I would like to take this moment in today's dose of SCO goes North Korean to give my heartfelt thanks to those ubercool people over there in Germany who have been kicking SCO's ass all over the Internet for weeks now.
First we have LinuxTag telling SCO to put up or shut up, treating everybody to the sight of SCO withdrawing their claims without even pretending to fight, meek as mice. Then we have Heise magazine getting pictures of the code out to the world, probably one of the biggest scoops in the history of computer journalism, giving the good guys their first chance to mount a counterattack.
That's two of the most important developments from the same European country. During this time, the American legal system hasn't even been able to pull its finger out, let alone do anything to stop these madmen. When this is over and the GPL has won, it will be no small part because of the Germans -- and somehow, I don't think SCO was expecting them even to come to the party.
"...and shit in your neck." Man, I thought he was just joking when I heard that the first time, but no, that is exactly what he did. Damn, what a cool game.
But what we need to understand is 1) they could give two shits if the/. community is kind to them, and 2) the general geek lobby doesn't gain any credibility by turning any story about movies or music into a personal rights debate.
This site isn't just read by geeks anymore. The last proof of that can be found by going to Google News and checking out how many stories from Slashdot they carry. For good or bad, this is site has a pretty big impact in the media now. They don't call it slashdotting for nothing.
The actual situation is that some poor exec is wishing for the good old days when they could make money of a shitty movie by promo'ing it.
Having said the above, I agree completely with you here. It was a nicer world for those in power when the only media were mass media, and the suckers couldn't communicate amongst themselves very well. Now, they might just have to make a good product instead of giving their marketing droids a lot of money.
Note that you can also say the reverse is true: The word on a good film will get around even if there isn't much marketing power behind it (Hero was a film that I heard about almost only by word of mouth; Secretary is another).
DocBook is seriously neat -- if you can get somebody else to do the job of getting it to the end format. Avoid this job at all costs, as it will drive you completely up the wall.
The problem is that the people behind DocBook don't seem to want to have anything to do with the tool chain that takes the source file and turns it into something you can actually publish. This means that putting all the programs together to get DocBook XML to, say, PDF and then getting it looking the way you want can be a royal pain in the ass even if your distributor has included and configured the important stuff for you.
Then, there are two types of DocBook - XML and SGML, so at any given time, you are bound to be looking at the wrong documentation for the wrong tool when trying to get to your target format. DocBook SGML is less of a problem, if you have a choice, use it. Getting from DocBook XML to anything but HTML/XHTML seems to still be rather non-trivial.
Again, if you don't have to deal with any of that (for example, if you are submitting stuff to the Linux Documentation Project) it is pretty neat. If the DocBook people had gone whole hog and provided a comprehensive tool set along with the standard, it would rock big time.
As it is, I'd think twice before recommending it to somebody who just wants to get ink on paper.
Just when I start to think Slashdot has grasped...
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Joining the ACLU?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
...that it is an international forum read by tens of thousands of people from all over the world, somebody comes along and posts something so utterly restricted to America that it probably has the rest of the world sitting there shaking their heads and going: So just what the fuck is an ACLU, and does it need USB 2.0?
Come on, this site is about "News for Nerds", not "Current Popular Views on American Politics". And no, this isn't YRO, either. If you want to discuss stuff like this, you might be more happy over at Kuro5hin with all of the other mature people. Heck, I might even answer a question like that there. Just leave us here on Slashdot to our kernel updates, SCO news, and gushings about how sexy Willow Rosenberg is as a vampire, the things that nerds all over the world value and understand.
Every time the discussion about replacing X comes up, somebody mentions Fresco (formerly named "Berlin"). However, I haven't heard anything for a long time about that project, and the last news is from March. Anybody know what happened? Our are they just hacking away so hard that they don't have time to update the webpage...
...should be shot, then cut up into very little cubes, fed to the fish, and the fish flushed. Network transparency is the single best thing about X, and the basis for such brilliant creations as the Linux Terminal Server Project, (LTSP) which just won the award for Best Open Source project 2003, thank you very much.Network transparency gave my old K6 a new life as a Linux Terminal, and will save me from buying a whole new computer for my parents.
Anything that wants to have a snowball's chance in hell to replace X is going to have to be network transparent, too.
The good things about Python that the other posters mentioned are true, but there is one thing that I really love about the language: It not only fits into your brain, it also stays there, even if months pass between programming sessions.
I don't get to program much, since I have a day job, and to make matters worse, my formal training with computers was brief. Basically, I learned Python on public transport, communiting to and from work (the Python Cookbook causes people to turn their heads, by the way). I tried learning Java at one point, but the problem is that there are too many details and formalisms that you have to remember to even get anything off the ground.
Not so with Python. Basically, you just write what you want to code. Want to know if there are characters in a string?
if 'chocolate' in mystring: ....print 'I love it!'
(This is new in Python 2.3, and I can't get the indentation to work here). Fantastically intuitive.
The only "problem" is the way the library keeps growing from release to release: Something that you had to code yourself a while back suddenly is a trivial feature. More of an embarrassment of riches than a real problem, but it does make you feel like a fool sometimes. "Why code that socket server? Just use..."
One other nice thing about learning Python is how amazingly friendly and helpful their tutor list is. I've asked some amazingly stupid questions in my time, and they have been very gentle and kind.
Apple laptops are sneaking into our company the hard way. We are a Microsoft-only shop (by contract, I think) and so we don't get to even install Mozilla Firebird, even though we seem to spend half of our time online getting rid of popups.
However, among the about 20 people in my sub-department, there are three with an Apple laptop for home use. One was always a Mac fan, the other took a good look on what as on the market, and the third talked to a bunch of people (including me) which laptop would be the least hassle. We all said: You don't want to have to fool around? Go get an Apple. Note that I've been a Linux person for ten years know, but I like my friends and intend to keep them. Linux on the laptop sucks, not because of Linux, but becaue of the laptop makers.
Anyway, we now have a small but critical mass of people who are getting everybody else interested, and keep bugging our tech people if they can get their Macs linked up to the rest of the system so they can do work from home on a real computer (company policy seems to say "no"). Also, they flash their iBooks around as Apple users are wont to do, and yes, those things are seriously cool. The design makes other laptops look like they were designed in the Soviet Union.
Buy an Apple desktop machine? Hell, no. I can get a far better deal with off-the-shelf x86 parts and SuSE. Buy a laptop from Apple? Yes, I'd switch, and I think most people in our department would, too. But official use? I don't see the inertia being broken. There is truth in the statement that nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft.
Red Hat are in business to make money - they do this by providing paid-for distributions with full support, custom-tweaked kernels and applications, and provide a validated platform on which to run commercial apps like Oracle.
Er, not exactly. RedHat is a listed company, and as such, they are in it for shareholder value. This means that they have to get their stock climbing, which means they need lots of bells and whistles at regular intervals -- just the same as every other listed company from AT&T to (yes) Microsoft to Yahoo!. Making money is one of the best ways to increase shareholder value, true, but even better is the perception in the market that you are going to make money. You create this perception by doing new things that look great in press releases, not quietly touching up the odds and ends of your distribution.
SuSE, on the other hand, are not a listed company, and so they don't have to play these games. They are, in fact, in it purely for the money, and so their first interest is (should be) making customers, not fat cat shareholders, happy.
The first thought with SuSE is not (should not be) "will this increase shareholder value" but "will we be able to sell more copies with this".
Which is why, in my mind, SuSE has the superior product. SuSE 8.2 is beautiful, and no, I don't work for them, I'm just a very, very happy costumer.
The sad thing is that sooner or later, SuSE will cave in to the call of all that money that going public will get them. Then they will (have to) go the same way RedHat is going, and the quality of the product will suffer, because SuSE too will take care of the needs of their shareholders before they consider the needs of their costumers. At this point, either a new, non-public distributor will turn up and take SuSE's place, or some Gentooesque system will make most of this stuff obsolete. What ever happens, I'm going to switch pretty soon after they issue stock.
The moral: Don't do business with a public listed company if you can help it. By law, they have to think of their shareholders before they think of you.
Linus himself came out and said something to the effect of "I think SCO is full of it", if I remember correctly. I always wonder if he added something in Finnish (or rather Swedish) that got lost in the translation. What do northern Europeans consider a good insult? "Go eat yellow snow"? "May the northern lights fall on your head"?
U.S. spelling has the original forms
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Flavor vs. Flavour
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We Americans should just grin and bear it, and accept the fact that our "English" is nonstandard.
Maybe I missed something, but who exactly gets to go around and tell people which version of what language is the standard? Is this one of those United Nations things? Or did I skip a ISO-bulletin?
There are 60 million people in Great Britain and 260 million in the U.S., which at least tells us what the norm is. Hollywood (where people with British accents are either evil or buttlers) and rock music (originally banned in the U.K.) both are pushing the American forms throughout the world to the point where the Brits are adopting them (try to find a Brit who still says "lorry" instead of "truck" and doesn't remember WW II first hand). British English is getting more quaint by the hour.
What is more, American English has the original forms, basically because we colonials were happy to be able to read and write at all, while the Brits had all of this free time to fool around with their spelling and pronounciation. If you check Mr. Shakespeare's manuscripts, you'll find color, not colour, and the pronounciation and spelling of alumin(i)um (Brits "aluMINIum", Yanks "ALUminum") started out the American way, until those bloody English blokes started going continental on us for a while.
Anyway, the thing to remember is that it isn't all that important. The real reason to have different versions is to have fun in the Buffy episode where they all lose their memory (Willow bungles a spell) and Spike and Giles think they are father and son...
My apologies for not including enough background information to the point where the post in its current form is obviously misleading; I had thought that putting "Lufthansa Systems" in the headline was clear enough, and that it was obvious that the costumers involved would not be flight passengers (but wouldn't that be a truely awesome form of hard-core advocacy: Go to a travel agency and demand an airline that uses Linux!). Obviously, I was wrong, and you are correct to complain.
Sorry. Next time, more detail, more background, better post.
We keep coming back to this point again and again with YRO, if it is Microsoft or SCO or flying drunk squirrels: The core of the problem tends to turn out to be the disfunctional U.S. legal system, where the guy with the most money wins (Microsoft), you can behave like a jack ass forever without anybody doing anything (SCO), and the lottery of trial-by-jury makes a mockery of anything anyway (OJ).
SCO's FUD campaign didn't survive five minutes in the German legal system, Microsoft is not going to get government permission to do anything the want to like in the U.S., and I don't think O.J. would be playing golf right now if the trial had been anywhere in Europe. America's legal system in increasingly becomming a liability to the U.S: With a bit of luck, Europe will be free of the lead weight of the Microsoft monoploy in a few years, while Americans will still be paying their Redmond tax.
The convenience is for pranksters, not for the people who actually want to use the elevator. Now instead of running down the stairs and pressing the buttons as you go along to force the elevator to open the door on every floor, you the teenage prankster can sit in the lobby -- hell, he or she can sit in the lobby of the next building -- and with your cellphone, send that elevator randomly from one floor to the next.
Now, for real fun, get a list of elevator numbers in your financial district and have your computer dial those numbers. The challenge to you and every other hacker in the city is to get all of the elevators in the basement at the same time. You get extra points for every CEO who misses a meeting because he is stuck in the cabin next to the heating room...
We make heroes out of the stupidest people alive and hold them up as role models for our kids.
Speak for yourself, man -- my role model is Willow Rosenberg. Given that she is a fictional Jewish lesbian witch who almost ended the world, which doesn't really describe anything about me, that might be strange, but then again, she certainly ain't "stupid".
On a more serious note, the "Dudes" just get most of the attention. Films and series are full of role models that do the right thing, stand up for what they believe, and work their but off. Star Trek NG and DS9 come to mind; it is exactly after the TV producers left the intelligent, good-people format (Enterprise, anyone?) that the viewers left. "Dudes" are good for the press and the Republicans to rant about, but look at the ratings for what teens really like to see. "Neo" from The Matrix is "not too bright", as we are told in the first part, but is he a bad role model?
This shows one very important point that is not often made: A major part of the SCO problem is the American legal system. In Germany, SCO has either had to put up or shut up (and wow did they shut up quickly), Australia and other countries are going in the same direction, but in the U.S., SCO can go on making claims seemingly forever that damage the repution (and therefore livelihood) of Linux companies and professionals.
One commentator pointed out that the SCO farce was bad for the U.S. -- true, but more to the point,
it is a symptom of a larger problem facing America. The legal system has ceased to function in any sane form, and it is hurting the U.S. bad. The lottery of trial by jury, abolished for good reason in almost all other western democracies, means that SCO could actually win this case in the U.S., while the rest of the world tells them to go jump in a lake. German companies such as SuSE won't be paying those license fees, that's for sure.
American readers should take note that the Constitution doesn't specify the details of how courts should be set up. Congress could overhaul the system any time they choose, and give the U.S. a system that doesn't suck money and talent from American companies and waste it on millionaire lawyers and legal fees. But then, Congress is full of lawyers...
We switched to a service where the actuall connection to the Internet is handled by a telephone company for a rather small sum, and we are very, very happy, not to mention a whole lot richer (well...). Our normal Internet provider just handles the mail, and does so well, too. The only problem is that I have had to drop my beloved uucp and switch to POP3 or IMAP like the rest of the slobs...this is Germany, by the way, your country may vary.
I live in Germany and get a lot of this crap: Europeans making fun of Americans' alleged lack of geographical knowledge. Note this comes from a bunch of people who tend to think that Syndey is the capital of Australia, believe the Grand Canyon is in Colorado (because of the river), and regularly call the people who live in Iran "Arabs" (hint: try "Persians").
Different educational systems stress different fields of learning. The Europeans spent centuries invading either each other or forcing third world countries into colonial slavery -- of course this sort of geography was traditionally important to them, if only for national prestige. Also, with the exception of Russia, Europe is a collection of very small countries, mostly not larger than a good sized U.S. state, and so you tend to run out of cities, states, and rivers to memorize rather more quickly. Americans for the most part stayed at home, or at least didn't establish colonies. If you have 50 states and a bunch of fun places in neighboring Canada, that's quite a lot.
Apart from that, Europeans have a hard time understanding that European geography is about as interesting to Americans as Japanese geography to the Europeans -- just ask one of these smart-ass Europeans to name the principle Japanese islands. Or, to the original poster Waikerie: Could you find Kyushu on a map? Yeah, right.
Another thing Europeans like to bitch about is that Americans don't know the name of their Chancellor / Prime Minister / whatever. Every time a German does this to me, I ask him to name the prime minister of the Netherlands, which they routinely fail at. Note this is a neighboring country and one that Germans visit in great numbers to buy drugs. The prime minister of Poland or, for that matter, Denmark, is completely beyond their grasp. Germans also regularly fail when asked to name the countries that have borders with Germany -- they usually get confused south of Poland, and seem unable to tell Slovenia and Slovakia apart.
To be fair, the Germans are starting to realize that their educational system is not as good as they keep telling themselves. The international PISA study put a big dent in their ego, and just today, the news magazine "Der Spiegel" has an article about how German universities are as expensive as anywhere else, but their quality of education is terrible.
So the next time some European here at Slashdot starts making those Anti-American remarks, don't moderate them as funny, moderate them as troll. Lack of education is never funny, even in cases where it is true, and people who use glass as a construction material shouldn't be throwing heavy silicoid compounds in any case.
If you are going to use Linux, or even going to think about considering the possibility you might think about using Linux, avoid Toshiba. I have a Satellite S2670DVD and even friendly, clever SuSE 8.1 was a major pain to install - I still don't have the graphics system running optimal. The PCMCIA port is on the right hand side, so if you are right handed and use a mouse, you keep hitting the network cable. The DVD drive is regularly confused with a starting airplane. The list goes on -- just trying to find out which graphics processor the thing has was a quest in itself -- but what it comes down to is that I can't see buying another Toshiba, ever.
Just this weekend, I had the chance to see my brother-and-law's new 12" Apple powerbook. I don't agree with the BSD license, I think the prices Apple is asking for its software are insane, and the think took forever to boot, but oh my God was it beautiful. The whole machine gives the impression that somebody actually sat down and thought about how the thing would be used, instead of sort of throwing the pieces together on the basis of what is the least expensive.
I can't see buying a desktop computer from Apple -- standard x86 parts and Linux serve me too well for so little -- but if our laptop were fall on the floor, a total write off, destroyed, shattered into a thousand pieces, I'd think very seriously about an iBook. If you want something like an Apple, get an Apple.
A while ago, we had a review on Slashdot of a book by one Andy Kessler from Wall Street who wrote an article in December 2002 called "I hate dividends" (see, somebody does follow those links). He has a couple of interesting quotes there:
[A]s an investor, I avoid companies that pay dividends like the plague, and you should too. Why? Because when they pay a dividend they are admitting they have nothing better to do with their money. If they won't invest in themselves, why should I?
and
Dividends entice investors into debt-laden, slow- or
no-growth companies, more likely to cut their dividend, burning investors worse than conflicted research analysts. Run away. They are wearing a scarlet dollar sign. You want yield? Buy a bond.
and
Failing companies just bribe investors with dividends. Encourage companies with a future to invest in their operations, seeking high returns. If all that mattered were dividends, we (...) would still be investing in railroad stocks.
I think we can rule out Microsoft being "debt-laden", but it still sheds an interesting light on how finanicial people with a tech background will be looking at this move: The growth days are over, and from here on, it is stagnation.
(Disclaimer: Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Slashdot)
Slashdot Mirror
First we have LinuxTag telling SCO to put up or shut up, treating everybody to the sight of SCO withdrawing their claims without even pretending to fight, meek as mice. Then we have Heise magazine getting pictures of the code out to the world, probably one of the biggest scoops in the history of computer journalism, giving the good guys their first chance to mount a counterattack.
That's two of the most important developments from the same European country. During this time, the American legal system hasn't even been able to pull its finger out, let alone do anything to stop these madmen. When this is over and the GPL has won, it will be no small part because of the Germans -- and somehow, I don't think SCO was expecting them even to come to the party.
Ah, you do sound like a prude. Let me guess, you're an American? Thought so...
"...and shit in your neck." Man, I thought he was just joking when I heard that the first time, but no, that is exactly what he did. Damn, what a cool game.
This site isn't just read by geeks anymore. The last proof of that can be found by going to Google News and checking out how many stories from Slashdot they carry. For good or bad, this is site has a pretty big impact in the media now. They don't call it slashdotting for nothing.
The actual situation is that some poor exec is wishing for the good old days when they could make money of a shitty movie by promo'ing it.
Having said the above, I agree completely with you here. It was a nicer world for those in power when the only media were mass media, and the suckers couldn't communicate amongst themselves very well. Now, they might just have to make a good product instead of giving their marketing droids a lot of money.
Note that you can also say the reverse is true: The word on a good film will get around even if there isn't much marketing power behind it (Hero was a film that I heard about almost only by word of mouth; Secretary is another).
The problem is that the people behind DocBook don't seem to want to have anything to do with the tool chain that takes the source file and turns it into something you can actually publish. This means that putting all the programs together to get DocBook XML to, say, PDF and then getting it looking the way you want can be a royal pain in the ass even if your distributor has included and configured the important stuff for you.
Then, there are two types of DocBook - XML and SGML, so at any given time, you are bound to be looking at the wrong documentation for the wrong tool when trying to get to your target format. DocBook SGML is less of a problem, if you have a choice, use it. Getting from DocBook XML to anything but HTML/XHTML seems to still be rather non-trivial.
Again, if you don't have to deal with any of that (for example, if you are submitting stuff to the Linux Documentation Project) it is pretty neat. If the DocBook people had gone whole hog and provided a comprehensive tool set along with the standard, it would rock big time.
As it is, I'd think twice before recommending it to somebody who just wants to get ink on paper.
Come on, this site is about "News for Nerds", not "Current Popular Views on American Politics". And no, this isn't YRO, either. If you want to discuss stuff like this, you might be more happy over at Kuro5hin with all of the other mature people. Heck, I might even answer a question like that there. Just leave us here on Slashdot to our kernel updates, SCO news, and gushings about how sexy Willow Rosenberg is as a vampire, the things that nerds all over the world value and understand.
Every time the discussion about replacing X comes up, somebody mentions Fresco (formerly named "Berlin"). However, I haven't heard anything for a long time about that project, and the last news is from March. Anybody know what happened? Our are they just hacking away so hard that they don't have time to update the webpage...
Anything that wants to have a snowball's chance in hell to replace X is going to have to be network transparent, too.
I don't get to program much, since I have a day job, and to make matters worse, my formal training with computers was brief. Basically, I learned Python on public transport, communiting to and from work (the Python Cookbook causes people to turn their heads, by the way). I tried learning Java at one point, but the problem is that there are too many details and formalisms that you have to remember to even get anything off the ground.
Not so with Python. Basically, you just write what you want to code. Want to know if there are characters in a string?
(This is new in Python 2.3, and I can't get the indentation to work here). Fantastically intuitive.
The only "problem" is the way the library keeps growing from release to release: Something that you had to code yourself a while back suddenly is a trivial feature. More of an embarrassment of riches than a real problem, but it does make you feel like a fool sometimes. "Why code that socket server? Just use..."
One other nice thing about learning Python is how amazingly friendly and helpful their tutor list is. I've asked some amazingly stupid questions in my time, and they have been very gentle and kind.
However, among the about 20 people in my sub-department, there are three with an Apple laptop for home use. One was always a Mac fan, the other took a good look on what as on the market, and the third talked to a bunch of people (including me) which laptop would be the least hassle. We all said: You don't want to have to fool around? Go get an Apple. Note that I've been a Linux person for ten years know, but I like my friends and intend to keep them. Linux on the laptop sucks, not because of Linux, but becaue of the laptop makers.
Anyway, we now have a small but critical mass of people who are getting everybody else interested, and keep bugging our tech people if they can get their Macs linked up to the rest of the system so they can do work from home on a real computer (company policy seems to say "no"). Also, they flash their iBooks around as Apple users are wont to do, and yes, those things are seriously cool. The design makes other laptops look like they were designed in the Soviet Union.
Buy an Apple desktop machine? Hell, no. I can get a far better deal with off-the-shelf x86 parts and SuSE. Buy a laptop from Apple? Yes, I'd switch, and I think most people in our department would, too. But official use? I don't see the inertia being broken. There is truth in the statement that nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft.
Er, not exactly. RedHat is a listed company, and as such, they are in it for shareholder value. This means that they have to get their stock climbing, which means they need lots of bells and whistles at regular intervals -- just the same as every other listed company from AT&T to (yes) Microsoft to Yahoo!. Making money is one of the best ways to increase shareholder value, true, but even better is the perception in the market that you are going to make money. You create this perception by doing new things that look great in press releases, not quietly touching up the odds and ends of your distribution.
SuSE, on the other hand, are not a listed company, and so they don't have to play these games. They are, in fact, in it purely for the money, and so their first interest is (should be) making customers, not fat cat shareholders, happy. The first thought with SuSE is not (should not be) "will this increase shareholder value" but "will we be able to sell more copies with this".
Which is why, in my mind, SuSE has the superior product. SuSE 8.2 is beautiful, and no, I don't work for them, I'm just a very, very happy costumer.
The sad thing is that sooner or later, SuSE will cave in to the call of all that money that going public will get them. Then they will (have to) go the same way RedHat is going, and the quality of the product will suffer, because SuSE too will take care of the needs of their shareholders before they consider the needs of their costumers. At this point, either a new, non-public distributor will turn up and take SuSE's place, or some Gentooesque system will make most of this stuff obsolete. What ever happens, I'm going to switch pretty soon after they issue stock.
The moral: Don't do business with a public listed company if you can help it. By law, they have to think of their shareholders before they think of you.
Linus himself came out and said something to the effect of "I think SCO is full of it", if I remember correctly. I always wonder if he added something in Finnish (or rather Swedish) that got lost in the translation. What do northern Europeans consider a good insult? "Go eat yellow snow"? "May the northern lights fall on your head"?
Maybe I missed something, but who exactly gets to go around and tell people which version of what language is the standard? Is this one of those United Nations things? Or did I skip a ISO-bulletin?
There are 60 million people in Great Britain and 260 million in the U.S., which at least tells us what the norm is. Hollywood (where people with British accents are either evil or buttlers) and rock music (originally banned in the U.K.) both are pushing the American forms throughout the world to the point where the Brits are adopting them (try to find a Brit who still says "lorry" instead of "truck" and doesn't remember WW II first hand). British English is getting more quaint by the hour.
What is more, American English has the original forms, basically because we colonials were happy to be able to read and write at all, while the Brits had all of this free time to fool around with their spelling and pronounciation. If you check Mr. Shakespeare's manuscripts, you'll find color, not colour, and the pronounciation and spelling of alumin(i)um (Brits "aluMINIum", Yanks "ALUminum") started out the American way, until those bloody English blokes started going continental on us for a while.
Anyway, the thing to remember is that it isn't all that important. The real reason to have different versions is to have fun in the Buffy episode where they all lose their memory (Willow bungles a spell) and Spike and Giles think they are father and son...
My apologies for not including enough background information to the point where the post in its current form is obviously misleading; I had thought that putting "Lufthansa Systems" in the headline was clear enough, and that it was obvious that the costumers involved would not be flight passengers (but wouldn't that be a truely awesome form of hard-core advocacy: Go to a travel agency and demand an airline that uses Linux!). Obviously, I was wrong, and you are correct to complain.
Sorry. Next time, more detail, more background, better post.
SCO's FUD campaign didn't survive five minutes in the German legal system, Microsoft is not going to get government permission to do anything the want to like in the U.S., and I don't think O.J. would be playing golf right now if the trial had been anywhere in Europe. America's legal system in increasingly becomming a liability to the U.S: With a bit of luck, Europe will be free of the lead weight of the Microsoft monoploy in a few years, while Americans will still be paying their Redmond tax.
Now, for real fun, get a list of elevator numbers in your financial district and have your computer dial those numbers. The challenge to you and every other hacker in the city is to get all of the elevators in the basement at the same time. You get extra points for every CEO who misses a meeting because he is stuck in the cabin next to the heating room...
Oh, to be young again...
... they only thing I can think of that would be missing is a compiler to turn Python into machine code, and I'm sure somebody is working on that.
Speak for yourself, man -- my role model is Willow Rosenberg. Given that she is a fictional Jewish lesbian witch who almost ended the world, which doesn't really describe anything about me, that might be strange, but then again, she certainly ain't "stupid".
On a more serious note, the "Dudes" just get most of the attention. Films and series are full of role models that do the right thing, stand up for what they believe, and work their but off. Star Trek NG and DS9 come to mind; it is exactly after the TV producers left the intelligent, good-people format (Enterprise, anyone?) that the viewers left. "Dudes" are good for the press and the Republicans to rant about, but look at the ratings for what teens really like to see. "Neo" from The Matrix is "not too bright", as we are told in the first part, but is he a bad role model?
For some reason, I think those who make decisions are not spending their time reading Slashdot...
One commentator pointed out that the SCO farce was bad for the U.S. -- true, but more to the point, it is a symptom of a larger problem facing America. The legal system has ceased to function in any sane form, and it is hurting the U.S. bad. The lottery of trial by jury, abolished for good reason in almost all other western democracies, means that SCO could actually win this case in the U.S., while the rest of the world tells them to go jump in a lake. German companies such as SuSE won't be paying those license fees, that's for sure.
American readers should take note that the Constitution doesn't specify the details of how courts should be set up. Congress could overhaul the system any time they choose, and give the U.S. a system that doesn't suck money and talent from American companies and waste it on millionaire lawyers and legal fees. But then, Congress is full of lawyers...
We switched to a service where the actuall connection to the Internet is handled by a telephone company for a rather small sum, and we are very, very happy, not to mention a whole lot richer (well...). Our normal Internet provider just handles the mail, and does so well, too. The only problem is that I have had to drop my beloved uucp and switch to POP3 or IMAP like the rest of the slobs...this is Germany, by the way, your country may vary.
Different educational systems stress different fields of learning. The Europeans spent centuries invading either each other or forcing third world countries into colonial slavery -- of course this sort of geography was traditionally important to them, if only for national prestige. Also, with the exception of Russia, Europe is a collection of very small countries, mostly not larger than a good sized U.S. state, and so you tend to run out of cities, states, and rivers to memorize rather more quickly. Americans for the most part stayed at home, or at least didn't establish colonies. If you have 50 states and a bunch of fun places in neighboring Canada, that's quite a lot. Apart from that, Europeans have a hard time understanding that European geography is about as interesting to Americans as Japanese geography to the Europeans -- just ask one of these smart-ass Europeans to name the principle Japanese islands. Or, to the original poster Waikerie: Could you find Kyushu on a map? Yeah, right.
Another thing Europeans like to bitch about is that Americans don't know the name of their Chancellor / Prime Minister / whatever. Every time a German does this to me, I ask him to name the prime minister of the Netherlands, which they routinely fail at. Note this is a neighboring country and one that Germans visit in great numbers to buy drugs. The prime minister of Poland or, for that matter, Denmark, is completely beyond their grasp. Germans also regularly fail when asked to name the countries that have borders with Germany -- they usually get confused south of Poland, and seem unable to tell Slovenia and Slovakia apart.
To be fair, the Germans are starting to realize that their educational system is not as good as they keep telling themselves. The international PISA study put a big dent in their ego, and just today, the news magazine "Der Spiegel" has an article about how German universities are as expensive as anywhere else, but their quality of education is terrible.
So the next time some European here at Slashdot starts making those Anti-American remarks, don't moderate them as funny, moderate them as troll. Lack of education is never funny, even in cases where it is true, and people who use glass as a construction material shouldn't be throwing heavy silicoid compounds in any case.
Just this weekend, I had the chance to see my brother-and-law's new 12" Apple powerbook. I don't agree with the BSD license, I think the prices Apple is asking for its software are insane, and the think took forever to boot, but oh my God was it beautiful. The whole machine gives the impression that somebody actually sat down and thought about how the thing would be used, instead of sort of throwing the pieces together on the basis of what is the least expensive.
I can't see buying a desktop computer from Apple -- standard x86 parts and Linux serve me too well for so little -- but if our laptop were fall on the floor, a total write off, destroyed, shattered into a thousand pieces, I'd think very seriously about an iBook. If you want something like an Apple, get an Apple.
Including, obviously, my speeeling. Try "dividends" in the headline instead of "dividens". Sorry.
I think we can rule out Microsoft being "debt-laden", but it still sheds an interesting light on how finanicial people with a tech background will be looking at this move: The growth days are over, and from here on, it is stagnation.
(Disclaimer: Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Slashdot)