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Alan Cox: The Battle for the Desktop
richjones writes: "There's a new interview with Alan Cox up. I think he's right on the money with how Linux is going to spread into businesses, but he seems to think Internet applications are going to be big with consumers... I can't really see it... but he's Alan Cox, so he must know :)"
It's sneaking in via devices like the Tivo. Here's a solid, reliable utterly useful device with a great interface. Think of it as proof of concept that Linux can be used to make a computer for your Mom.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Like many geeks ... er programmers without any notion
of business, Mr. Cox misses the ball on the proliferation
of Linux into the consumer market. Linux will continue to
be a niche product on the desktop until the day that AOL and
the other major Internet-service providers (ISPs) provide
an Internet client that runs on Linux. Why? The #1 consumer
application -- the killer application, if you will -- is
Internet connectivity.
When will AOL provide an Internet client that allows me to dial into AOL?
Shouldn't User Friendly be apologizing to you for subjecting you to bad art and no humor? The Penny Arcade guys were right. "People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day."
>I find it hard to believe that Cox believes that he's going to be arrested
>in the US for posting security fixes
And I don't think Dmitry Sklyarov believed he would be arrested in the US for writing software which ought to be under the "Accessibility" option in a Windows install.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Of course Internet Applications are going to be big with consumers.
Well, that's one point of view; the Allan Cox and, dare I say it, Microsoft point of view. At the other end of the spectrum is the Apple 'digital hub' point of view, with iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, iToilet, iEtc. That kind of intense processing can't be done by a web app.
Personally, I'm more inclined to the digital hub theory, because if all consumers wanted was web and email, WebTV would be a big hit by now. I guess time will tell.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Most of the people I know who have personal email addresses - use hotmail. It's the worlds biggest internet app.
I have used Yahoo Calendar as my organising tool before. It's another internet app.
They're easy to use, simple to start, accessible from almost anywhere.
They aren't the future, they're the present.
My Journal
What, the inability to recognize humorous intent, even when the poster beats you about the face and neck with a smiley?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I picked up on weirdness there too, but it was mostly the part where the edited final text of the interview says
How militant are you about which licences people use for their software, and how they use them?
People who are not following the (free software) licence are pirates, it's as simple as that.
Sounds like a silly thing for ac to say, right? Well, this implies that the original, unedited response (to whatever question was _really_ asked) was
People who are not following the licence are pirates, it's as simple as that.
Which makes perfect sense, as he goes on to say
It's no different if you take GPL code and don't give people the source code, or if you make copies of movies and sell them to people, it's the same thing. In terms of other software, it really depends on the people who write it. I don't think you have a right to dictate how somebody controls their own work, apart from the very, very basic standard you'd expect.
Read: follow the bloody licence or yer a pirate. I mean, it's pretty clear what he's saying. I'd like to say that Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity") applies here; this is rather difficult, because if it's stupidity, what about the relative cluefulness of the interviewer in the rest of the interview? If it's malice, why stop there? Why bother?
I can think of some answers for a few of these questions, I suppose, but none make it too much clearer.
M$ owns the desktop until there a robust
Office clone... My perfect anti-trust settlement
would force M$ and all other companies to
use standardized file formats and submit their
extensions to a standards body.
With MS file formats can be imported but never exported. OpenOffice comes close with most file
formats but there are still companies that would
never leave MS office because the have locked
themselves into Excel macros and actually want
to send *.exe files in Outlook, etc.
Until very large companies see he benefits and
just say no to proprietary formats owning THEIR
data ten M$ will continue to reate new formats
for media, e-commerce, distributed computing...
We the people should at least own the right to
2 or more vendors for a given application type.
That's the intent of anti-trust law... Competition
actually works to increase innovation and lower costs.
Of course, free software produces dramatic costs
decreases but it does limit the exchange of value
that creates a robust market. I see Eric Ramond's
Bazaar as a swap meet type of model... Great for
bargains that only the buyer truly values but most
cannot or will ot speculate in... To risky.
Of course, big projects that support consulting
models show some promise to establish some kind of
professional market but it wold ot be the technolog marketplace we have today... and it's hard to tell
the impacts of these models on the economy in the large. As Mel Brook's loved to say as the world's oldest man... "It's a nice living."
Of course Internet Applications are going to be big with consumers. I don't see why they wouldn't. They don't require installation, they don't crash, they don't take space on the harddrive and they're easier to use.
Let's see:
IOW, Internet applications may become big, but I fear demand is more driven by IT departments (who but into the "no installation hassle" advantage) than by consumers.
I've been working for a company that created a complex application for storage and manipulation of images. They had a Windows version and a Web-based version. The Web-based version was less functional, looked like shit and was bloody annoying because of the download times.
I can see it, and here is why: As technology spreads throughout the world, the devices are going to become easier and easier to come by. Soon they will just be a part of life for everyone. Look at how televisions are in every household now, and a radio in every car.
People are generally not expected to maintain their own television sets, radios, washing machines, cars, etc.
But oddly people don't make a big fuss about Windows expecting end users to carry out maintance tasks. Whilst they do about unix type systems having separation between these two. Even though it's Windows, rather than unix, which is at odds with just about every other piece of technology...