The target audience for this distribution is businesses who want to roll out in-house software. They want 1 desktop, 1 toolkit and if possible no licensing costs. GNOME/GTK fits the bill.
The only thing that worries me a bit is that by leaving out KDE/QT he's cutting himself off from all applications that exist for KDE/QT. This might be a bit short-sighted. Because if you can choose between a GNOME/GTK only distribution and one which has GNOME as it's default, but also provides the KDE/QT libraries to run KDE/QT apps, I'll choose the second. I can still develop my apps using the free GTK toolkit, while leaveraging the existing KDE/QT apps where they are better than existing GNOME/GTK applications.
But in the end it is his distribution. He calls the shots. The KDE/QT people can go and fork his distribution adding in KDE/QT. It's Open Source after all.
I've had great fun reading how either "This is trouble for Google's IPO" or "Google will trample SCO" but isn't this all a bit early? The article says that SCO sueing Google is "claimed by an unnamed source". Perhaps we should all wait until this is either confirmed or not, before we run around discussing the outcome? I mean if I remember correctly all Linux users should have received invoices or should have been sued in summer.
If Novell owns the IP, then how can SCO say they are going to sue everyone for IP violation as long as Novell says that they don't want to sue anyone. So if that's true the only basis for their claims can be that IBM took code from under an NDA and put it into the Linux kernel (as the manager said, the problematic code is in the kernel). IBM is basically moving they operations away from AIX to Linux. I guess because Linux is basically cheaper than maintaining and developing their own UNIX. Now if IBM is really serious about moving to Linux (and I think it looks like they are), then they are not going to jeopardise their move by allowing code to be copied from AIX to Linux. This leads me to the conclusion that it's all FUD. The only thing that bothers me is the question "Why are they doing it?". The way they are acting is not going to drive people from Linux to SCO's Unix. So basically they want to make money by licensing stuff. What are they going to license? According to Novell they don't own the IP. Perhaps they were really just hoping to be bought out by IBM. Or the top brass sold their shares when the price jumped because of their claims. It all just doesn't make sense to me.
Here in Austria (no kangaroos please;-) at my university you couldn't say that the humanities are getting inflated grades and the CS people aren't.
I've got a few colleagues who after 3 years still can't write a basic program in any language. Yet they've managed to pass most of the classes because you can get by with learning the stuff by heart. But basically there's not much grade infaltion in the CS department. The psychology studies are different. The courses are pretty simple, you can get points for nearly everything. Of course there are a few courses that are hard but most are simple. The history department is different again. The people there tend to receive As or Bs (1 or 2 in Austria on a scale of 1..5), but they tend to be really dedicated and work a lot for their studies.
I guess it's basically impossible to say that humanities are just plain easier to pass than the engineering studies. It depends more on the lecturers than on the area of study.
I fully agree with you that sueing the tobacco companies for causing cancer is not sensible.
On the other hand, sueing the tobacco companies for knowingly hiding the fact that smoking massively increases the chances of cancer is something different. And I do hope, that that is what is happening.
Civilian Casualties and the American Media
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
The participation of the Northern Allicance and other groups in Afghanistan has been mentioned quite a few times already. They have taken the place of American Soldiers, so to claim that no ground fighters are involved is basically a joke.
But what is basically not mentioned is the huge amount of civilian casualties. Take a look at http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm.
A total of 3,767 civilian casualties (as of 6th December 2001) is not what I would call an "unconfirmed number of casualties".
The American Media has successfully warped the truth of what is happening in Afghanistan, so as to please the White House and the Pentagon.
The numbers of Afghan casualties the American Media mentions showes, that the American Media has basically given up honest reporting and has become little more than an extension of the White House Press section.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what the XML Schema for these new XML based buildings looks like. Or do they still use DTDs?
Nice to see the FLOSS principles being taken up in more and more areas. :-)
The target audience for this distribution is businesses who want to roll out in-house software. They want 1 desktop, 1 toolkit and if possible no licensing costs. GNOME/GTK fits the bill.
The only thing that worries me a bit is that by leaving out KDE/QT he's cutting himself off from all applications that exist for KDE/QT. This might be a bit short-sighted. Because if you can choose between a GNOME/GTK only distribution and one which has GNOME as it's default, but also provides the KDE/QT libraries to run KDE/QT apps, I'll choose the second. I can still develop my apps using the free GTK toolkit, while leaveraging the existing KDE/QT apps where they are better than existing GNOME/GTK applications.
But in the end it is his distribution. He calls the shots. The KDE/QT people can go and fork his distribution adding in KDE/QT. It's Open Source after all.
I've had great fun reading how either "This is trouble for Google's IPO" or "Google will trample SCO" but isn't this all a bit early? The article says that SCO sueing Google is "claimed by an unnamed source". Perhaps we should all wait until this is either confirmed or not, before we run around discussing the outcome? I mean if I remember correctly all Linux users should have received invoices or should have been sued in summer.
Integrated security, well,well,well. We do live and learn :-)
If Novell owns the IP, then how can SCO say they are going to sue everyone for IP violation as long as Novell says that they don't want to sue anyone.
So if that's true the only basis for their claims can be that IBM took code from under an NDA and put it into the Linux kernel (as the manager said, the problematic code is in the kernel).
IBM is basically moving they operations away from AIX to Linux. I guess because Linux is basically cheaper than maintaining and developing their own UNIX. Now if IBM is really serious about moving to Linux (and I think it looks like they are), then they are not going to jeopardise their move by allowing code to be copied from AIX to Linux.
This leads me to the conclusion that it's all FUD. The only thing that bothers me is the question "Why are they doing it?". The way they are acting is not going to drive people from Linux to SCO's Unix. So basically they want to make money by licensing stuff. What are they going to license? According to Novell they don't own the IP.
Perhaps they were really just hoping to be bought out by IBM. Or the top brass sold their shares when the price jumped because of their claims. It all just doesn't make sense to me.
Here in Austria (no kangaroos please ;-) at my university you couldn't say that the humanities are getting inflated grades and the CS people aren't.
I've got a few colleagues who after 3 years still can't write a basic program in any language. Yet they've managed to pass most of the classes because you can get by with learning the stuff by heart. But basically there's not much grade infaltion in the CS department.
The psychology studies are different. The courses are pretty simple, you can get points for nearly everything. Of course there are a few courses that are hard but most are simple.
The history department is different again. The people there tend to receive As or Bs (1 or 2 in Austria on a scale of 1..5), but they tend to be really dedicated and work a lot for their studies.
I guess it's basically impossible to say that humanities are just plain easier to pass than the engineering studies. It depends more on the lecturers than on the area of study.
I fully agree with you that sueing the tobacco companies for causing cancer is not sensible.
On the other hand, sueing the tobacco companies for knowingly hiding the fact that smoking massively increases the chances of cancer is something different. And I do hope, that that is what is happening.
The participation of the Northern Allicance and other groups in Afghanistan has been mentioned quite a few times already. They have taken the place of American Soldiers, so to claim that no ground fighters are involved is basically a joke.
.
A total of 3,767 civilian casualties (as of 6th December 2001) is not what I would call an "unconfirmed number of casualties".
But what is basically not mentioned is the huge amount of civilian casualties. Take a look at http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm
The American Media has successfully warped the truth of what is happening in Afghanistan, so as to please the White House and the Pentagon. The numbers of Afghan casualties the American Media mentions showes, that the American Media has basically given up honest reporting and has become little more than an extension of the White House Press section.
The fortune cookie I got with this article sort of fit in:
President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax.