I agree with most of what you say. My proposal wasn't to encourage a new monopoly around Apple. Nor was it for anything else so absolutely, incredibly unlikely and regressive. I am just in favor of a temporary massing around Apple.
Using, developing, and evangelizing for Linux right now, other than for your own personal fun, which I can't begrudge, is equivalent to voting for a third party candidate in the U.S. The best choice? Sure. But you're "throwing your vote away." With enough people "voting" for Apple, we give them enough market force (5%, 10%... certainly no monopoly) to ensure that it's no longer a Microsoft Office world, or an IE world, or a Windows world. Developers have to consider other platforms. And if they're going to consider OS X, they may as well consider Linux too. (viz., it's a lot easier to get a "just another" platform added, than to change the "one platform" mindset).
Your "At the same time" paragraph sums up the problem nicely. I just believe that my proposal is the only short/medium-term viable solution forward for Open Source.
> Take a look at the office suit that Apple is promoting. Is it open or standardized? Yeah right. It's the same, closed [...]
I maintain my claim that people using Apple's closed office suite is a win for openness. Not directly, or immediate, but an important step. If enough people use Word Perfect, Apple's suite, or Star Office, that the general perception of a.doc as a universally readable format appropriate for exchange, archiving, etc decreases, then open standards and open source eventually fill the hole. (Initially, figuratively, in perception, and eventually, literally, in open source market share).
> Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around
I may have misremembered that, I won't deny. But I believe the back-room politics that went on were more complex than that. (Sources welcome.)
There is no IE7 for Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT or anything but Windows XP.
There is no IE7 for Linux or UNIX.
And perhaps most significantly, there is no IE7 for Mac. Microsoft has totally abandoned the platform. Apple having the balls the ship their OS with a non-MS browser, at the risk of damaging their sacred user experience, is responsible for the impossibility of another Microsoft lock on the web in the medium-term. (Though Apple owes a debt of gratitude to the groundbreaking Mozilla evangelism work which began the conversion of the web away from IE-only).
Every Mac that moves off the shelves of your local, brightly colored Apple store is not just a blow to Windows, but it's a win for the accessible web, the open, standardized office suite file format, etc.
In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.
Switch! And more importantly, keep OS X in mind during your UNIX development. (Props to the Firefox team; anti-props to the OpenOffice team).
You're right about the parent poster needing to be fired.
You're wrong about irregardless. Quoth Merriam-Webster:
Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose.
Here's what I submitted on the feedback page. Maybe they'll bite.
-
I commend CNN for having Jon Stewart on the Crossfire program on Friday. Though one or two of his comments may have gone slightly overboard, Paul and Tucker handled the situation well. The fact that he was allowed to get across his (very astute) points reflects highly on CNN's journalism principles.
I have long felt that there was an untapped market for a real, genuine, non-partisan debate show, much like what Jon was clamoring for, where issues could be discussed outside of the rhetoric and "spin", by legitimate experts in the relevant fields, rather than politicians beholden to the electorate's opinion. I think we all know your major competitor won't be bringing the public such open discourse. I hope that CNN can.
Sincerely, Jeremy M. Dolan Chicago resident and CNN viewer
I commend Mr. Thurrott on his professional journalism. Now perhaps he'll return the favor and commend my wonderful sarcasm. Or my clever circular logic.
Thank God the founder of Protestantism (Henry VIII) was such a role model: of the seven people he married, all were women.
The founder of Protestantism was Martin Luther. He married once.
Henry VIII was a staunch Roman Catholic. He strongly disapproved of Protestantism and Martin Luther. He married, and after being unable to produce a male heir, broke with the Catholic church after the Pope refused him a divoce. He founded the Church of England, and the the concept of separation of church and state was accidentally born. I do not believe he ever married another woman. His daughter "Bloody Mary" gained the throne after his death.
Your point might have been insightful, if not for the fact that it is completely inaccurate. But Slashdot moderators don't care. They ranked you up anyway. Yay for disinformation.
> RH Enterprise Linux WS is actually it's repacement.
> The only real change is that to get support from Redhat, you are going > to HAVE TO PAY for the support.
I think you've missed the very important part. RHEL is not available as a free download. No binaries. Certainly no ISOs. Simply a release of the source, to fulfill the letter of the GPL.
The most basic available RHEL product is the basic edition of "WS". This is priced at $179 and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORT. The standard edition of "WS" is $299 for i386, and has web support available.
$179 happens to be infinitely more expensive than the $0 price tag on Red Hat Linux 9. And it's an inferior product compared to RHL, because there are less users testing it. It may as well be BSDi, or HP-UX at this point.
Though todays announcement shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's followed Red Hat over the last year (support discontinuance was announced long ago, Fedora was announced more recently), I think it was a very poor move.
Yes, I do understand producing their "Red Hat Linux" product was expensive, and hurt their bottom line. They should have never split their product in two to begin with. Maintaining both RHL and Enterprise Linux was too much of a burden on the company. It reeks of bad management, much like the Mozilla project does (They are trying to develop no less than three different browsers at the moment, possibly more depending on how you count--and Netscape just cut them lose, so they're severely understaffed... you'd think they'd make consolidation efforts--but this is another tirade).
What they should have done is modularize their base product, and sell add-ons. They retain all of their users, all of their mind share, only have to develop one product, AND it can act as a stepping stone into your Enterprise-level services. Hell! They even had the infrastructure to do a single core product all laid out with Red Hat Network. Sell an Enterprise Web Server channel add-on to Red Hat Linux 10 for Enterprise-level prices, and so on. It would have been beautiful. Really.
It would have also provided their Enterprise customers with ten-times the amount of testing of the core OS. This is not to be underestimated. Much as Linus renames a kernel from e.g. 2.5.79 to 2.6.0-test1 when he wants (free!) wider testing, Red Hat now has a user base one-tenth the size to "test" their releases on. And problems that aren't caught in relase QA (many just can't be) will now HAVE to affect (high-)paying customers. There's no free users to take 90% of the falls.
Red Hat produced the de facto Linux distribution in the United States AND they were in the black. There was nothing to stop them. They provided a free, high quality alternative OS. People were switching to Linux, and switching to Red Hat. It was working. But apparently not fast enough for them.
Windows users have no highly visible, high quality alternative now. (No, it's NOT necessary to chime in with your favorite distribution.) What's good for Linux was good for Red Hat, and this is unquestionably bad for Linux, medium-term, at least.
Fedora does NO ONE any good. It's pseudo-managed by Red Hat, but with no guarantees, no support, no Red Hat Network, no Enterprise add-ons, and regular Joe-Schmoe developers fucking it up (cf. Debian). And the mix of open development and corporate bureaucracy, neither with any vision, is sure to pull and tug at it in no general direction, making it nothing more than a poor Debian clone. I wonder how long until Red Hat cut's it lose completely.
It's a sad day for Red Hat. Up until they split their product line last year, I was considering investing in the company. They had a real handle on the market. Now, they have nothing to drive themselves into becoming a big player. They'll remain a small service-oriented company. If they remain at all. (They kind of remind me of BSDi now. Probably not an association they would like.)
And it's a sad day for Linux. But I have faith the (huge) void will be filled. Will Debian step up? Someone new? It should be interesting, at least.
[Wow. That turned out to be longer than I'd expected. If I wasn't hungover I'd actually invest a little more time and proofread it. Hope it's been an interesting read, if anyone made it this far. Hey, e-mail me if you did! Tell me if you agree, or if I'm crazy, or both. Or just say hi! I'm bored. No one sends letters these days. The Internet's become so impersonal. But that's a whole nother tirade.]
If a bunch of you dorks decide to follow ESR and his ego and start wearing buttons and hats with a glider on them, I think I'd have to wear an eater in protest. (And as a show of geek superiority)
Sure you can. g, gg, gn, gi, dmoz, bbc, salon, nasa keywords. Easier to type a letter or two than deal with picking one from a menu. I have 16 keywords. Selecting a text box, typing, then selecting an entry from a 16-long list of destinations sounds like an abysmal idea to me.
I'm not gonna use Firebird until they support hitting down arrow to search on Google.
And what's so crazy about using the search field and saving that extra down arrow keystroke?
Focusing a separate text field is more work than the old down arrow method, and wastes absolutely disgusting amounts of screen real estate
Browsers should have one text field, and no more. One is needed to display the current address. Input is it's secondary use. Adding another text field that only has use as an input device is silly.
I think this guy would have been happier if you pointed him to the document on setting up custom keywords ("g foo" searches google for "foo" for me), or on setting his keyword URL pref so searches are automatic.
The search bar may (may) be helpful to new users, but I think most power users find it annoying. But since new users are the ones unlikely to edit preferences or install extensions, I find it an acceptable default.
There are licensing issues with a lot of the content they carry that prevents this sort of thing. Music contained in the shows, interview guests, these sorts of things. I believe they only have a license to stream this content on demand, either over airwaves, or via a streaming-only protocol, like Real. I recently wrote an e-mail to my local NPR member station (WBEZ) thanking them for the great job they do maintaining their show archive (of locally produced shows), even if it isn't archivable.
Part of their reply said:
We appreciate that you are a supporter, as play of audio on demand does
cost us money, but it's a service we are glad to provide.
So I'm sure since they are paying for Real, they'd much rather use a simple mp3 stream if it were possible.
We are in the same boat as you. Unfortunately IMAP just doesn't cut it for users. Outlook was made to work with Exchange, and nothing but.
You may want to check out Samsung Contact (nee HP OpenMail) which is a more cohesive solution. I'm currently in the process of deploying it right now, so I won't give any opinion yet. A 45-day trial is available.
All of your hard work, creative energy, raising capital, the meetings, market analysis, research, etc. you put forth to make your crackpot idea a reality
Amazon's reward for all of this work you mention was to become the number one Internet reseller, and a household name. If they have to abuse patent law to maintain that position, rather than providing a better service, than I will patronize another book seller.
I have the two flash files, they're great. Just no where to put them that my friends or I don't pay the bandwidth bill for. So if someone else wants to host them:
-rw------- 1 jmd 1066099 Feb 2 12:45 GaraltMovie.swf -rw------- 1 jmd 1409809 Feb 2 12:46 IkrosMovie.swf
Can't someone write an API that translates directly to native widgets on OS X, Gtk+, and MFC? Native will always win out over non-native (Apple's Safari being a recent example).
Or would the LCD of these three platform's toolkits not be usable in any way? Are they that inherently different?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of what you say. My proposal wasn't to encourage a new monopoly around Apple. Nor was it for anything else so absolutely, incredibly unlikely and regressive. I am just in favor of a temporary massing around Apple.
.doc as a universally readable format appropriate for exchange, archiving, etc decreases, then open standards and open source eventually fill the hole. (Initially, figuratively, in perception, and eventually, literally, in open source market share).
Using, developing, and evangelizing for Linux right now, other than for your own personal fun, which I can't begrudge, is equivalent to voting for a third party candidate in the U.S. The best choice? Sure. But you're "throwing your vote away." With enough people "voting" for Apple, we give them enough market force (5%, 10%... certainly no monopoly) to ensure that it's no longer a Microsoft Office world, or an IE world, or a Windows world. Developers have to consider other platforms. And if they're going to consider OS X, they may as well consider Linux too. (viz., it's a lot easier to get a "just another" platform added, than to change the "one platform" mindset).
Your "At the same time" paragraph sums up the problem nicely. I just believe that my proposal is the only short/medium-term viable solution forward for Open Source.
> Take a look at the office suit that Apple is promoting. Is it open or standardized? Yeah right. It's the same, closed [...]
I maintain my claim that people using Apple's closed office suite is a win for openness. Not directly, or immediate, but an important step. If enough people use Word Perfect, Apple's suite, or Star Office, that the general perception of a
> Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around
I may have misremembered that, I won't deny. But I believe the back-room politics that went on were more complex than that. (Sources welcome.)
> Apple marketshare has dropped for six years in a row.
6 years in a row, ending with 2004 maybe. Have a source on this claim that the loss continues?
There is no IE7 for Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT or anything but Windows XP.
There is no IE7 for Linux or UNIX.
And perhaps most significantly, there is no IE7 for Mac. Microsoft has totally abandoned the platform. Apple having the balls the ship their OS with a non-MS browser, at the risk of damaging their sacred user experience, is responsible for the impossibility of another Microsoft lock on the web in the medium-term. (Though Apple owes a debt of gratitude to the groundbreaking Mozilla evangelism work which began the conversion of the web away from IE-only).
Every Mac that moves off the shelves of your local, brightly colored Apple store is not just a blow to Windows, but it's a win for the accessible web, the open, standardized office suite file format, etc.
In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.
Switch! And more importantly, keep OS X in mind during your UNIX development. (Props to the Firefox team; anti-props to the OpenOffice team).
You're right about the parent poster needing to be fired.
You're wrong about irregardless. Quoth Merriam-Webster:
Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose.
Here's what I submitted on the feedback page. Maybe they'll bite.
-
I commend CNN for having Jon Stewart on the Crossfire program on Friday. Though one or two of his comments may have gone slightly overboard, Paul and Tucker handled the situation well. The fact that he was allowed to get across his (very astute) points reflects highly on CNN's journalism principles.
I have long felt that there was an untapped market for a real, genuine, non-partisan debate show, much like what Jon was clamoring for, where issues could be discussed outside of the rhetoric and "spin", by legitimate experts in the relevant fields, rather than politicians beholden to the electorate's opinion. I think we all know your major competitor won't be bringing the public such open discourse. I hope that CNN can.
Sincerely,
Jeremy M. Dolan
Chicago resident and CNN viewer
I commend Mr. Thurrott on his professional journalism. Now perhaps he'll return the favor and commend my wonderful sarcasm. Or my clever circular logic.
The founder of Protestantism was Martin Luther. He married once.
Henry VIII was a staunch Roman Catholic. He strongly disapproved of Protestantism and Martin Luther. He married, and after being unable to produce a male heir, broke with the Catholic church after the Pope refused him a divoce. He founded the Church of England, and the the concept of separation of church and state was accidentally born. I do not believe he ever married another woman. His daughter "Bloody Mary" gained the throne after his death.
Your point might have been insightful, if not for the fact that it is completely inaccurate. But Slashdot moderators don't care. They ranked you up anyway. Yay for disinformation.
Let's see. Someone who know's all about the NABP, who writes in with a carefully worded spin to rouse up the typical slashdot reader.
Oh yeah, and his "news article" is hosted on "www.rankforsales.com", a search engine positioning company.
Sounds like the poster is the same guy that's always e-mailing me trying to sell me Viagra on the cheap. No wonder he's disgruntled.
With these absurd escalations, this matter should be resolved sooner than anyone expected. Until then, I'll sit back and enjoy the humor of it all.
I think you've missed the very important part. RHEL is not available as a free download. No binaries. Certainly no ISOs. Simply a release of the source, to fulfill the letter of the GPL.
The most basic available RHEL product is the basic edition of "WS". This is priced at $179 and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORT. The standard edition of "WS" is $299 for i386, and has web support available.
$179 happens to be infinitely more expensive than the $0 price tag on Red Hat Linux 9. And it's an inferior product compared to RHL, because there are less users testing it. It may as well be BSDi, or HP-UX at this point.
See my rant from yesterday for my whole take on the matter.
Though todays announcement shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's followed Red Hat over the last year (support discontinuance was announced long ago, Fedora was announced more recently), I think it was a very poor move.
Yes, I do understand producing their "Red Hat Linux" product was expensive, and hurt their bottom line. They should have never split their product in two to begin with. Maintaining both RHL and Enterprise Linux was too much of a burden on the company. It reeks of bad management, much like the Mozilla project does (They are trying to develop no less than three different browsers at the moment, possibly more depending on how you count--and Netscape just cut them lose, so they're severely understaffed... you'd think they'd make consolidation efforts--but this is another tirade).
What they should have done is modularize their base product, and sell add-ons. They retain all of their users, all of their mind share, only have to develop one product, AND it can act as a stepping stone into your Enterprise-level services. Hell! They even had the infrastructure to do a single core product all laid out with Red Hat Network. Sell an Enterprise Web Server channel add-on to Red Hat Linux 10 for Enterprise-level prices, and so on. It would have been beautiful. Really.
It would have also provided their Enterprise customers with ten-times the amount of testing of the core OS. This is not to be underestimated. Much as Linus renames a kernel from e.g. 2.5.79 to 2.6.0-test1 when he wants (free!) wider testing, Red Hat now has a user base one-tenth the size to "test" their releases on. And problems that aren't caught in relase QA (many just can't be) will now HAVE to affect (high-)paying customers. There's no free users to take 90% of the falls.
Red Hat produced the de facto Linux distribution in the United States AND they were in the black. There was nothing to stop them. They provided a free, high quality alternative OS. People were switching to Linux, and switching to Red Hat. It was working. But apparently not fast enough for them.
Windows users have no highly visible, high quality alternative now. (No, it's NOT necessary to chime in with your favorite distribution.) What's good for Linux was good for Red Hat, and this is unquestionably bad for Linux, medium-term, at least.
Fedora does NO ONE any good. It's pseudo-managed by Red Hat, but with no guarantees, no support, no Red Hat Network, no Enterprise add-ons, and regular Joe-Schmoe developers fucking it up (cf. Debian). And the mix of open development and corporate bureaucracy, neither with any vision, is sure to pull and tug at it in no general direction, making it nothing more than a poor Debian clone. I wonder how long until Red Hat cut's it lose completely.
It's a sad day for Red Hat. Up until they split their product line last year, I was considering investing in the company. They had a real handle on the market. Now, they have nothing to drive themselves into becoming a big player. They'll remain a small service-oriented company. If they remain at all. (They kind of remind me of BSDi now. Probably not an association they would like.)
And it's a sad day for Linux. But I have faith the (huge) void will be filled. Will Debian step up? Someone new? It should be interesting, at least.
[Wow. That turned out to be longer than I'd expected. If I wasn't hungover I'd actually invest a little more time and proofread it. Hope it's been an interesting read, if anyone made it this far. Hey, e-mail me if you did! Tell me if you agree, or if I'm crazy, or both. Or just say hi! I'm bored. No one sends letters these days. The Internet's become so impersonal. But that's a whole nother tirade.]
If a bunch of you dorks decide to follow ESR and his ego and start wearing buttons and hats with a glider on them, I think I'd have to wear an eater in protest. (And as a show of geek superiority)
Wouldn't you instead need to see the cover to determine that?
Sure you can. g, gg, gn, gi, dmoz, bbc, salon, nasa keywords. Easier to type a letter or two than deal with picking one from a menu. I have 16 keywords. Selecting a text box, typing, then selecting an entry from a 16-long list of destinations sounds like an abysmal idea to me.
Focusing a separate text field is more work than the old down arrow method, and wastes absolutely disgusting amounts of screen real estate
Browsers should have one text field, and no more. One is needed to display the current address. Input is it's secondary use. Adding another text field that only has use as an input device is silly.
I think this guy would have been happier if you pointed him to the document on setting up custom keywords ("g foo" searches google for "foo" for me), or on setting his keyword URL pref so searches are automatic.
The search bar may (may) be helpful to new users, but I think most power users find it annoying. But since new users are the ones unlikely to edit preferences or install extensions, I find it an acceptable default.
> I suppose if I can't listen to NPR any more, I won't remember when to send them those checks any more either.
/really/ want thousands of your donated dollars to be spent on codec licensing fees, rather than show production?
Quicktime costs money. And apperently Apple wanted to change NPR too much.
Do you
And you CAN still listen. Real is available on every platform Quicktime is, and many more. Quit whining and take a dose of reality.
> why not just use some freakin' MP3?
There are licensing issues with a lot of the content they carry that prevents this sort of thing. Music contained in the shows, interview guests, these sorts of things. I believe they only have a license to stream this content on demand, either over airwaves, or via a streaming-only protocol, like Real. I recently wrote an e-mail to my local NPR member station (WBEZ) thanking them for the great job they do maintaining their show archive (of locally produced shows), even if it isn't archivable.
Part of their reply said:
We appreciate that you are a supporter, as play of audio on demand does
cost us money, but it's a service we are glad to provide.
So I'm sure since they are paying for Real, they'd much rather use a simple mp3 stream if it were possible.
We are in the same boat as you. Unfortunately IMAP just doesn't cut it for users. Outlook was made to work with Exchange, and nothing but.
You may want to check out Samsung Contact (nee HP OpenMail) which is a more cohesive solution. I'm currently in the process of deploying it right now, so I won't give any opinion yet. A 45-day trial is available.
So it looks as if they're changing the name. Sort of.
Speaking of which, Phoenix still has no new name.
All of your hard work, creative energy, raising capital, the meetings, market analysis, research, etc. you put forth to make your crackpot idea a reality
Amazon's reward for all of this work you mention was to become the number one Internet reseller, and a household name. If they have to abuse patent law to maintain that position, rather than providing a better service, than I will patronize another book seller.
What happened to the Phoenix rename? I haven't seen any official comment on it for a while. Just a public message board with some 400 suggestions.
I have the two flash files, they're great. Just no where to put them that my friends or I don't pay the bandwidth bill for. So if someone else wants to host them:
-rw------- 1 jmd 1066099 Feb 2 12:45 GaraltMovie.swf
-rw------- 1 jmd 1409809 Feb 2 12:46 IkrosMovie.swf
> gtk+ is not a native platform :o
Well, I listed Gtk+ as native, since it's the native toolkit of the GNOME platform.
I wouldn't want literal native X11 widgets... since that wouldn't match the look of or interoperate (DnD, paste, etc) with any other application.
Can't someone write an API that translates directly to native widgets on OS X, Gtk+, and MFC? Native will always win out over non-native (Apple's Safari being a recent example).
Or would the LCD of these three platform's toolkits not be usable in any way? Are they that inherently different?
Er... I think that's the whole point of XHTML.