no, webmail doesn't cut it...
Is there anyone working on this?
-Steve
Huh?
"Helping their sales" ??!?!?!
They don't really sell anything, do they?
Last year, they made, what twenty thousand dollars of revenue on expendidures of something on the order of ten million dollars?
"It's all free publicity"? Huh? Yeah, and Michael Jackson is getting lots of "free publicity" right now for banging little boys. I don't see that "free publicity" helping his record sales, either.
-Steve
Studies supporting the sharpie rumor:
See:
http://www.mscience.com/index.html
for an exhaustive review of why Sharpies Are Bad.
-Steve
Don't forget, supposedly the last bit of code that Gates wrote largely by himself was the code that allowed the handheld Radio Shack TRS-80 to run - a massive thing so tough that you could skip it on concrete without it breaking, and that is STILL in use today in harsh industrial environments (oil rigs, etc) because A. it has an RS-232 port and B. the thing is TOUGH - and they use it to collect data from things and dump it into more powerful computers.
The guy wrote software for consumer-grade hardware that is still in use 20+ years later - he may be a putz, but he can hack.
-Steve
I haven't seen an article yet about the MS Linux Business Unit programmers.
Oh, wait. That's because the Microsoft Linux Business Unit has no programmers - just a legal staff, and they are outsourced to some company based in Utah.
I lost money to a similar scam, except in my case the mail came in the form of a white envelope from the "Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service." Short verison, there were papers in there wanting to know my social security number, how much I made, what I spent it on, all of the same information from my wife...and then it ordered me to give a percentage of my income to them or else they would come and put me in jail!
I did a bit of research and found that this money had been taken from me from some group of thugs called the Congress of the United States. Apparently, they took my money and I'm told there's very little chance of getting it back.
They've even got my employer in on the scam - now they are paying some of my paycheck directly to them.
The San Francisco City Council recently passed Ordinance 2002-11-78b, which prohibits the sale or manufacture of pinouts and connectors that are exclusively "male" or "female".
Apparently, there were those who felt that having seperate male and female connectors was somehow discriminitory. In the words of Douglas Fillmore, spokesperson of a citizen's group that endorse that ordinance, "Technology, and our terminology that describes it does not only mirror life - it also helps guide it. By creating devices that can only be used in one method, to the exclusion of others, and to further use such value-laden terminology to describe them, sends a clear message that "there is only one accepted way to mate." This metaphor can be very injurous to groups we wish to show our support for."
So, go into a Radio Shack in San Fran and as for a male db25 pin connector. They'll sell you a connector that comes with a seperate mating collar, just incase you choose to mate it with another male. Or, if they're out of stock, they'll refer you to the Fry's Electronics in Oakland.
I'm just kidding. I hope no one believes this.
It appears that RedHat has made the decision that its future is in RHEL. Desktop Redhat is all but abandoned - I don't want to use Fedora, which is not a stable product but rather a hobbyist / experimental toy. I need a desktop that WORKS.
Unfortunately, Redhat has been the leader in the Linux industry - which means many programs only work properly under Redhat.
My question is this: with the abandonment of the Linux desktop, are you not afraid the Microsoft will introduce a new "feature" into Internet Explorer that will make it very advantageous for companies to migrate to Windows on their server platforms. Let's face it: most web-using consumers are currently using Internet Explorer. If MS integrates a new feature into IE and ties it into Windows server functionality, and this feature is appealing enough (and, of course, copyrighted and patented) to become a de-facto standard, where does that leave Redhat? It seems to me that this is inevitable, unless the number of Linux/Mac systems (and other web browsers) surpass 15% market share. Is Redhat being shortsighted by abandoning the desktop?
You may think that Linux is not ready for the desktop. You are partially right; until I can get Mattel Barbie Playhouse or stuff like that to run on Linux, Linux will not enjoy significant home user penetration. However, Linux desktops ARE ready to be deployed in controlled, corporate environments, and lots of people surf from work, and buy stuff while doing so. Ultimately, Linux MUST gain a noticable presence on the desktop, or else Microsoft, with its de-facto monopoly on the browser, will find a way to exploit that monopoly (either by legalistic crap or introducing new "features" that require a genuine MS server). Have you thought about this?
You missed the real story:
Congressman Doesn't Use a Form Letter to Reply to a Slashdot Reader!
Now, THAT'S news...
File:
http://www.sec.gov/complaint/cf942sec9570.htm
to lodge on online complaint against SCO for manipulation of security prices.