I think the poster you're replying to was referring to the fact that nVidia released closed-source drivers for X. Without the specs on hand, an independent group cannot develop an open source driver.
The problem with closed source drivers is that they're always going to suck. The kernel licensing makes it possible, but the kernel module interface is set up to benefit modules that are compiled against the actual source tree. nVidia's hardware accelerated drivers crash my machine without flaw. I had to downgrade to a prior version to get it to sort of work (the helpful nVidia developers actually told me that I had to do this, to their credit). Even then it crashes my X periodically.
If they had written an open source driver, all of the bugs would have certainly been fixed by now, and if they had just released the specs, they wouldn't have had to develop the driver at all.
And before you go and defend poor nVidia's property rights, let me save you the trouble. nVidia wanted to release an open source driver. They full well understand the benefits, being a company made up of the best engineers in the industry. Unfortunately, part of the driver code was contributed by a third-party who refuses to let them open source it. The end.
My next card, sadly, unfortunately, oh god I wish it could be, won't be an nVidia.
Making these tools illegal won't stop people from violating copyright law.
Copyright law doesn't even stop most people from violating copyright law. Just because massive software piracy outfits are now violating TWO laws means that they'll stop? Give me a break.
The DMCA does not help a company defend it's copyrights at all. What it does is give them COPY CONTROL. With the simplest "encryption" algorithm you can now 100% put a stop to reverse engineering, totally eliminating your competitors if you happen to have created an industry standard protocol.
Think of it as patenting the most ridiculously easy algorithm without actually requiring a patent or an original idea. IIRC, Real Networks won a case based on the DMCA because they set 1 bit in their packet headers that means "ENCRYPTED", even though the rest of the packet is identitical to the unencrypted form.
It is meant to squelch competition. Be it from individuals in research, open source hackers, or other proprietary software giants. Retail piracy outfits (like the ones in China) will be affected in no way whatsoever by the DMCA. Everyone else will.
When does something stop being 'security through obscurity'? Depending on how you look at it, all forms of security, (or at least most of the ones employed over the internet) are based on picking access tokens that are really hard to guess.
Running a service with no authentication on a random port isn't great security, but in principle, it's the same kind of security as running on a well known port and requiring a unique access identifier and passcode. It's just harder to guess, but still fundamentally the same.
Real security would be achieved through schemes where all of the knowledge in the world won't gain you privileged access.
New ideas are an extremely destabilizing thing in such a large and closed society. It's not so much that the ideas themselves are evil, as it is that the introduction of them at all.
This has the potential to destroy China's status quo. What would happen if everyone in China suddenly wanted a Porsche, or even just wanted ice cream? Can you imagine a billion people finding the internet? What happens when these people learn about miranda rights? Freedom of speech? Or, more likely, see all of the hardcore pornography..
Imagine going your whole life without ever seeing pornography until you were.. 27. You'd cream your pants instantly. Now, imagine the entire population did that. It'd be sheer chaos!
The only choice they have is oppression. They don't know what else to do. The internet will revolutionize China, but it won't be pretty.
It's a good thing that the makers of the Pinto are all sitting in jail for knowingly producing dangerous vehicles and saying nothing.
Oh wait! They're not! Ford was just made to pay millions of dollars rather than say, spend time in jail.
Corporations can literally get away with murder. How is setting up a corporation that distributes a commercial version of the Gimp with an infringing name more illegal than a company that can't pay off all of it's debts and folds?
In cases where a loan can't be paid off, or a big lawsuit does a company in, the investors can only lose as much as they put in.
I don't know about the rest of the world..
I even vaguely remember some radicals abusing corporate protection to protest the fact that corporations have such limited liability.
NOTE: It's a different case entirely if a company takes out a loan that's co-signed by the owner, which is much more common. In that case, you can fold the company and still owe all of that money. Most lenders will NEVER loan directly to limited liability businesses unless they're 100% sure that they're good for it.
We had contacted Time Warner when the terms of the merger were being dicussed with the FTC. Time Warner said it was anxious to let independent ISPs (even small ones like ours) onto it's cable networks.
We were being offered some interesting opportunities. We'd effectively be allowed to sell bandwidth over TWNYC's RoadRunner and market to the entire NYC area. Since ADSL is pretty shitty, we would have been glad to offer NYCT.NET brand cable to our customers.
If I'm clued in correctly, Time Warner stopped returning our calls once the merger was complete.
Form a Deleware corporation titled 'Abode Systems Inc.'
Take The GIMP and rename it 'Abode Photo Workshop'
Distribute far and wide
When Adobe sues you, delay and reschedule the trial as much as possible, racking up legal fees for Adobe. If you really want to, show up in court (in Deleware, urhh) and try to argue your case. You'll probably lose, but it'll certainly take much longer.
When you do lose, you obviously can't pay the $400,000 lawsuit, so Adobe gains ownership of your corporation, and a copy of a modified version of The Gimp
No reason you can't use corporatism against them, and it only costs about $100 to make Adobe spend far far more.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. Don't actually do this unless you get a real lawyer's opinion.
Where I used to regard someone like Adobe with complete and utter apathy, I now regard them with hate.
There's a difference between protecting their brand and being insane. They turned a situation that could be solved effortlessly into a messy legal battle. Does anyone doubt that the developer would have just changed the name if Adobe had come along and said "Hey dude, cool stuff, but we're kind of peeved that it's named 'Illustrator', can ya change it? We spent gazillions of dollars promoting the name 'Illustrator' and we feel kind of taken.'"
Christ, this is enough to make me want to infringe on one of their brands just out of retaliation.
Hmm. Could they feel threatened by open source?IIRC, they used to even recommend the Gimp when users asked them to port Photoshop to Linux.
Corporations do not have feelings, or emotions. They cannot feel pain or pleasure. They don't perceive and don't care about the difference between "right" and "wrong". They are artificial entities.
Sure, the people that work at these companies are moral, and have feelings, emotions, etc. They're generally decent and trying to make their living. But this rarely surfaces as part of the company as a whole. Good corporations will do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible. If they feel they can get away with resorting to illegal activity to do it, what would stop them?
We're not ungrateful for the things that capitalism makes possible. Frankly, it seems to be the only system that applies naturally to human instincts. But that doesn't mean corporations shouldn't be held accountable for what they do. Falsifying research towards their favor is not an acceptable practice. They should be punished for this.
When you meet something who is governed by one obsessive principle ("Make the most money no matter what!"), it's only natural to regard them with suspicion. The last thing you want to give to something like that is trust.
Out of all of the other languages I have ever studied [including C, C++, TCL, Perl, PHP, Forth, Scheme] Python is by far the easiest to pick up and use right away.
It's something you have to experience yourself to truly appreciate how easy it is to pick up.
If I ever had to teach someone how to program, I'd definitely introduce them to Python first. The concepts are easy to grasp without having to sweat all of the small stuff that could otherwise be extremely distracting and only dilute the main ideas.
i think it's kinda funny that MacOS X will almost immediatly surpas Linux - and shortly thereafter all other Unix-oid systems combined - in finally bringing Unix to the desktop. good fer them.
But MacOS X isn't user friendly enough. You may as well use Solaris or HPUX or some other proprietary UNIX. Sure, it has some open source components, but the bulk of it is still closed. There's no "We want to appeal to all of the hardcore techies out there" notion inherent in OS X, and there never was.
Oh, do you consider "user friendly" to be condescending GUIs? In that case, I guess it is better, but I find these systems absolutely unusable.
And I'm not saying command lines are any more usable. I feel just as restricted on a Windows machine as I do using Solaris. The open source culture of an OS does a lot towards making it more usable for me. This is the distinction between OS X, which has many a friendly graphical interface and some open source parts, being completely worthless to me, and Linux, which has a less polished happy graphical interace, but is completely usable to me.
So, from my point of view "Linux has surpassed all other OS's". But that only matters to me.
MySQL is free, and contrary to popular belief, is just as powerful as the for a huge price + 1000 times the size alternatives. It's also supported by a modest number of companies if you'd like to pay big bucks.
They have an arguable browser monopoly, (or at least close to it) and are clearly bundling in their content services, which are pretty lukewarm, in order to boost it's views.
My High School economics teacher performed a cute experiment to determine the best price to set for your product and make the most money at it. The term was "market price".
Anyway, the teacher took a survey of the class as to how many CDs they would buy per month if set at a certain price. Obviously, people would dozens if they were a dollar apiece, and significantly less if they were $40 apiece. You graph this, and select the price where # of units sold times price is the highest sum of all of the other samples.
So, what's the target price for 16-18 year old high school students in New York City? About $8.
Why are CDs so expensive you ask? Because teenagers aren't the target market. Adults are. If every teenager in the country stops buying CDs, they'll raise the price for adults who are probably much less net savvy (ie, less inclined to Napster) to compensate.
If Napster consumes their Adult market too, they'd either raise their prices even more to try to capture whatever's left of the non-net market, or cut them sharply to make them more appealing to the general public. I might just warez a CD if it costs $20, but it doesn't seem worth the effort for $5.
Can they set their prices to $5 and make a profit? Of course they can. They may have to tweak their business model a bit (uh oh, we can only blow 5 million on "promotion" instead of 10), but I wouldn't cry for them.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean people won't stop doing it. May as well legalize it and try to make money at it.:)
Thanks to the spirit of consumer advocation, Microsoft has provided the public with some very unsettling news. Open source is bad for businesses! Luckily, through a complete coincidence, Mr. Ballmer works at a company that can save you from open source! That's right, if you buy Microsoft products instead, you can totally avoid the cancer!
It's through selfless efforts like this that makes Microsoft such a great company. Thanks Microsoft! Where would the world be without you?
Really people. What did you expect him to say?Yeah, that's right. Linux is totally superior to our software in every way. If you switch to open source today, why, you're no longer our bitch! You can totally stop putting up with our crap like constant bluescreens, ridiculous licensing schemes, forced upgrades, and no source code. In fact, you'd have to be crazy to put up with us. What's wrong with you people?
This could be sort of justified if a reputable consumer advocate group said "avoid open source for the following reasons".
But it's not.
Despite the fact that his work contradicts much of your research, he also faces similar obstacles in having his work accepted or at least evaluated. No "institution" of higher education will even return his calls. I spoke to him via phone recently, and Mr. Ray believes that this is because they're run by fundamentalists engaged in some kind of conspiracy to keep the truth away from the public. He was understandably very frustrated by this.
I can't help but to wonder if other scientists face the same problems. Can you offer a correlating viewpoint?
In your efforts to have your work accepted, or at least taken seriously, do you find that fundementalists are a large obstacle? If so, do you believe that this is out of their own ignorance, or that maybe they do in fact have a sinister motive as Mr. Ray suggests?
I uploaded some homebrew benchmarking software to it. The memory bandwidth seems amazing. Compared to a reasonably high-end Intel server, it has about 10x the memory bandwidth. Either that, or lots and lots of L2 cache. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one on the system, and the tests consistently showed almost 10x the throughput of Intel.
The test was simple: take a range of memory of X megs, and write a random char to it. Time how many can be done in a quarter of a second, extrapolate MB/s from that. I get almost the same numbers if I use 10MB chunks as I do to 1MB chunks. Good shit here.
Single CPU performance isn't much different, but that wasn't the point. The systems could also be configured to give my account access to multiple processors.
If I started my own hosting company, I think I'd definitely use one of these babies.
..install their own systems? Outside of the IT departments, almost no one does anything on their machines other than point, click, and print.
Don't try to use Linux as if it were Windows. Windows does that better. The fact that most companies have (or should have) a pervasive network by now, coupled with the fact that each end-user workstation probably needs to perform at most one or two tasks, makes Linux perfect.
One appropriately skilled Linux hacker could probably run an entire small/medium-sized company (about 100 employees) if you left all of the software/hardware decisions up to her. And I don't mean by having her install crap like StarOffice on 100 Red Hat boxes. I mean by asking her to analyze your business and having them suggest the way to make it all come together, with modern technology. If you step back far enough, every system is an embedded system.
The fact that you can totally control Linux means that you can design a more efficient end user experience. If the Linux hacker is appropriately skilled, you needn't even employ them fulltime, ie -- they're a consultant!
This is what Linux companies should (and do) focus on. It is total silliness to try to provide something that looks and acts like Windows, when realistically, Windows is totally ill-suited to a lot of these tasks. Copying Windows means you're just doomed to fail. They do it better, and they have a monopoly. Instead, do something innovative
Windows has it's places, but Linux has so many more.
DNS protocol standardization takes place on the censored namedroppers mailing list. Vixie has had a large involvement in DNS, and I believe he even hosts the mailing list.
Have a read at Dan Bernstein's attempts to raise important issues on this list that are routinely censored:
Through a strange coincidence, it seems that plenty of problems I've read about center around or close to Paul Vixie. It's impossible not to have contempt for him at this point. Does he try??
He is involved or responsible for projects which have/had shown significant problems: Vixie Cron (security holes), BIND (security holes), DNS standardization (security holes, censorship, bloated/redundant features), Blacklisting (mis-filtering or abusing filters), etc. This is too weird.
The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an attempt to bring ancient PC "standards" up to something reasonable. Almost all hardware and OS/driver vendors are _for_ this. This is an attempt to give PC's real firmware, rather than the hack they have now.
If you've ever used big iron UNIX hardware, you've probably enjoyed the conveniance that the firmware itself provides (or maybe not).
Replacing the MBR is one aspect of this. This is not something to worry about unless MS pulls the embrace and extend crap, but I doubt they'd stoop to it on such a low-level aspect.
With some exceptions, all OS, Driver, and Hardware developers/vendors want EFI.
Possible conspiracy theories:
Intel is mostly responsible for EFI. Insert typical big scary corporation fear.
EFI lets each hardware vendor provide built-in drivers for all hardware. This could certainly mean that the OS has to use a binary-only driver to transmit something over the network card. Quality manufacturers will probably want an OS specific driver. At least EFI demands that the bundled driver follow a standard interface. The end result is that you may not have the source to some hardware drivers.
Realistically, the worst that EFI can do is give us something better than what we have now. At best, it could make PC's pleasurable (but don't bet on it).
Developers that come from open source environments tend to stay closer to the art of programming. If they can work in an open source environment (even if they're writing closed source code), they'll be all the more efficient.Obviously, you can have brilliant people working in closed environments and morons in open environments, but if you're looking to hire open source programmers, you've probably come to realize this.
Most open source advocates do believe that certain niches are more effective as closed source projects. Games, for the most part, is one of these niches. Games are probably the only piece of software that makes sense as a product. (Nowdays, that's much less true, but still true).
Software products were a joke then, and now.
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 4
The fact that Microsoft has managed to make a successful thriving business out of software products totally caught everyone off guard. Software in itself is fundamentally worthless, their competitors said. It was such a silly idea, that most big iron vendors didn't even try it. Businesses need custom solutions, not shrink-wrapped packages. So what about the masses with a PC at home? Realistically, that makes up a small percentage of Microsoft's revenue. Most of their killer apps were sold to businesses-- the very same businesses that IBM said wouldn't need them.
Software products are sold to a generic mass market, and as such, they cannot possibly do what every user wants it to do. A single software package will never do what you want, and you will always need to support it, and you will always need to change it to do what you precisely want.
Software products are proprietary by definition. They try to be black boxes. Buy it once and it solves the problem. The business model never takes into account support, for when the product fails, or further development, when the product almost does what you want, but isn't quite there. Your best bet is to hope that the next version, which will cost you to upgrade to, will do what you want, based on your feedback to the vendor.
Amazingly, Microsoft has made billions on a flawed software model. They went out and convinced everyone, (through no monopolistic means of course. Judge Jackson was clearly uninformed), that their bits on a disc are valuable and worth every penny. Since the only value of Microsoft software is the bits printed on a CD, obviously IP rights are extremely important to their livelihood.
The open source way, specifically GPL'd software, suggests a totally different business model. It means that someone can come in, choose from a wealth of open source software utilities, provide you with a custom solution, and you maintain all of the control you need. If anything, it means that a consultant you hire who builds you a point of sale system with open source components can't hide the source from you. You aren't stuck with the mercy of your original vendor. How could this be bad? Sure, maybe you can't resell your custom system, but realistcally, how many people can resell their closed source ones? If anything, you have a much higher chance of reselling a custom open source system.
When I think of system development with Linux, I think 2% custom code, and 98% software integration. When I imagine it with Windows, I imagine the exact opposite. Take a bunch of black boxes and try to glue them together with lots and lots of code. Oh, also, don't forget the software licensing costs!
There are always exceptions here, of course. Closed source works for a lot of business models. But really, people that care about retaining IP rights to their source code as a solutions provider are just looking to keep their clients at their mercy. Typically Microsoft.
And for those of you saying "Software service? Big deal. That's a totally insignificant market", here's a way to prove it to yourself. Look in the want ads for programming positions. I'd wager that 95% of the jobs being offered to programmers are to work on custom systems, rather than working at a company that provides a shrink-wrapped product. There's a reason that COBOL programmers are still in demand, despite almost no new commercial software being written in COBOL in the past 10 years.
Mundie says that Linux can never be used to make one company billions of monopoly dollars. You mean that we don't have to deal with another Microsoft if the world switches to open source? What's the fucking problem?
Get out! Scientologists abusing people through the legal system?! How dare you make such accusations?! I can't believe any of this garbage. People should stop being religious bigots and accept Scientology for the well meaning organization that it is.
Just to throw this in, since most people will think we're commie hippy scum..
Wal-Mart doesn't suck because they provide cheaper goods/services. No one is against that. The customer wins when that happens.
The suck part is that all of the smaller businesses can't compete with Wal-Mart. They go bankrupt. When these businesses made money, they stayed in the community. Their owners live there and spend their money there.
The money that Wal-Mart makes leaves the community entirely. Suddenly, the only place you can find employment is at Wal-Mart. All of the surrounding businesses that don't even compete with Wal-Mart in any way suddenly lose some business because the businesses that do compete with Wal-Mart have closed. Class mobility just became a little harder.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the poster you're replying to was referring to the fact that nVidia released closed-source drivers for X. Without the specs on hand, an independent group cannot develop an open source driver.
The problem with closed source drivers is that they're always going to suck. The kernel licensing makes it possible, but the kernel module interface is set up to benefit modules that are compiled against the actual source tree. nVidia's hardware accelerated drivers crash my machine without flaw. I had to downgrade to a prior version to get it to sort of work (the helpful nVidia developers actually told me that I had to do this, to their credit). Even then it crashes my X periodically.
If they had written an open source driver, all of the bugs would have certainly been fixed by now, and if they had just released the specs, they wouldn't have had to develop the driver at all.
And before you go and defend poor nVidia's property rights, let me save you the trouble. nVidia wanted to release an open source driver. They full well understand the benefits, being a company made up of the best engineers in the industry. Unfortunately, part of the driver code was contributed by a third-party who refuses to let them open source it. The end.
My next card, sadly, unfortunately, oh god I wish it could be, won't be an nVidia.
Making these tools illegal won't stop people from violating copyright law.
Copyright law doesn't even stop most people from violating copyright law. Just because massive software piracy outfits are now violating TWO laws means that they'll stop? Give me a break.
The DMCA does not help a company defend it's copyrights at all. What it does is give them COPY CONTROL. With the simplest "encryption" algorithm you can now 100% put a stop to reverse engineering, totally eliminating your competitors if you happen to have created an industry standard protocol.
Think of it as patenting the most ridiculously easy algorithm without actually requiring a patent or an original idea. IIRC, Real Networks won a case based on the DMCA because they set 1 bit in their packet headers that means "ENCRYPTED", even though the rest of the packet is identitical to the unencrypted form.
It is meant to squelch competition. Be it from individuals in research, open source hackers, or other proprietary software giants. Retail piracy outfits (like the ones in China) will be affected in no way whatsoever by the DMCA. Everyone else will.
When does something stop being 'security through obscurity'? Depending on how you look at it, all forms of security, (or at least most of the ones employed over the internet) are based on picking access tokens that are really hard to guess.
Running a service with no authentication on a random port isn't great security, but in principle, it's the same kind of security as running on a well known port and requiring a unique access identifier and passcode. It's just harder to guess, but still fundamentally the same.
Real security would be achieved through schemes where all of the knowledge in the world won't gain you privileged access.
New ideas are an extremely destabilizing thing in such a large and closed society. It's not so much that the ideas themselves are evil, as it is that the introduction of them at all.
This has the potential to destroy China's status quo. What would happen if everyone in China suddenly wanted a Porsche, or even just wanted ice cream? Can you imagine a billion people finding the internet? What happens when these people learn about miranda rights? Freedom of speech? Or, more likely, see all of the hardcore pornography..
Imagine going your whole life without ever seeing pornography until you were.. 27. You'd cream your pants instantly. Now, imagine the entire population did that. It'd be sheer chaos!
The only choice they have is oppression. They don't know what else to do. The internet will revolutionize China, but it won't be pretty.
It's a good thing that the makers of the Pinto are all sitting in jail for knowingly producing dangerous vehicles and saying nothing.
Oh wait! They're not! Ford was just made to pay millions of dollars rather than say, spend time in jail.
Corporations can literally get away with murder. How is setting up a corporation that distributes a commercial version of the Gimp with an infringing name more illegal than a company that can't pay off all of it's debts and folds?
In cases where a loan can't be paid off, or a big lawsuit does a company in, the investors can only lose as much as they put in.
I don't know about the rest of the world..
I even vaguely remember some radicals abusing corporate protection to protest the fact that corporations have such limited liability.
NOTE: It's a different case entirely if a company takes out a loan that's co-signed by the owner, which is much more common. In that case, you can fold the company and still owe all of that money. Most lenders will NEVER loan directly to limited liability businesses unless they're 100% sure that they're good for it.
We had contacted Time Warner when the terms of the merger were being dicussed with the FTC. Time Warner said it was anxious to let independent ISPs (even small ones like ours) onto it's cable networks.
We were being offered some interesting opportunities. We'd effectively be allowed to sell bandwidth over TWNYC's RoadRunner and market to the entire NYC area. Since ADSL is pretty shitty, we would have been glad to offer NYCT.NET brand cable to our customers.
If I'm clued in correctly, Time Warner stopped returning our calls once the merger was complete.
No reason you can't use corporatism against them, and it only costs about $100 to make Adobe spend far far more.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. Don't actually do this unless you get a real lawyer's opinion.
Where I used to regard someone like Adobe with complete and utter apathy, I now regard them with hate.
There's a difference between protecting their brand and being insane. They turned a situation that could be solved effortlessly into a messy legal battle. Does anyone doubt that the developer would have just changed the name if Adobe had come along and said "Hey dude, cool stuff, but we're kind of peeved that it's named 'Illustrator', can ya change it? We spent gazillions of dollars promoting the name 'Illustrator' and we feel kind of taken.'"
Christ, this is enough to make me want to infringe on one of their brands just out of retaliation.
Hmm. Could they feel threatened by open source?IIRC, they used to even recommend the Gimp when users asked them to port Photoshop to Linux.
Even commercial products aren't original, compare Microsoft Office
Exactly what is wrong with the K Desktop Environment appending a K if everyone else appends their company name?
Personally, I think KDE Office sounds better than KOffice. But that's not my decision :)
Perhaps Adobe shouldn't have chosen to make a brand out of such a generic word?
What's so hard to understand?
Corporations do not have feelings, or emotions. They cannot feel pain or pleasure. They don't perceive and don't care about the difference between "right" and "wrong". They are artificial entities.
Sure, the people that work at these companies are moral, and have feelings, emotions, etc. They're generally decent and trying to make their living. But this rarely surfaces as part of the company as a whole. Good corporations will do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible. If they feel they can get away with resorting to illegal activity to do it, what would stop them?
We're not ungrateful for the things that capitalism makes possible. Frankly, it seems to be the only system that applies naturally to human instincts. But that doesn't mean corporations shouldn't be held accountable for what they do. Falsifying research towards their favor is not an acceptable practice. They should be punished for this.
When you meet something who is governed by one obsessive principle ("Make the most money no matter what!"), it's only natural to regard them with suspicion. The last thing you want to give to something like that is trust.
Out of all of the other languages I have ever studied [including C, C++, TCL, Perl, PHP, Forth, Scheme] Python is by far the easiest to pick up and use right away.
It's something you have to experience yourself to truly appreciate how easy it is to pick up.
If I ever had to teach someone how to program, I'd definitely introduce them to Python first. The concepts are easy to grasp without having to sweat all of the small stuff that could otherwise be extremely distracting and only dilute the main ideas.
i think it's kinda funny that MacOS X will almost immediatly surpas Linux - and shortly thereafter all other Unix-oid systems combined - in finally bringing Unix to the desktop. good fer them.
But MacOS X isn't user friendly enough. You may as well use Solaris or HPUX or some other proprietary UNIX. Sure, it has some open source components, but the bulk of it is still closed. There's no "We want to appeal to all of the hardcore techies out there" notion inherent in OS X, and there never was.
Oh, do you consider "user friendly" to be condescending GUIs? In that case, I guess it is better, but I find these systems absolutely unusable.
And I'm not saying command lines are any more usable. I feel just as restricted on a Windows machine as I do using Solaris. The open source culture of an OS does a lot towards making it more usable for me. This is the distinction between OS X, which has many a friendly graphical interface and some open source parts, being completely worthless to me, and Linux, which has a less polished happy graphical interace, but is completely usable to me.
So, from my point of view "Linux has surpassed all other OS's". But that only matters to me.
Keep your OS bigotry off of my body.
Take a look at MySQL Myths Debunked
MySQL is free, and contrary to popular belief, is just as powerful as the for a huge price + 1000 times the size alternatives. It's also supported by a modest number of companies if you'd like to pay big bucks.
Oh come on, how obvious can they become?
They have an arguable browser monopoly, (or at least close to it) and are clearly bundling in their content services, which are pretty lukewarm, in order to boost it's views.
These are textbook monopoly practices here.
My High School economics teacher performed a cute experiment to determine the best price to set for your product and make the most money at it. The term was "market price".
Anyway, the teacher took a survey of the class as to how many CDs they would buy per month if set at a certain price. Obviously, people would dozens if they were a dollar apiece, and significantly less if they were $40 apiece. You graph this, and select the price where # of units sold times price is the highest sum of all of the other samples.
So, what's the target price for 16-18 year old high school students in New York City? About $8.
Why are CDs so expensive you ask? Because teenagers aren't the target market. Adults are. If every teenager in the country stops buying CDs, they'll raise the price for adults who are probably much less net savvy (ie, less inclined to Napster) to compensate.
If Napster consumes their Adult market too, they'd either raise their prices even more to try to capture whatever's left of the non-net market, or cut them sharply to make them more appealing to the general public. I might just warez a CD if it costs $20, but it doesn't seem worth the effort for $5.
Can they set their prices to $5 and make a profit? Of course they can. They may have to tweak their business model a bit (uh oh, we can only blow 5 million on "promotion" instead of 10), but I wouldn't cry for them.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean people won't stop doing it. May as well legalize it and try to make money at it. :)
Thanks to the spirit of consumer advocation, Microsoft has provided the public with some very unsettling news. Open source is bad for businesses! Luckily, through a complete coincidence, Mr. Ballmer works at a company that can save you from open source! That's right, if you buy Microsoft products instead, you can totally avoid the cancer!
It's through selfless efforts like this that makes Microsoft such a great company. Thanks Microsoft! Where would the world be without you?
Really people. What did you expect him to say? Yeah, that's right. Linux is totally superior to our software in every way. If you switch to open source today, why, you're no longer our bitch! You can totally stop putting up with our crap like constant bluescreens, ridiculous licensing schemes, forced upgrades, and no source code. In fact, you'd have to be crazy to put up with us. What's wrong with you people?
This could be sort of justified if a reputable consumer advocate group said "avoid open source for the following reasons". But it's not.
Perhaps your only rival on the internet is Gene Ray, the man who discovered Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous 4-day Time Cube.
Despite the fact that his work contradicts much of your research, he also faces similar obstacles in having his work accepted or at least evaluated. No "institution" of higher education will even return his calls. I spoke to him via phone recently, and Mr. Ray believes that this is because they're run by fundamentalists engaged in some kind of conspiracy to keep the truth away from the public. He was understandably very frustrated by this.
I can't help but to wonder if other scientists face the same problems. Can you offer a correlating viewpoint? In your efforts to have your work accepted, or at least taken seriously, do you find that fundementalists are a large obstacle? If so, do you believe that this is out of their own ignorance, or that maybe they do in fact have a sinister motive as Mr. Ray suggests?
Thank you for your time.
I uploaded some homebrew benchmarking software to it. The memory bandwidth seems amazing. Compared to a reasonably high-end Intel server, it has about 10x the memory bandwidth. Either that, or lots and lots of L2 cache. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one on the system, and the tests consistently showed almost 10x the throughput of Intel.
The test was simple: take a range of memory of X megs, and write a random char to it. Time how many can be done in a quarter of a second, extrapolate MB/s from that. I get almost the same numbers if I use 10MB chunks as I do to 1MB chunks. Good shit here.
Single CPU performance isn't much different, but that wasn't the point. The systems could also be configured to give my account access to multiple processors.
If I started my own hosting company, I think I'd definitely use one of these babies.
..install their own systems? Outside of the IT departments, almost no one does anything on their machines other than point, click, and print.
Don't try to use Linux as if it were Windows. Windows does that better. The fact that most companies have (or should have) a pervasive network by now, coupled with the fact that each end-user workstation probably needs to perform at most one or two tasks, makes Linux perfect.
One appropriately skilled Linux hacker could probably run an entire small/medium-sized company (about 100 employees) if you left all of the software/hardware decisions up to her. And I don't mean by having her install crap like StarOffice on 100 Red Hat boxes. I mean by asking her to analyze your business and having them suggest the way to make it all come together, with modern technology. If you step back far enough, every system is an embedded system.
The fact that you can totally control Linux means that you can design a more efficient end user experience. If the Linux hacker is appropriately skilled, you needn't even employ them fulltime, ie -- they're a consultant!
This is what Linux companies should (and do) focus on. It is total silliness to try to provide something that looks and acts like Windows, when realistically, Windows is totally ill-suited to a lot of these tasks. Copying Windows means you're just doomed to fail. They do it better, and they have a monopoly. Instead, do something innovative
Windows has it's places, but Linux has so many more.
DNS protocol standardization takes place on the censored namedroppers mailing list. Vixie has had a large involvement in DNS, and I believe he even hosts the mailing list.
Have a read at Dan Bernstein's attempts to raise important issues on this list that are routinely censored:
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/namedroppers.html
Through a strange coincidence, it seems that plenty of problems I've read about center around or close to Paul Vixie. It's impossible not to have contempt for him at this point. Does he try??
He is involved or responsible for projects which have/had shown significant problems: Vixie Cron (security holes), BIND (security holes), DNS standardization (security holes, censorship, bloated/redundant features), Blacklisting (mis-filtering or abusing filters), etc. This is too weird.
The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an attempt to bring ancient PC "standards" up to something reasonable. Almost all hardware and OS/driver vendors are _for_ this. This is an attempt to give PC's real firmware, rather than the hack they have now.
If you've ever used big iron UNIX hardware, you've probably enjoyed the conveniance that the firmware itself provides (or maybe not).
Replacing the MBR is one aspect of this. This is not something to worry about unless MS pulls the embrace and extend crap, but I doubt they'd stoop to it on such a low-level aspect.
With some exceptions, all OS, Driver, and Hardware developers/vendors want EFI.
Possible conspiracy theories:
Realistically, the worst that EFI can do is give us something better than what we have now. At best, it could make PC's pleasurable (but don't bet on it).
The fact that Microsoft has managed to make a successful thriving business out of software products totally caught everyone off guard. Software in itself is fundamentally worthless, their competitors said. It was such a silly idea, that most big iron vendors didn't even try it. Businesses need custom solutions, not shrink-wrapped packages. So what about the masses with a PC at home? Realistically, that makes up a small percentage of Microsoft's revenue. Most of their killer apps were sold to businesses-- the very same businesses that IBM said wouldn't need them.
Software products are sold to a generic mass market, and as such, they cannot possibly do what every user wants it to do. A single software package will never do what you want, and you will always need to support it, and you will always need to change it to do what you precisely want.
Software products are proprietary by definition. They try to be black boxes. Buy it once and it solves the problem. The business model never takes into account support, for when the product fails, or further development, when the product almost does what you want, but isn't quite there. Your best bet is to hope that the next version, which will cost you to upgrade to, will do what you want, based on your feedback to the vendor.
Amazingly, Microsoft has made billions on a flawed software model. They went out and convinced everyone, (through no monopolistic means of course. Judge Jackson was clearly uninformed), that their bits on a disc are valuable and worth every penny. Since the only value of Microsoft software is the bits printed on a CD, obviously IP rights are extremely important to their livelihood.
The open source way, specifically GPL'd software, suggests a totally different business model. It means that someone can come in, choose from a wealth of open source software utilities, provide you with a custom solution, and you maintain all of the control you need. If anything, it means that a consultant you hire who builds you a point of sale system with open source components can't hide the source from you. You aren't stuck with the mercy of your original vendor. How could this be bad? Sure, maybe you can't resell your custom system, but realistcally, how many people can resell their closed source ones? If anything, you have a much higher chance of reselling a custom open source system.
When I think of system development with Linux, I think 2% custom code, and 98% software integration. When I imagine it with Windows, I imagine the exact opposite. Take a bunch of black boxes and try to glue them together with lots and lots of code. Oh, also, don't forget the software licensing costs!
There are always exceptions here, of course. Closed source works for a lot of business models. But really, people that care about retaining IP rights to their source code as a solutions provider are just looking to keep their clients at their mercy. Typically Microsoft.
And for those of you saying "Software service? Big deal. That's a totally insignificant market", here's a way to prove it to yourself. Look in the want ads for programming positions. I'd wager that 95% of the jobs being offered to programmers are to work on custom systems, rather than working at a company that provides a shrink-wrapped product. There's a reason that COBOL programmers are still in demand, despite almost no new commercial software being written in COBOL in the past 10 years.
Mundie says that Linux can never be used to make one company billions of monopoly dollars. You mean that we don't have to deal with another Microsoft if the world switches to open source? What's the fucking problem?
Get out! Scientologists abusing people through the legal system?! How dare you make such accusations?! I can't believe any of this garbage. People should stop being religious bigots and accept Scientology for the well meaning organization that it is.
Just to throw this in, since most people will think we're commie hippy scum..
Wal-Mart doesn't suck because they provide cheaper goods/services. No one is against that. The customer wins when that happens.
The suck part is that all of the smaller businesses can't compete with Wal-Mart. They go bankrupt. When these businesses made money, they stayed in the community. Their owners live there and spend their money there.
The money that Wal-Mart makes leaves the community entirely. Suddenly, the only place you can find employment is at Wal-Mart. All of the surrounding businesses that don't even compete with Wal-Mart in any way suddenly lose some business because the businesses that do compete with Wal-Mart have closed. Class mobility just became a little harder.