I've been saying this all along: the worst thing that SCO for themselves could do is render the GPL invalid. They'd IMMEDIATELY open themselves up to a million lawsuits of death from irate copyright holders, a few of whom do have the money to kick the snot out of SCO (IBM, RedHat, and SGI come to mind).
"The GPL is invalid!" "That so? Stop shipping my code. Now. I wrote that code, the copyright reverts to me." "Uh, we own it! The GPL is invalid, and therefore, all GPL'd code belongs to us, because we said so!" "I think not." (lawsuit filed) Take that last line, multiply it by a million, and you'd see what would happen to SCO if the GPL was declared invalid. These people have honest-to-G-d, actual damages to claim. The GPL might die, but a dead SCO would be put right on top of its body.
First one: they stole the code which validates the keys. Once they figure out the valid keyspace (rwhich equires maybe 10 real CD keys), they can crank out keys all day with a keygen. Valve has to recall all boxes and rewrite the key algorithm. Theoretically, this could take a while.
That's one theory, anyways. Not sure why it would delay the game by 4 months.
The other theory is that their network protocol was using some sort of "security through obscurity" trick, and now needs to be totally rewritten. But, even that doesn't strike me as needing 4 months. Weird.
I don't think Seth's reasoning _ever_ got on this.
The boot process on Linux is slow. It's one of the few things that seems to be the same about every distribution. Compare boot time on a WinXP box with non-essential services turned off to boot time on a Linux box with non-essential services turned off. WinXP boots a lot faster, at least in my experience. Can the current system be improved enough to compete? At least one person is saying no.
Seth is proposing a new system that would be faster and have daemons "take care of themselves" without the need for tons of complicated scripts. These are valid and appropriate goals. It's not pushing some sort of desktop agenda (the "GNOME is taking over!" conspiracists amuse me, I must say), or forcing you to run X.
This doesn't "address the server-side", or so some people claim, but I've seen no reason that you couldn't easily direct text output to console exactly like the current init does. Of course he's addressing the X desktop - because that's the far more complicated problem.
Being a long-time resident of Baltimore, I must point out that the crime in the Inner Harbor is not as bad as you think during the day. I'm not sure if I'd use it as a safe spot at night, but for standard touristy stuff, it's fine.
I like the idea of free wi-fi. Go to (Hooters|HRC|whatever) grab some food, find a nice spot to sit down outside, and surf the web while enjoying a decent lunch. Combine that with a few fun attractions (boat tours, science center, ESPN Zone), and it has the makings of a fun day out that doesn't require you to give up all contact with the outside world.
Why you're bringing the laptop on a fun day out is beyond me, though... sometimes, we should just unplug, I think. Maybe it's for PDAs with wi-fi (and lots of batteries)?
I've never understood the kind of schiznophrenia that/.'ers approach NSA with.
On one hand, they wrote SELinux, which _no one_ has been able to find any deliberate backdoors in. It is exactly what they said it was: a security-enhanced, hardened Linux.
Yet, on the other hand, we accuse NSA of rigging Windows with backholes for them. Can we at least make up our minds on whether NSA believes in deliberate backdoors or not? It strikes me that the only "evidence" of an NSA backdoor in Windows was the infamous NSAkey brouhaha, but this is _hardly_ hard proof of anything.
If NSA can use a backdoor, then so, theoretically, can enemy governments. That's hardly good security, and if there's one thing that NSA knows, it's good security.
My pet theory was that the machines were unable to tell _really_ the difference between The Real World and The Matrix. It would explain why, at the end of Reloaded, Neo was able to stop the squids. They had to obey Neo in The Matrix - but they didn't trily understand that they weren't there.
I don't find Smith entering the real world so problematic. Like Morpheus says in the first movie: the body cannot exist without the mind. But what if there was a way to over-ride the mind? A plug in the base of your skull sure seems a good place to do it.
Spoiler: The Matrix Online requires that The Matrix still exist after the third movie, since it takes place after (confirmed by the devs). Draw your own conclusions - I know I have.
It did. And since the court said, "Congress never explicitly gave you the power to do this, so you can't", Congress is now saying to the FTC explicitly, "OK, here's the power!"
It's tough that some people will lose their jobs over this, but our democratic society has spoken: we want no-call lists, and to hell with the industry. The bulk of the telemarketing industry is low-skills, I should think, so they won't have to be retrained too much to find a new job.
My "real" first calculator was an RPN one, handed down by my engineer father. That makes me a real geek.
But, anyways, this reminds me of a funny story. I'm sitting in a low-level C++ class, when the teacher decides to show us some Lisp. I found this quite interesting and reminescent of my days with the RPN calculator, so (stupidly) I raised my hands to inquire whether or not the design of Lisp was based on Polish Notation (PN), which would at least cement in my mind how to treat the language.
Teacher: "WHAT! What did you say about Poles?!" Me: "Polish _Notation_. You know, the mathematical format." Teacher: "You're making it up!" (at this point, I was fairly stunned) Me: "It's called that because, theoretically, those Polish mathematicians knew what they were about, you know?"
It was probably the lowest day of my school career. We were getting CS teachers who _didn't know what RPN was_. How embarassing.
As for your calculator, no bloody idea, I just use my TI-83+ whenever the batteries still work.
I'll be nice: the parent to my post was obviously talking about playing Russian Roulette (RR) with the spammers.
RR is where you take a revolver (which has a 6 bullet chamber), put in a single bullet, spin the bullet chamber, put the gun to your head, and fire. 5/6 of the time, you're OK. 1/6 of the time, you die.
Now, a semi-automatic doesn't have a revolving chamber like a revolver. Instead, it has a magazine. A single bullet in the magazine has a 100% chance of firing (assuming it gets chambered into the barrel, first). Ergo, you want spammers to play RR with a semi-automatic because they'll 100% of the time die, if they go first.
Get it now? Makes for some funny jokes ("he should play RR with a glock!") in the right company.
I guess you're getting confused. If the RIAA suffers a $10k loss, and some poor guy who owns his own business suffers a $20k loss, and they have to choose which one to help, they need to help the poor guy, not the RIAA.
You're confusing "amount of monetary damage" with "corporation's money". Why do big corporations deserve less protection than small ones? Why can't we just use the amount of damage, not the size of corporations, as the determining factor?
Your final jab about who I voted for (Gore, incidentally) is immature and senseless. Thank you for making me look good in relationship.
I hate to say it, but how else do you categorize what's a serious crime or not? Somebody's who got a free service gets smacked off the net. VISA gets smacked off the net. Do you really want the cops to not help VISA first?
A one million dollar loss sounds worse than a thousand dollar loss, you know. If you've got a finite amount of resources, _someone_ is going to end up getting screwed, so shouldn't we handle the big stuff first?
If you need support, buy AS or AW distros - those are supported for 5 years. If you want to cheap out, compile them yourself from the sources that RedHat so nicely provides. Do you think SuSE is planning to support you for free forever? I think not.
Just because it's Linux doesn't mean it breaks life's most consistent rule: you don't get something for nothing.
The part that you don't mention is that there are so many warnings about "bricking" your iPaq that it's an extremely harrowing experience even if you know pretty much what you're doing. I've done the Familiar Linux thing with my iPaq 3150 - it was not at all fun the first time.
So, yes, hardened geeks who are fearless will not have too much of an issue putting Familiar on their iPaq. However, more casual users will certainly balk at this, especially on the more expensive iPaq variants.
Not all the quirks are worked out, either. There's no viable SD driver. Software support is somewhat lacking (no xmms-e!). Opie only recently released a 1.0 release, too.
This is how it's supposed to work: the business says, "you can have it all for X price, or you can have the individual components for Y and Z prices individually." The consumer picks what's best. Everyone's happy.
It's not often that I praise Sun, but if they do what they're saying, they've given everyone a good deal. Nice job!
I don't think it's a bad idea to have a GNOME version - it might even be better for people who aren't as used to Linux, due to the new focus on proper HID.
"I think" doesn't mean much from an AC. Be a man - post under your ID.
But, I'll say it again: if the changes had pissed off all those developers, _they would have left_. Seeing as GNOME still has those 100-1000 devs, I think it logically follows that most agreed.
The problem with that long rant is that it _didn't_ really show very much familiarity with the things the poster was ranting about.
Gconf2? Not a bad system _if you understand it_. Makes it easy for applications to store settings, and lets normal people at them with an easy app. However, since it vaguely resembles the Windows registry, people who aren't aware of its utility recoil in revulsion. The ".hidden files are best" echoes of what I read on the KDE mailing list when it was brought up.
Corporate support and guidance? What, do you think that KDE is totally pure? Their base lib is provided by a commercial entity, for crying out loud! Serious desktop development is going to be at least partially commercially funded. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Don't like the HIG? Frankly, it's based on research and study. Anecdotes just aren't impressive in the face of that. HID is a serious field of study, and I'd prefer GNOME hit "good usability" for that 5-95% quantile, even if I have to learn that the "OK" button is on the right side.
Nautilus abstracting the file system is a smart idea. It's not what people are used to - but why should they be used to filesystems? Think outside the box. Why can't users think in terms of drawers, desks, dressers, CD cases? Why are folders and files so important? Shouldn't we be trying to create a model that jives more with the real world? Why _shouldn't_ we hide implementation details from the average user?
GNOME is _not_ targetting power users any more. They're targetting people who want a simple yet powerful system to do things. Not everyone is interested in 32 desktops with the bizarre feature of the moment. Not everyone is interested in recompiling kernels and memorizing every bit of vocabulary on how their system works. I know how to recompile my kernel, I've done it _many_ times over the years. But that does not mean I particularly enjoy doing it - quite the opposite, I hate doing it. Wastes my time and everyone else's. So, why is it unfair to not make a new user learn how?
Really, the original poster seems to say "how dare they not do what I want!" And, strikingly, I was called a flamebaiter and ignorant for disagreeing and recommending the KDE project - a project that seems to be heading in the direction that he wants. However, just as GNOME loses devs for moving in a new direction, it'll gain them, too. That's what you forgot.
So go use KDE. There's room for more than one desktop environment, and if the GNOME team wants to move in the opposite direction of KDE (less flexibility in favor of more usability), that's their choice.
And, I'd like to point out that just because someone's a power user that it doesn't mean they wouldn't like a simple desktop with sane defaults that JUST WORKS. For me, at least, GNOME is just that - an elegant and simple desktop that helps me get work done.
I can't help but get the impression that you're just being reactionary. The GNOME project isn't trying to do more of the same - they're exploring new paths and new ideas (Mono, Dashboard, Storage). If something turns out to be a huge mistake, there's nothing stopping them from removing it. KDE tends to play it safe from what I've seen, by giving you more of the same, just better - but ultimately, I wonder if this won't be a problem in the future for them.
In other words, speak for yourself: this geek likes the way the GNOME project is moving. Don't try to imply that the majority does not, because I don't think you've got proof of that.
True - except that you didn't have the RIAA suing people who had them. At the very least, this legal action will encourage people to only violate copyright on a small scale.
Correct - if you downloaded a couple MP3s off Kazaa, nobody's going to hunt you down, most likely. If you're sharing a couple thousand, it's probably time to stop.
Remember, they're trying to be efficient - and it's much easier to prosecute a few hundred people than a couple million people. Take down the big sharers, and the system will come crashing down... at least that's the idea, I think.
Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding the concept, but I was always under the impression that to "do" civil disobedience, you were supposed to do it in public, and get arrested for it.
Just breaking the law because you don't like it is not quite the same thing, IMHO.
"which is the primary reason that our economy still sucks"
I disagree. It seems somewhat obvious that consumer confidence is the biggest thing holding back the economy right now.
All that fraudulent activity was happening _during_ the big boom and _after_ the big dot-com bust. I don't see any sort of causal relationship.
What caused the actual recession was the massive decline in investment after all those internet firms decided to self-destruct. Well, at least that's what the economicist (senior at college) part of me is saying.
Ken Lay had his reputation ruined, forever. Don't try to make believe that there are no consquences, even without jail time.
Your methodology is still flawed. Web servers only represent a part of the server market, a part which is getting smaller as desktop and workstation Linux begins to get into the vogue.
Now, for my proof: http://www.suse.de/us/company/press/press_ releases/archive02/market_share.html
In 2002, according to PCData, SuSE had a 38% market share in the US. Unless you think their share went _down_, which is highly unlikely, the math is simple: if RedHat is larger (let's say, 45%), that it doesn't leave room for anyone to be larger than SuSE besides RedHat in the total market.
I'd even argue that Debian has a special advantage in the internet-facing (web, ftp) server market that is responsible for its disproportionate share - the "stable" branch is famous for its security.
Personal anecdote: most people in my LUG run RedHat - the overwhelming majority, in fact. Then comes SuSE and Mandrake, and then everything else. Not scientific, I'm afraid... but I've given that above.
I think you're confusing "web sites" with "total install base". By your reasoning, there are more Linux installs than Windows installs _total in the world_. Obviously, that would be a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you!
I've been saying this all along: the worst thing that SCO for themselves could do is render the GPL invalid. They'd IMMEDIATELY open themselves up to a million lawsuits of death from irate copyright holders, a few of whom do have the money to kick the snot out of SCO (IBM, RedHat, and SGI come to mind).
"The GPL is invalid!"
"That so? Stop shipping my code. Now. I wrote that code, the copyright reverts to me."
"Uh, we own it! The GPL is invalid, and therefore, all GPL'd code belongs to us, because we said so!"
"I think not." (lawsuit filed)
Take that last line, multiply it by a million, and you'd see what would happen to SCO if the GPL was declared invalid. These people have honest-to-G-d, actual damages to claim. The GPL might die, but a dead SCO would be put right on top of its body.
-Erwos
Actually, there are very valid possible reasons:
First one: they stole the code which validates the keys. Once they figure out the valid keyspace (rwhich equires maybe 10 real CD keys), they can crank out keys all day with a keygen. Valve has to recall all boxes and rewrite the key algorithm. Theoretically, this could take a while.
That's one theory, anyways. Not sure why it would delay the game by 4 months.
The other theory is that their network protocol was using some sort of "security through obscurity" trick, and now needs to be totally rewritten. But, even that doesn't strike me as needing 4 months. Weird.
-Erwos
I don't think Seth's reasoning _ever_ got on this.
The boot process on Linux is slow. It's one of the few things that seems to be the same about every distribution. Compare boot time on a WinXP box with non-essential services turned off to boot time on a Linux box with non-essential services turned off. WinXP boots a lot faster, at least in my experience. Can the current system be improved enough to compete? At least one person is saying no.
Seth is proposing a new system that would be faster and have daemons "take care of themselves" without the need for tons of complicated scripts. These are valid and appropriate goals. It's not pushing some sort of desktop agenda (the "GNOME is taking over!" conspiracists amuse me, I must say), or forcing you to run X.
This doesn't "address the server-side", or so some people claim, but I've seen no reason that you couldn't easily direct text output to console exactly like the current init does. Of course he's addressing the X desktop - because that's the far more complicated problem.
-Erwos
Being a long-time resident of Baltimore, I must point out that the crime in the Inner Harbor is not as bad as you think during the day. I'm not sure if I'd use it as a safe spot at night, but for standard touristy stuff, it's fine.
I like the idea of free wi-fi. Go to (Hooters|HRC|whatever) grab some food, find a nice spot to sit down outside, and surf the web while enjoying a decent lunch. Combine that with a few fun attractions (boat tours, science center, ESPN Zone), and it has the makings of a fun day out that doesn't require you to give up all contact with the outside world.
Why you're bringing the laptop on a fun day out is beyond me, though... sometimes, we should just unplug, I think. Maybe it's for PDAs with wi-fi (and lots of batteries)?
-Erwos
I've never understood the kind of schiznophrenia that /.'ers approach NSA with.
On one hand, they wrote SELinux, which _no one_ has been able to find any deliberate backdoors in. It is exactly what they said it was: a security-enhanced, hardened Linux.
Yet, on the other hand, we accuse NSA of rigging Windows with backholes for them. Can we at least make up our minds on whether NSA believes in deliberate backdoors or not? It strikes me that the only "evidence" of an NSA backdoor in Windows was the infamous NSAkey brouhaha, but this is _hardly_ hard proof of anything.
If NSA can use a backdoor, then so, theoretically, can enemy governments. That's hardly good security, and if there's one thing that NSA knows, it's good security.
-Erwos
My pet theory was that the machines were unable to tell _really_ the difference between The Real World and The Matrix. It would explain why, at the end of Reloaded, Neo was able to stop the squids. They had to obey Neo in The Matrix - but they didn't trily understand that they weren't there.
I don't find Smith entering the real world so problematic. Like Morpheus says in the first movie: the body cannot exist without the mind. But what if there was a way to over-ride the mind? A plug in the base of your skull sure seems a good place to do it.
Spoiler: The Matrix Online requires that The Matrix still exist after the third movie, since it takes place after (confirmed by the devs). Draw your own conclusions - I know I have.
-Erwos
It is. However, there have been some concerns about bandwidth usage. Apparently, this project is attempting to solve them for once and for all.
There are a lot of excellent uses for this, too.
-Erwos
"Why not then let the court decide the case?"
It did. And since the court said, "Congress never explicitly gave you the power to do this, so you can't", Congress is now saying to the FTC explicitly, "OK, here's the power!"
It's tough that some people will lose their jobs over this, but our democratic society has spoken: we want no-call lists, and to hell with the industry. The bulk of the telemarketing industry is low-skills, I should think, so they won't have to be retrained too much to find a new job.
-Erwos
My "real" first calculator was an RPN one, handed down by my engineer father. That makes me a real geek.
But, anyways, this reminds me of a funny story. I'm sitting in a low-level C++ class, when the teacher decides to show us some Lisp. I found this quite interesting and reminescent of my days with the RPN calculator, so (stupidly) I raised my hands to inquire whether or not the design of Lisp was based on Polish Notation (PN), which would at least cement in my mind how to treat the language.
Teacher: "WHAT! What did you say about Poles?!"
Me: "Polish _Notation_. You know, the mathematical format."
Teacher: "You're making it up!" (at this point, I was fairly stunned)
Me: "It's called that because, theoretically, those Polish mathematicians knew what they were about, you know?"
It was probably the lowest day of my school career. We were getting CS teachers who _didn't know what RPN was_. How embarassing.
As for your calculator, no bloody idea, I just use my TI-83+ whenever the batteries still work.
-Erwos
I'll be nice: the parent to my post was obviously talking about playing Russian Roulette (RR) with the spammers.
RR is where you take a revolver (which has a 6 bullet chamber), put in a single bullet, spin the bullet chamber, put the gun to your head, and fire. 5/6 of the time, you're OK. 1/6 of the time, you die.
Now, a semi-automatic doesn't have a revolving chamber like a revolver. Instead, it has a magazine. A single bullet in the magazine has a 100% chance of firing (assuming it gets chambered into the barrel, first). Ergo, you want spammers to play RR with a semi-automatic because they'll 100% of the time die, if they go first.
Get it now? Makes for some funny jokes ("he should play RR with a glock!") in the right company.
-Erwos
I guess you're getting confused. If the RIAA suffers a $10k loss, and some poor guy who owns his own business suffers a $20k loss, and they have to choose which one to help, they need to help the poor guy, not the RIAA.
You're confusing "amount of monetary damage" with "corporation's money". Why do big corporations deserve less protection than small ones? Why can't we just use the amount of damage, not the size of corporations, as the determining factor?
Your final jab about who I voted for (Gore, incidentally) is immature and senseless. Thank you for making me look good in relationship.
-Erwos
Semi-automatics work best if you know you're not going first.
-Erwos
I hate to say it, but how else do you categorize what's a serious crime or not? Somebody's who got a free service gets smacked off the net. VISA gets smacked off the net. Do you really want the cops to not help VISA first?
A one million dollar loss sounds worse than a thousand dollar loss, you know. If you've got a finite amount of resources, _someone_ is going to end up getting screwed, so shouldn't we handle the big stuff first?
-Erwos
If you need support, buy AS or AW distros - those are supported for 5 years. If you want to cheap out, compile them yourself from the sources that RedHat so nicely provides. Do you think SuSE is planning to support you for free forever? I think not.
Just because it's Linux doesn't mean it breaks life's most consistent rule: you don't get something for nothing.
-Erwos
The part that you don't mention is that there are so many warnings about "bricking" your iPaq that it's an extremely harrowing experience even if you know pretty much what you're doing. I've done the Familiar Linux thing with my iPaq 3150 - it was not at all fun the first time.
So, yes, hardened geeks who are fearless will not have too much of an issue putting Familiar on their iPaq. However, more casual users will certainly balk at this, especially on the more expensive iPaq variants.
Not all the quirks are worked out, either. There's no viable SD driver. Software support is somewhat lacking (no xmms-e!). Opie only recently released a 1.0 release, too.
More info at Handhelds.org.
-Erwos
This is how it's supposed to work: the business says, "you can have it all for X price, or you can have the individual components for Y and Z prices individually." The consumer picks what's best. Everyone's happy.
It's not often that I praise Sun, but if they do what they're saying, they've given everyone a good deal. Nice job!
-Erwos
Be fair, they're only Gnome'ing everything up!
I don't think it's a bad idea to have a GNOME version - it might even be better for people who aren't as used to Linux, due to the new focus on proper HID.
-Erwos
"I think" doesn't mean much from an AC. Be a man - post under your ID.
But, I'll say it again: if the changes had pissed off all those developers, _they would have left_. Seeing as GNOME still has those 100-1000 devs, I think it logically follows that most agreed.
The problem with that long rant is that it _didn't_ really show very much familiarity with the things the poster was ranting about.
Gconf2? Not a bad system _if you understand it_. Makes it easy for applications to store settings, and lets normal people at them with an easy app. However, since it vaguely resembles the Windows registry, people who aren't aware of its utility recoil in revulsion. The ".hidden files are best" echoes of what I read on the KDE mailing list when it was brought up.
Corporate support and guidance? What, do you think that KDE is totally pure? Their base lib is provided by a commercial entity, for crying out loud! Serious desktop development is going to be at least partially commercially funded. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Don't like the HIG? Frankly, it's based on research and study. Anecdotes just aren't impressive in the face of that. HID is a serious field of study, and I'd prefer GNOME hit "good usability" for that 5-95% quantile, even if I have to learn that the "OK" button is on the right side.
Nautilus abstracting the file system is a smart idea. It's not what people are used to - but why should they be used to filesystems? Think outside the box. Why can't users think in terms of drawers, desks, dressers, CD cases? Why are folders and files so important? Shouldn't we be trying to create a model that jives more with the real world? Why _shouldn't_ we hide implementation details from the average user?
GNOME is _not_ targetting power users any more. They're targetting people who want a simple yet powerful system to do things. Not everyone is interested in 32 desktops with the bizarre feature of the moment. Not everyone is interested in recompiling kernels and memorizing every bit of vocabulary on how their system works. I know how to recompile my kernel, I've done it _many_ times over the years. But that does not mean I particularly enjoy doing it - quite the opposite, I hate doing it. Wastes my time and everyone else's. So, why is it unfair to not make a new user learn how?
Really, the original poster seems to say "how dare they not do what I want!" And, strikingly, I was called a flamebaiter and ignorant for disagreeing and recommending the KDE project - a project that seems to be heading in the direction that he wants. However, just as GNOME loses devs for moving in a new direction, it'll gain them, too. That's what you forgot.
-Erwos
So go use KDE. There's room for more than one desktop environment, and if the GNOME team wants to move in the opposite direction of KDE (less flexibility in favor of more usability), that's their choice.
And, I'd like to point out that just because someone's a power user that it doesn't mean they wouldn't like a simple desktop with sane defaults that JUST WORKS. For me, at least, GNOME is just that - an elegant and simple desktop that helps me get work done.
I can't help but get the impression that you're just being reactionary. The GNOME project isn't trying to do more of the same - they're exploring new paths and new ideas (Mono, Dashboard, Storage). If something turns out to be a huge mistake, there's nothing stopping them from removing it. KDE tends to play it safe from what I've seen, by giving you more of the same, just better - but ultimately, I wonder if this won't be a problem in the future for them.
In other words, speak for yourself: this geek likes the way the GNOME project is moving. Don't try to imply that the majority does not, because I don't think you've got proof of that.
-Erwos
True - except that you didn't have the RIAA suing people who had them. At the very least, this legal action will encourage people to only violate copyright on a small scale.
-Erwos
Correct - if you downloaded a couple MP3s off Kazaa, nobody's going to hunt you down, most likely. If you're sharing a couple thousand, it's probably time to stop.
Remember, they're trying to be efficient - and it's much easier to prosecute a few hundred people than a couple million people. Take down the big sharers, and the system will come crashing down... at least that's the idea, I think.
-Erwos
Perhaps I'm just misunderstanding the concept, but I was always under the impression that to "do" civil disobedience, you were supposed to do it in public, and get arrested for it.
Just breaking the law because you don't like it is not quite the same thing, IMHO.
-Erwos
"which is the primary reason that our economy still sucks"
I disagree. It seems somewhat obvious that consumer confidence is the biggest thing holding back the economy right now.
All that fraudulent activity was happening _during_ the big boom and _after_ the big dot-com bust. I don't see any sort of causal relationship.
What caused the actual recession was the massive decline in investment after all those internet firms decided to self-destruct. Well, at least that's what the economicist (senior at college) part of me is saying.
Ken Lay had his reputation ruined, forever. Don't try to make believe that there are no consquences, even without jail time.
-Erwos
Your methodology is still flawed. Web servers only represent a part of the server market, a part which is getting smaller as desktop and workstation Linux begins to get into the vogue.
_ releases /archive02/market_share.html
Now, for my proof:
http://www.suse.de/us/company/press/press
In 2002, according to PCData, SuSE had a 38% market share in the US. Unless you think their share went _down_, which is highly unlikely, the math is simple: if RedHat is larger (let's say, 45%), that it doesn't leave room for anyone to be larger than SuSE besides RedHat in the total market.
I'd even argue that Debian has a special advantage in the internet-facing (web, ftp) server market that is responsible for its disproportionate share - the "stable" branch is famous for its security.
Personal anecdote: most people in my LUG run RedHat - the overwhelming majority, in fact. Then comes SuSE and Mandrake, and then everything else. Not scientific, I'm afraid... but I've given that above.
-Erwos
I think you're confusing "web sites" with "total install base". By your reasoning, there are more Linux installs than Windows installs _total in the world_. Obviously, that would be a mistake.
-Erwos