If a significant number of PCs were sold with GNU/Linux (or GNU/Solaris) installed, instead of Windows, do you think that:
1. Most makers of the kind of "demo crap" that installs with PCs would go "Oh noes! Now we can't ship anything with a significant number of PCs! Our entire business model is now obsolete because of the OS that's shipped with a lot of computers!"
2. Most makers of the kind of "demo crap" that installs with PCs would port their software to GNU/(Linux|Solaris) (presumably using the free Wine libraries) and make the same kinds of deals they always have.
I appreciate there's a short-term jump to overcome before we get to that point, but it may actually work in the favour of Free operating systems. Most of us don't want that crap in the first place. A perception that a computer is more valuable, as evidenced by its $50 higher price, because it comes with Fedora or Ubuntu or Nexenta pre-installed, may undermine much of the "Free software is just cheap knockoffery" perception, and people who buy such PCs early on will, as Mac users do today, unquestionably praise the ease of use, speed, and lack of confusing crap, that a modern GNOME based free operating system generally has.
...which you will not get, because your plan is uneconomic. The best I can imagine is you paying full price for your phone and agreeing to let the operator de-assign your phone number when your phone is not in use in return for some kind of prepaid scheme like that.
What you'll likely get is what you get now, a pay-as-you-go plan that requires you generate around $10 in revenues every month at a minimum (or, in other countries with caller-pays, charges the usual rip-off rates for calls to mobiles but requires a lower commitment), with unlimited being an option for those who can afford it.
That said, I don't think any operator is going to even try to claw $150/month from its regular customers. The evidence so far as that around $50 a month is the "sweet spot" in the US for a mobile phone customers use in place of their landlines. What you might see is customers encouraged to buy other services that bring the total up to $150, but this would off-set those customer's expenditure on those services obtained from rivals. ie a cellphone that can also act as your broadband Internet access point (perhaps even with a built-in Ethernet adapter), that can also use W-USB to transmit DVR'd HD content received using DVB (a DVB receiver and DVR in your cellphone) to your W-USB HD TV. Cable TV, the Internet, and phone service, all in one tiny unit.
That's probably what they're aiming at, but it'd be interesting to see how practical such a device would be in practice, given the general incompetence of most operators.
Is the "top list" even remotely relevant to the question? The question is not whether some copyright violations are more popular than the authorized content on YouTube, but whether the vast majority of videos are legitimate.
I'm prepared to accept a higher proportion of its viewers watch the copyright violations than would match the ratio of violations to legitimate content (that is, if 5% of YouTube's total video content violates copyright law, I can imagine that 20% of the average YouTube user's time is spent watching that content), but I doubt still that the vast majority of minutes spent watching it are used to view unauthorized content, and almost every search term I've ever used on YouTube has brought up far more authorized videos than (obvious) copyright infringements.
The other difference is that I don't think anyone seriously believes that Napster's "library" was mostly original work, authorized (and uploaded) by the copyright holders, with the majority of Napster's users going to it for access to that type of content. Oh sure, some of it was, but the vast majority...
YouTube, by comparison, seems to be mostly original work, created and posted by the copyright holders to those works, they publish. As a tool, it's clearly aimed at legitimate uses, and Viacom's one legitimate complaint might be (MIGHT be) that Google just didn't police it well enough.
YouTube has much more chance of landing a Betamax-type verdict than Napster did. I'm not saying it's cut and dried, but I'd be surprised if they can't at least deflect the bulk of the liability to their (copyright infringing) users, which is arguably as it should be. $1 billion dollars? IANAL, but I just don't see it.
Well ok, it's interesting to you. I doubt "millions" have switched to it because it's "interesting", I think millions have gone from other platforms to Linux-based systems because that's what's provided in nice packaged forms. And network effects have ended up helping Linux, ensuring it has the widest possible base of platform compatibility.
But as a kernel, it isn't remotely interesting, and it's certainly never been a driver for innovation.
I'm holding off commenting fully on Solaris/SunOS. But I can believe that if it's everything its claimed to be, and if a compatibility layer is grafted on top, it could easily be the basis of the phrasing out of Linux, should GPL3 turn out to be what's hoped for, and should Sun do the relicensing.
This really depends on how it's done. It's quite possible to see Solaris, with a Linux kernel personality, being treated by many as a drop-in replacement. If Fedora 6, or Ubuntu Jumping Jellyfish, or whatever simply came out with Solaris instead of Linux, then it'd take over in much the same way that Firefox and Mozilla simply, transparently, replaced Netscape 4. End users wouldn't even care.
Linux's role in the operating system commonly described as "Linux" is way over-rated. It's in almost every GNU-based operating system distribution because there's no real point in replacing it, it's Free and well supported. Something whose license better supports the needs of Free software users that's as capable (or more capable) and can be made to be transparently backward compatible would certainly have a high probability of displacing it.
I doubt Objective C 2 is "proprietary" given Apple's built its compiler, as it did with Objective C, upon GCC, and submitted the changes to the GCC people. The status of the run-time is unknown, but that's not so much a language issue as an implementation issue.
You seem to have completely skipped over the last paragraph of my comment:
It may just be a small network in my case, but once you master DHCP, DNS, and a bit of shell scripting, there are relatively few limits to what you can do. Would it work for, say, routing large netblocks or anything like that? Of course not, but DHCP should be a component of any centrally managed IP addresses scheme.
And I stick by that. DHCP should be a component of any centally managed IP addresses scheme. It's proven technology and it works well. As a component it can provide "last mile" access to the wider database reliably and in a standard fashion.
Also your last paragraph makes no sense. Part of my reason for centrally managing IP addresses rather than manually configuring each of my machines on the machines themselves is precisely because computers on my home network do provide services. If I move DNS to a new server, or the IP gateway somewhere else, or want to change the entire IP topology of the network, DHCP makes the entire process a hell of a lot simpler. I don't have to remember which machines are using which services, and which ones are providing them.
Given GPL3 cannot be applied to the Linux kernel, I can't see GPL3 killing Linux in any way except possibly in being so much better that an alternative to Linux that is licensed under GPL3 gains massive popularity, in part due to licensing.
Which is not impossible, BTW.
Personally, I don't care about the long term survival of "Linux". Linux is a kernel, and not even a particularly interesting one. What I care about is the long term survival of useful Free software. If Linux takes a bullet because, for example, Solaris has a better Free software license, then so long Linux. Nice knowing you.
FWIW, my entire home network (six "live" machines plus a few others) runs off DHCP and there's not a single computer without a static IP address. It's great. Reinstalling an OS doesn't involve manually setting up the network. If I change the server that provides DNS, or the default gateway, I can make one change centrally. If I ever plan to move off 10.x.x.x and onto, say, 192.168.x.x, it'd take me about five minutes to change everything centrally, and then all I have to do is reboot everything.
It may just be a small network in my case, but once you master DHCP, DNS, and a bit of shell scripting, there are relatively few limits to what you can do. Would it work for, say, routing large netblocks or anything like that? Of course not, but DHCP should be a component of any centrally managed IP addresses scheme.
...not to mention the first guy on his list, Alexander Graham Bell, who was Scottish by Birth, and Canadian by nationality.
(Interestingly, many of the inventions listed weren't exclusively "invented" in the US, Joseph Swan invented the light bulb in Scotland, Benz invented the car in Germany, and even "the first country to invent the telephone" is under dispute. All of which said, there's little doubt that the US was a bigger driver for innovation at that time, and that was much to do with its beliefs in freedom and its openness. It amazes me that those people who get into nationalistic fights like this supposedly arguing "for" America are usually doing so to argue against what made America great to begin with.)
Yes and no. There has to be a willing suspension of disbelief, and frequently Hollywood (and television) assumes that the number of people in the viewership of a particular program is so low it quite happily removes all semblance of reality for that "minority" to the point, not really caring that the entire movie looks utterly ridiculous as a result for that group. What's bizarre to me is how rarely it's necessary for the plot or understandability of the end story for them to do that.
It would probably serve the plot well for quite a few films if a normal car's cruise control allowed the car to drive unmonitored, or if newspapers talked and responded to spoken database queries. They don't do either because almost the entire audience knows that there is too large a gap between reality and fiction for those specific examples. But if it involves computers, explosions and weapons, gravity, or even breaking glass, anything goes... Hell, sometimes if it's something that everyone knows today is ridiculous but once upon a time was a black-art, they'll get away with it because it's a cliche. Don't forget to hang up the telephone before they're able to trace the call!
It's worse when so-often the inaccuracies are basicly a Deus Ex Machina to get the hero out of a problem. If Chloe wasn't able to trace the call through the binary, Jack wouldn't know the terrorist's address, and so wouldn't be able to cross Los Angelas in twenty minutes at mid-day to prevent them from using the code they downloaded from the satellite to their PDAs to activate the chemical weapons.
You do realise that there have been Commodore PCs before - in that Commodore when it existed as a company made PCs?
Yes, I do. Indeed, I even made the same complaints at the time, 17 years ago.
You know, most of us end users go into modes where we apparently think we're better than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and explain where they're going wrong and what we would do in their place. And 90% of the time, we're wrong.
In the case of Commodore's management however, and all of us second guessing them, I think pretty much all of us were right, for once.
...the new Cray MCX, an amazing new supercomputer with a 2GHz Core2Duo, 512Mb of RAM, and a 40GB hard disk, goes on sale tomorrow.
I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.
Re:right....
on
DIY Laptop
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, then this article isn't for you.
Personally, I think anyone doing something different and practical like this is fairly interesting however useful (or desirable to ME) the end result might be.
I think the Deity thing comes from a slightly different source (but is, nonetheless, hardwired), that happens to link very well into the desire by human beings to get an explanation for everything.
Essentially, as mammals, we instinctively have a pack mentality, we look for leadership, and we look for leaders of leaders, and so on. There is never, within the bounds of our comprehension, a real "ultimate leader" (who would that be? The Secretary General of the UN? But he doesn't actually have that much power, and it's been a long time, if ever, that the UN has ever really been seen as a source of leadership. Actually, politics is a great one to look at for this. Remember the entire US looking to Rudy Gulliani on 9/11? There's a certain mismatch between theory and practice when it comes to the people we look to for guidance, and politics really doesn't match it as much as politicians like to think. Sometimes the Presidency isn't the top if the person in that position isn't someone that can be looked to like that.)
So our brains, to a certain extent, have to find ultimate leadership (leadership of the top of our visible hierarchies) in the invisible and uncertain. And as it happens, such a "leader" can only be more knowledgable and powerful than anyone we can see, which means He makes for a great source of explanations for much of the inexplicable.
In this model, atheism is more than just a rejection of what atheists see as a supernatural construct, it is also a rejection of a hardwiring of the pack, and in some ways this is probably why leaders are rarely (yes, there are exceptions) atheists the further up the hierarchy you go, and perhaps, to a certain extent, why the entire concept seems so threatening to so many theists and vice versa.
This is a primitive tribe without access to modern technologies, they run... oh forget it. Write your own punchline. I can think of dozens that'll thoroughly annoy someone. Y'know "Windows XP Service Pack 1!!!1!", "Debian Stable", "NetBSD", etc. Heh.
That reminds me: Remember folks, a Solar Eclipse is when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. Conversely, a Lunar Eclipse, which is what's happening tonight, is when the Sun gets between the Earth and the Moon.
Just letting you all know.
What's really upsetting is that I, and my party of missionaries, are due to be sacrificed by a cannibalistic tribe at noon today, and we were really hoping for a Solar eclipse as a result.
It does. Originally it contained configuration files, start-up scripts, and system management tools needed at boot. As time has gone on, most of the second group are in subdirectories of/etc, and the latter group was moved to/sbin. Amiga users will probably note that the "S" directory had similar problems in AmigaOS 1.x, and was similarly broken up on AmigaOS 2.x.
Historically, Unix had/sys for the kernel (short for SYStem, duh),/usr for user areas (yes, user areas),/lib for system libraries,/bin for top-level binaries, and/etc as the miscellaneous area. As time went on, substantial amounts of the operating system went into/usr, with the "bin" account set up to contain most of the tools people needed (which is why bin is also in/etc, and owns substantial amounts of the operating system, despite the apparent lack of a need to have that. It's legacy practices.)
So some time in the mid to late eighties, much of this started to be moved around. Real home directories were moved out of/usr to a variety of directories, eventually standardising, Mac OS X aside, on/home./usr itself started to be reorganized to look something like the top level,/etc was cleaned out (though much of this happened in the mid-nineties), and we have what we see today.
Meanwhile, people trying to be "clever" have invented new names for all these areas. I've heard people claim that USR stands for "Unix System Resources", which opens the question of why all the system directories don't begin with "US"? We see the nonsense above about ETC meaning something other than, well, etc, and other silly explanations doubtless exist for BIN and VAR.
The names mean what they sound like they mean. If it doesn't sound like a directory has a name that fits its current use, it's usually because it wasn't intended for that use originally.
Apple needs Darwin so it has something it has legal control over so it can keep as much (or as little) "open" as possible. Hacks like the Don't_Steal_MacOSX.kext thing wouldn't be viable if Apple had to release the source code to it under the GPL.
I do agree with your wider point though, I can see Solaris being the base of a more unified set of *ix operating systems in the future.
While the Wikipedia page could be interpreted as saying that, what it's actually saying (and what's actually correct) is that it's not "Bait and Switch" to, in good faith, offer something for sell, happen to sell out and offer only a higher priced alternative subsequently, if you put a disclaimer in your ad saying that the offer is "while stocks last".
That is, if the supermarket advertises "Buy Johnson's Flour for $1 a pound!", stocks 100 pounds, sells it all (at the $1 price, to real customers, after the campaign has started), and only has Smith's flour (for $1.10 a pound), then that's ok with the disclaimer. However, if the supermarket never had "Johnson's Flour", or does and refuses to sell it, then no amount of disclaimer boilerplate will get it out of trouble.
Under the terms of the recent agreement, Sun is permitted to use software from SCO's Unix System V Release 4. This allows Sun to use the Unix driver components that the company needs for its version of Solaris developed for Intel servers Relevant Products/Services.
They've always had the right to give away Solaris gratis and were doing so well before the SCO deal. I, personally, have a Solaris 8 media pack, bought in 2001 for the cost of the media and with as many free licenses as I wanted to be obtained from the website. The major problem with Solaris 8 is that it barely works on Intel (indeed, on both machines I tried it, a Thinkpad 600, and a VIA C3 based PC, the installer wouldn't make it all the way through for one reason or another.)
Sun had a different deal with AT&T and its successors than the deals IBM, DEC, HP, etc had.
I'm not sure, incidentally, how the term "FUD" applies to anything I've said. If Sun has bought an illegitimate indemnity deal from SCO, then that actually would have been wrong, especially given the timings. But SCO did have a legitimate product, in terms of its actual real (and unimagined) code in SCO Unix, and there's no reason why Sun shouldn't have bought it other than SCO being a company with evil business practices.
Don't know for sure. While the SCO deal was a big upset (Sun bought large amounts of SCO Unix so it could incorporate it into Solaris to make it stop sucking on Intel, but this was interpreted as a cash infusion to help SCO fight IBM at the time), the dislike seems to have gone on for much longer than that. I think it's just been minor little things building up for the most part. Sun's initial refusal to free Java being one of them.
If it's licensed under the GPL, nothing stops anyone from producing a fork that will allow you to keep your copyrights.
Bear in mind, however, that if you do, you'll end up in the same situation as Linux has this time around should it become necessary for there to be a GPLv4. You will not even have the choice of upgrading your fork to GPLv4, even if Sun (or the FSF or whomever owns the copyright to the original branch) consents to such an upgrade.
It certainly wouldn't be a "botch" to ensure contributors assign copyrights to the official branch, it's more that it's now obvious it was a botch for the Linux people not to (which I believe is why Linus is doing his sour grapes act at the moment about GPLv3, the more he criticizes it, the less people take notice of the original screw up he did which makes it virtually impossible for a license upgrade to happen.)
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Actually, no, the bug does allow remote access. Hence the initial bickering as to whether the bug constituted a "vulnerability" or not.
On the 5th of March, Core Labs wrote a proof of concept that showed how the bug could be used to execute arbitrary code in the kernel.
If a significant number of PCs were sold with GNU/Linux (or GNU/Solaris) installed, instead of Windows, do you think that:
1. Most makers of the kind of "demo crap" that installs with PCs would go "Oh noes! Now we can't ship anything with a significant number of PCs! Our entire business model is now obsolete because of the OS that's shipped with a lot of computers!"
2. Most makers of the kind of "demo crap" that installs with PCs would port their software to GNU/(Linux|Solaris) (presumably using the free Wine libraries) and make the same kinds of deals they always have.
I appreciate there's a short-term jump to overcome before we get to that point, but it may actually work in the favour of Free operating systems. Most of us don't want that crap in the first place. A perception that a computer is more valuable, as evidenced by its $50 higher price, because it comes with Fedora or Ubuntu or Nexenta pre-installed, may undermine much of the "Free software is just cheap knockoffery" perception, and people who buy such PCs early on will, as Mac users do today, unquestionably praise the ease of use, speed, and lack of confusing crap, that a modern GNOME based free operating system generally has.
What you'll likely get is what you get now, a pay-as-you-go plan that requires you generate around $10 in revenues every month at a minimum (or, in other countries with caller-pays, charges the usual rip-off rates for calls to mobiles but requires a lower commitment), with unlimited being an option for those who can afford it.
That said, I don't think any operator is going to even try to claw $150/month from its regular customers. The evidence so far as that around $50 a month is the "sweet spot" in the US for a mobile phone customers use in place of their landlines. What you might see is customers encouraged to buy other services that bring the total up to $150, but this would off-set those customer's expenditure on those services obtained from rivals. ie a cellphone that can also act as your broadband Internet access point (perhaps even with a built-in Ethernet adapter), that can also use W-USB to transmit DVR'd HD content received using DVB (a DVB receiver and DVR in your cellphone) to your W-USB HD TV. Cable TV, the Internet, and phone service, all in one tiny unit.
That's probably what they're aiming at, but it'd be interesting to see how practical such a device would be in practice, given the general incompetence of most operators.
Is the "top list" even remotely relevant to the question? The question is not whether some copyright violations are more popular than the authorized content on YouTube, but whether the vast majority of videos are legitimate.
I'm prepared to accept a higher proportion of its viewers watch the copyright violations than would match the ratio of violations to legitimate content (that is, if 5% of YouTube's total video content violates copyright law, I can imagine that 20% of the average YouTube user's time is spent watching that content), but I doubt still that the vast majority of minutes spent watching it are used to view unauthorized content, and almost every search term I've ever used on YouTube has brought up far more authorized videos than (obvious) copyright infringements.
The other difference is that I don't think anyone seriously believes that Napster's "library" was mostly original work, authorized (and uploaded) by the copyright holders, with the majority of Napster's users going to it for access to that type of content. Oh sure, some of it was, but the vast majority...
YouTube, by comparison, seems to be mostly original work, created and posted by the copyright holders to those works, they publish. As a tool, it's clearly aimed at legitimate uses, and Viacom's one legitimate complaint might be (MIGHT be) that Google just didn't police it well enough.
YouTube has much more chance of landing a Betamax-type verdict than Napster did. I'm not saying it's cut and dried, but I'd be surprised if they can't at least deflect the bulk of the liability to their (copyright infringing) users, which is arguably as it should be. $1 billion dollars? IANAL, but I just don't see it.
Well ok, it's interesting to you. I doubt "millions" have switched to it because it's "interesting", I think millions have gone from other platforms to Linux-based systems because that's what's provided in nice packaged forms. And network effects have ended up helping Linux, ensuring it has the widest possible base of platform compatibility.
But as a kernel, it isn't remotely interesting, and it's certainly never been a driver for innovation.
I'm holding off commenting fully on Solaris/SunOS. But I can believe that if it's everything its claimed to be, and if a compatibility layer is grafted on top, it could easily be the basis of the phrasing out of Linux, should GPL3 turn out to be what's hoped for, and should Sun do the relicensing.
This really depends on how it's done. It's quite possible to see Solaris, with a Linux kernel personality, being treated by many as a drop-in replacement. If Fedora 6, or Ubuntu Jumping Jellyfish, or whatever simply came out with Solaris instead of Linux, then it'd take over in much the same way that Firefox and Mozilla simply, transparently, replaced Netscape 4. End users wouldn't even care.
Linux's role in the operating system commonly described as "Linux" is way over-rated. It's in almost every GNU-based operating system distribution because there's no real point in replacing it, it's Free and well supported. Something whose license better supports the needs of Free software users that's as capable (or more capable) and can be made to be transparently backward compatible would certainly have a high probability of displacing it.
I doubt Objective C 2 is "proprietary" given Apple's built its compiler, as it did with Objective C, upon GCC, and submitted the changes to the GCC people. The status of the run-time is unknown, but that's not so much a language issue as an implementation issue.
You seem to have completely skipped over the last paragraph of my comment:
And I stick by that. DHCP should be a component of any centally managed IP addresses scheme. It's proven technology and it works well. As a component it can provide "last mile" access to the wider database reliably and in a standard fashion.
Also your last paragraph makes no sense. Part of my reason for centrally managing IP addresses rather than manually configuring each of my machines on the machines themselves is precisely because computers on my home network do provide services. If I move DNS to a new server, or the IP gateway somewhere else, or want to change the entire IP topology of the network, DHCP makes the entire process a hell of a lot simpler. I don't have to remember which machines are using which services, and which ones are providing them.
Given GPL3 cannot be applied to the Linux kernel, I can't see GPL3 killing Linux in any way except possibly in being so much better that an alternative to Linux that is licensed under GPL3 gains massive popularity, in part due to licensing.
Which is not impossible, BTW.
Personally, I don't care about the long term survival of "Linux". Linux is a kernel, and not even a particularly interesting one. What I care about is the long term survival of useful Free software. If Linux takes a bullet because, for example, Solaris has a better Free software license, then so long Linux. Nice knowing you.
FWIW, my entire home network (six "live" machines plus a few others) runs off DHCP and there's not a single computer without a static IP address. It's great. Reinstalling an OS doesn't involve manually setting up the network. If I change the server that provides DNS, or the default gateway, I can make one change centrally. If I ever plan to move off 10.x.x.x and onto, say, 192.168.x.x, it'd take me about five minutes to change everything centrally, and then all I have to do is reboot everything.
It may just be a small network in my case, but once you master DHCP, DNS, and a bit of shell scripting, there are relatively few limits to what you can do. Would it work for, say, routing large netblocks or anything like that? Of course not, but DHCP should be a component of any centrally managed IP addresses scheme.
(Interestingly, many of the inventions listed weren't exclusively "invented" in the US, Joseph Swan invented the light bulb in Scotland, Benz invented the car in Germany, and even "the first country to invent the telephone" is under dispute. All of which said, there's little doubt that the US was a bigger driver for innovation at that time, and that was much to do with its beliefs in freedom and its openness. It amazes me that those people who get into nationalistic fights like this supposedly arguing "for" America are usually doing so to argue against what made America great to begin with.)
Yes and no. There has to be a willing suspension of disbelief, and frequently Hollywood (and television) assumes that the number of people in the viewership of a particular program is so low it quite happily removes all semblance of reality for that "minority" to the point, not really caring that the entire movie looks utterly ridiculous as a result for that group. What's bizarre to me is how rarely it's necessary for the plot or understandability of the end story for them to do that.
It would probably serve the plot well for quite a few films if a normal car's cruise control allowed the car to drive unmonitored, or if newspapers talked and responded to spoken database queries. They don't do either because almost the entire audience knows that there is too large a gap between reality and fiction for those specific examples. But if it involves computers, explosions and weapons, gravity, or even breaking glass, anything goes... Hell, sometimes if it's something that everyone knows today is ridiculous but once upon a time was a black-art, they'll get away with it because it's a cliche. Don't forget to hang up the telephone before they're able to trace the call!
It's worse when so-often the inaccuracies are basicly a Deus Ex Machina to get the hero out of a problem. If Chloe wasn't able to trace the call through the binary, Jack wouldn't know the terrorist's address, and so wouldn't be able to cross Los Angelas in twenty minutes at mid-day to prevent them from using the code they downloaded from the satellite to their PDAs to activate the chemical weapons.
Yes, I do. Indeed, I even made the same complaints at the time, 17 years ago.
You know, most of us end users go into modes where we apparently think we're better than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and explain where they're going wrong and what we would do in their place. And 90% of the time, we're wrong.
In the case of Commodore's management however, and all of us second guessing them, I think pretty much all of us were right, for once.
I fail to see the point in this product being branded Commodore. It's another PC.
Well, then this article isn't for you.
Personally, I think anyone doing something different and practical like this is fairly interesting however useful (or desirable to ME) the end result might be.
I think the Deity thing comes from a slightly different source (but is, nonetheless, hardwired), that happens to link very well into the desire by human beings to get an explanation for everything.
Essentially, as mammals, we instinctively have a pack mentality, we look for leadership, and we look for leaders of leaders, and so on. There is never, within the bounds of our comprehension, a real "ultimate leader" (who would that be? The Secretary General of the UN? But he doesn't actually have that much power, and it's been a long time, if ever, that the UN has ever really been seen as a source of leadership. Actually, politics is a great one to look at for this. Remember the entire US looking to Rudy Gulliani on 9/11? There's a certain mismatch between theory and practice when it comes to the people we look to for guidance, and politics really doesn't match it as much as politicians like to think. Sometimes the Presidency isn't the top if the person in that position isn't someone that can be looked to like that.)
So our brains, to a certain extent, have to find ultimate leadership (leadership of the top of our visible hierarchies) in the invisible and uncertain. And as it happens, such a "leader" can only be more knowledgable and powerful than anyone we can see, which means He makes for a great source of explanations for much of the inexplicable.
In this model, atheism is more than just a rejection of what atheists see as a supernatural construct, it is also a rejection of a hardwiring of the pack, and in some ways this is probably why leaders are rarely (yes, there are exceptions) atheists the further up the hierarchy you go, and perhaps, to a certain extent, why the entire concept seems so threatening to so many theists and vice versa.
This is a primitive tribe without access to modern technologies, they run... oh forget it. Write your own punchline. I can think of dozens that'll thoroughly annoy someone. Y'know "Windows XP Service Pack 1!!!1!", "Debian Stable", "NetBSD", etc. Heh.
That reminds me: Remember folks, a Solar Eclipse is when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. Conversely, a Lunar Eclipse, which is what's happening tonight, is when the Sun gets between the Earth and the Moon.
Just letting you all know.
What's really upsetting is that I, and my party of missionaries, are due to be sacrificed by a cannibalistic tribe at noon today, and we were really hoping for a Solar eclipse as a result.
It does. Originally it contained configuration files, start-up scripts, and system management tools needed at boot. As time has gone on, most of the second group are in subdirectories of /etc, and the latter group was moved to /sbin. Amiga users will probably note that the "S" directory had similar problems in AmigaOS 1.x, and was similarly broken up on AmigaOS 2.x.
Historically, Unix had /sys for the kernel (short for SYStem, duh), /usr for user areas (yes, user areas), /lib for system libraries, /bin for top-level binaries, and /etc as the miscellaneous area. As time went on, substantial amounts of the operating system went into /usr, with the "bin" account set up to contain most of the tools people needed (which is why bin is also in /etc, and owns substantial amounts of the operating system, despite the apparent lack of a need to have that. It's legacy practices.)
So some time in the mid to late eighties, much of this started to be moved around. Real home directories were moved out of /usr to a variety of directories, eventually standardising, Mac OS X aside, on /home. /usr itself started to be reorganized to look something like the top level, /etc was cleaned out (though much of this happened in the mid-nineties), and we have what we see today.
Meanwhile, people trying to be "clever" have invented new names for all these areas. I've heard people claim that USR stands for "Unix System Resources", which opens the question of why all the system directories don't begin with "US"? We see the nonsense above about ETC meaning something other than, well, etc, and other silly explanations doubtless exist for BIN and VAR.
The names mean what they sound like they mean. If it doesn't sound like a directory has a name that fits its current use, it's usually because it wasn't intended for that use originally.
Apple needs Darwin so it has something it has legal control over so it can keep as much (or as little) "open" as possible. Hacks like the Don't_Steal_MacOSX.kext thing wouldn't be viable if Apple had to release the source code to it under the GPL.
I do agree with your wider point though, I can see Solaris being the base of a more unified set of *ix operating systems in the future.
While the Wikipedia page could be interpreted as saying that, what it's actually saying (and what's actually correct) is that it's not "Bait and Switch" to, in good faith, offer something for sell, happen to sell out and offer only a higher priced alternative subsequently, if you put a disclaimer in your ad saying that the offer is "while stocks last".
That is, if the supermarket advertises "Buy Johnson's Flour for $1 a pound!", stocks 100 pounds, sells it all (at the $1 price, to real customers, after the campaign has started), and only has Smith's flour (for $1.10 a pound), then that's ok with the disclaimer. However, if the supermarket never had "Johnson's Flour", or does and refuses to sell it, then no amount of disclaimer boilerplate will get it out of trouble.
No, Sun actually bought code from SCO, they wanted the ix86 device drivers from SCO Unix.
They've always had the right to give away Solaris gratis and were doing so well before the SCO deal. I, personally, have a Solaris 8 media pack, bought in 2001 for the cost of the media and with as many free licenses as I wanted to be obtained from the website. The major problem with Solaris 8 is that it barely works on Intel (indeed, on both machines I tried it, a Thinkpad 600, and a VIA C3 based PC, the installer wouldn't make it all the way through for one reason or another.)
Sun had a different deal with AT&T and its successors than the deals IBM, DEC, HP, etc had.
I'm not sure, incidentally, how the term "FUD" applies to anything I've said. If Sun has bought an illegitimate indemnity deal from SCO, then that actually would have been wrong, especially given the timings. But SCO did have a legitimate product, in terms of its actual real (and unimagined) code in SCO Unix, and there's no reason why Sun shouldn't have bought it other than SCO being a company with evil business practices.
Don't know for sure. While the SCO deal was a big upset (Sun bought large amounts of SCO Unix so it could incorporate it into Solaris to make it stop sucking on Intel, but this was interpreted as a cash infusion to help SCO fight IBM at the time), the dislike seems to have gone on for much longer than that. I think it's just been minor little things building up for the most part. Sun's initial refusal to free Java being one of them.
If it's licensed under the GPL, nothing stops anyone from producing a fork that will allow you to keep your copyrights.
Bear in mind, however, that if you do, you'll end up in the same situation as Linux has this time around should it become necessary for there to be a GPLv4. You will not even have the choice of upgrading your fork to GPLv4, even if Sun (or the FSF or whomever owns the copyright to the original branch) consents to such an upgrade.
It certainly wouldn't be a "botch" to ensure contributors assign copyrights to the official branch, it's more that it's now obvious it was a botch for the Linux people not to (which I believe is why Linus is doing his sour grapes act at the moment about GPLv3, the more he criticizes it, the less people take notice of the original screw up he did which makes it virtually impossible for a license upgrade to happen.)