I don't know about that. I do know that there were a ton of messiah-figures around at the time who were doing religious teachings. If you look at the socio-political situation of the time, this isn't at all surprising. Jesus could easily have been lumped in with all of the others if he was there at all.
All these so-called "discoveries" are just window dressing. Articles like this one remind me of the magicians using eye-catching attention getters to distract people from the charade they are respresenting as truth.
I think you're missing the point. This sort of thing isn't really taking a stand on the issue you're talking about, although we all tend to jump right to that anyway. Like you said, it can't be proven (or at least, we have absolutely no conception as to how to prove it right now) but what they are finding is the mechanism by which these things happen.
Before you discount the importance of this in the face of "God/No God", think of this: where would we be if Newton hadn't told us that, yes, the universe does have rules. Pasteur told us that, yes, there is something tangible (not just "sin") that causes disease. It might not directly be addressing your fundamental question, but it is an important thing to answer for both sides of the debate, as well as anyone in the middle or way out in left field. If you're looking to understand God or the Universe or something else entirely, discoveries like these help to realign your perceptions about how the world works in very jarring and enlightening ways. You don't have to go around believing you got the plague because you were a bad person, even though you thought you did everything right. You don't have to believe that there was a storm because you were destined to wind up at the bottom of the ocean for that affair you had. You can believe these things if you want to, but you gain the freedom and knowledge to make a more informed decision than our ancestors were able to make.
That, in my opinion, is the ultimate form of progress.
This does not really impact the fundamental question that you're addressing at all, nor does it take away from the beauty of the world around us. Indeed, I think things like this only serve to enrich both, and I find it sad that most people use these sorts of findings just to deconstruct the world for science or God.
For example, Noahs ark has been found. It size and position is exactly as described in the bible. Nobody cares except those who are looking for truth.
So what about the garden of Eden then? After all, that's pinpointed too (See Gen2.10-14) very specifically, but there's no garden and no angel with a flaming sword there.
And how about any record of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt? The only one we've got is a mention of Israel on a stele talking about them after they had formed their nation. No mention of plagues or mass exodus to the wilderness, and certainly no mention of an army drowning in a parted Sea.
A much more simple example would be the existance of Jesus Christ. Well, there is no doubt he existed, is there? History is based on his existance.
Well, Roman records have no mention of this man, nor do Jewish records outside of the Bible itself, so I suppose there is some doubt that he did exist. I'm willing to take it as a fact that he did exist though, but even then, how accurate is what we have? He says many times that the disciples will see the Kingdom of God come, and that he is the messiah. Of course, in Matthew he also rides in to Jerusalem on both a donkey and a colt at the same time (now that takes talent!) in order to fulfill the author's interpretation of Isaiah. None of the gospel texts were written until well after his death, and they all seem to stem from another source (known as "Q") that is lost to us.
And, most importantly, like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament does not seem to be written with historical accuracy in mind, but rather a thematic goal to impart to the audience. So asking about Jesus' existence is almost a silly thing, because what matters is whether or not the theme is correct, which is very much open to interpretation. Same goes for the Hebrew Bible (although that one seems to have been fulfilled with the establishment of Israel).
I refuse to believe that all life on earth was a fluke. Out of nowhere, pure chance, fluke. What rubbish.
You are welcome to believe what you will, as am I, but if you are so concerned about looking for the truth of life, I wouldn't recommend closing your mind to things like scientific evidence. Presuppositions (including the existence of God) really get you nowhere. In addition, learn about the historical and political contexts in which the scriptures that you cite were written. They may give you some new perspectives on the texts themselves.
If it was a fluke, Then why is it, that no man has ever shown how the first living thing on this earth, came to be? Should the depth of the makeup of even simple living things, be clue enough to conclude: Life was not a fluke. Life has order and design.
Well, we haven't shown how life itself came to be because it's kind of difficult. Try it and you'll see. But we've made some incredible progress there, if you'd look at the literature you might be surprised. The depth of makeup does not really tell us anything because just about any natural system is complex. It's the designed ones that are generally simple. Plus, both UNIX and life itself teach us that you can get an enormous degree of complexity from relatively simple systems interacting.
Overall, you are correct in saying that life has order. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't work. Design though, is another matter. A mountain or river doesn't really have any design (you might say it does, but not in the way that life might) but it still functions and has order. A river allows water to flow to a given point (order) and a mountain blocks movement across certain vectors (also order).
None of this denies the existence of a God at all though. Darwin himself believed in God. A scientist is trying to find out about the mechanisms of the world, not necessarily what put them there.
In all of the debate, they only had one true argument, and it was a bad argument at that. Guess what that argument was? "Positive" mutations haven't been reproduced or observed in the laboratory, therefore they do not exist, therefore evolution is false. And this article is about just that.
This isn't true at all really. Granted, we might never have zapped an E.coli with enough UV light to make it grow arms, but we've certaintly gotten plenty of positive function out of mutations in labs.
For instance, there is a well known tool in microbiology known as the "Temperature-Sensitive Mutant". A good way to get one of these is to zap it with UV or some other mutagen to induce a random point mutation (change in one nucleotide). This could alter the gene product just enough to make it non-functional at high temperatures, making the organism more sensitive to the environment than it was in the wild type form. This new sensitivity is a gain in function for the organism. It might not be beneficial, but it is a demonstrable gain of ability for the organism.
Another example would be oncogenes, which aren't always active, but can be activated via mutations, causing cancer.
There's some foddder for your next debate. Remember, a positive gain in function may wind up killing the organism, which is one reason why evolution takes so long. But random mutations certaintly have been shown to have an affect beyond deletion of the gene.
I haven't read "Darwin's Black Box", and I am a fan of both hideous complexity and Darwinism(I am a biologist after all;-)
I highly recommend reading The Touchstone of Life as a fantastic explanation for the evolution of the cell from the ground up. In reality, a lot of it is about feedback, but read the book yourself. One of the best pieces of biological thought I've ever seen. It's not meant to be a refutation of Creationism as far as I can tell (the author is too well established to care about that) but rather, a genuine explanation as to how information grows to create life naturally.
Unfortunately, while the scientists presuppose the existence of matter in your argument, you presuppose the existence of a God that can create that matter. No one wins this argument, like any other of this sort.
This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.
No, I am only comparing the x86 versions, but I don't really imagine that the linux apps will take up that much more room on PPC. And you're right, 128 MB is very reasonable for a system like OSX, but I just think it's strange how everyone says Linux apps are getting so bloated when I can run a very comfy desktop environment with massive apps in the same or less memory space.
Don't forget to add the cost of XFree86 and Gnome/KDE to your "very little", and don't go skimping into swap-hell, since this is aimed at desktop/workstation type environments.
Nothing against OSX, but in all honesty even a fully loaded Linux desktop will take less RAM than OSX. I'm running a fully loaded KDE right now, with Mozilla (rumor says it's bloated), StarOffice 6.0, and Kmail, and my used (not cache) memory is only at 64MB. Note that only KDE and Kmail share many libraries.
I don't know where people get this idea that you need a ton of memory to run these programs. Granted, 128MB is little on the high side if you're talking real low end, but these are desktop workstations, as you said. OSX requires that 128 at a bare minimum, and even that maxed out when I was using 10.0 (don't know if they decreased the RAM requirements as of 10.1, but I doubt it). Linux apps just don't take as much memory as people say. KDE gets you a solid UI with a lot of bells and whistles for relatively low memory cost. Plus, the inclined desktop user could simply run fluxbox or twm, which isn't possible without Darwin, in which case you can't easily switch to Aqua. OSX is great, but Linux has its advantages too.
I don't think you're right about that. I'm running Debian unstable, with lilo version 22.1 (package version 6) which matches the upstream's most stable. There's another poster who also is running this, and he can't get it to work. I'm not going to try tonight though, it's too late for me to be messing with the bootloader!
Yes... I'm certain all the Windows users will up and switch, saying "Well, it might not have Office, but it's got one hell of a splash screen!"
Of course, if someone implemented minesweeper and freecell in place of breakout, you'd have at least a shot at those people who don't really use Windows for much else;-)
From what I can tell, it's only SuSE's particular version of LILO that will be able to use this by default. Are any of their hooks being rolled back in to the upstream source so that the rest of us don't need a help page to get this working? Personally, LILO is not something I want to mess around with too much.
Perhaps these are the people who will buy the boxed version en masse, thereby contributing the ever-useful money the same way the fill AOL's coffers at a whopping $20 a month. Granted, it's not code or a HOWTO, but it's not something to turn your nose up at.
There is actually a free DPS library for X. It's made by Aladdin, the people who brought you Ghostscript, and the package itself is called Display Ghostscript.
It's actually not complete, and I don't know what's going on with it currently. I had seriously toyed with the idea of writing a window manager based off the library, a la' OSX, but from what I gathered the lib wasn't quite in a useable state. You can get it on debian via "apt-get install libdps" and there are dev packages too.
I would seriously love to see someone (particularly the Windowmaker & GNUStep team, as it fits them best) create my project of the DPS window manager and Widget set. I don't know how useful it would be, but I think it would definitely compel people to move forward. The URL for DPS programming info is here, if anyone is interested.
Thank you! I've been rolling my own kernels for two years now, and I've got the hang of it, but it was a major pain learning all my hardware initially. Even now, I'm a little scared every time I add new hardware. It took me over a year to get the balls to bother looking for the modules to get my CD burner working, and I still can't get my Visor syn'd after working on that off and on for the past months.
Let's face it, for those of us with less time, an autoconfigure tool would be nice. Especially when adding new hardware. I don't like having to keep track of all the esoteric shit needed to get my TV card/CD-burner/visor/3d acceleration/sound/networking card/etc. working! I'd rather spend my time actually using Linux, rather than compiling it. Sure, I could use a different distro (I'm using Debian, so I get what I deserve here) but this tool would go a long way, and it would help everyone, not just Aunt Tillie. The nephew and the geek girl in ESR's emails are a good example. They're smart people, just like all of us, but they just don't need to know every hardware quirk under the sun to run Linux.
THey will know that the copy-protection is the problem, and they will hear it, not just from a "consumer" (note that they never refer to their customers as "customers" - it's always "consumers"), who they don't generally listen to
There is a reason for this, and they are technically using the correct term. In marketing lingo, the customer is the person who buys the product, and the consumer is the one who actually uses it. Note that these two are not always the same. Thus, when they talk about consumers, it means that they're paying attention to you, the person actually using the CD, not your Auntie May who bought you the disk for Christmas.
Salespeople are more apt to talk about customers because they just want to get the sale. The marketing people are more concerned with consumer satisfaction, because they're the ones who will influence what's bought. Even when they are the same person, it pays for these people to use the terminology.
I think everyone on/. understands the need for impenetrable technical language;-)
The flipside is that if they comply, and the majority will, they will find that they have invested enormous amounts of money in the software now, and they are damn sure going to get their worth out of it! This will close up chances for Free Software on these kinds of systems, because no business is going to replace their brand new expensive software with Linux after paying out the ass.
I'm more scared about this personally. These companies, particularly Microsoft, are so well entrenched that they can do this. It means that they have the majority of companies by the balls, and they can do what they will to them. Sure, Free stuff will seem attractive, but the bottom line is that they will want to get the maximum value out of their investment. Scary.
What about Apple? Are we forgetting the fact that the original Mac was relatively secure for over a decade, despite granting full root access to whoever? Yes, there were virii and trojans and whatnot (can't really be prevented) but the design of the system prevented a lot of problems for the average user. These are the same average users who are going to be affected by the XP problems, not UNIX admins.
MS-DOS and its descendants were around for even longer than the Mac, and the NT system is very mature. Why can't they match Apple's security?
I'm sick of MS apologists. Microsoft makes shit. It's shit that's getting better, but it's still shit. Don't whine and say it's unfair. They have the money, the power, and the resources to make what is far and away the best software in the world. And yet we get articles like this, and we get people like you whining about how MS is being treated unfairly. Forget it.
As the market leaders who the majority of the world depend on for their computing needs they deserve heavy criticism. As predatory monopolists they deserve heavy criticism. As people who promise security they deserve heavy criticism. As people who would like nothing better than to see Windows everywhere, and the GPL and Linux and Apache and SAMBA wiped off the planet they deserve heavy criticism.
So fuck whining about how MS is treated unfairly. If we complain enough then maybe they'll listen for a change.
I dunno... if code is speech then it's kind of like saying to someone "Hey, go jump off a cliff." If they decide to do so as a result are you reliable? MS could get around this too by providing the code (shared-source and whatnot) but as it stands, you have no possible recourse in terms of judging the quality of the product. Closed source software can't really be speech, and as such I would guess that it can't be treated quite the same way as Free Software.
There is the free price thing too. While I agree with you that if you give something away, you can still be liable, but if you give a friend your old car that you think is fine shape, only to have it blow up his mother, are you liable? I'm not a lawyer so I don't know the answers to these questions, I'm just posing them. There is a distinct difference between what MS does and what Debian does (Redhat may be another matter though).
This is very true, but consider this: what if Microsoft's hegemony has squashed innovation to such a degree that the new great processor-and-memory-intensive-apps-for-the-masses just aren't being made? OSX is not that fast, even on high end hardware. The reason is that it's doing a ton of great stuff for the user behind the scenes. Maybe we can't see past our noses in this regard? Maybe there is more to be done that can really take advantage of all this capability, but because Microsoft doesn't really have anyone left to steal ideas from it hasn't gotten done?
This does seem a little absurd in a way, but I don't think it's far fetched. We all know how little Microsoft innovates, and now that there is no other real game in town, how much innovation is happening? There is a reason people advocate competition in the marketplace, and I think we're seeing the reason for it, as well as the dangers of monopoly.
I agree with you, but it could also be that he's just decided to cede the desktop to Mandrake now. Mandrake has done a better job than Redhat lately in making a desktop-friendly distro, and maybe Redhat realizes that it's better not to have them duke it out in that market and wind up killing each other. I'd be quite happy having SuSE and Mandrake as the big desktop options, with Redhat being the killer server distro (although I'd guess SuSE is great at that as well).
Building up to meet the UNIX-to-Linux migration or the migration to UNIX that is OS X? RH basically conceded the desktop in the face of M$ monopoly. Embedded is certainly the place for growth. But aside from that, is Apple the real competition?
No, when he said UNIX, he meant it. Like you said, Apple isn't really a competitor, they're a niche market. OSX Server ain't bad (used it plenty myself) but it's really going to be a minor player in relation to 2k (and whatever follows) and other *NIXes. Everyone knows Linux is a great server OS, there's no denying it,and that's where the meat of Redhat's income will be coming from for now. The way to make that income grow is to gather more of the server market, and the easiest way for them to do this is to make it easy to transition from their HP's and Solaris servers.
And as for rumors of OSX Server on other platforms, I'll believe it when I see it. There's no way, given Apple's past, that they'd do this now.
So Microsoft is responsible because people are satisfied with their computers? I don't think that's really what you were getting at.
No, that's not what I was really getting at. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that Microsoft is making people satisfied with their computers. What I mean is that because they are a monopoly, people have nothing else to compare to (except Apple, which they don't even look at) to realize that they could have better. In that sense, their absolute domination has killed the market.
And I think that the point about set-top boxes is mistaken. He's not really promising on any of this, he's delivered a package that people can use. I'm betting most all of the devices that use embedded linux won't be consumer-oriented. They'll be for corporations and engineers and such, people doing highly specialized work who need something more than a palm pilot. That's where I think Linux will make inroads. It won't be something most of us see or really care about, but I think he's right to go there.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about that. I do know that there were a ton of messiah-figures around at the time who were doing religious teachings. If you look at the socio-political situation of the time, this isn't at all surprising. Jesus could easily have been lumped in with all of the others if he was there at all.
I think you're missing the point. This sort of thing isn't really taking a stand on the issue you're talking about, although we all tend to jump right to that anyway. Like you said, it can't be proven (or at least, we have absolutely no conception as to how to prove it right now) but what they are finding is the mechanism by which these things happen.
Before you discount the importance of this in the face of "God/No God", think of this: where would we be if Newton hadn't told us that, yes, the universe does have rules. Pasteur told us that, yes, there is something tangible (not just "sin") that causes disease. It might not directly be addressing your fundamental question, but it is an important thing to answer for both sides of the debate, as well as anyone in the middle or way out in left field. If you're looking to understand God or the Universe or something else entirely, discoveries like these help to realign your perceptions about how the world works in very jarring and enlightening ways. You don't have to go around believing you got the plague because you were a bad person, even though you thought you did everything right. You don't have to believe that there was a storm because you were destined to wind up at the bottom of the ocean for that affair you had. You can believe these things if you want to, but you gain the freedom and knowledge to make a more informed decision than our ancestors were able to make.
That, in my opinion, is the ultimate form of progress.
This does not really impact the fundamental question that you're addressing at all, nor does it take away from the beauty of the world around us. Indeed, I think things like this only serve to enrich both, and I find it sad that most people use these sorts of findings just to deconstruct the world for science or God.
So what about the garden of Eden then? After all, that's pinpointed too (See Gen2.10-14) very specifically, but there's no garden and no angel with a flaming sword there.
And how about any record of the Israelites as slaves in Egypt? The only one we've got is a mention of Israel on a stele talking about them after they had formed their nation. No mention of plagues or mass exodus to the wilderness, and certainly no mention of an army drowning in a parted Sea.
Well, Roman records have no mention of this man, nor do Jewish records outside of the Bible itself, so I suppose there is some doubt that he did exist. I'm willing to take it as a fact that he did exist though, but even then, how accurate is what we have? He says many times that the disciples will see the Kingdom of God come, and that he is the messiah. Of course, in Matthew he also rides in to Jerusalem on both a donkey and a colt at the same time (now that takes talent!) in order to fulfill the author's interpretation of Isaiah. None of the gospel texts were written until well after his death, and they all seem to stem from another source (known as "Q") that is lost to us.
And, most importantly, like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament does not seem to be written with historical accuracy in mind, but rather a thematic goal to impart to the audience. So asking about Jesus' existence is almost a silly thing, because what matters is whether or not the theme is correct, which is very much open to interpretation. Same goes for the Hebrew Bible (although that one seems to have been fulfilled with the establishment of Israel).
You are welcome to believe what you will, as am I, but if you are so concerned about looking for the truth of life, I wouldn't recommend closing your mind to things like scientific evidence. Presuppositions (including the existence of God) really get you nowhere. In addition, learn about the historical and political contexts in which the scriptures that you cite were written. They may give you some new perspectives on the texts themselves.
Well, we haven't shown how life itself came to be because it's kind of difficult. Try it and you'll see. But we've made some incredible progress there, if you'd look at the literature you might be surprised. The depth of makeup does not really tell us anything because just about any natural system is complex. It's the designed ones that are generally simple. Plus, both UNIX and life itself teach us that you can get an enormous degree of complexity from relatively simple systems interacting.
Overall, you are correct in saying that life has order. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't work. Design though, is another matter. A mountain or river doesn't really have any design (you might say it does, but not in the way that life might) but it still functions and has order. A river allows water to flow to a given point (order) and a mountain blocks movement across certain vectors (also order).
None of this denies the existence of a God at all though. Darwin himself believed in God. A scientist is trying to find out about the mechanisms of the world, not necessarily what put them there.
This isn't true at all really. Granted, we might never have zapped an E.coli with enough UV light to make it grow arms, but we've certaintly gotten plenty of positive function out of mutations in labs.
For instance, there is a well known tool in microbiology known as the "Temperature-Sensitive Mutant". A good way to get one of these is to zap it with UV or some other mutagen to induce a random point mutation (change in one nucleotide). This could alter the gene product just enough to make it non-functional at high temperatures, making the organism more sensitive to the environment than it was in the wild type form. This new sensitivity is a gain in function for the organism. It might not be beneficial, but it is a demonstrable gain of ability for the organism.
Another example would be oncogenes, which aren't always active, but can be activated via mutations, causing cancer.
There's some foddder for your next debate. Remember, a positive gain in function may wind up killing the organism, which is one reason why evolution takes so long. But random mutations certaintly have been shown to have an affect beyond deletion of the gene.
I haven't read "Darwin's Black Box", and I am a fan of both hideous complexity and Darwinism(I am a biologist after all ;-)
I highly recommend reading The Touchstone of Life as a fantastic explanation for the evolution of the cell from the ground up. In reality, a lot of it is about feedback, but read the book yourself. One of the best pieces of biological thought I've ever seen. It's not meant to be a refutation of Creationism as far as I can tell (the author is too well established to care about that) but rather, a genuine explanation as to how information grows to create life naturally.
It's already happening!
Unfortunately, while the scientists presuppose the existence of matter in your argument, you presuppose the existence of a God that can create that matter. No one wins this argument, like any other of this sort.
It's called the Love Getty.
No, I am only comparing the x86 versions, but I don't really imagine that the linux apps will take up that much more room on PPC. And you're right, 128 MB is very reasonable for a system like OSX, but I just think it's strange how everyone says Linux apps are getting so bloated when I can run a very comfy desktop environment with massive apps in the same or less memory space.
Nothing against OSX, but in all honesty even a fully loaded Linux desktop will take less RAM than OSX. I'm running a fully loaded KDE right now, with Mozilla (rumor says it's bloated), StarOffice 6.0, and Kmail, and my used (not cache) memory is only at 64MB. Note that only KDE and Kmail share many libraries.
I don't know where people get this idea that you need a ton of memory to run these programs. Granted, 128MB is little on the high side if you're talking real low end, but these are desktop workstations, as you said. OSX requires that 128 at a bare minimum, and even that maxed out when I was using 10.0 (don't know if they decreased the RAM requirements as of 10.1, but I doubt it). Linux apps just don't take as much memory as people say. KDE gets you a solid UI with a lot of bells and whistles for relatively low memory cost. Plus, the inclined desktop user could simply run fluxbox or twm, which isn't possible without Darwin, in which case you can't easily switch to Aqua. OSX is great, but Linux has its advantages too.
I don't think you're right about that. I'm running Debian unstable, with lilo version 22.1 (package version 6) which matches the upstream's most stable. There's another poster who also is running this, and he can't get it to work. I'm not going to try tonight though, it's too late for me to be messing with the bootloader!
Yes... I'm certain all the Windows users will up and switch, saying "Well, it might not have Office, but it's got one hell of a splash screen!"
;-)
Of course, if someone implemented minesweeper and freecell in place of breakout, you'd have at least a shot at those people who don't really use Windows for much else
From what I can tell, it's only SuSE's particular version of LILO that will be able to use this by default. Are any of their hooks being rolled back in to the upstream source so that the rest of us don't need a help page to get this working? Personally, LILO is not something I want to mess around with too much.
Perhaps these are the people who will buy the boxed version en masse, thereby contributing the ever-useful money the same way the fill AOL's coffers at a whopping $20 a month. Granted, it's not code or a HOWTO, but it's not something to turn your nose up at.
There is actually a free DPS library for X. It's made by Aladdin, the people who brought you Ghostscript, and the package itself is called Display Ghostscript.
It's actually not complete, and I don't know what's going on with it currently. I had seriously toyed with the idea of writing a window manager based off the library, a la' OSX, but from what I gathered the lib wasn't quite in a useable state. You can get it on debian via "apt-get install libdps" and there are dev packages too.
I would seriously love to see someone (particularly the Windowmaker & GNUStep team, as it fits them best) create my project of the DPS window manager and Widget set. I don't know how useful it would be, but I think it would definitely compel people to move forward. The URL for DPS programming info is here, if anyone is interested.
Thank you! I've been rolling my own kernels for two years now, and I've got the hang of it, but it was a major pain learning all my hardware initially. Even now, I'm a little scared every time I add new hardware. It took me over a year to get the balls to bother looking for the modules to get my CD burner working, and I still can't get my Visor syn'd after working on that off and on for the past months.
Let's face it, for those of us with less time, an autoconfigure tool would be nice. Especially when adding new hardware. I don't like having to keep track of all the esoteric shit needed to get my TV card/CD-burner/visor/3d acceleration/sound/networking card/etc. working! I'd rather spend my time actually using Linux, rather than compiling it. Sure, I could use a different distro (I'm using Debian, so I get what I deserve here) but this tool would go a long way, and it would help everyone, not just Aunt Tillie. The nephew and the geek girl in ESR's emails are a good example. They're smart people, just like all of us, but they just don't need to know every hardware quirk under the sun to run Linux.
There is a reason for this, and they are technically using the correct term. In marketing lingo, the customer is the person who buys the product, and the consumer is the one who actually uses it. Note that these two are not always the same. Thus, when they talk about consumers, it means that they're paying attention to you, the person actually using the CD, not your Auntie May who bought you the disk for Christmas.
Salespeople are more apt to talk about customers because they just want to get the sale. The marketing people are more concerned with consumer satisfaction, because they're the ones who will influence what's bought. Even when they are the same person, it pays for these people to use the terminology.
I think everyone on
The flipside is that if they comply, and the majority will, they will find that they have invested enormous amounts of money in the software now, and they are damn sure going to get their worth out of it! This will close up chances for Free Software on these kinds of systems, because no business is going to replace their brand new expensive software with Linux after paying out the ass.
I'm more scared about this personally. These companies, particularly Microsoft, are so well entrenched that they can do this. It means that they have the majority of companies by the balls, and they can do what they will to them. Sure, Free stuff will seem attractive, but the bottom line is that they will want to get the maximum value out of their investment. Scary.
Perhaps this is their Eagle Scout project?
Yet Another Microsoft Apologist
What about Apple? Are we forgetting the fact that the original Mac was relatively secure for over a decade, despite granting full root access to whoever? Yes, there were virii and trojans and whatnot (can't really be prevented) but the design of the system prevented a lot of problems for the average user. These are the same average users who are going to be affected by the XP problems, not UNIX admins.
MS-DOS and its descendants were around for even longer than the Mac, and the NT system is very mature. Why can't they match Apple's security?
I'm sick of MS apologists. Microsoft makes shit. It's shit that's getting better, but it's still shit. Don't whine and say it's unfair. They have the money, the power, and the resources to make what is far and away the best software in the world. And yet we get articles like this, and we get people like you whining about how MS is being treated unfairly. Forget it.
As the market leaders who the majority of the world depend on for their computing needs they deserve heavy criticism.
As predatory monopolists they deserve heavy criticism.
As people who promise security they deserve heavy criticism.
As people who would like nothing better than to see Windows everywhere, and the GPL and Linux and Apache and SAMBA wiped off the planet they deserve heavy criticism.
So fuck whining about how MS is treated unfairly. If we complain enough then maybe they'll listen for a change.
I dunno... if code is speech then it's kind of like saying to someone "Hey, go jump off a cliff." If they decide to do so as a result are you reliable? MS could get around this too by providing the code (shared-source and whatnot) but as it stands, you have no possible recourse in terms of judging the quality of the product. Closed source software can't really be speech, and as such I would guess that it can't be treated quite the same way as Free Software.
There is the free price thing too. While I agree with you that if you give something away, you can still be liable, but if you give a friend your old car that you think is fine shape, only to have it blow up his mother, are you liable? I'm not a lawyer so I don't know the answers to these questions, I'm just posing them. There is a distinct difference between what MS does and what Debian does (Redhat may be another matter though).
This is very true, but consider this: what if Microsoft's hegemony has squashed innovation to such a degree that the new great processor-and-memory-intensive-apps-for-the-masses just aren't being made? OSX is not that fast, even on high end hardware. The reason is that it's doing a ton of great stuff for the user behind the scenes. Maybe we can't see past our noses in this regard? Maybe there is more to be done that can really take advantage of all this capability, but because Microsoft doesn't really have anyone left to steal ideas from it hasn't gotten done?
This does seem a little absurd in a way, but I don't think it's far fetched. We all know how little Microsoft innovates, and now that there is no other real game in town, how much innovation is happening? There is a reason people advocate competition in the marketplace, and I think we're seeing the reason for it, as well as the dangers of monopoly.
I agree with you, but it could also be that he's just decided to cede the desktop to Mandrake now. Mandrake has done a better job than Redhat lately in making a desktop-friendly distro, and maybe Redhat realizes that it's better not to have them duke it out in that market and wind up killing each other. I'd be quite happy having SuSE and Mandrake as the big desktop options, with Redhat being the killer server distro (although I'd guess SuSE is great at that as well).
No, when he said UNIX, he meant it. Like you said, Apple isn't really a competitor, they're a niche market. OSX Server ain't bad (used it plenty myself) but it's really going to be a minor player in relation to 2k (and whatever follows) and other *NIXes. Everyone knows Linux is a great server OS, there's no denying it,and that's where the meat of Redhat's income will be coming from for now. The way to make that income grow is to gather more of the server market, and the easiest way for them to do this is to make it easy to transition from their HP's and Solaris servers.
And as for rumors of OSX Server on other platforms, I'll believe it when I see it. There's no way, given Apple's past, that they'd do this now.
And I think that the point about set-top boxes is mistaken. He's not really promising on any of this, he's delivered a package that people can use. I'm betting most all of the devices that use embedded linux won't be consumer-oriented. They'll be for corporations and engineers and such, people doing highly specialized work who need something more than a palm pilot. That's where I think Linux will make inroads. It won't be something most of us see or really care about, but I think he's right to go there.