yes the victim can not choose not to press charges.
"Press charges" is not the same thing as actually prosecuting the case.
AFAIK (IANAL and other DETLAs) here in the UK if (e.g.) you punched me in the face I could be magnanimous and withdraw the charges in which case the police would probably (but not necessarily) drop the case. However, I wanted you to rot in jail for it, and pressed the issue it would still be up to (in the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service) to decide if it was appropriate to proceed with the criminal case. If they decide to drop the charges due to (e.g.) lack of evidence then I'm SOL (I could always bring a civil suit, but unless you give the judge the bird you won't go to jail for that).
If convicted, she could be sentenced to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. The police say they lack discretion because Regal Cinemas chose to prosecute
Please educate me - in the land of the free, does the "victim" really get the final say as to whether to actually prosecute a criminal charge against an individual (as opposed to the discretion to press charges or not, and/or bring a civil case)?
This year in the Netherlands, the following figures were published by the department of finance, for the number of income tax forms returned electronically.
I don't know the situation in the Netherlands, but in the UK millions of ordinary employees who have tax deducted at source, don't earn enough to pay higher rates of tax or have other sources of income don't need to file a tax return - in which case that would hardly be an unbiassed sample. For starters, that would preferentially select a lot of (e.g.) self employed people who need accountancy software (and, conceivably, dual-boot or use virtualization software come tax return time) - which is one area in which Mac and Linux are poorly served.
Come to think of it - how many of those forms are submitted by accountants on behalf of clients? You'd expect PCs to rule in accountancy officies...
In 1980, if MegaCorp scammed an extra $10 from 1 million of its customers
...then, hopefully, they would face a criminal prosecution for fraud. Last time I looked, you couldn't put "I reserve the right to defraud you" into a contract. The civil courts make lousy policemen and should be used to settle disputes, not punish crimes.
Arbitration necessarily precludes class-action lawsuits, which are the only way for a group of individual, damaged small parties to seek recompense against a large offender, such as a large public corporation.
...apart from (a) taking their business elsewhere, (b) stirring up a lot of bad publicity or (c) where appropriate, complaining to the authorities.
Problem is, MegaCorps get sued all the time - they have the legal staff to deal with it and the capital to pay settlements as soon as it looks like they're likely to lose. (a) and (b) are the only way to really hurt them.
A litigious society is one which hands a huge advantage to the big fishes with their full-time legal departments.
There will be certain minimum fixed costs in staff training for pre- and post- sales support support, localising manuals and packaging, having the committee meeting about exactly how much you're gonna gouge uk buyers this time, etc. which you will need to shift a certain number of boxes to justify.
10% of the market in the UK is far fewer boxen than 10% of the market in the USA (not sure what market Signapore is covering but it could be large) - so a viable proposition in the USA might not be viable in the UK.
Secondly - the Linux market may be more tech savvy and less inclined to buy from a big player such as Dell or Acer. Not every PC supplier forces you to buy Windows.
Thirdly, lots of us would like to dump windows but know that sooner or later we're going to need it (if only inside a VM). By far the cheapest (legal) way to get Windows is to get it bundled with a machine - a "full" version costs 3x as much (and bear in mind that, in the UK, we're already being reamed for Windows at £1 = $1). It doesn't make a lot of sense not to get Windows with a new machine (especially if the supplier's deal with MS means that MS gets paid either way).
It make even be that the UK is more MS-centric than other areas, because Apple priced themselves out of the market - most importantly education - for most of the 80s and 90s (the 'ol $1=£1 trick again). The other alternative platforms (there were some good ones, but that's not important right now) occupied Apple's ecological niche, but eventually failed for one reason or another. Hence, govenment, education and big business are used to assuming a MS monoculture.
And what is "biased" about criticizing the administration for imprisonment without due process, for violating privacy rights, for funneling billions to their buddies in industry without any oversight or review, for torture, and for lying in order to get us into a war?
Why does everybody assume that "biassed" means the same as "wrong"? "Bias" is a flaw in an argument which, in itself, proves nothing about the issue.
You can argue coherently, citing evidence, taking time to rebutt your opponents arguments and evidence, or even conceding a few points (important issues are rarely simple). That way you can change people's minds.
Or, you can cherry-pick evidence, assume conspiracy over cock-up, use hyperbole, and dispose of contrary articles by ridicule and name-calling - in which case, at best, anybody still open minded on the subject will ignore you and at worst you'll hand all sorts of ammunition to your opponents.
Don't tolerate bias just because you agree with the conclusion.
The case involved a lawsuit against Dell Computer, which refused to sell hundreds of mistakenly priced computers purchased on their website.
Maybe we aren't crying salty tears for Dell, but this sounds like exactly the sort of silly, greedy, "protect my constitutional right to get something for nothing" lawsuit that these arbitration clauses are intended to head off. Its not as if Dell are trying to force these customers to complete the purchase at full price, is it? If you are forced into arbitration because BigCorp have come round and claimed your first born (in accordance with para. 796, subsection y of the invisible terms of service) then save some of the blame for these guys (this is assuming, of course, that the arbiter actually turns out to be the BigCorp CEOs brother in law, and doesn't actually help you).
Before citing "bait and switch" and "fair competition", think of the smaller traders who would be harmed by simply having to defend against a bogus class action because they missed out a zero on their web shop, some bozo posted the to slashdot and 30 minutes later they had "sold" ten thousand $1000 laptops for $100 each.
I don't kow what happens in the US/Canada, but in the UK we have trading standards authorities who could investigate and prosecute traders in the event of a real "bait and switch" scam rather than leaving it to vigilante lawyers. Not saying they're efficient mind (too busy burning counterfieters at the stake to protect the right of brand name owners to get $50 for a $5 shirt with their logo) but the principle is sound.
If BBC staff were held to the same interest declaring standards as MPs, that couldn't have happened.
[narrowly avoids tea/keyboard accident]
I don't work for the BBC. Are you an MP by any chance? If so, what's the going rate for a Peerage nowadays?
The trouble is we're so seduced by images. The phrase "the camera never lies" must be the most inaccurate aphorism in history and should be expunged from the language - the camera always lies and always has done. It is in the nature of photographers, cameramen and film editors to re-arrange time and space to tell a story - if they didn't do that they wouldn't be able to do their job. The only possible solutions are:
To ensure that all future events of political or historical significance take less than 40 seconds, occur within the field of view of a single, fixed camera and that only one person talks at a time, or
for the audience to become more critical and never to rely on a single source.
So, we have a media that routinely and uncritically presents junk science as fact, lousy interviewers that ask politicians stupid "when did you stop beating your wife" questions and always pick the subjects that will have the loudest rows over those that might engage in some sort of useful debate... and nobody says anything, but splice two 10-second video clips of the Queen in the wrong order and bingo! Even you decided to pick up on a 20-year old controversy based around one short film clip rather than the Panorama debacle (well, it would have been a debacle if it had made it on to the "news agenda").
When the dust clears, the BBC and other broadcasters will doubtless have some shiny new lip-service guidelines on editing footage and using phone-ins, which will fail, because whichever way you turn it editing is misrepresenting reality and using premium-rate phone-ins does create a conflict of interest for producers.
Meanwhile, the BBC may be a million miles from perfect, but its better than Murdochvision - so if you want to knock it, knock it for something that matters today.
Rory Bremner sending up politicians is clearly satire. Modified footage of actual parliamentary sessions is misrepresentation.
ISTR that Bremner often uses modified footage of actual parliamentary sessions in his satire... Any editing could potentally be characterised as "modification" if the "victim" didn't like the result.
Over here in the UK we have been finding out just how much our national broadcaster has been lying to us. In particular, how during the miners' strike in the 1980s the order of footage was reversed to suggest that miners had attacked police, when the exact opposite was the case (the police baton charged a picket line.)
Not sure where the miners strike comes in to the current kerfuffle: there has been a recent storm-in-a-teacup about a slightly misleading trailer for a documentary that purported to show the Queen throwing a hissy fit. There has also been the startling revelation that competitions using premium rate phone lines exploit the gullible and vulnerable (NB: the independent broadcasters have been caught red-handed bending the rules too).
Call me cynical - but the shocker for me is not the revelations about the deceptive practices of the broadcast media, but how many people (including media and politicians, not just the blokes down the pub) are acting all surprised about it! People should get their heads around the fact that mass-media journalism is about telling a story - and any resemblance between that story and the truth is a happy coincidence.
I'm pretty sure that the one thing the BBC are not is party politically biased - they seem to attract equal flack from all sides of the political spectrum. While they were (allegedly) manipulating that footage of the miners to show a pro-government message, they were also (e.g.) doing a pretty good job of evading the govrenment's attempts to censor the IRA. Ask a Thatcherite what they think of the BBC and you'll almost certainly hear terms like "liberal elite", "political correctness" and "left wing bias". The BBC journalists do like nailing political scalps to the mantlepiece, but I see no clear preference for red scalps over blue ones.
The trouble is with bias is that you tend to ignore it when the story you hear matches your own beliefs. Also, bear in mind that the current "BBC on the ropes" story is one that many elements of the UK media - including the Murdoch-owned press - are very keen to believe. The real disappointment with the BBC is that while the commercial outfits have an excuse for chasing the lowest common denominator, the BBC could be so much better.
(As for the miners strike - you have a bunch of angry/scared miners on one side, a bunch of angry/scared police on the other side. Both groups would have included a handful of testosterone poisoning victims angling for a fight. Any ensuing violence was the joint responsibility of the two egomaniacs exploiting these groups for their own political ends. A couple of decades down the line, with the political map rewritten anyway, we should be worrying about not allowing such a situation to happen again - but that's tricky and complicated and doesn't contain a good enough story. So we argue about who started the inevitable fight.)
DEC's systems were a large computer surrounded by dumb terminals.
Speaking as someone who got off the VAX/VMS sysadmin career path just in time...
ISTR DEC being comfortably ahead of the game with an X-Window based desktop. Anyway, the "large computer surrounded by dumb terminals" was, in theory, a pretty sensible solution for the institutions and corporates that used DEC. Maintain hundreds of individual OS installations across a large site and manage backups? Duh!?
There's obviously multiple reasons for DEC (and other medium-sized iron)'s demise - but one that is being missed is pure office politics. Responsibility for PCs initially fell to the networking/technicians group in a large IT department, while PCs were still a bit of a joke. As the importance of PCs grew, this became a massive opportunity for empire building and budget-growing, at the expense of the traditional overlords of the central system. I worked in two separate IT departments in the late 80s/early 90s where the arrival of PCs was causing a (fairly civilised) internal coup which saw PCs winning for largely political reasons - despite all the practical support problems they caused. As someone working on the VAX/Unix side but mainly interested in the PC side (although MS/IBM PCs wouldn't have been my first choice) it was quite hard to come out from behind the orange wall.
Possibly DECs big disadvantage was that VAX/VMS stuff was all a bit monolithic and didn't play well with PCs and Unix. Apart from DECNet and all that, using a VMS application on anything other than a VTx00 terminal was always a pain, VMS had no such thing as a "plain text" file and many apps wouldn't read files generated by (say) the standard C library. (Although VAX Pascal was quite a nice language when you realised you could use the C library with it...:-) ) I remember the VMS version of Ingres reducing a Vax cluster to its knees and requiring special "tuning" of the Vax to cope.
Getting into IBM compatible PCs wouldn't have changed things in the long run - VMS would still have died and at best they'd have become just another PC manufacturer. They'd have had to get a DEC personal computer platform with orange manuals established as a standard.
And the recipient who doesn't have Internet access is supposed to use the URL how?
Simply pop into a cybercafe - they'll need to go into town anyway to return their Skype VOIP phone now that they've found out what the "I" in "VOIP" stands for...:-)
Meanwhile, what if a recipient doesn't have mains electricity? Obviously, the distributor should provide a portable generator along with the 200 5.25" floppy discs (if the recipient didn't have a CD-ROM) and an armed escort (the recipient's country doesn't have a secure postal system) with diplomatic immunity (the recipients country's goverment regards all computer discs as potential subversive literature). One hopes that GPLv3 has fixed this (in between Quixotic attempts to save the world from DRM and Patents).
Seriously - when GPLv2 was written, internet access (at least, fast, always-on internet access) was only available to a lucky few and this argument held water. These days its available to everyb..., well, ok, a vastly larger proportion of the lucky few with access to computers.
...that Windows XP and Mac OS X are actually very good desktops in terms of ease of use by non-technie users. A lot of research, development and testing has gone into achieving that. Although your average/.er could come up with 100 technical, security-related and ideological faults in Windows - and very valid issues they might be - "difficult to use for everyday tasks" doesn't really feature.
Linux desktops give the impression that the designers know what a good desktop "looks like" but don't really "get" how it works.
Couple of examples typical of many distributions:
Menu structure - the system preferences stuff is scattered around several sub-menus - as a fairly tech-savvy person I can see that there is some logic to this, depending on whether settings are per-user, system-wide or related to the look & feel of the chosen desktop (gnome/kde/etc). This is lost on lusers - and on OSX/Windows they can find everything under "Control Panel" or "System Preferences".
Terminology - use generic names for options/applications, not the quirky and witty names starting with "g", "k" or ending ".org"! Windows can get away with "Word", "Excel", "Outlook", "Photoshop" etc. because they are household names, but "Openoffice.org calc", "Evolution", "Synaptic package manager", "k3b" are just greek to users. Have a control panel which maps "Word Processor", "Mail" etc. to your applications of choice. Most users don't even want to know that they're using the Gnome desktop...
Kill the "Just Doesn't Work For Anybody Except the Author Ware" - and recognise the work-around of "sudo apt-get -polarity-of-neutron-flow=reverse | forward sensor array" is a hurdle to some users... (I'd give an example of this but it would be unfair without half a day's research to see if the issue was fixed) - however, the inability of most distros' "browse network" tools to connect to shares on a windows PC that do anything unreasonable like, say, require a password is one candidate - of course, real men just edit/etc/fstab.
How about dual head support that works properly? I.e. the way Windows and Mac do it, with a "master" and a "slave" screen that you can pretty much plug&play - not the Linux choice of (a) two independent desktops which can't interact or (b) one big desktop with all the menu bars etc. and any new windows stretching across both (with dialogues popping up right on the join). P.S. - this isn't a specialist requirement - lots of lusers where I work have laptops + a big screen and/or use data projectors regularly.
Dump the shovelware - although to be fair Ubuntu has made some progress in terms of not installing five alternate versions of the kitchen sink by default and having a two-tier package manager. However, I've yet to find something that, by default, just installs a basic, working desktop (as opposed to a choice between a complete "office", "workstation" or "development" system or a minimal shell-only install). Choose one of each common application type, make sure they install flawlessly, appear somewhere sensible on the menu/desktop, have help files in the same place as everything else and (after installation) pop up a document to tell you where they are and what to do next... Its still Linux under the hood, so all the choice and diversity a techie might want is just a tarball and a./configure away.
Of course - some problems are unavoidable, like jumping through hoops to install patent-encumbered codecs or non-free drivers. Ubuntu has probably gone about as far as they can to make this easy without compromising their legality or principles - but then you find that to get RhythmBox to connect to your iTunes share you have to go edit a.rc file...
Disclaimer - lots of people have put a lot of work into linux for free, and I really don't want to insult them, or dismiss the vast progress that has already been made. However, if Linux i
my view is that the distro kernel is solely there for bootstrapping the system until you can build a custom kernel to match your hardware and your needs.
Hmmm. I wonder why adoption of Linux by non technical users is so slow...:-)
Because that was how Microsoft/IBM were able to fool people into thinking the Amiga/ST were inferior to DOS boxen with amber displays.
Back then, the magic letters "IBM" created a reality distortion field (measuring about 10.5 kiloJobs*) around their mediocre warmed-over CP/M clone.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying (Commodore|Atari)" (try telling that to certain 80s/90s home computer magnates!) just doesn't have the same ring to it.
*10.5 kiloJobs (SI) = approx. 0.8 adjusted iPhone units (US) = 0.17 microPotters/m^3 (UK) - hype density measures are tricky as they are relative to the size/prominence of the relevant market. Back in 1979, 1 Job was a useful unit of reality distortion within the fledgling PC industry.
Err...no. No, the problem was that is was seen purely as a games machine by the mainstream, not as the decent workhorse it actually was. And at gaming, it lost to the Amiga hands down.
One annoyance was that you had to *choose* between a high res monochrome monitor (and I *mean* mono, not greyscale!) or a lower-res colour monitor running at TV frequency. Many games just wouldn't run on the mono monitor - so it was almost as if there was a "business" ST and a "home" ST. I guess you could have used a multisync monitor but they cost arm+leg back them. I juggled both - but I happened to already have a decent-ish colour monitor. (Soldiering that two million pin DIN video connector was a bugger!)
Plus, ST BASIC was *horrible* - the 6502 BBC Micro had a better and faster BASIC. (It was a different story if you used C, of course).
The Amiga was a much more sophisticated system (but rather more expensive ISTR) although the "skin deep" first impression was that the ST desktop looked slicker than the Amiga (and very, very much like a Mac).
Oh - and musicians went for the ST not because it had particualarly brilliant built-in sound, but because it had a MIDI interface as standard.
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
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Are you sure that this is the case? It would seem to me that they cannot change the text in the COPYING file, and thus the only thing they can do is distribute as "GPLv2 or later" themselves.
...Urgh... but how can I excercise my right to re-distribute under (quoth GPLv2) "(at your option) any later version" if I can't tell my recipuients that I have chosen a later version? I mean, most of the GPL is about what rights you grant to recipients! In any case, that doesn't apply if you create a derivative work by, er..., changing the "COPYING" file;-)
More seriously, you may well have a point about verbatim re-distribution but it wouldn't stop someone incorporating your "v2 or later" code in a genuine derivative work and re-distributing the result under "v3".
...but yeah, I guess it would take a lawyer to work out how "or later..." interacts with sections (1), (2) and (6) of GPLv2.
...and a second lawyer to contradict the first:-)
(Maybe the whole "or later" thing wasn't very well thought out - and hasn't been an issue until an "or later" candidate appeared)
Re:meanwhile, the evidence is missing
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Thats the libraries, not the compiler itself.
If you re-distribute (a future GPLv3 version of) the compiler (or, I think, the libraries in a reusable form rather than just a program linked to them) you will be agreeing to the GPLv3 (since nothing else gives you permission to re-distribute that compiler) although that doesn't mean the GPLv3 extends to the whole distro. This will affect (amongst others) the makers of Linux distributions and Apple (OSX comes with GCC).
Also, although the Linux kernel isn't linked with glibc as such, there are chunks of code in it acknowledged as "hand optimised from glibc" and suchlike - which probably doesn't come under the exemption. Now, obviously, this comes from the LGPL2 version of libc, so that is not an issue until and unless important patches to libc appear under GPL3 and the kernel devs want to incorporate them. Not a big deal - but if you want to find some way to apply GPLv3 retrospectively to Microsoft, be careful what you wish for!
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
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GCC 4.2.1 Released
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And you "missed the part" where developers who wrote their own code under the "V2 or later" clause can decide for themselves whether or not to move their own projects to "V3 or later" or whatever license they want.
...but there is still nothing they can do to stop others re-distributing the "v2 or later" version of the code under GPLv3. If they happen to agree with the substantial new restrictions the FSF has added, that's fine - but if they don't agree, if they feel that these restrictions break the FSF's assurance that future versions of GPL would be in the same spirit as v2, then that is just tough.
The idea that others could re-distribute your work provided they did not impose additional restrictions on the recipients is central to the GPL. FSF is effectively saying "its OK when we do it for the greater good" line.
Can FSF force everybody to use GPLv3 for future releases of their project? No. Are they in a position to create an uphill struggle for developers who want to stick to GPLv2? Yes.
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
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1. Linux distributors choosing to distribute GPLv3 binaries will be able to do so without changing what they're doing now.
Tell that to Novell.:-)
...but even Linux distributors who haven't drunk the MS Kool-aid will be faced with a "choice" between sticking with current versions of key products (with whatever bugs and vulnerabilities come to light), maintaining their own forks, or being bound by the terms of GPLv3.
2. You don't understand GPLv3 and think others might be confused too.
Darn right!
However, you missed the bit about all the developers who followed FSF's advice about the "or later" clause and now have no choice but to allow their work to be distributed under GPLv3.
None of this addresses the question: How does releasing GCC amount to shoveling the license down our throats?
Er, no, your "summary" just chose to exclude all the bits from the original that did address the question. However, in case you are havving difficlty with the concept of "metaphor" I fully concede that my post contained absolutely no evidence that any representative of the FSF has ever used a digging implement to compel any third party to physically ingest a software license.
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
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How does making a license freely available for software authors to use translate into "shoveling [sic] GPL3 down our throats"?
FSF/GNU hold the copyright to many crucial open source software projects (not least GCC, libc*) and will almost certainly migrate these to GPLv3. So even if the linux kernel and other individual projects stay with GPLv2 all Linux distributors will either have to fork the "GNU" part of GNU/Linux or be bound by the GPLv3 in respect of parts of their products (...the "mere aggregation" clause means that the GPLv3 doesn't have to extend to the whole distro, but you're still "distributing" the GPLv3 bits). The fact that FSF asks for copyright assignment means that they are free to switch - other complex projects that include third-party code licensed as "GPLv2 only" don't have that luxury.
FSF encouraged users of the GPLv2 to adopt the "or later..." clause - and it was included in the sample "boilerplate" wording in the "How to use the GPL" documentation. This means that a lot of authors have placed their trust in the FSF not to break the spirit of the GPL. The GPLv3 is more restrictive than v2 (the FSF makes no secret of this) so the practical upshot is that "downstream" recipients of your "GPLv2 or later" software can redistribute it under a more restrictive license - technically in breach of the spirit of GPL. While I don't think many authors intended that the "right to TiVOize" and the "right to sell dubious patent protection" should be among the freedoms that should be passed on, maybe the "right to redistribute this software without having to employ an IP lawyer to decipher the license for you" was kind of implied...
(* LibC is, of course, LGPL which is less "viral" than GPL - but I haven't seen much debate about v3 of LGPL...)
Didn't we decide this was a bad idea when MS did it?
No, I think we decided that it was a bad idea because MS was doing it - and was using it as an excuse for locking Windows users into IE and its capacity for "embracing and extending" web standards.
Actually, years before that we "decided" that web apps in general were a bad idea when Sun/Oracle touted their java-based thin client/Network Computer idea. I think that died, mainly, because the question was always "yes, but will it run Word for Windows and browse IE/Netscape only websites?"
Until the pyro people have put the magic smoke back into their server, its hard to even ask the right questions, but hopefully when they say "Firefox" they imply lots of standards-compliant goodness that left the applications portable across Firefox/Gecko, Webkit/KHTML or even (roll of thunder) Internet Explorer.
If anything, the Active Desktop idea was ahead of its time - back in 1995 you ran applications on your desktop, one of which was a networked hypertext reader called a "web browser" (even dynamic/data driven websites were very much "turn based") so it was far from clear why the two needed merging. In these days of AJAX and "Web 2.0" [Drops $2 into the industry buzzword swear box] the distinction between applications and web apps is blurring, and web-based technologies (Java, AJAX, Flash, DHTML) are becoming more attractive as (potentially OS-agnostic) application platforms.
One of the problems with the X Window system is that the central idea - network transparent GUI rendering - is past its sell-by date and only minimally usable with Gnome/KDE apps (I usually end up using xnest - at which point you might as well use a java VNC client in a browser...) - the cost difference between a client device smart enough to run an X server and a "thin client" capable of doing most of the GUI-related processing locally is too minimal.
These things take a few false starts to get going - I remember computer magazine front pages back in the 80s proclaiming that "The Year of Unix on the Desktop Has Arrived" - not to mention a Phillips brochure from about 1975 saying how we would have flat-screen TVs to hang on our wall like pictures Real Soon Now.
...as long as it had been treated as no more than a "kludge" that, by adding a few extra closing tags, double-quotes and other flourishes, let you write XML code that still worked in any well-behaved HTML renderer but could be parsed using XML tools (or, e.g. generated as output by XSL until common browsers get round to implementing FO, assuming it is possible to implement FO...). If you want to do proper semantic markup, just use pure XML with a CSS or XSL stylesheet and forget all the legacy rubish that HTML drags with it.
I don't suppose that W3C will break with tradition and produce a reference implementation of HTML5 so that (a) developers have a reference to compare with or (b) don't need to refer to the reference implementation, because the reference developers fed back the ambiguities and conflicts to the spec writers, who fixed the spec before it is cast in stone...?
RedHat and SUSE are specialised distros for customers who need entrerprise-grade (i.e. expensive) support.
Gentoo is a specialised distro for people who need/want everything compiled with the optimal settings for their specific hardware.
Debian is a specialised distro for (a) people who want a minimal/stable base installation without sacrificing gazillions of ready-made packages; (b) GPL purists; (c) people using minority architectures.
Haven't tried Slackware since 1996 - since its still around it obviously meets the needs of some user group
Ubuntu focusses on ease of use while trying to preserve FOSS ideology
Linspire etc. focus on windows "switchers" and take a more pragmatic approach to FOSS ideology than Ubuntu.
Fedora is the "free" bleeding edge sandbox for RedHat
Mandriva seems to focus on a slick desktop experience
Yeah, all this choice and flexibility is a terrible thing - especially since under the hood they're all using very similar concepts, applications, file formats, so even if you choose the wrong one to start with, switching is boringly trivial. Bring back one-size-fits-all...
Slashdot Mirror
"Press charges" is not the same thing as actually prosecuting the case.
AFAIK (IANAL and other DETLAs) here in the UK if (e.g.) you punched me in the face I could be magnanimous and withdraw the charges in which case the police would probably (but not necessarily) drop the case. However, I wanted you to rot in jail for it, and pressed the issue it would still be up to (in the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service) to decide if it was appropriate to proceed with the criminal case. If they decide to drop the charges due to (e.g.) lack of evidence then I'm SOL (I could always bring a civil suit, but unless you give the judge the bird you won't go to jail for that).
Please educate me - in the land of the free, does the "victim" really get the final say as to whether to actually prosecute a criminal charge against an individual (as opposed to the discretion to press charges or not, and/or bring a civil case)?
I don't know the situation in the Netherlands, but in the UK millions of ordinary employees who have tax deducted at source, don't earn enough to pay higher rates of tax or have other sources of income don't need to file a tax return - in which case that would hardly be an unbiassed sample. For starters, that would preferentially select a lot of (e.g.) self employed people who need accountancy software (and, conceivably, dual-boot or use virtualization software come tax return time) - which is one area in which Mac and Linux are poorly served.
Come to think of it - how many of those forms are submitted by accountants on behalf of clients? You'd expect PCs to rule in accountancy officies...
...then, hopefully, they would face a criminal prosecution for fraud. Last time I looked, you couldn't put "I reserve the right to defraud you" into a contract. The civil courts make lousy policemen and should be used to settle disputes, not punish crimes.
...apart from (a) taking their business elsewhere, (b) stirring up a lot of bad publicity or (c) where appropriate, complaining to the authorities.
Problem is, MegaCorps get sued all the time - they have the legal staff to deal with it and the capital to pay settlements as soon as it looks like they're likely to lose. (a) and (b) are the only way to really hurt them.
A litigious society is one which hands a huge advantage to the big fishes with their full-time legal departments.
Lets say that 10% of the market wants Linux...
There will be certain minimum fixed costs in staff training for pre- and post- sales support support, localising manuals and packaging, having the committee meeting about exactly how much you're gonna gouge uk buyers this time, etc. which you will need to shift a certain number of boxes to justify.
10% of the market in the UK is far fewer boxen than 10% of the market in the USA (not sure what market Signapore is covering but it could be large) - so a viable proposition in the USA might not be viable in the UK.
Secondly - the Linux market may be more tech savvy and less inclined to buy from a big player such as Dell or Acer. Not every PC supplier forces you to buy Windows.
Thirdly, lots of us would like to dump windows but know that sooner or later we're going to need it (if only inside a VM). By far the cheapest (legal) way to get Windows is to get it bundled with a machine - a "full" version costs 3x as much (and bear in mind that, in the UK, we're already being reamed for Windows at £1 = $1). It doesn't make a lot of sense not to get Windows with a new machine (especially if the supplier's deal with MS means that MS gets paid either way).
It make even be that the UK is more MS-centric than other areas, because Apple priced themselves out of the market - most importantly education - for most of the 80s and 90s (the 'ol $1=£1 trick again). The other alternative platforms (there were some good ones, but that's not important right now) occupied Apple's ecological niche, but eventually failed for one reason or another. Hence, govenment, education and big business are used to assuming a MS monoculture.
Why does everybody assume that "biassed" means the same as "wrong"? "Bias" is a flaw in an argument which, in itself, proves nothing about the issue.
You can argue coherently, citing evidence, taking time to rebutt your opponents arguments and evidence, or even conceding a few points (important issues are rarely simple). That way you can change people's minds.
Or, you can cherry-pick evidence, assume conspiracy over cock-up, use hyperbole, and dispose of contrary articles by ridicule and name-calling - in which case, at best, anybody still open minded on the subject will ignore you and at worst you'll hand all sorts of ammunition to your opponents.
Don't tolerate bias just because you agree with the conclusion.
Maybe we aren't crying salty tears for Dell, but this sounds like exactly the sort of silly, greedy, "protect my constitutional right to get something for nothing" lawsuit that these arbitration clauses are intended to head off. Its not as if Dell are trying to force these customers to complete the purchase at full price, is it? If you are forced into arbitration because BigCorp have come round and claimed your first born (in accordance with para. 796, subsection y of the invisible terms of service) then save some of the blame for these guys (this is assuming, of course, that the arbiter actually turns out to be the BigCorp CEOs brother in law, and doesn't actually help you).
Before citing "bait and switch" and "fair competition", think of the smaller traders who would be harmed by simply having to defend against a bogus class action because they missed out a zero on their web shop, some bozo posted the to slashdot and 30 minutes later they had "sold" ten thousand $1000 laptops for $100 each.
I don't kow what happens in the US/Canada, but in the UK we have trading standards authorities who could investigate and prosecute traders in the event of a real "bait and switch" scam rather than leaving it to vigilante lawyers. Not saying they're efficient mind (too busy burning counterfieters at the stake to protect the right of brand name owners to get $50 for a $5 shirt with their logo) but the principle is sound.
[narrowly avoids tea/keyboard accident]
I don't work for the BBC. Are you an MP by any chance? If so, what's the going rate for a Peerage nowadays?
The trouble is we're so seduced by images. The phrase "the camera never lies" must be the most inaccurate aphorism in history and should be expunged from the language - the camera always lies and always has done. It is in the nature of photographers, cameramen and film editors to re-arrange time and space to tell a story - if they didn't do that they wouldn't be able to do their job. The only possible solutions are:
So, we have a media that routinely and uncritically presents junk science as fact, lousy interviewers that ask politicians stupid "when did you stop beating your wife" questions and always pick the subjects that will have the loudest rows over those that might engage in some sort of useful debate... and nobody says anything, but splice two 10-second video clips of the Queen in the wrong order and bingo! Even you decided to pick up on a 20-year old controversy based around one short film clip rather than the Panorama debacle (well, it would have been a debacle if it had made it on to the "news agenda").
When the dust clears, the BBC and other broadcasters will doubtless have some shiny new lip-service guidelines on editing footage and using phone-ins, which will fail, because whichever way you turn it editing is misrepresenting reality and using premium-rate phone-ins does create a conflict of interest for producers.
Meanwhile, the BBC may be a million miles from perfect, but its better than Murdochvision - so if you want to knock it, knock it for something that matters today.
ISTR that Bremner often uses modified footage of actual parliamentary sessions in his satire... Any editing could potentally be characterised as "modification" if the "victim" didn't like the result.
Not sure where the miners strike comes in to the current kerfuffle: there has been a recent storm-in-a-teacup about a slightly misleading trailer for a documentary that purported to show the Queen throwing a hissy fit. There has also been the startling revelation that competitions using premium rate phone lines exploit the gullible and vulnerable (NB: the independent broadcasters have been caught red-handed bending the rules too).
Call me cynical - but the shocker for me is not the revelations about the deceptive practices of the broadcast media, but how many people (including media and politicians, not just the blokes down the pub) are acting all surprised about it! People should get their heads around the fact that mass-media journalism is about telling a story - and any resemblance between that story and the truth is a happy coincidence.
I'm pretty sure that the one thing the BBC are not is party politically biased - they seem to attract equal flack from all sides of the political spectrum. While they were (allegedly) manipulating that footage of the miners to show a pro-government message, they were also (e.g.) doing a pretty good job of evading the govrenment's attempts to censor the IRA. Ask a Thatcherite what they think of the BBC and you'll almost certainly hear terms like "liberal elite", "political correctness" and "left wing bias". The BBC journalists do like nailing political scalps to the mantlepiece, but I see no clear preference for red scalps over blue ones.
The trouble is with bias is that you tend to ignore it when the story you hear matches your own beliefs. Also, bear in mind that the current "BBC on the ropes" story is one that many elements of the UK media - including the Murdoch-owned press - are very keen to believe. The real disappointment with the BBC is that while the commercial outfits have an excuse for chasing the lowest common denominator, the BBC could be so much better.
(As for the miners strike - you have a bunch of angry/scared miners on one side, a bunch of angry/scared police on the other side. Both groups would have included a handful of testosterone poisoning victims angling for a fight. Any ensuing violence was the joint responsibility of the two egomaniacs exploiting these groups for their own political ends. A couple of decades down the line, with the political map rewritten anyway, we should be worrying about not allowing such a situation to happen again - but that's tricky and complicated and doesn't contain a good enough story. So we argue about who started the inevitable fight.)
Speaking as someone who got off the VAX/VMS sysadmin career path just in time...
ISTR DEC being comfortably ahead of the game with an X-Window based desktop. Anyway, the "large computer surrounded by dumb terminals" was, in theory, a pretty sensible solution for the institutions and corporates that used DEC. Maintain hundreds of individual OS installations across a large site and manage backups? Duh!?
There's obviously multiple reasons for DEC (and other medium-sized iron)'s demise - but one that is being missed is pure office politics. Responsibility for PCs initially fell to the networking/technicians group in a large IT department, while PCs were still a bit of a joke. As the importance of PCs grew, this became a massive opportunity for empire building and budget-growing, at the expense of the traditional overlords of the central system. I worked in two separate IT departments in the late 80s/early 90s where the arrival of PCs was causing a (fairly civilised) internal coup which saw PCs winning for largely political reasons - despite all the practical support problems they caused. As someone working on the VAX/Unix side but mainly interested in the PC side (although MS/IBM PCs wouldn't have been my first choice) it was quite hard to come out from behind the orange wall.
Possibly DECs big disadvantage was that VAX/VMS stuff was all a bit monolithic and didn't play well with PCs and Unix. Apart from DECNet and all that, using a VMS application on anything other than a VTx00 terminal was always a pain, VMS had no such thing as a "plain text" file and many apps wouldn't read files generated by (say) the standard C library. (Although VAX Pascal was quite a nice language when you realised you could use the C library with it... :-) ) I remember the VMS version of Ingres reducing a Vax cluster to its knees and requiring special "tuning" of the Vax to cope.
Getting into IBM compatible PCs wouldn't have changed things in the long run - VMS would still have died and at best they'd have become just another PC manufacturer. They'd have had to get a DEC personal computer platform with orange manuals established as a standard.
Simply pop into a cybercafe - they'll need to go into town anyway to return their Skype VOIP phone now that they've found out what the "I" in "VOIP" stands for... :-)
Meanwhile, what if a recipient doesn't have mains electricity? Obviously, the distributor should provide a portable generator along with the 200 5.25" floppy discs (if the recipient didn't have a CD-ROM) and an armed escort (the recipient's country doesn't have a secure postal system) with diplomatic immunity (the recipients country's goverment regards all computer discs as potential subversive literature). One hopes that GPLv3 has fixed this (in between Quixotic attempts to save the world from DRM and Patents).
Seriously - when GPLv2 was written, internet access (at least, fast, always-on internet access) was only available to a lucky few and this argument held water. These days its available to everyb..., well, ok, a vastly larger proportion of the lucky few with access to computers.
That's fine - I much prefer gErnel anyway... :-)
...that Windows XP and Mac OS X are actually very good desktops in terms of ease of use by non-technie users. A lot of research, development and testing has gone into achieving that. Although your average /.er could come up with 100 technical, security-related and ideological faults in Windows - and very valid issues they might be - "difficult to use for everyday tasks" doesn't really feature.
Linux desktops give the impression that the designers know what a good desktop "looks like" but don't really "get" how it works.
Couple of examples typical of many distributions:
Menu structure - the system preferences stuff is scattered around several sub-menus - as a fairly tech-savvy person I can see that there is some logic to this, depending on whether settings are per-user, system-wide or related to the look & feel of the chosen desktop (gnome/kde/etc). This is lost on lusers - and on OSX/Windows they can find everything under "Control Panel" or "System Preferences".
Terminology - use generic names for options/applications, not the quirky and witty names starting with "g", "k" or ending ".org"! Windows can get away with "Word", "Excel", "Outlook", "Photoshop" etc. because they are household names, but "Openoffice.org calc", "Evolution", "Synaptic package manager", "k3b" are just greek to users. Have a control panel which maps "Word Processor", "Mail" etc. to your applications of choice. Most users don't even want to know that they're using the Gnome desktop...
Kill the "Just Doesn't Work For Anybody Except the Author Ware" - and recognise the work-around of "sudo apt-get -polarity-of-neutron-flow=reverse | forward sensor array" is a hurdle to some users... (I'd give an example of this but it would be unfair without half a day's research to see if the issue was fixed) - however, the inability of most distros' "browse network" tools to connect to shares on a windows PC that do anything unreasonable like, say, require a password is one candidate - of course, real men just edit /etc/fstab.
How about dual head support that works properly? I.e. the way Windows and Mac do it, with a "master" and a "slave" screen that you can pretty much plug&play - not the Linux choice of (a) two independent desktops which can't interact or (b) one big desktop with all the menu bars etc. and any new windows stretching across both (with dialogues popping up right on the join). P.S. - this isn't a specialist requirement - lots of lusers where I work have laptops + a big screen and/or use data projectors regularly.
Dump the shovelware - although to be fair Ubuntu has made some progress in terms of not installing five alternate versions of the kitchen sink by default and having a two-tier package manager. However, I've yet to find something that, by default, just installs a basic, working desktop (as opposed to a choice between a complete "office", "workstation" or "development" system or a minimal shell-only install). Choose one of each common application type, make sure they install flawlessly, appear somewhere sensible on the menu/desktop, have help files in the same place as everything else and (after installation) pop up a document to tell you where they are and what to do next... Its still Linux under the hood, so all the choice and diversity a techie might want is just a tarball and a ./configure away.
Of course - some problems are unavoidable, like jumping through hoops to install patent-encumbered codecs or non-free drivers. Ubuntu has probably gone about as far as they can to make this easy without compromising their legality or principles - but then you find that to get RhythmBox to connect to your iTunes share you have to go edit a .rc file...
Disclaimer - lots of people have put a lot of work into linux for free, and I really don't want to insult them, or dismiss the vast progress that has already been made. However, if Linux i
Hmmm. I wonder why adoption of Linux by non technical users is so slow... :-)
...I mean, uptake of that amongst OSX users is going to be huge, so by the logic of TFA, windows is toast. Oh, wait...
(PS - hint to Apple - choose an OS name that people can spell unless you want it to be known as "leppard").
Back then, the magic letters "IBM" created a reality distortion field (measuring about 10.5 kiloJobs*) around their mediocre warmed-over CP/M clone.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying (Commodore|Atari)" (try telling that to certain 80s/90s home computer magnates!) just doesn't have the same ring to it.
*10.5 kiloJobs (SI) = approx. 0.8 adjusted iPhone units (US) = 0.17 microPotters/m^3 (UK) - hype density measures are tricky as they are relative to the size/prominence of the relevant market. Back in 1979, 1 Job was a useful unit of reality distortion within the fledgling PC industry.
One annoyance was that you had to *choose* between a high res monochrome monitor (and I *mean* mono, not greyscale!) or a lower-res colour monitor running at TV frequency. Many games just wouldn't run on the mono monitor - so it was almost as if there was a "business" ST and a "home" ST. I guess you could have used a multisync monitor but they cost arm+leg back them. I juggled both - but I happened to already have a decent-ish colour monitor. (Soldiering that two million pin DIN video connector was a bugger!)
Plus, ST BASIC was *horrible* - the 6502 BBC Micro had a better and faster BASIC. (It was a different story if you used C, of course).
The Amiga was a much more sophisticated system (but rather more expensive ISTR) although the "skin deep" first impression was that the ST desktop looked slicker than the Amiga (and very, very much like a Mac).
Oh - and musicians went for the ST not because it had particualarly brilliant built-in sound, but because it had a MIDI interface as standard.
...Urgh... but how can I excercise my right to re-distribute under (quoth GPLv2) "(at your option) any later version" if I can't tell my recipuients that I have chosen a later version? I mean, most of the GPL is about what rights you grant to recipients! In any case, that doesn't apply if you create a derivative work by, er..., changing the "COPYING" file ;-)
More seriously, you may well have a point about verbatim re-distribution but it wouldn't stop someone incorporating your "v2 or later" code in a genuine derivative work and re-distributing the result under "v3".
...but yeah, I guess it would take a lawyer to work out how "or later..." interacts with sections (1), (2) and (6) of GPLv2.
...and a second lawyer to contradict the first :-)
(Maybe the whole "or later" thing wasn't very well thought out - and hasn't been an issue until an "or later" candidate appeared)
Thats the libraries, not the compiler itself.
If you re-distribute (a future GPLv3 version of) the compiler (or, I think, the libraries in a reusable form rather than just a program linked to them) you will be agreeing to the GPLv3 (since nothing else gives you permission to re-distribute that compiler) although that doesn't mean the GPLv3 extends to the whole distro. This will affect (amongst others) the makers of Linux distributions and Apple (OSX comes with GCC).
Also, although the Linux kernel isn't linked with glibc as such, there are chunks of code in it acknowledged as "hand optimised from glibc" and suchlike - which probably doesn't come under the exemption. Now, obviously, this comes from the LGPL2 version of libc, so that is not an issue until and unless important patches to libc appear under GPL3 and the kernel devs want to incorporate them. Not a big deal - but if you want to find some way to apply GPLv3 retrospectively to Microsoft, be careful what you wish for!
...but there is still nothing they can do to stop others re-distributing the "v2 or later" version of the code under GPLv3. If they happen to agree with the substantial new restrictions the FSF has added, that's fine - but if they don't agree, if they feel that these restrictions break the FSF's assurance that future versions of GPL would be in the same spirit as v2, then that is just tough.
The idea that others could re-distribute your work provided they did not impose additional restrictions on the recipients is central to the GPL. FSF is effectively saying "its OK when we do it for the greater good" line.
Can FSF force everybody to use GPLv3 for future releases of their project? No. Are they in a position to create an uphill struggle for developers who want to stick to GPLv2? Yes.
Tell that to Novell. :-)
...but even Linux distributors who haven't drunk the MS Kool-aid will be faced with a "choice" between sticking with current versions of key products (with whatever bugs and vulnerabilities come to light), maintaining their own forks, or being bound by the terms of GPLv3.
Darn right!
However, you missed the bit about all the developers who followed FSF's advice about the "or later" clause and now have no choice but to allow their work to be distributed under GPLv3.
Er, no, your "summary" just chose to exclude all the bits from the original that did address the question. However, in case you are havving difficlty with the concept of "metaphor" I fully concede that my post contained absolutely no evidence that any representative of the FSF has ever used a digging implement to compel any third party to physically ingest a software license.
(* LibC is, of course, LGPL which is less "viral" than GPL - but I haven't seen much debate about v3 of LGPL...)
No, I think we decided that it was a bad idea because MS was doing it - and was using it as an excuse for locking Windows users into IE and its capacity for "embracing and extending" web standards.
Actually, years before that we "decided" that web apps in general were a bad idea when Sun/Oracle touted their java-based thin client/Network Computer idea. I think that died, mainly, because the question was always "yes, but will it run Word for Windows and browse IE/Netscape only websites?"
Until the pyro people have put the magic smoke back into their server, its hard to even ask the right questions, but hopefully when they say "Firefox" they imply lots of standards-compliant goodness that left the applications portable across Firefox/Gecko, Webkit/KHTML or even (roll of thunder) Internet Explorer.
If anything, the Active Desktop idea was ahead of its time - back in 1995 you ran applications on your desktop, one of which was a networked hypertext reader called a "web browser" (even dynamic/data driven websites were very much "turn based") so it was far from clear why the two needed merging. In these days of AJAX and "Web 2.0" [Drops $2 into the industry buzzword swear box] the distinction between applications and web apps is blurring, and web-based technologies (Java, AJAX, Flash, DHTML) are becoming more attractive as (potentially OS-agnostic) application platforms.
One of the problems with the X Window system is that the central idea - network transparent GUI rendering - is past its sell-by date and only minimally usable with Gnome/KDE apps (I usually end up using xnest - at which point you might as well use a java VNC client in a browser...) - the cost difference between a client device smart enough to run an X server and a "thin client" capable of doing most of the GUI-related processing locally is too minimal.
These things take a few false starts to get going - I remember computer magazine front pages back in the 80s proclaiming that "The Year of Unix on the Desktop Has Arrived" - not to mention a Phillips brochure from about 1975 saying how we would have flat-screen TVs to hang on our wall like pictures Real Soon Now.
...as long as it had been treated as no more than a "kludge" that, by adding a few extra closing tags, double-quotes and other flourishes, let you write XML code that still worked in any well-behaved HTML renderer but could be parsed using XML tools (or, e.g. generated as output by XSL until common browsers get round to implementing FO, assuming it is possible to implement FO...). If you want to do proper semantic markup, just use pure XML with a CSS or XSL stylesheet and forget all the legacy rubish that HTML drags with it.
I don't suppose that W3C will break with tradition and produce a reference implementation of HTML5 so that (a) developers have a reference to compare with or (b) don't need to refer to the reference implementation, because the reference developers fed back the ambiguities and conflicts to the spec writers, who fixed the spec before it is cast in stone...?
Didn't think so.
Yeah, all this choice and flexibility is a terrible thing - especially since under the hood they're all using very similar concepts, applications, file formats, so even if you choose the wrong one to start with, switching is boringly trivial. Bring back one-size-fits-all...