Market share and install base are definitely linked. If Apple's only selling 3% of computers, their install base is going to trend to 3% over time, holding all other things equal.
Mathematical example: total market is 100 computers, Apple has 3% market share) Year 0: 6 Macs, 150 PCs (so Apple has about 3.8% of the install base when we start) Year 1: 9 Macs, 247 PCs (install base is 3.5%) Year 2: 12 Macs, 344 PCs (install base is 3.3%) Year 3: 15 Macs, 441 PCs (install base is 3.2%)
I think you get the picture. Market share is not representative of total install base RIGHT NOW, but is certainly a good indicator of what's going to happen in the future. If you disagree, that's too bad, because I've just mathematically shown that you're wrong. Market share and install base are definitely linked.[1]
Apple's profitability really has nothing to do with their install base so much as their margins. If I'm selling stuff with a huge mark-up on actual costs, I could sell 30 pieces of it and still make money, even if the total market is 3 billion pieces.
-Erwos
[1] As for your "PCs don't last as long as Macs": prove it. I've used Macs for years, and Apple's build quality is not as good as people make it out to be. I'm not going to factor in differing "computer decays" without any kind of proof for them.
I'm not certain a national sales tax is a good idea. At all. And I say this as guy who's pretty much done (one course left!) with a degree in economics, so I'm not talking totally out of my ass.
The problems with national a sales tax: 1. People who were at the lowest tax bracket (aka, poor people and a LOT of senior citizens) weren't paying any income taxes to begin with, and thus this becomes a tax _increase_. The position paper they cite talks about rebates, but I can't believe there's any sane way to audit that. 2. It raises the price of goods, and makes people less likely to consume, thereby hurting businesses (and hurting the people they employ). You could make a similar argument for income tax, certainly, but it's an issue of mental framing. Once you've paid income tax, that money is "yours". But when you pay a sales tax over and over, it feels like the government is artificially raising prices (which, of course, they are).
Social security is going to collapse, and I do feel some animosity in having to pay for something I'm never going to see (I'm 22 years old). However, I'm not sure how import taxes are the solution to saving it.
I agree. I make it a point to NOT try to get out of jury duty, and I think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. Maybe if people took their societal obligations more seriously, and didn't subscribe to the idea of "getting out of jury duty is a good thing", we'd have fairer courts.
There is some blame to be laid on the system for pulling in 400 people for duty and only using 12*(3 to 6) of them, though. Jury duty is often perceived as a waste of time because of that. What we really need is to remove the BS pre-emptory strikes system that leads to racial/gender bias in the jury box.
If you want fairer courts, folks, the first thing to do is to not dodge the jury "draft", so to speak.
"I've been using ReiserFS _EXCLUSIVELY_ since about 2.4.11 and I've never had a single problem. It's important to format with the defaults and not specify 'special' arguments to mkreiserfs or you can run into trouble."
I've personally had several friends tell me of their data loss with ReiserFS. No one's arguing that it's a horrible file system, only that it still experimental.
The typical data loss situation is a power loss in the middle of a write. ReiserFS might be atomic in operation, but it still can't dodge hardware failure at that level.
I use ext3, and I've been happy. ReiserFS is definitely not an appropriate default partition type at this time.
I agree. I've not bought a new handheld since my Game Gear (fine system that it was!), but backwards-compat with every GB/GBA title ever made is really going to be hard to pass up. The only way PSP could compete is if they had a CD drive to play PSX (or even PS2) games!
I guess my only concern would be weight and battery life - two screens are going to suck down those batteries like crazy, and it doesn't look particularly light in general.
You bring up an excellent point, which is the importance of _sustained_ growth.
A few years of 7% growth is amazing, but it's not all that great in the long run if your growth rate bottoms out to.1% for the next 20. The US has averaged about 1.5% growth per year over the history of the country - and slow but steady wins the race.
The fact that (whatever country) is growing at 10% this year is no indication it will continue to grow at 10% forever. I believe that most/.'ers lose track of this simple fact. Often, there are societal, legal, or cultural reasons which will end up slowing down growth (trade restrictions, for instance).
The fact that Europe is "getting stronger" in the GDP department is not something to be worried about - since we have (mostly) free trade with the EU, their strengths can fill our weaknesses, and vica versa. Everyone's standard of life in the US and Europe will (hopefully) go up.
However, I would caution against misinterpreting the EU expansion with actual growth. In one sense, all that's happening is Europe transferring money from their left pocket to their right pocket. What matters over the long run is real growth, and (unfortunately!) there have been some problems with that.
I took a ton of stat courses, mostly having to do with the economics half of my degree, but there was some (limited) relevancy to CS as well. I suppose the most interesting part was learning SAS and Stata - gives you a feel for what people in the "real world" put up with.
They make you complete linear algebra and stat 400 (which is the first of the "advanced" stats) just for your CS degree, so it's somewhat difficult to get out of CS without knowing some decent math.
"You've just eliminated almost every journalism major out there with this qualifier."
Who cares? I'm not qualified to write about cars, even though I'm an excellent writer.
"BTW, sorry to hear about your Gentoo install problems."
I didn't have any problems, and its telling that you think I did. I installed it just fine on the first try. The fact is, though, I'm not interested in challenging and "learning experience" installs. I've used Linux for seven years. I don't need a teaching experience. I want an install system where I just have to click a few damned buttons and change some CDs.
Gentoo has NO INSTALLER. It is a BAD SYSTEM. Gentoo lovers love to preach about how it's so great to spend time learning all the shell commands, but totally ignore that pretty much every other aspect of the install process is an absolute train wreck. Usability? Godawful. Help system? Non-existent. Don't any of these things _mean something_ to anyone? The fact that I NEED to have the docs right next to me to do a Gentoo install should be a huge warning siren that something is horribly wrong.... and that's the point. If I pulled a random guy off the street and made him install Gentoo, he'd probably try to kill me by the end, especially if I gave him Fedora or SuSE to install afterwards. Do you understand now?
Distros should be reviewed on their OWN merits. That is all.
Side by side reviews are also known as "comparisons". I chose my language carefully.
You're making the assumption that most people spend $50 on music rather than people buy 50 songs. I'm not so sure that's a true assumption.
I'm not trying to say that people are not going to buy more at cheaper prices, but rather that I think you're over-estimating just how much music people want in general.
I was wondering if anyone knew of any (relatively) cheap NAS solutions which came _without_ an IDE hard drive? That is to say, so I could install a hard drive of my choosing. No need for features except for SMB and NFS support, either.
My fiance and I are getting married in Feb, and I'm trying my best to hunt down print servers and network storage so we can combine our network in a sane fashion. The print server is already taken care of for the LaserJet 6L, but we have no decent network storage solution for my external hard drive. (also have no solution for her crappy HP color inkjet, but it'll probably break before we get hitched anyways *grabs a hammer*).
Assuming this is part of RH's enterprise line, the EOL is a solid five years from release. I think that's acceptable, given that five year-old software in the Linux realm is generally considered hideously obsolete anyways.
"To properly review a distribution probably takes longer than most people who do such reviewing have time for."
Amen. Most distribution "reviews" are one page praise pieces these days, written by people who honestly have no qualifications in the first place to write a distribution review.
Could you imagine reviewing Windows, Office Super-Deluxe, and a hundred other bits of major software in a _day_? Of course not. You'd have to spend WEEKS. Yet, lo and behold, the majority of idiot reviewers do the install on a single machine, blame the distro for anything that goes wrong, and then go nitpicking (or, alternatively, ignore all flaws and praise the distro anyways because they use it). What happened to the rest of the damned review?
I'd also like to see some relatively unbiased reviews. For the love of G-d, please do not write a review if you're in love with the system in the first place, because you use it on your personal box. It just ends up as a piece of evangelism that wastes the three minutes of my precious life.
To summarize: 1. Limit the scope of the review to:
A. Certain users (and do proper and formal usability tests with them).
B. Certain pieces of software within the distribution (but be certain to test them thoroughly!). If this means you limit it to the installer and certain generic OS tasks, than so be it. 2. Make sure you are _qualified_ to write the review. This should involve some formal educational background in usability engineering at the very least. No one's interested in uninformed opinions. 3. Don't review the distribution you use and love. Your review will be hideously biased, whether you try to make it fair or not. Example: This is the primary reason why all Gentoo reviews seem to gloss over the horrifying install (in my experience). 4. On a similar note, give every distro a fair shake. The fact that it doesn't work just like your favorite distribution should not be a point against it. I'm sick and tired of hearing "but it doesn't have apt-get, so it sucks". 5. Avoid absolutes such as "this is the best" or "this is the worst". Make note of pros and cons, and let the reader decide. You can give recommendations if you want. 6. If you alter the system by installing non-standard software, make note of this (ie, apt on Fedora or SuSE). If you're doing weird configuration, make note of it on the review, too. 7. Thoroughly inform yourself of the features of the distribution, and make note of the fact that you're not reviewing the distribution on 1000 machines at once (if the distribution was intended to scale like that). Example: This is the primary reason why RHN always seems to get bashed in RHEL reviews - people make believe it's just up2date, and miss the extremely useful remote management functionality. 8. Avoid getting into comparison situations. If it's hard to install software, say so, but don't damn Mandrake for not being Slackware (or vica versa).
Those are some things to look for, anyways. Like I said, too many idiots taking too short a time to review far too much.
That's actually some interesting reasoning, and I must admit, it might even be true.
American firms have _always_ been engineering-focused. The first cotton textiles plants here were made from stolen British plans. But, what people fail to leave off is that they were than _massively_ improved. That trend (perhaps not so much the stealing) has continued. We see lots and lots of incremental improvements and redesigns, but hardly ever anything revolutionary on its own.
Universities tend to follow the corporate job market. Here at UMCP, there are very few "pure" Physics and Math majors (~600 out of 26k). There are more CS majors (~1250), and even more engineers (~4000). Thus, it is no surprise that fewer people are getting pure research degrees when the corporate market just doesn't need them.
I'm not sure I "appreciate research for itself", to be honest, but I'm also one of those crazy people who mostly agrees with Ayn Rand, so read as you will.
"Especialy since most of the Americans I know in grad school are only staying for the masters, and most of the internationals are interested in PhD and research."
Be fair, now. American students also see that they can get a much higher paying job than being the TA for some awful class, whereas international students often face barriers to being hired because of language issues, security clearances, or visas. If the schools paid more, you'd see more American graduate students. But, at $15k+tuition, it shouldn't come as any kind of surprise that no one's jumping on the train except for people who NEED that education.
Also, consider that your marginal earnings past an MS seldom justify getting a Ph.D. It's been shown time and time again that your _age_ has a far greater correlation to earnings than your education. That's not to say education is worthless (far from it!), but that it has difficulty justifying its own costs.
So, if employers paid more for a Masters/Ph.D. and schools upped their salaries for teaching assistants, you'd see more Americans in grad schools.
You can be almost 100% sure that it has nothing to do with a "national work ethic problem". According to that brilliant logic, those Indians have real work ethic problems because 30%+ of their country can't read. We have studies which give a pretty good estimate on the productivity per worker - if you need proof of work ethics problems, kindly refer to those rather than unrelated facts, please[1].
-Erwos
[1] This was not directed at anyone in particular, especially not the parent.
"Maybe I haven't been following too closely, but wasn't all the information already there before 9/11?"
Yes, but the "problem" is that the FBI and the CIA are not allowed _by law_ to cross-ref their information, since the CIA cannot operate inside US borders. Ditto for the NSA.
So, yes, we had all the right information in collective knowledge, but it wasn't being shared to put together the "ack, 9/11 tomorrow!" warning. Whether that's good or bad is up to your particular opinion, I suppose. But it's rather misleading to say "oh, they're just a bunch of screw-ups". There are laws that prevented them from using that information to put together the real situation.
"On the Debian side you have people focused on making distributions that are not encumbered by IP violations."
Just to be fair, both Mandrake and Red Hat are _totally free (as in freedom)_ distributions. Debian, in a way, is worse, since they do include non-free stuff in their repositories.
Why did they even bother with this silly (if not cunning) trick in the first place? I mean, OK, no one loves the "kernel tainted" message, but at the end of the day, is it really that much of a deal that it needs to be circumvented?
I think a more appropriate way of handling things would be have a message explaining _why_ the tainted message is coming up, and why they can't GPL the driver. Work with the system, not against it.
Of course no one's going to "stand up and defend Sealand", because no one really thinks it's a real country. They have no military. They have no international recognition. Their "currency" may as well be monopoly money, seeing as how it's linked to the US dollar yet has no real assets backing it.
The British military, however, is never going to waste tens of millions of dollars invading some dinky island server farm because Apple is upset. Cutting their links is a possibility, I suppose, but no one's going to care about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen that research? Let's see a link, then. Because, frankly, I think you're pulling the whole thing out of your ass.
-Erwos
Um, no.
Market share and install base are definitely linked. If Apple's only selling 3% of computers, their install base is going to trend to 3% over time, holding all other things equal.
Mathematical example: total market is 100 computers, Apple has 3% market share)
Year 0: 6 Macs, 150 PCs (so Apple has about 3.8% of the install base when we start)
Year 1: 9 Macs, 247 PCs (install base is 3.5%)
Year 2: 12 Macs, 344 PCs (install base is 3.3%)
Year 3: 15 Macs, 441 PCs (install base is 3.2%)
I think you get the picture. Market share is not representative of total install base RIGHT NOW, but is certainly a good indicator of what's going to happen in the future. If you disagree, that's too bad, because I've just mathematically shown that you're wrong. Market share and install base are definitely linked.[1]
Apple's profitability really has nothing to do with their install base so much as their margins. If I'm selling stuff with a huge mark-up on actual costs, I could sell 30 pieces of it and still make money, even if the total market is 3 billion pieces.
-Erwos
[1] As for your "PCs don't last as long as Macs": prove it. I've used Macs for years, and Apple's build quality is not as good as people make it out to be. I'm not going to factor in differing "computer decays" without any kind of proof for them.
"But instead, we're paying our teachers low wages, and chipping away at our long standing scientific advantage over the rest of the world."
I'm curious as to whether teachers in the US make all that much less than the rest of the world. Could you show us some statistics for that?
-Erwos
I'm not certain a national sales tax is a good idea. At all. And I say this as guy who's pretty much done (one course left!) with a degree in economics, so I'm not talking totally out of my ass.
The problems with national a sales tax:
1. People who were at the lowest tax bracket (aka, poor people and a LOT of senior citizens) weren't paying any income taxes to begin with, and thus this becomes a tax _increase_. The position paper they cite talks about rebates, but I can't believe there's any sane way to audit that.
2. It raises the price of goods, and makes people less likely to consume, thereby hurting businesses (and hurting the people they employ). You could make a similar argument for income tax, certainly, but it's an issue of mental framing. Once you've paid income tax, that money is "yours". But when you pay a sales tax over and over, it feels like the government is artificially raising prices (which, of course, they are).
Social security is going to collapse, and I do feel some animosity in having to pay for something I'm never going to see (I'm 22 years old). However, I'm not sure how import taxes are the solution to saving it.
-Erwos
I agree. I make it a point to NOT try to get out of jury duty, and I think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. Maybe if people took their societal obligations more seriously, and didn't subscribe to the idea of "getting out of jury duty is a good thing", we'd have fairer courts.
There is some blame to be laid on the system for pulling in 400 people for duty and only using 12*(3 to 6) of them, though. Jury duty is often perceived as a waste of time because of that. What we really need is to remove the BS pre-emptory strikes system that leads to racial/gender bias in the jury box.
If you want fairer courts, folks, the first thing to do is to not dodge the jury "draft", so to speak.
-Erwos
So, basically, because you've had no problems, you're discarding the evidence of everyone who has?
Give me a break. It's not FUD. It's the truth. The fact that you don't like hearing it doesn't make it false. Just accept that ReiserFS HAS ISSUES.
-Erwos
"I've been using ReiserFS _EXCLUSIVELY_ since about 2.4.11 and I've never had a single problem. It's important to format with the defaults and not specify 'special' arguments to mkreiserfs or you can run into trouble."
I've personally had several friends tell me of their data loss with ReiserFS. No one's arguing that it's a horrible file system, only that it still experimental.
The typical data loss situation is a power loss in the middle of a write. ReiserFS might be atomic in operation, but it still can't dodge hardware failure at that level.
I use ext3, and I've been happy. ReiserFS is definitely not an appropriate default partition type at this time.
-Erwos
I agree. I've not bought a new handheld since my Game Gear (fine system that it was!), but backwards-compat with every GB/GBA title ever made is really going to be hard to pass up. The only way PSP could compete is if they had a CD drive to play PSX (or even PS2) games!
I guess my only concern would be weight and battery life - two screens are going to suck down those batteries like crazy, and it doesn't look particularly light in general.
-Erwos
You bring up an excellent point, which is the importance of _sustained_ growth.
.1% for the next 20. The US has averaged about 1.5% growth per year over the history of the country - and slow but steady wins the race.
/.'ers lose track of this simple fact. Often, there are societal, legal, or cultural reasons which will end up slowing down growth (trade restrictions, for instance).
A few years of 7% growth is amazing, but it's not all that great in the long run if your growth rate bottoms out to
The fact that (whatever country) is growing at 10% this year is no indication it will continue to grow at 10% forever. I believe that most
The fact that Europe is "getting stronger" in the GDP department is not something to be worried about - since we have (mostly) free trade with the EU, their strengths can fill our weaknesses, and vica versa. Everyone's standard of life in the US and Europe will (hopefully) go up.
However, I would caution against misinterpreting the EU expansion with actual growth. In one sense, all that's happening is Europe transferring money from their left pocket to their right pocket. What matters over the long run is real growth, and (unfortunately!) there have been some problems with that.
-Erwos
You know, something which I found funny was that my Zip Disks have stood the test of time pretty well - a lot better than the Zip 100 drives did, too.
-Erwos
I believe you mean "cheap, fast, large capacity; pick two". "Good" is not really meaningful.
-Erwos
I agree that Gentoo is not for everyone, but I've seen people swear up and down that it is. I'm glad you're not of that silly persuasion.
The two statements do add up, because "it works" is not the same as "it's a good system".
-Erwos
I took a ton of stat courses, mostly having to do with the economics half of my degree, but there was some (limited) relevancy to CS as well. I suppose the most interesting part was learning SAS and Stata - gives you a feel for what people in the "real world" put up with.
They make you complete linear algebra and stat 400 (which is the first of the "advanced" stats) just for your CS degree, so it's somewhat difficult to get out of CS without knowing some decent math.
-Erwos
"You've just eliminated almost every journalism major out there with this qualifier."
... and that's the point. If I pulled a random guy off the street and made him install Gentoo, he'd probably try to kill me by the end, especially if I gave him Fedora or SuSE to install afterwards. Do you understand now?
Who cares? I'm not qualified to write about cars, even though I'm an excellent writer.
"BTW, sorry to hear about your Gentoo install problems."
I didn't have any problems, and its telling that you think I did. I installed it just fine on the first try. The fact is, though, I'm not interested in challenging and "learning experience" installs. I've used Linux for seven years. I don't need a teaching experience. I want an install system where I just have to click a few damned buttons and change some CDs.
Gentoo has NO INSTALLER. It is a BAD SYSTEM. Gentoo lovers love to preach about how it's so great to spend time learning all the shell commands, but totally ignore that pretty much every other aspect of the install process is an absolute train wreck. Usability? Godawful. Help system? Non-existent. Don't any of these things _mean something_ to anyone? The fact that I NEED to have the docs right next to me to do a Gentoo install should be a huge warning siren that something is horribly wrong.
Distros should be reviewed on their OWN merits. That is all.
Side by side reviews are also known as "comparisons". I chose my language carefully.
-Erwos
You're making the assumption that most people spend $50 on music rather than people buy 50 songs. I'm not so sure that's a true assumption.
I'm not trying to say that people are not going to buy more at cheaper prices, but rather that I think you're over-estimating just how much music people want in general.
-Erwos
I was wondering if anyone knew of any (relatively) cheap NAS solutions which came _without_ an IDE hard drive? That is to say, so I could install a hard drive of my choosing. No need for features except for SMB and NFS support, either.
My fiance and I are getting married in Feb, and I'm trying my best to hunt down print servers and network storage so we can combine our network in a sane fashion. The print server is already taken care of for the LaserJet 6L, but we have no decent network storage solution for my external hard drive. (also have no solution for her crappy HP color inkjet, but it'll probably break before we get hitched anyways *grabs a hammer*).
-DMZ
Assuming this is part of RH's enterprise line, the EOL is a solid five years from release. I think that's acceptable, given that five year-old software in the Linux realm is generally considered hideously obsolete anyways.
-DMZ
"To properly review a distribution probably takes longer than most people who do such reviewing have time for."
Amen. Most distribution "reviews" are one page praise pieces these days, written by people who honestly have no qualifications in the first place to write a distribution review.
Could you imagine reviewing Windows, Office Super-Deluxe, and a hundred other bits of major software in a _day_? Of course not. You'd have to spend WEEKS. Yet, lo and behold, the majority of idiot reviewers do the install on a single machine, blame the distro for anything that goes wrong, and then go nitpicking (or, alternatively, ignore all flaws and praise the distro anyways because they use it). What happened to the rest of the damned review?
I'd also like to see some relatively unbiased reviews. For the love of G-d, please do not write a review if you're in love with the system in the first place, because you use it on your personal box. It just ends up as a piece of evangelism that wastes the three minutes of my precious life.
To summarize:
1. Limit the scope of the review to:
A. Certain users (and do proper and formal usability tests with them).
B. Certain pieces of software within the distribution (but be certain to test them thoroughly!). If this means you limit it to the installer and certain generic OS tasks, than so be it.
2. Make sure you are _qualified_ to write the review. This should involve some formal educational background in usability engineering at the very least. No one's interested in uninformed opinions.
3. Don't review the distribution you use and love. Your review will be hideously biased, whether you try to make it fair or not. Example: This is the primary reason why all Gentoo reviews seem to gloss over the horrifying install (in my experience).
4. On a similar note, give every distro a fair shake. The fact that it doesn't work just like your favorite distribution should not be a point against it. I'm sick and tired of hearing "but it doesn't have apt-get, so it sucks".
5. Avoid absolutes such as "this is the best" or "this is the worst". Make note of pros and cons, and let the reader decide. You can give recommendations if you want.
6. If you alter the system by installing non-standard software, make note of this (ie, apt on Fedora or SuSE). If you're doing weird configuration, make note of it on the review, too.
7. Thoroughly inform yourself of the features of the distribution, and make note of the fact that you're not reviewing the distribution on 1000 machines at once (if the distribution was intended to scale like that). Example: This is the primary reason why RHN always seems to get bashed in RHEL reviews - people make believe it's just up2date, and miss the extremely useful remote management functionality.
8. Avoid getting into comparison situations. If it's hard to install software, say so, but don't damn Mandrake for not being Slackware (or vica versa).
Those are some things to look for, anyways. Like I said, too many idiots taking too short a time to review far too much.
-Erwos
I guess some criminals _can_ be rehabilitated. Nice to see our system isn't _totally_ broken.
-Erwos
That's actually some interesting reasoning, and I must admit, it might even be true.
American firms have _always_ been engineering-focused. The first cotton textiles plants here were made from stolen British plans. But, what people fail to leave off is that they were than _massively_ improved. That trend (perhaps not so much the stealing) has continued. We see lots and lots of incremental improvements and redesigns, but hardly ever anything revolutionary on its own.
Universities tend to follow the corporate job market. Here at UMCP, there are very few "pure" Physics and Math majors (~600 out of 26k). There are more CS majors (~1250), and even more engineers (~4000). Thus, it is no surprise that fewer people are getting pure research degrees when the corporate market just doesn't need them.
I'm not sure I "appreciate research for itself", to be honest, but I'm also one of those crazy people who mostly agrees with Ayn Rand, so read as you will.
-Erwos
"Especialy since most of the Americans I know in grad school are only staying for the masters, and most of the internationals are interested in PhD and research."
Be fair, now. American students also see that they can get a much higher paying job than being the TA for some awful class, whereas international students often face barriers to being hired because of language issues, security clearances, or visas. If the schools paid more, you'd see more American graduate students. But, at $15k+tuition, it shouldn't come as any kind of surprise that no one's jumping on the train except for people who NEED that education.
Also, consider that your marginal earnings past an MS seldom justify getting a Ph.D. It's been shown time and time again that your _age_ has a far greater correlation to earnings than your education. That's not to say education is worthless (far from it!), but that it has difficulty justifying its own costs.
So, if employers paid more for a Masters/Ph.D. and schools upped their salaries for teaching assistants, you'd see more Americans in grad schools.
You can be almost 100% sure that it has nothing to do with a "national work ethic problem". According to that brilliant logic, those Indians have real work ethic problems because 30%+ of their country can't read. We have studies which give a pretty good estimate on the productivity per worker - if you need proof of work ethics problems, kindly refer to those rather than unrelated facts, please[1].
-Erwos
[1] This was not directed at anyone in particular, especially not the parent.
"Maybe I haven't been following too closely, but wasn't all the information already there before 9/11?"
Yes, but the "problem" is that the FBI and the CIA are not allowed _by law_ to cross-ref their information, since the CIA cannot operate inside US borders. Ditto for the NSA.
So, yes, we had all the right information in collective knowledge, but it wasn't being shared to put together the "ack, 9/11 tomorrow!" warning. Whether that's good or bad is up to your particular opinion, I suppose. But it's rather misleading to say "oh, they're just a bunch of screw-ups". There are laws that prevented them from using that information to put together the real situation.
-Erwos
"On the Debian side you have people focused on making distributions that are not encumbered by IP violations."
Just to be fair, both Mandrake and Red Hat are _totally free (as in freedom)_ distributions. Debian, in a way, is worse, since they do include non-free stuff in their repositories.
-Erwos
Why did they even bother with this silly (if not cunning) trick in the first place? I mean, OK, no one loves the "kernel tainted" message, but at the end of the day, is it really that much of a deal that it needs to be circumvented?
I think a more appropriate way of handling things would be have a message explaining _why_ the tainted message is coming up, and why they can't GPL the driver. Work with the system, not against it.
-Erwos
Of course no one's going to "stand up and defend Sealand", because no one really thinks it's a real country. They have no military. They have no international recognition. Their "currency" may as well be monopoly money, seeing as how it's linked to the US dollar yet has no real assets backing it.
The British military, however, is never going to waste tens of millions of dollars invading some dinky island server farm because Apple is upset. Cutting their links is a possibility, I suppose, but no one's going to care about that.
-Erwos