Newsflash: the internet is already critical infrastructure, and the power grid that failed is critical infrastructure and has been for the better part of a Century.
If you're saying that lack of failure defines whether something is critical or ready to be critical then I guess by that definition the electrical distribution grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure. That is preposterous because it is and manages quite nicely for the most part. The rest is down to cost benefit.
This list will need to be distributed for spammers to check it for compliance. When it gets distributed it will be explicitly added to all spam lists by illegal spammers and list aggregators. All current and future illegal and foreign spammers (i.e. most of them) will then bombard everyone on the list with more spam.
As usual they will get away scott free thanks to hijacked servers and IP blocks foreign immunity & the usual shady practices.
A crime is a crime. If someone robs me I damned well want to be able to report a crime and have it investigated, and hopefully the perpetrators caught. Last I checked theft and fraud were illegal.
As for spending this on education; money needs to be spent in many areas not just your area of most concern. It's less than ideal if by educating kids if you let society in general go to hell in a handbasket through lawlessness.
$100 million in crime has a serious deliterious effect on the economy and that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cyber crime.
I can't imagine why anyone would think this enforcement is a bad thing, cybercrime is rifa nad international in scope, often knows no borders and the laws against theft & fraud need to be enforced to curtail it.
It's one thing to be a pedantic, smarmy smart ass and play the grammar police but you look like an uneducated shit for brains when you attempt it with no clue about what you're criticizing your respondent over.
I know what it means, I don't need your your patronizing ill conceived link to a dictionary, your post was sanctimonious. That you don't understand plain English or it's use is your problem. That you went to a dictionary looking for the narrowest definition you could informs me that you're a clueless fool who doesn't understand the use of the word or English in general.
Since you just don't get it read here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sanctim on ious
The most appropriate interpretation would be "feigning... righteousness", (with a touch of hypocricy in there too especially in the following sentence). Since YOU also insist in being a sanctimonious horses arse it looks like it's a common characted flaw. Please don't look up horses arse in an encyclopedia then ask me in which way you are a horses arse. If the description confuses you just move along, or maybe study some English interpretation before posting again.
GWB? Ha ha, just keep throwing the mud, you only demonstrate your bias. It's the same old tosh, "he's a moron", "he's arrogant" "he's.... whatever.....
You're conceited attack on GWB does not excuse anothers sanctimonious garbage. It's pretty clear what was sanctimonious, your only problem is you agree with his sermon, so you don't see it.
For the article if it's missing pop up a level & look, ain't my fault they don't provide persistent URLs (pretty lame of them really, some publications just don't 'get' the web).
NASA is considering spending $300M for a special unmanned mission to deorbit the Hubble 'safely', instead of letting it just reenter. Given the risks this is a disgusting waste of money.
If anything indicates that NASA is a risk averse bunch of middle management buffoons that needs to be pried lose from the purse strings they're grasping, this does.
This just illustrates how bullshit gets repeated until some dopes think it's fact. "Every" intelligence agency in the world warned the US? That's is a lie. Moreover, there were some vague warnings without specifics, including internally in the US from its own agencies. Heck anyone who's read Tom Clancy is aware of similar predictions, but a vague generalization is completely useless except to propagandists filling the heads of fools like you with bullshit. You can warn of any number of things, but without concrete facts nothing's going to prevent them. You don't consider the thousands of warnings of dire events where nothing ever happens. What credence do you put in a warning with no specifics scant evidence and no means to prevent it?
Now, let's look at the context of this discussion, someone is complaining about preemptive action. So the U.S. actually does something in anticipation of preventing future even worse calamities from a known funder of terrorism and still gets bashed for it. Damned if they do and damned if they don't.
As for the rest of your demented diatribe, it just illustrates how sick your mind is. This wasn't the US' fault by any stretch of the imagination, but it's clear you'd like to see more of the same or at least see the US prevented from doing anything about it. In your sick Anonymous Coward mind you blame the US for doing nothing, then blame the US for deserving to be attacked because they bestow the bounty of foreign trade upon others. Doubtless you also blame the US for arming Iraq first like the other morons of your ilk, when you're to dumb to realize that it was T72 tanks, BMPs, Russian RPGs & SAMs, Chinese radar, & sundry Russian & French weapons of various types etc they were facing in Iraq, hardly US armaments.
Your nonsense about the US raping other countries seems to revolve around the us showering it's dollars upon people through free trade which they turn round and buy goods back from the world with. You complain about the US installing dictators (which they don't in general they merely work with the incumbent) but then also complain when at last they remove a dictator and try to install a democracy. You hypocrite. The economics is simple trade relations and it's the only reason a dumb son of a bitch like you can pollute the internet with your sick ramblings about the death of 3000 innocent civilians in the US. Like most other dopes you aren't even smart enough to realize that the impact of that or similar attacks on the US could be one of the worst things to happen to your miserable existence merely through the economic ripples it sends throughout the world.
Your metaphors about beating raping and torturing the world are a childish fantasy. There were real men women and children having this inflicted on them in Iraq yet you don't give a shit about that, you'd rather spout crap about the US and imagined ficticious slights. Prosperity and rejuvenation invariably accompany American influence in the world.
No. But they can't be all bad. Anythings better than listening to Peter Jennings and other socialist nuts masquerading as enlightened internationalists.
Yea the US should just wait for the perceived threat to kill untold thousands or even millions of their citizens and countless others. That way they can live up to glorious European record of permitting and nurturing genocide while ignoring obvious threats even in the face of blatant provocation and agression. How dare they defend themselves against naked agression, clear threats asymmetric warfare and odious govenrments with no redeeming features.
Get over the propaganda and bullshit you're being fed. Get a sense of history and try and be a bit less sanctimonious.
The U.S. deserves a lot more credit for their conduct than you or your puppet masters would give them.
Moreover, how does Gandalf get the palantir and how do the Hobbits get to Gondor? The journey to Isengard and confrontation is absolutely frikin key to the progression of the plot.
TTT openning was possibly one of the most satisfying in the history of filmmaking seeing Gandalf battle the Balrog at last even if it was a Frodo dream sequence, it was amazing.
The start of ROTK may be one of the most disappointing because of it's sin of omission.
Maybe Jackson will just cut it short, it would be totally impossibly to eliminate Isengard and have it make any sense without a lame voiceover or flashbacks later in the movie (equally bad).
They limit your use and demand audits, all for software that they got for free i.e. *they did not write aforementioned software*. I can understand why that seems odious to some. What I also find odious is the deliberate burden they place on obtaining this software for free (in both senses) use. Sure they can charge for a distro and support but there is now an intentional attempt to eliminate the freedom that is supposed to be inherent in the software they are selling.
The Red Hat fanboys must be seeing red, they can't mod the article as troll and it gives the lie to all the rubbish that's been written about Fedora. The end of the Red Hat distro was a huge mistake and left an obvious gaping hole in the Linux market (it's like the management at RH just completely lost it). This makes it obvious and now we have something on the way to fill that gap. It's great, I was wondering which distro to jump to, Debian was looking good, now this from Perens means I'll go Debian now and probably contribute to the new distro.
Yep go on mod this as troll again for pointing out the obvious that RH made a mistake.
Well NVIDIA drivers are easy to install, there's a one click script that just works. I think it even configures the x server.
I do have a concern about any distro headed by Perens when it comes to drivers though, especially GL drivers. He went crazy over the NVIDIA driver issue when it hit. I think there's a place for closed source drivers if they are compatible with a free distro, and excluding them is a real pain in the ass for the "desktop" these guys keep talking about. That they will not include the most stable & functional drivers in distros speaks volumes about how successful their desktop push will be.
When your graphics implementation runs in software on the "desktop", then you're not a player and you're delusional if you think you are. To claim to be chasing the desktop and deliberately leave the only complete drivers as an optional download for those lucky enough to be online with broadband connections is a huge contradiction and the proverbial elephant in the livingroom for Linux desktop. you won't be ready until you deal with this issue.
Capable Open Source graphics drivers that track modern hardware and features is not something that is being delivered on and it would take a huge effort. The closed source drivers work fantastically well and don't impugn the open source nature of the kernel & the rest of the system etc. Include them already, at least until you have a viable alternative you can ship (which may never happen).
Nope it was bait & switch, and it's not the same distro you fool. The support is gone and so is the stability. But keep running around calling people who want the support option and have used Red Had for years dickheads, that'll win friends and influence people. If it was the same there would have been no need for this announcement. Me, I'm off to use another distro, I've used RHL for *years* but no more, I used RHL and this WAS bait & switch.
Morover it was the sleaziest betrayal of a user base I've ever seen, never mind seen in Linux. Microsoft has never stooped to such depths, and I'm no fan of theirs.
Adios Red Hat and adios rabid Red Hat fanboy attack dogs.
Red Hat's 'commitment' to any project is a negative as far as I'm concerned. I don't need their wavering 'support'.
Yup, and after RH's bait & switch you never know if their 'support' will stay the course. They now have a track record of pulling the plug on a major distro. They have zero credibility, so stuff them. Just say no, to Red Hat.
Agreed it's a license to print money if you have an exclusive, I'm just pointing out that anyone can come along in software and start writing or 'designing cars' in my analogy. Open Source / Free Software represents that natural evolution to a system where replication without taxation is possible and peopel can thrive and benefit from their shared collective efforts.
And of course we see people who think the resulting freedom is tantamount to communism with no reguard for the differences between free infinite manufacture of software controlled by all and a more traditional manufacturing industry where someone must make a capital investment to tool up for manufacture.
Don't assume that I'm somehow anti-capitalist, I'm not, capitalism is great and better than the naive churlish crap that gets bandied around by most of it's dim witted opponents today, but we have a situation here where the rules would have to be severely rigged to be able to sell software in the traditional model (yes they're trying to rig it as such, but that ain't capitalism, it's good oldfashioned graft). It is not a capitalist nirvana unless they can somehow stop free software in it's tracks through unscrupulous means. The honest capitalists should be investing in service businesses (in my analogy building chains of garages and gas stations to keep the vehicles on the road). This is of course exactly where some of the smart money is being invested.
That article uses some of the most strained and unrelated analogies I have ever encountered.
The simple fact that escapes the Professor and others who don't understand free software, is that there are virtually no manufacturing (duplication) costs for reproducing software. It is therefore possible to design or author software once and reproduce it infinitely especially where the costs of reproduction and distribution are bourne by the copier. Moreover, the previous design and authoring efforts are not wasted but build upon successive itterations.
Instead of explaining this further, let's use an analogy (since the professor likes analogies so much). Instead of horribly flawed analogies comparing open source to Nigerian email fraud let us use a genuinely equivalent analogy.
Imagine if Ford motor company or anyone else could make vehicles for free at the press of a button. That's right, just infinitely replicate any vehicle you come across just by pressing a button and coming back a few minutes later jumping in and driving away.
How would this change the business of vehicle manufacture?
Given this situation let us further imagine that Ford still sold vehicles and moreover that the vast majority of people on the highways drove around in Fords and agreed not to copy any of the vehicles despite their innate ability to be copied. You couldn't even tinker with the engines or change the oil never mind make a whole new copy of a car.
Now given this unresaonable restriction on the way the universe works naturally (in our scenario), wouldn't an enterprising bunch of mechanics team together to design a vehicle that anyone could duplicate freely, and wouldn't others quickly join to improve that vehicle from a primitive wagon into fine vehicles of all descriptions from sportscars to towncars to SUVs that anyone could copy in order to use the highway freely.
Now realize that this IS the nature of software and wonder why Professors still foolishly try to impose the business models and thinking processes suited to traditional manufacturing industries onto a software industry that so naturally matches the above scenario of infinite free replication and incremental creative design.
This is an old tactic, known as salting the earth, the intent is that nothing can grow there for anyone else.
It's not enough for Red Hat to abandon it's base which it won at the expense of other distros. Now that it is 'withdrawing' from that market it feels the need to undermine the whole desktop Linux business in a segment that it thinks won't affect it's own business.
Red Hat is gravely mistaken. It claims that it was unable to run a competitive business where the actual product was more or less free and the manufacturing overheads were miniscule. All that was left was support costs which are (or could be) passed directly along and a networked patch distribution model with little overhead.
So what is really going on here? The reason it withdrew was not lack of profitability, but insufficient profitability. It basically wanted the higher margins of it's enterprise product and saw it's premium business being undermined by it's consumer business. In other words it betrayed it's base because there was almost no differentiation between enterprise and desktop versions of it's products and most could get support less expensively for the desktop. This is the real reason for it's withdrawal, not some imagined nonsense about desktop readiness. Remember enterprise support costs more not less than desktop support, in other words it's a nice little earner. An appropriate response (if Red Hat's excuses were anything other than a sham)would have been to charge appropriately for support on the desktop instead of abandoning it's users to an experimental distro that will be a nightmare for it's allegedly naive user base. The fig leaf Red Had is holding isn't big enough to cover it's shame. A cynical betrayal of it's base to protect enterprise margins and now an attack on the desktop when it knows damned well that approriate pricing for support is all that is required. It's difficult to imaging a more paradoxical porition that Red Hat's over this, they are using their concern over their poor abused users as the excuse for abandoning them, when things were ticking along nicely. This betrayal has everything to do with preserving margins on undifferentiated products.
It will be a cold day in hell before I ever use Red Hat again, for enterprise or anything else. They have betrayed their base and mendaciously and cynically undermined Linux to justify this shame faced betrayal.
Never thought I'd see it from Red Hat. What a sad day for Linux. Just what the heck has happened inside Red Hat.
I had a bad experience with Debian installation years ago after I bought a boxed version (mouse detection of all silly things) and never revisited it, maybe it's time.
I'm pretty bummed that the RH distro has been tossed aside. For me it represented volume, stability, support and freedom, (with user friendliness) and you could pretty much choose where on the spectrum of each you wanted to play. It was in summary a nice one stop for one size fits all distro that I was comfortable with. They've built that up (at the expense of alternatives that could have occupied that position an thrived) and now they unilaterally take it away and point at fedorra, like they have no responsibility to their user base or the community. It's disappointing on a number of levels. I'm sitting looking at my RH9 for dummies that I got for a friend I'm coaxing over to Linux and boy I feel like a complete dummy for making this particular selection. None of this is helped by RH CEO talking utter crap and dissing Linux in an attempt to put his spin a decision to leave his users high and dry.
I'll probably go multiboot on an experimental system and install several distros for now, just to see how they compare.
Don't you see that the RH Pro packages just ceased entirely?
Anyhoo, with the recent SuSe announcement I'm not getting the warm and fuzzies over that either.
People have opined that Novel can be the kiss of death (and has been for other products they've acquired) and I tend to think that this might be one possible outcome. There is no telling what direction SuSe products will head in now, and it may mirror what RH has just done.
Sigh, how to pick my next distro...... maybe I'll go fedorra, maybe debian, or maybe just cross my fingers and pick SuSe afterall, none of these are ideal. Maybe I'll try and get the RH enterprise isos & give them a spin.
You have to understand that people want a product line where support is available, but optional at a decent price (I don't need it it's just a prerequisite for viability), and an ongoing plan with future product releases that reasonably track the mainstream development of the kernel & desktop environments with some attention to stability. It's not too much to ask, all this software is out there, package it up stick a bow on it put it in a box and sell it, with no shenanigans.
Slashdot Mirror
This question is; "critical for what purpose?" then.
Newsflash: the internet is already critical infrastructure, and the power grid that failed is critical infrastructure and has been for the better part of a Century.
If you're saying that lack of failure defines whether something is critical or ready to be critical then I guess by that definition the electrical distribution grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure. That is preposterous because it is and manages quite nicely for the most part. The rest is down to cost benefit.
It will undoubtedly be cracked when it is possible to trace the test program hashing the spam email names and finding them in the database.
This is horribly flawed.
This list will need to be distributed for spammers to check it for compliance. When it gets distributed it will be explicitly added to all spam lists by illegal spammers and list aggregators. All current and future illegal and foreign spammers (i.e. most of them) will then bombard everyone on the list with more spam.
As usual they will get away scott free thanks to hijacked servers and IP blocks foreign immunity & the usual shady practices.
This is unworkable.
A crime is a crime. If someone robs me I damned well want to be able to report a crime and have it investigated, and hopefully the perpetrators caught. Last I checked theft and fraud were illegal.
As for spending this on education; money needs to be spent in many areas not just your area of most concern. It's less than ideal if by educating kids if you let society in general go to hell in a handbasket through lawlessness.
$100 million in crime has a serious deliterious effect on the economy and that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cyber crime.
I can't imagine why anyone would think this enforcement is a bad thing, cybercrime is rifa nad international in scope, often knows no borders and the laws against theft & fraud need to be enforced to curtail it.
It's one thing to be a pedantic, smarmy smart ass and play the grammar police but you look like an uneducated shit for brains when you attempt it with no clue about what you're criticizing your respondent over.
m on ious
... righteousness", (with a touch of hypocricy in there too especially in the following sentence). Since YOU also insist in being a sanctimonious horses arse it looks like it's a common characted flaw. Please don't look up horses arse in an encyclopedia then ask me in which way you are a horses arse. If the description confuses you just move along, or maybe study some English interpretation before posting again.
I know what it means, I don't need your your patronizing ill conceived link to a dictionary, your post was sanctimonious. That you don't understand plain English or it's use is your problem. That you went to a dictionary looking for the narrowest definition you could informs me that you're a clueless fool who doesn't understand the use of the word or English in general.
Since you just don't get it read here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sancti
The most appropriate interpretation would be "feigning
See my other reply for that article link.
For that link, Go here:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
And select the "Case Closed" link.
GWB? Ha ha, just keep throwing the mud, you only demonstrate your bias. It's the same old tosh, "he's a moron", "he's arrogant" "he's.... whatever.....
You're conceited attack on GWB does not excuse anothers sanctimonious garbage. It's pretty clear what was sanctimonious, your only problem is you agree with his sermon, so you don't see it.
For the article if it's missing pop up a level & look, ain't my fault they don't provide persistent URLs (pretty lame of them really, some publications just don't 'get' the web).
NASA is considering spending $300M for a special unmanned mission to deorbit the Hubble 'safely', instead of letting it just reenter. Given the risks this is a disgusting waste of money.
If anything indicates that NASA is a risk averse bunch of middle management buffoons that needs to be pried lose from the purse strings they're grasping, this does.
Read this, 'nuff said.
t ic les/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Ar
This just illustrates how bullshit gets repeated until some dopes think it's fact. "Every" intelligence agency in the world warned the US? That's is a lie. Moreover, there were some vague warnings without specifics, including internally in the US from its own agencies. Heck anyone who's read Tom Clancy is aware of similar predictions, but a vague generalization is completely useless except to propagandists filling the heads of fools like you with bullshit. You can warn of any number of things, but without concrete facts nothing's going to prevent them. You don't consider the thousands of warnings of dire events where nothing ever happens. What credence do you put in a warning with no specifics scant evidence and no means to prevent it?
Now, let's look at the context of this discussion, someone is complaining about preemptive action. So the U.S. actually does something in anticipation of preventing future even worse calamities from a known funder of terrorism and still gets bashed for it. Damned if they do and damned if they don't.
As for the rest of your demented diatribe, it just illustrates how sick your mind is. This wasn't the US' fault by any stretch of the imagination, but it's clear you'd like to see more of the same or at least see the US prevented from doing anything about it. In your sick Anonymous Coward mind you blame the US for doing nothing, then blame the US for deserving to be attacked because they bestow the bounty of foreign trade upon others. Doubtless you also blame the US for arming Iraq first like the other morons of your ilk, when you're to dumb to realize that it was T72 tanks, BMPs, Russian RPGs & SAMs, Chinese radar, & sundry Russian & French weapons of various types etc they were facing in Iraq, hardly US armaments.
Your nonsense about the US raping other countries seems to revolve around the us showering it's dollars upon people through free trade which they turn round and buy goods back from the world with. You complain about the US installing dictators (which they don't in general they merely work with the incumbent) but then also complain when at last they remove a dictator and try to install a democracy. You hypocrite. The economics is simple trade relations and it's the only reason a dumb son of a bitch like you can pollute the internet with your sick ramblings about the death of 3000 innocent civilians in the US. Like most other dopes you aren't even smart enough to realize that the impact of that or similar attacks on the US could be one of the worst things to happen to your miserable existence merely through the economic ripples it sends throughout the world.
Your metaphors about beating raping and torturing the world are a childish fantasy. There were real men women and children having this inflicted on them in Iraq yet you don't give a shit about that, you'd rather spout crap about the US and imagined ficticious slights. Prosperity and rejuvenation invariably accompany American influence in the world.
No. But they can't be all bad. Anythings better than listening to Peter Jennings and other socialist nuts masquerading as enlightened internationalists.
Yea the US should just wait for the perceived threat to kill untold thousands or even millions of their citizens and countless others. That way they can live up to glorious European record of permitting and nurturing genocide while ignoring obvious threats even in the face of blatant provocation and agression. How dare they defend themselves against naked agression, clear threats asymmetric warfare and odious govenrments with no redeeming features.
Get over the propaganda and bullshit you're being fed. Get a sense of history and try and be a bit less sanctimonious.
The U.S. deserves a lot more credit for their conduct than you or your puppet masters would give them.
Richard E. Grant is the new doctor. There is some resemblance and of course it is his voice.
r vi ews/grant/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/shalka/inte
The BBC's web site also says:
"Scream of the Shalka
Richard E Grant stars in the Ninth Doctor's debut adventure."
Moreover, how does Gandalf get the palantir and how do the Hobbits get to Gondor? The journey to Isengard and confrontation is absolutely frikin key to the progression of the plot.
TTT openning was possibly one of the most satisfying in the history of filmmaking seeing Gandalf battle the Balrog at last even if it was a Frodo dream sequence, it was amazing.
The start of ROTK may be one of the most disappointing because of it's sin of omission.
Maybe Jackson will just cut it short, it would be totally impossibly to eliminate Isengard and have it make any sense without a lame voiceover or flashbacks later in the movie (equally bad).
They limit your use and demand audits, all for software that they got for free i.e. *they did not write aforementioned software*. I can understand why that seems odious to some. What I also find odious is the deliberate burden they place on obtaining this software for free (in both senses) use. Sure they can charge for a distro and support but there is now an intentional attempt to eliminate the freedom that is supposed to be inherent in the software they are selling.
The Red Hat fanboys must be seeing red, they can't mod the article as troll and it gives the lie to all the rubbish that's been written about Fedora. The end of the Red Hat distro was a huge mistake and left an obvious gaping hole in the Linux market (it's like the management at RH just completely lost it). This makes it obvious and now we have something on the way to fill that gap. It's great, I was wondering which distro to jump to, Debian was looking good, now this from Perens means I'll go Debian now and probably contribute to the new distro.
Yep go on mod this as troll again for pointing out the obvious that RH made a mistake.
Well NVIDIA drivers are easy to install, there's a one click script that just works. I think it even configures the x server.
I do have a concern about any distro headed by Perens when it comes to drivers though, especially GL drivers. He went crazy over the NVIDIA driver issue when it hit. I think there's a place for closed source drivers if they are compatible with a free distro, and excluding them is a real pain in the ass for the "desktop" these guys keep talking about. That they will not include the most stable & functional drivers in distros speaks volumes about how successful their desktop push will be.
When your graphics implementation runs in software on the "desktop", then you're not a player and you're delusional if you think you are. To claim to be chasing the desktop and deliberately leave the only complete drivers as an optional download for those lucky enough to be online with broadband connections is a huge contradiction and the proverbial elephant in the livingroom for Linux desktop. you won't be ready until you deal with this issue.
Capable Open Source graphics drivers that track modern hardware and features is not something that is being delivered on and it would take a huge effort. The closed source drivers work fantastically well and don't impugn the open source nature of the kernel & the rest of the system etc. Include them already, at least until you have a viable alternative you can ship (which may never happen).
Nope it was bait & switch, and it's not the same distro you fool. The support is gone and so is the stability. But keep running around calling people who want the support option and have used Red Had for years dickheads, that'll win friends and influence people. If it was the same there would have been no need for this announcement. Me, I'm off to use another distro, I've used RHL for *years* but no more, I used RHL and this WAS bait & switch.
Morover it was the sleaziest betrayal of a user base I've ever seen, never mind seen in Linux. Microsoft has never stooped to such depths, and I'm no fan of theirs.
Adios Red Hat and adios rabid Red Hat fanboy attack dogs.
Red Hat's 'commitment' to any project is a negative as far as I'm concerned. I don't need their wavering 'support'.
Yup, and after RH's bait & switch you never know if their 'support' will stay the course. They now have a track record of pulling the plug on a major distro. They have zero credibility, so stuff them. Just say no, to Red Hat.
Agreed it's a license to print money if you have an exclusive, I'm just pointing out that anyone can come along in software and start writing or 'designing cars' in my analogy. Open Source / Free Software represents that natural evolution to a system where replication without taxation is possible and peopel can thrive and benefit from their shared collective efforts.
And of course we see people who think the resulting freedom is tantamount to communism with no reguard for the differences between free infinite manufacture of software controlled by all and a more traditional manufacturing industry where someone must make a capital investment to tool up for manufacture.
Don't assume that I'm somehow anti-capitalist, I'm not, capitalism is great and better than the naive churlish crap that gets bandied around by most of it's dim witted opponents today, but we have a situation here where the rules would have to be severely rigged to be able to sell software in the traditional model (yes they're trying to rig it as such, but that ain't capitalism, it's good oldfashioned graft). It is not a capitalist nirvana unless they can somehow stop free software in it's tracks through unscrupulous means. The honest capitalists should be investing in service businesses (in my analogy building chains of garages and gas stations to keep the vehicles on the road). This is of course exactly where some of the smart money is being invested.
That article uses some of the most strained and unrelated analogies I have ever encountered.
The simple fact that escapes the Professor and others who don't understand free software, is that there are virtually no manufacturing (duplication) costs for reproducing software. It is therefore possible to design or author software once and reproduce it infinitely especially where the costs of reproduction and distribution are bourne by the copier. Moreover, the previous design and authoring efforts are not wasted but build upon successive itterations.
Instead of explaining this further, let's use an analogy (since the professor likes analogies so much). Instead of horribly flawed analogies comparing open source to Nigerian email fraud let us use a genuinely equivalent analogy.
Imagine if Ford motor company or anyone else could make vehicles for free at the press of a button. That's right, just infinitely replicate any vehicle you come across just by pressing a button and coming back a few minutes later jumping in and driving away.
How would this change the business of vehicle manufacture?
Given this situation let us further imagine that Ford still sold vehicles and moreover that the vast majority of people on the highways drove around in Fords and agreed not to copy any of the vehicles despite their innate ability to be copied. You couldn't even tinker with the engines or change the oil never mind make a whole new copy of a car.
Now given this unresaonable restriction on the way the universe works naturally (in our scenario), wouldn't an enterprising bunch of mechanics team together to design a vehicle that anyone could duplicate freely, and wouldn't others quickly join to improve that vehicle from a primitive wagon into fine vehicles of all descriptions from sportscars to towncars to SUVs that anyone could copy in order to use the highway freely.
Now realize that this IS the nature of software and wonder why Professors still foolishly try to impose the business models and thinking processes suited to traditional manufacturing industries onto a software industry that so naturally matches the above scenario of infinite free replication and incremental creative design.
This is an old tactic, known as salting the earth, the intent is that nothing can grow there for anyone else.
It's not enough for Red Hat to abandon it's base which it won at the expense of other distros. Now that it is 'withdrawing' from that market it feels the need to undermine the whole desktop Linux business in a segment that it thinks won't affect it's own business.
Red Hat is gravely mistaken. It claims that it was unable to run a competitive business where the actual product was more or less free and the manufacturing overheads were miniscule. All that was left was support costs which are (or could be) passed directly along and a networked patch distribution model with little overhead.
So what is really going on here? The reason it withdrew was not lack of profitability, but insufficient profitability. It basically wanted the higher margins of it's enterprise product and saw it's premium business being undermined by it's consumer business. In other words it betrayed it's base because there was almost no differentiation between enterprise and desktop versions of it's products and most could get support less expensively for the desktop. This is the real reason for it's withdrawal, not some imagined nonsense about desktop readiness. Remember enterprise support costs more not less than desktop support, in other words it's a nice little earner. An appropriate response (if Red Hat's excuses were anything other than a sham)would have been to charge appropriately for support on the desktop instead of abandoning it's users to an experimental distro that will be a nightmare for it's allegedly naive user base. The fig leaf Red Had is holding isn't big enough to cover it's shame. A cynical betrayal of it's base to protect enterprise margins and now an attack on the desktop when it knows damned well that approriate pricing for support is all that is required. It's difficult to imaging a more paradoxical porition that Red Hat's over this, they are using their concern over their poor abused users as the excuse for abandoning them, when things were ticking along nicely. This betrayal has everything to do with preserving margins on undifferentiated products.
It will be a cold day in hell before I ever use Red Hat again, for enterprise or anything else. They have betrayed their base and mendaciously and cynically undermined Linux to justify this shame faced betrayal.
Never thought I'd see it from Red Hat. What a sad day for Linux. Just what the heck has happened inside Red Hat.
I had a bad experience with Debian installation years ago after I bought a boxed version (mouse detection of all silly things) and never revisited it, maybe it's time.
I'm pretty bummed that the RH distro has been tossed aside. For me it represented volume, stability, support and freedom, (with user friendliness) and you could pretty much choose where on the spectrum of each you wanted to play. It was in summary a nice one stop for one size fits all distro that I was comfortable with. They've built that up (at the expense of alternatives that could have occupied that position an thrived) and now they unilaterally take it away and point at fedorra, like they have no responsibility to their user base or the community. It's disappointing on a number of levels. I'm sitting looking at my RH9 for dummies that I got for a friend I'm coaxing over to Linux and boy I feel like a complete dummy for making this particular selection. None of this is helped by RH CEO talking utter crap and dissing Linux in an attempt to put his spin a decision to leave his users high and dry.
I'll probably go multiboot on an experimental system and install several distros for now, just to see how they compare.
That isn't the *only* SUSE option.
Don't you see that the RH Pro packages just ceased entirely?
Anyhoo, with the recent SuSe announcement I'm not getting the warm and fuzzies over that either.
People have opined that Novel can be the kiss of death (and has been for other products they've acquired) and I tend to think that this might be one possible outcome. There is no telling what direction SuSe products will head in now, and it may mirror what RH has just done.
Sigh, how to pick my next distro...... maybe I'll go fedorra, maybe debian, or maybe just cross my fingers and pick SuSe afterall, none of these are ideal. Maybe I'll try and get the RH enterprise isos & give them a spin.
You have to understand that people want a product line where support is available, but optional at a decent price (I don't need it it's just a prerequisite for viability), and an ongoing plan with future product releases that reasonably track the mainstream development of the kernel & desktop environments with some attention to stability. It's not too much to ask, all this software is out there, package it up stick a bow on it put it in a box and sell it, with no shenanigans.