Companies that want to IPOs must put every scary fact or possibility out there in the prospectus and the IPO filings. Those are the rules. Furthermore, if something bad should happen to Red Hat's revenue stream in the future, and the possibility (even a remote possibility) of this happening could be forseen, but Red Hat didn't alert investors about this possibility, then the Red Hat principals could be sued or even criminally prosecuted.
For that reason, you can expect to read all kinds of dire things in the Red Hat IPO documents. They must spell out in big letters that investment in Red Hat is risky, even if they are convinced that Red Hat will conquer all obstacles and make piles of money.
Even after a company goes public, the quarterly filings with the SEC (the 10-Q statements) are always full of such warnings. The Linux community got all excited when Microsoft's SEC filing said that Linux was a possible threat to Microsoft's revenue stream. This statement doesn't mean that Microsoft believes it; it only means that they think that it is at least a very remote possibility.
Abraham Lincoln never said "no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent." It's stupid to think that the man who led the Union side of the Civil War could think such a thing. After all, the South did not consent to be part of the US, and Lincoln insisted that the country remain united anyway.
This and other sayings attributed to Abraham Lincoln were spread around by John Birch Society pamphlets, and seem to have no validity at all (he never said them, and probably never believed them).
But the LGPL also have problems; it isn't suitable for embedded systems customers, who have, in effect, been paying most of the bills for gcc development (via Cygnus support contracts). Switching libio to the LGPL would not be acceptable to the people that are doing or paying for most of the work.
The current license (GPL with special exception) requires that at least one.o file be compiled with gcc. But the LGPL has many more requirements: the executable must be shipped in linkable form, and there are other requirements as well.
Switching libio to the LGPL will make matters worse for many. Some other solution is needed.
If using the concept of archetypes is a sign that someone is an ass, Lucas is an ass. The source for the idea that Lucas is using concepts out of Joseph Campbell to construct Star Wars, complete with archetypical heros and villians, is... Lucas himself.
As for your last question: the fact that you rebel against a despot doesn't mean you're a democrat. It may just mean that you believe that someone else has the right to be despot (e.g. you think Princess Leia should be the queen, with powers like those of Elizabeth I).
In the end, you're just defending illiteracy. Anyone who analyzes the sources of a film or book you dismiss as "a middle-aged English teacher".
Perhaps Marcvs is unfamiliar with how countries with parliamentary systems work. Generally speaking, there is a president whose powers are mostly ceremonial except for times where there is a change of governments. At that point, if one party has a majority, there isn't a choice: the leader of that party gets to be prime minister or premier or chancellor. If no party has the majority, the president has some choice who to appoint, but the appointment is only successful if the appointee forms a successful coalition. In this case, Hindinberg picked Hitler. While Hitler's own party didn't have a majority, he had allies in other parties. These allies thought they could control Hitler; they were about as wrong as they could be, but that's why they went along.
What this means is that Hitler gained power by standard constitutional means; dozens of other leaders of democratic countries gained power in the same way (e.g. the current chancellor of Germany, who also doesn't have a majority).
Hitler later managed to abolish democracy. But at the time that he did this, he was wildly popular.
I've known RMS for years and because of my involvement with egcs/gcc, have exchanged tons of emails and had face-to-face discussions. I know what his position is.
Your remark claiming that the gcc manual copyright "sounds so much like a paper-published version of the GPL" suggests that you have not read the GPL.
Yes, RMS encourages copylefted documentation, but he never uses the GPL for that purpose and tells others the same thing. The FSF has never GPLed a manual. You are confused.
RMS has stressed the importance of free manuals that grant permission to others to modify the manuals as the software they describe is modified. The copyright notice must state this. But that is done with explicit text, and the terms of the GPL that clearly apply to programs should not be used.
Since RMS, the author of the GPL, says that the GPL is not an appropriate license for books, I am puzzled as to why it is being used.
For one thing, a GPLed book cannot contain the text of the GPL itself. The GPL is, of course copyrighted, and its copyright says that you can copy it verbatim but you can't modify it (if you could modify it, you'd be changing the license).
GNU manuals are distributed with a copyright that permits free copying, translation to other languages, and modification of most of the manual, but that also states what sections cannot be modified.
If you use the GPL for a book, is it legal for me to give a printout to a friend? It seems I must offer them the Latex source, or even give them a written offer good for three years to get the source!
I strongly suggest that the authors of this book take a look at these licenses, and possibly ask RMS for clarification. The GPL is not for books.
OK, the person who wrote this page is a poor English speaker. But the irony is that most of those of you that are laughing at him are completely monolingual, and can't speak or write any non-English language as well as this person wrote English (and no, your knowledge of computer languages, in which all the keywords are English words, isn't an argument against this point).
If anything, the poor English is a good sign that the people putting this site up are technical and have the information we need. If it were marketing people, their English would be perfect but they wouldn't know anything.
The Slashdot community could react to this effort to reach out with a wave of ridicule, or we could say "thanks... here's what we need." You decide.
Scott McNealy of Sun doesn't want a fair software industry for all. He wants to be Bill Gates. The same is true of most of the other big egos in the executive suites.
Both Sun and Netscape tried the monopoly game. Netscape, for a while, was unilaterally defining what the web was going to be. Sun's model for Java was that everyone would run Java on everything and would pay Sun for the privilege, so that Sun, rather than Microsoft, would in effect get to be the tax collector for the net.
Reflexive rejection of all things Microsoft is stupid. Sometimes they do the right thing for perhaps the wrong reasons (e.g. help undermine Sun's attempt to be the Microsoft of Java by supporting Kaffe, which is free software). People who think the game is about defeating MS are missing the point.
Microsoft needs to be contained, and prevented from capturing the open standards the net is based on. But the same is true of Sun, and AOL, and the phone companies, and the cable companies.
We've seen repeated evidence that it is not the whole community that is the problem. There are far more rude Slashdot readers than LWN or Linux Today readers. (There are plenty of intelligent Slashdot readers but there is a virulent minority that gives the site a bad name).
Example: several times a story appears first on LinuxToday and later on Slashdot. Journalists report that the tone of the responses changes after it gets picked up on Slashdot, because the proportion of flamers is just higher here, and because the LinuxToday people are much more likely than the Slashdot people to add "if you respond, be polite and coherent" warnings. When it's on LinuxToday only, the responses may flame the journalist but they are literate and well-thought-out. When it's on Slashdot it's more like "you suck! How much does Bill Gates pay you?".
For this reason, I suggest that Slashdot avoid carrying "some journalist said something stupid" articles. People who want to find such things can go elsewhere.
While the distorted way the graphs are drawn is a form of cheating, the SPEC benchmarks are industry standard and very hard to cheat, because the rules are very tight, so the underlying numbers can be counted on: the new processor is a hair better than the PIII for integer, with a more significant gain for floating point. Of course this doesn't mean that your floating point program will run 50% faster, but as benchmarks go SPEC is about the best available.
The real question, though, is whether AMD will be able to manufacture this processor with sufficient yield to be able to meet demand or make money. In the past, the fact that they haven't been able to do this is the primary reason that AMD has lost money in recent years. If they can't convince the PC manufacturers that they have their past problems beat, no one will do a deal with them and the speed of the processor will not matter.
Your anti-government ideology is so strong that it blinds you to the truth.
ARPA and the NSF did an excellent job managing the Internet through its many years of astronomical growth. This government (and government contractor) design out-competed all of the commercial, proprietary networks, which are slowly dying out. Despite the problems, hundreds of millions of people successfully use the net. It's been a huge success.
The net has been a success precisely because its design violates most of the prejudices of libertarians: though run as a government project, the net is far more decentralized than the proprietary networking schemes of the times (from IBM, DEC, or the telephone companies, for example). Libertarians seem to think that a government would produce a centralized system and a private company would produce a decentralized system. In most cases, the opposite is more likely to be true: companies are dictatorships, and they need a central point to get the money out.
By saying things like "they're the ones who didn't forsee these problems" you are imposing an impossible standard. No one forsaw the day, back when NSI was granted the contract, when www.mycompany.com would be on every billboard. The net was run by researchers and academics who made one very serious mistake: they assumed that people would act decently. There were two places in the system that were centralized: IP address assignments (run in a decent manner by Jon Postel) and top level domain administration (run in a less decent manner by NSI).
So yes, in the process, some mistakes were made. The primary mistake appears to be that Network Solutions' contract wasn't written as carefully as it should have been, so that NSI has managed to subvert the original intent.
But it's not clear that your central charge is at all correct: They're the ones who allowed a private company to turn public databases into a propriatary internal corporate database. Says who? NSI says that the whois database is their property, but many others disagree and no court has so ruled.
Whatever federal agency that administers NSI's contract should sue NSI for the database. It doesn't belong to NSI, they simply had the contract to run it. Yes, they put in labor to collect the database, but they have already been compensated for this labor.
Like many in the BSD world, you are confused about how Linux operates. NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are distributions, and are therefore properly compared to Debian, Red Hat, or SUSE, not Linux. Different distributions will have better or worse security policies.
Your claim that this incident is an argument in favor of OpenBSD's "total code review", however, is utter crap: OpenBSD's code review would not necessarily have saved an OpenBSD distributor from making a mistake like this. The bug could have been introduced at the last minute by whoever pressed the CD-ROMs. The worm was not present as source code in the original distribution, so there is nothing to catch by doing a review. And the OpenBSD people are good, but they are not perfect.
The Linux vendors definitely need to improve their security reviews. However, even with the way it is now, it's far better than what we used to get from commercial Unix vendors (who would typically ship with critical files world-writable, with programs setuid that were never designed that way).
The plan is to release security upgrades if needed.
For new devices, it's possible for third parties to provide drivers (however, USB may be another matter, requiring too much effort for all but the most senior kernel gurus to backport).
Userland programs don't care about the kernel, and it is never true that the source for something like gtk would need a particular C library (though someone's pre-installed binary might). Newer glibc's will run on older kernels, as well as non-Linux kernels; you can run Gnome on BSD or Unix systems.
If you let yourself fall way behind, it may mean that you have to build some software from source, rather than just install from an RPM or the 21st century equivalent.
While Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the desktop, they are not doing nearly so well in the server space, which is what tests like these are about. Linux or Solaris boxes running Samba are direct competition for NT Server seats, and are winning that competition in many cases.
The existence of competition in some of Microsoft's markets doesn't help them in claiming that they don't have a monopoly in other markets.
You are completely clueless, and do not know what FUD means. People like you, GiMP, give Linux advocates a bad name. It is astounding that you would present such an attack on a journalist who has demonstrated himself to be a friend of Linux. Don't you realize that it is people like you who are causing Linux to get poor press (by getting journalists pissed off at the whole Linux community)?
Get a clue: Linux is not currently the best at everything. Given the rapid rate of improvement, Linux will soon win in categories where it does not currently win, but if you are such a moron as to think that anyone who suggests that Linux is not currently the best OS for any conceivable application is in Microsoft's pay, then please just shut up.
There's a reason that the trade press just stopped writing about the Amiga: it's because any time they printed anything other than press releases from Commodore they were assaulted by people like you. So the path of least resistance was simply to not write about the Amiga at all.
The test is a replay of the Mindcraft test which is slanted to favor NT. The guy who did Samba has already said that, for this case, NT beats Samba. It is not FUD to print the truth.
Brin doesn't believe that "privacy is a tool of evil". Rather, he believes that privacy is doomed, so the closest we can come to freedom is to make sure that privacy gets invaded equally: not only can the cops watch you, but you can watch the cops. It's a provocative point of view, one that I'm not sure I agree with, but those attempting to smear him for it, distorting his position, are either ignorant or just evil.
And, of course, movies are propaganda, the most effective kind. Why shouldn't we take a billion-dollar industry seriously?
It seems that we need to update Godwin's law: it used to be fashionable to try to kill argument by comparing your opponent to Hitler. Lately, it seems that Stalin is the new favorite.
The person I am responding to seems to think that David Brin's critique of Star Wars is "almost Stalinist". Yeah, right. What rhetoric are you going to have left for when someone does something really bad, like deliberately force millions of people to starve to get them to accept your new way of organizing society and killing millions more?
Time to decide: free software, or Microsoft hatred
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Java-Clone Announced
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Time to decide: do you care about free software/open source, or do you just hate Microsoft? Too many slashdotters would chop off their own noses just to get at Bill Gates, backing outcomes that would damage the free software movement if only it would be a defeat for Microsoft.
In the case of Java, Sun wasn't interested in giving users freedom: Scott McNealy wanted to usurp Bill Gates' position and become Bill Gates himself. Everyone would run Java, and Sun would control Java, just as firmly as Microsoft now controls Windows. Everyone would have to supply Java, and everyone would have to pay Sun. Instead of a Microsoft tax on the Internet, we would have a Sun tax.
Kaffe is GPLed (and yes, there is also a non-free version). To the extent that Microsoft seems to be helping with that, great; it is only a tactical move on MS's part, but no matter; it is as important to break Sun's control over Java as it is to break MS's control over the desktop.
It appears that `lamer' has chosen a good handle for himself. Anyone reading the article would notice that the article itself quotes several notable people as saying that Microsoft's poor security is a major part of the problem, and that many non-ISS people (e.g. Marcus Ranum, who pioneered firewalls as we know them today, and is directly quoted attacking NT's security) were interviewed. The author obviously did plenty of research.
While the article is not perfect, it's about the best thing I've seen in the mainstream media on the subject. Yes, ISS gets more plugs than they perhaps deserve. But you can't do a "white hats vs black hats" story without interviewing the best-known and most financially successful white hats.
You don't only depend on the segment of wire that comes into your house. If the backbone on the net is terabit instead of gigabit, you're more likely to be able to actually use the lower bandwidth you're paying for, even if you're hitting sites everyone else is hitting.
Your parents are wrong: long distance was wildly expensive pre-1984, and while local rates went up somewhat, it's not that much once you take inflation into account.
I say fuck antitrust laws, you say. Fine. Let's go to the world of 1984. You can't buy a modem; you can only rent one from the phone company at a steep rate, so much so that most people use acoustic couplers that can't possibly get more than 1200 bits/sec. You get cheap local calls, but calling out of town costs 10x as much as what you pay today.
If Ma Bell hadn't been broken up, the net as you know it would not exist. Yes, there would be an Internet, but since all the long-distance lines would have to be leased from a monopolist at monopoly rates, it would cost at least ten times as much to have access, and since Ma Bell was extremely, extremely conservative about what types of equipment could be attached to the phone network, there would be far less innovation. No internal modems for PCs, that's for sure. You'd have to use external boxes leased from the phone company.
Sorry, but your history is wrong. XEmacs started as Lucid Emacs, a project by Lucid, Inc. to create a front end to their commercial Energize IDE. This started before Emacs 19 was out. The main reason for forking was technical differences. Lucid had no problem at the time with giving the changes back to RMS. But RMS didn't want a lot of them: he disagreed with the Lucid folks on a number of issues.
Problems with assignments have made it harder to re-unify the Emacses, but the major contributors (e.g. Lucid) did sign (so all the original work people like jwz did while at Lucid could be used in the FSF Emacs).
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To compile Linux 2.2x with gcc 2.95, you need to include the flag -fno-strict-aliasing
This flag is needed if you have code that does things like try to read an array of longs as an array of shorts, without using unions.
Companies that want to IPOs must put every scary fact or possibility out there in the prospectus and the IPO filings. Those are the rules. Furthermore, if something bad should happen to Red Hat's revenue stream in the future, and the possibility (even a remote possibility) of this happening could be forseen, but Red Hat didn't alert investors about this possibility, then the Red Hat principals could be sued or even criminally prosecuted.
For that reason, you can expect to read all kinds of dire things in the Red Hat IPO documents. They must spell out in big letters that investment in Red Hat is risky, even if they are convinced that Red Hat will conquer all obstacles and make piles of money.
Even after a company goes public, the quarterly filings with the SEC (the 10-Q statements) are always full of such warnings. The Linux community got all excited when Microsoft's SEC filing said that Linux was a possible threat to Microsoft's revenue stream. This statement doesn't mean that Microsoft believes it; it only means that they think that it is at least a very remote possibility.
Abraham Lincoln never said "no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent." It's stupid to think that the man who led the Union side of the Civil War could think such a thing. After all, the South did not consent to be part of the US, and Lincoln insisted that the country remain united anyway.
This and other sayings attributed to Abraham Lincoln were spread around by John Birch Society pamphlets, and seem to have no validity at all (he never said them, and probably never believed them).
The guy who runs Gnome is not a Red Hat employee.
But the LGPL also have problems; it isn't suitable for embedded systems customers, who have, in effect, been paying most of the bills for gcc development (via Cygnus support contracts). Switching libio to the LGPL would not be acceptable to the people that are doing or paying for most of the work.
The current license (GPL with special exception) requires that at least one .o file be compiled with gcc. But the LGPL has many more requirements: the executable must be shipped in linkable form, and there are other requirements as well.
Switching libio to the LGPL will make matters worse for many. Some other solution is needed.
If using the concept of archetypes is a sign that someone is an ass, Lucas is an ass. The source for the idea that Lucas is using concepts out of Joseph Campbell to construct Star Wars, complete with archetypical heros and villians, is ... Lucas himself.
As for your last question: the fact that you rebel against a despot doesn't mean you're a democrat. It may just mean that you believe that someone else has the right to be despot (e.g. you think Princess Leia should be the queen, with powers like those of Elizabeth I).
In the end, you're just defending illiteracy. Anyone who analyzes the sources of a film or book you dismiss as "a middle-aged English teacher".
Perhaps Marcvs is unfamiliar with how countries with parliamentary systems work. Generally speaking, there is a president whose powers are mostly ceremonial except for times where there is a change of governments. At that point, if one party has a majority, there isn't a choice: the leader of that party gets to be prime minister or premier or chancellor. If no party has the majority, the president has some choice who to appoint, but the appointment is only successful if the appointee forms a successful coalition. In this case, Hindinberg picked Hitler. While Hitler's own party didn't have a majority, he had allies in other parties. These allies thought they could control Hitler; they were about as wrong as they could be, but that's why they went along.
What this means is that Hitler gained power by standard constitutional means; dozens of other leaders of democratic countries gained power in the same way (e.g. the current chancellor of Germany, who also doesn't have a majority).
Hitler later managed to abolish democracy. But at the time that he did this, he was wildly popular.
I've known RMS for years and because of my involvement with egcs/gcc, have exchanged tons of emails and had face-to-face discussions. I know what his position is.
Your remark claiming that the gcc manual copyright "sounds so much like a paper-published version of the GPL" suggests that you have not read the GPL.
Yes, RMS encourages copylefted documentation, but he never uses the GPL for that purpose and tells others the same thing. The FSF has never GPLed a manual. You are confused.
RMS has stressed the importance of free manuals that grant permission to others to modify the manuals as the software they describe is modified. The copyright notice must state this. But that is done with explicit text, and the terms of the GPL that clearly apply to programs should not be used.
Since RMS, the author of the GPL, says that the GPL is not an appropriate license for books, I am puzzled as to why it is being used.
For one thing, a GPLed book cannot contain the text of the GPL itself. The GPL is, of course copyrighted, and its copyright says that you can copy it verbatim but you can't modify it (if you could modify it, you'd be changing the license).
GNU manuals are distributed with a copyright that permits free copying, translation to other languages, and modification of most of the manual, but that also states what sections cannot be modified.
If you use the GPL for a book, is it legal for me to give a printout to a friend? It seems I must offer them the Latex source, or even give them a written offer good for three years to get the source!
I strongly suggest that the authors of this book take a look at these licenses, and possibly ask RMS for clarification. The GPL is not for books.
OK, the person who wrote this page is a poor English speaker. But the irony is that most of those of you that are laughing at him are completely monolingual, and can't speak or write any non-English language as well as this person wrote English (and no, your knowledge of computer languages, in which all the keywords are English words, isn't an argument against this point).
If anything, the poor English is a good sign that the people putting this site up are technical and have the information we need. If it were marketing people, their English would be perfect but they wouldn't know anything.
The Slashdot community could react to this effort to reach out with a wave of ridicule, or we could say "thanks ... here's what we need." You decide.
Scott McNealy of Sun doesn't want a fair software industry for all. He wants to be Bill Gates. The same is true of most of the other big egos in the executive suites.
Both Sun and Netscape tried the monopoly game. Netscape, for a while, was unilaterally defining what the web was going to be. Sun's model for Java was that everyone would run Java on everything and would pay Sun for the privilege, so that Sun, rather than Microsoft, would in effect get to be the tax collector for the net.
Reflexive rejection of all things Microsoft is stupid. Sometimes they do the right thing for perhaps the wrong reasons (e.g. help undermine Sun's attempt to be the Microsoft of Java by supporting Kaffe, which is free software). People who think the game is about defeating MS are missing the point.
Microsoft needs to be contained, and prevented from capturing the open standards the net is based on. But the same is true of Sun, and AOL, and the phone companies, and the cable companies.
Example: several times a story appears first on LinuxToday and later on Slashdot. Journalists report that the tone of the responses changes after it gets picked up on Slashdot, because the proportion of flamers is just higher here, and because the LinuxToday people are much more likely than the Slashdot people to add "if you respond, be polite and coherent" warnings. When it's on LinuxToday only, the responses may flame the journalist but they are literate and well-thought-out. When it's on Slashdot it's more like "you suck! How much does Bill Gates pay you?".
For this reason, I suggest that Slashdot avoid carrying "some journalist said something stupid" articles. People who want to find such things can go elsewhere.
Actually, Andrew is named after both of CMU's founders, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. (CMU = Carnegie-Mellon University)
While the distorted way the graphs are drawn is a form of cheating, the SPEC benchmarks are industry standard and very hard to cheat, because the rules are very tight, so the underlying numbers can be counted on: the new processor is a hair better than the PIII for integer, with a more significant gain for floating point. Of course this doesn't mean that your floating point program will run 50% faster, but as benchmarks go SPEC is about the best available.
The real question, though, is whether AMD will be able to manufacture this processor with sufficient yield to be able to meet demand or make money. In the past, the fact that they haven't been able to do this is the primary reason that AMD has lost money in recent years. If they can't convince the PC manufacturers that they have their past problems beat, no one will do a deal with them and the speed of the processor will not matter.
Your anti-government ideology is so strong that it blinds you to the truth.
ARPA and the NSF did an excellent job managing the Internet through its many years of astronomical growth. This government (and government contractor) design out-competed all of the commercial, proprietary networks, which are slowly dying out. Despite the problems, hundreds of millions of people successfully use the net. It's been a huge success.
The net has been a success precisely because its design violates most of the prejudices of libertarians: though run as a government project, the net is far more decentralized than the proprietary networking schemes of the times (from IBM, DEC, or the telephone companies, for example). Libertarians seem to think that a government would produce a centralized system and a private company would produce a decentralized system. In most cases, the opposite is more likely to be true: companies are dictatorships, and they need a central point to get the money out.
By saying things like "they're the ones who didn't forsee these problems" you are imposing an impossible standard. No one forsaw the day, back when NSI was granted the contract, when www.mycompany.com would be on every billboard. The net was run by researchers and academics who made one very serious mistake: they assumed that people would act decently. There were two places in the system that were centralized: IP address assignments (run in a decent manner by Jon Postel) and top level domain administration (run in a less decent manner by NSI).
So yes, in the process, some mistakes were made. The primary mistake appears to be that Network Solutions' contract wasn't written as carefully as it should have been, so that NSI has managed to subvert the original intent.
But it's not clear that your central charge is at all correct: They're the ones who allowed a private company to turn public databases into a propriatary internal corporate database. Says who? NSI says that the whois database is their property, but many others disagree and no court has so ruled.
Whatever federal agency that administers NSI's contract should sue NSI for the database. It doesn't belong to NSI, they simply had the contract to run it. Yes, they put in labor to collect the database, but they have already been compensated for this labor.
Like many in the BSD world, you are confused about how Linux operates. NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are distributions, and are therefore properly compared to Debian, Red Hat, or SUSE, not Linux. Different distributions will have better or worse security policies.
Your claim that this incident is an argument in favor of OpenBSD's "total code review", however, is utter crap: OpenBSD's code review would not necessarily have saved an OpenBSD distributor from making a mistake like this. The bug could have been introduced at the last minute by whoever pressed the CD-ROMs. The worm was not present as source code in the original distribution, so there is nothing to catch by doing a review. And the OpenBSD people are good, but they are not perfect.
The Linux vendors definitely need to improve their security reviews. However, even with the way it is now, it's far better than what we used to get from commercial Unix vendors (who would typically ship with critical files world-writable, with programs setuid that were never designed that way).
The plan is to release security upgrades if needed.
For new devices, it's possible for third parties to provide drivers (however, USB may be another matter, requiring too much effort for all but the most senior kernel gurus to backport).
Userland programs don't care about the kernel, and it is never true that the source for something like gtk would need a particular C library (though someone's pre-installed binary might). Newer glibc's will run on older kernels, as well as non-Linux kernels; you can run Gnome on BSD or Unix systems.
If you let yourself fall way behind, it may mean that you have to build some software from source, rather than just install from an RPM or the 21st century equivalent.
While Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the desktop, they are not doing nearly so well in the server space, which is what tests like these are about. Linux or Solaris boxes running Samba are direct competition for NT Server seats, and are winning that competition in many cases.
The existence of competition in some of Microsoft's markets doesn't help them in claiming that they don't have a monopoly in other markets.
You are completely clueless, and do not know what FUD means. People like you, GiMP, give Linux advocates a bad name. It is astounding that you would present such an attack on a journalist who has demonstrated himself to be a friend of Linux. Don't you realize that it is people like you who are causing Linux to get poor press (by getting journalists pissed off at the whole Linux community)?
Get a clue: Linux is not currently the best at everything. Given the rapid rate of improvement, Linux will soon win in categories where it does not currently win, but if you are such a moron as to think that anyone who suggests that Linux is not currently the best OS for any conceivable application is in Microsoft's pay, then please just shut up.
There's a reason that the trade press just stopped writing about the Amiga: it's because any time they printed anything other than press releases from Commodore they were assaulted by people like you. So the path of least resistance was simply to not write about the Amiga at all.
The test is a replay of the Mindcraft test which is slanted to favor NT. The guy who did Samba has already said that, for this case, NT beats Samba. It is not FUD to print the truth.
Brin doesn't believe that "privacy is a tool of evil". Rather, he believes that privacy is doomed, so the closest we can come to freedom is to make sure that privacy gets invaded equally: not only can the cops watch you, but you can watch the cops. It's a provocative point of view, one that I'm not sure I agree with, but those attempting to smear him for it, distorting his position, are either ignorant or just evil.
And, of course, movies are propaganda, the most effective kind. Why shouldn't we take a billion-dollar industry seriously?
It seems that we need to update Godwin's law: it used to be fashionable to try to kill argument by comparing your opponent to Hitler. Lately, it seems that Stalin is the new favorite.
The person I am responding to seems to think that David Brin's critique of Star Wars is "almost Stalinist". Yeah, right. What rhetoric are you going to have left for when someone does something really bad, like deliberately force millions of people to starve to get them to accept your new way of organizing society and killing millions more?
Time to decide: do you care about free software/open source, or do you just hate Microsoft? Too many slashdotters would chop off their own noses just to get at Bill Gates, backing outcomes that would damage the free software movement if only it would be a defeat for Microsoft.
In the case of Java, Sun wasn't interested in giving users freedom: Scott McNealy wanted to usurp Bill Gates' position and become Bill Gates himself. Everyone would run Java, and Sun would control Java, just as firmly as Microsoft now controls Windows. Everyone would have to supply Java, and everyone would have to pay Sun. Instead of a Microsoft tax on the Internet, we would have a Sun tax.
Kaffe is GPLed (and yes, there is also a non-free version). To the extent that Microsoft seems to be helping with that, great; it is only a tactical move on MS's part, but no matter; it is as important to break Sun's control over Java as it is to break MS's control over the desktop.
It appears that `lamer' has chosen a good handle for himself. Anyone reading the article would notice that the article itself quotes several notable people as saying that Microsoft's poor security is a major part of the problem, and that many non-ISS people (e.g. Marcus Ranum, who pioneered firewalls as we know them today, and is directly quoted attacking NT's security) were interviewed. The author obviously did plenty of research.
While the article is not perfect, it's about the best thing I've seen in the mainstream media on the subject. Yes, ISS gets more plugs than they perhaps deserve. But you can't do a "white hats vs black hats" story without interviewing the best-known and most financially successful white hats.
You don't only depend on the segment of wire that comes into your house. If the backbone on the net is terabit instead of gigabit, you're more likely to be able to actually use the lower bandwidth you're paying for, even if you're hitting sites everyone else is hitting.
Your parents are wrong: long distance was wildly expensive pre-1984, and while local rates went up somewhat, it's not that much once you take inflation into account.
I say fuck antitrust laws, you say. Fine. Let's go to the world of 1984. You can't buy a modem; you can only rent one from the phone company at a steep rate, so much so that most people use acoustic couplers that can't possibly get more than 1200 bits/sec. You get cheap local calls, but calling out of town costs 10x as much as what you pay today.
If Ma Bell hadn't been broken up, the net as you know it would not exist. Yes, there would be an Internet, but since all the long-distance lines would have to be leased from a monopolist at monopoly rates, it would cost at least ten times as much to have access, and since Ma Bell was extremely, extremely conservative about what types of equipment could be attached to the phone network, there would be far less innovation. No internal modems for PCs, that's for sure. You'd have to use external boxes leased from the phone company.
Sorry, but your history is wrong. XEmacs started as Lucid Emacs, a project by Lucid, Inc. to create a front end to their commercial Energize IDE. This started before Emacs 19 was out. The main reason for forking was technical differences. Lucid had no problem at the time with giving the changes back to RMS. But RMS didn't want a lot of them: he disagreed with the Lucid folks on a number of issues.
Problems with assignments have made it harder to re-unify the Emacses, but the major contributors (e.g. Lucid) did sign (so all the original work people like jwz did while at Lucid could be used in the FSF Emacs).