Since you're not running it on the system that it was keyed to be run on before it was distributed, your copy has the hammer-death trojan feature that kicks in after it's been run a random period of time between 4 and 11 hours. Hope there wasn't anything important on your server...
Remember, closed source means never really knowing what's going on in there.
In the absence of IP, everything would be in the public domain
In the absence of IP, everything would be distributed as compiled binary objects. Sure, you could copy, disassemble, etc. any of it, but since the money would be in obfuscation, obfuscation would be the order of the day.
If copyright were declared invalid you'd be able to pass around binaries as much as you wanted, but businesses would see to it that their software was keyed to a particular piece of hardware. The capabilities of modern cryptography guarantees that would be the case. Case hardened dongles with challange keys to make ANYTHING of value run on your system, anybody?
But this is such a hypothetical, never-gonna-happen proposition that it's stupid to even waste time pondering it.
My experience with 'modern' linux desktops is that they are 'slower than shit' whereas windows on the same machine is 'slow as shit.'
I'm sorry, but I was using Slackware on a whole bunch of old junk hardware when my main 'flagship' machine was a 486-33 system with 16 megs of RAM. The 'slow' machines were things like 386sx-16 boxes with 8 megs of RAM.
They all worked fairly well, even if the 486-33 was the only really 'fast' machine that I could use for general purposes like playing games, going online, etc.
The current generation of bloat desktops won't even start up in a usable fashion, let alone run multiple programs, on a 486 machine.
And that isn't a good thing, no matter how people try to spin it.
Actually, hardly anybody votes for a third party. On the several rather rare instances where people have, it's generally went against the intentions of the people who voted for the third party.
I.e.:
Very few of the people who voted for Nader would rather have Bush than Gore as a president.
Very few of the people who voted for Perot would rather have Clinton than Dole as a president.
The US is a two party system mainly because that's how people polarize, to two 'extremes.' (Now-as to wether they are actual 'two extremes' or a left and right wing flapping on the same big stoopid bird is another matter...)
Those specs and prices were from the Walmart.com website. Which is completely not-the-same as walking into a WalMart store.
If people are going to cite WalMart as some down-home alternative source for computers, they can't sit in their swivel chair and pull up a website to do so.
You've gotta get in the car and drive cross town. Otherwise you're just pretending.
Lord help anybody who 'pretends' to go to WalMart.
Furthermore, if you use a free QT license, you 'taint' your codebase and can not later buy commercial QT and 'relicense' it. This is, at least, the interpretation that I have heard before. It means you can't develop a product using QT and then 'buy a license' when and if you decide to go commercial with it.
Someone please contradict me if I'm wrong, because I don't have it direct from Trolltech anywhere I can cite.
My Sun Ultra 1's (which I bought at auction for $12.50 each a few months ago) are 64-bit personal computers. I worked for a few years at a company where there were floors of QA people who each had an Ultra 1 on their desk, with keyboard, monitor, and mouse attached. They were being used as Personal Computers by the people whose cubes they were in. After awhile, the Ultra 1's were pulled* and shiney new Dell boxes were put in their place.
If that doesn't qualify them as PCs, I don't know what would.
(*there were both happy and unhappy people when the 'switch' happened)
Unfortunately for the rest of us, we can't pretend Bush is the only candidate, have a nice big bon-voyage party for a bunch of you, and then hold the regular bi-partisan election.
When I was in middle school, (well, High School, actually) we fought over who got the ASR-33 teletype (110 baud dialup to the timesharing system) and who got the Silent 700 or the CRT terminal (300 baud).
Of course you did. We all did. I, too, am resentful of the dearth of technical info available in the user manual with modern hardware. I'm just not going to pretend those 'features' were available to Joe Blow.
I had little programs all built in DOS to put my printer into those fancy print modes. Used 'em to turn in english papers in college off my 9-pin dot matrix printer. What would happen if someone tried to turn in a paper printed on a 9-pin DMP in college today?? heh.
You need to compare to a system from a top tier vendor like Dell.
Apple enthusiasts are always making claims like that. It seems the only way they can win a price battle is to choose the most expensive PC hardware vendor they can find.
Back in the day it was always Compaq. "You can't compare that Compu-Add 386, it has to be a Compaq Deskpro 386!" Because at the time, Compaq's machines were priced even higher (if you can believe it) than IBM's machines.
Sometimes Apple enthusiasts remind me of the kids when I was in High School (a long-long time ago now) who sneered at anybody who wasn't wearing Levi jeans. And years before that, the rich kid down the block who had the Schwinn bike. (all Schwinn-approved accessories, now. Don't compromise on the saddlebag, or you might as well be riding a Huffy!).
Keep up that sort of comment. It helps people blow off anything else you say that might make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you're not running it on the system that it was keyed to be run on before it was distributed, your copy has the hammer-death trojan feature that kicks in after it's been run a random period of time between 4 and 11 hours. Hope there wasn't anything important on your server...
Remember, closed source means never really knowing what's going on in there.
In the absence of IP, everything would be in the public domain
In the absence of IP, everything would be distributed as compiled binary objects. Sure, you could copy, disassemble, etc. any of it, but since the money would be in obfuscation, obfuscation would be the order of the day.
If copyright were declared invalid you'd be able to pass around binaries as much as you wanted, but businesses would see to it that their software was keyed to a particular piece of hardware. The capabilities of modern cryptography guarantees that would be the case. Case hardened dongles with challange keys to make ANYTHING of value run on your system, anybody?
But this is such a hypothetical, never-gonna-happen proposition that it's stupid to even waste time pondering it.
Not if you use a properly small root partition and/or are running a SCSI only system...
There are several sources for GNU compatible toolchains available out-of-the-box for Windows.
So, to ask your question more broadly, why should anybody run Linux?
(this is meant as sarcasm, folks....)
Is that coolness or what?!?!?
(slow down, cowboy)
My experience with 'modern' linux desktops is that they are 'slower than shit' whereas windows on the same machine is 'slow as shit.'
I'm sorry, but I was using Slackware on a whole bunch of old junk hardware when my main 'flagship' machine was a 486-33 system with 16 megs of RAM. The 'slow' machines were things like 386sx-16 boxes with 8 megs of RAM.
They all worked fairly well, even if the 486-33 was the only really 'fast' machine that I could use for general purposes like playing games, going online, etc.
The current generation of bloat desktops won't even start up in a usable fashion, let alone run multiple programs, on a 486 machine.
And that isn't a good thing, no matter how people try to spin it.
Actually, hardly anybody votes for a third party. On the several rather rare instances where people have, it's generally went against the intentions of the people who voted for the third party.
I.e.:
Very few of the people who voted for Nader would rather have Bush than Gore as a president.
Very few of the people who voted for Perot would rather have Clinton than Dole as a president.
The US is a two party system mainly because that's how people polarize, to two 'extremes.' (Now-as to wether they are actual 'two extremes' or a left and right wing flapping on the same big stoopid bird is another matter...)
Those specs and prices were from the Walmart.com website. Which is completely not-the-same as walking into a WalMart store.
If people are going to cite WalMart as some down-home alternative source for computers, they can't sit in their swivel chair and pull up a website to do so.
You've gotta get in the car and drive cross town. Otherwise you're just pretending.
Lord help anybody who 'pretends' to go to WalMart.
damn. Forgot to include the to Executor in above comment.
But will it run Executor?
(obviously a rhetorical question, as Executor is a Windows and Linux application)
Still cool to contemplate, though.
Furthermore, if you use a free QT license, you 'taint' your codebase and can not later buy commercial QT and 'relicense' it. This is, at least, the interpretation that I have heard before. It means you can't develop a product using QT and then 'buy a license' when and if you decide to go commercial with it.
Someone please contradict me if I'm wrong, because I don't have it direct from Trolltech anywhere I can cite.
People viewing television advertisements are not going to know what 'Linux' is, and they're certainly not going to know what 'BSD' is.
Why would Apple's thrust in television advertising be to be a 'bigger thorn'??
And we all remember when Intel was erring an add. Or was it some other floating point operation?
My Sun Ultra 1's (which I bought at auction for $12.50 each a few months ago) are 64-bit personal computers. I worked for a few years at a company where there were floors of QA people who each had an Ultra 1 on their desk, with keyboard, monitor, and mouse attached. They were being used as Personal Computers by the people whose cubes they were in. After awhile, the Ultra 1's were pulled* and shiney new Dell boxes were put in their place.
If that doesn't qualify them as PCs, I don't know what would.
(*there were both happy and unhappy people when the 'switch' happened)
Naw, they're the coordinates for the Chinese Embassy.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, we can't pretend Bush is the only candidate, have a nice big bon-voyage party for a bunch of you, and then hold the regular bi-partisan election.
But we can dream.
Dell PII with 128K of memory
I have some 30-pin 64K SIMMs, but I've never seen a Pentium II box that took 30-pin SIMMs. Are you sure about that memory size?
(rim-shot)
When I was in middle school, (well, High School, actually) we fought over who got the ASR-33 teletype (110 baud dialup to the timesharing system) and who got the Silent 700 or the CRT terminal (300 baud).
And that big thick racing stripe makes a difference, too.
Of course you did. We all did. I, too, am resentful of the dearth of technical info available in the user manual with modern hardware. I'm just not going to pretend those 'features' were available to Joe Blow.
I had little programs all built in DOS to put my printer into those fancy print modes. Used 'em to turn in english papers in college off my 9-pin dot matrix printer. What would happen if someone tried to turn in a paper printed on a 9-pin DMP in college today?? heh.
You need to compare to a system from a top tier vendor like Dell.
Apple enthusiasts are always making claims like that. It seems the only way they can win a price battle is to choose the most expensive PC hardware vendor they can find.
Back in the day it was always Compaq. "You can't compare that Compu-Add 386, it has to be a Compaq Deskpro 386!" Because at the time, Compaq's machines were priced even higher (if you can believe it) than IBM's machines.
Sometimes Apple enthusiasts remind me of the kids when I was in High School (a long-long time ago now) who sneered at anybody who wasn't wearing Levi jeans. And years before that, the rich kid down the block who had the Schwinn bike. (all Schwinn-approved accessories, now. Don't compromise on the saddlebag, or you might as well be riding a Huffy!).
Keep up that sort of comment. It helps people blow off anything else you say that might make sense.
Hay now. Take it easy. If you read the article summary, you'll see that it's climbed a whole .9 % recently (that's 36% of a 2.5% market share).
Read that again and weep: point.nine.percent!
Yes. It's hard to believe.
More. Expensive. Than. Macs.
Kinda makes you twitch and want to run to the Apple store waving the plastic, huh?
So, by your defintion, a PC has to be manufactured by one vendor and sold in that vendor's case.
Ooookay.
So it all comes down to 'marketing' and not what people do in the real world.
How 'Apple' of you to feel that way.