>we would have been better served invading Syria or Palestine
Palestine ??? palestine isn't a country yet, there are no borders, no army, no real government... the only military there is israeli troops, why would you need to invade palestine ???? send a couple hundreds of policemen there that would be enough...
Europe counties also had huge military budgets, during the cold war. It was not untill the end of the cold war when they developed a more rational budget. US is keeping up the cold war economy for its own reasons, but it's certainly not for the sake of europe (anymore).
not that i care much about american elections, but in your example, that "other" 50% obvioulsy doesn't matter. They didn't vote, did they? they could as well live in switzerland...
>until it is ready do not push it down the throat of >the general public
nobody is forcing anybody to switch to linux. People are just stating that they think linux is better than windows. from my personal xp, it is. Really.
A ferrari is not the cheapest, easiest or better suited for traffic jams car. But many people say that it's better than a renault.And it is. Many people are happy with their renault. Some people would not prefer the ferrari even if the price was the same. That's ok. But that doesn't mean that people shouldn't point out the fact that ferrari is a better car.
>the amount of viruses, spywars, adwares depend on >the market share of the operating system
This is a myth. Windows would be on the same magnitude with linux today if they had proper user/administrator setup. The whole point of a virus is to infect the system. In linux/unix it cannot do that because the user is discouraged from using the root account for everyday tasks. On the other hand, in windows it's the default setup, carried along from the old days when it was a single user OS.
It's a clear matter of choosing convenient over security. Linux will have this number of viruses only if it suddenly becomes a single user system like windows and macos used to be. But i don't see that happening...
>GNOME is definitely the more professional and >efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective, >of the large Free desktop environments
this is simply not true, Gnome started off later and never managed to keep up with KDE. The final blow was when they killed off gnome 1 and redesingned the whole thing.
I can see why people are unhappy - Gnome is constantly changing: They had balsa and gmc, they changed to evolution and nautilus. Abiword was dropped for openoffice. Even the configuration changes all the time... This is a pain if you are a distro that tries to actually support it.
that said, i really hope this serves as a "wake up" call to gnome developers. They have to get it together and stop this "let's start over","let's start over again" nonsense, *soon*.
>Nobody serious clamors for less operating >systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils
there are still many excellent desktops out there, if they get some attention from the developers they could prove more than a match for KDE.
>This would kill apple however because nobody in >their right mind would pay $2000+ for a good mac >when they could pay for a PC at $1500 and get mac >OS on it as well
apple is not as expensive as it used to be you know... today you can buy the (delicious) imac g5 with the 17'' tft screen for $1300 -- and you get a 64-bit machine. An athlon64 with similar specs doesn't cost much lower, and you don't get the all-in-one design. And $3000 for a dual 2.5ghz,64 bit is a good price. Definetely at the low end of the dual market.
there is a simple solution to all this, provided that you have enough bandwith:
Use the same browser/email client all the time. the best way is over ssh, just ssh -X to the box and start mozilla there, sometimes you need to use the option --no-irix-session if you already have a mozilla running on your machine.
this cannot work over modem or isdn of course. you need ethernet or a decent dsl connection to get it right.
something doesn't seem right, a hackers university? i mean how would the computer labs ever work there ???
"nearly 300 South Korean government computers... were infected with viruses capable of stealing passwords and other sensitive information."
really? millions of computers are infected with viruses worldwide, all i see from this is a lack of south korea administrators. It's obvious that in a country where every house has broadband the levels of virus infections would be higher than the rest of the world.
A good strategy for south korea would be to actually educate its people on the use and the dangers of internet.
>you mean to say we have nuclear energy today >largely because of prior nuclear weapons research?
no, but if you want to look for the "good" side of nuclear weapons research, you can say that we have nuclear energy because nuclear weapons were not actually used.
Also, because the nuclear weapons companies had to make a living.
the best choice is matrox, and it's a good choice, indeed...
however, you are not "locked into one kernel" with the nvidia drivers either... and ATIs' *opensource* drivers are somewhat better than nvidia's *opensource* drivers.
usually all you need to get linux drivers developed is some documentation. it's much cheaper than developing a windows driver, that's for sure.
>In fact, you are lucky to get anything from nVIDIA or ATI.
they don't seem to think that now, do they? supporting the 10% slice in this case means that you get a 10% slice. Nvidia is doing a good job at that and i do recomend an nvidia card for a tight budget, but for as long as i can remember, the best card you can buy in a linux box has always been a matrox.
>open konsole then open gnome-terminal and place >them side by side.konsole, like all QT apps, has >needless bordering everywhere,
funny, i see many more borders is gnome-terminal ?!?!
>This is why many notably amazing Linux apps >(GIMP, gaim, evolution, hell even firefox) >reject QT in favor of GTK.
gimp is the origin of gtk, i would be surprised to see gimp using qt. gaim, evolution and firefox (and nautilus and abiword and..) are using gtk for completely different reasons: qt is gpl'ed *not* lgpl'ed and it's only available in windows under a non-gpl license.
believe me, if qt was lgpl'ed only gimp would use gtk. qt is just so much easier...
i wonder how many of these windows "lite" versions that are sold to asia & russia, are destined for pirated software?
why on earth would you buy a machine with linux if you are going to install pirated windows over it ? why don't you just buy a machine with no os?
>It would be interesting to know where these numbers >come from (on both sides of this argument), and, how >they can possibly be verified.
The numbers are just statistics. all the machines that are sold can potentially be used with pirated software, it simply makes no difference whether you put linux on it or not. If 90% of linux machines are used with pirated windows, it can propably be shown that 90% of all machines ever sold are used with pirated software, be it a newer version of windows or pirated office etc.
but i wouldn't worry about this study: this is really just a little something to give to the shareholders when the expected next years' financial results come out. (yeah, we lost some marketshare and income this year but we are still a monopoly don't worry about a thing.. )
i checked the link, maybe you want to check it too? in the first page there are:
2 gpl'ed library automation programms
9 lgpl'ed libraries
6 programms/libraries under non-gpl licenses (BSD, mozilla etc.)
1 unmaintained gpl'ed python library
libstdc++ and
4 gpl'ed librariers i've never heard before.
You have a point though, if those four libraries aren't licensed under GPL for a purpose, their maintainers should be contacted.
>Now, lets say you want to write a peice of software >to USE libfoo.
yes, as i said, in that case you have to respect the license, and keep in mind that it is not your code. As for the gpl/lgpl thing, i was just answering to the article: " he carefully made sure the proprietary code in his system would only be dynamically linked to the GPL-protected code. "
>this IS how the GPL works, even though most people ignore it.
an old problem indeed, except for QT i can't think of a library that uses gpl, and trolltech makes it perfectly clear that if you want to develop non-GPL applications you have to buy QT with another license.
indeed, but i fail to see the problem. They are not forced to "take advantage of the openness of linux" , they choose to. If they do, they have to deal with the license, and that's the case with *any* program source you might get your hands on.
If a company wants a competitive advantage in the software, patching a bug and adding a feature in a linux will not do. They will have to give those back to the community, which is fine by me.
i give you the patents thing, it's really bad for developers and can potentionally create problems out of nowhere.
Licensing/copyright/ip however is quite simple and you don't really have to think about stuff like this twice: If you are somehow using other peoples code, you have to respect their license. In the case of GPL, linking dynamically instead of statically is not something hard, and anyway it's just a technicallity, not a programming issue. Other than that, as long as you keep in your mind that your code belongs to you and the rest belongs to others, you are good to go.
It's not the OSS movement, that undermines their model (which sure is not about capitalism!) it's the people. OSS was there throughout the glorious days but it didn't undermine anything. Microsoft must address the needs as it used to in the past. People want better code, cheaper products, better attitude and more *freedom*. online activation doesn't help, higher prices don't help, DRM doesn't help, added complexity doesn't help, certainly forcing people to use IE doesn't help !!
somehow i don't see these things changing in lobbies...
This is a pre-release version! Not even a release candidate. This can qualify for a record for *any* computer program -- i don't think even IE can achieve this for a pre-release version dispite the 10 times bigger installed base. I mean, 1 million downloads in 4 days is really something for any *regular* program. Here we have a million people willing to download a pre-release version, and track down bugs !! i would predict that this version will get downloaded by 3 million people.
Can you imagine how many bugs will be reported? If they manage to deal with them, Firefox v1.0 will be the most stable browser ever made.
Many more millions of "new users" are expected to follow after that.
>With a certain configuration, ssh is accessable >from outside, even with a firewall. indeed, but only if the firewall is not configured to block ssh.
This is quite different: it's like an ssh server *not accessable from outside*, that magically becomes accesible from outside after a kernel update. It's not overzealous, it's a configuration problem that is encountered when you upgrade to SP2. Yes, it's not an exploit. It's just configuration, but still an SP2 problem.
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>we would have been better served invading Syria or Palestine
Palestine ??? palestine isn't a country yet, there are no borders, no army, no real government... the only military there is israeli troops, why would you need to invade palestine ???? send a couple hundreds of policemen there that would be enough...
Europe counties also had huge military budgets, during the cold war. It was not untill the end of the cold war when they developed a more rational budget.
US is keeping up the cold war economy for its own reasons, but it's certainly not for the sake of europe (anymore).
not that i care much about american elections, but in your example, that "other" 50% obvioulsy doesn't matter. ...
They didn't vote, did they? they could as well live in switzerland
>until it is ready do not push it down the throat of
>the general public
nobody is forcing anybody to switch to linux. People are just stating that they think linux is better than windows. from my personal xp, it is. Really.
A ferrari is not the cheapest, easiest or better suited for traffic jams car. But many people say that it's better than a renault.And it is.
Many people are happy with their renault. Some people would not prefer the ferrari even if the price was the same. That's ok.
But that doesn't mean that people shouldn't point out the fact that ferrari is a better car.
>the amount of viruses, spywars, adwares depend on
>the market share of the operating system
This is a myth. Windows would be on the same magnitude with linux today if they had proper user/administrator setup.
The whole point of a virus is to infect the system. In linux/unix it cannot do that because the user is discouraged from using the root account for everyday tasks. On the other hand, in windows it's the default setup, carried along from the old days when it was a single user OS.
It's a clear matter of choosing convenient over security. Linux will have this number of viruses only if it suddenly becomes a single user system like windows and macos used to be. But i don't see that happening...
Not to mention what would happen during an "incident" with that girl from PR..
>GNOME is definitely the more professional and
>efficiently designed, from a purely UI perspective,
>of the large Free desktop environments
this is simply not true, Gnome started off later and never managed to keep up with KDE. The final blow was when they killed off gnome 1 and redesingned the whole thing.
I can see why people are unhappy - Gnome is constantly changing:
They had balsa and gmc, they changed to evolution and nautilus. Abiword was dropped for openoffice.
Even the configuration changes all the time...
This is a pain if you are a distro that tries to actually support it.
that said, i really hope this serves as a "wake up" call to gnome developers. They have to get it together and stop this "let's start over","let's start over again" nonsense, *soon*.
>Nobody serious clamors for less operating
>systems, less trouser styles, or less pencils
there are still many excellent desktops out there, if they get some attention from the developers they could prove more than a match for KDE.
oh, come on now, don't you understand why abusing your monopoly is illegal? if you don't understand it, you should just believe it.
>This would kill apple however because nobody in
>their right mind would pay $2000+ for a good mac >when they could pay for a PC at $1500 and get mac >OS on it as well
apple is not as expensive as it used to be you know...
today you can buy the (delicious) imac g5 with the 17'' tft screen for $1300 -- and you get a 64-bit machine. An athlon64 with similar specs doesn't cost much lower, and you don't get the all-in-one design.
And $3000 for a dual 2.5ghz,64 bit is a good price. Definetely at the low end of the dual market.
there is a simple solution to all this, provided that you have enough bandwith:
Use the same browser/email client all the time.
the best way is over ssh, just ssh -X to the box and start mozilla there, sometimes you need to use the option --no-irix-session if you already have a mozilla running on your machine.
this cannot work over modem or isdn of course. you need ethernet or a decent dsl connection to get it right.
something doesn't seem right, a hackers university? i mean how would the computer labs ever work there ???
... were infected with viruses capable of stealing passwords and other sensitive information."
"nearly 300 South Korean government computers
really? millions of computers are infected with viruses worldwide, all i see from this is a lack of south korea administrators. It's obvious that in a country where every house has broadband the levels of virus infections would be higher than the rest of the world.
A good strategy for south korea would be to actually educate its people on the use and the dangers of internet.
>you mean to say we have nuclear energy today
>largely because of prior nuclear weapons research?
no, but if you want to look for the "good" side of nuclear weapons research, you can say that we have nuclear energy because nuclear weapons were not actually used.
Also, because the nuclear weapons companies had to make a living.
i would say that it is not safe, and it's definetely more expensive than nuclear energy.
the best choice is matrox, and it's a good choice, indeed...
... and ATIs' *opensource* drivers are somewhat better than nvidia's *opensource* drivers.
however, you are not "locked into one kernel" with the nvidia drivers either
usually all you need to get linux drivers developed is some documentation.
it's much cheaper than developing a windows driver, that's for sure.
>In fact, you are lucky to get anything from nVIDIA or ATI.
they don't seem to think that now, do they?
supporting the 10% slice in this case means that you get a 10% slice.
Nvidia is doing a good job at that and i do recomend an nvidia card for a tight budget, but for as long as i can remember, the best card you can buy in a linux box has always been a matrox.
>open konsole then open gnome-terminal and place
..) are using gtk for completely different reasons: qt is gpl'ed *not* lgpl'ed and it's only available in windows under a non-gpl license.
...
>them side by side.konsole, like all QT apps, has >needless bordering everywhere,
funny, i see many more borders is gnome-terminal ?!?!
>This is why many notably amazing Linux apps
>(GIMP, gaim, evolution, hell even firefox)
>reject QT in favor of GTK.
gimp is the origin of gtk, i would be surprised to see gimp using qt.
gaim, evolution and firefox (and nautilus and abiword and
believe me, if qt was lgpl'ed only gimp would use gtk. qt is just so much easier
i wonder how many of these windows "lite" versions that are sold to asia & russia, are destined for pirated software?
.. )
why on earth would you buy a machine with linux if you are going to install pirated windows over it ? why don't you just buy a machine with no os?
>It would be interesting to know where these numbers
>come from (on both sides of this argument), and, how
>they can possibly be verified.
The numbers are just statistics. all the machines that are sold can potentially be used with pirated software, it simply makes no difference whether you put linux on it or not. If 90% of linux machines are used with pirated windows, it can propably be shown that 90% of all machines ever sold are used with pirated software, be it a newer version of windows or pirated office etc.
but i wouldn't worry about this study: this is really just a little something to give to the shareholders when the expected next years' financial results come out. (yeah, we lost some marketshare and income this year but we are still a monopoly don't worry about a thing
i checked the link, maybe you want to check it too?
in the first page there are:
2 gpl'ed library automation programms
9 lgpl'ed libraries
6 programms/libraries under non-gpl licenses (BSD, mozilla etc.)
1 unmaintained gpl'ed python library
libstdc++ and
4 gpl'ed librariers i've never heard before.
You have a point though, if those four libraries aren't licensed under GPL for a purpose, their maintainers should be contacted.
>Now, lets say you want to write a peice of software
>to USE libfoo.
yes, as i said, in that case you have to respect the license, and keep in mind that it is not your code.
As for the gpl/lgpl thing, i was just answering to the article:
" he carefully made sure the proprietary code in his system would only be dynamically linked to the GPL-protected code. "
>this IS how the GPL works, even though most people ignore it.
an old problem indeed, except for QT i can't think of a library that uses gpl, and trolltech makes it perfectly clear that if you want to develop non-GPL applications you have to buy QT with another license.
indeed, but i fail to see the problem. They are not forced to "take advantage of the openness of linux" , they choose to. If they do, they have to deal with the license, and that's the case with *any* program source you might get your hands on.
If a company wants a competitive advantage in the software, patching a bug and adding a feature in a linux will not do. They will have to give those back to the community, which is fine by me.
i give you the patents thing, it's really bad for developers and can potentionally create problems out of nowhere.
Licensing/copyright/ip however is quite simple and you don't really have to think about stuff like this twice: If you are somehow using other peoples code, you have to respect their license. In the case of GPL, linking dynamically instead of statically is not something hard, and anyway it's just a technicallity, not a programming issue.
Other than that, as long as you keep in your mind that your code belongs to you and the rest belongs to others, you are good to go.
oh, come on now, it was just a typo, what they meant was that it is not a high risk for MS *intellimouse* customers.
1/2+1/3+1/4+.. grows to infinity as surely as
1/3+1/4 is greater than 1/2
It's not the OSS movement, that undermines their model (which sure is not about capitalism!) it's the people. OSS was there throughout the glorious days but it didn't undermine anything.
Microsoft must address the needs as it used to in the past. People want better code, cheaper products, better attitude and more *freedom*.
online activation doesn't help, higher prices don't help, DRM doesn't help, added complexity doesn't help, certainly forcing people to use IE doesn't help !!
somehow i don't see these things changing in lobbies...
This is a pre-release version! Not even a release candidate. This can qualify for a record for *any* computer program -- i don't think even IE can achieve this for a pre-release version dispite the 10 times bigger installed base.
I mean, 1 million downloads in 4 days is really something for any *regular* program.
Here we have a million people willing to download a pre-release version, and track down bugs !!
i would predict that this version will get downloaded by 3 million people.
Can you imagine how many bugs will be reported?
If they manage to deal with them, Firefox v1.0 will be the most stable browser ever made.
Many more millions of "new users" are expected to follow after that.
>With a certain configuration, ssh is accessable
>from outside, even with a firewall.
indeed, but only if the firewall is not configured to block ssh.
This is quite different: it's like an ssh server *not accessable from outside*, that magically becomes accesible from outside after a kernel update. It's not overzealous, it's a configuration problem that is encountered when you upgrade to SP2.
Yes, it's not an exploit. It's just configuration, but still an SP2 problem.