You can give them the best answer: Many linux people use the windows key every day--unlike Windows where its just a useless advertising key for most. Once you map the windows key onto meta, it becomes an important key, akin to Macs open-apple command key. I use it in emacs, for moving between desktops, for moving windows between desktops, for maximizing and minimizing, etc. It is especially useful if you have a laptop, because you can eliminate most of your mousing by having multiple desktops and using meta-key combinations to move around from application to application!
OK, I should have quoted book, chapter, and verse. And you should have done some research before sticking your foot up your mouth. Here's what section 3 of the GPL states. Focus on Section 3B:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
* a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
* b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
* c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
To paraphrase (as I stated earlier) and contrary to what you said, you must distribute the source with the executables, or offer to give ANY third party the source.
The GPL requires that either (paraphrased, because I'm sick of hunting down the actual license text every time someone makes this error):
1) You distribute the source at the same time as the software, or
2) The software comes with a written offer to provide the source at a reasonable cost (e.g., not more than was paid for the actual software), good for 3 years or something, for ANYONE who asks.
There are a couple little loopholes, like they can give you the offer of source distribution that someone else gave them. Together with #2, this preserves the freedom of a buyer to resell or give the software to someone else, even if they never originally exercised their right to obtain the source code.
So, if they are redistributing koffice unchanged, redirecting you to the koffice source is probably sufficient. But when they make changes, it is not sufficient--it would really suck if their improvements to Kword didn't get rolled back in, because it could use some help. If they don't provide source that can compile to their final product, we would never know if it did.
So, if they didn't distribute the source on the actual media, they must offer it to all comers, including actual customers, the FSF, you, or I. There is no question begging going on here.
This is a cross-disciplinary field, and isn't taken too seriously by computer science departments OR psychology departments. Even Don Norman, whose work in the cognitive psychology of learning is still pretty important, probably couldn't get hired by a psych department nowadays. Consequently, in the past 5-10 years, a new trend has emerged--HCI researchers are finding homes in--of all places--the library. Increasingly, universities are starting "Schools of Information", or other similarly-named departments. These often combine HCI, Library science, design, aspects of cognitive science, and sometimes aspects of business school economics and sociology. And they are typically well-funded, both internally (via university "information initiatives") and externally (via corporate and government grants). Furthermore, they are frequently "Professional" schools, offering masters degrees to people who go off and work in all corners of the IT industry.
Of course, this doesn't mean anything "Good" is going on in these schools. But many of Nielson and Norman's colleagues who haven't found cushy jobs as consultants at NNG are the people who founded these schools. I don't think the future of HCI really has much to worry about.
This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000. I was stunned and amazed when I read this sentence. I had to read it twice before I believed it! Someone actually spelled "ridiculous" correctly on slashdot! Its gotten so that it doesn't even look correct anymore. Nice work!
According to this pdf, the report compares 4 compression codecs, and found for a small sample found:
MEAN LOSSLESS COMPRESSION RATIOS (big is good) ------------------ JPEG 2000: 2.5 JPEG-LS: 2.98 L-JPEG: 2.09 PNG: 3.52
JPEG-LS is was usually the best, but PNG had a few really good sample that pushed its average up. Actually, these outliers appear important, because that is what really separates the codecs on this metric.
Lossless Decoding Times, relative to JPEG-LS (big is bad) ----------------- JPEG 2000: 4.3 JPEG-LS: 1 L-JPEG:.9 PNG: 1.2
This doesn't make JPG2K appear too impressive. What it does offer, however, is features. Like Region Of Interest (ROI) coding, good lossy compression, random access, and other goodies that some people may really care about. The report claims that png doesn't do lossy encoding, which is news to me, but it does appear to be one of their major selling points for jpeg-2000 over png.
But even beginners deserve to share in the joy of debian. And even experts shouldn't have to do stupid things like manually set up network cards when they can be easily auto-detected. As a newbie, I tried to install debian several times, and never succeeded, always crawling back to Windows. Finally, I gave Storm Linux a shot, and it worked pretty well, at least until I hosed my system. Having gained some experience, I tried to install debian again. No dice, and so after a few more months on windows, I tried Progeny, and its installer was relatively painless! After eventually moving everything over to Debian unstable (mixed packages from progeny, ximian, woody, and potato made my system a dependency nightmare) and dropping Windows entirely, I became quite comfortable with linux. So, I tried to install Debian again--this time on a laptop. Forget about it--I ended crawling back to progeny for installation, and then apt-getting myself to Woody. In my opinion, the main thing that leads to debian's reputation as a 'expert' distro is that only experts can install it. Once installed, its pretty easy to maintain and use.
Someday, I hope to make it all the way through the debian installer. I have a feeling that at the end, Samus will remove his helmet and I'll find out he's a girl.
This is a ridiculous assumption. Open source coders have a huge incentive to make their code good--they get fewer emails from people yelling at them and asking them how to make things works.
I'm not claiming that open source software is good at interface design and ease-of-use. Overall, its terrible. There are gems of usability out there, and I don't think the usability is any worse than in the shareware world, but the reason its bad is NOT because the developers have incentives to make it difficult to use.
In fact, I'll make the claim that (for example) if xcdroast wasn't so difficult to use, the developer would be able to spend much more time improving it, rather than fielding email about "What does 'master tracks' mean?". The perversity is that creating unusable software impedes further progress on that software.
It really hurts when I see that Linux gains marketshare from other UNIX variants; it should be gaining from Windows, not from its brethren. This may endanger the viability of UNIX as a whole (investemnts made by companies like Sun, HP, IBM) and is not good news.
Don't feel bad--if Linux wasn't taking their marketshare, Windows would be. The unix market's is going through a little consolidation behind the flag of linux. Prior to linux's emergence, the unix sectors biggest problem (and strength) was the multiplicity of different (seemingly) incompatible solutions. Of course, POSIX and the OPEN group emerged to fight this off, but their business models couldn't last against WINTEL--they had more expensive software and hardware, no desktop to speak of, poor options for commodity peripheral support, difficulty to configure, and to top it all off, management all own stock in MS. Now, the proprietary unix vendors are enriching linux and offering a "linux strategy" in order to stay alive. But, as a result, more people than ever are using unix-like OSes. Once there is hegemony behind the diversity that is linux, look for linux desktop shares to encroach on Microsoft--at least to the level that Mac's do.
In my estimation, what's happening now is much like what went on in the early days of Islam. You had a bunch of fearsome barbaric nomadic tribes (unix) roaming around in the desert attacking each other. Mohammed (Linus) came along and united them under the the flag of Islam (Linux), after which they created an empire that covered the half of the known world, and creating one of the most advanced civilizations of its time (My computer once most mainstream games are available on linux).
It seems to me that Gateway may have just signed its death warrant. It is already in financial trouble: their recent Gateway Store idea looks like a bust, they are getting taken to the cleaners by Steven from Dell and the "current economic downturn", and their stock is in the toilet. Now, they just turned on one of the the only companies who could bail them out and keep them afloat, while at the same time making an enemy of the only supplier they have that is irreplaceable. No wonder the other OEMs don't want to testify.
b) There's a hell of a difference between just bumping into something and actually making use of it. Columbus and the Spanish get the credit they do because, regardless of whether the Chinese or Martians or whoever had already been round, no one established a permanent colony that's lasted through the ages until the Spanish did.
I'm sure you meant to say "no one but people with dark skin and hair established a permanent colony that's lasted through the ages..."
There might be a seed of good news here: if his work was based on other GPL work (even incorporating others' bugfixes), then his company gains little or nothing from "owning" the code. They can use it internally as much as they want, but if they try to license it to others (and thus profit from it), they will be required to license it to them under the GPL. But, it appears that their motivations in this affair are not for monetary gain, but rather they are pulling a management discipline trick. Maybe they feel like he was "moonlighting" and making him less productive (who can productively write code 8 hours a day, and then write code another 4 hours a night?), or his involvement with open source projects was actually cutting into his work productivity (email correspondence, etc.), or maybe he is only putting in 40 hours a week while his fellow employees are putting in 60 hours. I think they are probably using this as a strong-arm tactic make him behave and put in more time at work.
I have never tried Suse, and only installed Mandrake once on a laptop in hopes of getting it to recognize a pcmcia card (it didn't), so maybe I'm not making much sense here, but it seems to me that these two distros are battling each other for the "European KDE-leaning user-friendlyish financially-faltering" distro. Wouldn't closer collaboration on their parts be beneficial, to avoid redundancies in installers/configurators/packages/etc? I know their packaging schemes are different, and they probably have minor differences in their file system organization, but they may be able to achieve fairly substantial cost savings by cooperating more and each distributing their own "branded" versions.
This innovation myth is silly and ignorant. For every open source project that is implementing a feature set of a proprietary product, there are a dozen proprietary products implementing the same features. Right now, many visible open source projects are still in the early stages, where they have yet to implement the features normal users would expect. Its silly to blame gnumeric for not revolutionizing the way spreadsheets are used when it can't yet make decent graphs. Once these projects are able to compete feature-for-feature with their proprietary cousins, expect more "innovation" to occur.
That being said, there are thousands of little innovations in Free software projects, not the least of which is the innovative idea that the user should have control over the software. Like evolution's virtual folders. Like Nautilus's scripting facility. Like Konqueror's embedded command-line view. Like mozilla's chrome. Like the mini-commander. Like debian's APT. Like emacs's infinite configurability. Like nedit's column-based copy and paste. Like panel applets. Like mosaic (for its time). To be sure, there are 'innovations' in proprietary software as well, but I bet if you sit down and look at any piece of software and count the "innovations" versus the "copycat features", the ratio would be about the same for open source and proprietary projects. In truth, everybody is stealing ideas from everybody else, unless someone is lucky enough to get a patent for their idea.
Look at the more mature Open Source projects, and you will find they are jam-packed with innovation: perl, apache, imagemagick, ghostscript, pine, gcc, and on and on.
Re:Bad perhaps
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Google has always seemed to be driven by a happy medium of civic duty and profit.
I'm not trying to harass you personally, but this statement assumes that Google is making a profit. Are they really bringing in enough money with the adwords to fund their operation, or are they still operating on VC Baby Fat? If they are profitable, why are they trying to sell this corny $15,000 "Corporate Google" device? As the parent post said, Altavista tried that 5 years ago when they realized they needed more profits--it didn't help them much.
If they are making money, I ask: How is Google able to maintain the entire Deja usenet archives without ads when Deja wasn't able to maintain it profitably WITH ads in the.com advertising heydey? How are they able to cache the entire web supported on only adwords when every other search engine is losing money just caching their index? How are they able to be the grep of the web supported by tiny classified ads, while/. is not yet profitable supported by big ugly ads. Something doesn't add up.
Google's ultimate downfall will come about because of financial reasons, not because their search results go to pot. Once the money well runs dry (after they sell the ping-pong tables at HQ), they will start trying all sorts of crazy schemes to stay afloat. Like becoming a portal. Like offering a personal google device. Like selling big ugly adds. Like offering premium subscriptions. Hopefully, they can sidestep the pitfalls experienced by their failed predecessors, but I bet that within a year, Google will look very different than it does today.
OK, enough with the country music bashing. Its no worse than 'popular' music. As in: The 8 types of songs played on MTV:
1. Scantily-clad white girl dances while singing about how much she wants to please you. 2. A bunch of white pretty boys sing in harmony about how bad-ass they are. 3. A bunch of pretty black girls sing in harmony about how bad-ass they are. 4. Scantily-clad black man poses while singing about how much he wants to please you. 5. The real world. 6. Road Rules. 7. The Real World versus Road Rules. 8. Retro "The Real World" marathons with behind-the scenes interviews so you can really get to know the cast members.
I don't know if they are going to convince themselves that selling linux is a good idea. From here:
The hp workstation x1000 with Intel® Pentium® 4 processor running at 1.7GHz. This minitower configuration includes Windows 2000 Professional®, 20GB IDE Hard Drive, 128MB SDRAM, 48X CD-ROM, Matrox G450 graphics plus keyboard, mouse, power cord and recovery media.
hp workstations x1000 - Linux
Red Hat Linux 7.1, Intel Pentium 4 processor at 1.7GHz, 20GB IDE HDD, Matrox G450, 128MB SDRAM, 48X CD, power cord, media and manuals.:
$1,211
I think I'll get the windows version and install debian myself.
I agree that galeon is faster and lighter, and I find myself using it most of the time. But its kinda sad that we are satisfied with 3.0+ second response latencies. In terms of HCI, a good rule of thumb is that latencies longer than 500 msecs can lead to different behavior than sub-500 msec latencies. For example, many people say "startup time doesn't bother me because I leave my browser open all the time." Well, if the browser only took 500 msecs to open, most people wouldn't leave it open all the time. If new windows took only 500 msecs to open, I would use the "Open page in new browser window" option a lot more, and maybe even map in on to my middle mouse button. Of course, with today's technology, the only way to achieve these latencies may be preload all the libraries as is done with IE.
If you found some of his earlier points interesting, you may want to read the 1995 book "The trouble with computers" by Tom
Landauer. I think its kind of controversial, but he points out that a lot of the promised and perceived productivity gains due to computers have never come about.
In my opinion, the problem here is not about adding features to their "OS". Its about including programs that were previously available externally, charging more and pretending you are getting them for free. Its not as if IE cost Microsoft nothing to make, and they recouped their losses through sales of Windows, so they were really charging consumers for this. This practice and others were anticompetitive, which is illegal because they were deemed a monopoly: people had no real choice in the OS they bought, and so had no choice in the software they bought along with it.
My question is this: if Windows came in 2 versions: 1) barebones system for $99, including just what's needed to run programs, or 2) "consumer edition" for $199, with browser/cd player/winzip/photo editor/email client/etc., how many people would go for #1 and use other applications? How many businesses would opt for #1?
Slashdot Mirror
You can give them the best answer: Many linux people use the windows key every day--unlike Windows where its just a useless advertising key for most. Once you map the windows key onto meta, it becomes an important key, akin to Macs open-apple command key. I use it in emacs, for moving between desktops, for moving windows between desktops, for maximizing and minimizing, etc. It is especially useful if you have a laptop, because you can eliminate most of your mousing by having multiple desktops and using meta-key combinations to move around from application to application!
OK, I should have quoted book, chapter, and verse. And you should have done some research before sticking your foot up your mouth. Here's what section 3 of the GPL states. Focus on Section 3B:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
* a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
* b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
* c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
To paraphrase (as I stated earlier) and contrary to what you said, you must distribute the source with the executables, or offer to give ANY third party the source.
The GPL requires that either (paraphrased, because I'm sick of hunting down the actual license text every time someone makes this error):
1) You distribute the source at the same time as the software, or
2) The software comes with a written offer to provide the source at a reasonable cost (e.g., not more than was paid for the actual software), good for 3 years or something, for ANYONE who asks.
There are a couple little loopholes, like they can give you the offer of source distribution that someone else gave them. Together with #2, this preserves the freedom of a buyer to resell or give the software to someone else, even if they never originally exercised their right to obtain the source code.
So, if they are redistributing koffice unchanged, redirecting you to the koffice source is probably sufficient. But when they make changes, it is not sufficient--it would really suck if their improvements to Kword didn't get rolled back in, because it could use some help. If they don't provide source that can compile to their final product, we would never know if it did.
So, if they didn't distribute the source on the actual media, they must offer it to all comers, including actual customers, the FSF, you, or I. There is no question begging going on here.
This is a cross-disciplinary field, and isn't taken too seriously by computer science departments OR psychology departments. Even Don Norman, whose work in the cognitive psychology of learning is still pretty important, probably couldn't get hired by a psych department nowadays. Consequently, in the past 5-10 years, a new trend has emerged--HCI researchers are finding homes in--of all places--the library. Increasingly, universities are starting "Schools of Information", or other similarly-named departments. These often combine HCI, Library science, design, aspects of cognitive science, and sometimes aspects of business school economics and sociology. And they are typically well-funded, both internally (via university "information initiatives") and externally (via corporate and government grants). Furthermore, they are frequently "Professional" schools, offering masters degrees to people who go off and work in all corners of the IT industry.
Of course, this doesn't mean anything "Good" is going on in these schools. But many of Nielson and Norman's colleagues who haven't found cushy jobs as consultants at NNG are the people who founded these schools. I don't think the future of HCI really has much to worry about.
Probably, some joker went and logged in and changed the password. How elite--getting the slashdot username on NYT!
This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.
I was stunned and amazed when I read this sentence. I had to read it twice before I believed it! Someone actually spelled "ridiculous" correctly on slashdot! Its gotten so that it doesn't even look correct anymore. Nice work!
According to this pdf,
.9
the report compares 4 compression codecs, and found for a small sample found:
MEAN LOSSLESS COMPRESSION RATIOS (big is good)
------------------
JPEG 2000: 2.5
JPEG-LS: 2.98
L-JPEG: 2.09
PNG: 3.52
JPEG-LS is was usually the best, but PNG had a few really good sample that pushed its average up. Actually, these outliers appear important, because that is what really separates the codecs on this metric.
Lossless Decoding Times, relative to JPEG-LS (big is bad)
-----------------
JPEG 2000: 4.3
JPEG-LS: 1
L-JPEG:
PNG: 1.2
This doesn't make JPG2K appear too impressive. What it does offer, however, is features. Like Region Of Interest (ROI) coding, good lossy compression, random access, and other goodies that some people may really care about. The report claims that png doesn't do lossy encoding, which is news to me, but it does appear to be one of their major selling points for jpeg-2000 over png.
Many years from now, you will be considered "in the know" if you remember Signal11, and elite if you got personally trolled by him.
You misunderstood him. He meant, "Except for the powerful free software out there, the reputation is that free software isn't very powerful."
But even beginners deserve to share in the joy of debian. And even experts shouldn't have to do stupid things like manually set up network cards when they can be easily auto-detected. As a newbie, I tried to install debian several times, and never succeeded, always crawling back to Windows. Finally, I gave Storm Linux a shot, and it worked pretty well, at least until I hosed my system. Having gained some experience, I tried to install debian again. No dice, and so after a few more months on windows, I tried Progeny, and its installer was relatively painless! After eventually moving everything over to Debian unstable (mixed packages from progeny, ximian, woody, and potato made my system a dependency nightmare) and dropping Windows entirely, I became quite comfortable with linux. So, I tried to install Debian again--this time on a laptop. Forget about it--I ended crawling back to progeny for installation, and then apt-getting myself to Woody. In my opinion, the main thing that leads to debian's reputation as a 'expert' distro is that only experts can install it. Once installed, its pretty easy to maintain and use.
Someday, I hope to make it all the way through the debian installer. I have a feeling that at the end, Samus will remove his helmet and I'll find out he's a girl.
This is a ridiculous assumption. Open source coders have a huge incentive to make their code good--they get fewer emails from people yelling at them and asking them how to make things works.
I'm not claiming that open source software is good at interface design and ease-of-use. Overall, its terrible. There are gems of usability out there, and I don't think the usability is any worse than in the shareware world, but the reason its bad is NOT because the developers have incentives to make it difficult to use.
In fact, I'll make the claim that (for example) if xcdroast wasn't so difficult to use, the developer would be able to spend much more time improving it, rather than fielding email about "What does 'master tracks' mean?". The perversity is that creating unusable software impedes further progress on that software.
It really hurts when I see that Linux gains marketshare from other UNIX variants; it should be gaining from Windows, not from its brethren. This may endanger the viability of UNIX as a whole (investemnts made by companies like Sun, HP, IBM) and is not good news.
Don't feel bad--if Linux wasn't taking their marketshare, Windows would be. The unix market's is going through a little consolidation behind the flag of linux. Prior to linux's emergence, the unix sectors biggest problem (and strength) was the multiplicity of different (seemingly) incompatible solutions. Of course, POSIX and the OPEN group emerged to fight this off, but their business models couldn't last against WINTEL--they had more expensive software and hardware, no desktop to speak of, poor options for commodity peripheral support, difficulty to configure, and to top it all off, management all own stock in MS.
Now, the proprietary unix vendors are enriching linux and offering a "linux strategy" in order to stay alive. But, as a result, more people than ever are using unix-like OSes. Once there is hegemony behind the diversity that is linux, look for linux desktop shares to encroach on Microsoft--at least to the level that Mac's do.
In my estimation, what's happening now is much like what went on in the early days of Islam. You had a bunch of fearsome barbaric nomadic tribes (unix) roaming around in the desert attacking each other. Mohammed (Linus) came along and united them under the the flag of Islam (Linux), after which they created an empire that covered the half of the known world, and creating one of the most advanced civilizations of its time (My computer once most mainstream games are available on linux).
It seems to me that Gateway may have just signed its death warrant. It is already in financial trouble: their recent Gateway Store idea looks like a bust, they are getting taken to the cleaners by Steven from Dell and the "current economic downturn", and their stock is in the toilet. Now, they just turned on one of the the only companies who could bail them out and keep them afloat, while at the same time making an enemy of the only supplier they have that is irreplaceable. No wonder the other OEMs don't want to testify.
b) There's a hell of a difference between just bumping into something and actually making use of it. Columbus and the Spanish get the credit they do because, regardless of whether the Chinese or Martians or whoever had already been round, no one established a permanent colony that's lasted through the ages until the Spanish did.
I'm sure you meant to say "no one but people with dark skin and hair established a permanent colony that's lasted through the ages..."
There might be a seed of good news here: if his work was based on other GPL work (even incorporating others' bugfixes), then his company gains little or nothing from "owning" the code. They can use it internally as much as they want, but if they try to license it to others (and thus profit from it), they will be required to license it to them under the GPL. But, it appears that their motivations in this affair are not for monetary gain, but rather they are pulling a management discipline trick. Maybe they feel like he was "moonlighting" and making him less productive (who can productively write code 8 hours a day, and then write code another 4 hours a night?), or his involvement with open source projects was actually cutting into his work productivity (email correspondence, etc.), or maybe he is only putting in 40 hours a week while his fellow employees are putting in 60 hours. I think they are probably using this as a strong-arm tactic make him behave and put in more time at work.
I have never tried Suse, and only installed Mandrake once on a laptop in hopes of getting it to recognize a pcmcia card (it didn't), so maybe I'm not making much sense here, but it seems to me that these two distros are battling each other for the "European KDE-leaning user-friendlyish financially-faltering" distro. Wouldn't closer collaboration on their parts be beneficial, to avoid redundancies in installers/configurators/packages/etc? I know their packaging schemes are different, and they probably have minor differences in their file system organization, but they may be able to achieve fairly substantial cost savings by cooperating more and each distributing their own "branded" versions.
This innovation myth is silly and ignorant. For every open source project that is implementing a feature set of a proprietary product, there are a dozen proprietary products implementing the same features. Right now, many visible open source projects are still in the early stages, where they have yet to implement the features normal users would expect. Its silly to blame gnumeric for not revolutionizing the way spreadsheets are used when it can't yet make decent graphs. Once these projects are able to compete feature-for-feature with their proprietary cousins, expect more "innovation" to occur.
That being said, there are thousands of little innovations in Free software projects, not the least of which is the innovative idea that the user should have control over the software. Like evolution's virtual folders. Like Nautilus's scripting facility. Like Konqueror's embedded command-line view. Like mozilla's chrome. Like the mini-commander. Like debian's APT. Like emacs's infinite configurability. Like nedit's column-based copy and paste. Like panel applets. Like mosaic (for its time). To be sure, there are 'innovations' in proprietary software as well, but I bet if you sit down and look at any piece of software and count the "innovations" versus the "copycat features", the ratio would be about the same for open source and proprietary projects. In truth, everybody is stealing ideas from everybody else, unless someone is lucky enough to get a patent for their idea.
Look at the more mature Open Source projects, and you will find they are jam-packed with innovation: perl, apache, imagemagick, ghostscript, pine, gcc, and on and on.
Google has always seemed to be driven by a happy medium of civic duty and profit.
.com advertising heydey? How are they able to cache the entire web supported on only adwords when every other search engine is losing money just caching their index? How are they able to be the grep of the web supported by tiny classified ads, while /. is not yet profitable supported by big ugly ads. Something doesn't add up.
I'm not trying to harass you personally, but this statement assumes that Google is making a profit. Are they really bringing in enough money with the adwords to fund their operation, or are they still operating on VC Baby Fat? If they are profitable, why are they trying to sell this corny $15,000 "Corporate Google" device? As the parent post said, Altavista tried that 5 years ago when they realized they needed more profits--it didn't help them much.
If they are making money, I ask: How is Google able to maintain the entire Deja usenet archives without ads when Deja wasn't able to maintain it profitably WITH ads in the
Google's ultimate downfall will come about because of financial reasons, not because their search results go to pot. Once the money well runs dry (after they sell the ping-pong tables at HQ), they will start trying all sorts of crazy schemes to stay afloat. Like becoming a portal. Like offering a personal google device. Like selling big ugly adds. Like offering premium subscriptions. Hopefully, they can sidestep the pitfalls experienced by their failed predecessors, but I bet that within a year, Google will look very different than it does today.
Also they gave every 7th grader in maine an ibook this year, and those kids usually go down with one punch. :)
Yeah, but much like the Seinfeld Mother's day episode, most of us would blow the margin on the trip to Maine.
OK, enough with the country music bashing. Its no worse than 'popular' music. As in:
The 8 types of songs played on MTV:
1. Scantily-clad white girl dances while singing about how much she wants to please you.
2. A bunch of white pretty boys sing in harmony about how bad-ass they are.
3. A bunch of pretty black girls sing in harmony about how bad-ass they are.
4. Scantily-clad black man poses while singing about how much he wants to please you.
5. The real world.
6. Road Rules.
7. The Real World versus Road Rules.
8. Retro "The Real World" marathons with behind-the scenes interviews so you can really get to know the cast members.
...and don't forget misspelling things.
and from
I think I'll get the windows version and install debian myself.
I agree that galeon is faster and lighter, and I find myself using it most of the time. But its kinda sad that we are satisfied with 3.0+ second response latencies. In terms of HCI, a good rule of thumb is that latencies longer than 500 msecs can lead to different behavior than sub-500 msec latencies. For example, many people say "startup time doesn't bother me because I leave my browser open all the time." Well, if the browser only took 500 msecs to open, most people wouldn't leave it open all the time. If new windows took only 500 msecs to open, I would use the "Open page in new browser window" option a lot more, and maybe even map in on to my middle mouse button. Of course, with today's technology, the only way to achieve these latencies may be preload all the libraries as is done with IE.
If you found some of his earlier points interesting, you may want to read the 1995 book "The trouble with computers" by Tom
Landauer. I think its kind of controversial, but he points out that a lot of the promised and perceived productivity gains due to computers have never come about.
In my opinion, the problem here is not about adding features to their "OS". Its about including programs that were previously available externally, charging more and pretending you are getting them for free. Its not as if IE cost Microsoft nothing to make, and they recouped their losses through sales of Windows, so they were really charging consumers for this. This practice and others were anticompetitive, which is illegal because they were deemed a monopoly: people had no real choice in the OS they bought, and so had no choice in the software they bought along with it.
My question is this: if Windows came in 2 versions: 1) barebones system for $99, including just what's needed to run programs, or 2) "consumer edition" for $199, with browser/cd player/winzip/photo editor/email client/etc., how many people would go for #1 and use other applications? How many businesses would opt for #1?