It is important to note that open source developers, whether commercial or non-commercial, will not need a patent license for the development of implementations of these protocols or for the non-commercial distribution of these implementations,
So...commercial developers can develop as long as they don't distribute. Boy, that's helpful/useful. About as helpful and useful as a kick in the nuts.:)
I still say the idea that a protocol can be patented is silly to the point of almost being an oxymoron. We can, perhaps, debate whether an implementation of a protocol can be patented, but the idea that the protocol itself can be patented seems like blatant abuse of the patent system, even if you're one of those who believes that software or business-method patents are a valid notion.
Fortunately, it does seem to be getting easier to challenge patents. Now if only we could get MS to admit what patents they think various open source projects might be violating, so we can start the search for prior art....:)
(Alternatively, maybe we can keep them muttering vague threats about their patents without being specific long enough that we can ask for estoppel or laches if they ever do try to get specific. The rumblings help because that way they can't pretend that they didn't know about the supposed violations all along, a vital point in raising a defense of laches.)
One word: Motif. The mess caused by that is what finally convinced me that the GPL was a justifiable and justified option.
Motif probably set Unix development back by a decade, and was, I suspect, a not-inconsiderable factor in Microsoft's ability to penetrate the server room. And it was, at the time, a better option than the other choices (like OpenLook).
Of course, Motif was eventually both reverse-engineered (Lesstif) and engineered around (GTK/Qt), but it was a major obstacle and major headache for far longer than it should have been.
For whatever reasons, the (L)GPL seems to do far more to discourage forking than the BSD or MIT licenses. To anyone who remembers the Unix wars of the eighties, that's definitely a Good Thing(tm).
Wikipedia's pretty impressive, but how about the Internet Archive? Also a non-profit that doesn't run ads, and not only do they, like Google and Yahoo, "download the Internet" on a regular basis, but the Archive makes backups! Plus, they have huge amounts of streaming audio and video (pd or creative-commons). The first time I ever heard the word "Petabyte" being discussed in practical, real world terms (as in, "we're taking delivery next month") was in connection with the Internet Archive. Several years ago. And it was being used in the plural!:)
They may not have as much incoming traffic as Wikipedia, but the sheer volume of data they manage is truly staggering. (Heck, they have multiple copies of Wikipedia!) When I do download something from there, it's typically in the 80-150 MB range, and 1 or 2 GB in a pop isn't unusual, and I know I'm not the only one downloading, so their bandwidth bills must still be pretty impressive.
The fact that these two sites manage to survive and thrive the way they do never ceases to amaze me.
Microsoft is a large corporation which has had a very static culture now for almost 30 years. That was true of IBM at one time too (except that it was longer than 30 years). Then something happened--I think it was called the PS/2--and IBM was suddenly in a position they'd never faced before, where the market was ignoring them in droves.
There's a possibility that Vista will turn out to have been MS's PS/2. I'm not holding my breath. I don't think it's quite that drastic. On the other hand, MS is, for all their size and bloat, still somewhat smaller and more nimble than the monstrosity that IBM once was, so it's possible they don't need a failure as dramatic as the PS/2 to teach them that it's time to change direction. Dunno.
They were all educated computer professionals....good times... I hate to tell you this, but your delusion that educated computer professionals are "avid sports non-fans" is not only delusory, but offensive to both educated computer professional (assumes geeks can't be jocks) and sports fans (assumes jocks can't be geeks). The fact is that jocks and geeks are heavily overlapping sets, and have been since long before there was an Internet. Many of us who respect and both the body and the minds have nothing but contempt for those who only respect the body and those who only respect the mind. Your comment makes it pretty clear you're in the latter category. You pathetic loser.:p;)
AFAIK, the Usenet rec.sport hierarchy predates the actual Internet. I'm pretty sure there were sports fans on the Internet within moments of the time there was something that could reasonably be described as "the Internet".
(Wow, I can still remember my first "bang-path" address.)
The people who go "How do you know? Have you seen the source code?" almost invariably don't audit the code at all. I suspect that's because most people don't audit the code at all. But some do, and if a higher percentage of those people say "how do you know?" then your (possibly unintentional) implication here that people who say "have you seen the source code" are all hypocrites is wrong. I don't audit every bit of code that I use, but I do do spot checks on a semi-irregular basis. And I am one of those people who says "How do you know? Have you seen the source code?"
Granted, situations like the Debian ssh/ssl mess can and do slip through the mostly-anarchic seti-at-home-like distributed-audit that many of us engage in. Nothing's perfect and there are no silver bullets for software development. Nevertheless, having the code increases the chance that some of us will stumble across and help fix more problems. Just because something isn't perfect, that doesn't mean its not better than the alternatives.
I am reminded of a nifty story about Ken Thompson's login hack. The idea (in Ken Thompson's supposed hack) that the compiler can "recognize" the code for itself and for login is silly in today's world. It can work for very limited versions of "recognize", but beyond that, it devolves into an exercise in futility and/or magical thinking. AI isn't that good yet, and even if it were, the amount of code required to actually recognize source for a compiler that is under constant modification would be so large that it couldn't possibly hope to be hidden for long.
Many years ago, I built GCC using a C interpreter, and then used the interpreted version of GCC to rebuild the compiler. It took a long time (and I mostly did it to exercise the interpreter), but the result was a binary that was identical to one built with a compiled version of GCC. Ken Thompson's hack may still live somewhere (assuming it ever really did exist anywhere), but it isn't on GCC-based systems (like Linux). And, until the Singularity, yes, we pretty much can prove it.
BTW. What is the new term for flash drives now that flash drives are starting to pop-up in laptops? Do you mean "SSD" (Solid State Drive)? Or are you referring to something else? SSD is the term I've usually seen in reference to UMPCs like the Eee.
I keep hearing people pro open source code say "I can check it!" Well can you? Have you done so - in a project spanning more than a few thousand lines of code? Yes, all the time. Not every line of code, of course, but with my Debian Developer hat on, I have at least browsed through the vast majority of the code for, e.g. tcl/tk, and at least skimmed the code for hundreds of other projects. And even with my day-job hat on, I have done a lot of ad-hoc browsing through random open-source projects that we're either using or thinking of using. Evaluating the code base is, or should be, a big part of deciding whether to use (or continue to use) a given project or library.
You seem to be suggesting that the only way open-source can be safe or useful is if everyone evaluates every line of code they use. That's silly, of course. Open source can be safe and useful as long as enough people evaluate enough of the code. And given the number of random patches (some good, some bad) that the Debian project alone receives on a daily basis, I can assure you that a lot of people our there are reading a lot of code.
Of course, I don't personally need to evaluate every line of code in a project as long as I know (and I do) that there are others out there like me who at least do spot inspections. A little pro-active inspection up-front to give yourself at least a basic idea of how the code works can save a lot of grief further on down the line. I count it time well spent.
With proprietary code there are someone I can call and they are by contract obliged to fix problems within a certain time frame. That has nothing to do with the code being "proprietary", and everything to do with having a support contract. Do you imagine that companies using open-source don't have support contracts?
Have you ever even considered just how bloody huge the code base is for something like a database? What does that have to do with anything? I've seen tiny projects that were incomprehensible messes of tangled spaghetti code, and huge projects that were clearly and cleanly laid out, well organized, and a piece of cake to maintain, support, study and evaluate. Frankly, I'll take the latter over the former anyday. It's not about the size of the code base, it's about the structure and organization.
Also as a developer I got enough to do creating my own applications [...] Ah, well if you're the kind of developer who works in complete isolation on your own projects with no interaction with anyone else, I can understand your point of view. But that kind of development is pretty rare these days. Most of us work on teams, and evaluating other people's code is an almost-daily part of the job. The majority of that, at least in my case, involves code reviews (formal or informal) for other people in the company, but our code reviews are by no means limited to in-house code. We take more care with our own code because we know that we're the only eyes on it, but that doesn't mean we're foolish enough to assume that all third-party code is perfect and flawless.
On top of that, they have no arm rests. For a keyboard jockey, I think an arm rest set about five or ten cm higher than the keyboard is the only sane choice. A ball may be fine for lounging around or watching TV, but using it for "desktop coding" is just begging for wrist problems down the road.
Adjustable height and adjustable armrests are what I consider to be the two most critical and essential features of a computer chair. Anything else is gravy.
I think Tk has it beat by a long shot (over a decade).
(Plus, Tk is something I'd willingly install on pretty much every platform I have, while KDE is something I don't want on any platform, no matter how much you pay me. But that's a separate issue.):)
Since when was "open source" just an excuse for releasing a half-finished product? "Just"? I think you need to RTFCatB. Open source (or Free Software or whatever) has never been "just" an excuse for releasing a half-finished product, but "release early, release often" is one of the open source mantras. Why should they try to make it "feature-complete" (whatever that might happen to mean) before they go out and try to find out what features people actually want?
Surely they can afford to pay some programmers and testers to produce a finished product before they release it? Hey, if it's not good enough for you in its present state, I'm sure they'll be happy to refund your money in full. In the mean time, they get to start getting feedback from the users before they sink a whole bunch of money into developing more features that may or may not be what people want. Sounds like a Big Win to me. And anyway, who the hell are you to criticize how they decide to spend their money? Especially for something they're giving away for free in any case?
But the bottom line is, it sounds like they know a whole lot more about how to make really good free/libre/open source software than you do!
(I first used Linux 0.12, which was a long way from being feature complete--maybe you think Linus should have kept his code private until he had something good enough to call 1.0? I sure don't--I helped debug those early systems, and I don't think the system would have been anywhere near as good if he'd waited.)
What about users that need firefox for a single application Oh yeah, that's gotta be at least, what, 0.1% of the Firefox users at most? Yeah, that's absolutely the target audience that should drive all other users' experiences.
Firefox's old method, of not making itself the default browser on install but asking every time it's run unless told not to, was much better. Well, yeah, except for the other 99.9%+ of the users where the new behavior is a big win.:)
I notice we already have the embraceextendextinguish tag on the story, but is there really a story here? Looks to me more like a slashvertisement. Ooh, MS wants to merge some unnecessary proprietary* crap with a trendy-but-flakey web rad system. Why should I or anyone care? And if they want to get the word out, why don't they pay the normal advertising rates rates like anyone else? Why is this news for nerds?
*Yes, I know about moonlight, but this clearly says silverlight, and the two have not yet been shown to be compatible. Plus, both require a huge, ugly back end to be installed. There isn't enough money in the world to persuade me to install mono on my servers or even my clients. And I'm certainly not interested in locking out our customers by requiring them to have silverlight/moonlight installed.
goes against the wish of even the copy right owner. Goes against the wish of A copyright holder. Prince's performance is a derivative work of the original composition, and the recording is a derivative work of Prince's performance, so there are, at a bare minimum, three copyrights involved here. Any actions which potentially violate copyright would require approval from ALL copyright holders. Including Prince. This is what protects, e.g. the Linux kernel from being relicensed--all the (hundreds of) contributors would have to agree, which isn't going to happen.
Yes, I got your joke, but there's so many people here who seem to be under the impression that copyrights are unitary and indivisible that I felt I still had to make the point. In fact, my analysis should make you happy. This is not DMCA abuse because Prince's copyright in the derivative work is valid, AND the result is one less Prince recording on the Intarweb. Sounds like win-win to me!:)
I wrote:
ask the fan to remove the creative elements from the derivative work that Prince owns and release whatever is left That was awkwardly phrased. What I meant was: "ask the fan to remove the creative elements that Prince owns from the derivative work". I did not mean to imply that Prince now owns the complete derivative work. He's a part-owner, just like the hundreds of people that have contributed to Linux are part-owners of that kernel.
A performance cannot be copyrighted. Unless the performance has creative elements which stand on their own, i.e. the arrangement, the guitar solo, the intonations chosen when singing the lyrics, etc. Of course, that would technically be a composer's copyright, but that sounds confusing, so most groups that deal with legal fan-made recordings (i.e. the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive) usually just refer to it as a performance copyright. Basically, what it boils down to is that Prince's performance constitutes a derivative work, and unless Radiohead is now releasing their music under a copyleft, they have no say in the matter. The most they could do is ask the fan to remove the creative elements from the derivative work that Prince owns and release whatever is left, but the result would probably be incomprehensible, assuming that such removal were even possible. (Alternatively, they could try to prove that Prince's additions to his arrangement were too minimal to justify copyright protection, but that's likely to be very difficult.)
(If Radiohead's works were released under a copyleft, then Prince would have to choose between allowing fans to distribute his versions or not performing Radiohead compositions at all, but since they aren't, he doesn't.)
That may be the case for many of the smaller (and undeniably useful) open source projects, but it seems like all of the big names ones started out as a commercial or internal project. You mean like the Linux kernel? Except that it didn't. And like the BSD kernel (although that could arguably be called a derivative of an internal project, but the USL v Regents settlement puts that argument on shaky ground). Likewise the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU toolkit, GNU libraries, the X Window System, almost all of the surviving desktop environments (Motif/CDE and OpenLook are effectively dead) and associated office suites (Koffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc., etc.), Apache, Tomcat, Emacs, The GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, Sendmail, Perl, Python, PostgreSQL, Bind, and so on.:)
Some of those may only be medium-sized names, but some are very big names indeed. The idea that only small, obscure projects have come from a pure FLOSS background is utter nonsense.
on OS X it's just as easy to reboot the whole system at that point because all your applications are going to be killed anyway. Really? So you can't just run, say, a python script in the background or have some long-running tasks loaded under screen so that you can ssh in check on them remotely when you're at work? I have been giving some serious thought to getting a Mac (even though, as far as I'm concerned, the main point of an OS is simply to launch Emacs), but those limitations would be absolute deal-breakers.
And if those limitations don't exist, then forcing you to reboot the whole system just to restart the graphics engine is pretty nearly as bad, and would definitely reduce my interest in the platform by several orders of magnitude.
I'm going to disagree with you too, and it's not just because you're getting older--I've been reading SF for nearly four decades myself, and I think the average quality of SF has been improving my whole life. Of course, you have to keep Sturgeon's Law in mind.
There is one qualification I'll add: when I was young, fantasy was even more of a ghetto than Sf, and today the situation seems somewhat reversed. A lot more good new writers seem to go into fantasy these days, since it's a little more prestigious, which is too bad because I much prefer Sf in general. The flip side of this is that a lot more bad writers go into fantasy, so the shelves at the local bookstore are covered with dreck.
But really, the problem is simple. Sf (and fantasy) are both much more popular (and acceptable) than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Which means that there's a lot more people writing it. Which means there's a lot more third-rate crap being churned out, and it can be hard to find the gems. That doesn't mean they're not there--in fact, there's more high-quality Sf (and, yes, fantasy) than ever these days--but because of Sturgeon's law, there's so much more crap that it is harder than ever to find the good stuff. Which is probably why you think that there isn't as much good stuff any more.
Me, I haunt the awards-nominees lists to try to ferret out new authors worth reading, and I discover wonderful new authors that way just about every year. Not all award-nominated authors are good, but there's a much higher percentage of good ones than you'll find just randomly browsing the shelves at your local bookstore. I also have a couple of first-rate specialty Sf/Fantasy bookshops nearby where I can get good recommendations. If you don't have that, you can at least check out some of the better review sites: I like SFSite (which I found recommended in one of the Best SF of the Year anthologies a few years back), and SF Revu (which I discovered when it was nominated for a Hugo at a Worldcon I attended).
Quite honestly, the overall quality and especially the peak quality of Sf has improved so much over the last twenty years that I frequently find it hard to stomach some of the old classics I used to love.
I so thoroughly disagreed with one local newspaper critic that I actually found his reviews useful: if he hated it, I was in line the next day; if he loved it, I avoided it like the plague.
OK, I'm exaggerating a little. Nevertheless, if you learn something about a critic's tastes, the reviews can be useful even if those tastes don't match your own. Aside from that quibble, I agree with you. I find random reviews on the web to be all-but useless, since I usually know little about the reviewer.
Actually, I think it is bundling. But that doesn't matter, because, despite what the original post claimed, there's nothing wrong with bundling per-se. Bundling happened to be one of the mechanism MS used to illegally maintain and leverage their monopoly, but that doesn't mean that bundling is inherently wrong. Kicking a ball into a goal may win you praise; kicking an infant into a goal is likely to get you arrested. The problem is not the kicking, it's the circumstances and the target.
but this automatic bundling business is one of the huge anti-competitive issues with Microsoft. No. First of all, you can't engage in anti-competitive behavior unless you have a monopoly or are part of a trust with a monopoly. Which ASUS isn't. The problem with Microsoft's behavior wasn't that they have a monopoly (which is perfectly legal), nor that they engaged in bundling (which is also perfectly legal). The problem is that they used bundling as a tool to artificially maintain and leverage their monopoly. The fact that bundling was the tool (or one of the tools) they used is irrelevant. There's still nothing wrong with bundling per-se. It was the maintaining and leveraging of their monopoly that constituted anti-competitive behavior. Not the specific mechanisms (e.g. bundling).
Yes, you're right, you CAN choose not to buy an ASUS board (just like you can choose not to buy a HP or Dell preloaded with Windows). You pretty much answered your own question there.
But if bundling is wrong for one, how can it be right for another? Bundling wasn't wrong for MS. It was the anti-competitive that was wrong. I realize that car analogies are traditional on slashdot, but try this non-car analogy anyway: Two guys legally own guns. One shoots a bullet into a target. The other shoots a bullet into a shopkeeper while robbing a store. The latter is arrested, charged and convicted; the former gets off scott-free. But if shooting is wrong for one, how can it be right for another?
If you can figure out the answer to that, you should be able to figure out the answer to your own question.
Actually, I suspect that more people are buying iPods simply because that's the only name they know. My brother, who sort-of knows better came to me asking if I could recommend a good brand of iPod, since he knew I'd been comparison shopping recently. Of course, he meant "portable mp3 player", but to most people that is spelled "iPod". So I recommended the Samsung...iPod.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It is important to note that open source developers, whether commercial or non-commercial, will not need a patent license for the development of implementations of these protocols or for the non-commercial distribution of these implementations,
So...commercial developers can develop as long as they don't distribute. Boy, that's helpful/useful. About as helpful and useful as a kick in the nuts. :)
I still say the idea that a protocol can be patented is silly to the point of almost being an oxymoron. We can, perhaps, debate whether an implementation of a protocol can be patented, but the idea that the protocol itself can be patented seems like blatant abuse of the patent system, even if you're one of those who believes that software or business-method patents are a valid notion.
Fortunately, it does seem to be getting easier to challenge patents. Now if only we could get MS to admit what patents they think various open source projects might be violating, so we can start the search for prior art.... :)
(Alternatively, maybe we can keep them muttering vague threats about their patents without being specific long enough that we can ask for estoppel or laches if they ever do try to get specific. The rumblings help because that way they can't pretend that they didn't know about the supposed violations all along, a vital point in raising a defense of laches.)
IE7 is sooooooooo much slower to respond than Firefox
Hmm, it responds instantly for me:
But I have to say that it seems to be missing a feature or two compared to firefox. Like the ability to browse the web, just fer starters. :)
One word: Motif. The mess caused by that is what finally convinced me that the GPL was a justifiable and justified option.
Motif probably set Unix development back by a decade, and was, I suspect, a not-inconsiderable factor in Microsoft's ability to penetrate the server room. And it was, at the time, a better option than the other choices (like OpenLook).
Of course, Motif was eventually both reverse-engineered (Lesstif) and engineered around (GTK/Qt), but it was a major obstacle and major headache for far longer than it should have been.
For whatever reasons, the (L)GPL seems to do far more to discourage forking than the BSD or MIT licenses. To anyone who remembers the Unix wars of the eighties, that's definitely a Good Thing(tm).
Wikipedia's pretty impressive, but how about the Internet Archive? Also a non-profit that doesn't run ads, and not only do they, like Google and Yahoo, "download the Internet" on a regular basis, but the Archive makes backups! Plus, they have huge amounts of streaming audio and video (pd or creative-commons). The first time I ever heard the word "Petabyte" being discussed in practical, real world terms (as in, "we're taking delivery next month") was in connection with the Internet Archive. Several years ago. And it was being used in the plural! :)
They may not have as much incoming traffic as Wikipedia, but the sheer volume of data they manage is truly staggering. (Heck, they have multiple copies of Wikipedia!) When I do download something from there, it's typically in the 80-150 MB range, and 1 or 2 GB in a pop isn't unusual, and I know I'm not the only one downloading, so their bandwidth bills must still be pretty impressive.
The fact that these two sites manage to survive and thrive the way they do never ceases to amaze me.
There's a possibility that Vista will turn out to have been MS's PS/2. I'm not holding my breath. I don't think it's quite that drastic. On the other hand, MS is, for all their size and bloat, still somewhat smaller and more nimble than the monstrosity that IBM once was, so it's possible they don't need a failure as dramatic as the PS/2 to teach them that it's time to change direction. Dunno.
AFAIK, the Usenet rec.sport hierarchy predates the actual Internet. I'm pretty sure there were sports fans on the Internet within moments of the time there was something that could reasonably be described as "the Internet".
(Wow, I can still remember my first "bang-path" address.)
Granted, situations like the Debian ssh/ssl mess can and do slip through the mostly-anarchic seti-at-home-like distributed-audit that many of us engage in. Nothing's perfect and there are no silver bullets for software development. Nevertheless, having the code increases the chance that some of us will stumble across and help fix more problems. Just because something isn't perfect, that doesn't mean its not better than the alternatives. I am reminded of a nifty story about Ken Thompson's login hack. The idea (in Ken Thompson's supposed hack) that the compiler can "recognize" the code for itself and for login is silly in today's world. It can work for very limited versions of "recognize", but beyond that, it devolves into an exercise in futility and/or magical thinking. AI isn't that good yet, and even if it were, the amount of code required to actually recognize source for a compiler that is under constant modification would be so large that it couldn't possibly hope to be hidden for long.
Many years ago, I built GCC using a C interpreter, and then used the interpreted version of GCC to rebuild the compiler. It took a long time (and I mostly did it to exercise the interpreter), but the result was a binary that was identical to one built with a compiled version of GCC. Ken Thompson's hack may still live somewhere (assuming it ever really did exist anywhere), but it isn't on GCC-based systems (like Linux). And, until the Singularity, yes, we pretty much can prove it.
You seem to be suggesting that the only way open-source can be safe or useful is if everyone evaluates every line of code they use. That's silly, of course. Open source can be safe and useful as long as enough people evaluate enough of the code. And given the number of random patches (some good, some bad) that the Debian project alone receives on a daily basis, I can assure you that a lot of people our there are reading a lot of code.
Of course, I don't personally need to evaluate every line of code in a project as long as I know (and I do) that there are others out there like me who at least do spot inspections. A little pro-active inspection up-front to give yourself at least a basic idea of how the code works can save a lot of grief further on down the line. I count it time well spent. With proprietary code there are someone I can call and they are by contract obliged to fix problems within a certain time frame. That has nothing to do with the code being "proprietary", and everything to do with having a support contract. Do you imagine that companies using open-source don't have support contracts? Have you ever even considered just how bloody huge the code base is for something like a database? What does that have to do with anything? I've seen tiny projects that were incomprehensible messes of tangled spaghetti code, and huge projects that were clearly and cleanly laid out, well organized, and a piece of cake to maintain, support, study and evaluate. Frankly, I'll take the latter over the former anyday. It's not about the size of the code base, it's about the structure and organization. Also as a developer I got enough to do creating my own applications [...] Ah, well if you're the kind of developer who works in complete isolation on your own projects with no interaction with anyone else, I can understand your point of view. But that kind of development is pretty rare these days. Most of us work on teams, and evaluating other people's code is an almost-daily part of the job. The majority of that, at least in my case, involves code reviews (formal or informal) for other people in the company, but our code reviews are by no means limited to in-house code. We take more care with our own code because we know that we're the only eyes on it, but that doesn't mean we're foolish enough to assume that all third-party code is perfect and flawless.
On top of that, they have no arm rests. For a keyboard jockey, I think an arm rest set about five or ten cm higher than the keyboard is the only sane choice. A ball may be fine for lounging around or watching TV, but using it for "desktop coding" is just begging for wrist problems down the road.
Adjustable height and adjustable armrests are what I consider to be the two most critical and essential features of a computer chair. Anything else is gravy.
I think Tk has it beat by a long shot (over a decade).
:)
(Plus, Tk is something I'd willingly install on pretty much every platform I have, while KDE is something I don't want on any platform, no matter how much you pay me. But that's a separate issue.)
But the bottom line is, it sounds like they know a whole lot more about how to make really good free/libre/open source software than you do!
(I first used Linux 0.12, which was a long way from being feature complete--maybe you think Linus should have kept his code private until he had something good enough to call 1.0? I sure don't--I helped debug those early systems, and I don't think the system would have been anywhere near as good if he'd waited.)
I notice we already have the embraceextendextinguish tag on the story, but is there really a story here? Looks to me more like a slashvertisement. Ooh, MS wants to merge some unnecessary proprietary* crap with a trendy-but-flakey web rad system. Why should I or anyone care? And if they want to get the word out, why don't they pay the normal advertising rates rates like anyone else? Why is this news for nerds?
*Yes, I know about moonlight, but this clearly says silverlight, and the two have not yet been shown to be compatible. Plus, both require a huge, ugly back end to be installed. There isn't enough money in the world to persuade me to install mono on my servers or even my clients. And I'm certainly not interested in locking out our customers by requiring them to have silverlight/moonlight installed.
Yes, I got your joke, but there's so many people here who seem to be under the impression that copyrights are unitary and indivisible that I felt I still had to make the point. In fact, my analysis should make you happy. This is not DMCA abuse because Prince's copyright in the derivative work is valid, AND the result is one less Prince recording on the Intarweb. Sounds like win-win to me!
(If Radiohead's works were released under a copyleft, then Prince would have to choose between allowing fans to distribute his versions or not performing Radiohead compositions at all, but since they aren't, he doesn't.)
Some of those may only be medium-sized names, but some are very big names indeed. The idea that only small, obscure projects have come from a pure FLOSS background is utter nonsense.
So then if we bring them back, is that natural selection too?
And if those limitations don't exist, then forcing you to reboot the whole system just to restart the graphics engine is pretty nearly as bad, and would definitely reduce my interest in the platform by several orders of magnitude.
I'm going to disagree with you too, and it's not just because you're getting older--I've been reading SF for nearly four decades myself, and I think the average quality of SF has been improving my whole life. Of course, you have to keep Sturgeon's Law in mind.
There is one qualification I'll add: when I was young, fantasy was even more of a ghetto than Sf, and today the situation seems somewhat reversed. A lot more good new writers seem to go into fantasy these days, since it's a little more prestigious, which is too bad because I much prefer Sf in general. The flip side of this is that a lot more bad writers go into fantasy, so the shelves at the local bookstore are covered with dreck.
But really, the problem is simple. Sf (and fantasy) are both much more popular (and acceptable) than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Which means that there's a lot more people writing it. Which means there's a lot more third-rate crap being churned out, and it can be hard to find the gems. That doesn't mean they're not there--in fact, there's more high-quality Sf (and, yes, fantasy) than ever these days--but because of Sturgeon's law, there's so much more crap that it is harder than ever to find the good stuff. Which is probably why you think that there isn't as much good stuff any more.
Me, I haunt the awards-nominees lists to try to ferret out new authors worth reading, and I discover wonderful new authors that way just about every year. Not all award-nominated authors are good, but there's a much higher percentage of good ones than you'll find just randomly browsing the shelves at your local bookstore. I also have a couple of first-rate specialty Sf/Fantasy bookshops nearby where I can get good recommendations. If you don't have that, you can at least check out some of the better review sites: I like SFSite (which I found recommended in one of the Best SF of the Year anthologies a few years back), and SF Revu (which I discovered when it was nominated for a Hugo at a Worldcon I attended).
Quite honestly, the overall quality and especially the peak quality of Sf has improved so much over the last twenty years that I frequently find it hard to stomach some of the old classics I used to love.
I so thoroughly disagreed with one local newspaper critic that I actually found his reviews useful: if he hated it, I was in line the next day; if he loved it, I avoided it like the plague.
OK, I'm exaggerating a little. Nevertheless, if you learn something about a critic's tastes, the reviews can be useful even if those tastes don't match your own. Aside from that quibble, I agree with you. I find random reviews on the web to be all-but useless, since I usually know little about the reviewer.
Actually, I think it is bundling. But that doesn't matter, because, despite what the original post claimed, there's nothing wrong with bundling per-se. Bundling happened to be one of the mechanism MS used to illegally maintain and leverage their monopoly, but that doesn't mean that bundling is inherently wrong. Kicking a ball into a goal may win you praise; kicking an infant into a goal is likely to get you arrested. The problem is not the kicking, it's the circumstances and the target.
If you can figure out the answer to that, you should be able to figure out the answer to your own question.
Actually, I suspect that more people are buying iPods simply because that's the only name they know. My brother, who sort-of knows better came to me asking if I could recommend a good brand of iPod, since he knew I'd been comparison shopping recently. Of course, he meant "portable mp3 player", but to most people that is spelled "iPod". So I recommended the Samsung...iPod. :)