Um... Actually, you might want to look around a little more. Feudalism was pretty easy to maintain in practice. It lasted a pretty long time! Also, Marxism in practice modernized Russia in the space of a generation (brutally, bloodily, but nevertheless there it is) and capitalism reduced it to a third world kleptocracy in a decade. I am not defending any of these systems, but pointing out that there are more variables to the equation than just whether or not private ownership and management of capital is entirely unregulated.
Honestly, step away from yourself for a minute and look at what you write. It sounds like religion to me. The allmighty market will protect us. The market is all-knowing. Have faith in the market. Oh, your job just got moved to Mexico/India/Mordor? Well, the market works in mysterious ways, but it will all work out for the best!
Uh-huh. Reality TV is a product of the market. So much for your theory.
Wait, so are you actually saying that if it weren't for patents and they way they are awarded and enforced in the U.S., nobody would have an incentive to invent a fix for this TCP vulnerability?
Even our female/dotters have shown themselves to be relatively immune from tripe like this.
I really, really, really don't mean this as flamebait, but isn't stuff like this more than a little misogynistic? "Even our little women aren't dumb enough for that! Hyuk hyuk!" I mean, everyone complains about the lack of female nerds but this sort of thing isn't exactly going to keep women hanging out at sites like this.
OK, I admit I spent about 5 years away from slashdot so maybe it's been like this for a long time and I'm just uninformed. Still, you should consider what kind of message you're sending with stuff like that.
Oh yeah! I was a pretty big fan of The Squat. Can't say the same for the site it spoofed so well though. But wow, looking at that site, it's like travelling in an Intarweb Time Machine straight back to 1996. I mean, the brighter your background images, the cooler your site, right?
I do think The Squat jumped the shark when they replaced Larlene with Valvolene, though I have to admit Valvolene is a better name.
Good times, good times. Oooh, looky looky, suck.com is still around too. Only stuck on Oct. 13, 2000. Wow. It's like little bits of digital amber.
Try that with a family. Try that with kids who have to change schools and make new friends every time you decide you don't like your job.
Try that with kids and a spouse who also has to work. Are you going to insist that your spouse also dump his/her job and move 1500 miles away? And hopefully find another job there? What if he/she loves his/her job?
Try that as a single parent when you live close to family members who help you with day care.
Try that with a sick family member whose medical condition will suddenly become "pre-existing" and not eligible for coverage when you change HMOs.
In other words, try that when you're not a healthy young 20-something with no strings. Try that when you're like most of the population.
Hey, I know the feeling of quitting a job that sucked and I was glad I was in a position once to do that once upon a time. It's great! But it's a luxury, and some things are worth sticking with the most soul crushing job in the world.
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (in press). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. To appear in Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.
Let's save these overworked "educators" (aka administrators and bureaucrats, not the hard working teachers in the trenches) some work, shall we? Black T-shirt, white letters:
POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS
Take it a step further, just for kicks. On the back:
MOSTLY HARMLESS
Of course the HHGttG will be lost on most people, but it's fun.
I don't think most teachers are to blame for this, and I don't think that's what Katz is implying here. I know that when I was in high school, the people primarily responsible for the things that made it a truly horrible experience for me were administrators, or teachers who were ultimately seeking administrative positions.
These are the ones who turn their backs to the hazing, who don't like students to be "too different", who want to run a nice happy little school with no troublemakers, even if that means messing up some truly bright kids for life. Often they get off on control, or have an obsessive desire to "mold minds" rather than teach.
My little sister is about to enter graduate school to become a high school teacher. She wants to do it for all the noble reasons: she loves learning, she loves the subject matter (English), and she wants to bring that out in students. She does not want to control people and run a petty tyranny five days a week.
I think almost everyone on slashdot agrees that teachers, in general, are not the problem. They're trying to work with what they have and they generally aren't in positions of authority. The administrators (principals, guidance counselors, etc.) are typically the ones who are to blame for things like this. There are some bad teachers, and some good administrators, but in general the nature of the jobs attract different types of people.
This may come as a surprise to the majority of slashdot readers, but computers can be used for things besides Surfin' the Net and listening to MP3s. They can be used to track inventory, manage financial accounting, design things with CAD, and more! They can be library catalogs, medical records archives, and cash registers.
You know, when the first computers were in use, there was no network of any kind to hook them together, and nobody had even thought of online pr0n sitez. Yet people still had uses for them. Amazing, isn't it?
So I would say that people in the third world could definitely use computers. And if you think every single person in the third world is a dirt farmer who lives in a hut, you need to be smacked around a bit with the clue stick. The third world includes some very large cities with electricity, phones, highways, factories, schools, television, and all the other things that you'd expect in most major cities. These are the people who could use free software.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Miguel de Icaza (of GNOME fame) from Mexico? Granted, Mexico is further along than much of the world, but how many useful free software contributions are we missing out on because talented people haven't been exposed to the technology?
I love the way Libertarians complain about how the world 'liberal' was supposedly appropriated from the Classical Liberal types, and yet they do not seem to remember their five-finger discount on acquiring the word "Libertarianism" itself, which originally meant (and in Europe, often still means) "socialism without government".
Now that's Libertarianism I could support. It's funny, I used to be a "Libertarian" in the sense of the U.S. Libertarian Party (I even held a position in the local branch--not hard, I had a pulse), and now I'm older and wiser and still tend to support Libertarianism--only now in the correct, socialist-anarchist meaning of the word! Funny how life has these little ironies.
My, this is way off topic. OK, U.S. so-called "Libertarian" think tanks like the Cato Institute are largely responsible for the neoliberal economic meddling of the IMF. Distributing Linux to the third world may help these people see the productive power of non-hierarchical cooperation among free individuals, and thus act as an antidote to the kind of nonsense they're getting from the industrialized countries. There, I'm on topic again. Whoopee!
Let's see, privatization has done such a great job in Russia. Since adopting the economic policies that the IMF forced on them, the Russia's economy has shrunk to a third of the size it was ten years ago.
Privatization has done such a great job in Mexico. What a wonderful way for a corrupt government to give away its taxpayers' assets to its cronies and get accolades from the international community. Gee, I wish I thought of that, but then again I'm not a third world despot propped up by Wall Street interests so I guess it wouldn't matter if I had.
And yes, those $1/day jobs are so good for Indonesia, now that forcing their economy open to global corporations has destroyed small farmers and manufacturers. A $1/day job is better than no job at all, but its the IMF's policies and a corrupt, U.S./Wall Street supported government that destroyed the local economic systems.
Corporations aren't the problem, you say. But it's the corporations who want all this stuff. The notion that Corporate America wants a free market OR a fair market (which IMHO aren't necessarily the same things) is the naivete of someone who's just read Atlas Shrugged. The US Government is evil? Who do you think runs the US government? The corporations! They have for years. Now put down your copy of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (it's not worth reading anyhow) and take a good long look at who funds our elections and who pays for lobbyists.
Wake up, you dumb Libertarians. I'm sick of reading your ignorant crap. The people who you want to run this country are already running it (and the world) and they're obviously doing a piss poor job of it.
I know everyone else has gotten their two cents in here but ESR is starting to bug me so much anymore that I don't think I can leave this alone.
I am very concerned that Raymond sees open source advocacy as a way of promoting Libertarianism, and only secondarily as a way of promoting open source software. My concern is not unfounded; I used to be a Libertarian (even a member of my local Libertarian Party) and these people will try to co-opt any cause or group that might help boost them to major party status. That's not a criticism of Libertarians so much as it is a criticism of an electoral system that makes such desperate measures necessary, but either way this is the sort of behavior that caused me to part ways with Libertarians long before my political views began to change.
I think that in addition to sending the very clear message that the open source movement is not a Communist movement, we should send the message that it is not a Libertarian movement either. The open source movement is not about politics, and there is room for both Libertarians and Communists, as well as (in US terms) Republicans, Democrats, Jesse Ventura, Jesse Jackson, Jesse Helms, Jesse Duke, and even Anarcho-Greens such as myself.
Personally I would be a lot more upset if the Christian Coalition started using some code I'd written than I would be if the Chinese government did, but that's just the risk we take with open source. If we start putting limits on who can use our code and who can't, we'll be right back where we started and that just sucks.
So what if Pat Buchanan/Slobodan Milosevic/Saddam Hussein/Queen Elizabeth/[insert your favorite despot] can use Linux? You and your friends and your political allies can use it too! Even better, unlike Microsoft/Sun/whoever, the open source community isn't making money off of these people (or if they are, it's at their discretion).
I don't know if you can say that open source is apolitical, but you can definitely say that it is compatible with a very wide range of political viewpoints and does not really prove any of them (or proves all of them, take your pick).
I already have the sinking feeling that this will get moderated down to a troll but I simply can't go on without saying this, hopefully for the benefit of Slashdot but certainly for my own sanity.
The dollar sign goes in front of the number. Five dollars is $5, not 5$. I see this all the time and I'm starting to wonder how many people learned punctuation from MS BASIC.
IANAL and the SCSL may actually have a way to prohibit this (reading it made my head swim and I almost lost consciousness), but consider...
There might be a way to contribute to the Solaris community, get your ego boost, and still screw Sun!
1. Find a serious bug or exploit in Solaris.
2. Develop a fix for the problem.
3. Announce the bug/exploit on the net, and post your fix as a patch (your original code only), but license the patch under the GPL.
The Solaris community gets to fix the problem, since you can mix GPL'd and proprietary code as long as you don't distribute them together. You get your ego boost because it's your code. And Sun is screwed because they can't rip off your code to fix their lame software.
It is also my sneeking suspicion that part of why there are so many more men in geekdom is an unfairness to boys. There's immense pressure on males of all ages to pursue only "worthwhile" activities, those careers which manifest the tokens of success in our society and convey status. As it happens, engineering and computer programming fall into that heap. Thus (goes my hypothesis) many more young boys are exposed to geekdom, and encouraged, even pressured, to participate in it.
You know, that just gave me an idea for another hypothesis. Many male geeks (myself included) are terrible at sports, or just don't like sports. Nobody would argue that boys are not pressured to excel in sports in the U.S. The problem is, not everyone is good at sports (or even wants to be).
Computing is in many ways like most competitive sports. It has ideas of conquest and victory. You can demonstrate ability and be better than your peers, who will admire you for it. Perhaps there are so many male geeks because so many boys need computing as an alternative to sports. Gods, I hate to think that school athletics might have actually been good for something but it's certainly an interesting idea.
This makes me wonder, with so many girls becoming involved in school sports because of Title Nine, and increasing pressure to do so from their soccer moms and enthusiastic sports fan peers, will we start to see more girl geeks who see computing as an alternative? Hmmm, I always thought Title Nine was a very good thing, but this is even better than I imagined!
Since when does Solaris 7 (for Intel or SPARC) come with a logging file system? When I bought Solaris 7 (SPARC) last winter it came with plain old UFS. A journaling file system (I assume that's what you mean) was an expensive add-on from Veritas.
Also, my experience with Solaris 2.6 on Intel was that it was significantly slower than the Linux that was current at that time (2.0.30-something). A 64 MB PPro 200 box running Solaris 2.6 crunched about 75% of the RSA keys as a P133 with 32 MB running Linux 2.0.30-whatever. This might have been the fault of the RSA client, but considering how the UltraSPARC-optimized RSA client on the E450 was chewing through keys faster than two PA-8000 systems combined I can't believe the client would have been the sole culprit.
Netscape ran a little faster and better on Solaris/x86 because Solaris comes with Motif. If the Open Group wasn't a bunch of wankers that wouldn't matter, and it won't matter if Mozilla ever gets done. Motif sucks rocks anyhow and it's not worth keeping around, even for Netscape.
Since you have Solaris 7 on x86 handy, why don't you post some benchmarks for your system?
They are all free (beer and speech). They are all Unix-like. Three of them are descended from the same code. Two of them were the same code four years ago. All of them, the last I heard, have growing user bases.
Stupid article, would probably have been ignored on Usenet, not worth mentioning on Slashdot.
I noticed this same sort of behavior with Win95 (OSR2). I moved a bttv card over to squeeze in an Adaptec 2940U2W (btw, I have had no problems with the 2940 and it's really very nice--YMMV). Linux just noticed the new 2940 and behaved accordingly (Oh, look, there's a SCSI controller. Oh, look, here are the devices it has attached to it.)
A week or two later, when the wife booted up Win95, Windows had lost the bttv card, found a new one, and what the hell is this other thing? (The last part's understandable.) It even insisted that it had no driver for the bttv card. Now, excuse me, the drivers are installed with the PCI slot address written into them or something? Yuck.
In general my experience has been that Linux and BSD are both a lot easier to deal with when you add new hardware or move things around. And while CNN reporters might not know what a video card looks like, there are a lot of average Joe home users out there adding new hardware to their systems. CompUSA's selling all those HooDoo JuJu 3D UltraWidgets to somebody.
I'll go even further and say that as long as the user follows instructions correctly, it is probably easier for an average person to add a new driver to the kernel source and recompile/reinstall the kernel than it is to add a new driver to a Windows system. Following the instructions for low-level things like this on Linux always leads to the same, predictable results. On Windows, however, following the instructions can lead to very different results based on your system's configuration. Has anyone not had the experience of following a hardware vendor's installation instructions to the letter and winding up with a totally hosed Windows box?
The cars to computers analogy is a lousy one and I wish people would stop using it. Everyone uses their cars for pretty much the same thing. Not everyone uses their computers for the same thing. Frankly, a Linux without shell scripting, compilers, configuration files, etc. would be useless to me. That's why I don't use Windows; I can't do a damn thing on it!
If you must have an analogy, I suggest computers to vehicles. Maybe you need a car, and I need a dump truck, and someone else would need a jet.
If you must have an OS for the masses, then why don't you write one? Linux was written to be a powerful, Unix-like OS. That's why Linus started on it in the first place. I don't see why it has to meet the needs of every single person. If you want a free home-user OS, there's plenty of GPL'd code you could use to start building one.
Violating the law whenever you wanted to is a pretty poor way to conduct business. If Corel (or anyone) acted in a blatantly illegal manner, they would be out of business pretty quickly.
I like Corel and I honestly believe that they do not have any sinister intentions, but the precedent set by letting this sort of thing go is just way too dangerous. Legal battles are won and lost by established precedent, and as much as I would want to be a nice guy and let this go, I'm afraid of what a less scrupulous company or individual might get away with and be able to defend in court because the community weakened the GPL by selectively enforcing it.
I will say right up front that I do not have a single line of GPL'd code out there, which might make me a "typical slashdot loudmouth" in the eyes of some. However, I have built a career out of the use of GPL'd software and I enjoy a good income because of it. Coming from a non-traditional educational background, I do not believe I would have had the same opportunities in a proprietary world. I believe the GPL is just as valuable to the end user as it is to the developer. Seeing it weakened makes me nervous that all I've built upon it will also be weakened.
If the worst should happen, and Corel refuses to back down on this issue, I am willing to contribute $1000 (US) to a legal fund for developers to take Corel to court. I can safely say I've gotten tens times that value from GPL'd software. I think if enough of us who believe in the GPL contribute (even a few dollars), we could have a sizeable legal warchest.
Of course, it's up to the developers (it's their code), but I think the rest of us who have benefited so greatly from their work should make sure that they know their options should not be limited by the high cost of legal actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... Actually, you might want to look around a little more. Feudalism was pretty easy to maintain in practice. It lasted a pretty long time! Also, Marxism in practice modernized Russia in the space of a generation (brutally, bloodily, but nevertheless there it is) and capitalism reduced it to a third world kleptocracy in a decade. I am not defending any of these systems, but pointing out that there are more variables to the equation than just whether or not private ownership and management of capital is entirely unregulated.
Honestly, step away from yourself for a minute and look at what you write. It sounds like religion to me. The allmighty market will protect us. The market is all-knowing. Have faith in the market. Oh, your job just got moved to Mexico/India/Mordor? Well, the market works in mysterious ways, but it will all work out for the best!
Uh-huh. Reality TV is a product of the market. So much for your theory.
Wait, so are you actually saying that if it weren't for patents and they way they are awarded and enforced in the U.S., nobody would have an incentive to invent a fix for this TCP vulnerability?
So do you think the Iraqis will be more likely or less likely to use Linux as a result of this?
I really, really, really don't mean this as flamebait, but isn't stuff like this more than a little misogynistic? "Even our little women aren't dumb enough for that! Hyuk hyuk!" I mean, everyone complains about the lack of female nerds but this sort of thing isn't exactly going to keep women hanging out at sites like this.
OK, I admit I spent about 5 years away from slashdot so maybe it's been like this for a long time and I'm just uninformed. Still, you should consider what kind of message you're sending with stuff like that.
Oh yeah! I was a pretty big fan of The Squat. Can't say the same for the site it spoofed so well though. But wow, looking at that site, it's like travelling in an Intarweb Time Machine straight back to 1996. I mean, the brighter your background images, the cooler your site, right?
I do think The Squat jumped the shark when they replaced Larlene with Valvolene, though I have to admit Valvolene is a better name.
Good times, good times. Oooh, looky looky, suck.com is still around too. Only stuck on Oct. 13, 2000. Wow. It's like little bits of digital amber.
Try that with kids and a spouse who also has to work. Are you going to insist that your spouse also dump his/her job and move 1500 miles away? And hopefully find another job there? What if he/she loves his/her job?
Try that as a single parent when you live close to family members who help you with day care.
Try that with a sick family member whose medical condition will suddenly become "pre-existing" and not eligible for coverage when you change HMOs.
In other words, try that when you're not a healthy young 20-something with no strings. Try that when you're like most of the population.
Hey, I know the feeling of quitting a job that sucked and I was glad I was in a position once to do that once upon a time. It's great! But it's a luxury, and some things are worth sticking with the most soul crushing job in the world.
But please, don't let me rain on your little "Gee aren't women crazy? And why won't they date me?" parade.
But conveniently available here.
POTENTIALLY
DANGEROUS
Take it a step further, just for kicks. On the back:
MOSTLY
HARMLESS
Of course the HHGttG will be lost on most people, but it's fun.
I don't think most teachers are to blame for this, and I don't think that's what Katz is implying here. I know that when I was in high school, the people primarily responsible for the things that made it a truly horrible experience for me were administrators, or teachers who were ultimately seeking administrative positions.
These are the ones who turn their backs to the hazing, who don't like students to be "too different", who want to run a nice happy little school with no troublemakers, even if that means messing up some truly bright kids for life. Often they get off on control, or have an obsessive desire to "mold minds" rather than teach.
My little sister is about to enter graduate school to become a high school teacher. She wants to do it for all the noble reasons: she loves learning, she loves the subject matter (English), and she wants to bring that out in students. She does not want to control people and run a petty tyranny five days a week.
I think almost everyone on slashdot agrees that teachers, in general, are not the problem. They're trying to work with what they have and they generally aren't in positions of authority. The administrators (principals, guidance counselors, etc.) are typically the ones who are to blame for things like this. There are some bad teachers, and some good administrators, but in general the nature of the jobs attract different types of people.
This may come as a surprise to the majority of slashdot readers, but computers can be used for things besides Surfin' the Net and listening to MP3s. They can be used to track inventory, manage financial accounting, design things with CAD, and more! They can be library catalogs, medical records archives, and cash registers.
You know, when the first computers were in use, there was no network of any kind to hook them together, and nobody had even thought of online pr0n sitez. Yet people still had uses for them. Amazing, isn't it?
So I would say that people in the third world could definitely use computers. And if you think every single person in the third world is a dirt farmer who lives in a hut, you need to be smacked around a bit with the clue stick. The third world includes some very large cities with electricity, phones, highways, factories, schools, television, and all the other things that you'd expect in most major cities. These are the people who could use free software.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Miguel de Icaza (of GNOME fame) from Mexico? Granted, Mexico is further along than much of the world, but how many useful free software contributions are we missing out on because talented people haven't been exposed to the technology?
I love the way Libertarians complain about how the world 'liberal' was supposedly appropriated from the Classical Liberal types, and yet they do not seem to remember their five-finger discount on acquiring the word "Libertarianism" itself, which originally meant (and in Europe, often still means) "socialism without government".
Now that's Libertarianism I could support. It's funny, I used to be a "Libertarian" in the sense of the U.S. Libertarian Party (I even held a position in the local branch--not hard, I had a pulse), and now I'm older and wiser and still tend to support Libertarianism--only now in the correct, socialist-anarchist meaning of the word! Funny how life has these little ironies.
My, this is way off topic. OK, U.S. so-called "Libertarian" think tanks like the Cato Institute are largely responsible for the neoliberal economic meddling of the IMF. Distributing Linux to the third world may help these people see the productive power of non-hierarchical cooperation among free individuals, and thus act as an antidote to the kind of nonsense they're getting from the industrialized countries. There, I'm on topic again. Whoopee!
Let's see, privatization has done such a great job in Russia. Since adopting the economic policies that the IMF forced on them, the Russia's economy has shrunk to a third of the size it was ten years ago.
Privatization has done such a great job in Mexico. What a wonderful way for a corrupt government to give away its taxpayers' assets to its cronies and get accolades from the international community. Gee, I wish I thought of that, but then again I'm not a third world despot propped up by Wall Street interests so I guess it wouldn't matter if I had.
And yes, those $1/day jobs are so good for Indonesia, now that forcing their economy open to global corporations has destroyed small farmers and manufacturers. A $1/day job is better than no job at all, but its the IMF's policies and a corrupt, U.S./Wall Street supported government that destroyed the local economic systems.
Corporations aren't the problem, you say. But it's the corporations who want all this stuff. The notion that Corporate America wants a free market OR a fair market (which IMHO aren't necessarily the same things) is the naivete of someone who's just read Atlas Shrugged. The US Government is evil? Who do you think runs the US government? The corporations! They have for years. Now put down your copy of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (it's not worth reading anyhow) and take a good long look at who funds our elections and who pays for lobbyists.
Wake up, you dumb Libertarians. I'm sick of reading your ignorant crap. The people who you want to run this country are already running it (and the world) and they're obviously doing a piss poor job of it.
I know everyone else has gotten their two cents in here but ESR is starting to bug me so much anymore that I don't think I can leave this alone.
I am very concerned that Raymond sees open source advocacy as a way of promoting Libertarianism, and only secondarily as a way of promoting open source software. My concern is not unfounded; I used to be a Libertarian (even a member of my local Libertarian Party) and these people will try to co-opt any cause or group that might help boost them to major party status. That's not a criticism of Libertarians so much as it is a criticism of an electoral system that makes such desperate measures necessary, but either way this is the sort of behavior that caused me to part ways with Libertarians long before my political views began to change.
I think that in addition to sending the very clear message that the open source movement is not a Communist movement, we should send the message that it is not a Libertarian movement either. The open source movement is not about politics, and there is room for both Libertarians and Communists, as well as (in US terms) Republicans, Democrats, Jesse Ventura, Jesse Jackson, Jesse Helms, Jesse Duke, and even Anarcho-Greens such as myself.
Personally I would be a lot more upset if the Christian Coalition started using some code I'd written than I would be if the Chinese government did, but that's just the risk we take with open source. If we start putting limits on who can use our code and who can't, we'll be right back where we started and that just sucks.
So what if Pat Buchanan/Slobodan Milosevic/Saddam Hussein/Queen Elizabeth/[insert your favorite despot] can use Linux? You and your friends and your political allies can use it too! Even better, unlike Microsoft/Sun/whoever, the open source community isn't making money off of these people (or if they are, it's at their discretion).
I don't know if you can say that open source is apolitical, but you can definitely say that it is compatible with a very wide range of political viewpoints and does not really prove any of them (or proves all of them, take your pick).
Ahhhh, that explains it. Hemos is not from outer space. He is from France. Really.
AAAaaaaAAAAAaaaRRRRGGGHHH!!!
I already have the sinking feeling that this will get moderated down to a troll but I simply can't go on without saying this, hopefully for the benefit of Slashdot but certainly for my own sanity.
The dollar sign goes in front of the number. Five dollars is $5, not 5$. I see this all the time and I'm starting to wonder how many people learned punctuation from MS BASIC.
Thank you for your time.
IANAL and the SCSL may actually have a way to prohibit this (reading it made my head swim and I almost lost consciousness), but consider...
There might be a way to contribute to the Solaris community, get your ego boost, and still screw Sun!
1. Find a serious bug or exploit in Solaris.
2. Develop a fix for the problem.
3. Announce the bug/exploit on the net, and post your fix as a patch (your original code only), but license the patch under the GPL.
The Solaris community gets to fix the problem, since you can mix GPL'd and proprietary code as long as you don't distribute them together. You get your ego boost because it's your code. And Sun is screwed because they can't rip off your code to fix their lame software.
Brak: "Somethiiing tooooooo think aboooouuut!"
That's right, Brak. Think about it today, kids!
It is also my sneeking suspicion that part of why there are so many more men in geekdom is an unfairness to boys. There's immense pressure on males of all ages to pursue only "worthwhile" activities, those careers which manifest the tokens of success in our society and convey status. As it happens, engineering and computer programming fall into that heap. Thus (goes my hypothesis) many more young boys are exposed to geekdom, and encouraged, even pressured, to participate in it.
You know, that just gave me an idea for another hypothesis. Many male geeks (myself included) are terrible at sports, or just don't like sports. Nobody would argue that boys are not pressured to excel in sports in the U.S. The problem is, not everyone is good at sports (or even wants to be).
Computing is in many ways like most competitive sports. It has ideas of conquest and victory. You can demonstrate ability and be better than your peers, who will admire you for it. Perhaps there are so many male geeks because so many boys need computing as an alternative to sports. Gods, I hate to think that school athletics might have actually been good for something but it's certainly an interesting idea.
This makes me wonder, with so many girls becoming involved in school sports because of Title Nine, and increasing pressure to do so from their soccer moms and enthusiastic sports fan peers, will we start to see more girl geeks who see computing as an alternative? Hmmm, I always thought Title Nine was a very good thing, but this is even better than I imagined!
Since when does Solaris 7 (for Intel or SPARC) come with a logging file system? When I bought Solaris 7 (SPARC) last winter it came with plain old UFS. A journaling file system (I assume that's what you mean) was an expensive add-on from Veritas.
Also, my experience with Solaris 2.6 on Intel was that it was significantly slower than the Linux that was current at that time (2.0.30-something). A 64 MB PPro 200 box running Solaris 2.6 crunched about 75% of the RSA keys as a P133 with 32 MB running Linux 2.0.30-whatever. This might have been the fault of the RSA client, but considering how the UltraSPARC-optimized RSA client on the E450 was chewing through keys faster than two PA-8000 systems combined I can't believe the client would have been the sole culprit.
Netscape ran a little faster and better on Solaris/x86 because Solaris comes with Motif. If the Open Group wasn't a bunch of wankers that wouldn't matter, and it won't matter if Mozilla ever gets done. Motif sucks rocks anyhow and it's not worth keeping around, even for Netscape.
Since you have Solaris 7 on x86 handy, why don't you post some benchmarks for your system?
I will be brief:
Linux.
FreeBSD.
NetBSD.
OpenBSD.
They are all free (beer and speech). They are all Unix-like. Three of them are descended from the same code. Two of them were the same code four years ago. All of them, the last I heard, have growing user bases.
Stupid article, would probably have been ignored on Usenet, not worth mentioning on Slashdot.
I noticed this same sort of behavior with Win95 (OSR2). I moved a bttv card over to squeeze in an Adaptec 2940U2W (btw, I have had no problems with the 2940 and it's really very nice--YMMV). Linux just noticed the new 2940 and behaved accordingly (Oh, look, there's a SCSI controller. Oh, look, here are the devices it has attached to it.)
A week or two later, when the wife booted up Win95, Windows had lost the bttv card, found a new one, and what the hell is this other thing? (The last part's understandable.) It even insisted that it had no driver for the bttv card. Now, excuse me, the drivers are installed with the PCI slot address written into them or something? Yuck.
In general my experience has been that Linux and BSD are both a lot easier to deal with when you add new hardware or move things around. And while CNN reporters might not know what a video card looks like, there are a lot of average Joe home users out there adding new hardware to their systems. CompUSA's selling all those HooDoo JuJu 3D UltraWidgets to somebody.
I'll go even further and say that as long as the user follows instructions correctly, it is probably easier for an average person to add a new driver to the kernel source and recompile/reinstall the kernel than it is to add a new driver to a Windows system. Following the instructions for low-level things like this on Linux always leads to the same, predictable results. On Windows, however, following the instructions can lead to very different results based on your system's configuration. Has anyone not had the experience of following a hardware vendor's installation instructions to the letter and winding up with a totally hosed Windows box?
U R R1GHT D00D! U R 3L33T! 1F U L1K3 MZB TH3N N0-1 W1LL G1V3 U W4R3Z!@!!!!!111!!1
The cars to computers analogy is a lousy one and I wish people would stop using it. Everyone uses their cars for pretty much the same thing. Not everyone uses their computers for the same thing. Frankly, a Linux without shell scripting, compilers, configuration files, etc. would be useless to me. That's why I don't use Windows; I can't do a damn thing on it!
If you must have an analogy, I suggest computers to vehicles. Maybe you need a car, and I need a dump truck, and someone else would need a jet.
If you must have an OS for the masses, then why don't you write one? Linux was written to be a powerful, Unix-like OS. That's why Linus started on it in the first place. I don't see why it has to meet the needs of every single person. If you want a free home-user OS, there's plenty of GPL'd code you could use to start building one.
Violating the law whenever you wanted to is a pretty poor way to conduct business. If Corel (or anyone) acted in a blatantly illegal manner, they would be out of business pretty quickly.
I like Corel and I honestly believe that they do not have any sinister intentions, but the precedent set by letting this sort of thing go is just way too dangerous. Legal battles are won and lost by established precedent, and as much as I would want to be a nice guy and let this go, I'm afraid of what a less scrupulous company or individual might get away with and be able to defend in court because the community weakened the GPL by selectively enforcing it.
I will say right up front that I do not have a single line of GPL'd code out there, which might make me a "typical slashdot loudmouth" in the eyes of some. However, I have built a career out of the use of GPL'd software and I enjoy a good income because of it. Coming from a non-traditional educational background, I do not believe I would have had the same opportunities in a proprietary world. I believe the GPL is just as valuable to the end user as it is to the developer. Seeing it weakened makes me nervous that all I've built upon it will also be weakened.
If the worst should happen, and Corel refuses to back down on this issue, I am willing to contribute $1000 (US) to a legal fund for developers to take Corel to court. I can safely say I've gotten tens times that value from GPL'd software. I think if enough of us who believe in the GPL contribute (even a few dollars), we could have a sizeable legal warchest.
Of course, it's up to the developers (it's their code), but I think the rest of us who have benefited so greatly from their work should make sure that they know their options should not be limited by the high cost of legal actions.