There is no curious incident in the night, no capitalist conspiracy and no deliberate deception. Just how many influential media outlets have announced that Sun is open sourcing Java in the full sense of the term?
It could be argued that it is Stallman's article which is "deceptive and self-serving" since it emerges at the end that he is doing little more than pushing an advert for one of his own pet projects under the guise of excoriating Sun for something Sun has not, in fact, done:
We in the GNU Project continue developing the GNU Compiler for Java and GNU Classpath; we made great progress in the past year, so our free platform for Java is included in many major GNU/Linux distros. If you want to run Java and have freedom, please join in and help.
The article passes on rather a lot of sour comments about Ubuntu. But carping is no substitute for analysis. Ubuntu is here to stay and most would regard it as a huge success. There are important things that need to be worked out, though, around conflicts of interest when you have a lot of folks who are both Debian and Ubuntu devs and who in some cases might received money from Ubuntu. For example, whose packages and bug fixes do they process first, Debian's or Ubuntu's? The side that comes second is bound to complain.
The worry expressed by Joey Hess is a real one: that Debian could become like a supermarket or trade warehouse where distro-assemblers acquire their wares, leaving Debian without direct contact with an audience of its own and so fading as a user-based distro. But that is up to Debian to sort out, not Ubuntu. I don't think Debian has really risen to this challenge yet, but sooner or later they must. Personally I am not a fan of international businessmen come jet-setters mingling with Debian and rather wish they'd take a lower profile. Exactly what, after all, are they trying to do by turning up at a DebConf in the first place? The "social contract" is the heart and bedrock of Debian, and if this starts to become polluted by money and fame then Debian really will be in trouble. Perhaps it already is.
Why is this thought surprising or noteworthy? Only a tiny, tiny number of people have something genuinely fresh and interesting to say in any medium. For the rest - which must be 999 blogs out of a thousand - it is a matter of copycatting and churning other people's opinions, just as folks do in a million bars and coffee shops.
I don't think this is plagiarism in a classic sense, which implies a cunning plan with the intention of profiting by claiming another's work as your own. Plagiarism is what a few journalists or novelists get caught doing from time to time, long after they've received the accolades, accepted the prize or signed the lucrative publishing contract. It is quite different, imho.
What we are seeing with blogging is the outcome of the original BS much touted by Apple at one stage, namely all you have to do to "unleash your talent" and become the next Rembrandt or Shakespeare is buy a PC or Mac and spend a fortune on proprietary software. Sadly or not, the real world works rather differently...
Commercial customers can bring intense focus on customer needs and an understanding of what mass market consumers want (and of how computer literate they are). In this sense, Linux could do with a sharp dose of the Microsofts if it wants to be more than a small niche on the desktop. Anything rather than the sense I get with some distros at the moment of navigating around a huge building site where everything is in beta and the place is run by whingeing developers who gon't give a stuff about Joe User. The "community" this breeds is hopelessly unrepresentative of the vast mass of computer users and often seems to put a higher priority on simply shipping code than asking what kind of code is being shipped in the first place.
As for all the other er er aspects of Microsoft, no thank you. I think you can have one (respect for and focus on the customer) without the other (monopolies and bullying).
No disrespect to Mandriva, but their "model" doesn't sound that appealing. OpenSuSE will give you pretty well the same for free (fast downloads, too) while even the official version of SuSE with extra packages on the DVD is quite a lot cheaper than the Mandriva offerings. I hate to say it, but if I had to choose a distro that was losing out as the Linux competition hots up, it is Mandriva. That doesn't mean it isn't extremely good, just that its future looks dubious to say the least. The name changes, their financial situation and news of trouble at the top doesn't help either.
Maybe they do want ponies. That's fine. It is no good saying, effectively, that the reason MS docs don't always translate well to OO and vice versa is that users get it wrong. This article is just falling back on the old BS about how the program is perfect. That it produces poor results if, of course, all the dumb user's fault. We need to move on from this and put the focus on programming that serves the user.
Too many of yesterday's assumptions in this article. It's about how the user should conform to what the program wants to do or is expecting. The program doesn't like an extra line space between paragraphs, so the user should inconvenience themselves by using styles and formatting instead.
Users are going to do what they do regardless. So I guess the answer is to write much better import/export filters for when files are going to be used in more than one program. It's no good going on about typography either. Most people don't know what that is. But they know a friendly program that produces nice-looking results when they use it. And that is all they want.
It is risky to advocate that the energies of FOSS are best concentrated on running open source programs on closed source platforms (like Open Office on Windows). Once DRM gets a grip, the owners of closed source operating systems will be in a position to blacklist any programs they don't like by programming the DRM mechanism to refuse to run them.
Perhaps the writer's concerns are more applicable to the subset known as "desktop Linux". Desktop Linux will not grow and become popular unless it offers users what they want. In this regard, the writer does have a point in that proslytising essays about open source are no substitute for delivering the goods to Joe and Jill. If desktop Linux does not do this, then it won't get used outside of the enthusiast crowd. So long as Linux remains "owned" by its developers, this is always going to be a point of contention.
As for the server, I think it is a different story since this is for technical types and some things are very complex, like it or not. Complexity can still be overdone, I guess, especially when a developer is moved to include every option under the sun. My own bete noir is Exim 4 but fortunately there are alternatives with simpler configuration files, like Postfix.
Maybe it's time to borrow an idea from SpamCop and start something called PorkCop. This would offer monthly rankings of Washington politicians, listing how much they've banked in "campaign contributions", "research" and general pork-barelling from which corporations. Naturally there would be appealing, baby-kissing photographs, links enabling you to offer your own contributions (or, if you have no money, your prayers) and cross-references to all the favours I mean "laws" these fellows are proposing.
The box from YellowSheepRiver may sound like a bit of an April Fool - too bad it's not called the Munchicator and boots from a.baa file since we are talking sheep - but what we're seeing is another early step from the Chinese economy towards designing, manufacturing and assembling all its own IT stuff right down to the microchips. This may not sound much right now, but it sure will before long. The folks at Intel, AMD and other Wesern chip houses, Dell, etc., must feel a little queasier every time they see an announcement like this. I guess the same may eventually be true on the software side. The box is shipping Linux, but then didn't Microsoft recently ask the Chinese authorities to stop producing naked boxes with no OS on board? I guess the Chinese are now doing exactly what Microsoft asked.
Posting a story whose link bounces off an intermediate website is dishonest without an explanation as to why. The assumption is that someone is exploiting Slashdot readers to score referral dollars. It is really no different from a journalist who buys shares in a company the day before he writes an article saying how wonderful it is. The next day he sells the shares. I hope I am wrong about this and look forward to ScuttleMonkey adding a note of explanation to the summary.
I'd already seen this article. It is a minor piece of no great interest and pretty well tells the reader not to buy the monitor anyway because Asus have put a crap screen inside a very nice case.
As with some aspects of Hollywood and DRM, it's just a patent to shore up a dying economic model by attempting to use coercion rather than choice. If implemented, it will simply create a huge amount of ill will and do nothing to change the fact that the traditional broadcast TV model is on the way out. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before one of the industry's tame politicians introduces a bill saying that not watching adverts is unpatriotic and must be made a criminal offence toute suite. Then we can all see grannies being carted off to jail for skipping the latest news about fruit-flavoured douches and even shinier floor polish.
This article is from Wall Street, nb. What it seems to be saying is that a lot of Wall Street brokers would do very nicely out of a share price rise if Mr McNealy stepped down. Well, they would say that wouldn't they? What the article does not mention at all is a credible strategy to secure Sun's future prosperity, if one can be found. Without that, it doesn't matter whether McNealy, Schwartz or for that matter Donald Duck is at the helm.
Just my 2 cents, but whatever you think of him Scott McNealy is a colourful and entertaining character in an industry of direly grey men. I'd be sorry to see him go, at least until he'd found a new home for Sun as it is hard to see how it can continue on its own for that much longer.
Will China change? Ultimately yes, and they will change when they realize that suppressing human rights will not ultimately serve them to make $$$
I'm not sure why China should stop suppressing human rights when the greedy, brown-nosing behaviour of some corporate potentates effectively tells the Chinese government that it's OK to suppress human rights. Indeed, when pressure is applied, as in this Yahoo case, the potentates will actually help the Chinese authorities to suppress human rights. Historically, China has absolutely no traditon of democracy or human rights. Thinking that serving up the once-almighty dollar is suddenly going to produce democracy in China is as fatuous as thinking that democacry would flower in Iraq merely from the fact of invading the place.
It's hard not to warm to this announcement, imho. It is written in a clear style by someone who comes across as open, approachable and not afraid to take risks. Such a contrast to corporate chiefs who bark out orders, rubbish their competitors or spout incomprehensible jargon written for them by a marketing droid. OK the names for Ubuntu releases may be a bit eccentric but this cool, direct approach is what attracts me to Linux. It's my PC to do with as I wish and it absolutely doesn't have to have a toad from the office or authentication central inside it.
Just my 2 cents, but I think Ubuntu does have some pretty big challenges in front of it quite apart from incorporating "edgy" new technology. It needs to find a self-sustaining financial model and some kind of interface with business and the enterprise, which the Dapper release is meant to kick off, I believe. Anyway, Kudos to them.
IMHO, it's a matter of the culture around individual distrbutions. I subscribe to both Debian and SuSE mailing lists and also follow the Ubuntu forums from time to time. Regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, Debian is the only one of those three where snide remarks, unhelpful "advice" and generally rude or authoritarian behaviour is not uncommon. But then you only have to glance at, say, Planet Debian to surmise that the Debian "culture" seems to encourage elitism and a generally poor attitude towards ordinary Joe Users. SuSE and Ubuntu, by contrast, are normally polite, sane places. SuSE's mailing lists, in particular, have a calm and adult feel. These are regular folks interested in sorting out glitches and getting things right. Immature carry-on is given short shrift and the awful, cultish term "newbie" is rare whereas the Debian lists are full of it.
All the more reason to choose your Linux distro carefully. There's more to it than the reviews around the net. In the end, nothing good will come of treating your users poorly. For that reason, I'd say SuSE and Ubuntu have a brighter future than "pure" Debian.
We cannot be sure that Provenzano's crude attempts at a code were intended to foil the police. Why should he care? By now, several hundred Mafia informers (the pentiti) have already told the police just about everything you could think of. Besides, pencil and paper have turned out to be quite a good system, probably yielding a fraction of the information that electronic eavesdropping would.
The coded notes are more likely have been intended to prevent his fellow mafiosi from getting too close and knowing too much. There was nothing dumb about this man's rule as a godfather. He evaded capture for forty years, rebuilt the organization after the disasters of the Riina years, retained power by remaining as invisible to his fellow mobsters as he was to the authorities, and simply survived into his 70s in a "profession" in which many are lucky to reach their thirties.
Yes, it's good news that another gruesome killer is behind bars. But the more worrying question is why the godfather found it unnecessary to take more stringent precautions, suggesting that clearing out the Mafia-infested lands of Western Sicily and the corruption-prone "public works" economy still has a very long way to go. It's going to take more than a few smart remarks about cryptography to do that.
Novell is capitalized at +/- $3 billion. At present, pure SuSE accounts for well under 10 per cent of Novell's turnover, though it was barely 3 per cent a year ago. Novell are sitting on a lot of cash, so one could subtract that from the purchase price, I guess. Even so, after discounting the cash reserves, getting on for £2 billion seems an awful lot of money to pay for SuSE Linux unless Oracle want a lot of Novell's other things, or can figure out how to sell them off. This is a problem that may cause a few companies to blanch at acquiring Novell. I guess even a fraction of that kind of money would pay for a pretty nice Linux distro of your own.
The information is in their recent financials which I take it you have not read if you do have it. Novell announced a 22 per cent rise in the growth of their pure Linux products to $13 million. While that may sound impressive, Novell's annual turnover is just over $1.2 billion, and a huge proportion of that is their netware side which is declining since many netware customers are migrating to other platforms. No one has yet explained how a product line currently turning over $50 million is going to replace turnover worth $1.2 billion before the whole thing goes tits up, especially as Red Hat, Novell's main Linux competitor, are growing their own Linux market at twice Novell's rate which means less opportunity for Novell.
Like many people, I suspect you have been taken in by the SuSE story without realizing that it comprises not even 10 per cent of the whole company picture. In addition, no one has yet demonstrated that there is a market for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Novell's much-touted new killer distro, or that Mono is ever going to be something Novell will make money from.
Novell turned over just around $50 million in pure Linux products last year (as disinct from its Linux netware replacement products which you won't need if you don't want netware). Novell itself is capitalized at around $3 billion. Why should Oracle pay £3 billion to acquire a revenue stream worth $50 million? Explain please.
I'm afraid you are in the grip of a fantasy. I'd suggest you read up on Novell's recent financials before talking about them "making millions". Or ask your parents to read them to you when you are out of short trousers. You may be surprised at the real situtation, which makes the stream of announcements, interviews, etc., from Novell all the more fatuous.
Sometimes I wish someone would put this strange, tortured company out of its agony. Just when so many folks had agreed never again to join "year of" and "the Linux desktop" up jumps this fellow to let the whole side down. If you ever crossed Inspector Clouseau with the Terminator, Novell is what you could easily get. Maybe tomorrow he'll be back, saying that 2007 will be the year of Mono which will see "explosive" growth from its present user base of three men and a lost dog.
Just my 2 cents, but I don't think the FSF has any intention of making substantive changes to the GPL v3 and certainly not around the DRM issue. In this respect, the "community discussion" phase is rather a sham, since it probably is only there to lend credibility to what Stallman, Mogden et al have already decided. I don't think there is much to be lost by turning them down. Were the big cheeses folks with a track record of reasonable discussion and compromise it might be worth talking. But they aren't. Linus Torvalds'reaction is easy to paint as mistaken and impulsive but in practice, given whom he is dealing with, he is more likely to be correct.
We are given some rather improbable conspiracy theory around the ODF affair, a long wail about software patents, a few digs at Microsoft, some very tentative ideas about DRM and a slapdown of Linus Torvalds, something that now seems almost obligatory every time the big cheeses of the Linux world open their mouth. I wonder why they feel they have to run Torvalds down. Are they worried they won't be seen as following the correct right-on line and might be made to stand on their own in the playground? Frightened, perhaps, that Big Richard Stallman will say they are sissies and chuck them out of his gang? Whatever the reason it comes over as pretty darn unedifying.
Articles about how awful the patent system is are ten a penny. What is very hard to find are folks who have thought this one through, have some cogent and realistic proposals, and who are prepared to build support for change among those in a position to change things. Anyway, it doesn't sound as if Mr Perens will be one. Big cheese massage sounds more his gig.
Why should Microsoft buy Sony when Sony are doing such a good job of knocking themselves out of their own key markets? The PSP3 and BlueRay sound like classic troubled products. Sony's sprawling consumer electronics arm is up against the likes of Samsung these days. And Sony's public profile has been dragged through the mud by the CD rootkit scandal. Microsoft don't ahve to do much more than stand and watch.
In addition, there would be a serious cultural and probably political offset: the Americanos operating in the heartland of SE Asian electronics. That would go down like a lead balloon in many quarters.
When you've got $40 billion in the bank, anything can sound like a good buy. Quite why Micrsoft should get into manufacturing cameras and alarm clocks is a bit mystifying. There are many other things they could spend more wisely on, unless Sony goes so tits up that it is sold of piecemeal and bits can be bought separately.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no curious incident in the night, no capitalist conspiracy and no deliberate deception. Just how many influential media outlets have announced that Sun is open sourcing Java in the full sense of the term?
It could be argued that it is Stallman's article which is "deceptive and self-serving" since it emerges at the end that he is doing little more than pushing an advert for one of his own pet projects under the guise of excoriating Sun for something Sun has not, in fact, done:
We in the GNU Project continue developing the GNU Compiler for Java and GNU Classpath; we made great progress in the past year, so our free platform for Java is included in many major GNU/Linux distros. If you want to run Java and have freedom, please join in and help.
I think I'll stick to regular beans, thanks.
The article passes on rather a lot of sour comments about Ubuntu. But carping is no substitute for analysis. Ubuntu is here to stay and most would regard it as a huge success. There are important things that need to be worked out, though, around conflicts of interest when you have a lot of folks who are both Debian and Ubuntu devs and who in some cases might received money from Ubuntu. For example, whose packages and bug fixes do they process first, Debian's or Ubuntu's? The side that comes second is bound to complain.
The worry expressed by Joey Hess is a real one: that Debian could become like a supermarket or trade warehouse where distro-assemblers acquire their wares, leaving Debian without direct contact with an audience of its own and so fading as a user-based distro. But that is up to Debian to sort out, not Ubuntu. I don't think Debian has really risen to this challenge yet, but sooner or later they must. Personally I am not a fan of international businessmen come jet-setters mingling with Debian and rather wish they'd take a lower profile. Exactly what, after all, are they trying to do by turning up at a DebConf in the first place? The "social contract" is the heart and bedrock of Debian, and if this starts to become polluted by money and fame then Debian really will be in trouble. Perhaps it already is.
Why is this thought surprising or noteworthy? Only a tiny, tiny number of people have something genuinely fresh and interesting to say in any medium. For the rest - which must be 999 blogs out of a thousand - it is a matter of copycatting and churning other people's opinions, just as folks do in a million bars and coffee shops.
...
I don't think this is plagiarism in a classic sense, which implies a cunning plan with the intention of profiting by claiming another's work as your own. Plagiarism is what a few journalists or novelists get caught doing from time to time, long after they've received the accolades, accepted the prize or signed the lucrative publishing contract. It is quite different, imho.
What we are seeing with blogging is the outcome of the original BS much touted by Apple at one stage, namely all you have to do to "unleash your talent" and become the next Rembrandt or Shakespeare is buy a PC or Mac and spend a fortune on proprietary software. Sadly or not, the real world works rather differently
Commercial customers can bring intense focus on customer needs and an understanding of what mass market consumers want (and of how computer literate they are). In this sense, Linux could do with a sharp dose of the Microsofts if it wants to be more than a small niche on the desktop. Anything rather than the sense I get with some distros at the moment of navigating around a huge building site where everything is in beta and the place is run by whingeing developers who gon't give a stuff about Joe User. The "community" this breeds is hopelessly unrepresentative of the vast mass of computer users and often seems to put a higher priority on simply shipping code than asking what kind of code is being shipped in the first place. As for all the other er er aspects of Microsoft, no thank you. I think you can have one (respect for and focus on the customer) without the other (monopolies and bullying).
No disrespect to Mandriva, but their "model" doesn't sound that appealing. OpenSuSE will give you pretty well the same for free (fast downloads, too) while even the official version of SuSE with extra packages on the DVD is quite a lot cheaper than the Mandriva offerings. I hate to say it, but if I had to choose a distro that was losing out as the Linux competition hots up, it is Mandriva. That doesn't mean it isn't extremely good, just that its future looks dubious to say the least. The name changes, their financial situation and news of trouble at the top doesn't help either.
Maybe they do want ponies. That's fine. It is no good saying, effectively, that the reason MS docs don't always translate well to OO and vice versa is that users get it wrong. This article is just falling back on the old BS about how the program is perfect. That it produces poor results if, of course, all the dumb user's fault. We need to move on from this and put the focus on programming that serves the user.
Too many of yesterday's assumptions in this article. It's about how the user should conform to what the program wants to do or is expecting. The program doesn't like an extra line space between paragraphs, so the user should inconvenience themselves by using styles and formatting instead.
Users are going to do what they do regardless. So I guess the answer is to write much better import/export filters for when files are going to be used in more than one program. It's no good going on about typography either. Most people don't know what that is. But they know a friendly program that produces nice-looking results when they use it. And that is all they want.
It is risky to advocate that the energies of FOSS are best concentrated on running open source programs on closed source platforms (like Open Office on Windows). Once DRM gets a grip, the owners of closed source operating systems will be in a position to blacklist any programs they don't like by programming the DRM mechanism to refuse to run them.
Perhaps the writer's concerns are more applicable to the subset known as "desktop Linux". Desktop Linux will not grow and become popular unless it offers users what they want. In this regard, the writer does have a point in that proslytising essays about open source are no substitute for delivering the goods to Joe and Jill. If desktop Linux does not do this, then it won't get used outside of the enthusiast crowd. So long as Linux remains "owned" by its developers, this is always going to be a point of contention.
As for the server, I think it is a different story since this is for technical types and some things are very complex, like it or not. Complexity can still be overdone, I guess, especially when a developer is moved to include every option under the sun. My own bete noir is Exim 4 but fortunately there are alternatives with simpler configuration files, like Postfix.
Maybe it's time to borrow an idea from SpamCop and start something called PorkCop. This would offer monthly rankings of Washington politicians, listing how much they've banked in "campaign contributions", "research" and general pork-barelling from which corporations. Naturally there would be appealing, baby-kissing photographs, links enabling you to offer your own contributions (or, if you have no money, your prayers) and cross-references to all the favours I mean "laws" these fellows are proposing.
The box from YellowSheepRiver may sound like a bit of an April Fool - too bad it's not called the Munchicator and boots from a .baa file since we are talking sheep - but what we're seeing is another early step from the Chinese economy towards designing, manufacturing and assembling all its own IT stuff right down to the microchips. This may not sound much right now, but it sure will before long. The folks at Intel, AMD and other Wesern chip houses, Dell, etc., must feel a little queasier every time they see an announcement like this. I guess the same may eventually be true on the software side. The box is shipping Linux, but then didn't Microsoft recently ask the Chinese authorities to stop producing naked boxes with no OS on board? I guess the Chinese are now doing exactly what Microsoft asked.
Posting a story whose link bounces off an intermediate website is dishonest without an explanation as to why. The assumption is that someone is exploiting Slashdot readers to score referral dollars. It is really no different from a journalist who buys shares in a company the day before he writes an article saying how wonderful it is. The next day he sells the shares. I hope I am wrong about this and look forward to ScuttleMonkey adding a note of explanation to the summary.
I'd already seen this article. It is a minor piece of no great interest and pretty well tells the reader not to buy the monitor anyway because Asus have put a crap screen inside a very nice case.
As with some aspects of Hollywood and DRM, it's just a patent to shore up a dying economic model by attempting to use coercion rather than choice. If implemented, it will simply create a huge amount of ill will and do nothing to change the fact that the traditional broadcast TV model is on the way out. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before one of the industry's tame politicians introduces a bill saying that not watching adverts is unpatriotic and must be made a criminal offence toute suite. Then we can all see grannies being carted off to jail for skipping the latest news about fruit-flavoured douches and even shinier floor polish.
This article is from Wall Street, nb. What it seems to be saying is that a lot of Wall Street brokers would do very nicely out of a share price rise if Mr McNealy stepped down. Well, they would say that wouldn't they? What the article does not mention at all is a credible strategy to secure Sun's future prosperity, if one can be found. Without that, it doesn't matter whether McNealy, Schwartz or for that matter Donald Duck is at the helm.
Just my 2 cents, but whatever you think of him Scott McNealy is a colourful and entertaining character in an industry of direly grey men. I'd be sorry to see him go, at least until he'd found a new home for Sun as it is hard to see how it can continue on its own for that much longer.
Will China change? Ultimately yes, and they will change when they realize that suppressing human rights will not ultimately serve them to make $$$
I'm not sure why China should stop suppressing human rights when the greedy, brown-nosing behaviour of some corporate potentates effectively tells the Chinese government that it's OK to suppress human rights. Indeed, when pressure is applied, as in this Yahoo case, the potentates will actually help the Chinese authorities to suppress human rights. Historically, China has absolutely no traditon of democracy or human rights. Thinking that serving up the once-almighty dollar is suddenly going to produce democracy in China is as fatuous as thinking that democacry would flower in Iraq merely from the fact of invading the place.
It's hard not to warm to this announcement, imho. It is written in a clear style by someone who comes across as open, approachable and not afraid to take risks. Such a contrast to corporate chiefs who bark out orders, rubbish their competitors or spout incomprehensible jargon written for them by a marketing droid. OK the names for Ubuntu releases may be a bit eccentric but this cool, direct approach is what attracts me to Linux. It's my PC to do with as I wish and it absolutely doesn't have to have a toad from the office or authentication central inside it.
Just my 2 cents, but I think Ubuntu does have some pretty big challenges in front of it quite apart from incorporating "edgy" new technology. It needs to find a self-sustaining financial model and some kind of interface with business and the enterprise, which the Dapper release is meant to kick off, I believe. Anyway, Kudos to them.
IMHO, it's a matter of the culture around individual distrbutions. I subscribe to both Debian and SuSE mailing lists and also follow the Ubuntu forums from time to time. Regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, Debian is the only one of those three where snide remarks, unhelpful "advice" and generally rude or authoritarian behaviour is not uncommon. But then you only have to glance at, say, Planet Debian to surmise that the Debian "culture" seems to encourage elitism and a generally poor attitude towards ordinary Joe Users. SuSE and Ubuntu, by contrast, are normally polite, sane places. SuSE's mailing lists, in particular, have a calm and adult feel. These are regular folks interested in sorting out glitches and getting things right. Immature carry-on is given short shrift and the awful, cultish term "newbie" is rare whereas the Debian lists are full of it.
All the more reason to choose your Linux distro carefully. There's more to it than the reviews around the net. In the end, nothing good will come of treating your users poorly. For that reason, I'd say SuSE and Ubuntu have a brighter future than "pure" Debian.
We cannot be sure that Provenzano's crude attempts at a code were intended to foil the police. Why should he care? By now, several hundred Mafia informers (the pentiti) have already told the police just about everything you could think of. Besides, pencil and paper have turned out to be quite a good system, probably yielding a fraction of the information that electronic eavesdropping would.
The coded notes are more likely have been intended to prevent his fellow mafiosi from getting too close and knowing too much. There was nothing dumb about this man's rule as a godfather. He evaded capture for forty years, rebuilt the organization after the disasters of the Riina years, retained power by remaining as invisible to his fellow mobsters as he was to the authorities, and simply survived into his 70s in a "profession" in which many are lucky to reach their thirties.
Yes, it's good news that another gruesome killer is behind bars. But the more worrying question is why the godfather found it unnecessary to take more stringent precautions, suggesting that clearing out the Mafia-infested lands of Western Sicily and the corruption-prone "public works" economy still has a very long way to go. It's going to take more than a few smart remarks about cryptography to do that.
Novell is capitalized at +/- $3 billion. At present, pure SuSE accounts for well under 10 per cent of Novell's turnover, though it was barely 3 per cent a year ago. Novell are sitting on a lot of cash, so one could subtract that from the purchase price, I guess. Even so, after discounting the cash reserves, getting on for £2 billion seems an awful lot of money to pay for SuSE Linux unless Oracle want a lot of Novell's other things, or can figure out how to sell them off. This is a problem that may cause a few companies to blanch at acquiring Novell. I guess even a fraction of that kind of money would pay for a pretty nice Linux distro of your own.
The information is in their recent financials which I take it you have not read if you do have it. Novell announced a 22 per cent rise in the growth of their pure Linux products to $13 million. While that may sound impressive, Novell's annual turnover is just over $1.2 billion, and a huge proportion of that is their netware side which is declining since many netware customers are migrating to other platforms. No one has yet explained how a product line currently turning over $50 million is going to replace turnover worth $1.2 billion before the whole thing goes tits up, especially as Red Hat, Novell's main Linux competitor, are growing their own Linux market at twice Novell's rate which means less opportunity for Novell.
Like many people, I suspect you have been taken in by the SuSE story without realizing that it comprises not even 10 per cent of the whole company picture. In addition, no one has yet demonstrated that there is a market for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Novell's much-touted new killer distro, or that Mono is ever going to be something Novell will make money from.
Novell turned over just around $50 million in pure Linux products last year (as disinct from its Linux netware replacement products which you won't need if you don't want netware). Novell itself is capitalized at around $3 billion. Why should Oracle pay £3 billion to acquire a revenue stream worth $50 million? Explain please.
I'm afraid you are in the grip of a fantasy. I'd suggest you read up on Novell's recent financials before talking about them "making millions". Or ask your parents to read them to you when you are out of short trousers. You may be surprised at the real situtation, which makes the stream of announcements, interviews, etc., from Novell all the more fatuous.
Sometimes I wish someone would put this strange, tortured company out of its agony. Just when so many folks had agreed never again to join "year of" and "the Linux desktop" up jumps this fellow to let the whole side down. If you ever crossed Inspector Clouseau with the Terminator, Novell is what you could easily get. Maybe tomorrow he'll be back, saying that 2007 will be the year of Mono which will see "explosive" growth from its present user base of three men and a lost dog.
Just my 2 cents, but I don't think the FSF has any intention of making substantive changes to the GPL v3 and certainly not around the DRM issue. In this respect, the "community discussion" phase is rather a sham, since it probably is only there to lend credibility to what Stallman, Mogden et al have already decided. I don't think there is much to be lost by turning them down. Were the big cheeses folks with a track record of reasonable discussion and compromise it might be worth talking. But they aren't. Linus Torvalds'reaction is easy to paint as mistaken and impulsive but in practice, given whom he is dealing with, he is more likely to be correct.
There isn't much to be learned from this.
We are given some rather improbable conspiracy theory around the ODF affair, a long wail about software patents, a few digs at Microsoft, some very tentative ideas about DRM and a slapdown of Linus Torvalds, something that now seems almost obligatory every time the big cheeses of the Linux world open their mouth. I wonder why they feel they have to run Torvalds down. Are they worried they won't be seen as following the correct right-on line and might be made to stand on their own in the playground? Frightened, perhaps, that Big Richard Stallman will say they are sissies and chuck them out of his gang? Whatever the reason it comes over as pretty darn unedifying.
Articles about how awful the patent system is are ten a penny. What is very hard to find are folks who have thought this one through, have some cogent and realistic proposals, and who are prepared to build support for change among those in a position to change things. Anyway, it doesn't sound as if Mr Perens will be one. Big cheese massage sounds more his gig.
Why should Microsoft buy Sony when Sony are doing such a good job of knocking themselves out of their own key markets? The PSP3 and BlueRay sound like classic troubled products. Sony's sprawling consumer electronics arm is up against the likes of Samsung these days. And Sony's public profile has been dragged through the mud by the CD rootkit scandal. Microsoft don't ahve to do much more than stand and watch.
In addition, there would be a serious cultural and probably political offset: the Americanos operating in the heartland of SE Asian electronics. That would go down like a lead balloon in many quarters.
When you've got $40 billion in the bank, anything can sound like a good buy. Quite why Micrsoft should get into manufacturing cameras and alarm clocks is a bit mystifying. There are many other things they could spend more wisely on, unless Sony goes so tits up that it is sold of piecemeal and bits can be bought separately.