Yeah, me too. I prefer to buy a CD and rip it myself, to whatever bit rate and encoding I like.
If anyone from the RIAA is reading, I'd like them to note that my iPod is crammed with a few thousand songs, all legal, ripped from CDs I have. The great majority of these CDs are old material, mostly by well-known acts on major labels. The new material is all from either small Indie-ish labels, or very often, from CDs bought directly from bands that recorded and self-produced their material. There's just nothing I find worthwhile on major labels anymore, and this has been the case for years.
You don't suppose this could have anything to do with declining music sales, do you?
If you RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know, this is Slashdot. Still...), you'll find that the main point of danger was that the guy thought a prowler was in his yard and went outside with a kitchen knife. Under the circumstances (yes, that was a dumb thing to do, he should have called 911 himself), he could have been shot. Or, if the swat team had broken the door down, what might have happened? If someone broke your down in the middle of the night, in the dark, and rushed into your house, wouldn't you be likely to try and resist? Especially if you had a wife and kids and you thought you were being attacked? What if that had happened and he'd had a gun? Many people, in such circumstances, would assume it was a robbery and shoot. Then the SWAT team would have returned fire and killed him.
Yes, this guy needs to go to jail for a long, long time. Not to Federal prison, though, but to state prison, which is where the ass-pounding problem exists. Federal prisons are mostly filled with non-violent offenders and relatively easy time, which is where the "Club Fed" nickname came from.
Actually, they'd be far better off in Russia, where spamming is completely legal.
Kushnar's death had nothing to do with spamming; it was just random chance that he was a spammer. He was killed in a robbery gone wrong after he brought three women (!) back to his place from a night club and they slipped him a mickey so they could rob him. He started coming around while the robbery was still in progress, and was then beaten to death. Those sorts of robberies aren't (or at least weren't at the time) unusual there.
That's the first thing that crossed my mind, too. My last business travel was booked less than 72 hours in advance, when I was asked to attend a conference in place of someone else who had to cancel on short notice. That made me the only representative of my company in attendance, and since it was on the opposite coast, there's no way I could have driven there in that time, even if I'd been inclined to do so. Well, OK, maybe, but it would have been both dicey and dangerous and required at least 12 hours a day on the road at speeds well beyond the speed limit. No thanks.
I was pretty surprised to see this even appear on Slashdot. By noon PDT it had already been confirmed as a hoax. I expected to see it in the morning, when it was still thought to be true, or maybe early afternoon. As the hours went by and it didn't appear, I started to think that maybe there'd been some real editorial diligence going on at Slashdot. (I know, I know, what was I thinking???)
Then, BAM! After it's been denounced as a hoax in many quarters and has already mostly run its course, it not only shows up on Slashdot but gets posted by CowboyNeal personally. I guess my lack of faith in/. editorial standards shall remain intact for the foreseeable future:)
That's the funny thing about shills (or fanbo[iy]s, if you prefer) - they usually work for free.
There are also those who will defend anything Apple does, even when Apple is wrong, and those who, because they consider Linux superior to Windows, will extrapolate that "Linux is perfect and has no flaws."
While his preferences likely do not affect that move at all, Linspire has failed to appeal to much of the populace (general or otherwise) throughout its existence, and I don't see anything in Linspire 6 that is likely to change that.
The biggest problems faced by Linspire are:
-It's hard to get people to pay for Linux distros when most of them are free (lots of people don't even like to pay for proprietary apps or OSes, thus the popularity of warez). -Most new Linux users don't go out and choose a distro on their own. They ask around, consult friends who use Linux, as a local LUG for help or maybe attend a LUG installfest, etc. When they do those things, Linspire and Freespire are two names they may not hear at all, and if they do, it's unlikely to be in a positive context. Even before the Linspire-MSFT deal, Linspire wasn't all that well regarded; now, Linspire is widely reviled.
Looking at the second one, while his preferences may not affect that strategic move, those preferences also seem to be the preferences of most of the Linux user community, which is likely to affect the *success* of that move. In other words, individual preferences scale well. CF Novell, who signed the same deal. Novell has an entrenched and popular Linux brand in SuSE, which is probably second only to Red Hat in Enterprise deployments, and they have now also completed the move of Netware onto Linux. Those two branches of their customer base are both ones very used to using proprietary software and are thus unlikely to take much (if any) issue with Novell's deal with MSFT. The broader Linux community is no happier with Novell than it is with Linspire, but Novell's entrenched position in the enterprise may allow them to get away with it (or may not; time will tell, but I think they will).
Linspire doesn't have that luxury, because it is an end-user/home user oriented distro with little or no presence in the enterprise. In other words, it's very dependent on word of mouth, and the good will of the community. Having never enjoyed much more than a lukewarm community reception, and having now mostly lost whatever community good will it may have had, Linspire is not in an enviable position. Unlike Novell, Linspire is likely to be substantially harmed by the MSFT deal.
Uhh, pardon me, but I'm a former Microsoft employee, and "Microsoftie" is very commonly used by Microsoft employees as a self-reference. There is nothing at all wrong with having it on the front page of Slashdot. This most basic of errors renders your entire post baseless.
As far as Hilf being a hardcore Microsoftie, I can't directly comment on that because I don't know him, but I was a first-level manager during my time at Microsoft, and I feel comfortable stating that you cannot rise as high in management as he is without being a fairly hardcore Microsoftie. That doesn't mean he's not an effective manager or that he doesn't do a good job running the open source lab, but it does mean he drinks the Microsoft Kool-Aid or fakes it very, very well. You can't rise in MSFT if you don't. It's as simple as that. My main reason for leaving is that I don't drink that Kool-Aid, and it's a hard place to be comfortable if you don't. If you do, Microsoft is a pretty good place to work. Everyone there just "gets" the software business in a way you see at few other companies. The cafeteria pizza is awesome (but don't drink the coffee; it's the worst I've ever had. I can't imagine what they do to it to get it to taste to bad), and the prices on Microsoft software at the employee store are amazingly cheap. The swag is very expensive, though. I never bought any, even though there were a couple things I would have liked, even if I don't drink the Kool-Aid.
One other thing to keep in mind is why MSFT has an open source lab (I guess they've renamed it; used to be the Linux Lab, IIRC) is not because they think open source is good or because they really want to co-exist with it. The reasons they have it are twofold: one is that many of MSFT's big customers have either always used open source or are now, and it's so common that they have to co-exist with it whether they want to or not, and the other reason is they want to take a good look at and see what features they can co-opt/find ways to defeat it. Or as Sun Tzu put it, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."
The story as posted to Slashdot was really pretty accurate. Thanks for playing.
Joking? I certainly hope so. Windows doesn't come even close to making that cut, even if we restrict the scope to "One of the first personal computer OSes." Even the first version of Windows (which I have actually scene with my own eyes, running on a PC-XT, and which may be the reason I need corrective lenses today ) was a relative latecomer among personal computer OSes. Well before Windows there was CPM, Amiga, Apple, DOS, and many others.
One of the most popular OSes? Sure, at least for the "market share" definition of popular (for the definition of popular as "well liked" it might be another story).
The argument that (UNIX in general, not just Linux) is more secure than Windows is true. The argument that this is by design is also true, since some of the design choices made on Windows were - from a security perspective horrible mistakes. You could make the argument that some of the superior design that the UNIX security model has is because some of the dangerous choices in Windows just weren't thought of/possible in the late sixties when UNIX was invented, and that later designers of desktop environments for UNIX had both Microsoft's mistakes and Apples successes to look at when making their own choices, but at the end of the day, *nix just has a better security model.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is kind of locked into its security design mistakes because fixing them would change so many of the way things work that Windows users are used to (and one of the fixes - dumping the registry - would just require a compatibility-breaking complete re-tool of Windows). I'm not going to dive into a detailed debate of the how and why those design choices on Windows were made, or if they were justified, but they were made, and they have consequences. The end result of them is what we're concerned with.
That said, Windows is nevertheless a lot more secure than it used to be, and so is *nix. Both have raised the bar considerably. However, *nix is still a lot more secure than Windows for a number of reaons apart from the better security model. One is that exploitable vulnerabilities - especially if they are remotely exploitable - for open source software are typically patched within hours or days, and vendors get the patches out very swiftly thereafter. Another is that at least on Linux and BSD systems, applying those patches is quick, easy, can often be made automatic, and never requires a reboot except in cases of a kernel patch (for obvious reasons). Patches on Windows (and to be fair, Mac, and other proprietary *nix systems) typically take weeks, and sometimes months, to get issued. I could throw out a lot more specific examples all linked around the security models, such as how painful it is to not run as an administrative user on Windows, but I think you can see the point.
Is either OS secure? Depends on what you mean by secure. Absolutely secure? No, that's not possible. Good phsyical security doesn't do it. An airgap from any network doesn't do it. Even if you encased a computer in concrete, glass, steel, and another layer of concrete, then sunk it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, it wouldn't be secure. Someone who wanted it badly enough, and had the financial resources needed, could find it, recover it, un-encase it, and get it working - either fully, or at least enough to extract some data.
Security is a continuum, ranging from "wide open" to "Marianas Trench" and every computer (not just every OS) falls somewhere on that continuum. I'm sure there's an overlap around the top end of the Windows range and the bottom end of the *nix range (that is, the most well-secured Windows systems are probably more secure than the least well-secured *nix systems), the general fact is that most *nix systems are more secure than most Windows systems. I wish that weren't true; I wish Windows were much more secure. It would make my job in the security industry easier. Take away the Windows-based botnets and the Linux-based hosts running phishing sites don't matter (and FWIW, not all of those are compromised hosts, either; many of them are just run by phishers, usually in some "bulletproof hosting" environment, and don't forget that one of the big reasons the bot herders like them is because they are hard to break into and take over; they want neither other bot herders nor LE breaking in there, and that's much easier to achieve on *nix than it is on Windows).
Actually, security experts both in and out of government agents had warned against just that sort of attack, and had done so well before 9/11. The problem wasn't that nobody expected it; the problem was that nobody listened to and acted upon the advice of those who expected it.
Obligatory reference: it's just good they didn't try the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I'm also a long-time Thinkpad user (I still have a working 600X running Linux), and the only notebook I've ever used that I think is as good (albeit very different) than a ThinkPad is the MacBook Pro I'm using at work. If you really want something other than a ThinkPad, give one a look.
That said, there isn't anything you can buy that won' have a bunch of its components made and/or assembled in China. That's just a fact on the ground. Another poster mentioned that Fujitsu notebooks are still made in Japan. Assuming that as true without verifying it, even if the machine is made in Japan, some of its components will almost certainly be made in China, especially electrical things like power supplies.
Whether that matter of degree (a Japanese-made machine with some Chinese parts Vs. a Chinese-made machine with some non-Chinese parts) is important or not is something you'll have to decide for yourself, but one thing is pretty sure: it's very, very hard, if not impossible, to buy a computer that doesn't have at least some Chinese-made parts.
Finally, while China is a major vendor (at least) to the Burmese government for arms, and has human rights problems of its own, it is not China that is doing this, it is the Burmese government. Also, AFAIK, Lenovo is not a state-owned company (someone correct me on that if I'm wrong), so they are sort of an innocent bystander to this. Still, if you feel China is culpable enough here that you want to boycott all Chinese products, then do what you have to do.
I'm on the opposite side on that one. I rather like O2K7 and would be happy if OO.Org adopted a ribbon-based UI, but I don't like Vista. The security model is a pain, and the whole thing seems more designed to keep a computer safe *from* me than to keep it safe *for* me. YMMV.
Vista will improve -like others have said, XP was pretty crappy at first, too - and it will eventually be reliable (but the security model will still suck, I expect), and people still running XP will upgrade about the time Vista's successor is released, like my brother, who just upgraded to XP about the time Vista was released (from Win2K). He might not have done it even then, but I was still working for Microsoft at the time, and I bought him a copy at the company store. That made it cost-effective enough to get him to upgrade.
Well, I can't say that I practice it often, but I do believe that on those occasions when one trolls, one should at least do it at least halfway properly. That would include being clear on the difference between trolling and flamebait, because being unclear on that means that one can neither troll properly, nor flame properly.
P.S. The foregoing is meant to be funny (but also serious, since those posts were clearly trolls, not flamebait); please mod accordingly. Of course, since I marked it as OT, it'll probably get modded Insightful:-/
Before moderating, you mods really ought to read the mod guidelines. The post that started this little thread was clearly a troll, according to the moderator guidelines. So was the parent to this post.
I won't give you a link to the moderator guidelines; it will do you good to look them up for yourself.
Or, if you just can't be bothered, the following is a clear example of flamebait:
"If you're too fscking stupid to tell the difference between a troll and flamebait, don't fscking use your mod points. You probably won't get any of your other mods right either, and we'll all be better off if you take your mod points and stick them up your ass instead of moderating."
The foregoing flamebait has been a public service announcement.
By their own logic, maybe, but not according to the law. Trademark law doesn't prevent people from using the name of your product to talk about it, even if you think it does/should.
An example of a way to weaken your trademark and potentially risk losing it is someone else starts a business or product with the same name as yours (or maybe very similar; there was a charity resale boutique called Sacks Fifth Avenue (which was on 5th Avenue, I forget what city, and they were successfully sued for trademark infringement by Sak's Fifth Avenue) and in the same general market sector, and you don't do anything to prevent it.
In the Sak's case, while it gave them kind of a black eye at the time, they went ahead anyway because if they failed to enforce their trademark, no matter how noble the reason, they could have lost the ability to enforce their trademark in the future.
That pretty covers it. The article takes something that isn't even any sort of problem, and tries to build it into one. Adverti^H^H^H^H grandstanding maneuver by the Kolivas PR team? Probably.
Identity crisis? Pfft. Risk of forking Linux? Pffft. There are tons of forked kernels out there already. Red Hat has kernel patches that aren't in the upstream. So does Debian. So does . Some people run the -mm kernel, which is not the same as the mainline kernel, either. If Kolivas wants to create his own kernel fork too, that's fine. I'm sure Linus would even give him his blessings. Some people would use it. Most wouldn't. If he really had something that was somehow better than the mainline kernel, some distros might diff it and apply the patch to their kernels. Life would go on, Linux would go on. Hardly anyone outside of the kernel development community would even notice there was another kernel fork.
I don't think anyone, not even Linus, knows how many kernel forks there are. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
I don't know what the laws regarding modeling releases are in the jurisdictions relevant to this case, but a good friend of mine who's a professional photographer here in California says that you'd better have a signed modeling release if you want to do anything with a photo other than keep it for yourself, and you're better off having one even in that case. He's never done any work using under-eighteen models, but the fact that she is a minor can only make it worse.
If a court would buy an argument like inferring a modeling release, that might help Virgin Mobile and Flickr get out from under, leaving only the photographer with any exposure. Since he probably doesn't have any money, of course, it's not very likely he'll be sued. If the court doesn't buy it and says they should have verified a modeling release, especially since the subject is a minor. They may well raise that argument at pre-trial hearings, and if the court doesn't agree, I expect they'll start talking settlement rather than have it go to trial.
It was hard to decide between replying and spending my last mod point to mod you up, but I eventually settled on the reply.
I agree with a lot of what you say (you don't see many men majoring in nursing, especially straight men, and I think a major reason why is that so many other straight men would assume they were gay if they did so), but I'll throw out another reason why a lot of women don't "do" computers/engineering/math/etc: a lot of them just don't really like that stuff. I have two young daughters: one of them loves to build things, take stuff apart, try to put stuff together, etc., and the other has little interest in that but loves language tasks. She just started kindergarten and is not yet five, can already read by herself, and is a native speaker of two languages (her younger sister also speaks two languages, but not nearly as well as she did at the same age). I can easily see my younger daughter becoming an engineer (or a Marine; she's pretty tough, rather aggressive, usually fearless, will try to climb anything, and never loses a fight with her older sister, despite being much shorter and lighter), but would be surprised indeed if my older daughter had any interest in it.
My wife could probably be an engineer. She's good at math, has a great instinctive feel for fixing things and figuring out how they work, assembling furniture, toys, etc., but she has no interest in it. She's a designer and founded a boutique which became her family business, but even the design part of it doesn't interest her all that much. The part of the business she likes best is using her people skills on the boutique floor.
Before you get the impression that I'm (only) saying "It's because girls don't like that stuff," I should also point out that most boys don't like that stuff all that much, either. Boys and girls all have to take math, one or more of physics/bio/chem in school, but most of the boys and most of the girls don't go on to major in any engineering discipline in college. To be sure, the percentage of girls who go on to study engineering in college is smaller than the percentage of boys (women are definitely a serious minority in engineering programs), I think that this is more a "matter of degree" issue than the huge difference it might appear to be if we look only at the ratio of men to women in engineering programs.
How many men study literature? A good number, actually. I almost majored in it myself, and at least where I went to school, there were lots of guys in lit classes (I settled on linguistics instead, because I really liked it and thought I could make a better living with a linguistics degree).
Fix the culture at age 10? I'm not sure you can (how often do you run across 10 year old girls who are interested in engineering? Even then, I bet they're a minority of around the same number who still like it when entering college), or even that it's early enough: my kids are four and five (almost) and it's already quite clear which one of them likes engineering-type stuff and which one doesn't. Trying to encourage the older one in that direction (something we've both worked on) gets us no where; she's just not interested. She likes languages, and she likes girly-girl stuff. She wants to go to ballet class. Her younger sister wants to go to karate class. They've already sorted out their likes and dislikes.
That said, I'd be interested to hear what you think should (and more importantly, can) be fixed at 10, or even earlier? I could be wrong, and you may know this a lot better than I do. For example, how can we make girls (or boys, for that matter) at 10, or even 8, or even 5, like math (or engineering, or mechanics, or literature, or ballet, or sewing, or cooking, or...) if they just aren't interested in that stuff and think it's boring? I know that I always did far better in subjects I liked than in subjects I didn't, and nobody ever *made* me like a subject I didn't like. Can we change the culture when the culture is to a very great extent an extension of likes and dislikes we establish at a very early age, and in some cases are significantly established along gender lines?
By some people, maybe, but I got Windows 95 on my first Pentium machine, and it was superior in every way to the Windows 3.11 on the machine it replaced. Vista hasn't shown us that they sort of night-and-day difference between itself and XP. Yes, Vista will be shoved down our throats eventually, but it will be a very long time before the Vista installed base is >= the XP installed base.
That pretty well covers it, although I do give him a certain amount of credit for publicly admitting that he got it so wrong, even if his admission is partly self-justifying.
His problem, which led him to look at a dog and swear it was a crack pipe, is not that he looked at the evidence and insisted that it meant the opposite of what he said; it's that he didn't look at at the evidence, he only looked at the competing claimants. In large part it was his pro-corporate prejudices, as you say, but I think there's a little more to it than that. After all, Novell, Red Hat, and IBM are also corporations; far larger and richer ones than SCO, at that. All three of them called BS on SCO, refused to negotiate at all, and said "We'll see you in court." He should have taken that into account, but it seems he ignored that and chose to look only at the Slashdot and Groklaw crowds, choosing to dismiss them as partisans and "amateur sleuths." What he failed to realize is that just because you're partisan, that doesn't mean you're wrong, and that among those partisan crowds there was also a great deal of expertise about Linux, UNIX, and law. He completely missed the fact that there was so much expertise there, writing them off as the unwashed masses.
I guess he didn't really look too closely at the DR-DOS case, either, since there was a big difference between that and the Linux cases, namely that in the former case they actually *had* a case. Seems he only looked at who won and figured they could do it again.
Granted, as a business and financial guy and not a tech guy, he wouldn't have been able to make much of the evidence even if he had looked at, but that gets us back to listening to the experts. Absolutely everyone who actually had any clue about the whole situation and who wasn't an employee, lawyer, or expert witness for SCO (that is, people being paid), said from the outset that the claims were ridiculous and SCO had no case. He should have listened. Even Darl, I'm certain, knew perfectly well that SCO's claims were groundless, although I doubt any written evidence of that will ever be found. I'm sure he's at least smart enough to have confined all such communication to face-to-face speech.
Lyons' chickens have come home to roost. So have SCO's. It's just a shame this didn't actually come to trial, to establish once and for all, in court, the strength of the GPL. Still, it's a good victory, and no one may dare to try and pull a SCO again for a very long time, if ever. And if they do, they certainly aren't going to try it on IBM. Big blue made that message as clear as if they'd left a horse's head in Darl's bed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, me too. I prefer to buy a CD and rip it myself, to whatever bit rate and encoding I like.
If anyone from the RIAA is reading, I'd like them to note that my iPod is crammed with a few thousand songs, all legal, ripped from CDs I have. The great majority of these CDs are old material, mostly by well-known acts on major labels. The new material is all from either small Indie-ish labels, or very often, from CDs bought directly from bands that recorded and self-produced their material. There's just nothing I find worthwhile on major labels anymore, and this has been the case for years.
You don't suppose this could have anything to do with declining music sales, do you?
No kidding. I bet "Police, police, get down!" Would be a pretty effective thing for home-invasion robbers to shout, too.
If you RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know, this is Slashdot. Still...), you'll find that the main point of danger was that the guy thought a prowler was in his yard and went outside with a kitchen knife. Under the circumstances (yes, that was a dumb thing to do, he should have called 911 himself), he could have been shot. Or, if the swat team had broken the door down, what might have happened? If someone broke your down in the middle of the night, in the dark, and rushed into your house, wouldn't you be likely to try and resist? Especially if you had a wife and kids and you thought you were being attacked? What if that had happened and he'd had a gun? Many people, in such circumstances, would assume it was a robbery and shoot. Then the SWAT team would have returned fire and killed him.
Yes, this guy needs to go to jail for a long, long time. Not to Federal prison, though, but to state prison, which is where the ass-pounding problem exists. Federal prisons are mostly filled with non-violent offenders and relatively easy time, which is where the "Club Fed" nickname came from.
Actually, they'd be far better off in Russia, where spamming is completely legal.
Kushnar's death had nothing to do with spamming; it was just random chance that he was a spammer. He was killed in a robbery gone wrong after he brought three women (!) back to his place from a night club and they slipped him a mickey so they could rob him. He started coming around while the robbery was still in progress, and was then beaten to death. Those sorts of robberies aren't (or at least weren't at the time) unusual there.
That's the first thing that crossed my mind, too. My last business travel was booked less than 72 hours in advance, when I was asked to attend a conference in place of someone else who had to cancel on short notice. That made me the only representative of my company in attendance, and since it was on the opposite coast, there's no way I could have driven there in that time, even if I'd been inclined to do so. Well, OK, maybe, but it would have been both dicey and dangerous and required at least 12 hours a day on the road at speeds well beyond the speed limit. No thanks.
I was pretty surprised to see this even appear on Slashdot. By noon PDT it had already been confirmed as a hoax. I expected to see it in the morning, when it was still thought to be true, or maybe early afternoon. As the hours went by and it didn't appear, I started to think that maybe there'd been some real editorial diligence going on at Slashdot. (I know, I know, what was I thinking???)
/. editorial standards shall remain intact for the foreseeable future :)
Then, BAM! After it's been denounced as a hoax in many quarters and has already mostly run its course, it not only shows up on Slashdot but gets posted by CowboyNeal personally. I guess my lack of faith in
That's the funny thing about shills (or fanbo[iy]s, if you prefer) - they usually work for free.
There are also those who will defend anything Apple does, even when Apple is wrong, and those who, because they consider Linux superior to Windows, will extrapolate that "Linux is perfect and has no flaws."
While his preferences likely do not affect that move at all, Linspire has failed to appeal to much of the populace (general or otherwise) throughout its existence, and I don't see anything in Linspire 6 that is likely to change that.
The biggest problems faced by Linspire are:
-It's hard to get people to pay for Linux distros when most of them are free (lots of people don't even like to pay for proprietary apps or OSes, thus the popularity of warez).
-Most new Linux users don't go out and choose a distro on their own. They ask around, consult friends who use Linux, as a local LUG for help or maybe attend a LUG installfest, etc. When they do those things, Linspire and Freespire are two names they may not hear at all, and if they do, it's unlikely to be in a positive context. Even before the Linspire-MSFT deal, Linspire wasn't all that well regarded; now, Linspire is widely reviled.
Looking at the second one, while his preferences may not affect that strategic move, those preferences also seem to be the preferences of most of the Linux user community, which is likely to affect the *success* of that move. In other words, individual preferences scale well. CF Novell, who signed the same deal. Novell has an entrenched and popular Linux brand in SuSE, which is probably second only to Red Hat in Enterprise deployments, and they have now also completed the move of Netware onto Linux. Those two branches of their customer base are both ones very used to using proprietary software and are thus unlikely to take much (if any) issue with Novell's deal with MSFT. The broader Linux community is no happier with Novell than it is with Linspire, but Novell's entrenched position in the enterprise may allow them to get away with it (or may not; time will tell, but I think they will).
Linspire doesn't have that luxury, because it is an end-user/home user oriented distro with little or no presence in the enterprise. In other words, it's very dependent on word of mouth, and the good will of the community. Having never enjoyed much more than a lukewarm community reception, and having now mostly lost whatever community good will it may have had, Linspire is not in an enviable position. Unlike Novell, Linspire is likely to be substantially harmed by the MSFT deal.
Uhh, pardon me, but I'm a former Microsoft employee, and "Microsoftie" is very commonly used by Microsoft employees as a self-reference. There is nothing at all wrong with having it on the front page of Slashdot. This most basic of errors renders your entire post baseless.
As far as Hilf being a hardcore Microsoftie, I can't directly comment on that because I don't know him, but I was a first-level manager during my time at Microsoft, and I feel comfortable stating that you cannot rise as high in management as he is without being a fairly hardcore Microsoftie. That doesn't mean he's not an effective manager or that he doesn't do a good job running the open source lab, but it does mean he drinks the Microsoft Kool-Aid or fakes it very, very well. You can't rise in MSFT if you don't. It's as simple as that. My main reason for leaving is that I don't drink that Kool-Aid, and it's a hard place to be comfortable if you don't. If you do, Microsoft is a pretty good place to work. Everyone there just "gets" the software business in a way you see at few other companies. The cafeteria pizza is awesome (but don't drink the coffee; it's the worst I've ever had. I can't imagine what they do to it to get it to taste to bad), and the prices on Microsoft software at the employee store are amazingly cheap. The swag is very expensive, though. I never bought any, even though there were a couple things I would have liked, even if I don't drink the Kool-Aid.
One other thing to keep in mind is why MSFT has an open source lab (I guess they've renamed it; used to be the Linux Lab, IIRC) is not because they think open source is good or because they really want to co-exist with it. The reasons they have it are twofold: one is that many of MSFT's big customers have either always used open source or are now, and it's so common that they have to co-exist with it whether they want to or not, and the other reason is they want to take a good look at and see what features they can co-opt/find ways to defeat it. Or as Sun Tzu put it, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."
The story as posted to Slashdot was really pretty accurate. Thanks for playing.
Joking? I certainly hope so. Windows doesn't come even close to making that cut, even if we restrict the scope to "One of the first personal computer OSes." Even the first version of Windows (which I have actually scene with my own eyes, running on a PC-XT, and which may be the reason I need corrective lenses today ) was a relative latecomer among personal computer OSes. Well before Windows there was CPM, Amiga, Apple, DOS, and many others.
One of the most popular OSes? Sure, at least for the "market share" definition of popular (for the definition of popular as "well liked" it might be another story).
I know you're just a troll, but...
The argument that (UNIX in general, not just Linux) is more secure than Windows is true. The argument that this is by design is also true, since some of the design choices made on Windows were - from a security perspective horrible mistakes. You could make the argument that some of the superior design that the UNIX security model has is because some of the dangerous choices in Windows just weren't thought of/possible in the late sixties when UNIX was invented, and that later designers of desktop environments for UNIX had both Microsoft's mistakes and Apples successes to look at when making their own choices, but at the end of the day, *nix just has a better security model.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is kind of locked into its security design mistakes because fixing them would change so many of the way things work that Windows users are used to (and one of the fixes - dumping the registry - would just require a compatibility-breaking complete re-tool of Windows). I'm not going to dive into a detailed debate of the how and why those design choices on Windows were made, or if they were justified, but they were made, and they have consequences. The end result of them is what we're concerned with.
That said, Windows is nevertheless a lot more secure than it used to be, and so is *nix. Both have raised the bar considerably. However, *nix is still a lot more secure than Windows for a number of reaons apart from the better security model. One is that exploitable vulnerabilities - especially if they are remotely exploitable - for open source software are typically patched within hours or days, and vendors get the patches out very swiftly thereafter. Another is that at least on Linux and BSD systems, applying those patches is quick, easy, can often be made automatic, and never requires a reboot except in cases of a kernel patch (for obvious reasons). Patches on Windows (and to be fair, Mac, and other proprietary *nix systems) typically take weeks, and sometimes months, to get issued. I could throw out a lot more specific examples all linked around the security models, such as how painful it is to not run as an administrative user on Windows, but I think you can see the point.
Is either OS secure? Depends on what you mean by secure. Absolutely secure? No, that's not possible. Good phsyical security doesn't do it. An airgap from any network doesn't do it. Even if you encased a computer in concrete, glass, steel, and another layer of concrete, then sunk it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, it wouldn't be secure. Someone who wanted it badly enough, and had the financial resources needed, could find it, recover it, un-encase it, and get it working - either fully, or at least enough to extract some data.
Security is a continuum, ranging from "wide open" to "Marianas Trench" and every computer (not just every OS) falls somewhere on that continuum. I'm sure there's an overlap around the top end of the Windows range and the bottom end of the *nix range (that is, the most well-secured Windows systems are probably more secure than the least well-secured *nix systems), the general fact is that most *nix systems are more secure than most Windows systems. I wish that weren't true; I wish Windows were much more secure. It would make my job in the security industry easier. Take away the Windows-based botnets and the Linux-based hosts running phishing sites don't matter (and FWIW, not all of those are compromised hosts, either; many of them are just run by phishers, usually in some "bulletproof hosting" environment, and don't forget that one of the big reasons the bot herders like them is because they are hard to break into and take over; they want neither other bot herders nor LE breaking in there, and that's much easier to achieve on *nix than it is on Windows).
That'll teach me to not hit preview first :p
Of course, it should read "Inside and outside of government agencies"
Actually, security experts both in and out of government agents had warned against just that sort of attack, and had done so well before 9/11. The problem wasn't that nobody expected it; the problem was that nobody listened to and acted upon the advice of those who expected it.
Obligatory reference: it's just good they didn't try the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
My Razr has had a couple of updates.
I'm also a long-time Thinkpad user (I still have a working 600X running Linux), and the only notebook I've ever used that I think is as good (albeit very different) than a ThinkPad is the MacBook Pro I'm using at work. If you really want something other than a ThinkPad, give one a look.
That said, there isn't anything you can buy that won' have a bunch of its components made and/or assembled in China. That's just a fact on the ground. Another poster mentioned that Fujitsu notebooks are still made in Japan. Assuming that as true without verifying it, even if the machine is made in Japan, some of its components will almost certainly be made in China, especially electrical things like power supplies.
Whether that matter of degree (a Japanese-made machine with some Chinese parts Vs. a Chinese-made machine with some non-Chinese parts) is important or not is something you'll have to decide for yourself, but one thing is pretty sure: it's very, very hard, if not impossible, to buy a computer that doesn't have at least some Chinese-made parts.
Finally, while China is a major vendor (at least) to the Burmese government for arms, and has human rights problems of its own, it is not China that is doing this, it is the Burmese government. Also, AFAIK, Lenovo is not a state-owned company (someone correct me on that if I'm wrong), so they are sort of an innocent bystander to this. Still, if you feel China is culpable enough here that you want to boycott all Chinese products, then do what you have to do.
I'm on the opposite side on that one. I rather like O2K7 and would be happy if OO.Org adopted a ribbon-based UI, but I don't like Vista. The security model is a pain, and the whole thing seems more designed to keep a computer safe *from* me than to keep it safe *for* me. YMMV.
Vista will improve -like others have said, XP was pretty crappy at first, too - and it will eventually be reliable (but the security model will still suck, I expect), and people still running XP will upgrade about the time Vista's successor is released, like my brother, who just upgraded to XP about the time Vista was released (from Win2K). He might not have done it even then, but I was still working for Microsoft at the time, and I bought him a copy at the company store. That made it cost-effective enough to get him to upgrade.
Well, I can't say that I practice it often, but I do believe that on those occasions when one trolls, one should at least do it at least halfway properly. That would include being clear on the difference between trolling and flamebait, because being unclear on that means that one can neither troll properly, nor flame properly.
:)
Thanks for asking
P.S. The foregoing is meant to be funny (but also serious, since those posts were clearly trolls, not flamebait); please mod accordingly. Of course, since I marked it as OT, it'll probably get modded Insightful :-/
Before moderating, you mods really ought to read the mod guidelines. The post that started this little thread was clearly a troll, according to the moderator guidelines. So was the parent to this post.
I won't give you a link to the moderator guidelines; it will do you good to look them up for yourself.
Or, if you just can't be bothered, the following is a clear example of flamebait:
"If you're too fscking stupid to tell the difference between a troll and flamebait, don't fscking use your mod points. You probably won't get any of your other mods right either, and we'll all be better off if you take your mod points and stick them up your ass instead of moderating."
The foregoing flamebait has been a public service announcement.
By their own logic, maybe, but not according to the law. Trademark law doesn't prevent people from using the name of your product to talk about it, even if you think it does/should.
An example of a way to weaken your trademark and potentially risk losing it is someone else starts a business or product with the same name as yours (or maybe very similar; there was a charity resale boutique called Sacks Fifth Avenue (which was on 5th Avenue, I forget what city, and they were successfully sued for trademark infringement by Sak's Fifth Avenue) and in the same general market sector, and you don't do anything to prevent it.
In the Sak's case, while it gave them kind of a black eye at the time, they went ahead anyway because if they failed to enforce their trademark, no matter how noble the reason, they could have lost the ability to enforce their trademark in the future.
That pretty covers it. The article takes something that isn't even any sort of problem, and tries to build it into one. Adverti^H^H^H^H grandstanding maneuver by the Kolivas PR team? Probably.
Identity crisis? Pfft. Risk of forking Linux? Pffft. There are tons of forked kernels out there already. Red Hat has kernel patches that aren't in the upstream. So does Debian. So does . Some people run the -mm kernel, which is not the same as the mainline kernel, either. If Kolivas wants to create his own kernel fork too, that's fine. I'm sure Linus would even give him his blessings. Some people would use it. Most wouldn't. If he really had something that was somehow better than the mainline kernel, some distros might diff it and apply the patch to their kernels. Life would go on, Linux would go on. Hardly anyone outside of the kernel development community would even notice there was another kernel fork.
I don't think anyone, not even Linus, knows how many kernel forks there are. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
I don't know what the laws regarding modeling releases are in the jurisdictions relevant to this case, but a good friend of mine who's a professional photographer here in California says that you'd better have a signed modeling release if you want to do anything with a photo other than keep it for yourself, and you're better off having one even in that case. He's never done any work using under-eighteen models, but the fact that she is a minor can only make it worse.
If a court would buy an argument like inferring a modeling release, that might help Virgin Mobile and Flickr get out from under, leaving only the photographer with any exposure. Since he probably doesn't have any money, of course, it's not very likely he'll be sued. If the court doesn't buy it and says they should have verified a modeling release, especially since the subject is a minor. They may well raise that argument at pre-trial hearings, and if the court doesn't agree, I expect they'll start talking settlement rather than have it go to trial.
It was hard to decide between replying and spending my last mod point to mod you up, but I eventually settled on the reply.
I agree with a lot of what you say (you don't see many men majoring in nursing, especially straight men, and I think a major reason why is that so many other straight men would assume they were gay if they did so), but I'll throw out another reason why a lot of women don't "do" computers/engineering/math/etc: a lot of them just don't really like that stuff. I have two young daughters: one of them loves to build things, take stuff apart, try to put stuff together, etc., and the other has little interest in that but loves language tasks. She just started kindergarten and is not yet five, can already read by herself, and is a native speaker of two languages (her younger sister also speaks two languages, but not nearly as well as she did at the same age). I can easily see my younger daughter becoming an engineer (or a Marine; she's pretty tough, rather aggressive, usually fearless, will try to climb anything, and never loses a fight with her older sister, despite being much shorter and lighter), but would be surprised indeed if my older daughter had any interest in it.
My wife could probably be an engineer. She's good at math, has a great instinctive feel for fixing things and figuring out how they work, assembling furniture, toys, etc., but she has no interest in it. She's a designer and founded a boutique which became her family business, but even the design part of it doesn't interest her all that much. The part of the business she likes best is using her people skills on the boutique floor.
Before you get the impression that I'm (only) saying "It's because girls don't like that stuff," I should also point out that most boys don't like that stuff all that much, either. Boys and girls all have to take math, one or more of physics/bio/chem in school, but most of the boys and most of the girls don't go on to major in any engineering discipline in college. To be sure, the percentage of girls who go on to study engineering in college is smaller than the percentage of boys (women are definitely a serious minority in engineering programs), I think that this is more a "matter of degree" issue than the huge difference it might appear to be if we look only at the ratio of men to women in engineering programs.
How many men study literature? A good number, actually. I almost majored in it myself, and at least where I went to school, there were lots of guys in lit classes (I settled on linguistics instead, because I really liked it and thought I could make a better living with a linguistics degree).
Fix the culture at age 10? I'm not sure you can (how often do you run across 10 year old girls who are interested in engineering? Even then, I bet they're a minority of around the same number who still like it when entering college), or even that it's early enough: my kids are four and five (almost) and it's already quite clear which one of them likes engineering-type stuff and which one doesn't. Trying to encourage the older one in that direction (something we've both worked on) gets us no where; she's just not interested. She likes languages, and she likes girly-girl stuff. She wants to go to ballet class. Her younger sister wants to go to karate class. They've already sorted out their likes and dislikes.
That said, I'd be interested to hear what you think should (and more importantly, can) be fixed at 10, or even earlier? I could be wrong, and you may know this a lot better than I do. For example, how can we make girls (or boys, for that matter) at 10, or even 8, or even 5, like math (or engineering, or mechanics, or literature, or ballet, or sewing, or cooking, or...) if they just aren't interested in that stuff and think it's boring? I know that I always did far better in subjects I liked than in subjects I didn't, and nobody ever *made* me like a subject I didn't like. Can we change the culture when the culture is to a very great extent an extension of likes and dislikes we establish at a very early age, and in some cases are significantly established along gender lines?
By some people, maybe, but I got Windows 95 on my first Pentium machine, and it was superior in every way to the Windows 3.11 on the machine it replaced. Vista hasn't shown us that they sort of night-and-day difference between itself and XP. Yes, Vista will be shoved down our throats eventually, but it will be a very long time before the Vista installed base is >= the XP installed base.
That pretty well covers it, although I do give him a certain amount of credit for publicly admitting that he got it so wrong, even if his admission is partly self-justifying.
His problem, which led him to look at a dog and swear it was a crack pipe, is not that he looked at the evidence and insisted that it meant the opposite of what he said; it's that he didn't look at at the evidence, he only looked at the competing claimants. In large part it was his pro-corporate prejudices, as you say, but I think there's a little more to it than that. After all, Novell, Red Hat, and IBM are also corporations; far larger and richer ones than SCO, at that. All three of them called BS on SCO, refused to negotiate at all, and said "We'll see you in court." He should have taken that into account, but it seems he ignored that and chose to look only at the Slashdot and Groklaw crowds, choosing to dismiss them as partisans and "amateur sleuths." What he failed to realize is that just because you're partisan, that doesn't mean you're wrong, and that among those partisan crowds there was also a great deal of expertise about Linux, UNIX, and law. He completely missed the fact that there was so much expertise there, writing them off as the unwashed masses.
I guess he didn't really look too closely at the DR-DOS case, either, since there was a big difference between that and the Linux cases, namely that in the former case they actually *had* a case. Seems he only looked at who won and figured they could do it again.
Granted, as a business and financial guy and not a tech guy, he wouldn't have been able to make much of the evidence even if he had looked at, but that gets us back to listening to the experts. Absolutely everyone who actually had any clue about the whole situation and who wasn't an employee, lawyer, or expert witness for SCO (that is, people being paid), said from the outset that the claims were ridiculous and SCO had no case. He should have listened. Even Darl, I'm certain, knew perfectly well that SCO's claims were groundless, although I doubt any written evidence of that will ever be found. I'm sure he's at least smart enough to have confined all such communication to face-to-face speech.
Lyons' chickens have come home to roost. So have SCO's. It's just a shame this didn't actually come to trial, to establish once and for all, in court, the strength of the GPL. Still, it's a good victory, and no one may dare to try and pull a SCO again for a very long time, if ever. And if they do, they certainly aren't going to try it on IBM. Big blue made that message as clear as if they'd left a horse's head in Darl's bed.