Okay, I'm a bit suprised by this for serious resons. 1. I thought the big mainframe vendor back in the golden times did this too (or was it just limited to the hardware?) 2. Shareware works like that?
I don't know if th fact it's "applied just to an OS" makes a lot of distinction, legally, but practically, this patent seems to have a grade of innovation of zero.
a lot of linux and mac os x do not have a lot of features listed, nor did they have them when they were 'conceived.'
Nor do a lot of Windows Vista installs. Can you have those features on Linux/Mac OS X? Yes (excluding parental control, and keeping in mind we are talking about "approaches" more than how a certain feature exactly works. Because MS has patented that exact method so no one else can legally use it).
In the end, the OS is as secure as the user keeps it. You can have a super secure Windows/Linux/Mac installation, or equally have a very loose one.
And effectively hardening your OS implies you have to understand you might lose some functionality (see all those apps on Windows that fire up unneeded UAC prompts by doing the very wrong thing, or those apps on Linux that are happily unaware of SELinux) and do not bitch about it with the wrong people (the OS makers).
Although I concede you that there has been a certain mindset of "I run Linux/Mac OS so I'm inherently secure" that needs to be eradicated ASAP
Back on the topic, it doesn't matter what OS you choose, but develop good policies and stick with them and you'll be reasonably secure.
No. Copyright law is preserving the right of the artist to attempt to profit from their work without the active interference of others.
More correctly, it preserves the author right to decide under which conditions said work can be copied, and under which conditions said work can be modified.
Creative Commons (and Open Source) use the copyright mechanism extensively and that is, in fact, their legal stand.
It does not work (completely) out of the box; the things that you need to tweak are the following:
Boot Fedora from USB, by downloading any live iso (or the netinstall if you are short on space) and following http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo (or the relevant page in the manual: I'm frankly more happy with the manual)
Install the whole thing (SSD users might want to check out Theodore T'so blog on how to correctly format an SSD to have semi-decent performances)
The GMA950 is going to be a pain as usual, so if you plan to run compiz like I do you should google for optimizations of the driver. It mostly boils down to inserting Option "MigrationHeuristics" "greedy" in the Device section of/etc/X11/xorg.conf but this might be outdated information.
However, this is to improve performances, the stuff will work (just slow, and compiz can REALLY slow down apps like Firefox)
Like Bill Clinton once said... or was it Al Gore? Anyway, most of the amazing battery performances of cellphones come from using dedicated, low power hardware.
A small, and absolutely not comprehensive list:
ARM based processor (yes, RISC is much more efficient and predictable, than whatever-i686-is) Low-power wireless (that can be a true killer, especially true for WiFi, much less for WiMax) No hard disk (that kills a lot) Etc etc
Sure, software has its own share of guilt: mainly, the fact that mainstream OSes, in their standard configuration, are much oriented toward having to deal with x86 processors, hard disks, PCI buses, etc.
From those OSes, one can churn out a system that retains the kernel and some userland but does a better job handling low-power resources.
A practical example, my EeePc (from which I'm typing this) ran painfully slow when i first installed Fedora on it (default install, with LVM, big swap space, continuous disk access). Tweaking parameters here and there has fixed a lot of speed issues and, probably, makes the battery run better than it did.
Maybe one should try Ubuntu NetBook edition and do comparisons based on that.
That's mostly because, unless in the US, I think here the telcos take some revenues from the device selling (and from the contract too which is outrageous).
Actually, the two telcos selling it here are Vodafone and TIM, and the second did have horrible balances until last time. And if you look at their plans to resurrect the company, it was all about the iPhone.
They are sure people would spend double the right price to have it just because it's the iPhone.
Neither system is perfect. But one is much much much much much more forgiving. The communist system requires more or less perfect people. Therefore it cannot work. +1
I was talking about the "ideal" capitalism. I completely agree with you.
No, this has nothing to do on how you select leaders. This has to do with the fact that, with communism, economy MUST be lead. You can't just build a meat-packing plant and tell the director there "do what the fuck you want". You need to know what the country needs and coordinate the economic effort. Ideally, with capitalism, economy has no lead. In fact, it has: economy would not produce enough advanced innovation, and in fact most of the innovation comes from government funded stuff (be it military production or whatever else).
Okay, we're going a bit offroad here. Medics were paid more (in a way or another) even in the communist states. The fundamental difference between capitalism and communism was that capitalism was an ecosystem with different needs and actors, each pulling for its own side, and this combined "pulling" made the system reach a stability (it's a natural stable system). Communism, on the other hand, called for totally arbitrary pre-planning of economy (you couldn't really go and tell people "do what the fuck you want"), which were the infamous Quinquennial plans of the Soviets. The communist approach did had one highlight: the quick electirifcation and modernization of Russia. However, on the other hand, any single mistake from the "big bosses" in the Kremlin had catastrophic consequences. With a capitalist system, we can afford having completely dumb leaders:D.
OSes are written in C/C++ because, well, when coding a kernel you can't say "let's have someone else do the memory management". So you use a programming language that allows you to access the memory.
That was, btw, why C was created. Back in the times, people used languages that did memory management for you for high-level apps (yes, LISP had a garbage collector) and assembler for kernels.
The strength of C was that it was a high level language and yet allowed you to take the memory management in your own hands.
I think medium/big companies and institutions should use that tactic more, especially when they know they are stuck on Windows for whatever reason.
They can phone up Microsoft and ask how much upgrading will work, then, upon hearing it, starts to say that it's "too much" and that they will instead switch to Linux and tell everyone how much they have saved switching to Linux etc etc.
Bet that way, you can get loads of free software from Microsoft:D
Spammers don't pay for bandwidth like everyone else?
No they don't. They infect machines through viruses/trojans/whatever, creating botnets that proceed to send spam for a short time until they get blacklisted. My boss at work took one a few days ago, resulting in out whole network being blacklisted. Along with our mailserver (YAY!)
ISP fees would be lower?
Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.
Expense to the recipient?
To go back at my work example. I hadn't blocked access to port 25 through the firewall because some people in the office check/use their private mail, not passing through the company mailserver for sending stuff. Then my boss got a virus, everything got blacklisted and basically we had to sustain the following expenses:
50 EUR for being speedily removed from some RBL sites
30 minutes of my work (lifted off another project) to go Nazi and close all the ports that weren't 80, 443, 21 and some others, restricting outcoming traffic on port 25 only if generated by the mailserver
Six hours to hunt down the virus making sure all Windows machines we have were clean
Well, it's an online survey. The data probably gets collected in a db. The db has a record for every answer (1 record == 1 user). So it's more simple to do the math on the number of users rather than the number of selections: having done SQL, and being the lazy programmer I am, I'm pretty sure that's the main reason behind it.
Trolltech releases their code under GPL. Last time I checked, Microsoft didn't. Trolltech is by far one of the most open-source friendly corporations. Hence, your point is invalid, as both the Gnome and KDE codebase are equally free.
We might discuss on technical terms now, but that would be offtopic.
Not entirely true. So far, MS patent strategy has been more on the lines of "be aware, we might sue you" rather than actually suing someone. I'm however intrested to see what their patent strategy will become, and it could take three ways: a) Suing half of the world, thus starting Patent War I. b) Threatening to do point a until the point where everyone (IBM, SUN, Adobe, Novell et al) pull out their nukes and people start getting frightened about the unavoidable carnage. And then be like "okay, what about getting rid of all these nukes?": more or less what Reagan did at the end of the 80es (Space Shield Program -> START I and II treaties). c) Decide to slowly and subtly "inject" patent-peace clauses in their license hence making Patent War I impossible due to the cross-pollination and software dependencies. Same effect of option b, except no one will ever notice until it's over.
So that means you copy a CD online and you damaged them $15 or so.
So in this system what is going to prevent everyone from stealing first and paying later? If the only amount you pay is close to what you would have payed anyway it makes good business sense to steal. With all that said this whole case is ridiculous but thats because of the jury instructions as you mentioned, not the final amount she might have to pay. That is just layers of ridiculousness.
That was not the point of GP. The whole point is that, although higher than the commercial value of what you stole, you shouldn't be fined for an overly excessive amount of money.
Let's assume you hate someone, deeply, and you decide one day to break his/her car's left mirror. It would be okay if they awarded the plaintiff a $300 in damages, but it would surely make me raise an eyebrow if they fined you for $5k: and that was the point of the GP too.
I don't know if, in this case, they have detailed the amount of damage they had: but here where I live, you should bring proof and calculations of the damage by an independent expert in order to get awarded the damage.
In this case, it doesn't seem to me that they did so: since apparently Sony/BMG said they were still in the process of calculating said damage: once they had, this data should be reviewed by an expert nominated by the court and only at last the defendant should be fined.
Recently I bought a multifunctional HP printer, since apparently in the store where I went they had no "old style printers" anymore. I was a little concerned about that, since generally I hook the printer to the linux router/home server in order to serve printing over the net through CUPS (which btw, works pretty flawless with Windows). With my surprise, I just had to install the HP drivers and everything worked fine, and so the scanner through sane (and a bit of python coding made it available through the web to the other computers: so there's remote scanning now too). Now, HP invests pretty hugely in Linux, but I don't think they actually invest more money doing Linux driver rather than the windows ones (plus all that crap that gets installed when you install the drivers on Windows). My point here is that actually, making good opensource drivers for Linux doesn't seem to have hurt HP printing dept. and it's not prohibitively expensive. I'm pretty sure that if Linux was a little more widespread it will have this kind of hardware support as well. What makes Linux unworthy for the desktop right now is: * Wireless support (bluetooth and some wireless cards) * A decent office suite (OpenOffice has a long way to go still, and its integration with the mainstream DEs sucks) * 3D graphic cards drivers on par with their windows counterparts * Support for games * Support for MSN (full support, including webcams, audio, and all those features like emoticons that make me cringe but that the kids love), Skype and all the like * A little more standardization and refinition: for example, shortcuts and the like on KDE are not totally standardized (changing tabs in applications have different default shortcuts), and the GNOME vfs for remote files is supported only by a subset of programs (and so on). Basically, what FreeDesktop strives for.
Will we be there in a few years? I hope so: the technical growth of Linux in recent years has been pretty impressive (compare Red Hat 6.2 with Gnome 1.0 with a Fedora Core 7 with Compiz, and then Windows 2000 and Windows Vista and see what I mean).
> Unix and Unix-like systems have been around for a very long time (a lot longer than windows) and have yet to hit big on the desktop.
Well, to be fair we have to say that UNIX systems spent a lot of their career when the "desktop championship" wasn't still there. However I agree that the idea of "building things for the average user" isn't something that was in from the beginning in Linux developement, for a very simple reasons: the Linux community has been (in the past) just a bunch of hackers scratching their personal itches[1]. Hence they were building things for themselves primarily, and they were by no means average users. However this has been slowly changing, in the "application" world. GNOME and its flying circus is fairly user-friendly and designed with the average user in mind (even too much, some would argue).
Back to TFA, I do think that has very few to do with the kernel. I rarely see a user complaining for boot times, however they do get really vocal when the whole system crashes and they lose all their work. So, I think that, in kernel design, priorities should be the following: 1) Robustness 2) Design clean-ness (helps in point 1, and in all subsequent points too) 3) Performance in atomic areas 4) Predictability
Up from that point, it's the application's business, or all the layers that are in between: what about an utility that observes the load and automagically calls nice to fix priorities? That'll leave the hacker in full control (cause he just won't use the utility) and the newbie/average user won't even notice.
But this are just my 2 cents, and have been stamped around 1974
[1] This very partial view of the whole community has been oversimplified and characterized to enlighten an aspect of the problem. I do not intend it to be a realistic portray of anything.
> But I do know that if my sole/product/ was software, I, too, would be leary about giving away the code for free.
If I had a software house, I wouldn't base my business off the code I just downloaded from someone else's FTP and of which I do not know anything (e.g. I am not contributing to). What would happen if something breaks or there's a bug? Or if the customer asks some extra features (cause, with big companies, it's what _every_ customer does, in my own experience)? I would be royally screwed, the customers will be pissed, demand back his money, I would fail.
IMHO, if you are a small shop, you should try to focus on providing services rather than products.
The problem with the normal product development, these days, is that you need a huge initial investment, that you're going to get back into it only in a long time span, and that you also need a huge marketing effort to convince people they need the features you offer (look at Apple, where they rebrand everything they do as completely revolutionary).
Selling services, as hookers have known for centuries, is just a way more sane business model.
It is not the first time that someone says that (I think I've seen other people make this same observation here on Slashdot) but actually, doing technical assistance with a terminal is WAY much better than doing it on a GUI. The Italian biggest ISP tech support (I live in Italy), actually, makes you open a terminal in order to diagnose network problems on the phone. On windows. And most of the time, the hard problem is getting the customer to open the terminal, and once you're in everything goes pretty straightforward: you tell the guy what to type, and the guy reads the response to you. Quick and simple. On the other hand, the conversation to get him open the terminal is usually along those lines: TS: "I have to ask you to open a terminal" C: "Oh, ok, but how do I do that?" TS: "Click on the start button" C: "There is no start button" TS: "Are you sure? A green button in the left-bottom corner of your screen?" C: "Oh, ok, you meant the windows button" TS: "Yes" (but there's a big START written on it, goddamnit) TS: "Now go to all programs and then accessories" C: "Ok" TS: "Click on terminal" C: "I think my computer just broke" TS: "What happened?" C: "A black window appeared and it looks all broken" TS: "It is normal: that is the terminal" C: "It's ugly" TS: "Well, hopefully we won't have to look at it for long" TS: "Now, I will tell you to write things inside that window, and you will have to read me what appears: is it ok?" C: "Ok"
And then you make the poor customer ping this and that, see if it is a dns problem or what, then do a couple of traceroutes and discover some idiot messed up some router somewhere, so you fix it and then you tell the customer to see if his internet works. He's all happy. You are happy too, and you're about to close the call when he's like
C: "Oh, one last thing" TS: "Yes?" C: "Do I really have to keep the black ugly window opened to make it work?" TS: "Oh no, that's okay, you can close it. It was just for testing" C: "Oh thanks!"
Indeed that is true. My point was that monopolies are not always given by the state. And when the state does, well, that's extremely sad, but i see how that cannot be too uncommon.
Monopoly is NOT given by the state. Monopoly is a degenerated case that can happen in a very unbalanced market, but happens due to the natural evolution of said market rather then from a state decision.
I think that what caused said degeneration is the fact that every operating system, right now, has its own market, due to the fact they are largely incompatible with each other (eg. switching from Windows to Mac isn't a simple change of OS: you need to change all the programs too, and very few are cross platform).
Now, we have all seen how Microsoft waves the patent banner everytime someone builds a system that is compatible with theirs (Samba, Mono, etc etc), so we can also see how Microsoft tries to strangle any competition in its field: and when this "strangling" reaches a level where is currently impossible for any third party to compete, we have a monopoly.
At last, I have to say I'm not totally sure that right now Microsoft has a monopoly: the patent claims never resulted in any legal action and so on, so I guess we can't really call it, but it is, however, in a good position to quickly establish one.
By comparison, since all the services from Google do not constitute a platform as I said above (I could easily switch everything I have on Google to Yahoo tomorrow and I will not have to change browser or OS or anything else), there is no risk for Google to become as threatening as Microsoft was.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'm a bit suprised by this for serious resons.
1. I thought the big mainframe vendor back in the golden times did this too (or was it just limited to the hardware?)
2. Shareware works like that?
I don't know if th fact it's "applied just to an OS" makes a lot of distinction, legally, but practically, this patent seems to have a grade of innovation of zero.
This is not true, being paid per visualization is quite common still, although one gets paid really few for it.
The "user clicked and bought product" is called conversion, and is paid a lot, but is not the only thing paid.
a lot of linux and mac os x do not have a lot of features listed, nor did they have them when they were 'conceived.'
Nor do a lot of Windows Vista installs. Can you have those features on Linux/Mac OS X? Yes (excluding parental control, and keeping in mind we are talking about "approaches" more than how a certain feature exactly works. Because MS has patented that exact method so no one else can legally use it).
In the end, the OS is as secure as the user keeps it. You can have a super secure Windows/Linux/Mac installation, or equally have a very loose one.
And effectively hardening your OS implies you have to understand you might lose some functionality (see all those apps on Windows that fire up unneeded UAC prompts by doing the very wrong thing, or those apps on Linux that are happily unaware of SELinux) and do not bitch about it with the wrong people (the OS makers).
Although I concede you that there has been a certain mindset of "I run Linux/Mac OS so I'm inherently secure" that needs to be eradicated ASAP
Back on the topic, it doesn't matter what OS you choose, but develop good policies and stick with them and you'll be reasonably secure.
No. Copyright law is preserving the right of the artist to attempt to profit from their work without the active interference of others.
More correctly, it preserves the author right to decide under which conditions said work can be copied, and under which conditions said work can be modified.
Creative Commons (and Open Source) use the copyright mechanism extensively and that is, in fact, their legal stand.
I'm typing this from my 901 running Fedora 9.
It does not work (completely) out of the box; the things that you need to tweak are the following:
Boot Fedora from USB, by downloading any live iso (or the netinstall if you are short on space) and following http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo (or the relevant page in the manual: I'm frankly more happy with the manual)
Install the whole thing (SSD users might want to check out Theodore T'so blog on how to correctly format an SSD to have semi-decent performances)
See that it works "sort of"
Check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Eee_PC. It does not have all the solutions but has valid pointers for googling.
The GMA950 is going to be a pain as usual, so if you plan to run compiz like I do you should google for optimizations of the driver. /etc/X11/xorg.conf but this might be outdated information.
It mostly boils down to inserting
Option "MigrationHeuristics" "greedy"
in the Device section of
However, this is to improve performances, the stuff will work (just slow, and compiz can REALLY slow down apps like Firefox)
Like Bill Clinton once said... or was it Al Gore? Anyway, most of the amazing battery performances of cellphones come from using dedicated, low power hardware.
A small, and absolutely not comprehensive list:
ARM based processor (yes, RISC is much more efficient and predictable, than whatever-i686-is)
Low-power wireless (that can be a true killer, especially true for WiFi, much less for WiMax)
No hard disk (that kills a lot)
Etc etc
Sure, software has its own share of guilt: mainly, the fact that mainstream OSes, in their standard configuration, are much oriented toward having to deal with x86 processors, hard disks, PCI buses, etc.
From those OSes, one can churn out a system that retains the kernel and some userland but does a better job handling low-power resources.
A practical example, my EeePc (from which I'm typing this) ran painfully slow when i first installed Fedora on it (default install, with LVM, big swap space, continuous disk access). Tweaking parameters here and there has fixed a lot of speed issues and, probably, makes the battery run better than it did.
Maybe one should try Ubuntu NetBook edition and do comparisons based on that.
That's mostly because, unless in the US, I think here the telcos take some revenues from the device selling (and from the contract too which is outrageous).
Actually, the two telcos selling it here are Vodafone and TIM, and the second did have horrible balances until last time. And if you look at their plans to resurrect the company, it was all about the iPhone.
They are sure people would spend double the right price to have it just because it's the iPhone.
The communist system requires more or less perfect people. Therefore it cannot work. +1
I was talking about the "ideal" capitalism. I completely agree with you.
No, this has nothing to do on how you select leaders.
This has to do with the fact that, with communism, economy MUST be lead.
You can't just build a meat-packing plant and tell the director there "do what the fuck you want". You need to know what the country needs and coordinate the economic effort.
Ideally, with capitalism, economy has no lead. In fact, it has: economy would not produce enough advanced innovation, and in fact most of the innovation comes from government funded stuff (be it military production or whatever else).
Okay, we're going a bit offroad here. Medics were paid more (in a way or another) even in the communist states. :D.
The fundamental difference between capitalism and communism was that capitalism was an ecosystem with different needs and actors, each pulling for its own side, and this combined "pulling" made the system reach a stability (it's a natural stable system).
Communism, on the other hand, called for totally arbitrary pre-planning of economy (you couldn't really go and tell people "do what the fuck you want"), which were the infamous Quinquennial plans of the Soviets.
The communist approach did had one highlight: the quick electirifcation and modernization of Russia. However, on the other hand, any single mistake from the "big bosses" in the Kremlin had catastrophic consequences.
With a capitalist system, we can afford having completely dumb leaders
OSes are written in C/C++ because, well, when coding a kernel you can't say "let's have someone else do the memory management". So you use a programming language that allows you to access the memory.
That was, btw, why C was created. Back in the times, people used languages that did memory management for you for high-level apps (yes, LISP had a garbage collector) and assembler for kernels.
The strength of C was that it was a high level language and yet allowed you to take the memory management in your own hands.
I think medium/big companies and institutions should use that tactic more, especially when they know they are stuck on Windows for whatever reason.
:D
They can phone up Microsoft and ask how much upgrading will work, then, upon hearing it, starts to say that it's "too much" and that they will instead switch to Linux and tell everyone how much they have saved switching to Linux etc etc.
Bet that way, you can get loads of free software from Microsoft
uh, RTFA. Seriously.
This is about Microsoft putting under a big "Windows beats Linux!" a case study where their customer upgraded from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008.
No they don't. They infect machines through viruses/trojans/whatever, creating botnets that proceed to send spam for a short time until they get blacklisted. My boss at work took one a few days ago, resulting in out whole network being blacklisted. Along with our mailserver (YAY!)
ISP fees would be lower?Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.
Expense to the recipient?To go back at my work example. I hadn't blocked access to port 25 through the firewall because some people in the office check/use their private mail, not passing through the company mailserver for sending stuff. Then my boss got a virus, everything got blacklisted and basically we had to sustain the following expenses:
How about coming back with some facts next time?
Just the password and IP should work. You're posting the root password after all.
Well, it's an online survey. The data probably gets collected in a db.
The db has a record for every answer (1 record == 1 user).
So it's more simple to do the math on the number of users rather than the number of selections: having done SQL, and being the lazy programmer I am, I'm pretty sure that's the main reason behind it.
Trolltech releases their code under GPL. Last time I checked, Microsoft didn't. Trolltech is by far one of the most open-source friendly corporations. Hence, your point is invalid, as both the Gnome and KDE codebase are equally free.
We might discuss on technical terms now, but that would be offtopic.
Not entirely true. So far, MS patent strategy has been more on the lines of "be aware, we might sue you" rather than actually suing someone.
I'm however intrested to see what their patent strategy will become, and it could take three ways:
a) Suing half of the world, thus starting Patent War I.
b) Threatening to do point a until the point where everyone (IBM, SUN, Adobe, Novell et al) pull out their nukes and people start getting frightened about the unavoidable carnage. And then be like "okay, what about getting rid of all these nukes?": more or less what Reagan did at the end of the 80es (Space Shield Program -> START I and II treaties).
c) Decide to slowly and subtly "inject" patent-peace clauses in their license hence making Patent War I impossible due to the cross-pollination and software dependencies. Same effect of option b, except no one will ever notice until it's over.
So in this system what is going to prevent everyone from stealing first and paying later? If the only amount you pay is close to what you would have payed anyway it makes good business sense to steal. With all that said this whole case is ridiculous but thats because of the jury instructions as you mentioned, not the final amount she might have to pay. That is just layers of ridiculousness.
That was not the point of GP. The whole point is that, although higher than the commercial value of what you stole, you shouldn't be fined for an overly excessive amount of money.
Let's assume you hate someone, deeply, and you decide one day to break his/her car's left mirror. It would be okay if they awarded the plaintiff a $300 in damages, but it would surely make me raise an eyebrow if they fined you for $5k: and that was the point of the GP too.
I don't know if, in this case, they have detailed the amount of damage they had: but here where I live, you should bring proof and calculations of the damage by an independent expert in order to get awarded the damage.
In this case, it doesn't seem to me that they did so: since apparently Sony/BMG said they were still in the process of calculating said damage: once they had, this data should be reviewed by an expert nominated by the court and only at last the defendant should be fined.
Recently I bought a multifunctional HP printer, since apparently in the store where I went they had no "old style printers" anymore.
I was a little concerned about that, since generally I hook the printer to the linux router/home server in order to serve printing over the net through CUPS (which btw, works pretty flawless with Windows).
With my surprise, I just had to install the HP drivers and everything worked fine, and so the scanner through sane (and a bit of python coding made it available through the web to the other computers: so there's remote scanning now too).
Now, HP invests pretty hugely in Linux, but I don't think they actually invest more money doing Linux driver rather than the windows ones (plus all that crap that gets installed when you install the drivers on Windows). My point here is that actually, making good opensource drivers for Linux doesn't seem to have hurt HP printing dept. and it's not prohibitively expensive.
I'm pretty sure that if Linux was a little more widespread it will have this kind of hardware support as well.
What makes Linux unworthy for the desktop right now is:
* Wireless support (bluetooth and some wireless cards)
* A decent office suite (OpenOffice has a long way to go still, and its integration with the mainstream DEs sucks)
* 3D graphic cards drivers on par with their windows counterparts
* Support for games
* Support for MSN (full support, including webcams, audio, and all those features like emoticons that make me cringe but that the kids love), Skype and all the like
* A little more standardization and refinition: for example, shortcuts and the like on KDE are not totally standardized (changing tabs in applications have different default shortcuts), and the GNOME vfs for remote files is supported only by a subset of programs (and so on). Basically, what FreeDesktop strives for.
Will we be there in a few years? I hope so: the technical growth of Linux in recent years has been pretty impressive (compare Red Hat 6.2 with Gnome 1.0 with a Fedora Core 7 with Compiz, and then Windows 2000 and Windows Vista and see what I mean).
> Unix and Unix-like systems have been around for a very long time (a lot longer than windows) and have yet to hit big on the desktop.
Well, to be fair we have to say that UNIX systems spent a lot of their career when the "desktop championship" wasn't still there.
However I agree that the idea of "building things for the average user" isn't something that was in from the beginning in Linux developement, for a very simple reasons: the Linux community has been (in the past) just a bunch of hackers scratching their personal itches[1]. Hence they were building things for themselves primarily, and they were by no means average users.
However this has been slowly changing, in the "application" world. GNOME and its flying circus is fairly user-friendly and designed with the average user in mind (even too much, some would argue).
Back to TFA, I do think that has very few to do with the kernel. I rarely see a user complaining for boot times, however they do get really vocal when the whole system crashes and they lose all their work.
So, I think that, in kernel design, priorities should be the following:
1) Robustness
2) Design clean-ness (helps in point 1, and in all subsequent points too)
3) Performance in atomic areas
4) Predictability
Up from that point, it's the application's business, or all the layers that are in between: what about an utility that observes the load and automagically calls nice to fix priorities? That'll leave the hacker in full control (cause he just won't use the utility) and the newbie/average user won't even notice.
But this are just my 2 cents, and have been stamped around 1974
[1] This very partial view of the whole community has been oversimplified and characterized to enlighten an aspect of the problem. I do not intend it to be a realistic portray of anything.
> But I do know that if my sole /product/ was software, I, too, would be leary about giving away the code for free.
If I had a software house, I wouldn't base my business off the code I just downloaded from someone else's FTP and of which I do not know anything (e.g. I am not contributing to). What would happen if something breaks or there's a bug? Or if the customer asks some extra features (cause, with big companies, it's what _every_ customer does, in my own experience)?
I would be royally screwed, the customers will be pissed, demand back his money, I would fail.
IMHO, if you are a small shop, you should try to focus on providing services rather than products.
The problem with the normal product development, these days, is that you need a huge initial investment, that you're going to get back into it only in a long time span, and that you also need a huge marketing effort to convince people they need the features you offer (look at Apple, where they rebrand everything they do as completely revolutionary).
Selling services, as hookers have known for centuries, is just a way more sane business model.
It is not the first time that someone says that (I think I've seen other people make this same observation here on Slashdot) but actually, doing technical assistance with a terminal is WAY much better than doing it on a GUI.
The Italian biggest ISP tech support (I live in Italy), actually, makes you open a terminal in order to diagnose network problems on the phone. On windows. And most of the time, the hard problem is getting the customer to open the terminal, and once you're in everything goes pretty straightforward: you tell the guy what to type, and the guy reads the response to you. Quick and simple. On the other hand, the conversation to get him open the terminal is usually along those lines:
TS: "I have to ask you to open a terminal"
C: "Oh, ok, but how do I do that?"
TS: "Click on the start button"
C: "There is no start button"
TS: "Are you sure? A green button in the left-bottom corner of your screen?"
C: "Oh, ok, you meant the windows button"
TS: "Yes" (but there's a big START written on it, goddamnit)
TS: "Now go to all programs and then accessories"
C: "Ok"
TS: "Click on terminal"
C: "I think my computer just broke"
TS: "What happened?"
C: "A black window appeared and it looks all broken"
TS: "It is normal: that is the terminal"
C: "It's ugly"
TS: "Well, hopefully we won't have to look at it for long"
TS: "Now, I will tell you to write things inside that window, and you will have to read me what appears: is it ok?"
C: "Ok"
And then you make the poor customer ping this and that, see if it is a dns problem or what, then do a couple of traceroutes and discover some idiot messed up some router somewhere, so you fix it and then you tell the customer to see if his internet works. He's all happy. You are happy too, and you're about to close the call when he's like
C: "Oh, one last thing"
TS: "Yes?"
C: "Do I really have to keep the black ugly window opened to make it work?"
TS: "Oh no, that's okay, you can close it. It was just for testing"
C: "Oh thanks!"
Indeed that is true. My point was that monopolies are not always given by the state. And when the state does, well, that's extremely sad, but i see how that cannot be too uncommon.
Monopoly is NOT given by the state. Monopoly is a degenerated case that can happen in a very unbalanced market, but happens due to the natural evolution of said market rather then from a state decision.
I think that what caused said degeneration is the fact that every operating system, right now, has its own market, due to the fact they are largely incompatible with each other (eg. switching from Windows to Mac isn't a simple change of OS: you need to change all the programs too, and very few are cross platform).
Now, we have all seen how Microsoft waves the patent banner everytime someone builds a system that is compatible with theirs (Samba, Mono, etc etc), so we can also see how Microsoft tries to strangle any competition in its field: and when this "strangling" reaches a level where is currently impossible for any third party to compete, we have a monopoly.
At last, I have to say I'm not totally sure that right now Microsoft has a monopoly: the patent claims never resulted in any legal action and so on, so I guess we can't really call it, but it is, however, in a good position to quickly establish one.
By comparison, since all the services from Google do not constitute a platform as I said above (I could easily switch everything I have on Google to Yahoo tomorrow and I will not have to change browser or OS or anything else), there is no risk for Google to become as threatening as Microsoft was.