Personally, I think a court ruling that I cannot distribute the code (for example, my offices and actions are frozen by the court during a federal investigation) would superceed the lowly GPL in that case
Yes, but the GPL accounts for this. Go read the rest of clause 7:
If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
SCO has only sued people it has done business with in the past.
And there you have it.
Not sure it's relevant, but I used to work closely with a supplier who's a 100% VMS/Windows shop. And even their engineers reckon SCO is making a huge mistake, making more enemies than friends.
It's quite possibly more cost-effective to modify a BSD kernel than to license QNX.
Tell me, how much does it cost in lost business, professional indemnity insurance, legal fees and PR if (when?) an operating system chosen purely on grounds of cost causes someone to die?
Not a troll! I also am a Linux zealot. But surely, if Windows is chosen, at least Windows Embedded? Without any of the SMB or scripting hosts would be a good start...
I upgraded my Dell Inspiron 5150 from Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10.
This is something I wouldn't expect someone who was inexperienced with Linux to know, but a couple of years ago, many Linux distributions (and Mandrake was certainly one of them) were appallingly unreliable when you chose the "Upgrade" option of the install. Usually, you'd be better off backing up/home and/usr/local and reloading from scratch.
It is disappointing to see that nothing much has changed there.
In a business, chances are that most desktop computers would be running identical (or at least very similar) software configurations, reasonably similar hardware configurations and any major changes would be carefully managed by a team of experienced people who have the time to test everything thoroughly. And users wouldn't be updating software themselves. In such cases, Linux is probably more-or-less desktop ready - indeed, my employer's been using it for about 2 or 3 years now on the desktop.
For home users who don't want to go through all that, it's probably not ideal. Things can go wrong rather horribly. Unfortunately, this has been true for almost every operating system on the PC for many years.
As a user of Mandrake products all the way from 8.0 to 10, please bear in mind that, like many distro betas, Mandrake's aren't always terribly reliable.
Don't be too disappointed if the shiny new beta has issues which make it a non-starter for you.
"No Ports Open" simply means that nothing's listening on those ports. It doesn't mean there's some voodoo magic which keeps them closed. If you want that, it implies you want something at a TCP/IP level in the host OS preventing anything from getting to user level programs. I'd call that a firewall.
The daemons listening on localhost are configured to. Users don't usually configure trojans.
It's not WinCE, it's "Windows PocketPC Edition" : ie. the slightly newer version on all the managers iPaqs.
It "only works on ARM devices". Well, seeing as that's 80-90% of the PDA market and Microsoft don't actually develop Windows Pocket for anything other than the ARM processor, that's a non-issue.
I'm probably not the best person to tell you, since the thing which caused me to drop Windows was a job in which I administered 120 9x machines. But, here goes...
Speaking as a techie, the thing which is good about Linux is that if something goes wrong (and it will - those who tell you it won't are either lying or inexperienced) the error messages tend to be more useful, as do the error logs.
You can usually communicate directly with someone fairly closely involved in developing whatever software/driver is broken. You're not stuck with Microsoft's "support", and I find that the signal/noise ratio in mailing lists tends to be significantly higher. Basically, you don't generally have a bunch of MCSE monkeys telling you what the problem is and getting it spectacularly (and obviously) wrong.
Programs tend to be relatively small and self-contained - an obscure bug with a particular package in userland won't usually affect much else in the system (unlike Internet Explorer).
The developers are generally far more open & honest about bugs. You're more likely to hear "Oh, that's new. Looks like a bug..." from an open source developer than from a Microsoftie.
I can sleep at night knowing that not a single byte of software on my computer is pirated.
It may be that none of these are convincing reasons to switch. Fine, then don't. The best operating system is the one that does what you want it to. (Hear that sound? That's my karma evaporating)
It may be that you find these things sufficiently interesting to take another look. Great. If there's a Linux user group in your area, get to know them. They will be able to help if (when) you encounter trouble, and you can return the favour by helping the next new person to send an email saying "Hi..."
There's a simple answer to not having a floppy drive:
1. Get an image of a Win98 emergency repair disk (the one which includes CD-ROM drivers). These can sometimes be found online, or ask a friend. 2. Prepare a CD containing the BIOS update program, the new BIOS and a copy of the old BIOS. 3. Use the image of the win98 floppy as an El-Torito boot image on your CD. 4. Burn it, and voila! Instant DOS boot disk which doesn't require a floppy drive.
There are circumstances in which it is an emergency, and it is necessary to break the law in order to save human life, or reduce the chance of an accident.
This may involve parking illegally near a hospital or doctor's surgery or speeding to avoid causing an accident.
A human police officer can use their discretion regarding prosecution. A speed camera cannot, but at least you've got some photographic evidence to show to a human judge.
A chip embedded in the dashboard offers neither of these safeguards. THIS is the fear.
It's been ages since I've seen a car towed from around Broadmead for instance; it just doesn't seem to happen any more.
I'll tell you why that is. They're going after the richer pickings in the districts on the edge of the town centre. Where there are plenty of yellow lines but people are perhaps less careful then than they are in the city centre.
I live about 10 minutes walk away, I've seen the tow truck show up at 8:30PM and tow someone who was just on the double-yellows.
Note for non-UK'ers - areas where it is illegal to park on the road are usually shown by yellow lines (single or double, depending on what time of day you may park IIRC) painted on the edge of the road.
It's better than that. AFAIK, there is no long-term study regarding the uniqueness of fingerprints when you happen to be using a database containing millions of records.
The fingerprints of a known criminal in the system don't need to be identical to yours, they just need to be close enough to fool a machine and a human. And both machines and human fingerprint experts have been known to make mistakes, giving both false-positive and false-negative matches.
When you have millions of fingerprints to choose from? More likely to be one that matches.....
I live in Bristol as well. Note that they include "illegal parking" in the list of offences.
As any Slashdot reader who's spent any length of time in Bristol (UK) will know, the local traffic wardens are vicious. I've seen people who weren't causing an obstruction towed away at 7:30AM on a Sunday. They've towed cars away while the owner was watching - even in cases where the owner was a woman with a young child. Once the wheels leave the ground, the car is towed - even if you show up to protest.
Oh yes, and they don't always check that the vehicle is actually parked illegally. There are (anecdotal) cases of legally parked cars being towed away.
And now cars will automatically report when they're illegally parked? Ouch.
Play fair. The article discusses Win2K and XP. RedHat 7.2 is a few years older than XP, and predates RedHat deciding not to enable everything by default.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think a court ruling that I cannot distribute the code (for example, my offices and actions are frozen by the court during a federal investigation) would superceed the lowly GPL in that case
Yes, but the GPL accounts for this. Go read the rest of clause 7:
If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
SCO has only sued people it has done business with in the past.
And there you have it.
Not sure it's relevant, but I used to work closely with a supplier who's a 100% VMS/Windows shop. And even their engineers reckon SCO is making a huge mistake, making more enemies than friends.
Dammit, wish I still had mod points. And hadn't contributed to the discussion.
the Microsoft-zombie will fight on until someone proverbially shoots it in the head
Don't you have to bury zombies at a crossroads with a stake through their hearts?
Otherwise all you're doing is cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Me neither. I'm told that such things don't exist in things like aviation or military, I would hope that something similar appears in medicine.
Even if you can't be sued, you've still got the lost business and PR disaster.
As various other commentators have already pointed out, the source of infection isn't always the Big Bad Internet. Sometimes it's engineers laptops...
It's quite possibly more cost-effective to modify a BSD kernel than to license QNX.
Tell me, how much does it cost in lost business, professional indemnity insurance, legal fees and PR if (when?) an operating system chosen purely on grounds of cost causes someone to die?
Not a troll! I also am a Linux zealot. But surely, if Windows is chosen, at least Windows Embedded? Without any of the SMB or scripting hosts would be a good start...
I upgraded my Dell Inspiron 5150 from Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10.
/home and /usr/local and reloading from scratch.
This is something I wouldn't expect someone who was inexperienced with Linux to know, but a couple of years ago, many Linux distributions (and Mandrake was certainly one of them) were appallingly unreliable when you chose the "Upgrade" option of the install. Usually, you'd be better off backing up
It is disappointing to see that nothing much has changed there.
In a business, chances are that most desktop computers would be running identical (or at least very similar) software configurations, reasonably similar hardware configurations and any major changes would be carefully managed by a team of experienced people who have the time to test everything thoroughly. And users wouldn't be updating software themselves. In such cases, Linux is probably more-or-less desktop ready - indeed, my employer's been using it for about 2 or 3 years now on the desktop.
For home users who don't want to go through all that, it's probably not ideal. Things can go wrong rather horribly. Unfortunately, this has been true for almost every operating system on the PC for many years.
The one which does what you want it to.
As a user of Mandrake products all the way from 8.0 to 10, please bear in mind that, like many distro betas, Mandrake's aren't always terribly reliable.
Don't be too disappointed if the shiny new beta has issues which make it a non-starter for you.
"No Ports Open" simply means that nothing's listening on those ports. It doesn't mean there's some voodoo magic which keeps them closed. If you want that, it implies you want something at a TCP/IP level in the host OS preventing anything from getting to user level programs. I'd call that a firewall.
The daemons listening on localhost are configured to. Users don't usually configure trojans.
It's not WinCE, it's "Windows PocketPC Edition" : ie. the slightly newer version on all the managers iPaqs.
It "only works on ARM devices". Well, seeing as that's 80-90% of the PDA market and Microsoft don't actually develop Windows Pocket for anything other than the ARM processor, that's a non-issue.
And Palm have been losing market share to mobile Windows devices for some years now.
So, in answer to your question, I'd say we learn damn-all.
sorry, meant "inadvertantly found a solution, a cure to all ills".... could have worded that better.
There is a BIG difference between patenting a drug that cures a disease, and patenting the disease itself.
FFFish, I think you may have inadvertantly hit the nail on the head there.
Now, because we have patents on diseases, we can sue the disease itself for daring to rear its ugly head without first licensing the relevant patents!
(Or, more likely, sue the patients for catching a patented disease....)
I'm probably not the best person to tell you, since the thing which caused me to drop Windows was a job in which I administered 120 9x machines. But, here goes...
Speaking as a techie, the thing which is good about Linux is that if something goes wrong (and it will - those who tell you it won't are either lying or inexperienced) the error messages tend to be more useful, as do the error logs.
You can usually communicate directly with someone fairly closely involved in developing whatever software/driver is broken. You're not stuck with Microsoft's "support", and I find that the signal/noise ratio in mailing lists tends to be significantly higher. Basically, you don't generally have a bunch of MCSE monkeys telling you what the problem is and getting it spectacularly (and obviously) wrong.
Programs tend to be relatively small and self-contained - an obscure bug with a particular package in userland won't usually affect much else in the system (unlike Internet Explorer).
The developers are generally far more open & honest about bugs. You're more likely to hear "Oh, that's new. Looks like a bug..." from an open source developer than from a Microsoftie.
I can sleep at night knowing that not a single byte of software on my computer is pirated.
It may be that none of these are convincing reasons to switch. Fine, then don't. The best operating system is the one that does what you want it to. (Hear that sound? That's my karma evaporating)
It may be that you find these things sufficiently interesting to take another look. Great. If there's a Linux user group in your area, get to know them. They will be able to help if (when) you encounter trouble, and you can return the favour by helping the next new person to send an email saying "Hi..."
There's a simple answer to not having a floppy drive:
1. Get an image of a Win98 emergency repair disk (the one which includes CD-ROM drivers). These can sometimes be found online, or ask a friend.
2. Prepare a CD containing the BIOS update program, the new BIOS and a copy of the old BIOS.
3. Use the image of the win98 floppy as an El-Torito boot image on your CD.
4. Burn it, and voila! Instant DOS boot disk which doesn't require a floppy drive.
If the clients knew what they wanted at the begining...
Isn't this what Systems Analysts are supposed to do?
Americans are going "We Need better education!" And they will wright...
Repeat after me:
And they will write
Not sure if you're trolling or not but....
There are circumstances in which it is an emergency, and it is necessary to break the law in order to save human life, or reduce the chance of an accident.
This may involve parking illegally near a hospital or doctor's surgery or speeding to avoid causing an accident.
A human police officer can use their discretion regarding prosecution. A speed camera cannot, but at least you've got some photographic evidence to show to a human judge.
A chip embedded in the dashboard offers neither of these safeguards. THIS is the fear.
It's been ages since I've seen a car towed from around Broadmead for instance; it just doesn't seem to happen any more.
I'll tell you why that is. They're going after the richer pickings in the districts on the edge of the town centre. Where there are plenty of yellow lines but people are perhaps less careful then than they are in the city centre.
I live about 10 minutes walk away, I've seen the tow truck show up at 8:30PM and tow someone who was just on the double-yellows.
Note for non-UK'ers - areas where it is illegal to park on the road are usually shown by yellow lines (single or double, depending on what time of day you may park IIRC) painted on the edge of the road.
It's better than that. AFAIK, there is no long-term study regarding the uniqueness of fingerprints when you happen to be using a database containing millions of records.
The fingerprints of a known criminal in the system don't need to be identical to yours, they just need to be close enough to fool a machine and a human. And both machines and human fingerprint experts have been known to make mistakes, giving both false-positive and false-negative matches.
When you have millions of fingerprints to choose from? More likely to be one that matches.....
Also in the area I live in (Bristol)
I live in Bristol as well. Note that they include "illegal parking" in the list of offences.
As any Slashdot reader who's spent any length of time in Bristol (UK) will know, the local traffic wardens are vicious. I've seen people who weren't causing an obstruction towed away at 7:30AM on a Sunday. They've towed cars away while the owner was watching - even in cases where the owner was a woman with a young child. Once the wheels leave the ground, the car is towed - even if you show up to protest.
Oh yes, and they don't always check that the vehicle is actually parked illegally. There are (anecdotal) cases of legally parked cars being towed away.
And now cars will automatically report when they're illegally parked? Ouch.
Redhat 7.2
Play fair. The article discusses Win2K and XP. RedHat 7.2 is a few years older than XP, and predates RedHat deciding not to enable everything by default.