ZDNet Reporter: Hello, I'm a ZDNet reporter and I'm calling you because you are a regular Mandrake member. Are you pissed that Mandrake has decided to take StarOffice 6.0 away from you because you're just a regular member?
Leon: no, OpenOffice does all I need, I prefer to use open source anyway, and it sems fair to me to ask for more payment if you're getting more service. By the way, you can download Mandrake 8.2, including OpenOffice and the source for it for free, no strings attached. Are you riding an agenda with that question?
ZDNet reporter: Uh... bugger. now we're going to have to add `Some' to the headline. Bill will halve our kickb^H^H^H^H^Hencouragement for that.
Some people dont want word macro virii. Some people dont want their entire network hacked, taken down, etc by word.
Some people don't want the world to read their revisions, deleted opinions of clients and competition, random snatches of conversation that happened to be lying around in memory.
Some people don't want to be tracked either by document IDs or by their software calling home.
Some people don't want to be locked in to an endlessly escalating software rental deal.
Some people don't want to use software produced by a convicted but essentially unrepentant criminal organisation, one successfully prosecuted on many occasions for crimes like software piracy, lying and cheating - to say nothing of monopolisation.
If IE's Windows integration is a monopoly, then I'm all for the removal of Konqueror from KDE
Not the removal, the separate availability. <mind mode=screensaver>You should be able to buy Linux and install it without Konqueror, and Konqueror without Linux. Oh, wait a minute... you can!</mind>
Just to rub the point home, you can buy and install Linux with or without graphics, with a different Graphics layer (such as Berlin), with a different window manager (such as FluxBox) and so on. All (modulo a few libraries) with or without Konqueror or one of a host of other browsers (Mozilla/Galeon/SkipStone, Netscape, Opera, Amaya, Mnemonic, OmniWeb etc).
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Cactus Ed Abbey
In the society you dream of, it would have been necessary for the king and priest to also be free. The fact that at least one of them needs to be murdered (the priest may have died of natural causes, although the implication is `not') is a demonstration that Mr Abbey's society (and so a man in it) is not free.
Your next problem is that in a conceptually free society, no individual could have any more authority than any other, except that other grant it to him. So if I decide that ripping people's entrails out is a fine thing, and start with you, you have no more authority to decide that this is wrong, than I have that this is right. In theory an impasse, in practice might-makes-right, the stronger individual or team gets to carry out their will.
The missing ingredient is an incorruptible lawmaker with power to enforce. It's ironic that in order to be free, you must be in someone else's power... of course, most people won't settle for this, reason be damned, because the obvious candidate for the seat is God.
So tell them. They're the kind of company which is prone to fixing things like that; they're not Microsoft. When the donate link first went up, it was on the front page. They moved it to a more obscure location at the request of their business partners. They've turned to the community before calling it quits, which takes more guts and frankness than 99% of corporations have. Would you rather see that attitude perish, or the ``nothing to see folks, business as usual, oh shit'' approach die?
When was the last time Mandrake donated money to me for writing software, finding bugs, or solving technical problems for their users? Never.
Funny, I seem to recall something about free downloads, something else about paying their developers to fix code used by you (and in other distros), and lots of other generous moves, including that their base distro is (except for Navigator) 100% Open Source and nearly 100% GPL.
The whole nature of a company is to make profit. If they can not do that, then perhaps they need to think twice about starting business ventures.
They did. It was one of the calculated risks that they took. They didn't say ``let's make a buck out of Linux'', they said ``let's produce a good Linux distro and if we make a buck as well, great!'' They're only in trouble now because their previous management team ignored the corporate spirit and started pushing them towards standard DotCom stupidity. And were fired for it. I say support them not because they're a business venture but because they do so much for Linux in perticular, and Free software in general; and because they're a flagship of sorts. If they go down, it will cause some serious finger-pointing among the enemies of Free software and Linux.
If linux is ever going to survive in its current form, it needs to be a viable competitor with Microsoft.
1. no matter what you do, Linux will not survive in it's current form, and that's a good thing. Linux is a living, growing beastie. It has no current form, at least not for more than a week.
2. Linux doesn't need or want to compete with Microsoft, certainly not head on. If you focus on beating your competitors, the best you can possibly do is slightly better than them, and who wants to aim so low?
3. What Linux wants to do is its own thing, and do it so well that Microsoft will die of natural causes. IRL, Linux doesn't care about Microsoft all that much. Linux will continue press on without publicity, without major funding, without lawyers, without distributors as such. That's how Linux was born, that's how Linux will live, and when its turn comes, that's how Linux will die.
SuSE seems happier on a more proprietary road, and some things like their X drivers occasionally shine for this approach. Mandrake is - as far as is reasonably possible - totally GPLed, and their whole spirit is different. You couldn't mix the two and get an enviable result.
I believe you could mix Mandrake and Debian (urpmi, at heart, doesn't care whether it's based on RPM or PKG), or SuSE and Caldera (for a distro that knows Novell and displays well), and get a much better outcome.
I hope they aren't also claiming that the PowerPC release is ready... I tried it recently, and while promising, it has some show-stopper bugs.
It's not. It went into beta some weeks after the x86 version. I guess they're planning an 8.2-for-Alpha as well, since there is currently an Alpha Cooker around.
If you want a version `optimised' for 386, 486, P3, P4 or Athlon, one of the things Mandrake carefully checked during this Cooker cycle was that Athlon optimisations worked properly, when selected. There is also a new package, rpm-rebuild, which will rebuild the entire distribution from source in one go.
They also timed the release rather well, fielding and dealing with the PHP, OpenSSH and zlib bugs in the 11th hour. It should be one of their best releases, BoC I'm no prophet: only time will tell.
I'm wondering if anyone has any links to some nice games for Linux.
Frozen-bubble was written by Guillaume Cottenceau (spelling of that is almost certainly wrong), one of the Mandrake developers, and is surprisingly addictive. It's kind of like Snood, if you've played that.
There are more than 10x as many OSS projects with more than 100k installations in the field than there are M$ products in the same boat. There are more than 100 distinct OSS products (not counting libraries and such, but including games) installed on this Mandrake Linux box which see use at least once a week, and it's doing nothing special. How many copies of Mandrake Linux are there in the field? Now add in packages unique to RedHat, SuSE, Debian...
Oh you mean where they actualy PAID some real developers and coders to come in and make a real OS? (as opposed to buying one for pocket change.:D )
No, not exactly. Windows NT was at first spelling-error-compatible with MICA - a variant of Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) VMS - which may just have been a coincidence but for the fact that they hired away the head MICA developer from DEC to do this.
Oh and after they ditched the stolen Stacker code the issues with the built in compression on MS systems pretty much went away
I think that's mostly because people stopped using compressed drives.
at least IE does not use the old Netscape HTML rendering engine
Yah. Terrible shame that M$ don't use Gecko instead, though. Since Gecko's modular, they wouldn't even have to worry about that terrifying GPL business.
Open Source Operating System contained a bug which could be a security flaw. [...]
Closed Source Operating System contained the same bug, but due to design differences, the bug was not a security flaw.
FWIW, it is not yet a security flaw for the OSOS. If someone eventually figures out how to exploit it (difficulty level: 8, bonus points for an animated splash screen, souble bonus for multiple architectures), most OSOS systems will have long since been patched against it, and the few remaining will be self-curing.
Meanwhile, the CSOS vendor has absolutely NFI whether they have a security vulnerability or not, and won't know for many weeks or months. Because it is CS, we can't fix it for them.
Since the bug wasn't an urgent problem, it got added to the bug-fixes-for-the-next-service-pack queue.
IRL, that's the bug-changes-for-the-next-SP queue.
Any proper system should be able to rebuild completly from source, catching ALL statically linked binaries.
For your compiling pleasure, Mandrake 8.2 includes a tool to do just that. But you will also have to grep the entire source tree to catch self-included static copies of zlib. Just be glad that you can do this. (-:
``Hello, Microsoft Technical Support here. Can I have your money, er, support number please?... Thanks, OK, now what seems to be the problem?... Rebuild from source? Sir, don't you mean reboot...?''
Another fine reason to give money to Mandrake instead of Microsoft.
I'd love to see Microsoft write their own OS from scratch the way GNU did.;)
That's true, they never have written an OS from scratch. Windows 9X is DOS-plus-GUI-shell and DOS was derived from QDOS; Windows NT is DEC's MICA, broken and in fancy clothes, and 2k, XP, Longhorn etc are all derived from that. What about CE? Maybe that's why you need an expensive mega-micro-beast to run it on.
If MS truly want OS security, why not just wrap their user interface around OpenBSD? The licence allows it, provided credit is given (and that can be done in very fine print).
So if they use evil and risky open source software why did they do it?
Oh, it's OK for them to use BSD-ish software, just not for their poor stupid customers who have no brains (else why would they either buy our stuff or trust us?).
Seriously, I'm betting it was desperation. They couldn't get their own stuff to work for love nor money, so they borrowed someone else's brains. It worked pretty well for NT (AKA Digital Equipment Corp's MICA or broken VMS in fancy dress) and for SQL Server. Not so well for Stacker or SpyGlass, but in the end they came out ahead, which is all that really matters to a corporation like that.
I don't normally reply to people with coprolalia and poor self-control (-: it must be in their breeding, I think:-), but in this case the answer is simple, clear and instructive.
Those of us who wish to continue evolving don't need you and your anti-survival ilk pissing in our genepool.
Biologists extracting blood cells from T-Rex bones can get a fairly good idea of an upper limit for the bone's age, based on home much the organic material has decayed.
The only dating method using how "much the organic material has decayed" that I know of would be radiocarbon 14 dating.
Ah, yes! The evil, black-helicoptered Scientific Orthodoxy! An army of jack-booted, blue-helmeted thugs, commanded by Persian-catted evil overlords in their concrete fortresses on the far side of the moon. They are coming for us. They are coming for us all.
Well, no. All that needs to happen, and it often does without specifically evil intent, is for paperstogounpublishedoftenenough. And evidently they do.
[Darwin's theory has]
survived these attacks it has risen to become one of sciences greatest achievements,
That must be why Stephen J Gould gets so much mileage out opf catastrophism, and why `benchmark' fossils proving Darwinism are repeatedly being proclaimed, and later silently (or at best very quietly) withdrawn.
Eohippus is no longer part of a series, Archaeopteryx is a variant on the theme `Hoatzin' and Lucy was resting several layers above a modern human skull. Sorry, where was that evidence again?
Behe's `irreducible complexity' and Dembski's `specified complexity' are merely fighting over the carcass. It's time for a completely new theory.
much to the concern of creationists and flat-earthers alike.
I don't see that evolution counts one way or the other to someone with a flat-earth POV.
Does this guy count as a creationist in your eyes? His `wild' theory of specie development is a mathematical certainty when compared with Darwinism.
I'm not looking forward to climbing on my roof in the middle of the night to shovel it off so I can get my heat and lights.
You wouldn't need to very often. In order to collect enough power, your roof would have to be nearly vertical, and huge... er, sorry, northern neighbour... and pity those in (e.g.) Novosibirsk.
If the shingles on my roof were all replaced with small solar cells, it would generate many times more electricity than I use now.
By golly, you were singularly fortunate to have a skillion roof optimally aligned for your latitude!
How does it manage to track the sun? How does it arrange to collect most of its power in winter and just after sunset, when it's nost needed? How often do you wash down your roof? What is your average annual cloud cover?
Does your energy budget include storage and conversion losses? What kind of cells did you model? Does it also account for the manufactured (`inherent' or `embodied') energy in your house, furniture, fencing, solar power system, car (and propulsion thereof), street etc?
I could lose another $15k if I shut my servers off
Or ran the right MIPS boxes with no luxury items like video cards. You can just about power those from a hand-cranked flywheel.
You'd likely save more than that by replacing your existing refrigerator with an efficient DC-motor chest 'fridge.
Slashdot Mirror
Leon: no, OpenOffice does all I need, I prefer to use open source anyway, and it sems fair to me to ask for more payment if you're getting more service. By the way, you can download Mandrake 8.2, including OpenOffice and the source for it for free, no strings attached. Are you riding an agenda with that question?
ZDNet reporter: Uh... bugger. now we're going to have to add `Some' to the headline. Bill will halve our kickb^H^H^H^H^Hencouragement for that.
Some people don't want the world to read their revisions, deleted opinions of clients and competition, random snatches of conversation that happened to be lying around in memory.
Some people don't want to be tracked either by document IDs or by their software calling home.
Some people don't want to be locked in to an endlessly escalating software rental deal.
Some people don't want to use software produced by a convicted but essentially unrepentant criminal organisation, one successfully prosecuted on many occasions for crimes like software piracy, lying and cheating - to say nothing of monopolisation.
Not the removal, the separate availability. <mind mode=screensaver>You should be able to buy Linux and install it without Konqueror, and Konqueror without Linux. Oh, wait a minute... you can!</mind>
Just to rub the point home, you can buy and install Linux with or without graphics, with a different Graphics layer (such as Berlin), with a different window manager (such as FluxBox) and so on. All (modulo a few libraries) with or without Konqueror or one of a host of other browsers (Mozilla/Galeon/SkipStone, Netscape, Opera, Amaya, Mnemonic, OmniWeb etc).
In the society you dream of, it would have been necessary for the king and priest to also be free. The fact that at least one of them needs to be murdered (the priest may have died of natural causes, although the implication is `not') is a demonstration that Mr Abbey's society (and so a man in it) is not free.
Your next problem is that in a conceptually free society, no individual could have any more authority than any other, except that other grant it to him. So if I decide that ripping people's entrails out is a fine thing, and start with you, you have no more authority to decide that this is wrong, than I have that this is right. In theory an impasse, in practice might-makes-right, the stronger individual or team gets to carry out their will.
The missing ingredient is an incorruptible lawmaker with power to enforce. It's ironic that in order to be free, you must be in someone else's power... of course, most people won't settle for this, reason be damned, because the obvious candidate for the seat is God.
So tell them. They're the kind of company which is prone to fixing things like that; they're not Microsoft. When the donate link first went up, it was on the front page. They moved it to a more obscure location at the request of their business partners. They've turned to the community before calling it quits, which takes more guts and frankness than 99% of corporations have. Would you rather see that attitude perish, or the ``nothing to see folks, business as usual, oh shit'' approach die?
Funny, I seem to recall something about free downloads, something else about paying their developers to fix code used by you (and in other distros), and lots of other generous moves, including that their base distro is (except for Navigator) 100% Open Source and nearly 100% GPL.
They did. It was one of the calculated risks that they took. They didn't say ``let's make a buck out of Linux'', they said ``let's produce a good Linux distro and if we make a buck as well, great!'' They're only in trouble now because their previous management team ignored the corporate spirit and started pushing them towards standard DotCom stupidity. And were fired for it. I say support them not because they're a business venture but because they do so much for Linux in perticular, and Free software in general; and because they're a flagship of sorts. If they go down, it will cause some serious finger-pointing among the enemies of Free software and Linux.
1. no matter what you do, Linux will not survive in it's current form, and that's a good thing. Linux is a living, growing beastie. It has no current form, at least not for more than a week.
2. Linux doesn't need or want to compete with Microsoft, certainly not head on. If you focus on beating your competitors, the best you can possibly do is slightly better than them, and who wants to aim so low?
3. What Linux wants to do is its own thing, and do it so well that Microsoft will die of natural causes. IRL, Linux doesn't care about Microsoft all that much. Linux will continue press on without publicity, without major funding, without lawyers, without distributors as such. That's how Linux was born, that's how Linux will live, and when its turn comes, that's how Linux will die.
I believe you could mix Mandrake and Debian (urpmi, at heart, doesn't care whether it's based on RPM or PKG), or SuSE and Caldera (for a distro that knows Novell and displays well), and get a much better outcome.
It's not. It went into beta some weeks after the x86 version. I guess they're planning an 8.2-for-Alpha as well, since there is currently an Alpha Cooker around.
If you want a version `optimised' for 386, 486, P3, P4 or Athlon, one of the things Mandrake carefully checked during this Cooker cycle was that Athlon optimisations worked properly, when selected. There is also a new package, rpm-rebuild, which will rebuild the entire distribution from source in one go.
They also timed the release rather well, fielding and dealing with the PHP, OpenSSH and zlib bugs in the 11th hour. It should be one of their best releases, BoC I'm no prophet: only time will tell.
Frozen-bubble was written by Guillaume Cottenceau (spelling of that is almost certainly wrong), one of the Mandrake developers, and is surprisingly addictive. It's kind of like Snood, if you've played that.
There are more than 10x as many OSS projects with more than 100k installations in the field than there are M$ products in the same boat. There are more than 100 distinct OSS products (not counting libraries and such, but including games) installed on this Mandrake Linux box which see use at least once a week, and it's doing nothing special. How many copies of Mandrake Linux are there in the field? Now add in packages unique to RedHat, SuSE, Debian...
No, not exactly. Windows NT was at first spelling-error-compatible with MICA - a variant of Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) VMS - which may just have been a coincidence but for the fact that they hired away the head MICA developer from DEC to do this.
I think that's mostly because people stopped using compressed drives.
Yah. Terrible shame that M$ don't use Gecko instead, though. Since Gecko's modular, they wouldn't even have to worry about that terrifying GPL business.
rpm-rebuilder
FWIW, it is not yet a security flaw for the OSOS. If someone eventually figures out how to exploit it (difficulty level: 8, bonus points for an animated splash screen, souble bonus for multiple architectures), most OSOS systems will have long since been patched against it, and the few remaining will be self-curing.
Meanwhile, the CSOS vendor has absolutely NFI whether they have a security vulnerability or not, and won't know for many weeks or months. Because it is CS, we can't fix it for them.
IRL, that's the bug-changes-for-the-next-SP queue.
For your compiling pleasure, Mandrake 8.2 includes a tool to do just that. But you will also have to grep the entire source tree to catch self-included static copies of zlib. Just be glad that you can do this. (-:
``Hello, Microsoft Technical Support here. Can I have your money, er, support number please? ... Thanks, OK, now what seems to be the problem? ... Rebuild from source? Sir, don't you mean reboot...?''
Another fine reason to give money to Mandrake instead of Microsoft.
Mandrake, for example. That and any other package for which this was straightforward to do.
That's true, they never have written an OS from scratch. Windows 9X is DOS-plus-GUI-shell and DOS was derived from QDOS; Windows NT is DEC's MICA, broken and in fancy clothes, and 2k, XP, Longhorn etc are all derived from that. What about CE? Maybe that's why you need an expensive mega-micro-beast to run it on.
If MS truly want OS security, why not just wrap their user interface around OpenBSD? The licence allows it, provided credit is given (and that can be done in very fine print).
Where's `OS Bob' then? (-:
Seriously, most of it is attempting to make stuff work that Microsoft implemented in a broken way. And in general it succeeds rampantly. (-:
Oh, it's OK for them to use BSD-ish software, just not for their poor stupid customers who have no brains (else why would they either buy our stuff or trust us?).
Seriously, I'm betting it was desperation. They couldn't get their own stuff to work for love nor money, so they borrowed someone else's brains. It worked pretty well for NT (AKA Digital Equipment Corp's MICA or broken VMS in fancy dress) and for SQL Server. Not so well for Stacker or SpyGlass, but in the end they came out ahead, which is all that really matters to a corporation like that.
Actually, you do, and even that isn't enough to genetically break even (this extinction mutagenesis link cites deliberately accelerated examples but nicely explains the principle).
I recommend extending your education before pontificating. (-:
I'm not talking about C14, I'm talking about meat, bone and blood cells.
Well, no. All that needs to happen, and it often does without specifically evil intent, is for papers to go unpublished often enough. And evidently they do.
Or you could close your eyes and shout 'tis! (-:
That must be why Stephen J Gould gets so much mileage out opf catastrophism, and why `benchmark' fossils proving Darwinism are repeatedly being proclaimed, and later silently (or at best very quietly) withdrawn.
Eohippus is no longer part of a series, Archaeopteryx is a variant on the theme `Hoatzin' and Lucy was resting several layers above a modern human skull. Sorry, where was that evidence again?
Behe's `irreducible complexity' and Dembski's `specified complexity' are merely fighting over the carcass. It's time for a completely new theory.
I don't see that evolution counts one way or the other to someone with a flat-earth POV.
Does this guy count as a creationist in your eyes? His `wild' theory of specie development is a mathematical certainty when compared with Darwinism.
You wouldn't need to very often. In order to collect enough power, your roof would have to be nearly vertical, and huge... er, sorry, northern neighbour... and pity those in (e.g.) Novosibirsk.
...lofted at stupendous cost from Earth and still working after over 400 years in transit... `tap, tap, is this thing on...'? (-:
By golly, you were singularly fortunate to have a skillion roof optimally aligned for your latitude!
How does it manage to track the sun? How does it arrange to collect most of its power in winter and just after sunset, when it's nost needed? How often do you wash down your roof? What is your average annual cloud cover?
Does your energy budget include storage and conversion losses? What kind of cells did you model? Does it also account for the manufactured (`inherent' or `embodied') energy in your house, furniture, fencing, solar power system, car (and propulsion thereof), street etc?
Or ran the right MIPS boxes with no luxury items like video cards. You can just about power those from a hand-cranked flywheel.
You'd likely save more than that by replacing your existing refrigerator with an efficient DC-motor chest 'fridge.