Personnel costs don't have that much impact. Design and the intended payload of the booster you're using do. Soviet propulsion systems were bigger than U.S. systems because they had to lob great honking warheads across the North Pole. The Russians are still leveraging that technology.
But... if memory serves, the original NASA shuttle proposal called for a fully recoverable platform, with a 747-size manned booster being flown to a nice, quiet landing on an ordinary runway, while the equally recoverable orbiter went on with the mission. Budget cuts and all the other unholy weirdness that afflicted the Nixon White House morphed that design into the expensive bastardization that flies today.
Seems to me that there's always been a lot of hominid hubris involved in this business of postulating our uniqueness or lack thereof as the bastion of intelligence life in the universe.
Isn't the basic problem that we are too far away from the next neighborhood to visit it so we can find out if anyone really lives there? The fact that we can't yet, get, or talk, to the next neighborhood has nothing to do with whether or not someone lives there. It just means we don't have the ability to determine that.
So, until Captain Cook managed to get to Australia, did it make sense for Europeans to assume that "there's no life down there"? Probably not, but the point is that whatever Europeans thought or knew had nothing at all to do with the reality of all those people walking around what Europeans decided to call Australia. p? If you support the uniqueness of Earth in the universe, it seems to me that the burden is on you to produce a cogent argument explaining why it is Just Us Humans.
Most posters here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that AOL is thinking about buying Red Hat so they can bring out their own Linux distribution. Why would AOL want to bring out a Linux distribution? To all intents and purposes, no one has yet figured out how to sustain a business that sells something meant to be given away. I don't think AOL really cares about the OS people use. MS has the consumer desktop market today, so that's where the business is. There's no profit in porting the AOL client, etc., to other platforms.
I like to cook. So what can't I go to McDonald's and buy all the ingredients? Must be something wrong with McDonald's business model, I guess.
Listen, I'm not a Mac user (the new machines are enticing, though) but I'm sure Mr. Jobs will appreciate all the free advice and second guessing that's going on here. Geez, I wonder how he managed to sell all those Apple II's and all those little 9-inch Mac's without you.
Beats me what's inside Jobs' head, but Apple doesn't have to eliminate Microsoft from the face of the Earth to be succcessful. All they have to do is sell enough stuff to stay in business and return a profit. If Jobs thinks he can do that by building a different kind of computer, more power to him. The marketplace will decide.
Ummm...I think Apple has figured out that some people won't buy a computer that sits inside a big ugly beige box on the floor and goes "whirrr" all the time. Style counts for a lot of people. What's the harm?
A stable,unified and democratic Europe is in the interests of the U.S. The U.S. was brought into the two world wars in large measure because a non-unified Europe fueled the creation of undemocratic powers whose military aggression eventually threatened the U.S. Arguing that U.S. security is served by fostering a fractured, bickering Europe is arrogant and blindly foolhardy.
Yes, you can use nukes to target the other side's military capabilities. A single 20-megaton weapon is quite capable of vaporizing any military installation, as is a a cluster of smaller MIRV'ed weapons (as well as much of the surrounding territory).
However, targeting the other side's military infrastructure strongly implies that you have adopted a first-strike policy, because the other side's weapons systems would not be there for you to attack if you followed a second-strike policy. (I.e., their weapons would already have beren launched against you.) In the latter case, you'd likely target population centers and civilian infrastructure.
Let's just get on with it and put some people back on the Moon, ok? Jeez, we did it more than 30 years ago. What would've (not) happened if we all waited 30 years after the Wright's first flights to start putting people back in airplanes?
...Well, not really. But the two MS products are inextricably linked, especially in the minds of the normal 99% of the human race that doesn't read Slashdot or worry about operating systems without a decent suite of business software.
Differentiation counts for something. Porting Office to Your Favorite OS makes that OS seem like some Windows wannabe to the folks who don't (need to) care about operating systems.
How about some original ideas in the UNIX/Linux camp. instead of lame attempts to beat Windows at its own game?
Package management was a good idea because users didn't have to learn how to use a compiler or tar before they could install software. So now they have to learn the quirks and foibles of packaging systems, and cope with this thing called "dependencies". How about some standards, folks, so we can get on with life?
...it was pretty but slow, and I didn't have much use for the Ghome apps. Then I used Red Carpet to download a Red Carpet upgrade (1.2) and Red Carpet broke. Then I couldn't remove Red Carpet, since I needed Red Carpet to download the last good version. Then I removed Ximian and moved on.
This is not an open source issue. It's really about a mis-match between the stated goals of a project and the available resources. Microsoft would have the same problem if they only had a dozen or so folks working on Word.
Maybe development efforts -- open source or otherwise -- ought to scale their dreams back to something they can do well and finish before they hit retirement age.
You know, if we make the assumption that OSX developers actually want to be paid for their efforts, it will be interesting to see if OSX spawns more imaginative, innovative apps the Linux or the BSD's.
Open Source is tied to the Wonderful World of Unix more or less by historical accident. Stallman grew up in a pre-Windows world, and Linus wanted a better version of Andrew Tannenbaum's pedagogical mini-Unix, Minix . There are reasons that open Source and Unix-like OS's are now inextricably linked, but couldn't we imagine an open source movement that is OS-independent? Putting aside the reality of making a living,, what's standing in the way of Windows or Mac developers using Open Source tools to build more Open Source?
More than the tough install stands in the way of wider acceptance of Debian. The Stable release, in my experience, is just that: stable. But, perhaps, the Debian folks have erred in their conservatism. Key pieces of software that a non-techie user might expect to use aren't available in their current incarnation in Stable. Pulling them in from Testing or Unstable is probably beyond the ken of most members of the "What's Linux" community. Even users who have at least a piece of a clue might have better things to do than worry about mixing and matching from Stable, Unstable and Testing.
DesqView Was Good Stuff; There Were Others
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Lineo Frees CP/M
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· Score: 1
DesqView was really good software that delivered what it promised. I once worked in an office that stood up a little Novell LAN with about 15 workstations all running DesqView. We were in the editing business, and cranked out tens of thousands of words every day, using XyWrite -- another really good piece of DOS software -- as our editing tool. It worked, it was fast, and it was stable.
DOS was DOS, and it was limited by IBM's original PC design, but spme really good coders wrote a number of really good programs that ran on it. Anyone besides me still fell pangs of withdrawl because you can't use Magellan?
Let's be honest. This is gonna happen with the open source development model. For that matter, it'll happen with the shareware model, or any similar scheme. If the sole person responsible for the care and feeding of your favorite piece of code chooses to move on in life, you're out of luck.
Corporate activity in this arena is a result, not a cause, of globalism. The walls between nation states, especially in technologically adept societies, are fading away. Ties of common interests and needs increasingly flow along lines that ignore national boundaries. This is because the problems humanity faces, and the tools we need to use to address those problems, cannot be addressed from a nation-state perspective.
I read this piece in the print version of Wired and it struck me as reasonably cogent. It still does. The first OS I ever used was Unix. It make more sense to me than Windows. So I'm just more at home using Linux. But, jeez, people, why can't we see some original software? With all this virtuous open source sharing going on, doesn't anyone have a better idea than Microsoft?
If the goal is to get people to use open source instead of Microsoft, copycat versions of Office won't do it. Open source needs to give folks something they can't get from Windows.
Sheeesh, more arrogant Linux blather. If you want to install everything from source, or whatever, fine. No one's gonna stop you. But just because someone else is more interested in what the computer does than in how it works, don't derisively brand them as a "luser".
Most of the time, I use Linux 'cause it is Unix. I don't care a whit about open source, Stallman, and other theologians. Most everyone else I know uses something else. They want their computers to make their lives easier, and they want to be able to get work done without. As they'd say, that's what computers are for.
Don't know what kind of understanding you had at your last job, but where I work you are supposed to make you case to the folks who actually own the place before you start tinkering. Like it or not, technical considerations are not the only things that matter.
Re:do something different --Yes!
on
Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Absolutely! If you let your competition define what you are, if you let your competition change the rules of the game, then you can't win. Is the goal simply to push Office off the desktop? Then find a company who can reengineer it, try to sell it for, say, $25 a license, and absord the loss as everyone says "Why trust a cheap imitation?"
Or...go study the market and find out what people really want to do with a computer and build something that does exactly that.
Remember, Linux is Unix, and Unix has been around for a quarter century. If we really want Ordinary Mortals (i.e., people who don't care what OS they use) to use Linux, or any other "free" OS, we're going to have to give them a very, very good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
But... if memory serves, the original NASA shuttle proposal called for a fully recoverable platform, with a 747-size manned booster being flown to a nice, quiet landing on an ordinary runway, while the equally recoverable orbiter went on with the mission. Budget cuts and all the other unholy weirdness that afflicted the Nixon White House morphed that design into the expensive bastardization that flies today.
Isn't the basic problem that we are too far away from the next neighborhood to visit it so we can find out if anyone really lives there? The fact that we can't yet, get, or talk, to the next neighborhood has nothing to do with whether or not someone lives there. It just means we don't have the ability to determine that.
So, until Captain Cook managed to get to Australia, did it make sense for Europeans to assume that "there's no life down there"? Probably not, but the point is that whatever Europeans thought or knew had nothing at all to do with the reality of all those people walking around what Europeans decided to call Australia. p? If you support the uniqueness of Earth in the universe, it seems to me that the burden is on you to produce a cogent argument explaining why it is Just Us Humans.
It wasn't the OS, it was the PC architecture that imposed the 640k limit.
Most posters here seem to be jumping to the conclusion that AOL is thinking about buying Red Hat so they can bring out their own Linux distribution. Why would AOL want to bring out a Linux distribution? To all intents and purposes, no one has yet figured out how to sustain a business that sells something meant to be given away. I don't think AOL really cares about the OS people use. MS has the consumer desktop market today, so that's where the business is. There's no profit in porting the AOL client, etc., to other platforms.
Listen, I'm not a Mac user (the new machines are enticing, though) but I'm sure Mr. Jobs will appreciate all the free advice and second guessing that's going on here. Geez, I wonder how he managed to sell all those Apple II's and all those little 9-inch Mac's without you.
Ummm...I think Apple has figured out that some people won't buy a computer that sits inside a big ugly beige box on the floor and goes "whirrr" all the time. Style counts for a lot of people. What's the harm?
A stable,unified and democratic Europe is in the interests of the U.S. The U.S. was brought into the two world wars in large measure because a non-unified Europe fueled the creation of undemocratic powers whose military aggression eventually threatened the U.S. Arguing that U.S. security is served by fostering a fractured, bickering Europe is arrogant and blindly foolhardy.
However, targeting the other side's military infrastructure strongly implies that you have adopted a first-strike policy, because the other side's weapons systems would not be there for you to attack if you followed a second-strike policy. (I.e., their weapons would already have beren launched against you.) In the latter case, you'd likely target population centers and civilian infrastructure.
Think small, be small.
Differentiation counts for something. Porting Office to Your Favorite OS makes that OS seem like some Windows wannabe to the folks who don't (need to) care about operating systems.
How about some original ideas in the UNIX/Linux camp. instead of lame attempts to beat Windows at its own game?
Package management was a good idea because users didn't have to learn how to use a compiler or tar before they could install software. So now they have to learn the quirks and foibles of packaging systems, and cope with this thing called "dependencies". How about some standards, folks, so we can get on with life?
...it was pretty but slow, and I didn't have much use for the Ghome apps. Then I used Red Carpet to download a Red Carpet upgrade (1.2) and Red Carpet broke. Then I couldn't remove Red Carpet, since I needed Red Carpet to download the last good version. Then I removed Ximian and moved on.
Normal mortals don't care how hard it is to write code. And they don't have any reason to care. They just want it to work and not surprise them.
Maybe development efforts -- open source or otherwise -- ought to scale their dreams back to something they can do well and finish before they hit retirement age.
You know, if we make the assumption that OSX developers actually want to be paid for their efforts, it will be interesting to see if OSX spawns more imaginative, innovative apps the Linux or the BSD's.
Open Source is tied to the Wonderful World of Unix more or less by historical accident. Stallman grew up in a pre-Windows world, and Linus wanted a better version of Andrew Tannenbaum's pedagogical mini-Unix, Minix . There are reasons that open Source and Unix-like OS's are now inextricably linked, but couldn't we imagine an open source movement that is OS-independent? Putting aside the reality of making a living,, what's standing in the way of Windows or Mac developers using Open Source tools to build more Open Source?
More than the tough install stands in the way of wider acceptance of Debian. The Stable release, in my experience, is just that: stable. But, perhaps, the Debian folks have erred in their conservatism. Key pieces of software that a non-techie user might expect to use aren't available in their current incarnation in Stable. Pulling them in from Testing or Unstable is probably beyond the ken of most members of the "What's Linux" community. Even users who have at least a piece of a clue might have better things to do than worry about mixing and matching from Stable, Unstable and Testing.
DOS was DOS, and it was limited by IBM's original PC design, but spme really good coders wrote a number of really good programs that ran on it. Anyone besides me still fell pangs of withdrawl because you can't use Magellan?
Let's be honest. This is gonna happen with the open source development model. For that matter, it'll happen with the shareware model, or any similar scheme. If the sole person responsible for the care and feeding of your favorite piece of code chooses to move on in life, you're out of luck.
Corporate activity in this arena is a result, not a cause, of globalism. The walls between nation states, especially in technologically adept societies, are fading away. Ties of common interests and needs increasingly flow along lines that ignore national boundaries. This is because the problems humanity faces, and the tools we need to use to address those problems, cannot be addressed from a nation-state perspective.
If the goal is to get people to use open source instead of Microsoft, copycat versions of Office won't do it. Open source needs to give folks something they can't get from Windows.
Most of the time, I use Linux 'cause it is Unix. I don't care a whit about open source, Stallman, and other theologians. Most everyone else I know uses something else. They want their computers to make their lives easier, and they want to be able to get work done without. As they'd say, that's what computers are for.
Don't know what kind of understanding you had at your last job, but where I work you are supposed to make you case to the folks who actually own the place before you start tinkering. Like it or not, technical considerations are not the only things that matter.
Or...go study the market and find out what people really want to do with a computer and build something that does exactly that.
Remember, Linux is Unix, and Unix has been around for a quarter century. If we really want Ordinary Mortals (i.e., people who don't care what OS they use) to use Linux, or any other "free" OS, we're going to have to give them a very, very good reason.