I assure you, my mis-guided friend, that OS X's adoption rates have nothing to do with the fact it has a command line. In fact, one would need only a cursory knowledge of Apple and its products to know that everything they do is aimed at making the command line unnecessary. So your argument should actually be that Apple has gained a 21% share of the consumer market because they have very effectively hidden the fact their software may have a command line.
I wish you were right. However, I try out Linux every 6 months or so, and have just re-installed Windows XP after wresting with Ubuntu 7.10 for the last 2 weeks. It crashed repeatedly, and when I finally got my hardware working it upgraded to 8.04 and broke it all. What Linux lovers don't get (and I'm going to lump you in with this crowd, based on your username) is that, again, for the vast majority of users Linux "Just Doesn't Work". I'm pretty sure that if I you lived at my house I wouldn't need to go into the command line either.
But this argument is pointless. Linux users don't get it. And Windows will continue to have their OS monopoly until they do.
Unfortunately, you are in the tiny minority, and this is why Linux continues to strike out on the desktop. I'm guessing that less than 1% of computer users can use the command line. That's a pretty small market share Linux is aiming at, and as far as Microsoft is concerned, Linux can have all of it. They're quite happy to take the other 99.9% of users who don't give a fuck about the command line or different desktop environments and are quite willing to pay real money to have something they can use.
It's a pity, really, because the other benefits of Linux you mention (adding and removing software as well as the benefits that OSS brings) are quite remarkable.
There have been many explanations posted to you saying how the "1 in 4" claim can be true. However, it is actually just a random occurence that you know more than 4 people and none have been affected by identity theft.
You see, I know 14,999,999 Britons (curiously, none of whom are known by you), and EVERY. SINGLE. LAST. ONE. have had their identity stolen.
I have long felt that the biggest problem with the adoption and growth of FOSS is that there is so seldom a revenue stream. In all honesty, I think that if someone could solve this problem (i.e. how to pay FOSS developers for their time) almost all the other problems (adoption rates, bugs, abandoned projects) would solve themselves. It is not possible to work for free forever, and this story illustrates precisely why this is true.
Solve the revenue problem and you'll have solved the FOSS problem.
YouTube and FaceBook generate revenue. Wikipedia is demonstrating that it does not. I feel this may be the cause for the radically different valuations you noticed.
In general I agree with you, but I think you're missing one thing:
Telcos are trying to make themselves the train-station. Without net-neutrality, your ISP can limit your access to the places you'd prefer to go. They can sell a lot of sandwiches if you're locked in the train station!
Yes, I agree. It is the duty of the technorati to inform the population. I believe this is the great failing of the geeks of the world. We do not yet understand that we are the magicians from the fairy-tales. Our understanding of technology gives us insight in to issues and problems that many people just can't understand. And with that knowledge comes the ability and the duty to protect thoso who cannot understand the danger and have no defense against it.
What you and almost every other poster are missing is that, while they may get their Windows for free, the PERCEPTION is that it is expensive. Part of the reason they pirate it or willing take the $5 version is because they THINK they are stealing $400 worth of software.
That's some good thinking there, tiger. Let's not vote for the guy who tried to change US copyright law on a shoe-string budget against the wishes of the biggest and richest corporations in America. Is it at least possible that the things he learned going through that could help him to be succesful next time? Or do you win all your SCOTUS cases first time? What's that? You've never fought a case against corruption at the level of the supreme court? You've never even fought any court cases against corruption?
I don't mean to sound like a fanboy, but Lessig has proven that he's willing to fight for the things I (and likely you, this being Slashdot and all) actually care about, and you slag him because he didn't win his supreme court case! Unbelievable.
No, I think the analogy still holds. Irregardless of anyone's rights, people who are less educated will tend to do worse in school, yes? They don't send 8-year-olds to advanced calculus because they won't understand it. They may with years of training in between. It's the same for Intel/AMD. Intel has 8 times more money because they are a monopoly and get the vast majority of sales. Thus, they have 8 times more money to invest in making their products better. Therefore their products are better.
Just because you can find a difference between my analogy and the actual situation, doesn't invalidate my analogy. You could also say my analogy is invalid because a black person could wear a hat where a company cannot. So what?
You don't think that has anything to do with how much money Intel can invest in their products compared to AMD? That's like saying black people shouldn't be allowed to go to school because they're uneducated, or that someone is too sick to get cancer. You have shown the symptom of the problem, not the cause.
I tried to work Nazis in to my illustration, but failed.
Hmmm...I would have put a link in, but I'm certainly not a whiz with html. I have trouble making line breaks when I write a comment!
I appreciate your summary and your link findings. In all honesty, it was less of an announcement and more of just being excited about what is going on. Thanks for your interest anyways. It is appreciated.
I believe the guerilla documentary is the most effective tool we have in the battle against corporations and the government. If this gets rolling, I promise two things: 1. Make it refundable in case it all falls through and I'll donate 50 pounds to the movie. 2. I'll spend no less than 100 GB of bandwidth distributing it on eMule.
What this really needs is someone to organize it and make it happen. I'd volunteer, but I'm already fighting the fight over at iRate Radio (our attempt to completely circumvent the RIAA. Come check us out, the project is just taking off again and is destined for something great).
Obviously, you have to be a good writer in the first place - if your stuff sucks, it doesn't matter whether you give it away or not
This is actually one of the reasons that some artists are scared of this business model. In the traditional author / publisher / reader model, an author only has to impress the publisher (who shoulders the risk of failure). In this new model, if you suck, you suck, and you will know it. No other entity will screen you financially from failure.
It's a bit scary, but it's great for the consumer!
For the most part I quite agree with you (and Puddlegum). I see no reason why someone who rejects religion as unlikely can't live a moral life which benefits those around him, in the same way I see no reason that people can't model their lives after some Christian principles and be fantastic citizens of the human race. For me personally, I have no problem with "why" people act in good and moral ways, as long as they do. I only get angry when some particular "why" gets forced on to other people.
In my mind, if you are comfortable with a "god of the gaps" scenario, and that helps you survive and do good in this world, more power to you. I simply found that I no longer needed religious motivation to be moral (which allowed me to jettison the religious baggage I had been carrying around), and I only feel smug and superior about it (although I am ashamed that I feel this way) because I'm not and never will be perfect.
Thanks for your reply, dada21. I appreciate you taking the time to post back. I have responded to a different post farther down, but my response applies to almost everyone that responded, including yourself.
Thanks to everyone who replied. As someone else pointed out, it's nice to have a CALM discussion on Slashdot! As this person's post seems to be the highest rated, and my response applies equally to all, I thought I'd answer here.
The common thought through all these posts is that evolution and creation can work if you take Genesis allegorically (or, at least take aspects of it).
The trouble I have with this approach, and where I'd like to take the discussion next, if I may, is if you allow yourselves to treat even one portion of the Bible as non-literal, what stops you from treating any other portion as non-literal? For example, as soon as you say, "The creation story in Genesis is an allegory and never really happened," what stops you from then saying, "When God said he hates homosexuals, he didn't mean it." This is a slippery slope for Christians, I would think, and opens it up for anyone to say they don't agree with whatever particular portion is out of style at the time.
I think this also a "God of the gaps" argument, is it not? There is certainly a lot of evidence now for evolution, so people discount Genesis and keep the rest. It's not socially acceptable to forbid women to speak, so we discount the verses that forbid them to. There are many such instances as this. We treat as "literal" the parts that haven't yet been invalidated and keep the rest. I believe (and the reason I de-converted) these patch-work Bibles fail the Occam's Razor test. The bits we know are false we treat as false. The bits we don't know are false we treat as true. It's much more likely that a book that claims to be perfectly right, but has been proven to be at least partially wrong (or, at the very least, irrelevant), is most likely wrong.
I'd love to hear what people think about that and I look forward to continued discussion.
"Thousands and thousands of non-French servicemen gave their lives to help France fight for it's independence after being quickly taken over by the Nazis - when the latest war started in Iraq, how did young French people show their "support" for all of those dead servicemen? By painting swastikas on their tombs and overturning their headstones."
- Yes and thousands and thousands of French servicemen gave their lives fighting the Nazis in WWII and the Germans in WWI. Many thousands, including women and children also perished in the underground resistance during WWII.
I'd like to just strengthen this point a little more. In both World Wars the Americans were years late to the party. Tens of thousands of French died in WWI before any Americans set foot in Europe. America has a long history of isolationism which waives her right to condemn any other country's reluctance to go to war.
As an aside, where does this stereotype come from that the French always surrender? In the early 1800's the French army was the terror of Europe. In WWI they did not surrender, even with 5,000,000 casualties. There were 10 Frenchmen killed for every American. In WWII they surrendered, but they were facing a war-machine that was very different than any that had been seen before. They were simply unfortunate enough to be next to the main aggressor in that conflict. No other nation in their situation would have done better. Are the French wimps? I think not. This myth is propogated in America and it's demonstrably ridiculous.
Hi, I've been looking for a Christian who believes evolution poses no problem to Christianity for a few months. May I ask you a question?
How do you deal with the problem of original sin? I see the problem as thus: If evolution is true, there was no literal Adam. If there was no Adam, there was no "fall". If there was no fall, what do we require Jesus to "save" us from?
I (as an ex-Christian) deal with this by saying Christianity is not real. I had a long talk with my father (a conservative evangelical minister) over Christmas, and he feels that evolution would completely undermine his faith so he deals with it by saying evolution is not real.
I am quite curious how you feel about this issue. I rewrote this post about 4 times but couldn't find words that I was confident implied I'm not looking for a fight, so I'm resorting to this disclaimer. You'll get nothing but polite and (hopefully) well-thought out responses from me. I look forward to your answer!
Slashdot Mirror
I assure you, my mis-guided friend, that OS X's adoption rates have nothing to do with the fact it has a command line. In fact, one would need only a cursory knowledge of Apple and its products to know that everything they do is aimed at making the command line unnecessary. So your argument should actually be that Apple has gained a 21% share of the consumer market because they have very effectively hidden the fact their software may have a command line.
I wish you were right. However, I try out Linux every 6 months or so, and have just re-installed Windows XP after wresting with Ubuntu 7.10 for the last 2 weeks. It crashed repeatedly, and when I finally got my hardware working it upgraded to 8.04 and broke it all. What Linux lovers don't get (and I'm going to lump you in with this crowd, based on your username) is that, again, for the vast majority of users Linux "Just Doesn't Work". I'm pretty sure that if I you lived at my house I wouldn't need to go into the command line either.
But this argument is pointless. Linux users don't get it. And Windows will continue to have their OS monopoly until they do.
Unfortunately, you are in the tiny minority, and this is why Linux continues to strike out on the desktop. I'm guessing that less than 1% of computer users can use the command line. That's a pretty small market share Linux is aiming at, and as far as Microsoft is concerned, Linux can have all of it. They're quite happy to take the other 99.9% of users who don't give a fuck about the command line or different desktop environments and are quite willing to pay real money to have something they can use.
It's a pity, really, because the other benefits of Linux you mention (adding and removing software as well as the benefits that OSS brings) are quite remarkable.
There have been many explanations posted to you saying how the "1 in 4" claim can be true. However, it is actually just a random occurence that you know more than 4 people and none have been affected by identity theft.
:)
You see, I know 14,999,999 Britons (curiously, none of whom are known by you), and EVERY. SINGLE. LAST. ONE. have had their identity stolen.
What are the odds!
Thanks for the fascinating stories and insight.
I have long felt that the biggest problem with the adoption and growth of FOSS is that there is so seldom a revenue stream. In all honesty, I think that if someone could solve this problem (i.e. how to pay FOSS developers for their time) almost all the other problems (adoption rates, bugs, abandoned projects) would solve themselves. It is not possible to work for free forever, and this story illustrates precisely why this is true.
Solve the revenue problem and you'll have solved the FOSS problem.
YouTube and FaceBook generate revenue. Wikipedia is demonstrating that it does not. I feel this may be the cause for the radically different valuations you noticed.
I was just going to post that, but you beat me to it! It's my life motto...generally.
In general I agree with you, but I think you're missing one thing:
Telcos are trying to make themselves the train-station. Without net-neutrality, your ISP can limit your access to the places you'd prefer to go. They can sell a lot of sandwiches if you're locked in the train station!
Yes, I agree. It is the duty of the technorati to inform the population. I believe this is the great failing of the geeks of the world. We do not yet understand that we are the magicians from the fairy-tales. Our understanding of technology gives us insight in to issues and problems that many people just can't understand. And with that knowledge comes the ability and the duty to protect thoso who cannot understand the danger and have no defense against it.
What you and almost every other poster are missing is that, while they may get their Windows for free, the PERCEPTION is that it is expensive. Part of the reason they pirate it or willing take the $5 version is because they THINK they are stealing $400 worth of software.
That's some good thinking there, tiger. Let's not vote for the guy who tried to change US copyright law on a shoe-string budget against the wishes of the biggest and richest corporations in America. Is it at least possible that the things he learned going through that could help him to be succesful next time? Or do you win all your SCOTUS cases first time? What's that? You've never fought a case against corruption at the level of the supreme court? You've never even fought any court cases against corruption?
I don't mean to sound like a fanboy, but Lessig has proven that he's willing to fight for the things I (and likely you, this being Slashdot and all) actually care about, and you slag him because he didn't win his supreme court case! Unbelievable.
SGI uses Python on their supercomputers? Well, there's your problem right there!
No, I think the analogy still holds. Irregardless of anyone's rights, people who are less educated will tend to do worse in school, yes? They don't send 8-year-olds to advanced calculus because they won't understand it. They may with years of training in between. It's the same for Intel/AMD. Intel has 8 times more money because they are a monopoly and get the vast majority of sales. Thus, they have 8 times more money to invest in making their products better. Therefore their products are better.
Just because you can find a difference between my analogy and the actual situation, doesn't invalidate my analogy. You could also say my analogy is invalid because a black person could wear a hat where a company cannot. So what?
You don't think that has anything to do with how much money Intel can invest in their products compared to AMD? That's like saying black people shouldn't be allowed to go to school because they're uneducated, or that someone is too sick to get cancer. You have shown the symptom of the problem, not the cause.
I tried to work Nazis in to my illustration, but failed.
Hmmm...I would have put a link in, but I'm certainly not a whiz with html. I have trouble making line breaks when I write a comment!
I appreciate your summary and your link findings. In all honesty, it was less of an announcement and more of just being excited about what is going on. Thanks for your interest anyways. It is appreciated.
I believe the guerilla documentary is the most effective tool we have in the battle against corporations and the government. If this gets rolling, I promise two things: 1. Make it refundable in case it all falls through and I'll donate 50 pounds to the movie. 2. I'll spend no less than 100 GB of bandwidth distributing it on eMule.
What this really needs is someone to organize it and make it happen. I'd volunteer, but I'm already fighting the fight over at iRate Radio (our attempt to completely circumvent the RIAA. Come check us out, the project is just taking off again and is destined for something great).
Don't worry, mate. No one was ever killed with Polonium.
What, no "+1 Ironic"?
This is actually one of the reasons that some artists are scared of this business model. In the traditional author / publisher / reader model, an author only has to impress the publisher (who shoulders the risk of failure). In this new model, if you suck, you suck, and you will know it. No other entity will screen you financially from failure.
It's a bit scary, but it's great for the consumer!
For the most part I quite agree with you (and Puddlegum). I see no reason why someone who rejects religion as unlikely can't live a moral life which benefits those around him, in the same way I see no reason that people can't model their lives after some Christian principles and be fantastic citizens of the human race. For me personally, I have no problem with "why" people act in good and moral ways, as long as they do. I only get angry when some particular "why" gets forced on to other people.
In my mind, if you are comfortable with a "god of the gaps" scenario, and that helps you survive and do good in this world, more power to you. I simply found that I no longer needed religious motivation to be moral (which allowed me to jettison the religious baggage I had been carrying around), and I only feel smug and superior about it (although I am ashamed that I feel this way) because I'm not and never will be perfect.
Thanks for your good post.
Thanks for your reply, dada21. I appreciate you taking the time to post back. I have responded to a different post farther down, but my response applies to almost everyone that responded, including yourself.
Thanks to everyone who replied. As someone else pointed out, it's nice to have a CALM discussion on Slashdot! As this person's post seems to be the highest rated, and my response applies equally to all, I thought I'd answer here.
The common thought through all these posts is that evolution and creation can work if you take Genesis allegorically (or, at least take aspects of it).
The trouble I have with this approach, and where I'd like to take the discussion next, if I may, is if you allow yourselves to treat even one portion of the Bible as non-literal, what stops you from treating any other portion as non-literal? For example, as soon as you say, "The creation story in Genesis is an allegory and never really happened," what stops you from then saying, "When God said he hates homosexuals, he didn't mean it." This is a slippery slope for Christians, I would think, and opens it up for anyone to say they don't agree with whatever particular portion is out of style at the time.
I think this also a "God of the gaps" argument, is it not? There is certainly a lot of evidence now for evolution, so people discount Genesis and keep the rest. It's not socially acceptable to forbid women to speak, so we discount the verses that forbid them to. There are many such instances as this. We treat as "literal" the parts that haven't yet been invalidated and keep the rest. I believe (and the reason I de-converted) these patch-work Bibles fail the Occam's Razor test. The bits we know are false we treat as false. The bits we don't know are false we treat as true. It's much more likely that a book that claims to be perfectly right, but has been proven to be at least partially wrong (or, at the very least, irrelevant), is most likely wrong.
I'd love to hear what people think about that and I look forward to continued discussion.
I heard, "Why are there trees along the Champs Elysee?"
"The Germans hate to march in the sun."
I'd like to just strengthen this point a little more. In both World Wars the Americans were years late to the party. Tens of thousands of French died in WWI before any Americans set foot in Europe. America has a long history of isolationism which waives her right to condemn any other country's reluctance to go to war.
As an aside, where does this stereotype come from that the French always surrender? In the early 1800's the French army was the terror of Europe. In WWI they did not surrender, even with 5,000,000 casualties. There were 10 Frenchmen killed for every American. In WWII they surrendered, but they were facing a war-machine that was very different than any that had been seen before. They were simply unfortunate enough to be next to the main aggressor in that conflict. No other nation in their situation would have done better. Are the French wimps? I think not. This myth is propogated in America and it's demonstrably ridiculous.
Hi, I've been looking for a Christian who believes evolution poses no problem to Christianity for a few months. May I ask you a question?
How do you deal with the problem of original sin? I see the problem as thus: If evolution is true, there was no literal Adam. If there was no Adam, there was no "fall". If there was no fall, what do we require Jesus to "save" us from?
I (as an ex-Christian) deal with this by saying Christianity is not real. I had a long talk with my father (a conservative evangelical minister) over Christmas, and he feels that evolution would completely undermine his faith so he deals with it by saying evolution is not real.
I am quite curious how you feel about this issue. I rewrote this post about 4 times but couldn't find words that I was confident implied I'm not looking for a fight, so I'm resorting to this disclaimer. You'll get nothing but polite and (hopefully) well-thought out responses from me. I look forward to your answer!