amazon.com has it for $199.99, and I think I've seen it at retail for the same price. (I'm a bit disappointed at amazon here - I'll have to try eToys).
Yes, Proposition 13 did reduce the amount of money made available to local government.
No, it doesn't make me sympathise with your argument. Overall, California is still one of the highest taxed states in the union, and yet it has rotten services. We'd better make the most of what we have, instead of looking at Proposition 13 for an excuse.
Not all goods and services are worth the price charged, especially when there is a tenuous link between price and quality. If a con man manages to promise something without delivering it, do you get angry, or do you say the service he provided was worth the price?
Hmm, I wonder if you happen to know I'm a SGI fan:-).
I assume you're referring to the IDO (Iris Development Option)? The IDO is "available" to pretty much anyone who asks their dealer nicely for it when buying a used machine. You can also get it if you make a moderate-sized bid on eBay. This is piracy, but it's relatively benign in that I really don't think SGI cares; they'd rather see us use their machines than not.
At any rate, since Irix 6.2, the header files you need are included with the base OS and you just have to install them from the CD and you're good to go for GCC.
The real Microsoft tax in my view is the constant crashing - and my Indigo2 has been 100% reliable since the day I bought it.
I know Rob probably has two (based on the two series of Aibo ads I've seen on Slashdot), but I must confess that it seems awfully expensive for a gift.
Other than that, I think it would be ideal, actually, because it shows cleverness and thoughtfulness, both desirable traits. But as far as I can tell, the only way to get one now is to pay $5,000 plus through eBay, and that seems like a bit much.
Actually, Lego Mindstorms lets you express your creativity, albiet with more work. I'd probably have more fun with it in the end, and even a totally tricked out set with every possible accessory would cost thousands less than Aibo.
(1) Net transactions are generally services which are not subject to sales tax, or goods passed across state lines, which are also not sales taxed. This doesn't make you not liable for things such as the income tax, on both state and federal levels.
(2) The real fear is that Internet types who don't like the present taxing regime will set up shop in Antigulla or similar countries, which have no tiresome income tax or regulations. Certainly if you have loose roots in your existing community, moving to Antigulla could be an attractive proposition. You'd probably miss the urban amenities of your present location, but I understand Antigulla has a pleasant Carribean climate. Watch out for the occasional tiresome hurricane, though.
(3) On the other hand, I have yet to find a government that provides quality services. Businesses have had to adopt to lower profit margins; I see no reason why governments can't adapt to lower revenues. In my view, anyway, there are enough goods that will be bought locally to prevent a collapse of sales tax revenues. For instance, fresh food will always come from grocery markets, and even Internet markets have to pay sales tax if they do home deliveries in your area. I buy a lot of books at amazon.com, but I still buy a lot of books from my local bookstore, too. What happens in my case is that publishers make more money, because instead of looking longingly at that $50 book in the store, I buy it at amazon instead of reluctantly passing it by as I did in the past. In the end, I spend more money on books, and maybe 10% less at bookstores than I used to - hardly a catastrophe for local tax revenues.
(4) Pretty much ever since I was born, I have never had any identity with my local community. Flatly, none. I don't think the Internet has created this situation - I think it existed long before the net and even pervasive personal computing. I haven't found a really good explanation for why this is, but I suspect the primary reason is that during the 60s and 70s, people started to fear each other. They started to be afraid of crime and people unlike them. So suburbs were formed, with the intent of isolating people in a safe environment. It worked in crime terms, but psychologically it seems to have been very isolating. Another factor is a basic feeling of futility about the workings of the political process - which seem to be way above the abilities of the average person to manipulate.
I think this way predates the Internet, so I can't say the Internet is to blame.
In my view, our local governments have dug their own graves. Here in California, we get poor-quality roads, long lines at the DMV, an indifferent police force that cares more about giving out parking tickets then protecting us, schools that don't educate, a dysfunctional welfare system, etc, etc, etc. So why should we pay an 8.25% sales tax plus $.30 per gallon of gas plus an income tax up to 10% of income for these "services"?
I'll be darned if I know. You tell me.
Finally, it's worth noting that the most cohesive communities, the communities where neighbors are genuinely friendly and seem to care about each other, are the ones where they face a common foe. Malibu and Topanga, California, for instance, face tiresome natural disasters every few years, and I think it makes the communities and the relationships stronger. Perhaps that is, in an odd way, a path towards community building and success?
My theory is that we can continue using the command line stuff as long as there is a Unix, and the people who hate command lines can use the GUI.
I didn't imply that the GUI would blend together seamlessly with the command line, or that you could easily automate GUI stuff. But you can use the existing interfaces to automate tasks.
The big problem I see in the present state of computing is that we're making simple things complex in a quest to make complex things simple. In the end, simple winds up not even being an option, and that's an enormous regression from the Unix way.
For instance, C programmers under Unix can do a three line plus include files hello, world. It will be command line only, but it gets people started. C++ programmers in Windows use a Wizard to generate a 500 line mess that nobody understands. I find it mind-boggling, but my sense is that most people learning programming on Windows don't understand what the hello, world windows program works or what it does. This is bound to result in a brick wall and far less of an appetite for programming in the future.
I suspect that's a major reason for your desire to not even learn Windows as we see it. And I must agree with you, even though I've been doing all too much in the way of Windows stuff over the past few years. I don't particularly want to understand it either, and that inevitably limits my skills and chances for advancement. I'm hoping the recent rise of Unix/Linux will fix this for me - I'm getting an increasing number of Linux jobs.
I'm sorry about the terminology confusion - yes, that's what I meant by "the desktop". I personally run Linux and Irix on my desktop and they both serve me very well.
The big difference in my mind between the IBM mainframe world and the MS world is quality. IBM may have been the villain in the old days (which I do indeed remember), but nobody every said the base IBM software didn't work reliably. I had a sneaking admiration for IBM and their gleaming machines, even though all my friends hated the company.
People cursed their IBM systems because they were hard to use, and in my little exposure to an AS/400, I can see it takes a totally different approach to programing. In some ways, it's pretty cool, but the learning curve is a vertical brick wall.
Now people curse their Microsoft solutions because they're highly prone to failure. Personally, I'd rather have a system hard to learn (IBM mainframes) then our current state where systems are easy to learn, impossible to keep running.
Curiously enough, Unix is much, much easier to learn than an IBM mainframe, or at least an AS/400. Unix is designed to be a complex agglomoration of simple things; to program on an AS/400 you have to understand how pretty much everything fits together to proceed to step one; this is pretty tough.
So I think in the end, programming environments have basically gotten worse, since you can't trust them anymore, even as computers have gotten better and faster then ever.
But in terms of the rest of your argument, about how we have to emulate undesirable aspects of Microsoft programming environments to get people to use our stuff, I think that's true to some degree. But I think it can be done with environments such as KDE and Enlightenment in such a way that we still have our command lines, our cron and our automated processing. In theory, that should give people the best of both worlds, right?
Actually, my first thought when I saw this article was exactly the same as the original poster. China has done some very dodgy things to get our latest missile technology, and that's pretty much the same stuff used to send people into space. Think about the Clinton scandals and John Huang.
This is not a racist statement; I'm sure China has many fine scientists, and I'm sure they're capable of doing good stuff. But the espionage is a fact, and the transfer of US technology is a fact. They wouldn't have paid so much for it if they weren't going to put it to use.
It's important because of familiarity. As you so rightly say about BSD, more familiar people are with something, the more likely they are to specify it. And businesspeople have the power of the purse, so their first idea is to use a system similar to what they have on the desktop: Windows.
That's the reason for the rise of Windows in the server space. A businessperson probably knows a drone-style-programmer who can do VB, and ASP is basically moving VB to the server.
The only way to counteract this is to encourage Unix in the desktop, in my view. Make people more familiar with it, and they're more likely to specify it when the time comes to do a server-based system.
I have an ancient anti-Scientology site at http://www.amazing.com/scientology/ . It's interesting to note that a couple of days ago, I got an email from publicrelations@scientology.org . The chap had a friendly enough written voice and basically asked if there was any way he could get me to change my mind about the group. I think that means he wanted me to remove my page. Since I haven't changed it in eons and haven't done anything to publicise it in ages, I had no idea why he bothered to contact me.
Now I know - it looks like they are trying to start another aggressive phase, now that people like me have since gone to other causes. If they push this much further, I'm going to start reading the Scientology newsgroups again, and I don't think they want that.
Incidentally, the reason I stopped maintaining my page was that it was taking about four hours a day to read everything on ARS, HTMLitize it, answer emails, etc. It was tremendously satisfying work while I was doing it, but it was interfering way too much with what I really wanted to do with my life. Eventually, I figured out that being part of the "anti-cult" was every bit as all-consuming as being a Scientologist - and I say that as someone who's still extremely sympathetic to their views.
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Re:What more could a Unix user want?
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I don't know if I'm a typical Unix user. Compared to most Slashdotters, I suspect I have a touching ignorance of what's under the hood. But I've used a Unix-style operating system as my primary computing platform since circa 1994, so I think I can give you some hints.
Right now, the environment I most like is SGI Irix. Buy a used SGI Indigo2, plug it in, turn it on and there it is: Once installed, everything works. Fonts work. Cut and paste works. Netscape works (well, it crashes too, but less than on other platforms). Xemacs works. The fonts work; I can read most of them without eyestrain. The user interface looks nothing like Windows95, so I can immediately get the feeling I'm not a Microsoft drone. The system is reliable; other than running out of disk space, I've had exactly zero problems with it.
I'm not going to say my SGI machine is perfect - the 2GB system disk is a travesty, to tell the truth, and their upgrade prices are a comedy routine in and of themselves. But you can buy an old SGI for about the same as a similarly equipped PC, and if you upgrade it using off-the-shelf memory and disk, it's not expensive to feed.
So, what would make me want to move on from Irix? Probably something like Enlightenment, something where the creator rethought everything from the start and produced a truly unique brainchild. Enlightenment also looks pretty, and I doubt that I'd have a SGI box if I didn't like pretty.
But I'm not in a big hurry. If commercial software wasn't so expensive on the platform, I'd have no complaints whatsoever about SGI (other than the fact that SGI the company appears to be deserting loyal users such as myself).
To get closer to an answer to the original poster's question, I think what "real" hackers want is a user interface that's not difficult to use, but which doesn't remind them of Windows. I think that to many, a different system should look, well, different. I miss the colourful world of operating systems of the past, from LISP machines to TENEX to ITS, where every machine was an intriguing new challenge.
Now, it's more or less to Unix and Windows, and I daresay few hackers appreciate the latter. So we're left with just one OS to call our own. Depressing.
(But Be's looking interesting. And I think that if you read the above, you can see Be's appeal quite clearly).
Let me stipulate, for the sake of this discussion, that I know next to nothing about the way Windows actually works. I just know what I've been told and what I've read about the product. And, sadly, I've been to the school of hard knocks: I've written a sizable VB application and spent all too much time dealing with these installation issues.
As you so rightly say:
The problem is that lazy programmers or buggy installers either don't set the version number, or don't test it, and the OS let's you overwrite critical system files.
The secondary problem is this: A VB program is very often put together using software written by numerous third-party companies. A third-party will sell you a DLL or OCX control. Your installation program has to put that in the right place. Generally, the vendors of the DLLs and OCXs have recommended installation into the infamous \windows\system directory.
As a result, due to Microsoft's negligent design - which was my point in the first place - system files are being constantly written and overwritten. Yes, they have tried to bandage the problem. No, I haven't seen these problems go away, even in brand spanking new versions of Windows and Office.
I don't doubt that you know more about Windows then I do. Doesn't matter; you shouldn't have to know about Windows internals to write a Windows application. I can write an enormous GTK+ application under Unix with database connectivity and such, and it never gives me the kind of grief I had under Windows. My GTK programming has never even crashed the system, let alone render it inoperable.
At any rate, none of this really matters in the end. As you admitted yourself, these problems happen. They may be due to design. They may be due to terrifying incompetence. But they happen, and that's not going away any time soon.
I was actually kinda intrigued by Communist Chinese history, because of a bunch of Maoists I knew who insisted that China had the closest thing we could see to the One True Communism.
So I read up on it a bit. Read about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Apparently Mao et al sent everyone with even vague intellectual pretentions out into the countryside to farm beets, while they selected their new leaders based largely on their degree of fanaticism. This had predictably rotten results, widely acknowledged by pretty much everyone outside of the central government itself.
The cold truth is that private trade is a lot like a cockroach - it will survive in even the worst conditions, just a bit mutilated, because trade and exchange are basic human needs. You can have a much better society by just liberating those impulses and letting them fly. If you try and suppress them, as has been tried in Russia and China, all sorts of ugly things happen. Thus, stuff like the Cultural Revolution in China and grain shortages in Russia.
So no, I would certainly argue that letting capitalism take its course in China would have made things work significantly better than they do now. The Chinese economic recovery of recent years is mainly due to the increasing permissiveness regarding private exchange and property.
I'd agree with you, if I felt there was any likelihood that Windows could be repaired.
Look at the history of Windows. It was born when Microsoft realized, correctly, that consumers were not ready for systems with the hardware requirements of OS/2. As a result, the mandate was to keep them down to a bare minimum.
What is the biggest problem with Windows? In my opinion, it's the difficulty of dealing with naming conflicts. Create a file called GRAPH.DLL and you can write an installation program that will overwrite a file used by many other programs in the system. Save a Microsoft-provided OLE DLL as part of your installation program, and it can overwrite and crush a newer or older version needed by some other program.
Now, you might ask, why was this done? Why are DLLs and such in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory? Because MS didn't want to store more than 8+3 character file names in the internal listings. For instance, if my program in \PROG1 had a file called GRAPH.DLL in the prog1 directory, and another program in the \PROG2 directory had a different file called GRAPH.DLL, Windows would load and retain in memory the first one loaded. Run prog1, things work great. Run prog2, it finds the old graph.dll already loaded and collapses because it's the wrong file. This problem could have been easily solved by including the path in the in-memory file description, but nobody thought of that on time.
Unix avoids conflicts like that by including the version number in the file name, so you have graph.1.1.so and graph.2.0.so . Your program can then specifically request graph.1.1 or graph.2.0.
Eventually, Microsoft added a new mechanism called the Registry, but they made it so complex and convoluted that many stuck with the old ways. And, of course, with the same\windows\system directory still existing, DLLs continue to be loaded into it and the original problem is not solved. Instead of actually fixing the problem by insisting on use of conventions (such as beginning the name of your DLL with the manufacturer's name), they created an insane pastiche of unique but impossible to remember or type IDs. Despite this, the core OLE system still uses the old way, so OLE modules are constantly interfering with each other. I suspect lack of core operating system support for long file names is a good part of the reason for this.
It is my contention that these problems with Windows simply cannot be fixed. You can attempt to paper over them, but at base, they are unsolvable without breaking all existing code and starting with a clean sweep. I don't need to tell you how likely that would be to happen - the clean sweep would wipe out the only advantage Windows has over other platforms.
Generally, most programmers don't find fixing a fundementally broken system to be much fun. In my experience, you have to pay them big money to go out fixing broken systems.
Because of this, I think any open sourcing of Microsoft code would echo the Mozilla experience - loads of people would download, few would dig in in any detail and even fewer would help.
I actually preferred the other book on Celebration - I think it was called 'Celebration USA'. Celebration Chronicles wanders so far from its proported subject at times that I often wondered if it would ever return.
I would guess that it's probably easier to get Java running well on BeOS than any other environment, because Java is a thread-based language. From what I understand, Be threads are a snap.
And I suspect that online sales represent the overwhelming majorit of O'Reilly book sales, so I would say it's representative of how the books are doing.
At any rate, I think O'Reilly will make a profit, Illiad will make a profit, and good for them both.
I like the idea of forcing MS to publish its file formats and APIs.
However, others have shown objections to MS hardware certification requiring disclosure actions from third parties - I agree with the folks who say that seems like a penalty more on hardware makers than MS.
Incidentally, could you direct me to the page on gnu.org where these ideas live? I wandered through the site and couldn't find it.
You know, the strangest thing about this case is that it's not about money. The only person who's going to be happy about a $ 10 rebate for Microsoft products is the pirate, and he's not going to be entitled to it.
$ 10 is hardly even enough for a half decent lunch here in LA.:-(
We're more or less civilized nowadays, so we can't expropriate Microsoft and destroy them.
We can break 'em up, but that's not going to make their OS into any less of a monopoly.
We can slap 'em with fines and distribute the results to their competitors. I don't know how much good that will do; most of the affected companies are actually not doing that badly. Netscape is part of prospering AOL; Sun is, well, Sun; Oracle is, well, Larry Ellison; etc.
The best solution I see is a breakup, but look what that did to AT&T. The original AT&T is being re-formed pretty darn quick nowadays. So was all that antitrust effort for naught?
In the end, the only way to end Microsoft's dominance is to consciously choose to use non-MS products - which is not something antitrust law can control.
I don't see any type of penalty that would actually make a difference in the way the world worked today.
The court is officially responsible for determining the facts. Then, as a separate matter, it is responsible for making a judgement based upon those facts.
As a general rule, the facts themselves are very rarely disupted in an appeal, only the interpretation of those facts (the judgement).
So this is in a sense more important than the judgement, because the judgement can be overturned upon appeal, but any appeal has to use these findings as its base.
The basic argument is that we have a choice, and generally government is the lead actor in taking it away.
For instance, in the late 70s, the United States was grinding out crummy cars by the millions. The Japanese came in and made cars that were both higher quality and better suited to the economic conditions of the time.
This gave us a choice we didn't have before: Between large, inefficient and bloated automakers and producers of sleek, small and well-made cars. Understandably, we voted with our dollars and made a Japanese guy named Honda pretty well off.
The US government acted quickly, to deprive us of that choice. Acting on massive lobbying by US automakers, our government passed laws preventing more than a certain number of Japanese cars from entering our country.
This gives you a good idea of the positions of the two entitites. What power Ford has stems exactly from how many cars it can sell. If nobody likes their cars, Ford will fail. That's the power we all have, and we can exercise it as individuals; I can choose to buy - or not to buy - a Ford car. Best of all, if I don't want a Ford at all, I can go down to my pals at Mercedes-Benz and pick up a nice shiny S500.
The power our government has comes from how much money it can extract from its citizens. Unless we want to go to the extremely drastic step of leaving the country, which most of us would have an extremely hard time doing, we are stuck paying taxes. It doesn't matter if we disapprove of the government. It doesn't matter that we might want to pay government for some things but not others. We have to sit there and take the whole package, for good or for ill. We have to support both the governmental products we like and those we detest.
So you can see our relationship with the government is very different from that of a corporation. Corporations are free to do as they please, because they have a clear purpose - to satisfy us well enough so we'll keep buying from them.
We have to have checks on governmental power, because otherwise it can grow to unlimited proportions.
Hope that helped.
I was going to explain something of how this applies to Microsoft, but I fear my brain's too fuzzy to get it right, so I'll close. If you want more, reply to this message or email me.
Slashdot Mirror
amazon.com has it for $199.99, and I think I've seen it at retail for the same price. (I'm a bit disappointed at amazon here - I'll have to try eToys).
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Amazon.com (US) reports a hardcover edition to be published in February 2000.
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Yes, Proposition 13 did reduce the amount of money made available to local government.
No, it doesn't make me sympathise with your argument. Overall, California is still one of the highest taxed states in the union, and yet it has rotten services. We'd better make the most of what we have, instead of looking at Proposition 13 for an excuse.
Not all goods and services are worth the price charged, especially when there is a tenuous link between price and quality. If a con man manages to promise something without delivering it, do you get angry, or do you say the service he provided was worth the price?
I feel exactly that way about government.
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Hmm, I wonder if you happen to know I'm a SGI fan :-).
I assume you're referring to the IDO (Iris Development Option)? The IDO is "available" to pretty much anyone who asks their dealer nicely for it when buying a used machine. You can also get it if you make a moderate-sized bid on eBay. This is piracy, but it's relatively benign in that I really don't think SGI cares; they'd rather see us use their machines than not.
At any rate, since Irix 6.2, the header files you need are included with the base OS and you just have to install them from the CD and you're good to go for GCC.
The real Microsoft tax in my view is the constant crashing - and my Indigo2 has been 100% reliable since the day I bought it.
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I have a Sony 400PS and have been delighted with it. No experience with the GS series - but that's not 19", is it?
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I know Rob probably has two (based on the two series of Aibo ads I've seen on Slashdot), but I must confess that it seems awfully expensive for a gift.
Other than that, I think it would be ideal, actually, because it shows cleverness and thoughtfulness, both desirable traits. But as far as I can tell, the only way to get one now is to pay $5,000 plus through eBay, and that seems like a bit much.
Actually, Lego Mindstorms lets you express your creativity, albiet with more work. I'd probably have more fun with it in the end, and even a totally tricked out set with every possible accessory would cost thousands less than Aibo.
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(1) Net transactions are generally services which are not subject to sales tax, or goods passed across state lines, which are also not sales taxed. This doesn't make you not liable for things such as the income tax, on both state and federal levels.
.30 per gallon of gas plus an income tax up to 10% of income for these "services"?
(2) The real fear is that Internet types who don't like the present taxing regime will set up shop in Antigulla or similar countries, which have no tiresome income tax or regulations. Certainly if you have loose roots in your existing community, moving to Antigulla could be an attractive proposition. You'd probably miss the urban amenities of your present location, but I understand Antigulla has a pleasant Carribean climate. Watch out for the occasional tiresome hurricane, though.
(3) On the other hand, I have yet to find a government that provides quality services. Businesses have had to adopt to lower profit margins; I see no reason why governments can't adapt to lower revenues. In my view, anyway, there are enough goods that will be bought locally to prevent a collapse of sales tax revenues. For instance, fresh food will always come from grocery markets, and even Internet markets have to pay sales tax if they do home deliveries in your area. I buy a lot of books at amazon.com, but I still buy a lot of books from my local bookstore, too. What happens in my case is that publishers make more money, because instead of looking longingly at that $50 book in the store, I buy it at amazon instead of reluctantly passing it by as I did in the past. In the end, I spend more money on books, and maybe 10% less at bookstores than I used to - hardly a catastrophe for local tax revenues.
(4) Pretty much ever since I was born, I have never had any identity with my local community. Flatly, none. I don't think the Internet has created this situation - I think it existed long before the net and even pervasive personal computing. I haven't found a really good explanation for why this is, but I suspect the primary reason is that during the 60s and 70s, people started to fear each other. They started to be afraid of crime and people unlike them. So suburbs were formed, with the intent of isolating people in a safe environment. It worked in crime terms, but psychologically it seems to have been very isolating. Another factor is a basic feeling of futility about the workings of the political process - which seem to be way above the abilities of the average person to manipulate.
I think this way predates the Internet, so I can't say the Internet is to blame.
In my view, our local governments have dug their own graves. Here in California, we get poor-quality roads, long lines at the DMV, an indifferent police force that cares more about giving out parking tickets then protecting us, schools that don't educate, a dysfunctional welfare system, etc, etc, etc. So why should we pay an 8.25% sales tax plus $
I'll be darned if I know. You tell me.
Finally, it's worth noting that the most cohesive communities, the communities where neighbors are genuinely friendly and seem to care about each other, are the ones where they face a common foe. Malibu and Topanga, California, for instance, face tiresome natural disasters every few years, and I think it makes the communities and the relationships stronger. Perhaps that is, in an odd way, a path towards community building and success?
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My theory is that we can continue using the command line stuff as long as there is a Unix, and the people who hate command lines can use the GUI.
I didn't imply that the GUI would blend together seamlessly with the command line, or that you could easily automate GUI stuff. But you can use the existing interfaces to automate tasks.
The big problem I see in the present state of computing is that we're making simple things complex in a quest to make complex things simple. In the end, simple winds up not even being an option, and that's an enormous regression from the Unix way.
For instance, C programmers under Unix can do a three line plus include files hello, world. It will be command line only, but it gets people started. C++ programmers in Windows use a Wizard to generate a 500 line mess that nobody understands. I find it mind-boggling, but my sense is that most people learning programming on Windows don't understand what the hello, world windows program works or what it does. This is bound to result in a brick wall and far less of an appetite for programming in the future.
I suspect that's a major reason for your desire to not even learn Windows as we see it. And I must agree with you, even though I've been doing all too much in the way of Windows stuff over the past few years. I don't particularly want to understand it either, and that inevitably limits my skills and chances for advancement. I'm hoping the recent rise of Unix/Linux will fix this for me - I'm getting an increasing number of Linux jobs.
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I'm sorry about the terminology confusion - yes, that's what I meant by "the desktop". I personally run Linux and Irix on my desktop and they both serve me very well.
The big difference in my mind between the IBM mainframe world and the MS world is quality. IBM may have been the villain in the old days (which I do indeed remember), but nobody every said the base IBM software didn't work reliably. I had a sneaking admiration for IBM and their gleaming machines, even though all my friends hated the company.
People cursed their IBM systems because they were hard to use, and in my little exposure to an AS/400, I can see it takes a totally different approach to programing. In some ways, it's pretty cool, but the learning curve is a vertical brick wall.
Now people curse their Microsoft solutions because they're highly prone to failure. Personally, I'd rather have a system hard to learn (IBM mainframes) then our current state where systems are easy to learn, impossible to keep running.
Curiously enough, Unix is much, much easier to learn than an IBM mainframe, or at least an AS/400. Unix is designed to be a complex agglomoration of simple things; to program on an AS/400 you have to understand how pretty much everything fits together to proceed to step one; this is pretty tough.
So I think in the end, programming environments have basically gotten worse, since you can't trust them anymore, even as computers have gotten better and faster then ever.
But in terms of the rest of your argument, about how we have to emulate undesirable aspects of Microsoft programming environments to get people to use our stuff, I think that's true to some degree. But I think it can be done with environments such as KDE and Enlightenment in such a way that we still have our command lines, our cron and our automated processing. In theory, that should give people the best of both worlds, right?
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Actually, my first thought when I saw this article was exactly the same as the original poster. China has done some very dodgy things to get our latest missile technology, and that's pretty much the same stuff used to send people into space. Think about the Clinton scandals and John Huang.
This is not a racist statement; I'm sure China has many fine scientists, and I'm sure they're capable of doing good stuff. But the espionage is a fact, and the transfer of US technology is a fact. They wouldn't have paid so much for it if they weren't going to put it to use.
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It's important because of familiarity. As you so rightly say about BSD, more familiar people are with something, the more likely they are to specify it. And businesspeople have the power of the purse, so their first idea is to use a system similar to what they have on the desktop: Windows.
That's the reason for the rise of Windows in the server space. A businessperson probably knows a drone-style-programmer who can do VB, and ASP is basically moving VB to the server.
The only way to counteract this is to encourage Unix in the desktop, in my view. Make people more familiar with it, and they're more likely to specify it when the time comes to do a server-based system.
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I have an ancient anti-Scientology site at http://www.amazing.com/scientology/ . It's interesting to note that a couple of days ago, I got an email from publicrelations@scientology.org . The chap had a friendly enough written voice and basically asked if there was any way he could get me to change my mind about the group. I think that means he wanted me to remove my page. Since I haven't changed it in eons and haven't done anything to publicise it in ages, I had no idea why he bothered to contact me.
Now I know - it looks like they are trying to start another aggressive phase, now that people like me have since gone to other causes. If they push this much further, I'm going to start reading the Scientology newsgroups again, and I don't think they want that.
Incidentally, the reason I stopped maintaining my page was that it was taking about four hours a day to read everything on ARS, HTMLitize it, answer emails, etc. It was tremendously satisfying work while I was doing it, but it was interfering way too much with what I really wanted to do with my life. Eventually, I figured out that being part of the "anti-cult" was every bit as all-consuming as being a Scientologist - and I say that as someone who's still extremely sympathetic to their views.
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I don't know if I'm a typical Unix user. Compared to most Slashdotters, I suspect I have a touching ignorance of what's under the hood. But I've used a Unix-style operating system as my primary computing platform since circa 1994, so I think I can give you some hints.
Right now, the environment I most like is SGI Irix. Buy a used SGI Indigo2, plug it in, turn it on and there it is: Once installed, everything works. Fonts work. Cut and paste works. Netscape works (well, it crashes too, but less than on other platforms). Xemacs works. The fonts work; I can read most of them without eyestrain. The user interface looks nothing like Windows95, so I can immediately get the feeling I'm not a Microsoft drone. The system is reliable; other than running out of disk space, I've had exactly zero problems with it.
I'm not going to say my SGI machine is perfect - the 2GB system disk is a travesty, to tell the truth, and their upgrade prices are a comedy routine in and of themselves. But you can buy an old SGI for about the same as a similarly equipped PC, and if you upgrade it using off-the-shelf memory and disk, it's not expensive to feed.
So, what would make me want to move on from Irix? Probably something like Enlightenment, something where the creator rethought everything from the start and produced a truly unique brainchild. Enlightenment also looks pretty, and I doubt that I'd have a SGI box if I didn't like pretty.
But I'm not in a big hurry. If commercial software wasn't so expensive on the platform, I'd have no complaints whatsoever about SGI (other than the fact that SGI the company appears to be deserting loyal users such as myself).
To get closer to an answer to the original poster's question, I think what "real" hackers want is a user interface that's not difficult to use, but which doesn't remind them of Windows. I think that to many, a different system should look, well, different. I miss the colourful world of operating systems of the past, from LISP machines to TENEX to ITS, where every machine was an intriguing new challenge.
Now, it's more or less to Unix and Windows, and I daresay few hackers appreciate the latter. So we're left with just one OS to call our own. Depressing.
(But Be's looking interesting. And I think that if you read the above, you can see Be's appeal quite clearly).
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Let me stipulate, for the sake of this discussion, that I know next to nothing about the way Windows actually works. I just know what I've been told and what I've read about the product. And, sadly, I've been to the school of hard knocks: I've written a sizable VB application and spent all too much time dealing with these installation issues.
As you so rightly say:
The problem is that lazy programmers or buggy installers either don't set the version number, or don't test it, and the OS let's you overwrite critical system files.
The secondary problem is this: A VB program is very often put together using software written by numerous third-party companies. A third-party will sell you a DLL or OCX control. Your installation program has to put that in the right place. Generally, the vendors of the DLLs and OCXs have recommended installation into the infamous \windows\system directory.
As a result, due to Microsoft's negligent design - which was my point in the first place - system files are being constantly written and overwritten. Yes, they have tried to bandage the problem. No, I haven't seen these problems go away, even in brand spanking new versions of Windows and Office.
I don't doubt that you know more about Windows then I do. Doesn't matter; you shouldn't have to know about Windows internals to write a Windows application. I can write an enormous GTK+ application under Unix with database connectivity and such, and it never gives me the kind of grief I had under Windows. My GTK programming has never even crashed the system, let alone render it inoperable.
At any rate, none of this really matters in the end. As you admitted yourself, these problems happen. They may be due to design. They may be due to terrifying incompetence. But they happen, and that's not going away any time soon.
And that was my only point in the first place.
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I was actually kinda intrigued by Communist Chinese history, because of a bunch of Maoists I knew who insisted that China had the closest thing we could see to the One True Communism.
So I read up on it a bit. Read about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Apparently Mao et al sent everyone with even vague intellectual pretentions out into the countryside to farm beets, while they selected their new leaders based largely on their degree of fanaticism. This had predictably rotten results, widely acknowledged by pretty much everyone outside of the central government itself.
The cold truth is that private trade is a lot like a cockroach - it will survive in even the worst conditions, just a bit mutilated, because trade and exchange are basic human needs. You can have a much better society by just liberating those impulses and letting them fly. If you try and suppress them, as has been tried in Russia and China, all sorts of ugly things happen. Thus, stuff like the Cultural Revolution in China and grain shortages in Russia.
So no, I would certainly argue that letting capitalism take its course in China would have made things work significantly better than they do now. The Chinese economic recovery of recent years is mainly due to the increasing permissiveness regarding private exchange and property.
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I'd agree with you, if I felt there was any likelihood that Windows could be repaired.
Look at the history of Windows. It was born when Microsoft realized, correctly, that consumers were not ready for systems with the hardware requirements of OS/2. As a result, the mandate was to keep them down to a bare minimum.
What is the biggest problem with Windows? In my opinion, it's the difficulty of dealing with naming conflicts. Create a file called GRAPH.DLL and you can write an installation program that will overwrite a file used by many other programs in the system. Save a Microsoft-provided OLE DLL as part of your installation program, and it can overwrite and crush a newer or older version needed by some other program.
Now, you might ask, why was this done? Why are DLLs and such in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory? Because MS didn't want to store more than 8+3 character file names in the internal listings. For instance, if my program in \PROG1 had a file called GRAPH.DLL in the prog1 directory, and another program in the \PROG2 directory had a different file called GRAPH.DLL, Windows would load and retain in memory the first one loaded. Run prog1, things work great. Run prog2, it finds the old graph.dll already loaded and collapses because it's the wrong file. This problem could have been easily solved by including the path in the in-memory file description, but nobody thought of that on time.
Unix avoids conflicts like that by including the version number in the file name, so you have graph.1.1.so and graph.2.0.so . Your program can then specifically request graph.1.1 or graph.2.0.
Eventually, Microsoft added a new mechanism called the Registry, but they made it so complex and convoluted that many stuck with the old ways. And, of course, with the same\windows\system directory still existing, DLLs continue to be loaded into it and the original problem is not solved. Instead of actually fixing the problem by insisting on use of conventions (such as beginning the name of your DLL with the manufacturer's name), they created an insane pastiche of unique but impossible to remember or type IDs. Despite this, the core OLE system still uses the old way, so OLE modules are constantly interfering with each other. I suspect lack of core operating system support for long file names is a good part of the reason for this.
It is my contention that these problems with Windows simply cannot be fixed. You can attempt to paper over them, but at base, they are unsolvable without breaking all existing code and starting with a clean sweep. I don't need to tell you how likely that would be to happen - the clean sweep would wipe out the only advantage Windows has over other platforms.
Generally, most programmers don't find fixing a fundementally broken system to be much fun. In my experience, you have to pay them big money to go out fixing broken systems.
Because of this, I think any open sourcing of Microsoft code would echo the Mozilla experience - loads of people would download, few would dig in in any detail and even fewer would help.
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I actually preferred the other book on Celebration - I think it was called 'Celebration USA'. Celebration Chronicles wanders so far from its proported subject at times that I often wondered if it would ever return.
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I would guess that it's probably easier to get Java running well on BeOS than any other environment, because Java is a thread-based language. From what I understand, Be threads are a snap.
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Learning Perl is at 385, Programming Perl at 297.
And I suspect that online sales represent the overwhelming majorit of O'Reilly book sales, so I would say it's representative of how the books are doing.
At any rate, I think O'Reilly will make a profit, Illiad will make a profit, and good for them both.
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I like the idea of forcing MS to publish its file formats and APIs.
However, others have shown objections to MS hardware certification requiring disclosure actions from third parties - I agree with the folks who say that seems like a penalty more on hardware makers than MS.
Incidentally, could you direct me to the page on gnu.org where these ideas live? I wandered through the site and couldn't find it.
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You know, the strangest thing about this case is that it's not about money. The only person who's going to be happy about a $ 10 rebate for Microsoft products is the pirate, and he's not going to be entitled to it.
:-(
$ 10 is hardly even enough for a half decent lunch here in LA.
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amazon.com sales rank: 323
:-)
DNS and Bind has an amazon.com sales rank of 869.
Sendmail, that hoary classic, has a sales rank of 4,953.
Cathedral and the Bazaar is 4,052.
So I'd say that User Friendly is a real best-seller by O'Reilly standards. I don't think they're going to lose money on it.
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We're more or less civilized nowadays, so we can't expropriate Microsoft and destroy them.
We can break 'em up, but that's not going to make their OS into any less of a monopoly.
We can slap 'em with fines and distribute the results to their competitors. I don't know how much good that will do; most of the affected companies are actually not doing that badly. Netscape is part of prospering AOL; Sun is, well, Sun; Oracle is, well, Larry Ellison; etc.
The best solution I see is a breakup, but look what that did to AT&T. The original AT&T is being re-formed pretty darn quick nowadays. So was all that antitrust effort for naught?
In the end, the only way to end Microsoft's dominance is to consciously choose to use non-MS products - which is not something antitrust law can control.
I don't see any type of penalty that would actually make a difference in the way the world worked today.
Thoughts?
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The court is officially responsible for determining the facts. Then, as a separate matter, it is responsible for making a judgement based upon those facts.
As a general rule, the facts themselves are very rarely disupted in an appeal, only the interpretation of those facts (the judgement).
So this is in a sense more important than the judgement, because the judgement can be overturned upon appeal, but any appeal has to use these findings as its base.
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The basic argument is that we have a choice, and generally government is the lead actor in taking it away.
For instance, in the late 70s, the United States was grinding out crummy cars by the millions. The Japanese came in and made cars that were both higher quality and better suited to the economic conditions of the time.
This gave us a choice we didn't have before: Between large, inefficient and bloated automakers and producers of sleek, small and well-made cars. Understandably, we voted with our dollars and made a Japanese guy named Honda pretty well off.
The US government acted quickly, to deprive us of that choice. Acting on massive lobbying by US automakers, our government passed laws preventing more than a certain number of Japanese cars from entering our country.
This gives you a good idea of the positions of the two entitites. What power Ford has stems exactly from how many cars it can sell. If nobody likes their cars, Ford will fail. That's the power we all have, and we can exercise it as individuals; I can choose to buy - or not to buy - a Ford car. Best of all, if I don't want a Ford at all, I can go down to my pals at Mercedes-Benz and pick up a nice shiny S500.
The power our government has comes from how much money it can extract from its citizens. Unless we want to go to the extremely drastic step of leaving the country, which most of us would have an extremely hard time doing, we are stuck paying taxes. It doesn't matter if we disapprove of the government. It doesn't matter that we might want to pay government for some things but not others. We have to sit there and take the whole package, for good or for ill. We have to support both the governmental products we like and those we detest.
So you can see our relationship with the government is very different from that of a corporation. Corporations are free to do as they please, because they have a clear purpose - to satisfy us well enough so we'll keep buying from them.
We have to have checks on governmental power, because otherwise it can grow to unlimited proportions.
Hope that helped.
I was going to explain something of how this applies to Microsoft, but I fear my brain's too fuzzy to get it right, so I'll close. If you want more, reply to this message or email me.
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