Aside from the obvious price issue, a compelling reason for buying a cheap-o chinese player sell is because they are often region free. Perhaps the US market doesn't care much, but in Europe it's a pretty big deal.
If the likes of Sony et al didn't have their head up their asses about hopelessly broken regional encoding and just dumped it altogether, the more sales will go their way.
I suppose regional distributors might whine about grey imports, but how many sales would they lose anyway? If it were more than a miniscule fraction of their total I would be very surprised. Besides, most EU countries prosecute grey imports of movies so it's not like regional encoding is adding much.
That's because Postal 2 thinks gross out humour makes up for rotten and repetitive gameplay. If you appreciate the gross-out element, download the demo and savour it. The full game adds nothing new except one tedious box like maze level after another.
What about a judge displaying the ten commandments in his courthouse?
If the state is meant to be secular then all the services provided by the state should be secular too. That includes the schools and the teachers in them.
What someone does when they are not representing the state is their own damn business.
Does Mozilla have countless memory leaks? To my knowledge it is remarkably stable.
That's not to say it is perfect and leak free but most of the memory expansion people complain about is simply the memory buffers filling up, session histories growing etc.
The Mozilla team is anyone who wants to throw their help into the project. Lot's of people don't work on Firebird (the browser), but their contribution is still important. Think of people working on mail / news, editting, embedding etc.
If someone wants to port to Amiga, then let them. For all anyone knows they might find some bugs in the layout engine, or widgets or add something useful to the configuration script etc. . It's even possible that while porting to what might politely be called a throwback platform they introduce benefits that other low performance platforms such as handhelds can use.
If all things were equal then perhaps. But Hurd has been bogged down in politics, lack of direction, lack of support, lack of volunteers, instability intransigence, purity over pragmatism etc. for the last decade.
Hence the reason that it is all but forgotten while Linux is busy taking over the world. Considering that Hurd was started before Linux, this is a pretty sad indictment.
Remember Netcaster?. Netcaster might have been a heinous abomination but it was still an app written in HTML, JS etc. as the link makes pretty clear.
Or perhaps MS thinks that the patent only covers Win32-only HTML apps. In other words cripple your HTML based app so it only runs on their platform and infringe on their patent. It makes sense to someone I'm sure.
Nullsoft has been owned by AOL for three years now and isn't that branded. In fact AOL has been traditionally tried to forge separate identities for all of its acquisitions - think of Compuserve, Netscape, Mapquest, Nullsoft, Moviefone, DigitalCity etc. While there might be an AOL logo, link or icon here or there, but they pretty much retained their own distinct look and feel.
Unfortunately, AOL has gone down the pan and perhaps this distinction now works against them. Perhaps management doesn't feel the same guilt from slashing jobs when they're not technically AOL jobs.
For example, what do you do if you're using a proprietary, obsolete, closed source, single platform browser made by your main competitor but your Netscape division has developed an open source, standards compliant browser, capable of embedding in any app on any platform? Answer - sack all the Netscape developers of course! Why? Who knows, but I bet it boiled down to "not invented here" syndrome - IE is comfortable straitjacket, which Gecko is some scary 'open source' thing. AOL has become institutionalized.
I bet some management / marketing idiots fretted over the minor flux of replacing IE with the slightly scary Gecko and scuppered it. Apparantly AOL thinks letting your main competitor control your content delivery mechanism is good business, not sheer stupidity.
Nullsoft is another example of AOL stupidity. What do you do when you own one of the most popular media players on the market? Why, licence all your streaming content and players from Real of course! And for good measure, sign deals with Apple to sell your own music from their store when you've had the chance to sell direct using WinAmp via its minibrowser for three years.
Google probably run their server farm from BOOTP or something like it. So they could update one machine for a $5 sub and mirror it to all the others with NFS.
Actually I think it comes very close to being a general purpose GUI. Supporting a large and varied real world app like Eclipse sees to that. It might not do MDI, but that is an alien concept to most platforms anyway (and discouraged in Win32) so it's hardly a major loss.
I don't believe SWT is suitable for every purpose, but it is suitable if you want to turn out a responsive app with a native L&F. JFC really is hopeless for that.
Besides, SWT might just be for Eclipse now, but remember that GTK started out as a widget set to support the GIMP. Now look at it.
Great if you're prepared to overlook it's shortcomings. The most serious of which is that it's so antiquated that most of the effort these days appears to go into writing extensions to overcome it's limitations.
Chiu is a quack, as are all sellers of magna-therapy bracelets, sole inliners etc. They wouldn't know science, double blind testing, the placebo effect or reality for that matter if it bit them on the ass.
The sad thing is they'll use stories like this to hawk their snake oil.
Both of these will pretty much kill the Sun initiative. I think we can be fairly confident that this will fail. Linux on the desktop (basically what this is) would do FAR better if targeted at business users rather than consumers.
It would do far better if actually provided what consumers want. Stuff such as user friendliness, task centric help, easy managability, multimedia, click N run drivers, games, etc. As a power user, I wouldn't mind some of those things either. MS manages to target power users and home users and I don't see any technical reason that Linux couldn't either.
Unfortunately Linux in its current incarnation is like a cake baked to resemble a dog turd. Consumers aren't going to bother with it even if you insist its actually made of delicious marzipan.
Perhaps Sun should put some weight behind SWT if they want to regain trust in Java on the desktop. JFC is a nice GUI API, but unfortunately it turns out slug like apps which are inconsistent on every platform they run on.
I'm sure purists will claim that JFC is better for X number of reasons, but a glance at Eclipse (which Sun have also shunned) demonstrates it can produce compelling, fast and native looking apps - something which JFC has singularly failed to do.
I would suggest that a viable mission might be to send a robot to the moon and try those things - land at a mineral rich site and mine it. It's not like the robot has to be autonomous since the moon is right next door, it just has to be able to mine the ore and smelt it into something useful like wire, rods or ingots.
It would be an incredible advance if wire or rods could be made from ore. Other robots could clear rocks, dig foundations, tunnels and drill holes. From there you have the rudiments to build increasingly complex (permenant & habitable) structures.
It's hard to say what he means. However I wouldn't be concerned that some other programme paying lip service to the concepts of freenet means that freenet is somehow compromised as well.
After all, perhaps these guys thought they'd ditch some of the features to make P2P usable - Freenet would be hopeless for P2P because it is a performance slug (thanks to the number of hops etc. to fetch data) - and in the process compromised their own security. Or perhaps they were just idiots and boasted about getting warez using Winny on some monitored IRC channel which was enough to initiate a raid. Either way, it doesn't mean much for freenet without more information.
And Apple is going to email each Mac user personally with these instructions and telephone support?
I didn't think so. Either they release a patch that does this step for the user, or they release the patch that fixes the problem. Expecting users to read advisories or follow step by step instructions for some thing called 'LDAP' ("wtf is that? Is it like WAP?") is simply not going to work even assuming they did email everyone.
Re:My hopes for 2004 - some realisation please
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
I don't see that making Linux ready for the desktop negates any efforts to replace Unix. The issue with making desktop ready is about putting a user friendly skin over the top of Unix (much like OS X), but it does not stop someone dropping to command line, or running a more 'unix like' desktop if they feel so inclined. In short, it does not dumb down Linux.
As for it not being on the radar, I think you are wrong. Kernel developers are just one group, and while it may not be to them there are people developing GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice + numerous apps and games who couldn't give a fig about 'legacy' Unix so much as producing a decent user experience. Even amongst kernel developers, there are those working on drivers, multimedia, graphics etc. who (whether it impacts them or not) are critical for the success of the desktop experience.
And of course an expanding Linux user base from across the spectrum is a good thing. More users means there is more reason for the Red Hats, Mandrakes, SUSEs etc. of this world to hire Linux programmers.
Re:Yeah, let's have some realisation please
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
What are you smoking?
Fedora is a nice GUI, nicer than either of SUSE or Mandrake simply because
someone has obviously put the effort into fixing the deficiencies that most
other dists suffer from. Not just subtle deficiencies, but obvious ones. I
don't have any bias towards Red Hat, in fact I installed Mandrake and SUSE before
Fedora. . All I wanted was an OS that could work with a 4 year old Dell laptop,
a Xircom Realport LAN/56k card and a Netgear MA401 wireless card. It shouldn't
be rocket science. The good news was all three installed, the bad news was
Mandrake and SUSE were severely lacking because neither detected the wireless
card and neither saw fit to give me a useable desktop either.
For example SUSE 8.2 has a terrible
dialler which after fruitlessly trying to get working for a couple of hours, I
discovered I had to check some "Stupid Mode" option in the sluggish Yast
tool- well that's intuitive. Even after sorting that out,I found
the modem icon on the KDE panel just drops the call if you click on it. It
doesn't even prompt you(or even have a preference to prompt you) - it
just drops the call whether the click was accidental or not. And my wireless
card could have been a lump of inert matter as far as SUSE was concerned. And
the deskop uses the derided and idiotic
icons-are-hyperlinks-single-click-to-launch behaviour which was dumped by MS in
the days of IE4/Win95 because it was so unusable. And the default SUSE window
theme set the resize area for windows to 0 or 1 pixels making it near
impossible to resize a window.
And Mandrake has the most slapdash shoddy tools of any major dist. It's worse
than SUSE in almost every way. The drak tools aren't even consistent in
behaviour with each other let alone the rest of the desktop.
By contrast Fedora came as a breath of fresh air. The desktop behaves sanely
out of the box, and it detected my hardware and made it easy to configure them.
Aside from some screwing around trying to use WEP128 with the wireless, it all
worked fine. This is not due to GNOME vs KDE, but simply because Fedora is
polished and simple. The configuration tools look consistent with the rest of
the system and do with simple dialogs what it takes Drak / Yast require
multiple screen hogging windows to do.
As for the driver issue, the reason that there are so few is obvious (so
obvious I wonder why you can't see it). There are umpteen distributions, each
at umpteen version releases and each release has umpteen kernels for SMP,
intel, athlon, security fixes etc. Throw in various packaging systems (rpm,
apt, deb, shell scripts), various security umasks, various gcc compiler
versions (or no toolchain at all) and you have a recipe for disaster. You try
writing and supporting a driver for potentially hundreds of different
configurations.I pity an OEM trying to produce a driver on Linux. Frankly
it is a wonder that any can even be bothered with it just to appease a vocal
and whining minority. All that would change if the dist makers rallied around a
binary level driver API, installation mechanism and QA lab which ensured a
single driver worked on all dists, and all kernels for some major release such
as the 2.6.x kernel. That is what is required and you're living in cloud cuckoo
land if you think its for any other reason (e.g. evil corporate conspiracies).
Hardware manufacturers would be delighted to support Linux if the effort
weren't so disproportionate to the number of users.
In summary if you think Linux is ready for the desktop you are simply deluded.
It might be ready for use where there is a system administrator or expert
hanging overhead to install and fix it, but not in the general sense.Step
back, take a deep breath and accept some constructive criticism eh? I remember
people with the same indignant attitude about OS/2 and the Amiga and look where
it got them.
Re:Yeah, let's have some realisation please
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
Viruses are another matter altogether. I am referring to the fact that Windows is for the most part plug and play, has task centric help, can play games out of the box and has a UI that covers practically everything that a user might want to configure. Replace XP with OS X if you like, but the same applies.
Linux is nowhere near close to this. The best IMO is Fedora which has a very nice GUI - minmal, simple and effective. Combine that with SUSE's help system and we be getting somewhere. Combine that with a decent driver system and I'd say Linux would be on par with XP.
Sadly at the current rate Windows will be on Longhorn by that time, complete with sexy graphics, even more slick UI and even more media lockin. But users won't care about that last one - they'll just see this cool OS on the one hand and this clunker on the other. If linux wants to be seen seriously it has to look like a Ferrari it is, not the rusty jalopy that most distributors seem content on putting out.
My hopes for 2004 - some realisation please
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I believe (or rather hope) that someone will cop on during 2004 and we
will see movement on the following.
A desktop offering hardware acceleration, scaling, blending, composition effects. There are promising extensions for X for this and they should be leapt on. But if means ditching X / a WM then so be it - QT / GTK are meant to be abstraction layers after all and X can run rootless on top of whatever-it-is if need be.
A desktop where KDE / GNOME / dist homegrown tools are blended into a single cohesive entity. Not one with a generic KDE / GNOME slapped together with some weird tools (i.e. Mandrake). The desktop will be referred to as "the desktop" in all dialogs / apps and not KDE / GNOME / Drak / Yast etc. except in advanced documentation.
A unified help system - one that offers one stop access to all man pages, info, html, READMEs, GNOME / KDE / dist help, all ordered in a task centric way with full search facilities.
A desktop that offers to install additional apps (especially DVD, MP3 player etc.) in a user friendly manner click N run style during installation and at any time after. Even if there are legal reasons for not shipping MP3 on the CDs for example, the dist could still make it easy to find them remotely.
A unified distribution neutral driver model with detection, installation / removal architecture. The situation at the moment with
getting a driver (or the hell of writing and supporting one) on Linux is a joke. Even a popular driver like NVidia involves screwing around at the command prompt and having a toolchain and kernel source if your dist is not directly supported.
A unified theme engine. A single engine that any app, toolkit or WM can use to render buttons and decorations.
Identification of every day operations and a UI to support them completely with no overlapping functionality. There should be no need for mere mortals to drop to the shell. Not even once. If OS X users can control a BSD derivative with a (single button) mouse then so can Linux. It doesn't mean Linux must be 'dumbed down', just that needless complication should be identified and removed / hidden from those who don't want to see it.
And most importantly:
A realisation that Longhorn is coming and unless people pull their fingers out of their arses and address these shortcomings now Linux is going to look like a relic. It struggles enough to even compete with XP and that in no small part is due to lacklustre enthusiasm most Linux users have for the problem. Linux will never replace Windows on it desktop with the RTFM attitude so leave it at the door.
Each month sees more and more Palm / PocketPC / Phones on the market. Why not just write an app for one of these that encrypts and decrypts and sends the stream as data or VoIP?
Actually their development model has always been open simply through the fact that they took other peoples stuff and bundled it up in their dist.
As for Red Hat 9 losing money... How much is Fedora going to lose? After all, at least RH9 recouped some money through retail sales and paid support, and of course the hundreds of WS/ES/AS deployments it lead to. Whereas Fedora costs nothing, sells nowhere, has no paid support and is not likely going to result in nearly as many sales of Red Hat's high end commercial offerings.
I don't see the change being a smart thing at all.
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If the likes of Sony et al didn't have their head up their asses about hopelessly broken regional encoding and just dumped it altogether, the more sales will go their way.
I suppose regional distributors might whine about grey imports, but how many sales would they lose anyway? If it were more than a miniscule fraction of their total I would be very surprised. Besides, most EU countries prosecute grey imports of movies so it's not like regional encoding is adding much.
That's because Postal 2 thinks gross out humour makes up for rotten and repetitive gameplay. If you appreciate the gross-out element, download the demo and savour it. The full game adds nothing new except one tedious box like maze level after another.
If the state is meant to be secular then all the services provided by the state should be secular too. That includes the schools and the teachers in them.
What someone does when they are not representing the state is their own damn business.
That's not to say it is perfect and leak free but most of the memory expansion people complain about is simply the memory buffers filling up, session histories growing etc.
No that would be "Master and Commander".
If someone wants to port to Amiga, then let them. For all anyone knows they might find some bugs in the layout engine, or widgets or add something useful to the configuration script etc. . It's even possible that while porting to what might politely be called a throwback platform they introduce benefits that other low performance platforms such as handhelds can use.
In other words, the more platforms the merrier.
Hence the reason that it is all but forgotten while Linux is busy taking over the world. Considering that Hurd was started before Linux, this is a pretty sad indictment.
Remember Netcaster?. Netcaster might have been a heinous abomination but it was still an app written in HTML, JS etc. as the link makes pretty clear.
Or perhaps MS thinks that the patent only covers Win32-only HTML apps. In other words cripple your HTML based app so it only runs on their platform and infringe on their patent. It makes sense to someone I'm sure.
Unfortunately, AOL has gone down the pan and perhaps this distinction now works against them. Perhaps management doesn't feel the same guilt from slashing jobs when they're not technically AOL jobs.
For example, what do you do if you're using a proprietary, obsolete, closed source, single platform browser made by your main competitor but your Netscape division has developed an open source, standards compliant browser, capable of embedding in any app on any platform? Answer - sack all the Netscape developers of course! Why? Who knows, but I bet it boiled down to "not invented here" syndrome - IE is comfortable straitjacket, which Gecko is some scary 'open source' thing. AOL has become institutionalized.
I bet some management / marketing idiots fretted over the minor flux of replacing IE with the slightly scary Gecko and scuppered it. Apparantly AOL thinks letting your main competitor control your content delivery mechanism is good business, not sheer stupidity.
Nullsoft is another example of AOL stupidity. What do you do when you own one of the most popular media players on the market? Why, licence all your streaming content and players from Real of course! And for good measure, sign deals with Apple to sell your own music from their store when you've had the chance to sell direct using WinAmp via its minibrowser for three years.
In summary, there are some very dim bulbs in AOL.
Google probably run their server farm from BOOTP or something like it. So they could update one machine for a $5 sub and mirror it to all the others with NFS.
I don't believe SWT is suitable for every purpose, but it is suitable if you want to turn out a responsive app with a native L&F. JFC really is hopeless for that.
Besides, SWT might just be for Eclipse now, but remember that GTK started out as a widget set to support the GIMP. Now look at it.
Great if you're prepared to overlook it's shortcomings. The most serious of which is that it's so antiquated that most of the effort these days appears to go into writing extensions to overcome it's limitations.
The sad thing is they'll use stories like this to hawk their snake oil.
It would do far better if actually provided what consumers want. Stuff such as user friendliness, task centric help, easy managability, multimedia, click N run drivers, games, etc. As a power user, I wouldn't mind some of those things either. MS manages to target power users and home users and I don't see any technical reason that Linux couldn't either.
Unfortunately Linux in its current incarnation is like a cake baked to resemble a dog turd. Consumers aren't going to bother with it even if you insist its actually made of delicious marzipan.
I'm sure purists will claim that JFC is better for X number of reasons, but a glance at Eclipse (which Sun have also shunned) demonstrates it can produce compelling, fast and native looking apps - something which JFC has singularly failed to do.
It would be an incredible advance if wire or rods could be made from ore. Other robots could clear rocks, dig foundations, tunnels and drill holes. From there you have the rudiments to build increasingly complex (permenant & habitable) structures.
Oooh that's a tough nut to crack! Perhaps some kind of popup is in order before applying the patch?
After all, perhaps these guys thought they'd ditch some of the features to make P2P usable - Freenet would be hopeless for P2P because it is a performance slug (thanks to the number of hops etc. to fetch data) - and in the process compromised their own security. Or perhaps they were just idiots and boasted about getting warez using Winny on some monitored IRC channel which was enough to initiate a raid. Either way, it doesn't mean much for freenet without more information.
I didn't think so. Either they release a patch that does this step for the user, or they release the patch that fixes the problem. Expecting users to read advisories or follow step by step instructions for some thing called 'LDAP' ("wtf is that? Is it like WAP?") is simply not going to work even assuming they did email everyone.
As for it not being on the radar, I think you are wrong. Kernel developers are just one group, and while it may not be to them there are people developing GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice + numerous apps and games who couldn't give a fig about 'legacy' Unix so much as producing a decent user experience. Even amongst kernel developers, there are those working on drivers, multimedia, graphics etc. who (whether it impacts them or not) are critical for the success of the desktop experience.
And of course an expanding Linux user base from across the spectrum is a good thing. More users means there is more reason for the Red Hats, Mandrakes, SUSEs etc. of this world to hire Linux programmers.
Fedora is a nice GUI, nicer than either of SUSE or Mandrake simply because someone has obviously put the effort into fixing the deficiencies that most other dists suffer from. Not just subtle deficiencies, but obvious ones. I don't have any bias towards Red Hat, in fact I installed Mandrake and SUSE before Fedora. . All I wanted was an OS that could work with a 4 year old Dell laptop, a Xircom Realport LAN/56k card and a Netgear MA401 wireless card. It shouldn't be rocket science. The good news was all three installed, the bad news was Mandrake and SUSE were severely lacking because neither detected the wireless card and neither saw fit to give me a useable desktop either.
For example SUSE 8.2 has a terrible dialler which after fruitlessly trying to get working for a couple of hours, I discovered I had to check some "Stupid Mode" option in the sluggish Yast tool- well that's intuitive. Even after sorting that out,I found the modem icon on the KDE panel just drops the call if you click on it. It doesn't even prompt you(or even have a preference to prompt you) - it just drops the call whether the click was accidental or not. And my wireless card could have been a lump of inert matter as far as SUSE was concerned. And the deskop uses the derided and idiotic icons-are-hyperlinks-single-click-to-launch behaviour which was dumped by MS in the days of IE4/Win95 because it was so unusable. And the default SUSE window theme set the resize area for windows to 0 or 1 pixels making it near impossible to resize a window.
And Mandrake has the most slapdash shoddy tools of any major dist. It's worse than SUSE in almost every way. The drak tools aren't even consistent in behaviour with each other let alone the rest of the desktop.
By contrast Fedora came as a breath of fresh air. The desktop behaves sanely out of the box, and it detected my hardware and made it easy to configure them. Aside from some screwing around trying to use WEP128 with the wireless, it all worked fine. This is not due to GNOME vs KDE, but simply because Fedora is polished and simple. The configuration tools look consistent with the rest of the system and do with simple dialogs what it takes Drak / Yast require multiple screen hogging windows to do.
As for the driver issue, the reason that there are so few is obvious (so obvious I wonder why you can't see it). There are umpteen distributions, each at umpteen version releases and each release has umpteen kernels for SMP, intel, athlon, security fixes etc. Throw in various packaging systems (rpm, apt, deb, shell scripts), various security umasks, various gcc compiler versions (or no toolchain at all) and you have a recipe for disaster. You try writing and supporting a driver for potentially hundreds of different configurations.I pity an OEM trying to produce a driver on Linux. Frankly it is a wonder that any can even be bothered with it just to appease a vocal and whining minority. All that would change if the dist makers rallied around a binary level driver API, installation mechanism and QA lab which ensured a single driver worked on all dists, and all kernels for some major release such as the 2.6.x kernel. That is what is required and you're living in cloud cuckoo land if you think its for any other reason (e.g. evil corporate conspiracies). Hardware manufacturers would be delighted to support Linux if the effort weren't so disproportionate to the number of users.
In summary if you think Linux is ready for the desktop you are simply deluded. It might be ready for use where there is a system administrator or expert hanging overhead to install and fix it, but not in the general sense.Step back, take a deep breath and accept some constructive criticism eh? I remember people with the same indignant attitude about OS/2 and the Amiga and look where it got them.
Linux is nowhere near close to this. The best IMO is Fedora which has a very nice GUI - minmal, simple and effective. Combine that with SUSE's help system and we be getting somewhere. Combine that with a decent driver system and I'd say Linux would be on par with XP.
Sadly at the current rate Windows will be on Longhorn by that time, complete with sexy graphics, even more slick UI and even more media lockin. But users won't care about that last one - they'll just see this cool OS on the one hand and this clunker on the other. If linux wants to be seen seriously it has to look like a Ferrari it is, not the rusty jalopy that most distributors seem content on putting out.
- A desktop offering hardware acceleration, scaling, blending, composition effects. There are promising extensions for X for this and they should be leapt on. But if means ditching X / a WM then so be it - QT / GTK are meant to be abstraction layers after all and X can run rootless on top of whatever-it-is if need be.
- A desktop where KDE / GNOME / dist homegrown tools are blended into a single cohesive entity. Not one with a generic KDE / GNOME slapped together with some weird tools (i.e. Mandrake). The desktop will be referred to as "the desktop" in all dialogs / apps and not KDE / GNOME / Drak / Yast etc. except in advanced documentation.
- A unified help system - one that offers one stop access to all man pages, info, html, READMEs, GNOME / KDE / dist help, all ordered in a task centric way with full search facilities.
- A desktop that offers to install additional apps (especially DVD, MP3 player etc.) in a user friendly manner click N run style during installation and at any time after. Even if there are legal reasons for not shipping MP3 on the CDs for example, the dist could still make it easy to find them remotely.
- A unified distribution neutral driver model with detection, installation / removal architecture. The situation at the moment with
getting a driver (or the hell of writing and supporting one) on Linux is a joke. Even a popular driver like NVidia involves screwing around at the command prompt and having a toolchain and kernel source if your dist is not directly supported.
- A unified theme engine. A single engine that any app, toolkit or WM can use to render buttons and decorations.
- Identification of every day operations and a UI to support them completely with no overlapping functionality. There should be no need for mere mortals to drop to the shell. Not even once. If OS X users can control a BSD derivative with a (single button) mouse then so can Linux. It doesn't mean Linux must be 'dumbed down', just that needless complication should be identified and removed / hidden from those who don't want to see it.
And most importantly:Each month sees more and more Palm / PocketPC / Phones on the market. Why not just write an app for one of these that encrypts and decrypts and sends the stream as data or VoIP?
As for Red Hat 9 losing money... How much is Fedora going to lose? After all, at least RH9 recouped some money through retail sales and paid support, and of course the hundreds of WS/ES/AS deployments it lead to. Whereas Fedora costs nothing, sells nowhere, has no paid support and is not likely going to result in nearly as many sales of Red Hat's high end commercial offerings.
I don't see the change being a smart thing at all.