A modified smallpox could wipe the US off the map without so much as an ICBM in sight.
All to true, and quite scary by itself. Thing is, with a missile defense system in place you force the hand of someone wishing to attack you to actually have to deliver the payload personally. You have to manage to smuggle whatever weapon we're talking about across the border, provide for transportation to the target, and do all this without raising any suspicions.
No, missile defense is not a catch all, stop all kinds of nasties. It does make things more difficult for a North Korea or Iraq to just lob a missile at the US with no more than a few minutes warning, and no defense for it. The attacker is forced to get up close and personal, on US turf.
Hopefully we don't get any "smart" terrorists with money behind them. Like folks who would be smart enough to make sure the get away car had a license plate, or wouldn't go back to get the deposit on his Ryder truck rental.
That's why a lot of us like the BSD license more than the GPL and it's "free software" variations.
Even if MySQL had been released under the BSD license, you'd still have a nasty trademark dispute. Copyright license does not impact in any way tradmark.
Someone might want to correct me here in the details. Yes, Linus owns the trademark to Linux. I believe that someone else (MadDog?) actually keeps tabs on it's use.
Are Linux.com,.org, and.net, which all lead to diferent sites, in violation of that trademark?
Only if they are using the name without permission. It's probably fair to assume that the owners of those sites have been granted this permission. It is perfectly okay to use someone else's trademark, so long as there has been some agreement reached in it's use.
If everyone can use Linux in the Name of their distro, can everyone also use Mysql in theirs?
No. A trademark owner can set up rules and guidelines on how their trademark may be legally used without having to explicitly grant permission. If Linus set up some provision which stated that it was perfectly okay for someone to use the name "Linux" for an operating system based on a certain kernel, or other criteria, then it's all cool.
For example, if you were to develop "Pete's Linux" which actually used the FreeBSD kernel underneath, then you might run under a trademark violation. If on the other hand this distro met the guidelines for the Linux name, such as actually using the Linux kernel, then everything is legit and legal.
As the owner of a trademark, you get to set up rules in how it will be used. If MySQL AB didn't allow for some other company to come in and use their trademark without their permission, it is very much a violation.
If I go and register "www.disney.org" then provide a link over to the.com site, it's still every bit as much of a trademark violation. Disney spent a lot of time, money, and energy to present that name in a certain light, and trademarking it is what protects it.
This is outright wrong of them - they are just being bullies here
Trademark demands that you act as a bully. If you don't defend it, you lose it. Many of the rules involving trademark are wildly different then copyright. In my Disney example, if they didn't come after me hard and fast to give up the hypothetical disney.org site, they risk losing their trademark altogether.
This only becomes a copyright issue if NuSphere doesn't release the code they've added to their propietary product built on top of the GPL'd MySQL. One thing that's interesting here is that NuSphere is dodging this point by promising to release at some future date. This is LONG after they've been selling this code on the street. From a legal standpoint I wonder how long you can just promise to release before you're in actual violation of the GPL?
Lastly, NuSphere supposedly started up this site because they didn't like how MySQL's folks ran their development. Well, if they didn't like it, why are they still using the name MySQL? The reason is simple, and it's why we have trademark protection. NuSphere is utilizing the MySQL name to ride on top of it's good reputation that's taken years to build up. If they just named it "NuSphere's Database Hack", it would also take them years to develop a worthy reputation.
NuSphere is WAY in the wrong on this one. They know it too. They're just hoping their lawyers talk prettier then MySQL's lawyers.
Printing images using GIMP/Ghostscript is already in great shape. Generally, having Adobe port their apps won't do squat for printing quality. That's a function of the printer drivers.
Yeah, because we all know about that great open source replacement for InDesign right? And Acrobat (no, not the reader). Oh yeah, I'm thinking them print professionals are just falling over themselves to get using GS's poorly rendered fonts, or Gimp's non-existent CMYK support.
In my mind there are two companies that will be required for Linux to be a true threat to Microsoft at the desktop. Those two being Adobe and Macromedia. Every major application gap that Linux now has is covered by one of those two companies. When you go through their respective product offerings, very very little of it can be found for Linux.
Linux needs Adobe. Now if only Adobe fealt they needed to have a presence on Linux. One of those catch-22 kinda things I suppose.
In l870, begging bankers for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio.
Standard Oil was the basis for the same Sherman Anti-Trust Act that Microsoft was getting sued under. Due to this act, Standard Oil was split up into multiple companies.
The only reason I mention this is that while the world has been watching what all will happen with Microsoft, pretty much all the companies that were split from Standard Oil are once again a single company. This may not be all that relevant considering the state of the oil industry today as compared to Rockefeller's time, but it is kind of interesting just the same.
All this, of course, is no help to those companies being screwed by Amazon.com's "One Click Shopping" patent.
What I'd like to know is how in the heck do you get a patent for ANY software? That's like getting a patent for a song due to the sequential process and timing involved with strumming strings on a guitar.
If the DMCA unconsitutional, why doesn't someone challenge it in court?
I was wondering the very same thing when President Clinton signed in a budget that kicked in a retroactive tax. Sad truth of the matter is that the US Constitution has become more of a guideline then the law of the land.
Part of the problem has to do with two schools of thought concerning the Constitution. On one hand you have folks who believe that it should be interpereted along side the arguments and writings of those men who wrote it. On the other hand you've got those who see no value in the historical context and look at it from a purely here and now stand point.
In addition, it's important to consider that this shift in attitude towards the Constitution seems to rest far more with the Supreme Courts of late then the legislature. Seeing as how any challenge would go there if accepted, those looking to challenge would have to have a firm belief they'd win such a case. Losing at that level is actually far worse then a new restrictive law, because now you've got precedent working against you on any future case.
I guess you haven't done a Windows ME install lately have you? It comes with a new Feature(tm) along with IE. After the install when you attempt to run IE you are then prompted for a membership for MSN.
I like to think I'm pretty clever at using these here computer things, but it took me a while to figure out how to get IE started without subscribing to MSN. I honestly don't recall the workaround for this, but it's hardly obvious. Then, once you get past this gauntlet the damn OS keeps throwing pop up windows at you to remind you what a swell deal MSN is.
I personally don't have a problem with MS making it relatively simple for users of their OS to sign up with their service. Thing is, when the screens are obviously designed to cause a user to believe they are required to do so in order to get core functions to work, that's an entirely different issue. No, a user isn't being forced to use this service, but there is certainly a very high level of deception at work here.
I damn well expect this deception to be cranked up a few notches for XP as Microsoft moves towards being a company of services rather than products. And you though ad banners on web pages were bad. You haven't seen nothing yet!
Do yourself a favor - make the effort to move to Postgres
I probably would have already except for one factor. After a number of horridly failed attempts I've found a web hosting company that is both rock solid and with a fair price. The down side is that they don't do anything with Postgres as of yet. If it was offered up, I'd most likely jump on it.
As it is, MySQL has been doing a great job for me on a couple of different sites that I've put together. I've not had any corrupted data, downtime, or slow server response due to the database. One of the sites I've put together actually gets hit with a pretty fair amount of traffic, on a shared server even, and things hold up pretty darn well.
I may do some playing around with Postgres here on my local FreeBSD box before too long. Thing is, at this point I don't have a web host I really trust that I can publish that work to. The down side of finding a good thing in a hosting vendor is not wanting to jump around feature hunting.
Great Bridge and Red Hat are planning to bring new features and keep it's source closed for a while.
I do believe you need to back this statement up with some facts, if you've got them. If this is purely opinion, then please state what previous action RedHat has taken to lead you to this opinion.
Gee, like they do with the kernel, X, mozilla, samba, kde, and gnome?
I know you're not attacking RedHat here, but I felt I should note that they do a bit more than just wrap stuff together. They've got a lot of folks doing development work on a number of those items mentioned.
I don't personally use RedHat here, but I do have a great deal of respect for them as a company. From what I've seen, they appear to be very straight shooters that have managed to not only lead the Linux market, but also maintain a great deal of repectability while doing so.
Doubtful there will be any immediate benefit beyond simply coupling Postgres with RedHat, other than the RPM integration you mentioned. In the long run though, consider how Microsoft has put SQL Server to work for them. Pretty much every product they label "Enterprise" somehow integrates in with their database server.
As RedHat goes struggling for the "Enterprise" market, having a known database running under the hood is going to become more and more critical. Anything they can do to simplify the process of getting that database up and running quickly is also a major selling point over other solutions.
Personally, I mostly use MySQL for stuff. I'm a simpleton, and it's nice and simple. For what RedHat is looking to do I doubt there's a better choice out there than Postgres. That, and if Postgres gets a nice influx of new dedicated developers this should be great news for both RedHat and Postgres users.
In all fairness, I believe that the majority of the reviews I've read about this movie are completely reversed to what all was wrong with it. Yes, the love story thing was slow, the dialog weak. Still, the first 90 minutes had stuff happening and lead the audience into a wee bit of the pre-attack history. Had they polished up the dialog a bit, that lead in could have been a movie all alone, at a savings of $140 million of wasted CGI effect.
The crime of this movie was that attack scene itself. With Bay's super fast cut editing, all the CGI effects were totally wasted. Stop and consider why Private Ryan's D-Day invasion was so powerful. The camera simply sat still for a while, allowing the audience to take in the scope of what all was happening. These were real people being mowed down before you, and you felt it.
Bay managed to remove any emotional attachment you might feel towards the men aboard those ships. Halfway into the battle, it's just booms and bullets. You might as well just spin a kaliedoscope around really fast, you'll get the very same effect. If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing out on what amounts to a 40 minute strobe speeded collage of images that apparently had something to do with the US entry into WWII.
If you like sparkly things that don't mean anything and won't have you feel anything, you will absolutely love that battle scene. If you're willing to suspend belief far enough to buy the notion that the Japanese military wasted tons of ordinance on civilian targets while enjoying a 98% hit ratio on the military ones, unless of course our heroes are inside one of them, you'll love this movie!
Personally, I'm trying to look up some reference to why we don't tar and feather movie makers for desecration. I sure can't think of a good reason after seeing this crap.
Why not come up with an "easy installation" that compiles the program?
Folks already have! That's the concept that drives the FreeBSD ports collection. There's even a GUI interface called "pib" that can handle your pointing and clicking needs.
For the unenlightened on the subject, FreeBSD includes a directory stucture under/usr/ports with a number of category subdirectories like "mail", "www", "x11" as well as many others. Under those you'll find a directory dedicated to each application in the tree. Example...
cd/usr/ports/www/mozilla/
Inside of this directory is a couple of small files. One is a script that has all the information needed to download the application, uncompress, configure, compile, and install it. A couple of other files in there are used to describe what the application is, so that GUI based clients can tell a user what it is they're installing. There's also a file that lists what all is going to get installed, and where so you can pretty accurately uninstall this thing. These scripts are capable of checking for file dependencies, like actually fixing them, not just spitting out bogus error messages.
To install that example above of Mozilla, all you need to type is...
make install
Best of all, this tree is updated with a fairly simple script through CVS. Since we're only talking small text files, this is pretty darn quick to update even across a modem. There's over 4000 applications in that tree today, with more being added all the time.
Whether you like FreeBSD or not, this is a really wonderful system that's been worked out over on this. No, it's not perfect as I'm sure some replies will mention, but the concept behind it is sound. Instead of having 1000's of people trying to figure out how to compile something as massive and complex as a Gnome or KDE, one person gets it all working proper for this OS and submits it in.
Wasn't that the point of Open Source in the first place?
What happens when a very powerful computer can be small (concealable)?
Well, you might not see that concealed 10Gig processor the size of a nail clipping. On the other hand, it might be a wee bit tougher hiding that car battery with the 1200 cranking amps to keep it going. What's worse, trying to get that darn liquid nitrogen tank hidden away.
You don't need super hi-tech to play big brother anyway. We have the income tax to monitor every penny you make. We have a phone system that congress okay'd nearly unlimited tapping abilities on. Low tech servers running at ISP's monitoring traffic for the FBI. Egads, we even have folks begging to have chips installed into our TV's to monitor "incorrect" programs for our children.
If you're going to be paranoid, at least do so concerning to those things that really are a danger to privacy. A faster/smaller chip isn't the concern. It's them bigger/slower governments that individuals need to be wary of.
I just wish that GNOME and KDE would include XFree86 configuration utilities
Totally agree.
they should make a bigger deal of the latest version of linuxconf
Now on this point the waters get muddier. I'm the first one in line to point out the lack of GUI config tools presently available. Problem with what you're saying is that "linuxconf" is just that, a Linux configuration tool. Both Gnome and KDE are Unix applications meant to work on a variety of platforms.
When appropriate, these folks should be pushing config tools for Unix applications. I would even hope that we would see GUI tools for system specific issues, as much of linuxconf deals with. What isn't such a hot idea at the moment is having these folks just ignore all other platforms for the sake of Linux. A balance needs to be had in dealing with this kind of thing.
At this paticular point in time, no. A short ways down the road as companies look to port applications on over to the *nix desktop it may prove to be WAY too much choice.
I for one happen to really like having the choice between desktops. Much more of a KDE person myself, with a definite appreciation of some of the functionality on the Gnome side. Even still, as you stated...
...then breeding out the inferior designs.
One of these two eventually needs to take a definitive lead at some point down the road. The major software players like Adobe, Macromedia, and even Microsoft who might be looking to port apps will want to do so for one toolkit or another. For better or worse, players at that level may be the ones who make the decision for the rest of us. *shudder*
Better to have both emacs and vi than just one.
This isn't even remotely the same concept. Say what you will about the ability for Emacs to be customized, it is still simply an application. Certainly the same is true of VI. Both Gnome and KDE are foundations by which applications are to be built around and on top of. This is not a subtle difference.
I still recall hearing the news about the Gnome Foundation, with Sun, Hp, and IBM all saying that GTK will be their official stuff. At that point I figured, game over. There's no way Gnome is going to survive this group of losers at the desktop. Glad to see they've managed to thrive just the same.
Re:Just One Little Problem - I Can't Find It
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FreeBSD 4.3 Released
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· Score: 5
Why anyone would need to read the manual for this is beyond me.
Umm, because there's a bit more to it. More than likely you'll want to get your source tree all up to date, tweak in your kernel config, and get all your user land stuff in sync. A great site for a to the point summary on all this is the FreeBSD Cheat Sheets. This site also includes specific instructions on how to make world.
Personally, my "make buildworld" is running now in the background as I type this. Just cvsup'd the latest source changes, and away she goes! Couldn't care less about getting an ISO for a CD burn. By keeping the tree up to date every week or so it only takes about 5 minutes per update across a dial-up connection. Every couple of months I run through the make world process and everything is up to date.
Oh sure, this here build takes a while on this K6-450. It's running in the background, so it can take as long as it wants.
Webmin is some good stuff, but it's more a proof of concept kind of application. The concept it proves is that you really can have some utility to assist in configuring daemons without having to give up the ability to edit text files directly.
What I'm specifically referring to is having either a set of GTK or QT based apps that can do this. Using the web as an interface for this type of work is limiting, though webmin does a fair job of working around it. The goal here should be to provide a set of "compelling" (yes I'm going to over use this word) set of tools that *nix a no brainer kind of decision when a choice is to be made.
All to often I've seen companies that friends of mine work for go with an NT solution based only on the fact that they've got folks that know how to admin it. The thinking is also that there's a lot more NT folks out there then *nix folks, and they're cheaper too. Pages served per second, up time stats, and software licenses all go to the toilet in comparison to ease (or more appropriately, apparent ease) of use.
Again, I don't have anything really against Webmin. It's just that we shouldn't consider that the end game.
I kinda figured there'd be replies similar to this one, so a reply here is as good as anywhere else.
For the admin part, I am very glad that I don't have to deal with GUI tools.
So am I. All to often folks seem to get the notion that you have either GUI or Text config, but never ever both. That is simply not true. SWAT does an outstanding job of admin for Samba, yet I am just as capable of editing the text file directly. SWAT also shows me up front a variety of tweaks and settings that'd take me far longer to locate and learn then reading a cryptic man page. The two concepts can live in harmony.
It hurts performance, hurts stability, and most of all it opens up a whole lot of security issues.
Again you seem to be thinking from an NT perspective. There's no reason why a GUI would need to be running all the time. An admin can get in, make the tweaks, and get back out again. The point is, none of the GUI solutions available now give the sysadmin a compelling reason to use them.
From a webdesigner/developers point of view, Linux offers a lot of useful tools. Granted, no WYSIWYG html editors...
You say that like it's a minor point. This is a HUGE point for folks doing layout and design work. This is a major show stopper for a lot of folks. It should be a place where a *nix app provides a highly compelling reason for a user to move on over. The web is a Linux/BSD specialty served up on a gold platter.
For that, I use Quanta +, which offers the tools I need.
Quanta is a tweak on KWrite with the GUI made to look like HomeSite, without even half the functionality. For example, you do some PHP coding, as do I. Try putting together a page with JavaScript, HTML and PHP all in the same file and watch what happens to that syntax highlighting. I could rattle off another twenty some odd features I use regularly in HomeSite that Quanta, nor any other text/html editor simply doesn't provide.
It's not a matter of having apps that are "good enough" in comparison to Windows counterparts. Companies such as Eazel need to be working on those apps that make working with *nix a compelling choice for users on the fence. They don't have to be free, but they do need to make a user want to use the platform they're sitting on.
I'm not going to start a KDE vs. Gnome flamewar here
Oh sure, and take ALL the fun outta Slashdot while you're at it:) BTW, I'm also of a similar opinion on this. Very definitely a KDE advocate. Thing is, providing the tools for the admin and webmaster are going to be key to which of those two come out dominant in the long run. If neither get to it in a serious way, it'll probably keep things split up like they are for a long while to come.
It just seems to me that both Gnome and KDE are missing out on an important niche as they go striving for usability for the mass market. At this point in time the *nix desktops simply don't offer much to either the system admin, or to the web developer. Considering that these are the folks most likely using *nix now.
Eazel has tossed the bulk of their effort into making a file manager and putting gobs of ease of use features in and around it. The problem is, that's not where the holes are! Both Gnome and KDE are quite user friendly on their own merits today. Both are making great strides in this realm without venture capital.
To my earlier point of what is missing, for admins I'm referring to good, solid GUI based apps for configuring the basic services. A small suite to deal with Apache, Sendmail, Inn, and other daemons. Today folks would rather tweak on the text files directly then use those few apps that are out there because they aren't nearly as good as they should be yet. Neither GUI environment today provides much for admins.
As to my point about the web developer, there's simply nothing I've seen in the *nix world that compares to Dreamweaver and HomeSite for development. I just have to imagine there are a lot of web developers that would like to work on the platform that Apache runs best on. Neither of those apps are perfect, but telling someone who has been working on a Mac or Windows that they need to take a month out to learn EMACS is just silly. In all fairness, there are some projects looking to provide some of HomeSite's uses, but there's nothing even coming close to Dreamweaver in the way of a GUI HTML editor.
Bottom line, if Eazel does crash and burn I really don't feel that this is an indication of some kind of open source failure. On the contrary, it might go to prove that the environments already in place are plenty user friendly. What is needed are the apps for those folks most likely to be looking to work with Linux or a BSD and expand upon that.
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A modified smallpox could wipe the US off the map without so much as an ICBM in sight.
All to true, and quite scary by itself. Thing is, with a missile defense system in place you force the hand of someone wishing to attack you to actually have to deliver the payload personally. You have to manage to smuggle whatever weapon we're talking about across the border, provide for transportation to the target, and do all this without raising any suspicions.
No, missile defense is not a catch all, stop all kinds of nasties. It does make things more difficult for a North Korea or Iraq to just lob a missile at the US with no more than a few minutes warning, and no defense for it. The attacker is forced to get up close and personal, on US turf.
Hopefully we don't get any "smart" terrorists with money behind them. Like folks who would be smart enough to make sure the get away car had a license plate, or wouldn't go back to get the deposit on his Ryder truck rental.
That's why a lot of us like the BSD license more than the GPL and it's "free software" variations.
Even if MySQL had been released under the BSD license, you'd still have a nasty trademark dispute. Copyright license does not impact in any way tradmark.
Does Linus hold the TM on Linux?
.org, and .net, which all lead to diferent sites, in violation of that trademark?
Someone might want to correct me here in the details. Yes, Linus owns the trademark to Linux. I believe that someone else (MadDog?) actually keeps tabs on it's use.
Are Linux.com,
Only if they are using the name without permission. It's probably fair to assume that the owners of those sites have been granted this permission. It is perfectly okay to use someone else's trademark, so long as there has been some agreement reached in it's use.
If everyone can use Linux in the Name of their distro, can everyone also use Mysql in theirs?
No. A trademark owner can set up rules and guidelines on how their trademark may be legally used without having to explicitly grant permission. If Linus set up some provision which stated that it was perfectly okay for someone to use the name "Linux" for an operating system based on a certain kernel, or other criteria, then it's all cool.
For example, if you were to develop "Pete's Linux" which actually used the FreeBSD kernel underneath, then you might run under a trademark violation. If on the other hand this distro met the guidelines for the Linux name, such as actually using the Linux kernel, then everything is legit and legal.
As the owner of a trademark, you get to set up rules in how it will be used. If MySQL AB didn't allow for some other company to come in and use their trademark without their permission, it is very much a violation.
Right on the front page they even have:...
.com site, it's still every bit as much of a trademark violation. Disney spent a lot of time, money, and energy to present that name in a certain light, and trademarking it is what protects it.
If I go and register "www.disney.org" then provide a link over to the
This is outright wrong of them - they are just being bullies here
Trademark demands that you act as a bully. If you don't defend it, you lose it. Many of the rules involving trademark are wildly different then copyright. In my Disney example, if they didn't come after me hard and fast to give up the hypothetical disney.org site, they risk losing their trademark altogether.
This only becomes a copyright issue if NuSphere doesn't release the code they've added to their propietary product built on top of the GPL'd MySQL. One thing that's interesting here is that NuSphere is dodging this point by promising to release at some future date. This is LONG after they've been selling this code on the street. From a legal standpoint I wonder how long you can just promise to release before you're in actual violation of the GPL?
Lastly, NuSphere supposedly started up this site because they didn't like how MySQL's folks ran their development. Well, if they didn't like it, why are they still using the name MySQL? The reason is simple, and it's why we have trademark protection. NuSphere is utilizing the MySQL name to ride on top of it's good reputation that's taken years to build up. If they just named it "NuSphere's Database Hack", it would also take them years to develop a worthy reputation.
NuSphere is WAY in the wrong on this one. They know it too. They're just hoping their lawyers talk prettier then MySQL's lawyers.
Printing images using GIMP/Ghostscript is already in great shape. Generally, having Adobe port their apps won't do squat for printing quality. That's a function of the printer drivers.
Yeah, because we all know about that great open source replacement for InDesign right? And Acrobat (no, not the reader). Oh yeah, I'm thinking them print professionals are just falling over themselves to get using GS's poorly rendered fonts, or Gimp's non-existent CMYK support.
In my mind there are two companies that will be required for Linux to be a true threat to Microsoft at the desktop. Those two being Adobe and Macromedia. Every major application gap that Linux now has is covered by one of those two companies. When you go through their respective product offerings, very very little of it can be found for Linux.
Linux needs Adobe. Now if only Adobe fealt they needed to have a presence on Linux. One of those catch-22 kinda things I suppose.
In l870, begging bankers for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio.
Standard Oil was the basis for the same Sherman Anti-Trust Act that Microsoft was getting sued under. Due to this act, Standard Oil was split up into multiple companies.
The only reason I mention this is that while the world has been watching what all will happen with Microsoft, pretty much all the companies that were split from Standard Oil are once again a single company. This may not be all that relevant considering the state of the oil industry today as compared to Rockefeller's time, but it is kind of interesting just the same.
Dude, we just don't like monarchs here. That and you're letting the truth get in the way of a perfectly good story.
Now I'm outta here to celebrate the fact that the Indians couldn't enforce there immigration laws.
All this, of course, is no help to those companies being screwed by Amazon.com's "One Click Shopping" patent.
What I'd like to know is how in the heck do you get a patent for ANY software? That's like getting a patent for a song due to the sequential process and timing involved with strumming strings on a guitar.
If the DMCA unconsitutional, why doesn't someone challenge it in court?
I was wondering the very same thing when President Clinton signed in a budget that kicked in a retroactive tax. Sad truth of the matter is that the US Constitution has become more of a guideline then the law of the land.
Part of the problem has to do with two schools of thought concerning the Constitution. On one hand you have folks who believe that it should be interpereted along side the arguments and writings of those men who wrote it. On the other hand you've got those who see no value in the historical context and look at it from a purely here and now stand point.
In addition, it's important to consider that this shift in attitude towards the Constitution seems to rest far more with the Supreme Courts of late then the legislature. Seeing as how any challenge would go there if accepted, those looking to challenge would have to have a firm belief they'd win such a case. Losing at that level is actually far worse then a new restrictive law, because now you've got precedent working against you on any future case.
And you're being forced to use them how?
I guess you haven't done a Windows ME install lately have you? It comes with a new Feature(tm) along with IE. After the install when you attempt to run IE you are then prompted for a membership for MSN.
I like to think I'm pretty clever at using these here computer things, but it took me a while to figure out how to get IE started without subscribing to MSN. I honestly don't recall the workaround for this, but it's hardly obvious. Then, once you get past this gauntlet the damn OS keeps throwing pop up windows at you to remind you what a swell deal MSN is.
I personally don't have a problem with MS making it relatively simple for users of their OS to sign up with their service. Thing is, when the screens are obviously designed to cause a user to believe they are required to do so in order to get core functions to work, that's an entirely different issue. No, a user isn't being forced to use this service, but there is certainly a very high level of deception at work here.
I damn well expect this deception to be cranked up a few notches for XP as Microsoft moves towards being a company of services rather than products. And you though ad banners on web pages were bad. You haven't seen nothing yet!
Do yourself a favor - make the effort to move to Postgres
I probably would have already except for one factor. After a number of horridly failed attempts I've found a web hosting company that is both rock solid and with a fair price. The down side is that they don't do anything with Postgres as of yet. If it was offered up, I'd most likely jump on it.
As it is, MySQL has been doing a great job for me on a couple of different sites that I've put together. I've not had any corrupted data, downtime, or slow server response due to the database. One of the sites I've put together actually gets hit with a pretty fair amount of traffic, on a shared server even, and things hold up pretty darn well.
I may do some playing around with Postgres here on my local FreeBSD box before too long. Thing is, at this point I don't have a web host I really trust that I can publish that work to. The down side of finding a good thing in a hosting vendor is not wanting to jump around feature hunting.
Great Bridge and Red Hat are planning to bring new features and keep it's source closed for a while.
I do believe you need to back this statement up with some facts, if you've got them. If this is purely opinion, then please state what previous action RedHat has taken to lead you to this opinion.
But - MySql has been plagued by the fact that they never implemented foreign key support into their DBMS.
Well, they know this as well. Please note the 1st item on the todo list for version 4.0.
Gee, like they do with the kernel, X, mozilla, samba, kde, and gnome?
I know you're not attacking RedHat here, but I felt I should note that they do a bit more than just wrap stuff together. They've got a lot of folks doing development work on a number of those items mentioned.
I don't personally use RedHat here, but I do have a great deal of respect for them as a company. From what I've seen, they appear to be very straight shooters that have managed to not only lead the Linux market, but also maintain a great deal of repectability while doing so.
Doubtful there will be any immediate benefit beyond simply coupling Postgres with RedHat, other than the RPM integration you mentioned. In the long run though, consider how Microsoft has put SQL Server to work for them. Pretty much every product they label "Enterprise" somehow integrates in with their database server.
As RedHat goes struggling for the "Enterprise" market, having a known database running under the hood is going to become more and more critical. Anything they can do to simplify the process of getting that database up and running quickly is also a major selling point over other solutions.
Personally, I mostly use MySQL for stuff. I'm a simpleton, and it's nice and simple. For what RedHat is looking to do I doubt there's a better choice out there than Postgres. That, and if Postgres gets a nice influx of new dedicated developers this should be great news for both RedHat and Postgres users.
In all fairness, I believe that the majority of the reviews I've read about this movie are completely reversed to what all was wrong with it. Yes, the love story thing was slow, the dialog weak. Still, the first 90 minutes had stuff happening and lead the audience into a wee bit of the pre-attack history. Had they polished up the dialog a bit, that lead in could have been a movie all alone, at a savings of $140 million of wasted CGI effect.
The crime of this movie was that attack scene itself. With Bay's super fast cut editing, all the CGI effects were totally wasted. Stop and consider why Private Ryan's D-Day invasion was so powerful. The camera simply sat still for a while, allowing the audience to take in the scope of what all was happening. These were real people being mowed down before you, and you felt it.
Bay managed to remove any emotional attachment you might feel towards the men aboard those ships. Halfway into the battle, it's just booms and bullets. You might as well just spin a kaliedoscope around really fast, you'll get the very same effect. If you haven't seen it yet, you're missing out on what amounts to a 40 minute strobe speeded collage of images that apparently had something to do with the US entry into WWII.
If you like sparkly things that don't mean anything and won't have you feel anything, you will absolutely love that battle scene. If you're willing to suspend belief far enough to buy the notion that the Japanese military wasted tons of ordinance on civilian targets while enjoying a 98% hit ratio on the military ones, unless of course our heroes are inside one of them, you'll love this movie!
Personally, I'm trying to look up some reference to why we don't tar and feather movie makers for desecration. I sure can't think of a good reason after seeing this crap.
Why not come up with an "easy installation" that compiles the program?
/usr/ports with a number of category subdirectories like "mail", "www", "x11" as well as many others. Under those you'll find a directory dedicated to each application in the tree. Example...
/usr/ports/www/mozilla/
Folks already have! That's the concept that drives the FreeBSD ports collection. There's even a GUI interface called "pib" that can handle your pointing and clicking needs.
For the unenlightened on the subject, FreeBSD includes a directory stucture under
cd
Inside of this directory is a couple of small files. One is a script that has all the information needed to download the application, uncompress, configure, compile, and install it. A couple of other files in there are used to describe what the application is, so that GUI based clients can tell a user what it is they're installing. There's also a file that lists what all is going to get installed, and where so you can pretty accurately uninstall this thing. These scripts are capable of checking for file dependencies, like actually fixing them, not just spitting out bogus error messages.
To install that example above of Mozilla, all you need to type is...
make install
Best of all, this tree is updated with a fairly simple script through CVS. Since we're only talking small text files, this is pretty darn quick to update even across a modem. There's over 4000 applications in that tree today, with more being added all the time.
Whether you like FreeBSD or not, this is a really wonderful system that's been worked out over on this. No, it's not perfect as I'm sure some replies will mention, but the concept behind it is sound. Instead of having 1000's of people trying to figure out how to compile something as massive and complex as a Gnome or KDE, one person gets it all working proper for this OS and submits it in.
Wasn't that the point of Open Source in the first place?
What happens when a very powerful computer can be small (concealable)?
Well, you might not see that concealed 10Gig processor the size of a nail clipping. On the other hand, it might be a wee bit tougher hiding that car battery with the 1200 cranking amps to keep it going. What's worse, trying to get that darn liquid nitrogen tank hidden away.
You don't need super hi-tech to play big brother anyway. We have the income tax to monitor every penny you make. We have a phone system that congress okay'd nearly unlimited tapping abilities on. Low tech servers running at ISP's monitoring traffic for the FBI. Egads, we even have folks begging to have chips installed into our TV's to monitor "incorrect" programs for our children.
If you're going to be paranoid, at least do so concerning to those things that really are a danger to privacy. A faster/smaller chip isn't the concern. It's them bigger/slower governments that individuals need to be wary of.
I just wish that GNOME and KDE would include XFree86 configuration utilities
Totally agree.
they should make a bigger deal of the latest version of linuxconf
Now on this point the waters get muddier. I'm the first one in line to point out the lack of GUI config tools presently available. Problem with what you're saying is that "linuxconf" is just that, a Linux configuration tool. Both Gnome and KDE are Unix applications meant to work on a variety of platforms.
When appropriate, these folks should be pushing config tools for Unix applications. I would even hope that we would see GUI tools for system specific issues, as much of linuxconf deals with. What isn't such a hot idea at the moment is having these folks just ignore all other platforms for the sake of Linux. A balance needs to be had in dealing with this kind of thing.
Is two desktops really too much choice?
...then breeding out the inferior designs.
At this paticular point in time, no. A short ways down the road as companies look to port applications on over to the *nix desktop it may prove to be WAY too much choice.
I for one happen to really like having the choice between desktops. Much more of a KDE person myself, with a definite appreciation of some of the functionality on the Gnome side. Even still, as you stated...
One of these two eventually needs to take a definitive lead at some point down the road. The major software players like Adobe, Macromedia, and even Microsoft who might be looking to port apps will want to do so for one toolkit or another. For better or worse, players at that level may be the ones who make the decision for the rest of us. *shudder*
Better to have both emacs and vi than just one.
This isn't even remotely the same concept. Say what you will about the ability for Emacs to be customized, it is still simply an application. Certainly the same is true of VI. Both Gnome and KDE are foundations by which applications are to be built around and on top of. This is not a subtle difference.
I still recall hearing the news about the Gnome Foundation, with Sun, Hp, and IBM all saying that GTK will be their official stuff. At that point I figured, game over. There's no way Gnome is going to survive this group of losers at the desktop. Glad to see they've managed to thrive just the same.
Why anyone would need to read the manual for this is beyond me.
Umm, because there's a bit more to it. More than likely you'll want to get your source tree all up to date, tweak in your kernel config, and get all your user land stuff in sync. A great site for a to the point summary on all this is the FreeBSD Cheat Sheets. This site also includes specific instructions on how to make world.
Personally, my "make buildworld" is running now in the background as I type this. Just cvsup'd the latest source changes, and away she goes! Couldn't care less about getting an ISO for a CD burn. By keeping the tree up to date every week or so it only takes about 5 minutes per update across a dial-up connection. Every couple of months I run through the make world process and everything is up to date.
Oh sure, this here build takes a while on this K6-450. It's running in the background, so it can take as long as it wants.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
PHP rocks
And Microsoft's ASP really sucks a whole bunch, achoo!
Webmin is some good stuff, but it's more a proof of concept kind of application. The concept it proves is that you really can have some utility to assist in configuring daemons without having to give up the ability to edit text files directly.
What I'm specifically referring to is having either a set of GTK or QT based apps that can do this. Using the web as an interface for this type of work is limiting, though webmin does a fair job of working around it. The goal here should be to provide a set of "compelling" (yes I'm going to over use this word) set of tools that *nix a no brainer kind of decision when a choice is to be made.
All to often I've seen companies that friends of mine work for go with an NT solution based only on the fact that they've got folks that know how to admin it. The thinking is also that there's a lot more NT folks out there then *nix folks, and they're cheaper too. Pages served per second, up time stats, and software licenses all go to the toilet in comparison to ease (or more appropriately, apparent ease) of use.
Again, I don't have anything really against Webmin. It's just that we shouldn't consider that the end game.
I kinda figured there'd be replies similar to this one, so a reply here is as good as anywhere else.
:) BTW, I'm also of a similar opinion on this. Very definitely a KDE advocate. Thing is, providing the tools for the admin and webmaster are going to be key to which of those two come out dominant in the long run. If neither get to it in a serious way, it'll probably keep things split up like they are for a long while to come.
For the admin part, I am very glad that I don't have to deal with GUI tools.
So am I. All to often folks seem to get the notion that you have either GUI or Text config, but never ever both. That is simply not true. SWAT does an outstanding job of admin for Samba, yet I am just as capable of editing the text file directly. SWAT also shows me up front a variety of tweaks and settings that'd take me far longer to locate and learn then reading a cryptic man page. The two concepts can live in harmony.
It hurts performance, hurts stability, and most of all it opens up a whole lot of security issues.
Again you seem to be thinking from an NT perspective. There's no reason why a GUI would need to be running all the time. An admin can get in, make the tweaks, and get back out again. The point is, none of the GUI solutions available now give the sysadmin a compelling reason to use them.
From a webdesigner/developers point of view, Linux offers a lot of useful tools. Granted, no WYSIWYG html editors...
You say that like it's a minor point. This is a HUGE point for folks doing layout and design work. This is a major show stopper for a lot of folks. It should be a place where a *nix app provides a highly compelling reason for a user to move on over. The web is a Linux/BSD specialty served up on a gold platter.
For that, I use Quanta +, which offers the tools I need.
Quanta is a tweak on KWrite with the GUI made to look like HomeSite, without even half the functionality. For example, you do some PHP coding, as do I. Try putting together a page with JavaScript, HTML and PHP all in the same file and watch what happens to that syntax highlighting. I could rattle off another twenty some odd features I use regularly in HomeSite that Quanta, nor any other text/html editor simply doesn't provide.
It's not a matter of having apps that are "good enough" in comparison to Windows counterparts. Companies such as Eazel need to be working on those apps that make working with *nix a compelling choice for users on the fence. They don't have to be free, but they do need to make a user want to use the platform they're sitting on.
I'm not going to start a KDE vs. Gnome flamewar here
Oh sure, and take ALL the fun outta Slashdot while you're at it
It just seems to me that both Gnome and KDE are missing out on an important niche as they go striving for usability for the mass market. At this point in time the *nix desktops simply don't offer much to either the system admin, or to the web developer. Considering that these are the folks most likely using *nix now.
Eazel has tossed the bulk of their effort into making a file manager and putting gobs of ease of use features in and around it. The problem is, that's not where the holes are! Both Gnome and KDE are quite user friendly on their own merits today. Both are making great strides in this realm without venture capital.
To my earlier point of what is missing, for admins I'm referring to good, solid GUI based apps for configuring the basic services. A small suite to deal with Apache, Sendmail, Inn, and other daemons. Today folks would rather tweak on the text files directly then use those few apps that are out there because they aren't nearly as good as they should be yet. Neither GUI environment today provides much for admins.
As to my point about the web developer, there's simply nothing I've seen in the *nix world that compares to Dreamweaver and HomeSite for development. I just have to imagine there are a lot of web developers that would like to work on the platform that Apache runs best on. Neither of those apps are perfect, but telling someone who has been working on a Mac or Windows that they need to take a month out to learn EMACS is just silly. In all fairness, there are some projects looking to provide some of HomeSite's uses, but there's nothing even coming close to Dreamweaver in the way of a GUI HTML editor.
Bottom line, if Eazel does crash and burn I really don't feel that this is an indication of some kind of open source failure. On the contrary, it might go to prove that the environments already in place are plenty user friendly. What is needed are the apps for those folks most likely to be looking to work with Linux or a BSD and expand upon that.