[thelist] AOL wants to buy RH Linux??

[deke]

On 20 Jan 2002 at 13:50, .jeff posted a message which said:

> let's talk about mapquest.  it used to be one of the best mapping sites
> on the net (circa 98ish).  now look at it, it's just an aol billboard --
> 6 banners on the homepage and they're all for aol.  

Hmmm. It looks to *me* like maps.yahoo.com - powered by mapquest -
is a Yahoo billboard.

> here's an idea if you think aol isn't so bad -- go find some
> documentation on a particular product from aol.  now, go find
> documentation about a particular product from microsoft.  sure, you
> might have alittle difficulty finding microsoft's, but you'll be damned
> if you can find anything for aol. heck, webtv's developer documentation
> is *really* easy to find:
> http://developer.webtv.net/
> you can even get a viewer for testing your pages in.  

Actually, that site now redirects to developer.msntv.com. And while the 
documentation is easy to find, it is absymally incomplete.

How many cookies can a MSNTV user have from a single site, and how many 
in total?  MSNTV doesn't say. How does a MSNTV user view his cookies or 
delete them?  MSNTV doesn't say. Did you know that there is a way to 
give an MSNTV user a cookie that can't be deleted? MSNTV doesn't talk 
about them. How do you provide a link for a MSNTV user to a given 
channel on a given port of a given IRC server?  MSNTV doesn't say. How 
do you provide a link to the MSNTV user's home page? MSNTV doesn't say.

> can you do the
> same for aol's service.  ha!  yeah right.  you can if you infest your
> system with an aol install and pay for the service each month.

Whereas, you can't even get that information from MSNTV if you *do* 
subscribe.  (Of course, subscribers can read the MSNTV TOS, and you 
cannot do *that* from outside of MSNTV.)

> > But the key point of this is that RED HAT DOESN'T OWN
> > LINUX.

> well, yes.  quite true and a fair distinction.  however, you're missing
> the point i was making in that aol would own the os on the computers of
> its users (from the perspective that their customers couldn't migrate to
> another os).

And can an MSN user switch operating systems? No. In any case, how is 
AOL on Linux on a PC any different than AOL on Linux on an AOLTV?

Netscape is available for something like 18 or 20 different OSes. 
Microsoft doesn't make MSIE available for anything except *certain* 
versions of Windows, *certain* versions of Mac, and *certain* versions 
of Solaris.

deke
--------
We are the parents our people warned us about....