Looks very promising. Hmmn, Hawaiian week at MS, then. I hope that Microsoft end up making an extremely good email client from Kahuna. It's not in anyone's interest for it to be a poor client. If Kahuna is good then the competition - Google, Yahoo, etc. - will be obliged to up their game. I guess an important question will be whether these new-generation clients are easy to use in Internet cafes and other public access sites, which often have dubious screens, crappy mice and clunky machines. They won't be so helpful if their devs assume users will have top-line gear on a good display at home.
Hmmn, this really comes over as a senior suit dissing the competition and engaging in a little preening. Lunch with Shadowman would surely have been more entertaining though it would probably be a couple of days before the hangover subsided.
Novell/SUSE have an increasingly strong product and it's very, very far from "theater". And besides, the ultimo, leading Linux distro may not even have been launched yet. A major corporation could enter the Linux world tomorrow with a brand-new distro and turn the entire place upside down.
I guess Red Hat had better keep running because there could be some really hungry bears after them.
I live in a dense populated country (UK) with no native large wild cats. For at least twenty years now there have been persistent claims of pumas or leopards living wild here, probably released by their owners when keeping them was made illegal. Numerous press reports, even books on the subject. At one stage army snipers were called in for a stake-out. Sightings are usually referred to as "The Beast" - the Beast of Bodmin, the Beast of Exmoor, and only last week half a dozen miles away claims of a sighting of the Beast of Long Hanborough.
One Beast, it was claimed, broke into someone's outhouse and stole several pounts of sausages from a fridge. The householder said they were alerted by the noise of the break-in and a terrible slurping sound. They stayed in their bedroom, quaking.
Just one problem. No body. No solid, untainted scientific evidence from anywhere in the world. In fact, nada.
We'd all like to believe it, I guess. We all have a deep, primitive need to believe it, perhaps. All of human history is full of tales of terrible but elusive predators, part real, part nightmare. The writer Bruce Chatwin theorized that this is the subconscious recalling the days earlier in our evolution when proto-humans were easy prey for big cats like sabre-toothed tigers.
Perhaps this is rather like alien sightings or ley lines. There are plenty of them where people believe in them and study them, and none at all where people don't.
If it was almost any company other than Symantec one might feel some sympathy. But Symantec's software is awful in my experience, slowing WinXP to a crawl, hectoring the user with FUD and paranoia about "threats" and popping up unnecessary and self-congratulatory windows telling you what it's doing. It's not cheap to purcahse, either. It may be ironic if Symantec gets its comeuppance at the hands of Microsoft but it will be richly deserved, imho.
But... oh but... security left in the sole hands of Microsoft would be the fox in the henhouse all over. One can imagine other companies of any size being asked to pay up for "certification" (by joining, say, an MS Trusted Partner Program) or get put on the AV blocklist, their sites being listed as thoroughly dubious. God knows what their AV scanner would do if it detected a Linux install on the computer.
What exactly is the point of Mono? Here I am running a Linux distro. In order to get with the C#/mono/whatsit scene I have to installed about 20 megs of libraries and stuff just to get - what? A photo sorter, note-taker, a file searcher and maybe a couple of other utilities, all of them matched or bested by conventional gtk/QT apps. Is this all Mono has managed to get together? It seems rather a lot of work with not much to show for it. At least with Java I get Azureus which is a solid and extremely useful program not bested by Gtk/Qt one (as yet).
Hmmn... there is a problem with the plans of Google and their pals. They all depend on fast, stable, 24/7 internet access. Maybe that's the reality in the fevered world of Silicon Valley but elsewhere the internet is not a particularly reliable beast. Google is now trading at $312 a share. I wonder if Google and it's followers aren't rather overestimating the internet's capabilities. Even one share seems an awful lot for yet another rss system, to add to the scores and scores already out there.
Ah, we have Novell Linux, SUSE Linux and OpenSUSE Linux. Perhaps Novell themselves aren't sure of the differences between them, hence their taciturn and rather dull web page.
You seem to be conflating the three to some extent. SUSE supplies what drives Novell's Linux strategy, and if their Linux strategy fails they are toast. If the company were ever broken up SUSE would form a substantial chunk of its value. It's hard to see investment bankers getting excited about much besides, though the corporate jets might provide some pocket money. In addition, some might argue that Novell's tardiness in building an independent developer community around SUSE (which they have now begun to do via OpenSUSE) is one of the primo reasons for Novell's Linux offerings always featuring, at best, in second place. A "gesture" in this direction, with it's implications of a parsimonious corporate emperor throwing someone a tidbit, really doesn't cut it. Novell's present predicament requires a little more get-go than that.
"Legislation shouldn't be used as a way of solving a technical problem, and this is really just a technical problem with e-mail."
That can be a little dubious. Most legislation to do with pollution, for example, is dealing with a technical problem (from one perspective) but it's necessary because companies individually won't clean up their act unless they are made to. Legislation helps to set a level playing field for change and tells companies and/or citizens that an elected government representing the will of the people means for change to happen or else.
In the same way, a more secure email system is a technical problem, yes, but citizens could hardly be blamed for losing patience with the failure of the IT industry to produce a new system. Where is it, then, and why aren't we all using it? In which case, enforcing a better email system through legislation might be the only answer where there is no longer any confidence that the IT industry will produce a fair and workable solution. The sooner the better, imho.
Really admire SUSE and have used it for several years now. I only wish Novell admired the tremendous care and hard work put in by the SUSE engineers, but if you go to the front page of http://www.novell.com/ you'd be pushed to know Novell even have SUSE. This new version and the new OpenSUSE initiative are things to shout about, one might think. Sigh. Novell are their own worst enemies.
Will be installing OpenSUSE and Gnome over the weekend. From the sound of it, this new SUSE is faster than previous versions which were a bit too slow for me, and they are getting behind Gnome in a way they haven't before since they always majored on KDE and Gnome was a poor relative.
These are very exciting times for Linux considering the quality of so many distros now on offer.
Every sale of MS Office on Linux represents a direct loss of revenue on a Windows license and a potential loss of revenue on any other MSware a user might purchase. This particularly applies to any MS serverware upgrade crack that ties together user installations of Office.
The Linux "economy" does not expect to have to pay for stuff, or not pay much anyway. So MS might well find it extremely hard to price Office on Linux at a level comparable to Office on Windows.
Support costs would increase substantially for MS and it would no longer be possible to guarantee the "user experience" across scores of different distros and software combinations. Both would be anathema to Microsoft.
If the worst came to the worst, which it won't, Microsoft might be better off buying or teaming up with a Linux distro, adapting it MS-stylee and offering Office as closed source exclusively through it. Folks have often speculated that Red Hat, with its MS-like ambitions, would be an ideal partner for such an enterprise.
Ah yes, introducing Nemmy, the lovable laughing policeman and cousin to Clippy. Nemmy will automagically patrol your network and seek out those pesky villains who try to evade our "strict controls". Are those mp3s Nemmy's found on that hard disk? Don't worry! Nemmy will pop up a friendly "hello hello hello" and suggest the user goes off for a soothing cup of coffee while he deletes every file and sends an alert to the RIAA. Now what could be easier and more affordable than that?
The figures for desktop Linux use are always a little vague. Are they just counting the States and Western Europe or the whole world? How do they account for Win/Linux dual boot systems which may well be the norm for a lot of early adopters?
Linux has great attractions for the developing world where folks either can't afford the Wintel upgrade crack or are leery of it for political reasons. Yesterday, for example, it was announced that Sun Wah Linux will be rolled out on 150,000 PCs in Chinese schools, arguably a more solid achievement for open sauce than yesterday's Google/Sun lovefest. It's possible that an increase in desktop Linux in the West will be prompted by its widespread use everywhere else first.
Hmmn, aside from the macabre pleasure of watching a couple of primo corporate sharks polishing each other's teeth, there's an element of who is conning who in all this.
Why should Google mess with Solaris? They could probably get what they want by home-brewing some Linux - no need to involve themselves with Sun, except on Google's terms anyway.
What this announcement appears to have done, without Google having to commit to anything, is keep the best alternative to MS Office out of anyone else's hands. It's also, probably, put the cappers on anyone being tempted to take Sun over. So Messrs McNealy and Swchartz have now been hung up pending consumption later at the back of the Google freezer wagon. And all at no cost to Google. Nice one.
So I guess it's only a matter of time before some charmer like Orrin Hatch introduces a bill in Congress mandating the US government to publish a guide for those wishing to migrate from Linux to Windows.
It's so refreshing to see someone in his position tell things straight and in a way we can all understand.
Even so, I suspect there's a problem here that's slowly appearing on the horizon and that's the future of Debian. It's beginning to resemble an old tramp steamer. Years of sterling, cargo-carrying service but now the crew are arguing on the bridge and some are even trying to force the captain's safe. The engineers (fewer than there were) are desperately trying to keep the ship's rather aged boilers from bursting. And a flotilla of other vessels, some flying the skull and crossbones, are circling, many darting in to nick some of the deck cargo and occasionally a few crew members to boot (although the chief purser has so far proved too weighty to carry off in a pirate lighter). If the old girl starts to founder then a whole lot of people are going to be in a serious pickle.
It may be that simply contributing patches back up to Debian isn't enough. Debian is a huge and amazing project, but for that reason is needs a lot of organization and talented manpower to keep it not merely going but a beacon of excellence. If it catches a cold, so does everyone else. With Debian being pulled in different directions, you have to wonder how long it can hold up for without beginning to suffer.
I don't know how the hackers hacked, but OpenSUSE is a very young outfit and this may serve as a useful wake up call so that by the time they get to be big and flourishing they'll have things locked down real tight. It must be hard locking down php scripts like MediaWiki, though. Php seems to run Microsoft Windows close as a great way to get hacked.
Anyway, as one of the main contributors to the OpenSUSE project pointed out, a few script kiddies planting half-baked slogans on a site not even appropriate for them palls beside the things elsewhere in the world that happened overnight, such as the dreadful loss of life in Bali. It's a sign of the sheer immaturity of the hackers that they should think what they're doing is important. So in hoping to publicize their cause, they're in fact just making it a laughing stock.
Which makes them two-time losers in my book. If they are who they claim to be, of course.
They seem to stick to the big names, perhaps because they are the names that provide a healthy chunk of the magazine's advertising? Perish the thought.
Unless I've completely missed them, strange they've omitted Open Office 2 (even if in beta), Debian Sarge (on which so much other software is based) and the Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra nForce 4 motherboards which do what the tier one boards do only more stably and less expensively. Instead there is an overrated Asus board, a marque so beloved of the "independent" tests run in Tom's Hardware that it seems to win them all before even being switched on. In addition, HalfLife 2 may have been massive but arguably Battlefield 2 has given more fun to more folks without the Valve/Steam online nightmare.
A huge amount is riding on Vista, not just for Microsoft but all through the IT industry right down to the little guy in China who helps make circuit boards. They all want a piece of what they hope will be frenzied upgrade action and plenty of businesses will suffer badly if they don't get it.
There will be huge pressure on Microsoft to make Vista work, if necessarily fairly brutally - stick with WinXP and find your security expectations downgraded, monthly updates increasingly scarecrow and difficulties soon arising accessing certain websites or playing certain media, etc, etc. We'll all be told that only Vista can guarantee proper security "for your own good" or whatever.
It's great to see Linux making inroads, but they are still fairly small and tentative. These guys, after all, are only scoping out Linux, not installing it. Linux still needs some big, influential and well-respected folks to get behind it of the kind Joe Sixpack will admire. Apple has Steve Jobs and the ipod, two items of superb natural showmanship anyone can relate to. What does Linux have? The Eric S. Raymond Opensaucemanship Memorial Lecture is no substitute. Dell will want a bit more excitement before they start shipping Linux boxes en masse.
Plus, if they do it well enough, Google may eventually be able to go to cities and ask them how much they'd like to contribute from their municipal budget to Google's infrastructure expenses for the privilege of having the city Googlified. For cities too stingy to get with it, shame and embarrassment would beckon. I'm sure very reasonable rates could be agreed, far lower than their counterparts might have to pay in er ahem Palermo, Sicily, for example.
"According to 'The Google Legacy,' history is about to repeat itself."
History never repeats itself. I guess this guy is a little optimistic if he thinks folks will pay 180 dollars for a cliche that isn't true in the first place. Ebay is the place to sell cliches, I guess.
"When you have a problem with Windows, always reformat and reinstall" - what am I bid, $150, $180, $200??!
"Linux is the wave of the future" - opening at $8, no $10 to the gentleman on my right with the beard and sandals
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" - we have telephone bids for $500
Besides, it's a bit premature to talk about the "legacy" of an outfit that's till in its infancy. Microsoft has $50 billion in cash, annual profits of around $12 billion and a vast monopoly. They aren't just going to roll over, stick their legs in the air and die.
It's very hard to make money out of publishing, so I guess the guy is a genius really. He's also got recognition. When I go into a shop I'll very likely buy the O'Reilly book out of the choices available because I know I'll get a solid number from a company worth supporting. So many other outfits are just faceless conglomerates owned by a monster toad somewhere. And with some topics, an O'Reilly book will be the only choice available anyway.
There is some competition, I guess. My local Borders has some nice titles from No Starch Press in among the O'Reilly ones. Too bad there isn't one title on Debian from anyone stocked, though. It would be good to see more No Starch books. They're a little more hip and sometime a row of O'Reilly can look a bit staid.
I once mail-ordered a book from O'Reilly and they sent me the wrong one. When I called them, they said they'd send out a replacement pdq (which they did) and told me I could keep the other, wrong one with their compliments. No need to inconvenience myself by returning it. It's a great book too. You have to respect a company like that.
Still have all my O'Reilly books. They are really well put together unlike most these days.
It's high time something like this was implemented, imho, but in reality it's probably unworkable and will be for many years. In the meantime, the market will have to act as arbiter. Would software writers be expected to test their products against the millions of different hardware configs that exist? Even a megacorp would find that very hard.
The problem is that where such consumer protection has been implemented in other industries the result has always destroyed the little guy to the advantage of the large corporations. Only large corporations can afford the insurance, the testing procedures and the hardware necessary to comply. An analogy in the EU would be with food production. No one can afford to sell home-made jams or cakes if a requirement is installing 50,000 bucks' worth of standards-compliant cooking equipment. You could argue that only large corporations can afford the legal and er er "lobbying fees" to get their way with the government mafias that introduce such laws.
Another problem in the current climate is that a host of wacko special interest groups would try to get any new law gold-plated to such an extent that no one would want to write software anymore - the safety/accident people, the accessibility people, the Hollywood/drm crowd, politcal correctness nuts of every stripe, etc.
So I guess the proposal would only work if it was fairly limited in scope and carefully drafted. For example, there might be exemptions for those publishing software as individuals, for software that is published for free, for software from a company turning over less than xxx per year, etc. And the liability would probably have to extened to really major problems only, such as the software blatantly not doing what it says on the box or failing to run under an OS with which it is listed as compatible.
I can understand the writer's frustration, but for a computer journalist he seems a little unaware of the IT industry.
Many folks I know are very interested in an alternative office suite when the subject comes up. They do not have 200-300 bucks to spend on MS Office and wouldn't spend that kind of money on any software program anyway.
The difficulty, though, is that whereas you can buy MS Office by walking in to almost any computer store, getting hold of Star (or for that matter Open) Office is very difficult. Where I live it is hardly ever available except online and that rules it out for anyone who doesn't have access to broadband. You can often get it off magazine cover disks, but ordinary Joe's find computer zines extremely forbidding.
The same is true of Linux. A major PC store I know in central Londond doesn't stock a single copy of any version of Linux. I wonder how much marketing dosh MS are slipping them...
If an alternative to MS Office was easily available then I reckon a lot more folks would be using it. Even then, many home users still wouldn't use it even if they wanted to. They are running old machines with, say, Win98 and only 32 or 48 megs of ram. For them, I'd guess that MS Office 97 still does the job for a few notes from, say, a second-hand stall or car boot. But I'd be a little surprised if new versions of an alternative could run well in such modest resources.
I do apologize, Mr Coward - my typing, perhaps even my distros (Debian and SuSE). But it still remains a great test for this Q&A-troubled desktop environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks very promising. Hmmn, Hawaiian week at MS, then. I hope that Microsoft end up making an extremely good email client from Kahuna. It's not in anyone's interest for it to be a poor client. If Kahuna is good then the competition - Google, Yahoo, etc. - will be obliged to up their game. I guess an important question will be whether these new-generation clients are easy to use in Internet cafes and other public access sites, which often have dubious screens, crappy mice and clunky machines. They won't be so helpful if their devs assume users will have top-line gear on a good display at home.
Hmmn, this really comes over as a senior suit dissing the competition and engaging in a little preening. Lunch with Shadowman would surely have been more entertaining though it would probably be a couple of days before the hangover subsided.
Novell/SUSE have an increasingly strong product and it's very, very far from "theater". And besides, the ultimo, leading Linux distro may not even have been launched yet. A major corporation could enter the Linux world tomorrow with a brand-new distro and turn the entire place upside down.
I guess Red Hat had better keep running because there could be some really hungry bears after them.
I live in a dense populated country (UK) with no native large wild cats. For at least twenty years now there have been persistent claims of pumas or leopards living wild here, probably released by their owners when keeping them was made illegal. Numerous press reports, even books on the subject. At one stage army snipers were called in for a stake-out. Sightings are usually referred to as "The Beast" - the Beast of Bodmin, the Beast of Exmoor, and only last week half a dozen miles away claims of a sighting of the Beast of Long Hanborough.
One Beast, it was claimed, broke into someone's outhouse and stole several pounts of sausages from a fridge. The householder said they were alerted by the noise of the break-in and a terrible slurping sound. They stayed in their bedroom, quaking.
Just one problem. No body. No solid, untainted scientific evidence from anywhere in the world. In fact, nada.
We'd all like to believe it, I guess. We all have a deep, primitive need to believe it, perhaps. All of human history is full of tales of terrible but elusive predators, part real, part nightmare. The writer Bruce Chatwin theorized that this is the subconscious recalling the days earlier in our evolution when proto-humans were easy prey for big cats like sabre-toothed tigers.
Perhaps this is rather like alien sightings or ley lines. There are plenty of them where people believe in them and study them, and none at all where people don't.
If it was almost any company other than Symantec one might feel some sympathy. But Symantec's software is awful in my experience, slowing WinXP to a crawl, hectoring the user with FUD and paranoia about "threats" and popping up unnecessary and self-congratulatory windows telling you what it's doing. It's not cheap to purcahse, either. It may be ironic if Symantec gets its comeuppance at the hands of Microsoft but it will be richly deserved, imho.
... oh but ... security left in the sole hands of Microsoft would be the fox in the henhouse all over. One can imagine other companies of any size being asked to pay up for "certification" (by joining, say, an MS Trusted Partner Program) or get put on the AV blocklist, their sites being listed as thoroughly dubious. God knows what their AV scanner would do if it detected a Linux install on the computer.
But
What exactly is the point of Mono? Here I am running a Linux distro. In order to get with the C#/mono/whatsit scene I have to installed about 20 megs of libraries and stuff just to get - what? A photo sorter, note-taker, a file searcher and maybe a couple of other utilities, all of them matched or bested by conventional gtk/QT apps. Is this all Mono has managed to get together? It seems rather a lot of work with not much to show for it. At least with Java I get Azureus which is a solid and extremely useful program not bested by Gtk/Qt one (as yet).
Error - come back later, or words to that effect.
... there is a problem with the plans of Google and their pals. They all depend on fast, stable, 24/7 internet access. Maybe that's the reality in the fevered world of Silicon Valley but elsewhere the internet is not a particularly reliable beast. Google is now trading at $312 a share. I wonder if Google and it's followers aren't rather overestimating the internet's capabilities. Even one share seems an awful lot for yet another rss system, to add to the scores and scores already out there.
Hmmn
Ah, we have Novell Linux, SUSE Linux and OpenSUSE Linux. Perhaps Novell themselves aren't sure of the differences between them, hence their taciturn and rather dull web page.
You seem to be conflating the three to some extent. SUSE supplies what drives Novell's Linux strategy, and if their Linux strategy fails they are toast. If the company were ever broken up SUSE would form a substantial chunk of its value. It's hard to see investment bankers getting excited about much besides, though the corporate jets might provide some pocket money. In addition, some might argue that Novell's tardiness in building an independent developer community around SUSE (which they have now begun to do via OpenSUSE) is one of the primo reasons for Novell's Linux offerings always featuring, at best, in second place. A "gesture" in this direction, with it's implications of a parsimonious corporate emperor throwing someone a tidbit, really doesn't cut it. Novell's present predicament requires a little more get-go than that.
"Legislation shouldn't be used as a way of solving a technical problem, and this is really just a technical problem with e-mail."
That can be a little dubious. Most legislation to do with pollution, for example, is dealing with a technical problem (from one perspective) but it's necessary because companies individually won't clean up their act unless they are made to. Legislation helps to set a level playing field for change and tells companies and/or citizens that an elected government representing the will of the people means for change to happen or else.
In the same way, a more secure email system is a technical problem, yes, but citizens could hardly be blamed for losing patience with the failure of the IT industry to produce a new system. Where is it, then, and why aren't we all using it? In which case, enforcing a better email system through legislation might be the only answer where there is no longer any confidence that the IT industry will produce a fair and workable solution. The sooner the better, imho.
Really admire SUSE and have used it for several years now. I only wish Novell admired the tremendous care and hard work put in by the SUSE engineers, but if you go to the front page of http://www.novell.com/ you'd be pushed to know Novell even have SUSE. This new version and the new OpenSUSE initiative are things to shout about, one might think. Sigh. Novell are their own worst enemies.
Will be installing OpenSUSE and Gnome over the weekend. From the sound of it, this new SUSE is faster than previous versions which were a bit too slow for me, and they are getting behind Gnome in a way they haven't before since they always majored on KDE and Gnome was a poor relative.
These are very exciting times for Linux considering the quality of so many distros now on offer.
Every sale of MS Office on Linux represents a direct loss of revenue on a Windows license and a potential loss of revenue on any other MSware a user might purchase. This particularly applies to any MS serverware upgrade crack that ties together user installations of Office.
The Linux "economy" does not expect to have to pay for stuff, or not pay much anyway. So MS might well find it extremely hard to price Office on Linux at a level comparable to Office on Windows.
Support costs would increase substantially for MS and it would no longer be possible to guarantee the "user experience" across scores of different distros and software combinations. Both would be anathema to Microsoft.
If the worst came to the worst, which it won't, Microsoft might be better off buying or teaming up with a Linux distro, adapting it MS-stylee and offering Office as closed source exclusively through it. Folks have often speculated that Red Hat, with its MS-like ambitions, would be an ideal partner for such an enterprise.
Ah yes, introducing Nemmy, the lovable laughing policeman and cousin to Clippy. Nemmy will automagically patrol your network and seek out those pesky villains who try to evade our "strict controls". Are those mp3s Nemmy's found on that hard disk? Don't worry! Nemmy will pop up a friendly "hello hello hello" and suggest the user goes off for a soothing cup of coffee while he deletes every file and sends an alert to the RIAA. Now what could be easier and more affordable than that?
The figures for desktop Linux use are always a little vague. Are they just counting the States and Western Europe or the whole world? How do they account for Win/Linux dual boot systems which may well be the norm for a lot of early adopters?
Linux has great attractions for the developing world where folks either can't afford the Wintel upgrade crack or are leery of it for political reasons. Yesterday, for example, it was announced that Sun Wah Linux will be rolled out on 150,000 PCs in Chinese schools, arguably a more solid achievement for open sauce than yesterday's Google/Sun lovefest. It's possible that an increase in desktop Linux in the West will be prompted by its widespread use everywhere else first.
Hmmn, aside from the macabre pleasure of watching a couple of primo corporate sharks polishing each other's teeth, there's an element of who is conning who in all this.
Why should Google mess with Solaris? They could probably get what they want by home-brewing some Linux - no need to involve themselves with Sun, except on Google's terms anyway.
What this announcement appears to have done, without Google having to commit to anything, is keep the best alternative to MS Office out of anyone else's hands. It's also, probably, put the cappers on anyone being tempted to take Sun over. So Messrs McNealy and Swchartz have now been hung up pending consumption later at the back of the Google freezer wagon. And all at no cost to Google. Nice one.
So I guess it's only a matter of time before some charmer like Orrin Hatch introduces a bill in Congress mandating the US government to publish a guide for those wishing to migrate from Linux to Windows.
It's so refreshing to see someone in his position tell things straight and in a way we can all understand.
Even so, I suspect there's a problem here that's slowly appearing on the horizon and that's the future of Debian. It's beginning to resemble an old tramp steamer. Years of sterling, cargo-carrying service but now the crew are arguing on the bridge and some are even trying to force the captain's safe. The engineers (fewer than there were) are desperately trying to keep the ship's rather aged boilers from bursting. And a flotilla of other vessels, some flying the skull and crossbones, are circling, many darting in to nick some of the deck cargo and occasionally a few crew members to boot (although the chief purser has so far proved too weighty to carry off in a pirate lighter). If the old girl starts to founder then a whole lot of people are going to be in a serious pickle.
It may be that simply contributing patches back up to Debian isn't enough. Debian is a huge and amazing project, but for that reason is needs a lot of organization and talented manpower to keep it not merely going but a beacon of excellence. If it catches a cold, so does everyone else. With Debian being pulled in different directions, you have to wonder how long it can hold up for without beginning to suffer.
Happiness is what happens when we're doing something else.
I don't know how the hackers hacked, but OpenSUSE is a very young outfit and this may serve as a useful wake up call so that by the time they get to be big and flourishing they'll have things locked down real tight. It must be hard locking down php scripts like MediaWiki, though. Php seems to run Microsoft Windows close as a great way to get hacked.
Anyway, as one of the main contributors to the OpenSUSE project pointed out, a few script kiddies planting half-baked slogans on a site not even appropriate for them palls beside the things elsewhere in the world that happened overnight, such as the dreadful loss of life in Bali. It's a sign of the sheer immaturity of the hackers that they should think what they're doing is important. So in hoping to publicize their cause, they're in fact just making it a laughing stock.
Which makes them two-time losers in my book. If they are who they claim to be, of course.
They seem to stick to the big names, perhaps because they are the names that provide a healthy chunk of the magazine's advertising? Perish the thought.
Unless I've completely missed them, strange they've omitted Open Office 2 (even if in beta), Debian Sarge (on which so much other software is based) and the Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra nForce 4 motherboards which do what the tier one boards do only more stably and less expensively. Instead there is an overrated Asus board, a marque so beloved of the "independent" tests run in Tom's Hardware that it seems to win them all before even being switched on. In addition, HalfLife 2 may have been massive but arguably Battlefield 2 has given more fun to more folks without the Valve/Steam online nightmare.
Just my 2 cents.
A huge amount is riding on Vista, not just for Microsoft but all through the IT industry right down to the little guy in China who helps make circuit boards. They all want a piece of what they hope will be frenzied upgrade action and plenty of businesses will suffer badly if they don't get it.
There will be huge pressure on Microsoft to make Vista work, if necessarily fairly brutally - stick with WinXP and find your security expectations downgraded, monthly updates increasingly scarecrow and difficulties soon arising accessing certain websites or playing certain media, etc, etc. We'll all be told that only Vista can guarantee proper security "for your own good" or whatever.
It's great to see Linux making inroads, but they are still fairly small and tentative. These guys, after all, are only scoping out Linux, not installing it. Linux still needs some big, influential and well-respected folks to get behind it of the kind Joe Sixpack will admire. Apple has Steve Jobs and the ipod, two items of superb natural showmanship anyone can relate to. What does Linux have? The Eric S. Raymond Opensaucemanship Memorial Lecture is no substitute. Dell will want a bit more excitement before they start shipping Linux boxes en masse.
Plus, if they do it well enough, Google may eventually be able to go to cities and ask them how much they'd like to contribute from their municipal budget to Google's infrastructure expenses for the privilege of having the city Googlified. For cities too stingy to get with it, shame and embarrassment would beckon. I'm sure very reasonable rates could be agreed, far lower than their counterparts might have to pay in er ahem Palermo, Sicily, for example.
"According to 'The Google Legacy,' history is about to repeat itself."
History never repeats itself. I guess this guy is a little optimistic if he thinks folks will pay 180 dollars for a cliche that isn't true in the first place. Ebay is the place to sell cliches, I guess.
"When you have a problem with Windows, always reformat and reinstall" - what am I bid, $150, $180, $200??!
"Linux is the wave of the future" - opening at $8, no $10 to the gentleman on my right with the beard and sandals
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" - we have telephone bids for $500
Besides, it's a bit premature to talk about the "legacy" of an outfit that's till in its infancy. Microsoft has $50 billion in cash, annual profits of around $12 billion and a vast monopoly. They aren't just going to roll over, stick their legs in the air and die.
It's very hard to make money out of publishing, so I guess the guy is a genius really. He's also got recognition. When I go into a shop I'll very likely buy the O'Reilly book out of the choices available because I know I'll get a solid number from a company worth supporting. So many other outfits are just faceless conglomerates owned by a monster toad somewhere. And with some topics, an O'Reilly book will be the only choice available anyway.
There is some competition, I guess. My local Borders has some nice titles from No Starch Press in among the O'Reilly ones. Too bad there isn't one title on Debian from anyone stocked, though. It would be good to see more No Starch books. They're a little more hip and sometime a row of O'Reilly can look a bit staid.
I once mail-ordered a book from O'Reilly and they sent me the wrong one. When I called them, they said they'd send out a replacement pdq (which they did) and told me I could keep the other, wrong one with their compliments. No need to inconvenience myself by returning it. It's a great book too. You have to respect a company like that.
Still have all my O'Reilly books. They are really well put together unlike most these days.
It's high time something like this was implemented, imho, but in reality it's probably unworkable and will be for many years. In the meantime, the market will have to act as arbiter. Would software writers be expected to test their products against the millions of different hardware configs that exist? Even a megacorp would find that very hard.
The problem is that where such consumer protection has been implemented in other industries the result has always destroyed the little guy to the advantage of the large corporations. Only large corporations can afford the insurance, the testing procedures and the hardware necessary to comply. An analogy in the EU would be with food production. No one can afford to sell home-made jams or cakes if a requirement is installing 50,000 bucks' worth of standards-compliant cooking equipment. You could argue that only large corporations can afford the legal and er er "lobbying fees" to get their way with the government mafias that introduce such laws.
Another problem in the current climate is that a host of wacko special interest groups would try to get any new law gold-plated to such an extent that no one would want to write software anymore - the safety/accident people, the accessibility people, the Hollywood/drm crowd, politcal correctness nuts of every stripe, etc.
So I guess the proposal would only work if it was fairly limited in scope and carefully drafted. For example, there might be exemptions for those publishing software as individuals, for software that is published for free, for software from a company turning over less than xxx per year, etc. And the liability would probably have to extened to really major problems only, such as the software blatantly not doing what it says on the box or failing to run under an OS with which it is listed as compatible.
I can understand the writer's frustration, but for a computer journalist he seems a little unaware of the IT industry.
Many folks I know are very interested in an alternative office suite when the subject comes up. They do not have 200-300 bucks to spend on MS Office and wouldn't spend that kind of money on any software program anyway.
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The difficulty, though, is that whereas you can buy MS Office by walking in to almost any computer store, getting hold of Star (or for that matter Open) Office is very difficult. Where I live it is hardly ever available except online and that rules it out for anyone who doesn't have access to broadband. You can often get it off magazine cover disks, but ordinary Joe's find computer zines extremely forbidding.
The same is true of Linux. A major PC store I know in central Londond doesn't stock a single copy of any version of Linux. I wonder how much marketing dosh MS are slipping them
If an alternative to MS Office was easily available then I reckon a lot more folks would be using it. Even then, many home users still wouldn't use it even if they wanted to. They are running old machines with, say, Win98 and only 32 or 48 megs of ram. For them, I'd guess that MS Office 97 still does the job for a few notes from, say, a second-hand stall or car boot. But I'd be a little surprised if new versions of an alternative could run well in such modest resources.
I do apologize, Mr Coward - my typing, perhaps even my distros (Debian and SuSE). But it still remains a great test for this Q&A-troubled desktop environment.