Why not? If we don't even ask for it to be open source, what is the likelyhood we will get open source? If we ask for open source and we get only closed source we still have gotten something.
Aside from that a good reason it should be open source is platform support. If it is open source it will quickly get ported from x86 and PPC (the two platforms Apple is likely to support) to Alpha, Sparc, PA-RISC, MIPS, 68k, etc. If Apple wants to promote QuickTime as an industry standard, having ports to every major hardware architecture would be a great checklist item for them. If they do it closed source, it is a lot of work for them to support multiple platforms. If they release open source the community will do the porting work for them for free.
Another thing is better support of special features of x86 variants. If Apple releases open source, then other people can handle special optimizations for QuickTime on CPU's like the K6 and Athlon so Apple doesn't have to do all that work themselves.
I'm not sure if this is just a troll or what, so at the risk of feeding the trolls...
send 20,000 volts through his fat ass.. that'll get him talking
Uh, he'd be quite dead if there was any amperage behind that. Besides that, you must not have seen the interview with him on 60 Minutes last Sunday. It appears that Kevin has lost a considerable amount of weight in prison, as he looked fairly fit in the interview.
As for using torture techniques, sure, they could do that. But luckily they tend to be fairly cautious when it comes to that sort of thing because they don't want a lot of negative publicity or to stir too much general sympathy for the convicts if that sort of thing leaked out. Generally they seem more inclined to do things like putting people in with other inmates that are trouble makers so that they can maintain plausable deniability (WE didn't do it, it was his evil cellmate!).
its light-years behind such advanced OS like Win2000 Pro and MacOSX as far as useability
You are entitled to your opinion., but I would disagree with that. I can't say much about MacOSX, but in the case of Windows 2000, unless it is really a giant step beyond NT 4, I can't say that I am all that impressed. It is flashier, and perhaps slightly more consistant than Red Hat, but I find NT frustrating. I don't necessarily equate fancy with advanced. The NT environment may be easier for people who don't like to learn anything to stumble their way through, but for people who know what they are doing, things just take too much click-click-clicking to do. There are a lot of things I'd rather do by command line or script, and those things just aren't that nice to do in the Wintel world.
Well, it may be more accurate to say that a lot of us are subjected to having to use Windows in addition to Linux. And a lot of Slashdot readers use Macs or *BSD or other OSes besides either Windows or Linux. It just isn't a simple either-or kinda thing.
So you are proud of 11 days turnaround time? If I was a Windows user I'd want a bit quicker response than that. Microsoft is lucky that the person that found the bug was a reputable person and not someone who would have used it maliciously or announced it into the script kiddie community. While this will no doubt be somewhat of an embarrasment to Microsoft, things could easily have been much worse.
5th Amendment doesn't keep people from being required to provide a blood sample for DNA and I'm pretty sure it doesn't keep them from being required to turn over keys to a safe if the court issues a warrant.
The 5th Amendment may not apply to physical property (such as a blood sample or a safe) like it does things that are in the defendant's head, but we aren't talking about physical property in this case. I haven't ever heard of a case of someone being ordered to turn over keys, not that there haven't been any. In any case, they'd have to prove that the defendant possessed them, in which case they would have just siezed them the same way they seized the safe. What would be a better example would be the combination to a safe. Again, I'd like to see an example where someone has been ordered to turn over a combination to a safe rather than the authorities just cutting it open.
Perhaps encrypted files could be thought of as a safe. If law enforcement can convince a judge that the encrypted file(s) probably contain evidence of a crime (files from a cracked system) or are criminal themselves (encrypted kiddie porn), they'll get a warrant for Mitnik to provide the key. If he doesn't comply he could be jailed for contempt.
The prosecution made the assertation that the files did indeed contain evidence that they would have liked to have used against Mitnick. If the government could have gotten such a warrant to override Mitnick's 5th amendment rights, they would have done so during the trial, and they didn't. They are, and have been, holding out on the files in order to try to find a back-door way around that. I don't believe that the judge ruled that forcing Mitnick to reveal his key wouldn't be a 5th Amendment violation as much as she ruled that the 5th Amendment didn't apply directly in this case (which I would personally disagree with) because the file wasn't being used as evidence against Mitnick.
If you're thinking, "yeah but with a safe they could just jackhammer it open," think of it as a boobytrapped safe. The court could require someone to disable the boobytraps.
However, since these files aren't a physical thing per-se, that argument just doesn't really apply. Nobody would be in any kind of physical danger brute forcing encrypted files open.
If they could decrypt it, would they tell us? They didn't need the data to get Mitnick convicted, so they would have no reason to reveal that they know what the files contain, especially if they are something that isn't terribly valuable to the government (but might be to Kevin). On the other hand, by not admitting to have decrypted the files, they can keep Kevin from getting them back.
Probably most seriously though, is if the government admitted they could crack the encryption, it would not be good for the government. It would encourage more people to use more heavy-duty encryption. It would put more political pressure on the government to further laxen the export rules, which is not something they would like. By not admitting to being able to crack the encryption (assuming for a moment they really can), they give other people a false sense of security. All in all, it would be a loss for the government to make the admission with very little upside for them.
On a side note, are there any legal precedents or restrictions regarding how long Federal officials are allowed to hold confiscated equipment/data? I've heard stories of equipment being kept even with no charges being filed...
Unfortunately, it seems not at all uncommon for the authorities to sieze property as you note. It is not at all uncommon for defendants, even those against whom no charges are ever filed to have to go to court in order to get their property back. In many cases it takes so long that the property in question no longer has much value (in the case of computer equipment in particular). Sometimes defendants find that their property has either been lost (often a creative euphemism for when authority employees personally aquire goods from evidence), damaged, or even sold by the agencies. Of course at that point, there is usually no way for the defendants to get any sort of compensation.
MISplice is right -- while KDE et al. may be nice WMs, getting them up can be a huge pain in the ass, as I've discovered to my chagrin this past weekend, when I installed FreeBSD.
I've got nothing against *BSD personally, but I think that the 'its designed for hackers' complaint is much more true about the *BSD's than it is to mainstream Linux distros like Red Hat, Caldera and SuSE.
XF86 has a known bug with ATI Rage graphics cards, such as is present on-board on my current mobo. My hsync is completely out of whack, and I can't even start X with something vanilla like SVGA or even VGA16 servers (640x480: mode not defined. no valid modes found. exiting.)
It must not be a completely universal problem because I did an install of Red Hat 6.1 at work on a Compaq Deskpro EN series machine here with onboard ATI Rage video the other day and it not only came up with sync correctly, it even PnP detected by name the monitor (Compaq V75). I was quite favorably impressed when that happened, as were a couple of other people who had dealt with getting X running in the past.
The RH 6.1 CD directly booted up on the Compaq, came up to a GUI installer, it recognized the built in ethernet on the motherboard, recognized the video, monitor and mouse. About the only part of the install that I'd say was perhaps beyond what the average person could handle (without reading the book) is disk partitioning.
When I wanted to add a few additional packages, I found the GUI RPM tool actually worked pretty well. Again, I was favorably impressed.
I think that the article has its points, but I would disagree with the conclusion that improvements in usability will not happen or can not happen is off base. I've seen things come a long way since I first started using Linux back in 1993. Don't get me wrong, things aren't perfect yet, but the gap for point-and-click users is narrowing a lot more quickly than what the article would lead you to believe.
I guess I was just glad that they didn't spell it "Pearl". That is something that I've seen quite frequently, especially in non-computer press (like help wanted ads).
It looks like someone at Gartner is finally starting to get it. This peice, while seeming to be basically a summary piece (undoubtedly to sell other documents) actually gets just about everything right and unlike most of their stuff which does an awful lot of waffling and guessing is written in a straightforward style. It neither oversells nor dismisses OSS, and that sets it way above most of the stuff I've seen from similar organizations.
That being said, I openly wonder how they will be doing the cataloguing on Arcserve for Linux. On the NT Server version, you had a choice of either using their own proprietary (buggy) database, or SQL Server 6.x.
Since they already have a port of their Ingres II database for Linux, one would suspect they might use that. I don't know if that is the proprietary database on NT you mention or not (although I believe that Ingres is available for NT). It is hard to say what CA will really support.
Sorry, that's 60% of the discretionary budget, which is about 35% of the total Federal Budget.
35% sounds a lot more like the numbers I'd seen quoted.
This is in the context of a piece which talks about how Ben&Jerry's co-founder Cohen wants to divert some of that money towards education - a goal support by 79% of Americans in one poll.
While I'd in general say that education is a better way to spend the money than on defense, I'd prefer to put that kind of money towards paying down the national debt.
So in my mind it feels wrong for people to be getting so upset about China when we've got plenty on our own plate that we should deal with first.
Just because people are upset about China doesn't mean they aren't upset when our government does something it shouldn't. Plenty of people complain about that sort of thing here and on other forums as well. There is of course differences of opinion on what is right and wrong, but that is only natural. At any rate, I think that most people have more than enough capacity to get upset to be upset both at the Chinese government and the US government.
Hmm, what would you call the 60% of the budget that goes in defence spending then?
60%? Where did you come up with that figure? I don't think defense spending was ever anywhere near that high even under such strong-arm cold war presidents as Truman, Kennedy, Johnson or Reagan. Note that I leave out Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter because in general they didn't boost defense spending as much as the others I listed did).
And as someone should point out, without defense spending we would never have had a space program or many of the technological advances we enjoy (particularly in the computer field) today.
While I think the US government probably spends too much money on defense these days, and it is almost unquestionable there is still tons of waste in defense spending, I think it is a bit silly to think that it never benefitted the average person.
You want high taxes, government rationed healthcare and oppressive gun control? Yea, I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that. If nothing else, it proves that one person's valhalla might be another person's hell.
I never said it didn't. I just said it doesn't always, and it doesn't because the media is afraid to, but that they choose to.
Well, from my perspective most reporting is extremely biased in favour of the status quo.
You won't get any disagreement from me on that point, however, the part of it that matters is the word "most". That is significantly different than all. You may have to work to find it, but there are media outlets in the US that offer distinctly nonconforming viewpoints. In a country like China, publishers of such content are brutally suppressed. Occasionally rogue government groups will harrass people like that here in the US, but it isn't an official policy, and generally when they get caught, something is done about it. Not usually as much as should be, but usually something at least.
Take the Seattle coverage, how much of the media focussed on the insignificant and unrepresentative trouble caused by a surprisingly small minority of the crowds?
I would agree that a lot of the press did a poor job of covering that story, but the difference was they did it because they wanted to cover it that way, not because the government made them. Unfortunately, a lot of their behavior in that case was due to their desire for sensationalism.
How much did it focus on the brutality of using tear-gas?
Enough that you know about it. In a truly oppressive society, anyone reporting that kind of detail would probably be jailed.
I really have to disagree with such a rosy assessment.
Don't mistake my statement as 'rosy'. I am no big defender of the US government when they are going over the edge, but I just don't see a lot of evidence that the US government is doing a lot to try to stifle the press. Instead, I would be critical of the press for not always taking advantage of the freedom they have to try to present a balanced, unbiased view of the whole news. Their biggest sin is usually the sin of omission, and of placement (they just neglect to cover things that don't match their biases, or they cover them on a back page, etc).
By what criteria though? I have nothing in particular against any of those countries (I'm 1/4 Norwegian by descent), but I personally don't want to live in a country with high taxation, oppressive gun control or socialized medicine either. I can't say for sure that all of those countries suffer from those ills, but I know that at least a couple of them suffer from one or more of those problems.
The difference here is that in the US, the press is free to put coverage of such events on the front page of the newspaper and on the 6pm news. In China, the government controls what their state run newspapers and television stations broadcast. Protests that are suppressed in China aren't reported to the people or are at least reported with the best possible spin for the governmnent.
I am not always happy with some things that happen here in the US. I don't believe that the US is perfect. However, it could be a lot worse than it is, and comparitively, I can't think of many examples of countries that are better.
The following is taken directly from IBM's web pages:
VisualAge for Java Version 3.0 includes an Early Adopters Environment providing support for Java 2, formerly known as JDK 1.2. Developers can start now to build and deploy selected applications that target the Java 2 platform, taking advantage of Java 2 features such as improved security, portability, and advanced user interface controls.
It appears you are partially correct, as it looks like the JDK 1.2 support is beta at this point. The place I work is a fairly large IBM customer, so we get a lot of stuff fairly early.
Not only are LaserJets by far one of the most popular printer families used in business, most of the other laser class printers out there emulate HP printers. So this stuff is really a lot more applicable than it might seem. Software designed for LaserJets should work without modification on a lot of other brands of printers, and as long as it is open sourced, any minor differences and/or additional features in other brands of printers should be able to be tweaked by others in the community.
I would think that this is a win-win for HP, as it should help them sell printers. Printers are probably HP's most successful long-term products. It also should help HP/UX, as you know, Samba isn't Linux specific.
You are correct up to a point. IBM never got broken up, but it was forced to make some concessions to the government to avoid that. Interestingly in the end IBM chose to break large parts of itself off (the spinoff of Lexmark, the sale of Rolm to Siemens, etc). Not being able to replay history with different scenarios, it is hard to say that IBM ever would have changed had they not had to live under the DOJ's scrutiny. Also the industry has yet to prove that it can force Microsoft to change their ways like it did with IBM, so I am not yet ready to think that DOJ action against Microsoft isn't necessary. Without the DOJ keeping IBM fighting on another front in court, would the industry have been able to break from IBM's grasp? Count me as someone who would be happy if Microsoft could/would choose to clean up their act on their own, or that the industry could force them to do so without requiring government action. But until that happens, I hope the DOJ continues to fight them.
VisualAge does not support Java2. Websphere does not support Java2.
This is obsolete information. WebSphere 3.0 and Visual Age for Java 3.0 have support for Java2. We just got our CD's for the 3.0 versions the other day and will be upgrading from the 2.0 versions in the near future.
There was a time when IBM was as hated as Microsoft is today,
You are very correct. I used to be a very vocal critic of IBM, much as I am of Microsoft now. Many of the things I find objectionable about Microsoft now are tactics that I believe they learned from the IBM of the 60's to the mid 80's.
and now even the "underground Microsoft resistance" doesn't have too much bad to say about IBM. I imagine it stems from their underdog status gained during the development of OS/2.
OS/2 may be more important to other people than it is to me. I never really was very interested in it, as I was a *nix person before OS/2 was first announced.
Or, it could be their lack of unfair business practices.
For me, my attitude to IBM has changed mostly because I have seen solid evidence that they have really cleaned up their act and are now a company that is conducting business in an ethical manner. To be totally honest, I was surprised when things changed at IBM, particularly how quickly they have been able to turn things around. But it is certainly a pleasant surprise. I won't say that I don't still view IBM with a little long term cautiousness, but until I see any evidence of backsliding on their part I am encouraged.
Personally, I don't view this as that much of a loss to the SCSI world. Western Digital has been on my bad list for quite some time. The past several hard drives that I have had fail on me have all been Western Digital,and usually just past the warrantee (dohh!). Lately I've been buying mostly Maxtor and have had pretty good luck with them. I've also had good luck with Quantum (but I've heard lots of bad things about their BigFoot line -- never bought one myself though). I've been mostly buying IDE drives lately, but when I buy SCSI drives I generally either get Quantum or Seagate (although I am not a big fan of Seagate's IDE drives, their SCSI drives seem pretty good). I've heard good things about IBM's SCSI drives, but haven't tried any of their newer ones.
All in all, there are enough other choices that I don't think Western Digital will be missed in the SCSI world.
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Why not? If we don't even ask for it to be open source, what is the likelyhood we will get open source? If we ask for open source and we get only closed source we still have gotten something.
Aside from that a good reason it should be open source is platform support. If it is open source it will quickly get ported from x86 and PPC (the two platforms Apple is likely to support) to Alpha, Sparc, PA-RISC, MIPS, 68k, etc. If Apple wants to promote QuickTime as an industry standard, having ports to every major hardware architecture would be a great checklist item for them. If they do it closed source, it is a lot of work for them to support multiple platforms. If they release open source the community will do the porting work for them for free.
Another thing is better support of special features of x86 variants. If Apple releases open source, then other people can handle special optimizations for QuickTime on CPU's like the K6 and Athlon so Apple doesn't have to do all that work themselves.
I'm not sure if this is just a troll or what, so at the risk of feeding the trolls...
send 20,000 volts through his fat ass.. that'll get him talking
Uh, he'd be quite dead if there was any amperage behind that. Besides that, you must not have seen the interview with him on 60 Minutes last Sunday. It appears that Kevin has lost a considerable amount of weight in prison, as he looked fairly fit in the interview.
As for using torture techniques, sure, they could do that. But luckily they tend to be fairly cautious when it comes to that sort of thing because they don't want a lot of negative publicity or to stir too much general sympathy for the convicts if that sort of thing leaked out. Generally they seem more inclined to do things like putting people in with other inmates that are trouble makers so that they can maintain plausable deniability (WE didn't do it, it was his evil cellmate!).
its light-years behind such advanced OS like Win2000 Pro and MacOSX as far as useability
You are entitled to your opinion., but I would disagree with that. I can't say much about MacOSX, but in the case of Windows 2000, unless it is really a giant step beyond NT 4, I can't say that I am all that impressed. It is flashier, and perhaps slightly more consistant than Red Hat, but I find NT frustrating. I don't necessarily equate fancy with advanced. The NT environment may be easier for people who don't like to learn anything to stumble their way through, but for people who know what they are doing, things just take too much click-click-clicking to do. There are a lot of things I'd rather do by command line or script, and those things just aren't that nice to do in the Wintel world.
Well, it may be more accurate to say that a lot of us are subjected to having to use Windows in addition to Linux. And a lot of Slashdot readers use Macs or *BSD or other OSes besides either Windows or Linux. It just isn't a simple either-or kinda thing.
So you are proud of 11 days turnaround time? If I was a Windows user I'd want a bit quicker response than that. Microsoft is lucky that the person that found the bug was a reputable person and not someone who would have used it maliciously or announced it into the script kiddie community. While this will no doubt be somewhat of an embarrasment to Microsoft, things could easily have been much worse.
5th Amendment doesn't keep people from being required to provide a blood sample for DNA and I'm pretty sure it doesn't keep them from being required to turn over keys to a safe if the court issues a warrant.
The 5th Amendment may not apply to physical property (such as a blood sample or a safe) like it does things that are in the defendant's head, but we aren't talking about physical property in this case. I haven't ever heard of a case of someone being ordered to turn over keys, not that there haven't been any. In any case, they'd have to prove that the defendant possessed them, in which case they would have just siezed them the same way they seized the safe. What would be a better example would be the combination to a safe. Again, I'd like to see an example where someone has been ordered to turn over a combination to a safe rather than the authorities just cutting it open.
Perhaps encrypted files could be thought of as a safe. If law enforcement can convince a judge that the encrypted file(s) probably contain evidence of a crime (files from a cracked system) or are criminal themselves (encrypted kiddie porn), they'll get a warrant for Mitnik to provide the key. If he doesn't comply he could be jailed for contempt.
The prosecution made the assertation that the files did indeed contain evidence that they would have liked to have used against Mitnick. If the government could have gotten such a warrant to override Mitnick's 5th amendment rights, they would have done so during the trial, and they didn't. They are, and have been, holding out on the files in order to try to find a back-door way around that. I don't believe that the judge ruled that forcing Mitnick to reveal his key wouldn't be a 5th Amendment violation as much as she ruled that the 5th Amendment didn't apply directly in this case (which I would personally disagree with) because the file wasn't being used as evidence against Mitnick.
If you're thinking, "yeah but with a safe they could just jackhammer it open," think of it as a boobytrapped safe. The court could require someone to disable the boobytraps.
However, since these files aren't a physical thing per-se, that argument just doesn't really apply. Nobody would be in any kind of physical danger brute forcing encrypted files open.
If they could decrypt it, would they tell us? They didn't need the data to get Mitnick convicted, so they would have no reason to reveal that they know what the files contain, especially if they are something that isn't terribly valuable to the government (but might be to Kevin). On the other hand, by not admitting to have decrypted the files, they can keep Kevin from getting them back.
Probably most seriously though, is if the government admitted they could crack the encryption, it would not be good for the government. It would encourage more people to use more heavy-duty encryption. It would put more political pressure on the government to further laxen the export rules, which is not something they would like. By not admitting to being able to crack the encryption (assuming for a moment they really can), they give other people a false sense of security. All in all, it would be a loss for the government to make the admission with very little upside for them.
On a side note, are there any legal precedents or restrictions regarding how long Federal officials are allowed to hold confiscated equipment/data? I've heard stories of equipment being kept even with no charges being filed...
Unfortunately, it seems not at all uncommon for the authorities to sieze property as you note. It is not at all uncommon for defendants, even those against whom no charges are ever filed to have to go to court in order to get their property back. In many cases it takes so long that the property in question no longer has much value (in the case of computer equipment in particular). Sometimes defendants find that their property has either been lost (often a creative euphemism for when authority employees personally aquire goods from evidence), damaged, or even sold by the agencies. Of course at that point, there is usually no way for the defendants to get any sort of compensation.
MISplice is right -- while KDE et al. may be nice WMs, getting them up can be a huge pain in the ass, as I've discovered to my chagrin this past weekend, when I installed FreeBSD.
I've got nothing against *BSD personally, but I think that the 'its designed for hackers' complaint is much more true about the *BSD's than it is to mainstream Linux distros like Red Hat, Caldera and SuSE.
XF86 has a known bug with ATI Rage graphics cards, such as is present on-board on my current mobo. My hsync is completely out of whack, and I can't even start X with something vanilla like SVGA or even VGA16 servers (640x480: mode not defined. no valid modes found. exiting.)
It must not be a completely universal problem because I did an install of Red Hat 6.1 at work on a Compaq Deskpro EN series machine here with onboard ATI Rage video the other day and it not only came up with sync correctly, it even PnP detected by name the monitor (Compaq V75). I was quite favorably impressed when that happened, as were a couple of other people who had dealt with getting X running in the past.
The RH 6.1 CD directly booted up on the Compaq, came up to a GUI installer, it recognized the built in ethernet on the motherboard, recognized the video, monitor and mouse. About the only part of the install that I'd say was perhaps beyond what the average person could handle (without reading the book) is disk partitioning.
When I wanted to add a few additional packages, I found the GUI RPM tool actually worked pretty well. Again, I was favorably impressed.
I think that the article has its points, but I would disagree with the conclusion that improvements in usability will not happen or can not happen is off base. I've seen things come a long way since I first started using Linux back in 1993. Don't get me wrong, things aren't perfect yet, but the gap for point-and-click users is narrowing a lot more quickly than what the article would lead you to believe.
I guess I was just glad that they didn't spell it "Pearl". That is something that I've seen quite frequently, especially in non-computer press (like help wanted ads).
It looks like someone at Gartner is finally starting to get it. This peice, while seeming to be basically a summary piece (undoubtedly to sell other documents) actually gets just about everything right and unlike most of their stuff which does an awful lot of waffling and guessing is written in a straightforward style. It neither oversells nor dismisses OSS, and that sets it way above most of the stuff I've seen from similar organizations.
That being said, I openly wonder how they will be doing the cataloguing on Arcserve for Linux. On the NT Server version, you had a choice of either using their own proprietary (buggy) database, or SQL Server 6.x.
Since they already have a port of their Ingres II database for Linux, one would suspect they might use that. I don't know if that is the proprietary database on NT you mention or not (although I believe that Ingres is available for NT). It is hard to say what CA will really support.
Sorry, that's 60% of the discretionary budget, which is about 35% of the total Federal Budget.
35% sounds a lot more like the numbers I'd seen quoted.
This is in the context of a piece which talks about how Ben&Jerry's co-founder Cohen wants to divert some of that money towards education - a goal support by 79% of Americans in one poll.
While I'd in general say that education is a better way to spend the money than on defense, I'd prefer to put that kind of money towards paying down the national debt.
So in my mind it feels wrong for people to be getting so upset about China when we've got plenty on our own plate that we should deal with first.
Just because people are upset about China doesn't mean they aren't upset when our government does something it shouldn't. Plenty of people complain about that sort of thing here and on other forums as well. There is of course differences of opinion on what is right and wrong, but that is only natural. At any rate, I think that most people have more than enough capacity to get upset to be upset both at the Chinese government and the US government.
Hmm, what would you call the 60% of the budget that goes in defence spending then?
60%? Where did you come up with that figure? I don't think defense spending was ever anywhere near that high even under such strong-arm cold war presidents as Truman, Kennedy, Johnson or Reagan. Note that I leave out Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter because in general they didn't boost defense spending as much as the others I listed did).
And as someone should point out, without defense spending we would never have had a space program or many of the technological advances we enjoy (particularly in the computer field) today.
While I think the US government probably spends too much money on defense these days, and it is almost unquestionable there is still tons of waste in defense spending, I think it is a bit silly to think that it never benefitted the average person.
You want high taxes, government rationed healthcare and oppressive gun control? Yea, I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that. If nothing else, it proves that one person's valhalla might be another person's hell.
Does it not happen here?
I never said it didn't. I just said it doesn't always, and it doesn't because the media is afraid to, but that they choose to.
Well, from my perspective most reporting is extremely biased in favour of the status quo.
You won't get any disagreement from me on that point, however, the part of it that matters is the word "most". That is significantly different than all. You may have to work to find it, but there are media outlets in the US that offer distinctly nonconforming viewpoints. In a country like China, publishers of such content are brutally suppressed. Occasionally rogue government groups will harrass people like that here in the US, but it isn't an official policy, and generally when they get caught, something is done about it. Not usually as much as should be, but usually something at least.
Take the Seattle coverage, how much of the media focussed on the insignificant and unrepresentative trouble caused by a surprisingly small minority of the crowds?
I would agree that a lot of the press did a poor job of covering that story, but the difference was they did it because they wanted to cover it that way, not because the government made them. Unfortunately, a lot of their behavior in that case was due to their desire for sensationalism.
How much did it focus on the brutality of using tear-gas?
Enough that you know about it. In a truly oppressive society, anyone reporting that kind of detail would probably be jailed.
I really have to disagree with such a rosy assessment.
Don't mistake my statement as 'rosy'. I am no big defender of the US government when they are going over the edge, but I just don't see a lot of evidence that the US government is doing a lot to try to stifle the press. Instead, I would be critical of the press for not always taking advantage of the freedom they have to try to present a balanced, unbiased view of the whole news. Their biggest sin is usually the sin of omission, and of placement (they just neglect to cover things that don't match their biases, or they cover them on a back page, etc).
Better countries? Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland.
By what criteria though? I have nothing in particular against any of those countries (I'm 1/4 Norwegian by descent), but I personally don't want to live in a country with high taxation, oppressive gun control or socialized medicine either. I can't say for sure that all of those countries suffer from those ills, but I know that at least a couple of them suffer from one or more of those problems.
The difference here is that in the US, the press is free to put coverage of such events on the front page of the newspaper and on the 6pm news. In China, the government controls what their state run newspapers and television stations broadcast. Protests that are suppressed in China aren't reported to the people or are at least reported with the best possible spin for the governmnent.
I am not always happy with some things that happen here in the US. I don't believe that the US is perfect. However, it could be a lot worse than it is, and comparitively, I can't think of many examples of countries that are better.
The following is taken directly from IBM's web pages:
VisualAge for Java Version 3.0 includes an Early Adopters Environment providing support for Java 2, formerly known as JDK 1.2. Developers can start now to build and deploy selected applications that target the Java 2 platform, taking advantage of Java 2 features such as improved security, portability, and advanced user interface controls.
It appears you are partially correct, as it looks like the JDK 1.2 support is beta at this point. The place I work is a fairly large IBM customer, so we get a lot of stuff fairly early.
Not only are LaserJets by far one of the most popular printer families used in business, most of the other laser class printers out there emulate HP printers. So this stuff is really a lot more applicable than it might seem. Software designed for LaserJets should work without modification on a lot of other brands of printers, and as long as it is open sourced, any minor differences and/or additional features in other brands of printers should be able to be tweaked by others in the community.
I would think that this is a win-win for HP, as it should help them sell printers. Printers are probably HP's most successful long-term products. It also should help HP/UX, as you know, Samba isn't Linux specific.
You are correct up to a point. IBM never got broken up, but it was forced to make some concessions to the government to avoid that. Interestingly in the end IBM chose to break large parts of itself off (the spinoff of Lexmark, the sale of Rolm to Siemens, etc). Not being able to replay history with different scenarios, it is hard to say that IBM ever would have changed had they not had to live under the DOJ's scrutiny. Also the industry has yet to prove that it can force Microsoft to change their ways like it did with IBM, so I am not yet ready to think that DOJ action against Microsoft isn't necessary. Without the DOJ keeping IBM fighting on another front in court, would the industry have been able to break from IBM's grasp?
Count me as someone who would be happy if Microsoft could/would choose to clean up their act on their own, or that the industry could force them to do so without requiring government action. But until that happens, I hope the DOJ continues to fight them.
VisualAge does not support Java2. Websphere does not support Java2.
This is obsolete information. WebSphere 3.0 and Visual Age for Java 3.0 have support for Java2. We just got our CD's for the 3.0 versions the other day and will be upgrading from the 2.0 versions in the near future.
There was a time when IBM was as hated as Microsoft is today,
You are very correct. I used to be a very vocal critic of IBM, much as I am of Microsoft now. Many of the things I find objectionable about Microsoft now are tactics that I believe they learned from the IBM of the 60's to the mid 80's.
and now even the "underground Microsoft resistance" doesn't have too much bad to say about IBM. I imagine it stems from their underdog status gained during the development of OS/2.
OS/2 may be more important to other people than it is to me. I never really was very interested in it, as I was a *nix person before OS/2 was first announced.
Or, it could be their lack of unfair business practices.
For me, my attitude to IBM has changed mostly because I have seen solid evidence that they have really cleaned up their act and are now a company that is conducting business in an ethical manner. To be totally honest, I was surprised when things changed at IBM, particularly how quickly they have been able to turn things around. But it is certainly a pleasant surprise. I won't say that I don't still view IBM with a little long term cautiousness, but until I see any evidence of backsliding on their part I am encouraged.
Personally, I don't view this as that much of a loss to the SCSI world. Western Digital has been on my bad list for quite some time. The past several hard drives that I have had fail on me have all been Western Digital,and usually just past the warrantee (dohh!). Lately I've been buying mostly Maxtor and have had pretty good luck with them. I've also had good luck with Quantum (but I've heard lots of bad things about their BigFoot line -- never bought one myself though). I've been mostly buying IDE drives lately, but when I buy SCSI drives I generally either get Quantum or Seagate (although I am not a big fan of Seagate's IDE drives, their SCSI drives seem pretty good). I've heard good things about IBM's SCSI drives, but haven't tried any of their newer ones.
All in all, there are enough other choices that I don't think Western Digital will be missed in the SCSI world.
Try Navigator 4.61 or 4.7 on a recent (RH 6.0, Mandrake 6.0 or SuSE 6.2 or newer) distro and you should find stability considerably better.