Lieberfarb's lawyer is David Boies of Microsoft anti-trust and Microsoft-funded SCO suit fame. The Newsweek article fucks this up: "Boise" is what they write.
Well, that's one opinion... But it lacks imagination on the side of what word processors could do. Word processors, and every other application you use, could integrate in with web services.
*Cough* Content management system *cough cough*.
Whenever you post on Slashdot, whenever you use any site based on Slashcode, PostNuke, wiki, etc., you are experiencing the primitive, retarded great-grandfather of the future word processor you describe.
That + Googlish searching capabilities + lots of testing, crazy ideas and learning from fuckups = the future.
It may be getting there, O'Reilly points out the fact that web-based "killer apps" that appeal to a desktop user (ie. Google) run Linux but a Dell shipping with Red Hat is a long way off.
Windows is currently 70% of the server market. Microsoft is depending on.NET-based web-services to shore up its lock-in of the desktop.
There is still a lot of ground to be covered server-side. Not to mention on embedded devices. The line that nothing matters until you can get OEM Linux at Best Buy is ludicrous.
Desktop machines and applications are growing in absolute numbers, but shrinking as a percentage of the overall computing market. If Linux continues to stagnate on the desktop but continues to grow on the other pieces of the pie, I for one will be more than happy.
Come on. There isn't a single open-source-support company out there who can hold a candle to the level of support (i.e. ass-kissing) that M$ and it's $billions in the bank can give.
You have *got* to be f'ing kidding. Last year a site I was working at had a Linux server downage on Memorial Day weekend. Hardware problem, as it turned out. IBM sent an engineer down there within two hours, and then had a hardware component couriered over from the next city.
Do not try to tell me you could get similar support from Microsoft.
Why is this modded insightful? The thrust of the article was something O'Reilly's been saying for a while:
Want to point open-source successes out to someone? Don't for chrissakes start talking about OpenOffice, the GIMP and Mozilla. Amazon and Google are open-source successes.
The point is that Windows is a niche market. A tough one to crack, maybe; but an increasingly small part of everything that's done on computers.
I can see medicine and CAD using it, but a employee, aunt or kid?
Sun doesn't give a rat's ass about aunts and kids - they shouldn't, either; aunts are cheap and kids have no money. "Knowledge workers" might not have any use for it right now. But medicine and CAD might be lucrative fields...
Probably also a few other small but expensive markets for it. At least that's what I'd guess would be the hope.
I'm aware that every single anti-GPL troll in existence has suggested the BSD license for Sun in every single forum discussion to even touch on the topic simply because they don't like the GPL, but is there anything official or semi-official to back that assertion up?
Compatibility for WordArt is not at the top of my requirements list for compatibility.
Oh Jesus! People here bitch about Flash, but they obviously haven't been in an office where WordArt is in heavy use. It's a fucking monstrosity that offends god and man, I tell you.
It's definitely on my list of things I don't want to see compatibility for.
This has nothing to do with the open source community. It's a proprietary app that happens to run on Linux. Also, OpenOffice spreadsheet already weakened userbase of Gnumeric, which was and is a better and more compatible app. I don't see you whining about that.
The extent to which OpenOffice is hyped has sadly cut into a lot of Gnumeric's mindshare, despite it being the better product by far. I know some people like to hate Miguel de Icaza for trying to port.NET, but he did a fuck of a good job on the foundation of Gnumeric and the present team has kept on making it better. Don't fall for "bundling": use the better program.
Problem is, the energy savings only apply to a couple of months out of the year. For the rest of the year, gained evening light is offset by lost morning light. Not to mention more early-morning traffic accidents and lost productivity from fatigue and oversleep.
Depends on if you mean the interpreter and standard libraries or the source code you produce.
For the source code, you can often get quite small while still being readable. Ruby's designer, Matz, takes things like aesthetics, intuitiveness and liveable design more seriously than most language designers. Whether it succeeds or not is a personal judgement call. It leads to some useful things being excluded from the standard base because they are deemed "not the Ruby Way", but also to a tool base that is (in the estimation of fans) very clean, useful and fun to use.
You can read about the ideas behind Ruby here in a presentation by Matz called "How Ruby Sucks". Also an extended Python/Ruby comparison here.
Basically if you want to see what Perl would look like if it was created by a crazy Japanese guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming instead of a crazy American guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming, take a look at Ruby.
Sounds interesting. If the custom bootable iso creator works as well as it's supposed to it'd be a godsend to those of us who have to put together kiosks vel sim. fairly often.
One complaint though: I wish the author would quit calling it an "operating system" as if it wasn't yet another source-based [Linux | GNU/Linux] distribution. Sure, call it a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but don't get carried away. I'm glad he did so in the writeup; I hope he'll change the webpage too.
One question though: why isn't there a Sourceforge or Rubyforge page for the script? Also, there seems to be a namespace conflict with an in-development Ruby-based Enhydra clone.
Re:What does Linux give Iraq that other OS's do no
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Cobind is designed to run on slightly older machines. If you have a really archaic system, there's always Damn Small Linux. (Not to mention a custom Debian or Gentoo setup). So you can have a new distro on an old machine, you just have to bypass the more popular ones, or do some of the rolling on your own.
The ILUG guys, however, seem to have settled on Mandrake. And I guess they know their target audience better than we do.
Re:What does Linux give Iraq that other OS's do no
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Linux offers Robust networking and server capabilities on cheap-ass hardware.
In a country where:
* Capital is expensive,
* Knowledge and labor are cheap, and
* Network and web infrastructure are close to non-existent,
that's pretty goddamn important. May not satisfy the SlashbotLinux-on-the-desktop pro/anti monomania, but it's pretty goddamn important.
Re:Is a GNU/Linux biz feasible?
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Probably very difficult. For all the talk many companies based on OSS in the West are struggling for profitability as far as I can make out, and I dont see them flooding the job markets with linux requirements. Additionally you have the 'benefactor' issue in Iraq. The US want their contracts, and to be honest many of these are huge projects. Abdul and his mate working out of their garage are just not going to be able to supply the IT requirements to them.
Okay, you're talking about two things: one, running a large OSS-based development company and two, government contracting. I'd agree, those areas probably won't be easy - they're not in the US, either.
But currently in Iraq: education levels are high, labor is cheap, hardware is expensive, and network and web infrastructure is basically non-existent. If nothing else, this means a good market for freelance guys doing LAMP-based web development on the cheap for universities, political parties, and home-grown companies looking to get an internet presence. You can use cheap hardware and afford to pay someone to tinker. I'd say ditto for setting up basic lans and email systems, but the advantage of OSS over pirated MS might not be as high here.
An interesting but somewhat less certain angle would be setting up LTSP thin-client installations, since there are no doubt a lot of greying pre-embargo boxes sitting around just waiting to be turned into X terminals.
Do not believe the hype. This works as long as you do not want to add significant functionality to the existing Knoppix base. If you do, apt-get is likely to get all tangled up and nasty. knx-hdinstall is an experimental program and should not be considered the preferred easy way to install Debian - although it's very nice when it works.
Man: Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed
Astro-Man: Yeah, that Windows product will never catch on!
Actually, this is a pretty good test-case of the limits of openness and closedness. The parent poster's example was http. One might also cite X vs. its closed competitors. The counter-example is Windows, to which one might add the entire Office suite.
Now, it strikes me that under present circumstances drop-in, single-machine solutions like desktop Windows and Office can support closedness and still be ubiquitous. Whereas things that require customization and intercommuncation between machines have to be open to really take off. Thus Flash is in a lot of places but hardly everywhere; web ActiveX content is for the moment practically forgotten.
RIght now the primary nexus between the desktop and the network is the browser. And basically this means IE these days. It's interesting to note that MS has had a lot of success in blocking new web standards, but only limited success in imposing its own non-standard functionality through IE.
As we all know MS's strategy is to fuck up the web and make it closed. The little analysis above leads me to conclude that they will have limited success, but their success will be really fucking annoying.
A bigger problem is owning Microsoft stock. I'd imagine there are already mechanisms to take care of this in government, but you'd be surprised how many managers want Windows because they're up to their hoo-ha in MSFT. Doesn't raise the same conflict-of-interest concerns, but it does make my life a PITA.
I just got done working with a medium-sized auto parts redistributor who just moved from a perfectly good VAX/COBOL system to a WinXP/SQLServer abortion you'd have to see to believe. Not f'ing pretty.
Anyhoo, back to the article: basically their moving from HPUX to Linux for their servers. Which is nice, but a proprietary Unix to Linux move isn't the news it used to be. What I'd love to see is a formerly Windows-only shop transitioning to an all-Linux server backbone without major wrinkles. That'd be news, and much bigger news than more of the same Linux on the desktop vapor.
Why, except in a few rare cases, would you regularly use a command line IM client in favor of a graphical one? It seems terribly inconvenient.
Why? Because you wouldn't be able to see "buddy icons". 99.999% of IM is text-driven anyways, and a command-line client would allow you to do all sorts of perverse things with pipes and scripting and awk and sed and all of those other lovely-horrible unix tools.
Thanks for the idea. I've found some links to these creatures here, and am excited to give them a whirl.
Before I get modded down, let me clarify why this is a problem:
It's a police state, Bush is the Führer, and any democracy and freedom you believe you have is an illusion (remember the Diebold scandal). The sooner the Americans start a revolution, the better.
Okay granted, under the normal Slashdot regime you'd just substiture 'M$' for 'Bush', but the above is something we've been seeing an awful lot of lately. Let's push for some more biodiversity of paranoia!
Maybe that's why Brazil and France (for example) are migrating to Linux/FOSS.
Don't believe PR. The fact that a few governments have made noises about Linux adoption should not distract from the real issue, which is deployments.
Really, I'm sick of this "Europe and the Third World are going to make Linux happen" schtick. Fact is, Windows is actually equally if not more prevalent in non-US countries. In fact, other than Germany and the former East Bloc, IIS is used for web-serving at a higher rate in Europe (and much higher in Latin America) than the US. Ditto for Asia besides Japan and South Korea.
Fact is, piracy is easier outside the US, and knowledge of how to administer a Unixy system is generally poorer. The chief determinant of Open Source adoption seems to be strength of technical education rather than lack of wealth. In fact, there is actually a loose correlation between low GDP and high Windows adoption.
Personally, I'm pretty optimistic about long-term prospects for Open Source growth in a few of these countries (esp. Brazil). But pretending it'll happen automagically without a leading trend in large economies like the US, Germany and Japan is delusional. Linux, let us recall, is at the point it's at today mostly because of investment by IBM, the NSA, Oracle and other big nasty multinational concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
Lieberfarb's lawyer is David Boies of Microsoft anti-trust and Microsoft-funded SCO suit fame. The Newsweek article fucks this up: "Boise" is what they write.
Tin-foil hat time: deliberate misspelling?
Well, that's one opinion... But it lacks imagination on the side of what word processors could do. Word processors, and every other application you use, could integrate in with web services.
*Cough* Content management system *cough cough*.
Whenever you post on Slashdot, whenever you use any site based on Slashcode, PostNuke, wiki, etc., you are experiencing the primitive, retarded great-grandfather of the future word processor you describe.
That + Googlish searching capabilities + lots of testing, crazy ideas and learning from fuckups = the future.
(the question is: will we want to live in it?)
It may be getting there, O'Reilly points out the fact that web-based "killer apps" that appeal to a desktop user (ie. Google) run Linux but a Dell shipping with Red Hat is a long way off.
.NET-based web-services to shore up its lock-in of the desktop.
Windows is currently 70% of the server market. Microsoft is depending on
There is still a lot of ground to be covered server-side. Not to mention on embedded devices. The line that nothing matters until you can get OEM Linux at Best Buy is ludicrous.
Desktop machines and applications are growing in absolute numbers, but shrinking as a percentage of the overall computing market. If Linux continues to stagnate on the desktop but continues to grow on the other pieces of the pie, I for one will be more than happy.
Come on. There isn't a single open-source-support company out there who can hold a candle to the level of support (i.e. ass-kissing) that M$ and it's $billions in the bank can give.
You have *got* to be f'ing kidding. Last year a site I was working at had a Linux server downage on Memorial Day weekend. Hardware problem, as it turned out. IBM sent an engineer down there within two hours, and then had a hardware component couriered over from the next city.
Do not try to tell me you could get similar support from Microsoft.
Why is this modded insightful? The thrust of the article was something O'Reilly's been saying for a while:
Want to point open-source successes out to someone? Don't for chrissakes start talking about OpenOffice, the GIMP and Mozilla. Amazon and Google are open-source successes.
The point is that Windows is a niche market. A tough one to crack, maybe; but an increasingly small part of everything that's done on computers.
$h1tz0rz. BSD is for the Java3D code, not Solaris. Right. Those responsible have been sacked.
I can see medicine and CAD using it, but a employee, aunt or kid?
Sun doesn't give a rat's ass about aunts and kids - they shouldn't, either; aunts are cheap and kids have no money. "Knowledge workers" might not have any use for it right now. But medicine and CAD might be lucrative fields...
Probably also a few other small but expensive markets for it. At least that's what I'd guess would be the hope.
However, they chose a BSD license apparently.
I'm aware that every single anti-GPL troll in existence has suggested the BSD license for Sun in every single forum discussion to even touch on the topic simply because they don't like the GPL, but is there anything official or semi-official to back that assertion up?
Compatibility for WordArt is not at the top of my requirements list for compatibility. Oh Jesus! People here bitch about Flash, but they obviously haven't been in an office where WordArt is in heavy use. It's a fucking monstrosity that offends god and man, I tell you.
It's definitely on my list of things I don't want to see compatibility for.
This has nothing to do with the open source community. It's a proprietary app that happens to run on Linux. Also, OpenOffice spreadsheet already weakened userbase of Gnumeric, which was and is a better and more compatible app. I don't see you whining about that.
The extent to which OpenOffice is hyped has sadly cut into a lot of Gnumeric's mindshare, despite it being the better product by far. I know some people like to hate Miguel de Icaza for trying to port .NET, but he did a fuck of a good job on the foundation of Gnumeric and the present team has kept on making it better. Don't fall for "bundling": use the better program.
Problem is, the energy savings only apply to a couple of months out of the year. For the rest of the year, gained evening light is offset by lost morning light. Not to mention more early-morning traffic accidents and lost productivity from fatigue and oversleep.
Chief O'Hara: Our lady's tits, Commisioner Ashcroft! That no-good Napster is up to its ol' shenanigans again!
Commisioner Ashcroft: This can only be a job for HATCHMAN .
Depends on if you mean the interpreter and standard libraries or the source code you produce.
For the source code, you can often get quite small while still being readable. Ruby's designer, Matz, takes things like aesthetics, intuitiveness and liveable design more seriously than most language designers. Whether it succeeds or not is a personal judgement call. It leads to some useful things being excluded from the standard base because they are deemed "not the Ruby Way", but also to a tool base that is (in the estimation of fans) very clean, useful and fun to use.
You can read about the ideas behind Ruby here in a presentation by Matz called "How Ruby Sucks". Also an extended Python/Ruby comparison here.
Basically if you want to see what Perl would look like if it was created by a crazy Japanese guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming instead of a crazy American guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming, take a look at Ruby.
Sounds interesting. If the custom bootable iso creator works as well as it's supposed to it'd be a godsend to those of us who have to put together kiosks vel sim. fairly often.
One complaint though: I wish the author would quit calling it an "operating system" as if it wasn't yet another source-based [Linux | GNU/Linux] distribution. Sure, call it a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but don't get carried away. I'm glad he did so in the writeup; I hope he'll change the webpage too.
One question though: why isn't there a Sourceforge or Rubyforge page for the script? Also, there seems to be a namespace conflict with an in-development Ruby-based Enhydra clone.
Cobind is designed to run on slightly older machines. If you have a really archaic system, there's always Damn Small Linux. (Not to mention a custom Debian or Gentoo setup). So you can have a new distro on an old machine, you just have to bypass the more popular ones, or do some of the rolling on your own.
The ILUG guys, however, seem to have settled on Mandrake. And I guess they know their target audience better than we do.
Linux offers Robust networking and server capabilities on cheap-ass hardware.
In a country where:
* Capital is expensive,
* Knowledge and labor are cheap, and
* Network and web infrastructure are close to non-existent,
that's pretty goddamn important. May not satisfy the Slashbot Linux-on-the-desktop pro/anti monomania, but it's pretty goddamn important.
Probably very difficult. For all the talk many companies based on OSS in the West are struggling for profitability as far as I can make out, and I dont see them flooding the job markets with linux requirements. Additionally you have the 'benefactor' issue in Iraq. The US want their contracts, and to be honest many of these are huge projects. Abdul and his mate working out of their garage are just not going to be able to supply the IT requirements to them.
Okay, you're talking about two things: one, running a large OSS-based development company and two, government contracting. I'd agree, those areas probably won't be easy - they're not in the US, either.
But currently in Iraq: education levels are high, labor is cheap, hardware is expensive, and network and web infrastructure is basically non-existent. If nothing else, this means a good market for freelance guys doing LAMP-based web development on the cheap for universities, political parties, and home-grown companies looking to get an internet presence. You can use cheap hardware and afford to pay someone to tinker. I'd say ditto for setting up basic lans and email systems, but the advantage of OSS over pirated MS might not be as high here.
An interesting but somewhat less certain angle would be setting up LTSP thin-client installations, since there are no doubt a lot of greying pre-embargo boxes sitting around just waiting to be turned into X terminals.
Boot up, hit Ctrl-Alt-F2, type knx-hdinstall.
Do not believe the hype. This works as long as you do not want to add significant functionality to the existing Knoppix base. If you do, apt-get is likely to get all tangled up and nasty. knx-hdinstall is an experimental program and should not be considered the preferred easy way to install Debian - although it's very nice when it works.
Man: Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed
Astro-Man: Yeah, that Windows product will never catch on!
Actually, this is a pretty good test-case of the limits of openness and closedness. The parent poster's example was http. One might also cite X vs. its closed competitors. The counter-example is Windows, to which one might add the entire Office suite.
Now, it strikes me that under present circumstances drop-in, single-machine solutions like desktop Windows and Office can support closedness and still be ubiquitous. Whereas things that require customization and intercommuncation between machines have to be open to really take off. Thus Flash is in a lot of places but hardly everywhere; web ActiveX content is for the moment practically forgotten.
RIght now the primary nexus between the desktop and the network is the browser. And basically this means IE these days. It's interesting to note that MS has had a lot of success in blocking new web standards, but only limited success in imposing its own non-standard functionality through IE.
As we all know MS's strategy is to fuck up the web and make it closed. The little analysis above leads me to conclude that they will have limited success, but their success will be really fucking annoying.
A bigger problem is owning Microsoft stock. I'd imagine there are already mechanisms to take care of this in government, but you'd be surprised how many managers want Windows because they're up to their hoo-ha in MSFT. Doesn't raise the same conflict-of-interest concerns, but it does make my life a PITA.
I just got done working with a medium-sized auto parts redistributor who just moved from a perfectly good VAX/COBOL system to a WinXP/SQLServer abortion you'd have to see to believe. Not f'ing pretty.
Anyhoo, back to the article: basically their moving from HPUX to Linux for their servers. Which is nice, but a proprietary Unix to Linux move isn't the news it used to be. What I'd love to see is a formerly Windows-only shop transitioning to an all-Linux server backbone without major wrinkles. That'd be news, and much bigger news than more of the same Linux on the desktop vapor.
Why, except in a few rare cases, would you regularly use a command line IM client in favor of a graphical one? It seems terribly inconvenient.
Why? Because you wouldn't be able to see "buddy icons". 99.999% of IM is text-driven anyways, and a command-line client would allow you to do all sorts of perverse things with pipes and scripting and awk and sed and all of those other lovely-horrible unix tools.
Thanks for the idea. I've found some links to these creatures here, and am excited to give them a whirl.
One wonders if there's one for Emacs....
Before I get modded down, let me clarify why this is a problem:
It's a police state, Bush is the Führer, and any democracy and freedom you believe you have is an illusion (remember the Diebold scandal). The sooner the Americans start a revolution, the better.
Okay granted, under the normal Slashdot regime you'd just substiture 'M$' for 'Bush', but the above is something we've been seeing an awful lot of lately. Let's push for some more biodiversity of paranoia!
We seem to get an overabundance of Your Rights Online/MPAA/RIAA/patent stuff every time he's in the big chair.
Maybe that's why Brazil and France (for example) are migrating to Linux/FOSS.
Don't believe PR. The fact that a few governments have made noises about Linux adoption should not distract from the real issue, which is deployments.
Really, I'm sick of this "Europe and the Third World are going to make Linux happen" schtick. Fact is, Windows is actually equally if not more prevalent in non-US countries. In fact, other than Germany and the former East Bloc, IIS is used for web-serving at a higher rate in Europe (and much higher in Latin America) than the US. Ditto for Asia besides Japan and South Korea.
Fact is, piracy is easier outside the US, and knowledge of how to administer a Unixy system is generally poorer. The chief determinant of Open Source adoption seems to be strength of technical education rather than lack of wealth. In fact, there is actually a loose correlation between low GDP and high Windows adoption.
Personally, I'm pretty optimistic about long-term prospects for Open Source growth in a few of these countries (esp. Brazil). But pretending it'll happen automagically without a leading trend in large economies like the US, Germany and Japan is delusional. Linux, let us recall, is at the point it's at today mostly because of investment by IBM, the NSA, Oracle and other big nasty multinational concerns.