It sounds to me like some propaganda people at M$ have been busy feeding fud to the suits at these companies. Telling them lies about how linux is unstable or untested or insecure, whatever. The typicaly BS that you'd expect from Redmond. Unfortunately suits are typically clueless except when it comes to pushing paper, so they don't know any better. They don't understand that Microsoft has a lot to lose and therefore every reason to lie. Not that Microsoft would need much of a reason anyway. If your work won't let you use the best tools for the job, start sending your resume around. When you leave, let them know the reason. It might not change anything at that company, but at least you'll have your self respect.
Microsoft has ALWAYS had the freedom to innovate. It's really rather insulting that they would attempt to sell such baseless propaganda to us. What Microsoft really wants is the freedom to have undue influence over the software industry. The freedom to dictate to consumers what software they will use by limiting their choices. The freedom to essentially stamp out any competition or true innovation that doesn't come out of their own R&D department. I see no reason to give them this freedom. In fact I see a lot of reasons why we should line the top execs at Microsoft up in front of a firing squad.
This shouldn't come as any great suprise. The mark of a loser is not that he fails, but that he doesn't even try to win. This reminds me of the flakes over at Apple. I'm totally disgusted by this. There is room in the market for an alternative to the PC. The fact that Apple hasn't succeeded killing itself despite its best efforts show this. I miss the early 80's when completely new computers were coming out all the time. Each had its own personality and I miss that. Now all you've got is the PC or the Mac. You can choose your own OS, but its still a PC (or Mac).
I've heard this attitude before and its truly a dissapointment to hear so much of it. The privacy issue is a question of right and wrong. The fact that our privacy has been invaded in many ways already does not mean the government should have the freedom to invade it. It's truly sickening that our representatives in congress are acting on behalf on the justice department instead of on behalf of their constituents. This country is truly going down the tubes. Things are going to get far worse I can promise you. Gone are the days of government by the people for the people. I just don't know what to do about it. The cause is the average person's lack of concern for what goes on. People don't take any responsibility for what the government does, they don't stand up and say "NO!" when things like this happen, and so the thugs in the FBI get the ability to tap your phones. Don't kid yourself that they are only going to tap the phones of the bad guys. No instead they will harrass ordinary people like you and me who have opinions they don't like. The FBI had a bigger file on Martin Luther King Jr. than on anyone else at the time. What does that say about them? All government is stained by evil. The only real question is how much. We could have a country where the government was accountable to the people and truly acted on their behalf. But the only way that is ever going to happen is if we ourselves make it happen.
I agree wholeheartedly. Anyone serious about creating MP3's with the highest quality should simply use this encoder. It is VERY slow but that shouldn't matter to anyone who cares about how their music sounds. I used to use bladenc but to get it to sound good you have to set the bitrate through the roof, no thanks. I'd rather save diskspace and encode at 128 with mp3enc. I encode with the qual=9 setting and I can't tell the difference between the MP3s that come out and the original tracks on CD, and I'm listening to them through a pair of $75 dollar headphones. The program is EXPENSIVE however. If you don't have the case bladenc will work if you don't mind 12 megs MP3 files.
No, the US government should not tax email. How much money the USPS loses to email is irrelevant. The post office doesn't deserve money just for being there. They don't have a right to our money unless they provide a service to us, mailing our packages and letters. The fact that we choose another route to send messages doesn't mean we are stealing from them. This kind of reminds me of the laws making it so the government own the space inside your mailbox so that only the USPS can put mail in it.
The internet poses a threat to those who fear freedom of information and ideas. The people who scream for internet censorship are not worried about pornography, or at least not only pornography. They are not so worried that their child is going to see T&A as they are that their child will encounter ideas or facts that don't correspond to the view of the world their parents are trying to spoon feed them. In other words they are afraid that their child might see something online that led them to conclusions not shared by the parents. This is also known as thinking for yourself. It is the unspoken right upon which other rights such as freedom of speech or freedom or religion depend. Without freedom of thought, you cannot speak your own mind nor have religious beliefs that are truly your own.
Pornography is used as an excuse to introduce censorship, which will then be used to attack other types of online content. This is already happening right now. The companies which create software packages such as CyberPatrol do not release their lists of banned sites, and many sites having nothing at all to do with pornography are on them. Sites dealing with social issues are frequently banned.
The only reliable means of controlling someone's mind is to control what they learn and what information they have access to.
The content online cannot be controlled by any one entity or power. Ideas and views must stand on their own against other ideas on merit alone. That scares people whose ideas are based on things that cannot be proven, or have already been proven false. These are the people who have the most to gain from internet censorship, and the most to lose from the free exchange of ideas that the internet represents. Online censorship is the digital equivalent of burning books.
So the next time you hear someone screaming about how online porn is harming kids, stop and look at that person and think about what deeper agenda they may be following. They may simply be a parent who is truly concerned about pornography alone. If people weren't concerned about the pornography there would be no issue for the book burners to use an excuse to begin with. Its sad that a legitmate concern can be so easily taken and twisted into an attack on all of us.
They can, although it isn't as easy for them as something like DES which I suspect they've found a flaw in. They've got a lot of very bright people working for them to undermine your constitutional rights in the name of national security. I wouldn't put my money on any encryption method being beyond their ability to crack. It would be funny though to give them encrypted white noise and see what kinds of funky patterns they do find in it.
I never realized exactly what was going on until I read your post. I think that these fears are encouraged because only the fearful will give up their rights for the promise of security. Divide and conquer as the saying goes. Divide the country, make citizens fearful of each other, and you'll be able to run right over them. It's really a very old trick and I'm somewhat embarrassed that I didn't see it before now.
The FBI should not have the ability to block anything by themselves. I can't understand why they have this power. It should take no less than an act of congress to do such a thing, and even then it wouldn't be the right thing to do.
Its these kinds of things that reinforce my libertarianism. The federal government stopped being by the people for the people a long time ago. We need to put a stop to this kind of thing and the only way to do that is to be actively involved in government. Vote dammit! Keep track of what your senators and representatives are doing, let them know on a regular basis what you believe. Another thing we can all do is closely watch companies/industries that make campaign contributions since these are often used to buy votes. If a congressman/woman is doing things he shouldn't we should boycott the people who paid to get him in office.
Things got to be the mess that they are because we simply didn't take responsibility for our government. The government was created to be accountable to the people, but that only works when we hold it accountable. The only real safeguard against tyrrany is an ordinary person who is informed and willing to fight to preserve freedom.
A century is far too long a period of time to be able to pick one person and say that they somehow sum it up. It would be better to take each decade and describe the people who made the world a better place during that time, or the people who made the world a different place for those who came after them. This whole man of the century is nothing more than something to sell more magazines, it's got very little merit as an idea.
It will take more people who are able to think and reason for themselves instead of being led around by the nose.
It still amazes and disgusts me when I see someone treating a young person in a way they themselves would never have wanted to be treated at that age. But they do it anyway because that is the social norm, and they don't think anything about it.
More people need to start thinking for themselves and coming to their own conclusions about what they think is right or wrong instead of looking to someone or something to tell them. You've got a brain, use it. Don't go along with some idea just because thats what society teaches you. Look at it yourself and decide if its valid. I'm starting to rant, so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.
"An act of congress can easily make something Illegal, but nothing short of an act of God can make it wrong."
Similar arguments against gun ownership are put up by the gun control crowd. Its the same exact situation. Encryption and guns are both sources of power. A democracy is supposed to be based off the idea that the people hold the power and the government derives its power from them. Attempts to limit or nullify the power of the people are sure signs that the kinds of people who would like to destroy our liberty are hard at work. I think its fitting that encryption technology is considered a "munition" because in some ways that is exactly what it is.
I'm sure that everyone out there knows someone who is a mac person. You know the type, they think that Macs are king and that everything else sucks. Well the macs were better in many ways at one time, but these guys still strut around like it was still true. They do almost as much to hurt the platform as the stooges at Apple itself. When I see people blasting the mindcraft study it reminds me of this a great deal. If we want linux to win it will take more than bitching and bragging about advantages that are no longer there. Apparently the service patches for NT are not just bugfixes. Microsoft has done some work to actually improve their product, and the linux community needs to do the same. If NT is able to beat linux today we need to find out why so that the same won't be true tomorrow. Chanting mantras like a Macolyte won't cut it. Benchmarks like this are a very good thing for linux because they spur developers to fix problems that might otherwise not have been seen. If we respond to this challenge by improving linux then in the end we will be the ones who gain from it, not Microsoft.
Actually he didn't "adapt" minix either. Minix was his original inspiration and in the beginning he intended to create his own version of it, but thats much different from taking minix code and tweaking it.
Windows 9x is loaded from dos and still makes use of dos calls for some things while running win31 code, but win32 is not based off dos. The implementation of it under win9x does make use of some 16 bit code, but not real mode code which is what dos is. Linus did not write the whole thing from scratch. Linus started the development of the linux kernel and he still directs it, but he didn't write all the code himself, not even close. Not to mention the fact that things like the C library were begun by others before linux even existed. There is no reason to assume that Unix will take over the world. Hearing that reminds me of the mac people who thought it was going to take over the world. The battle between windows and linux is far from over and in fact has not really begun. If you can declare a winner at this point you should go work for the psychic friends network.
Just because a GUI is the thing that most users associate with an operating system does not mean that is what an operating system is. Unix in real under the hood power kicks the shit out of operating systems that base their claim to fame on their GUI. X itself has been around for 15 years and GUIs that run on top of it such as CDE have been around for quite a few years. Basically what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't judge the technology an operating system is based on off what kind and whether it has a GUI sitting on top of it. I agree that KDE is a good thing though.
I'm not even sure where to begin on this one. The article was written very carefully to sell the idea that Linux is going to lose against NT 5 (or whatever the hell MS is calling it this week.) While there is every possibility that linux will lose, it will not be for the reasons he discussed. Unix is 30 years old now, but unlike some things it has grown over those years. Metcalfe says that the linux crowd would have you ignore 3 decades of innovation. What he tries to obscure is the fact that unix was the platform which many of those innovations sprung from. Ford has made the Mustang for many years, but that doesn't mean that the design has stayed static since Lee Iacocca's days. He also tries to say that NT5 will kill linux because linux won't kill it. That's an either/or proposition and in the real world things aren't usually that simple. In my humble opinion Linux's future will depend on how it grows from here. It is already a very capable server platform which is gaining market share. Metcalfe tries to make unix and linuxseem smaller by lumping together NT and netware, but that won't work. Linux is gaining market that other unix variants are losing, but it is also taking market share from NT and novell, just not as quickly. Linux's real challenge exists on the desktop. Right now the average joe does not have the patience to learn how to use Linux, but that is changing. Both KDE and Gnome are intended to make unix easier for non-technical people to use, and both are making good progress towards that goal. Metcalfe compares Emacs to MS Word. I don't really know what he was trying to say by doing that since the two applications serve different needs. He would do much better to compare Word to Wordperfect or the word processor in Star Office or Applixware, or even Abiword. Metcalfe also compares the open source movement to communism. Well I have to admit that he's partially right there. There are nuts in the movement who are out of touch with the real world. Stallman is one of them to some extent, but Torvalds is not. Linus is very pragmatic and realistic. But even if both were total psychopaths it would not be a fatal situation. The future of Linux will be largely shaped by what that companies who sell it do. It has gained enough momentum that even if Stallman and all his disciples whined to high heaven, it would not change its course. I don't think that linux in its current form will displace windows as the operating system of choice, at least not accross the board. It has a very good chance of running neck and neck with NT on the server end and it may in fact surpass it in market share. But servers are one thing, client computers are another. For linux to replace NT as a client OS it will have to be made easier for non-techies to operate. Preferably it should provide a consistent logical interface that people can get up to speed on quickly and which provides some support for system configuration. To beat windows it will have to be better than windows in that respect. If the linux community, including companies such as redhat, caldera, corel, etc., can do that, then linux will have a better shot at the desktop. He who owns the desktop owns the world. Linux has a long ways to go before it even gains a significant portion of the desktop, let alone challenges MS for dominance. A LONG ways to go. But it can get there if we do the right things and keep our eyes on the ball. We must push forward and we must do the things that lead to victory. We must do the things that will gain new users for linux and keep existing ones. Things that will lead to increased development and 3rd party support. Never put philosophy or ideology before results and real world success. I think that Metcalfe's statements can be traced back to a financial interest in Microsoft more than anything. Only someone with something at stake would paint the picture he did.
Both the Republican and the Democratic parties are corrupt and controlled by special interests, they only differ in their rhetoric. If you want to stand up for individual liberty and freedom, vote libertarian.
The FBI fears strong encryption in the hands of the common citizen the same way some (including many in the FBI) fear guns in the hands of that same citizen. Both are a source of power that make that individual just a little bit harder to control, which is the real reason the feds fear them. Why should I give up something just so that the feds will supposedly have an easier time catching criminals? What exactly do they mean by criminal anyway? What is to stop that definition from changing? You might wake up one day to find that anyone who thinks for themself and speaks their mind is a criminal. Before you make that face and scoff at me remember that it's happpened before and IT CAN HAPPEN HERE. Don't give up sources of power that serve as important safeguards against tyrrany. I'm far more afraid of the feds than I am of a criminal organization that would have a use for encryption.
Lee
This is a marketing issue, not a technical one.
on
Linux is Not Red Hat
·
· Score: 1
There are people out there who don't understand that under the hood, all linux distributions are pretty much the same thing. The only important difference is whether they are libc5 or libc6 based. Today Slackware is the only remaining libc5 based distribution with any real following, making even the libc issue moot for most users (until glibc2.1 becomes popular anyway). So if Metrowerks decides to market their stuff for Redhat, so what? Redhat is the dominant distribution and anyone using another distribution should already be familiar with getting rpm's for redhat to install on their system and the resulting apps to run. I would be VERY suprised if SuSE wouldn't run codewarrior for redhat out of the box. I do agree with what he said about the LSB though, that is a very imporant initiative. There have been some statements made by people at redhat that indicate a bad attitude. They seem to think that linux is their backyard and that other distributions are the enemy. Sorry guys but you're just a middleman, you don't create linux you just package it. Now the issue would be different if they were creating scores of applications for linux and selling them under the redhat name, they would have claim to them, but that isn't what they are doing as of yet. They would be smart to do that though, because then they would have the opportunity to make money off of linux users regardless of whether they bought the redhat distribution or not. There is nothing wrong with competing with other distributions, but don't let it become a blood feud, find a way to have at least some cooperation involved.
The definition of the word Hacker, and all words derived from it, put forth by the mainstream media is incorrect. A hacker is someone like Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or RMS or me even (at least in intent if not in talent). A hacker is someone who seeks to understand as fully as possible how a system works, so that they might improve it or originate a new system. It's basically a philosophy and an outlook on life. Sometimes along they way a hacker will break into a system that he or she would not otherwise have access too, but this is relatively rare and when it is done it is done for the pursuit of knowledge and never with the purpose of causing harm. A cracker on the other hand is kind of like a hacker from the dark side. These scumbags are the ones who are responsible for things like computer viri. They take joy in invading a system and destroying it. Some of them have great technical skills, but rather than use them to make new things, they only use them to destroy what others have created and bring the scrutiny of law enforcement officials down on all of us along the way. Crackers are sociopaths who use a computer as a way to cause harm anonymously and from a distance. Sick cowards in other words. So please understand that when you use the word hacker to describe such a person, you do everyone who considers themself a true hacker a disservice by further promoting the misuse of the word.
Slashdot Mirror
His stated philosophy when it comes to writing about an issue is:
If you have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
His whole bag is destructive criticism.
It sounds to me like some propaganda people at M$ have been busy feeding fud to the suits at these companies. Telling them lies about how linux is unstable or untested or insecure, whatever. The typicaly BS that you'd expect from Redmond. Unfortunately suits are typically clueless except when it comes to pushing paper, so they don't know any better. They don't understand that Microsoft has a lot to lose and therefore every reason to lie. Not that Microsoft would need much of a reason anyway. If your work won't let you use the best tools for the job, start sending your resume around. When you leave, let them know the reason. It might not change anything at that company, but at least you'll have your self respect.
Microsoft has ALWAYS had the freedom to innovate. It's really rather insulting that they would attempt to sell such baseless propaganda to us. What Microsoft really wants is the freedom to have undue influence over the software industry. The freedom to dictate to consumers what software they will use by limiting their choices. The freedom to essentially stamp out any competition or true innovation that doesn't come out of their own R&D department. I see no reason to give them this freedom. In fact I see a lot of reasons why we should line the top execs at Microsoft up in front of a firing squad.
This shouldn't come as any great suprise. The mark of a loser is not that he fails, but that he doesn't even try to win. This reminds me of the flakes over at Apple. I'm totally disgusted by this. There is room in the market for an alternative to the PC. The fact that Apple hasn't succeeded killing itself despite its best efforts show this. I miss the early 80's when completely new computers were coming out all the time. Each had its own personality and I miss that. Now all you've got is the PC or the Mac. You can choose your own OS, but its still a PC (or Mac).
I've heard this attitude before and its truly a dissapointment to hear so much of it. The privacy issue is a question of right and wrong. The fact that our privacy has been invaded in many ways already does not mean the government should have the freedom to invade it. It's truly sickening that our representatives in congress are acting on behalf on the justice department instead of on behalf of their constituents. This country is truly going down the tubes. Things are going to get far worse I can promise you. Gone are the days of government by the people for the people. I just don't know what to do about it. The cause is the average person's lack of concern for what goes on. People don't take any responsibility for what the government does, they don't stand up and say "NO!" when things like this happen, and so the thugs in the FBI get the ability to tap your phones. Don't kid yourself that they are only going to tap the phones of the bad guys. No instead they will harrass ordinary people like you and me who have opinions they don't like. The FBI had a bigger file on Martin Luther King Jr. than on anyone else at the time. What does that say about them? All government is stained by evil. The only real question is how much. We could have a country where the government was accountable to the people and truly acted on their behalf. But the only way that is ever going to happen is if we ourselves make it happen.
Is your name Mr Rogers? Cuz you sure seem to live in the land of make believe to me.
I agree wholeheartedly. Anyone serious about creating MP3's with the highest quality should simply use this encoder. It is VERY slow but that shouldn't matter to anyone who cares about how their music sounds. I used to use bladenc but to get it to sound good you have to set the bitrate through the roof, no thanks. I'd rather save diskspace and encode at 128 with mp3enc. I encode with the qual=9 setting and I can't tell the difference between the MP3s that come out and the original tracks on CD, and I'm listening to them through a pair of $75 dollar headphones. The program is EXPENSIVE however. If you don't have the case bladenc will work if you don't mind 12 megs MP3 files.
No, the US government should not tax email. How much money the USPS loses to email is irrelevant. The post office doesn't deserve money just for being there. They don't have a right to our money unless they provide a service to us, mailing our packages and letters. The fact that we choose another route to send messages doesn't mean we are stealing from them. This kind of reminds me of the laws making it so the government own the space inside your mailbox so that only the USPS can put mail in it.
The internet poses a threat to those who fear freedom of information and ideas. The people who scream for internet censorship are not worried about pornography, or at least not only pornography. They are not so worried that their child is going to see T&A as they are that their child will encounter ideas or facts that don't correspond to the view of the world their parents are trying to spoon feed them. In other words they are afraid that their child might see something online that led them to conclusions not shared by the parents. This is also known as thinking for yourself. It is the unspoken right upon which other rights such as freedom of speech or freedom or religion depend. Without freedom of thought, you cannot speak your own mind nor have religious beliefs that are truly your own.
Pornography is used as an excuse to introduce censorship, which will then be used to attack other types of online content. This is already happening right now. The companies which create software packages such as CyberPatrol do not release their lists of banned sites, and many sites having nothing at all to do with pornography are on them. Sites dealing with social issues are frequently banned.
The only reliable means of controlling someone's mind is to control what they learn and what information they have access to.
The content online cannot be controlled by any one entity or power. Ideas and views must stand on their own against other ideas on merit alone. That scares people whose ideas are based on things that cannot be proven, or have already been proven false. These are the people who have the most to gain from internet censorship, and the most to lose from the free exchange of ideas that the internet represents. Online censorship is the digital equivalent of burning books.
So the next time you hear someone screaming about how online porn is harming kids, stop and look at that person and think about what deeper agenda they may be following. They may simply be a parent who is truly concerned about pornography alone. If people weren't concerned about the pornography there would be no issue for the book burners to use an excuse to begin with. Its sad that a legitmate concern can be so easily taken and twisted into an attack on all of us.
Lee
You sure got that one right. It the same reason why you have so much effort going into gun control. An armed populace is a free populace.
They can, although it isn't as easy for them as something like DES which I suspect they've found a flaw in. They've got a lot of very bright people working for them to undermine your constitutional rights in the name of national security. I wouldn't put my money on any encryption method being beyond their ability to crack. It would be funny though to give them encrypted white noise and see what kinds of funky patterns they do find in it.
I never realized exactly what was going on until I read your post. I think that these fears are encouraged because only the fearful will give up their rights for the promise of security. Divide and conquer as the saying goes. Divide the country, make citizens fearful of each other, and you'll be able to run right over them. It's really a very old trick and I'm somewhat embarrassed that I didn't see it before now.
The FBI should not have the ability to block anything by themselves. I can't understand why they have this power. It should take no less than an act of congress to do such a thing, and even then it wouldn't be the right thing to do.
Its these kinds of things that reinforce my libertarianism. The federal government stopped being by the people for the people a long time ago. We need to put a stop to this kind of thing and the only way to do that is to be actively involved in government. Vote dammit! Keep track of what your senators and representatives are doing, let them know on a regular basis what you believe. Another thing we can all do is closely watch companies/industries that make campaign contributions since these are often used to buy votes. If a congressman/woman is doing things he shouldn't we should boycott the people who paid to get him in office.
Things got to be the mess that they are because we simply didn't take responsibility for our government. The government was created to be accountable to the people, but that only works when we hold it accountable. The only real safeguard against tyrrany is an ordinary person who is informed and willing to fight to preserve freedom.
A century is far too long a period of time to be able to pick one person and say that they somehow sum it up. It would be better to take each decade and describe the people who made the world a better place during that time, or the people who made the world a different place for those who came after them. This whole man of the century is nothing more than something to sell more magazines, it's got very little merit as an idea.
It will take more people who are able to think and reason for themselves instead of being led around by the nose.
It still amazes and disgusts me when I see someone treating a young person in a way they themselves would never have wanted to be treated at that age. But they do it anyway because that is the social norm, and they don't think anything about it.
More people need to start thinking for themselves and coming to their own conclusions about what they think is right or wrong instead of looking to someone or something to tell them. You've got a brain, use it. Don't go along with some idea just because thats what society teaches you. Look at it yourself and decide if its valid. I'm starting to rant, so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.
"An act of congress can easily make something Illegal, but nothing short of an act of God can make it wrong."
Similar arguments against gun ownership are put up by the gun control crowd. Its the same exact situation. Encryption and guns are both sources of power. A democracy is supposed to be based off the idea that the people hold the power and the government derives its power from them. Attempts to limit or nullify the power of the people are sure signs that the kinds of people who would like to destroy our liberty are hard at work. I think its fitting that encryption technology is considered a "munition" because in some ways that is exactly what it is.
Lee
I'm sure that everyone out there knows someone who is a mac person. You know the type, they think that Macs are king and that everything else sucks. Well the macs were better in many ways at one time, but these guys still strut around like it was still true. They do almost as much to hurt the platform as the stooges at Apple itself. When I see people blasting the mindcraft study it reminds me of this a great deal. If we want linux to win it will take more than bitching and bragging about advantages that are no longer there. Apparently the service patches for NT are not just bugfixes. Microsoft has done some work to actually improve their product, and the linux community needs to do the same. If NT is able to beat linux today we need to find out why so that the same won't be true tomorrow. Chanting mantras like a Macolyte won't cut it. Benchmarks like this are a very good thing for linux because they spur developers to fix problems that might otherwise not have been seen. If we respond to this challenge by improving linux then in the end we will be the ones who gain from it, not Microsoft.
Actually he didn't "adapt" minix either. Minix was his original inspiration and in the beginning he intended to create his own version of it, but thats much different from taking minix code and tweaking it.
Windows 9x is loaded from dos and still makes use of dos calls for some things while running win31 code, but win32 is not based off dos. The implementation of it under win9x does make use of some 16 bit code, but not real mode code which is what dos is. Linus did not write the whole thing from scratch. Linus started the development of the linux kernel and he still directs it, but he didn't write all the code himself, not even close. Not to mention the fact that things like the C library were begun by others before linux even existed. There is no reason to assume that Unix will take over the world. Hearing that reminds me of the mac people who thought it was going to take over the world. The battle between windows and linux is far from over and in fact has not really begun. If you can declare a winner at this point you should go work for the psychic friends network.
Just because a GUI is the thing that most users associate with an operating system does not mean that is what an operating system is. Unix in real under the hood power kicks the shit out of operating systems that base their claim to fame on their GUI. X itself has been around for 15 years and GUIs that run on top of it such as CDE have been around for quite a few years. Basically what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't judge the technology an operating system is based on off what kind and whether it has a GUI sitting on top of it. I agree that KDE is a good thing though.
I'm not even sure where to begin on this one. The article was written very carefully to sell the idea that Linux is going to lose against NT 5 (or whatever the hell MS is calling it this week.) While there is every possibility that linux will lose, it will not be for the reasons he discussed. Unix is 30 years old now, but unlike some things it has grown over those years. Metcalfe says that the linux crowd would have you ignore 3 decades of innovation. What he tries to obscure is the fact that unix was the platform which many of those innovations sprung from. Ford has made the Mustang for many years, but that doesn't mean that the design has stayed static since Lee Iacocca's days. He also tries to say that NT5 will kill linux because linux won't kill it. That's an either/or proposition and in the real world things aren't usually that simple. In my humble opinion Linux's future will depend on how it grows from here. It is already a very capable server platform which is gaining market share. Metcalfe tries to make unix and linuxseem smaller by lumping together NT and netware, but that won't work. Linux is gaining market that other unix variants are losing, but it is also taking market share from NT and novell, just not as quickly. Linux's real challenge exists on the desktop. Right now the average joe does not have the patience to learn how to use Linux, but that is changing. Both KDE and Gnome are intended to make unix easier for non-technical people to use, and both are making good progress towards that goal. Metcalfe compares Emacs to MS Word. I don't really know what he was trying to say by doing that since the two applications serve different needs. He would do much better to compare Word to Wordperfect or the word processor in Star Office or Applixware, or even Abiword. Metcalfe also compares the open source movement to communism. Well I have to admit that he's partially right there. There are nuts in the movement who are out of touch with the real world. Stallman is one of them to some extent, but Torvalds is not. Linus is very pragmatic and realistic. But even if both were total psychopaths it would not be a fatal situation. The future of Linux will be largely shaped by what that companies who sell it do. It has gained enough momentum that even if Stallman and all his disciples whined to high heaven, it would not change its course. I don't think that linux in its current form will displace windows as the operating system of choice, at least not accross the board. It has a very good chance of running neck and neck with NT on the server end and it may in fact surpass it in market share. But servers are one thing, client computers are another. For linux to replace NT as a client OS it will have to be made easier for non-techies to operate. Preferably it should provide a consistent logical interface that people can get up to speed on quickly and which provides some support for system configuration. To beat windows it will have to be better than windows in that respect. If the linux community, including companies such as redhat, caldera, corel, etc., can do that, then linux will have a better shot at the desktop. He who owns the desktop owns the world. Linux has a long ways to go before it even gains a significant portion of the desktop, let alone challenges MS for dominance. A LONG ways to go. But it can get there if we do the right things and keep our eyes on the ball. We must push forward and we must do the things that lead to victory. We must do the things that will gain new users for linux and keep existing ones. Things that will lead to increased development and 3rd party support. Never put philosophy or ideology before results and real world success. I think that Metcalfe's statements can be traced back to a financial interest in Microsoft more than anything. Only someone with something at stake would paint the picture he did.
Both the Republican and the Democratic parties are
corrupt and controlled by special interests, they only differ in their rhetoric. If you want to stand up for individual liberty and freedom, vote libertarian.
The FBI fears strong encryption in the hands of the common citizen the same way some (including many in the FBI) fear guns in the hands of that same citizen. Both are a source of power that make that individual just a little bit harder to control, which is the real reason the feds fear them. Why should I give up something just so that the feds will supposedly have an easier time catching criminals? What exactly do they mean by criminal anyway? What is to stop that definition from changing? You might wake up one day to find that anyone who thinks for themself and speaks their mind is a criminal. Before you make that face and scoff at me remember that it's happpened before and IT CAN HAPPEN HERE. Don't give up sources of power that serve as important safeguards against tyrrany. I'm far more afraid of the feds than I am of a criminal organization that would have a use for encryption.
Lee
There are people out there who don't understand that under the hood, all linux distributions are pretty much the same thing. The only important difference is whether they are libc5 or libc6 based. Today Slackware is the only remaining libc5 based distribution with any real following, making even the libc issue moot for most users (until glibc2.1 becomes popular anyway). So if Metrowerks decides to market their stuff for Redhat, so what? Redhat is the dominant distribution and anyone using another distribution should already be familiar with getting rpm's for redhat to install on their system and the resulting apps to run. I would be VERY suprised if SuSE wouldn't run codewarrior for redhat out of the box. I do agree with what he said about the LSB though, that is a very imporant initiative. There have been some statements made by people at redhat that indicate a bad attitude. They seem to think that linux is their backyard and that other distributions are the enemy. Sorry guys but you're just a middleman, you don't create linux you just package it. Now the issue would be different if they were creating scores of applications for linux and selling them under the redhat name, they would have claim to them, but that isn't what they are doing as of yet. They would be smart to do that though, because then they would have the opportunity to make money off of linux users regardless of whether they bought the redhat distribution or not. There is nothing wrong with competing with other distributions, but don't let it become a blood feud, find a way to have at least some cooperation involved.
The definition of the word Hacker, and all words derived from it, put forth by the mainstream media is incorrect. A hacker is someone like Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or RMS or me even (at least in intent if not in talent). A hacker is someone who seeks to understand as fully as possible how a system works, so that they might improve it or originate a new system. It's basically a philosophy and an outlook on life. Sometimes along they way a hacker will break into a system that he or she would not otherwise have access too, but this is relatively rare and when it is done it is done for the pursuit of knowledge and never with the purpose of causing harm. A cracker on the other hand is kind of like a hacker from the dark side. These scumbags are the ones who are responsible for things like computer viri. They take joy in invading a system and destroying it. Some of them have great technical skills, but rather than use them to make new things, they only use them to destroy what others have created and bring the scrutiny of law enforcement officials down on all of us along the way. Crackers are sociopaths who use a computer as a way to cause harm anonymously and from a distance. Sick cowards in other words. So please understand that when you use the word hacker to describe such a person, you do everyone who considers themself a true hacker a disservice by further promoting the misuse of the word.
That's my $.02
Lee