Ireland is just being used as a proxy here, imho. This is really aimed at the EU which is generally a high tax area. Corporations probably wouldn't dare to insult the EU directly but it's OK, apparently, to diss Ireland now that it's been brought low by corruption and incompetence. Given its history, location out on the fringes of mainland Europe and the strength of lack of it of the Irish economy, attractive rates of corporation tax are probably one of the few USPs Ireland has to attract jobs and business. So it's probably a good idea to keep these tax rates low but that is, or should be, the sovereign decision of the Irish people and what they decide we should respect. It's worth pointing out that of the corporations doing the complaining, two are utterly discredited and owe their continued existence to public funding (the banks) and three are gross monopolies. Complaints from outfits like these that poor people should become poorer so that rich people elsewhere can become richer are pretty darn sickening. If the Irish people decided to send these fellows home in a rowing boat, one couldn't blame them.
However, the larger question here is whether the EU/IMF bailout of Ireland will be sensitive and sympathetic. If the rulers of the EU (i.e., France and Germany) use the exercise as an excuse to strip Ireland of the few advantages it has, such as the option of offering low rates of corporate taxes, claiming "harmonisation" but with the real aim of luring these companies elsewhere then the "rescue" will really amount to a rape. These days you don't need to strip factories and ship them home, you just need to shuffle the foreign bank accounts and trusts around. Given the arrogance and clumsiness of those who run the EU, it would be prudent not to be too confident.
It's worth bearing in mind that whether you like this deal or not, Novell has successfully lifted several hundred million bucks from the Beast of Redmond. That's a lot of money and a huge sum for a Linux company. It may - may - turn out that this money was what Novell needed to keep the show on the road. From the sound of it, this recent news suggests that the deal is now over. Fine, nothing lasts forever. Forward to the next deal. Besides, Novell's problem has always been the same since they acquired SuSE: how to handle the awkward fact that traditional netware come backlist revenues are declining much faster than the Linux come new business revenues are rising. Sooner or later Novell will surely have to bite this bullet and reinvent itself or, yes, it probably will go under. And it won't be anything to do with Microsoft.
Several of the names on that list crop up every time the doomsters gather for another round. In any case, there's nothing wrong with being "sold off". Sometimes that's the making of a company which now has access to capital and markets it would never have had on its own. The only thing one can say for certain is that no one know what's going to happen, and one can say with some degree of likelihood that if some big names do falter in the next two or three years then among them will be some names that have never been on a a Doomsday list because everyone thought were fine. There'll be a lot of execs out there sitting on some awkward secrets (read: big holes appearing in the balance sheet and the banks unwilling to refinance) or some awkward legal claims (read: massive damages for corporate IT scams the victims have so far kept secret for fear of affecting their sales and stock price).
Oh well, another year, another theory about something that's become a dull-looking tourist trap jammed next to a busy main road. Another "explanation" is bound to be along in 2009. Stonehenge is really just a prism for the subconscious preoccupations of the day. One deduces from the latest idea that the UK is now worried about how long its current royal family will last. Surprising really that the archaeologists haven't uncovered "evidence" that the site was constructed under the supervision of a Stone Age health and safety executive. Perhaps next year they'll uncover the remains of a tree stump and declare that a hollow indentation in it is proof positive of the world's first on-site hard hat.
The article makes one very small point: something that doesn't work is no value even if it is free. Otherwise, the article's premise is mistaken. If it were true that free is a no-no, then you'd expect there to be little or no trade in filesharing. Instead, billions in copyrighted material is traded annually on a "free" basis.
The reasons for Linux's so far modest adoption are pretty simple.
It is hard to obtain - most OEMs don't offer it as a preinstall (which most users will stick with anyway) and very few retail outlets carry any flavour of Linux.
Second, in some regards desktop Linux still doesn't work well enough and requires too much configuration by hand - wifi is the classic example but getting multimedia to work with patent-encumbered stuff is another; or you could cite, say, Fedora and it's paucity of gui-based user configuration tools, or perhaps Debian and its baffling decision to leave out Firefox (which the new user will eventually find is called IceWeasel thanks to some zealot).
Third, Linux is still "owned" by its developers. These fellows have a poor record of understanding users who aren't geeks themselves and many devs seem to have an equally poor record of even wanting to. A classic example of this is the user of the command line. The broad mass of PC users has made it very clear that they want gui-based tools and no command line at all, thanks very much. Whether that's a good idea is beside the point: it's what users want, and they'll go where they get what they want - which is only being rational.
Two more reaons: Linux does not have MS Word, the one program I almost always hear mentioned whenever someone is trying to string a PC together. Second, Linux often comes with absolutely no style whatsoever. We live in a fashion-conscious age where appearance is all. The old *nix idea that it doesn't matter what it looks like so long as it works is pretty well suicidal when trying to present ideas to a mass audience.
For Linux to become more popular, two things have to happen. It has to become much more widely available, and it has to become much more attuned to delivering what non-technical PC users actually want regardless of whether the devs approve. Until then... more of the same.
Recognizing the limits of government and doing as little as possible is one of the secrets of good government.
I would appoint a cabinet of the best talents I could find, regardless of their political affiliation (if any), and give them maximum leeway to get on with it.
I would require all employers to offer at least 28-days paid holiday a year and I would fire anyone in government who did not take it and also fire anyone who made a habit of working seven-day weeks.
I would ban breakfest meetings which are profoundly uncivilized.
I would go to bed at 11 pm and leave every official engagement by 10 pm regardless of what it was.
I would be nasty to Vladimir Putin, lock up financiers from time to time to remind them of who's boss, require anyone worth more than $2 million to give at least 10 per cent of their income to charity and make public the details, offer Texas to the Iranians in exchange for peace in the Gulf (the sooner the USA is rid of Texas the better we'll all be), and generally see my role as keeping everyone's spirits up.
So, the suggestion is that in order to defray the cost of their incarceration, criminals be forcibly involved in an experiment that is not only technical but medical in nature too. Wonder where we've heard all about that before.
Society may have the right to take away another's freedom but it has no right to take away another's human rights or dignity (unless you support capital punishment). No doubt tagging prisoners would make the life of prison warders easier, but then so would gassing or shooting their charges. There is really nothing more to say.
These figures are not very surprising. As operating systems mature generally and hardware becomes more capable, you'd expect fewer folks to upgrade and everyone to upgrade their whole PC less often anyway. WinXP represented a much bigger jump away from the Win9x userbase (home users) than Vista does over XP. Vista comes with much less pressure on anyone to upgrade.
If anything, Microsoft allowed their Vista marketing to run away with them and too many people came to believe in the hype and the marketshare projections. Still, after reading a lot of naysaying, I've installed Vista over XP and have been pleasantly surprised. It is better than I was expecting, though the cruft has to be turned down or turned off. It's certainly "good enough" despite shortcomings, imho, which is what counts with Microsoft. So I imagine Vista will continue to make solid progress in the home and on pre-installs. The enterprise is something else. Besides, if it's known that a Windows 7 will appear in, say, 2009 or 2010, many outfits would elect to skip Vista as a matter of course, whatever it brought to the table.
Reinstalling my Microsoft OS has also reminded me how much good open-source software is now available on this platform. It's often said that a resurgent Apple is putting pressure on the market share of desktop Linux. I wonder whether Vista or in future Windows 7 plus a nice suite of the Open Office, Gimp and Firefox kind won't put on similar pressure from a different direction.
London - Londonistan - is now home to a large Russian community as well as a simply huge floating population of "businessmen" and chancers from all over the world. It's hardly a surprise that from time to time they turn out to bring somewhat unorthodox business practices with them as well as some undeclared duty-free items fresh from the reactor core. A former British Intelligence boss has pointed out that this is about the tenth high-profile contract killing involving Russians and not a single one has been solved. Besides, poisoning is a particularly dark crime and appeals to the ghoul in most of us, hence a lot of the publicity.
I think people forget the massive loss of face the Russians suffered when communism collapsed. Perhaps the Kremlin want to repair some of that damage and get back to what they believe Russia should be doing, which is running the world and dictating its energy policies. I guess the good news is that the Russians are usually too disorganized and hung-over to be much good at that.
I'd never consider upgrading a distro like this. Save off your settings and personal files, wipe and reinstall. As many have found, the alternative is asking for trouble.
Even so, let's hope some good comes of this. Perhaps it will encourage the Ubuntu team to take a hard look at what they're doing and where they're at. In retrospect, calling anything like this "Edgy" was a mistake. Ubuntu is aimed at newer and less technically-minded users on the desktop, primarily. That puts a premium on easy, simple and reliable, not on "edgy" as in "the latest gizmos for techies". Techies are not Ubuntu's natural territory. If you want the bleeding edge and all that goes with it, there are 1001 other distros to use. Maybe Ubuntu will decide that its core appeal does not lie in this game, and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, imho, it risks losing the tremendous goodwill it has built up. Ubuntu has never been "just another distro", but if it allows itself to be led only by what developers want, it could easily become one.
No statement I can see about how much this treatment will cost. Many new-gen drugs are so expensive that only the super-rich can afford them. So, while nice to know of, they are effectively useless for 99 per cent of humanity. The irony is that the super-rich are much less likely to need such treatments, since they can afford to eat well. No corn-syrup-soaked breakfast cereal for them, no breads mostly containing only fats and air with a few corner-sweepings of wheat thrown in, no vegetables pumped full of water and then covered in salt and sugar.
It probably is a bad idea, but not because forking Firefox helps IE7 or splits the user base in some way.
This move runs a risk with two things. First, it gives the impression that open source is fickle, prone to ayatollah-ish upheavals and not to be relied upon. If you were a business or institution, would you really feel happy running Debian knowing that next year the "community" (meaning: a vocal minority) might suddenly decide that package X was inappropriate and mere "marketing" and then alter it in some way that caused you a lot of trouble. Not long ago the Mozilla folks and Firefox were heroes. Now they are apparently running dogs and capitalists and we should "give Mozilla the finger", in Debian's own words. Mozilla may (or may not) be mistaken and inflexible in their attitude, but that just makes it even more important than the response to their stance is not similar in kind. Alas, it has been and that's a sign of immaturity to me.
Second, if Web 2.0 takes off, Firefox will have an even more important role to play, so this is probably not the best moment to fork one of the best-known and most successful open-source projects and then reissue it under a name no one gives fig for.
Still, I guess everyone has the freedom not to run Debian if they prefer not to.
Fine balancing act, I guess. Debian has to commit to quality because without that it is nothing - there would be no point in using it. OTOH, there are other pressures, too, not least being seen to run a well-founded ship. Users out there, particularly institutional ones, are bound to have expectations. For example, today the City of Munich announced the latest stage in its Debian rollout, but they likely wouldn't have gone for Debian to begin with if they'd thought its development process was struggling. And maybe some folks - quite understandably - want to lay a few ghosts to rest after the soap opera of the Sarge release.
So paying a couple of guys (and only if needed) to help get this huge and complex project out on time doesn't seem a big deal. If the quality is still not there, I am sure Debian will delay the release anyway. I guess what this shows is that there is a lot of competition out there now - Ubuntu, CentOS, etc - and Debian can't afford to go "ivory tower" despite what some of its developers probably think. The Dunc-Tank board has some very solid and experienced people on it. Best to wish them well. They are hardly looking to raise zillions, just a decent wage for the best talent available.
As with economists, you could lay all of America's business professors end to end and still never reach a conclusion.
Linux does not aim to be best, second best or ninety-third best. Take Debian: it aims to provide a free universal operating system. How well it does, in the perception of others, is only incidental to Debian's core purpose. So, looking at all this in terms of winners and losers or best and worst is largely illusory. Linux is doing just fine and does not have to hit some arbitrary bar - such as overtaking Microsoft's market share - to continue to do just fine.
If you cannot detect what's wrong with the maintainers' statement - and why most software professionals would not release a public statement of this kind - then ask your parents to explain it to you when you are out of short trousers. FWIW I run Debian Unstable and like it very much, but that doesn't mean I can't tell an orange from a pear.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, it is surely possible for Debian to issue a statement about it without resorting to personal abuse? Debian has so many, many good things going for it, and yet the whole project seems to let itself down so often by displaying attitude problems of one kind or another. FFS: "You're a liar, No I'm not, Yes you are", etc., etc., should have been left behind in the school playground.
This is England. The "judge" would have been a lay magistrate, just a member of the public with special training. Not, anyway, a professional lawyer who would probably have had to ask "What is the internet?", assuming the hearing was held before lunch and therefore that the "judge" was still relatively sober.
The apparent leniency of this sentence might have something to do with the aggrieved party, a large company, initially demanding 29,000 pounds in compensation from a sixteen-year-old boy, not a very nice or proportionate thing to do. This demand by the prosecution was dropped during the trial. It's possible that the magistrates were showing that bullying of this kind is not on, in England, and that if this company's mail servers could be so easily knocked over by a sixteen year-old, they couldn't have been much good in the first place.
Computer specialists might object to the idea, but lay magistrates are partly there to reflect public opinion, and public opinion doesn't hold computers in very high regard.
Probably the only job open to her now is that of Official Keeper of the Glorious Counter-Counter-Revolutionary Bush. The Official Keeper's duties are to comb the breadcrumbs from Richard Stallman's beard each morning, and to bear it before him, resting it tenderly on a bed of cloth of velvet, at all official functions of the FSF. Unfortunately, a highly complicated dispute involving several professors at law, as to whether "breadcrumbs" refers only to home-made organic bread or also to the superheated patented supermarket dough known as "bread", is likely to mean that even this opportunity may not be available to her.
Oh God, not another round of this GPL blabber. About a third of the posts on here seem to be about what Richard Stallman may or may not have meant by what he may or may not have said. Yeah, right.
Stand back and look at the view. Unless Linux continues to provide what its users want, it will wither and die. Hordes of folks will simply drift away to other platforms leaving only a few diehards, probably not enough to continue to attract the talent Linux needs to stay sharp. Will the GPL v3 help or hinder the continued prosperity and increased adoption of Linux? That's really the only question that matters unless you live in an ivory tower.
Yes, this may mean dealing with, shock horror, capitalist roaders who'll deliver binary-only drivers and other unholy objects. Better they do that than have them abandon the platform and stuff everyone, though, which would start to become tempting if enough insults get hurled their way. No 3D drivers from Nvidia or ATI, for example, would kill desktop Linux stone dead on the spot. I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't what some of these here puritans would like.
Interesting idea, but the wrong target. Red Hat have spent years and much skill building up their strong position in the enterprise and no other Linux outfit is likely to be dislodging them any time soon.
Much more vulnerable are Novell/SuSE and their rather hamfisted "me too" strategies and lesser distros like Mandriva. Those are the ones Ubuntu is likely to take market share from. SuSE could be especially vulnerable since their OpenSuSE "community" distro is arguably just a corporate sham with very little of a true community about it.
Perhaps the question needs wider phrasing: can the IT industry - not just the malware side - be trusted? Personally I don't think so because they seem addicted to denying the consequences of their own actions or foisting the cost on the public. You can see this everywhere from the paltry, tokenish efforts to tackle malware and spam by corporations that regularly turn in billions in profits, to the Heath-Robinson-like, energy-guzzling design of the PC itself, to dumping clean up and recycling via shady deals with the Chinese. Let's not even look at moral issues like DRM and Hollywood or Chinese censors.
OTOH, no industry can be trusted. If it wasn't for some tireless public-minded advocates the auto industry would probably have us still driving deathtraps with engines designed in the 1950s or the pharma industry, for example, would have us growing three heads while being charged 50 bucks for a paracetamol.
"So, just how much am I supposed to give a stranger? When does it stop?"
I don't know how much you are supposed to give a stranger. Where I live, it is usually a UK pound "for a cup of tea". Actually buying a stranger a cup of tea in lieu of cash tends to be unpopular, though, as a cup of tea is not what the stranger invariably has in mind.
The core of McAllister's argument is that the FSF has changed its stance on software from promoting an "idealistic notion" which was "not just radical, but surprisingly practical" (and hugely successful) to "moralistic oppostion" in which DRM is given such an inflated importance that opposing it has become an "evangelical dogma".
Looking at the terms like "evil" used by the FSF to describe DRM, it is hard not to think McAllister has a point.
This has little to do with whether you think DRM is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. It is a question of the FSF's attitude towards it. Alas, what the article doesn't do is consider whether the FSF's new tactics (if you think they are new) are more or less likely to succeed than their older and more laid-back ones.
Telling someone that if they disagree with you they are morally wrong is not usually a great way to get them on your side. It comes across as arrogant, I would guess. Suggesting that by agreeing with you they will help to make the world a fairer and better place for both them and everyone else is usually more successful. So, yes, one can argue that the FSF has chosen to be too shrill and over-the-top to be as effective as it might be, especially since consumers have already shown with iTunes that if the price is right they will flock to a DRM-encumbered scheme in huge numbers.
However, Apple is only one company. Behind them lurk some decidedly bloodthirsty characters, and the Beast of Redmond...
I am using Dapper Drake on my laptop and it is fine, but overall I think Ubuntu are trying to do too much too quickly. Their resources and manpower are still limited. For example I much prefer xfce to gnome on this machine, but the Ubuntu implementation has a couple of annoying bugs and isn't that well thought out in design terms. It needs a bit more polishing to be truly smooth and slick.
I guess Ubuntu's best work is under the bonnet and unseen, in terms of excellent hardware detection and the smooth integration of kernel modules for wifi and similar things. Impressive, and easy to overlook.
I still prefer Debian and SuSE, though. The things that put me off Ubuntu are the silly names and too much teenage carry-on in the user community, with the fanboys and the peer group stuff. I prefer something well away from all that, and the fanboys haven't helped by raising expectations that will be near impossible to fulfil and creating the feeling (strictly imho) that Ubuntu is somehow a little lightweight and not so serious.
It's always good to see a new ship launched. I guess only time will determine how Ubuntu's hopes for the enterprise pan out. It's a rough, tough market out there.
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Ireland is just being used as a proxy here, imho. This is really aimed at the EU which is generally a high tax area. Corporations probably wouldn't dare to insult the EU directly but it's OK, apparently, to diss Ireland now that it's been brought low by corruption and incompetence. Given its history, location out on the fringes of mainland Europe and the strength of lack of it of the Irish economy, attractive rates of corporation tax are probably one of the few USPs Ireland has to attract jobs and business. So it's probably a good idea to keep these tax rates low but that is, or should be, the sovereign decision of the Irish people and what they decide we should respect. It's worth pointing out that of the corporations doing the complaining, two are utterly discredited and owe their continued existence to public funding (the banks) and three are gross monopolies. Complaints from outfits like these that poor people should become poorer so that rich people elsewhere can become richer are pretty darn sickening. If the Irish people decided to send these fellows home in a rowing boat, one couldn't blame them.
However, the larger question here is whether the EU/IMF bailout of Ireland will be sensitive and sympathetic. If the rulers of the EU (i.e., France and Germany) use the exercise as an excuse to strip Ireland of the few advantages it has, such as the option of offering low rates of corporate taxes, claiming "harmonisation" but with the real aim of luring these companies elsewhere then the "rescue" will really amount to a rape. These days you don't need to strip factories and ship them home, you just need to shuffle the foreign bank accounts and trusts around. Given the arrogance and clumsiness of those who run the EU, it would be prudent not to be too confident.
It's worth bearing in mind that whether you like this deal or not, Novell has successfully lifted several hundred million bucks from the Beast of Redmond. That's a lot of money and a huge sum for a Linux company. It may - may - turn out that this money was what Novell needed to keep the show on the road. From the sound of it, this recent news suggests that the deal is now over. Fine, nothing lasts forever. Forward to the next deal. Besides, Novell's problem has always been the same since they acquired SuSE: how to handle the awkward fact that traditional netware come backlist revenues are declining much faster than the Linux come new business revenues are rising. Sooner or later Novell will surely have to bite this bullet and reinvent itself or, yes, it probably will go under. And it won't be anything to do with Microsoft.
Several of the names on that list crop up every time the doomsters gather for another round. In any case, there's nothing wrong with being "sold off". Sometimes that's the making of a company which now has access to capital and markets it would never have had on its own. The only thing one can say for certain is that no one know what's going to happen, and one can say with some degree of likelihood that if some big names do falter in the next two or three years then among them will be some names that have never been on a a Doomsday list because everyone thought were fine. There'll be a lot of execs out there sitting on some awkward secrets (read: big holes appearing in the balance sheet and the banks unwilling to refinance) or some awkward legal claims (read: massive damages for corporate IT scams the victims have so far kept secret for fear of affecting their sales and stock price).
Thought Experiments at http://www.bryanappleyard.com/ - stuff that makes you think by the writer and journalist Bryan Appleyard. Feed = http://www.bryanappleyard.com/atom.xml
Nigeness - http://nigeness.blogspot.com/ - acute observation and a connoisseur of many forms of art, a welcome port in the verbiage-strewn seas of the net. Feed = http://nigeness.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
The Lumber Rood at http://elberry.wordpress.com/ - why moan about the end of the world and the collapse of civilization when you can enjoy them instead? This blog will show you how. Feed = http://elberry.wordpress.com/feed/
Oie de Chine at http://chine.blog.lemonde.fr/ - a photo-blog of daily life in China from a hugely talented French photographer. Feed = http://chine.blog.lemonde.fr/feed/
Oh well, another year, another theory about something that's become a dull-looking tourist trap jammed next to a busy main road. Another "explanation" is bound to be along in 2009. Stonehenge is really just a prism for the subconscious preoccupations of the day. One deduces from the latest idea that the UK is now worried about how long its current royal family will last. Surprising really that the archaeologists haven't uncovered "evidence" that the site was constructed under the supervision of a Stone Age health and safety executive. Perhaps next year they'll uncover the remains of a tree stump and declare that a hollow indentation in it is proof positive of the world's first on-site hard hat.
The reasons for Linux's so far modest adoption are pretty simple.
For Linux to become more popular, two things have to happen. It has to become much more widely available, and it has to become much more attuned to delivering what non-technical PC users actually want regardless of whether the devs approve. Until then
Recognizing the limits of government and doing as little as possible is one of the secrets of good government.
I would appoint a cabinet of the best talents I could find, regardless of their political affiliation (if any), and give them maximum leeway to get on with it.
I would require all employers to offer at least 28-days paid holiday a year and I would fire anyone in government who did not take it and also fire anyone who made a habit of working seven-day weeks.
I would ban breakfest meetings which are profoundly uncivilized.
I would go to bed at 11 pm and leave every official engagement by 10 pm regardless of what it was.
I would be nasty to Vladimir Putin, lock up financiers from time to time to remind them of who's boss, require anyone worth more than $2 million to give at least 10 per cent of their income to charity and make public the details, offer Texas to the Iranians in exchange for peace in the Gulf (the sooner the USA is rid of Texas the better we'll all be), and generally see my role as keeping everyone's spirits up.
So, the suggestion is that in order to defray the cost of their incarceration, criminals be forcibly involved in an experiment that is not only technical but medical in nature too. Wonder where we've heard all about that before.
Society may have the right to take away another's freedom but it has no right to take away another's human rights or dignity (unless you support capital punishment). No doubt tagging prisoners would make the life of prison warders easier, but then so would gassing or shooting their charges. There is really nothing more to say.
These figures are not very surprising. As operating systems mature generally and hardware becomes more capable, you'd expect fewer folks to upgrade and everyone to upgrade their whole PC less often anyway. WinXP represented a much bigger jump away from the Win9x userbase (home users) than Vista does over XP. Vista comes with much less pressure on anyone to upgrade.
If anything, Microsoft allowed their Vista marketing to run away with them and too many people came to believe in the hype and the marketshare projections. Still, after reading a lot of naysaying, I've installed Vista over XP and have been pleasantly surprised. It is better than I was expecting, though the cruft has to be turned down or turned off. It's certainly "good enough" despite shortcomings, imho, which is what counts with Microsoft. So I imagine Vista will continue to make solid progress in the home and on pre-installs. The enterprise is something else. Besides, if it's known that a Windows 7 will appear in, say, 2009 or 2010, many outfits would elect to skip Vista as a matter of course, whatever it brought to the table.
Reinstalling my Microsoft OS has also reminded me how much good open-source software is now available on this platform. It's often said that a resurgent Apple is putting pressure on the market share of desktop Linux. I wonder whether Vista or in future Windows 7 plus a nice suite of the Open Office, Gimp and Firefox kind won't put on similar pressure from a different direction.
London - Londonistan - is now home to a large Russian community as well as a simply huge floating population of "businessmen" and chancers from all over the world. It's hardly a surprise that from time to time they turn out to bring somewhat unorthodox business practices with them as well as some undeclared duty-free items fresh from the reactor core. A former British Intelligence boss has pointed out that this is about the tenth high-profile contract killing involving Russians and not a single one has been solved. Besides, poisoning is a particularly dark crime and appeals to the ghoul in most of us, hence a lot of the publicity.
I think people forget the massive loss of face the Russians suffered when communism collapsed. Perhaps the Kremlin want to repair some of that damage and get back to what they believe Russia should be doing, which is running the world and dictating its energy policies. I guess the good news is that the Russians are usually too disorganized and hung-over to be much good at that.
I'd never consider upgrading a distro like this. Save off your settings and personal files, wipe and reinstall. As many have found, the alternative is asking for trouble.
Even so, let's hope some good comes of this. Perhaps it will encourage the Ubuntu team to take a hard look at what they're doing and where they're at. In retrospect, calling anything like this "Edgy" was a mistake. Ubuntu is aimed at newer and less technically-minded users on the desktop, primarily. That puts a premium on easy, simple and reliable, not on "edgy" as in "the latest gizmos for techies". Techies are not Ubuntu's natural territory. If you want the bleeding edge and all that goes with it, there are 1001 other distros to use. Maybe Ubuntu will decide that its core appeal does not lie in this game, and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, imho, it risks losing the tremendous goodwill it has built up. Ubuntu has never been "just another distro", but if it allows itself to be led only by what developers want, it could easily become one.
No statement I can see about how much this treatment will cost. Many new-gen drugs are so expensive that only the super-rich can afford them. So, while nice to know of, they are effectively useless for 99 per cent of humanity. The irony is that the super-rich are much less likely to need such treatments, since they can afford to eat well. No corn-syrup-soaked breakfast cereal for them, no breads mostly containing only fats and air with a few corner-sweepings of wheat thrown in, no vegetables pumped full of water and then covered in salt and sugar.
It probably is a bad idea, but not because forking Firefox helps IE7 or splits the user base in some way.
This move runs a risk with two things. First, it gives the impression that open source is fickle, prone to ayatollah-ish upheavals and not to be relied upon. If you were a business or institution, would you really feel happy running Debian knowing that next year the "community" (meaning: a vocal minority) might suddenly decide that package X was inappropriate and mere "marketing" and then alter it in some way that caused you a lot of trouble. Not long ago the Mozilla folks and Firefox were heroes. Now they are apparently running dogs and capitalists and we should "give Mozilla the finger", in Debian's own words. Mozilla may (or may not) be mistaken and inflexible in their attitude, but that just makes it even more important than the response to their stance is not similar in kind. Alas, it has been and that's a sign of immaturity to me.
Second, if Web 2.0 takes off, Firefox will have an even more important role to play, so this is probably not the best moment to fork one of the best-known and most successful open-source projects and then reissue it under a name no one gives fig for.
Still, I guess everyone has the freedom not to run Debian if they prefer not to.
Fine balancing act, I guess. Debian has to commit to quality because without that it is nothing - there would be no point in using it. OTOH, there are other pressures, too, not least being seen to run a well-founded ship. Users out there, particularly institutional ones, are bound to have expectations. For example, today the City of Munich announced the latest stage in its Debian rollout, but they likely wouldn't have gone for Debian to begin with if they'd thought its development process was struggling. And maybe some folks - quite understandably - want to lay a few ghosts to rest after the soap opera of the Sarge release.
So paying a couple of guys (and only if needed) to help get this huge and complex project out on time doesn't seem a big deal. If the quality is still not there, I am sure Debian will delay the release anyway. I guess what this shows is that there is a lot of competition out there now - Ubuntu, CentOS, etc - and Debian can't afford to go "ivory tower" despite what some of its developers probably think. The Dunc-Tank board has some very solid and experienced people on it. Best to wish them well. They are hardly looking to raise zillions, just a decent wage for the best talent available.
As with economists, you could lay all of America's business professors end to end and still never reach a conclusion.
Linux does not aim to be best, second best or ninety-third best. Take Debian: it aims to provide a free universal operating system. How well it does, in the perception of others, is only incidental to Debian's core purpose. So, looking at all this in terms of winners and losers or best and worst is largely illusory. Linux is doing just fine and does not have to hit some arbitrary bar - such as overtaking Microsoft's market share - to continue to do just fine.
If you cannot detect what's wrong with the maintainers' statement - and why most software professionals would not release a public statement of this kind - then ask your parents to explain it to you when you are out of short trousers. FWIW I run Debian Unstable and like it very much, but that doesn't mean I can't tell an orange from a pear.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, it is surely possible for Debian to issue a statement about it without resorting to personal abuse? Debian has so many, many good things going for it, and yet the whole project seems to let itself down so often by displaying attitude problems of one kind or another. FFS: "You're a liar, No I'm not, Yes you are", etc., etc., should have been left behind in the school playground.
This is England. The "judge" would have been a lay magistrate, just a member of the public with special training. Not, anyway, a professional lawyer who would probably have had to ask "What is the internet?", assuming the hearing was held before lunch and therefore that the "judge" was still relatively sober.
The apparent leniency of this sentence might have something to do with the aggrieved party, a large company, initially demanding 29,000 pounds in compensation from a sixteen-year-old boy, not a very nice or proportionate thing to do. This demand by the prosecution was dropped during the trial. It's possible that the magistrates were showing that bullying of this kind is not on, in England, and that if this company's mail servers could be so easily knocked over by a sixteen year-old, they couldn't have been much good in the first place.
Computer specialists might object to the idea, but lay magistrates are partly there to reflect public opinion, and public opinion doesn't hold computers in very high regard.
Probably the only job open to her now is that of Official Keeper of the Glorious Counter-Counter-Revolutionary Bush. The Official Keeper's duties are to comb the breadcrumbs from Richard Stallman's beard each morning, and to bear it before him, resting it tenderly on a bed of cloth of velvet, at all official functions of the FSF. Unfortunately, a highly complicated dispute involving several professors at law, as to whether "breadcrumbs" refers only to home-made organic bread or also to the superheated patented supermarket dough known as "bread", is likely to mean that even this opportunity may not be available to her.
Oh God, not another round of this GPL blabber. About a third of the posts on here seem to be about what Richard Stallman may or may not have meant by what he may or may not have said. Yeah, right.
Stand back and look at the view. Unless Linux continues to provide what its users want, it will wither and die. Hordes of folks will simply drift away to other platforms leaving only a few diehards, probably not enough to continue to attract the talent Linux needs to stay sharp. Will the GPL v3 help or hinder the continued prosperity and increased adoption of Linux? That's really the only question that matters unless you live in an ivory tower.
Yes, this may mean dealing with, shock horror, capitalist roaders who'll deliver binary-only drivers and other unholy objects. Better they do that than have them abandon the platform and stuff everyone, though, which would start to become tempting if enough insults get hurled their way. No 3D drivers from Nvidia or ATI, for example, would kill desktop Linux stone dead on the spot. I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't what some of these here puritans would like.
Interesting idea, but the wrong target. Red Hat have spent years and much skill building up their strong position in the enterprise and no other Linux outfit is likely to be dislodging them any time soon.
Much more vulnerable are Novell/SuSE and their rather hamfisted "me too" strategies and lesser distros like Mandriva. Those are the ones Ubuntu is likely to take market share from. SuSE could be especially vulnerable since their OpenSuSE "community" distro is arguably just a corporate sham with very little of a true community about it.
Perhaps the question needs wider phrasing: can the IT industry - not just the malware side - be trusted? Personally I don't think so because they seem addicted to denying the consequences of their own actions or foisting the cost on the public. You can see this everywhere from the paltry, tokenish efforts to tackle malware and spam by corporations that regularly turn in billions in profits, to the Heath-Robinson-like, energy-guzzling design of the PC itself, to dumping clean up and recycling via shady deals with the Chinese. Let's not even look at moral issues like DRM and Hollywood or Chinese censors.
OTOH, no industry can be trusted. If it wasn't for some tireless public-minded advocates the auto industry would probably have us still driving deathtraps with engines designed in the 1950s or the pharma industry, for example, would have us growing three heads while being charged 50 bucks for a paracetamol.
"So, just how much am I supposed to give a stranger? When does it stop?"
I don't know how much you are supposed to give a stranger. Where I live, it is usually a UK pound "for a cup of tea". Actually buying a stranger a cup of tea in lieu of cash tends to be unpopular, though, as a cup of tea is not what the stranger invariably has in mind.
It only stops when you are dead.
The core of McAllister's argument is that the FSF has changed its stance on software from promoting an "idealistic notion" which was "not just radical, but surprisingly practical" (and hugely successful) to "moralistic oppostion" in which DRM is given such an inflated importance that opposing it has become an "evangelical dogma".
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Looking at the terms like "evil" used by the FSF to describe DRM, it is hard not to think McAllister has a point.
This has little to do with whether you think DRM is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. It is a question of the FSF's attitude towards it. Alas, what the article doesn't do is consider whether the FSF's new tactics (if you think they are new) are more or less likely to succeed than their older and more laid-back ones.
Telling someone that if they disagree with you they are morally wrong is not usually a great way to get them on your side. It comes across as arrogant, I would guess. Suggesting that by agreeing with you they will help to make the world a fairer and better place for both them and everyone else is usually more successful. So, yes, one can argue that the FSF has chosen to be too shrill and over-the-top to be as effective as it might be, especially since consumers have already shown with iTunes that if the price is right they will flock to a DRM-encumbered scheme in huge numbers.
However, Apple is only one company. Behind them lurk some decidedly bloodthirsty characters, and the Beast of Redmond
I am using Dapper Drake on my laptop and it is fine, but overall I think Ubuntu are trying to do too much too quickly. Their resources and manpower are still limited. For example I much prefer xfce to gnome on this machine, but the Ubuntu implementation has a couple of annoying bugs and isn't that well thought out in design terms. It needs a bit more polishing to be truly smooth and slick.
I guess Ubuntu's best work is under the bonnet and unseen, in terms of excellent hardware detection and the smooth integration of kernel modules for wifi and similar things. Impressive, and easy to overlook.
I still prefer Debian and SuSE, though. The things that put me off Ubuntu are the silly names and too much teenage carry-on in the user community, with the fanboys and the peer group stuff. I prefer something well away from all that, and the fanboys haven't helped by raising expectations that will be near impossible to fulfil and creating the feeling (strictly imho) that Ubuntu is somehow a little lightweight and not so serious.
It's always good to see a new ship launched. I guess only time will determine how Ubuntu's hopes for the enterprise pan out. It's a rough, tough market out there.