Technical quibble: thirty-four states aren't "going after Microsoft." Nine(?) states are going after Microsoft. The others just got their shorts in a bunch when Microsoft tried to use the argument that the states weren't allowed to pursue their own remedies because the federal case was settled. So really, they're mostly just protecting their right for states to bring individual suits in antitrust cases.
Let's get something straight. I go home to be home. That's what it means to have a life. You want me to make business-related phone calls? Only on company time for which you must compensate me. I have a huge financial and emotional investment in myself, my life, and the people I choose to share it with.
I do not need extra stresses on my valuable free time because you think it would be cheaper for me to wear a pager than to hire somebody to watch the network at night. My life does not need to be brought to a halt because some clueless VP forgot the password to her dial-up e-mail at 10PM.
The people in my life are ones that I need to spend time with. Not want. Need. I also need time to pursue interests outside of work. There is enough for me to keep track of without you coming in and making my life harder.
Think this is a rant from one of the uber-lazy? Wrong. I'm just sick of employers who have decided that just because I've agreed to provide them with certain services, that they own me 24/7.
No, I *do* understand your point. Hopefully you understand mine. Employers have a lot of power over their employees. We need our jobs. We're terrified of losing our jobs. We would--and are often made to--go to exceptional lengths in order to keep them.
Because we're employees accepting paychecks, we have a duty to earn them. There's nothing onerous about that duty, because we're employees. And there's a shameful amount of abuse that can go on. But unplugging a useful tool like the Internet because somebody might spend some time reading personal e-mail or downloading pr0n makes only slightly more sense than taking away phones because somebody might decide to price shop for a new fender or talk dirty to his wife. Virii are a more credible risk, but there are ways to minimize that risk there without turning yet another facet of one's work life into a joyless hell.
"I have to agree with the above posters that companies have a legitimate point here. Flash animations, greeting cards, personal email, pr0n...all this stuff takes bandwith folks. Moreover, all this stuff will travel over the COMPANY's network on COMPANY time."
To some extent, I agree with you. Companies shouldn't have to pay someone who isn't being productive, or who is maxing out the network by downloading gigabytes of music and movies. Behavior like that amounts to stealing.
"Worse, let's say Dumb Secretary #1 opens up an ILOVEYOU-type virus (I saw such a case on the evening news at the time.) Boom-infected machines that will have to be cleaned up. This is most certainly a BAD THING."
Certainly, this is a bad thing. There are technological solutions that don't require a complete ban on Internet access (firewalling, attachment scanning, dropping Outlook or changing its default settings, strongly-worded emails openly mocking anyone stupid enough to download executables from total strangers), and a total ban isn't going to eliminate the problem so long as your machines have floppy drives.
"Now, before I'm flamed by the personal freedoms crowd, let me point out that work is a privilege. You have been hired by said company to perform said tasks. You have not been hired to bid on eBay, manage your stocks, or visit the Hamsterdance. Those people who need access, like developers, will likely be granted it. The article means companies in general, some tech firms probably won't mess with it."
Work is not a privilege. Most people need to be employed, the same way that they need air to survive. There are exceptions, but they can generally be divided between the independently wealthy and the clinically insane.
Which, of course, is why businesses aren't given free rein over their companies. Things like OSHA, minimum wage, and whistleblower laws are meant to ensure workers are given a certain standard of living. It's doubtful that the Feds will ever step in and declare Internet-free workplaces an occupational hazard, but it seems that society has decided that there is only so much crap an employee should have to put up with.
Though you're being reasonable, a lot of the folks on the "your company owns you" bandwagon leave me with the impression that a corporation has no obligation to its employees other than getting the maximum amount of production out of them each pay period. I think that's wrong, and that employers have a duty to not to pile too much suckiness onto their employees' lives.
// Begin irrelevant tangent. Return 1 on failure.
What would really be cool is a company that was owned entirely by the employees. When you get hired on, you automatically get a share of the stock in the company, based on the value of the work you're doing. You can't sell it, but you're paid in dividends. The upper management is voted in by the employee/stockholders, and can be voted out by the same.
So, instead of having a charter which requires the company to "maximize shareholder value," it's guided by the wishes of the employees. So if a policy is proposed that would increase profit and increase suckiness*, the employees themselves would be the ones to decide whether the extra cash was worth it. Under the current system, the answer is always, "Full steam ahead."
Anyways, I think that would be an incredibly cool corporate model to be a part of.
"We'll have to see where this goes, but I say let's wait and see."
I think I see it going the same places you do. Some corporations will jump on it, others won't touch it. Just as it's always been. After all, the idea of unplugging the worker bees isn't a new one (although the "We must avert the Hacker Armaggeddon" pitch might be a new twist). Some employees won't mind. Others will set fire to their desks and dance naked until security throw them out. The flames will be extinguished, and life will go on.
* An ill-defined metric, I'll admit. But I think everyone knows what I'm talking about.
No, you don't get it. Neither do I. In fact, nobody could get it by reading the article, because he simply doesn't explain what he means by "charging for the source."
If he means, "You don't get our GPL'ed product with source until you pay us $50," that's perfectly OK. If he means, "You get the binary for $50, and the source will cost you $5000 extra," then that's not okay under the GPL.
In the latter case, Windows XP perfectly and completely fulfills the terms of the GPL. After all, if you were able to scrape together $300 billion, I'm sure Bill Gates would be more than happy to sell you a copy of the source code with unlimited distribution rights. And then come over to wax your Ferarri.
OpenOffice is supported by Sun, and IIRC the two share a codebase similar to the relationship between Mozilla and Netscape. It looks like Sun will be charging for SO6.
Speaking of Mozilla, it's also a good example of a successful end-user app being developed by a major corporation.
GAIM probably isn't intended as a moneymaker, since its intent is to provide similar functionality to the AIM client which is given away for free. However, when a linux distro includes GAIM, it makes the distro as a whole more valuable. So it might nevertheless make financial sense to develop it.
Oh, and on an unrelated note, it's sad when the president of a company doesn't bother to spellcheck his public correspondences (and then proudly links to it from their homepage). If I'd come across this article as a/. post, I would only mod up if it were below +3. TheKompany's new "You may have the source but you may not redistribute the source" license is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how satisfactory it will be to OSS users.
There is such a license, and it is called the GPL.
Red Hat's boxed distros, just as an example, fulfill your requirements exactly. The only real difference is that RHAT ships source CDs instead of making you download it off the Net.
His ambiguity here bothered me, too. It's possible that he means, "You buy the product, and you get the source along with it." That would work under the GPL. It's also possible that he means, "You can buy the source-free version for $50, or the sourced version for $5000. Take your pick." That would just be evil. I browsed around theKompany, but couldn't figure out which product he was referring to.
The fact that the Novell CNA/CNE certifications weren't even listed says something about how little weight they carry these days. I completed mine about this time last year, and stupidly thought it was my ticket to fame and fortune. Turns out, even in Utah (Novell's stomping grounds and probably its most die-hard install base), there's not an overwhelming demand for it.
Now, the program I got my CNE from was an excellent program. By the time you took the test, you had a good deal of hands-on experience, and really understood the material. The course even included an internship with an IT department. It certainly beat the pants off those courses advertised on TV ("Get certified in four weeks, and make six figures a year for life! Call now!") But job hunting was just depressing. Send off a dozen resumes, and get maybe one call back. The closest I ever got was a, "Well, we would have hired you but we decided to eliminate the position."
Certifications don't mean a whole lot. Even within my own program, there was a wide variance in the competence of the students. I'd say that the entire concept of certifications was designed to make life easier on HR departments. And too many of the training schools have the "certify them quickly and let them get experience on someone else's dime" mentality. It cheapens the value of the certifications themselves, and hurts the entire industry.
In my case, I've decided that I can finally afford to go back and get a CS degree. It's not the ticket to fame and fortune either, but at least I get to learn some cool stuff. But if someone in the Salt Lake area is looking for a geek who knows a bit of everything and will work dirt cheap, I'm interested.
Mozilla uses the Gecko rendering engine, but Gecko doesn't comprise the whole of the Mozilla code. Heck, Gecko is even used in projects unrelated to web browsing, like Komodo. Can anyone tell us how closely the beta-tested browser actually resembles Mozilla/Netscape?
There would have been dancing in the streets of Slashopolis. I would have run through the streets in a state of undress, shouting wild shouts of exultation and blinding unwary bystanders.
Yes, AOL is a huge behemoth, but in this case not a proprietary one. If I grok Mozilla rightly, the Gecko engine is what decides how to display html/xml. Since it follows the standards better than IE, it will lead to pressure for a more standard-compliant web. Had Microsoft also adopted Gecko, it would have led to the same pressures.
Of course, Microsoft would never actually do that, because they'd have a tough time spinning the implication that their technology was inferior to a competitor's. Also, the IE rendering engine is supposedly too inte-muh-grated to be ripped out of the OS like that.
Finally, the fact is that Gecko is open source, which means that anyone, anytime, can fork the code and create a competitive new browser. This leads to competition in the marketplace, which leads to goodness all around.
Probably not. Linux is still a bit of a niche desktop market, and AOL doesn't see it as cost-effective to support.
It's an economic thing called "marginal cost." To release a client for YipeeOS, they need to write the client, debug the client, test it on a wide variety of hardware/software configurations, and then distribute the new client alongside the AOL client for Windows (increasing burning time and making the install process ever so slightly more complicated). AOL's current policy is to provide free tech support to all customers, so they also have to write a knowledge database for that client, and train at least a few techs in using it.
It was worthwhile for them to release a Macintosh client, and at some point the beancounters will have to admit that it's worthwhile to support Linux. At the moment, I think AOL's best option would be to release an unsupported Linux client (for download rather than CD-based distribution). I know there are people out there who would use it.
No, it doesn't. AOL didn't get to be a huge company by being suicidal. Distributing AOL CDs with a gecko-based web browser instead of IE isn't suicidal, but not allowing AOL users to browse with IE would be.
Some customers are going to switch to the new browser. Some are going to install it, then use IE anyways. Some will try to browse with a Win32 version of Lynx.
Santa Claus, not having heard that you can't make money by giving away stuff for free, announces the IPO of North Pole Enterprises.
Ebay refuses to hire me for their tech support.
Mandrake realizes the obvious fact that it wouldn't be hemorraging money if everyone in the world gave it just $5, then extrapolates that into a business model.
Slashdot realizes the obv. . . oh, never mind.
I go out and buy a Mandrake distro out of guilt, not need.
North Pole Enterprises announces huge layoffs. Santa gored to death by a disgruntled Blitzen.
"If Linux becomes what Windows is in terms of usability, it will be every bit as bloated as MS. Don't believe me? Look at Redhat. Their default install wants to eat up a gig of space. Granted it comes with lots of apps, but it has its share of bloat too."
You can't compare the bloatiness of XP and Red Hat 7.2 by simply comparing how many megabytes each chews up. You have to find some sort of bloat/functionality metric. In such a comparison, I think that any Linux distro would win handily.
When you install either OS, you're also installing a lot of auxillary software. Red Hat gives you a C/C++ compiler for free, while you would have to buy VC++6 from Microsoft. Red Hat includes an IRC client, which is a separate download under Windows. Red Hat gives you more text editors than you can possibly be interested in (joe, several variations of VI, Emacs and XEmacs, gEdit, NEdit, Abiword, Kate). You even have the option of installing StarOffice 5.2, free. With MS, you get Notepad, Wordpad, and EDIT (command-line). And last I heard, Notepad *still* had that 64K limit, which is simply braindead. Red Hat gives you TuxRacer, while you would have to shell out $50 for Microsoft's HALO.:)
Finally, the docs that ship with Red Hat are probably way more thorough (though less organized) than anything Microsoft gives you.
The point is, if you can see where the bloat is coming from, then it really isn't bloat. Most Linux distros have big installs because they provide a lot of different utilities and a lot of documentation. I'm hard pressed to figure out where the bloat in Windows comes from.
"It's in everybody's best interest if Microsoft does well, believe it or not."
If, by "does well," you mean "continues to exist, continues to improve its software, and continues to provide incentives for competitors to improve theirs" then I fully agree. If you mean, "continues to pursue Complete World Domination(TM), continues to lock customers into proprietary formats and solutions, and continues to force customers along expensive upgrade paths," then you would be wrong. Microsoft has its place in the world, I'll agree. But that place is not the center of the world's information economy.
Seeing: IIRC, the idea behind invisibility is to sew fiber opbics into the fabric, which shunt the light around the body and out the other side. I don't think 100% invisibility would be practical. Rather, they're simply trying to reduce visibility as much as they can.
But what would be really cool is if they could use it to move light from the back of your head to the side of your eye, giving you sort of a rear-view mirror.
Infrared: What would be really cool is having a refrigeration unit on your suit. The heat could be collected in something disposable in your boots, and then driven into the ground. The idea comes from "Red Mars," which had a stealth vehicle that did basically the same thing.
Exoskeletons: Presuming that the devices on your feet could absorb much of the impact, and there were gyros to make sure you didn't land head first, jumping might be possible. As for carrying heavy loads, I don't know how practical that would be for long distances. After all, you need to carry a great deal of stored energy. It might just be easier to build a small one-man vehicle (say, a motorcycle on steroids). It would be much more useful in hand-to-hand combat, or for sprinting short distances quickly.
As someone who has actually been in the Army, this is something we very definitely do not want. Any pleasure derived from seeing certain military type women scantily clad must be weighed against the risk of, well, seeing certain other military type women scantily clad.
Correction: Updated source code was made available within hours of being found. While it's far superior to the Microsoft solution (beg and beg for us to put a fix in the next Service Pack and we just might). But don't forget that there are lots of folks who won't be made aware of the hole, or won't bother plugging it. A lot of people will end up leaving it open until the next distro upgrade. As for me, I'm probably going to upgrade the.so and then flush it from my brain forever.
Hopefully their next step will be to replace their low-level tech support computer OS'es with a Linux thin client. I'm presuming that they currently run Windows. That would at least cost MS some licensing fees, and would hurt them even more if the thin client code were GPL'ed for widespread use.
For higher-level tech support, it might be a problem, since they might need to try and simulate the problem on their own computers. For that sort of thing, Windows would be a necessity.
[Note: I am not an AOL employee, and haven't been an AOL user since 1994. As such, I don't know what I'm talking about.]
Sorry. I was assuming 2 Redhat CDs and a separate disk for the AOL client. I guess they could ship a really stripped-down Linux OS and client on a single CD, as someone else helpfully pointed out.
Still. . . not having the Documentation CD.::shudders:: Best not to think about it.
Worse, they're implying that AOL is for non-geeks only.
I browsed Google for solutions for folk who want to use AOL. While I did find a listing for AOL Tunneling Client for UNIX on linux.org, the web page that it links to seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the WINE project offers another ray of hope.
It seems like the best solution would be for AOL to switch from its proprietary internal protocols to TCP/IP and family. With packet filtering, they should be able to maintain just as much control over the user environment as they do now, while making it easier to support "non-standard" clients.
And while they're at it, I'd like them to switch to IPv6. Plus I want world peace and a pony.
Seriously, there are a thousand good reasons to switch to TCP/IP. What advantages do they gain by sticking with what they have?
Maybe not. By the sound of the article, the people at AOL don't want to have to do tech support for a Linux client. Without a Linux client, anyone using the Internet is someone who is using another ISP.
Also, the boxed Red Hat 7.2 distro contains no fewer than 7 CDs (2 install disks, 2 source disks, Star Office, some Loki demos, and a documentation CD). Even if they limited it to just the first two, it still means tripling the already vast amount of plastic being distributed, and I don't think they'll go for that.
Finally, given the expertise differential between "installing the AOL Client" and "reformatting or repartitioning the HDD and installing Red Hat Linux," it's a bad idea. I think there are too many people out there who would wreak havoc on their current system if some Red Hat CDs dropped into their laps. It wouldn't be good for thousands of people to think of Linux as "that software that ate my computer."
Yet another, "It was obvious from the commercials that the movie sucked, so why bother going to it?" response. I've seen too many great commercials for bad movies (and vice versa) to respect this sort of thinking.
It looks to me like the standard practice for movie marketing is to take whatever movie is being promoted, pigeonhole it into one of several genres ("Chick Flick," "Horror," "Kids Film," "Shoot-em Up," etc.) and then spend thirty seconds trying to convince everyone that the movie is the greatest example of that genre ever to grace the box office. So a crappy movie with pretty actors and a couple of mind-blowing scenes has a huge advantage over a superior movie with less eye candy.
Thus, you wind up with lousy commercials for great movies, because the commercials don't capture the unique feel of the movie in its race to overwhelm your visual cortex.
Don't judge a book by its cover, or even its jacket lining. Judge it by whether or not JonKatz liked it.:)
Egads! Then people will start writing cheap, inferior knockoffs of TuxRacer, completely obliterating all the major distros. Have these IP looters no souls at all?
/me thwarts them by designating Tux as a national monument.
I honestly don't know where your rant is coming from. It seems completely unrelated to both the parent article and reality.
First, I'd like to clear up your apparent misconception that "public domain" refers to the.ORG TLD. It doesn't.
Second,.ORG was never intended to be limited to "sites advancing the public interest." Quite the opposite, it was.COM that was intended solely for sites of a commercial nature..NET was supposed to be used by ISPs and other organizations related to communications and networking..ORG was meant as the "catchall" for anything that didn't fit other categories.
If there's anything to complain about, it's the fact that country code TLDs are underutilized, especially.US (lousy Yankees).
There should be no difference between linking statically and linking at runtime. If a piece of code cannot function without being linked to GPL'ed (not LGPL'ed) code, then it's insane to claim that the result is not a derivative work of the GPL'ed code.
That's precisely why the LGPL was created, and why some people choose it instead of the GPL. Were this not the case, the LGPL would never have been written.
Also insane is claiming that the author is trying to start a lynch mob, when the author didn't bother to tell us who to lynch. Sure, what his employer is doing is scummy, but it's also perfectly plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
Technical quibble: thirty-four states aren't "going after Microsoft." Nine(?) states are going after Microsoft. The others just got their shorts in a bunch when Microsoft tried to use the argument that the states weren't allowed to pursue their own remedies because the federal case was settled. So really, they're mostly just protecting their right for states to bring individual suits in antitrust cases.
Let's get something straight. I go home to be home. That's what it means to have a life. You want me to make business-related phone calls? Only on company time for which you must compensate me. I have a huge financial and emotional investment in myself, my life, and the people I choose to share it with.
I do not need extra stresses on my valuable free time because you think it would be cheaper for me to wear a pager than to hire somebody to watch the network at night. My life does not need to be brought to a halt because some clueless VP forgot the password to her dial-up e-mail at 10PM.
The people in my life are ones that I need to spend time with. Not want. Need. I also need time to pursue interests outside of work. There is enough for me to keep track of without you coming in and making my life harder.
Think this is a rant from one of the uber-lazy? Wrong. I'm just sick of employers who have decided that just because I've agreed to provide them with certain services, that they own me 24/7.
No, I *do* understand your point. Hopefully you understand mine. Employers have a lot of power over their employees. We need our jobs. We're terrified of losing our jobs. We would--and are often made to--go to exceptional lengths in order to keep them.
Because we're employees accepting paychecks, we have a duty to earn them. There's nothing onerous about that duty, because we're employees. And there's a shameful amount of abuse that can go on. But unplugging a useful tool like the Internet because somebody might spend some time reading personal e-mail or downloading pr0n makes only slightly more sense than taking away phones because somebody might decide to price shop for a new fender or talk dirty to his wife. Virii are a more credible risk, but there are ways to minimize that risk there without turning yet another facet of one's work life into a joyless hell.
Certainly, this is a bad thing. There are technological solutions that don't require a complete ban on Internet access (firewalling, attachment scanning, dropping Outlook or changing its default settings, strongly-worded emails openly mocking anyone stupid enough to download executables from total strangers), and a total ban isn't going to eliminate the problem so long as your machines have floppy drives.
Work is not a privilege. Most people need to be employed, the same way that they need air to survive. There are exceptions, but they can generally be divided between the independently wealthy and the clinically insane.
Which, of course, is why businesses aren't given free rein over their companies. Things like OSHA, minimum wage, and whistleblower laws are meant to ensure workers are given a certain standard of living. It's doubtful that the Feds will ever step in and declare Internet-free workplaces an occupational hazard, but it seems that society has decided that there is only so much crap an employee should have to put up with.
Though you're being reasonable, a lot of the folks on the "your company owns you" bandwagon leave me with the impression that a corporation has no obligation to its employees other than getting the maximum amount of production out of them each pay period. I think that's wrong, and that employers have a duty to not to pile too much suckiness onto their employees' lives.
What would really be cool is a company that was owned entirely by the employees. When you get hired on, you automatically get a share of the stock in the company, based on the value of the work you're doing. You can't sell it, but you're paid in dividends. The upper management is voted in by the employee/stockholders, and can be voted out by the same.
So, instead of having a charter which requires the company to "maximize shareholder value," it's guided by the wishes of the employees. So if a policy is proposed that would increase profit and increase suckiness*, the employees themselves would be the ones to decide whether the extra cash was worth it. Under the current system, the answer is always, "Full steam ahead."
Anyways, I think that would be an incredibly cool corporate model to be a part of.
I think I see it going the same places you do. Some corporations will jump on it, others won't touch it. Just as it's always been. After all, the idea of unplugging the worker bees isn't a new one (although the "We must avert the Hacker Armaggeddon" pitch might be a new twist). Some employees won't mind. Others will set fire to their desks and dance naked until security throw them out. The flames will be extinguished, and life will go on.
* An ill-defined metric, I'll admit. But I think everyone knows what I'm talking about.
No, you don't get it. Neither do I. In fact, nobody could get it by reading the article, because he simply doesn't explain what he means by "charging for the source."
If he means, "You don't get our GPL'ed product with source until you pay us $50," that's perfectly OK. If he means, "You get the binary for $50, and the source will cost you $5000 extra," then that's not okay under the GPL.
In the latter case, Windows XP perfectly and completely fulfills the terms of the GPL. After all, if you were able to scrape together $300 billion, I'm sure Bill Gates would be more than happy to sell you a copy of the source code with unlimited distribution rights. And then come over to wax your Ferarri.
OpenOffice is supported by Sun, and IIRC the two share a codebase similar to the relationship between Mozilla and Netscape. It looks like Sun will be charging for SO6.
/. post, I would only mod up if it were below +3. TheKompany's new "You may have the source but you may not redistribute the source" license is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how satisfactory it will be to OSS users.
Speaking of Mozilla, it's also a good example of a successful end-user app being developed by a major corporation.
GAIM probably isn't intended as a moneymaker, since its intent is to provide similar functionality to the AIM client which is given away for free. However, when a linux distro includes GAIM, it makes the distro as a whole more valuable. So it might nevertheless make financial sense to develop it.
Oh, and on an unrelated note, it's sad when the president of a company doesn't bother to spellcheck his public correspondences (and then proudly links to it from their homepage). If I'd come across this article as a
There is such a license, and it is called the GPL.
Red Hat's boxed distros, just as an example, fulfill your requirements exactly. The only real difference is that RHAT ships source CDs instead of making you download it off the Net.
Or have I missed the point of your post?
His ambiguity here bothered me, too. It's possible that he means, "You buy the product, and you get the source along with it." That would work under the GPL. It's also possible that he means, "You can buy the source-free version for $50, or the sourced version for $5000. Take your pick." That would just be evil. I browsed around theKompany, but couldn't figure out which product he was referring to.
The fact that the Novell CNA/CNE certifications weren't even listed says something about how little weight they carry these days. I completed mine about this time last year, and stupidly thought it was my ticket to fame and fortune. Turns out, even in Utah (Novell's stomping grounds and probably its most die-hard install base), there's not an overwhelming demand for it.
Now, the program I got my CNE from was an excellent program. By the time you took the test, you had a good deal of hands-on experience, and really understood the material. The course even included an internship with an IT department. It certainly beat the pants off those courses advertised on TV ("Get certified in four weeks, and make six figures a year for life! Call now!") But job hunting was just depressing. Send off a dozen resumes, and get maybe one call back. The closest I ever got was a, "Well, we would have hired you but we decided to eliminate the position."
Certifications don't mean a whole lot. Even within my own program, there was a wide variance in the competence of the students. I'd say that the entire concept of certifications was designed to make life easier on HR departments. And too many of the training schools have the "certify them quickly and let them get experience on someone else's dime" mentality. It cheapens the value of the certifications themselves, and hurts the entire industry.
In my case, I've decided that I can finally afford to go back and get a CS degree. It's not the ticket to fame and fortune either, but at least I get to learn some cool stuff. But if someone in the Salt Lake area is looking for a geek who knows a bit of everything and will work dirt cheap, I'm interested.
Mozilla uses the Gecko rendering engine, but Gecko doesn't comprise the whole of the Mozilla code. Heck, Gecko is even used in projects unrelated to web browsing, like Komodo. Can anyone tell us how closely the beta-tested browser actually resembles Mozilla/Netscape?
There would have been dancing in the streets of Slashopolis. I would have run through the streets in a state of undress, shouting wild shouts of exultation and blinding unwary bystanders.
Yes, AOL is a huge behemoth, but in this case not a proprietary one. If I grok Mozilla rightly, the Gecko engine is what decides how to display html/xml. Since it follows the standards better than IE, it will lead to pressure for a more standard-compliant web. Had Microsoft also adopted Gecko, it would have led to the same pressures.
Of course, Microsoft would never actually do that, because they'd have a tough time spinning the implication that their technology was inferior to a competitor's. Also, the IE rendering engine is supposedly too inte-muh-grated to be ripped out of the OS like that.
Finally, the fact is that Gecko is open source, which means that anyone, anytime, can fork the code and create a competitive new browser. This leads to competition in the marketplace, which leads to goodness all around.
Probably not. Linux is still a bit of a niche desktop market, and AOL doesn't see it as cost-effective to support.
It's an economic thing called "marginal cost." To release a client for YipeeOS, they need to write the client, debug the client, test it on a wide variety of hardware/software configurations, and then distribute the new client alongside the AOL client for Windows (increasing burning time and making the install process ever so slightly more complicated). AOL's current policy is to provide free tech support to all customers, so they also have to write a knowledge database for that client, and train at least a few techs in using it.
It was worthwhile for them to release a Macintosh client, and at some point the beancounters will have to admit that it's worthwhile to support Linux. At the moment, I think AOL's best option would be to release an unsupported Linux client (for download rather than CD-based distribution). I know there are people out there who would use it.
No, it doesn't. AOL didn't get to be a huge company by being suicidal. Distributing AOL CDs with a gecko-based web browser instead of IE isn't suicidal, but not allowing AOL users to browse with IE would be.
Some customers are going to switch to the new browser. Some are going to install it, then use IE anyways. Some will try to browse with a Win32 version of Lynx.
When you install either OS, you're also installing a lot of auxillary software. Red Hat gives you a C/C++ compiler for free, while you would have to buy VC++6 from Microsoft. Red Hat includes an IRC client, which is a separate download under Windows. Red Hat gives you more text editors than you can possibly be interested in (joe, several variations of VI, Emacs and XEmacs, gEdit, NEdit, Abiword, Kate). You even have the option of installing StarOffice 5.2, free. With MS, you get Notepad, Wordpad, and EDIT (command-line). And last I heard, Notepad *still* had that 64K limit, which is simply braindead. Red Hat gives you TuxRacer, while you would have to shell out $50 for Microsoft's HALO.
Finally, the docs that ship with Red Hat are probably way more thorough (though less organized) than anything Microsoft gives you.
The point is, if you can see where the bloat is coming from, then it really isn't bloat. Most Linux distros have big installs because they provide a lot of different utilities and a lot of documentation. I'm hard pressed to figure out where the bloat in Windows comes from.
If, by "does well," you mean "continues to exist, continues to improve its software, and continues to provide incentives for competitors to improve theirs" then I fully agree. If you mean, "continues to pursue Complete World Domination(TM), continues to lock customers into proprietary formats and solutions, and continues to force customers along expensive upgrade paths," then you would be wrong. Microsoft has its place in the world, I'll agree. But that place is not the center of the world's information economy.
Seeing: IIRC, the idea behind invisibility is to sew fiber opbics into the fabric, which shunt the light around the body and out the other side. I don't think 100% invisibility would be practical. Rather, they're simply trying to reduce visibility as much as they can.
But what would be really cool is if they could use it to move light from the back of your head to the side of your eye, giving you sort of a rear-view mirror.
Infrared: What would be really cool is having a refrigeration unit on your suit. The heat could be collected in something disposable in your boots, and then driven into the ground. The idea comes from "Red Mars," which had a stealth vehicle that did basically the same thing.
Exoskeletons: Presuming that the devices on your feet could absorb much of the impact, and there were gyros to make sure you didn't land head first, jumping might be possible. As for carrying heavy loads, I don't know how practical that would be for long distances. After all, you need to carry a great deal of stored energy. It might just be easier to build a small one-man vehicle (say, a motorcycle on steroids). It would be much more useful in hand-to-hand combat, or for sprinting short distances quickly.
As someone who has actually been in the Army, this is something we very definitely do not want. Any pleasure derived from seeing certain military type women scantily clad must be weighed against the risk of, well, seeing certain other military type women scantily clad.
In the end, the reward just isn't worth the risk.
Correction: Updated source code was made available within hours of being found. While it's far superior to the Microsoft solution (beg and beg for us to put a fix in the next Service Pack and we just might). But don't forget that there are lots of folks who won't be made aware of the hole, or won't bother plugging it. A lot of people will end up leaving it open until the next distro upgrade. As for me, I'm probably going to upgrade the .so and then flush it from my brain forever.
To say it was "stamped out" is an exaggeration.
Hopefully their next step will be to replace their low-level tech support computer OS'es with a Linux thin client. I'm presuming that they currently run Windows. That would at least cost MS some licensing fees, and would hurt them even more if the thin client code were GPL'ed for widespread use.
For higher-level tech support, it might be a problem, since they might need to try and simulate the problem on their own computers. For that sort of thing, Windows would be a necessity.
[Note: I am not an AOL employee, and haven't been an AOL user since 1994. As such, I don't know what I'm talking about.]
Sorry. I was assuming 2 Redhat CDs and a separate disk for the AOL client. I guess they could ship a really stripped-down Linux OS and client on a single CD, as someone else helpfully pointed out.
::shudders:: Best not to think about it.
Still. . . not having the Documentation CD.
Worse, they're implying that AOL is for non-geeks only.
I browsed Google for solutions for folk who want to use AOL. While I did find a listing for AOL Tunneling Client for UNIX on linux.org, the web page that it links to seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the WINE project offers another ray of hope.
It seems like the best solution would be for AOL to switch from its proprietary internal protocols to TCP/IP and family. With packet filtering, they should be able to maintain just as much control over the user environment as they do now, while making it easier to support "non-standard" clients.
And while they're at it, I'd like them to switch to IPv6. Plus I want world peace and a pony.
Seriously, there are a thousand good reasons to switch to TCP/IP. What advantages do they gain by sticking with what they have?
Maybe not. By the sound of the article, the people at AOL don't want to have to do tech support for a Linux client. Without a Linux client, anyone using the Internet is someone who is using another ISP.
Also, the boxed Red Hat 7.2 distro contains no fewer than 7 CDs (2 install disks, 2 source disks, Star Office, some Loki demos, and a documentation CD). Even if they limited it to just the first two, it still means tripling the already vast amount of plastic being distributed, and I don't think they'll go for that.
Finally, given the expertise differential between "installing the AOL Client" and "reformatting or repartitioning the HDD and installing Red Hat Linux," it's a bad idea. I think there are too many people out there who would wreak havoc on their current system if some Red Hat CDs dropped into their laps. It wouldn't be good for thousands of people to think of Linux as "that software that ate my computer."
Yet another, "It was obvious from the commercials that the movie sucked, so why bother going to it?" response. I've seen too many great commercials for bad movies (and vice versa) to respect this sort of thinking.
:)
It looks to me like the standard practice for movie marketing is to take whatever movie is being promoted, pigeonhole it into one of several genres ("Chick Flick," "Horror," "Kids Film," "Shoot-em Up," etc.) and then spend thirty seconds trying to convince everyone that the movie is the greatest example of that genre ever to grace the box office. So a crappy movie with pretty actors and a couple of mind-blowing scenes has a huge advantage over a superior movie with less eye candy.
Thus, you wind up with lousy commercials for great movies, because the commercials don't capture the unique feel of the movie in its race to overwhelm your visual cortex.
Don't judge a book by its cover, or even its jacket lining. Judge it by whether or not JonKatz liked it.
Egads! Then people will start writing cheap, inferior knockoffs of TuxRacer, completely obliterating all the major distros. Have these IP looters no souls at all?
/me thwarts them by designating Tux as a national monument.
I honestly don't know where your rant is coming from. It seems completely unrelated to both the parent article and reality.
.ORG TLD. It doesn't.
.ORG was never intended to be limited to "sites advancing the public interest." Quite the opposite, it was .COM that was intended solely for sites of a commercial nature. .NET was supposed to be used by ISPs and other organizations related to communications and networking. .ORG was meant as the "catchall" for anything that didn't fit other categories.
.US (lousy Yankees).
First, I'd like to clear up your apparent misconception that "public domain" refers to the
Second,
If there's anything to complain about, it's the fact that country code TLDs are underutilized, especially
There should be no difference between linking statically and linking at runtime. If a piece of code cannot function without being linked to GPL'ed (not LGPL'ed) code, then it's insane to claim that the result is not a derivative work of the GPL'ed code.
That's precisely why the LGPL was created, and why some people choose it instead of the GPL. Were this not the case, the LGPL would never have been written.
Also insane is claiming that the author is trying to start a lynch mob, when the author didn't bother to tell us who to lynch. Sure, what his employer is doing is scummy, but it's also perfectly plausible.