And that piracy is a big reason why Linux can work so well in the Far East. When you have a culture, or class of people, that are used to just pirating what they want, then it's a pretty easy sell to say - instead of dropping a few bucks on a pirated OS that you really can't verify whether or not it's been tampered with, here take this free, open source OS.
Now, once the market in Asia is set up that it predominantly runs Linux - I think there will be a huge market that opens up for custom software for Linux, that could be a boon to the US economy - selling custom code and service to the large economies of Asia.
And since Linux is free, and represents Freedom, maybe the people there will realize how great freedom is and want more of it.. putting pressure on the tinhorn communist dictators that run the region.
I think this is a non-start of an issue. Clearly, there is room for both Netscape and Mozilla, why wouldn't there be room for a Open Source JVM and a proprietary JVM?
And I would suspect that while the Open Source JVM included new features more rapidly, I think the proprietary JVM would be the "debian-stable" version, and the only one that Sun would officially support.
Nothing to fear here - this is just giving developers like myself more choices, and more tools to work with.
I have a question - were the pictures presented meant to be Satire? Lampooning political figures happens all the time, though IANAL, I wonder if making satirical photoshopped images, from a copyrighted source or not, would be protected by free speech?
Now I'm not defending these images, which were clearly meant to be passed off as real, but what if... oh I dunno - say the original picture was used in a photoshop thread on fark or something - what about then?
Seems to me that this is a lot trickier of an issue then what the surface of it seems.
And finally, as far as the rich in power - no political figure, regardless of party affiliation, should be judged on the actions on it's extremist kooks.
FvwmPager would definately be considered Prior Art - but - this is the United States Government, and let's face it.. government employees are often behind the curve, and many of them have probably never heard of Linux, or X, or Fvwm, or are even aware of the existence of Window Managers in general. So why don't we tell them?
(Gets out Soapbox) So why don't we give the USPTO and Congress a good old fashioned snail mail slashdotting and try to convince them that while software copyrights on source code is fine, that software patents are patently stupid.
C'mon - who's with me? Anyone want to step up and coordinate this effort?
Let's write letters and Slashdot the USPTO! And the US Senate! And The House! Here's the USPTO Mailing address -
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
USPTO Contact Center (UCC)
Crystal Plaza 3, Room 2C02
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
http://www.senate.gov for finding your state's senator. http://www.house.gov for finding your district's representative.
Wait a minute - if "sampling" is so bad, then why didn't Queen sue Vanilla Ice?
Why didn't Van Halen sue Tone Loc? (U2 can sue him too, actually...)
Why hasn't James Brown sued any of the rap acts that have sampled his stuff? (and many, many, many hip hop songs have ripped off his stuff)
Why didn't the Jimi Hendrix estate sue the now defunct WCW (since I don't think Time Warner owns the Hendrix copyrights)? The nWo theme was nothing but a mishmash of Jimi Hendrix riffs, after all..
Did Sir Mix-A-Lot pay royalties to Black Sabbath for his rip-off of 'Iron Man'?
Where would hip hop be without ripping off other artists? At least if credit was given the way the classical composers did it (saying, hey, this melody is a derivative of "___" by "___"), I think it would be less of a big deal.
Now, Apple should have licensed the use of these songs - but isn't it just a bit hypocritical of Eminem to sue apple when the biggest rip-offs of music has been several hip-hop artists?
Someone who's more familiar with Eminem's music can answer this - but who has Eminem ripped off?
This was the same group that said SDI wouldn't work back in '83-'84.
After a few successful tests, i'd suggest that they were full of it then, and continue to be full of it now. Talk about a group with an axe to grind. They might as well have called themselves 'Union of Progressive Scientists'. Truth in advertising.
They are on perma-ignore.
They're also the same group that warned everyone of Global Cooling back in the 1970's, and warn everyone of global warming today.
Here's a question - if Dinosaurs once ruled the Earth when it was a tropical paradise, doesn't it make sense that the Earth would return to that temperature?
Chicken Little called, he wants his gimmick back from these guys.
Getting tough on crime might not be the answer to every social ill, but for this one it is. In the case of Drunk Driving, it's a problem of recurrence - here in Texas there was recently a little girl killed by a drunk driver that had over 10 previous DUI convictions. By increasing the penalty, and locking this guy up for a while - we save that little girl's life.
People are people, and will continue to make bad decisions, but if we as a society tell people that if they misbehave, that they get a timeout for 5 years in prison, they'll shape up. If you're in prison, you're not killing pedestrians because you're driving drunk.
I'm not opposed to bars installing breathylizers, as long as it's the bar's choice and not the government telling bar owners that they have to...
Other unfunded mandates in products that were just as stupid include: The V-Chip in your television! Because the benevolent Government wants to protect the children (as opposed to... the PARENTS).
Nothing good ever happens from an unfunded Government mandate like this - this law is just ridiculous. All this law does is increase the cost of producing the car, which in turns just costs the consumer more money, all to stop someone from driving drunk. "Hey - this guy over here is a screw up, so let's punish everyone else".
You want to put a stop to drunk driving? Here's a hint - you can't. But what you can do is increase on the punishment of a DUI conviction, and that might make some people think twice about it. That's really the only way to do it.
Now, this is not meant to be flamebait, this is my honest opinion, feel free to disagree, but it really shouldn't surprise anyone that a Democrat proposed this (and that the Democrat Governor there would likely sign it), since the Democrats always seem to favor stuff like this to protect people from themselves at the expense (in this case, financial) of others. Not to mention that laws like this never work...
Microsoft should be allowed to bundle or ship any software it wants with it's Operating System. Period. If MS wants to ship Media Player (which has shipped since Windows 3.1) - then fine. If they want to ship / bundle Internet Explorer with Windows, fine.
After all - Windows is Microsoft's Operating System. So what's the problem here?
And since MS owns the OS, Microsoft should be legally allowed to break other vendors applications by changing the Windows API, or by changing the File Formats for it's data. Again - MS should do whatever it wishes with Windows.
And since all this is true - the beauty of Open Source Operating Systems becomes amazingly apparent. When the underlying OS is Open Source, no one company can control it to freeze out competitors the way MS does with Windows. Captialism at it's core - a level playing field for all interested companies.
The problem with Microsoft is still the discounts PC vendors get if they agree to only ship Windows. If you could go to Best Buy - and there's two identical machines hardware-wise - and one is $300 cheaper because you're not paying the MS Tax, which PC do you think the majority of people are going to buy?
That's the key to Linux winning the desktop battle - getting retail Linux boxes on the shelf at major retailers. By the way - GNOME and KDE are already better then the UI of Windows XP.
Actually hardened conservative capitalists like myself see Linux as the ultimate level playing field for software development - a playing field where the best applications win, not where one company has access to underlying OS features and can freeze out competitors using predatory behavior...
And as far as applications - let's face it - there's more then enough room for many, many similar applications that people can choose from. For example - web browsers. Some people (like myself) prefer Opera, others Mozilla, some Konqueror, some Galeon, some Firefox, some people still use Lynx, Mac folks seem to like Safari... and yes, there's some poor, poor fools still using Internet Exploder.
Take Word Processing - go back to the early days of Dos / Windows - some people wanted to use WordPerfect, others Wordstar, some people PFS Professional Write, and there was more then enough room for all those applications - it was which one you liked best, and most of them could write files to various formats for sharing information. Now, we have OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc, and again - these all write to multiple file formats - just pick the one you like best. Competition and Capitalism at it's finest, if you ask me.. which is the opposite route SCO is going with their money grab and frivolous lawsuit.
I haven't looked lately, but MS used to release free viewers for their Office format documents (ala Adode Acrobat Reader).. if they're still doing this, you should just get these until you build up your confidence using OpenOffice.
As far as sending documents that need to look a certain way, have you considered other formats then.doc? (PDF, HTML, TeX, RTF (hahahahah ok I'm only kidding on that one)
But seriously - OpenOffice 1.1 will let you export your docs as.pdf files.. and Acrobat Reader is everywhere..
The problem is that to use Mac OS X most companies would have to buy a LOT of new hardware that many just haven't budgeted for. You go to any Fortune 500 company and chances are that not only will you find leased machines from companies like Dell, but the secretaries and other non-geek types still have Pentium 2 based machines.
And then there's the executives... with state of the art boxes, marvelling at how fast Solitaire is and how pretty the screensaver looks.
But, I agree with you on one thing - they should get a few Macs - if for no other reason that a hetergeneous network of Winblows, Mac, and Linux is the best defense against the Worm or Trojan of the week. (Aside from not hiring attachment clicking morons.)
I think it has to do with marketing - I'd suspect that a lot of people have never even heard of AMD - but have heard of Intel because of the stupid alien commercials (where an alien inserts a Pentium into some gel and checks out a chick in a bikini) and the old Blue Man Group commercials... that and the 4 note sounder..
But what about AMD? I've personally never seen a commercial touting an Athlon from AMD. AMD should buy some commercial time and tout "Hey we kick Intel's ass AND we're cheaper! Join the revolution" or something similar.
It's all about the name recognition (or lack thereof)...
No, you're not being cynical, but there is a valid reason - the testing and burn-in phase, which can take months if not years. If memory serves me correctly, there was a recent probe that ran on 4 Intel 486 processors. Why didn't they use the then available Pentium 2? Testing - the 486's they had were proven to work in the extreme environments and it would have caused unneccessary delays to test with a new processor / motherboards.
Personally, I wouldn't be that surprised in the Rovers were running Red Hat 6... or similar, due to that long test cycle.
Are you liberals *still* whining about this? The electoral college is part of the Constitution - and the electors voted for George W. Bush. The Popular Vote means nothing for votes for president.
What's also worth noting is that the electors are not legally required to vote a certain way - the Gore camp was trying to find "faithless" electors so Gore would win.
And there have been faithless electors, I forget when.. 1976? But there was an elector that cast his vote for Ronald Reagan instead of Gerald Ford. (Note - I may be wrong, it might have been a Nixon elector that cast for Reagan, but I'm too lazy to look it up.)
But as far as legitimate votes... you're talking about all the valid military ballots that David Boies got disqualified, right? You know roughly 80% of those went to Bush..
Did you read the article you referenced?
It says "Microsoft will use the Virtual PC technology it acquired from Connectix last year to provide backward-compatibility with the current generation of Xbox games."
Buying an X-box technically doesn't give MS any money.
This is a fallacy that many here on Slashdot seem to repeat far more often then they should. If you buy an X-Box - you are still sending MS money - they lose money on the sale based on the cost to produce the unit, but it you didn't buy one MS would lose THAT MUCH MORE money.
It's really simple - you want Microsoft to lose money? Then don't buy *any* Microsoft products. That means Windows Operating Systems, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Sidewinders / Mice, any game published by MS (FreeLancer, Halo, etc.), or anything else released or produced by Microsoft.
Isn't this a somewhat obvious result of the study? It makes sense that people who are well rested and refreshed from a good night sleep (or a timely nap) would be more alert and better able to think on their feet.
Anyone who has ever crammed all night for a final knows how your brain seems to turn to mush after the test is over from the fatigue of it all.
Who knows, maybe now that it's been scientifically proven, businesses will realize that people are actually more productive when not forced to work ridiculous amounts of mandatory, unpaid overtime.
You might try http://www.linuxiso.org - they've got ISO's of many, many Linux distributions that you can download and check out.
I too, was a loyal Red Hat user until they started messing with KDE. So, I came on Slashdot and read a comment where someone was saying Mandrake was "Red Hat Lite". So, I gave Mandrake 9.0 a try, and I've since upgraded to 9.1 (will upgrade to 9.2 soon), and I've not looked back.
Knoppix is also an amazing distro, if you only ever need it for a system recovery disk then it's still worth the time and bandwidth to grab it.
I'd recommend starting with those two, and I will mention that here on slashdot Debian and Gentoo are also extremely popular, and SuSe and Slackware also have vocal fans.
But - check out http://www.linuxiso.org and see what all they have.
You know, I was non-plussed when I first bought and played Quake 3. I think buying and playing Unreal Tournament ruined Quake 3 for me. In the pit of my stomach, I think that the scenario is about to repeat, with Doom 3 getting overshadowed by Half-Life 2.
Quake 3 was/is a good game, but I was expecting a *great* game.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, once the market in Asia is set up that it predominantly runs Linux - I think there will be a huge market that opens up for custom software for Linux, that could be a boon to the US economy - selling custom code and service to the large economies of Asia.
And since Linux is free, and represents Freedom, maybe the people there will realize how great freedom is and want more of it.. putting pressure on the tinhorn communist dictators that run the region.
Exporting freedom and capitalism never hurts...
And I would suspect that while the Open Source JVM included new features more rapidly, I think the proprietary JVM would be the "debian-stable" version, and the only one that Sun would officially support.
Nothing to fear here - this is just giving developers like myself more choices, and more tools to work with.
Now I'm not defending these images, which were clearly meant to be passed off as real, but what if... oh I dunno - say the original picture was used in a photoshop thread on fark or something - what about then?
Seems to me that this is a lot trickier of an issue then what the surface of it seems.
And finally, as far as the rich in power - no political figure, regardless of party affiliation, should be judged on the actions on it's extremist kooks.
(Gets out Soapbox) So why don't we give the USPTO and Congress a good old fashioned snail mail slashdotting and try to convince them that while software copyrights on source code is fine, that software patents are patently stupid.
C'mon - who's with me? Anyone want to step up and coordinate this effort?
Let's write letters and Slashdot the USPTO! And the US Senate! And The House! Here's the USPTO Mailing address -
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
USPTO Contact Center (UCC)
Crystal Plaza 3, Room 2C02
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
http://www.senate.gov for finding your state's senator. http://www.house.gov for finding your district's representative.
Yes, I was being viciously sarcastic, and I'm glad to see that someone finally picked it up and got the point I was trying to make.
The reason I used sarcasm, is because I didn't want to be modded down too quickly for attacking Apple, so I went in a roundabout way to do it.
Why didn't Van Halen sue Tone Loc? (U2 can sue him too, actually...)
Why hasn't James Brown sued any of the rap acts that have sampled his stuff? (and many, many, many hip hop songs have ripped off his stuff)
Why didn't the Jimi Hendrix estate sue the now defunct WCW (since I don't think Time Warner owns the Hendrix copyrights)? The nWo theme was nothing but a mishmash of Jimi Hendrix riffs, after all..
Did Sir Mix-A-Lot pay royalties to Black Sabbath for his rip-off of 'Iron Man'?
Where would hip hop be without ripping off other artists? At least if credit was given the way the classical composers did it (saying, hey, this melody is a derivative of "___" by "___"), I think it would be less of a big deal.
Now, Apple should have licensed the use of these songs - but isn't it just a bit hypocritical of Eminem to sue apple when the biggest rip-offs of music has been several hip-hop artists?
Someone who's more familiar with Eminem's music can answer this - but who has Eminem ripped off?
After a few successful tests, i'd suggest that they were full of it then, and continue to be full of it now. Talk about a group with an axe to grind. They might as well have called themselves 'Union of Progressive Scientists'. Truth in advertising.
They are on perma-ignore.
They're also the same group that warned everyone of Global Cooling back in the 1970's, and warn everyone of global warming today.
Here's a question - if Dinosaurs once ruled the Earth when it was a tropical paradise, doesn't it make sense that the Earth would return to that temperature?
Chicken Little called, he wants his gimmick back from these guys.
People are people, and will continue to make bad decisions, but if we as a society tell people that if they misbehave, that they get a timeout for 5 years in prison, they'll shape up. If you're in prison, you're not killing pedestrians because you're driving drunk.
I'm not opposed to bars installing breathylizers, as long as it's the bar's choice and not the government telling bar owners that they have to...
You want to put a stop to drunk driving? Here's a hint - you can't. But what you can do is increase on the punishment of a DUI conviction, and that might make some people think twice about it. That's really the only way to do it.
Now, this is not meant to be flamebait, this is my honest opinion, feel free to disagree, but it really shouldn't surprise anyone that a Democrat proposed this (and that the Democrat Governor there would likely sign it), since the Democrats always seem to favor stuff like this to protect people from themselves at the expense (in this case, financial) of others. Not to mention that laws like this never work...
After all - Windows is Microsoft's Operating System. So what's the problem here?
And since MS owns the OS, Microsoft should be legally allowed to break other vendors applications by changing the Windows API, or by changing the File Formats for it's data. Again - MS should do whatever it wishes with Windows.
And since all this is true - the beauty of Open Source Operating Systems becomes amazingly apparent. When the underlying OS is Open Source, no one company can control it to freeze out competitors the way MS does with Windows. Captialism at it's core - a level playing field for all interested companies.
The problem with Microsoft is still the discounts PC vendors get if they agree to only ship Windows. If you could go to Best Buy - and there's two identical machines hardware-wise - and one is $300 cheaper because you're not paying the MS Tax, which PC do you think the majority of people are going to buy?
That's the key to Linux winning the desktop battle - getting retail Linux boxes on the shelf at major retailers. By the way - GNOME and KDE are already better then the UI of Windows XP.
Whoa... didn't mean to rant like that!
While wearing a Red Hat?
And as far as applications - let's face it - there's more then enough room for many, many similar applications that people can choose from. For example - web browsers. Some people (like myself) prefer Opera, others Mozilla, some Konqueror, some Galeon, some Firefox, some people still use Lynx, Mac folks seem to like Safari... and yes, there's some poor, poor fools still using Internet Exploder.
Take Word Processing - go back to the early days of Dos / Windows - some people wanted to use WordPerfect, others Wordstar, some people PFS Professional Write, and there was more then enough room for all those applications - it was which one you liked best, and most of them could write files to various formats for sharing information. Now, we have OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc, and again - these all write to multiple file formats - just pick the one you like best. Competition and Capitalism at it's finest, if you ask me.. which is the opposite route SCO is going with their money grab and frivolous lawsuit.
As far as sending documents that need to look a certain way, have you considered other formats then .doc? (PDF, HTML, TeX, RTF (hahahahah ok I'm only kidding on that one)
But seriously - OpenOffice 1.1 will let you export your docs as .pdf files.. and Acrobat Reader is everywhere..
And then there's the executives... with state of the art boxes, marvelling at how fast Solitaire is and how pretty the screensaver looks.
But, I agree with you on one thing - they should get a few Macs - if for no other reason that a hetergeneous network of Winblows, Mac, and Linux is the best defense against the Worm or Trojan of the week. (Aside from not hiring attachment clicking morons.)
But what about AMD? I've personally never seen a commercial touting an Athlon from AMD. AMD should buy some commercial time and tout "Hey we kick Intel's ass AND we're cheaper! Join the revolution" or something similar.
It's all about the name recognition (or lack thereof)...
*wink*
Personally, I wouldn't be that surprised in the Rovers were running Red Hat 6... or similar, due to that long test cycle.
What's also worth noting is that the electors are not legally required to vote a certain way - the Gore camp was trying to find "faithless" electors so Gore would win.
And there have been faithless electors, I forget when.. 1976? But there was an elector that cast his vote for Ronald Reagan instead of Gerald Ford. (Note - I may be wrong, it might have been a Nixon elector that cast for Reagan, but I'm too lazy to look it up.)
But as far as legitimate votes... you're talking about all the valid military ballots that David Boies got disqualified, right? You know roughly 80% of those went to Bush..
Upcoming thread temperature: Burnination.
Did you read the article you referenced?
It says "Microsoft will use the Virtual PC technology it acquired from Connectix last year to provide backward-compatibility with the current generation of Xbox games."
This is a fallacy that many here on Slashdot seem to repeat far more often then they should. If you buy an X-Box - you are still sending MS money - they lose money on the sale based on the cost to produce the unit, but it you didn't buy one MS would lose THAT MUCH MORE money.
It's really simple - you want Microsoft to lose money? Then don't buy *any* Microsoft products. That means Windows Operating Systems, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Sidewinders / Mice, any game published by MS (FreeLancer, Halo, etc.), or anything else released or produced by Microsoft.
Anyone who has ever crammed all night for a final knows how your brain seems to turn to mush after the test is over from the fatigue of it all.
Who knows, maybe now that it's been scientifically proven, businesses will realize that people are actually more productive when not forced to work ridiculous amounts of mandatory, unpaid overtime.
... but where are the X-Ray glasses promised to us in the throngs of comic books of our youth? Hmmm?
I too, was a loyal Red Hat user until they started messing with KDE. So, I came on Slashdot and read a comment where someone was saying Mandrake was "Red Hat Lite". So, I gave Mandrake 9.0 a try, and I've since upgraded to 9.1 (will upgrade to 9.2 soon), and I've not looked back.
Knoppix is also an amazing distro, if you only ever need it for a system recovery disk then it's still worth the time and bandwidth to grab it.
I'd recommend starting with those two, and I will mention that here on slashdot Debian and Gentoo are also extremely popular, and SuSe and Slackware also have vocal fans.
But - check out http://www.linuxiso.org and see what all they have.
Hope this helps!
Quake 3 was