LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  To  : Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 16:50:51 +0930

Re: French govt open source

On Sat, Apr 29, 2000 at 01:21:43PM +0918, Alan Kennington wrote:

 > <politics>
 > Of course, socialism is completely dead and/or comatose
 > in Australia. So we won't ever see this kind of legislation
 > here. The pro-capitalist parties believe in globalisation
 > (i.e. global domination by the US), and that means letting
 > MS do what they want.
 > </politics>
 
On the contrary:  The ACCC has already come out and said that they're
likely to respect and enforce any outcomes which come out of the DoJ
case in the US;  If MS is shown to be anticompetitive overseas, they'll
be deemed to be anticompetitive here too -- And our laws about that kind
of thing are much stronger than the ones in the US.

 > On the linux front, it's interesting to project forward and
 > see that maybe secret software code could be outlawed in future
 > as being a threat to security, which it is.

The French are somewhat more sensitive to that kind of thing than much
of the rest of the world, seeing as how there has been a long history of
suspicion that the US has used its spying apparatus to provide competitive
advantage to US companies at the expense of French companies.  The US
Government virtually admitted that they'd used NSA-derived info to help 
Boeing win contracts instead of Airbus.  As such, the French Government
is more leary than usual about using American software/hardware.

 > PPS. It turns out that MSI boards for ATX power supply do _not_
 > have a BIOS option to make them turn on when the mains power
 > comes back on. What a nuisance.
 > This means that ATX power supplies are incompatible with
 > the idea of a server that recovers after the power supply
 > is turned back on by whoever bought the power stations
 > from the capitalist running-dogs who flogged them off.

This is complete crap -- There are many models of ATX motherboards which
will quite happily turn themselves on under the control of a BIOS option
after power is reapplied following an outage -- our machine room at work is
full of off-the-shelf mass-produced examples of them.  As I said last time
you brought this up, don't blame the ATX spec for the crappy implementation
of same embodied in your personal motherboard/PS configuration.

    - mark

--------------------------------------------------------------------
I tried an internal modem,                    newton@atdot.dotat.org
     but it hurt when I walked.                          Mark Newton
----- Voice: +61-4-1620-2223 ------------- Fax: +61-8-82231777 -----

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