I think that actually supports my claim. You're so eager to have them make it, because they're convenient, that you're willing to overlook a few transgressions now and then. So they spammed. So they filed for patents. So the sued over one of those patents. So what? It's *CONVENIENT* to have them!
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd like the long-term convenience of a network where companies behave like responsible citizens *before* people threaten to boycott them. You can have convenient books now, and doom us all to a lifetime of having to boycott someone every couple of weeks as they try some clever new way to abuse the system, or maybe you should step back a bit, think about your long-term needs, and make the push for *RESPONSIBLE* companies.
Amazon started with spam; they spent years insisting that they had the right to email any customer at any time until he said to quit it, and sometimes beyond that. They have never changed; they still think that way. You're not people to them, you're possible revenue streams, and I think you should remember this.
If it doesn't bother you, if purchase circles didn't bother you, if patent lawsuits didn't bother you, if horrible working conditions didn't bother you, if people who will outright lie to get a complainer off the phone didn't bother you, if Amazon employees posting to Usenet anonymously as "customers" defending Amazon's policies didn't bother you, well, I don't know what would.
Actually, I emailed Bezos once. I emailed lots of people at Amazon. I got lies, stonewalls, and "we won't discuss company policy with individuals". Why? Because I was asking about their spam policy.
Do I want to take B&N's side?
WHAT DOES THAT MATTER?
If patent abuse is wrong, *IT IS WRONG NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE TRYING TO USE IT AGAINST*.
Double standards are wrong. Very wrong. If I wouldn't want B&N to be able to do this to Amazon, I'd damn well better not think it's okay if Amazon does it to B&N.
That's all there is to it. They spam, they lie, they get bogus patents, and, despite anything they've said, they have *SUED* people for "infringing" on those patents.
What's with the huge emotional investment in finding a way to pretend Amazon isn't really evil? The fact is, they did exactly what we've all said we hate. They've invented new ways (purchase circles) to reveal personal information. They've filed for patents they knew were bogus, they've sued people, and then they've pretended it was a "purely defensive" patent. Sorry, but suing someone isn't "purely defensive".
People are so happy that this is resolved. What's resolved? You've verified that if, every few months, thousands of you write them letters, they will cut down on abusive practices, give you a blatantly false explanation of why they did them in the first place, and then go right ahead and find another thing to screw up.
Face it, they're playing you. They *KNOW* we're all big on "e-commerce" and we want them to succeed, and that means we'll keep watching them like hawks and feel like somehow we should have to put up with this.
You can't trust someone that needs to be slapped down this often for abuses. Go back a few years and watch the Amazon people staunchly defending their right to send email to people who never asked for it. Watch them slowly cave in to pressure, a lot of it applied by their upstream, who have *DISCONNECTED* companies who sent that many unsolicited messages, even to "customers".
Amazon will continue testing your limits to see what they can get away with. As long as you keep pretending it's all okay if they back down occasionally, they'll keep pushing.
I don't think compilers solve the halting problem. They do something totally different: They answer the question "if this were to do something, what would it do", and try to solve that. If they aren't sure, they translate mechanically, and ignore the infinite loops.
And I never said it wasn't worth doing UI's right, just that "intuitive" is often meaningless, and that we should remember that the systems we have now on, say, Linux, *allow you to do things*. If we take away those options, of course we can make a very easy interface; eventually, you can simplify any GUI to a single-click interface, which doesn't work.:)
You make a very good point; there's more than one kind of complexity, and some of them are easier to avoid than others.
I think the problem is trying to eliminate the wrong complexity. We try to make it so that an "end user" can easily do something, like routing or network admin, which is simply *not actually an easy task*.
Screw that. Let's try to get them something they can *USE*, maybe some word processing.
I think you are arguing a different point than I am.
Nowhere did I say that people shouldn't have access to the full power of their computers.
However, I did say, and continue to say, that you cannot abstract away all the difficulties without losing all of the power, too.
Policy-based routing, along with special cases for proxies for certain services, is powerful. You cannot make it "intuitive" in the sense of "accessible to a naive end user".
There is certainly a lot of excess complexity in modern UI's, and it should be reduced. However, never make the mistake of believing that you can somehow magically make something complicated so easy that a naive user can understand it without effort.
If you look at modern UI's, they're often much worse than older ones, because we've started getting used to them, so now there's all sorts of underlying things you need to know to even *begin* to make sense of a Windows system. "Move your mouse over the grayish areas to find pictures you can click on" is not an "intuitive" concept.
Should non-techies have access to the full power of their computers? Should non-mathematicians have access to the full power of analytic geometry?
I have no problem with people having access to anything they want, but it is *logically impossible* to make the interface simpler than the task it performs.
"Average" people, right now, have access to a great deal of computing power, and a great deal of information, that they didn't ten years ago. We're making progress. However, just as people who want to drive need to spend a fair amount of time learning about cars, people who want to use computers will still, always, need to learn how.
Natural language? Still takes time to learn how to interact with a system, what its limits are... It's always there. *People* have a learning curve.
Some things are not intuitive. The only time a user interface is "intuitive" is when its model of what you want to do is the same as your model. Users do not share models very often, so we invent "common" approaches, but these simplified approaches *cannot* model the more-complicated tasks!
Frankly, a lot of the "desktop" market is people who would not be able to administer sendmail if it understood English, because they don't know *what they want it to do*. They just sort of want, you know, the thing where the other thing isn't done unless it's supposed'ta.
This can't be resolved by making interfaces intuitive, any more than we can make graduate-level math accessible to children by using "intuitive" words and pictures to describe it.
Eventually, we have to accept that part of what we want to do is educate the users a bit more, so they can figure out what they want to do; at this point, the interface can be designed for efficiency.
Yeah, but does "the source tree" compile on 20 different kinds of computers? Multiple different branches that integrate fixes from each other are not the same thing as a unified source tree.
I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the Amiga and the Sun3 different "ports", because they're substantially different systems, even if they have the same CPU.
I do think it's unfair to use the existance somewhere of a port of a piece of software to a platform maintained by a third party as "support" for that platform.
It's all trade-offs; if nothing else, can we at least agree that Windows NT is *not* the multi-platform leader?
Gauntlet may be the best known, but they're running a *very* old BSD/OS codebase, and I don't think they're doing driver updates. They got bought by Network Associates a while back, and I think that was about the point at which they stopped following our "current" releases.
If the BSD/OS SMP is so awful, why is the FreeBSD one the one getting scrapped?
BSD/OS is *not* the same thing as FreeBSD, and it sure as hell isn't "the same thing two years older". It's a different system, with different goals, targeted at a different market.
I'm sorry you didn't find that BSD/OS met your needs, but I think it's a little drastic to talk about "things which don't suck nearly as much". BSD/OS may not be the be-all and end-all of systems, but it doesn't *suck*, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway, as the code starts getting shared between the systems, we'll see a lot of changes for both communities, and I think they'll all be for the better. FreeBSD will get a "real" SMP, instead of a "pretty-good-hack" SMP. BSD/OS will quite possibly get the bus_space code.
(Of course, that's NetBSD's work, not FreeBSD's, originally.)
It's amazing; it's almost as though, when multiple groups of developers work on different projects, they produce different things. What's really amazing is that this surprises people.
I don't see any point to changing cdrom.com over, but yes, I would expect BSD/OS can handle comparable loads to FreeBSD. Despite getting there by very different paths, both systems have fairly good reliability and performance...
* NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all get neat new toys.
* BSDI gets a bunch of the "non-server" driver code they've historically ignored, which means better desktop support.
* FreeBSD gets sexy new SMP.
* Over time, I believe *all* the BSD's get a better support framework.
* I get a free copy of FreeBSD in the mail.
* BSD Stronger == MS Weaker.
The last one is worth remembering; people tend to argue about Linux Vs. BSD. Screw it; the world's big enough for the both of us. The question is, how much *Microsoft* can we all displace?
Probably technically a first, although be aware that drivers under NDA will stay under NDA.
It's not that big a deal; BSD/OS has always been based largely on 4.4BSD code, and we've given away code to other systems before; NetBSD-current has our 'login.conf' code, for instance.
In theory, sure, someone could "steal" the resulting code.
In practice, OS-level code isn't *worth* stealing if your system isn't fairly similar, on an architectural level.
Could NT try to steal our code? Sure. Just like they could steal NetBSD or FreeBSD code today. They don't, because it's easier to engineer from scratch, using our code as a reference base - which they could have done at any point for the cost of a source license.
And yes, I think this may be YAOSL, but I think it's a temporary one only. FreeBSD will still be under the BSD license.
You might consider the Open or Net BSD's - they are not as well-funded as FreeBSD, and some of the code you like in FreeBSD was probably developed on one of them. Remember that the BSD family, despite being "fractured", is actually fairly cooperative. (I'm a big fan of NetBSD, myself.)
You want to do them a world of good? Offer the $20k to support a specific port or driver project that's languishing for lack of time, or to get a software developer to port a package to some free system. $20k may not be enough in the latter case, but it might nudge them over the edge.
It's amazing to see someone on a site so full of open-source advocates complaining about someone "copying everything you do".
If I thought a competitor was trying to copy everything I did, I'd try to make sure that I did it *better*.
Amazon, by contrast, has stuck to its opt-out mailing guns, abused privacy rights, gotten patents, and used those patents aggressively (not just as a "defensive" measure, but as an attempt to kill competition).
They're not good guys. They've never, ever, been good guys. Amazon is one of the first companies to really exploit the fact that Internet users assume that Internet companies are somehow "nice guys". Amazon are a bunch of lying scumbags who are *VERY* good at *TELLING YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR*.
A couple of things. First off, I'm arguing for NetBSD, because that's what I use on many of my other systems.
Anyway, Psion's OS is great if you want to do *exactly* what they built the machine for. Beyond that, it's a closed, proprietary system. If I want a small, stable, general purpose computer, my best bet is a palmtop running some kind of Unix.
WinCE is too unstable. EPOC and Palm are too specialized. Thus, enter Unix on a palmtop. Yes, it's what I'd want if I were getting something like a WorkPad.
I'm not saying "Unix is the only thing it would ever make sense to run on a palmtop". I'm saying it's not particularly irrational to pick a Unix-derived system for a palmtop, because it's fundementally a general-purpose user OS, not some kind of mainframe-oriented server OS.
Actually, yes, I do think palmtops crash. I use a Psion, and it's never crashed. However, the comp.sys.psion.misc newsgroup is full of ex-WinCE users who had *frequent* crashes.
Yes, stability matters.
Overhead? Yes, even with X, Unix has dramatically lower overhead than MacOS or Windows. I've run Windows and Unix on the same system; the difference is quite visible.
And, as to your last question, why would I want what is now a generalized data-processing system on my palmtop?
BECAUSE WHAT I MOSTLY DO WITH COMPUTERS OF ANY SORT IS PROCESS DATA!
Yes, I'd like a palmtop that had a good programming language built in, or the ability to run shell scripts or C programs I wrote for Unix.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that actually supports my claim. You're so eager to have them make it, because they're convenient, that you're willing to overlook a few transgressions now and then. So they spammed. So they filed for patents. So the sued over one of those patents. So what? It's *CONVENIENT* to have them!
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd like the long-term convenience of a network where companies behave like responsible citizens *before* people threaten to boycott them. You can have convenient books now, and doom us all to a lifetime of having to boycott someone every couple of weeks as they try some clever new way to abuse the system, or maybe you should step back a bit, think about your long-term needs, and make the push for *RESPONSIBLE* companies.
Amazon started with spam; they spent years insisting that they had the right to email any customer at any time until he said to quit it, and sometimes beyond that. They have never changed; they still think that way. You're not people to them, you're possible revenue streams, and I think you should remember this.
If it doesn't bother you, if purchase circles didn't bother you, if patent lawsuits didn't bother you, if horrible working conditions didn't bother you, if people who will outright lie to get a complainer off the phone didn't bother you, if Amazon employees posting to Usenet anonymously as "customers" defending Amazon's policies didn't bother you, well, I don't know what would.
Actually, I emailed Bezos once. I emailed lots of people at Amazon. I got lies, stonewalls, and "we won't discuss company policy with individuals". Why? Because I was asking about their spam policy.
Do I want to take B&N's side?
WHAT DOES THAT MATTER?
If patent abuse is wrong, *IT IS WRONG NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE TRYING TO USE IT AGAINST*.
Double standards are wrong. Very wrong. If I wouldn't want B&N to be able to do this to Amazon, I'd damn well better not think it's okay if Amazon does it to B&N.
Why are we so committed to liking these bastards?
FACT: Amazon sued over a trivially stupid patent.
That's all there is to it. They spam, they lie, they get bogus patents, and, despite anything they've said, they have *SUED* people for "infringing" on those patents.
What's with the huge emotional investment in finding a way to pretend Amazon isn't really evil? The fact is, they did exactly what we've all said we hate. They've invented new ways (purchase circles) to reveal personal information. They've filed for patents they knew were bogus, they've sued people, and then they've pretended it was a "purely defensive" patent. Sorry, but suing someone isn't "purely defensive".
People are so happy that this is resolved. What's resolved? You've verified that if, every few months, thousands of you write them letters, they will cut down on abusive practices, give you a blatantly false explanation of why they did them in the first place, and then go right ahead and find another thing to screw up.
Face it, they're playing you. They *KNOW* we're all big on "e-commerce" and we want them to succeed, and that means we'll keep watching them like hawks and feel like somehow we should have to put up with this.
You can't trust someone that needs to be slapped down this often for abuses. Go back a few years and watch the Amazon people staunchly defending their right to send email to people who never asked for it. Watch them slowly cave in to pressure, a lot of it applied by their upstream, who have *DISCONNECTED* companies who sent that many unsolicited messages, even to "customers".
Amazon will continue testing your limits to see what they can get away with. As long as you keep pretending it's all okay if they back down occasionally, they'll keep pushing.
I don't think compilers solve the halting problem. They do something totally different: They answer the question "if this were to do something, what would it do", and try to solve that. If they aren't sure, they translate mechanically, and ignore the infinite loops.
:)
And I never said it wasn't worth doing UI's right, just that "intuitive" is often meaningless, and that we should remember that the systems we have now on, say, Linux, *allow you to do things*. If we take away those options, of course we can make a very easy interface; eventually, you can simplify any GUI to a single-click interface, which doesn't work.
You make a very good point; there's more than one kind of complexity, and some of them are easier to avoid than others.
I think the problem is trying to eliminate the wrong complexity. We try to make it so that an "end user" can easily do something, like routing or network admin, which is simply *not actually an easy task*.
Screw that. Let's try to get them something they can *USE*, maybe some word processing.
I think you are arguing a different point than I am.
Nowhere did I say that people shouldn't have access to the full power of their computers.
However, I did say, and continue to say, that you cannot abstract away all the difficulties without losing all of the power, too.
Policy-based routing, along with special cases for proxies for certain services, is powerful. You cannot make it "intuitive" in the sense of "accessible to a naive end user".
There is certainly a lot of excess complexity in modern UI's, and it should be reduced. However, never make the mistake of believing that you can somehow magically make something complicated so easy that a naive user can understand it without effort.
If you look at modern UI's, they're often much worse than older ones, because we've started getting used to them, so now there's all sorts of underlying things you need to know to even *begin* to make sense of a Windows system. "Move your mouse over the grayish areas to find pictures you can click on" is not an "intuitive" concept.
Should non-techies have access to the full power of their computers? Should non-mathematicians have access to the full power of analytic geometry?
I have no problem with people having access to anything they want, but it is *logically impossible* to make the interface simpler than the task it performs.
"Average" people, right now, have access to a great deal of computing power, and a great deal of information, that they didn't ten years ago. We're making progress. However, just as people who want to drive need to spend a fair amount of time learning about cars, people who want to use computers will still, always, need to learn how.
Natural language? Still takes time to learn how to interact with a system, what its limits are... It's always there. *People* have a learning curve.
True enough, but we're talking OS stuff, not just lightweight userland utilities.
Heh. I wonder if they ever give credit for that ftp client; if not, maybe someone should whack them.
Some things are not intuitive. The only time a user interface is "intuitive" is when its model of what you want to do is the same as your model. Users do not share models very often, so we invent "common" approaches, but these simplified approaches *cannot* model the more-complicated tasks!
Frankly, a lot of the "desktop" market is people who would not be able to administer sendmail if it understood English, because they don't know *what they want it to do*. They just sort of want, you know, the thing where the other thing isn't done unless it's supposed'ta.
This can't be resolved by making interfaces intuitive, any more than we can make graduate-level math accessible to children by using "intuitive" words and pictures to describe it.
Eventually, we have to accept that part of what we want to do is educate the users a bit more, so they can figure out what they want to do; at this point, the interface can be designed for efficiency.
Expert-friendly is the way to go.
Yeah, but does "the source tree" compile on 20 different kinds of computers? Multiple different branches that integrate fixes from each other are not the same thing as a unified source tree.
I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the Amiga and the Sun3 different "ports", because they're substantially different systems, even if they have the same CPU.
I do think it's unfair to use the existance somewhere of a port of a piece of software to a platform maintained by a third party as "support" for that platform.
It's all trade-offs; if nothing else, can we at least agree that Windows NT is *not* the multi-platform leader?
Gauntlet may be the best known, but they're running a *very* old BSD/OS codebase, and I don't think they're doing driver updates. They got bought by Network Associates a while back, and I think that was about the point at which they stopped following our "current" releases.
Hee hee.
Remember, a bunch of the drivers are still under NDA, and *CANNOT BE RELEASED*.
That said, calm down a little, and wait and see what happens. No one will be harmed by waiting a few days to hear more about release plans.
If the BSD/OS SMP is so awful, why is the FreeBSD one the one getting scrapped?
BSD/OS is *not* the same thing as FreeBSD, and it sure as hell isn't "the same thing two years older". It's a different system, with different goals, targeted at a different market.
I'm sorry you didn't find that BSD/OS met your needs, but I think it's a little drastic to talk about "things which don't suck nearly as much". BSD/OS may not be the be-all and end-all of systems, but it doesn't *suck*, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway, as the code starts getting shared between the systems, we'll see a lot of changes for both communities, and I think they'll all be for the better. FreeBSD will get a "real" SMP, instead of a "pretty-good-hack" SMP. BSD/OS will quite possibly get the bus_space code.
(Of course, that's NetBSD's work, not FreeBSD's, originally.)
It's amazing; it's almost as though, when multiple groups of developers work on different projects, they produce different things. What's really amazing is that this surprises people.
I don't see any point to changing cdrom.com over, but yes, I would expect BSD/OS can handle comparable loads to FreeBSD. Despite getting there by very different paths, both systems have fairly good reliability and performance...
Hard to say.
Right away, Nothing Happens.
Over time:
* NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all get neat new toys.
* BSDI gets a bunch of the "non-server" driver code they've historically ignored, which means better desktop support.
* FreeBSD gets sexy new SMP.
* Over time, I believe *all* the BSD's get a better support framework.
* I get a free copy of FreeBSD in the mail.
* BSD Stronger == MS Weaker.
The last one is worth remembering; people tend to argue about Linux Vs. BSD. Screw it; the world's big enough for the both of us. The question is, how much *Microsoft* can we all displace?
Probably technically a first, although be aware that drivers under NDA will stay under NDA.
It's not that big a deal; BSD/OS has always been based largely on 4.4BSD code, and we've given away code to other systems before; NetBSD-current has our 'login.conf' code, for instance.
In theory, sure, someone could "steal" the resulting code.
In practice, OS-level code isn't *worth* stealing if your system isn't fairly similar, on an architectural level.
Could NT try to steal our code? Sure. Just like they could steal NetBSD or FreeBSD code today. They don't, because it's easier to engineer from scratch, using our code as a reference base - which they could have done at any point for the cost of a source license.
And yes, I think this may be YAOSL, but I think it's a temporary one only. FreeBSD will still be under the BSD license.
Mostly, as I understand it, it will be the NDA'd drivers and related stuff that don't get freed.
And yes, the intent is a merged source tree at some future date.
You might consider the Open or Net BSD's - they are not as well-funded as FreeBSD, and some of the code you like in FreeBSD was probably developed on one of them. Remember that the BSD family, despite being "fractured", is actually fairly cooperative. (I'm a big fan of NetBSD, myself.)
You want to do them a world of good? Offer the $20k to support a specific port or driver project that's languishing for lack of time, or to get a software developer to port a package to some free system. $20k may not be enough in the latter case, but it might nudge them over the edge.
It's amazing to see someone on a site so full of open-source advocates complaining about someone "copying everything you do".
If I thought a competitor was trying to copy everything I did, I'd try to make sure that I did it *better*.
Amazon, by contrast, has stuck to its opt-out mailing guns, abused privacy rights, gotten patents, and used those patents aggressively (not just as a "defensive" measure, but as an attempt to kill competition).
They're not good guys. They've never, ever, been good guys. Amazon is one of the first companies to really exploit the fact that Internet users assume that Internet companies are somehow "nice guys". Amazon are a bunch of lying scumbags who are *VERY* good at *TELLING YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR*.
But every so often, the truth will out.
Then why is he being a jerk about it? If he really just wanted to avoid abuse, he'd have gotten it and ignored it.
Two of my credit cards have started showing up at various places. I wondered how someone got my personal information all correct.
Thanks, Trans Union!
There is no, and has been no, common carrier status for ISP's or anything like 'em.
Insofar as a couple of the backbone companies are also phone companies, *THAT PART OF THEIR BUSINESS* is a common carrier.
That's it. The rest of us are just normal private businesses, large and small, and own our own networks.
Companies that spam invariably turn out to be scum in general. It wasn't surprising the first time, and it isn't surprising this time either.
A couple of things. First off, I'm arguing for NetBSD, because that's what I use on many of my other systems.
Anyway, Psion's OS is great if you want to do *exactly* what they built the machine for. Beyond that, it's a closed, proprietary system. If I want a small, stable, general purpose computer, my best bet is a palmtop running some kind of Unix.
WinCE is too unstable. EPOC and Palm are too specialized. Thus, enter Unix on a palmtop. Yes, it's what I'd want if I were getting something like a WorkPad.
I'm not saying "Unix is the only thing it would ever make sense to run on a palmtop". I'm saying it's not particularly irrational to pick a Unix-derived system for a palmtop, because it's fundementally a general-purpose user OS, not some kind of mainframe-oriented server OS.
Actually, yes, I do think palmtops crash. I use a Psion, and it's never crashed. However, the comp.sys.psion.misc newsgroup is full of ex-WinCE users who had *frequent* crashes.
Yes, stability matters.
Overhead? Yes, even with X, Unix has dramatically lower overhead than MacOS or Windows. I've run Windows and Unix on the same system; the difference is quite visible.
And, as to your last question, why would I want what is now a generalized data-processing system on my palmtop?
BECAUSE WHAT I MOSTLY DO WITH COMPUTERS OF ANY SORT IS PROCESS DATA!
Yes, I'd like a palmtop that had a good programming language built in, or the ability to run shell scripts or C programs I wrote for Unix.