The news is somebody worrying about the redhat EULA and taking their interpretation to FSF for an opinion.
Agreed. Plus for folks like me -- someone who uses Debian and not Red Hat -- I was shocked to learn that Red Hat would be doing audits on anyone. I mean, isn't that a huge reason people want to use Linux in the first place?
Great point. And, seriously, that's one reason why my wife and I decided to get rid of our TV when we move.
But no matter how dedicated a fan you might be, there's always the reality of life -- sometimes it's just far more convenient to watch something on TV.
It always amazes me, having paid to watch NBA games (and it's the same with other pro sports) in several different cities, I have yet to attend one with the excitement and electric atmosphere that you find in a typical high school basketball game.
I know that's blasphemy; the fact that I can pay $3 to get into my high school's game in no way compares with the "pleasure" of paying $50 to go to an NBA game. Since money measures all things in our society, I guess I'm just a bad citizen -- err, I mean consumer.
I wouldn't count on that dead idea. As long as there's a market, someone will come up with a $50 converter to dumb the HDTV signals down to NTSC -- and so that old TV can still be used for many, many years.
It'll be a "conspicuous consumption"/keep-up-with-the-Jones idea that will ultimately kill off the NTSC TVs.
What I wonder is this: Why can't I watch my local high school or local college's sports teams on TV? Why can't I watch the town meeting/local gov't on TV? (Yes, I know about public access cable, but that isn't available where I live.)
We have all sorts of TV, but all of it is controlled by large corporations, and all of it is funded by large corporations. It stands to reason that we're going to get biases from those controlling powers in our media.
The FCC is looking at the picture all wrong. They assume that there's something to watch on TV and that people are satisfied with it.
I, and most of my friends, are in now way satisfied with TV. I'm in the process of moving and my semi-new (only several-months old) 27" TV won't make the move -- I'm dumping it.
If the FCC wants to do something, why not open things up for hobbyists, citizen groups, NGOs, and non-multi-national corporations?
When my local high school and college both have AV departments, it amazes me that I cannot watch their sports games or cultural events on my TV. Instead, I get homogenized crap fed to me by large, out-of-touch media monopolies.
He's clearly in violation of ALL 14 security measures, isn't he?
Not that I'm aware of. Could you point out the Iraqi violations that have been proven? After months, the weapons inspectors only identified one missle type that would go 10 or so miles further than it was supposed to go.
Here's the propaganda aspect of US news reporting -- muddy things up so bad that most people can't sort it out and they'll buy the "official" line.
There is no evidence that Iraq has fired SCUDs in Gulf War 2. Some news outlets have said they fired SCUDs, but most reworded it after learning they weren't SCUDs that landed in Kuwait.
Iraq has many types of crude missles. The Al Samoud is perfectly legal. The Al Samoud II uses a Russian anti-aircraft missle rocket motor which gives it a bit more range and Hans Blix said that missle was illegal, and thus the Iraqis were destroying Al Samoud IIs when the US launched its attack.
The Iraqis have FROG missles (and derivatives) which are again, perfectly legal under the cease fire agreement.
The missles shot into Kuwait early in the war were Al Samoud Is, FROGs, and a crude cruise missle. None of those are banned.
But at this point it's pretty moot. It's generally agreed that the US war is illegal. Kofi Annan, the head of the UN, says it violates the UN Charter. The US says we don't need any UN authorization to back the war, and claims existing resolutions can justify the war.
But again, everyone from Kofi Annan to the Pope says its an illegal, immoral war, and the US actions of trying to arm-twist a security council resolution authorizing force would seem to blatantly indicate that the US also thought they needed a resolution to launch the war.
If the US war on Iraq is illegal -- which a majority of the world and UN security council seems to think -- then Iraq is perfectly justified in using any weapon it wants to fight off the aggressors.
The whole of your argument becomes: "Do you trust Bush or Saddam more?" I think that there's only one sensical(sp?) answer.
Correct, to me the only sensical answer is "neither."
I've personally witnessed Bush go on TV and tell lie after lie. (A "small lie" was him repeatedly saying the weapons inspectors were "kicked out" of Iraq under Clinton, when in reality they were pulled out by the UN on the eve of US cruise missile attacks by Clinton.)
I'm no Clinton fan -- to me he was an adulterous liar -- but at least when Clinton lied to the American people it was about a personal affair he had with a girl half his age.
George Bush lies about matters of policy and life/death/war. He assumed the presidency on a lie -- his brother rigging the vote in Florida. And now while in office he's told some huge lies -- he's in a whole other league compared to Clinton.
I'm sure Saddam Hussein has told his share of whoppers too (but I don't speak Arabic). But to me, the only reasonable answer is, as I said, "neither."
Oh, I agree with you -- the US in no way has the moral high ground. But you can't break people's bubbles too quickly.
If you start citing things like that the US invaded the USSR but the USSR never invaded the US, or that the CIA provided assassination lists to kill roughly 3/4 of a million Indonesians during the mid-60s -- and all of the other related atrocities committed by the US government in the name of "freedom" -- I've found that you will quickly overload people's circuitry and they just snap off. Sad, but true.
To further your reading, try some of BU history prof Howard Zinn's books, the _People's History of the US_ or his _The 20th Century_. To me, those should be required reading in public schools, but unfortunately (he says saying it as a former public high school history teacher), a teacher would likely be fired for using such books, at least in most schools.
It's depressing that there's documented proof from our own government of its terrorist actions. What's worse is nobody seems to care.
I agree. What just sickens me is the US history of medical experiments on unsuspecting civilians. I mean, we use the Nazi "Dr." Mengele as a stereotype of evil.
Yet the US has its own similar doctors who have conducted horrific experiments (e.g. injecting pregnant black women with radioactive material and then scheduling more appointments for them so you can watch the unborn child mutate and abort and the mother become sicker!) and those doctors freely walk the streets!:-(
Killing enemies who would otherwise kill you is the norm in EVERY country.
True, but I always thought that the US treated people (especially our own citizens!) as innocent until proven guilty. Blowing up people half a world away based on "intelligence" is simply murder. We're supposed to be a democratic republic; we're supposed to respect the rule of law and hold ourselves to a higher standard than a run-of-the-mill dictatorship. One can argue this is no longer true.
1. What kind of torture? 2. You know this, HOW?
Check out this week's print version of The Nation magazine. It has a front-cover story, "In Torture We Trust," about how the US routinely engages in torture now, with lots of juicy quotes from various officials.
Considering that George Bush has gone so far as to joke about torture in a news conference, this should be no surprise. But seriously, read that Nation article if you're truly interested.
How about grinding people up in plastic shredders?
At no time have I ever expressed any sympathy for Saddam Hussein's regime. On the other hand, many members of the Bush administrations have supported Iraq, have used our tax dollars to guarantee loans for billions of dollars to Hussein's regime, have sold weapons to Iraq, have had business dealings with Iraq, have shaken hands with Saddam Hussein and smiled at cameras with him thereby legitimizing his rule.
Given your opposition to torture and dictatorship, I suppose that means that you are opposed to any politician which supported and supports brutality and dictatorship, correct? If not, what rationalization did you use to clear your conscience?
Why the hell is it that when you documented proof of torture and murder of innocent civilians nobody believes or care
Are you talking about the US gov't jailing thousands of innocent Muslim people as suspected terrorists, blowing up cars full of "suspects" (including an American citizen) by remote control, and torturing Al Queda members that they've caught?
Back when the US didn't do such things, you may have had a point. Now the US has no claim to the moral high ground.
This is an interesting aspect that no corporate media outlet dares comment on.
What if the US invasion uncovers no weapons of mass destruction? That would mean that Bush's entire line of logic for the invasion is a big lie.
Of course, the US administration would quickly manufacturer some "evidence" -- and hopefully it would be a better forgery than the "Iraq is trying to buy African uranium" lies that the weapons inspectors refuted. In such a case, the rest of the world would see the truth, but the US media I'm sure would cover it up quickly as a non-story.
If you were Hussein, wouldn't you use your WMD early in the war, just in a case of "use it or lose it"?
Oh no, it's probably those sneaky Iraqi bastards -- they're hiding their WMD just to get political propaganda mileage out of the war...:-(
However, if the attack is an immoral, illegal war -- which everyone from Kofi Annan to the Pope says it is -- isn't "supporting the troops" akin to helping a murderer feel good about killing people?
I mean, capitalism's worship of profits would never mean tossing people out on the street in search of a lower-paid employee, right?! (Especially an evil foreigner!)
And even if it did -- that cannot happen to college-educated professionals! That sort of stuff only happens to eighth-grade-educated blue-collar manufacturing workers, right?!
Say it isn't so...
And the US is invading Iraq because of the rock-solid connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda's terrorism, and our heartbreaking concern of the human rights of the Iraqi people too!
But diamonds are a plentiful commodity in the earth's crust.
It's an effective cartel -- DeBeers -- which creates the impression that diamonds are scarce, that you need to give one to your fiance to show your love, and that second-hand-diamonds and artificially produced diamonds are an insult instead of a "gem."
Why do we need electric cars anyway? They may have been needed in the mid-90s, when GM first came out with the EV1. But now, we don't need to worry about advanced technologies like electric or combo gas/electric cars!
With the invasion of Iraq we'll be able to drive our huge gas-guzzeling SUVs all we want! And if we put our SUVs into 4WD, we might be able to make it over the mounds of dead Iraqis and GIs which will be killed in George's war...
I remember playing GalCiv way back in the OS/2 days. It was a pretty cool game.
But this is 2003 -- are they going to come out with a Linux version?
If not, then why do I care? Should I have to go out and buy Windows XP to play a game? (Sorry, I can't run Windows for legal/ethical reasons.) Should I have to dumb down my Linux box by buying a commercial WINE variant that seems little more than a big kludge?
It's got to be native Linux binaries or nothing...
We're really not that far off. But a few key hurdles remain.
Packaging: RPM simply sucks. Debian's apt-get handles dependencies, but there needs to be a hard and fast rule that any generic package will install on any Linux distro -- we can't expect users to hunt down packages specific to their distro (nor can we expect developers to create several package types). Until this is overcome Linux will never be ready for prime time.
Hardware: Huge strides have been made towards supporting various devices, but there's still more to be done. Having one sane, standard package format would actually encourage hardware manufacturers to do support.
More standardization: How come all Linux word processors don't use a standard XML file format?! This could be fixed with the next compile/release of AbiWord, KWord, etc. but it is not done. How come there isn't a common CUA standard (yes, progress is being made, but it's being made slowly)?
We've got our strong points too. I've been playing with KDE 3.1 and it simply rocks. KDE 3.1 is ready for a Windows end user -- it's that slick, that easy, and it still has the bells, whistles and config power to keep me happy. I'd say the desktop is ready -- it may need a big of polish and a good selection of nifty themes, but it's ready.
What's this?! They want to just break even instead of screwing their customers as hard as they can? Isn't that against the law in the US?
Re:Don't make anything out of it.
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Lest anyone be accusing Red Hat of animosity towards KDE, note that RH's kernels are also behind the latest releases from Linus, and yet nobody... well, nobody worth listening to -- claims that RH has it in for Mr. Torvalds' little project.
Bad example -- there's no alternative kernel in Red Hat. Let me bring it more in line with the KDE/GNOME feud:
Let's suppose that Red Hat started shipping a BSD kernel. Let's say they modified all the GNU software so that BSD and Linux would be similar. Let's say that Red Hat says to its customers, "Hey, you get the best of both worlds -- you can choose BSD or Linux, we favor neither." And let's say that in the process that broke a few minor things in the Linux kernel. Now remember that Red Hat has a ton of BSD developers on staff, and that the last Linux kernel hacker, Alan Cox, quit Red Hat in a snit griping about incompatabilities and lobotomizing Linux.
Would you then say that Red Hat would be biased towards BSD? Or would you take the issue that they're simply trying to bring unity to the two *nix kernels?
He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this - it is after all a valid patent, and that what is needed now is prior art.
But SBC is the villan. Who cares if they have a patent or not?!
If the some Nazi benefitted off from the murder of a few million Jews -- can he be faulted? After all, that Nazi had the law on his side! (/. tip: Always bring up Nazis to prove your point -- it works wonders.)
Morality is based on the Golden Rule. SBC's actions fail this. They used an overworked, clueless patent office to get a patent on a common, obvious process. And now they're attempting to profit from it by picking on a little guy. They not be villans under the laws of capitalism, but that doesn't mean they're not villans.
Democracy my arse, we're [the UK] the 52nd friggin state buddy - what with Bush and his lapdog Blair...
Sorry, the UK is not the 52nd state. I know that because your health care is too cheap compared to the US, and your people live longer than Americans and have lower infant mortality rates.
Instead, the US has just purchased your foreign policy...the toy poodle (Blair) was just thrown in with the purchase.
Actually, we're fuming about the fact that Gore won the popular AND electoral vote, and Bush had his daddy lean on the Supreme Court Justices who owed him political favors to convince them to overturn the will of the voters in Flordia.
Shhh! Shhhh! You're not supposed to talk about that! We're supposed to pretend that we're a happy democratic republic and that George Bush was really elected fair-and-square.
And before you mention it -- just to give you a reminder -- you're not supposed to talk about the fact that Richard Nixon and Ronny Raygun also successfully rigged US elections either. Shhh!
The founders of the United States never intended for the U.S. to be a democracy.
Quite true. And if one reads the background information on the Constitution, specifically, the Federalist Papers where the authors of the Constitution argued over many illuminating theoretical points of the then-proposed government, you'll see that many of our system's policies and procedures (e.g. the difficulty in making amendments, the fact that senators are elected in 1/3s over 6 years) were specifically designed to stop, make difficult, or thwart the democratic will of the people from being realized.
It will also become clear from this background reading that the original intent of the Constitution was never to really represent people, it was instead to represent the states. Most of the democratic tendencies that we have now in our government (e.g. that the people directly elect senators) are the results of decades of struggle by the citizenry to make our government more democratic.
Is the current president in the whitehouse thanks solely to his own abilities and merits?
He doesn't have to be. Merits, abilities, and votes have not much to do with being president.
To be president without being elected you just need to be: (A) a Republican -- I don't know of any instances where the Democrat party rigged national elections; (B) Have views which are fully in sync with Corporate America, the "fine folks" who fund our elections; and (C) be not so objectionable that you rally the populace against the sham our "democratic" system is at the national level.
GNU/Linux systems do have uninstall routines -- and they work quite well in removing packages.
I don't buy your point. It also fails the Windows comparison test -- do these companies create custom installs for Windows? No, they do a generic one. That's all what GNU/Linux people are asking for.
What people want is a GNU/Linux install with a kernel that supports the devices in the machine. That's what the manufacturer should do if they want to claim Linux support.
Supporting multiple distros is a no-brainer: Create a bare-bones install for each supported distro, include the CDs so that users can add other packages that they want to add, and it's done. Supporting 4 or 5 distros would take one person a week per distro per machine model (that's being generous) to set up the base install. After that's done, it's just a matter of blowing it down to the machine -- an automated procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
The news is somebody worrying about the redhat EULA and taking their interpretation to FSF for an opinion.
Agreed. Plus for folks like me -- someone who uses Debian and not Red Hat -- I was shocked to learn that Red Hat would be doing audits on anyone. I mean, isn't that a huge reason people want to use Linux in the first place?
Great point. And, seriously, that's one reason why my wife and I decided to get rid of our TV when we move.
But no matter how dedicated a fan you might be, there's always the reality of life -- sometimes it's just far more convenient to watch something on TV.
It always amazes me, having paid to watch NBA games (and it's the same with other pro sports) in several different cities, I have yet to attend one with the excitement and electric atmosphere that you find in a typical high school basketball game.
I know that's blasphemy; the fact that I can pay $3 to get into my high school's game in no way compares with the "pleasure" of paying $50 to go to an NBA game. Since money measures all things in our society, I guess I'm just a bad citizen -- err, I mean consumer.
I wouldn't count on that dead idea. As long as there's a market, someone will come up with a $50 converter to dumb the HDTV signals down to NTSC -- and so that old TV can still be used for many, many years.
It'll be a "conspicuous consumption"/keep-up-with-the-Jones idea that will ultimately kill off the NTSC TVs.
What I wonder is this: Why can't I watch my local high school or local college's sports teams on TV? Why can't I watch the town meeting/local gov't on TV? (Yes, I know about public access cable, but that isn't available where I live.)
We have all sorts of TV, but all of it is controlled by large corporations, and all of it is funded by large corporations. It stands to reason that we're going to get biases from those controlling powers in our media.
The FCC is looking at the picture all wrong. They assume that there's something to watch on TV and that people are satisfied with it.
I, and most of my friends, are in now way satisfied with TV. I'm in the process of moving and my semi-new (only several-months old) 27" TV won't make the move -- I'm dumping it.
If the FCC wants to do something, why not open things up for hobbyists, citizen groups, NGOs, and non-multi-national corporations?
When my local high school and college both have AV departments, it amazes me that I cannot watch their sports games or cultural events on my TV. Instead, I get homogenized crap fed to me by large, out-of-touch media monopolies.
Am I the only one that feels this way?
He's clearly in violation of ALL 14 security measures, isn't he?
Not that I'm aware of. Could you point out the Iraqi violations that have been proven? After months, the weapons inspectors only identified one missle type that would go 10 or so miles further than it was supposed to go.
Here's the propaganda aspect of US news reporting -- muddy things up so bad that most people can't sort it out and they'll buy the "official" line.
There is no evidence that Iraq has fired SCUDs in Gulf War 2. Some news outlets have said they fired SCUDs, but most reworded it after learning they weren't SCUDs that landed in Kuwait.
Iraq has many types of crude missles. The Al Samoud is perfectly legal. The Al Samoud II uses a Russian anti-aircraft missle rocket motor which gives it a bit more range and Hans Blix said that missle was illegal, and thus the Iraqis were destroying Al Samoud IIs when the US launched its attack.
The Iraqis have FROG missles (and derivatives) which are again, perfectly legal under the cease fire agreement.
The missles shot into Kuwait early in the war were Al Samoud Is, FROGs, and a crude cruise missle. None of those are banned.
But at this point it's pretty moot. It's generally agreed that the US war is illegal. Kofi Annan, the head of the UN, says it violates the UN Charter. The US says we don't need any UN authorization to back the war, and claims existing resolutions can justify the war.
But again, everyone from Kofi Annan to the Pope says its an illegal, immoral war, and the US actions of trying to arm-twist a security council resolution authorizing force would seem to blatantly indicate that the US also thought they needed a resolution to launch the war.
If the US war on Iraq is illegal -- which a majority of the world and UN security council seems to think -- then Iraq is perfectly justified in using any weapon it wants to fight off the aggressors.
The whole of your argument becomes: "Do you trust Bush or Saddam more?" I think that there's only one sensical(sp?) answer.
Correct, to me the only sensical answer is "neither."
I've personally witnessed Bush go on TV and tell lie after lie. (A "small lie" was him repeatedly saying the weapons inspectors were "kicked out" of Iraq under Clinton, when in reality they were pulled out by the UN on the eve of US cruise missile attacks by Clinton.)
I'm no Clinton fan -- to me he was an adulterous liar -- but at least when Clinton lied to the American people it was about a personal affair he had with a girl half his age.
George Bush lies about matters of policy and life/death/war. He assumed the presidency on a lie -- his brother rigging the vote in Florida. And now while in office he's told some huge lies -- he's in a whole other league compared to Clinton.
I'm sure Saddam Hussein has told his share of whoppers too (but I don't speak Arabic). But to me, the only reasonable answer is, as I said, "neither."
Oh, I agree with you -- the US in no way has the moral high ground. But you can't break people's bubbles too quickly.
:-(
If you start citing things like that the US invaded the USSR but the USSR never invaded the US, or that the CIA provided assassination lists to kill roughly 3/4 of a million Indonesians during the mid-60s -- and all of the other related atrocities committed by the US government in the name of "freedom" -- I've found that you will quickly overload people's circuitry and they just snap off. Sad, but true.
To further your reading, try some of BU history prof Howard Zinn's books, the _People's History of the US_ or his _The 20th Century_. To me, those should be required reading in public schools, but unfortunately (he says saying it as a former public high school history teacher), a teacher would likely be fired for using such books, at least in most schools.
It's depressing that there's documented proof from our own government of its terrorist actions. What's worse is nobody seems to care.
I agree. What just sickens me is the US history of medical experiments on unsuspecting civilians. I mean, we use the Nazi "Dr." Mengele as a stereotype of evil.
Yet the US has its own similar doctors who have conducted horrific experiments (e.g. injecting pregnant black women with radioactive material and then scheduling more appointments for them so you can watch the unborn child mutate and abort and the mother become sicker!) and those doctors freely walk the streets!
Killing enemies who would otherwise kill you is the norm in EVERY country.
True, but I always thought that the US treated people (especially our own citizens!) as innocent until proven guilty. Blowing up people half a world away based on "intelligence" is simply murder. We're supposed to be a democratic republic; we're supposed to respect the rule of law and hold ourselves to a higher standard than a run-of-the-mill dictatorship. One can argue this is no longer true.
1. What kind of torture? 2. You know this, HOW?
Check out this week's print version of The Nation magazine. It has a front-cover story, "In Torture We Trust," about how the US routinely engages in torture now, with lots of juicy quotes from various officials.
Considering that George Bush has gone so far as to joke about torture in a news conference, this should be no surprise. But seriously, read that Nation article if you're truly interested.
How about grinding people up in plastic shredders?
At no time have I ever expressed any sympathy for Saddam Hussein's regime. On the other hand, many members of the Bush administrations have supported Iraq, have used our tax dollars to guarantee loans for billions of dollars to Hussein's regime, have sold weapons to Iraq, have had business dealings with Iraq, have shaken hands with Saddam Hussein and smiled at cameras with him thereby legitimizing his rule.
Given your opposition to torture and dictatorship, I suppose that means that you are opposed to any politician which supported and supports brutality and dictatorship, correct? If not, what rationalization did you use to clear your conscience?
Why the hell is it that when you documented proof of torture and murder of innocent civilians nobody believes or care
Are you talking about the US gov't jailing thousands of innocent Muslim people as suspected terrorists, blowing up cars full of "suspects" (including an American citizen) by remote control, and torturing Al Queda members that they've caught?
Back when the US didn't do such things, you may have had a point. Now the US has no claim to the moral high ground.
This is an interesting aspect that no corporate media outlet dares comment on.
:-(
What if the US invasion uncovers no weapons of mass destruction? That would mean that Bush's entire line of logic for the invasion is a big lie.
Of course, the US administration would quickly manufacturer some "evidence" -- and hopefully it would be a better forgery than the "Iraq is trying to buy African uranium" lies that the weapons inspectors refuted. In such a case, the rest of the world would see the truth, but the US media I'm sure would cover it up quickly as a non-story.
If you were Hussein, wouldn't you use your WMD early in the war, just in a case of "use it or lose it"?
Oh no, it's probably those sneaky Iraqi bastards -- they're hiding their WMD just to get political propaganda mileage out of the war...
However, if the attack is an immoral, illegal war -- which everyone from Kofi Annan to the Pope says it is -- isn't "supporting the troops" akin to helping a murderer feel good about killing people?
I mean, capitalism's worship of profits would never mean tossing people out on the street in search of a lower-paid employee, right?! (Especially an evil foreigner!)
And even if it did -- that cannot happen to college-educated professionals! That sort of stuff only happens to eighth-grade-educated blue-collar manufacturing workers, right?!
Say it isn't so...
And the US is invading Iraq because of the rock-solid connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda's terrorism, and our heartbreaking concern of the human rights of the Iraqi people too!
But diamonds are a plentiful commodity in the earth's crust.
It's an effective cartel -- DeBeers -- which creates the impression that diamonds are scarce, that you need to give one to your fiance to show your love, and that second-hand-diamonds and artificially produced diamonds are an insult instead of a "gem."
Why do we need electric cars anyway? They may have been needed in the mid-90s, when GM first came out with the EV1. But now, we don't need to worry about advanced technologies like electric or combo gas/electric cars!
With the invasion of Iraq we'll be able to drive our huge gas-guzzeling SUVs all we want! And if we put our SUVs into 4WD, we might be able to make it over the mounds of dead Iraqis and GIs which will be killed in George's war...
I remember playing GalCiv way back in the OS/2 days. It was a pretty cool game.
But this is 2003 -- are they going to come out with a Linux version?
If not, then why do I care? Should I have to go out and buy Windows XP to play a game? (Sorry, I can't run Windows for legal/ethical reasons.) Should I have to dumb down my Linux box by buying a commercial WINE variant that seems little more than a big kludge?
It's got to be native Linux binaries or nothing...
Packaging: RPM simply sucks. Debian's apt-get handles dependencies, but there needs to be a hard and fast rule that any generic package will install on any Linux distro -- we can't expect users to hunt down packages specific to their distro (nor can we expect developers to create several package types). Until this is overcome Linux will never be ready for prime time.
Hardware: Huge strides have been made towards supporting various devices, but there's still more to be done. Having one sane, standard package format would actually encourage hardware manufacturers to do support.
More standardization: How come all Linux word processors don't use a standard XML file format?! This could be fixed with the next compile/release of AbiWord, KWord, etc. but it is not done. How come there isn't a common CUA standard (yes, progress is being made, but it's being made slowly)?
We've got our strong points too. I've been playing with KDE 3.1 and it simply rocks. KDE 3.1 is ready for a Windows end user -- it's that slick, that easy, and it still has the bells, whistles and config power to keep me happy. I'd say the desktop is ready -- it may need a big of polish and a good selection of nifty themes, but it's ready.
It's those other items that are creating drag...
What's this?! They want to just break even instead of screwing their customers as hard as they can? Isn't that against the law in the US?
Lest anyone be accusing Red Hat of animosity towards KDE, note that RH's kernels are also behind the latest releases from Linus, and yet nobody ... well, nobody worth listening to -- claims that RH has it in for Mr. Torvalds' little project.
Bad example -- there's no alternative kernel in Red Hat. Let me bring it more in line with the KDE/GNOME feud:
Let's suppose that Red Hat started shipping a BSD kernel. Let's say they modified all the GNU software so that BSD and Linux would be similar. Let's say that Red Hat says to its customers, "Hey, you get the best of both worlds -- you can choose BSD or Linux, we favor neither." And let's say that in the process that broke a few minor things in the Linux kernel. Now remember that Red Hat has a ton of BSD developers on staff, and that the last Linux kernel hacker, Alan Cox, quit Red Hat in a snit griping about incompatabilities and lobotomizing Linux.
Would you then say that Red Hat would be biased towards BSD? Or would you take the issue that they're simply trying to bring unity to the two *nix kernels?
He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this - it is after all a valid patent, and that what is needed now is prior art.
But SBC is the villan. Who cares if they have a patent or not?!
If the some Nazi benefitted off from the murder of a few million Jews -- can he be faulted? After all, that Nazi had the law on his side! (/. tip: Always bring up Nazis to prove your point -- it works wonders.)
Morality is based on the Golden Rule. SBC's actions fail this. They used an overworked, clueless patent office to get a patent on a common, obvious process. And now they're attempting to profit from it by picking on a little guy. They not be villans under the laws of capitalism, but that doesn't mean they're not villans.
Democracy my arse, we're [the UK] the 52nd friggin state buddy - what with Bush and his lapdog Blair...
Sorry, the UK is not the 52nd state. I know that because your health care is too cheap compared to the US, and your people live longer than Americans and have lower infant mortality rates.
Instead, the US has just purchased your foreign policy...the toy poodle (Blair) was just thrown in with the purchase.
Actually, we're fuming about the fact that Gore won the popular AND electoral vote, and Bush had his daddy lean on the Supreme Court Justices who owed him political favors to convince them to overturn the will of the voters in Flordia.
Shhh! Shhhh! You're not supposed to talk about that! We're supposed to pretend that we're a happy democratic republic and that George Bush was really elected fair-and-square.
And before you mention it -- just to give you a reminder -- you're not supposed to talk about the fact that Richard Nixon and Ronny Raygun also successfully rigged US elections either. Shhh!
Quite true. And if one reads the background information on the Constitution, specifically, the Federalist Papers where the authors of the Constitution argued over many illuminating theoretical points of the then-proposed government, you'll see that many of our system's policies and procedures (e.g. the difficulty in making amendments, the fact that senators are elected in 1/3s over 6 years) were specifically designed to stop, make difficult, or thwart the democratic will of the people from being realized.
It will also become clear from this background reading that the original intent of the Constitution was never to really represent people, it was instead to represent the states. Most of the democratic tendencies that we have now in our government (e.g. that the people directly elect senators) are the results of decades of struggle by the citizenry to make our government more democratic.
He doesn't have to be. Merits, abilities, and votes have not much to do with being president.
To be president without being elected you just need to be: (A) a Republican -- I don't know of any instances where the Democrat party rigged national elections; (B) Have views which are fully in sync with Corporate America, the "fine folks" who fund our elections; and (C) be not so objectionable that you rally the populace against the sham our "democratic" system is at the national level.
Quite true, from a polisci perspective. The problem is that de factor we're not a democratic republic either.
GNU/Linux systems do have uninstall routines -- and they work quite well in removing packages.
I don't buy your point. It also fails the Windows comparison test -- do these companies create custom installs for Windows? No, they do a generic one. That's all what GNU/Linux people are asking for.
What people want is a GNU/Linux install with a kernel that supports the devices in the machine. That's what the manufacturer should do if they want to claim Linux support.
Supporting multiple distros is a no-brainer: Create a bare-bones install for each supported distro, include the CDs so that users can add other packages that they want to add, and it's done. Supporting 4 or 5 distros would take one person a week per distro per machine model (that's being generous) to set up the base install. After that's done, it's just a matter of blowing it down to the machine -- an automated procedure.