You are thinking Microsoft sells windows directly to the public, and it doesn't. The missing component in this vision are the OEMs. The real outcome here is not that MS will be forced to bundle these other apps with Windows, but that they will no longer be able to prevent (European) OEMs from doing so.
So think OEMs, these are the companies that actually distribute Windows, not Microsoft.
They also underpin the GPL and similar licences. Abolish copyright on software, and there's nothing to stop people and companies from taking source and incorporating it into closed source products. Sure, you could do that with closed source stuff too, to an extent, but decompiling a binary to produce meaningful source code is somewhat harder than just downloading the source in the first place.
If there were no copyright, there would be no advantage in binary-only distribution, so nobody would do it. There would be no need for the GPL.
Consider, for example, the addition of a simple bit of natural language to a computer language. Say there were an "it" keyword, which referred to the most recently used variable which type checks in the context in which it is used, except that in the arguments of a method, it cannot refer to the object on which the method is called. Such a keyword would be practically impossible to use reasonably, since it would be extremely fragile and hard to interpret.
So yes, technically speaking, the BBC should not have a "side" of the story -- even if they are involved. Their journalists should report this Hutton Inquiry news in a factual and even-handed manner. No slant.
Which is exactly what has happened. The BBC has been widely praised in other sections of the media for accurately reporting both sides of the story, particularly the Panorama programme on Jan 21 which heavily criticised the BBC's bosses for not checking the facts before opening their mouths.
BTW, what happened before Creation? See, everyone, at some point, gets backed into the taking-something-on-faith corner. Some are just more explicit about it than others.
Time is part of the Creation, so asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking "What is south of the south pole?". When you are at the south pole, every direction you look is north.
Other than that, it means you can't lose your timecard (major accidents excepted)
You raise an interesting point here. Consider those people who, for one reason or another, don't have the bits of "bio" to "metric" (say due to accident, congenital deformities, Thalidomide, etc). Most rich countries have some legislation that makes it illegal to discriminate against these unfortunates in the workplace. How do these scanners sit with those kind of laws?
Is the embedded device market or server market a market which desktop users will reference in their purchasing decisions? I don't think so.
I disagree. Corporates buy large numbers of desktops, and they are the bridge for Linux out of the server rooms and on to the desktop. First of all into a simple niche like the call centres, from there it can spread into the wider office market. Once people start seeing Linux on their phones, their PDAs, and in their offices then it's only a small step to ask for it when they buy a PC.
You slipped in the proviso "As far as the desktop market is concerned", but if you forgive me mixing my metaphors the Innovators Dilemma tells us that you can cross the chasm in a series of steps.
Linux has long held the innovators sector, it has just about captured the embedded market, it stands eyeball-to-eyeball with Microsoft in the server space. As it raises its profile on emedded devices home users will become more comfortable with the idea of a Linux desktop. Similarly as corporates become comfortable with Linux in their server racks, more and more of them will consider the possibility of deploying Linux desktops, perhaps starting with places like call-centres where they don't need a fully-fledged Windows rollout.
The desktop will be the very last sector that Linux captures, this is Microsoft's front-lawn, and only Redmond tanks are permitted to park there, for now.
However, Linux will eventually win the desktop not because it is technically superior (the best technology rarely wins the mass market) but because it has economics on its side. Open-source software will eventually become the dominant software development method simply because it is more economically efficient for software companies to maintain the software infrastructure collectively. Those companies that recognise this will squeeze out the less efficient ones that decide to maintain all their secret code themselves.
Darl's diatribe can basically be summed up by the last paragraph:
We take these actions... knowing that those who believe "software should be free" cannot prevail against the U.S. Congress and voices of seven U.S. Supreme Court justices who believe that "the motive of profit is the engine that ensures the progress of science."
The preamble to the General Public License (para 2) says:
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)
No need to panic everyone, the profit motive is alive and well.
OK, here's my contribution based on little bit of research and my obviously different experiences.
- The Corporate desktop is about 65% of PC market. - Linux desktops are a better fit for large companies than small ones. Small companies will prefer windows because they use their desktops in a very ad-hoc fashion; they are more likely to have (Windows-based) application choices forced on them by large customers or vendors; many of their employees will support their own desktops and will only be familiar with Windows; flexibility will be one of their main concerns. The biggies, on the other hand will be attracted to Linux because they can benefit from economies of scale brought by highly standardised desktops with a centralised support team and Linux is better at this; they don't want flexibility (at least for those at the coal-face, senior PHBs might see themselves differently) they will have more professional techies on hand to do it; they probably already have some good feelings about Linux from their server experiences.
Bingo! Common standards - not common technology. The standards are things like TCP/IP, posix, etc, etc. benevolently dictated by IETF amongst others. OSS is ahead of the game here, your typical piece of free software will be far more standards compliant than an MS equivalent.
Oh, and give yourself "+1 Correct Use of Ironic". Well done.
We need a Desktop Czar in the same vein as Linus is to the Kernel. Someone to assemble the application side of OS. One shell. One scripting language (preferably the same interpreter AS the shell). One compile and build system. One package management system. One file layout. One printing system. Some one needs to stick their neck out and say "This is how it is will be done."
This is what Microsoft would like you to believe, there is One True Way of doing things and it comes from Redmond. There is no God but Bill and Steve the Dancing Monkey Boy is his prophet.
Instead of comparing open-source software to other software, compare instead with the hardware business, you will quickly realise that choice is normal: AMD or Intel? IDE or SCSI? Laptop or tower? ASUS, Abit, Elite, Gigabyte, Micro-Star, or Supermicro? This is an asset not a hinderance, the competition drives new inventions and the differing approaches are allowed to compete with each other in the open market place. If one option is clearly inferior, it will soon die. x86 hardware now dominates the industry, giving proprietry box-shifters like Sun cold sweats, because of this competition not in spite of it.
Repeat after me: Free software, free markets, free people GOOD! Monopoly domination BAD!
We kick the Iraqi army's ass, and now we're supposed to turn tail and leave? Do you have any idea what would happen to Iraq?
Saddam kicked the Kuwaiti army's ass, you know. It wasn't considered grounds for him to be allowed to keep it.
It would implode. Arab extremists would overtake the country in a heartbeat, making Iran look like Sweden by comparison. The right thing to do is to stay there and ensure the country is stabilized before handing over complete control to a national government.
"But they can still vote for their own government" you say. Yeah. UN and Red Cross offices, police stations and hotels - all being bombed regularly. You think a polling place wouldn't become a target?
All good points, well made. It doesn't change the fact that ordinary Iraqis would probably like the chance to choose their own government.
Sorry for going off-topic. Honestly speaking, I see very little difference between practical applications of Fascism (3rd Reich, Mussolini's Italy) and Communism (Soviet Union, China). The rhetoric is different, but the practical effects are similar: a totalitarian state. Minorities (Jews or Tibetans or whatever) are persecuted, no criticism of the government is allowed, censorship and corruption are part of everyday life, military has a very important role in politics,... the rant goes on and on.
You are right, in that both types of regime are totalitarian, with little regard for individual liberty. The principle difference is Fascists believe in and support the concept of private property. As a rule of thumb, if a totalitarian government has privately owned industries then it is usually called fascist. Other distinctions along the Left-Right political spectrum are also present in their attitudes, for example should a government be secular (left wing and communist) or should it support religious morality (right wing and fascist)
China over the last 20 years has gradually abandoned communist trappings like collectivised farming, so by this definition they be called fascist.
But he is right about Dell being a distributor, not a manufacturer. I love when business mags publish stuff about what a great manufacturer Dell is. They manufacture _nothing_ except maybe Powerpoints and advertising material. Chances are, your Dell equipment was never even seen by a Dell employee.
This will eventually catch up to Dell because the company adds so little value.
Dell's big achievement is the efficiency of their supply chain. The emergence of successful, hyper-efficient distributors is a sign that the PC industry is a mature commodity market. Although PCs are not a truly interchangeable commodity like crude oil, the badge on the front of the box has not mattered for years.
This isn't going to be the demise of Dell, it is the very core of their success. When, and if, Dell disappear there will be a whole bunch of other distributors just like them fighting to take their place.
Righto... things like this drive me nuts. There presently already is a cheep and efficent means of taxing cars based on distance they drive. By taxing the fuel it self you have an accurate means of charging for a vehicel's use on the road. Heavier vehicels such as SUVs pay more then a honda driver due to the fact that these vehicels use more fuel per mile.
You may not have heard about it where you are but back in Sept 2000, the UK had a good old fashioned tax revolt over the highest fuel taxes in the developed world. Over a period of 8 days, the country was almost brought to a standstill. These very high taxes have not cut private car usage, nor have the reduced congestion. It is now politically impossible to raise these taxes any further.
In contrast, the London Congestion Charge, a 5 GBP daily charge for entering central London, has cut congestion by 25% and has been easily digested by the public, provoking almost none of the widely predicted opposition. The traffic doesn't slow down down for poll booths, they just use a camera that takes your vehicle license number. The scheme is a far bigger success than even the Mayor of London, the man who introduced it, had hoped for.
The UK government is now very keen to extend road charging elsewhere.
This is valid point; in fact, it's actually oozing validity. If Linux is going to be presented in mass advertising as a device for simplification, it had better damn well live up to that description.
I put Debian on my laptop last week with Knoppix. I had a running a system within 5 minutes, all my hardware was correctly detected and configured, including the 2 things that caused the most pain when I previously tried to do them manually, the wireless LAN and the X config. I had Internet access, Open Office, everything I wanted. It took 40 minutes to install to the HDD, but while that was happening I had a fully working, Internet-enabled laptop. It really doesn't get any easy than that.
Take specialists from multiple fields with 150+ years of research behind them, have them work together and share ideas freely... just imagine the type of genious that would be it's output.
It doesn't work that way. Take a look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn. Just about every really revolutionary advance in the sciences is made by somebody in their 20s. As scientists become older and more conservative they become stronger supporters of the existing theories. Even Einstein and Newton, probably the two most radical scientific thinkers, fall into this pattern.
Older scientists tend to support the dominant theories which are often quoted as sources of authority. ("But that violates Bungle's First Law!"). New experiments are performed in their shadow, often seeking to support them, extend their range, but only very, very rarely to contradict them. Teachers and texts maintain the dominant theories, the peer review process prevents anyone from straying too far.
As contradictory data builds up, the major influences on choosing a new theory include: established scientific customs, esthetic factors (which theory is the is the most 'pleasing' or 'elegant'), whether or not any popular analogies can be found, unpredictable imaginative leaps, and of course the aging and dying of conservative scientists.
It is likely that having immortal scientists would go a long way towards halting scientific progress altogether.
It should actually be written "10 g's", with 'g' in lower case, as this refers to 10 times the normal acceleration, while "G" the capital letter refers to something entirely different.
Actually, you shouldn't be using apostrophes at all for plurals. "10g's" refers to something belonging to 10g.
He means on the desktop. Obviously, even Bill knows that Linux kick MS ass on the server side. But until Linus starts bringing the GUI into the tree, then I would tend to agree that Linux will never make significant inroads to Windows.
Good God, No! The desktop is a Userland application, it has absolutely no business being in the kernel. Even Windows used to run on top of DOS, until Bill realised he could bundle them and kill off IBM DOS and DR DOS. There was no technical justification, it was purely a tactic against his competitors. In exactly the the same way as Netscape lost their air supply.
Slashdot Mirror
You are thinking Microsoft sells windows directly to the public, and it doesn't. The missing component in this vision are the OEMs. The real outcome here is not that MS will be forced to bundle these other apps with Windows, but that they will no longer be able to prevent (European) OEMs from doing so.
So think OEMs, these are the companies that actually distribute Windows, not Microsoft.
If there were no copyright, there would be no advantage in binary-only distribution, so nobody would do it. There would be no need for the GPL.
We'd have awesome policitical power, just as soon as we've settled vi-vs-Emacs, Linux-vs-BSD, etc, etc.
The day Games Workshop pull that off is the day the day they need to start looking over their shoulder for the Tolkien estate.
I see you're not a Perl programmer
No, that was just the French. There's about 80 monarchies in the world, and about half of these posts are held by the same person, Queen Elizabeth.
Which is exactly what has happened. The BBC has been widely praised in other sections of the media for accurately reporting both sides of the story, particularly the Panorama programme on Jan 21 which heavily criticised the BBC's bosses for not checking the facts before opening their mouths.
Time is part of the Creation, so asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking "What is south of the south pole?". When you are at the south pole, every direction you look is north.
You raise an interesting point here. Consider those people who, for one reason or another, don't have the bits of "bio" to "metric" (say due to accident, congenital deformities, Thalidomide, etc). Most rich countries have some legislation that makes it illegal to discriminate against these unfortunates in the workplace. How do these scanners sit with those kind of laws?
I disagree. Corporates buy large numbers of desktops, and they are the bridge for Linux out of the server rooms and on to the desktop. First of all into a simple niche like the call centres, from there it can spread into the wider office market. Once people start seeing Linux on their phones, their PDAs, and in their offices then it's only a small step to ask for it when they buy a PC.
You slipped in the proviso "As far as the desktop market is concerned", but if you forgive me mixing my metaphors the Innovators Dilemma tells us that you can cross the chasm in a series of steps.
Linux has long held the innovators sector, it has just about captured the embedded market, it stands eyeball-to-eyeball with Microsoft in the server space. As it raises its profile on emedded devices home users will become more comfortable with the idea of a Linux desktop. Similarly as corporates become comfortable with Linux in their server racks, more and more of them will consider the possibility of deploying Linux desktops, perhaps starting with places like call-centres where they don't need a fully-fledged Windows rollout.
The desktop will be the very last sector that Linux captures, this is Microsoft's front-lawn, and only Redmond tanks are permitted to park there, for now.
However, Linux will eventually win the desktop not because it is technically superior (the best technology rarely wins the mass market) but because it has economics on its side. Open-source software will eventually become the dominant software development method simply because it is more economically efficient for software companies to maintain the software infrastructure collectively. Those companies that recognise this will squeeze out the less efficient ones that decide to maintain all their secret code themselves.
The preamble to the General Public License (para 2) says:
No need to panic everyone, the profit motive is alive and well.
- The Corporate desktop is about 65% of PC market.
- Linux desktops are a better fit for large companies than small ones. Small companies will prefer windows because they use their desktops in a very ad-hoc fashion; they are more likely to have (Windows-based) application choices forced on them by large customers or vendors; many of their employees will support their own desktops and will only be familiar with Windows; flexibility will be one of their main concerns. The biggies, on the other hand will be attracted to Linux because they can benefit from economies of scale brought by highly standardised desktops with a centralised support team and Linux is better at this; they don't want flexibility (at least for those at the coal-face, senior PHBs might see themselves differently) they will have more professional techies on hand to do it; they probably already have some good feelings about Linux from their server experiences.
Oh, and give yourself "+1 Correct Use of Ironic". Well done.
This is what Microsoft would like you to believe, there is One True Way of doing things and it comes from Redmond. There is no God but Bill and Steve the Dancing Monkey Boy is his prophet.
Instead of comparing open-source software to other software, compare instead with the hardware business, you will quickly realise that choice is normal: AMD or Intel? IDE or SCSI? Laptop or tower? ASUS, Abit, Elite, Gigabyte, Micro-Star, or Supermicro? This is an asset not a hinderance, the competition drives new inventions and the differing approaches are allowed to compete with each other in the open market place. If one option is clearly inferior, it will soon die. x86 hardware now dominates the industry, giving proprietry box-shifters like Sun cold sweats, because of this competition not in spite of it.
Repeat after me: Free software, free markets, free people GOOD! Monopoly domination BAD!
Go on then, what are you waiting for? Oh
Saddam kicked the Kuwaiti army's ass, you know. It wasn't considered grounds for him to be allowed to keep it.
All good points, well made. It doesn't change the fact that ordinary Iraqis would probably like the chance to choose their own government.
No need to put that in the past tense. I'm sure the people of Iraq would still love the chance to vote for their own leader.
You are right, in that both types of regime are totalitarian, with little regard for individual liberty. The principle difference is Fascists believe in and support the concept of private property. As a rule of thumb, if a totalitarian government has privately owned industries then it is usually called fascist. Other distinctions along the Left-Right political spectrum are also present in their attitudes, for example should a government be secular (left wing and communist) or should it support religious morality (right wing and fascist)
China over the last 20 years has gradually abandoned communist trappings like collectivised farming, so by this definition they be called fascist.
Dell's big achievement is the efficiency of their supply chain. The emergence of successful, hyper-efficient distributors is a sign that the PC industry is a mature commodity market. Although PCs are not a truly interchangeable commodity like crude oil, the badge on the front of the box has not mattered for years.
This isn't going to be the demise of Dell, it is the very core of their success. When, and if, Dell disappear there will be a whole bunch of other distributors just like them fighting to take their place.
You may not have heard about it where you are but back in Sept 2000, the UK had a good old fashioned tax revolt over the highest fuel taxes in the developed world. Over a period of 8 days, the country was almost brought to a standstill. These very high taxes have not cut private car usage, nor have the reduced congestion. It is now politically impossible to raise these taxes any further.
In contrast, the London Congestion Charge, a 5 GBP daily charge for entering central London, has cut congestion by 25% and has been easily digested by the public, provoking almost none of the widely predicted opposition. The traffic doesn't slow down down for poll booths, they just use a camera that takes your vehicle license number. The scheme is a far bigger success than even the Mayor of London, the man who introduced it, had hoped for.
The UK government is now very keen to extend road charging elsewhere.
I put Debian on my laptop last week with Knoppix. I had a running a system within 5 minutes, all my hardware was correctly detected and configured, including the 2 things that caused the most pain when I previously tried to do them manually, the wireless LAN and the X config. I had Internet access, Open Office, everything I wanted. It took 40 minutes to install to the HDD, but while that was happening I had a fully working, Internet-enabled laptop. It really doesn't get any easy than that.
It doesn't work that way. Take a look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn. Just about every really revolutionary advance in the sciences is made by somebody in their 20s. As scientists become older and more conservative they become stronger supporters of the existing theories. Even Einstein and Newton, probably the two most radical scientific thinkers, fall into this pattern.
Older scientists tend to support the dominant theories which are often quoted as sources of authority. ("But that violates Bungle's First Law!"). New experiments are performed in their shadow, often seeking to support them, extend their range, but only very, very rarely to contradict them. Teachers and texts maintain the dominant theories, the peer review process prevents anyone from straying too far.
As contradictory data builds up, the major influences on choosing a new theory include: established scientific customs, esthetic
factors (which theory is the is the most 'pleasing' or 'elegant'), whether or not any popular analogies can be found, unpredictable imaginative leaps, and of course the aging and dying of conservative scientists.
It is likely that having immortal scientists would go a long way towards halting scientific progress altogether.
It should actually be written "10 g's", with 'g' in lower case, as this refers to 10 times the normal acceleration, while "G" the capital letter refers to something entirely different.
Actually, you shouldn't be using apostrophes at all for plurals. "10g's" refers to something belonging to 10g.
Good God, No! The desktop is a Userland application, it has absolutely no business being in the kernel. Even Windows used to run on top of DOS, until Bill realised he could bundle them and kill off IBM DOS and DR DOS. There was no technical justification, it was purely a tactic against his competitors. In exactly the the same way as Netscape lost their air supply.