IDG is an interesting workaround, but I don't really need it. Until 6 gets here, OpenSSH does what I want. I can get files and gui's out of my network. That's all I really need until I bother with VOIP, but then I can do that on my gateway machine as easy as I can on any other.
The thing I thought was funny was how they carefully but incompletely stepped through the hypothetical argument they had just made fun of. What it showed me was that both Windoze and Mac have serious and arbitrary limitations that create ignorance and force poor networking practices on the world. If you don't understand and work within those crazy limitations, you just are not leet like the Ars people are.
I predict it will succeed in displacing jpg just like png displaced both gif and jpg.
Or WMA replaced MP3. png did replace gif with good reason and could take the place of jpeg without much cost to device makers. M$ pushed WMA as hard as they could, making it the default format for WMP, shoving it down the throats of device makers while forbiding them to use ogg, but WMA still flopped. It flopped because it sucked. They said it was better but it was not and everyone ignored them.
The article does a great job of presenting the debate. In every talk, you should tell the audience what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell you what you told them. In this case, the author took the novel and interesting approach of using a Slashdot summary of the subject, linking to a previous discussion and paraphrasing it. I present the summary and the expansion side by side to highlight their ingenious rhetorical style:
"Use NAT, n00b. All 1337 of my Linux boxes share a single IP and it's safer, too!"
Hosts behind a NAT device get addresses in the 10.0.0.0, 172.16.0.0, or 192.168.0.0 address blocks that have been set aside for private use in RFC 1918. The NAT device replaces the private address in packets sent by the hosts in the internal network with its own address, and the reverse for incoming packets. This way, multiple computers can share a single public address.
"NAT is not a firewall."
With IPv4, there will generally be a NAT device that functions as a simple firewall by blocking incoming sessions (although there are ways to trick NATs into allowing them). If you're working on security, keep your eye out for IPv6 because if overlooked, IPv6 could allow things that are blocked over IPv4.
"NAT sucks."
[1]However, NAT has several downsides. First of all, incoming connections don't work anymore, because when a session request comes in from the outside, the NAT device doesn't know which internal host this request should go to.
[2]Things get even trickier for applications that need referrals. NAT also breaks protocols that embed IP addresses. For instance, with VoIP, the client computer says to the server, "Please send incoming calls to this address." Obviously this doesn't work if the address in question is a private address. For this reason and a few others, most of the people who participate in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) don't care much for NAT.
"You suck."
This [1]is largely solvable with port mappings and protocols like uPnP and NAT-PMP.
Working around this [2] requires a significant amount of special case logic in the NAT device, the communication protocol, and/or the application.
More to the point, NAT is already in wide use, and apparently we still need 170 million new IP addresses every year.
Thanks for the shoutout, Ars. The explanation of various non free software limitations for using IP4/IP6 and partial explanation of why those systems may need firewalls to begin with is sure to add to the human body of knowledge and foster civilized conversations. After reading the article, it's all clear to me, for sure not at all. Respeckt!
Far from displacing US workers, highly skilled foreign-born workers will continue to function as they always have: as job creators.
Do you really think Mr. Gates wants new software companies that compete with Microsoft? The same Bill Gates that's trying to kill Google and Wikipedia like he wiped out Netscape, Palm, OS/2, Correl, Caldera and so on and so forth? How can you believe what he has said, knowing his company's predatory past?
No, Mr. Gates is not interested in US job creation, he's interested in lower operating costs for M$. If he wanted to create jobs he's got all the money and position he needs. Instead his shadow hangs over every tech start up and has discouraged everyone, much to the detriment of his business model. His business model has always been to buy the "loss leader", or their employees, for substantially less than it would cost him to make his own product and then use it to crush all other competitors. Far from creating new jobs, his approach has destroyed existing jobs and discouraged tech investment which would create future work. Now, as people with any sense are avoiding tech like the outsource prone disaster it is, Mr. Gates finds himself unable to "innovate" cheaply.
The non free way no longer makes money for anyone who's not a M$ vassal, and increasingly, those are feeling the squeeze too. Fortunately, free software continues to provide users what they need and profits for those who would compete fairly. IBM, Google, and just about everyone but M$ is sick of M$.
Upgrades are just one practical and obvious problem with non free software in cars. Your worries are justified in an industry that practically invented "planned obsolescence" and still practices every form imaginable. Just look at the myriad of mechanical and electrical fasteners that already exist in automobiles when standardization would be cheaper. Of course they chose M$, when they could have better control and lower costs of their own gnu/linux based systems.
There are more sinister problems with the lack of control non free software enforces. Some that spring to mind are
OnStar type bugging of cell phones through the bluetooth system that can be done outside of public network protections,
inaccurate and impossible to audit reporting of driving habits to insurance comp,
private geographical tracking,
computer failures making the car unusably inconvenient if not dangerous,
single source subscription radio,
Other people can think of more sinister things, because I'm basically honest and don't think like the above.
The civil liberty implications are the most disturbing, even though they directly effect a small minority of activists who may be harassed and silenced. The indirect effect of a corporate/government police surveillance state apply to all and are much greater than the sum of their parts and is miserable for everyone. The only thing more expensive than liberty is slavery.
I'm going to avoid the whole mess, if I can. I have devices that work and don't need built in toys.
As one commenter put it, "Find me a CEO with two employees, no revenue, and $200,000 in assets who makes $146,000 a year."
The $150,000 in created value is not a revenue.... Moms are basically like the best nannies, and those make $40K. My wife deserves millions, but not in a free market.
Not to knock the nanny, but they don't do all of the things the wife does and that's how they measured the substitution cost. People who don't grasp this concept run businesses into the ground because they don't have a real grasp on what their employees actually do for company.
Salary.com measures the salary of a stay-at-home mom. (The statisticians calculated that doing the housekeeping, cooking, babysitting, chauffeuring, administration and other jobs involved in staying at home with a preschooler in Chicago would probably take around 91 hours a week and be worth about $146,000.)
Check out very impressive clean up of a PDA camera. That's good. Ordinary smoothing filters blur important details, like those in the watch or the baby's ear. How nice that it is already in Digikam, one of the easiest to use photo managers out there.
This pyramid photo has basically been 'ruined' after the denoising...
Do you think? Are those details in the stone any more real than those in the sky? Some may have been lost, but I'm having a hard time deciding which should have stayed. The picture was sad to begin with.
They are overly smoothed and detail is destroyed. They look like the type of thing a noob makes upon discovering video filters. For example, look at the delicate features in the jellyfish or the pig's hair. This samples look more like demonstrations of soften or posterization filters.
Sure, he's a noob. That DT-MRI of gray matter paths in your brain based on diffusion tensors is purely the stuff of rank amateurs! Bah, next you will tell me free software authors can make a powerful and easy to use image editor. I'm sticking to well known commercial filters found in Paint Shop Pro version 1.0, you know the one that fits on a floppy. Yeah, that's the freedom program.
Oh wait, those other filters are not helping my pig. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong and need to leave that to the pros as well.
They should also use real, not artificial, noise.
Sufficiently advanced noise is indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of a cheap imaging device, but it's not magic.
Of course they found emails saying this. It's blatantly obvious to any armchair strategist. The only way you wouldn't find an email somewhere in the MS vault saying something anti-competitive is if the entire organization had been coached not to use this type of language.
Tomorrow, the M$ astroturfer cloud, will tell me I'm paranoid and that M$ is not that evil.
"M$" was not mentioned by name - that's probably because Cerf knows the problem can hardly be blamed on Microsoft
I'll let Cerf tell me that, not some troll like you. The little slide show you pointed to mentioned XP but no other OS. What exactly were you trying to tell me? Have you found a successful gnu/linux hosted botnet outside of a lab? Take your chicken little nonsense back to Redmond and help those idiots hold up the sky, because it has fallen on them.
Cerf says the biggest threats are the proliferation of spam, botnets, malware, and denial-of-service attacks. "Much work is needed to increase the security of the Internet and its connected computers," he says, "and to make the environment more reliable for everyone."
"And use of IPSec would foil some higher-level protocol attacks, and digital signing of IP address assignment records could reduce some routing/spoofing risks," he says. OSes need to be more airtight, too, and two-factor authentication should be more the norm than plain old passwords, he says.
But Cerf knows securing his baby won't be easy. "Security is a mesh of actions and features and mechanisms," he says. "No one thing makes you secure."
It's too bad the reporter injected so much of their own opinion into the article. I'd much rather have heard Cert's own words than interpretations. The result is that it looks like the reporter did not ask the right questions at the time to get clear answers.
Reading and rereading the above, it looks like he's thinking of ways to make the network work without having to trust the clients attached. That would be a neat trick.
What, and risk government Office sales? That would sink them.
3. Users too stubborn to use anything but Office.
I suppose you mean, M$ makes it difficult to save in anything but their own formats with all the usual cheap tricks:
Creating confusing names like OOXML, which looks like Open Office XML but is not.
Changing their own format down the road to make it more "open" sounding.
Making the "save as" button hard to find.
Hiding file extensions, so the user can't tell what they have.
"updating" user preferences all the time.
Sure they can keep playing those silly games, but it's going to cost them sales. People don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for software that tricks them and does not do what they want.
No, M$ is fighting this with all of their might, errr money and they are going to lose.
Microsoft lobbyists stampeding to California to convince them that OOXML is actually "open".
If that's true, it will be cheaper for M$ to give in and adopt ODF. If M$ starts throwing around lobby money, every grafty legislator in the country is going to figure out how to suck it up. You can expect every state and federal legislature to introduce multiple bills, everyone of them expecting a pay off. Smear campaigns won't work because the clever law monkeys will find fall guys to sacrifice while they collect the cash for defeating threats to M$ business and innovation. As soon as one bill is defeated, another one will pop up and it will pass when M$ gets tired of spending money.
This battle is over, but it's going to be fun to see how badly M$ is going to fall for it. I'm not very good at math in situations like this. Is there anyone out there who can predict what $40 billion dollars is divided by fifty state legislatures and all of the world's federal governments? I keep getting zero errors.
It also wouldn't shock me if this initiative in CA, TX, etc. gets shot down thanks to massive MS lobbying efforts.
If that's true, it will be cheaper for M$ to give in and adopt ODF. If M$ starts throwing around lobby money, every grafty legislator in the country is going to figure out how to suck it up. You can expect every state and federal legislature to introduce multiple bills, everyone of them expecting a pay off. Smear campaigns won't work because the clever little monkeys will find fall guys to sacrifice while they collect the cash for defeating threats to M$ business and innovation.
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on
The funny thing is that users only get the features they want if they are free to implement them. Quality software is a fortunate byproduct of free software. The same kinds of arguments were made two hundred years ago about the link between freedom and wealth and they are just as true today.
Well troll, since you're so sure of this, why don't you tell us what Microsoft does not provide that Apple has? That should be amusing.
Botnet membership? Oh wait, that's what M$ provides that Apple does not. Apple offers a far better user experience that M$ does, but I'm not really interested in the details.
I listed things that free software offers that neither Apple nor M$ have and that's really all that matters to me.
United States of America Population: 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)
California Population: 33,871,648
Texas Population: 20,851,820
Massachusetts Population: 6,349,097
Minnesota Population: 4,919,479
What's that 66/300, 22%? Better than 4/50 or 8% would suggest. California alone is better than 8%.
Don't worry, there will be more soon. States like NY, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, etc. usually follow the tech savvy lead of CA, TX and MA quickly. Sooner or later all of them do.
Microsoft will soon have to compete with something other than secret file formats and other dirty tricks. If Vista is the best they've got, it's over.
The only way applications can compete on merit is if they all use published standards to exchange information. No one can compete with secret formats and no public document should ever use one. Nothing but greed and fear of competition is keeping M$ from using ODF or inventing an equally well documented standard. Well, perhaps a little incompetence keeps them second rate.
90% of computer users are incapable of operating a command line.
That does not really matter for my project because it's just for me. I've documented the code I've written so others in the group can use it if they want to, but when I'm done the work is done and there will be little need for it.
That most people can't use a command line is a sad M$ legacy. DOS was and still is both clumsy and lacking proper documentation. I'm told they finally got tab complete sort of working, but their paths are still foo-bar and there's no proper man or info commands. Without bash, proper paths and man, I would not know much either.
Dell and Gateway do great in the corporate world, which is a space Apple has yet to penetrate to any large degree, because the customer doesn't fit their product space.
What kind of crazy assumptions and blinders go into that conclusion? What exactly does Apple offer that does not fit the corporate customer? How does Windoze fit them better? Are you trying to tell me that fewer features for more money is what big dumb companies want? Bah! companies need to get their work done and everything else is a costly distraction. The more tools they have to do that and the less they cost, the better the corporate user works.
Neither company fits what big companies need. The only advantage non free software enjoys right now is in multi media and non free entertainment content. If companies really care about that, Apple is the winner. In every other category, free software wins. Right now, free software offers control, hardware costs, flexibility, stability and applications people in the non free software world envy. User created tools do the user's work better than boxed bits.
Don't cry about legacy systems holding them back either. Those are non free problems that go away as soon as you get out of the non free world. The longer companies wait, the more they pay and the harder it gets. Every dollar you spend on non free software is another dollar the non free software companies use to build the next trap for your data. Now, as M$ transitions to Vista, is the best time to jump. Wine, crossover office, email exporters and all sorts of other tools work with current M$ junk. Vista will, I'm sure, break many of those tools and make things harder again. Rather than spend lots of money on a Vista downgrade, people should be making a free software upgrade. Apple and M$ have their legacy niches, and that's where they should be deployed until those gaps are filled. Many of those gaps can be filled with virtual computing. Actual needs, like small scale movie making and drafting, would give non free a vanishing minority OS share.
Finally, as non affiliated computer customization and sales companies, both Dell and Gateway should be able to sell any of the above to any company. That they can't is one of the biggest downers of non free software. The game only works as long as everyone co operates to screw the customer and each other. The first company that breaks out of the game is going to be the biggest winner. When the rest follow, they will all have to compete on an even playing field of hardware and organizational merit.
Why not just use the command line? I didn't see anything in this article that would exclude its usage.
An example he cites but does not provide, is a photo browser. You could use a combination of image magic and curses to do the same thing, but cli input could be tedious for more than simple viewing and the author's approach could save effort.
I'm doing a lot of cli image manipulation and I'm interested in this technique. I've got an ugly imaging device and a pile of c code to interpret it's output and make images of it. Having some simple feedback would be nice. It would be even nicer if I could serve that output to others in my group in a platform independent way.
"It's a process that's excruciatingly manual... with each person able to do less than ten machines a night "
Bullshit. Do you even *believe* this crap you write? You've never had a job in a real company with more than 100 machines, so do us all a favor and just don't share your opinion on things like these. OK? Thanks.
Yes, Bungi, I've actually been on a Windoze upgrade slave gang for a fortune 100 bank and what I describe is how I remember it. They had some of the automated upgrade tools you mentioned, but they did not work. Instead, they wiped and reloaded with boot floppies that grabbed images from a server running linux. Most of the programs had to be installed anyway so that the registry would be consistent.
Did you really? You're so leet. By any chance would you happen to be running an eight-year old version of Linux?
Ha ha, I'm a normal desktop user and no, I don't have to run eight year old versions of software that have been continually upgraded and improved. The longest chain of upgrading I can remember is potato to woody to sarge. It got tricky once but everything usually worked. Mostly, it's easier to install binaries fresh. Leet is a concept that only applies in the non free world of secrets and bullshit.
You mean forget everything I know? No way! Even if I thought outsourcing email was a good idea, M$ is the last group I'd trust. I don't, but I can say that LSU's outsourced email works.
Slashdot Mirror
IDG is an interesting workaround, but I don't really need it. Until 6 gets here, OpenSSH does what I want. I can get files and gui's out of my network. That's all I really need until I bother with VOIP, but then I can do that on my gateway machine as easy as I can on any other.
The thing I thought was funny was how they carefully but incompletely stepped through the hypothetical argument they had just made fun of. What it showed me was that both Windoze and Mac have serious and arbitrary limitations that create ignorance and force poor networking practices on the world. If you don't understand and work within those crazy limitations, you just are not leet like the Ars people are.
I predict it will succeed in displacing jpg just like png displaced both gif and jpg.
Or WMA replaced MP3. png did replace gif with good reason and could take the place of jpeg without much cost to device makers. M$ pushed WMA as hard as they could, making it the default format for WMP, shoving it down the throats of device makers while forbiding them to use ogg, but WMA still flopped. It flopped because it sucked. They said it was better but it was not and everyone ignored them.
The article does a great job of presenting the debate. In every talk, you should tell the audience what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell you what you told them. In this case, the author took the novel and interesting approach of using a Slashdot summary of the subject, linking to a previous discussion and paraphrasing it. I present the summary and the expansion side by side to highlight their ingenious rhetorical style:
"Use NAT, n00b. All 1337 of my Linux boxes share a single IP and it's safer, too!"
"NAT is not a firewall."
"NAT sucks."
"You suck."
Thanks for the shoutout, Ars. The explanation of various non free software limitations for using IP4/IP6 and partial explanation of why those systems may need firewalls to begin with is sure to add to the human body of knowledge and foster civilized conversations. After reading the article, it's all clear to me, for sure not at all. Respeckt!
Far from displacing US workers, highly skilled foreign-born workers will continue to function as they always have: as job creators.
Do you really think Mr. Gates wants new software companies that compete with Microsoft? The same Bill Gates that's trying to kill Google and Wikipedia like he wiped out Netscape, Palm, OS/2, Correl, Caldera and so on and so forth? How can you believe what he has said, knowing his company's predatory past?
No, Mr. Gates is not interested in US job creation, he's interested in lower operating costs for M$. If he wanted to create jobs he's got all the money and position he needs. Instead his shadow hangs over every tech start up and has discouraged everyone, much to the detriment of his business model. His business model has always been to buy the "loss leader", or their employees, for substantially less than it would cost him to make his own product and then use it to crush all other competitors. Far from creating new jobs, his approach has destroyed existing jobs and discouraged tech investment which would create future work. Now, as people with any sense are avoiding tech like the outsource prone disaster it is, Mr. Gates finds himself unable to "innovate" cheaply.
The non free way no longer makes money for anyone who's not a M$ vassal, and increasingly, those are feeling the squeeze too. Fortunately, free software continues to provide users what they need and profits for those who would compete fairly. IBM, Google, and just about everyone but M$ is sick of M$.
I worry about upgrades.
Upgrades are just one practical and obvious problem with non free software in cars. Your worries are justified in an industry that practically invented "planned obsolescence" and still practices every form imaginable. Just look at the myriad of mechanical and electrical fasteners that already exist in automobiles when standardization would be cheaper. Of course they chose M$, when they could have better control and lower costs of their own gnu/linux based systems.
There are more sinister problems with the lack of control non free software enforces. Some that spring to mind are
Other people can think of more sinister things, because I'm basically honest and don't think like the above.
The civil liberty implications are the most disturbing, even though they directly effect a small minority of activists who may be harassed and silenced. The indirect effect of a corporate/government police surveillance state apply to all and are much greater than the sum of their parts and is miserable for everyone. The only thing more expensive than liberty is slavery.
I'm going to avoid the whole mess, if I can. I have devices that work and don't need built in toys.
As one commenter put it, "Find me a CEO with two employees, no revenue, and $200,000 in assets who makes $146,000 a year."
The $150,000 in created value is not a revenue. ... Moms are basically like the best nannies, and those make $40K. My wife deserves millions, but not in a free market.
Not to knock the nanny, but they don't do all of the things the wife does and that's how they measured the substitution cost. People who don't grasp this concept run businesses into the ground because they don't have a real grasp on what their employees actually do for company.
Don't tell your wife, she'll quit her job!
They should also use real, not artificial, noise.
Check out very impressive clean up of a PDA camera. That's good. Ordinary smoothing filters blur important details, like those in the watch or the baby's ear. How nice that it is already in Digikam, one of the easiest to use photo managers out there.
This pyramid photo has basically been 'ruined' after the denoising ...
Do you think? Are those details in the stone any more real than those in the sky? Some may have been lost, but I'm having a hard time deciding which should have stayed. The picture was sad to begin with.
They are overly smoothed and detail is destroyed. They look like the type of thing a noob makes upon discovering video filters. For example, look at the delicate features in the jellyfish or the pig's hair. This samples look more like demonstrations of soften or posterization filters.
Sure, he's a noob. That DT-MRI of gray matter paths in your brain based on diffusion tensors is purely the stuff of rank amateurs! Bah, next you will tell me free software authors can make a powerful and easy to use image editor. I'm sticking to well known commercial filters found in Paint Shop Pro version 1.0, you know the one that fits on a floppy. Yeah, that's the freedom program.
Oh wait, those other filters are not helping my pig. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong and need to leave that to the pros as well.
They should also use real, not artificial, noise.
Sufficiently advanced noise is indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of a cheap imaging device, but it's not magic.
Today, you and many others say this is obvious:
Of course they found emails saying this. It's blatantly obvious to any armchair strategist. The only way you wouldn't find an email somewhere in the MS vault saying something anti-competitive is if the entire organization had been coached not to use this type of language.
Tomorrow, the M$ astroturfer cloud, will tell me I'm paranoid and that M$ is not that evil.
"M$" was not mentioned by name - that's probably because Cerf knows the problem can hardly be blamed on Microsoft
I'll let Cerf tell me that, not some troll like you. The little slide show you pointed to mentioned XP but no other OS. What exactly were you trying to tell me? Have you found a successful gnu/linux hosted botnet outside of a lab? Take your chicken little nonsense back to Redmond and help those idiots hold up the sky, because it has fallen on them.
The security quote:
It's too bad the reporter injected so much of their own opinion into the article. I'd much rather have heard Cert's own words than interpretations. The result is that it looks like the reporter did not ask the right questions at the time to get clear answers.
Reading and rereading the above, it looks like he's thinking of ways to make the network work without having to trust the clients attached. That would be a neat trick.
2. Charge extra for ODF format in MS Office.
What, and risk government Office sales? That would sink them.
3. Users too stubborn to use anything but Office.
I suppose you mean, M$ makes it difficult to save in anything but their own formats with all the usual cheap tricks:
Sure they can keep playing those silly games, but it's going to cost them sales. People don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for software that tricks them and does not do what they want.
No, M$ is fighting this with all of their might, errr money and they are going to lose.
Microsoft lobbyists stampeding to California to convince them that OOXML is actually "open".
If that's true, it will be cheaper for M$ to give in and adopt ODF. If M$ starts throwing around lobby money, every grafty legislator in the country is going to figure out how to suck it up. You can expect every state and federal legislature to introduce multiple bills, everyone of them expecting a pay off. Smear campaigns won't work because the clever law monkeys will find fall guys to sacrifice while they collect the cash for defeating threats to M$ business and innovation. As soon as one bill is defeated, another one will pop up and it will pass when M$ gets tired of spending money.
This battle is over, but it's going to be fun to see how badly M$ is going to fall for it. I'm not very good at math in situations like this. Is there anyone out there who can predict what $40 billion dollars is divided by fifty state legislatures and all of the world's federal governments? I keep getting zero errors.
It also wouldn't shock me if this initiative in CA, TX, etc. gets shot down thanks to massive MS lobbying efforts.
If that's true, it will be cheaper for M$ to give in and adopt ODF. If M$ starts throwing around lobby money, every grafty legislator in the country is going to figure out how to suck it up. You can expect every state and federal legislature to introduce multiple bills, everyone of them expecting a pay off. Smear campaigns won't work because the clever little monkeys will find fall guys to sacrifice while they collect the cash for defeating threats to M$ business and innovation.
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on
The funny thing is that users only get the features they want if they are free to implement them. Quality software is a fortunate byproduct of free software. The same kinds of arguments were made two hundred years ago about the link between freedom and wealth and they are just as true today.
Well troll, since you're so sure of this, why don't you tell us what Microsoft does not provide that Apple has? That should be amusing.
Botnet membership? Oh wait, that's what M$ provides that Apple does not. Apple offers a far better user experience that M$ does, but I'm not really interested in the details.
I listed things that free software offers that neither Apple nor M$ have and that's really all that matters to me.
An AC taunts:
46 to go.
OK, let's take that to Google.
What's that 66/300, 22%? Better than 4/50 or 8% would suggest. California alone is better than 8%.
Don't worry, there will be more soon. States like NY, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, etc. usually follow the tech savvy lead of CA, TX and MA quickly. Sooner or later all of them do.
Microsoft will soon have to compete with something other than secret file formats and other dirty tricks. If Vista is the best they've got, it's over.
Hooray for Government mandated mediocrity.
The only way applications can compete on merit is if they all use published standards to exchange information. No one can compete with secret formats and no public document should ever use one. Nothing but greed and fear of competition is keeping M$ from using ODF or inventing an equally well documented standard. Well, perhaps a little incompetence keeps them second rate.
90% of computer users are incapable of operating a command line.
That does not really matter for my project because it's just for me. I've documented the code I've written so others in the group can use it if they want to, but when I'm done the work is done and there will be little need for it.
That most people can't use a command line is a sad M$ legacy. DOS was and still is both clumsy and lacking proper documentation. I'm told they finally got tab complete sort of working, but their paths are still foo-bar and there's no proper man or info commands. Without bash, proper paths and man, I would not know much either.
Dell and Gateway do great in the corporate world, which is a space Apple has yet to penetrate to any large degree, because the customer doesn't fit their product space.
What kind of crazy assumptions and blinders go into that conclusion? What exactly does Apple offer that does not fit the corporate customer? How does Windoze fit them better? Are you trying to tell me that fewer features for more money is what big dumb companies want? Bah! companies need to get their work done and everything else is a costly distraction. The more tools they have to do that and the less they cost, the better the corporate user works.
Neither company fits what big companies need. The only advantage non free software enjoys right now is in multi media and non free entertainment content. If companies really care about that, Apple is the winner. In every other category, free software wins. Right now, free software offers control, hardware costs, flexibility, stability and applications people in the non free software world envy. User created tools do the user's work better than boxed bits.
Don't cry about legacy systems holding them back either. Those are non free problems that go away as soon as you get out of the non free world. The longer companies wait, the more they pay and the harder it gets. Every dollar you spend on non free software is another dollar the non free software companies use to build the next trap for your data. Now, as M$ transitions to Vista, is the best time to jump. Wine, crossover office, email exporters and all sorts of other tools work with current M$ junk. Vista will, I'm sure, break many of those tools and make things harder again. Rather than spend lots of money on a Vista downgrade, people should be making a free software upgrade. Apple and M$ have their legacy niches, and that's where they should be deployed until those gaps are filled. Many of those gaps can be filled with virtual computing. Actual needs, like small scale movie making and drafting, would give non free a vanishing minority OS share.
Finally, as non affiliated computer customization and sales companies, both Dell and Gateway should be able to sell any of the above to any company. That they can't is one of the biggest downers of non free software. The game only works as long as everyone co operates to screw the customer and each other. The first company that breaks out of the game is going to be the biggest winner. When the rest follow, they will all have to compete on an even playing field of hardware and organizational merit.
Why not just use the command line? I didn't see anything in this article that would exclude its usage.
An example he cites but does not provide, is a photo browser. You could use a combination of image magic and curses to do the same thing, but cli input could be tedious for more than simple viewing and the author's approach could save effort.
I'm doing a lot of cli image manipulation and I'm interested in this technique. I've got an ugly imaging device and a pile of c code to interpret it's output and make images of it. Having some simple feedback would be nice. It would be even nicer if I could serve that output to others in my group in a platform independent way.
Old troll Bungi doubts me:
"It's a process that's excruciatingly manual ... with each person able to do less than ten machines a night "
Bullshit. Do you even *believe* this crap you write? You've never had a job in a real company with more than 100 machines, so do us all a favor and just don't share your opinion on things like these. OK? Thanks.
Yes, Bungi, I've actually been on a Windoze upgrade slave gang for a fortune 100 bank and what I describe is how I remember it. They had some of the automated upgrade tools you mentioned, but they did not work. Instead, they wiped and reloaded with boot floppies that grabbed images from a server running linux. Most of the programs had to be installed anyway so that the registry would be consistent.
Did you really? You're so leet. By any chance would you happen to be running an eight-year old version of Linux?
Ha ha, I'm a normal desktop user and no, I don't have to run eight year old versions of software that have been continually upgraded and improved. The longest chain of upgrading I can remember is potato to woody to sarge. It got tricky once but everything usually worked. Mostly, it's easier to install binaries fresh. Leet is a concept that only applies in the non free world of secrets and bullshit.
please note the vendor neutrality, here
You mean forget everything I know? No way! Even if I thought outsourcing email was a good idea, M$ is the last group I'd trust. I don't, but I can say that LSU's outsourced email works.