I totally agree... true, The Simpsons has gone downhill over the past few years, it's still way more entertaining than most of the other stuff on TV these days.
Oh, brother. Only on Slashdot would you see MS-bashing brought into a discussion that has _absolutely nothing_ to do with MS. It wasn't even a terribly good analogy. Take the karma-whoring elsewhere, please...
Microsoft is also updating its IE browser for the Mac. "It's not the product we want it to be," Browne said. "We want to improve performance, implement a security infrastructure, and implement HTML and XML rendering."
Does anybody else see anything wrong with this statement? Implementing HTML rendering would imply that IE for the Mac doesn't do that already...
But when are they needed? The web (no matter how wrong this is most of the time) is being used as an application platform, and for this to work as well as it possibly can, you really need scripting, and the ability to pop up windows, and so on... all the same stuff that gets exploited. Turning it off would limit the annoying stuff, but also the useful stuff.
I s'pose you could provide easy ways to enable scripting, etc for those sites that legitimately need them, and leave them off by default. But with the current installed browser base that's not really an option right now. But simply taking away functionality is, as usual, not the answer. I'm just not sure what it is yet.
There's more to Toonami than Anime. (Although not much more these days) I know this may put me in the vast geek minority, but I'm just not a big anime fan. And for the record, it's really annoying now that SGC2C is down to once a week...
Alright, I'll give. Perhaps I'm part of the problem... but what was significant about September '91? I've also seen September alluded to a few other times in this context. I didn't start using the 'net until 1994-ish, so I guess that makes me a newbie but I'd like to know...
The computers in Office Space were pretty laughable... take the scene where Peter is trying to shut down his computer so he can duck out of work early and avoid his boss...
For starters, the computer is obviously a Mac, even though it's using some very Win3.1-ish fonts. However, while it's writing tables out to disk, you get to see a spinning Windows hourglass, and when it eventually shuts down you get to see a DOS prompt (although it memory serves, it's using the wrong slash - "A:/" or something like that). This might not be completely accurate as I haven't watched it in a bit but I remember thinking it was funny at the time. (My non-geek friends didn't quite see the humor!)
Does this make me a nerd? Heck yeah. I just found it amusing how they threw in elements of a couple of different computer platforms instead of doing the "futuristic spinning animated 3D graphics with funky computer noises" approach you often see on computers in movies.
No more native software?
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So... am I missing something, or is the whole idea of.NET to take away native software? Replace everything we currently run with a virtual machine? Yeah, write-once-run-anywhere _seems_ nice but am I the only person left on the planet who still wants software that's optimized and tuned to run on my hardware... not a generic VM?
I dunno. This just seems crazy to me. There has got to be a better way to do cross-platform software than what basically amounts to emulation. And in this case it makes even less sense... MS is naturally targeting this mostly at Windows, which is still pretty much a single-platform deal. So where's the benefit in using slow(er) bytecode as opposed to petal-to-the-metal, optimized native code? Argh...
I got Interface a couple of years ago (at a bargain bin in Wal-Mart, IIRC). It was not a bad read but I remember that after I finished, I remember thinking that overall, the novel seemed... well, flat, somehow.
Very interesting to find out that was Stephenson after all! I loved Cryptonomicon, loved Snow Crash even more (what a mind job!), thought Diamond Age was weird, and so on. Cryptonomicon is divided up into two time periods (WWII and the present-ish), and the best compliment I can give it is that, while I was reading each section, I didn't want it to end and go back to the other one.
It'll be interesting to see how he follows that one up.
Count me in, LoseNotLooseGuy. This has been one of my pet peeves for many moons now, but I had given up all faith in the quest. Your example gives me hope. Keep the faith!
I'd also be happy to donate a bit of money to bands I like if the music was freely distributed... but from what I've seen of human nature, most people wouldn't. (including most of my friends)
However, I can't really see any way around it. I have a feeling that everything is going to end up digitally distributed whether the big boys like it or not, and unfortunately, that seems to mean that everything is going to be free. Technology and people being what they are it's hard to conceive of an encryption or protection scheme that can't be broken and/or subverted, and once it is, then it can't be used and everything becomes free again.
And yes, that is unfortunate. The benefits of distributing stuff online are enormous but it'll be a sad thing when people can't expect to be paid for their work because people just plain don't want to, and technology means they don't have to. No, this doesn't matter as much right now when we still have the RIAA/label situation in place, but if music really does turn into a "cottage industry" (as another post suggested) then there will be many more small artists than there are now, and people who don't pay for their work will directly affect those artists... meaning less high-quality music available.
Sad, but I've spent many hours BSing this topic with people and I truly don't see a way around it.
It's not necessarily that you *can't* surf the web, make PowerPoint presentations, etc... obviously, you can. It's just that in many cases it seems pretty darned hard to get a system to a configuration where you can. Pre-installing stuff would probably help, because if a PowerPoint clone isn't installed, how is the average uninformed user going to figure out how to make a pretty presentation?
On a Windows box, if PowerPoint wasn't already preinstalled, then most people at least know that they need to get PowerPoint somehow... MS has at least done their job in getting mindshare. Love it or hate it, everybody's heard of Office.
But will they know what to use on Linux? Will they know what to download, whether they need KDE or GNOME or whatnot? And where to find it if they do? How to build an app from source, or how to use a package management system to install it? Probably not, and there is a lot to learn there...
On Linux, the software is there for the most part, and some of it finally doesn't suck (not just a Linux issue; most software sucks, although at least on Windows it's a form of suck people are familiar with). It's just a question of familiarity with it, I guess. Things in the Un*x world are sufficiently different from the norm that people just aren't comfortable with it yet. The only way to fix this is lots of exposure, which is tricky to get sometimes.
But to get back on topic, knowing a lot of geeks, my guess isn't that they're too smart to teach "normal" people but just tend to focus on what they deal with, which is the technical details which tend to intimidate everyone else. Geeks are tinkerers, "normal" people like to get things working and leave it that way. So when systems running Linux that have all this stuff, and work fine without any tinkering, become widely available the problem might go away somewhat.
In my experience, the "two types of people" tends to be mostly true, but not entirely... categorizing people can be helpful, of course, but you nearly always end up ignoring important qualities in a person when you do it.
It's a mistake to say that people can't be both artistically and technically minded. I personally am a clear example that this is not true. I'm not a great artist or a great coder, but I'm way better than average in both of these (and a musician as well). I'm a very creative person, and in my experience, this comes into play just as much when I'm coming up with an elegant solution to a tricky problem as it does when I'm drawing a picture or something.
One generalization I think you *can* make, though, is that some people aren't techies and probably never will be, although with a lot of work they might be able to learn to write simple programs or whatever. This comes from me trying to tutor many of my non-techie friends in Computing Concepts (the computing course non-CS majors need to graduate). Some of them simply don't have the brain for it (although, some do, which surprised me)... the ability to intuitively break down a task into the steps needed to tell a computer how to do it. And this, I think, is a crucial step before you can really "get" computers, whether coding or admining or whatever.
Maybe this style of thinking is something you can teach yourself; I've just never seen anyone learn it who didn't seem to already have a feel for it.
I've heard much about the amazing low-latency kernel patches for Linux... anyone know *why* they are unofficial? I've been hearing about them for over a year now, and it seems like they would have been integrated into the official kernel unless there's something evil and bad about them. Any comments from people in the know?
If you happen to be unlucky enough to live in an area where you can't get Enterprise at all (no UPN, no WB) how can you see it? I heard the pilot is online somewhere, but heck if I can find it...
Next thing we see cockpits will start copying their joysticks from the gaming industry...
I used to work at a large industrial/agricultural tractor company, and many (most?) of their new models are joystick controlled. I know for a fact that the designers *were* copying joystick designs from off-the-shelf gaming joysticks, so they could save lots of money in ergonomic design and all that. OK, it's not quite a cockpit, but still...
Not to be off-topic, but did anybody else notice that although the story had *nothing* to do with Microsoft, the submitter managed to stick an anti-Microsoft reference in there? The "Microsoft-is-evil" message has been fairly well received; it doesn't need to be inserted in *every* story. That's just annoying.
I dunno... seems like a killer geek device, of course, but it's going to take a *lot* of work to convince me that this is worth it. One of the nice things about (especially) the Palm family is that it avoids the complexity of the desktop entirely, and I'm just not sure it should be put back. Really, why do you Linux on a PDA at all? Software compatibility w/ the desktop, maybe... I could see that. But for the most part PDA's and desktops serve entirely different needs and I think the software should reflect that. (There will always be exceptions to this...)
I've been wrong before 'tho. Guess I'll wait and see, but for me it's a moot point anyway, as I can't come up with a single justifiable reason to replace my PalmIIIxe right now. It does everything I need it to, and I'd rather hack on my desktop anyway.
I'm the author of BeAIM, a (rather out-of-date) AIM clone for BeOS. BeAIM doesn't seem to be having any problems logging in or staying connected, and AFAIK, it never has. Every time AOL has pulled a fast one and libfaim-based stuff stopped working, BeAIM seemed to work fine.
I don't mean to disrespect the libfaim coders at *all*... BeAIM wouldn't exist without their work (it's not based on libfaim, but many ideas and techniques were borrowed, and I spent many hours with mid's OSCAR docs!) But why is my code still working fine when nobody else's is? BeAIM doesn't do anything tricky. It uses OSCAR, it doesn't try to pretend it's a Windows client (it actually reports itself to the BOS server as "BeAIM") and I'm certainly not doing anything with MD5 or AIM.exe.
I haven't researched this much... hopefully sometime today I'm going to try and figure out if BeAIM is actually receiving the mysterious 0001/0001f packets. But as of right now, I'm terribly confused about all this.
I can only come up w/ a few scenarios as to why this is happening...
1. This is all a mistake. The 16 bytes in question aren't an MD5 sum of AIM.exe and the libfaim folks are wrong.
Somehow I doubt this; again, I haven't researched much, but they seem to be fairly sure this is the case and I'm inclined to take their word for it.
2. BeAIM is just amazingly well coded.
Ummm.... no. Trust me.:-)
3. Somebody inside AOL really likes BeAIM, and so BeAIM is not being blocked.
This is possible, I guess, especially since there's a tiny number of BeAIM users (all things considered). But, I kind of doubt it. I'm guessing it would take a fair bit of work on AOL's part for this to happen, with no benefit at all to them.
4. AOL is specifically targeting libfaim.
This almost makes the most sense; after all, the last time I checked, the two major users of libfaim-based code were GAIM and Jabber transports, which are probably also some of the biggest non-official bits of software that access AIM. If they wanted to take a good swipe at all the non-official AIM users this would be a nice way to do it. If this is the case, I'd like to know what methods they're using to identify libfaim-based clients... and if they can do that, then why bother with the MD5 bit in the first place?
Conspiracy theories aside, here's another possibility... perhaps the packets requesting the MD5 chunks are only sent if certain *other* conditions are met. I doubt that the MD5 thing has been supported since AIM 1.0, and they wouldn't want to be booting older official clients off, and somehow BeAIM qualifies as an "older" client. Then again, last I checked, really old clients simply aren't allowed to login.
Anyway, I'm fairly confused by all this but now it's got me interested...
Well, there's the problem in a nutshell. Why can you only do harm to people by closing your source? Really, why?
Don't just give me links to RMS's rantings; I've read them all and I'm still not convinced. This doesn't make me a MS junkie (although I have to admit; as a desktop OS Win2K is not bad at all... open a couple of PuTTY windows and I'm good to go), and pretty much everything I've ever written or contributed to is OSS (except at work). But I have yet to find a good, solid reason why it's ethically a bad thing to write software and not open the source if you don't want to. There are plenty of good reasons to open your source, yes, but the RMS's tactic of intentionally seeking to destroy proprietary stuff by making it very hard for it to compete seems vaguely Nazi-ish to me.
This isn't meant to be flamebait, and no, I haven't (yet) figured out the ideal solution to all this. But I'm a college geek 1.5 years away from the job market, and I want to write code for a living. So far there are a *ton* of opportunities to do this commercially, but despite all the cries of "you CAN make money with open source!" I've yet to see any of them, even though I'm quite sure they're out there. I've got this dreadful feeling that if RMS manages to win somehow, and closed-source can no longer compete, we'll have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but what bugs me is that it's going to get pretty dark before we see it. There are tons of good sites (mine included) that for better or for worse, *must* rely on ad revenue to stay afloat. I'm a student, and without ad revenue, there's no way I could afford the hosting fees. We (myself and the other guy who runs the site) got lucky and may be able to move my site to a local ISP, where we can get very cheap hosting, which is the only thing that will help us weather the storm. But if we hadn't lucked into that, we'd be screwed... as it looks now, ad revenue for January will cover about 20% of our hosting fees, and we only have enough cash to run at a loss for a month or so.
Anyway, how are all these little sites going to survive? Many of them are well worth having (at least their audiences think so) but the simple fact of life is that without revenue, no web site. Partnering with the advertisers themselves or getting into specialized technology ads (like the Real ones mentioned earlier) is all well and good for the big fish in the ocean, but us part-timers are going to be left out in the cold here. I suppose user sponsorship is a possibility, but knowing our readers, most of them wouldn't go for it. And e-commerce? Really, what do most sites have to sell?
Eventually this will all shake itself out, through ads that force you to notice them, intrusive targeting technology, whatever. But I fear that by then, the Internet will become a place where the only sites that can afford to exist are either corporate commercial sites or the lucky ones that don't have to pay for themselves. Unfortunately, many of the more worthwhile sites on the 'net (from my point of view, anyway) may not survive until then.
Ha! You think that was bad? I, too, renewed my BYTE subscription just before it was killed... IIRC I bought 3 years worth. Only I didn't get Business 2.0 for the remainder of the 3 years... I got Windows magazine.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree... true, The Simpsons has gone downhill over the past few years, it's still way more entertaining than most of the other stuff on TV these days.
Oh, brother. Only on Slashdot would you see MS-bashing brought into a discussion that has _absolutely nothing_ to do with MS. It wasn't even a terribly good analogy. Take the karma-whoring elsewhere, please...
Uh, no...
But when are they needed? The web (no matter how wrong this is most of the time) is being used as an application platform, and for this to work as well as it possibly can, you really need scripting, and the ability to pop up windows, and so on... all the same stuff that gets exploited. Turning it off would limit the annoying stuff, but also the useful stuff.
I s'pose you could provide easy ways to enable scripting, etc for those sites that legitimately need them, and leave them off by default. But with the current installed browser base that's not really an option right now. But simply taking away functionality is, as usual, not the answer. I'm just not sure what it is yet.
That episode is home of one of Homer's best lines ever:
:-)
"Donuts... is there anything they can't do?"
Cracks me up every time.
There's more to Toonami than Anime. (Although not much more these days) I know this may put me in the vast geek minority, but I'm just not a big anime fan. And for the record, it's really annoying now that SGC2C is down to once a week...
Alright, I'll give. Perhaps I'm part of the problem... but what was significant about September '91? I've also seen September alluded to a few other times in this context. I didn't start using the 'net until 1994-ish, so I guess that makes me a newbie but I'd like to know...
The computers in Office Space were pretty laughable... take the scene where Peter is trying to shut down his computer so he can duck out of work early and avoid his boss...
For starters, the computer is obviously a Mac, even though it's using some very Win3.1-ish fonts. However, while it's writing tables out to disk, you get to see a spinning Windows hourglass, and when it eventually shuts down you get to see a DOS prompt (although it memory serves, it's using the wrong slash - "A:/" or something like that). This might not be completely accurate as I haven't watched it in a bit but I remember thinking it was funny at the time. (My non-geek friends didn't quite see the humor!)
Does this make me a nerd? Heck yeah. I just found it amusing how they threw in elements of a couple of different computer platforms instead of doing the "futuristic spinning animated 3D graphics with funky computer noises" approach you often see on computers in movies.
So... am I missing something, or is the whole idea of .NET to take away native software? Replace everything we currently run with a virtual machine? Yeah, write-once-run-anywhere _seems_ nice but am I the only person left on the planet who still wants software that's optimized and tuned to run on my hardware... not a generic VM?
I dunno. This just seems crazy to me. There has got to be a better way to do cross-platform software than what basically amounts to emulation. And in this case it makes even less sense... MS is naturally targeting this mostly at Windows, which is still pretty much a single-platform deal. So where's the benefit in using slow(er) bytecode as opposed to petal-to-the-metal, optimized native code? Argh...
I got Interface a couple of years ago (at a bargain bin in Wal-Mart, IIRC). It was not a bad read but I remember that after I finished, I remember thinking that overall, the novel seemed... well, flat, somehow.
Very interesting to find out that was Stephenson after all! I loved Cryptonomicon, loved Snow Crash even more (what a mind job!), thought Diamond Age was weird, and so on. Cryptonomicon is divided up into two time periods (WWII and the present-ish), and the best compliment I can give it is that, while I was reading each section, I didn't want it to end and go back to the other one.
It'll be interesting to see how he follows that one up.
Count me in, LoseNotLooseGuy. This has been one of my pet peeves for many moons now, but I had given up all faith in the quest. Your example gives me hope. Keep the faith!
I'd also be happy to donate a bit of money to bands I like if the music was freely distributed... but from what I've seen of human nature, most people wouldn't. (including most of my friends)
However, I can't really see any way around it. I have a feeling that everything is going to end up digitally distributed whether the big boys like it or not, and unfortunately, that seems to mean that everything is going to be free. Technology and people being what they are it's hard to conceive of an encryption or protection scheme that can't be broken and/or subverted, and once it is, then it can't be used and everything becomes free again.
And yes, that is unfortunate. The benefits of distributing stuff online are enormous but it'll be a sad thing when people can't expect to be paid for their work because people just plain don't want to, and technology means they don't have to. No, this doesn't matter as much right now when we still have the RIAA/label situation in place, but if music really does turn into a "cottage industry" (as another post suggested) then there will be many more small artists than there are now, and people who don't pay for their work will directly affect those artists... meaning less high-quality music available.
Sad, but I've spent many hours BSing this topic with people and I truly don't see a way around it.
Glad I wasn't the only person who thought that...
It's not necessarily that you *can't* surf the web, make PowerPoint presentations, etc... obviously, you can. It's just that in many cases it seems pretty darned hard to get a system to a configuration where you can. Pre-installing stuff would probably help, because if a PowerPoint clone isn't installed, how is the average uninformed user going to figure out how to make a pretty presentation?
On a Windows box, if PowerPoint wasn't already preinstalled, then most people at least know that they need to get PowerPoint somehow... MS has at least done their job in getting mindshare. Love it or hate it, everybody's heard of Office.
But will they know what to use on Linux? Will they know what to download, whether they need KDE or GNOME or whatnot? And where to find it if they do? How to build an app from source, or how to use a package management system to install it? Probably not, and there is a lot to learn there...
On Linux, the software is there for the most part, and some of it finally doesn't suck (not just a Linux issue; most software sucks, although at least on Windows it's a form of suck people are familiar with). It's just a question of familiarity with it, I guess. Things in the Un*x world are sufficiently different from the norm that people just aren't comfortable with it yet. The only way to fix this is lots of exposure, which is tricky to get sometimes.
But to get back on topic, knowing a lot of geeks, my guess isn't that they're too smart to teach "normal" people but just tend to focus on what they deal with, which is the technical details which tend to intimidate everyone else. Geeks are tinkerers, "normal" people like to get things working and leave it that way. So when systems running Linux that have all this stuff, and work fine without any tinkering, become widely available the problem might go away somewhat.
In my experience, the "two types of people" tends to be mostly true, but not entirely... categorizing people can be helpful, of course, but you nearly always end up ignoring important qualities in a person when you do it.
It's a mistake to say that people can't be both artistically and technically minded. I personally am a clear example that this is not true. I'm not a great artist or a great coder, but I'm way better than average in both of these (and a musician as well). I'm a very creative person, and in my experience, this comes into play just as much when I'm coming up with an elegant solution to a tricky problem as it does when I'm drawing a picture or something.
One generalization I think you *can* make, though, is that some people aren't techies and probably never will be, although with a lot of work they might be able to learn to write simple programs or whatever. This comes from me trying to tutor many of my non-techie friends in Computing Concepts (the computing course non-CS majors need to graduate). Some of them simply don't have the brain for it (although, some do, which surprised me)... the ability to intuitively break down a task into the steps needed to tell a computer how to do it. And this, I think, is a crucial step before you can really "get" computers, whether coding or admining or whatever.
Maybe this style of thinking is something you can teach yourself; I've just never seen anyone learn it who didn't seem to already have a feel for it.
I've heard much about the amazing low-latency kernel patches for Linux... anyone know *why* they are unofficial? I've been hearing about them for over a year now, and it seems like they would have been integrated into the official kernel unless there's something evil and bad about them. Any comments from people in the know?
If you happen to be unlucky enough to live in an area where you can't get Enterprise at all (no UPN, no WB) how can you see it? I heard the pilot is online somewhere, but heck if I can find it...
Sure would be nice to see it for myself!
Next thing we see cockpits will start copying their joysticks from the gaming industry...
I used to work at a large industrial/agricultural tractor company, and many (most?) of their new models are joystick controlled. I know for a fact that the designers *were* copying joystick designs from off-the-shelf gaming joysticks, so they could save lots of money in ergonomic design and all that. OK, it's not quite a cockpit, but still...
Not to be off-topic, but did anybody else notice that although the story had *nothing* to do with Microsoft, the submitter managed to stick an anti-Microsoft reference in there? The "Microsoft-is-evil" message has been fairly well received; it doesn't need to be inserted in *every* story. That's just annoying.
I dunno... seems like a killer geek device, of course, but it's going to take a *lot* of work to convince me that this is worth it. One of the nice things about (especially) the Palm family is that it avoids the complexity of the desktop entirely, and I'm just not sure it should be put back. Really, why do you Linux on a PDA at all? Software compatibility w/ the desktop, maybe... I could see that. But for the most part PDA's and desktops serve entirely different needs and I think the software should reflect that. (There will always be exceptions to this...)
I've been wrong before 'tho. Guess I'll wait and see, but for me it's a moot point anyway, as I can't come up with a single justifiable reason to replace my PalmIIIxe right now. It does everything I need it to, and I'd rather hack on my desktop anyway.
I'm the author of BeAIM, a (rather out-of-date) AIM clone for BeOS. BeAIM doesn't seem to be having any problems logging in or staying connected, and AFAIK, it never has. Every time AOL has pulled a fast one and libfaim-based stuff stopped working, BeAIM seemed to work fine.
:-)
I don't mean to disrespect the libfaim coders at *all*... BeAIM wouldn't exist without their work (it's not based on libfaim, but many ideas and techniques were borrowed, and I spent many hours with mid's OSCAR docs!) But why is my code still working fine when nobody else's is? BeAIM doesn't do anything tricky. It uses OSCAR, it doesn't try to pretend it's a Windows client (it actually reports itself to the BOS server as "BeAIM") and I'm certainly not doing anything with MD5 or AIM.exe.
I haven't researched this much... hopefully sometime today I'm going to try and figure out if BeAIM is actually receiving the mysterious 0001/0001f packets. But as of right now, I'm terribly confused about all this.
I can only come up w/ a few scenarios as to why this is happening...
1. This is all a mistake. The 16 bytes in question aren't an MD5 sum of AIM.exe and the libfaim folks are wrong.
Somehow I doubt this; again, I haven't researched much, but they seem to be fairly sure this is the case and I'm inclined to take their word for it.
2. BeAIM is just amazingly well coded.
Ummm.... no. Trust me.
3. Somebody inside AOL really likes BeAIM, and so BeAIM is not being blocked.
This is possible, I guess, especially since there's a tiny number of BeAIM users (all things considered). But, I kind of doubt it. I'm guessing it would take a fair bit of work on AOL's part for this to happen, with no benefit at all to them.
4. AOL is specifically targeting libfaim.
This almost makes the most sense; after all, the last time I checked, the two major users of libfaim-based code were GAIM and Jabber transports, which are probably also some of the biggest non-official bits of software that access AIM. If they wanted to take a good swipe at all the non-official AIM users this would be a nice way to do it. If this is the case, I'd like to know what methods they're using to identify libfaim-based clients... and if they can do that, then why bother with the MD5 bit in the first place?
Conspiracy theories aside, here's another possibility... perhaps the packets requesting the MD5 chunks are only sent if certain *other* conditions are met. I doubt that the MD5 thing has been supported since AIM 1.0, and they wouldn't want to be booting older official clients off, and somehow BeAIM qualifies as an "older" client. Then again, last I checked, really old clients simply aren't allowed to login.
Anyway, I'm fairly confused by all this but now it's got me interested...
Slarty
Well, there's the problem in a nutshell. Why can you only do harm to people by closing your source? Really, why?
Don't just give me links to RMS's rantings; I've read them all and I'm still not convinced. This doesn't make me a MS junkie (although I have to admit; as a desktop OS Win2K is not bad at all... open a couple of PuTTY windows and I'm good to go), and pretty much everything I've ever written or contributed to is OSS (except at work). But I have yet to find a good, solid reason why it's ethically a bad thing to write software and not open the source if you don't want to. There are plenty of good reasons to open your source, yes, but the RMS's tactic of intentionally seeking to destroy proprietary stuff by making it very hard for it to compete seems vaguely Nazi-ish to me.
This isn't meant to be flamebait, and no, I haven't (yet) figured out the ideal solution to all this. But I'm a college geek 1.5 years away from the job market, and I want to write code for a living. So far there are a *ton* of opportunities to do this commercially, but despite all the cries of "you CAN make money with open source!" I've yet to see any of them, even though I'm quite sure they're out there. I've got this dreadful feeling that if RMS manages to win somehow, and closed-source can no longer compete, we'll have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but what bugs me is that it's going to get pretty dark before we see it. There are tons of good sites (mine included) that for better or for worse, *must* rely on ad revenue to stay afloat. I'm a student, and without ad revenue, there's no way I could afford the hosting fees. We (myself and the other guy who runs the site) got lucky and may be able to move my site to a local ISP, where we can get very cheap hosting, which is the only thing that will help us weather the storm. But if we hadn't lucked into that, we'd be screwed... as it looks now, ad revenue for January will cover about 20% of our hosting fees, and we only have enough cash to run at a loss for a month or so.
Anyway, how are all these little sites going to survive? Many of them are well worth having (at least their audiences think so) but the simple fact of life is that without revenue, no web site. Partnering with the advertisers themselves or getting into specialized technology ads (like the Real ones mentioned earlier) is all well and good for the big fish in the ocean, but us part-timers are going to be left out in the cold here. I suppose user sponsorship is a possibility, but knowing our readers, most of them wouldn't go for it. And e-commerce? Really, what do most sites have to sell?
Eventually this will all shake itself out, through ads that force you to notice them, intrusive targeting technology, whatever. But I fear that by then, the Internet will become a place where the only sites that can afford to exist are either corporate commercial sites or the lucky ones that don't have to pay for themselves. Unfortunately, many of the more worthwhile sites on the 'net (from my point of view, anyway) may not survive until then.
Ha! You think that was bad? I, too, renewed my BYTE subscription just before it was killed... IIRC I bought 3 years worth. Only I didn't get Business 2.0 for the remainder of the 3 years... I got Windows magazine. :-)
Needless to say, I called and got it canceled.