> The Viking Longboat was no ordinary boat. It was > designed to be sailed up a low-lying beach, > picked up by the oars, and carried to where the > raid...
Hmmm, that's actually a new one on me. The raider version of the viking ships was, IIRC, a deep sea-going vessel that doubled as a beach landing craft. I believe a classic raider like the Gokstad ship would still be too heavy for a portage - and in any case lugging the ship around would have deprived the vikings of the quick hit and run tactics they often used.
The Swedish vikings (Rus) did use portage-capable boats of the same "clinker" design on Russian rivers, but it was a much smaller than the North Sea raiders.
Still, for its very design elegance, flexible construction and extreme usefulness to the intended job, the viking longship was indeed a classic hack.
Oh yeah, they're scared all right. So are all of the other huge institutions that originated during the industrial era.
What we are seing could very well be early skirmishes in the conflict between the forces of the "mass-market" industrial past and the new, but still disorganised forces of a new society. Corporatism after all was an offspring of the industrial revolution.
Right now the old forces are befuddled by the changing landscape, but they do have one advantage: the ability to manipulate a government system originally designed by elements friendly to rising industrialism 200+ years ago.
In this light, representative government - the system itself - is geared against the Net and any other new information technologies that threaten the old order.
Of course they're scared, so should we. It's gonna be one hell of a fight.
"we are the world" So said the Yankee musical glitterati in the 80's. C'mon man, this is why US tourists are so well liked by the primitives in the non-world. -M
You raise a good point and I'm sure it's already happening as your other responders have pointed out.
The difference between the posers and the genuine in any tribe is depth. As geek becomes chic, I'm sure the real geeks will still find ways to differentiate themselves from the poseurs, and it will probably be knowledge based, not something superficial. So scripts kiddies will eventually be exposed as superficial unless they take the time and effort to gain real depth.
We just have to avoid looking arrogant to the masses in asserting ourselves as the real thing... oops. Too late.
Sure, the BSDs are extremely good but would most people (non-Unix literates) have heard of them if it wasn't for Linux? Would the now-solved licensing issues be cleared as they were with the existence of Linux as a prod? Would there be as many good OSS projects out there as there are now if Linux hadn't come along to complete GNU?
So you'd be using something else. And since I seriously doubt there'd be a free Unix as viable as Linux is right now, I really wonder how many of the current crop of Linux converts would be using it. I think we'd be back where we were in 1995 .
I'd agree with that. What we now call Linux is, by any other name, a collection of open software arranged around the Linux kernel. If Linux wasn't OSS, I think that another open source kernel+OS would be moving (or have already moved) into that space.
I think that the Linux kernel allowed the attainment of a complete GNU system at a very good time and because of that timing, we now have a rapidly maturing system.
If Linux hadn't moved into that space when it did, something else would have eventually, perhaps a BSD perhaps something else. I also think we'd be well behind where we are now and still irrelevant in the eyes of the mainstream. And yes, I think Linus' kernel would be languishing with Andy's.
... play on Linux and work on a commercial Un*x. That way you can eat and play and the skills you develop in play can easily be used at work making you even more valuable and allowing you to eat even more.
Why bother with Win32 at all. Even if (Solaris|HP-UX|AIX|IRIX) isn't Linux, it's a lot closer to the mark than any Window pain.
Hmmm, you're right, but why limit yourself to the poor and inexperienced?
I was a 30 year old techie who could afford, and owned, a SPARCstation at home when I switched to Linux in 1995. I had a SPARC because I wanted to have the same home and work platform. Yes, I used all the GNU stuff on SunOS even before Solaris 2.x made it an even better choice to do so.
Linux let me go back to owning a hardware platform that didn't gouge me for every little hardware extra (chech the prices for SBUS video boards etc... Holy Scheisse!!!) and still have the top-notch techie tools to which I was so attached. It was, in a nutshell, the best of all worlds: an honest to goodness and cheap Unix on commodity hardware.
You don't have to be a 13-24 to see a good thing as a good thing.
"They will simply offer it to customers and let the customers decide if it will be Linux, NT or Novell."
This seems to me similar to the operating procedure used by the big blue sales force back in the early '90's. They wouldn't push AIX over other platforms, they'd let the customer decide. By time they figured out the customer wasn't going to decide on MVS or OS/400 or OS/2, Sun or HP had snuck into the customer's site with a Unix box. Didn't see DEC Ultrix much. I guess too many Digital salespeople were waiting for customers to decide between it and VMS...
I can't see breaking them up as solving anything. It could actually harm the market more than help it. It would also do nothing to prevent another information age monopoly from rising down the road.
I say force them to open up the code in the areas of monopoly and keep it on the books as a solution to future software monopolies. BTW, by "open the code" I mean go as far as GPL levels of "open." Maybe extend that rule to ensure network protocols stay open.
Just a thought, but I think it may be more effective than a simple breakup.
I just don't know what to think about this, it's a real tough call. It's easy to look at this with more than a little cynicism but on the other hand it is a very interesting development.
If nothing else, the opening up of a "traditional" Unix will be interesting from the "how did _they_ do this/that/other thing" on a brick by brick basis. Many of us will be getting their first peek at System V code after years of working with the binary OS. I for one am curious. Am I the only one?
As for Yet Another License. Well just like "one tool fits all tasks" isn't true, maybe one licensing model doesn't fit all situations. GPL may just be too difficult to fit code that evolved largely in the Cathedral - even of it is a Bizarre(Bazaarish?) Cathedral.
Any opening is a good thing. We'll soon all be able topeek, if we wish, at bit and pieces of Solaris code. This is something we couldn't do last week, it is therefore a positive development.
Apple pickers have been compared to just about every computing based culture/tribe in existence over the last eon and a half. It's just finally now that a comparison between Mac Heads and Un*x wireheads has finally been considered worthy of attention by the self absorbed literati and other mainstream pundits. Strangely, it was these same experts who often called the Mac-PC slagfest the "Apple-IBM" slagfest long after IBM ceased to be relevant in the slagging.
The funny thing is the way the article treated Linux and BSD and Unix in general as if they were somehow mutually exclusive. I also finf it funny how articles like this and many others seem to view Linux as a strictly "youth" thing and ignore the 20+ year old tradition of Unix based OSS development and the accompanying mindset. Just about every 30-40-something Unix literate I know runs Linux at home. So much for it being the exclusive OS of inexperienced teens. Many of us have known many long years of being memebers of a virtually unknown computing tribe.
Lastly, the article's comparison is dead wrong with the "wait till they have their bad weather" drivel. Viewed in the longer lens of history, the Unix tradition has been ignored, dismissed, and even been prematurely pronounced dead by advocates of "superior" technologies. Linux and BSD are proof that Unix is alive and kicking back - again.
In this light, even to be recognised as being in existence by the Apple pickers is better than continuing to tolerate their ignorance of a long and very successful tradition. It just may take them a while to truly clue into what it means.
I've experienced the opposite, at least from the people whose opinion I give a damn about;-)
When I moved back to the rat race in January, I ended up doing the consultant thing. No more 9 to 5 for this techie. I also declined to buy a car and now use taxis, transit, bicycle or the good old train where necessary.
When on a customer project, I work at the necessary pace to get the job done, and done properly, no rush, no BS. When it's done, I'm done.
My friends, especially the ones with mortgages and car payments and hour and a half commutes to thankless DBA jobs in soulless industrial parks in the faceless suburbs, envy me. They say I'm more relaxed than ever, even look healthier.
In the meantime, I'm very connected. Internet connection, cell phone, pager, the whole works. After all, I'm a technologist. The trick is to use the technology wisely and not get overheated in some endless purposeless spiral ratrace.
I don't think it's the technology that's killing people. It's the rat race in the chase for the almighty buck that's at fault. The technology is just technology. The frantic pace at which we use it and let it control us is our own choice.
MAybe it's easier for some than others, but ultimately it all comes down to choice. If you choose to be controlled by the latest in gadgets for no better reason than "everybody else does it, so I have to as well in order to be cool" then you are a victim of corporate produced, mass enforced peer pressure, AKA fashion.
Hey, this guy is living proof on network television that the real wacko hillbillies are living north of the border, not in the Ozarks.
Then again, the guy sounds more interesting in the interview than he seems as the two dimensional hick weirdo from the sticks portrayed on TV. So I guess he's really an inventive and innovative wacko hillbilly from north of the border.
> Apple did this, now look how far they've fallen > after they stopped seeding educational > institutions.
Sure, my first machine was an Apple in high school (early-mid 80's) which I learned how to program in BASIC. Never saw an Apple in college. Never did any BASIC in college either. Been using Un*x ever since. Wonder why? Think about going under the hood on an Apple. Geez! Can't find a CLI let alone the frigging source.
> learning Unix from one's elders thing -- my eyes > actually rolled when I read that
You mean you never heard about the well known mentoring system out there? Most, if not all, Unix types I know, me included, learned the trick of "actually learning Unix" from a more experienced friend or associate. Roll your eyes all you want, _Tradition_ means transmitting the folklore in the oral tradition. Unix is a traditional philosophy. Linux continues in this tradition. You seem unaware of this.
>... just added Linux as a shameless attempt to > catch a ride on the bandwagon.
Again, Linux is very much a part and a continuation of the Unix tradition. The article indicates this. You must have missed this.
Not to be dismissive of MS' tactics but this could backfire on them, maybe badly.
Over the last few years MS has pushed and pushed to get corporate IT types to move to an all MS environment from laptop to server. This push would use MS' desktop dominance to pressure Unix and Netware out of corporate machine rooms.
It seems to be failing. Corporate IT types have learned or are learning that NT falls over far too much to be anything more than a workgroup server.
So now they're trying to take over academia by first squeezing into the server rooms and then pushing down to the desktop? In my view it will never get farther than the server because the servers will be too busy falling over for MS to go anywhere else but out the door.
Yes, keep our eyes open, this monster is far from dead, and the wounded monster is often the most dangerous. But I think this tactic will fail - after a while.
Hmmm, that sounds more like German. Swedish is more challenging. How about:
Teenen hu vas sewd foer lankar til MP3 filer har bin fried buy lokale kort. Korten say him are gillty still av hjelping kopieratt kreim, bat sints det warnt vad him were charged with, him vas let gaa.
Since Svenska looks like badly written Engelska in the first place, I think it's harder to fake.
>... and the criminals aren't likely to turn in their guns
Sure, but what if they only rounded up the handguns? You can still defend your home with a 30-ought-6 hunting rifle, can't you?
IIRC, most deaths by handguns in the United States are accidental, including self inflicted. So instead of guaranteeing your safety, the guns often just compromise it. If they changed the rules so that you have to be _trained_and_qualified_ to own a gun, then maybe...
And tell me, how is owning a pistol going to help if Washington decides to go tyrant on you? You think a pistol is going to help against the US Armed Forces? And who says the Armed Forces will help a tyrant in a country as used to freedom as the US. Face it, any comparison to Kosovo or 1776 colonial politics is bunk. They don't apply in this day, age, and society. Why do people keep digging up arguments that have no bearing on the US, yet ignore rich democratic societies where conditions are more similar?
> Because most of the shooting is done by criminals
And as for this tired old argument... for one response, in the place where I live they are changing the law to add on a mandatory ten years to the sentence for any crime commited with the assistance of a firearm. I think this is a start.
Strange country you have. More of your citizens die from gunshot wounds than the rest of the G24/OECD countries combined. Yet when it come time to figure out why, your elected twits decide it has something to do with entertainment and not all of your guns.
So, if the rest of the world's rich countries watch the same TV and movie violence, surf the same internet, and play the same Quake deathmatches and other violent video games, and yet manage to have a murder rate less than a tenth that of the US, it must be magic. It can't have anything to do with the fact that we have far fewer guns.
What's wrong with you and your politicians and your stupid gun lobby? Get rid of all of your lethal weapons and maybe the problem will be less.
And BTW, I'm writing from Canada, a country with sctrict guns laws, a miniscule murder rate, and yet our hunting season is alive and well. Go figure.
Open your eyes America, maybe, just maybe, some of us ignoranrt hut/igloo dwelling foreigners have it figured out better than the greatest country in the history of history (sarcasm intended).
Indeed this could be the new strategy, although I think it took the increasing visibilty of Linux and OSS for the corporate jocks to clue in.
Since MS has been known to undermine competition by underpricing and even giving away software, a tactic that is subsidised by the Windows monopoly cash cow, this strategy is basically poetic justice.
But how do you make money from poetic justice? Professional Services and subscriptions to online services. Open software is a low-to-no cost development item so giving away (not selling) something that costs nothing is not going to cause much of a loss. Selling services, all sorts of services, is where the cash comes in.
Make them come to your portal by giving the software away. They then know the site is there and may (hopefully will) come back for services and/or other goodies.
It's a service economy, remember? (I keep hearing this anyway). Services and other value adds is also the standard answer to "How do we make $$$ from OSS?"
Hmmm, I think you have hit the nail right on the head, at least in McNealy's view.
Sun would love nothing more than to have fat servers and thin clients as the new computing model, especially if it's _their_ fat servers running the show. In that world, who cares what the client OS is? Sun has given up on the desktop and if Linux helps to clear MS away from the pesky PC market so much the better. It's easier for Linux to communicate with cousin Solaris on the big fat servers than it is for MS-anything and Sun knows it.
If Linux helps clear the PCs of MS and allows Sun to concentrate on the big fat servers the Sun gods will be as happy as swines in excrement.
So MS should stick to their core business, desktops and should not wander into distributed computing? Besides, Sun's core busniness is Unix systems, networking just comes with that turf as a natural sidekick. They haven't wandered an inch. -M
Slashdot Mirror
> The Viking Longboat was no ordinary boat. It was ...
> designed to be sailed up a low-lying beach,
> picked up by the oars, and carried to where the
> raid
Hmmm, that's actually a new one on me. The raider version of the viking ships was, IIRC, a deep sea-going vessel that doubled as a beach landing craft. I believe a classic raider like the Gokstad ship would still be too heavy for a portage - and in any case lugging the ship around would have deprived the vikings of the quick hit and run tactics they often used.
The Swedish vikings (Rus) did use portage-capable boats of the same "clinker" design on Russian rivers, but it was a much smaller than the North Sea raiders.
Still, for its very design elegance, flexible construction and extreme usefulness to the intended job, the viking longship was indeed a classic hack.
-M
Oh yeah, they're scared all right. So are all of the other huge institutions that originated during the industrial era.
What we are seing could very well be early skirmishes in the conflict between the forces of the "mass-market" industrial past and the new, but still disorganised forces of a new society. Corporatism after all was an offspring of the industrial revolution.
Right now the old forces are befuddled by the changing landscape, but they do have one advantage: the ability to manipulate a government system originally designed by elements friendly to rising industrialism 200+ years ago.
In this light, representative government - the system itself - is geared against the Net and any other new information technologies that threaten the old order.
Of course they're scared, so should we. It's gonna be one hell of a fight.
-M
"we are the world" So said the Yankee musical glitterati in the 80's. C'mon man, this is why US tourists are so well liked by the primitives in the non-world. -M
You raise a good point and I'm sure it's already happening as your other responders have pointed out.
... oops. Too late.
The difference between the posers and the genuine in any tribe is depth. As geek becomes chic, I'm sure the real geeks will still find ways to differentiate themselves from the poseurs, and it will probably be knowledge based, not something superficial. So scripts kiddies will eventually be exposed as superficial unless they take the time and effort to gain real depth.
We just have to avoid looking arrogant to the masses in asserting ourselves as the real thing
-M
Sure, the BSDs are extremely good but would most people (non-Unix literates) have heard of them if it wasn't for Linux? Would the now-solved licensing issues be cleared as they were with the existence of Linux as a prod? Would there be as many good OSS projects out there as there are now if Linux hadn't come along to complete GNU?
I really doubt it.
-MV
So you'd be using something else. And since I seriously doubt there'd be a free Unix as viable as Linux is right now, I really wonder how many of the current crop of Linux converts would be using it. I think we'd be back where we were in 1995 .
-MV
I'd agree with that. What we now call Linux is, by any other name, a collection of open software arranged around the Linux kernel. If Linux wasn't OSS, I think that another open source kernel+OS would be moving (or have already moved) into that space.
I think that the Linux kernel allowed the attainment of a complete GNU system at a very good time and because of that timing, we now have a rapidly maturing system.
If Linux hadn't moved into that space when it did, something else would have eventually, perhaps a BSD perhaps something else. I also think we'd be well behind where we are now and still irrelevant in the eyes of the mainstream. And yes, I think Linus' kernel would be languishing with Andy's.
-MV
... play on Linux and work on a commercial Un*x. That way you can eat and play and the skills you develop in play can easily be used at work making you even more valuable and allowing you to eat even more.
Why bother with Win32 at all. Even if (Solaris|HP-UX|AIX|IRIX) isn't Linux, it's a lot closer to the mark than any Window pain.
-M
Hmmm, you're right, but why limit yourself to the poor and inexperienced?
... Holy Scheisse!!!) and still have the top-notch techie tools to which I was so attached. It was, in a nutshell, the best of all worlds: an honest to goodness and cheap Unix on commodity hardware.
I was a 30 year old techie who could afford, and owned, a SPARCstation at home when I switched to Linux in 1995. I had a SPARC because I wanted to have the same home and work platform. Yes, I used all the GNU stuff on SunOS even before Solaris 2.x made it an even better choice to do so.
Linux let me go back to owning a hardware platform that didn't gouge me for every little hardware extra (chech the prices for SBUS video boards etc
You don't have to be a 13-24 to see a good thing as a good thing.
-M
Quoted from the article:
...
"They will simply offer it to customers and let
the customers decide if it will be Linux, NT or Novell."
This seems to me similar to the operating procedure used by the big blue sales force back in the early '90's. They wouldn't push AIX over other platforms, they'd let the customer decide. By time they figured out the customer wasn't going to decide on MVS or OS/400 or OS/2, Sun or HP had snuck into the customer's site with a Unix box. Didn't see DEC Ultrix much. I guess too many Digital salespeople were waiting for customers to decide between it and VMS
Maybe a bit of history will repeat again?
-M
I can't see breaking them up as solving anything. It could actually harm the market more than help it. It would also do nothing to prevent another information age monopoly from rising down the road.
I say force them to open up the code in the areas of monopoly and keep it on the books as a solution to future software monopolies. BTW, by "open the code" I mean go as far as GPL levels of "open." Maybe extend that rule to ensure network protocols stay open.
Just a thought, but I think it may be more effective than a simple breakup.
-M
I just don't know what to think about this, it's a real tough call. It's easy to look at this with more than a little cynicism but on the other hand it is a very interesting development.
If nothing else, the opening up of a "traditional" Unix will be interesting from the "how did _they_ do this/that/other thing" on a brick by brick basis. Many of us will be getting their first peek at System V code after years of working with the binary OS. I for one am curious. Am I the only one?
As for Yet Another License. Well just like "one tool fits all tasks" isn't true, maybe one licensing model doesn't fit all situations. GPL may just be too difficult to fit code that evolved largely in the Cathedral - even of it is a Bizarre(Bazaarish?) Cathedral.
Any opening is a good thing. We'll soon all be able topeek, if we wish, at bit and pieces of Solaris code. This is something we couldn't do last week, it is therefore a positive development.
Let's let the jury sit for a while.
-M
Apple pickers have been compared to just about every computing based culture/tribe in existence over the last eon and a half. It's just finally now that a comparison between Mac Heads and Un*x wireheads has finally been considered worthy of attention by the self absorbed literati and other mainstream pundits. Strangely, it was these same experts who often called the Mac-PC slagfest the "Apple-IBM" slagfest long after IBM ceased to be relevant in the slagging.
The funny thing is the way the article treated Linux and BSD and Unix in general as if they were somehow mutually exclusive. I also finf it funny how articles like this and many others seem to view Linux as a strictly "youth" thing and ignore the 20+ year old tradition of Unix based OSS development and the accompanying mindset. Just about every 30-40-something Unix literate I know runs Linux at home. So much for it being the exclusive OS of inexperienced teens. Many of us have known many long years of being memebers of a virtually unknown computing tribe.
Lastly, the article's comparison is dead wrong with the "wait till they have their bad weather" drivel. Viewed in the longer lens of history, the Unix tradition has been ignored, dismissed, and even been prematurely pronounced dead by advocates of "superior" technologies. Linux and BSD are proof that Unix is alive and kicking back - again.
In this light, even to be recognised as being in existence by the Apple pickers is better than continuing to tolerate their ignorance of a long and very successful tradition. It just may take them a while to truly clue into what it means.
-M
I've experienced the opposite, at least from the people whose opinion I give a damn about ;-)
When I moved back to the rat race in January, I ended up doing the consultant thing. No more 9 to 5 for this techie. I also declined to buy a car and now use taxis, transit, bicycle or the good old train where necessary.
When on a customer project, I work at the necessary pace to get the job done, and done properly, no rush, no BS. When it's done, I'm done.
My friends, especially the ones with mortgages and car payments and hour and a half commutes to thankless DBA jobs in soulless industrial parks in the faceless suburbs, envy me. They say I'm more relaxed than ever, even look healthier.
In the meantime, I'm very connected. Internet connection, cell phone, pager, the whole works. After all, I'm a technologist. The trick is to use the technology wisely and not get overheated in some endless purposeless spiral ratrace.
I don't think it's the technology that's killing people. It's the rat race in the chase for the almighty buck that's at fault. The technology is just technology. The frantic pace at which we use it and let it control us is our own choice.
MAybe it's easier for some than others, but ultimately it all comes down to choice. If you choose to be controlled by the latest in gadgets for no better reason than "everybody else does it, so I have to as well in order to be cool" then you are a victim of corporate produced, mass enforced peer pressure, AKA fashion.
-M
Hey, this guy is living proof on network television that the real wacko hillbillies are living north of the border, not in the Ozarks.
Then again, the guy sounds more interesting in the interview than he seems as the two dimensional hick weirdo from the sticks portrayed on TV. So I guess he's really an inventive and innovative wacko hillbilly from north of the border.
-M
> Apple did this, now look how far they've fallen
... just added Linux as a shameless attempt to
> after they stopped seeding educational
> institutions.
Sure, my first machine was an Apple in high school (early-mid 80's) which I learned how to program in BASIC. Never saw an Apple in college. Never did any BASIC in college either. Been using Un*x ever since. Wonder why? Think about going under the hood on an Apple. Geez! Can't find a CLI let alone the frigging source.
> learning Unix from one's elders thing -- my eyes
> actually rolled when I read that
You mean you never heard about the well known mentoring system out there? Most, if not all, Unix types I know, me included, learned the trick of "actually learning Unix" from a more experienced friend or associate. Roll your eyes all you want, _Tradition_ means transmitting the folklore in the oral tradition. Unix is a traditional philosophy. Linux continues in this tradition. You seem unaware of this.
>
> catch a ride on the bandwagon.
Again, Linux is very much a part and a continuation of the Unix tradition. The article indicates this. You must have missed this.
I wish you good learning.
-M
Not to be dismissive of MS' tactics but this could backfire on them, maybe badly.
Over the last few years MS has pushed and pushed to get corporate IT types to move to an all MS environment from laptop to server. This push would use MS' desktop dominance to pressure Unix and Netware out of corporate machine rooms.
It seems to be failing. Corporate IT types have learned or are learning that NT falls over far too much to be anything more than a workgroup server.
So now they're trying to take over academia by first squeezing into the server rooms and then pushing down to the desktop? In my view it will never get farther than the server because the servers will be too busy falling over for MS to go anywhere else but out the door.
Yes, keep our eyes open, this monster is far from dead, and the wounded monster is often the most dangerous. But I think this tactic will fail - after a while.
-M
Hmmm, that sounds more like German. Swedish is more challenging. How about:
Teenen hu vas sewd foer lankar til MP3 filer har bin fried buy lokale kort. Korten say him are gillty still av hjelping kopieratt kreim, bat sints det warnt vad him were charged with, him vas let gaa.
Since Svenska looks like badly written Engelska in the first place, I think it's harder to fake.
-M
> ... and the criminals aren't likely to turn in their guns
...
... for one response, in the place where I live they are changing the law to add on a mandatory ten years to the sentence for any crime commited with the assistance of a firearm. I think this is a start.
Sure, but what if they only rounded up the handguns? You can still defend your home with a 30-ought-6 hunting rifle, can't you?
IIRC, most deaths by handguns in the United States are accidental, including self inflicted. So instead of guaranteeing your safety, the guns often just compromise it. If they changed the rules so that you have to be _trained_and_qualified_ to own a gun, then maybe
And tell me, how is owning a pistol going to help if Washington decides to go tyrant on you? You think a pistol is going to help against the US Armed Forces? And who says the Armed Forces will help a tyrant in a country as used to freedom as the US. Face it, any comparison to Kosovo or 1776 colonial politics is bunk. They don't apply in this day, age, and society. Why do people keep digging up arguments that have no bearing on the US, yet ignore rich democratic societies where conditions are more similar?
> Because most of the shooting is done by criminals
And as for this tired old argument
-M
Hunting weapons are fine. I doubt they'll be banned. Deer aren't endangered, on the contrary...
Why do private citizens need handguns? If less of you did, less people would get shot.
And I'm no leftist, I'm a licensed hunter. I just don't own a handgun. I don't see the point.
-M
First or second amendment?
Strange country you have. More of your citizens die from gunshot wounds than the rest of the G24/OECD countries combined. Yet when it come time to figure out why, your elected twits decide it has something to do with entertainment and not all of your guns.
So, if the rest of the world's rich countries watch the same TV and movie violence, surf the same internet, and play the same Quake deathmatches and other violent video games, and yet manage to have a murder rate less than a tenth that of the US, it must be magic. It can't have anything to do with the fact that we have far fewer guns.
What's wrong with you and your politicians and your stupid gun lobby? Get rid of all of your lethal weapons and maybe the problem will be less.
And BTW, I'm writing from Canada, a country with sctrict guns laws, a miniscule murder rate, and yet our hunting season is alive and well. Go figure.
Open your eyes America, maybe, just maybe, some of us ignoranrt hut/igloo dwelling foreigners have it figured out better than the greatest country in the history of history (sarcasm intended).
-M
So naturally the Office Suite that will appear on WebTV will be a Microsoft offering, like maybe a huge CaptiveX monster.
Think? Indeed.
-M
Indeed this could be the new strategy, although I think it took the increasing visibilty of Linux and OSS for the corporate jocks to clue in.
Since MS has been known to undermine competition by underpricing and even giving away software, a tactic that is subsidised by the Windows monopoly cash cow, this strategy is basically poetic justice.
But how do you make money from poetic justice? Professional Services and subscriptions to online services. Open software is a low-to-no cost development item so giving away (not selling) something that costs nothing is not going to cause much of a loss. Selling services, all sorts of services, is where the cash comes in.
Make them come to your portal by giving the software away. They then know the site is there and may (hopefully will) come back for services and/or other goodies.
It's a service economy, remember? (I keep hearing this anyway). Services and other value adds is also the standard answer to "How do we make $$$ from OSS?"
-M
Hmmm, I think you have hit the nail right on the head, at least in McNealy's view.
Sun would love nothing more than to have fat servers and thin clients as the new computing model, especially if it's _their_ fat servers running the show. In that world, who cares what the client OS is? Sun has given up on the desktop and if Linux helps to clear MS away from the pesky PC market so much the better. It's easier for Linux to communicate with cousin Solaris on the big fat servers than it is for MS-anything and Sun knows it.
If Linux helps clear the PCs of MS and allows Sun to concentrate on the big fat servers the Sun gods will be as happy as swines in excrement.
Onto the next monopoly. This one's getting old.
-M
So MS should stick to their core business, desktops and should not wander into distributed computing? Besides, Sun's core busniness is Unix systems, networking just comes with that turf as a natural sidekick. They haven't wandered an inch. -M