The reason Bush can stick to his positions so easily is that his positions amount to a pack of carefully packaged lies.
Take the Bush tax cuts for example. He wanted the tax cuts, and he wanted them slanted to favor the very rich. We know that much, if only because that's exactly what he got. But his position (lie) was (depending on the day):
. We're running huge surpluses far into the future. In that light, it's immoral to collect so much in taxes. . We're in a recession, only tax cuts for will save the economy. (and only the *same* tax cuts for the rich that happen to be the least efficient at fighting a recession) . I'm giving a few hundred dollars in cuts to lots of middle class families, so most of my tax cuts go to middle class families. (even though in total dollars most of the money goes to the top few percent by a huge margin) . Taxes on dividends amount to immoral double-taxation (even though Corporations take enough deductions to never pay taxes on the money). . Repealing the inheritance tax will save family farms that would otherwise be lost.
On any given day, Bush's position was for tax cuts. But his rationale was all over the map. Likewise, his rationale for invading Iraq was all over the map (i.e. he was lying). The only difference is the *real* rationale isn't quite (oil?) as obvious (oil?) when it comes to (oil?) Iraq.
I was listening to Bill Kristol the other day explaining how invading Iraq was *still* the right thing to do, because the sanctions were going to come off. What the interviewer neglected to ask him was "who was pushing for the sanctions to come off and why"? I never heard anybody publicly call for that, but I'll bet some big Oil patch donors wanted it. So what Bill really meant was Republican beneficiaries of Oil interests were unable to resist their benefactors' requests to remove the sanctions, so we needed to go to war to destroy the regime so it was safe to remove the sanctions.
It ought to be easy to check whether the current atime is for today and limit the atime updates to one write per day per file. That would provide most of the info provided by atime and eliminate most of the overhead, no?
I have a win32 app that's been run on all win32 platforms, including WINE. But in recent years, as IT departments became 'sophisticated' about security (i.e. stopped running all users as admin), we started having permissions problems on.ini files. I was using the 'standard' GetPrivateProfile... stuff to access.ini files in the 'default' location, which turned out to be C:\Windows. Now, if you ask me, this was a bug in XP. Why on earth should the default location for storing application settings be someplace that non-admin users can't access?
Anyway I was gearing up to bite the bullet and 'fix' this to hardcode a path (I don't want to use the registry), when Vista came along. When I tested my app on Vista, I found out that they changed the default behavior to create per-user copies of.ini files from C:\windows into the user's application data area. So now it 'just works'. Makes sense for the default location for an.ini file to be someplace user-writeable, no? Anyway, it's still 'broken' in XP, but I just have them make those ini files globally writeable, and then it works.
So, I guess Vista's not *all* bad. But it's a hell of a lot slower than XP ever was.
Let's not resort to irrelevant spin to sweep a legitimate issue under the rug. Any of the Vista versions can run essentially all Win32 software, whether that was built for Win9X, 2000, XP or Vista. As long as the software doesn't use Vista-specific features, it's not an issue. And 90% of software doesn't (and doesn't need to).
Beyond monopoly shenanigans and history, this is the *main* reason people use Windows over Linux. It has had a stable ABI for years now. There are negatives to that, I'm sure. But for all but the widest-market apps, it's a huge boon to be able to target a single platform. Hell, don't ask me. Ask the authors of Firefox and OpenOffice. There's a reason even Open Source apps are better supported on Windows than Linux. Part of it is just that there's a bigger user base, but part of it is the difficulty of targeting multiple distros and coexisting with multiple desktop frameworks.
Saying that's not important may feel good, but it won't help Linux succeed. Maybe Linux can't ever match Windows' single-platform advantage, but if so, it more due to politics and ideology than technology. Still, if that's how it's gonna be, let's figure out where Linux *can* succeed within those parameters and stop assuming that it's being free will inevitably lead to it's being dominant. It won't, because there's no 'it'. There are 300 its - or 4,5 or 6, depending on how you count. There could be 1 - there just won't be.
Just because he's calling the author a coward doesn't mean he's saying he himself is brave. Just not a coward.
Fear of violating a lousy law that's practically unenforceable is bordering on irrational.
Hell, all those 'patriots' ranting about granting 'amnesty to law-breakers' are missing the point too. If a law is not enforced, and is actually circumvented by a large, powerful segment of society (Wal-Mar, etc.), it's essentially a non-existant law. And to demonize the powerless for violating it is pure perversity.
A friend just bought a new Compaq notebook with Vista (home basic) and 512MB of RAM. It was dog slow, especially booting up, so I had him add RAM. Still slow as hell with 1.5GB.
This thing has a Sempron processor, but c'mon. I've never seen a speed issue on Windows that couldn't be fixed by throwing RAM at it... until now.
Running at low priority is *not* the same thing as not interfering with the operation of the system. Once the thing has to do disk I/O, however low its priority, it's going to interfere with all the other disk I/O you're doing on your system - if only because reading the disk involves physical movement of the disk heads, which means they're not where other apps left them when the apps go to do their next I/O.
Have you ever tried to use your system while it's performing a system backup? Even if you run the backup at the lowest possible priority, your system will be dog slow until the backup completes. It also eats up system cache memory as it loads all those files into memory, causing other 'old' stuff to be discarded from the cache, which has another profound effect on system performance.
A low-priority screen saver can make the claim that it's only using idle cycles and so doesn't interfere with other apps. Anything that accesses the disk cannot make that claim.
From Microsoft's idea of capitulation (or of a snow job on the DOJ): "...And third, it will "inform" software makers, computer makers and users that "the desktop search index in Vista is designed to run in the background and cede precedence over computing resources to any other software product, including third-party desktop search products and their respective search indices."
If I read that quote correctly, the MS indexer cannot be disabled. It can be made to run at a low priority, but it'll still be there in the background dragging your disk heads all over the place, reading every file on your system and generally slowing your system down, even if you've chosen to use a different indexer (Google's or someone else's). There is no good reason for this, except that MS wants you to use their indexer and search - mainly to deal with their perceived competitive threat from Google. It's entirely equivalent to their saying "IE is part of the OS and can't be removed". There was one and only one reason for that one (as shown in court) - to kill Netscape. And this is not any different.
I'm not sure Google cares that much about desktop search per se. They probably think they can do a better job of it than Microsoft, but assuming Vista provided equal access to the desktop search database, I don't thing Google would care that much.
The real point, and where Vista *is* anticompetitive is that the built-in search wants to integrate Microsoft's version of Internet search into the built-in desktop search viewer. Internet search is not a feature of the OS - or any desktop OS I know of, and there's no reason Microsoft should be able to use their desktop monopoly to make it look like their internet search is built-in while other engines are added on. In the light of past anticompetitive behavior and agreements, that's not legal.
It appears that the hooks between desktop search and an internet search engine *have* been built into Vista, and there's no good reason other than the anticompetitive one for the relevant API's to be limited to Microsoft.
Note how these deals are being made with commercial Linux vendors. And only the ones that have not made a success of it financially. Red Hat isn't interested. And Microsoft either isn't approaching developers directly or they're not interested either.
Microsoft wants one thing out of all this patent nonsense - for Linux to no longer be considered viable as free beer software. For them, that's the driving force behind all of these deals. They don't really care about interoperability, but they don't mind it either - as long as they can eventually price-gouge their way to the top. And as long as Linux is free, they can't.
The commercial distros are in a funny business. They take free software and try to make a living selling and supporting it. It's not illegal, it's not evil. And the GPL guarantees that it provides some benefit to the community at large. But essentially, these guys are on the same side of the fence as Microsoft. They want to sell software. They understand that they have to live with the fact that the software they sell is available legally for free - after all, that's how they got it. But that doesn't mean that they like it.
Red Hat is a different case. They got to the top first and are able to make money based on a combination of quality, stability, playing by the rules and, not incidentally, staying mostly out of Microsoft's way on the desktop. They understand that it would be to their great disadvantage to join the Microsoft protection racket, and they don't really have much to gain from it either. That's lucky for us.
Ubuntu is still living off of its status as a billionaire's plaything. That works out okay for us too.
But Novell has to make a living, and their business competes directly with Microsoft. If they were able to show Red Hat's consistent growth, their need of the community might outweigh their need of Microsoft's dollars and co-marketing. The patent thing's a red herring for them, but they're also not averse to wiping out the market for free Linux. At some level, they must realize that wiping out the market for free Linux means wiping out Linux, and with it, Novell. But they're a public company, and they can't afford to thing anything like long-term. And there's the other dirty secret about public companies. Their leadership has lots of incentives to rake in short-term gains, and rarely sticks around long enough to be penalized for their bad decisions.
So expect more of this until which time the patent issue goes away - either through changes in the law or a counterthreat from the likes of IBM.
Speaking of IBM... I think that's where the future of Linux lies. As a free 'razor to sell the blades' part of a total hardware/software/support offering. Only in that context are there no incentives to work against the free nature of Linux. And in that context, there are also serious incentives to work toward the standardization that's a vital (if controversial) need for Linux to make the leap to the desktop.
And then there's TIVO. They're the good guys here too. They do nothing to harm Linux, they give back their improvements (assuming they make any - I assume they do). And they have a business model that isn't threatened by free Linux. So why are the GPL3'ers so against them? Because they don't give their hardware away with their software. That would be nuts, and it's nuts to expect that from them. Hardware has a cost. They subsidize that cost by selling a service. You may not like their business model, but it doesn't hurt Linux one bit. If you don't like it, don't buy a TIVO.
Oh, and by the way... nobody's bothering to notice *why* Apple is price competitive these days. I think it's because, with the iPod, they've gotten into a high-volume, high-margin business for the first time. They're making so much money there that they no longer need to charge an 'Apple premium' for their Macintosh computers, and in fact are able to remain quite healthy in spite of competing more or less directly on price in the market for mp3 players.
In other words, they no longer need to make as much money on each Macintosh in order to stay in business. That's why they can afford to price their laptops competitively. Also, there is enough computer use these days centered on portable Internet technologies that the vaunted Microsoft network effects are less important than they used to be (in the home market at least). So, again, their Macintosh business is less threatened by 'everyone else using Windows' than it used to be. They can afford to write of huge segments of the market without becoming completely irrelevant.
But why should they? Apple's in a completely different position as a business than they were the last time they allowed clones. On the one hand, it's less necessary for them to offer low-end systems, and so they aren't being forced to find a way to do it. But on the other hand, they're better able to compete with the clones that they license than they were the last time around. I don't know how those 2 opposing effects balance out, but I suspect that they're at worst a wash. Then again, I don't see the Apple clones anywhere, so maybe they've done the analysis and decided it won't work for them...
I'm not suggesting that they start selling boxed OS/X to load on any X86 clone out there. I'm suggesting that they license a few OEM's to build systems guaranteed "to just work", just like the Apple equivalents. But either limit them contractually to the low end or just have enough faith in their own abilities to make their high-end hardware appealing enough to compete.
I guess I'm assuming that most of Apple's current mac customer base would stick with Apple hardware, either because they can already afford it, or because they're 'cult of Apple' types that would pay extra even if they didn't have to. Maybe that's a false assumption. But if it's not, then low-end clones would mean Apple's computers would be running a 'more mainstream' OS, and would have more available applications. That's got to be good for Apple. Whether it's better they their current monopoly control of a non-mainstream system with limited application availability is an interesting question. I just wonder whether they're asking it of themselves these days.
Remember that when Microsoft was trying to get into the file/print/email server game, Novell was the leader in the field. But to win, Microsoft merely had to more or less match their functionality and throw in some price cuts and desktop tie-ins to sweeten the deal.
With Linux, this is harder. They can't use a price advantage to 'choke off the air supply'. Or can they? To me, that's what the Novell patent deal is all about (from MS's point of view, at least). To un-freeify Linux. Microsoft is confident that they can compete on a level playing field. After all, they have a huge starting advantage, plus they still have the ability to tie their server products to their desktop products. But they can no longer undercut on price. That is, unless they convince the marketplace that free Linux is illegal, and the only way to get Linux is to pay Novell's price. Then they can once again price Novell out of the market.
At least one of the Linux-esque ways of doing business is running servers for free, or at least without per-seat licensing. If that goes away, at least a large part of those Linux fans will lose some of their attachment.
I think it's time to allow companies to produce OS/X based clones. I know they tried this in the past and ended up screwing the companies that took the bait, but Apple is a different company than it was years ago.
Today's Apple is largely a mystique/fashion-statement company. They build products that do essentially the same thing as other products, but have a reputation for doing it better. Enough so that their customers will endure a significant lack of software offerings to stay their customers.
It used to be that most of that mystique was based around their slick software. Now, while some still is, I'd say most of the mystique is based around their slick hardware. And, as this article points out, in the arenas where Apple chooses to compete, they are cost-competitive. The only thing holding them back is their unwillingness (or inability) to compete at the low end. So, which is better - cede the low end to Dell or to Microsoft/Dell? Assuming they can continue to be competitive at the high end, any minor loss there would be more than made up for by gains at the low end (which would consist of all-profit software sales). Plus expanding the OS/X pie would have to help their high end hardware business as well as their consumer electronics businesses.
And the resultant whittling down of the Microsoft monopoly would help the industry in general by raising the importance of portable, multi-platform software.
Microsoft may force you to upgrade for their own reasons - mainly to force you to upgrade.
But Firefox doesn't force you to upgrade unless they have to. Maybe FF 2.0 won't work on win98, I don't know. But all prior versions did. I used all FF's up to 1.5 on Win95 before I got a new box.
And FF 2.0 could probably work fine on any Linux distro. But the distros, for various reasons, can't easily support it. I think Mandriva 2007 had some GNOME dependencies on FF 1 stuff, so there was never an FF 2 upgrade path there.
And that is a real world issue. We Linux'ers don't mind installing a new distro version 2 or 3 times a year (and don't talk to me about apt-get distro version upgrades - I sure wouldn't trust that, so why should a non technical user do it). The one thing (other than monopoly lock-in and all the 3rd party apps) that Windows has in its favor is it's infrequent upgrade schedule. They apparently have enough functionality in their system that XP can live from 2001 to 2007 and nobody complains too much. That's a good thing.
Linux is still changing APIs (at least at the desktop level) every 6 months or so. And it's not going to catch on in a big way on the desktop until that shakes out. Why should it? I use Linux as my primary desktop OS at home, but I wouldn't recommend it for others - except other tech savvy folks that can appreciate what's been accomplished. Desktop Linux is really impressive these days, but it's not finished, and it seems unfinished *by design*. It's time to at least consider what would constitute a finished desktop Linux. Stable API's, standard sound libraries and packaging. That kind of thing.
...was just a ploy to take some of the wind out of Java's sails.
Absolutely right. Microsoft was originally pushing.NET as a 'better Java', and in some ways, it actually was better. But in the way that really mattered to most Java developers, it was much worse. Its cross-platform nature was the main appeal of Java. Yes, the language may have been viewed as an improvement, and the 'managed code' approach to security is nice. But 'write once, run anywhere' was the main selling point of Java.
So how did Microsoft 'compete'? First, by deliberately sabotaging the cross-platform nature of Java, and Second by implying that their Java clone was cross-platform as well.
And the saddest part is that if Microsoft had been broken up by the Justice Dept when it should have been,.NET probably would have been made truly cross-platform. Then it could have competed honestly with Java.
In an ideal world, people serving up content would refuse to use a Windows-only format. Because content formats should be about what they the providers, not Microsoft, want in terms of accessibility by every possible customer.
And then Microsoft would have to support all those platforms in order to play.
But because of Microsoft's near-monopoly, and the stupidity of those who assume the 'great software' offered up cheap by Microsoft will work for everybody, they can get away with this.
After all, the only reason for Microsoft to build a Flash clone (I'm assuming that's what this thing is), is to nudge the internet into Windows-only territory. And there's no good reason (other than ignorance) for content producers to go along with it.
>Those are the lucky exceptions, not the rules. I know from bitter experience. Microsoft breaks some backwards compatibility with every minor revision
Come on now. At least they try to maintain backward compatibility (except, of course, when they want to play planned obsolescense with Office). The Linux desktop projects don't even try. And that's been 'good enough' so long as nobody runs anything but the stuff that comes with their distro. Yep. We've got the source, so stuff can be rebuilt every time backward compatibility breaks. But that's definitely *not* a good thing, and people ought to face up to it instead of just chanting "choice is good, choice is good". Sounds like brainwashed red staters chanting "we're fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them here". Bullshit.
I for one wrote a Windows app years ago in straight C windows SDK, and the executable works unmodified on Win9X, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, AND WINE fer Chrissake. That's a good thing. Maybe a rarity, but along with the CAD guy, this makes 2 of us.
If you want Linux to ever be viable as anything but a basic Internet kiosk, you need to take this issue seriously. Like, say, if you want to be able to work on Linux or write software for it at you job.
This is definitely true, but it doesn't have to be as big a problem as it is now.
Because non-GPL developers can't use QT without paying, KDE needs to work harder to intergrate with apps built without QT. That doesn't mean the GNOME folks shouldn't be working just as hard at this, but at least they can say that anyone can build free or non-free apps with their toolkit. In theory, they'll never have to 'build everything themselves' as KDE seems to be trying to do. And I prefer KDE, by the way.
I recently spent about an hour getting kaffeine to be the default video player everywhere in my Mandriva 2007 system. Had to set it separately in Konqueror, Firefox and whatever GNOME app Firefox uses to 'display containing folder' from it's download window. And in each of those cases, I had to navigate to kaffeine using a completely different file navigation tool. First of all, there's no need for separate file type mappings in these apps (except that the underlying toolkits have each seen fit to build their registries for this kind of info instead of cooperating). This should be the easiest of interoperability issues to solve - just use the same data structures to hold the info and keep your separate API's if you want. Then you get to the more complex issue of file navigation. Ideally all toolkits should use the 'current desktop's' dialogs for this - or agree to make them all work the same.
None of this is KDE's fault per se, but because of the QT issue, I think KDE has a greater responsibility to get toolkit interoperability working. I'm sure there are ongoing efforts in this direction, but I don't know if it's a top priority item at this point. It should be. If Linux desktops are ever going to support third-party apps, the desktop toolkits need to get their feature sets established and start freezing ABI's (or at least figure out how to easily support apps targeted at older ABI's). It's all well and good to have KDE and GNOME attempt to cover all the app bases, but except for certain limited use cases, that's just not practical.
As noted before, the OEOne desktop was an early implementation of this. I think it was originally written for a stand-alone appliance (OLPC, anyone?). At the time, it was considered a bit slow and incomplete. And, as I remember, there was some question about whether the XUL platform specs had settled down enough to make it feasible to keep this thing going, let alone to have 3rd parties attempt to target OEOne as a platform.
But having recently tried the Songbird demo, I think it may be time to take a second look at this idea. Songird is a new XULRunner-based iTunes clone, and it's pretty amazing in terms of its desktop app-ness.
XUL as a platform was always a great idea, but using it as a replacement for the entire desktop is bound to run into a chicken-and-egg omelete. Still, if they can build a nice cross-platform suite of apps that can run with or without an XUL desktop, it might take off...
Probably they want some software patents allowed and others denied.
After all it would only take one valid patent on the.doc format to put OpenOffice 'out of business', which they'd really like to do. Whereas really, really stupid patents on things like cascading menus just make it hard for them to copy other peoples' ideas.
Some software ideas are more innovative than others. Unfortunately, all software patents hurt open source equally. And patents that are effectively monopoly lock-ins are seriously anticompetitive.
Here's a question for you, what DRM scheme is used to protect most songs on people's computer's? Answer: PlaysForSure. There is only one reason for this, Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop OS's, with which they bundle Windows Media Player which adds that DRM when it rips CDs by default.
Is that really true? And if so, does it mean that a Windows user that ripped a bunch of CD's to the default format can't import those songs even to their Zune? Somehow, I doubt it - though I wouldn't put it past Microsoft's brain-dead Zune DRM switcheroo.
...and I just bought a hybrid vehicle... Yes, it's an SUV, but I also need space to hold all that comes with having an infant (car seat, stroller, diaper bag, and still gotta carry the groceries or whatever we're going out for).
I just love this kind of self-justification. You don't 'need' an SUV. I think you could carry all that stuff pretty easily in a small hatchback - or a minivan - or any of several vehicle types that have plenty of room for such everyday suburban needs. You bought an SUV because the culture, fed by the car companies, taught you to *want* an SUV.
Now you may *need* 4 wheel drive up there in Alberta, but you certainly don't *need* a big, heavy truck.
There *kind of* is a DRM system like that. It's called physical CD's and DVD's. You can copy them, but if they were reasonably priced, why bother. At $10 a pop, I wouldn't think twice about buying a CD, but at $18, I feel ripped off, and if a friend has a copy...
The media companies think they can make more money by selling the pure bits over the internet than by manufacturing and shipping physical CD's, but how important is that really to the average consumer? All of the music on my iPod came from CD's. The only advantage to digital downloads from iTunes is the ability to buy single songs for a reasonable price. And most iPod owners that take advantage of that ability don't seem to mind that there's a DRM downside to it. It's a pretty nice balance.
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The reason Bush can stick to his positions so easily is that his positions amount to a pack of carefully packaged lies.
Take the Bush tax cuts for example. He wanted the tax cuts, and he wanted them slanted to favor the very rich. We know that much, if only because that's exactly what he got. But his position (lie) was (depending on the day):
. We're running huge surpluses far into the future. In that light, it's immoral to collect so much in taxes.
. We're in a recession, only tax cuts for will save the economy. (and only the *same* tax cuts for the rich that happen to be the least efficient at fighting a recession)
. I'm giving a few hundred dollars in cuts to lots of middle class families, so most of my tax cuts go to middle class families. (even though in total dollars most of the money goes to the top few percent by a huge margin)
. Taxes on dividends amount to immoral double-taxation (even though Corporations take enough deductions to never pay taxes on the money).
. Repealing the inheritance tax will save family farms that would otherwise be lost.
On any given day, Bush's position was for tax cuts. But his rationale was all over the map. Likewise, his rationale for invading Iraq was all over the map (i.e. he was lying). The only difference is the *real* rationale isn't quite (oil?) as obvious (oil?) when it comes to (oil?) Iraq.
I was listening to Bill Kristol the other day explaining how invading Iraq was *still* the right thing to do, because the sanctions were going to come off. What the interviewer neglected to ask him was "who was pushing for the sanctions to come off and why"? I never heard anybody publicly call for that, but I'll bet some big Oil patch donors wanted it. So what Bill really meant was Republican beneficiaries of Oil interests were unable to resist their benefactors' requests to remove the sanctions, so we needed to go to war to destroy the regime so it was safe to remove the sanctions.
It ought to be easy to check whether the current atime is for today and limit the atime updates to one write per day per file. That would provide most of the info provided by atime and eliminate most of the overhead, no?
I have a win32 app that's been run on all win32 platforms, including WINE. But in recent years, as IT departments became 'sophisticated' about security (i.e. stopped running all users as admin), we started having permissions problems on .ini files. I was using the 'standard' GetPrivateProfile... stuff to access .ini files in the 'default' location, which turned out to be C:\Windows. Now, if you ask me, this was a bug in XP. Why on earth should the default location for storing application settings be someplace that non-admin users can't access?
.ini files from C:\windows into the user's application data area. So now it 'just works'. Makes sense for the default location for an .ini file to be someplace user-writeable, no? Anyway, it's still 'broken' in XP, but I just have them make those ini files globally writeable, and then it works.
Anyway I was gearing up to bite the bullet and 'fix' this to hardcode a path (I don't want to use the registry), when Vista came along. When I tested my app on Vista, I found out that they changed the default behavior to create per-user copies of
So, I guess Vista's not *all* bad. But it's a hell of a lot slower than XP ever was.
Let's not resort to irrelevant spin to sweep a legitimate issue under the rug. Any of the Vista versions can run essentially all Win32 software, whether that was built for Win9X, 2000, XP or Vista. As long as the software doesn't use Vista-specific features, it's not an issue. And 90% of software doesn't (and doesn't need to).
Beyond monopoly shenanigans and history, this is the *main* reason people use Windows over Linux. It has had a stable ABI for years now. There are negatives to that, I'm sure. But for all but the widest-market apps, it's a huge boon to be able to target a single platform. Hell, don't ask me. Ask the authors of Firefox and OpenOffice. There's a reason even Open Source apps are better supported on Windows than Linux. Part of it is just that there's a bigger user base, but part of it is the difficulty of targeting multiple distros and coexisting with multiple desktop frameworks.
Saying that's not important may feel good, but it won't help Linux succeed. Maybe Linux can't ever match Windows' single-platform advantage, but if so, it more due to politics and ideology than technology. Still, if that's how it's gonna be, let's figure out where Linux *can* succeed within those parameters and stop assuming that it's being free will inevitably lead to it's being dominant. It won't, because there's no 'it'. There are 300 its - or 4,5 or 6, depending on how you count. There could be 1 - there just won't be.
Just because he's calling the author a coward doesn't mean he's saying he himself is brave. Just not a coward.
Fear of violating a lousy law that's practically unenforceable is bordering on irrational.
Hell, all those 'patriots' ranting about granting 'amnesty to law-breakers' are missing the point too. If a law is not enforced, and is actually circumvented by a large, powerful segment of society (Wal-Mar, etc.), it's essentially a non-existant law. And to demonize the powerless for violating it is pure perversity.
A friend just bought a new Compaq notebook with Vista (home basic) and 512MB of RAM. It was dog slow, especially booting up, so I had him add RAM. Still slow as hell with 1.5GB.
This thing has a Sempron processor, but c'mon. I've never seen a speed issue on Windows that couldn't be fixed by throwing RAM at it... until now.
Running at low priority is *not* the same thing as not interfering with the operation of the system. Once the thing has to do disk I/O, however low its priority, it's going to interfere with all the other disk I/O you're doing on your system - if only because reading the disk involves physical movement of the disk heads, which means they're not where other apps left them when the apps go to do their next I/O.
Have you ever tried to use your system while it's performing a system backup? Even if you run the backup at the lowest possible priority, your system will be dog slow until the backup completes. It also eats up system cache memory as it loads all those files into memory, causing other 'old' stuff to be discarded from the cache, which has another profound effect on system performance.
A low-priority screen saver can make the claim that it's only using idle cycles and so doesn't interfere with other apps. Anything that accesses the disk cannot make that claim.
From Microsoft's idea of capitulation (or of a snow job on the DOJ): "...And third, it will "inform" software makers, computer makers and users that "the desktop search index in Vista is designed to run in the background and cede precedence over computing resources to any other software product, including third-party desktop search products and their respective search indices."
If I read that quote correctly, the MS indexer cannot be disabled. It can be made to run at a low priority, but it'll still be there in the background dragging your disk heads all over the place, reading every file on your system and generally slowing your system down, even if you've chosen to use a different indexer (Google's or someone else's). There is no good reason for this, except that MS wants you to use their indexer and search - mainly to deal with their perceived competitive threat from Google. It's entirely equivalent to their saying "IE is part of the OS and can't be removed". There was one and only one reason for that one (as shown in court) - to kill Netscape. And this is not any different.
I'm not sure Google cares that much about desktop search per se. They probably think they can do a better job of it than Microsoft, but assuming Vista provided equal access to the desktop search database, I don't thing Google would care that much.
The real point, and where Vista *is* anticompetitive is that the built-in search wants to integrate Microsoft's version of Internet search into the built-in desktop search viewer. Internet search is not a feature of the OS - or any desktop OS I know of, and there's no reason Microsoft should be able to use their desktop monopoly to make it look like their internet search is built-in while other engines are added on. In the light of past anticompetitive behavior and agreements, that's not legal.
It appears that the hooks between desktop search and an internet search engine *have* been built into Vista, and there's no good reason other than the anticompetitive one for the relevant API's to be limited to Microsoft.
Note how these deals are being made with commercial Linux vendors. And only the ones that have not made a success of it financially. Red Hat isn't interested. And Microsoft either isn't approaching developers directly or they're not interested either.
Microsoft wants one thing out of all this patent nonsense - for Linux to no longer be considered viable as free beer software. For them, that's the driving force behind all of these deals. They don't really care about interoperability, but they don't mind it either - as long as they can eventually price-gouge their way to the top. And as long as Linux is free, they can't.
The commercial distros are in a funny business. They take free software and try to make a living selling and supporting it. It's not illegal, it's not evil. And the GPL guarantees that it provides some benefit to the community at large. But essentially, these guys are on the same side of the fence as Microsoft. They want to sell software. They understand that they have to live with the fact that the software they sell is available legally for free - after all, that's how they got it. But that doesn't mean that they like it.
Red Hat is a different case. They got to the top first and are able to make money based on a combination of quality, stability, playing by the rules and, not incidentally, staying mostly out of Microsoft's way on the desktop. They understand that it would be to their great disadvantage to join the Microsoft protection racket, and they don't really have much to gain from it either. That's lucky for us.
Ubuntu is still living off of its status as a billionaire's plaything. That works out okay for us too.
But Novell has to make a living, and their business competes directly with Microsoft. If they were able to show Red Hat's consistent growth, their need of the community might outweigh their need of Microsoft's dollars and co-marketing. The patent thing's a red herring for them, but they're also not averse to wiping out the market for free Linux. At some level, they must realize that wiping out the market for free Linux means wiping out Linux, and with it, Novell. But they're a public company, and they can't afford to thing anything like long-term. And there's the other dirty secret about public companies. Their leadership has lots of incentives to rake in short-term gains, and rarely sticks around long enough to be penalized for their bad decisions.
So expect more of this until which time the patent issue goes away - either through changes in the law or a counterthreat from the likes of IBM.
Speaking of IBM... I think that's where the future of Linux lies. As a free 'razor to sell the blades' part of a total hardware/software/support offering. Only in that context are there no incentives to work against the free nature of Linux. And in that context, there are also serious incentives to work toward the standardization that's a vital (if controversial) need for Linux to make the leap to the desktop.
And then there's TIVO. They're the good guys here too. They do nothing to harm Linux, they give back their improvements (assuming they make any - I assume they do). And they have a business model that isn't threatened by free Linux. So why are the GPL3'ers so against them? Because they don't give their hardware away with their software. That would be nuts, and it's nuts to expect that from them. Hardware has a cost. They subsidize that cost by selling a service. You may not like their business model, but it doesn't hurt Linux one bit. If you don't like it, don't buy a TIVO.
Oh, and by the way... nobody's bothering to notice *why* Apple is price competitive these days. I think it's because, with the iPod, they've gotten into a high-volume, high-margin business for the first time. They're making so much money there that they no longer need to charge an 'Apple premium' for their Macintosh computers, and in fact are able to remain quite healthy in spite of competing more or less directly on price in the market for mp3 players.
In other words, they no longer need to make as much money on each Macintosh in order to stay in business. That's why they can afford to price their laptops competitively. Also, there is enough computer use these days centered on portable Internet technologies that the vaunted Microsoft network effects are less important than they used to be (in the home market at least). So, again, their Macintosh business is less threatened by 'everyone else using Windows' than it used to be. They can afford to write of huge segments of the market without becoming completely irrelevant.
But why should they? Apple's in a completely different position as a business than they were the last time they allowed clones. On the one hand, it's less necessary for them to offer low-end systems, and so they aren't being forced to find a way to do it. But on the other hand, they're better able to compete with the clones that they license than they were the last time around. I don't know how those 2 opposing effects balance out, but I suspect that they're at worst a wash. Then again, I don't see the Apple clones anywhere, so maybe they've done the analysis and decided it won't work for them...
I'm not suggesting that they start selling boxed OS/X to load on any X86 clone out there. I'm suggesting that they license a few OEM's to build systems guaranteed "to just work", just like the Apple equivalents. But either limit them contractually to the low end or just have enough faith in their own abilities to make their high-end hardware appealing enough to compete.
I guess I'm assuming that most of Apple's current mac customer base would stick with Apple hardware, either because they can already afford it, or because they're 'cult of Apple' types that would pay extra even if they didn't have to. Maybe that's a false assumption. But if it's not, then low-end clones would mean Apple's computers would be running a 'more mainstream' OS, and would have more available applications. That's got to be good for Apple. Whether it's better they their current monopoly control of a non-mainstream system with limited application availability is an interesting question. I just wonder whether they're asking it of themselves these days.
Remember that when Microsoft was trying to get into the file/print/email server game, Novell was the leader in the field. But to win, Microsoft merely had to more or less match their functionality and throw in some price cuts and desktop tie-ins to sweeten the deal.
With Linux, this is harder. They can't use a price advantage to 'choke off the air supply'. Or can they? To me, that's what the Novell patent deal is all about (from MS's point of view, at least). To un-freeify Linux. Microsoft is confident that they can compete on a level playing field. After all, they have a huge starting advantage, plus they still have the ability to tie their server products to their desktop products. But they can no longer undercut on price. That is, unless they convince the marketplace that free Linux is illegal, and the only way to get Linux is to pay Novell's price. Then they can once again price Novell out of the market.
At least one of the Linux-esque ways of doing business is running servers for free, or at least without per-seat licensing. If that goes away, at least a large part of those Linux fans will lose some of their attachment.
I think it's time to allow companies to produce OS/X based clones. I know they tried this in the past and ended up screwing the companies that took the bait, but Apple is a different company than it was years ago.
Today's Apple is largely a mystique/fashion-statement company. They build products that do essentially the same thing as other products, but have a reputation for doing it better. Enough so that their customers will endure a significant lack of software offerings to stay their customers.
It used to be that most of that mystique was based around their slick software. Now, while some still is, I'd say most of the mystique is based around their slick hardware. And, as this article points out, in the arenas where Apple chooses to compete, they are cost-competitive. The only thing holding them back is their unwillingness (or inability) to compete at the low end. So, which is better - cede the low end to Dell or to Microsoft/Dell? Assuming they can continue to be competitive at the high end, any minor loss there would be more than made up for by gains at the low end (which would consist of all-profit software sales). Plus expanding the OS/X pie would have to help their high end hardware business as well as their consumer electronics businesses.
And the resultant whittling down of the Microsoft monopoly would help the industry in general by raising the importance of portable, multi-platform software.
Nothing to lose... lots to gain, no?
Microsoft may force you to upgrade for their own reasons - mainly to force you to upgrade.
But Firefox doesn't force you to upgrade unless they have to. Maybe FF 2.0 won't work on win98, I don't know. But all prior versions did. I used all FF's up to 1.5 on Win95 before I got a new box.
And FF 2.0 could probably work fine on any Linux distro. But the distros, for various reasons, can't easily support it. I think Mandriva 2007 had some GNOME dependencies on FF 1 stuff, so there was never an FF 2 upgrade path there.
And that is a real world issue. We Linux'ers don't mind installing a new distro version 2 or 3 times a year (and don't talk to me about apt-get distro version upgrades - I sure wouldn't trust that, so why should a non technical user do it). The one thing (other than monopoly lock-in and all the 3rd party apps) that Windows has in its favor is it's infrequent upgrade schedule. They apparently have enough functionality in their system that XP can live from 2001 to 2007 and nobody complains too much. That's a good thing.
Linux is still changing APIs (at least at the desktop level) every 6 months or so. And it's not going to catch on in a big way on the desktop until that shakes out. Why should it? I use Linux as my primary desktop OS at home, but I wouldn't recommend it for others - except other tech savvy folks that can appreciate what's been accomplished. Desktop Linux is really impressive these days, but it's not finished, and it seems unfinished *by design*. It's time to at least consider what would constitute a finished desktop Linux. Stable API's, standard sound libraries and packaging. That kind of thing.
...was just a ploy to take some of the wind out of Java's sails.
.NET as a 'better Java', and in some ways, it actually was better. But in the way that really mattered to most Java developers, it was much worse. Its cross-platform nature was the main appeal of Java. Yes, the language may have been viewed as an improvement, and the 'managed code' approach to security is nice. But 'write once, run anywhere' was the main selling point of Java.
.NET probably would have been made truly cross-platform. Then it could have competed honestly with Java.
Absolutely right. Microsoft was originally pushing
So how did Microsoft 'compete'? First, by deliberately sabotaging the cross-platform nature of Java, and Second by implying that their Java clone was cross-platform as well.
And the saddest part is that if Microsoft had been broken up by the Justice Dept when it should have been,
In an ideal world, people serving up content would refuse to use a Windows-only format. Because content formats should be about what they the providers, not Microsoft, want in terms of accessibility by every possible customer.
And then Microsoft would have to support all those platforms in order to play.
But because of Microsoft's near-monopoly, and the stupidity of those who assume the 'great software' offered up cheap by Microsoft will work for everybody, they can get away with this.
After all, the only reason for Microsoft to build a Flash clone (I'm assuming that's what this thing is), is to nudge the internet into Windows-only territory. And there's no good reason (other than ignorance) for content producers to go along with it.
>Those are the lucky exceptions, not the rules. I know from bitter experience. Microsoft breaks some backwards compatibility with every minor revision
Come on now. At least they try to maintain backward compatibility (except, of course, when they want to play planned obsolescense with Office). The Linux desktop projects don't even try. And that's been 'good enough' so long as nobody runs anything but the stuff that comes with their distro. Yep. We've got the source, so stuff can be rebuilt every time backward compatibility breaks. But that's definitely *not* a good thing, and people ought to face up to it instead of just chanting "choice is good, choice is good". Sounds like brainwashed red staters chanting "we're fighting them over there, so we don't have to fight them here". Bullshit.
I for one wrote a Windows app years ago in straight C windows SDK, and the executable works unmodified on Win9X, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, AND WINE fer Chrissake. That's a good thing. Maybe a rarity, but along with the CAD guy, this makes 2 of us.
If you want Linux to ever be viable as anything but a basic Internet kiosk, you need to take this issue seriously. Like, say, if you want to be able to work on Linux or write software for it at you job.
This is definitely true, but it doesn't have to be as big a problem as it is now.
Because non-GPL developers can't use QT without paying, KDE needs to work harder to intergrate with apps built without QT. That doesn't mean the GNOME folks shouldn't be working just as hard at this, but at least they can say that anyone can build free or non-free apps with their toolkit. In theory, they'll never have to 'build everything themselves' as KDE seems to be trying to do. And I prefer KDE, by the way.
I recently spent about an hour getting kaffeine to be the default video player everywhere in my Mandriva 2007 system. Had to set it separately in Konqueror, Firefox and whatever GNOME app Firefox uses to 'display containing folder' from it's download window. And in each of those cases, I had to navigate to kaffeine using a completely different file navigation tool. First of all, there's no need for separate file type mappings in these apps (except that the underlying toolkits have each seen fit to build their registries for this kind of info instead of cooperating). This should be the easiest of interoperability issues to solve - just use the same data structures to hold the info and keep your separate API's if you want. Then you get to the more complex issue of file navigation. Ideally all toolkits should use the 'current desktop's' dialogs for this - or agree to make them all work the same.
None of this is KDE's fault per se, but because of the QT issue, I think KDE has a greater responsibility to get toolkit interoperability working. I'm sure there are ongoing efforts in this direction, but I don't know if it's a top priority item at this point. It should be. If Linux desktops are ever going to support third-party apps, the desktop toolkits need to get their feature sets established and start freezing ABI's (or at least figure out how to easily support apps targeted at older ABI's). It's all well and good to have KDE and GNOME attempt to cover all the app bases, but except for certain limited use cases, that's just not practical.
As noted before, the OEOne desktop was an early implementation of this. I think it was originally written for a stand-alone appliance (OLPC, anyone?). At the time, it was considered a bit slow and incomplete. And, as I remember, there was some question about whether the XUL platform specs had settled down enough to make it feasible to keep this thing going, let alone to have 3rd parties attempt to target OEOne as a platform.
But having recently tried the Songbird demo, I think it may be time to take a second look at this idea. Songird is a new XULRunner-based iTunes clone, and it's pretty amazing in terms of its desktop app-ness.
XUL as a platform was always a great idea, but using it as a replacement for the entire desktop is bound to run into a chicken-and-egg omelete. Still, if they can build a nice cross-platform suite of apps that can run with or without an XUL desktop, it might take off...
Probably they want some software patents allowed and others denied.
.doc format to put OpenOffice 'out of business', which they'd really like to do. Whereas really, really stupid patents on things like cascading menus just make it hard for them to copy other peoples' ideas.
After all it would only take one valid patent on the
Some software ideas are more innovative than others. Unfortunately, all software patents hurt open source equally. And patents that are effectively monopoly lock-ins are seriously anticompetitive.
Here's a question for you, what DRM scheme is used to protect most songs on people's computer's? Answer: PlaysForSure. There is only one reason for this, Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop OS's, with which they bundle Windows Media Player which adds that DRM when it rips CDs by default.
Is that really true? And if so, does it mean that a Windows user that ripped a bunch of CD's to the default format can't import those songs even to their Zune? Somehow, I doubt it - though I wouldn't put it past Microsoft's brain-dead Zune DRM switcheroo.
...and I just bought a hybrid vehicle... Yes, it's an SUV, but I also need space to hold all that comes with having an infant (car seat, stroller, diaper bag, and still gotta carry the groceries or whatever we're going out for).
I just love this kind of self-justification. You don't 'need' an SUV. I think you could carry all that stuff pretty easily in a small hatchback - or a minivan - or any of several vehicle types that have plenty of room for such everyday suburban needs. You bought an SUV because the culture, fed by the car companies, taught you to *want* an SUV.
Now you may *need* 4 wheel drive up there in Alberta, but you certainly don't *need* a big, heavy truck.
Isn't this like the Microsoft search wizard that went to Google China? Didn't Google have to agree not to have him work on search technology?
There *kind of* is a DRM system like that. It's called physical CD's and DVD's. You can copy them, but if they were reasonably priced, why bother. At $10 a pop, I wouldn't think twice about buying a CD, but at $18, I feel ripped off, and if a friend has a copy...
The media companies think they can make more money by selling the pure bits over the internet than by manufacturing and shipping physical CD's, but how important is that really to the average consumer? All of the music on my iPod came from CD's. The only advantage to digital downloads from iTunes is the ability to buy single songs for a reasonable price. And most iPod owners that take advantage of that ability don't seem to mind that there's a DRM downside to it. It's a pretty nice balance.