I think it's clear that using common bytecode offers some advantages to developers, as outlined by Miguel. It also seems like CLR can offer performance advantages over Java since it basically just maps native API calls to functions in the.NET framework, much like wxWindows or anyGui do for GUIs. If the classes are properly documented, it should be possible to match their functionality on other operating systems.
So what is Microsoft aiming for? Probably two things:
- Kill Java. They need to kill it before it becomes too wide-spread. They have a really good shot at doing so given Java's performance problems [insert thousands of flames from Java developers here] and C#'s advanced features like better encapsulation (you don't need to call set() and get() methods, you can map them to the = operator, for example).
- "Write once, run on Microsoft". In order to run.NET apps on another platform you would have to virtually re-implement (or substitute) the entire Win32 API, which will probably be modified at an ever-increasing pace. No company can keep up -- only open source may be able to do that, but Microsoft's opinion might be that open source is no real threat for the platforms where they want to deploy.NET. (After all, even the average Slashdotter seems to think that Linux will never be ready for the desktop -- quite idiotic, IMHO, but the more people believe that, the better.)
Insofar Ximian's Mono project may be a good thing as it offers a migration path where previously none existed (from Windows to Linux), even if.NET apps don't run properly on Mono (think about all the GUI stuff that can go wrong, for example). Besides, Java has never really been a mature technology IMHO and it's about time to replace it with something better, even if superficially less cross-platform.
Now the advantages of having a modular architecture become clear. Mono cannot break Linux, it cannot break X, it can probably not even break GNOME. There are more alternatives than you can throw a kernel image at if something goes wrong. Let's just wait and see what the Mono guys come up with. The only people who should worry about this are Sun and their followers. And maybe RMS.
You're right, of course: The benefits of open culture are easily overlooked. This is also true for operating systems. On technical merits alone, we might have gone with OS/2 -- but it was still a proprietary system owned by a large corporation that would have been used in the same way by elites to exercise control as Windows currently is. Unfortunately, the main spokesperson for freedom in software, RMS, whose arguments are usually fairly sound, is too dogmatic and abrasive to carry these ideas. Oftentimes we see benchmarks about Linux, Windows and MacOS, and forget what the competition is really all about: freedom or no freedom.
On a site like MP3.com (which itself is run by Vivendi) you will find lots of subversive music: Music critical of the war, or of religion, or of any social or political policy. In other words, exactly the kind of stuff that can hardly be found in our "clean" world of pop culture. This is important because it is a powerful counter-force to the many forces that tell us to be "adjusted" and to not question social norms and mores (some of these forces live in ourselves and are evolutionary in nature -- "herd behavior"). Music nowadays is often completely devoid of meaning. Taking back culture is necessary to create a new society.
It's nice to fantasize about a world where all existing barriers to content distribution are broken. But as long as the law is practically controlled by large corporations, these fantasies will remain just that: fantasies. In the given example case, it would be simple to impose restrictions on the manufacturers of such devices not to include distribution mechanisms without built-in DRM. (Black market is not an issue here since these devices are only relevant when you reach a certain critical mass, as some manufacturers such as Cybiko have already learned.)
Furthermore, this kind of thinking is still rather primitive: "The content industry controls everything, but ha!, we, the great hackers & crackers, will break everything they come up with, and then we will distribute it for free! But if they ask nicely, we will still send the artists a check, or something." What is currently happening in the software industry -- the slow substitution of proprietary software with copylefted software developed collaboratively by volunteers and supported by sympathetic individuals and corporations -- must repeat in all other areas of information production. If that is the case, we can use all the existing infrastructure to distribute the content in question, be it Bluetooth or be it UMTS, without any limitations. Or has anyone ever sent you a nasty letter for downloading a Linux kernel?
So we need to develop revenue and marketing models that can compete with the existing oligarchy. And in order to take the laws into our own hands, we need to reform (or rather, reinvent) democracy itself. The tools that are needed to accomplish these goals are essentially similar and closely related:
Rating mechanisms that allow people to find high-quality content, as well as reputation mechanisms, that make it possible to select ratings according to the people who have expressed them. This makes traditional mass marketing obsolete if widely deployed. Think Slashdot (or rather Kuro5hin) effect, but on a p2p network.
Easy and secure user-to-user payment standards. Don't think "micropayments" (the basic micropayment idea is to have incredibly tiny payments running transparently in the background all the time), think mini-payments that are clearly associated with specific transactions. Support a website, request a feature for an open-source-product, support an especially good artist, support the production of a movie or book by a renowned creator Street Performer Protocol style etc. etc. -- but much easier and more wide-spread than possible with Paypal. Probably best implemented with prepaid digital coins.
Distributed, secure voting systems. Currently even open source projects have not yet agreed on such a standard. Optimally, the voting process should be combined with the information gathering process, so that people who vote will also be able to discuss and rate comments on the same page.
These are all key technologies, all implemented in software, that are much more important than any file-sharing solution alone. For all of them, user interfaces are of utmost importance: One click too many, one second too much latency and people will not use them.
Nevertheless, little progress has been made to wide deployment of these technologies. These technologies will not only make it possible to make money with any kind of content, they will also allow more direct participation of people in the lawmaking process -- if only on the level of newly formed political parties at first.
It's all nice and good to complain about the stranglehold that the content industry has on content distribution and on lawmakers. And I'm the first to support the kid who is locked up for copying an MP3 or DivX movie. But if there's not a serious counter-culture, the industry will win. There will be licenses required for cryptography. There will be DRM in every major operating system (even in Linux, in the form of binary only drivers), because otherwise hardware will simply not run. There will be laws like the SSSCA to enforce this. This will be done on an international level using organizations such as WIPO and WTO, which are fundamentally undemocratic. There will be protests and cracks, but think "war on drugs" here: You will find few people on this site who think locking drug consumers up en masse is a good idea -- yet that's exactly what's been happening for the last decades. Don't complain about your government but then naively assume that they are actually still kind of good misled guys who just need to be sent a few nice letters. Not with the money involved in this game, now and in the future.
Create counter-culture, not cracks. That's what the revolution is all about, baby.
Thanks for the insights! It's probably just a matter of deployment again, default installations should turn "hinting" off at low font sizes (this is reasonably obscure knowledge, so even developers can't be expected to have it as the screenshot shows). Of course, having all font/anti-aliasing settings accessible through a nice GUI, which would put reasonable constraints/warnings on user changes, would probably be best. Do you know how Windows currently sets these settings automatically? They seem to strike a very good balance, and I've never seen a flawed low size font rendering under Windows.
I am not familiar with the patent in question -- good that it doesn't seem to concern anything essential!
.. the screen-shot still shows the flaws of anti-aliasing under Linux. Take a look at the "k" in the "Bookmarks" text on the toolbar, or at the "W" in Wednesday -- this is what it actually looks like if you turn on anti-aliasing under KDE. Some fairly standard fonts just get really ugly and you have to search a long time until you have disabled all of them everywhere without removing them (webpages can probably still use them), or you have to disable anti-aliasing entirely at certain font sizes (haven't figured out how to do that yet, but haven't really looked either, KDE doesn't seem to have an option for it at least, but somewhere in the mess that is X configuration I'm sure it's possible).
Even if Linux desktop installations weren't so horribly deployed as they are by most distributors (I completely lost faith in SuSE after their handling of the Euro-Sign, I think that they are no longer interested in ordinary desktop users), anti-aliasing algorithms itself could probably be much improved, although the Freetype page points out that Apple patents are a problem and some features had to be disabled (damn you, Apple!). All in all, I'm not happy with anti-aliasing support at all, except for subpixel rendering, which works very well on my Notebook. (And don't give me the "You didn't pay, don't complain" bullshit -- I paid a lot of cash to distributors already, but they seem to prefer to spend it on the server end).
You may be interested in reading this proposal I have made for Scoop, which is the engine that runs K5. Both Scoop and Slashcode are written in Perl, so it may be possible to develop a shared Wiki plugin.
The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.
Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.
Even if official I18N doesn't continue, which, as BaronM correctly points out, is highly unlikely, amateurs may still provide localization hacks, much like the Germans who translated Civ3 before its German release (and were sued for doing so) -- although this may be a lot harder with all those pesky Asian letters.
I think that kernel compilation should obviously be as easy and accessible as possible. After all, one of the promises of Linux is to make hacking fun (cf. L. Torvalds: Just for Fun), and there's no reason to build artificial barriers into the OS. The more I play around with Linux, the more I find myself exploring other concepts of computing (networking, various script languages, filesystems etc.) about which I would not even think on Windows, because everything that does not work best over a graphical interface is just so user-unfriendly. (OTOH, there are many times when Linux has been frustrating, especially with regard to documentation -- I think using different tools, like Wikis, may make this part of Linux development more accessible to contributors.)
But I don't think "Aunt Tillie" should accidentally come anywhere near a kernel: Users should not care about kernels because they have to, but because they can. That means that most hardware configuration tasks should be accessible without touching the kernel, including installation of new drivers. So include lots of warning signs -- optimally a normal user will never have to log into his box as "root" except for installing new software with a graphical apt-get like tool.
Non-biased -- well, that can hardly be done by a single person. But I've tried both to some extent and am very happy with KDE. True, it is overall significantly slower than GNOME, and if you're on a low-end machine you will probably want to run GNOME or WindowMaker or somesuch (I like ion for productivity tasks, a nice window manager.. "apt-get install ion" and give it a try). If you turn off all the gimmicks in KDE it gets reasonably fast, but it still seems to run a lot more processes, and swap/access the disk more than other DEs/WMs. (The performance differences reported by KDE users on CPU-wise similar machines may relate to different effects of disk access: A high-end SCSI system will probably not mind the frequent accesses, whereas some IDE hard drives / controllers do not regard your CPU with much respect.) Upgrading my memory to 640 MB has made little/no performance difference other than for the obvious memory-intesive tasks (Mozilla etc.).
KDE is very nice for people who migrate from Windows (or keep using Windows) because after installation it lets you choose a Windows-like theme and keybindings (without losing any of its functionality, of course). GNOME, OTOH, takes a while to get into, especially with sawfish as a WM, but can be set up in a Windows-like fashion, too -- so if you're planning to set something up for lots of end users it doesn't make much of a difference. Overall, I think KDE makes optimal use of existing Windows knowledge, whereas GNOME mostly requires you to learn from scratch -- if it's your first PC;-) it will likely not make much of a difference.
Otherwise the differences are not so big. Konqueror is a nice browser, especially with anti-aliasing (which is not really satisfying on Linux, but that's not KDE's fault -- at least you can get ClearType-like subpixel antialiasing on LCDs, which is almost as good as Windows'), but apps are interoperable. The KDE task bar and GNOME task bar are similar, both support little applets, but those are not interoperable AFAIK. I found the GNOME taskbar somewhat more intuitive, but I'm not really happy with either one (yes, I try to submit bugs and suggestions, thank you).
As regards productivity, it should not really make much of a difference once you've gotten into it. GNOME may be the obvious choice on lower-end machines, although my university has some quite snappy low-end machines running KDE, so with tuning you can probably achieve a lot. Hopefully, KDE performance will improve over time. I think both GTK and Qt are versatile interface toolkits, of which Qt is, by default, more Windows-like, but you can probably create an almost exactly Windows-like look & feel with GTK as well. But I liked the KDE default settings a lot more.
I agree with you that monopolies are not necessarily bad. But this is only a theoretical assumption: In history, there have been few if any monopolies rising through the well-known mechanisms of capital accumulation which have not abused their market power in order to suppress competition. And, from a market theory standpoint, a company that wouldn't lobby politicians, kill competition with patents and trademarks and create manipulative contracts would not act correctly: It can be expected to do anything to expand its monopoly that it can get away with. To realize this, companies should have to become ever more transparent as their market share increases.
That's why regulation is necsesary, and much more than is currently the case. A monopoly should not necessarily be split up just because it's a monopoly, but a market situation should be created where competition becomes much easier for everyone involved -- if the monopolist can still retain its monopoly after increased competitive pressure, than that may not only be desirable, but the only way to distribute the goods in question. Therefore, monopolies should be absolutely transparent: They should essentially leave their doors open to anyone who cares what they do and share all their data. They should not be able to keep anything they do secret, not their strategies, their presentations, their data, their scientific discoveries. If all this knowledge doesn't help others make better products, then let the monopoly persist (but under the continued guidelines).
Free marketers need to finally accept that much of market theory is pseudoscience, and only a regulated market economy (not a planned one) produces a fair distribution of wealth in nations of the industrial age (the information age may need yet different models).
Your attitude is one of the main reasons it's so hard to achieve anything on the political level. Here's a guy who does something on a local scale, which could be a model for others if it's successful. He asks for input from the Slashdot "community", and people from all over the world reply what their political ideas are and how they think they could be turned into practice. Ideally, the guy will listen. That's exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen, and the open-source community (of which Slashdot is, like it or not, an advocacy channel) needs to push its people into politics, or to get the knowledge to the politicians.
As for the cost savings, yes, Linux can cost more money than it saves when the transition is not carefully planned and executed. Part of the reason for that is the large number of people who "make Linux harder than it is", as Roblimo, IIRC, pointed out. There is a variety of extremely simple graphical e-mail clients. Konqueror or Mozilla are both web browsers that can be used by almost anyone (whereas Konqueror can be set up easily by anyone with half a clue to look and act like IE). It's exactly the Internet client problems that are mostly solved on the desktop. Don't invent problems that do not exist. Surely you could set up mutt and procmail on a library computer, but then don't be surprised if people point and laugh.
But cost savings are not the main reason to move to Linux. The main reason are the long-term benefits of source code openness, which includes easy expandability, which is a major plus, because many additions by anyone from government agencies to corporations will be returned into the pool of open source software, to the benefit of all -- the more open-source software (GPL) is used, the more powerful this effect becomes (and there's the obvious "given enough eyes.." security/stability advantage, which also increases exponentially). Also, schools and libraries will not have to deal with unmanageable obsolescence cycles which are deliberately created by the Wintel duopoly. OSS will make computers better, more easy-to-use and cheaper. You should support those trying to make that difference, or become one of them.
That is not correct, since the water was found near the poles, not at the poles (which would, indeed, have been a rather obvious discovery). Reuters release:
On Wednesday, scientists said the first pass by the neutron spectrometer had revealed evidence of hydrogen in the soil in northern regions near the pole.
[...]
Significant water ice deposits easily accessible on the surface of the planet would benefit any future Mars mission astronauts and make it much more likely that life might have existed on the planet.
NASA scientists said they were excited by the initial indications of hydrogen deposits, describing the readings sent back as clearer, more definite and much earlier than had been expected.
"We were expecting that it would take many orbits (to determine the presence of hydrogen)," said Stephen Saunders, a scientist on the Odyssey project. "But we saw it the very first time."
Also, prior to this discovery, it has been claimed many times that significant amounts of water have never existed on Mars, and that what we are seeing is mostly carbon dioxide (cf. Google search) except for some water ice at the poles. These claims should now finally be refuted. Therefore, this is an extremely important discovery, suggesting large amounts of water elsewhere under the surface, given that we already know of the prior presence of an ocean on Mars (it was also debated that what we are seeing are merely the results of carbon dioxide erosion).
.. the prior story about preliminary findings. This is not redundant: It is something that has mostly been ignored by official NASA press releases but has still made it into the mainstream media. I really hope that the failure of NASA to mention that they already have detected "large desposits of hydrogen" close to the surface means that they're waiting to confirm their findings, not that there's some dark conspiracy postponing any serious trips to Mars by decades in favor of sinking money into NMD, ISS and the Shuttle instead.
Well, you may have a point here: The fact that the machine looks like an iMac may make it sell better, i.e. not that it looks good on its own, but that it looks like something people already know and think is good / pretty. Of course, this also has its downside, as other posters have pointed out...
I think you are underestimating the relevance of marketing. A lot of the cash people paid for the iMac was paid for their own manipulation, i.e. a massive media/hype campaign that was very effective. Together with the trusted Apple brand which has come to be associated with "easy-to-use computers" thanks to countless movies and hordes of fanatic fans, this has made the iMac a sure winner. When the iMac came out, a lot of people criticized its colors and looks -- without marketing, this might have remained the dominant viewpoint. It is not necessarily the actual design that is relevant, but the media context in which this design is presented. Plus, the design of the AIOERJUGIR or what's it called is no longer innovative.
Too expensive. The brand is unknown, and people are not going to spend $800 for something that just looks nice. This will likely come and go like the Internet computers before it. If they would market it as a versatile Net/multimedia station / PVR, maybe they would sell some units (however, the patents involved in PVR may create problems).
Also, Mozilla 0.93.. if I remember correctly 0.95 was the point where Mozilla became usable on a daily basis. 0.93 may not cut it and lacks some of the wonderful later features like tabs. They probably should have waited one more month before going public so they could present a mature product instead of hurrying something that still has many loose ends (the DNS requirement for dial-up ISPs is probably a major showstopper for newbies). So my strategy to place this thing on the market would be:
Make sure Internet setup is very easy with all configurations
MP3 and DVD playback are nice, but can be had very cheap nowadays. PVR is not so common -- this is therefore an essential feature that should be marketed accordingly
Get all software to the latest versions and use apt-get, apt-rpm or something like that to fetch the latest packages regularly
Eliminate stupid product registrations -- they hurt you more than they help you
Games: There are some nice, free open-source games like Armagetron (which I have yet to get working but the shots looked promising), Heroes, Freeciv, Tuxracer,... These should be installed by default and easily accessible. It may be possible to cut a deal with Transgaming or Loki in return for access to their subscription services.
Community: People just love online forums, chat, weblogs and the like. The system should come with easy access to preselected chat rooms (IRC?) and forums (newsgroups?).
Down with the price. A "healthy" margin is a good thing if you're not planning to sell many units or if you're Apple.
Clever marketing. If you think the product is really good, donate some to various schools/libraries with an added prominent, non-removable "I want to buy a machine like this" link somewhere. Try to create as much hype for the product as possible.
Send a cleverly formulated "story" asking for more ideas to "Ask Slashdot" and choose the ones at +5 and -1 for preselection.
It may be possible to create a viable product in this fashion. Oh yeah, I forgot: STEP 3: PROFIT!!!!!
I don't think hardware is really much of a problem in the long run. Consider the things you can do online:
mail and news
browse the web
access ftp sites
These are really the primary applications. Multimedia is of limited relevance in third world countries. None of these applications requires a high-end computer. Even web-browsing can be done on an old 486 if text-mode browsing is acceptable (and thanks to open-source developers, browsers like links, lynx and w3m keep getting updated and are capable of viewing most online text).
So anything from a 486 onward can be used to access the Net (and to develop software) if you use a low-footprint system like Linux. We're talking about computers that can be bought for 20 bucks and less. Add another 30 bucks for an old 14" and a modem, and you`re all set - the software is free.
The "digital divide" is only a symptom of a far larger problem, the economic divide between the north and south. If you can't afford food, you are unlikely to care about Internet access. However, if you have your basic needs met, getting a cheap system set up is completely viable.
The real problem in doing so with Linux is knowledge: While there is information about everything you need to know somewhere, the information you find online and offline is of very varying quality. Without a rating database to find the most relevant texts (such as this free Linux book from South Africa) people will simply not know how and where to start. Future Linux distributions will have to become knowledge portals, guiding the user to information about everything from software development to system administration. While the distros already come with a lot of docs, many of them are not introductory, and many of the good free books are missing.
Lindows seems to follow an approach similar to that of Transgaming: Get a few Win32 apps to work well and ignore the rest. (Contrary to Transgaming, however, Lindows appears to be proprietary with no intention to ever change that.) Whether this approach is really sufficient is doubtful: If private users can't run Fooster to trade MP3s and cannot play their favorite games, and commercial users can't run their in-house VB/Access stuff, they might quickly want to get rid of Lindows (which will probably change its name sooner or later). $100 also appears to be too expensive to just try it out to see if you can live without Windows. One of the advantages of Linux has always been that PC magazines could bundle it, and that you could download it from various websites.
There may still be a Linux market for Lindows' extensions to WINE or whatever they're building on, though. There are certainly worse ways to burn VC.
I have tested the previous version of KWord and was quite impressed. Some have argued that KOffice merely duplicates Microsoft's efforts, but that is not true: Unlike MS Word, KWord uses a very simple and efficient frame concept, which makes it quite easy to create complex layouts. For example I was able to create a letter layout with two columns in a couple of minutes with no prior knowledge of the program.
You just draw frames where you want to have text and type in them (if you use frames, you can also use KWord without them like a normal word processor). You can connect frames so that text flows between them, and they are automatically extended to subsequent pages.
Things I haven't yet tested are data connectivity (which is essential for business stuff) and very large documents. But general writing functionality was quite impressive already. The biggest problem I had was printing: I didn't get the result to look like the preview. Reading the summary, I doubt this is fixed, but I'll be pleased to find out I'm wrong. Generally, KWord is on the right track.
Yes, I'm not very familiar with Mac browsers. I hear iCab is quite nice, too. Maybe we will see more ports with OSX.
Most alternative browsers by now have the masquerading feature. Konqueror also makes use of KDE/Freetype anti-aliasing when this is turned on in the control center, however, Linux' anti-aliasing is clearly inferior to anything else at the moment (partially thanks to one of Apple's patents), and it took me a while to set it up satisfyingly (only some fonts work well), and even then I still have problems with certain letters. (I'm not the only one, though: most Linux desktop screenshots you will find either use big/bold fonts, or reveal the same problems, unless they don't use anti-aliasing at all, of course..) Anti-aliasing is also quite slow, but I'm not sure if that's the fault of my nVidia drivers or of the library.
If you insist on using an open-source email client on Windows, you are probably able to install a Cygwin environment on your Windows box. Cygwin comes with the feature-rich mutt mailer, although I have no experience in setting it up under Windows. There's also a Windows version of PINE, which is quite popular under Unix (probably mostly because its user interface actually deserves the name;-) and does have some decent functionality, but I would not want to use it as my everyday mailer.
Here's a secret tip: OpenXP is the open source version of legendary mail/news offline reader "CrossPoint". It runs in a console window, is very fast, and has all the features you could ask for, including support for various protocols and its own dialer (you can also use an existing Internet connection). OpenXP may take a while to get used to, but it's definitely worth it. I've used CrossPoint from ca. 1993-1996, and a friend still uses it today, although he doesn't care about the new versions.
For mail on Windows, I've been using Pegasus Mail for quite some time. It's more than a decade old and was recently released in version 4.0. Its interface, while graphical, takes a bit to get used to, and it's not open source (Windows freeware doesn't have Unix' open source tradition because of the lack of free compilers), but it is extremely feature-rich, renders HTML (terribly) and supports the Unix mailbox format for its folders. Only downside: I don't know if this relates to crashes of my NT machine (different story), but I've had some mail indexing problems with Pegasus, which made the search ignore some messages.
The situation was much worse with Netscape Messenger, which is the reason I haven't tried out Mozilla's successor yet: Messenger once ate a whole huge mailbox of mine during the process of "reorganization", when not enough disk space was available for this. So I would definitely be careful with Mozilla's Mail module, especially since it's not yet widely tested: You want your mailer to be reliable and not to lose data, ever.
Another semi-free contender is The Bat!, which is trialware and costs 25 bucks for students. I've heard very good things about it, but I have not yet had the need to switch from Pegasus.
On Linux, there are many more choices, and good things are increasingly being said about Ximian's Evolution -- perhaps it will be ported to Windows? Similarly, Balsa and KMail are nice graphical e-mail clients, and there's a huge list of text-mode clients which all have their strengths and weaknesses. You really don't have to decide on either one permanently because they can all access the same mailbox files (neat, huh?). Generally, because of the interoperability and reliability of Unix mail, if you have a choice, I recommend using a Unix system for all email. It may be a bit trickier to set up at first, but once you have a nice procmail and mailer(s) configuration running, you won't want to switch back.
First, there is really not enough information about this bug to draw any conclusions yet. It may be harmless, or it may indeed be devastating. That's the result of Microsoft's idiotic non-disclosure policy, which fits in well with their entire company philosophy.
Second, don't just bitch about IE. If you haven't already, check out the alternatives:
Mozilla, now in Version 0.9.6, is very feature-rich and fast and the most standard-compliant browser in existence, but not for computers with less than 128 MB of memory.
kmeleon (Windows) and galeon (Linux) are Mozilla derivatives with smaller footprint.
Opera, which is closed source adware and requires registration, is a very fast browser that is especially recommended for "information surfers" because of its excellent navigation and caching.
Konqueror is KDE's built-in browser. Thanks to Qt/Embedded and/or KDE-Cygwin, it might be ported to Windows as well.
Lynx and W3M are up-to-date text mode browsers capable of displaying most pages which do not depend on images or animations.
There is a choice, you just have to make it. And no, I didn't copy&paste this from elsewhere and I actually tested all of these, so you may mod me up without guilt. My personal recommendation: Opera (and Mozilla once I've upgraded to 512 megs and V1.0 is out).
Slashdot Mirror
So what is Microsoft aiming for? Probably two things:
- Kill Java. They need to kill it before it becomes too wide-spread. They have a really good shot at doing so given Java's performance problems [insert thousands of flames from Java developers here] and C#'s advanced features like better encapsulation (you don't need to call set() and get() methods, you can map them to the = operator, for example).
- "Write once, run on Microsoft". In order to run .NET apps on another platform you would have to virtually re-implement (or substitute) the entire Win32 API, which will probably be modified at an ever-increasing pace. No company can keep up -- only open source may be able to do that, but Microsoft's opinion might be that open source is no real threat for the platforms where they want to deploy .NET. (After all, even the average Slashdotter seems to think that Linux will never be ready for the desktop -- quite idiotic, IMHO, but the more people believe that, the better.)
Insofar Ximian's Mono project may be a good thing as it offers a migration path where previously none existed (from Windows to Linux), even if .NET apps don't run properly on Mono (think about all the GUI stuff that can go wrong, for example). Besides, Java has never really been a mature technology IMHO and it's about time to replace it with something better, even if superficially less cross-platform.
Now the advantages of having a modular architecture become clear. Mono cannot break Linux, it cannot break X, it can probably not even break GNOME. There are more alternatives than you can throw a kernel image at if something goes wrong. Let's just wait and see what the Mono guys come up with. The only people who should worry about this are Sun and their followers. And maybe RMS.
.. would be to clean up the "HTML" produced by Microsoft Word for their report. My eyes are burning!
On a site like MP3.com (which itself is run by Vivendi) you will find lots of subversive music: Music critical of the war, or of religion, or of any social or political policy. In other words, exactly the kind of stuff that can hardly be found in our "clean" world of pop culture. This is important because it is a powerful counter-force to the many forces that tell us to be "adjusted" and to not question social norms and mores (some of these forces live in ourselves and are evolutionary in nature -- "herd behavior"). Music nowadays is often completely devoid of meaning. Taking back culture is necessary to create a new society.
Furthermore, this kind of thinking is still rather primitive: "The content industry controls everything, but ha!, we, the great hackers & crackers, will break everything they come up with, and then we will distribute it for free! But if they ask nicely, we will still send the artists a check, or something." What is currently happening in the software industry -- the slow substitution of proprietary software with copylefted software developed collaboratively by volunteers and supported by sympathetic individuals and corporations -- must repeat in all other areas of information production. If that is the case, we can use all the existing infrastructure to distribute the content in question, be it Bluetooth or be it UMTS, without any limitations. Or has anyone ever sent you a nasty letter for downloading a Linux kernel?
So we need to develop revenue and marketing models that can compete with the existing oligarchy. And in order to take the laws into our own hands, we need to reform (or rather, reinvent) democracy itself. The tools that are needed to accomplish these goals are essentially similar and closely related:
These are all key technologies, all implemented in software, that are much more important than any file-sharing solution alone. For all of them, user interfaces are of utmost importance: One click too many, one second too much latency and people will not use them. Nevertheless, little progress has been made to wide deployment of these technologies. These technologies will not only make it possible to make money with any kind of content, they will also allow more direct participation of people in the lawmaking process -- if only on the level of newly formed political parties at first.
It's all nice and good to complain about the stranglehold that the content industry has on content distribution and on lawmakers. And I'm the first to support the kid who is locked up for copying an MP3 or DivX movie. But if there's not a serious counter-culture, the industry will win. There will be licenses required for cryptography. There will be DRM in every major operating system (even in Linux, in the form of binary only drivers), because otherwise hardware will simply not run. There will be laws like the SSSCA to enforce this. This will be done on an international level using organizations such as WIPO and WTO, which are fundamentally undemocratic. There will be protests and cracks, but think "war on drugs" here: You will find few people on this site who think locking drug consumers up en masse is a good idea -- yet that's exactly what's been happening for the last decades. Don't complain about your government but then naively assume that they are actually still kind of good misled guys who just need to be sent a few nice letters. Not with the money involved in this game, now and in the future.
Create counter-culture, not cracks. That's what the revolution is all about, baby.
I am not familiar with the patent in question -- good that it doesn't seem to concern anything essential!
Even if Linux desktop installations weren't so horribly deployed as they are by most distributors (I completely lost faith in SuSE after their handling of the Euro-Sign, I think that they are no longer interested in ordinary desktop users), anti-aliasing algorithms itself could probably be much improved, although the Freetype page points out that Apple patents are a problem and some features had to be disabled (damn you, Apple!). All in all, I'm not happy with anti-aliasing support at all, except for subpixel rendering, which works very well on my Notebook. (And don't give me the "You didn't pay, don't complain" bullshit -- I paid a lot of cash to distributors already, but they seem to prefer to spend it on the server end).
I think I'm going to archive your post. This is something I can tell my children about.
Yeah, here's your embryo. MURDER! MURDER! I can see a face in that right cell!
The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.
Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.
Even if official I18N doesn't continue, which, as BaronM correctly points out, is highly unlikely, amateurs may still provide localization hacks, much like the Germans who translated Civ3 before its German release (and were sued for doing so) -- although this may be a lot harder with all those pesky Asian letters.
But I don't think "Aunt Tillie" should accidentally come anywhere near a kernel: Users should not care about kernels because they have to, but because they can. That means that most hardware configuration tasks should be accessible without touching the kernel, including installation of new drivers. So include lots of warning signs -- optimally a normal user will never have to log into his box as "root" except for installing new software with a graphical apt-get like tool.
KDE is very nice for people who migrate from Windows (or keep using Windows) because after installation it lets you choose a Windows-like theme and keybindings (without losing any of its functionality, of course). GNOME, OTOH, takes a while to get into, especially with sawfish as a WM, but can be set up in a Windows-like fashion, too -- so if you're planning to set something up for lots of end users it doesn't make much of a difference. Overall, I think KDE makes optimal use of existing Windows knowledge, whereas GNOME mostly requires you to learn from scratch -- if it's your first PC ;-) it will likely not make much of a difference.
Otherwise the differences are not so big. Konqueror is a nice browser, especially with anti-aliasing (which is not really satisfying on Linux, but that's not KDE's fault -- at least you can get ClearType-like subpixel antialiasing on LCDs, which is almost as good as Windows'), but apps are interoperable. The KDE task bar and GNOME task bar are similar, both support little applets, but those are not interoperable AFAIK. I found the GNOME taskbar somewhat more intuitive, but I'm not really happy with either one (yes, I try to submit bugs and suggestions, thank you).
As regards productivity, it should not really make much of a difference once you've gotten into it. GNOME may be the obvious choice on lower-end machines, although my university has some quite snappy low-end machines running KDE, so with tuning you can probably achieve a lot. Hopefully, KDE performance will improve over time. I think both GTK and Qt are versatile interface toolkits, of which Qt is, by default, more Windows-like, but you can probably create an almost exactly Windows-like look & feel with GTK as well. But I liked the KDE default settings a lot more.
That's why regulation is necsesary, and much more than is currently the case. A monopoly should not necessarily be split up just because it's a monopoly, but a market situation should be created where competition becomes much easier for everyone involved -- if the monopolist can still retain its monopoly after increased competitive pressure, than that may not only be desirable, but the only way to distribute the goods in question. Therefore, monopolies should be absolutely transparent: They should essentially leave their doors open to anyone who cares what they do and share all their data. They should not be able to keep anything they do secret, not their strategies, their presentations, their data, their scientific discoveries. If all this knowledge doesn't help others make better products, then let the monopoly persist (but under the continued guidelines).
Free marketers need to finally accept that much of market theory is pseudoscience, and only a regulated market economy (not a planned one) produces a fair distribution of wealth in nations of the industrial age (the information age may need yet different models).
As for the cost savings, yes, Linux can cost more money than it saves when the transition is not carefully planned and executed. Part of the reason for that is the large number of people who "make Linux harder than it is", as Roblimo, IIRC, pointed out. There is a variety of extremely simple graphical e-mail clients. Konqueror or Mozilla are both web browsers that can be used by almost anyone (whereas Konqueror can be set up easily by anyone with half a clue to look and act like IE). It's exactly the Internet client problems that are mostly solved on the desktop. Don't invent problems that do not exist. Surely you could set up mutt and procmail on a library computer, but then don't be surprised if people point and laugh.
But cost savings are not the main reason to move to Linux. The main reason are the long-term benefits of source code openness, which includes easy expandability, which is a major plus, because many additions by anyone from government agencies to corporations will be returned into the pool of open source software, to the benefit of all -- the more open-source software (GPL) is used, the more powerful this effect becomes (and there's the obvious "given enough eyes .." security/stability advantage, which also increases exponentially). Also, schools and libraries will not have to deal with unmanageable obsolescence cycles which are deliberately created by the Wintel duopoly. OSS will make computers better, more easy-to-use and cheaper. You should support those trying to make that difference, or become one of them.
.. the prior story about preliminary findings. This is not redundant: It is something that has mostly been ignored by official NASA press releases but has still made it into the mainstream media. I really hope that the failure of NASA to mention that they already have detected "large desposits of hydrogen" close to the surface means that they're waiting to confirm their findings, not that there's some dark conspiracy postponing any serious trips to Mars by decades in favor of sinking money into NMD, ISS and the Shuttle instead.
Well, you may have a point here: The fact that the machine looks like an iMac may make it sell better, i.e. not that it looks good on its own, but that it looks like something people already know and think is good / pretty. Of course, this also has its downside, as other posters have pointed out...
I think you are underestimating the relevance of marketing. A lot of the cash people paid for the iMac was paid for their own manipulation, i.e. a massive media/hype campaign that was very effective. Together with the trusted Apple brand which has come to be associated with "easy-to-use computers" thanks to countless movies and hordes of fanatic fans, this has made the iMac a sure winner. When the iMac came out, a lot of people criticized its colors and looks -- without marketing, this might have remained the dominant viewpoint. It is not necessarily the actual design that is relevant, but the media context in which this design is presented. Plus, the design of the AIOERJUGIR or what's it called is no longer innovative.
Also, Mozilla 0.93 .. if I remember correctly 0.95 was the point where Mozilla became usable on a daily basis. 0.93 may not cut it and lacks some of the wonderful later features like tabs. They probably should have waited one more month before going public so they could present a mature product instead of hurrying something that still has many loose ends (the DNS requirement for dial-up ISPs is probably a major showstopper for newbies). So my strategy to place this thing on the market would be:
- Make sure Internet setup is very easy with all configurations
- MP3 and DVD playback are nice, but can be had very cheap nowadays. PVR is not so common -- this is therefore an essential feature that should be marketed accordingly
- Get all software to the latest versions and use apt-get, apt-rpm or something like that to fetch the latest packages regularly
- Eliminate stupid product registrations -- they hurt you more than they help you
- Games: There are some nice, free open-source games like Armagetron (which I have yet to get working but the shots looked promising), Heroes, Freeciv, Tuxracer,
... These should be installed by default and easily accessible. It may be possible to cut a deal with Transgaming or Loki in return for access to their subscription services.
- Community: People just love online forums, chat, weblogs and the like. The system should come with easy access to preselected chat rooms (IRC?) and forums (newsgroups?).
- Down with the price. A "healthy" margin is a good thing if you're not planning to sell many units or if you're Apple.
- Clever marketing. If you think the product is really good, donate some to various schools/libraries with an added prominent, non-removable "I want to buy a machine like this" link somewhere. Try to create as much hype for the product as possible.
- Send a cleverly formulated "story" asking for more ideas to "Ask Slashdot" and choose the ones at +5 and -1 for preselection.
It may be possible to create a viable product in this fashion. Oh yeah, I forgot: STEP 3: PROFIT!!!!!These are really the primary applications. Multimedia is of limited relevance in third world countries. None of these applications requires a high-end computer. Even web-browsing can be done on an old 486 if text-mode browsing is acceptable (and thanks to open-source developers, browsers like links, lynx and w3m keep getting updated and are capable of viewing most online text).
So anything from a 486 onward can be used to access the Net (and to develop software) if you use a low-footprint system like Linux. We're talking about computers that can be bought for 20 bucks and less. Add another 30 bucks for an old 14" and a modem, and you`re all set - the software is free.
The "digital divide" is only a symptom of a far larger problem, the economic divide between the north and south. If you can't afford food, you are unlikely to care about Internet access. However, if you have your basic needs met, getting a cheap system set up is completely viable.
The real problem in doing so with Linux is knowledge: While there is information about everything you need to know somewhere, the information you find online and offline is of very varying quality. Without a rating database to find the most relevant texts (such as this free Linux book from South Africa) people will simply not know how and where to start. Future Linux distributions will have to become knowledge portals, guiding the user to information about everything from software development to system administration. While the distros already come with a lot of docs, many of them are not introductory, and many of the good free books are missing.
There may still be a Linux market for Lindows' extensions to WINE or whatever they're building on, though. There are certainly worse ways to burn VC.
You just draw frames where you want to have text and type in them (if you use frames, you can also use KWord without them like a normal word processor). You can connect frames so that text flows between them, and they are automatically extended to subsequent pages.
Things I haven't yet tested are data connectivity (which is essential for business stuff) and very large documents. But general writing functionality was quite impressive already. The biggest problem I had was printing: I didn't get the result to look like the preview. Reading the summary, I doubt this is fixed, but I'll be pleased to find out I'm wrong. Generally, KWord is on the right track.
Most alternative browsers by now have the masquerading feature. Konqueror also makes use of KDE/Freetype anti-aliasing when this is turned on in the control center, however, Linux' anti-aliasing is clearly inferior to anything else at the moment (partially thanks to one of Apple's patents), and it took me a while to set it up satisfyingly (only some fonts work well), and even then I still have problems with certain letters. (I'm not the only one, though: most Linux desktop screenshots you will find either use big/bold fonts, or reveal the same problems, unless they don't use anti-aliasing at all, of course..) Anti-aliasing is also quite slow, but I'm not sure if that's the fault of my nVidia drivers or of the library.
Here's a secret tip: OpenXP is the open source version of legendary mail/news offline reader "CrossPoint". It runs in a console window, is very fast, and has all the features you could ask for, including support for various protocols and its own dialer (you can also use an existing Internet connection). OpenXP may take a while to get used to, but it's definitely worth it. I've used CrossPoint from ca. 1993-1996, and a friend still uses it today, although he doesn't care about the new versions.
For mail on Windows, I've been using Pegasus Mail for quite some time. It's more than a decade old and was recently released in version 4.0. Its interface, while graphical, takes a bit to get used to, and it's not open source (Windows freeware doesn't have Unix' open source tradition because of the lack of free compilers), but it is extremely feature-rich, renders HTML (terribly) and supports the Unix mailbox format for its folders. Only downside: I don't know if this relates to crashes of my NT machine (different story), but I've had some mail indexing problems with Pegasus, which made the search ignore some messages.
The situation was much worse with Netscape Messenger, which is the reason I haven't tried out Mozilla's successor yet: Messenger once ate a whole huge mailbox of mine during the process of "reorganization", when not enough disk space was available for this. So I would definitely be careful with Mozilla's Mail module, especially since it's not yet widely tested: You want your mailer to be reliable and not to lose data, ever.
Another semi-free contender is The Bat!, which is trialware and costs 25 bucks for students. I've heard very good things about it, but I have not yet had the need to switch from Pegasus.
On Linux, there are many more choices, and good things are increasingly being said about Ximian's Evolution -- perhaps it will be ported to Windows? Similarly, Balsa and KMail are nice graphical e-mail clients, and there's a huge list of text-mode clients which all have their strengths and weaknesses. You really don't have to decide on either one permanently because they can all access the same mailbox files (neat, huh?). Generally, because of the interoperability and reliability of Unix mail, if you have a choice, I recommend using a Unix system for all email. It may be a bit trickier to set up at first, but once you have a nice procmail and mailer(s) configuration running, you won't want to switch back.
Second, don't just bitch about IE. If you haven't already, check out the alternatives:
-
Mozilla, now in Version 0.9.6, is very feature-rich and fast and the most standard-compliant browser in existence, but not for computers with less than 128 MB of memory.
- kmeleon (Windows) and galeon (Linux) are Mozilla derivatives with smaller footprint.
- Opera, which is closed source adware and requires registration, is a very fast browser that is especially recommended for "information surfers" because of its excellent navigation and caching.
- Konqueror is KDE's built-in browser. Thanks to Qt/Embedded and/or KDE-Cygwin, it might be ported to Windows as well.
- Lynx and W3M are up-to-date text mode browsers capable of displaying most pages which do not depend on images or animations.
There is a choice, you just have to make it. And no, I didn't copy&paste this from elsewhere and I actually tested all of these, so you may mod me up without guilt. My personal recommendation: Opera (and Mozilla once I've upgraded to 512 megs and V1.0 is out).