Yeah, but most people aren't going to take the time to recompile the desktop code. Besides, the smart company would provide some value added features to the desktop in addition to the advertising, like user configurable applets (calculator, calendar, stock tickers, news headlines, daily cartoons, etc...)
Regardless of what value they add, the advertisements can and will still be turned off.
I honestly wouldn't mind one big every changing ad on my desktop if it was unobtrusive and I got good support, a solid desktop, and frequent security and functionality updates in return.
I get those here without paying a cent or seeing an ad anywhere.
Most computer users use Microsoft Word. That is unfortunate for them, because Word is proprietary software, denying its users the freedom to study, change, copy, and redistribute it.
And it's lousy as a product.
Stallman is right that people would like to freely copy and distribute software, but this is where we run up against the dirty secret of open source: open source developers like to scratch their own itch. And, unfortunately, that attitude doesn't jive with creating consumer applications, so those consumer needs get left up to businesses that need to make money off their product to exist.
So it's only coincidental that Linux is an excellent operating system for everything from mainframes to PDAs?
The only competitive contender on that list is StarOffice, which, of course, started as a proprietary application.
And you conveniently fail to explain why the others are not competitive...
The Gimp is a fine graphics program, but it doesn't measure up (especially running under Windows) to Adobe Photoshop, or even Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
Bullshit. 'Nuff said.
And where are the competitive open source competitors for Adobe's Illustrator, ImageReady, PageMaker, InDesign, Premier, AfterEffects, etc.? What open source app would professionals choose over Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Freehand, Flash, Shockwave, Director, Authorware, etc? Answer: they don't exist.
Answer: they aren't needed.
Illustrator PHB fodder.
Macromedia Dreamweaver jEdit, Emacs, vi, etc. If you need a program like this, you deserve to be stuck with Windows.
Macromedia Fireworks, Freehand, Flash, Shockwave, Director, Authorware More PHB fodder.
Open source developers don't care enough about those applications to develop them, and they sure don't care enough to develop them for the non-open source platforms (e.g. Windows, Mac) that most of the world uses. The bottom line is...well, the bottom line. If consumers want these kinds of tools that are of interest to consumers, but not of use to the geeks who know programming languages, then the consumers are either going to have to learn to code themselves (ain't gonna happen; we all have other careers) or the consumer will need to pay to have someone else develop them.
That's an insult and a half to the hard-working developers who created Cygwin, GTK+ for Win32, and the like.
The demands for these consumer apps gets filled by corporations who exercise proprietary control over their intellectual property in order to recoup the development costs, because the companies have to hire developers to scratch someone else's itch. And that proprietary control means patents and copyrights1, because to make money off a product you must, repeat MUST, control reproduction and redistribution. And businesses are about making money.
If you're stupid enough to have a business model based on creating and maintaining artificial scarcity, you deserve to lose your shirt.
witness the struggle to get KDE and GNOME to some usable point
Witness the struggle to get Microsoft Windows to some usable point.
and remember that Eazel tanked.
Eazel tanked because its flagship product was a file manager. Don't kid yourself.
Problems like those that have plagued the attempt to put an open source GUI on the Linux operating system illustrate another problem with open source: too many cooks in the kitchen screw up the menus.
There's been an Open Source GUI since you were in diapers -- the X Window System.
If ACME industries makes a word processor, ACME WonderWord, then ACME WonderWord is much more valuable to me if ten million people use it as opposed to ten thousand, because we're all using the same tool. The best illustration of the concept of an economy of increasing returns is the Microsoft monopoly. People won't switch to Linux and StarOffice, because everyone else in their workplace or community is using Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. In a networked environment where you have to share your output and input, life is more difficult if you're not using the same tool.
Obviously you've never heard of the concept of interoperability. Are you aware that AbiWord can read and write KWord documents, and vice versa?
The open source response to that is "it's not the tool, it's the standard." If every tool adhered to an open standard, then they'd all work together. Which is basically Stallman's point -- use text or HTML instead of the proprietary Word.doc format. It's a lofty and valuable goal. But until the day when Stallman or someone else can figure out a way to get open source developers to scratch someone else's itch with the same fervor and quality with which they scratch their own, it's just not a realistic goal.
And now you insult the the developers of fine office suite software like AbiSuite, KOffice, and OpenOffice. Didn't your mother teach you manners when you were little?
For example, if you were attacked by a gun-wielding maniac, based on your gaming, you should run around till you find a gun bigger than his, charge him head on, and pump a round of flak into his gut, and promptly find a health pack to heal your flesh wound.
Actually, based on my gaming, I should take cover and then request help from the police, because if he manages to shoot me I'll likely be killed. If I do happen to have a weapon to shoot him with, I should try to sneak around him and shoot him from behind, preferably at long range.
Surprisingly enough, this applies to real life pretty well...
Making a Mac stable enough to run NWN would be pretty hard too. The stability of Mac OS X is quite reminiscent of Windows 95, and MacOS 9 of Windows 3.1.
That really depends on who the friends are, don't you think? A lot of those 'friends' turn out to be drug addicts or the like. I dunno about you, but I'd prefer the video games. I'm 18 and I find the smell of beer an irritating stench.
1) Start a new company, grow it to the point where it employees hundreds of people, and go public for millions. Repeat.
The dot-com boom is over. What hole have you been hiding in?
2) Get laid. Get so good at it that you can walk into any social situation and walk out with someone you just met.
That's impossible. Some women aren't whores, you know.
3) Find a person who perfectly compliments your own strengths and faults, marry them, create a strong and lasting marriage, have kids, and raise them to be excellent people.
That's possible, except for raising the kid(s) to be "excellent", which is entirely probabilistic. Your kid(s) might become "excellent", but there are no guarantees, and nothing you can do to insure that they do. There are numerous factors beyond your control that shape them.
In summary, you are not qualified to talk about the relationship between video games and real life, because you are obviously thoroughly uneducated in the latter.
My configuration is that hitting pause will pause XMMS; alt-pause will skip to next song; and win-pause will repeat previous song. It's much easier than deiconifying XMMS or clicking the tiny buttons on GKrellMMS when I want to hear something else. Of course, the windows key is also mapped to meta, for programs that need it. I haven't mapped the menu key to anything useful, but I probably could...
I also have a "power up/down" key (it's labelled with an equilateral triangle pointing left, like the key on old Macintosh keyboards which you pushed to power the machine on). I bound it to start xscreensaver.
As you can see, I'm into binding the otherwise unused keys on my keyboard to useful actions. For this reason, I actually wanted to get one of those keyboards with the cutesy 'Shop on the Web' buttons just so I could come up with something useful to map them to, like, say, starting jEdit (<plug type="shameless">Emacs for the 21st century</plug>) or Galeon.
Most of these posts are rubbish. Judging by them, Linux is supported by puerile adolescents who believe that making money is evil. Repeat after me: It is only software. It is not religion.
I'll bet that they will write a pretty damn good emulator.
They'll have to make it worse than the OS it's emulating (in order to avoid having it compete with Windows). To do that it'd have to suck harder than the first version of dbx.
The only thing evil and borgish thing that they might do is to modify their Windows software to only work on *their* emulator. And I bet if they knew how to prevent WINE from running Windows apps, they would probably have already done it.
They've already tried damn hard to do it. As you can see, they've failed. The reason is that the WINE developers are quite capable of adapting to whatever MS throws at them.
For these reasons, WINE will always be better than anything MS comes up with.
Suppose I rob a bank and steal a dollar out of every one of the customers' money. I put it into little stock baggies and stash it in my hideyhole. After counting it I realize I have a veritable shitload. My wife and I wonder what to do with all this. Let's help poor kids! That's always a good thing to do. Ah, I'm glad I figured out that problem.
Am I now a person worthy of praise for helping poor kids?
Yes, you are. I doubt most of the assholes you stole that buck from will ever even notice, let alone care, but a lot of poor kids certainly will.
That said, it's still wrong to rob a bank (or do something similarly illegal), even if you do intend to use the loot for charity. And Bill Gates stole a lot more than a dollar from all the people he screwed.
My sister's theory is that most women have serious self-esteem issues and don't believe they are worthy of being treated right.
If that's correct, becoming friends with one gives you an opportunity to improve her self-esteem, thus eliminating that problem. Obviously, this requires a great deal of patience and dedication, but then, isn't that also true about marriage?
Perhaps you should ask yourself how those ratings are formulated. I sincerely doubt the massive media corporations know what every single person in America is watching at the moment.
Unless I'm mistaken, this data is gathered through surveys. Surveys are hardly infallible; it's very easy to poison the data by lying on the survey.
Since I've never been surveyed on what I'm watching or plan to watch, and neither have my parents, I am forced to assume that ratings are not based on what Joe Random watches, but what some specific (rich?) demographic watches.
Here's another thing to think about. As the Lewinsky scandal dragged on, people began to complain left and right about how they didn't care about it. Sometimes these complaints even aired on the news channels themselves, such as on CNN's "TalkBack Live", wherein people can send email (or call, I think) to the show and have their opinion voiced and discussed on the air. This strongly suggests that the American public at large is not the demographic used to establish ratings.
Given this, lowly geeks like us will probably not affect ratings, and so taking your suggested course of action is futile at best.
If you're suggesting that there's some kind of mass pedophilia phenomenon among the American public, I should point out that it has been repeatedly stressed on the news that Elizabeth Smart looks a lot older than she actually is.
Technically, JK said that Bill Gates is a "greedy capitalist", meaning that Bill Gates is a capitalist that's greedy. Though it is typically inferred, this does not necessarily mean that Bill Gates' being a capitalist makes him greedy, nor that his greed makes him a capitalist (though it probably does).
Mind you, he's given billions to charities.
That's like breaking into someone's house, robbing it, and donating all the loot to charity. Don't give me that "given billions to charities" crud.
There is, I suppose, the argument that there are a few, very few, genuinely international organisations which should have domain names not tied to any particular country. The International Red Cross is the kind of organisation which comes to mind as the type which has the moral right to the irc.org domain name.
That's what the.int TLD is for.
The pollution of the.org space by hobby software projects is another case in point. While these are certainly very useful and worthwhile projects, and the groups of individuals are frequently located all around the globe, I really don't think they have much in the way of absolute moral right to be in the.org namespace. Perhaps they should have a fully international top level domain name of their own. Is it.gnu or.oss?
Actually,.org was intended to be used by
non-profit organizations
individuals for personal domains
everything that doesn't fit into another TLD
Therefore, the only namespace pollution in.org is companies that belong in.com, etc. Hobbyists and Open Source projects are using.org correctly.
The administration of domains which have been given away or sold by their countries should revert to the UN until the countries in question can do it for themselves. The very idea that the whole address space for an entire country can be traded away for the personal profit of an idividual is, in this author's opinion anyway, just plain wrong, and should be corrected as soon as possible.
I concur. I was rather discomforted when I first learned of what happened to.tv.
Similarly, while the enhancement of Internet security is sorely needed at the
moment, no particular commercial interest should ever be able to hijack the
whole exercise by introducing secret protocols protected by draconian
intellectual property laws. The overall effect of this will be to give the
particular patent holder the right to tax every Internet user, or indeed every
single message.
Did you have any such secret/IP-encumbered protocols in mind?
Perhaps Open Source is not the greatest threat to Microsoft after all. The great Roman empire was destroyed from within; the invaders from without merely finished it off. Perhaps we'll soon see a similar scenario here, where Open Source is merely a coup de grace?
If not, at what price would you? Oh, so you've got morals, ay? What if you had no money, and your family and kids were starving to death?
No. Then I'd try to find the best way to escape the situation and move somewhere else where there's more food. If I have to do it illegally and/or unpleasantly (eg, stowing away aboard a ship), well, you gotta do what you gotta do, as they say.
It's winter, you don't make enough money at your job to give your kids any shelter or food, and they're out hiding in the dumpster behind McDonald's trying to fend off frostbite while getting some free food. Would you do it then?
No. Same as above.
Better yet, for a little irony: what if the person at the other end of the button was Jack Valenti, George Bush, Osama bin Laden? Would your views be different then?
Yes. The whole world would benefit from their death. So much the better if I'm partly responsible for it! I'd prefer to have all three of them and a few others killed, but hey, you have to start somewhere, right?
Actually, if there were a button on the wall of my living room, and I were told that pushing it would cause someone to die, then I would trace the wiring. If it turns out that the wires lead away from my house, I would jury-rig the wires to the 220 feed to my dryer, and fry whatever's on the other end. If the blast happens to kill some filthy murderer waiting for me to push it before going out and killing someone, so much the better -- the gene pool got a little cleaner!
Slashdot Mirror
If you're stupid enough to subscribe to Slashdot, you deserve to have CmdrTaco and friends rip you off.
A self-described marketroid using Linux??? Now there's something you don't see everyday!
Slashdot is taking lessons from the World Wrestling Federation on when the Earth will expire? The end must truly be near...
- Illustrator PHB fodder.
- Macromedia Dreamweaver jEdit, Emacs, vi, etc. If you need a program like this, you deserve to be stuck with Windows.
- Macromedia Fireworks, Freehand, Flash, Shockwave, Director, Authorware More PHB fodder.
That's an insult and a half to the hard-working developers who created Cygwin, GTK+ for Win32, and the like. If you're stupid enough to have a business model based on creating and maintaining artificial scarcity, you deserve to lose your shirt. Witness the struggle to get Microsoft Windows to some usable point. Eazel tanked because its flagship product was a file manager. Don't kid yourself. There's been an Open Source GUI since you were in diapers -- the X Window System. Obviously you've never heard of the concept of interoperability. Are you aware that AbiWord can read and write KWord documents, and vice versa? And now you insult the the developers of fine office suite software like AbiSuite, KOffice, and OpenOffice. Didn't your mother teach you manners when you were little?Surprisingly enough, this applies to real life pretty well...
Making a Mac stable enough to run NWN would be pretty hard too. The stability of Mac OS X is quite reminiscent of Windows 95, and MacOS 9 of Windows 3.1.
That really depends on who the friends are, don't you think? A lot of those 'friends' turn out to be drug addicts or the like. I dunno about you, but I'd prefer the video games. I'm 18 and I find the smell of beer an irritating stench.
In summary, you are not qualified to talk about the relationship between video games and real life, because you are obviously thoroughly uneducated in the latter.
I also have a "power up/down" key (it's labelled with an equilateral triangle pointing left, like the key on old Macintosh keyboards which you pushed to power the machine on). I bound it to start xscreensaver.
As you can see, I'm into binding the otherwise unused keys on my keyboard to useful actions. For this reason, I actually wanted to get one of those keyboards with the cutesy 'Shop on the Web' buttons just so I could come up with something useful to map them to, like, say, starting jEdit (<plug type="shameless">Emacs for the 21st century</plug>) or Galeon.
For these reasons, WINE will always be better than anything MS comes up with.
That said, it's still wrong to rob a bank (or do something similarly illegal), even if you do intend to use the loot for charity. And Bill Gates stole a lot more than a dollar from all the people he screwed.
Unless I'm mistaken, this data is gathered through surveys. Surveys are hardly infallible; it's very easy to poison the data by lying on the survey.
Since I've never been surveyed on what I'm watching or plan to watch, and neither have my parents, I am forced to assume that ratings are not based on what Joe Random watches, but what some specific (rich?) demographic watches.
Here's another thing to think about. As the Lewinsky scandal dragged on, people began to complain left and right about how they didn't care about it. Sometimes these complaints even aired on the news channels themselves, such as on CNN's "TalkBack Live", wherein people can send email (or call, I think) to the show and have their opinion voiced and discussed on the air. This strongly suggests that the American public at large is not the demographic used to establish ratings.
Given this, lowly geeks like us will probably not affect ratings, and so taking your suggested course of action is futile at best.
If you're suggesting that there's some kind of mass pedophilia phenomenon among the American public, I should point out that it has been repeatedly stressed on the news that Elizabeth Smart looks a lot older than she actually is.
- non-profit organizations
- individuals for personal domains
- everything that doesn't fit into another TLD
Therefore, the only namespace pollution inPerhaps Open Source is not the greatest threat to Microsoft after all. The great Roman empire was destroyed from within; the invaders from without merely finished it off. Perhaps we'll soon see a similar scenario here, where Open Source is merely a coup de grace?
And who might those monopolists be?
Actually, if there were a button on the wall of my living room, and I were told that pushing it would cause someone to die, then I would trace the wiring. If it turns out that the wires lead away from my house, I would jury-rig the wires to the 220 feed to my dryer, and fry whatever's on the other end. If the blast happens to kill some filthy murderer waiting for me to push it before going out and killing someone, so much the better -- the gene pool got a little cleaner!