But SUN's hardware is quite expensive and with the power saving alone you would be able to buy a bunch of x68 hardware with the prefered Linux flavor of your choice. I still understand your concerns and if you have the budget then stick to SUN. Besides the SUN's are well designed, nice-coloured and you could install redhat or fedora on them, if you get one on ebay. For end-of-lifecycle die-hard redhats there's community Fedora Legacy Project.
You really didn't understand a word he said. Let's look at it again...
I don't mean to be a troll, but there is one reason why I have advised several consulting clients in the past to SUN and Solaris certified applications. A couple of my clients include fortune 1000 companies that invested around USD 50 million into their ERP and CRM systems and what sold them on Sun was the fact that the let's say their ERP software no longer works in Solaris 10. Sun will send a team of software engineers to make sure their application will work.
You see, what he's talking about is support. Not colours. Not design. Not "prefered Linux flavour". He's saying that with Sun and Solaris, he can deploy an application and rest assured that 10 years from now he can still get Sun to support the hardware and the software. His example of Solaris 10 is 100% right; I've seen Sun bend over backwards to get applications written for Solaris 2 running on Solaris 9.
Hell, I have worked on projects with 15 year old Sun gear. Something goes wrong and Sun does send somebody out to fix it! Usually a grizzled old guy nearing retirement but they have spares and knowledge and experience. Yes, they charge through the nose for it, but when you've got a critical system that is 15 years old, you don't fucking care!
Going with RedHat in critical situations is a mistake because RedHat won't even support software they sold you two years ago. It really blew away their credibility in the enterprise market. That's why the entire enterprise market is looking for another vendor for Linux. It looks like SuSe might come out on top.
Your suggestion that he picks up "a bunch of x68 hardware" to run Linux, or even sillier, run Fedora on a second-hand Sparc box he bought off eBay, is so entirely naive that it boggles the mind. You're thinking of the nuts and bolts. You don't understand what business needs.
Yeah also try explaining that Xerox invented the mouse and the GUI. I get great responses to that.
Because you're wrong. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse at Stanford university (actually SRI, the research institute). The GUI, now that's a gray area, but Memex and Engelbart and Sutherland and Sketchpad and Smalltalk have to be part of the story. Recall that Engelbart demonstrated live video conferencing inside GUI windows in the 1960s!
In any event, both mice and GUIs predate Xerox PARC. The PARC is famous for making a product out of the ideas but they didn't invent the ideas.
Preempting any comments about Apple and Xerox PARC. Although Apple definitely took some ideas from Xerox (paid for, not stolen) the Lisa and Macintosh weren't copies of the Xerox Star. Apple added a lot of GUI innovation (eg, spatial folders, dropdown menus). Also bear in mind that several of the ideas that Apple used from Xerox PARC were not invented at Xerox PARC! Windows and icons and scrollbars predated Xerox PARC as well. Xerox PARC simply integrated all the cutting edge ideas into a neat little package.
I was sad until I walked down the beach. That made it better. Then I was just sad it was over. One of the best games I have ever played. Can't recommend it enough.
I would have preferred an ending without the beach. It was a tragic yet moving ending without the beach. The beach scene made it Disney-esque.
That said, it was an astounding game. Easily my favourite PS2 game.
The company I work for evaluated OOo. I have managed to get them to use several other free software packages (notably perl rather than asp) but there's no way I could sell them on OOo. It's ugly, it's counterintuitive, and it inherits all the interface mistakes Office has -- and you can't get professional support for it. And so my office shelled out to get everyone copies of Office 2k3.
So you didn't even consider paying $50/seat to Sun for StarOffice, which is effectively OpenOffice with professional support.
Actually, Sun bought Open Office (then Star Office) from StarDivision. Star Office was a pretty good product already.
Sure, but StarOffice wasn't open source. Sun spent $70+ million to buy StarOffice before they open sourced it. That's a pretty damn big gift to open source.
Also Sun fixed a lot of the ickiest problems with StarOffice. Such as the MDI, the regular crashing, the font handling, the speed problems, etc.
Also Sun employs professional programmers and managers to further develop OpenOffice. Sun deserves heaps of kudos for all of this.
Of course, most people prefer to bash Sun for not open-sourcing Java, or for buying drivers from SCO *before* SCO started accusing Linux of being tainted. With friends like that, Sun doesn't need any enemies.
...one of their other big points is that OO doesn't have it's own email/PIM client.
Of course it doesn't... between mozilla/evolution/insert your favorite email client here/ they don't -need- to include one.
More to the point, StarOffice used to have a mail client, but Sun wisely removed it. YAMC (Yet Another Mail Client) was definitely bloat.
All I meant by my last statement is that unless linux offers something to assure users their computer is easily fixable when something goes wrong (and something always does go wrong - that's just machines in general), people being people will go for the easy option. Unfortunately, that's Windows.
I disagree. People do not always choose the easy option. For example, more people chose MS-DOS than MacOS. My conclusion is that people choose the cheapest option if it does what they want. The fixability aspect is, IMO, not that important.
"System Restore" is a feature XP has, where you simply click a calendar to restore your PC to how it was on that day. It's fixed everything I've needed it to fix (dodgy ATI driver installs, crappy shareware, etc.) and can be used by any end user. It even knows when you're doing something that could screw your machine (ie unsigned drivers) and makes a restore point automatically.
It's not perfect, but it's as close as anyone's got to a self-fixing OS. I'm no microsoft zealot but Linux has to achieve that just to stay on par with windows' usability.
That's a very silly statement. Linux doesn't have to implement System Restore to "stay on par". There are many aspects to usability and snapshots will not make-or-break Linux.
And when your wifey comes to update her software, or something breaks? That's where the real difference is.
I don't see how it's any different. Most users cannot "fix" their computers when the software breaks. There's an enormous cottage industry of friends, neighbours, relatives who do nothing but "fix" Windows installations.
Installing new software? This one's hit and miss. Sometimes users get it right. Quite often I've been asked to install a game or a driver for somebody after the instructions or installer let them down.
In my experience, Macs are easier but they're also fallible. Admittedly not very often. I can recall two times in my life where an installer failed on a Mac and the user couldn't figure it out on their own. Though I can recall dozens of incidents where MacOS broke and the user couldn't fix it. This was all pre-X but I'm sure OSX isn't perfect. Sadly not many (not enough) people use Macs.
I suspect what you're really saying is that Linux broke for you once and you had to do weird things to fix it, or you needed somebody elses help. So? I've lived through DOS 3.1, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP and I assure you, on several occasions I needed to do arcane things to make Windows work. That doesn't seem to have stopped Microsoft from dominating the PC industry.
I always thought the goal of Linux was to provide a free, open source Unix-like operating system.
Nope. That's the goal of the GNU project.
Linux was started because Linus wanted to learn more about 386 protected mode. You could say that the original goal of Linux was to give Linus something fun to do.
Some people soon realised they could finish GNU by integrating it with Linux. At that time you might say that there were some people with the goal of using Linux to make a free UNIX.
Afterwards, when GNU/Linux had proven itself worthy, other people introduced their own goals. One goal was cheap terminals to access the Real UNIX(tm) boxes. So XFree86 was ported.
Some users then realised that Linux would be pretty good as a desktop for geeky developers. They started the KDE project. This led to major improvements in audio, video and input.
Some forward-thinking companies realised that Linux was small enough to be used in embedded systems. They tweaked it a little and stated the goal of Linux as an embedded operating system.
Then some companies noticed and they thought Linux was pretty close to being usable as a corporate desktop. Sun bought OpenOffice for us, Ximian gave us Evolution, Netscape gave us a browser, and now one stated goal of Linux (by at least some companies) is to provide extremely cheap corporate desktops.
And there is always the crazy crowd whose goal with Linux is to destroy Microsoft. Hopefully we can all learn to ignore these people because they won't do us the favour of shutting up.
My point is that there is no single goal. We have millions of users, each with their own goals, with Linux being pulled and teased in all directions at once. I think there might have been a time when the dominant goal was to provide a free open-source UNIX-like operating system. But I don't think that's been the dominant goal for many years. I think the current dominant goal is Linux as a corporate desktop (probably half the work I'm observing is towards that goal). There's representation of all the other goals, though.
PS: I think the lack of a single goal is one of Linux's greatest strengths.
Everytime something happens w/ linux "oh its only debian.org", "oh thats only local", "only 3 kernel advisories this month, that should be all for a while". We _can not_ keep brushing things off and pretending they are not significant.
We are not brushing things off and pretending they are insignificant.
Some people brush it off. Some people do not. This is not a collective. We do not all share the same opinion.
I was never of the opinion that the debian.org incident was something to casually dismiss. Luckily, the Debian sysadmins agreed. They treated it very seriously and took several Debian servers offline to fix it. The gnome.org sysadmins are being equally professional.
Just because you can read/. user-id 702942 saying something stupid like "M$ is dumheds and Lunix Rulze" does not mean that WE are all of the same opinion.
Your music retailer is now no longer a spacious shop with hundreds of boxes on shelves, but a small boutique establishment with a licence to copy, a fast Internet connection, a computer, and a bank of CD writers. All legal and above board. What's your problem? Providing a useful service perhaps?
It could be even better than that. Imagine this scenario:
Motorist: I'd like a big mac and a small fries, thanks.
Checkout: That will be $5.95. For 50c extra I can wire the latest Froobnitz album to your car's stereo.
Motorist: Sure, why not.
Checkout: Ok, $6.45 has been deducted from your car's e-card. Please drive to the next window.
We have the technology to do this right now. We have e-cards to pay those automatic toll booths. We have wireless communications. We have MP3 players in car stereos. The music industry could give us what we want, right now. Music. On demand. For a reasonable price.
[rhetorical]
But why would they give us what we want when they can just extort us $29.95 for 8 songs on a 20-year old physical format.
[/rhetorical]
I can think of dozens of modern scenarios for transferring music. Walk up to an e-Music booth (like those interactive booths in shopping malls) and plug your iPod into the firewire jack. Push $1 into the coin slot. Get an album of your choice. Effectively a vending machine for music. They could stick 1TB storage in the machine and have a gigantic catalogue. No need to restock. Just empty the money out once a day and keep it powered. Stick these in shopping malls and they would rake in millions per year per booth.
The problem is they have no incentive to do this. They know we have to come to them; they've got a monopoly on the artists we want to hear. They could put the music on wax phonographs and charge $100 and we'd still pay for it. They've got us by the short and curlies and they know it.
compare that to developing on windows. not everything is nice, but the MSDN documentation collection for developers is the best documentation ever, and includes not only a complete function reference, but also tons of samples that -shock horror - actually work.
I'm always impressed by how good the OSS documentation is. OK, I can relate to your experience of Microsoft documentation being better. I have to agree. Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and IBM are all first rate in the documentation department. But have you used documentation from other vendors? Dell? Nortel? Shudder. It's enough to make you cry.
OSS documentation isn't always the best, but it's quite often not the worst. GNU documentation is consistently shoulders above UNIX documentation. Linux kernel documentation is lacking but GTK and GNOME documentation is good. Perl documentation is excellent (though that sort of language needs it). Popular server applications for Linux like Sendmail, BIND, Apache are all extremely well documented both for developers and users alike.
I agree with you that writing device drivers for Linux is like stumbling through a darkened room filled with lethal boobytraps. Linux isn't a stable API or ABI (yet). Other OSS can be much better. It's no different to the commercial world where some vendors are good at documentation and other vendors definitely are not!
... but let's see if I'm the only person that thinks that way.
Reasons why Open Source Will Boom:
Open source gives everybody access to the same software.[1]
Countries not ruled by the USA will choose open-source.[2]
OSS will grow faster than any other software.[3]
OSS raises the bar.[4]
OSS will fill every niche.[5]
No vendor lock-in!
Enthusiasm![6]
[1] This allows a small company to use the same software that the
"big boys" are using. This means a company can pick the support,
training and developer options that suit their budget and needs without
sacrificing themselves to inferior software, or locking themselves into
proprietary crapware. Small companies will have improved options for
support, reference material, third-party add-ons, etc. It's going to be
great news for small companies. It also means that amateur developers
can train themselves on the proper software. No more piracy to keep
yourself abreast of the latest software. No more "Education" versions
or crippleware. It's all the real deal, baby!
[2] If Australia buys 1,000,000 Windows desktops (Windows + Office)
then that's half a BILLION dollars going overseas to the USA. Imagine how
much money is flowing into the USA from the rest of the world, thanks to
the USA led dominance of the software industry. This has a bigger effect
on smaller and poorer countries. Countries who recognise this economic
impact are naturally going to encourage local software development but
what software can compete with Microsoft? OSS can! Better to pay a local
to improve OSS than send the money overseas! We're already seeing this
argument appearing in briefing papers from the New Zealand government, the
German government, the Peru government, etc. Governments will be sneaky
about this; they'll impose tariffs and legal obstacles to encourage OSS
(and perhaps locally owned proprietary software as well).
[3] The gigantic developer base possible with OSS means it will
grow faster than any other software. We're already seeing this
happen. Linux was 1 developer in 1991. 100 developers in 1992. 1,000
developers in 1993. Current estimates (including userspace projects
like GNOME and GNU) are upwards of 100,000 developers. Not all of those
developers work fulltime but it doesn't matter because the growth is
accelerating. GNU/Linux got to where it is today with far fewer
developers. It's going to be a wild wide from now on in. In 5 years
time I think it will be obviously ludicrous for a proprietary company
to "compete" against popular OSS projects like Linux. The only way to
recruit enough developers to be competitive will be for companies to
cooperate via OSS licensing.
[4] Incredibly important. Software is getting harder to write. In the
70s a single talented guy could do it in a year. Woz built the Apple I
by himself. In the 80s, you needed dozens of people to build something
cool. The Macintosh had 80+ people in the team and it took 5 years,
though admittedly Burrell and Raskin and Hertzfeld and Atkinson were key
figures in its success. A modern OS like Longhorn has 1000s of developers
and takes 6+ years even though they aren't starting from scratch.
A small startup can't start from zero; they need to license software
from Microsoft or WindRiver or they'll never complete in a reasonable
time. This reinforces the dominance of Microsoft and WindRiver. Great for
the companies in control. Terrible for the startup. Rather than spend
money on new and exciting things, they're wasting money on licenses so
Bill Gates can buy another extension to his $50 million mansion. OSS
gives every startup the same headstart. Companies don't need to start
from zero! They can start from a working FREE foundation. They can invest
in exciting new technology. "If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".
[5] Open Source allows the
users to grow the software in unplanned directions. OSS will fill
every software niche, even ones t
The negative thoughts that many/.ers have for Microsoft in general and their top men in specific, Both Gates and Allen have long been active philanthropists. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [gatesfoundation.org] benefits "global health and learning" (directed by Bill Gates' father).
Bill never donated a dime to any charity until he married Melinda. What does that tell you? It tells me that Bill is still the stingy bastard he always was but Melinda is a much better person.
Of course, being generous with your ill-gotten gains isn't exactly a saintly act. It's like the godfather of the mafia donating to an orphanage. All well and good for the orphanage. Not so good for all the victims of the mafia.
And in case anybody thinks I'm going over the top with my comparison of Bill to the godfather of the mafia, let's not forget that Microsoft has been sued twice by the US DOJ and once by the EU for anticompetitive abuse of their monopoly. They settled once with the US (the terms of which they subsequently broke) and was found guilty by the EU and the US on the two other occasions. This is a company that lies to the court, destroys those companies they can't compete with, and they have been found guilty on more than one occasion of code theft, patent abuse, industrial espionage, and deceptive business practises.
Microsoft is a very abusive company which has been harming the industry for decades. Imagine how far computing could have progressed by now if Microsoft wasn't in such a position of power. We had ubiquitous GUIs in 1984 (AmigaOS, MacOS, GEM, GeOS) but it wasn't until *1995* that a similar level of GUI quality reached the market, thanks to Microsoft. That's 11 years of progress, lost, thanks to the power hungry ambitions of the talentless half of the original Microsoft duo (Paul Allen is a god, but Bill was always second-rate).
Bill doesn't get to wipe his slate clean just because he's spreading around less than *half* of his ill-gotten loot. He needs to give it all away and apologise for screwing this industry over for nearly 2 decades. And he also needs to apologise for that self-serving book he wrote, in which he managed to totally dismiss the importance of the Internet, leading to an unannounced *rewrite* of the book (2nd edition) so he wouldn't look like such a myopic moron to future generations. He's a bad person. Screwing Netscape I can live with. But rewriting history is just... disgusting.
I take it you don't know much about Raskin. He has real reasons to criticize "another Windows" as he puts it, reasons that go far beyond "we've used this same model for some time.
Ignoring your snide attack on the previous guy's knowledge - do you really think anybody on/. doesn't know who Raskin is? - I agree with the previous guy that it's unfair to blame open-source coders for producing "more of the same". Let's look at the comments:
"There's this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world," Lanier said. "So what do they make -- another version of Unix?"
Jef Raskin jumped in. "And what do they put on top of it? Another Windows!"
"What are they thinking?" Lanier continued. "Why is the idealism just about how the code is shared -- what about idealism about the code itself?"
They say that "Windows" (meaning WIMP) on top of "UNIX" is a bad idea. Why? It's exactly what Raskin's former employer is currently doing. And Windows is essentially WIMP on top of VMS. Where is the innovation coming out of the leading two desktop OSs? They too are just rehashed versions of decades old ideas.
I don't think it's the open-source community's responsibility to be free R&D for the entire computer industry. Isn't it enough that they are producing free software? Do they have to research it as well? What an onerous task! R&D should be in the domain of researchers and academics. It took 40 years for WIMP to progress this far. Does Raskin think open-source can turn that around over night? If so, then he has more unrealistic expectations about open-source than all the/. cheerleaders combined.
To put it bluntly, I don't think it's fair for Raskin and Lanier to demand such a high standard from the money-poor open-source community when the ultra-rich closed source companies aren't doing any better. Microsoft pumped how many billions into their R&D department and what they did get? A ripoff of J2EE and a ripoff of MacOS X. Apple pumped billions into their own R&D and they've produced Display Postscript... I mean Display PDF... only 20 years after Adobe did it. Colour me unimpressed.
A post on CircleID has reported about an RFC prepared by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd and Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com's Washington D.C. correspondent, analyzing proposals from various parties to mandate the use of special top level domain names (such as.sex or.xxx) or an IP address bit to flag 'adult' or 'unsafe' material or the like.
So now the underlying protocols that drive communications for the entire world need to have bits to designate "sexual content", just to appease the ridiculously puritanical Amercians.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened to your priorities. You'll go to war and kill 1000s of people to find WMD (which it seems never existed). You'll televise your murderous rampage to the world in all its horrifying brutality. Yet if a woman shows a breast on television then there's a "moral" outcry. Whose morals? It seems your society's morals are those of a prudish spinster.
The incredible thing is that in the area of morals and censorship, America shares more in common with religious regimes like the Taleban than with any other group. I can only think of two regions in the world that are so ridiculously out of touch with their human nature: the USA and the religious nutcases in the Middle East.
It'd be so easy to dismiss this rant as a troll or flamebait. Sure, it's easier to ignore that which you wish wasn't true, but you know that I'm making you uncomfortable because I'm telling the truth. There's a serious problem with morals in America right now. Your laws are repressing a natural part of the human existence, imposing an incredibly puritanical view of humanity onto millions of people, yet your same lawmakers allow a 10 year old child to see a man murdered on television. What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
Call me shallow. Call me prejudiced. But when I see a post where the poster can't so much as capitalize their "I"s, or even remember to not capitalize letters in the middle of a sentence, I immediately feel the inclination to dismiss the message, even if I agree with it.
I know I'm not the only one.
You really don't have to be perfect. But, using reasonable, basic English grammar and syntax is a prerequisite to being taken seriously.
Uhhh, dude, he already lost all credibility when he wrote...
If i cant get get it on Vinyl (if you are under 25 or a not DJ try it sometime, to my ears it gives a richer more comfortable sound)
Richer! More comfortable! Fidelity be damned, I too want music with padded cushions!
Though deep-frozen vinyl, coloured with a green pen, and connected to your valve amplifier by oxygen-free platinum ribbon cables... now that's a sound that can't be beat!
100 *hiss* stupid audiophiles *crackle* on the wall, 100 *pop* stupid audiophiles. Take one down *hiss*, shoot him in the he... *click screeech* 100 *hiss* stupid audiophiles *crackle* on the wall, 100 *pop* stupid audiophiles. Take one down *hiss*, shoot him in the he... *click screeech* 100 *hiss* stupid audiophiles... [ad infinitum]
The GPL serves a purpose (though I'm not sure what), but perhaps it's time to get off the "Free" soapbox and settle for plain old free. In the long run, it will help Linux gain widespread acceptance - and that's what Linux people want, right?
Well you DID get a cheap router out of the deal. Imagine if companies didn't use Linux for routers, opting to develop the OS on their own or purchase it. How much do you think that would add to the cost of each router?
Right idea, wrong focus. It's not that we got a cheap router out of the deal. They got a cheap OS out of the deal. Linux is equivalent to millions of dollars in saved licensing fees. This gives them a huge market advantage over their competition. Their only obligation was to make all modifications available under the terms of the GPL.
Except they reneged on their obligations. They were happy to profit from Linux but they're not so keen to pay the pricetag. Too bad for them. If they want to keep their code secret they can go pay $20/device for an embedded VxWorks license like all the other companies do. They deserve no sympathy and no defence. Linux isn't a free-for-all; it's a give-as-you-receive.
They should have used BSD if they wanted to plunder without giving back.
Why on earth wouldn't I want windows to play back videos fresh out of the box.
Because you're a corporate customer and you don't want your employees wasting time playing videos.
Because you're a home user and you'd rather buy the cheaper version of Windows because you have no intention of playing videos.
Because you're an OEM who would rather bundle a cheaper product than Windows Media Player, so you can undercut your competitors.
There are lots of reasons. They all have to do with competition and fairness to others. Your mistake is that you're only thinking of yourself, so you can't see the problem.
Of course extradition to North Korea, China, etc. of a US national would never happen as there would be an uproar, but it would be no different to what is happening in this case. How on earth is Australia letting this happen? Where is the "Fuck you" from the Australian government? Do they have any balls at all?
Nope. Our current government is a bunch of spineless weasels who bend over backwards for the US government. It's shameful.
The leader of the opposition (not in power) Mark Latham called our prime minister John Howard an "arse licker". Hit the nail right on the head. Our current government is a disgrace to the country. In between licking the arses of the US govt, sending us to war despite an overwhelming public outcry, lying to us about all sorts of things (including falsified "intelligence" that led to our participation in the war), a disgraceful attitude towards immigrants and refugees, spending more public money per student on private schools than public schools, the destruction of the public health care system, and introducing GST (aka sales tax), it has become very clear that our government is raping this country for the benefit of the ultra-rich and, of course, the Americans.
Extraditing Australian citizens to the US for trial in the US and punishment in the US because of crimes committed in Australia? Nothing would surprise me anymore. There's a reason that the cynics among us have started calling Australia "The 51st State".
Slashdot Mirror
You really didn't understand a word he said. Let's look at it again...
You see, what he's talking about is support. Not colours. Not design. Not "prefered Linux flavour". He's saying that with Sun and Solaris, he can deploy an application and rest assured that 10 years from now he can still get Sun to support the hardware and the software. His example of Solaris 10 is 100% right; I've seen Sun bend over backwards to get applications written for Solaris 2 running on Solaris 9.
Hell, I have worked on projects with 15 year old Sun gear. Something goes wrong and Sun does send somebody out to fix it! Usually a grizzled old guy nearing retirement but they have spares and knowledge and experience. Yes, they charge through the nose for it, but when you've got a critical system that is 15 years old, you don't fucking care!
Going with RedHat in critical situations is a mistake because RedHat won't even support software they sold you two years ago. It really blew away their credibility in the enterprise market. That's why the entire enterprise market is looking for another vendor for Linux. It looks like SuSe might come out on top.
Your suggestion that he picks up "a bunch of x68 hardware" to run Linux, or even sillier, run Fedora on a second-hand Sparc box he bought off eBay, is so entirely naive that it boggles the mind. You're thinking of the nuts and bolts. You don't understand what business needs.
Because you're wrong. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse at Stanford university (actually SRI, the research institute). The GUI, now that's a gray area, but Memex and Engelbart and Sutherland and Sketchpad and Smalltalk have to be part of the story. Recall that Engelbart demonstrated live video conferencing inside GUI windows in the 1960s!
In any event, both mice and GUIs predate Xerox PARC. The PARC is famous for making a product out of the ideas but they didn't invent the ideas.
Preempting any comments about Apple and Xerox PARC. Although Apple definitely took some ideas from Xerox (paid for, not stolen) the Lisa and Macintosh weren't copies of the Xerox Star. Apple added a lot of GUI innovation (eg, spatial folders, dropdown menus). Also bear in mind that several of the ideas that Apple used from Xerox PARC were not invented at Xerox PARC! Windows and icons and scrollbars predated Xerox PARC as well. Xerox PARC simply integrated all the cutting edge ideas into a neat little package.
I would have preferred an ending without the beach. It was a tragic yet moving ending without the beach. The beach scene made it Disney-esque.
That said, it was an astounding game. Easily my favourite PS2 game.
Are you kidding? Have you ever seen the average woman's handbag? I've seen smaller European cars.
So you didn't even consider paying $50/seat to Sun for StarOffice, which is effectively OpenOffice with professional support.
Sure, but StarOffice wasn't open source. Sun spent $70+ million to buy StarOffice before they open sourced it. That's a pretty damn big gift to open source.
Also Sun fixed a lot of the ickiest problems with StarOffice. Such as the MDI, the regular crashing, the font handling, the speed problems, etc.
Also Sun employs professional programmers and managers to further develop OpenOffice. Sun deserves heaps of kudos for all of this.
Of course, most people prefer to bash Sun for not open-sourcing Java, or for buying drivers from SCO *before* SCO started accusing Linux of being tainted. With friends like that, Sun doesn't need any enemies.
More to the point, StarOffice used to have a mail client, but Sun wisely removed it. YAMC (Yet Another Mail Client) was definitely bloat.
I disagree. People do not always choose the easy option. For example, more people chose MS-DOS than MacOS. My conclusion is that people choose the cheapest option if it does what they want. The fixability aspect is, IMO, not that important.
That's great, unfortunately it doesn't always work.
That's a very silly statement. Linux doesn't have to implement System Restore to "stay on par". There are many aspects to usability and snapshots will not make-or-break Linux.
I don't see how it's any different. Most users cannot "fix" their computers when the software breaks. There's an enormous cottage industry of friends, neighbours, relatives who do nothing but "fix" Windows installations.
Installing new software? This one's hit and miss. Sometimes users get it right. Quite often I've been asked to install a game or a driver for somebody after the instructions or installer let them down.
In my experience, Macs are easier but they're also fallible. Admittedly not very often. I can recall two times in my life where an installer failed on a Mac and the user couldn't figure it out on their own. Though I can recall dozens of incidents where MacOS broke and the user couldn't fix it. This was all pre-X but I'm sure OSX isn't perfect. Sadly not many (not enough) people use Macs.
I suspect what you're really saying is that Linux broke for you once and you had to do weird things to fix it, or you needed somebody elses help. So? I've lived through DOS 3.1, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP and I assure you, on several occasions I needed to do arcane things to make Windows work. That doesn't seem to have stopped Microsoft from dominating the PC industry.
Nope. That's the goal of the GNU project.
Linux was started because Linus wanted to learn more about 386 protected mode. You could say that the original goal of Linux was to give Linus something fun to do.
Some people soon realised they could finish GNU by integrating it with Linux. At that time you might say that there were some people with the goal of using Linux to make a free UNIX.
Afterwards, when GNU/Linux had proven itself worthy, other people introduced their own goals. One goal was cheap terminals to access the Real UNIX(tm) boxes. So XFree86 was ported.
Some users then realised that Linux would be pretty good as a desktop for geeky developers. They started the KDE project. This led to major improvements in audio, video and input.
Some forward-thinking companies realised that Linux was small enough to be used in embedded systems. They tweaked it a little and stated the goal of Linux as an embedded operating system.
Then some companies noticed and they thought Linux was pretty close to being usable as a corporate desktop. Sun bought OpenOffice for us, Ximian gave us Evolution, Netscape gave us a browser, and now one stated goal of Linux (by at least some companies) is to provide extremely cheap corporate desktops.
And there is always the crazy crowd whose goal with Linux is to destroy Microsoft. Hopefully we can all learn to ignore these people because they won't do us the favour of shutting up.
My point is that there is no single goal. We have millions of users, each with their own goals, with Linux being pulled and teased in all directions at once. I think there might have been a time when the dominant goal was to provide a free open-source UNIX-like operating system. But I don't think that's been the dominant goal for many years. I think the current dominant goal is Linux as a corporate desktop (probably half the work I'm observing is towards that goal). There's representation of all the other goals, though.
PS: I think the lack of a single goal is one of Linux's greatest strengths.
We are not brushing things off and pretending they are insignificant.
Some people brush it off. Some people do not. This is not a collective. We do not all share the same opinion.
I was never of the opinion that the debian.org incident was something to casually dismiss. Luckily, the Debian sysadmins agreed. They treated it very seriously and took several Debian servers offline to fix it. The gnome.org sysadmins are being equally professional.
Just because you can read /. user-id 702942 saying something stupid like "M$ is dumheds and Lunix Rulze" does not mean that WE are all of the same opinion.
So shut the fuck up.
It could be even better than that. Imagine this scenario:
We have the technology to do this right now. We have e-cards to pay those automatic toll booths. We have wireless communications. We have MP3 players in car stereos. The music industry could give us what we want, right now. Music. On demand. For a reasonable price.
[rhetorical]
But why would they give us what we want when they can just extort us $29.95 for 8 songs on a 20-year old physical format.
[/rhetorical]
I can think of dozens of modern scenarios for transferring music. Walk up to an e-Music booth (like those interactive booths in shopping malls) and plug your iPod into the firewire jack. Push $1 into the coin slot. Get an album of your choice. Effectively a vending machine for music. They could stick 1TB storage in the machine and have a gigantic catalogue. No need to restock. Just empty the money out once a day and keep it powered. Stick these in shopping malls and they would rake in millions per year per booth.
The problem is they have no incentive to do this. They know we have to come to them; they've got a monopoly on the artists we want to hear. They could put the music on wax phonographs and charge $100 and we'd still pay for it. They've got us by the short and curlies and they know it.
I'm always impressed by how good the OSS documentation is. OK, I can relate to your experience of Microsoft documentation being better. I have to agree. Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and IBM are all first rate in the documentation department. But have you used documentation from other vendors? Dell? Nortel? Shudder. It's enough to make you cry.
OSS documentation isn't always the best, but it's quite often not the worst. GNU documentation is consistently shoulders above UNIX documentation. Linux kernel documentation is lacking but GTK and GNOME documentation is good. Perl documentation is excellent (though that sort of language needs it). Popular server applications for Linux like Sendmail, BIND, Apache are all extremely well documented both for developers and users alike.
I agree with you that writing device drivers for Linux is like stumbling through a darkened room filled with lethal boobytraps. Linux isn't a stable API or ABI (yet). Other OSS can be much better. It's no different to the commercial world where some vendors are good at documentation and other vendors definitely are not!
... but let's see if I'm the only person that thinks that way.
Reasons why Open Source Will Boom:
[1] This allows a small company to use the same software that the "big boys" are using. This means a company can pick the support, training and developer options that suit their budget and needs without sacrificing themselves to inferior software, or locking themselves into proprietary crapware. Small companies will have improved options for support, reference material, third-party add-ons, etc. It's going to be great news for small companies. It also means that amateur developers can train themselves on the proper software. No more piracy to keep yourself abreast of the latest software. No more "Education" versions or crippleware. It's all the real deal, baby!
[2] If Australia buys 1,000,000 Windows desktops (Windows + Office) then that's half a BILLION dollars going overseas to the USA. Imagine how much money is flowing into the USA from the rest of the world, thanks to the USA led dominance of the software industry. This has a bigger effect on smaller and poorer countries. Countries who recognise this economic impact are naturally going to encourage local software development but what software can compete with Microsoft? OSS can! Better to pay a local to improve OSS than send the money overseas! We're already seeing this argument appearing in briefing papers from the New Zealand government, the German government, the Peru government, etc. Governments will be sneaky about this; they'll impose tariffs and legal obstacles to encourage OSS (and perhaps locally owned proprietary software as well).
[3] The gigantic developer base possible with OSS means it will grow faster than any other software. We're already seeing this happen. Linux was 1 developer in 1991. 100 developers in 1992. 1,000 developers in 1993. Current estimates (including userspace projects like GNOME and GNU) are upwards of 100,000 developers. Not all of those developers work fulltime but it doesn't matter because the growth is accelerating. GNU/Linux got to where it is today with far fewer developers. It's going to be a wild wide from now on in. In 5 years time I think it will be obviously ludicrous for a proprietary company to "compete" against popular OSS projects like Linux. The only way to recruit enough developers to be competitive will be for companies to cooperate via OSS licensing.
[4] Incredibly important. Software is getting harder to write. In the 70s a single talented guy could do it in a year. Woz built the Apple I by himself. In the 80s, you needed dozens of people to build something cool. The Macintosh had 80+ people in the team and it took 5 years, though admittedly Burrell and Raskin and Hertzfeld and Atkinson were key figures in its success. A modern OS like Longhorn has 1000s of developers and takes 6+ years even though they aren't starting from scratch. A small startup can't start from zero; they need to license software from Microsoft or WindRiver or they'll never complete in a reasonable time. This reinforces the dominance of Microsoft and WindRiver. Great for the companies in control. Terrible for the startup. Rather than spend money on new and exciting things, they're wasting money on licenses so Bill Gates can buy another extension to his $50 million mansion. OSS gives every startup the same headstart. Companies don't need to start from zero! They can start from a working FREE foundation. They can invest in exciting new technology. "If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".
[5] Open Source allows the users to grow the software in unplanned directions. OSS will fill every software niche, even ones t
Bill never donated a dime to any charity until he married Melinda. What does that tell you? It tells me that Bill is still the stingy bastard he always was but Melinda is a much better person.
Of course, being generous with your ill-gotten gains isn't exactly a saintly act. It's like the godfather of the mafia donating to an orphanage. All well and good for the orphanage. Not so good for all the victims of the mafia.
And in case anybody thinks I'm going over the top with my comparison of Bill to the godfather of the mafia, let's not forget that Microsoft has been sued twice by the US DOJ and once by the EU for anticompetitive abuse of their monopoly. They settled once with the US (the terms of which they subsequently broke) and was found guilty by the EU and the US on the two other occasions. This is a company that lies to the court, destroys those companies they can't compete with, and they have been found guilty on more than one occasion of code theft, patent abuse, industrial espionage, and deceptive business practises.
Microsoft is a very abusive company which has been harming the industry for decades. Imagine how far computing could have progressed by now if Microsoft wasn't in such a position of power. We had ubiquitous GUIs in 1984 (AmigaOS, MacOS, GEM, GeOS) but it wasn't until *1995* that a similar level of GUI quality reached the market, thanks to Microsoft. That's 11 years of progress, lost, thanks to the power hungry ambitions of the talentless half of the original Microsoft duo (Paul Allen is a god, but Bill was always second-rate).
Bill doesn't get to wipe his slate clean just because he's spreading around less than *half* of his ill-gotten loot. He needs to give it all away and apologise for screwing this industry over for nearly 2 decades. And he also needs to apologise for that self-serving book he wrote, in which he managed to totally dismiss the importance of the Internet, leading to an unannounced *rewrite* of the book (2nd edition) so he wouldn't look like such a myopic moron to future generations. He's a bad person. Screwing Netscape I can live with. But rewriting history is just... disgusting.
Ignoring your snide attack on the previous guy's knowledge - do you really think anybody on /. doesn't know who Raskin is? - I agree with the previous guy that it's unfair to blame open-source coders for producing "more of the same". Let's look at the comments:
They say that "Windows" (meaning WIMP) on top of "UNIX" is a bad idea. Why? It's exactly what Raskin's former employer is currently doing. And Windows is essentially WIMP on top of VMS. Where is the innovation coming out of the leading two desktop OSs? They too are just rehashed versions of decades old ideas.
I don't think it's the open-source community's responsibility to be free R&D for the entire computer industry. Isn't it enough that they are producing free software? Do they have to research it as well? What an onerous task! R&D should be in the domain of researchers and academics. It took 40 years for WIMP to progress this far. Does Raskin think open-source can turn that around over night? If so, then he has more unrealistic expectations about open-source than all the /. cheerleaders combined.
To put it bluntly, I don't think it's fair for Raskin and Lanier to demand such a high standard from the money-poor open-source community when the ultra-rich closed source companies aren't doing any better. Microsoft pumped how many billions into their R&D department and what they did get? A ripoff of J2EE and a ripoff of MacOS X. Apple pumped billions into their own R&D and they've produced Display Postscript... I mean Display PDF... only 20 years after Adobe did it. Colour me unimpressed.
So now the underlying protocols that drive communications for the entire world need to have bits to designate "sexual content", just to appease the ridiculously puritanical Amercians.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened to your priorities. You'll go to war and kill 1000s of people to find WMD (which it seems never existed). You'll televise your murderous rampage to the world in all its horrifying brutality. Yet if a woman shows a breast on television then there's a "moral" outcry. Whose morals? It seems your society's morals are those of a prudish spinster.
The incredible thing is that in the area of morals and censorship, America shares more in common with religious regimes like the Taleban than with any other group. I can only think of two regions in the world that are so ridiculously out of touch with their human nature: the USA and the religious nutcases in the Middle East.
It'd be so easy to dismiss this rant as a troll or flamebait. Sure, it's easier to ignore that which you wish wasn't true, but you know that I'm making you uncomfortable because I'm telling the truth. There's a serious problem with morals in America right now. Your laws are repressing a natural part of the human existence, imposing an incredibly puritanical view of humanity onto millions of people, yet your same lawmakers allow a 10 year old child to see a man murdered on television. What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
Uhhh, dude, he already lost all credibility when he wrote...
Richer! More comfortable! Fidelity be damned, I too want music with padded cushions!
Though deep-frozen vinyl, coloured with a green pen, and connected to your valve amplifier by oxygen-free platinum ribbon cables... now that's a sound that can't be beat!
100 *hiss* stupid audiophiles *crackle* on the wall, 100 *pop* stupid audiophiles. Take one down *hiss*, shoot him in the he... *click screeech* 100 *hiss* stupid audiophiles *crackle* on the wall, 100 *pop* stupid audiophiles. Take one down *hiss*, shoot him in the he... *click screeech* 100 *hiss* stupid audiophiles... [ad infinitum]
Physical property is an artificial concept too, if you care to think about it.
I think what you want to say is that IP scarcity is an artificial concept.
Wrong.
There's really nothing more to add.
Right idea, wrong focus. It's not that we got a cheap router out of the deal. They got a cheap OS out of the deal. Linux is equivalent to millions of dollars in saved licensing fees. This gives them a huge market advantage over their competition. Their only obligation was to make all modifications available under the terms of the GPL.
Except they reneged on their obligations. They were happy to profit from Linux but they're not so keen to pay the pricetag. Too bad for them. If they want to keep their code secret they can go pay $20/device for an embedded VxWorks license like all the other companies do. They deserve no sympathy and no defence. Linux isn't a free-for-all; it's a give-as-you-receive.
They should have used BSD if they wanted to plunder without giving back.
Because you're a corporate customer and you don't want your employees wasting time playing videos.
Because you're a home user and you'd rather buy the cheaper version of Windows because you have no intention of playing videos.
Because you're an OEM who would rather bundle a cheaper product than Windows Media Player, so you can undercut your competitors.
There are lots of reasons. They all have to do with competition and fairness to others. Your mistake is that you're only thinking of yourself, so you can't see the problem.
Nope. Our current government is a bunch of spineless weasels who bend over backwards for the US government. It's shameful.
The leader of the opposition (not in power) Mark Latham called our prime minister John Howard an "arse licker". Hit the nail right on the head. Our current government is a disgrace to the country. In between licking the arses of the US govt, sending us to war despite an overwhelming public outcry, lying to us about all sorts of things (including falsified "intelligence" that led to our participation in the war), a disgraceful attitude towards immigrants and refugees, spending more public money per student on private schools than public schools, the destruction of the public health care system, and introducing GST (aka sales tax), it has become very clear that our government is raping this country for the benefit of the ultra-rich and, of course, the Americans.
Extraditing Australian citizens to the US for trial in the US and punishment in the US because of crimes committed in Australia? Nothing would surprise me anymore. There's a reason that the cynics among us have started calling Australia "The 51st State".
We've already got one. It's called "frames per second in Quake, level 1".
This goes nicely with disk space measured in units of "libraries of congress" and CD burner speeds measured in units of "RIAA lawsuits".