First, I'm sure Chileans appreciate you spelling their country's name as if it were a popular dish made with beans and spices. You must have missed the correct spelling while you were there, eh?
Second, I'd say Chile has a Western economy. If you want third world, take a trip to subSaharan Africa.
Developing countries are following the same path as the UK, Europe and the U.S. followed in their development a century or so ago. People want the material wealth that a Western-style economy delivers.
Your post is an example of the polarization of the discussion around this issue -- extremists on one side selfishly claim it's all someone else's problem, while extremists on the other side want to stop all development, period. There's barely any room for serious people who want to use and manage resources to bring development to as many people as possible.
So, before the marketers suckered you into buying an SUV, you were unfree and unsafe?
You bought an SUV because female drivers with cellphones are gonna ram you? Guess all those men I see yapping on cellphones control their SUV's via telepathy? You're just rationalizing a buying decision based on emotion.
What's with this "freedom tool" stuff? What freedom didn't you have before you bought the thing? Sure, you're free to drive around in your big waste-of-space. Other people are free to work the political process to boost mileage requirements for SUV's. Myself, I'd like to see a weighted tax on fuel consumption and emission rate.
True. Somewhere, someone is working on technology that will leapfrog everything we use today -- Microsoft, Linux, the whole bunch. There's always a chance that the breakthrough may come from one of the current entrenched players, but given the deep conservatism of the IT industry, that seems unlikely.
MS controls 90-95 percent of the OS market. If, by magic, Linux controlled 90-95 percent of the OS market, what's different?
BTW, Linux distributions are irrelevant to this kind of discussion. The distributions add litle original value to Linux, apart from their install routines. An individual vendor might, I suppose, do something interesting like rewriting the kernel or a library or two to add some unique and compelling capabilities. that could give hem a marketing edge, but imagine the reaction among the Linux faithful.
By your definition, then, Microsoft is not a monopoly, since people are clearly able to buy software from other vendors.
About all those Linux distributions: Yes, you can buy or download many distributions. Two or three might actually still be here this time next year. Take away their install routines and they're all almost exactly the same. In the end, having a "choice" of distributions doesn't really mean much.
You're correct on all counts. Read my post; I wasn't condoning MS's behavior.
I think it is naive to expect criminals to suddenly stop being criminals unless some outside force intervenes and stops them. Even then, big crooks might not be stopped, just forced a bit off course.
Many, many posts here on this issue strike me as coming from folks who seem surprised that a wealthy corporation would fight tooth and nail to preserve the practices, legal and illegal, that made it rich. It's almost as if they expect Gates and Ballmer to read Slashdot, slap their foreheads, and say "We're Sorry! Here, take all the money back."
No matter how objective each individual sory may be, it remains possible to show bias via the selection of stories. Although I trust BBC reporting, their editors make story selections based on internal policies and on BBC perceptions of what their audience wants.
News organization are not morally or ethically compelled to cover everything, all the time.
Suppose MS disappeared tomorrow and everyone moved en masse to Linux? Bingo, a new monopoly. What's the difference?
The IT world is awash with valiant but failed efforts by committees to set standards. The standards that count are the ones people really use, and that's market driven. There will always be a market leader, and everyone else will follow them, because that's where the money is.
Last I heard, the BBC was the British Broadcasting Corporation, so I'd expect their news selection to reflect their perceptions of UK and European interests. Hence, they do things like run stories about the euro and interview actual Europeans.
And, in the UK just as elsewhere, almost all their readers, listeners and viewers live in a Microsoft world. Why go off an a tangent about EULA's when it is a credible assumption that's of interest to only a tiny fraction of their audience.?
No news organization can, or even needs to attempt to, provide every possible countervailing thread in every single news piece they release. If the BBC's selection of news offends you, go elsewhere.
>> "Continuing their current trend of only giving you half the story the BBC have this article on how fair and equitable Microsoft are...
What's your problem? Do you expect a professional news organization to adopt the posture of a place like/. and use innuendo, bias, sarcasm, unsupported assertions and unverified claims to support their own agenda? The BBC report is a straight news piece containing not a single word of BBC opinion. They're reporting on the pending XP patch that responds to the mandate of the court. If you think they should do a piece on the EULA, send them an email.
Curious to see evidence of their "trend of giving you only half the story..".
A rare rational statement, for the most part. I doubt that I'm a typical Mac owner, per the reasons I've given elsewhere in this thread. Apple's closed and tightly controlled hardware-software integration brings advantages and disadvantages. Right now, the advantages tip the scales for me. And, for those who don't remember the 1980's, hardware-software integration was a common approach -- in particular, see Amiga and Atari. IBM's open PC architecture changed all that (and also open the door for Microsoft's closed software platform.) There was more variety and competition in the PC market before IBM released their first PC than after. All Apple has done is carefully nurture their brand in order to carve out a tiny sliver of the overall market.
By the way, I'll trade you the Apple stories for all the "Game Developer Fires Staff", "Video Card Cracks Terabyte Barrier", and "Linux Powers Server in My Boot Heel" pieces.
Not saying it's a waste of your time at all. Some people enjoy "tweaking" their car, other people just want to drive.
I don't use Office or Photoshop, games bore me, and I could care less about downloading music and movies to my machine. (Boring junk stays boring junk after you download it.)
For several years, I ran machines with Linux and its brethern as well as Windows. Linux was/is fascinating, but one day I realized that most of my time on the machine was devoted to constant adjustments and readjustments of something. Optimize this; download that; futz with libraries; compile this, then fix what broke.
My frustration grew, and one day I just had enough. This was all input and no output. I wanted to stop playing with my car and just drive someplace.
So I bought a Mac, something I wouldn't have considered prior to OSX and Aqua. First, I want access to Unix (that's why I used Linux in the first place; I've used MKS Toolkit on DOS and Windows for years), and second, because the quality of the image displayed on the screen is very important to me. (Perhaps more important than to most people; no Linux desktop -- even an antialiased KDE/Liquid setup -- ever pleased me.) Did I pay a premium for that? I suppose so, but that's OK. It's my choice.
Like I said, if I get could what I want on a cheaper Intel box running Linux, I'd still be there.
Is Apple selling a brand, an image? Sure. So is MS, IBM, Dell, Gateway, and all the rest. Even you local no-name beige box vendor can't avoid having an image.
And, yes, I read Slashot daily, and have for a long time. What I don't understand is why Mac stories provoke reams of vitrolic posts by people who seem to think Apple is a direct threat to their personal wellbeing. Some people need to walk away from the keyboard and get a life.
As a proponent of an aggressive manned space program, I'd agree that the shuttle has not lived up to its initial objectives. This is due, in large measure, to the shuttle's inability to launch with the frequency NASA intended. The actual design of the shuttle was permanently compromised in political and budget battles during the Nixon administration.
Few, if any, expendable boosters have the lift capacity of the shuttle, so I'm skeptical abut your claim that "anything would be cheaper. But that's a quibble. More importantly, in the two decades that the shuttle has been flying, no one -- government or private -- has made a serious effort to design, build and launch boosters large enough to dramatically reduce cost-to-orbit. The technology is there; it has been there since the 1960's. What's keeping this from happening? Timidity and lack of political will. The "Final Frontier" is in the hands of bureaucrats and corporate execs who can't see beyond the next commo satellite launch. It's as if the only reason to move into space is to make our damn cell phones work.
Ya know, some of us are using a Mac, regardless of gender, because we've grown tired of all that tweaking you find so bloody interesting. If interesting means it doesn't work out of the box, requires hours of setup, and is still a pain to use, well then, I guess I'm getting boring myself. I did it for years with Linux. What do I have to show for it? Nothing. It was a complete waste of my time.
For me, OS X is good because I can use the traditional Unix tools I'm comfortable with, without having to put up with the half-baked semi-pro attempts at interface design pawned off by the open source community. I've got better things to do than trying to massage KDE or Gnome or whatever into something that doesn't annoy me. Maybe someday they will be up to par, but I don't want to wait.
So, obviously, I don't care if Macs aren't as "tweakable" as PC's. That's a good thing. It means I found something I can use without wasting time. If the ever-so-strident open source crowd had managed to market a Linux-based PC with similar attributes, I might have purchased it, instead. But, they won't do that because half of them are off building UI's and "themes" that look like a cross between a teen-ager's wet dream and rejects from Design 101. The other half are off whining, whimpering and worrying about preserving their so-called right to "share" music and movies with the entire planet.
Nor are Macs "ridiculously expensive". More expensive than a $699 Dell or a $400 no-name white box? Sure. But some of us actually have an income and can make our own decisions. There is no "geek" market to speak of, so why should Apple care about Slashdotters whining about price? Every self-described Slashdot geek could disappear tomorrow with no impact on industry revenues.
No one has to buy from Apple. If they want to tightly integrate hardware and software, that's their business, not your's. There's no reason why they should do anything different.
As for why Slashdot is posting Apple stories, perhaps it has something to do with attracting readers who actually have some discretionary income to spend. I'm sure their advertisers would appreciate that.
Well, I disagree with the Mac comments, but I won't disagree with you about the general decline of interesting pieces here. Add in an increasing uncivility by many posters and you've got an uninteresting and unpleasant place to visit.
You wouldn't necessarily buy a new Mac to use as server. But since the entire Mac world is being migrated to a platform that installs Apache, etc., someone has decided to write a piece explaining how to take advantage of that fact. What's your problem with that?
As for price, I would have paid just as much for a PC as I did for this Mac. All the PC would have given me was the need to install Linux and spend hours tweaking the thing so I could stand to look at it. My time is more important to me than the money, so I went the Mac route.
Why does a "community" that whines so much about "choice" and "freedom" have such a hissy fit every time someone says something positive or useful about a competing platform? Any chance that's because you want to limit choice and freedom to only one kind of software?
Having a "grip on technology" has nothing to do with it. Regardless of what I know or don't know, why should I dive into the weeds if I can get the same results by taking the easy route? That applies to admins, too, who shouldn't be spending the company's dime mucking about when they don't need to be.
That pretty much summarizes why I switched to OSX after several years on Linux. Too much is "not ready". I've never had any reason to share software -- open source or proprietary -- with anyone, nor have I ever had a reason or the time to change someone else's code to my liking.
While the "freedom" aspect is interesting, the development model's diffused and decentralized nature often puts users' interests at risk when developers leave a project before completion. If no one else steps in to finish the product, users are left holding the bag with a released-but-unfinished piece of software. (Again, access to source is irrelevant for people who are not developers.)
I'm not a poor college student or struggling developer. I can afford to buy my software. What I want from software is capability, ease of use, polish, and choice. Open source may or may not give me those. Even the much touted choice attribute is somewhat illusionary. Open source, in common with proprietary software, suffers from a decided lack of really original applications..
>> You do not have a right to make money off your art.
Geez, that's so preposterously wrong that it is hard to imagine how you came to that conclusion.
People who make something -- music, movies, or whatever -- have every right to try to sell their creations, for any price, to anyone. Your only right in the matter is to not buy.
It's rather nice to hear from an actual musician. His fear -- that no one will buy his music if they can get it free -- seems reasonable to me. After all, almost everyone here constantly and stridently asserts their right to copy digital recordings of his music.
>> Those working on open source, like myself and many others, clearly rely on the goodwill and kindness of the community.
How, then, are you paying your bills? Canvassing the neighborhood for donations? Why would you expect to receive the community's continuing goodwill? (By community I mean a real, physical place, not the imaginary "community" of disparate people with sharedd interests.)
I think it is demeaning to people who create software to expect them to work for nothing. Likewise, it is demeaning to musicians to expect them to work for nothing.
>> These laws are to make large corporations rich...
No question that the media corporatins have successfully molded copyright law into a tool to bludgeon both the consumer and the artist. Historically, though, copyright law is intended to protect artists and consumers from predatory businesses. In simple terms, no copyright, no protection of reproducible art, no art to buy apart from live performances. Most importantly, the ability of people who write books to protect their interests would disappear. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'm sure Chileans appreciate you spelling their country's name as if it were a popular dish made with beans and spices. You must have missed the correct spelling while you were there, eh?
Second, I'd say Chile has a Western economy. If you want third world, take a trip to subSaharan Africa.
Developing countries are following the same path as the UK, Europe and the U.S. followed in their development a century or so ago. People want the material wealth that a Western-style economy delivers.
Your post is an example of the polarization of the discussion around this issue -- extremists on one side selfishly claim it's all someone else's problem, while extremists on the other side want to stop all development, period. There's barely any room for serious people who want to use and manage resources to bring development to as many people as possible.
So, before the marketers suckered you into buying an SUV, you were unfree and unsafe?
You bought an SUV because female drivers with cellphones are gonna ram you? Guess all those men I see yapping on cellphones control their SUV's via telepathy? You're just rationalizing a buying decision based on emotion.
What's with this "freedom tool" stuff? What freedom didn't you have before you bought the thing? Sure, you're free to drive around in your big waste-of-space. Other people are free to work the political process to boost mileage requirements for SUV's. Myself, I'd like to see a weighted tax on fuel consumption and emission rate.
Give us all a break, OK?
True. Somewhere, someone is working on technology that will leapfrog everything we use today -- Microsoft, Linux, the whole bunch. There's always a chance that the breakthrough may come from one of the current entrenched players, but given the deep conservatism of the IT industry, that seems unlikely.
>> Monopoly" doesn't automatically equal "anticompetetive."
Umm...yes it does. That's the point.
MS controls 90-95 percent of the OS market. If, by magic, Linux controlled 90-95 percent of the OS market, what's different?
BTW, Linux distributions are irrelevant to this kind of discussion. The distributions add litle original value to Linux, apart from their install routines. An individual vendor might, I suppose, do something interesting like rewriting the kernel or a library or two to add some unique and compelling capabilities. that could give hem a marketing edge, but imagine the reaction among the Linux faithful.
By your definition, then, Microsoft is not a monopoly, since people are clearly able to buy software from other vendors.
About all those Linux distributions: Yes, you can buy or download many distributions. Two or three might actually still be here this time next year. Take away their install routines and they're all almost exactly the same. In the end, having a "choice" of distributions doesn't really mean much.
You're correct on all counts. Read my post; I wasn't condoning MS's behavior.
I think it is naive to expect criminals to suddenly stop being criminals unless some outside force intervenes and stops them. Even then, big crooks might not be stopped, just forced a bit off course.
Many, many posts here on this issue strike me as coming from folks who seem surprised that a wealthy corporation would fight tooth and nail to preserve the practices, legal and illegal, that made it rich. It's almost as if they expect Gates and Ballmer to read Slashdot, slap their foreheads, and say "We're Sorry! Here, take all the money back."
Not gonna happen, people.
...should harness Slashdot.
No matter how objective each individual sory may be, it remains possible to show bias via the selection of stories. Although I trust BBC reporting, their editors make story selections based on internal policies and on BBC perceptions of what their audience wants.
News organization are not morally or ethically compelled to cover everything, all the time.
Yes, a sloppy headline.
Suppose MS disappeared tomorrow and everyone moved en masse to Linux? Bingo, a new monopoly. What's the difference?
The IT world is awash with valiant but failed efforts by committees to set standards. The standards that count are the ones people really use, and that's market driven. There will always be a market leader, and everyone else will follow them, because that's where the money is.
Of course Ballmer has not intention of changing unless he's forced into it. Why would he?
/. posters who castigate them for continuing to do what made them all rich is stunning.
Microsoft deserves to be bashed, but the naivete of
Last I heard, the BBC was the British Broadcasting Corporation, so I'd expect their news selection to reflect their perceptions of UK and European interests. Hence, they do things like run stories about the euro and interview actual Europeans.
And, in the UK just as elsewhere, almost all their readers, listeners and viewers live in a Microsoft world. Why go off an a tangent about EULA's when it is a credible assumption that's of interest to only a tiny fraction of their audience.?
No news organization can, or even needs to attempt to, provide every possible countervailing thread in every single news piece they release. If the BBC's selection of news offends you, go elsewhere.
>> "Continuing their current trend of only giving you half the story the BBC have this article on how fair and equitable Microsoft are ...
/. and use innuendo, bias, sarcasm, unsupported assertions and unverified claims to support their own agenda? The BBC report is a straight news piece containing not a single word of BBC opinion. They're reporting on the pending XP patch that responds to the mandate of the court. If you think they should do a piece on the EULA, send them an email.
What's your problem? Do you expect a professional news organization to adopt the posture of a place like
Curious to see evidence of their "trend of giving you only half the story..".
A rare rational statement, for the most part. I doubt that I'm a typical Mac owner, per the reasons I've given elsewhere in this thread. Apple's closed and tightly controlled hardware-software integration brings advantages and disadvantages. Right now, the advantages tip the scales for me. And, for those who don't remember the 1980's, hardware-software integration was a common approach -- in particular, see Amiga and Atari. IBM's open PC architecture changed all that (and also open the door for Microsoft's closed software platform.) There was more variety and competition in the PC market before IBM released their first PC than after. All Apple has done is carefully nurture their brand in order to carve out a tiny sliver of the overall market.
By the way, I'll trade you the Apple stories for all the "Game Developer Fires Staff", "Video Card Cracks Terabyte Barrier", and "Linux Powers Server in My Boot Heel" pieces.
Not saying it's a waste of your time at all. Some people enjoy "tweaking" their car, other people just want to drive.
/Liquid setup -- ever pleased me.) Did I pay a premium for that? I suppose so, but that's OK. It's my choice.
I don't use Office or Photoshop, games bore me, and I could care less about downloading music and movies to my machine. (Boring junk stays boring junk after you download it.)
For several years, I ran machines with Linux and its brethern as well as Windows. Linux was/is fascinating, but one day I realized that most of my time on the machine was devoted to constant adjustments and readjustments of something. Optimize this; download that; futz with libraries; compile this, then fix what broke.
My frustration grew, and one day I just had enough. This was all input and no output. I wanted to stop playing with my car and just drive someplace.
So I bought a Mac, something I wouldn't have considered prior to OSX and Aqua. First, I want access to Unix (that's why I used Linux in the first place; I've used MKS Toolkit on DOS and Windows for years), and second, because the quality of the image displayed on the screen is very important to me. (Perhaps more important than to most people; no Linux desktop -- even an antialiased KDE
Like I said, if I get could what I want on a cheaper Intel box running Linux, I'd still be there.
Is Apple selling a brand, an image? Sure. So is MS, IBM, Dell, Gateway, and all the rest. Even you local no-name beige box vendor can't avoid having an image.
And, yes, I read Slashot daily, and have for a long time. What I don't understand is why Mac stories provoke reams of vitrolic posts by people who seem to think Apple is a direct threat to their personal wellbeing. Some people need to walk away from the keyboard and get a life.
As a proponent of an aggressive manned space program, I'd agree that the shuttle has not lived up to its initial objectives. This is due, in large measure, to the shuttle's inability to launch with the frequency NASA intended. The actual design of the shuttle was permanently compromised in political and budget battles during the Nixon administration.
Few, if any, expendable boosters have the lift capacity of the shuttle, so I'm skeptical abut your claim that "anything would be cheaper. But that's a quibble. More importantly, in the two decades that the shuttle has been flying, no one -- government or private -- has made a serious effort to design, build and launch boosters large enough to dramatically reduce cost-to-orbit. The technology is there; it has been there since the 1960's. What's keeping this from happening? Timidity and lack of political will. The "Final Frontier" is in the hands of bureaucrats and corporate execs who can't see beyond the next commo satellite launch. It's as if the only reason to move into space is to make our damn cell phones work.
Ya know, some of us are using a Mac, regardless of gender, because we've grown tired of all that tweaking you find so bloody interesting. If interesting means it doesn't work out of the box, requires hours of setup, and is still a pain to use, well then, I guess I'm getting boring myself. I did it for years with Linux. What do I have to show for it? Nothing. It was a complete waste of my time.
For me, OS X is good because I can use the traditional Unix tools I'm comfortable with, without having to put up with the half-baked semi-pro attempts at interface design pawned off by the open source community. I've got better things to do than trying to massage KDE or Gnome or whatever into something that doesn't annoy me. Maybe someday they will be up to par, but I don't want to wait.
So, obviously, I don't care if Macs aren't as "tweakable" as PC's. That's a good thing. It means I found something I can use without wasting time. If the ever-so-strident open source crowd had managed to market a Linux-based PC with similar attributes, I might have purchased it, instead. But, they won't do that because half of them are off building UI's and "themes" that look like a cross between a teen-ager's wet dream and rejects from Design 101. The other half are off whining, whimpering and worrying about preserving their so-called right to "share" music and movies with the entire planet.
Nor are Macs "ridiculously expensive". More expensive than a $699 Dell or a $400 no-name white box? Sure. But some of us actually have an income and can make our own decisions. There is no "geek" market to speak of, so why should Apple care about Slashdotters whining about price? Every self-described Slashdot geek could disappear tomorrow with no impact on industry revenues.
No one has to buy from Apple. If they want to tightly integrate hardware and software, that's their business, not your's. There's no reason why they should do anything different.
As for why Slashdot is posting Apple stories, perhaps it has something to do with attracting readers who actually have some discretionary income to spend. I'm sure their advertisers would appreciate that.
Well, I disagree with the Mac comments, but I won't disagree with you about the general decline of interesting pieces here. Add in an increasing uncivility by many posters and you've got an uninteresting and unpleasant place to visit.
So, don't read it.
You wouldn't necessarily buy a new Mac to use as server. But since the entire Mac world is being migrated to a platform that installs Apache, etc., someone has decided to write a piece explaining how to take advantage of that fact. What's your problem with that?
As for price, I would have paid just as much for a PC as I did for this Mac. All the PC would have given me was the need to install Linux and spend hours tweaking the thing so I could stand to look at it. My time is more important to me than the money, so I went the Mac route.
Why does a "community" that whines so much about "choice" and "freedom" have such a hissy fit every time someone says something positive or useful about a competing platform? Any chance that's because you want to limit choice and freedom to only one kind of software?
Having a "grip on technology" has nothing to do with it. Regardless of what I know or don't know, why should I dive into the weeds if I can get the same results by taking the easy route? That applies to admins, too, who shouldn't be spending the company's dime mucking about when they don't need to be.
That pretty much summarizes why I switched to OSX after several years on Linux. Too much is "not ready". I've never had any reason to share software -- open source or proprietary -- with anyone, nor have I ever had a reason or the time to change someone else's code to my liking.
While the "freedom" aspect is interesting, the development model's diffused and decentralized nature often puts users' interests at risk when developers leave a project before completion. If no one else steps in to finish the product, users are left holding the bag with a released-but-unfinished piece of software. (Again, access to source is irrelevant for people who are not developers.)
I'm not a poor college student or struggling developer. I can afford to buy my software. What I want from software is capability, ease of use, polish, and choice. Open source may or may not give me those. Even the much touted choice attribute is somewhat illusionary. Open source, in common with proprietary software, suffers from a decided lack of really original applications..
>> You do not have a right to make money off your art.
Geez, that's so preposterously wrong that it is hard to imagine how you came to that conclusion.
People who make something -- music, movies, or whatever -- have every right to try to sell their creations, for any price, to anyone. Your only right in the matter is to not buy.
It's rather nice to hear from an actual musician. His fear -- that no one will buy his music if they can get it free -- seems reasonable to me. After all, almost everyone here constantly and stridently asserts their right to copy digital recordings of his music.
>> Those working on open source, like myself and many others, clearly rely on the goodwill and kindness of the community.
How, then, are you paying your bills? Canvassing the neighborhood for donations? Why would you expect to receive the community's continuing goodwill? (By community I mean a real, physical place, not the imaginary "community" of disparate people with sharedd interests.)
I think it is demeaning to people who create software to expect them to work for nothing. Likewise, it is demeaning to musicians to expect them to work for nothing.
>> These laws are to make large corporations rich...
No question that the media corporatins have successfully molded copyright law into a tool to bludgeon both the consumer and the artist. Historically, though, copyright law is intended to protect artists and consumers from predatory businesses. In simple terms, no copyright, no protection of reproducible art, no art to buy apart from live performances. Most importantly, the ability of people who write books to protect their interests would disappear. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.