No they didn't. The law covered terrorism *As well*, not exclusively. Check your facts next time you rant.
You're absolutely right, but it's an easy mistake to make when virtually every news report about this issue stated that the Icelandic money *was* frozen under anti-terrorism law. The confusion arose because the title of the bill included 'terrorism', but reading the specific clause (?section) that was used makes it quite clear that it was intended for non-terrorism related purposes as well (something like 'serious threats to the nation's economic stability'). Shame I can't remember where this was all set out clearly.
From what I've seen, weekly IPLs seems to be close to standard practice within the mainframe world. With a reboot frequency like that you're not going to even see most stability issues.
We run IBM z Series mainframes on behalf of a large number of customers and the typical IPL frequency is now about every 2-3 months. It could probably be less frequent on some systems. If you *have* to IPL every week, you're not running your system properly.
Has it even become possible to switch to and from daylight savings yet without rebooting the mainframe?
The hardware and OS support it but as there's no way to guarantee the behavior of the (particularly non-IBM) software products and the applications (which are especially *not* expecting the clock to go backwards), so it's too risky. I would wonder how well any software on a non-mainframe platform (e.g. Oracle on Linux) would cope with time going backwards - surely this would screw up the logs etc? We *could* probably take down all the databases, CICS services, non-IBM products etc., change the time, and (after waiting 1 hour in the backwards case) bring them all back up *without* an IPL but by the time you've done this it's probably a lot safer just to follow the standard IPL sequence. The other thing is that certain changes (e.g. base MVS fixes - equivalent of Linux kernel changes) do require an IPL as they would require a reboot on Linux. As we only IPL about 4-6 times per year we really need the clock change IPLs for putting other changes in.
Having used yum/rpms/yumex on Fedora and apt/deb/synaptic on Ubuntu, I've got the following two observations:
1/ At the time I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu, synaptic was a lot faster than yumex 2/ Synaptic is a very nice easy to use but flexible gui frontend.
But really I'd be fairly happy to use either on a reasonably fast machine; on a slow machine I think the apt/deb route would probably be a better experience.
Wow, talk about spin. The return rates are higher for Linux, yet "most people are quite happy with Linux?" What a leap.
Ho hum. Does this really need explaining? If you have a 4% return rate for Linux and 1% for Windows, *most* people (i.e. 96%) are (apparently) happy with Linux despite the return rate being 4x greater.
No PC manufacturer can ignore this market and open source software provides the only cost effective means by which to achieve a competitive solution. Linux as it turns out will win on the school desktop.
Except that MS will almost give away their software in particular contexts rather than lose market share. I believe they're only charging something like $5 for Windows XP on netbooks, for example.
TV is done. It's going to die faster than radio, because I can listen to radio in my car.
You haven't got the faintest clue, have you? The majority of the population (in the US or in the UK where I live) still come home from work and slump in front of the TV. They don't want to choose a DVD or find something on youtube, they just want to flick through a few channels and settle on something comfortable and familiar while they wind down. Maybe later they'll do something else. Yes, TV isn't as important and central as it was; but it'll still be broadcasting (profitably) to millions in 5, 10, 20 years.
Cleverly, shops have continued selling analogue-only TVs, VCRs and even DVD/HD recorders without clear labels saying Don't buy this, you moron!
I didn't feel particularly moronic when I bought a 28" widescreen analogue TV last year for £120 to put in the bedroom. I wasn't prepared to pay £299 or more for a LCD equivalent; the decoder box cost was trivial compared to the saving (and it doesn't get used enough for the power consumption to be important).
I guess you must be referring to estoppel although I'm not convinced as to whether inducing you to believe they want to buy your domain when they're actually planning to sue falls within the definition. They could claim they were collecting evidence of your possible ill intent and that was the only way to do it.
The question remains: what good is Redhat over CentOS (the only difference being logos and a support contract) if they ignore a major performance bug for two years?
Even if you concede that RH support is worthless (which I don't - your conclusion seems to be that because RH were crap on one support issue, they would be crap in all cases - other posters seem to have better experiences) the value of Redhat over CentOS is that quite a lot of non-technical business types have heard of it and probably have at least a vague impression of it being a significant force with some solidity. This sort of thing is very important for many companies when buying software or support.
For the record, in the UK at least, Dell's Ubuntu systems are significantly cheaper than the Windows equivalents.
Maybe. Maybe not. I think it varies from week to week. When I bought my Dell 530 desktop a few months ago, I got a better spec machine with Vista Home Premium than I could get for the same price with Ubuntu; I guess I should have got the Ubuntu machine on principle but there you go; I installed it myself instead and saved some money.
But if Microsoft vs. IBM really happens, I'm looking forward to IBM's lawyers digging out that prior art and attacking Microsoft's patents en masse;-)
This is why patent wars against Linux are the 'nuclear option' for Microsoft. They will only use them when they are really desperate (and by then it will probably be too late).
A bunch of code is given to a project under the LGPL, which contains MS-patented methods and algorithms.
You can guess what comes next: another SCO-style attempt at bankrupting the project in question.
IANAL but...
The word 'estoppal' comes to mind. If MS donates the code, on the face of it free and unencumbered under a license which allows modification and distribution without obtaining any patent license etc. then it would forgo its right to sue for a patent violation, in the same way that you can't give someone what is clearly understood to be a gift and then sue for its return or compensation.
Where as getting TPB's server logs would take a minor international incident.
It's not a question of getting access to TPB's logs; Apple only has to participate in the relevant torrents in order to get the IP addresses of everyone involved, and then use standard legal methods to get the related names and addresses from the ISPs.
How is the average person supposed to know that Distrowatch.com even exists? Furthermore, why should they take the time to find one that works? The average person doesn't want to go to leaps and bounds to find one distro that is the most user friendly. If 'the average person' gets as far as even knowing that Linux exists and considers installing it, they will surely have come across the almost ubiquitous advice to try Ubuntu.
I for one am kind of sick of having to beat Fedora and Redhat into shape using 3rd party repositories and my own hacks because the developers are too snooty to include Nvidia or ATI drivers, MP3 support, mplayer, etc, etc, etc.
Then why don't you use something like Ubuntu instead, which integrates such things as the closed source Nvidia drivers with no hassle at all, and will install mp3 support etc. virtually seamlessly on demand? Fedora is a pretty 'purist' distro so it seems a bit odd to whinge about it being purist rather than using something more suitable for your needs.
Show me a piece of hardware that doesn't work on Windows, and it's some obscure thing that once had a Windows driver but the producer stopped making drivers for years ago.
My Canon CanoScan 650U flatbed scanner is about 6 years old and probably good for another 20 given how much I use it. Not supported now or (presumably) ever in Vista. Supported perfectly (and probably indefinitely) in Linux. I wouldn't rate this as obscure, and it's not one of those things that you might as well replace because the latest models are so much cheaper and better.
if you consider the pace of technological change, that could be only a decade away, when the concept of "internet search" is antiquated.
I'd stick my neck out and say the *concept* of 'Internet Search' will never be antiquated. As long as there are various forms of information 'out there' on the Internet or its successor networks, this information will need to be indexed and classified and queriable/searchable in various ways. And the thing doing that job will be some sort of 'search engine' even if it is also much more than that as well - you will still want to be able to make queries like 'list all steam railways in the UK' and get a straightforward answer (as you can with google today).
when Linux becomes too popular and if it becomes the target of malware like windows is I will move to something else, maybe some flavor of BSD or Solaris...
The important thing is that Linux cannot and will not "become like Windows" because the whole development process automatically leads to multiple versions composed of different combinations of individual software packages compiled with different options, and makes it much more difficult to target large numbers of systems with (say) a single malware binary. It's like the difference between pedigree cats (look very pretty but can have serious inbreeding problems) and 'moggies' (who are the product of random breeding but are much more robust).
That doesn't help the situation. If windows goes away, the problem with just migrate to Linux.
Linux, by its very nature allows and encourages diversity - the structure of the FOSS community means that there will always be various distros and if any particular distro gets overwhelmed by security problems then it's not just possible but easy to switch to a new distro.
If you aren't happy with SUSE's direction, you can go to RHEL and vice versa without creating a lot of fuss.
This is one of the real plusses of the FOSS environment. I've gone from RH9 to FC2/4/6/7 and then switched to Ubuntu without much disruption; when Fedora just didn't work out for me on my new PC (Fedora 7 wouldn't recognize my network card;Fedora 8 had a buggy sound setup with pulseaudio), I just switched to Ubuntu (gutsy/7.10) and it worked just fine. If MS's versions of windows doesn't work for you, there's no alternative except buying different hardware.
since the 8.04 folder of the gobuntu download page it's empty.
If you look in http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/daily/ you will see daily builds of 8.04 up to 21st April 2008, so I would confidently predict there will be a final release of Gobuntu appearing within days.
Slashdot Mirror
No they didn't. The law covered terrorism *As well*, not exclusively. Check your facts next time you rant.
You're absolutely right, but it's an easy mistake to make when virtually every news report about this issue stated that the Icelandic money *was* frozen under anti-terrorism law. The confusion arose because the title of the bill included 'terrorism', but reading the specific clause (?section) that was used makes it quite clear that it was intended for non-terrorism related purposes as well (something like 'serious threats to the nation's economic stability'). Shame I can't remember where this was all set out clearly.
From what I've seen, weekly IPLs seems to be close to standard practice within the mainframe world. With a reboot frequency like that you're not going to even see most stability issues.
We run IBM z Series mainframes on behalf of a large number of customers and the typical IPL frequency is now about every 2-3 months. It could probably be less frequent on some systems. If you *have* to IPL every week, you're not running your system properly.
Has it even become possible to switch to and from daylight savings yet without rebooting the mainframe?
The hardware and OS support it but as there's no way to guarantee the behavior of the (particularly non-IBM) software products and the applications (which are especially *not* expecting the clock to go backwards), so it's too risky.
I would wonder how well any software on a non-mainframe platform (e.g. Oracle on Linux) would cope with time going backwards - surely this would screw up the logs etc?
We *could* probably take down all the databases, CICS services, non-IBM products etc., change the time, and (after waiting 1 hour in the backwards case) bring them all back up *without* an IPL but by the time you've done this it's probably a lot safer just to follow the standard IPL sequence.
The other thing is that certain changes (e.g. base MVS fixes - equivalent of Linux kernel changes) do require an IPL as they would require a reboot on Linux. As we only IPL about 4-6 times per year we really need the clock change IPLs for putting other changes in.
does anyone prefer yum/rpms to apt/deb
Having used yum/rpms/yumex on Fedora and apt/deb/synaptic on Ubuntu, I've got the following two observations:
1/ At the time I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu, synaptic was a lot faster than yumex
2/ Synaptic is a very nice easy to use but flexible gui frontend.
But really I'd be fairly happy to use either on a reasonably fast machine; on a slow machine I think the apt/deb route would probably be a better experience.
Wow, talk about spin. The return rates are higher for Linux, yet "most people are quite happy with Linux?" What a leap.
Ho hum. Does this really need explaining? If you have a 4% return rate for Linux and 1% for Windows, *most* people (i.e. 96%) are (apparently) happy with Linux despite the return rate being 4x greater.
No PC manufacturer can ignore this market and open source software provides the only cost effective means by which to achieve a competitive solution. Linux as it turns out will win on the school desktop.
Except that MS will almost give away their software in particular contexts rather than lose market share. I believe they're only charging something like $5 for Windows XP on netbooks, for example.
TV is done. It's going to die faster than radio, because I can listen to radio in my car.
You haven't got the faintest clue, have you? The majority of the population (in the US or in the UK where I live) still come home from work and slump in front of the TV. They don't want to choose a DVD or find something on youtube, they just want to flick through a few channels and settle on something comfortable and familiar while they wind down. Maybe later they'll do something else.
Yes, TV isn't as important and central as it was; but it'll still be broadcasting (profitably) to millions in 5, 10, 20 years.
Cleverly, shops have continued selling analogue-only TVs, VCRs and even DVD/HD recorders without clear labels saying Don't buy this, you moron!
I didn't feel particularly moronic when I bought a 28" widescreen analogue TV last year for £120 to put in the bedroom. I wasn't prepared to pay £299 or more for a LCD equivalent; the decoder box cost was trivial compared to the saving (and it doesn't get used enough for the power consumption to be important).
I had a Sinclair ZX-81 with OS and BASIC language in ROM.
Young whippersnapper. I had a TRS-80 model 1 with 4k ROM BASIC while you were still suckling (probably)!
I guess you must be referring to estoppel although I'm not convinced as to whether inducing you to believe they want to buy your domain when they're actually planning to sue falls within the definition. They could claim they were collecting evidence of your possible ill intent and that was the only way to do it.
The question remains: what good is Redhat over CentOS (the only difference being logos and a support contract) if they ignore a major performance bug for two years?
Even if you concede that RH support is worthless (which I don't - your conclusion seems to be that because RH were crap on one support issue, they would be crap in all cases - other posters seem to have better experiences) the value of Redhat over CentOS is that quite a lot of non-technical business types have heard of it and probably have at least a vague impression of it being a significant force with some solidity. This sort of thing is very important for many companies when buying software or support.
For the record, in the UK at least, Dell's Ubuntu systems are significantly cheaper than the Windows equivalents.
Maybe. Maybe not. I think it varies from week to week. When I bought my Dell 530 desktop a few months ago, I got a better spec machine with Vista Home Premium than I could get for the same price with Ubuntu; I guess I should have got the Ubuntu machine on principle but there you go; I installed it myself instead and saved some money.
But if Microsoft vs. IBM really happens, I'm looking forward to IBM's lawyers digging out that prior art and attacking Microsoft's patents en masse ;-)
This is why patent wars against Linux are the 'nuclear option' for Microsoft. They will only use them when they are really desperate (and by then it will probably be too late).
s/Great/Galactic/
The world won't end... It will go dark, and everything will halt, waiting for someone -- anyone -- to click "CANCEL OR ALLOW"
The world's too old for UAC prompts; it's more likely to be "RETRY, ABORT OR IGNORE?"
A bunch of code is given to a project under the LGPL, which contains MS-patented methods and algorithms.
You can guess what comes next: another SCO-style attempt at bankrupting the project in question.
IANAL but...
The word 'estoppal' comes to mind. If MS donates the code, on the face of it free and unencumbered under a license which allows modification and distribution without obtaining any patent license etc. then it would forgo its right to sue for a patent violation, in the same way that you can't give someone what is clearly understood to be a gift and then sue for its return or compensation.
Where as getting TPB's server logs would take a minor international incident.
It's not a question of getting access to TPB's logs; Apple only has to participate in the relevant torrents in order to get the IP addresses of everyone involved, and then use standard legal methods to get the related names and addresses from the ISPs.
How is the average person supposed to know that Distrowatch.com even exists? Furthermore, why should they take the time to find one that works? The average person doesn't want to go to leaps and bounds to find one distro that is the most user friendly.
If 'the average person' gets as far as even knowing that Linux exists and considers installing it, they will surely have come across the almost ubiquitous advice to try Ubuntu.
I for one am kind of sick of having to beat Fedora and Redhat into shape using 3rd party repositories and my own hacks because the developers are too snooty to include Nvidia or ATI drivers, MP3 support, mplayer, etc, etc, etc.
Then why don't you use something like Ubuntu instead, which integrates such things as the closed source Nvidia drivers with no hassle at all, and will install mp3 support etc. virtually seamlessly on demand? Fedora is a pretty 'purist' distro so it seems a bit odd to whinge about it being purist rather than using something more suitable for your needs.
...or smelly long haired bearded Unix freaks doing it.
I object strongly to this. I don't have a beard.
Show me a piece of hardware that doesn't work on Windows, and it's some obscure thing that once had a Windows driver but the producer stopped making drivers for years ago.
My Canon CanoScan 650U flatbed scanner is about 6 years old and probably good for another 20 given how much I use it. Not supported now or (presumably) ever in Vista. Supported perfectly (and probably indefinitely) in Linux.
I wouldn't rate this as obscure, and it's not one of those things that you might as well replace because the latest models are so much cheaper and better.
if you consider the pace of technological change, that could be only a decade away, when the concept of "internet search" is antiquated.
I'd stick my neck out and say the *concept* of 'Internet Search' will never be antiquated. As long as there are various forms of information 'out there' on the Internet or its successor networks, this information will need to be indexed and classified and queriable/searchable in various ways. And the thing doing that job will be some sort of 'search engine' even if it is also much more than that as well - you will still want to be able to make queries like 'list all steam railways in the UK' and get a straightforward answer (as you can with google today).
when Linux becomes too popular and if it becomes the target of malware like windows is I will move to something else, maybe some flavor of BSD or Solaris...
The important thing is that Linux cannot and will not "become like Windows" because the whole development process automatically leads to multiple versions composed of different combinations of individual software packages compiled with different options, and makes it much more difficult to target large numbers of systems with (say) a single malware binary. It's like the difference between pedigree cats (look very pretty but can have serious inbreeding problems) and 'moggies' (who are the product of random breeding but are much more robust).
That doesn't help the situation. If windows goes away, the problem with just migrate to Linux.
Linux, by its very nature allows and encourages diversity - the structure of the FOSS community means that there will always be various distros and if any particular distro gets overwhelmed by security problems then it's not just possible but easy to switch to a new distro.
If you aren't happy with SUSE's direction, you can go to RHEL and vice versa without creating a lot of fuss.
This is one of the real plusses of the FOSS environment. I've gone from RH9 to FC2/4/6/7 and then switched to Ubuntu without much disruption; when Fedora just didn't work out for me on my new PC (Fedora 7 wouldn't recognize my network card;Fedora 8 had a buggy sound setup with pulseaudio), I just switched to Ubuntu (gutsy/7.10) and it worked just fine. If MS's versions of windows doesn't work for you, there's no alternative except buying different hardware.
since the 8.04 folder of the gobuntu download page it's empty.
If you look in http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/daily/ you will see daily builds of 8.04 up to 21st April 2008, so I would confidently predict there will be a final release of Gobuntu appearing within days.