There's this distressing "cave man grunt" mentality to the way a lot of people just dismiss the notion that Microsoft is successful because they competed and won in the marketplace.
If Microsoft was successful because they competed in the market and won, then there'd be no problems. I mean, consider AOL. They were successful. They competed in the market, against all odds, and won. But they didn't win by preventing Prodigy and Compuserve from competing, or use their market dominance to prevent competition.
Microsoft's idea of competition, really is to buy or bury all competitors. IOW, Microsoft has convinced themselves and other that anti-competitive practices is really competition. You notice that both Compuserve and Prodigy no longer exist. This is the goal that they, of course, wanted, yet they didn't have to do things like prevent Prodigy bundling their software with OEM's, or other things like that.
Also, note that AOL has competition that is vying to replace AOL's market dominance. Yet even with that we see nothing from AOL indicating that they are using their market domenince to keep others out. AOL could do things like prevent OEM's to bunding other online services software, or prevent it from being bundled with magazines and other marketable areas. But they don't.
You see, it's not success that's a problem. If Microsoft were just successful like AOL is, I'd probably still be using some of their products that are better then the competition. But when they do things like prevent Compaq from bundling Netscape, charge IBM 4 times the amount to license Windows 95 as they would have if IBM didn't sell OS/2, developed Windows to be "incompatible" with competing DOS's, and force ISV's to ship unnecessary Microsoft products with their software, then I think that's going beyond what a successful, competing company would do.
Now I've just got to get another PC. I've been waiting to run FreeBSD in my mix for a long time, but had nothing really to use it for. Applixware is as good a reason as any, I presume.
Now the important question. Which has better FreeBSD support? Gnome or KDE?
Instead of making more distributions and trying to have something better than another, why not focus on a few, rather than 30+?
That's right! I wish more companies would take that advice, especially car manufacturs. I mean, really, a sub-compact car is a sub-compact car, right? Why should we have 3 dozen different models of sub-compact cars, each with their dozen different options.
As I read somewhere "linux will kill linux".
Having so many model is killing the sub-compact car market. People are going back to horse and buggy, for heavens sake.
With this many distributions, there are really no standards, and will cause many problems in the future.
With every sub-compact car having its own peculiareties, its no wonder buyers are becoming disillusioned. Every engine is different, every dashboard is decided customized in placement, even the door locks are different. It's a real shame. Don't you think that buyers would be much more receptive if they had the choice of perhaps 2 or 3 models of a sub-compact car, and that even those models agreed on placement and engine type?
I can't believe they ever shipped a product. It looked like they were just running a scam to get a big IPO (and maybe they still are). At least now they've cleaned up the webpage a little and have an actual distro. I wonder what it's based around? Anyone?
I thought it was mostly Red Hat, but that might have been another so-called product of theirs.
I agree that people buying motherboards would be the doityerselfer type who would probably be interested in Linux. But aren't those same people the ones who would probably want to choose their own distro, or already have a distro they want to use? I wonder if it would/will do anything for user numbers at all.
You have a good point. It's a strange market, those who would be predisposed to useing Linux are probably already using Linux, and those that aren't probably won't
Okay, but this does 2 things. #1, it gets Corel Linux into the hands of those who probably wouldn't have chosen it to begin with. #2, there are still thousands of "hackers" still using Windows. It's time to give them a chance to feel up Linux.
I think pre-loading is a Bad Thing; look at Windoze. The only reason windoze is on so many systems now is that it was pre-loaded and people were too lazy or ignorant to take it off. Then M$ got lazy too. Since nobody switched to anything else, they figured they could skimp on the product and charge more and make a fortune (which they did).
Ah, but Microsoft had no competition. This is good for Linux, because, should Corel start getting lazy, the OEM's would quickly go to Red Hat or someone. Microsoft had no such incentive.
And, as you mentioned, everyone is to lazy or ignorant to use something else, so they just use what's pre-installed. That means more marketshare for Linux:)
Minimal perhaps... but price is irrelevant. Low-cost or not, it's still a tax. Isn't that what we're always complaining about with M$?
No, a "tax" is where you don't have any choice, because (in this case) Microsoft has crippled the market into forcing you to pay for Windows. The tax isn't the simple fact that they sell Windows, it's that they prevent anyone from not selling Windows.
In this case, even if PC Chips has an exclusive contract, you could go to another vendor. You can't do that with Windows. Now I suppose if Corel had licensing with all Mobo makers, so that even if I wanted to run FreeBSD, I had to pay them their $12, then I'd be upset. But they don't
I don't see exclusivity contracts as bad. I see them as bad when they are used to force OEM's to capitulate in other contracts. If Corel was using its dmoniance with Wordperfect to force OEM's to pay for Corel Linux, that'd be bad.
But to license their product to be included with all mb's, that's not a problem.
My father has a PHD from standford and would never begin to understand what to do with linux.
But would he understand what to do with a motherboard? We aren't talking OEM, purchase at Best Buy, type systems here. Assemble-yourself motherboards required some bit of technical know-how. People buying motherboards would tend to be the type of people who would be interested in Linux.
Therefore, Corel is marketing to the right group of people. Whee! Good for them.
I hate it how everytime someone (other them Microsoft) tries to market their goods, everyone pooh-poohs them. Hehe, Microsoft doesn't need to win the anti-trust trial. If the people around here had their way, MS wouldn't have anyone competing with them. Who needs enemies with friends like these.
Oh, wait, maybe they are enemies. More "grass-roots" effort straight from Microsoft, perhaps?
Simply said, there are dozens of open source applications that no one would consider replacing with closed clones.
That's a funny statement considering that most open source applications are clones of commercial applications, not vice-versa.
What was first, an open source web server, or a closed source? How about an open source web browser, or a closed source? How about DNS servers? Smtp servers? Was the first OS open source, or closed source? How ebout the TCP/IP stack?
Sorry, check out the history. Lots of applications started out as open source implementations.
Hmmm, I posted that hurriedly after returning from Friday afternoon drinking and realize I may be jeopardizing precious karma points.
Yes, you've got to watch out. hehe
Mozilla -- hey, I have great hopes for Mozilla and it should eventually meet my expectations. But today? Clearly better than IE? No way.
Clearly, Mozilla is still a work in progress. You actually clipped off my comment, I mentioned that when I listed it. I wasn't so much as saying it was better now, but that it was slated to be easily better when it was complete.
But there's nothing wrong with pointing out a projects goals, even if it hasn't got there yet. Mozilla is pretty close and we know what progress has been like, and where it is going to end up. Everyone does this:) Microsoft has been claiming for 5 years all the good things that W2K was going to do.
KDE/GNOME -- I find KDE's progress astounding and I can't wait for 2.0 and KOffice. But is it clearly superior to MacOS, today? No way.
I mentioned this already. "Better" is hard to define. Certainly, everyone has a different opinion on what their favorite WM is, but that doesn't change the fact that both KDE and Gnome are amazingly outstanding applications, and they will only get better.
I don't think anything could be better then OS/2's Presentation Manager myself.
Gimp -- clearly superior to Photoshop? Maybe for making Propaganda tiles, but not even close for publishing work.
There are graphical applications to do many different things. Let's not compare apples to oranges here. Even Photoshop isn't meant for certain graphical work. But the Gimp has a strong niche too. Maybe not in everything, but that certain doesn't discount its quality.
As I refered to earlier, Adobes response to questions about a Linux port of Photoshop is, "Have you tried out the Gimp?" They certainly think it has merit.
[...]open source applications that no one would consider replacing with closed clones.
Oh, this has got to be a joke.
Microsoft has "partnered" with Transvirtual and funded Microsoft technologies to be added to Kaffe. I consider this a strong action on Microsoft's part that they consider Kaffe a very important Open Source project. Come on now, any time Microsoft don't try to destroy competition, there must be something special about it.
BUT most of the documentation is written for a command prompt. Sure, most people will see the icon and think, "Oh, this accesses my floppy drive" but if you went to linux.com and tried to find that, it would tell you, in very arcane and technical language, how to do it from the command prompt.
What, do you think the OEM's are going to ship howto's with their 'internet boxes'? I doubt it. And going to Linux.com and looking for an answer, would be like me looking in a Ford Ranger manual to figure out how to replace the transmission in my Ford Taurus. There are numerous ways to do it, and I don't think consumers will "accidentally" pop the cd out the wrong way.:)
Besides, it's more likely that these consumer devices won't have floppy drives
Upgrading kernels is a bitch (still haven't figured it out) while in Windows it's a self-executable file you download when a dialog box pops up informing you you need to download stuff from MS's website.
I don't think that consumers will be interested in compiling their kernel. These boxes probably won't even have gcc installed. Instead, they'll have some sort of update manager that they'll click and update the box, ala Windows Update.
Lack of some programs that are only on Windows machines is a pain too.
Again, these consumer devices probably won't have the capability of installing your own software. So even if it *had* Windows, the other apps wouldn't be useful. This is for people who are interested in a device to do a few limited tasks. Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, and so on.
No Internet Explorer (yes, most people do prefer it over Netscape).
Web standards. No functionality should be different. They should need to know whether they are using Netscape or IE.
Rebooting wrong screws everything up (I GUARENTEE(sp) that 3/4 of the new Linux users will reboot by just pressing the reboot button when X crashes, and screw up their file systems.)
I doubt if these boxes will have "reboot" buttons. Must likely the button will only turn "on" the device, not shut it down. Also, it was mentioned that the file system could be set up in a more safe way.
Windows was designed/marketed to be a consumer OS. Linux was designed/marketed to be a server OS. And it's easy to tell it when you compare them together.
I agree here. But OEM's are finding that Linux works great in the embedded market, and so how's to stop them?
I seriously doubt they'll ship any flavor of Linux. The article said the machines "will be designed mainly to surf the Internet" which indicates to me that they'll be targeting people who don't want a computer -- they just want something to browse that "web" that they hear everyone buzzing about. For that market segment, Linux would be about the worst possible choice; contrary to what some people around here might believe, Linux is *not* ready for the average computer newbie.
No, actually, you are wrong. Because if you are building a "black box" that you want to lock down, and provide defined applications, to a consumer who has no computer experience, then Linux *is* the perfect fit.
Unlike Windows, the OEM has control over the OS to tailor it perfectly to the box. Unlike Windows, the OEM doesn't have to worry about a user deleting "extra" files. Unlike Windows, the OEM can provide a truely customised, intuitive interface.
With Linux, the consumer buys the box, plugs it in like a VCR, enters in their ISP account information, and tada, instant access to the web.
I don't see how *that* could be beyond the grasp of a consumer. That seems actually easier then Windows.
They're all NT boxen. I'm no expert or nuthin, but I betcha there might be some common NT security flaw he(?)'s exploiting.
Yes, but does anyone know what that flaw is? Probably not, eh? Ah, the power of Closed Source.
PC Week is wrong. Closed Source doesn't hide holes from the bad, but from the good. Now there is a hacker who isn't going to tell what the hole is, because they don't have to. And yet NT is secure right?
Open Source is the only security. It's that simple.
Of course, what they ought to do, if they're so worked up about it, is write their own dang filter and put it on their FreeBSD servers. I'm not quite ready to hold my breath for that, though.
The article mentioned that Microsoft *may* have contracted Network Associates to write a Melissa-capable McAfee scanner for FreeBSD this summer.
The real issue here isn't FreeBSD. FreeBSD has absolutely no problems in this case at all. The problem is with Windows, and it's lack of security. Microsoft has always said that Viruses weren't a problem because you should be using a virus scanner. But now we have an issue where an OS must scan for viruses that affect a totally different OS.
There is nothing in FreeBSD that prevents it from scanning files. There just needs to be a virus scanner written for it. No big deal.
From what you quoted, I took it to mean that several OEM's are sticking with intel's 32-bit line.
Unless I read it wrong the article specifically said that they announced they were planning on sticking with their *own* chips. Instead of the (more logical path of dropping their 64bit chips for) Intel 64bit chips.
It was a bogus argument that Intel's chip were better then current 64bit chips.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft was successful because they competed in the market and won, then there'd be no problems. I mean, consider AOL. They were successful. They competed in the market, against all odds, and won. But they didn't win by preventing Prodigy and Compuserve from competing, or use their market dominance to prevent competition.
Microsoft's idea of competition, really is to buy or bury all competitors. IOW, Microsoft has convinced themselves and other that anti-competitive practices is really competition. You notice that both Compuserve and Prodigy no longer exist. This is the goal that they, of course, wanted, yet they didn't have to do things like prevent Prodigy bundling their software with OEM's, or other things like that.
Also, note that AOL has competition that is vying to replace AOL's market dominance. Yet even with that we see nothing from AOL indicating that they are using their market domenince to keep others out. AOL could do things like prevent OEM's to bunding other online services software, or prevent it from being bundled with magazines and other marketable areas. But they don't.
You see, it's not success that's a problem. If Microsoft were just successful like AOL is, I'd probably still be using some of their products that are better then the competition. But when they do things like prevent Compaq from bundling Netscape, charge IBM 4 times the amount to license Windows 95 as they would have if IBM didn't sell OS/2, developed Windows to be "incompatible" with competing DOS's, and force ISV's to ship unnecessary Microsoft products with their software, then I think that's going beyond what a successful, competing company would do.
-Brent--
Sega doesn't really "use" WinCE, they just support it as an option.
How on earth will Sega compete against the company that owns the OS they are using?Microsoft had better learn soon, you *never* compete against your clients.
-Brent--
Yes, we all want competition. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't compete. They destroy.
-Brent--
Now I've just got to get another PC. I've been waiting to run FreeBSD in my mix for a long time, but had nothing really to use it for. Applixware is as good a reason as any, I presume.
Now the important question. Which has better FreeBSD support? Gnome or KDE?
-Brent--
That's right! I wish more companies would take that advice, especially car manufacturs. I mean, really, a sub-compact car is a sub-compact car, right? Why should we have 3 dozen different models of sub-compact cars, each with their dozen different options.
As I read somewhere "linux will kill linux".Having so many model is killing the sub-compact car market. People are going back to horse and buggy, for heavens sake.
With this many distributions, there are really no standards, and will cause many problems in the future.With every sub-compact car having its own peculiareties, its no wonder buyers are becoming disillusioned. Every engine is different, every dashboard is decided customized in placement, even the door locks are different. It's a real shame. Don't you think that buyers would be much more receptive if they had the choice of perhaps 2 or 3 models of a sub-compact car, and that even those models agreed on placement and engine type?
There's my two cents.Mine too.
-Brent--
Whoa! Who are you to deny people their rights to waste time as they please :)
I thought the idea was to make Linux more useless then Windows. World Domination, or something.
-Brent--
I thought it was mostly Red Hat, but that might have been another so-called product of theirs.
-Brent--
Mine too. Of course, they hadn't released a Linux port yet, and have no plans in the future to do so.
I wonder how many people need to call to get their attention? Several thousand this evening should do the trick :)
-Brent--
She meant that you were only the second person to ask *her* for it. Of course, it's not her regular duty to answer phones :)
-Brent--
My understanding was that there was a lot of x86 specific code, therefore...
2. Assuming 1. - Would I be able to use navigator/exploder under WINE on the alpha?...no
-Brent--
You have a good point. It's a strange market, those who would be predisposed to useing Linux are probably already using Linux, and those that aren't probably won't
Okay, but this does 2 things. #1, it gets Corel Linux into the hands of those who probably wouldn't have chosen it to begin with. #2, there are still thousands of "hackers" still using Windows. It's time to give them a chance to feel up Linux.
-Brent--
Ah, but Microsoft had no competition. This is good for Linux, because, should Corel start getting lazy, the OEM's would quickly go to Red Hat or someone. Microsoft had no such incentive.
And, as you mentioned, everyone is to lazy or ignorant to use something else, so they just use what's pre-installed. That means more marketshare for Linux :)
-Brent--
No, a "tax" is where you don't have any choice, because (in this case) Microsoft has crippled the market into forcing you to pay for Windows. The tax isn't the simple fact that they sell Windows, it's that they prevent anyone from not selling Windows.
In this case, even if PC Chips has an exclusive contract, you could go to another vendor. You can't do that with Windows. Now I suppose if Corel had licensing with all Mobo makers, so that even if I wanted to run FreeBSD, I had to pay them their $12, then I'd be upset. But they don't
I don't see exclusivity contracts as bad. I see them as bad when they are used to force OEM's to capitulate in other contracts. If Corel was using its dmoniance with Wordperfect to force OEM's to pay for Corel Linux, that'd be bad.
But to license their product to be included with all mb's, that's not a problem.
-Brent--
But would he understand what to do with a motherboard? We aren't talking OEM, purchase at Best Buy, type systems here. Assemble-yourself motherboards required some bit of technical know-how. People buying motherboards would tend to be the type of people who would be interested in Linux.
Therefore, Corel is marketing to the right group of people. Whee! Good for them.
I hate it how everytime someone (other them Microsoft) tries to market their goods, everyone pooh-poohs them. Hehe, Microsoft doesn't need to win the anti-trust trial. If the people around here had their way, MS wouldn't have anyone competing with them. Who needs enemies with friends like these.
Oh, wait, maybe they are enemies. More "grass-roots" effort straight from Microsoft, perhaps?
-Brent--
It was to be 'leet, of course.
How can people thin you're cool if you say you are running OpenBSD, when no one's heard of OpenBSD. Now, everyone's heard about Linux, that's cool.
-Brent--
What was first, an open source web server, or a closed source? How about an open source web browser, or a closed source? How about DNS servers? Smtp servers? Was the first OS open source, or closed source? How ebout the TCP/IP stack?
Sorry, check out the history. Lots of applications started out as open source implementations.
-Brent--
Yes, you've got to watch out. hehe
Mozilla -- hey, I have great hopes for Mozilla and it should eventually meet my expectations. But today? Clearly better than IE? No way.Clearly, Mozilla is still a work in progress. You actually clipped off my comment, I mentioned that when I listed it. I wasn't so much as saying it was better now, but that it was slated to be easily better when it was complete.
But there's nothing wrong with pointing out a projects goals, even if it hasn't got there yet. Mozilla is pretty close and we know what progress has been like, and where it is going to end up. Everyone does this :) Microsoft has been claiming for 5 years all the good things that W2K was going to do.
KDE/GNOME -- I find KDE's progress astounding and I can't wait for 2.0 and KOffice. But is it clearly superior to MacOS, today? No way.I mentioned this already. "Better" is hard to define. Certainly, everyone has a different opinion on what their favorite WM is, but that doesn't change the fact that both KDE and Gnome are amazingly outstanding applications, and they will only get better.
I don't think anything could be better then OS/2's Presentation Manager myself.
Gimp -- clearly superior to Photoshop? Maybe for making Propaganda tiles, but not even close for publishing work.There are graphical applications to do many different things. Let's not compare apples to oranges here. Even Photoshop isn't meant for certain graphical work. But the Gimp has a strong niche too. Maybe not in everything, but that certain doesn't discount its quality.
As I refered to earlier, Adobes response to questions about a Linux port of Photoshop is, "Have you tried out the Gimp?" They certainly think it has merit.
-Brent--
Microsoft has "partnered" with Transvirtual and funded Microsoft technologies to be added to Kaffe. I consider this a strong action on Microsoft's part that they consider Kaffe a very important Open Source project. Come on now, any time Microsoft don't try to destroy competition, there must be something special about it.
-Brent--
This is going to be fun. Especially since "better" is clearly undefinable.
Oh well, here goes.
- Apache,
- Bind
- Sendmail
- PHP3
- Mozilla (Not quite done yet, but already strong)
- KDE/Gnome
- Gimp (Yes, Adobe refers you to gimp, as a replacement for its graphical apps on platforms it doesn't support)
- Kaffe
- Perl
That's enough for now. Simply said, there are dozens of open source applications that no one would consider replacing with closed clones. -Brent--
... the sugar content of water isn't very high.
-Brent--
What, do you think the OEM's are going to ship howto's with their 'internet boxes'? I doubt it. And going to Linux.com and looking for an answer, would be like me looking in a Ford Ranger manual to figure out how to replace the transmission in my Ford Taurus. There are numerous ways to do it, and I don't think consumers will "accidentally" pop the cd out the wrong way. :)
Besides, it's more likely that these consumer devices won't have floppy drives
Upgrading kernels is a bitch (still haven't figured it out) while in Windows it's a self-executable file you download when a dialog box pops up informing you you need to download stuff from MS's website.I don't think that consumers will be interested in compiling their kernel. These boxes probably won't even have gcc installed. Instead, they'll have some sort of update manager that they'll click and update the box, ala Windows Update.
Lack of some programs that are only on Windows machines is a pain too.Again, these consumer devices probably won't have the capability of installing your own software. So even if it *had* Windows, the other apps wouldn't be useful. This is for people who are interested in a device to do a few limited tasks. Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, and so on.
No Internet Explorer (yes, most people do prefer it over Netscape).Web standards. No functionality should be different. They should need to know whether they are using Netscape or IE.
Rebooting wrong screws everything up (I GUARENTEE(sp) that 3/4 of the new Linux users will reboot by just pressing the reboot button when X crashes, and screw up their file systems.)I doubt if these boxes will have "reboot" buttons. Must likely the button will only turn "on" the device, not shut it down. Also, it was mentioned that the file system could be set up in a more safe way.
Windows was designed/marketed to be a consumer OS. Linux was designed/marketed to be a server OS. And it's easy to tell it when you compare them together.I agree here. But OEM's are finding that Linux works great in the embedded market, and so how's to stop them?
-Brent--
No, actually, you are wrong. Because if you are building a "black box" that you want to lock down, and provide defined applications, to a consumer who has no computer experience, then Linux *is* the perfect fit.
Unlike Windows, the OEM has control over the OS to tailor it perfectly to the box. Unlike Windows, the OEM doesn't have to worry about a user deleting "extra" files. Unlike Windows, the OEM can provide a truely customised, intuitive interface.
With Linux, the consumer buys the box, plugs it in like a VCR, enters in their ISP account information, and tada, instant access to the web.
I don't see how *that* could be beyond the grasp of a consumer. That seems actually easier then Windows.
-Brent--
Yes, but does anyone know what that flaw is? Probably not, eh? Ah, the power of Closed Source.
PC Week is wrong. Closed Source doesn't hide holes from the bad, but from the good. Now there is a hacker who isn't going to tell what the hole is, because they don't have to. And yet NT is secure right?
Open Source is the only security. It's that simple.
-Brent--
The article mentioned that Microsoft *may* have contracted Network Associates to write a Melissa-capable McAfee scanner for FreeBSD this summer.
The real issue here isn't FreeBSD. FreeBSD has absolutely no problems in this case at all. The problem is with Windows, and it's lack of security. Microsoft has always said that Viruses weren't a problem because you should be using a virus scanner. But now we have an issue where an OS must scan for viruses that affect a totally different OS.
There is nothing in FreeBSD that prevents it from scanning files. There just needs to be a virus scanner written for it. No big deal.
-Brent--
Unless I read it wrong the article specifically said that they announced they were planning on sticking with their *own* chips. Instead of the (more logical path of dropping their 64bit chips for) Intel 64bit chips.
It was a bogus argument that Intel's chip were better then current 64bit chips.
-Brent--