I easily found several vendors who offered laptops without any OS (or hard drives for that matter)
Ah, I know you can get laptops without an OS *installed*. I was saying it's hard to get a laptop without *paying* for the OS. There is a difference. (Although there really *shouldn't* be a difference - the fact that there is a difference is evidence of Microsoft abusing market power).
I agree with your scenario in general, but StarOffice is probably not less crash-prone than MS Office. If you'll wait for a couple of years for (GNOME|K)Office to become stable, that would probably fit in better.
Never mistake an operating system for the lines of code which comprise its current version. The team developing the code are probably a more important part in the long run.
Could an operating system have produced something as miraculous as the Holy Bible?
I think the answer is either "Yes" or "No", depending on whether you believe the Bible to be the word of God or self-contradictory. But this ain't the place for that debate;-). Anyway, I don't think the original poster was making that claim, he was just making a comparison. A parable if you like. Jesus never said we were actually seeds scattered on the ground. Similarly, the original poster never said that OSes actually were religions.
Further similarity between OpenBSD and Judaism are that neither sets out to maximise it's "market share" and that it's a little difficult for an outsider to get accepted into the community. Linux must be equated to Christianity cos there are many many distros, some of which are almost identical. FreeBSD and Islam are both supposed to be updated versions of something which predates and sparked their "competitors" - although FreeBSD 4.0 is not regarded as "final" in at all the same way as Islam.
Sorry to reply to my reply but the original comment just got marked down as a troll. I happen to think it was wrong, but I don't think it was a troll. Shurely some mistake?
I simply do not agree that Microsoft is a monopoly.
Try and buy one PC notebook without paying for Windows. It's stunningly hard really - harder than buying a PC notebook without a hard drive. I reckon that's a pretty good indicator that Microsoft is capable of diminishing economic freedom of choice.
when you're talking about how they SEE things [...] you use the adverb form
differently. [...] not different.
A sentence is valid if native speakers would happily use it. Since many native speakers do actually use Hemos's construction without batting an eyelid, that means his sentence is linguistically valid.
What is not linguistically valid is to take rules which are appropriate for formal writing, and then assume they apply to stuff written in an informal style. No modern linguist would support your objection to Hemos's sentence. Grammar rules are descriptive, not prescriptive, at least when applied to adult native speakers.
Lets tear this great American company down and give companies from other countries a chance to fill in the void left behind!
This "great American company" has been found guilty of reducing American consumers' freedom of choice through bullying. If there's a void for foreigners to film, it's largely because MS has illegally squashed a lot of its American competitors like Novell and Netscape (and even IBM).
I don't understand how this country of our rampantly embraces capitalism and then scowls at the outcome of it's behavior.
If you love democracy, you don't cheer when The People vote a dictator into office. Similarly if you love free market capitalism, you don't cheer when it allows a company to grow big enough to squash the free market. Governments need to apply the minimum force neccessary to prevent the free market from being squashed.
Name me a need [...] that the DCMA affects in an adverse manner.
Medicine. It may make it possible to restrict the use of medicine in a way that increases profits but decreases use. E.g. selling a patented drug in batches of 10,000 and then banning redistribution, so that everybody has to pay for 10,000 pills whether they need them or not. Effectively this would stop some people being able to afford treatment.
The DCMA is so broad that you can use it to bugger things up in most markets, if you are ingenious/unscrupulous enough.
Can someone knowledgeable explain the issues behind getting a specific processor to work in tandem with itself? I've heard it said that AMD chips won't do this as well as Intel chips - is this just FUD? How different will a multiprocessor G4 be to the single processor version?
I think his point was that the original post claimed the Linux version of WPO2K is stable, but the response complained about WINE and so suggested that the windows version was being used through wine. I dunno if the respondant meant to say "winelib".
The core of the "information wants to be free" meme, is copyright, whether you like it or not. If you want information to be free, you must at the same time respect the same copyright that upholds the GPL
I respectfully disagree. I may wish to (illegally) smoke cannabis; yet I might get extremely pissed off if a dealer tried to give heroin to my seven-year-old daughter outside school. Just because I disagree with one part of copyright law, it doesn't mean I shouldn't uphold and utilise another part.
Have you ever illegally copied music? Does that mean I can assume you want to bring all copyright law crashing around your head?
I think using the GPL, but opposing copyright law as it stands, is just sensible modularisation and segmentation.
That was very interesting. I would suggest that Linux's (3) is currently quite active from the kernel mailing list. Hmm, d'y'have an opinion as to how HURD measures up with that model?
The best survive, because they're the best at surviving.
Yes, but the idea of market economics is that the best at surviving are also the best at giving the user what he wants. That appears to be untrue in the software industry, at least in the long term. (Does anybody want Outlook viruses? Does anybody want BSODs?)
Motif is now freely available on all Unixes, either supplied by the vendor, or for download. That is good.
I think few people will be able to distribute the source though. Their license only applies to fully open-source operating systems - so not Red Hat, not SuSE, not Caldera etc.. Debian and any of the *BSDs won't ship the source because it doesn't conform to their own rules. So AFAICS nobody big will be distributing the source with their distro.
let Bob Gobman at 1 Happy St. get all the junk mail destined for me.
Yeah, I often wonder how much crap does get sent to The Queen, Buckingham Palace. It must be really annoying for her. (And of course she opens all her own mail, yeah)
if you are THAT paranoid about common public information, then DON'T POST YOUR REAL DATA!!!
That's all very well, but I don't want Bob Gobman to get my copy of "GTK+/GNOME Application Development".
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Ah, I know you can get laptops without an OS *installed*. I was saying it's hard to get a laptop without *paying* for the OS. There is a difference. (Although there really *shouldn't* be a difference - the fact that there is a difference is evidence of Microsoft abusing market power).
I agree with your scenario in general, but StarOffice is probably not less crash-prone than MS Office. If you'll wait for a couple of years for (GNOME|K)Office to become stable, that would probably fit in better.
Never mistake an operating system for the lines of code which comprise its current version. The team developing the code are probably a more important part in the long run.
I think the answer is either "Yes" or "No", depending on whether you believe the Bible to be the word of God or self-contradictory. But this ain't the place for that debate ;-). Anyway, I don't think the original poster was making that claim, he was just making a comparison. A parable if you like. Jesus never said we were actually seeds scattered on the ground. Similarly, the original poster never said that OSes actually were religions.
Further similarity between OpenBSD and Judaism are that neither sets out to maximise it's "market share" and that it's a little difficult for an outsider to get accepted into the community. Linux must be equated to Christianity cos there are many many distros, some of which are almost identical. FreeBSD and Islam are both supposed to be updated versions of something which predates and sparked their "competitors" - although FreeBSD 4.0 is not regarded as "final" in at all the same way as Islam.
Sorry to reply to my reply but the original comment just got marked down as a troll. I happen to think it was wrong, but I don't think it was a troll. Shurely some mistake?
Try and buy one PC notebook without paying for Windows. It's stunningly hard really - harder than buying a PC notebook without a hard drive. I reckon that's a pretty good indicator that Microsoft is capable of diminishing economic freedom of choice.
Exactly.
A sentence is valid if native speakers would happily use it. Since many native speakers do actually use Hemos's construction without batting an eyelid, that means his sentence is linguistically valid.
What is not linguistically valid is to take rules which are appropriate for formal writing, and then assume they apply to stuff written in an informal style. No modern linguist would support your objection to Hemos's sentence. Grammar rules are descriptive, not prescriptive, at least when applied to adult native speakers.
This "great American company" has been found guilty of reducing American consumers' freedom of choice through bullying. If there's a void for foreigners to film, it's largely because MS has illegally squashed a lot of its American competitors like Novell and Netscape (and even IBM).
I don't see anything in the original post which is anti-corporate. It merely suggests that MS's PR machine is good at diverting blame.
If you love democracy, you don't cheer when The People vote a dictator into office. Similarly if you love free market capitalism, you don't cheer when it allows a company to grow big enough to squash the free market. Governments need to apply the minimum force neccessary to prevent the free market from being squashed.
IMHO winver.exe is very well written and I challenge anyone here to do a better job.
Your .sig's interesting - what does it mean?
Really? Wow! any idea why they did that? Is it a problem with getting a Linux compiler or something? I can't think of any other reason.
Medicine. It may make it possible to restrict the use of medicine in a way that increases profits but decreases use. E.g. selling a patented drug in batches of 10,000 and then banning redistribution, so that everybody has to pay for 10,000 pills whether they need them or not. Effectively this would stop some people being able to afford treatment.
The DCMA is so broad that you can use it to bugger things up in most markets, if you are ingenious/unscrupulous enough.
Can someone knowledgeable explain the issues behind getting a specific processor to work in tandem with itself? I've heard it said that AMD chips won't do this as well as Intel chips - is this just FUD? How different will a multiprocessor G4 be to the single processor version?
But they haven't actually *released* the products which will give them a market yet: namely all the bits of their office suite.
Err ... I'm probably being slow here, but isn't that exactly what Corel are doing? That is, recompiling their Windows apps using winelib.
I think his point was that the original post claimed the Linux version of WPO2K is stable, but the response complained about WINE and so suggested that the windows version was being used through wine. I dunno if the respondant meant to say "winelib".
I respectfully disagree. I may wish to (illegally) smoke cannabis; yet I might get extremely pissed off if a dealer tried to give heroin to my seven-year-old daughter outside school. Just because I disagree with one part of copyright law, it doesn't mean I shouldn't uphold and utilise another part.
Have you ever illegally copied music? Does that mean I can assume you want to bring all copyright law crashing around your head?
I think using the GPL, but opposing copyright law as it stands, is just sensible modularisation and segmentation.
That was very interesting. I would suggest that Linux's (3) is currently quite active from the kernel mailing list. Hmm, d'y'have an opinion as to how HURD measures up with that model?
Yes, but the idea of market economics is that the best at surviving are also the best at giving the user what he wants. That appears to be untrue in the software industry, at least in the long term. (Does anybody want Outlook viruses? Does anybody want BSODs?)
I think few people will be able to distribute the source though. Their license only applies to fully open-source operating systems - so not Red Hat, not SuSE, not Caldera etc.. Debian and any of the *BSDs won't ship the source because it doesn't conform to their own rules. So AFAICS nobody big will be distributing the source with their distro.
Yeah, I often wonder how much crap does get sent to The Queen, Buckingham Palace. It must be really annoying for her. (And of course she opens all her own mail, yeah)
That's all very well, but I don't want Bob Gobman to get my copy of "GTK+/GNOME Application Development".
I didn't know there was an IE 5 for Solaris - is it better than IE3 for Solaris was?