I'm optimistic that our electoral process would work and pass effective legislation to prevent genetic discrimination. Don't be too sure. As mentioned in the article, such legislation (the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA) has already passed the House by a wide margin. What it did not state is that the legislations is being held up in the Senate by a single senator. For those wanting more information, GINA is being held up by a single Senator, Tom Coburn (R - Oklahoma), who, strangely enough, is also a medical doctor. You can see that the health industry makes up his largest contributing block, with also a strong showing from ideology/single-issue groups. You can read more about GINA. Full story.
I'm optimistic that our electoral process would work and pass effective legislation to prevent genetic discrimination.
Don't be too sure. As mentioned in the article, such legislation (the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA) has already passed the House by a wide margin. What it did not state is that the legislations is being held up in the Senate by a single senator.
This is the third or fourth posting about this in the last couple weeks and it is a total waste of time. DELL ALREADY SELLS COMPUTERS WITH RHEL. Go to Dell and check out their "n" series. We have over 200 Dell 450n/470n/490n Precision workstations that came with RHEL on them (we wiped them and install our own custom Debian build). We also have two racks of their blades (PowerEdge 1855) that are running 64-bit Ubuntu. Dell only provides hardware support for these systems. If you have RHEL problems, you call Dell and they transfer your to Red Hat (since we wipe RHEL off the systems, we are own our own).
Please, please, please Dell and Slashdot editors: just admit it, Dell already sells Linux. Stop these nonsensical postings about corporate posturing.
The guy in the video (http://www.redhat.com/rhel/informationcenter/succ essstories/government/faa.html) says they migrated from a RISC-based system. The press release says UNIX. So it must be a RISC/UNIX system. HP-UX? Probably. Solaris? AIX? Maybe (most people do not refer to SPARC or POWER as RISC even though they are). IRIX? Doubtful.
Quite frankly, more puff is what linux and free (as in freedom) software need. We all know and love the stuff, but how many newbies have you converted in the last month? We need to get the word out, and puff does that extremely effectively. It gets the business-types to ask questions and wonder if free software can work. We need big companies to get the word out for us, we need to penetrate into the big server market (like IBM serves) just as we need to get on the desktop. These pieces in high profile publications are what are going to open the door, and once its open, there is no stopping us.
People who don't know a thing about./configure && make && make install need this stuff.
What impact will the findings of fact and whatever action is taken have on anti-trust laws in general?
It is my understanding that at least part of this lawsuit is based on the new economic model that a monopoly must be redefined for high-tech or otherwise interdependent economies.[1] For example, if you are a company I do business with, I don't care what type of company cars you give your employees, but I do care what type of PC software you run. If my software is incompatible with yours, this makes our communication more difficult and you may go elsewhere for the services I provide. Since the large majority of businesses use Windows/Office, I too must use those to ensure ``optimal'' compatibility in communications (etc.) between my company and the companies I interact with.
Therefore, if everything goes as it seems it is going to, will ``monopoly'' receive a more general, powerful definition and the possibility of this happening again (with another Microsoft-like monopoly) be lessened since the courts will be forced to recognize the nature of high-tech economics?
1. I cannot recall the economist who developed this model.
It is not that *nix is hard, it is that it is different. Most people don't think Windows is hard because that is what they have ``grown up'' on; it is what they are used to; it is what they know.
Trust me, as someone who doesn't use Windows, it is not exactly intuitive. My father recently got his first computer and has Windows 98 on there with Office 2000, etc., because that is what his company uses. He calls me all the time asking how to do this or that, and to try and figure it out is often not easy.
If you grew up using *nix (as my children will), then that would be easy for you. When forced to use a windows machine, you would ask ``why does it crash?'', ``what should I do when it freezes?'', ``why is everything in one directory?'', ``why would they put everything about the system into one file?'', ``how come I have to reboot to get it to work right?'' It would be Windows that would seem odd, difficult, and nonintuitive.
You see, it is all perception. Everything you experience is tainted by what you know. Since you know Windows, you use it as a yardstick to judge other operating systems. But *nix is so different from traditional PC OS's, that this is really a disservice to *nix. You must approach fresh, forgetting what you know. Then you can begin to appreciate *nix for what it has to offer.
Sorry to bust balls on this, but when people talk about Big Brother it really ticks me off. Has anyone read 1984? If you have, you know that Big Brother has come to mean something completely different in our society than it did in Oceania.
Sure, Big Brother was omnipresent in everyone's life, but he was a welcome presence. He brought security and order (much like Nixon promised when he got elected). People accepted the monitoring because they valued these other things more then their own privacy. Even Winston didn't mind the invasion of privacy so much, he was rebelling against the control of ideas and lack of idealogical freedom within the system.
So whereas we go ballistic at any mention of Big Brother, the people of Oceania _loved_ Big Brother. So the comparison is faulty.
As for the monitoring software, it only has partial, minimally significant aspects of Big Brother. On the other hand, these aspects are also the most disturbing ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be too sure. As mentioned in the article, such legislation (the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA) has already passed the House by a wide margin. What it did not state is that the legislations is being held up in the Senate by a single senator.
This is the third or fourth posting about this in the last couple weeks and it is a total waste of time. DELL ALREADY SELLS COMPUTERS WITH RHEL. Go to Dell and check out their "n" series. We have over 200 Dell 450n/470n/490n Precision workstations that came with RHEL on them (we wiped them and install our own custom Debian build). We also have two racks of their blades (PowerEdge 1855) that are running 64-bit Ubuntu. Dell only provides hardware support for these systems. If you have RHEL problems, you call Dell and they transfer your to Red Hat (since we wipe RHEL off the systems, we are own our own).
Please, please, please Dell and Slashdot editors: just admit it, Dell already sells Linux. Stop these nonsensical postings about corporate posturing.
The guy in the video (http://www.redhat.com/rhel/informationcenter/succ essstories/government/faa.html) says they migrated from a RISC-based system. The press release says UNIX. So it must be a RISC/UNIX system. HP-UX? Probably. Solaris? AIX? Maybe (most people do not refer to SPARC or POWER as RISC even though they are). IRIX? Doubtful.
> > Although it's true that functionality is
> > important, at what cost?
>
> At all costs. What else is there?
Freedom.
Debian GNU/Linux has a hamradio section already.
Quite frankly, more puff is what linux and free (as in freedom) software need. We all know and love the stuff, but how many newbies have you converted in the last month? We need to get the word out, and puff does that extremely effectively. It gets the business-types to ask questions and wonder if free software can work. We need big companies to get the word out for us, we need to penetrate into the big server market (like IBM serves) just as we need to get on the desktop. These pieces in high profile publications are what are going to open the door, and once its open, there is no stopping us.
./configure && make && make install need this stuff.
People who don't know a thing about
dd
"if you hang the blame on the wall
What impact will the findings of fact and whatever action is taken have on anti-trust laws in general?
It is my understanding that at least part of this lawsuit is based on the new economic model that a monopoly must be redefined for high-tech or otherwise interdependent economies.[1] For example, if you are a company I do business with, I don't care what type of company cars you give your employees, but I do care what type of PC software you run. If my software is incompatible with yours, this makes our communication more difficult and you may go elsewhere for the services I provide. Since the large majority of businesses use Windows/Office, I too must use those to ensure ``optimal'' compatibility in communications (etc.) between my company and the companies I interact with.
Therefore, if everything goes as it seems it is going to, will ``monopoly'' receive a more general, powerful definition and the possibility of this happening again (with another Microsoft-like monopoly) be lessened since the courts will be forced to recognize the nature of high-tech economics?
1. I cannot recall the economist who developed this model.
It is not that *nix is hard, it is that it is different. Most people don't think Windows is hard because that is what they have ``grown up'' on; it is what they are used to; it is what they know.
Trust me, as someone who doesn't use Windows, it is not exactly intuitive. My father recently got his first computer and has Windows 98 on there with Office 2000, etc., because that is what his company uses. He calls me all the time asking how to do this or that, and to try and figure it out is often not easy.
If you grew up using *nix (as my children will), then that would be easy for you. When forced to use a windows machine, you would ask ``why does it crash?'', ``what should I do when it freezes?'', ``why is everything in one directory?'', ``why would they put everything about the system into one file?'', ``how come I have to reboot to get it to work right?'' It would be Windows that would seem odd, difficult, and nonintuitive.
You see, it is all perception. Everything you experience is tainted by what you know. Since you know Windows, you use it as a yardstick to judge other operating systems. But *nix is so different from traditional PC OS's, that this is really a disservice to *nix. You must approach fresh, forgetting what you know. Then you can begin to appreciate *nix for what it has to offer.
Sorry to bust balls on this, but when people talk about Big Brother it really ticks me off. Has anyone read 1984? If you have, you know that Big Brother has come to mean something completely different in our society than it did in Oceania.
Sure, Big Brother was omnipresent in everyone's life, but he was a welcome presence. He brought security and order (much like Nixon promised when he got elected). People accepted the monitoring because they valued these other things more then their own privacy. Even Winston didn't mind the invasion of privacy so much, he was rebelling against the control of ideas and lack of idealogical freedom within the system.
So whereas we go ballistic at any mention of Big Brother, the people of Oceania _loved_ Big Brother. So the comparison is faulty.
As for the monitoring software, it only has partial, minimally significant aspects of Big Brother. On the other hand, these aspects are also the most disturbing ones.