If Microsoft's monopoly didn't distort the computer industry, someone else's would have. Maybe Apple, maybe IBM, maybe in that bearded Spock universe, it would have been Amiga or Be, Inc. Nobody, not software houses, retailers, or Joe Average wants to go back to the days of five or six different major platforms.
I do this in just about every article like this, and I gotta do it here; if those users declare that the GUI is in fact "unready", what the fuck difference does it make? Are they throwing money into the pool? More than likely, no. Are they going to throw in a code patch, or even a bug report that goes beyond "Application X crashed and I don't know why" or "I want feature Z"? No. Best just to let 'em be on their way with a Vista or OSX box; when they're ready, they'll find us on their own.
And it's a question of when the application developers will see any point in doing so. If iTunes was made available for Linux tomorrow, do you think Apple would get any praise for the move? Fuck no. They'd be condemned across the board for trying to "contaminate" Linux with their evil "non-free" software.
I thought that Microsoft's success on the desktop came from being slightly less stupid than all of the potential competitors. Apple and Amiga tried to go with proprietary hardware in a commodity market, OS/2 got tied to IBM's chicken-shit customer control tactics with the PS/2 line, the various open-source Unixes tried to do away with bourgeois concepts like "marketing" and wonder why nobody knows they exist, etc etc. Granted, they're not geniuses (look at the whole Vista boondoggle), but like my grandma always said, it's not about outswimming the sharks, it's about outswimming your buddies.
Trademarks don't have to be registered to be qualified and protected as trademarks. Granted, I think registraton is necessary sometime prior to actually starting court action (kinda like copyright), and most FOSS is non-commercial, so it's kind of a moot point.
By hoops, I take it you mean "install the default web browser from the Ubuntu 8.04 CD". Granted, it's about as stable as everything else in the distribution.
XP wasn't bad on an old Toshiba POS I had (1 GHz Celeron, 256M RAM). At least before it was crufted and spywared up (I was a bit of an idiot as far as tech goes back then).
Mozilla Suite alone held >2% of the browser market since the end of the Netscape days, and most of those users were the initial Firefox crowd. Other than that, basically true. If MS won't give the customers what they want, someone else will. Really, I think MS's entry into this market is a good thing. If there's actual competition going on, it prevents Linux from being seen as "cheap software for cheap hardware." Nobody wants to be the Sam's Choice of PCs.
Syscalls come from POSIX, and explicitly are *not* derived works. Binary only kernel modules, OTOH *are* derivative works becuase they go above and beyond the syscall layer. FUSE uses a shim in kernelspace and puts the majority of the driver in userspace as a sort of workaround, so it's in the same boat as a kernel module.
Asus actually seems to be pushing a profitable product to make them more money. OLPC, like most charities, is more about assuaging guilt over the fact that we are prosperous while others aren't.
True enough. Their operating cost for a copy of Windows is about 5 cents for the manual, and with an OEM, they don't even pay for the disc. Granted, they had to pay to develop the thing, but that money's gone whether they sell ten copies or ten billion.
You're the one comparing apples and oranges here. Microsoft doesn't interalize driver development, just about every OEM knows this and gives you the recovery discs/partition for JUST THAT REASON. Linux not only interalizes development, but makes it damn near impossible (or borderline illegal) to develop useful 3rd party drivers outside of the source tree. Sure, it's their call, but if you want to walk through the briar patch, don't bitch about the thorns.
If it's a fine solution, then go with it. As a Linux user (bordering on power user), I am sick to fucking death of all the people who treat it like some sort of bad multi-level marketing scheme. If you need the constant approval of other people to justify a decision you made (especially over something as trivial as whether or not to use a fringe operating system), you're fucked in the head anyways.
You do know that hardware is a kernel thing, not a distro thing, right? If no other Linux distribution supports it, Slackware more than likely will not.
Really, any distribution boils down to package selection, package management, and release engineering. As per your example, Ubuntu uses Debian unstable for packages and apt for management, but only supports a small subset of unstable, and releases every six months. Yeah, just about every GNOME and KDE distro looks the same (well, scratch that for KDE, considering how much Mandriva, SuSE, and Kubuntu patch it all to hell and think they're actually *improving* it). Slackware's more of a throwback to the days when a Linux distro was just an easy way to get a system up and running, as opposed to an all-inclusive software library.
Eh, it's not too bad. It's ncurses based (no super-pretty, takes 10 minutes to load anaconda crap), and partitions still have to be done by hand (although cfdisk is a lot nicer than regular fdisk). All in all, just regular Linux install stuff (select packages, set time zone, configure network, yadda yadda yadda).
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If Microsoft's monopoly didn't distort the computer industry, someone else's would have. Maybe Apple, maybe IBM, maybe in that bearded Spock universe, it would have been Amiga or Be, Inc. Nobody, not software houses, retailers, or Joe Average wants to go back to the days of five or six different major platforms.
Great, now you're going to wake up with a horse's head in your bed from the Groklaw types.
I do this in just about every article like this, and I gotta do it here; if those users declare that the GUI is in fact "unready", what the fuck difference does it make? Are they throwing money into the pool? More than likely, no. Are they going to throw in a code patch, or even a bug report that goes beyond "Application X crashed and I don't know why" or "I want feature Z"? No. Best just to let 'em be on their way with a Vista or OSX box; when they're ready, they'll find us on their own.
And it's a question of when the application developers will see any point in doing so. If iTunes was made available for Linux tomorrow, do you think Apple would get any praise for the move? Fuck no. They'd be condemned across the board for trying to "contaminate" Linux with their evil "non-free" software.
I thought that Microsoft's success on the desktop came from being slightly less stupid than all of the potential competitors. Apple and Amiga tried to go with proprietary hardware in a commodity market, OS/2 got tied to IBM's chicken-shit customer control tactics with the PS/2 line, the various open-source Unixes tried to do away with bourgeois concepts like "marketing" and wonder why nobody knows they exist, etc etc. Granted, they're not geniuses (look at the whole Vista boondoggle), but like my grandma always said, it's not about outswimming the sharks, it's about outswimming your buddies.
It's kind of a lot of work for something that's basically tits on a boar for 99% of users.
Any Linux distro that has a web browser called "Mozilla Firefox" (ie, anything but Debian and the source ones) has to comply with the EULA.
Trademarks don't have to be registered to be qualified and protected as trademarks. Granted, I think registraton is necessary sometime prior to actually starting court action (kinda like copyright), and most FOSS is non-commercial, so it's kind of a moot point.
By hoops, I take it you mean "install the default web browser from the Ubuntu 8.04 CD". Granted, it's about as stable as everything else in the distribution.
XP wasn't bad on an old Toshiba POS I had (1 GHz Celeron, 256M RAM). At least before it was crufted and spywared up (I was a bit of an idiot as far as tech goes back then).
Mozilla Suite alone held >2% of the browser market since the end of the Netscape days, and most of those users were the initial Firefox crowd. Other than that, basically true. If MS won't give the customers what they want, someone else will. Really, I think MS's entry into this market is a good thing. If there's actual competition going on, it prevents Linux from being seen as "cheap software for cheap hardware." Nobody wants to be the Sam's Choice of PCs.
Syscalls come from POSIX, and explicitly are *not* derived works. Binary only kernel modules, OTOH *are* derivative works becuase they go above and beyond the syscall layer. FUSE uses a shim in kernelspace and puts the majority of the driver in userspace as a sort of workaround, so it's in the same boat as a kernel module.
FUSE requires kernel hooks, so I imagine that the usual incompatibilities would get in the way.
Asus actually seems to be pushing a profitable product to make them more money. OLPC, like most charities, is more about assuaging guilt over the fact that we are prosperous while others aren't.
True enough. Their operating cost for a copy of Windows is about 5 cents for the manual, and with an OEM, they don't even pay for the disc. Granted, they had to pay to develop the thing, but that money's gone whether they sell ten copies or ten billion.
You're the one comparing apples and oranges here. Microsoft doesn't interalize driver development, just about every OEM knows this and gives you the recovery discs/partition for JUST THAT REASON. Linux not only interalizes development, but makes it damn near impossible (or borderline illegal) to develop useful 3rd party drivers outside of the source tree. Sure, it's their call, but if you want to walk through the briar patch, don't bitch about the thorns.
If it's a fine solution, then go with it. As a Linux user (bordering on power user), I am sick to fucking death of all the people who treat it like some sort of bad multi-level marketing scheme. If you need the constant approval of other people to justify a decision you made (especially over something as trivial as whether or not to use a fringe operating system), you're fucked in the head anyways.
Not bloody likely. Even a "clean-room" interpretation of ZFS will run afoul of Sun's patents, and those patents are only licensed under the CDDL.
Your .sig's out of date.
Because it's hard to take them at their word and blame America for it at the same time.
You do know that hardware is a kernel thing, not a distro thing, right? If no other Linux distribution supports it, Slackware more than likely will not.
WTF? 12.1 ships with FVWM 2.4.20. Along with blackbox, fluxbox (my personal fave), windowmaker, and twm, the REAL man's window manager.
Really, any distribution boils down to package selection, package management, and release engineering. As per your example, Ubuntu uses Debian unstable for packages and apt for management, but only supports a small subset of unstable, and releases every six months. Yeah, just about every GNOME and KDE distro looks the same (well, scratch that for KDE, considering how much Mandriva, SuSE, and Kubuntu patch it all to hell and think they're actually *improving* it). Slackware's more of a throwback to the days when a Linux distro was just an easy way to get a system up and running, as opposed to an all-inclusive software library.
Eh, it's not too bad. It's ncurses based (no super-pretty, takes 10 minutes to load anaconda crap), and partitions still have to be done by hand (although cfdisk is a lot nicer than regular fdisk). All in all, just regular Linux install stuff (select packages, set time zone, configure network, yadda yadda yadda).
Because it has the highest amount of slack in any Linux distro.