You are the one missing the point--not everyone else. Yes, he should have decided based on which would cost his company more. Buy the licenses--they're out some money; don't buy the licenses--RedHat covers your ass in court and you are not out any money.
The deal with SCO not only would prevent EV1's Linux hosting customers from being sued, it also would take both EV1 and its users "out of the current fray," said Everyones Internet CEO Robert Marsh on the day of the announcement.
He bought into the FUD from SCO at the time of the deal. The purchase deal of those IP licenses in no way protected them from SCO lawsuits. We've seen the text of SCO license deals on Groklaw, and they never grant any kind of immunity like that. It's always just based on a verbal threat. "Sign this deal or we'll sue you." The agreement never says they won't sue afterward anyway, so it's still up to SCO if they want to honor their side of the protection deal. As people have pointed out, SCO still has not sued anyone they did not have some kind of contract with, so EV1 was moving toward the cross-hairs, not away from them. I'm pretty sure this is real buyer's remorse, following a bonehead decision.
Using tricks to snoop on your kids like this will breed an attitude of distrust and paranoia. You'll also only find out what they're up to after the event. Instead of working against them, you should actively work with them.
My dad used all kinds of ways to check up on me--calling up my friends' parents sometimes when I had spent the night there, and such like that. It had a good side and a bad side. Yes, it caused an air of not wanting to trust him, but it also caused a very useful sense of paranoia in me. I was caught doing stuff I shouldn't a few times, when I thought I had gotten away with it. It really worked, because many times after that, my friends would suggest doing something or going somewhere I shouldn't and I would say, "I can't. My dad will find out somehow; I just know it." Maybe that's not a very nice way to go about it, but it sure works to keep a kid out of trouble.
I feel like I'm being baited by a troll, but you got modded insightful, so it's worth replying.
As far as competition with MicroSoft goes, the GNU system just doesn't have what it takes. Windows has all these graphical configuration tools and wizards that can make even a complete agnostic feel in control.
"Feel" being the operative word--in real life, that's actually an illusion. The vast majority of PC problems aren't fixed by using those "graphical configuration tools and wizards", they are fixed by rebooting, returning the machine, or having a 12 year old whiz kid fix it.
I call "straw man". You missed the boat here. Did he say "problems"? He didn't mention any problems that need to be fixed. He mentioned configuration tools. If people want to adjust the screen size, they want to bring up a properties box, select the size they want and click OK. They don't want to bring up a terminal, run a config utility or edit config files and then have to restart X windows and reload their desktop environment. (hmm, here's one where Windows doesn't need a reboot to change the setting) Yes, I just discovered SuSE that has an easy configuration utility after frustration with a few other distros. (3 cheers for Novell for deciding to open source YaST!)
Sorry to break it to you, but Wizards and GUI tools don't obviate the need for knowledge. If anything, Windows requires more experience to manage well, and it keeps changing.
I think you're in a different world than the parent poster. We're not talking about a Windows Server. He's talking about just being able to use the computer and make a few adjustments. You are thinking of being able to control and tinker with everything, set up a custom firewall, NAT addressing, proxy servers, user authentication, and I don't know what else. My analogy is that there is a 1-foot step of learning for people to be able to effectively use their Windows system and get it to do what they normally want. The advanced configuration stuff is then an 8-foot step for them to climb. With Linux, it's a 6-foot step from the beginning to get the system to do what you want, but then once you have gotten up there, you can do anything you want with it.
Contrary to popular opinion, gadgets are not well supported on Windows. Sure, lots of hardware ships with Windows drivers and installers, but [HOGWASH]a lot of the time, they don't work, and with some regularity, they mess up the entire Windows installation.[/HOGWASH]
Less hardware pretends to work with Linux, but the stuff that works usually really does work and works really well; unlike hardware under Windows, hardware under Linux will also keep working through system upgrade after system upgrade.
You forgot an HTML tag in there, so I put it in for you:). Driver discs for devices in Windows just about always work, and they sure won't corrupt your Windows installation. (I'm probably going to get responses from Linux people saying, "I tried to install something in Windows and then went into regedit and messed with some stuff in the registry, and then Windows was all corrupted! Those Windows drivers must have messed it up!") It is a little disappointing that some hardware didn't have good support going from the Win95/98/ME type of platform to the WinNT/2K/XP type of platform, but that is a major shift in the type of OS, so it's a little understandable. Linux has been the same type of design from the beginning, so there has generally just been added hardware support, rather than dropped support.
I am amused to no end how Linux fans think the Windows registry is just a config file and then are surprised when it doesn't work very well that way. It's not. It's not supposed to be easy to figure out. It's not really supposed to be edited, except for very special cases.
Somehow you're supposed to know that[...]
No you're not supposed to know that. You're not supposed to be in there. If you don't know in advance the specific key you need to search for and exactly what to change it to, you really shouldn't be reading through it and trying to tweak stuff that "looks interesting".
And if I have to hear one more time about, "And if the Windows registry gets corrupted..." I may scream. I've been using Windows systems almost exclusively for over 10 years, and I've never had a corrupt registry problem. That's because I know better than to manually mess around in the registry and screw things up. You have to understand that this isn't the same type of system as Linux, and the registry is made to be updated automatically; not manually. I know that hurts you to think of using a computer that way, without exerting total control, but if you're going to use something in a manner it wasn't made for, then you have no right to complain if it doesn't operate the way you want.
OK a couple of side notes on this: Someone briefly mentioned how hard this is to deal with in a server situation. I agree with you totally, and my take is that Windows has no place on any server. Servers need something more secure, more configurable, more controllable, and guess what? BSD and Linux and UNIX serve those roles so much better.
My other note is that I have edited a Windows registry a few times, but it was in this context. I had found a reference on the web that said very specifically, "Registry key XXXXXXXX does XXXXXX. If you change its value to XXXXXXX, it will do XXXXXXXX."
I asked yesterday about any open source apps that can do what YaST does. Wow, answers come faster than I thought, and I didn't expect it to come in the form of a whole article. [Homer voice]Mmm, YaST with apt[/Homer voice]
Yeah, good to know, but I run a little behind the cutting edge of technology. I'm still hesitating about getting a new video card to replace the 2MB one I still use that came in my Pentium 100 back in '95. If someone has a better video card than mine sitting around they want to get rid of, I'd be happy to take it off your hands.
That's interesting. I only know of a different use for it. I work at a semiconductor company (not AMD or Intel, though), and we use it in the lab when debugging failing parts in R&D development. We can test chips while they are still on the wafer, and if they have shorts on them, we can use flourinert to help locate the short. We squirt some flourinert on it while it's operating. The shorted area generates a lot heat, so the fluorinert will start boiling locally and generating a lot of tiny bubbles right where the short is.
I'm not familiar with all the tools available with all the distros (probably no one person is, but collectively, maybe I can get an answer). I just tried SuSE LiveEval 9.0 a couple days ago, and got to see what YaST can do. I discovered finally a tool that can manage some hardware settings with a graphical app on your desktop. I had tried Mandrake and Debian, and they didn't seem to have a way to just do something like change my display size.
I was used to being able to do a right-click and Properties on my background and change colors, resolution, etc. Are there any OSS apps that can do that from within KDE, or does YaST have the only implementation?
Eh, it depends on how you use it. My wife has a PayPal account set up and uses a slight loophole in their usage agreements. I don't know if this is still true or if they've changed it for new accounts recently. When she first signed up for the account, it had a total spending limit of like $50 or $100. They sent an email asking her to confirm/register the account. It mentioned that confirming the account would go ahead and raise the spending limit. She just never did that, and has been able to use it ever since with a known small spending limit. That prevents the potential of significant ripoff, and besides, anything that is going to cost a lot more than that should really have a secure ordering system to use a real credit card or just take a check or money order.
Here's a concrete example of this lack of testing. I recently looked on Sourceforge for an application for Windows that would extract CD audio and encode it to mp3. (Freakin' $10 for a WMP codec to do it???) I downloaded CD-DA X Tractor; description seemed good, and it was rated 5-Production/Stable. I found that it could never find any of my CDs in the CDDB. I could go to the CDDB website, and find them manually--no problem. WTF? This seems like a pretty major feature to not even work. How did this get to be considered "Production/Stable"? I only just now went looking through their bug reports, and many people are complaining about this because they apparently broke it in v0.24, their current release.
Yeah, I have a system I've tried to install Linux on. The headaches are my OPTi ISA sound card, and my S3 Trio64/32 video card. I've tried Mandrake, Debian, Knoppix, and Mepis, and none have been able to deal with them.
The weird thing I've found is that programmers know of these problems and have found sort-of workaround solutions, but they don't work very well. For my video card, I found on the web that there is an apt package I could install to make it work, but of course no distro will actually detect that and put it in for you. Instead, X won't load, and I had to go find that out about that apt package and do it myself. For the sound card, there are some really ugly hacks people have made to get this card to work, but noone has been able to make a script or anything that will take care of it. It's a do it yourself process of writing your own config file and compiling modules for the kernel.
I thought this was rather amusing. I think the author is trying to pretend to be too dumb. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well because in real life he isn't, so there's this horrible incongruity in switching between knowing what's going on and total "Duuuhhhh..." I particularly noticed it in this section already (haven't finished reading the whole thing.)
He had seen such thing before and never really understood them. But it didn't matter as he just had deleted his Windows 98 with fdisk.
So if you're going to pretend he doesn't understand partitioning, how would he know about removing old partitions? Most regular Windows users I've ever come across, even pretty good ones, are still just "users". Most of them don't understand partitions and have never used or possibly even heard of fdisk. I think that's a stretch to say that he knew to delete his Windows partition before doing this. More accurate, and still within scope of this evaluation, would be to go from him still having his active Windows partition and see how the installer would respond to that.
Heh, heh, Incorrect information--Informative! Correct information--Informative! I'd love to cash in on some of that.
Anyway, for all of you who roll your eyes at the ignorance of many around you who believe this kind of thing, you should prescribe snopes.com to them. It should become a household name for them. Maybe put a Post-it note on their monitor to remind them of it.
There is something to be aware of about that site, though. If you haven't really searched around there, go to the section called "Lost Legends". There are very interesting items there, such as that Mr. Ed was really played by a zebra, Kentucky Fried Chicken actually changed its name because of legal pressure from the state of Kentucky for using their name, and a few others. Those are fakes, and each of them has a link at the end for "more information about this page". They then let you know that "The Repository of Lost Legends (TROLL)" is their place to blow off a little non-factual steam and illustrate the point of never blindly trusting ANY source to be completely authoritative by itself.
Here is what's even more repulsive about it. The judges in that building codes case blindly assumed something in making that decision. They don't see anything wrong with it because you can still request or buy a copy of the law from the copyright holder. Here's the big problem with that: they are assuming the copyright holder will make it available. They never really have to, though. That is where this ruling can accidentally be applied in a police-state kind of way. The law can be enforced on the citizens potentially without their having any way to see what the law actually is.
Woe unto U.S. citizens if a company drafts and copyrights legislation like this, and then sets up an under the table deal to receive kickbacks on fines imposed against violators. The financial incentive to show the law would be gone as it would dry up the revenue stream of fines.
Wow, let's see if I can insert a clue or two here.
" I'm curious as to what possible reasoning Starbucks used to enter this completely alien market." Starbucks already sells music compilation CDs--not an alien market to them at all.
"There's little money to be made from it and it seems impractical due to the time required to both burn the CD and create the playlist." If they have reasonable license terms, selling burned CDs is a good way to make money. In case you didn't see the pricing scale in someone's earlier post, they are selling them for about the same or more than iTunes, and 'Bucks doesn't even have to manage a large server farm and online purchasing infrastructure. This would probably be a cheaper implementation. Burning a CD doesn't take that long on a decently fast burner(I can do 40X, and I'm sure they would have a better machine than I've got.), and selecting their playlist is part of the fun, so that probably wouldn't be a disuading factor.
"Unless their goal is to keep the customer in their store for longer periods of time" Have you ever been in a Starbucks? It will obviously vary from one location to another, but when people are arranging to meet somewhere to talk, Starbucks is almost always the first suggestion, and any Starbucks near a college campus has the opposite problem--they can't get people to leave because they get a coffee, and then hang around for hours studying or talking. I'm not sure enough to say most, but many of their customers don't just come in, get their coffee, and head right out.
Somebody below pointed out that people are not talking about their regular coffee. Yes, you can go anywhere to get that. People go to Starbucks for the espresso drinks. Those run about $3.50+.
The mom and pop serves "premium" coffee, like starbucks. The tim hortons sells generic coffee, like safeway. The gas station sells battery acid, like home depot.
Your comments are very different than my experience. Most mom and pop places I've seen usually serve regular old coffee that isn't great. The Starbucks coffee (brewed, not espresso) is the second vilest stuff I've ever tasted. Our breakroom coffee at work is the worst, but that's because they make it in those huge industrial coffee machines with big spigots on the front. Tim Hortons actually has some of the best coffee I've ever had. We moved from Toledo Ohio to Boise Idaho, and they don't have Tim Hortons out here, so my father in law, who lives in Michigan sent us a 1 lb. can of Tim Hortons coffee, and it's well worth it. A lot of the gas stations I've been to have the generic crappy coffee, but also have several good kinds for the same price. They brew up Irish cream, cinnamon hazelnut, etc. that are pretty good.
We now have two foods we "import" from different parts of the country. Tim Hortons coffee is the new one, but they unfortunately don't let you order it direct. We'll have to have my father in law keep sending it to us. The other is Tony Packo's pickles and peppers relish. Tuna sandwiches just can't live without it.
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You are the one missing the point--not everyone else. Yes, he should have decided based on which would cost his company more. Buy the licenses--they're out some money; don't buy the licenses--RedHat covers your ass in court and you are not out any money.
Maybe that's not a very nice way to go about it, but it sure works to keep a kid out of trouble.
I call "straw man". You missed the boat here. Did he say "problems"? He didn't mention any problems that need to be fixed. He mentioned configuration tools. If people want to adjust the screen size, they want to bring up a properties box, select the size they want and click OK. They don't want to bring up a terminal, run a config utility or edit config files and then have to restart X windows and reload their desktop environment. (hmm, here's one where Windows doesn't need a reboot to change the setting)
Yes, I just discovered SuSE that has an easy configuration utility after frustration with a few other distros. (3 cheers for Novell for deciding to open source YaST!)
I think you're in a different world than the parent poster. We're not talking about a Windows Server. He's talking about just being able to use the computer and make a few adjustments. You are thinking of being able to control and tinker with everything, set up a custom firewall, NAT addressing, proxy servers, user authentication, and I don't know what else. My analogy is that there is a 1-foot step of learning for people to be able to effectively use their Windows system and get it to do what they normally want. The advanced configuration stuff is then an 8-foot step for them to climb. With Linux, it's a 6-foot step from the beginning to get the system to do what you want, but then once you have gotten up there, you can do anything you want with it.
You forgot an HTML tag in there, so I put it in for you
Not to mention you would also get to play football with your feet.
No you're not supposed to know that. You're not supposed to be in there. If you don't know in advance the specific key you need to search for and exactly what to change it to, you really shouldn't be reading through it and trying to tweak stuff that "looks interesting".
And if I have to hear one more time about, "And if the Windows registry gets corrupted..." I may scream. I've been using Windows systems almost exclusively for over 10 years, and I've never had a corrupt registry problem. That's because I know better than to manually mess around in the registry and screw things up. You have to understand that this isn't the same type of system as Linux, and the registry is made to be updated automatically; not manually. I know that hurts you to think of using a computer that way, without exerting total control, but if you're going to use something in a manner it wasn't made for, then you have no right to complain if it doesn't operate the way you want.
OK a couple of side notes on this:
Someone briefly mentioned how hard this is to deal with in a server situation. I agree with you totally, and my take is that Windows has no place on any server. Servers need something more secure, more configurable, more controllable, and guess what? BSD and Linux and UNIX serve those roles so much better.
My other note is that I have edited a Windows registry a few times, but it was in this context. I had found a reference on the web that said very specifically, "Registry key XXXXXXXX does XXXXXX. If you change its value to XXXXXXX, it will do XXXXXXXX."
I asked yesterday about any open source apps that can do what YaST does. Wow, answers come faster than I thought, and I didn't expect it to come in the form of a whole article. [Homer voice]Mmm, YaST with apt[/Homer voice]
Yeah, good to know, but I run a little behind the cutting edge of technology. I'm still hesitating about getting a new video card to replace the 2MB one I still use that came in my Pentium 100 back in '95. If someone has a better video card than mine sitting around they want to get rid of, I'd be happy to take it off your hands.
That's interesting. I only know of a different use for it. I work at a semiconductor company (not AMD or Intel, though), and we use it in the lab when debugging failing parts in R&D development. We can test chips while they are still on the wafer, and if they have shorts on them, we can use flourinert to help locate the short. We squirt some flourinert on it while it's operating. The shorted area generates a lot heat, so the fluorinert will start boiling locally and generating a lot of tiny bubbles right where the short is.
I'll go in with you on that. 998 more volunteers?
I'm not familiar with all the tools available with all the distros (probably no one person is, but collectively, maybe I can get an answer). I just tried SuSE LiveEval 9.0 a couple days ago, and got to see what YaST can do. I discovered finally a tool that can manage some hardware settings with a graphical app on your desktop. I had tried Mandrake and Debian, and they didn't seem to have a way to just do something like change my display size.
I was used to being able to do a right-click and Properties on my background and change colors, resolution, etc. Are there any OSS apps that can do that from within KDE, or does YaST have the only implementation?
So after this licensing change, they should probably also change the name to Xprop86.
Eh, it depends on how you use it. My wife has a PayPal account set up and uses a slight loophole in their usage agreements. I don't know if this is still true or if they've changed it for new accounts recently. When she first signed up for the account, it had a total spending limit of like $50 or $100. They sent an email asking her to confirm/register the account. It mentioned that confirming the account would go ahead and raise the spending limit. She just never did that, and has been able to use it ever since with a known small spending limit. That prevents the potential of significant ripoff, and besides, anything that is going to cost a lot more than that should really have a secure ordering system to use a real credit card or just take a check or money order.
Here's a concrete example of this lack of testing. I recently looked on Sourceforge for an application for Windows that would extract CD audio and encode it to mp3. (Freakin' $10 for a WMP codec to do it???) I downloaded CD-DA X Tractor; description seemed good, and it was rated 5-Production/Stable. I found that it could never find any of my CDs in the CDDB. I could go to the CDDB website, and find them manually--no problem. WTF? This seems like a pretty major feature to not even work. How did this get to be considered "Production/Stable"? I only just now went looking through their bug reports, and many people are complaining about this because they apparently broke it in v0.24, their current release.
Yeah, I have a system I've tried to install Linux on. The headaches are my OPTi ISA sound card, and my S3 Trio64/32 video card. I've tried Mandrake, Debian, Knoppix, and Mepis, and none have been able to deal with them.
The weird thing I've found is that programmers know of these problems and have found sort-of workaround solutions, but they don't work very well. For my video card, I found on the web that there is an apt package I could install to make it work, but of course no distro will actually detect that and put it in for you. Instead, X won't load, and I had to go find that out about that apt package and do it myself. For the sound card, there are some really ugly hacks people have made to get this card to work, but noone has been able to make a script or anything that will take care of it. It's a do it yourself process of writing your own config file and compiling modules for the kernel.
So if you're going to pretend he doesn't understand partitioning, how would he know about removing old partitions? Most regular Windows users I've ever come across, even pretty good ones, are still just "users". Most of them don't understand partitions and have never used or possibly even heard of fdisk. I think that's a stretch to say that he knew to delete his Windows partition before doing this. More accurate, and still within scope of this evaluation, would be to go from him still having his active Windows partition and see how the installer would respond to that.
I've got those right here--just a sec...
Oh yeah, here they are.
enlarge *.*
So, who lives closest to this guy? Anyone? We need someone to volunteer to make the hit.
Heh, heh, Incorrect information--Informative! Correct information--Informative! I'd love to cash in on some of that.
Anyway, for all of you who roll your eyes at the ignorance of many around you who believe this kind of thing, you should prescribe snopes.com to them. It should become a household name for them. Maybe put a Post-it note on their monitor to remind them of it.
There is something to be aware of about that site, though. If you haven't really searched around there, go to the section called "Lost Legends". There are very interesting items there, such as that Mr. Ed was really played by a zebra, Kentucky Fried Chicken actually changed its name because of legal pressure from the state of Kentucky for using their name, and a few others. Those are fakes, and each of them has a link at the end for "more information about this page". They then let you know that "The Repository of Lost Legends (TROLL)" is their place to blow off a little non-factual steam and illustrate the point of never blindly trusting ANY source to be completely authoritative by itself.
Here is what's even more repulsive about it. The judges in that building codes case blindly assumed something in making that decision. They don't see anything wrong with it because you can still request or buy a copy of the law from the copyright holder. Here's the big problem with that: they are assuming the copyright holder will make it available. They never really have to, though. That is where this ruling can accidentally be applied in a police-state kind of way. The law can be enforced on the citizens potentially without their having any way to see what the law actually is.
Woe unto U.S. citizens if a company drafts and copyrights legislation like this, and then sets up an under the table deal to receive kickbacks on fines imposed against violators. The financial incentive to show the law would be gone as it would dry up the revenue stream of fines.
Wow! That was sweet, now I'm waiting for the following so I can reap the +1 Funny rewards:
"You know what I imagine?"
"How do you like hot grits served?"
"Do you think I'm insensitive?"
"Do you have a business plan to make us profitable?"
ok...any time now...go ahead, I'm ready.
Also, I think it was one of the first where you could aim up and down. Doom didn't have it.
Wow, let's see if I can insert a clue or two here.
" I'm curious as to what possible reasoning Starbucks used to enter this completely alien market."
Starbucks already sells music compilation CDs--not an alien market to them at all.
"There's little money to be made from it and it seems impractical due to the time required to both burn the CD and create the playlist."
If they have reasonable license terms, selling burned CDs is a good way to make money. In case you didn't see the pricing scale in someone's earlier post, they are selling them for about the same or more than iTunes, and 'Bucks doesn't even have to manage a large server farm and online purchasing infrastructure. This would probably be a cheaper implementation.
Burning a CD doesn't take that long on a decently fast burner(I can do 40X, and I'm sure they would have a better machine than I've got.), and selecting their playlist is part of the fun, so that probably wouldn't be a disuading factor.
"Unless their goal is to keep the customer in their store for longer periods of time"
Have you ever been in a Starbucks? It will obviously vary from one location to another, but when people are arranging to meet somewhere to talk, Starbucks is almost always the first suggestion, and any Starbucks near a college campus has the opposite problem--they can't get people to leave because they get a coffee, and then hang around for hours studying or talking. I'm not sure enough to say most, but many of their customers don't just come in, get their coffee, and head right out.
Hmm, with the recent furor or McDonald's "causing" obesity, they should probably avoid "Baby Got Back" in their song giveaway.
Your comments are very different than my experience. Most mom and pop places I've seen usually serve regular old coffee that isn't great. The Starbucks coffee (brewed, not espresso) is the second vilest stuff I've ever tasted. Our breakroom coffee at work is the worst, but that's because they make it in those huge industrial coffee machines with big spigots on the front. Tim Hortons actually has some of the best coffee I've ever had. We moved from Toledo Ohio to Boise Idaho, and they don't have Tim Hortons out here, so my father in law, who lives in Michigan sent us a 1 lb. can of Tim Hortons coffee, and it's well worth it. A lot of the gas stations I've been to have the generic crappy coffee, but also have several good kinds for the same price. They brew up Irish cream, cinnamon hazelnut, etc. that are pretty good.
We now have two foods we "import" from different parts of the country. Tim Hortons coffee is the new one, but they unfortunately don't let you order it direct. We'll have to have my father in law keep sending it to us. The other is Tony Packo's pickles and peppers relish. Tuna sandwiches just can't live without it.