Hasn't the past week or two proved that lobbies can actually be the anti-thesis of political power? How much power do you think the NRA has right this moment after the debacle with Clinton in the media? Who's about to take money from the Chinese and their associated lobbies?
Actually, according to the Washington Times (and other sources) the NRA is experiencing a surge in membership because of Lapierre's accusations. More members =more money + more energized voters willing to back candidates seen as pro-NRA.
As for the Chinese, considering that the main beneficiaries of the PRC money have gotten off without so much as a $5 fine from the FEC...(insert your own conclusion here)
It may be hard to get geeks out to vote, but this is why online voting is so importent to the geek community! I would say the one big issue geeks should try to unite behind is online voting.. as it would increase our political power.
I couldn't disagree more. When you tell me you're to busy to get your butt to the polls (which is essentially what you're saying when you support online voting) you're telling me you don't care enough to make the effort.
The other big problem which your quote dose not make clear is: who tells us how to vote?
Why do you need to be told "how to vote"? Are you a real citizen or just a tax generator? Nobody can defend your interests better than you, because nobody knows better than you what those interests are. Figure out what you want, set your priorities and go look at the candidates. You may be surprised at what you find.
The riligious right has an orginisation to figure out what state and local officials they want.
Wrong. By your definition, I would qualify as a member of the Religious Right since I'm a conservative Catholic, but that doesn't mean that Jerry Falwell and I agree on much politically. There are scads of "religious right" lobbies and organizations out there, and a lot of them have a particular purpose/cause they're interested in above everything else. Like everything else, in politics you need to read carefully and make up your own mind.
Geeks may never have a simillar level of organisation, but we can help to communicate the findings of other orginisations (EFF, ACLU, etc.) to people. These orginisations are pretty bad about not checking out local politicians, but they might put more effort into it when people donate the necissary website work to the state chapters.
Maybe Minnesota's an exception, but I don't have to expend much effort to find out where my state legislators and their prospective opponents stand on issues important to me, and it isn't hard to figure out their position on issue x from what they say on issues a,b,c and d. I'll bet if you spent an hour a week keeping an eye on those thieves you could figure it out too.
Rodentia said: the attitude is all now. That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
Another poster commented that the 1990s don't look very much like SF writers in the 1960s said they would, either. Bang on. Sterling's whine about the deteriorating ecosystem totally ignores the progress being made...among other things, the Green Revolution in agriculture and the plummeting price of food means that the Great Plains aren't getting chewed up by clueless undereducated farmers as they were in the 1930s. Cheap water filtration is getting us to the point where you have to look really hard to find polluted water systems in North America and Europe...and the rest of the world is catching up.
Sterling's notion of the world turning its back on space is a non-starter also...one of these days soon we'll be up there, because it's raining soup and NASA isn't the only outfit that can afford bowls any more.
People like Sterling probably didn't see any point in financing Columbus' expedition, either.
FuriousJester wrote: Which of these things don't belong:
UCITA in Virginia Anti-Spam Law passed in Colorado On Research Institutions and Corporate Interests Review: Java Security Review: On "The Beach"
I have a confession to make. I usually skip right over whatever goofy noise Katz is making and go straight to the comments, because they're a lot more entertaining. I think TPTB here at/. are well aware of this (you think they call him the Resident Gasbag as a term of affection?) and keep him around to stir up controversy by his many void-o-logic assertions about American society.
That having been said, I don't think he ought to be exiled to AICN, since he does serve a useful function around here. However, doing reviews of dumbass Leonard DiCaprio movies isn't it. What's next, a review of the next NSync CD? Zounds, guys, tighten his leash a little and keep him gassing only about Great Societal Issues In Geekdom, OK?
Pump money into the public schools: The smarter the populace, the more people who can think for themselves, the better. Better teachers, smaller school systems, smaller class sizes, more community involvement.
Like this hasn't been tried already? In Washington DC they're forking out nearly $7000 per pupil to turn out some of the least educated kids in the country. It's not the money, it's the fact that parents have no alternative...unless they're rich and powerful folks like Bill Clinton and Algore, who can afford to send their kids to private schools and keep them out of the wastelands that are the DC public schools. Why is it that people who would never put up with a monopoly in the software or hardware field are so trusting when it comes to a government-run monopoly?
Face it, the problem isn't just corporations and money- it's power, and political power works even better than economic power (money) in the short term since the government can always make the money worthless through taxes, inflation, fascist/Stalinist restrictions on money transfers, you name it. The only answer to breaking up the concentrations of political and economic power is to get rid of the professional politicians and to spread stock ownership as widely as possible so that people can actually affect what goes on at M$FT, GM, Dow and all the other corporations you seem to hate so much.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with the situation in France with Leonardo, but neither did that extended rant you posted.
Where are my own articles? I seriously doubt that most/.ers are all that interested in baseball, and as far as my other interests go (SF, history) I have other forums to publish in.
Most of the reason I hang out here on/. is because I'm interested in staying abreast of what's happening in the world of high-tech, Linux, and privacy issues, and this is a better source for that sort of thing than anything the mainstream media cranks out.
Clarification: I don't think everything Jon Katz is dreck. Some of what he's posted to Slashdot is pretty good. OTOH, this wasn't.
Re:A good argument for moderating articles, this i
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Actually, you're dead on. I was comparing Communism to religion, since they do (regrettably) have a lot in common. I'm assuming you know enough about both to see what they are for yourself, so I won't waste your time (and everybody else's) by pointing them out.
Having said that, we could sit here and compare body counts -total, on an annual basis, per nation, whatever- and compare them to the amount of good done by the one as opposed to the other, and I think religion comes out way ahead on the scorecard. This may be entertaining, but it wanders away from the original point, which was that Katz and others like him reject what religion has to tell us about morality out of hand and then stand around whining about how there isn't any good moral guidance around for these scientists to follow...which is just dumb, imao.
As for not addressing what Shinto, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic or Santierist theologians might have to say on the subject, I freely admit that I don't know what they might or might not have said on the subject. Educate me.
A good argument for moderating articles, this is
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 3
Katz shows his complete inability to think clearly or even do basic research when he 1)bemoans the lack of ethical restrictions on the tinkering with genetics and 2)slams organized religion as being responsible for more bloodshed and genocide than any other force in history. (Like, Communism was a bad dream or something?) Hello? Am I the only one who sees the cognitive dissonance here? For all that Katz derides Christianity and Judaism, the fact remains that at least the religious leaders have done *some* thinking about this subject and its implications, thinking that has a lot more depth and seriousness than Mary Shelley or H.G. Wells could ever hope to attain.
We're talking about two millenia worth of thought and reflection on life and morality here, Jon, not some Johnny-come-lately spawn of the so-called Enlightenment.
Katz and other intellectuals love to bash on Fundamentalists and Catholics as if they were all educationally stunted retards, which is a symptom of their own inability to deal with the arguments resented by those people. (It's called an "ad hominem" attack.) The fact of the matter is that Catholicism, Judaism and other monotheistic religions include large numbers of people whose brainpower makes Katz look like the tenth-rate scribbler he is. Fifty years from now, does anyone seriously think that Katz will be thought of as being in the same league as William F. Buckley, to name but one well-known Catholic intellectual?
In any case, this is just typical whining by somebody who doesn't like the answers he's getting from organized religion and therefore assumes that there are no good answers. Can we just have another link to suck.com next time? At least that was amusing.
For Katz to blithely state that since the end of the millenium will come and go soon, we'll be spared any more millenially-themed movies is way beyond stupid. Anyone who understands the Bible for what it is -a mix of the Word, inspired literature, and redacted history- understands that the millenium is not some exactly specified date, but an event. Assuming that Jesus isn't coming back on 12/31/00, I think we'll have a lot more of these movies coming up, and if they don't have Arnold, so what? He's not the only well-known action star out there.
I think Katz and other reviewers forget that a lot of us go to the movies to just have fun and enjoy the explosions, not to have some deeply moving Artistic Experience.
Hobbex' notion that schools ought to be pared down to the basics is fundamentally correct, but I take issue with one of his statements:
What students need to learn in school is no longer information but how to gather, handle, and learn from the information they will be presented with continually for the rest of their lives.
Sorry, but kids need a bedrock of facts to build on. Part of the problem with schools today is that they utterly fail to teach the basics of history, English composition, and other subjects needed to "handle and learn from" the ocean of information we're all swimming in. They're being denied the context they need to figure out where all the facts fit into the framework of their society and their life. Teaching people "how to learn" has been a buzzphrase for years in the public schools here, and it's been a miserable failure.
Steve Forbes pointed out in an essay for IMPRIMIS (a publication of Hillsdale College) that our school system here in the States is modeled on that of 19th century Prussia, which was all about drilling kids to accept their parts as bureaucratic/industrial worker/soldier cogs in the militarized Prussian society. In spite of this the public schools did a good job in the first third of this century (1901-1929) because they stuck to teaching facts and basic skills. We need to change public schools so that they're better suited to training people to deal with new tech and how it affects their lives, and that means giving parents choices among different types of schools that use different methods to teach the same basic skill sets and fundamental facts.
We may not like the idea that some parents will insist on sending their kids to Catholic/Jewish/ Muslim/Creationist schools, but as long as the kids are coming out educated -and a lot of them aren't these days- why should we care?
Franco didn't have any right to keep anybody from coming to power in Spain, or to turn Spain into a monstrous Catholic theocracy, As opposed to a monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy, of course. I think our respective biases are showing.:)
that prevented it from being a reasonably prosperous European country, rather than the rural backwaters it was after the Civil War. After the Civil War Spain was mostly in ruins. They rebuilt rather well- better than, say, Greece or the Warsaw Pact nations.
Spain would arguably have been better off if it had been involved in WWII on the right side, rather than flirting with the Axis like Franco did. Notice he never went all the way with them, though, in spite of major-league wheedling by Adolf. Franco knew Spain was in no shape to get involved in WW2 and wisely stayed neutral.
The comparison is not with Spain today, but with Spain under Franco, which wasn't a pretty sight. No place is pretty if you're on the losing side of a civil war and have to run for your life. It still beats the hell out of living in Cuba at any time during the Castro regime.
It does however seem as if we can agree on that Teller is a crazy old man. Nope. Old, yes. Crazy? Not hardly.
And that we should all be happy that his kind didn't get all of their ideas through. I just get so tired of all the "you would all be speaking Russian if it weren't for us!" attitudes that are predominant amongst them. Tough. If it weren't for people like us,you would be speaking Russian. For you, it would have no doubt been a very educational, if somewhat lethal, experience.
Playing on people's fears should be a capital punishment when the entire world is at stake in your little game. It's only a game when you get to sit on the sidelines and let other people carry the burden. This will no doubt be moderated down as flamebait,but the fact is that the Western democracies and their authoritarian allies won, and the Soviets lost bigtime. No thanks to you, and people like you who can't seem to recognize evil when you see it.
Think of the promises Lenin made, or Stalin, or Castro, or Franco.
Hey, dirty pool. Franco kept the Reds from coming to power in Spain, kept Spain from getting dragged into World War II, and when he died Spain was a lot better off than it was before he came to power- in all respects. You can't seriously compare the level of political and economic freedom in Spain today to the chaos in Russia, the abject misery in Cuba, or the repression in the PRC. Franco delivered on his promises.
>I am pretty sure SCO has bought all of itself >out couple of years ago.
This is not correct. SCO is still publicly traded (SCOC on the NASDAQ) and as recently as March Novell was still selling the chunks of SCOC they'd picked up in exchange for something they'd sold SCO. Besides, even if M$FT owns 10%, if RHAT owns a controlling share in the company (hell, if they offered me $10/share I'd sell my trivial stake) there wouldn't be squat that the Evil Empire could say.
"What will this do to Clinton/Gore's 'volunteer to pay off your college' initiative?"
Nothing. Everybody knows the Feds only rev up the chainsaws when the Head Fed wants somebody or something converted to hamburger. (Cf. Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the 700 "raw" FBI files that "somehow" wound up in the White House...)
On a more serious level, I doubt that this is going to affect community freenets and things like Slashdot...unless you're making a fast buck off this, Rob.:)
>But please tell me SCO and Digital Unix are >going to bite the dust to make room for this new >one?
There hasn't been much talk about Digital Unix since CPQ ate DEC, and ditto for SCO Unix now that SCO has Unixware to play with. My impression of the whole project is that they aren't so much trying to fold AIX and Unixware and SCO Unix together as they are trying to make it easier for all the various products to port between flavors.
Down the line, though, I could see Project Monterey serving as the groundwork for YAUOS that would supersede the three versions mentioned above. But that's the future.
>Why should anyone consider paying for >unixware licenses so they can run >products written for a free operating system?
Because not all corporate IT departments (and for sure not too many small businesses) have a Linux/Unix guru on staff. If you have a Unixware license, you can run to SCO --or maybe IBM, once this Project Monterey business is wrapped up-- for help. That may not mean squat to someone who is totally on top of their own install at home, but to a business support means a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
power? How much power do you think the NRA has right this moment after the debacle with Clinton
in the media? Who's about to take money from the Chinese and their associated lobbies?
Actually, according to the Washington Times (and other sources) the NRA is experiencing a surge
in membership because of Lapierre's accusations. More members =more money + more energized voters
willing to back candidates seen as pro-NRA.
As for the Chinese, considering that the main beneficiaries of the PRC money have gotten off
without so much as a $5 fine from the FEC...(insert your own conclusion here)
It may be hard to get geeks out to vote, but this is why online voting is so importent to the
geek community! I would say the one big issue geeks should try to unite behind is online
voting.. as it would increase our political power.
I couldn't disagree more. When you tell me you're to busy to get your butt to the polls (which is
essentially what you're saying when you support online voting) you're telling me you don't care
enough to make the effort.
The other big problem which your quote dose not make clear is: who tells us how to vote?
Why do you need to be told "how to vote"? Are you a real citizen or just a tax generator? Nobody
can defend your interests better than you, because nobody knows better than you what those interests
are. Figure out what you want, set your priorities and go look at the candidates. You may be
surprised at what you find.
The riligious right has an orginisation to figure out what state and local officials they
want.
Wrong. By your definition, I would qualify as a member of the Religious Right since I'm a
conservative Catholic, but that doesn't mean that Jerry Falwell and I agree on much politically.
There are scads of "religious right" lobbies and organizations out there, and a lot of them have a
particular purpose/cause they're interested in above everything else. Like everything else,
in politics you need to read carefully and make up your own mind.
Geeks may never have a simillar level of organisation, but we can help to communicate the
findings of other orginisations (EFF, ACLU, etc.) to people. These orginisations are pretty bad
about not checking out local politicians, but they might put more effort into it when people donate
the necissary website work to the state chapters.
Maybe Minnesota's an exception, but I don't have to expend much effort to find out where my state
legislators and their prospective opponents stand on issues important to me, and it isn't hard to
figure out their position on issue x from what they say on issues a,b,c and d. I'll bet if you
spent an hour a week keeping an eye on those thieves you could figure it out too.
Rodentia said:
the attitude is all now. That jaded, po-mo chatter is sooo yesterday. In two years this
article will look as dated as a 1-gig Athlon.
Another poster commented that the 1990s don't look very much like SF writers in the 1960s said they
would, either. Bang on. Sterling's whine about the deteriorating ecosystem totally ignores the
progress being made...among other things, the Green Revolution in agriculture and the plummeting
price of food means that the Great Plains aren't getting chewed up by clueless undereducated
farmers as they were in the 1930s. Cheap water filtration is getting us to the point
where you have to look really hard to find polluted water systems
in North America and Europe...and the rest of the world is catching up.
Sterling's notion of the world turning its back on space is a non-starter also...one of these days
soon we'll be up there, because it's raining soup and NASA isn't the only outfit that can afford bowls any more.
People like Sterling probably didn't see any point in financing Columbus' expedition, either.
FuriousJester wrote:
/. are
Which of these things don't belong:
UCITA in Virginia
Anti-Spam Law passed in Colorado
On Research Institutions and Corporate Interests
Review: Java Security
Review: On "The Beach"
I have a confession to make. I usually skip right over whatever goofy noise Katz is making and go
straight to the comments, because they're a lot more entertaining. I think TPTB here at
well aware of this (you think they call him the Resident Gasbag as a term of affection?) and keep
him around to stir up controversy by his many void-o-logic assertions about American society.
That having been said, I don't think he ought to be exiled to AICN, since he does serve a useful
function around here. However, doing reviews of dumbass Leonard DiCaprio movies isn't it. What's
next, a review of the next NSync CD? Zounds, guys, tighten his leash a little and keep him gassing
only about Great Societal Issues In Geekdom, OK?
Pump money into the public schools: The smarter the populace, the more people who can think for themselves, the better. Better teachers, smaller school systems, smaller class sizes, more community involvement.
Like this hasn't been tried already? In Washington DC they're forking out nearly $7000 per pupil to turn out some of the least educated kids in the country. It's not the money, it's the fact that parents have no alternative...unless they're rich and powerful folks like Bill Clinton and Algore, who can afford to send their kids to private schools and keep them out of the wastelands that are the DC public schools. Why is it that people who would never put up with a monopoly in the software or hardware field are so trusting when it comes to a government-run monopoly?
Face it, the problem isn't just corporations and money- it's power, and political power works even better than economic power (money) in the short term since the government can always make the money worthless through taxes, inflation, fascist/Stalinist restrictions on money transfers, you name it. The only answer to breaking up the concentrations of political and economic power is to get rid of the professional politicians and to spread stock ownership as widely as possible so that people can actually affect what goes on at M$FT, GM, Dow and all the other corporations you seem to hate so much.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with the situation in France with Leonardo, but neither did that extended rant you posted.
Where are my own articles? I seriously doubt that most /.ers are all that interested in baseball, and as far as my other interests go (SF, history) I have other forums to publish in.
/. is because I'm interested in staying abreast of what's happening in the world of high-tech, Linux, and privacy issues, and this is a better source for that sort of thing than anything the mainstream media cranks out.
Most of the reason I hang out here on
Clarification: I don't think everything Jon Katz is dreck. Some of what he's posted to Slashdot is pretty good.
OTOH, this wasn't.
Actually, you're dead on. I was comparing Communism to religion, since they do (regrettably) have a lot in common. I'm assuming you know enough about both to see what they are for yourself, so I won't waste your time (and everybody else's) by pointing them out.
Having said that, we could sit here and compare body counts -total, on an annual basis, per nation, whatever- and compare them to the amount of good done by the one as opposed to the other, and I think religion comes out way ahead on the scorecard. This may be entertaining, but it wanders away from the original point, which was that Katz and others like him reject what religion has to tell us about morality out of hand and then stand around whining about how there isn't any good moral guidance around for these scientists to follow...which is just dumb, imao.
As for not addressing what Shinto, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic or Santierist theologians might have to say on the subject, I freely admit that I don't know what they might or might not have said on the subject. Educate me.
We're talking about two millenia worth of thought and reflection on life and morality here, Jon, not some Johnny-come-lately spawn of the so-called Enlightenment.
Katz and other intellectuals love to bash on Fundamentalists and Catholics as if they were all educationally stunted retards, which is a symptom of their own inability to deal with the arguments resented by those people. (It's called an "ad hominem" attack.) The fact of the matter is that Catholicism, Judaism and other monotheistic religions include large numbers of people whose brainpower makes Katz look like the tenth-rate scribbler he is. Fifty years from now, does anyone seriously think that Katz will be thought of as being in the same league as William F. Buckley, to name but one well-known Catholic intellectual?
In any case, this is just typical whining by somebody who doesn't like the answers he's getting from organized religion and therefore assumes that there are no good answers. Can we just have another link to suck.com next time? At least that was amusing.
For Katz to blithely state that since the end of the millenium will come and go soon, we'll
be spared any more millenially-themed movies is way beyond stupid. Anyone who understands
the Bible for what it is -a mix of the Word, inspired literature, and redacted history- understands
that the millenium is not some exactly specified date, but an event. Assuming that Jesus isn't
coming back on 12/31/00, I think we'll have a lot more of these movies coming up, and if they
don't have Arnold, so what? He's not the only well-known action star out there.
I think Katz and other reviewers forget that a lot of us go to the movies to just have fun and
enjoy the explosions, not to have some deeply moving Artistic Experience.
Hobbex' notion that schools ought to be pared down to the basics is fundamentally correct, but
I take issue with one of his statements:
What students need to learn in school is no longer information but how to gather, handle, and
learn from the information they will be presented with continually for the rest of their lives.
Sorry, but kids need a bedrock of facts to build on. Part of the problem with schools today is
that they utterly fail to teach the basics of history, English composition, and other subjects
needed to "handle and learn from" the ocean of information we're all swimming in. They're being
denied the context they need to figure out where all the facts fit into the framework of their
society and their life. Teaching people "how to learn" has been a buzzphrase for years in the
public schools here, and it's been a miserable failure.
Steve Forbes pointed out in an essay for IMPRIMIS (a publication of Hillsdale College) that
our school system here in the States is modeled on that of 19th century Prussia, which was all
about drilling kids to accept their parts as bureaucratic/industrial worker/soldier cogs in
the militarized Prussian society. In spite of this the public schools did a good job in the first
third of this century (1901-1929) because they stuck to teaching facts and basic skills. We
need to change public schools so that they're better suited to training people to deal with
new tech and how it affects their lives, and that means giving parents choices among different
types of schools that use different methods to teach the same basic skill sets and fundamental
facts.
We may not like the idea that some parents will insist on sending their kids to Catholic/Jewish/
Muslim/Creationist schools, but as long as the kids are coming out educated -and a lot of them
aren't these days- why should we care?
Franco didn't have any right to keep anybody from coming to power in Spain, or to turn Spain into a monstrous Catholic theocracy, :)
As opposed to a monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy, of course. I think our respective biases are showing.
that prevented it from being a reasonably prosperous European country, rather than the rural backwaters it was after the Civil War.
After the Civil War Spain was mostly in ruins. They rebuilt rather well- better than, say, Greece or the Warsaw Pact nations.
Spain would arguably have been better off if it had been involved in WWII on the right side, rather than flirting with the Axis like Franco did.
Notice he never went all the way with them, though, in spite of major-league wheedling by Adolf.
Franco knew Spain was in no shape to get involved in WW2 and wisely stayed neutral.
The comparison is not with Spain today, but with Spain under Franco, which wasn't a pretty sight.
No place is pretty if you're on the losing side of a civil war and have to run for your life.
It still beats the hell out of living in Cuba at any time during the Castro regime.
It does however seem as if we can agree on that Teller is a crazy old man.
Nope. Old, yes. Crazy? Not hardly.
And that we should all be happy that his kind didn't get all of their ideas through. I just get so tired of all the "you would all be speaking Russian if it weren't for us!" attitudes that are predominant amongst them.
Tough. If it weren't for people like us,you would be speaking Russian. For you, it
would have no doubt been a very educational, if somewhat lethal, experience.
Playing on people's fears should be a capital punishment when the entire world is at stake in your little game.
It's only a game when you get to sit on the sidelines and let other people carry the burden.
This will no doubt be moderated down as flamebait,but the fact is that the Western
democracies and their authoritarian allies won, and the Soviets lost bigtime. No thanks to you,
and people like you who can't seem to recognize evil when you see it.
Think of the promises Lenin made, or Stalin, or
Castro, or Franco.
Hey, dirty pool. Franco kept the Reds from coming
to power in Spain, kept Spain from getting dragged
into World War II, and when he died Spain was a
lot better off than it was before he came to
power- in all respects. You can't seriously
compare the level of political and economic
freedom in Spain today to the chaos in Russia, the
abject misery in Cuba, or the repression in the
PRC. Franco delivered on his promises.
>I am pretty sure SCO has bought all of itself
>out couple of years ago.
This is not correct. SCO is still publicly traded
(SCOC on the NASDAQ) and as recently as March
Novell was still selling the chunks of SCOC
they'd picked up in exchange for something they'd
sold SCO. Besides, even if M$FT owns 10%, if RHAT
owns a controlling share in the company (hell, if
they offered me $10/share I'd sell my trivial
stake) there wouldn't be squat that the Evil
Empire could say.
"What will this do to Clinton/Gore's 'volunteer
:)
to pay off your college' initiative?"
Nothing. Everybody knows the Feds only rev up
the chainsaws when the Head Fed wants somebody
or something converted to hamburger. (Cf. Waco,
Ruby Ridge, and the 700 "raw" FBI files that
"somehow" wound up in the White House...)
On a more serious level, I doubt that this is
going to affect community freenets and things
like Slashdot...unless you're making a fast buck
off this, Rob.
>But please tell me SCO and Digital Unix are
>going to bite the dust to make room for this new
>one?
There hasn't been much talk about Digital Unix
since CPQ ate DEC, and ditto for SCO Unix now
that SCO has Unixware to play with. My impression
of the whole project is that they aren't so much
trying to fold AIX and Unixware and SCO Unix
together as they are trying to make it easier for
all the various products to port between flavors.
Down the line, though, I could see Project
Monterey serving as the groundwork for YAUOS that
would supersede the three versions mentioned
above. But that's the future.
>Why should anyone consider paying for
>unixware licenses so they can run
>products written for a free operating system?
Because not all corporate IT departments (and
for sure not too many small businesses) have a
Linux/Unix guru on staff. If you have a Unixware
license, you can run to SCO --or maybe IBM, once
this Project Monterey business is wrapped up--
for help. That may not mean squat to someone who
is totally on top of their own install at home,
but to a business support means a lot.