>(has there ever been any such company of note which hasn't ended up screwed?). Symantec? Also Apple did pretty well with the bailout from MS (which many people compare this to)
But, as you said; instead of stating that they want to be 'good citizens' of the open source community they've explicity said that because of the GPL they won't issue a statement saying they won't sue other distributions; and Ballmer himself has made very threatening statements regarding the choice of distributions other than Suse.
In all seriousness, is anyone here still willing to endorse Microsoft's attacks on Linux and their abuse of the patent system, or are you planning on switching away from the use of SUSE Linux in your work enviroment?
...and fuse. If you're one of those odd people who like stability, and are -therefore- running a 2.4 kernel, prepare to dig around for an old version of fuse which supports makeing the required kernel module that ntfs-3g requires. I gave up and installed 2.6; which promptly started crashing for no readily apparent reason (just as I remembered it doing with every machine I've tried it on). When I feel energetic I'm backing this up and nuking it.
The 2.6 kernel is complete crap, and it's made every machine I've ran it on as crash-prone as win98 SE. I mean that literally, by the way.
A better way to go (if you're dual booting XP and Linux) is the Ext2 Installable Filesystem Driver for XP. You lose the journal the goes with your ext3 drives (at least while you're running XP) and there's issues with it occasionally failing to mark the drives clean at reboot; but overall it performs decently and is -as far as I can tell- fairly stable.
WHY does anyone assume that IBM is going to save Linux from any sort of patent problem? IBM is like, the god corporation of patents. Honestly, I wish you people would pull your heads out of your nether regions for just one brief moment and realise that it's much more likely that IBM would simply shrug and (if they needed to) switch over to SUSE.
This is about patents; IBM LOVES patents, much more than they like Linux.
Anyone who counts on IBM is a fool, and has forgotten that before microsoft was "M$", IBM was the big evil. It's much, much more likely that IBM will return to their old ways than it is that they'll fight a patent war against MS.
If even the founders of the project think it's dead and gone, then it's dead and gone in truth. Personally, I'll probably switch to OpenBSD; at least its' still maintained (not to mention the fact it's a full version ahead!)
If Novell goes belly up, or gets in trouble financially, this will give MS at least a tenuous claim to the UNIX source code (or whatever part of UNIX Novell owns the rights to), thereby putting them in a great posistion to litigate the hell out of every free *nix in existence?
Of course, I'm just speculating wildly here; but that was my first thought when I saw this article.
Personally speaking; I just hate letting my old k6-2 sit around and gather dust. Some slackware and a little cut and paste from the NAT HOWTO and it makes a fine file serving/ICS machine.
>Sure, it requires that you be on the internal LAN already, and that you be running ICS, and who runs ICS anyway?
Anyone using NAT under Linux, for one. Families connecting multiple computers onto a single network, for another. Not to mention people who share the same printer or who have a central file server set up to share mp3s or whatever.
If the graphics applications you use require windows, and all of the major firewall vendors are bloated (symantec), worthless (keiro) or both (macaffee) then what can you do?
Isn't that how you always paid? I vaguely remember that you had to pay your monthly fee to a seperate pay-pal like agency who gave the funds over to allofmp3.
On a related note; can you get around this and just use paypal?
Dunno. You'd have to ask yahoo how many people have paid for their yahoo plus service. Personally, if I'm going to switch, I'd rather use gmail for free instead of financially rewarding yahoo for successfully annoying me.
1. to legalize as money. 2. to coin into money: to monetize gold. 3. to give the character of money to. 4. Economics. to convert (a debt, esp. the national debt) into currency, esp. by issuing government securities or notes.
So, either yahoo is going to start printing money, or the gp poster is right and this term has been co-opted from its' 1875 usage and is now used exclusively by corporate slimeballs.
>And by email, I hope you mean the old email, not the new oddpost+SOAP+WS* monstrosity
Ugh. I had just managed to forget about that. The minute they take away the option to use the old yahoo mail, is the minute I permanantly switching over to gmail.
Those will be slathered in ads to the point of being unusable; much like geocities, yahoo groups, etc.
Someone please remind me again why we give a shit about yahoo (apart from email)? They've got to be the most craptastic set of services on the entire internet.
I don't have them set up at the moment, so I don't remember what they're called offhand; but one of the utilities that nvidia gives you gives you virtual desktops; though they're a lot clunkier (IMHO) to navigate than what you get with either GNOME or KDE. But, none-the-less; they're there. The downside being you have to have an nvidia card, of course.
The front-line for support in any OS is the same: friends and family.
I will, however, mention your point about Linux's lack of support the next time I'm talking to a non-tech person who asking my opinion of *nix in comparision to XP.
It's better by far that MS should get that call at 1am than me.
Slashdot Mirror
>(has there ever been any such company of note which hasn't ended up screwed?).
Symantec? Also Apple did pretty well with the bailout from MS (which many people compare this to)
But, as you said; instead of stating that they want to be 'good citizens' of the open source community they've explicity said that because of the GPL they won't issue a statement saying they won't sue other distributions; and Ballmer himself has made very threatening statements regarding the choice of distributions other than Suse.
In all seriousness, is anyone here still willing to endorse Microsoft's attacks on Linux and their abuse of the patent system, or are you planning on switching away from the use of SUSE Linux in your work enviroment?
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Slashdot: where MS has been a sinking ship since 1997!
...and fuse. If you're one of those odd people who like stability, and are -therefore- running a 2.4 kernel, prepare to dig around for an old version of fuse which supports makeing the required kernel module that ntfs-3g requires. I gave up and installed 2.6; which promptly started crashing for no readily apparent reason (just as I remembered it doing with every machine I've tried it on). When I feel energetic I'm backing this up and nuking it.
The 2.6 kernel is complete crap, and it's made every machine I've ran it on as crash-prone as win98 SE. I mean that literally, by the way.
A better way to go (if you're dual booting XP and Linux) is the Ext2 Installable Filesystem Driver for XP. You lose the journal the goes with your ext3 drives (at least while you're running XP) and there's issues with it occasionally failing to mark the drives clean at reboot; but overall it performs decently and is -as far as I can tell- fairly stable.
WHY does anyone assume that IBM is going to save Linux from any sort of patent problem? IBM is like, the god corporation of patents. Honestly, I wish you people would pull your heads out of your nether regions for just one brief moment and realise that it's much more likely that IBM would simply shrug and (if they needed to) switch over to SUSE.
This is about patents; IBM LOVES patents, much more than they like Linux.
Anyone who counts on IBM is a fool, and has forgotten that before microsoft was "M$", IBM was the big evil. It's much, much more likely that IBM will return to their old ways than it is that they'll fight a patent war against MS.
If even the founders of the project think it's dead and gone, then it's dead and gone in truth. Personally, I'll probably switch to OpenBSD; at least its' still maintained (not to mention the fact it's a full version ahead!)
I'm surprised this came up first in brazil; this seems more like something the US or the UK would pass (if we haven't already).
IBM and Intel both made public statements heralding this move, so I wouldn't look to them for any help at all.
If Novell goes belly up, or gets in trouble financially, this will give MS at least a tenuous claim to the UNIX source code (or whatever part of UNIX Novell owns the rights to), thereby putting them in a great posistion to litigate the hell out of every free *nix in existence?
Of course, I'm just speculating wildly here; but that was my first thought when I saw this article.
>Too cheap to buy a free after rebate router?
Personally speaking; I just hate letting my old k6-2 sit around and gather dust. Some slackware and a little cut and paste from the NAT HOWTO and it makes a fine file serving/ICS machine.
>Sure, it requires that you be on the internal LAN already, and that you be running ICS, and who runs ICS anyway?
Anyone using NAT under Linux, for one. Families connecting multiple computers onto a single network, for another. Not to mention people who share the same printer or who have a central file server set up to share mp3s or whatever.
If the graphics applications you use require windows, and all of the major firewall vendors are bloated (symantec), worthless (keiro) or both (macaffee) then what can you do?
>Politics is about number one,
Could fool me, mostly it smells like number two.
Isn't that how you always paid? I vaguely remember that you had to pay your monthly fee to a seperate pay-pal like agency who gave the funds over to allofmp3.
On a related note; can you get around this and just use paypal?
>if I had a buck for every rightwing authoritarian blogger that demanded that anonymous commenters state their name and serial numbers....
I'd be glad to send you one! name and SS#, please...?
Now I can switch away from this buggy, crummy, out of date firefox!
The republicans, the democrats, or the american public? I'm confused here, who is this supposed to benefit?
Dunno. You'd have to ask yahoo how many people have paid for their yahoo plus service. Personally, if I'm going to switch, I'd rather use gmail for free instead of financially rewarding yahoo for successfully annoying me.
So, either yahoo is going to start printing money, or the gp poster is right and this term has been co-opted from its' 1875 usage and is now used exclusively by corporate slimeballs.
Personally, I'm thinking it's the latter.
>And by email, I hope you mean the old email, not the new oddpost+SOAP+WS* monstrosity
Ugh. I had just managed to forget about that. The minute they take away the option to use the old yahoo mail, is the minute I permanantly switching over to gmail.
Those will be slathered in ads to the point of being unusable; much like geocities, yahoo groups, etc.
Someone please remind me again why we give a shit about yahoo (apart from email)? They've got to be the most craptastic set of services on the entire internet.
My friends don't need tech support; it's my family and everyone else's friends ("so I heard you're good with computers...").
I don't have them set up at the moment, so I don't remember what they're called offhand; but one of the utilities that nvidia gives you gives you virtual desktops; though they're a lot clunkier (IMHO) to navigate than what you get with either GNOME or KDE. But, none-the-less; they're there. The downside being you have to have an nvidia card, of course.
The front-line for support in any OS is the same: friends and family.
I will, however, mention your point about Linux's lack of support the next time I'm talking to a non-tech person who asking my opinion of *nix in comparision to XP.
It's better by far that MS should get that call at 1am than me.
Denying any financial connection is not the same as denying any connection at all.