Only if you don't count Fedora core, the free version of Redhat that is still worked on. Which is also officially unsupported. You can, in fact, buy support for Ubuntu Desktop.
Fedora's a geeky test bed, Ubuntu's for Windows refugees. Gentoo, of course, is for gamers. Huh. That's almost entirely the opposite of how I'd put it.
That is: Gentoo is a geeky test bed, Ubuntu is for gamers and other Windows refugees, and Fedora is the upgrade path for RedHat's non-Enterprise Linux.
Far as I would understand it, this constitutes a breach of contract on their part, giving you immediate termination rights. Which, depending on where you live, may mean you go back to the wonderful world of dialup, or the strange new world of satellite.
No, if I was in that situation, I wouldn't want termination rights. I'd want damages, and/or actually forcing reasonable service out of them.
Weapon \Weap"on\ (w[e^]p"[u^]n; 277), n. [OE. wepen, AS.
w[=ae]pen; akin to OS. w[=a]pan, OFries. w[=e]pin, w[=e]pen,
D. wapen, G. waffe, OHG. waffan, w[=a]fan, Icel. v[=a]pn,
Dan. vaaben, Sw. vapen, Goth. w[=e]pna, pl.; of uncertain
origin. Cf. Wapentake.]
[1913 Webster]
1. An instrument of offensive of defensive combat; something
to fight with; anything used, or designed to be used, in
destroying, defeating, or injuring an enemy, as a gun, a
sword, etc. Sounds very much like teeth, claws, or stings.
We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected. Entirely possible -- we kill millions, and a billion is just another number. The radioactive fallout would probably get to them, though...
But it doesn't prove your point:
The truth is there is no such thing as a spooky or scary weapon. I'd say it depends on context. A large knife, dripping with blood, particularly when it's still in the hands of the person who last used it, is a very scary weapon.
Given that just about any weapon can be scary in the right context, I think what you're proving is that nothing is scary when you aren't paying attention to it, no matter how scary it really is.
And each of those computers has storage, if you are unfamiliar with today's computers. By "storage" I meant "physical space" -- I know today's computers are small, but you still need a place to put them with proper ventilation and cooling.
Sugar has issues. Lots of them. They need to be fixed, have needed to be fixed but guess what? That awesomeness of FOSS hasn't done much to get them fixed. Standard response would be, go and fix them yourself. At least you can.
But really, I don't think the awesomeness of XP is going to be any better.
Does that include an exact replica of the dock working exactly the same as in OS X? I'm asking seriously as that is the only thing I want from OS X when I am using Linux. KDE? Not that I know of.
However, I was using WindowMaker before I ever touched OS X. It's not an "exact replica" in that it looks very different -- downright ugly, compared to OS X -- but it functions pretty much the same. They share common roots, in any case -- NeXT.
KDE also by default puts a border on maximised windows, which puts the scroll bar a couple of pixels away from the edge of the screen, which is just plain stupid. On Kubuntu, at one point, it would maximize properly, the way GNOME does -- no border, and no rounded corners.
But for some reason, I've fallen back to a default where the only difference between a normal window and a maximized window is the size and the fact that the "maximize" button is now a "restore" button.
I can see where it makes sense in that you can grab that border and resize just as if it wasn't maximized. I still wish I could figure out how to get this back to the Ubuntu style, or tweak that default -- knowing that KDE does, in fact, provide a way to tweak just about any default.
enlighten the rest of us mortals. how do I compete with free? One thing you can do is go free yourself. Include advertising to pay for it, and your users get it for free. That's the business model of just about every webcomic on the planet, and radio before that.
Another thing you can do is add value, in a way which can't be copied. Not through DRM, but through actual services. Consider WoW -- they've got, what, ten million subscribers now? Each paying $12.95 a month! Don't you think they would pirate it if they could?
In fact, people have written and set up pirate WoW servers, but they are a vast minority. Most people have found that WoW provides something they can't get anywhere else, and that it's worth a large monthly fee.
Then, to a lesser extent, there are services like Steam and Xbox Live. Technically, the games you find here are easily pirated even multiplayer, and many of them are single-player. But through a combination of not over-charging (Portal is absolutely worth $20) and adding features like a friends list, the ability to easily join a game a friend is playing (or start a game with a friend, on Xbox Live), and toys like "Achievements", the legitimate version starts to look better.
Add to that the fact that the pirated version of a Steam game is actually less convenient than the legit version -- I can just enter my username and password anywhere, and download the game, and if I have a credit card, I can always start downloading another game that I want. The pirated version would require me to jump through a lot more hoops.
Now, compare this to places where piracy wins -- movies and music, and many other single-player games. When the tech-savvy person is going to buy the game in the store (to make sure you get paid), and then pirate it anyway, because the pirated version is actually going to be safer to their computer (and won't require swapping CDs), something is VERY wrong.
And when I can get pretty much instant gratification via things like YouTube, and close to it with BitTorrent, whereas buying them legitimately either requires a trip across town or a very specific version of Windows Media Player or iTunes -- and the song will only play on an iPod and not a Zune, or vice-versa -- I would pay more to get the kind of service I already get for free from piracy.
Do you see the difference?
Now, following the link in your signature -- It seems like you could provide this via steam, if you wanted to. At a glance, I can see what you might want to offer in a service of your own -- maybe let people play against each other, or the world at large. Democracy, in particular, looks like it could be made into an MMO of sorts -- you could create a world in which only one person can win a particular election, and then let players form their own communities and political parties.
But that's off the top of my head, and I haven't even played them. You know your games better than I do.
Please list any experience you have in paying the rent by using this system of yours. That is, in fact, what I'm doing right now.
Because of this, and because it's still in the early stages, I'm not going to discuss details, but I will say that we do both of the above -- we provide a better product than the pirated version (by hooking it into a service, among other things), and we provide it for free.
One warning: Be sure that this service is something people actually want. No one wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
Be aware it is MY product they are offering for free. Irrelevant.
If they are offering it for free, and they're also delivering it faster, and in a better format -- and keep in mind, they very likely have day jobs, too -- then something is wrong with your model.
That's not to say that the pirates are right, but the moment you stop thinking of them as competitors and start thinking of them as thieving bastards, you lose.
Yes, tomsrtbt, I think, used a higher-density format of the floppy, and bzip2 instead of gzip compression for the kernel.
Point is, you wouldn't even think about this for most other OSes. Linux can, in fact, squeeze absurd amounts onto a floppy. Windows can barely squeeze onto a 2 gig hard drive.
Finally, if you expose the schema to outside users, you are effectively making this your API. If you want to change your schema in the future, you are going to be breaking all of the legacy queries that you customers have written. That's perhaps the biggest issue. Encapsulation 101: Provide an API. You can make it nice and RESTful -- I'd use YAML and/or JSON, but you can make it nice and enterprisey XML. Sit down with the customers and find out what kind of queries they actually want to run, and build an API around that. With any luck, they only need one or two queries anyway, and it'll take less than a day to get them the functionality they really wanted.
But if you just give them actual, SQL-level access, aside from all the security and performance implications, you're also setting yourself up to be even more rigid than you may already be with respect to schema changes. You shouldn't even be touching the SQL directly yourself, when you can wrap it in an API.
Now, security and performance... Performance issues can be demonstrated as easily as a 'SELECT * FROM SOME_HUGE_TABLE' -- and you could add a few joins without conditions (or with very broad conditions) to make it even worse.
Security issues shouldn't need a demonstration. Just calmly point out that most variants of SQL are Turing-complete, and that you're very sorry, but customers are NOT allowed to run executable code on your production server.
Finally, worst-case, give them a dump of all the data they need, in a format which they can easily import into their own Oracle database. Explain that it's the closest they'll get, unless they want to use your API.
I don't have much to say (yet), but while I'm here:
Why would anybody assume that I'm missing development pacakages if I obviously can compile the code? On Debian/Ubuntu, the -dev mainly applies to headers. While compiling from source,./configure will attempt to detect which headers are available. If it doesn't find a zlib header, but can compile without zlib support, that's probably what happened.
In other words: That you compiled from source doesn't necessarily mean that advice was wrong, it was just Debian/Ubuntu-specific.
In my own posts, I always give generic information first, and then the Ubuntu-specific information -- with a note that it's Ubuntu-specific. I think distro-specific help is still very useful, even if it's not for your distro, so long as it has context.
*Sigh* What's with you people and calling everything an ad-hominem, when it plainly isn't? Do you actually think it makes you sound smarter than what you really are? Not worth it this time.
From memory, an ad-hominem is an argument made by attacking a person's character, rather than their argument. It is a logical fallacy because the argument itself may be true, regardless of who made it.
Here, rather than tell me why it wasn't an ad-hominem, you insult me by suggesting I only use the term to make myself sound smarter than I am... which is, you guessed it, another ad-hominem.
You are not helping your case here.
I will tell you one thing, though, since you seem to have put so much effort into your response: It absolutely is possible to compete with free. Yes, free, whether it's legal or not -- it is possible to compete with piracy. But if you intend to do that, the very first thing you have to do is stop attacking it as a moral issue, and start attacking it as a competitor.
Go play with Sugar, and then tell me that XP can add anything to that.
One keystroke reveals the source to any program you're running. You can edit that source, then go back to the program to see the results. Another key resets it to the original, in case you screw it up.
Tell me that's not about open source. More importantly, tell me that's not about learning.
Also, I call bullshit on this:
B. Microsoft is a for-profit business. So for every million laptops sold, Microsoft gets 3 million dollars -- for a company which makes fifty billion dollars a year.
It would be a drop in the bucket for them to give this away -- it would likely have been worth the positive PR -- but they didn't. It's not enough for them to destroy what OLPC is doing, they have to squeeze every last cent out of it in the process.
If they're NOT better off in the long run I'd like to hear why that is exactly. Other posts have said it better than I have, but let me put it this way: Starting from the ground up, Linux provides more possibilities than Windows does. All of the things Windows is good at will be irrelevant to these kids.
The question is, when they grow up and start building businesses, and building their countries, will they be paying another $3 here, $5 there to Microsoft? Or will they be supporting each other, as a community?
Well, Apple did include XCode (their dev tools) on my OS X install CD, along with Classic and their X11 -- none installed by default, but all readily available.
They also include plenty of other things in their base distribution -- ruby, python, etc -- but these are often bastardized and outdated, and there isn't really a good way to install/update/manage things in the core Unix system. So at least when I was using it, it required quite a lot of hacking around, custom-compiling things, and tweaking in general to make some things work -- much moreso than on Linux.
Oh, and then there's Sugar. Been ported to Windows, I think, but instead of that, they're including Microsoft Works and Powerpoint. This is the slap in the face, to me, and to anyone who can appreciate what Sugar was trying to do.
I admit, that was my first reaction: Fuck no, I'm not going to buy an XO now, and I'm not going to develop the Sugar UI if it simply ends up being abandoned on 99% of the new laptops being shipped. (In favor of Microsoft Works. Yes, really.)
Then, I remembered -- one of the earliest documented cases of astroturfing was a couple of Microsoft employees sent to a Linux convention, when a bunch of large corporations started attending -- you know, when there started to be an IBM booth. They stood around spewing crap like "The revolution is over! The suits are taking over, now... It was fun while it lasted."
I also remember talking to my boss, who used to work inside MS -- talking about how there was a time when just about every meeting, someone would ask "What are we going to do about Linux?" And there would be no answer. They were running scared.
What this means is, OLPC was actually cool enough and big enough to provoke this kind of response from Microsoft. If we let it die now, we let Microsoft win.
I don't know what to do, but I am not ready to give up here.
That, right there, should tell you something about how much Vista sucks.
Say what you will about the same bloat being present everywhere, it's simply not true. It may be more difficult, and may no longer support everything the kernel is capable of, but I bet I can still squeeze Linux onto a 1.44 meg floppy.
XP needs a special version to fit in 2 gigs, and they didn't even try with Vista.
Slashdot Mirror
That is: Gentoo is a geeky test bed, Ubuntu is for gamers and other Windows refugees, and Fedora is the upgrade path for RedHat's non-Enterprise Linux.
No, if I was in that situation, I wouldn't want termination rights. I'd want damages, and/or actually forcing reasonable service out of them.
It completely implodes for me on 3.0b5.
w[=ae]pen; akin to OS. w[=a]pan, OFries. w[=e]pin, w[=e]pen,
D. wapen, G. waffe, OHG. waffan, w[=a]fan, Icel. v[=a]pn,
Dan. vaaben, Sw. vapen, Goth. w[=e]pna, pl.; of uncertain
origin. Cf. Wapentake.]
[1913 Webster]
1. An instrument of offensive of defensive combat; something
to fight with; anything used, or designed to be used, in
destroying, defeating, or injuring an enemy, as a gun, a
sword, etc. Sounds very much like teeth, claws, or stings.
Because it doesn't work in Konqueror, shows exactly one per page for 20 pages, and appears to work entirely on Javascript.
And because it lacks a "print layout" -- clicking "print" actually tells the browser to attempt to print.
I wouldn't call it the "worst ever" layout, though. That's an honor reserved for a few million MySpace pages.
I'm pretty sure that's how it worked -- or at least, it does carry explosives.
But it doesn't prove your point: The truth is there is no such thing as a spooky or scary weapon. I'd say it depends on context. A large knife, dripping with blood, particularly when it's still in the hands of the person who last used it, is a very scary weapon.
Given that just about any weapon can be scary in the right context, I think what you're proving is that nothing is scary when you aren't paying attention to it, no matter how scary it really is.
Thinkgeek must not have been using a database which supports boolean fields.
Then you didn't read my real response.
How does XP improve this situation?
But really, I don't think the awesomeness of XP is going to be any better.
However, I was using WindowMaker before I ever touched OS X. It's not an "exact replica" in that it looks very different -- downright ugly, compared to OS X -- but it functions pretty much the same. They share common roots, in any case -- NeXT.
But for some reason, I've fallen back to a default where the only difference between a normal window and a maximized window is the size and the fact that the "maximize" button is now a "restore" button.
I can see where it makes sense in that you can grab that border and resize just as if it wasn't maximized. I still wish I could figure out how to get this back to the Ubuntu style, or tweak that default -- knowing that KDE does, in fact, provide a way to tweak just about any default.
Another thing you can do is add value, in a way which can't be copied. Not through DRM, but through actual services. Consider WoW -- they've got, what, ten million subscribers now? Each paying $12.95 a month! Don't you think they would pirate it if they could?
In fact, people have written and set up pirate WoW servers, but they are a vast minority. Most people have found that WoW provides something they can't get anywhere else, and that it's worth a large monthly fee.
Then, to a lesser extent, there are services like Steam and Xbox Live. Technically, the games you find here are easily pirated even multiplayer, and many of them are single-player. But through a combination of not over-charging (Portal is absolutely worth $20) and adding features like a friends list, the ability to easily join a game a friend is playing (or start a game with a friend, on Xbox Live), and toys like "Achievements", the legitimate version starts to look better.
Add to that the fact that the pirated version of a Steam game is actually less convenient than the legit version -- I can just enter my username and password anywhere, and download the game, and if I have a credit card, I can always start downloading another game that I want. The pirated version would require me to jump through a lot more hoops.
Now, compare this to places where piracy wins -- movies and music, and many other single-player games. When the tech-savvy person is going to buy the game in the store (to make sure you get paid), and then pirate it anyway, because the pirated version is actually going to be safer to their computer (and won't require swapping CDs), something is VERY wrong.
And when I can get pretty much instant gratification via things like YouTube, and close to it with BitTorrent, whereas buying them legitimately either requires a trip across town or a very specific version of Windows Media Player or iTunes -- and the song will only play on an iPod and not a Zune, or vice-versa -- I would pay more to get the kind of service I already get for free from piracy.
Do you see the difference?
Now, following the link in your signature -- It seems like you could provide this via steam, if you wanted to. At a glance, I can see what you might want to offer in a service of your own -- maybe let people play against each other, or the world at large. Democracy, in particular, looks like it could be made into an MMO of sorts -- you could create a world in which only one person can win a particular election, and then let players form their own communities and political parties.
But that's off the top of my head, and I haven't even played them. You know your games better than I do. Please list any experience you have in paying the rent by using this system of yours. That is, in fact, what I'm doing right now.
Because of this, and because it's still in the early stages, I'm not going to discuss details, but I will say that we do both of the above -- we provide a better product than the pirated version (by hooking it into a service, among other things), and we provide it for free.
One warning: Be sure that this service is something people actually want. No one wants to subscribe to your newsletter. Be aware it is MY product they are offering for free. Irrelevant.
If they are offering it for free, and they're also delivering it faster, and in a better format -- and keep in mind, they very likely have day jobs, too -- then something is wrong with your model.
That's not to say that the pirates are right, but the moment you stop thinking of them as competitors and start thinking of them as thieving bastards, you lose.
Yes, tomsrtbt, I think, used a higher-density format of the floppy, and bzip2 instead of gzip compression for the kernel.
Point is, you wouldn't even think about this for most other OSes. Linux can, in fact, squeeze absurd amounts onto a floppy. Windows can barely squeeze onto a 2 gig hard drive.
I seem to remember that you could run it in a GUI mode, yes.
Been awhile, though. These days, I prefer to let most of my computers save power.
But if you just give them actual, SQL-level access, aside from all the security and performance implications, you're also setting yourself up to be even more rigid than you may already be with respect to schema changes. You shouldn't even be touching the SQL directly yourself, when you can wrap it in an API.
Now, security and performance... Performance issues can be demonstrated as easily as a 'SELECT * FROM SOME_HUGE_TABLE' -- and you could add a few joins without conditions (or with very broad conditions) to make it even worse.
Security issues shouldn't need a demonstration. Just calmly point out that most variants of SQL are Turing-complete, and that you're very sorry, but customers are NOT allowed to run executable code on your production server.
Finally, worst-case, give them a dump of all the data they need, in a format which they can easily import into their own Oracle database. Explain that it's the closest they'll get, unless they want to use your API.
SELECT * FROM A_HUGE_TABLE;
In other words: That you compiled from source doesn't necessarily mean that advice was wrong, it was just Debian/Ubuntu-specific.
In my own posts, I always give generic information first, and then the Ubuntu-specific information -- with a note that it's Ubuntu-specific. I think distro-specific help is still very useful, even if it's not for your distro, so long as it has context.
From memory, an ad-hominem is an argument made by attacking a person's character, rather than their argument. It is a logical fallacy because the argument itself may be true, regardless of who made it.
Here, rather than tell me why it wasn't an ad-hominem, you insult me by suggesting I only use the term to make myself sound smarter than I am... which is, you guessed it, another ad-hominem.
You are not helping your case here.
I will tell you one thing, though, since you seem to have put so much effort into your response: It absolutely is possible to compete with free. Yes, free, whether it's legal or not -- it is possible to compete with piracy. But if you intend to do that, the very first thing you have to do is stop attacking it as a moral issue, and start attacking it as a competitor.
One keystroke reveals the source to any program you're running. You can edit that source, then go back to the program to see the results. Another key resets it to the original, in case you screw it up.
Tell me that's not about open source. More importantly, tell me that's not about learning.
Also, I call bullshit on this: B. Microsoft is a for-profit business. So for every million laptops sold, Microsoft gets 3 million dollars -- for a company which makes fifty billion dollars a year.
It would be a drop in the bucket for them to give this away -- it would likely have been worth the positive PR -- but they didn't. It's not enough for them to destroy what OLPC is doing, they have to squeeze every last cent out of it in the process. If they're NOT better off in the long run I'd like to hear why that is exactly. Other posts have said it better than I have, but let me put it this way: Starting from the ground up, Linux provides more possibilities than Windows does. All of the things Windows is good at will be irrelevant to these kids.
The question is, when they grow up and start building businesses, and building their countries, will they be paying another $3 here, $5 there to Microsoft? Or will they be supporting each other, as a community?
Well, Apple did include XCode (their dev tools) on my OS X install CD, along with Classic and their X11 -- none installed by default, but all readily available.
They also include plenty of other things in their base distribution -- ruby, python, etc -- but these are often bastardized and outdated, and there isn't really a good way to install/update/manage things in the core Unix system. So at least when I was using it, it required quite a lot of hacking around, custom-compiling things, and tweaking in general to make some things work -- much moreso than on Linux.
Oh, and then there's Sugar. Been ported to Windows, I think, but instead of that, they're including Microsoft Works and Powerpoint. This is the slap in the face, to me, and to anyone who can appreciate what Sugar was trying to do.
I really hope that's not the end of it.
I admit, that was my first reaction: Fuck no, I'm not going to buy an XO now, and I'm not going to develop the Sugar UI if it simply ends up being abandoned on 99% of the new laptops being shipped. (In favor of Microsoft Works. Yes, really.)
Then, I remembered -- one of the earliest documented cases of astroturfing was a couple of Microsoft employees sent to a Linux convention, when a bunch of large corporations started attending -- you know, when there started to be an IBM booth. They stood around spewing crap like "The revolution is over! The suits are taking over, now... It was fun while it lasted."
I also remember talking to my boss, who used to work inside MS -- talking about how there was a time when just about every meeting, someone would ask "What are we going to do about Linux?" And there would be no answer. They were running scared.
What this means is, OLPC was actually cool enough and big enough to provoke this kind of response from Microsoft. If we let it die now, we let Microsoft win.
I don't know what to do, but I am not ready to give up here.
That, right there, should tell you something about how much Vista sucks.
Say what you will about the same bloat being present everywhere, it's simply not true. It may be more difficult, and may no longer support everything the kernel is capable of, but I bet I can still squeeze Linux onto a 1.44 meg floppy.
XP needs a special version to fit in 2 gigs, and they didn't even try with Vista.