I had the head of desktop support in my company ask about running Linux on our computers. I told him that it definitely would NOT run everything we used, but that it could serve just fine for most people. His second question was, "What virus scanner do you run?" I sort of laughed, and then realized he was serious. I told him that I didn't run one, since I didn't see the need. He told me very clearly that if were we to even consider running Linux inside the company that we'd have to get a virus scanner in place first. This is an example of the bias and the warping that working with only Microsoft products for 15 years does to a person. They don't even realize the unbelievable assumptions they're working with. It's downright scary. I'd be willing to have a debate on the merits of this issue, but I cannot accept the argument that we simply have to run a virus scanner because it's a "PC," and -- I can just see it coming -- if you can't get a virus scanner on Linux that catches N number of threats, where "N" is exactly the number of Symantec's corporate scanner, it's no good at all.
Now they've gone a hired a guy I really respect, and he's talking crap about how we need to automatically apply all patches to any Macs that we might get in the company, when we don't even do that to Windows! (Because it could break things, of course.)
The same guy is running around telling everyone that there are more patches in "Linux" than "Windows." Sigh. Didn't we get over this about 5 years ago? Now I've got to go dig up some anti-FUD on simple counting of vulnerabilities.
NO ONE thinks they are affected by advertising (and I'm no different), but the TRILLIONS of dollars that companies GLEEFULLY spend on it every year begs to differ. That's the beauty of the system, as long as you're on the right side of it. There's been some illuminating psychological studies done on this, but they're defying simple Googling at the moment.
Wow. A reasoned and literate conversation on Slashdot. Thank you. I have enjoyed this whole discussion. I don't have anything to add except my astonishment and appreciation!
I think what you fail to understand is that I know about these arguments, and I'm not persuaded. I like how you minimize human life by calling it simply a "ball of cells," and consider the "torture and horrific death" of MEAT to be somehow worthy of consideration. I also understand some of the arguments against eating "factory farm" food, and my wife typically buys organic where and when possible (at great expense), but I don't care that other people do it, or consume it. My original post was trying to point out there isn't -- no matter how much you guys like to preach it -- a moral imperative here. Or, if there is, then my belief, as what I'm positive you'd call a "fundie," is just as valid. Something I don't think you'll agree with. To you, this has become a moral position, and, as such, a sort of religion, and all that talk about perspective and knee-jerking is bunch of hooey designed to ignore this reality. Note I'm NOT criticizing you for having it. All I'm asking is that you embrace it, and then apply the same sort of code of conduct about it that you would place on me for having MY beliefs.
This is part of the problem. You make an assumption that because we're talking about something as dear to you as the very food you eat, then you get to do as much harm as you like without needing to justify it. But you do need to justify it, as much as any action that has an impact on others. Who said I needed to justify it? You? So what? Who in the world am I "impacting" when I eat an animal? You've completely lost me on this.
It's perfectly clear from this discussion that you hold the life of what I call "food" as nearly as important as a human being's. It speaks to at least a nearly-religious view. But I'm going to take a wild guess that you don't take my religious views seriously, being as they're based on a rather literal interpretation of a book that is several thousand years old. So why should I take your views seriously? By what moral or logical authority do you make your argument? You think it's just obvious that we should leave as little "mark" on the ecology as possible. I think it's just as obvious that all this "stuff" was put here for our explicit use as raw materials for any manner of things, not even just food.
In a overly broad stroke, I'll point out that most vegans are probably supportive of a woman's "choice." You may or may not be covered in this generalization personally, but, in the main, how can anything they say about the sanctity of animals be taken seriously when they feel it's permissible to kill perfectly viable people just prior to being born?
The bottom line is that you're simply wrong, both philosophically and legally. I do NOT have to justify my diet. Not to you, or anyone else, for that matter. It's not being forced on me by humanity or the country I'm living in, nor is it in my ethical convictions, nor is it implied by my moral code. Your position is interesting and certainly well thought out, but it doesn't make it absolute.
And you know what? Neither is mine, but I'm not the one telling YOU that you MUST eat meat.
I'm sure Microsoft slathers its campaign contributions around so that no matter who wins, they owe Redmond a few favors.
Before the anti-trust action here in the States, Microsoft gave essentially nothing to political parties. By the time the trial ended -- with what amounted to a slap on the wrist -- they were donating $1M per year to BOTH parties.
Bill may come to the party late on everything he gets involved with, but when he finally does it, he does it to win.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Don't say that the performance of Windows-based games takes a hit on Linux. I've run Linux on the desktop for 12 years. Every few months, I get the bug to "try it again." The last time I did so, I pirated -- yes, pirated -- I've bought it 3 times, and never gotten it to actually play the games I wanted to play -- Cedega, and took it for a drive. On both Counter Strike and Battlefield 2, the game played BETTER under Linux than it did under Windows. BF2 was appreciably better. However, two things kept me from switching. For CS:S, it was horribly long load times. I don't know what it was about Steam, but it would take several minutes to finally load up. BF2 was different. PunkBuster is NOT SUPPORTED under Cedega. What's so pathetic is that PunkBuster (and Valve's VAC) are apparently not preventing cheating. Our clan kicks people out of our servers all the time for hacking. Yet it keeps me from playing online under Linux. Other than that, Wine is letting the software actually run faster on the same hardware. YMMV.
Note that Crossover is promising select games will work under their new version, like Steam and WoW. I'm thinking about buying this again for Outlook functionality at work. (Evolution's Exchange plugin isn't working with meeting invitations, but I'm WAY off the subject now.) CodeWeavers is saying that their NEXT version will support PunkBuster. That would be cool, as it would remove the main barrier to playing games on Linux at this point.
Speaking of which, because of my older hardware not being able to play some of the new games, I just reinstalled Quake 3. I'm on Gentoo, and that was a simple process. I just put my discs in my drives, and did an ``emerge +cdinstall''. However, PunkBuster needed to update, and it wouldn't do it automatically. I found out how to force this, and did so in the main installation directory, but the game still wouldn't let me play online (it kept kicking me into observer mode). I finally figured out that I needed to run the update utility in my ~/.q3a/pb directory. So, I'm just leaving a googleable memory trail here.;-)
As someone with a robotics degree from Carnegie Mellon, I feel to compelled to point out that you're ignoring just how abjectly stupid and incompetent robots still are. We do not have anywhere near the level of AI needed for robot farmers to deal with the messy, filthy, ever-changing world of a farm. Automatic tractors that can plow fields or spray crops, yes. Weeding and picking fruit, no. Power isn't the problem; intelligence is.
I am a robot, so I am really getting a kick out of these replies. Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.... You don't. I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about. This is how bad info gets passed around. If you don't know about the topic....Don't make yourself sound like you do. Because some Slashdotters believe anything they hear.
You imply that, say, Red Hat or Novell own the code involved, and are therefore liable. I hadn't thought about this before, but you may have a point that I overlooked. A lot of core code in the kernel and Gnome has been written by people on the payroll of one of the commercial vendors. I've never looked to see who retained the copyright on that source. Whoever it is, that's the entity that's liable. So it may just be that Microsoft is cherry picking their patent disputes in order to involve someone with deep pockets, rather than individual developers. I guess we can't know right now because Microsoft won't be specific.
I knew someone would bring this up; it crossed my mind too. I would guess that SCO was part of this plan all along. IBM is mopping the floor with SCO in that lawsuit, but there's no doubt that they've spent millions defending themselves. I wonder if Microsoft's strategy to take "the fight" out of them. It would take a doubly charitable IBM to take up the charge against Microsoft for anything other than suits directed at them specifically. They may not even have legal standing to do so.
This is really key. The fight shouldn't be against me, using the software at home, or even a distributor of a collection of compiled programs. It should be -- if we accept that software patents as an idea is even valid -- against the people who wrote it. They are the ones that are infringing Microsoft's patents.
Microsoft wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sue "Linux" for violating 235 patents, when in actuality, they should undertake roughly 235 SEPARATE lawsuits against the individual programmers whose code infringes. IT'S NOT LIKE THAT'S A SECRET. Code is always attributed in the free software world.
And what's with not being specific as to the patents? More SCO-like nonsense. They're afraid of giving people time to "open source" the defense using something like Groklaw to rally around.
Just yesterday, I tried to get to a GIS database in my state. The site said I needed IE 6 or later. I was using Firefox. So I just opened IE 7 and tried to go to the site (which I have to use internally at my company anyway, but which I avoid using on internet sites.) It still said that I needed IE 6 OR LATER. I guess their devs don't understand the meaning of "or later?" I even tried the user agent plugin on Firefox, set it to IE 6, and tried to go to the site. It told me I was using IE 6, but that I needed IE 6 or later to use the site. Uh, thanks, guys. Way to go.
Screw that! I've GOT a Dell laptop. I've tried SLED, Ubuntu, and Gentoo on it. All of them had "issues" of some sort or another. (My fave, Gentoo, did NOTHING when I tried to switch the video for a projector.) If Dell offered a laptop with Linux pre-installed -- by which I mean that all the hardware JUST WORKED with Linux -- I'd GLADLY pay $50 more for the stupid thing. What's wrong with you people?! Isn't this worth anything to you? It is to me, and you go ahead and bet your bottom dollar that the next time I make a requisition for a new laptop (which should be this fiscal year), if Dell's offering, I'm buying. I know that may not seem like a big deal, what with voting with my company's dollars, but, if I were the one buying it with my money, this still would be a no-brainer.
I think libraries OUGHT to have complete control of the books they choose to carry. Some people call it "censorship," and that's unfortunate. It's a Bad Word now, but it shouldn't be. To me, censorship WOULD mean that the government PREVENTS THE BOOK FROM BEING PUBLISHED or quashes it when it leaks into the public anyway. As long as the book is being sold freely, then you can get a copy. This is still a free enterprise system. You want a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook, then BUY a copy. No one in the government is preventing you. Nowhere is it guaranteed in the Constitution that we all are supposed to have FREE access to all "information." Some may raise the spectre of the "poor" not being able to afford $7.99 for a paperback, but I refuse to let that consideration override everything else about this argument. To summarize: no censorship does NOT equal FREE. THIS is what irks me about these discussions.
The infuriating thing about this case is that, even if you saw him on the street and asked him about that briefcase, he could simply laugh all the way to the bank. He's made millions while this thing has dragged on. While I've seen people comment that there could be another lawsuit against SCO's board for bringing a frivolous suit, I doubt seriously that anything would come of it, and, even if it did, Darl has surely made sure that his assets would be protected in such a case. There are many things wrong about this situation, but this is the one that irks me more than them all. Something's wrong with the system when such things are allowed to happen. It seems like we could use some sort of "smell test" early on in a case like this. You know, like, the judge could have said, "Hey! You've been talking smack for months now in the press. Show me what you've got. Nuthin', huh? Beat it. Case dismissed."
It's inevitable: there will be people complaining about how this is an oppressive form of censorship. Let's face it: that argument is why this post was "greenlighted." But there's no censorship here; at least not in this case. The government is in no way telling those sites what to do with their content.
It's NOT the job of the government to give out free internet access as though it were an "inalienable right." If you want to go to those sites, and the library doesn't give you that permission, then go buy a computer and do it on your own.
Sorry, I don't trust ANY x-number person court to decide this issue. And, you can bet your sweet bippie that whichever way the SCotUS would rule on this, half the country is going to argue about it anyway, so let's just avoid it and work it out the way our government was supposed to work. I'm tired of this coming up, and everyone backing away from it. Let's just put it to Congress to amend the Constitution, and clarify it. That way, we can get the debate going WHERE IT OUGHT TO BE, get PEOPLE TO TALK TO THEIR REPRESENTATIVES, clarify what it OUGHT TO MEAN IN THE 21st CENTURY, and settle it for another couple hundred years. I'm a HUGE proponent of an individual's right to keep and bear whatever weapons he can afford, but our government is a democratic republic, if the majority of the people (and the companies that represent them -- don't get me started) can sway Congress to kill this right, then so be it. THAT'S HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK. I can't stand the fact that our Congress won't touch it because it's such a "hot" issue. It's their stupid jobs! When there's this much confusion about law, the law needs to be re-worked. It's that simple. (There are case studies out there from other countries that have effectively killed the right of personal defense, and we can study these efforts, which would -- or maybe rather *should* -- be outside the scope of our Supreme Court. Again, don't get me started.)
I was at a conference about 6 years ago. It was devoted to big engineering database applications, and most of us were either using Sun or thinking about it. So McNealy was on hand to give the keynote address. (It wasn't a large conference, but it was in San Francisco, so I guess he thought, "Hey, I won't have to drive far," or something.) Anyway, Sun had *just* released bought and released StarOffice. He made a comment about that in his speech. It went something like, "So, we just bought StarOffice and released it for free, because, well, because we could." And he had this really sneaky grin on his face while he said it, and it was understood that, while there were lots of really cool things going to come of this, he was really enjoying the fact that they were sticking it to Microsoft with the move. (IIRC, it only cost them a couple of million.) It was really funny.
The sick part of this is that SCO's management will probably laugh all the way to Barbados after this is done anyway. I know that IBM has some counterclaims based on some Lanham Act or something, which probably has to do with what most of here on Slashdot feel was criminal intent to use the courts to do things that the courts were never meant to do, but I doubt they'll really bring anyone to personal accountability for such things, much as we would like them to.
It's like I keep telling people: it's stupid easy to make a lot of money if you have no morals or conscience.
So far, the discussion has missed an important point. One of the "features" of Vista will be DirectX 10. Microsoft aren't going to port DX10 to XP. So, if you want to play the latest games, you'll have to upgrade. Oh yeah, and there's only 1 video card on the market that currently supports DX10, and it costs upwards of $600.
Buh bye PC gaming. It's been more frustrating than fun most of the time anyway. Hello Nintendo Wii!
Indeed, as a long time Linux gearhead, I'd still rather administrate a large group of users' permissions on Windows rather than Linux. I'll give you that one. Yeah, ACL's, and they're hard to use. I get by without them.
Sandboxes? We don't even have to use the SELinux model as an example, though it's certainly a really good one. Have you never heard of chroot jails? "We've" had those for a long, long time now.
Windows is monolithic? Yes and no. Windows is certainly more of a microkernel rather than monolithic. Linux is still all monolithic. You're right about one thing though, there are things like this under the hood that show that the basic, fundamental assumptions are different between the two platforms. I'd say I'm "equally dangerous" on either platform, and I'll take Linux any day.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the head of desktop support in my company ask about running Linux on our computers. I told him that it definitely would NOT run everything we used, but that it could serve just fine for most people. His second question was, "What virus scanner do you run?" I sort of laughed, and then realized he was serious. I told him that I didn't run one, since I didn't see the need. He told me very clearly that if were we to even consider running Linux inside the company that we'd have to get a virus scanner in place first. This is an example of the bias and the warping that working with only Microsoft products for 15 years does to a person. They don't even realize the unbelievable assumptions they're working with. It's downright scary. I'd be willing to have a debate on the merits of this issue, but I cannot accept the argument that we simply have to run a virus scanner because it's a "PC," and -- I can just see it coming -- if you can't get a virus scanner on Linux that catches N number of threats, where "N" is exactly the number of Symantec's corporate scanner, it's no good at all.
Now they've gone a hired a guy I really respect, and he's talking crap about how we need to automatically apply all patches to any Macs that we might get in the company, when we don't even do that to Windows! (Because it could break things, of course.)
The same guy is running around telling everyone that there are more patches in "Linux" than "Windows." Sigh. Didn't we get over this about 5 years ago? Now I've got to go dig up some anti-FUD on simple counting of vulnerabilities.
NO ONE thinks they are affected by advertising (and I'm no different), but the TRILLIONS of dollars that companies GLEEFULLY spend on it every year begs to differ. That's the beauty of the system, as long as you're on the right side of it. There's been some illuminating psychological studies done on this, but they're defying simple Googling at the moment.
Wow. A reasoned and literate conversation on Slashdot. Thank you. I have enjoyed this whole discussion. I don't have anything to add except my astonishment and appreciation!
I think what you fail to understand is that I know about these arguments, and I'm not persuaded. I like how you minimize human life by calling it simply a "ball of cells," and consider the "torture and horrific death" of MEAT to be somehow worthy of consideration. I also understand some of the arguments against eating "factory farm" food, and my wife typically buys organic where and when possible (at great expense), but I don't care that other people do it, or consume it. My original post was trying to point out there isn't -- no matter how much you guys like to preach it -- a moral imperative here. Or, if there is, then my belief, as what I'm positive you'd call a "fundie," is just as valid. Something I don't think you'll agree with. To you, this has become a moral position, and, as such, a sort of religion, and all that talk about perspective and knee-jerking is bunch of hooey designed to ignore this reality. Note I'm NOT criticizing you for having it. All I'm asking is that you embrace it, and then apply the same sort of code of conduct about it that you would place on me for having MY beliefs.
It's perfectly clear from this discussion that you hold the life of what I call "food" as nearly as important as a human being's. It speaks to at least a nearly-religious view. But I'm going to take a wild guess that you don't take my religious views seriously, being as they're based on a rather literal interpretation of a book that is several thousand years old. So why should I take your views seriously? By what moral or logical authority do you make your argument? You think it's just obvious that we should leave as little "mark" on the ecology as possible. I think it's just as obvious that all this "stuff" was put here for our explicit use as raw materials for any manner of things, not even just food.
In a overly broad stroke, I'll point out that most vegans are probably supportive of a woman's "choice." You may or may not be covered in this generalization personally, but, in the main, how can anything they say about the sanctity of animals be taken seriously when they feel it's permissible to kill perfectly viable people just prior to being born?
The bottom line is that you're simply wrong, both philosophically and legally. I do NOT have to justify my diet. Not to you, or anyone else, for that matter. It's not being forced on me by humanity or the country I'm living in, nor is it in my ethical convictions, nor is it implied by my moral code. Your position is interesting and certainly well thought out, but it doesn't make it absolute.
And you know what? Neither is mine, but I'm not the one telling YOU that you MUST eat meat.
Before the anti-trust action here in the States, Microsoft gave essentially nothing to political parties. By the time the trial ended -- with what amounted to a slap on the wrist -- they were donating $1M per year to BOTH parties.
Bill may come to the party late on everything he gets involved with, but when he finally does it, he does it to win.
Don't say that the performance of Windows-based games takes a hit on Linux. I've run Linux on the desktop for 12 years. Every few months, I get the bug to "try it again." The last time I did so, I pirated -- yes, pirated -- I've bought it 3 times, and never gotten it to actually play the games I wanted to play -- Cedega, and took it for a drive. On both Counter Strike and Battlefield 2, the game played BETTER under Linux than it did under Windows. BF2 was appreciably better. However, two things kept me from switching. For CS:S, it was horribly long load times. I don't know what it was about Steam, but it would take several minutes to finally load up. BF2 was different. PunkBuster is NOT SUPPORTED under Cedega. What's so pathetic is that PunkBuster (and Valve's VAC) are apparently not preventing cheating. Our clan kicks people out of our servers all the time for hacking. Yet it keeps me from playing online under Linux. Other than that, Wine is letting the software actually run faster on the same hardware. YMMV.
;-)
Note that Crossover is promising select games will work under their new version, like Steam and WoW. I'm thinking about buying this again for Outlook functionality at work. (Evolution's Exchange plugin isn't working with meeting invitations, but I'm WAY off the subject now.) CodeWeavers is saying that their NEXT version will support PunkBuster. That would be cool, as it would remove the main barrier to playing games on Linux at this point.
Speaking of which, because of my older hardware not being able to play some of the new games, I just reinstalled Quake 3. I'm on Gentoo, and that was a simple process. I just put my discs in my drives, and did an ``emerge +cdinstall''. However, PunkBuster needed to update, and it wouldn't do it automatically. I found out how to force this, and did so in the main installation directory, but the game still wouldn't let me play online (it kept kicking me into observer mode). I finally figured out that I needed to run the update utility in my ~/.q3a/pb directory. So, I'm just leaving a googleable memory trail here.
Why not six months? IIRC, that's about how long Daniel Robbins (of Gentoo fame) lasted at Microsoft.
I am a robot, so I am really getting a kick out of these replies. Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.... You don't. I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about. This is how bad info gets passed around. If you don't know about the topic....Don't make yourself sound like you do. Because some Slashdotters believe anything they hear.
You imply that, say, Red Hat or Novell own the code involved, and are therefore liable. I hadn't thought about this before, but you may have a point that I overlooked. A lot of core code in the kernel and Gnome has been written by people on the payroll of one of the commercial vendors. I've never looked to see who retained the copyright on that source. Whoever it is, that's the entity that's liable. So it may just be that Microsoft is cherry picking their patent disputes in order to involve someone with deep pockets, rather than individual developers. I guess we can't know right now because Microsoft won't be specific.
I knew someone would bring this up; it crossed my mind too. I would guess that SCO was part of this plan all along. IBM is mopping the floor with SCO in that lawsuit, but there's no doubt that they've spent millions defending themselves. I wonder if Microsoft's strategy to take "the fight" out of them. It would take a doubly charitable IBM to take up the charge against Microsoft for anything other than suits directed at them specifically. They may not even have legal standing to do so.
This is really key. The fight shouldn't be against me, using the software at home, or even a distributor of a collection of compiled programs. It should be -- if we accept that software patents as an idea is even valid -- against the people who wrote it. They are the ones that are infringing Microsoft's patents.
Microsoft wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sue "Linux" for violating 235 patents, when in actuality, they should undertake roughly 235 SEPARATE lawsuits against the individual programmers whose code infringes. IT'S NOT LIKE THAT'S A SECRET. Code is always attributed in the free software world.
And what's with not being specific as to the patents? More SCO-like nonsense. They're afraid of giving people time to "open source" the defense using something like Groklaw to rally around.
Just yesterday, I tried to get to a GIS database in my state. The site said I needed IE 6 or later. I was using Firefox. So I just opened IE 7 and tried to go to the site (which I have to use internally at my company anyway, but which I avoid using on internet sites.) It still said that I needed IE 6 OR LATER. I guess their devs don't understand the meaning of "or later?" I even tried the user agent plugin on Firefox, set it to IE 6, and tried to go to the site. It told me I was using IE 6, but that I needed IE 6 or later to use the site. Uh, thanks, guys. Way to go.
Screw that! I've GOT a Dell laptop. I've tried SLED, Ubuntu, and Gentoo on it. All of them had "issues" of some sort or another. (My fave, Gentoo, did NOTHING when I tried to switch the video for a projector.) If Dell offered a laptop with Linux pre-installed -- by which I mean that all the hardware JUST WORKED with Linux -- I'd GLADLY pay $50 more for the stupid thing. What's wrong with you people?! Isn't this worth anything to you? It is to me, and you go ahead and bet your bottom dollar that the next time I make a requisition for a new laptop (which should be this fiscal year), if Dell's offering, I'm buying. I know that may not seem like a big deal, what with voting with my company's dollars, but, if I were the one buying it with my money, this still would be a no-brainer.
I think libraries OUGHT to have complete control of the books they choose to carry. Some people call it "censorship," and that's unfortunate. It's a Bad Word now, but it shouldn't be. To me, censorship WOULD mean that the government PREVENTS THE BOOK FROM BEING PUBLISHED or quashes it when it leaks into the public anyway. As long as the book is being sold freely, then you can get a copy. This is still a free enterprise system. You want a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook, then BUY a copy. No one in the government is preventing you. Nowhere is it guaranteed in the Constitution that we all are supposed to have FREE access to all "information." Some may raise the spectre of the "poor" not being able to afford $7.99 for a paperback, but I refuse to let that consideration override everything else about this argument. To summarize: no censorship does NOT equal FREE. THIS is what irks me about these discussions.
The infuriating thing about this case is that, even if you saw him on the street and asked him about that briefcase, he could simply laugh all the way to the bank. He's made millions while this thing has dragged on. While I've seen people comment that there could be another lawsuit against SCO's board for bringing a frivolous suit, I doubt seriously that anything would come of it, and, even if it did, Darl has surely made sure that his assets would be protected in such a case. There are many things wrong about this situation, but this is the one that irks me more than them all. Something's wrong with the system when such things are allowed to happen. It seems like we could use some sort of "smell test" early on in a case like this. You know, like, the judge could have said, "Hey! You've been talking smack for months now in the press. Show me what you've got. Nuthin', huh? Beat it. Case dismissed."
It's inevitable: there will be people complaining about how this is an oppressive form of censorship. Let's face it: that argument is why this post was "greenlighted." But there's no censorship here; at least not in this case. The government is in no way telling those sites what to do with their content.
It's NOT the job of the government to give out free internet access as though it were an "inalienable right." If you want to go to those sites, and the library doesn't give you that permission, then go buy a computer and do it on your own.
What was the actual problem? Bad software, bad configuration, bad programming, bad security practice, just a clever hacker?
Yes, I'm hoping it was a Microsoft shop, top-to-bottom. 8-)
Sorry, I don't trust ANY x-number person court to decide this issue. And, you can bet your sweet bippie that whichever way the SCotUS would rule on this, half the country is going to argue about it anyway, so let's just avoid it and work it out the way our government was supposed to work. I'm tired of this coming up, and everyone backing away from it. Let's just put it to Congress to amend the Constitution, and clarify it. That way, we can get the debate going WHERE IT OUGHT TO BE, get PEOPLE TO TALK TO THEIR REPRESENTATIVES, clarify what it OUGHT TO MEAN IN THE 21st CENTURY, and settle it for another couple hundred years. I'm a HUGE proponent of an individual's right to keep and bear whatever weapons he can afford, but our government is a democratic republic, if the majority of the people (and the companies that represent them -- don't get me started) can sway Congress to kill this right, then so be it. THAT'S HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK. I can't stand the fact that our Congress won't touch it because it's such a "hot" issue. It's their stupid jobs! When there's this much confusion about law, the law needs to be re-worked. It's that simple. (There are case studies out there from other countries that have effectively killed the right of personal defense, and we can study these efforts, which would -- or maybe rather *should* -- be outside the scope of our Supreme Court. Again, don't get me started.)
I was at a conference about 6 years ago. It was devoted to big engineering database applications, and most of us were either using Sun or thinking about it. So McNealy was on hand to give the keynote address. (It wasn't a large conference, but it was in San Francisco, so I guess he thought, "Hey, I won't have to drive far," or something.) Anyway, Sun had *just* released bought and released StarOffice. He made a comment about that in his speech. It went something like, "So, we just bought StarOffice and released it for free, because, well, because we could." And he had this really sneaky grin on his face while he said it, and it was understood that, while there were lots of really cool things going to come of this, he was really enjoying the fact that they were sticking it to Microsoft with the move. (IIRC, it only cost them a couple of million.) It was really funny.
The sick part of this is that SCO's management will probably laugh all the way to Barbados after this is done anyway. I know that IBM has some counterclaims based on some Lanham Act or something, which probably has to do with what most of here on Slashdot feel was criminal intent to use the courts to do things that the courts were never meant to do, but I doubt they'll really bring anyone to personal accountability for such things, much as we would like them to.
It's like I keep telling people: it's stupid easy to make a lot of money if you have no morals or conscience.
Yeah, well, can you blame him? He's also one of those guys who makes everyone say "GNU/Linux."
So far, the discussion has missed an important point. One of the "features" of Vista will be DirectX 10. Microsoft aren't going to port DX10 to XP. So, if you want to play the latest games, you'll have to upgrade. Oh yeah, and there's only 1 video card on the market that currently supports DX10, and it costs upwards of $600.
Buh bye PC gaming. It's been more frustrating than fun most of the time anyway. Hello Nintendo Wii!
Indeed, as a long time Linux gearhead, I'd still rather administrate a large group of users' permissions on Windows rather than Linux. I'll give you that one. Yeah, ACL's, and they're hard to use. I get by without them.
Sandboxes? We don't even have to use the SELinux model as an example, though it's certainly a really good one. Have you never heard of chroot jails? "We've" had those for a long, long time now.
Windows is monolithic? Yes and no. Windows is certainly more of a microkernel rather than monolithic. Linux is still all monolithic. You're right about one thing though, there are things like this under the hood that show that the basic, fundamental assumptions are different between the two platforms. I'd say I'm "equally dangerous" on either platform, and I'll take Linux any day.
I just wish Linux's laptop support was better.
Sheesh. You're probably one of those guys who still runs around calling GNU/Linux just plain, old "Linux." Get a clue, man!