That's the whole point of the GPL, MS can't use that tactic. Even if the GPl is determined to by unenforceable, common copyright law still holds effect, which says that MS can't redistribute the relevant code.
OT PS - the cripple fight scene in South Park was taken from the fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live, hit-for-hit, line-for-line.
While I certainly concede your points that my complaint can be directed at numerous systems, you're going to a have tough time convincing me that downloading drivers from ati.com is much of a nuisance as getting people on irc to tell you what packages the package manager failed to install, that the usbmouse kernel module apparently isn't for usb mice, and what to put in a handful of config files. I was even ridiculed for daring to load "random" modules to try and make my usb mouse work. Not a fault of the debian system, but you certainly won't get that response from a web page or the driver's setup program.
Optical solutions. They were doing very well until they stopped courting rural and independent telcos, focusing only on RBOCs. The RBOCs are interested, mind you, just very slow to act. The dollar investment of the copper lines they have every is enormous, so jumping over to fiber isn't exactly in their short term plans.
Did you try the Knoppix CD? This is possibly the best hardware detection in the Linux world and allows easy install of Debian right from the disc.
actually I staretd off with knoppix for this pass at debian. I have to admit, it got my sound card right, which Red Hat hasn't been able to do in the past few major releases. The last Red Hat release that ran sndconfig to setup soundcards was the last one that setup my sound card out of box. All the hardware worked, so I did the hard drive install, rebooted, ran `apt-get update; apt-get upgrade` and it puked. I figured if that didn't work out-of-box then I wasn't going to use it, and went to pure debian. I was about to reburn the knoppix cd to get the mouse config, but the folks on IRC got it set straight before I had a chance (IDE controller wasn't accessible so I couldn't burn the CD, so I waited it out a bit on IRC and it paid off). It's just stupid to have to go through that much effort for something so trivial as a usb mouse. But with anaconda ported to debian, much of that will hopefully go away.
what exactly is so horrid about RPM? Off the top of my head the only real difference between deb and rpm is RPM supports GPG signing and MD5 checksums to verify integrity.
Well, the thing about Debian is it's only user-friendly if your hardware works on it out-of-the box. My laptop has an Intel i830M chipset. If I want 1024x768 resolution with anything over 8 bit color, I must either user another disrtibution or run Debian unstable with experimental packages to get XFree86 4.3. I installed Debian unstable on my 5 year old PC this month and had to get on IRC to get my USB mouse working. Then after installing the 2.4.22 SMP kernel, I had to get back on IRC to get access to my IDE drives! These two should have been automatic years ago. As it sits now I can burn CDs in ATAPI mode, which is dog-freaking slow compared to the SCSI emulation mode, which I can't find any documentation on configuring.
Just to give you a little background, I've been running Linux at home, starting with Slackware, moving to Red Hat, and trying out Debian, for 7 years. I've managed a remote datacenter of 10 Linux boxes with nothing but ssh and the occasional use of a cyclades terminal server for when things get really fubar (like the nfs server got a little hosed and i couldn't log into anything remotley). So I'm no stranger to building my own kernels and configuring hardware by hand, I just find Debian makes it so much harder than it needs to be.
The problem with your argument is that when you buy a Windows PC from Dell, HP, IBM, etc, Office doesn't cost $600, and Windows doesn't cost $100-$300. When you ship the volumes that those vendors do, and agree to pay Microsoft a license fee for every machine sold, rather than every machine the products are shipped on, the cost of Office and Windows likely drops below $50 each. When Dell was selling desktops with Red Hat Linux, they chose to use one of the retail editions, and it ended up that the Linux PCs they sold cost more than the Windows PCs they sold. I'll grant that Dell should have chosen the free version of RH, so we could truly see the MS tax. But most consumers don't know that. All they saw was that the Dell machine with Linux cost more than the Dell machine with Windows. Even now, HP is selling the d220 with Mandrake Linux for $84 more than with Windows. They do this because the expensive Linux distros are more user-friendly than the free ones.
I could easily build a quad xeon monster and sit it on my desk, effectively making it a personal computer.
Despite your dictionary quote (which you failed to attribute, so we can't assume it's the official English (UK or US English) definition) I'd say that putting a computer on your desk does not effectively make it a personal computer. I'd think that for purposes of advertising, a personal computer is one produced and marketed as such. Go to dell.com, hp.com, or ibm.com and find me a quad xeon configuration of a system labeled as home user system.
Please don't compare a whitebox [Wintel] PC with anything other than a whitebox Apple [PC]. The prices are so different because they are not in the same class and market.
which they will NOT support, its completely community driven
Not entirely accurate, but the sentiment is right. Red Hat won't be paying their employees to backport patches and host them on RHN. Community volunteers are being given a framework to have take over maintenance of packages, and even have their pacakges included as official packages. I anticipate it will be a fair balance between RHL and Debian. You get the community support and package maintenance, combined with a supported framework for third party repositories. But you still get a corporation paying people to develop core pieces. I guess maybe GNOME itself would be a good example. Red Hat has a handful of core GNOME developers on staff, but GNOME also has volunteer developers as official project contributors.
Not quite on-topic with the book review, but relevant to the comments discussing life-cycle. If I've observed anything out of the transition from Red Hat Linux to Fedora, which is nowhere near done, it's that a common standard like the LSB and FHS combined with package managet agnostic repository header information is becoming essential. While waiting for FC to come out I installed Debian unstable, and was quickly reminded that the reason I liked Red Hat in the first place was for the awesome config tools. I actually had to get on irc to figure out not only how to configure my USB mouse but also how to get my IDE controller working! Move forward a couple of weeks and FC is out and installed side-by-side with Debian unstable. I hate having to do so much extra legwork to get ntfs and mp3 support. When LSB/FHS compliance are so strong between the major vendors that an app packaged for Debian can be installed on Red Hat and Red Hat's config tools can see/configure it, or Red Hat's config tools can be installed on Debian and produce config files that Debian will be aware of, there will be rejoicing in the streets. RedHat adding yuma dn apt support to up2date is a huge step. Yum is part of the Fedora Core, and apt is on the way, I believe. But having the tool agnostic repo header info will make it all moot. You setup your package repo and magically apt, yum, and up2date can all process dependencies. What a glorious day it will be.
I recall one of the biggest holdups to ogg support in portables was in the hardware. I think it was that none of the portables shipped with an FPU, and ogg required one. So perhaps you bought a player before there was technical ability for portables to support ogg. I'm sure someone will post a link or two and take any potential informative mod points i might have received were i more motivated to research futher.
That's the big point of ending Red Hat Linux and merging with Fedora.us for a free RH distro. Rh engineers will still be contributing by maintaining the packages for Red Hat authored software and I'm sure some other core packages. But then the rest of, potentially like Mozilla, will be maintained by the volunteer community, like Debian is. The maintainers then get to decide to backport the fix or package the new version.
not quite. You're not allowed to modify any of the trademarked stuff and still call it Red Hat. So CheapBytes was within their rights to burn the iso images unedited to CDR and sell them. The restriction was if you change any of if you're not allowed to call it RedHat, because of the trademarked content like icons and such.
First off, realise that I've stated in at least two other posts that I agree this tactic is anti-competetive.
Breaking other people's software and bundling software together is exactly the behavior Microsoft was accused of in the antitrust trial.
No, doing all that in the context of leveraging a monopoly is what Microsoft was accused of. Apple doesn't have a monopoly to abuse, so they can't be compared in the legal context of monopoly behavior.
Apple doesn't need a monopoly position in the Windows-based PC market. They are attempting to create a monopoly in software for synchronizing the iPod on Windows by breaking software that previously worked, and then further trying to extend that monopoly into other areas by taking over the functions of all other media players on the system.
So you can leverage a monopoly without having one? That's news to me. In your original post you stated If you look at it in the exact same way that the court looked at Microsoft, then you'll find it is monopolistic:. Which to me means you think they are leveraging a monopoly.
Remember that at the time the antitrust trial was brought against Microsoft they didn't have anything resembling a monopoly in either Internet browsers or media players, either, but were accused of using an OS monopoly (over a very limited market) to push out competition in these areas.
That's exactly right, and that was the right time to bring legal action. Microsoft was seen to be leveraging their monopoly of the x86-based PC market to gain a dominant position in the web browser and media player markets. Those are three separate markets so such a tactic is illegal.
As far as leveraging a monopoly on MacOS based PCs, it was simply that monopoly that allowed them to market the iPod and iTunes to the point where the platform had enough strength to leverage it's way into the Windows-based PC space.
Please cite examples of how Apple did the same thing with Mac OS and iTunes that Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer. You'll have to show me products which compete with iPod and iTunes on Mac OS which were technically incapable of competing because Apple altered the OS to give them the advantage. If you can't do that, then you can't claim Apple leveraged their Mac OS based PC monopoly to gain a dominant position in the portable mp3 player and online music retail markets. If you can, then I'll concede that I was wrong.
Apple is now simply leveraging the popularity of the iPod to push iTunes into the Windows space
Apple does not have a monopoly in the portable mp3 player market. Leveraging popularity is not the same as leveraging a monopoly. One is legal, one is not.
Once again, so we're all clear, I'm not defending this action as fair and competetive, I'm defending it as not monopoly abusing.
I work with NT kernel crashes and I can tell you that bugchecks in the GDI code are pretty rare... in my opinion this "without any significant decrease" is not a load of shit. Most bluescreens come from driver code.
I need no convincing that drivers are the problem. I just can't recall having to be so concerned about non-critical drivers crashing the entire system with any OS other than Windows. I don't think a network card driver should be able to crash the gui interface, and vice versa. If the driver for the disk controller with my system drive crashes, then it makes sense that the whole system will be unusable.
I don't know anything about mozilla, opera, konquerer, netscape or whatever but they probably put rendering code in shared libraries too. I mean, it's a good design if you want to reuse the same code to do a help system, run MSDN, run the Visual Studio environment (god I hate this thing), and run the explorer code.
Shared libraries are a good thing. The difference is the IE code is in libraries that are required for the OS to work. You don't need Mozilla libraries for the Linux kernel to operate. Also, the API's contained in the IE code are not made available for other application vendors to use. They are available for mozilla and konqueror.
With regard to your linksys driver, that's just poor driver design. That really sucks. But I have a laptop with an intel centrino wireless card that works great when running as non-admin on XP so it's not a limitation of windows.
Had not meant to imply it was Window's fault, just that there are scenarios in Windows-land that require you to run as administrator when you shouldn't have to. The same could certainly happen in Linux, but I'm not aware of any.
I don't mean to be defending windows here -- there are some bad design choices and definitely things to fix... but I don't think an excessive amount of code runs in kernel mode and in the 2k/XP timeframe a lot of work went into making it easy to run as a non-administrator which were the two points that the original post was attacking.
But this discussion is about software on Windows PCs. How does it leverage their monopoly of MacOS based PCs to gain extra market share in the portable MP3 player and/or online music retail markets? Apple has no monopoly positions in the Windows based PC market.
If this is the case, I never again want to hear complaints about the terrible things Microsoft has done before they were actually convicted of monopolistic practices, nor the terrible things they have done in markets where they don't have monopoly status.
The problem is not having a monopoly in a particular market, or even branching into other markets when a monopoly is held. The problem is using the monopoly to gain a competetive advantage. Microsoft forced OEM computer manufacturers to make products in one market more visible than competing products before licensing a different product which held a Monopoly. Apple is doing no such thing. I do thing this in anti-competetive behavior on Apple's part, it's just not Monopoly abuse.
This isn't anti-competetive monopoly abuse. It is anti-competetive free-market tactics. Apple has a monopoly on MacOS based desktop systems. They might also have a monopoly on legal online music sales in the U.S., and/or portable mp3 players. I consider those to be part of the same market though. So no monopoly position is being abused to gain market share in a new market, rather to increase market share in the same market. If MS does something anti-competetive with Windows to gain market share in the Intel based desktop PC market, it wouldn't be a strong candidate for anti-trust proceedings. Some consumers have iPods which they access with Windows. They then obtained iTunes for Windows. These are two products both made by Apple for use with a service which Apple provides. You were not forced to buy either of these components with your Windows PC, nor are you forced to buy either with an Apple PC. It is purely up to each consumer to go out of their way to obtain these products. That is why it is defensible, in my opinion.
Before you over-react and call me a fanboy or a zealot, I have two home computers running Linux, and my worktstation at work runs Linux. I have never owned an Apple computer. And I did start off calling this tactic anti-competetive. I just tried to clarify how it's not anti-competetive by way of monopoly abuse (selectively criticizing).
blame on me for careless examples. If I'm not mistaken, video drivers run in kernel space, so should have been my example for that. I didn't mean to imply that IE was both a kernel service and run as root, just that those two parts of the Windows platform in combination are bad. And to be fair, the IE rendering code is in system DLLs, so it's not an unreasonable misunderstading to think some of it might be running in kernel space. As for stuff needing to be logged in as administrator, I have a linksys wireless card which, using the current drivers, is useless unless I am logged in as an administrator. Note that I mean 100% useless, it will not associate with an AP unless I am an administrator. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, I even went through two levels of Linksys support. So in order to have my wireless internet access without buying more hardware, I must run as administrator.:( Fortunately I just run Linux all the time.
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That's the whole point of the GPL, MS can't use that tactic. Even if the GPl is determined to by unenforceable, common copyright law still holds effect, which says that MS can't redistribute the relevant code.
OT PS - the cripple fight scene in South Park was taken from the fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live, hit-for-hit, line-for-line.
While I certainly concede your points that my complaint can be directed at numerous systems, you're going to a have tough time convincing me that downloading drivers from ati.com is much of a nuisance as getting people on irc to tell you what packages the package manager failed to install, that the usbmouse kernel module apparently isn't for usb mice, and what to put in a handful of config files. I was even ridiculed for daring to load "random" modules to try and make my usb mouse work. Not a fault of the debian system, but you certainly won't get that response from a web page or the driver's setup program.
You already pay that. It's the Universal Access Fee on your phone bill.
disclaimer - I used to work for OSI
actually I staretd off with knoppix for this pass at debian. I have to admit, it got my sound card right, which Red Hat hasn't been able to do in the past few major releases. The last Red Hat release that ran sndconfig to setup soundcards was the last one that setup my sound card out of box. All the hardware worked, so I did the hard drive install, rebooted, ran `apt-get update; apt-get upgrade` and it puked. I figured if that didn't work out-of-box then I wasn't going to use it, and went to pure debian. I was about to reburn the knoppix cd to get the mouse config, but the folks on IRC got it set straight before I had a chance (IDE controller wasn't accessible so I couldn't burn the CD, so I waited it out a bit on IRC and it paid off). It's just stupid to have to go through that much effort for something so trivial as a usb mouse. But with anaconda ported to debian, much of that will hopefully go away.
what exactly is so horrid about RPM? Off the top of my head the only real difference between deb and rpm is RPM supports GPG signing and MD5 checksums to verify integrity.
Just to give you a little background, I've been running Linux at home, starting with Slackware, moving to Red Hat, and trying out Debian, for 7 years. I've managed a remote datacenter of 10 Linux boxes with nothing but ssh and the occasional use of a cyclades terminal server for when things get really fubar (like the nfs server got a little hosed and i couldn't log into anything remotley). So I'm no stranger to building my own kernels and configuring hardware by hand, I just find Debian makes it so much harder than it needs to be.
The problem with your argument is that when you buy a Windows PC from Dell, HP, IBM, etc, Office doesn't cost $600, and Windows doesn't cost $100-$300. When you ship the volumes that those vendors do, and agree to pay Microsoft a license fee for every machine sold, rather than every machine the products are shipped on, the cost of Office and Windows likely drops below $50 each. When Dell was selling desktops with Red Hat Linux, they chose to use one of the retail editions, and it ended up that the Linux PCs they sold cost more than the Windows PCs they sold. I'll grant that Dell should have chosen the free version of RH, so we could truly see the MS tax. But most consumers don't know that. All they saw was that the Dell machine with Linux cost more than the Dell machine with Windows. Even now, HP is selling the d220 with Mandrake Linux for $84 more than with Windows. They do this because the expensive Linux distros are more user-friendly than the free ones.
thank you.
Despite your dictionary quote (which you failed to attribute, so we can't assume it's the official English (UK or US English) definition) I'd say that putting a computer on your desk does not effectively make it a personal computer. I'd think that for purposes of advertising, a personal computer is one produced and marketed as such. Go to dell.com, hp.com, or ibm.com and find me a quad xeon configuration of a system labeled as home user system.
Please don't compare a whitebox [Wintel] PC with anything other than a whitebox Apple [PC]. The prices are so different because they are not in the same class and market.
Not entirely accurate, but the sentiment is right. Red Hat won't be paying their employees to backport patches and host them on RHN. Community volunteers are being given a framework to have take over maintenance of packages, and even have their pacakges included as official packages. I anticipate it will be a fair balance between RHL and Debian. You get the community support and package maintenance, combined with a supported framework for third party repositories. But you still get a corporation paying people to develop core pieces. I guess maybe GNOME itself would be a good example. Red Hat has a handful of core GNOME developers on staff, but GNOME also has volunteer developers as official project contributors.
Not quite on-topic with the book review, but relevant to the comments discussing life-cycle. If I've observed anything out of the transition from Red Hat Linux to Fedora, which is nowhere near done, it's that a common standard like the LSB and FHS combined with package managet agnostic repository header information is becoming essential. While waiting for FC to come out I installed Debian unstable, and was quickly reminded that the reason I liked Red Hat in the first place was for the awesome config tools. I actually had to get on irc to figure out not only how to configure my USB mouse but also how to get my IDE controller working! Move forward a couple of weeks and FC is out and installed side-by-side with Debian unstable. I hate having to do so much extra legwork to get ntfs and mp3 support. When LSB/FHS compliance are so strong between the major vendors that an app packaged for Debian can be installed on Red Hat and Red Hat's config tools can see/configure it, or Red Hat's config tools can be installed on Debian and produce config files that Debian will be aware of, there will be rejoicing in the streets. RedHat adding yuma dn apt support to up2date is a huge step. Yum is part of the Fedora Core, and apt is on the way, I believe. But having the tool agnostic repo header info will make it all moot. You setup your package repo and magically apt, yum, and up2date can all process dependencies. What a glorious day it will be.
Put that in your pipe and smurf it!
I recall one of the biggest holdups to ogg support in portables was in the hardware. I think it was that none of the portables shipped with an FPU, and ogg required one. So perhaps you bought a player before there was technical ability for portables to support ogg. I'm sure someone will post a link or two and take any potential informative mod points i might have received were i more motivated to research futher.
That's the big point of ending Red Hat Linux and merging with Fedora.us for a free RH distro. Rh engineers will still be contributing by maintaining the packages for Red Hat authored software and I'm sure some other core packages. But then the rest of, potentially like Mozilla, will be maintained by the volunteer community, like Debian is. The maintainers then get to decide to backport the fix or package the new version.
not quite. You're not allowed to modify any of the trademarked stuff and still call it Red Hat. So CheapBytes was within their rights to burn the iso images unedited to CDR and sell them. The restriction was if you change any of if you're not allowed to call it RedHat, because of the trademarked content like icons and such.
don't you mean it will swallow up one of their war ships?
Breaking other people's software and bundling software together is exactly the behavior Microsoft was accused of in the antitrust trial.
No, doing all that in the context of leveraging a monopoly is what Microsoft was accused of. Apple doesn't have a monopoly to abuse, so they can't be compared in the legal context of monopoly behavior.
Apple doesn't need a monopoly position in the Windows-based PC market. They are attempting to create a monopoly in software for synchronizing the iPod on Windows by breaking software that previously worked, and then further trying to extend that monopoly into other areas by taking over the functions of all other media players on the system.
So you can leverage a monopoly without having one? That's news to me. In your original post you stated If you look at it in the exact same way that the court looked at Microsoft, then you'll find it is monopolistic:. Which to me means you think they are leveraging a monopoly.
Remember that at the time the antitrust trial was brought against Microsoft they didn't have anything resembling a monopoly in either Internet browsers or media players, either, but were accused of using an OS monopoly (over a very limited market) to push out competition in these areas.
That's exactly right, and that was the right time to bring legal action. Microsoft was seen to be leveraging their monopoly of the x86-based PC market to gain a dominant position in the web browser and media player markets. Those are three separate markets so such a tactic is illegal.
As far as leveraging a monopoly on MacOS based PCs, it was simply that monopoly that allowed them to market the iPod and iTunes to the point where the platform had enough strength to leverage it's way into the Windows-based PC space.
Please cite examples of how Apple did the same thing with Mac OS and iTunes that Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer. You'll have to show me products which compete with iPod and iTunes on Mac OS which were technically incapable of competing because Apple altered the OS to give them the advantage. If you can't do that, then you can't claim Apple leveraged their Mac OS based PC monopoly to gain a dominant position in the portable mp3 player and online music retail markets. If you can, then I'll concede that I was wrong.
Apple is now simply leveraging the popularity of the iPod to push iTunes into the Windows space
Apple does not have a monopoly in the portable mp3 player market. Leveraging popularity is not the same as leveraging a monopoly. One is legal, one is not.
Once again, so we're all clear, I'm not defending this action as fair and competetive, I'm defending it as not monopoly abusing.
I need no convincing that drivers are the problem. I just can't recall having to be so concerned about non-critical drivers crashing the entire system with any OS other than Windows. I don't think a network card driver should be able to crash the gui interface, and vice versa. If the driver for the disk controller with my system drive crashes, then it makes sense that the whole system will be unusable.
I don't know anything about mozilla, opera, konquerer, netscape or whatever but they probably put rendering code in shared libraries too. I mean, it's a good design if you want to reuse the same code to do a help system, run MSDN, run the Visual Studio environment (god I hate this thing), and run the explorer code.
Shared libraries are a good thing. The difference is the IE code is in libraries that are required for the OS to work. You don't need Mozilla libraries for the Linux kernel to operate. Also, the API's contained in the IE code are not made available for other application vendors to use. They are available for mozilla and konqueror.
With regard to your linksys driver, that's just poor driver design. That really sucks. But I have a laptop with an intel centrino wireless card that works great when running as non-admin on XP so it's not a limitation of windows.
Had not meant to imply it was Window's fault, just that there are scenarios in Windows-land that require you to run as administrator when you shouldn't have to. The same could certainly happen in Linux, but I'm not aware of any.
I don't mean to be defending windows here -- there are some bad design choices and definitely things to fix... but I don't think an excessive amount of code runs in kernel mode and in the 2k/XP timeframe a lot of work went into making it easy to run as a non-administrator which were the two points that the original post was attacking.
fair enough. :)
But this discussion is about software on Windows PCs. How does it leverage their monopoly of MacOS based PCs to gain extra market share in the portable MP3 player and/or online music retail markets? Apple has no monopoly positions in the Windows based PC market.
The problem is not having a monopoly in a particular market, or even branching into other markets when a monopoly is held. The problem is using the monopoly to gain a competetive advantage. Microsoft forced OEM computer manufacturers to make products in one market more visible than competing products before licensing a different product which held a Monopoly. Apple is doing no such thing. I do thing this in anti-competetive behavior on Apple's part, it's just not Monopoly abuse.
you can, just re-install MM. You're implied point that you shouldn't have to reinstall stands, but installing iTunes doesn't permanently break MM.
what I find amusing about that is the senetences make complete sense to me until someone points out grammar and I try to re-read them!
Before you over-react and call me a fanboy or a zealot, I have two home computers running Linux, and my worktstation at work runs Linux. I have never owned an Apple computer. And I did start off calling this tactic anti-competetive. I just tried to clarify how it's not anti-competetive by way of monopoly abuse (selectively criticizing).
blame on me for careless examples. If I'm not mistaken, video drivers run in kernel space, so should have been my example for that. I didn't mean to imply that IE was both a kernel service and run as root, just that those two parts of the Windows platform in combination are bad. And to be fair, the IE rendering code is in system DLLs, so it's not an unreasonable misunderstading to think some of it might be running in kernel space. As for stuff needing to be logged in as administrator, I have a linksys wireless card which, using the current drivers, is useless unless I am logged in as an administrator. Note that I mean 100% useless, it will not associate with an AP unless I am an administrator. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, I even went through two levels of Linksys support. So in order to have my wireless internet access without buying more hardware, I must run as administrator. :( Fortunately I just run Linux all the time.