The MadTux machine also has optional upgrades right there in the cart. Easy to miss, but they're there. With a gig and an 80-gig hard drive, you're looking at $292. Add a dual-layer 16x burner and you're looking at another $38, and still no OS.
It isn't Wal-Mart, so getting this close to the same price is pretty darn good. Besides, it's MadTux, and people who shop there can generally download their OS for free (even directly from MadTux, although the Ubuntu 7.04 isn't workign very well today).
I've heard all this about Wal-mart not paying shit. My cousin made a sizable down-payment on her house from cashing in just a portion of her stock options from Wal-Mart, and she has assured both of her kids that their college funds are going well.
They have been in trouble for not allowing sufficient breaks, and they have been know to cut people's ours just short of getting full-time status to avoid paying benefits. I'm not sure that in the retail job market, though, that they pay all that dismally.
Now, their environmental impact, their habit of buying Chinese goods, refusing to allow any union workers to help build their stores, and other things are all worth yelling about to various people. I'm not sure their pay ranks up there.
KDE and GNOME are mostly just different in appearance, BTW. They do use different libraries but a system can have both sets of libraries installed and can use the apps for one with the window manage for the other. Of course, if a distro neglects to include a way to set up both, then that's more of a pain. More window managers are out there, too, and most of them work well with either GNOME or KDE environments.
The package managers are less of an issue all the time, as things like alien are made for just this reason. The LSB demands RPM support in addition to any other package manager solution, too.
The rc systems shouldn't matter to a casual user, and an admin should probably be able to handle more than one. They're not _that_ different, after all. A consistent one would be nice, though.
As for the shells, choice is nice but any distro designer who uses a default shell other than bash when the code goes out the door should be flogged. The other shells should be options, but there's just no reason for bash not to be the default given it ubiquity, its strength in scriptability over csh, and its integration of much of ksh syntax.
If all distros would stick to the LSB and put their nice tweaks on besides once the LSB is satisfied, then it'd be much nicer.
Scorched Earth wasn't a B game. Microsoft's QBasic Gorrilas! was a B game. Scorched Earth was awesome. It inspired such greats as Charred Dirt, Scorched 3D, etc.
Now, BZ Flag is probably a B game.
ShadowGames Shooter is definitely a B game, and it is fun and hilarious at the same time. Ken's Labyrinth was (and still is, since it's now ported to modern OSes) a B game that's fun to play.
Trade Wars 2002 (okay, I'm showing my age I guess) had a lottery module, card game modules, and more that a BBS sysop could install for games inside the game. Most of them let you win or lose the main game's currency.
Many adventure, puzzle, and mystery games have, over the years, had mini puzzles, games to be played against NPCs, and casinos within the games, too.
Commission of a crime in front of an officer, or reasonable suspicion on the part of the officer, precludes the need for a warrant in regard to properly targeted and sufficiently narrow searches and seizures.
Do you think someone's nail clippers or their liquid medicines being confiscated at an airport because they forgot to pack them separately is "due process"? Actually, you generally have a choice there, as in not taking the flight in order to keep your stuff, but that's not much of a choice. Is that more or less troubling than temporary freezing of an account?
IANAL, but I've been told that in some jurisdictions you can refuse to take a breathalyzer based on the fact that the cop is not a medical professional and that many are not well-trained in the use of their equipment. They have you tested, then, by piss and/or blood (usually blood).
I, for one, am diabetic and the methods by which many breathalyzer tests can show erratic results for me if my system's out of whack. I was used as an example once, showing that I could be staggering (not driving, mind you, just an example) and blow pretty much stone cold sober. I could, theoretically, also blow sloppy drunk while sober, and this would be about the time my speech might start to slur from low sugar. Now, granted, it's not a good idea to drive while passing out for medical reasons either, but a couple of crackers and some orange juice and I'm fine in a couple of minutes.
The breathalyzer, then, is not the best way to test some people. It's a great tool for most people most of the time. Field sobriety test training and liquid samples (blood and/or urine) should not be ruled out in favor of a breathalyzer exclusively, though. The police should be trained to know this, but chances are many do not.
If I was pulled over or stopped at a checkpoint and they asked me to take a breathalyzer test, I would submit gladly to a field test, blood test, or urine test, but not to the breathalyzer, and I would explain (as calmly as possible) why.
Hey, I used to live in Springfield. You're lucky you didn't die in custody like that poor mentally handicapped guy a couple of years back, or get the shit kicked out of you. Especially if you were near 16th St.
I had a motorcycle stolen when I live in Springfield, and the police and DA didn't do a damn thing because the thief brought it back (with $600 worth of parts destroyed) when he was told that my bike, parked on a private lot, was not in fact abandoned. In need of a paint job, yes, but it was my damn property.
When I went to complain to the DA's office, two assistant DAs looking at my paperwork saw that I lived on Seven Pines Rd. (the row of several apartment complexes off of Chatham Rd.) and started talking about how it wasn't stolen, it was probably just a drug deal gone bad, or my dealer didn't bring it back on time after he borrowed it. This was in front of the reception window, while a dozen other people and I were waiting, and just after I'd explained my whole situation to the receptionist. That's pretty damn stupid, for a couple of lawyers to slander me in the county building while representing the county, isn't it?
But that's par for the course in Springfield, the town that has a perfectly good river on one side of it but that gets its drinking water from a lake with mercury deposits on the bottom of it and leptosclerosis infection warnings for swimmers and boaters every damn summer.
Just because I use Windows, OS X, and Linux doesn't mean I don't also have BSD, AmigaOS, and OS/2 systems. Which, by the way, I do. I was just looking earlier for a BeBox, for that matter.
The beverage analogy isn't nearly as far off as you think. Yum Brands (which used to be part of Pepsico, and which is Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver's, and A&W) only serves Pepsi products. People who would prefer Coke products often eat somewhere else for that reason unless the urge to eat a chain's food overcomes the urge to drink their preferred soft drink. Most people who've had Jones Soda would really love to find a restaurant that serves it. Yet not enough people know Jones Soda that a restaurant chain would ever feel comfortable switching to it.
People use the OS with the features and interface they prefer unless they have some applications they want or need that overwhelmingly suggest a different OS. It's very much the same thing.
Microsoft can afford to sell the shitty OS that everyone despises so long as most of the popular applications are on their OS. Developers can make money selling applications for Windows so long as all the other applications are there, because that means Windows will be the market leader. It's still all about network effects.
There's a tipping point somewhere when one network undermines another, but there's certainly money to be made for the players who get in before that point -- or even if it never happens.
So, if you could get Linux software for what you're looking for, you'd buy that instead of the same software for Windows? Let your vendors know. The more developers realize they could make money on Linux, the more of them will do so.
It's called juxtaposition. The author wanted to make clear his point that this could be handled swiftly if the politicians made it a priority.
Given the title of the piece, the summary, and the fact that the first line of the the rest of the article is about how quickly this situation could be improved, I think the examples given up front make a nice impact.
Due process after how many days? Ever heard of a writ of habeas corpus? Ever heard of a suspect being shot by police? Ever heard of evidence being seized before the trial? Did you know that a holding cell and a long-term detention cell are two different things?
You can probably imagine the problems of a prosecutor who's not allowed to show a chain of custody for evidence at trial. Now, imagine that the suspect has not been deprived, temporarily, the use of his gun, ammo, drugs, car, PDA, nor meth lab equipment. How are those things going to be used as evidence when the suspect simply disposes of all of them after the arrest?
There are troubling things about the power the Bush people are accumulating. Confusing due process with never allowing the executive to act against a suspect concerns me more with Slashdotters than with Bush, though.
Do you think a suspected drunk driver gets a trial before his car is seized? No. How about someone whith what appears to the officer to be cocaine on the front seat? No.
He gets his car back if he's proven innocent, so he's not permanently deprived of it. But it's seized and used as evidence against him first. In some cases, he has to sue to get the property back even though he was acquitted or the charges were dropped.
Also, a search warrant isn't a trial, but it at least needs a judge.
That's fast enough for me, thanks. If I can send a message to to Alpha Centauri and get a response back in seconds rather than decades, that's rather an improvement.
He and colleagues discovered it. He was sure they were making an error or that there was some other explanation, because the apparent result didn't seem right to him. However, even if he is proven to be wrong and that it does happen, he'll be given credit for doing work leading to the discovery.
Actually, this shows how great of a scientist Einstein was. When he had personal intellectual, religious, or general emotional reservations about an idea, he was still willing to present a hypothesis counter to his own beliefs and offer it up for testing. If this had been proven during his lifetime, it may or may not have shaken his personal faith in God. He was humble enough to put the body of knowledge of the human race ahead of his feelings on this subject, too. That means he was probably a pretty damn good man of faith as well.
He believed in the importance of science and the importance of faith, and he had some issues he had to work out between them. That's pretty human. So whether he agreed with it being real or not, I think he deserves credit for the work he did leading to it.
The problem with this reasoning is that there are already ten thousand begware, nagware, freeware, shareware, postcardware, download for $5.95, shrinkwrap for $19.95, heavily advertised for $695, and dongle-protected for $4995 products in your software market for XP.
If you can support just three distros (or just one, even) and do the absolute best job out of ten companies selling in your market to Linux customers, you can really clean up on that 2%.
Think about it. How many PCs are there, even just in the US? There are about 300 million people. Conservatively, let's say 100 million PCs, because 100 is a nice number to work with. So you say Linux is 2%. Fine, 2 million PCs. Let's say you go for a 25% distribution (or one that is part of a branch of distros similar enough to share the software easily). That's 500,000 potential users. Now, let's say your software is applicable to a quarter of the users. That's 125,000 systems. Now, let's say you get 20% market share. That's 25,000 copies.
So, yeah, those aren't Microsoft Windows numbers. They're not even Adobe Photoshop numbers. But how many Windows programs do you know of that sell 25,000 copies? Aside from that, if your three or five person company can get $20 25,000 times on one product (or $100, or $5, or $300, depending on what your product does), do you really mind if you're targeting a niche?
I hate to break this to some of you, but nearly universal usership like MS, Pepsi, Coke, Tylenol, McDonald's and Budweiser is not what builds companies. Those were positioned at the right place at the right time by some very bright people who took advantage of markets very slyly, who used network effects to their advantage, and who were quite frankly willing not to perfect their products because they'd rather have volume than drive up their prices and cut back demand.
Nearly noone calls Budweiser their favorite beer. You wanna know an open secret? It's not meant to be your favorite. The tour guides at the Anheuser-Busch brewery tour in St. Louis will tell you that. Brewing the absolute best beer is always expensive. There are too many opinions on what makes the best beer to please everyone that any beer is best. Most of those esoteric flavors and textures that convince one group a beer is best turn off other people. Budweiser wasn't meant to get into those debates. It was meant to be the beer that sold well. It sells well because despite not being the very best, it's very non-confrontational. Anheuser-Busch has done a very good job at making sure that although Budweiser is not #1 on many lists, it's the beer that's safe to buy when you know your guests drink beer.
Pizza Hut isn't the best pizza. Coke isn't the best soda. McDonald's isn't the best burger. Ikea isn't the best furniture. JC Penney doesn't sell the best clothes. What these companies do is to be good enough, cheap enough, and known widely enough that you'd rather play it safe with them than to either go high-end and risk that you've overspent or go low-end and get truly crap products. They trade being the best for being the best value. They do this in consistency, quality, and trust.
I'd trust my local pizza places to have the best pizza in town. If I see another with the same name a few hundred miles away, I might take a shot at trying it. If I just want to know I'm getting pretty good pizza at a pretty good price, I'd probably find a chain like Imo's, Mazzio's, Pizzeria Uno, Gino's or Cassano's. If I'm further from home and none of the regional chains are around, I'd likely fall back to a national chain like Pizza Hut. I also fall back to Pizza Hut sometimes when they run a special or when they have a buffet, so I can get in and out quickly.
Microsoft is the same way. Yes, Microsoft probably has the resources at this point to make the world's best operating system for some person's definition of best. Their goals, though, are market share and profit. They get market share and keep it by being good enough, by serving the most popular needs, by foregoing any co
It's really more of a hierarchy than an inner circle and 297 outsiders.
You seriously discount Red Flag, TurboLinux, PolishLinux, Mandriva, Fedora, CentOS, and most of all Debian. There are some players still really important in other ways, too.
Red Flag: targeted at China by the Chinese. There are more than a few potential users there.
PolishLinux: targeted at Poland by the Poles. Not as many people as China, but still, it's a whole country.
Mandriva is very popular in some areas, as is TurboLinux. Localization helps these two quite a bit. I have a couple of Mandriva boxes myself right now, despite speaking French very poorly. TurboLinux has been entrenched in some areas for a very long time, and isn't going away quickly.
There are basically a handful of major distros, each of which is the root of a tree (or bush) of downstream distros.
Debian is the foundation for Ubuntu as well as many others. It's the root of the tree. Ubuntu, at this point, may very well be a trunk, but Debian is still the root. Xandros and Knoppix are pretty nice branches on this tree, too, and I've had no problems using software back and forth.
Fedora is not RHEL by any means, and is very popular. CentOS is almost RHEL, and among people who want the software that's written with the best support for RHEL but who don't need RedHat's support contract, it's very popular and a very good choice. This is the RedHat tree. Mandriva used to be part of this tree, but has been grafted elsewhere.
Slackware is still a force to be reckoned with in certain situations. Lots of security-minded and performance-minded people still have their own Slack-based setups, but since Gentoo is centered around compiling everything and uses a different method to get there, it's pulling some of Slack's people.
uCLinux, MontaVista, and the other embedded Linux distos hit where little else does. There's Debian Small, and T2 or LFS or possibly Gentoo could go the embedded route if you like. However, uCLinux and MontaVista live there.
Most of the distributions out of the 300 or so don't matter on a wide scale, but it's a bit too confining to say that only Suse, RedHat, and Ubuntu matter. Even if Ubuntu kills Debian on popularity, as long as it uses Debian as its upstream then Debian matters quite a bit.
If power efficiency is the only major goal, hard drives would be replaced by flash, too. Vista does, I'm sure, support a monitor timeout to take that choice away from the customer, though, takes away thing like watching a movie (What? do you move your mouse around while watching movies?).
Also, besides the C7 being very low power, it also dissipates very little heat and doesn't usually need a CPU cooling fan. If it does use a fan, it's a little thing that takes nearly no power compared to a lot of processor fans. Don't be surprised if you find out this system has a passively cooled CPU, chipset, and video system.
By "immunity", your PP was saying that their computer systems would be immune from having these backdoors installed in the first place, while everyone else's would not.
That's not "immunity on paper". That's more a case of "them as have, get", "people in power tend to care only to preserve their power", or "people often come to think of stewardship over something as ownership of it" (in this case the law and the country). Take your pick of verbal clichés here.
The immunity though, would be actually binding for people who consider themselves intrinsically more important than you, and they'd be using technical means to undermine the privacy and security of others while using "legal" means to prevent the same technical means against them.
I'm not sure it's cynicism when it's so obviously true. In Microsoft's defense, it's very difficult to properly test everything for stability and performance against all the third-party hardware and software out there.
It's not that difficult, though, to check for buffer overruns, array bounds violations, and stack overflows these days. It's also not that difficult to use proper security protocols as opposed to crap like PPTP, for that matter.
I think Microsoft's public image has been hurt pretty badly by the likes of Nimda, Blaster, Melissa, and similar widespread attacks. Macs, Solaris, and Linux machines have strong arguments for them, but part of what market share they get would default to Microsoft if people hadn't had such poor experiences with Windows and Office. Heck, I'm a Linux guy, but I'm writing this from an XP box because for some things I still need Windows.
If Microsoft and their Windows team did more than pay lip service to POSIX, security in depth, minimal daemon/services profiles, a powerful command line, standard networking instead of their proprietary stuff, and proactive security audits then lots of people who run Linux, BSD, Solaris, and OS X would never use anything but Windows. Some of us still would, but if Windows had enough POSIX support to run everything written for Unix, had the security of a decent Linux distro, only enabled what services you actually need running, and had a record of fewer actual vulnerabilities (and not just a comparison that their core OS has fewer "critical" bugs than all of the software that ships with RHEL, when RedHat is more likely to call something "critical" anyway), then why would people bother? OS X would be just for video, audio, and graphics people. Solaris, AIX, and other commercial Unixes would be real niche players. Linux and the BSDs would be mainly curiosities for tinkerers, just as MS tries to portray them, and would have only small installations in the business world. There'd still be a place for all of these, but they'd have a much harder time of it if Windows was real quality work in these areas.
In short, the embrace and extend tactics, the FUD MS spreads, and the NIH syndrome are finally catching up to Microsoft. So yes, I'd say that although they're not hurting much, what little pain they're having is in large part caused by their security practices.
My wife didn't think she cared. When we got engaged I was living in an apartment, and she told me she'd much rather I bought a house than mess with any gift for her. Then, when we were into my friend's dad's jewelry shop looking at wedding bands, she found a engagement ring she really liked. So she got that, too.
There's a good thing about having a good friend who's dad is a good jeweler, though. Other shops have offered to buy her ring from us for more than I paid so they can mark it up and sell it.
If you don't want to see his posts, ignore him. There's no need to be a controlling, pompous fucktard about it and tell him not to post or to change his sig for your sake.
When did he say anything about sport? Perhaps he likes to eat duck or goose. Did you ever think of that? How do you think people eat meat if nobody kills the animals?
Besides, do you know what a "range" is, as in a shooting range? You don't kill anything at a shooting range if you're doing it right. Maybe he never hunts and he just wants people who have pet dogs that are from hunting dog lines to let their dogs hear the gunshots, and maybe retrieve the targets. Do you have something against shooting cast iron or clay targets, too? Equal rights for pottery?
Oh, and if you want to talk morality, how about a nick that makes you the fully engorged penis of a children's puppet? Or is pedophilia okay as long as you don't eat a duck? How's that for jumping to conclusions without sufficient information? You don't like it when it's applied to you, do you?
As long as you're wanting to talk about being holier-than-thou and not killing things, why don't you have one of my friends talk to you about The Living Diet and the evils of harvesting root vegetables? Well, you know, some people think it's morally reprehensible to eat anything that has been killed, don't you? These people eat only things that can be taken without killing -- milk, unfertilized eggs, berries, nuts, cut grasses, and hand-picked seed pods and leaves from plants left standing. Do you want them to judge you based on their ideals? If not, why not stop judging everyone else by yours?
A lot of people think it's evil to tell other people what to think and what to say. A sin against individuality is a sin directly against a man's soul, or something. Perhaps you'd like to be judged by that measure based on this thread? No, I didn't think so.
So, I'm not going to tell you not to post "your bullshit on slashdot anymore [sic]". I will leave you with those things to think about before you go off half-cocked (half puppet-cocked, for that matter) on other people.
That's a good point. Who cares how cheap it is to manufacture if it's going to cost a lot more to operate? Of course, if it's cheap enough that it'd take 4 or 5 years to make up the difference, then there's definitely market viability.
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The MadTux machine also has optional upgrades right there in the cart. Easy to miss, but they're there. With a gig and an 80-gig hard drive, you're looking at $292. Add a dual-layer 16x burner and you're looking at another $38, and still no OS.
It isn't Wal-Mart, so getting this close to the same price is pretty darn good. Besides, it's MadTux, and people who shop there can generally download their OS for free (even directly from MadTux, although the Ubuntu 7.04 isn't workign very well today).
I've heard all this about Wal-mart not paying shit. My cousin made a sizable down-payment on her house from cashing in just a portion of her stock options from Wal-Mart, and she has assured both of her kids that their college funds are going well.
They have been in trouble for not allowing sufficient breaks, and they have been know to cut people's ours just short of getting full-time status to avoid paying benefits. I'm not sure that in the retail job market, though, that they pay all that dismally.
Now, their environmental impact, their habit of buying Chinese goods, refusing to allow any union workers to help build their stores, and other things are all worth yelling about to various people. I'm not sure their pay ranks up there.
This is a valid point.
KDE and GNOME are mostly just different in appearance, BTW. They do use different libraries but a system can have both sets of libraries installed and can use the apps for one with the window manage for the other. Of course, if a distro neglects to include a way to set up both, then that's more of a pain. More window managers are out there, too, and most of them work well with either GNOME or KDE environments.
The package managers are less of an issue all the time, as things like alien are made for just this reason. The LSB demands RPM support in addition to any other package manager solution, too.
The rc systems shouldn't matter to a casual user, and an admin should probably be able to handle more than one. They're not _that_ different, after all. A consistent one would be nice, though.
As for the shells, choice is nice but any distro designer who uses a default shell other than bash when the code goes out the door should be flogged. The other shells should be options, but there's just no reason for bash not to be the default given it ubiquity, its strength in scriptability over csh, and its integration of much of ksh syntax.
If all distros would stick to the LSB and put their nice tweaks on besides once the LSB is satisfied, then it'd be much nicer.
Scorched Earth wasn't a B game. Microsoft's QBasic Gorrilas! was a B game. Scorched Earth was awesome. It inspired such greats as Charred Dirt, Scorched 3D, etc.
Now, BZ Flag is probably a B game.
ShadowGames Shooter is definitely a B game, and it is fun and hilarious at the same time. Ken's Labyrinth was (and still is, since it's now ported to modern OSes) a B game that's fun to play.
Trade Wars 2002 (okay, I'm showing my age I guess) had a lottery module, card game modules, and more that a BBS sysop could install for games inside the game. Most of them let you win or lose the main game's currency.
Many adventure, puzzle, and mystery games have, over the years, had mini puzzles, games to be played against NPCs, and casinos within the games, too.
Commission of a crime in front of an officer, or reasonable suspicion on the part of the officer, precludes the need for a warrant in regard to properly targeted and sufficiently narrow searches and seizures.
Do you think someone's nail clippers or their liquid medicines being confiscated at an airport because they forgot to pack them separately is "due process"? Actually, you generally have a choice there, as in not taking the flight in order to keep your stuff, but that's not much of a choice. Is that more or less troubling than temporary freezing of an account?
IANAL, but I've been told that in some jurisdictions you can refuse to take a breathalyzer based on the fact that the cop is not a medical professional and that many are not well-trained in the use of their equipment. They have you tested, then, by piss and/or blood (usually blood).
I, for one, am diabetic and the methods by which many breathalyzer tests can show erratic results for me if my system's out of whack. I was used as an example once, showing that I could be staggering (not driving, mind you, just an example) and blow pretty much stone cold sober. I could, theoretically, also blow sloppy drunk while sober, and this would be about the time my speech might start to slur from low sugar. Now, granted, it's not a good idea to drive while passing out for medical reasons either, but a couple of crackers and some orange juice and I'm fine in a couple of minutes.
The breathalyzer, then, is not the best way to test some people. It's a great tool for most people most of the time. Field sobriety test training and liquid samples (blood and/or urine) should not be ruled out in favor of a breathalyzer exclusively, though. The police should be trained to know this, but chances are many do not.
If I was pulled over or stopped at a checkpoint and they asked me to take a breathalyzer test, I would submit gladly to a field test, blood test, or urine test, but not to the breathalyzer, and I would explain (as calmly as possible) why.
Hey, I used to live in Springfield. You're lucky you didn't die in custody like that poor mentally handicapped guy a couple of years back, or get the shit kicked out of you. Especially if you were near 16th St.
I had a motorcycle stolen when I live in Springfield, and the police and DA didn't do a damn thing because the thief brought it back (with $600 worth of parts destroyed) when he was told that my bike, parked on a private lot, was not in fact abandoned. In need of a paint job, yes, but it was my damn property.
When I went to complain to the DA's office, two assistant DAs looking at my paperwork saw that I lived on Seven Pines Rd. (the row of several apartment complexes off of Chatham Rd.) and started talking about how it wasn't stolen, it was probably just a drug deal gone bad, or my dealer didn't bring it back on time after he borrowed it. This was in front of the reception window, while a dozen other people and I were waiting, and just after I'd explained my whole situation to the receptionist. That's pretty damn stupid, for a couple of lawyers to slander me in the county building while representing the county, isn't it?
But that's par for the course in Springfield, the town that has a perfectly good river on one side of it but that gets its drinking water from a lake with mercury deposits on the bottom of it and leptosclerosis infection warnings for swimmers and boaters every damn summer.
Just because I use Windows, OS X, and Linux doesn't mean I don't also have BSD, AmigaOS, and OS/2 systems. Which, by the way, I do. I was just looking earlier for a BeBox, for that matter.
The beverage analogy isn't nearly as far off as you think. Yum Brands (which used to be part of Pepsico, and which is Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver's, and A&W) only serves Pepsi products. People who would prefer Coke products often eat somewhere else for that reason unless the urge to eat a chain's food overcomes the urge to drink their preferred soft drink. Most people who've had Jones Soda would really love to find a restaurant that serves it. Yet not enough people know Jones Soda that a restaurant chain would ever feel comfortable switching to it.
People use the OS with the features and interface they prefer unless they have some applications they want or need that overwhelmingly suggest a different OS. It's very much the same thing.
Microsoft can afford to sell the shitty OS that everyone despises so long as most of the popular applications are on their OS. Developers can make money selling applications for Windows so long as all the other applications are there, because that means Windows will be the market leader. It's still all about network effects.
There's a tipping point somewhere when one network undermines another, but there's certainly money to be made for the players who get in before that point -- or even if it never happens.
So, if you could get Linux software for what you're looking for, you'd buy that instead of the same software for Windows? Let your vendors know. The more developers realize they could make money on Linux, the more of them will do so.
It's called juxtaposition. The author wanted to make clear his point that this could be handled swiftly if the politicians made it a priority.
Given the title of the piece, the summary, and the fact that the first line of the the rest of the article is about how quickly this situation could be improved, I think the examples given up front make a nice impact.
Due process after how many days? Ever heard of a writ of habeas corpus? Ever heard of a suspect being shot by police? Ever heard of evidence being seized before the trial? Did you know that a holding cell and a long-term detention cell are two different things?
You can probably imagine the problems of a prosecutor who's not allowed to show a chain of custody for evidence at trial. Now, imagine that the suspect has not been deprived, temporarily, the use of his gun, ammo, drugs, car, PDA, nor meth lab equipment. How are those things going to be used as evidence when the suspect simply disposes of all of them after the arrest?
There are troubling things about the power the Bush people are accumulating. Confusing due process with never allowing the executive to act against a suspect concerns me more with Slashdotters than with Bush, though.
Do you think a suspected drunk driver gets a trial before his car is seized? No. How about someone whith what appears to the officer to be cocaine on the front seat? No.
He gets his car back if he's proven innocent, so he's not permanently deprived of it. But it's seized and used as evidence against him first. In some cases, he has to sue to get the property back even though he was acquitted or the charges were dropped.
Also, a search warrant isn't a trial, but it at least needs a judge.
That's fast enough for me, thanks. If I can send a message to to Alpha Centauri and get a response back in seconds rather than decades, that's rather an improvement.
He and colleagues discovered it. He was sure they were making an error or that there was some other explanation, because the apparent result didn't seem right to him. However, even if he is proven to be wrong and that it does happen, he'll be given credit for doing work leading to the discovery.
Actually, this shows how great of a scientist Einstein was. When he had personal intellectual, religious, or general emotional reservations about an idea, he was still willing to present a hypothesis counter to his own beliefs and offer it up for testing. If this had been proven during his lifetime, it may or may not have shaken his personal faith in God. He was humble enough to put the body of knowledge of the human race ahead of his feelings on this subject, too. That means he was probably a pretty damn good man of faith as well.
He believed in the importance of science and the importance of faith, and he had some issues he had to work out between them. That's pretty human. So whether he agreed with it being real or not, I think he deserves credit for the work he did leading to it.
The problem with this reasoning is that there are already ten thousand begware, nagware, freeware, shareware, postcardware, download for $5.95, shrinkwrap for $19.95, heavily advertised for $695, and dongle-protected for $4995 products in your software market for XP.
If you can support just three distros (or just one, even) and do the absolute best job out of ten companies selling in your market to Linux customers, you can really clean up on that 2%.
Think about it. How many PCs are there, even just in the US? There are about 300 million people. Conservatively, let's say 100 million PCs, because 100 is a nice number to work with. So you say Linux is 2%. Fine, 2 million PCs. Let's say you go for a 25% distribution (or one that is part of a branch of distros similar enough to share the software easily). That's 500,000 potential users. Now, let's say your software is applicable to a quarter of the users. That's 125,000 systems. Now, let's say you get 20% market share. That's 25,000 copies.
So, yeah, those aren't Microsoft Windows numbers. They're not even Adobe Photoshop numbers. But how many Windows programs do you know of that sell 25,000 copies? Aside from that, if your three or five person company can get $20 25,000 times on one product (or $100, or $5, or $300, depending on what your product does), do you really mind if you're targeting a niche?
I hate to break this to some of you, but nearly universal usership like MS, Pepsi, Coke, Tylenol, McDonald's and Budweiser is not what builds companies. Those were positioned at the right place at the right time by some very bright people who took advantage of markets very slyly, who used network effects to their advantage, and who were quite frankly willing not to perfect their products because they'd rather have volume than drive up their prices and cut back demand.
Nearly noone calls Budweiser their favorite beer. You wanna know an open secret? It's not meant to be your favorite. The tour guides at the Anheuser-Busch brewery tour in St. Louis will tell you that. Brewing the absolute best beer is always expensive. There are too many opinions on what makes the best beer to please everyone that any beer is best. Most of those esoteric flavors and textures that convince one group a beer is best turn off other people. Budweiser wasn't meant to get into those debates. It was meant to be the beer that sold well. It sells well because despite not being the very best, it's very non-confrontational. Anheuser-Busch has done a very good job at making sure that although Budweiser is not #1 on many lists, it's the beer that's safe to buy when you know your guests drink beer.
Pizza Hut isn't the best pizza. Coke isn't the best soda. McDonald's isn't the best burger. Ikea isn't the best furniture. JC Penney doesn't sell the best clothes. What these companies do is to be good enough, cheap enough, and known widely enough that you'd rather play it safe with them than to either go high-end and risk that you've overspent or go low-end and get truly crap products. They trade being the best for being the best value. They do this in consistency, quality, and trust.
I'd trust my local pizza places to have the best pizza in town. If I see another with the same name a few hundred miles away, I might take a shot at trying it. If I just want to know I'm getting pretty good pizza at a pretty good price, I'd probably find a chain like Imo's, Mazzio's, Pizzeria Uno, Gino's or Cassano's. If I'm further from home and none of the regional chains are around, I'd likely fall back to a national chain like Pizza Hut. I also fall back to Pizza Hut sometimes when they run a special or when they have a buffet, so I can get in and out quickly.
Microsoft is the same way. Yes, Microsoft probably has the resources at this point to make the world's best operating system for some person's definition of best. Their goals, though, are market share and profit. They get market share and keep it by being good enough, by serving the most popular needs, by foregoing any co
It's really more of a hierarchy than an inner circle and 297 outsiders.
You seriously discount Red Flag, TurboLinux, PolishLinux, Mandriva, Fedora, CentOS, and most of all Debian. There are some players still really important in other ways, too.
Red Flag: targeted at China by the Chinese. There are more than a few potential users there.
PolishLinux: targeted at Poland by the Poles. Not as many people as China, but still, it's a whole country.
Mandriva is very popular in some areas, as is TurboLinux. Localization helps these two quite a bit. I have a couple of Mandriva boxes myself right now, despite speaking French very poorly. TurboLinux has been entrenched in some areas for a very long time, and isn't going away quickly.
There are basically a handful of major distros, each of which is the root of a tree (or bush) of downstream distros.
Debian is the foundation for Ubuntu as well as many others. It's the root of the tree. Ubuntu, at this point, may very well be a trunk, but Debian is still the root. Xandros and Knoppix are pretty nice branches on this tree, too, and I've had no problems using software back and forth.
Fedora is not RHEL by any means, and is very popular. CentOS is almost RHEL, and among people who want the software that's written with the best support for RHEL but who don't need RedHat's support contract, it's very popular and a very good choice. This is the RedHat tree. Mandriva used to be part of this tree, but has been grafted elsewhere.
Slackware is still a force to be reckoned with in certain situations. Lots of security-minded and performance-minded people still have their own Slack-based setups, but since Gentoo is centered around compiling everything and uses a different method to get there, it's pulling some of Slack's people.
uCLinux, MontaVista, and the other embedded Linux distos hit where little else does. There's Debian Small, and T2 or LFS or possibly Gentoo could go the embedded route if you like. However, uCLinux and MontaVista live there.
Most of the distributions out of the 300 or so don't matter on a wide scale, but it's a bit too confining to say that only Suse, RedHat, and Ubuntu matter. Even if Ubuntu kills Debian on popularity, as long as it uses Debian as its upstream then Debian matters quite a bit.
If power efficiency is the only major goal, hard drives would be replaced by flash, too. Vista does, I'm sure, support a monitor timeout to take that choice away from the customer, though, takes away thing like watching a movie (What? do you move your mouse around while watching movies?).
Also, besides the C7 being very low power, it also dissipates very little heat and doesn't usually need a CPU cooling fan. If it does use a fan, it's a little thing that takes nearly no power compared to a lot of processor fans. Don't be surprised if you find out this system has a passively cooled CPU, chipset, and video system.
The Dell mailer I just got the other day says that all their PCs come with no trialware, not even the 90 Office lock-in.
What I want to know, though, is do I call Walmart for the OpenOffice source, or Everex?
By "immunity", your PP was saying that their computer systems would be immune from having these backdoors installed in the first place, while everyone else's would not.
That's not "immunity on paper". That's more a case of "them as have, get", "people in power tend to care only to preserve their power", or "people often come to think of stewardship over something as ownership of it" (in this case the law and the country). Take your pick of verbal clichés here.
The immunity though, would be actually binding for people who consider themselves intrinsically more important than you, and they'd be using technical means to undermine the privacy and security of others while using "legal" means to prevent the same technical means against them.
I'm not sure it's cynicism when it's so obviously true. In Microsoft's defense, it's very difficult to properly test everything for stability and performance against all the third-party hardware and software out there.
It's not that difficult, though, to check for buffer overruns, array bounds violations, and stack overflows these days. It's also not that difficult to use proper security protocols as opposed to crap like PPTP, for that matter.
I think Microsoft's public image has been hurt pretty badly by the likes of Nimda, Blaster, Melissa, and similar widespread attacks. Macs, Solaris, and Linux machines have strong arguments for them, but part of what market share they get would default to Microsoft if people hadn't had such poor experiences with Windows and Office. Heck, I'm a Linux guy, but I'm writing this from an XP box because for some things I still need Windows.
If Microsoft and their Windows team did more than pay lip service to POSIX, security in depth, minimal daemon/services profiles, a powerful command line, standard networking instead of their proprietary stuff, and proactive security audits then lots of people who run Linux, BSD, Solaris, and OS X would never use anything but Windows. Some of us still would, but if Windows had enough POSIX support to run everything written for Unix, had the security of a decent Linux distro, only enabled what services you actually need running, and had a record of fewer actual vulnerabilities (and not just a comparison that their core OS has fewer "critical" bugs than all of the software that ships with RHEL, when RedHat is more likely to call something "critical" anyway), then why would people bother? OS X would be just for video, audio, and graphics people. Solaris, AIX, and other commercial Unixes would be real niche players. Linux and the BSDs would be mainly curiosities for tinkerers, just as MS tries to portray them, and would have only small installations in the business world. There'd still be a place for all of these, but they'd have a much harder time of it if Windows was real quality work in these areas.
In short, the embrace and extend tactics, the FUD MS spreads, and the NIH syndrome are finally catching up to Microsoft. So yes, I'd say that although they're not hurting much, what little pain they're having is in large part caused by their security practices.
My wife didn't think she cared. When we got engaged I was living in an apartment, and she told me she'd much rather I bought a house than mess with any gift for her. Then, when we were into my friend's dad's jewelry shop looking at wedding bands, she found a engagement ring she really liked. So she got that, too.
There's a good thing about having a good friend who's dad is a good jeweler, though. Other shops have offered to buy her ring from us for more than I paid so they can mark it up and sell it.
If you don't want to see his posts, ignore him. There's no need to be a controlling, pompous fucktard about it and tell him not to post or to change his sig for your sake.
When did he say anything about sport? Perhaps he likes to eat duck or goose. Did you ever think of that? How do you think people eat meat if nobody kills the animals?
Besides, do you know what a "range" is, as in a shooting range? You don't kill anything at a shooting range if you're doing it right. Maybe he never hunts and he just wants people who have pet dogs that are from hunting dog lines to let their dogs hear the gunshots, and maybe retrieve the targets. Do you have something against shooting cast iron or clay targets, too? Equal rights for pottery?
Oh, and if you want to talk morality, how about a nick that makes you the fully engorged penis of a children's puppet? Or is pedophilia okay as long as you don't eat a duck? How's that for jumping to conclusions without sufficient information? You don't like it when it's applied to you, do you?
As long as you're wanting to talk about being holier-than-thou and not killing things, why don't you have one of my friends talk to you about The Living Diet and the evils of harvesting root vegetables? Well, you know, some people think it's morally reprehensible to eat anything that has been killed, don't you? These people eat only things that can be taken without killing -- milk, unfertilized eggs, berries, nuts, cut grasses, and hand-picked seed pods and leaves from plants left standing. Do you want them to judge you based on their ideals? If not, why not stop judging everyone else by yours?
A lot of people think it's evil to tell other people what to think and what to say. A sin against individuality is a sin directly against a man's soul, or something. Perhaps you'd like to be judged by that measure based on this thread? No, I didn't think so.
So, I'm not going to tell you not to post "your bullshit on slashdot anymore [sic]". I will leave you with those things to think about before you go off half-cocked (half puppet-cocked, for that matter) on other people.
That's a good point. Who cares how cheap it is to manufacture if it's going to cost a lot more to operate? Of course, if it's cheap enough that it'd take 4 or 5 years to make up the difference, then there's definitely market viability.
One could always front-light the screen. Perhaps this is funded by Phillips or GE to sell more of the natural-light light bulbs.
At least your head's still on forward... It is on forward, isn't it?