TFA cites Con Kolivas's retirement from kernel work as a sign that desktop Linux isn't healthy. But in fact the bad sign was that Con Kolivas was ever the leading hacker for desktop kernel features. Because nobody ever paid him for his work on the kernel. Indeed, he's not even a working programmer! He's a medical doctor who programs as a hobby.
That pretty much sums up the status of desktop Linux: it still belongs to hobbyists at a time when server-side Linux is an important commercial product. Unless and until you can change that, it doesn't matter who controls Linux kernel development: the needs of Big Iron will prevail.
I think you've hit the nail right on the head, and you state an important aspect of open source software that linux fanboys don't seem to grasp. There will never be a widespread, successful "desktop linux" until it becomes an economically viable necessity for someone or some group of people with cash and investors. Right now, what impetus is there in investing all of this effort into diverting from the canonical linux kernel? Microshaft still dominates the desktop market, they've got infection deals with all the major PC vendors, and the majority of software publishers and hardware vendors still don't get this "linux" thing and resist supporting it. Apple as the only major competitor gives its customers a shrinkwrapped package that is targeted to a specific type of customer. So there's really not a lot of market to be gotten by an open source desktop oriented operating system. Not yet anyway. It might be more of a profitable market when more vendors are publishing and maintaining quality software for linux, but even then you've got to get Microsoft off the backs of the major PC vendors and convince them that linux is profitable for them and to fund development for and actively promote and support linux desktop PCs. Then you've got the resources to divert into another direction and improve the desktop experience from under the hood.
Because they're worse ideologues than RMS(they believe that propietarians should have the right to fuck you over, and that removing that right is evil) and they could never work on anything that dared to preserve freedom. Congratulations on beating a straw man to death.
"But, I can install Windows on this computer...I have a CD my brother-in-law gave me!"
You touch on a very interesting point. Windows' widespread popularity (and thus dominant user base) is a result of massive pirating in the past due to the "feature" of a lack of effective copy protection on previous releases. I would think that this anal retentive copy protection will only serve to redirect some of the potential Windows Vista user base to other systems that can be obtained more easily and cheaply, and won't intentionally or unintentionally deactivate themselves.
Does their study show... why Liberals are a bunch of pansies that want to back out of a war we... can win?
Oh man, thanks for the laugh! That's just what I needed to cheer me up this fine 9/11 morning!
Sure, we *can* win the war (read:complete clusterfuck) in Iraq, except for two obstacles:
Didn't we already do that? I sem to recall a fantastic photoshoot of our Fearless Leader on an aircraft carrier with a giant flag banner stating "Mission Accomplished", and that we were promised that major combat operations had concluded. The leadership then can't now have an American "win" and subsequent withdrawal, because their twisted reality would come crumbling down on them. Their only hope is to keep the stalemate in a positive light until they can conclude their terms in office, put their assets in a Swiss bank, and flee to a tropical island where they can't later be summoned by a congressional committee.
Short of nuking the entire middle east and raiding every town in every nation for jihadists and Al-Qaeda supporters and wiping them off the face of the earth, I don't see how this little foray into Iraq can be "won", when there's no other clear objective except "kill the terrorists", while we sit on our thumbs and wait for a nation that has lived under monarchy and dictatorship its entire existence to learn democracy and clean up the mess we handed it through the barrel of an M1 Abrams tank. I'll put it another way. Suppose for a moment that the states of the US were independent with no federal government. If the Iraqi army came in to Texas and quickly destroyed the government and military leadership, do you think they'd successfully establish a friendly government and pull out without having to kill every southwestern gun toting hillbilly and his family and his friends, destroy every baptist church, and guard every yard of every border from insurgent Oklahomans, Arkansas, New Mexicans, Nevadans, Coloradans, Louisianians, Alabamans, Missourians, Kansans, and Virginians, who have a rabid hate for the muslim invaders, plenty of guns and ammunition supplied by their state governments, and the support of the Texan populace?
I don't have any mod points today, but dammit I'm glad someone doesn't have their head wedged directly up their ass on this issue.
Inefficient, bloated software is inefficient and bloated regardless of what hardware it is running on; and 'inefficient' and 'bloated' are not admirable traits.
have you used vista?
it's a far better user experience than windows XP. if they did put some DRM related stuff in there, I haven't noticed, nor will 99.99% of its userbase. That reminds me, I've got some tasty Jim Jones brand kool-aid for you. I think they put something else in the kool-aid, but you won't notice. And neither will 99.99% of the dead bodies around you.
In which society, right now, would your rather live given the choice between predominately Christian, Jewish, or Muslim countries?
Let me make it first clear, that I do agree that at least from what I see on Fox&Friends Islamic ideals are often in direct opposition to those of America as a society. However, people like to ignore the fact that there are successful progressive societies in which Islam is the predominate religion, there is a separation between church and state, people do not live in caves, and RPG-7s are not distributed to school children.
With that said, if America is succeeding according to the mission it set out upon, it should not matter if its society became predominately christian, jewish, muslim, atheist, wiccan, church of the subgenious, scientologist, zoroastrian, or hindu, because the laws of the state are intended to be separate from those of the religious majority. If that is not the case, then we need to address why that is.
Why can't a free society just stockpile information in case it might be needed? Because that's not in the spirit of freedom of the people, it's in the spirit of the power of the state. It also costs the taxpayers money to fund these esoteric operations.
I don't see a problem until they start with a person, then find out what he's guilty of. This person's uncle had suspicious behavior, so they dug up everything they had on him. They went to him with everything they had dug up, and asked him to explain the suspicious parts. This is perfectly acceptable in a free society. Selecting a person by name or by a data pattern is still preemptively selecting a person. And that's what seems to have happened in the poster's story. there was no crime being investigated, the uncle wasn't ever formally charged. He just got harassed because he was "suspicious", with hopes that the investigation would reveal a crime that might or might not have been committed, of which the investigators had no knowledge.
I still stand by my point. In a free society, the public is not be under the all seeing eye of the state.
"I find it kinda disconcerting that I could one day be confronted by police with an exhaustive list of my movements for the last 10 years."
I could care less. It would establish my innocence. I don't find it intimidating at all. I think you've missing the bigger picture here. In a free society information about citizens isn't arbitrarily stockpiled for potential criminal investigations. In a free society, information for a criminal investigation is gathered once a citizen is officially suspected of a crime. The purpose of a free society's law enforcement is not to preemptively scour the populous with microphones and video cameras for all lawbreakers and dissenters, as you would see in a totalitarian state, but to respond to visible breaches of the law. In America, we're headed down a slippery slope - letting our congress sign away our traditional rights and liberties, because we're afraid that the "terrorists" are going to get us in our sleep. Eventually, we'll have no liberties to be abused by the "terrorists", and we'll simply trudge through servile lives anxiously avoiding any "suspicious" activity or thought deemed dangerous (read: independent) by the government, lest we be whisked away in a black van paid for by our own tax dollars to an offshore unsupervised prison we opted not to care about when it was erected, to be interrogated through torture we legalized to get information from terrorists, out of sight and mind of anyone that might care but now can't do anything without being locked in the cells next to us.
Maybe that's a paranoid rant, but that's how I imagine a life lived in "safety" in exchange for liberty.
Don't expect the governement to get it right if they cant realize when you put in a change of address for a new license and they will not send you notices that your registration is out of date to the new address I doubt they can figure anything else about you. I wouldn't jump to that conclusion so quickly - it's in the government's best interests that your registration expire, so that you can fund police with the ticket fee. Now if the IRS lost track of you so easily, I might be able to jump to that conclusion.
Sprinkling the post with:-),:-P, or:-/ here and there can help get the correct tone across, even if it looks kind of lame.:-/
<?XML version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tone xmlns="http://smileysarebad.com/xsd/tone">
<facetious>Hasn't XML, in its infinite glory in all applications, already given us a method that's a little less lame?</facetious>
</tone>
So, do they even have any market share today? Anybody really use it? Hardly anybody uses it now and if this deal causes more people to shun them, will anybody even notice? Who is Linspire anyway?
I think there is a problem with this thinking. MS will want to own Linux if it can to deny it market share. If it can't own it, it will kill it. They make good headway on plan B by eliminating fringe distributions one by one by tainting them to the point that users abandon them.
It's especially dangerous in the business market, where Microsoft could corral up the business customers of defunct Linux distributions, and say "hey, you have a covenant agreement with Microsoft, and we hate to see your business suffer through the death of your software provider. Microsoft will be more than happy to give you a discount on a Microsoft partnership in the interest of your business needs." BOOM. They've regained customers by killing their software support and baiting them back in under the pretext of their "Covenant", because business users LOVE partnerships and agreements and will trust them all the way to bank. They know that's the only reason Linux users would approach a distribution with a Microsoft covenant in the first place. Once the user is left with nowhere to run in the middleground between MS and the OSS world, the little liferaft MS will throw at them is more than enough to swing wayward business customers back to the dark side.
Are they going to maintain a list of words that are okay to use on TV? It's so arbitrary and transient. What happens when "asshole" gets shortened to "hole" with the meaning determined by context? Would the FCC start regulating words and their context? It's totally insane.
They'd have to, or else the Eukanuba Championship would never be aired again. "She's a lovely bitch, that one there!"
I call bullshit on the author being a Linux admin. I'm not trolling and this certainly isn't flamebait, only truth: "It's Linux - no worries" is a load of crap and everyone here knows it.
Surely you jest!
I've used rsync for backups for years. I back up my mail, my Thunderbird data, and "my document" directory (i.e.,/home/xxxx/). One of these backup commands looks like this and sits in a single shell script and runs from cron once a day (I've already sent the ssh key to the backup target server so no need to manually login to the backup server for this command to run):
I'm sure plenty of linux admins promote the use of both rsync as a backup/restore mechanism and the use of the root login over the internet! They all happen to be 13, but still...
They will be probably be accused of publishing illegal translations of foreign movies (which is forbidden by Polish copyright law).
I applaud the Poles on their consistency, but I think it's a bit superfluous to declare that illegal translations are forbidden under law... after all, it would be quite an oxymoron for an illegal translation to be permissible...
While I read this article and think "Well, that was fucking stupid." I have to wonder if there needs to be a school-sanctioned version of this concept in place.
I grew up in US/USSR Cold War times and spent a few schoolday hours a year huddled in the fallout shelter basement during drills.
Students across the nation are already being taught to "duck and cover" in reaction to the most recent VT incident, and it has about the same effect as in the nuclear situation in that the students are still no safer (i.e. they would die prostrated on the floor instead of sitting or running) and the core issues generating the problem still go unaddressed (no, not nuclear disarmament and gun control).
You're missing some glaring holes in your argument there.
First, Vista is not advertised as a "part" of what you see on the screen, nor do you as the consumer produce the visuals shown own your own. If the ads simply show a person presenting a slideshow that gets them a million dollar bonus, you'd have a case, but that's not the issue.
Second, in the automobile industry, when a vehicle is shown doing something that it obviously can't do or that is dangerous, the fine print states "professional driver on closed course", or "dramatisation", or something similar. And when they show the low low price of the LS model above a decked out LTZ model, the fine print must say "optional equipment installed", or otherwise tune the viewer into the fact that the demonstrated product differs significantly from the product actually advertised.
Microsoft is advertising Windows Vista by demonstrating the Wow factor of optional items, and not clarifying the differences between editions in advertisements or in "Vista capable" stickers. IANAL, but this certainly strikes me as a bait and switch, especially since Windows Vista is advertised as a solitary product, but there is no discrete product named "Windows Vista". The advertisements make no distinction about this, and so the consumer has no indication that the demonstrated features are not part of all editions of Vista.
Are you saying that Star Wars doesn't have a loyal fan base? That's quite possibly the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard. "Jedi" is an organized religion in many countries. Serenity can't touch that.
I'm certain that the regression in quality of official Star Wars works (due largely in part to George Lucas's brain being overtaken by his neck) has alienated much of the Star Wars fan base. Let's review some of the highlights?
Han Solo didn't shoot first? Ok, we the audience must not have been paying attention for the past 30 years.
Hayden Christensen "backported" into ROTJ. I swear he was old and decrepit when he died, but I guess Anakin's just got enough midi-chlorians that, unlike Yoda and Obi-Wan, he can reverse his age when he becomes a blue ghostie.
Nerf-herders and lazer brains
Jar-Jar Binks
Need new alien races? Just do some variations of a walking frog in a computer, and make them all speak a different form of broken english.
Yoda has a clear regression from bona-fide character to prop and effects gimmick.
The Senate of the Republic turns out to be no more than kids on floating bumper cars. Hoorah!
The force, at first a mystical energy field that binds the world together, is actually the byproduct of an amoeba? And if that wasn't bad enough, let's call that amoeba a midi-chlorian and REALLY make the force a completely ridiculous concept!
General Jar-Jar Binks
We're a Droid army! Roger Roger! Um.. err... uhhh.. you're under arrest! Get him! Gee, Moe, what mo' can a fellow say? That's all there is, there ain't no mo'!
Representative Binks (wasn't he once banished for being a clumsy wreck of a computer animated character?)
After watching Episodes I-III, I cannot see how Obi-Wan could possibly recollect Anakin as a "cunning warrior" and a "good friend". Especially with lines like "It's not fair!" and "He doesn't understand!". I guess Obi-Wan was just trying to let Luke off easy. Telling him "Your father had an uncontrollable temper, with serious dependency and intimacy issues. He was a self-centered ass, and threw tantrums in front of any authority figure" might have made Luke cry.
Vader saying "Padme". Then wailing in his plastic and vinyl halloween costume. How can anyone continue to find his character intimidating.
IBM does not really benefit is suing. SCO is broke. What are they going to get?
*sarcasm* Obviously, the rights to UNIX, so they can distribute linux without being in infringement! SCO has known all along that IBM with its Deep Pockets would try this tactic when they failed to disprove SCO's claims before SCO finally would reveal them!
... those who played World of Warcraft more often resorted to striking wild boars and skinning their hides while on a nature walk than those involved in the study who were not exposed to the video game.
Researchers conclude that if a video game were marketed in which the player was tasked with wedging an opposable digit into the anal orifice of the character, the individuals playing the game would be more likely to pursue a career researching the connections between video games and human behavior.
candid - carefully articulated, with purposed reference to selling points and marketing terms, avoidance of meaningful response to questions, and absolute denial of facts.
Slashdot Mirror
That pretty much sums up the status of desktop Linux: it still belongs to hobbyists at a time when server-side Linux is an important commercial product. Unless and until you can change that, it doesn't matter who controls Linux kernel development: the needs of Big Iron will prevail.
I think you've hit the nail right on the head, and you state an important aspect of open source software that linux fanboys don't seem to grasp. There will never be a widespread, successful "desktop linux" until it becomes an economically viable necessity for someone or some group of people with cash and investors. Right now, what impetus is there in investing all of this effort into diverting from the canonical linux kernel? Microshaft still dominates the desktop market, they've got infection deals with all the major PC vendors, and the majority of software publishers and hardware vendors still don't get this "linux" thing and resist supporting it. Apple as the only major competitor gives its customers a shrinkwrapped package that is targeted to a specific type of customer. So there's really not a lot of market to be gotten by an open source desktop oriented operating system. Not yet anyway. It might be more of a profitable market when more vendors are publishing and maintaining quality software for linux, but even then you've got to get Microsoft off the backs of the major PC vendors and convince them that linux is profitable for them and to fund development for and actively promote and support linux desktop PCs. Then you've got the resources to divert into another direction and improve the desktop experience from under the hood.
Dumbass.
You touch on a very interesting point. Windows' widespread popularity (and thus dominant user base) is a result of massive pirating in the past due to the "feature" of a lack of effective copy protection on previous releases. I would think that this anal retentive copy protection will only serve to redirect some of the potential Windows Vista user base to other systems that can be obtained more easily and cheaply, and won't intentionally or unintentionally deactivate themselves.
Oh man, thanks for the laugh! That's just what I needed to cheer me up this fine 9/11 morning!
Sure, we *can* win the war (read:complete clusterfuck) in Iraq, except for two obstacles:
I don't have any mod points today, but dammit I'm glad someone doesn't have their head wedged directly up their ass on this issue.
Inefficient, bloated software is inefficient and bloated regardless of what hardware it is running on; and 'inefficient' and 'bloated' are not admirable traits.
line 1: unexpected ")"
it's a far better user experience than windows XP. if they did put some DRM related stuff in there, I haven't noticed, nor will 99.99% of its userbase. That reminds me, I've got some tasty Jim Jones brand kool-aid for you. I think they put something else in the kool-aid, but you won't notice. And neither will 99.99% of the dead bodies around you.
Let me make it first clear, that I do agree that at least from what I see on Fox&Friends Islamic ideals are often in direct opposition to those of America as a society. However, people like to ignore the fact that there are successful progressive societies in which Islam is the predominate religion, there is a separation between church and state, people do not live in caves, and RPG-7s are not distributed to school children.
With that said, if America is succeeding according to the mission it set out upon, it should not matter if its society became predominately christian, jewish, muslim, atheist, wiccan, church of the subgenious, scientologist, zoroastrian, or hindu, because the laws of the state are intended to be separate from those of the religious majority. If that is not the case, then we need to address why that is.
I still stand by my point. In a free society, the public is not be under the all seeing eye of the state.
<tone xmlns="http://smileysarebad.com/xsd/tone">
<facetious>Hasn't XML, in its infinite glory in all applications, already given us a method that's a little less lame?</facetious>
</tone>
I think there is a problem with this thinking. MS will want to own Linux if it can to deny it market share. If it can't own it, it will kill it. They make good headway on plan B by eliminating fringe distributions one by one by tainting them to the point that users abandon them.
It's especially dangerous in the business market, where Microsoft could corral up the business customers of defunct Linux distributions, and say "hey, you have a covenant agreement with Microsoft, and we hate to see your business suffer through the death of your software provider. Microsoft will be more than happy to give you a discount on a Microsoft partnership in the interest of your business needs." BOOM. They've regained customers by killing their software support and baiting them back in under the pretext of their "Covenant", because business users LOVE partnerships and agreements and will trust them all the way to bank. They know that's the only reason Linux users would approach a distribution with a Microsoft covenant in the first place. Once the user is left with nowhere to run in the middleground between MS and the OSS world, the little liferaft MS will throw at them is more than enough to swing wayward business customers back to the dark side.
Surely you jest!
I've used rsync for backups for years. I back up my mail, my Thunderbird data, and "my document" directory (i.e., /home/xxxx/). One of these backup commands looks like this and sits in a single shell script and runs from cron once a day (I've already sent the ssh key to the backup target server so no need to manually login to the backup server for this command to run):
/home/xxxx/.mozilla-thunderbird/ root@mycomcastipnumber:/hdb/ibmt60-ubuntu-mozilla- tbird/ >> /home/xxxx/backup-.txt
rsync -avgz
I'm sure plenty of linux admins promote the use of both rsync as a backup/restore mechanism and the use of the root login over the internet! They all happen to be 13, but still...
You're missing some glaring holes in your argument there.
First, Vista is not advertised as a "part" of what you see on the screen, nor do you as the consumer produce the visuals shown own your own. If the ads simply show a person presenting a slideshow that gets them a million dollar bonus, you'd have a case, but that's not the issue.
Second, in the automobile industry, when a vehicle is shown doing something that it obviously can't do or that is dangerous, the fine print states "professional driver on closed course", or "dramatisation", or something similar. And when they show the low low price of the LS model above a decked out LTZ model, the fine print must say "optional equipment installed", or otherwise tune the viewer into the fact that the demonstrated product differs significantly from the product actually advertised.
Microsoft is advertising Windows Vista by demonstrating the Wow factor of optional items, and not clarifying the differences between editions in advertisements or in "Vista capable" stickers. IANAL, but this certainly strikes me as a bait and switch, especially since Windows Vista is advertised as a solitary product, but there is no discrete product named "Windows Vista". The advertisements make no distinction about this, and so the consumer has no indication that the demonstrated features are not part of all editions of Vista.
I'm certain that the regression in quality of official Star Wars works (due largely in part to George Lucas's brain being overtaken by his neck) has alienated much of the Star Wars fan base. Let's review some of the highlights?
... those who played World of Warcraft more often resorted to striking wild boars and skinning their hides while on a nature walk than those involved in the study who were not exposed to the video game.
Researchers conclude that if a video game were marketed in which the player was tasked with wedging an opposable digit into the anal orifice of the character, the individuals playing the game would be more likely to pursue a career researching the connections between video games and human behavior.
candid - carefully articulated, with purposed reference to selling points and marketing terms, avoidance of meaningful response to questions, and absolute denial of facts.