Microsoft dominates the desktop market. They are now seeing some competition entering
Competition is now entering the market? The Mac and Linux didn't exist until now? A year ago I could have bought a Mac. Five years ago I could have bought a Mac. Fifteen years ago I could have bought a Mac. Even though Microsoft has had the most market share for a long time, they have never had a monopoly, which was the parent's point. Providing a definition of "monopoly" is interesting, but most of us know what it means, and many of us do not believe that Microsoft fits that definition.
Ever take a look at a huge jumbled mass of almost completely undocumented code that had no governing design principles? Now imagine that's your first day on the job.
Not sure if that question was directed at me, but yes I have. And yes, it was at a new job (I may not have litterally seen any code on my first day). Change that 15% turnover to 100% as everyone who had written the program had been hired en masse to another company (to write a suspiciously similar program; these were internal tools for the respective companys, not commercial products).
And the code had no documentation, either externally or as comments. And the program was all in perl (it was a "web application" to be used within the company). And the coding style was lousy (compounded by the fact that I was still fairly new to perl, although I still think using something like "(a==b) && a=3;" rather than an if statement is unnecessary, even if the language would make you use curly braces on your if). And we didn't have any form of source control set up, so frequently two people would have the same file open for edit and would clobber each other's changes. Actually, I guess we did have source control in the form of "hey, is anyone using this file?".
In its own way, this kind of programming was pretty "eXtreme".
I own my own business and trying to get it started was a joke
Do you think it would have been easier a slave in the eighteenth century? Or as a woman in the eighteenth century? Or as a member of any religious/ ethnic minority in the eighteenth century? Taking those into account, do you really think that, on average, it would have been easier in the eighteenth century (in the United States) than today? This is the point I was originally trying to make when I brought up slavery, etc., but obviously I failed to make it, so I'm trying again. Unless you are really willing to answer yes to the last question, then it is hard to say that your experiences with your business bespeaks a "decay of liberty" since the eighteenth century.
The fact that the founding fathers all were opposed to slavery and were trying hard to make sure it was abolished was overlooked in your comments. You also did not mention the fact that slavery had been around for thousands of years and it was our country that put and end to it once and for all in the later part of the 1800's and took a giant leap to ensuring everyone is treated equally.
I didn't mention these things because they are irrelevant to your claim that there has been a "decay of liberty", which is what I was addressing. The only relevant factors in deciding if that is true are the amount of liberty in the eighteenth century and the amount in contemporary America, not whether the founding fathers liked slavery, what happened during the prior millenia or whether the eighteenth century improved upon them.
I don't necessarily disagree with you that the government is more invasive today than in the past or that the practices of the government less accurately reflect the Constitution, but I do disagree that the United States as a whole has seen a decay in liberty. I hoped that I could demonstrate to you why this is the case, but I apparently have failed.
But I think the point is that this always happens. No one who tries to follow XP is able to fully follow its tenets, and then their failure is blamed on not following XP, just like you're doing.
I don't think this would be too helpful. The question in my mind is mainly how feasible XP is for large, long-term projects, since that's where lack of documentation, etc., will really bite you in the ass. Unless this study is going to employ two teams of programmers full time for a few years, it won't accurately be ableto show that.
Your original post claimed that in the eighteenth century, the governance of the United States was in much closer harmony with the Constitution than it is today. This is certainly true, but isn't the point I addressed in my reply, which is why I am confounding by this post's parent, in which you continue talking about that. The point to which I objected is that there has been a "decay of liberty". I don't know why you even brought it up (it seems unrelated to your argument about constitutionality), but it is clearly false. People today certainly have more liberties today than they did two hundred years ago, or one hundred, or even fifty. If you think the Constitution has gone out the window, then I agree, but I don't agree that people have less liberty. We haven't come as far as we'd like in that area, but we're certainly better off than we were.
As a side note, referring to the entire history of slavery and women's suffrage as an "anectode" seems rather obnoxious and insulting.
In this country in the 1800's, the Constituion prevailed- it meant something. And the results were very good
Yes, that was a great time for liberties. What with slavery, women being unable to vote, Lincoln suspending habeas corpus. Undoubtedly society was far more accepting of gays, atheists, the mentally and physically handicapped. You could freely publish pornography and other offensive speech without going to jail. I certainly miss the bountiful liberties of the nineteenth century.
Re:Missing the point of CMYK?
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 1
This would presumably involve hiring a coder, hiring some lawyers, licensing the patent to use CMYK, etc.? I do not thing this is cheaper or easier than buying the "equivalent commercial product". On which part of "why build and light a candle from scratch when I can just go to the store and buy a perfectly fine flashlight?" are you not quite clear?
I never heard anyone other than a cs concentrator use that name, and even among us it was rare. I tried to do what I could to popularize it because I always thought it was pretty clever.
we're talking about obscure software, then the probability of a pirate turning a legit customer to the dark side is low, because the number of intersections between your legit and pirate set of people are smaller.
I disagree. People frequently have friends with similar interests to themselves, which means that those pirating "obscure" software will likely know other people with an interest in the software. You are trying to treat the users of obscure software as being distributed uniformly at random throughout society, which isn't true. The reality is much closer to the chem class example than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
That's ridiculous. Buying a product doesn't only serve to "vote" for it, it also serves to fund it. I don't see how you can ignore that. If half as many people voted in an election, but the votes were distributed in the same way, there would be the same outcome. If half as many people paid for the products in a given market, the results would be very different because the companies make them would each get half as much revenue (or the consumers who paid would pay more, or some combination of these).
True, they indeed could have gotten PSP or The Gimp, but something tells me they wanted to actually be able to get some work done doing image processing, retouching, etc, etc.
All of them? There is no one pirating photoshop whose needs couldn't be met by psp or the gimp? I'm sure there are plently of pirates who legitimately need the functionality that photoshop provides above psp and the gimp, but there are also plenty who don't, so I think the parent's point is valid.
This doesn't really fit with games, as you rarely see two games that do the same thing.
I see tons of games that do the same thing. While I agree that there are more people who want lots of similar games than there are who want lots of similar software of other kinds (like your photoshop example), there are still lots of us for whom similar games are directly competing for our money. For example, if I were to buy one football game, I would probably not choose another football game as my next purchase since it "does the same thing". Similarly, if I already own a several racing games, I would generally choose to buy an action game or a fighting game rather than another racing game.
I understand that there are people who will buy every rpg, or every first-person shoter, etc., but for many of us, similar games really are directly competing.
I'd like to point out that games have a fundamental economic problem moving forward: The cost to make games is rising, but the price of games isn't.
It only loks like a problem if you leave out a fundamental part of the equation, which is more units being sold. If you sell more games at the same prices you've always charged, you can afford the higher cost of making games.
Bullshit. An "enterprise level solution" involves a lot more than bits on a cd. That's what makes it a "solution" and not just a piece of plastic. Real businesses and real managers already understand this, which is why they often go with solutions other than linux. Whenever they do, all the fanboys on this site say "Wow those businesses are idiots, don't they know they could be using linux for free? The guys who paid for something else must be clueless phb's". It might help to stop and consider that they might actually know what they're doing rather than claiming that it's "just FUD", which will mainly get you ignored.
So then what difference does it make if it's in.sex?
Because then parents could easily use a filter to stop their kids from getting there. The porn site wins because they get rid of users who could only freeload (since the assumption was that they couldn't pay for content, and thus would only download whatever free samples or whatever the site has), and the parents win because their kids are blocked from going to the porn site. Thus "cool".
Given that that site ceased existing exactly because of its inappopriate content, I don't think it is a good example of how how inappropriate content can't be stopped.
you agree that is Microsoft the one that should be blamed?
I will restate what I said since it was obviously unclear: Windows XP provides everything that is needed to allow you to run day-to-day as an ordinary user. It does not require you to be root unless you are doing the kind of things that should require you to be root. The same is true of Unix. In both environments, it is possible to write software that requires the user to be root. If you write your software that way unnecessarily, you are doing something wrong, regardless of whether your software is for windows or for unix.
The parent had said that there is a problem with Windows in this regard, and that simply is not true (at least for current versions of Windows). Just like Unix, Windows does a fine job of allowing you not to be root. If there are problems caused by individual applications, you should blame the applications, not the operating system. The article to which you linked discusses Age of Empires which is a piece of software that runs on top of Windows. If it requires you to be root, then that is unfortunate, just like it would be if the (hypothetical) OS X version of that game required you to be root. But again, saying that a certain windows application is not doing what it should is not the same as saying that the os should be designed different.
He's not a troll, he's completely right. The operating system already has what the parent was asking for. If people aren't using it (i.e., are running as root), blame them. If Tron requires you to be root, blame Tron. This isn't an OS issue; I could just as easily right a Unix game that requires you to be root.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition is now entering the market? The Mac and Linux didn't exist until now? A year ago I could have bought a Mac. Five years ago I could have bought a Mac. Fifteen years ago I could have bought a Mac. Even though Microsoft has had the most market share for a long time, they have never had a monopoly, which was the parent's point. Providing a definition of "monopoly" is interesting, but most of us know what it means, and many of us do not believe that Microsoft fits that definition.
Not sure if that question was directed at me, but yes I have. And yes, it was at a new job (I may not have litterally seen any code on my first day). Change that 15% turnover to 100% as everyone who had written the program had been hired en masse to another company (to write a suspiciously similar program; these were internal tools for the respective companys, not commercial products).
And the code had no documentation, either externally or as comments. And the program was all in perl (it was a "web application" to be used within the company). And the coding style was lousy (compounded by the fact that I was still fairly new to perl, although I still think using something like "(a==b) && a=3;" rather than an if statement is unnecessary, even if the language would make you use curly braces on your if). And we didn't have any form of source control set up, so frequently two people would have the same file open for edit and would clobber each other's changes. Actually, I guess we did have source control in the form of "hey, is anyone using this file?".
In its own way, this kind of programming was pretty "eXtreme".
There must be sarcasm somewhere in a post with the title "follow the money" that exhorts readers to major in philosophy.
Do you think it would have been easier a slave in the eighteenth century? Or as a woman in the eighteenth century? Or as a member of any religious/ ethnic minority in the eighteenth century? Taking those into account, do you really think that, on average, it would have been easier in the eighteenth century (in the United States) than today? This is the point I was originally trying to make when I brought up slavery, etc., but obviously I failed to make it, so I'm trying again. Unless you are really willing to answer yes to the last question, then it is hard to say that your experiences with your business bespeaks a "decay of liberty" since the eighteenth century.
I didn't mention these things because they are irrelevant to your claim that there has been a "decay of liberty", which is what I was addressing. The only relevant factors in deciding if that is true are the amount of liberty in the eighteenth century and the amount in contemporary America, not whether the founding fathers liked slavery, what happened during the prior millenia or whether the eighteenth century improved upon them.
I don't necessarily disagree with you that the government is more invasive today than in the past or that the practices of the government less accurately reflect the Constitution, but I do disagree that the United States as a whole has seen a decay in liberty. I hoped that I could demonstrate to you why this is the case, but I apparently have failed.
But I think the point is that this always happens. No one who tries to follow XP is able to fully follow its tenets, and then their failure is blamed on not following XP, just like you're doing.
I don't think this would be too helpful. The question in my mind is mainly how feasible XP is for large, long-term projects, since that's where lack of documentation, etc., will really bite you in the ass. Unless this study is going to employ two teams of programmers full time for a few years, it won't accurately be ableto show that.
Your original post claimed that in the eighteenth century, the governance of the United States was in much closer harmony with the Constitution than it is today. This is certainly true, but isn't the point I addressed in my reply, which is why I am confounding by this post's parent, in which you continue talking about that. The point to which I objected is that there has been a "decay of liberty". I don't know why you even brought it up (it seems unrelated to your argument about constitutionality), but it is clearly false. People today certainly have more liberties today than they did two hundred years ago, or one hundred, or even fifty. If you think the Constitution has gone out the window, then I agree, but I don't agree that people have less liberty. We haven't come as far as we'd like in that area, but we're certainly better off than we were.
As a side note, referring to the entire history of slavery and women's suffrage as an "anectode" seems rather obnoxious and insulting.
Yes, that was a great time for liberties. What with slavery, women being unable to vote, Lincoln suspending habeas corpus. Undoubtedly society was far more accepting of gays, atheists, the mentally and physically handicapped. You could freely publish pornography and other offensive speech without going to jail. I certainly miss the bountiful liberties of the nineteenth century.
This would presumably involve hiring a coder, hiring some lawyers, licensing the patent to use CMYK, etc.? I do not thing this is cheaper or easier than buying the "equivalent commercial product". On which part of "why build and light a candle from scratch when I can just go to the store and buy a perfectly fine flashlight?" are you not quite clear?
Especially given that no government project has ever been known to exceed its projected budget.
I would hope that the
This is also the same way it usually works on a corporate intranet. A given webpage will just be at http://somename .
I never heard anyone other than a cs concentrator use that name, and even among us it was rare. I tried to do what I could to popularize it because I always thought it was pretty clever.
He was appointed by Jesse Jackson? Are you sure?
I disagree. People frequently have friends with similar interests to themselves, which means that those pirating "obscure" software will likely know other people with an interest in the software. You are trying to treat the users of obscure software as being distributed uniformly at random throughout society, which isn't true. The reality is much closer to the chem class example than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
That's ridiculous. Buying a product doesn't only serve to "vote" for it, it also serves to fund it. I don't see how you can ignore that. If half as many people voted in an election, but the votes were distributed in the same way, there would be the same outcome. If half as many people paid for the products in a given market, the results would be very different because the companies make them would each get half as much revenue (or the consumers who paid would pay more, or some combination of these).
All of them? There is no one pirating photoshop whose needs couldn't be met by psp or the gimp? I'm sure there are plently of pirates who legitimately need the functionality that photoshop provides above psp and the gimp, but there are also plenty who don't, so I think the parent's point is valid.
I see tons of games that do the same thing. While I agree that there are more people who want lots of similar games than there are who want lots of similar software of other kinds (like your photoshop example), there are still lots of us for whom similar games are directly competing for our money. For example, if I were to buy one football game, I would probably not choose another football game as my next purchase since it "does the same thing". Similarly, if I already own a several racing games, I would generally choose to buy an action game or a fighting game rather than another racing game.
I understand that there are people who will buy every rpg, or every first-person shoter, etc., but for many of us, similar games really are directly competing.
It only loks like a problem if you leave out a fundamental part of the equation, which is more units being sold. If you sell more games at the same prices you've always charged, you can afford the higher cost of making games.
Bullshit. An "enterprise level solution" involves a lot more than bits on a cd. That's what makes it a "solution" and not just a piece of plastic. Real businesses and real managers already understand this, which is why they often go with solutions other than linux. Whenever they do, all the fanboys on this site say "Wow those businesses are idiots, don't they know they could be using linux for free? The guys who paid for something else must be clueless phb's". It might help to stop and consider that they might actually know what they're doing rather than claiming that it's "just FUD", which will mainly get you ignored.
You're right of course. I was trying to express something like "data is a word that means 'discrete facts'", but didn't do it quite right.
Because then parents could easily use a filter to stop their kids from getting there. The porn site wins because they get rid of users who could only freeload (since the assumption was that they couldn't pay for content, and thus would only download whatever free samples or whatever the site has), and the parents win because their kids are blocked from going to the porn site. Thus "cool".
Given that that site ceased existing exactly because of its inappopriate content, I don't think it is a good example of how how inappropriate content can't be stopped.
I will restate what I said since it was obviously unclear: Windows XP provides everything that is needed to allow you to run day-to-day as an ordinary user. It does not require you to be root unless you are doing the kind of things that should require you to be root. The same is true of Unix. In both environments, it is possible to write software that requires the user to be root. If you write your software that way unnecessarily, you are doing something wrong, regardless of whether your software is for windows or for unix.
The parent had said that there is a problem with Windows in this regard, and that simply is not true (at least for current versions of Windows). Just like Unix, Windows does a fine job of allowing you not to be root. If there are problems caused by individual applications, you should blame the applications, not the operating system. The article to which you linked discusses Age of Empires which is a piece of software that runs on top of Windows. If it requires you to be root, then that is unfortunate, just like it would be if the (hypothetical) OS X version of that game required you to be root. But again, saying that a certain windows application is not doing what it should is not the same as saying that the os should be designed different.
He's not a troll, he's completely right. The operating system already has what the parent was asking for. If people aren't using it (i.e., are running as root), blame them. If Tron requires you to be root, blame Tron. This isn't an OS issue; I could just as easily right a Unix game that requires you to be root.