Red-Carpet is from Ximian and NOT Red Hat. Red-Carpet is used for Ximian Deskto (XD2), RHN (Red Hat Network) is from Red Hat. It is much more configuarable then Windows Update IMO and it is easy to set up a local service. It is also much more powerfull as far as control over the systems and what you want to send down and to what machines. Oh, and there is NO REBOOT REQUIRED.
Well the article I read said he was an employee of data mining company. Which means he had some inside knowlege of the systesm. He broke in through an external FTP server and did not get through their firewall. So I think Acxiom deserves a little break. There is no such thing as a 100% secure system, especially with inside knowlegde of the systems. As a programmer for a fortune 500 company, I could literally bring that company to it's knees and cause millions (USD) lost per day. However, I don't do that because I am a professional and would not use my skills to be abusive. I hope this dude get some hard time.
So the business who helped fund the project, through taxes can't use it?
Sure they can. They just cannot make it proprietary and claim it as their own. Just as I cannot claim the interstate highways (which are funded by our tax dollars) as my own and charge you fees to use it when it was you and I who paid for it. A business pays taxes for the right to do business in America. They are not an individual citizen. This nation was found by and for the people not for corporate profit. Most companies do not complain about paying taxes because America is a great place for a business to make insane amounts of money. Plus, most business get tons of loop holes and tax writeoffs and pay as little tax as possible. Also, there is nothing to stop a company from making money off the software as long as they do not try to make it proprietary. They could incorporate it into a proprietary product, sell support, add-ons, etc.
But a $SMALL_COMPANY could use it make the development much cheaper.
Any company can benefit from it as long as their changes to the actual product are given back for the good of the people.
I guess you assume the worst and I don't.
I am not assuming the worst, I am looking at reality. Companies are in business to make money which is fine. However, the majority will push the system as far as they can to maximize profit. Many even give bribes (they call them campaign contributions) to congress to sway votes in favor of their company.
There are only a few companys that are big enough to do who you explain.
Size doesn't matter with business greed. It is one of the flaws I see in capitalism when there are not enough checks and balances to keep capitalism in check.
That is not how a business is ran. A product is sold for whatever the market will bear. Look an many commercial applications that have been around for a while. From release to release there are not many changes, yet the price stays the same or goes up. Look at MS office 2000 to MS office XP. Very little major changes, yet the price goes up. Look at photoshop 6 -> photoshop 7, again, I don't notice any real differences, yet the price is still very high. The problem I have with a BSD license for public funded software is the same as the grandparent pointed out. There is nothing stoping $BIG_COMPANY from taking it and making it incompatible to the public domain version and forcing it out to people. Say the public funds the next-gen audio/video codec and it turns out great. Now all the public can benefit from it until $BIG_COMPANY comes along and makes proprietary changes to it and puts it in all of there new players. So now that public funded codec becomes useless since there are no public funded players being handed out with the public funded version of the codec. So $BIG_COMPANY just got free public funded development and now resell it to us in their players, yet with small proprietary changes so that we cannot benefit from the efforts of our tax dollars that paid for the codec. The GPL would stop abuse and keep it available to ALL which is exactly how a public funded software project should stay IMO.
Could anyone at sco think they have any chance to get away with this crap after threating US government agencies? If anything, shouldn't they want to get the US government on their side. I bet the execs are trying to find all the ways that they can cash out big time before the boat sinks. I hope the SEC gets into this and puts Daryl boy in jail and a big man named bubba makes Daryl his bitch.
I have used Macs, just never bought my own : )
I just found the price/performance ratio to high on
Mac, so I stuck with the X86. I do hate how my 1.7Ghz
P4 laptop practically burns me and gets at most 3 hours
of batter life.
Are those eMacs any good? A 17" one looks kind of tempting.
The problem with the apple iBook for $1,299.00 is that
is is a VERY low spec machine. A 900 Mhz G3 is a dog compared to a G4 and especially the nice G5's and is horrid compared to any $1,299 X86 laptop. I have never owned a mac and don't plan on it unless Apple gets smart REALLY lowers the prices. I love Linux and use it exclusively, howver I would also LOVE to use a Mac. It is just that I will not pay such high prices to have a pretty computer. If Apple would really drop those prices, they could easily replace ms windows for the average home user (I'd still stick to Linx though I could also have a nice Mac). X86 hardware has become a commodity and is very low priced now. Moving to Apple would actually be a regression and we would lose all the benefits of having affordable hardware. I also am not keen on having to get ALL my software AND hardware from one vendor. That is just the next monopoly waiting to happen. I like what Apple has been doing so far, I just hope they put out a machine that can compete against an X86 on performance AND price. I don't have a problem paying $200 - $300 more for a Mac, howevr I will not spend a $1,000+ more for a comparable system. With that extra grand I could really beef up the X86. Give me a 1Ghz+ G4 with 512MB, 40GB+ hard drive with a DVD/CDRW for around $1,200 and I would buy it in a heart beat. I can get this type of setup on X86 for $700 or so.
To "talk" with windows PCs? Huh? You mean SMB? ODBC? DCOM? Oh wait, those are all known.
SMB is NOT know. It has been painstakenly reverse enginerred by a group of developers. Every new version that comes out MS tweaks and makes it incompatible in some way. So the ONLY reason any non-ms OS can "talk" to an MS network is because of the hard work by dedicated programmers and NOT because of MS. MS continually tries to STOP any non-ms software from working within an ms environment, which goes well beyond competition. ODBC does not talk to MS windows. It is a "Open DataBase Connectivity" standard. It has nothing to do with "talking" to MS windows. The specs to DCOM were opened in 1999 however, DCOM itself remains proprietary, by virtue of being controlled by Microsoft alone.
They must be talking about ActiveDirectory, right? That's more of a nice new feature than a necessity for business. Will it be the case that every new feature MSFT comes up with must be given away to all?
ActiveDirectory is a bastardized LDAP implementation. Instead of sticking to the LDAP specs, MS "embraced and extended it" to stop non-ms software from interacting with it. And yes LDAP is a very useful (some would say critical) piece of software to a medium to large corporation. When you control the underlying OS, you MUST provide ALL the specs needed for others to compete on the OS. What if Ford only allowed Ford parts? I just don't understand why what makes MS monkeys like you tick. I have nothing against their products, I don't like them but I don't care if others do. What I don't like is ONE company trying to contorl an ENTIRE industry WORLD WIDE! And then using their position to stop competition and to make it very difficult for others to exercise their choice in the market place.
The Media Player thing is stupid too. It's already "uncoupled" from the OS. You need not install or use it, they even made a special little control panel applet to "uninstall" it. If someone made a better media player, I'd be using it right now.
Wrong. Longhorn will have the MS Media Player embedded into the OS just as they have done with IE. You may be able to click a button that says "uninstall", however it has not been uninstalled and only hidden from the non-technical user. There are tons of better media players out there then the SLOW and bloated ms media player. MS media player cannont even handle DVD's out of the box. MPlayer and Xine leaves it in the dust as fars as features and speed goes. Media player was unable to play a DVD on my brother-in-laws PIII 600 MHZ 128MB laptop under winXP. After I switched him to Red Hat 9, he can now watch any movie he wants with MPlayer and Xine.
I think the two posters above have the combined IQ of 4! I guess stupidity loves company as well. Captitlisms most important aspect is competition. If you remove competition, you no longer have captitalism. MS destroys capitalism by their monopolistic practices. They keep undocumented API's to give their other product offering an advantage. They have closed document formats to prevent competitors to compete against them and a slew of other unethical practices.
Think of it like this. I am a producer of TV's and 95% of the world use my TV. Now there are tons of companies out there that would love to offer VCR's, DVD players, digital recorders, sound systems, etc. However, I keep the internals of the TV secret so that my other sub-divisions (which happen to make these products) can have a better advantage in the market place. I make all my money from selling these TV's so I give away a VCR with each TV purchase. I am losing money on the development and distribution of those VCR's, however, I just pass along that expense to my TV division and all is well. I just killed off the competition and have full control over the market. In capitalism, it is the market that is supposed to control things and not one dominant monopoly in that market. This is the problem with MS and it is sad more people do not see it. There are a bunch of Libertarians screeming for the government to stay out of it because the market will fix itself. While I am not a Libertarian, I do agree that less government is often a better government. Howver, in the case of MS, the market cannot fix itself. MS has too much of a stronhold on the entire market and are able to control all the protocols, API's, multimedia and document formats. With that kind of control there cannot be captialism. No other player is allowed to even try to compete.
Trying to compare Open Source/Free Software with MS is just silly. Open Source is well, OPEN. ANYONE can use it to compete and offer different/better offerings. No one is forced to use any one Open Source product. NO Open Source product I know of has hidden API's, closed protocols and document formats to stop others from competing or interacting with it. Red Hat includes thousands of apps with their OS and NONE of them are required. You can install Mozilla, Galeon, MozillaPhoenix, Opera, Konq, Netscape, lynx, links, elinks, w3m, etc. With MS, IE is no longer a stand alone product and is incorporated into the OS. They used their dominant desktop OS position to get their browser to the dominant position. They are now doing this with their media player by embedding it into longhorn. This means that MS can make proprietary changes to HTML (which they have) and now you are locked out of that content UNLESS you buy their OS. They are now trying to do this with multimedia. Soon, to watch or listen to any media you will be required to give MS money by purchasing their products. If MS stuck to standards and published ALL of their protocols, document formats, etc they would not be in court for being a monopoly. Most people do not care about the size of MS, they care about the amount of control that MS has grabbed and are continuing to grab. A monopoly is devistating to a society based on captialism, and it saddens me to see how many Americans just don't give a sh*t. I hope the EU will give MS a kick in the *ss unlike the slap on the wrist the corrupted US government gave them. If MS is not stopped in some way, then in about 10 years time, you will be required to pay MS in one form or another to have ANY interaction with a computer system.
Basically, to make the studies and "facts" sound legit, they will throw a bone or two at Linux by saying that it is OK for this purpose or that. HOWEVER, the study will go on to show "facts" how MS and all their offerings provide a better TCO, have substantially greater security (LOL) and integration with MS products. Why bother spending all this money to study how your pruducts compare against another product. I hope NO ONE will actually believe any of the "facts" put out by this "effort". Do you really think MS will hire competant Linux admins? No! They will get some point and click MS Windows admin to try to setup the Linux boxen and network and then show "facts" for just how unstable and unsecure it is. What a load of FUD. I would love to see them get some real Linux admins in there and set those boxen and networks up to be sweet. Also, does anyone think MS would make a press statement that this Linux "Lab" actaully did anything better then any of their products? What a joke.
At work I use Ximian's Evolution with Ximians Connector
to work with an Exchange 2003 server. It works great and
only costs $69. www.ximian.com I am trying to get the admins to move to a REAL IMAP server, until then, Ximian Connector does the job well.
This got modded insightful? MS has done little to no innovation The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation". They got most of their ideas from Mac. Even Mac didn't do all the innovation. You see there is a thing foreign to the world of MS that is called Information Sharing. It is the thing that has driven man kind from the begining. There is very little real innovation in the world. Most of the time it is taking good ideas and making them just a little better. So why do you have a problem if the KDE guys and Gnome guys take good ideas for a desktop environment and make them a little better? How are they playing catch-up with MS or Mac? Sorry, it is just not the case. The only area Linux has been playing catch-up in is in user friendliness since Linux started out as a geek toy, it makes sense that the orginal design of the desktop was not a Fisher Price Point-N-Click gui. Though it is very close now with KDE, Gnome 2.2 and Ximian's XD2. As a programmer I have plenty of problems with the useablity of MS's desktops. They are too stupified for me and often make me less productive because they are designed too general geared for a computer newbie. Maybe the previous generation grew up without a computer, however almost all of the current generation is pretty tech savvy. If MS keeps dumbing down their GUI for grandma and grandpa to be able to send an email, I think more and more people will desire the more powerfull GUI offered by KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc.
I posted this article with the title "Linux nears Windows XP usability". I wonder why someone at/. would change it to a more MS friendly "Windows XP Edges Out KDE in Usability Test"?
I have yet to see where Linux does not play well with other OSes. I have no problems with samba under Red Hat 9 and connecting to the MS network here at work. I can work with Mac's, I can work with Active Directory and other LDAP servers. I can work with NFS shares from Solaris and connect into Oracle and SQL Server. I think the article is way off base because they only tested out how well SuSE was able to build thier OS to use Samba for ms windows shares. Why didn't the reviewer try to tweak samba? Why didn't the reviewer try the largest Linux distribution which is Red Hat? You have to configure an MS Windows network, why wouldn't someone be expected to do a little configuration for a Linux/SMB netowrk?
And as far as working with other OSes, MS sucks at it. How many file systems can it do out of the box verses what Linux can do? How many different network protocols can ms windows do out of the box verses Linux? I just recently had to handle some mac files on my Linux workstation because the other guys ms windows workstation didn't know how to read the CD. MS windows does not play nice with any other OS. It is ever other OS that is expected to play nice with windows. If you were to take away every ms window box, you would be suprised at how well all machines played together. Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc would all be able to work together over standard protocols.
What you list there is actually a major reason why Windows (in all its glory - fault-ridden or not, depending on who you ask) has dominated the desktop market. Microsoft decided to make a computer an appliance, essentially. You cannot appeal to the massess of everyday non-techies unless you turn something that is effectively complex into an appliance that is easy to use.
MS dominatest the desktop market because of the monopoly they built. The made proprietary standards that force one to use MS to work with those standards. They would not allow PC dealers to sell any other OS, etc, etc. When people first started with DOS, they had to learn how to use it. Then they had to learn Win-3.x, then how to use Win9X, win2k, WinXP. It is no different for Linux. Once you learn Linux, going from one version to the next is trivial. Also, the only things MS has made easy MS windows are web browsing and email. And it is just as easy to do that under Linux. When it comes to more complex tasks it takes the same amount of time/effort to learn to do it under MS windows as it does under Linux. I just had my brother-in-law switch his HP notebook from MS windows XP to Red Hat 9. He did the install without any problems with all hardware detected including his PCMCIA network card and smart media reader. I installed apt for RPM for him and he then installed MozillaFirebird, and is now doing the web, email gaim, and digital imaging with the same ease as under MS windows without costing a fortune and without having to support a monopoly or give up basic rights as a consumer.
I have been using Red Hat 9 at work exclusively for about 4 months now at a fortune 500 company as my development workstation. Almost every desktop here is MS, except for mine. We have Linux, Solaris and MS Windows servers. I have not had any problems at work. It has been such a joy to use my favorite OS at work. I get much better performance with my Linu box then when ms window XP was on there. Using samba I have no problems working in an MS windows network. I have far greater development tools under Linux then I had under MS windows which has helped me be more productive. My home network has been 100% MS free for 3 years and I just switched my brother-in-law to linux for his HP notebook from MS windows XP. While there is more to learn with Linux verses MS Windows, once you get the fundamentals of Linux down, you would be surprised at all the power and tools you have available.
The only single problem I have had with Linux at work has been with MS's horrid Exchange server. I have been using Ximian Evolution 1.4.x for a month or so and it has worked great. Until the exchange admins upgraded to the "latest and greatest" exchange server. MS changed something in the protocol and now basic Ximian Evolution cannot connect. However, Ximian's Exchange connector lets me connect in fine, so I will be buying that product.
I guess the point of my babbling is that if you use Linux and expect it to be a free version of MS windows, then you will be dissapointed, just as you would be dissapointed if you use MS windows and expect it to be an expensive version of Linux. I personally am tired of all these crack head reviewers that don't know how to compare two products and find the pros and cons of each. Linux kicks on the server and Linux is great on the desktop. Spend a little time and learn all the powerfull tools and features that are there for you.
Write some MS specific markup, it'll only work with MS browsers. Whose fault is that? Microsoft's? Only partially, in my opinion.
What? How the hell is it only partially MS's fault? There is a standard. If you deviate from that, you cannot expect others to be able to use it unless you publish those deviations. We all know MS does NOT publish their deviations from standards. For example, IT at my company just upgraded to the "latest and greatest" exchange server (damn it sucks). It has a web interface. When you log in with IE, you get completely different HTML, then if you log in with a none IE browser. I then used Mozilla and got completely different HTML, next I had Mozilla use an IE User Agent string, now agian, I get different HTML, that is no where near the published standard for HTML.
Industries work on standards, the world works on standars. The only industry that is screwed up is the IT industry because of ONE nasty monopoly that is MS. Electrical Engineers can build based on standard parts that have a known function such as transitors, capacitors, etc. Surgeons, can use medical equipment with know functionality. Automakers make cars with know functionality and standards, etc, etc. Remove MS the monopoly and the IT industry would become a much nicer place to work in with far greater interoperabilty.
When you are faced with a problem like this you should look at all possible solutions, whether that solutions is.Net, Java, PHP, etc. I work as a programmer for a fortune 500 company and we just finished a large evalution for our corporate systems and what platform to migrate to between Java and.Net. We did a lot of in house testing and paid big bucks for external recommendations from Sun, MS and a third party..Net offered the lowest learning curve for people comming from ASP and VB. However, Java offered the best solution overall for us. Java scales very well, is rock solid, very secure and can migrate to just about any platform out there. My personal reccommendation for someone with a small budget is to seriously consider two 2-way Linux servers that you could get starting at around $1,500 each. You could get a hardware load balancer to put those two boxes to work. You could even buy a cheap third 1-way box to do the load balancing. This way if one box goes down, they still have the other one. With the one bigger box, they are SOL if it goes down. Now as far as the solution goes. You are only limited by your imagination with Linux. You could deliver a solution with C, C++, PHP, Perl, Java, JSP. The Java/JSP solution will let you do just about anything you want. LDAP, DB, server applications, web with JSP/Servlets, etc. The other bonus with Java is that it has been around for a long time now and has proven to be secure, stable and scalable. We are running J2EE on small boxes all the way up to some huge Sun iron. And with the load balancer, as budget allows you just slap in another box and you have just scaled your application. Though load balancing with a DB is a little more work and is sometimes better to use one larger box.
There is nothing preventing other people from growing their own food, so the only tactics to maintain a monopoly are use of force(through the government), and FUD. FUD wouldnt be effective, how would you FUD the competitions wheat when yours is the same (Microsoft's FUD against linux is somewhat successful only because linux is different from windows, otherwise they'd be FUDing their product too). Thus only the government could impose such a monopoly, so it doesn't serve your argument that monopolies are more powerful than the government.
If I owned 90%+ of all the fertile ground in the USA able to bear wheat, how then would you compete? It would be pretty hard. I could also just lower my prices for a time until you were no longer able to compete and swoop in and take your remaining 10% and now have full control of all wheat production, which is very similar to the postioin MS is in and where they are trying to go.
Buying votes is simply bribing the government(actually the officials in the government) to do what they want. It still has no point without the force of government to enforce their wishes. Without law enforcment Congress can pass all the laws they want, but they won't make any more difference than if I decided to make up a new law.
I see the point you are trying to make, however the fact in America is that congress does give in to bribes to pass laws that benefit big business and then those laws are now able to be exploited by those copanies with their hug cash piles and endless supply of corporate laywers.
First, is it at all possible that Microsoft got to where it is by offering the best (and easiest to learn) product for the best price to the best portion of the populace? Take a minute to think about that before answering. Is Starbucks a monopoly? They charge WAY too much for a cup of coffee, yet I don't hear people on/. rant about them all the time.
No, MS got to where they are because they started off with monopolistic tactics. When the personal IBM PC came out the only choice was MS-DOS. There was the proprietary Unix versions, however they were way too expensive, around $5,000(USD) per PC. So the personal PC started with a crappy single task, single user OS, when Unix was way ahead of the game. Competitors came along like DR-DOS, etc. However, MS would not allow ANY vendor to sell any other OS if they wanted to be able to sell MS-DOS. That is how the monopoly started. Some may say that all is fair in business and there was nothing wrong with that. However, many more will say that this is not capitalism but an abuse of a companies position. As far as starbucks goes, that is a very bad comparision. I can go anywhere and get coffee, Dunkin Donuts, 7-11, WaWa, a dinner, etc. Now if Starbucks owned all the coffee bean plantations and would not sell them to any competitor, then that would be on par with MS.
Second, define "monopoly". Basically, it means that a market is 100% saturated by products by one company, and that company purchases all the companies that try to compete with it. Microsoft hasn't tried to purchase Red Hat or Apple, so they're not really a monopoly. You might say they are a monopoly on desktops. Interesting point... What OS do you have loaded?
Well, the US government convicted MS of being a monopoly. They might have gotten off with a slap on the wrist, however they were still convicted. Whether you think they are or are not a monopoly is irrelevent. My home office has been exclusively Linux for 2 years now. At work I have 2 Linux workstations and 2 MS Windows (2000 and XP) workstations. I program MS Windows and Linux.
Third, if Microsoft is so terrible, and everyone hates them, why aren't there any companes that compete with them? You might say that they buy all the companies that try. IBM released OS/2 Warp about 7-8 years ago. It sucked, but Microsoft didn't buy them.
The fact is, companies cannot compete with them. MS has no monoploy on the Server. The majority of the servers run Unix, followed by ms windows and Linux closing in. However, on the desktop MS has the monopoly with 90%+ of the desktop installs. They keep their protocols hidden, their office document formats hidden and have many internal API's that only MS can use. It is pretty hard for someone to compete in a market against MS when they do not have access to this information. Oh, and as far as OS/2 goes, I can tell you never used it. It was far superior to what MS was offering back then. Ask anyone that actually used it. IBM just was bad at marketing which didn't help, and the real killer for OS/2 was that MS would not allow vendors to also ship MS OSes if they wanted to ship OS/2.
If those competitors can convince people that their product can serve the needs and desires of the customers better than Microsoft can, and at a price (of both time to learn, and money) that is attractive, they will switch.
Again, the IT industry does not work like that. As a programmer at a fortune 500 company I speak from experience. Too many companies have billions tied up in MS's proprietary cage and MS uses that to their advantage to 1) stop them from switching because of closed API which makes it much harder to migrate. 2) Keeping customers on a quick upgrade cycle by making products and office formats to become obsolete. This rapid upgrade cycle cost tons of IT resources in money and time which makes it even harder for a company to ju
Economic Left/Right: -6.62
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.33
Not too far from you and really close to Ghandi! Political Compass Score
Now if we can get more of the world to be closer to us on the political scale we could have world dominiation! : )
I want to see if we have and/.ers close to Hitler.
Libertarians want less government, which IMO is a good thing. However, their methods also allow out of control captitalism and monopolies. Many libertarians supported MS and think it is OK to have that kind of monopoly power. I found this good read on why libertarians should think differently about monopolies. Microsoft - Undeserving of Libtertarian Praise
Larger corporations have something far more powerfull then police/military, it is called money. That is all you need in this nation to have total power. I personally think that if a corporation ever has more then 80% of a business sector, then it should be split into 2 or more competitng companies. Also, with monopolies, people never have the chance to vote with thier money. As the grandparent post pointed out, we need to eat, so when one company controls too much of a food supply market, it is detrimental to the people. The same goes for technology, some may argue that you don't need technology or a computer, however I think it has become engrained into our society and is needed. This is another reason why MS controlling so much of the IT industry is a bad thing. IMO, MS, Sysco, Clear Channel, and a few others are too powerful to let them continue. However, with all their money comes power to buy votes, so it is we the people that suffer.
The original Constitution layed down the fundamentals for this to be a possibility. Howver, we all know the outcome. Congress supports big business for those big kick backs. It took a war for us to gain our freedom and become a nation and establish the Constitution. I personally think it will take one or two more revolutionary wars for us to have this country to truly be for the people. Maybe every 200 - 300 years we as a people will have to take down our current government and rebuild it on principals of freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Red-Carpet is from Ximian and NOT Red Hat. Red-Carpet is used for Ximian Deskto (XD2), RHN (Red Hat Network) is from Red Hat. It is much more configuarable then Windows Update IMO and it is easy to set up a local service. It is also much more powerfull as far as control over the systems and what you want to send down and to what machines. Oh, and there is NO REBOOT REQUIRED.
Well the article I read said he was an employee of data mining company. Which means he had some inside knowlege of the systesm. He broke in through an external FTP server and did not get through their firewall. So I think Acxiom deserves a little break. There is no such thing as a 100% secure system, especially with inside knowlegde of the systems. As a programmer for a fortune 500 company, I could literally bring that company to it's knees and cause millions (USD) lost per day. However, I don't do that because I am a professional and would not use my skills to be abusive. I hope this dude get some hard time.
That is not how a business is ran. A product is sold for whatever the market will bear. Look an many commercial applications that have been around for a while. From release to release there are not many changes, yet the price stays the same or goes up. Look at MS office 2000 to MS office XP. Very little major changes, yet the price goes up. Look at photoshop 6 -> photoshop 7, again, I don't notice any real differences, yet the price is still very high. The problem I have with a BSD license for public funded software is the same as the grandparent pointed out. There is nothing stoping $BIG_COMPANY from taking it and making it incompatible to the public domain version and forcing it out to people. Say the public funds the next-gen audio/video codec and it turns out great. Now all the public can benefit from it until $BIG_COMPANY comes along and makes proprietary changes to it and puts it in all of there new players. So now that public funded codec becomes useless since there are no public funded players being handed out with the public funded version of the codec. So $BIG_COMPANY just got free public funded development and now resell it to us in their players, yet with small proprietary changes so that we cannot benefit from the efforts of our tax dollars that paid for the codec. The GPL would stop abuse and keep it available to ALL which is exactly how a public funded software project should stay IMO.
Could anyone at sco think they have any chance to get away with this crap after threating US government agencies? If anything, shouldn't they want to get the US government on their side. I bet the execs are trying to find all the ways that they can cash out big time before the boat sinks. I hope the SEC gets into this and puts Daryl boy in jail and a big man named bubba makes Daryl his bitch.
Hey that sounds nice! I thought Apple messed with the bios to stop it from booting anything other then Mac OSX? How are the eMacs?
I have used Macs, just never bought my own : )
I just found the price/performance ratio to high on Mac, so I stuck with the X86. I do hate how my 1.7Ghz P4 laptop practically burns me and gets at most 3 hours of batter life.
Are those eMacs any good? A 17" one looks kind of tempting.
The problem with the apple iBook for $1,299.00 is that is is a VERY low spec machine. A 900 Mhz G3 is a dog compared to a G4 and especially the nice G5's and is horrid compared to any $1,299 X86 laptop. I have never owned a mac and don't plan on it unless Apple gets smart REALLY lowers the prices. I love Linux and use it exclusively, howver I would also LOVE to use a Mac. It is just that I will not pay such high prices to have a pretty computer. If Apple would really drop those prices, they could easily replace ms windows for the average home user (I'd still stick to Linx though I could also have a nice Mac). X86 hardware has become a commodity and is very low priced now. Moving to Apple would actually be a regression and we would lose all the benefits of having affordable hardware. I also am not keen on having to get ALL my software AND hardware from one vendor. That is just the next monopoly waiting to happen. I like what Apple has been doing so far, I just hope they put out a machine that can compete against an X86 on performance AND price. I don't have a problem paying $200 - $300 more for a Mac, howevr I will not spend a $1,000+ more for a comparable system. With that extra grand I could really beef up the X86. Give me a 1Ghz+ G4 with 512MB, 40GB+ hard drive with a DVD/CDRW for around $1,200 and I would buy it in a heart beat. I can get this type of setup on X86 for $700 or so.
I think the two posters above have the combined IQ of 4! I guess stupidity loves company as well. Captitlisms most important aspect is competition. If you remove competition, you no longer have captitalism. MS destroys capitalism by their monopolistic practices. They keep undocumented API's to give their other product offering an advantage. They have closed document formats to prevent competitors to compete against them and a slew of other unethical practices.
Think of it like this. I am a producer of TV's and 95% of the world use my TV. Now there are tons of companies out there that would love to offer VCR's, DVD players, digital recorders, sound systems, etc. However, I keep the internals of the TV secret so that my other sub-divisions (which happen to make these products) can have a better advantage in the market place. I make all my money from selling these TV's so I give away a VCR with each TV purchase. I am losing money on the development and distribution of those VCR's, however, I just pass along that expense to my TV division and all is well. I just killed off the competition and have full control over the market. In capitalism, it is the market that is supposed to control things and not one dominant monopoly in that market. This is the problem with MS and it is sad more people do not see it. There are a bunch of Libertarians screeming for the government to stay out of it because the market will fix itself. While I am not a Libertarian, I do agree that less government is often a better government. Howver, in the case of MS, the market cannot fix itself. MS has too much of a stronhold on the entire market and are able to control all the protocols, API's, multimedia and document formats. With that kind of control there cannot be captialism. No other player is allowed to even try to compete.
Trying to compare Open Source/Free Software with MS is just silly. Open Source is well, OPEN. ANYONE can use it to compete and offer different/better offerings. No one is forced to use any one Open Source product. NO Open Source product I know of has hidden API's, closed protocols and document formats to stop others from competing or interacting with it. Red Hat includes thousands of apps with their OS and NONE of them are required. You can install Mozilla, Galeon, MozillaPhoenix, Opera, Konq, Netscape, lynx, links, elinks, w3m, etc. With MS, IE is no longer a stand alone product and is incorporated into the OS. They used their dominant desktop OS position to get their browser to the dominant position. They are now doing this with their media player by embedding it into longhorn. This means that MS can make proprietary changes to HTML (which they have) and now you are locked out of that content UNLESS you buy their OS. They are now trying to do this with multimedia. Soon, to watch or listen to any media you will be required to give MS money by purchasing their products. If MS stuck to standards and published ALL of their protocols, document formats, etc they would not be in court for being a monopoly. Most people do not care about the size of MS, they care about the amount of control that MS has grabbed and are continuing to grab. A monopoly is devistating to a society based on captialism, and it saddens me to see how many Americans just don't give a sh*t. I hope the EU will give MS a kick in the *ss unlike the slap on the wrist the corrupted US government gave them. If MS is not stopped in some way, then in about 10 years time, you will be required to pay MS in one form or another to have ANY interaction with a computer system.
Basically, to make the studies and "facts" sound legit, they will throw a bone or two at Linux by saying that it is OK for this purpose or that. HOWEVER, the study will go on to show "facts" how MS and all their offerings provide a better TCO, have substantially greater security (LOL) and integration with MS products. Why bother spending all this money to study how your pruducts compare against another product. I hope NO ONE will actually believe any of the "facts" put out by this "effort". Do you really think MS will hire competant Linux admins? No! They will get some point and click MS Windows admin to try to setup the Linux boxen and network and then show "facts" for just how unstable and unsecure it is. What a load of FUD. I would love to see them get some real Linux admins in there and set those boxen and networks up to be sweet. Also, does anyone think MS would make a press statement that this Linux "Lab" actaully did anything better then any of their products? What a joke.
At work I use Ximian's Evolution with Ximians Connector to work with an Exchange 2003 server. It works great and only costs $69. www.ximian.com I am trying to get the admins to move to a REAL IMAP server, until then, Ximian Connector does the job well.
This got modded insightful? MS has done little to no innovation The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation". They got most of their ideas from Mac. Even Mac didn't do all the innovation. You see there is a thing foreign to the world of MS that is called Information Sharing. It is the thing that has driven man kind from the begining. There is very little real innovation in the world. Most of the time it is taking good ideas and making them just a little better. So why do you have a problem if the KDE guys and Gnome guys take good ideas for a desktop environment and make them a little better? How are they playing catch-up with MS or Mac? Sorry, it is just not the case. The only area Linux has been playing catch-up in is in user friendliness since Linux started out as a geek toy, it makes sense that the orginal design of the desktop was not a Fisher Price Point-N-Click gui. Though it is very close now with KDE, Gnome 2.2 and Ximian's XD2. As a programmer I have plenty of problems with the useablity of MS's desktops. They are too stupified for me and often make me less productive because they are designed too general geared for a computer newbie. Maybe the previous generation grew up without a computer, however almost all of the current generation is pretty tech savvy. If MS keeps dumbing down their GUI for grandma and grandpa to be able to send an email, I think more and more people will desire the more powerfull GUI offered by KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc.
I posted this article with the title "Linux nears Windows XP usability". I wonder why someone at /. would change it to a more MS friendly "Windows XP Edges Out KDE in Usability Test"?
I have yet to see where Linux does not play well with other OSes. I have no problems with samba under Red Hat 9 and connecting to the MS network here at work. I can work with Mac's, I can work with Active Directory and other LDAP servers. I can work with NFS shares from Solaris and connect into Oracle and SQL Server. I think the article is way off base because they only tested out how well SuSE was able to build thier OS to use Samba for ms windows shares. Why didn't the reviewer try to tweak samba? Why didn't the reviewer try the largest Linux distribution which is Red Hat? You have to configure an MS Windows network, why wouldn't someone be expected to do a little configuration for a Linux/SMB netowrk?
And as far as working with other OSes, MS sucks at it. How many file systems can it do out of the box verses what Linux can do? How many different network protocols can ms windows do out of the box verses Linux? I just recently had to handle some mac files on my Linux workstation because the other guys ms windows workstation didn't know how to read the CD. MS windows does not play nice with any other OS. It is ever other OS that is expected to play nice with windows. If you were to take away every ms window box, you would be suprised at how well all machines played together. Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc would all be able to work together over standard protocols.
I have been using Red Hat 9 at work exclusively for about 4 months now at a fortune 500 company as my development workstation. Almost every desktop here is MS, except for mine. We have Linux, Solaris and MS Windows servers. I have not had any problems at work. It has been such a joy to use my favorite OS at work. I get much better performance with my Linu box then when ms window XP was on there. Using samba I have no problems working in an MS windows network. I have far greater development tools under Linux then I had under MS windows which has helped me be more productive. My home network has been 100% MS free for 3 years and I just switched my brother-in-law to linux for his HP notebook from MS windows XP. While there is more to learn with Linux verses MS Windows, once you get the fundamentals of Linux down, you would be surprised at all the power and tools you have available.
The only single problem I have had with Linux at work has been with MS's horrid Exchange server. I have been using Ximian Evolution 1.4.x for a month or so and it has worked great. Until the exchange admins upgraded to the "latest and greatest" exchange server. MS changed something in the protocol and now basic Ximian Evolution cannot connect. However, Ximian's Exchange connector lets me connect in fine, so I will be buying that product.
I guess the point of my babbling is that if you use Linux and expect it to be a free version of MS windows, then you will be dissapointed, just as you would be dissapointed if you use MS windows and expect it to be an expensive version of Linux. I personally am tired of all these crack head reviewers that don't know how to compare two products and find the pros and cons of each. Linux kicks on the server and Linux is great on the desktop. Spend a little time and learn all the powerfull tools and features that are there for you.
Industries work on standards, the world works on standars. The only industry that is screwed up is the IT industry because of ONE nasty monopoly that is MS. Electrical Engineers can build based on standard parts that have a known function such as transitors, capacitors, etc. Surgeons, can use medical equipment with know functionality. Automakers make cars with know functionality and standards, etc, etc. Remove MS the monopoly and the IT industry would become a much nicer place to work in with far greater interoperabilty.
When you are faced with a problem like this you should look at all possible solutions, whether that solutions is .Net, Java, PHP, etc. I work as a programmer for a fortune 500 company and we just finished a large evalution for our corporate systems and what platform to migrate to between Java and .Net. We did a lot of in house testing and paid big bucks for external recommendations from Sun, MS and a third party. .Net offered the lowest learning curve for people comming from ASP and VB. However, Java offered the best solution overall for us. Java scales very well, is rock solid, very secure and can migrate to just about any platform out there. My personal reccommendation for someone with a small budget is to seriously consider two 2-way Linux servers that you could get starting at around $1,500 each. You could get a hardware load balancer to put those two boxes to work. You could even buy a cheap third 1-way box to do the load balancing. This way if one box goes down, they still have the other one. With the one bigger box, they are SOL if it goes down. Now as far as the solution goes. You are only limited by your imagination with Linux. You could deliver a solution with C, C++, PHP, Perl, Java, JSP. The Java/JSP solution will let you do just about anything you want. LDAP, DB, server applications, web with JSP/Servlets, etc. The other bonus with Java is that it has been around for a long time now and has proven to be secure, stable and scalable. We are running J2EE on small boxes all the way up to some huge Sun iron. And with the load balancer, as budget allows you just slap in another box and you have just scaled your application. Though load balancing with a DB is a little more work and is sometimes better to use one larger box.
No, MS got to where they are because they started off with monopolistic tactics. When the personal IBM PC came out the only choice was MS-DOS. There was the proprietary Unix versions, however they were way too expensive, around $5,000(USD) per PC. So the personal PC started with a crappy single task, single user OS, when Unix was way ahead of the game. Competitors came along like DR-DOS, etc. However, MS would not allow ANY vendor to sell any other OS if they wanted to be able to sell MS-DOS. That is how the monopoly started. Some may say that all is fair in business and there was nothing wrong with that. However, many more will say that this is not capitalism but an abuse of a companies position. As far as starbucks goes, that is a very bad comparision. I can go anywhere and get coffee, Dunkin Donuts, 7-11, WaWa, a dinner, etc. Now if Starbucks owned all the coffee bean plantations and would not sell them to any competitor, then that would be on par with MS.
Well, the US government convicted MS of being a monopoly. They might have gotten off with a slap on the wrist, however they were still convicted. Whether you think they are or are not a monopoly is irrelevent. My home office has been exclusively Linux for 2 years now. At work I have 2 Linux workstations and 2 MS Windows (2000 and XP) workstations. I program MS Windows and Linux.
The fact is, companies cannot compete with them. MS has no monoploy on the Server. The majority of the servers run Unix, followed by ms windows and Linux closing in. However, on the desktop MS has the monopoly with 90%+ of the desktop installs. They keep their protocols hidden, their office document formats hidden and have many internal API's that only MS can use. It is pretty hard for someone to compete in a market against MS when they do not have access to this information. Oh, and as far as OS/2 goes, I can tell you never used it. It was far superior to what MS was offering back then. Ask anyone that actually used it. IBM just was bad at marketing which didn't help, and the real killer for OS/2 was that MS would not allow vendors to also ship MS OSes if they wanted to ship OS/2.
Again, the IT industry does not work like that. As a programmer at a fortune 500 company I speak from experience. Too many companies have billions tied up in MS's proprietary cage and MS uses that to their advantage to 1) stop them from switching because of closed API which makes it much harder to migrate. 2) Keeping customers on a quick upgrade cycle by making products and office formats to become obsolete. This rapid upgrade cycle cost tons of IT resources in money and time which makes it even harder for a company to ju
Economic Left/Right: -6.62 /.ers close to Hitler.
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.33
Not too far from you and really close to Ghandi!
Political Compass Score
Now if we can get more of the world to be closer to us on the political scale we could have world dominiation! : )
I want to see if we have and
Libertarians want less government, which IMO is a good thing. However, their methods also allow out of control captitalism and monopolies. Many libertarians supported MS and think it is OK to have that kind of monopoly power. I found this good read on why libertarians should think differently about monopolies. Microsoft - Undeserving of Libtertarian Praise
Larger corporations have something far more powerfull then police/military, it is called money. That is all you need in this nation to have total power. I personally think that if a corporation ever has more then 80% of a business sector, then it should be split into 2 or more competitng companies. Also, with monopolies, people never have the chance to vote with thier money. As the grandparent post pointed out, we need to eat, so when one company controls too much of a food supply market, it is detrimental to the people. The same goes for technology, some may argue that you don't need technology or a computer, however I think it has become engrained into our society and is needed. This is another reason why MS controlling so much of the IT industry is a bad thing. IMO, MS, Sysco, Clear Channel, and a few others are too powerful to let them continue. However, with all their money comes power to buy votes, so it is we the people that suffer.
The original Constitution layed down the fundamentals for this to be a possibility. Howver, we all know the outcome. Congress supports big business for those big kick backs. It took a war for us to gain our freedom and become a nation and establish the Constitution. I personally think it will take one or two more revolutionary wars for us to have this country to truly be for the people. Maybe every 200 - 300 years we as a people will have to take down our current government and rebuild it on principals of freedom.