"Nonetheless, "not trusting" is not the same as "is evil".
That was my point. It's irrelevant if Sun actually is "evil" if you don't trust them on principle.
Actually I don't think Linus has all that much "power" in the political sense of the term. Since there are several thousand kernel maintainers and since only 5% or less of the kernel has any code left from him, the only source of "power" he has is his ability to "manage a herd of cats" and his basic copyright. That's not political power, it's what is called "sapiental authority" - authority that derives from knowing what you're doing. Unless you know more than such a person does, it's wise to follow their lead - which is not the same as "trusting" them - until they screw up.
I don't use terms like "evil" anyway - I think in terms of correct or incorrect, or in the case of Sun, stupid, or in the case of Gates, malicious and greedy.
If Harmony achieves its goal, what value will Sun have in maintaining control? The community will have taken control away from Sun, to some degree at least.
Sure, Sun can still try to maintain its control over its version of the language - or even act as the "center" of the language.
But that will start to look to the OSS community like Microsoft and.NET. I don't think that's going to go over well eventually.
Corporations will stick with Sun's version, of course, for the obvious reasons - until their developers start preferring OSS for the equally obvious reasons.
Another equally possible outcome is that both centers of Java cooperate and feed each other to accelerate the development of the language.
The bottom line for the purpose of the discussion is that is irrelevant whether Sun is "evil" as long as Java is somehow made OSS or close enough for horseshoes.
Unless my belief in nanotech works out, as I'm 56, I don't think there's too much "later in life" left.
As a free-market anarchist who started out as an Objectivist (before I came to my senses), I'm perfectly familiar with the difference between Communism and Capitalism. Where you're not familiar is with the similarities.
All of which will be provided by technology - just before technology obviates the need for any of it - long before evolution will.
The whole discussion of NATURAL evolution of humans is just pointless - there will BE no such evolution anymore, in favor of "participatory evolution".
The human species will not survive this century in its current form due to technology, not evolution.
There will be no more "natural" evolution of humans, as humans will cease to exist in this century.
Transhumans will arise and anybody who doesn't convert will either be left behind, exterminated or converted whether they want to or not - or more likely, all three depending on your behavior towards Transhumans.
Better get on my good side now and avoid the rush.
First of all, it's probably still going to be faster because MS is incapable of writing anything but bloated featuritis-devastated code.
Second, FireFox will still be more standards-based as MS as already said they don't want to support the latest CSS version.
Third, FireFox is still OSS and that will matter to everybody to whom it DOES matter.
My projection is that the idiots who use MS will continue to do so, and those who don't trust MS will continue to download FF - though perhaps not at the same rate.
By end of 2005, I still suspect FF will have been downloaded at least 100 million times and have 8-15% of the browser market - which is remarkable when you consider that Netscape, Opera and the rest only achieved 3% of the market over the last five years.
I'm well aware that MS cuts schools slack on the retail cost of the software.
My point has always been that using Windows software only is MORE expensive than using free software and that point remains.
You cannot factor out the cost of administratORS and then say Windows is cheaper. That makes no sense. If the costs of admins factor out, then Windows still costs money where free software does not.
More importantly, Windows costs are in the form of administraTION - that is, the crashes, viruses, etc. that are a staple of the use of Windows in any environment, corporate or educational.
It's not the costs of administraTORS that matters, (although again Linux sysadmins are cheaper because they can do more), it's the cost of administraTION that matters.
As for students doing simple stuff on Windows vrs Linux, we have a ton of students at City College of San Francisco who HAVE taken a course or two pursuant to the UNIX/Linux Certificate here OR who have exposure to Linux at home who DO a LOT of work aiding the teachers here - even to the point of setting up sophisticiated programs like Oracle on lab machines.
Once any students are exposed to Linux, they can do EXACTLY the same stuff any Windows student can do. Which means they can be used to factor out administraTOR costs for Linux as well as Windows students can.
All this is irrelevant anyway - the bottom line is that most education administrators simply do not have the knowledge or imagination to be willing to explore alternatives to simply paying out their budget to a corporation.
It's really that simply and any argument to the contrary is just excusing them.
The same is true is most corporations.
The only way around that, as I have said elsewhere, is to write the - free - software needed to prove otherwise. Which will happen eventually.
And "balanced reporting" is most often used as an excuse to distort the facts to favor the side with the least truthful facts.
That's why Fox gets away with saying "fair and balanced" - "fair" means we let the false information get airplay, and "balanced" means we make sure the truth gets grayed out by the false.
There is no "fair and balanced" - there is only "correct" and "incorrect".
O'Gara's factual statements about where so-and-so is, what is physically there, etc. are (probably) mostly correct in her PJ article.
The intent most certainly is NOT correct. It was a hatchet job about irrelevancies, nothing more.
The only problem I have with the list above is the "define a set of values" - a journalist's job is to uncover facts and then discern the CONSEQUENCES of those facts and then report the facts and possible consequences in a coherent, comprehensible manner.
The discernment of consequences is where values come into play, but in many cases the values are used to distort reporting of possible consequences. This is true on both the right and the left.
Discerning consequences is an issue of using historical and scientific fact and logical inference to determine consequences - it is not an issue of "values". This is where journalists go wrong, allowing their personal prejudices to influence their reporting of consequences by selectively picking consequences that appeal to their bias.
A glass is not half empty OR half full - it is simultaneously both. And that is how it should be reported.
Actually I believe that was one of the reasons Turner resigned - there is a rumor that Fuat was NOT going to adhere to the ban on MoG despite having said he would to Turner.
No surprise that your boss lies to you, but it's a good reason to get the hell out before he makes you look like a fool for believing him.
The Fuat interview clearly shows the man has absolutely no problem lying through his teeth.
I assume he got modded up because he included a link to the article.
In any event, his comment on women seems to apply to O'Gara unless you assume she really is nothing but an SCO shill - in which case she might not really have been emotional about it.
Clearly her article is emotionally vindictive in every sense of the word - and this IS exactly how a lot of women react to criticism from other women.
Leave the PC feminist crap at home. It doesn't apply here.
"I'm posting as AC because I am an online journalist."
No, you're posting as AC because you're actually what AC means.
You work for Sys-Con, perhaps?
PJ has every right to comment on anything she wants to on her own blog - just as O'Gara has every right to speak any bullshit she wants to.
The difference is that PJ claims to be a blogger doing journalism vis-a-vis the legal basis of the SCO case, and MoG claims to be doing "accurate factural journalism" when in fact she is a shill for SCO.
And no, who she is is utterly irrelevant to ninety-nine percent of her articles - unless she is not in fact a paralegal, in which case her comments on legal procedure would be called into question. The fact that few commentators on GrokLaw have done so would indicate that she is in fact correct about her legal comments.
One thing I notice about so-called journalists like you (and everybody in broadcast journalism( is how thin-skinned the industry is. God forbid anybody criticize a so-called "journalist"! They all have a conniption fit. They immediately escalate it to "censorship" and "restraint of trade" and "freedom of the press." "Freedom of the press" to attack anybody they want and kowtow to anybody with the power to grant them an interview is what they mean.
PJ's articles stand on their own merits. It is TOTALLY irrelevant who she is (although if she is NOT a paralegal, her legal procedure comments would be much less persuasive.)
As for who is paying her, if anyone, that is totally irrelevant as well. It is NOT totally irrelevant for MoG given that she has revealed inside contacts with SCO, access to information she could not have had without such contacts, and a willingness to inflate the importance of that information for SCO's benefit. All of PJ's stuff is procured from either the court records, people who witnessed court events, and the commentary of the GrokLaw community.
Finally, NO information about PJ's income source or ANY influence on GrokLaw by anyone was established in MoG's article, despite the snide reference to PJ living near to an IBM facility.
What WAS revealed is that MoG gained access to PJ's cell phone logs, which is definitely a violation of privacy and possibly illegal as well.
"But the simple fact is that PJ stepped up and made herself a public figure in an extremely controversial case. And there is no constitutional or guaranteed right to remain anonymous.:
Which is TOTALLY irrelevant to the issue in this case.
Your reframing the actual issue to be this crap proves you're an idiot.
The actual issue is that MoG was repeatedly demonstrated by PJ to be an SCO shill - or at the very least an incompetent journalist. MoG then proved this by spending a ridiculous amount of effort trying to "prove" who PJ was (as if it mattered in ANY respect at all) and then proceeded to hurl insults ("harridan") and snide remarks about PJ's living conditions and status and mental state in the process - all under the guise of "trade industry journalism".
In case you haven't seen it, Turner published an email from a journalism ethics organization which completely agreed that MoG's actions were totally beyond the pale.
"While it was an error on my part to not mention the Windows admin costs, they still factor out to be far less than OSS or other UNIX solutions."
No, they don't. Every study indicates a UNIX sys admin can support more machines than an MCSE. Why? First because the UNIX sysadmin is more used to doing so with command line tools and scripts vs a GUI interface. Second, because Windows systems are FAR less stable than UNIX systems.
On Windows SERVERS, vrs desktops, no student can be thrown in on the deep end any more than on Linux. Windows servers, as opposed to desktops, are FAR more complicated to administer than UNIX servers.
And Linux DESKTOPS are LESS hard to manage ONCE THEY'VE BEEN CONFIGURED CORRECTLY.
"Our university too developed their own distribution system for the Academic Alliance software thru the web; it was developed by a friend of mine using a few hundred lines of CF code for a couple hundred dollars. I'm sure the department made that choice since it was likely cheaper to do than pay the AA management people to do it for them."
And this is exactly how schools can get low-cost software for other purposes - find somebody willing and able to do it cheaper than the corporate boys - which is what OSS is all about.
As for my "end of the world scenario", that was not intended to be taken seriously, I was merely commenting out how fucked up the industry is by being dependent on crap from Microsoft.
As for students "wishing to be limited", you offer Windows on the desktop courses and then wonder why students don't take "Compiler Design" on Linux?
What's wrong with this picture?
I suggested to a UNIX/Linux teacher at CCSF that we need an "Introduction to Linux" course which would cover installation, configuration and administration from the command line AND the GUI, and the available business applications like Samba. He said Linux was probably still too hard on the desktop to do such a class.
I suggested the same class to one of my Windows teachers and he thought it was a great idea.
So in other words, Windows is so easy to use we need to teach courses in it, but Linux is too hard, so we don't?
You'd need one hell of a lot more than a single documentary.
You'd need a sustained and expensive public campaign on a par with Bush's push for SS reform...
Such a campaign simply isn't going to happen.
The "general public" cannot be "educated" on ANY issue. On MOST issues, the public is ignorant and prefers to stay that way.
In this country of 300 million, there's no "overwhelming public outcry" about anything. Whatever looks like one is an orchestrated media event, nothing more. 9/11 is about the only exception I can think of in my lifetime (well, maybe the Kennedy assassination - the first one, nobody cared about Bobby even).
And we STILL don't know what happened in 9/11 with any certainty.
Human behavior only changes under the impact of death or new technology (the WIDESPREAD appearance of new technology - which means get those OSS educational programs written and proven, or fergeddaboutit.)
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"Nonetheless, "not trusting" is not the same as "is evil".
That was my point. It's irrelevant if Sun actually is "evil" if you don't trust them on principle.
Actually I don't think Linus has all that much "power" in the political sense of the term. Since there are several thousand kernel maintainers and since only 5% or less of the kernel has any code left from him, the only source of "power" he has is his ability to "manage a herd of cats" and his basic copyright. That's not political power, it's what is called "sapiental authority" - authority that derives from knowing what you're doing. Unless you know more than such a person does, it's wise to follow their lead - which is not the same as "trusting" them - until they screw up.
I don't use terms like "evil" anyway - I think in terms of correct or incorrect, or in the case of Sun, stupid, or in the case of Gates, malicious and greedy.
Thank you for proving my point about lack of imagination.
If Harmony achieves its goal, what value will Sun have in maintaining control? The community will have taken control away from Sun, to some degree at least.
Sure, Sun can still try to maintain its control over its version of the language - or even act as the "center" of the language.
But that will start to look to the OSS community like Microsoft and
Corporations will stick with Sun's version, of course, for the obvious reasons - until their developers start preferring OSS for the equally obvious reasons.
Another equally possible outcome is that both centers of Java cooperate and feed each other to accelerate the development of the language.
The bottom line for the purpose of the discussion is that is irrelevant whether Sun is "evil" as long as Java is somehow made OSS or close enough for horseshoes.
This gets modded "Flamebait" because some moron says IE will kill FireFox, then I make three perfectly good reasons why it won't.
The Windows trolls are out in force again, I see.
Obviously they don't like to be called idiots, and by such actions they prove me right.
Unless my belief in nanotech works out, as I'm 56, I don't think there's too much "later in life" left.
As a free-market anarchist who started out as an Objectivist (before I came to my senses), I'm perfectly familiar with the difference between Communism and Capitalism. Where you're not familiar is with the similarities.
All of which will be provided by technology - just before technology obviates the need for any of it - long before evolution will.
The whole discussion of NATURAL evolution of humans is just pointless - there will BE no such evolution anymore, in favor of "participatory evolution".
The human species will not survive this century in its current form due to technology, not evolution.
There will be no more "natural" evolution of humans, as humans will cease to exist in this century.
Transhumans will arise and anybody who doesn't convert will either be left behind, exterminated or converted whether they want to or not - or more likely, all three depending on your behavior towards Transhumans.
Better get on my good side now and avoid the rush.
FireFox is NOT going to be killed by IE7.
First of all, it's probably still going to be faster because MS is incapable of writing anything but bloated featuritis-devastated code.
Second, FireFox will still be more standards-based as MS as already said they don't want to support the latest CSS version.
Third, FireFox is still OSS and that will matter to everybody to whom it DOES matter.
My projection is that the idiots who use MS will continue to do so, and those who don't trust MS will continue to download FF - though perhaps not at the same rate.
By end of 2005, I still suspect FF will have been downloaded at least 100 million times and have 8-15% of the browser market - which is remarkable when you consider that Netscape, Opera and the rest only achieved 3% of the market over the last five years.
Uh, you're missing one word - "yet".
The point is not to trust ANY corporate head - even if they have NEVER done anything wrong and probably never will.
The operative word is "probably". Unless you can nail down the probabilities to a couple percent, trusting a corporate head is just dumb.
Since Harmony will open source Java - or force Sun to do so - that's not really relevant.
It's not Java that's evil - depending on your view of the language - it's Sun.
And only those people working at Sun at the top.
Kim Polese, who was the marketing person for Java, is now the CEO of SpikeSource, a totally OSS company.
The only reason people work for companies is lack of imagination.
Of course, there's no shortage of lack of imagination.
Gee, that sounds like a Bushism!
I'm well aware that MS cuts schools slack on the retail cost of the software.
My point has always been that using Windows software only is MORE expensive than using free software and that point remains.
You cannot factor out the cost of administratORS and then say Windows is cheaper. That makes no sense. If the costs of admins factor out, then Windows still costs money where free software does not.
More importantly, Windows costs are in the form of administraTION - that is, the crashes, viruses, etc. that are a staple of the use of Windows in any environment, corporate or educational.
It's not the costs of administraTORS that matters, (although again Linux sysadmins are cheaper because they can do more), it's the cost of administraTION that matters.
As for students doing simple stuff on Windows vrs Linux, we have a ton of students at City College of San Francisco who HAVE taken a course or two pursuant to the UNIX/Linux Certificate here OR who have exposure to Linux at home who DO a LOT of work aiding the teachers here - even to the point of setting up sophisticiated programs like Oracle on lab machines.
Once any students are exposed to Linux, they can do EXACTLY the same stuff any Windows student can do. Which means they can be used to factor out administraTOR costs for Linux as well as Windows students can.
All this is irrelevant anyway - the bottom line is that most education administrators simply do not have the knowledge or imagination to be willing to explore alternatives to simply paying out their budget to a corporation.
It's really that simply and any argument to the contrary is just excusing them.
The same is true is most corporations.
The only way around that, as I have said elsewhere, is to write the - free - software needed to prove otherwise. Which will happen eventually.
As I recall, Stalin was not much of a economist or anything else.
I believe you might want to read Ludwig Von Mises, or Murray Rothbard, before you mouth off.
Not the same thing at all.
PJ's stuff is drawn from publicly available documents. Anybody can make their own assessment.
MS's studies are set up by MS, then executed by an "independent" testing company solely to cover the fact that MS set up the test.
And "balanced reporting" is most often used as an excuse to distort the facts to favor the side with the least truthful facts.
That's why Fox gets away with saying "fair and balanced" - "fair" means we let the false information get airplay, and "balanced" means we make sure the truth gets grayed out by the false.
There is no "fair and balanced" - there is only "correct" and "incorrect".
O'Gara's factual statements about where so-and-so is, what is physically there, etc. are (probably) mostly correct in her PJ article.
The intent most certainly is NOT correct. It was a hatchet job about irrelevancies, nothing more.
The only problem I have with the list above is the "define a set of values" - a journalist's job is to uncover facts and then discern the CONSEQUENCES of those facts and then report the facts and possible consequences in a coherent, comprehensible manner.
The discernment of consequences is where values come into play, but in many cases the values are used to distort reporting of possible consequences. This is true on both the right and the left.
Discerning consequences is an issue of using historical and scientific fact and logical inference to determine consequences - it is not an issue of "values". This is where journalists go wrong, allowing their personal prejudices to influence their reporting of consequences by selectively picking consequences that appeal to their bias.
A glass is not half empty OR half full - it is simultaneously both. And that is how it should be reported.
Actually I believe that was one of the reasons Turner resigned - there is a rumor that Fuat was NOT going to adhere to the ban on MoG despite having said he would to Turner.
No surprise that your boss lies to you, but it's a good reason to get the hell out before he makes you look like a fool for believing him.
The Fuat interview clearly shows the man has absolutely no problem lying through his teeth.
I assume he got modded up because he included a link to the article.
In any event, his comment on women seems to apply to O'Gara unless you assume she really is nothing but an SCO shill - in which case she might not really have been emotional about it.
Clearly her article is emotionally vindictive in every sense of the word - and this IS exactly how a lot of women react to criticism from other women.
Leave the PC feminist crap at home. It doesn't apply here.
Uh, how is that an endorsement of her ethics?
Or brains.
"I'm posting as AC because I am an online journalist."
No, you're posting as AC because you're actually what AC means.
You work for Sys-Con, perhaps?
PJ has every right to comment on anything she wants to on her own blog - just as O'Gara has every right to speak any bullshit she wants to.
The difference is that PJ claims to be a blogger doing journalism vis-a-vis the legal basis of the SCO case, and MoG claims to be doing "accurate factural journalism" when in fact she is a shill for SCO.
And no, who she is is utterly irrelevant to ninety-nine percent of her articles - unless she is not in fact a paralegal, in which case her comments on legal procedure would be called into question. The fact that few commentators on GrokLaw have done so would indicate that she is in fact correct about her legal comments.
One thing I notice about so-called journalists like you (and everybody in broadcast journalism( is how thin-skinned the industry is. God forbid anybody criticize a so-called "journalist"! They all have a conniption fit. They immediately escalate it to "censorship" and "restraint of trade" and "freedom of the press." "Freedom of the press" to attack anybody they want and kowtow to anybody with the power to grant them an interview is what they mean.
Gutless punch of punks.
PJ's articles stand on their own merits. It is TOTALLY irrelevant who she is (although if she is NOT a paralegal, her legal procedure comments would be much less persuasive.)
As for who is paying her, if anyone, that is totally irrelevant as well. It is NOT totally irrelevant for MoG given that she has revealed inside contacts with SCO, access to information she could not have had without such contacts, and a willingness to inflate the importance of that information for SCO's benefit. All of PJ's stuff is procured from either the court records, people who witnessed court events, and the commentary of the GrokLaw community.
Finally, NO information about PJ's income source or ANY influence on GrokLaw by anyone was established in MoG's article, despite the snide reference to PJ living near to an IBM facility.
What WAS revealed is that MoG gained access to PJ's cell phone logs, which is definitely a violation of privacy and possibly illegal as well.
"But the simple fact is that PJ stepped up and made herself a public figure in an extremely controversial case. And there is no constitutional or guaranteed right to remain anonymous.:
Which is TOTALLY irrelevant to the issue in this case.
Your reframing the actual issue to be this crap proves you're an idiot.
The actual issue is that MoG was repeatedly demonstrated by PJ to be an SCO shill - or at the very least an incompetent journalist. MoG then proved this by spending a ridiculous amount of effort trying to "prove" who PJ was (as if it mattered in ANY respect at all) and then proceeded to hurl insults ("harridan") and snide remarks about PJ's living conditions and status and mental state in the process - all under the guise of "trade industry journalism".
In case you haven't seen it, Turner published an email from a journalism ethics organization which completely agreed that MoG's actions were totally beyond the pale.
Get a fucking clue.
Who needs the experiment?
Just look at the behavior of practically everybody you have ever heard of.
Humans are monkey-ass primates to whom pecking order are their whole lives. Period.
You have no clue..."dude"
"While it was an error on my part to not mention the Windows admin costs, they still factor out to be far less than OSS or other UNIX solutions."
No, they don't. Every study indicates a UNIX sys admin can support more machines than an MCSE. Why? First because the UNIX sysadmin is more used to doing so with command line tools and scripts vs a GUI interface. Second, because Windows systems are FAR less stable than UNIX systems.
On Windows SERVERS, vrs desktops, no student can be thrown in on the deep end any more than on Linux. Windows servers, as opposed to desktops, are FAR more complicated to administer than UNIX servers.
And Linux DESKTOPS are LESS hard to manage ONCE THEY'VE BEEN CONFIGURED CORRECTLY.
"Our university too developed their own distribution system for the Academic Alliance software thru the web; it was developed by a friend of mine using a few hundred lines of CF code for a couple hundred dollars. I'm sure the department made that choice since it was likely cheaper to do than pay the AA management people to do it for them."
And this is exactly how schools can get low-cost software for other purposes - find somebody willing and able to do it cheaper than the corporate boys - which is what OSS is all about.
As for my "end of the world scenario", that was not intended to be taken seriously, I was merely commenting out how fucked up the industry is by being dependent on crap from Microsoft.
As for students "wishing to be limited", you offer Windows on the desktop courses and then wonder why students don't take "Compiler Design" on Linux?
What's wrong with this picture?
I suggested to a UNIX/Linux teacher at CCSF that we need an "Introduction to Linux" course which would cover installation, configuration and administration from the command line AND the GUI, and the available business applications like Samba. He said Linux was probably still too hard on the desktop to do such a class.
I suggested the same class to one of my Windows teachers and he thought it was a great idea.
So in other words, Windows is so easy to use we need to teach courses in it, but Linux is too hard, so we don't?
What's wrong with THIS picture?
Your arguments don't hold water.
You'd need one hell of a lot more than a single documentary.
You'd need a sustained and expensive public campaign on a par with Bush's push for SS reform...
Such a campaign simply isn't going to happen.
The "general public" cannot be "educated" on ANY issue. On MOST issues, the public is ignorant and prefers to stay that way.
In this country of 300 million, there's no "overwhelming public outcry" about anything. Whatever looks like one is an orchestrated media event, nothing more. 9/11 is about the only exception I can think of in my lifetime (well, maybe the Kennedy assassination - the first one, nobody cared about Bobby even).
And we STILL don't know what happened in 9/11 with any certainty.
Human behavior only changes under the impact of death or new technology (the WIDESPREAD appearance of new technology - which means get those OSS educational programs written and proven, or fergeddaboutit.)