Cuba does not produce microchips or motherboards. If they buy computers from Dell, HP, IBM or Apple, the pre-installled operating system will not be "pirate" under the US law.
Probably most of the computers in Cuba are state-owned, and they buy motherboards, monitors, etc, and assemble them. The copyright laws in Cuba are very different, and, if you make a copy of a software and install it on your computer, you don't have to pay the copyright owner - thus, there are "pirate" copies of Windows floating in Cuba.
Cuba is an isolated country because of their copyright laws, as they can't even be part of the World Trade Organization.
KDE has chosen a better infrastructure than Gnome - QT is better than GTK. It reflects on a consistency of the desktop, and in its speed. But Gnome is better in terms of the software they developed. KDE tries to look like Windows too much for my taste. Gnome is inspired on the same ideas of Mac OS, something more elegant.
Re:Good news, even for Sid users.
on
Sarge is Now Frozen
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That is a good reason to drop the other architectures, and favor i386, and PowerPC, as well as their 64 bits flavors: x86-64, ia-64 and PowerPC 64.
For me the reason to support other architectures was the existance of the Alpha, a great processor for scientific computing and clusters. But, let's face it, it is dead. Adn there was ARM, Mips and SH3 in the embedded area. But, lets face it again, ARM is the architecture of choice for most people! These 11 other architectures should be moved out of Debian, as side projects, that would contribute to it but would not delay the release dates.
Otherwise, in a few years apt-based distros, like Ubuntu, will make Debian irrelevant.
I agree with you. Microsoft is deliberately stopping Wine users to update their MS Office if the Windows Update webservice detects the program is running on top of Wine. There is no technical justification for this, and they are only using the semi-monopoly they have on the office applications market (with MS Office) to enforce the semi-monopoly they have on the operating systems market (with Windows).
It does not matter if this "feature" is written in an Eula, or if the intellectual property of Windows and Office belong to Microsoft. If it is against the law, it is illegal.
Is is very much like when a company developed a DOS clone, DR DOS. If you used Windows 3 with DR DOS, Windows would detect it was running on top of other operating system and some error screens would appear. But Windows would operate perfectly: Microsoft introduced the error screens on Windows code only to create fear, uncertainty and doubt among users. "Gee, I see these error messages when I see DR DOS, I should go back to DOS".
The situation is much worse today, as users will say: "I can't update MS Office if I change Windows for Wine and Linux. My hands are tied, the costs to change from two MS products together are too high."
Where is the DOJ when we need them? Isn't it a violation of the "probation period" that will expire in 2 years, as part of the settlement of the anti-trust suit?
Slashdot users used to be more critical of these tactics of Microsoft. Are we losing our nerve?
Why the "It's funny. Laugh" topic icon is not on this story? The whole western world is locked-in to the current calendar. All the reforms were made centuries ago because few people cared about calendars, and all you needed was to persuade the Pope and a few kings.
He wants a change for 2006. Forget it. It is not going to happen.
You use a Pocket PC to read HTML files? Grab Plucker (Google for that) and PDA Converter (www.jakewalk.de), and you will be able to store HTML files on your Palm.
You could also use isilo (www.isilo.com) and isolx (www.isilo.com), but they are not free (as in beer).
The rules to have a job running on the Earth Simulator are very strict. All the results must be made available to the scientific community, under the public domain.
It leaves almost all research projects with military or commercial purposes out of the Earth Simulator. Most of the data processed there help understand the global weather or the seismic movements. As Japan is a country that has to deal with typhoons and earthquakes, and the Japanese government is ultimately the owner of the Earth Simulator, it serves them well.
It is very different from the fastest supercomputers on the United States, that are operated by the military. They have "white" and "black" nodes - the white nodes are used for scientific and public research, while the black nodes are used for classified research.
Your are absolutely right, my mistake. The Novell marketing term is "mixed source". The business strategy seems doable to me, let's see if it pays off.
IBM has a similar strategy, but with a difference: their revenues come not only from selling proprietary software that runs on Linux, but also from support and service contracts.
Some might not have noticed, but it seems to be the first topic with the "N" logo from Novell. I don't like the company in particular, but you to admit that Novell is betting high on Linux and open source - although they are not abandoning their closed source software like Zenworks, a strategye they call "shared source".
It looks to me that Debian is cracking under it's own weight. Computer programs escalate, but to manage hundreds of developers that are not receiving a paycheck, you have to be a political master. Debian seems to have too many packages, too many developers, and the political infighting seems to be dragging the release date of stable versions beyond acceptable.
The creation of Debian-based distributions like User Linux and Ubantu, in my opinion, are sincere efforts made by people 100% committed do Debian, that are trying to help it. They are basically saying: "Hey, we can have a Debian stalbe release with a 2.6 kernel and 2.6 Gnome now! We don't have to wait any longer!"
In my opinion, that might make Debian work. A normal user can assume that current free software under Debian will always be under unstable, that stable means "outdated" and that developers use the "pure" Debian unstable. If you don't want to mess with it, go get a meta-distribution, like Progeny, Linspire, User Linux or Ubantu.
I think a very important feature that is missing is the ability to transfer photos made on a digital camera. If it had an interface for cards like Secure Digital, Compact Flash and Memory Stick, you wouldn't need a PC to transfer photos to the device. On a travel it would be usefull.
Pageranks and its algorithms are good to organize search results. That's why Google surpassed Altavista: back in the day, even when Google would return less results than Altavista, it organized them better, giving the best results on the first page. With Altavista, you had to go through many pages to find the result you wanted.
This sentence also alerted me. It seems like it is a classic case of a "Betamax defense". This reasoning not only apply for audio tapes: home video cassette recorders for a long time have the ability to record shows on programed schedules. The guy only needs a good lawyer and a lot of courage, as RIAA can loose big time.
And, think for a minute: Lawrence Lessig and the EFF defend that we should have something like an "internet tax", that would revert to pay artists whose songs are being shared on Kazaa, Napster and whatever. But who will resort to Kazaa if, paying US$ 10 a month for a digital radio subscription and a software that recorded it to your computer, you could have a large amount of good quality songs for you? This software makes XM Radio more attractive to costumers, and could generate a lot of money to the RIAA members.
It is REALLY easy. Using Bit Tornado, an improved version of the original Bit Torrent client, you only have to click on "Advanced" and get a list of EVERYONE that is connected to a particular torrent.
That is advertisement, not marketing. Imagine you are the head of marketing for a company; and the main product is not selling much. You make a marketing research, and discover that costumers don't like the product for 3 reasons. With that information, your company can take two actions:
1. Change the product, to adapt to the user's needs. You can also make some advertisements to alert people these changes were made.
2. Accept the shitty product made up by engineers and developers, and try to fool costumers with advertising.
Marketing is only a management tool, and advertisement a tool for marketing. As any tool, it can be used the bad way.
Many people think that Apache was the "killer app" for Linux, and Apache 1.0 was released in december 1995. So, in one or two years the Linux market will mature and we will see if it will eventually surpass Windows or if it will be and underdog, with something like 20% or 30% market share on servers.
For desktops Linux is very distant from maturity. Open Office 1.0 and Mozilla 1.0 were released recently, and without them the Linux desktop was a free OS with proprietary apps, an unstable mixture.
I live in Brazil and have not seen these adds in newspapers. Better check you sources.
But I have read in a computer-related website (I am not sure, but I think it was IDG) a frustrated Windows-to-Linux migration story of a small company. The story has simillar points with this one: as a Windows-only shop, they did not had Linux expertise inhouse and had to contract outside consultants. But latter the owner pulled back and returned to Windows claiming "Everybody knows how to operate a Windows server, but Linux experts are hard to find".
The whole story seemed like a big press release feed to the journalist by the Microsoft reseller that made the Linux-to-Windows migration or by Microsoft itself.
Yes, I have 70 GB of disk space on my work desktop and 50 GB at home, and sometimes it is easier to find information in the web (thanks to Google) than to find inside my computer. Even if you have descriptive filenames, you can't recall the content of every file, and sometimes the information you need is buried inside a document, spreadsheet of PDF file.
I would rather see Google making a good desktop search than Microsoft advancing in web search.
I use Mozilla 1.7 for most of my web browsing, and it rarely display incorrectly a website (javascript-based websites are the cause for most of the problems).
Firefox 0.9 is faster, has a smaller memory footprint and has a better rendering time, but it doesn't load many sites. I wish I could replace Mozilla for it, but I still can't.
Let me explain. I work in a big corporation, with thousans of computers, and on every single one Windows and MS office are installed. If, for some reason, I go to a different computer, log on with my username and password, and launch MS Office, the "hide assistant" setting is not there, and Clippy shows in all his glory. It has happened twice this week, for example.
So please stop astroturfing Microsoft. They deserve every complain about Clippy.
To look at real OS use on desktop, a good method is to look on the statistics of your webserver. Most people I have talked to say about 95% of their visitors use Windows. The numbers of Google Zeitgeist are similar to these, giving Mac, Linux and "Other" operating systems 9% of their audience.
Many people work on big (or small companies) that use Windows on desktops and have opted to not install any other browser than IE. Corporate users don't have a choice. The lazyness is not only of home users, but also of PHBs.
The problems with big and sometimes buggy RPMs are common among the main distributions (Red Hat, Suse). Over and over, I have spotted problems with RPMs - the software underneath it is 100% functional, but some wrong dependency makes installing it a pain. I submit a bug report, it is corrected, only to see the same problem reappear in the next version, on a different package.
There is a relatively obscure distribution in Brazil that, in my opinion, has solved them in a very clever way- Conectiva. They build small RPMs, one for each application, departing from the standard of KDE and Gnome. They also build "meta-RPMs" with 0 bytes, that have dependencies for other RPMs that contains files. This way, for example, you type "rpm -i task-kernel" and install all the RPMs necessary for kernel building.
Conectiva has also adapted apt-get to work with RPMs, making the update and upgrade of the operating system a very simple task.Type apt-get install or click on the graphical front end and way you go.
I don't think that Conectiva is a solution, as they have many problems of their own -their installed base is not big and it takes time to bug reports arrive, compared to Red Hat and Debian. But I would like to see their approach (small RPMS, meta-RPMS, apt-get) copied by other rpm-based distributions.
Very unlikely. Two of the most popular downloads on sourceforge.net are P2P applications that run on Windows - eMule and DC++. P2P programs are not ilegal, altough they can be used on unlawfull maners. Like guns.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably most of the computers in Cuba are state-owned, and they buy motherboards, monitors, etc, and assemble them. The copyright laws in Cuba are very different, and, if you make a copy of a software and install it on your computer, you don't have to pay the copyright owner - thus, there are "pirate" copies of Windows floating in Cuba.
Cuba is an isolated country because of their copyright laws, as they can't even be part of the World Trade Organization.
KDE has chosen a better infrastructure than Gnome - QT is better than GTK. It reflects on a consistency of the desktop, and in its speed. But Gnome is better in terms of the software they developed. KDE tries to look like Windows too much for my taste. Gnome is inspired on the same ideas of Mac OS, something more elegant.
For me the reason to support other architectures was the existance of the Alpha, a great processor for scientific computing and clusters. But, let's face it, it is dead. Adn there was ARM, Mips and SH3 in the embedded area. But, lets face it again, ARM is the architecture of choice for most people! These 11 other architectures should be moved out of Debian, as side projects, that would contribute to it but would not delay the release dates.
Otherwise, in a few years apt-based distros, like Ubuntu, will make Debian irrelevant.
I agree with you. Microsoft is deliberately stopping Wine users to update their MS Office if the Windows Update webservice detects the program is running on top of Wine. There is no technical justification for this, and they are only using the semi-monopoly they have on the office applications market (with MS Office) to enforce the semi-monopoly they have on the operating systems market (with Windows). It does not matter if this "feature" is written in an Eula, or if the intellectual property of Windows and Office belong to Microsoft. If it is against the law, it is illegal. Is is very much like when a company developed a DOS clone, DR DOS. If you used Windows 3 with DR DOS, Windows would detect it was running on top of other operating system and some error screens would appear. But Windows would operate perfectly: Microsoft introduced the error screens on Windows code only to create fear, uncertainty and doubt among users. "Gee, I see these error messages when I see DR DOS, I should go back to DOS". The situation is much worse today, as users will say: "I can't update MS Office if I change Windows for Wine and Linux. My hands are tied, the costs to change from two MS products together are too high." Where is the DOJ when we need them? Isn't it a violation of the "probation period" that will expire in 2 years, as part of the settlement of the anti-trust suit? Slashdot users used to be more critical of these tactics of Microsoft. Are we losing our nerve?
He wants a change for 2006. Forget it. It is not going to happen.
You could also use isilo (www.isilo.com) and isolx (www.isilo.com), but they are not free (as in beer).
It leaves almost all research projects with military or commercial purposes out of the Earth Simulator. Most of the data processed there help understand the global weather or the seismic movements. As Japan is a country that has to deal with typhoons and earthquakes, and the Japanese government is ultimately the owner of the Earth Simulator, it serves them well.
It is very different from the fastest supercomputers on the United States, that are operated by the military. They have "white" and "black" nodes - the white nodes are used for scientific and public research, while the black nodes are used for classified research.
IBM has a similar strategy, but with a difference: their revenues come not only from selling proprietary software that runs on Linux, but also from support and service contracts.
Some might not have noticed, but it seems to be the first topic with the "N" logo from Novell. I don't like the company in particular, but you to admit that Novell is betting high on Linux and open source - although they are not abandoning their closed source software like Zenworks, a strategye they call "shared source".
Some days later, Canonical announced their projetc on Slashdot. Now it is named Ubuntu.
The creation of Debian-based distributions like User Linux and Ubantu, in my opinion, are sincere efforts made by people 100% committed do Debian, that are trying to help it. They are basically saying: "Hey, we can have a Debian stalbe release with a 2.6 kernel and 2.6 Gnome now! We don't have to wait any longer!"
In my opinion, that might make Debian work. A normal user can assume that current free software under Debian will always be under unstable, that stable means "outdated" and that developers use the "pure" Debian unstable. If you don't want to mess with it, go get a meta-distribution, like Progeny, Linspire, User Linux or Ubantu.
I think a very important feature that is missing is the ability to transfer photos made on a digital camera. If it had an interface for cards like Secure Digital, Compact Flash and Memory Stick, you wouldn't need a PC to transfer photos to the device. On a travel it would be usefull.
Pageranks and its algorithms are good to organize search results. That's why Google surpassed Altavista: back in the day, even when Google would return less results than Altavista, it organized them better, giving the best results on the first page. With Altavista, you had to go through many pages to find the result you wanted.
And, think for a minute: Lawrence Lessig and the EFF defend that we should have something like an "internet tax", that would revert to pay artists whose songs are being shared on Kazaa, Napster and whatever. But who will resort to Kazaa if, paying US$ 10 a month for a digital radio subscription and a software that recorded it to your computer, you could have a large amount of good quality songs for you? This software makes XM Radio more attractive to costumers, and could generate a lot of money to the RIAA members.
It is REALLY easy. Using Bit Tornado, an improved version of the original Bit Torrent client, you only have to click on "Advanced" and get a list of EVERYONE that is connected to a particular torrent.
1. Change the product, to adapt to the user's needs. You can also make some advertisements to alert people these changes were made.
2. Accept the shitty product made up by engineers and developers, and try to fool costumers with advertising.
Marketing is only a management tool, and advertisement a tool for marketing. As any tool, it can be used the bad way.
For desktops Linux is very distant from maturity. Open Office 1.0 and Mozilla 1.0 were released recently, and without them the Linux desktop was a free OS with proprietary apps, an unstable mixture.
But I have read in a computer-related website (I am not sure, but I think it was IDG) a frustrated Windows-to-Linux migration story of a small company. The story has simillar points with this one: as a Windows-only shop, they did not had Linux expertise inhouse and had to contract outside consultants. But latter the owner pulled back and returned to Windows claiming "Everybody knows how to operate a Windows server, but Linux experts are hard to find".
The whole story seemed like a big press release feed to the journalist by the Microsoft reseller that made the Linux-to-Windows migration or by Microsoft itself.
I would rather see Google making a good desktop search than Microsoft advancing in web search.
Firefox 0.9 is faster, has a smaller memory footprint and has a better rendering time, but it doesn't load many sites. I wish I could replace Mozilla for it, but I still can't.
Let me explain. I work in a big corporation, with thousans of computers, and on every single one Windows and MS office are installed. If, for some reason, I go to a different computer, log on with my username and password, and launch MS Office, the "hide assistant" setting is not there, and Clippy shows in all his glory. It has happened twice this week, for example.
So please stop astroturfing Microsoft. They deserve every complain about Clippy.
To look at real OS use on desktop, a good method is to look on the statistics of your webserver. Most people I have talked to say about 95% of their visitors use Windows. The numbers of Google Zeitgeist are similar to these, giving Mac, Linux and "Other" operating systems 9% of their audience.
Many people work on big (or small companies) that use Windows on desktops and have opted to not install any other browser than IE. Corporate users don't have a choice. The lazyness is not only of home users, but also of PHBs.
There is a relatively obscure distribution in Brazil that, in my opinion, has solved them in a very clever way- Conectiva. They build small RPMs, one for each application, departing from the standard of KDE and Gnome. They also build "meta-RPMs" with 0 bytes, that have dependencies for other RPMs that contains files. This way, for example, you type "rpm -i task-kernel" and install all the RPMs necessary for kernel building.
Conectiva has also adapted apt-get to work with RPMs, making the update and upgrade of the operating system a very simple task.Type apt-get install or click on the graphical front end and way you go.
I don't think that Conectiva is a solution, as they have many problems of their own -their installed base is not big and it takes time to bug reports arrive, compared to Red Hat and Debian. But I would like to see their approach (small RPMS, meta-RPMS, apt-get) copied by other rpm-based distributions.
Very unlikely. Two of the most popular downloads on sourceforge.net are P2P applications that run on Windows - eMule and DC++. P2P programs are not ilegal, altough they can be used on unlawfull maners. Like guns.