And I'm a troll. Now, since I'm a troll and I just sort of walk away, as all the arrows bounce off of me, does that really mean that I'm a golem... like a golem would be someone who trolls but doesn't take the wrath too personally...like, made out of stone.
Why aren't people moving to Antartica for the same reasons?
Probably because, my friend, it takes an enterprising salesman to sell religious nuts little habitats to live there with... maybe an open source project to design a habit for people to live in antartica....
You know, I actually agree with you but you are so pompous I just had to rattle you.
It's only a couple billion dollars a year... the feds should do vaccination program, nationwide, and just throw it on the tab. If we can drop a half a trillion on saving the people of Iraq from their own inability to form a peaceful government, I think we can squeeze in vaccinating all the children in the United States, period.
I really like web development on Linux more, and Apache most of all. But, sometimes, we're stuck with IIS and Windows.
FastCGI will allow me to write a service in C++, and be more portable to Linux. Sure, I have a bunch of socket code that I could use, but, web servers do such great things with threads and sockets that I'd love to be able to leverage that. FastCGI, you make my day.
Now, to find a good FastCGI library for C++, or, just read the spec. Hopefully, Microsoft complies with the spec.
As much as I troll around about the virtues of Windows, in my heart of hearts, I love Linux more. Even the other night, my wife found a cracked copy of Vista Ultimate for my dual opteron, and I just couldn't bring myself to get rid of SUSE, even though I've completely wrecked my installation. So I downloaded Ubuntu instead and will apply that!
Why would a person want to live on the moon? This is not meant as a troll, but the only reason a person would on the moon voluntarily (penal colony perhaps...) I can think of is to do research.
People will move to the moon for religious reasons. For example, if lunar colonies were affordable for a few hundred people, and could be self expanding, and not just sustaining, you'd find plenty of American religious movements heading off to the moon, just so they could set up their own fundamentalist laws. The moon will become dotted with a bunch of varying fundy groups, just like, well, America was when it was first colonized.
Is anyone else noticing the almost exponential rise in the rate at which new features are being added to the kernel? Linux major release anouncements would dwarf similar anouncements by 'competing' operating systems.
I think they write out every little thing they did, designed to more impress than really say oh wow, big new features. Microsoft major releases go in circles, but they do some pretty big stuff. Let's see, starting in NT4, they put the graphics drivers into the kernel, then a few releases later, they moved them out. Then they shifted the whole driver model around a few times. Then they put http protocol into the kernel, then they put the sound drivers outside of the kernel and probably down the road, something will inspire them to move http out of the kernel and put the sound drivers back into the kernel space. And, some of the features they've added along the way include incremental improvements to kernel queues, and, like Linux, MS seems to always be searching for a better scheduler.
fallocate, is something else.What exactly does this have to do with Windows 2000.
Let me make it simple for you, because, you seem to be the type that needs things to be exactly spelled out.
I started out the post by making a joke that I would compare fallocate to SetFilePointer or Sparse Files, and thus claim the feature was available in Windows 2000.. you know, the version of Windows from many years ago... get it?
But then I followed it up with some research on sparse files in Windows, and it turns out that they sorta suck anyway, and I thought was pretty funny.
fallocate() is a new system call which will allow applications to preallocate space to any file(s) in a file system. Applications can get a guarantee of space for particular file(s) - even if later the system becomes full
I was about to go and make fun of Linux for creating a feature that's been around in Windows for quite a while - take your pick of SetFilePointer or sparse files. Yes, yes, I understand that reserving space for a file is not the same as growing it and not using that space. Twas meant to be a troll....But, it turns out that a bit of googling reveals that sparse files under Windows are not all that they are cracked up to be:
You don't need to make a mess of uncompatable code that nobody but you will use.
STL sucks. My own containers are faster. I do like iterators though, and above all, I really don't like the idea of being told that I should use a particular thing, just to be compatible. Why not use Windows?
In 2009, I will ship my office suite, Stork Office. It will be fully open source, be even leaner than koffice, and not have the stupid Access-like tools. Then, if KDE isn't finished their 4.0 desktop, and fix the register view in KDevelop, I may just write my own GUI and IDE to go with it, for release in 2009. Oh, and I'll have Duke Nukem Forever as a game that ships with my system!
As people like yourself so often love to point out, we do pay for our health care, via. taxes. The only difference is that the majority of us are not so selfish to deny medical care to those who are unable to pay for it themselves.
But you do deny health care to people, ultimately. That's the whole point. Socialism and Capitalism are different ways of addressing scarcity. With socialism, you essentially cut services to people, and make them form lines, whereas, in capitalism, some people don't get them. So, somebody gets screwed in either scenario. It's just a question of who.
Well clearly we should use your one extremely lucky case as a basis for all our medical health care decisions. In fact since obviously car accidents are apparently completely safe and all other people who are in hospital deserve to die we should just close them down, yes?
I think you need to take a chill pill. All I said was that socialized medicine sucks, and our present level of medical practice isn't good enough. Now you go off on the deep end. Get off the bong and learn to think.
God damn idiots. Plenty of my family and friends are still here thanks to those hospitals, your goddamn lucky I don't know where you live or I might give you an idea about why we need them
You could try, but I would either kick your ass, burn your house down, or shoot you in the face.
That's a wee bit more than monopoly, don't you think? There are criminal laws to address that.
Actually, most of what Standard Oil did was legal at the time. The "blowing up" bit was illegal, but tolerated as part of "business" in those days. The Sherman Anti-trust act really put out an end to this, and specified just what a "monopoly" was. A monopoly by itself isn't illegal. Market share doesn't matter when determining if a business is acting like an evil monopoly in America. It's restraint of trade that's illegal. It's tying that's illegal.
You really can't restrain trade with computers, and that's what MS has been rightfully saying all along. It doesn't matter if MS sews up Dell to an exclusive deal or even really leans on them, because the PC market is structured so that anyone could get a PC, or make one, without Windows, as people who are into Linux do all the time.
The only way Microsoft could actually be really guilty about restraining trade and tying would be if they were pressure Intel, AMD, and IBM into not selling processors to somebody who was using an operating system other than Windows. But they don't. Intel doesn't care what operating system you use. In fact, both Intel and AMD promote Linux.
It's the same sort of defense that Dunkin Donuts uses.... they have basically a "monopoly" on donut stores, and drove Amy Joy out of business, but, they argued, successfully, they did not restrain trade because you could always by donuts from the likes of Entemann's, Tastycake, at Wawa, and so forth.
Well for one I am not willing to see children suffer and die.
Blah blah blah. In a country that has abortion and stuffs kids in daycare rather than raise them, I think this whole suffering children thing is more political posturing than anything else. How many african kids from TV do you sponsor? Obviously, again, these kids can't be too important if their own parents can't even be bothered to vaccinate them.
Also I don't think you understand how vaccinations work. They are not 100% effective. They function in two ways. One they provide protection for a large percentage of the people vaccinated and they reduce the totally number of v irises in the environment
Like I said, deport the illegal immigrants, and let them infect their own country. Why doesn't Mexico pay the bill for this? How come these parents have the money to send billions of dollars back to Mexico, but don't even pay for their own kids to get medical care? Do you event want this mooching culture to continue to exist?
Second you can not deport poor people. Not everyone getting the free immunizations are illegals. So we are providing them anyway
That's like saying, hey we invaded Afghanistan, so lets invade Iraq, because, we're invading anyway. And again, the question has to be, why can't people pay for vaccines themselves? There's 40 million illegal immigrants.
Third it is wrong to punish children for the actions of their parents. Those kids didn't come sneak into the US by themselves their parents brought them. Some of them are US citizens because under US law if you where born here you are a citizen.
Being too cheap to pay for vacinations for all children is wrong and frankly counter productive when it comes to total monetary costs of health care.
I'm not punishing anyone. I'm not a judge, and neither are you. There is no God in this country and therefor, no morality. It's really simple.
Go ahead, be a hero. Pay for them all. I'm raising my son, with one parent at home, to raise him the right way, supporting a family by myself, while the bulk of this country hauls their kids off to daycare like so much cattle and the other half is off to the abortion clinic because they are too selfish to raise a child, and then a whole bunch are split up because they are too arrogant to make the compromises needed to make a marriage work. Tell me that you are against abortion, tell me that you think divorce ought to be stigmatized, tell me that you are willing to sacrifice personal luxuries so that one parent can stay at home and raise a child at home, while the other works... tell me that you believe in the traditional family, I'll believe that you care about children. Otherwise, shut the hell up with your fake morality.
I challenge you to compete with Dell and their economies of scale, as well as their customer support
Your thinking is silly. There are plenty of openings and opportunities and you are just rationalizing your fears and depressing everyone with this nonsense. There are so many ways you can go after Dell - you could have a better organized web site, different product mixes, different modelling conventions, and you could do rather well, me thinks.
I mean, if everyone listened to the likes of you, there would be no Sam Adams Beer, no Toyota, and heck, for that matter, no Microsoft. All of them went up against much larger, established competition, and proved to be rather profitable, and even ultimately prevailed over that competition.
Then we'll be hearing about how the "evil convicted monopolist" is hampering their sales
What sales? These people are "too good" to get out there and sell. Instead, they'll argue that they should just have a tax to do what they want. Yawn, classically liberal.
Vista is an atomic bomb with a slow fuse. When it goes off, there will be no linux left.
First, cost is not irrelevant. Obviously, you are not in sales then. Every CEO I have ever met, every really successful sales guy I ever met, says that over and over and over, that cost and value are two entirely different things. How much you charge for something has absolutely nothing to do with how much it costs. If you can get a markup of %200, then go for it, because, its the value that you bring to the client, if they are willing to fork over that money.
But seriously, you are not comparing that value to a Linux desktop distro that has just about every software a regular user would need?
I personally don't think Linux has -everything- a regular user would need, but, I do also think that you are vastly understating the value of that Linux distribution. Linux adds thousands of dollars in value to a PC. That's the point you are missing. Don't think in terms of Linux v Windows, or this or that. Imagine walking into a store, with a computer, and it has Linux on it, and says, hey, here is a computer, you can word process, surf, run scientific applications, host web sites, a bunch of programming languages and a lot of sucky games, out of the box, and that's a lot of value right there.
Don't be bitching about a monopoly, because a monopoly replies a restraint of trade and there isn't one. It's not like when Standard Oil used to go around and blow up the oil refineries of its competitors, or buy up all the rail access to a rival oil field. Nobody is blocking you from making a PC, putting Linux on it, and selling it.
IE works for most people because that is all they know. Once they understand taking advantage of FireFox plugins, they never go back
I like IE for somethings, and I like Firefox for others.
So do Linux distros. Windows market status attracts driver support from appliance makers, but not as much of an advantage of the software architecture per se.
Windows market status is an excuse. The technical hurdles are the same. There is no single Linux. The software deployment process is cumbersome on Linux, more so than on Windows. The toolchain is spotty for desktop development, unless you write in Java, and Java sucks.
Not compelling. Too many other alternatives now
C# crushes Java hands down, and Visual Studio is the best IDE out there period for desktop forms development, and is pretty damned good for web development as well. I'd take C#/VS2007 over Eclipse/Java any day of the week. For C++, the situation is a bit different, but I think WTL is a better app framework than anything in the Linux world... and, at the end of the day, Linux will always remain haunted by the lack of a single standard widget like the sort Windows has. Has anyone read the SDK for what the Vista API adds to the stock widget sets - new button classes, new list classes, new options for lists... a lot of stuff that benefits SDK developers down the line. Plus, there's a lot of stuff in there to support threadpools, kernel queues, all of which Linux still lacks.
expect 6 billion in productions costs to do a lot more
You need to really look at the SDK documentation changes for Vista to see where 6 billion went, and then, you'd see, yep, they really did spend that much on Vista, and yep, its worth it. I mean, just one new style in the button control is a week's worth of developer work - as all that's written in straight C internally in Windows, and all of the controls have new stuff in them. Then there's the enhanced kernel queue, the unified driver model, a much better low level sound interface. Honestly, there's a lot of stuff in Vista that applications are not using, because they aren't there yet. But there's a lot of stuff that's pretty cool. Vista's huge, and my next spare $200 is going to go get me one, because the value of the buttons alone in the SDK make it worth my time to spend the money on it.
Bloody hell, they even wrote a new::MessageBox..., and that hasn't changed since Windows 3.1, me thinks. And there's a handwriting analysis API.... just a lot of cool stuff.
Oooh, don't forget that fancy new 3D UI, I'm sure Vista is way better than Linux there
Actually, the Linux looks flashier, for sure.
Question is, to get back to my original point, why couldn't someone put that on a PC, bundled, put it into a store, and sell it? This is not a case of Microsoft being a monopoly. It is the case that there is no one in Linux world that has the savvy and nerve to make a PC company based around a good Linux distro.
And, to answer the original "cost" argument, I would think that, if you had a good looking case, and had some level of online help for the system, that, you'd be able to do a bundled PC with it. Look at all the value that the Linux software adds to a PC.. you get an enterprise class web server, a pretty good IDE for Java (Eclipse), and a decent C++ IDE (KDevelop), plus a bunch of scientific, image editing and 3d tools. Open Office is workable and fails largely because it tries to imitate Word rather than the superior Lotus WordPro. A Linux box would be a perfect thing to put in a store for a college engineering student. For that matter, when is IBM going to port SmartSuite to Linux?
Plus, if you did a bundled PC, you could go to all the codec people (where patents apply), and get the legal, bundled, ready to go codecs that you'd have to pay for, but be ok with that because you'd be selling the whole package.
Did you read that article at all? It says, the proportional cost of bundled software climbed from 5% to 50%
Ah, but what's the proportional value of the software? See, you need to think more like a salesperson. Cost is irrelevant. It's the value that is added. And, look at all the value Windows adds to a PC..
a) You have Direct X 10, for games. And, there are a ton of games for Windows. b) You.NET, for business applications development c) You have a pretty good web browser. Yeah, IE has its flaws, but it works pretty good for most people. That is, I can go to the baseball site, get the scores, and it works. d) You have interfaces to a whole bunch of consumer appliances, from digital cameras and video players, and more. e) Vista has a really cool sound model that I am eager to play with. f) Unicode (UTF-16) is built in from the ground up. NTFS stacks up well against Reiser and ExtN for most applications. Remote Desktop and Terminal Services for Windows work really well...
Again, the question isn't about competing with Microsoft. Microsofts' model is dying - who wants to compete with that? Then you'll be worried about the next linux-like thing to come along and eat your lunch.
Boy, I wish I could die like Microsoft. They have double digit growth in both revenues and earnings per share, and are set to pass 50 billion dollars in revenues this year. For all of this talk about Google competing with Microsoft, Google's revenues remain a paltry few billion a year.
Yeah, that sounds like dying. Boy, I hear them death rattles now... Microsoft, on the verge of shutting down... except for that "oh we made 50 billion dollars this year part". Microsoft makes more in one month than all Linux distributions -combined-.
Microsoft can't compete with either the gift or pay-it-forward economies. If everyone who uses linux does this for just 2 people per year, within 5 years, Microsoft will have less than half the market, there will be tons of applications for linux, etc.
I think you are rationalizing a fear of competing with Microsoft. A gift economy is not an economy, it is a drain. Economy implies the production of wealth so that you can invest that wealth and advance. You aren't creating wealth when you give away hard drives. In fact, viewed at a macro level, your whole plan is really a good way for "Linux co" to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in promotional hard drives.
There is a great story, and I think it applies in this case. Back in the day, during one of the Communist Chinese 5 year plans to instantly become a modern state, Chairman Mao decided that he didn't need to invest the capital to create big steel plants. Mass action, he reasoned, was enough to show the socialists could trump capitalism. SO, he decreed that every villager in China had to produce some small amount of steel. The small steel would be gathered up, and then could be redistributed for other projects. What happened, though, was that the steel produced was so widely varying in quality that it could not be used. China supposedly produced a bunch of steel in those years, but it was all useless junk, and ultimately, villagers blew out the rest of the local economies trying to make steel, and everyone starved.
There's more hope than ever, it is just that you are too smart to see it. Everything required to make a PC is more of a commodity than ever, you have an OS that is pretty good and free, and some applications to go along with it. Linux may not do everything that Windows does, but, it also does a lot of things that Windows doesn't. It may not be perfect, but then again, Japanese cars were by no means perfect when they first began to arrive in the late 1960s, but, you just have to stay profitable, hang in there, make a quality thing, and keep rolling.
Really, to do this though, you need to take a Linux distro, and get rid of everything that isn't -perfect-. Do that, and have a system that -never- crashes, and word of mouth will take over and momentum will be on your side.
This isn't rocket science. Americans did it to the British. The Japanese did it to the Americans, the South Koreans to the Japanese, and so on. Build quality, stay focused, stay alive, and in time you get the big prize.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm a troll. Now, since I'm a troll and I just sort of walk away, as all the arrows bounce off of me, does that really mean that I'm a golem... like a golem would be someone who trolls but doesn't take the wrath too personally...like, made out of stone.
Why aren't people moving to Antartica for the same reasons?
Probably because, my friend, it takes an enterprising salesman to sell religious nuts little habitats to live there with... maybe an open source project to design a habit for people to live in antartica....
You know, I actually agree with you but you are so pompous I just had to rattle you.
It's only a couple billion dollars a year... the feds should do vaccination program, nationwide, and just throw it on the tab. If we can drop a half a trillion on saving the people of Iraq from their own inability to form a peaceful government, I think we can squeeze in vaccinating all the children in the United States, period.
I really like web development on Linux more, and Apache most of all. But, sometimes, we're stuck with IIS and Windows.
FastCGI will allow me to write a service in C++, and be more portable to Linux. Sure, I have a bunch of socket code that I could use, but, web servers do such great things with threads and sockets that I'd love to be able to leverage that. FastCGI, you make my day.
Now, to find a good FastCGI library for C++, or, just read the spec. Hopefully, Microsoft complies with the spec.
As much as I troll around about the virtues of Windows, in my heart of hearts, I love Linux more. Even the other night, my wife found a cracked copy of Vista Ultimate for my dual opteron, and I just couldn't bring myself to get rid of SUSE, even though I've completely wrecked my installation. So I downloaded Ubuntu instead and will apply that!
But how clean will your codebase be? Because that's the killer feature that is going to make me drop Microsoft Office!
My codebase will be so clean, you can eat off of it. I won't have a single dirty keyword in the whole thing!
Why would a person want to live on the moon? This is not meant as a troll, but the only reason a person would on the moon voluntarily (penal colony perhaps...) I can think of is to do research.
People will move to the moon for religious reasons. For example, if lunar colonies were affordable for a few hundred people, and could be self expanding, and not just sustaining, you'd find plenty of American religious movements heading off to the moon, just so they could set up their own fundamentalist laws. The moon will become dotted with a bunch of varying fundy groups, just like, well, America was when it was first colonized.
Is anyone else noticing the almost exponential rise in the rate at which new features are being added to the kernel? Linux major release anouncements would dwarf similar anouncements by 'competing' operating systems.
I think they write out every little thing they did, designed to more impress than really say oh wow, big new features. Microsoft major releases go in circles, but they do some pretty big stuff. Let's see, starting in NT4, they put the graphics drivers into the kernel, then a few releases later, they moved them out. Then they shifted the whole driver model around a few times. Then they put http protocol into the kernel, then they put the sound drivers outside of the kernel and probably down the road, something will inspire them to move http out of the kernel and put the sound drivers back into the kernel space. And, some of the features they've added along the way include incremental improvements to kernel queues, and, like Linux, MS seems to always be searching for a better scheduler.
fallocate, is something else.What exactly does this have to do with Windows 2000.
Let me make it simple for you, because, you seem to be the type that needs things to be exactly spelled out.
I started out the post by making a joke that I would compare fallocate to SetFilePointer or Sparse Files, and thus claim the feature was available in Windows 2000.. you know, the version of Windows from many years ago... get it?
But then I followed it up with some research on sparse files in Windows, and it turns out that they sorta suck anyway, and I thought was pretty funny.
that killed the pope. Sounds like our guy not only had an anti-papist agenda, but didn't like jews either.
fallocate() is a new system call which will allow applications to preallocate space to any file(s) in a file system. Applications can get a guarantee of space for particular file(s) - even if later the system becomes full
I was about to go and make fun of Linux for creating a feature that's been around in Windows for quite a while - take your pick of SetFilePointer or sparse files. Yes, yes, I understand that reserving space for a file is not the same as growing it and not using that space. Twas meant to be a troll....But, it turns out that a bit of googling reveals that sparse files under Windows are not all that they are cracked up to be:
http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/sparse-files.phtml
You don't need to make a mess of uncompatable code that nobody but you will use.
STL sucks. My own containers are faster. I do like iterators though, and above all, I really don't like the idea of being told that I should use a particular thing, just to be compatible. Why not use Windows?
In 2009, I will ship my office suite, Stork Office. It will be fully open source, be even leaner than koffice, and not have the stupid Access-like tools. Then, if KDE isn't finished their 4.0 desktop, and fix the register view in KDevelop, I may just write my own GUI and IDE to go with it, for release in 2009. Oh, and I'll have Duke Nukem Forever as a game that ships with my system!
As people like yourself so often love to point out, we do pay for our health care, via. taxes. The only difference is that the majority of us are not so selfish to deny medical care to those who are unable to pay for it themselves.
But you do deny health care to people, ultimately. That's the whole point. Socialism and Capitalism are different ways of addressing scarcity. With socialism, you essentially cut services to people, and make them form lines, whereas, in capitalism, some people don't get them. So, somebody gets screwed in either scenario. It's just a question of who.
Well clearly we should use your one extremely lucky case as a basis for all our medical health care decisions. In fact since obviously car accidents are apparently completely safe and all other people who are in hospital deserve to die we should just close them down, yes?
I think you need to take a chill pill. All I said was that socialized medicine sucks, and our present level of medical practice isn't good enough. Now you go off on the deep end. Get off the bong and learn to think.
God damn idiots. Plenty of my family and friends are still here thanks to those hospitals, your goddamn lucky I don't know where you live or I might give you an idea about why we need them
You could try, but I would either kick your ass, burn your house down, or shoot you in the face.
That's a wee bit more than monopoly, don't you think? There are criminal laws to address that.
Actually, most of what Standard Oil did was legal at the time. The "blowing up" bit was illegal, but tolerated as part of "business" in those days. The Sherman Anti-trust act really put out an end to this, and specified just what a "monopoly" was. A monopoly by itself isn't illegal. Market share doesn't matter when determining if a business is acting like an evil monopoly in America. It's restraint of trade that's illegal. It's tying that's illegal.
You really can't restrain trade with computers, and that's what MS has been rightfully saying all along. It doesn't matter if MS sews up Dell to an exclusive deal or even really leans on them, because the PC market is structured so that anyone could get a PC, or make one, without Windows, as people who are into Linux do all the time.
The only way Microsoft could actually be really guilty about restraining trade and tying would be if they were pressure Intel, AMD, and IBM into not selling processors to somebody who was using an operating system other than Windows. But they don't. Intel doesn't care what operating system you use. In fact, both Intel and AMD promote Linux.
It's the same sort of defense that Dunkin Donuts uses.... they have basically a "monopoly" on donut stores, and drove Amy Joy out of business, but, they argued, successfully, they did not restrain trade because you could always by donuts from the likes of Entemann's, Tastycake, at Wawa, and so forth.
Well for one I am not willing to see children suffer and die.
Blah blah blah. In a country that has abortion and stuffs kids in daycare rather than raise them, I think this whole suffering children thing is more political posturing than anything else. How many african kids from TV do you sponsor? Obviously, again, these kids can't be too important if their own parents can't even be bothered to vaccinate them.
Also I don't think you understand how vaccinations work. They are not 100% effective. They function in two ways. One they provide protection for a large percentage of the people vaccinated and they reduce the totally number of v irises in the environment
Like I said, deport the illegal immigrants, and let them infect their own country. Why doesn't Mexico pay the bill for this? How come these parents have the money to send billions of dollars back to Mexico, but don't even pay for their own kids to get medical care? Do you event want this mooching culture to continue to exist?
Second you can not deport poor people. Not everyone getting the free immunizations are illegals. So we are providing them anyway
That's like saying, hey we invaded Afghanistan, so lets invade Iraq, because, we're invading anyway. And again, the question has to be, why can't people pay for vaccines themselves? There's 40 million illegal immigrants.
Third it is wrong to punish children for the actions of their parents. Those kids didn't come sneak into the US by themselves their parents brought them. Some of them are US citizens because under US law if you where born here you are a citizen.
Being too cheap to pay for vacinations for all children is wrong and frankly counter productive when it comes to total monetary costs of health care.
I'm not punishing anyone. I'm not a judge, and neither are you. There is no God in this country and therefor, no morality. It's really simple.
Go ahead, be a hero. Pay for them all. I'm raising my son, with one parent at home, to raise him the right way, supporting a family by myself, while the bulk of this country hauls their kids off to daycare like so much cattle and the other half is off to the abortion clinic because they are too selfish to raise a child, and then a whole bunch are split up because they are too arrogant to make the compromises needed to make a marriage work. Tell me that you are against abortion, tell me that you think divorce ought to be stigmatized, tell me that you are willing to sacrifice personal luxuries so that one parent can stay at home and raise a child at home, while the other works... tell me that you believe in the traditional family, I'll believe that you care about children. Otherwise, shut the hell up with your fake morality.
As for this "choice" thing you're talking about. That's the function of the market isn't it? Wouldn't just proprietary software give people "choice"?
If open source didn't give people more choices, would there really be any point to it?
I challenge you to compete with Dell and their economies of scale, as well as their customer support
Your thinking is silly. There are plenty of openings and opportunities and you are just rationalizing your fears and depressing everyone with this nonsense. There are so many ways you can go after Dell - you could have a better organized web site, different product mixes, different modelling conventions, and you could do rather well, me thinks.
I mean, if everyone listened to the likes of you, there would be no Sam Adams Beer, no Toyota, and heck, for that matter, no Microsoft. All of them went up against much larger, established competition, and proved to be rather profitable, and even ultimately prevailed over that competition.
Then we'll be hearing about how the "evil convicted monopolist" is hampering their sales
What sales? These people are "too good" to get out there and sell. Instead, they'll argue that they should just have a tax to do what they want. Yawn, classically liberal.
Vista is an atomic bomb with a slow fuse. When it goes off, there will be no linux left.
First, cost is not irrelevant.
::MessageBox..., and that hasn't changed since Windows 3.1, me thinks. And there's a handwriting analysis API.... just a lot of cool stuff.
Obviously, you are not in sales then. Every CEO I have ever met, every really successful sales guy I ever met, says that over and over and over, that cost and value are two entirely different things. How much you charge for something has absolutely nothing to do with how much it costs. If you can get a markup of %200, then go for it, because, its the value that you bring to the client, if they are willing to fork over that money.
But seriously, you are not comparing that value to a Linux desktop distro that has just about every software a regular user would need?
I personally don't think Linux has -everything- a regular user would need, but, I do also think that you are vastly understating the value of that Linux distribution. Linux adds thousands of dollars in value to a PC. That's the point you are missing. Don't think in terms of Linux v Windows, or this or that. Imagine walking into a store, with a computer, and it has Linux on it, and says, hey, here is a computer, you can word process, surf, run scientific applications, host web sites, a bunch of programming languages and a lot of sucky games, out of the box, and that's a lot of value right there.
Don't be bitching about a monopoly, because a monopoly replies a restraint of trade and there isn't one. It's not like when Standard Oil used to go around and blow up the oil refineries of its competitors, or buy up all the rail access to a rival oil field. Nobody is blocking you from making a PC, putting Linux on it, and selling it.
IE works for most people because that is all they know. Once they understand taking advantage of FireFox plugins, they never go back
I like IE for somethings, and I like Firefox for others.
So do Linux distros. Windows market status attracts driver support from appliance makers, but not as much of an advantage of the software architecture per se.
Windows market status is an excuse. The technical hurdles are the same. There is no single Linux. The software deployment process is cumbersome on Linux, more so than on Windows. The toolchain is spotty for desktop development, unless you write in Java, and Java sucks.
Not compelling. Too many other alternatives now
C# crushes Java hands down, and Visual Studio is the best IDE out there period for desktop forms development, and is pretty damned good for web development as well. I'd take C#/VS2007 over Eclipse/Java any day of the week. For C++, the situation is a bit different, but I think WTL is a better app framework than anything in the Linux world... and, at the end of the day, Linux will always remain haunted by the lack of a single standard widget like the sort Windows has. Has anyone read the SDK for what the Vista API adds to the stock widget sets - new button classes, new list classes, new options for lists... a lot of stuff that benefits SDK developers down the line. Plus, there's a lot of stuff in there to support threadpools, kernel queues, all of which Linux still lacks.
expect 6 billion in productions costs to do a lot more
You need to really look at the SDK documentation changes for Vista to see where 6 billion went, and then, you'd see, yep, they really did spend that much on Vista, and yep, its worth it. I mean, just one new style in the button control is a week's worth of developer work - as all that's written in straight C internally in Windows, and all of the controls have new stuff in them. Then there's the enhanced kernel queue, the unified driver model, a much better low level sound interface. Honestly, there's a lot of stuff in Vista that applications are not using, because they aren't there yet. But there's a lot of stuff that's pretty cool. Vista's huge, and my next spare $200 is going to go get me one, because the value of the buttons alone in the SDK make it worth my time to spend the money on it.
Bloody hell, they even wrote a new
Oooh, don't forget that fancy new 3D UI, I'm sure Vista is way better than Linux there
Actually, the Linux looks flashier, for sure.
Question is, to get back to my original point, why couldn't someone put that on a PC, bundled, put it into a store, and sell it? This is not a case of Microsoft being a monopoly. It is the case that there is no one in Linux world that has the savvy and nerve to make a PC company based around a good Linux distro.
And, to answer the original "cost" argument, I would think that, if you had a good looking case, and had some level of online help for the system, that, you'd be able to do a bundled PC with it. Look at all the value that the Linux software adds to a PC.. you get an enterprise class web server, a pretty good IDE for Java (Eclipse), and a decent C++ IDE (KDevelop), plus a bunch of scientific, image editing and 3d tools. Open Office is workable and fails largely because it tries to imitate Word rather than the superior Lotus WordPro. A Linux box would be a perfect thing to put in a store for a college engineering student. For that matter, when is IBM going to port SmartSuite to Linux?
Plus, if you did a bundled PC, you could go to all the codec people (where patents apply), and get the legal, bundled, ready to go codecs that you'd have to pay for, but be ok with that because you'd be selling the whole package.
Did you read that article at all? It says, the proportional cost of bundled software climbed from 5% to 50%
.NET, for business applications development
Ah, but what's the proportional value of the software? See, you need to think more like a salesperson. Cost is irrelevant. It's the value that is added. And, look at all the value Windows adds to a PC..
a) You have Direct X 10, for games. And, there are a ton of games for Windows.
b) You
c) You have a pretty good web browser. Yeah, IE has its flaws, but it works pretty good for most people. That is, I can go to the baseball site, get the scores, and it works.
d) You have interfaces to a whole bunch of consumer appliances, from digital cameras and video players, and more.
e) Vista has a really cool sound model that I am eager to play with.
f) Unicode (UTF-16) is built in from the ground up. NTFS stacks up well against Reiser and ExtN for most applications. Remote Desktop and Terminal Services for Windows work really well...
Again, the question isn't about competing with Microsoft. Microsofts' model is dying - who wants to compete with that? Then you'll be worried about the next linux-like thing to come along and eat your lunch.
Boy, I wish I could die like Microsoft. They have double digit growth in both revenues and earnings per share, and are set to pass 50 billion dollars in revenues this year. For all of this talk about Google competing with Microsoft, Google's revenues remain a paltry few billion a year.
Yeah, that sounds like dying. Boy, I hear them death rattles now... Microsoft, on the verge of shutting down... except for that "oh we made 50 billion dollars this year part". Microsoft makes more in one month than all Linux distributions -combined-.
Microsoft can't compete with either the gift or pay-it-forward economies. If everyone who uses linux does this for just 2 people per year, within 5 years, Microsoft will have less than half the market, there will be tons of applications for linux, etc.
I think you are rationalizing a fear of competing with Microsoft. A gift economy is not an economy, it is a drain. Economy implies the production of wealth so that you can invest that wealth and advance. You aren't creating wealth when you give away hard drives. In fact, viewed at a macro level, your whole plan is really a good way for "Linux co" to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in promotional hard drives.
There is a great story, and I think it applies in this case. Back in the day, during one of the Communist Chinese 5 year plans to instantly become a modern state, Chairman Mao decided that he didn't need to invest the capital to create big steel plants. Mass action, he reasoned, was enough to show the socialists could trump capitalism. SO, he decreed that every villager in China had to produce some small amount of steel. The small steel would be gathered up, and then could be redistributed for other projects. What happened, though, was that the steel produced was so widely varying in quality that it could not be used. China supposedly produced a bunch of steel in those years, but it was all useless junk, and ultimately, villagers blew out the rest of the local economies trying to make steel, and everyone starved.
while it certainly doesn't offer much hope,
There's more hope than ever, it is just that you are too smart to see it. Everything required to make a PC is more of a commodity than ever, you have an OS that is pretty good and free, and some applications to go along with it. Linux may not do everything that Windows does, but, it also does a lot of things that Windows doesn't. It may not be perfect, but then again, Japanese cars were by no means perfect when they first began to arrive in the late 1960s, but, you just have to stay profitable, hang in there, make a quality thing, and keep rolling.
Really, to do this though, you need to take a Linux distro, and get rid of everything that isn't -perfect-. Do that, and have a system that -never- crashes, and word of mouth will take over and momentum will be on your side.
This isn't rocket science. Americans did it to the British. The Japanese did it to the Americans, the South Koreans to the Japanese, and so on. Build quality, stay focused, stay alive, and in time you get the big prize.