There are many issues with the grub boot loader and it is well documented. It is actually quite easy to mess up your system and make it appear to be bricked.
The most common version of this issue has to do with when a new kernel update occurs during a NORMAL ubuntu update. You click the orange star, choose update, let it download and install, then reboot and voila...no more access to any hard drive. It happens to my machine every single time.
I have to get out my liveCD boot with it, mount the main HDD partition, go into the/boot/grub and edit the menu.lst to change everything back.
If you have customized your menu.lst you will also have problems the next time a kernel update happens as the update will wipe out your customization, so if you have modified the menu.lst file to make change the order in which the menu displays your choices and which os is the default, that will be wiped out and you could loose access to one or more of your partitions (hence OSes). I have see this repeatedly, and in the latest situation I have had to turn off all updates so it didn't brick this retired gentleman's system.
On my system it changes the hard drive number and I have to either boot with the livecd or remember to modify the menu.lst before I reboot the computer. Total pain.
Now I'm not supporting the idea that the installer bricked his unit. It didn't. I'm saying that making this sort of error and letting it stand for years without being addressed and then tossing it back into the face of the user (who just might be a retired friend who knows little about computers) is not the way to go about marking your product.
Been using Ubuntu for a couple years now. It is my main desktop. I have come to enjoy and rely on it for everything I do. It has proven itself capable, flexible, customizable, and more over more competent and secure than anything Windows has offered, ever.
That aside, I have to warn against the herring. This is not a hardy product. It has lots of failures most particularly during the set up. It is a step backwards on many laptops. Functionality that once was no longer is.
Even if Canonical mistepped they could always recover, but on many laptop models (not all, but many of the most popular of the past 2-3 years) the product has gone down hill. Laptop owners asked for wifi, for compiz, for solid sound, etc. What we got with Hardy is failed wifi, compiz that once worked but no longer does in this release, and sound that is just as messed up as it was 2 years ago. One could pass this off as a misstep and move forward looking to the time when these issues would be addressed. Unfortunately, as I said, some 2 years ago the sound issues were reported but there's been no resolution. Sound on some of these 2-3 year old laptops works inconsistently if at all. The once working compiz in 7.10 was wonderful, only today it doesn't work at all. Wifi has never worked properly and when it did it only took some random update for ubuntu to make it cease working. On top of that having some of the restricted drivers installed caused it to screw up the sound and networking (wired).
My point here is that it is going down hill on laptops, not up hill. It isn't improving. One of the most oft requested focus items at the brainstorm.ubuntu.com is to have sound and wifi working. No luck here. The forums are replete with repetitive misinformation that leads users down the wrong street and wastes tons of their hours. When it is determined to be a Canonical screw up there's never a word from them about it.
One example of the sound issue is this. On some of these laptops if you use the alsa driver and then you log in you may get sound (if you entered the username and password yourself). If you change the login to be auto login then you may hear the start up sound but you hear nothing else after that. If you attempt to play some sound the cpu will go into 100% utilization, even if you kill the app that was playing the sound. If you switch it back from auto login to manual log in the problem disappears, except there are still issues with alsa messing up. If you switch to OSS you have other issues. Pulse Audio is totally out of the question.
With the share of laptops vs. desktops growing at a fast pace, how does stepping backwards on functionality for laptops make anyone happy?
The set up essentially killed one of my installs. After doing an upgrade the sound didn't work, the mouse didn't work, compiz didn't work. Nearly nothing worked on a previously working system. I wiped and reinstalled only to find that wifi still didn't work, compiz which did work worked no longer, and sound was totally haphazard.
These are important pieces of functionality especially when addressing the needs of the average Joe adjusting to Linux from Windows. You can't toss this back into the face of the users and tell them to fix it themselves or for them to rely on the community of people that tend to toss up FAQs instead of investigating the issue for exceptions to the FAQ that result in the same issues. I can only imagine the sheer number of frustrated people and the lost hours of people following a FAQ instead of getting real help for their issue. All of this goes into destroying the reputation of the OS and the distro implementation. People don't want to struggle/to fight with these problems. They want to use the computer for its intended purpose--the programs, their data, and their communication.
I'm saying only that Ubuntu 8.04 is in many ways a step backwards and since it is going to be a LTS that much of this should have been addressed long before the release. We're going to have to live with every company that relies on LTS status to just live with it the way it is until the next LTS comes out.
Because it was an illegal act. If a civilian in the US were to attack our government troops it would be an illegal act. Granted it wouldn't be considered terrorism. But when other terrorist organizations that have attacked civilians to affect politics and then that same organization attacks the military of another nation then it is terrorism. Also, consider that these were not attacks of one government on another which was supported by the people. This was an illegal attack by a known terrorist organization that attacked and murdered civilians in the past.
They must have thought we stopped looking. I mean come on. We all saw it happen. It was pathetic. They destroyed any belief in their process. No one in their right mind would now look at them as having any relevance; and every standard will now be questioned. Their ethics are shot.
They want a cease fire because they are getting huge bad press and this is jeopardizing their ability to remain as any sort of functional organization. I almost sense a panic coming from them. What I don't understand is that it was obvious that we were watching and they went ahead with it anyway.
OOXML is not a standard. It is platform specific due to elements of the specification. That makes it somewhat less than open and therefore can't be considered an ISO standard. That alone should have ruled it out in everyone's mind and forced a 'no' vote.
The little boys in Redmond (Ballmer no exception regardless of his girth) have always been a bit delusional. If 90% of a market is held by one company in one market and that is anti-competitive then 90% of a market held by one company in the OS market is obviously anti-competitive.
The Redmond boys need to stick to copying software ideas and stay out of the big boy markets where they obviously are limited in mental maturity.
You seem to misinterpret who the victim is. The victim is not the ISO. They are culpable before and after the fact. The victim is everyone else. Those that will be adopting the standard without knowing how the process was corrupted. Those that purchase those products for home and school to teach the next generation of minds--that don't know that the process was corrupted. The ISO members and the corruption of the process worked together with Microsoft.
For the next 10-20 years we are going to have this crap as a standard and it will only make it easier to for Microsoft to get more crap adopted. These are locking mechanisms to keep people on Microsoft's products. There is no other reason for such a deceitful battle to have taken place had it been for the benefit of the public and the openness necessary for all. We know that OOXML's alleged openness is a lie.
One way or the other this was going to pass. If it is just enlightening to see that they did pushed at it so hard so fast that it became obvious to anyone paying attention to the battle that someone was cheating and manipulating the process.
Those that managed the process are very responsible for what happened here as they allowed unusual rules to be adopted and these rules were designed to get the specification passed. Though there are other closed standards (what an oxymoron) most people involved in debating this issue should have become well enough educated at Microsoft's tactics to know that something was going on and that this was very wrong. If this had just been some specification for a technology that wasn't so tightly integrated into a criminal monopolist's products then we could accept some irregularities (though I would feel even those are unacceptable). This one certianly takes the cake because those that managed this process managed to allow it to become corrupted.
I hope enough outrage occurs that the process is examined and that some serious adjustments are to take place to correct the criminal behavior. No, this isn't Italy where they actually allow you to bribe someone. This is an international standards body.
I hope someone takes the time to follow the money on this. It would be cool to have that all exposed and traced back. And there is always a money trail.
The ODF process of adoption wasn't corrupted and there were no irregularities in getting it approved. That's the difference here. The deck wasn't stacked. People weren't paid off. When the majority of the member nation's voting body says to vote "no" and yet the vote for that nation is "yes" then something is wrong, seriously wrong, and it isn't just in that country. One would have to follow what happened in each country. This would have to take place quickly to supplant any view that this is really a standard now.
I worked at Siemens for some time and the plant that manufactured Digital Mevatrons (used in the treatment of cancer), was shut down by the FDA because of a lack of process certification. It took them a year or more to bring it back up to standards and the ISO certification was extremely important in that decision. I would advise against any thinking that ISO certification wasn't important and didn't matter to big business and government contracts.
More than not, this is about locking people into Microsoft's technologies. We all know that people want to use Word because most documents are stored in word format and there's a need to interchange, even if there are other very viable competing products. Let's get our heads on straight and understand that this is incredibly important because it allows Microsoft to lock everyone into their monopoly products for the next 10-20 years.
There's no such thing as a standard owned/created by Microsoft. That is an oxymoron. It is also a locking technology. We don't want nor need anything having to do with locking technologies. What's a locking technology? It is a technology used to lock you into Microsoft products. Once you rely on the locking technology it is impossible to use anything else or escape the Windows OS trap. Bad things come from a monopoly, especially one convicted of criminal anti-competitive predatory practices, that have control of standards. Their technologies should be options, not standards. By virtue of being a monopoly they should not be allowed to control standards as a standards control is a way to prop up a monopoly, which is also illegal.
Isn't that just amazing. Some of the best gems are often found in the rough. A genius working to make a living solves a problem that will help all humanity in some way. Good for him.
KDE 4.0 has some fundamental problems. They tried to somewhat mimic the Vista start menu and essentially failed. They were trying to shoot the prairie dog and killed the horse by mistake. IMHO they created an ugly weak and problematic menu.
Other things are that KDE 4.0 was released early so that developers could work on it to help resolve issues and create new features. In the end, as far as end users are concerned tho, if they chose to use it as an early adopter they will have to put up with some extremely messy looking features.
I've looked at it and after some time dropped it. It was messy as hell and had some real organizational issues. Even the icons on the desktop are kludgy. They can easily get disorganized and spread around thus creating a messy desktop. They are extremely buggy and the desktop itself can be inadvertently moved off center of the screen with no hopes of moving it back, unless you restart KDM.
Conceptually, it is a good first start, but I'd say it is about a year out before it becomes anything really useful to the average person. This makes it an obvious choice for limited support.
KDE needs serious work, but it is the future of their desktop. It is a good first try, though buggy as all hell.
Yes, that's a very big misunderstanding due to poorly worded post. They are saying this.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu is free and will ALWAYS remain free.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu will always provide community support, free of charge.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu will provide paid support if you wish to go that route. Paid support is provided by trained technicians from Canonical, whereas the free support is provided by the community.
KDE 3.5x is the official Kubuntu product.
KDE 4.x is the new version of KDE and thus has not been fleshed out.
There is paid support for KDE 4.x, but it is limited due to the fact that it hasn't been fleshed out.
There is no cut down to size version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu and there is no branching that forces you to accept something less unless you are willing to pay extra.
The only difference is that KDE 4.x is not accepted by the Kubuntu folks as being stable and feature complete to include it in the official 8.04 release of Kubuntu. If you wish you can install it but you probably will have problems and if so you can pay for support. Otherwise, you are supposed to rely on community support.
WUBI won't interfere with your windows partition. You can get rid of it by simply deleting your c:\wubi folder or by going into your add/remove programs and uninstalling it. You can also run the installer provided by WUBI. If you choose to just delete the folder you will still have to contend with the boot menu item. You can delete that by modifying the c:\boot.ini file.
WUBI is an optional way to install Linux. The 8.04 ISO image is designed to be booted and run as a live CD where you choose the install icon off the gnome desktop. Just like the old way.
The WUBI way, the reason for the wubi.exe in the root of the CD, is so you can put it into your CD/DVD drive and have it autoplay or just launch it. That way you don't have to search for it to test the installer.
I have WUBI installs on multiple machines. It runs just fine. I have performed various upgrades to it over time without issue. It is running as its own OS and not as some emulation or virtual machine. It runs very well and it can take advantage of your full Windows partition. In fact, when you get WUBI successfully installed it will mount your Windows paritition with NTFS-3G, showing it as the HOST drive. You can read/write to it just like you would any NTFS partition under Windows.
I have Linux running on multiple laptops thanks to WUBI. I could have done a dedicated partition but I liked the idea of working with it in this fashion to help the developers. I also have many computers that run Linux dedicated and a few machines that run Windows dedicated.
My only word of advice to perspective WUBI users is to give the WUBI install size the largest you can so you don't run out of room. The reason is you'll get very addicted to Linux and Ubuntu and want to try more things out and it doesn't pay to not have enough room, so choosing a small amount of space to test with is not sufficient.
Linux is used world wide and there are estimates of 50 million users world-wide. Whole governments are using it on the desktop. Linux performs well and is very stable and secure. It does 99% of what 90% of us want to do with it. There are even retail games that have Linux clients. Linux has more in-kernel support for drivers than any other kernel in OS history.
I don't know about the weaknesses of things like wireless support under 8.04. I do know they must be improved to capture more of the market. Hopefully that has happened. I also don't know the state of sound for laptops, as it has been a rather weak point for Ubuntu these past couple years, especially on the HP platform where HPs most commonly sold models didn't have adequate sound support (or it was too buggy and too confusing to resolve).
I will say that there has been a down hill slide in the #ubuntu IRC as the participants are far to quick to spam the guides without reading the actual appeals for help.
Other than that, I think some of the attempts they made with the graphical auto adjustment have failed miserably and I don't expect that they have resolved the issue this time around either. I would like to see this fool proof. Unfortunately, also there are many other issues that I think won't get the resolutions they need because there are some issues with someone setting the priorities. For instance, laptop wireless and sound are important, and so is mounting of secondary and other volumes. Too much manual work has to be done just to add a second, third, forth, HDD. Adding those and plugging in USB and other removable media can result in some extremely unexpected results. Even though this has been reported no effort is being made to resolve them, or so it seems. Further, updates to the OS via the online updates can completely wipe out a custom/boot/grub/menu.conf customization. This is pretty bad and it is a serious bug, yet there seems to be no attention going to that either.
Comcast may think they have the right to do what they are doing but this is all bad publicity. That though is the normalized side of things. They'll loose lots of business.
What Comcast may not be understanding is that shitting on the FCC now means the FCC will shit on them later. Guaranteed. Comcast is burning bridges.
They need to disassociate their activities completely with any blocking and open the network and become neutral. What the FCC will probably do is give everyone the right to sue Comcast over what the consumer does on line. Essentially they are removing their own neutrality.
Comcast is far to simplistic in their thinking and dangerous in their actions.
Untrue. I lived the era. WP started as a group of guys writing an editor on larger computers, like a lot of software engineers did.
I've read more books on the industry that the author of that book and many others combined. And I read them during the time this was happening. I'll take my experience and education over some dork who thought he might make money on an inaccurate book.
DDE tho seemingly useful in the day really turns out to be nothing. It was hard to implement DDE perfectly. I remember thinking that there were a lot of technologies that were going to go nowhere and that a lot of companies such as Lotus Development and Word Perfect were going to go the way of the DoDo if they didn't realize this. People were interested in simple solutions with lots of features while Microsoft was driving the trade journals using their advertising dollar to get the reviewers to demand every false feature they could think of. They knew that if they announced features designed by other software vendors they could stifle sales of those products.
Word Perfect was a great DOS program and they provided every kind of support you can imagine for printing, fonts, etc. But I really never liked editing those codes, though it did make for a more perfect document if you managed to get the hang of it. I was an early adopter and used Wordstar then Word Perfect. I also used MS Word for DOS and found it to be buggy, cumbersome and very much breaking programming conventions that they were telling other vendors not to break. It was obvious they were breaking the programming conventions because as you used it in a multi-user environment it would try to write to the hardware and this was cause for a lot of grief. Little could be done except to not use it.
The reason they were bleeding cash was because it became obvious that they were tossing in misleading featuresets that were destined to go no where. So, companies such as Lotus and Word Perfect were spinning their wheels trying to implement this stuff.
When you think about the Pen Computing attack they were simply taking a look at other products features and then announcing they were going to implement this or that feature into windows. Since Windows was the OS and everyone would get it for free few companies had the incentive to compete. We could see the same thing in the browser market during the time that Microsoft was attempting to kill Netscape and when they were trying to destroy Java as a real alternative to platform specific coding. They simply announced this or that feature, the trade journals picked up on it, and the end result was dead in the water competition.
I used to read articles day in and day out as I read on average 30 trade journals a month back then. There was a lot in print. Reviews were on everything you could imagine. Where Microsoft couldn't compete they just told everyone that this or that market was a dead end and they wouldn't be supporting it, even if the market itself would have accepted that new product.
Now that we see the philosophy behind their maneuvers (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), it becomes clear that they were up to more than just competitive rivalry. They controlled the OS and dictated features, etc. Another thing was that there were near constant complaints about undocumented API features that Microsoft's people were taking advantage of that the market knew little about. This also cut seriously into their ability to develop stable efficient code. Not only did the Microsoft people have the Apple GUI programming experience (nothing wrong with that), not that they didn't buy the MS Word product (questionable as to whether they really are capable of producing something on their own), but their Office developers had access to early API coding for Windows and had the upper hand on any changes and hidden features (they probably had a hand in saying which features were to be hidden).
Today we have Microsoft threatening every feature in their book particularly against any competitor and most particularly against Linux with their unconfirmed, unverified, and unjustified accusations of 235 patent violations. If Microsoft had been held to that same standard back then there would have been few if any real products coming out of Microsoft. Imagine Lotus (or earlier products) demanding Microsoft pay royalties for certain features they stole.
Yeah, anything prior to OS X was pretty bad. I kept a neutral stance on OSes till the late 90s when I learned about all the nasty things Microsoft had been doing to manipulate the market and essentially steal from the average person. OS 6, 7, 8 were pretty bad but for their time they were awesome interfaces. One thing about those OS versions was that applications were rarer than in the Windows world so it would seem clear why you switched. I saw a mac in the early 80s and clearly cited that it was niche. When I saw the mac with OS X they had clearly left the niche market for the mainstream. OSX is nothing more than a beautiful interface (and tremendous ease of use) on top of Unix.
Ubuntu/kubuntu has always had a alternative.iso file that you can use to install so you don't have to boot to the live CD first. You can find it in the same location that you found the live cd type installs.
Linux is a solid competent and in many ways superior Operating System. 99% of what 90% of the people do can easily be handled by Linux and they wouldn't know the difference if they had never seen an OS before. Definitely there are issues with it, but there are issues with all OSes. One has to ask themselves: if my mother or father had never used an OS before and I set up linux for them (to do their mail, chat with friends, browse the web, order products on line, etc.) would they know any different or would they not be able to do these tasks? A rational human being would say that 99% of what they want to do in that respect they can do.
So, why would anyone say that Linux is not able or unstable? It is because they have a beef with it. They don't like having to learn something new. They are set in their way (can't teach old dogs new tricks). They are a zealot for what they are used to (keep in mind I'm not disrespecting zealots--there are those that love a certain kind of car, or a brand of TV, or a favorite dish, etc.) It is those that actively seek to harm the others that make for a bad zealot. No, I'm not talking about those that are zealots that trying to bring an honest choice out and to balance the choices by giving others a choice. I'm talking about the irrational attack on an OS just because it is different.
Linux is ready for the desktop. The Linux market share is much greater than you can imagine. When the world is using 90% Windows and the rest is divided up by the other OSes, even small percentages in growth lead to millions of users. So, I really wish people would stop reacting like Linux has no users. It is estimated that world wide, across all distributions there are approximately 50 million Linux users. This is no small number. So, stop trying to belittle it. There was a time when DOS didn't have 50 million users and there was a time when Windows didn't even come close to the number of users that Linux has.
I don't agree with anything he said other than to admit that using Linux is a stark contrast to the boring Windoze. Windows puts you to sleep. It isn't highly configurable and in many ways Windows was designed to limit you. The Windows registry is a nightmare and is highly manipulated by spyware/malware criminals. Their modifying the registry, modifying permissions of sections in the registry, and many other things having to do with obscure sections of the registry all help them to gain control and maintain control of the windows box.
If this guy had said that Linux was being used because primarily it was fun I would have agreed with him, but he's actually disrespecting Linux. He's attempting to thwart the efforts we all have made in getting others to look at the product by lying and saying that all those things we hold dear about Linux are lies.
One of the most important reasons I use Linux day in and day out is that I will be ensured that my privacy is not violated by Microsoft (or the US government) with programs such as WGA, WGN, DRM, and any potential back door set up to assist the government. In the Linux world thousands of eyes see that kernel and see all the code going into it. Not only that millions see it world wide, so not just one corporation highly protected by our government organizations has control.
Also, it is clear that Open Source is the way of the future. It essentially eliminates the hopes any one corporation (whether it is Microsoft or any other) to control our content, control our progress in computer science, and it helps to ensure that by creating prior art before the big corporations do (before they have a chance to extort the rest of the world of money better used to help raise our children, fund our schools, better our research after the education has taken place, get those innovations as a result of children's progress, our schools advancements, and our research, before the corporations lock them down) in order to raise the costs of things such as the cost of drugs, health care, etc.
Google is not and has never been a monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly and has been ruled a monopoly by the courts. This puts a burden on Microsoft to play by special rules. ALL monopolies must play by special rules.
Google and Doubleclick were not competitors of one another and that's what the EU ruled. Apparently most don't understand what Doubleclick does/did to make money. Yes, Google makes money on advertisement and they make money on their search service, only you don't see it. They license their search tools/services to other entities.
Even if Google and Doubleclick were competitors (which the ruling specifically stated they were not), they would not put such a burden on competitors as to destroy their competitiveness (which is also essentially what the ruling stated).
I see a lot of Microsoft in these posts. Some don't seem to be able to stand the fact that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and they don't understand what it means and why it came about. Microsoft has been great at obfuscating the issues they were/are involved in, even today. Again, you can't expect companies that are not monopolists, that were not ruled a monopoly, to play by exactly the same rules. Otherwise there'd be no rules imparted upon the monopoly. Monopolies can be beneficial to society but they almost never are. So, we see a lot of anti-monopoly company rhetoric and those that don't seem to like that are attacking a company that is not, and has never been ruled a monopoly.
Microsoft can't compete except by using it's monopolistic practices and when the Bush administration is gone you can expect a change and greater oversight and maybe even a spectacular battle to come. Other non-monopolies trying to compete that grow in other markets yet still wishing for a level playing field in those markets held by the monopolist, and gain enough power to fight back with their lobbying dollars. As Microsoft implodes, which it will do, has been doing, and will continue to do, it will have less money to bribe and manipulate.
Right now you should understand that you pay more for an inferior product that essentially has become a rehash of old but with a twisted violation on your privacy. They have made you and everyone else pay for and use a product that is so wrong in so many ways. You should be able to see this easily: Look at Vista and how they are going to dismantle XP in favor of Vista when it is clear that the majority feel Vista is inferior and has other factors such as privacy violations, spyware, Digital Restrictions Management, lock in technologies, etc.
You may think there is nothing wrong, but you won't face the fact that if a car company did this you'd be up in arms. Imagine you could no longer buy the car you wanted, you had to buy the car they put out and that you would no longer receive support (gas, maintenance, upgrades, parts) because the car company having the monopoly dictated it. You should be setting the stage as to what and how long that support should exist, not the car company and especially, not the ONLY car company. What would you do if they threatened to sue you because you fixed it yourself or you decided to look for another car company to do business with? You'd be livid. Understand this. Microsoft is telling you what you can do and how you can do it instead of them adjusting to the needs you have. Not only that, they are spying on you to ensure you do it their way and they report back when they think you are breaking their rules. Imagine if the same car company said you couldn't sell your car to someone else? Imagine if they said you couldn't use other parts from another company other than those they suggest. What if they took control of your car and refused to start because they sensed you had turned off the mechanism that allowed them to monitor your car? Again, you'd be livid.
So, this Google/Doubleclick dispute that you have here is literally one where a convicted monopolist has been doing that for a long time and wants to control other markets
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I know Microsoft's history and know their motivation to not release any development code. If this had any hope other than say prototyping something which in the end helps no one, then they'd have kept it for themselves.
Microsoft is an organization that is after profit from closed software. We can't get them to even release the API of DirectX, so why would they want to release this unless they had some other motivation.
Again, this has been chopped up by many in this thread showing that these concepts are not new though they may be newly implemented by Microsoft.
Considering their prior behavior and the obvious motivations one must constantly be vigalent against anything that could possibly taint. It is best to be safe than sorry when it comes to dealing with Microsoft.
Remember Microsoft is the company that states that Linux infringes 235 patents but refuses to say which ones and they do so in a way as to create FUD, which generally only affects business and developers. It is not a far stretch to say that they are simply using this as a way to muddy the waters to attempt to redefine what open source is so that they can take ownership of the term and redirect businesses focus onto their endeavors.
So, some crap kernel is released that demos some obvious but more modern concepts. The product wasn't going anywhere and won't help anyone. The concepts of kernel development were fleshed out years and years ago. This is no benefit as a product to Microsoft. There are other products that have failed or are no longer feasible so why release this? Why not release the other stuff as well.
People shouldn't care about this product. It is a dead end, as has been demonstrated by their own decision to release it. Yet, we must also acknowledge that is has hopes of being used for some other purpose and academia is not it, not fully and not truthfully..
So, unless you can say more than I have no idea what I'm talking about maybe you should self-reflect.
There are other true open kernels besides this one. The kernels of other OSes are available for people to learn from. How does Microsoft releasing an "opened" source code kernel impact the learning of the few thousands that could potentially learn from it? First, you have the kernels of the BEOS, BSD, Linux, etc. There are many other worthy kernels that others can learn from. Since this really isn't of much use other than to look at those involved in learning kernel programming would be better served by learning the kernel of Linux instead. As Linus T. said, the concepts of kernel development have been fleshed out 40+ years ago.
So one must ask the real motivation behind this. I suspect it is moreover an attempt to muddy the waters regarding long standing definitions to terms as a single battle in a greater war than it is a research project. Yes, it may have begun as a true research project internally in Microsoft, but later became a dead end and they decided to toss it out to taint and muddy.
But the good news is that we have supporters of the terms that have been in use for a long time and are well established. As well, no one except a company decidedly focused on killing "open source" (where they made public statements that they would kill open source) and is a convicted monopolist, has challenged that definition.
Those that created the concept get to define it. People can challenge it all they want but the OSI definition is really the only true definition. Come up with a definition of the term established before the OSI definition (which really has never been challenged in many years of use). I'd suspect there isn't one. To date theirs is the only definition and it really has not been challenged. Let's not perpetuate this logic that flies in the face of reason.
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There are many issues with the grub boot loader and it is well documented. It is actually quite easy to mess up your system and make it appear to be bricked.
/boot/grub and edit the menu.lst to change everything back.
The most common version of this issue has to do with when a new kernel update occurs during a NORMAL ubuntu update. You click the orange star, choose update, let it download and install, then reboot and voila...no more access to any hard drive. It happens to my machine every single time.
I have to get out my liveCD boot with it, mount the main HDD partition, go into the
If you have customized your menu.lst you will also have problems the next time a kernel update happens as the update will wipe out your customization, so if you have modified the menu.lst file to make change the order in which the menu displays your choices and which os is the default, that will be wiped out and you could loose access to one or more of your partitions (hence OSes). I have see this repeatedly, and in the latest situation I have had to turn off all updates so it didn't brick this retired gentleman's system.
On my system it changes the hard drive number and I have to either boot with the livecd or remember to modify the menu.lst before I reboot the computer. Total pain.
Now I'm not supporting the idea that the installer bricked his unit. It didn't. I'm saying that making this sort of error and letting it stand for years without being addressed and then tossing it back into the face of the user (who just might be a retired friend who knows little about computers) is not the way to go about marking your product.
Been using Ubuntu for a couple years now. It is my main desktop. I have come to enjoy and rely on it for everything I do. It has proven itself capable, flexible, customizable, and more over more competent and secure than anything Windows has offered, ever.
That aside, I have to warn against the herring. This is not a hardy product. It has lots of failures most particularly during the set up. It is a step backwards on many laptops. Functionality that once was no longer is.
Even if Canonical mistepped they could always recover, but on many laptop models (not all, but many of the most popular of the past 2-3 years) the product has gone down hill. Laptop owners asked for wifi, for compiz, for solid sound, etc. What we got with Hardy is failed wifi, compiz that once worked but no longer does in this release, and sound that is just as messed up as it was 2 years ago. One could pass this off as a misstep and move forward looking to the time when these issues would be addressed. Unfortunately, as I said, some 2 years ago the sound issues were reported but there's been no resolution. Sound on some of these 2-3 year old laptops works inconsistently if at all. The once working compiz in 7.10 was wonderful, only today it doesn't work at all. Wifi has never worked properly and when it did it only took some random update for ubuntu to make it cease working. On top of that having some of the restricted drivers installed caused it to screw up the sound and networking (wired).
My point here is that it is going down hill on laptops, not up hill. It isn't improving. One of the most oft requested focus items at the brainstorm.ubuntu.com is to have sound and wifi working. No luck here. The forums are replete with repetitive misinformation that leads users down the wrong street and wastes tons of their hours. When it is determined to be a Canonical screw up there's never a word from them about it.
One example of the sound issue is this. On some of these laptops if you use the alsa driver and then you log in you may get sound (if you entered the username and password yourself). If you change the login to be auto login then you may hear the start up sound but you hear nothing else after that. If you attempt to play some sound the cpu will go into 100% utilization, even if you kill the app that was playing the sound. If you switch it back from auto login to manual log in the problem disappears, except there are still issues with alsa messing up. If you switch to OSS you have other issues. Pulse Audio is totally out of the question.
With the share of laptops vs. desktops growing at a fast pace, how does stepping backwards on functionality for laptops make anyone happy?
The set up essentially killed one of my installs. After doing an upgrade the sound didn't work, the mouse didn't work, compiz didn't work. Nearly nothing worked on a previously working system. I wiped and reinstalled only to find that wifi still didn't work, compiz which did work worked no longer, and sound was totally haphazard.
These are important pieces of functionality especially when addressing the needs of the average Joe adjusting to Linux from Windows. You can't toss this back into the face of the users and tell them to fix it themselves or for them to rely on the community of people that tend to toss up FAQs instead of investigating the issue for exceptions to the FAQ that result in the same issues. I can only imagine the sheer number of frustrated people and the lost hours of people following a FAQ instead of getting real help for their issue. All of this goes into destroying the reputation of the OS and the distro implementation. People don't want to struggle/to fight with these problems. They want to use the computer for its intended purpose--the programs, their data, and their communication.
I'm saying only that Ubuntu 8.04 is in many ways a step backwards and since it is going to be a LTS that much of this should have been addressed long before the release. We're going to have to live with every company that relies on LTS status to just live with it the way it is until the next LTS comes out.
Because it was an illegal act. If a civilian in the US were to attack our government troops it would be an illegal act. Granted it wouldn't be considered terrorism. But when other terrorist organizations that have attacked civilians to affect politics and then that same organization attacks the military of another nation then it is terrorism. Also, consider that these were not attacks of one government on another which was supported by the people. This was an illegal attack by a known terrorist organization that attacked and murdered civilians in the past.
They must have thought we stopped looking. I mean come on. We all saw it happen. It was pathetic. They destroyed any belief in their process. No one in their right mind would now look at them as having any relevance; and every standard will now be questioned. Their ethics are shot.
They want a cease fire because they are getting huge bad press and this is jeopardizing their ability to remain as any sort of functional organization. I almost sense a panic coming from them. What I don't understand is that it was obvious that we were watching and they went ahead with it anyway.
OOXML is not a standard. It is platform specific due to elements of the specification. That makes it somewhat less than open and therefore can't be considered an ISO standard. That alone should have ruled it out in everyone's mind and forced a 'no' vote.
As I said, it is pathetic.
The little boys in Redmond (Ballmer no exception regardless of his girth) have always been a bit delusional. If 90% of a market is held by one company in one market and that is anti-competitive then 90% of a market held by one company in the OS market is obviously anti-competitive.
The Redmond boys need to stick to copying software ideas and stay out of the big boy markets where they obviously are limited in mental maturity.
Bullshit. This is simply their attempt to own open source. They want to embrace, extend, extinguish.
Their model has nothing to do with the decade old definition of open source.
You seem to misinterpret who the victim is. The victim is not the ISO. They are culpable before and after the fact. The victim is everyone else. Those that will be adopting the standard without knowing how the process was corrupted. Those that purchase those products for home and school to teach the next generation of minds--that don't know that the process was corrupted. The ISO members and the corruption of the process worked together with Microsoft.
For the next 10-20 years we are going to have this crap as a standard and it will only make it easier to for Microsoft to get more crap adopted. These are locking mechanisms to keep people on Microsoft's products. There is no other reason for such a deceitful battle to have taken place had it been for the benefit of the public and the openness necessary for all. We know that OOXML's alleged openness is a lie.
One way or the other this was going to pass. If it is just enlightening to see that they did pushed at it so hard so fast that it became obvious to anyone paying attention to the battle that someone was cheating and manipulating the process.
Those that managed the process are very responsible for what happened here as they allowed unusual rules to be adopted and these rules were designed to get the specification passed. Though there are other closed standards (what an oxymoron) most people involved in debating this issue should have become well enough educated at Microsoft's tactics to know that something was going on and that this was very wrong. If this had just been some specification for a technology that wasn't so tightly integrated into a criminal monopolist's products then we could accept some irregularities (though I would feel even those are unacceptable). This one certianly takes the cake because those that managed this process managed to allow it to become corrupted.
I hope enough outrage occurs that the process is examined and that some serious adjustments are to take place to correct the criminal behavior. No, this isn't Italy where they actually allow you to bribe someone. This is an international standards body.
I hope someone takes the time to follow the money on this. It would be cool to have that all exposed and traced back. And there is always a money trail.
The ODF process of adoption wasn't corrupted and there were no irregularities in getting it approved. That's the difference here. The deck wasn't stacked. People weren't paid off. When the majority of the member nation's voting body says to vote "no" and yet the vote for that nation is "yes" then something is wrong, seriously wrong, and it isn't just in that country. One would have to follow what happened in each country. This would have to take place quickly to supplant any view that this is really a standard now.
I worked at Siemens for some time and the plant that manufactured Digital Mevatrons (used in the treatment of cancer), was shut down by the FDA because of a lack of process certification. It took them a year or more to bring it back up to standards and the ISO certification was extremely important in that decision. I would advise against any thinking that ISO certification wasn't important and didn't matter to big business and government contracts.
More than not, this is about locking people into Microsoft's technologies. We all know that people want to use Word because most documents are stored in word format and there's a need to interchange, even if there are other very viable competing products. Let's get our heads on straight and understand that this is incredibly important because it allows Microsoft to lock everyone into their monopoly products for the next 10-20 years.
Wouldn't one have to conclude that you must have taken someone into space to be a space tourism industry member?
There's no such thing as a standard owned/created by Microsoft. That is an oxymoron. It is also a locking technology. We don't want nor need anything having to do with locking technologies. What's a locking technology? It is a technology used to lock you into Microsoft products. Once you rely on the locking technology it is impossible to use anything else or escape the Windows OS trap.
Bad things come from a monopoly, especially one convicted of criminal anti-competitive predatory practices, that have control of standards. Their technologies should be options, not standards. By virtue of being a monopoly they should not be allowed to control standards as a standards control is a way to prop up a monopoly, which is also illegal.
Isn't that just amazing. Some of the best gems are often found in the rough. A genius working to make a living solves a problem that will help all humanity in some way. Good for him.
KDE 4.0 has some fundamental problems. They tried to somewhat mimic the Vista start menu and essentially failed. They were trying to shoot the prairie dog and killed the horse by mistake. IMHO they created an ugly weak and problematic menu.
Other things are that KDE 4.0 was released early so that developers could work on it to help resolve issues and create new features. In the end, as far as end users are concerned tho, if they chose to use it as an early adopter they will have to put up with some extremely messy looking features.
I've looked at it and after some time dropped it. It was messy as hell and had some real organizational issues. Even the icons on the desktop are kludgy. They can easily get disorganized and spread around thus creating a messy desktop. They are extremely buggy and the desktop itself can be inadvertently moved off center of the screen with no hopes of moving it back, unless you restart KDM.
Conceptually, it is a good first start, but I'd say it is about a year out before it becomes anything really useful to the average person. This makes it an obvious choice for limited support.
KDE needs serious work, but it is the future of their desktop. It is a good first try, though buggy as all hell.
Yes, that's a very big misunderstanding due to poorly worded post. They are saying this.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu is free and will ALWAYS remain free.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu will always provide community support, free of charge.
Ubuntu/Kubuntu will provide paid support if you wish to go that route. Paid support is provided by trained technicians from Canonical, whereas the free support is provided by the community.
KDE 3.5x is the official Kubuntu product.
KDE 4.x is the new version of KDE and thus has not been fleshed out.
There is paid support for KDE 4.x, but it is limited due to the fact that it hasn't been fleshed out.
There is no cut down to size version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu and there is no branching that forces you to accept something less unless you are willing to pay extra.
The only difference is that KDE 4.x is not accepted by the Kubuntu folks as being stable and feature complete to include it in the official 8.04 release of Kubuntu. If you wish you can install it but you probably will have problems and if so you can pay for support. Otherwise, you are supposed to rely on community support.
WUBI won't interfere with your windows partition. You can get rid of it by simply deleting your c:\wubi folder or by going into your add/remove programs and uninstalling it. You can also run the installer provided by WUBI. If you choose to just delete the folder you will still have to contend with the boot menu item. You can delete that by modifying the c:\boot.ini file.
/boot/grub/menu.conf customization. This is pretty bad and it is a serious bug, yet there seems to be no attention going to that either.
WUBI is an optional way to install Linux. The 8.04 ISO image is designed to be booted and run as a live CD where you choose the install icon off the gnome desktop. Just like the old way.
The WUBI way, the reason for the wubi.exe in the root of the CD, is so you can put it into your CD/DVD drive and have it autoplay or just launch it. That way you don't have to search for it to test the installer.
I have WUBI installs on multiple machines. It runs just fine. I have performed various upgrades to it over time without issue. It is running as its own OS and not as some emulation or virtual machine. It runs very well and it can take advantage of your full Windows partition. In fact, when you get WUBI successfully installed it will mount your Windows paritition with NTFS-3G, showing it as the HOST drive. You can read/write to it just like you would any NTFS partition under Windows.
I have Linux running on multiple laptops thanks to WUBI. I could have done a dedicated partition but I liked the idea of working with it in this fashion to help the developers. I also have many computers that run Linux dedicated and a few machines that run Windows dedicated.
My only word of advice to perspective WUBI users is to give the WUBI install size the largest you can so you don't run out of room. The reason is you'll get very addicted to Linux and Ubuntu and want to try more things out and it doesn't pay to not have enough room, so choosing a small amount of space to test with is not sufficient.
Linux is used world wide and there are estimates of 50 million users world-wide. Whole governments are using it on the desktop. Linux performs well and is very stable and secure. It does 99% of what 90% of us want to do with it. There are even retail games that have Linux clients. Linux has more in-kernel support for drivers than any other kernel in OS history.
I don't know about the weaknesses of things like wireless support under 8.04. I do know they must be improved to capture more of the market. Hopefully that has happened. I also don't know the state of sound for laptops, as it has been a rather weak point for Ubuntu these past couple years, especially on the HP platform where HPs most commonly sold models didn't have adequate sound support (or it was too buggy and too confusing to resolve).
I will say that there has been a down hill slide in the #ubuntu IRC as the participants are far to quick to spam the guides without reading the actual appeals for help.
Other than that, I think some of the attempts they made with the graphical auto adjustment have failed miserably and I don't expect that they have resolved the issue this time around either. I would like to see this fool proof. Unfortunately, also there are many other issues that I think won't get the resolutions they need because there are some issues with someone setting the priorities. For instance, laptop wireless and sound are important, and so is mounting of secondary and other volumes. Too much manual work has to be done just to add a second, third, forth, HDD. Adding those and plugging in USB and other removable media can result in some extremely unexpected results. Even though this has been reported no effort is being made to resolve them, or so it seems. Further, updates to the OS via the online updates can completely wipe out a custom
No not at all. You use it just like linux. No noticeable differnce. All security, everything is there. Full read/write.
As far as performance goes on an old laptop with winxp home installed it works flawlessly with little to no performance drop.
If you try it you will see.
Comcast may think they have the right to do what they are doing but this is all bad publicity. That though is the normalized side of things. They'll loose lots of business.
What Comcast may not be understanding is that shitting on the FCC now means the FCC will shit on them later. Guaranteed. Comcast is burning bridges.
They need to disassociate their activities completely with any blocking and open the network and become neutral. What the FCC will probably do is give everyone the right to sue Comcast over what the consumer does on line. Essentially they are removing their own neutrality.
Comcast is far to simplistic in their thinking and dangerous in their actions.
Untrue. I lived the era. WP started as a group of guys writing an editor on larger computers, like a lot of software engineers did.
I've read more books on the industry that the author of that book and many others combined. And I read them during the time this was happening. I'll take my experience and education over some dork who thought he might make money on an inaccurate book.
DDE tho seemingly useful in the day really turns out to be nothing. It was hard to implement DDE perfectly. I remember thinking that there were a lot of technologies that were going to go nowhere and that a lot of companies such as Lotus Development and Word Perfect were going to go the way of the DoDo if they didn't realize this. People were interested in simple solutions with lots of features while Microsoft was driving the trade journals using their advertising dollar to get the reviewers to demand every false feature they could think of. They knew that if they announced features designed by other software vendors they could stifle sales of those products.
Word Perfect was a great DOS program and they provided every kind of support you can imagine for printing, fonts, etc. But I really never liked editing those codes, though it did make for a more perfect document if you managed to get the hang of it. I was an early adopter and used Wordstar then Word Perfect. I also used MS Word for DOS and found it to be buggy, cumbersome and very much breaking programming conventions that they were telling other vendors not to break. It was obvious they were breaking the programming conventions because as you used it in a multi-user environment it would try to write to the hardware and this was cause for a lot of grief. Little could be done except to not use it.
The reason they were bleeding cash was because it became obvious that they were tossing in misleading featuresets that were destined to go no where. So, companies such as Lotus and Word Perfect were spinning their wheels trying to implement this stuff.
When you think about the Pen Computing attack they were simply taking a look at other products features and then announcing they were going to implement this or that feature into windows. Since Windows was the OS and everyone would get it for free few companies had the incentive to compete. We could see the same thing in the browser market during the time that Microsoft was attempting to kill Netscape and when they were trying to destroy Java as a real alternative to platform specific coding. They simply announced this or that feature, the trade journals picked up on it, and the end result was dead in the water competition.
I used to read articles day in and day out as I read on average 30 trade journals a month back then. There was a lot in print. Reviews were on everything you could imagine. Where Microsoft couldn't compete they just told everyone that this or that market was a dead end and they wouldn't be supporting it, even if the market itself would have accepted that new product.
Now that we see the philosophy behind their maneuvers (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), it becomes clear that they were up to more than just competitive rivalry. They controlled the OS and dictated features, etc. Another thing was that there were near constant complaints about undocumented API features that Microsoft's people were taking advantage of that the market knew little about. This also cut seriously into their ability to develop stable efficient code. Not only did the Microsoft people have the Apple GUI programming experience (nothing wrong with that), not that they didn't buy the MS Word product (questionable as to whether they really are capable of producing something on their own), but their Office developers had access to early API coding for Windows and had the upper hand on any changes and hidden features (they probably had a hand in saying which features were to be hidden).
Today we have Microsoft threatening every feature in their book particularly against any competitor and most particularly against Linux with their unconfirmed, unverified, and unjustified accusations of 235 patent violations. If Microsoft had been held to that same standard back then there would have been few if any real products coming out of Microsoft. Imagine Lotus (or earlier products) demanding Microsoft pay royalties for certain features they stole.
Back when Lotus 123 was the most sol
Yeah, anything prior to OS X was pretty bad. I kept a neutral stance on OSes till the late 90s when I learned about all the nasty things Microsoft had been doing to manipulate the market and essentially steal from the average person. OS 6, 7, 8 were pretty bad but for their time they were awesome interfaces. One thing about those OS versions was that applications were rarer than in the Windows world so it would seem clear why you switched. I saw a mac in the early 80s and clearly cited that it was niche. When I saw the mac with OS X they had clearly left the niche market for the mainstream. OSX is nothing more than a beautiful interface (and tremendous ease of use) on top of Unix.
Well said.
Ubuntu/kubuntu has always had a alternative.iso file that you can use to install so you don't have to boot to the live CD first. You can find it in the same location that you found the live cd type installs.
Linux is a solid competent and in many ways superior Operating System. 99% of what 90% of the people do can easily be handled by Linux and they wouldn't know the difference if they had never seen an OS before. Definitely there are issues with it, but there are issues with all OSes. One has to ask themselves: if my mother or father had never used an OS before and I set up linux for them (to do their mail, chat with friends, browse the web, order products on line, etc.) would they know any different or would they not be able to do these tasks? A rational human being would say that 99% of what they want to do in that respect they can do.
So, why would anyone say that Linux is not able or unstable? It is because they have a beef with it. They don't like having to learn something new. They are set in their way (can't teach old dogs new tricks). They are a zealot for what they are used to (keep in mind I'm not disrespecting zealots--there are those that love a certain kind of car, or a brand of TV, or a favorite dish, etc.) It is those that actively seek to harm the others that make for a bad zealot. No, I'm not talking about those that are zealots that trying to bring an honest choice out and to balance the choices by giving others a choice. I'm talking about the irrational attack on an OS just because it is different.
Linux is ready for the desktop. The Linux market share is much greater than you can imagine. When the world is using 90% Windows and the rest is divided up by the other OSes, even small percentages in growth lead to millions of users. So, I really wish people would stop reacting like Linux has no users. It is estimated that world wide, across all distributions there are approximately 50 million Linux users. This is no small number. So, stop trying to belittle it. There was a time when DOS didn't have 50 million users and there was a time when Windows didn't even come close to the number of users that Linux has.
I don't agree with anything he said other than to admit that using Linux is a stark contrast to the boring Windoze. Windows puts you to sleep. It isn't highly configurable and in many ways Windows was designed to limit you. The Windows registry is a nightmare and is highly manipulated by spyware/malware criminals. Their modifying the registry, modifying permissions of sections in the registry, and many other things having to do with obscure sections of the registry all help them to gain control and maintain control of the windows box.
If this guy had said that Linux was being used because primarily it was fun I would have agreed with him, but he's actually disrespecting Linux. He's attempting to thwart the efforts we all have made in getting others to look at the product by lying and saying that all those things we hold dear about Linux are lies.
One of the most important reasons I use Linux day in and day out is that I will be ensured that my privacy is not violated by Microsoft (or the US government) with programs such as WGA, WGN, DRM, and any potential back door set up to assist the government. In the Linux world thousands of eyes see that kernel and see all the code going into it. Not only that millions see it world wide, so not just one corporation highly protected by our government organizations has control.
Also, it is clear that Open Source is the way of the future. It essentially eliminates the hopes any one corporation (whether it is Microsoft or any other) to control our content, control our progress in computer science, and it helps to ensure that by creating prior art before the big corporations do (before they have a chance to extort the rest of the world of money better used to help raise our children, fund our schools, better our research after the education has taken place, get those innovations as a result of children's progress, our schools advancements, and our research, before the corporations lock them down) in order to raise the costs of things such as the cost of drugs, health care, etc.
Google is not and has never been a monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly and has been ruled a monopoly by the courts. This puts a burden on Microsoft to play by special rules. ALL monopolies must play by special rules.
Google and Doubleclick were not competitors of one another and that's what the EU ruled. Apparently most don't understand what Doubleclick does/did to make money. Yes, Google makes money on advertisement and they make money on their search service, only you don't see it. They license their search tools/services to other entities.
Even if Google and Doubleclick were competitors (which the ruling specifically stated they were not), they would not put such a burden on competitors as to destroy their competitiveness (which is also essentially what the ruling stated).
I see a lot of Microsoft in these posts. Some don't seem to be able to stand the fact that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and they don't understand what it means and why it came about. Microsoft has been great at obfuscating the issues they were/are involved in, even today. Again, you can't expect companies that are not monopolists, that were not ruled a monopoly, to play by exactly the same rules. Otherwise there'd be no rules imparted upon the monopoly. Monopolies can be beneficial to society but they almost never are. So, we see a lot of anti-monopoly company rhetoric and those that don't seem to like that are attacking a company that is not, and has never been ruled a monopoly.
Microsoft can't compete except by using it's monopolistic practices and when the Bush administration is gone you can expect a change and greater oversight and maybe even a spectacular battle to come. Other non-monopolies trying to compete that grow in other markets yet still wishing for a level playing field in those markets held by the monopolist, and gain enough power to fight back with their lobbying dollars. As Microsoft implodes, which it will do, has been doing, and will continue to do, it will have less money to bribe and manipulate.
Right now you should understand that you pay more for an inferior product that essentially has become a rehash of old but with a twisted violation on your privacy. They have made you and everyone else pay for and use a product that is so wrong in so many ways. You should be able to see this easily: Look at Vista and how they are going to dismantle XP in favor of Vista when it is clear that the majority feel Vista is inferior and has other factors such as privacy violations, spyware, Digital Restrictions Management, lock in technologies, etc.
You may think there is nothing wrong, but you won't face the fact that if a car company did this you'd be up in arms. Imagine you could no longer buy the car you wanted, you had to buy the car they put out and that you would no longer receive support (gas, maintenance, upgrades, parts) because the car company having the monopoly dictated it. You should be setting the stage as to what and how long that support should exist, not the car company and especially, not the ONLY car company. What would you do if they threatened to sue you because you fixed it yourself or you decided to look for another car company to do business with? You'd be livid. Understand this. Microsoft is telling you what you can do and how you can do it instead of them adjusting to the needs you have. Not only that, they are spying on you to ensure you do it their way and they report back when they think you are breaking their rules. Imagine if the same car company said you couldn't sell your car to someone else? Imagine if they said you couldn't use other parts from another company other than those they suggest. What if they took control of your car and refused to start because they sensed you had turned off the mechanism that allowed them to monitor your car? Again, you'd be livid.
So, this Google/Doubleclick dispute that you have here is literally one where a convicted monopolist has been doing that for a long time and wants to control other markets
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I know Microsoft's history and know their motivation to not release any development code. If this had any hope other than say prototyping something which in the end helps no one, then they'd have kept it for themselves.
Microsoft is an organization that is after profit from closed software. We can't get them to even release the API of DirectX, so why would they want to release this unless they had some other motivation.
Again, this has been chopped up by many in this thread showing that these concepts are not new though they may be newly implemented by Microsoft.
Considering their prior behavior and the obvious motivations one must constantly be vigalent against anything that could possibly taint. It is best to be safe than sorry when it comes to dealing with Microsoft.
Remember Microsoft is the company that states that Linux infringes 235 patents but refuses to say which ones and they do so in a way as to create FUD, which generally only affects business and developers. It is not a far stretch to say that they are simply using this as a way to muddy the waters to attempt to redefine what open source is so that they can take ownership of the term and redirect businesses focus onto their endeavors.
So, some crap kernel is released that demos some obvious but more modern concepts. The product wasn't going anywhere and won't help anyone. The concepts of kernel development were fleshed out years and years ago. This is no benefit as a product to Microsoft. There are other products that have failed or are no longer feasible so why release this? Why not release the other stuff as well.
People shouldn't care about this product. It is a dead end, as has been demonstrated by their own decision to release it. Yet, we must also acknowledge that is has hopes of being used for some other purpose and academia is not it, not fully and not truthfully..
So, unless you can say more than I have no idea what I'm talking about maybe you should self-reflect.
There are other true open kernels besides this one. The kernels of other OSes are available for people to learn from. How does Microsoft releasing an "opened" source code kernel impact the learning of the few thousands that could potentially learn from it? First, you have the kernels of the BEOS, BSD, Linux, etc. There are many other worthy kernels that others can learn from. Since this really isn't of much use other than to look at those involved in learning kernel programming would be better served by learning the kernel of Linux instead. As Linus T. said, the concepts of kernel development have been fleshed out 40+ years ago.
So one must ask the real motivation behind this. I suspect it is moreover an attempt to muddy the waters regarding long standing definitions to terms as a single battle in a greater war than it is a research project. Yes, it may have begun as a true research project internally in Microsoft, but later became a dead end and they decided to toss it out to taint and muddy.
But the good news is that we have supporters of the terms that have been in use for a long time and are well established. As well, no one except a company decidedly focused on killing "open source" (where they made public statements that they would kill open source) and is a convicted monopolist, has challenged that definition.
Those that created the concept get to define it. People can challenge it all they want but the OSI definition is really the only true definition. Come up with a definition of the term established before the OSI definition (which really has never been challenged in many years of use). I'd suspect there isn't one. To date theirs is the only definition and it really has not been challenged. Let's not perpetuate this logic that flies in the face of reason.