Looks like it echos and expands my own little guide I threw out a few months ago. SEO stuff is pretty interesting and doing it right can really help searchers. It's a shame so many people try to rig the system incorrectly while those with real, useful, content usually ignore SEO altogether.
Duh. I didn't mean current Wifi - I meant allow future variants to make use of additional spectrum however they find useful. For many things 20 times slower might be just fine. Why use a 100Mb connection when your only trying to move 20Kb of data an hour. Or do something intereting with that extra spectrum to find a new way to crank some speed out of it. There are alway possibilities but little can be done with them as long as they sell off all the spectrum for useless schemes like radio and tv.
I'd rather encourage corporations to do cool stuff inside public spectrum without interfering with other uses of that spectrum. I think we have the technology today that we can all play nice without needing to hand out chunks of spectrum. Controls about power limitations and interference and such should be enough. If someone has a novel enough concept that does require something different then it should be a rare case that has to apply for special use rights.
Just to note.. the 'web page' interface has always sucked at things like going back, printing, etc that this article complains about. Ever since layout and form elements started getting mixed into content all this has been a shit fest. Ever tried printing HTML or viewing in with a screen reader (such as used for blind users)? It sucks! Moving towards CSS and XML has helped a lot and could do a lot more if more people would use them properly. In short HTML sucks but did well enough and was easy enough to use that it got the job done at the beginning - it's time to move on though.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that with AJAX you have to be even more careful to maintain an interface that is flexible and degrades cleanly. AJAX should be a transition stage away from the web page idea and a new cleaner system that sepperates content from interface. Load XML data from one resource and the interface from another and put them together to get a powerful tool. Interfaces should be changable more easily because of this. You can have a full blown application, a web app, and normal good old HTML pages all making the same information available in different interfaces.
I'd much rather the govt buy back (or jsut take back) the spectrum and release it to public use. The small amount of public spectrum we have has given us such useful things as wireless phones and WiFi - much more useful than a broadcast of Jessica Simpson's latest hit - so why not collect more of the spectrum for those useful things. If we could collect back all the spectrum sold for radio and tv use we could have a lot more spectrum to work with. Faster Wifi with fewer problems with overlapping AP's maybe.
Your girlfriend (ha! a likely story!) found something rare and decided to kill it? What if it was the only one? These greenies will be knocking on her door if they hear about it. Better keep it hush hush.
Damn it, leave the poor thing alone! I knew some rat bastard had stollen my cat but didn't know they were going to put a halloween costume on her and chase her around in the woods with a camera. If they wanted to make another Blair Witch movie they should have just asked to borrow my cat.
So when you nuts are done chasing Miss Whiskers around with your cameras please bring her home.
Strangly enough that company rents an apartment downstairs from me and has like half a dozen employees that seem to be working there and two large trucks out in the lot. Makes me wonder if it's the same group.. you see them in there typing away all hours of the day and night.
Amusing if it is the same people since I did a lot of work on AI when I was younger. Enough that I doubt that they say is anywhere near true. I think a true AI is possible but that before we see it we'll see many steps along the way. Maybe they've reached one of those major steps at best. I'd love to see some proof though. Putting the thing on IRC and letting random people chat with it would be a good start.
*shrugs* I use Ubuntu and Fedora and like them about the same. Neither seems to detect this laptops wifi card but I assume that's just a temporary problem. My other laptop's wifi wasn't detected when I first got it and now works fine. Actually it works better than this laptop's wifi does in Windows. A shame they don't make wifi cards an internal component that can easily be swapped out.:)
I use Debian too but find it to be a bit patchy when it comes to polish. Some places it has it, some places it doesn't, and sometimes the polish comes and goes with different upgrades. I'd complain about how unpolished, if very functional, apt is except that yum is slow and flakey. Ximian's rug worked much better than either apt or yum. To bad the community didn't want to use it or support it after Novell seemingly killed it. Synaptic is nice for newbies though. About on par with Red Carpet although I liked Red Carpet's UI better in most ways. Debian often lags a bit, even if using one of the unstable versions, when it comes to access to new versions of software. A little frustrating. It seems the third party packages for Fedora are easier to find and that fills in a lot of holes in the offical release. Ubuntu is sort of new so I can forgive it for having fewer of these third party packages.. it seems to be improving in this regard pretty quickly.
Not from what I've heard about it. From what Microsoft said it sounded like an incremental upgrade to the existing IE engine. If it's a new engine and still as pitifully limited as they described then they really are wasting their energy.
C'mon even Firefox fans would mostly appreciate Microsoft using the Gecko engine in IE. FINALLY advanced web features could be available to the 80% of web users still silly enough to use IE. It'd sure be nice not to have to create JPG and GIF versions of my PNG (or now SVG) graphics just for IE. JPG and GIF look like shit for certain things. Actual CSS support in the range of Firefox and Safari would be a wonder too. Amazing to not have to create an IE specific stylesheet that still leaves the site not looking quite as good. If IE had XUL, SVG, and canvas support it'd absolutely rock. With those you can make some seriously cool web apps.
Just to be fair.. c'mon FF guys. Why don't we have text shadows yet?! Why is there still no good way to link fonts (real, TTF fonts) from a page such that if they are used on a page and the OS doesn't have the needed font already it'll download the font the same as if it were an image or any other embed object. Just do it! Make a font meta tag or something.
I'm sure it's not helped any that they moved most the IE engineers that understood it's design to other projects or that IE itself is obviously in horrible need of a major overhaul. Making the clever decision to tie it tightly into other programs and the OS was another good idea that has benefited IE's security and ease of repair and testing.
May I suggest they refactor IE a bit? Maybe starting by switching to a more modern and secure engine like Gecko or KHTML? IE doesn't earn them anything directly and they could keep the IE name and look without users noticing if they switched to a different rendering engine. It's totally legal and free. It'd offload a lot of security and bug fixing to those not on Microsoft's payroll. It's squash the threat Firefox is becoming. Seems a pretty obvious choice to me.
The people that could read the specs already know. I don't care if my printer I just paid $200 for only has $5 of parts in it or that my new video cards achieves it's speed by switching into a special mode when I start Doom 6. These are things I expect. I just want their damn product to work when, where, and how I need it to work and that means open specs so if I need to use it somewhere or somehow they can't be expected to design for that I can make the needed changes.
Yes, I bought my car in San Diego knowing it didn't come with snow tires. I'm okay with that so long as I can put snow tires, chains, or whatever on it should I need to take it to Maine. Same thing.
I must not have been clear enough. Nobody could afford to pay to have developed every piece of software they might need.
Even in your case though I doubt you could afford your software if many pieces you use without knowing it weren't opensource or otherwise free. The Internet would be ungodly expensive if every bit of software that drives it was commercial. We're talking $.10/min just to use the network and a charge for using every website. Probably something like AOL, Compuserve, etc used to be where every email you sent was $.25. It'd really add up quickly. I have dozens of free websites on my servers. I couldn't afford to make them free to others if I had to pay per site I hosted for a commercial webserver or OS.
No single company, not even Microsoft, could have created all the software people need.
If you're claiming you never have problems with your software you're either in denial, live in some void where you don't do anything with your software, or most likely you just are so used to those problems that you no longer notice them. XP does crash and even more often it gets bogged down by processes not working properly - not third-party software only either - Windows Explorer and built-in Windows programs like ping are some I see hang and leak memory a lot. Funny that I didn't see being infected with spyware, software crashing, and data loss advertised on the boxes. Given that those are on the box I'll give to you that all commercial software runs as advertised.
Customers each assist in product improvements in their own way. A few may not want to be involved at all, and with opensource that is totally allowed, but most customers want a problem to be fixed when they report it. They don't want to have to pay for a new version in the hopes of getting that fix. THAT is a customer providing useful feedback. A smaller fraction of customers do want more active involvement. They may write docs on how to use the software (this happens for both open and closed source software), they will provide patches, etc. The small percentage of users that want to do this is usually enough to help a lot.
If a car has a problem and the user has no way of reporting it and getting a response then they will be frustrated. Again for the majority that is all they want to do but they do want to be able to do that. Again, the few will be of the type that they'll enjoy fixing the problem and letting others know how it can be done. Many others will enjoy just adding on cool new features to their car and letting others know what they did and how. Or maybe you've not noticed the HUGE market for after market and custom mods for cars. Very few people will just let the car break and be content not to have any involvement in doing something about it.
Have you used Windows? It isn't easy. I have almost everyone I know constantly asking me to install this, fix that, etc because it isn't easy for them. Granted it is easier to add drivers for odd ball hardware because usually none exists at all for Linux. Hard to add what doesn't exist. Most drivers in Linux are easier though as you plug the device in and the drivers are either there or can be added in seconds with no wondering if you'll have to install it through a wizard or some other weird ass interface (why driver provides can't decide on a single interface for installation I dunno) or fixing incompatibilites with other software. The Linux ones require more knowledge up front (because the quickstart manual rarely has Linux directions) but are quicker and easier to do if you have that knowledge. No stupid reboots required for Linux installation either.;)
Most users don't care about open specs and drivers or open software because they want everything easy now even at the expense of it being really hard later. Ooops my scanner no longer works because I switched from 2000 to XP.. totally screwed now. Bitch bitch bitch. Ooops I have 10 years of financial records in this proprietary format that only works with this program that has been discon
I do have experience as an OEM. What your talking about isn't practical for even a midsize dealer. All in all it'd be much cheaper for the manufacturer to open the specs or drivers than it is for the average dealer to do so. For the investment required for a dealer it'd be cheaper to develop your own product in many cases.
Maybe if you're talking Walmart or Amazon levels of volume it'd be easy. I highly doubt an order for even 5000 units would get you much. It'd take a pretty big amount of leverage to get the information and a lot more to get permission to release that information to the public at large. Not very likely for a small new dealer. I doubt I could get a bank loan for enough money to buy 5,000,000 units of much of anything.
If a dealer had access to the information to create drivers I would. Sadly I highly doubt this is the case. You'd have to make the unit yourself which of course has all the costs of entering such a market from scratch.. millions, if not billions, of dollars required.
If you'd grown up with a real OS instead of on Windows you'd use this feature a lot more. Just because you don't think of using this kind of feature doesn't mean it isn't useful. An example from my life. I have a set-top box that runs Linux. Rather than having a hot noisy powerful system in there I chose something quiet which is less powerful. It runs the apps on the server in another room but displays them on the set-top box exactly as if they were local. If I switch rooms I can bring the desktop up on the set-top in that room instead without any problem. All the same files, the same apps, no complex configuration, and no fan noise in any of them. That's just one example of where I use this ability.
Very true - but there are a lot of opensource fans that would make the same promise. Compared to the almost zero cost of the company doing this selling a few thousand extra units should easily cover the cost. Meanwhile it should reflect by creating a better experience (higher quality drivers, better documentation, etc) for their existing customers which will likely give those cutomers cause to buy more of the company's products. All in all a lot of cheap advertising.
Seems a pretty good business decision. How much can it cost to pay a technical writer and engineer to clean up the internal product documentation a bit and make it available to the public? Do that and throw up a website for driver development and you've expended your money on the project. A website for a year is less than $1000. A couple days of time from a staff writer and staff engineer is probably again less than $1000. So even if my estimates are way wrong it'd cost the company $5000 or less.
You mean those crazy ideas that let me effeciently run X apps on one computer and see them on another? Crazy assumptions about networking there.. OSX and Windows have to tack on crappy alternatives to do the same and those don't work well at all.
Funny then that Linux with X still draws faster with less processor use. OS X is freaking slow even on new hardware. Linux/X runs fine on my 5 year old hardware. X certainly has problems but they are problems best addressed by refactoring and not by reinventing the wheel. Most of them are being addressed.
Postscript isn't a good standard for printers. It offers flexibility that printers just don't honestly need 99% of the time. It's a fine standard for the 1% that do need it but really shouldn't there be a standard for the other 99% of printers? No fancy communications are needed to print. All you really need to do is select a few printing options and transfer raw image data. Heck, get fancy and make it transfer compressed raw image data to speed up printing. Not at all hard - they just don't want such a standard. This would not make printing any worse or more expensive.
FAT isn't a camera standard. It's the filesystem that is used on most memory cards. It's a default standard because it's simple enough to fit within that small space and work in that price of hardware and it works well with Windows. It tells the camera nothing about how to communicate with the computer. Actually a lot of newer cameras are becoming standardized in how they communicate (showing up as a removable drive) which is good. There is no reason for any camera not to follow this standard for still photos. Streaming cameras could use some work on a standardized interface though.
VESA is a loose standard. It's more of a video API than a real driver. It doesn't support required modern features. Video cards need basically the same information to do what they do. Most software already uses standard API's such as DirectX or OpenGL to access these cards. There is no reason that the drivers can't be as standardized as these API's. Doing so might raise the price slightly by moving processing that goes on on the CPU to the card but I doubt it'd be much because the processors of modern video cards are already extremely powerful and flexible.
USB has nothing to with joysticks other than being the generic method by which they connect. It doesn't tell the computer how to understand the joysticks input. Joysticks are fairly standardized but they are growing less standardized and that is bad for stability. Do you want your game to crash in the middle of a firefight because it has a non-standard driver that doesn't work with your video card? Do joysticks even need to be recognized as different from a mouse? Standard mouse drivers understand multiple axis at a high precision and many buttons. What else does a joystick need?
Modems were mostly standardized until some moron invented the concept of a winmodem. Winmodems NEVER work well. They offload hardware processing to the CPU which has the mixed effect of slowing the computer and making the modem less reliable. Brilliant. The difference in price between a real hardware modem and a winmodem? About $10 back in the day - probably less now.
All in all I see no argument for not standardizing. You can allow standards that allow extensions. As you say OpenGL and many others allow that. The difference between that and no standards is that with extensible standards there are fewer places for problems to develop and as standards grow to support new concepts products can be adapted to follow those standards in new versions.
Without standard interfaces the PC probably wouldn't have made the huge impact on our society it did. By following standard interfaces the consumer has choices and can expect things to work together even when made by different manufacturers. The trend towards no standardization is hurting choice and reliability. Would you buy a harddrive that instead of following a SCSI standard decided to implement their own LUCI (Less Universal Connection Interface) interface that wouldn't work with your PC or only if you jumped through a lot of hoops? Probably not.
We are stuck in the 90's technology wise because of lack of standards. Has IE improved since the 90's? Not much. We should have rich interactive websites that degrade cleanly but Microsoft doesn't see supporting these as worth their effort so they've pretty much killed the market. They knew they couldn't compete with the web so they killed the web's development. Yeh, great! IE still doesn't support decent CSS or
My experience is that hardware compatibility is hard on ALL computers.
Your video driver might be incompatible with your network driver or your camera driver and there is nothing you can do about it. You might not notice other than just complaining at normal Windows bugginess but that is part of why Windows is so buggy.
Your scanner or camera might work fine but be incompatible with your new computer because those items simply don't have drivers that work with the newest version of Windows. So you either have to stay behind the curve until your hardware all wears out or buy a whole new computer and all new hardware whenever a new version of Windows comes out.
Fun. All because hardware companies think standardizing and open specs will hurt their profits and Microsoft encourages their misbehavior to keep the OS market cornered.
If they want my business then I'd say it is their responsibility to either make their product compatible with an existing standard, which a generic driver can support, or provide the information needed to make custom drivers for their product. They don't have to write the driver I need, they just need to let me write the driver I need.
There really is no reason for every damn product on the market to need a custom driver though. There should be one interface for a printer, one for a camera, one for a video card, one for a joystick, one for a modem, etc. The consumer needs to demand this. Not only will it give us choices as to what OS and software we use with these products but it'll also make computers a lot more stable. A lot of crashes and other common problems are the result of minor incompatibilities between different drivers on the system. Standard drivers can be well tested. A mish mash of random drivers can't be tested well at all.
My first explanation would probably sound rather rude and that wouldn't really prove anything other than getting into a name calling fight. So to a more useful argument..
I am a big free software advocate. I am a professional programmer that invests much of my time and money sponsoring free software development. A single person could never create, or pay for, every single piece of software they might need to use in this day and age. By working with others we can share what software we can create, and pay for, so that we all benefit. THAT is the entire basis to the concept of free software. There is no rule that you can't also sell software. Obviously many free software supporters do sell the software to great profit.
What you can't do is continue to sell crap. Crap can be defined as software that doesn't work, can't be made to work, and can't be returned. THAT is exactly what the commercial software industry is. You buy a program and half the time it doesn't work well enough to acomplish the things the box claimed it could do. So.. return it and try something else.. oops that's right. They won't take software returns. You can't see the source code so you can't fix it. You're just fucked.
Please make free software and sell it. Make a profit. Hire more programmers. Sell more software. Make more profit. We, the free software community, want you to do this because it makes more software available to us. It makes better software available to us. We'll even help you add features and fix bugs at no cost to you. Maybe you won't be able to sell a poorly supported crappy product with no documentation for $300 but you will be able to sell a good product with good support and documentation for a reasonable price. Sounds like a lot more work for the buck until you consider that the customer will help improve, document, and support your product.
I REALLY say this to hardware companies. Make your product with good, open source, drivers (or well documented specifications) and I'll buy your products. The drivers don't even need to be for my OS of choice (Linux). If they're open source I'll port them myself if needed. I'll pick your product over cheaper products if you do this because I won't need to worry about the product not having drivers or having drivers that suck or no longer work in the future. (I've had to many bits of perfectly good hardware stop working in Windows because the company didn't release drivers for the new version of Windows.) Money is not a problem. I spend a LOT of money on electronics and software. I just want to know your product will work when I need it to and to me that means having the information to write or fix drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like it echos and expands my own little guide I threw out a few months ago. SEO stuff is pretty interesting and doing it right can really help searchers. It's a shame so many people try to rig the system incorrectly while those with real, useful, content usually ignore SEO altogether.
If you wanted to do that why would you bother giving notice? That'd be quite stupid I'd think.
Duh. I didn't mean current Wifi - I meant allow future variants to make use of additional spectrum however they find useful. For many things 20 times slower might be just fine. Why use a 100Mb connection when your only trying to move 20Kb of data an hour. Or do something intereting with that extra spectrum to find a new way to crank some speed out of it. There are alway possibilities but little can be done with them as long as they sell off all the spectrum for useless schemes like radio and tv.
I'd rather encourage corporations to do cool stuff inside public spectrum without interfering with other uses of that spectrum. I think we have the technology today that we can all play nice without needing to hand out chunks of spectrum. Controls about power limitations and interference and such should be enough. If someone has a novel enough concept that does require something different then it should be a rare case that has to apply for special use rights.
Just to note.. the 'web page' interface has always sucked at things like going back, printing, etc that this article complains about. Ever since layout and form elements started getting mixed into content all this has been a shit fest. Ever tried printing HTML or viewing in with a screen reader (such as used for blind users)? It sucks! Moving towards CSS and XML has helped a lot and could do a lot more if more people would use them properly. In short HTML sucks but did well enough and was easy enough to use that it got the job done at the beginning - it's time to move on though.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that with AJAX you have to be even more careful to maintain an interface that is flexible and degrades cleanly. AJAX should be a transition stage away from the web page idea and a new cleaner system that sepperates content from interface. Load XML data from one resource and the interface from another and put them together to get a powerful tool. Interfaces should be changable more easily because of this. You can have a full blown application, a web app, and normal good old HTML pages all making the same information available in different interfaces.
I'd much rather the govt buy back (or jsut take back) the spectrum and release it to public use. The small amount of public spectrum we have has given us such useful things as wireless phones and WiFi - much more useful than a broadcast of Jessica Simpson's latest hit - so why not collect more of the spectrum for those useful things. If we could collect back all the spectrum sold for radio and tv use we could have a lot more spectrum to work with. Faster Wifi with fewer problems with overlapping AP's maybe.
Your girlfriend (ha! a likely story!) found something rare and decided to kill it? What if it was the only one? These greenies will be knocking on her door if they hear about it. Better keep it hush hush.
Damn it, leave the poor thing alone! I knew some rat bastard had stollen my cat but didn't know they were going to put a halloween costume on her and chase her around in the woods with a camera. If they wanted to make another Blair Witch movie they should have just asked to borrow my cat.
So when you nuts are done chasing Miss Whiskers around with your cameras please bring her home.
Strangly enough that company rents an apartment downstairs from me and has like half a dozen employees that seem to be working there and two large trucks out in the lot. Makes me wonder if it's the same group.. you see them in there typing away all hours of the day and night.
Amusing if it is the same people since I did a lot of work on AI when I was younger. Enough that I doubt that they say is anywhere near true. I think a true AI is possible but that before we see it we'll see many steps along the way. Maybe they've reached one of those major steps at best. I'd love to see some proof though. Putting the thing on IRC and letting random people chat with it would be a good start.
*shrugs* I use Ubuntu and Fedora and like them about the same. Neither seems to detect this laptops wifi card but I assume that's just a temporary problem. My other laptop's wifi wasn't detected when I first got it and now works fine. Actually it works better than this laptop's wifi does in Windows. A shame they don't make wifi cards an internal component that can easily be swapped out. :)
I use Debian too but find it to be a bit patchy when it comes to polish. Some places it has it, some places it doesn't, and sometimes the polish comes and goes with different upgrades. I'd complain about how unpolished, if very functional, apt is except that yum is slow and flakey. Ximian's rug worked much better than either apt or yum. To bad the community didn't want to use it or support it after Novell seemingly killed it. Synaptic is nice for newbies though. About on par with Red Carpet although I liked Red Carpet's UI better in most ways. Debian often lags a bit, even if using one of the unstable versions, when it comes to access to new versions of software. A little frustrating. It seems the third party packages for Fedora are easier to find and that fills in a lot of holes in the offical release. Ubuntu is sort of new so I can forgive it for having fewer of these third party packages.. it seems to be improving in this regard pretty quickly.
Not from what I've heard about it. From what Microsoft said it sounded like an incremental upgrade to the existing IE engine. If it's a new engine and still as pitifully limited as they described then they really are wasting their energy.
C'mon even Firefox fans would mostly appreciate Microsoft using the Gecko engine in IE. FINALLY advanced web features could be available to the 80% of web users still silly enough to use IE. It'd sure be nice not to have to create JPG and GIF versions of my PNG (or now SVG) graphics just for IE. JPG and GIF look like shit for certain things. Actual CSS support in the range of Firefox and Safari would be a wonder too. Amazing to not have to create an IE specific stylesheet that still leaves the site not looking quite as good. If IE had XUL, SVG, and canvas support it'd absolutely rock. With those you can make some seriously cool web apps.
Just to be fair.. c'mon FF guys. Why don't we have text shadows yet?! Why is there still no good way to link fonts (real, TTF fonts) from a page such that if they are used on a page and the OS doesn't have the needed font already it'll download the font the same as if it were an image or any other embed object. Just do it! Make a font meta tag or something.
I'm sure it's not helped any that they moved most the IE engineers that understood it's design to other projects or that IE itself is obviously in horrible need of a major overhaul. Making the clever decision to tie it tightly into other programs and the OS was another good idea that has benefited IE's security and ease of repair and testing.
May I suggest they refactor IE a bit? Maybe starting by switching to a more modern and secure engine like Gecko or KHTML? IE doesn't earn them anything directly and they could keep the IE name and look without users noticing if they switched to a different rendering engine. It's totally legal and free. It'd offload a lot of security and bug fixing to those not on Microsoft's payroll. It's squash the threat Firefox is becoming. Seems a pretty obvious choice to me.
The people that could read the specs already know. I don't care if my printer I just paid $200 for only has $5 of parts in it or that my new video cards achieves it's speed by switching into a special mode when I start Doom 6. These are things I expect. I just want their damn product to work when, where, and how I need it to work and that means open specs so if I need to use it somewhere or somehow they can't be expected to design for that I can make the needed changes.
Yes, I bought my car in San Diego knowing it didn't come with snow tires. I'm okay with that so long as I can put snow tires, chains, or whatever on it should I need to take it to Maine. Same thing.
I must not have been clear enough. Nobody could afford to pay to have developed every piece of software they might need.
;)
Even in your case though I doubt you could afford your software if many pieces you use without knowing it weren't opensource or otherwise free. The Internet would be ungodly expensive if every bit of software that drives it was commercial. We're talking $.10/min just to use the network and a charge for using every website. Probably something like AOL, Compuserve, etc used to be where every email you sent was $.25. It'd really add up quickly. I have dozens of free websites on my servers. I couldn't afford to make them free to others if I had to pay per site I hosted for a commercial webserver or OS.
No single company, not even Microsoft, could have created all the software people need.
If you're claiming you never have problems with your software you're either in denial, live in some void where you don't do anything with your software, or most likely you just are so used to those problems that you no longer notice them. XP does crash and even more often it gets bogged down by processes not working properly - not third-party software only either - Windows Explorer and built-in Windows programs like ping are some I see hang and leak memory a lot. Funny that I didn't see being infected with spyware, software crashing, and data loss advertised on the boxes. Given that those are on the box I'll give to you that all commercial software runs as advertised.
Customers each assist in product improvements in their own way. A few may not want to be involved at all, and with opensource that is totally allowed, but most customers want a problem to be fixed when they report it. They don't want to have to pay for a new version in the hopes of getting that fix. THAT is a customer providing useful feedback. A smaller fraction of customers do want more active involvement. They may write docs on how to use the software (this happens for both open and closed source software), they will provide patches, etc. The small percentage of users that want to do this is usually enough to help a lot.
If a car has a problem and the user has no way of reporting it and getting a response then they will be frustrated. Again for the majority that is all they want to do but they do want to be able to do that. Again, the few will be of the type that they'll enjoy fixing the problem and letting others know how it can be done. Many others will enjoy just adding on cool new features to their car and letting others know what they did and how. Or maybe you've not noticed the HUGE market for after market and custom mods for cars. Very few people will just let the car break and be content not to have any involvement in doing something about it.
Have you used Windows? It isn't easy. I have almost everyone I know constantly asking me to install this, fix that, etc because it isn't easy for them. Granted it is easier to add drivers for odd ball hardware because usually none exists at all for Linux. Hard to add what doesn't exist. Most drivers in Linux are easier though as you plug the device in and the drivers are either there or can be added in seconds with no wondering if you'll have to install it through a wizard or some other weird ass interface (why driver provides can't decide on a single interface for installation I dunno) or fixing incompatibilites with other software. The Linux ones require more knowledge up front (because the quickstart manual rarely has Linux directions) but are quicker and easier to do if you have that knowledge. No stupid reboots required for Linux installation either.
Most users don't care about open specs and drivers or open software because they want everything easy now even at the expense of it being really hard later. Ooops my scanner no longer works because I switched from 2000 to XP.. totally screwed now. Bitch bitch bitch. Ooops I have 10 years of financial records in this proprietary format that only works with this program that has been discon
I do have experience as an OEM. What your talking about isn't practical for even a midsize dealer. All in all it'd be much cheaper for the manufacturer to open the specs or drivers than it is for the average dealer to do so. For the investment required for a dealer it'd be cheaper to develop your own product in many cases.
Maybe if you're talking Walmart or Amazon levels of volume it'd be easy. I highly doubt an order for even 5000 units would get you much. It'd take a pretty big amount of leverage to get the information and a lot more to get permission to release that information to the public at large. Not very likely for a small new dealer. I doubt I could get a bank loan for enough money to buy 5,000,000 units of much of anything.
If a dealer had access to the information to create drivers I would. Sadly I highly doubt this is the case. You'd have to make the unit yourself which of course has all the costs of entering such a market from scratch.. millions, if not billions, of dollars required.
If you'd grown up with a real OS instead of on Windows you'd use this feature a lot more. Just because you don't think of using this kind of feature doesn't mean it isn't useful. An example from my life. I have a set-top box that runs Linux. Rather than having a hot noisy powerful system in there I chose something quiet which is less powerful. It runs the apps on the server in another room but displays them on the set-top box exactly as if they were local. If I switch rooms I can bring the desktop up on the set-top in that room instead without any problem. All the same files, the same apps, no complex configuration, and no fan noise in any of them. That's just one example of where I use this ability.
Of course. X wasn't designed to go over that slow of a link. Over a fast network though X is way better than VNC.
Very true - but there are a lot of opensource fans that would make the same promise. Compared to the almost zero cost of the company doing this selling a few thousand extra units should easily cover the cost. Meanwhile it should reflect by creating a better experience (higher quality drivers, better documentation, etc) for their existing customers which will likely give those cutomers cause to buy more of the company's products. All in all a lot of cheap advertising.
Seems a pretty good business decision. How much can it cost to pay a technical writer and engineer to clean up the internal product documentation a bit and make it available to the public? Do that and throw up a website for driver development and you've expended your money on the project. A website for a year is less than $1000. A couple days of time from a staff writer and staff engineer is probably again less than $1000. So even if my estimates are way wrong it'd cost the company $5000 or less.
You mean those crazy ideas that let me effeciently run X apps on one computer and see them on another? Crazy assumptions about networking there.. OSX and Windows have to tack on crappy alternatives to do the same and those don't work well at all.
Funny then that Linux with X still draws faster with less processor use. OS X is freaking slow even on new hardware. Linux/X runs fine on my 5 year old hardware. X certainly has problems but they are problems best addressed by refactoring and not by reinventing the wheel. Most of them are being addressed.
Postscript isn't a good standard for printers. It offers flexibility that printers just don't honestly need 99% of the time. It's a fine standard for the 1% that do need it but really shouldn't there be a standard for the other 99% of printers? No fancy communications are needed to print. All you really need to do is select a few printing options and transfer raw image data. Heck, get fancy and make it transfer compressed raw image data to speed up printing. Not at all hard - they just don't want such a standard. This would not make printing any worse or more expensive.
FAT isn't a camera standard. It's the filesystem that is used on most memory cards. It's a default standard because it's simple enough to fit within that small space and work in that price of hardware and it works well with Windows. It tells the camera nothing about how to communicate with the computer. Actually a lot of newer cameras are becoming standardized in how they communicate (showing up as a removable drive) which is good. There is no reason for any camera not to follow this standard for still photos. Streaming cameras could use some work on a standardized interface though.
VESA is a loose standard. It's more of a video API than a real driver. It doesn't support required modern features. Video cards need basically the same information to do what they do. Most software already uses standard API's such as DirectX or OpenGL to access these cards. There is no reason that the drivers can't be as standardized as these API's. Doing so might raise the price slightly by moving processing that goes on on the CPU to the card but I doubt it'd be much because the processors of modern video cards are already extremely powerful and flexible.
USB has nothing to with joysticks other than being the generic method by which they connect. It doesn't tell the computer how to understand the joysticks input. Joysticks are fairly standardized but they are growing less standardized and that is bad for stability. Do you want your game to crash in the middle of a firefight because it has a non-standard driver that doesn't work with your video card? Do joysticks even need to be recognized as different from a mouse? Standard mouse drivers understand multiple axis at a high precision and many buttons. What else does a joystick need?
Modems were mostly standardized until some moron invented the concept of a winmodem. Winmodems NEVER work well. They offload hardware processing to the CPU which has the mixed effect of slowing the computer and making the modem less reliable. Brilliant. The difference in price between a real hardware modem and a winmodem? About $10 back in the day - probably less now.
All in all I see no argument for not standardizing. You can allow standards that allow extensions. As you say OpenGL and many others allow that. The difference between that and no standards is that with extensible standards there are fewer places for problems to develop and as standards grow to support new concepts products can be adapted to follow those standards in new versions.
Without standard interfaces the PC probably wouldn't have made the huge impact on our society it did. By following standard interfaces the consumer has choices and can expect things to work together even when made by different manufacturers. The trend towards no standardization is hurting choice and reliability. Would you buy a harddrive that instead of following a SCSI standard decided to implement their own LUCI (Less Universal Connection Interface) interface that wouldn't work with your PC or only if you jumped through a lot of hoops? Probably not.
We are stuck in the 90's technology wise because of lack of standards. Has IE improved since the 90's? Not much. We should have rich interactive websites that degrade cleanly but Microsoft doesn't see supporting these as worth their effort so they've pretty much killed the market. They knew they couldn't compete with the web so they killed the web's development. Yeh, great! IE still doesn't support decent CSS or
My experience is that hardware compatibility is hard on ALL computers.
Your video driver might be incompatible with your network driver or your camera driver and there is nothing you can do about it. You might not notice other than just complaining at normal Windows bugginess but that is part of why Windows is so buggy.
Your scanner or camera might work fine but be incompatible with your new computer because those items simply don't have drivers that work with the newest version of Windows. So you either have to stay behind the curve until your hardware all wears out or buy a whole new computer and all new hardware whenever a new version of Windows comes out.
Fun. All because hardware companies think standardizing and open specs will hurt their profits and Microsoft encourages their misbehavior to keep the OS market cornered.
If they want my business then I'd say it is their responsibility to either make their product compatible with an existing standard, which a generic driver can support, or provide the information needed to make custom drivers for their product. They don't have to write the driver I need, they just need to let me write the driver I need.
There really is no reason for every damn product on the market to need a custom driver though. There should be one interface for a printer, one for a camera, one for a video card, one for a joystick, one for a modem, etc. The consumer needs to demand this. Not only will it give us choices as to what OS and software we use with these products but it'll also make computers a lot more stable. A lot of crashes and other common problems are the result of minor incompatibilities between different drivers on the system. Standard drivers can be well tested. A mish mash of random drivers can't be tested well at all.
My first explanation would probably sound rather rude and that wouldn't really prove anything other than getting into a name calling fight. So to a more useful argument..
I am a big free software advocate. I am a professional programmer that invests much of my time and money sponsoring free software development. A single person could never create, or pay for, every single piece of software they might need to use in this day and age. By working with others we can share what software we can create, and pay for, so that we all benefit. THAT is the entire basis to the concept of free software. There is no rule that you can't also sell software. Obviously many free software supporters do sell the software to great profit.
What you can't do is continue to sell crap. Crap can be defined as software that doesn't work, can't be made to work, and can't be returned. THAT is exactly what the commercial software industry is. You buy a program and half the time it doesn't work well enough to acomplish the things the box claimed it could do. So.. return it and try something else.. oops that's right. They won't take software returns. You can't see the source code so you can't fix it. You're just fucked.
Please make free software and sell it. Make a profit. Hire more programmers. Sell more software. Make more profit. We, the free software community, want you to do this because it makes more software available to us. It makes better software available to us. We'll even help you add features and fix bugs at no cost to you. Maybe you won't be able to sell a poorly supported crappy product with no documentation for $300 but you will be able to sell a good product with good support and documentation for a reasonable price. Sounds like a lot more work for the buck until you consider that the customer will help improve, document, and support your product.
I REALLY say this to hardware companies. Make your product with good, open source, drivers (or well documented specifications) and I'll buy your products. The drivers don't even need to be for my OS of choice (Linux). If they're open source I'll port them myself if needed. I'll pick your product over cheaper products if you do this because I won't need to worry about the product not having drivers or having drivers that suck or no longer work in the future. (I've had to many bits of perfectly good hardware stop working in Windows because the company didn't release drivers for the new version of Windows.) Money is not a problem. I spend a LOT of money on electronics and software. I just want to know your product will work when I need it to and to me that means having the information to write or fix drivers.