First he talks about google like the only thing they do (or are successful at) is "search" and then he goes on to talk about all the linux mobile phone platforms out there now as a "common cold" like people stopped working on them.
Openmoko only seems to be gaining momentum, sure they're not "in your face" but that hardly means they're going away either.
The thing that bothers me is the way he talks about developers as the people porting the gphone software to a hardware device. But there's two set's of developers in this mix and it may take alot of 0's to get out there, but when you look at the companies already in the alliance you can only guess that it will start up with alot of 0's. The second set of developers are the ones who'll develop applications to run ontop of the platform - and you can guarantee alot of the geeks here will be getting that sdk with the 12th rolls around.
One thing symbian should count itself lucky for however is that iPhone didnt come with an SDK. The guy seems to ignore the developers who are coding applications for the phone and not at the phone hardware.
But, one thing i think will work against google is the way phone developers are going to all have a similar platform which makes it hard for them to differentiate their offerings (even though its being licensed under the apache v2 license to avoid such problems).
I think the biggest error in judgment he makes though is talking about mobile phones like they aren't becoming computers - and lets face it they are and have been for quite some time. The "gsm/3g/cdma/etc" bit (or the hardware parts in general really) are just interfaces to be coded in. I think mr symbian is in for a bit of a shock - google are quite good at doing things like this (the right way), just like apple (who got it wrong - again). As for the gui that goes on top, there are sooo many example that can be built on its not funny and its well past time we got an open ones that look like they may gain a foothold and i personally hope that perhaps one day in the future openmoko and gphone/andriodev will end up merging in some way.
he mentions VMWare because equalogic + vmware have been working together for some time to make the equalogic solution with vmware perform exceptionally well.
And if you knew vmware esx, you'd also know that vmfs is a cluster filesystem (like ocfs2 and gfs2) where multiple machines *DO* access the block device at the same time (in a co-ordinated fashion).
And if you've never heard of a cluster file system before then perhaps you shouldn't be commenting on a storage product - or at least, perhaps you should do a small bit of googling before pushing out a comment like that...
I work for a company that sells these equalogic units (and install/train) and they are quite impressive.
I wont bang on about them, but they have a number of plus's which make them great for smaller companies and they scale quite remarkably well. They're pretty simple to manage and so forth (but you can get at the guts of them, they run a bsd variant).
One of the things i do appreciate about them is its 1 cost and you get everything they have to offer (on the software side anyways) and you dont have to get any golden screwdriver/license upgrades.
Performance wise in the bang for buck arena they are very competative though.
The biggest problem with selling them? iSCSI. Alot of people just dont seem to get iSCSI at all and write it off as a "less secure and slow" fibre channel option. We sell fibre channel products as well, and while fc has its advantages, they really aren't in the area of speed or latency (often thats true even when your not using a iSCSI hba).
But, as i said, i work for a reseller who stocks these and am ultimately going to be written off as biased (and yes we sell 3par, hds, sun and so forth as well).
"Nigeria has declared it will buy 500,000 gphones in the first batch but have decided to install WM6 over the top. Of course, they'll still pay for support from gphone".
The follow-up follow-up was something about Balmer, leaving the nigerian embassy) saying he had nothing to do with it while carrying a copy of Mandriva under his arm.
1. "waaaah, centos makes redhat RHEL more accessible" 2. "waaaah, redhat should do something about centos mmmkay?" 3. "waaaah, redhat is bad mmmkay??" 4. "waaaah, none of the other distro's have a chance to supplant rhel because centos is free".
And you wonder why redhat do nothing about centos? seriously??? I dont mean that because of his comments. But from a RHEL perspective everyone wins. RHEL get someone else to distribute a version of their OS that they dont have to support but comes with all the other bonus's of running RHEL. When a customer can afford it they move to RHEL for reasons that make sense to them. At the end of th day, ragardless of whether your running RHEL or CentosOS - your still running an OS who's ideals are wrapped around RHEL's. Which gives RedHat alot of leeway in things that wrap around RHEL (like enterprise desktop maybe?) "yeah, our enterprise destkops work with centos, just dont ask us to support your centos servers, but here's a migration strategy...".
The biggest difference in my mind between eclipse and NB is really external developement.
When you look at the wide variety of extra functionality that exists (through plugins or whatever) for eclipse v's NB the difference is huge. Not only do 3rd parties take eclipse and build an IDE out of it (palm did that, but theres ALOT more than just palm), but the thousands of plugins available for eclipse are impressive. Hopefully the GPL license will mean NB starts getting more plugin dev from third parties because its a nice IDE IMHO.
On performance though - both are relatively chunky editors, but i do find NB faster than eclipse. I can feel the "lag" in both too though, if i open something in gleany/gphpeditor/vim i notice the difference between it and either NB/eclipse for typing lag. Its only milliseconds, but its still noticable.
Having said all that, the plugins used with either can vastly affect performance! the original php plugin for eclipse (or really it was an entire download of eclipse with php functionality added in originally and probably still is) it was dog slow compared to the eclipse i used for c/c++ dev work.
Well, i like netbeans 5.5.1 anyway. When i downloaded 6 (a little while ago, i think it was m2 or something?) i was most annoyed with the lack of ability to develop c/c++ apps (or at least, the extensions from 5.5.1 hadnt been moved across yet).
Having said that, i only use it for c/c++. I'd use it for php if it had a plugin worth using. I used to use eclipse for c/c++/php but these days i use gleany for php. I used to like eclipse, but eventually i just got annoyed with it and retired it.
Annoyed at the rather closed minded (and often ignorant) comments of some as usual, but anyone who's flown to various parts of asia (mostly japan), already knew all this.
a good example is the kind of mobile phones we walk around with in the west today were old school in 2002 over there.
But, in reality it extends to all things in ways you dont think about until you see it in use.
Sadly if it doesn't have an intel/amd cpu and run an OS, the west is behind japan by a long shot - and always has been, always will be.
It might be the post-globalist age if your outsourcing jobs from the US/AU/etc to india, but when it comes to building tech its a different story for a number of reasons, but japanese building technology (especially anything human-interactive) for japan and chinese speaking continents is a huge market and making it western'er worthy is often of no real value to them given then bang/buck ratio.
We should call this battle "OOXML II - The fight for copyright!"
Seriously though, why is it that whenever i see microsoft and some kind of broad-brush standard i think "oh god this is going to be bad for the industry". Its no small irony that they're pushing an MS standard to battle google's "proprietary".
One can only hope google turn proprietary into standard and perhaps we have a chance for a real standard like ODF rather than another non-standard like ooxml!.
Although, the choice of Thunderbird is a little annoying. I was having a chat not that long ago (actually the day OO 2.3 came out) with a friend and we both came to the conclusion we both use ms office because the number 1 thing we use is outlook.
Now, if OO 3 had a viable outlook alternative (notice the use of the word viable) then i'd never have to fire up outlook ever again. OF course, by viable i mean something that has at least the calender - i use evolution at work with exchange and it works "ok" when its not crashing, but if OO had its eyes on thunderbird and upping its functionality levels then more power to them i say!. My life would be complete!
I do use t-bird at home for everything, but its so hard to do that in a job given that lack of (useful) calendering. Now, evolutions outlook (owa) connector may be quite annoying really but there is work underway for a real connector to exchange for evolution and if that library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/) could be used in t-bird - then brilliant!.
Im of course getting ahead of myself, one step at a time eh?
I had to read that twice and check i hadn't fallen asleep for a couple of years (old-school rip van winkle style) and woken up on the 1st of april.
This sounds like a bad re-run of futurama.
Hopefully by 2050 we'll have the "dont date robots" and "electric ghonorea (sp?), the noisey killer" videos. Although, they may be so badly encumbered with DRM we wont be able to view them.
HAH, trust the MPAA/RIAA to ensure the future death of mankind because people cant see instructional video's about why they shouldnt couple with AI's!
In all honesty, if you believe this isnt coming from a MS gun then there's gotta be something wrong with you.
The thing I dont quite understand is why MS seem to be doing this case by case. rather than a full-frontal assault by a bunch of different MS lackeys at the same time we're seeing 1 after the other, all bring the fight from a different angle. Not only that, but they seem to be aiming to take anyone out that is doing anything thats UI related (by that i mean they look like they went after apple previously).
But if you were a patent troll company looking at things that implement the whole virtual desktop/desktop pager/whatever you want to call it, why Novell and RedHat? Sure they've got some cash - but in reality this is about what gnome and kde are capable of and that covers alot more than just those two vendors. Whats more than that, it covers alot of little individuals that have implemented desktop pages on just about any wm (windows, apple and X wm's). From an MS value point of view its easily undone and perhaps thats what its really about? if redhat/novell code it out/disable it in the distro's they're admitting its a problem.
Maybe they're hitting linux/foss 1 by 1 cause theres so few patent infringement cases they need them to be dragged on as long possible? or maybe this is the beginning of a flood.
It could be very interestingly dangerous though - like mp3, sue linux distro's until they have no functionality left and problem solved, who would want to use a linux desktop that has nothing worth while anymore?
Regardless of the out comes though, there are alot more battles to come.
May MS, bill gates and steve balmer rot in hell - i can imagine if such a place exists they're destined for an eternity of agony.
But, my understanding of the law is if you break the law, your location is irrelevant. Take the case of the UK guys that were running an online casino (outside the US), landed in the US (just passing thru?) and were arrested. There's alot of examples of that though - the recent lawsuit again spamhaus, etc.
I could be wrong, but if he is breaking US law by doing that in the UK, he's still breaking the law in the US and would/could have to answer for it if he ever came back.
Having said that, is he breaking the law really?
Who know's. MS's intent has always been clear "we are evil" and they'll continue to spread FUD like that as much as possible (basis or no basis).
On one hand it sounds like the UK govt are the german nazi's with the whole book-burning thing. Which is extremely disturbing.
But, i find it very hard to believe that the UK govt would hole up a teenager for no reason other than this. It sounds a little implausible.
But, of course, the world has gone slightly psycho when it comes to anything that could vaguely be interpreted at terrorism. I half expect to read about how some guy's dog did a cr*p on the lawn at a park when he just happened to have a clear line of site to George W Bush and so he got arrested for using his dog to drop a bomb that could have been used to kill the president of the USA.
its interesting that alot of what our societies were built on was to protect against such ridiculous and draconian control over the populace!
Being able to integrate with exchange would be MARVELOUS - if it were open. And by that i dont mean that Exchange should be open, but the communication with it. Take a look at things like:
There have been MANY projects to try and pull apart that communications channel into a library that could be implemented anywhere and no one has managed it (yet). The original work (above) was about trying to make an exchange (server) replacement, but now its extending into implementing client connectivity. Hell, evolution only manages to do it by going thru the OWA (which is a hack at best). So everyone sitting there going "oh it should have exchange connectivity" paleeease write to MS and tell them they should open the protocols (personally, i think they should be forced to do this).. It would be fair to say that it would be nice if it had a real calendar/colab tool for the corporate environment, but if your using this at home you really REALLY need to get a more spontaneous life, seriously!.
Whenever i see discussions like this i always think to myself, "look to the past". (I use the word linux here alot, but in reality i mean a whole host of things like apache and mysql, etc).
If you go back and look at the past, you may see the future spelled out for you.
The one known constant in the software industry so far has been almost-0 innovation from MS except in the area of the user interface. Everything they've done has been driven by someone coming up with an idea, MS taking it, putting a more usable UI on it and then (ab)using the market to kill off competition.
But go back not too far and you'll see linux as the dominant player in the (small-fry) server game with MS playing a very big role of catch-up. Linux didn't have the desktop by any stretch of the imagination and MS was simply in the right place at the right time. So they (ab)used their desktop dominance to steal the server role. But it doesn't really change much. MS still doesn't inovate. MS Live is a good example of that.
These days, linux is playing a catch-up game with the UI and its going to be a slow game, but i really dont think its a game MS can win in the long run given their lack on innovation. I dont think there will every be a big break through, but we've already seen a few medium sized ones. People are shipping linux as a desktop OS on blackbox computers and thats a huge step like it or not and it can only get better with time.
But the point im trying to make is linux does innovate significantly (or at least, the players in the OSS industry). What you can do with linux on a server still far out-paces MS in many many ways in terms of functionality if not in terms of usability.
But that will change.
Apple will always be a bit-player tho, they're a hardware producer and they might as well stop producing an OS and start spending their efforts doing something useful (though they really dont seem to understand that at all which is a shame).
Having done both photoshop for years (and now using gimp also) in the industry im appalled not only at the lack of more than about 3 decent comments (and at the rediculous modding up some posts have gotten) here but the pure lack of understand of either application, what 8bits v 16bits per channel actually means.
Now you idiots who sit there talking about prosumer and even pro digital cameras and use 16bit in the same sentence, go and get a clue.
16bit was NEVER EVER EVER EVER made for prosumer/pro digital cameras, and if you think it was you know alot less than you think you do.
While the author doesn't write his article well, I think you missed the point. That being that its a kernel level discussion about distribution outcomes. But the point is this *IS* about Linux, Linus, the kernel and how people think that kernel should be developing given a specific target market.
While the author talks about distributions, he's really aiming at the fact that things like the -ck line of kernel patches were aimed at making the desktop experience much better (which is helpful to desktop distributions). What he's trying to get at is that perhaps the kernel aimed at providing a good experience for user-grade mainstream linux desktops would mean that ubuntu (among others) would probably be a better experience on the desktop given a kernel aimed at that type of thing!.
Is there enough space for both solutions? Well, go back and read all the articles about CK giving up his line of kernel patches and why. I think the jury is still out on that one myself. I personally think its a broader discussion than that though myself.
Lackies? lackeys? not sure what the spelling of that is and am too lazy to type dict into mozilla.
However, some time ago there was an article on slashdot about the top 10 things MS could do to kill the linux "threat". Since then at least 5 of them have been quite prominent - among those was the idea of forking both the development and community, one has been achieved in some way with MS pulling some linux tricks we all know about and so i can only think this is a part-approach to the second problem.
I wish i could find that article on slashdot though, it was pricessless more because of the fact that it looks like a play book MS have been using ever since!
It looked pretty good and has some decent names behind it (now, that wasnt always the case). Plus its kinda functional in both directions in that they were bringing out a native exchange connector for evolution.
I remember writing a whole concept article about a replacement for mail a while ago based on the whole tagging concept but could never get it started. The motivation though was really about the lack of collab suites that exist in the OSS arena. I dont really consider Zimbra to be all that OSS myself though.
I was seriously thinking last night... "what the world needs is another compiler".
It would have been nice to know what the non-licensing aspects of the pcc were, there are already a number of BSD licensed compilers. It is interesting in one of the posts about pcc someone goes on about how the evaluation of x = y changed in 3.x to 4.x of gcc and they were told "suck eggs" by the gcc team. What i dont get about that whole comment is how they think that's going to change with pcc. The original problem still exists - the c standard is unclear (but thats off the point a bit).
It would be nice to see the effort perhaps pumped into something a little more worthwhile. But, rebuilding the wheel is anyone's prerogative, and as long as it makes you happy and perhaps solves a problem for someone, more power to ya! Compilers seemed to have become a bit of a topic of late which is interesting considering how over the last couple of years people have been working hard to abstract away from the actual compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
First he talks about google like the only thing they do (or are successful at) is "search" and then he goes on to talk about all the linux mobile phone platforms out there now as a "common cold" like people stopped working on them.
Openmoko only seems to be gaining momentum, sure they're not "in your face" but that hardly means they're going away either.
The thing that bothers me is the way he talks about developers as the people porting the gphone software to a hardware device. But there's two set's of developers in this mix and it may take alot of 0's to get out there, but when you look at the companies already in the alliance you can only guess that it will start up with alot of 0's. The second set of developers are the ones who'll develop applications to run ontop of the platform - and you can guarantee alot of the geeks here will be getting that sdk with the 12th rolls around.
One thing symbian should count itself lucky for however is that iPhone didnt come with an SDK. The guy seems to ignore the developers who are coding applications for the phone and not at the phone hardware.
But, one thing i think will work against google is the way phone developers are going to all have a similar platform which makes it hard for them to differentiate their offerings (even though its being licensed under the apache v2 license to avoid such problems).
I think the biggest error in judgment he makes though is talking about mobile phones like they aren't becoming computers - and lets face it they are and have been for quite some time. The "gsm/3g/cdma/etc" bit (or the hardware parts in general really) are just interfaces to be coded in. I think mr symbian is in for a bit of a shock - google are quite good at doing things like this (the right way), just like apple (who got it wrong - again). As for the gui that goes on top, there are sooo many example that can be built on its not funny and its well past time we got an open ones that look like they may gain a foothold and i personally hope that perhaps one day in the future openmoko and gphone/andriodev will end up merging in some way.
he mentions VMWare because equalogic + vmware have been working together for some time to make the equalogic solution with vmware perform exceptionally well.
And if you knew vmware esx, you'd also know that vmfs is a cluster filesystem (like ocfs2 and gfs2) where multiple machines *DO* access the block device at the same time (in a co-ordinated fashion).
And if you've never heard of a cluster file system before then perhaps you shouldn't be commenting on a storage product - or at least, perhaps you should do a small bit of googling before pushing out a comment like that...
I work for a company that sells these equalogic units (and install/train) and they are quite impressive.
I wont bang on about them, but they have a number of plus's which make them great for smaller companies and they scale quite remarkably well. They're pretty simple to manage and so forth (but you can get at the guts of them, they run a bsd variant).
One of the things i do appreciate about them is its 1 cost and you get everything they have to offer (on the software side anyways) and you dont have to get any golden screwdriver/license upgrades.
Performance wise in the bang for buck arena they are very competative though.
The biggest problem with selling them? iSCSI. Alot of people just dont seem to get iSCSI at all and write it off as a "less secure and slow" fibre channel option. We sell fibre channel products as well, and while fc has its advantages, they really aren't in the area of speed or latency (often thats true even when your not using a iSCSI hba).
But, as i said, i work for a reseller who stocks these and am ultimately going to be written off as biased (and yes we sell 3par, hds, sun and so forth as well).
now THAT sounds like fun!
I like openMoko (and i hope gphone uses something like it), but a project based on such an idea would be very popular.
I.e.
- Heres the hardware you need
- heres how you get openmoko/something else going on it.
It'd be like the wrt/nslu type projects but involving (and evolving) hardware and people in something very kewl.
Everyone missed the follow-up article!
"Nigeria has declared it will buy 500,000 gphones in the first batch but have decided to install WM6 over the top. Of course, they'll still pay for support from gphone".
The follow-up follow-up was something about Balmer, leaving the nigerian embassy) saying he had nothing to do with it while carrying a copy of Mandriva under his arm.
1. "waaaah, centos makes redhat RHEL more accessible"
2. "waaaah, redhat should do something about centos mmmkay?"
3. "waaaah, redhat is bad mmmkay??"
4. "waaaah, none of the other distro's have a chance to supplant rhel because centos is free".
And you wonder why redhat do nothing about centos? seriously??? I dont mean that because of his comments. But from a RHEL perspective everyone wins. RHEL get someone else to distribute a version of their OS that they dont have to support but comes with all the other bonus's of running RHEL. When a customer can afford it they move to RHEL for reasons that make sense to them. At the end of th day, ragardless of whether your running RHEL or CentosOS - your still running an OS who's ideals are wrapped around RHEL's. Which gives RedHat alot of leeway in things that wrap around RHEL (like enterprise desktop maybe?) "yeah, our enterprise destkops work with centos, just dont ask us to support your centos servers, but here's a migration strategy...".
The biggest difference in my mind between eclipse and NB is really external developement.
When you look at the wide variety of extra functionality that exists (through plugins or whatever) for eclipse v's NB the difference is huge. Not only do 3rd parties take eclipse and build an IDE out of it (palm did that, but theres ALOT more than just palm), but the thousands of plugins available for eclipse are impressive. Hopefully the GPL license will mean NB starts getting more plugin dev from third parties because its a nice IDE IMHO.
On performance though - both are relatively chunky editors, but i do find NB faster than eclipse.
I can feel the "lag" in both too though, if i open something in gleany/gphpeditor/vim i notice the difference between it and either NB/eclipse for typing lag. Its only milliseconds, but its still noticable.
Having said all that, the plugins used with either can vastly affect performance! the original php plugin for eclipse (or really it was an entire download of eclipse with php functionality added in originally and probably still is) it was dog slow compared to the eclipse i used for c/c++ dev work.
I too still use vi/vim a fair bit. I LOVE *LOVE* vi syntax.
On a side note though, eclipse and NB both have vi plugins - havent used either of them myself though.
As i said, last time i looked which was sometime ago, it wasn't available. But i wasn't planning to try it again until 6.0 gets out of beta.
5.5.1 + c++ = working pretty well. So the desire to mess with it is quite limited unless i stumble on a bug which halts my ability to code.
My original point was more that 5.5.1 was quite good and 6.0 is likely to become as good which is why i moved from eclipse to it for c/c++ dev work.
Well, i like netbeans 5.5.1 anyway. When i downloaded 6 (a little while ago, i think it was m2 or something?) i was most annoyed with the lack of ability to develop c/c++ apps (or at least, the extensions from 5.5.1 hadnt been moved across yet).
Having said that, i only use it for c/c++. I'd use it for php if it had a plugin worth using. I used to use eclipse for c/c++/php but these days i use gleany for php. I used to like eclipse, but eventually i just got annoyed with it and retired it.
Annoyed at the rather closed minded (and often ignorant) comments of some as usual, but anyone who's flown to various parts of asia (mostly japan), already knew all this.
a good example is the kind of mobile phones we walk around with in the west today were old school in 2002 over there.
But, in reality it extends to all things in ways you dont think about until you see it in use.
Sadly if it doesn't have an intel/amd cpu and run an OS, the west is behind japan by a long shot - and always has been, always will be.
It might be the post-globalist age if your outsourcing jobs from the US/AU/etc to india, but when it comes to building tech its a different story for a number of reasons, but japanese building technology (especially anything human-interactive) for japan and chinese speaking continents is a huge market and making it western'er worthy is often of no real value to them given then bang/buck ratio.
Another standard, backed by microsoft?
We should call this battle "OOXML II - The fight for copyright!"
Seriously though, why is it that whenever i see microsoft and some kind of broad-brush standard i think "oh god this is going to be bad for the industry". Its no small irony that they're pushing an MS standard to battle google's "proprietary".
One can only hope google turn proprietary into standard and perhaps we have a chance for a real standard like ODF rather than another non-standard like ooxml!.
All i can say is brilliant!.
Although, the choice of Thunderbird is a little annoying. I was having a chat not that long ago (actually the day OO 2.3 came out) with a friend and we both came to the conclusion we both use ms office because the number 1 thing we use is outlook.
Now, if OO 3 had a viable outlook alternative (notice the use of the word viable) then i'd never have to fire up outlook ever again. OF course, by viable i mean something that has at least the calender - i use evolution at work with exchange and it works "ok" when its not crashing, but if OO had its eyes on thunderbird and upping its functionality levels then more power to them i say!. My life would be complete!
I do use t-bird at home for everything, but its so hard to do that in a job given that lack of (useful) calendering. Now, evolutions outlook (owa) connector may be quite annoying really but there is work underway for a real connector to exchange for evolution and if that library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/) could be used in t-bird - then brilliant!.
Im of course getting ahead of myself, one step at a time eh?
I had to read that twice and check i hadn't fallen asleep for a couple of years (old-school rip van winkle style) and woken up on the 1st of april.
This sounds like a bad re-run of futurama.
Hopefully by 2050 we'll have the "dont date robots" and "electric ghonorea (sp?), the noisey killer" videos. Although, they may be so badly encumbered with DRM we wont be able to view them.
HAH, trust the MPAA/RIAA to ensure the future death of mankind because people cant see instructional video's about why they shouldnt couple with AI's!
Why don't "we" patent all forms of patent trolling as an open invention and then sue people who use our "invention" to generate income?
im sure its process one could "nail down" into a distinct set of procedures!
In all honesty, if you believe this isnt coming from a MS gun then there's gotta be something wrong with you.
The thing I dont quite understand is why MS seem to be doing this case by case. rather than a full-frontal assault by a bunch of different MS lackeys at the same time we're seeing 1 after the other, all bring the fight from a different angle. Not only that, but they seem to be aiming to take anyone out that is doing anything thats UI related (by that i mean they look like they went after apple previously).
But if you were a patent troll company looking at things that implement the whole virtual desktop/desktop pager/whatever you want to call it, why Novell and RedHat? Sure they've got some cash - but in reality this is about what gnome and kde are capable of and that covers alot more than just those two vendors. Whats more than that, it covers alot of little individuals that have implemented desktop pages on just about any wm (windows, apple and X wm's). From an MS value point of view its easily undone and perhaps thats what its really about? if redhat/novell code it out/disable it in the distro's they're admitting its a problem.
Maybe they're hitting linux/foss 1 by 1 cause theres so few patent infringement cases they need them to be dragged on as long possible? or maybe this is the beginning of a flood.
It could be very interestingly dangerous though - like mp3, sue linux distro's until they have no functionality left and problem solved, who would want to use a linux desktop that has nothing worth while anymore?
Regardless of the out comes though, there are alot more battles to come.
May MS, bill gates and steve balmer rot in hell - i can imagine if such a place exists they're destined for an eternity of agony.
Im aussy, so take it with a grain of salt.
But, my understanding of the law is if you break the law, your location is irrelevant. Take the case of the UK guys that were running an online casino (outside the US), landed in the US (just passing thru?) and were arrested. There's alot of examples of that though - the recent lawsuit again spamhaus, etc.
I could be wrong, but if he is breaking US law by doing that in the UK, he's still breaking the law in the US and would/could have to answer for it if he ever came back.
Having said that, is he breaking the law really?
Who know's. MS's intent has always been clear "we are evil" and they'll continue to spread FUD like that as much as possible (basis or no basis).
On one hand it sounds like the UK govt are the german nazi's with the whole book-burning thing. Which is extremely disturbing.
But, i find it very hard to believe that the UK govt would hole up a teenager for no reason other than this. It sounds a little implausible.
But, of course, the world has gone slightly psycho when it comes to anything that could vaguely be interpreted at terrorism. I half expect to read about how some guy's dog did a cr*p on the lawn at a park when he just happened to have a clear line of site to George W Bush and so he got arrested for using his dog to drop a bomb that could have been used to kill the president of the USA.
its interesting that alot of what our societies were built on was to protect against such ridiculous and draconian control over the populace!
Being able to integrate with exchange would be MARVELOUS - if it were open. And by that i dont mean that Exchange should be open, but the communication with it. Take a look at things like:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/
There have been MANY projects to try and pull apart that communications channel into a library that could be implemented anywhere and no one has managed it (yet). The original work (above) was about trying to make an exchange (server) replacement, but now its extending into implementing client connectivity. Hell, evolution only manages to do it by going thru the OWA (which is a hack at best). So everyone sitting there going "oh it should have exchange connectivity" paleeease write to MS and tell them they should open the protocols (personally, i think they should be forced to do this).. It would be fair to say that it would be nice if it had a real calendar/colab tool for the corporate environment, but if your using this at home you really REALLY need to get a more spontaneous life, seriously!.
Whenever i see discussions like this i always think to myself, "look to the past". (I use the word linux here alot, but in reality i mean a whole host of things like apache and mysql, etc).
If you go back and look at the past, you may see the future spelled out for you.
The one known constant in the software industry so far has been almost-0 innovation from MS except in the area of the user interface. Everything they've done has been driven by someone coming up with an idea, MS taking it, putting a more usable UI on it and then (ab)using the market to kill off competition.
But go back not too far and you'll see linux as the dominant player in the (small-fry) server game with MS playing a very big role of catch-up. Linux didn't have the desktop by any stretch of the imagination and MS was simply in the right place at the right time. So they (ab)used their desktop dominance to steal the server role. But it doesn't really change much. MS still doesn't inovate. MS Live is a good example of that.
These days, linux is playing a catch-up game with the UI and its going to be a slow game, but i really dont think its a game MS can win in the long run given their lack on innovation. I dont think there will every be a big break through, but we've already seen a few medium sized ones. People are shipping linux as a desktop OS on blackbox computers and thats a huge step like it or not and it can only get better with time.
But the point im trying to make is linux does innovate significantly (or at least, the players in the OSS industry). What you can do with linux on a server still far out-paces MS in many many ways in terms of functionality if not in terms of usability.
But that will change.
Apple will always be a bit-player tho, they're a hardware producer and they might as well stop producing an OS and start spending their efforts doing something useful (though they really dont seem to understand that at all which is a shame).
Having done both photoshop for years (and now using gimp also) in the industry im appalled not only at the lack of more than about 3 decent comments (and at the rediculous modding up some posts have gotten) here but the pure lack of understand of either application, what 8bits v 16bits per channel actually means.
Now you idiots who sit there talking about prosumer and even pro digital cameras and use 16bit in the same sentence, go and get a clue.
16bit was NEVER EVER EVER EVER made for prosumer/pro digital cameras, and if you think it was you know alot less than you think you do.
While the author doesn't write his article well, I think you missed the point. That being that its a kernel level discussion about distribution outcomes. But the point is this *IS* about Linux, Linus, the kernel and how people think that kernel should be developing given a specific target market.
While the author talks about distributions, he's really aiming at the fact that things like the -ck line of kernel patches were aimed at making the desktop experience much better (which is helpful to desktop distributions). What he's trying to get at is that perhaps the kernel aimed at providing a good experience for user-grade mainstream linux desktops would mean that ubuntu (among others) would probably be a better experience on the desktop given a kernel aimed at that type of thing!.
Is there enough space for both solutions? Well, go back and read all the articles about CK giving up his line of kernel patches and why. I think the jury is still out on that one myself. I personally think its a broader discussion than that though myself.
Lackies? lackeys? not sure what the spelling of that is and am too lazy to type dict into mozilla.
However, some time ago there was an article on slashdot about the top 10 things MS could do to kill the linux "threat". Since then at least 5 of them have been quite prominent - among those was the idea of forking both the development and community, one has been achieved in some way with MS pulling some linux tricks we all know about and so i can only think this is a part-approach to the second problem.
I wish i could find that article on slashdot though, it was pricessless more because of the fact that it looks like a play book MS have been using ever since!
To be honest, i was more interested in seeing where this got: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/
It looked pretty good and has some decent names behind it (now, that wasnt always the case). Plus its kinda functional in both directions in that they were bringing out a native exchange connector for evolution.
I remember writing a whole concept article about a replacement for mail a while ago based on the whole tagging concept but could never get it started. The motivation though was really about the lack of collab suites that exist in the OSS arena. I dont really consider Zimbra to be all that OSS myself though.
I was seriously thinking last night... "what the world needs is another compiler".
It would have been nice to know what the non-licensing aspects of the pcc were, there are already a number of BSD licensed compilers. It is interesting in one of the posts about pcc someone goes on about how the evaluation of x = y changed in 3.x to 4.x of gcc and they were told "suck eggs" by the gcc team. What i dont get about that whole comment is how they think that's going to change with pcc. The original problem still exists - the c standard is unclear (but thats off the point a bit).
It would be nice to see the effort perhaps pumped into something a little more worthwhile. But, rebuilding the wheel is anyone's prerogative, and as long as it makes you happy and perhaps solves a problem for someone, more power to ya! Compilers seemed to have become a bit of a topic of late which is interesting considering how over the last couple of years people have been working hard to abstract away from the actual compiler.