And back in the mid 80's there was another one that did shows in 1/4 mile races en Mexico, racing against a Mack Truck that also had a rocket...I don't remember the times, but the damn things were fast and noisy...and those of us on the pits at the local track (the pits in Monterrey's speedway used to be right besides the 1/4 mile track) would feel very uncomfortable heat when they sped past.
It was lots of fun:)
On the other hand, the rocket in this VW is a small one, at least compared to the one that Manauto (the company that built the VW and truck that used to run here) used...the back half of the (old style) VW bug's roof was cut off and if you looked at the car face first, you'd see about...8 or 9 inches of the top of the turbine above the car.
It's somewhere in the site of mplayer....
here, found the link
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/info.html
At the end of that page, where it talks about license. Notice he says "basically GPL, but includes..." and not "Basically GPL" as he would if it were the name of a license.
Actually, they say their code is GPL, but some stuff they include (codecs and other things, I'd guess...haven't checked the whole thing) are not under GPL...that's why they get pissed off whenever somebody posts binaries of MPlayer...according to them, some of the code can't be legally distributed as binaries...that's why they say the code is basically GPL (and not Basically GPL as in a name of a license, but as in "mostly GPL").
I am not involved in the samba/tng projects in any way, except as a user, but I've been following the project sort-of closely for a good while, and here's how things about this fork look like.
First, TNG was *not* the devel branch of samba, it was a parallel branch to the HEAD (aka main) branch of samba. TNG's objective has always been to create a Primary Domain Controller with full WindowsNT4.0 functionality. HEAD's objective has never been stated as to haveing a PDC...it's for a file/print share server, nothing else.
Samba has been able to authenticate win9x clients for a while, but if you have an NT worktsation, you need to have an NT server to authenticate your domain, because samba won't listen to it.
Luke and other samba developers have been working on TNG for a good while (as long as I have been following samba) with the goal of creating a Samba PDC that you can't distinguish from an NT4.0 PDC.
There has always been some tension between Luke/the TNG team and the main Samba team, because of technical and phylosophical matters, that came to a conclussion about a month ago, when Luke decided to drop out of the Samba team and, aparently, drop TNG.
Now, Luke and the other TNG people have decided not to drop TNG, but fork it off samba.
As a user/administrator of samba boxes, I believe this is one of those forks that will end up in the Good Thing list....why?
Samba is a great file/print shareing server, fast and reliable (as fast and reliable as the very broken and ugly SMB protocol can be), and the samba team focuses on that, and they do it well.
TNG's objective is, for all purposes, different and broader...they want to create a Primary Domain Controller That Doesn't Suck, that is...a *nix based PDC, and that, in my view, is a Good Thing.
They travell the same paths, because file/print shareing and PDCs use the SMB protocol to accomplish their job in a mixed enviroment...but they have never really been the same thing...and I see this fork as a Good Thing.
If you really want all the info on this, read up on the archives for the samba mailing lists, or the Kernel Cousin - Samba archives that Linuxcare puts out every week, you'll be able to understand what's going on better.
Vox, who knows good things will come out from Samba and TNG.
>Anyhow, i'm more interested in how this will impact Mandrake. I say that only because of the
>close relation between Mandrake and Redhat. Will the two start to spread apart now, Mandrake
>forming its own identity? Or will Mandrake make efforts to remain as close to Redhat as they
>already are?
Mandrake has been "growing appart" from RH since version 6.0...they are working on the beta of 7.2 as it is right now, and their 7.0 came out way ahead of RH's.
Also, Mandrake has gone FHS-compliant* (at least there's talk about that in the cooker [mandrake developers] mailing list...I haven't tried the 7.2 betas yet); I belive Mandrake is now its own distro, tho I'm sure they are gonna try to remind RH-compatible (they like knowing that all commercial "For RHL" software runs on Mdk too, I guess).
Anyway...RH's latest shouldn't affect Mdk, one way or another
Vox
* I have no clue if RH is FHS-compliant yet or if they have plans to be...have been using Mdk exclusively since 6.0
Well, I can understand how not getting an immediate answer to your questions can be frustrating, but...most of the silence times I've noticed are during work hours, when most of us get called away from the computer to do the stuff we get payed to do. Most of the #linuxhelp people work on computer related fields, so we tend to be online while at work, but that doesn't mean we have a chance to be chatting all the time.
Be patient and you shall recive...I've never seen a guy with patience and desire to learn leave #linuxhelp without getting an answer (annoying people who don't follow directions when being helped are a different matter completely)
I can't have any respect for a distro that's putting X 4.0 into any sort of release. Despite the fact that it's versioned as an actual release, the general consensus is that it's still beta quality w.r.t stability, and it definately is missing support for numerous cards, such as the I128s that are in the lab where I work on my current research project. Including X4 in a distro at this point is stupid. (Even a beta - why have your beta release held up until whenever X4 catches up to X3.3.6 in stability/card support? Who knows when that's going to happen?)
I'm running X4 on 2 boxes (personal workstation at home, and my workstation at work) on top of mandrake 7...works like a charm, haven't had it crash yet...and I installed it 2 days after it came out.
Besides...mandrake 7.1 has both X3.3.6 and X4 and lets you choose during install....don't bash that which you don't know.
Vox, who wishes he had the bandwith to be dlding beta ISOs
As a fellow mexican I want to know...what do you think is the impact of OSS in our country? I know all about the project of putting a whole bunch of linux boxens in schools, so that's nice, but...what about developers? I don't really remember more than a couple of names of mexican developers besides yours, which, in a way, also means that we don't have as much advocacy/knowledge about OSS in Mexico as we should (the MS tax kills easier here than in the US, for obvious reasons).
I guess as part of that question...what do you think should be done to "push" more developers into OSS here in Mexico?
Gracias por un excelente trabajo para todos nosotros.
I agree with you...talk is cheap, but....when Big Blue talks, it can be beneficial. I mean...this article, plus the one about linux on a mainframe from a couple of weeks ago, plus whatever other buzz they make in the future will bring Linux to the minds of more people.
I know the OS/FS movement isn't about advertising and stuff like that, but...see this as an expensive ad that IBM made for themselfs and Linux, with no cost for us:)
IBM might not be the biggest name in the PC world, but they are still one of the (if not the one) biggest companies when it comes to corporate mindshare...it's good to have em on this side and not paired up with MS:)
"Type: $photoshop myimage.png" Which will work IF: photoshop is in the path. Most programs installed with an RPM/deb go to a place that IS in the path or that gets added to the path by the after-install script (at least in those RPMs that are correcty constructed)
myimage.png is in the current directory. If it isn't, you type the whole path, easy.
both of which are very often untrue. Actually finding where the photoshop binary is located is not a newbie task.
Mmmmm...."whereis photoshop" is usually enough, very intuitive, even.
Neither is altering the path. On this one I have to agree...altering the path is something a newbiew can't usually do by himself, unless he's had some DOS experience.
As far as that "open with" BS... You could just drag the icon for the myimage.png to the icon for the photoshop program. That's the proper way to use a gui. And probably even easier than typing your command line.
Mmmmm....two clicks to open My Computer (same if you want to use Windows Explorer), a bunch more to find the photoshop.exe program (unless you have a shortcut to it on your desktop, which ususally means having to do it yourself...let a newbie try to do that on NT Workstation 4,,,not as easy as you make it sound)...then open another My Computer/WExplorer window, find the silly graphic, drag it to the photoshop.exe icon....yes, very easy, I can see that.
And yes, I know what I'm talking about, I'm writing this on an NT box...and I, among other things, train people on both Windows and Linux at work.
Windows is easy, as somebody else already said, only for those that are used to it, and as an example I'll put my mom...she started using computers about a 18months ago or so...I gave her the choice between running linux and windows ("what do you like better, what I run on my computer (Mandrake 5.x at the time, with E as my wm),or what my brother runs on his (winNT workstation)?" She chose linux:)
After about 3 months, her computer gave up (very old box...damn HD died after only 8 years), so she started using my brother's box while I was buying parts for a new box for her...after a week, she threatened me with bodily harm if her box wasn't working in the next week, cause she couldn't get a thing done in my brother's NT box.
Two days later her box was ready...15 months later, she still thinks all the "windows is easy" people have no clue what 'easy' means.
And no, before you ask, she had never used a computer before I gave her that old box with linux in it...and no, she didn't set up a thing in it, I did it all...just like I did with NT for my brother, DOS for my father (he runs only one program in his computer, so...boot DOS, load program, do stuff, exit program, turn off puter)...what people still can't understand if that setting up an OS is NOT something for the average Joe...I don't care who makes the OS, my mom will NEVER be able to install it.
And yes, she does install programs in her box sometimes (only RPMs, and if she gets a dep error, she ICQs me and tells me what are the missing things and I find teh packages for her and then she just "rpm -Uvh *" in the dir where she placed them all)myimagemyimageVox, who is REALLY sick of this "this is easier than that"
There's power in co-opting a negatively-tainted word and turning it into a positive word. Queer and Nigger are both words that are, in the appropriate peer group, used as power words.
Other group that has done the same thing is the BDSMers/leather community..."pervs/perverts and proud of it".
It's always interesting to know where the terms we use come from, and what they mean for those that get those terms applied to them/us:)
The difference is that/. has NEVER tried to hide its bias, while ZD and other sites keep saying they are objective/unbiased....unbiased journalism is nothing but a myth, and like all myths, it's only belived by those who have no critical thinking abilities
Sounds to me like your just a piss poor NT admin. As for the "I have and MCSE so I should know" theory; just because you have an MCSE doesn't make you some sort of 'lord of all that is NT'
You are right about something...a MCSE doesn't make you good at what you do...the thing is...I do have almost 5 years of experience as an NT admin (and almost 20 of using computers in one way or another). I don't think of myself as the ultimate NT admin (I do know some that are better than me) but I do *know* that I'm a competent admin.
I refuse to run NT as a server because I hate having midnight calls, but I do admit NT is a good desktop enviroment for some people, as long as they don't mind it BSODing once in a while. The right tool, for me, is Linux on my servers (don't need a huge server, just email, web, gatewaying, firewalling, file/printer serving and to be my workstation in a 50 or so puter's network, so I don't use Solaris or one of the other big unices), and NT on my PHB's desktop.
I think it really depends on what your intentions for it are...*I* rather read it on the web, not cause of the money, but cause I spend most of my waking time infront of it, and I can read it while I monitor my servers, chat on IRC, read email, etc.
But I do plan on buying it, as has been mentioned, so I can give it out for Xmas to PHBs and non-initiated...makes for a nice gift, supports the people that give their time to OSS, and makes people know what I support.
Well...4 years having a beeper/cell phone tell me that the stupid NT server is dead while somebody is trying to work at the office made me hate NT. Then I got linux working, and the only time it's been down in 6 months is when somebody disconnected the power from the server by accident...so...not having to go to the office on a saturday/sunday or after I'm home during the week is enough reason for me to refuse to run NT on my servers:)
I'm trying to decide what to use at our office (small shop, about 40 clients), either Lotus Domino or HP's OpenMail....exchange is out of the question because I refuse to use NT in any way, shape or form (and yes, I know what I'm talking about...I'm a MCSE).
>I wonder how well the name recognition would be if he didn't name the OS after himself.
He didn't name Linux after himself...the guy (who's name I forget) who gave Linus the FTP space to put the source for the kernel for the first time is the one who named it Linux....Linus called it FreakX or something similar to that.
I've seen some of the comments about goverments (particularly the US gvmnt) "forcing" open source licenses...I don't think that that's the way.
What the goverments SHOULD force (in a legal way) is for companies that produce software to adhere to open STANDARDS. For those that don't understand the difference...is not the same thing to say "you have to GPL your OS" than "You can license your OS any way you want, but if you use TCP/IP in your OS, you HAVE to use the standard protocol, can't borg it up with weird propietary crap"
That way, freedom is still there, but STANDARDS become that...standards.
For example, SMB is now (un)fortunately a de-facto standard, but it is fully controlled by MS...whenever the Samba team has it down right, MS rolls out a new piece of cruft and breaks it up, and Samba has to start doing some reverse eng to catch up. If things where right, the SMB standard would be controlled by a standrad's body who'd say "sure, encrypting passwords is good....this is how it will be done".
The attitude of this french senator is, almost, the right one...make it a law to follow standards of inter-operativelity(sp?), with the freedom of doing whatever you want with everything else in your product.
Just the opinion of somebody who thinks freedom is not only being allowed to do as you please, but being protected from those that try to lock you out of being free.
This sounds a lot like the history of the animal kingdom on earth...who is the "best designed" animal? The Big, Bad and Mean T-Rex or the small, fast and adaptable rat?
We can see that in technollogy, as happened in biology, the winner usually is the rat, able to stay hungry for long periods of time, eating whatever insects it may catch, adapting fast to circumstances.
I firmly belive small companies (even when they are small "companies" within big companies, like the PC division in IBM mentioned in a previous post) will allways outmanuver the bigger monsters...yes, MS may have all the money in the world, the may have the big market right now, they may have even proven that they can turn on a dime when needed...but they are still not fast enough, when compared to a company like RedHat or a community like the one driving Debian, and when the next big breakthrough comes, MS will go out of the track trying to take the curve, while RH, Debian and others will continue in the race.
I think most of the people here will agree with me when I say that I rather work for a small company (untill it grows) than for a big company (till it sinks?).
You are missing one very important point...the DoJ thing and the monopoly thing is not about what MS is doing today or the position in the market that they have today...it's about what they DID and the position in the market that they HAD and the way they used it.
Microsoft may not be a monopoly now (I think it still IS a monopoly) but it was one, and it used that position to kill everything that it didn't like (look at Stacker compression, for example).
As for people wanting MS dead...I don't think so...what most of us DO want is MS reduced to what it should be according to the quality of their software (a minority player).
Slashdot Mirror
The winner design has collapseable sections too...just click the arrows beside the names and they'll collapse/expand.
:)
I actually like Alex's design better than Peter's...probably font size or something, but Alex's seems a bit less cluttered than Peter's to me.
Besides...this is a site for geeks...we all use RSS readers, not web browsers, right?
And back in the mid 80's there was another one that did shows in 1/4 mile races en Mexico, racing against a Mack Truck that also had a rocket...I don't remember the times, but the damn things were fast and noisy...and those of us on the pits at the local track (the pits in Monterrey's speedway used to be right besides the 1/4 mile track) would feel very uncomfortable heat when they sped past.
:)
It was lots of fun
On the other hand, the rocket in this VW is a small one, at least compared to the one that Manauto (the company that built the VW and truck that used to run here) used...the back half of the (old style) VW bug's roof was cut off and if you looked at the car face first, you'd see about...8 or 9 inches of the top of the turbine above the car.
It's somewhere in the site of mplayer....
here, found the link
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/info.html
At the end of that page, where it talks about license. Notice he says "basically GPL, but includes..." and not "Basically GPL" as he would if it were the name of a license.
Vox
Actually, they say their code is GPL, but some stuff they include (codecs and other things, I'd guess...haven't checked the whole thing) are not under GPL...that's why they get pissed off whenever somebody posts binaries of MPlayer...according to them, some of the code can't be legally distributed as binaries...that's why they say the code is basically GPL (and not Basically GPL as in a name of a license, but as in "mostly GPL").
./ story needs yet another clarification.
Vox
I am not involved in the samba/tng projects in any way, except as a user, but I've been following the project sort-of closely for a good while, and here's how things about this fork look like.
First, TNG was *not* the devel branch of samba, it was a parallel branch to the HEAD (aka main) branch of samba. TNG's objective has always been to create a Primary Domain Controller with full WindowsNT4.0 functionality. HEAD's objective has never been stated as to haveing a PDC...it's for a file/print share server, nothing else.
Samba has been able to authenticate win9x clients for a while, but if you have an NT worktsation, you need to have an NT server to authenticate your domain, because samba won't listen to it.
Luke and other samba developers have been working on TNG for a good while (as long as I have been following samba) with the goal of creating a Samba PDC that you can't distinguish from an NT4.0 PDC.
There has always been some tension between Luke/the TNG team and the main Samba team, because of technical and phylosophical matters, that came to a conclussion about a month ago, when Luke decided to drop out of the Samba team and, aparently, drop TNG.
Now, Luke and the other TNG people have decided not to drop TNG, but fork it off samba.
As a user/administrator of samba boxes, I believe this is one of those forks that will end up in the Good Thing list....why?
Samba is a great file/print shareing server, fast and reliable (as fast and reliable as the very broken and ugly SMB protocol can be), and the samba team focuses on that, and they do it well.
TNG's objective is, for all purposes, different and broader...they want to create a Primary Domain Controller That Doesn't Suck, that is...a *nix based PDC, and that, in my view, is a Good Thing.
They travell the same paths, because file/print shareing and PDCs use the SMB protocol to accomplish their job in a mixed enviroment...but they have never really been the same thing...and I see this fork as a Good Thing.
If you really want all the info on this, read up on the archives for the samba mailing lists, or the Kernel Cousin - Samba archives that Linuxcare puts out every week, you'll be able to understand what's going on better.
Vox, who knows good things will come out from Samba and TNG.
>Anyhow, i'm more interested in how this will impact Mandrake. I say that only because of the
>close relation between Mandrake and Redhat. Will the two start to spread apart now, Mandrake
>forming its own identity? Or will Mandrake make efforts to remain as close to Redhat as they
>already are?
Mandrake has been "growing appart" from RH since version 6.0...they are working on the beta of 7.2 as it is right now, and their 7.0 came out way ahead of RH's.
Also, Mandrake has gone FHS-compliant* (at least there's talk about that in the cooker [mandrake developers] mailing list...I haven't tried the 7.2 betas yet); I belive Mandrake is now its own distro, tho I'm sure they are gonna try to remind RH-compatible (they like knowing that all commercial "For RHL" software runs on Mdk too, I guess).
Anyway...RH's latest shouldn't affect Mdk, one way or another
Vox
* I have no clue if RH is FHS-compliant yet or if they have plans to be...have been using Mdk exclusively since 6.0
(Disclaimer: I'm an op in Undernet's #linuxhelp)
Well, I can understand how not getting an immediate answer to your questions can be frustrating, but...most of the silence times I've noticed are during work hours, when most of us get called away from the computer to do the stuff we get payed to do. Most of the #linuxhelp people work on computer related fields, so we tend to be online while at work, but that doesn't mean we have a chance to be chatting all the time.
Be patient and you shall recive...I've never seen a guy with patience and desire to learn leave #linuxhelp without getting an answer (annoying people who don't follow directions when being helped are a different matter completely)
Vox
I can't have any respect for a distro that's putting X 4.0 into any sort of release. Despite the fact that it's versioned as an actual release, the general consensus is that it's still beta quality w.r.t stability, and it definately is missing support for numerous cards, such as the I128s that are in the lab where I work on my current research project. Including X4 in a distro at this point is stupid. (Even a beta - why have your beta release held up until whenever X4 catches up to X3.3.6 in stability/card support? Who knows when that's going to happen?)
I'm running X4 on 2 boxes (personal workstation at home, and my workstation at work) on top of mandrake 7...works like a charm, haven't had it crash yet...and I installed it 2 days after it came out.
Besides...mandrake 7.1 has both X3.3.6 and X4 and lets you choose during install....don't bash that which you don't know.
Vox, who wishes he had the bandwith to be dlding beta ISOs
Hola, Miguel
As a fellow mexican I want to know...what do you think is the impact of OSS in our country? I know all about the project of putting a whole bunch of linux boxens in schools, so that's nice, but...what about developers? I don't really remember more than a couple of names of mexican developers besides yours, which, in a way, also means that we don't have as much advocacy/knowledge about OSS in Mexico as we should (the MS tax kills easier here than in the US, for obvious reasons).
I guess as part of that question...what do you think should be done to "push" more developers into OSS here in Mexico?
Gracias por un excelente trabajo para todos nosotros.
Vox.
I agree with you...talk is cheap, but....when Big Blue talks, it can be beneficial. I mean...this article, plus the one about linux on a mainframe from a couple of weeks ago, plus whatever other buzz they make in the future will bring Linux to the minds of more people.
:)
:)
I know the OS/FS movement isn't about advertising and stuff like that, but...see this as an expensive ad that IBM made for themselfs and Linux, with no cost for us
IBM might not be the biggest name in the PC world, but they are still one of the (if not the one) biggest companies when it comes to corporate mindshare...it's good to have em on this side and not paired up with MS
Vox
I agree...trying to solve de Xmas puzzle while being in slashnet was lots of fun, specially the two times I thought I had the answer :)
:)
Anyway, I'm all for the puzzles
Vox
The site is slashdotted all to hell...do you think they'll call this a "retaliatory DoS attack because of the article"? :)
:/
I'm sure somebody out there would belive it
Vox
PS: I hope this isn't duplicated.../. isn't answering on the first try
The site is slashdotted all to hell...do you think they'll call this a "retaliatory DoS attack because of the article"? :)
I'm sure somebody out there would belive it
Vox
"Type: $photoshop myimage.png" Which will work IF: photoshop is in the path.
:)
Most programs installed with an RPM/deb go to a place that IS in the path or that gets added to the path by the after-install script (at least in those RPMs that are correcty constructed)
myimage.png is in the current directory.
If it isn't, you type the whole path, easy.
both of which are very often untrue. Actually finding where the photoshop binary is located is not a newbie task.
Mmmmm...."whereis photoshop" is usually enough, very intuitive, even.
Neither is altering the path.
On this one I have to agree...altering the path is something a newbiew can't usually do by himself, unless he's had some DOS experience.
As far as that "open with" BS... You could just drag the icon for the myimage.png to the icon for the photoshop program. That's the proper way to use a gui. And probably even easier than typing your command line.
Mmmmm....two clicks to open My Computer (same if you want to use Windows Explorer), a bunch more to find the photoshop.exe program (unless you have a shortcut to it on your desktop, which ususally means having to do it yourself...let a newbie try to do that on NT Workstation 4,,,not as easy as you make it sound)...then open another My Computer/WExplorer window, find the silly graphic, drag it to the photoshop.exe icon....yes, very easy, I can see that.
And yes, I know what I'm talking about, I'm writing this on an NT box...and I, among other things, train people on both Windows and Linux at work.
Windows is easy, as somebody else already said, only for those that are used to it, and as an example I'll put my mom...she started using computers about a 18months ago or so...I gave her the choice between running linux and windows ("what do you like better, what I run on my computer (Mandrake 5.x at the time, with E as my wm),or what my brother runs on his (winNT workstation)?" She chose linux
After about 3 months, her computer gave up (very old box...damn HD died after only 8 years), so she started using my brother's box while I was buying parts for a new box for her...after a week, she threatened me with bodily harm if her box wasn't working in the next week, cause she couldn't get a thing done in my brother's NT box.
Two days later her box was ready...15 months later, she still thinks all the "windows is easy" people have no clue what 'easy' means.
And no, before you ask, she had never used a computer before I gave her that old box with linux in it...and no, she didn't set up a thing in it, I did it all...just like I did with NT for my brother, DOS for my father (he runs only one program in his computer, so...boot DOS, load program, do stuff, exit program, turn off puter)...what people still can't understand if that setting up an OS is NOT something for the average Joe...I don't care who makes the OS, my mom will NEVER be able to install it.
And yes, she does install programs in her box sometimes (only RPMs, and if she gets a dep error, she ICQs me and tells me what are the missing things and I find teh packages for her and then she just "rpm -Uvh *" in the dir where she placed them all)myimagemyimageVox, who is REALLY sick of this "this is easier than that"
There's power in co-opting a negatively-tainted word and turning it into a positive word. Queer and Nigger are both words that are, in the appropriate peer group, used as power words.
:)
Other group that has done the same thing is the BDSMers/leather community..."pervs/perverts and proud of it".
It's always interesting to know where the terms we use come from, and what they mean for those that get those terms applied to them/us
Vox
The difference is that /. has NEVER tried to hide its bias, while ZD and other sites keep saying they are objective/unbiased....unbiased journalism is nothing but a myth, and like all myths, it's only belived by those who have no critical thinking abilities
Vox
Sounds to me like your just a piss poor NT admin. As for the "I have and MCSE so I should know" theory; just because you have an MCSE doesn't make you some sort of 'lord of all that is NT'
You are right about something...a MCSE doesn't make you good at what you do...the thing is...I do have almost 5 years of experience as an NT admin (and almost 20 of using computers in one way or another). I don't think of myself as the ultimate NT admin (I do know some that are better than me) but I do *know* that I'm a competent admin.
I refuse to run NT as a server because I hate having midnight calls, but I do admit NT is a good desktop enviroment for some people, as long as they don't mind it BSODing once in a while. The right tool, for me, is Linux on my servers (don't need a huge server, just email, web, gatewaying, firewalling, file/printer serving and to be my workstation in a 50 or so puter's network, so I don't use Solaris or one of the other big unices), and NT on my PHB's desktop.
Vox
I think it really depends on what your intentions for it are...*I* rather read it on the web, not cause of the money, but cause I spend most of my waking time infront of it, and I can read it while I monitor my servers, chat on IRC, read email, etc.
:)
But I do plan on buying it, as has been mentioned, so I can give it out for Xmas to PHBs and non-initiated...makes for a nice gift, supports the people that give their time to OSS, and makes people know what I support.
Besides...I like ESR
Vox
Well...4 years having a beeper/cell phone tell me that the stupid NT server is dead while somebody is trying to work at the office made me hate NT. Then I got linux working, and the only time it's been down in 6 months is when somebody disconnected the power from the server by accident...so...not having to go to the office on a saturday/sunday or after I'm home during the week is enough reason for me to refuse to run NT on my servers :)
Vox
I'm trying to decide what to use at our office (small shop, about 40 clients), either Lotus Domino or HP's OpenMail....exchange is out of the question because I refuse to use NT in any way, shape or form (and yes, I know what I'm talking about...I'm a MCSE).
So...what do you all think?
Vox
>I wonder how well the name recognition would be if he didn't name the OS after himself.
He didn't name Linux after himself...the guy (who's name I forget) who gave Linus the FTP space to put the source for the kernel for the first time is the one who named it Linux....Linus called it FreakX or something similar to that.
Vox
I've seen some of the comments about goverments (particularly the US gvmnt) "forcing" open source licenses...I don't think that that's the way.
What the goverments SHOULD force (in a legal way) is for companies that produce software to adhere to open STANDARDS. For those that don't understand the difference...is not the same thing to say "you have to GPL your OS" than "You can license your OS any way you want, but if you use TCP/IP in your OS, you HAVE to use the standard protocol, can't borg it up with weird propietary crap"
That way, freedom is still there, but STANDARDS become that...standards.
For example, SMB is now (un)fortunately a de-facto standard, but it is fully controlled by MS...whenever the Samba team has it down right, MS rolls out a new piece of cruft and breaks it up, and Samba has to start doing some reverse eng to catch up. If things where right, the SMB standard would be controlled by a standrad's body who'd say "sure, encrypting passwords is good....this is how it will be done".
The attitude of this french senator is, almost, the right one...make it a law to follow standards of inter-operativelity(sp?), with the freedom of doing whatever you want with everything else in your product.
Just the opinion of somebody who thinks freedom is not only being allowed to do as you please, but being protected from those that try to lock you out of being free.
Vox
This sounds a lot like the history of the animal kingdom on earth...who is the "best designed" animal? The Big, Bad and Mean T-Rex or the small, fast and adaptable rat?
:)
We can see that in technollogy, as happened in biology, the winner usually is the rat, able to stay hungry for long periods of time, eating whatever insects it may catch, adapting fast to circumstances.
I firmly belive small companies (even when they are small "companies" within big companies, like the PC division in IBM mentioned in a previous post) will allways outmanuver the bigger monsters...yes, MS may have all the money in the world, the may have the big market right now, they may have even proven that they can turn on a dime when needed...but they are still not fast enough, when compared to a company like RedHat or a community like the one driving Debian, and when the next big breakthrough comes, MS will go out of the track trying to take the curve, while RH, Debian and others will continue in the race.
I think most of the people here will agree with me when I say that I rather work for a small company (untill it grows) than for a big company (till it sinks?).
Better be a rat alive than a dead T-Rex
Vox
You are missing one very important point...the DoJ thing and the monopoly thing is not about what MS is doing today or the position in the market that they have today...it's about what they DID and the position in the market that they HAD and the way they used it.
Microsoft may not be a monopoly now (I think it still IS a monopoly) but it was one, and it used that position to kill everything that it didn't like (look at Stacker compression, for example).
As for people wanting MS dead...I don't think so...what most of us DO want is MS reduced to what it should be according to the quality of their software (a minority player).
Vox
Want to give me an example of some of these so called bugs in windows?
What about Win98 SE freezing on shutdown? there's been 2 official fixes out for it, still no go for many people.
Or what about the 49 days lockup, that only took em like 3 years to fix?
Or what about NT Server giving me BSODs at boot after installing SP3 on a clean install?
I'm sure there's lots more, but I'm sick of Windows, so I don't use it anymore.
Vox