Well, I certainly intend to play with it... because I code mostly for myself, not for the "common good." It seems that it could be a lot of fun to hack on something modern, fast and object-oriented... all of which X-Windows is *not* (and by extension, Gnome and KDE).
Supporting whatever flavor of open source politics you happen to be into is not the only reason to code. Maybe if more people realized this, we could get some cool new stuff to play with instead of stacking more cruft onto "cool" GPL projects that, in many cases, should have been scrapped years ago.
Ad effectiveness isn't the issue here. How does your ad blocking affect only you? Did you think the bandwidth you use comes for free? Furthermore, do you think Slashdot would have ever gotten big in the first place if they couldn't have paid for their bandwidth/servers/etc? How do you think they *did* pay for it?
Please, pull your head out of your arse and get a clue. Most of the quality, non-corporate sites can't afford to run at a loss, and banner ads are often the *only* income they get. Too many people block the ads, the sites disappear. It's that simple.
Sounds a lot like what Linux/FreeBSD/whatever users say about Windows.:-)
Seriously, that seems to happen a lot around here. It's just the norm to bash MS and praise Linux (or whatever, I'm speaking in the general sense) without really saying what you're talking about. Sure, Linux is more stable, but that's not the only thing I want in an operating system. Windows, for example, beats the snot out of Linux when it comes to application support. It's got Internet Explorer, which despite the shrieks of horror that I hear whenever the name comes up, is easily the best all around browser in existence right now. (No, Mozilla doesn't count yet.) And it's got Photoshop. 'nuff said.
Ha! I *loved* that episode... it was just hilarious, even for Simpsons. I think my favorite part was when the ball dropped and 2000 blinked on, and immediately changed to 1900. I just laughed *so* hard at that!
Not a chance, dude... *I* invented the hydrogen atom (and licensed it to God), and I've got the documentation to prove it. If you disagree, my lawyers and I will see you in court. Unless, of course, you'd care to come to some agreement... (cackles evilly)
I noticed this last night... I was fixing a computer for someone, and needed something from the web. Went to Altavista, and it was *totally* different. Then I tried to search for something... and lo and behold, got the message:
"We're sorry, but the server is unavailable right now." (or something to that effect)
Tried it twice with the same results. Went to another search engine. Came back later, and AV worked again... but had the same old interface. Who knows what they're thinking? If they're trying to *hide* the new interface, then accidentally taking it live isn't a good solution...:-)
Of course I see the error... none of the womEn I know can pluralize correctly anyway.:-) But this is Slashdot... and I've given up all hope that Slashdotters will eventually learn to use correct grammar, or even make an attempt at it.
Case in point: all the people who write things like "Give me you IP address."
or... "Don't loose your password!"
Maybe I'm anal, but I cringe every time I see this stuff. And it's not just Slashdot... the rest of the world is falling into the same grammatical hole (including the media, and those people should really know better).
Be's gone corporate, all right...
on
Be on the G4
·
· Score: 1
Be doesn't *seem* to have changed much from the IPO, but in this little expository, Gassee is demonstrating his prowess at writing a whole lot while saying almost nothing (a corporate talent if I've ever seen one). Just about everyone's heard why Be doesn't/can't/won't support Apple's G3 machines; that's all been covered before. The big questions is... if a sizeable manufacturer starts making PPC machines based on the newly released stuff from IBM, will Be support it or not? And we've gotten *no* word on the answer to that. Come on, Be! A yes, a no, or a strong maybe... anything would be preferable to "no comment."
Time for a big ole' rant, I think. This is pretty much the same sort of thing I've been expecting for over a year now, and it's finally happening on a big scale.
Is this whole trademark thing a dirty and stupid trick? Heck yeah... but it's just a sign of the trends that are occurring right now. Don't react with surprise or anything because someone is trying to get down, dirty, and commercial with Linux. The OSS fanatics have been talking world domination for years. Well, it's starting to happen. But the whole OSS happy let's-all-share attitude ain't gonna be adopted by the vultures just because this is the Open Source world... they're going try and make money off everything they can, including stupid trademarks if they can get them, no matter what you say.
Sure, there will be rants. There will be features posted on Slashdot and other places and huge cries of outrage because someone is muddying the waters and diluting the movement with the evil force known as capitalism. Well, tough... the perpetrators of that evil force aren't going to listen, because they don't care what the purists think. They care about the opinions of the people who *buy* the stuff... and for the most part, *those* people don't care what the purists think either.
It's been happening the whole time. The commercialization of various OSS programs/companies. IPO's of Linux distributors, meaning they now have to worry more about what shareholders think than the people who *make* the OS. Stupid, inaccurate stories on C-Net, and so on. Linux is hot, there's a potload of money to be made, and it's all going blatantly commercial under everyone's noses. In a few years people will wake up and realize that Linux is now just as messed up as Windows - at least in the political sense, if not others; the one-OS-many-distributors model might not hold up so well in that world. This is not to say that money can't be made with OSS, or Linux can't work in the real world, etc, etc. That's a completely different argument. But if there's money to be made (and there is) then the whole scene is going to change radically in the process, whether for the good or for the bad.
Sorry for the doomsday scenario, but this is as good a time as any to say it, I guess. I doubt there's too much anyone can do about the Corporatization of Linux - the whole OSS model sort of facilitates it, in a way. But just don't act surprised when stuff like this happens.
Must be nice living in your own little world, eh? Seriously, it's great that Linux is getting a ton of press and all, but a lot of it is just the latest "tecnofad." And if you look at the situation carefully you'll see that the driving force behind all the Linux coverage is actually the trouble with Microsoft. Microsoft is closed and monopolistic, Linux is open and a worthy contender, so let the battle begin, and bring on the cameras! You can bet that in another year or so all the hype will start to fade... because it's was never the Linux people generating it in the first place. Be doesn't get quite as much press, because the proprietary model behind it is old hat and not quite as newsworthy as the OSS bit.
But don't mistake the lack of press as a sign that Be is ready to call it quits! They have been making some serious progress on the BeOS lately, and there are a bunch of the "media authoring" apps just around the corner. Be may not be able to ride the press wave like Linux can, and they don't have the pre-committed developer support that Apple has for OS X. But they're not down and out - not by a long shot. You'd do better to step out and take a look at the actual situation before you make your doomsday judgements, instead of getting all your news and opinions from Slashdot.
Java's problems aren't over, and they're being perpetuated by just about everyone. It's a nice language; I've used it a bit, and I like it a lot. What I don't like is that even with JIT's and the like, Java apps are infernally slow. Drives me nuts.
I always thought that it would be nice if companies started coming out with native Java compilers; that is, ones that didn't make you target a virtual machine. (Not *everything* needs to run everywhere!) Microsoft did this with Visual J++ 6.0, and immediately got flamed terribly for something I actually thought was a good idea. So right away everyone backs off on this so they don't piss Sun off, and now we're stuck with Java, the nice language that isn't really good for much if you want native performance and don't give a dink about some user on a weird machine/OS being able to use your app.
Anyway, the point of this long spiel is that often the media isn't to blame for typecasting, but the originators themselves. i.e. Sun with "write once run everywhere and damn you if you want to go native", and Linux users constantly crowing about server prowess, Be doing the "Media OS" thing, etc.
Of course they're concerned... why shouldn't they be? After all, as much as I love MP3s, they represent a significant loss of revenue to the people who make the things. As more and more people get on the net and bandwidth gets better, that will only get worse.
With all the babble about "software should be free!" around here, people seem to miss the concept that some things can't be. Any idiot with a computer can grab a copy of Linux and use gcc to make software and distribute it for free... but it takes MONEY to make music and movies. Even "low-budget" flicks anymore usually have multi-millions at their disposal. And the big ones... The Matrix - $63 million? Titanic - $200 million? You think that the studios can afford for piracy to become mainstream?
So, if pirated movies start becoming a big deal, then I think they have a lot to be worried about in terms of their future. Once again, people... if you like something, don't steal it, BUY IT.
It's going off the fact that statistically most IRC users are windows, using mIRC to boot. Alt-F4 is the standard windows hotkey to close the current application.
What about the utilities of the world? There are plenty of nice, simple programs that do something valuable but are fairly intuitive. In many cases, it took a LOT of work to be able to GET them that way, but if they succeed, not much support will be needed... and the programmers will starve.
I agree that support is the way things are going, but it can't work for everything. I strongly believe that if someone puts a lot of time and work into their software, and it serves a useful purpose, then they deserve payment for it. In many cases, that payment may HAVE to come upfront, or not at all.
In a perfect world, everything WOULD be free... but commercialism isn't going anywhere. If Linux becomes the world-dominating success people many people hope it will be, then y'all are just going to have to accept the fact that lots of the better software will eventually be shrink-wrapped, and maybe not OSS at all. Things will change, but not enough to prevent that.
Does Slashdot need to constantly post blatant flamebait? What was the purpose of this story? We all know Gates makes the occasional idiot of himself, so why does it need to be news every time it happens?
Now we have yet another forum for indignant slashdotters to rant about Microsoft, call Gates naughty words, demand that Microsoft be bombed/dismantled/whatever, and pat themselves on the back for being users of Linux, the cool OS which 99.9999% of them had nothing to do with... all without ever once considering that there could be more to the story than what they think. I could probably quote you half the comments on this story without having read them.
Come on, admin types! Need I point you to your own slogan? "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Does this sort of thing matter? Sure, if all you want out of slashdot is a 24/7 flamewar. That's what slashdot has been turning into for the past couple of months, and stories like this encourage it, even with all the moderation system stuff. You want a flame site? You got it... but I'm outta here.
Yup... seems extremely stable to me. I've had it freeze a couple of times doing certain activities, but I think this is a hardware problem... it does exactly the same thing under Windows, Linux, and DOS (the last time I used it.) Not something I worry about, as I can't afford to replace my video card (the likely culprit) and it doesn't happen too often. Especially not under Be or Linux. (gee, wonder why...)
Other than that, it's rock solid. I can crash NetPositive reliably by opening up the admin stats page on Legions and resizing it... that page has LOTS of tables. But it never takes the OS down.
I do lots of BeOS dev work, and my programs have had their share of nasty crashes... I think that I can claim to have stress tested it more than the average user.:-)
It's kind of too bad, really... the PowerPC architecure is so sweet, and the x86 is so... old. I didn't realize the full extent of this until I had to study them for a CS class last semester.
I would *LOVE* to see the BeOS running on G3's! I was never a big PowerPC fan because the only OS that really ran on them was the bloated MacOS, which I would Insanely Hate to use that much. (I know, don't start pestering me about Linux...)
So, due to Apple's fear of competition, I doubt that BeOS/PPC has much of a future. This irks me beyond belief. The BeOS is really really cool... why does Be's future have to be on an architecture that so clearly belongs in the past?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I certainly intend to play with it... because I code mostly for myself, not for the "common good." It seems that it could be a lot of fun to hack on something modern, fast and object-oriented... all of which X-Windows is *not* (and by extension, Gnome and KDE).
Supporting whatever flavor of open source politics you happen to be into is not the only reason to code. Maybe if more people realized this, we could get some cool new stuff to play with instead of stacking more cruft onto "cool" GPL projects that, in many cases, should have been scrapped years ago.
Ad effectiveness isn't the issue here. How does your ad blocking affect only you? Did you think the bandwidth you use comes for free? Furthermore, do you think Slashdot would have ever gotten big in the first place if they couldn't have paid for their bandwidth/servers/etc? How do you think they *did* pay for it?
Please, pull your head out of your arse and get a clue. Most of the quality, non-corporate sites can't afford to run at a loss, and banner ads are often the *only* income they get. Too many people block the ads, the sites disappear. It's that simple.
This may or may not be a silly question, but... is there a chance this will be available for FreeBSD in the (somewhat near) future?
:-)
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a troll or anything, I just happen to like FreeBSD a bit better...
Sounds a lot like what Linux/FreeBSD/whatever users say about Windows. :-)
Seriously, that seems to happen a lot around here. It's just the norm to bash MS and praise Linux (or whatever, I'm speaking in the general sense) without really saying what you're talking about. Sure, Linux is more stable, but that's not the only thing I want in an operating system. Windows, for example, beats the snot out of Linux when it comes to application support. It's got Internet Explorer, which despite the shrieks of horror that I hear whenever the name comes up, is easily the best all around browser in existence right now. (No, Mozilla doesn't count yet.) And it's got Photoshop. 'nuff said.
Slarty's First Law:
Most Slashdot Moderators are Morons.
... and even those who aren't tend to be rather stupid when given moderator points. This is the Linux community, after all.
'nuff said.
Slarty
Ha! I *loved* that episode... it was just hilarious, even for Simpsons. I think my favorite part was when the ball dropped and 2000 blinked on, and immediately changed to 1900. I just laughed *so* hard at that!
Had to see it, I guess.
Not a chance, dude... *I* invented the hydrogen atom (and licensed it to God), and I've got the documentation to prove it. If you disagree, my lawyers and I will see you in court. Unless, of course, you'd care to come to some agreement... (cackles evilly)
Slarty
The same could be said about you...
I noticed this last night... I was fixing a computer for someone, and needed something from the web. Went to Altavista, and it was *totally* different. Then I tried to search for something... and lo and behold, got the message:
:-)
"We're sorry, but the server is unavailable right now." (or something to that effect)
Tried it twice with the same results. Went to another search engine. Came back later, and AV worked again... but had the same old interface. Who knows what they're thinking? If they're trying to *hide* the new interface, then accidentally taking it live isn't a good solution...
Slarty
Of course I see the error... none of the womEn I know can pluralize correctly anyway. :-) But this is Slashdot... and I've given up all hope that Slashdotters will eventually learn to use correct grammar, or even make an attempt at it.
Case in point: all the people who write things like
"Give me you IP address."
or...
"Don't loose your password!"
Maybe I'm anal, but I cringe every time I see this stuff. And it's not just Slashdot... the rest of the world is falling into the same grammatical hole (including the media, and those people should really know better).
OK, I'm done ranting now.
Slarty
-.-. --- --- .-.. .-.-.- .. ..-. .. -. .- .-.. .-.. -.-- --. . - - --- ..-- ... . -- -.-- -- --- .-. ... . ..-. --- .-. ... --- -- . - .... .. -. --. .- --. .- .. -. .-.-.- -- .- -.-- --. . ... --- -- . -.. .- -.-- .. .-- .. .-.. .-.. ..-- ... . -- -.-- . -..- - .-. .- -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .-.. .. -.-. . -. ... . .- --. .- .. -. .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.- ... .. --. .... .-.-.- .-.-.- .-.-.-
Be doesn't *seem* to have changed much from the IPO, but in this little expository, Gassee is demonstrating his prowess at writing a whole lot while saying almost nothing (a corporate talent if I've ever seen one). Just about everyone's heard why Be doesn't/can't/won't support Apple's G3 machines; that's all been covered before. The big questions is... if a sizeable manufacturer starts making PPC machines based on the newly released stuff from IBM, will Be support it or not? And we've gotten *no* word on the answer to that. Come on, Be! A yes, a no, or a strong maybe... anything would be preferable to "no comment."
Slarty
Time for a big ole' rant, I think. This is pretty much the same sort of thing I've been expecting for over a year now, and it's finally happening on a big scale.
Is this whole trademark thing a dirty and stupid trick? Heck yeah... but it's just a sign of the trends that are occurring right now. Don't react with surprise or anything because someone is trying to get down, dirty, and commercial with Linux. The OSS fanatics have been talking world domination for years. Well, it's starting to happen. But the whole OSS happy let's-all-share attitude ain't gonna be adopted by the vultures just because this is the Open Source world... they're going try and make money off everything they can, including stupid trademarks if they can get them, no matter what you say.
Sure, there will be rants. There will be features posted on Slashdot and other places and huge cries of outrage because someone is muddying the waters and diluting the movement with the evil force known as capitalism. Well, tough... the perpetrators of that evil force aren't going to listen, because they don't care what the purists think. They care about the opinions of the people who *buy* the stuff... and for the most part, *those* people don't care what the purists think either.
It's been happening the whole time. The commercialization of various OSS programs/companies. IPO's of Linux distributors, meaning they now have to worry more about what shareholders think than the people who *make* the OS. Stupid, inaccurate stories on C-Net, and so on. Linux is hot, there's a potload of money to be made, and it's all going blatantly commercial under everyone's noses. In a few years people will wake up and realize that Linux is now just as messed up as Windows - at least in the political sense, if not others; the one-OS-many-distributors model might not hold up so well in that world. This is not to say that money can't be made with OSS, or Linux can't work in the real world, etc, etc. That's a completely different argument. But if there's money to be made (and there is) then the whole scene is going to change radically in the process, whether for the good or for the bad.
Sorry for the doomsday scenario, but this is as good a time as any to say it, I guess. I doubt there's too much anyone can do about the Corporatization of Linux - the whole OSS model sort of facilitates it, in a way. But just don't act surprised when stuff like this happens.
Slarty
Must be nice living in your own little world, eh? Seriously, it's great that Linux is getting a ton of press and all, but a lot of it is just the latest "tecnofad." And if you look at the situation carefully you'll see that the driving force behind all the Linux coverage is actually the trouble with Microsoft. Microsoft is closed and monopolistic, Linux is open and a worthy contender, so let the battle begin, and bring on the cameras! You can bet that in another year or so all the hype will start to fade... because it's was never the Linux people generating it in the first place. Be doesn't get quite as much press, because the proprietary model behind it is old hat and not quite as newsworthy as the OSS bit.
But don't mistake the lack of press as a sign that Be is ready to call it quits! They have been making some serious progress on the BeOS lately, and there are a bunch of the "media authoring" apps just around the corner. Be may not be able to ride the press wave like Linux can, and they don't have the pre-committed developer support that Apple has for OS X. But they're not down and out - not by a long shot. You'd do better to step out and take a look at the actual situation before you make your doomsday judgements, instead of getting all your news and opinions from Slashdot.
- Slarty
Java's problems aren't over, and they're being perpetuated by just about everyone. It's a nice language; I've used it a bit, and I like it a lot. What I don't like is that even with JIT's and the like, Java apps are infernally slow. Drives me nuts.
I always thought that it would be nice if companies started coming out with native Java compilers; that is, ones that didn't make you target a virtual machine. (Not *everything* needs to run everywhere!) Microsoft did this with Visual J++ 6.0, and immediately got flamed terribly for something I actually thought was a good idea. So right away everyone backs off on this so they don't piss Sun off, and now we're stuck with Java, the nice language that isn't really good for much if you want native performance and don't give a dink about some user on a weird machine/OS being able to use your app.
Anyway, the point of this long spiel is that often the media isn't to blame for typecasting, but the originators themselves. i.e. Sun with "write once run everywhere and damn you if you want to go native", and Linux users constantly crowing about server prowess, Be doing the "Media OS" thing, etc.
- Slarty
Of course they're concerned... why shouldn't they be? After all, as much as I love MP3s, they represent a significant loss of revenue to the people who make the things. As more and more people get on the net and bandwidth gets better, that will only get worse.
With all the babble about "software should be free!" around here, people seem to miss the concept that some things can't be. Any idiot with a computer can grab a copy of Linux and use gcc to make software and distribute it for free... but it takes MONEY to make music and movies. Even "low-budget" flicks anymore usually have multi-millions at their disposal. And the big ones... The Matrix - $63 million? Titanic - $200 million? You think that the studios can afford for piracy to become mainstream?
So, if pirated movies start becoming a big deal, then I think they have a lot to be worried about in terms of their future. Once again, people... if you like something, don't steal it, BUY IT.
It's going off the fact that statistically most IRC users are windows, using mIRC to boot. Alt-F4 is the standard windows hotkey to close the current application.
I'll be happy when mass-market proprietary software dies off...
Don't hold your breath.
- Slarty
Unfortunately, not everything NEEDS service.
What about the utilities of the world? There are plenty of nice, simple programs that do something valuable but are fairly intuitive. In many cases, it took a LOT of work to be able to GET them that way, but if they succeed, not much support will be needed... and the programmers will starve.
I agree that support is the way things are going, but it can't work for everything. I strongly believe that if someone puts a lot of time and work into their software, and it serves a useful purpose, then they deserve payment for it. In many cases, that payment may HAVE to come upfront, or not at all.
In a perfect world, everything WOULD be free... but commercialism isn't going anywhere. If Linux becomes the world-dominating success people many people hope it will be, then y'all are just going to have to accept the fact that lots of the better software will eventually be shrink-wrapped, and maybe not OSS at all. Things will change, but not enough to prevent that.
- Slarty
So? So does un-free software.
No one's claiming that it doesn't work. Only that there might be problems with it, just like everything else.
- Slarty
Well, I'm working on some in Africa, but they're not really in style anymore. You know I won an award for Norway, though. :-)
- Slarty
Does Slashdot need to constantly post blatant flamebait? What was the purpose of this story? We all know Gates makes the occasional idiot of himself, so why does it need to be news every time it happens?
Now we have yet another forum for indignant slashdotters to rant about Microsoft, call Gates naughty words, demand that Microsoft be bombed/dismantled/whatever, and pat themselves on the back for being users of Linux, the cool OS which 99.9999% of them had nothing to do with... all without ever once considering that there could be more to the story than what they think. I could probably quote you half the comments on this story without having read them.
Come on, admin types! Need I point you to your own slogan? "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Does this sort of thing matter? Sure, if all you want out of slashdot is a 24/7 flamewar. That's what slashdot has been turning into for the past couple of months, and stories like this encourage it, even with all the moderation system stuff. You want a flame site? You got it... but I'm outta here.
- Slarty
Well, I hope it's true... I never managed to grab the first one (although I didn't try terribly hard) but it'd be fun to have it working!
- Slarty
Yup... seems extremely stable to me. I've had it freeze a couple of times doing certain activities, but I think this is a hardware problem... it does exactly the same thing under Windows, Linux, and DOS (the last time I used it.) Not something I worry about, as I can't afford to replace my video card (the likely culprit) and it doesn't happen too often. Especially not under Be or Linux. (gee, wonder why...)
:-)
Other than that, it's rock solid. I can crash NetPositive reliably by opening up the admin stats page on Legions and resizing it... that page has LOTS of tables. But it never takes the OS down.
I do lots of BeOS dev work, and my programs have had their share of nasty crashes... I think that I can claim to have stress tested it more than the average user.
- Slarty
It's kind of too bad, really... the PowerPC architecure is so sweet, and the x86 is so... old. I didn't realize the full extent of this until I had to study them for a CS class last semester.
I would *LOVE* to see the BeOS running on G3's! I was never a big PowerPC fan because the only OS that really ran on them was the bloated MacOS, which I would Insanely Hate to use that much. (I know, don't start pestering me about Linux...)
So, due to Apple's fear of competition, I doubt that BeOS/PPC has much of a future. This irks me beyond belief. The BeOS is really really cool... why does Be's future have to be on an architecture that so clearly belongs in the past?
- Slarty