I felt screwed by apple, and I'm never going back, no matter how nice their stuff is. There's a reason people push free as in speech, and it's because you will not get screwed over when some company like apple decides you're not worth the effort because you don't use photoshop.
Exactly right. Apple treated me (and millions of others) like scum. Apple would have to do something pretty amazing for me to go back to them. Free software is a different story. With free software, I don't have to worry about being dragged through s%&t by a large corporation.With free software, I have total control over my computer.
History tells us: the problem with Apple is that you just can't trust 'em.
I used to do a huge amount of C++ programming too, and enjoyed it. But that was back before the committees got hold of it and turned it into a baroque monstrosity.
And there I was thinking Perl was pure baroque with all that weird syntax. The clarity of C on the other hand is Enlightenment. Which makes Pascal Renaissance.
That 5 planes were shot down was also reported on BBC World, following a report from a local US TV station, but I haven't heard anything about it since. Obviously, if it is true, it will come to light in the next few hours/days. You can't cover up the crashing of 4 planes.
This is a great article, because he gives a solution to the problem that he sees. The solution also makes sense. Sun is doing good things with J2EE and it makes sense for open source to hop on board that band wagon.
In the enterprise, Java is highly respected (I know, I talk to these guys) and it has a first mover advantage. It's time to captilise on that.
I BEGGED them to send me either a Latitude with Linux pre-loaded or a blank box with no OS. They flat-out REFUSED. They would only ship with MS Win2000 or WinME preinstalled and REFUSED to provide me with information so I could obtain a refund for the unused Windows license.
Me too.
And me. In fact, I asked Dell whether it would invalidate the warranty if I installed Linux. They said yes unless the laptop came with Linux installed by Dell.I also asked for no OS, or if I put Windows on a small partition and installed Linux on the rest. Whatever I did, it would invalidate the warranty. And I don't need a warranty to cover software, I just need a warranty to cover defective hardware.
I've been using personal computers since 1982 when my VIC-20 had 5K of RAM and ran at 1Mhz. Do you seriously want to go back to using a machine like that?
No, but I'm reading this on a Mac 6500 running DebianPPC. With this setup, it is a great computer that runs RealPlayer and plays mp3s. I don't need the latest and greatest. The 6500 beats the $*%& out of my newer Vaio laptop which has the worst build quality of any big brand name computer I've ever used.
The american courts and government has always been the place where you can buy whatever you desire or whatever decision you want.
Maybe that's right. Microsoft is very rich and very powerful and can buy alot. The rest of the world is richer and more powerful and can buy more. The EU is already looking at Microsoft in a lot of detail thanks in part to complaints by Sun Microsystems. Legal action by Microsoft's rivals has not even started. This soap will go on for years.
Microsoft will always be looking over its shoulder now for more suits and more legal actions. It will have to think carefully about anything it does. It will never be the same company again.
Oh, dear...I really can't let you get away with this.
Picture this. An aesthetically challenged male trawling the internet for those few porn pictures he hasn't got, jerking off over his key board.
This male is what is known as a sad git. If you want to be a sad git too, please consume a lot of porn.
There is nothing wrong with porn. A healthy sex drive is exactly that -- healthy.
And what has porn got to do with a healthy sex drive? A sex drive is, I would have thought, something that makes you want to go and have sex, not something that encourages you to pull the cord. Face it, porn is for those with no personality who can not get laid, ever.
Would you like to limit your ability to pick up women? Then tell them how much you enjoy porn. In fact, suggest that you'd like to try whatever you saw in the streamed video you were salivating over last night. Why not ask her whether she has a best friend who would like to indulge in a threesome.
Oh, maybe your one of the disingenuous types, who doesn't look at porn, no, no, no. You only consume "erotica". Which is all very tastefully done and is designed for men AND women.
The problem with porn is it takes normal, potentially intelligent men and turns them into idiots
Just remember that attitudes like this have caused billions of deaths over the course of human history.
ROFL! Puh-lease
This posting has a point. It is this. Forget porn. Go out. Meet people - lots of people. Understand yourself. Understand others. Understand the world we live in. And then maybe you'll get laid.
The unexamined life is not worth living. --Socrates
I don't agree with this at all. Mandrake is having problems because their business model is wrong. You can't make money by selling boxed sets. I have had long chats with senior execs from SuSE and RedHat and they all say this. For both of these companies, the way of the future is to sell support to corporates. Both SuSE and RedHat have agreements with IBM to support Linux running on their eServer range.
SuSE have their Alpha distro, for exactly this reason - you're not going to make any money selling it are you? There are not enough users running Alpha workstations. But you can sell support.
You can't beat MS on the desktop. No way, no how. Linux distributors must play on Linux's strengths which is increasingly in the enterprise server market. Once that market is won, then maybe, they can turn their sights to the desktop.
But maybe it doesn't have to work all the time. As long as an encryption system makes it too fidddly/time consuming for most people to play music on their stereos and walkmans, it won't matter that there is a free copy floating around the net.
After all, people have been quite happy to buy regionally encoded DVD players.
What does the average desktop need portmap for? Or sendmail that accepts external connections. Or a web server.
I find these things useful, but you're right. Why does the average user want to run *nix? I don't get it.
The average user doesn't need a malleable, flexible operating system with all the development tools you could ever want.
The average user wants applications. And these are email, MP3s and porn. Want to conqueur the desktop, give an Outlook-like email app, Winamp and xv all bound together with a pretty interface.
.
What I'd like to know is exactly how people were convinced that these companies could make money? If you work or have worked for one of these companies,
please can you explain to me how they planned to make a profit?
There are two ways companies can make money from commodity software, IMHO.
The Wal-Mart, pile it high, sell it cheap method. This means making money through volume sales. I don't know whether this can work until we get boxes with Linux pre-installed. Like Wal-Mart it means razor thin profit margins. And yes you can can make a fortune, you just have to sell a lot.
The Savile Row, cut to measure method. Here you don't sell a lot, but what you do sell, you sell with nice big profits. You add loads of value. You go into a company, listen to what they want, and deliver an open source solution, that works. You provide 24 hr support and guarantee uptime.
The problem that Eazel has, is that as far as I see it, they don't have a product that will work out of the box. Easy-to-use must be that. It must be a no-brainer and ideally it must come already installed on a computer.
That's also because they think it consists entirely of
software that would frighten almost any journalist, like Emacs and Vi. Now, to her credit, she also talks about StarOffice, which in my mind is basically a
Linux port of Microsoft Office, and certainly enough to frighten any hacker. But her problem is the same.
What I don't understand is why she wants a word processor to write her articles. I write mine using Emacs. Why can't she? Emacs has a wonderful spellchecker (ispell) and is fully compatible with the worlds best layout language TeX. Why do you need anything else?
I agree with her on the desktop. I like having billions of looks and feels to choose from, but the average user hates it.
However, most distros now default to one look. This has to continue. I once told Gael Duval that to beat Microsoft Linux should copy the MS desktop widget for widget so users feel nice and comfortable with it.
Consumers have accepted encrypted and regional encoded DVD players. As most consumers use Windows, this probably makes perfect sense because it will encourage Windows to be used in home computers and internet appliances.
OK so Linux is not ready for the desktop and it will probably be a year before it is. But that is not Corel's problem.
Corel completely misunderstood the Linux market, the Linux philosophy and Linux users. They tried to bring old-fashioned shrink wrap style products to a world they didn't understand.
Besides that not all their products were much good. Wordperfect sucks. It is slow and incredibly buggy. I don't use it anymore and if I need to do any wordprocessing AbiWord 0.7 does everything I need.
I think it's more of a pity for Debian than Linux as a whole, because Debian (which is a great distro for gurus) needs an easy-to-use version.
It hasn't happened yet with space flight, but then too will spaceflight achieve the same rapid growth.
Yes, the free flow of information was slightly tapered by the rise of corporatism. This will only be a blip in history; already, the flow is beginning to resume its exponential
course.
Against this I can site David Landes "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations". Many societies have forgotten information. The Chinese are the classic example. The big turning point in history was when they actively gave up their ship building. By the time Europeans got to the coast of China there was barely a Chinese ship in sight. The Chinese never developed uses for gun powder like the Europeans despite having developed it 1000 years before. And so on.
What's to say that we won't forget information? There is already much pressure to do just that. Remember the porno scare. "Stop the internet to stop porn!" or encryption "Don't use encryption because you'll help pedophiles, drug dealers, terrorists and copyright infringers". Currently, there is much pressure for us to abandon distributed networks like FreeNet despite the fact this is a very interesting and probably beneficial technology.
In fact, I could argue that the free flow of information is the blip in history. Most societies depend on a centralised top-down control. From the Egyptians to Medieval Europe, knowledge was in the hands of the elite who passed on only what they thought wasn't too dangerous for the plebs to know.
Gutenberg changed all that of course, when he invented the technology that the nasty radical:-) Martin Luther could use to give us protestant Christianity.
Now, however, the interests of corporations (like the interests of the Catholic Church in Martin Luther's day) demand that information be controlled so they don't lose their privileged positions. Who says they won't win?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right. Apple treated me (and millions of others) like scum. Apple would have to do something pretty amazing for me to go back to them. Free software is a different story. With free software, I don't have to worry about being dragged through s%&t by a large corporation.With free software, I have total control over my computer.
History tells us: the problem with Apple is that you just can't trust 'em.
I used to do a huge amount of C++ programming too, and enjoyed it. But that was back before the committees got hold of it and turned it into a baroque monstrosity.
And there I was thinking Perl was pure baroque with all that weird syntax. The clarity of C on the other hand is Enlightenment. Which makes Pascal Renaissance.
So what would Leonardo da Vinci programmed in?
Oh, dear, there does the little karma I had
Because Linux is cheap, flexible and gives total control to the user.
That 5 planes were shot down was also reported on BBC World, following a report from a local US TV station, but I haven't heard anything about it since. Obviously, if it is true, it will come to light in the next few hours/days. You can't cover up the crashing of 4 planes.
This is a great article, because he gives a solution to the problem that he sees. The solution also makes sense. Sun is doing good things with J2EE and it makes sense for open source to hop on board that band wagon.
In the enterprise, Java is highly respected (I know, I talk to these guys) and it has a first mover advantage. It's time to captilise on that.
I BEGGED them to send me either a Latitude with Linux pre-loaded or a blank box with no OS. They flat-out REFUSED. They would only ship with MS Win2000 or WinME preinstalled and REFUSED to provide me with information so I could obtain a refund for the unused Windows license.
Me too.
And me. In fact, I asked Dell whether it would invalidate the warranty if I installed Linux. They said yes unless the laptop came with Linux installed by Dell.I also asked for no OS, or if I put Windows on a small partition and installed Linux on the rest. Whatever I did, it would invalidate the warranty. And I don't need a warranty to cover software, I just need a warranty to cover defective hardware.
What is the situation now?
No, but I'm reading this on a Mac 6500 running DebianPPC. With this setup, it is a great computer that runs RealPlayer and plays mp3s. I don't need the latest and greatest. The 6500 beats the $*%& out of my newer Vaio laptop which has the worst build quality of any big brand name computer I've ever used.
Maybe that's right. Microsoft is very rich and very powerful and can buy alot. The rest of the world is richer and more powerful and can buy more. The EU is already looking at Microsoft in a lot of detail thanks in part to complaints by Sun Microsystems. Legal action by Microsoft's rivals has not even started. This soap will go on for years.
Microsoft will always be looking over its shoulder now for more suits and more legal actions. It will have to think carefully about anything it does. It will never be the same company again.
Oh, dear...I really can't let you get away with this.
Picture this. An aesthetically challenged male trawling the internet for those few porn pictures he hasn't got, jerking off over his key board.
This male is what is known as a sad git. If you want to be a sad git too, please consume a lot of porn.
There is nothing wrong with porn. A healthy sex drive is exactly that -- healthy.And what has porn got to do with a healthy sex drive? A sex drive is, I would have thought, something that makes you want to go and have sex, not something that encourages you to pull the cord. Face it, porn is for those with no personality who can not get laid, ever.
Would you like to limit your ability to pick up women? Then tell them how much you enjoy porn. In fact, suggest that you'd like to try whatever you saw in the streamed video you were salivating over last night. Why not ask her whether she has a best friend who would like to indulge in a threesome.
Oh, maybe your one of the disingenuous types, who doesn't look at porn, no, no, no. You only consume "erotica". Which is all very tastefully done and is designed for men AND women.
The problem with porn is it takes normal, potentially intelligent men and turns them into idiots
Just remember that attitudes like this have caused billions of deaths over the course of human history.ROFL! Puh-lease
This posting has a point. It is this. Forget porn. Go out. Meet people - lots of people. Understand yourself. Understand others. Understand the world we live in. And then maybe you'll get laid.
I don't agree with this at all. Mandrake is having problems because their business model is wrong. You can't make money by selling boxed sets. I have had long chats with senior execs from SuSE and RedHat and they all say this. For both of these companies, the way of the future is to sell support to corporates. Both SuSE and RedHat have agreements with IBM to support Linux running on their eServer range.
SuSE have their Alpha distro, for exactly this reason - you're not going to make any money selling it are you? There are not enough users running Alpha workstations. But you can sell support.
You can't beat MS on the desktop. No way, no how. Linux distributors must play on Linux's strengths which is increasingly in the enterprise server market. Once that market is won, then maybe, they can turn their sights to the desktop.
But maybe it doesn't have to work all the time. As long as an encryption system makes it too fidddly/time consuming for most people to play music on their stereos and walkmans, it won't matter that there is a free copy floating around the net.
After all, people have been quite happy to buy regionally encoded DVD players.
I find these things useful, but you're right. Why does the average user want to run *nix? I don't get it.
The average user doesn't need a malleable, flexible operating system with all the development tools you could ever want.
The average user wants applications. And these are email, MP3s and porn. Want to conqueur the desktop, give an Outlook-like email app, Winamp and xv all bound together with a pretty interface. .
There are two ways companies can make money from commodity software, IMHO.
The problem that Eazel has, is that as far as I see it, they don't have a product that will work out of the box. Easy-to-use must be that. It must be a no-brainer and ideally it must come already installed on a computer.
What I don't understand is why she wants a word processor to write her articles. I write mine using Emacs. Why can't she? Emacs has a wonderful spellchecker (ispell) and is fully compatible with the worlds best layout language TeX. Why do you need anything else?
I agree with her on the desktop. I like having billions of looks and feels to choose from, but the average user hates it.
However, most distros now default to one look. This has to continue. I once told Gael Duval that to beat Microsoft Linux should copy the MS desktop widget for widget so users feel nice and comfortable with it.
What makes you say that?
Consumers have accepted encrypted and regional encoded DVD players. As most consumers use Windows, this probably makes perfect sense because it will encourage Windows to be used in home computers and internet appliances.
Of course, clever intelligent people will be able to hack it. But the question is whether your average Joe Punter is going to.
The content industry is betting that he won't, it will not be worth his while, and he will be happy to pay for encrypted media.
If the content industry only releases stuff in Windows Media format. Where does that leave MacOS and Linux?
OK so Linux is not ready for the desktop and it will probably be a year before it is. But that is not Corel's problem.
Corel completely misunderstood the Linux market, the Linux philosophy and Linux users. They tried to bring old-fashioned shrink wrap style products to a world they didn't understand.
Besides that not all their products were much good. Wordperfect sucks. It is slow and incredibly buggy. I don't use it anymore and if I need to do any wordprocessing AbiWord 0.7 does everything I need.
I think it's more of a pity for Debian than Linux as a whole, because Debian (which is a great distro for gurus) needs an easy-to-use version.
Against this I can site David Landes "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations". Many societies have forgotten information. The Chinese are the classic example. The big turning point in history was when they actively gave up their ship building. By the time Europeans got to the coast of China there was barely a Chinese ship in sight. The Chinese never developed uses for gun powder like the Europeans despite having developed it 1000 years before. And so on.
What's to say that we won't forget information? There is already much pressure to do just that. Remember the porno scare. "Stop the internet to stop porn!" or encryption "Don't use encryption because you'll help pedophiles, drug dealers, terrorists and copyright infringers". Currently, there is much pressure for us to abandon distributed networks like FreeNet despite the fact this is a very interesting and probably beneficial technology.
In fact, I could argue that the free flow of information is the blip in history. Most societies depend on a centralised top-down control. From the Egyptians to Medieval Europe, knowledge was in the hands of the elite who passed on only what they thought wasn't too dangerous for the plebs to know.
Gutenberg changed all that of course, when he invented the technology that the nasty radical :-) Martin Luther could use to give us protestant Christianity.
Now, however, the interests of corporations (like the interests of the Catholic Church in Martin Luther's day) demand that information be controlled so they don't lose their privileged positions. Who says they won't win?