Sure, you can keep *some* information out of the hands of corporations. But, you know your insurance agency? They are a corporation. They know a lot about you-- health, income, demographics, etc.
It disturbs me that some people won't trust the government, which is ultimately disorganized and essentially responsible to the public; but they trust corporations, which are not beholden to anyone... not even their customers. Yes, they are supposed to be responsible to their shareholders. Big deal. As long as they maximize profits (by any means necessary), they can do what they want.
No, I don't trust the government. But I trust corporations even less.
Corporations have most of the rights of individuals (even the right to buy votes), but none of the resonsibility.
Considering the misinformation coming from *both* sides of the Linux/MS-Windows debate (the general "Windows Sux" vs "open source is UnAmerican"), how can the two operating systems co-exist?
Do you ever see a time when Linux and MS-Windows will be judged on merit, rather than hype and propoganda? Or is does Microsoft consider this a true "war," with a winner and a loser?
Why does it seem that laws passed on technological issues favor the corporations, and not the individual? Is this just perception, or is it truth?
Technology is a great opportunity to set us free, as people, across the world. Why does our government of the people, for the people, by the people pass laws that protect corporate interest (DMCA, and UCITA on the state level)? And why isn't more done to promote public participation in discussion of this kind of legislation?
Sorry for the loaded questions-- but it does *seem* the government favors business over personal freedom.
Interesting stastics. Where did you get them? According to cnet, IBM's unix sales grew by 30% in one quarter last year. How's that staying flat?
The other statistics are suspect, too. As are all statistics, I might add.
I do agree that the best operating system for job x may not be the best for x'. But I have yet to find a situation (not dictated by application availability) where MS-Windows is a better fit.
True-- but that's not the point. The core concept of my original post is merely this: for years people have been predicting the demise of Linux, because it isn't foo, or doesn't have bar.
And for years, Linux has continued to grow, when most other operating systems have not. Considering that Linux now rivals MacOS in total number of *desktop* installs. This doesn't seem significant, but it really is.
"Fastest growing OS" doesn't mean much, except when you consider that Linux is making great inroads. And it doesn't look likely that Linux *can* die, let alone *will* die.
Adverb.... hmmm.... used to know about them. Damn. Mind... foggy... from... tedius... grammar... trolls.....
As far as the IDC survey goes-- true. My survey is older than your survey. You are own all my surveys. Doesn't change to fact-- Linux is growing very quickly. (Did I use it right? I mean, Did I use it properly?) Perhaps as quickly as MS-Windows, perhaps more. (Sorry for the sentence fragment. Oh, that's two. Damn it, another one!) The growth of Linux is hard to measure, as it is amorphous, with no licensing (a gerund! Oh my!) or sales to track.
Is this the sign of a floundering operating system? Grammar trolls aside, does it invalidate my observation that this is almost exactly the same doomsay we read five years ago?
For five years, I've read the same articles over and over again. "Linux needs to be simpler to install, and there needs to be more documentation, or it won't survive."
Yet it's still the fastest-growing OS in the world. I don't get it. Have the installs gotten simpler? Well, okay, maybe. Has the documentation gotten better or easier?
When do you need a high-powered RDBMS (like Oracle) over PostgreSQL or MySQL? When you need high-throughput, high-availability access to your data. Just as Linux won't scale to a 64-way machine, MySQL is hardly the solution for a multi-node redundant load-balanced database.
For *most* needs, PostgreSQL is a perfect solution. For anything that is enterprise-essential (or other buzzword-compliance), the Oracle RDBMS is a better solution.
Plus, Oracle Developer is a great RAD environment.
For every copy-protection scheme, there are n anti-protection schemes, where n>=1 (and usually n >> 1). What do they hope to gain with this? A little time?
Too bad these idiots weren't around in the time Guttenburg.
Them: "Hi, we'd like to put this device on your new printing press that chucks out the lead after every printing, just in case you try to print protected material."
It depends on how you define "brought down." IBM is at its strongest ever, yet it was brought down in the '70s and '80s.
Read your history-- at one time, IBM was in the *exact* same position as MS, destroying competition not through superior products, but through superior market position and greater reach. It used suspicious contracts and marketting to lock customers in, and make them happy to *be* locked in, same as MS does now.
Take a look at IBM today-- it has greater global reach than MS, superior products, and embraces the Free/Open Source software movement. Yes, it's not completely converted, but IBM bases its technology on standards. Mostly.
Not that IBM is a model company; but it was brought down from its position of dictatorship, and is today a stronger company because of it.
For MS-Windows NT, JFS was introduced in 1995, near as I recall. This was pretty early on. However, it was not robust, and not many people trusted it, and it killed performance. Microsoft did fix most of these problems in the ensuing releases.
ReiserFS has been around since (at least) late '96. However, it was not robust, and not many people trusted it, and it killed performance. The ReiserFS development team has fixed most of these problems in the ensuing releases. ReiserFS is now included in the kernel source.
Clustering? What kind? Load balancing? Failover? Computational? NT has the first two, but not really the third. Linux has all three, several versions.
So, assuming you weren't being subtly ironic, I would like to point out that Linux has pretty much everything NT has. (Does NT include support for hot-swappable CPUs and memory? I know Linux does not, currently, but Solaris (for instance) does).
Anyway, just a small rebuttal. There is plenty of support among software enthusiasts for even the more-complex stuff. In fact, some of us prefer the really complex stuff (like a complete kernel).
I am currently reading a book about a major contributor to the OED, a homocidal lunatic. Very good book. Not my point, though.
My point is this: the OED, one of the greatest reference works in the English language (or, *the* greatest reference work *on* the English language) was constructed by commitee. *Very* interesting, the parallels between the OED and GNUPedia.
Of course, the OED did have an editor who could control content.
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Yep. And MS-Windows 2000 (hell, even MS-WinME) is clearly better than Linux-- and will remain so.
IE is clearly inferior to Mozilla (not Netscape). Mozilla is attempting to be 100% standards-complian-- and MS-IE is trying to push Unix out of the back-end (as IE "works best" with MS-IIS and ActiveX). Mozilla is as fast as IE at rendering, and presents a better-looking page (IMNSHO). It is in the process of gaining full DOM support-- something IE isn't even concerned with (because once everything is MS-IIS on the back end, MS doesn't give a fuck about standards).
No, thank you. I'll support the better alternative. And IE has hardly "already won the browser war." First, there's plenty of room for browsers to co-exist; and second, the burgeoning field of portables is transmogrifying the browser playing field tremendously.
I prefer to get my industry and economic facts from sources other than popular entertainment, thank you. Although that probably does explain where your notions of how the world works were formed...
Did you know that Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" was also popular entertainment? But it was the only accurate description of the meat packing industry during his day. All the economic, industry, and news rags of the day ignored what was truly happening.
Often, art gives a better view of life than "news."
I prefer to get my industry and economic facts from sources other than popular entertainment, thank you. Although that probably does explain where your notions of how the world works were formed...
Well, I'd hardly call "Brain Candy" popular. But it was designed to make a statement-- in that respect, it is more art than entertainment.
My notions of how the world works has been formed by 12 years in a public education system, 3 years in the army, 3 years in higher education, and 10 years in the computer industry, working first for a university, and now (for 5 years) in the health industry. My knowledge of pharmacutical companies comes from talks with doctors and pharmacists, and not popular entertainment. Mostly we compare and contrast the nature of the computer industry (as exemplified by Microsoft) and the pharmacutical companies.
The comparisons are strikingly similar. Both produce mass-consumption, low-impact, often destructive products designed to make money from ignorance, and use ruthless marketing to fob off questionable products, when they could have invested their time and energy into creating worthwhile drugs or software (whichever they do best).
Economic facts are couched in the terms of economics-- that is, dollars. Dollars do not translate to social or ethical good. I prefer to get my industry and economic facts from numbers-- on the internet, out of magazines, wherever. But I allow my interpretation of those facts to be clouded by mysterious and ineffable things such as "ideals," "honor," and "scrupples."
Those are things you'll never get from economic or industrial trade rags, just as you'd never see Microsoft's highly questionable business practices by the reporting of ZD magazines.
You are correct. The disease is corporatism. Note this is not capitalism-- I am, essentially, a capitalist. Pharmacutical companies spend more money trying to push their drugs down the public's throats (literally), and not into research. They are a purveyer of the disease, and not just a mindless symptom.
They are responsible, just as any corporation that intentionally profits from the expoitation of the public. They may not be the disease, but they are certainly not helping fight the disease. And they are not mindless, as a sneeze or a fever is mindless. They know full well what they are doing.
their suffering assuaged by pain-relief medication from the dread pharaceutical corporatist running-dogs.
Yeah. Glad to see there's a cure for cancer.
This is a perfect example-- most of those "pain-relief" medications have been around for a long time, and are nothing new. And they didn't originate from pharmacutical companies.
the enormous profits from Viagra are what will allow the development of other drugs.
Yeah-- other useless (but money-making) drugs.
By the same logic, the enourmous profits from MS-Office allows Microsoft to innovate.
Most research into AIDS cures happens via federal funding, at research institutes. The drug cartels are too busy patenting hay-fever suppressants to give a damn about AIDS. In fact, having an incurable terminal illness like AIDS allows them to hoodwink the gullible public into thinking they serve a fucking purpose. Which they don't.
Talk to a pharmacist. You will be surprised at how the drug industry operates; the public is getting fucked. Badly. In the ass. With a broken coke bottle.
They are making huge profits, and very little of that profit goes to research.
Watch The Kids in the Hall movie, "Brain Candy." It is a fairly accurate (though absurd) look at the drug industry. It's painful for a non-KITH fan, though. So be warned.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhmmm....
Sure, you can keep *some* information out of the hands of corporations. But, you know your insurance agency? They are a corporation. They know a lot about you-- health, income, demographics, etc.
It disturbs me that some people won't trust the government, which is ultimately disorganized and essentially responsible to the public; but they trust corporations, which are not beholden to anyone... not even their customers. Yes, they are supposed to be responsible to their shareholders. Big deal. As long as they maximize profits (by any means necessary), they can do what they want.
No, I don't trust the government. But I trust corporations even less.
Corporations have most of the rights of individuals (even the right to buy votes), but none of the resonsibility.
Considering the misinformation coming from *both* sides of the Linux/MS-Windows debate (the general "Windows Sux" vs "open source is UnAmerican"), how can the two operating systems co-exist?
Do you ever see a time when Linux and MS-Windows will be judged on merit, rather than hype and propoganda? Or is does Microsoft consider this a true "war," with a winner and a loser?
Why does it seem that laws passed on technological issues favor the corporations, and not the individual? Is this just perception, or is it truth?
Technology is a great opportunity to set us free, as people, across the world. Why does our government of the people, for the people, by the people pass laws that protect corporate interest (DMCA, and UCITA on the state level)? And why isn't more done to promote public participation in discussion of this kind of legislation?
Sorry for the loaded questions-- but it does *seem* the government favors business over personal freedom.
- tony
Interesting stastics. Where did you get them? According to cnet, IBM's unix sales grew by 30% in one quarter last year. How's that staying flat?
The other statistics are suspect, too. As are all statistics, I might add.
I do agree that the best operating system for job x may not be the best for x'. But I have yet to find a situation (not dictated by application availability) where MS-Windows is a better fit.
The strawman is that Unix is a fading market share. Unix is stronger now than it has ever been.
Fortunately, FreeBSD is getting more attention. Linux is in the spotlight, but FreeBSD is in the server rooms.
What server would *you* suggest? You certainly don't seem enamored of Unix (and by extension, Linux).
True-- but that's not the point. The core concept of my original post is merely this: for years people have been predicting the demise of Linux, because it isn't foo, or doesn't have bar.
And for years, Linux has continued to grow, when most other operating systems have not. Considering that Linux now rivals MacOS in total number of *desktop* installs. This doesn't seem significant, but it really is.
"Fastest growing OS" doesn't mean much, except when you consider that Linux is making great inroads. And it doesn't look likely that Linux *can* die, let alone *will* die.
Adverb.... hmmm.... used to know about them. Damn. Mind... foggy... from... tedius... grammar... trolls.....
As far as the IDC survey goes-- true. My survey is older than your survey. You are own all my surveys. Doesn't change to fact-- Linux is growing very quickly. (Did I use it right? I mean, Did I use it properly?) Perhaps as quickly as MS-Windows, perhaps more. (Sorry for the sentence fragment. Oh, that's two. Damn it, another one!) The growth of Linux is hard to measure, as it is amorphous, with no licensing (a gerund! Oh my!) or sales to track.
Is this the sign of a floundering operating system? Grammar trolls aside, does it invalidate my observation that this is almost exactly the same doomsay we read five years ago?
No? Didn't think so.
For five years, I've read the same articles over and over again. "Linux needs to be simpler to install, and there needs to be more documentation, or it won't survive."
Yet it's still the fastest-growing OS in the world. I don't get it. Have the installs gotten simpler? Well, okay, maybe. Has the documentation gotten better or easier?
Okay, maybe.
But Linux is still going to die! Trust me.
When do you need a high-powered RDBMS (like Oracle) over PostgreSQL or MySQL? When you need high-throughput, high-availability access to your data. Just as Linux won't scale to a 64-way machine, MySQL is hardly the solution for a multi-node redundant load-balanced database.
For *most* needs, PostgreSQL is a perfect solution. For anything that is enterprise-essential (or other buzzword-compliance), the Oracle RDBMS is a better solution.
Plus, Oracle Developer is a great RAD environment.
I'm worried that a bunch of script kiddies will try to fix all the Linux bugs, too.
The point isn't that "school children" can fix mistakes-- it's that grad students writing a thesis on a particular work can fix mistakes.
It's not that *every*one can, it's that *any*one can.
For every copy-protection scheme, there are n anti-protection schemes, where n>=1 (and usually n >> 1). What do they hope to gain with this? A little time?
Too bad these idiots weren't around in the time Guttenburg.
Them: "Hi, we'd like to put this device on your new printing press that chucks out the lead after every printing, just in case you try to print protected material."
Guttenburg: "Fuck off."
So-- "Enabling the 2-way web." Why does the web site have only 2 pages?
I'm hoping Know-Now is going to make good use of him.
It depends on how you define "brought down." IBM is at its strongest ever, yet it was brought down in the '70s and '80s.
Read your history-- at one time, IBM was in the *exact* same position as MS, destroying competition not through superior products, but through superior market position and greater reach. It used suspicious contracts and marketting to lock customers in, and make them happy to *be* locked in, same as MS does now.
Take a look at IBM today-- it has greater global reach than MS, superior products, and embraces the Free/Open Source software movement. Yes, it's not completely converted, but IBM bases its technology on standards. Mostly.
Not that IBM is a model company; but it was brought down from its position of dictatorship, and is today a stronger company because of it.
For MS-Windows NT, JFS was introduced in 1995, near as I recall. This was pretty early on. However, it was not robust, and not many people trusted it, and it killed performance. Microsoft did fix most of these problems in the ensuing releases.
ReiserFS has been around since (at least) late '96. However, it was not robust, and not many people trusted it, and it killed performance. The ReiserFS development team has fixed most of these problems in the ensuing releases. ReiserFS is now included in the kernel source.
Clustering? What kind? Load balancing? Failover? Computational? NT has the first two, but not really the third. Linux has all three, several versions.
So, assuming you weren't being subtly ironic, I would like to point out that Linux has pretty much everything NT has. (Does NT include support for hot-swappable CPUs and memory? I know Linux does not, currently, but Solaris (for instance) does).
Anyway, just a small rebuttal. There is plenty of support among software enthusiasts for even the more-complex stuff. In fact, some of us prefer the really complex stuff (like a complete kernel).
As a matter of fact, you can take that extra money you'll be getting back (if we actually get the tax cut Bush is promising)
Hrmmm....
"Read my lips: no new taxes!"
- Another famous Bush, just before creating new taxes
Face it-- we're all fucked. We have many years of his partying, drug-using indolence and lack of respect for people to indicate what's ahead for us.
Our only hope is that my race of Super Potato(e)s can save us.
Sorry about that-- I did say "committee," didn't I? Sorry. I was on crack.
In my original post, I meant to say "volunteers," not "committee."
You can still bite me, though. ("Left wing wacko." Yeah, you're real fuckin' unbiased, yourself.)
Uhm, the OED was developed not by committee, but by volunteers who sent in unsolicited contributions. Duh. Just... like... GNUPedia.
That's my point. That's all I said. And it is the truth, fact. Not some biased "Left Wing Wacko" thing.
So bite me.
I am currently reading a book about a major contributor to the OED, a homocidal lunatic. Very good book. Not my point, though.
My point is this: the OED, one of the greatest reference works in the English language (or, *the* greatest reference work *on* the English language) was constructed by commitee. *Very* interesting, the parallels between the OED and GNUPedia.
Of course, the OED did have an editor who could control content.
Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.
Yep. And MS-Windows 2000 (hell, even MS-WinME) is clearly better than Linux-- and will remain so.
IE is clearly inferior to Mozilla (not Netscape). Mozilla is attempting to be 100% standards-complian-- and MS-IE is trying to push Unix out of the back-end (as IE "works best" with MS-IIS and ActiveX). Mozilla is as fast as IE at rendering, and presents a better-looking page (IMNSHO). It is in the process of gaining full DOM support-- something IE isn't even concerned with (because once everything is MS-IIS on the back end, MS doesn't give a fuck about standards).
No, thank you. I'll support the better alternative. And IE has hardly "already won the browser war." First, there's plenty of room for browsers to co-exist; and second, the burgeoning field of portables is transmogrifying the browser playing field tremendously.
Thank you for your support.
... and scream loud enough to break windows for 5 blocks.
uhm... Windows has been broken since the first day MS released it.
I prefer to get my industry and economic facts from sources other than popular entertainment, thank you. Although that probably does explain where your notions of how the world works were formed ...
Did you know that Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" was also popular entertainment? But it was the only accurate description of the meat packing industry during his day. All the economic, industry, and news rags of the day ignored what was truly happening.
Often, art gives a better view of life than "news."
I prefer to get my industry and economic facts from sources other than popular entertainment, thank you. Although that probably does explain where your notions of how the world works were formed ...
Well, I'd hardly call "Brain Candy" popular. But it was designed to make a statement-- in that respect, it is more art than entertainment.
My notions of how the world works has been formed by 12 years in a public education system, 3 years in the army, 3 years in higher education, and 10 years in the computer industry, working first for a university, and now (for 5 years) in the health industry. My knowledge of pharmacutical companies comes from talks with doctors and pharmacists, and not popular entertainment. Mostly we compare and contrast the nature of the computer industry (as exemplified by Microsoft) and the pharmacutical companies.
The comparisons are strikingly similar. Both produce mass-consumption, low-impact, often destructive products designed to make money from ignorance, and use ruthless marketing to fob off questionable products, when they could have invested their time and energy into creating worthwhile drugs or software (whichever they do best).
Economic facts are couched in the terms of economics-- that is, dollars. Dollars do not translate to social or ethical good. I prefer to get my industry and economic facts from numbers-- on the internet, out of magazines, wherever. But I allow my interpretation of those facts to be clouded by mysterious and ineffable things such as "ideals," "honor," and "scrupples."
Those are things you'll never get from economic or industrial trade rags, just as you'd never see Microsoft's highly questionable business practices by the reporting of ZD magazines.
...dont blame the symptom, blame the disease.
You are correct. The disease is corporatism. Note this is not capitalism-- I am, essentially, a capitalist. Pharmacutical companies spend more money trying to push their drugs down the public's throats (literally), and not into research. They are a purveyer of the disease, and not just a mindless symptom.
They are responsible, just as any corporation that intentionally profits from the expoitation of the public. They may not be the disease, but they are certainly not helping fight the disease. And they are not mindless, as a sneeze or a fever is mindless. They know full well what they are doing.
their suffering assuaged by pain-relief medication from the dread pharaceutical corporatist running-dogs.
Yeah. Glad to see there's a cure for cancer.
This is a perfect example-- most of those "pain-relief" medications have been around for a long time, and are nothing new. And they didn't originate from pharmacutical companies.
the enormous profits from Viagra are what will allow the development of other drugs.
Yeah-- other useless (but money-making) drugs.
By the same logic, the enourmous profits from MS-Office allows Microsoft to innovate.
Most research into AIDS cures happens via federal funding, at research institutes. The drug cartels are too busy patenting hay-fever suppressants to give a damn about AIDS. In fact, having an incurable terminal illness like AIDS allows them to hoodwink the gullible public into thinking they serve a fucking purpose. Which they don't.
Talk to a pharmacist. You will be surprised at how the drug industry operates; the public is getting fucked. Badly. In the ass. With a broken coke bottle.
They are making huge profits, and very little of that profit goes to research.
Watch The Kids in the Hall movie, "Brain Candy." It is a fairly accurate (though absurd) look at the drug industry. It's painful for a non-KITH fan, though. So be warned.
- Tony