Well the thing is this very point has been made many times, but the LSB committe simply rejects it. (They cite SysV documents of all things, but that's neither here nor there I suppose.) Standards can be a good thing, but they can come from many places other than a particular committee that seems to be very unresponsive to the needs and concerns of large segments of those using the product they want to standardise. I'd much rather see defacto standards arise through an evolutionary process, as is happening all the time, than a centralised committee being able to force their views. Which, fortunately, is not what's happening - the LSB can't force anything, and most people that didn't agree with their standards before they wrote them down just ignore them. We may disagree on it, but I do think that's a good thing.
Look, anyone can compile a 'standard'. It's meaningless, unless and until it's implemented. And people with any sense won't implement it simply because you call it a 'standard' - if you want it to be a real standard there has to be more weight to the advantages of doing so than the problems in it.
How many distros implement the LSB? Redhat comes the closest, but I don't think it even fully conforms - and the conformance in that case seems to be more a matter of LSB following Redhat than the other way around.
An example: LSB has rules about the use of/usr/usr/local and/opt. Now first, of course, is the fact that these don't really constitute a 'standard' except to the degree they're used, and certain distros use them while others don't. But, there's a more important issue here as well, which is that the 'standard' here doesn't make sense - if it were followed it would not actually help anything - things would be no less confusing and unpredictable than they are now. Ask yourself, where does foo go? Does it go in/usr or/opt or/usr/local? By my reading of the LSB, that depends on whether foo was installed by the distro, from a third party binary, or compiled locally. Now the filesystem standard is supposed to help make it less confusing to figure where things will be, but this just doesn't do that. Any given program could be in any of the three places, depending on the distro and the installation method - that's nuts. If you just use/usr and/usr/local, and forget about/opt, you only have two directories to check, which still isn't 'perfect' but how is it better to have three instead? Adopting the 'standard' just means you have to check yet another place, so it's very difficult to see how that makes things better rather than worse.
Apparently you're not aware that one of the main infrastucture advantages to info is that it can easily be converted to other formats, including html, from the texinfo source. If you want it that way, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to figure where the files are on your system and what the command line is to convert the entire thing to html. Obviously it would be trivial for any distro producer to do the same thing.
Man is out of date for a reason - it's deprecated and hasn't been used for ages. Try info instead, that's where you'll find up to date documentation for most things.
There are more problems with the LSB as well. It definately has a tendency to 'fix things that aren't broken,' and to introduce unecessary complexity. As much as I like the idea behind standards, I don't have much faith in LSB to write them correctly, and as long as that is the case it's better to just ignore them.
Hey! I LIKE Lawrence Welk! We need more polka people! (this post is only half joking)
NPR actually did a story awhile back on an album done by doing exactly what all the study groups said people didn't like... it had accordians, banjos, a polka beat, bass voices I think... it actually sounded kind of cool.
Whereas going the opposite route gets us... millions of tenth generations zeppelin clones (I like zeppelin, just not the endless hordes of imitators with no soul) millions of tenth generation madonna clones (OK, back when I was 14 she was pretty damn cute, but she was never a musical genius, and britney spears kissing her is a nice clip, but no reason to buy either of their albums) etc. etc. ad infinitum.
So, now that I think of it, simply doing the exact opposite of what marketing says is far from the worst possible plan.
But you have to rule out the sort of abusive reading you're giving it.
What's best for the job is not necessarily what is most popular at the moment - in fact that is very rarely the case.
MS is notorious for not playing well with other systems. This alone should rule it out of the game for many government installations (and private ones too) until and unless they fix it completely. If I pay taxes to support the government agency, and I want information I have a legal right to use, but they provide it only in an obfuscated form that I can't read because they chose to use MS, how is that freedom and choice? I have to choose MS if I want the information?
If on the other hand they use a Free and Open solution, and publish the information in a standard format, I can access it just as well whether I use MS or something else. That's freedom and choice, and it's not excluding me from using MS, it's just excluding the government from using programs that use this behaviour.
If hell freezes over and MS decides to start producing software that doesn't encrypt every document in unreadable proprietary formats, that doesn't break or pervert every standard it claims to implement, and generally quit writing the sort of crap they've always written - well then it would be fair to start comparing other factors and considering them, along with all the other vendors. But until then...
I know 'regular people' - and I know many of them don't understand these things. They use IE cause it's on the computer and they don't think of it as a program, they think of it as 'the internet'. They use MSN search because it's what 'the internet' sends them to. When I show them mozilla and google, they're usually very receptive, and in many cases I've shown these things to people that did not know anything about them before.
I see plenty of ads and "preferred links" on Google.
They have some, yes, but they don't pose as regular search results, let alone posing as the entire first page of the search results with a misleading line at the bottom implying that there is only one more search result instead of thousands either.
They can do whatever they want with their own search engine.
But what's happened is that, in part because they use it as an ad channel rather than a straightforward search engine, users don't find it very useful and tend to use the competition (primarily google) instead. Now, MS has a captive market consisting of those people who don't realise they can change browsers and use other search sites, but that's far from the whole market, and the rest of us don't typically use MSN - we use google. So far, so good, this is the way the market is supposed to operate. If MSN wants to stick with their captives and push ads, so be it. If they want to become attractive to the rest of us, though, they'll have to give that ad channel up.
So, MicroSoft thinking at it's best, what they want to do instead is just buy Google and turn it into an MSN clone, removing that choice and making the whole market captive again! THIS is what upsets people.
And this is different from other commercial websites, how?
It's very obviously different from google, as you must know if you read ANY of the submission, the article it linked, the discussion I linked...
What about other commercial software and their "network affect"? Does that make you mad? Or is it just Microsoft, because it's Microsoft?
Sun, SCO and IBM used to be real bad for it. IBM has cleaned up a lot. Sun, too, has been forced to clean up to stay in business in a lot of ways, although they can certainly still be annoying. SCO, of course, eventually were driven out of the business and their assets sold off. But it's MS that have perfected this way of doing business, even though they didn't originate it.
There are lots of 'businessmen' that think the way to respond when you're being out-competed is to buy the competition and neuter them so the customers are forced to come back, rather than cleaning up your act so the customers want to come back. Stupid as it is, that's a pretty typical mindset in some crowds. But, for now at least, MS is particularly successful in doing so, and therefore particularly annoying. That's all.
True, but it doesn't actually say that anywhere - it just says "Results 1-15 of about 16 containing linux windows". Also, there is a 'sponsored links' section on the right of the page, separate to these 15. You need to click on the 'next' button to see "Results 16-30 of about 8898833". Which is an abysmal design decision, if nothing else.
This is exactly the reason all of us old-timers hate MicroSoft so much - this is a perfect example of the sort of thing they've been pulling for decades. Little things, individually, but annoying to folks that know better, but all carefully designed to create a 'network affect' to keep all the noobies from getting better, to keep them penned up in the little MS sandbox and paying the rent.
I think you're on to part of their game, yes. They whore out their first page, as you put it, and this makes their site a lot less useful to folk, who turn to google. Typical MicroSoft response, of course, is to buy google and do the same thing with it.
There was a discussion of this same story awhile back on Groklaw and there are some interesting observations made there. There is a huge difference in hits between the MSN main search and the MSN UK search, I wonder if the UK site is just not 'whoring' the same way?
There are a number of good reasons not to do the install in Graphics mode. It's not necessary. It would introduce unecessary complexity in a crucial operation (installation) that doesn't require such complexity - that alone is good reason to veto the idea. Setting up the video properly is one of the most difficult things to do, and when you have a graphics mode installer a failure in setting that up properly on auto becomes a fatal error rather than a minor inconvenience. Plus a lot of Linux installations don't use graphics mode anyway - why go to the windows way of requiring a graphics card on machines that should be running headless and accessed via telnet and/or console cables only? Plenty of people use linux on machines that don't have a graphics system of any kind, and that's fine, in many cases it's a good thing. Why make an installer that won't work on a sizable portion of the machines that will run the software you're installing? How much sense does that make?
If it ain't broke don't fix it is an axiom for a reason - and making a graphic mode installer would be a great example of fixing something that isn't broke. The Debian installer could certainly be improved though, and from the article it seems they've made excellent choices in deciding what needs to be improved - and what isn't broken and shouldn't be fixed.
OK, I actually agree with you on this. Linux doesn't want to be anything, and in a lot of ways it's better than any MacOS.
"Apple hardware is for real computer lovers."
You're way offbase on that one. It is very nice hardware, and the one-button mouse crap is a myth, admittedly one that is based on facts, but those facts are long past. Macs work just fine with any fancy mouse you want to throw at them. I have a logitech optical for gaming, and a trackball that's nice to ease the wrist strain while working all day, both with several buttons and both work fine on the Mac. The only remnant of the one-button days is that you can still do everything with a one button mouse if you want - because if you click and hold for a bit it's interpreted the same way as a right-click is. Which is actually a very elegant design point - the folks that really do get confused by having too many buttons can get around still, but without inconvencing the rest of us in the slightest.
"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
I'm no Aqua fan, in fact I've been bitching about it since the first pre-release screenshots showed up. It's a steaming pile of... well you know. But it's still better than Windows in every way, and a lot less confusing for the 'typical user' than trying to setup a consistent X-Win system.
"OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source."
You're right, it shows nothing of the sort. But they still do deserve a little applause for releasing Darwin and fixing the license up, it's not a bad thing, although I have seen one or two people exagerate it as you're portraying.
"You get what you pay for with Apple hardware."
As another poster already pointed out, your 'facts' on this one were sheer fiction.
"...blah blah MHz myth blah..."
Your 'facts' on this one are just as bad, or maybe even worse. The G5s can keep up with the 3ghz P4 just fine, thank you, and blow them out of the water on code that's properly optimised for them, all the while using less electrity and making less heat.
What I want to know is whether there's something in the US legal system that can stop SCO just stringing the court out ad infinitum with bogus ownership claims on file after file. All SCO's execs need is another couple of quarters and they win, regardless of what happens to SCO afterwards.
As I understand it, for the moment that's up to the patience of the judge. Once plaintiff gets caught in a few lies the judges tend to get a bit short-tempered.
Beyond that, though, the assumption in your original post that the authorship of this code is somehow murky is incorrect. It took mere hours from the time the examples they screened in Las Vegas became known to the time they were identified, and a couple more days to refine the identification at most. One example that came through SGI is public domain as a result of being derived from V32, the other (the one that TSG claimed as an example of obfuscation) was a reimplimentation from the Berkley spec, both cases are well documented. You can pull any file you want, select a section of code, and pretty quickly track down where it came from, what publically (or, in the case of SysV and the like, semi-publically) available codebases it's occurred in, plot a timeline of changes... the only thing that could really make this difficult is the sheer number of different sections one might wind up looking at.
But judges, as I said, aren't known for limitless patience. Once SCO gets specific and advances some verifiable claims, and has them shot down in flames, the judge isn't going to simply let them go through that cycle ad infinitum. He's going to berate them for wasting his time, forward some transcripts to ethics committees and possibly other agencies, and turn his attention to the counterclaims. TSG knows this, and that's why they're dancing like crazy in these filings trying to deny that they ever made the claims they made, trying to avoid specifying any real claims that can be refuted.
The jig is almost up for them. The US legal system may move slow, but it gets quicker when the judge starts suspecting someone is jerking him around, and that's what's happening. Oral arguments have been scheduled, a good sign he's already caught a whiff of what TSG has cooking and he doesn't like it.
Or we can master it by formatting and re-installing slack. That's how I mastered RH.
No flamebaiting intended, though I know some will take it that way, but really. I'm not the best person to ask about this, as RH alienated me from the start... but presumably there are some people out there that actually liked their product, and RH is going out of their way to make sure that everyone understands that Fedora will not be the same. It sounds like RH-attempts-debian, which is fine I suppose, but I have a feeling the folks that like it will like debian even more.
Umm those numbers show Apple blowing the doors off the competition whenever the code is optimised for their processor, I think it proves exactly the opposite of what you think it does.
Actually I'm not assuming that at all. They can all be logged separately, they can still be changed as they occur or at any time thereafter, without leaving any evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
And if your main documentation relies on images just how is it going to be accessible via ssh or a serial cable?
It's much easier to add images to a document that works without them than to take them out of a document written with them from the beginning.
Well the thing is this very point has been made many times, but the LSB committe simply rejects it. (They cite SysV documents of all things, but that's neither here nor there I suppose.) Standards can be a good thing, but they can come from many places other than a particular committee that seems to be very unresponsive to the needs and concerns of large segments of those using the product they want to standardise. I'd much rather see defacto standards arise through an evolutionary process, as is happening all the time, than a centralised committee being able to force their views. Which, fortunately, is not what's happening - the LSB can't force anything, and most people that didn't agree with their standards before they wrote them down just ignore them. We may disagree on it, but I do think that's a good thing.
Look, anyone can compile a 'standard'. It's meaningless, unless and until it's implemented. And people with any sense won't implement it simply because you call it a 'standard' - if you want it to be a real standard there has to be more weight to the advantages of doing so than the problems in it.
How many distros implement the LSB? Redhat comes the closest, but I don't think it even fully conforms - and the conformance in that case seems to be more a matter of LSB following Redhat than the other way around.
An example: LSB has rules about the use of /usr /usr/local and /opt. Now first, of course, is the fact that these don't really constitute a 'standard' except to the degree they're used, and certain distros use them while others don't. But, there's a more important issue here as well, which is that the 'standard' here doesn't make sense - if it were followed it would not actually help anything - things would be no less confusing and unpredictable than they are now. Ask yourself, where does foo go? Does it go in /usr or /opt or /usr/local? By my reading of the LSB, that depends on whether foo was installed by the distro, from a third party binary, or compiled locally. Now the filesystem standard is supposed to help make it less confusing to figure where things will be, but this just doesn't do that. Any given program could be in any of the three places, depending on the distro and the installation method - that's nuts. If you just use /usr and /usr/local, and forget about /opt, you only have two directories to check, which still isn't 'perfect' but how is it better to have three instead? Adopting the 'standard' just means you have to check yet another place, so it's very difficult to see how that makes things better rather than worse.
Apparently you're not aware that one of the main infrastucture advantages to info is that it can easily be converted to other formats, including html, from the texinfo source. If you want it that way, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to figure where the files are on your system and what the command line is to convert the entire thing to html. Obviously it would be trivial for any distro producer to do the same thing.
Man is out of date for a reason - it's deprecated and hasn't been used for ages. Try info instead, that's where you'll find up to date documentation for most things.
There are more problems with the LSB as well. It definately has a tendency to 'fix things that aren't broken,' and to introduce unecessary complexity. As much as I like the idea behind standards, I don't have much faith in LSB to write them correctly, and as long as that is the case it's better to just ignore them.
And how does that compare with postfix, eh?
NPR actually did a story awhile back on an album done by doing exactly what all the study groups said people didn't like... it had accordians, banjos, a polka beat, bass voices I think... it actually sounded kind of cool.
Whereas going the opposite route gets us... millions of tenth generations zeppelin clones (I like zeppelin, just not the endless hordes of imitators with no soul) millions of tenth generation madonna clones (OK, back when I was 14 she was pretty damn cute, but she was never a musical genius, and britney spears kissing her is a nice clip, but no reason to buy either of their albums) etc. etc. ad infinitum.
So, now that I think of it, simply doing the exact opposite of what marketing says is far from the worst possible plan.
After more investigation, it turns out that this is indeed very deliberate. Check out this.
Use what is best for the job is a fine rule.
But you have to rule out the sort of abusive reading you're giving it.
What's best for the job is not necessarily what is most popular at the moment - in fact that is very rarely the case.
MS is notorious for not playing well with other systems. This alone should rule it out of the game for many government installations (and private ones too) until and unless they fix it completely. If I pay taxes to support the government agency, and I want information I have a legal right to use, but they provide it only in an obfuscated form that I can't read because they chose to use MS, how is that freedom and choice? I have to choose MS if I want the information?
If on the other hand they use a Free and Open solution, and publish the information in a standard format, I can access it just as well whether I use MS or something else. That's freedom and choice, and it's not excluding me from using MS, it's just excluding the government from using programs that use this behaviour.
If hell freezes over and MS decides to start producing software that doesn't encrypt every document in unreadable proprietary formats, that doesn't break or pervert every standard it claims to implement, and generally quit writing the sort of crap they've always written - well then it would be fair to start comparing other factors and considering them, along with all the other vendors. But until then...
I know 'regular people' - and I know many of them don't understand these things. They use IE cause it's on the computer and they don't think of it as a program, they think of it as 'the internet'. They use MSN search because it's what 'the internet' sends them to. When I show them mozilla and google, they're usually very receptive, and in many cases I've shown these things to people that did not know anything about them before.
They have some, yes, but they don't pose as regular search results, let alone posing as the entire first page of the search results with a misleading line at the bottom implying that there is only one more search result instead of thousands either.
They can do whatever they want with their own search engine.
But what's happened is that, in part because they use it as an ad channel rather than a straightforward search engine, users don't find it very useful and tend to use the competition (primarily google) instead. Now, MS has a captive market consisting of those people who don't realise they can change browsers and use other search sites, but that's far from the whole market, and the rest of us don't typically use MSN - we use google. So far, so good, this is the way the market is supposed to operate. If MSN wants to stick with their captives and push ads, so be it. If they want to become attractive to the rest of us, though, they'll have to give that ad channel up.
So, MicroSoft thinking at it's best, what they want to do instead is just buy Google and turn it into an MSN clone, removing that choice and making the whole market captive again! THIS is what upsets people.
It's very obviously different from google, as you must know if you read ANY of the submission, the article it linked, the discussion I linked...
Sun, SCO and IBM used to be real bad for it. IBM has cleaned up a lot. Sun, too, has been forced to clean up to stay in business in a lot of ways, although they can certainly still be annoying. SCO, of course, eventually were driven out of the business and their assets sold off. But it's MS that have perfected this way of doing business, even though they didn't originate it.
There are lots of 'businessmen' that think the way to respond when you're being out-competed is to buy the competition and neuter them so the customers are forced to come back, rather than cleaning up your act so the customers want to come back. Stupid as it is, that's a pretty typical mindset in some crowds. But, for now at least, MS is particularly successful in doing so, and therefore particularly annoying. That's all.
I'm sure the are cases as you describe, but I don't believe anywhere near all of them can be written off as such. Some were malicious to begin with.
This is exactly the reason all of us old-timers hate MicroSoft so much - this is a perfect example of the sort of thing they've been pulling for decades. Little things, individually, but annoying to folks that know better, but all carefully designed to create a 'network affect' to keep all the noobies from getting better, to keep them penned up in the little MS sandbox and paying the rent.
I think you're on to part of their game, yes. They whore out their first page, as you put it, and this makes their site a lot less useful to folk, who turn to google. Typical MicroSoft response, of course, is to buy google and do the same thing with it.
There was a discussion of this same story awhile back on Groklaw and there are some interesting observations made there. There is a huge difference in hits between the MSN main search and the MSN UK search, I wonder if the UK site is just not 'whoring' the same way?
But it does. It has a lot to do with it, because a text-mode installer will work through one, and a bitmapped GUI one won't.
There are a number of good reasons not to do the install in Graphics mode. It's not necessary. It would introduce unecessary complexity in a crucial operation (installation) that doesn't require such complexity - that alone is good reason to veto the idea. Setting up the video properly is one of the most difficult things to do, and when you have a graphics mode installer a failure in setting that up properly on auto becomes a fatal error rather than a minor inconvenience. Plus a lot of Linux installations don't use graphics mode anyway - why go to the windows way of requiring a graphics card on machines that should be running headless and accessed via telnet and/or console cables only? Plenty of people use linux on machines that don't have a graphics system of any kind, and that's fine, in many cases it's a good thing. Why make an installer that won't work on a sizable portion of the machines that will run the software you're installing? How much sense does that make?
If it ain't broke don't fix it is an axiom for a reason - and making a graphic mode installer would be a great example of fixing something that isn't broke. The Debian installer could certainly be improved though, and from the article it seems they've made excellent choices in deciding what needs to be improved - and what isn't broken and shouldn't be fixed.
OK, I actually agree with you on this. Linux doesn't want to be anything, and in a lot of ways it's better than any MacOS.
You're way offbase on that one. It is very nice hardware, and the one-button mouse crap is a myth, admittedly one that is based on facts, but those facts are long past. Macs work just fine with any fancy mouse you want to throw at them. I have a logitech optical for gaming, and a trackball that's nice to ease the wrist strain while working all day, both with several buttons and both work fine on the Mac. The only remnant of the one-button days is that you can still do everything with a one button mouse if you want - because if you click and hold for a bit it's interpreted the same way as a right-click is. Which is actually a very elegant design point - the folks that really do get confused by having too many buttons can get around still, but without inconvencing the rest of us in the slightest.
I'm no Aqua fan, in fact I've been bitching about it since the first pre-release screenshots showed up. It's a steaming pile of... well you know. But it's still better than Windows in every way, and a lot less confusing for the 'typical user' than trying to setup a consistent X-Win system.
You're right, it shows nothing of the sort. But they still do deserve a little applause for releasing Darwin and fixing the license up, it's not a bad thing, although I have seen one or two people exagerate it as you're portraying.
As another poster already pointed out, your 'facts' on this one were sheer fiction.
Your 'facts' on this one are just as bad, or maybe even worse. The G5s can keep up with the 3ghz P4 just fine, thank you, and blow them out of the water on code that's properly optimised for them, all the while using less electrity and making less heat.
Hrmm, I'll nominate her.
As I understand it, for the moment that's up to the patience of the judge. Once plaintiff gets caught in a few lies the judges tend to get a bit short-tempered.
Beyond that, though, the assumption in your original post that the authorship of this code is somehow murky is incorrect. It took mere hours from the time the examples they screened in Las Vegas became known to the time they were identified, and a couple more days to refine the identification at most. One example that came through SGI is public domain as a result of being derived from V32, the other (the one that TSG claimed as an example of obfuscation) was a reimplimentation from the Berkley spec, both cases are well documented. You can pull any file you want, select a section of code, and pretty quickly track down where it came from, what publically (or, in the case of SysV and the like, semi-publically) available codebases it's occurred in, plot a timeline of changes... the only thing that could really make this difficult is the sheer number of different sections one might wind up looking at.
But judges, as I said, aren't known for limitless patience. Once SCO gets specific and advances some verifiable claims, and has them shot down in flames, the judge isn't going to simply let them go through that cycle ad infinitum. He's going to berate them for wasting his time, forward some transcripts to ethics committees and possibly other agencies, and turn his attention to the counterclaims. TSG knows this, and that's why they're dancing like crazy in these filings trying to deny that they ever made the claims they made, trying to avoid specifying any real claims that can be refuted.
The jig is almost up for them. The US legal system may move slow, but it gets quicker when the judge starts suspecting someone is jerking him around, and that's what's happening. Oral arguments have been scheduled, a good sign he's already caught a whiff of what TSG has cooking and he doesn't like it.
IANALS
I am not a land shark.
Try man info.
Or we can master it by formatting and re-installing slack. That's how I mastered RH.
No flamebaiting intended, though I know some will take it that way, but really. I'm not the best person to ask about this, as RH alienated me from the start... but presumably there are some people out there that actually liked their product, and RH is going out of their way to make sure that everyone understands that Fedora will not be the same. It sounds like RH-attempts-debian, which is fine I suppose, but I have a feeling the folks that like it will like debian even more.
Umm those numbers show Apple blowing the doors off the competition whenever the code is optimised for their processor, I think it proves exactly the opposite of what you think it does.
Actually I'm not assuming that at all. They can all be logged separately, they can still be changed as they occur or at any time thereafter, without leaving any evidence.