Their undisguised aim is to study Linux and see where they have a competitive advantage, to use in market, and where they are behind, to use in future product development. If they improve their OS or help point out areas for Linux distros to improve, that is a *good* thing.
If there is a big back conspiring with and supporting SCO then my bet is that it will turn out to be Sun. They have mentioned Sun as a licensee in recent articles. In the Byte article Sun is the only company described as having a clean OS in SCO's view. The SCO 10-Q hints that the big backer has warrants on their stock. Sun benefits most from FUD against AIX and Linux, etc. IMO, Sun is the more likely candidate than MSFT.
They heard fundamental data today that Linux was doing really well in the server market and also that Microsoft is afraid of Linux (all Linux stocks went up, VA Linux went up even more), and they are confused enough to think that SCO may somehow "own" an important chunk of Linux.
I'm not sure I really want to be giving MSFT business advice. But what the hell...I think that they have made a strategic mistake by spreading themselves much too think in terms of the depth and breadth of their development platforms. At one time they had businesses in the mindset where Visual Basic was the default no-brainer choice for in-house app development and Visual C++ the same for commercial development. This status had huge leverage effects in terms of developer mindshare and platform choices. Later on, they allowed the rise of Java, XML,.NET ideas, etc. to distract them and they tried to pursue a million directions at once. In the process,they lost that status as the default development platform for business, and it is costing them dearly. They need to go back and refine their vision of how to lock developers into their platform and then execute on that. Of course, I hope they fail...
Re:Anyone else think that KDE and Gnome look avera
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 1
Both of them offer several different styles/appearances and can be programmed to look most any other way. The KDE and GNOME technologies don't really constrain how they look. At a minimum, you should clarify whether you are criticizing the default look/feel on some particular installation or whether it is that you don't like any of the alternatives that ship with some distribution. In any case, my KDE desktop looks great but it doesn't use any of the installation defaults.
It's true, and Kalam is also a very cool guy. But people should realize that PM and not President is the position of power most parallel to President in the U.S. system. Also, since my in-laws live in India, I order stuff from Indian e-commerce sites fairly often and I can attest from personal experience that finding sites that only work with IE is about 10-20 times more likely for sites based in India compared to ones based in the U.S.
In my mind, both copyright and patents can be appropriate in some situations, while problems come in when the range of those situations are overextended and enforcement is overzealous or infringes on other important rights. But at core, the very notion of copyright, even digital copyright, is so much more ethically benign than the notion of patent that it's hard for me understand advocacy against the former in absence of advocacy against the latter. Even a digital copyright only applies to a specific, original form (albeit, wherever that form is instantiated), while a patent restricts a whole class of behaviors that were not even explicitly, sometimes not implicitly, imagined by the creator. Patents are *intrinsically*, at best, a pragmatically necessary, basically fascistic, evil. Copyright intrinsically seems like a buyers choice (not talking here about broken laws that restrict devices or services that might be used to violate copyright copyright).
Right those are the allegations. But what has people burned up is that the whole case is just a strategy to get payment for shutting them up. Even if the allegations were true and some random dev driver or something had tainted code in it, kernel folk would be happy to throw it away and re-implement and IBM would be happy to pay a fine proportional to any real damage related to that snippet. Instead SCO wants to make as much noise and tarnish the whole community with as broad a brush as possible while keeping everyone in the dark, because they believe this strategy serves their business interest and gives them leverage. The moment they actually attempted any action that would affect a customer they could be counter-sued, but they have smart legal advice and will not do this. Instead they are just FUDDing for money.
The main focus of people playing Diablo2 is typically the acquisition of special items. The way in which Blizzard was able to set up a combinatorial system of item properties that provides a subtrate with enough variety to keep people interested is amazing. People who think about ways in developments of 500 houses could each be slightly personalized, in a cost effective way, could learn something from the design of this game.
Of course there is room for improvement and improvement should be pursued, but they are all good enough that the quality of the interface isn't going to be the reason for booting one OS vs. another (obviously KDE vs. GNOME is more of a pure choice since all the same apps can run).
To put things in context, out there one the net somewhere is a large extension to MythII called "Seventh God", also done by volunteers, that adds completely different levels and character types to the original.
Whether SCO is successful against IBM will depend on the specifics of the contract that they signed with IBM. We don't know the details of that contract or whether it has any particular similarity to the contract Microsoft has when they developed Xenix. To suppose that the two are legally parallel however is a massive leap and probably incorrect. So it could very well be that SCO has a basis to sue IBM and not MSFT. We just don't have enough info to judge.
It's not true that the computers play the end game perfectly. In fact, they are comparatively weaker at the end game with the exception of particular endgames that they have stored solutions for. See the following site for an example of computer problems with endgame type positions that an average human player understands: http://www.worldchessrating.com/5217 72350.html?905 145836528391
One of the ways in which Linux + free software can help is in the removal of need to count licenses and also do the whole purchase order dance whenver adding a node or an application to an existing node. Not spending time on that stuff can be a cost savings in itself.
Economics 102 takes into consideration the fact that 1) the natural market for an OS per se is tiny, what people really buy is a system to run particular software applications, 2) there is a big functionality incentive to run applications that store data in compatible formats with friends and co-workers, 3) it takes a lot of expense (fixed cost) to produce a complex application and a big chunk of the expense needs to be reduplicated for OS with different API and ABI, 4) this expense can only be justified if there is a big enough user market for the application, 5) there is a significant user penalty to the complexity of installing multiple OS on the same computer and also a time/convenience penalty to rebooting between OS even having done so, 6) most users depend on using an OS installed by the computer hardware seller, 7) most computer hardware sellers have historically depended on special deals on the price of the OS software that they get in exchange for some combo of a) only selling from one vendor, b) co-marketing, c) achieving certain volume targets for the given OS, 8) the effort to create a complete roster of applications/games is larger than the effort to create an OS in the first place - practically no company/organization could do that by themselves.
It's only point 7) that has been finally somewhat nullified by anti-trust cases against Microsoft. It remains to be seen whether the absence of 7) will create more competition in the desktop OS space given the existence of a monopoly and all the other factors.
Of course I don't blame Jackson one bit for forming the opinions of Microsoft that he did, but the rules are right and he is wrong on this speaking out issue. Consider: anyone who has ever spent any time on Usenet has umpteen examples of how intellectual vanity takes over after a person has staked out a position and they will go to great contortions of logic and common sense to defend that position and preserve the illusion that they were always right. Similarly, a judge who shares their opinion with a reporter while a trial is going on is going to have an incentive of intellectual vanity not to change that opinion upon further reflection or evidence. The rules prevent this sort of influence on trials and therefore lead to less bias. Being a judge is a special job - other people can comment on trials.
On the topic of QT, I'd like to pose the question, for those, who know, of what underlying API QT uses for the OS X specific part of the toolkit. Is it Carbon?
Re:LFS is really good
on
LFS 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's easy to understand how LFS enables greater customization. It's also easy for most conventional distribution users to think of particular packages that they like to compile from source to their own custom specs (typically kernel, if nothing else). But it would be nice if an LFS advocate could post something on the most appealing/useful examples of massive customization that they feel justify the extra time/effort involved compared to using a distro with customizations tacked on.
Lots organizations, many funded by the government, require use of Microsoft software in order to transact with them. Other "competitors" are not substitutable for Microsoft products in these situations since it isn't a matter of individual choice. Whether or not this situation is legal behavior for either Microsoft or, hypothetically, McDonalds, doesn't change the fact that the Microsoft situation is not "OK" for the consumer.
Programmers tend to use the word 'marketing' as a synonym for some combination of salesmanship, b.s., and evil intentions. In reality, marketing is about figuring out who might buy a given type of product and what combinations of product, product message, price, etc. would appeal to different groups of potential customers. Marketing is needed to figure out, for example, if Linux games sell badly because a) not enough users, b) the games released long after MS-Windows versions so potential customers already have a copy, c) games more buggy than MS-Windows counterparts, d) minimal distribution channel and advertising for Linux version, or e) Linux game lovers don't pay for commercial software. Someone who wants to answer this type of question needs to start with real research, not speculation. Doing this kind of research is hard because the answers may depend on posing the questions correctly.
I'm not should what the poster meant by an "add hardware" but I've long thought that the kernel distribution could and should help get the ball rolling by referencing a stand alone file containing hardware config information about the target machine that persists across different kernel builds/versions, with some easy format that trusted applications could modify.
Totally agree. RedHat ethics good, but I can't understand why the distro is so popular. It is surpassed by other distribution on every dimension except size of user base.
The distinction between MAC (mostly used by the military) and Discretionary Access Control (the common form in most OSs) is classical in the security literature. SELinux was primarily an attempt to produce a MAC system our of a free resource, Linux, that is highly usable, works on cheap hardware, runs lots of applications, and could do many functions for the government. Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't even offer an OS with MAC capabilities. That the NSA would be cowed by Microsoft nonsense out of continuing development on a worthwhile project that could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars is absurd and criminally stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Their undisguised aim is to study Linux and see where they have a competitive advantage, to use in market, and where they are behind, to use in future product development. If they improve their OS or help point out areas for Linux distros to improve, that is a *good* thing.
If there is a big back conspiring with and supporting SCO then my bet is that it will turn out to be Sun. They have mentioned Sun as a licensee in recent articles. In the Byte article Sun is the only company described as having a clean OS in SCO's view. The SCO 10-Q hints that the big backer has warrants on their stock. Sun benefits most from FUD against AIX and Linux, etc. IMO, Sun is the more likely candidate than MSFT.
They heard fundamental data today that Linux was doing really well in the server market and also that Microsoft is afraid of Linux (all Linux stocks went up, VA Linux went up even more), and they are confused enough to think that SCO may somehow "own" an important chunk of Linux.
I'm not sure I really want to be giving MSFT business advice. But what the hell...I think that they have made a strategic mistake by spreading themselves much too think in terms of the depth and breadth of their development platforms. At one time they had businesses in the mindset where Visual Basic was the default no-brainer choice for in-house app development and Visual C++ the same for commercial development. This status had huge leverage effects in terms of developer mindshare and platform choices. Later on, they allowed the rise of Java, XML, .NET ideas, etc. to distract them and they tried to pursue a million directions at once. In the process ,they lost that status as the default development platform for business, and it is costing them dearly. They need to go back and refine their vision of how to lock developers into their platform and then execute on that. Of course, I hope they fail...
Both of them offer several different styles/appearances and can be programmed to look most any other way. The KDE and GNOME technologies don't really constrain how they look. At a minimum, you should clarify whether you are criticizing the default look/feel on some particular installation or whether it is that you don't like any of the alternatives that ship with some distribution. In any case, my KDE desktop looks great but it doesn't use any of the installation defaults.
It's true, and Kalam is also a very cool guy. But people should realize that PM and not President is the position of power most parallel to President in the U.S. system. Also, since my in-laws live in India, I order stuff from Indian e-commerce sites fairly often and I can attest from personal experience that finding sites that only work with IE is about 10-20 times more likely for sites based in India compared to ones based in the U.S.
In other interviews SCO specifically mentioned doing a lot of license business with Sun.
In my mind, both copyright and patents can be appropriate in some situations, while problems come in when the range of those situations are overextended and enforcement is overzealous or infringes on other important rights. But at core, the very notion of copyright, even digital copyright, is so much more ethically benign than the notion of patent that it's hard for me understand advocacy against the former in absence of advocacy against the latter. Even a digital copyright only applies to a specific, original form (albeit, wherever that form is instantiated), while a patent restricts a whole class of behaviors that were not even explicitly, sometimes not implicitly, imagined by the creator. Patents are *intrinsically*, at best, a pragmatically necessary, basically fascistic, evil. Copyright intrinsically seems like a buyers choice (not talking here about broken laws that restrict devices or services that might be used to violate copyright copyright).
With all of Microsoft's antitrust and image problems, it is much safer and better for them to have somebody else carrying this fight.
Right those are the allegations. But what has people burned up is that the whole case is just a strategy to get payment for shutting them up. Even if the allegations were true and some random dev driver or something had tainted code in it, kernel folk would be happy to throw it away and re-implement and IBM would be happy to pay a fine proportional to any real damage related to that snippet. Instead SCO wants to make as much noise and tarnish the whole community with as broad a brush as possible while keeping everyone in the dark, because they believe this strategy serves their business interest and gives them leverage. The moment they actually attempted any action that would affect a customer they could be counter-sued, but they have smart legal advice and will not do this. Instead they are just FUDDing for money.
The main focus of people playing Diablo2 is typically the acquisition of special items. The way in which Blizzard was able to set up a combinatorial system of item properties that provides a subtrate with enough variety to keep people interested is amazing. People who think about ways in developments of 500 houses could each be slightly personalized, in a cost effective way, could learn something from the design of this game.
Of course there is room for improvement and improvement should be pursued, but they are all good enough that the quality of the interface isn't going to be the reason for booting one OS vs. another (obviously KDE vs. GNOME is more of a pure choice since all the same apps can run).
To put things in context, out there one the net somewhere is a large extension to MythII called "Seventh God", also done by volunteers, that adds completely different levels and character types to the original.
Whether SCO is successful against IBM will depend on the specifics of the contract that they signed with IBM. We don't know the details of that contract or whether it has any particular similarity to the contract Microsoft has when they developed Xenix. To suppose that the two are legally parallel however is a massive leap and probably incorrect. So it could very well be that SCO has a basis to sue IBM and not MSFT. We just don't have enough info to judge.
It's not true that the computers play the end game perfectly. In fact, they are comparatively weaker at the end game with the exception of particular endgames that they have stored solutions for. See the following site for an example of computer problems with endgame type positions that an average human player understands:7 72350.html?905 145836528391
http://www.worldchessrating.com/521
One of the ways in which Linux + free software can help is in the removal of need to count licenses and also do the whole purchase order dance whenver adding a node or an application to an existing node. Not spending time on that stuff can be a cost savings in itself.
Economics 102 takes into consideration the fact that 1) the natural market for an OS per se is tiny, what people really buy is a system to run particular software applications, 2) there is a big functionality incentive to run applications that store data in compatible formats with friends and co-workers, 3) it takes a lot of expense (fixed cost) to produce a complex application and a big chunk of the expense needs to be reduplicated for OS with different API and ABI, 4) this expense can only be justified if there is a big enough user market for the application, 5) there is a significant user penalty to the complexity of installing multiple OS on the same computer and also a time/convenience penalty to rebooting between OS even having done so, 6) most users depend on using an OS installed by the computer hardware seller, 7) most computer hardware sellers have historically depended on special deals on the price of the OS software that they get in exchange for some combo of a) only selling from one vendor, b) co-marketing, c) achieving certain volume targets for the given OS, 8) the effort to create a complete roster of applications/games is larger than the effort to create an OS in the first place - practically no company/organization could do that by themselves.
It's only point 7) that has been finally somewhat nullified by anti-trust cases against Microsoft. It remains to be seen whether the absence of 7) will create more competition in the desktop OS space given the existence of a monopoly and all the other factors.
Of course I don't blame Jackson one bit for forming the opinions of Microsoft that he did, but the rules are right and he is wrong on this speaking out issue. Consider: anyone who has ever spent any time on Usenet has umpteen examples of how intellectual vanity takes over after a person has staked out a position and they will go to great contortions of logic and common sense to defend that position and preserve the illusion that they were always right. Similarly, a judge who shares their opinion with a reporter while a trial is going on is going to have an incentive of intellectual vanity not to change that opinion upon further reflection or evidence. The rules prevent this sort of influence on trials and therefore lead to less bias. Being a judge is a special job - other people can comment on trials.
On the topic of QT, I'd like to pose the question, for those, who know, of what underlying API QT uses for the OS X specific part of the toolkit. Is it Carbon?
It's easy to understand how LFS enables greater customization. It's also easy for most conventional distribution users to think of particular packages that they like to compile from source to their own custom specs (typically kernel, if nothing else). But it would be nice if an LFS advocate could post something on the most appealing/useful examples of massive customization that they feel justify the extra time/effort involved compared to using a distro with customizations tacked on.
Lots organizations, many funded by the government, require use of Microsoft software in order to transact with them. Other "competitors" are not substitutable for Microsoft products in these situations since it isn't a matter of individual choice. Whether or not this situation is legal behavior for either Microsoft or, hypothetically, McDonalds, doesn't change the fact that the Microsoft situation is not "OK" for the consumer.
Programmers tend to use the word 'marketing' as a synonym for some combination of salesmanship, b.s., and evil intentions. In reality, marketing is about figuring out who might buy a given type of product and what combinations of product, product message, price, etc. would appeal to different groups of potential customers. Marketing is needed to figure out, for example, if Linux games sell badly because a) not enough users, b) the games released long after MS-Windows versions so potential customers already have a copy, c) games more buggy than MS-Windows counterparts, d) minimal distribution channel and advertising for Linux version, or e) Linux game lovers don't pay for commercial software. Someone who wants to answer this type of question needs to start with real research, not speculation. Doing this kind of research is hard because the answers may depend on posing the questions correctly.
I'm not should what the poster meant by an "add hardware" but I've long thought that the kernel distribution could and should help get the ball rolling by referencing a stand alone file containing hardware config information about the target machine that persists across different kernel builds/versions, with some easy format that trusted applications could modify.
Totally agree. RedHat ethics good, but I can't understand why the distro is so popular. It is surpassed by other distribution on every dimension except size of user base.
The distinction between MAC (mostly used by the military) and Discretionary Access Control (the common form in most OSs) is classical in the security literature. SELinux was primarily an attempt to produce a MAC system our of a free resource, Linux, that is highly usable, works on cheap hardware, runs lots of applications, and could do many functions for the government. Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't even offer an OS with MAC capabilities. That the NSA would be cowed by Microsoft nonsense out of continuing development on a worthwhile project that could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars is absurd and criminally stupid.