All the jerking knees around here ignore the fact that, increasingly, we can't look to either Microsoft or Linux and open source to develop new amd innovative ways for people to use computers. Why? Microsoft's ability to infuse real innovation into the market is constrained by the universality of Windows. The open source community spends considerable amounts of time and intellectual capital in internecine warfare about licensing dogma (rather akin, in its irrelevancy, to medieval priests debating angels dancing on the heads of pins) and appears to contain a strong element that believes that users should change to accommodate computers, not the other way around.
As I take it, his basic point seems to be that both Windows and Linux are based on OS concepts developed at least 30 years ago:
"Data" and "Code" are separate and inviolable
data resides in specific files, acted upon by executable code residing in other files.
Someone, or something, must remember the association between data in a given file, the action the user wishes to perform with/on that data, and the name of the file that contains the appropriate executable code.
Interface design attempts to reduce the learning curve associated with command line control of an OS by use of small visual clues that reduce the need to memorize or look up file names and command structures.
The Windows, Mac, X, etc., GUI's follow identical paradigms.
Whatever it is, it won't be PPC-based in an ATX form factor, use PCI and take off-the-shelf memory. That's the same Pc platform we've known since IBM rolled out the PC AT 20-odd years ago. The key thing to remember is the PC revolution took place before IBM got in the game. Apple, Commodore, Atari and others made personal computing possible and practical. No single vendor controlled the software or hardware market. No single architecture dominated. Even after IBM brought out the first PC's, other PC vendors were in the game selling PC hardware that wasn't, yet, tied inexorably to Microsoft.
We need a new platform that revolutionizes computing the way those pre-IBM vendors did.
...I wonder if so many amateur economists would be posting here now?
In truth, the remedies sought by the anti-settlement states would have had little, if any, impact on the market share enjoyed by Microsoft products. Telling Microsoft not to bully vendors who hide a few icons is not the way to foster competitive products.
Lost in all this smoke and hot air is the intimate link between Microsoft and the x86 PC architecture. Other architectures were, and are, possible. Vendors selling alternative OS's for the x86 platform may eventually carve out a stable and profitable niche, but their impact on MS will be minimal. (A decision today in favor of the anti-settlement states would not have changed that fact.)
The way to check Microsoft's influence is to create and market a personal computing platform based on a new, non-x86 platform that offers compelling capabilities that the x86 can't. This would represent a paradigm shift as significant as the original PC industry in the late '70's and early '80's.
Then you mean a regulated free market, not a completely free market. Free markets left unencumbered by regulation have proven to be fruitful soil for the development of monopolies.
>>...the risk that development of the open source office suite you chose could be dropped at any time if the contributors get bored with it
That's a key and often overlooked point. Before an organization sinks 6- or 7-figure sums into an deployment, they want to be sure that the software isn't going to go "poof" the following year. In addition to soft pedaling the expense of rolling out new software, even if that software is free, many open source advocates ignore the general impression of lack of commitment and "college kids passing code on the Internet" that their chosen development model radiates in some circles.
That's unfortunate, and in the case of heavyweight effort like Apache, not justified. In other instances, though, it is justified.
OK, but wearing my IANAL hat, you could assert that insertion of a URL as an active link in an HTML file indicates an intent to make the addressed file available to the public. And, that storage of a file on the same server, but without the creation of a link to point to it, indicates an intent to keep it private. (Obviously, that also indicates a lot of naivete. If you don't want people to see it, don't put it on the server. If your resident techie didn't explain that, time to get a new techie. Do something worse if the techie actually put the file there.)
I don't know how far that notion of "intent" would get you in court, but I'd be likely to equate the file with a link to a published telephone number, and the file without a link to an unpublished number. I.e., successfully identifying and using an unlisted number could be construed as a deliberate act to violate someone's privacy.
As of yet, there's not enough incentive for the non-ideologically driven to drop Word and switch to an open source product. Large organizations, and MITRE is large, already have Word sitting on thousands of desktops, they've paid for it, and they've sent employees off to "How To Use Word" training. Bringing in a Word replacement means additonal time and cost (installations, tweaking, employee training, help desk training, etc.) without a compelling payoff --you pay for the transition and your capabilities remain essentially the same.
Open source office suites will need to do a lot more than be "free" and successfully mimic MS Office before they're become worth the price of switching.
Interesting. I'm under the lawyer-induced opinion that content deliberately made accessible via a URL on a publicly available server is just that, public. The URL is key, of course, the argument being that if no URL points to something, that "something" remains private.
That falls apart when other files, not meant for public consumption, stashed in the same file system, are accessible via a little creative editing of a published URL.
Is it a privacy violation to go fishing on a public server to see what else is lurking there?
No, just that you didn't pay for it. There's little reason for Apple to market directly to "Unix geeks" because they don't purchase the tools they use on the job. In this case, Apple's marketing target is management.
Seen any job ads lately looking for a Gimp expert instead of a Photshop expert?
Seen any job ads lately looking for an OpenOffice expert?
Gimp and OpenOffice are prime examples of open source copycat apps that concede the ball game before they even start to play. Unless you choose software based on ideology rather than capabilities and usability, or are just too cheap or too poor to buy it, open source desktop apps are just so-so knock offs.
1. Not everyone is blessed with perfect eyesight, or an indifference to half-baked visual crap foisted off by amateurish X11 coders. Good, legible, easy-to-read screen fonts are just as important as legible, easy-to-read fonts in books. (Even in books that put balloons around the words.)
2. I've installed Gentoo. Three times. It broke every time I added something that wasn't part of is packaging scheme.(Have they decided to tell people not to delete Python yet?)
3. No one's trying to drag you away from your precious green screen, so stop beating your chest about what a real man you are.
All these posts about OSX and Unix geeks are inane. Mac desktops are consumer machines. Apple need a new OS to replace the mummified OS that Macs ran from Day One. The fact that they chose a Unix variant is a Good Thing for people who know Unix, but that's where it stops.
For that matter, Linux will remain a geek OS hobbled by semi-pro GUI's as long as self-declared Unix geeks play a role in its development.
No one is forcing anyone to send money to the cable companies. Sure, there almost always a local monopoly, and their pricing scheme gouges customers, but the content they sell you has nothing at all to do with computing. If you choose to buy it, if you choose to use your computer for something other than computing, you're in league with the monopolists you condemn
No, but the fuss is really going to be about control of content. The cable and media companies want people to pay for entertainment delivered down the network connection that they're already paying for. The industry will find a way to prevent copying and redistribution of the content they sell, which will trigger great and incessant rants about rights being trampled. Given the quality of the content likely to be on offer, this will be a bit like ranting about your "right" to reproduce and redistribute your neighbor's trash. Or, worse yet, a typical night's programming on the WB.
Using PC's as entertainment devices plays right into the hands of the cable companies, the entertainment industry, and folks like Microsoft. They're just drooling at the prospect of relegating the computer to an overblown entertainment node, with their pay-to-play servers feeding the addicted.
You can stop this by killing the market: Cancel your cable TV subscription. Don't download or play music on your PC. Play DVD's with you TV. You know the drill.
Re:There's some clever people with weblogs out the
on
Blogger Hacked
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but judging by most posts here, the typical Slashdotter's cognitive abilities stagnated at about the same time that their social skills stopped developing, i.e., about age thirteen. If software doesn't let them play a game or turn their computer into the equivalent of a $75 boom box,they can't see the point. They wouldn't even know how to find, much less deal with, intelligent writing.
You should, by now, understand my basic point that the Founders made a mistake by allowing slavery to exist in the south from the beginning. They should have used whatever means necessary to eliminate it. I don't care about pedantic arguments about the morality or legality of secession. Preserving the Union was paramount, doing that required destroying the slave culture. The cost was high, but worth it. (And, don't forget, responsibility for the war and its destruction rests squarely with the South. All they had to do was abandon slavery and take loyalty oaths.)
Since Google operates in France and Germany, why shouldn't they be expected to obey the laws of those countries?
This is not a free speech issue. Google is a private company making its own business decisions. They're under no obligation to index everything or to enable access to everything they index. If you don't like it, too bad -- take your business elsewhere.
Travelling in space isn't about science. Science will be done there, but space travel is its own justification. Humans belong there, just as much as they belong on Earth. When we get over our parochial attitudes about race, nationality and language will finally be able to start behaving like intelligent creatures and start leaving the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
As I take it, his basic point seems to be that both Windows and Linux are based on OS concepts developed at least 30 years ago:
Whatever it is, it won't be PPC-based in an ATX form factor, use PCI and take off-the-shelf memory. That's the same Pc platform we've known since IBM rolled out the PC AT 20-odd years ago. The key thing to remember is the PC revolution took place before IBM got in the game. Apple, Commodore, Atari and others made personal computing possible and practical. No single vendor controlled the software or hardware market. No single architecture dominated. Even after IBM brought out the first PC's, other PC vendors were in the game selling PC hardware that wasn't, yet, tied inexorably to Microsoft.
We need a new platform that revolutionizes computing the way those pre-IBM vendors did.
...I wonder if so many amateur economists would be posting here now?
In truth, the remedies sought by the anti-settlement states would have had little, if any, impact on the market share enjoyed by Microsoft products. Telling Microsoft not to bully vendors who hide a few icons is not the way to foster competitive products.
Lost in all this smoke and hot air is the intimate link between Microsoft and the x86 PC architecture. Other architectures were, and are, possible. Vendors selling alternative OS's for the x86 platform may eventually carve out a stable and profitable niche, but their impact on MS will be minimal. (A decision today in favor of the anti-settlement states would not have changed that fact.)
The way to check Microsoft's influence is to create and market a personal computing platform based on a new, non-x86 platform that offers compelling capabilities that the x86 can't. This would represent a paradigm shift as significant as the original PC industry in the late '70's and early '80's.
Then you mean a regulated free market, not a completely free market. Free markets left unencumbered by regulation have proven to be fruitful soil for the development of monopolies.
>> ...the risk that development of the open source office suite you chose could be dropped at any time if the contributors get bored with it
That's a key and often overlooked point. Before an organization sinks 6- or 7-figure sums into an deployment, they want to be sure that the software isn't going to go "poof" the following year. In addition to soft pedaling the expense of rolling out new software, even if that software is free, many open source advocates ignore the general impression of lack of commitment and "college kids passing code on the Internet" that their chosen development model radiates in some circles.
That's unfortunate, and in the case of heavyweight effort like Apache, not justified. In other instances, though, it is justified.
OK, but wearing my IANAL hat, you could assert that insertion of a URL as an active link in an HTML file indicates an intent to make the addressed file available to the public. And, that storage of a file on the same server, but without the creation of a link to point to it, indicates an intent to keep it private. (Obviously, that also indicates a lot of naivete. If you don't want people to see it, don't put it on the server. If your resident techie didn't explain that, time to get a new techie. Do something worse if the techie actually put the file there.)
I don't know how far that notion of "intent" would get you in court, but I'd be likely to equate the file with a link to a published telephone number, and the file without a link to an unpublished number. I.e., successfully identifying and using an unlisted number could be construed as a deliberate act to violate someone's privacy.
As of yet, there's not enough incentive for the non-ideologically driven to drop Word and switch to an open source product. Large organizations, and MITRE is large, already have Word sitting on thousands of desktops, they've paid for it, and they've sent employees off to "How To Use Word" training. Bringing in a Word replacement means additonal time and cost (installations, tweaking, employee training, help desk training, etc.) without a compelling payoff --you pay for the transition and your capabilities remain essentially the same.
Open source office suites will need to do a lot more than be "free" and successfully mimic MS Office before they're become worth the price of switching.
Interesting. I'm under the lawyer-induced opinion that content deliberately made accessible via a URL on a publicly available server is just that, public. The URL is key, of course, the argument being that if no URL points to something, that "something" remains private.
That falls apart when other files, not meant for public consumption, stashed in the same file system, are accessible via a little creative editing of a published URL.
Is it a privacy violation to go fishing on a public server to see what else is lurking there?
>> ...brainwash the masses...
How is belief in democracy in keeping with this attitude about the people? We're all part of "the masses".
No, just that you didn't pay for it. There's little reason for Apple to market directly to "Unix geeks" because they don't purchase the tools they use on the job. In this case, Apple's marketing target is management.
I doubt Apple cares about Unix geeks switching to OS X. There's no money in it. (How many employed geeks actually bought the hardware they use?)
Seen any job ads lately looking for a Gimp expert instead of a Photshop expert?
Seen any job ads lately looking for an OpenOffice expert?
Gimp and OpenOffice are prime examples of open source copycat apps that concede the ball game before they even start to play. Unless you choose software based on ideology rather than capabilities and usability, or are just too cheap or too poor to buy it, open source desktop apps are just so-so knock offs.
1. Not everyone is blessed with perfect eyesight, or an indifference to half-baked visual crap foisted off by amateurish X11 coders. Good, legible, easy-to-read screen fonts are just as important as legible, easy-to-read fonts in books. (Even in books that put balloons around the words.)
2. I've installed Gentoo. Three times. It broke every time I added something that wasn't part of is packaging scheme.(Have they decided to tell people not to delete Python yet?)
3. No one's trying to drag you away from your precious green screen, so stop beating your chest about what a real man you are.
Nonsense.
All these posts about OSX and Unix geeks are inane. Mac desktops are consumer machines. Apple need a new OS to replace the mummified OS that Macs ran from Day One. The fact that they chose a Unix variant is a Good Thing for people who know Unix, but that's where it stops.
For that matter, Linux will remain a geek OS hobbled by semi-pro GUI's as long as self-declared Unix geeks play a role in its development.
Let's hear it again for geek social skills. No wonder people keep them locked up in the room with the servers.
Well, if you're happy banging away at your keyboard, I doubt there's any reason for you to consider anything with a GUI.
Besides, while I'm sure Apple is quite happy to sell into the "Unix geek" market, that's incidental.
No one is forcing anyone to send money to the cable companies. Sure, there almost always a local monopoly, and their pricing scheme gouges customers, but the content they sell you has nothing at all to do with computing. If you choose to buy it, if you choose to use your computer for something other than computing, you're in league with the monopolists you condemn
Well, good luck, but I'm pretty sure that hardware controls will emerge to effectively prevent use of copied digital recordings.
No, but the fuss is really going to be about control of content. The cable and media companies want people to pay for entertainment delivered down the network connection that they're already paying for. The industry will find a way to prevent copying and redistribution of the content they sell, which will trigger great and incessant rants about rights being trampled. Given the quality of the content likely to be on offer, this will be a bit like ranting about your "right" to reproduce and redistribute your neighbor's trash. Or, worse yet, a typical night's programming on the WB.
Using PC's as entertainment devices plays right into the hands of the cable companies, the entertainment industry, and folks like Microsoft. They're just drooling at the prospect of relegating the computer to an overblown entertainment node, with their pay-to-play servers feeding the addicted.
You can stop this by killing the market: Cancel your cable TV subscription. Don't download or play music on your PC. Play DVD's with you TV. You know the drill.
Yeah, but judging by most posts here, the typical Slashdotter's cognitive abilities stagnated at about the same time that their social skills stopped developing, i.e., about age thirteen. If software doesn't let them play a game or turn their computer into the equivalent of a $75 boom box,they can't see the point. They wouldn't even know how to find, much less deal with, intelligent writing.
You should, by now, understand my basic point that the Founders made a mistake by allowing slavery to exist in the south from the beginning. They should have used whatever means necessary to eliminate it. I don't care about pedantic arguments about the morality or legality of secession. Preserving the Union was paramount, doing that required destroying the slave culture. The cost was high, but worth it. (And, don't forget, responsibility for the war and its destruction rests squarely with the South. All they had to do was abandon slavery and take loyalty oaths.)
Since Google operates in France and Germany, why shouldn't they be expected to obey the laws of those countries?
This is not a free speech issue. Google is a private company making its own business decisions. They're under no obligation to index everything or to enable access to everything they index. If you don't like it, too bad -- take your business elsewhere.
Travelling in space isn't about science. Science will be done there, but space travel is its own justification. Humans belong there, just as much as they belong on Earth. When we get over our parochial attitudes about race, nationality and language will finally be able to start behaving like intelligent creatures and start leaving the planet.