Much as I love Linux, I'm not in the least bit interested in how this affects it in comparison with how this affects my (now former) colleagues, and their families.
I know how I'd feel if I suddenly found out I was losing my job, had a mortgage to pay, maybe kids to feed and no obvious way of doing so.
The real tragedy is the people here, not the company, and while I'm sure that most if not all of them will get new jobs very soon, this is a very scary time, and my thoughts are with them.
I don't know why people seem to be surprised at Red Hat not being part of this - it's not as if they've been one of the companies you'd associate with KDE. The fact is that if they had joined up, slashdot would be covered in messages about them using M$ style tactics, trying to control things, embrace and extend and all that. I'm not a Red Hat user (anymore), but I thnk they've made the right choice by not just jumping in on this.
Nor am I a KDE user (I use GNOME and XFCE), but I think this is a good thing for the community. Choice is good, and having corporate backers for the two main choices that are going to get Linux onto the world's desktops has to be a good thing. IBM stand out in the list for me, they (IIRC) are also part of the GNOME Foundation. Having Big Blue back both desktop options says to the business world that this is serious, Linux is worth looking at.
Seems to me that they've rushed it to "market" a bit (good ol' AOL eh?)
I would have liked it to be a lot tighter than it is, I downloaded it this morning (UK time), and got pretty decent transfer rates off linuxftp.netscape.com, might not be so speedy now. Having installed it however, things were not quite so quick. It seems to render the chrome a damn sight slower than Mozilla nightly does, ditto displaying even relatively simple pages off local servers, and ps afx resulted in netscape spawned processes more than filling my Eterm! On the whole, using it was painfully slow (on a 500Mhz - 501 according to/proc/cpuinfo - CPU with 128Mb physical RAM)
In spite of all this, being the generous BOFH that I am, I made it available to the rest of my office, and one of our sales guys loves it because "it's blue, not grey!" and maybe this will prove to be it's saving grace... Non-techies will love it simply because it's pretty "ooh, I can skin it!"
I, on the other hand, have already returned to the safe territory of Galeon with libgtkembedmoz.so from the latest nightly.
The SuSE patches include USB patches from the 2.4 development tree, as well as other oatches such as support for the HighPoint HPT366 UDMA66 chipset (Very useful if, like me, you have one)
"I say, one of those horrid greasy beat combos have asked us to ban something called Napster. Well, I don't know what it is, but if 'Metal Liker' don't want it at our university it must be a favourable item. Request denied"
Well, jolly good, always nice to have another great big internet corporation bow down and realise how important it is to their future to be on board with Linux (AOL of course having already tested the waters slightly with their webserver and Transmeta/Linux/Mozilla webpads)
But... I would like it if they fixed the routing for icq.mirabilis.com, cos a whole bunch of us in the UK haven't been able to get to it for about a month now!
On the offchance that someone from AOL reads this:
/usr/sbin/traceroute icq.mirabilis.com
[First few steps removed to hide employers name]
4 e2-0-1.TH2.highwayone.net (195.70.64.50) 19 ms 33 ms 15 ms
5 62.232.126.78 (62.232.126.78) 17 ms 128 ms 37 ms
6 customer-100Mbps.uk.above.net (208.184.63.1) 19 ms 19 ms 22 ms
7 core1-linx-oc3-2.lhr.above.net (216.200.254.85) 26 ms 15 ms 17 ms
8 iad-lhr-stm4.iad.above.net (216.200.254.77) 82 ms 85 ms 83 ms
9 core1-core3-oc48.iad.above.net (209.249.203.34) 85 ms 81 ms 87 ms
10 pop1-vie-P2-0.atdn.net (209.249.203.230) 98 ms 89 ms 91 ms
11 bb1-vie-P6-1.atdn.net (204.148.99.197) 87 ms 94 ms 96 ms
12 bb1-dtc-P5-0.atdn.net (204.148.98.9) 86 ms 83 ms 82 ms
13 pop2-dtc-P14-0.atdn.net (204.148.99.130) 81 ms 88 ms 101 ms
14 ow4-dtc-P0-0.atdn.net (204.148.102.38) 84 ms 84 ms 83 ms
15 oscar-dc3-P0-1.aol.com (205.188.130.210) 97 ms 81 ms 84 ms
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 oscar-dc3-P0-1.aol.com (205.188.130.210) 84 ms !A * *
And yes, it has been the same point at which the traceroute died the whole time...
Dunno if anyone else has noticed that openoffice.org appears to require password authentication. "Please enter username for Tigirs at openoffice.org"
This deliberate, or in error? And can anyone with a username/password shed light as to what is contained therein?
This is fantastic news of course, those of us who have been trumpeting SO as a realistic alternative to MSO while lamenting it's closed nature can amp up our trumpets and really give it some. Speech and beer, well, it don't get much better than this.
For innovation to occur ideas must be had. It may well be the case that a lot of recent innovations have happened in the commercial sector. That is simply because the people who had the ideas were working in that sector.
There is nothing to stop people in the academic sector having ideas. In fact, if anything ideas in the university setting are more likely to be approved and pursued, as commercial value does not neccessarily have to be proven.
The notion that Microsoft should be allowed to censor/. or any other medium is repugnant, and were this solely about this then I'd be throwing my hat in with everyone else who has knee-jerked and screamed "WE HATE BILL" with all their might.
If only they'd bothered to look at the issue here...
Microsoft say that certain posts infringed their copyright, and, if we're honest, they did. People blatently posted material copyrighted to M$. Such posts should never have been allowed to remain on the server, but they did.
Please don't do anything daft and turn this into a legal case that slashdot/Andover can't afford. I fear you would lose, and it wouldn't even be a blaze of glory you'd go out in.
The way new technologies become 'standard' be that as approved by ISO or similar or de-facto is for big businesses and other large organisations to adopt them. Corporate (America|UK|Europe) is already adopting Linux at server level for web serving, mail serving... It's a short step mentally from that to a directory service.
Let's say you're responsible at a management level within a company for web content. I don't mean you're the web server admin, I mean you're where the buck stops before the CEO. You want people across the company to be able to contribute relevant information to the website, which has been running happily on Linux for the past three years. Your server admin informs you that he has no intention of giving every Tom Dick and Harry in the company shell access to the server, so what are you going to do? What you need is some method of maintaining information on people, and allowing them access to the server solely for this purpose - an opening...
Mail again is a natural opening to directory services. If people are already getting their mail from a Linux box, why not extend it to serve any information on them as may be required internally, subject to all the usual security disclaimers of course...
All that is required really is for someone to start work on it - get a team of top notch hackers on board and away you go. Consult managers from the sort of corporation who this could be targetted at to find out what they'd want/expect out of such a system as a starting point. Believe it or not you can apply commercial software development ideas to open source development:)
The freedom of the user to choose what he or she wants what appears on their desktop looks like.
What the Suck crew have got right is that where you have to use skins to use an app you want to use - one very important choice is taken away from the user, and that is the choice to have that app look the same (consistent, not boring) as every other one on their desktop.
But that is a problem with specific skinned apps, not with skinning as a concept. As a concept, skinning works, Richard Stallman said "users should always have a choice", he was talking about free software, but it applies to user interfaces as well. If a person wants their desktop to look like the Star Trek LCARS system, let them - it doesn't mean the rest of us have to. Similarly, if a person wants Netscape 6 to look like the rest of their (Windows|Mac|Linux|etc) desktop, they should be allowed to.
You can't legislate for what people find easier to use, or more pleasing on the eye, or more useful for impressing their friends (or whatever reason people customise their desktops), all you can, and should, do is allow them the freedom to do so anyway they choose.
Isn't this just the sort of thing we need to know about guys? Although I have to say, I think knowing how cool it got the drink would be useful... (Did it freeze it? Was it cooler than from the fridge? Did it prove to be a wasted effort)
Kind of demonstrates how versatile all this computer hardware we use is. Let's see, if we can cool cans with processor fans, what's next? The obvious answer is of course that we can use the processors that the fans had previously been on to fry up a cooked breakfast (and then to give us an excuse to test out the nearest fire extinguisher).
Maybe there are other uses, a new line in geek magicians perhaps? (Pick a sound card, any sound card........was that your sound card?)
And of course, the obvious, use your old Amiga 500 as a door wedge *:)
Microsoft hasn't impacted us? What planet are you living on?
No, it hasn't - has the widespread use of Windows and financial domination of Microsoft impacted the way you live your life? It certainly hasn't impacted mine. Mobile phones and EPOC have - they allow me to keep in touch with people wherever I am, UN*X etc have, I learnt to program, got my first taste of the net etc on them from '94ish up till now, and I'm still learning, DVD has, digital quality movies in my home, Mmmm, nice., MP3 has, I can store my CD collection in a relatively small amount of disk space (anything's relatively small when you have as much as I do) and listen to them as much as I like, in whatever order I like without having to be constantly switching them, and without them getting scratched, damaged etc...
The fact that a two-bit american company has, by the use of shady, even illegal business practices forced it's product onto 80-90% of the world's PCs has not impacted my life one iota, I pity those whose life it has impacted.
JK's hit several nails full square on their heads with this piece, the plain fact of the matter is that to describe the [insert description of time here] before yesterday's ruling as the Microsoft Era is to give them kudos and credit they simply do not deserve.
To suggest we are leaving The Microsoft Era is to suggest that Microsoft have in some way impacted our lives up until now. Frankly, apart from giving us something to fight against, they haven't.
If I think back over the past decade or so, [technological] things that have impacted my life significantly have been mobile phones & mobile computing [of the Epoc variety], UN*X/GNU/Linux/Open Source, DVD, MP3.
If we are leaving a technological era, it is probably the Closed Source Era. Not just Microsoft, but producers of CS across the board. We are not however entering the Open Source era, we've been there for a very long time (eras can overlap can't they?), merely coming to a stage where it is going to predominate in the software market. Nor are we going to see the end of closed source software, there is a place for it (surely not I hear you cry, and if you knew who I work for, you'd shout it even louder), but frankly, there are some systems that have to be kept closed, even secretive by their nature. Imagine is a government, any government, opened the source for their [insert intellgence system of your choice] software, they'd be screwed yeah? That's my point.
If we're leaving a financial era, it's the one of having a single behemoth in the software market. If the decision is taken to break-up Microsoft, chances are that it will be broken into three companies: Operating Systems, Internet and Applications. Welcome to the wonderful world of having three Microsofts in the market place, who, by the very nature of the split, will not be competing with each other. Observe as their collective stock value outstrips anything any dotCom speculator considers feasible, but also be aware of the fact that the public now knows the truth, so notice how much less power they have than if Bill hd decided to split the company in such a way voluntarily, say, five years ago. Be thankful therefore that this case has happened, because if they had split the company down previously, you can bet this case would never have been brought, and the practices would have continued unchecked.
Yes, the government has done it as a show and nothing more, but although the reason may not be 'pure', the result is most certainly a Good Thing [TM]
I wonder whether these companies are doing this for the publicity (all P is good P and all that) in the wake of all the PSX2 publicity recently. Afterall, for copyright infingement, surely criminal procedures, involving some sort of law enforcement agency would be more appropriate than suing.
Doing it this way, gets them on all the news sites [Slashdot included, oddly;)], and those sites carrying it, could well be playing right into their hands.
I'm not saying that Yahoo! are innocent in this, that really is for the courts to determine, what I am saying is that this is not the most appropriate means to pursue an issue like this.
While I have to confess to not being a fan of Word Perfect (I prefer Lotus Word Pro or Star Office), this is incredibly significant.
Someone's already said that if Corel Draw were to be added to this it would be a serious package for a Linux based office. I think it is as it stands.
Yes, in Star Office and ApplixWare Linux already has two integrated office suites, but irrespective of how good/bad/etc you may consider these packages, neither has quite the mainstream commercial significance as Corel.
With certain Lotus software already being ported to Linux, could it only be a matter of time before the only one of the 'Big Three' office suites missing is MS Office? I hope so, SmartSuite on Linux would go down very well in my book.
I see no reason why Linux should 'fork' at all into incompatible OS's...
The nature of the GPL is such that any any alterations to code (including the kernel) have to be released, making it possible to keep any strands that shoot off included in Linus/Alan's 'official' kernel, or not if they were pants.
Yes, Open Source software allows for people to take code where they want to, but in the case of Linux, where there are obvious focal points (Linus Alan etc) for what is or isn't the 'official' kernel, it seems unlikely to me that it would happen.
Even if it did, I don't think it would really matter, porting software between platforms that would inevitably be very similar would be no great hassle on the whole.
I believe the latest pre-release version of KDE2 is going to be in the 'Unsorted' section of the CD, along with XFree86 4.0.
The most appropriate place for it, given that it's not finished yet, but people (like yourself) will want to try it.
--
Re:When it is finally out can I just download an I
on
SuSE 6.4 Announced
·
· Score: 3
Yes, you can do an FTP install, the bootdisks are all on the FTP site (ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/6.3/disks/ for 6.3 - sure you can work out where for 6.4).
Getting a degree requires that a person commit a lot of their time to it. Sure, the actual university fees may be free, but the actual cost to a person is a lot more than that.
In order to have a decent crack at the higher education whip, a person would have to:
Give up their job, or significantly reduce the number of hours they work, either way reduce their income
In this case, potentially have to invest in computer hardware & software (OK, not neccesarily software - hooray for Linux), more cost. Attending a traditionbal university does not include this cost, and you physically attend lectures etc, and computer labs are often provided for essay writing purposes.
The real route to free university education is for government to pay course fees, and provide a grant system, such as the one that's just about be clubbed to death in the UK. Yes, it means an increase in taxation in the short run, but once a generation of well educated graduates are unleashed on the nation, the increase in earnings that their degrees will bring will result in more tax going to the treasury.
Yes, I know this is a slightly simplistic look at it, but sometimes you have to look at things simply to understand rather complex issues.
Slashdot Mirror
...for the poor buggers who've been laid off.
Much as I love Linux, I'm not in the least bit interested in how this affects it in comparison with how this affects my (now former) colleagues, and their families.
I know how I'd feel if I suddenly found out I was losing my job, had a mortgage to pay, maybe kids to feed and no obvious way of doing so.
The real tragedy is the people here, not the company, and while I'm sure that most if not all of them will get new jobs very soon, this is a very scary time, and my thoughts are with them.
James Ogley, SuSE UK (until 23rd Feb)
--
Well, I submitted it, but I'm not sure my borther did...
/.
Don't think he even reads
--
I don't know why people seem to be surprised at Red Hat not being part of this - it's not as if they've been one of the companies you'd associate with KDE. The fact is that if they had joined up, slashdot would be covered in messages about them using M$ style tactics, trying to control things, embrace and extend and all that. I'm not a Red Hat user (anymore), but I thnk they've made the right choice by not just jumping in on this.
:)
Nor am I a KDE user (I use GNOME and XFCE), but I think this is a good thing for the community. Choice is good, and having corporate backers for the two main choices that are going to get Linux onto the world's desktops has to be a good thing. IBM stand out in the list for me, they (IIRC) are also part of the GNOME Foundation. Having Big Blue back both desktop options says to the business world that this is serious, Linux is worth looking at.
World domination here we come!
--
Seems to me that they've rushed it to "market" a bit (good ol' AOL eh?)
/proc/cpuinfo - CPU with 128Mb physical RAM)
I would have liked it to be a lot tighter than it is, I downloaded it this morning (UK time), and got pretty decent transfer rates off linuxftp.netscape.com, might not be so speedy now. Having installed it however, things were not quite so quick. It seems to render the chrome a damn sight slower than Mozilla nightly does, ditto displaying even relatively simple pages off local servers, and ps afx resulted in netscape spawned processes more than filling my Eterm! On the whole, using it was painfully slow (on a 500Mhz - 501 according to
In spite of all this, being the generous BOFH that I am, I made it available to the rest of my office, and one of our sales guys loves it because "it's blue, not grey!" and maybe this will prove to be it's saving grace... Non-techies will love it simply because it's pretty "ooh, I can skin it!"
I, on the other hand, have already returned to the safe territory of Galeon with libgtkembedmoz.so from the latest nightly.
--
According to Linux Today, Microsoft say that the code is safe after the attack (presumably as safe as it was before, ahem...)
Info here ;
--
Its great that we can now take the code and add features that are sadly lacking in StarOffice, such as the MS Office Assistant...
We could have a little popup Tux penguin.
"It looks like you're writing a letter slagging off Microsoft. Would you like me to make it anonymous for you?"
--
The SuSE patches include USB patches from the 2.4 development tree, as well as other oatches such as support for the HighPoint HPT366 UDMA66 chipset (Very useful if, like me, you have one)
It also contains stuff like ip_masq_quake.
--
You store the passwords in plain text?
Dude, that's as lame as something I'd write...
--
Oxford's response would most likely be:
"I say, one of those horrid greasy beat combos have asked us to ban something called Napster. Well, I don't know what it is, but if 'Metal Liker' don't want it at our university it must be a favourable item. Request denied"
--
Surely it would be Windows 3, ummm, 95, that is, I meant to say 98, which of course was a joke, I meant to say 2000, just testing, it was ME.
Good job we have M$ to invent computing for us every couple of years eh?
--
Well, jolly good, always nice to have another great big internet corporation bow down and realise how important it is to their future to be on board with Linux (AOL of course having already tested the waters slightly with their webserver and Transmeta/Linux/Mozilla webpads)
But... I would like it if they fixed the routing for icq.mirabilis.com, cos a whole bunch of us in the UK haven't been able to get to it for about a month now!
On the offchance that someone from AOL reads this:
/usr/sbin/traceroute icq.mirabilis.com
[First few steps removed to hide employers name]
4 e2-0-1.TH2.highwayone.net (195.70.64.50) 19 ms 33 ms 15 ms
5 62.232.126.78 (62.232.126.78) 17 ms 128 ms 37 ms
6 customer-100Mbps.uk.above.net (208.184.63.1) 19 ms 19 ms 22 ms
7 core1-linx-oc3-2.lhr.above.net (216.200.254.85) 26 ms 15 ms 17 ms
8 iad-lhr-stm4.iad.above.net (216.200.254.77) 82 ms 85 ms 83 ms
9 core1-core3-oc48.iad.above.net (209.249.203.34) 85 ms 81 ms 87 ms
10 pop1-vie-P2-0.atdn.net (209.249.203.230) 98 ms 89 ms 91 ms
11 bb1-vie-P6-1.atdn.net (204.148.99.197) 87 ms 94 ms 96 ms
12 bb1-dtc-P5-0.atdn.net (204.148.98.9) 86 ms 83 ms 82 ms
13 pop2-dtc-P14-0.atdn.net (204.148.99.130) 81 ms 88 ms 101 ms
14 ow4-dtc-P0-0.atdn.net (204.148.102.38) 84 ms 84 ms 83 ms
15 oscar-dc3-P0-1.aol.com (205.188.130.210) 97 ms 81 ms 84 ms
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 oscar-dc3-P0-1.aol.com (205.188.130.210) 84 ms !A * *
And yes, it has been the same point at which the traceroute died the whole time...
--
This deliberate, or in error? And can anyone with a username/password shed light as to what is contained therein?
This is fantastic news of course, those of us who have been trumpeting SO as a realistic alternative to MSO while lamenting it's closed nature can amp up our trumpets and really give it some. Speech and beer, well, it don't get much better than this.
--
For innovation to occur ideas must be had. It may well be the case that a lot of recent innovations have happened in the commercial sector. That is simply because the people who had the ideas were working in that sector.
There is nothing to stop people in the academic sector having ideas. In fact, if anything ideas in the university setting are more likely to be approved and pursued, as commercial value does not neccessarily have to be proven.
--
The notion that Microsoft should be allowed to censor /. or any other medium is repugnant, and were this solely about this then I'd be throwing my hat in with everyone else who has knee-jerked and screamed "WE HATE BILL" with all their might.
If only they'd bothered to look at the issue here...
Microsoft say that certain posts infringed their copyright, and, if we're honest, they did. People blatently posted material copyrighted to M$. Such posts should never have been allowed to remain on the server, but they did.
Please don't do anything daft and turn this into a legal case that slashdot/Andover can't afford. I fear you would lose, and it wouldn't even be a blaze of glory you'd go out in.
--
I fail to see why this could not be the case...
:)
The way new technologies become 'standard' be that as approved by ISO or similar or de-facto is for big businesses and other large organisations to adopt them. Corporate (America|UK|Europe) is already adopting Linux at server level for web serving, mail serving... It's a short step mentally from that to a directory service.
Let's say you're responsible at a management level within a company for web content. I don't mean you're the web server admin, I mean you're where the buck stops before the CEO. You want people across the company to be able to contribute relevant information to the website, which has been running happily on Linux for the past three years. Your server admin informs you that he has no intention of giving every Tom Dick and Harry in the company shell access to the server, so what are you going to do? What you need is some method of maintaining information on people, and allowing them access to the server solely for this purpose - an opening...
Mail again is a natural opening to directory services. If people are already getting their mail from a Linux box, why not extend it to serve any information on them as may be required internally, subject to all the usual security disclaimers of course...
All that is required really is for someone to start work on it - get a team of top notch hackers on board and away you go. Consult managers from the sort of corporation who this could be targetted at to find out what they'd want/expect out of such a system as a starting point. Believe it or not you can apply commercial software development ideas to open source development
--
...freedom!
The freedom of the user to choose what he or she wants what appears on their desktop looks like.
What the Suck crew have got right is that where you have to use skins to use an app you want to use - one very important choice is taken away from the user, and that is the choice to have that app look the same (consistent, not boring) as every other one on their desktop.
But that is a problem with specific skinned apps, not with skinning as a concept. As a concept, skinning works, Richard Stallman said "users should always have a choice", he was talking about free software, but it applies to user interfaces as well. If a person wants their desktop to look like the Star Trek LCARS system, let them - it doesn't mean the rest of us have to. Similarly, if a person wants Netscape 6 to look like the rest of their (Windows|Mac|Linux|etc) desktop, they should be allowed to.
You can't legislate for what people find easier to use, or more pleasing on the eye, or more useful for impressing their friends (or whatever reason people customise their desktops), all you can, and should, do is allow them the freedom to do so anyway they choose.
--
Isn't this just the sort of thing we need to know about guys? Although I have to say, I think knowing how cool it got the drink would be useful... (Did it freeze it? Was it cooler than from the fridge? Did it prove to be a wasted effort)
....was that your sound card?)
Kind of demonstrates how versatile all this computer hardware we use is. Let's see, if we can cool cans with processor fans, what's next? The obvious answer is of course that we can use the processors that the fans had previously been on to fry up a cooked breakfast (and then to give us an excuse to test out the nearest fire extinguisher).
Maybe there are other uses, a new line in geek magicians perhaps? (Pick a sound card, any sound card....
And of course, the obvious, use your old Amiga 500 as a door wedge *:)
--
Microsoft hasn't impacted us? What planet are you living on?
No, it hasn't - has the widespread use of Windows and financial domination of Microsoft impacted the way you live your life? It certainly hasn't impacted mine. Mobile phones and EPOC have - they allow me to keep in touch with people wherever I am, UN*X etc have, I learnt to program, got my first taste of the net etc on them from '94ish up till now, and I'm still learning, DVD has, digital quality movies in my home, Mmmm, nice., MP3 has, I can store my CD collection in a relatively small amount of disk space (anything's relatively small when you have as much as I do) and listen to them as much as I like, in whatever order I like without having to be constantly switching them, and without them getting scratched, damaged etc...
The fact that a two-bit american company has, by the use of shady, even illegal business practices forced it's product onto 80-90% of the world's PCs has not impacted my life one iota, I pity those whose life it has impacted.
--
JK's hit several nails full square on their heads with this piece, the plain fact of the matter is that to describe the [insert description of time here] before yesterday's ruling as the Microsoft Era is to give them kudos and credit they simply do not deserve.
To suggest we are leaving The Microsoft Era is to suggest that Microsoft have in some way impacted our lives up until now. Frankly, apart from giving us something to fight against, they haven't.
If I think back over the past decade or so, [technological] things that have impacted my life significantly have been mobile phones & mobile computing [of the Epoc variety], UN*X/GNU/Linux/Open Source, DVD, MP3.
If we are leaving a technological era, it is probably the Closed Source Era. Not just Microsoft, but producers of CS across the board. We are not however entering the Open Source era, we've been there for a very long time (eras can overlap can't they?), merely coming to a stage where it is going to predominate in the software market. Nor are we going to see the end of closed source software, there is a place for it (surely not I hear you cry, and if you knew who I work for, you'd shout it even louder), but frankly, there are some systems that have to be kept closed, even secretive by their nature. Imagine is a government, any government, opened the source for their [insert intellgence system of your choice] software, they'd be screwed yeah? That's my point.
If we're leaving a financial era, it's the one of having a single behemoth in the software market. If the decision is taken to break-up Microsoft, chances are that it will be broken into three companies: Operating Systems, Internet and Applications. Welcome to the wonderful world of having three Microsofts in the market place, who, by the very nature of the split, will not be competing with each other. Observe as their collective stock value outstrips anything any dotCom speculator considers feasible, but also be aware of the fact that the public now knows the truth, so notice how much less power they have than if Bill hd decided to split the company in such a way voluntarily, say, five years ago. Be thankful therefore that this case has happened, because if they had split the company down previously, you can bet this case would never have been brought, and the practices would have continued unchecked.
Yes, the government has done it as a show and nothing more, but although the reason may not be 'pure', the result is most certainly a Good Thing [TM]
--
I wonder whether these companies are doing this for the publicity (all P is good P and all that) in the wake of all the PSX2 publicity recently. Afterall, for copyright infingement, surely criminal procedures, involving some sort of law enforcement agency would be more appropriate than suing.
;)], and those sites carrying it, could well be playing right into their hands.
Doing it this way, gets them on all the news sites [Slashdot included, oddly
I'm not saying that Yahoo! are innocent in this, that really is for the courts to determine, what I am saying is that this is not the most appropriate means to pursue an issue like this.
--
While I have to confess to not being a fan of Word Perfect (I prefer Lotus Word Pro or Star Office), this is incredibly significant.
Someone's already said that if Corel Draw were to be added to this it would be a serious package for a Linux based office. I think it is as it stands.
Yes, in Star Office and ApplixWare Linux already has two integrated office suites, but irrespective of how good/bad/etc you may consider these packages, neither has quite the mainstream commercial significance as Corel.
With certain Lotus software already being ported to Linux, could it only be a matter of time before the only one of the 'Big Three' office suites missing is MS Office? I hope so, SmartSuite on Linux would go down very well in my book.
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I see no reason why Linux should 'fork' at all into incompatible OS's...
The nature of the GPL is such that any any alterations to code (including the kernel) have to be released, making it possible to keep any strands that shoot off included in Linus/Alan's 'official' kernel, or not if they were pants.
Yes, Open Source software allows for people to take code where they want to, but in the case of Linux, where there are obvious focal points (Linus Alan etc) for what is or isn't the 'official' kernel, it seems unlikely to me that it would happen.
Even if it did, I don't think it would really matter, porting software between platforms that would inevitably be very similar would be no great hassle on the whole.
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I would have liked to see the KDE 2
I believe the latest pre-release version of KDE2 is going to be in the 'Unsorted' section of the CD, along with XFree86 4.0.
The most appropriate place for it, given that it's not finished yet, but people (like yourself) will want to try it.
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Yes, you can do an FTP install, the bootdisks are all on the FTP site
(ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/6.3/disks/
for 6.3 - sure you can work out where for 6.4).
As for burning a CD, I'm not sure whether you can or not - the problem being that YaST (The SuSE set up tool family) is not GPL. Info on this at
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i38 6/6.3/COPYRIGHT.yast
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Getting a degree requires that a person commit a lot of their time to it. Sure, the actual university fees may be free, but the actual cost to a person is a lot more than that.
In order to have a decent crack at the higher education whip, a person would have to:
The real route to free university education is for government to pay course fees, and provide a grant system, such as the one that's just about be clubbed to death in the UK. Yes, it means an increase in taxation in the short run, but once a generation of well educated graduates are unleashed on the nation, the increase in earnings that their degrees will bring will result in more tax going to the treasury.
Yes, I know this is a slightly simplistic look at it, but sometimes you have to look at things simply to understand rather complex issues.
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