His point was that the potential time delays on the listed Linux support mechanisms may be much more expensive to a customer than a support contract.
The original poster stated Linux has good free support. The poster didn't come outright and say that SVR4 by contrast has terrible free support, but it's implied.
The response was that free support doesn't cut it if you're doing something important! Paid support for SVR4 is ENTERPRISE grade, but it's a pointless argument since you can find enterprise grade paid support for Linux as well.
The fact that I get my work done faster using a command-line 95% of the time, and manipulate GUI elements using conventions established in the 80s around the X11 project suggest that computers haven't gotten that much easier to use. In fact, in their rush to become more usable for the uninitiated, I think they become harder for experienced people to use.
When I sit down at Windows or Mac, my productivity drops. Eventually it comes to a total standstill because I'm so frustrated that I have to stop and find out how to emulate x-mouse under the workstation I'm in front of today. Or find some alt/ctrl-click window resize equivalent since every laptop has a difficult to control pointing device and positioning it over the exact lip of the edge to drag is pretty troublesome. Or look for some xkill equivalent and realize that most systems don't have one and that I really do have to wait for this sluggish application to decide to respond.
I'm still trying to figure out how to make MacOS X usable since everyone sits me in front of it expecting me to enjoy it more because it's "UNIX underneath, somewhere". Then I spend a few minutes to try to remember where to find Terminal and then spend another 10 minutes trying to adjust the colors/font settings so that it's white on black and not 6pt font. I've been doing it for about 4 years now so I figured I'd be an expert on it, but I never can seem to remember. Maybe it's because one day Apple decided to improve it and moved the widgets around and I haven't been able to make any sense of it since. I usually give up and go to a different computer or suffer with the terminal as-is, hoping that I get my work done before I go blind. At least when I can't figure out how to make gnome-terminal or kterm do what I want, I can ALT-CTRL-F1 and get the virtual console which is usually a heavenly 80x25.
Also, apparantly no one but me feels that MacOS X's interface is too slow, even on really really powerful machines.
Define "price". Having to wait around for days
on end while somebody on the mailing list or web
forum decides to answer your question (or some-
times not at all)is unacceptable. Sun, HP, and
IBM, provide guaranteed response times and they
do it well. When your systems are down and
costing you $5000 an hour open-source "support"
don't cut and ends up costing you a lot more.
What the hell? You don't get enterprise support for free as a result of popping in a Solaris installation disc. Why would you expect one if it's Linux disc?
Yesterday in Massachusetts, a snow plow operator, too dumb to know his truck had GPS, exposed himself to a woman at a coffee shop, hopped back in his truck and was apprehended in minutes because the state troopers, knowing only the location of the coffee shop and that it was a snow plow operator, could find his exact whereabouts.
Wow, someone has all of this high technology used against him all because we think he was so shockingly ugly simply because we, collectively, thought he be punished for it?
Bravo. Clap. Clap.
Having someone "expose" themselves to you can certainly be creepy, but come on, law enforcement shouldn't be implementing biblical commandments.
After a long stint of playing GTA, if I go out driving and realize I suddenly did something illegal, I'd feel myself look up and to the right just a bit to to see if I had a `wanted' level.
Another GTA urge I always have to suppress is driving into oncoming traffic if I have to get somewhere in a hurry; the cars in the oncoming lane are out of your way much faster as long as you avoid them.
...but filing taxes on my own was a novelty that I've already experienced. Now I pay an accountant to do it. And if you really want me to blow your mind, other than contacting him via email to request an appointment, no general purpose computers are used in the process (by me).
Yes, I also pay bills with hand-written checks and mail them back by USPS mail.
If they had just approached Intel out of the blue, Intel wouldn't have felt any pressure to buy it. But sell it reaaal cheap to their competition (AMD), let them watch their edge in the market slip away, and eventually Intel will come begging.
Creators can try as hard as they like to make their system sound legitimate, but telling me that I've committed a crime by looking at or listening to something that was freely available without permission is what I call nonsense.
Fiat money is nonsense too, but that's a different discussion.
Hacking into a bank and changing your account balance is called fraud.
Well, copyright isn't part of a free market economy either. In fact, it's the antithesis of it -- since information has virtually unlimited supply, it is not a scarce resource and thusly its value is undefined. All of this is a fancy way of saying that information in a free market economy is free.
I hate sitting in front of a video screen like a drooling idiot hoping The Powers That Be can entertain me. It's almost as lame as sitting here reading messages posted to Slashdot.
Most people would say that TV is one of the least fun things they can think of doing.
Instead of opting for TV over DSL, I'm about ready to cancel cable TV. But I can never seem to make the phone call. :/
Measuring the Linux market by commodity software is like measuring the auto industry by car manufacturer sales.
Cars require fuel. And maintenance. And roads. And (ick) regulations. The amount is staggering -- cars are an enormous part of our economy and looking at only the businesses that sell them and the people that design and manufacture them is not seeing the whole picture.
Not to mention that the critical difference between software and automobiles is that software is unlimited (it's just information), and that this kind of software (open source) encourages unlimited copying, so the unit sales numbers are even more meaningless.
I wish I had the balls to talk to lawyers that way when I'm on the receiving end of a notice. I suppose knowing that the threats are meaningless helps increase courage.
...makes me want to download every piece of code I can from DJB's site, find a hole, write an exploit, and post the most arrogant, obnoxious message I can to BUGTRAQ.
Wouldn't it be fairly easy to demonstrate that this would cause devastating harm to the economy?
Most of the unique software in the world today is never redistributed. Some of the software is widely redistributed. The latter market may be affected, but dooming the economy? Nah.
Dooming the economy would be rewriting all of the COBOL code in the world.
Is the argument that software is a machine and that it shouldn't be illegal to clone a machine whose design isn't patented?
That's a fine idea by me, but the patent office is dangerously inept at dealing with software.
How many real software innovations have there been? I can only think of some compression algorithms and ciphers that are worth patenting, and even then they go too far and last way too long.
Like him or not, Bill Gates was the guy who really made it so developers could get paid.
I get paid to write software and none of it has anything to do with Mr. Gates's model of the modern software industry.
And what I do is pretty common.
Are you making the mistake of assuming that the shrinkwrap software industry represents the software-by-contract/service industry? It's a big mistake to make, since one is about 20-30 times larger than the other.
In fact, it's the open source "community" that does more to help out the industry I'm in than Microsoft does.
Microsoft's model did usher in the PC revolution, but their model is exceptional -- there are comparitively few other companies that make as much money as they do turning software into an end user store-shelf product.
For years I dealt with a client who would write long, incoherent rambling emails that he constructed across several states of mind. I'd have to spend hours every morning deciphering what he was trying to say. He just wasn't cut out for email, or so I thought.
Then one day he forwarded me an email he had written to his lawyers regarding some extremely important litigation, and what a suprise. He wrote succinctly, spelled perfectly, and got his point across with minimal deciphering required.
As I got to know this client, it became apparant that most of the people in his life just didn't matter to him. As such, he wrote them utter garbage without fail. He showed his respect for you by how he would write messages to you. The ones he felt were important got readable, useful messages. Luckily, I got to bill him for the time I had to spend decrypting his garbage emails and asking his staff to clarify.
We're left with little option but to make it illegal, I agree. But in doing so we create a black market, and spam's the kind of thing where the criminals can be Russian mobsters in Russia.
...making them illegal doesn't necessarily mean people will stop doing them.
If you make spam illegal and prosecute the people sending it, you basically force businesses who respect the law out of the market, and what remains are the businesses with no respect for the law: organized criminals
The mob's next frontier is spam, and spam's next frontier is the mob. I don't think this is an improvement.
I'm not interested in arguing the merits of abortion being murder or not murder. I argue that if it doesn't affect me it's none of my concern, and if it does affect me it's my concern and no one else's (unless they are similarly affected).
Confused?
A woman who I have never met aborting her pregnancy is none of my business. If she or someone else along the line sells the tissue for fun and profit, it's also none of my business.
I don't find it offensive or immoral.
If I do know the woman, or if I am the woman, it's my problem and you, stranger, should mind your own business.
On the other hand, a large, well organized gang with a lots of awesome firepower going around telling everyone that they may not abort their pregnancies, or can only abort their pregnancies through these approved channels is something I find very offensive, very immoral, and something I will resist vehemently.
Take your life/not-a-life rules and shove them. I don't care.
I don't know about anyone else, but helping a paralyzed woman walk again by regrowing parts of her damaged spine sounds quite miraculous. All hail the scientist champions of our human species!
Surely, we must give to them unlimited resources so that they may cure all of the plagues of the human experience!
Slashdot Mirror
Now, was there a point relating to usability guidelines somewhere?
Yes, actually. The headline is: Usability Guidelines From Early 80s Still Relevant, Industry Shocked.
My point is that it's not that shocking. Computer using conventions from the early 80s are still relevant, and haven't much improved since. For me.
His point was that the potential time delays on the listed Linux support mechanisms may be much more expensive to a customer than a support contract.
The original poster stated Linux has good free support. The poster didn't come outright and say that SVR4 by contrast has terrible free support, but it's implied.
The response was that free support doesn't cut it if you're doing something important! Paid support for SVR4 is ENTERPRISE grade, but it's a pointless argument since you can find enterprise grade paid support for Linux as well.
Oh shit, I've been trolled.
The fact that I get my work done faster using a command-line 95% of the time, and manipulate GUI elements using conventions established in the 80s around the X11 project suggest that computers haven't gotten that much easier to use. In fact, in their rush to become more usable for the uninitiated, I think they become harder for experienced people to use.
When I sit down at Windows or Mac, my productivity drops. Eventually it comes to a total standstill because I'm so frustrated that I have to stop and find out how to emulate x-mouse under the workstation I'm in front of today. Or find some alt/ctrl-click window resize equivalent since every laptop has a difficult to control pointing device and positioning it over the exact lip of the edge to drag is pretty troublesome. Or look for some xkill equivalent and realize that most systems don't have one and that I really do have to wait for this sluggish application to decide to respond.
I'm still trying to figure out how to make MacOS X usable since everyone sits me in front of it expecting me to enjoy it more because it's "UNIX underneath, somewhere". Then I spend a few minutes to try to remember where to find Terminal and then spend another 10 minutes trying to adjust the colors/font settings so that it's white on black and not 6pt font. I've been doing it for about 4 years now so I figured I'd be an expert on it, but I never can seem to remember. Maybe it's because one day Apple decided to improve it and moved the widgets around and I haven't been able to make any sense of it since. I usually give up and go to a different computer or suffer with the terminal as-is, hoping that I get my work done before I go blind. At least when I can't figure out how to make gnome-terminal or kterm do what I want, I can ALT-CTRL-F1 and get the virtual console which is usually a heavenly 80x25.
Also, apparantly no one but me feels that MacOS X's interface is too slow, even on really really powerful machines.
Complaints that no one understands. *sigh*
Define "price". Having to wait around for days on end while somebody on the mailing list or web forum decides to answer your question (or some- times not at all)is unacceptable. Sun, HP, and IBM, provide guaranteed response times and they do it well. When your systems are down and costing you $5000 an hour open-source "support" don't cut and ends up costing you a lot more.
What the hell? You don't get enterprise support for free as a result of popping in a Solaris installation disc. Why would you expect one if it's Linux disc?
Yesterday in Massachusetts, a snow plow operator, too dumb to know his truck had GPS, exposed himself to a woman at a coffee shop, hopped back in his truck and was apprehended in minutes because the state troopers, knowing only the location of the coffee shop and that it was a snow plow operator, could find his exact whereabouts.
Wow, someone has all of this high technology used against him all because we think he was so shockingly ugly simply because we, collectively, thought he be punished for it?
Bravo. Clap. Clap.
Having someone "expose" themselves to you can certainly be creepy, but come on, law enforcement shouldn't be implementing biblical commandments.
Oh man.
After a long stint of playing GTA, if I go out driving and realize I suddenly did something illegal, I'd feel myself look up and to the right just a bit to to see if I had a `wanted' level.
Another GTA urge I always have to suppress is driving into oncoming traffic if I have to get somewhere in a hurry; the cars in the oncoming lane are out of your way much faster as long as you avoid them.
...but filing taxes on my own was a novelty that I've already experienced. Now I pay an accountant to do it. And if you really want me to blow your mind, other than contacting him via email to request an appointment, no general purpose computers are used in the process (by me).
Yes, I also pay bills with hand-written checks and mail them back by USPS mail.
OOoooohh how devious.
If they had just approached Intel out of the blue, Intel wouldn't have felt any pressure to buy it. But sell it reaaal cheap to their competition (AMD), let them watch their edge in the market slip away, and eventually Intel will come begging.
Information ownership is nonsense.
Creators can try as hard as they like to make their system sound legitimate, but telling me that I've committed a crime by looking at or listening to something that was freely available without permission is what I call nonsense.
Fiat money is nonsense too, but that's a different discussion.
Hacking into a bank and changing your account balance is called fraud.
Well, copyright isn't part of a free market economy either. In fact, it's the antithesis of it -- since information has virtually unlimited supply, it is not a scarce resource and thusly its value is undefined. All of this is a fancy way of saying that information in a free market economy is free.
I really hate television.
I hate sitting in front of a video screen like a drooling idiot hoping The Powers That Be can entertain me. It's almost as lame as sitting here reading messages posted to Slashdot.
Most people would say that TV is one of the least fun things they can think of doing.
Instead of opting for TV over DSL, I'm about ready to cancel cable TV. But I can never seem to make the phone call. : /
*sigh*
Measuring the Linux market by commodity software is like measuring the auto industry by car manufacturer sales.
Cars require fuel. And maintenance. And roads. And (ick) regulations. The amount is staggering -- cars are an enormous part of our economy and looking at only the businesses that sell them and the people that design and manufacture them is not seeing the whole picture.
Not to mention that the critical difference between software and automobiles is that software is unlimited (it's just information), and that this kind of software (open source) encourages unlimited copying, so the unit sales numbers are even more meaningless.
Their responses to legal threats are comedy gold.
I wish I had the balls to talk to lawyers that way when I'm on the receiving end of a notice. I suppose knowing that the threats are meaningless helps increase courage.
...makes me want to download every piece of code I can from DJB's site, find a hole, write an exploit, and post the most arrogant, obnoxious message I can to BUGTRAQ.
Wouldn't it be fairly easy to demonstrate that this would cause devastating harm to the economy?
Most of the unique software in the world today is never redistributed. Some of the software is widely redistributed. The latter market may be affected, but dooming the economy? Nah.
Dooming the economy would be rewriting all of the COBOL code in the world.
No software copyright?
Is the argument that software is a machine and that it shouldn't be illegal to clone a machine whose design isn't patented?
That's a fine idea by me, but the patent office is dangerously inept at dealing with software.
How many real software innovations have there been? I can only think of some compression algorithms and ciphers that are worth patenting, and even then they go too far and last way too long.
Invalidating software copyright practically demands patent reform.
Like him or not, Bill Gates was the guy who really made it so developers could get paid.
I get paid to write software and none of it has anything to do with Mr. Gates's model of the modern software industry.
And what I do is pretty common.
Are you making the mistake of assuming that the shrinkwrap software industry represents the software-by-contract/service industry? It's a big mistake to make, since one is about 20-30 times larger than the other.
In fact, it's the open source "community" that does more to help out the industry I'm in than Microsoft does.
Microsoft's model did usher in the PC revolution, but their model is exceptional -- there are comparitively few other companies that make as much money as they do turning software into an end user store-shelf product.
For years I dealt with a client who would write long, incoherent rambling emails that he constructed across several states of mind. I'd have to spend hours every morning deciphering what he was trying to say. He just wasn't cut out for email, or so I thought.
Then one day he forwarded me an email he had written to his lawyers regarding some extremely important litigation, and what a suprise. He wrote succinctly, spelled perfectly, and got his point across with minimal deciphering required.
As I got to know this client, it became apparant that most of the people in his life just didn't matter to him. As such, he wrote them utter garbage without fail. He showed his respect for you by how he would write messages to you. The ones he felt were important got readable, useful messages. Luckily, I got to bill him for the time I had to spend decrypting his garbage emails and asking his staff to clarify.
We're left with little option but to make it illegal, I agree. But in doing so we create a black market, and spam's the kind of thing where the criminals can be Russian mobsters in Russia.
...making them illegal doesn't necessarily mean people will stop doing them.
If you make spam illegal and prosecute the people sending it, you basically force businesses who respect the law out of the market, and what remains are the businesses with no respect for the law: organized criminals
The mob's next frontier is spam, and spam's next frontier is the mob. I don't think this is an improvement.
The system is discontinued once police get busted trying to cover up illicit police activity.
They've only been making crappy movie-spinoff games for like 10 years now.
There are people who consider your apathy itself to be a threat...
Minding your own business is a time honored tradition that can be appreciated by all.
I'm not interested in arguing the merits of abortion being murder or not murder. I argue that if it doesn't affect me it's none of my concern, and if it does affect me it's my concern and no one else's (unless they are similarly affected).
Confused?
A woman who I have never met aborting her pregnancy is none of my business. If she or someone else along the line sells the tissue for fun and profit, it's also none of my business. I don't find it offensive or immoral.
If I do know the woman, or if I am the woman, it's my problem and you, stranger, should mind your own business.
On the other hand, a large, well organized gang with a lots of awesome firepower going around telling everyone that they may not abort their pregnancies, or can only abort their pregnancies through these approved channels is something I find very offensive, very immoral, and something I will resist vehemently.
Take your life/not-a-life rules and shove them. I don't care.
Now, lets see some cures you baby-killers.
...and say "no fucking shit?".
I don't know about anyone else, but helping a paralyzed woman walk again by regrowing parts of her damaged spine sounds quite miraculous. All hail the scientist champions of our human species!
Surely, we must give to them unlimited resources so that they may cure all of the plagues of the human experience!
Right?