It says they've been urged to do so, but will not at this time. They're considering it, but have very good reasons not to. If they did remove it, it would be basically a symbolic move that would hurt a few innocent people. Putting in this readme drawing attention to the controversy achieves a similar symbolic statement, without hurting those people. I think it's a good move.
As long as they are just using binaries, you may be right. The moment they modify or distribute anything they'll be in violation both of the contract they signed with SCO, and of the GPL. They're setting themselves up for lawsuits they would not otherwise be vulnerable to. It's a very stupid move.
It would still be stupid. It would be accepting a contract which they could then sue you for violating later. It would also terminate your legal ability to modify or distributed any GPL Software.
And in actual fact it's not even the entire US Empire, as some of us refuse to assimilate and continue to use our traditional spellings rather than Websters to this day.
According to law enforcement officials, the person arrested was a known sophisticated hacker.
Translation from law enforcement language - this was a guy that knows what things like encryption, and ftp are. This was a guy that knows the difference between a megabyte and a megahertz. A real wizard. Be afraid.
Just a PS. You were talking about display machines. It would be silly for them to use one of the high powered machines to display Linux - they aren't trying to sell Linux, they're trying to sell their hardware.
They should, however, have a display model of the machine they are selling with Linux. You seem to imply they don't? But the article said they did. At any rate, they should have that, it shouldn't be a problem, but in order for that to help their sales it would need to be something that entices the customer, not something that totally turns them off, as 'thiz' Linux doubtless does.
The Fry's I work at has done just that. I know this, because I'm the one they hired with Linux experience.
And from the rest of what you wrote, it's obvious you're seriously underutilised. You won't be there long.
If they want to do this right, they need a couple in a central position, not stuck as a low level employee at a storefront.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why the hell should a retail chain be supporting a Linux distro? Isn't that the point of the commerical vendors?
They support their target audiences. Fry's isn't one of them. Perhaps Lindows would be interested, the others likely would not, it's not their style.
But what I'm trying to point out is that the cost of 'rolling your own' with Free Software is low enough it would actually make sense for a place like Frys to do it. They could leverage the work of one of the distros already in existence, but tailor it to their specific hardware and setup. They could remove a good 90% of the software in a typical distribution and only track followups for what is needed, and maintain their own repository, even automatic updates, with really minimal costs.
I think the rest of your post makes it clear why this will never happen, however. The limits of corporate stupidity... gah... I'm so glad to no longer have to work in that environment myself.
But the only PC I have to show off Linux on as an old 333MHz machine that even runs Windows dog-slow; not the best choice for demoing Linux, in my opinion.
Au contraire!
I'm absolutely amazed at how many people that ought to know better seem to have the opinion you imply when you say this - that Linux requires more hardware capability than Windows. This is absolute BULLSHIT. I've run Linux on 386s, and it works great. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that people are giving the wrong idea entirely about Linux in these cases. Somehow people are equating Linux with some incredibly bloated and poorly designed windows clones that can be run on top of it. They are not the same thing at all.
Those machines are where Linux really shines if it's setup properly for it. You don't have to run every bloated windows-copying 'desktop' to have a good system. Set those thing up with, oh, say XFCE would be a good choice. Yes, it's not exactly like Windows. That's good. It's no harder to use, it's probably easier to use, and it's no harder to learn. A little decent documentation and a sane default setup and you've got a system every bit as good as Windows, running faster on old cheap hardware.
...does everyone seem to think Linux is ready for the average consumer?
OK, I'm taking that out of context and interpreting it slightly differenly than you had in mind, but it's the question you should be asking before the question you actually did even comes up.
And the answer is no, but. But neither is Windows. Even the Mac isn't really ideal for the average consumer. They still manage to get them to work well enough for them, most of the time.
If the average consumer can use a windows box, there's absolutely no reason why he couldn't use a properly pre-configured Linux box just as well. That's a key phrase though. I've yet to see any of the people selling Linux computers doing that.
So they wind up with products no one wants. We geeks just format the disk and put something decent on, of course, but Mom and Pop that might buy the thing won't know to do that, and they'll get a very wrong impression.
I don't know why it seems to be so hard for these stores to do this right. All they need to do is hire one or two people that know what they're doing. They could take a regular distribution, Debian, Slack, Redhat, whatever they're good at working on, configure all the hardware properly, setup a user account and a GUI and so forth, with all the normal things that the average user expects at their fingertips. Then make a package repository for updates, a disk image for installs, and a short 'getting started' book. Maybe even a live tutorial. None of this would be all that difficult or time consuming to do, given that the code is Free and there's nothing really new here, just applying procedures already well developed. Then they could sell boxes that provide the Mom and Pop users with a real viable alternative to Windows, at a cheaper cost. That's a big market. Why do they keep doing these half-measures instead, and just giving Linux a bad name?
I've had a lot of fun reading this site. But I have to say, the funniest line on it seems to be unintentional.
There is a gradeschooler who lives in an apartment complex down the street for whom I built a 486 some time ago. It's running Windows 95, and I am forced to fix it for him constantly. One day he called me up and said that his computer is opening up all of his files. I grabbed my coat and hat and popped over to see what he had done to the poor thing. He had selected everything on his desktop and made shortcuts of them in a new folder on the desktop, in the quick-launch, and, worst of all, his startup folder. Imagine booting all the MS Office 97 applications at startup on a 486...quite painful.
Umm imagine a supposedly clueful techie, laughing at the clueless l0s3rs, thinking that application programs 'boot'?
No, you're right, storage density has gone up but reliability has really plummeted in recent years. They're making bigger, faster, cheaper hard drives, but they certainly don't last like they used to. Even Western Digital has scaled back their warranty as a reflection of this.
Actually I last used RH prior to 8, and I can tell you that it definately did not do a very good job of handling dependencies in some cases even then.
I suspect part of the reason is lack of rationality in package definitions. I've literally seen the same program have maybe 4 or 5 dependencies in the slackware package and well over 30 for the RH package. Now, absent a handful of small patches, these are based from the same source code, so the problem I am guessing has more to do with the packaging system than anything else.
I remember trying to upgrade a package on mandrake with urpmi, leaving it working, coming back the next day and it was still downloading, I forget exactly how many packages it had done, but it was many, and when I looked closely I realised it was upgrading xfree and a ton of other stuff. I rebooted to my slack partition, grabbed the same program in a.tgz package, and it just installed without a problem, without upgrading xfree, with, IIRC, only two small package upgrades needed as dependencies. I decided to upgrade xfree too and that took about half an hour. The difference was insane, and again, couldn't have anything to do with the underlying code, but rather with the way things were packaged.
- Is there no legal way to stop ISP's from doing that ?
No, and it would be dangerous if there were.
The inhibiting factor for most is simply the risk of being blackholed by the rest of us if they do.
Sadly there are a few that have such a huge chunk of the net under their thumb they are basically immune to this threat. I think that's the number two contributor to the spam problem (number one being fools that buy from spamvertisers.)
Several times. I couldn't figure out what the scam was so I did some googling. Apparently the guy sending them out is a bit... different. He really seems to believe that some time-traveling bad-guys ruined his life and caused him health and other problems. He seems to believe there are actually many time-travellers on earth at the moment, and wants to get a machine so he can travel back in time and undo the horrid stuff they did to him as a child.
Numerous folk have corresponded with him and he's made the deal many times, but somehow the bad guys always seem to nab his seller at the last moment. Poor guy.
Well to a degree they're commoditising the low end, which could work out to hurt them except that they don't have such a great market share their to begin with, so they'll probably still win there.
On the other hand, if they can't compete well there, they could wind up losing that market entirely to the likes of Dell.
But even if that were to happen, that's not where the profit margins are. If we wind up with most big businesses running Dell with Linux on the lower end, but IBM minis and mainframes, IBM still will come out well, for the reasons you pointed out.
They won't win any awards for processing power per dollar, that's for sure. Their I/O bandwidth is extraordinary, however, and their reliability puts even Suns biggest boxes to shame.
For what they are designed for, they're still the kings.
You sure about that? Considering AIX is being moved towards linux (the "L" in AIX 5L stands for Linux!), what else do they have left?
Umm AIX is being moved toward working better with Linux over the network, but it's not being phased out anytime soon. There are two other OS IBM won't be abandoning anytime soon either - z/OS and OS/390. That's the big iron stuff. AIX is mostly for the minis these days. Linux is for the micros.
They are putting a lot of work into making sure everything plays nicely together, but they are certainly NOT going towards using Linux exclusively.
The funny thing is, in my experience, this is most often a problem on redhat, which was one of the first to go to a package manager that supposedly takes care of dependencies for you. Slackware, which doesn't even attempt to do this, has never caused me any serious problems. Perhaps because the packages are better setup? I don't know. But when I need to install stuff on slack it's always pretty straightforward. There are a handful of dependencies, usually already satisfied, and if not then at least easily identified and obtained.
I try to install the same programs on RH and get lists of dependencies that scroll right off the terminal. One won't install without the second, but the second won't install without the first. The redhat fans say use force. Then later when the database is all fouled up, they say you used force didn't you? NEVER DO THAT.
Pretty ironic when a system that was designed to fix a problem seems to make it much worse.
Anway, my limited experience with Debian was much better, so obviously not all implementations of that idea are the same.
No one that we know of has been sentenced to death, yet. However it's definately been threatened.
In addition to the people already declared 'enemy combatants' the Moussaui (sp?) case has shown what I'm talking about, with the prosecution refusing to produce witnesses and saying openly that if they don't like how it's going they'll just declare him an enemy combatant and take his case away from the legal system. And the same threat was used to extract plea bargains recently from the so-called 'Lackawanna Six.' See this article for some coverage on that.
Actually once the soviet union came down we gained access to the old KGB records... and found out that in McCarthy's day the country, and particularly the government was indeed crawling with KGB agents. The ironic thing, however, is that even though McCarthy was right about that, he never actually caught any of them. He just railroaded innocents. He would have been expected to catch a few just by random chance, but somehow he didn't. Odd, eh?
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No, read it again.
It says they've been urged to do so, but will not at this time. They're considering it, but have very good reasons not to. If they did remove it, it would be basically a symbolic move that would hurt a few innocent people. Putting in this readme drawing attention to the controversy achieves a similar symbolic statement, without hurting those people. I think it's a good move.
As long as they are just using binaries, you may be right. The moment they modify or distribute anything they'll be in violation both of the contract they signed with SCO, and of the GPL. They're setting themselves up for lawsuits they would not otherwise be vulnerable to. It's a very stupid move.
It would still be stupid. It would be accepting a contract which they could then sue you for violating later. It would also terminate your legal ability to modify or distributed any GPL Software.
And in actual fact it's not even the entire US Empire, as some of us refuse to assimilate and continue to use our traditional spellings rather than Websters to this day.
I thought the most offensive post was the original message, actually.
Translation from law enforcement language - this was a guy that knows what things like encryption, and ftp are. This was a guy that knows the difference between a megabyte and a megahertz. A real wizard. Be afraid.
Just a PS. You were talking about display machines. It would be silly for them to use one of the high powered machines to display Linux - they aren't trying to sell Linux, they're trying to sell their hardware.
They should, however, have a display model of the machine they are selling with Linux. You seem to imply they don't? But the article said they did. At any rate, they should have that, it shouldn't be a problem, but in order for that to help their sales it would need to be something that entices the customer, not something that totally turns them off, as 'thiz' Linux doubtless does.
And from the rest of what you wrote, it's obvious you're seriously underutilised. You won't be there long.
If they want to do this right, they need a couple in a central position, not stuck as a low level employee at a storefront.
They support their target audiences. Fry's isn't one of them. Perhaps Lindows would be interested, the others likely would not, it's not their style.
But what I'm trying to point out is that the cost of 'rolling your own' with Free Software is low enough it would actually make sense for a place like Frys to do it. They could leverage the work of one of the distros already in existence, but tailor it to their specific hardware and setup. They could remove a good 90% of the software in a typical distribution and only track followups for what is needed, and maintain their own repository, even automatic updates, with really minimal costs.
I think the rest of your post makes it clear why this will never happen, however. The limits of corporate stupidity... gah... I'm so glad to no longer have to work in that environment myself.
Au contraire!
I'm absolutely amazed at how many people that ought to know better seem to have the opinion you imply when you say this - that Linux requires more hardware capability than Windows. This is absolute BULLSHIT. I've run Linux on 386s, and it works great. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that people are giving the wrong idea entirely about Linux in these cases. Somehow people are equating Linux with some incredibly bloated and poorly designed windows clones that can be run on top of it. They are not the same thing at all.
Those machines are where Linux really shines if it's setup properly for it. You don't have to run every bloated windows-copying 'desktop' to have a good system. Set those thing up with, oh, say XFCE would be a good choice. Yes, it's not exactly like Windows. That's good. It's no harder to use, it's probably easier to use, and it's no harder to learn. A little decent documentation and a sane default setup and you've got a system every bit as good as Windows, running faster on old cheap hardware.
OK, I'm taking that out of context and interpreting it slightly differenly than you had in mind, but it's the question you should be asking before the question you actually did even comes up.
And the answer is no, but. But neither is Windows. Even the Mac isn't really ideal for the average consumer. They still manage to get them to work well enough for them, most of the time.
If the average consumer can use a windows box, there's absolutely no reason why he couldn't use a properly pre-configured Linux box just as well. That's a key phrase though. I've yet to see any of the people selling Linux computers doing that.
So they wind up with products no one wants. We geeks just format the disk and put something decent on, of course, but Mom and Pop that might buy the thing won't know to do that, and they'll get a very wrong impression.
I don't know why it seems to be so hard for these stores to do this right. All they need to do is hire one or two people that know what they're doing. They could take a regular distribution, Debian, Slack, Redhat, whatever they're good at working on, configure all the hardware properly, setup a user account and a GUI and so forth, with all the normal things that the average user expects at their fingertips. Then make a package repository for updates, a disk image for installs, and a short 'getting started' book. Maybe even a live tutorial. None of this would be all that difficult or time consuming to do, given that the code is Free and there's nothing really new here, just applying procedures already well developed. Then they could sell boxes that provide the Mom and Pop users with a real viable alternative to Windows, at a cheaper cost. That's a big market. Why do they keep doing these half-measures instead, and just giving Linux a bad name?
As I indicated, that's what I thought too.
It's a great example of a the wisdom of the KISS philosophy.
I've had a lot of fun reading this site. But I have to say, the funniest line on it seems to be unintentional.
Umm imagine a supposedly clueful techie, laughing at the clueless l0s3rs, thinking that application programs 'boot'?
Heh.
No, you're right, storage density has gone up but reliability has really plummeted in recent years. They're making bigger, faster, cheaper hard drives, but they certainly don't last like they used to. Even Western Digital has scaled back their warranty as a reflection of this.
Actually I last used RH prior to 8, and I can tell you that it definately did not do a very good job of handling dependencies in some cases even then.
I suspect part of the reason is lack of rationality in package definitions. I've literally seen the same program have maybe 4 or 5 dependencies in the slackware package and well over 30 for the RH package. Now, absent a handful of small patches, these are based from the same source code, so the problem I am guessing has more to do with the packaging system than anything else.
I remember trying to upgrade a package on mandrake with urpmi, leaving it working, coming back the next day and it was still downloading, I forget exactly how many packages it had done, but it was many, and when I looked closely I realised it was upgrading xfree and a ton of other stuff. I rebooted to my slack partition, grabbed the same program in a .tgz package, and it just installed without a problem, without upgrading xfree, with, IIRC, only two small package upgrades needed as dependencies. I decided to upgrade xfree too and that took about half an hour. The difference was insane, and again, couldn't have anything to do with the underlying code, but rather with the way things were packaged.
No, and it would be dangerous if there were.
The inhibiting factor for most is simply the risk of being blackholed by the rest of us if they do.
Sadly there are a few that have such a huge chunk of the net under their thumb they are basically immune to this threat. I think that's the number two contributor to the spam problem (number one being fools that buy from spamvertisers.)
Several times. I couldn't figure out what the scam was so I did some googling. Apparently the guy sending them out is a bit... different. He really seems to believe that some time-traveling bad-guys ruined his life and caused him health and other problems. He seems to believe there are actually many time-travellers on earth at the moment, and wants to get a machine so he can travel back in time and undo the horrid stuff they did to him as a child.
Numerous folk have corresponded with him and he's made the deal many times, but somehow the bad guys always seem to nab his seller at the last moment. Poor guy.
Well to a degree they're commoditising the low end, which could work out to hurt them except that they don't have such a great market share their to begin with, so they'll probably still win there.
On the other hand, if they can't compete well there, they could wind up losing that market entirely to the likes of Dell.
But even if that were to happen, that's not where the profit margins are. If we wind up with most big businesses running Dell with Linux on the lower end, but IBM minis and mainframes, IBM still will come out well, for the reasons you pointed out.
It all depends on the benchmarks you choose.
They won't win any awards for processing power per dollar, that's for sure. Their I/O bandwidth is extraordinary, however, and their reliability puts even Suns biggest boxes to shame.
For what they are designed for, they're still the kings.
And don't forget OS/400, which I forgot in my original post. That's for the iSeries minis, formerly called AS/400s.
IBM is big on linux right now, no doubt about it, but when folks say stuff like it's their only OS they are way wrong.
Don't forget southern Idaho. The infestation there is particularly bad, many claim it's actually worse there than in Utah.
Umm AIX is being moved toward working better with Linux over the network, but it's not being phased out anytime soon. There are two other OS IBM won't be abandoning anytime soon either - z/OS and OS/390. That's the big iron stuff. AIX is mostly for the minis these days. Linux is for the micros.
They are putting a lot of work into making sure everything plays nicely together, but they are certainly NOT going towards using Linux exclusively.
The funny thing is, in my experience, this is most often a problem on redhat, which was one of the first to go to a package manager that supposedly takes care of dependencies for you. Slackware, which doesn't even attempt to do this, has never caused me any serious problems. Perhaps because the packages are better setup? I don't know. But when I need to install stuff on slack it's always pretty straightforward. There are a handful of dependencies, usually already satisfied, and if not then at least easily identified and obtained.
I try to install the same programs on RH and get lists of dependencies that scroll right off the terminal. One won't install without the second, but the second won't install without the first. The redhat fans say use force. Then later when the database is all fouled up, they say you used force didn't you? NEVER DO THAT.
Pretty ironic when a system that was designed to fix a problem seems to make it much worse.
Anway, my limited experience with Debian was much better, so obviously not all implementations of that idea are the same.
It's a for instance. I'm not saying use Emacs, I'm saying use a decent editor, Emacs is an example but certainly not the only one.
Doesn't your vb ide allow you to plug in another editor?
The one that comes with it should be doing this to begin with, but if it doesn't, it needs to be replaced or fixed.
Just get a proper editor. Long lines should be wrapped in a way that makes that fact recognisable. Emacs, for instance, has been doing this for ages.
No one that we know of has been sentenced to death, yet. However it's definately been threatened.
In addition to the people already declared 'enemy combatants' the Moussaui (sp?) case has shown what I'm talking about, with the prosecution refusing to produce witnesses and saying openly that if they don't like how it's going they'll just declare him an enemy combatant and take his case away from the legal system. And the same threat was used to extract plea bargains recently from the so-called 'Lackawanna Six.' See this article for some coverage on that.
Actually once the soviet union came down we gained access to the old KGB records... and found out that in McCarthy's day the country, and particularly the government was indeed crawling with KGB agents. The ironic thing, however, is that even though McCarthy was right about that, he never actually caught any of them. He just railroaded innocents. He would have been expected to catch a few just by random chance, but somehow he didn't. Odd, eh?