Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?.
Jeez, you're just axing for it on/. if you make silly statements like that. And for the record: TI 99/4A. My days of looking back at Windows 3.1, 95 or Vista with a sense of warm fuzzies are a LONG, LONG way off, I can tell you that.
You answered your own question: convenience of better operating systems ('nix/bsd [hurd if you're a wannabe FOSS Che Guevara-geek] etc) keeps us from having to "reverse engineer" anything. You seem to be missing the point of open source: the code is there so YOU can change it (and share your changes if they amount to anything productive - again YOU not US or WE,) in an OPEN, daylight environment of collaboration as opposed to hacking away in the wee hours of the night so you can share you latest "patch" with a small circle of friends you wish to impress.
The "FUD" surrounding DRM is DRM itself. I do not need the contents of my computer managed any more than I need the contents of the notebooks I carry managed. If I decide to write down the words to "Strawberry Fields Forever" in my journal or notebook - or on the freakin' walls of my apartment - I should be able to do so without the interference of anyone questioning either why I did it or what it's use is or whether or not Paul McCartney should get a stipend for my use of his words on my walls. Piracy - the act of distributing copies of artistic enterprise owned by someone to others who have no legal right to it - will never be thwarted by DRM, which makes DRM a nuisance to the average user who wishes to make use of his legally licensed property.
One last thing: I'm assuming your a M$ user and if so, you have ever right to your preference. I have 5 different hologrammed cd copies of Windows all sitting tightly in their cases which I have bought (sorry - licensed) over the years going completely to waste. I don't use M$ products and I won't not because I don't like them, but because M$ makes using their products a never-ending game of paying M$ (or one of it's licensees) in order to protect and help themselves as opposed to protecting and helping me. Linux is the ultimate "opt out".
See, that's why I like thrift stores. Today on a lark I went to the local Goodwill and picked up a rockin' no-name point & shoot 35mm for like, $2. Film, battery and developing will probably run about $10 total and I get to hold nice, weirdly uber-colored, glossy photos in my hand as opposed to looking at them (as most people do) from the back of a digital camera on a tiny screen. Analog rocks and Panasonic can kiss my gritty iso 100 butt.
"no, I will bloody well not say "GNU/Linux" every time,"
Bravo! I applaud your aplomb, Sir. I too, subscribe to this exposition of what "Linux" is: a GENERIC term for a "Linux-based OS". If I want to talk about the kernel, I'll damned well say "THE LINUX KERNEL" so as not to frighten any Stallman bed-wetting, ass-kissers out there worried that GNU (or Stallman) isn't getting it's (or his) fair share of the glory.
Ugh... Vista. Well, I feel for you. It's been said many-a-time before and I suppose doesn't need repeating - nonetheless: Pretty Is As Pretty Does.
I think the deal (for now, anyway) is that you pretty much have to have a "Lego Builder" predisposition when it comes to Linux On The Desktop. When I finally jumped ship three years ago I also had a hard time wrangling my desktop into some semblance of pleasing eye-candy. The majors, ie, KDE and Gnome, just don't fly straight when it comes to function and form in my estimation. Enlightenment seems like it's only for those who occasionally spaz-out. XFCE is sort of a cross between W98 and Gnome Lite (and amazingly bereft of handlbars - unless they're somehow mounted to it's helmet). But then I found Fluxbox and stopped thinking in terms of "desktop" and started to grasp that there was a way to have functionality make it cool. Wow. And Blazing Fast, too. Most of the M$ users who've seen my desktop in action usually flip out and leave my computer very, very envious.
I use Wbar and Fluxbox can easily change the window decorations to resemble OSX - got oodles of informative apps in the slit and adesklet widgets, conky, etc. My desktop is cool, functional and there's 4 of them to work on with the flip of a mouse wheel. OSX? No thanks. This way is much better. And as for not wanting to mess with the cli - personally, I wouldn't want to own a computer where I couldn't get to it's psychological center in less than one click or keypress.
I have to agree, though, that there's way too much "innovation" going on with the major desktops. Get what you've got working refined, let the users have more control of it and stop trying to redefine what a "usable GUI" is - it is what those who use it make it (as opposed to those who make it and use it for 10 minutes before changing it).
As a house call tech, I eventually just made up some little 3 inch stickers to put on my customer's monitor: NEVER CLICK ON ADS. Best antivirus tool ever.
You know - there's no reason we Americans can't celebrate two holidays at the same time: one for being appreciative of those who fell protecting our freedoms (which when added to a quarter will buy you a smoke, the depreciated value of which is due to a little thing we like to call the "Patriot Act" - a mind-bogglingly stupid bit of legislation which says that in order to be free we have to give up our freedom in order to maintain the pretense that we are free), and one for appreciating a guy who taught us how to defend ourselves against the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
We shall nonetheless hail the True Patriots - our honored dead. Additionally, we shall continue to miss and admire our friend from across the pond, The Late Douglas Adams.
"If I'm a graphic professional, I'm not going to boycott Adobe just because Photoshop isn't available on Linux."
The problem, all along, has not been one of adoption but of adaptation. No one is asking Adobe to "adopt" linux (as if!) - but soon now they will have to "adapt" in order to maintain a viable business growth model. Business, as you are probably well aware, makes no bones about it's loayalties: THE ALMIGHTY $. Business will go where the least resistance to flow gets them to the largest pile of dollar$. It is business - and not the end user - who is at the whims of fad, lowered expectations and the 90-Second-Attention-Span. You, and all of us, can use that to our advantage.
It's been my experience that Linux users, in general, aren't "diametrically opposed" to using commercial software. Far from it: they embrace those developers who have the foresight to step up to the plate and work to gain 'nixers as customers. Open Source has it's place but it's not by any stretch of the imagination the only viable, working model for the average linux user. This idea that the general population of Linux Users are somehow rife with Entitlement Issues is wrong, biased and overblow FUD, and you, Sir, should not be promoting it.
As proof of that - a general showing of raised hands here on./ could easily convince even Adobe that there is a market for their product on this platform. Who, for instance, would buy Photoshop if it were available for Linux?
On a side note, I wonder just how much Army Salad-Tossing Balmer had to do to get this deal rolling? Pawning off a warped, useless operating system to the gov? Wowsa! That guy's never going to get the tast of anus out of his mouth!
If you think that's funny, try juxtaposing this against the whole idea of "community driven software". Drepper makes his own brand of Personal Fascism sound like his god-given duty while seemingly giving nodding support to Arm at the same time:
"The OS (kernel + everything else) has been ported to many architectures. While I don't care a bit about it, I concede that having it available for some embedded architectures like Arm is useful."
Seems he's updated his Mussolini-esque personality - or opinion - since 2005!
Although any.org is, so far as I'm concerned, free to use any naming convention it likes, Kildall & Stern's initial objections to the original Wikipedia entry and subsequent rebuttal website seems to be a very elaborate and after-the-fact justification of Gaming the System at Wikipedia. Tricky, and one needs to jump around a bit to follow the logic trail, but their rhetoric belies their motives (which appear to be self-promotion) in the end.
Quoting from one of the more "eloquent" portions of the argument:
"...originality has been rejected by art. There is no such thing. It's all just different forms of appropriation. So it seems to me that Wikipedia is a perfect place to expose the current state of affairs"
M'kay. Perhaps in Mr. Mecklenburg's art-philosophy opinion notebook it is, but not in mine and I feel relatively assured that this guy might have just took a big dump on that book were he still alive.
Still, Wikipedia needs to back off now that it's won on it's own site; squelching a.org is just, well, bad form.
Agreed. With the stipulation that we (the public), after having sucked at that bitter teat, aught to move on to something better or at least different, ie, a network which is totally uninvolved with or connected to the "internet" as it is now known. It's not like now that the majors have a hold on this one that they'll be letting go of it any time soon, ehy?
What that would be, look like or how it would act or be implemented I have no idea of (which is kinda' why I hang out here); just the basic concept of, "Well, we colonized the hell out of this island, let's move on, shall we?"
Of course, it couldn't hurt if you stopped consulting that oversized, mutant, Mr. Softee dildo strapped to your forehead before you left comments, too, you know.
Aww, there's nothing wrong with taxation per se, so long as there is only ONE tax and it's small. Isn't taking the pork away the only real means of scaling back the government and making those in government "service" actually work for a living? (And if you happen to work in the gov and really do work, I don't mean you, I mean your boss. Ahh! Gotcha' there, didn't I?)
I don't mind rich people. Know some pretty nice ones, in fact. Wouldn't want to live that way myself - always worried about five cents on the dollar - bleh... Nonetheless, if government should have any power to regulate and restrain, it should be on that "1%" of the population that has the financial ability to advance their special interests as opposed to the other 99% who just want to get by and prosper moderately.
Youtube is fast becoming a moot media outlet, much as Rupert Murdoch's rebooted Myspace is. It doesn't matter who or what is to blame; things change, usually (but not always) for the worse. Look on it as the natural decay of democratic capitalism since that what a ponzi scheme actually is: "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned". If that doesn't describe the FED, I don't know what does.
I think Democratic Capitalism is fading into obsolescence now because people are just too savvy to the ways that corporations have been manipulating them psychologically for the last 50 years; pigeon-holing people into demographic, SRI VALS consumer groups, leading them by the nose via media and political outlets and the like. It's kind of humbling to realise that I've been part of that for the last 30 years... Corporations have taken over the administration of the Government, and quite frankly, people are growing tired of Nike, Coke, McDonald's, Microsoft and News Corp. making all the rules and telling us who we are, how and where to live and what we should eat, drink and wear.
It's great to live in a society of convenience, but not at the expense of my liberties. Losing those piecemeal has been the greatest inconvenience of all.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?.
Jeez, you're just axing for it on /. if you make silly statements like that. And for the record: TI 99/4A. My days of looking back at Windows 3.1, 95 or Vista with a sense of warm fuzzies are a LONG, LONG way off, I can tell you that.
...DRM (or my preferred term, Fair Use Circumvention Kit)
Good one!
You answered your own question: convenience of better operating systems ('nix/bsd [hurd if you're a wannabe FOSS Che Guevara-geek] etc) keeps us from having to "reverse engineer" anything. You seem to be missing the point of open source: the code is there so YOU can change it (and share your changes if they amount to anything productive - again YOU not US or WE,) in an OPEN, daylight environment of collaboration as opposed to hacking away in the wee hours of the night so you can share you latest "patch" with a small circle of friends you wish to impress.
The "FUD" surrounding DRM is DRM itself. I do not need the contents of my computer managed any more than I need the contents of the notebooks I carry managed. If I decide to write down the words to "Strawberry Fields Forever" in my journal or notebook - or on the freakin' walls of my apartment - I should be able to do so without the interference of anyone questioning either why I did it or what it's use is or whether or not Paul McCartney should get a stipend for my use of his words on my walls. Piracy - the act of distributing copies of artistic enterprise owned by someone to others who have no legal right to it - will never be thwarted by DRM, which makes DRM a nuisance to the average user who wishes to make use of his legally licensed property.
One last thing: I'm assuming your a M$ user and if so, you have ever right to your preference. I have 5 different hologrammed cd copies of Windows all sitting tightly in their cases which I have bought (sorry - licensed) over the years going completely to waste. I don't use M$ products and I won't not because I don't like them, but because M$ makes using their products a never-ending game of paying M$ (or one of it's licensees) in order to protect and help themselves as opposed to protecting and helping me. Linux is the ultimate "opt out".
That wasn't Balmer, that was Bill Cosby trying to sell expansion modules for the TI99 4/A.
...Duke Nukem Forever is released for Windows 7 only.
Oh you poor, sad little dreamer... I feel your shoot-everything-that-moves, sexist pain.
See, that's why I like thrift stores. Today on a lark I went to the local Goodwill and picked up a rockin' no-name point & shoot 35mm for like, $2. Film, battery and developing will probably run about $10 total and I get to hold nice, weirdly uber-colored, glossy photos in my hand as opposed to looking at them (as most people do) from the back of a digital camera on a tiny screen. Analog rocks and Panasonic can kiss my gritty iso 100 butt.
"no, I will bloody well not say "GNU/Linux" every time,"
Bravo! I applaud your aplomb, Sir. I too, subscribe to this exposition of what "Linux" is: a GENERIC term for a "Linux-based OS". If I want to talk about the kernel, I'll damned well say "THE LINUX KERNEL" so as not to frighten any Stallman bed-wetting, ass-kissers out there worried that GNU (or Stallman) isn't getting it's (or his) fair share of the glory.
...freakin' shitebiters...
Ugh... Vista. Well, I feel for you. It's been said many-a-time before and I suppose doesn't need repeating - nonetheless: Pretty Is As Pretty Does.
I think the deal (for now, anyway) is that you pretty much have to have a "Lego Builder" predisposition when it comes to Linux On The Desktop. When I finally jumped ship three years ago I also had a hard time wrangling my desktop into some semblance of pleasing eye-candy. The majors, ie, KDE and Gnome, just don't fly straight when it comes to function and form in my estimation. Enlightenment seems like it's only for those who occasionally spaz-out. XFCE is sort of a cross between W98 and Gnome Lite (and amazingly bereft of handlbars - unless they're somehow mounted to it's helmet). But then I found Fluxbox and stopped thinking in terms of "desktop" and started to grasp that there was a way to have functionality make it cool. Wow. And Blazing Fast, too. Most of the M$ users who've seen my desktop in action usually flip out and leave my computer very, very envious.
I use Wbar and Fluxbox can easily change the window decorations to resemble OSX - got oodles of informative apps in the slit and adesklet widgets, conky, etc. My desktop is cool, functional and there's 4 of them to work on with the flip of a mouse wheel. OSX? No thanks. This way is much better. And as for not wanting to mess with the cli - personally, I wouldn't want to own a computer where I couldn't get to it's psychological center in less than one click or keypress.
I have to agree, though, that there's way too much "innovation" going on with the major desktops. Get what you've got working refined, let the users have more control of it and stop trying to redefine what a "usable GUI" is - it is what those who use it make it (as opposed to those who make it and use it for 10 minutes before changing it).
As a house call tech, I eventually just made up some little 3 inch stickers to put on my customer's monitor: NEVER CLICK ON ADS. Best antivirus tool ever.
Only the dimwits at M$ could try and patent this kind of teen-aged bull$hite... Talk about lowest common denominator! What is this, a Limbo Line???
Balmer (M$) & Thompson ($ymantec):
Goodbye and Good Riddance.
Yeah, but only Canadians would use one! (Ka-Zing! Ba-dum-bum!)
Me too. How "Zune" and "Fail" cannot exist in the same sentence is beyond my comprehension, yet, there it is. Chalk one up to /. Hooked In!!!
We shall nonetheless hail the True Patriots - our honored dead. Additionally, we shall continue to miss and admire our friend from across the pond, The Late Douglas Adams.
"If I'm a graphic professional, I'm not going to boycott Adobe just because Photoshop isn't available on Linux."
The problem, all along, has not been one of adoption but of adaptation. No one is asking Adobe to "adopt" linux (as if!) - but soon now they will have to "adapt" in order to maintain a viable business growth model. Business, as you are probably well aware, makes no bones about it's loayalties: THE ALMIGHTY $. Business will go where the least resistance to flow gets them to the largest pile of dollar$. It is business - and not the end user - who is at the whims of fad, lowered expectations and the 90-Second-Attention-Span. You, and all of us, can use that to our advantage.
It's been my experience that Linux users, in general, aren't "diametrically opposed" to using commercial software. Far from it: they embrace those developers who have the foresight to step up to the plate and work to gain 'nixers as customers. Open Source has it's place but it's not by any stretch of the imagination the only viable, working model for the average linux user. This idea that the general population of Linux Users are somehow rife with Entitlement Issues is wrong, biased and overblow FUD, and you, Sir, should not be promoting it.
As proof of that - a general showing of raised hands here on ./ could easily convince even Adobe that there is a market for their product on this platform. Who, for instance, would buy Photoshop if it were available for Linux?
I would - for one - so there's an easy $350.
This is a joke, right? No? Really? Wow.
"Military Intelligence", INDEEEEED!
On a side note, I wonder just how much Army Salad-Tossing Balmer had to do to get this deal rolling? Pawning off a warped, useless operating system to the gov? Wowsa! That guy's never going to get the tast of anus out of his mouth!
50,000 laptops? To kids??? Can you imagine what landfills in South Carolina are going to look like in a year when they go "out of style"?
Foot.
Gun.
BLAM!
Ow! (Hop-hop-hop).
Just can't stop shooting yourself in the foot, can ya', stupid Microsoft...
"The OS (kernel + everything else) has been ported to many architectures. While I don't care a bit about it, I concede that having it available for some embedded architectures like Arm is useful."
Seems he's updated his Mussolini-esque personality - or opinion - since 2005!
Quoting from one of the more "eloquent" portions of the argument:
"...originality has been rejected by art. There is no such thing. It's all just different forms of appropriation. So it seems to me that Wikipedia is a perfect place to expose the current state of affairs"
M'kay. Perhaps in Mr. Mecklenburg's art-philosophy opinion notebook it is, but not in mine and I feel relatively assured that this guy might have just took a big dump on that book were he still alive.
.org is just, well, bad form.
Still, Wikipedia needs to back off now that it's won on it's own site; squelching a
Suck it up.
Agreed. With the stipulation that we (the public), after having sucked at that bitter teat, aught to move on to something better or at least different, ie, a network which is totally uninvolved with or connected to the "internet" as it is now known. It's not like now that the majors have a hold on this one that they'll be letting go of it any time soon, ehy?
What that would be, look like or how it would act or be implemented I have no idea of (which is kinda' why I hang out here); just the basic concept of, "Well, we colonized the hell out of this island, let's move on, shall we?"
I'm just going to copyright my DNA; at lest then I'll have the RIAA on my side if strands of it turn up in future super-soldiers.
Bwah-ha-ha-ha haaa!
...which annoys me to no end.
Of course, it couldn't hurt if you stopped consulting that oversized, mutant, Mr. Softee dildo strapped to your forehead before you left comments, too, you know.
Aww, there's nothing wrong with taxation per se, so long as there is only ONE tax and it's small. Isn't taking the pork away the only real means of scaling back the government and making those in government "service" actually work for a living? (And if you happen to work in the gov and really do work, I don't mean you, I mean your boss. Ahh! Gotcha' there, didn't I?)
I don't mind rich people. Know some pretty nice ones, in fact. Wouldn't want to live that way myself - always worried about five cents on the dollar - bleh... Nonetheless, if government should have any power to regulate and restrain, it should be on that "1%" of the population that has the financial ability to advance their special interests as opposed to the other 99% who just want to get by and prosper moderately.
Youtube is fast becoming a moot media outlet, much as Rupert Murdoch's rebooted Myspace is. It doesn't matter who or what is to blame; things change, usually (but not always) for the worse. Look on it as the natural decay of democratic capitalism since that what a ponzi scheme actually is: "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned". If that doesn't describe the FED, I don't know what does.
I think Democratic Capitalism is fading into obsolescence now because people are just too savvy to the ways that corporations have been manipulating them psychologically for the last 50 years; pigeon-holing people into demographic, SRI VALS consumer groups, leading them by the nose via media and political outlets and the like. It's kind of humbling to realise that I've been part of that for the last 30 years... Corporations have taken over the administration of the Government, and quite frankly, people are growing tired of Nike, Coke, McDonald's, Microsoft and News Corp. making all the rules and telling us who we are, how and where to live and what we should eat, drink and wear.
It's great to live in a society of convenience, but not at the expense of my liberties. Losing those piecemeal has been the greatest inconvenience of all.
That was seriously useless. Talk about redundant.