I don't think the patent process is evil, per se. It's when it is applied to things like gene sequences ( but I can see patenting a process to derive a specific gene sequence from a specific host and a specific product made from that expressed gene sequence) in general (i.e., if you have a particular gene sequence, causing your body to generate a specific, unique protein, if Genentech "discovers" this sequence in some other animal and makes the same protein somewhere else, hey, they patent the *sequence*, not the entire process & product, so you've basically been patented).
Or the guy who's trying to sequence everyone in Iceland for his company...
Or software "patents". What would happen if straight, arithmetic addition were to be patented, more specifically, a specific configuration of TTL logic gates to perform that addition? Would we all retroactively be forced to pay Microsoft or Robert X. Cringely (who else would do this, either seriously or in jest) some sort of retroactive fee?
Innovation has prospered in the past based on patents on real, PHYSICAL, processes and items. Software is not real (OK, probably a big philosophical point of contention here. Am I a Negropontist? maybe I am...), so why should a physical process that worked good for real, physical, things be used on such an ephemeral thing as software and algorithms?
Hmm... sounds sort of like all those clustering solutions (Univ of Washington's Uniform Access machines work like that, and did in 1991...one login to a "server", you get dumped onto one of N physical servers, determined by the loads on the machines.
So the web "login" is different than a Unix login?
Sure, a network of caching web proxy servers sounds OK. But there are issues...
would SlashDot be served well for users on @Home who sucked up the recent "reconfigure your browser" e-mail (i.e., to configure it to run againt @Home's proxy servers)? Sure, they seem to get things downloaded faster, but what about real content?
What about more nefarious things like "intelligent, filtering" proxy servers that sort of lose "bad", "inappropriate", etc. data?
Maybe if HTTP could be split, or maybe when things like CSS, etc., could allow two streams of download: one stream for graphics, the other for the text. But none of the Ad-driven sites will go for that because it'll mean it's too easy then to just ignore the graphics pipe...
Hmm... you *could* pay me enough to teach. But my price is probably too high.
I'd have to be able to grant 'F's. I'd have to be able to not grant any 'A's if no one had earned them.
I'd have to be able to kick Johnny out of my class.
I'd have to be able to tell parents what my educational goals were, what I expected of them and their kid(s), etc.
I'd have to have a school system that backed me up.
Since the last demand is probably the one that could never be met (Oh, they'd SAY they'd back me up, but as soon as someone whispered, "he did that...yeah, THAT...to studentX", I'd be hanging in the wind)...
Yep. Most of the news in the US is sourced either from AP or Reuters. If some agency or group cracked those feeds, then the US (and probably most of Europe) is totally vulnerable to some pretty subtle propaganda (like it doesn't happen already to push more "media" to us poor brainless idiot newsumers)... At least in the current situation most of the players know who they are as they dance there tete a tete.
Is Id liable for player's actions? Probably not. Should Id try to make a counter class-action suit, where all the victim families gang on the families of the shooters for wrongful death? Probably not. Did Id's software contribute to worsening the behavior of the Colorado shooters? My gut says probably yes. How do you come to this? It's like Ted Bundy throwing out the 'Playboy' link to his behavior before he was offed. It's like blaming circus clowns for having inspired John Wayne Gacy's getup. It is SUCH a red herring that even the seagulls won't go after it. So why do we? Read "Rage", by Richard Bachman (Stephen King). How old is this book? Should it be banned? What about "Christine", where the kid gets an (evil) car that exacts whatever revenges he has bottled up inside him for him?
Shouldn't Stephen King & his publisher(s) also be brought into the suit for this book?
Linux doesn't get the shelf space because it's all bought up by Microsoft...
Most stores reserve most of their shelf space for producers who pay for that shelf space. The rest of the stuff, consignments, sales, whatever, get put where they can.
that VM ware uses a virtual machine for each operating system. This is similar to JVM. It allows each OS to run natively on the same computer using it's resources without conflicting with the others. What *I* want to know is disk partitions/file systems. Do you need a different partition for each OS? Or a different drive entirely. Yes, you need a different partition for each OS. But it's that way anyways (for the multi-boot people) without VMWare. VMWare, however, can be set to use an existing partiton with an OS in "RAW" mode, so you don't have to reinstall the OS in a VMWare space on the host OS. Of course, you DO NOT want the host OS to be able to access that partition when VMWare is running...
...no, it's pretty standard. Why we're doing it this late in the game, I don't know.
In the past, it has been: capture or knock out telecom, TV, radio, newspaper systems. Capture is better than knock out, so you can feed the people your own propaganda. But with some special planes that the US has, we can knock out their TV & radio systems and broadcast our own stuff instead.
But this is a NATO-run operation. So that would also explain why this has happened only now.
That Milosovec has been allowed to spew the utter BS crap for so long is amazing to me. Yugoslavia doesn't have the FAX network that China or Russia has. Yugoslavia probably doesn't have the sympathetic connections in the media here and in Europe that Viet Nam somehow managed to acquire...
Not to mention the issue of 'trade secrets'. The authors of this article fail completely to examine the contract between the inventor and government that patents represent. The concept of patent in modern law is simple - it is a contract between the government and the inventor. This contract gives that inventor exclusive rights for a period of time for commercial rights for a product. In return the inventor fully discloses the nature of his invention, that is makes his knowledge available to all. WITHOUT PATENTS INVENTORS DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO KEEP THEIR INVENTION SECRET. History is full of examples of this, and it is proven the lack of this dissemination of knowedge slows the rate of progress in a modern society.
...but this is sort of a red herring argument. What about companies that do not patent things they've invented until they're ready to release a product made on the idea, so as to not tip their hands to competitors until they have a warehouse full of product to ship? What of industrial espionage?
Reality is full of counter-examples to this poster's argument justifying current IP that would exist whether or not there was our current IP scheme.
Let's look at a sillier IP situation: The NBA and the scores of its games. The NBA was suing companies providing live scores of NBA games through such things as pagers, etc., claiming that the score of the game (which is just information) was IP of the NBA, and the companies doing this were distributing this information/IP w/o license from the NBA, and it should be stopped.
I think the NBA actually prevailed on this one, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Or the efforts that Priscilla Presley, or the estates of any other dead media figure, go to to try and restrict how the images of the dead people get used...
Then moving on to patents. How can you own a law of nature. Similar to copyright, it is not the law of nature that is patented, but a specific adaptation of that law of nature....one should apply this thought to the patenting of gene sequences, etc.! Too bad, though. Should I try to get my DNA sequenced so I can patent it? I've thought about that, and wish it was feasible to. That a company can patent part of me and a bunch of other people implicitly is bothersome... Of course, noone can patent the law of gravity, or the law of inertia, but you can patent a specific method of utilizing these laws to create a self-winding watch. This is analogous to not being able to copyright information or facts, but you are able to copyright a certain adaption of those facts. ...but the problem is is that patents are being granted on ideas, i.e., the *concept* of a perpetual, self-winding watch, not a specific implementation. OK, one could argue that a self-winding watch is just a specific implementation of an escapement-based, mechanical time-keeping device or inertial motion micro generator powering an electrical quartz watch... but, see the point? Would we have wrist-based PDAs if someone at, say, Commodore Electronics had patented the *idea* and fuzzy implementation details of the first LED-based electronic watches (or TI, or whoever), and said patent was still in place?
Then moving on to patents. How can you own a law of nature. Similar to copyright, it is not the law of nature that is patented, but a specific adaptation of that law of nature. ...one should apply this thought to the patenting of gene sequences, etc.! Too bad, though. Should I try to get my DNA sequenced so I can patent it? I've thought about that, and wish it was feasible to. That a company can patent part of me and a bunch of other people implicitly is bothersome... Of course, noone can patent the law of gravity, or the law of inertia, but you can patent a specific method of utilizing these laws to create a self-winding watch. This is analogous to not being able to copyright information or facts, but you are able to copyright a certain adaption of those facts. ...but the problem is is that patents are being granted on ideas, i.e., the *concept* of a perpetual, self-winding watch, not a specific implementation. OK, one could argue that a self-winding watch is just a specific implementation of an escapement-based, mechanical time-keeping device or inertial motion micro generator powering an electrical quartz watch... but, see the point? Would we have wrist-based PDAs if someone at, say, Commodore Electronics had patented the *idea* and fuzzy implementation details of the first LED-based electronic watches (or TI, or whoever), and said patent was still in place?
Hmm... MS involvement in the I2 team. Well, a lot of what probably happens in these groups is a lot of politicking. How many of the companies involved in the effort have some sort of servitude deal, be it good deals on enterprise-wide site licensing or comarketing deals, with MS in other markets? How many of the universities in the I2 group also have pretty killer site licenses for MS software?
Sure, it would be petty for Microsoft to mention these things when such agreements were up for renewal, regarding the voting by others on such and such.
I don't know...
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/365.pdf
...is a good place to start on Microsoft "benevolency".
...but we have politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc., all people in places of power, or at least responsibility over other people, who are in it for the money...
I wonder if people will even actually BUY MP3 files.
Hmm... mp3.com is doing well.
I have two computers
...do you see the problem with this line, that sets you out of the ordinary already?
, and this PII400 can handle anything, but my old P133 with 32MB of RAM slows down, and often skips, when I connect to the net while playing MP3s. Not everyone who listens to music has a good computer.
...and not everyone who listens to CDs have decent systems to listen to them from. So?
And very few people have Portable MP3 hardware. At the same time, MANY MANY people have stereos with CD drives, and many people have portable CD PLayers.
...and how many people now work in front of computers with CD drives & speakers? Now many computers sold now have the bare minimum to handle MP3 (233MHz P-MMX?) easily? So what that portable MP3 players are a small segment of the market... portable CD players were, as well. Yes, I have a Diskman. But I never use it anymore. I have a separate stereo here in my office. My office mate & I alternate between him (or me) playing his MP3s & me playing CDs on my stereo. That I could make my own playlists from HIS music to listen to is way cool... good thing we have overlapping musical tastes...
Plus, playing CDs on a stereo puts no strain on the computer, so one can do work on a slow computer while listening to music (unlike MP3; that's my experiance).
...unless you need to use the CD drive for something...
If we have developers work with GPL'd software, are they now intellectually "contaminated" and if so does that mean that they are now useless (legally) to move back to prorpietary products like AIX? I mean, what if said programmer accidentally bases some proprietary code off of what he learned from GPL'd code? Hmm... I don't know. The same thing that would happen if programmer X on the AIX team took something he wrote from work from some AIX product and incorporated it into his own fledgling product he's working on on the side at home in his off-time? Or the same thing that would happen if someone accidentally included some closed code in the GPL code tree, or any other code tree, or caused it to become available to competitors?
...why worry, when Microsoft is buying up/investing in DSL providers?
Two have been mentioned in InfoWorld. Yesterday, in this article, http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?9 90420.icmsnorth.htm, MS is investing in NorthPoint Communications.
MS has also invested in Rhythm Networks. http://www.rhythm.net (but no mention of MS investments)...
For both, MS is cutting deals for ISPs involved with these CLECs to provide "portals" for MSN. The virus...no, cancer, grows...
"The deal is Microsoft's second DSL investment in the past month. The software giant announced a $30 million stake in Rhythms NetConnections, a competitor to NorthPoint, on March 17. That deal also calls for a co-branded MSN portal. "
Umm... cogeneration, regeneration & collection and redistribution of otherwise lost energy are not new techniques.
The ACC at the UW was heated/cooled by the water cooling system for the IBM & Cyber mainframes (if anyone still remembers those machines there).
When they pulled those out, it was a big deal for a few months how to continue having people using that building without HVAC (but they finally did get a system in)... Seattle may be pretty temperate most of the year, but 90 degrees in Seattle is pretty harsh. Add to this a big thermal heat mass that a concrete building is, with 15 or so hours of sun exposure on it...
Too bad we can't get a politician heat regeneration system to capture all the hot air and butt gas that they emit...
Why should just hackers/programmers/geeks be the only ones to benefit from Linux? If we keep Linux only as a toy for the few people who are willing to put up with its eccentricities, we condemn Linux to become yet another footnote in computer history. Well, why *shouldn't* Linux stay this way (or at least take its own sweet time to become something else)?
But this same arrogance you associate with Unix (or Unix-like...) SysAdmins is also very similar to the paternalistic attitude demonstrated to most of its users that Microsoft has.
Do you have to spite your face (i.e., throw out all the level of detail to manage Unix, or a Unix-like, system) to cut off your nose, ala Windows/WindowsNT, to make a product that is percieved to be "easy to use" and "easy to install"?
It is hard to think in non-cynical terms about "average users" when you don't identify yourself as one, especially when you work in some way with supporting them on how they use their computers.
Sure, there is a stereotype there. But the sad thing is, there are so many Average Users who live down to it.
I know I personally don't care whether Average Users ever really consciously adopt Linux, because for Linux, it Just Doesn't Matter. Linux doesn't NEED them to survive. If all it does is remain a "hacker" tool, then so be it.
Sure, it may doom me to living a generation or two behind the Average User's systems. It may doom me to either figuring out how to reverse engineer drivers, etc., from the Average User's OS to Linux, violating all sorts of laws, etc.
I'll take whatever baggage Linux has over the increasing amount of baggage that comes with being dependent on the Average User's OS, because the tradeoff is Freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the patent process is evil, per se.
It's when it is applied to things like gene sequences ( but I can see patenting a process to derive a specific gene sequence from a specific host and a specific product made from that expressed gene sequence) in general (i.e., if you have a particular gene sequence, causing your body to generate a specific, unique protein, if Genentech "discovers" this sequence in some other animal and makes the same protein somewhere else, hey, they patent the *sequence*, not the entire process & product, so you've basically been patented).
Or the guy who's trying to sequence everyone in Iceland for his company...
Or software "patents". What would happen if straight, arithmetic addition were to be patented, more specifically, a specific configuration of TTL logic gates to perform that addition? Would we all retroactively be forced to pay Microsoft or Robert X. Cringely (who else would do this, either seriously or in jest) some sort of retroactive fee?
Innovation has prospered in the past based on patents on real, PHYSICAL, processes and items. Software is not real (OK, probably a big philosophical point of contention here. Am I a Negropontist? maybe I am...), so why should a physical process that worked good for real, physical, things be used on such an ephemeral thing as software and algorithms?
Hmm... sounds sort of like all those clustering solutions (Univ of Washington's Uniform Access machines work like that, and did in 1991...one login to a "server", you get dumped onto one of N physical servers, determined by the loads on the machines.
So the web "login" is different than a Unix login?
Prior Art? Lack of originality?
Sure, a network of caching web proxy servers sounds OK. But there are issues...
would SlashDot be served well for users on @Home who sucked up the recent "reconfigure your browser" e-mail (i.e., to configure it to run againt @Home's proxy servers)? Sure, they seem to get things downloaded faster, but what about real content?
What about more nefarious things like "intelligent, filtering" proxy servers that sort of lose "bad", "inappropriate", etc. data?
Maybe if HTTP could be split, or maybe when things like CSS, etc., could allow two streams of download: one stream for graphics, the other for the text. But none of the Ad-driven sites will go for that because it'll mean it's too easy then to just ignore the graphics pipe...
Hmm... you *could* pay me enough to teach. But my price is probably too high.
I'd have to be able to grant 'F's. I'd have to be able to not grant any 'A's if no one had earned them.
I'd have to be able to kick Johnny out of my class.
I'd have to be able to tell parents what my educational goals were, what I expected of them and their kid(s), etc.
I'd have to have a school system that backed me up.
Since the last demand is probably the one that could never be met (Oh, they'd SAY they'd back me up, but as soon as someone whispered, "he did that...yeah, THAT...to studentX", I'd be hanging in the wind)...
Yep. Most of the news in the US is sourced either from AP or Reuters. If some agency or group cracked those feeds, then the US (and probably most of Europe) is totally vulnerable to some pretty subtle propaganda (like it doesn't happen already to push more "media" to us poor brainless idiot newsumers)... At least in the current situation most of the players know who they are as they dance there tete a tete.
Shouldn't Stephen King & his publisher(s) also be brought into the suit for this book?
Linux doesn't get the shelf space because it's all bought up by Microsoft...
Most stores reserve most of their shelf space for producers who pay for that shelf space. The rest of the stuff, consignments, sales, whatever, get put where they can.
that VM ware uses a virtual machine for each operating system. This is similar to JVM. It allows each OS to run natively on the same computer using it's resources without conflicting with the others. What *I* want to know is disk partitions/file systems. Do you need a different partition for each OS? Or a different drive entirely. Yes, you need a different partition for each OS. But it's that way anyways (for the multi-boot people) without VMWare. VMWare, however, can be set to use an existing partiton with an OS in "RAW" mode, so you don't have to reinstall the OS in a VMWare space on the host OS. Of course, you DO NOT want the host OS to be able to access that partition when VMWare is running...
...no, it's pretty standard. Why we're doing it this late in the game, I don't know.
In the past, it has been: capture or knock out telecom, TV, radio, newspaper systems. Capture is better than knock out, so you can feed the people your own propaganda. But with some special planes that the US has, we can knock out their TV & radio systems and broadcast our own stuff instead.
But this is a NATO-run operation. So that would also explain why this has happened only now.
That Milosovec has been allowed to spew the utter BS crap for so long is amazing to me. Yugoslavia doesn't have the FAX network that China or Russia has. Yugoslavia probably doesn't have the sympathetic connections in the media here and in Europe that Viet Nam somehow managed to acquire...
-Corey
Not to mention the issue of 'trade secrets'. The authors of this article fail completely to examine the contract between the inventor and government that patents represent. The concept of patent in modern law is simple - it is a contract between the government and the inventor. This contract gives that inventor exclusive rights for a period of time for commercial rights for a product. In return the inventor fully discloses the nature of his invention, that is makes his knowledge available to all. WITHOUT PATENTS INVENTORS DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO KEEP THEIR INVENTION SECRET. History is full of examples of this, and it is proven the lack of this dissemination of knowedge slows the rate of progress in a modern society.
...but this is sort of a red herring argument. What about companies that do not patent things they've invented until they're ready to release a product made on the idea, so as to not tip their hands to competitors until they have a warehouse full of product to ship? What of industrial espionage?
Reality is full of counter-examples to this poster's argument justifying current IP that would exist whether or not there was our current IP scheme.
Let's look at a sillier IP situation: The NBA and the scores of its games. The NBA was suing companies providing live scores of NBA games through such things as pagers, etc., claiming that the score of the game (which is just information) was IP of the NBA, and the companies doing this were distributing this information/IP w/o license from the NBA, and it should be stopped.
I think the NBA actually prevailed on this one, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Or the efforts that Priscilla Presley, or the estates of any other dead media figure, go to to try and restrict how the images of the dead people get used...
Then moving on to patents. How can you own a law of nature. Similar to copyright, it is not the law of nature that is patented, but a specific adaptation of that law of nature. ...one should apply this thought to the patenting of gene sequences, etc.! Too bad, though. Should I try to get my DNA sequenced so I can patent it? I've thought about that, and wish it was feasible to. That a company can patent part of me and a bunch of other people implicitly is bothersome... Of course, noone can patent the law of gravity, or the law of inertia, but you can patent a specific method of utilizing these laws to create a self-winding watch. This is analogous to not being able to copyright information or facts, but you are able to copyright a certain adaption of those facts. ...but the problem is is that patents are being granted on ideas, i.e., the *concept* of a perpetual, self-winding watch, not a specific implementation. OK, one could argue that a self-winding watch is just a specific implementation of an escapement-based, mechanical time-keeping device or inertial motion micro generator powering an electrical quartz watch... but, see the point? Would we have wrist-based PDAs if someone at, say, Commodore Electronics had patented the *idea* and fuzzy implementation details of the first LED-based electronic watches (or TI, or whoever), and said patent was still in place?
Then moving on to patents. How can you own a law of nature. Similar to copyright, it is not the law of nature that is patented, but a specific adaptation of that law of nature. ...one should apply this thought to the patenting of gene sequences, etc.! Too bad, though. Should I try to get my DNA sequenced so I can patent it? I've thought about that, and wish it was feasible to. That a company can patent part of me and a bunch of other people implicitly is bothersome... Of course, noone can patent the law of gravity, or the law of inertia, but you can patent a specific method of utilizing these laws to create a self-winding watch. This is analogous to not being able to copyright information or facts, but you are able to copyright a certain adaption of those facts. ...but the problem is is that patents are being granted on ideas, i.e., the *concept* of a perpetual, self-winding watch, not a specific implementation. OK, one could argue that a self-winding watch is just a specific implementation of an escapement-based, mechanical time-keeping device or inertial motion micro generator powering an electrical quartz watch... but, see the point? Would we have wrist-based PDAs if someone at, say, Commodore Electronics had patented the *idea* and fuzzy implementation details of the first LED-based electronic watches (or TI, or whoever), and said patent was still in place?
Hmm... MS involvement in the I2 team. Well, a lot of what probably happens in these groups is a lot of politicking. How many of the companies involved in the effort have some sort of servitude deal, be it good deals on enterprise-wide site licensing or comarketing deals, with MS in other markets? How many of the universities in the I2 group also have pretty killer site licenses for MS software?
Sure, it would be petty for Microsoft to mention these things when such agreements were up for renewal, regarding the voting by others on such and such.
I don't know...
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/365.pdf
...is a good place to start on Microsoft "benevolency".
...but we have politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc., all people in places of power, or at least responsibility over other people, who are in it for the money...
Hmm... your playstation doesn't run Civilization.
Game over.
Hmm... mp3.com is doing well.
I have two computers
...do you see the problem with this line, that sets you out of the ordinary already?
, and this PII400 can
handle anything, but my old P133 with 32MB of RAM slows down,
and often skips, when I connect to the net while playing
MP3s. Not everyone who listens to music has a good computer.
...and not everyone who listens to CDs have decent systems to listen to them from. So?
And very few people have Portable MP3 hardware. At the same
time, MANY MANY people have stereos with CD drives, and many
people have portable CD PLayers.
...and how many people now work in front of computers with CD drives & speakers? Now many computers sold now have the bare minimum to handle MP3 (233MHz P-MMX?) easily? So what that portable MP3 players are a small segment of the market... portable CD players were, as well. Yes, I have a Diskman. But I never use it anymore. I have a separate stereo here in my office. My office mate & I alternate between him (or me) playing his MP3s & me playing CDs on my stereo. That I could make my own playlists from HIS music to listen to is way cool... good thing we have overlapping musical tastes...
Plus, playing CDs on a
stereo puts no strain on the computer, so one can do work
on a slow computer while listening to music (unlike MP3;
that's my experiance).
...unless you need to use the CD drive for something...
If we have developers work with GPL'd software, are they now intellectually "contaminated" and if so does that mean that they are now useless (legally) to move back to prorpietary products like AIX? I mean, what if said programmer accidentally bases some proprietary code off of what he learned from GPL'd code? Hmm... I don't know. The same thing that would happen if programmer X on the AIX team took something he wrote from work from some AIX product and incorporated it into his own fledgling product he's working on on the side at home in his off-time? Or the same thing that would happen if someone accidentally included some closed code in the GPL code tree, or any other code tree, or caused it to become available to competitors?
...why worry, when Microsoft is buying up/investing in DSL providers?
9 90420.icmsnorth.htm, MS is investing in NorthPoint Communications.
Two have been mentioned in InfoWorld. Yesterday, in this article, http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?
MS has also invested in Rhythm Networks.
http://www.rhythm.net (but no mention of MS investments)...
For both, MS is cutting deals for ISPs involved with these CLECs to provide "portals" for MSN. The virus...no, cancer, grows...
"The deal is Microsoft's second DSL investment in the past month. The software giant announced a $30 million stake in Rhythms NetConnections, a competitor to NorthPoint, on March 17. That deal also calls for a co-branded MSN portal. "
Umm... cogeneration, regeneration & collection and redistribution of otherwise lost energy are not new techniques.
The ACC at the UW was heated/cooled by the water cooling system for the IBM & Cyber mainframes (if anyone still remembers those machines there).
When they pulled those out, it was a big deal for a few months how to continue having people using that building without HVAC (but they finally did get a system in)... Seattle may be pretty temperate most of the year, but 90 degrees in Seattle is pretty harsh. Add to this a big thermal heat mass that a concrete building is, with 15 or so hours of sun exposure on it...
Too bad we can't get a politician heat regeneration system to capture all the hot air and butt gas that they emit...
Why should just hackers/programmers/geeks be the only ones to benefit from Linux? If we keep Linux only as a toy for the few people who are willing to put up with its eccentricities, we condemn Linux to become yet another footnote in computer history. Well, why *shouldn't* Linux stay this way (or at least take its own sweet time to become something else)?
But this same arrogance you associate with Unix (or Unix-like...) SysAdmins is also very similar to the paternalistic attitude demonstrated to most of its users that Microsoft has.
Do you have to spite your face (i.e., throw out all the level of detail to manage Unix, or a Unix-like, system) to cut off your nose, ala Windows/WindowsNT, to make a product that is percieved to be "easy to use" and "easy to install"?
It is hard to think in non-cynical terms about "average users" when you don't identify yourself as one, especially when you work in some way with supporting them on how they use their computers.
Sure, there is a stereotype there. But the sad thing is, there are so many Average Users who live down to it.
I know I personally don't care whether Average Users ever really consciously adopt Linux, because for Linux, it Just Doesn't Matter. Linux doesn't NEED them to survive. If all it does is remain a "hacker" tool, then so be it.
Sure, it may doom me to living a generation or two behind the Average User's systems. It may doom me to either figuring out how to reverse engineer drivers, etc., from the Average User's OS to Linux, violating all sorts of laws, etc.
I'll take whatever baggage Linux has over the increasing amount of baggage that comes with being dependent on the Average User's OS, because the tradeoff is Freedom.