.. they actually state on the website that it was not in "wide use" for "enterprise websites" prior to 2000.
This sounds more like a scam than anything else.
Evidently these guys choose to ignore the existence of AOL and Prodigy that used images as links (even for keyword searches) during the last millennium.
Besides, prior art doesn't require "wide usage" anyway.
Do you really think it's a good idea to bother emergency services with countless "I lost my mommy" calls?
Sure if it prevents countless Amber Alerts...
But I do get your point about not being able to call phoneless parents. I think it's unlikely that both parents will have a smart phone.
What's the big deal? I thought GSM phones were big in the UK. Just leave the Smartphone at home, and place your SIM card in a cheap cell phone when your at the amusement park. Contrary to popular believe you won't die from not being able to check your email, and your business won't suffer if you take a single day off. If it does then you have bigger worries than a policy at an amusement park.
Do you think that the main reason Google has offices in other countries (like China) is to enjoy a cheaper labor rate?
I didn't say that cheap labor was the main reason behind Google having offices in other countries. I think you're being naive to think that it's not one of the perks of having foreign offices (especially for a company based entirely on the Internet).
I said higher wages would be a consequence as an answer to:
Do you have any idea what would happen to Google or its employees in many of these countries if they were to refuse to obey a lawful demand for information?
Since:
a) Google, being a creation of the Internet, doesn't have to actually be in that country to sell ads or other services.
b) It would cost them more money to hire workers elsewhere, or bring in foreign workers from their target markets.
You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
Maybe, but I'm probably just as qualified as your are:P.
The main reason Google has foreign offices is money. They have a target market, and having a local presence within that market lowers their operating costs. However, Google is not required to have a local presence to service that market.
Neither am I an expert, but my knowledge [answers.com] of clearinghouses says that they need to do things like move checks, money transfers, and whatnot. I don't think just "storing information" qualifies, unfortunately.
That is easily fixed. Once Google shares the medical information with another party (or subsidiary) then they can "officially" be called a clearinghouse.
Make no mistake Google is a clearinghouse for all your information...
Google does not provide medical services, which is why they are not bound to the provisions of HIPAA.
While Google may not be practicing medicine, they are now inside the "health services" realm. HIPPA was suppose to protect the patient from having their medical information mishandled by those that are keeping the information. This not only includes their doctors, but also their insurance companies, and the medical record storage companies.
Not quite. If one of the main attributes of Open Source software was not to have duplicate work, we should tell vim, emacs, gnome, KDE, openbsd, freebsd,...
That's competition, there is a subtle difference.
There's a difference between "wanting to create a new product" and "wanting to improve an existing product". I would say the ability to improve an existing product is one of the main attributes of Open Source. I have all the source code, so I only need to change what is necessary for my improvement. The fact that some may decide to create a whole different application that does the same thing does not diminish the ability of not having to duplicate work (Maybe they had a difference in philosophy or just felt the need to start over from scratch).
But the main point is, everything that Red Hat does is Open Source and Canonical can reuse that. The problem is that reusing that with a different version of frozen software again requires a lot of effort, hence Ubuntu's request for aligning releases.
This is where the motive of self-preservation comes in. If my goal is to fill a void in my perceived market, I would want to do that in a manner that would cost me the least amount of money.
So we agree that if the releases were synchronized, Canonical would benefit at Red Hat's expense. My point has always been "so what?" What makes Red Hat deserving of special treatment? They may not had a hand in creating all the rules associated with the market that made them a lot of wealth, but they knew all the pitfalls beforehand (ie. Don't hate the player, hate the game).
I do not agree. Ubuntu is both bleeding edge and stable. In this whole discussion you are comparing Ubuntu with RHEL, while you should be comparing Ubuntu LTS with RHEL. Like Ubuntu LTS 6.06 with RHEL 5, Ubuntu LTS sucked in comparison to RHEL 5 and the reason is the one year difference. Similar to RHEL5 compared to Ubuntu LTS 8.04.
Wait, I might have introduced some confusion here (nothing new). When I said :
I don't think anybody in their right mind would confuse Ubuntu with the bleeding edge of Linux engineering.
I meant to say Canonical (the company) not Ubuntu (the distribution). My bad, I got a little tripped up since RedHat is both a company name and a distribution...
I intended to say that no one would view Canonical as being on the bleeding edge of Linux engineering (innovation wise).
While RedHat has a reputation of funding and/or being directly involved with developing features for Linux. I would say that Canonical is known for packaging Linux in a way that would make those advance features accessible to a less tech-savvy population (which isn't really that easy).
I know there is bleeding edge software in the distribution (Hell even the current LTS has beta software in it) and did not mean to say otherwise.
Now the opinions over quality of distribution doesn't really enter into this discussion since we are talking about reuse. But since I did share the reasons why I personally stopped using RedHat (The subscription model was inappropriate for those who never needed tech support) and Fedora (The lack of quality at the time).
For the record, it was the transition from Fedora Core 4 to Core 5 that was the final straw for me. There were some security exploits in a couple of programs that we used, the update was available on Core 5 but there was no effort to backport to Core 4. Core 5 was a perfect storm of a major glib change and the LegacyGroup disbanding. I tried to upgrade to Core 5 (fresh install was not an option at the time) and of course the system was toast. I took the opportunity to try Ubuntu Server and never had the fore mention problems again.
To be fair, I believe Fedora finally got the back porting as an official repository in Core 6. However, I haven't had a reason to switch back...
The thorn in RedHat's side at the time was Mandrake. Mandrake was to RedHat as Kubuntu is to Ubuntu.
Mandrake was actually becoming more popular than RedHat, and I could see the resentment forming. RedHat brought it on themselves by not only holding steadfast to Gnome as the one true desktop, but breaking the KDE that shipped with their distribution at the time (Oh the scars of the bluecurve flamefest). Anyway, as KDE became popular so did Mandrake at the expense of RedHat.
After shutting off the spigot so to speak, Mandrake went through some big financial troubles. Eventually they renamed themselve Mandriva because of a trademark dispute, but they still exist today.
Ironically unlike RedHat, Madriva still makes their official distributions available to the public for free and have 2 derivatives (MCNLive and PCLinuxOS).
When Fedora was created, I remember RedHat saying that they didn't like their name being distributed with the many RedHat derivatives that were out there at the time.
Their reasoning was that it would be harder for them to defend their trademark on the "RedHat" if they continued to allow derivatives to redistribute their work. So they pulled all the ISOs of what is now called RHEL, and made the red-headed step child named Fedora... No offence to Fedora or red-headed step children...;-)
I always suspected that even though they are taking advantage of the liberal distribution policy given by the open source software that they redistribute, they personally don't like people taking advantage of their work. Coincidently, this attitude shows itself in the Slashdot story that we are commenting on.
I am saying there is an ulterior motive for Canonical to synchronise their releases with other Enterprise distributions.
No duh. Every distribution has an ulterior motive, especially one of self preservation.
Canonical does not have the workforce to do what Novell and Red Hat are doing and by aligning releases they can much easier just take that work instead of having to re-apply it to their own frozen releases of software.
So? I thought one of the main attributes of Open Source software was not to have to duplicate work.
...except maybe the perception they create and the fact they won't be leading engineering.
I don't think anybody in their right mind would confuse Ubuntu with the bleeding edge of Linux engineering. Having said that, Ubuntu seems better at creating distributions targeted at the masses better than RedHat. Not to mention, it is the threat posed by Ubuntu that is giving RedHat the incentive to put more effort into Fedora.
There are some other false statements (and emotions) in your comment,...
What? Did you mean to call me a liar, a shrill, or both? Which part of my comment amused you? The fact that I personally supported RedHat as a paying customer (which is true), the fact that RedHat doesn't make it easy for someone to get the 'enterprised edition' easily and with regular updates directly from RedHat (Thank you CentOS and Scientific Linux for making this possible), or the fact that evidently until recently Fedora had a bad habit of not supporting their core releases after the new one was released (Oh yea that is what RHEL is for).
but they are a very good source for another opinion piece:-) Thanks for that !
Opinions are like assholes - everyone has one, and Slashdot has a large number of both. I think I am beginning to see the real devil behind the devil's advocate...
This abandoning the desktop talk really annoys me.
I'm annoyed by it too, but not for the same reason you gave.
I think when they say "desktop", they really mean Home/Small business market. I guess they are trying to refer to what people are running on their desktops (the furniture not the graphical metaphore), rather than what is being used in a server or rack-mount machine.
For the record, Red Hat did abandon the Home/Small business market, and gave Fedora as a consolation prize.
I gave up on RedHat a long time ago, but I still have some scientists who insist on using Scientific Linux. Your repositories makes life with Scientific Linux bearable... Thanks! Bill
I left Fedora for Ubuntu back when Fedora dropped the ball on back-porting security updates. To be fair, The group responsible ('LegacyGroup'? I forgot the name) just disbanded and Fedora was in a state of flux. Anyway, I went Ubuntu and never came back.
The lack of back-porting was the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak, since I felt snubbed by RedHat when they no longer made their 'stable' distribution available to the non-enterprise user for a reasonable amount of money. I was a paying customer (still have some of the retail boxes including RH4) from nearly the very beginning, and the "Thanks for funding our venture, but now that we hit it big you can go f*** yourself unless you want to pay for RHEL..." attitude just didn't sit right with me.
Anyway...
I don't understand Dag Wieers' problem? He's upset that Ubuntu may be benefitting from Red Hat's work on a piece of GPL software that allows for the free distribution of derivative works? It was this attitude that caused backlash toward RedHat which forced them to introduce Fedora in the first place. Am I the only person who remembers Red Hat as trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux realm?
Anyone else notice that he gives CentOS a pass, since they don't compete by offering any paid customer support? It is as if to say:
Sure we support the concept of Open Source and the ideas behind the GPL. Just look at how we allow CentOS to use our code (even though we really don't have a choice). Ubuntu may make money using the same code? Those filthy bastards... I know let's start some negative publicity and let the Fedora fanbois defend our comments.
Sigh.. Like it's Ubuntu's fault that Red Hat made the decision to not directly support the small business/home user market.
Don't get me wrong. If you think it's OK to be a permanent beta tester for a corporation that won't allow you to download a final (with support available) product then by all means use Fedora. All I ask is not to belittle Ubuntu for not being a corporate prick too.
Maybe someone can explain why the act of entering the country nullifies my constitutional rights.
Because technically it doesn't. You said it yourself:
Not according to the Fourth Amendment to the US constitution: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
I changed the emphasis, but as you can see the 4th amendment only protects you from unreasonable searches. Most people believe that searching a person's belongings before granting entry into a country is a reasonable search.
I have a Quad-Core 3.0 and I can tell you, with the GPUs that came with it, I can barely play WoW, nevermind any other new games.
I'm having no troubles running WoW on my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with only 2GB of RAM. It even works great when I use my 24" wide-screen external monitor at it's native resolution.
The only time I heard people complain about the performance of WoW, was when they didn't realize that WoW runs natively on the Mac and were running it within Parallels....
I think you and Kjella are almost saying the same thing, or I may be confused. Please entertain the following:
But this would be more akin to the government claiming the right to tell you exactly how you can (and, by implication, how you can't) drive in your car, anywhere, for any purpose.
The government does have the authority to tell you how to drive your car on public roads. You can't drive over the posted speed limit. You can't run a stop light. You can't drive while intoxicated. You can't drive without a license...
So if someone drives the way they are told they can, and hits me, does this mean the government is responsible?
No. The government doesn't allow people to hit you, nor do they instruct people to hit you.
Basically, my point is that the right to authorize use is similar to responsibility for how it is used under that authorization.
Nope. It's already been determined in the courts. You are authorized to use your VCR to tape shows, but the VCR manufacture is not responsible if you decide to pirate videos.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree.
This sounds more like a scam than anything else.
Evidently these guys choose to ignore the existence of AOL and Prodigy that used images as links (even for keyword searches) during the last millennium.
Besides, prior art doesn't require "wide usage" anyway.
Sure if it prevents countless Amber Alerts...
But I do get your point about not being able to call phoneless parents. I think it's unlikely that both parents will have a smart phone.
What's the big deal? I thought GSM phones were big in the UK. Just leave the Smartphone at home, and place your SIM card in a cheap cell phone when your at the amusement park. Contrary to popular believe you won't die from not being able to check your email, and your business won't suffer if you take a single day off. If it does then you have bigger worries than a policy at an amusement park.
What about road debris? (Rocks, Tires, Trash are dangerous at high speeds too).
At least with a motorcycle, you have the windshield and the actual bike. I don't see much protection offered by this design...
I didn't say that cheap labor was the main reason behind Google having offices in other countries. I think you're being naive to think that it's not one of the perks of having foreign offices (especially for a company based entirely on the Internet).
I said higher wages would be a consequence as an answer to:
Since:
a) Google, being a creation of the Internet, doesn't have to actually be in that country to sell ads or other services.
b) It would cost them more money to hire workers elsewhere, or bring in foreign workers from their target markets.
Maybe, but I'm probably just as qualified as your are :P.
The main reason Google has foreign offices is money. They have a target market, and having a local presence within that market lowers their operating costs. However, Google is not required to have a local presence to service that market.
Troll? Sheez, tough crowd...
Is it too early in the day for humor?
That is easily fixed. Once Google shares the medical information with another party (or subsidiary) then they can "officially" be called a clearinghouse.
Make no mistake Google is a clearinghouse for all your information...
While Google may not be practicing medicine, they are now inside the "health services" realm. HIPPA was suppose to protect the patient from having their medical information mishandled by those that are keeping the information. This not only includes their doctors, but also their insurance companies, and the medical record storage companies.
Pay higher wages somewhere else?
What caused pdns_recursor to crash today?
That's competition, there is a subtle difference.
There's a difference between "wanting to create a new product" and "wanting to improve an existing product". I would say the ability to improve an existing product is one of the main attributes of Open Source. I have all the source code, so I only need to change what is necessary for my improvement. The fact that some may decide to create a whole different application that does the same thing does not diminish the ability of not having to duplicate work (Maybe they had a difference in philosophy or just felt the need to start over from scratch).
This is where the motive of self-preservation comes in. If my goal is to fill a void in my perceived market, I would want to do that in a manner that would cost me the least amount of money.
So we agree that if the releases were synchronized, Canonical would benefit at Red Hat's expense. My point has always been "so what?" What makes Red Hat deserving of special treatment? They may not had a hand in creating all the rules associated with the market that made them a lot of wealth, but they knew all the pitfalls beforehand (ie. Don't hate the player, hate the game).
Wait, I might have introduced some confusion here (nothing new). When I said :
I meant to say Canonical (the company) not Ubuntu (the distribution). My bad, I got a little tripped up since RedHat is both a company name and a distribution...
I intended to say that no one would view Canonical as being on the bleeding edge of Linux engineering (innovation wise).
While RedHat has a reputation of funding and/or being directly involved with developing features for Linux. I would say that Canonical is known for packaging Linux in a way that would make those advance features accessible to a less tech-savvy population (which isn't really that easy).
I know there is bleeding edge software in the distribution (Hell even the current LTS has beta software in it) and did not mean to say otherwise.
Now the opinions over quality of distribution doesn't really enter into this discussion since we are talking about reuse. But since I did share the reasons why I personally stopped using RedHat (The subscription model was inappropriate for those who never needed tech support) and Fedora (The lack of quality at the time).
For the record, it was the transition from Fedora Core 4 to Core 5 that was the final straw for me. There were some security exploits in a couple of programs that we used, the update was available on Core 5 but there was no effort to backport to Core 4. Core 5 was a perfect storm of a major glib change and the LegacyGroup disbanding. I tried to upgrade to Core 5 (fresh install was not an option at the time) and of course the system was toast. I took the opportunity to try Ubuntu Server and never had the fore mention problems again.
To be fair, I believe Fedora finally got the back porting as an official repository in Core 6. However, I haven't had a reason to switch back...
Other than Ubuntu LTS is Ubuntu that has long term support, while fedoraprojects is sorta like RHEL. No you didn't miss anything...
Jeez I keep hitting the submit button too early.
On more thing for the younger people:
The thorn in RedHat's side at the time was Mandrake. Mandrake was to RedHat as Kubuntu is to Ubuntu.
Mandrake was actually becoming more popular than RedHat, and I could see the resentment forming. RedHat brought it on themselves by not only holding steadfast to Gnome as the one true desktop, but breaking the KDE that shipped with their distribution at the time (Oh the scars of the bluecurve flamefest). Anyway, as KDE became popular so did Mandrake at the expense of RedHat.
After shutting off the spigot so to speak, Mandrake went through some big financial troubles. Eventually they renamed themselve Mandriva because of a trademark dispute, but they still exist today.
Ironically unlike RedHat, Madriva still makes their official distributions available to the public for free and have 2 derivatives (MCNLive and PCLinuxOS).
When Fedora was created, I remember RedHat saying that they didn't like their name being distributed with the many RedHat derivatives that were out there at the time.
Their reasoning was that it would be harder for them to defend their trademark on the "RedHat" if they continued to allow derivatives to redistribute their work. So they pulled all the ISOs of what is now called RHEL, and made the red-headed step child named Fedora... No offence to Fedora or red-headed step children... ;-)
I always suspected that even though they are taking advantage of the liberal distribution policy given by the open source software that they redistribute, they personally don't like people taking advantage of their work. Coincidently, this attitude shows itself in the Slashdot story that we are commenting on.
OK. Let me go ahead apologize in advance. I am only running off of 2 hours sleep, so I may be a little cranky... ;-)
Yes.
No duh. Every distribution has an ulterior motive, especially one of self preservation.
So? I thought one of the main attributes of Open Source software was not to have to duplicate work.
I don't think anybody in their right mind would confuse Ubuntu with the bleeding edge of Linux engineering. Having said that, Ubuntu seems better at creating distributions targeted at the masses better than RedHat. Not to mention, it is the threat posed by Ubuntu that is giving RedHat the incentive to put more effort into Fedora.
What? Did you mean to call me a liar, a shrill, or both? Which part of my comment amused you? The fact that I personally supported RedHat as a paying customer (which is true), the fact that RedHat doesn't make it easy for someone to get the 'enterprised edition' easily and with regular updates directly from RedHat (Thank you CentOS and Scientific Linux for making this possible), or the fact that evidently until recently Fedora had a bad habit of not supporting their core releases after the new one was released (Oh yea that is what RHEL is for).
Opinions are like assholes - everyone has one, and Slashdot has a large number of both. I think I am beginning to see the real devil behind the devil's advocate...
I'm annoyed by it too, but not for the same reason you gave.
I think when they say "desktop", they really mean Home/Small business market. I guess they are trying to refer to what people are running on their desktops (the furniture not the graphical metaphore), rather than what is being used in a server or rack-mount machine.
For the record, Red Hat did abandon the Home/Small business market, and gave Fedora as a consolation prize.
Yes I do now realize he was playing "Devil's advocate." I'm just fighting insomnia way past 1:00 am...
So please allow the following correction:
I don't understand the problem of the devil for which dag is advocating.
There I feel a little better (even though my grammar still sucks).
I gave up on RedHat a long time ago, but I still have some scientists who insist on using Scientific Linux. Your repositories makes life with Scientific Linux bearable... Thanks! Bill
I left Fedora for Ubuntu back when Fedora dropped the ball on back-porting security updates. To be fair, The group responsible ('LegacyGroup'? I forgot the name) just disbanded and Fedora was in a state of flux. Anyway, I went Ubuntu and never came back.
The lack of back-porting was the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak, since I felt snubbed by RedHat when they no longer made their 'stable' distribution available to the non-enterprise user for a reasonable amount of money. I was a paying customer (still have some of the retail boxes including RH4) from nearly the very beginning, and the "Thanks for funding our venture, but now that we hit it big you can go f*** yourself unless you want to pay for RHEL..." attitude just didn't sit right with me.
Anyway...
I don't understand Dag Wieers' problem? He's upset that Ubuntu may be benefitting from Red Hat's work on a piece of GPL software that allows for the free distribution of derivative works? It was this attitude that caused backlash toward RedHat which forced them to introduce Fedora in the first place. Am I the only person who remembers Red Hat as trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux realm?
Anyone else notice that he gives CentOS a pass, since they don't compete by offering any paid customer support? It is as if to say:
Sure we support the concept of Open Source and the ideas behind the GPL. Just look at how we allow CentOS to use our code (even though we really don't have a choice). Ubuntu may make money using the same code? Those filthy bastards... I know let's start some negative publicity and let the Fedora fanbois defend our comments.
Sigh.. Like it's Ubuntu's fault that Red Hat made the decision to not directly support the small business/home user market.
Don't get me wrong. If you think it's OK to be a permanent beta tester for a corporation that won't allow you to download a final (with support available) product then by all means use Fedora. All I ask is not to belittle Ubuntu for not being a corporate prick too.
IANAL.
Because technically it doesn't. You said it yourself:
I changed the emphasis, but as you can see the 4th amendment only protects you from unreasonable searches. Most people believe that searching a person's belongings before granting entry into a country is a reasonable search.
I'm having no troubles running WoW on my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with only 2GB of RAM. It even works great when I use my 24" wide-screen external monitor at it's native resolution.
The only time I heard people complain about the performance of WoW, was when they didn't realize that WoW runs natively on the Mac and were running it within Parallels....
Why spend extra money on SSD when a mechanical drive will work?
Also, would they have been able to recover the data if they have used an SSD?
BTW I am not a lawyer... As if it wasn't obvious already ;)
I think you and Kjella are almost saying the same thing, or I may be confused. Please entertain the following:
The government does have the authority to tell you how to drive your car on public roads. You can't drive over the posted speed limit. You can't run a stop light. You can't drive while intoxicated. You can't drive without a license...
No. The government doesn't allow people to hit you, nor do they instruct people to hit you.
Nope. It's already been determined in the courts. You are authorized to use your VCR to tape shows, but the VCR manufacture is not responsible if you decide to pirate videos.