Yes Microsoft was a huge corporate juggernaut in it's first 5 years too. It was started with billions of dollars and all Bill had to do was sit there. If either O'Reilly or RedHat reach 25 years (and I can see O'Reilly doing it) then they won't exactly be short of money either.
Europe doesn't lack democracy, it has regular elections for MEPs. The unelected commissioners are chosen by the elected MEPs.
How do you remove Murdoch from his position of power? Only the government or large institutional investors can do that and they have too much at stake.
However a European parliament composed of some of the staunchest defenders of real freedom of speech would neuter his enormous political clout. Why do you think Murdoch doesn't own anything in, say, Denmark. Because his megalomania would not be tolerated, and his ego couldn't stand that.
Installing a new version of glibc is a great deal more than just rpm -Uvh glibc-2.2.rpm. Loads of stuff depends on it and you're usually better off waiting for a new distro and patching any smaller holes while you're waiting.
Not it isn't. QNX, BeOS, MacOS 9, Windows 2000 and KDE 2.1 on Linux are just as friendly. Windows is just better known than the above. Your average corporate IT user isn't going to have any trouble using any of these, especially since they'll have an IT helpdesk if they get stuck. Home users should stick to Windows for the time being, but the way to get Linux on the desktop is to get it into somewhere like Ford or Citibank first and then this will drive home adoption.
What you're forgetting is that Britain is ruled by the likes Rupert Murdoch, not Tony Blair. If Europe ran us at least we'd be run by a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who don't like power-crazed corporations at all and would cut Murdoch down to size. Why do you think all the Murdoch papers oppose the Euro and the European superstate - because all the political clout that Murdoch has in the UK would be stripped from him. There may be disadvantages to Europe but don't let the newspaper owners' political agendas blind you to the good points.
Ahem. In the UK, a lot of the drunk and disorderly behaviour would be lessened by having a reliable way for people to get home at 2.00am. I had to walk the 2 miles home from the city center, drunk as a skunk because I couldn't get a cab.
In the places I've visited or lived in on mainland Europe, getting a cab at any time is easy because there are so many of them and there's only one kind of cab not the black cab/minicab bull in the UK.
Also there are the brainless licensing laws. Let's encourage people to get as many drinks down them as possible and throw them all out on the street at exactly the same time. Brilliant.
I'm tired of the UK government tackling the symptom rather than the cause, merely so they can say to their tabloid masters that something is being done.
Just like that. How do we convince the VCs to lend us the several billion marketing budget? The answer is not to buy, but consumers don't have full access to information - if they did Intel PCs would have never taken off in the first place, never mind Windows NT.
Surely you can't be suggesting that Windows might be fragmented in some way. That is obviously nonsense since Office works on all of them and doesn't even run on Unix. (This is sarcasm BTW)
It was the Internet that pushed the PC into the mainstream, MS was just a lucky passenger. Netscape were the ones that brought the Internet to the masses and sold all those extra Win95 licenses for Microsoft.
Other superior platforms and OSes existed in the past but Microsoft buried them all with a combination of marketing and anti-competitive practices.
Second in server shipments for last year is not a niche player. For the average office user it would be just as easy as Windows NT. Since office users have an internal IT helpdesk to help them deal with problems with their workstations and since Linux provides a great deal more crash information than NT, the problem can be diagnosed and fixed for good, rather than the reboot/reinstall and hope method. It isn't ready for the person that can't set the clock on their video, but neither is Windows.
My family often have to ask me to have a look at their PCs and I hate having to recommend a reinstall which, with all the updates required, can take many unnecessary hours. I would quite happily support them on Mandrake and I'm going to see if I can talk my dad into using 8.0 when it comes out, as he finds Windows' crappiness horribly frustrating.
I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't see any proof. The point I was making was that Microsoft don't have to do anything when they use BSD code apart from include the copyright. That's why IBM isn't pushing FreeBSD even though it's superior to Linux (at least to 2.2 anyway). There's no way IBM are going to do $1.3BN of R&D just for Microsoft to come along and use it without any fear of reprisals. Microsoft aren't the only corporation with deep pockets after all.
So you're accusing Microsoft of misappropriating GPL'd code. Do you have a URL? I notice that samba.org are unaware of the fact, seeing as it's not on their website.
I used to think this was all audiophile whinging - until I heard a 128Kbit MP3 of a song that I'd been listening to quite a lot in my car CD and I could tell it was worse than the CD version. Not by a huge amount, but it was still noticeable.
Another difference between Linux and BSD is that Microsoft cannot cherrypick the best bits of Linux extend them and close them up. Probably the reason why IBM are investing $1.3BN dollars in Linux and not BSD.
Can *no other company* produce new technology anymore?
The ones that tried were FUDed or vapourised a long time ago. Notice that every other x86 OS is available for no cost under various terms and conditions. No payware OS has ever succeeded in shifting Microsoft because buyers have to pay for a second OS, whereas they may be inclined to try something they get for nothing. This is why the anti-trust trial is so important - any area where Microsoft is threatened is immediately co-opted or crushed and until this roadblock to real innovation is removed OS and productivity software will stay as just rehashes + bloat of previous versions (and producing a stable OS after only 21 years of trying doesn't count as innovation - all the other OSes managed that years ago).
Only until Microsoft shut them down for stealing their 'intellectual' property. This argument came up when the Russian hackers had access to Microsoft's servers for a while and didn't do anything (yeah right). No-one from WINE or Samba would touch this code as it would immediately kill their project.
The law is on the side of Adobe though. Fair use doesn't apply as an access control circumvention device is being provided, which is illegal under the DMCA.
It just requires patience for the market to begin to take risks. I remember in the early 90s laughing at the primitive DOS games as compared to my Amiga. 8 years later and the Amiga has risen from the dead more times than Dracula and WinDOS has some amazing stuff for it. The same thing could happen with Linux, who knows. One thing I'd love is to be able to put a CD in the drive and boot into a game with a stripped down Linux handling the necessary devices.
No crappy unstable OS getting in the way, just the bare bones required.
What loyalty have corps ever shown to their staff - look at the tech sector at the moment, layoffs everywhere just because profits are going to fall a bit. I mean Cisco and Intel are 2 of the most fantastically profitable companies in the world and yet because their profits aren't increasing the way the market wants, they're letting people go. That's why I'm a contractor, the job security is exactly the same as being permanent and you get paid a lot more.
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Yes Microsoft was a huge corporate juggernaut in it's first 5 years too. It was started with billions of dollars and all Bill had to do was sit there. If either O'Reilly or RedHat reach 25 years (and I can see O'Reilly doing it) then they won't exactly be short of money either.
Europe doesn't lack democracy, it has regular elections for MEPs. The unelected commissioners are chosen by the elected MEPs.
How do you remove Murdoch from his position of power? Only the government or large institutional investors can do that and they have too much at stake.
However a European parliament composed of some of the staunchest defenders of real freedom of speech would neuter his enormous political clout. Why do you think Murdoch doesn't own anything in, say, Denmark. Because his megalomania would not be tolerated, and his ego couldn't stand that.
Installing a new version of glibc is a great deal more than just rpm -Uvh glibc-2.2.rpm. Loads of stuff depends on it and you're usually better off waiting for a new distro and patching any smaller holes while you're waiting.
Not it isn't. QNX, BeOS, MacOS 9, Windows 2000 and KDE 2.1 on Linux are just as friendly. Windows is just better known than the above. Your average corporate IT user isn't going to have any trouble using any of these, especially since they'll have an IT helpdesk if they get stuck. Home users should stick to Windows for the time being, but the way to get Linux on the desktop is to get it into somewhere like Ford or Citibank first and then this will drive home adoption.
What you're forgetting is that Britain is ruled by the likes Rupert Murdoch, not Tony Blair. If Europe ran us at least we'd be run by a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who don't like power-crazed corporations at all and would cut Murdoch down to size. Why do you think all the Murdoch papers oppose the Euro and the European superstate - because all the political clout that Murdoch has in the UK would be stripped from him. There may be disadvantages to Europe but don't let the newspaper owners' political agendas blind you to the good points.
Ahem. In the UK, a lot of the drunk and disorderly behaviour would be lessened by having a reliable way for people to get home at 2.00am. I had to walk the 2 miles home from the city center, drunk as a skunk because I couldn't get a cab.
In the places I've visited or lived in on mainland Europe, getting a cab at any time is easy because there are so many of them and there's only one kind of cab not the black cab/minicab bull in the UK.
Also there are the brainless licensing laws. Let's encourage people to get as many drinks down them as possible and throw them all out on the street at exactly the same time. Brilliant.
I'm tired of the UK government tackling the symptom rather than the cause, merely so they can say to their tabloid masters that something is being done.
Aye, time to switch to decaf :-)
Cynicism about corporate motives is a learned response after 12 years of working for them.
How do you know they won't? What's to stop them? Only not buying the console will absolutely ensure that this won't happen, so I'm not having one.
Just like that. How do we convince the VCs to lend us the several billion marketing budget? The answer is not to buy, but consumers don't have full access to information - if they did Intel PCs would have never taken off in the first place, never mind Windows NT.
Surely you can't be suggesting that Windows might be fragmented in some way. That is obviously nonsense since Office works on all of them and doesn't even run on Unix. (This is sarcasm BTW)
It was the Internet that pushed the PC into the mainstream, MS was just a lucky passenger. Netscape were the ones that brought the Internet to the masses and sold all those extra Win95 licenses for Microsoft.
Other superior platforms and OSes existed in the past but Microsoft buried them all with a combination of marketing and anti-competitive practices.
Second in server shipments for last year is not a niche player. For the average office user it would be just as easy as Windows NT. Since office users have an internal IT helpdesk to help them deal with problems with their workstations and since Linux provides a great deal more crash information than NT, the problem can be diagnosed and fixed for good, rather than the reboot/reinstall and hope method. It isn't ready for the person that can't set the clock on their video, but neither is Windows.
My family often have to ask me to have a look at their PCs and I hate having to recommend a reinstall which, with all the updates required, can take many unnecessary hours. I would quite happily support them on Mandrake and I'm going to see if I can talk my dad into using 8.0 when it comes out, as he finds Windows' crappiness horribly frustrating.
What? Name one OS that hasn't been modified beyond it's existing specifications.
I think you'll find it here.
I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't see any proof. The point I was making was that Microsoft don't have to do anything when they use BSD code apart from include the copyright. That's why IBM isn't pushing FreeBSD even though it's superior to Linux (at least to 2.2 anyway). There's no way IBM are going to do $1.3BN of R&D just for Microsoft to come along and use it without any fear of reprisals. Microsoft aren't the only corporation with deep pockets after all.
So you're accusing Microsoft of misappropriating GPL'd code. Do you have a URL? I notice that samba.org are unaware of the fact, seeing as it's not on their website.
I used to think this was all audiophile whinging - until I heard a 128Kbit MP3 of a song that I'd been listening to quite a lot in my car CD and I could tell it was worse than the CD version. Not by a huge amount, but it was still noticeable.
Another difference between Linux and BSD is that Microsoft cannot cherrypick the best bits of Linux extend them and close them up. Probably the reason why IBM are investing $1.3BN dollars in Linux and not BSD.
Can *no other company* produce new technology anymore?
The ones that tried were FUDed or vapourised a long time ago. Notice that every other x86 OS is available for no cost under various terms and conditions. No payware OS has ever succeeded in shifting Microsoft because buyers have to pay for a second OS, whereas they may be inclined to try something they get for nothing. This is why the anti-trust trial is so important - any area where Microsoft is threatened is immediately co-opted or crushed and until this roadblock to real innovation is removed OS and productivity software will stay as just rehashes + bloat of previous versions (and producing a stable OS after only 21 years of trying doesn't count as innovation - all the other OSes managed that years ago).
Only until Microsoft shut them down for stealing their 'intellectual' property. This argument came up when the Russian hackers had access to Microsoft's servers for a while and didn't do anything (yeah right). No-one from WINE or Samba would touch this code as it would immediately kill their project.
The law is on the side of Adobe though. Fair use doesn't apply as an access control circumvention device is being provided, which is illegal under the DMCA.
It just requires patience for the market to begin to take risks. I remember in the early 90s laughing at the primitive DOS games as compared to my Amiga. 8 years later and the Amiga has risen from the dead more times than Dracula and WinDOS has some amazing stuff for it. The same thing could happen with Linux, who knows. One thing I'd love is to be able to put a CD in the drive and boot into a game with a stripped down Linux handling the necessary devices.
No crappy unstable OS getting in the way, just the bare bones required.
What loyalty have corps ever shown to their staff - look at the tech sector at the moment, layoffs everywhere just because profits are going to fall a bit. I mean Cisco and Intel are 2 of the most fantastically profitable companies in the world and yet because their profits aren't increasing the way the market wants, they're letting people go. That's why I'm a contractor, the job security is exactly the same as being permanent and you get paid a lot more.
Or 'Sie sind in der Scheiße, Pirat schweinhund'
Are there? I can think of about 10 and some of them are for different platforms than x86.