Speaking to key SaMBa developers, if M$ could have shut down SaMBa any time after about two years ago, Bill would have picked up his PalmPil^[^Htricorder and said "Make it so, Mr Ballmer".
If Trey manages to freeze FOSS out of the 'states, he's going to create the biggest brain-drain, and the biggest boost for non-US economies ever seen.
If it can be shown that Microsoft deliberately contributed (for example) several MS-Windows components to the Linux kernel, there would be grounds for subpoenaing the MS-Windows sources so that every kernel contributor had access to check for similarities in code.
/* This patch to fix pluralisation in usb-storage submitted by [insert countless email addresses here]. */
...that when IBM sees to The SCO Group's encraterment, they do a really, really thorough job. Big flash, widespread aftershocks, debris found over a very wide area. Small sign on tourist lookout saying "Go ahead, Bill, make our day". (-:
We see it in TimeLine suits, the shafting of SpyGlass Systems, Blue Mountain Greeting Cards et al, the clone wars beteen MS-DOS and DR-DOS, the emBorgment of STAC Systems to settle yet another suit, and so on ad nauseum. Heck the company started by dumpster-diving for printouts of other people's software, and probably also had a copy of the Dartmouth BASIC source in hand while they wrote their 4K ROM BASIC (which they had already sold as pre-existing; ie, their first product was vapourware, the start of a long tradition). This is the company that copied the Mac interface right down to details like throwing away variable-sized elevators in order to look more Mac-like (and got sued for that one too).
This is a severe case of the event horizon casting aspersions about the kettle's colour! "Chutzpah" isn't a substantial enough concept for this, it isn't even in the running!
I've seen the Bible (0.75 megawords) summarised as "In the end, God wins"; I think a book teaching Linux admins how to admin MS-Windows could be summarised much more quickly: "Don't".
A slightly longer summary would have a subtitle "How to run for your life in order to stand still" and an overview like this:
Stuff changes by itself, you're running the security equivalent of a black colander (leaky and the holes are really obvious), everything costs heaps and much of it still doesn't work. If you're hoping to escape the command line, be prepared to at least RegEdit regularly if not hit CMD.EXE more than once a week. If you want to understand how something works, buy a book on it and bear in mind that it will have changed since the book will written. If the drivers for something are broken, stiff bikkies. Microsoft will be running the system directly soon, putting out of a job (since that will screw things up so totally at least twice that the site will switch to Linux out of self-defense anyway). It is very point-and-click but the letters on the front are neither warm nor friendly [ever actually read a EULA] and they left the first and most important word ("don't") off.
The actual content will say:
Reboot it. If that doesn't fix the problem, install the latest upgrades. If still no go, reboot from a write-protected floppy and format every hard disk, then reinstall everything. If that doesn't fix it, install the latest upgrades again. Still sad? Then
PANIC!
Hah, so normal users will be powring over the code before they install a patch.
I think you mean "poring".
After all this time, you still haven't gained a basic understanding. Ordinary users generally won't. I generally don't, because I trust the people who make my updates (a luxury no Microsoft client can afford) and I have very little to lose. But the important point is that I can. If I had a lot to lose or my distributor went dodgy, poring over source would be a reasonable option. But as I said before, that's evidently not somewhere Microsoft wants you to go today.
Quite aside from these basics, in my early days I learnt quite a lot from pulling down FOSS software (before it was called that or the GPL had been invented) and fixing or extending it. DECUS was a godsend to a fledgling programmer.
I'm curious when they will make platters about 1 inch across and stack them on a shaft a few inches long and lay them flat in a drive case, instead of a few vertical slow platters, a whole bunch of horizontal fast small platters.
Drum storage with a difference. At 10,000 RPM or worse, those suckers would precess like crazy. Perhaps they could use paired contra-rotating shafts, good bearings and hope nobody used them for a mobile app. Or build them into Segways. (-:
If you store 8 bits deep, you can read a byte in the same amount of time it takes to read a bit.
AFAICT, they're not talking about multi-layer recording, they're just standing the existing bits on end so that the same amount of magnetic material uses up less surface real-estate. <deadpan>If they did multi-layer recording, they'd have to slow the drives down so that the surface of the disk wasn't so stretched by centrifugal "force" and the shallower bits didn't sag into the next cylinder. Otherwise they'd have to angle the heads WRT the platter surface, which means they can't fly them close enough to record that deep.</deadpan>
Bernard Blackham, Bernd Felsch, Shaun Patston, Lyall Stewart, John Pengelley, David Pengelley, Patrick Ko, Jeremy Malcolm, Patrick Tehvand, Pia Smith, Jeff Waugh, Anand Kumria, Hugh Blemings, Paul Russel, Andrew Cowie, Matt Kemner (aka "Zombie"), Tony Breeds-Taurima, Stewart Smith (no relation), Dave Emrik, Harry McNally, Jacqueline McNally, Anne Busby, Steve Ireland, Wayne Langlois, Gavin Coe, Brett Looney, Gavin Tweedie, Chris Caston, Craig Ringer, Clare Johnstone, Michael Hunt, Otto Benschop, James Devenish, David Madeley (aka "proXy"), Trent Lloyd (aka "Lathiat"), David Lloyd (no relation), John Knight (aka "Anarchist Tomato"), Ben Jensz, Scott Middleton, Andrew Furey, Brad Campbell, Major<*>, Suzanne Kelly-Hopkinson, Daniel Pearson, Brad Cobb, Tim Downing, Peter Stone, Fred Myers, Chas Stan-Bishop, James Andrewartha, James Bromberger, James Henstridge.
One for every week of the year so far, plus a spare, sticking to people I know face-to-face and with a 100% hit rate on understanding - leaving out "cult figure" acquaintances like Linus Torvalds, Peter Anvin, Alan and Telsa Cox - and still going strong. If I wanted to hit the 60% comprehension level I could probably run that up to around 200 people. Now go and get a life.
Once GPLed it would ship. If not by them, by someone else. I don't know if ReactOS would be happy to be redundant or annoyed that their little challenge was taken from them.
Totting up all of the users who directly interface with machines I've set up, probably about forty. Solo. Indirectly (as in, I might see one call a year from or on behalf of each), probably about 200. Extra staff is hard for a small place (the difference between one and two is huge, two and three still large but not so drastic, and from there to about a dozen it's no sweat), PFY tend to be incompetent when it counts, and the next notch of competence above that tend to be independent enough to run their own show.
easier to just image machines from a generic install image
Evidently they've not tried automated network installs of Linux. (-:
Windows Update kicks the snot out of any linux distro update that I've seen so far (Red Hat, debian, SuSE)
That surprises me. While apt-get does require command-line fiddling to set it up, after that it's fire and forget. URPMI is the equivalent Mandrake tool.
I'll try putting Mandrake along side XP Pro and see if I change my mind.
Add some toys from here or the "Mandrake RPMS" section of this site's "RPM/DEB Outlet" and see if it helps. I recommend Thac for audio toys, the Penguin Liberation Front for video CoDecs and Drakian if any particular Debian package took your fancy.
Here's yer dilly bag, thisis a place we call the Simpson. We'd like you to think about your destructive greed for a while, mate. Catch yer 'round. <roar of diesel engine charging off over next sand dune>
...but IMESHO it would be more productive to have a SCO-only splash-screen which says "running under protest" and a yellow flag with a black ball, and offers to fire up a web browser to explain why.
That would probably mean that MS could not use it (their own code mind you) in the next version of Windows.
Even allowing for your other preposterosity, that's wrong. Even if someone else were somehow able to GPL (say) the MS-Windows-XP and -2003 codebases, that would not stop Microsoft from shipping it. They'd just have to make copies of the source available too, and GPL any improvements they made to it.
Also, the situation you're describing would probably be a fork. The owner would retain the right to distribute other copies under a different licence, up to and including give-me-your-firstborn-sign-in-blood-kiss-your-but t-goodbye EULAs.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't laugh myself silly when I saw the first release of Debian XP. (-:
Microsoft knowingly underpaid TimeLine and took a risk on TimeLine rolling over for that. TimeLine didn't, and the end users are at risk. In real life, Microsoft are actually at risk for defrauding all of their MS-SQL developer community into buying a safely licenced product that wasn't, but no developer has the balls to sue them for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely they would never do a thing like that!
If Trey manages to freeze FOSS out of the 'states, he's going to create the biggest brain-drain, and the biggest boost for non-US economies ever seen.
...that when IBM sees to The SCO Group's encraterment, they do a really, really thorough job. Big flash, widespread aftershocks, debris found over a very wide area. Small sign on tourist lookout saying "Go ahead, Bill, make our day". (-:
So... it's not BSD that's Bloody Slow to Die, it's really Poul? (-:
Well, you know what to do: if you don't like it, fork it.
Yeah, funny. Ho, ho. Bloody hilarious. Nothing at all two-faced about Microsoft, is there?
We see it in TimeLine suits, the shafting of SpyGlass Systems, Blue Mountain Greeting Cards et al, the clone wars beteen MS-DOS and DR-DOS, the emBorgment of STAC Systems to settle yet another suit, and so on ad nauseum. Heck the company started by dumpster-diving for printouts of other people's software, and probably also had a copy of the Dartmouth BASIC source in hand while they wrote their 4K ROM BASIC (which they had already sold as pre-existing; ie, their first product was vapourware, the start of a long tradition). This is the company that copied the Mac interface right down to details like throwing away variable-sized elevators in order to look more Mac-like (and got sued for that one too).
This is a severe case of the event horizon casting aspersions about the kettle's colour! "Chutzpah" isn't a substantial enough concept for this, it isn't even in the running!
See next level-1 post for details. (-: "You insensitive clod!" :-)
Australian made and amazingly comprehensive, especially under the hood.
Laugh! If you start crying at what Microsoft says and does, you'll never stop.\
(-: The page was probably trying to install an ActiveX wizard to do the changeover for you, and assumed you were using Exploder :-)
A slightly longer summary would have a subtitle "How to run for your life in order to stand still" and an overview like this:
The actual content will say:
I think you mean "poring".
After all this time, you still haven't gained a basic understanding. Ordinary users generally won't. I generally don't, because I trust the people who make my updates (a luxury no Microsoft client can afford) and I have very little to lose. But the important point is that I can. If I had a lot to lose or my distributor went dodgy, poring over source would be a reasonable option. But as I said before, that's evidently not somewhere Microsoft wants you to go today.
Quite aside from these basics, in my early days I learnt quite a lot from pulling down FOSS software (before it was called that or the GPL had been invented) and fixing or extending it. DECUS was a godsend to a fledgling programmer.
Drum storage with a difference. At 10,000 RPM or worse, those suckers would precess like crazy. Perhaps they could use paired contra-rotating shafts, good bearings and hope nobody used them for a mobile app. Or build them into Segways. (-:
AFAICT, they're not talking about multi-layer recording, they're just standing the existing bits on end so that the same amount of magnetic material uses up less surface real-estate. <deadpan>If they did multi-layer recording, they'd have to slow the drives down so that the surface of the disk wasn't so stretched by centrifugal "force" and the shallower bits didn't sag into the next cylinder. Otherwise they'd have to angle the heads WRT the platter surface, which means they can't fly them close enough to record that deep.</deadpan>
Manager: "Tell me again why we still need an NT box?"
...if that's really when we run out of IPv4 numbers.
In no particular order:
One for every week of the year so far, plus a spare, sticking to people I know face-to-face and with a 100% hit rate on understanding - leaving out "cult figure" acquaintances like Linus Torvalds, Peter Anvin, Alan and Telsa Cox - and still going strong. If I wanted to hit the 60% comprehension level I could probably run that up to around 200 people. Now go and get a life.
<*>Yes, that's his real name.
Once GPLed it would ship. If not by them, by someone else. I don't know if ReactOS would be happy to be redundant or annoyed that their little challenge was taken from them.
Totting up all of the users who directly interface with machines I've set up, probably about forty. Solo. Indirectly (as in, I might see one call a year from or on behalf of each), probably about 200. Extra staff is hard for a small place (the difference between one and two is huge, two and three still large but not so drastic, and from there to about a dozen it's no sweat), PFY tend to be incompetent when it counts, and the next notch of competence above that tend to be independent enough to run their own show.
Evidently they've not tried automated network installs of Linux. (-:
That surprises me. While apt-get does require command-line fiddling to set it up, after that it's fire and forget. URPMI is the equivalent Mandrake tool.
Add some toys from here or the "Mandrake RPMS" section of this site's "RPM/DEB Outlet" and see if it helps. I recommend Thac for audio toys, the Penguin Liberation Front for video CoDecs and Drakian if any particular Debian package took your fancy.
Here's yer dilly bag, this is a place we call the Simpson. We'd like you to think about your destructive greed for a while, mate. Catch yer 'round. <roar of diesel engine charging off over next sand dune>
...or Linux (-:
...but IMESHO it would be more productive to have a SCO-only splash-screen which says "running under protest" and a yellow flag with a black ball, and offers to fire up a web browser to explain why.
...AKA Mandrake Linux. (-:
BTW, does NT4 do IPv6?
Even allowing for your other preposterosity, that's wrong. Even if someone else were somehow able to GPL (say) the MS-Windows-XP and -2003 codebases, that would not stop Microsoft from shipping it. They'd just have to make copies of the source available too, and GPL any improvements they made to it.
Also, the situation you're describing would probably be a fork. The owner would retain the right to distribute other copies under a different licence, up to and including give-me-your-firstborn-sign-in-blood-kiss-your-but t-goodbye EULAs.
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't laugh myself silly when I saw the first release of Debian XP. (-:
Microsoft knowingly underpaid TimeLine and took a risk on TimeLine rolling over for that. TimeLine didn't, and the end users are at risk. In real life, Microsoft are actually at risk for defrauding all of their MS-SQL developer community into buying a safely licenced product that wasn't, but no developer has the balls to sue them for that.