Funny that you mention it, but a lot of MIT stuff recommends that you buy books, or, tada get them from the library!
MIT Opencourseware is not all as good as you might think. I was working on my own ultimately failed solution to P=NP last summer and so I spent a lot of time surfing various universities to get myself up to speed on information theory. MIT's stuff turned out to be pretty lame in that, they might have some syllabus notes and a few things like that but its hardly a good online experience.
To almost put together a good knowledge base, you have to really go almost university shopping on a class by class basis. There was another university that had almost an online course that explained how to properly transform SAT into another NP Complete problem and thereby prove a problem was NP-Complete and they explained it clearly and simply and walked through a few trivial examples to show it. Funny thing is, I can't remember which university it was. I want to say Northwestern...but I'm not sure.
Will this bill stop the pre existing condition BS? Let you buy any plan that you want? UN tie it from your job?
Actually, no the bill won't do any of that. Are you sure you are not asking for someone else to pay your medical bills? I agree that employers should be untied from medical care and all insurance should be privately purchased. But I think if you have a pre-existing condition you should be shuffled into a government program that covers your costs since you most likely cannot cover them yourself.
Take, for example, HIV treatment. Most people probably couldn't afford the cocktail that keeps them alive. But I don't think its too terrible to throw in a couple bucks of year in taxes per person to help another guy stay alive, as long as he doesn't bitch about Republicans, in which case, I'd vote to cut him off.
How about having a Bankruptcy that is just for Health stuff and does not show up on any back round check?
Nope. Why should it? I would think that, as a lender, paying back your health loans first would be the thing that they look for... you know, do the logical thing and pay the people to keep you alive.
Not let people ask about you medial history before offering your a job?
Quite frankly I think any credit check should be off limits when applying for a job or a place to live.
Make it so you can not be dropped by a insurance provider.
That would throw too many programmers out of work. Besides, the whole point of insurance is about risk management. If an insurance cannot manage the risk, it cannot operate as a company. Quite frankly the thing to do would be to deregulate all the coverage provided by insurance and get rid of all the various state mandates that make it more expensive.
Is that the House Democrats are essentially following the blueprint for Healthcare provided by Republican Mitt Romney in Massachussetts. So far, the Massachusetts model has pretty much worked, in that, they did reduce the number of uninsured significantly. However, costs for the state provided side of the plan have come in way more than anyone either promised or expected. Quite frankly, the expansion of the health insurance pool did not increase the economies of scale and drive down costs for everyone. Now everyone just has procedures that they cannot afford done.
The other irony is that Obama's said to be considering the McCain plan's idea of taxing health care benefits and requiring employers to purchase it.
Not to mention how sad it is for a science fiction writer to not understand the importance of the Internet
He didn't say it wasn't important. He said it sucked and he preferred libraries. For him, perhaps, the whole human face to face side of libraries, the visible comradery in a culture of learning and self improvement, outweighs the utility of search.
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
That's rather the point of a library, is it not. The internet is not a library, because it does not have a librarian. The idea of a library is to have good material in it for a community to share in. The choices that the library makes are as much of a statement of humanity as anything else. When you use the internet, and filter noise yourself, you aren't getting the same level of service.
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet. Or, are you starting out with the Martian Chronicle instead?
If anything, given the level of thought that the man has historically produced, you might find it instructive to understand what his criticisms are. If anything, it would only serve to improve the internet.
Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.
Hmmm, no, I would not be so quick to dispute that statement at all.
There is so much crap on the internet that it undermines all the information that is out there. Conversely, if you go to the 500 and 600 sections of the library, you can be somewhat assured that you are getting at least -something- that is accurate.
Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line. Seriously, how much will you google around before you spend a few bucks and go out and buy Steven's books before doing some sockets works. Would you monkey around with Perl and a bunch of fanboi sites with terrible examples, or why not just go out and buy the Camel book. Or, if you were doing Windows SDK work, would you wade through MSDN and all the Microsoft fanboi sites, or would you just go and get the Petzold bible.
If there's any problem with libraries, its more a lack of funding and a lack of societies attention to pay librarians seriously and to respect the field. A good librarian is a skilled position, somebody who can reach into all the various fields and find what's good, and gather it up into one spot.
There's a lot to be said for libraries. The other day, my wife came home with a new library card. Big internet a holic, but there's always something about halls of books.
How much are you going to share with them? 50 people at $100,000 each is 5 of your millions gone already. $100,000 would be nice to tide someone through the recession but they'd hardly be retiring rich
I would think that splitting it 50/50 between me and my people would be what I would do. So, if I made 10 million yeah, each gets 100k. I would be be grateful if I got let go with 100k, as that gives me a year to get my own business off the ground. And, if I made 100 million, than those 50 could take a bit more time looking for work, for sure.
Telling you, if I ever do come up with that big idea, it would pay to work with me.
May be last time you installed some Linux desktop was a decade ago.
I have Linux with the latest Ubuntu. I prefer Vista. It has nothing to do with mind inertia. Instead, its very simple:
a) Visual Studio is still the best all around IDE. Microsoft's C compiler is still one of the best for native code. Microsoft's debugger is better than GNU's, for sure, largely because the IDE view of it gives a better register view and the watch is easier to deal with.
b) I have a choice of good browsers for Windows. I run Google Chrome first, Firefox second, and IE8 third.
c) I like Vista's desktop better than Ubuntu's latest KDE, and certainly better than Gnome. I think KDE's plasma with its emphasis on making everything into a widget is kind of a mistake. I like having a big -desktop- with all my junk right on it. Vista has way better common dialogs, particularly for file open and file save, and Vista's search bar works better than the one in KDE or Gnome.
d) I can play a lot of my favorite games on Vista.
e) I like programming the Windows SDK natively more than I like programming Linux in C++. I do tend to prefer Linux's file handle system - like sockets are files, and so forth (please don't f-- that up), but what I really wish is that Linux would go more the Plan 9 route and make everything a file. But they won't and increasingly we have a watered down and confusing Windows. I like GDI as a native graphics thing and if I want something more fancy I can choose either DirectX or OpenGL. If I want to saw my arm off and go native, WPF and Silverlight are good. All of those solutions are easy to ensure they are deployed on a client machine.
f) Cut and paste doesn't screw up in Windows in the way it does when crossing from Gnome to KDE applications.
As for end users, its pretty hard to not recommend Office. The problem is that, while developers have a natural tendency to assume that the features that they picked are good enough, often times, they are not. Nowhere is this more true than Office. I've seen in the corporate world people doing things with Excel or Word that frankly should not be done and honestly the power to do those things in Open Office simply isn't there.
A lot of this really, comes about because of Linux culture. Linux is a self indulgent thing, kinda programmers for programmers. I admit, its hard to not get caught up into its spell. I like Bash, for sure, and development of console applications is great, and, as a consequence, fastcgi applications is pretty cool too. It would be unthinkable to make a C++ web service app under Windows, although MS has made a lot of progress there, but doing so under Linux is entirely a reasonable proposition. I also like that Linux has so much of a good 64 bit maturity that includes legacy drivers, like my SATA controller.
But....
End users like all the stuff that Linux developers and Linux core users don't care about, and as such, Linux will never be ready to prime time in that market. It's like pretending that the Chevy Cobalt is the same kind of a small car that a Toyota Corolla is. I mean, I would buy a Chevy Cobalt over a Corolla becuase I'm an American car guy, and the ideological reasons trump, but I'm under no illusion whose product is really "better". Linux developers should see things the same way, and deal with it honestly. Linux is like a truck maker trying to compete with people that want small cars.
That sucks. I would like to think that if I made a millions selling a company with 50 people in it, the I would hook up the guys that got whacked who helped make it possible.
(Actually, "Dr Doctoro" sounds like the worst supervillain ever, a mad scientist whose weapons and powers are entirely stethoscope and tongue-depressor related or something. "Someday, Spider-Man, you shall feel the cold touch of my DETHOSCOPE!")
Either that, or a really bad, or should I say, good, porn film. "Come here, Spider-girl, and feel the warm touch of my throbbing DETHOSCOPE!"
I couldn't make it the past web site... that's pretty rough. I agree with you on the HFCS... that's our "Republican" free trade for you... ban the import of stuff that hurts only Republican states.
By the way, for my web site on our Independence Day I'm going to fly the Union Jack and thank the UK for being a cool ally.
Yet another IT company gets to live my dream!
on
Oracle Kills Virtual Iron
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I would so love to be Virtual Iron, or anyone who got bought out like that. Geez, they buy me out, then tell me, that, I really am not allowed to work on it any more and can just take off for a few years, here's your millions of dollars.
Bad things happen quite often, services become unavailable, malware causes downtime, heavy load causes crashes. You should work for Microsoft marketing as you want to put lipstick on pigs.
It's probably all your bad programming that's screwing up the servers. I bet if you had a Linux farm to work with, you'd be crashing it too.
The reality is that Microsoft's stuff is technically excellent and the unix world is a bunch of also-rans trying to tout minor engineering advantages over the better engineering choices Microsoft has to tended to make. Changes to user interfaces make them better. Office 2003 is better than 2000, and Office 2007 is absolutely wonderful. It doesn't take that much to learn a new u/i. Sometimes people should be forced to upgrade. I mean, seriously, do you still think PC's should have ISA adapters.?
I suspect whoever controls (or fails to control) monopolies there might disagree.
It's a cheap excuse. Coca cola and Pespi both try to do exclusive deals all the time. There is a reason you get Coke at McDonalds and Burger King, and not Pepsi. I actually hate Pepsi, and I thought it was a victory for freedom when Burger King switched to Coke. There is huge competition between Coke and Pepsi, trying to lock in these winner take all deals. But, it can only go so far. Many convenient store chains still carry both coke and pespi despite any perceived threat, that is actually backed up by consistent market practice.
The point is, if 7-11 can tell Pepsi and Coke that is going to carry both, or else, at some point, the soda companies will have to blink. Look at this way, Microsoft could only withdraw Windows from the likes of Dell once. Sure, Dell might crater down to half of its market share with Linux, or even a fraction of that, but, ultimately, that would establish Linux in the market place. Asian companies know this, and so does Microsoft. The whole netbook thing might have actually been not a push to get Linux into the consumer space, but a push by Asian companies to get Microsoft to lower their prices.
I do and I actually wrote a couple of things for it. For the most part, BeOS torpedoed itself when they switched from BeOS 5 to that whole Network appliance push they were trying to make. BeOS had a viable business selling copies from their download site. If they would have just stuck it out, I think they would have been able to make a go at it, especially considering that the entire value proposition of having an operating system designed to work with massive numbers of CPUS turned out to be remarkably right.
I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"
Actually, we find your work to be subpar. Perhaps if you were not posting on slashdot, this telescope would not be the failed lemon that it is. Get back to work, and let's not hear back from you until we have some surface detail of Pluto.
Hmmm, an instance where the death of someone causes severe repercussions involving possibly billions of dollars of money. I don't know how that could possibly go wrong...
Am surprised you did not get modded funny or insightful for this. I would give you a point.
The irony is that Dr Doctoro is another intermediary too, putting himself between the things he finds interesting and us. what a corporate dog! I free myself of your monopoly!
The great mystery of computing is not that Linux is not in the consumer space, but that Windows is so entrenched in the enterprise space.
Windows is inherently a consumer operating system. It has a developer mythology that the dream Windows development is to make that one product that you can sell and make millions with. It's got a rich set of services developers can use to build consumer products, and it treats a product like a product, a property that can be bought, traded, and rented. You've got a well documented set of graphics and sound APIs, a halfway decent networking stack, and a bunch of tools that are frankly geared towards producing consumer products and these things support a healthy consumer market. Consumers, to some degree, actually like to spend money, so that Windows is non-free actually enhances its perceived value in the consumer space. If you receive something or buy something that doesn't work in Windows, its not something that you try and sort out and fix, its time to move on to another product. Everything is a black box good that you pay for, it either works or it doesn't, and that's what people on the consumer level want.
On the other hand, Linux is a total corporate and government system. It has a developer mythology that "welcome to the basement of megacorp, I've got a jar skittles.. we're both cogs.. here's your cube." Thus, the economic prospect that in the Linux world, your work product is worthless in the market sense, but, your boss gets to use the economic benefit of it over and over again, and, if you can get to keep working on it for a bit, that's pretty interesting and you get a paycheck for it. If you want to get rich with Linux, it won't be by making an application. You'd have to make a consumer black box out of it by hosting a web site using it. But all the development and other tools of Linux have a certain corporate basement feel. Nothing is really a consumer level product, but, everything has all sorts of rich nooks and crannies to do a bunch of different corporate tasks. Consumers don't need to replace social security numbers in a giant database with some new form of proprietary identifier, but Linux developers do, and that's where the strength of Linux tools lie.
Do you really want Linux to be a consumer system anyway? To some extent, that means getting rid of an awful lot that is lovable about Linux. It means polishing out (getting rid of), that barely documented switch to a command where an author left a note saying "uh, this piece of code I put in and got to work for this one thing that I was doing but I'm not really maintaining it", or, to not have that feature at all, or, even worse, have the feature, but not the warning. In any case, there's nothing about Windows that reminds me of the guy in the basement offering some skittles in the basement of the power company, but Linux has that in spades, and I like skittles.
For Linux to be a consumer system, we have to have a world where we take art seriously. That means no copying of images, or songs, worrying about who owns what, and, in a corporate world, all of that is a pain in the rear. If we made Linux into a consumer system and had a consumer culture with it, there's no way you could, from your basement, tell the next bit of bits in your desk to get in line, just like all the other bits. We're all just corporate cogs, hey, here's some skittles.
Me thinks that rather than charging to get consumers to adopt Linux, it should be to drive Windows out of the corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny that you mention it, but a lot of MIT stuff recommends that you buy books, or, tada get them from the library!
MIT Opencourseware is not all as good as you might think. I was working on my own ultimately failed solution to P=NP last summer and so I spent a lot of time surfing various universities to get myself up to speed on information theory. MIT's stuff turned out to be pretty lame in that, they might have some syllabus notes and a few things like that but its hardly a good online experience.
To almost put together a good knowledge base, you have to really go almost university shopping on a class by class basis. There was another university that had almost an online course that explained how to properly transform SAT into another NP Complete problem and thereby prove a problem was NP-Complete and they explained it clearly and simply and walked through a few trivial examples to show it. Funny thing is, I can't remember which university it was. I want to say Northwestern...but I'm not sure.
Will this bill stop the pre existing condition BS? Let you buy any plan that you want? UN tie it from your job?
Actually, no the bill won't do any of that. Are you sure you are not asking for someone else to pay your medical bills? I agree that employers should be untied from medical care and all insurance should be
privately purchased. But I think if you have a pre-existing condition you should be shuffled into a government program that covers your costs since you most likely cannot cover them yourself.
Take, for example, HIV treatment. Most people probably couldn't afford the cocktail that keeps them alive. But I don't think its too terrible to throw in a couple bucks of year in taxes per person to help another guy stay alive, as long as he doesn't bitch about Republicans, in which case, I'd vote to cut him off.
How about having a Bankruptcy that is just for Health stuff and does not show up on any back round check?
Nope. Why should it? I would think that, as a lender, paying back your health loans first would be the thing that they look for... you know, do the logical thing and pay the people to keep you alive.
Not let people ask about you medial history before offering your a job?
Quite frankly I think any credit check should be off limits when applying for a job or a place to live.
Make it so you can not be dropped by a insurance provider.
That would throw too many programmers out of work. Besides, the whole point of insurance is about risk management. If an insurance cannot manage the risk, it cannot operate as a company. Quite frankly the thing to do would be to deregulate all the coverage provided by insurance and get rid of all the various state mandates that make it more expensive.
Is that the House Democrats are essentially following the blueprint for Healthcare provided by Republican Mitt Romney in Massachussetts. So far, the Massachusetts model has pretty much worked, in that, they did reduce the number of uninsured significantly. However, costs for the state provided side of the plan have come in way more than anyone either promised or expected. Quite frankly, the expansion of the health insurance pool did not increase the economies of scale and drive down costs for everyone. Now everyone just has procedures that they cannot afford done.
The other irony is that Obama's said to be considering the McCain plan's idea of taxing health care benefits and requiring employers to purchase it.
Not to mention how sad it is for a science fiction writer to not understand the importance of the Internet
He didn't say it wasn't important. He said it sucked and he preferred libraries. For him, perhaps, the whole human face to face side of libraries, the visible comradery in a culture of learning and self improvement, outweighs the utility of search.
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
The whole point of the library is that the noise tends to be filtered for you. Thus, the internet is a dump, not a library.
Just because you can't seem to find your way out of the trashy romance novels, it doesn't mean that a particular "library" is complete trash.
That's rather the point of a library, is it not. The internet is not a library, because it does not have a librarian. The idea of a library is to have good material in it for a community to share in. The choices that the library makes are as much of a statement of humanity as anything else. When you use the internet, and filter noise yourself, you aren't getting the same level of service.
I agree; what an idiot. T
Until you write Fahrenheit 451, I wouldn't be so quick to call Ray Bradbury an idiot, no matter what he says about the internet. Or, are you starting out with the Martian Chronicle instead?
If anything, given the level of thought that the man has historically produced, you might find it instructive to understand what his criticisms are. If anything, it would only serve to improve the internet.
Technically, the internet is the largest library of information ever known to man. To dismiss it only shows his inability to truly grasp it.
Hmmm, no, I would not be so quick to dispute that statement at all.
There is so much crap on the internet that it undermines all the information that is out there. Conversely, if you go to the 500 and 600 sections of the library, you can be somewhat assured that you are getting at least -something- that is accurate.
Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line. Seriously, how much will you google around before you spend a few bucks and go out and buy Steven's books before doing some sockets works. Would you monkey around with Perl and a bunch of fanboi sites with terrible examples, or why not just go out and buy the Camel book. Or, if you were doing Windows SDK work, would you wade through MSDN and all the Microsoft fanboi sites, or would you just go and get the Petzold bible.
If there's any problem with libraries, its more a lack of funding and a lack of societies attention to pay librarians seriously and to respect the field. A good librarian is a skilled position, somebody who can reach into all the various fields and find what's good, and gather it up into one spot.
There's a lot to be said for libraries. The other day, my wife came home with a new library card. Big internet a holic, but there's always something about halls of books.
How much are you going to share with them? 50 people at $100,000 each is 5 of your millions gone already. $100,000 would be nice to tide someone through the recession but they'd hardly be retiring rich
I would think that splitting it 50/50 between me and my people would be what I would do. So, if I made 10 million yeah, each gets 100k. I would be be grateful if I got let go with 100k, as that gives me a year to get my own business off the ground. And, if I made 100 million, than those 50 could take a bit more time looking for work, for sure.
Telling you, if I ever do come up with that big idea, it would pay to work with me.
May be last time you installed some Linux desktop was a decade ago.
I have Linux with the latest Ubuntu. I prefer Vista. It has nothing to do with mind inertia. Instead, its very simple:
a) Visual Studio is still the best all around IDE. Microsoft's C compiler is still one of the best for native code. Microsoft's debugger is better than GNU's, for sure, largely because the IDE view of it gives a better register view and the watch is easier to deal with.
b) I have a choice of good browsers for Windows. I run Google Chrome first, Firefox second, and IE8 third.
c) I like Vista's desktop better than Ubuntu's latest KDE, and certainly better than Gnome. I think KDE's plasma with its emphasis on making everything into a widget is kind of a mistake. I like having a big -desktop- with all my junk right on it. Vista has way better common dialogs, particularly for file open and file save, and Vista's search bar works better than the one in KDE or Gnome.
d) I can play a lot of my favorite games on Vista.
e) I like programming the Windows SDK natively more than I like programming Linux in C++. I do tend to prefer Linux's file handle system - like sockets are files, and so forth (please don't f-- that up), but what I really wish is that Linux would go more the Plan 9 route and make everything a file. But they won't and increasingly we have a watered down and confusing Windows. I like GDI as a native graphics thing and if I want something more fancy I can choose either DirectX or OpenGL. If I want to saw my arm off and go native, WPF and Silverlight are good. All of those solutions are easy to ensure they are deployed on a client machine.
f) Cut and paste doesn't screw up in Windows in the way it does when crossing from Gnome to KDE applications.
As for end users, its pretty hard to not recommend Office. The problem is that, while developers have a natural tendency to assume that the features that they picked are good enough, often times, they are not. Nowhere is this more true than Office. I've seen in the corporate world people doing things with Excel or Word that frankly should not be done and honestly the power to do those things in Open Office simply isn't there.
A lot of this really, comes about because of Linux culture. Linux is a self indulgent thing, kinda programmers for programmers. I admit, its hard to not get caught up into its spell. I like Bash, for sure, and development of console applications is great, and, as a consequence, fastcgi applications is pretty cool too. It would be unthinkable to make a C++ web service app under Windows, although MS has made a lot of progress there, but doing so under Linux is entirely a reasonable proposition. I also like that Linux has so much of a good 64 bit maturity that includes legacy drivers, like my SATA controller.
But....
End users like all the stuff that Linux developers and Linux core users don't care about, and as such, Linux will never be ready to prime time in that market. It's like pretending that the Chevy Cobalt is the same kind of a small car that a Toyota Corolla is. I mean, I would buy a Chevy Cobalt over a Corolla becuase I'm an American car guy, and the ideological reasons trump, but I'm under no illusion whose product is really "better". Linux developers should see things the same way, and deal with it honestly. Linux is like a truck maker trying to compete with people that want small cars.
That sucks. I would like to think that if I made a millions selling a company with 50 people in it, the I would hook up the guys that got whacked who helped make it possible.
(Actually, "Dr Doctoro" sounds like the worst supervillain ever, a mad scientist whose weapons and powers are entirely stethoscope and tongue-depressor related or something. "Someday, Spider-Man, you shall feel the cold touch of my DETHOSCOPE!")
Either that, or a really bad, or should I say, good, porn film. "Come here, Spider-girl, and feel the warm touch of my throbbing DETHOSCOPE!"
He is a Cory, that is his formal title, you could call him Cr. Doctorow
'Tis an injustice that you are not modded up. For, I read Cr. Doctorow, as Cocker Doctorow, which, is rather brilliantly funny.
A much nicer way to rot your teeth.
I couldn't make it the past web site... that's pretty rough. I agree with you on the HFCS... that's our "Republican" free trade for you... ban the import of stuff that hurts only Republican states.
By the way, for my web site on our Independence Day I'm going to fly the Union Jack and thank the UK for being a cool ally.
I would so love to be Virtual Iron, or anyone who got bought out like that. Geez, they buy me out, then tell me, that, I really am not allowed to work on it any more and can just take off for a few years, here's your millions of dollars.
Yeah... SWEET!
Bad things happen quite often, services become unavailable, malware causes downtime, heavy load causes crashes. You should work for Microsoft marketing as you want to put lipstick on pigs.
It's probably all your bad programming that's screwing up the servers. I bet if you had a Linux farm to work with, you'd be crashing it too.
The reality is that Microsoft's stuff is technically excellent and the unix world is a bunch of also-rans trying to tout minor engineering advantages over the better engineering choices Microsoft has to tended to make. Changes to user interfaces make them better. Office 2003 is better than 2000, and Office 2007 is absolutely wonderful. It doesn't take that much to learn a new u/i. Sometimes people should be forced to upgrade. I mean, seriously, do you still think PC's should have ISA adapters.?
I suspect whoever controls (or fails to control) monopolies there might disagree.
It's a cheap excuse. Coca cola and Pespi both try to do exclusive deals all the time. There is a reason you get Coke at McDonalds and Burger King, and not Pepsi. I actually hate Pepsi, and I thought it was a victory for freedom when Burger King switched to Coke. There is huge competition between Coke and Pepsi, trying to lock in these winner take all deals. But, it can only go so far. Many convenient store chains still carry both coke and pespi despite any perceived threat, that is actually backed up by consistent market practice.
The point is, if 7-11 can tell Pepsi and Coke that is going to carry both, or else, at some point, the soda companies will have to blink. Look at this way, Microsoft could only withdraw Windows from the likes of Dell once. Sure, Dell might crater down to half of its market share with Linux, or even a fraction of that, but, ultimately, that would establish Linux in the market place. Asian companies know this, and so does Microsoft. The whole netbook thing might have actually been not a push to get Linux into the consumer space, but a push by Asian companies to get Microsoft to lower their prices.
Does anyone remember BeOS?
I do and I actually wrote a couple of things for it. For the most part, BeOS torpedoed itself when they switched from BeOS 5 to that whole Network appliance push they were trying to make. BeOS had a viable business selling copies from their download site. If they would have just stuck it out, I think they would have been able to make a go at it, especially considering that the entire value proposition of having an operating system designed to work with massive numbers of CPUS turned out to be remarkably right.
more like microsoft just up and killed your horse and then claimed it won the race that they would otherwise have lost
Obviously you should have made a better horse, if it were so easy for Microsoft to have killed it.
I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"
Actually, we find your work to be subpar. Perhaps if you were not posting on slashdot, this telescope would not be the failed lemon that it is. Get back to work, and let's not hear back from you until we have some surface detail of Pluto.
Hmmm, an instance where the death of someone causes severe repercussions involving possibly billions of dollars of money. I don't know how that could possibly go wrong...
Am surprised you did not get modded funny or insightful for this. I would give you a point.
The irony is that Dr Doctoro is another intermediary too, putting himself between the things he finds interesting and us. what a corporate dog! I free myself of your monopoly!
The great mystery of computing is not that Linux is not in the consumer space, but that Windows is so entrenched in the enterprise space.
Windows is inherently a consumer operating system. It has a developer mythology that the dream Windows development is to make that one product that you can sell and make millions with. It's got a rich set of services developers can use to build consumer products, and it treats a product like a product, a property that can be bought, traded, and rented. You've got a well documented set of graphics and sound APIs, a halfway decent networking stack, and a bunch of tools that are frankly geared towards producing consumer products and these things support a healthy consumer market. Consumers, to some degree, actually like to spend money, so that Windows is non-free actually enhances its perceived value in the consumer space. If you receive something or buy something that doesn't work in Windows, its not something that you try and sort out and fix, its time to move on to another product. Everything is a black box good that you pay for, it either works or it doesn't, and that's what people on the consumer level want.
On the other hand, Linux is a total corporate and government system. It has a developer mythology that "welcome to the basement of megacorp, I've got a jar skittles.. we're both cogs.. here's your cube." Thus, the economic prospect that in the Linux world, your work product is worthless in the market sense, but, your boss gets to use the economic benefit of it over and over again, and, if you can get to keep working on it for a bit, that's pretty interesting and you get a paycheck for it. If you want to get rich with Linux, it won't be by making an application. You'd have to make a consumer black box out of it by hosting a web site using it. But all the development and other tools of Linux have a certain corporate basement feel. Nothing is really a consumer level product, but, everything has all sorts of rich nooks and crannies to do a bunch of different corporate tasks. Consumers don't need to replace social security numbers in a giant database with some new form of proprietary identifier, but Linux developers do, and that's where the strength of Linux tools lie.
Do you really want Linux to be a consumer system anyway? To some extent, that means getting rid of an awful lot that is lovable about Linux. It means polishing out (getting rid of), that barely documented switch to a command where an author left a note saying "uh, this piece of code I put in and got to work for this one thing that I was doing but I'm not really maintaining it", or, to not have that feature at all, or, even worse, have the feature, but not the warning. In any case, there's nothing about Windows that reminds me of the guy in the basement offering some skittles in the basement of the power company, but Linux has that in spades, and I like skittles.
For Linux to be a consumer system, we have to have a world where we take art seriously. That means no copying of images, or songs, worrying about who owns what, and, in a corporate world, all of that is a pain in the rear. If we made Linux into a consumer system and had a consumer culture with it, there's no way you could, from your basement, tell the next bit of bits in your desk to get in line, just like all the other bits. We're all just corporate cogs, hey, here's some skittles.
Me thinks that rather than charging to get consumers to adopt Linux, it should be to drive Windows out of the corporation.