Correct me if my history is wrong here, but I understand that the taxes levied by the British on stamps, molasses, and other products reached oppressive proportions before the colonists rebelled.
It's despicable to start a war because the 18th century equivalent of Donald Trump (George Washington, one of the richest men in the country at the time) is deprived of some small portion of his riches. It's not nearly as unethical to fight because the average farmer just had his income effectively cut by a third.
Then I watched the original three flicks again. They're horrendous. 3P0 is marginally less annoying than Jar Jar. The stories have huge plot holes. Colossal. Mind-boggling.
You were probably ten, or five, or three when you first saw Star Wars. You were a lot easier on the inconsistencies and absurdities at that age than you are now. The Phantom Menace most definitely wasn't a film classic, but neither were the original three.
The CLI and GUI camps can coexist. He just has it in for people who think that all Linux users must learn to use the command line well. I agree with him completely. Command Line is great and much faster in the hands of a skilled user, but if we require all linux newbies to learn it, we aren't going to get many converts.
I spent a summer living with my uncle, who had AOL. If you used another browser without using the AOL browser for 15 minutes, it declared you idle and disconnected you from the 'net.
That was REALLY annoying. Hopefully it's not still true.
Read the article. Prima facie nothing, it's a bit deeper than that.
The corruption and mistakes in the Federation can be addressed and fixed from within. The Federation is democratic, and sometimes the democracy even works well. Contrast to Star Wars, where there is no recourse against tyranny except rebellion. The democracy portrayed in Episode 1 is a shambles.
The villians in Star Trek use subterfuge and are not always easily discernible by their actions and outfits. Some of them have understandable motives, like self-preservation or stealing better technology for their species. Contrast to Star Wars, where the villians wear sinister outfits and have openly expressed plans to conquer the galaxy simply for its own sake.
The actions of the main characters in Star Trek are not above the law and do not supersede normal mortals. People are court martialed, and the prime directive is important. Contrast this to Star Wars, where the redemption of Darth Vader for saving his own son redeem him from the murders of thousands of innocents, including the destruction of a planet (Alderaan). There is no scale.
The heroes in Star Trek are the human ideal, but not truly superhuman (with exceptions like Data, who is still not perfect or the main character). Star Wars Jedi Knights and Sith are technologically and physically superhuman. No normal man could defeat a jedi in a fight, in piloting, or engineering.
Brin makes a good argument that Lucas is bombarding us with propoganda in favor of aristocracy. That may not be an expressed intention, but that is the result. Star Trek is certainly idealistic, but it favors democracy.
My grandfather would tell stories from his father how the mine owners directed the rescue crews after collapses to focus on digging out the donkeys, because they were more expensive to replace than the workers. They employed teams of men with clubs to beat the workers whenever they attempted to strike.
Large lengths of the first transcontinental railroads were built by Asian immigrants that were quite literally worked to death. Not in the dozens, but in the thousands.
The industrial economy was partially funded by riches accumulated from the use of Africans as slaves. It was built on land acquired by driving out and killing by weapon (or disease) an estimated 12 million Native Americans.
America is a great nation now, but it was built on blood.
With their two shots per minute muskets, gentlemen's battles and bayonets!
A hundred guys with AK-47 rifles and sufficient ammunition could have won the revolutionary war for either side in under a year. If the average 20th century American didn't have access to semiautomatic pistols the same hundred guys could take over any small US rural town of their choice.
Believe it or not, the average third world citizen doesn't have access to dealers selling semiautomatic weapons, let alone automatic. Even if they did, these guns cost more than their homes.
The American revolution couldn't be repeated in the 21st century. A well-equipped, well trained private army might overthrow a government, but a people's rebellion is worse than pitting some Afghani mountain fighters against the US military... it would be a complete turkey shoot.
The Linux should be extremely easy to use for the end users. That I agree with.
It wouldn't take too long to teach a handful of IT people (even, God forbid, MCSEs) to use visual configuration tools to set up email, networking, office suites, login scripts, etc... But it would be much cheaper and faster to have one or two Unix-savvy people write a handful of scripts that could be remotely run to set up each unit.
For a small business, the time lost writing the scripts may be more than the time lost individually setting up each PC. But for a business Merrill Lynch-size, you could cut weeks out of the process.
it seems everyone sets their games to the fastest setting.
If you set the game to "normal" speed (God forbid), it takes longer to build your initial army. But you get to use strategy, tactics, and unit micromanagement in battle without having to memorize 70 hotkeys.
At the fastest setting, Starcraft is all about economic micromanagement and rushing with hordes of units. At the slow setting, Starcraft is a tactician's wet dream. (At the slowest setting, it's a tactician's nap time.)
The killer is that textbooks don't lose value. My $90 3rd edition calc book might be seven years old, but it still has calculus I can learn.
If I paid $400 for a license of Visual Studio in 1996, I would probably only be able to make software that works on NT 3.5 or Windows95.
Photoshop is probably worse - don't know never used it. I would bet there's a dozen more/better features than there was in the version they released five years ago.
The responsibility falls squarely upon the killers themselves, BUT:
The parents should have noticed the arsenal of semiautomatic weapons and explosives their children were acquiring. There is no excuse for that.
If (I don't know) the kids had previous mentioned their problems with bullies to their parents and teachers, the parents and teachers should have done something about it. I had my ears flicked and my nuts whacked at least once a week for six years in a row, and the only reason I didn't kill those little bastards was lack of opportunity. My kids will not put up with the same shit I did, even if I have to home school them. (I am fully aware that many people were bullied much more than I was.) My parents called the school, we met with teachers, and they even called the parents of the bullies. It didn't help, but just knowing that they tried to intervene was something. I'm under the impression that the Columbine guys were screwed from the start, and no one gave a damn.
The killers are guilty of murder, but at least in this case, the parents most definitely did have something to do with it. They're guilty of negligence.
Microsoft did this: "If you want to sell all your prebuilt PCs with Windows95, we'll charge you $X per MS license. If you sell any PCs with another operating system, we'll charge you $3X for per MS license."
When DR-DOS was released way back when, Microsoft announced that they would have a superior product out in six months. So sales of DR-DOS fell well short of projections. Over a year later, MS came out with the latest version of DOS - and it was inferior to DR-DOS. It didn't matter, their lying had the intended affect.
Internet Explorer and Netscape were fighting a war on the desktop for most popular internet browser, and for a while they were about equal for speed and quality. Microsoft jacked up the prices of Windows, and bundled IE with it. Since consumers had no choice but to pay for IE, Netscape sales plummeted. Microsoft now had millions in cash to pump into improving IE, while Netscape scrambled to stay alive. That's when IE got a leg (and an arm, and a head) up over Netscape. IE wasn't better than the Netscape browser until after Microsoft cripped Netscape inc.
There's plenty more. These aren't rumors or rantings of a crazed Linux fanatic (I use MS, dammit!). They're documented. MS didn't get their monopoly by being the best in the market. They clawed their way to the top with a two punch combination of tremendous advertising (which is legal) and screwing their competition any way they could (which is not).
If you look at this there's one decent, well written, CONCRETE criticism of his work. Lomborg makes some mistakes in his statistical analysis of deforestation, and the critic points them out fair and square.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the articles at that site aren't nearly as well written.
I think (?) computer games are produced and burned to CD en masse... Don't forget you need the license key to install the game, in addition to accessing battle.net. If you wanted to use a random license key for each copy, you would have to burn that key into the license key checker-thingerdoodle program on that particular copy. So instead of burning 30,000,000 copies of the same CD, they would have to burn 30,000,000 different CDs and then make sure the correct license key was packaged with each one...
Of course, you should always ship one CD with each game that contained only encrypted license keys, but it seems wasteful to me.
Of course you, having grown up in a family of obese people, having been obese yourself, having successfully lost all of your excess fat and kept it off for five years, would know all about it.
You must be an authority on metabollism, muscle building, fat loss, and health.
Please point me to the literature you've read, because I've encountered some contradictory points of view. More than one study has shown between 95% and 99% of all dieters regain all the weight they've lost within five years, and one third regain more. In fact, some studies also show that healthy eating and regular exercise are more important than weight.
People that work long hours often don't have the time to prepare a healthy meal. They are also often forced to eat supper late, a big (but to them, unavoidable) no-no for efficient digestion. I've known an anorexic that ate normal meals every two or three days. When her fainting spells started taking place in public, her mom forced her to eat regular meals every day. She gained over a hundred pounds in two years.
Personal responsibility is admirable. But when you're being marketed deadly supplements (fen/phen), contradictory diet information (the Zone vs Atkins vs Richard Simmons vs Natural Hygiene, etc...), contradictory exercise information (Spinning, Pilates, Tae Bo, etc...), contradictory strength training (machines vs free weights, HIT vs Weider, Heavy Duty, Super Slow, etc...). Plus, you have to deal with the extreme emphasis on thinness in popular fashion and entertainment.
Being healthy is great. But this unnatural emphasis on thinness over health in general and in the face of the evidence, is crazy. When size eight women (smaller than Marilyn Monroe) are featured in fat-women clothing magazines, you've got a problem.
"Blatantly illegal Gestapo tactics"?? "Gestapo Tactics"? I missed the part in the article when it said, "They came in and cut off fingers and toes until he confessed, and then executed him." That, my boy, is Gestapo. The feds break the laws, but they're not death camp guards.
If he posted legitimate, valuable information for constructing bombs, isn't it possible (however unlikely) that the SWAT team trying to break in would have been met by automatic weapons fire or an Oklahoma City class explosion?
And as for the seized property and stolen data: if he did hacking, the government agents can't take half of his hard drive for perusal in court and leave him the portion with Windows and Starcraft (or whatever). Yes he lost data, because it was taken for evidence.
Never mind that research has shown pot as a cause of cancer is less dangerous than tobacco, which is legal.
Never mind that research has shown pot as a cause of judgement and reaction impairment is much less powerful than alcohol, which is legal.
Never mind that research has shown pot to be less addictive than tobacco or alcohol, which are legal.
Never mind the fact that alcohol prohibition failed. Never mind the fact that tobacco prohibition hasn't even been tried. Somehow, a ban on pot will work!
Never mind that in some states, mandatory sentencing for drug users exceeds minimum sentences for violent crimes.
Never mind that pot was first declared illegal because it incited users to violence. I don't know any violent potheads. Does anyone else?
Who cares if its relative hemp is an industrial product being produced in dozens of countries?
The US government isn't quite the devil some people paint it to be, but neither is it a saint.
I'm probably going to be off a bit with my reply, but I can give you the gist. The first difference is non-commercial versus commercial, and the second is package management.
Debian is not for profit, and denotes all non-free or non-open source software that comes with the distribution as such. It is volunteer-run and also not particularly newbie friendly. Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, etc... are run by for profit companies. Because they're out to make profit, it's in their vested interest to be newbie friendly. I've installed Debian potato and Suse 7.2, and the Suse install was much easier. Other than ease of install, commercial vs. non-commercial makes no difference to me, but it is important to some people.
The real distinction is in the packaging system. Red Hat started the R(edhat)P(ackage)M(anagement) system, and a big chunk of the commercial distributions use it. So if you want to install a new package, you obtain the.rpm file and then
install it using the rpm program.
Debian uses A(nother)P(ackaging)T(ool). You can configure apt to read from hard drive, CD-ROM, and/or the internet. Apt takes rpm two steps further, by fetching the package for you and also grabbing and also installing all necessary dependent packages. You can easily automate massive installs this way, including updating every package on your machine to the latest release (as far as I know).
That WOULD give a tremendous advantage to Debian, except for the nature of open source... some creative programmers wrote an apt for rpm files. So now you can do everything a Debian user can do with an rpm-based distribution.
I know that one example does not constitute proof, but where I work our only Unix crash since I started was due to a faulty power supply. Our Win2K boxes, which are all faithfully patched, rarely last a month between reboots. A few crash and burn several times a week.
Crashing once or twice a month, or even once a week, isn't too damaging to productivity. But it is still frustrating as hell, especially when you're occasionally forced to reinstall the program you were running when it died.
1. Microsoft doesn't have to change format. These open source developers are attempting to write programs that open, edit, and safe Microsoft formats. The shoe is on the other foot. If they change their own formats in a non-trival way, it will hurt people who haven't upgraded to Office Whatever as much as the Linux users. In a way, Open Source is now embracing and extending Microsoft's software capabilities.
2. You're probably right. The up front cost isn't as massive as you think, provided (and I grant that this is a big provision) the migration process is managed competently. In fact, it could be downright cheap. But the associated cost from lost time as people acclimatize themselves to their new environment... that'll hit the productivity hard.
3. Eliminated licensing fees and (potentially) faster administration. I'm not a MSCSE, but I'm under the impression that there are dozens of administrative tasks that must be done point and click. Whether you have to use each workstation or run VNC, that takes time. A competent Unix administrator can configure an office full of units with a few scripts. There are licensing fees for OS, Office, ZIP, Database systems, Photo-editing software, Terminal services software... it adds up fast. The only two software costs that remain comparable are administration and tech support.
I think IF (I will not assume 'when') Linux gains a large portion of the desktop market, AOL will market AOL for Linux. Until then, they'll market for Microsoft... go where the profit lies.
I beg to differ. I'm no expert, but I'm under the impression that the bows and crossbows of the period were impressively powerful. I believe it wasn't until the English longbows reached some 6 feet in length with an incredibly powerful draw that they were able to render medieval armor useless.
I'm certain plate armoUr wouldn't block a high powered rifle or steel-jacketed bullets, but I wouldn't be surprised if it allowed the wearer to shrug off fire from normal handguns.
But when KDE or GNOME locked up on you, did you try Ctrl+Alt+ (F1 through F6)? That should bring you to a text console. From there you should be able to log in and kill -9 without the frustration of rebooting your machine.
I don't believe Linux is viable for the home users that don't care to learn more than absolutely necessary about the workings of their operating system (which I believe is the vast majority of PC users). It is getting closer, but the gap is still huge.
I hate to break it to you, but those crashes aren't mythical. I have a win98 box at home that has NEVER ran more than 48 hours without crashing. It has installed:
Netscape 6, Star Office 6, Winzip, McAfee Virus Scan, Opera 5, CD recording software, and a handful of games.
I dual boot to Suse or Debian (depending upon my mood) on the same box without ever crashing.
This is not an exception. My roommates in college crashed their machines left and right. The public computing labs on campus all had a handful of unusable computers. My parent's machine crashes often. My siblings' machines crash at least once a week. I haven't met anyone in person that has a crash-free (or even crash-light) Windows PC.
If your machine is stable, I'm sincerely happy for you. But don't generalize your experience mean all Windows machines work great.
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I'm fairly sure that's an exaggeration.
Correct me if my history is wrong here, but I understand that the taxes levied by the British on stamps, molasses, and other products reached oppressive proportions before the colonists rebelled.
It's despicable to start a war because the 18th century equivalent of Donald Trump (George Washington, one of the richest men in the country at the time) is deprived of some small portion of his riches. It's not nearly as unethical to fight because the average farmer just had his income effectively cut by a third.
I hated The Phantom Menace when I first saw it.
Then I watched the original three flicks again. They're horrendous. 3P0 is marginally less annoying than Jar Jar. The stories have huge plot holes. Colossal. Mind-boggling.
You were probably ten, or five, or three when you first saw Star Wars. You were a lot easier on the inconsistencies and absurdities at that age than you are now. The Phantom Menace most definitely wasn't a film classic, but neither were the original three.
The CLI and GUI camps can coexist. He just has it in for people who think that all Linux users must learn to use the command line well. I agree with him completely. Command Line is great and much faster in the hands of a skilled user, but if we require all linux newbies to learn it, we aren't going to get many converts.
I spent a summer living with my uncle, who had AOL. If you used another browser without using the AOL browser for 15 minutes, it declared you idle and disconnected you from the 'net.
That was REALLY annoying. Hopefully it's not still true.
Read the article. Prima facie nothing, it's a bit deeper than that.
The corruption and mistakes in the Federation can be addressed and fixed from within. The Federation is democratic, and sometimes the democracy even works well. Contrast to Star Wars, where there is no recourse against tyranny except rebellion. The democracy portrayed in Episode 1 is a shambles.
The villians in Star Trek use subterfuge and are not always easily discernible by their actions and outfits. Some of them have understandable motives, like self-preservation or stealing better technology for their species. Contrast to Star Wars, where the villians wear sinister outfits and have openly expressed plans to conquer the galaxy simply for its own sake.
The actions of the main characters in Star Trek are not above the law and do not supersede normal mortals. People are court martialed, and the prime directive is important. Contrast this to Star Wars, where the redemption of Darth Vader for saving his own son redeem him from the murders of thousands of innocents, including the destruction of a planet (Alderaan). There is no scale.
The heroes in Star Trek are the human ideal, but not truly superhuman (with exceptions like Data, who is still not perfect or the main character). Star Wars Jedi Knights and Sith are technologically and physically superhuman. No normal man could defeat a jedi in a fight, in piloting, or engineering.
Brin makes a good argument that Lucas is bombarding us with propoganda in favor of aristocracy. That may not be an expressed intention, but that is the result. Star Trek is certainly idealistic, but it favors democracy.
Study your history.
My grandfather would tell stories from his father how the mine owners directed the rescue crews after collapses to focus on digging out the donkeys, because they were more expensive to replace than the workers. They employed teams of men with clubs to beat the workers whenever they attempted to strike.
Large lengths of the first transcontinental railroads were built by Asian immigrants that were quite literally worked to death. Not in the dozens, but in the thousands.
The industrial economy was partially funded by riches accumulated from the use of Africans as slaves. It was built on land acquired by driving out and killing by weapon (or disease) an estimated 12 million Native Americans.
America is a great nation now, but it was built on blood.
With their two shots per minute muskets, gentlemen's battles and bayonets!
A hundred guys with AK-47 rifles and sufficient ammunition could have won the revolutionary war for either side in under a year. If the average 20th century American didn't have access to semiautomatic pistols the same hundred guys could take over any small US rural town of their choice. Believe it or not, the average third world citizen doesn't have access to dealers selling semiautomatic weapons, let alone automatic. Even if they did, these guns cost more than their homes.
The American revolution couldn't be repeated in the 21st century. A well-equipped, well trained private army might overthrow a government, but a people's rebellion is worse than pitting some Afghani mountain fighters against the US military... it would be a complete turkey shoot.
The Linux should be extremely easy to use for the end users. That I agree with.
It wouldn't take too long to teach a handful of IT people (even, God forbid, MCSEs) to use visual configuration tools to set up email, networking, office suites, login scripts, etc... But it would be much cheaper and faster to have one or two Unix-savvy people write a handful of scripts that could be remotely run to set up each unit.
For a small business, the time lost writing the scripts may be more than the time lost individually setting up each PC. But for a business Merrill Lynch-size, you could cut weeks out of the process.
it seems everyone sets their games to the fastest setting. If you set the game to "normal" speed (God forbid), it takes longer to build your initial army. But you get to use strategy, tactics, and unit micromanagement in battle without having to memorize 70 hotkeys. At the fastest setting, Starcraft is all about economic micromanagement and rushing with hordes of units. At the slow setting, Starcraft is a tactician's wet dream. (At the slowest setting, it's a tactician's nap time.)
The killer is that textbooks don't lose value. My $90 3rd edition calc book might be seven years old, but it still has calculus I can learn.
If I paid $400 for a license of Visual Studio in 1996, I would probably only be able to make software that works on NT 3.5 or Windows95.
Photoshop is probably worse - don't know never used it. I would bet there's a dozen more/better features than there was in the version they released five years ago.
The responsibility falls squarely upon the killers themselves, BUT:
The parents should have noticed the arsenal of semiautomatic weapons and explosives their children were acquiring. There is no excuse for that.
If (I don't know) the kids had previous mentioned their problems with bullies to their parents and teachers, the parents and teachers should have done something about it. I had my ears flicked and my nuts whacked at least once a week for six years in a row, and the only reason I didn't kill those little bastards was lack of opportunity. My kids will not put up with the same shit I did, even if I have to home school them. (I am fully aware that many people were bullied much more than I was.) My parents called the school, we met with teachers, and they even called the parents of the bullies. It didn't help, but just knowing that they tried to intervene was something. I'm under the impression that the Columbine guys were screwed from the start, and no one gave a damn.
The killers are guilty of murder, but at least in this case, the parents most definitely did have something to do with it. They're guilty of negligence.
Microsoft did this: "If you want to sell all your prebuilt PCs with Windows95, we'll charge you $X per MS license. If you sell any PCs with another operating system, we'll charge you $3X for per MS license."
When DR-DOS was released way back when, Microsoft announced that they would have a superior product out in six months. So sales of DR-DOS fell well short of projections. Over a year later, MS came out with the latest version of DOS - and it was inferior to DR-DOS. It didn't matter, their lying had the intended affect.
Internet Explorer and Netscape were fighting a war on the desktop for most popular internet browser, and for a while they were about equal for speed and quality. Microsoft jacked up the prices of Windows, and bundled IE with it. Since consumers had no choice but to pay for IE, Netscape sales plummeted. Microsoft now had millions in cash to pump into improving IE, while Netscape scrambled to stay alive. That's when IE got a leg (and an arm, and a head) up over Netscape. IE wasn't better than the Netscape browser until after Microsoft cripped Netscape inc.
There's plenty more. These aren't rumors or rantings of a crazed Linux fanatic (I use MS, dammit!). They're documented. MS didn't get their monopoly by being the best in the market. They clawed their way to the top with a two punch combination of tremendous advertising (which is legal) and screwing their competition any way they could (which is not).
If you look at this there's one decent, well written, CONCRETE criticism of his work. Lomborg makes some mistakes in his statistical analysis of deforestation, and the critic points them out fair and square.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the articles at that site aren't nearly as well written.
A few pirates spoiled Napster for those of us who legally trade MP3's.
That's got to be the funniest thing I've read this year.
I think (?) computer games are produced and burned to CD en masse... Don't forget you need the license key to install the game, in addition to accessing battle.net. If you wanted to use a random license key for each copy, you would have to burn that key into the license key checker-thingerdoodle program on that particular copy. So instead of burning 30,000,000 copies of the same CD, they would have to burn 30,000,000 different CDs and then make sure the correct license key was packaged with each one...
Of course, you should always ship one CD with each game that contained only encrypted license keys, but it seems wasteful to me.
Of course you, having grown up in a family of obese people, having been obese yourself, having successfully lost all of your excess fat and kept it off for five years, would know all about it. You must be an authority on metabollism, muscle building, fat loss, and health.
Please point me to the literature you've read, because I've encountered some contradictory points of view. More than one study has shown between 95% and 99% of all dieters regain all the weight they've lost within five years, and one third regain more. In fact, some studies also show that healthy eating and regular exercise are more important than weight.
People that work long hours often don't have the time to prepare a healthy meal. They are also often forced to eat supper late, a big (but to them, unavoidable) no-no for efficient digestion. I've known an anorexic that ate normal meals every two or three days. When her fainting spells started taking place in public, her mom forced her to eat regular meals every day. She gained over a hundred pounds in two years.
Personal responsibility is admirable. But when you're being marketed deadly supplements (fen/phen), contradictory diet information (the Zone vs Atkins vs Richard Simmons vs Natural Hygiene, etc...), contradictory exercise information (Spinning, Pilates, Tae Bo, etc...), contradictory strength training (machines vs free weights, HIT vs Weider, Heavy Duty, Super Slow, etc...). Plus, you have to deal with the extreme emphasis on thinness in popular fashion and entertainment.
Being healthy is great. But this unnatural emphasis on thinness over health in general and in the face of the evidence, is crazy. When size eight women (smaller than Marilyn Monroe) are featured in fat-women clothing magazines, you've got a problem.
"Blatantly illegal Gestapo tactics"?? "Gestapo Tactics"? I missed the part in the article when it said, "They came in and cut off fingers and toes until he confessed, and then executed him." That, my boy, is Gestapo. The feds break the laws, but they're not death camp guards.
If he posted legitimate, valuable information for constructing bombs, isn't it possible (however unlikely) that the SWAT team trying to break in would have been met by automatic weapons fire or an Oklahoma City class explosion?
And as for the seized property and stolen data: if he did hacking, the government agents can't take half of his hard drive for perusal in court and leave him the portion with Windows and Starcraft (or whatever). Yes he lost data, because it was taken for evidence.
Never mind that research has shown pot as a cause of cancer is less dangerous than tobacco, which is legal.
Never mind that research has shown pot as a cause of judgement and reaction impairment is much less powerful than alcohol, which is legal.
Never mind that research has shown pot to be less addictive than tobacco or alcohol, which are legal.
Never mind the fact that alcohol prohibition failed. Never mind the fact that tobacco prohibition hasn't even been tried. Somehow, a ban on pot will work!
Never mind that in some states, mandatory sentencing for drug users exceeds minimum sentences for violent crimes.
Never mind that pot was first declared illegal because it incited users to violence. I don't know any violent potheads. Does anyone else?
Who cares if its relative hemp is an industrial product being produced in dozens of countries?
The US government isn't quite the devil some people paint it to be, but neither is it a saint.
I'm probably going to be off a bit with my reply, but I can give you the gist. The first difference is non-commercial versus commercial, and the second is package management.
.rpm file and then
install it using the rpm program.
Debian is not for profit, and denotes all non-free or non-open source software that comes with the distribution as such. It is volunteer-run and also not particularly newbie friendly. Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, etc... are run by for profit companies. Because they're out to make profit, it's in their vested interest to be newbie friendly. I've installed Debian potato and Suse 7.2, and the Suse install was much easier. Other than ease of install, commercial vs. non-commercial makes no difference to me, but it is important to some people.
The real distinction is in the packaging system. Red Hat started the R(edhat)P(ackage)M(anagement) system, and a big chunk of the commercial distributions use it. So if you want to install a new package, you obtain the
Debian uses A(nother)P(ackaging)T(ool). You can configure apt to read from hard drive, CD-ROM, and/or the internet. Apt takes rpm two steps further, by fetching the package for you and also grabbing and also installing all necessary dependent packages. You can easily automate massive installs this way, including updating every package on your machine to the latest release (as far as I know).
That WOULD give a tremendous advantage to Debian, except for the nature of open source... some creative programmers wrote an apt for rpm files. So now you can do everything a Debian user can do with an rpm-based distribution.
I know that one example does not constitute proof, but where I work our only Unix crash since I started was due to a faulty power supply. Our Win2K boxes, which are all faithfully patched, rarely last a month between reboots. A few crash and burn several times a week.
Crashing once or twice a month, or even once a week, isn't too damaging to productivity. But it is still frustrating as hell, especially when you're occasionally forced to reinstall the program you were running when it died.
By that logic, wouldn't everyone still be using the original BSD Unix, or DOS?
Migration has happened before and it will happen again. But just like other migrations in the past, it isn't an overnight switch.
1. Microsoft doesn't have to change format. These open source developers are attempting to write programs that open, edit, and safe Microsoft formats. The shoe is on the other foot. If they change their own formats in a non-trival way, it will hurt people who haven't upgraded to Office Whatever as much as the Linux users. In a way, Open Source is now embracing and extending Microsoft's software capabilities.
2. You're probably right. The up front cost isn't as massive as you think, provided (and I grant that this is a big provision) the migration process is managed competently. In fact, it could be downright cheap. But the associated cost from lost time as people acclimatize themselves to their new environment... that'll hit the productivity hard.
3. Eliminated licensing fees and (potentially) faster administration. I'm not a MSCSE, but I'm under the impression that there are dozens of administrative tasks that must be done point and click. Whether you have to use each workstation or run VNC, that takes time. A competent Unix administrator can configure an office full of units with a few scripts. There are licensing fees for OS, Office, ZIP, Database systems, Photo-editing software, Terminal services software... it adds up fast. The only two software costs that remain comparable are administration and tech support.
I think IF (I will not assume 'when') Linux gains a large portion of the desktop market, AOL will market AOL for Linux. Until then, they'll market for Microsoft... go where the profit lies.
I beg to differ. I'm no expert, but I'm under the impression that the bows and crossbows of the period were impressively powerful. I believe it wasn't until the English longbows reached some 6 feet in length with an incredibly powerful draw that they were able to render medieval armor useless.
I'm certain plate armoUr wouldn't block a high powered rifle or steel-jacketed bullets, but I wouldn't be surprised if it allowed the wearer to shrug off fire from normal handguns.
But when KDE or GNOME locked up on you, did you try Ctrl+Alt+ (F1 through F6)? That should bring you to a text console. From there you should be able to log in and kill -9 without the frustration of rebooting your machine.
I don't believe Linux is viable for the home users that don't care to learn more than absolutely necessary about the workings of their operating system (which I believe is the vast majority of PC users). It is getting closer, but the gap is still huge.
I hate to break it to you, but those crashes aren't mythical. I have a win98 box at home that has NEVER ran more than 48 hours without crashing. It has installed:
Netscape 6, Star Office 6, Winzip, McAfee Virus Scan, Opera 5, CD recording software, and a handful of games.
I dual boot to Suse or Debian (depending upon my mood) on the same box without ever crashing.
This is not an exception. My roommates in college crashed their machines left and right. The public computing labs on campus all had a handful of unusable computers. My parent's machine crashes often. My siblings' machines crash at least once a week. I haven't met anyone in person that has a crash-free (or even crash-light) Windows PC.
If your machine is stable, I'm sincerely happy for you. But don't generalize your experience mean all Windows machines work great.