I thought the whole point of Linux was that it was the same OS and any app written for Linux should run on all Linux distros. We all know this isn't true. Stuff is in different places in different distros, different libraries are included and at different version levels. Even though the kernels may be at the same version, an app written for Red Hat, may not work on SuSE.
Combining the other distros into one uber-distro makes some sense, but it seems that we really have the same old thing all over again. Has anyone ever heard of OSF/1? It was supposed to be a common Unix "distro". One Unix distro that all the vendors would support and could customize to make theirs stand out, but still be compatible with the others.
Yeah, right. It isn't possible and it will fail miserably.
"One distro to rule them all,
One distro to find them,
One distro to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
In the land of Linux where the shadow lies"
Forget white LEDs, give me bright blue ones. The power on light for UV Networks web appliance is a bright blue LED. I think I will buy one just for the cool blue LED. I need these blue LEDs on all of my puters!
Call me an idealist, but you CAN change the law through voting. If you don't like the law and your local rep voted for that law, get rid of him/her. If enough people get mad, mountains can be moved. This is harder at the national level, but very possible at the local level.
Bill Gates only has one vote. Even if all the MSFT employees voted the way Bill wanted them to, they are only 10,000 versus millions of non-MSFT voters, and this would only really effect Seattle/Washington State.
Well, you have two competing goals here. One is having the fastest processor avaiable. Two is having the most applications available for that processor.
PowerPC has goal #1 licked. It's much superior to Sparc when it comes to performance.
Most people (some people in this discussion excepted) would agree that their are more apps available for Solaris then for Sparc, and that ISVs would rather develop for Sparc than for PowerPC. That means Sparc wins for goal #2.
If IBM bought Sun they could do one of two things. They could improve the performance of Sparc, which is a relatively easy (for IBM) thing to do over time. They could also port Solaris to PowerPC, which may or may not be an easy thing to do, but far greater implications than the first option.
There is one reason for IBM to buy Sun that no one has mentioned (and the reason why it will never happen). IBM could buy Sun to get them out of the picture. If they get something other than this, so be it. IBM is huge, with lot's of resources. Sun is not out of their reach financially.
I find these IDC numbers highly suspect. IBM tends to sell large site licenses and count the max license as installed systems. For instance they sell a big company a license for 10,000 workstations and even though the company only installs 5,000 workstations they convince IDC to count the entire number. IBM did this with OS/2, which according to their numbers was the leading PC OS at one time.
Oh, BTW, Sun is the Dot in.COM, not IBM. At least that was what Sun's ads said.
This is not the first time there has been talk about IBM buying Sun.
AIX (IBM's brand of Unix) has always been the red-headed step child of Unix OSes, lagging far behind Solaris and HP/UX in market share.
IBM has always wanted people to develop applications for AIX and usually resorts to paying ISVs huge sums of money to port their apps to AIX.
Buying Sun just makes sense. You get rid of AIX, which isn't that popular (outside of the scientific computing arena) anyway. You can concentrate the Power architecture R&D on its use in the iSeries 400 (AS/400). You can bring the huge resources of IBM's semiconductor business to bear on making SPARC more competitive on a performance basis.
As for IBM's control of Java, who knows? I think they have been coveting Java for quite a long time now. They would kill for an opportunity to co-opt Java to their own devices, but Sun stands in their way.
IBM would rule the commericial Unix computing market, which is why the FTC/EU would never approve the merger.
It's something to think about, but unlikely to happen.
I guess greed is still good in the new millenium, just like it was in the last one.
This has absolutely nothing to do with free speech or copyright. It has everything to do with capitalism. The authors don't get any royalties for used book sales, and they are pissed because Amazon is giving their customers a lower cost alternative to new books. Way to go Amazon. The free market at its best.
The authors are free to do whatever they want to convince Amazon to stop doing this. They can even cut off their nose to spite their face and stop distributing their books through Amazon.
What I don't like seeing is them making this into something its not. Not everything is a copyright issue or a free speech issue.
I'm sorry I wasted even this much time commenting on such a ridiculous subject.
Back when I was a college student, the computer we had was so slow we could make coffee from scratch (including picking the beans) before it would boot up. It had a hand crank too. And to get to the computer center we had to walk 20 miles up hill (both directions) in the snow (even in summer). We would have killed for a 386 12mhz, 20mb HDD, 640k RAM!
Does anyone have the sneaking suspicion that Richard Stallman is Karl Marx reincarnated? I think Marx would have had the same views about free software that Richard Stallman does. And did you see the picture? Give him a few years and some gray hair and he'll be a dead ringer for Marx. I mean, has anyone ever seen them together? Eerie.
Actually, the Time Warner users complained most about the ubiquitous "You've Got Mail" voice that had been changed by AOL programmers to say "You've Got Mail, You Lazy, Good for Nothing, Old Economy Loser." And the fact that they now get AOL CDs via interoffice mail every two weeks.
Absolutely. Because my personal preferences are based on hands on testing, not some devotion based on ideology.
I have also written derogatory things about my favorite OS or product, when something needed to be said. Personal preference doesn't mean I am biased for a specific company.
Anyway, corporate whore connotes some sort of payoff from a company. It's never happened. In fact, one time, a company wrote me to thank me for my kind words defending their company, and the opponents of that company accused me of being in their pocket. The funny thing is: I wasn't writing about that company. I was writing about an issue in general, and both sides decided I was supporting the company's policies.
It just goes to show you: journalism is a complicated business and not always what it seems on the surface.
Your right, Slashdot people aren't journalists. But they are editors, and therefore have the power to control what the Slashdot public discusses. They have biases just like everyone, but I don't know if I'd call them corporate whores.
Now, as for all journalists being corporate whores, I would have to disagree. I have written about technology for 10 years and have never altered what I wrote due to the request or pressure of a company.
I may not be representative of all tech journalists, but I think it is unfair to condemn all tech journalists for the actions of some.
This decision was not overturned. It was vacated. All this means is that another judge will review the findings of fact and the original ruling, and a new penalty will be considered. The lower court (not Thomas Penfield Jackson) may decide that MS should be broken up anyways.
It's not fair to compare chips to systems. Intel is in the chip business, VA is in the systems business. In this case, when people say "hardware" they mean systems. Lots of people make money on "hardware" such as storage subsystems, printers, networking devices, etc. Just not systems.
This decision is a NOOP. Smart publishers have been securing digital rights to "works for hire" for years now. As a magazine editor, my contracts always state that the article is a "work for hire", and the magazine buys all rights explicitly stated, or implicitly implied. It's true that I pay more per article than others, but it's worth it.
I saw this movie at the preview. What an unbelievable load of doo doo. I always thought documentaries were supposed to document all sides of what happened in a fair and impartial manner.
This flick was one-sided and made the Open Source case against M$ through not-so-clever tricks like having a woman read Bill Gate's letter to the Homebrew Computer Club in a frenzied almost manaical voice.
Basically, it was a vehicle for Linus, Larry, Eric, Bruce and Richard to get their faces on the big screen. I don't think it was worth the film it was printed on. I'll bet Larry Augustin financed a good portion of the movie.
Moore was asked during Q&A after the preview if he would be releasing the film to the public, open source style. His reply was that he put alot of time into the movie by doing the work of much of the traditional movie crew and didn't think that others should profit from his hard work (not a quote). Obviuosly he doesn't get the open source software movement. At least not the spirit of it.
I think he should release it as an "open source" movie and people could shoot new footage and add to his work and re-release it!
My sentiments exactly. We have 10-digit dialing in the Philly area and it's no big deal. What is a big deal is having to know whether you need to using 10-digit dialing. When I went home for the holidays I wanted to make a local phone call, but didn't know whether I had to use 10-digit dialing or 7-digit dialing. This should be consistent across the whole country. The only thing confusing about 10-digit dialing is figuring out whether you have to use it or not.
Just because something is working great doesn't mean there isn't sound business (or technical) reasons for usng something else.
Maybe they should ask whether Exchange is the appropriate solution for the job, and not just ask for people who can tell him why Exchange sucks.
I have found that management seldom listens to techies who come up with laundry lists of reasons why the solution they (management) have chosen is wrong. Examine the problem with an open mind and help them make the right decision. Maybe thats Exchange, maybe thats staying with Unix.
I hope you are prepared to live in a country where our personal freedoms are abridged, our environment is destroyed, and the rich get tax breaks at the expense of the poor.
That is what you are about to get.
Politics in this country is all about pragmatics. You can vote for Nader and claim to have voted your conscience, but you have to sleep in the bed you have made.
Only problem is: I have to sleep in that bed as well.
Personally, I will be looking to start an American expatriate colony overseas.
It seems as if the only smart thing our boy did was to cooperate fully and honestly with the FBI. I am sure that the FBI thought that his visits and snooping around might be a "criminal returns to the scene of the crime" kind of thing.
This highlights the problem with White Hat hackers. Just because you say you were only looking around to see how the site was exploited, doesn't mean you should be believed.
Call me naive for believing in the system, but I am sure you will be exonerated if you are truly innocent. As for your computer equipment, who knows how long you will be without it.
Maybe this will make you think twice about poking around what is ostensibly a crime scene shortly after a site has been hacked.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the whole point of Linux was that it was the same OS and any app written for Linux should run on all Linux distros. We all know this isn't true. Stuff is in different places in different distros, different libraries are included and at different version levels. Even though the kernels may be at the same version, an app written for Red Hat, may not work on SuSE.
Combining the other distros into one uber-distro makes some sense, but it seems that we really have the same old thing all over again. Has anyone ever heard of OSF/1? It was supposed to be a common Unix "distro". One Unix distro that all the vendors would support and could customize to make theirs stand out, but still be compatible with the others.
Yeah, right. It isn't possible and it will fail miserably.
"One distro to rule them all,
One distro to find them,
One distro to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
In the land of Linux where the shadow lies"
I agree that map.net is a good site. I haven't been able to get through to KartOO yet, so I can't compare them, but map.net is cool.
I like the way you browse the map and things related to what you are looking for are nearby.
I will wait till later today and try KartOO again.
Forget white LEDs, give me bright blue ones. The power on light for UV Networks web appliance is a bright blue LED. I think I will buy one just for the cool blue LED. I need these blue LEDs on all of my puters!
See, Microsoft isn't the only greedy software company out there!
I wouldn't blame Oracle entirely. I work for a state government and we have to justify every penny.
There was someone asleep at the switch on this one. It's a deal similar to the 800 hours of AOL for only $10 more than the 700 hour deal.
Call me an idealist, but you CAN change the law through voting. If you don't like the law and your local rep voted for that law, get rid of him/her. If enough people get mad, mountains can be moved. This is harder at the national level, but very possible at the local level.
Bill Gates only has one vote. Even if all the MSFT employees voted the way Bill wanted them to, they are only 10,000 versus millions of non-MSFT voters, and this would only really effect Seattle/Washington State.
Well, you have two competing goals here. One is having the fastest processor avaiable. Two is having the most applications available for that processor.
PowerPC has goal #1 licked. It's much superior to Sparc when it comes to performance.
Most people (some people in this discussion excepted) would agree that their are more apps available for Solaris then for Sparc, and that ISVs would rather develop for Sparc than for PowerPC. That means Sparc wins for goal #2.
If IBM bought Sun they could do one of two things. They could improve the performance of Sparc, which is a relatively easy (for IBM) thing to do over time. They could also port Solaris to PowerPC, which may or may not be an easy thing to do, but far greater implications than the first option.
There is one reason for IBM to buy Sun that no one has mentioned (and the reason why it will never happen). IBM could buy Sun to get them out of the picture. If they get something other than this, so be it. IBM is huge, with lot's of resources. Sun is not out of their reach financially.
Yes I know. And if that is how you define "the dot in dotcom" then, yes, IBM is it. I was reffering to the Sun ads.
I find these IDC numbers highly suspect. IBM tends to sell large site licenses and count the max license as installed systems. For instance they sell a big company a license for 10,000 workstations and even though the company only installs 5,000 workstations they convince IDC to count the entire number. IBM did this with OS/2, which according to their numbers was the leading PC OS at one time.
.COM, not IBM. At least that was what Sun's ads said.
Oh, BTW, Sun is the Dot in
"I'm not a journalist, but I play one on TV."
This is not the first time there has been talk about IBM buying Sun.
AIX (IBM's brand of Unix) has always been the red-headed step child of Unix OSes, lagging far behind Solaris and HP/UX in market share.
IBM has always wanted people to develop applications for AIX and usually resorts to paying ISVs huge sums of money to port their apps to AIX.
Buying Sun just makes sense. You get rid of AIX, which isn't that popular (outside of the scientific computing arena) anyway. You can concentrate the Power architecture R&D on its use in the iSeries 400 (AS/400). You can bring the huge resources of IBM's semiconductor business to bear on making SPARC more competitive on a performance basis.
As for IBM's control of Java, who knows? I think they have been coveting Java for quite a long time now. They would kill for an opportunity to co-opt Java to their own devices, but Sun stands in their way.
IBM would rule the commericial Unix computing market, which is why the FTC/EU would never approve the merger.
It's something to think about, but unlikely to happen.
"I'm not a journalist, but I play one on TV."
I guess greed is still good in the new millenium, just like it was in the last one.
This has absolutely nothing to do with free speech or copyright. It has everything to do with capitalism. The authors don't get any royalties for used book sales, and they are pissed because Amazon is giving their customers a lower cost alternative to new books. Way to go Amazon. The free market at its best.
The authors are free to do whatever they want to convince Amazon to stop doing this. They can even cut off their nose to spite their face and stop distributing their books through Amazon.
What I don't like seeing is them making this into something its not. Not everything is a copyright issue or a free speech issue.
I'm sorry I wasted even this much time commenting on such a ridiculous subject.
And what's wrong with Menudo?
Does anyone have the sneaking suspicion that Richard Stallman is Karl Marx reincarnated? I think Marx would have had the same views about free software that Richard Stallman does. And did you see the picture? Give him a few years and some gray hair and he'll be a dead ringer for Marx. I mean, has anyone ever seen them together? Eerie.
Actually, the Time Warner users complained most about the ubiquitous "You've Got Mail" voice that had been changed by AOL programmers to say "You've Got Mail, You Lazy, Good for Nothing, Old Economy Loser." And the fact that they now get AOL CDs via interoffice mail every two weeks.
I use the names of famous Communist leaders:
mao, stalin, castro, etc.
Would work great for Linux or other Open Source OS machines.
I guess for the Windows machines you could use the names of famous capitalists:
jpmorgan, rockefeller, carnegie, gates, etc.
Absolutely. Because my personal preferences are based on hands on testing, not some devotion based on ideology.
I have also written derogatory things about my favorite OS or product, when something needed to be said. Personal preference doesn't mean I am biased for a specific company.
Anyway, corporate whore connotes some sort of payoff from a company. It's never happened. In fact, one time, a company wrote me to thank me for my kind words defending their company, and the opponents of that company accused me of being in their pocket. The funny thing is: I wasn't writing about that company. I was writing about an issue in general, and both sides decided I was supporting the company's policies.
It just goes to show you: journalism is a complicated business and not always what it seems on the surface.
Your right, Slashdot people aren't journalists. But they are editors, and therefore have the power to control what the Slashdot public discusses. They have biases just like everyone, but I don't know if I'd call them corporate whores.
Now, as for all journalists being corporate whores, I would have to disagree. I have written about technology for 10 years and have never altered what I wrote due to the request or pressure of a company.
I may not be representative of all tech journalists, but I think it is unfair to condemn all tech journalists for the actions of some.
This article at Open magazine (loosely related to /.) also talks about Quantum Computing.
This decision was not overturned. It was vacated. All this means is that another judge will review the findings of fact and the original ruling, and a new penalty will be considered. The lower court (not Thomas Penfield Jackson) may decide that MS should be broken up anyways.
It's not fair to compare chips to systems. Intel is in the chip business, VA is in the systems business. In this case, when people say "hardware" they mean systems. Lots of people make money on "hardware" such as storage subsystems, printers, networking devices, etc. Just not systems.
This decision is a NOOP. Smart publishers have been securing digital rights to "works for hire" for years now. As a magazine editor, my contracts always state that the article is a "work for hire", and the magazine buys all rights explicitly stated, or implicitly implied. It's true that I pay more per article than others, but it's worth it.
This flick was one-sided and made the Open Source case against M$ through not-so-clever tricks like having a woman read Bill Gate's letter to the Homebrew Computer Club in a frenzied almost manaical voice.
Basically, it was a vehicle for Linus, Larry, Eric, Bruce and Richard to get their faces on the big screen. I don't think it was worth the film it was printed on. I'll bet Larry Augustin financed a good portion of the movie.
Moore was asked during Q&A after the preview if he would be releasing the film to the public, open source style. His reply was that he put alot of time into the movie by doing the work of much of the traditional movie crew and didn't think that others should profit from his hard work (not a quote). Obviuosly he doesn't get the open source software movement. At least not the spirit of it.
I think he should release it as an "open source" movie and people could shoot new footage and add to his work and re-release it!
My sentiments exactly. We have 10-digit dialing in the Philly area and it's no big deal. What is a big deal is having to know whether you need to using 10-digit dialing. When I went home for the holidays I wanted to make a local phone call, but didn't know whether I had to use 10-digit dialing or 7-digit dialing. This should be consistent across the whole country. The only thing confusing about 10-digit dialing is figuring out whether you have to use it or not.
Maybe they should ask whether Exchange is the appropriate solution for the job, and not just ask for people who can tell him why Exchange sucks.
I have found that management seldom listens to techies who come up with laundry lists of reasons why the solution they (management) have chosen is wrong. Examine the problem with an open mind and help them make the right decision. Maybe thats Exchange, maybe thats staying with Unix.
I hope you are prepared to live in a country where our personal freedoms are abridged, our environment is destroyed, and the rich get tax breaks at the expense of the poor.
That is what you are about to get.
Politics in this country is all about pragmatics. You can vote for Nader and claim to have voted your conscience, but you have to sleep in the bed you have made.
Only problem is: I have to sleep in that bed as well.
Personally, I will be looking to start an American expatriate colony overseas.
This highlights the problem with White Hat hackers. Just because you say you were only looking around to see how the site was exploited, doesn't mean you should be believed.
Call me naive for believing in the system, but I am sure you will be exonerated if you are truly innocent. As for your computer equipment, who knows how long you will be without it.
Maybe this will make you think twice about poking around what is ostensibly a crime scene shortly after a site has been hacked.