Yes, and some VPN's include features in order to get around NAT devices typically installed on home networks. For example, Cisco's VPN can communicate on the standard IPSec IP protocol, or if you're behind a NAT device, you turn on UDP encapsulation and all of your packets go from UDP port 10000 and to UDP port 10000.
Of course, I'm one of those lucky people who has a choice of cable modem at my house or several xDSL providers. So if the cable company ever decides to ban VPN's and if they ever figure out how to effectively enforce such a ban (doubtful) then I get to take advantage of competition.
The good news is for those of you without such a plethora of choices is that enforcement, AFAIK is currently impossible.
Wouldn't a regular cable channel like comedy central be willing to take some of their revenue from commercials and pay a satellite company to broadcast their signal nation wide for free. If they did this, wouldn't their user base would sky rocket enough to cover the cost
Bingo! And once their viewers increase, they can justify the added costs for the advertising space that they sell.
Brilliant! (+1,Insightful - virtual moderator point)
Of course, I never intended my argument to include premium channels. Premium (i.e. non-advertising channels) have to be done on a subscription basis, since the primary value they offer is to the subscriber (no commercials) instead of to the advertiser (lots of eyes/ears).
All I want is to be able to hear my favorite sports teams from anywhere in the country... for the price of my having to listen to advertisements. You can have your prem channels, and I can have my sports.
I don't want satelite radio for music. I have mp3.
I want satelite radio for sports. I like sports. Especially the Green Bay Packers. I live in Charlotte, NC. It's awfully difficult to listen to the packers in NC, unless of course they happen to be playing in NC, and then I just go the game. About the only thing that satelite radio provides me that I want is access to my favorite sports broadcasts no matter where I am in the country. That is, by far, the biggest selling point to me.
But I'm not going to get it. I am just not going to pay anything per month for this. There is no way that they're going to remove commercials from sports broadcasts. So I'm going to be paying someone to advertise to me? I think not. But even more important than that is the idea of the incremental infrastructure costs.
The reason that I pay for cable service to my house is because it actually costs the cable company extra money to run the cable to my house, and to continually maintain it. I pay for internet service because in order for me to get that service, I have to pay the additional infrastructure that allows me to connect to it (modems, bandwidth). So the more subscribers that a cable company or an ISP has, the more infrastructure that company requires. Thus there is an incremental cost associated with each additional customer that they have.
But this is not the case for broadcast providers. If 10 people listen to a broadcast or 1000 people listen to a broadcast, it costs the same amount for the broadcaster. Basic calculus: as the number of listeners approaches infinity, the cost per listener approaches 0. (Yes, yes, I know the number of listeners is finite.) Or put another way the incremental cost per listener is nothing.
So with no incremental cost per listener, the value of the service comes from getting lots and lots of listeners. In the cable and ISP world, lots of subscribers are good, but they also impose an additional cost per subscriber. But in the broadcast world, once you've put up the basic infrastructure, you want as many people to get that service as possible. Your costs are finished, so remove as many barriers as possible. Why? So that you can then turn around and tell advertisers that they can reach 275 million people (i.e. the entire US) with your service. If you put up barriers to entry for your listeners, you weaken the value of your advertising real estate. Why do the TV networks love the superbowl so much? Because 1 billion viewers is *very* expensive advertising real estate. TV networks make a killing on the superbowl. Advertising real estate is seriously valuable stuff.
Satelite radio and TV have such an oppurtunity to have the highest priced advertising space in the world. But they're squandering that oppurtunity by charging listeners/veiwers for their service. And why do they do that? Because their investors are simply not patient enough to be able to wait for returns on their investment. The cost of putting up satelites for these services is very high. But even so, it's a fixed, one time cost. What you want is to put that against ongoing, and increasing income. One strategy is to charge $x per month to the listeners. But this is short sighted. It does provide ongoing income, but it's hard to increase it without losing sources of that income (i.e. every time you increase the cost, you lose some customers).
The other option is to give the service away to listeners/viewers, and then charge advertisers for access. As the numbers of listeners/viewers increases, your advertising rates can also increase. So fixed cost, balanced by ongoing, and increasing income.
The problem, of course, is that the investors can't wait long enough for the satelite companies to build up their viewers. They want their returns and they want them as soon as possible. What they fail to see is that the demand for that immediate return is resulting in building businesses for which people will not subscribe. And, as a previous poster mentioned, when these companies fail, they certainly won't say it's because we had a bad plan.
What Stallman is trying to do is ram his ideology (good aspects notwithstanding) down everyones throat in much the same way that Microsoft tries to ram their ideology down our throats.
Ultimately, what is best for the users is what the users want. And generally if you provide what the users want, you won't need to force them to do what you want them to do.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Let's use the pharmaceutical (sp?) world as an example. In that case, it is certainly not the case that what the customers want is what's best for them.
RMS is saying, I think, that the software producing world should have the same responsibility to the public as the pharmaceutical world has. Computers are becoming more and more a critical piece of our infrastructure, and as such, we as a society should demand that our software producers are making software the complies with all of our better interests. RMS is saying that the only way to do that is to hold the software industry to the openness that the pharmaceutical industry is held. Before a drug can be sold to the public it must undergo incredible public scrutiny for the impacts it has on public health. Basically, this is scientific peer review. RMS would say that the same should be true for software and its impact on the overall well being of our critical infrastructure.
Do I agree with this? Dunno, but it can't be easily dismissed. Code Red, ILOVEYOU, the Morris worm, et al, are prime examples of how software can cause actual damage, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. They didn't really cause any direct damage. Had the authors of these worms been bent on destruction, the impact could have been tremendously bad.
I'd love to see the industry come up with a solution to this on its own, but so far our solution includes producing Microsoft. I don't see them volunteering to undergo the kind of scrutiny that Merck and Glaxo have to take on.
If some day GNOME, GCC, GNU Emacs, and all of GNU are obsolete and forgotten, but computer users generally are free to share and change the software they use, these programs will have done their job well. If, on the other hand, GNOME and the rest of the GNU system are widely used, but mainly in combination with proprietary software, they will have succeeded only part-way, and a big task will remain ahead of us.
Does this paragraph indicate that RMS would support KDE, if KDE meets his definition of free software? Note: I'm not trying to start a flame war about GNOME vs. KDE. I'm just asking if RMS, in his answer to this question, would support stopping the GNOME project in favor of a more popular, more established, more whatever GUI environment for the GNU system. Maybe KDE is that system. If so, would RMS, if part of the GNOME board, work to further the goals of KDE if he felt that KDE was a better GUI for the GNU system?
It's interesting that this discussion came up at exactly the same time that I'm browsing around looking at Pie Menus. And at one time they say that they are tightly integrated with IE and Active X, but in the next sentance they claim that they are free and unrestricted. My immediate reaction was that they can hardly be free if they're tightly integrated with something that is non-free. In other words, the use of free software obligates me to use non-free software, which obligates me to support a company I find reprehensible. Is that sort of thing extending or restricting my freedom?
And then someone goes and posts this, and now I find myself taking the exact opposite stance. While I'd like to agree with RMS, I can't. Just because GNOME is a GNU project does not mean that GNOME must subjugate it's responsibilities to its own success in order to maintain "higher responsibilities" to the success of GNU and free software.
That's kinda like the draft isn't it? When our country calls us to die for the furtherance of its goals. It's great if you, as a citizen, volunteer for that responsibility, but it's a whole other ball of wax when you're forcibly required to do it.
What to think about this? What to think? Hmmm.....
As a debian user, I'm a big proponant of using a well thought out package system. But, you're entirely correct. If you have a core system componant (like a library) and the packaged version doesn't provide a piece of functionality that you need, you are completely screwed.
Installing that one library from source doesn't solve the problem. The package mgmt system doesn't see the lib that you installed so it still doesn't install the prog that you want.
So you end up with two choices: install everything from source, or install everything from the package manager.
Debian uses the equivs package to resolve this problem. Basically, you use equivs to create an entry into the package for everything that you install from source. So let's say you install libFoo from source. And the package bar depends on libFoo. You create an equivs package that you install that provides "libFoo". Now you can install the prepackaged bar and everything works.
The other alternative is to add an additional step to everytime you compile from source: create a package for the system you're operating on. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes this is very difficult.
My point is that there are ways of interoperting a packaging system with programs that are installed from source.
Boy howdy, did you capture it in a nutshell. The point of this phase of the trial is REMEDY. The reason that we complain about the proposed settlements is not because they don't punish microsoft, but because they don't restore competition.
The goal is so that we (OS competitors) can compete ON THE MERITS of our OS, and not lose solely because we're not Microsoft. THat doesn't guarantee a win, but it at least lets us in the game, and that's all that we should be focused on, getting in the game.
FWIW, I've used it before. We were forced into using it when NetCache decided that they would no longer support their software only solution. Squid + SmartFilter was faster, more thorough, and less buggy than NetCache + SmartFilter.
Microsoft supports the Fortune 1000 a little differently than your pirated copies of Win95.
That may be the perception from the executive level. But as an admin in a Fortune 50 company, it certainly wasn't the perception from the admin level. Our requests for bug fixes got ignored, too.
Other that that tiny nit, I could not agree more with your post.
A good admin is a good admin is a good admin. All one has to do is force yourself to think outside of just one particular mindset.
You know, I don't think that I agree. Of course, I might be misunderstanding what you're saying and arguing with that. In any case, I think that windows breeds bad admins.
Let's use DNS as an example. The guy who admins bind knows that there are two db's that have to be maintained. He knows that the two can get out of sync. But the windows admin just uses a gui or a wizard. All of the intelligence is built into the wizard. Consequently, you end up with windows DNS systems that are responsible for a name->address zone, but wrongly think they're also responsible for the corresponding address->name zone.
How many other wizards are there that hide the underlying infrastructure from the windows admin? Plenty. And they're breeding a huge number of people who don't really know what's going on, but think they do. Then when something breaks they have no idea why and no clue how to fix it.
Where we can make a start is nibbling round the edges - for example proxy server is not included, so we can use Linux and Squid. Except (SFAIK) Squid does not integrate with things like Websense which we need to block sites (nothing draconian - mainly web e-mail to stop viruses and web porn to stop lawsuits).
You may be invested in WebSense, but in case you have the ability to change, you might want to know about SmartFilter for Squid.
Totally true. But all I'm interested in doing is getting the attention of NC's Atty General. I'm interested in declaring my point of view, and telling him what I want done. I'm not trying to win the war here. That's already been done by someone more competant than I.
I'm just a cheerleader for the AG to tell him how at least one of his constituents feels, and urging him to act appropriately.
It appears that the Atty General of NC is still on the fence about this one. Here's a copy of the email that I sent to our AG last Friday. Let's see if we can get him to act.
To: agjus@mail.jus.state.nc.us
Subject: Please pursue stiffer penalties for Microsoft
Dear Mr. Roy Cooper:
I am a citizen of North Carolina, residing in Charlotte (see my address below). I am writing to you today to urge you to object to the settlement offered between the US Department of Justice and Microsoft, and to continue to pursue more effective remedy in the case.
Considering Microsoft's history of ignoring consent decrees, I hope that you will agree that another consent decree should be held highly skeptical as an effective remedy. The fact that Microsoft violated a 1995 consent was part of what prompted the current antitrust proceedings. How effective can the same remedy be, when its prior violations helped to protect and extend Microsoft's illegal monopoly?
Microsoft has recently released Windows XP, a computer operating system with the explicit goal of extending their monopoly reach into web services. This is a clear violation of antitrust law, and a clear demonstration that Microsoft intends to completely ignore remedial actions to reinstall competition into the computer software market.
As a citizen of North Carolina, I urge you to reject the current settlement and pursue an effective remedy to restore competition in the computer operating systems market, and prevent Microsoft from extending their illegal monopoly into other computer software markets.
Sincerely,
XXXX XXXXXX
XXXX XXXXXXXX XX
Charlotte, NC XXXXX
Let's take advantage of this oppurtunity to express our opinions on what our state representatives should do.
To all you Microsoft apologists out there: Do you REALLY want Microsoft in control of EVERYTHING to do with computing? Because, without the anti-trust case, that's exactly where we'd be heading. Without this "government interference", every computing experience would be handled by Microsoft. We'd all use Windows, Explorer, Office, MSN, Media Player, Windows Messaging, Passport, etc.
Which is precisely what all the M$ apologists want. They think that homogenius OS environment will solve more problems. Suddenly data interchange isn't a problem. You don't have to worry about compliance to standards. Everything already speaks the same language.
You're not going to convert someone who wants to go to Las Vegas, by saying, "Hey buddy, you'd better get off that road. You're headed straight for Las Vegas." You have to convince them that what they want really is bad in the long run.
With Linux, customers "end up being in the operating systems business," managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other," Miller said. "That's the job of a software vendor like Microsoft."
Yeah, and it works great in debian:
echo deb http://security.debian.org/ potato/updates main contrib non-free >>/etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Let's see: dependancy management, security updates. What exactly was it that Linux doesn't do?
What I'd much rather see, than Linux supporting lots of games is game developers using Linux to create bootable CD's on which thier games exist. If the game developer doesn't want to have support problems, then create the entire OS environment on the CD and distribute a bootable CD that just starts up the game. It's cheap for the vendor because they don't have to pay for Linux, and it makes a huge cut in support costs becuase they don't have to deal with installation problems on *any* os. The game is already installed and will interact with the OS perfectly... and to the consumer, it doesn't matter what OS is installed on their machine, or how fubar'ed the installation is. All that matters is that you have a machine with the minimum hardware requirements.
Of course the biggest problem with this is knowing what hardware the user has - especially video cards - and making sure that a large number of video cards support a standard set of well known API's accessable from drivers written for Linux. Without this, the idea falls on its face.
I know! It shouldn't be too hard to convince all the video card makers that it's in their best interest to release open source drivers for their cards... oh wait.... nevermind.
Re:Timothy McVeigh was a fundamentalist...
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
Why wasn't a war declared on the sort of organisations that McVeigh belonged to, and the sort of anti-goverment far right views that are regularly expressed on right wing talk shows ?
Becuase, the last time that I checked, none of those organizations, nor the governments of the states that McViegh lived in, nor the right wing talk show hosts, none of them were refusing to turn McViegh over for investigation and prosecution. If you want to say that the federal government should be attacking talk show hosts, and right wing organizations, then you've got to demonstrate that those organizations were not complying with demands made of them.
The taliban is under attack, and rightfully so, for thumbing their noses at the world. They harbored a known terrorist. A terrorist linked to the bombing of the USS Cole, and two US Embassy's in Africa. All of which are soverign pieces of American soil. These attacks, alone, can be seen as an act of war. And the Taliban's refusal to turn over Bin Laden, could easily be seen as the act of a co-conspirator. Yet the US maintained restraint.
The Taliban are not being attacked simply by association with Bin Laden. Their refusal to turn him over was the last straw that demonstrated that they wish for him to continue, and that they will never actually turn him over. And *still* the US has a simple policy: turn him over and we stop attacking.
Might work most of the time, but there are very obscure times when it will fail miserably. I used to work at a company in Houston. Our parent company was in California. This was before the time of widely deployed firewalls, and our internet access was through our parent company.
If I wanted to send email across the street, the email first went to the parent company in Cali, and then across the street. This was true of pings also.
So, any amount of probes that you had deployed would have thought that my network was about 2500 miles away from California, and none of them would have thought that I was in Houston.
Help them, but don't trash talk Microsoft or Apple in the processes. If they ask what you like about Linux (and they will), tell them the possitive things about Linux, but don't *compare* it to anything else. Just say what you like without trash talking something else.
Well that's going to be difficult. One of the things that I like about free software is that I own the data, and when I choose to share that data with you, I don't obligate you to someone else. Let's take Word Perfect for example. If I create a document in Word Perfect, and I send it to you, you suddenly need pay for a license from Corel. In other words, Corel governs my communication with you. And I don't like that.
Now, of course, I certainly don't demand that you dislike it also. That's up to you. But if you ask me what I like about free software, it's that it gives me more freedom. Which inherently implies that proprietary software is restrictive. I don't see anyway to tell people what I like about free software w/out also telling them what I don't like about proprietary software.
Your Christian example is a good one, but I think that you make it too broad. When someone asks me why I'm a Christian, part of my answer has to be that I no longer wanted to be a slave to sin. It's not the only answer that I give, but it has to be part of it. So, too with people who ask me why I use Linux, I have to tell them that I can't stand the alternative. Again, that's not the whole answer, but it's unavoidable.
Tangentially, there are a lot of analogies between Christianity and Free Software:
Each following's proponants believe that those on the outside are in slavery, but they just don't know it.
Each requires looking at yourself and what you're doing, and committing to giving up some of that in order to learn a better way of life.
I read this article yesterday on Linuxtoday, and I was immediately struck by how many people there are who think that GNU/Linux and other free software can be driven in the same way that proprietary software is drivin. Or that the goals of the creators of free software, are the same goals of the creators of proprietary software.
This guys seems to think that the best way to push the development of GNU/Linux is to write an article about what does not work. This, I guess, is supposed to spread concern among the users of the software who will then, en masse, complain to the software creator and vote with their wallets on something that will do better. What this presumes is that the people who create the software are going to care about how users spend money.
But, obviously, this is not the case with free software. Developers create free software for a single purpose: to accomplish something that they want done. They don't write it to get someone to spend money on it. They write it to get something done, and then they share what they've accomplished with others. So, if users don't spend their money on software, what do the developers care? That software still accomplished a task for the developer, and that's all that matters.
I believe that this guy really does want to see free software succeed. What he doesn't understand is that the ways to do that have changed. Writing articles to incite users isn't as effective with free software as with proprietary software. The best tools to improve free software are an editor and a compiler and time.
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Yes, and some VPN's include features in order to get around NAT devices typically installed on home networks. For example, Cisco's VPN can communicate on the standard IPSec IP protocol, or if you're behind a NAT device, you turn on UDP encapsulation and all of your packets go from UDP port 10000 and to UDP port 10000.
Of course, I'm one of those lucky people who has a choice of cable modem at my house or several xDSL providers. So if the cable company ever decides to ban VPN's and if they ever figure out how to effectively enforce such a ban (doubtful) then I get to take advantage of competition.
The good news is for those of you without such a plethora of choices is that enforcement, AFAIK is currently impossible.
Bingo! And once their viewers increase, they can justify the added costs for the advertising space that they sell.
(+1,Insightful) Virtual moderator point for you!
Brilliant! (+1,Insightful - virtual moderator point)
Of course, I never intended my argument to include premium channels. Premium (i.e. non-advertising channels) have to be done on a subscription basis, since the primary value they offer is to the subscriber (no commercials) instead of to the advertiser (lots of eyes/ears).
All I want is to be able to hear my favorite sports teams from anywhere in the country... for the price of my having to listen to advertisements. You can have your prem channels, and I can have my sports.
Like I said: Brilliant!
I want satelite radio for sports. I like sports. Especially the Green Bay Packers. I live in Charlotte, NC. It's awfully difficult to listen to the packers in NC, unless of course they happen to be playing in NC, and then I just go the game. About the only thing that satelite radio provides me that I want is access to my favorite sports broadcasts no matter where I am in the country. That is, by far, the biggest selling point to me.
But I'm not going to get it. I am just not going to pay anything per month for this. There is no way that they're going to remove commercials from sports broadcasts. So I'm going to be paying someone to advertise to me? I think not. But even more important than that is the idea of the incremental infrastructure costs.
The reason that I pay for cable service to my house is because it actually costs the cable company extra money to run the cable to my house, and to continually maintain it. I pay for internet service because in order for me to get that service, I have to pay the additional infrastructure that allows me to connect to it (modems, bandwidth). So the more subscribers that a cable company or an ISP has, the more infrastructure that company requires. Thus there is an incremental cost associated with each additional customer that they have.
But this is not the case for broadcast providers. If 10 people listen to a broadcast or 1000 people listen to a broadcast, it costs the same amount for the broadcaster. Basic calculus: as the number of listeners approaches infinity, the cost per listener approaches 0. (Yes, yes, I know the number of listeners is finite.) Or put another way the incremental cost per listener is nothing.
So with no incremental cost per listener, the value of the service comes from getting lots and lots of listeners. In the cable and ISP world, lots of subscribers are good, but they also impose an additional cost per subscriber. But in the broadcast world, once you've put up the basic infrastructure, you want as many people to get that service as possible. Your costs are finished, so remove as many barriers as possible. Why? So that you can then turn around and tell advertisers that they can reach 275 million people (i.e. the entire US) with your service. If you put up barriers to entry for your listeners, you weaken the value of your advertising real estate. Why do the TV networks love the superbowl so much? Because 1 billion viewers is *very* expensive advertising real estate. TV networks make a killing on the superbowl. Advertising real estate is seriously valuable stuff.
Satelite radio and TV have such an oppurtunity to have the highest priced advertising space in the world. But they're squandering that oppurtunity by charging listeners/veiwers for their service. And why do they do that? Because their investors are simply not patient enough to be able to wait for returns on their investment. The cost of putting up satelites for these services is very high. But even so, it's a fixed, one time cost. What you want is to put that against ongoing, and increasing income. One strategy is to charge $x per month to the listeners. But this is short sighted. It does provide ongoing income, but it's hard to increase it without losing sources of that income (i.e. every time you increase the cost, you lose some customers).
The other option is to give the service away to listeners/viewers, and then charge advertisers for access. As the numbers of listeners/viewers increases, your advertising rates can also increase. So fixed cost, balanced by ongoing, and increasing income.
The problem, of course, is that the investors can't wait long enough for the satelite companies to build up their viewers. They want their returns and they want them as soon as possible. What they fail to see is that the demand for that immediate return is resulting in building businesses for which people will not subscribe. And, as a previous poster mentioned, when these companies fail, they certainly won't say it's because we had a bad plan.
Too bad. It's a good idea, ruined by impatience.
I know it's late in the article's life, but I've already browsed at -1 to see if anyone had any idea of what CAT is and how it will work.
So far, no good.
Any thoughts on how CAT will work and how it will effectively count up computers? How will it's usage preclude the usage of NAT?
I don't think this is necessarily true. Let's use the pharmaceutical (sp?) world as an example. In that case, it is certainly not the case that what the customers want is what's best for them.
RMS is saying, I think, that the software producing world should have the same responsibility to the public as the pharmaceutical world has. Computers are becoming more and more a critical piece of our infrastructure, and as such, we as a society should demand that our software producers are making software the complies with all of our better interests. RMS is saying that the only way to do that is to hold the software industry to the openness that the pharmaceutical industry is held. Before a drug can be sold to the public it must undergo incredible public scrutiny for the impacts it has on public health. Basically, this is scientific peer review. RMS would say that the same should be true for software and its impact on the overall well being of our critical infrastructure.
Do I agree with this? Dunno, but it can't be easily dismissed. Code Red, ILOVEYOU, the Morris worm, et al, are prime examples of how software can cause actual damage, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. They didn't really cause any direct damage. Had the authors of these worms been bent on destruction, the impact could have been tremendously bad.
I'd love to see the industry come up with a solution to this on its own, but so far our solution includes producing Microsoft. I don't see them volunteering to undergo the kind of scrutiny that Merck and Glaxo have to take on.
Does this paragraph indicate that RMS would support KDE, if KDE meets his definition of free software? Note: I'm not trying to start a flame war about GNOME vs. KDE. I'm just asking if RMS, in his answer to this question, would support stopping the GNOME project in favor of a more popular, more established, more whatever GUI environment for the GNU system. Maybe KDE is that system. If so, would RMS, if part of the GNOME board, work to further the goals of KDE if he felt that KDE was a better GUI for the GNU system?
It's interesting that this discussion came up at exactly the same time that I'm browsing around looking at Pie Menus. And at one time they say that they are tightly integrated with IE and Active X, but in the next sentance they claim that they are free and unrestricted. My immediate reaction was that they can hardly be free if they're tightly integrated with something that is non-free. In other words, the use of free software obligates me to use non-free software, which obligates me to support a company I find reprehensible. Is that sort of thing extending or restricting my freedom?
And then someone goes and posts this, and now I find myself taking the exact opposite stance. While I'd like to agree with RMS, I can't. Just because GNOME is a GNU project does not mean that GNOME must subjugate it's responsibilities to its own success in order to maintain "higher responsibilities" to the success of GNU and free software.
That's kinda like the draft isn't it? When our country calls us to die for the furtherance of its goals. It's great if you, as a citizen, volunteer for that responsibility, but it's a whole other ball of wax when you're forcibly required to do it.
What to think about this? What to think? Hmmm.....
Score:+1, Insightful (Virtual Moderator Point)
As a debian user, I'm a big proponant of using a well thought out package system. But, you're entirely correct. If you have a core system componant (like a library) and the packaged version doesn't provide a piece of functionality that you need, you are completely screwed.
Installing that one library from source doesn't solve the problem. The package mgmt system doesn't see the lib that you installed so it still doesn't install the prog that you want.
So you end up with two choices: install everything from source, or install everything from the package manager.
Debian uses the equivs package to resolve this problem. Basically, you use equivs to create an entry into the package for everything that you install from source. So let's say you install libFoo from source. And the package bar depends on libFoo. You create an equivs package that you install that provides "libFoo". Now you can install the prepackaged bar and everything works.
The other alternative is to add an additional step to everytime you compile from source: create a package for the system you're operating on. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes this is very difficult.
My point is that there are ways of interoperting a packaging system with programs that are installed from source.
Hope this is helpful.
Score:+1, Insightful (Virtual Moderation Point)
Boy howdy, did you capture it in a nutshell. The point of this phase of the trial is REMEDY. The reason that we complain about the proposed settlements is not because they don't punish microsoft, but because they don't restore competition.
The goal is so that we (OS competitors) can compete ON THE MERITS of our OS, and not lose solely because we're not Microsoft. THat doesn't guarantee a win, but it at least lets us in the game, and that's all that we should be focused on, getting in the game.
Amen, brother. Amen.
FWIW, I've used it before. We were forced into using it when NetCache decided that they would no longer support their software only solution. Squid + SmartFilter was faster, more thorough, and less buggy than NetCache + SmartFilter.
$.02
Anyone else read this and think, man my small office/home office is *CRAP* compared to some guy who's producing sunspot images!
Maybe it's just me, and I have SOHO inferiority complex.
That may be the perception from the executive level. But as an admin in a Fortune 50 company, it certainly wasn't the perception from the admin level. Our requests for bug fixes got ignored, too.
Other that that tiny nit, I could not agree more with your post.
Cheers.
You know, I don't think that I agree. Of course, I might be misunderstanding what you're saying and arguing with that. In any case, I think that windows breeds bad admins.
Let's use DNS as an example. The guy who admins bind knows that there are two db's that have to be maintained. He knows that the two can get out of sync. But the windows admin just uses a gui or a wizard. All of the intelligence is built into the wizard. Consequently, you end up with windows DNS systems that are responsible for a name->address zone, but wrongly think they're also responsible for the corresponding address->name zone.
How many other wizards are there that hide the underlying infrastructure from the windows admin? Plenty. And they're breeding a huge number of people who don't really know what's going on, but think they do. Then when something breaks they have no idea why and no clue how to fix it.
$.02.
Cheers.
You may be invested in WebSense, but in case you have the ability to change, you might want to know about SmartFilter for Squid.
Cheers.
Totally true. But all I'm interested in doing is getting the attention of NC's Atty General. I'm interested in declaring my point of view, and telling him what I want done. I'm not trying to win the war here. That's already been done by someone more competant than I.
I'm just a cheerleader for the AG to tell him how at least one of his constituents feels, and urging him to act appropriately.
Thanks for the feedback.
Which is precisely what all the M$ apologists want. They think that homogenius OS environment will solve more problems. Suddenly data interchange isn't a problem. You don't have to worry about compliance to standards. Everything already speaks the same language.
You're not going to convert someone who wants to go to Las Vegas, by saying, "Hey buddy, you'd better get off that road. You're headed straight for Las Vegas." You have to convince them that what they want really is bad in the long run.
$.02
Didn't we have one of those already? And wasn't a huge part of the case that Microsoft blatantly disregarded any of the terms of that consent decree?
There's something rotten in Denmark.
Yeah, and it works great in debian: /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb http://security.debian.org/ potato/updates main contrib non-free >>
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Let's see: dependancy management, security updates. What exactly was it that Linux doesn't do?
What I'd much rather see, than Linux supporting lots of games is game developers using Linux to create bootable CD's on which thier games exist. If the game developer doesn't want to have support problems, then create the entire OS environment on the CD and distribute a bootable CD that just starts up the game. It's cheap for the vendor because they don't have to pay for Linux, and it makes a huge cut in support costs becuase they don't have to deal with installation problems on *any* os. The game is already installed and will interact with the OS perfectly... and to the consumer, it doesn't matter what OS is installed on their machine, or how fubar'ed the installation is. All that matters is that you have a machine with the minimum hardware requirements.
Of course the biggest problem with this is knowing what hardware the user has - especially video cards - and making sure that a large number of video cards support a standard set of well known API's accessable from drivers written for Linux. Without this, the idea falls on its face.
I know! It shouldn't be too hard to convince all the video card makers that it's in their best interest to release open source drivers for their cards... oh wait.... nevermind.
Becuase, the last time that I checked, none of those organizations, nor the governments of the states that McViegh lived in, nor the right wing talk show hosts, none of them were refusing to turn McViegh over for investigation and prosecution. If you want to say that the federal government should be attacking talk show hosts, and right wing organizations, then you've got to demonstrate that those organizations were not complying with demands made of them.
The taliban is under attack, and rightfully so, for thumbing their noses at the world. They harbored a known terrorist. A terrorist linked to the bombing of the USS Cole, and two US Embassy's in Africa. All of which are soverign pieces of American soil. These attacks, alone, can be seen as an act of war. And the Taliban's refusal to turn over Bin Laden, could easily be seen as the act of a co-conspirator. Yet the US maintained restraint.
The Taliban are not being attacked simply by association with Bin Laden. Their refusal to turn him over was the last straw that demonstrated that they wish for him to continue, and that they will never actually turn him over. And *still* the US has a simple policy: turn him over and we stop attacking.
You're analogy to McViegh is wayyy off.
PIM's vs. paper... very interesting, but what really caught my attention in your post was this little gem:
Wow, not only did you have a date scheduled, but you've got more than one girlfriend!Man, being a geek ain't what it used to be. I guess Scott Adams was right
Might work most of the time, but there are very obscure times when it will fail miserably. I used to work at a company in Houston. Our parent company was in California. This was before the time of widely deployed firewalls, and our internet access was through our parent company.
If I wanted to send email across the street, the email first went to the parent company in Cali, and then across the street. This was true of pings also.
So, any amount of probes that you had deployed would have thought that my network was about 2500 miles away from California, and none of them would have thought that I was in Houston.
$.02.
Well that's going to be difficult. One of the things that I like about free software is that I own the data, and when I choose to share that data with you, I don't obligate you to someone else. Let's take Word Perfect for example. If I create a document in Word Perfect, and I send it to you, you suddenly need pay for a license from Corel. In other words, Corel governs my communication with you. And I don't like that.
Now, of course, I certainly don't demand that you dislike it also. That's up to you. But if you ask me what I like about free software, it's that it gives me more freedom. Which inherently implies that proprietary software is restrictive. I don't see anyway to tell people what I like about free software w/out also telling them what I don't like about proprietary software.
Your Christian example is a good one, but I think that you make it too broad. When someone asks me why I'm a Christian, part of my answer has to be that I no longer wanted to be a slave to sin. It's not the only answer that I give, but it has to be part of it. So, too with people who ask me why I use Linux, I have to tell them that I can't stand the alternative. Again, that's not the whole answer, but it's unavoidable.
Tangentially, there are a lot of analogies between Christianity and Free Software:
The list goes on...
I read this article yesterday on Linuxtoday, and I was immediately struck by how many people there are who think that GNU/Linux and other free software can be driven in the same way that proprietary software is drivin. Or that the goals of the creators of free software, are the same goals of the creators of proprietary software.
This guys seems to think that the best way to push the development of GNU/Linux is to write an article about what does not work. This, I guess, is supposed to spread concern among the users of the software who will then, en masse, complain to the software creator and vote with their wallets on something that will do better. What this presumes is that the people who create the software are going to care about how users spend money.
But, obviously, this is not the case with free software. Developers create free software for a single purpose: to accomplish something that they want done. They don't write it to get someone to spend money on it. They write it to get something done, and then they share what they've accomplished with others. So, if users don't spend their money on software, what do the developers care? That software still accomplished a task for the developer, and that's all that matters.
I believe that this guy really does want to see free software succeed. What he doesn't understand is that the ways to do that have changed. Writing articles to incite users isn't as effective with free software as with proprietary software. The best tools to improve free software are an editor and a compiler and time.