It's all uncharted territory. MS would like for.NET to catch on because A) it would greatly strengthen their server side role, and B) it would allow them to gradually shift their focus from selling software to renting services (providing a much steadier income without the necessity of coming up with and sucessfully marketing new versions of their products).
However, this doesn't mean that Web Services is going to actually take off. Some poor sap (with a big pile of money) thought that FED-EXing catfood around the country was a good idea, it didn't make pets.com a winner.
Just remember, Microsoft also thought that people were going to want to use Microsoft Bob.
Now, I am not saying that the idea of web services is completely bogus. I just know that the cool parts of this concept will almost certainly be available to Free Software hackers in plenty of time to meet customer demand. The reason for this is simple. Free Software hackers are right on the forefront of actually building solutions. Microsoft is busy building a product that they hope others will turn into solutions. There's a big difference.
Imagine that, a consultant that not only lowered the maintenance and upgrade fees for his client, but also delivered a solution that was easier to maintain and ran faster to boot. I bet the port wasn't even that difficult. PostgreSQL is getting to be quite competitive feature-wise.
Believe it or not, this is precisely the type of things that most employers want. However, most IS groups are too busy with CYA tactics to ever even worry about providing the best solution for the job. They just want to choose software that is safe, and in those cases the more expensive it is the better.
Your response was literally the funniest thing that I have heard in some time. Someone replaced DB2 with a low-cost, low maintenance PostgreSQL solution, and your suggestion is that he should have instead spent his time reading some arcane IBM manual.
You only need an aircraft carrier if you are landing fighter planes at sea. If you are just going fishing, a rowboat is fine.
Oracle is nice, but it is completely overkill for most projects. PostgreSQL has many of the same features, including all of the referential integrity features that make Oracle so nice to develop for, and it comes with a fishing boat price.
One of the things that I like best about PostgreSQL is the fact that the developers are brutally honest about the software. The core PostgreSQL developers have always been quite frank about which parts of PostgreSQL were ready for production, and which parts were kludges, or were largely untested. The problem with commercial databases, even good ones like Oracle, is that the people who know where the rough edges are aren't talking about them. That sort of honesty goes a long way towards building my trust.
PostgreSQL has an amazing featureset, especially considering its price. I think that fairly soon Oracle is going to wake up to the fact that the database is becoming a commodity market, and quite frankly, they aren't likely to be competively priced.
If you would have read the article you would have realized that the folks at Largo aren't putting computers on people's desktops. They currently have over 400 X terminal devices deployed. These devices have no moving parts, and boot off of the network. Basically you plug the bad boy in, and you are in business. Any idiot could do it.
With this arrangement there is precisely one machine to administer, the server.
Using dumb X terminals as clients is so much less labor intensive than putting PCs on people's desktops that it is almost ridiculous to compare them. There is no need to painfully construct a master PC image, and there is no need to purchase big piles of identical PC hardware, and there is certainly no need to install operating systems on client PCs. Add to that the fact that the Linux + X Windows set up costs a heck of a lot less to purchase in the first place and you start to see how brilliant the folks in Largo really are.
Holy smokes! That's cool. The Free Library actually had books I would like to read, and the Webscriptions deal is pretty cool too. Four books a month, in a plain text format, for $10. That's a deal.
I just went from e-book skeptical to very enthusiastic about the format. I think that it's time to get me a palm pilot so that I can read these away from my computer.
The problem with most e-books is that the format they are published in is quite literally a value subtracted format. You can't share them, you can't market them up, and the FBI is likely to show up at your door if you develop a tool to read them on your Linux box.
Plain text and its derivatives HTML, XML, etc. don't have any of these drawbacks, and they have considerable upside as well, like being able to use grep and find to search your collection of books. If e-books were in a text-based format then annotations, bookmarks, and a whole list of other physical book benefits would be taken care of automatically (Emacs, for example, would allow you to mark up your texts in ways you never dreamt of with a paper book). You would also maintain all of your fair use rights.
Publishers, on the other hand, would lose a fair amount of control.
Because of this most publishers (besides O'Reilly) are not interested in plain text e-books because they think that people will just steal them. Maybe they are right too. All I know is that e-books are not going to take off as long as these issues are not sorted out. People are not likely to purchase e-books as long as the format is closed, and publishers are unlikely to release more books in open formats for fear that people will just steal their work.
It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell.
Big whoop. 15 year olds have been doing dumb things since the dawn of time. I personally would much rather see kids writing viruses and taking out web servers than see them chucking hunks of concrete off the overpass onto the highway. That's what the 15 year olds in my old hometown do for kicks. I had some friends when I was a kid that got caught doing this, and just recently another set of kids put an old lady in intensive care with this stunt. The kids involved weren't underprivileged, they weren't disturbed (well more than any 15 year old boy), they just were bored and stupid.
It scares the heck out of me every time I drive under that overpass, especially at night.
My father is a lawyer, and he worked quite a bit as a public juvenile defendent while I was growing up. I have heard plenty of stories about the dumb things that teenagers do. Believe me, writing a virus doesn't even make the top ten list.
Adding technology to the mix doesn't make for a revolutionary new breed of 15 year old. The "Digital Revolution" is hardly a revolution at all, and it certainly isn't more dangerous than the things that stupid 15 year olds did in 1950. Much more troubling in my mind is the growing number of 15 year olds who are in gangs and walking around armed with automatic weapons. Compared to that defacing a web server is hardly any cause for alarm at all.
Thanks for clearing that up. That was a very enlightening post. I especially appreciate the points you made about hiring an editor. It seems fairly obvious to me now that hiring an independent editor should be possible. I imagine if you hired out the web serving and the creation of the "secure" version of the e-book to someone else you could still create an e-book for less than a hardback, but it doesn't sound like the slam dunk win that I expected it to be.
Not that it matters. Treating the e-book format as secure is clearly insane, and there is definitely added value in a physical book (except possibly for reference manuals).
Actually ebooks provides a simple method for circumventing the publishers. After all, while you might not be able to afford to have a book published, nearly anyone can afford a web site. If you don't need an actual paper book, then perhaps you don't need the publisher.
The fact that this format would allow readers to cut out the publisher middlemen doesn't necessarily mean that this particular format will work. First of all, publishers do have a useful function screening and editting content. The best example of why this is useful, to my mind, is Victor Hugo's Les Miserable. By the time Hugo wrote Les Miserable he was so famous that he could refuse to have his book editted. As anyone who has read the unabridged version of that particular book can tell you, Hugo really should have left some of the text on the cutting room floor. To me personally the abridged version was definitely "value added."
Second of all, If I want to read a book without purchasing it I personally prefer to use the library. It is considerably less expensive, I don't give up any fair use rights (I can make copies of pages if I want), and I don't have to worry about being "on the clock" when I am reading. Ten cumulative hours might not be long enough for some people to read a book, but two weeks generally is (and you can always renew). I also enjoy loaning out books (I am a masochist, I suppose). You can't do that with an e-book of this nature.
Now, if the time based rental of the story was quite a bit less expensive, that's another story. I might be willing to purchase such a story if it only cost me 25 or 50 cents.
Having a Samba file system driver means that all of a sudden you have to update every last one of your client machines. Not only that, but you probably have to watch out for Microsoft breaking your driver with a Windows Update. Microsoft isn't particularly likely to break their driver, on the other hand, so you are safe as long as your file servers mimic a Windows server.
SMB is a horrific kludge of a filesystem, and the Samba developers will all happily acknowledge that. If you want to install file system drivers you would probably be better off using some other network file system. The beauty of SMB, however, is that every single Microsoft OS ever has a built in client. Leveraging that built in client saves adminstrators time and money.
Microsoft has the advantage with the WMA format in that it will be included in all future versions of Windows. However, Microsoft is also doing it's best to tie this format to their new and improved content management system. If Microsoft makes it difficult for people to share WMA files (by tying them to one machine or whatever), then Ogg Vorbis will win by default. Contrary to what the RIAA thinks people want to be able to share music, not pay for it. Technology that goes out of its way to make file sharing difficult is doomed to failure.
The fact of the matter is that a patent-free, high quality audio codec that isn't tied to a content management system is going to gain popularity, even if it is a little harder to use, because that is what people want.
The 0.6.1 version is still available with source from tuxracer.sourceforge.net, what more do you want?
Patry has done the work, and he has shared a great deal of the code. Who are we to complain? Now if Sunspire is using code from other contributors without getting their approval, well, that's a bad thing. I don't care what their intentions are, if they are using someone else's GPLed code illegally, then they need to be stopped.
If the end users and enthusiasts still have the source code that they have been playing with, and apparently there are even other developers interested in the source code (according to the Debian changelog anyway). The GPL doesn't say anything about your future intentions, it simply guarantees that people who use your code have access to the corresponding version of the source code.
Yes, there certainly is a lot of Free Software for Windows. In fact, I don't feel comfortable on a Windows box until it has Cygwin, Emacs, Perl, Python, Bash, and a host of other good software.
Which sort of makes my point. Why pay money for Windows, and spend time and effort downloading all of the Free Software on your list if you could simply get a Linux CD from Cheapbytes and get nearly all of the above software right on the same set of CDs. Better yet, run Debian Linux and update your software to the newest version with a simple 'apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade'. Plus, you get virus protection for free.
Of course, I suppose that it is possible that I simply like the Unix environment, and so my opinion is biased.
Linux installs are like Windows installs in that they are much easier after you have done 5 or 6 of them, but that's hardly consolation to the new Linux user. Even worse, Linux is only a little better if you can get it pre-installed. Even then it's not quite like Windows, and there certainly are quite a few things that aren't well supported. On the other hand Linux has some really cool advantages over Windows, especially for power users. I definitely prefer my Linux desktop over my Windows one, but I have learned to use Unixy tools.
There are some tips that make Linux a little easier to use. First of all, join a Linux mailing list, preferrably one for the distribution that you are using, and spend some time lurking. Yes, I know, you have better things to do than reading 100 emails a day about how to get a particular sournd card working. You don't have to actually read all of the email, you just need to get a feel for what sort of questions are being asked, so that you can A) not ask the same question as the last 400 people when you have a question and B) so that you can learn a little bit about how actual Linuxers get their work done.
For example, a new Windows refugee with a fresh install of Linux almost always heads straight for Wine, because they want to run their old familiar software. Now, Wine is certainly useful for those critical pieces of software that don't have Linux equivalents, but that kind of software is getting more and more scarce all of the time. Instead you should (after making sure that it hasn't been asked a million times) ask some actual Linuxers what they use as a replacement for the software that you would like to use. You would be surprised how enlightening this is. I learned about LaTeX that way (long before Linux had a word processor), and I have been grateful since. LaTeX is certainly not as easy to use as a word processor, but for some types of documents it is clearly the "right tool for the job."
Another word of advice is to refrain from building packages from source unless you really have to. Yes, I realize that this sounds contrary to the whole Open Source ethos, but the way to mastery is long and fraught with many perils (sorry I couldn't resist). Chances are good that there is an RPM package of the software you want to use, and since you use RedHat, it's almost certain to work for you. Save the source code for pieces of software that you want to hack (or debug).
If you decide that Linux isn't for you, try back again in six months to a year. You will be amazed at how far along it will have come. Linux isn't for everyone yet, but it is getting there.
Exactly, that's why my most recent workstation purchase came as a stack of parts. It was the only way that I could guarantee that I wasn't paying for Windows. There was a price savings, but mostly I hate paying for things that I don't want.
Besides, am I the only one who thinks that comparing how much you paid for Linux to how much you paid for Windows is insane. After all, what useful software do you get with Windows, besides notepad and freecell? When I consider how much it would cost to replace all of the Linux software that I use regularly with a commercial replacement my investment in Linux starts to look pretty intelligent. By the time you pay for an Office Suite, development tools, database (PostgreSQL rocks), application server (Zope), and all of the other nifty tools you are talking about a substantial pile of cash. The fact that I can then put these tools on as many machines as I like and use them for whatever purpose I want only sweetens the deal.
Oh yeah, it's impossible to develop desktop software for Linux, after all Linux wasn't even written in America.
Whatever...
The fact of the matter is that it is unlikely that MS Office would get ported to Linux (even if MS was broken up) for three very important reasons.
It would be hard. MS Office is quite Windows specific, not because it had to be, but because it made sense for Microsoft to tie their office suite to their OS. In fact, if the OS and Apps split did happen my guess is that the Apps company might seriously rethink it's investment in MS Office for the Macintosh. It's almost certainly a significant investment for such a small market.
Linux has very little market share, and most Linuxers who are interested in running Office already have a copy of Windows laying around.
Open Office, Gnome Office, and KDE Office, are all getting pretty darn good, and all are free. Corel's Perfect Office is also available for Linux, and it is quite a bit less expensive than MS Office. Chances are good that if you are already running Linux, you are also evaluating an alternative office suite, and MS Office is far more expensive than their competitors, with very little added functionality.
The reasons why desktop companies are interested in Linux have nothing to do with Linux's technology. Heck, porting from Windows to Winelib is really quite straight forward. Instead they have everything to do with simple economics. They know that Linux is a very limited desktop market, and they don't believe that it would be worth the effort to build and support software for such a small market.
Unfortunately for commercial software companies, their reluctance to port to Linux has not stopped the Free Software developers from creating Free Software equivalents to their commercial products. Even now it is pretty amazing how much useful desktop software is available for free with Linux, and this software is only going to improve. When Linux does start making inroads on the desktop for many companies it will be too late. They won't be able to port to Linux in time to compete with the freely available software.
I myself use Debian, and I love it, but it is a pain to install because it doesn't have any sort of hardware auto-detection. I would bet money that any other modern distribution would auto-detect both your video and sound, and if your modem isn't a win-modem it would nail that too.
You might try Progeny, if you really want a Debian based distribution, but I would suggest simply installing RedHat.
The funny thing about the concept of corporatism is that it almost doesn't matter what government does, some corporation is going to benefit, and some others are going to be hurt. Katz writes about "evil" corporatism because it is easy copy to write. Katz's apathetic non-voting listeners want someone to blame for their inability to cope with the system, and so they flock to demogogues criticizing the nebulous "establishment."
Microsoft gets busted and that gets labeled as anti-corporatism because no one here likes Microsoft. But the reality of the matter is that many more corporations will benefit from this decision than will be hurt by it. AOL, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Novell, and a host of other companies are almost certainly ecstatic over the news.
In fact, that's part of the reason that Microsoft is doomed to fail eventually. They have made to many enemies. It doesn't matter how big you are, you can't stay king of the hill forever, especially if you are aggressively pushing your former allies off of the hill. Microsoft has rigged the deck so that they are the only ones that are able to develop for Windows and make money. Which only guarantees that they former allies will start looking for other platforms on which to develop their new cool toys. Microsoft might be chuck full of talented individuals, but if they alienate everyone else, they will find that they are unable to compete with the combined intellect of everyone else.
Or, as in this case, even Microsoft's tremendous economic power does not allow them to buy up politicians fast enough to outpace the political maneuverings of their enemies. Especially when their enemies have busted out their checkbooks as well.
Microsoft's.NET vision is very cool. Imagine all the advantages of the Java platform, without the one huge disadvantage of that platform, you don't have to write everything in Java. It's even possible that their implementation of this vision will work as advertised. If that is the case then having a competing implementation isn't just a good idea, it's going to be critical to the success of Free Software.
Even if.NET is horrific, there will undoubtedly be some sites that use.NET technology, a useful.NET client would therefore be useful even if.NET turns out to be less than Microsoft is advertising.
Unfortunately Microsoft has all the leverage in this particular case because they control the client. We could come up with something a hundred times better than.NET and.NET would still win because the client bits of.NET will be on every new PC firmly embedded into Windows.
The Samba developers really have the right idea. Instead of creating a network file system and then trying to create a Windows client (which Microsoft could break at every.dll update) they instead took the route of emulating Windows servers. Even with a crufty protocol like SMB this turned out to be the easiest route. Microsoft doesn't want to break their own clients, and so they are limited in what they can really change.
One of these days Linux (or some other open system) might very well have enough client side market share that the Free Software folks could create a client side standard and actually have some weight behind it. The closest we have ever come was with browser based applications, and even that was marred by Netscape-isms and the even more overwhelming IE-isms that are cropping up more recently.
Free Software is getting closer, however. My guess is that it is only a matter of time.
My guess is that if you get an email containing sensitive information from somewhere in the United States then it is legal for you to publish it. Of course, I don't know where you live, or have any idea of the laws in your country, but that doesn't stop me from making things up...
In case you hadn't noticed, this particular Ask Slashdot dealt with a legal question. As such the answer depends on your jurisdiction. The answers to legal questions like this quite often vary from state to state, and even from county to county. They certainly vary from country to country. This sort of discussion might not be helpful if you live in Communist China, where you probably have little influence on local laws, but it's at least somewhat germane to anyone who lives in any sort of republic or representative democracy, because the comparison of foreign and domestic law often reveals loopholes that one might wish to avoid in their own jurisdiction.
I imagine that you also have a say in the creation of your local laws (scary as that may seem), and so the quote mentioned above also applies to you. That makes you an official amateur lawmaker, so you might want to become informed a bit. Barring that, you might want to push the back button on your browser and perhaps read a different article if you don't want to discuss an issue that is primarily going to reflect/.'s US audience.
On the other hand, it is possible that you live in some forward-thinking country where they don't have anything as backwards as law. In that case, flame away.
That's part of the reason that RMS chose to call it "Free" Software, it's all about Freedom from tyranny. In fact, RMS still believes that the primary reason that one should switch to Free Software is because of the freedoms that it provides. He believes that you should even use Free Software if it is vastly inferior to its commercial software rivals. BSA strong-arming, and anti-consumer features in the new versions of Windows XP will simply bring this type of freedom to the forefront.
You can still use whatever software you want. For example, you can continue to not use.NET if that makes you happy. The difference is that those of us that are interested in supporting.NET clients (or acting as.NET clients) will now be able to do so.
That's what choice is all about. Making options available and letting people decide.
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It's all uncharted territory. MS would like for .NET to catch on because A) it would greatly strengthen their server side role, and B) it would allow them to gradually shift their focus from selling software to renting services (providing a much steadier income without the necessity of coming up with and sucessfully marketing new versions of their products).
However, this doesn't mean that Web Services is going to actually take off. Some poor sap (with a big pile of money) thought that FED-EXing catfood around the country was a good idea, it didn't make pets.com a winner.
Just remember, Microsoft also thought that people were going to want to use Microsoft Bob.
Now, I am not saying that the idea of web services is completely bogus. I just know that the cool parts of this concept will almost certainly be available to Free Software hackers in plenty of time to meet customer demand. The reason for this is simple. Free Software hackers are right on the forefront of actually building solutions. Microsoft is busy building a product that they hope others will turn into solutions. There's a big difference.
Imagine that, a consultant that not only lowered the maintenance and upgrade fees for his client, but also delivered a solution that was easier to maintain and ran faster to boot. I bet the port wasn't even that difficult. PostgreSQL is getting to be quite competitive feature-wise.
Believe it or not, this is precisely the type of things that most employers want. However, most IS groups are too busy with CYA tactics to ever even worry about providing the best solution for the job. They just want to choose software that is safe, and in those cases the more expensive it is the better.
Your response was literally the funniest thing that I have heard in some time. Someone replaced DB2 with a low-cost, low maintenance PostgreSQL solution, and your suggestion is that he should have instead spent his time reading some arcane IBM manual.
My old boss had a saying:
Oracle is nice, but it is completely overkill for most projects. PostgreSQL has many of the same features, including all of the referential integrity features that make Oracle so nice to develop for, and it comes with a fishing boat price.
One of the things that I like best about PostgreSQL is the fact that the developers are brutally honest about the software. The core PostgreSQL developers have always been quite frank about which parts of PostgreSQL were ready for production, and which parts were kludges, or were largely untested. The problem with commercial databases, even good ones like Oracle, is that the people who know where the rough edges are aren't talking about them. That sort of honesty goes a long way towards building my trust.
PostgreSQL has an amazing featureset, especially considering its price. I think that fairly soon Oracle is going to wake up to the fact that the database is becoming a commodity market, and quite frankly, they aren't likely to be competively priced.
If you would have read the article you would have realized that the folks at Largo aren't putting computers on people's desktops. They currently have over 400 X terminal devices deployed. These devices have no moving parts, and boot off of the network. Basically you plug the bad boy in, and you are in business. Any idiot could do it.
With this arrangement there is precisely one machine to administer, the server.
Using dumb X terminals as clients is so much less labor intensive than putting PCs on people's desktops that it is almost ridiculous to compare them. There is no need to painfully construct a master PC image, and there is no need to purchase big piles of identical PC hardware, and there is certainly no need to install operating systems on client PCs. Add to that the fact that the Linux + X Windows set up costs a heck of a lot less to purchase in the first place and you start to see how brilliant the folks in Largo really are.
Holy smokes! That's cool. The Free Library actually had books I would like to read, and the Webscriptions deal is pretty cool too. Four books a month, in a plain text format, for $10. That's a deal.
I just went from e-book skeptical to very enthusiastic about the format. I think that it's time to get me a palm pilot so that I can read these away from my computer.
Thanks for the info.
The problem with most e-books is that the format they are published in is quite literally a value subtracted format. You can't share them, you can't market them up, and the FBI is likely to show up at your door if you develop a tool to read them on your Linux box.
Plain text and its derivatives HTML, XML, etc. don't have any of these drawbacks, and they have considerable upside as well, like being able to use grep and find to search your collection of books. If e-books were in a text-based format then annotations, bookmarks, and a whole list of other physical book benefits would be taken care of automatically (Emacs, for example, would allow you to mark up your texts in ways you never dreamt of with a paper book). You would also maintain all of your fair use rights.
Publishers, on the other hand, would lose a fair amount of control.
Because of this most publishers (besides O'Reilly) are not interested in plain text e-books because they think that people will just steal them. Maybe they are right too. All I know is that e-books are not going to take off as long as these issues are not sorted out. People are not likely to purchase e-books as long as the format is closed, and publishers are unlikely to release more books in open formats for fear that people will just steal their work.
It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell.
Big whoop. 15 year olds have been doing dumb things since the dawn of time. I personally would much rather see kids writing viruses and taking out web servers than see them chucking hunks of concrete off the overpass onto the highway. That's what the 15 year olds in my old hometown do for kicks. I had some friends when I was a kid that got caught doing this, and just recently another set of kids put an old lady in intensive care with this stunt. The kids involved weren't underprivileged, they weren't disturbed (well more than any 15 year old boy), they just were bored and stupid.
It scares the heck out of me every time I drive under that overpass, especially at night.
My father is a lawyer, and he worked quite a bit as a public juvenile defendent while I was growing up. I have heard plenty of stories about the dumb things that teenagers do. Believe me, writing a virus doesn't even make the top ten list.
Adding technology to the mix doesn't make for a revolutionary new breed of 15 year old. The "Digital Revolution" is hardly a revolution at all, and it certainly isn't more dangerous than the things that stupid 15 year olds did in 1950. Much more troubling in my mind is the growing number of 15 year olds who are in gangs and walking around armed with automatic weapons. Compared to that defacing a web server is hardly any cause for alarm at all.
Thanks for clearing that up. That was a very enlightening post. I especially appreciate the points you made about hiring an editor. It seems fairly obvious to me now that hiring an independent editor should be possible. I imagine if you hired out the web serving and the creation of the "secure" version of the e-book to someone else you could still create an e-book for less than a hardback, but it doesn't sound like the slam dunk win that I expected it to be.
Not that it matters. Treating the e-book format as secure is clearly insane, and there is definitely added value in a physical book (except possibly for reference manuals).
Thanks again.
Actually ebooks provides a simple method for circumventing the publishers. After all, while you might not be able to afford to have a book published, nearly anyone can afford a web site. If you don't need an actual paper book, then perhaps you don't need the publisher.
The fact that this format would allow readers to cut out the publisher middlemen doesn't necessarily mean that this particular format will work. First of all, publishers do have a useful function screening and editting content. The best example of why this is useful, to my mind, is Victor Hugo's Les Miserable. By the time Hugo wrote Les Miserable he was so famous that he could refuse to have his book editted. As anyone who has read the unabridged version of that particular book can tell you, Hugo really should have left some of the text on the cutting room floor. To me personally the abridged version was definitely "value added."
Second of all, If I want to read a book without purchasing it I personally prefer to use the library. It is considerably less expensive, I don't give up any fair use rights (I can make copies of pages if I want), and I don't have to worry about being "on the clock" when I am reading. Ten cumulative hours might not be long enough for some people to read a book, but two weeks generally is (and you can always renew). I also enjoy loaning out books (I am a masochist, I suppose). You can't do that with an e-book of this nature.
Now, if the time based rental of the story was quite a bit less expensive, that's another story. I might be willing to purchase such a story if it only cost me 25 or 50 cents.
Having a Samba file system driver means that all of a sudden you have to update every last one of your client machines. Not only that, but you probably have to watch out for Microsoft breaking your driver with a Windows Update. Microsoft isn't particularly likely to break their driver, on the other hand, so you are safe as long as your file servers mimic a Windows server.
SMB is a horrific kludge of a filesystem, and the Samba developers will all happily acknowledge that. If you want to install file system drivers you would probably be better off using some other network file system. The beauty of SMB, however, is that every single Microsoft OS ever has a built in client. Leveraging that built in client saves adminstrators time and money.
Microsoft has the advantage with the WMA format in that it will be included in all future versions of Windows. However, Microsoft is also doing it's best to tie this format to their new and improved content management system. If Microsoft makes it difficult for people to share WMA files (by tying them to one machine or whatever), then Ogg Vorbis will win by default. Contrary to what the RIAA thinks people want to be able to share music, not pay for it. Technology that goes out of its way to make file sharing difficult is doomed to failure.
The fact of the matter is that a patent-free, high quality audio codec that isn't tied to a content management system is going to gain popularity, even if it is a little harder to use, because that is what people want.
The 0.6.1 version is still available with source from tuxracer.sourceforge.net, what more do you want?
Patry has done the work, and he has shared a great deal of the code. Who are we to complain? Now if Sunspire is using code from other contributors without getting their approval, well, that's a bad thing. I don't care what their intentions are, if they are using someone else's GPLed code illegally, then they need to be stopped.
If the end users and enthusiasts still have the source code that they have been playing with, and apparently there are even other developers interested in the source code (according to the Debian changelog anyway). The GPL doesn't say anything about your future intentions, it simply guarantees that people who use your code have access to the corresponding version of the source code.
Yes, there certainly is a lot of Free Software for Windows. In fact, I don't feel comfortable on a Windows box until it has Cygwin, Emacs, Perl, Python, Bash, and a host of other good software.
Which sort of makes my point. Why pay money for Windows, and spend time and effort downloading all of the Free Software on your list if you could simply get a Linux CD from Cheapbytes and get nearly all of the above software right on the same set of CDs. Better yet, run Debian Linux and update your software to the newest version with a simple 'apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade'. Plus, you get virus protection for free.
Of course, I suppose that it is possible that I simply like the Unix environment, and so my opinion is biased.
Linux installs are like Windows installs in that they are much easier after you have done 5 or 6 of them, but that's hardly consolation to the new Linux user. Even worse, Linux is only a little better if you can get it pre-installed. Even then it's not quite like Windows, and there certainly are quite a few things that aren't well supported. On the other hand Linux has some really cool advantages over Windows, especially for power users. I definitely prefer my Linux desktop over my Windows one, but I have learned to use Unixy tools.
There are some tips that make Linux a little easier to use. First of all, join a Linux mailing list, preferrably one for the distribution that you are using, and spend some time lurking. Yes, I know, you have better things to do than reading 100 emails a day about how to get a particular sournd card working. You don't have to actually read all of the email, you just need to get a feel for what sort of questions are being asked, so that you can A) not ask the same question as the last 400 people when you have a question and B) so that you can learn a little bit about how actual Linuxers get their work done.
For example, a new Windows refugee with a fresh install of Linux almost always heads straight for Wine, because they want to run their old familiar software. Now, Wine is certainly useful for those critical pieces of software that don't have Linux equivalents, but that kind of software is getting more and more scarce all of the time. Instead you should (after making sure that it hasn't been asked a million times) ask some actual Linuxers what they use as a replacement for the software that you would like to use. You would be surprised how enlightening this is. I learned about LaTeX that way (long before Linux had a word processor), and I have been grateful since. LaTeX is certainly not as easy to use as a word processor, but for some types of documents it is clearly the "right tool for the job."
Another word of advice is to refrain from building packages from source unless you really have to. Yes, I realize that this sounds contrary to the whole Open Source ethos, but the way to mastery is long and fraught with many perils (sorry I couldn't resist). Chances are good that there is an RPM package of the software you want to use, and since you use RedHat, it's almost certain to work for you. Save the source code for pieces of software that you want to hack (or debug).
If you decide that Linux isn't for you, try back again in six months to a year. You will be amazed at how far along it will have come. Linux isn't for everyone yet, but it is getting there.
Exactly, that's why my most recent workstation purchase came as a stack of parts. It was the only way that I could guarantee that I wasn't paying for Windows. There was a price savings, but mostly I hate paying for things that I don't want.
Besides, am I the only one who thinks that comparing how much you paid for Linux to how much you paid for Windows is insane. After all, what useful software do you get with Windows, besides notepad and freecell? When I consider how much it would cost to replace all of the Linux software that I use regularly with a commercial replacement my investment in Linux starts to look pretty intelligent. By the time you pay for an Office Suite, development tools, database (PostgreSQL rocks), application server (Zope), and all of the other nifty tools you are talking about a substantial pile of cash. The fact that I can then put these tools on as many machines as I like and use them for whatever purpose I want only sweetens the deal.
Linux is a sweet deal no matter how you slice it.
Oh yeah, it's impossible to develop desktop software for Linux, after all Linux wasn't even written in America.
Whatever...
The fact of the matter is that it is unlikely that MS Office would get ported to Linux (even if MS was broken up) for three very important reasons.
The reasons why desktop companies are interested in Linux have nothing to do with Linux's technology. Heck, porting from Windows to Winelib is really quite straight forward. Instead they have everything to do with simple economics. They know that Linux is a very limited desktop market, and they don't believe that it would be worth the effort to build and support software for such a small market.
Unfortunately for commercial software companies, their reluctance to port to Linux has not stopped the Free Software developers from creating Free Software equivalents to their commercial products. Even now it is pretty amazing how much useful desktop software is available for free with Linux, and this software is only going to improve. When Linux does start making inroads on the desktop for many companies it will be too late. They won't be able to port to Linux in time to compete with the freely available software.
I myself use Debian, and I love it, but it is a pain to install because it doesn't have any sort of hardware auto-detection. I would bet money that any other modern distribution would auto-detect both your video and sound, and if your modem isn't a win-modem it would nail that too.
You might try Progeny, if you really want a Debian based distribution, but I would suggest simply installing RedHat.
The funny thing about the concept of corporatism is that it almost doesn't matter what government does, some corporation is going to benefit, and some others are going to be hurt. Katz writes about "evil" corporatism because it is easy copy to write. Katz's apathetic non-voting listeners want someone to blame for their inability to cope with the system, and so they flock to demogogues criticizing the nebulous "establishment."
Microsoft gets busted and that gets labeled as anti-corporatism because no one here likes Microsoft. But the reality of the matter is that many more corporations will benefit from this decision than will be hurt by it. AOL, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Novell, and a host of other companies are almost certainly ecstatic over the news.
In fact, that's part of the reason that Microsoft is doomed to fail eventually. They have made to many enemies. It doesn't matter how big you are, you can't stay king of the hill forever, especially if you are aggressively pushing your former allies off of the hill. Microsoft has rigged the deck so that they are the only ones that are able to develop for Windows and make money. Which only guarantees that they former allies will start looking for other platforms on which to develop their new cool toys. Microsoft might be chuck full of talented individuals, but if they alienate everyone else, they will find that they are unable to compete with the combined intellect of everyone else.
Or, as in this case, even Microsoft's tremendous economic power does not allow them to buy up politicians fast enough to outpace the political maneuverings of their enemies. Especially when their enemies have busted out their checkbooks as well.
You really should take a look at SOAP's kissing cousin XML-RPC.
Microsoft's .NET vision is very cool. Imagine all the advantages of the Java platform, without the one huge disadvantage of that platform, you don't have to write everything in Java. It's even possible that their implementation of this vision will work as advertised. If that is the case then having a competing implementation isn't just a good idea, it's going to be critical to the success of Free Software.
Even if .NET is horrific, there will undoubtedly be some sites that use .NET technology, a useful .NET client would therefore be useful even if .NET turns out to be less than Microsoft is advertising.
Unfortunately Microsoft has all the leverage in this particular case because they control the client. We could come up with something a hundred times better than .NET and .NET would still win because the client bits of .NET will be on every new PC firmly embedded into Windows.
The Samba developers really have the right idea. Instead of creating a network file system and then trying to create a Windows client (which Microsoft could break at every .dll update) they instead took the route of emulating Windows servers. Even with a crufty protocol like SMB this turned out to be the easiest route. Microsoft doesn't want to break their own clients, and so they are limited in what they can really change.
One of these days Linux (or some other open system) might very well have enough client side market share that the Free Software folks could create a client side standard and actually have some weight behind it. The closest we have ever come was with browser based applications, and even that was marred by Netscape-isms and the even more overwhelming IE-isms that are cropping up more recently.
Free Software is getting closer, however. My guess is that it is only a matter of time.
My guess is that if you get an email containing sensitive information from somewhere in the United States then it is legal for you to publish it. Of course, I don't know where you live, or have any idea of the laws in your country, but that doesn't stop me from making things up...
In case you hadn't noticed, this particular Ask Slashdot dealt with a legal question. As such the answer depends on your jurisdiction. The answers to legal questions like this quite often vary from state to state, and even from county to county. They certainly vary from country to country. This sort of discussion might not be helpful if you live in Communist China, where you probably have little influence on local laws, but it's at least somewhat germane to anyone who lives in any sort of republic or representative democracy, because the comparison of foreign and domestic law often reveals loopholes that one might wish to avoid in their own jurisdiction.
I imagine that you also have a say in the creation of your local laws (scary as that may seem), and so the quote mentioned above also applies to you. That makes you an official amateur lawmaker, so you might want to become informed a bit. Barring that, you might want to push the back button on your browser and perhaps read a different article if you don't want to discuss an issue that is primarily going to reflect /.'s US audience.
On the other hand, it is possible that you live in some forward-thinking country where they don't have anything as backwards as law. In that case, flame away.
That's part of the reason that RMS chose to call it "Free" Software, it's all about Freedom from tyranny. In fact, RMS still believes that the primary reason that one should switch to Free Software is because of the freedoms that it provides. He believes that you should even use Free Software if it is vastly inferior to its commercial software rivals. BSA strong-arming, and anti-consumer features in the new versions of Windows XP will simply bring this type of freedom to the forefront.
You can still use whatever software you want. For example, you can continue to not use .NET if that makes you happy. The difference is that those of us that are interested in supporting .NET clients (or acting as .NET clients) will now be able to do so.
That's what choice is all about. Making options available and letting people decide.