Even if you did win, the exception does not prove the rule.
Using a portion of the bandwidth purchased by someone else without that person's permission is theft, as defined by the law of Canada. What you or I think it should has no bearing. Your analogy about fires is irrelevant; the kind of stuff sophomores try in debating class or after one too many beers.
One can always conjure extraordinary circumstances. The possibility that something extremely unusual or rare might happen doesn't nullify the intent of the law.
For example. you might be suffering from dementia, and entered my house under the impression that it was your own. That fact would not stop me from filing charges. (We're talking about criminal charges, not a lawsuit, as your suggested.) If you could prove your dementia in court, you'd likey not be convicted.
However, if you broke into my house while it was on fire, you're defense would be considerably weaker. You, of course, suggest that you entering my house in order to warn me of the fire. If I was not at home, or if you made no attempt to warn me, I will certainly argue that forcing an entry through a second-floor window, rather than using the front door, is evidence of breaking and entering and an intent to use the fire to camouflage your activities.
Your reason for breaking into my house are irrelevant.
Entering a house without permission is usually defined as trespassing. Opening a second-floor window and entering a house without permission sounds to me like breaking and entering.
And you did steal bandwidth. You consumed it without my permission. That's theft. As I said, whether or not you think you did me no harm is no defense.
The article lists the personal computers the writer believes are the most "important". I.e., it's his opinion.
Our hapless submitter changed that to most "popular", which is an entirely different thing, of course. And, easily determined by looking at sales records.
I know/. has sworn off using editors, but at least the staff might try using their brains.
If you open a second-floot window in my house, walk around the living room, and leave by the same window, you may not have done me or the house any physical harm, but you'd better believe I'm filing charges.
I agree that you don't deserve 10 years in prison for stealing bandwidth, but how about 30 days and a hefty fine?
Every time/. posts a story like this, a bunch of folks get on and whine that no one was harmed and that no crime was committed. That's silly. Crimes are defined in the criminal codes. You may disagree sometimes, but your disagreement is no defense in court.
I interpreted those remarks to refer to current Windows users, not current Linux users. It was simply an acknowledgement that for many, many people Linux still has too many rough edges, and that it will take a few more years of development before Linux becomes a compelling desktop alternative for those people.
In particular, the lack of device drivers for many commercial add-on products deters people from switching from Windows to Linux. If your favorite Gizmo is working with Windows, but the vendor tells you they make no driver for Linux, why would you switch?
Szulik said the retail line was profitable, but not the best avenue for developing Red Hat's business. I understand that to mean they've decided that they can get a greater return on their investment by leaving that market and concentrating on the enterprise and corporate desktop markets. As the Linux market changes and Linux matures, I wouldn't be surprised to see Red Hat reenter the retail market.
There's plenty of evidence that retailing Linux is a losing proposition. Mandrake appears to survive by appealing for donations. SuSE continues to market a retail package while clearly focusing on the enterprise market. That may change following the Novell acquisition.
Microsoft's experience doesn't necessarily translate to today's environment. Microsoft rode, and helped create, the PC revolution. Before Microsoft could sell into the enterprise market, they had to create a desktop market, which they did by means fair and unfair. Today, however, the market is entirely different. Linux is not ubiquitous on the desktop, and almost certanly will never be. If Linux makes sufficient inroads into the desktop market, I'm sure Red Hat will reenter the retail stream. Until then, why should they throw good money after bad?
>> The average person who WANTS to use Linux (as opposed to merely the average user) is going to be capable of using their digital camera with Linux.
I don't think that's important The important question is will the average personb who wants to use Linux buy it at a price that's high enough to sustain it as a product? Szulik clearly said that Red Hat has decided there's more money to be made elsewhere. That's a business decision. Expectations that Red Hat is obligated to maintain a line of business that they want to eliminate are naive and misplaced.
I live wthin shouting distance of Red Hat's home office and, even here, you've had to beat the bushes to find a store that sold Red Hat. What you found were a few dusty boxes of the current release on the shelves at Best Buy and CompUSA, sitting next to a few dusty boxes of the current SuSE release. Big-box booksellers might have one box of each on their shelves.
AFAIK, vendors like Red Hat buy shelf space in stores. It's always been my impression that all those dusty unsold boxes meant Linux vendors were wasting their money.
Right. It's one thing to have drunken loons and morons commiting mayhem on the raods, but it's quite another to have them flying over my house. At least no soccer mom in her SUV is going to crash through my roof.
All I can say is that my experience is as I outlined it. I agree that consultants are likely to have knowledge of Liux these days, and potentially recommend it, but that wasn't the point at issue.
Dunno why you're ranting about Fedora. I haven't been talking about Fedora.
I'm sure you're right about smaller companies. In my experience in large organizations, their first priorities for an IT chief are managing people and managing budgets. Tech savvy comes in second. Trust me, IT headaches are nothing compared with people and money headaches.
In the environments where I've worked, it didn;t make any difference what kind of experience our IT had, or what kind of career path he or she had followed. Why? Because the IT chief wasn't empowered to unilateraaly make significant decisions that affected the course of the company, including choice of OS. (It was not his money.) He hired and fired IT staff, put out proposals for and administered contract support, etc. However, decisions of a fundamental nature about the organization's IT infrastructure were made by a board of managers. The IT chief sat on that board and cast one vote. There were times when his opinion swayed votes, and there were times that the board voted contrary to his opinion.
If the firm(s) that we hired to make recommendations about IT had proposed Linux as an alternative, then our managers would have voted it up or down, If they had not, no board member had the authority to propose a Linux alternative. Their only altnerative would be to propose that the board reject all proposals and start over.
>> We're talking about OS's. The Director of Information Technology was once a help desk guy, or at least a network admin. HE is the one making the OS recommendations, for servers and clients alike./I.
Not where I've worked, and we spent tens of millions of dollars to support thousands of employees and a global VPN. Sure, our IT honcho had opinions. (but, no, he wasn't a graduate from the Help Desk. We contracted out the Help Desk.) Since it wasn't his money that he was spending, his opinions remained just that.
I'm not denying that exposure to Linux helps form positive opinions, and may help ensure that a recommendation to consider it isn't laughed out of the board room.
But, I'm also describing what's been my experience. We used independent firms to study our requirements and make recommendations to management. We looked to our IT staff to lend their expertise to the discussion of which recommendation to accept, but it wasn't their call to amke unilaterally.
Businesses I've been associated with hire outside consulting firms to come in, assess their requirements, and make recommendations. Company employees are often explicitly denied the ability to make specific recommendations for conflict-of-interest and other reasons.
It's absurd to imagine that stockholders would have the knowledge or skills to intelligently vote on a company's IT infrastructure. It's the job of the company's board and managers to make money for the stockholders.
Why do people think that corporations will switch to an OS based on the recommendation of an anonymous employee? Do corporations switch law firms because Bob Smith in Accounting told some VP that the lawyer who handled his divorce did a good job? Any business that switches to an OS based on that kind of recommendation is flaky.
Has Red Hat's shrinkwrapped consumer-level product stream ever made a proft? To your knowledge, has SUSE or anyone else over made a profit from consumer sales?
RedHat hasn't said Linux is an impossibility on the desktop. They've said it isn't ready now. Of course, that's a judgement call, and presumably RedHat's judgement is strongly influenced by the fact that they haven't been making a profit selling shrink-wrapped RedHat in the consumer channels. (My totally insubstantiated guess is that no one, including Microsoft, makes money selling shrinkwrapped operating systems to consumers. Apple might clear a profit on their annual $129 OS X upgrade, but it's an exception because it is wedded to their hardware market.)
Lots of folks apparently believe RedHat owes something to the Linux community and that they've done a nasty by dropping consumer sales. Well, I suppose they do owe something -- they didn't write all that code themselves. But, that's in the nature of the GPL, which stipulates that RedHat gets to pay off its GPL debt with source code, not by stubbornly staying with a profit-less product.
RedHat is a business. Their obligation to make a profit and pay dividends to their stockholders takes precedence over any alleged loyalty to the Linux community.
What they do with Fedora bears watching. I've been using it since Fedora Core was released and it really is "not bad". If Fedora turns into a really innovative kind of Linux, rather than an easily installed Linux with legible fonts, Good Things may happen.
This is to be expected. Just as horse-drawn carriage makers sought to thwart the rise of the auto that made them irrelevant, countries will work to thwart the network that makes their borders invisible and their power to reject the wishes of their people invisible.
...that Apple would not have support costs, would not have to pay the RIAA, would not have to pay credit card costs, etc., etc?
Contrary to the semi-literate ravings The Register cranks out to boost readership and, hence, their own revenue, (go look up "yellow journalism in your history books, boys and girls. God, it's embarrassing to have that rag associated with this industry.), the rest of the world does not work on a gratis basis.
No one is ever going to prevent the record industry from charging whatever it wants to charge until someone else puts together a different marketing structure that, somehow, charges less. And, oh, when that happens, people will find out just how altruistic their favorite musicians really are. Entertainers are like you and me: they don't want a pay cut.
It's hard for me to believe that Apple didn't know this going in, and has always positioned music sales as a loss leader for the iPod.
Nixon is the reason we ro;led back the sapce program after Apollo. (He's also the reason for many of the ills currently afflicting this country's politics. but that's another post.)
A man of decidely narrow and short-sighted imagination, Nixon came to the presidency in 1972 replete with irrational venom against anything done by the Kennedy clan. Rather than provide any leadership at all on this issue, he simply browbeat NASA about their spending. So, because Nixon's brain couldn't figure out how to set the next destination in space, NASA's bureaucrats eventually secured their jobs with a plan to go round-and-round in circles in low Earth orbit, all to no apparent purpose. This is what we know today as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you did win, the exception does not prove the rule.
Using a portion of the bandwidth purchased by someone else without that person's permission is theft, as defined by the law of Canada. What you or I think it should has no bearing. Your analogy about fires is irrelevant; the kind of stuff sophomores try in debating class or after one too many beers.
One can always conjure extraordinary circumstances. The possibility that something extremely unusual or rare might happen doesn't nullify the intent of the law.
For example. you might be suffering from dementia, and entered my house under the impression that it was your own. That fact would not stop me from filing charges. (We're talking about criminal charges, not a lawsuit, as your suggested.) If you could prove your dementia in court, you'd likey not be convicted.
However, if you broke into my house while it was on fire, you're defense would be considerably weaker. You, of course, suggest that you entering my house in order to warn me of the fire. If I was not at home, or if you made no attempt to warn me, I will certainly argue that forcing an entry through a second-floor window, rather than using the front door, is evidence of breaking and entering and an intent to use the fire to camouflage your activities.
Your reason for breaking into my house are irrelevant.
Entering a house without permission is usually defined as trespassing. Opening a second-floor window and entering a house without permission sounds to me like breaking and entering.
And you did steal bandwidth. You consumed it without my permission. That's theft. As I said, whether or not you think you did me no harm is no defense.
The article lists the personal computers the writer believes are the most "important". I.e., it's his opinion.
/. has sworn off using editors, but at least the staff might try using their brains.
Our hapless submitter changed that to most "popular", which is an entirely different thing, of course. And, easily determined by looking at sales records.
I know
If you open a second-floot window in my house, walk around the living room, and leave by the same window, you may not have done me or the house any physical harm, but you'd better believe I'm filing charges.
/. posts a story like this, a bunch of folks get on and whine that no one was harmed and that no crime was committed. That's silly. Crimes are defined in the criminal codes. You may disagree sometimes, but your disagreement is no defense in court.
I agree that you don't deserve 10 years in prison for stealing bandwidth, but how about 30 days and a hefty fine?
Every time
I interpreted those remarks to refer to current Windows users, not current Linux users. It was simply an acknowledgement that for many, many people Linux still has too many rough edges, and that it will take a few more years of development before Linux becomes a compelling desktop alternative for those people.
In particular, the lack of device drivers for many commercial add-on products deters people from switching from Windows to Linux. If your favorite Gizmo is working with Windows, but the vendor tells you they make no driver for Linux, why would you switch?
Szulik said the retail line was profitable, but not the best avenue for developing Red Hat's business. I understand that to mean they've decided that they can get a greater return on their investment by leaving that market and concentrating on the enterprise and corporate desktop markets. As the Linux market changes and Linux matures, I wouldn't be surprised to see Red Hat reenter the retail market.
There's plenty of evidence that retailing Linux is a losing proposition. Mandrake appears to survive by appealing for donations. SuSE continues to market a retail package while clearly focusing on the enterprise market. That may change following the Novell acquisition.
Microsoft's experience doesn't necessarily translate to today's environment. Microsoft rode, and helped create, the PC revolution. Before Microsoft could sell into the enterprise market, they had to create a desktop market, which they did by means fair and unfair. Today, however, the market is entirely different. Linux is not ubiquitous on the desktop, and almost certanly will never be. If Linux makes sufficient inroads into the desktop market, I'm sure Red Hat will reenter the retail stream. Until then, why should they throw good money after bad?
>> The average person who WANTS to use Linux (as opposed to merely the average user) is going to be capable of using their digital camera with Linux.
I don't think that's important The important question is will the average personb who wants to use Linux buy it at a price that's high enough to sustain it as a product? Szulik clearly said that Red Hat has decided there's more money to be made elsewhere. That's a business decision. Expectations that Red Hat is obligated to maintain a line of business that they want to eliminate are naive and misplaced.
I live wthin shouting distance of Red Hat's home office and, even here, you've had to beat the bushes to find a store that sold Red Hat. What you found were a few dusty boxes of the current release on the shelves at Best Buy and CompUSA, sitting next to a few dusty boxes of the current SuSE release. Big-box booksellers might have one box of each on their shelves.
AFAIK, vendors like Red Hat buy shelf space in stores. It's always been my impression that all those dusty unsold boxes meant Linux vendors were wasting their money.
So, English-speaking geeks are illiterate, and correct use of the language is evidence of deception.
Sure...
Email and pims that work like Outlook. Browsers. Office suites.
Yawn...
Why doesn't Perens give us something that Microsoft, Apple and every other Linux distribution don't already give us?
Right. It's one thing to have drunken loons and morons commiting mayhem on the raods, but it's quite another to have them flying over my house. At least no soccer mom in her SUV is going to crash through my roof.
...overstuffed pickup truck, right?
All I can say is that my experience is as I outlined it. I agree that consultants are likely to have knowledge of Liux these days, and potentially recommend it, but that wasn't the point at issue.
Dunno why you're ranting about Fedora. I haven't been talking about Fedora.
I'm sure you're right about smaller companies. In my experience in large organizations, their first priorities for an IT chief are managing people and managing budgets. Tech savvy comes in second. Trust me, IT headaches are nothing compared with people and money headaches.
I think you're missing my point.
In the environments where I've worked, it didn;t make any difference what kind of experience our IT had, or what kind of career path he or she had followed. Why? Because the IT chief wasn't empowered to unilateraaly make significant decisions that affected the course of the company, including choice of OS. (It was not his money.) He hired and fired IT staff, put out proposals for and administered contract support, etc. However, decisions of a fundamental nature about the organization's IT infrastructure were made by a board of managers. The IT chief sat on that board and cast one vote. There were times when his opinion swayed votes, and there were times that the board voted contrary to his opinion.
If the firm(s) that we hired to make recommendations about IT had proposed Linux as an alternative, then our managers would have voted it up or down, If they had not, no board member had the authority to propose a Linux alternative. Their only altnerative would be to propose that the board reject all proposals and start over.
>>
We're talking about OS's. The Director of Information Technology was once a help desk guy, or at least a network admin. HE is the one making the OS recommendations, for servers and clients alike./I.
Not where I've worked, and we spent tens of millions of dollars to support thousands of employees and a global VPN. Sure, our IT honcho had opinions. (but, no, he wasn't a graduate from the Help Desk. We contracted out the Help Desk.) Since it wasn't his money that he was spending, his opinions remained just that.
I'm not denying that exposure to Linux helps form positive opinions, and may help ensure that a recommendation to consider it isn't laughed out of the board room.
But, I'm also describing what's been my experience. We used independent firms to study our requirements and make recommendations to management. We looked to our IT staff to lend their expertise to the discussion of which recommendation to accept, but it wasn't their call to amke unilaterally.
Businesses I've been associated with hire outside consulting firms to come in, assess their requirements, and make recommendations. Company employees are often explicitly denied the ability to make specific recommendations for conflict-of-interest and other reasons.
It's absurd to imagine that stockholders would have the knowledge or skills to intelligently vote on a company's IT infrastructure. It's the job of the company's board and managers to make money for the stockholders.
Has Red Hat's consumer product line ever been profitable? To your knowledge, has any Linux vendor ever had a profitable consumer product?
Why do people think that corporations will switch to an OS based on the recommendation of an anonymous employee? Do corporations switch law firms because Bob Smith in Accounting told some VP that the lawyer who handled his divorce did a good job? Any business that switches to an OS based on that kind of recommendation is flaky.
Has Red Hat's shrinkwrapped consumer-level product stream ever made a proft? To your knowledge, has SUSE or anyone else over made a profit from consumer sales?
Troll, indeed, but, I'll bite.
RedHat hasn't said Linux is an impossibility on the desktop. They've said it isn't ready now. Of course, that's a judgement call, and presumably RedHat's judgement is strongly influenced by the fact that they haven't been making a profit selling shrink-wrapped RedHat in the consumer channels. (My totally insubstantiated guess is that no one, including Microsoft, makes money selling shrinkwrapped operating systems to consumers. Apple might clear a profit on their annual $129 OS X upgrade, but it's an exception because it is wedded to their hardware market.)
Lots of folks apparently believe RedHat owes something to the Linux community and that they've done a nasty by dropping consumer sales. Well, I suppose they do owe something -- they didn't write all that code themselves. But, that's in the nature of the GPL, which stipulates that RedHat gets to pay off its GPL debt with source code, not by stubbornly staying with a profit-less product.
RedHat is a business. Their obligation to make a profit and pay dividends to their stockholders takes precedence over any alleged loyalty to the Linux community.
What they do with Fedora bears watching. I've been using it since Fedora Core was released and it really is "not bad". If Fedora turns into a really innovative kind of Linux, rather than an easily installed Linux with legible fonts, Good Things may happen.
This is to be expected. Just as horse-drawn carriage makers sought to thwart the rise of the auto that made them irrelevant, countries will work to thwart the network that makes their borders invisible and their power to reject the wishes of their people invisible.
...that Apple would not have support costs, would not have to pay the RIAA, would not have to pay credit card costs, etc., etc?
Contrary to the semi-literate ravings The Register cranks out to boost readership and, hence, their own revenue, (go look up "yellow journalism in your history books, boys and girls. God, it's embarrassing to have that rag associated with this industry.), the rest of the world does not work on a gratis basis.
No one is ever going to prevent the record industry from charging whatever it wants to charge until someone else puts together a different marketing structure that, somehow, charges less. And, oh, when that happens, people will find out just how altruistic their favorite musicians really are. Entertainers are like you and me: they don't want a pay cut.
It's hard for me to believe that Apple didn't know this going in, and has always positioned music sales as a loss leader for the iPod.
Nixon is the reason we ro;led back the sapce program after Apollo. (He's also the reason for many of the ills currently afflicting this country's politics. but that's another post.)
A man of decidely narrow and short-sighted imagination, Nixon came to the presidency in 1972 replete with irrational venom against anything done by the Kennedy clan. Rather than provide any leadership at all on this issue, he simply browbeat NASA about their spending. So, because Nixon's brain couldn't figure out how to set the next destination in space, NASA's bureaucrats eventually secured their jobs with a plan to go round-and-round in circles in low Earth orbit, all to no apparent purpose. This is what we know today as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.