It's got nothing to do with decent support outside the US. I couldn't get decent support _in_ the US. BTW, SCO laying the FUD on Linux is nothing new. Three years ago, at a business briefing, some SCO marketroid spent a half hour FUDing all other server OSs. Right after NT, he went to Linux: "Linux? _Linux?_ _Linux_ is for people who want to get their tech support from _Finland_!". My response on the reply card: "Linux is for people who want to get their tech support". My outfit had reported bugs to them, including a full-blown PANIC. We got nowhere.
Just because the Holy Circles find their way into the new space doesn't mean that they can dominate it. Take the Roman Catholic Church, as an example.
This was a force that had ultimate authority for over a millenium. Martin Luther, almost unwittingly, knocked that authority down.
Today, there are hundreds of Christian religions. Centuries have passed, and the Roman Catholic Church has not regained the total eminence that they had.
The moral: the Big Boys will often enter the new arenas. They will not often dominate them as they did the old arenas.
A quantum leap, while instantaneous, still can't be measured by the naked eye.
While they don't realize it, MS marketing is telling us that they have pushed the state of the art by a few microns (if that). Even I will grant them that.
Remember this. Most marketing firms that use this term don't understand it, and are thus tricked into telling the truth.
For those not versed in the hardware arts, accelerometers detect acceleration (big surprise!) such as G-forces. Given acceleration, you can calculate velocity, assuming a starting velocity. It's a fairly safe assumption that a mouse is at rest when it boots, but not always a given. For reference, most mice detect position or velocity, either by passing over optical grids, or measuring the travel of a wheel.
The big problem with figuring out mouse motion via accelerometers is that it takes perfect calibration. A decalibrated accelerometer mouse would think that it is still moving when you have stopped it, and would result in pointer creep.
Two other problems exist. First off, an accelerometer mouse would work poorly in an accelerating environment. You would never see such a mouse in a maritime environment, for instance. It might also do badly in an enviroment prone to low-level seismic events. Can anyone speak as to how this would work in Silicon Valley?
Finally, this would require a larger mousing surface. Many of us need more "travel" in our mice than the regular mousing surface provides. Thus, we have become quite proficient at the "push, lift, retract" version of mousing (move your mouse around the screen and see if you do it--it comes so naturally that some people don't know they do it). This works because you don't move the ball while moving the mouse through the air. With an accelerometer, the mouse would register motion when off the pad, so the "push, lift, retract" method would result in a useless pointer jiggle.
If this MS Optical Mouse stuff takes off, then we'll have a large population of ball-less mice. We've been successful at keeping that population down for now, and just sticking with the male mice. But now...can anybody say "tribble"?
It is now time to segregate the hardware closets...
Do you even need a touchpad driver? I got some no-name keyboard with touchpad (it has a brand name, but I've never heard of it and don't remember it offhand). The keyboard came with a driver CD which I haven't bothered to remove from the shrinkwrap; there was no documentation telling the software compatibility on the touchpad. The mouse section (two cables; one keyboard, one mouse) was serial, but came with a PS/2 adapter. When I plugged it in and installed Linux (RH 5.2), it found a PS/2 mouse and asked me if I wanted 3-button emulation. It just worked. I think that, to Linux, a PS/2 mouse is a PS/2 mouse is a PS/2 mouse. I believe that some Linux doc noted that, even if you have an MS mouse attached to a PS/2 port via an adapter, just call it a PS/2 mouse (rather than an MS mouse) and Linux will pick it up.
Amazingly enough, that HOWTO contained one piece of information useful to me. It pointed me to www.cheapbytes.com. I needed an upgrade to my Linux machine, and don't want to suck a whole distribution down a 28.8. I've got the doc, so I don't need the box. They ship CDs, cheap. What can I say? K-Q00L! (I guess I should return to my role as mild-mannered online security geek now...)
I wouldn't compare it to the highway or SS. The neat difference is that this software doesn't belong to the government. We're too used to everything being owned by a person, a company, or the government. IMHO, we're in deep kimshi if the government takes over ownership of open software...
Linux can do more things than most people can imagine. So can Windows. So can a lot of other things. Nobody requires that you use every program installed on your Linux box. You don't have to understand it all. Linux is a universe beyond comprehension to all but the ubergeeks (and possibly not even them). But we're used to having too many choices. We respond by throwing out big heaping gobs of them. That's what we humans do; throw huge numbers of options out. Look at a chess game. Chess is a game beyond complete comprehension to us; computers can't completely "comprehend" the game. While the possibilities are limited, they are myriad. Supercomputers can't consider all the possibilities. Only recently has a computer been able to defeat a Kasparov. That's not because Kasparov can think faster than the supercomputer; it's because he can throw out 99% of the available moves very quickly.
Only use what you need out of Linux; you likely have enough hard drive to leave the rest hanging out. When you need to do something new, learn how to do it by asking, surfing, or using whatever techniques you have. If Linux has a program to solve the problem for you, you will likely find it. Until then, you don't even have to know that the program even exists.
I'm a software engineer, and I was trained to be a mechanical engineer. Frankly, I'm appalled by what some people call works of software engineering. A good piece of engineering, in any other field, is solid and robust. That is, it is hard to make it fail, and it fails in a predictable way when it does (for a perfect example, think of automotive "crumple zones"--they even make the cars crash the right way).
I've never heard of good definitions of computer science and software engineering, but we can (in theory) derive such definitions from other science and engineering disciplines.
To me, science is the bleeding edge. In science, you discover principals that tell you more about your area of study. Often, the scientists are the ones to first invent a piece of technology. Computer scientists are the same way--always out there doing things that the rest of us think is impossible or unlikely. It took a lot of computer science to build Unix, because a lot of it hadn't been done before.
Engineers, on the other hand, take things that the scientists do and render it more usable. While it took a scientist to develop (for example) fuzzy logic and similar technologies to analyze the human voice, it took engineers to make a dictation system out of it. Where it took scientists to notice the thermal effects of microwave radiation, it took engineers to create the microwave oven.
Unlike Unix, Linux was built with more engineering and science. Since Linux is based on Unix, 99.9% of the bleeding-edge science was already done. Building new, solid implementations of this stuff is the engineering part.
Then there's Microsoft. You could call it engineering, but I would consider that an insult to engineering. Engineers optimize a product for technical merit; Microsoft actively sabotages technical merit (their own and others) in order to win.
If you bought a machine with Windows or DOS preinstalled, you paid the Microsoft tax--just implicitly. How many people buy Windows in the box compared to Windows in the case (complete with RAM, drives, CPU, etc.). Actually, it costs less to get the lowest of the low-end Linux based systems. I figure that Microsoft bloat accounts for one full generation of computer. That is, a computer that costs $2000 today and uses Windows is comparable to a computer that cost $2000 eighteen months ago (and thus costs about $1000 today) Linux. Sure, the WinModems won't work, but you make yesterday's hardware perform like tomorrow's.
What's got to be driving him nuts is that he is no longer in charge of the world's largest software development shop. Of course, the largest such shop isn't a company at all... Linux: Made by the biggest software development team in the known universe.
Egad. Now you're scaring me. I think that we're in a race. If MS makes its own distro while embracing and extending, they might be able to use the Sheep Factor to frag the Linux market like they've been doing with Java. The sickest part will be that it could be completely legal. If Linux can get to a critical mass of market respect before MS tries something like this, we stand good odds of leaving MS-Linux marginalized, rather than MS-Linux leaving real Linux marginalized. One of our defenses against this may be the MS religious abstinence from releasing source. Guys, any other ways to fight this possible weak spot?
Absolutely. I believe that there is an exception in the case of the draft (you don't have to graduate to be a conscript, do you?). However, AFAIK, it takes an officer to arm or launch nuclear ordinance (egad, I hope so!). The fact still remains that you can train a fifteen-year-old to launch a nuke (and maybe even have it hit its target). Atomic theory is complex, but engineers have reduced the entire operation to where it could be just push-button. I assume (pray!) that it takes more than a push-button to launch such a weapon, but the complexity has nothing to do with the technology; it is simply a matter of molly-guarding the biggest of the Big Red Switches.
Heck, install the rack in your refrigerator. Liquid-cooled computing. Really useful for those tropical hackers. OTOH, I've already seen a demo of a fridge with a built-in screen and computer--so you can keep track of what you need to buy. I don't see what advantage it has over a mag-mount whiteboard, though.
If you base your life on the technology, you will lose. The technology has a short half-life. If you base a career on a technology (i.e. "I am a Unix sysadmin") and live by that, you will become obsolete as soon as the technology does. So what is a poor geek to do? First off, don't base your life on the technology. There is a lot more to life than ones and zeroes, no matter what you can do with them. You can make technology your life and possibly make a lot of money, but you will have missed out on the good stuff. Basing a career on technology is certainly doable; it's basing a career on a particular technology that is problematic. If you base your career on technology, you are building your house on a fault line. It is better to base your career on the unchanging, and then to add the changing technology skills. You certainly need to know the current tech, and you need to learn the future tech. But companies look for things beyond the technology. Things like a can-do attitude, a commitment to quality, an understanding of business communications (aka talking to people in your company), and the ability to juggle multiple products. These aren't pointy-haired mumbo-jumbo; these are skills that make companies money, and thus skills that they want you to have. Those skills don't go out of style, and companies will pay big bucks for them. If you have those permanent skills, some companies will even hire you and train you to get the techno skills that you need. If you have the techno skills and not the permanent business skills, you may be tolerated--or you may not be. If you have both the permanent skills and today's hot tech skills, you can basically write your own ticket.
If this "top match" goes through, I openly wonder how much it would cost to "buy" all the single letters, and the numbers 1-12. If we set up a fund to do that, we could give all the links to the Children's Television Workshop for use with Sesame Street. If today's episode is brought to you by the letters F, R, and the number 3, why not the other way around? There shouldn't be too much demand for these matches anyhow. The possible exceptions would be A, E, I, O, and U, which will likely be snarfed up by the Wheel of Fortune ASAP.
No, it's specifically unlike what Lycos does. When Lycos tailors a banner ad to your search (a good thing, IMHO), it separates the ad from the real data. By their nature, a banner ad screams that it is an ad.
When you mix the ads in with the real data, you start truly deceiving the user. When you set up shop as a search engine, you imply that the result of a search is a list of the most relevant sites it can find (isn't that what "sort by relevance" means?). I know that this is wrong. I'd be surprised if it's legal.
OTOH, somebody like the Yellow Pages can get away with putting ads in. They're the Yellow Pages--they carry an implication that everything they have is a paid advertisement.
The type of hardware that either OS can beat the other on is largely irrelevant. People buy the hardware to run the OS. Note that even Windows 95 blows Linux away on PPP performance on WinModems. A fair test would be to take two similarly-skilled engineers (one an NT guru, one a Linux guru), and give them hardware budgets to be spent at one soup-to-nuts parts vendor. Heck, spot NT the licensing fees. Put in the sort of requirements one would have for a real-world server (such as hard drive failover), so that you have to tune for stability and speed. Which OS can do better on a Quad? Frankly, who cares? As was mentioned upthread, the extra three processors probably slowed Linux down for this test. Which OS can do better on (say) $5,000 in hardware? That's the important question to my mind.
I don't know why SGI did it, but I do understand KFC. They wanted to stop using the evil "F" word--"Fried". Remember that this happened in the Age of the Health Kick?
I strongly believe that the society that we have, steeped in fictional sex and violence, is going to have an effect on people, especially children. This is a cumulative effect, and parents exist to counteract this. A parent needs to have more influence on a child than the mass media does; when a parent finds that they don't, they must reach out for help. When parents fail at this, or don't even try, the parents are being negligent.
Tools that parents have to do this of their own free will are Good Things. I will also turn around and say that some of these tools add up to outright censorship, which is a Bad Thing. Parents have the right and duty to censor for their children; the government has neither.
OTOH, I do not believe that the above is any excuse for any lawsuit of the form "This child listened to this song or watched that movie and then went psycho". It is true; there are people who will play a game of Doom (or watch a violent show, or listen to a violent song), and do something horrible. Sometimes this will involve killing themselves or somebody else. This should raise some large flags: this kid was messed up beforehand.
There are some sick people out there, basically bombs ready to go off. They have hidden triggers. Sooner or later, someone or something is going to pull the trigger without realizing it. They won't even know that there was a bomb to be triggered. The one who pulls the trigger is in no way responsible for the bomb; they had no way of knowing. It could be Ozzy Osborne. It could be Danny Osmond.
So who is responsible? first off, the person who lost control is responsible for losing control (how many people forget this one!). You can argue that some people are so far gone that they have no control over themselves; I won't argue that, so long as those people get a free trip to the rubber rooms. People without self control have no place in society, regardless of why they have no self control.
In the case of a child who loses control, the parents or guardians are responsible for their own negligence in parenting. Again, I will offer exceptions for parents who realized that they could not control their child and tried to get help. Some kids are too much for some parents to handle, but these parents must make every effort, and enlist help. The parents who don't talk to their kids, don't know what their lives are like, don't know their friends--I have little sympathy for.
You can argue that the world is responsible for saturating a young mind with violent imagery. Unfortunately, the world cannot be held accountable for anything. You can change the world, though. Don't like the violent TV shows? Change the channel. Don't let your kids watch it. Teach them other ways to solve problems and deal with their anger. Get together with others and write letters to the broadcasters. This is a capitalism; companies put out the sex and violence because it sells. Vote with your wallet, and with your remote control. If enough concerned parents stop watching the violent shows and start watching other, next season's lineup will be full of non-violent programming. This is already happening, for those in range of a PAX TV station.
You've obviously never seen a Playborg centerfold. Lat month, it was a Quad Xeon with 256MB RAM, a full rack of SCSI drives, and the cover completely removed! Mmm-mmm.
Copyright is simply a legal representation of common sense. What you create, is yours to do with as you please. Just because you thought it up instead of building it doesn't make it any less yours.
Agreed. It seems that the chief argument here is that copyright is unenforcable in some circumstances, therefore it should be removed in those circumstances. There I disagree. The fact that something is unenforceable, in and of itself, doesn't make a law a bad law. However, the caveat is that those who wish to make a living off of copyrights must know that lawbreaking may occur, and that the Warez D00dz are hard to stop even with lawyers. If you still think that you can make a living on your copyrights, go for it. One of the nice things about OSS is that it sidesteps most of the copyright issue entirely (and likely makes us look like weenies to the d00dz). The fact that it works for us doesn't mean that we have the right to force it on anybody else.
Second, and more important, manufacturers simply are afraid to lose their larger clients and will go to great lenghts to keep their customers happy. So I know that in the corporate world accountability IS important enough to be a deciding factor in choosing OS's or any kind of product for that matter.
I absolutely agree; proprietary shops will bend over backwards to solve a big customer's problem. I think that OSS supporters will bend even further.
First, get one thing clear. If you're a small outfit, or a home user, you can get your support from USENET and similar sources. If you're doing serious work with OSS and can't afford to have it down for a long time, you must have support. You either have a support department in-house that understands the software, or you have a support contract with an outside entity. If you fail to do this, you deserve to lose. Linux General's Warning: This Is Not Free Beer. If you buy Linux so that you can pay nothing, you will fail.
That being said, and assuming that you actually buy a support contract, an OSS support organization will bend over backwards to solve the big customer's problems just like a proprietary vendor would. The OSS support team will bend over further because you can hire another organization, or do it yourself. The proprietary house has some control because it has the source code; if you want to change support organizations, you have to purchase and deploy new software. If your OSS support team fails you, you can use the same software and a get a new team; your users may never know.
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It's got nothing to do with decent support outside the US. I couldn't get decent support _in_ the US. BTW, SCO laying the FUD on Linux is nothing new. Three years ago, at a business briefing, some SCO marketroid spent a half hour FUDing all other server OSs. Right after NT, he went to Linux: "Linux? _Linux?_ _Linux_ is for people who want to get their tech support from _Finland_!". My response on the reply card: "Linux is for people who want to get their tech support". My outfit had reported bugs to them, including a full-blown PANIC. We got nowhere.
This was a force that had ultimate authority for over a millenium. Martin Luther, almost unwittingly, knocked that authority down.
Today, there are hundreds of Christian religions. Centuries have passed, and the Roman Catholic Church has not regained the total eminence that they had.
The moral: the Big Boys will often enter the new arenas. They will not often dominate them as they did the old arenas.
While they don't realize it, MS marketing is telling us that they have pushed the state of the art by a few microns (if that). Even I will grant them that.
Remember this. Most marketing firms that use this term don't understand it, and are thus tricked into telling the truth.
For those not versed in the hardware arts, accelerometers detect acceleration (big surprise!) such as G-forces. Given acceleration, you can calculate velocity, assuming a starting velocity. It's a fairly safe assumption that a mouse is at rest when it boots, but not always a given. For reference, most mice detect position or velocity, either by passing over optical grids, or measuring the travel of a wheel.
The big problem with figuring out mouse motion via accelerometers is that it takes perfect calibration. A decalibrated accelerometer mouse would think that it is still moving when you have stopped it, and would result in pointer creep.
Two other problems exist. First off, an accelerometer mouse would work poorly in an accelerating environment. You would never see such a mouse in a maritime environment, for instance. It might also do badly in an enviroment prone to low-level seismic events. Can anyone speak as to how this would work in Silicon Valley?
Finally, this would require a larger mousing surface. Many of us need more "travel" in our mice than the regular mousing surface provides. Thus, we have become quite proficient at the "push, lift, retract" version of mousing (move your mouse around the screen and see if you do it--it comes so naturally that some people don't know they do it). This works because you don't move the ball while moving the mouse through the air. With an accelerometer, the mouse would register motion when off the pad, so the "push, lift, retract" method would result in a useless pointer jiggle.
If this MS Optical Mouse stuff takes off, then we'll have a large population of ball-less mice. We've been successful at keeping that population down for now, and just sticking with the male mice. But now...can anybody say "tribble"?
It is now time to segregate the hardware closets...
Microsoft is planning a larger version, for people with larger hands. It will make "beep...beep" noises when you are moving it backwards ;^>
Do you even need a touchpad driver? I got some no-name keyboard with touchpad (it has a brand name, but I've never heard of it and don't remember it offhand). The keyboard came with a driver CD which I haven't bothered to remove from the shrinkwrap; there was no documentation telling the software compatibility on the touchpad. The mouse section (two cables; one keyboard, one mouse) was serial, but came with a PS/2 adapter. When I plugged it in and installed Linux (RH 5.2), it found a PS/2 mouse and asked me if I wanted 3-button emulation. It just worked. I think that, to Linux, a PS/2 mouse is a PS/2 mouse is a PS/2 mouse. I believe that some Linux doc noted that, even if you have an MS mouse attached to a PS/2 port via an adapter, just call it a PS/2 mouse (rather than an MS mouse) and Linux will pick it up.
Amazingly enough, that HOWTO contained one piece of information useful to me. It pointed me to www.cheapbytes.com. I needed an upgrade to my Linux machine, and don't want to suck a whole distribution down a 28.8. I've got the doc, so I don't need the box. They ship CDs, cheap. What can I say? K-Q00L! (I guess I should return to my role as mild-mannered online security geek now...)
I wouldn't compare it to the highway or SS. The neat difference is that this software doesn't belong to the government. We're too used to everything being owned by a person, a company, or the government. IMHO, we're in deep kimshi if the government takes over ownership of open software...
Only use what you need out of Linux; you likely have enough hard drive to leave the rest hanging out. When you need to do something new, learn how to do it by asking, surfing, or using whatever techniques you have. If Linux has a program to solve the problem for you, you will likely find it. Until then, you don't even have to know that the program even exists.
I've never heard of good definitions of computer science and software engineering, but we can (in theory) derive such definitions from other science and engineering disciplines.
To me, science is the bleeding edge. In science, you discover principals that tell you more about your area of study. Often, the scientists are the ones to first invent a piece of technology. Computer scientists are the same way--always out there doing things that the rest of us think is impossible or unlikely. It took a lot of computer science to build Unix, because a lot of it hadn't been done before.
Engineers, on the other hand, take things that the scientists do and render it more usable. While it took a scientist to develop (for example) fuzzy logic and similar technologies to analyze the human voice, it took engineers to make a dictation system out of it. Where it took scientists to notice the thermal effects of microwave radiation, it took engineers to create the microwave oven.
Unlike Unix, Linux was built with more engineering and science. Since Linux is based on Unix, 99.9% of the bleeding-edge science was already done. Building new, solid implementations of this stuff is the engineering part.
Then there's Microsoft. You could call it engineering, but I would consider that an insult to engineering. Engineers optimize a product for technical merit; Microsoft actively sabotages technical merit (their own and others) in order to win.
If you bought a machine with Windows or DOS preinstalled, you paid the Microsoft tax--just implicitly. How many people buy Windows in the box compared to Windows in the case (complete with RAM, drives, CPU, etc.). Actually, it costs less to get the lowest of the low-end Linux based systems. I figure that Microsoft bloat accounts for one full generation of computer. That is, a computer that costs $2000 today and uses Windows is comparable to a computer that cost $2000 eighteen months ago (and thus costs about $1000 today) Linux. Sure, the WinModems won't work, but you make yesterday's hardware perform like tomorrow's.
What's got to be driving him nuts is that he is no longer in charge of the world's largest software development shop. Of course, the largest such shop isn't a company at all... Linux: Made by the biggest software development team in the known universe.
Egad. Now you're scaring me. I think that we're in a race. If MS makes its own distro while embracing and extending, they might be able to use the Sheep Factor to frag the Linux market like they've been doing with Java. The sickest part will be that it could be completely legal. If Linux can get to a critical mass of market respect before MS tries something like this, we stand good odds of leaving MS-Linux marginalized, rather than MS-Linux leaving real Linux marginalized. One of our defenses against this may be the MS religious abstinence from releasing source. Guys, any other ways to fight this possible weak spot?
Absolutely. I believe that there is an exception in the case of the draft (you don't have to graduate to be a conscript, do you?). However, AFAIK, it takes an officer to arm or launch nuclear ordinance (egad, I hope so!). The fact still remains that you can train a fifteen-year-old to launch a nuke (and maybe even have it hit its target). Atomic theory is complex, but engineers have reduced the entire operation to where it could be just push-button. I assume (pray!) that it takes more than a push-button to launch such a weapon, but the complexity has nothing to do with the technology; it is simply a matter of molly-guarding the biggest of the Big Red Switches.
Heck, install the rack in your refrigerator. Liquid-cooled computing. Really useful for those tropical hackers. OTOH, I've already seen a demo of a fridge with a built-in screen and computer--so you can keep track of what you need to buy. I don't see what advantage it has over a mag-mount whiteboard, though.
If you base your life on the technology, you will lose. The technology has a short half-life. If you base a career on a technology (i.e. "I am a Unix sysadmin") and live by that, you will become obsolete as soon as the technology does. So what is a poor geek to do? First off, don't base your life on the technology. There is a lot more to life than ones and zeroes, no matter what you can do with them. You can make technology your life and possibly make a lot of money, but you will have missed out on the good stuff. Basing a career on technology is certainly doable; it's basing a career on a particular technology that is problematic. If you base your career on technology, you are building your house on a fault line. It is better to base your career on the unchanging, and then to add the changing technology skills. You certainly need to know the current tech, and you need to learn the future tech. But companies look for things beyond the technology. Things like a can-do attitude, a commitment to quality, an understanding of business communications (aka talking to people in your company), and the ability to juggle multiple products. These aren't pointy-haired mumbo-jumbo; these are skills that make companies money, and thus skills that they want you to have. Those skills don't go out of style, and companies will pay big bucks for them. If you have those permanent skills, some companies will even hire you and train you to get the techno skills that you need. If you have the techno skills and not the permanent business skills, you may be tolerated--or you may not be. If you have both the permanent skills and today's hot tech skills, you can basically write your own ticket.
If this "top match" goes through, I openly wonder how much it would cost to "buy" all the single letters, and the numbers 1-12. If we set up a fund to do that, we could give all the links to the Children's Television Workshop for use with Sesame Street. If today's episode is brought to you by the letters F, R, and the number 3, why not the other way around? There shouldn't be too much demand for these matches anyhow. The possible exceptions would be A, E, I, O, and U, which will likely be snarfed up by the Wheel of Fortune ASAP.
When you mix the ads in with the real data, you start truly deceiving the user. When you set up shop as a search engine, you imply that the result of a search is a list of the most relevant sites it can find (isn't that what "sort by relevance" means?). I know that this is wrong. I'd be surprised if it's legal.
OTOH, somebody like the Yellow Pages can get away with putting ads in. They're the Yellow Pages--they carry an implication that everything they have is a paid advertisement.
The type of hardware that either OS can beat the other on is largely irrelevant. People buy the hardware to run the OS. Note that even Windows 95 blows Linux away on PPP performance on WinModems. A fair test would be to take two similarly-skilled engineers (one an NT guru, one a Linux guru), and give them hardware budgets to be spent at one soup-to-nuts parts vendor. Heck, spot NT the licensing fees. Put in the sort of requirements one would have for a real-world server (such as hard drive failover), so that you have to tune for stability and speed. Which OS can do better on a Quad? Frankly, who cares? As was mentioned upthread, the extra three processors probably slowed Linux down for this test. Which OS can do better on (say) $5,000 in hardware? That's the important question to my mind.
I don't know why SGI did it, but I do understand KFC. They wanted to stop using the evil "F" word--"Fried". Remember that this happened in the Age of the Health Kick?
Tools that parents have to do this of their own free will are Good Things. I will also turn around and say that some of these tools add up to outright censorship, which is a Bad Thing. Parents have the right and duty to censor for their children; the government has neither.
OTOH, I do not believe that the above is any excuse for any lawsuit of the form "This child listened to this song or watched that movie and then went psycho". It is true; there are people who will play a game of Doom (or watch a violent show, or listen to a violent song), and do something horrible. Sometimes this will involve killing themselves or somebody else. This should raise some large flags: this kid was messed up beforehand.
There are some sick people out there, basically bombs ready to go off. They have hidden triggers. Sooner or later, someone or something is going to pull the trigger without realizing it. They won't even know that there was a bomb to be triggered. The one who pulls the trigger is in no way responsible for the bomb; they had no way of knowing. It could be Ozzy Osborne. It could be Danny Osmond.
So who is responsible? first off, the person who lost control is responsible for losing control (how many people forget this one!). You can argue that some people are so far gone that they have no control over themselves; I won't argue that, so long as those people get a free trip to the rubber rooms. People without self control have no place in society, regardless of why they have no self control.
In the case of a child who loses control, the parents or guardians are responsible for their own negligence in parenting. Again, I will offer exceptions for parents who realized that they could not control their child and tried to get help. Some kids are too much for some parents to handle, but these parents must make every effort, and enlist help. The parents who don't talk to their kids, don't know what their lives are like, don't know their friends--I have little sympathy for.
You can argue that the world is responsible for saturating a young mind with violent imagery. Unfortunately, the world cannot be held accountable for anything. You can change the world, though. Don't like the violent TV shows? Change the channel. Don't let your kids watch it. Teach them other ways to solve problems and deal with their anger. Get together with others and write letters to the broadcasters. This is a capitalism; companies put out the sex and violence because it sells. Vote with your wallet, and with your remote control. If enough concerned parents stop watching the violent shows and start watching other, next season's lineup will be full of non-violent programming. This is already happening, for those in range of a PAX TV station.
You've obviously never seen a Playborg centerfold. Lat month, it was a Quad Xeon with 256MB RAM, a full rack of SCSI drives, and the cover completely removed! Mmm-mmm.
Agreed. It seems that the chief argument here is that copyright is unenforcable in some circumstances, therefore it should be removed in those circumstances. There I disagree. The fact that something is unenforceable, in and of itself, doesn't make a law a bad law. However, the caveat is that those who wish to make a living off of copyrights must know that lawbreaking may occur, and that the Warez D00dz are hard to stop even with lawyers. If you still think that you can make a living on your copyrights, go for it. One of the nice things about OSS is that it sidesteps most of the copyright issue entirely (and likely makes us look like weenies to the d00dz). The fact that it works for us doesn't mean that we have the right to force it on anybody else.
I absolutely agree; proprietary shops will bend over backwards to solve a big customer's problem. I think that OSS supporters will bend even further.
First, get one thing clear. If you're a small outfit, or a home user, you can get your support from USENET and similar sources. If you're doing serious work with OSS and can't afford to have it down for a long time, you must have support. You either have a support department in-house that understands the software, or you have a support contract with an outside entity. If you fail to do this, you deserve to lose. Linux General's Warning: This Is Not Free Beer. If you buy Linux so that you can pay nothing, you will fail.
That being said, and assuming that you actually buy a support contract, an OSS support organization will bend over backwards to solve the big customer's problems just like a proprietary vendor would. The OSS support team will bend over further because you can hire another organization, or do it yourself. The proprietary house has some control because it has the source code; if you want to change support organizations, you have to purchase and deploy new software. If your OSS support team fails you, you can use the same software and a get a new team; your users may never know.