This doesn't have to do with Windows as much as it has to do with Dell.
Basically, Dell said (in the EULA) that they would refund money if you don't agree to the terms. So that's what the guy did.
If anything, this just shows how few people read license agreements than anything else. And shows that, once again, 'customer support' still stinks:)
The article is also basically devoid of any details regarding the methodology. There wasn't even anything at the Haifa Linux Club web site about it. It looks like since the arrival of Vista-infected machines, the old methods for Windows Refund need updating.
The club at least could make some noise and show the new steps to the dance. Many will be buying new computers in the coming weeks and could use the extra 150 USD / EUR
I'll take an expert over a pay-for-say MS "expert" any day. Facts happen to run against MS, get over it. That's why the marketing firms they hire come down so hard on reviewers, evaluators and benchmarkers.
If you want to get down to the bottom of some of the many, many problems with MS Vista, as well as the OpenGL imitation, then see Peter Gutmann's analysis, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.
Running a smear campaign may or may not annoy the author, but it is the facts he is reporting. You can even read Peter's response to the MS attack dogs where he addresses their tactics as well as emphasizes some of the points they chose to skip over.
MS has a long history of manufacturing abuse of not just critics but also critical data. Money spend on MS products goes into funding unethical, anti-competitive, and, in some cases, illegal activity. Even helping keep the monopoly going, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by not supporting open formats or protocols allows the malfeasance continued funding.
... Open source is necessary but not sufficient to truly understand what code will do.
What part needs further explanation? Open source is both necessary and sufficient: You need the source code -- all of it. Not just the top-level application, and not just the libraries that contribute to that application, but also the compiler and even the underlying operating system and its components. It's that last one where OpenSolaris falls short.
Raven64 is distracting from the key shortcomings in the license for and system itself in OpenSolaris. It currently allows BLOBs and the weird-ass licensing, the CDDL, was chosen to allow BLOBs.
... it would have been 10 seconds on the nightly news about a computer mishap.
Except that it's not a "computer" mishap, it's a MS Windows-specific problem. Had she been using any other OS, the incident would not have happened in the first place. OS X, Fedora and Ubuntu are off-the-shelf ready for classroom use and had she been using any of those, there would have been no incident. Fancy tools like LTSP, K12LTSP, Edubuntu and Skolelinux are specifically designed for classrooms. Even outlyers like NetBSD or OpenSolaris can be tricked out by a competent IT department to be perfect for classroom use.
No, the problem does not lay as much with the defense or prosecutors as much as with the smoke screen they are making to defend the real criminals: the executives and employees at Microsoft Corporation. Without their utter failure, viruses, popups and other malware would not be wasting over $10 billion per year of the US' economy.
Raven64, please stop trolling about the GPL and go back to where you came from.
If you bother to read the OpenSolaris FAQs, you'll find that there are two licensing shortcomings with OpenSolaris still. The first one, as you skirt around, is the granularity of the CDDL - it does not apply to whole packages. And that leads the to the real problem: OpenSolaris, as fantastic as it is in many other ways, it is partially closed-source binary.
That's not good for either portability, long-term maintenance or, especially, security. Nasty things can be found in BLOBs, both there on purpose and by accident. What can't happen, though, is for these nasties to be fixed or removed. For that you need the source and no substitute will do.
For what it's worth, you have SAS for Linux already. They don't make the product easy to find, and there are a lot of deadlinks, but it works well -- if you can get it.
Also, SPSS for Linux has been available for a while, too.
So you can let the researchers work on whichever platform makes the most productive, be it OS X or Linux. But the real boost is for the system maintenance team. Getting rid of the last of the Windows cruft from the LAN means that all those hours spent coddling and repairing M$ junk can be instead directed towards improving the computing environment. Providing better service is a better goal than just trying to keep things running long enough to get work done.
2008; Gates has had his decade. Worked out well for him, didn't it?
Well it may not be on schedule, and the market share may be eroding, but he still has enough of a monopoly to command monopoly rents.
Even "pirated" copies of M$ junk help drive up the price of computing by maintaining that monopoly. Sure a lot of people think they pay zero for that "free" copy of M$, but that simply allows Bill to charge the other users 5x the going rate.
Once enough of the market upgrade to OS X or Red Hat or Kubuntu, then Bill and crowd can no longer set the prices. The likely way that will happen may be through government-level and business-level migrations, and that will be set off by those that use Linux or OS X at home and want their work systems to be as fast and easy to use at the home systems. Until then, M$ will keep overcharging.
It is possible that, buried under all the spin, pay-for-say articles, and astroturfing that this tipping point has already occurred. M$ has been buying/selling an awful lot of stock and that is another way to stay in business besides leasing software.
... Maybe we should just encourage people in violence-based parts of the world (like India, Russia, and the minority communities of the USA) to use pirated Microsoft and other proprietary software.
"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. Theyâ(TM)ll get sort of addicted, and then weâ(TM)ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." -- Gates, circa 1998
Advocating piracy in order to undercut competitors has carried M$ through the decades even now:
"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not"
-- Gates, circa 2007
The only way for the market situation to get better is to avoid any and all use of M$Âproducts, including "pirated" ones.
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...
Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.
People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.
Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.
At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move.
Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.
I'll save time and post this now, rather than waiting half a month:
The links in the original post are dead. They were around for a few weeks, but since they pointed to wire feeds and, worse, a Google search, they're gone. If they had been linked to directly, we'd have a chance, we'd at least know the date they were available and the site hosting. In which case we could have tracked down archived copies, in worst case, offline.
Well, the problem is whether or not the Library of Congress has a record for what you are cataloging. For example, my institution's library consists of a large number of rare books that do not appear in the LoC database. I'm sure there are plenty of other organizations in the same boat as us, which is how OCLC stays in business.
So in the case of newly acquired rare books, someone will have to have the dangerous task of opening the front cover and reading at least the title page. Yes all that takes time and many institutions don't budget for that time any more, but it can be cheaper and less hassle than dealing with OCLC's shenanigans.
Or you can take your ball and go, if OCLC won't play. Catalogs do have the ability to transfer records using ISO 2709 or ANSI/NISO Z39.2.
Is LOC data accessed through Z39.50 or their MARC gateway in the Public Domain?
It appears, by virtue of consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship, specifically lists taken from public documents or other common sources, to not be under copyright and thus in the Public Domain. This is, after all, material taken from the inside cover of the published item. The list itself, the Library of Congress Catalog, is also a public document.
Now all that won't stop RIAA, M$ and Disney from suing you. But then what would?
Some of the problems caused by OCLC can be avoided by using better tools. Evergreen, Koha are both feature-rich, open source integrated library systems. They're not just competitive, in many cases they are just plain better.
Another danger point is Metalib. The Z39.50 profiles are about the only advantage there, aside from the sales pitch. Those are public anyway and could easily be listed centrally by pooling resources to the tune of a few cents per month per participating organization.
However, all that is about the code and the article is about claims of ownership over database content. Well fortunately enough, data can be imported, exported and shared between systems like Koha or Evergreen without ever having anything to do with OCLC. Most libraries, even many library consortia, no longer have any catalogers. In those cases, import the metadata for the catalog from the Library of Congress, that's what it's there for...
I run Kubuntu 8.04 on a Compaq Evo N410c, which is a 1.2GHz P-III with 512MB memory. It's just fine.
Indeed, it's not so much a matter of the distro but more of the window manager or desktop environment.
I'm also generally using KDE. On one netbook, however, I prefere FVWM, simply because I use it for a few things and don't need *any* eye candy or fancy menus. However, as you get into weaker processors and smaller RAM, other desktop environments might be more enjoyable. Xfce and Fluxbox come to mind.
One fact that is not as widely known as it could be is that just about any distro can be modified through adding or removing packages and themes, and changing configurations, to be identical to any other. As an example, Fluxbuntu can be grown into Kubuntu by adding the package kubuntu-desktop.
The headline should reflect the content of the article and that is about the rapid headway that the Samba team is making. It's not the first time, nor even one of the first times, that the M$ developers have had to rely on the Samba team. Let's give credit where credit is due.
You don't LOAD THE WHOLE THING @ ONCE into the calling app's memory space - YOU ONLY LOAD THE FUNCTION PORTION YOU NEED, period.
On a normal system, yes. But not if the machine is infected with MS Windows.
What downtime? What rebuilds? A properly built Exchange server in a school will run just as well as... a smoking turd
There fixed that for you.
It's obscene how far MS apologists will try to bend the definition of "run well". I hear all the time from MSFTers how well their MS Exchange server works. The same server is down many times a week, not counting scheduled outages. The users of the same server also lose 10% - 20% of the mail that tries to pass either into or out of MS Exchange.
It's 2008 not 1998. No one falls for that line about MS Exchange being suitable for anything except job security for the half-trained MS monkeys. Without MS they'd be hard pressed to get a job at McDonald's.
Heck that's one of the reasons those said same half-trained MS monkeys, as you called them, go to such great lengths to prevent using other clients against MS Exchange or using other servers against MS Outlook. If you have two to compare, it becomes quickly evident which one is faster, easier, more functional, more reliable.
Further the drag on the economy caused by the decreased productivity MS Vista and especially MS Exchange bring is probably going to make this recession bear more than just a passing resemblance to the Great Depression of last century. Thanks MS boosters.
They already do. I've done support for W.A. schools that were having problems with their internal Exchange server. They were shocked when we discussed the 'real' price for Exchange. They paid less than $1000 for it including CALs and hardware. MS has some serious sweetheart deals for schools and I bet if it came down to providing even cheaper Windows and Office for schools they will do it.
That's not the real price, though. The real price also includes all the down time, extra re-builds, malware tools, etc. Add to that also the cost of missing incoming messages, missing outgoing messages and delayed messages -- these last add up to more work for the users, which can number in the 100's, rather than just the maintenance staff which can usually be counted on one hand.
Before MS Exchange was hammered through the back door, e-mail was both so fast and reliable that many used it in ways resembling instant messaging.
If you need a plain vanilla mail transfer agent instead of all the non-essentials, then postfix, exim, qmail, the new sendmail, and simta each have their niche. They're used pretty much everywhere, even if you don't always see the evidence of them outside the message headers.
If Sun bought MySQL to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
If Oracle bought InnoDB to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
...
Oracle also took down Berkeley DB. It's still there but buried rather deeply. If Oracle is contributing to BerkeleyDB, then now is a good time to be vocal about it and collect some good karma.
...So open source != Linux, instead Linux is a subset of open source.
If you need a simplification that's more accurate, consider that it's M$ vs (closed source + open source).
M$ boosters have been working to try to conflate Linux and Open Source. Another goal has been to try to create a false dichotomy of choosing between Linux and M$. The choice is greater. You've got all kinds of Open Source, which Linux (both the kernel and the distros) are a part of.
Unfortunately in areas with too much damage from Microsoftianism, the term "Linux" is used to mean any thing that is not M$
However, the name
Open Source, with it's 10 criteria, is from the Open Source Initiative. Free Software, as a name, is older, having turned 25. (BTW WTF is up with/. to have missed that? Too many M$ boosters on staff?) Prior to that, it was simply called "software". It was self-evident that you got the source for use and modification and redistribution. Usually accompanied by some text file called README or COPYING giving the details.
didn't IBM also resign from ISO over OOXML? i think this form of passive protest is important as it draws attention to the corruption at hand. if nothing else, it's garnered media attention...
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't have to do with Windows as much as it has to do with Dell.
Basically, Dell said (in the EULA) that they would refund money if you don't agree to the terms. So that's what the guy did.
If anything, this just shows how few people read license agreements than anything else. And shows that, once again, 'customer support' still stinks :)
The article is also basically devoid of any details regarding the methodology. There wasn't even anything at the Haifa Linux Club web site about it. It looks like since the arrival of Vista-infected machines, the old methods for Windows Refund need updating.
The club at least could make some noise and show the new steps to the dance. Many will be buying new computers in the coming weeks and could use the extra 150 USD / EUR
Choose your "experts" carefully.
I'll take an expert over a pay-for-say MS "expert" any day. Facts happen to run against MS, get over it. That's why the marketing firms they hire come down so hard on reviewers, evaluators and benchmarkers.
If you want to get down to the bottom of some of the many, many problems with MS Vista, as well as the OpenGL imitation, then see Peter Gutmann's analysis, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.
Running a smear campaign may or may not annoy the author, but it is the facts he is reporting. You can even read Peter's response to the MS attack dogs where he addresses their tactics as well as emphasizes some of the points they chose to skip over.
MS has a long history of manufacturing abuse of not just critics but also critical data. Money spend on MS products goes into funding unethical, anti-competitive, and, in some cases, illegal activity. Even helping keep the monopoly going, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by not supporting open formats or protocols allows the malfeasance continued funding.
... Open source is necessary but not sufficient to truly understand what code will do.
What part needs further explanation? Open source is both necessary and sufficient: You need the source code -- all of it. Not just the top-level application, and not just the libraries that contribute to that application, but also the compiler and even the underlying operating system and its components. It's that last one where OpenSolaris falls short.
Raven64 is distracting from the key shortcomings in the license for and system itself in OpenSolaris. It currently allows BLOBs and the weird-ass licensing, the CDDL, was chosen to allow BLOBs.
... it would have been 10 seconds on the nightly news about a computer mishap.
Except that it's not a "computer" mishap, it's a MS Windows-specific problem. Had she been using any other OS, the incident would not have happened in the first place. OS X, Fedora and Ubuntu are off-the-shelf ready for classroom use and had she been using any of those, there would have been no incident. Fancy tools like LTSP, K12LTSP, Edubuntu and Skolelinux are specifically designed for classrooms. Even outlyers like NetBSD or OpenSolaris can be tricked out by a competent IT department to be perfect for classroom use.
No, the problem does not lay as much with the defense or prosecutors as much as with the smoke screen they are making to defend the real criminals: the executives and employees at Microsoft Corporation. Without their utter failure, viruses, popups and other malware would not be wasting over $10 billion per year of the US' economy.
Raven64, please stop trolling about the GPL and go back to where you came from.
If you bother to read the OpenSolaris FAQs, you'll find that there are two licensing shortcomings with OpenSolaris still. The first one, as you skirt around, is the granularity of the CDDL - it does not apply to whole packages. And that leads the to the real problem: OpenSolaris, as fantastic as it is in many other ways, it is partially closed-source binary.
That's not good for either portability, long-term maintenance or, especially, security. Nasty things can be found in BLOBs, both there on purpose and by accident. What can't happen, though, is for these nasties to be fixed or removed. For that you need the source and no substitute will do.
... apps like SAS, SPSS, ...
For what it's worth, you have SAS for Linux already. They don't make the product easy to find, and there are a lot of deadlinks, but it works well -- if you can get it. Also, SPSS for Linux has been available for a while, too.
So you can let the researchers work on whichever platform makes the most productive, be it OS X or Linux. But the real boost is for the system maintenance team. Getting rid of the last of the Windows cruft from the LAN means that all those hours spent coddling and repairing M$ junk can be instead directed towards improving the computing environment. Providing better service is a better goal than just trying to keep things running long enough to get work done.
2008; Gates has had his decade. Worked out well for him, didn't it?
Well it may not be on schedule, and the market share may be eroding, but he still has enough of a monopoly to command monopoly rents.
Even "pirated" copies of M$ junk help drive up the price of computing by maintaining that monopoly. Sure a lot of people think they pay zero for that "free" copy of M$, but that simply allows Bill to charge the other users 5x the going rate.
Once enough of the market upgrade to OS X or Red Hat or Kubuntu, then Bill and crowd can no longer set the prices. The likely way that will happen may be through government-level and business-level migrations, and that will be set off by those that use Linux or OS X at home and want their work systems to be as fast and easy to use at the home systems. Until then, M$ will keep overcharging.
It is possible that, buried under all the spin, pay-for-say articles, and astroturfing that this tipping point has already occurred. M$ has been buying/selling an awful lot of stock and that is another way to stay in business besides leasing software.
So-called piracy only helps M$ against FOSS. See this 2006 LA Times article:
Advocating piracy in order to undercut competitors has carried M$ through the decades even now:
The only way for the market situation to get better is to avoid any and all use of M$Âproducts, including "pirated" ones.
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it...
Which is precisely what you have here. M$ tried via SCO to scuttle Linux. It turned out that SCO hadn't a leg to stand on. So, enter the Novel-M$ SW Patent deal where de Icaza and other receipt-carrying M$ Boosters inject proprietary technology into otherwise free and open source projects. Novell differs from SCO in that this time around there is a trail of receipts showing that yes you do owe M$money for their products even though they were readily available for download.
People have been good about readying the licenses for the main packages, but de Icaza and co. target the libraries and other components that these packages are built on. Combine that with a marketing team that hangs around Slashdot and goes after sites like Boycott Novell and they have made some headway. To be sure, Mono wastes a lot of space on the Ubuntu installation CD. Space which could have been used by Free Software. So even without the sw patent deal, Mono is technologically unsound.
Then there are Novell's attacks against OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format. But that speaks for itself.
At the beginning it was simply described as a stupid move. Novell/M$ is a problem that is getting worse, mostly due to the noise they make and the interference they cause in free and open source projects. The patent pact put Novell outside the free and open source software community. The actions since then have only proven this to be more so.
I'll save time and post this now, rather than waiting half a month:
The links in the original post are dead. They were around for a few weeks, but since they pointed to wire feeds and, worse, a Google search, they're gone. If they had been linked to directly, we'd have a chance, we'd at least know the date they were available and the site hosting. In which case we could have tracked down archived copies, in worst case, offline.
Well, the problem is whether or not the Library of Congress has a record for what you are cataloging. For example, my institution's library consists of a large number of rare books that do not appear in the LoC database. I'm sure there are plenty of other organizations in the same boat as us, which is how OCLC stays in business.
So in the case of newly acquired rare books, someone will have to have the dangerous task of opening the front cover and reading at least the title page. Yes all that takes time and many institutions don't budget for that time any more, but it can be cheaper and less hassle than dealing with OCLC's shenanigans.
Or you can take your ball and go, if OCLC won't play. Catalogs do have the ability to transfer records using ISO 2709 or ANSI/NISO Z39.2.
Is LOC data accessed through Z39.50 or their MARC gateway in the Public Domain?
It appears, by virtue of consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship, specifically lists taken from public documents or other common sources, to not be under copyright and thus in the Public Domain. This is, after all, material taken from the inside cover of the published item. The list itself, the Library of Congress Catalog, is also a public document.
Now all that won't stop RIAA, M$ and Disney from suing you. But then what would?
Some of the problems caused by OCLC can be avoided by using better tools. Evergreen, Koha are both feature-rich, open source integrated library systems. They're not just competitive, in many cases they are just plain better.
Another danger point is Metalib. The Z39.50 profiles are about the only advantage there, aside from the sales pitch. Those are public anyway and could easily be listed centrally by pooling resources to the tune of a few cents per month per participating organization.
However, all that is about the code and the article is about claims of ownership over database content. Well fortunately enough, data can be imported, exported and shared between systems like Koha or Evergreen without ever having anything to do with OCLC. Most libraries, even many library consortia, no longer have any catalogers. In those cases, import the metadata for the catalog from the Library of Congress, that's what it's there for...
I run Kubuntu 8.04 on a Compaq Evo N410c, which is a 1.2GHz P-III with 512MB memory. It's just fine.
Indeed, it's not so much a matter of the distro but more of the window manager or desktop environment. I'm also generally using KDE. On one netbook, however, I prefere FVWM, simply because I use it for a few things and don't need *any* eye candy or fancy menus. However, as you get into weaker processors and smaller RAM, other desktop environments might be more enjoyable. Xfce and Fluxbox come to mind.
One fact that is not as widely known as it could be is that just about any distro can be modified through adding or removing packages and themes, and changing configurations, to be identical to any other. As an example, Fluxbuntu can be grown into Kubuntu by adding the package kubuntu-desktop.
Why hasn't this been caught in the 3,000 previous security issues patched for Windows? It seems like kind of a biggie.
Because Samba is getting too much positive press and Google has to be pumped full of negative articles for the string smb to bury them?
This is not a new thing. They have been working with samba for a couple of years at least.
Why is it that the Samba crew does all the work, including taking the case all the way through the courts, and shot down the appeals, and shooting down disinformation, and dealing with the anti-FOSS documentation NDAs, only for "JP" to give the headlines to M$?
The headline should reflect the content of the article and that is about the rapid headway that the Samba team is making. It's not the first time, nor even one of the first times, that the M$ developers have had to rely on the Samba team. Let's give credit where credit is due.
You don't LOAD THE WHOLE THING @ ONCE into the calling app's memory space - YOU ONLY LOAD THE FUNCTION PORTION YOU NEED, period. On a normal system, yes. But not if the machine is infected with MS Windows.
What downtime? What rebuilds? A properly built Exchange server in a school will run just as well as ... a smoking turd
There fixed that for you.
It's obscene how far MS apologists will try to bend the definition of "run well". I hear all the time from MSFTers how well their MS Exchange server works. The same server is down many times a week, not counting scheduled outages. The users of the same server also lose 10% - 20% of the mail that tries to pass either into or out of MS Exchange.
It's 2008 not 1998. No one falls for that line about MS Exchange being suitable for anything except job security for the half-trained MS monkeys. Without MS they'd be hard pressed to get a job at McDonald's.
Heck that's one of the reasons those said same half-trained MS monkeys, as you called them, go to such great lengths to prevent using other clients against MS Exchange or using other servers against MS Outlook. If you have two to compare, it becomes quickly evident which one is faster, easier, more functional, more reliable.
Further the drag on the economy caused by the decreased productivity MS Vista and especially MS Exchange bring is probably going to make this recession bear more than just a passing resemblance to the Great Depression of last century. Thanks MS boosters.
They already do. I've done support for W.A. schools that were having problems with their internal Exchange server. They were shocked when we discussed the 'real' price for Exchange. They paid less than $1000 for it including CALs and hardware. MS has some serious sweetheart deals for schools and I bet if it came down to providing even cheaper Windows and Office for schools they will do it.
That's not the real price, though. The real price also includes all the down time, extra re-builds, malware tools, etc. Add to that also the cost of missing incoming messages, missing outgoing messages and delayed messages -- these last add up to more work for the users, which can number in the 100's, rather than just the maintenance staff which can usually be counted on one hand.
Before MS Exchange was hammered through the back door, e-mail was both so fast and reliable that many used it in ways resembling instant messaging.
Worth a look:
Roundcube: http://roundcube.net/
Kolab: http://www.kolab.org/
Citadel: http://www.citadel.org/
Zimbra: http://www.zimbra.com/
If you need a plain vanilla mail transfer agent instead of all the non-essentials, then postfix, exim, qmail, the new sendmail, and simta each have their niche. They're used pretty much everywhere, even if you don't always see the evidence of them outside the message headers.
Too bad Apple got rid of the quality control but kept the price level.
And to add insult to injury they went with the x86 architecture. It would have been really good to continue with the PPC or some other decent chip.
The titanium cases also hold up better and have a nicer feel. With enough wear, they get *really* smooth.
...
If Sun bought MySQL to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
If Oracle bought InnoDB to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
...
Oracle also took down Berkeley DB. It's still there but buried rather deeply. If Oracle is contributing to BerkeleyDB, then now is a good time to be vocal about it and collect some good karma.
...So open source != Linux, instead Linux is a subset of open source.
If you need a simplification that's more accurate, consider that it's M$ vs (closed source + open source).
M$ boosters have been working to try to conflate Linux and Open Source. Another goal has been to try to create a false dichotomy of choosing between Linux and M$. The choice is greater. You've got all kinds of Open Source, which Linux (both the kernel and the distros) are a part of. Unfortunately in areas with too much damage from Microsoftianism, the term "Linux" is used to mean any thing that is not M$
However, the name Open Source, with it's 10 criteria, is from the Open Source Initiative. Free Software, as a name, is older, having turned 25. (BTW WTF is up with /. to have missed that? Too many M$ boosters on staff?) Prior to that, it was simply called "software". It was self-evident that you got the source for use and modification and redistribution. Usually accompanied by some text file called README or COPYING giving the details.
didn't IBM also resign from ISO over OOXML? i think this form of passive protest is important as it draws attention to the corruption at hand. if nothing else, it's garnered media attention...
Where? MSNBC? MS Newseek? MS WashingtonPost?
DOS will not have any of the power management features required to operate a modern laptop. The hit to your battery life would be SEVERE
The other way to say this is that the CPU(s) and fan will run as hard as they can the whole time the system is running in memory.
Just a quick question: why, exactly, do MBAs need to know calculus?
Please, I'm not following.
"In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/derivative.html