Look, I *want* to believe that the G5 makes great coffee, gives fantastic backrubs, cures cancer and runs faster than every P4. I do. I've just heard all these lines before, with the G4.
I just got back from a seminar with Motorola and the architecture of their new and upcoming chips. Some nice stuff on the horizon. The did mention some of the less than stellar performance on prior chipsets, and explained that it was due to not taking advantage of the chip features. An operating system or user application that must be backwards compatible will not be able to utilize the chipsets to full advantage.
You don't judge high end chipsets based on mass market consumer applications.
They leave the Microsoft trails every time they use the internet. They just don't notice it because there's a networking standard that even Microsoft can't get around. Microsoft doesn't own the infrastructure like the rail barons did. Just another reason why this comparison isn't extremely helpful.
p.s. Comparing Microsoft to Standard Oil would be more in line.
The Microsoft situation is very similar to the "robber barons" of yesteryear. Both examples show monopolies rising in a brand new industry, and both demonstrated the need for open standards.
All the railroad companies used different rail gauges so that a city couldn't switch railroads even if they wanted to. The funny thing is, the emergence of open rail standards occured WITHOUT government intervention. The customers were pissed royal that they had to switch trains every ten miles because the rail gauges changed. Make a standard gauge and suddenly the monopolies no longer had a lock on the towns. But it wasn't the government that instituted the standard gauge, it was the industry itself.
But there is one crucial difference between the railroad barons and Microsoft. The railroads owned the infrastructure (the tracks). Microsoft doesn't own any infrastructure. They are more akin to a steam engine business providing the trains that run on the rails. Today I can surf the web, read my email, play my games, and a whole bunch other stuff without once having to ask Microsoft for permission or having to use any of their products. Such was not the case 150 years ago with the railroads.
p.s. If your into conspiracy theories, evidence suggests that the railroad monopolies were already hitting the hard times when the feds stepped in, and that it was the railroad barons that got the anti-trust stuff moving so that they could *keep* their monopolies. Looking at the rail industry today, it seems that they were successful.
p.p.s. How come nobody for breaking up Microsoft is for breaking up the local telcos and cablecos? They are much more akin to the railroad barons, since they DO own the infrastructure.
Require open standards. No more proprietary protocols or file formats. All have to be published by the time Microsoft releases a product to the public.
The computer industry is still a new industry, and the market is still evolving its standards. It takes time to come up with a meaningful standard, and it doesn't help any that the technology is improving faster than the defacto standards can keep up.
A government solution in this area is the wrong way to go about. The government is not smart enough to insitute meaningful technological standards, and is not fast enough to keep up with the improving technology. I would love open standards for everything. But I am unwilling to make closed standards illegal. There are other solutions however.
First off, we need to stop singling out Microsoft as the only problem. They are only a small part of it. When you hit a website that doesn't support HTML 4.0 (Konqueror or Mozilla), don't blame Microsoft, blame the webmaster. When you receive a Word document as an email, don't blame Microsoft blame the poster. These are both symptoms of a young industry. The webmaster doesn't know any better than to target specific platforms. The poster doesn't know that word processors are inappropriate for text messaging. No amount of legislation against Microsoft is going to educate these people.
Second, don't use any closed standards yourself. If you're running a website then create it according to the standards. We did a wonderful job of cleaning our own websites of gifs without any government help, so it shouldn't be that hard to get our own homes in order. Dump Visual Basic. Dump FrontPage. Dump Outlook server. Learn HTML/XML, C/C++, PHP, Perl/Python.
Finally, there is indeed something the government can do without mucking up the works. It can require all products it uses to comply with published open standards. It doesn't need to tell anyone else what to do, only itself. As the single largest customer of Microsoft products, it can through its weight around quite a bit without having to arrest anyone.
HR people don't know the first thing about programming. All they know are enough buzzwords to act as a filter for the guys who DO know something about programming.
If you know the current buzzwords and have a solid traditional programming skillset, then the worthwhile jobs will always be available. A competent company will look for solid traditional programming skills. An incompetent company will just offer you promises and then fold in six months.
Competition is not evil. Take a foot race for example (check the writings of Saint Paul for more on competitive foot races). It is not evil to train for the race. It is not evil to try to be faster than the other guy. It is not evil to fail to slow down when you are winning. And it is not evil to win.
What *is* evil is to deliberately hinder the other racers. Tripping your opponent is evil. Slipping exlax into his gatorade is evil. Greasing his baton is evil.
A competitive advantage does not have to be something negative imposed on your competitor. If there is something that will improve your business performance without hindering your competitors, there is nothing immoral about using it as an advantage.
I don't know of any religion that says, fast people should not compete in the 100 meter, strong people should not compete in greco-roman wresting, and tall people should not compete in basketball.
There is a special class of laws for corporations that everyone else doesn't have to follow.
My point is that I want objective law. If there is to be a class of law that applies to corporate entities, then that law should be uniformly applied to all corporate entities regardless of size.
Linus really, really, REALLY needs to start the 2.5.x branch.
Stable branches need to be stable. Do all of the new feature experimentation in unstable. It's gotten to the point now that "stable" has become a meaningless word in linuxland.
Next time around, let's fork off 2.7.0 at the same time 2.6.2 is released. Or maybe Linux needs to split into three branches: "flimsy" for experimentation and VM wars, "unstable" for up-to-date hardware support but no new features, and "stable" which only gets bug and security fixes.
What is not legal is using monopoly power to gain a competitive advantage.
I think you missed the sarcasm in my post. Next time I'll use a sledgehammer.
What bugs me about the antitrust laws is that justice is turned on it's head. The blindfolds have been taken off of Lady Justice, so that she now says "tell me who you are and I will tell you what laws you must follow". Seeking a competitive advantage is a natural, legal, ethical and moral course of action for companies, unless you have been declared a monopoly.
I am a firm believer that laws should apply to everyone equally. If something is illegal for you, it should also be illegal for your congressman, and if your congressman has a special legal priviledge, then you should have it as well. Likewise, if a action is legal if performed by Sun, IBM, Apple, or the ISP down the street, then it should be also legal for Microsoft.
What has always bugged me about the kneejerk slashdot suggestions for retaliation, and the current fed proposal for Microsoft, is that the punishments do not fit the crime. Certainly the settlement does not. But neither does breaking up Microsoft or fining them billions.
The basic problem is that no one understand just what crime Microsoft committed. Bundling is not a crime. Exclusive contracts are not a crime. They got in trouble for being a monopoly. Regulating OEM contracts will not cause Microsoft to cease being a monopoly. Breaking them up will only cause multiple monopolies to emerge.
The punishment MUST fit the crime. And since the crime is being a monopoly, the only sensible punishment is to remove their monopoly status. This is problematic, however, since Microsoft did not gain their monopoly in the same way that Pacific Bell, PG&E or SoCal Edison did (through exclusive government charter). Instead they gained their monopoly because people chose to buy their products.
The solution is simple, but harsh. Determine the market share that defines monopolyhood in the software industry, and prevent Microsoft from ever exceeding it. Quotas in other words. This will require armed policemen standing around at Fry's and CompUSA forcibly preventing consumers from purchasing Windows if the quota has been exceeded that day. DOJ inspecters need to patrol OEM facilities, inspecting each unit that leaves to ensure they don't have an excess of MSOffice.
The only way we can get our freedom back is through direct government regulation of the consumer. We gave the consumer the right to purchase their own software and that failed miserably because they chose to purchase Microsoft products. We must now make their choices for them so that they can be free.
Without these stringent measures Microsoft will continue its monopoly status.
yes, I know it supports loadable modules but they're not really useed yet
They are being used more and more. Looking at 4.4 it seems that my NIC, USB, audio and even agpgart are modules. It's not as modularized as say Mach, but neither is it in the dark ages.
You really should recompile a BSD kernel ASAP after install.
Ditto for Linux. I've seen 75% size reductions for recompiling Mandrake's default kernel.
Great, your installation was a success. Now you need to take the next step: systems administration. Try configuring X and see if that works. (last time a distro automatically configured X for me, it though my Matrox G450 was a generic frame buffer; the one before that caused a boot/crash/reboot cycle; I'll stick with good old reliable xf86config)
Slackware has excellent documentation. Try reading it. You can find it on ISO #4, or at www.slackware.com/book/
He wasn't talking about building a distro from scratch. Anyone can do it. That's the easy part.
The hard part is keeping a distro up to date at all times. It's pure energy drainage. You have to keep track of the development of EVERY package you included, and for a significant number of them, bang 'em hard enough with a mallet so that they fit.
Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE manage because they have a big staff. FreeBSD and Debian manage because they have scads of volunteers. One guy by himself gets swamped pretty quickly. It's one reason why Patrick kept the distro small.
No, it's only an archiver. The key word is system. A packaging system actually installs the package. The Slackware packaging system unarchives the package, installs the contents, runs any postinstall scripts that happen to be in there, and records the metadata for the package under/var/adm/packages. The Slackware packaging system can then use this metadata do upgrade or remove the package.
Including dependencies in the metadata would be nice, but they aren't the only metadata. (actually, dependency information is useless for installing packages if it won't fetch the dependencies, but it's quite handy for removing packages)
The way I see it, Slackware is the intersection of Linux. Take any distro and remove anything that isn't included in all the other distros. What you are left with is Slackware.
It's pure undiluted Linux, and by George, it looks a lot like Unix!
You have no rights whatsoever that aren't agreed upon by your fellow man.
I'm in a world of hurt then, because history demonstrates that my fellow man is all too willing to trade my rights for a bit of silver.
Documents like those you mentioned are not your only guarantee or your best guarantee, but they are infinitely more to the point that some notion of birthright.
A guarantee is not an act of creation. I agree that these documents help to guarantee my liberty, but they do not create it.
Think they were an abusive monopolist before? You ain't seen anything yet
How sad it must be going through life thinking your liberty is predicated on the punishment of Microsoft.
I want to use Gnumeric because it is Gnumeric. If I wanted to use Excel then I would just use Excel. Sometimes the basic concepts are hard to grok, aren't they?
Not everything can have the utmost priority. Not even security issues. Of course, there aren't a whole bunch of pending securities issues right now, so there should be time to work on the lesser priority ones. I don't know why Patrick hasn't placed 2.2.20 and 2.4.12 kernel packages under patches and current. But I do know the Slackware track record, and it's a better track record than those distros that issue press releases disputing security issues.
p.s. I misread that bugtrack, I thought it said 19 and not = 19. My mistake.
p.p.s. I guess I don't understand what a "local exploit" is. I thought they were exploits that could not be made remotely. Again, my mistake.
p.p.p.s. These issues came out two weeks ago, during a time of intense chaos at Slackware Inc. It would be nice if every issue was resolved in two hours and chaos relegated to the deepest pits of quantum physics, but the fact that they're not is still no reason to worry over the demise of Slackware Inc.
In business, most places are small mom-and-pop (more than 50% of the US ecconomy?) compared to the relatively few McDonalds out there.
Last I checked, which was five years ago, 90% of private sector jobs in the US are provided by business employing twenty or fewer employees (mom-and-pops). This included independent franchises (including the few independent McDonald franchises), but did not include and corporate owned or operated stores.
It's braindead not in substance, but in execution. There's nothing inherently wrong with RPM or distributions that use RPM. But there IS something fundamentally wrong when the packages are built with other packages as dependencies. If a package needs libfubar.so.1.3 to run, then it should look for libfubar.so.1.3, and NOT look for fubar-1.3-7_i386.rpm. Maybe I built it from scratch. Maybe I grabbed it from Redhat or Debian.
Having to use --no-deps when I already have all dependencies installed is what makes the SuSE package management braindead.
(p.s. SuSE is my second favorite distro after Slackware. I *like* SuSE. But I don't like they way they make RPMs)
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I *want* to believe that the G5 makes great coffee, gives fantastic backrubs, cures cancer and runs faster than every P4. I do. I've just heard all these lines before, with the G4.
I just got back from a seminar with Motorola and the architecture of their new and upcoming chips. Some nice stuff on the horizon. The did mention some of the less than stellar performance on prior chipsets, and explained that it was due to not taking advantage of the chip features. An operating system or user application that must be backwards compatible will not be able to utilize the chipsets to full advantage.
You don't judge high end chipsets based on mass market consumer applications.
They leave the Microsoft trails every time they use the internet. They just don't notice it because there's a networking standard that even Microsoft can't get around. Microsoft doesn't own the infrastructure like the rail barons did. Just another reason why this comparison isn't extremely helpful.
p.s. Comparing Microsoft to Standard Oil would be more in line.
The Microsoft situation is very similar to the "robber barons" of yesteryear. Both examples show monopolies rising in a brand new industry, and both demonstrated the need for open standards.
All the railroad companies used different rail gauges so that a city couldn't switch railroads even if they wanted to. The funny thing is, the emergence of open rail standards occured WITHOUT government intervention. The customers were pissed royal that they had to switch trains every ten miles because the rail gauges changed. Make a standard gauge and suddenly the monopolies no longer had a lock on the towns. But it wasn't the government that instituted the standard gauge, it was the industry itself.
But there is one crucial difference between the railroad barons and Microsoft. The railroads owned the infrastructure (the tracks). Microsoft doesn't own any infrastructure. They are more akin to a steam engine business providing the trains that run on the rails. Today I can surf the web, read my email, play my games, and a whole bunch other stuff without once having to ask Microsoft for permission or having to use any of their products. Such was not the case 150 years ago with the railroads.
p.s. If your into conspiracy theories, evidence suggests that the railroad monopolies were already hitting the hard times when the feds stepped in, and that it was the railroad barons that got the anti-trust stuff moving so that they could *keep* their monopolies. Looking at the rail industry today, it seems that they were successful.
p.p.s. How come nobody for breaking up Microsoft is for breaking up the local telcos and cablecos? They are much more akin to the railroad barons, since they DO own the infrastructure.
Require open standards. No more proprietary protocols or file formats. All have to be published by the time Microsoft releases a product to the public.
The computer industry is still a new industry, and the market is still evolving its standards. It takes time to come up with a meaningful standard, and it doesn't help any that the technology is improving faster than the defacto standards can keep up.
A government solution in this area is the wrong way to go about. The government is not smart enough to insitute meaningful technological standards, and is not fast enough to keep up with the improving technology. I would love open standards for everything. But I am unwilling to make closed standards illegal. There are other solutions however.
First off, we need to stop singling out Microsoft as the only problem. They are only a small part of it. When you hit a website that doesn't support HTML 4.0 (Konqueror or Mozilla), don't blame Microsoft, blame the webmaster. When you receive a Word document as an email, don't blame Microsoft blame the poster. These are both symptoms of a young industry. The webmaster doesn't know any better than to target specific platforms. The poster doesn't know that word processors are inappropriate for text messaging. No amount of legislation against Microsoft is going to educate these people.
Second, don't use any closed standards yourself. If you're running a website then create it according to the standards. We did a wonderful job of cleaning our own websites of gifs without any government help, so it shouldn't be that hard to get our own homes in order. Dump Visual Basic. Dump FrontPage. Dump Outlook server. Learn HTML/XML, C/C++, PHP, Perl/Python.
Finally, there is indeed something the government can do without mucking up the works. It can require all products it uses to comply with published open standards. It doesn't need to tell anyone else what to do, only itself. As the single largest customer of Microsoft products, it can through its weight around quite a bit without having to arrest anyone.
So you're saying the crime is being a monopolist? If so just take away their monopoly. Geez.
I once learned that in Australia the phrase "knock-up" means to call someone on the telephone...
Doh! And I just thought everyone over there was randier than hell.
HR people don't know the first thing about programming. All they know are enough buzzwords to act as a filter for the guys who DO know something about programming.
If you know the current buzzwords and have a solid traditional programming skillset, then the worthwhile jobs will always be available. A competent company will look for solid traditional programming skills. An incompetent company will just offer you promises and then fold in six months.
Competition is not evil. Take a foot race for example (check the writings of Saint Paul for more on competitive foot races). It is not evil to train for the race. It is not evil to try to be faster than the other guy. It is not evil to fail to slow down when you are winning. And it is not evil to win.
What *is* evil is to deliberately hinder the other racers. Tripping your opponent is evil. Slipping exlax into his gatorade is evil. Greasing his baton is evil.
A competitive advantage does not have to be something negative imposed on your competitor. If there is something that will improve your business performance without hindering your competitors, there is nothing immoral about using it as an advantage.
I don't know of any religion that says, fast people should not compete in the 100 meter, strong people should not compete in greco-roman wresting, and tall people should not compete in basketball.
There is a special class of laws for corporations that everyone else doesn't have to follow.
My point is that I want objective law. If there is to be a class of law that applies to corporate entities, then that law should be uniformly applied to all corporate entities regardless of size.
Linus really, really, REALLY needs to start the 2.5.x branch.
Stable branches need to be stable. Do all of the new feature experimentation in unstable. It's gotten to the point now that "stable" has become a meaningless word in linuxland.
Next time around, let's fork off 2.7.0 at the same time 2.6.2 is released. Or maybe Linux needs to split into three branches: "flimsy" for experimentation and VM wars, "unstable" for up-to-date hardware support but no new features, and "stable" which only gets bug and security fixes.
What is not legal is using monopoly power to gain a competitive advantage.
I think you missed the sarcasm in my post. Next time I'll use a sledgehammer.
What bugs me about the antitrust laws is that justice is turned on it's head. The blindfolds have been taken off of Lady Justice, so that she now says "tell me who you are and I will tell you what laws you must follow". Seeking a competitive advantage is a natural, legal, ethical and moral course of action for companies, unless you have been declared a monopoly.
I am a firm believer that laws should apply to everyone equally. If something is illegal for you, it should also be illegal for your congressman, and if your congressman has a special legal priviledge, then you should have it as well. Likewise, if a action is legal if performed by Sun, IBM, Apple, or the ISP down the street, then it should be also legal for Microsoft.
What has always bugged me about the kneejerk slashdot suggestions for retaliation, and the current fed proposal for Microsoft, is that the punishments do not fit the crime. Certainly the settlement does not. But neither does breaking up Microsoft or fining them billions.
The basic problem is that no one understand just what crime Microsoft committed. Bundling is not a crime. Exclusive contracts are not a crime. They got in trouble for being a monopoly. Regulating OEM contracts will not cause Microsoft to cease being a monopoly. Breaking them up will only cause multiple monopolies to emerge.
The punishment MUST fit the crime. And since the crime is being a monopoly, the only sensible punishment is to remove their monopoly status. This is problematic, however, since Microsoft did not gain their monopoly in the same way that Pacific Bell, PG&E or SoCal Edison did (through exclusive government charter). Instead they gained their monopoly because people chose to buy their products.
The solution is simple, but harsh. Determine the market share that defines monopolyhood in the software industry, and prevent Microsoft from ever exceeding it. Quotas in other words. This will require armed policemen standing around at Fry's and CompUSA forcibly preventing consumers from purchasing Windows if the quota has been exceeded that day. DOJ inspecters need to patrol OEM facilities, inspecting each unit that leaves to ensure they don't have an excess of MSOffice.
The only way we can get our freedom back is through direct government regulation of the consumer. We gave the consumer the right to purchase their own software and that failed miserably because they chose to purchase Microsoft products. We must now make their choices for them so that they can be free.
Without these stringent measures Microsoft will continue its monopoly status.
yes, I know it supports loadable modules but they're not really useed yet
They are being used more and more. Looking at 4.4 it seems that my NIC, USB, audio and even agpgart are modules. It's not as modularized as say Mach, but neither is it in the dark ages.
You really should recompile a BSD kernel ASAP after install.
Ditto for Linux. I've seen 75% size reductions for recompiling Mandrake's default kernel.
Great, your installation was a success. Now you need to take the next step: systems administration. Try configuring X and see if that works. (last time a distro automatically configured X for me, it though my Matrox G450 was a generic frame buffer; the one before that caused a boot/crash/reboot cycle; I'll stick with good old reliable xf86config)
Slackware has excellent documentation. Try reading it. You can find it on ISO #4, or at www.slackware.com/book/
He wasn't talking about building a distro from scratch. Anyone can do it. That's the easy part.
The hard part is keeping a distro up to date at all times. It's pure energy drainage. You have to keep track of the development of EVERY package you included, and for a significant number of them, bang 'em hard enough with a mallet so that they fit.
Redhat, Mandrake and SuSE manage because they have a big staff. FreeBSD and Debian manage because they have scads of volunteers. One guy by himself gets swamped pretty quickly. It's one reason why Patrick kept the distro small.
Under definition 2, PKZip is a packaging system.
/var/adm/packages. The Slackware packaging system can then use this metadata do upgrade or remove the package.
No, it's only an archiver. The key word is system. A packaging system actually installs the package. The Slackware packaging system unarchives the package, installs the contents, runs any postinstall scripts that happen to be in there, and records the metadata for the package under
Including dependencies in the metadata would be nice, but they aren't the only metadata. (actually, dependency information is useless for installing packages if it won't fetch the dependencies, but it's quite handy for removing packages)
I run my Slack with KDE and wouldn't have it any other way :-)
Don't forget that just because a distro has requirements of a PIII and 2G of hard drive means that that's what it actually requires.
Then maybe they should stop lying about their requirements...
The way I see it, Slackware is the intersection of Linux. Take any distro and remove anything that isn't included in all the other distros. What you are left with is Slackware.
It's pure undiluted Linux, and by George, it looks a lot like Unix!
You have no rights whatsoever that aren't agreed upon by your fellow man.
I'm in a world of hurt then, because history demonstrates that my fellow man is all too willing to trade my rights for a bit of silver.
Documents like those you mentioned are not your only guarantee or your best guarantee, but they are infinitely more to the point that some notion of birthright.
A guarantee is not an act of creation. I agree that these documents help to guarantee my liberty, but they do not create it.
Think they were an abusive monopolist before? You ain't seen anything yet
How sad it must be going through life thinking your liberty is predicated on the punishment of Microsoft.
I want to use Gnumeric because it is Gnumeric. If I wanted to use Excel then I would just use Excel. Sometimes the basic concepts are hard to grok, aren't they?
IMO, Microsoft in itself is the type of thing that drives OSS projects.
I sure hope not! I would much rather use software that was written TO BE something, rather than software that was written NOT TO BE something.
Not everything can have the utmost priority. Not even security issues. Of course, there aren't a whole bunch of pending securities issues right now, so there should be time to work on the lesser priority ones. I don't know why Patrick hasn't placed 2.2.20 and 2.4.12 kernel packages under patches and current. But I do know the Slackware track record, and it's a better track record than those distros that issue press releases disputing security issues.
p.s. I misread that bugtrack, I thought it said 19 and not = 19. My mistake.
p.p.s. I guess I don't understand what a "local exploit" is. I thought they were exploits that could not be made remotely. Again, my mistake.
p.p.p.s. These issues came out two weeks ago, during a time of intense chaos at Slackware Inc. It would be nice if every issue was resolved in two hours and chaos relegated to the deepest pits of quantum physics, but the fact that they're not is still no reason to worry over the demise of Slackware Inc.
In business, most places are small mom-and-pop (more than 50% of the US ecconomy?) compared to the relatively few McDonalds out there.
Last I checked, which was five years ago, 90% of private sector jobs in the US are provided by business employing twenty or fewer employees (mom-and-pops). This included independent franchises (including the few independent McDonald franchises), but did not include and corporate owned or operated stores.
It's braindead not in substance, but in execution. There's nothing inherently wrong with RPM or distributions that use RPM. But there IS something fundamentally wrong when the packages are built with other packages as dependencies. If a package needs libfubar.so.1.3 to run, then it should look for libfubar.so.1.3, and NOT look for fubar-1.3-7_i386.rpm. Maybe I built it from scratch. Maybe I grabbed it from Redhat or Debian.
Having to use --no-deps when I already have all dependencies installed is what makes the SuSE package management braindead.
(p.s. SuSE is my second favorite distro after Slackware. I *like* SuSE. But I don't like they way they make RPMs)