Absolutely false. In fact, right-wing republicans proposed the constitutional amendment ratifying an income tax thinking it would never pass. Shock horror all the states ratified it -- classic case of what here in Italy we call autogol, the kicking of the ball into one's own goal.
Maybe, maybe not. There is actually a considerable body of evidence that it was not properly ratified. If you are interested here is a place to start.
There are also a couple of completely separate arguments for the same conclusion - if you are interested I am sure you are capable of doing your own research.
At any rate, the income tax originally took a tiny percentage of the top couple of percent of wage-earners income - and of course the politicians that came up with it swore it would never get bigger. Yeah, right. Anyhow...
Now tell me, how quickly will this thread head off-topic?
Rather quickly, I imagine... I wonder if someone has posted that they own all your italian bases yet?
But seriously, if topic is x, and x leads to y, and y leads to z, is z off-topic? Of course not. This is a discussion site isn't it?
But I really want to know: do you love my English? I've been studying it for many years now. If I make a mistake, please alert me. I'll correct it. I'm very obsessive about these things. It's gorgeous here in Sardinia -- I'm on vacation, dreaming up my next book --
Your english is fine, at least in this post - remembering that most native speakers are atrocious at it these days. I believe you misused the colon (":") - should have been a semicolon (";") but that's one most natives seem to get wrong so don't feel too bad...
Ah, taxes. Do you you that a century ago in America it was your farmers who demanded taxes on the rich? Times so change. Now neo-peasants like Eric Raymond want to abolish taxes. In Italy we'd say zitto, stronzo and tax his guns.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Como se "zitto" y "stronzo" en ingles?
That's spanish, not italian, but I've been told they are close enough that an italian will generally understand at least the simpler stuff... in case I was told wrong I was asking what "zitto, stronzo" means...
Sardinia in the spring... beautiful no? Enjoy it...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
While you make a good point, it's just... wrong to use the word rich as you are using it, and the fact the media uses it that way is not an excuse. True rich people don't pay taxes, to any significant degree. They have accountants and lawyers and investments and lots of write-offs and loopholes - they aren't people that work for a good salary, they are people that have so much money IT supports them.
The people that pay the most taxes, and thus the ones that benefit most from tax cuts, are not rich people - they are upper middle-class people that work for a living at well above average wages. They are usually professionals that have worked their way to the top of their field, senior database analysts, network admins, engineers, etc. Lumping them together with people that never need to work, that make far more money than they are likely to ever even see, simply by sitting on their arse and letting their money work for them, is bizaare and I dare say absurd.
Sure, a guy that makes say, 100-160k/year is better off than the guy flipping burgers - but he's a world away from folks like Buffet, Turner, Gates or Bush. And he's the one shouldering the tax burden - not them.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Microsoft's gargantuan and controversial presence triggered a techno-social
revolution over the last decade. Microsoft's dominance -- and as some
describe it, predation -- helped shape the computer revolution and the new
economy. It was also instrumental in spawning Open Source, Free Software
and the related individualistic, decentralized media that may well have saved the
Net from the corporatized fate of much of the rest of the non-virtual information
culture.
A number of errors here. Microsoft certainly triggered no such revolution - it rode a wave that was well underway, and excelled at profiting from it. At most, one might argue that they accelerated a revolution that would have happened no matter what. Microsoft certainly did not in any way "spawn... Free Software" - the GNU project started when MS was still a very small player, providing an early and primitive version of dos for IBM, along with their basic engine and the like. Free Software was a reaction, yes, but to the actions of the likes of SUN and DEC, not MS.
While I think I agree with the overall point of your article (certainly I agree that "One of the problems is that our media has become a mob, lurching one way, then the other. Perspective and clarity is hard to come by." and that Jacksons decision has some flaws...) I really can't imagine that you would want to spread such misinformation as this.
As to the judgement, a deeper issue that you don't mention is that antitrust law itself is a tangled mess of subjective criteria to begin with. Monopoly is a concept solid enough to be fairly useful in economics, but not quite solid enough to be objectively definable in law. A monopoly is a single supplier in a given market. In order to determine whether or not MS "is" a monopoly, one must define the relevant market. Personal computer software? Not a monopoly. Desktop x86 computer software? Not a monopoly. MS-Windows compatible software? There they are a monopoly, and given the share of the total personal computer market that represents, that makes them a juggernaught, for sure, but there are some definate reasons to find such a narrow definition of the market for legal purposes quite troubling - it nearly makes them a monopoly by definition. By that criteria, Apple must be a monopolist (just a monopolist in a smaller market) and so is SUN, and hell, Symantec has a monopoly on Norton Utilities, right?
So I've watched this whole story with very mixed feelings. Microsoft has a tremendous market clout which they've used in VERY questionable ways. They do stifle innovation, they do harm consumers, and it's tempting to view anything that strips them of a little part of their all too great and all too often abused power as a good thing. But antitrust law is just as scary and abusable.
At any rate, a thought provoking article. Please do correct the factual errors before publishing an article like this in the future though - it's bad enough that an army of MS Marketdroids are out there misinforming people about the history of computing - the last thing that should happen is people like you helping them.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
For those that can't be bothered to read the articles, at least check out the pics. This could be really huge. The arguments will surely go on until more blatant evidence comes out, but this looks pretty solid - magnetotactic bacteria leave pretty distinctive, if small and fragile, artifacts, and the stuff buried in these rocks sure look like it.
The NASA guys have been studying the artifacts since 1996, and they are now convinced enough to put their reputation on the line. These aren't people to do that lightly.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
For WindowsCE you have Visual Basic, Waba, KVM. For Palm, you have
AppForge, Satellite Forms Pro, Waba, KVM, PQAs, etc.
Which, for various reasons, are unavailable, not favoured or simply not acceptable to many of the best and brightest, and many of the rest of us as well.
Obligatory flames from VB victims aside, anyone that can code well, can code well under linux. It's a programmers system from the ground up, that's its strength, and its weakness.
The success of a platform like this will directly depend on the the manufacturer getting them into the hands of the right hackers ASAP.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Really? All those languages huh? Let's not forget they have libraries
associated with them that take up space - which on a PDA device is bound to
be limited.
Sure it will be. But then again, how many applications are you really going to want on such a device?
The storage limitation is part and parcel for that sort of hardware - and it's the same issue no matter what OS you use.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Hmm you should have read the legalese before posting on it. They defined "invention" for the purposes of the contract, rather incredibly broadly, and it did indeed cover those things.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
A few weeks back we had a discussion here about a new email client for Linux that was 'compatible' with
LookOut, including support for HTML email. I posted a small rant on why that's not a feature, but a bug, and a
few called me a ludite.
I agree with you this is a bug not a feature, however, if you were not prepared to offer a non-buggy way to make the users who expect this happy, that might legitimately have earned you such an epithet.
Face it, the typical e-mail user these days does expect some formatting capabilities. There is a way to do this without diving into html-hell. See this. The Text/Enriched MIME format was designed to provide formatting capabilities that many users desire without the never-ending problems entailed by using HTML out of place. The makers of Pegasus Mail have taken a very usable approach to satisfy users desires with the minimal messiness on the other end - HTML messages incoming can be parsed internally with a minimal module that only understand the most commonly used and innocous tags, handed off to an external browser for parsing, or simply stripped to text. Formatted messages are normally sent using Text/Enriched, RTF is also available as an option (very useful if you know the recipient to be on a windows box.) So the pmail users can receive these annoying things and read them fine, but when they forward/reply they don't perpetuate the madness.
But you're only safe if everyone else uses Pine, and everything they know uses, etc. Just need one java-enabled
mail program in the link and everything's compromised.
Hrmm... no. He'd have to deliberately forward garbage for this to work, how many Pine (or Mutt, or Pmail, or...) users deliberately forward garbage? I certainly don't. That's a big part of why people choose these clients - to filter out the garbage.
My experience: On Mandrake 7 KDE is noticeably more stable in default configuration (Gnome was running with E for a memory manager, which is certainly at least part of the reason.) On Slackware 7.1, with Gnome running with Sawfish, it seems about equally stable to KDE. Changing window manager to WindowMaker helps stability a bit and gives it the edge, though not by much.
That said, both have stability problems. Not on the scale of Win 9x by any means, but not much better than NT... the only real advantage stability wise is that problems can only dump you back to the command line, not actually reboot the machine. Which I think is a pretty big advantage really, but I know a lot of people that disagree. Don't ask me why.
Disclaimer: These experiences are with earlier version of both Gnome and KDE. Hopefully both have gotten better, but I work through a modem at home and can't just reflexively update every time a program revs - particularly extremely large programs like these.
Speaking of stability, has anyone seen this situation: you're using Mandrake
6.1 through 7.2, you install packages or edit menus in either KDE or Gnome
(using kpackage as the front-end in both cases) and when the package has
been installed, all of the sudden your customized system menu has been
replaced by the default Mandrake menu. This doesn't happen all the time, but
just often enough that I have to keep backups of my menu setup. Anyone
else see this?
Sorry, never happened to me. Just a wild guess, but are you running X as root?
One thing that turns me off about helix/ximian is the lack of packages in standard tar.gz formats - what's up with that? Seems very unprofessional of them.
Excellent timing on the article, as I am getting ready to switch ISPs and was considering these guys. While it's great to know they use a real OS internally, that doesn't necessarily mean they are friendly to customers doing the same (Roadrunner certainly is not, for instance, proclaiming that using Linux is grounds for terminating a customer account according to one would-be customer of theirs I spoke with recently.)
Anyone have any experience using their service with *nix? I know that it's pretty easy to simply do it on your own, without letting the provider know, but I also really don't like doing that, I don't like supporting a provider that even tries to require their customers pay the MS tax.
I've read through their online information and seen nothing sinister, but I'm very interested in hearing from anyone that's using them now, or that was using them recently.
Yes, I have been following it. The first thing I did was read Tucows' open
letter at bsd.tucows.com. The impression I got was that there were *many*
people complaining to Tucows. That impression is based off've quotes like
this:
Ahh... well, I've been following it for a bit longer than that, which is why reading their statement gave me the impression that they were just making stuff up to try and save face. To be fair, neither of us really knows all the sum of the feedback they have received. I know I wrote them very politely about some of their more glaring errors, and was ignored, and I know others who have done the same. That, and the timing of their announcement, almost immediately following the public criticism, gives me a definate impression of what happened, but I'll admit it's no more than an educated guess. Still, it seems to me extremely unwarranted to assume that the BSDers are at fault here, or to give the statement from tucows any credibility - when all the evidence I have points in the other direction.
Claiming BSD is GPL'd is a pretty blatant mistake to you and me. It should
have been to Tucows and their writers/etc, but it wasn't. I don't believe they
deserved the flames I'm sure they got, though - and I *know* they got
more than the flames from BSD Today or Daemon News.
How do you know that?
I'm not saying they did or they didn't, I don't know, but I find it hard to believe any "faction" of the BSD community would write in to tell them it was really GPL, as their posting implies. At most, perhaps some prankster did, but honestly, if they weren't capable of (and motivated to) spend perhaps 2 minutes to verify the licensing themselves, they had no business trying to run a BSD site to begin with, IMHOP. And this was far from their only error, the article from bsdtoday lists several more that would be apparent to anyone that had bothered to read the FAQs before pronouncing themselves an authority.
If in fact people were pointing out the incorrect information to Tucows and
they chose not to fix it... well, that's their deal. They can choose to shut the
site down, which is probably best if they don't have any knowledgable people
or at least any people who care.
Forgive my clubieness on this topic, but are any other distros organized as
NPOs? Is this an innovation?
Debian is and has always been non-profit, so it's not a new idea, but most (all?) other linux distribution producers are organized as for-profit enterprises.
Cause you don't sound like you have a clue what you're talking about. The advocacy how-to is a great resource, but not relevant here. There was no "insane zealotry" involved, at least not from bsdtoday or daemonnews - one might argue that the tucows/bsd staff was involved in some "insane zealotry" in favor of windows and linux I suppose.
Tucows hired writers who hadn't the slightest clue about anything BSD to write that section, and those writers couldn't even be bothered to do the slightest research before they blathered off their inane and misinformed views, or even to correct their factual errors when readers tried to politely correct them. After awhile a couple of real BSD writers corrected them publically, and tucows responded by closing the section down, leaving the nonsense letter that's up currently, which has no more connection to reality than their consistent statements previously claiming that BSD was GPLd.
Very well reasoned and argued, as one would expect given the source.
Perhaps the most important quote:
2. Among academics and programmers, communicating in computer code (in addition to or in lieu of a natural language) is essential "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...", the core purpose of copyright. U.S. CONST., art. I, 8 (Copyright Clause). Minimizing First Amendment protections given to code would deter, not promote, the progress of science.
That point cannot be made often enough. What the MPAA wants to do is use copyright in a way completely antithetical to the reason copyrights were granted to begin with.
No, it's not GPL, it is BSD, which license allows them to do this. They didn't reimpliment anything, they ported it from BSD, along with a significant portion of NT. Not enough, obviously, but the point is it's perfectly legal because the BSD license allows it. This is why people that don't want MS getting rich off their work use the GPL instead.
The questioner completely glosses over this, as if he thinks they are the same. They are not. The BSD license allows you to rip their code for any purpose whatsoever. OpenSSH is under the BSD license, not the GPL, so that answers the question.
Which doesn't mean you should do what you are talking about, only that you can.
Of course the answer is no, and the previous poster already pointed out why. But consider also that if you *could* do this, you would simply be wasting half the processor. The whole point to crusoe is x86 compatibility. If all you want is the low power consumption, that's what the ARM processors are all about, and they're quite available. Check out the NetWinders at rebel.com.
"We want users to be able to run applications without even knowing it," says the company's vice president of interface technologies, Kai-Fu Lee
You think after the rash of virii this sort of thinking has already spawned, they might rethink it? Not a chance. Just wait for the next level.
Link - The original upstart -Bruce Perens
on
HP And Bruce Perens
·
· Score: 2
LinuxWorld does a profile and interview with BP: "Filmmaker, Linux hacker, and ham radio geek, Bruce Perens is one of the quirkiest figures in the open source and free software communities. He's as famous for resigning from high-profile projects in high dudgeon as he is for founding them. He helped to set up Software in the Public Interest, the Linux Standard Base, and the Open Source Initiative -- and he has left them all. This is his side of those stories -- and a few more." A rather good interview in that they get ESR and RMS to clarify some points made and some titbits about the OSI debacle etc are thrown up in the air.
It seems we mean different things by "stable kernel API." Normally when this comes up, the reference is not to changing the external (POSIX) API but the internal API - this has been an issue with proprietary device drivers for years. The specifications for how kernel modules interact has changed, and Linus has made it clear it can change again at any time. A recompile of the modules, linked against the new kernel source, normally works in this case.
Also, remember that recompiling is something hackers, not users, do - even in free software.
I won't grant that this is necessarily true - I am hardly a hacker, but I compile things fairly often. With configure and make this is hardly a challenging task, unless there is something wrong with the source distribution.
It's dangerous to make too much of that dichotomy - hackers are users too, albeit a particular type of users, just like DTP and Graphic Designers are types of users.
However, it is true that most people install binaries, but the availability of binaries is a direct function of compilation. With a closed source driver, only one organisation has the source and thus only they can do a recompile and make the updated binary available. This is often a major bottleneck. In the world of Free Software, everyone has or can get the source, and therefore many people can and do compile the same program and make packages available - often linked against different libraries, with different compilation options. This is as it should be, and maximises the availability and choice, and minimises the turn-around time when an update must be made, for all users - even the ones that don't compile, for whatever reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not downing the Hurd, it's a very interesting project with a lot of promise.
Just a small note though - your stable kernel API is not necessarily an advantage. Linus doesn't want that for good reasons.
A stable kernel API means a commitment to backward binary compatibility. Which, over time, means an accumulation of all kinds of cruft (look at the latest iteration of Windows9x for plenty of examples.) It can severely limit developer options. Sometimes changing the API is the right thing to do. And the only advantage one would get out of this is binary compatibility - with any Free (or even merely Open) program, a simple recompile against the updated kernel source works. The drawbacks in this case clearly outweigh the rather dubious benefits.
I'm not a Hurd hacker, just an interested party that follows the information released on it, but I don't remember seeing this claim that the HURD will maintain a stable kernel API anywhere. Lacking any official word to the contrary, I would tend to expect that their position is the same as Linus on this - I would certainly be shocked if the FSF's own kernel project were willing to go make any significant technical sacrifice simply to maintain binary compatibility with some yet-to-be written commercial program that isn't even Open Source.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not "the richest 1%" it's "the top 1% of wage-earners." There is a big difference.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Maybe, maybe not. There is actually a considerable body of evidence that it was not properly ratified. If you are interested here is a place to start.
There are also a couple of completely separate arguments for the same conclusion - if you are interested I am sure you are capable of doing your own research.
At any rate, the income tax originally took a tiny percentage of the top couple of percent of wage-earners income - and of course the politicians that came up with it swore it would never get bigger. Yeah, right. Anyhow...
Rather quickly, I imagine... I wonder if someone has posted that they own all your italian bases yet?
But seriously, if topic is x, and x leads to y, and y leads to z, is z off-topic? Of course not. This is a discussion site isn't it?
Your english is fine, at least in this post - remembering that most native speakers are atrocious at it these days. I believe you misused the colon (":") - should have been a semicolon (";") but that's one most natives seem to get wrong so don't feel too bad...
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Como se "zitto" y "stronzo" en ingles?
That's spanish, not italian, but I've been told they are close enough that an italian will generally understand at least the simpler stuff... in case I was told wrong I was asking what "zitto, stronzo" means...
Sardinia in the spring... beautiful no? Enjoy it...
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
While you make a good point, it's just... wrong to use the word rich as you are using it, and the fact the media uses it that way is not an excuse. True rich people don't pay taxes, to any significant degree. They have accountants and lawyers and investments and lots of write-offs and loopholes - they aren't people that work for a good salary, they are people that have so much money IT supports them.
The people that pay the most taxes, and thus the ones that benefit most from tax cuts, are not rich people - they are upper middle-class people that work for a living at well above average wages. They are usually professionals that have worked their way to the top of their field, senior database analysts, network admins, engineers, etc. Lumping them together with people that never need to work, that make far more money than they are likely to ever even see, simply by sitting on their arse and letting their money work for them, is bizaare and I dare say absurd.
Sure, a guy that makes say, 100-160k/year is better off than the guy flipping burgers - but he's a world away from folks like Buffet, Turner, Gates or Bush. And he's the one shouldering the tax burden - not them.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
A number of errors here. Microsoft certainly triggered no such revolution - it rode a wave that was well underway, and excelled at profiting from it. At most, one might argue that they accelerated a revolution that would have happened no matter what. Microsoft certainly did not in any way "spawn... Free Software" - the GNU project started when MS was still a very small player, providing an early and primitive version of dos for IBM, along with their basic engine and the like. Free Software was a reaction, yes, but to the actions of the likes of SUN and DEC, not MS.
While I think I agree with the overall point of your article (certainly I agree that "One of the problems is that our media has become a mob, lurching one way, then the other. Perspective and clarity is hard to come by." and that Jacksons decision has some flaws...) I really can't imagine that you would want to spread such misinformation as this.
As to the judgement, a deeper issue that you don't mention is that antitrust law itself is a tangled mess of subjective criteria to begin with. Monopoly is a concept solid enough to be fairly useful in economics, but not quite solid enough to be objectively definable in law. A monopoly is a single supplier in a given market. In order to determine whether or not MS "is" a monopoly, one must define the relevant market. Personal computer software? Not a monopoly. Desktop x86 computer software? Not a monopoly. MS-Windows compatible software? There they are a monopoly, and given the share of the total personal computer market that represents, that makes them a juggernaught, for sure, but there are some definate reasons to find such a narrow definition of the market for legal purposes quite troubling - it nearly makes them a monopoly by definition. By that criteria, Apple must be a monopolist (just a monopolist in a smaller market) and so is SUN, and hell, Symantec has a monopoly on Norton Utilities, right?
So I've watched this whole story with very mixed feelings. Microsoft has a tremendous market clout which they've used in VERY questionable ways. They do stifle innovation, they do harm consumers, and it's tempting to view anything that strips them of a little part of their all too great and all too often abused power as a good thing. But antitrust law is just as scary and abusable.
At any rate, a thought provoking article. Please do correct the factual errors before publishing an article like this in the future though - it's bad enough that an army of MS Marketdroids are out there misinforming people about the history of computing - the last thing that should happen is people like you helping them.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
For those that can't be bothered to read the articles, at least check out the pics. This could be really huge. The arguments will surely go on until more blatant evidence comes out, but this looks pretty solid - magnetotactic bacteria leave pretty distinctive, if small and fragile, artifacts, and the stuff buried in these rocks sure look like it.
The NASA guys have been studying the artifacts since 1996, and they are now convinced enough to put their reputation on the line. These aren't people to do that lightly.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
For a quick antidote to that happiness overdose, read the EULA.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Which, for various reasons, are unavailable, not favoured or simply not acceptable to many of the best and brightest, and many of the rest of us as well.
Obligatory flames from VB victims aside, anyone that can code well, can code well under linux. It's a programmers system from the ground up, that's its strength, and its weakness.
The success of a platform like this will directly depend on the the manufacturer getting them into the hands of the right hackers ASAP.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Sure it will be. But then again, how many applications are you really going to want on such a device?
The storage limitation is part and parcel for that sort of hardware - and it's the same issue no matter what OS you use.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
Hmm you should have read the legalese before posting on it. They defined "invention" for the purposes of the contract, rather incredibly broadly, and it did indeed cover those things.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
I agree with you this is a bug not a feature, however, if you were not prepared to offer a non-buggy way to make the users who expect this happy, that might legitimately have earned you such an epithet.
Face it, the typical e-mail user these days does expect some formatting capabilities. There is a way to do this without diving into html-hell. See this. The Text/Enriched MIME format was designed to provide formatting capabilities that many users desire without the never-ending problems entailed by using HTML out of place. The makers of Pegasus Mail have taken a very usable approach to satisfy users desires with the minimal messiness on the other end - HTML messages incoming can be parsed internally with a minimal module that only understand the most commonly used and innocous tags, handed off to an external browser for parsing, or simply stripped to text. Formatted messages are normally sent using Text/Enriched, RTF is also available as an option (very useful if you know the recipient to be on a windows box.) So the pmail users can receive these annoying things and read them fine, but when they forward/reply they don't perpetuate the madness.
Hrmm... no. He'd have to deliberately forward garbage for this to work, how many Pine (or Mutt, or Pmail, or...) users deliberately forward garbage? I certainly don't. That's a big part of why people choose these clients - to filter out the garbage.
The few features of HTML which are actually useful in email are properly used by selecting the Text/Enriched MIME format, see RFC1896.
Some mail gateways discard HTML before forwarding messages - more of them should.
My experience: On Mandrake 7 KDE is noticeably more stable in default configuration (Gnome was running with E for a memory manager, which is certainly at least part of the reason.) On Slackware 7.1, with Gnome running with Sawfish, it seems about equally stable to KDE. Changing window manager to WindowMaker helps stability a bit and gives it the edge, though not by much.
That said, both have stability problems. Not on the scale of Win 9x by any means, but not much better than NT... the only real advantage stability wise is that problems can only dump you back to the command line, not actually reboot the machine. Which I think is a pretty big advantage really, but I know a lot of people that disagree. Don't ask me why.
Disclaimer: These experiences are with earlier version of both Gnome and KDE. Hopefully both have gotten better, but I work through a modem at home and can't just reflexively update every time a program revs - particularly extremely large programs like these.
Sorry, never happened to me. Just a wild guess, but are you running X as root?
One thing that turns me off about helix/ximian is the lack of packages in standard tar.gz formats - what's up with that? Seems very unprofessional of them.
Excellent timing on the article, as I am getting ready to switch ISPs and was considering these guys. While it's great to know they use a real OS internally, that doesn't necessarily mean they are friendly to customers doing the same (Roadrunner certainly is not, for instance, proclaiming that using Linux is grounds for terminating a customer account according to one would-be customer of theirs I spoke with recently.)
Anyone have any experience using their service with *nix? I know that it's pretty easy to simply do it on your own, without letting the provider know, but I also really don't like doing that, I don't like supporting a provider that even tries to require their customers pay the MS tax.
I've read through their online information and seen nothing sinister, but I'm very interested in hearing from anyone that's using them now, or that was using them recently.
Ahh... well, I've been following it for a bit longer than that, which is why reading their statement gave me the impression that they were just making stuff up to try and save face. To be fair, neither of us really knows all the sum of the feedback they have received. I know I wrote them very politely about some of their more glaring errors, and was ignored, and I know others who have done the same. That, and the timing of their announcement, almost immediately following the public criticism, gives me a definate impression of what happened, but I'll admit it's no more than an educated guess. Still, it seems to me extremely unwarranted to assume that the BSDers are at fault here, or to give the statement from tucows any credibility - when all the evidence I have points in the other direction.
How do you know that?
I'm not saying they did or they didn't, I don't know, but I find it hard to believe any "faction" of the BSD community would write in to tell them it was really GPL, as their posting implies. At most, perhaps some prankster did, but honestly, if they weren't capable of (and motivated to) spend perhaps 2 minutes to verify the licensing themselves, they had no business trying to run a BSD site to begin with, IMHOP. And this was far from their only error, the article from bsdtoday lists several more that would be apparent to anyone that had bothered to read the FAQs before pronouncing themselves an authority.
Exactly.
Debian is and has always been non-profit, so it's not a new idea, but most (all?) other linux distribution producers are organized as for-profit enterprises.
Cause you don't sound like you have a clue what you're talking about. The advocacy how-to is a great resource, but not relevant here. There was no "insane zealotry" involved, at least not from bsdtoday or daemonnews - one might argue that the tucows/bsd staff was involved in some "insane zealotry" in favor of windows and linux I suppose.
Tucows hired writers who hadn't the slightest clue about anything BSD to write that section, and those writers couldn't even be bothered to do the slightest research before they blathered off their inane and misinformed views, or even to correct their factual errors when readers tried to politely correct them. After awhile a couple of real BSD writers corrected them publically, and tucows responded by closing the section down, leaving the nonsense letter that's up currently, which has no more connection to reality than their consistent statements previously claiming that BSD was GPLd.
Very well reasoned and argued, as one would expect given the source.
Perhaps the most important quote:
That point cannot be made often enough. What the MPAA wants to do is use copyright in a way completely antithetical to the reason copyrights were granted to begin with.
No, it's not GPL, it is BSD, which license allows them to do this. They didn't reimpliment anything, they ported it from BSD, along with a significant portion of NT. Not enough, obviously, but the point is it's perfectly legal because the BSD license allows it. This is why people that don't want MS getting rich off their work use the GPL instead.
The questioner completely glosses over this, as if he thinks they are the same. They are not. The BSD license allows you to rip their code for any purpose whatsoever. OpenSSH is under the BSD license, not the GPL, so that answers the question.
Which doesn't mean you should do what you are talking about, only that you can.
Of course the answer is no, and the previous poster already pointed out why. But consider also that if you *could* do this, you would simply be wasting half the processor. The whole point to crusoe is x86 compatibility. If all you want is the low power consumption, that's what the ARM processors are all about, and they're quite available. Check out the NetWinders at rebel.com.
You think after the rash of virii this sort of thinking has already spawned, they might rethink it? Not a chance. Just wait for the next level.
The Original Upstart is a great piece, highly recommended reading.
It seems we mean different things by "stable kernel API." Normally when this comes up, the reference is not to changing the external (POSIX) API but the internal API - this has been an issue with proprietary device drivers for years. The specifications for how kernel modules interact has changed, and Linus has made it clear it can change again at any time. A recompile of the modules, linked against the new kernel source, normally works in this case.
I won't grant that this is necessarily true - I am hardly a hacker, but I compile things fairly often. With configure and make this is hardly a challenging task, unless there is something wrong with the source distribution.
It's dangerous to make too much of that dichotomy - hackers are users too, albeit a particular type of users, just like DTP and Graphic Designers are types of users.
However, it is true that most people install binaries, but the availability of binaries is a direct function of compilation. With a closed source driver, only one organisation has the source and thus only they can do a recompile and make the updated binary available. This is often a major bottleneck. In the world of Free Software, everyone has or can get the source, and therefore many people can and do compile the same program and make packages available - often linked against different libraries, with different compilation options. This is as it should be, and maximises the availability and choice, and minimises the turn-around time when an update must be made, for all users - even the ones that don't compile, for whatever reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not downing the Hurd, it's a very interesting project with a lot of promise.
Just a small note though - your stable kernel API is not necessarily an advantage. Linus doesn't want that for good reasons.
A stable kernel API means a commitment to backward binary compatibility. Which, over time, means an accumulation of all kinds of cruft (look at the latest iteration of Windows9x for plenty of examples.) It can severely limit developer options. Sometimes changing the API is the right thing to do. And the only advantage one would get out of this is binary compatibility - with any Free (or even merely Open) program, a simple recompile against the updated kernel source works. The drawbacks in this case clearly outweigh the rather dubious benefits.
I'm not a Hurd hacker, just an interested party that follows the information released on it, but I don't remember seeing this claim that the HURD will maintain a stable kernel API anywhere. Lacking any official word to the contrary, I would tend to expect that their position is the same as Linus on this - I would certainly be shocked if the FSF's own kernel project were willing to go make any significant technical sacrifice simply to maintain binary compatibility with some yet-to-be written commercial program that isn't even Open Source.