There are a few differences between ATMs and voting machines. First of all, ATMs are used daily, and if there was a bug in an ATM, it would be caught very quickly.
Second of all, ATMs can be reflashed using the same connection that they use to contact the bank, so if a bug was found, it could be corrected very fast. Also, a bank has a HUGE financial incentive to test ATMs extensively before putting them in service, so it is unlikely that a bug would make it into the real world.
In general, it is hard to reflash a voting machine when a bug is found. The states' have laws about modifying those machines, and require that a long certification process take place after the modification (which is not to say that the certification process is in any way useful). The only incentive to check the machines for accuracy is idealism about the voting process, which is great in theory but not really shared by the majority of society.
I'm not defending the voting machine companies here. Malice is a stretch though; so is ignorance. I would blame it on tight schedules, poor internal engineering standards, and lack of initiative on the states' part to require useful certification. What probably happened was a small team was told to put their ATM project on hold for as short a period of time as possible to develop a voting machine, and their manager got uppity and tried to get them to finish even faster.
A teacher who is in any way involved with computers should be aware of major movements in the computing world. Considering the impact GNU had on the software world, I would think that a computer teacher would be aware of it.
"Alos, if I was teacher, I'd need to be convinced that I had a valid educational reason to put Linux in my lesson plans. "
Except that this had nothing to do with the lesson plan. The teacher confiscated LiveCDs because she thought they were illegal.
"The world does indeed expect new graduates to know Windows."
First of all, we are talking about a middle school, not a high school or college. The world does not expect middle school students to know anything about software.
Second of all, there are schools that provide job training. We call them vocational schools, and you can get a 2 year degree from them, and get a job in some specific trade. High schools and universities should NOT be in the business of training their students for a job. Doing so would undermine the educational value of such institutions; after all, why bother with courses in the history of African kingdoms or classical literature if it is just about job training? There is an inherent value in education, which unfortunately most Americans seem to miss.
"Telling a prospective employer that you know Linux but not Word is not the way to get a job."
Clearly, you are not very familiar with the job market for engineers and programmers. Speaking from my own experience, I found that emphasizing my Linux skills was a boon for job applications. Ask a VLSI designer what system they use for their work -- chances are it is either some Linux or proprietary Unix. To be honest, if I ever found myself in a position to hire someone, and they emphasized that they were experts with MS Office but had no idea what Linux or BSD is, I would be very sceptical.
One final comment: on many occasions, someone has asked me questions like, "How to I turn this Word document into a PDF file?" or "How can I concatenate these 4 PDFs into a single document?" They are amazed at how easy it is to just use free software to accomplish these tasks, especially when the other people in the room are either clueless or think that the solution is to purchase Acrobat (or pirate it). There is value in just being AWARE of free software, even if you are not an expert. It is a disservice to those children to try and convince them that GNU, Ubuntu, or whatever else, is illegal.
Worse than that, she is trying to spread her own ignorance to the students. If I were one of the students, I would have come to class the next day with a copy of the GPL, BSD license, APL, and a few other free software licenses, and insisted that she show me which clause I was violating by handing out LiveCDs. Being the sort of person I am, I would have done this in front of the entire class. Since this is a middle school, I would be that the students would love an opportunity to show up their teacher.
Methamphetamine is not illegal, it is available by prescription, even prescriptions to children, and methamphetamine abusers should be grouped together with any other prescription drug abuser.
Open your mind and think really hard: if you wanted some marijuana, could you get some? Much as we would like to deny it, everyone knows someone who could find some marijuana, even if we would be afraid to ask them. Keeping it illegal has had little to no effect on its availability. Government propaganda has done more to curb the use of marijuana than making it illegal, so why spend the money on arrested people over it? Continue the propaganda when it is legal, I doubt you would see much of a change in use.
Point 2 applies equally to just about any drug. How many people out there think that MDMA (ecstasy) is one of the most dangerous substances a person can be exposed to? How many people think that LSD is terrifying and that taking it once means never living a normal life again? It is only loosely based on reality, but people swallow it hook, line and sinker. It does not matter whether or not it is legal if people are terrified of using it. Again, why spend tax dollars arresting people for possession, AND more tax dollars on propaganda? Stick with the propaganda, it is at least mildly effective.
Don't get me wrong, the propaganda campaign is not a cure-all. People, teenagers included, still use drugs even after exposure to the anti-drug messages. People also tend to go slightly overboard with drug use after a lifetime of lies from the government. However, if the goal is to prevent as many people as possible from using drugs, it is more effective than prohibition. Those people who never try drugs are terrified of the drugs, and keep a safe, closed mind -- if someone who has actually tried some drug tells one of the non-drug users how the commercials were fake, the non-drug user can quickly label the person as a hopeless addict whose mind is warped by drugs, and who has no idea what the effect on their body is (that last bit is probably true).
Actually, the measure of a system's security is a lot more than just the number of viruses, or even the number of exploits on the system. For home users, security generally entails susceptibility to viruses, but for higher security installations (banks, governments, etc.), security considerations are more complex. How are user privileges separated? Can a user who misbehaves be terminated before they can cause further damage? Will everything be audited? Resource protection? These are all very real considerations, especially because an exploit can be patched easily, but a core architecture change is a lot more difficult and incurs a high cost.
Why should a home user, running an OS with no known viruses in the wild, be checking for viruses on other platforms? We are not talking about a file server that thousands of people are sharing, we are talking about a single desktop machine running (theoretically) a single OS. If Windows is being run in a VM, the AV software should be run in that same VM, especially since it is possible (not sure if this is common on Mac, but it is becoming common on Linux) to set up multi-boot machines where the user has the option of running the other installed OSes in virtual machines OR rebooting to use them natively.
The Linux kernel is enormous and monolithic, which is why it is vulnerable to that sort of activity. But a smaller, microkernel design like Minix is easier to inspect, for those who have the time to do so. If you are truly concerned about people sneaking code into your OS, your best bet is to go with a microkernel and put in the effort to inspect that kernel and any relevant drivers; if you do not have that time, then you just need to trust others to do the inspecting for you.
We need to kill its parent process! Where did that $100M come from? Pitchfork and torch time!!!
It is censorship, Brave New World style
on
Censorship By Glut
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· Score: 4, Informative
It is a different form of censorship. Case-in-point: when the US government doesn't want news cameras filming caskets coming back from Iraq, they flood the news with irrelevant details about every battle fought in every small town in the middle east, so that Iraq reporters are too busy reporting on those stories to report on the number of dead soldiers on the US side. Nobody is physically stopping the media from showing those caskets, they are just giving them apparently "juicier" stories that they either have to take or be the only news network that is not reporting the story.
It is not that kids in the 1950's were smarter, it is that the standards for tests were higher. In New York State, the standardized math tests have become ludicrously easy, and even so, the passing score (required to advance to the next grade level of math) had to be lowered from 65% to 55% just to keep the high school graduation rate high enough for the schools to remain open.
"You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes and likely introducing errors already makes you fairly dumb given an alternative."
I encounter this attitude all the time, but frankly, it is completely misguided. There is the obvious problem: someone has to design the calculators, and that person will need to know how those operations work; you could just dismiss this by saying that engineers can be taught the material, elitism notwithstanding. The deeper problem is that you will wind up with a culture of people who never give math problems any deep thought, because as soon as something which would require deep thinking comes their way, they can just have a calculator find the answer. Increasing numbers of people think that math is just about memorizing formulas and knowing which one to enter into their calculator to get the right answer.
"The universities cant let their standards slip so it just gets harder and harder for the students that actually go to university,"
I beg to differ. Top tier schools can afford to uphold their standards, just because of the competition to get in, but what were once good middle tier schools are starting to decline. It is becoming typical for universities to set the bar to the level that their students are at, because if one university makes a stand and refuses to lower the bar, the students will simply flee to another school.
The problem here is cultural. We, at least here in the US and apparently in the UK as well, do not have a culture that places a high value on education in its own rite. In the US, the value is placed on the job one can get as a result of an education, or more accurately, as a result of a college degree. It becomes a situation where the students are haggling with their teachers to keep their grades high, or even just passing, because in their eyes, it is just a chore than needs to be taken care of in order to get a job.
After a long enough period of time, yes, they will succeed. However, it is more likely than not that by the time they succeed, a new version will come out, and we will be back to square one.
In other news, Apple has responded by issuing an update which accidentally causes an iPhone running a Linux kernel to become inoperable. Apple apologized for this mistake, and is working on a fix.
Except that RMS was not going after the users, he was going after the distro maintainers who were running a nonfree repository for their distro, effectively falling back on that nonfree software in cases where there is no free software alternative. If GNU began going after users who ran proprietary software side by side with free software, or rewrote the GPL to forbid such a thing, you might have a point, but the users are allowed to run proprietary software if they choose. Saying that a distro should not maintain a nonfree repository is not even close to saying that a user cannot run proprietary software.
How is this in direct conflict with the freedom to run any program? The users are free to run the program. The point of the guideline was that the distro should not be instructing users to run proprietary software; worded poorly, yes, but the intent was just that. A free-libre distro cannot fall back on proprietary to fill in the gaps from free software, that's all they wanted to say.
First of all, when did web browser stop requiring downloads and installations? Just because it is built into some -- SOME -- operating systems, does not mean that it is ubiquitous or that it is a good idea to develop software for it. Fedora 9 and 10 demonstrate that it is equally easy for an OS vendor to ship Flash and Java support with their OS, and Windows demonstrates that.NET support can also be built in. There is no reason to think that silverlight is any different. All of these are better platforms for developing distributed applications, far less clunky, heavy, and with lower latency than anything AJAX could ever produce.
Just because something is popular does not mean it is good. There is a reason that you do not see Windows being used in the most critical environments (satellite control, aircraft control, RADAR system control, etc.) -- there is no room for popular-but-cheap when the cost of failure is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars or in human life, or both. Likewise, AJAX is generally not used in applications where information updates need to propagate very quickly, because the latency is too high and the reliability is too low, and other platforms with all of AJAX's advantages are used instead.
You talk about application from different vendors working together as if it is some kind of new trend in computing that has never been seen before, which could not be further from the truth. Text-mode Unix programs could usually be strung together using scripts and pipes, and it was common and routine to do so. Some even wrote scripts that ran processes on multiple systems.
The only thing that one needs to get this sort of behavior is a common interface. In the Unix command line, stdin/stdout was a common interface, and as long as a program was reading its input from stdin and writing its output to stdout, it worked together with other programs. On the web, the interface is a bit more complex, involving various languages and protocols, but it is still a common interface that everyone is programming to, which allows the applications to be strung together.
It is not the "semantic web." The software has no insights into the semantics of what I want to do, and routinely I need to go 5 or 6 pages deep to find anything relevant in any of my searches, on Google, on Yahoo!, on my university's library search system, and so forth.
Actually, they do not like to release pricing because it would take away one of the best bargaining pieces they have: the ability to lower the price during a sales meeting. Enterprise vendors love to tell a customer that they are going to lower the price by 50%, 60%, 80%, etc., because in the end, it works out for everybody. The customer goes back thinking they got a deal and the vendor still turns a profit (because the list price is marked up significantly). Once you are forced to reveal your list price to the world, it becomes more difficult to convince your customers that you are even willing to give them a discount or negotiate, because they have already seen the price and assume that is what they will be charged. The order in which things are revealed to a customer will determine whether or not that customer is willing to close the deal and buy the product.
Breaking the law is always easy
on
Fedora 10 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The fun thing about using Ubuntu is that Canonical does not have any concerns about the laws of the United States of America. Red Hat does, because unlike Canonical, Red Hat is an American corporation. Red Hat cannot ship any software that could violate patent or copyright law, and many of the codecs in the non-free repositories do violate those laws. If you do not like the consequences of those laws, then:
Let your congressman know that, unless he at least attempts to undo those laws, you will stop voting for him.
Join the campaign to repeal those laws
Use free codecs and demand that people send you media that is free-libre
Empirically, supported software usually has fewer bugs. As for ease of use, some software is inherently difficult to configure, or has intrinsic nuances that cannot be coded around. For example, a security package (such as SELinux) needs to be tailored, and it needs to be tailored by an expert, or else the benefits are reduced. Supported software is backed by experts who can not only tailor such a package, but update the policies as security needs evolve. This is not about typical desktop software, where one-size-fits-all is an acceptable approach. A company can choose to hire a full time expert, whose services are only needed some of the time, or save money by buying support from a company that already employs experts. It is sort of like a bank: the experts derive their salaries from the support contracts of multiple companies, and as long as those companies do not all require that support at the exact same time, the system works.
Oh contraire, there are plenty of facts to support your opinion. Software does not age the way hardware does. There are systems out there that have been running the same software, on newer and newer hardware, for decades, because the code does exactly what it needs to do and there is nothing new that can be added. As an example, look at any of the uptime pissing contests that occur on Slashdot, and see some of the VMS and mainframe examples that people bring up. Companies charge yearly fees for such software simply because there is no other way to keep their revenue stream up when they produce such solid, no-need-to-upgrade code.
You need to add more value to what you sell. The code itself is not valuable enough, so something like support or guaranteed compatible hardware/software (if applicable) needs to be thrown in the mix. If other people start selling those same perks, then what you are facing is basic business competition, which is inescapable.
"Question: Does Red Hat now ship code that just works of am I out of luck when I visit flash rich sites like http://youtube.com/ and java rich sites like http://games.yahoo.com/."
You should give Fedora 9 a try, it has out of the box swfdec (which is 95% there in terms of flash, should not be long before it is 100%) and OpenJDK (which is 100% there in terms of Java support; the only issue I ever had was an applet that actually tried making direct sound system calls to the Windows sound system, no joke, which one can hardly blame OpenJDK for). I was skeptical at first, as these were not too solid in Fedora 8, but after 6 months of using them, I am thoroughly impressed. Also, assuming you are not on an unsupported configuration, you can always add the yum repo. for Adobe's proprietary flash, which is a pretty basic RPM install that integrates with the automated updates.
It is perfectly fair. Red Hat does not make its money selling software, it makes money selling support for that software, as you stated. CentOS gives it away for free, yes, but guess what? You can get RHEL for free also, the sources are on Red Hat's FTP servers, assuming you have the skill to compile the distro (which is not as hard as some might think it is). Red Hat is not even obligated to do that under the GPL (they must only make the sources available upon request from the people they distribute RHEL to, but they are not required to make those sources available to everyone).
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few differences between ATMs and voting machines. First of all, ATMs are used daily, and if there was a bug in an ATM, it would be caught very quickly. Second of all, ATMs can be reflashed using the same connection that they use to contact the bank, so if a bug was found, it could be corrected very fast. Also, a bank has a HUGE financial incentive to test ATMs extensively before putting them in service, so it is unlikely that a bug would make it into the real world.
In general, it is hard to reflash a voting machine when a bug is found. The states' have laws about modifying those machines, and require that a long certification process take place after the modification (which is not to say that the certification process is in any way useful). The only incentive to check the machines for accuracy is idealism about the voting process, which is great in theory but not really shared by the majority of society.
I'm not defending the voting machine companies here. Malice is a stretch though; so is ignorance. I would blame it on tight schedules, poor internal engineering standards, and lack of initiative on the states' part to require useful certification. What probably happened was a small team was told to put their ATM project on hold for as short a period of time as possible to develop a voting machine, and their manager got uppity and tried to get them to finish even faster.
A teacher who is in any way involved with computers should be aware of major movements in the computing world. Considering the impact GNU had on the software world, I would think that a computer teacher would be aware of it.
"Alos, if I was teacher, I'd need to be convinced that I had a valid educational reason to put Linux in my lesson plans. "
Except that this had nothing to do with the lesson plan. The teacher confiscated LiveCDs because she thought they were illegal.
"The world does indeed expect new graduates to know Windows."
First of all, we are talking about a middle school, not a high school or college. The world does not expect middle school students to know anything about software.
Second of all, there are schools that provide job training. We call them vocational schools, and you can get a 2 year degree from them, and get a job in some specific trade. High schools and universities should NOT be in the business of training their students for a job. Doing so would undermine the educational value of such institutions; after all, why bother with courses in the history of African kingdoms or classical literature if it is just about job training? There is an inherent value in education, which unfortunately most Americans seem to miss.
"Telling a prospective employer that you know Linux but not Word is not the way to get a job."
Clearly, you are not very familiar with the job market for engineers and programmers. Speaking from my own experience, I found that emphasizing my Linux skills was a boon for job applications. Ask a VLSI designer what system they use for their work -- chances are it is either some Linux or proprietary Unix. To be honest, if I ever found myself in a position to hire someone, and they emphasized that they were experts with MS Office but had no idea what Linux or BSD is, I would be very sceptical.
One final comment: on many occasions, someone has asked me questions like, "How to I turn this Word document into a PDF file?" or "How can I concatenate these 4 PDFs into a single document?" They are amazed at how easy it is to just use free software to accomplish these tasks, especially when the other people in the room are either clueless or think that the solution is to purchase Acrobat (or pirate it). There is value in just being AWARE of free software, even if you are not an expert. It is a disservice to those children to try and convince them that GNU, Ubuntu, or whatever else, is illegal.
Worse than that, she is trying to spread her own ignorance to the students. If I were one of the students, I would have come to class the next day with a copy of the GPL, BSD license, APL, and a few other free software licenses, and insisted that she show me which clause I was violating by handing out LiveCDs. Being the sort of person I am, I would have done this in front of the entire class. Since this is a middle school, I would be that the students would love an opportunity to show up their teacher.
Don't get me wrong, the propaganda campaign is not a cure-all. People, teenagers included, still use drugs even after exposure to the anti-drug messages. People also tend to go slightly overboard with drug use after a lifetime of lies from the government. However, if the goal is to prevent as many people as possible from using drugs, it is more effective than prohibition. Those people who never try drugs are terrified of the drugs, and keep a safe, closed mind -- if someone who has actually tried some drug tells one of the non-drug users how the commercials were fake, the non-drug user can quickly label the person as a hopeless addict whose mind is warped by drugs, and who has no idea what the effect on their body is (that last bit is probably true).
OK, enough ranting.
Actually, the measure of a system's security is a lot more than just the number of viruses, or even the number of exploits on the system. For home users, security generally entails susceptibility to viruses, but for higher security installations (banks, governments, etc.), security considerations are more complex. How are user privileges separated? Can a user who misbehaves be terminated before they can cause further damage? Will everything be audited? Resource protection? These are all very real considerations, especially because an exploit can be patched easily, but a core architecture change is a lot more difficult and incurs a high cost.
Why should a home user, running an OS with no known viruses in the wild, be checking for viruses on other platforms? We are not talking about a file server that thousands of people are sharing, we are talking about a single desktop machine running (theoretically) a single OS. If Windows is being run in a VM, the AV software should be run in that same VM, especially since it is possible (not sure if this is common on Mac, but it is becoming common on Linux) to set up multi-boot machines where the user has the option of running the other installed OSes in virtual machines OR rebooting to use them natively.
The Linux kernel is enormous and monolithic, which is why it is vulnerable to that sort of activity. But a smaller, microkernel design like Minix is easier to inspect, for those who have the time to do so. If you are truly concerned about people sneaking code into your OS, your best bet is to go with a microkernel and put in the effort to inspect that kernel and any relevant drivers; if you do not have that time, then you just need to trust others to do the inspecting for you.
We need to kill its parent process! Where did that $100M come from? Pitchfork and torch time!!!
It is a different form of censorship. Case-in-point: when the US government doesn't want news cameras filming caskets coming back from Iraq, they flood the news with irrelevant details about every battle fought in every small town in the middle east, so that Iraq reporters are too busy reporting on those stories to report on the number of dead soldiers on the US side. Nobody is physically stopping the media from showing those caskets, they are just giving them apparently "juicier" stories that they either have to take or be the only news network that is not reporting the story.
It is not that kids in the 1950's were smarter, it is that the standards for tests were higher. In New York State, the standardized math tests have become ludicrously easy, and even so, the passing score (required to advance to the next grade level of math) had to be lowered from 65% to 55% just to keep the high school graduation rate high enough for the schools to remain open.
"You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes and likely introducing errors already makes you fairly dumb given an alternative."
I encounter this attitude all the time, but frankly, it is completely misguided. There is the obvious problem: someone has to design the calculators, and that person will need to know how those operations work; you could just dismiss this by saying that engineers can be taught the material, elitism notwithstanding. The deeper problem is that you will wind up with a culture of people who never give math problems any deep thought, because as soon as something which would require deep thinking comes their way, they can just have a calculator find the answer. Increasing numbers of people think that math is just about memorizing formulas and knowing which one to enter into their calculator to get the right answer.
"The universities cant let their standards slip so it just gets harder and harder for the students that actually go to university,"
I beg to differ. Top tier schools can afford to uphold their standards, just because of the competition to get in, but what were once good middle tier schools are starting to decline. It is becoming typical for universities to set the bar to the level that their students are at, because if one university makes a stand and refuses to lower the bar, the students will simply flee to another school.
The problem here is cultural. We, at least here in the US and apparently in the UK as well, do not have a culture that places a high value on education in its own rite. In the US, the value is placed on the job one can get as a result of an education, or more accurately, as a result of a college degree. It becomes a situation where the students are haggling with their teachers to keep their grades high, or even just passing, because in their eyes, it is just a chore than needs to be taken care of in order to get a job.
After a long enough period of time, yes, they will succeed. However, it is more likely than not that by the time they succeed, a new version will come out, and we will be back to square one.
In other news, Apple has responded by issuing an update which accidentally causes an iPhone running a Linux kernel to become inoperable. Apple apologized for this mistake, and is working on a fix.
Except that RMS was not going after the users, he was going after the distro maintainers who were running a nonfree repository for their distro, effectively falling back on that nonfree software in cases where there is no free software alternative. If GNU began going after users who ran proprietary software side by side with free software, or rewrote the GPL to forbid such a thing, you might have a point, but the users are allowed to run proprietary software if they choose. Saying that a distro should not maintain a nonfree repository is not even close to saying that a user cannot run proprietary software.
How is this in direct conflict with the freedom to run any program? The users are free to run the program. The point of the guideline was that the distro should not be instructing users to run proprietary software; worded poorly, yes, but the intent was just that. A free-libre distro cannot fall back on proprietary to fill in the gaps from free software, that's all they wanted to say.
First of all, when did web browser stop requiring downloads and installations? Just because it is built into some -- SOME -- operating systems, does not mean that it is ubiquitous or that it is a good idea to develop software for it. Fedora 9 and 10 demonstrate that it is equally easy for an OS vendor to ship Flash and Java support with their OS, and Windows demonstrates that .NET support can also be built in. There is no reason to think that silverlight is any different. All of these are better platforms for developing distributed applications, far less clunky, heavy, and with lower latency than anything AJAX could ever produce.
Just because something is popular does not mean it is good. There is a reason that you do not see Windows being used in the most critical environments (satellite control, aircraft control, RADAR system control, etc.) -- there is no room for popular-but-cheap when the cost of failure is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars or in human life, or both. Likewise, AJAX is generally not used in applications where information updates need to propagate very quickly, because the latency is too high and the reliability is too low, and other platforms with all of AJAX's advantages are used instead.
You talk about application from different vendors working together as if it is some kind of new trend in computing that has never been seen before, which could not be further from the truth. Text-mode Unix programs could usually be strung together using scripts and pipes, and it was common and routine to do so. Some even wrote scripts that ran processes on multiple systems.
The only thing that one needs to get this sort of behavior is a common interface. In the Unix command line, stdin/stdout was a common interface, and as long as a program was reading its input from stdin and writing its output to stdout, it worked together with other programs. On the web, the interface is a bit more complex, involving various languages and protocols, but it is still a common interface that everyone is programming to, which allows the applications to be strung together.
It is not the "semantic web." The software has no insights into the semantics of what I want to do, and routinely I need to go 5 or 6 pages deep to find anything relevant in any of my searches, on Google, on Yahoo!, on my university's library search system, and so forth.
Actually, they do not like to release pricing because it would take away one of the best bargaining pieces they have: the ability to lower the price during a sales meeting. Enterprise vendors love to tell a customer that they are going to lower the price by 50%, 60%, 80%, etc., because in the end, it works out for everybody. The customer goes back thinking they got a deal and the vendor still turns a profit (because the list price is marked up significantly). Once you are forced to reveal your list price to the world, it becomes more difficult to convince your customers that you are even willing to give them a discount or negotiate, because they have already seen the price and assume that is what they will be charged. The order in which things are revealed to a customer will determine whether or not that customer is willing to close the deal and buy the product.
Thank you, I never actually took French and had no idea how to properly spell it.
Empirically, supported software usually has fewer bugs. As for ease of use, some software is inherently difficult to configure, or has intrinsic nuances that cannot be coded around. For example, a security package (such as SELinux) needs to be tailored, and it needs to be tailored by an expert, or else the benefits are reduced. Supported software is backed by experts who can not only tailor such a package, but update the policies as security needs evolve. This is not about typical desktop software, where one-size-fits-all is an acceptable approach. A company can choose to hire a full time expert, whose services are only needed some of the time, or save money by buying support from a company that already employs experts. It is sort of like a bank: the experts derive their salaries from the support contracts of multiple companies, and as long as those companies do not all require that support at the exact same time, the system works.
Oh contraire, there are plenty of facts to support your opinion. Software does not age the way hardware does. There are systems out there that have been running the same software, on newer and newer hardware, for decades, because the code does exactly what it needs to do and there is nothing new that can be added. As an example, look at any of the uptime pissing contests that occur on Slashdot, and see some of the VMS and mainframe examples that people bring up. Companies charge yearly fees for such software simply because there is no other way to keep their revenue stream up when they produce such solid, no-need-to-upgrade code.
You need to add more value to what you sell. The code itself is not valuable enough, so something like support or guaranteed compatible hardware/software (if applicable) needs to be thrown in the mix. If other people start selling those same perks, then what you are facing is basic business competition, which is inescapable.
"Question: Does Red Hat now ship code that just works of am I out of luck when I visit flash rich sites like http://youtube.com/ and java rich sites like http://games.yahoo.com/."
You should give Fedora 9 a try, it has out of the box swfdec (which is 95% there in terms of flash, should not be long before it is 100%) and OpenJDK (which is 100% there in terms of Java support; the only issue I ever had was an applet that actually tried making direct sound system calls to the Windows sound system, no joke, which one can hardly blame OpenJDK for). I was skeptical at first, as these were not too solid in Fedora 8, but after 6 months of using them, I am thoroughly impressed. Also, assuming you are not on an unsupported configuration, you can always add the yum repo. for Adobe's proprietary flash, which is a pretty basic RPM install that integrates with the automated updates.
It is perfectly fair. Red Hat does not make its money selling software, it makes money selling support for that software, as you stated. CentOS gives it away for free, yes, but guess what? You can get RHEL for free also, the sources are on Red Hat's FTP servers, assuming you have the skill to compile the distro (which is not as hard as some might think it is). Red Hat is not even obligated to do that under the GPL (they must only make the sources available upon request from the people they distribute RHEL to, but they are not required to make those sources available to everyone).