If someone posted that half-thought-out, irrational, outright wrong blather on Slashdot, the score on the POS would drop to -1 faster than the wintertime temperature in Antarctica. And yet here it is as an article. As a valid contrarian viewpoint.
Hell, why don't we just have the WIPO Troll write the next article? It'll make about as much sense, and be just as offensive.
My position on porn is that I'm fine with whatever floats your boat, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. Manga throws both of those rules out the window. Sure, all the boxes claim that all the characters are at least 18, but a lot of them are clearly drawn to look about 12. And there's a lot of raping. Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either - we're talking about triple-penetration rape by demons.
This should either be +5, Funny or -1, Flamebait. I'm laughing at it because I always laugh at stupid ramblings, but I suppose I can't know the mind of the author. I'll advise my fellow users to mod the parent as the mood hits them.
The line "Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either - we're talking about triple-penetration rape by demons." is especially good and, I suppose, marks this as satire instead of flamebait.
At the risk of being taken as a whooshee, it's spelled 'disgusting'. I'm anal about spelling.
Well, that certainly explains the stubborness. I have a possible solution: Point him at a book. (I used "The Linux Bible," but that's just one in a sea.) Then he can do it himself, as his pride dictates, by learning it from a book written by people who (should) know what they're doing, as basic sense dictates. I know O'Reilly makes "Using Linux" (I have it) but I don't know how good that would be as a tutorial.
Then, once he has a foothold, you can point him towards the various Internet resources (and Google, if he doesn't know if it yet) and the rather extensive documentation that ships with the OS. That's a second step towards self-sufficiency, and a cheap way to stay up-to-date.
How about dropping IIS and bundling Win2k2 with Apache? They can wrap it all in a nice shell that makes it easy to use and configure. They wouldn't have to GPL any of their secrets if it works on the side or above the GPL'd code they choose to use.
And I'm sure IBM would be so willing to pay MSFT's licensing fees when they could just drop so much less cash and get an OS they can use as they please without MSFT's lawyers taking an interest.
Could it be that Linux is becoming a target for MS' "embrace and extend" tactics?
How can a corporation 'embrace and extend' an entire culture? I might remind you that over two hundred Linux distros exist right now, but that number is really meaningless: It does not reflect the fact that those are mainly noncommercial ventures begun by people who love Linux and wish to change it in a direction previously untapped. Similar things have happened around BSD, although it's less popular in the desktop market. Never before has something like that happened, and corporations are just recently waking up to it.
IBM thinks it's good to get free, standards-compliant software that runs on their hardware, so they're pushing Linux pretty aggressively. This is partly because no IBM OS has really succeeded since the PC replaced the minicomputer.
Apple thinks it's good to get stable code that has been hazed by people who want to use that code, so they built their new OS around an open-source kernel. This is partly because their OS, designed in the 80s for single-tasking, single-user desktops with no memory protection, was in dire need of an overhaul.
Microsoft thinks it's a disaster that others can give away free what it charges too much for, and that liberated software can pose a serious threat to its licensing agreements. So Microsoft has been attacking Linux as hard as it can without admitting that Linux is even on its radar screens ("Linux? Never heard of it. But NEVER, EVER GO NEAR IT! THE GPL (which we don't think is a threat, by the way) WILL RUIN EVERYTHING!"). This is entirely because Microsoft makes its living selling software to a market it can't really control: Anyone can make software that runs on PC hardware (as Gates himself proved). So Microsoft has no monopoly on their platform, which breeds a certain level of paranoia.
Now Microsoft has changed its tactic. Has Linux changed? Well, it's grown in popularity, partly due to IBM. Has Apple changed? No, Apple is Apple, and shall continue to sell open software on proprietary hardware until it's forced to change. Has IBM changed? Not since it adopted Linux. So Microsoft must have changed for some reason. Why? I'll leave the wild speculation to the editors and my fellow posters.
All we need is for normal people to type "headache, sneezing, aches, tiredness" into a computer and see things like Bubonic Plague, Ebola, Haunta Virus, and other such things.
This much is a simple user interface problem: Make the machine list the common diseases first. We know that the flu is more likely than late-stage anthrax given the same symptoms (once you have flulike symptoms with an anthrax infection, it's probably too late for a will), so make the program put the flu at the top of the list and anthrax someplace above Bavarian Leech Dystemper.
We can, further, program the machine to look at case histories with an eye to statistics: Feed it in x thousand case histories and make it come up with the most common symptom-disease correlations. With that kind of weighting, it'll list the diseases the correct way.
Finally, as another has said, 'A little learning can be a dangerous thing, but no learning is fatal.' It's better to have a computer aid for diagnosis than it is to not have one, and it's better to know about your body than it is to not know.
Speaking of Perl, it's sort of like Larry Wall's postmodern Christianity thing. He doesn't beat Perl coders over the head with Bibles or nothing, but certainly elements of his religion visibly influence his work.
I'm a semi-serious Perl freak and I have no idea what you're talking about. The Church of TMTOWTDI? Acolytes of DWIM? I must be reading the Camel the wrong way, 'cause I haven't found any reference to religion in it (other than the fact that it is a Bible). OTOH, he does call the little informational speils about Perl6 'Apocalypses', but he also releases State of the Onion reports.
So, after having gone this long without knowing if Larry was even religious at all, I'm being told that he's been sneaking his faith into his work by a Slashdotter. So, do you have any evidence? I'm really curious.
So all of a sudden mass-production is back to the level of the late Industrial age with absolutely no automation at all. How nice.
If you could remove the bile ducts from your mouth, you might be able to produce a listenable arugment. If you could remove the blinders from your eyes, you might be able to see mine. Calling me a bubblehead while ignoring the profound changes that have occurred in this century is simply lazy. Ignoring the fact that most 'industrial' jobs bear little resemblence to what was being done in the 19th and early 20th centuries because most of the tedium has been mechanized is simple ignorance, and unexcusable in an age where all of the information you need to craft a good argument is literally at your fingertips.
Fifty years ago, could you have looked up the GNP of Ghana while viewing a live feed of the inside of someone's dorm room? Could you have found five million pages that reference a specific disease in less than a second? Could you possibly have gotten so much information to need anything as complex as google to even hope to sort through it all? No. Simply impossible, all of those things. Such concepts didn't exist in the 1950s, because the 1950s was on the tail end of the Industrial Age. In the 1950s, information was something you hunted for, not filtered through. Finding information meant looking among all of the general-purpose works, unless the information was so important as to merit its own treatment. Getting a deluge of information for relatively narrow topics was not possible.
How times have changed. A google search for 'Perl6', a specific revision of a specific language, gets me 'about 128,000' returns. 128,000 pages is more than ten big dictionaries, 128,000 books is an exceptionally well-stocked library. I now have to filter out all the noise and find the stuff I want. (A search for 'earthquake' gets me 'about '1,690,000', by the way, a number that would give a little over a page to every six people on earth.) Why? Why can I get so much information so quickly? Why could I not have gotten it fifty years ago?
Because in this age, information counts. 'Things,' physical artifacts, have gotten so cheap that they don't drive economies anymore. They have gotten this cheap because production methods have changed radically, removing the need for people to stand in front of machines of steam and steel just to produce the most basic items of commerce. Lang's factories are no longer economically viable because they lack automation and computerization and rely on human drudges. Slavery is not viable for the same reasons.
So telling me I'm living in a dream world while you ignore the facts of life is a rather odd admixture of irritation and amusement to me.
*Somebody* has to be working with heavy machines in order to produce the manufactured goods you use and enjoy. In Lang's vision of the future, employees in a subterranean world beneath the city fulfilled that function. In reality, those of us in the West have just exported our heavy, exploitive, polluting drudgery to the Third World, where despots are more than willing to whip our servants into submission for us. I'd say Lang's vision of the future was fundamentally correct - he just got a few irrelevant details wrong.
And except for the fact that you've completely ignored the point of the post you're responding to, you're fundamentally correct.
Lang's vision of the future is fundamentally Industrial, which means it is based on things: Physical objects, such as oil and gold and wood and iron, are the basic items of commodity. They are the things corporations live and die on. They are the things that the whole infrastructure of nations is built to transport. The Interstate Highway System is the ultimate Industrial infrastructure, because it allows people to move things in a reliable way from any point in the country to another cheaply. That is what Lang saw for the future: More of the same, but bigger.
Now we have made a transition from Stuff to Information. We live in the Information Age, and we now have to move information around efficiently. We have to find or produce information. Corporations live or die on their ability to react to information. J. P. Morgan's steel works could ignore the goings-on of Nihon or Corea or French Indochina because none of those regions were close enough to affect it. These days, dead is the corporation that thinks physical distance has the slightest to do with impact, or that it is safe to ignore whole regions of the globe. The Internet is the new infrastructure, because it allows us to move information around reliably and cheaply.
So, Citizen Kane is a thin character? And the movie that bears that name is simplistic and relies on FX to fill holes? Truly, you do a disservice to all of the great screenplays that have been written.
I've been interested in the GIMP/Photoshop debate for a while now, and I have one question: What does Photoshop have that the GIMP doesn't? Is it just personal preference, or is it something tangible?
Or, maybe to phrase it better, what could the GIMP do to make you drop Photoshop?
Personal insults don't make you sound any smarter. Save it. And besides I thought my comment was rather clever and not "mindless" at all.
Oh, shove it. Of course you would find everything you spew to be pure gold.
OSS is as valid a business model as NT's dominance in the server market. For, we all know, everyone uses Windows NT when they want low-cost stability and security. And we all know that Microsoft would never use unfair tactics to keep Linux out of the desktop market. Oh no, the integrity of OEMs is sacrosanct to Redmond.
And let's flash forward to today when all of those ridiculous-sounding ideas have come true. Does the average slashdotter have one iota of additional respect for Apple? I've yet to see it. Frankly I think Apple could make a completely open source, totally off-the-shelf hardware- based, fit-in-your-pocket, fanless, never-crash, artificial intelligence, world changing computer that also levitated, kept your breath fresh and costs $1.99
and most here would sneer at it still.
Uh, why? If Apple ever manages to get its head out of its ass as far as hardware goes, I'd seriously consider a moderately-priced Macintosh OS as a hobby system. A change of pace from the *nix world, so to speak (although not really with OS X, but it would still be Different). If Apple ever open-sourced everything, they would certainly have my ear (and my money as I bought a Macintosh distro). We need to support our local OSS vendors to prove to the business world that Open Source is a viable business model.
So, do you have some insider information about how I really think? Do you presume to speak for all of Slashdot? Feh.
Parting shot - Libertarians shouldn't use the Internet until they're prepared to discuss how a Libertarian society would have ever created it.
Morons shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet until they're able to discuss things without mindless political jabs.
As a point of fact, the Internet is an example of semi-Libertarianism: Open markets with limited governmental control (and no taxes), near-total freedom of speech (try and count all of the insanely obscene posts Usenet garners in a month), and a decentralized powerbase (nobody controls the Internet, nobody owns it). A Libertarian government may not have created the Internet, but Libertarians sure as hell run it.
Don't be fooled by Falun Gong. They hide behind their sham-of-a-religion to promote an overthrow of the current government.
Thanks for giving me a reason to support the Falun Gong. If it's bad for the PRC, it's good enough for me!
Their leader is a coward and a phony who should be dragged out and shot.
Thanks for giving me a reason to regard you as an imbecile too cowardly to use a nickname when he posts potentially illegal (incitement to a crime, maybe?) bullshit.
Minimal nusiance value... opt-outs work... unsubscribes honored in perpetuity... [whine]why don't you love my 'service'!!![/whine]
I'll tell you why, you absurd little pissant: My email service is set up for my use and my convenience, not yours. You have no right to use it. Period. That means I should not have to clean up your little mess, you snarky freak. It makes not one bung of difference how easy it is to mop up your urine, it's urine just the same and I never asked for it to be dumped on my paid-for service.
It's trivially easy to clean shit off of your house. So easy you could probably do it unsupervised, in fact. But it is not a pleasant job (as your mother well knows, you little feces-flinger), and not one someone would pay to do. Having shit smeared on our walls degrades the value of our homes (as spam degrades the value of our email accounts), which we must constantly pay for (as we must pay for our email service), and it should not be a necessary job (shit-lobbers and spammers are similarly useless, not to mention similarly simian). It matters not that someone is tossing teflon tard-nuggets, the fact remains that the shit shouldn't have been heaved in the first place. Now, if some group was constantly throwing shit at your house would you silently clean it up, accepting it as part of having a house, or would you go after the scat-scatterers with whatever means you could? (We all know what you would do, tiny moron, I'm talking to the general public here.) Would you feel grateful that some of them threw a slightly less putrid putrescence, or would you view them as all the same? Shit, these aren't obscure concepts.
Now, fertilizer friend, are you so interested in defending your manure-spreader you can't see the facts through the feces? I think the Slashdot community knows, plonk pal.
You can strip the Linux kernel down so far it will run on nearly anything, but at some point you have to ask yourself something: Is it still Linux, or is it another OS that shares a little interoperability with Linux?
This question is not as pedantic as it may first seem. Linux, as well as all other UNIX-based OSes, are pre-emptive multitasking OSes with the ability to protect memory and have seperate processes. The kernel itself is built around those assumptions. That requires a certain level of hardware sophistication: An 8086, for example, cannot handle seperate processes or memory protection. There is a port of Linux to the 8086, but the OS is crippled: The kernel itself has been reduced to what the hardware can support. That is, singletasking with no possible way to protect memory. A misbehaved or malicious program (or user) could invade the OS's personal space, as it were, and completely overwrite it, a problem common with DOSes and DOS-based OSes to this day but impossible in a true UNIX-like OS.
Is it Linux? I would be inclined to say no. It might look like Linux to the casual user, it might even run most Linux programs, but at a very fundamental level, it isn't Linux.
Moral of the story? Good OSes need good hardware, and good hardware hasn't always existed. It didn't exist when the IMSAI was developed, so the IMSAI can't run Linux. It could probably run an OS that calls itself Linux but lacks fundamental things due to hardware limitations. Sorry.
No subliminal (Buy Windows XP Home for one soul!) ads (AMD Rocks!) here, (Intel Suxx0rz! Buy AMD!) nosirree (Cowboy NealSoft!) bob (*BSD is alive and well and living in Las Vegas)!
Hemos (Don't get Guidescope!) and CmdrTaco (Drop Junkbuster!) wouldn't (.NET castrates your favorite language for $500!) stoop (Oracle wants your information!) to that level. (Java is superfast! Sun needs money!)
I feel strange fnord. Let's fnord buy some PDAs fnord fnord.
Oh, but Slashdotters can whine loudly. Loudly enough people can take note, loudly enough others will care. If we can bring a site to its knees just by mentioning it (Slashdot Effect/Slashdotted is a dictionary word now), we can effect a pretty loud boycott. And in politics, loud matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, your arguments are rather flaccid. No, we get annoyed when people invade our space with complete and utter nonsense that manages to be offensive as well. There's a difference. And who is insulting people through the shield of defending an 'artist'? Put down the color wheel: You can't make any of us as black as you are.
If someone posted that half-thought-out, irrational, outright wrong blather on Slashdot, the score on the POS would drop to -1 faster than the wintertime temperature in Antarctica. And yet here it is as an article. As a valid contrarian viewpoint.
Hell, why don't we just have the WIPO Troll write the next article? It'll make about as much sense, and be just as offensive.
January 1, 1970 0000 GMT is the standard *nix epoch, so the clock must have been set to zero at the time it spat up that little gem.
The line "Not just run-of-the-mill raping, either - we're talking about triple-penetration rape by demons." is especially good and, I suppose, marks this as satire instead of flamebait.
At the risk of being taken as a whooshee, it's spelled 'disgusting'. I'm anal about spelling.
Then, once he has a foothold, you can point him towards the various Internet resources (and Google, if he doesn't know if it yet) and the rather extensive documentation that ships with the OS. That's a second step towards self-sufficiency, and a cheap way to stay up-to-date.
IBM thinks it's good to get free, standards-compliant software that runs on their hardware, so they're pushing Linux pretty aggressively. This is partly because no IBM OS has really succeeded since the PC replaced the minicomputer.
Apple thinks it's good to get stable code that has been hazed by people who want to use that code, so they built their new OS around an open-source kernel. This is partly because their OS, designed in the 80s for single-tasking, single-user desktops with no memory protection, was in dire need of an overhaul.
Microsoft thinks it's a disaster that others can give away free what it charges too much for, and that liberated software can pose a serious threat to its licensing agreements. So Microsoft has been attacking Linux as hard as it can without admitting that Linux is even on its radar screens ("Linux? Never heard of it. But NEVER, EVER GO NEAR IT! THE GPL (which we don't think is a threat, by the way) WILL RUIN EVERYTHING!"). This is entirely because Microsoft makes its living selling software to a market it can't really control: Anyone can make software that runs on PC hardware (as Gates himself proved). So Microsoft has no monopoly on their platform, which breeds a certain level of paranoia.
Now Microsoft has changed its tactic. Has Linux changed? Well, it's grown in popularity, partly due to IBM. Has Apple changed? No, Apple is Apple, and shall continue to sell open software on proprietary hardware until it's forced to change. Has IBM changed? Not since it adopted Linux. So Microsoft must have changed for some reason. Why? I'll leave the wild speculation to the editors and my fellow posters.
How much functional hardware can YOU stick in your head? None? Well then 160GB is pretty damn impressive.
Well, I still have more than 160 gigs worth of Star Trek trivia and pr0n in my skull. Johnny was a wussy!
All we need is for normal people to type "headache, sneezing, aches, tiredness" into a computer and see things like Bubonic Plague, Ebola, Haunta Virus, and other such things.
This much is a simple user interface problem: Make the machine list the common diseases first. We know that the flu is more likely than late-stage anthrax given the same symptoms (once you have flulike symptoms with an anthrax infection, it's probably too late for a will), so make the program put the flu at the top of the list and anthrax someplace above Bavarian Leech Dystemper.
We can, further, program the machine to look at case histories with an eye to statistics: Feed it in x thousand case histories and make it come up with the most common symptom-disease correlations. With that kind of weighting, it'll list the diseases the correct way.
Finally, as another has said, 'A little learning can be a dangerous thing, but no learning is fatal.' It's better to have a computer aid for diagnosis than it is to not have one, and it's better to know about your body than it is to not know.
Speaking of Perl, it's sort of like Larry Wall's postmodern Christianity thing. He doesn't beat Perl coders over the head with Bibles or nothing, but certainly elements of his religion visibly influence his work.
I'm a semi-serious Perl freak and I have no idea what you're talking about. The Church of TMTOWTDI? Acolytes of DWIM? I must be reading the Camel the wrong way, 'cause I haven't found any reference to religion in it (other than the fact that it is a Bible). OTOH, he does call the little informational speils about Perl6 'Apocalypses', but he also releases State of the Onion reports.
So, after having gone this long without knowing if Larry was even religious at all, I'm being told that he's been sneaking his faith into his work by a Slashdotter. So, do you have any evidence? I'm really curious.
So all of a sudden mass-production is back to the level of the late Industrial age with absolutely no automation at all. How nice.
If you could remove the bile ducts from your mouth, you might be able to produce a listenable arugment. If you could remove the blinders from your eyes, you might be able to see mine. Calling me a bubblehead while ignoring the profound changes that have occurred in this century is simply lazy. Ignoring the fact that most 'industrial' jobs bear little resemblence to what was being done in the 19th and early 20th centuries because most of the tedium has been mechanized is simple ignorance, and unexcusable in an age where all of the information you need to craft a good argument is literally at your fingertips.
Fifty years ago, could you have looked up the GNP of Ghana while viewing a live feed of the inside of someone's dorm room? Could you have found five million pages that reference a specific disease in less than a second? Could you possibly have gotten so much information to need anything as complex as google to even hope to sort through it all? No. Simply impossible, all of those things. Such concepts didn't exist in the 1950s, because the 1950s was on the tail end of the Industrial Age. In the 1950s, information was something you hunted for, not filtered through. Finding information meant looking among all of the general-purpose works, unless the information was so important as to merit its own treatment. Getting a deluge of information for relatively narrow topics was not possible.
How times have changed. A google search for 'Perl6', a specific revision of a specific language, gets me 'about 128,000' returns. 128,000 pages is more than ten big dictionaries, 128,000 books is an exceptionally well-stocked library. I now have to filter out all the noise and find the stuff I want. (A search for 'earthquake' gets me 'about '1,690,000', by the way, a number that would give a little over a page to every six people on earth.) Why? Why can I get so much information so quickly? Why could I not have gotten it fifty years ago?
Because in this age, information counts. 'Things,' physical artifacts, have gotten so cheap that they don't drive economies anymore. They have gotten this cheap because production methods have changed radically, removing the need for people to stand in front of machines of steam and steel just to produce the most basic items of commerce. Lang's factories are no longer economically viable because they lack automation and computerization and rely on human drudges. Slavery is not viable for the same reasons.
So telling me I'm living in a dream world while you ignore the facts of life is a rather odd admixture of irritation and amusement to me.
*Somebody* has to be working with heavy machines in order to produce the manufactured goods you use and enjoy. In Lang's vision of the future, employees in a subterranean world beneath the city fulfilled that function. In reality, those of us in the West have just exported our heavy, exploitive, polluting drudgery to the Third World, where despots are more than willing to whip our servants into submission for us. I'd say Lang's vision of the future was fundamentally correct - he just got a few irrelevant details wrong.
And except for the fact that you've completely ignored the point of the post you're responding to, you're fundamentally correct.
Lang's vision of the future is fundamentally Industrial, which means it is based on things: Physical objects, such as oil and gold and wood and iron, are the basic items of commodity. They are the things corporations live and die on. They are the things that the whole infrastructure of nations is built to transport. The Interstate Highway System is the ultimate Industrial infrastructure, because it allows people to move things in a reliable way from any point in the country to another cheaply. That is what Lang saw for the future: More of the same, but bigger.
Now we have made a transition from Stuff to Information. We live in the Information Age, and we now have to move information around efficiently. We have to find or produce information. Corporations live or die on their ability to react to information. J. P. Morgan's steel works could ignore the goings-on of Nihon or Corea or French Indochina because none of those regions were close enough to affect it. These days, dead is the corporation that thinks physical distance has the slightest to do with impact, or that it is safe to ignore whole regions of the globe. The Internet is the new infrastructure, because it allows us to move information around reliably and cheaply.
Mittler zwischen Hirn und Hand muss das Herz sein.
Intermediary between brain and hand must be the heart.
From Dictionary.com's translation service.
So, Citizen Kane is a thin character? And the movie that bears that name is simplistic and relies on FX to fill holes? Truly, you do a disservice to all of the great screenplays that have been written.
I've been interested in the GIMP/Photoshop debate for a while now, and I have one question: What does Photoshop have that the GIMP doesn't? Is it just personal preference, or is it something tangible?
Or, maybe to phrase it better, what could the GIMP do to make you drop Photoshop?
OSS is as valid a business model as NT's dominance in the server market. For, we all know, everyone uses Windows NT when they want low-cost stability and security. And we all know that Microsoft would never use unfair tactics to keep Linux out of the desktop market. Oh no, the integrity of OEMs is sacrosanct to Redmond.
You don't have a leg to stand on, little man.
So, do you have some insider information about how I really think? Do you presume to speak for all of Slashdot? Feh. Morons shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet until they're able to discuss things without mindless political jabs.
As a point of fact, the Internet is an example of semi-Libertarianism: Open markets with limited governmental control (and no taxes), near-total freedom of speech (try and count all of the insanely obscene posts Usenet garners in a month), and a decentralized powerbase (nobody controls the Internet, nobody owns it). A Libertarian government may not have created the Internet, but Libertarians sure as hell run it.
It's trivially easy to clean shit off of your house. So easy you could probably do it unsupervised, in fact. But it is not a pleasant job (as your mother well knows, you little feces-flinger), and not one someone would pay to do. Having shit smeared on our walls degrades the value of our homes (as spam degrades the value of our email accounts), which we must constantly pay for (as we must pay for our email service), and it should not be a necessary job (shit-lobbers and spammers are similarly useless, not to mention similarly simian). It matters not that someone is tossing teflon tard-nuggets, the fact remains that the shit shouldn't have been heaved in the first place. Now, if some group was constantly throwing shit at your house would you silently clean it up, accepting it as part of having a house, or would you go after the scat-scatterers with whatever means you could? (We all know what you would do, tiny moron, I'm talking to the general public here.) Would you feel grateful that some of them threw a slightly less putrid putrescence, or would you view them as all the same? Shit, these aren't obscure concepts.
Now, fertilizer friend, are you so interested in defending your manure-spreader you can't see the facts through the feces? I think the Slashdot community knows, plonk pal.
You can strip the Linux kernel down so far it will run on nearly anything, but at some point you have to ask yourself something: Is it still Linux, or is it another OS that shares a little interoperability with Linux?
This question is not as pedantic as it may first seem. Linux, as well as all other UNIX-based OSes, are pre-emptive multitasking OSes with the ability to protect memory and have seperate processes. The kernel itself is built around those assumptions. That requires a certain level of hardware sophistication: An 8086, for example, cannot handle seperate processes or memory protection. There is a port of Linux to the 8086, but the OS is crippled: The kernel itself has been reduced to what the hardware can support. That is, singletasking with no possible way to protect memory. A misbehaved or malicious program (or user) could invade the OS's personal space, as it were, and completely overwrite it, a problem common with DOSes and DOS-based OSes to this day but impossible in a true UNIX-like OS.
Is it Linux? I would be inclined to say no. It might look like Linux to the casual user, it might even run most Linux programs, but at a very fundamental level, it isn't Linux.
Moral of the story? Good OSes need good hardware, and good hardware hasn't always existed. It didn't exist when the IMSAI was developed, so the IMSAI can't run Linux. It could probably run an OS that calls itself Linux but lacks fundamental things due to hardware limitations. Sorry.
My Source: They're running into these very issues trying to port Linux to the IBM AS/400.
No subliminal (Buy Windows XP Home for one soul!) ads (AMD Rocks!) here, (Intel Suxx0rz! Buy AMD!) nosirree (Cowboy NealSoft!) bob (*BSD is alive and well and living in Las Vegas)!
Hemos (Don't get Guidescope!) and CmdrTaco (Drop Junkbuster!) wouldn't (.NET castrates your favorite language for $500!) stoop (Oracle wants your information!) to that level. (Java is superfast! Sun needs money!)
I feel strange fnord. Let's fnord buy some PDAs fnord fnord.
Hmmm...
;-)
Crappy, derivative game made by a corporation with questionable morals = $60 - $80.
Red Hat Linux 7.1 = $50 or less with a huge 'Learning Linux'-type book.
I wonder which is the better deal...
Oh, but Slashdotters can whine loudly. Loudly enough people can take note, loudly enough others will care. If we can bring a site to its knees just by mentioning it (Slashdot Effect/Slashdotted is a dictionary word now), we can effect a pretty loud boycott. And in politics, loud matters.