Exactly, Choice is good. The important fact is that all of these OSes are a mere hop, skip, and a jump from each other. All of them also have their technical advantages as well.
And yes, that includes Linux.
The beautty is that once compatibility is out of the picture you are free to choose your OS for purely technical reasons.
Exactly. Why pay $300 for software that emulates another machine when for $400 I could buy a Windows machine, put it under my desk and VNC to the thing? Two machines are almost always better than one.
Of course, with the added competition of Win4Lin and now Plex86 there are going to be a whole lot of geeks that re-think their future VMWare purchases. So VMWare will do poorly, and they will probably go bankrupt, and then they will blame the Free Software community for making it impossible to make a living selling Linux software. There will be a whole new round of articles entitled "Linux Software Companies Deemed Severely Unprofitable."
SMP is plenty interesting to the Linux crowd. They have spent a huge amount of time working on it. The fact that it isn't interesting to Theo and the folks working on OpenBSD simply highlights one of the benefits to the Open Source way of getting things done.
If you start your project on OpenBSD and decide that you need SMP to get the performance you need "porting" to Linux shouldn't be much harder than moving your source to a Linux box and typing "make." If, on the other hand, you develop on Linux and then decide that Linux's security isn't good enough for implementation, you can just as easily port to OpenBSD.
There is never going to be an Uber OS that is specialized for every task (although the generic Unix way of recompiling the kernel does come close). That's why standardized APIs are so important. That way you can change your OS midstream if it isn't giving you what you need. The Open Source community has done a pretty good job of matching up APIs.
Sure it is, if the control that AOL has is limited to the amount of control that it has over Mozilla.
For example, let's imagine that Mozilla took over the entire browser market (unlikely in anything but the extreme long term). I could still take the Mozilla source code and change it so that it did exactly what I wanted. I could have a 100% AOL compatible browser with my own special additional features.
There is at least some chance that AOL will eventually switch to Mozilla as their AOL client browser. That single action would almost certainly turn the browser war back into a horse race.
And yet some of these packages still manage to be quite robust. For example, when was the last time that you crashed your Linux box (not on purpose:)?
I have been using Emacs since 1995, and am constantly amazed by the next weird thing someone has gotten it do. For example, do you know that some freak show wrote a GNUS backend for Slashdot. I can now read/. using both my GNUS scoring system and the/. moderator system. That's insane!
And yet in all the years I have used Emacs I have never had it crash one me. My Journal is a 200 page LaTeX document written primarily in Emacs, and I have written who knows how many lines of code, in several languages. I use Emacs as a debugger, a mail client, a web browser (well, sometimes). I even play the built in games. And yet I have never ever crashed the darn thing.
Of course, Emacs is pretty modular (read, there are a whole pile of Lisp packages). But it certainly goes to show that a program can be big without being a bug haven. Sometimes the next cool thing really is the next cool thing.
Fah, neither management, nor the customer actually have any idea what they want until they see what you have done and then utter the fatal words...
"Well, that's almost right."
At which point the customer is generally able to point out the ways in which your software is wrong. This is perfectly normal. If your customer knew anything about software design, they could write the software themselves. They don't, however, and so they don't categorize the million and one exceptions until your software somehow magically fails to divine them from thin air.
That is actually one of the reason why Open Source hackers "scratching their own itch" are such an effective programming force. They happen to know what they actually want the software to do the first time that they sit down to write it. It's also why planning to "throw the first one out" is such an important concept. Unless you are writing software for yourself you will almost certainly misunderstand the customer the first time (or more likely they will fail to give you enough information to accurately understand the problem).
Planning needs to happen, design needs to happen as well, but feature creep will happen (especially with new projects where the programmers are not expert in the particular field).
I was thinking the same thing. Instead of teachng the students about "Linux" why not jump right to the chase and start teaching your new students from the GNU Emacs Manual. It's packed full of exciting information, it's free, and it's very well written. Once your students have learned Emacs they won't need to use any other programs.
That's funny, I believe that is almost precisely what the old IBM Mainframe gurus used to say about PCs. For years the mantra was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." And then suddenly the old mantra was 100% completely untrue.
Even closer to home we probably all remember a time when WordPerfect was the undisputed king of word processors, and Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet.
If there is one thing that is a truism in the world of computers is that the least expensive option that is "good enough" eventually wins out. Linux probably isn't to the point where it is "good enough" for most people, but it is getting there fast, and it certainly is inexpensive. OSes and operating systems will eventually be a commodity, despite all of Microsoft's tricks.
Sun could re-license OpenOffice all they want. However, they can't take away my right to distribute the version of OpenOffice I downloaded under the terms of the GPL.
In other words, they could theoretically release the next version under a closed source commercial license. However, they couldn't force all of the people that had the GPLed version to give back the source. So development would almost certainly continue on the GPLed branch, and it would compete against Sun's proprietary branch. In fact, Sun's branch would probably be ignored altogether.
That really is the beautty of the GPL. In essence the end user has nearly as many rights as the copyright holder. You are no longer at the mercy of your software vendor. If you don't like the service, you can switch to a different vendor, and your new vendor will still have access to the source code.
The difference, of course, is that your RedHat system won't stop working if you refuse to pay up. It will stop updating itself automatically, but it won't give you the game over light when you try to save changes to your existing documents. You could even upgrade the box yourself, by hand, if you needed to.
People who stop sending money to Microsoft will find that they have turned their computer into an expensive boat anchor. They will also find out that their data is now locked into Microsoft's proprietary format, and the only thing that the can do is open it (for viewing) and print it.
Free Software doesn't give your software provider nearly the leverage that closed source commercial software does. RedHat can't do anything that would take away your right to run the software that you are currently running. Microsoft, on the other hand, will soon have that power. This is fine with me. As the copyright holders of the software they have the right to license it however they want. However, I can't imagine putting my data in Microsoft's hands, especially considering the fact that there are alternatives.
Republicans apparently do the same thing to those who don't agree with them. If the cops in Philly hadn't resorted to Gestapo tactics then the press would have ignored the protesters. When the cops came in busting heads it played right into the hands of the protestors.
The cops in Philadelphia did their job, and they did a fine job of it as well. Despite the fact that the protestors walked around armed with cam-corders and were trained in making the cops look bad, they almost completely failed. I saw a lot more scenes of rioting protestors than power-mad policemen. Honestly, how many cops are being charged with Gestapo-like tactics?
If the protesters would have gotten a permit (and they could have gotten one), and if they would have abstained from breaking the laws, then there wouldn't have been a "riot," and no one would have been thrown in jail. And perhaps someone would take their stance seriously.
The fact of the matter is if the roles would have been reversed and it was the protesters that had a permit (like the Republicans did), and it was the Republicans that were out breaking the law, then there would have been a a bunch of jail cells filled with Republicans.
If you think that the Man lost a war (or even had a strategic set back), then you clearly spend too much of your time smoking dope and reading "alternative" (read extremely biased) news sources. The actions of the protesters actually hurt their cause. The public rightly associates the rioters with loose thinking, long haired, punk kids looking for trouble.
I suppose we could have a war over semantics. But what's the fun in that? If you want to believe that the riots in Philadelphia were a "protest" then I will cede that argument because the true issue is whether or not the actions of the "protestors" can be justified?
Which liberties were the protesters defending that required their extremism? The protesters talked quite a bit about "freedom" and liberty, but apparently they believe that these values only apply to people that believe the same things that they do. Should the Republicans lose their right of assembly just because they believe differently than you do? The rioters apparently felt that the Replubicans didn't deserve this right. In pursuit of this goal, they broke all sorts of laws, damaged property, assaulted police officers, and generally ran over everyone else's rights. What principles of liberty and freedom were these misguided fools sticking up for? The freedom to wreck property and block roads illegally.
You might not have noticed, but the Boston Tea Party could very well be considered the first bit of organized violence on behalf of the American revolutionaries.
In other words, it was an act of Treason against the British government, and not a simple protest.
To put it more basically the difference between a protest and a riot is that in a protest no laws are broken. Even the Aryan nation crazies in Northern Idaho can figure that out. Which is why they don't get arrested when they demonstrate. If you are destroying someone else's property you are no longer protesting. If you are blocking roads illegally you are no longer protesting.
Your right to assemble does not give you the right to abridge other's right to property, nor does it permit you to put motorists at risk.
Part of the reason that I have no respect for people like "Shapeshifter" is that he deliberately is blurring the lines between riot and protest, and then he expects the law to be on his side. Protestors don't need training in how to get the local law enforcement agencies in compromising situations.
Besides, how many of you here actually believe that Mr. McGuckin wasn't, in fact, directing part of the Philadelphia riot? Apparently there was enough evidence for a jury...
In fact, AOL is about the only group out there that can save Mozilla from irrelevance. Right now IE has a big enough market share that it is almost safe to simply develop for IE and be done with it. However, AOL's sponsorship of Mozilla means that there is at least some chance of their being a Mozilla based AOL client eventually (which would put Mozilla right back in the running).
AOL's paying for the lion's share of Mozilla development, you can't hardly blame them if they are trying to come up with ways to recoup those development costs. If you don't like what they are doing then use another browser (or take Gecko and make your own).
I find it amazing that you Americans can take a message as crystal clear as the KDE League PR announcement and re-cast it as something completely different.
That's funny, I find it amazing that you can fail to see the parallels between the Gnome Foundation and the KDE League. I mean really, your whole post reminds me of a Monty Python skit. Do you really think that these corporations are going to throw money at the KDE project without getting any control back in return? At the very least the people running these corporations employ the current KDE developers. That implies a certain amount of control right there.
A talent which is clearly evident when looking at the radically different and facile interpretation of events as portrayed by the two sides of the Presidential election campaign over Florida's' vote. Highly embarrassing for you. Sheer entertainment for the rest of the world. Oh how the mighty fall !!
Politics in America are fun, and not only for Europeans. However, before you laugh too much at our expense remember that America is not the first country in the world where we have had close election results. Unlike most other countries where something like this happens, however, a close election will not destroy the system. Eventually we will have a President, and that will be the end of the matter (until the next election). In a lot of other countries people would be stockpiling food and making sure that their weapons were loaded and ready.
Heck, in many parts of Europe there is more trouble after a football match than has been caused by this election. Arguing is part of the American system in much the same way that public arguing is an important part of the Open Source movement.
You just WANT the KDE League to be like the GNOME Foundation! That way it 1) gets you off the hook, and 2) gives you some ammunition to throw at the KDE folks about U turns and such.
The fact that the KDE League closely resembles the Gnome Foundation (the differences are semantics) does not get me off the hook, nor does it give me ammunition. I don't happen to think that hypocrisy is not a particularly big deal. When the Gnome Foundation was announced, the KDE folks said some rash things, and made some hasty promises. However, they have now realized that the Gnome Foundation can afford to throw an order of magnitude more firepower at the problem of a Universal Unix desktop than the disparate KDE developers can. In order for KDE to be able to compete they are going to need the sort of corporate support, marketing, and developer help that the Gnome Foundation affords Gnome.
Now KDE has it, and that's a good thing. I just am not naive enough to pretend that the KDE League isn't exactly what the KDE developers said was bad about the Gnome Foundation. The fact of the matter is that these companies are going to make marketing promises, and the KDE developers are going to have to comply, or these companies are going to hire someone who will comply. In other words, the only difference between this alliance and the Gnome Foundation is that there aren't probably going to be hackers on the board of the KDE League.
A PR Organization is nothing more that a steering committee without any hackers on it. The KDE League will make promises (like any good marketing department), and the KDE hackers will have to make good on those promises or the companies that have hired them will find someone else to do it for them.
You did notice that the list looked like a who's who of KDE developer employers, didn't you?
If you want to believe that there is a huge difference between a bunch of corporations getting together and "marketing" software, and a whole bunch of corporations getting together to "develop" software, well then, I suppose you can live in your little chunk of reality. Say hello to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for me while you are there. I don't get to visit La-La Land very often.
Yeah, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you if you actually believe that. A PR organization like the KDE League is nothing more than a steering committee with nothing but suits sitting on the board. Either that, or it's a large bag of hot gas, a complete waste of time.
Honestly, the list of members of the KDE League sounds like the who's who's of the primary KDE developer's employers. These people are looking to sell KDE, and you can bet they are going to use their leverage to get what they want from the developers. In other words the KDE League is going to be exactly like the Gnome Foundation (except for the fact that Miguel de Icaza, a bonafied hacker, sits on the Gnome Foundation board). Otherwise I can see the ad copy now:
"We don't know what are hackers are doing, but we are fairly sure it will be cool. You should buy it."
You can bet that the KDE League wasn't formed so that they could share that message with the world.
I grew up in Eastern Washington, and so I definitely agree that the current boundaries for the states don't necessarily make as much sense as they should. As a child I could never understand why they called Washington the "Evergreen State." It certainly wasn't green in my home town.
Your solution is to just say that the majority voice should have its say. That's fine and dandy as long as you are on the side of the majority. If you, for example, feel that guns should be banned, then it probably upsets you quite a bit that the people in Eastern Washington are very NRA friendly. Or if you feel like breaching the dams on the Columbia river you are probably sick to death of hearing from the Eastern Washington farmers. On the other hand the people in Eastern Washington probably see these attempts as "those damn Seattle-ites trying to take away our guns and our livelihood."
The whole point of our system is that laws should be difficult to pass simply because any new law will effect some people in a negative manner. Our current system of presidential elections is part of this system. For example, radical candidates (like Nader or Buchannon) have almost zero chance of making any impact at all, and contrary to what the third party folks say this isn't due to advertising. It's due to the fact that Americans are very centrist politically. Our system isn't so much about electing the best man for the job as it is about electing the lesser of two evils. This may seem like a bad thing, but in reality it guarantees that any changes that are made are incremental, and widely popular. Even if your candidate does lose, it's not the end of the world, because the opponent A) was strangely similar, and B) can make incremental changes at best.
Contrast that with a world in which Nader gets elected one year, and Buchannon gets elected four years later. Losing that sort of election would be devastating.
You may feel that universal gun control laws and abortion statutes are important, but I can't imagine that a bureaucrat in Washington D.C. has any chance of coming up with a good compromise if we can't even come up with a workable solution at the state level. If the people on either side of the Puget Sound can't agree on a local issue, then what are the chances that someone not from the area is likely to resolve the issue correctly. Our national leaders would simply decide the issue based on what the average Californian thinks if it wasn't for our current system of government. The average Californian can't even find the state of Washington on a map.
I would rather have separate laws in every state than have one universally poor law in all states. Which is, of course, the crux of this whole argument. Fortunately for all of us it is the local elections that really matter, and we certainly have a say in those.
If you really think that, then you must not get out much. Regional issues are alive and well. For example, in the Pacific Northwest there are all sorts of issues that we see differently than the rest of the nation.
For example, we aren't nearly as interested in the deregulation of power as the rest of the US, and we certainly don't want Californians deciding if our dams get breached. We are also concerned about being able to use Federal lands. I imagine in New York they would probably vote to keep all federal lands "pristine." No logging, no ranching, no roads. However, some of us actually live out here.
Trust me, regional politics will be alive and well long after we are all dead and gone. Silicon valley has its set of issues, and the Magic Valley in Idaho has a totally separate set of issues and values. Part of the reason that the small states chose to join this Union in the first place was that we realized that there would be checks and balances that would keep the more populous areas of the country from imposing their wills on us. Our votes would in essence "count more."
If you really think that the states are merely a convenient partitioning scheme, then you should consider moving to a state where your vote would matter more. For example, Wyoming has just as many Senators as California, and it's people have a lot more of say in the Presidential election per capita. Just don't be surprised when you find that the political climate in Wyoming is very different than in whatever state you happen to live in.
This is absolutely not true. There are three Python 2.0 DB compliant PostgreSQL drivers. PyGreSQL has just added 2.0 compliancy, PoPy is 2.0 compliant, and there's another one that also purports to be 2.0 compliant.
Apart from Momjian's excellent online manual there is still the existing PostgreSQL documentation. Everything from basic queries to creating your own types, to hacking out extensions in C are covered by this documentation. MySQL may have more books about it, but most of the information in these books will be duplicate.
The fact of the matter is that PostgreSQL has more features than MySQL, is more standards compliant (SQL-92), is released under a more liberal license (BSD style versus GPL), and it is now even starting to outperform MySQL for simple selects and joins.
The reasons for staying within MySQL's limited abilities are getting smaller and smaller. Why not just use PostgreSQL in the first place? Eventually every successful database project is going to want the features that PostgreSQL has, why start with MySQL and face the prospect of migration later.
This assumes, of course, that the school will sit on their current version of Windows forever. However, anyone that knows anything about Windows realizes that every couple of years Microsoft is going to literally force a migration to the "next best thing."
In fact, that's part of the reason why companies are holding back on Windows 2000, it's going to cost them billions of dollars to upgrade their licenses, retrain their staff, and migrate from their existing systems. When these ongoing tasks are added to Windows' TCO, the balance shifts even more in Linux's favor.
This is one area where Linux has some serious TCO advantages. Not only is it less expensive than Windows, but upgrades are free. Oh, and development tools are free as well. And the Linux community is much less interested in making your skills obsolete. How useful are your old DOS skills, or the tricks you learned for Windows 3.11? People that learned Unix in that same time period are still getting mileage out of their skills (and they have got some cool new toys to boot).
It has become almost an axiom in the computer industry that once the cost of migration is the only reason not to switch from a product, the product is doomed. Microsoft is no exception. On the one hand Microsoft is forced to say that switching to Linux would cost companies too much money, but on the other hand they want these same companies to make a switch that is almost as radical. They want companies to pull out their NT servers and put in Windows 2000.
Uh, Ralph Nader is a private citizen, just like the rest of us. The safety of automobiles became an issue for various reasons (Nader among them) and the populace pushed the legislators to make rules. And, for the most part, this works out fairly well. There have been some hiccups along the way like mandatory air bags that for smaller folks actually increase the risk of death, but mostly things work fine.
However, if the government would have jumped in at the beginning of the automobile revolution with legislation we would still be riding horses around.
In other words, progress is inherently unsafe. It is impossible to know what new dangers each invention will bring. Tim Berners Lee had no idea that his invention would create the Internet Predator, he just knew that it would solve his particular problem. Pairing inventors with bureaucrats who have the power to veto ideas because they might be unsafe would stop progress altogether. Not too mention the fact that a good portion of our true progress is made while our scientists are looking for faster ways for us to kill each other. You might not like the atom bomb, for example, but there certainly are some valid uses for atomic power and radioactive isotopes. And I certainly am glad that the United States ended up with this power first instead of some other country. The world would be a different place if the Nazis would have developed this sort of weapon first. There is no way to put that particular genie back in the bottle, but there is little evidence that the world isn't better off because of it's existence.
Now I agree that there should be "monitors," but I don't think that the government is likely to do a good job. Fortunately each and every one of us has the same power that Nader has. We can each speak up about the abuses that go on around us. There is nothing magical about what Nader did. And there is no guarantee that you could elect or appoint someone to do the same job. In fact, the second you have a designated whistle blower the whole process opens itself up to politics and corruption.
Yes, my bad. Clearly commercial != closed source, and it is closed source commercial vendors that are holding their customers hostage. I have got nothing against commercial vendors that release their source code. In fact, I encourage them (by purchasing distributions instead of downloading them).
The Business Software Alliance can almost certainly scrounge up one unhappy ex-employee in every large company on the planet. If they awarded "bounties" they could probably even get happy current employees. For example, let's say that they offered potential witnesses a reward of 33% of all monies recovered in a successful investigation. With the right employer that could be worth a big fat pile of cash.
Commercial software houses have their users by the short hairs, and things are just now starting to get interesting. With UCITA's remote termination, increased pressure from the BSA, and the push towards ASPs and pay-by-the-hour software the "freedom" offered by Free Software is looking more attractive all of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, Choice is good. The important fact is that all of these OSes are a mere hop, skip, and a jump from each other. All of them also have their technical advantages as well.
And yes, that includes Linux.
The beautty is that once compatibility is out of the picture you are free to choose your OS for purely technical reasons.
Exactly. Why pay $300 for software that emulates another machine when for $400 I could buy a Windows machine, put it under my desk and VNC to the thing? Two machines are almost always better than one.
Of course, with the added competition of Win4Lin and now Plex86 there are going to be a whole lot of geeks that re-think their future VMWare purchases. So VMWare will do poorly, and they will probably go bankrupt, and then they will blame the Free Software community for making it impossible to make a living selling Linux software. There will be a whole new round of articles entitled "Linux Software Companies Deemed Severely Unprofitable."
Grumble, Grumble.
SMP is plenty interesting to the Linux crowd. They have spent a huge amount of time working on it. The fact that it isn't interesting to Theo and the folks working on OpenBSD simply highlights one of the benefits to the Open Source way of getting things done.
If you start your project on OpenBSD and decide that you need SMP to get the performance you need "porting" to Linux shouldn't be much harder than moving your source to a Linux box and typing "make." If, on the other hand, you develop on Linux and then decide that Linux's security isn't good enough for implementation, you can just as easily port to OpenBSD.
There is never going to be an Uber OS that is specialized for every task (although the generic Unix way of recompiling the kernel does come close). That's why standardized APIs are so important. That way you can change your OS midstream if it isn't giving you what you need. The Open Source community has done a pretty good job of matching up APIs.
Sure it is, if the control that AOL has is limited to the amount of control that it has over Mozilla.
For example, let's imagine that Mozilla took over the entire browser market (unlikely in anything but the extreme long term). I could still take the Mozilla source code and change it so that it did exactly what I wanted. I could have a 100% AOL compatible browser with my own special additional features.
Yes, AOL is evil, but Mozilla is good.
There is at least some chance that AOL will eventually switch to Mozilla as their AOL client browser. That single action would almost certainly turn the browser war back into a horse race.
And yet some of these packages still manage to be quite robust. For example, when was the last time that you crashed your Linux box (not on purpose :)?
I have been using Emacs since 1995, and am constantly amazed by the next weird thing someone has gotten it do. For example, do you know that some freak show wrote a GNUS backend for Slashdot. I can now read /. using both my GNUS scoring system and the /. moderator system. That's insane!
And yet in all the years I have used Emacs I have never had it crash one me. My Journal is a 200 page LaTeX document written primarily in Emacs, and I have written who knows how many lines of code, in several languages. I use Emacs as a debugger, a mail client, a web browser (well, sometimes). I even play the built in games. And yet I have never ever crashed the darn thing.
Of course, Emacs is pretty modular (read, there are a whole pile of Lisp packages). But it certainly goes to show that a program can be big without being a bug haven. Sometimes the next cool thing really is the next cool thing.
Fah, neither management, nor the customer actually have any idea what they want until they see what you have done and then utter the fatal words...
"Well, that's almost right."
At which point the customer is generally able to point out the ways in which your software is wrong. This is perfectly normal. If your customer knew anything about software design, they could write the software themselves. They don't, however, and so they don't categorize the million and one exceptions until your software somehow magically fails to divine them from thin air.
That is actually one of the reason why Open Source hackers "scratching their own itch" are such an effective programming force. They happen to know what they actually want the software to do the first time that they sit down to write it. It's also why planning to "throw the first one out" is such an important concept. Unless you are writing software for yourself you will almost certainly misunderstand the customer the first time (or more likely they will fail to give you enough information to accurately understand the problem).
Planning needs to happen, design needs to happen as well, but feature creep will happen (especially with new projects where the programmers are not expert in the particular field).
I was thinking the same thing. Instead of teachng the students about "Linux" why not jump right to the chase and start teaching your new students from the GNU Emacs Manual. It's packed full of exciting information, it's free, and it's very well written. Once your students have learned Emacs they won't need to use any other programs.
That's funny, I believe that is almost precisely what the old IBM Mainframe gurus used to say about PCs. For years the mantra was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." And then suddenly the old mantra was 100% completely untrue. Even closer to home we probably all remember a time when WordPerfect was the undisputed king of word processors, and Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet.
If there is one thing that is a truism in the world of computers is that the least expensive option that is "good enough" eventually wins out. Linux probably isn't to the point where it is "good enough" for most people, but it is getting there fast, and it certainly is inexpensive. OSes and operating systems will eventually be a commodity, despite all of Microsoft's tricks.
Sun could re-license OpenOffice all they want. However, they can't take away my right to distribute the version of OpenOffice I downloaded under the terms of the GPL.
In other words, they could theoretically release the next version under a closed source commercial license. However, they couldn't force all of the people that had the GPLed version to give back the source. So development would almost certainly continue on the GPLed branch, and it would compete against Sun's proprietary branch. In fact, Sun's branch would probably be ignored altogether.
That really is the beautty of the GPL. In essence the end user has nearly as many rights as the copyright holder. You are no longer at the mercy of your software vendor. If you don't like the service, you can switch to a different vendor, and your new vendor will still have access to the source code.
The difference, of course, is that your RedHat system won't stop working if you refuse to pay up. It will stop updating itself automatically, but it won't give you the game over light when you try to save changes to your existing documents. You could even upgrade the box yourself, by hand, if you needed to.
People who stop sending money to Microsoft will find that they have turned their computer into an expensive boat anchor. They will also find out that their data is now locked into Microsoft's proprietary format, and the only thing that the can do is open it (for viewing) and print it.
Free Software doesn't give your software provider nearly the leverage that closed source commercial software does. RedHat can't do anything that would take away your right to run the software that you are currently running. Microsoft, on the other hand, will soon have that power. This is fine with me. As the copyright holders of the software they have the right to license it however they want. However, I can't imagine putting my data in Microsoft's hands, especially considering the fact that there are alternatives.
The cops in Philadelphia did their job, and they did a fine job of it as well. Despite the fact that the protestors walked around armed with cam-corders and were trained in making the cops look bad, they almost completely failed. I saw a lot more scenes of rioting protestors than power-mad policemen. Honestly, how many cops are being charged with Gestapo-like tactics?
If the protesters would have gotten a permit (and they could have gotten one), and if they would have abstained from breaking the laws, then there wouldn't have been a "riot," and no one would have been thrown in jail. And perhaps someone would take their stance seriously.
The fact of the matter is if the roles would have been reversed and it was the protesters that had a permit (like the Republicans did), and it was the Republicans that were out breaking the law, then there would have been a a bunch of jail cells filled with Republicans.
If you think that the Man lost a war (or even had a strategic set back), then you clearly spend too much of your time smoking dope and reading "alternative" (read extremely biased) news sources. The actions of the protesters actually hurt their cause. The public rightly associates the rioters with loose thinking, long haired, punk kids looking for trouble.
I suppose we could have a war over semantics. But what's the fun in that? If you want to believe that the riots in Philadelphia were a "protest" then I will cede that argument because the true issue is whether or not the actions of the "protestors" can be justified?
Which liberties were the protesters defending that required their extremism? The protesters talked quite a bit about "freedom" and liberty, but apparently they believe that these values only apply to people that believe the same things that they do. Should the Republicans lose their right of assembly just because they believe differently than you do? The rioters apparently felt that the Replubicans didn't deserve this right. In pursuit of this goal, they broke all sorts of laws, damaged property, assaulted police officers, and generally ran over everyone else's rights. What principles of liberty and freedom were these misguided fools sticking up for? The freedom to wreck property and block roads illegally.
What a truly noble cause!
You might not have noticed, but the Boston Tea Party could very well be considered the first bit of organized violence on behalf of the American revolutionaries.
In other words, it was an act of Treason against the British government, and not a simple protest.
To put it more basically the difference between a protest and a riot is that in a protest no laws are broken. Even the Aryan nation crazies in Northern Idaho can figure that out. Which is why they don't get arrested when they demonstrate. If you are destroying someone else's property you are no longer protesting. If you are blocking roads illegally you are no longer protesting.
Your right to assemble does not give you the right to abridge other's right to property, nor does it permit you to put motorists at risk.
Part of the reason that I have no respect for people like "Shapeshifter" is that he deliberately is blurring the lines between riot and protest, and then he expects the law to be on his side. Protestors don't need training in how to get the local law enforcement agencies in compromising situations.
Besides, how many of you here actually believe that Mr. McGuckin wasn't, in fact, directing part of the Philadelphia riot? Apparently there was enough evidence for a jury...
In fact, AOL is about the only group out there that can save Mozilla from irrelevance. Right now IE has a big enough market share that it is almost safe to simply develop for IE and be done with it. However, AOL's sponsorship of Mozilla means that there is at least some chance of their being a Mozilla based AOL client eventually (which would put Mozilla right back in the running).
AOL's paying for the lion's share of Mozilla development, you can't hardly blame them if they are trying to come up with ways to recoup those development costs. If you don't like what they are doing then use another browser (or take Gecko and make your own).
That's funny, I find it amazing that you can fail to see the parallels between the Gnome Foundation and the KDE League. I mean really, your whole post reminds me of a Monty Python skit. Do you really think that these corporations are going to throw money at the KDE project without getting any control back in return? At the very least the people running these corporations employ the current KDE developers. That implies a certain amount of control right there.
Politics in America are fun, and not only for Europeans. However, before you laugh too much at our expense remember that America is not the first country in the world where we have had close election results. Unlike most other countries where something like this happens, however, a close election will not destroy the system. Eventually we will have a President, and that will be the end of the matter (until the next election). In a lot of other countries people would be stockpiling food and making sure that their weapons were loaded and ready.
Heck, in many parts of Europe there is more trouble after a football match than has been caused by this election. Arguing is part of the American system in much the same way that public arguing is an important part of the Open Source movement.
The fact that the KDE League closely resembles the Gnome Foundation (the differences are semantics) does not get me off the hook, nor does it give me ammunition. I don't happen to think that hypocrisy is not a particularly big deal. When the Gnome Foundation was announced, the KDE folks said some rash things, and made some hasty promises. However, they have now realized that the Gnome Foundation can afford to throw an order of magnitude more firepower at the problem of a Universal Unix desktop than the disparate KDE developers can. In order for KDE to be able to compete they are going to need the sort of corporate support, marketing, and developer help that the Gnome Foundation affords Gnome.
Now KDE has it, and that's a good thing. I just am not naive enough to pretend that the KDE League isn't exactly what the KDE developers said was bad about the Gnome Foundation. The fact of the matter is that these companies are going to make marketing promises, and the KDE developers are going to have to comply, or these companies are going to hire someone who will comply. In other words, the only difference between this alliance and the Gnome Foundation is that there aren't probably going to be hackers on the board of the KDE League.
A PR Organization is nothing more that a steering committee without any hackers on it. The KDE League will make promises (like any good marketing department), and the KDE hackers will have to make good on those promises or the companies that have hired them will find someone else to do it for them.
You did notice that the list looked like a who's who of KDE developer employers, didn't you?
If you want to believe that there is a huge difference between a bunch of corporations getting together and "marketing" software, and a whole bunch of corporations getting together to "develop" software, well then, I suppose you can live in your little chunk of reality. Say hello to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for me while you are there. I don't get to visit La-La Land very often.
Yeah, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you if you actually believe that. A PR organization like the KDE League is nothing more than a steering committee with nothing but suits sitting on the board. Either that, or it's a large bag of hot gas, a complete waste of time.
Honestly, the list of members of the KDE League sounds like the who's who's of the primary KDE developer's employers. These people are looking to sell KDE, and you can bet they are going to use their leverage to get what they want from the developers. In other words the KDE League is going to be exactly like the Gnome Foundation (except for the fact that Miguel de Icaza, a bonafied hacker, sits on the Gnome Foundation board). Otherwise I can see the ad copy now:
"We don't know what are hackers are doing, but we are fairly sure it will be cool. You should buy it."
You can bet that the KDE League wasn't formed so that they could share that message with the world.
I grew up in Eastern Washington, and so I definitely agree that the current boundaries for the states don't necessarily make as much sense as they should. As a child I could never understand why they called Washington the "Evergreen State." It certainly wasn't green in my home town.
Your solution is to just say that the majority voice should have its say. That's fine and dandy as long as you are on the side of the majority. If you, for example, feel that guns should be banned, then it probably upsets you quite a bit that the people in Eastern Washington are very NRA friendly. Or if you feel like breaching the dams on the Columbia river you are probably sick to death of hearing from the Eastern Washington farmers. On the other hand the people in Eastern Washington probably see these attempts as "those damn Seattle-ites trying to take away our guns and our livelihood."
The whole point of our system is that laws should be difficult to pass simply because any new law will effect some people in a negative manner. Our current system of presidential elections is part of this system. For example, radical candidates (like Nader or Buchannon) have almost zero chance of making any impact at all, and contrary to what the third party folks say this isn't due to advertising. It's due to the fact that Americans are very centrist politically. Our system isn't so much about electing the best man for the job as it is about electing the lesser of two evils. This may seem like a bad thing, but in reality it guarantees that any changes that are made are incremental, and widely popular. Even if your candidate does lose, it's not the end of the world, because the opponent A) was strangely similar, and B) can make incremental changes at best.
Contrast that with a world in which Nader gets elected one year, and Buchannon gets elected four years later. Losing that sort of election would be devastating.
You may feel that universal gun control laws and abortion statutes are important, but I can't imagine that a bureaucrat in Washington D.C. has any chance of coming up with a good compromise if we can't even come up with a workable solution at the state level. If the people on either side of the Puget Sound can't agree on a local issue, then what are the chances that someone not from the area is likely to resolve the issue correctly. Our national leaders would simply decide the issue based on what the average Californian thinks if it wasn't for our current system of government. The average Californian can't even find the state of Washington on a map.
I would rather have separate laws in every state than have one universally poor law in all states. Which is, of course, the crux of this whole argument. Fortunately for all of us it is the local elections that really matter, and we certainly have a say in those.
If you really think that, then you must not get out much. Regional issues are alive and well. For example, in the Pacific Northwest there are all sorts of issues that we see differently than the rest of the nation.
For example, we aren't nearly as interested in the deregulation of power as the rest of the US, and we certainly don't want Californians deciding if our dams get breached. We are also concerned about being able to use Federal lands. I imagine in New York they would probably vote to keep all federal lands "pristine." No logging, no ranching, no roads. However, some of us actually live out here.
Trust me, regional politics will be alive and well long after we are all dead and gone. Silicon valley has its set of issues, and the Magic Valley in Idaho has a totally separate set of issues and values. Part of the reason that the small states chose to join this Union in the first place was that we realized that there would be checks and balances that would keep the more populous areas of the country from imposing their wills on us. Our votes would in essence "count more."
If you really think that the states are merely a convenient partitioning scheme, then you should consider moving to a state where your vote would matter more. For example, Wyoming has just as many Senators as California, and it's people have a lot more of say in the Presidential election per capita. Just don't be surprised when you find that the political climate in Wyoming is very different than in whatever state you happen to live in.
You really need to get out more.
This is absolutely not true. There are three Python 2.0 DB compliant PostgreSQL drivers. PyGreSQL has just added 2.0 compliancy, PoPy is 2.0 compliant, and there's another one that also purports to be 2.0 compliant.
Apart from Momjian's excellent online manual there is still the existing PostgreSQL documentation. Everything from basic queries to creating your own types, to hacking out extensions in C are covered by this documentation. MySQL may have more books about it, but most of the information in these books will be duplicate.
The fact of the matter is that PostgreSQL has more features than MySQL, is more standards compliant (SQL-92), is released under a more liberal license (BSD style versus GPL), and it is now even starting to outperform MySQL for simple selects and joins.
The reasons for staying within MySQL's limited abilities are getting smaller and smaller. Why not just use PostgreSQL in the first place? Eventually every successful database project is going to want the features that PostgreSQL has, why start with MySQL and face the prospect of migration later.
This assumes, of course, that the school will sit on their current version of Windows forever. However, anyone that knows anything about Windows realizes that every couple of years Microsoft is going to literally force a migration to the "next best thing."
In fact, that's part of the reason why companies are holding back on Windows 2000, it's going to cost them billions of dollars to upgrade their licenses, retrain their staff, and migrate from their existing systems. When these ongoing tasks are added to Windows' TCO, the balance shifts even more in Linux's favor.
This is one area where Linux has some serious TCO advantages. Not only is it less expensive than Windows, but upgrades are free. Oh, and development tools are free as well. And the Linux community is much less interested in making your skills obsolete. How useful are your old DOS skills, or the tricks you learned for Windows 3.11? People that learned Unix in that same time period are still getting mileage out of their skills (and they have got some cool new toys to boot).
It has become almost an axiom in the computer industry that once the cost of migration is the only reason not to switch from a product, the product is doomed. Microsoft is no exception. On the one hand Microsoft is forced to say that switching to Linux would cost companies too much money, but on the other hand they want these same companies to make a switch that is almost as radical. They want companies to pull out their NT servers and put in Windows 2000.
Uh, Ralph Nader is a private citizen, just like the rest of us. The safety of automobiles became an issue for various reasons (Nader among them) and the populace pushed the legislators to make rules. And, for the most part, this works out fairly well. There have been some hiccups along the way like mandatory air bags that for smaller folks actually increase the risk of death, but mostly things work fine.
However, if the government would have jumped in at the beginning of the automobile revolution with legislation we would still be riding horses around.
In other words, progress is inherently unsafe. It is impossible to know what new dangers each invention will bring. Tim Berners Lee had no idea that his invention would create the Internet Predator, he just knew that it would solve his particular problem. Pairing inventors with bureaucrats who have the power to veto ideas because they might be unsafe would stop progress altogether. Not too mention the fact that a good portion of our true progress is made while our scientists are looking for faster ways for us to kill each other. You might not like the atom bomb, for example, but there certainly are some valid uses for atomic power and radioactive isotopes. And I certainly am glad that the United States ended up with this power first instead of some other country. The world would be a different place if the Nazis would have developed this sort of weapon first. There is no way to put that particular genie back in the bottle, but there is little evidence that the world isn't better off because of it's existence.
Now I agree that there should be "monitors," but I don't think that the government is likely to do a good job. Fortunately each and every one of us has the same power that Nader has. We can each speak up about the abuses that go on around us. There is nothing magical about what Nader did. And there is no guarantee that you could elect or appoint someone to do the same job. In fact, the second you have a designated whistle blower the whole process opens itself up to politics and corruption.
Yes, my bad. Clearly commercial != closed source, and it is closed source commercial vendors that are holding their customers hostage. I have got nothing against commercial vendors that release their source code. In fact, I encourage them (by purchasing distributions instead of downloading them).
The Business Software Alliance can almost certainly scrounge up one unhappy ex-employee in every large company on the planet. If they awarded "bounties" they could probably even get happy current employees. For example, let's say that they offered potential witnesses a reward of 33% of all monies recovered in a successful investigation. With the right employer that could be worth a big fat pile of cash.
Commercial software houses have their users by the short hairs, and things are just now starting to get interesting. With UCITA's remote termination, increased pressure from the BSA, and the push towards ASPs and pay-by-the-hour software the "freedom" offered by Free Software is looking more attractive all of the time.