I used to live in Vietnam, which has made great economic progress but is still one of the world's poorest countries, and I never saw anything less than a Pentium II there, and even those were rare. Most of the used machines were mid-range PIIIs. New stuff is all P4 and Celeron.
The odd part was that AMD is a total non-player, in what is without doubt the most price-sensitive market I've seen (I made less money as a sysadmin/net eng/sales eng there than I would have working at McDonald's here, and I was making *way* more than any Vietnamese admins or programmers I knew). There were a couple of shops in the Ho Chi Minh City computer district that had Durons on their price lists, and one or two motherboards to match. No one sold Athlons or a motherboard capable of taking any Athlon.
Those same shops also listed Adaptec 2940UW on their price list, but if you asked them if they had one or could order one, the answer was always "no." Makes me wonder if they really had Durons, either.
There are still a few 486 boxes out there serving as routers or print servers even in G-7 countries, but by and large even the rest of the world doesn't use that stuff any more.
Why do you get abuse heaped on you? Umm, don't look now, but you're the one who opened with abuse? Does "code hoarder" sound familiar? Don't you recall pouring out abuse on anyone who has respectfully
Regarding point 2, when did you free this code? After DOS was no longer in use and the code was commercially worthless? If so, you're being dishonest. And were you really selling it, or were you asking money and wishing someone would buy it? For that matter, why don't you tell us all the names of these things that you've freed? I was around in the DOS days and way before that. So were some other/. readers. Perhaps we've heard of them? While you're at it, why not stop posting as an AC? You've got big talk when you won't even let anyone know your nick.
Regarding points 3 and 4, you did in fact state that you could/would add the features. Allow me to refresh your memory with a quote:
"_I_ want to add the features."
In fact, let me quote what went before that:
" I don't WANT to be at the mercy of some fickle-minded, fat-assed, acne-faced hobbyist to implement, or more likely, NOT implement, a feature. He could die, or he could just throw his drug addled hands up and walk away -- THEN you're fucked."
I could go into an aside here on the topic of who is heaping abuse upon whom, but it would be lost on you.
Instead, let's take a look at what you have now said.
You have said "I want to add these features. I don't want to be dependent on someone else to do it." Now you have in fact admitted that, well, you can't do it yourself. Which puts you back to being dependent on others to do it. Freeing the source code would change this how? You'd be just as dependent on others as you are now, and because you have such an attitude problem, no one would do anything for you.
I would ask you to explain how one would go about fucking a hat, but frankly, Scarlett, I don't really want to know.
Why do you sound so much like a person who has never written, or even attemped to write, a single line of code? Ever? Like a person who just wants free (as in beer) software? Correct me (civilly) if I'm wrong, but I'm entirely certain that if he GPLed it tomorrow, you would never contribute a single feature to it, nor push any cash in the direction of someone willing to write those features on your behalf. Even if by some amazing turn of the planets I am wrong and you do code, could you code what he codes? I doubt it, or you'd be out there doing it already.
If you want to add the features, why not start now? Can't get his code? No problem, write a clone. You talk like it's so easy, so stop griping on/. and get started right away. The sooner you get something out there under the GPL, the sooner other people can start helping you with it. Or would, if they could stand your attitude and mouth. I bet that if you had whatever price he would want to free the code, he wouldn't sell it to you because of your impossible rudeness. Even by the low standards of civility one finds on/. you are exceptional.
Please try to remember that if you create a thing, you can do anything you want with it. Proprietary license. GPL. Keep it on a CD under your pillow until you die, with instructions that it be buried with you and never shown to anyone. It's yours, and no one else's. You, and only you, have the right to decide what happens to it. He has made his decision. That is his right.
I'd love to see everyone financially able to do so make everything Free Software. Some people can do that, other people can't. Let us all be grateful to the ones who can and do, and understanding of those who cannot. And let us never forget one thing: you cannot *compel* anyone to release their software under a Free license if they don't want to do so. The second you compel someone to release it, IT IS NO LONGER *FREE* because you deprived the author of her freedom to do what she wants with her property.
I've never been to a Best Buy, couldn't honestly say if San Diego even has one, I've never checked.
The point is, I just download my linux distros from the Internet, and most people either do the same, or get them from acquaintances who did, or from places like Cheap Bytes, or the back of a book or magazine.
ISOs for Red Hat on Kazaa? Umm, at this point, I simply need to ask "why?" You can download them for free from Red Hat's site or any of the numerous Red Hat mirrors around the world. With Red Hat's blessing. Spyware not included:-) I can't imagine why anyone would put them on Kazaa. Bit Torrent, maybe, since the don't do the whole spyware thing, but again, why bother? Getting them from the source is easy, fast, and more trustworthy, since any binary you get from a P2P network could be trojaned.
I personally do not use any P2P software, since you never know if/when there will be a good 'sploit in it that will allow someone to get a remote shell. I do a daily update against security.debian.org so there should be no known and unpatched local root exploits on my system, but there's never a guarantee on any platform that there isn't an unknown one that is waiting to be found, or has already been found by blackhats.
Perhaps my point has been unclear, so I'll try to make it crystal here: the free redistribution of Red Hat is:
1) Completely legal and ethical;
2) Expressly authorized by the license (GPL);
3) Not harmful to Red Hat, since there business model is making money off of sales of consulting, enterprise support, RHAS, etc.
4) Not likely to increase significantly after RH boxed sets go away, since almost everyone gets RH through the other channels mentioned above already.
To conclude, eliminating the boxed will improve RH's bottom line (doubtless the reason they are doing it) and is not likely to cause them any significant loss of market share, and quite possibly no loss at all. In Red Hat's opinion (at least), this will be a win for them. They are probably right.
No one was talking about RH Advanced Server, the product under discussion was the Red Hat boxed set that can be found on retail shelves. I've never seen RHAS there, have you? The original article also did not state or imply that they would stop selling media, deadtree documentation, etc (a boxed set, by any other name) for AS. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but the article didn't mention it.
Your line of thinking seems to be that discontinuing boxed sets of plain old, freely copyable Red Hat Linux will somehow increase piracy of the not-freely-copyable RHAS. If that is in fact what you are stating, would you please explain exactly how that is supposed to happen? There seems to be no logical connection at all between dropping boxed sets and people pirating RHAS. If that's not what you're saying, then just what are you trying to say?
Regarding "unregulated duplication of the product," the first thing that needs to be said is that it is not unregulated. Indeed, the governing license (GPL) regulates the situation by specifically giving anyone who has the software the right to copy and redistribute the software, in modified or unmodified form. You seem to be trying to some kind of connection between this copying and piracy, but that is completely wrong. Copying GPLed software is not in any respect piracy, it is merely the exercise of rights that you are specifically granted by that license.
Does that generate revenue for Red Hat? No, but it does the next best thing: it distributes their product at no cost to them. The fact that they are withdrawing the boxed sets means that they must be a money-loser and that RH does not expect that to change in the foreseeable future. So, they save a bunch of money by just making ISOs available and the existing network in the community downloads them and duplicates them for others. RH gets the same installed base, but without the cost of making all those boxed sets. Their bandwidth needs likely won't change, since it seems that hardly anyone buys the boxed sets anyway.
For a boxed-set vendor to make money off of those sets, they probably need to follow SuSE's model. That model probably stands in the way of market share, since downloading the individual packages and making ISOs is more work than most people want to do, but it apparently works for SuSE. It is apparently RH's judgement that download-only will work better for them than reversing their long-standing free ISO availablility would be (and the subsequent alienation of a lot of people who use RH). Time will tell whose strategy is better.
" but also simply because so much piracy exists in their future (online) environment."
Huh? Piracy of GPLed software? That would be taking the code and using it in a proprietary product, but you seem to be saying (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that people would be illegally copying Red Hat. It is, of course, completely legal to copy Red Hat. That's how I've gotten every version of RH I've ever had except one. Heck, before TurboLinux had an actual distro called that, the first TurboLinux product I ever saw was called "The TurboLinux Edition of Red Hat Linux 4.2." It was a 100% copy of Red Hat, nothing at all changed. Everything in the installer and elsewhere said "Red Hat." There was no reference at all to TurboLinux anywhere except the label on the CD. And it was 100% legal.
I think RH was probably faced with making one of two choices: pull the boxed sets, which must be losing money for them, or follow SuSE's approach and not provide ISOs of Red Hat. Assuming that SuSE hasn't changed anything recently, you can FTP down all of their individual files, but if you want ISOs, you have to make them yourself.
They probably figured that not having ISOs for download would lose them far more market share, and save them far less money, than dropping the boxed sets would.
Umm, no, it's not at all Red Hat saying "The Linux desktop doesn't exist." They know perfectly well that it does, and that they probably have the largest single share of it.
What Red Hat is saying is that Linux does not get onto the desktop via the boxed set, at least not in sufficient quantities for them to make money at it.
Look around at the people you know who are running Linux. How many of them installed from a boxed set that they purchased, or even from someone else's purchased boxed set? Probably very few. Most people who need CDs either buy them for a small charge from someone who will burn them a set cheaply, or from outfits like Cheap Bytes, who sell low-cost CDs for various distros.
I saw Progeny's boxed set of Potato at Fry's in San Diego about two weeks ago. There were one or two boxes, and I have to wonder just how long they've been there:-)
Many of the world's Internet users pay *per minute* for access, to the telco, the ISP, or in some cases both. So yes, spam really does cost a lot of us money.
I've recently returned to the United States after nine years of living abroad, and everywhere I lived during those nine years (eight of them in a G-7 country) had per-minute charges.
I don't have to deal with those anymore, but I do have to deal with being unemployed and with waiting for the fscking telco to get those three load coils out of my phone line so the DSL I ordered three weeks ago and was told two weeks ago that it was up and running, will actually work:-(
The trouble with the Starbucks at Shinjuku Minamiguchi is that the number of customers always exceeds the number of seats, unless you include sitting on the steps outside.
Actually, Gifu is the nicest place in Japan I've ever been (I lived in Japan for 8 years and saw quite a few places in that time). If you haven't been to Gujo-Hachiman, go up there in summer some time, you'll love it. The nicest way to go is from Nagoya to Mino-Oota via Gifu City, and from Mino-Oota take the Nagaragawa Tetsudo to Gujo-Hachiman. That's a long trip, longer if you're coming from Tokyo or Osaka, but worth the time. The Nagaragawa gorge is breathtaking. I was nearly speechless the first time I saw it, in 1992.
WRT bandwidth, ISDN is available practically everywhere in Japan and has been for years. If you can only get 64K, it's like that's all your ISP supports - something that isn't NTT's fault. I used a 128K leased line with a Yamaha ISDN router for years. Not DSL, but I found it sufficient. Granted, if it wasn't a perk of sorts from my job (I was on call 7-24, the leased line and a/28 was my compensation), it would have been a whole lot more expensive than DSL.
Well, not *exactly* reverse-engineered. IBM actually published the IBM PC BIOS source code, so that people developing applications for the PC could know exactly what to expect from the BIOS. You weren't allowed to do anything with the source code other than look it, and under copyright law, having seen it would almost certainly preclude you from working on a competing BIOS project.
However, what earlier cloners such as Phoenix and Compaq did was to have two teams work on the cloning project. The first team looked at the source code and documented all of the system calls. The second team read that documentation and produced clean-room code that would behave the same way as the IBM BIOS. The second team never saw, of course, the IBM source code.
If the user chooses to not do this and subsequently loses said data, that's not the vendor's problem. We know that all disk drives fail: they have moving parts, and some day those parts will stop moving. You don't know if that day will come when the disk is 5 years old or 5 days old, so if you value the data, back it up.
Japans' relative longevity is directly related to their far better diet.
The Japanese diet contains quite a lot of meat, and what passes as low-salt in Japan would be considered a health risk in the United States. The amount of salt in the Japanese diet is astronomical. Meat consumption is also far higher than you might think. Walk into any Japanese supermarket and compare the amount of meat on the shelves to the amount of fish. Ones with a lot of fish will have it divided about 50/50. In most, there's more meat than fish. Junk food is also very widely consumed, and many office workers eat at least one meal a day of prepared food from a convenience store, which is high in fat, salt, and probably MSG. McDonald's and various Japanese fast food chains are dishing up hamburgers as fast as they can be made, as well as the equally unhealthy gyuudon (a bowl of rice with beef on top, lots of fat and salt). Junk food - candy, chips, etc., - is also widely consumed.
The Japanese diet may not be as unhealthy as the North American one, but it's a lot closer than most people outside of Japan think. That healthy diet is half-mythical. It's almost like it's part of Japan's managed external image, which is quite effective at concealing a lot of ugly truths about Japanese society.
Also, a large portion of the US's healthcare profits have been re-invested into research, and that research has been succesfull.
Japanese pharmaceutical companies spend a lot on research, too.
Because for various reasons, the US and other Developed Countries have agreed NOT to charge the poor countries full price.
That's because those poor countries were going to go ahead and make it themselves, anyway. Small profit beats no profit. The big pharmaceuticals are hardly doing that out of the goodness of their hearts.
The main thing that makes the US health care system so expensive is most certainly not any subsidy to other countries. The only thing that can raise the cost of is medicine. It doesn't make running a hospital more expensive. It doesn't make running a doctor's office more expensive. What does, then? Low hospital occupancy makes it hard to cover room costs, which can drive up room prices to compensate. Out of control malpractice suits make malpractice insurance so expensive that doctors have to charge a lot more. The very high cost of medical school. The ridiculous price of green fees and good golf clubs:-)
And plain old greed.
The final factor, though, remains the health insurance question. If everyone had it, health care wouldn't be unreasonably expensive in most cases. Universal coverage is the answer.
Please note that having universal coverage does not mean getting rid of private insurance. Japan has private health insurance companies providing national health insurance, and they generally do it cheaper than the government corporation does. There's no reason why the US couldn't implement a standard national health insurance program, with a standard pricing scheme and no paperwork, but with the actual insurance provided exclusively by private carriers who meet the standards of the plan.
I lived in Japan for eight years, and I had universal health care the whole time.
What I observed during that time is that the high-end of medical care in the US is higher and better than that generally available in Japan, and hospital rooms are a lot posher (I was hospitalized for a week there once, and while it was rather spartan, it also cost me very little), the Japanese average is much closer, and the low-end is much, much better than the U.S. (where the low-end is people with no insurance and low income, who often can't afford much medical care and put it off until the emergency room is needed).
The Japanese universal health insurance system works like this: you have national health insurance. It may be the general public insurance type, or it may be the employer-paid type, depending on your job (full-time workers generally have the latter).
If you need medical care or dental, you go to the provider of your choice, so long as they take national health insurance (the great majority do) and pay the co-payment (30% for the fomer type, 10% for the latter type) and you are treated. No forms, no muss, no fuss.
How much you pay for insurance depends on your salary the year before, so if you're poor, that makes your health insurance nearly free (yes, there is an upper cap on premiums; having a good salary doesn't put the whole thing into health insurance).
Japanese national health insurance has something of a looming liquidity problem as a result of a rapidly aging population, but that doesn't detract from its effectiveness at getting people decent health care.
Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, for both men and women, despite how much so many Japanese men drink, and despite how many of them are heavy smokers (most Japanese men smoke, as do an increasing number of Japanese women, and based on my observations, I'd guess that the average Japanese male smoker consumes at least a pack a day, and heavy drinking after work is quite common (commuting by train has its advantages;-) ). Could the ready availability of decent health care have something to do with this longevity in the face of excess? I think so.
3) I'm sorry when did you get a muscle car with a 400 mile range? Generally (even with an oversized gas tank) these cars come in at the 200-300 mile range per fill-up at best.
I owned a 1987 Mustang GT (5 liter V-8, overdrive automatic transmission w/lockup converter, 2.73:1 rear axle) for 6 years, and it could go 400 miles (freeway driving, average speed about 65 MPH) on the standard Ford gas tank. I drove from San Diego, California, to Payson, Utah (a distance of over 800 miles) and only stopped along the way for gas once, then filled it again when I reached Payson. I repeated the performance on the way back, stopping for gas once en route, then filling up again when I reached San Diego.
That car typically got 25 - 26 MPG in freeway driving, and my single tank record was 28.5 MPG, driving in California's Central Valley (it's very flat, and the air was relatively cool that day). Granted, going 400 miles on a tank left it very low, but it was possible. 350 was no problem at all, and even my normal mix of city street and freeway driving around San Diego got me 300 miles per tank.
If they haven't downside the gas tanks, I would expect a recent-model Mustang GT to go even farther on a single tank, and other manufacturers doubtless have similar range capabilities.
You say most murderers aren't executed, and then you ask what's wrong with me? What's wrong with the system, that murderers aren't taken out and shot?
You say all he committed was a thought crime? Now I need to ask what the hell is wrong with *you*? Because he was a consumer, someone else was encouraged to be a producer, and someone harmed those children. That makes him not guilty of a thought crime, but a party by extension to the actual crime. Everyone - both the producers and the consumers - involved in child pornography is a party to the crime, and nothing but the lowest form of scumbag, and should be given a punishment fitting the crime. The fitting punishment is capital punishment.
You write like someone who doesn't have children. I tell you this: anyone who would do that to anyone's children is a threat to all children, including mine, and should be executed for the good of society and the safety of all children. Do you know that many of the children used in child pornography are abducted? Many of them are eventually killed. You would let someone responsible for that live and maybe someday go free, and you think there's something wrong with me? You need a serious reality check.
In addition, it is not unusual for a company to have a policy that states something to the effect that you should have zero expectation of privacy when using company computer resources, including but nor limited to email and the network. Anything you do may be monitored or archived. Call centers frequently extend this to the telephone, but I'm sure they are not alone in that.
Microsoft has various intentions. Two of their main intentions are, as a for-profit company and a software vendor, to make money and to make quality software.
Thus far, they have proven far more adept at the former, however, just as no for-profit company *intends* to not make money, no software vendor *intends* to produce bad software, either. If Microsoft produces unreliable software, it is a failure of execution rather than a failure of intent.
you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.
I'd ask if you'd ever tried this, but I can tell already that you haven't. How? The thing with trees is that:
1) They grow. This could be a problem for hole alignment, not just on the trees in question, but others may be growing upwards in between them;
2) They are outside. Other things are also outside. Wind, for example. Because of wind's also being outside, the chances of getting those holes lined up in the first place are pretty small. The chances of keeping them that way are much smaller, and the chances of keeping them that way at some figure approaching "all the time" are, well, about zero.
A few weeks ago, I implemented an 802.11b WAN as the LAN/WAN engineer on a satellite + 802.11b WAN/VoIP pilot project in rural northern Vietnam. We had trees to contend with. Big ones, right between two of the sites. The way you deal with this is antenna poles. Big ones. Shoot the signal over the trees and use directional antennas.
In a situation like theirs, you could use a combination of outdoor WAPs uplinked to wireless 802.11b WAN routers , linking back to the place where the T1s (plural because 1 isn't going to be enough).
One of his questions, though, was how to equitably distribute the bandwidth. Unless you could find 802.11b WAP equipment that supported rate limiting (off the top of my head I can't think of any; Googling for it will be left as an exercise for the reader), another solution would be to rate-limit at the central router (assuming Cisco here) via traffic policing. Police traffic by netblock and have several different/24s in the wireless WAN.
Another alternative is to just not worry about it. Let the bandwidth hogs be bandwidth hogs. When there is plenty of bandwidth available, they can download big files in a hurry. When everybody is online, it will take them longer. Essentially, it's a question of "Do we make it artificially slower for everyone all the time, or do we let it become unavoidably slower for everyone some of the time, and faster for those online the rest of the time?"
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You forgot to mention his spelling of "Eunuch" :-)
I used to live in Vietnam, which has made great economic progress but is still one of the world's poorest countries, and I never saw anything less than a Pentium II there, and even those were rare. Most of the used machines were mid-range PIIIs. New stuff is all P4 and Celeron.
The odd part was that AMD is a total non-player, in what is without doubt the most price-sensitive market I've seen (I made less money as a sysadmin/net eng/sales eng there than I would have working at McDonald's here, and I was making *way* more than any Vietnamese admins or programmers I knew). There were a couple of shops in the Ho Chi Minh City computer district that had Durons on their price lists, and one or two motherboards to match. No one sold Athlons or a motherboard capable of taking any Athlon.
Those same shops also listed Adaptec 2940UW on their price list, but if you asked them if they had one or could order one, the answer was always "no." Makes me wonder if they really had Durons, either.
There are still a few 486 boxes out there serving as routers or print servers even in G-7 countries, but by and large even the rest of the world doesn't use that stuff any more.
Regarding points 3 and 4, you did in fact state that you could/would add the features. Allow me to refresh your memory with a quote:
"_I_ want to add the features."
In fact, let me quote what went before that:
" I don't WANT to be at the mercy of some fickle-minded, fat-assed, acne-faced hobbyist to implement, or more likely, NOT implement, a feature. He could die, or he could just throw his drug addled hands up and walk away -- THEN you're fucked."
I could go into an aside here on the topic of who is heaping abuse upon whom, but it would be lost on you. Instead, let's take a look at what you have now said.
You have said "I want to add these features. I don't want to be dependent on someone else to do it." Now you have in fact admitted that, well, you can't do it yourself. Which puts you back to being dependent on others to do it. Freeing the source code would change this how? You'd be just as dependent on others as you are now, and because you have such an attitude problem, no one would do anything for you.
I would ask you to explain how one would go about fucking a hat, but frankly, Scarlett, I don't really want to know.
Why do you sound so much like a person who has never written, or even attemped to write, a single line of code? Ever? Like a person who just wants free (as in beer) software? Correct me (civilly) if I'm wrong, but I'm entirely certain that if he GPLed it tomorrow, you would never contribute a single feature to it, nor push any cash in the direction of someone willing to write those features on your behalf. Even if by some amazing turn of the planets I am wrong and you do code, could you code what he codes? I doubt it, or you'd be out there doing it already.
/. and get started right away. The sooner you get something out there under the GPL, the sooner other people can start helping you with it. Or would, if they could stand your attitude and mouth. I bet that if you had whatever price he would want to free the code, he wouldn't sell it to you because of your impossible rudeness. Even by the low standards of civility one finds on /. you are exceptional.
If you want to add the features, why not start now? Can't get his code? No problem, write a clone. You talk like it's so easy, so stop griping on
Please try to remember that if you create a thing, you can do anything you want with it. Proprietary license. GPL. Keep it on a CD under your pillow until you die, with instructions that it be buried with you and never shown to anyone. It's yours, and no one else's. You, and only you, have the right to decide what happens to it. He has made his decision. That is his right.
I'd love to see everyone financially able to do so make everything Free Software. Some people can do that, other people can't. Let us all be grateful to the ones who can and do, and understanding of those who cannot. And let us never forget one thing: you cannot *compel* anyone to release their software under a Free license if they don't want to do so. The second you compel someone to release it, IT IS NO LONGER *FREE* because you deprived the author of her freedom to do what she wants with her property.
I've never been to a Best Buy, couldn't honestly say if San Diego even has one, I've never checked.
:-) I can't imagine why anyone would put them on Kazaa. Bit Torrent, maybe, since the don't do the whole spyware thing, but again, why bother? Getting them from the source is easy, fast, and more trustworthy, since any binary you get from a P2P network could be trojaned.
The point is, I just download my linux distros from the Internet, and most people either do the same, or get them from acquaintances who did, or from places like Cheap Bytes, or the back of a book or magazine.
ISOs for Red Hat on Kazaa? Umm, at this point, I simply need to ask "why?" You can download them for free from Red Hat's site or any of the numerous Red Hat mirrors around the world. With Red Hat's blessing. Spyware not included
I personally do not use any P2P software, since you never know if/when there will be a good 'sploit in it that will allow someone to get a remote shell. I do a daily update against security.debian.org so there should be no known and unpatched local root exploits on my system, but there's never a guarantee on any platform that there isn't an unknown one that is waiting to be found, or has already been found by blackhats.
Perhaps my point has been unclear, so I'll try to make it crystal here: the free redistribution of Red Hat is:
1) Completely legal and ethical;
2) Expressly authorized by the license (GPL);
3) Not harmful to Red Hat, since there business model is making money off of sales of consulting, enterprise support, RHAS, etc.
4) Not likely to increase significantly after RH boxed sets go away, since almost everyone gets RH through the other channels mentioned above already.
To conclude, eliminating the boxed will improve RH's bottom line (doubtless the reason they are doing it) and is not likely to cause them any significant loss of market share, and quite possibly no loss at all. In Red Hat's opinion (at least), this will be a win for them. They are probably right.
No one was talking about RH Advanced Server, the product under discussion was the Red Hat boxed set that can be found on retail shelves. I've never seen RHAS there, have you? The original article also did not state or imply that they would stop selling media, deadtree documentation, etc (a boxed set, by any other name) for AS. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but the article didn't mention it.
Your line of thinking seems to be that discontinuing boxed sets of plain old, freely copyable Red Hat Linux will somehow increase piracy of the not-freely-copyable RHAS. If that is in fact what you are stating, would you please explain exactly how that is supposed to happen? There seems to be no logical connection at all between dropping boxed sets and people pirating RHAS. If that's not what you're saying, then just what are you trying to say?
Regarding "unregulated duplication of the product," the first thing that needs to be said is that it is not unregulated. Indeed, the governing license (GPL) regulates the situation by specifically giving anyone who has the software the right to copy and redistribute the software, in modified or unmodified form. You seem to be trying to some kind of connection between this copying and piracy, but that is completely wrong. Copying GPLed software is not in any respect piracy, it is merely the exercise of rights that you are specifically granted by that license.
Does that generate revenue for Red Hat? No, but it does the next best thing: it distributes their product at no cost to them. The fact that they are withdrawing the boxed sets means that they must be a money-loser and that RH does not expect that to change in the foreseeable future. So, they save a bunch of money by just making ISOs available and the existing network in the community downloads them and duplicates them for others. RH gets the same installed base, but without the cost of making all those boxed sets. Their bandwidth needs likely won't change, since it seems that hardly anyone buys the boxed sets anyway.
For a boxed-set vendor to make money off of those sets, they probably need to follow SuSE's model. That model probably stands in the way of market share, since downloading the individual packages and making ISOs is more work than most people want to do, but it apparently works for SuSE. It is apparently RH's judgement that download-only will work better for them than reversing their long-standing free ISO availablility would be (and the subsequent alienation of a lot of people who use RH). Time will tell whose strategy is better.
P.S.
" but also simply because so much piracy exists in their future (online) environment."
Huh? Piracy of GPLed software? That would be taking the code and using it in a proprietary product, but you seem to be saying (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that people would be illegally copying Red Hat. It is, of course, completely legal to copy Red Hat. That's how I've gotten every version of RH I've ever had except one. Heck, before TurboLinux had an actual distro called that, the first TurboLinux product I ever saw was called "The TurboLinux Edition of Red Hat Linux 4.2." It was a 100% copy of Red Hat, nothing at all changed. Everything in the installer and elsewhere said "Red Hat." There was no reference at all to TurboLinux anywhere except the label on the CD. And it was 100% legal.
I think RH was probably faced with making one of two choices: pull the boxed sets, which must be losing money for them, or follow SuSE's approach and not provide ISOs of Red Hat. Assuming that SuSE hasn't changed anything recently, you can FTP down all of their individual files, but if you want ISOs, you have to make them yourself.
They probably figured that not having ISOs for download would lose them far more market share, and save them far less money, than dropping the boxed sets would.
Umm, no, it's not at all Red Hat saying "The Linux desktop doesn't exist." They know perfectly well that it does, and that they probably have the largest single share of it.
What Red Hat is saying is that Linux does not get onto the desktop via the boxed set, at least not in sufficient quantities for them to make money at it.
Look around at the people you know who are running Linux. How many of them installed from a boxed set that they purchased, or even from someone else's purchased boxed set? Probably very few. Most people who need CDs either buy them for a small charge from someone who will burn them a set cheaply, or from outfits like Cheap Bytes, who sell low-cost CDs for various distros.
I saw Progeny's boxed set of Potato at Fry's in San Diego about two weeks ago. There were one or two boxes, and I have to wonder just how long they've been there :-)
Many of the world's Internet users pay *per minute* for access, to the telco, the ISP, or in some cases both. So yes, spam really does cost a lot of us money.
:-(
I've recently returned to the United States after nine years of living abroad, and everywhere I lived during those nine years (eight of them in a G-7 country) had per-minute charges.
I don't have to deal with those anymore, but I do have to deal with being unemployed and with waiting for the fscking telco to get those three load coils out of my phone line so the DSL I ordered three weeks ago and was told two weeks ago that it was up and running, will actually work
ummmmmm....
Why, no, it's not. You might want to look up "anthropomorphism" in your dictionary.
The trouble with the Starbucks at Shinjuku Minamiguchi is that the number of customers always exceeds the number of seats, unless you include sitting on the steps outside.
Actually, Gifu is the nicest place in Japan I've ever been (I lived in Japan for 8 years and saw quite a few places in that time). If you haven't been to Gujo-Hachiman, go up there in summer some time, you'll love it. The nicest way to go is from Nagoya to Mino-Oota via Gifu City, and from Mino-Oota take the Nagaragawa Tetsudo to Gujo-Hachiman. That's a long trip, longer if you're coming from Tokyo or Osaka, but worth the time. The Nagaragawa gorge is breathtaking. I was nearly speechless the first time I saw it, in 1992.
/28 was my compensation), it would have been a whole lot more expensive than DSL.
WRT bandwidth, ISDN is available practically everywhere in Japan and has been for years. If you can only get 64K, it's like that's all your ISP supports - something that isn't NTT's fault. I used a 128K leased line with a Yamaha ISDN router for years. Not DSL, but I found it sufficient. Granted, if it wasn't a perk of sorts from my job (I was on call 7-24, the leased line and a
Well, not *exactly* reverse-engineered. IBM actually published the IBM PC BIOS source code, so that people developing applications for the PC could know exactly what to expect from the BIOS. You weren't allowed to do anything with the source code other than look it, and under copyright law, having seen it would almost certainly preclude you from working on a competing BIOS project.
However, what earlier cloners such as Phoenix and Compaq did was to have two teams work on the cloning project. The first team looked at the source code and documented all of the system calls. The second team read that documentation and produced clean-room code that would behave the same way as the IBM BIOS. The second team never saw, of course, the IBM source code.
The user is supposed to back up the data.
If the user chooses to not do this and subsequently loses said data, that's not the vendor's problem. We know that all disk drives fail: they have moving parts, and some day those parts will stop moving. You don't know if that day will come when the disk is 5 years old or 5 days old, so if you value the data, back it up.
Mostly fish and not meat? Ah, I see you've bought into that myth, too. Please see my other post for more on that topic.
The Japanese diet contains quite a lot of meat, and what passes as low-salt in Japan would be considered a health risk in the United States. The amount of salt in the Japanese diet is astronomical. Meat consumption is also far higher than you might think. Walk into any Japanese supermarket and compare the amount of meat on the shelves to the amount of fish. Ones with a lot of fish will have it divided about 50/50. In most, there's more meat than fish. Junk food is also very widely consumed, and many office workers eat at least one meal a day of prepared food from a convenience store, which is high in fat, salt, and probably MSG. McDonald's and various Japanese fast food chains are dishing up hamburgers as fast as they can be made, as well as the equally unhealthy gyuudon (a bowl of rice with beef on top, lots of fat and salt). Junk food - candy, chips, etc., - is also widely consumed.
The Japanese diet may not be as unhealthy as the North American one, but it's a lot closer than most people outside of Japan think. That healthy diet is half-mythical. It's almost like it's part of Japan's managed external image, which is quite effective at concealing a lot of ugly truths about Japanese society.
Also, a large portion of the US's healthcare profits have been re-invested into research, and that research has been succesfull.
Japanese pharmaceutical companies spend a lot on research, too.
Because for various reasons, the US and other Developed Countries have agreed NOT to charge the poor countries full price.
That's because those poor countries were going to go ahead and make it themselves, anyway. Small profit beats no profit. The big pharmaceuticals are hardly doing that out of the goodness of their hearts.
The main thing that makes the US health care system so expensive is most certainly not any subsidy to other countries. The only thing that can raise the cost of is medicine. It doesn't make running a hospital more expensive. It doesn't make running a doctor's office more expensive. What does, then? Low hospital occupancy makes it hard to cover room costs, which can drive up room prices to compensate. Out of control malpractice suits make malpractice insurance so expensive that doctors have to charge a lot more. The very high cost of medical school. The ridiculous price of green fees and good golf clubs :-)
And plain old greed.
The final factor, though, remains the health insurance question. If everyone had it, health care wouldn't be unreasonably expensive in most cases. Universal coverage is the answer.Please note that having universal coverage does not mean getting rid of private insurance. Japan has private health insurance companies providing national health insurance, and they generally do it cheaper than the government corporation does. There's no reason why the US couldn't implement a standard national health insurance program, with a standard pricing scheme and no paperwork, but with the actual insurance provided exclusively by private carriers who meet the standards of the plan.
I lived in Japan for eight years, and I had universal health care the whole time.
;-) ). Could the ready availability of decent health care have something to do with this longevity in the face of excess? I think so.
What I observed during that time is that the high-end of medical care in the US is higher and better than that generally available in Japan, and hospital rooms are a lot posher (I was hospitalized for a week there once, and while it was rather spartan, it also cost me very little), the Japanese average is much closer, and the low-end is much, much better than the U.S. (where the low-end is people with no insurance and low income, who often can't afford much medical care and put it off until the emergency room is needed).
The Japanese universal health insurance system works like this: you have national health insurance. It may be the general public insurance type, or it may be the employer-paid type, depending on your job (full-time workers generally have the latter).
If you need medical care or dental, you go to the provider of your choice, so long as they take national health insurance (the great majority do) and pay the co-payment (30% for the fomer type, 10% for the latter type) and you are treated. No forms, no muss, no fuss.
How much you pay for insurance depends on your salary the year before, so if you're poor, that makes your health insurance nearly free (yes, there is an upper cap on premiums; having a good salary doesn't put the whole thing into health insurance).
Japanese national health insurance has something of a looming liquidity problem as a result of a rapidly aging population, but that doesn't detract from its effectiveness at getting people decent health care.
Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, for both men and women, despite how much so many Japanese men drink, and despite how many of them are heavy smokers (most Japanese men smoke, as do an increasing number of Japanese women, and based on my observations, I'd guess that the average Japanese male smoker consumes at least a pack a day, and heavy drinking after work is quite common (commuting by train has its advantages
I owned a 1987 Mustang GT (5 liter V-8, overdrive automatic transmission w/lockup converter, 2.73:1 rear axle) for 6 years, and it could go 400 miles (freeway driving, average speed about 65 MPH) on the standard Ford gas tank. I drove from San Diego, California, to Payson, Utah (a distance of over 800 miles) and only stopped along the way for gas once, then filled it again when I reached Payson. I repeated the performance on the way back, stopping for gas once en route, then filling up again when I reached San Diego.
That car typically got 25 - 26 MPG in freeway driving, and my single tank record was 28.5 MPG, driving in California's Central Valley (it's very flat, and the air was relatively cool that day). Granted, going 400 miles on a tank left it very low, but it was possible. 350 was no problem at all, and even my normal mix of city street and freeway driving around San Diego got me 300 miles per tank.
If they haven't downside the gas tanks, I would expect a recent-model Mustang GT to go even farther on a single tank, and other manufacturers doubtless have similar range capabilities.
You say most murderers aren't executed, and then you ask what's wrong with me? What's wrong with the system, that murderers aren't taken out and shot?
You say all he committed was a thought crime? Now I need to ask what the hell is wrong with *you*? Because he was a consumer, someone else was encouraged to be a producer, and someone harmed those children. That makes him not guilty of a thought crime, but a party by extension to the actual crime. Everyone - both the producers and the consumers - involved in child pornography is a party to the crime, and nothing but the lowest form of scumbag, and should be given a punishment fitting the crime. The fitting punishment is capital punishment.
You write like someone who doesn't have children. I tell you this: anyone who would do that to anyone's children is a threat to all children, including mine, and should be executed for the good of society and the safety of all children. Do you know that many of the children used in child pornography are abducted? Many of them are eventually killed. You would let someone responsible for that live and maybe someday go free, and you think there's something wrong with me? You need a serious reality check.
In addition, it is not unusual for a company to have a policy that states something to the effect that you should have zero expectation of privacy when using company computer resources, including but nor limited to email and the network. Anything you do may be monitored or archived. Call centers frequently extend this to the telephone, but I'm sure they are not alone in that.
> They need counselling, of course, but rison is a death sentence for these people, and that should not be taken lightly.
No, they need a death sentence (not prison, a death sentence).
Microsoft has various intentions. Two of their main intentions are, as a for-profit company and a software vendor, to make money and to make quality software.
Thus far, they have proven far more adept at the former, however, just as no for-profit company *intends* to not make money, no software vendor *intends* to produce bad software, either. If Microsoft produces unreliable software, it is a failure of execution rather than a failure of intent.
404
you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.
I'd ask if you'd ever tried this, but I can tell already that you haven't. How? The thing with trees is that:
1) They grow. This could be a problem for hole alignment, not just on the trees in question, but others may be growing upwards in between them;
2) They are outside. Other things are also outside. Wind, for example. Because of wind's also being outside, the chances of getting those holes lined up in the first place are pretty small. The chances of keeping them that way are much smaller, and the chances of keeping them that way at some figure approaching "all the time" are, well, about zero.
A few weeks ago, I implemented an 802.11b WAN as the LAN/WAN engineer on a satellite + 802.11b WAN/VoIP pilot project in rural northern Vietnam. We had trees to contend with. Big ones, right between two of the sites. The way you deal with this is antenna poles. Big ones. Shoot the signal over the trees and use directional antennas.
In a situation like theirs, you could use a combination of outdoor WAPs uplinked to wireless 802.11b WAN routers , linking back to the place where the T1s (plural because 1 isn't going to be enough).
One of his questions, though, was how to equitably distribute the bandwidth. Unless you could find 802.11b WAP equipment that supported rate limiting (off the top of my head I can't think of any; Googling for it will be left as an exercise for the reader), another solution would be to rate-limit at the central router (assuming Cisco here) via traffic policing. Police traffic by netblock and have several different
Another alternative is to just not worry about it. Let the bandwidth hogs be bandwidth hogs. When there is plenty of bandwidth available, they can download big files in a hurry. When everybody is online, it will take them longer. Essentially, it's a question of "Do we make it artificially slower for everyone all the time, or do we let it become unavoidably slower for everyone some of the time, and faster for those online the rest of the time?"