I don't know, I *generally* use Fluxbox, but I swap back and forth between that and KDE depending on the time of the month. Fluxbox is nice, fast, and runs all of my apps, but I've got some aesthetic/interface issues with it:
Way too angular-looking
Have not yet found a lightweight, fast VT that can copy & paste into other apps (is this too much to ask?)
Workspaces need to be organized in a straight line?
Rox-Filer is kind of weird and counterintuitive
Besides, since I just went from 512=>1024 ram, KDE is plenty fast, and I'm very in love with OOo 1.3-kde. I find all of the other WMs either too stripped down (fvwm), too baroque (e16), or too weird (icewm, and gnome for that matter).
Re:I wonder who would use it.
on
Skype + Kazaa = ?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Pardon my cliche, but most people I know who use Kazaa wouldn't know what IRC is if it bit them on the ass. I'm at a college, and, out of all my friends here, three know IRC: a goth, a metalhead, and a linux nerd; none of them use Kazaa, and neither do I. Face it, IRC's pretty damn geeky, and I'd rate the vast majority of current Kazaa users would give a blank, bovine stare if you said, "EFNet."
BTW, is there any way to get Kazaa to not install a metric ton of adware, so I can stop yelling at people to not install it?
Firstly, I agree. The idea of a government computer system based on anything but Unix gives me haunting, goo-filled nightmares. What's next, the phishers go straight to the Social Security Administration? Military systems are supposed to be precise, not easy to use.
However, though normally a Linux zealot, I have to point out that Microsoft's probably doing more good than bad for America's economy, at least at this point. I get that you're being a bit tongue in cheek, but I don't think our economy is going into the shitter anytime soon. America's current biggest export, I conjecture (aside from our culture), is our software -- therefore as long as Microsoft keeps employing more people here than over there, it is a big, huge siphon which replenishes the cash we loose the rest of the world by not making our khakis and GI-Joes locally. I mean, you don't see many americans tripping over themselves to buy a Korean-made MMORPG.
And as for outsourcing, I've never heard anyone except the CEO of an outsourcing firm speak out on how great their product is. Yes, there are many steller Indian engineers out there; the trouble is, most live in America. Outsourcing is a fad. The following will become evident to execs very soon: 1) Mutual intelligability is important, and 2) the benefits of a tight-knit dev team outweigh the bottom-line gains of outsourcing.
Microsoft has managed to convince the entire world that their "product" is worth 280 bucks. Convincing one tightass middle-manager a far more advanced and accurate living being is worth 40 an hour is cake. Seriously, we should have an ad campaign.
You think for a second that if windows had that, Bonzai Buddy and that stupid temperature tray thingy wouldn't end up on windows workstations? Dream on.
I think we're actually talking about two different things. You seem to be referring to things a user is stupid enough to say yes to. RTFA. These are things that the user never even gets a prompt for.
Big fucking deal.
IE runs under a user with administrator privileges (press ctrl-alt-delete and see who's running what) and has the ability to run active-x controls; there's your vector. IE lets the site run a control, and the system lets an administrator-level program write to the hard drive and the registry. It's not even a real hacker worthy exploit (buffer overflows, etc), just telling the computer to do something stupid and watching as it complies.
By contrast, Java (the only real code Firefox can excute) is much more paranoid than IE - that is, I've seen it throw security exceptions. You'd have to not only find a way to get root privs, but get past Java as well.
The GP is correct -> windows is targeted becuase of two reasons: 1) Market Share, 2) Lowest average IQ of users.
Absolutely correct. But that does not mean that not-windows users are not-targeted because of their not-dominent market share. That's a logical fallacy. Linux contributors should not become complacent, yes, but I am of the opinion that users have every right to be stupid, and that their computers should not make it easier for others to exploit that perfectly human condition - that is, that their computers should be well-designed. If XP needs all of these security patches just to keep going, where a mac or linux box could stand like a column of basalt for years, clearly something is deeply wrong with it; hell, that probably qualifies under the lemon law.
...if only I could afford to. $1500 for an iBook is a tad steep when you can get a P.O.S. HP or Dell laptop for $700, tops.
Yeah, you're mostly right . . . Except you can get a starter level ibook for $1000. That is a price point. Also, factor in the average user looking at all of the options of PC laptops (especially because laptops are so prone to break down), and then they look at the apple website. Also, if they started putting out a bunch of shoddy products, it would destroy their reputation of reliability.
Personally, I'm getting an ibook because I want to know how to fix and maintain a Mac, and because of the unix underbelly. I'm recommending ibooks to all of my friends because 1) I can't recommend somebody putting their butt on the line with an inferior, insecure OS and 2) I'm sick and tired of trying to phone-support my parents. I would love it if I could just ssh in and fix it for them. Can you do that with macs?
Agreed. I know two people who supposedly have fibromyalgia (a chronic pain disorder) - one is doing fine and she's on homeopathic medicine, therapy and acupuncture, and the other is having seizures because she's on such a bizarre coctail of drugs.
The pharmo-medical complex has made doctors more likely to give a pill for a given problem than refer somebody to a therapist, and the drugs which my friend has been prescribed are highly addictive and cause the body to adapt quickly: the prescription runs out, and the pain comes back even worse.
Vivendi is desparately trying to hold onto the SKU business - that is, selling games as if they were actual, physical products. Throw steam into the mix, and guess what? Nobody needs publishers anymore. Keep in mind that Valve and Blizzard are probably their most popular pc developers, probably the most successful in the world.
Now, the fact that HL Silver has more games than CE for cheaper pisses them off to no end. And it's hard to move CE's in retail, therefore EB says, "Well, we're only going to buy those for (say) $5 more than the SE." So they're trying to sell the collector's editions to somebody they know can upsell better - Amazon - because Vivendi gets, say, a $10 markup over SE. Amazon takes the hit because they are certain the units will sell, because they've cornered the market.
Thus, Vivendi maximizes the velocity of their product on all levels, and perpetuate the fiction that games are anything but 1's and 0's. Believe me, I romanticize with the store model, it won't be long before you can download console games (ahem, legally) too, and EB will go the way of all things.
Your average computer nerd is sort of a de facto admin to their computer-illiterate friends. I irregularly tweak about ten peoples' computers in exchange for pizza and beer, though not to the point of annoyance.
We all know it's like invasive oral surgery to get people away from IE, even though firefox has most of the same features. People freak when stuff isn't where they expect it to be, and yes, most people don't even know what a web browser is.
However, certain statements can overcome inertia, like, "Use this or someone could steal your credit card numbers, format your hard drive, and get you convicted as a child pornographer." So yeah, I force people to change. It's worked a few times.
All this searching just makes me increasingly baffled as to why MS didn't include some cutesy GUI'd analog to slocate in XP. It seems like such a simple, straightforward technology: there's a perl port of it that's like 70 lines.
Ah. My experience with patent law is limited to what I learned from my grandfather, a successful inventor who had several patents, and the vagueries gathered from the state of software/business practice patent law at this time.
But, is not the "expression" of a patented invention in the medium of source code arguably infringement, or at least accessory to it?
If I implement a piece of software that is already patented and put it in the public domain, can I be sued for this?
Strictly speaking, yes. Patents protect the abstract concept of something. If the code was just copyrighted, you could release a competing open source product though. That's why companies like patents.
Can someone write a free implementation of a patented idea just for the sake of other people doing research on the idea (e.g timing and comparing certain patented algorithms, etc.)? This doesn't seem different from publication of said idea/algorithm.
IANAL, but they probably have permission. Publishing firms have armies of lawyers to prevent infringement. However, whenever you are about to use something patented, ask yourself, "Am I making a profit based on this person's idea?" In the case of a book which touts X's patented sort routine or Y's mipmapping algorithm, the patent holder would probably concent because it's like free advertising. If you release a GPL'd implementation of something, you are still violating their patent. You'd have to talk to the company first and get their expressed, written concent.
I remember when a barb with whirlwind and two life-steak greatswords was unbeatable. Now I don't really care whether it's bash-pallys or static field sorceresses that are in vogue, I just play to have fun and enjoy myself.
They nerfed barbs, and just like DotComs got nerfed, so will the patents be nerfed by the invisible hand of the economy. Better to just think about building a career and a family than to worry about which field is "hot."
And cheap living. A friend of mine makes about 80k as an admin mogul, and this is a very decent living in the SF Bay Area. He and his wife are looking to buy a house soon, and will probably spend about $500,000. Go anywhere else and you can buy a goddamn mansion for about $100,000.
Sure, the night life might suck, but if I could live in a rural area making what I am now, I would very seriously consider buying cowboy boots and becoming a rifle enthusiast.
I see it as a problem with American engineering schools, at least the ones I've been exposed to. I have a friend who's getting her masters in Civ Eng at Leeds, England, and she is very multitalented - dances, cooks, plays guitar, shoots (when she can), etc. The engineers I know over here, with the exception of one Physics major, are all crazy, crazy people with no hobbies. My friend did a year over here, which she loved, but she thought that our classes had too much emphasis on brute work that is useless. She said, you don't really learn anything til you're on site, and her classes at Leeds were much further ahead of ours, with less busy work.
This system does not encourage one to be multifarous. It almost makes me sad that Humanities students can be so well-rounded, while engineers are encouraged to be moles. I dare say I (an English major) have more programming talent (!=experience) than some of my colleagues in EECS, but most jobs won't even consider me for a non-programming technical position (e.g. tech writer) without a technical degree, regardless of whether I can write fluent English.
List of interests follows:
I started at a community college, taking (since it was mostly liberal arts) tons of courses in English literature, Art History and Computer Science. When I got to Berkeley, I found that none of my 20 units of computer science courses articulated (because they insist in using Scheme here - ick!). So now, I'm this English major specializing in Milton and Restoration Lit with a minor in Art History and looking at graduate school in the humanities. I work at a campus project that does digital library stuff, programming EMACS extensions and perl/bash scripts for them when I'm not web designing, and I'm teaching my coworkers the ropes of Unix; this summer I learned how to cook loads of desserts and asian dishes from scratch from my girlfriend who is good enough to be a line chef; I starred in a production of Milton's Comus last semester, which is never performed, anywhere, at least not well, and Much Ado About Nothing, where by some twist of fate I fell in love with the young woman playing my father-in-law; I can read Latin pretty well; I play electric guitar and sing; I know music theory, and once upon a time I was pretty good at multivar calculus; I can render a likeness of someone pretty flawlessly in chalk or pen and pencil. There's some other stuff, too, I'm sure.
Your ideas are very well thought-out and informative, and there's no doubt in my mind that they're true.
However, this works because Munich is centralized and has that German obsession with efficiency. They're not really as culpable to an outside body as a corporation. Granted, there are the same control structures, theoretically - both governments and corps are generally controlled by a dozen or so guys in suits - and if they decide that switching is a good idea, great.
However, if a major, publicly traded corporation decides to do this, not only will you have to listen to the screams of every middle manager and every [pansy] Windows admin, you'll have to hear cries of infringing on due dilligence from your shareholders, and that can get you a fat lawsuit. It is never "Are you doing what's best for the company five years from now?" it's, "What are you doing to drive up the stock prices today?" and if you ask those hedonistic Wallstreet types to wait five years for a payoff, wow, you're in for a talking to.
I now officially forgive you for all the hours I've spent fixing spyware and virus ridden Windows boxes for my friends and family over the last few years (I've been on Linux for 5 years, still can't seem to get away from fixing windows boxes though).
I know exactly how you feel.
The trouble is, for all the downfalls of Windows, I still wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone who isn't already very proficient in computers, has a lot of free time, and remembers DOS. This whole paradigm reminds me of the buzzword "killer app" that you used to hear so much, and not at all nowadays. That used to be Wordperfect, for those of us with short memories - it was that product which Microsoft destroyed that allowed Microsoft to succeed in the first place, because it alone justified the purchase of the computer.
Microsoft has spent the last ten years turning Windows itself into a killer app, and that is only magnified by Office. If Linux is ever going to gain any significant market share, it needs to be approximately as easy as windows, along with its current security superiority, have enterprise capabilities, and Star/OpenOffice needs to be clearly superior to MS Office.
Or, everyone will have to switch over when the security compromises reach some kind of critical mass and even looking at a WinPC means your identity has been stolen. I have a bottle of expensive vodka waiting for that day.
My suspicion is that SCO realised that it'd be deadly dull with no posting.
Groklaw: Provides legal docs; presents a point of view which does not get media coverage; and, allows people to discuss the issues.
They already have a repository for legal docs somewhere on their main site. Their highly publicized press releases are partisan to their viewpoint. They are not really interested in posts from people in the "community" because there is no community; they are more unilaterally despised than any other computer company today, perhaps in the last ten years.
QED, a website would have been a redundant waste of the precious little money they have left.
Now, if we could actually see what's going on inside those DLLs, theoretically Wine(x) could achieve 1:1 results with Windows. Unfortunately that'll probably never happen.
That's Microsoft's entire lynchpin with the DX enterprise: create a proprietary API that makes writing Windows games much easier, but blocks porting entirely, starving their competitors.
Of course, if Linux reaches some kind of a tipping point with Windows and companies cash in on us geeks, developers might start putting pressure on MS to open the standards to make development easier.
Only reason for using MS is ignorant marketing people that don't dare take a chance with FOSS because "MS products work out of the box"....
A manager's ability to lead and get paid more than their underlings depends on the perception that they are smarter than said underlings. The fact that my boss has administrative knowledge and I have technical knowledge is not really a concern; they generally shoot down proposals because simply based on a gut reaction and a lack of knowledge. Your average manager doesn't know what the hell a GPL is, and would probably be initially distrustful of it. They're also more likely to succumb to MS/SCO's fud campaign.
Example: Our last project was a photo archive. We could have set up a spare computer, installed FreeBSD or Linux, and finished in two weeks or less by using pre-existing GPL software, PHP and the like. Instead, we went with the college's no-dynamic-content-allowed sun servers, built everything in static HTML by hand, and it took four months.
Educate your bosses; send memos to them privately so they're not humiliated by their own ineptitude, try to draft proposals in managerese with a nice big bottom line, and make them like you. Or, found a new company that is tech saavy which can whip them four ways to friday.
Swaret and pkgtool are damn fine things, and I'll challenge you to show me how they come up short. I mean, I do kind of long for those sweet, sweet ebuilds of gentoo, but i can just type in
swaret --install tuxracer
or
swaret --upgrade
and that is that. Oh yeah, and you can also point out that Slackware users don't need or want wizards and guis; we'll take a swarm of xterms, thank you.
In-game, the annual trick or treating, costuming, and spookery is going on. This year they're also throwing around some glamours to let players take the part of monsters for a while.
The practice of going into a game and assuming a different persona only to have that persona assume yet another persona is kind of mind-boggling especially if you're a humanities student. I mean, it was bad enough last year when I dressed up as a vampirate.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, I *generally* use Fluxbox, but I swap back and forth between that and KDE depending on the time of the month. Fluxbox is nice, fast, and runs all of my apps, but I've got some aesthetic/interface issues with it:
Besides, since I just went from 512=>1024 ram, KDE is plenty fast, and I'm very in love with OOo 1.3-kde. I find all of the other WMs either too stripped down (fvwm), too baroque (e16), or too weird (icewm, and gnome for that matter).
You are my hero.
Pardon my cliche, but most people I know who use Kazaa wouldn't know what IRC is if it bit them on the ass. I'm at a college, and, out of all my friends here, three know IRC: a goth, a metalhead, and a linux nerd; none of them use Kazaa, and neither do I. Face it, IRC's pretty damn geeky, and I'd rate the vast majority of current Kazaa users would give a blank, bovine stare if you said, "EFNet."
BTW, is there any way to get Kazaa to not install a metric ton of adware, so I can stop yelling at people to not install it?
Is it better to give up all hope and crawl under a rock, or to be optimistic and try to fight it?
Firstly, I agree. The idea of a government computer system based on anything but Unix gives me haunting, goo-filled nightmares. What's next, the phishers go straight to the Social Security Administration? Military systems are supposed to be precise, not easy to use.
However, though normally a Linux zealot, I have to point out that Microsoft's probably doing more good than bad for America's economy, at least at this point. I get that you're being a bit tongue in cheek, but I don't think our economy is going into the shitter anytime soon. America's current biggest export, I conjecture (aside from our culture), is our software -- therefore as long as Microsoft keeps employing more people here than over there, it is a big, huge siphon which replenishes the cash we loose the rest of the world by not making our khakis and GI-Joes locally. I mean, you don't see many americans tripping over themselves to buy a Korean-made MMORPG.
And as for outsourcing, I've never heard anyone except the CEO of an outsourcing firm speak out on how great their product is. Yes, there are many steller Indian engineers out there; the trouble is, most live in America. Outsourcing is a fad. The following will become evident to execs very soon: 1) Mutual intelligability is important, and 2) the benefits of a tight-knit dev team outweigh the bottom-line gains of outsourcing.
Microsoft has managed to convince the entire world that their "product" is worth 280 bucks. Convincing one tightass middle-manager a far more advanced and accurate living being is worth 40 an hour is cake. Seriously, we should have an ad campaign.
He is, I'm looking at my swaret listing of slackware-current right now.
My wishes go out to Patrick.
I think we're actually talking about two different things. You seem to be referring to things a user is stupid enough to say yes to. RTFA. These are things that the user never even gets a prompt for.
IE runs under a user with administrator privileges (press ctrl-alt-delete and see who's running what) and has the ability to run active-x controls; there's your vector. IE lets the site run a control, and the system lets an administrator-level program write to the hard drive and the registry. It's not even a real hacker worthy exploit (buffer overflows, etc), just telling the computer to do something stupid and watching as it complies.
By contrast, Java (the only real code Firefox can excute) is much more paranoid than IE - that is, I've seen it throw security exceptions. You'd have to not only find a way to get root privs, but get past Java as well.
Absolutely correct. But that does not mean that not-windows users are not-targeted because of their not-dominent market share. That's a logical fallacy. Linux contributors should not become complacent, yes, but I am of the opinion that users have every right to be stupid, and that their computers should not make it easier for others to exploit that perfectly human condition - that is, that their computers should be well-designed. If XP needs all of these security patches just to keep going, where a mac or linux box could stand like a column of basalt for years, clearly something is deeply wrong with it; hell, that probably qualifies under the lemon law.
Yeah, you're mostly right . . . Except you can get a starter level ibook for $1000. That is a price point. Also, factor in the average user looking at all of the options of PC laptops (especially because laptops are so prone to break down), and then they look at the apple website. Also, if they started putting out a bunch of shoddy products, it would destroy their reputation of reliability.
Personally, I'm getting an ibook because I want to know how to fix and maintain a Mac, and because of the unix underbelly. I'm recommending ibooks to all of my friends because 1) I can't recommend somebody putting their butt on the line with an inferior, insecure OS and 2) I'm sick and tired of trying to phone-support my parents. I would love it if I could just ssh in and fix it for them. Can you do that with macs?
Agreed. I know two people who supposedly have fibromyalgia (a chronic pain disorder) - one is doing fine and she's on homeopathic medicine, therapy and acupuncture, and the other is having seizures because she's on such a bizarre coctail of drugs.
The pharmo-medical complex has made doctors more likely to give a pill for a given problem than refer somebody to a therapist, and the drugs which my friend has been prescribed are highly addictive and cause the body to adapt quickly: the prescription runs out, and the pain comes back even worse.
Vivendi is desparately trying to hold onto the SKU business - that is, selling games as if they were actual, physical products. Throw steam into the mix, and guess what? Nobody needs publishers anymore. Keep in mind that Valve and Blizzard are probably their most popular pc developers, probably the most successful in the world.
Now, the fact that HL Silver has more games than CE for cheaper pisses them off to no end. And it's hard to move CE's in retail, therefore EB says, "Well, we're only going to buy those for (say) $5 more than the SE." So they're trying to sell the collector's editions to somebody they know can upsell better - Amazon - because Vivendi gets, say, a $10 markup over SE. Amazon takes the hit because they are certain the units will sell, because they've cornered the market.
Thus, Vivendi maximizes the velocity of their product on all levels, and perpetuate the fiction that games are anything but 1's and 0's. Believe me, I romanticize with the store model, it won't be long before you can download console games (ahem, legally) too, and EB will go the way of all things.
Your average computer nerd is sort of a de facto admin to their computer-illiterate friends. I irregularly tweak about ten peoples' computers in exchange for pizza and beer, though not to the point of annoyance.
We all know it's like invasive oral surgery to get people away from IE, even though firefox has most of the same features. People freak when stuff isn't where they expect it to be, and yes, most people don't even know what a web browser is.
However, certain statements can overcome inertia, like, "Use this or someone could steal your credit card numbers, format your hard drive, and get you convicted as a child pornographer." So yeah, I force people to change. It's worked a few times.
All this searching just makes me increasingly baffled as to why MS didn't include some cutesy GUI'd analog to slocate in XP. It seems like such a simple, straightforward technology: there's a perl port of it that's like 70 lines.
Ah. My experience with patent law is limited to what I learned from my grandfather, a successful inventor who had several patents, and the vagueries gathered from the state of software/business practice patent law at this time.
But, is not the "expression" of a patented invention in the medium of source code arguably infringement, or at least accessory to it?
Strictly speaking, yes. Patents protect the abstract concept of something. If the code was just copyrighted, you could release a competing open source product though. That's why companies like patents.
IANAL, but they probably have permission. Publishing firms have armies of lawyers to prevent infringement. However, whenever you are about to use something patented, ask yourself, "Am I making a profit based on this person's idea?" In the case of a book which touts X's patented sort routine or Y's mipmapping algorithm, the patent holder would probably concent because it's like free advertising. If you release a GPL'd implementation of something, you are still violating their patent. You'd have to talk to the company first and get their expressed, written concent.
I have no knowledge of GPU programming, but your statement assumes that they made no poor coding decisions.
The weirdest trope just occurred to me:
I remember when a barb with whirlwind and two life-steak greatswords was unbeatable. Now I don't really care whether it's bash-pallys or static field sorceresses that are in vogue, I just play to have fun and enjoy myself.
They nerfed barbs, and just like DotComs got nerfed, so will the patents be nerfed by the invisible hand of the economy. Better to just think about building a career and a family than to worry about which field is "hot."
And cheap living. A friend of mine makes about 80k as an admin mogul, and this is a very decent living in the SF Bay Area. He and his wife are looking to buy a house soon, and will probably spend about $500,000. Go anywhere else and you can buy a goddamn mansion for about $100,000.
Sure, the night life might suck, but if I could live in a rural area making what I am now, I would very seriously consider buying cowboy boots and becoming a rifle enthusiast.
You are now my official role model.
I see it as a problem with American engineering schools, at least the ones I've been exposed to. I have a friend who's getting her masters in Civ Eng at Leeds, England, and she is very multitalented - dances, cooks, plays guitar, shoots (when she can), etc. The engineers I know over here, with the exception of one Physics major, are all crazy, crazy people with no hobbies. My friend did a year over here, which she loved, but she thought that our classes had too much emphasis on brute work that is useless. She said, you don't really learn anything til you're on site, and her classes at Leeds were much further ahead of ours, with less busy work.
This system does not encourage one to be multifarous. It almost makes me sad that Humanities students can be so well-rounded, while engineers are encouraged to be moles. I dare say I (an English major) have more programming talent (!=experience) than some of my colleagues in EECS, but most jobs won't even consider me for a non-programming technical position (e.g. tech writer) without a technical degree, regardless of whether I can write fluent English.
List of interests follows:
I started at a community college, taking (since it was mostly liberal arts) tons of courses in English literature, Art History and Computer Science. When I got to Berkeley, I found that none of my 20 units of computer science courses articulated (because they insist in using Scheme here - ick!). So now, I'm this English major specializing in Milton and Restoration Lit with a minor in Art History and looking at graduate school in the humanities. I work at a campus project that does digital library stuff, programming EMACS extensions and perl/bash scripts for them when I'm not web designing, and I'm teaching my coworkers the ropes of Unix; this summer I learned how to cook loads of desserts and asian dishes from scratch from my girlfriend who is good enough to be a line chef; I starred in a production of Milton's Comus last semester, which is never performed, anywhere, at least not well, and Much Ado About Nothing, where by some twist of fate I fell in love with the young woman playing my father-in-law; I can read Latin pretty well; I play electric guitar and sing; I know music theory, and once upon a time I was pretty good at multivar calculus; I can render a likeness of someone pretty flawlessly in chalk or pen and pencil. There's some other stuff, too, I'm sure.
Your ideas are very well thought-out and informative, and there's no doubt in my mind that they're true.
However, this works because Munich is centralized and has that German obsession with efficiency. They're not really as culpable to an outside body as a corporation. Granted, there are the same control structures, theoretically - both governments and corps are generally controlled by a dozen or so guys in suits - and if they decide that switching is a good idea, great.
However, if a major, publicly traded corporation decides to do this, not only will you have to listen to the screams of every middle manager and every [pansy] Windows admin, you'll have to hear cries of infringing on due dilligence from your shareholders, and that can get you a fat lawsuit. It is never "Are you doing what's best for the company five years from now?" it's, "What are you doing to drive up the stock prices today?" and if you ask those hedonistic Wallstreet types to wait five years for a payoff, wow, you're in for a talking to.
That said, go open source!
I know exactly how you feel.
The trouble is, for all the downfalls of Windows, I still wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone who isn't already very proficient in computers, has a lot of free time, and remembers DOS. This whole paradigm reminds me of the buzzword "killer app" that you used to hear so much, and not at all nowadays. That used to be Wordperfect, for those of us with short memories - it was that product which Microsoft destroyed that allowed Microsoft to succeed in the first place, because it alone justified the purchase of the computer.
Microsoft has spent the last ten years turning Windows itself into a killer app, and that is only magnified by Office. If Linux is ever going to gain any significant market share, it needs to be approximately as easy as windows, along with its current security superiority, have enterprise capabilities, and Star/OpenOffice needs to be clearly superior to MS Office.
Or, everyone will have to switch over when the security compromises reach some kind of critical mass and even looking at a WinPC means your identity has been stolen. I have a bottle of expensive vodka waiting for that day.
Groklaw: Provides legal docs; presents a point of view which does not get media coverage; and, allows people to discuss the issues.
They already have a repository for legal docs somewhere on their main site. Their highly publicized press releases are partisan to their viewpoint. They are not really interested in posts from people in the "community" because there is no community; they are more unilaterally despised than any other computer company today, perhaps in the last ten years.
QED, a website would have been a redundant waste of the precious little money they have left.
Now, if we could actually see what's going on inside those DLLs, theoretically Wine(x) could achieve 1:1 results with Windows. Unfortunately that'll probably never happen.
That's Microsoft's entire lynchpin with the DX enterprise: create a proprietary API that makes writing Windows games much easier, but blocks porting entirely, starving their competitors.
Of course, if Linux reaches some kind of a tipping point with Windows and companies cash in on us geeks, developers might start putting pressure on MS to open the standards to make development easier.
I'm such a dreamer
A manager's ability to lead and get paid more than their underlings depends on the perception that they are smarter than said underlings. The fact that my boss has administrative knowledge and I have technical knowledge is not really a concern; they generally shoot down proposals because simply based on a gut reaction and a lack of knowledge. Your average manager doesn't know what the hell a GPL is, and would probably be initially distrustful of it. They're also more likely to succumb to MS/SCO's fud campaign.
Example: Our last project was a photo archive. We could have set up a spare computer, installed FreeBSD or Linux, and finished in two weeks or less by using pre-existing GPL software, PHP and the like. Instead, we went with the college's no-dynamic-content-allowed sun servers, built everything in static HTML by hand, and it took four months.
Educate your bosses; send memos to them privately so they're not humiliated by their own ineptitude, try to draft proposals in managerese with a nice big bottom line, and make them like you. Or, found a new company that is tech saavy which can whip them four ways to friday.
Swaret and pkgtool are damn fine things, and I'll challenge you to show me how they come up short. I mean, I do kind of long for those sweet, sweet ebuilds of gentoo, but i can just type in
orand that is that. Oh yeah, and you can also point out that Slackware users don't need or want wizards and guis; we'll take a swarm of xterms, thank you.
The practice of going into a game and assuming a different persona only to have that persona assume yet another persona is kind of mind-boggling especially if you're a humanities student. I mean, it was bad enough last year when I dressed up as a vampirate.