Why not, i just build Gnome 2.4, and have been using it since, i had used KDE3 before. Gnomes nice now, I'll probably keep using it as my desktop for now, but I still use all my KDE apps, kmail, kdevelop, knode k[insert normal name here]
To be perfectly honest I really looked at Gnome only because i use GDM and since upgrading to 2.4 from 2.2, it wont read the scripts to launch other window managers, and i cant find out why. oh well, at least Gnomes not bad now. except metacity, i dont like metacity
Its not really a question of if it runs on it, its a question of if its installed. Bash is only default on linux, even the bsd's don't install it by default, and there may be times when the senior admin just doesnt want it on there, wether you want it or not, and that is his perogative. A good generic book or examples, in my opinion will use tcsh or sh for scripts, unless the script is specifically for Linux.
It was a zebra black fine tip i found on the floor one day, lasted me 3 years before it finally fell apart, which was amazing since it was in bad shape to begin with. i bought another one and was just as happy.
Someone whos right doesn't act like this. They may have been right about IBM putting code in Linux, it appeares that SGI did, although inline with the licence of said code but there may be some question as to the licence its under now. Once they moved to the claim that everything that runs on a Unix anywhere is theirs, the possibility that they may be right went right out the window. Someone who is trying to fix a wrong, in this case IP infringment, works with the people to remove it, at the very least shows them what has to go and gives them a deadline. SCO on the otherhand, doesn't want this problem to be fixed, they want to be paid for it. They want to become the owners of Linux, especially considering their own Unix is relativly useless, and unless a mirical happens, SCO will cease to exist. As long as there is a problem, they might be able to milk money from it.
indeed, Linksys is using GPL software and does have to abide by that document.
However, to me, whenever something like this comes up, it just cements in my mind the BSD style licence for use in commercial products.
The spirit of the GPL is more a political statement then a copyright by demanding that if you use a product under the GPL (directly) your product is now GPL (its a gross understement I know, but in this case fundamentally accurate), whereas the BSD license allows you to create works based on, or that directly use it and still keep your part of the product closed. Like it or not not every company is going to open source they're product, and neither should they.
The GPL is trying to bring about a radical change in the way software is made, and for some it makes sence, I think its good to see Linux under a licence that prevents anyone from taking control, and as much as i don't particularly aggree with some of RMS's beliefs, the GPL is a good thing, and if your going to use it, or something under it, then your expected to abide by it. BSD is far more about creating good software for use. They don't dictate what use that is, or how to use it only asking for the proper attributions, which is of course only fair. It seems to me that this is far closer to what Linksys wanted.
So had Linksys actually used a licence that was inline wth what they wanted to do there would be no problem, they just decided to hop on the band wagon. This was a stupid decision on the part of Linksys to act in this manner, especially when there was a much better alternative that would have allowed them to do what they wanted to do.
On top of all that, this is just one more reason I want to replace my linksys with something else, their service sucks, it took forever to get a replacement router and that only happened when I complined to every e-mail address on they're site, and the thing seems to just stop working till I cycle the power. My linux machines don't act like that so not only did they break the licence, they also screwed up the end product.
No, no, no, true, no, and no. Copying and distributing copies is NOT legal in Canada. It says "... musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy..."
Making a copy is from a original, or legal copy in this instance requireing you to OWN the legal original. Downloading from P2P apps is at least a copy of a copy, and even if you could have such a copy by construing this law, there is no way that distributing it to the world through Kazaa is "Private use".
If someone steals a commercial CD, steals a blank CD-R, and then copies the commercial CD onto the CD-R, they are a thief, but they have not infringed copyright. Yes they have both stolen and broken copy right law, they did not own the CD in the first place to make a legal copy.
You can legally lend a commercial CD to a friend, give him a blank CD-R, let him use your computer, and help him burn the CD-R which he can keep for his own private use. He does not own a legal copy therefore he is not entitled to a copy for private use
You can legally copy a commercial CD , keep the copy, and give your friend the original. You would no longer be entitled to a copy for private use, you no longer own the original
You cannot legally make the copy yourself and give your friend the copy True, however this is the same as giving the original and keeping the copy
Alice borrows it and makes a copy for her own use. She then passes the commercial CD on to Benoit, who makes a copy for his own use. Benoit gives the commercial CD back to you. This is all perfectly legal. Nope, your friends do not own the original therefore again, are not entitled to copies for private use.
if Alice had copied the commercial CD, given it back to you, and passed her copy on to Benoit to make a copy for his own use, then copyright would have "probably" been infringed No probably about it, its illegal.
The intent of the law, and the wording its self allows for you to make a copy of something you bought for your own use, distributing or allowing others to copy copyrighted material is ILLEGAL, if you do not own a legal copy, you can not copy someone elses legal copy and think you arn't breaking the law.
afraid that the infringing snippets will 'disappear' from the kernel source, hence losing a case against all those commercial users of Linux they want to sue
And this is of course what this whole thing is about. They don't want to have the code delt with, they're very happy that its there, because now they can extort money from everyone using Linux.
If this was any other IP case the entire point would be to a) halt production of the infringing product, b) have some money paid for losses by the infringing entity c) Licence the producer of the code or have it removed.
Nothing has been done to halt the production, and yes they could get a court order stoping the distrobution from kernel.org and US based Linux distributers. The other two points are to have money paid by the entity(s) distributing the product in question, however, seeing that they just wont get money out of that, (when was the last time you paid for your distro of choice) they can only go after users. Thats extortion. In this case what would have to be done, if they were indeed worried about loosing sales to Linux, would be to prove infringment and demand the infringing areas be removed immedeatly. We have all seen this isnt the route they have choosen and chances are just about everyone here would be shocked if they did.
This case isnt about IP infringment, illegel code, the Linux community process, Open Source, the GPL or anything else. Its a company trying to make lots of money without putting work into a product that is actually worth using.
At which is the heart of current Sci-Fi, that being, its a fantasy. 60's Star Trek was great for everyone because it was nice stories, possibly relevent to the then current world in which the viewers lived, but it still was a fantasy.
It will never happen, there will never be faster-then-light travel i'm told because some old man in a patent office said so with no real proof of it, he just liked the idea. There can be no time travel because you would be able to undo what your just then doing and that just couldnt be possibe.
People seem to be reading more fantasy because you just realized that all Science Fiction is a fantasy. I dont recall eating people this morning for breakfast, or asking my computer for a drink at dinner. I've never had a sword of light flung in my face or a huge ass engine destroy space to bring these far flung parts together.
Sci-Fi is and always has been a fantasy, and that will never change. Why do we still read of space ships fly faster then light, or threw other 'layers' of space? Because the world and physics is quite boring, they say it cant be done. So a Sci-Fi writer has to stick to the magic that has been created before he ever started writing.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy are one and the same, only the setting differs.
Are you insinuating that people not of northern european decent are incapable of learning and passing such a test, simply because of what race their parents were?
Yes but every time it is being sent, it says you should see it, and obviously it would have to be unencrypted. Yes, it is good that your system should not be talking to someone else behind your back, but the problem here isnt you simply seeing what you put in.
In short if you can see it unencrypted, so can anyone else. Information, especially of this nature, should be emcrypted the moment its entered. Since sending encrypted traffic would be impossible to 'see and approve' it would have to be encrypted at someother stage of the transmission. It would be a trivial thing then to steal that info, unencrypted, by having a trojan or the like to alter the packits just a little to send it somewhere else in a man in the middle sort of setup.
Though none of this matters considering in a week or so no one will remember this document anyway.
I think you'll find he did what he did because it was just a learning experience into how the 386 worked and a single large kernel was a better choice for it because it was easier to write. As a Computer science student at the time, had be been creating linux to become what it is today, no doubt he would have tried a micro kernel because thats what would have got him more 'notice' from his professors and people who care about it.
I doubt it was a decision of "Micro-kernel' is just hype, and more, this will be faster to finnish.
First, with any platform that's being used, the system is only as secure as the knowledge of the person administering it lets it be. With OpenBSD nothing is on, but that may not be what the user wants so they turn stuff on, windows, prior to 2003, (2003 has improved upon this leaning towards its not installed till you say it is) comes with just about everything turned on, so securing it is just a matter of looking at it differently and making intelligent decisions.
Linux is actually an interesting platform when you look at this. Linux use is growing but its probably growing the fastest, outside of business's among the kids who run it thinking that simply running Linux makes them 'know computers'.
The first distro of choice among most people is probably Red Hat, it's the most known. Red Hat, in my opinion, installs and runs much more then it needs to, by default, I believe that NFS, DHCP, Bind, Apache, Sendmail or some other mailer, and who knows what else, is installed and *RUNNING*, of course all running as root.
However, these users, being not as knowledgeable as the red hatted penguin would have them believe they are, do not know enough to do anything about these and are quite possibly unaware that these are running. This situation is no different then windows installing and running IIS for no apparent reason. Quite frankly I have had this argument with several people, its nice to see I was right.
Chances are the Super Computer will cost a great deal more. With a cluster of off-the-shelf components, the cost of R&D is spread over the mass produced parts, but with a specially designed processor, either for one or a few installations, in order to at the very least recoup the costs involved, the cost of all of the time and research that went into it is only spread across a few parts. It would be just the same as a Luxury car compared to a Kia, the parts are similar, and they do similar functions, but the cost of the one is far more then the other. Obviously there is a cost associated with the prestige of owning say a Jag which also drives up the cost, but again, the same would happen to a Super Computer.
Yes while to the uninformed this seems interesting and possibly more then coincedental, if you were to actually read GNU's site about this problem you would see that it was cracked in March after the problem was found before a patch was released.
So unless SCO has created a time machine, why dont you get a clue and think for once.
I don't see why we should maintain any code who is only going to benefits instances we don't wish to support.
Users of SCO openunix are not nessesarly SCO themselves. GCC supports as many current OS's as its developers can and that includes SCO. If they're going to drop support for an OS or arcatecture because they dont agree with what the controlling company or group is doing or supporting, it ceses to be a software progect and becomes a members only eletist club that you cant be a part of unless your politics align with the fsf or gcc maintainers. If they drop SCO because of the idiocy there, next they'll drop support for Win32, then what, maybe they have a little argument with the CEO of Red Hat, will they drop support for Red Hat Linux then, or shouldn't dropping support for SCO include dropping Caldara or OpenLinux or whatever they call it. the FSF was created for the freedom of USERS to use and create high quality free and open software, dropping support for the users of SCO's OS's will no hurt SCO and only create a black mark on the FSF and everything they have a hand in. Set the politics aside and stick to creating good software for your users.
Given the history of SCO in this matter so far did you really think that they were going to stick to only attempting to extort those running Linux for commercial purposes?
Everyone knows a software company wants those nice government contracts, so why wouldnt SCO try to claim they already have them and just havent been paid.
> 2) The artists don't get paid millions--they get paid SHIT. > They get about a tenth as much as the tech staff, >instead of a thousand times as much.
How do you figure this? I seem to remember Britney spears making millons and millions for her first CD, the those shitty boybands doing the same. Stones, U2 and them dont do any work and make a hell of a lot more then any tech working on their albums.
Remember Seal, he made one CD, the first single came out and he bought some exotic itallian car. Hundreds of Thousands of dollars for a 4 minute song that SUCKED TOTAL ASS.
The whole point is making music or acting just isnt that much work, not compared to those who really do work., its definatly not worth anywhere near what they get for it. For that matter professional sports stars arnt worth what they get paid either, but at least the major leagues arnt sueing all their fans.
BSD's demon isn't offensive, it's a play on words, and ask most people it's the cutest logo for a computer system they've seen.
It's a sad state of affairs when a monkey (Ximian, get it?) is offensive. It's just a logo, and quite an apt one. I assume you approve of the Debian swirl thing, as long as they don't include Tux, as I see you don't seem to like penguins. Sure it can't be construed as offensive without some serious thought, but what does it mean, how does it symbolize the Debian Project?
And why stop there? What about the Enron 'E', its a little crooked, seems we should have known they were up to something, or IBM's, I mean with those parts missing, my god its down right shady, should I not trust IBM's products now?
The logo for MS windows isn't non-cultural as you say because they wanted to appeal to a large audience but because it's a Window, it made sense. Apples is an apple because, well the Steve's didn't think that a pomegranate would be a good image for a company named Apple, oh and notice that little Byte out of it, see humor, something it seems you lack.
A logo should be something that embodies the entity it represents, while ideally being something that is easily recognizable. The people obviously have a thing about monkeys, who else would choose the word Ximian for their project, or mono for a C# implementation. They like monkeys, it's their project name, so obviously their logo is also a monkey. The BSD's demon is humor along the same lines as Apples, so it makes perfect sense to those who use it.
If you want to deprive yourself of good software because a monkey scares you, that's up to you, but these logos and images do encompass the projects they represent, and for those who know, for example the users, they make sense
Slashdot Mirror
Why not, i just build Gnome 2.4, and have been using it since, i had used KDE3 before. Gnomes nice now, I'll probably keep using it as my desktop for now, but I still use all my KDE apps, kmail, kdevelop, knode k[insert normal name here]
To be perfectly honest I really looked at Gnome only because i use GDM and since upgrading to 2.4 from 2.2, it wont read the scripts to launch other window managers, and i cant find out why. oh well, at least Gnomes not bad now. except metacity, i dont like metacity
Its not really a question of if it runs on it, its a question of if its installed. Bash is only default on linux, even the bsd's don't install it by default, and there may be times when the senior admin just doesnt want it on there, wether you want it or not, and that is his perogative. A good generic book or examples, in my opinion will use tcsh or sh for scripts, unless the script is specifically for Linux.
It was a zebra black fine tip i found on the floor one day, lasted me 3 years before it finally fell apart, which was amazing since it was in bad shape to begin with. i bought another one and was just as happy.
Someone whos right doesn't act like this. They may have been right about IBM putting code in Linux, it appeares that SGI did, although inline with the licence of said code but there may be some question as to the licence its under now. Once they moved to the claim that everything that runs on a Unix anywhere is theirs, the possibility that they may be right went right out the window.
Someone who is trying to fix a wrong, in this case IP infringment, works with the people to remove it, at the very least shows them what has to go and gives them a deadline. SCO on the otherhand, doesn't want this problem to be fixed, they want to be paid for it. They want to become the owners of Linux, especially considering their own Unix is relativly useless, and unless a mirical happens, SCO will cease to exist. As long as there is a problem, they might be able to milk money from it.
indeed, Linksys is using GPL software and does have to abide by that document.
However, to me, whenever something like this comes up, it just cements in my mind the BSD style licence for use in commercial products.
The spirit of the GPL is more a political statement then a copyright by demanding that if you use a product under the GPL (directly) your product is now GPL (its a gross understement I know, but in this case fundamentally accurate), whereas the BSD license allows you to create works based on, or that directly use it and still keep your part of the product closed. Like it or not not every company is going to open source they're product, and neither should they.
The GPL is trying to bring about a radical change in the way software is made, and for some it makes sence, I think its good to see Linux under a licence that prevents anyone from taking control, and as much as i don't particularly aggree with some of RMS's beliefs, the GPL is a good thing, and if your going to use it, or something under it, then your expected to abide by it. BSD is far more about creating good software for use. They don't dictate what use that is, or how to use it only asking for the proper attributions, which is of course only fair. It seems to me that this is far closer to what Linksys wanted.
So had Linksys actually used a licence that was inline wth what they wanted to do there would be no problem, they just decided to hop on the band wagon. This was a stupid decision on the part of Linksys to act in this manner, especially when there was a much better alternative that would have allowed them to do what they wanted to do.
On top of all that, this is just one more reason I want to replace my linksys with something else, their service sucks, it took forever to get a replacement router and that only happened when I complined to every e-mail address on they're site, and the thing seems to just stop working till I cycle the power. My linux machines don't act like that so not only did they break the licence, they also screwed up the end product.
No, no, no, true, no, and no. Copying and distributing copies is NOT legal in Canada. It says "... musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy..."
Making a copy is from a original, or legal copy in this instance requireing you to OWN the legal original. Downloading from P2P apps is at least a copy of a copy, and even if you could have such a copy by construing this law, there is no way that distributing it to the world through Kazaa is "Private use".
If someone steals a commercial CD, steals a blank CD-R, and then copies the commercial CD onto the CD-R, they are a thief, but they have not infringed copyright.
Yes they have both stolen and broken copy right law, they did not own the CD in the first place to make a legal copy.
You can legally lend a commercial CD to a friend, give him a blank CD-R, let him use your computer, and help him burn the CD-R which he can keep for his own private use.
He does not own a legal copy therefore he is not entitled to a copy for private use
You can legally copy a commercial CD , keep the copy, and give your friend the original.
You would no longer be entitled to a copy for private use, you no longer own the original
You cannot legally make the copy yourself and give your friend the copy
True, however this is the same as giving the original and keeping the copy
Alice borrows it and makes a copy for her own use. She then passes the commercial CD on to Benoit, who makes a copy for his own use. Benoit gives the commercial CD back to you. This is all perfectly legal.
Nope, your friends do not own the original therefore again, are not entitled to copies for private use.
if Alice had copied the commercial CD, given it back to you, and passed her copy on to Benoit to make a copy for his own use, then copyright would have "probably" been infringed
No probably about it, its illegal.
The intent of the law, and the wording its self allows for you to make a copy of something you bought for your own use, distributing or allowing others to copy copyrighted material is ILLEGAL, if you do not own a legal copy, you can not copy someone elses legal copy and think you arn't breaking the law.
Escort? isnt it closer to extort.
And this is of course what this whole thing is about. They don't want to have the code delt with, they're very happy that its there, because now they can extort money from everyone using Linux.
If this was any other IP case the entire point would be to a) halt production of the infringing product, b) have some money paid for losses by the infringing entity c) Licence the producer of the code or have it removed.
Nothing has been done to halt the production, and yes they could get a court order stoping the distrobution from kernel.org and US based Linux distributers. The other two points are to have money paid by the entity(s) distributing the product in question, however, seeing that they just wont get money out of that, (when was the last time you paid for your distro of choice) they can only go after users. Thats extortion. In this case what would have to be done, if they were indeed worried about loosing sales to Linux, would be to prove infringment and demand the infringing areas be removed immedeatly. We have all seen this isnt the route they have choosen and chances are just about everyone here would be shocked if they did.
This case isnt about IP infringment, illegel code, the Linux community process, Open Source, the GPL or anything else. Its a company trying to make lots of money without putting work into a product that is actually worth using.
At which is the heart of current Sci-Fi, that being, its a fantasy. 60's Star Trek was great for everyone because it was nice stories, possibly relevent to the then current world in which the viewers lived, but it still was a fantasy.
It will never happen, there will never be faster-then-light travel i'm told because some old man in a patent office said so with no real proof of it, he just liked the idea. There can be no time travel because you would be able to undo what your just then doing and that just couldnt be possibe.
People seem to be reading more fantasy because you just realized that all Science Fiction is a fantasy. I dont recall eating people this morning for breakfast, or asking my computer for a drink at dinner. I've never had a sword of light flung in my face or a huge ass engine destroy space to bring these far flung parts together.
Sci-Fi is and always has been a fantasy, and that will never change. Why do we still read of space ships fly faster then light, or threw other 'layers' of space? Because the world and physics is quite boring, they say it cant be done. So a Sci-Fi writer has to stick to the magic that has been created before he ever started writing.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy are one and the same, only the setting differs.
Are you insinuating that people not of northern european decent are incapable of learning and passing such a test, simply because of what race their parents were?
And if RMS had his way, thats quite true.
Yes but every time it is being sent, it says you should see it, and obviously it would have to be unencrypted. Yes, it is good that your system should not be talking to someone else behind your back, but the problem here isnt you simply seeing what you put in.
In short if you can see it unencrypted, so can anyone else. Information, especially of this nature, should be emcrypted the moment its entered. Since sending encrypted traffic would be impossible to 'see and approve' it would have to be encrypted at someother stage of the transmission. It would be a trivial thing then to steal that info, unencrypted, by having a trojan or the like to alter the packits just a little to send it somewhere else in a man in the middle sort of setup.
Though none of this matters considering in a week or so no one will remember this document anyway.
I think you'll find he did what he did because it was just a learning experience into how the 386 worked and a single large kernel was a better choice for it because it was easier to write. As a Computer science student at the time, had be been creating linux to become what it is today, no doubt he would have tried a micro kernel because thats what would have got him more 'notice' from his professors and people who care about it.
I doubt it was a decision of "Micro-kernel' is just hype, and more, this will be faster to finnish.
Exactly.
First, with any platform that's being used, the system is only as secure as the knowledge of the person administering it lets it be. With OpenBSD nothing is on, but that may not be what the user wants so they turn stuff on, windows, prior to 2003, (2003 has improved upon this leaning towards its not installed till you say it is) comes with just about everything turned on, so securing it is just a matter of looking at it differently and making intelligent decisions.
Linux is actually an interesting platform when you look at this. Linux use is growing but its probably growing the fastest, outside of business's among the kids who run it thinking that simply running Linux makes them 'know computers'.
The first distro of choice among most people is probably Red Hat, it's the most known. Red Hat, in my opinion, installs and runs much more then it needs to, by default, I believe that NFS, DHCP, Bind, Apache, Sendmail or some other mailer, and who knows what else, is installed and *RUNNING*, of course all running as root.
However, these users, being not as knowledgeable as the red hatted penguin would have them believe they are, do not know enough to do anything about these and are quite possibly unaware that these are running. This situation is no different then windows installing and running IIS for no apparent reason.
Quite frankly I have had this argument with several people, its nice to see I was right.
They came right back because no one trusts the systems with sservices. I wonder why they have them at all.
The information was captured by Dr Watson which does not capture information on other OS's so your statement Is just wrong becasue you cant read.
Does anyone who actually comments on stories actually read them?
Chances are the Super Computer will cost a great deal more. With a cluster of off-the-shelf components, the cost of R&D is spread over the mass produced parts, but with a specially designed processor, either for one or a few installations, in order to at the very least recoup the costs involved, the cost of all of the time and research that went into it is only spread across a few parts.
It would be just the same as a Luxury car compared to a Kia, the parts are similar, and they do similar functions, but the cost of the one is far more then the other.
Obviously there is a cost associated with the prestige of owning say a Jag which also drives up the cost, but again, the same would happen to a Super Computer.
Pure-FTP doesnt like to work through my firewall, of course i could be just stupid, its been known to happen.
Yes while to the uninformed this seems interesting and possibly more then coincedental, if you were to actually read GNU's site about this problem you would see that it was cracked in March after the problem was found before a patch was released.
So unless SCO has created a time machine, why dont you get a clue and think for once.
If they're going to drop support for an OS or arcatecture because they dont agree with what the controlling company or group is doing or supporting, it ceses to be a software progect and becomes a members only eletist club that you cant be a part of unless your politics align with the fsf or gcc maintainers.
If they drop SCO because of the idiocy there, next they'll drop support for Win32, then what, maybe they have a little argument with the CEO of Red Hat, will they drop support for Red Hat Linux then, or shouldn't dropping support for SCO include dropping Caldara or OpenLinux or whatever they call it.
the FSF was created for the freedom of USERS to use and create high quality free and open software, dropping support for the users of SCO's OS's will no hurt SCO and only create a black mark on the FSF and everything they have a hand in. Set the politics aside and stick to creating good software for your users.
What are you people idiots, did you see that eye on Leela, who wouldnt want to be frozen for 1000 years to meet her
Given the history of SCO in this matter so far did you really think that they were going to stick to only attempting to extort those running Linux for commercial purposes? Everyone knows a software company wants those nice government contracts, so why wouldnt SCO try to claim they already have them and just havent been paid.
> 2) The artists don't get paid millions--they get paid SHIT. > They get about a tenth as much as the tech staff, >instead of a thousand times as much.
How do you figure this? I seem to remember Britney spears making millons and millions for her first CD, the those shitty boybands doing the same. Stones, U2 and them dont do any work and make a hell of a lot more then any tech working on their albums.
Remember Seal, he made one CD, the first single came out and he bought some exotic itallian car. Hundreds of Thousands of dollars for a 4 minute song that SUCKED TOTAL ASS.
The whole point is making music or acting just isnt that much work, not compared to those who really do work., its definatly not worth anywhere near what they get for it. For that matter professional sports stars arnt worth what they get paid either, but at least the major leagues arnt sueing all their fans.
BSD's demon isn't offensive, it's a play on words, and ask most people it's the cutest logo for a computer system they've seen. It's a sad state of affairs when a monkey (Ximian, get it?) is offensive. It's just a logo, and quite an apt one. I assume you approve of the Debian swirl thing, as long as they don't include Tux, as I see you don't seem to like penguins. Sure it can't be construed as offensive without some serious thought, but what does it mean, how does it symbolize the Debian Project? And why stop there? What about the Enron 'E', its a little crooked, seems we should have known they were up to something, or IBM's, I mean with those parts missing, my god its down right shady, should I not trust IBM's products now? The logo for MS windows isn't non-cultural as you say because they wanted to appeal to a large audience but because it's a Window, it made sense. Apples is an apple because, well the Steve's didn't think that a pomegranate would be a good image for a company named Apple, oh and notice that little Byte out of it, see humor, something it seems you lack. A logo should be something that embodies the entity it represents, while ideally being something that is easily recognizable. The people obviously have a thing about monkeys, who else would choose the word Ximian for their project, or mono for a C# implementation. They like monkeys, it's their project name, so obviously their logo is also a monkey. The BSD's demon is humor along the same lines as Apples, so it makes perfect sense to those who use it. If you want to deprive yourself of good software because a monkey scares you, that's up to you, but these logos and images do encompass the projects they represent, and for those who know, for example the users, they make sense