gottahavacuppamocha

I’ve been doing some updating over the past week. Basically, I added some new forums and deleted a couple of old ones. I re-arranged the eGallery by getting rid of the “downloads” section there and putting the images in either the textures section or the CG Art section. I added some new links and a few new sections in the links as well. And finally, I changed the default theme to aqua2.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you probably know Microsoft is being tried in the United States for anti-competitive practices that have helped it gain a virtual monopoly in operating systems (OS’s) for personal computers. You go into any place computers are sold and you would be hard pressed to find a computer running anything other than Windows (with the exception of Apple). So, Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems on PC’s, whether by accident or design. Microsoft has tried (and is trying) very hard to keep its market share. This is obvious, because Windows is it’s best known, and probably most used product. They say it’s reliable. It’s stable because they have 99.999% uptime. It’s versatile because of the wide variety of programs it runs. And probably most important of all, it’s familiar. People know Windows, and know how to work with it.

At this point, they subtly engage in spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) with regards to other operating systems, such as Linux. They tell people that free software is anti-competitive because a company can’t make money off of a free product (How will we pay our employees?). They it’s un-American, ignoring that competition – in whatever form – is very American. They say open-source stifles innovation, because if people can’t profit for their works, there will be no incentive to create anything new, ignoring the fact that there are thousands of open-source projects turning out elegant, sophisticated products like GIMP, OpenOffice, Xine, Mozilla, and so on.

For many people, the arguments seem to make sense. I mean, how can a company make money if gives its products away for free. Duh. Most of the people who buy this argument haven’t heard of SuSE, Red Hat, or Mandrake, or they may have heard they were in troubled financial straits. These companies make money by selling a “free” product. Plus, they also sell services, and give their customers value for what they buy. These companies don’t necessarily make a ton of money – certainly not on a Microsoft scale – but they do make money.

I think Microsoft is worried about what will happen with the trial for a few reasons. A court in France ruled against Microsoft, saying that they used someone else’s source code in one of their products. Essentially, they stole. I think that nothing scares Microsoft more than the Windows source code being opened up, for two reasons. I’m guessing they know (or suspect, or fear) that somewhere in the code for Windows there is a piece of code that was taken from a GPL program. This could expose them to lawsuits where they might end up paying x dollars for every copy of Windows sold. And worse yet, if there is GPL code, then they might be held to the GPL license which says that if you use a piece of code that was released under the General Public License (GPL), then the rest of the code also has to be released under the license. I think the threat of the GPL would be more frightening than a lawsuit. Microsoft has lawyers galore to fight lawsuits. Open-source advocates have a deep knowledge of how software is put together and they will undoubtedly spend hours/days/weeks/months poring over Windows source code.

If open-source advocates got a hold of the Windows source code, they dissect it thoroughly. They will take it apart line-by-line. They will laugh at it. They will be amazed by it. They will change it. They will break it. They will improve it. In the spirit of open-source, they will probably send the improvements back to Microsoft. If it is found that Microsoft used GPL’d code, then there would probably be a variety of reactions. From the gloating (“My code is so good that Microsoft used it”), to the PR storm, to the inevitable lawsuits, open-source advocates would have a field day.

Open source isn’t so bad. Microsoft would stand to gain a tremendous amount of goodwill with open-source programs, particularly if they followed the “many-eyes” and “release early and often” approaches to development. Their operating systems (which would be free software, at this point) would probably become a lot more stable. Sure, they would probably have to do a lot of revisions, but the quality of the product would most likely improve. Of course, it would actually depend on what revisions they included. They would have to get over the, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” mentality, and realize that those features are really bugs. Once they did that, the number of security problems (worms, viruses, etc) would probably decrease considerably.

Anyway, operating systems should be free all around. A computer is worthless without an operating system. Sure, you can turn it on and watch the BIOS come up, but the novelty of that wears off pretty quick. Microsoft can make money with other things like Office, Visual Studio, the X box, and whatnot. The computer makers would love it because it cut down on their costs. Consumers would love it because they would be able to afford computers again. If Microsoft gave away a very basic version of Windows, it would probably spark another high-tech boom, like the one in the mid-to-late 1990’s. They could post it free on the web or an FTP server, and save the money of packaging and CDs.

On the other hand, this would probably ensure their monopoly for a long time. Forget it. Maybe the court should make Microsoft charge an additional $500/copy for Windows. That would be both punitive, and enable their competition to grow. Computer makers would dump Windows faster than you can say Linux.

I just finished upgrading my computer to SuSE 8.0. No biggie, I know, but there are a lot of features I wanted that have been added or improved since SuSE 7.3, which I had on it previously.

Probably the most noticeable things are the fast and simple installation, that fact improved hardware detection, and the new interface. Since I just finished, it’s still pretty early to tell whether it’s an improvements over 7.3 or not, but here are that pros and cons as I see them

Pros:

The new KDE 3 window manager/desktop has some updated features that I really wanted…like the integrated digital camera browser.

The default installation is very quick – even with a 40GB hard drive.

The fact that it found my ZIP drive – and it works :-)

There is lot of mature software in this issue (mature is version 1.0 or higher – not a beta version)

It recognized my CD-R as a CD-R (I still have to see how well it records though)

Cons: (or maybe I’m nitpicking)

The “upgrade” selection didn’t work. I had to do a fresh install, which means I lost some data. On the other hand, I should have backed up everything first. Luckily, there was nothing there that I couldn’t stand to lose. Most of it was crap anyway.

I have a 17″ monitor and the default resolution on it is 1024×768, which is just a little too large for me. The other option it gave me was 1600×1200, in which everything is pretty tiny. I would ideally have a 1280×1024 screen resolution, but for somereason it didn’t give me that option. I’ll have to fool around to get that working right.

It didn’t see my old parallel-port ZIP…or it sees it, but it doesn’t work. It does see my internal ZIP, so I don’t really need the other one, but it’s a minor annoyance (whine).

It sees my printer, but it doesn’t work. This is more a problem with my printer, which uses some proprietary software, rather than a fault with Linux. On the other hand at least it sees it, unlike SuSE 7.3, which didn’t even do that. The installation stuff said that there wer uissues with these types of printers, and to check out the SuSE website for the latest information and possibley the latest drivers. Haven’t done it yet, but it’s on the itinerary tonight.
It didn’t come with some of my favorite programs from the last issue, such as Xine and Blender. Okay, Blender is out of business, but they could have at least put in an old version. As far as Xine goes, I’ll just get the latest copy off the web.

It has two Napster clients (which was shut down even at the time this edition came out) but no Gnutella clients (as far as I can tell)

Overall, it seems like a good distribution and one that would be very easy for even a Linux novice to setup. The cons are relatively minor, and the pros are definite improvements. I look forward to seeing what they do in the future