... there are only broken email clients. It's the crappy OS that is infected not the protocol.
I like the way Kmail does it. It displays the silly html as text, with a button that asks you if you want it rendered. A quick scan shows you who it's from and if the thing is legitimate. Clients that are all or nothing and riding on an OS that's full of holes are the cause of the problem.
I've written two short stories for publication in open office, and I wrote this post in Firefox...both from a Windows Box. But GIMP? I can't use that. It doesn't support the features I need as a photographer (color management, adjustment layers, photoshop plugins, and different color models). I prefer Adobe Camera RAW (and now Lightroom) for it's power when working with RAW files. And its name isn't acceptable when my future sister-in-law has a child with cerebral palsy.
I agree with you about the name. You could call it the GNU Imp, "new imp," which is it's name after all. I'd like to see ferry based icons. The magic, as in image magic, theme goes much better than a wolf. My point is that the name does not matter. Most people will never know the name and won't care.
The feature set you need is not at all typical. The vast majority of computer users don't need it. Most people use cameras that don't have a raw setting, much less the need to manipulate raw images further. A simple 2.1M pixel camera makes pictures that rivals 35 mm film when printed and that's all most people care about. GIMPs feature set is more than adequate for manipulating images, in fact it's overkill for most people and digikam comes with a stripped down editor that does what people really want.
Let me be clear, when I ask for a feature I'm missing I'm asking for one I'd care about. The ability to work with cameras I can't afford or need is not a feature I miss. It's not worth the hundreds of dollars I'd have to spend on software, that's for sure.
OO.org, and the Gimp are NOT "best of class". Microsoft Office and Photoshop totally demolish both of your mentioned applications. I don't know what delusion you are in, but we welcome you back whenever you want.
You forgot to mention Firefox, which like Mozilla and Netscape, are superior to the M$ offering in every way. Konqueror is my favorite and has even more features like divisible tabs and excellent file system integration.
I'm in that delusion where the only difference between the other two is in how much money I have to spend to get what I need. OO and Gimp do everything that I need to do and cost nothing. I get to spend the money on hardware instead. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on software licenses for a single shared computer, I have multiple desktops, everyone in my house has a nice laptop and all of those computers have all the software they want. Name me a feature I'm missing and you might start to errode my "delusion" of happiness.
People actually doing things with their computers at the CCCC tend to share my delusion.
SeaMonkey. Ubuntu. Gimp. Great applications. Totally unacceptable in corporate settings, just because of their names.
The "best" names are already trademarked, but it does not matter. Just ask IBM, Chrysler, Lowes, and all of the other big companies that have already jumped on the free software bandwagon. Companies that don't jump will face increasing relative IT costs. Money is the language every company understands. What's important to them is that there are free browsers, databases, image manipulation programs and GUIs they can use. The name is irrelevant, when 95% of user simply push a button to start the application. You can put whatever name or icon on that button you want and most reasonable distributions arrange things by function and purpose.
Your intended flame has brought up one of the better things about free software for ease of use. Menus are reasonably organized in the free software world. This is in great contrast to the Windoze world, where applications are still arranged by company name - Adobe (mud!), Symantic, Norton, Correl. They have to do this in order to promote their brand. Free software coders and distributions have no similar compulsion. Free software will never resemble the commercial billboard that the non free desktop is. Windoze will always end up looking like the ugliest commercial strip mall lined freeway you can think of. Free software will always look like a posh resort town. The contrast is so obvious, you have to be blind of habituated to miss it. Given time, everyone ends up liking the resort more.
This is the way we are pushing free software at the Cajun Clickers Computer Club, one of the oldest and largest computer clubs around. As much as I favor 100% free systems, the easiest way to move people is through distributions like Xandros, Mepis and others that include non free "add-ons" that give the user those few things free does not: Flash, and accelerated video. I also highly recommend Parallels to those other nasty little things that are left. It's working too. People who use a combination of free and non free come to understand that their pain comes from non free. I can see 15% Linux Desktop penetration this year, followed by the 30% tipping point in 2009. The media content will follow that tipping point because it always courts the audience wherever it can. Free Software has not gone away and it is the future because of it.
The biggest draw right now is that Linux is the easiest way for them to move into the future. Thanks to the porting and popularity of Firefox, Open Office, Gimp and other applications to Windoze, Linux is now the easiest way for the majority of users to keep using these best of class applications. 32 bit versions are good enough for users that just don't want to be forced to spend $2000 on new hardware. The security and stability of free software is very important - current Windoze users are fed up with all of the absurd crap they have to do to keep Windoze working. Commercial Linux gives them what they want right now and does so with much less trouble than an XP install.
Microsoft has done a lot to undermine themselves through DRM and that combined with the usual upgrade is going to wreck them. Vista does not provide the path to media because DRM screws it up. Serious A/V people are going to continue to buy set top boxes to get their media for much less cost and effort than it takes to do things through M$. A $30 DVD player will feed your big screen TV and audio system just as well as an Xbox does right now. Now combine that with Nothing in Vista and Office 2007 being familiar. I watched someone try to save a Word Doc as.doc instead of.docx on a new computer last week. Smoke poured out of her ears as she pushed her usual shortcuts and looked in vain at the remaining menu items. Sooner or later I asked her what the flashing light was and there she found a save as item. She had given up already. I have to wonder if the light would have flashed at all for a patient person like myself who does not know the goofy keyboard shortcut. Open Office is much easier than that and KDE has all the bling Vista does without the pain. Free software has a very good desktop for a very dissatisfied user base. Power users already know this and are looking at Linux as an escape. The other users will follow if we can move those user now. Things have never been easier.
But Google is preset as the home page on Firefox.... To really make these figures more accurate, we would need to sets everyone's homepage to (blank)
Is Google the default homepage of Firefox? I thought it was the Mozilla page. Most GNU/Linux distros do exactly what you want, they have a local start page which is a file on the system. With free software, the default is what the last person to build it says it is. Many will leave the project defaults alone, some will not, then users will almost always put in their own choice. The kind of people who go out and get free software are not the kind of people who will settle for default behavior.
The weight of defaults must be balanced for distribution use. M$, unfortunately, still owns 80 to 90% of the desktop market and 80% of that uses IE. That Google trails by such a small margin is a measure of real popularity and use.
... thinks Vista will change anything? The exploits are already being marketed and published. It reminds me of the "use XP SP2" chorus, when the only thing that did was break existing applications and push more obnoxious EULAs and DRM. We will soon see the Vista added to the list of threats which currently list XP, 2000, XP, 98 etc back to the earliest version the watchers care to add. The reason those threats typically break every previous version of Windoze is because M$ rarely rewrites anything and the same old binaries are passed on from version to version. Vista was made the same way the other versions were and the same old process is going to yield the same old results. Vista is the same old same old.
I think what Microsoft is doing right now is analogous to the old practice of offering a product at a higher cost initially just so you can then negotiate down to the price you really want.
So, are you telling me that they will take all the "tilt bits" out of third party drivers if no one buys Vista for a while? Or maybe you think that they will undo the core of the operating system they just spent six years developing. Nope, not happening.
The absolute best they can do is play it off like ME by issuing another OS in one or two years, but that would be an even bigger screw to the hardware world than "Plays for Sure." M$ is throwing what little credibility they had left right into the trash.
Vista is so bad that this is going to be the year of Linux.
This so-called analysis was written by thinking of a conclusion first, then filling in the blanks. There are no citing of references to support his claims.
The author's opinion and interpretation of the document look solid to me. There really are "tilt bits" and other concepts I checked are there. It goes a long way to explaining Vista's reported bugs, bloat and lack of drivers for existing equipment. None of it changes the bottom line, M$ is the only thing that's going to fall down the "analog hole".
Debating the details is pointless because the results are already in. The specifics of the "secure path" implementations can only provide amusement. Everyone said it was going to fail and it has already in Windows Media Center and other equipment critics have panned and no one is buying. Vista has much the same in store, it's not going to work and people are not going to buy it.
People are going to avoid Vista and are going to be very pissed as M$ "updates" remove functionality from XP, which will never be allowed to view "premium" content.
The only winners will be content providers that avoid the whole mess. Movie and music publishers who provide DRM free media are going make a lot of money while the majors continue to insult and sue their shrinking fan base.
Every year, there's a slew of folks here that like to bandy around the "year of the Linux desktop" line.
That's funny, I never see any of those posts. Would you point to one or two of them? I know that I have not been hopeful for more use until recently. With more than a million users, there's sure to be one of every kind of post imaginable, so your task should not be very hard.
It always has the air of some sort of criticism. There's some implication that it was supposed to be already, has yet to happen, and never will.
It's intersting that you can read into posts that don't exist, but yes it is obvious that there should be a greater Linux market share. The GNU/Linux desktop has enjoyed numerous advantages over non free software for close to a decade and it's cheaper. A free market would have more free software in it. The continued M$ vendor lock is both puzzling and outrageous.
what exactly is the phrase supposed to mean?
It's the tipping point, where a combination of M$ user frustration and standards adoption undo the power of non free software. Firefox is a good example of how that power is broken. Because IE sucked, people on Windows adopted Firefox and this has made the internet a more standards based and friendly place. With 20% of users, and most of them influential trend setters, on Firefox few websites are willing to risk using some crappy M$ toy that does not work outside of IE. This alone has made a dent in M$'s hold because the easiest way to make Firefox work now is to move to free software. Companies like Chrysler and IBM are already moving. When enough users get on free software, the FUD will be gone. Hardware vendors and home users alike will be happy when they can quit worrying about the "M$ network effect" and paying the M$ tax to simply make their computer work and exchange information with each other. If you think about it, the odd thing is that people managed to give Bill Gates so much power over their work. The tip will be fast and the transition complete within a few years of it happening.
2007 and the introduction of Vista will do the trick. It's so bloated, so restricted and so expensive that people who want the features are leaving the M$ world in droves. There is nothing it can do that you can't get done with less hardware and less trouble in the free software world. I predict Linux Desktop use will surpass 15% this year and that the conversion will grow exponentially, 30% in 2008, 60% in 2009 then dominance in 2010 and beyond, tapering off to 95% of the market with some niche use of non free software for very special legacy purposes. This will eliminate their ability to influence laws and the "IP" nightmare laws will start to be undone.
Will people be so keen to put their lives on Flickr once anyone from ID thieves to governments can find out their name, and who they associate with?"
The bad guys already know so hiding only hurts your friends. The resources they own are the ISP, your non free OS, your phone calls and public "security cameras". Your friends only have what you can give them. The bad guys want to limit your ability to match their power and knowledge. The only solution is to guard what's really private and give rest away as freely as possible.
is there anything that Microsoft could do as a business that would ever please you? Honestly?
To paraphrase the animatrix: Surrender your code and you will enjoy a new life of the mind. You have no choice.
While I think that the only way for them to prevent a repeat of past abuses is to GPL their code, most people would be happy if they would just quit trying to FUCK EVERYONE. You know, stop threatening to sue everyone, shoving formats onto media, quit the drive to "trusted computing" where everyone must pay a fine to run on "their platform" and nothing else runs on any computing device made, stupid totalitarian shit like that. I don't have anything to do with their garbage, yet still they bother me. I have to trade files with people who still suffer on their platform. Worse, I have to put up with all the silly restrictions they force onto ISPs, which do little to stop the further damage their OS does to the networks every day. If drawing up little rules about packaging for what constitutes a game on Windoze is any indication, they are going in the wrong direction. They are flexing muscles they should not have to no good purpose. It's an exercise in pure annoyance that announces the future stagnation of Windows gaming.
The funniest thing about all of this is that it's suicidal. By sticking to their own junk and the non free way, they are falling further and further behind. Had they spent the last six years porting to free software instead of building Vista, they would be much stronger today. Instead they are about to take a huge fall: Vista is going to be a washout and revenue from Office is going to dry up.
Their death will be good for the rest of the industry. There are plenty of good distributions out there, ready, willing and able to configure PCs for vendors. Their biggest roadblock is M$'s cross licensing and vendor intimidation to keep specs out of their hands. Microsoft's downfall will bring real and honest competition to an industry that's been hamstrung for decades.
single screen user interface... To what are you referring to here?
The whole Microsoft experience. Mostly, I'm talking about their lack of virtual desktops and pagers, for which they substitute that pathetic menu bar. Yes, I've seen their sorry XP power toy. It's does not come close to being as useful as any decent free window manager and the hapless user is forced to use two or three monitors to spread their work out. The ever changing configuration interface and lack of useful programs are also show stoppers.
What about "Looks, locks, lacks" don't you understand? Vista can easily be "infinitely more pleasant to use" than any previous Windoze incarnation and still suck eggs next to every other OS. Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 and hard to make worse. DRM and treacherous computing are the things that can actually make things suck more, so Vista is heavy on that. The consensus opinion is that Vista will give you some eye candy at tremendous hardware and software cost. At ten gigs, it still does not match what NeXT gave the world back in 1991. Mac gives you much more and GNU/Linux will deliver more for much less cost to your current hardware.
ISS isn't a proper space colony, though. 1. It isn't remotely self-sufficient. ISS 2 (or whatever) probably won't be fully self-sufficient either, but it'll let us work on the logistics issue first. 2. It is strictly a space lab. [want a space craft garage]... 3. It is very low orbit.
Low earth orbit, inside Earth's magnetic protection, is where space stations have to be but self sufficiency will only come from beyond orbit. The only resources available in Earth orbit are zero G growing conditions and position. Self sufficiency requires either drastically reduced costs of transport or real resources. Without infrastructure beyond orbit, there's little need for a space based garage. Without resources to trade, the positional value is limited.
Consider the world's oceans and America as examples. There are plenty of resources there but no one has bothered to make any off shore colonies. It took five hundred years to build the American economy but it now dominates the world. All the world's rockets and shuttles are more like Kon-Tiki or Greek triremes than the Hispanola. They can get us there but they will never establish a profitable trade. Much more needs to be done and none of it will be profitable for a long time. My wild projection that it will take two hundred years for the space based economy to equal Earth's. At that point, everything will look obvious.
I run XP SP2, Kapersky, and run an antivirus/antispyware (Avast and Spybot) about once every month. I've never had a virus infection on this machine or my previous machine.
Like 75% of Windows users, you probably rate your machine as "moderately" to "very" secure. Yet more than 80% of windows computers are part of the botnet. What do you think you know that 90% of windows users don't? It's all well laid out here in stunning and referenced detail.
The FSF has a clearly stated agenda of eradicating proprietary software, as it's immoral according to them. How is that not going to constitute a biased approach when debating industry topics...
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. Standing up for your rights is a bias but isn't that the one you want in your news? Would you prefer some kind of industry shill to tell you what's good for you? How can you even begin to equate these two diametrically opposed things?
The New York Times has decided it's not in their reader's best interest to pass on advertisements, aka paid opinions, as legitimate reviews. Good for them and good for everyone. As someone else pointed out, they are indeed discovering better sources of information. The Registry's hostility to this is as difficult to understand as your hostility to the FSF.
Thanks for taking time to use the NYT search tool. Twenty three stories mentioning the free software foundation since 1981 is not bad for a newspaper. They even found out by 1989, that's impressive. I applaud the steps they are taking and can see they are working to represent the interests of their readers.
Maybe they should rather make up their own minds. Much as I agree with the EFF and the FSF, they do have their own agendas.
That agenda makes those groups ideal sources of information for newspapers. Newspapers ultimately serve their readers or perish. The FSF, EFF and Opensource.org all have the user's freedom and prosperity as their goal. They are expert and impartial to industry interests.
The agenda of FSF and friends has little to do with pushing a specific program or platform. The FSF, for example, recognize BSD and Linux distributions as a free OSs, despite having their own kernel. They don't care who's tools you use, so long as they are free.
That perspective does not make them ignorant, or even impractical. All groups, to one extent or another, bow to practicality. GNU was written on non free software at one point because there was no other available. The opensource.org group are especially flexible in this regard and generally worry about performance before freedom.
The problem, from my perspective, is not that "mainstream" journalists can't make up their own minds, it's that they have not been talking to everyone they could. Making up your mind in ignorance is worse than doing nothing. The discussion of "alternate" operating systems never seems to get further than a brief mention of Apple. GNU is rarely mentioned, even though Apple, Sun and others use the GNU toolset. It's not even an ideological problem, if you buy into the "Linux is Communism" nonsense, because there are plenty of commercial Linux distributions ready to sell you non free software as addons the same way Michael Dell does. Informed decisions come from knowing the options. Something is clearly missing when a search for:
Vista linux returns 947 results. This would be encouraging if the first page were not stories about what Bill Gates said recently. You might imagine results more like the next one if it were not for this.
The stigma of a well paid job. Ah, how will I ever show my face in civilized society again?
Money spent on software licenses is money that won't go into your pocket. Bill Gates is happy that he's still on your company's payroll, despite the trouble you have getting work done with his junk.
If the same people that use Windows for Powerpoint and Word and have a gazillion worms in their system used Linux, their systems would be as infected as they are now. They would probably using a 2.2 kernel, a very old build of KDE, and so on. The fact is: Smart users don't get infected, naive users do.
No, everyone who uses Windoze gets infected. It's not something you can do anything about because only M$ can "improve" the system. See here for well documented facts about the ongoing M$ security dissaster. A market for Vista exploits just goes to prove that nothing has changed.
Projecting Windows flaws to the free software world is not something you can do. The fact is that you can't even project those flaws to other non free OS like Mac. I dare you to tell me that all OSX users are somehow "smart" and that's why they don't get overrun with botnet malware. A user would be hard pressed to find a distro still using a 2.2 kernel and upgrading has never been hard. You have to go back four or five years for that, even in the conservative world of Debian. Sarge came with 2.4 and 2.6 kernels and Etch is about to go stable. Woody, back in 2001 or so, was the last time you could get a 2.2 kernel by default. More importantly, actual kernel problems have been patched up and never were the kind of threat found in the M$ world. KDE is as easy to upgade as your OS is. I'm using Etch with KDE 3.5 to write this, on a 266 MHz PII laptop that probably came with a Win98 OEM CD and never could have been upgraded to 2000 let alone XP. In the non free software world, people use that OEM CD until they can't stand it, then consider the computer itself dead. The free software world is much easier than that. The proof, of course, is in the data: there are no widespread security problems outside the M$ world.
I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it.
I lived through it too but I agree with the author's assertion that the trade mags of the time were full of shit and that M$ still is. In the end, it's hard to disagree with the author's well documented thesis: that M$ conned the wintel press into comparing existing software to M$'s future vision. The details are less important than the big picture because it will keep you from being fooled into thinking Vista is competitive.
This is one of the best summaries of M$ marketing practices I've ever seen. If you have a better feature compare, spanning two decades, I'd like to see it.
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry. Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article,
The Roughly Drafted article is not supposed to be a Window's history, it's a Microsoft Marketing history. Versions of software are mentioned and compared to competing and promissed versions. The history presented is accurate as are the product descriptions. What's more important is how M$ prommisses everything their competitors have today, convince the press the promisses are credible, but fail to deliver for decades. To find the same information in Wikipedia, you need to combine the Microsoft specific information from these articles:
Or you could just have a memory and a brain. It should be clear to any Windows user that M$'s operating systems are bloated, insecure and feature poor. It is equally clear that the reason for their market dominance has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with technology. The author goes into some of those mechanics and why they won't work in the future.
The central thesis, that M$ uses vaporware to it's advantage, is clearly true. The similarity between Cairo an Longhorn mostly exist because Microsoft has yet to deliver on the feature promisses they made for Cairo. As the author pointed out, those features were available in competing products of the day and many are still not implemented in the new 10 Gigabyte sized Windoze.
Specifically, Cairo promised to deliver:
an object oriented user interface, featuring direct manipulation of desktop objects like OS/2 already had
an object oriented development environment like the one already offered by NeXT
distributed computing features like those offered by NeXT
an object or database file system that would replace the flat file system with a fully searchable object store
a standards based messaging system like Lotus Notes
a standards based directory system just like Novell's NDS
Yes, when I say many, I refer to the lack of standards and use "Embrace, Extend Extinguish" delivers after a decade of fumbling. You can run in circles forever with slippery M$ promisses, or you can get out and enjoy standards based software from innovators. This has been the case for decades.
This is probably going to be a massive "M$ IS TEH SUX" and "Windoze crashes every five minutes, use Linux instead" religious FUD campaign, except that now it will be officially sanctioned by the FSF.
Silly Buggi, the FSF is tells you what they are doing - they are going to carefully outline how Vista restricts user freedom and put alternatives in their hands. Spreading freedom has always been their core mission. The poor performance of Vista has been adequately covered by the mainstream press, but they will soon forget what they said when M$ starts passing out advertisement money.
Be careful what you wish for, Moglen, Stallman et.al. You just might get it.
What, like people using free software? I'm sure they would be thrilled. You have claimed to live in Baton Rouge, Buggi old troll, why don't you stop by the CCCC Linux Desktop SIG and see it all working? Bring a box and we'll set you up - it's an install fest. I'm sure you will be happy with the improved performance of your hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the way Kmail does it. It displays the silly html as text, with a button that asks you if you want it rendered. A quick scan shows you who it's from and if the thing is legitimate. Clients that are all or nothing and riding on an OS that's full of holes are the cause of the problem.
I've written two short stories for publication in open office, and I wrote this post in Firefox...both from a Windows Box. But GIMP? I can't use that. It doesn't support the features I need as a photographer (color management, adjustment layers, photoshop plugins, and different color models). I prefer Adobe Camera RAW (and now Lightroom) for it's power when working with RAW files. And its name isn't acceptable when my future sister-in-law has a child with cerebral palsy.
I agree with you about the name. You could call it the GNU Imp, "new imp," which is it's name after all. I'd like to see ferry based icons. The magic, as in image magic, theme goes much better than a wolf. My point is that the name does not matter. Most people will never know the name and won't care.
The feature set you need is not at all typical. The vast majority of computer users don't need it. Most people use cameras that don't have a raw setting, much less the need to manipulate raw images further. A simple 2.1M pixel camera makes pictures that rivals 35 mm film when printed and that's all most people care about. GIMPs feature set is more than adequate for manipulating images, in fact it's overkill for most people and digikam comes with a stripped down editor that does what people really want.
Let me be clear, when I ask for a feature I'm missing I'm asking for one I'd care about. The ability to work with cameras I can't afford or need is not a feature I miss. It's not worth the hundreds of dollars I'd have to spend on software, that's for sure.
OO.org, and the Gimp are NOT "best of class". Microsoft Office and Photoshop totally demolish both of your mentioned applications. I don't know what delusion you are in, but we welcome you back whenever you want.
You forgot to mention Firefox, which like Mozilla and Netscape, are superior to the M$ offering in every way. Konqueror is my favorite and has even more features like divisible tabs and excellent file system integration.
I'm in that delusion where the only difference between the other two is in how much money I have to spend to get what I need. OO and Gimp do everything that I need to do and cost nothing. I get to spend the money on hardware instead. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on software licenses for a single shared computer, I have multiple desktops, everyone in my house has a nice laptop and all of those computers have all the software they want. Name me a feature I'm missing and you might start to errode my "delusion" of happiness.
People actually doing things with their computers at the CCCC tend to share my delusion.
SeaMonkey. Ubuntu. Gimp. Great applications. Totally unacceptable in corporate settings, just because of their names.
The "best" names are already trademarked, but it does not matter. Just ask IBM, Chrysler, Lowes, and all of the other big companies that have already jumped on the free software bandwagon. Companies that don't jump will face increasing relative IT costs. Money is the language every company understands. What's important to them is that there are free browsers, databases, image manipulation programs and GUIs they can use. The name is irrelevant, when 95% of user simply push a button to start the application. You can put whatever name or icon on that button you want and most reasonable distributions arrange things by function and purpose.
Your intended flame has brought up one of the better things about free software for ease of use. Menus are reasonably organized in the free software world. This is in great contrast to the Windoze world, where applications are still arranged by company name - Adobe (mud!), Symantic, Norton, Correl. They have to do this in order to promote their brand. Free software coders and distributions have no similar compulsion. Free software will never resemble the commercial billboard that the non free desktop is. Windoze will always end up looking like the ugliest commercial strip mall lined freeway you can think of. Free software will always look like a posh resort town. The contrast is so obvious, you have to be blind of habituated to miss it. Given time, everyone ends up liking the resort more.
This is the way we are pushing free software at the Cajun Clickers Computer Club, one of the oldest and largest computer clubs around. As much as I favor 100% free systems, the easiest way to move people is through distributions like Xandros, Mepis and others that include non free "add-ons" that give the user those few things free does not: Flash, and accelerated video. I also highly recommend Parallels to those other nasty little things that are left. It's working too. People who use a combination of free and non free come to understand that their pain comes from non free. I can see 15% Linux Desktop penetration this year, followed by the 30% tipping point in 2009. The media content will follow that tipping point because it always courts the audience wherever it can. Free Software has not gone away and it is the future because of it.
The biggest draw right now is that Linux is the easiest way for them to move into the future. Thanks to the porting and popularity of Firefox, Open Office, Gimp and other applications to Windoze, Linux is now the easiest way for the majority of users to keep using these best of class applications. 32 bit versions are good enough for users that just don't want to be forced to spend $2000 on new hardware. The security and stability of free software is very important - current Windoze users are fed up with all of the absurd crap they have to do to keep Windoze working. Commercial Linux gives them what they want right now and does so with much less trouble than an XP install.
Microsoft has done a lot to undermine themselves through DRM and that combined with the usual upgrade is going to wreck them. Vista does not provide the path to media because DRM screws it up. Serious A/V people are going to continue to buy set top boxes to get their media for much less cost and effort than it takes to do things through M$. A $30 DVD player will feed your big screen TV and audio system just as well as an Xbox does right now. Now combine that with Nothing in Vista and Office 2007 being familiar. I watched someone try to save a Word Doc as .doc instead of .docx on a new computer last week. Smoke poured out of her ears as she pushed her usual shortcuts and looked in vain at the remaining menu items. Sooner or later I asked her what the flashing light was and there she found a save as item. She had given up already. I have to wonder if the light would have flashed at all for a patient person like myself who does not know the goofy keyboard shortcut. Open Office is much easier than that and KDE has all the bling Vista does without the pain. Free software has a very good desktop for a very dissatisfied user base. Power users already know this and are looking at Linux as an escape. The other users will follow if we can move those user now. Things have never been easier.
But Google is preset as the home page on Firefox. ... To really make these figures more accurate, we would need to sets everyone's homepage to (blank)
Is Google the default homepage of Firefox? I thought it was the Mozilla page. Most GNU/Linux distros do exactly what you want, they have a local start page which is a file on the system. With free software, the default is what the last person to build it says it is. Many will leave the project defaults alone, some will not, then users will almost always put in their own choice. The kind of people who go out and get free software are not the kind of people who will settle for default behavior.
The weight of defaults must be balanced for distribution use. M$, unfortunately, still owns 80 to 90% of the desktop market and 80% of that uses IE. That Google trails by such a small margin is a measure of real popularity and use.
... thinks Vista will change anything? The exploits are already being marketed and published. It reminds me of the "use XP SP2" chorus, when the only thing that did was break existing applications and push more obnoxious EULAs and DRM. We will soon see the Vista added to the list of threats which currently list XP, 2000, XP, 98 etc back to the earliest version the watchers care to add. The reason those threats typically break every previous version of Windoze is because M$ rarely rewrites anything and the same old binaries are passed on from version to version. Vista was made the same way the other versions were and the same old process is going to yield the same old results. Vista is the same old same old.
I think what Microsoft is doing right now is analogous to the old practice of offering a product at a higher cost initially just so you can then negotiate down to the price you really want.
So, are you telling me that they will take all the "tilt bits" out of third party drivers if no one buys Vista for a while? Or maybe you think that they will undo the core of the operating system they just spent six years developing. Nope, not happening.
The absolute best they can do is play it off like ME by issuing another OS in one or two years, but that would be an even bigger screw to the hardware world than "Plays for Sure." M$ is throwing what little credibility they had left right into the trash.
Vista is so bad that this is going to be the year of Linux.
This so-called analysis was written by thinking of a conclusion first, then filling in the blanks. There are no citing of references to support his claims.
Google has an html version of Vista Content Crippling Spec. and points to an obfuscated version I don't care to download. More can be fond here.
The author's opinion and interpretation of the document look solid to me. There really are "tilt bits" and other concepts I checked are there. It goes a long way to explaining Vista's reported bugs, bloat and lack of drivers for existing equipment. None of it changes the bottom line, M$ is the only thing that's going to fall down the "analog hole".
Debating the details is pointless because the results are already in. The specifics of the "secure path" implementations can only provide amusement. Everyone said it was going to fail and it has already in Windows Media Center and other equipment critics have panned and no one is buying. Vista has much the same in store, it's not going to work and people are not going to buy it.
People are going to avoid Vista and are going to be very pissed as M$ "updates" remove functionality from XP, which will never be allowed to view "premium" content.
The only winners will be content providers that avoid the whole mess. Movie and music publishers who provide DRM free media are going make a lot of money while the majors continue to insult and sue their shrinking fan base.
Every year, there's a slew of folks here that like to bandy around the "year of the Linux desktop" line.
That's funny, I never see any of those posts. Would you point to one or two of them? I know that I have not been hopeful for more use until recently. With more than a million users, there's sure to be one of every kind of post imaginable, so your task should not be very hard.
It always has the air of some sort of criticism. There's some implication that it was supposed to be already, has yet to happen, and never will.
It's intersting that you can read into posts that don't exist, but yes it is obvious that there should be a greater Linux market share. The GNU/Linux desktop has enjoyed numerous advantages over non free software for close to a decade and it's cheaper. A free market would have more free software in it. The continued M$ vendor lock is both puzzling and outrageous.
what exactly is the phrase supposed to mean?
It's the tipping point, where a combination of M$ user frustration and standards adoption undo the power of non free software. Firefox is a good example of how that power is broken. Because IE sucked, people on Windows adopted Firefox and this has made the internet a more standards based and friendly place. With 20% of users, and most of them influential trend setters, on Firefox few websites are willing to risk using some crappy M$ toy that does not work outside of IE. This alone has made a dent in M$'s hold because the easiest way to make Firefox work now is to move to free software. Companies like Chrysler and IBM are already moving. When enough users get on free software, the FUD will be gone. Hardware vendors and home users alike will be happy when they can quit worrying about the "M$ network effect" and paying the M$ tax to simply make their computer work and exchange information with each other. If you think about it, the odd thing is that people managed to give Bill Gates so much power over their work. The tip will be fast and the transition complete within a few years of it happening.
2007 and the introduction of Vista will do the trick. It's so bloated, so restricted and so expensive that people who want the features are leaving the M$ world in droves. There is nothing it can do that you can't get done with less hardware and less trouble in the free software world. I predict Linux Desktop use will surpass 15% this year and that the conversion will grow exponentially, 30% in 2008, 60% in 2009 then dominance in 2010 and beyond, tapering off to 95% of the market with some niche use of non free software for very special legacy purposes. This will eliminate their ability to influence laws and the "IP" nightmare laws will start to be undone.
Will people be so keen to put their lives on Flickr once anyone from ID thieves to governments can find out their name, and who they associate with?"
The bad guys already know so hiding only hurts your friends. The resources they own are the ISP, your non free OS, your phone calls and public "security cameras". Your friends only have what you can give them. The bad guys want to limit your ability to match their power and knowledge. The only solution is to guard what's really private and give rest away as freely as possible.
is there anything that Microsoft could do as a business that would ever please you? Honestly?
To paraphrase the animatrix: Surrender your code and you will enjoy a new life of the mind. You have no choice.
While I think that the only way for them to prevent a repeat of past abuses is to GPL their code, most people would be happy if they would just quit trying to FUCK EVERYONE. You know, stop threatening to sue everyone, shoving formats onto media, quit the drive to "trusted computing" where everyone must pay a fine to run on "their platform" and nothing else runs on any computing device made, stupid totalitarian shit like that. I don't have anything to do with their garbage, yet still they bother me. I have to trade files with people who still suffer on their platform. Worse, I have to put up with all the silly restrictions they force onto ISPs, which do little to stop the further damage their OS does to the networks every day. If drawing up little rules about packaging for what constitutes a game on Windoze is any indication, they are going in the wrong direction. They are flexing muscles they should not have to no good purpose. It's an exercise in pure annoyance that announces the future stagnation of Windows gaming.
The funniest thing about all of this is that it's suicidal. By sticking to their own junk and the non free way, they are falling further and further behind. Had they spent the last six years porting to free software instead of building Vista, they would be much stronger today. Instead they are about to take a huge fall: Vista is going to be a washout and revenue from Office is going to dry up.
Their death will be good for the rest of the industry. There are plenty of good distributions out there, ready, willing and able to configure PCs for vendors. Their biggest roadblock is M$'s cross licensing and vendor intimidation to keep specs out of their hands. Microsoft's downfall will bring real and honest competition to an industry that's been hamstrung for decades.
single screen user interface ... To what are you referring to here?
The whole Microsoft experience. Mostly, I'm talking about their lack of virtual desktops and pagers, for which they substitute that pathetic menu bar. Yes, I've seen their sorry XP power toy. It's does not come close to being as useful as any decent free window manager and the hapless user is forced to use two or three monitors to spread their work out. The ever changing configuration interface and lack of useful programs are also show stoppers.
What about "Looks, locks, lacks" don't you understand? Vista can easily be "infinitely more pleasant to use" than any previous Windoze incarnation and still suck eggs next to every other OS. Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 and hard to make worse. DRM and treacherous computing are the things that can actually make things suck more, so Vista is heavy on that. The consensus opinion is that Vista will give you some eye candy at tremendous hardware and software cost. At ten gigs, it still does not match what NeXT gave the world back in 1991. Mac gives you much more and GNU/Linux will deliver more for much less cost to your current hardware.
ISS isn't a proper space colony, though. 1. It isn't remotely self-sufficient. ISS 2 (or whatever) probably won't be fully self-sufficient either, but it'll let us work on the logistics issue first. 2. It is strictly a space lab. [want a space craft garage]... 3. It is very low orbit.
Low earth orbit, inside Earth's magnetic protection, is where space stations have to be but self sufficiency will only come from beyond orbit. The only resources available in Earth orbit are zero G growing conditions and position. Self sufficiency requires either drastically reduced costs of transport or real resources. Without infrastructure beyond orbit, there's little need for a space based garage. Without resources to trade, the positional value is limited.
Consider the world's oceans and America as examples. There are plenty of resources there but no one has bothered to make any off shore colonies. It took five hundred years to build the American economy but it now dominates the world. All the world's rockets and shuttles are more like Kon-Tiki or Greek triremes than the Hispanola. They can get us there but they will never establish a profitable trade. Much more needs to be done and none of it will be profitable for a long time. My wild projection that it will take two hundred years for the space based economy to equal Earth's. At that point, everything will look obvious.
I run XP SP2, Kapersky, and run an antivirus/antispyware (Avast and Spybot) about once every month. I've never had a virus infection on this machine or my previous machine.
Like 75% of Windows users, you probably rate your machine as "moderately" to "very" secure. Yet more than 80% of windows computers are part of the botnet. What do you think you know that 90% of windows users don't? It's all well laid out here in stunning and referenced detail.
The FSF has a clearly stated agenda of eradicating proprietary software, as it's immoral according to them. How is that not going to constitute a biased approach when debating industry topics ...
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. Standing up for your rights is a bias but isn't that the one you want in your news? Would you prefer some kind of industry shill to tell you what's good for you? How can you even begin to equate these two diametrically opposed things?
The New York Times has decided it's not in their reader's best interest to pass on advertisements, aka paid opinions, as legitimate reviews. Good for them and good for everyone. As someone else pointed out, they are indeed discovering better sources of information. The Registry's hostility to this is as difficult to understand as your hostility to the FSF.
Thanks for taking time to use the NYT search tool. Twenty three stories mentioning the free software foundation since 1981 is not bad for a newspaper. They even found out by 1989, that's impressive. I applaud the steps they are taking and can see they are working to represent the interests of their readers.
At the same time, not much is being written about alternatives to Microsoft by the news industry at large.
Maybe they should rather make up their own minds. Much as I agree with the EFF and the FSF, they do have their own agendas.
That agenda makes those groups ideal sources of information for newspapers. Newspapers ultimately serve their readers or perish. The FSF, EFF and Opensource.org all have the user's freedom and prosperity as their goal. They are expert and impartial to industry interests.
The agenda of FSF and friends has little to do with pushing a specific program or platform. The FSF, for example, recognize BSD and Linux distributions as a free OSs, despite having their own kernel. They don't care who's tools you use, so long as they are free.
That perspective does not make them ignorant, or even impractical. All groups, to one extent or another, bow to practicality. GNU was written on non free software at one point because there was no other available. The opensource.org group are especially flexible in this regard and generally worry about performance before freedom.
The problem, from my perspective, is not that "mainstream" journalists can't make up their own minds, it's that they have not been talking to everyone they could. Making up your mind in ignorance is worse than doing nothing. The discussion of "alternate" operating systems never seems to get further than a brief mention of Apple. GNU is rarely mentioned, even though Apple, Sun and others use the GNU toolset. It's not even an ideological problem, if you buy into the "Linux is Communism" nonsense, because there are plenty of commercial Linux distributions ready to sell you non free software as addons the same way Michael Dell does. Informed decisions come from knowing the options. Something is clearly missing when a search for:
The stigma of a well paid job. Ah, how will I ever show my face in civilized society again?
Money spent on software licenses is money that won't go into your pocket. Bill Gates is happy that he's still on your company's payroll, despite the trouble you have getting work done with his junk.
Taking out the non operative words, we have:
OLE structure storage was present as alternate NTFS streams in NT 5 Beta 2 ... [but did not work and was not released] ... but ... it was ... Real Code.
Did not work and never saw the light of day is who's idea of software?
If the same people that use Windows for Powerpoint and Word and have a gazillion worms in their system used Linux, their systems would be as infected as they are now. They would probably using a 2.2 kernel, a very old build of KDE, and so on. The fact is: Smart users don't get infected, naive users do.
No, everyone who uses Windoze gets infected. It's not something you can do anything about because only M$ can "improve" the system. See here for well documented facts about the ongoing M$ security dissaster. A market for Vista exploits just goes to prove that nothing has changed.
Projecting Windows flaws to the free software world is not something you can do. The fact is that you can't even project those flaws to other non free OS like Mac. I dare you to tell me that all OSX users are somehow "smart" and that's why they don't get overrun with botnet malware. A user would be hard pressed to find a distro still using a 2.2 kernel and upgrading has never been hard. You have to go back four or five years for that, even in the conservative world of Debian. Sarge came with 2.4 and 2.6 kernels and Etch is about to go stable. Woody, back in 2001 or so, was the last time you could get a 2.2 kernel by default. More importantly, actual kernel problems have been patched up and never were the kind of threat found in the M$ world. KDE is as easy to upgade as your OS is. I'm using Etch with KDE 3.5 to write this, on a 266 MHz PII laptop that probably came with a Win98 OEM CD and never could have been upgraded to 2000 let alone XP. In the non free software world, people use that OEM CD until they can't stand it, then consider the computer itself dead. The free software world is much easier than that. The proof, of course, is in the data: there are no widespread security problems outside the M$ world.
I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it.
I lived through it too but I agree with the author's assertion that the trade mags of the time were full of shit and that M$ still is. In the end, it's hard to disagree with the author's well documented thesis: that M$ conned the wintel press into comparing existing software to M$'s future vision. The details are less important than the big picture because it will keep you from being fooled into thinking Vista is competitive.
This is one of the best summaries of M$ marketing practices I've ever seen. If you have a better feature compare, spanning two decades, I'd like to see it.
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry. Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article,
The Roughly Drafted article is not supposed to be a Window's history, it's a Microsoft Marketing history. Versions of software are mentioned and compared to competing and promissed versions. The history presented is accurate as are the product descriptions. What's more important is how M$ prommisses everything their competitors have today, convince the press the promisses are credible, but fail to deliver for decades. To find the same information in Wikipedia, you need to combine the Microsoft specific information from these articles:
Or you could just have a memory and a brain. It should be clear to any Windows user that M$'s operating systems are bloated, insecure and feature poor. It is equally clear that the reason for their market dominance has everything to do with marketing and nothing to do with technology. The author goes into some of those mechanics and why they won't work in the future.
The central thesis, that M$ uses vaporware to it's advantage, is clearly true. The similarity between Cairo an Longhorn mostly exist because Microsoft has yet to deliver on the feature promisses they made for Cairo. As the author pointed out, those features were available in competing products of the day and many are still not implemented in the new 10 Gigabyte sized Windoze.
Yes, when I say many, I refer to the lack of standards and use "Embrace, Extend Extinguish" delivers after a decade of fumbling. You can run in circles forever with slippery M$ promisses, or you can get out and enjoy standards based software from innovators. This has been the case for decades.
This is probably going to be a massive "M$ IS TEH SUX" and "Windoze crashes every five minutes, use Linux instead" religious FUD campaign, except that now it will be officially sanctioned by the FSF.
Silly Buggi, the FSF is tells you what they are doing - they are going to carefully outline how Vista restricts user freedom and put alternatives in their hands. Spreading freedom has always been their core mission. The poor performance of Vista has been adequately covered by the mainstream press, but they will soon forget what they said when M$ starts passing out advertisement money.
Be careful what you wish for, Moglen, Stallman et.al. You just might get it.
What, like people using free software? I'm sure they would be thrilled. You have claimed to live in Baton Rouge, Buggi old troll, why don't you stop by the CCCC Linux Desktop SIG and see it all working? Bring a box and we'll set you up - it's an install fest. I'm sure you will be happy with the improved performance of your hardware.
Do you still have bad things to say about Bruce Perens? You can bring that too, but no one will know what you are talking about.