People are also complaining about lockups in a regular desktop situation...
Oh...in that case, they've achieved parity with ATI's proprietary driver. I got sick of the problem with nVidia's proprietary drivers causing X to hang and eat 99+% of CPU (there's a two-year-old thread on their forum on the problem), bit the bullet and got an ATI card sufficiently recent that ATI deigns to provide a proprietary Linux driver for it--and a couple of days ago woke up to find the same problem my wife's computer had with an ATI card, i.e. the computer irretrievably wedged with a 3D-using screensaver image on the display.
I look forward to the day I can order cards from the Open Graphics Project and tell nVidia and ATI that they can use their proprietary hardware and drivers for reaction mass.
My own family wonders why PCs from 5 years ago are no longer usable but their 10 year old VCR still ticks.
I hope your family is better educated about technology than that.
A VCR has a single function. It deals with inputs and outputs that have been pretty well settled on for something like forty years, and will only be obsolete when the switch to digital TV is complete.
Now, in theory the ten-year-old VCR could be just as out of date; one could make a VCR that reads XDS data from Line 21 in order to set its own clock, display program titles, and so on, or that has an Ethernet connection to your home computer and offers to fire up your favorite browser to look at URLs referenced in XDS data (and grabs program schedule information and correlates it with the XDS data, so that football games running overtime or Presidential speeches don't get recorded instead of the show you were expecting when you asked for channel whatever from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.). But people weren't interested, or manufacturers didn't think it was worth targeting anything but the least common denominator. (And it won't happen now; analog TV probably won't be around long enough, and The Powers That Be are more interested in destroying fair use rights and working around the Betamax decision than actually catering to consumers.)
Software, OTOH, is far less stable, and new software requires more CPU cycles and better graphics.
I set my sister up with a computer running Ubuntu. I visit a couple of times a year...and she has spent most of the year without a functioning printer. I couldn't diagnose it from afar, and only now are things back in order (we came back for Christmas).
If there'd been a local LUG, she'd have had a working printer (and probably have the Wacom Graphire 3 going) a long time ago.
Corporate movement towards Linux is great, but don't forget the home user.
When processors/memory/lcds etc are getting cheaper by the minute, Why would you want to go back and use something that came to light so many years ago?
Why would anyone restore an antique car? Why would airline pilots fly ultralights on their days off? Why do poets still write sonnets when there's free verse? Why do hams who could run a kilowatt work QRP?
They do it because there's an enjoyable challenge in seeing what one can do with minimal resources.
Now, if you're asking why the general public would go for such a thing, darned if I know. From looking at TFA, it looks like they just want the name.
I should know better than to feed the trolls, but... whoever lit that photo should be strung up; it's perfect--if your goal is to vastly magnify every wrinkle and skin blemish.
Moreover, I vehemently disagree with your assertion.
I agree wholeheartedly. I consider the folks who produce "reality shows" despicable, and pandering to the worst in our behavior--but OTOH, the sort of people who win at Survivor, which rewards deceit and treachery, are equally contemptible. (Would anyone care to do business with people who can so easily rationalize lying?)
The vilest of the vile was the WB show that intentionally selected the worst possible singers for an American Idol style show, with the punch line at the end being the scene where the finalists are told the truth, that they stink on ice. Oddly enough, I don't think the producers got what they wanted, i.e. people breaking down on camera; the people had so deceived themselves that they were still convinced that they were great. Truly sad.
Knuth. Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming. George Polya, How to Solve It. Gries, The Science of Programming. Bentley, Programming Pearls. Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides, Design Patterns. Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Hunt and Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer.
Hmmm. My own bookshelf is lacking. Time to shop...
That's funny... that's not the experience I had when I set my wife up with a Linux box.
[Nixon=ON]My wife is not a geek.[Nixon=OFF] She refuses to do mathematical things--says she's not good at it, but I think she just had lousy instructors. Her formal training is in theater, speech pathology, and teaching. Her past computer experience was, I think, mostly with Macintoshes, and whatever specialized systems they used at a newspaper she worked at.
I plunked her down in front of a computer running FC2. She decided she liked KDE. She hasn't looked back through a move to FC3, FC4, and more recently to Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and then Breezy Badger...though she does occasionally wish for an iMac or Mac Mini, she refuses to let me get her one.
She does allude to some programs being difficult to use, but until I hear "Go ahead and get me that Mac Mini, honey," I have to infer that she's OK with Linux.
For that matter, a couple that we've set up with a serviceable PIII box running Breezy Badger aren't geeks either, though they are in fact reading the copy of Gagne's book on converting to Linux that I lent them.
Oh, yes...I remember the writings of Nancy Foy and Rex Malik about IBM, and the horrors of JCL and the 360/370. IBM dominated the mainframe market while vastly more elegant systems (e.g. the Burroughs 5000 and descendants, whose operating system (aka MCP, which should give a giggle to Tron fans) was written in an extended Algol 60 well before Unix existed) were nearly unknown.
After all, it was Donald Knuth himself who, in "Structured Programming with goto Statements" (Computing Surveys, sometime in 1974), wrote "At the [year] IFIPS Conference, I was introduced to Dr. Eiichi Goto, who cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated."
(Apologies for errors, as my issues of CS are in storage and I'm doing this from memory.)
In brief: France was once far more important than it is now. French was at one time the language of belles lettres (itself a French term), philosophy, diplomacy, math, and science.
German took over for chemistry for a while (vide Beilstein, and a fun Asimov detective short story that turns on it). Once upon a time Arabic held sway (all those borrowed words starting in "al," the Arabic definite article, are remnants of that time). It's English's turn now, but for how long?
Lets face it, education is a business FIRST AND FOREMOST here in the USA.
If it is, it's like the software business, with the government playing the part of Microsoft. The analogy's not perfect, though; it's still possible to avoid paying the "Microsoft tax," and Microsoft doesn't have a police force to come after those of us who avoid it.
[Rundgren] kicked off the year with Faithful, an album that split into original pop material and re-creations of '60s chestnuts from the Yardbirds, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beach Boys. His resurrection of "Good Vibrations" brought him his first Top 40 hit in three years.
How does that (the cover half) compare with the hypothetical situation?
Said situation doesn't say anything about whether you pay the appropriate royalties for your recreation. If you do, what's the difference between this and Faithful?
I'm an Open Source user. I made the mistake of buying a Samsung CLP-510N laser printer because it claimed Linux support. It has a proprietary driver.
This driver lacks feature parity with the Windows driver. It installs its own bizarro control panel rather than working and playing well with CUPS. I'm thinking of moving to AMD64... gee, Samsung hasn't bothered to write a 64-bit driver. If I make the move, I have a $400, 80-pound paperweight.
My wife's computer has an ATI Radeon graphics card. Gee... it's not new enough for ATI to want to bother to support. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon. It's not new enough either, but even if it were, ATI's Linux drivers don't support the TV tuner functionality--and while I admire the efforts of the Gatos Project people, I never was able to get things to work to my satisfaction.
As a Linux user, I'm sick of binary drivers and of manufacturers who won't provide the information needed to write Open Source drivers. What about a binary API would cause anything more than the half-assed binary drivers we're stuck with now?
Interesting article. Basically, he points out that money is made by being the owner of widely-used proprietary interfaces that are in a sense "addictive" or entrapping--once you start using them, it costs too much to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps a remake of "Thela Hun Ginjeet"?
"This is a dangerous place..."
OK. A spammer gets fined $11e9 for spamming. MS gets a slap on the wrist for its behavior. What's wrong with this picture?
If the tool will "gimmee" enough, I could care less whether it was created by Apple or Microsoft or Walmart. Merit trumps all.
Even ethics and the law?
Take what we have now, add whatever we want, for fucking christ sake get something coherent out of it and call it C+++.
How can one add to something incoherent and get a coherent result?
People are also complaining about lockups in a regular desktop situation...
Oh...in that case, they've achieved parity with ATI's proprietary driver. I got sick of the problem with nVidia's proprietary drivers causing X to hang and eat 99+% of CPU (there's a two-year-old thread on their forum on the problem), bit the bullet and got an ATI card sufficiently recent that ATI deigns to provide a proprietary Linux driver for it--and a couple of days ago woke up to find the same problem my wife's computer had with an ATI card, i.e. the computer irretrievably wedged with a 3D-using screensaver image on the display.
I look forward to the day I can order cards from the Open Graphics Project and tell nVidia and ATI that they can use their proprietary hardware and drivers for reaction mass.
My own family wonders why PCs from 5 years ago are no longer usable but their 10 year old VCR still ticks.
I hope your family is better educated about technology than that.
A VCR has a single function. It deals with inputs and outputs that have been pretty well settled on for something like forty years, and will only be obsolete when the switch to digital TV is complete.
Now, in theory the ten-year-old VCR could be just as out of date; one could make a VCR that reads XDS data from Line 21 in order to set its own clock, display program titles, and so on, or that has an Ethernet connection to your home computer and offers to fire up your favorite browser to look at URLs referenced in XDS data (and grabs program schedule information and correlates it with the XDS data, so that football games running overtime or Presidential speeches don't get recorded instead of the show you were expecting when you asked for channel whatever from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.). But people weren't interested, or manufacturers didn't think it was worth targeting anything but the least common denominator. (And it won't happen now; analog TV probably won't be around long enough, and The Powers That Be are more interested in destroying fair use rights and working around the Betamax decision than actually catering to consumers.)
Software, OTOH, is far less stable, and new software requires more CPU cycles and better graphics.
I set my sister up with a computer running Ubuntu. I visit a couple of times a year...and she has spent most of the year without a functioning printer. I couldn't diagnose it from afar, and only now are things back in order (we came back for Christmas).
If there'd been a local LUG, she'd have had a working printer (and probably have the Wacom Graphire 3 going) a long time ago.
Corporate movement towards Linux is great, but don't forget the home user.
When processors/memory/lcds etc are getting cheaper by the minute, Why would you want to go back and use something that came to light so many years ago?
Why would anyone restore an antique car? Why would airline pilots fly ultralights on their days off? Why do poets still write sonnets when there's free verse? Why do hams who could run a kilowatt work QRP?
They do it because there's an enjoyable challenge in seeing what one can do with minimal resources.
Now, if you're asking why the general public would go for such a thing, darned if I know. From looking at TFA, it looks like they just want the name.
I should know better than to feed the trolls, but... whoever lit that photo should be strung up; it's perfect--if your goal is to vastly magnify every wrinkle and skin blemish.
Moreover, I vehemently disagree with your assertion.
I agree wholeheartedly. I consider the folks who produce "reality shows" despicable, and pandering to the worst in our behavior--but OTOH, the sort of people who win at Survivor, which rewards deceit and treachery, are equally contemptible. (Would anyone care to do business with people who can so easily rationalize lying?)
The vilest of the vile was the WB show that intentionally selected the worst possible singers for an American Idol style show, with the punch line at the end being the scene where the finalists are told the truth, that they stink on ice. Oddly enough, I don't think the producers got what they wanted, i.e. people breaking down on camera; the people had so deceived themselves that they were still convinced that they were great. Truly sad.
Hmmm. The obvious answers:
Knuth.
Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming.
George Polya, How to Solve It.
Gries, The Science of Programming.
Bentley, Programming Pearls.
Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides, Design Patterns.
Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Hunt and Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer.
Hmmm. My own bookshelf is lacking. Time to shop...
Not that I like the idea under discussion, but... USnail is a common carrier, but you can still pay more for priority mail.
That's funny... that's not the experience I had when I set my wife up with a Linux box.
[Nixon=ON]My wife is not a geek.[Nixon=OFF] She refuses to do mathematical things--says she's not good at it, but I think she just had lousy instructors. Her formal training is in theater, speech pathology, and teaching. Her past computer experience was, I think, mostly with Macintoshes, and whatever specialized systems they used at a newspaper she worked at.
I plunked her down in front of a computer running FC2. She decided she liked KDE. She hasn't looked back through a move to FC3, FC4, and more recently to Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and then Breezy Badger...though she does occasionally wish for an iMac or Mac Mini, she refuses to let me get her one.
She does allude to some programs being difficult to use, but until I hear "Go ahead and get me that Mac Mini, honey," I have to infer that she's OK with Linux.
For that matter, a couple that we've set up with a serviceable PIII box running Breezy Badger aren't geeks either, though they are in fact reading the copy of Gagne's book on converting to Linux that I lent them.
Life is good.
Eh? What was all the brouhaha about "eating your own dogfood", then?
You have it exactly wrong. The closer to things you are, the more you have your nose rubbed in the places where it sucks.
World to Otto Z. Stern: GOAT.
Mr. Stern is John Dvorak without the talent.
I look forward to the day I can call my cable provider and say "I'd like everything I'm getting now except for that piece of [expletive] G4."
Oh, yes...I remember the writings of Nancy Foy and Rex Malik about IBM, and the horrors of JCL and the 360/370. IBM dominated the mainframe market while vastly more elegant systems (e.g. the Burroughs 5000 and descendants, whose operating system (aka MCP, which should give a giggle to Tron fans) was written in an extended Algol 60 well before Unix existed) were nearly unknown.
...how the claim that other people have used tactics like those of Microsoft excuses Microsoft, as the reviewer seems to think.
After all, it was Donald Knuth himself who, in "Structured Programming with goto Statements" (Computing Surveys, sometime in 1974), wrote "At the [year] IFIPS Conference, I was introduced to Dr. Eiichi Goto, who cheerfully complained that he was always being eliminated."
(Apologies for errors, as my issues of CS are in storage and I'm doing this from memory.)
In brief: France was once far more important than it is now. French was at one time the language of belles lettres (itself a French term), philosophy, diplomacy, math, and science.
German took over for chemistry for a while (vide Beilstein, and a fun Asimov detective short story that turns on it). Once upon a time Arabic held sway (all those borrowed words starting in "al," the Arabic definite article, are remnants of that time). It's English's turn now, but for how long?
Lets face it, education is a business FIRST AND FOREMOST here in the USA.
If it is, it's like the software business, with the government playing the part of Microsoft. The analogy's not perfect, though; it's still possible to avoid paying the "Microsoft tax," and Microsoft doesn't have a police force to come after those of us who avoid it.
From VH-1's Todd Rundgren biography:
[Rundgren] kicked off the year with Faithful, an album that split into original pop material and re-creations of '60s chestnuts from the Yardbirds, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beach Boys. His resurrection of "Good Vibrations" brought him his first Top 40 hit in three years.
How does that (the cover half) compare with the hypothetical situation?
Said situation doesn't say anything about whether you pay the appropriate royalties for your recreation. If you do, what's the difference between this and Faithful?
It depends. Do you mean competition based on merit, or competition via FUD and monopoly influence?
I'm an Open Source user. I made the mistake of buying a Samsung CLP-510N laser printer because it claimed Linux support. It has a proprietary driver.
This driver lacks feature parity with the Windows driver. It installs its own bizarro control panel rather than working and playing well with CUPS. I'm thinking of moving to AMD64... gee, Samsung hasn't bothered to write a 64-bit driver. If I make the move, I have a $400, 80-pound paperweight.
My wife's computer has an ATI Radeon graphics card. Gee... it's not new enough for ATI to want to bother to support. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon. It's not new enough either, but even if it were, ATI's Linux drivers don't support the TV tuner functionality--and while I admire the efforts of the Gatos Project people, I never was able to get things to work to my satisfaction.
As a Linux user, I'm sick of binary drivers and of manufacturers who won't provide the information needed to write Open Source drivers. What about a binary API would cause anything more than the half-assed binary drivers we're stuck with now?
Interesting article. Basically, he points out that money is made by being the owner of widely-used proprietary interfaces that are in a sense "addictive" or entrapping--once you start using them, it costs too much to change.
Not a bad living, if one can live with oneself.