Nautilus is not its own desktop, it's the file manager for GNOME (Ximian or otherwise) 1.4 and up.
Exactly. And Gnome is the default desktop for Red Hat.
That's precisely my point - the various Gnome factions are jockeying to see whose configuration will be installed by whom. That's why Slashdot has had all these stories recently about how, say, Sun and Dell, which had already committed to other incarnations of Gnome, have now announced their plans to ship Eazel. Like they weren't doing that already. The question is whose version of Gnome.
By the way, Eazel PR does push the idea of Gnome + Nautilus as the "Eazel desktop" or the "Eazel environment".
Step 1: Company announces its partnership with Red Hat, and that it will be installing Red Hat Linux on its computers.
Step 2 (or 1, if it's a non-Linux Unix company): Company announces its partnership with the Gnome Foundation and that it will be installing Gnome as its default desktop.
Step 3: Company announces its partnership with Helix Code and that it will be installing Helix Gnome as its default desktop.
Step 4: Company announces its partnership with Eazel and that it will be installing the Nautilus desktop as its default desktop.
Whatever the merits of some incarnation of Gnome over the alternatives, clearly there's no technical reason for, say, Dell to announce that they're switching from Gnome to Eazel Gnome. (Or was it Helix Gnome to Eazel Gnome?) I would assume that this is partly just companies with piles of VC money bringing a wheelbarrow of it to computer makers and asking for endorsement.
But I guess what we're also seeing is the emerging fight as to who will collect the tolls on the Linux desktop. Kind of like the fight between MS and computer makers as to what will appear on the Windows desktop, the question is whose desktop configuration will ship and whose revenue scheme will be supported-- Red Hat's subscription service for updates, Helix Code's ticketing commissions and subscription service for updates or Eazel's disk space and, ummm, subscription service for updates.
Many of us who went to elementary or junior high school in the late 70's/early 80's will remember "New Games" - non-competitive games and athletic activities that were based on cooperation rather than competition. The book New Games is out of print, but the "Customers who bought this book also bought:" section at Amazon gives some similar titles. (Names like Everyone Wins and The Cooperative Sports and Games Book : Challenge Without Competition give a flavor of the idea.)
It's interesting to speculate on why that fad died out. To some extent, it was probably the last thing that would appeal to your typical whistle-chomping PE teacher. But, also, people just have a natural urge to keep score. I'm a lousy athlete and not especially competitive but I enjoyed my rec league hockey game last night far more than I ever did tossing a kid in a blanket under the direction of my hippie 4th grade teacher.
Well, I see the every-Friday US-UK troll squabble has spilled up out of -1.;-)
I can't help wondering how the Frenchman Jules Verne didn't make your list. I would consider him the real originator of what we know as science fiction, lit-crit cleverness about Poe or Shelley aside.
What was, I think, pioneered in the US was science fiction as a genre. That formed around Doc Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Amazing Stories and the like. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...
Well, the Andromeda Strain" is:
1) The pathogen kills the town.
2) The team of scientists is assembled.
3) They can't figure out how to stop it.
4) They make a breakthrough but then have their lives threatened.
So it's a little off the blueprint but I'd say it essentially fits it. And Congo is straight out of the Crichton-o-matic.
By the way, that review was excellent - literate, well-thought-out, insightful and did an excellent job conveying the sense of the book.
As far as the purchase cost is concerned, it is not intended to be for the masses, it is for public areas like schools, wehre people congregate.
Right - at least that's my non-Portuguese-speaking understanding of "...construído para levar a internet de graça a escolas, postos de saúde, microempresas e pequenas comunidades."
My first thought was the same as wceschim's. There is no way the people at the bottom of the Brazilian society, in favelas or in the jungle, are going to benefit from this program. I suspect Michael suffers from the "Everything in America is worse than everything anyplace else!" mentality (the lesser known liberal variant of the "Everything in America is better than everything anyplace else!" mentality) and thinks the Brazilian poor are comparable to or better off than the poorest Americans.
So, somebody at Microsoft said bad things about Linux. How many days of screeching, whining, doing a s/Linux/Windows* on the text to produce an allegedly funny retort and variations on the stupid, repetitive sarcasm of Linux humor sites do we need to have over this?
Not a day passes that Slashdot isn't full of laughably inaccurate, wildly hyperbolic nonsense about Windows. You think everyone at Microsoft runs around in state of constant hysteria?
* Now that I think about it, I don't recollect a single s/Linux/Windows retort of the hundreds I've read here that has been funny or insightful in the slightest. But I'm betting someone is going to reply with: So somebody at Red Hat said bad things about Windows...
He knows that -- his point is that most of the work bearing the GNU name is being done by people who work outside Stallman's organization. GNOME, egcs, GNUStep... The FSF itself has produced precious little in recent years.
My original login (#3800) used the name Otter, which I've been using since my first Usenet access in the late 80's. I got the name because someone thought I looked like Otter in Animal House. I still use the nick on IRC.
I started this account to see how quickly I could karma cap a new account. (About 4 weeks, with pretty contrarian opinions. No whoring here.) I picked the name because I'd been doing some Qt programming the night before and had been calling update() a lot. I've kept posting mostly on this account, to protect Otter from karma erosion* and because if people know one of the names, it's more likely to be the one I've used lately.
* Yes, I know, karma isn't really good for anything. But it feels like a reward I've earned so I'm resisting letting it get eaten up by crack-addled moderators.
The BugTraq totals include vulnerabilities in the packages that come with the OS. To quote: For example, this means that a vulnerability in IIS will also be considered a vulnerability in Windows NT at the later ships with the former.
Besides, don't you think that the statement that if you are trained for developing under platform A but instead get to develop under platform B, you perform less good than those who ARE trained for the platform they develop under apply equally well no matter if A is windows and B is linux, or if it's the opposite?:)
People keep invoking defacements to prove the wrong point -- IIS/Front Page is full of holes compared to Apache or MacOS web servers. Defacements aren't intrusions and say little about the security of the underlying OS.
And wasn't there another wuftpd vulnerability found this week?
Many really good points, and many other equally bad ones.
Honestly, I don't see much in the way of either. To summarize, with my take on them:
Free software is not turning out to be profitable for developers
I'd say so far no one has proved him wrong. Hell, the distro makers are selling software someone else writes and they can't make money.
The 2.4 kernel is "raw technology" and not "ready for business use"
I'm not sure what he meant by that -- he and the people responding to him seem to be confusing the kernel with the platform.
IDC says Linux server growth has stopped
IDC suggests otherwise.
"Microsoft is leading the charge with.Net. Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
Well, Linux certainly is never leading anything except for ever more ornate window managers. And MS is blowing their usual hot air with.Net.
Linux development is slower than Windows development.
Probably true for developers with Windows experience, not true for Unix developers.
Linux businesses are doing badly. "For a so-called exploding market, this should not happen. Sales of actual products are relatively flat."
If we're talking about desktop software, that's certainly correct. Corel Linux apps, Applixware, Quake III - pretty much all bleak news on that front.
Re:Apple not just a hardware company
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
My question to you is, how much money would Apple actually make selling hardware, if that hardware didn't come with the Mac OS attached to it? Would you buy an overpriced piece of hardware just because it looked cool, but had to run windows on it?
As a variant on bgarcia's point, if Apple couldn't compete in the Windows market, why should they be able to compete against exactly the same machines for OS X sales? Of course their competitive advantage is the OS but it's precisely that advantage that allows them to maintain the high margins on hardware that fund software development.
For crying out loud -- it was the Mac clones that nearly nailed Apple's coffin shut it the 90's!
Whenever a familiar site changes, it always seems clumsy and unintuitive, so I like to reserve my opinion until I've used it for a while. As long as we're critiquing VA-owned sites, though, Themes.org made a major renovation of their site a couple of years ago and I still find it almost impossible to use.
It's an extreme case of featuritis run amok. I used to check the WindowMaker page almost daily and I contributed a bunch of themes. I've basically given up on the site because I find it impossible to browse comfortably.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this month publicly said that Linux was his company's greatest threat going forward.
And Joachim Kempin recently said"Linux is simply a fad that has been generated by the media and is destined to fall by the wayside in time. Windows 2000 will gradually overtake the Linux share in the server market." So who knows? I don't think MS is in the business of disclosing their real strategy to reporters.
My guess is that they're viewing Linux as a genuine challenger on the server front and laughing at all the "Dell is going to be shipping Red Hat systems! No, now Dell is going to be preinstalling the Gnome desktop! No, now Dell is going to support the Eazel desktop!" posturing that passes for desktop market share in the Linux world. Especially now that Corel has utterly failed to sell Linux apps, Applixware is being sold off, iD will stop selling boxed Linux versions...
When Jamal Lewis rushed to the corner for a touchdown and the Giants challenged the call, the best view was courtesy of the "useless" 3D instant replay.
That's what I thought at first but -- given that the 3D view is a reconstruction based on x camera angles, how can you tell if a given camera angle is real footage or an approximation? Here's yet another point where technology makes it easy to confuse reality with reenactment.
The "author" I was referring to is the author of the article, not you. I'm making the same point I think you are - that the justification for IP isn't based solely on the premise she's attacking.
I agree with you that the author of the linked article uses Libertarian vocabulary and thoughts, but it is just inconceivable that Rand, author of the Fountainhead, would ever be against intellectual property.
Absolutely. The idea that intellectual labor has no value and only physical production should be rewarded isn't some new insight from the "Austrian libertarian school" -- it's an old staple of populism and one that Rand reviled.
That said, I do think the author is trying to justify her anti-IP views in a Randian framework and that her point is wasted on anyone who does not operate on the assumption that the right to property is the be-all of life and law.
Not that anyone should be expected to, you know, actually read an article before running off at the mouth about it but "$2 billion industry looking to exploit Linux for fun and profit" is the submitter's words, not a quote from the article.
Second, (back on point) the author attacks a few specific instances of IP and one or two of the minor (but poorly accepted) arguments for IP, but completely or mostly ignores the well accepted arguments for it.
Reading between the lines, I get the impression the author is an Ayn Rand-ie with the common Rand-ie trait of speaking as though her basic axioms are universally accepted by every other person in the world. Sure, IP law conflicts with the idea that the law should only protect physical instances of property. But the law is not written on that assumption, nor is that most people's idea of a "free market".
Instances of an idea may not be scarce but the ideas themselves certainly are. It's that scarcity that creates the value the law protects.
Incidentally, what I find irritating is that I don't for a second imagine that Hemos and CmdrTaco actually believe any of this crap they endorse. Over the last few years, this anti-IP bandwagon has gelled around them and they're unwilling to disavow it. Maybe someday they'll explain why copyrights are bad but the GPL is sacred. No, calling it a "copyleft" isn't a valid explanation.
There's a lot of squabbling in the Linux world about how the Unix mentality of small apps communicating through standard input/output to form a pipeline should be maintained in the new whiz-bang, GUI environments. Do you think that it can/should be done? What should be the most important considerations for such a messaging system and how should a standard be established?
I'll admit to a little Schadenfreude* when other Linux companies run into trouble but I was really rooting for LinuxPPC. They've been the engine behind PowerPC Linux for a few years now -- building the distro the others lean on, giving tons of support to the PPC developers (who, by the way, are tremendous hackers who don't get a fraction of the credit they deserve) and creating the lion's share of the publicity for non-x86 Linux. And they've been much more interested in doing cool stuff than in playing the Linux celebrity clique game.
Their quality control could stand some improvement but, hey.;-)
So at what point did the open source crowd, which has been around a lot longer than Linux, decide to allow the Linux advocates to co-opt the term "open source" for themselves, to promulgate the very idea that "Open Source == Linux"?
Linux was around for years before Eric Raymond coined (or at least popularized and trademarked) "Open Source." Actually, the "Open Source Movement" and their "Free Software" counterparts both retroactively lay claim to all sorts of software (Linux, Perl, Apache, BSD...) whose creation had nothing to do with them.
I don't get this story or the press release. This is a test lab funded by a group of corporations. Who is going to be writing code for these projects -- someone at the test facility or developers at one of the sponsoring companies?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. And Gnome is the default desktop for Red Hat.
That's precisely my point - the various Gnome factions are jockeying to see whose configuration will be installed by whom. That's why Slashdot has had all these stories recently about how, say, Sun and Dell, which had already committed to other incarnations of Gnome, have now announced their plans to ship Eazel. Like they weren't doing that already. The question is whose version of Gnome.
By the way, Eazel PR does push the idea of Gnome + Nautilus as the "Eazel desktop" or the "Eazel environment".
Step 2 (or 1, if it's a non-Linux Unix company): Company announces its partnership with the Gnome Foundation and that it will be installing Gnome as its default desktop.
Step 3: Company announces its partnership with Helix Code and that it will be installing Helix Gnome as its default desktop.
Step 4: Company announces its partnership with Eazel and that it will be installing the Nautilus desktop as its default desktop.
Whatever the merits of some incarnation of Gnome over the alternatives, clearly there's no technical reason for, say, Dell to announce that they're switching from Gnome to Eazel Gnome. (Or was it Helix Gnome to Eazel Gnome?) I would assume that this is partly just companies with piles of VC money bringing a wheelbarrow of it to computer makers and asking for endorsement.
But I guess what we're also seeing is the emerging fight as to who will collect the tolls on the Linux desktop. Kind of like the fight between MS and computer makers as to what will appear on the Windows desktop, the question is whose desktop configuration will ship and whose revenue scheme will be supported-- Red Hat's subscription service for updates, Helix Code's ticketing commissions and subscription service for updates or Eazel's disk space and, ummm, subscription service for updates.
It's interesting to speculate on why that fad died out. To some extent, it was probably the last thing that would appeal to your typical whistle-chomping PE teacher. But, also, people just have a natural urge to keep score. I'm a lousy athlete and not especially competitive but I enjoyed my rec league hockey game last night far more than I ever did tossing a kid in a blanket under the direction of my hippie 4th grade teacher.
I can't help wondering how the Frenchman Jules Verne didn't make your list. I would consider him the real originator of what we know as science fiction, lit-crit cleverness about Poe or Shelley aside.
What was, I think, pioneered in the US was science fiction as a genre. That formed around Doc Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Amazing Stories and the like. Someone correct me if I'm wrong...
1) The pathogen kills the town.
2) The team of scientists is assembled.
3) They can't figure out how to stop it.
4) They make a breakthrough but then have their lives threatened.
So it's a little off the blueprint but I'd say it essentially fits it. And Congo is straight out of the Crichton-o-matic.
By the way, that review was excellent - literate, well-thought-out, insightful and did an excellent job conveying the sense of the book.
Right - at least that's my non-Portuguese-speaking understanding of "...construído para levar a internet de graça a escolas, postos de saúde, microempresas e pequenas comunidades."
My first thought was the same as wceschim's. There is no way the people at the bottom of the Brazilian society, in favelas or in the jungle, are going to benefit from this program. I suspect Michael suffers from the "Everything in America is worse than everything anyplace else!" mentality (the lesser known liberal variant of the "Everything in America is better than everything anyplace else!" mentality) and thinks the Brazilian poor are comparable to or better off than the poorest Americans.
Not a day passes that Slashdot isn't full of laughably inaccurate, wildly hyperbolic nonsense about Windows. You think everyone at Microsoft runs around in state of constant hysteria?
* Now that I think about it, I don't recollect a single s/Linux/Windows retort of the hundreds I've read here that has been funny or insightful in the slightest. But I'm betting someone is going to reply with:
So somebody at Red Hat said bad things about Windows...
He knows that -- his point is that most of the work bearing the GNU name is being done by people who work outside Stallman's organization. GNOME, egcs, GNUStep... The FSF itself has produced precious little in recent years.
I started this account to see how quickly I could karma cap a new account. (About 4 weeks, with pretty contrarian opinions. No whoring here.) I picked the name because I'd been doing some Qt programming the night before and had been calling update() a lot. I've kept posting mostly on this account, to protect Otter from karma erosion* and because if people know one of the names, it's more likely to be the one I've used lately.
* Yes, I know, karma isn't really good for anything. But it feels like a reward I've earned so I'm resisting letting it get eaten up by crack-addled moderators.
The BugTraq totals include vulnerabilities in the packages that come with the OS. To quote: For example, this means that a vulnerability in IIS will also be considered a vulnerability in Windows NT at the later ships with the former.
Of course it does. That's precisely my point. ;-)
And wasn't there another wuftpd vulnerability found this week?
Honestly, I don't see much in the way of either. To summarize, with my take on them:
Free software is not turning out to be profitable for developers
I'd say so far no one has proved him wrong. Hell, the distro makers are selling software someone else writes and they can't make money.
The 2.4 kernel is "raw technology" and not "ready for business use"
I'm not sure what he meant by that -- he and the people responding to him seem to be confusing the kernel with the platform.
IDC says Linux server growth has stopped
IDC suggests otherwise.
"Microsoft is leading the charge with .Net. Linux is not leading anything, it is simply providing a 'free' operating system."
Well, Linux certainly is never leading anything except for ever more ornate window managers. And MS is blowing their usual hot air with .Net.
Linux development is slower than Windows development.
Probably true for developers with Windows experience, not true for Unix developers.
Linux businesses are doing badly. "For a so-called exploding market, this should not happen. Sales of actual products are relatively flat."
If we're talking about desktop software, that's certainly correct. Corel Linux apps, Applixware, Quake III - pretty much all bleak news on that front.
As a variant on bgarcia's point, if Apple couldn't compete in the Windows market, why should they be able to compete against exactly the same machines for OS X sales? Of course their competitive advantage is the OS but it's precisely that advantage that allows them to maintain the high margins on hardware that fund software development.
For crying out loud -- it was the Mac clones that nearly nailed Apple's coffin shut it the 90's!
It's an extreme case of featuritis run amok. I used to check the WindowMaker page almost daily and I contributed a bunch of themes. I've basically given up on the site because I find it impossible to browse comfortably.
And Joachim Kempin recently said "Linux is simply a fad that has been generated by the media and is destined to fall by the wayside in time. Windows 2000 will gradually overtake the Linux share in the server market." So who knows? I don't think MS is in the business of disclosing their real strategy to reporters.
My guess is that they're viewing Linux as a genuine challenger on the server front and laughing at all the "Dell is going to be shipping Red Hat systems! No, now Dell is going to be preinstalling the Gnome desktop! No, now Dell is going to support the Eazel desktop!" posturing that passes for desktop market share in the Linux world. Especially now that Corel has utterly failed to sell Linux apps, Applixware is being sold off, iD will stop selling boxed Linux versions...
That's what I thought at first but -- given that the 3D view is a reconstruction based on x camera angles, how can you tell if a given camera angle is real footage or an approximation? Here's yet another point where technology makes it easy to confuse reality with reenactment.
The "author" I was referring to is the author of the article, not you. I'm making the same point I think you are - that the justification for IP isn't based solely on the premise she's attacking.
Absolutely. The idea that intellectual labor has no value and only physical production should be rewarded isn't some new insight from the "Austrian libertarian school" -- it's an old staple of populism and one that Rand reviled.
That said, I do think the author is trying to justify her anti-IP views in a Randian framework and that her point is wasted on anyone who does not operate on the assumption that the right to property is the be-all of life and law.
Not that anyone should be expected to, you know, actually read an article before running off at the mouth about it but "$2 billion industry looking to exploit Linux for fun and profit" is the submitter's words, not a quote from the article.
Reading between the lines, I get the impression the author is an Ayn Rand-ie with the common Rand-ie trait of speaking as though her basic axioms are universally accepted by every other person in the world. Sure, IP law conflicts with the idea that the law should only protect physical instances of property. But the law is not written on that assumption, nor is that most people's idea of a "free market".
Instances of an idea may not be scarce but the ideas themselves certainly are. It's that scarcity that creates the value the law protects.
Incidentally, what I find irritating is that I don't for a second imagine that Hemos and CmdrTaco actually believe any of this crap they endorse. Over the last few years, this anti-IP bandwagon has gelled around them and they're unwilling to disavow it. Maybe someday they'll explain why copyrights are bad but the GPL is sacred. No, calling it a "copyleft" isn't a valid explanation.
So Korn (the band) drinks Coors Light? I might have suspected...
Their quality control could stand some improvement but, hey. ;-)
* Boy, those Germans have a word for everything!
Linux was around for years before Eric Raymond coined (or at least popularized and trademarked) "Open Source." Actually, the "Open Source Movement" and their "Free Software" counterparts both retroactively lay claim to all sorts of software (Linux, Perl, Apache, BSD...) whose creation had nothing to do with them.
I don't get this story or the press release. This is a test lab funded by a group of corporations. Who is going to be writing code for these projects -- someone at the test facility or developers at one of the sponsoring companies?