I think you are right we should take SCO as declaring WAR against us!
Now, we need to solve this problem, they have abused the GPL liscense, they distributed GNU software in violation of it.
We need to set a fund up to enable all the kernal maintainers and other developers to launch concurrent lawsuits against SCO.
If they recieve several thousand lawsuits at once they will need to hire additional legal council depleting the cash M$ just gave to them.
All of the major Linux supporters will have to jump on the boat to send supplementary legal council to all those that sue or risk losing a case and killing their business.
As far as IBMs patent portfolio, well they have made a commitment to Linux and as such those patents are our patents, not in a legal sense, but they are essentially cross-liscensed to us.
The reality is many many companies and IP firms hold patents that could at anytime be used against Linux, the good thing about IBM is that their patent portfolio is diverse enough to squelch any of those people who would attack Linux, much the same way MicroSoft can not attack Linux head on or risk losing their cross liscenses from IBM, and many others who use Linux to make money.
Write and call your congressman now to get them on board OSS software. We need to hit SCO from as many fronts as possible and make them sink as quickly as possible.
Wait a sec, they said they're going to put invisable ink on the backside of the card, ok, go right ahead.
I could never count cards when anything over a single deck was involved anyhow, but now with invisible ink I think we may have something to take advantage of here.
I'm thinking of some sort of ccd built into glasses with a display on the inside of one of the lenses displaying what marked cards the ccd sees. This would also make poker considerably easier.
Not like tech has ever been used to win roulette before or anything.
Oh, you must have forgotten that.com.net.org were originally US, such as why.us is not used for anything much other than local governments, sorry man, that's reality, it just isn't cool to have a.us domain, that and explaining what anything other than.com to an AOL user is fruitless. That how slashdot avoided the early AOL crowd:-)
But really, not trying to bash on you or anything, just general statements, even thinking slashdot is a news source of any validity is......well mistaken.
We can't even get the editors to use a spell checker or some sort of anti-dupe mechanism.
Slashdot is biased to the American side, it's in the FAQ, but please don't compare it with traditional news sources.
Funny thing is I have seen some of the comments on Slashdot used in traditional news sources, so smile you're being watched.
If companies like BeOS got a clue and served their niche market they would still be in business, making money. I bought every intel version until they folded, and it was a cool OS to run on my SMP machine in the day, it actually used both processors efficiently. It really was a killer os.
Ten years ago, before Commodore's forced demise at the hands of Irving Gould and Medhi Ali.
I would have expected the Amiga engineers to devise a wicked cool, almost supercomputer type system that no one would understand or buy, but the dedicated few would remain faithful..... with the latest and greatest Video Toaster installed, Lightwave and Imagine v10.0 rendering cinematic quality scenes in realtime. An extension to the datatype's modules to allow for new video, image and sound codecs, that run on all programs, assisted by newer ultra fast co-processors..
Oh, yeah, and protected memory would have been a must have.
Unfortunatly, the company sunk, along with the dream of a niche computer that did exactly what I wanted it to, tho Linux comes somewhat close.
Well when I was a kid all the local hobby stores stopped carrying them, they might now, I'd say I've outgrown the smaller ones for sure.
I bought a few copies of High Powered Rocketry and was going to get back into it, but after 9/11 I didn't want to be percieved as any sort of threat to anyone, the unfounded fear in others is understandable.
I saw on your site this very issue is still being dealt with here.
Really, this is a cool hobby, more slashdotters should get involved and maybe lend a hand in stopping these draconian laws from even being thought of.
I'd hate to one day see that the chance to build and launch rockets into the skies is gone, especially for young kids.
I learned to write one of my first "real" programs on a vic-20 with datasette just to figure out how high in the sky they went.
Did anyone else notice they pulled many of the dangerous but fun toys off the store shelves in the late 80's.
I remember those model rockets that were sold everywhere, I always bought them, then one day they all vanished except for a few private hobby shops, and I had a friend who ended up with third degree burns for being a bone head..
The other one were those mega chemistry sets, the huge ones with what seemed like hundreds of bottles to make cool things, like neato toxic smoke, I filled the house with those vapors on many occasions (twitch-twitch).
The final one were those lawn darts, tho they did provide ample evidence of darwin's theory with many a dart ending up stuck in bodies across the land, but they were cool anyhow.
The slip and slides of death, where a dude obviously too big for it tried it out head first and had to piss in a bag from then on.
I think the lesson here is these toys tought us that death and injury can be fun, what will the upcoming generations learn, especially with foam covered everything painted with lead free enamel, where's the paint chips to eat.
No, this is a perfect business model to use on higher end items with such restrictions. A corpoaration needs new hardware and tossing the old in the dumpster wouldn't allow the company to extract the last bit of profit for the item's lifetime.
So leasing it, while keeping it under contract is a good idea, the only thing you would need to do is inform cisco of the new tech contact for the particular item. There are no problems to deal with except a company defaulting on the lease, I imagine the program would be actually run by a third party company acting in the leasing companies interests.
With the price of the highend cisco stuff, as well as other machines like high end firewalls and such, this makes sense.
They would be hard pressed to mess with this as many companies already lease cisco products and it wouldn't be too hard to take cisco to court and make them honour your lease or apply their idea of ownership to all of the other leasees.
Either way you win (sorta), as all cisco products would become something to migrate away from and the company dies, or your new third party leasing firm gets rich.
IBM jumps in and whacks the good old folding chair on SCO's head
Oracle announces it will be a Linux shop through and through, taking all of SCOs threating talk and brushing them off like a runt.
Novell anounces that while it will keep Netware around, there will be a Linux option, further breaking SCO's back with their loss of any credibility.
I think now that almost every major heavy hitter in Industry from Movies to Wall Street is using Linux, in the process of deploying it, or making plans too, billyg must be seriously thinking, do I keep stonewalling or port everything over.
With all the FUD SCO tried to spread, the press releases and news reports throw it right back in their face, the very fact IBM's lawyers put SCO's GPL violations in their complaint validates it all.
ESR may be extreme, he may be a pain in the ass, but the man did make a major contribution to computing and this whole saga deserves to be written in history.
These are good times for the battle tested UNIX/Linux admins out there, it's really hard to be a paper Linux admin(RHCE whatever) and not get called on it, funny thing is most Linux people can do Windows, but they leave that for the help:-)
Does anyone remember the Bill Gates thing on cross-license, well IBM is dumping huge amounts of money into Linux, they see the potential, it's in their interest to never use these patents against Linux, just as it's in their interest to never use them against MicroSoft, as it's in MicroSoft's interest to not use them against Linux as IBM is sitting there with it's portfolio ready to shred MicroSoft if it came down to it, so effectively Linux is using cross licesened patents, and being protected from others by IBM. This is business, this is how patents are used, we should be glad IBM is up on IP law and knows how to use it, and that Linux is so valuable to IBM.
In the news today a nearly blind and deaf man was arrested for terrorist acts after his home built guided missile traveled the atlantic and started a fire at a shoreside housing complex, a terrorized elderly couple lost 16 cats in the fierce blaze.
Oh My GOD, there must be a GOD, as this is the closest thing I've seen to an old school slashdot discussion in a long while. Noone is right, noone is wrong, actual thought provoking discussions, it must be a miracle!
I guess you missed the RadioShack reference, they prove there's a market for over priced under performing equipment (not sure about what they have now though), I guess I'm just not sure why the article made it to slashdot, the article itself should be modded flamebait(article modding would be cool).
But as for my jukebox, mine specificly, I can't speak for anyone else. The vibration test, or I guess you could call it that, was a 4000watt 4 subwoofer setup, I plugged the jukebox into the headunit and let it loose on everything from Metal, Country, Techno, you name it, ripped on a 266pentium I was borrowing that day, running Win98(the jukebox had a bigger harddrive than the system). I eventually got out due to queesyness, the jukebox bounced around on the floor for 3-4 hours with the playlist rolling. As far as dropping it, yes I did, on carpet from table top height (on-spun up)and slightly lower on concrete minding any plastic might crack at that height(on-not spun up). I did do my best to break it, I was on vacation in another state and wasn't too sure about WalMart's exchange policy across state lines. It held up quite well, it's about the same size as a cd player, so it's not bulky, I keep it in a case I used for my previous cd player, beats an iPod for twice the price or a microplayer with not enough space.
Yep, gotta install software, that is a letdown, but not much of one, once the drivers are installed you can skip the creative thing and use media player. I like the creative thing since it seems to handle my mp3 catalog better than media player does, it does a decent job ripping mp3s, I was using cdex, but the (creative)software grows on you. It seems to be set up for a neophyte user, once you look at it from that perspective the interface makes sense.
The micro mp3 players have space issues, IMHO there isn't a really compelling reason to buy one but for geek chic or ignorance. Normal people seem to be able to tell the difference between a 128K and 192K-360K rip, 2 baby boomer box sets wouldn't fit on one at a decent bit rate.
I don't think anyone is making the assertion that people should buy a mega mp3 player, but for the price it's just not up to par.
Gateway reminds me of RadioShack 10 years ago, "Can I intrest you an hdtv with that computer, oh and we have this cool mp3 player for just a bit more, and as a plus everything says Gateway, how about an extended warranty....."
I just bought a creative jukebox 2 from walmart for something around $180.00, it has 20GB of capacity. As far as it being rugged, well I tried to kill it within the return period by treating it to many decibles of bass in a show car on my vacation, it held up fine. As for simple, well I'm not a fan of the software, but it worked out of the box without any problems on a cheesy old pentium, single sheet consice instructions.
Walmart had many other mp3 players, most of which were cheaper (from memory)than the Gateway one, the best thing, no shipping involved.
I would say mp3 players are as cheap, simple and rugged as any cd player on the market with the plus of no scratched cds, they stay at home, in the case, ripped once and put away forever..
Corel's products have sucked for a very long time, and I was once one of those people who purchased every update to their office suite, I then stopped due to it crashing so often. It wasn't reliable.
Don't think slashdot is the world, most Linux users I know would gladly pay Microsoft for a decent offic suite for Linux.
As far as I can tell there is no Linux Microsoft war with the exception of extreme Linux and MS fanatics, they do make the larger majority look childish.
I started using Linux in late 1993, it wasn't anything close to primetime, it's 2003, it is primetime, it now works seamlessly. I have set up SuSE workstations that are in use by people with no computer skills. These systems are reliable, run 24/7, run all the apps they need, one of them is open office, I'm not going to install an OS 1000 miles away from me and not have the ability to lock everything down and remotely maintain them. Windows XP is lacking in so many areas, MS apps only run on Windows, so MS has one less customer. In the future as people like me put these solutions in place will Microsoft lose even more, just because of arrogance, not because I wouldn't send them checks.
One other thing, I'm hardcore on my clients when it comes to licenses on software, I rip pirated software off machines and replace with OSS or legal copies of the software. If you make money with someone's IP, they deserve to be paid.
Where are the Microsoft office apps? Do they run on Linux or FreeBSD, does anything else Microsoft run in Linux or FreeBSD other than frontpage extensions?
So what you're saying is they have the necessary technology, but still fail to innovate. Isn't that what the article was about? Constant chaos in a large company brings nothing fully functional to the market. For smaller apps it seems Java has won that market, the only true write once run everywhere environment.
Microsoft is beating themselves with their own disconnected arms.
Dude, this is slashdot, it all comes down to how much wit you can pack into a paragraph.
It doesn't mean it's right, just that the majority of slashdot posters are Democrats, and some of those Democrats like to verbally mastrubate with inane bullshit, exposing their ignorance on their very own party politicians.
I know all mine are the best lying cheating bastards, it's what I expect of a Republican candidate, keep the bible banging bastards tho, that would be hypocracy.:-)
Pro-business does not necessarily mean pro-RIAA, if the Kazaa guys got into the act as well as some hardware companies their ideas might very well turn into laws too, greese the wheels.
Don't paint any group of people with the same brush, it spreads germs.
I hope a few people at Microsoft will glance at this, but more than likely they won't, or will and can't change a thing.
I completely dislike windows. I don't consider it worthy of much more than solitare, however, I like Microsoft applications, they are well put together, have great functionality and work well. Wine wouldn't be where it's at now if this wan't true. MicroSoft's strength is solid applications.
If Microsoft were to ditch their operating system completely on the desktop and spec a GNU/Linux or FreeBSD OS to be assembled by system integrators it would be a leap forward, no one cares about the operating system, it's the applications. The OS only comes into play when it repeatedly crashes, when explorer crashes, when odd programs cause the whole OS to freak out, or buggy drivers lead you to the BSOD.
XP is buggy as hell, I can push an XP system in the wrong way and get it to crash quickly, in some cases faster than Win2K.
Microsoft should port their apps to some sort of VM instruction set and make a VM for each operating system out there. We all know windows would run it faster, I really don't care, I need reliablity. Give me both and Redmond will get my cash, and my client's cash as well.
Until then OpenOffice gets better every release, X gets better every release and Gnome and KDE are both headed in the right direction, there may soon be no need for MicroSoft at all if this continues.
We were told making cars in this country was too expensive, domestics started moving production out of the country......and foreign manufacturers started moving in.
America does the high end stuff pretty good, those that make the high end stuff do pretty well too. If the laid off programmers get out of monkey mode they can be making more money than they were before, solve a problem no one knew existed and hammer the market (and get a good patent lawyer).
Give me a big Krell amp, a pair of Martin Logans, a custom chopper and the new Ford GT for the weekends....please.
Slashdot Mirror
Build your own heat pipe here
German is the ultimate romance language
I think you are right we should take SCO as declaring WAR against us!
Now, we need to solve this problem, they have abused the GPL liscense, they distributed GNU software in violation of it.
We need to set a fund up to enable all the kernal maintainers and other developers to launch concurrent lawsuits against SCO.
If they recieve several thousand lawsuits at once they will need to hire additional legal council depleting the cash M$ just gave to them.
All of the major Linux supporters will have to jump on the boat to send supplementary legal council to all those that sue or risk losing a case and killing their business.
As far as IBMs patent portfolio, well they have made a commitment to Linux and as such those patents are our patents, not in a legal sense, but they are essentially cross-liscensed to us.
The reality is many many companies and IP firms hold patents that could at anytime be used against Linux, the good thing about IBM is that their patent portfolio is diverse enough to squelch any of those people who would attack Linux, much the same way MicroSoft can not attack Linux head on or risk losing their cross liscenses from IBM, and many others who use Linux to make money.
Write and call your congressman now to get them on board OSS software. We need to hit SCO from as many fronts as possible and make them sink as quickly as possible.
Wait a sec, they said they're going to put invisable ink on the backside of the card, ok, go right ahead.
I could never count cards when anything over a single deck was involved anyhow, but now with invisible ink I think we may have something to take advantage of here.
I'm thinking of some sort of ccd built into glasses with a display on the inside of one of the lenses displaying what marked cards the ccd sees. This would also make poker considerably easier.
Not like tech has ever been used to win roulette before or anything.
Go for it Vegas!
Oh, you must have forgotten that .com .net .org were originally US, such as why .us is not used for anything much other than local governments, sorry man, that's reality, it just isn't cool to have a .us domain, that and explaining what anything other than .com to an AOL user is fruitless. That how slashdot avoided the early AOL crowd :-)
But really, not trying to bash on you or anything, just general statements, even thinking slashdot is a news source of any validity is......well mistaken.
We can't even get the editors to use a spell checker or some sort of anti-dupe mechanism.
Slashdot is biased to the American side, it's in the FAQ, but please don't compare it with traditional news sources.
Funny thing is I have seen some of the comments on Slashdot used in traditional news sources, so smile you're being watched.
We even have it on our wallets.
If companies like BeOS got a clue and served their niche market they would still be in business, making money.
I bought every intel version until they folded, and it was a cool OS to run on my SMP machine in the day, it actually used both processors efficiently. It really was a killer os.
Ten years ago, before Commodore's forced demise at the hands of Irving Gould and Medhi Ali.
I would have expected the Amiga engineers to devise a wicked cool, almost supercomputer type system that no one would understand or buy, but the dedicated few would remain faithful..... with the latest and greatest Video Toaster installed, Lightwave and Imagine v10.0 rendering cinematic quality scenes in realtime.
An extension to the datatype's modules to allow for new video, image and sound codecs, that run on all programs, assisted by newer ultra fast co-processors..
Oh, yeah, and protected memory would have been a must have.
Unfortunatly, the company sunk, along with the dream of a niche computer that did exactly what I wanted it to, tho Linux comes somewhat close.
Well when I was a kid all the local hobby stores stopped carrying them, they might now, I'd say I've outgrown the smaller ones for sure.
I bought a few copies of High Powered Rocketry and was going to get back into it, but after 9/11 I didn't want to be percieved as any sort of threat to anyone, the unfounded fear in others is understandable.
I saw on your site this very issue is still being dealt with here.
Really, this is a cool hobby, more slashdotters should get involved and maybe lend a hand in stopping these draconian laws from even being thought of.
I'd hate to one day see that the chance to build and launch rockets into the skies is gone, especially for young kids.
I learned to write one of my first "real" programs on a vic-20 with datasette just to figure out how high in the sky they went.
Did anyone else notice they pulled many of the dangerous but fun toys off the store shelves in the late 80's.
I remember those model rockets that were sold everywhere, I always bought them, then one day they all vanished except for a few private hobby shops, and I had a friend who ended up with third degree burns for being a bone head..
The other one were those mega chemistry sets, the huge ones with what seemed like hundreds of bottles to make cool things, like neato toxic smoke, I filled the house with those vapors on many occasions (twitch-twitch).
The final one were those lawn darts, tho they did provide ample evidence of darwin's theory with many a dart ending up stuck in bodies across the land, but they were cool anyhow.
The slip and slides of death, where a dude obviously too big for it tried it out head first and had to piss in a bag from then on.
I think the lesson here is these toys tought us that death and injury can be fun, what will the upcoming generations learn, especially with foam covered everything painted with lead free enamel, where's the paint chips to eat.
No, this is a perfect business model to use on higher end items with such restrictions.
A corpoaration needs new hardware and tossing the old in the dumpster wouldn't allow the company to extract the last bit of profit for the item's lifetime.
So leasing it, while keeping it under contract is a good idea, the only thing you would need to do is inform cisco of the new tech contact for the particular item. There are no problems to deal with except a company defaulting on the lease, I imagine the program would be actually run by a third party company acting in the leasing companies interests.
With the price of the highend cisco stuff, as well as other machines like high end firewalls and such, this makes sense.
They would be hard pressed to mess with this as many companies already lease cisco products and it wouldn't be too hard to take cisco to court and make them honour your lease or apply their idea of ownership to all of the other leasees.
Either way you win (sorta), as all cisco products would become something to migrate away from and the company dies, or your new third party leasing firm gets rich.
It was late and that was a typo, should've been fully awake when typing that.
Redhat and SuSE slam SCO
:-)
IBM jumps in and whacks the good old folding chair on SCO's head
Oracle announces it will be a Linux shop through and through, taking all of SCOs threating talk and brushing them off like a runt.
Novell anounces that while it will keep Netware around, there will be a Linux option, further breaking SCO's back with their loss of any credibility.
I think now that almost every major heavy hitter in Industry from Movies to Wall Street is using Linux, in the process of deploying it, or making plans too, billyg must be seriously thinking, do I keep stonewalling or port everything over.
With all the FUD SCO tried to spread, the press releases and news reports throw it right back in their face, the very fact IBM's lawyers put SCO's GPL violations in their complaint validates it all.
ESR may be extreme, he may be a pain in the ass, but the man did make a major contribution to computing and this whole saga deserves to be written in history.
These are good times for the battle tested UNIX/Linux admins out there, it's really hard to be a paper Linux admin(RHCE whatever) and not get called on it, funny thing is most Linux people can do Windows, but they leave that for the help
Does anyone remember the Bill Gates thing on cross-license, well IBM is dumping huge amounts of money into Linux, they see the potential, it's in their interest to never use these patents against Linux, just as it's in their interest to never use them against MicroSoft, as it's in MicroSoft's interest to not use them against Linux as IBM is sitting there with it's portfolio ready to shred MicroSoft if it came down to it, so effectively Linux is using cross licesened patents, and being protected from others by IBM. This is business, this is how patents are used, we should be glad IBM is up on IP law and knows how to use it, and that Linux is so valuable to IBM.
In the news today a nearly blind and deaf man was arrested for terrorist acts after his home built guided missile traveled the atlantic and started a fire at a shoreside housing complex, a terrorized elderly couple lost 16 cats in the fierce blaze.
Oh My GOD, there must be a GOD, as this is the closest thing I've seen to an old school slashdot discussion in a long while. Noone is right, noone is wrong, actual thought provoking discussions, it must be a miracle!
I guess you missed the RadioShack reference, they prove there's a market for over priced under performing equipment (not sure about what they have now though), I guess I'm just not sure why the article made it to slashdot, the article itself should be modded flamebait(article modding would be cool).
But as for my jukebox, mine specificly, I can't speak for anyone else. The vibration test, or I guess you could call it that, was a 4000watt 4 subwoofer setup, I plugged the jukebox into the headunit and let it loose on everything from Metal, Country, Techno, you name it, ripped on a 266pentium I was borrowing that day, running Win98(the jukebox had a bigger harddrive than the system).
I eventually got out due to queesyness, the jukebox bounced around on the floor for 3-4 hours with the playlist rolling. As far as dropping it, yes I did, on carpet from table top height (on-spun up)and slightly lower on concrete minding any plastic might crack at that height(on-not spun up). I did do my best to break it, I was on vacation in another state and wasn't too sure about WalMart's exchange policy across state lines. It held up quite well, it's about the same size as a cd player, so it's not bulky, I keep it in a case I used for my previous cd player, beats an iPod for twice the price or a microplayer with not enough space.
Yep, gotta install software, that is a letdown, but not much of one, once the drivers are installed you can skip the creative thing and use media player. I like the creative thing since it seems to handle my mp3 catalog better than media player does, it does a decent job ripping mp3s, I was using cdex, but the (creative)software grows on you. It seems to be set up for a neophyte user, once you look at it from that perspective the interface makes sense.
The micro mp3 players have space issues, IMHO there isn't a really compelling reason to buy one but for geek chic or ignorance. Normal people seem to be able to tell the difference between a 128K and 192K-360K rip, 2 baby boomer box sets wouldn't fit on one at a decent bit rate.
I don't think anyone is making the assertion that people should buy a mega mp3 player, but for the price it's just not up to par.
Gateway reminds me of RadioShack 10 years ago, "Can I intrest you an hdtv with that computer, oh and we have this cool mp3 player for just a bit more, and as a plus everything says Gateway, how about an extended warranty....."
I just bought a creative jukebox 2 from walmart for something around $180.00, it has 20GB of capacity.
As far as it being rugged, well I tried to kill it within the return period by treating it to many decibles of bass in a show car on my vacation, it held up fine.
As for simple, well I'm not a fan of the software, but it worked out of the box without any problems on a cheesy old pentium, single sheet consice instructions.
Walmart had many other mp3 players, most of which were cheaper (from memory)than the Gateway one, the best thing, no shipping involved.
I would say mp3 players are as cheap, simple and rugged as any cd player on the market with the plus of no scratched cds, they stay at home, in the case, ripped once and put away forever..
Hey they owned the Amiga for a bit too, it was two years too late then too, seems to be Gateway's M.O.
I hadn't realized Microsoft and Intel were flopping around....Oh that's right this is slashdot............
Corel's products have sucked for a very long time, and I was once one of those people who purchased every update to their office suite, I then stopped due to it crashing so often. It wasn't reliable.
Don't think slashdot is the world, most Linux users I know would gladly pay Microsoft for a decent offic suite for Linux.
As far as I can tell there is no Linux Microsoft war with the exception of extreme Linux and MS fanatics, they do make the larger majority look childish.
I started using Linux in late 1993, it wasn't anything close to primetime, it's 2003, it is primetime, it now works seamlessly.
I have set up SuSE workstations that are in use by people with no computer skills. These systems are reliable, run 24/7, run all the apps they need, one of them is open office, I'm not going to install an OS 1000 miles away from me and not have the ability to lock everything down and remotely maintain them. Windows XP is lacking in so many areas, MS apps only run on Windows, so MS has one less customer. In the future as people like me put these solutions in place will Microsoft lose even more, just because of arrogance, not because I wouldn't send them checks.
One other thing, I'm hardcore on my clients when it comes to licenses on software, I rip pirated software off machines and replace with OSS or legal copies of the software. If you make money with someone's IP, they deserve to be paid.
Where are the Microsoft office apps? Do they run on Linux or FreeBSD, does anything else Microsoft run in Linux or FreeBSD other than frontpage extensions?
So what you're saying is they have the necessary technology, but still fail to innovate. Isn't that what the article was about? Constant chaos in a large company brings nothing fully functional to the market. For smaller apps it seems Java has won that market, the only true write once run everywhere environment.
Microsoft is beating themselves with their own disconnected arms.
Dude, this is slashdot, it all comes down to how much wit you can pack into a paragraph.
:-)
It doesn't mean it's right, just that the majority of slashdot posters are Democrats, and some of those Democrats like to verbally mastrubate with inane bullshit, exposing their ignorance on their very own party politicians.
I know all mine are the best lying cheating bastards, it's what I expect of a Republican candidate, keep the bible banging bastards tho, that would be hypocracy.
Pro-business does not necessarily mean pro-RIAA, if the Kazaa guys got into the act as well as some hardware companies their ideas might very well turn into laws too, greese the wheels.
Don't paint any group of people with the same brush, it spreads germs.
I hope a few people at Microsoft will glance at this, but more than likely they won't, or will and can't change a thing.
I completely dislike windows. I don't consider it worthy of much more than solitare, however, I like Microsoft applications, they are well put together, have great functionality and work well. Wine wouldn't be where it's at now if this wan't true. MicroSoft's strength is solid applications.
If Microsoft were to ditch their operating system completely on the desktop and spec a GNU/Linux or FreeBSD OS to be assembled by system integrators it would be a leap forward, no one cares about the operating system, it's the applications. The OS only comes into play when it repeatedly crashes, when explorer crashes, when odd programs cause the whole OS to freak out, or buggy drivers lead you to the BSOD.
XP is buggy as hell, I can push an XP system in the wrong way and get it to crash quickly, in some cases faster than Win2K.
Microsoft should port their apps to some sort of VM instruction set and make a VM for each operating system out there. We all know windows would run it faster, I really don't care, I need reliablity. Give me both and Redmond will get my cash, and my client's cash as well.
Until then OpenOffice gets better every release, X gets better every release and Gnome and KDE are both headed in the right direction, there may soon be no need for MicroSoft at all if this continues.
Their downfall will be Billy G's arrogance.
We were told making cars in this country was too expensive, domestics started moving production out of the country......and foreign manufacturers started moving in.
America does the high end stuff pretty good, those that make the high end stuff do pretty well too. If the laid off programmers get out of monkey mode they can be making more money than they were before, solve a problem no one knew existed and hammer the market (and get a good patent lawyer).
Give me a big Krell amp, a pair of Martin Logans, a custom chopper and the new Ford GT for the weekends....please.