My opinion, having been a Slash reader since the site's infancy, is that there's actually a fairly low level of religious knowledge amongst the learned Slashdot crowd. This tends to [unfortunately] manifest itself in haughty arrogance. QED indeed.
My opinion, having been a Slashdot reader since before the site was even called Slashdot, is that this site is overrun with religious nutcases. Just look at the number of comments stating "I believe in a literal interpretation of the Ark story" that are moderated to +5. Slashdot is very sympathetic towards pro-religious speech.
Interestingly enough, there is an unusually high percentage of religious "faithful" in the IT industry. Much higher than in other hard science or mathematical fields. Also interestingly enough there is an unusually high percentage of AUTISTIC people in the IT industry. I don't think those two facts are unrelated.
Linux users must restrain themselves. If the vendors see Linux users as a hostile environment, they're not going to ship their products on that platform, no matter what the market mass is. That means no reverse engineering,
Reverse engineering is not illegal, it is not immoral, and it is not something to "restrain" from.
How did the RIAA manage to convince all these people that "reverse engineering" and "fair play" is wrong?
<disgust>Oh I know, the RIAA offered them toys and shiny things, and that's how the RIAA Youth was formed.</disgust>
Sports Utility Vehicle. Though I have never understood what's so "sporty" about a 4 tonne diesel powered truck with knobbly tyres and a centre of gravity approximately 1.5m off the ground.
If you could vote from home, you'd put less thought into it. It would be one step closer to a news site poll, except THIS poll would make our final official selections. People wouldn't take it seriously enough. More people would vote, but the quality of those votes would not carry the same weight.
Even worse, vote-from-home allows votes to be sold or stolen. A vooting booth has to be provably secure and private.
There is absolutely, 100% nothing wrong with the government cracking down on this. Slashdot wants to pretend it's some sort of miniscule, "gray area" problem, but it's millions of users all trading warez and making it harder to sell software.
I'm browsing at +3 and more than half the comments are saying that these groups got what they deserved, and it's hardly a gray area but rather a black/white example of illegal software trading. So I don't think your "Slashdot is teh sucks" comment is justified. The very fact that you were moderated +5 Insightful shows that the Slashdot moderators agree with you.
My unsolicited personal opinion is that I'm glad these groups are finally getting caught. If the illegal trade in software is stopped then some of the software "thieves" where I work might have to start paying for their software. I'm looking forward to seeing the look of shock on their faces when they realise they need to spend upwards of $5000/year to support their software habits. Perhaps it will force them to reconsider Linux when they realise how much they're supposed to be paying for Windows.
Claims that our production of carbon dioxide will destroy life as we know it demonstrate ignorance of how the entire carbon cycle works.
Ahh yes, so anybody who disagrees with you is ignorant.
I am not a climatologist
Says it all, really.
Before writing a scathing reply, consider that I don't have an opinion either way as to whether humans are or aren't contributing to global warming, but I have a very strong opinion about people who dismiss the opposition as "ignorant" when they themselves don't have any training or qualifications.
I'd also like to see better punishments. Speeding tickets hurt a lot if you don't have a whole lot of money, but are little more than a slap on the wrist for other people. I'd rather see something that is directly related to driving (thus keeping a better associating with driving habits, which would hopefully increase the salience of the punishment for behavior-changing purposes). For example, folks who get two moving violations in a year could be banned from using the interstate highway system for 1 or more years.
Well, in one of those cold European countries (Sweden?) the speeding fine is proportional to your income. I think that's a great idea because it doesn't discriminate against people with low incomes.
In Australia there's a points system. A minor speeding infringement is 1 point. A medium one is 3 points. A major one is 6 points. Tailgating is 1 point. If you lose 12 points in 3 years then your license is revoked for a minimum of 3 months (longer suspensions for more serious offences). I think those are the right details but I'm going from memory so maybe I made a mistake. Our system sounds a little like what you're asking for.
Unfortunately the points system doesn't seem to work very well. We still have idiots who speed and tailgate. I think we should have means-tested fines as well as the points.
What the hell? I was never taught anything called 'three Rs'. I can't even think of what they might be. "Reading, Riting, and Retardation"? No, that would be a profoundly stupid thing to suggest to children, who would grow up unable to spell and end up making a web page on geocities.
Well no, of course you wouldn't have learnt the three Rs yet. That's not until high school.
So... You ask what happens? What happens is you discover, even with the tools only a handful of people ever made *good* music. For every good one, there's thousands of crap mod files, crap flash animations, and now crap "machinima". Having cheap and easy tools can't make everyone a great animator anymore than the availability of cheap pencils and paper made everyone a great writer.
Sure, there's lots of drek, but there's also an increase in the amount of good quality stuff.
You brought the example of cheap pencils and paper. Go back 1000 years and very few people knew how to write. These days a huge percentage of the world's population can read/write, and it's even higher if you only consider so-called western society. So sure, there's lots of crap (looks at Slashdot *g*) but there's also lots of great stuff. We have more books published every year than was published in the entire 2 millenia before the printing press was invented. Most of them are crap, but even if only 1% is great that is still 10s of 1000s of great books per year.
So OK, I agree that the tools don't make the artist and they will still need talent, but an increased number of machinima directors can only be a good thing. You never know who has talent until they give it a go, so the shotgun approach (everyone gets the tools) works really well.
This actually leads into one of my personal peeves with copyright. The copyright cheerleaders claim that the rapid increase in the amount and quality of work over the past 100 years has been a direct result of copyright laws. I disagree. I think it's because the tools of the trade (pens, paper, musical instruments, recording equipment) have gotten cheaper and are more available. While at the same time the training available to the common man has increased dramatically (the "three Rs" are taught in schools, music lessons are cheap, we have libraries). I think copyright does very little to promote the progress of arts and science except in very exceptional cases (eg, large collaborative works). I think copyright has far greater influence on the monetisation of cerebrial material than on its progress.
The GPL does not permit this bundling. It is clearly linked, and it is not the source code.
To distribute it like this is a violation of the GPL.
Just to play devil's advocate, the GPL doesn't care too much about linked, but more about derived works. RMS has argued in the past that linking is a sure sign of a derivative, but the recent LKML arguments over the nvidia driver prove that other people disagree with that interpretation. You do not even need linking to create a derived work; I have seen arguments that overly familiar use of IPC could be enough to constitute a derivative (eg, passing a data structure over IPC).
So we really need a legal eagle to decide on whether the firmware is a derived work of Linux, if the driver is a derived work of Linux, and if the bundle of Linux + driver + firmware is a derived work of Linux. Only then would we have a clearer understanding of whether this is a GPL violation.
However as another astute person pointed out in an earlier comment, a possible GPL violation doesn't change what Debian has done. Debian has additional requirements; they have the DFSG and the social contract to adhere to. I think Debian was right in declaring these firmware bundles a violation of that social contract, even if their GPL status is unclear.
Understand this: Debian has a very explicit social contract with their users. If you continue to be surprised by their strict adherence, then either 1)you need to accept that they will always side with Freedom over pragmatism, or 2)you have a seriously warped worldview that causes you to be mystified by integrity. Either way, find something else to gripe about.
The explicit social contract is the #1 reason why I stick with Debian. In the past, Debian had a number of unique features like apt and a sensible filesystem layout. But other distros have caught up and Debian no longer has a lead in those areas. But Debian is still the "most free" of the Linux distributions. I can rest assured that everything in main has been argued to death over its actual freeness. This might not mean much to some people but it means a lot to me.
If Debian ever reneged on its social contract and started compromising "free" for "convenient" then I'd have lost my last good reason to stick with Debian. I'd probably switch to Fedore Core because at least that's more like the systems I install for customers (typically RHEL). So I'm grateful that Debian has stuck to its charter on this one. We need at least one distro that gives freedom the highest priority.
To be fair, RedHat seems to be as pedantic as Debian with regards to licensing. Look at the MP3 situation on RedHat. So perhaps RedHat can give Debian a serious run for the trophy in the "most free" category.
As for Windows being a UI ripoff of MacOS - hardly.
Uhh, did you sleep through the whole Look and Feel lawsuit? It took 4 years of legal wrangling before Microsoft settled out of court. Remember that $150 million payment from Microsoft in 1997? The judge had already decided that of the 189 unique GUI elements in MacOS, Microsoft had used 179 of them in Windows. And you think they're hardly the same? For cripes sake, take the blinkers off.
And? You could say the same thing about any goofy audio format. What makes Ogg so special that is deserves special treatment? The audio codec space is already filled to capacity.
No licensing fees or royalties to implement OGG encoders or decoders.
As players get cheaper, I fully expect the smaller companies to start offering OGG. It's a commoditisation effect.
What I'm wondering is if the Linux coders feel like real schmoes right about now because lots and lots of companies and people are making fortunes off of their work, and all they get is maybe one line in a hidden readme file that nobody will read? I know this'll get modded down, but I'm really curious. I know that if I did some work, then it was taken and used by lots of people to make lots of money, and I didn't even get a "thanks", I know I'd be pretty pissed off. Of course, they knew this going in, so why exactly do OSS people do this? It makes no sense.
Ok, I'll attempt an answer. I'll be honest and admit that I'm an insignificant contributor. In the grand scheme of things I rate slightly lower than a slug's belly. But I've still put in a fair few hours. Why do I do it? Because in return I've received the equivalent of over $15,000 of s'ware on my desktop alone. Even better, my licenses for Linux (including BSD, GPL, ART) permit unlimited copies. I can install software whenever and where ever I feel like it, without going through the hassle of paying some obscure company and getting a silly number that makes the software work.
The incredible thing is that when you have a million developers all providing insignificant little contributions, you get a very significant end product. I'm not saying that all developers are insignificant - some Linux developers have contributed far more than anybody else - but the concept is true for the rest of us: I give a little and I receive a lot. I get back far more than I put in. So I'm willing to keep putting something back in. I don't need thanks (nor would I expect any considering my insignificance) because all this great software is even better.
Now if I worked on BSD code I'd probably feel differently. Those guys are exploited schmucks;-D
That's what original and good design can do for you, dear linux crowd. I'm currently feeling my way around KDE and while very impressed (all this for FREE?) I'm constantly muttering "rip-off" under my breath.
Yeah, I was recently feeling my way around MacOS X and while very impressed, I'm constantly muttering "rip-off" under my breath. That file browser, direct rip-off of NeXTSTEP. The dock at the bottom? That's a rip-off from CDE. The WIMP interface, rip-off from the Star. And boy, did I get a shock when I opened a terminal and saw a UNIX command line. What a freaking rip-off.
There's nothing original in any of the modern OS offerings. They're nothing more than cheap implementations of decades-old concepts. This is the way it has always been.
The same could be said of KDE (Windows ripoff), Evolution (Outlook ripoff), XMMS (WinAmp ripoff), KDevelop (DevStudio ripoff) and I daresay quite a few other OSS projects.
Windows was a ripoff of MacOS (and to a lesser extent, CDE, which Microsoft worked on as a joint project with Sun and IBM).
Outlook was a ripoff of Eudora. Eudora was a ripoff of PINE. PINE was a ripoff of ELM. There's a long history of ripoffs there.
WinAMP was a ripoff of MP3PLAYER, the original MP3 music player from Fraunhofer.
DevStudio was a ripoff of Borland IDE.
Everything is a ripoff of something else. Just because YOU saw it first on Windows does NOT MEAN it was actually first on Windows. It only means you know a lot less than you think you do.
The karmic balance of the universe means somebody will now point out some obscure app or OS proving that I know a lot less than I think I do, and that is all good and proper.
You say that, but MacOS, and even Windows, made their own improvements on what they were imitating. That's not a "pale imitation". I agree that it's all about evolutionary improvements, but all Lindows/Linspire is doing is making inferior knockoffs in order to get publicity by getting sued. Everything they've made has been a step BACKWARD. There are no evolutionary improvements going on here, just pale imitation. Why not come up with a completely novel interface that changes the whole paradigm?
Oh, I agree about Lindows/Linspire, I've never seen a more obvious ripoff. I was more agro about the earlier person's claim that "that's all Linux is- a pale imitation of the other OSes". I disagree. I've seen some fairly innovative ideas come out on Linux before MacOS or Windows. For example, Linux was one of the earliest desktops to have:
Automatic update features. Probably not the first (I'm sure somebody can point to an example of "prior art") but GNOME/KDE really made it an integral part of the desktop, well before Windows Update or MacOS Software Update.
Bug Buddy. Ok, I saw this concept first in Netscape Communicator, but GNOME was the first time I saw it integrated with the entire desktop. Apple and Microsoft are only just now repeating this feature in their own offerings.
Completely themeable toolkits. Once again, I'm sure Linux wasn't the first and I'm aware of Mac extensions like Kaleidoscope, but the theming engines in GTK and QT really blow Kaleidoscope out of the water. The complete integration makes Linux at least an early pioneer, even if not the first.
Once again, it's not about being first. It's difficult to be first because it's very rare to create an idea entirely in isolation. It's usually an amalgamation of many ideas from many sources. That's why I can't stand the word "innovation". Bill Gates started spreading that word around during the DOJ vs Microsoft court case and now the meme has taken hold. It means "first" or "new" and that's a laugh, because there is very little about Windows that is first or new.
Why not come up with a completely novel interface that changes the whole paradigm?
But that is happening! There are people working on 3D desktops, and FPS desktops, and things like dasher, and the Zoom interface, and Jef's LEAP thingamie, and the list goes on.
The thing about "completely novel" interfaces is that they're research projects. They're not actually usable! It takes about 20 years to go from research to your hands, even in computing. The WIMP interface that you're using now started in the 60s with Sutherland and Engelbart. It's been a hard slog from millions of coders to get it this far. The "completely novel" interfaces are currently 1 or 2 guys working in isolation. In 20 years times you might see the fruits of their labour. Or maybe you won't. But don't blame Linux for the delay. It just doesn't happen that quickly.
Just remember, it's not that Linux is a pale imitation of Windows and MacOS. It's that all 3 are copying their ideas from 30 years of human interface research. WIMP is where all the money and effort went. The GNOME/KDE developers would be stupid to ignore that investment and start from scratch.
i'm kinda sick of hearing about Lindows/Linspire. why can't these guys come up with their own original ideas instead of stealing others'? there's way too much of this going on in the Linux community, and these guys make it look like that's all Linux is- a pale imitation of the other OSes...
Windows XP is a pale imitation of VMS and MacOS.
MacOS X is a pale imitation of BSD and NeXTStep.
Face facts, all operating systems are small evolutionary improvements over existing OSs. Stop complaining about Linux ripping off MacOS and Windows. Linux is simply learning from the grand masters of ripoffs.
What do you, personally, need more speed for? The only thing I ever do that taxes my G4 is video editing and running VirtualPC. Everything else is more than fast enough. A G5 would probably help the video editing, but it's not something I do every day, and I'm happy to just set everything up and leave it doing the rendering while I'm asleep. VirtualPC is about PII 266 speed, and I don't really need it to be any faster (sure, it would be nice to run it at P4 speeds, but if I really needed to do much x86-specific stuff I'd have bought an x86 laptop).
Hand in your geek badge, your membership is revoked! You can never have a fast enough processor.
It would actually be really nice if there were some way a card could have its own driver. Then you would need one standard query interface on every card to fetch the driver, which every piece of hardware and every OS would need to support, and whatever code came back from it would have to be somehow runnable on every device conceivable with support for the way the card is plugged in.
Welcome to Sun hardware! Sun cards have an onboard "minidriver" written in the Forth language. Forth is a bytecode language and the motherboard has an interpreter.
First off, I've been using the TUI since the old Commie 64 days (the ay-deez). But, for some reason in all my readings and various meanderings through computer sci I've NEVER heard a command line referred to as a TUI!
That's because a TUI isn't the same thing as a CLI. A TUI is like those DOS programs written with Borland Turbovision. A picture is worth at least 78 words here. This is a CLI.
$ ls bar baz foo $ rm bar $ ls baz foo
And this is a TUI.
Well I'd like to give you a picture here, but Slashdot thinks TUIs are too lame.
Examples of TUIs on Linux include mutt, links, pine... I suppose emacs and vim. They're a little zany but their distinguishing feature is that they're all text and they aren't command-line.
You consider it a feature that installing applications under linux requires a PhD?
Installing software of linux does not require a PhD. You click on the pretty "update" icon and you select the package you want. 2 minutes later it's downloaded and installed, fully configured, and incorporated into the automatic security updates. Look at Lindows, Xandros, Mandrake, SuSe and RedHat for examples of this easy procedure.
You consider the primary reason why Linux is completely failing to compete with Apple/MS on the desktop to be a positive feature of the OS?
I don't think ease-of-installation for third party unvetted software is the "primary reason" for Microsoft's market dominance.
And yes I do consider it a feature that it's difficult to install third party unvetted software. It limits the spread of trojans, spyware, malware, adware, and other annoyances that plague the Windows platform.
I do consider it a feature that Linux software is first vetted, debugged, certified, configured, and integrated by the Linux distributor. It means I just go "install foo" and "foo" is working. I don't need to answer any questions. It JUST WORKS.
So what if it means I have to wait for the distributor to package the software. I can wait. I'm not impatient.
That's hardly constructive. But it is useful for people to know. That kind of attitude is exactly why the usability problem hasn't been fixed, and probably never will be.
Ease-of-installation of third-party unvetted software has very little to do with usability in general. You are standing on a soapbox with your bullhorn but you are not saying anything useful.
All you need to do to install an application is download the exe and doubleclick on it (although MSIE will also allow you to run the app just from clicking its link).
Which is one of the primary reasons why the average Windows desktop has 27 spyware/malware components installed.
If you can't do exactly the same thing under Linux, then Linux has failed.
You call it failure. I call it a feature. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
My opinion, having been a Slashdot reader since before the site was even called Slashdot, is that this site is overrun with religious nutcases. Just look at the number of comments stating "I believe in a literal interpretation of the Ark story" that are moderated to +5. Slashdot is very sympathetic towards pro-religious speech.
Interestingly enough, there is an unusually high percentage of religious "faithful" in the IT industry. Much higher than in other hard science or mathematical fields. Also interestingly enough there is an unusually high percentage of AUTISTIC people in the IT industry. I don't think those two facts are unrelated.
God said to Noah
... On the Arky Arky
There's going to be a Floody Floody!
Down came the rain
It started to get Muddy Muddy
Get Those Animals...
*clap*
Reverse engineering is not illegal, it is not immoral, and it is not something to "restrain" from.
How did the RIAA manage to convince all these people that "reverse engineering" and "fair play" is wrong?
<disgust>Oh I know, the RIAA offered them toys and shiny things, and that's how the RIAA Youth was formed.</disgust>
Sports Utility Vehicle. Though I have never understood what's so "sporty" about a 4 tonne diesel powered truck with knobbly tyres and a centre of gravity approximately 1.5m off the ground.
Even worse, vote-from-home allows votes to be sold or stolen. A vooting booth has to be provably secure and private.
I'm browsing at +3 and more than half the comments are saying that these groups got what they deserved, and it's hardly a gray area but rather a black/white example of illegal software trading. So I don't think your "Slashdot is teh sucks" comment is justified. The very fact that you were moderated +5 Insightful shows that the Slashdot moderators agree with you.
My unsolicited personal opinion is that I'm glad these groups are finally getting caught. If the illegal trade in software is stopped then some of the software "thieves" where I work might have to start paying for their software. I'm looking forward to seeing the look of shock on their faces when they realise they need to spend upwards of $5000/year to support their software habits. Perhaps it will force them to reconsider Linux when they realise how much they're supposed to be paying for Windows.
Ahh yes, so anybody who disagrees with you is ignorant.
Says it all, really.
Before writing a scathing reply, consider that I don't have an opinion either way as to whether humans are or aren't contributing to global warming, but I have a very strong opinion about people who dismiss the opposition as "ignorant" when they themselves don't have any training or qualifications.
Well, in one of those cold European countries (Sweden?) the speeding fine is proportional to your income. I think that's a great idea because it doesn't discriminate against people with low incomes.
In Australia there's a points system. A minor speeding infringement is 1 point. A medium one is 3 points. A major one is 6 points. Tailgating is 1 point. If you lose 12 points in 3 years then your license is revoked for a minimum of 3 months (longer suspensions for more serious offences). I think those are the right details but I'm going from memory so maybe I made a mistake. Our system sounds a little like what you're asking for.
Unfortunately the points system doesn't seem to work very well. We still have idiots who speed and tailgate. I think we should have means-tested fines as well as the points.
Well no, of course you wouldn't have learnt the three Rs yet. That's not until high school.
Cerebral. Obviously I failed one of the Rs.
Sure, there's lots of drek, but there's also an increase in the amount of good quality stuff.
You brought the example of cheap pencils and paper. Go back 1000 years and very few people knew how to write. These days a huge percentage of the world's population can read/write, and it's even higher if you only consider so-called western society. So sure, there's lots of crap (looks at Slashdot *g*) but there's also lots of great stuff. We have more books published every year than was published in the entire 2 millenia before the printing press was invented. Most of them are crap, but even if only 1% is great that is still 10s of 1000s of great books per year.
So OK, I agree that the tools don't make the artist and they will still need talent, but an increased number of machinima directors can only be a good thing. You never know who has talent until they give it a go, so the shotgun approach (everyone gets the tools) works really well.
This actually leads into one of my personal peeves with copyright. The copyright cheerleaders claim that the rapid increase in the amount and quality of work over the past 100 years has been a direct result of copyright laws. I disagree. I think it's because the tools of the trade (pens, paper, musical instruments, recording equipment) have gotten cheaper and are more available. While at the same time the training available to the common man has increased dramatically (the "three Rs" are taught in schools, music lessons are cheap, we have libraries). I think copyright does very little to promote the progress of arts and science except in very exceptional cases (eg, large collaborative works). I think copyright has far greater influence on the monetisation of cerebrial material than on its progress.
Just to play devil's advocate, the GPL doesn't care too much about linked, but more about derived works. RMS has argued in the past that linking is a sure sign of a derivative, but the recent LKML arguments over the nvidia driver prove that other people disagree with that interpretation. You do not even need linking to create a derived work; I have seen arguments that overly familiar use of IPC could be enough to constitute a derivative (eg, passing a data structure over IPC).
So we really need a legal eagle to decide on whether the firmware is a derived work of Linux, if the driver is a derived work of Linux, and if the bundle of Linux + driver + firmware is a derived work of Linux. Only then would we have a clearer understanding of whether this is a GPL violation.
However as another astute person pointed out in an earlier comment, a possible GPL violation doesn't change what Debian has done. Debian has additional requirements; they have the DFSG and the social contract to adhere to. I think Debian was right in declaring these firmware bundles a violation of that social contract, even if their GPL status is unclear.
The explicit social contract is the #1 reason why I stick with Debian. In the past, Debian had a number of unique features like apt and a sensible filesystem layout. But other distros have caught up and Debian no longer has a lead in those areas. But Debian is still the "most free" of the Linux distributions. I can rest assured that everything in main has been argued to death over its actual freeness. This might not mean much to some people but it means a lot to me.
If Debian ever reneged on its social contract and started compromising "free" for "convenient" then I'd have lost my last good reason to stick with Debian. I'd probably switch to Fedore Core because at least that's more like the systems I install for customers (typically RHEL). So I'm grateful that Debian has stuck to its charter on this one. We need at least one distro that gives freedom the highest priority.
To be fair, RedHat seems to be as pedantic as Debian with regards to licensing. Look at the MP3 situation on RedHat. So perhaps RedHat can give Debian a serious run for the trophy in the "most free" category.
Uhh, did you sleep through the whole Look and Feel lawsuit? It took 4 years of legal wrangling before Microsoft settled out of court. Remember that $150 million payment from Microsoft in 1997? The judge had already decided that of the 189 unique GUI elements in MacOS, Microsoft had used 179 of them in Windows. And you think they're hardly the same? For cripes sake, take the blinkers off.
No licensing fees or royalties to implement OGG encoders or decoders.
As players get cheaper, I fully expect the smaller companies to start offering OGG. It's a commoditisation effect.
Rewind 10 years and you could have said the same thing about MP3s.
Times, they are a changing.
Ok, I'll attempt an answer. I'll be honest and admit that I'm an insignificant contributor. In the grand scheme of things I rate slightly lower than a slug's belly. But I've still put in a fair few hours. Why do I do it? Because in return I've received the equivalent of over $15,000 of s'ware on my desktop alone. Even better, my licenses for Linux (including BSD, GPL, ART) permit unlimited copies. I can install software whenever and where ever I feel like it, without going through the hassle of paying some obscure company and getting a silly number that makes the software work.
The incredible thing is that when you have a million developers all providing insignificant little contributions, you get a very significant end product. I'm not saying that all developers are insignificant - some Linux developers have contributed far more than anybody else - but the concept is true for the rest of us: I give a little and I receive a lot. I get back far more than I put in. So I'm willing to keep putting something back in. I don't need thanks (nor would I expect any considering my insignificance) because all this great software is even better.
Now if I worked on BSD code I'd probably feel differently. Those guys are exploited schmucks ;-D
Yeah, I was recently feeling my way around MacOS X and while very impressed, I'm constantly muttering "rip-off" under my breath. That file browser, direct rip-off of NeXTSTEP. The dock at the bottom? That's a rip-off from CDE. The WIMP interface, rip-off from the Star. And boy, did I get a shock when I opened a terminal and saw a UNIX command line. What a freaking rip-off.
There's nothing original in any of the modern OS offerings. They're nothing more than cheap implementations of decades-old concepts. This is the way it has always been.
Windows was a ripoff of MacOS (and to a lesser extent, CDE, which Microsoft worked on as a joint project with Sun and IBM).
Outlook was a ripoff of Eudora. Eudora was a ripoff of PINE. PINE was a ripoff of ELM. There's a long history of ripoffs there.
WinAMP was a ripoff of MP3PLAYER, the original MP3 music player from Fraunhofer.
DevStudio was a ripoff of Borland IDE.
Everything is a ripoff of something else. Just because YOU saw it first on Windows does NOT MEAN it was actually first on Windows. It only means you know a lot less than you think you do.
The karmic balance of the universe means somebody will now point out some obscure app or OS proving that I know a lot less than I think I do, and that is all good and proper.
Oh, I agree about Lindows/Linspire, I've never seen a more obvious ripoff. I was more agro about the earlier person's claim that "that's all Linux is- a pale imitation of the other OSes". I disagree. I've seen some fairly innovative ideas come out on Linux before MacOS or Windows. For example, Linux was one of the earliest desktops to have:
Once again, it's not about being first. It's difficult to be first because it's very rare to create an idea entirely in isolation. It's usually an amalgamation of many ideas from many sources. That's why I can't stand the word "innovation". Bill Gates started spreading that word around during the DOJ vs Microsoft court case and now the meme has taken hold. It means "first" or "new" and that's a laugh, because there is very little about Windows that is first or new.
But that is happening! There are people working on 3D desktops, and FPS desktops, and things like dasher, and the Zoom interface, and Jef's LEAP thingamie, and the list goes on.
The thing about "completely novel" interfaces is that they're research projects. They're not actually usable! It takes about 20 years to go from research to your hands, even in computing. The WIMP interface that you're using now started in the 60s with Sutherland and Engelbart. It's been a hard slog from millions of coders to get it this far. The "completely novel" interfaces are currently 1 or 2 guys working in isolation. In 20 years times you might see the fruits of their labour. Or maybe you won't. But don't blame Linux for the delay. It just doesn't happen that quickly.
Just remember, it's not that Linux is a pale imitation of Windows and MacOS. It's that all 3 are copying their ideas from 30 years of human interface research. WIMP is where all the money and effort went. The GNOME/KDE developers would be stupid to ignore that investment and start from scratch.
Windows XP is a pale imitation of VMS and MacOS.
MacOS X is a pale imitation of BSD and NeXTStep.
Face facts, all operating systems are small evolutionary improvements over existing OSs. Stop complaining about Linux ripping off MacOS and Windows. Linux is simply learning from the grand masters of ripoffs.
Hand in your geek badge, your membership is revoked! You can never have a fast enough processor.
Welcome to Sun hardware! Sun cards have an onboard "minidriver" written in the Forth language. Forth is a bytecode language and the motherboard has an interpreter.
That's because a TUI isn't the same thing as a CLI. A TUI is like those DOS programs written with Borland Turbovision. A picture is worth at least 78 words here. This is a CLI.
And this is a TUI.Examples of TUIs on Linux include mutt, links, pine... I suppose emacs and vim. They're a little zany but their distinguishing feature is that they're all text and they aren't command-line.
Installing software of linux does not require a PhD. You click on the pretty "update" icon and you select the package you want. 2 minutes later it's downloaded and installed, fully configured, and incorporated into the automatic security updates. Look at Lindows, Xandros, Mandrake, SuSe and RedHat for examples of this easy procedure.
I don't think ease-of-installation for third party unvetted software is the "primary reason" for Microsoft's market dominance.
And yes I do consider it a feature that it's difficult to install third party unvetted software. It limits the spread of trojans, spyware, malware, adware, and other annoyances that plague the Windows platform.
I do consider it a feature that Linux software is first vetted, debugged, certified, configured, and integrated by the Linux distributor. It means I just go "install foo" and "foo" is working. I don't need to answer any questions. It JUST WORKS.
So what if it means I have to wait for the distributor to package the software. I can wait. I'm not impatient.
Ease-of-installation of third-party unvetted software has very little to do with usability in general. You are standing on a soapbox with your bullhorn but you are not saying anything useful.
Which is one of the primary reasons why the average Windows desktop has 27 spyware/malware components installed.
You call it failure. I call it a feature. Go figure.