[Ignoring for the moment that your post is marginally off-topic] Could you innumerate exactly what gives Debian "real power" over all the other distros?
Stating that Roosevelt went after Standard Oil and that Nixon went after IBM in the hope that I will conclude that, because Clinton is going after everybody, he is just like them does little to convince me that he is pro-business.
In short, I deny the major and minor of your attempted syllogism.
Clinton and Gore...about as pro-business as you can get
You're kidding, right? This is the clique going after tobacco producers, gun manufacturers, and Microsoft, and are gearing up to drop the hammer on oil companies. They've raised the minimum wage more times than I can count, increased regulation on many business sectors, and are proposing legislation giving new mothers 3 months of paid leave. (Just examples.)
Yeah, this is a real pro-business group.
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Re:It doesn't look like this will happen but..
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Akopia Buys Minivend
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· Score: 2
No. Soaking up BSD licensed code and producing proprietary software with it does not make the original BSD licensed code vanish. And someone could still take that code and spawn a new project.
There's nothing magical about the GPL that makes it superior to BSD or any other open source license in this respect. Thus the fallacy of the statement by Anonymous Coward in post #40.
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Re:Aviation Fuel Cheaper than Car Gas
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Napster Wars
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· Score: 2
Artificially low? That would only be true if someone (the government) subsidized fuel producers so they could deliver their product cheaper.
Rather, the price is artificially high in other countries because of heavy taxation.
It's an opinion -- one judge's opinion and the government's. It happens to be an opinion of someone with a lot of power, but it's still an opinion. If someone robs me, that's a provable fact because there is physical evidence. There is no physical evidence involved here. Monopolies are designated by completely nebulous rules.
No physical evidence?!? You're kidding, right? If someone robs you and then burns what he took, then it's not provable because there's no physical evidence?
I disagree. The Sherman Act defines in great detail what is and is not a monopoly, and how a monopoly may and may not be used legally. There is very little that is "nebulous" about it.
I wish more people would take the time to read the Findings of Fact. The text is long, but very informative. It first demonstrates that Microsoft is, in fact, a monopoly (which isn't illegal by itself), and then exemplifies how they used this monopoly contrary to the Sherman Act (which is definitely illegal).
A quick look at the cauceresponse indicates that they are all for it and why.
In general, I support cauce and their put-the-power-in-the-hands-of-the-people-not-the-g overnment philosophy. So if cauce likes it then it's probably a pretty good idea. If you hate UCE then consider joining cauce. They do lobby legislature and the quantity of their members adds to their political ability.
[This is an old story and it's unlikely that anybody but the poster I'm replying to will read this...]
I agree that the Connells were good; I even have one of their albums. But did anybody outside of North Carolina ever even hear of them? They were sort of a local band, Ralaigh if I remember correctly.
I know who they are because I lived in NC for about a year in the early part of the 90's, but I've never heard anything of theirs any place else.
I'm hardly a `freedom fighter'. As far as I'm concerned, they could write whatever they like into their software. I don't even really mind if it's closed source (although it wouldn't be my first preference) as long as it works and I'm reasonably certain that nothing fishy is going on.
I'm all for credit where credit is due, as long as it's in the appropriate place, but I have second thoughts about my syslogs being the appropriate place. On principle, I think log files should have a very high signal to noise ratio.
The bottom line is that I question the wisdom of beginning down this road. It begins with silly things like this, but it's all just a matter of degree. Soon companies start contributing to projects with the expectation of ad space in the boot sequence. (Or worse, contributing on the condition of such representation.) Some would choose which projects to contribute to based on whether they will get space.
It doesn't take much before the log file is useless. Take a look at USENET for an example of what happens when people stop using a medium for it's intended purpose. Try to find some useful information or discussion among the spams in some newsgroups.
I could just comment out the offending block of source, but if this became commonplace then I would get pretty sick of having to touch the source of every driver on my system every time I upgrade a kernel. Thank you, but I have better things to do with my time, which is why I use a distro instead of compiling my entire system from source.
I think that's a legitimate price to pay for FREE software.
How much is the maximum legitimate price for free software?
The problem is that you have to draw a line someplace. How much is too much? 3 lines? 5 lines? 10 lines? 100?... After all, it's free software, so what's the harm in popping up a nag screen when the user starts his mail client to remind him of important free software projects? The user's not paying for it, after all.
As far as I'm concerned, bootup progs should get one line, unless they have legitimate (as in, "important for debugging purposes") information which requires more to convey.
When I go to dmesg, it's because I want to figure out why something or another is happening. In short, I'm looking for information about my system, not ads. If every boot prog had a single line of useful information and an additional three lines of sponsorship ads, then the usefulness of dmesg would be diminished considerably, as I would be forced to wade through all the crap just to find the debugging info.
About your sig: Does any one out there really use Gnome or KDE? WM is my favorite, I'm tired of start menu's (This also includes stylized "K"'s and "little feet")
I use Gnome. Really.
With regard to the foot menu, it's not an essential part, and it's easy to remove (right click on the foot->Remove from panel).
For that matter, the entire panel could be removed, or easily configured in almost any way that suits you. Or you could have several of them, each configured differently.
In any case, WM does have a root menu, and how this is different from a foot menu is difficult to fathom. Except that there's an icon on the panel for it, but like I said, there doesn't have to be.
one thing I just can't stand about companies and their products is the "See the HELPMR.PDF file for details."
Indeed. I also don't consider.pdf files to be any more useful than other forms of documentation. The only reason to use something like pdf is that they want to give you something that looks like a book without actually giving you a book. Kind of like taking the bus is just like driving a car without actually driving a car. There are probably other formats that would be more useful electronically if you can just break out of the "it must look like a book" mindset.
Wandering slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the mournful transition in the Windows world from simple, human-readable/editable INI files to that hideous monstrosity that is the System Registry. With INI files, I could at least look at them and maybe figure out what went wrong with the software in question, even if that software was Windows.
In really desperate situations, I could resort to COPY CON WHATEVER.INI, which I did once out of necessity. Try editing the Registry like that when you can't get the GUI to boot. Heck, try to edit the Registry even with the GUI tools -- now there's a black art on par with, say, configuring the X Window System by hand.
Printed manuals are largely a waste of money and space.
A waste of whose money? I don't recall a single software vendor reducing their price when they stopped shipping printed docs. (I've been around long enough to remember when they all shipped the hard manuals.) Not having the books seems to be a waste of my money, since I am being charged the same anyway.
I knew a guy once who made is own holograms. (Or should that be holographs? I don't know.) He claimed the film was ASA 1. I'd love to know where he got that stuff.
You may get a lot of junk skins, but you'll also get some very good ones. Some will be better than the OS norms.
I doubt that this will be true, generally; although a very few exceptions may turn up. The people who like skins are not generally those who value UI consistency highly. I, for one, am part of the latter group.
When I'm looking for a new app, I deliberately seek out those which use gtk because that's the primary toolkit I use on my system. The look and feel is just how I like it and I can control that globally from a single preferences dialog. I don't want an application-specific skin for each program on my system.
Back when the Mozilla project made the decision to use gtk as their toolkit, my reaction was, "Great! It will fit right in with my system." But then they went and invented their own widgets. What's the point of using gtk (I'm not sure that they still are) if they were just going to scrap everything about the toolkit that made it useful?
Now I understand that they are using the gecko rendering engine to make the widgets and menus and such. And that's cool and modular, but it's also bothersome and inconsistent. Take a look at this and see if you can find the application that looks out of place.
I can probably find a skin to make it look and feel like the rest of the system, but it will probably do so imperfectly. And why should I have to? Everything else follows the look-and-feel rules I'v established without my having to go find a workaround to make it behave.
[As a side note about the default Mozilla/Netscape skin: Does anybody else miss the back button history, which allows you to go back past the previous page that just redirected you to the current page? Just an example.]
In the end, all I can do is sigh and wait patiently for someone to take gecko and develop a http thin client which does only web browsing and does it well. Not one that also wants to be my mail client, newsgroup client, address book, and web publisher; I have other applications which do those things well, and I don't need or want a web browser that soaks up many megabytes with duplicated functionality. I wish I had the spare time to develop such an app myself.
I'm a big fan of this site, which I first discovered through a link on the gnome website. Most of their reviews are spot on. And I like show this sight to young, impressionable CSCI students at the local university.
With regard to the lack of Linux examples on the sight (I can only recall one), this certainly has nothing to do with lack of material. They are Windows users primarily, and not many Linux users send them examples. If we all started sending Linux examples to them, I doubt that they would be able to keep up with the volume.
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Re:Everybody take a breather
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Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 2
I am against govt intervention in general and believe that the free market will sort most things out if given the proper time. However, in some tiny percentage of cases, such as when the free market cannot act due to the existence of a predatory monopolist, intervention is, unfortunately, necessary.
The government remains many steps behind the fast-moving industry, and is never in tune with the real world. But now they slam Microsoft, and all of a sudden the judicial system knows what's best?
The courts make rulings for and against industries they don't understand all the time. This is what expert witnesses are for. In fact, it is not the judicial systems place to make a judgement about the technological merits of Microsoft's products. Microsoft is a business, foremost, and it must play by the rules of law as a business. A predatory monopoly is illegal regardless of which industry is being considered. It is the court's job to decide whether Microsoft's business practices have been illegal. That tech is a fast-moving industry is irrelevent. The only thing relevent to the court is whether Microsoft has used its monopoly power illegally.
Put another way, prosecuting criminals is exactly what the courts are for. If any company (not just Microsoft) behaves illegally, should we just leave it to the free market to punish them? I doubt that this would be very effective. All the company would have to do is look good to a majority of the public or offer the public something they want and the company could get away with just about anything.
By the time the remedies take effect, will the browser market (the heart of the whole case) look even remotely the same?
If it weren't for the DOJ case, the answer would most likely be, "No." The fact that Microsoft is being called to task about the browser issue has significantly increased the chance that we may now answer your question in the positive.
No, we shouldn't look the other way, but any sudden disruption to Microsoft is going to cause major, major collateral damage.
What are you saying, exactly? We shouldn't ignore it but we shouldn't do anything about it, either? Allowing the monopoly to continue stifling competition isn't damaging enough to justify the pain of striking them down?
A gradual erosion, courtesy of net appliances, the free software movement, or anything else, was the best hope for change.
And you believe that Microsoft wouldn't strong-arm their way into net appliances the same as they have done in every other market that they decided should be theirs? In fact, they have probably already got that ball rolling.
If Microsoft were left unchecked, don't you suppose they might develop a plan to deny open source entry into the market by subverting open standards with proprietary extensions? Oh yeah, they did that already. Isn't it interesting how innovating and stifling innovation look like the same thing on the surface? But the results are very different!
I played StarCraft on a virtual NT. This was long enough ago that I don't recall the details of how I set it up, but I do recall needing to change my pixel depth to 8-bit in X.
Occasionally, the color pallette would get nuked, requiring that I switch from and back to full screen mode to fix it. But I did it -- I swear! And it really wasn't that hard.
So all the government needs to do here, is establish an 'operating system pricing commission' or suchlike, which tells Microsoft that they cannot charge more than a certain price for their operating systems.
This is a monumentally bad idea. Do you really want the federal government deciding what any software should cost? (I don't) Do you trust the government to make a good decision? (I don't) Do you believe that ten or twenty years from now they will still be making good decisions? (I don't) Perhaps we should establish a commission to oversee the pricing commission and make sure they continue to do their jobs right as years go by.
Would Linux and FreeBSD be subject to this pricing commission? Maybe we would be forced to charge similar prices for these OS's in order to keep the OS market "competitive."
The problem with monitoring is that it just boils down to a game between the monitoring committee and the people they are monitoring. The monitors try to prevent violations, and their wily opponents try to use their power in new ways that the monitoring committee is not allowed to challenge. This consumes resources and creates ill will. History tells us, imperically, that this doesn't work. And Microsoft has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will hide behind any technicality and take advantage of any ambiguous language in order to maintain business as usual.
There is nothing wrong with having a monopoly, but abuse of one is a crime. Microsoft will abuse any monopoly position it has in any way that it can. Haven't we learned this yet? This is why all of the concessions proposed by Microsoft are just so much talk. All of them involve keeping Microsoft's monopoly intact. The last thing Microsoft wants to have to do is compete for its income.
Slashdot Mirror
[Ignoring for the moment that your post is marginally off-topic] Could you innumerate exactly what gives Debian "real power" over all the other distros?
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In short, I deny the major and minor of your attempted syllogism.
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You're kidding, right? This is the clique going after tobacco producers, gun manufacturers, and Microsoft, and are gearing up to drop the hammer on oil companies. They've raised the minimum wage more times than I can count, increased regulation on many business sectors, and are proposing legislation giving new mothers 3 months of paid leave. (Just examples.)
Yeah, this is a real pro-business group.
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There's nothing magical about the GPL that makes it superior to BSD or any other open source license in this respect. Thus the fallacy of the statement by Anonymous Coward in post #40.
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Rather, the price is artificially high in other countries because of heavy taxation.
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Doesn't exactly roll off your tongue, does it?
Actually, I thought that, since they used to be called Microsoft, and now they are smaller, they should be called Nanosoft. :)
But I capitulated when someone here suggested MICROS~1 and MICROS~2. Now that's funny!
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No physical evidence?!? You're kidding, right? If someone robs you and then burns what he took, then it's not provable because there's no physical evidence?
I disagree. The Sherman Act defines in great detail what is and is not a monopoly, and how a monopoly may and may not be used legally. There is very little that is "nebulous" about it.
I wish more people would take the time to read the Findings of Fact. The text is long, but very informative. It first demonstrates that Microsoft is, in fact, a monopoly (which isn't illegal by itself), and then exemplifies how they used this monopoly contrary to the Sherman Act (which is definitely illegal).
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CAUCE vigorously supports HR 3113...
I only said that CAUCE likes it. I said nothing of the decenting opinions of other parties.
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In general, I support cauce and their put-the-power-in-the-hands-of-the-people-not-the-g overnment philosophy. So if cauce likes it then it's probably a pretty good idea. If you hate UCE then consider joining cauce. They do lobby legislature and the quantity of their members adds to their political ability.
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I agree that the Connells were good; I even have one of their albums. But did anybody outside of North Carolina ever even hear of them? They were sort of a local band, Ralaigh if I remember correctly.
I know who they are because I lived in NC for about a year in the early part of the 90's, but I've never heard anything of theirs any place else.
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I'm all for credit where credit is due, as long as it's in the appropriate place, but I have second thoughts about my syslogs being the appropriate place. On principle, I think log files should have a very high signal to noise ratio.
The bottom line is that I question the wisdom of beginning down this road. It begins with silly things like this, but it's all just a matter of degree. Soon companies start contributing to projects with the expectation of ad space in the boot sequence. (Or worse, contributing on the condition of such representation.) Some would choose which projects to contribute to based on whether they will get space.
It doesn't take much before the log file is useless. Take a look at USENET for an example of what happens when people stop using a medium for it's intended purpose. Try to find some useful information or discussion among the spams in some newsgroups.
I could just comment out the offending block of source, but if this became commonplace then I would get pretty sick of having to touch the source of every driver on my system every time I upgrade a kernel. Thank you, but I have better things to do with my time, which is why I use a distro instead of compiling my entire system from source.
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How much is the maximum legitimate price for free software?
The problem is that you have to draw a line someplace. How much is too much? 3 lines? 5 lines? 10 lines? 100?... After all, it's free software, so what's the harm in popping up a nag screen when the user starts his mail client to remind him of important free software projects? The user's not paying for it, after all.
As far as I'm concerned, bootup progs should get one line, unless they have legitimate (as in, "important for debugging purposes") information which requires more to convey.
When I go to dmesg, it's because I want to figure out why something or another is happening. In short, I'm looking for information about my system, not ads. If every boot prog had a single line of useful information and an additional three lines of sponsorship ads, then the usefulness of dmesg would be diminished considerably, as I would be forced to wade through all the crap just to find the debugging info.
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I use Gnome. Really.
With regard to the foot menu, it's not an essential part, and it's easy to remove (right click on the foot->Remove from panel).
For that matter, the entire panel could be removed, or easily configured in almost any way that suits you. Or you could have several of them, each configured differently.
In any case, WM does have a root menu, and how this is different from a foot menu is difficult to fathom. Except that there's an icon on the panel for it, but like I said, there doesn't have to be.
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Indeed. I also don't consider .pdf files to be any more useful than other forms of documentation. The only reason to use something like pdf is that they want to give you something that looks like a book without actually giving you a book. Kind of like taking the bus is just like driving a car without actually driving a car. There are probably other formats that would be more useful electronically if you can just break out of the "it must look like a book" mindset.
Wandering slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the mournful transition in the Windows world from simple, human-readable/editable INI files to that hideous monstrosity that is the System Registry. With INI files, I could at least look at them and maybe figure out what went wrong with the software in question, even if that software was Windows.
In really desperate situations, I could resort to COPY CON WHATEVER.INI, which I did once out of necessity. Try editing the Registry like that when you can't get the GUI to boot. Heck, try to edit the Registry even with the GUI tools -- now there's a black art on par with, say, configuring the X Window System by hand.
Well, maybe configuring X is easier. :)
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A waste of whose money? I don't recall a single software vendor reducing their price when they stopped shipping printed docs. (I've been around long enough to remember when they all shipped the hard manuals.) Not having the books seems to be a waste of my money, since I am being charged the same anyway.
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I knew a guy once who made is own holograms. (Or should that be holographs? I don't know.) He claimed the film was ASA 1. I'd love to know where he got that stuff.
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[For the copy-and-paste deprived, try this.]
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-- Winston Churchill, November, 1947
Well, I think it's a correct quotation.
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I doubt that this will be true, generally; although a very few exceptions may turn up. The people who like skins are not generally those who value UI consistency highly. I, for one, am part of the latter group.
When I'm looking for a new app, I deliberately seek out those which use gtk because that's the primary toolkit I use on my system. The look and feel is just how I like it and I can control that globally from a single preferences dialog. I don't want an application-specific skin for each program on my system.
Back when the Mozilla project made the decision to use gtk as their toolkit, my reaction was, "Great! It will fit right in with my system." But then they went and invented their own widgets. What's the point of using gtk (I'm not sure that they still are) if they were just going to scrap everything about the toolkit that made it useful?
Now I understand that they are using the gecko rendering engine to make the widgets and menus and such. And that's cool and modular, but it's also bothersome and inconsistent. Take a look at this and see if you can find the application that looks out of place.
I can probably find a skin to make it look and feel like the rest of the system, but it will probably do so imperfectly. And why should I have to? Everything else follows the look-and-feel rules I'v established without my having to go find a workaround to make it behave.
[As a side note about the default Mozilla/Netscape skin: Does anybody else miss the back button history, which allows you to go back past the previous page that just redirected you to the current page? Just an example.]
In the end, all I can do is sigh and wait patiently for someone to take gecko and develop a http thin client which does only web browsing and does it well. Not one that also wants to be my mail client, newsgroup client, address book, and web publisher; I have other applications which do those things well, and I don't need or want a web browser that soaks up many megabytes with duplicated functionality. I wish I had the spare time to develop such an app myself.
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With regard to the lack of Linux examples on the sight (I can only recall one), this certainly has nothing to do with lack of material. They are Windows users primarily, and not many Linux users send them examples. If we all started sending Linux examples to them, I doubt that they would be able to keep up with the volume.
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The government remains many steps behind the fast-moving industry, and is never in tune with the real world. But now they slam Microsoft, and all of a sudden the judicial system knows what's best?
The courts make rulings for and against industries they don't understand all the time. This is what expert witnesses are for. In fact, it is not the judicial systems place to make a judgement about the technological merits of Microsoft's products. Microsoft is a business, foremost, and it must play by the rules of law as a business. A predatory monopoly is illegal regardless of which industry is being considered. It is the court's job to decide whether Microsoft's business practices have been illegal. That tech is a fast-moving industry is irrelevent. The only thing relevent to the court is whether Microsoft has used its monopoly power illegally.
Put another way, prosecuting criminals is exactly what the courts are for. If any company (not just Microsoft) behaves illegally, should we just leave it to the free market to punish them? I doubt that this would be very effective. All the company would have to do is look good to a majority of the public or offer the public something they want and the company could get away with just about anything.
By the time the remedies take effect, will the browser market (the heart of the whole case) look even remotely the same?
If it weren't for the DOJ case, the answer would most likely be, "No." The fact that Microsoft is being called to task about the browser issue has significantly increased the chance that we may now answer your question in the positive.
No, we shouldn't look the other way, but any sudden disruption to Microsoft is going to cause major, major collateral damage.
What are you saying, exactly? We shouldn't ignore it but we shouldn't do anything about it, either? Allowing the monopoly to continue stifling competition isn't damaging enough to justify the pain of striking them down?
A gradual erosion, courtesy of net appliances, the free software movement, or anything else, was the best hope for change.
And you believe that Microsoft wouldn't strong-arm their way into net appliances the same as they have done in every other market that they decided should be theirs? In fact, they have probably already got that ball rolling.
If Microsoft were left unchecked, don't you suppose they might develop a plan to deny open source entry into the market by subverting open standards with proprietary extensions? Oh yeah, they did that already. Isn't it interesting how innovating and stifling innovation look like the same thing on the surface? But the results are very different!
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Yes. It should be #3 or #4. Definitely not #1.
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Occasionally, the color pallette would get nuked, requiring that I switch from and back to full screen mode to fix it. But I did it -- I swear! And it really wasn't that hard.
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This is a monumentally bad idea. Do you really want the federal government deciding what any software should cost? (I don't) Do you trust the government to make a good decision? (I don't) Do you believe that ten or twenty years from now they will still be making good decisions? (I don't) Perhaps we should establish a commission to oversee the pricing commission and make sure they continue to do their jobs right as years go by.
Would Linux and FreeBSD be subject to this pricing commission? Maybe we would be forced to charge similar prices for these OS's in order to keep the OS market "competitive."
The problem with monitoring is that it just boils down to a game between the monitoring committee and the people they are monitoring. The monitors try to prevent violations, and their wily opponents try to use their power in new ways that the monitoring committee is not allowed to challenge. This consumes resources and creates ill will. History tells us, imperically, that this doesn't work. And Microsoft has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will hide behind any technicality and take advantage of any ambiguous language in order to maintain business as usual.
There is nothing wrong with having a monopoly, but abuse of one is a crime. Microsoft will abuse any monopoly position it has in any way that it can. Haven't we learned this yet? This is why all of the concessions proposed by Microsoft are just so much talk. All of them involve keeping Microsoft's monopoly intact. The last thing Microsoft wants to have to do is compete for its income.
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[later...]
So yeah, as an educated consumer i know what fits MY bill.
Who were you educated by? Microsoft PR?
The history of the PC is replete with the smoking carcases of innovative companies that tried to compete with Microsoft:
- DR-DOS
- Stac Electronics
- Netscape
- Blue Mountain Arts
- TV Host
- Internet Electronics (Did you know that "IE" is not a trademark of Microsoft?)
- etc.
Perhaps you can tell me what, exactly, Win3.11 had that Win3.1 didn't except an incompatible API that broke a number of competing products.--