I want people to use (and contribute back to) Linux because it offers a fresh, powerful way to do stuff. Not because it looks just like what's gone before.
As a lot of people are pointing out, one of the major knocks against Linux is its supposed lack of a GUI, and obviously Caldera and Trolltech are doing something about that.
(Aside: I find this odd since Caldera, IIRC, has positioned its distro as a server-oriented one, and obviously putting out a pretty GUI for the install is most likely to appeal to people who want a desktop OS.)
Put succinctly: it's marketing, baby. That's why the GUI install, it has no intrinsic connection to the technical merits of the underlying OS. I realize that's why/.ers (including myself) prefer to use Linux, but if the OS is going to spread beyond propeller-heads, it's got to become palatable to Josephine WinUser, and that's GUIficiation.
I suppose that this might worry some of us: if we have to resort to marketing rather than technical superiority to push Linux fully into the mainstream, we'll be more like MS than we wanted to be. But advocates of alternate OSs are up against the world's biggest FUD and marketing machine (well, outside of governments, anyhow), and we all know that technical superiority doesn't always win out in the end, however much that pisses us off.
So I cautiously applaud the effort; it looks good and can only help to appeal to Win users.
A final caveat, though: all this only works as long as its kept open-source and made available to other distros, If it's exclusive to Caldera, well, then I don't applaud it because it won't help Linux (or other alternate OSs) as a whole.
I have sitting in front of me an IBM 300PL of recent vintage which did not come with a Win98 CD-ROM, but only a rescue CD. I've seen Dells come with at least modified boot-time splash screens, so it's not exactly unprecedented for MS and OEMs to have some sort of arrangement like that. What would be different about the Compaq/MS arrangment you describe is if there is (e.g.) some added functionality in the "Compaq" OS.
I don't see why that would necessarily be the case. I mean, if Caldera starts shipping drivers that are optimized for whatever IBM's putting in, there's no reason they couldn't also include the standard set, or that you couldn't download patches for whatever HW you're using. Also (and here I profess no expertise), isn't IBM generally using non-proprietary hardware these days?
Hmmm... (this just struck me) it might also be that Caldera's going to start distributing an "IBM" version? But the story doesn't say. Maybe the machines will just ship with a preinstalled OS that's been tweaked. At any rate, I don't see cause for worry
Is it just me, or did any one else think of professor John Frink presenting his death ray to Grampa Simpson here:
Oh, I never thought of that... the death ray has only evil uses...
Back to the real world... Heavens to marketroid! it just goes to show that people who report on IT should have a freakin' clue about what they're talking about. Those original reports about a "hybrid" OS should never have been filed because the dopes that wrote them should have called whoever made the announcement on it. Not that the death ray shouldn't have been used on the guy who made the announcement too. But reporters have really got to learn to ask the right questions, it's their job, d*&&^% it.
Uhh, Linux not Windows... this OS not Windows... this OS must be Linux, right?
Imagine it's 2008 and everyone uses Linux, which is free (as in beer). Imagine some entrepreneur raising a case that this "predatory pricing" prevents him developing a new OS and narrows consumer choice. Some bureaucrat might just go for it... and once again we'd have know-nothing governmental noses in our world.
Who do they go after? Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and anyone else who makes a commercial distro? MS is a definite target, and there's definitely some small group of individuals who benefit by their practices. But as long as GPL-type stuff continues to dominate in the Linux/BSD community(-ies), there's no one who benefits like an old-time robber-baron. The future Linux World-Domination will come about, if it comes about at all, through grass-roots activity, not top-down corporate decisions. The government wouldn't know how to handle such a thing except maybe by brutal physical repression (read the last week's UF for details).
Think of it: even if there were a single target (Linus Torvalds?), how is any U.S. government going to make a case against them (yes, even the one that appears to be prepared to pass an amendment against flag-burning, as if that's such a freaking pressing issue that it deserves to be on the legislator's "to do" list... grrr... but that's another issue)? It's like trying to legislate against people in the US speaking Spanish among each other; pass all the laws you want, but they're not going to do anything to stop people -- and of course such laws are egregiously unconstitutional.
The fact that the inevitable Linux worldwide OS hegemony will be based on individual choice and not ultimately on top-down decisions made by back-room executives makes all the difference.
Oh yeah, and while I like Linux as much as the next guy, I also don't think it will ever dominate to the extent that MS has -- the point has always been about choice.
Naw, just strip them of their fortunes and make 'em work in soup kitchens.
Or, since we should probably distinguish between what the corporation has done and what certain people at the top of the hierarchy of that corporation have done, we could always break apart Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and, oh, say Ed Muth (nice try at the trial, Ed) into several parts. Then, as is happening with AT&T and the "Baby Bells," years later we could see some sort of Frankenstein-like combination of Bill, Steve and Ed come back to terrorize the peasants...
Aren't they already? You can buy Debian w/ install manuals for ~$40 at my "local" (nearest) Borders, and IIRC, LSL also has something like that for sale.
(not that I couldn't be wrong about this; I don't know if it's the FSF or GNU project what does it)
I tried looking at (what I took to be) largely HTML/CSS 1.0 pages to see what they look like with a 'fully compliant' browser, and it had trouble flipping back and forth between pages with the 'forward' and 'back' buttons; you'd think that's a pretty serious breach in functionality (even re-typing in the URL of one of the pages didn't work).
But OH that page rendering speed is something to marvel at. I hope they get it working soon!
There seems to me to be a perfectly good reason for publishing it./.ers, and the Open Source community in general, should know what other people are saying about them, to realize that things one might want to say in the heat of the moment can come back and be used against you, in the way that Mindcraft (apparently) has done here. Certainly if they were being professional about it, they wouldn't bother. (Not that I think the kinds of responses Mindcraft got from these people are appropriate). But what this story shows is that the competition is not only (a) well-heeled, (b) not above dirty tricks, but (c) smart enough to exploit one of the major weaknesses of its competitor (the lack of centralized planning in 'marketing/advocacy' -- and I realize the lack of centralization is also a major source of strength for Open Source Software). And this, of course, holds whether or not Mindcraft is in fact Bill Gates' lap dog (or Mr. Bigglesworth)
Linux (or BSD, or BeOS, or whatever) advocacy cannot be successfully conducted by people who are just venting; a 'suit' who sees stuff like the responses Mindcraft is posting is going to be affected pretty damn seriously by seeing stuff like that: he's already heard it's a hacker's OS and he's not sure he trusts software produced by such people. When he sees their potty-mouths, he's that much less likely to take a serious look at the OS based on its technical merits.
But the amendment by Reps. Bob Franks (R-New Jersey) and Chip Pickering (R-Mississippi) would force e-rate recipients to block out child pornography and obscene content. In addition, it directs communities and school officials to determine what other "harmful" material should be screened out.
From your post:
I really don't understand why this is such a Bad Thing. The bill isn't saying that you can't look at porn; it just says that I don't have to pay for you to look at porn.
Libraries already don't carry Hustler. Does any other than the most close-minded ACLU types really feel that that's censorship?
The problem I have with the bill, is the provision quoted right at the top, is the part about letting local school administrators determine what is to be seen and what isn't. Is a website promoting atheism "harmful"? What about a website with "blond" jokes? Or... (take this, Alabama legislators) websites about evolution!
As drafted,it's a recipe for disaster. I have this vision of every petty Napoleon in a school system getting their hands on this bill and using it to crush access to websites on the grounds that they don't want people exposed to those ideas. There's presumably a good reason for keeping Hustler out: it's not intended to be educational (although it might have educational uses: look at how some people view women); but what about some of my other examples, which may well be intended for educational purposes
(to the legislators) Has anything in history caused more harm than the Commandment to "have no other gods before me?" Sorry to rant; your point wasn't entirely unreasonable, but I thought I'd point out what the real problem with the legislation is
However, honestly, do you really think Gates stands much to lose from the DoJ trial?
The issue for anyone seeking to 'get into bed' with MS isn't isn't whether Gates will lose anything after the DOJ is finished, but whether the company will be able to provide the level of service they can now (supposing you think MS service now is acceptable; personally, I have no opinion about that).
It just doesn't strike me as good strategy to get involved in any new venture with MS right now. Maybe the government in that part of Germany doesn't think so, but certainly companies in the US are using the trial to position themselves to kick MS when it's down, and they're much closer to the action.
I don't think that the DOJ is going to wipe out MS or Gates, but there's likely to be a lot of internal turmoil if the judge does anything on the order of what MS has given him reason to do (i.e something pretty serious). And that just makes things uncertain, which businessmen and governments tend not to like.
Given that MS faces an uncertain future, with the outcome of the DOJ case yet to be decided, I'm actually a bit surprised that any entity as large as a German state would sign any NEW serious agreement with MS right now. Maybe the DOJ case isn't as big news there as here in the US? Power to the protestors!
Remember you dont have anything to worry about if you didn't do anything wrong.
I don't know if you meant to say that, exactly: one of the problems with the litigious culture is that people will sue for the stupidest of reasons, and sometimes they will even win.
Suppose you do nothing wrong and run into one of those people who just decide, for whatever reason, they're going to try to ruin you. They hire a lawyer with the morals of Lionel Hutz (and probably better skills) and now you're stuck defending yourself: even if you're successful, it's a huge hassle and you'll probably end up stuck with the legal bills.
Plus, the point that what's legally wrong in locale X is not what's legally wrong in locale Y makes it awfully hard to figure out, sometimes, whether what you did was right or wrong. Not to mention this problem: suppose you live in AL sorry, no lawyer there can help you; you'll have to go to VA to find a lawyer to defend you.
(That said, the guy who pointed out that the 'net shouldn't be a free-for-all is certainly right).
Could anyone familiar with this term explain what is is and how it relates to RedHat situation ?
SEC stands for "Securites and Exchange Commission", the US governmental agency most directly responsible for regulating publicly traded (i.e. on the stock market) companies.
This guy is writing in a large-circulation newspaper, for the general public! I don't think it's reasonable to just 'brush off' his opinion and remind everyone here that they're preaching to the converted.
There oughta be a rebuttal in the Chi. Trib. to such columns -- otherwise it looks for all the world like the Tribune gave away free advertising to MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. (OK, offtopic, but it needed to be said)
Umm, the translation said they're 1 gigaBIT chips, not one gigaBYTE as the header tells us.
As a lot of people are pointing out, one of the major knocks against Linux is its supposed lack of a GUI, and obviously Caldera and Trolltech are doing something about that.
(Aside: I find this odd since Caldera, IIRC, has positioned its distro as a server-oriented one, and obviously putting out a pretty GUI for the install is most likely to appeal to people who want a desktop OS.)
Put succinctly: it's marketing, baby. That's why the GUI install, it has no intrinsic connection to the technical merits of the underlying OS. I realize that's why /.ers (including myself) prefer to use Linux, but if the OS is going to spread beyond propeller-heads, it's got to become palatable to Josephine WinUser, and that's GUIficiation.
I suppose that this might worry some of us: if we have to resort to marketing rather than technical superiority to push Linux fully into the mainstream, we'll be more like MS than we wanted to be. But advocates of alternate OSs are up against the world's biggest FUD and marketing machine (well, outside of governments, anyhow), and we all know that technical superiority doesn't always win out in the end, however much that pisses us off.
So I cautiously applaud the effort; it looks good and can only help to appeal to Win users.
A final caveat, though: all this only works as long as its kept open-source and made available to other distros, If it's exclusive to Caldera, well, then I don't applaud it because it won't help Linux (or other alternate OSs) as a whole.
I have sitting in front of me an IBM 300PL of recent vintage which did not come with a Win98 CD-ROM, but only a rescue CD. I've seen Dells come with at least modified boot-time splash screens, so it's not exactly unprecedented for MS and OEMs to have some sort of arrangement like that. What would be different about the Compaq/MS arrangment you describe is if there is (e.g.) some added functionality in the "Compaq" OS.
I don't see why that would necessarily be the case. I mean, if Caldera starts shipping drivers that are optimized for whatever IBM's putting in, there's no reason they couldn't also include the standard set, or that you couldn't download patches for whatever HW you're using. Also (and here I profess no expertise), isn't IBM generally using non-proprietary hardware these days?
Hmmm ... (this just struck me) it might also be that Caldera's going to start distributing an "IBM" version? But the story doesn't say. Maybe the machines will just ship with a preinstalled OS that's been tweaked. At any rate, I don't see cause for worry
Is it just me, or did any one else think of professor John Frink presenting his death ray to Grampa Simpson here:
Oh, I never thought of that ... the death ray has only evil uses...
Back to the real world ... Heavens to marketroid! it just goes to show that people who report on IT should have a freakin' clue about what they're talking about. Those original reports about a "hybrid" OS should never have been filed because the dopes that wrote them should have called whoever made the announcement on it. Not that the death ray shouldn't have been used on the guy who made the announcement too. But reporters have really got to learn to ask the right questions, it's their job, d*&&^% it.
Uhh, Linux not Windows ... this OS not Windows ... this OS must be Linux, right?
Who do they go after? Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and anyone else who makes a commercial distro? MS is a definite target, and there's definitely some small group of individuals who benefit by their practices. But as long as GPL-type stuff continues to dominate in the Linux/BSD community(-ies), there's no one who benefits like an old-time robber-baron. The future Linux World-Domination will come about, if it comes about at all, through grass-roots activity, not top-down corporate decisions. The government wouldn't know how to handle such a thing except maybe by brutal physical repression (read the last week's UF for details).
Think of it: even if there were a single target (Linus Torvalds?), how is any U.S. government going to make a case against them (yes, even the one that appears to be prepared to pass an amendment against flag-burning, as if that's such a freaking pressing issue that it deserves to be on the legislator's "to do" list ... grrr... but that's another issue)? It's like trying to legislate against people in the US speaking Spanish among each other; pass all the laws you want, but they're not going to do anything to stop people -- and of course such laws are egregiously unconstitutional.
The fact that the inevitable Linux worldwide OS hegemony will be based on individual choice and not ultimately on top-down decisions made by back-room executives makes all the difference.
Oh yeah, and while I like Linux as much as the next guy, I also don't think it will ever dominate to the extent that MS has -- the point has always been about choice.
Naw, just strip them of their fortunes and make 'em work in soup kitchens.
Or, since we should probably distinguish between what the corporation has done and what certain people at the top of the hierarchy of that corporation have done, we could always break apart Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and, oh, say Ed Muth (nice try at the trial, Ed) into several parts. Then, as is happening with AT&T and the "Baby Bells," years later we could see some sort of Frankenstein-like combination of Bill, Steve and Ed come back to terrorize the peasants ...
Uhh, on second thought, let's not do that =)
(not that I couldn't be wrong about this; I don't know if it's the FSF or GNU project what does it)
That should, I believe, be "esr" not "rms," unless you know something no other /.er knows =)
Singing: Oh, the life of a pedant's for me ...
I tried looking at (what I took to be) largely HTML/CSS 1.0 pages to see what they look like with a 'fully compliant' browser, and it had trouble flipping back and forth between pages with the 'forward' and 'back' buttons; you'd think that's a pretty serious breach in functionality (even re-typing in the URL of one of the pages didn't work).
But OH that page rendering speed is something to marvel at. I hope they get it working soon!
There seems to me to be a perfectly good reason for publishing it. /.ers, and the Open Source community in general, should know what other people are saying about them, to realize that things one might want to say in the heat of the moment can come back and be used against you, in the way that Mindcraft (apparently) has done here. Certainly if they were being professional about it, they wouldn't bother. (Not that I think the kinds of responses Mindcraft got from these people are appropriate). But what this story shows is that the competition is not only (a) well-heeled, (b) not above dirty tricks, but (c) smart enough to exploit one of the major weaknesses of its competitor (the lack of centralized planning in 'marketing/advocacy' -- and I realize the lack of centralization is also a major source of strength for Open Source Software). And this, of course, holds whether or not Mindcraft is in fact Bill Gates' lap dog (or Mr. Bigglesworth)
Linux (or BSD, or BeOS, or whatever) advocacy cannot be successfully conducted by people who are just venting; a 'suit' who sees stuff like the responses Mindcraft is posting is going to be affected pretty damn seriously by seeing stuff like that: he's already heard it's a hacker's OS and he's not sure he trusts software produced by such people. When he sees their potty-mouths, he's that much less likely to take a serious look at the OS based on its technical merits.
From the story:
But the amendment by Reps. Bob Franks (R-New Jersey) and Chip Pickering (R-Mississippi) would force e-rate recipients to block out child pornography and obscene content. In addition, it directs communities and school officials to determine what other "harmful" material should be screened out.
From your post:
I really don't understand why this is such a Bad Thing. The bill isn't saying that you can't look at porn; it just says that I don't have to pay for you to look at porn.
Libraries already don't carry Hustler. Does any other than the most close-minded ACLU types really feel that that's censorship?
The problem I have with the bill, is the provision quoted right at the top, is the part about letting local school administrators determine what is to be seen and what isn't. Is a website promoting atheism "harmful"? What about a website with "blond" jokes? Or ... (take this, Alabama legislators) websites about evolution!
As drafted ,it's a recipe for disaster.
I have this vision of every petty Napoleon in a school system getting their hands on this bill and using it to crush access to websites on the grounds that they don't want people exposed to those ideas. There's presumably a good reason for keeping Hustler out: it's not intended to be educational (although it might have educational uses: look at how some people view women); but what about some of my other examples, which may well be intended for educational purposes
(to the legislators) Has anything in history caused more harm than the Commandment to "have no other gods before me?"
Sorry to rant; your point wasn't entirely unreasonable, but I thought I'd point out what the real problem with the legislation is
The issue for anyone seeking to 'get into bed' with MS isn't isn't whether Gates will lose anything after the DOJ is finished, but whether the company will be able to provide the level of service they can now (supposing you think MS service now is acceptable; personally, I have no opinion about that).
It just doesn't strike me as good strategy to get involved in any new venture with MS right now. Maybe the government in that part of Germany doesn't think so, but certainly companies in the US are using the trial to position themselves to kick MS when it's down, and they're much closer to the action.
I don't think that the DOJ is going to wipe out MS or Gates, but there's likely to be a lot of internal turmoil if the judge does anything on the order of what MS has given him reason to do (i.e something pretty serious). And that just makes things uncertain, which businessmen and governments tend not to like.
Given that MS faces an uncertain future, with the outcome of the DOJ case yet to be decided, I'm actually a bit surprised that any entity as large as a German state would sign any NEW serious agreement with MS right now. Maybe the DOJ case isn't as big news there as here in the US? Power to the protestors!
Off-topic a bit, but:
Remember you dont have anything to worry about if you didn't do anything wrong.I don't know if you meant to say that, exactly: one of the problems with the litigious culture is that people will sue for the stupidest of reasons, and sometimes they will even win.
Suppose you do nothing wrong and run into one of those people who just decide, for whatever reason, they're going to try to ruin you. They hire a lawyer with the morals of Lionel Hutz (and probably better skills) and now you're stuck defending yourself: even if you're successful, it's a huge hassle and you'll probably end up stuck with the legal bills.
Plus, the point that what's legally wrong in locale X is not what's legally wrong in locale Y makes it awfully hard to figure out, sometimes, whether what you did was right or wrong. Not to mention this problem: suppose you live in AL sorry, no lawyer there can help you; you'll have to go to VA to find a lawyer to defend you.
(That said, the guy who pointed out that the 'net shouldn't be a free-for-all is certainly right).But wait ...
This guy is writing in a large-circulation newspaper, for the general public! I don't think it's reasonable to just 'brush off' his opinion and remind everyone here that they're preaching to the converted.
There oughta be a rebuttal in the Chi. Trib. to such columns -- otherwise it looks for all the world like the Tribune gave away free advertising to MS.