Ah yes. But the GATE they use to get there, is. Or at the very least, the clues that show them how to get there. Guess we won't really know till Friday;)
It is ridiculous to assume that Bill G and his crew cannot see or understand what Linux is, they probably have a deeper, more accurate and more profound understanding of Linux than eveyone on slashdot put together, fair enough since MS have probably spend millions of dollars analysing linux.
That is like saying, "It is rediculous to assume that racist skinheads don't understand that all people are equal. They have a deeper understanding of the issue than the entire population of the Million Man March put together, since they have been persecuting non-whites for over half a century."
The point is, they don't see the truth because they don't WANT to see the truth. Redmond is in severely deep denial of the reality that FLOSS is taking over, that the paradigm has already shifted and that all that is left is the shakeout which follows. They will fight, kick and scream, because they see the market as territory they have conquered, and they aren't about to give it up without a fight. A more accurate analogy is that the market is a vein of ore that is quickly depleting and they need to find new prospects instead of chasing the poor prospectors from the surrounding area and cracking the whip on their serfs.
No one at Redmond is going to see or say that the Emperor has no clothes. They get paid too much money not to bolt on the rose colored glasses. (welding helmet?) So don't accuse Microsoft of being clueful. If they were, we would have seen some evidence of it by now.
the reason they have all the spyware and viruses is usually because they are the ones that want to install every casino game and toolbar they come across.
While in the past, your statement would be true, lately it really doesn't take much more than simply firing up IE to get plastered to the wall with all sorts of stuff. Now you have to be running Adaware or something similar to not get your browser broken. It's not just the stupid people getting hammered anymore. For a while recently, I used IE mostly out of laziness. AdAware quickly became a necessity. Now, I've been in the IT industry for 12 years. I know what will kill and what will slightly maim. I know what kinds of sites not to go to, and not to install ANYTHING from a popup. In fact, I usually use task manager to kill those kinds of popups, call me paranoid. Yet still I got plastened, and quick.
On the surface, adaware and such are pretty cool. They take care of spyware the way A/V software takes care of viruses. But I have a real problem with having to run an additional program on my computer to protect it. The browser should be able to protect itself. Now I run Firefox, and it does. BTW, the only thing causing me to dual boot is the lack of a ventrilo client for linux. All the games worth playing work on linux. For anything else you want your computer to do, there are better (IMHO) programs under linux to get the job done. GNUCash is a prime example. It's top notch. I wouldn't mind seeing some serious improvement in the niche GIMP is trying to fill. It just doesn't do what Photoshop does. But all in all, those types of programs work better on a Mac anyway.
No, it is news. Assuming it isn't an error, Microsoft losing a 1% of the market share means that 1 out of every hundred people got so fed up with IE being taken over by popup scripts and everything else wrong with it, that they decided change was in order. Most people loathe the idea of change, especially when it comes to the computer. So this is very significant, if it is accurate. Dropping one percent so quickly is a serious threat to dominance and make no mistake that Bill is concerned. Also keep in mind that this change is mostly home computers, not businesses. Businesses do not change unless they absolutely must, most of the time. So that 1% likely translates to 2 or 3% of home users. Which would mean that 1 out of possibly every 33 homes stopped using IE. You bet your ass Bill has a committee researching this one as we type.
In real life, tritium's a gas. It's not a metal at anything anywhere close to room temperature and one atmosphere.
Since when does solid/liquid/gas/plasma equate to metal/nonmetal? Though, I will grant you it's not metal at all, being an isotope of hydrogen(three protons.)
And what about his visit to Lockheed Martin? He tries to suggest they make weapons there even though they make weather and communication satellites.
Lockheed Martin is probably the most prolific military constractor there is. You actually intend to try and imply that they are strictly a satellite manufacturer? On Slashdot? Then I apologize in advance for replying to a troll.
It seems to me that a better idea for this type of thing would be setting down criteria for a finished product, starting or selecting an OSS project for the product, and once the project meets the criteria, all coders who contributed to the project get a percentage of the prize based on the percentage of code or content they contributed.
Say I wanted a database interface for a recipe program. I want it to be able to import data from some of the more popular cookbook programs out there, Betty Crocker or whatever, and I want to connect to something that amounts to FreeDB for recipes to get recipes from the web. I want it to be able to convert recipes and I want it to be able to give me nutrition info for the meals. I want to be able to make a menu and print me a shopping list, I want to be able to put in prices and know how much I will be spending(approximately). I want an easy interface for entering new recipes, and if I designate it as an original recipe or one with no copyright restrictions, I want the option of uploading it to the database mentioned above.
So it seems to me I would be best off offering small rewards at the milestones, say 500 to 1000, depending mostly on budget, and a large one when it meets all the criteria. Now, and individual might choke on this, but maybe a hotel chain or restaurant chain would be willing to sponsor it, because it's a one-time expense that they can then use forever, or a long time, whereas before they were coughing up 2K everytime they wanted a new license, which adds up after 20 new restaurants. Then those same coders could turn around and put together a package of OSS software that caters to the needs of mom and pop restaurants, OO.o and the above idea, GNUcash, and whatever else they might need, train them how to use it and help them set it up for maybe 5k or so, wash rinse repeat, you have yourself a viable OSS business model.
I respect your comment, and you make some good arguments, but I just cannot like HR ppl. It's like the military: I can't get a real job, so I'll go for an HR position. In general, HR people make my skin crawl the same way as used car salesmen, polititians, apartment finders(who thought up this crap? Does nothing but chase up apartment prices), SCO employees, and closed source advocates do. You know they are in it for the wrong reasons. You know they are strait out lying to get something from you, be it a buck or a vote or an answer that will disqualify you for a job.
Don't extend an olive leaf, extend a fire hose and wash the slime from those ppl:)
I have never, ever met an HR person who I would hire after seeing them in action. An anectote about a monkey and a football come to mind.
Open Source development, however, is PEER reviewed. The bullsh*t walks, in any project of a substantial size and momentum to produce, say, an office suite. Someones screws up enough times and they get kicked from the project. Peers have the actual knowledge to say, this guys work is crap. HR can say, well he showed up in a clean suit with a good haircut and had a great handshake. Thats real nice, but Ill take the open source software anyday.
Half the reason proprietary software sucks, aside from not being free, is that its written by the guy with the best handshake, or whatever cosmetic thing the HR weenie was looking for that day. Never trust a bureaucrat HR rep to make a decision that a peer could make better.
I mean, its all good to know whether the visitor is from.com or.edu. But really, what you should be after is whether you need to optimize for IE or Mozilla/Netscape/FireFox.
Maybe if your site fails to properly load for a browser, the visitor should burst into flames with associated noises. That way website owners would not remain oblivious to broken websites. It would be uncomfortable explaining to the boss why avatars are screaming and dying whenever they enter your site.
I propose an unwashed heathen for IE users, a cool looking guy for the various incarnations of Netscape/Moz with associated logos on the shirts, a blind person with a cane for lynx users and a mad scientist for Opera. As alternatives, you could use a person in a wheelchair or stait jacket for IE and, hey, an opera singer for Opera. I want Bender for web spiders, its not negotiable:)
If you include mail servers in there, you could use mail trucks to deliver the mail, with the brown UPS trucks delivering from non-spam sites and the USPS trucks delivering from sites that are known spam havens. I know Im more excited to see the UPS truck than the USPS truck. Nobody sends junkmail through UPS.
Yes I agree. I loved BeOS. But it's downfall was caused pretty much directly by the fact that it was controlled by a corporation. They sold out the userbase for a one-time profit, litigating Microsoft. They refused to open the source, which at the time would have drawn developers in droves. The driver issues would have worked themselves out shortly after that. And then, even if Be Inc. went under or was bought out, it would have left a legacy, which could be rivaling linux and OS X today. If ever a company should have stuck it out and developed an open source business model, it was Be Inc. They stood as good a chance as, say Mandrake or Suse. Better, really, because all they would have really had to open up is the OS. They could still have developed commercial apps to sell for BeOS, with only a small committee to guide OS development.
What I learned from BeOS is that Open Source is the only real answer to the Microsoft monopoly. Before Be, I believed it, but without evidence. Be proved it.
"Noncommercial software products in general, and Linux in particular, present a competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they require our concentrated focus and attention. . . . In this environment of lean budgets and concerns about Microsoft's attention to customers, noncommercial software such as Linux and OpenOffice is seen as an interesting, 'good enough' or 'free' alternative."
For my needs, it's not 'good enough.' It's better. I don't have to spend 40 minutes wrestling formatting with OO.o like I do with MS Office. It just works right. I don't have to worry about vbs viruses/worms, because it doesn't use vbs. My open source email client doesn't magically install viruses on my computer, either. Oh, sure, there are some areas of lack, such as clip art. But these are minor. And as for advanced formatting, there comes a point when you really ought to be using a publishing suite instead. And while it's not ported to Windows, Scribus is coming along nicely.
Microsoft ought to consider moving from the software industry into something new. They have the capital for anything. They have enough brainpower to do anything. Commercial space flight comes to mind as one of the most important contributions Bill and friends could make to Planet Earth. It's something no individual needs, sure, but there is big money in it just waiting to be tapped. Imagine going on a space vacation and eating at the 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe.' So cool. Imagine playing Ender's game in space, with lasertag style suites that caused joints to lock. I bet it would replace football on ESPN. And there's a hundred thousand other things people would pay to do on their vacation. That's only the recreation aspect. Then think of science, and paying for lab time in space. And mining the moon or asteroids. Colonization, because such a base would be an ideal staging platform.
But in the software industry, I think they are just about done. They will not contribute anything else important to mankind there. They can only cause damage to the world by crippling the internet they helped create, or crippling software by continuing their current pattern. Time to bow out gracefully and move on.
Let's take free game consoles. Which are practically pc's now. which can almost without exception be hacked to run linux. I'll take 50. Time for a cluster. I see that model not working because 90% of console owners buy maybe 3 games, ever. Not enough to support the HW costs.
Now lets take PC gamers. There's a market now, when most PC's come with a 3D card, I don't see that changing soon, unless M$ buys out the big vidcard manufacturers. Then others will crop up. Sorry don't see that happening either.
Now lets take DVD players. Well, the current model is working, sell DVDs, sell DVD players. Is the MPAA suddenly going to say, "Don't buy that player, let US buy it for you!" Okie dokie.
Sounds like someone is trying out for a position as Bill's proctologist.
I agree. the processes behind cooking may be science, but the act of cooking is art, or at the very least talent and skill. Unless you are cooking only one dish at a time, there is considerable juggling and timing involved. Baking and Pastry are an art. Some chefs can just look at the dough and tell whether the cake will rise or fall. Others (most of them) are hoping with crossed fingers, no matter what they say. Knowing which spices to use, when, and how much is not science. It's art, like knowing how much paint to put where on that oil painting. Fixing a broken sauce is something most cannot do. Some chefs, however, can fix just about anything. Those are artists. Oh sure, there's science behind it, just like there's science to mixing colors and making canvas and determining oil paint viscosity. But painting is still an art no matter how much science you throw at it and so is cooking.
And yet it still has the fatal flaw of no database program.
Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).
All well and good. But what you really mean is you want an office suite with a built-in IDE for a database. I agree. I've often wondered why one doesn't exist for, say, OO.o. After all, its just a matter of teaching the IDE to connect to various databases, then teaching it to translate its own GUI into SQL statements. Granted, different databases speak SQL with a slightly different dialect. But that is not an insurmountable obstacle. Past that, teach it to write to it's own file format. That's basically what Access does. It's not really a "database program" at all: its just an IDE for one.
Forgive me for my simplistic view of programming. I know its a lot more complicated than that.
So lets all go and drop kick it into the next millenium! Very nice. This guy never even had a prayer. The inside of his server probably looks like the front row of a Gallager show.
Sure. Very good points. And since we are discussing fixing Linux's desktop, lets please throw in the fact that it all starts with XWindows. If you're going to fix it, fix it from the foundation up. Linux needs something else. I love XWindows. But it's LOTS of overhead for most folks. Except a few power users, most people don't use XWindows's functionality at all. Something much simpler would do nicely. It's like installing a hydraulic lift and pnumatic tools in your home garage. For shade tree mechanic work, you pretty much wasted your cash. Or installing surround sound on a completely deaf person's home theater system. He (or she) really doesn't need it. I'm not saying to get rid of it, I simply want a more sane option. While I'm dreaming, make it cross-platform, so that it could replace the windows shell. That way, I could have my same interface no matter what, even though functionality would differ.
Because Longhorn is not going to be adopted by the public? Longhorn will go the way of ME, for different reasons. XP works fine, relatively speaking. People will be reluctant to switch. Those who would switch will be looking in linux's direction, too. I foresee Longhorn being a severe failure.
I didn't like Leo at first. He's got the whole Chester the Molester thing going, and at first glance, he seems to have a kind of superior attitude. But after a while he grows on you, like a fungus. The whole crew (Leo included) is awesome. I would have liked to see more geeky shows on techtv, like the GNews with Richard Stallman, or a nice studio production of The Linux Show, where you could see them bantering ala the Howard Stern show (but for geeks). I am really sad that they are getting such a bad shake.
I tell you the truth. If Stargate gets canceled, I'm giving up on TV.
Next someone will be telling me that Slashdot doesn't really run news, or that they got bought by OSDN. I'd be downhill from there, for sure. Oh, wait...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes. But the GATE they use to get there, is. Or at the very least, the clues that show them how to get there. Guess we won't really know till Friday;)
The point is, they don't see the truth because they don't WANT to see the truth. Redmond is in severely deep denial of the reality that FLOSS is taking over, that the paradigm has already shifted and that all that is left is the shakeout which follows. They will fight, kick and scream, because they see the market as territory they have conquered, and they aren't about to give it up without a fight. A more accurate analogy is that the market is a vein of ore that is quickly depleting and they need to find new prospects instead of chasing the poor prospectors from the surrounding area and cracking the whip on their serfs.
No one at Redmond is going to see or say that the Emperor has no clothes. They get paid too much money not to bolt on the rose colored glasses. (welding helmet?) So don't accuse Microsoft of being clueful. If they were, we would have seen some evidence of it by now.
Just in time for the premier of Stargate:Atlantis. Beautiful. What a promo.
On the surface, adaware and such are pretty cool. They take care of spyware the way A/V software takes care of viruses. But I have a real problem with having to run an additional program on my computer to protect it. The browser should be able to protect itself . Now I run Firefox, and it does. BTW, the only thing causing me to dual boot is the lack of a ventrilo client for linux. All the games worth playing work on linux. For anything else you want your computer to do, there are better (IMHO) programs under linux to get the job done. GNUCash is a prime example. It's top notch. I wouldn't mind seeing some serious improvement in the niche GIMP is trying to fill. It just doesn't do what Photoshop does. But all in all, those types of programs work better on a Mac anyway.
No, it is news. Assuming it isn't an error, Microsoft losing a 1% of the market share means that 1 out of every hundred people got so fed up with IE being taken over by popup scripts and everything else wrong with it, that they decided change was in order. Most people loathe the idea of change, especially when it comes to the computer. So this is very significant, if it is accurate. Dropping one percent so quickly is a serious threat to dominance and make no mistake that Bill is concerned. Also keep in mind that this change is mostly home computers, not businesses. Businesses do not change unless they absolutely must, most of the time. So that 1% likely translates to 2 or 3% of home users. Which would mean that 1 out of possibly every 33 homes stopped using IE. You bet your ass Bill has a committee researching this one as we type.
Since when does solid/liquid/gas/plasma equate to metal/nonmetal? Though, I will grant you it's not metal at all, being an isotope of hydrogen(three protons.)
It seems to me that a better idea for this type of thing would be setting down criteria for a finished product, starting or selecting an OSS project for the product, and once the project meets the criteria, all coders who contributed to the project get a percentage of the prize based on the percentage of code or content they contributed.
Say I wanted a database interface for a recipe program. I want it to be able to import data from some of the more popular cookbook programs out there, Betty Crocker or whatever, and I want to connect to something that amounts to FreeDB for recipes to get recipes from the web. I want it to be able to convert recipes and I want it to be able to give me nutrition info for the meals. I want to be able to make a menu and print me a shopping list, I want to be able to put in prices and know how much I will be spending(approximately). I want an easy interface for entering new recipes, and if I designate it as an original recipe or one with no copyright restrictions, I want the option of uploading it to the database mentioned above.
So it seems to me I would be best off offering small rewards at the milestones, say 500 to 1000, depending mostly on budget, and a large one when it meets all the criteria. Now, and individual might choke on this, but maybe a hotel chain or restaurant chain would be willing to sponsor it, because it's a one-time expense that they can then use forever, or a long time, whereas before they were coughing up 2K everytime they wanted a new license, which adds up after 20 new restaurants. Then those same coders could turn around and put together a package of OSS software that caters to the needs of mom and pop restaurants, OO.o and the above idea, GNUcash, and whatever else they might need, train them how to use it and help them set it up for maybe 5k or so, wash rinse repeat, you have yourself a viable OSS business model.
I'd have modded you up if you had only owned up to it.
Don't extend an olive leaf, extend a fire hose and wash the slime from those ppl:)
Open Source development, however, is PEER reviewed. The bullsh*t walks, in any project of a substantial size and momentum to produce, say, an office suite. Someones screws up enough times and they get kicked from the project. Peers have the actual knowledge to say, this guys work is crap. HR can say, well he showed up in a clean suit with a good haircut and had a great handshake. Thats real nice, but Ill take the open source software anyday.
Half the reason proprietary software sucks, aside from not being free, is that its written by the guy with the best handshake, or whatever cosmetic thing the HR weenie was looking for that day. Never trust a bureaucrat HR rep to make a decision that a peer could make better.
Maybe if your site fails to properly load for a browser, the visitor should burst into flames with associated noises. That way website owners would not remain oblivious to broken websites. It would be uncomfortable explaining to the boss why avatars are screaming and dying whenever they enter your site.
I propose an unwashed heathen for IE users, a cool looking guy for the various incarnations of Netscape/Moz with associated logos on the shirts, a blind person with a cane for lynx users and a mad scientist for Opera. As alternatives, you could use a person in a wheelchair or stait jacket for IE and, hey, an opera singer for Opera. I want Bender for web spiders, its not negotiable:)
If you include mail servers in there, you could use mail trucks to deliver the mail, with the brown UPS trucks delivering from non-spam sites and the USPS trucks delivering from sites that are known spam havens. I know Im more excited to see the UPS truck than the USPS truck. Nobody sends junkmail through UPS.
Haven't seen one of those in... well, since I installed Mozilla. Are those really a problem for people?
Heh heh heh. [/smirk]
What I learned from BeOS is that Open Source is the only real answer to the Microsoft monopoly. Before Be, I believed it, but without evidence. Be proved it.
One nice thing it would mean is that OO.o could include java as part of the package for Windows. If the license is not Evil.
Microsoft ought to consider moving from the software industry into something new. They have the capital for anything. They have enough brainpower to do anything. Commercial space flight comes to mind as one of the most important contributions Bill and friends could make to Planet Earth. It's something no individual needs, sure, but there is big money in it just waiting to be tapped. Imagine going on a space vacation and eating at the 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe.' So cool. Imagine playing Ender's game in space, with lasertag style suites that caused joints to lock. I bet it would replace football on ESPN. And there's a hundred thousand other things people would pay to do on their vacation. That's only the recreation aspect. Then think of science, and paying for lab time in space. And mining the moon or asteroids. Colonization, because such a base would be an ideal staging platform.
But in the software industry, I think they are just about done. They will not contribute anything else important to mankind there. They can only cause damage to the world by crippling the internet they helped create, or crippling software by continuing their current pattern. Time to bow out gracefully and move on.
Now lets take PC gamers. There's a market now, when most PC's come with a 3D card, I don't see that changing soon, unless M$ buys out the big vidcard manufacturers. Then others will crop up. Sorry don't see that happening either.
Now lets take DVD players. Well, the current model is working, sell DVDs, sell DVD players. Is the MPAA suddenly going to say, "Don't buy that player, let US buy it for you!" Okie dokie.
Sounds like someone is trying out for a position as Bill's proctologist.
Alton Brown does rock though.
Forgive me for my simplistic view of programming. I know its a lot more complicated than that.
So lets all go and drop kick it into the next millenium! Very nice. This guy never even had a prayer. The inside of his server probably looks like the front row of a Gallager show.
Sure. Very good points. And since we are discussing fixing Linux's desktop, lets please throw in the fact that it all starts with XWindows. If you're going to fix it, fix it from the foundation up. Linux needs something else. I love XWindows. But it's LOTS of overhead for most folks. Except a few power users, most people don't use XWindows's functionality at all. Something much simpler would do nicely. It's like installing a hydraulic lift and pnumatic tools in your home garage. For shade tree mechanic work, you pretty much wasted your cash. Or installing surround sound on a completely deaf person's home theater system. He (or she) really doesn't need it. I'm not saying to get rid of it, I simply want a more sane option. While I'm dreaming, make it cross-platform, so that it could replace the windows shell. That way, I could have my same interface no matter what, even though functionality would differ.
Because Longhorn is not going to be adopted by the public? Longhorn will go the way of ME, for different reasons. XP works fine, relatively speaking. People will be reluctant to switch. Those who would switch will be looking in linux's direction, too. I foresee Longhorn being a severe failure.
whooooooshhhh.....
Seriously, The Wall Street Journal is not the New York Times, but they do put thier own spin on things. I haven't taken them seriously in years.
I tell you the truth. If Stargate gets canceled, I'm giving up on TV.
Next someone will be telling me that Slashdot doesn't really run news, or that they got bought by OSDN. I'd be downhill from there, for sure. Oh, wait...