I just love it when CEO's from companies producing large, expensive, proprietary data systems start throwing rocks at OSS because it's immature.
What's even more is how he presents the "mess" created by non free software as a reason to eliminate free software. From the fine article,
"The mess that companies have with their IT today is unimaginable, and the larger they get the more mess they have," Graf said. Some SAP customers have as many as 3,000 systems, for example.
3,000 systems and NONE OF THEM TALK TO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL WRITTEN BY GREEDY PIGHEADS. Would you like to buy another one? The one, the only, final solution that's somehow different from the other 2,999 we sold you? Ha, ha, ha.
How anyone thinks they will escape the mess outside free and open software is beyond me.
These people have the lowdown on what M$ keeps track of without telling the user. Fast find remembers your passwords and everything else you type. It's one small part of the tools that defeat any serious attempt at security on Microsoft platforms.
So stealing my laptop will allow anyone to go to websites and impersonate me?
They can do that now, depending on what tools you use to store your information. All of the better browsers have some kind of password memory. If you took Bill's bait, you are using passport, the one password to rule them all. Of course, any of the keyloggers that propagate by M$ born worm will remember your passwords without telling you and Microsoft's "fast find" has kept a log of everything you type since 98. The real thing to worry about is the system being compromised from afar. Someone who knows what they are doing does not have to steal your laptop to get what they want out of it. Non Microsoft tools have taken local and remote attack into consideration but all bets are off with silly stuff like fast find.
The govt will be able to read data from clueless suspects as they do now. So a win all round. And who doesn't suspect MS would leave backdoors anyway?
What's the difference between you and a "clueless suspect"? Nothing, unless you assume that no detective ever made a mistake. That or you ARE a criminal and consider your tools better than average.
Obviously the UK thinks M$ leaves backdoors and is asking to buy one publically. That's not very bright.
You mean the crack based on the backdoor the US government demanded or the one Bill put in for his own use or the one Bill will sell any interested party or...?
Thank you 'twitter', I'm sure Bruce Perens needed a refresher essay on how Debian works.
You are welcome, AC moron. He might not know how bad things are in the Windoze world and he might also like to see the two compared so favorably. As it's been a long time since I've had to use Windoze, I only know how bad things are when people tell me. Little details get by me, such as changing a stick of RAM or adding a hard disk ruining your XP "activation" so that you have to visit a M$ website with serial numbers and all that to make your computer work again. Debian compares favorably with nonsense like that.
In about 1-2 years the PDA market will be 100% Windows Mobile. The battle will shift into the smartphone space with Symbian and Windows Mobile being the biggest players and everyone else feeding off the table crumbs.
Steve, just promise me you won't break any chairs of fucking kill anyone when your little wet dream does not work any better than Xbox or tablet PCs.
the market has chosen features over minimalism (it always does, BTW). No matter how ridiculous it is to watch movies on a 4" screen, this is what consumers want and Microsoft answered a call while Palm actually tried to tell consumers that they actually would not want to do that.
PDA sales are in the dirtrightnow. I suspect it has something to do with a planned lack of choices outside expensive but underperforming WinCE machines and constantly breaking Windoze syncs. Those losers can't even get handwriting recognition right. Saying that Windoze mobile has won in a market like that is not saying much. They might have "won" but they did it by killing the market and it's not going to get any better till choice comes back.
Oh yeah, one more reason for poor sales is good devices. I'm still happily syncing my handspring visor with Kontact and KPilot and those programs continue to improve it's capabilities. Here's three cheers for marking contact birthdays in my calendar.
It also means you don't need special crackberry servers or a crackberry subscription. So my guess is that this will be the downfall of crackberry, and not a moment too soon.
Is there something I don't know about Blackberry reliability? So, you think it's better to use one of the least secure and most expensive mail servers because it has a special method to talk to a WinCE crippled PDA? WinCE and "Smart Phones" have both have records about as good as Exchange. Why are you so ready to jump on this?
Are you one of those people who used the term "Nutscrape"?
I'm not sure your approach would work because there is a good reason to restrict the number of companies that own those wires.
Either everyone owns the wires or anyone is free to run a new one. Anything in between invites abuse that makes the problems of either extreme look small.
The author of the article believes that regulation is the right approach, that the government should tell ISPs how they can and cannot structure their business. I'm not so libertarian as to deny that government regulation is sometimes necessary, but I prefer to see it as a solution of last resort.
An easier answer is to end government protection of cable and telco companies by opening up the public servitude to more than a single telco and a single cable company. This eliminates the monopoly abuse problem and removes the need for most regulations. The incumbents are still beholden to the public for the protection granted in the past and should be held to the promisses they made to gain that protection, even as new companies build around them to provide better service.
No further control is required to provide the public with firs rate service.
It's always beta. I'd imagine that each definition file gets some testing, but not the same amount as a new software product.
My thought is that this is the beginning of the usual Microsoft offensive into new territory on their platform. You only have to look back at the way they eliminated DRDOS, back up software, Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape and other media players to see the pattern. The hapless user sees their favorite program performance degrade and they are soon left fighting Microsoft preference changes or giving in to use the inferior Microsoft program. Other anti-competitive tricks abound as well. Try finding a free beer CD writer with ISO capability. Try the default defrag tool sometime, it takes all night to run and blows up half the time, but resizing a NTFS partition without first doing a defrag is risky. The death of Norton, Symantic and others was announced years ago when Microsoft decided that AV/Security, aka fixing their own bugs, was a profit center. So, I agree, this is not really a beta issue.
Still, this is a good time to compare the Microsoft and free distribution method lifecycles. Debian is a good example of a GNU/Linux distribution and I'll compare that to Microsoft from a user's perspective.
Debian is consistent, easy and the user is well taken care of. Code is selected in the experimental branch, tested in the testing branch and maintained in stable. The experimental branch is as good or better than most commercial software ever is. Testing is usually better and stable is like a rock. In binary form, you can still download older stable distributions, which include thousands of programs to do just about anything you want. While there are many distributions specialized to older and more limited hardware, you can pick up an older release and it will work as well as it ever did. Because of a lack of co-operation by hardware and software vendors, free software has been more difficult to install but once it's there it's stable and never goes away.
In the Windows world, the user is on their own and compatibility issues abound. Windows itself is a minimal distribution of software which does not include even the basics, such as virtual desktops or a spell checker. To get a functional system, you have to go to dozens of vendors. Individual companies write software for various versions of Windows, but it's impossible to tune it to all of them, so performance is hit and miss. Even when things do work, they might not work together, thanks to DLL hell and constant M$ "updates" which never seem to improve the system's 12 minute half life. Much like free software, Microsoft and other companies reuse and improve their code base. Unlike free software, they are unable and unwilling to co-operate. The life cycle there goes something like this:
Beta - a reward for the elite of the community. Beta software often includes features unavailable to ordinary users, and distributed free of charge. It may not be as stable as production software.
Production - The multihundred dollar thing monopoly distributed by the likes of Dell. Stability reaches it's peak, which is not very good. People using Microsoft often lose files to "data corruption" for reasons unheard of in the free software world.
End of Life. This starts the day the next "version" is released as beta software. Commercial software writers target the beta version and things get buggier and buggier for those who don't move along. Official end of life is announced by Microsoft themselves as an end of service packs and updates, but the real end is years earlier.
The after life. People continue to install their original software long after the end of life because it's the only way they have to run hardware with non free drivers and non free binaries they were sold.
While you might be able to get a system that works with itself from Dell, keeping it up is a nightmare. If any one of the twelve or so vendors changes things so that they don't wor
So long as everyone else gets to spend all of their time porting their routines to your language of choice, you will love it. Just tell them that the company needs a strong leader, someone like you.
I wish Midnight Commander would be as solid, reliable and feature rich as it's Windows cousin.
You need to discover Konqueror and Krusader. GMC, the Gnome Midnight Commander, is reasonably solid as well. With SFTP and decent underlying file systems, these programs leave their Windoze counterparts light years behind.
when a monopoly seizes control of something, it usually drives people to alternatives.... it could make the internet "free" as in speech again.
Why let things get that far? Demand access to what we've already paid for. Build your own infrastructure regardless. The more you have the more robust the country is. Centralization is obsolete and dangerous.
Those Bell assholes and the cable companies are sitting on a public network built by monopoly protection grants. They are in that position again because they made a bunch of promisses they never kept. If they want to get cute, drop the monopoly protection and let companies like Google have access to the public servitude and bandwith needed to route around their damage. That would show them who's boss and make them compete for customers. The telco monopolies stopped working decades ago, if indeed they ever did work.
Check out GTKpod. It ships with Amorak on Mepis, so you can try it live. TuxMobil has links to all the other questions you might have.
Getting a decent music player that does OGG and normal USB mass transfer is still not cheap or easy. The Xiph list is informative. Iriver players are one of the few ogg players widely available. They don't do USBfs out of the box, and I suspect most "works for sure" players suck that way and you won't find a good cheap player down the street in the US. This leaves you needing to copy your music to mp3 in order to enjoy any of the bazillion cheap portable music players out there but available music managers don't deal with this very well. Even then, finding a player that also works with USBfs is hit and miss.
PDA's running Familiar, OZ or whathave you may provide a better route to music than music players do.
You need to make sure only two or three companies have the ability to "clog the airwaves" with "official" opinion. With a single telco, you can sell your broadcast spectrum to two or three of the highest bidders which you can threaten and pit against each other. While the public debates the specious arguments you troll them with, real policy is decided by you and your friends. Everone else will then be a non mainstream crackpot easy to ignore.
If you allow a free press, true local cultures and thoughts will spring up and things are much more difficult to arrange.
...I assume your OS install disk includes Office, Photoshop lite, World of Warcraft, Quicken, TurboTax, Dreamweaver, Eudora, Half-Life 2, RealPlayer, AIM, Limewire, Webshots Desktop, Acrobat Reader, Flash, Winamp, Bookworm Deluxe, Encarta, and the countless other little things that your typical user installs over the lifetime of a machine, yes?
Linux versions or direct replacements for all of those over hyped pieces of commercial software you just named are indeed on the average GNU/Linux install disk. Mepis, for instance, comes with Acrobat, Macromedia Flash and Real Player directly, and Open Office, Gimp, XMMS and Amorak, Gaim, Azureus, Digikam as superior replacements for most of the rest. Wikipedia, of course, is a superior replacement for Encarta and kdict, kthesaurus and countless other utilities are included which have no direct Windoze substitute. The time to install this "lifetime collection" is 20 minutes. Copying your home directory moves all of your settings in a way no windoze user ever could and the install respects home directories if they are present.
The issue is the accumulated filter effects and transformations applied to a digital image. Each such effect can create subtle artifacts and degradations. When you start with 8bit/color channel (traditional 24bpp) then these can build up fast to become noticeably visible in the final image.
Well, duh, that's what internal representations are for and it has nothing to do with what I was saying. When I write an image filter, I use a 32 bit float for each channel, regardless of the input file type. Gimp does a similar trick. General input libraries handle file formats. My point was that it's unlikely that a camera will be able to capture 16 bits per channel, your eyes can't tell the difference and that people who spend big bucks on such devices are usually wasting their money. That's double the case if the camera maker uses some silly format for storage representation that they won't tell anyone about.
The problem is, is that this isn't really a fair comparison, as the Windows 2000 UI, it more comparable to something like sawfish. Well, the look is similar, but Even straight X Windows has a better feature set. So, I could use Sawfish, but If I start up a KDE Program, then it takes forever just to start it up.
It would be more fair to compare to packages that came with Woody or Potato, which are closer to year 2000 than the latest and greatest GNU Linux distribution is. KDE 2 and Gnome 1 are both speedy on those machines as are Window Maker, Afterstep and Enlightenment. The bigger window managers have grown with hardware available. Not all window managers have gone that way, and there are new low resource alternatives.
Window Maker, Afterstep and Enlightenment are still usable on that machine and new versions play well with KDE applications such as the Kicker, which you can stick to a single virtual window. I used Sarge on a 233 MHz P2 laptop with less than 256 RAM for more than a year this way. The only problem program was Open Office. It was slow but it ran for the few times I needed to deal with M$ formats.
Fluxbox and XFCE also work and there are probably others I have not tried much.
When people spend big bucks on good cameras they probably know what they are doing.
They are mostly spending big bucks. 24 bpp + alpha is more than my eyes can discern and I'd be surprised if the other 24 bpp was not mostly white noise to the camera as well. It's hard for me to imagine light and voltage differences controlled so finely in the imaging or display devices. At 16 bits you are talking about 65,536 levels of difference on each pixel. At a generous 5 volts, you are looking at controlling your signal to 7.6E-5 volts. If either your fancy camera or monitor can control line ripple to 1E-4 V, I'll give you a nickel of your money back.
As a test, take a picture of an object that's supposed to be one color under the most uniform lighting you can make then tell me how consistent all 48 bits of your color space are. I'm really interested. Point me to specs if they exist.
Using the pmap -d trick gives some insight but the amount of swap space used is what actually slows down system response. The author notes that a user who mostly runs either KDE or Gnome will pay a greater marginal cost for running the one Gnome or KDE application that's different. That's true, but it's also hard to avoid and it often does not matter, even on a modest system with 256 MB RAM. You would think that running konqueror, kontact, gimp and gnumeric on Enlightenment or Window Maker would suck down resources. It does, but it might not be enough to get you into swap space. Just run top and see. A low resource window manager can use fewer resources than a full Gnome or KDE Window Manager, despite the magic of shared libraries. DSL and Feather GNU Linux distributions run on P1s because they come with very low resource programs, which may or may not share many libraries. A little swap use does not hurt, but things get slow when too much gets in there.
The whole discussion should be grounded in the reality of alternatives. A typical M$ system will grind it's way into swap space on start up, before the user loads anything! The very latest and greatest Linux distros run well on Pentium IIs and the like, which XP refuses to install on.
So, the author is telling me that Photoshop is the most important app for Linux Desktop Migration? He tells me this right after telling me that the only people who really know how to use it are graphic design users on Macs, aka a minority of a minority of computer users? He admits that he's out of his comfort zone when it comes to graphics. What he should realize is that most of the people he knows are like that too and are better served with something that does not cost $4,000 a seat per year. The very simple tools provided by Digikam, kpaint, and konqueror are all the average user needs. GIMP is overkill for the majority of computer users. He and Novel have been trolled.
Would I be happy to see Adobe bring all their toys to the GNU/Linux party? Sure. Does more than 1% of the population need it? No.
GNU/Linux desktops have what users want and more. People who don't think so have not tried to use it in the last six years.
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It's not Irony, it's ugly. Chances are, Mac users can't read the stupid flame.
What's even more is how he presents the "mess" created by non free software as a reason to eliminate free software. From the fine article,
"The mess that companies have with their IT today is unimaginable, and the larger they get the more mess they have," Graf said. Some SAP customers have as many as 3,000 systems, for example.
3,000 systems and NONE OF THEM TALK TO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL WRITTEN BY GREEDY PIGHEADS. Would you like to buy another one? The one, the only, final solution that's somehow different from the other 2,999 we sold you? Ha, ha, ha.
How anyone thinks they will escape the mess outside free and open software is beyond me.
They can do that now, depending on what tools you use to store your information. All of the better browsers have some kind of password memory. If you took Bill's bait, you are using passport, the one password to rule them all. Of course, any of the keyloggers that propagate by M$ born worm will remember your passwords without telling you and Microsoft's "fast find" has kept a log of everything you type since 98. The real thing to worry about is the system being compromised from afar. Someone who knows what they are doing does not have to steal your laptop to get what they want out of it. Non Microsoft tools have taken local and remote attack into consideration but all bets are off with silly stuff like fast find.
Things are better on non M$ platforms.
What's the difference between you and a "clueless suspect"? Nothing, unless you assume that no detective ever made a mistake. That or you ARE a criminal and consider your tools better than average.
Obviously the UK thinks M$ leaves backdoors and is asking to buy one publically. That's not very bright.
You mean the crack based on the backdoor the US government demanded or the one Bill put in for his own use or the one Bill will sell any interested party or ...?
You are welcome, AC moron. He might not know how bad things are in the Windoze world and he might also like to see the two compared so favorably. As it's been a long time since I've had to use Windoze, I only know how bad things are when people tell me. Little details get by me, such as changing a stick of RAM or adding a hard disk ruining your XP "activation" so that you have to visit a M$ website with serial numbers and all that to make your computer work again. Debian compares favorably with nonsense like that.
Steve, just promise me you won't break any chairs of fucking kill anyone when your little wet dream does not work any better than Xbox or tablet PCs.
the market has chosen features over minimalism (it always does, BTW). No matter how ridiculous it is to watch movies on a 4" screen, this is what consumers want and Microsoft answered a call while Palm actually tried to tell consumers that they actually would not want to do that.
PDA sales are in the dirt right now. I suspect it has something to do with a planned lack of choices outside expensive but underperforming WinCE machines and constantly breaking Windoze syncs. Those losers can't even get handwriting recognition right. Saying that Windoze mobile has won in a market like that is not saying much. They might have "won" but they did it by killing the market and it's not going to get any better till choice comes back.
Oh yeah, one more reason for poor sales is good devices. I'm still happily syncing my handspring visor with Kontact and KPilot and those programs continue to improve it's capabilities. Here's three cheers for marking contact birthdays in my calendar.
Is there something I don't know about Blackberry reliability? So, you think it's better to use one of the least secure and most expensive mail servers because it has a special method to talk to a WinCE crippled PDA? WinCE and "Smart Phones" have both have records about as good as Exchange. Why are you so ready to jump on this?
Are you one of those people who used the term "Nutscrape"?
Either everyone owns the wires or anyone is free to run a new one. Anything in between invites abuse that makes the problems of either extreme look small.
An easier answer is to end government protection of cable and telco companies by opening up the public servitude to more than a single telco and a single cable company. This eliminates the monopoly abuse problem and removes the need for most regulations. The incumbents are still beholden to the public for the protection granted in the past and should be held to the promisses they made to gain that protection, even as new companies build around them to provide better service.
No further control is required to provide the public with firs rate service.
It's always beta. I'd imagine that each definition file gets some testing, but not the same amount as a new software product.
My thought is that this is the beginning of the usual Microsoft offensive into new territory on their platform. You only have to look back at the way they eliminated DRDOS, back up software, Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape and other media players to see the pattern. The hapless user sees their favorite program performance degrade and they are soon left fighting Microsoft preference changes or giving in to use the inferior Microsoft program. Other anti-competitive tricks abound as well. Try finding a free beer CD writer with ISO capability. Try the default defrag tool sometime, it takes all night to run and blows up half the time, but resizing a NTFS partition without first doing a defrag is risky. The death of Norton, Symantic and others was announced years ago when Microsoft decided that AV/Security, aka fixing their own bugs, was a profit center. So, I agree, this is not really a beta issue.
Still, this is a good time to compare the Microsoft and free distribution method lifecycles. Debian is a good example of a GNU/Linux distribution and I'll compare that to Microsoft from a user's perspective.
Debian is consistent, easy and the user is well taken care of. Code is selected in the experimental branch, tested in the testing branch and maintained in stable. The experimental branch is as good or better than most commercial software ever is. Testing is usually better and stable is like a rock. In binary form, you can still download older stable distributions, which include thousands of programs to do just about anything you want. While there are many distributions specialized to older and more limited hardware, you can pick up an older release and it will work as well as it ever did. Because of a lack of co-operation by hardware and software vendors, free software has been more difficult to install but once it's there it's stable and never goes away.
In the Windows world, the user is on their own and compatibility issues abound. Windows itself is a minimal distribution of software which does not include even the basics, such as virtual desktops or a spell checker. To get a functional system, you have to go to dozens of vendors. Individual companies write software for various versions of Windows, but it's impossible to tune it to all of them, so performance is hit and miss. Even when things do work, they might not work together, thanks to DLL hell and constant M$ "updates" which never seem to improve the system's 12 minute half life. Much like free software, Microsoft and other companies reuse and improve their code base. Unlike free software, they are unable and unwilling to co-operate. The life cycle there goes something like this:
While you might be able to get a system that works with itself from Dell, keeping it up is a nightmare. If any one of the twelve or so vendors changes things so that they don't wor
Given 11 dimensions, you will be able to kiss everyone good bye, at the same time, without knowing it.
You need to discover Konqueror and Krusader. GMC, the Gnome Midnight Commander, is reasonably solid as well. With SFTP and decent underlying file systems, these programs leave their Windoze counterparts light years behind.
Why let things get that far? Demand access to what we've already paid for. Build your own infrastructure regardless. The more you have the more robust the country is. Centralization is obsolete and dangerous.
Those Bell assholes and the cable companies are sitting on a public network built by monopoly protection grants. They are in that position again because they made a bunch of promisses they never kept. If they want to get cute, drop the monopoly protection and let companies like Google have access to the public servitude and bandwith needed to route around their damage. That would show them who's boss and make them compete for customers. The telco monopolies stopped working decades ago, if indeed they ever did work.
Getting a decent music player that does OGG and normal USB mass transfer is still not cheap or easy. The Xiph list is informative. Iriver players are one of the few ogg players widely available. They don't do USBfs out of the box, and I suspect most "works for sure" players suck that way and you won't find a good cheap player down the street in the US. This leaves you needing to copy your music to mp3 in order to enjoy any of the bazillion cheap portable music players out there but available music managers don't deal with this very well. Even then, finding a player that also works with USBfs is hit and miss.
PDA's running Familiar, OZ or whathave you may provide a better route to music than music players do.
If you allow a free press, true local cultures and thoughts will spring up and things are much more difficult to arrange.
Linux versions or direct replacements for all of those over hyped pieces of commercial software you just named are indeed on the average GNU/Linux install disk. Mepis, for instance, comes with Acrobat, Macromedia Flash and Real Player directly, and Open Office, Gimp, XMMS and Amorak, Gaim, Azureus, Digikam as superior replacements for most of the rest. Wikipedia, of course, is a superior replacement for Encarta and kdict, kthesaurus and countless other utilities are included which have no direct Windoze substitute. The time to install this "lifetime collection" is 20 minutes. Copying your home directory moves all of your settings in a way no windoze user ever could and the install respects home directories if they are present.
What were you trying to tell us?
Well, duh, that's what internal representations are for and it has nothing to do with what I was saying. When I write an image filter, I use a 32 bit float for each channel, regardless of the input file type. Gimp does a similar trick. General input libraries handle file formats. My point was that it's unlikely that a camera will be able to capture 16 bits per channel, your eyes can't tell the difference and that people who spend big bucks on such devices are usually wasting their money. That's double the case if the camera maker uses some silly format for storage representation that they won't tell anyone about.
It would be more fair to compare to packages that came with Woody or Potato, which are closer to year 2000 than the latest and greatest GNU Linux distribution is. KDE 2 and Gnome 1 are both speedy on those machines as are Window Maker, Afterstep and Enlightenment. The bigger window managers have grown with hardware available. Not all window managers have gone that way, and there are new low resource alternatives.
Window Maker, Afterstep and Enlightenment are still usable on that machine and new versions play well with KDE applications such as the Kicker, which you can stick to a single virtual window. I used Sarge on a 233 MHz P2 laptop with less than 256 RAM for more than a year this way. The only problem program was Open Office. It was slow but it ran for the few times I needed to deal with M$ formats.
Fluxbox and XFCE also work and there are probably others I have not tried much.
They are mostly spending big bucks. 24 bpp + alpha is more than my eyes can discern and I'd be surprised if the other 24 bpp was not mostly white noise to the camera as well. It's hard for me to imagine light and voltage differences controlled so finely in the imaging or display devices. At 16 bits you are talking about 65,536 levels of difference on each pixel. At a generous 5 volts, you are looking at controlling your signal to 7.6E-5 volts. If either your fancy camera or monitor can control line ripple to 1E-4 V, I'll give you a nickel of your money back.
As a test, take a picture of an object that's supposed to be one color under the most uniform lighting you can make then tell me how consistent all 48 bits of your color space are. I'm really interested. Point me to specs if they exist.
The whole discussion should be grounded in the reality of alternatives. A typical M$ system will grind it's way into swap space on start up, before the user loads anything! The very latest and greatest Linux distros run well on Pentium IIs and the like, which XP refuses to install on.
Would I be happy to see Adobe bring all their toys to the GNU/Linux party? Sure. Does more than 1% of the population need it? No.
GNU/Linux desktops have what users want and more. People who don't think so have not tried to use it in the last six years.