> You can see the same in ecology: fast growing, non-native plants often > displace native plants quickly, but in the end, they die because they > aren't well adapted to the long-term conditions.
Guess I'm not taking a long enough view or something, but I can point out a couple of counter examples. Come down south and behold the Kudzu, been quite a while since it was introduced into the local ecology and it is still kicking the ass off of everything it encounters. Or go to south Louisiana and behold the nutria, a small rodent like animal that has wreaked major havok on the local ecology since it arived and shows no sign of dying off anytime soon.
Ok troll, perhaps YOU enjoy the delicious irony of needing a closed source network driver installed to make the network interface work so you can download the network driver..... Or more likely have a spare 3c905 around to stuff in long enough to get the driver, but either way it is BS. Like they can have something OS fscking original in a network interface in this day that they can't release programming specs for it? And yes, closed drivers ARE a major pain in the ass, been there done that and ain't going there again willingly.
Guess you should read Linux Journal then, because they ran an artical about a project to replace an exchange server, detailing their efforts to reverse engineer the protocol. It's all there. I think it is the Feb 03 issue, but it is at work and I'm at home and their webpage doesn't index content that recent for the general public.
Don't mention the NForce around these parts. We Linux users don't exactly like the NForce since we can't use em without jumping through hoops. You have to download a closed source network driver... without being able to access the network.
And my T-Bird+VIA chipset at home has NEVER been stable. But on the other hand the Durons at work have run flawlessly. So stop being an AMD fanboy and deal with em as just another vendor selling products. Some are good, some not.
Anyone remember DOS-EMU? By the time it hit 1.0 and pretty much 'just worked' nobody gave a rat's rectum about DOS anymore. So it was a top notch piece of software that nobody cared about by the time it was completed. And it had the advantages of a) shooting at a stationary target and b) not actually having to rewrite DOS, just provide a virtualized environment for it to run it.
I'm afraid this is WINE's fate, especially since it was only recently protected by the LGPL. The commercial interests seem content to ignore the newer source trees and just keep applying their closed improvements to the last free tree. Had the LGPL switch happened BEFORE Crossover Office and WineX the story might have been different since the need for Wine is currently higher than the need for DOSEMU was. Five years from now though and I expect most of the critical application gaps to be closed and Wine will only be needed for games, which means Transgaming will be able to man the tollgates for the forseeable future.
Basically this is a tax on large multimational corporations. So that makes small companies more competitive. What's not to like?
AOL, eBay, etc have to comply because they have operations in the EU. Small companies, located entirely in the US can safely ignore anything the EU says because their laws don't leave their borders any more than a US law can apply to a company in the EU.
This is just a larger version of the fun we get inside the US with sales tax. Buy from a small outfit and you don't pay sales tax unless you are unlucky enough to be in the same state. Which, btw, is why so many mailorder/online retailers avoid establishing operations in high population states.
RHAS has per processer licensing in that the Workstation version is intentionally crippled to only run on uniprocessor or dual processor boxes with 4GB or less of memory. The Advanced server product removes the limits by supplying a kernel with those limits compiled out of the kernel. Workstation is licensed by the seat.
Note that the GPL would allow you to run it on as many machines as you like, but the major reasons to buy it in the first place are tech support and access to RHN, both of which are conditioned upon your accepting the limits. So you can't buy one copy, let it download the errata and mirror out of/var/spool/up2date to your other identical machines.
In other words, it is bullshit, and everything we wanted to get away from with proprietary systems. I pay for access to errata, I'll pay for a service contract if I think I need one and the price is right, and I even pay for box sets and manuals. But I'll be damned and burn in hell before I go back to tracking licenses. Won't be a year before those pinheads are doing Product Activation.
No you can't. The license aggreement for RHN explicetly forbids applying an errata package to any machine not covered by the service contract. Probably a GPL violation in there somewhere but the sort of corporate types buying RHEL won't want to be a test case for a legal showdown.
The problem is the 1 year errata window. If you have been using RH long you know some versions stink, especially until the first batch of errata hits. But now you must upgrade to each version to avoid hitting a window without errata availability. And any machine connected to the net MUST be covered by security errata.
And the other problem is that in the past we had the.2 releases to deploy on end users's machines while we played with the.0 and.1 versions, explored the new features and turned in bug reports. But now the pattern looks like it will be.0, then another.0, then maybe a.1 and roll the bug fixes up and release another version of RHEL and another.0 for the 'hobbyists. But once I'm switched over to running Debian at work, why am I supposed to continue caring what RH is releasing? Nope, I'll be running testing or sid at home, looking to see what sort of fun things are in the Debian pipeline.
And RHEL-WS just isn't an option for desktop users. If you a 'workstation' power user with a HP Precision on their desk the cost of WS gets lost in the sticker price, but if, like us, you have folks still banging away on PII-266 boxes you just can't justify the annual fees JUST to get errata for the 3-5 years a machine needs to sit on someone's desk with minimal fuss and retraining issues.
Linux on the desktop is starting to happen, RedHat has chosen not to be a part of it. Time for us to accept their decision, deal with it and select another distribution. I'm learning Debian for various reasons, but use whatever works for you.
> Office is another (most people who don't have any preference for free > software prefer MS Office I've found by a long way).
Well yea, assuming you are pirating MS Office or using OPM... and are running a platform where it is an option and are uneducated about the serious problem of locking valuable data into undocumented formats. But meanwhile, back her on Planet Earth, where OOo is a free download and MS Office is expensive to buy and keeps on costing to keep current the situation is somewhat different. As people learn of the existence of OOo they express a great deal of interest in it.
Apple isn't mentioned because most people in IT have figured out Apple is content to stay in their botique niche collecting obscene margins on low volume from a cult like fan base. And considering they are making a healthy profit at it it is hard to argue with the merits of the strategy.
Consider the arguments in favor:
Customer support is expensive; raking in a lot of money from a few customers sure beats the PC vendor model of hoping a customer doesn't call support because one call can eat up the entire margin from the sale of a lowend machine.
As a practical matter, growing marketshare beyond a couple of points is impossible without licensing other OEMs. OS licensing isn't nearly as profitable as selling hardware+OS until you reach M$ market share levels, and Apple has zero chance of taking out Microsoft since M$ can kill Apple anytime it pleases by removing MacOffice.
So Apple contents itself being Microsoft's official 'token competition' and laughs all the way to the bank. Sure Steve will never be as rich as Bill in this situation, but he makes plenty of dough. But neither of them counted on the Penguin to come along and snuff both of them, and it will be both since they have evolved a unhealthy symbiosis and probably can't survive alone.
Microsoft can't invent so they need Apple, Apple needs M$ to be better than to maintain the loyalty of their user cult. Just wouldn't be the same to have M$ stealing ideas from Linux and Apple won't be able to keep the zealots whipped into a frenzy of haughty condescension and hatred of Linux users.
I dunno about that. I used to run Slackware (from floppies) and Yggdrasil, I have also tried Mandrake and Debian but my machines have been booting into RedHat by default since RH4.0. Because it works.
Of course since 7.3 is going EOL on 12/31/03 with no stable replacement planned I'll be moving to Debian in due course, but not because RedHat has technical problems.
Re:Cringley, Linus, and Christoph Hellwig
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Earth to idiot, Earth to idiot......
Google for "microsoft outlook security patches" and you will find a swarm of Outlook patches in the last three years. Face it, viruses as we had known them have all but vanished because the script kiddies find it so much quicker and more damaging to write Outlook worms.... except for the ones attacking IIS and SQL Server.
As for VB not being a stable platform, I admit I don't use the crap, but when the former author of the official Microsoft VB book feels the need to speak out about the constantly changing language I take that as authoratative. [pun intended]
As for migrarating from Mac to Windows, whatever. If you gave up waiting on Apple to get off the pot and release a real OS during the Copeland/Pink/Taligent/blah...blah fiasco I guess I can't fault you, but Windows isn't an answer to many questions.
Windows if you need a specific app not available anywhere else, Mac for end users and UNIX for the backend, power users and task specific stations. Any other IT strategy shows a lack of knowledge/skills.
Re:Cringley, Linus, and Christoph Hellwig
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Nah, that last part was just Cringley trolling again. He is almost qualified to join the trolls here on/. with his constant "Microsoft Linux" and "Mac OS on Intel" wishful thinking/rumormongering. He just needs to add in a "BSD is Dying" or something about about hot grits to his future work.:)
Microsoft will never abandon Windows for a *NIX base like Apple did, because Microsoft knows they will never compete in the marketplace on the merits of their products. No sane IT person trusts them on any front, from general customer relations (Licensing 6.0), security (Outlook), stability (all products) to having a stable upgrade path (VB.NET). Without their monopoly they are out of business. If they even ported Office it would only hurt them. The only people buying Office for Linux would be buying it in the context of migrating OFF of Windows and using Office for Linux as a temporary bridge product, meaning a one-time sale instead of a revenue stream.
Nevertheless, the monopoly will be broken and they will fade into history. Too large to be allowed to completely fail, but settling into has-been status as one of those big mega-corps that nobody can really figure out what they do anymore, but still they exist.
> In addition, copyrights have fair use limitations. If the owner of > copyright in a published work refuses to sell copies of the work and > refuses to license the work, it could be argued that the copyright owner > thereby denies the existence of any "potential market for or value of > the copyrighted work" (17 USC 107) that could be harmed by the alleged > infringement.
Yea, right. I'd like to see this litigated in the real world. Tell ya what, put the cleanest copy of Disney's _Song of the South_ you can locate up on a web server and watch how big of a check you end up writing to settle the case. That movie was declared unPC and buried deeper than Disney's frighteningly effective WWII propaganda cartoons, never to see the light of day ever again. But out here in the real world, that copyright is just as perpetual as _Steamboat Willie_ or _Snow White_.
Guess again. Our library received a bunch of stuff from GLF. The hardware was underpowered Gateway e series boxes struggling to run NT4 with only 64MB of RAM and was loaded with just about every title in the Microsoft catalog. The only 'third party' product supplied was Apple Quicktime and that was only because some of the Microsoft educational software required it. And I'd bet they counted the MSRP on each and every title.
And of course it was all licensed under a special 'donation edition' license that provided for zero upgrade rights and disallowed any transfer. Basically, the first hit was free but we were expected to pay full (well full education rate) price if we wanted to upgrade in the future.
Joke was on them though, jacked the ram in those cowboxes and installed RedHat as soon as our commitment[1] was completed and they are still in service five years on with only a pair of hard drives and one monitor croaking out of 22 boxes. So while we didn't use it as intended, we are happy to have got in on that program.
[1] We got extra hardware by agreeing to host a regional training center so we couldn't blow off NT until that was over. They didn't impose a requirement to run Windows as a general condition.
Perhaps, perhaps not. It is the conventional wisdom at NASA that inflight repair is not possible. Therefore learning the truth beforehand would only doom the astronauts to a slow death in orbit and NASA to certain defunding after the month long cable news circus. So the decision was made that a quick burnup would be better than a slow death since, if the shuttle were damaged death was certain.
Of course I am not content to leave the matter there. If this truly IS the prevailing mindset at NASA it should be defunded, because it is obvious that it is now only populated with idiots without any imagination and the odds of any real science or serious exploration happening there has dropped to nil.
Had this sort of thinking been in vogue during Apollo 13 they would have decided a few minutes after the incident that the mission was doomed and secretly triggered a self destruct (venting the remaining air perhaps?) to prevent the 'media circus' of having the doomed crew linger on for days helplessly in space. Politically expedient, but it would have left Apollo 13 a tragedy instead of NASA's finest hour. Saving the crew (and perhaps Columbia herself) would have trumped Apollo 13 and re-energized the public's fascination with the space program.
The XBox is a mutant PC. This means it can actually run programs.
The PS2 is a game console. Sony doesn't actually give you access to much of the hardware (like the DVD drive) and the box is very underpowered as a computer. Those slow little MIPS chips can't do MPEG2 decoding without hardware assist, which Sony won't reveal the secrets of and you can forget reasonable resolution MPEG4/DIVX decoding. And 32MB of memory is very lite. As a media box, Xbox is the only game in town.
Of course getting GL on either box running isn't very likely in the near future.
I'm no great coder or anything, and I think RMS is wrong about a great many things, but the GPL was a truly great invention. Certainly RMS's greatest hit; even greater than emacs. Assuming you mean anyone with a/. id as low as mine can never be convinced otherwise I'll take it as a compliment.
Not bloody likely. A bunch of SCA medieval wannabes wouldn't last long against the survivalists with bunkers full of guns, ammo and more importantly, food.
Food preservation isn't one of the skills one associates with the SCA, they are more concerned with period costumes (including weapons & armor as costume) period art (dance, modes of speach and poetry, etc) and the more 'fun' crafts. And they are way too topheavy on nobility and not nearly enough peasants to have a viable skillbase.
Assuming civilivation fell apart, it wouldn't go medieval again because we KNOW about better tech and we would have the remenants of our present tech to build on. So forget those fantasy scenarios about a return to chivalry, knights in shining armor and jousting. Won't happen. Mr. 9mm makes plate armor suicidal and renders edged weapons of all kinds a niche tool for close in fighting. We would also retain electricity, radio and some computing capability. We would still know a lot of chemistry and physics that would allow things the medieval mind never dreamed of.
Yes, but lets not attract the Faithful Followers of Steve to this thread. Almost as bad as Amigans or Team OS/2.
> Of course good neighbors tend to reciprocate anyway, but only a rude > neighbor would actually insist on it. That's what the GPL is--a rude > neighbor.
Neighbors tend to do the 'right' thing because everybody knows everyone and bad behaviour would become known. When social groupings grow beyond a threshold size more formal rules are the norm. And it isn't like we can't all name fifty companies that grabbed up BSD and made closed products from it and have never given the first bugfix back. The GPL is the community's way of telling those leaches to FOAD if they can't at least manage a half assed attempt to co-operate.
> Screwing SCO on a 'gotcha' because they continued to distribute the > Linux kernel after they filed the lawsuit may seem like just deserts
Perhaps, but how about these ideas?
If we stipulate that there is some SCO IP in the kernel (which I doubt) and that IBM did indeed contribute it to Linus and claim it as their own (which I'd be shocked to find true) and acknowledge that SCO did indeed distribute said tainted code before and after learning it's origins we get the following:
1. SCO can not expect 3rd parties to be any more liable for infringement than SCO themselves are for their own lack of due dilligence. Since SCO is likely to hold themselves and their customers blameless they can't then expect damages from anyone else. After all, only SCO possessed their precious archival UNIX code to compare against so they were in the best position to detect the infringment.
2. Since SCO has yet to formally request a DMCA takedown, no distributer can be held liable up to such time as they file a formal takedown request. Yes, the DMCA is going to work in our favor in this case, especially for kernel.org and mirrors.
3. So we get a best case for SCO, where they prove their case anc get a total legal victory and are unable to collect damages from anyone other than IBM. And IBM can keep the case on appeal until sometime after the final trump blows so they get no money and end up bankrupt.
> He can be sure that other programmers won't use his app in proprietary > applications, but he has nothing to defend himself against companies > like RedHat distributing his "music" in ways that make the RIAA look > like a generous patron by comparison.
Wrong model. If not for the GPL RedHat would have probably turned into another BSDI. I.E. taken freely available software and turned it into a closed product to sell to the corporate world instead of becoming the major evangelising force in the boardroom.
But because of the GPL and their belief in it, they serve a valuable purpose in the Free Software ecosystem instead of acting as a simple parasite.
> BSD says "I can't make money off this, maybe you can". GPL says > "I can't make money off this, neither can you."
Again this is just wrong regarding the GPL. The GPL is saying "I am sharing this code on the condition that you are obligated to return the favor." The GPL author expects to be paid with bug fixes and general assistance building and maintaining the codebase.
You admit they didn't have anything with creating it, they just bought out the company that owned this tech.
> Polychlorinated Biphenyls (Aroclor, Pyroclor)
These were very useful compounds, and nobody knew of any risks. And the 'risks' were probably overstated since those sort of scares were all the rage back in the 70's. For that matter they seem to be pretty popular even after we have lived through enough that we should know better. (Lawsuits against McDonalds. Lawsuits against Nabisco. Etc.)
> rBGH Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone
Ok, this one was a good idea, but if the proper testing had happened it would never have made it to market. One evil point for Monsanto.
> Agent Orange
Safe for use in the US and safe enough to use in a war zone are two completely different things. Balance the risks of using Agent Orange vs the risks of being shot by the VC hiding in the jungle and I thing I'd say "Spray em!" if I were a soldier in Vietnam.
Monsanto is neither good or evil. They are a corporation. Some of the people working there are evil, some good, most just praying they don't get rightsized. Which is why corporations as we have them are a bad idea, no accountability.
Slashdot Mirror
> You can see the same in ecology: fast growing, non-native plants often
> displace native plants quickly, but in the end, they die because they
> aren't well adapted to the long-term conditions.
Guess I'm not taking a long enough view or something, but I can point out a couple of counter examples. Come down south and behold the Kudzu, been quite a while since it was introduced into the local ecology and it is still kicking the ass off of everything it encounters. Or go to south Louisiana and behold the nutria, a small rodent like animal that has wreaked major havok on the local ecology since it arived and shows no sign of dying off anytime soon.
Then your only real choice is Evolution + the Exchange connector. Bummer.
Ok troll, perhaps YOU enjoy the delicious irony of needing a closed source network driver installed to make the network interface work so you can download the network driver..... Or more likely have a spare 3c905 around to stuff in long enough to get the driver, but either way it is BS. Like they can have something OS fscking original in a network interface in this day that they can't release programming specs for it? And yes, closed drivers ARE a major pain in the ass, been there done that and ain't going there again willingly.
Guess you should read Linux Journal then, because they ran an artical about a project to replace an exchange server, detailing their efforts to reverse engineer the protocol. It's all there. I think it is the Feb 03 issue, but it is at work and I'm at home and their webpage doesn't index content that recent for the general public.
Don't mention the NForce around these parts. We Linux users don't exactly like the NForce since we can't use em without jumping through hoops. You have to download a closed source network driver... without being able to access the network.
And my T-Bird+VIA chipset at home has NEVER been stable. But on the other hand the Durons at work have run flawlessly. So stop being an AMD fanboy and deal with em as just another vendor selling products. Some are good, some not.
Anyone remember DOS-EMU? By the time it hit 1.0 and pretty much 'just worked' nobody gave a rat's rectum about DOS anymore. So it was a top notch piece of software that nobody cared about by the time it was completed. And it had the advantages of a) shooting at a stationary target and b) not actually having to rewrite DOS, just provide a virtualized environment for it to run it.
I'm afraid this is WINE's fate, especially since it was only recently protected by the LGPL. The commercial interests seem content to ignore the newer source trees and just keep applying their closed improvements to the last free tree. Had the LGPL switch happened BEFORE Crossover Office and WineX the story might have been different since the need for Wine is currently higher than the need for DOSEMU was. Five years from now though and I expect most of the critical application gaps to be closed and Wine will only be needed for games, which means Transgaming will be able to man the tollgates for the forseeable future.
Basically this is a tax on large multimational corporations. So that makes small companies more competitive. What's not to like?
AOL, eBay, etc have to comply because they have operations in the EU. Small companies, located entirely in the US can safely ignore anything the EU says because their laws don't leave their borders any more than a US law can apply to a company in the EU.
This is just a larger version of the fun we get inside the US with sales tax. Buy from a small outfit and you don't pay sales tax unless you are unlucky enough to be in the same state. Which, btw, is why so many mailorder/online retailers avoid establishing operations in high population states.
RHAS has per processer licensing in that the Workstation version is intentionally crippled to only run on uniprocessor or dual processor boxes with 4GB or less of memory. The Advanced server product removes the limits by supplying a kernel with those limits compiled out of the kernel. Workstation is licensed by the seat.
/var/spool/up2date to your other identical machines.
Note that the GPL would allow you to run it on as many machines as you like, but the major reasons to buy it in the first place are tech support and access to RHN, both of which are conditioned upon your accepting the limits. So you can't buy one copy, let it download the errata and mirror out of
In other words, it is bullshit, and everything we wanted to get away from with proprietary systems. I pay for access to errata, I'll pay for a service contract if I think I need one and the price is right, and I even pay for box sets and manuals. But I'll be damned and burn in hell before I go back to tracking licenses. Won't be a year before those pinheads are doing Product Activation.
No you can't. The license aggreement for RHN explicetly forbids applying an errata package to any machine not covered by the service contract. Probably a GPL violation in there somewhere but the sort of corporate types buying RHEL won't want to be a test case for a legal showdown.
The problem is the 1 year errata window. If you have been using RH long you know some versions stink, especially until the first batch of errata hits. But now you must upgrade to each version to avoid hitting a window without errata availability. And any machine connected to the net MUST be covered by security errata.
.2 releases to deploy on end users's machines while we played with the .0 and .1 versions, explored the new features and turned in bug reports. But now the pattern looks like it will be .0, then another .0, then maybe a .1 and roll the bug fixes up and release another version of RHEL and another .0 for the 'hobbyists. But once I'm switched over to running Debian at work, why am I supposed to continue caring what RH is releasing? Nope, I'll be running testing or sid at home, looking to see what sort of fun things are in the Debian pipeline.
And the other problem is that in the past we had the
And RHEL-WS just isn't an option for desktop users. If you a 'workstation' power user with a HP Precision on their desk the cost of WS gets lost in the sticker price, but if, like us, you have folks still banging away on PII-266 boxes you just can't justify the annual fees JUST to get errata for the 3-5 years a machine needs to sit on someone's desk with minimal fuss and retraining issues.
Linux on the desktop is starting to happen, RedHat has chosen not to be a part of it. Time for us to accept their decision, deal with it and select another distribution. I'm learning Debian for various reasons, but use whatever works for you.
> Office is another (most people who don't have any preference for free
> software prefer MS Office I've found by a long way).
Well yea, assuming you are pirating MS Office or using OPM... and are running a platform where it is an option and are uneducated about the serious problem of locking valuable data into undocumented formats. But meanwhile, back her on Planet Earth, where OOo is a free download and MS Office is expensive to buy and keeps on costing to keep current the situation is somewhat different. As people learn of the existence of OOo they express a great deal of interest in it.
Apple isn't mentioned because most people in IT have figured out Apple is content to stay in their botique niche collecting obscene margins on low volume from a cult like fan base. And considering they are making a healthy profit at it it is hard to argue with the merits of the strategy.
Consider the arguments in favor:
Customer support is expensive; raking in a lot of money from a few customers sure beats the PC vendor model of hoping a customer doesn't call support because one call can eat up the entire margin from the sale of a lowend machine.
As a practical matter, growing marketshare beyond a couple of points is impossible without licensing other OEMs. OS licensing isn't nearly as profitable as selling hardware+OS until you reach M$ market share levels, and Apple has zero chance of taking out Microsoft since M$ can kill Apple anytime it pleases by removing MacOffice.
So Apple contents itself being Microsoft's official 'token competition' and laughs all the way to the bank. Sure Steve will never be as rich as Bill in this situation, but he makes plenty of dough. But neither of them counted on the Penguin to come along and snuff both of them, and it will be both since they have evolved a unhealthy symbiosis and probably can't survive alone.
Microsoft can't invent so they need Apple, Apple needs M$ to be better than to maintain the loyalty of their user cult. Just wouldn't be the same to have M$ stealing ideas from Linux and Apple won't be able to keep the zealots whipped into a frenzy of haughty condescension and hatred of Linux users.
I dunno about that. I used to run Slackware (from floppies) and Yggdrasil, I have also tried Mandrake and Debian but my machines have been booting into RedHat by default since RH4.0. Because it works.
Of course since 7.3 is going EOL on 12/31/03 with no stable replacement planned I'll be moving to Debian in due course, but not because RedHat has technical problems.
Earth to idiot, Earth to idiot......
Google for "microsoft outlook security patches" and you will find a swarm of Outlook patches in the last three years. Face it, viruses as we had known them have all but vanished because the script kiddies find it so much quicker and more damaging to write Outlook worms.... except for the ones attacking IIS and SQL Server.
As for VB not being a stable platform, I admit I don't use the crap, but when the former author of the official Microsoft VB book feels the need to speak out about the constantly changing language I take that as authoratative. [pun intended]
As for migrarating from Mac to Windows, whatever. If you gave up waiting on Apple to get off the pot and release a real OS during the Copeland/Pink/Taligent/blah...blah fiasco I guess I can't fault you, but Windows isn't an answer to many questions.
Windows if you need a specific app not available anywhere else, Mac for end users and UNIX for the backend, power users and task specific stations. Any other IT strategy shows a lack of knowledge/skills.
Nah, that last part was just Cringley trolling again. He is almost qualified to join the trolls here on /. with his constant "Microsoft Linux" and "Mac OS on Intel" wishful thinking/rumormongering. He just needs to add in a "BSD is Dying" or something about about hot grits to his future work. :)
Microsoft will never abandon Windows for a *NIX base like Apple did, because Microsoft knows they will never compete in the marketplace on the merits of their products. No sane IT person trusts them on any front, from general customer relations (Licensing 6.0), security (Outlook), stability (all products) to having a stable upgrade path (VB.NET). Without their monopoly they are out of business. If they even ported Office it would only hurt them. The only people buying Office for Linux would be buying it in the context of migrating OFF of Windows and using Office for Linux as a temporary bridge product, meaning a one-time sale instead of a revenue stream.
Nevertheless, the monopoly will be broken and they will fade into history. Too large to be allowed to completely fail, but settling into has-been status as one of those big mega-corps that nobody can really figure out what they do anymore, but still they exist.
> In addition, copyrights have fair use limitations. If the owner of
> copyright in a published work refuses to sell copies of the work and
> refuses to license the work, it could be argued that the copyright owner
> thereby denies the existence of any "potential market for or value of
> the copyrighted work" (17 USC 107) that could be harmed by the alleged
> infringement.
Yea, right. I'd like to see this litigated in the real world. Tell ya what, put the cleanest copy of Disney's _Song of the South_ you can locate up on a web server and watch how big of a check you end up writing to settle the case. That movie was declared unPC and buried deeper than Disney's frighteningly effective WWII propaganda cartoons, never to see the light of day ever again. But out here in the real world, that copyright is just as perpetual as _Steamboat Willie_ or _Snow White_.
> I doubt they're giving away much software,
Guess again. Our library received a bunch of stuff from GLF. The hardware was underpowered Gateway e series boxes struggling to run NT4 with only 64MB of RAM and was loaded with just about every title in the Microsoft catalog. The only 'third party' product supplied was Apple Quicktime and that was only because some of the Microsoft educational software required it. And I'd bet they counted the MSRP on each and every title.
And of course it was all licensed under a special 'donation edition' license that provided for zero upgrade rights and disallowed any transfer. Basically, the first hit was free but we were expected to pay full (well full education rate) price if we wanted to upgrade in the future.
Joke was on them though, jacked the ram in those cowboxes and installed RedHat as soon as our commitment[1] was completed and they are still in service five years on with only a pair of hard drives and one monitor croaking out of 22 boxes. So while we didn't use it as intended, we are happy to have got in on that program.
[1] We got extra hardware by agreeing to host a regional training center so we couldn't blow off NT until that was over. They didn't impose a requirement to run Windows as a general condition.
Perhaps, perhaps not. It is the conventional wisdom at NASA that inflight repair is not possible. Therefore learning the truth beforehand would only doom the astronauts to a slow death in orbit and NASA to certain defunding after the month long cable news circus. So the decision was made that a quick burnup would be better than a slow death since, if the shuttle were damaged death was certain.
Of course I am not content to leave the matter there. If this truly IS the prevailing mindset at NASA it should be defunded, because it is obvious that it is now only populated with idiots without any imagination and the odds of any real science or serious exploration happening there has dropped to nil.
Had this sort of thinking been in vogue during Apollo 13 they would have decided a few minutes after the incident that the mission was doomed and secretly triggered a self destruct (venting the remaining air perhaps?) to prevent the 'media circus' of having the doomed crew linger on for days helplessly in space. Politically expedient, but it would have left Apollo 13 a tragedy instead of NASA's finest hour. Saving the crew (and perhaps Columbia herself) would have trumped Apollo 13 and re-energized the public's fascination with the space program.
Ya, whatever.
The XBox is a mutant PC. This means it can actually run programs.
The PS2 is a game console. Sony doesn't actually give you access to much of the hardware (like the DVD drive) and the box is very underpowered as a computer. Those slow little MIPS chips can't do MPEG2 decoding without hardware assist, which Sony won't reveal the secrets of and you can forget reasonable resolution MPEG4/DIVX decoding. And 32MB of memory is very lite. As a media box, Xbox is the only game in town.
Of course getting GL on either box running isn't very likely in the near future.
Thank you!
/. id as low as mine can never be convinced otherwise I'll take it as a compliment.
I'm no great coder or anything, and I think RMS is wrong about a great many things, but the GPL was a truly great invention. Certainly RMS's greatest hit; even greater than emacs. Assuming you mean anyone with a
Not bloody likely. A bunch of SCA medieval wannabes wouldn't last long against the survivalists with bunkers full of guns, ammo and more importantly, food.
Food preservation isn't one of the skills one associates with the SCA, they are more concerned with period costumes (including weapons & armor as costume) period art (dance, modes of speach and poetry, etc) and the more 'fun' crafts. And they are way too topheavy on nobility and not nearly enough peasants to have a viable skillbase.
Assuming civilivation fell apart, it wouldn't go medieval again because we KNOW about better tech and we would have the remenants of our present tech to build on. So forget those fantasy scenarios about a return to chivalry, knights in shining armor and jousting. Won't happen. Mr. 9mm makes plate armor suicidal and renders edged weapons of all kinds a niche tool for close in fighting. We would also retain electricity, radio and some computing capability. We would still know a lot of chemistry and physics that would allow things the medieval mind never dreamed of.
> Or MacOS X
Yes, but lets not attract the Faithful Followers of Steve to this thread. Almost as bad as Amigans or Team OS/2.
> Of course good neighbors tend to reciprocate anyway, but only a rude
> neighbor would actually insist on it. That's what the GPL is--a rude
> neighbor.
Neighbors tend to do the 'right' thing because everybody knows everyone and bad behaviour would become known. When social groupings grow beyond a threshold size more formal rules are the norm. And it isn't like we can't all name fifty companies that grabbed up BSD and made closed products from it and have never given the first bugfix back. The GPL is the community's way of telling those leaches to FOAD if they can't at least manage a half assed attempt to co-operate.
> Screwing SCO on a 'gotcha' because they continued to distribute the
> Linux kernel after they filed the lawsuit may seem like just deserts
Perhaps, but how about these ideas?
If we stipulate that there is some SCO IP in the kernel (which I doubt) and that IBM did indeed contribute it to Linus and claim it as their own (which I'd be shocked to find true) and acknowledge that SCO did indeed distribute said tainted code before and after learning it's origins we get the following:
1. SCO can not expect 3rd parties to be any more liable for infringement than SCO themselves are for their own lack of due dilligence. Since SCO is likely to hold themselves and their customers blameless they can't then expect damages from anyone else. After all, only SCO possessed their precious archival UNIX code to compare against so they were in the best position to detect the infringment.
2. Since SCO has yet to formally request a DMCA takedown, no distributer can be held liable up to such time as they file a formal takedown request. Yes, the DMCA is going to work in our favor in this case, especially for kernel.org and mirrors.
3. So we get a best case for SCO, where they prove their case anc get a total legal victory and are unable to collect damages from anyone other than IBM. And IBM can keep the case on appeal until sometime after the final trump blows so they get no money and end up bankrupt.
> He can be sure that other programmers won't use his app in proprietary
> applications, but he has nothing to defend himself against companies
> like RedHat distributing his "music" in ways that make the RIAA look
> like a generous patron by comparison.
Wrong model. If not for the GPL RedHat would have probably turned into another BSDI. I.E. taken freely available software and turned it into a closed product to sell to the corporate world instead of becoming the major evangelising force in the boardroom.
But because of the GPL and their belief in it, they serve a valuable purpose in the Free Software ecosystem instead of acting as a simple parasite.
> BSD says "I can't make money off this, maybe you can". GPL says
> "I can't make money off this, neither can you."
Again this is just wrong regarding the GPL. The GPL is saying "I am sharing this code on the condition that you are obligated to return the favor." The GPL author expects to be paid with bug fixes and general assistance building and maintaining the codebase.
> Control of Plant Gene Expression
You admit they didn't have anything with creating it, they just bought out the company that owned this tech.
> Polychlorinated Biphenyls (Aroclor, Pyroclor)
These were very useful compounds, and nobody knew of any risks. And the 'risks' were probably overstated since those sort of scares were all the rage back in the 70's. For that matter they seem to be pretty popular even after we have lived through enough that we should know better. (Lawsuits against McDonalds. Lawsuits against Nabisco. Etc.)
> rBGH Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone
Ok, this one was a good idea, but if the proper testing had happened it would never have made it to market. One evil point for Monsanto.
> Agent Orange
Safe for use in the US and safe enough to use in a war zone are two completely different things. Balance the risks of using Agent Orange vs the risks of being shot by the VC hiding in the jungle and I thing I'd say "Spray em!" if I were a soldier in Vietnam.
Monsanto is neither good or evil. They are a corporation. Some of the people working there are evil, some good, most just praying they don't get rightsized. Which is why corporations as we have them are a bad idea, no accountability.