And then it will go back up and hit 50. And then it will go slightly below again. I remember back when they introduced karma. I had just submitted an AMD story right about then and so it shot up. It's been going down every since. It took me quite a while to hit 50 but I did.
Not that I really care. I thought they should have included a filter which would allow you to "tune out a UID" rather than restrict it arbitrarily at 50. I toyed with writing such a feature myself and then submitting a patch. But then work intruded and I was too busy to breathe.
I do really like the messages feature. It allows one to see replies without having to get a high enough score to let the post pass the original poster's filters (I read at +1, and sometimes +2). So I suppose my goal of the reply being seen has been met.
And just to keep this on topic: I wonder what effect/. had on the "I'm a 1337 geek because I read slashdot" during the whole tech expansion. I personally know more than a couple people that should never have worked in a tech industry (and I'm sure a few would argue that my Geology background precludes me from membership into the geek club). Mostly artists and the like. The fellas who called writing web pages "coding".
Anyway, interesting graphics. Did you hear about the Uhaul shortage in Silicon Valley/Bay Area? That's a metric I'd like to see explored.
The game was called Mail Order Monsters. You can download it from that link. You need an emulator (like VICE, Come Back 64, or EC64) to run it. You'll have to make a blank "disk" to save your stuff on when you play the game, so be sure to read up on the emulator of your choice on how to do that (I usually overwrite the contents of a coped disk file, but YMMV).
On a whim I did a Google search for a more recent version (kinda like what these two great guys did with Xscorch). Someone seems to have liked it enough to make a GNU version, although there's not a lot there yet.
-B
Gates' wife wrote the paper clip
on
LWCE Bits and Pieces
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Who knows who wrote the paper clip in [Microsoft] Word?.
Bill Gates' wife was responsible for the paper clip. Really, it's true. Melinda French Gates was a project lead on MS Bob (you have to remember MicroSoft Bob -- it was that cartoony software that slowed your machine to a crawl and insulted you while balancing your checkbook or reading email). When Bob was revealed to be the complete and utter turkey that it was always destined to be, guess what got some of the "usability and human interface" stuff? Office. Guess who happened to also be, ah, "seeing" The Boss? Melinda. Why wasn't Bob just canned, like any other project that wastes millions and failed completely? You have to wonder if Bill G wasn't getting pillow-talked into something. In fact, MS Bob was the first consumer product Bill Gates released personally. People do the strangest things for love.
Anyway, a lot of what Bob had to offer didn't get canned (as it should have). It got repuposed and wound up in other MS products. Take a look at the screenshot on this page. See that dog in the lower corner? That was Bob's dog Rex. (I wish they had a picture of the dragon named "Java"; I wonder if McNealy every knew about that?) Looks like that paper clip, eh? Bob's ghost is in other stuff, too. MS Agent had a re-incarnation.
Well this is all way OT. But I think the Bob fiasco sheds some light on what goes on at MS. There's really no reason to wonder about the pape clip. I'm sure Melinda will insist on touchy-feely stuff being included in every MS product.
I love it when someone thinks for me...
...sounds like someone needs to get into their preferences and disable image loading
Just hit the 'g' key a couple times. Toggles "show", "show but don't load", and "don't show/don't load" modes. There's no reason to dig anywhere.
And if you want to try something extra spiffy, hit F8, then hit 'g'. Now type in something and you'll get the Google search results for the term you entered.
I love RC tracked vehicles. I have no idea why. Anyway, the little guys are neat and all, but if you want the kind of desktop toy you can really play with, get an RC tank that actually shoots.
The T90 is a wee bit big for most desktops, but it plays well on the kitchen counter and the like. Dogs and cats don't mind them unless you shoot them... in which case they don't like you to get the tank down off the shelf at all. The little Airsoft pellets do sting, and leave a mark: my wife ended up with a tiny welt (completely accidentally, of course).
The model itself is very well done and it's easy to put together. No painting needed, though. Contrary to what Dan says (at the link above), the tank does work in grass. It'll climb a stack of books, up to about a 60 degree incline. It'll go right over a bunch of bananas, a 2x4, Doc Martens, etc. Works great on tile, kinda good on carpet (turning isn't so great on carpet). The pellets have a decent range. You can can them bounce off your neighbors house across the street for instance. (Nothing works better for keeping the young kids off your lawn, BTW, than a couple pellets headed down their direction.)
Anyway, fun stuff. You can also get red and green 6mm paintballs for your tank as well. I haven't tried them yet. My wife is upset enough without having to see little red and green splotches all over the house. Maybe for Christmas, though...
Hey, why bash VMS? It's to easy a target. Leave them VMS guys alone...
Oh, I don't like Windows. I just had a pithy comment. That's all. I don't like VMS either. Had to use that once...
No, you really can't make this stuff up
on
Hotmail Hacked
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· Score: 2
Speaking of choice remarks, Mr. Gates once mentioned a problem about factoring prime numbers. Yeah... I seem to recall some difficulty there... something about making better cryptographic numbers... yeah... to enhance security... yeah... with large primes and their, um, factors...
With an argument as strong as yours, I'm gonna get rid of Linux as soon as I can. No, really... you're ASCII art has me convinced. I must have been delusioned this whole time thinking I had an OS that didn't suck. I've seen the light. Linux sucks. Says so right up there. You wouldn't have typed that out if it weren't true. I mean, really, why would you lie? You've obviously got something important to share, and a very well-informed opinion, so I should heed your advice and admonition.
So what OS should I use? I could re-install Windows I guess -- I'd need to buy a copy from some place. I also don't have much Windows software. Can Windows run Linux software? I can run some Windows stuff in WINE. BeOS runs pretty well on my machine, although their SCSI drivers leave a little to be desired. I could run one of the BSDs too...
What do you think? What is it I should be doing? How can I run an OS that doesn't suck? How can I meet with your approval?
So do they have Linux drivers?
on
ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I couldn't find any mention of Linux in the reviews that I read. Without decent Linux support, the card is useless for me.
(Say what you will about me wanting actual vendor support, but I went through the DRI hell of owning -- and eventually dumping at a considerable loss -- a Voodoo5 5500. I now have a GeForce2 Ultra and the Nvidia driver was easy to install and works reasonably well. And I could care less that it isn't open source. Their hardware, their driver, my choice to use it. Same as my choice to use Opera. It's the best tool for the job.)
Anyway, I'd really like to see some of the "independant" review sites (especially Tom's and/or AnandTech) start including a bit about Linux compatibility (including whether or not OSS drivers exist), performance, availability, etc. But I guess since the press kit didn't have any mention of Linux, the reviews won't either, like Michael says. Plenty of ad views on those reviews, though...
They load Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4, of all things. Any other linux ought to work just fine, though. Red Hat has a Hardware Compatibility Page which lists other laptops known to work.
The Lacks family - still poor and struggling to access health care - has not been compensated for the use of Henrietta's cells.
I find it very hard to believe that people in the US can't get health care (or "struggle" to get it). If they don't have it, then it's because they haven't tried. When I was young my family had very little money, and we went to the county hospital for everything from TB to broken bones. You showed up, avoided the prisoners chained to the benches next to you, saw a doctor (who maybe didn't speak English so well), got treated and left. I don't remember any of us every whining about it or asking for any pity or using our fairly austere upbringing to lend a sad yet authoritative note to some third party's wank of a film. They removed cancer from her. You don't typically get compensation for that kind of thing. At least, people didn't used to. Now that we have socially correct, wooly-headed thinkers like Charlene Gilbert around, that might change.
I wonder how many epidermal cells I've lost without receiving adequate compensation? Someone probably owes me cash. That air handler at Disney World stole my cells! I struggled to make those as a poor child! They traded my flesh for entertainment! I want cash! Someone make me a film about poor children! Breadwinners want their slice!
Either that or we can start a dialog, and talk about all the issues surrounding our cultural paradigm with respect to ethical consent and the shifting mores of a society wrenched with knowing it paid for people whose cells have been also traded as so much chattel and will live on into the next century long after we're all gone but still thinking of the viable mythlike qualities of the implicable ramifications of its moral institutions...
fortunately, it's just executing a print statment, however, you could easily replace "print" with "system" and your encoded command.
Yeah, you'd be able to see the system call. You could probably make it more insidious using exec or something embedded in the print statement. But since they'd know where the damage came from, it's not a good idea be malicious in a.sig (not that it's a good idea to be malicious anyway, but you get the point...:-)
About the h38 instead fo h36. My email used to be wrhodes1@san.rr.com. I was too lazy to change it all the way (and it works just as well -- h5000 would work fine). Run 'perldoc -f pack' to see some helpful info as well.
Microsoft has a new competitor which unlike previous competitors could not be driven out fo business.
That's partially true. An OSS project lives as long as the tarballs are on a server somewhere. Howeer, you can't think that they wouldn't be happy to see VA Linux, Red Hat, SuSE, Ximian, et al. go away? They might not be able to get rid of the software, but they seem to have shown a certain skill reducing the market share of competitor's projects. For example, I doubt many people are using WordPerfect on OS/2 these days...
There can be no endgame for MS. They cannot go after a checkmate. They cannot kill us.
Yes, there can and they can and will. They can do something similar to what the IM stuff has been all about. They tacitly agree to help Mono (by not squashing it outright and releasing some sorta-open code). They get good press and the DoJ off their backs somewhat. People are duped into thinking MS can change and actually do some good for OSS. Then let's say that IBM or some such starts backing Mono. And then let's say that other companies like this because it's either free or low cost, or they have hackers that can toy with it, or whatever. So they start using Mono-based stuff instead of the MS stuff. Maybe even an OSS version of Passport comes out and starts to take off.
What will hapen then is that the Mono-based stuff will break in subtle ways. Like Java, maybe. Or Kerberos. Or like what will happen soon with SMB. Nothing sinister. It's just that Windows 2004 XP needed small changes "in order to maintain interoperbility with Microsoft's.NET (TM) and Passport (TM) services..." And, oops, those small changes break every Mono-based implementation previously released. And, no, the spec will not be opened because it would compromise MS's IP.
At that point, Mono plays catch-up and eventually dies. No company will touch Mono with a ten foot pole if they fear that at some point down the road MS might "have" to change a spec, and that change will break their apps. Apps which will aim to take people's money, mind you. That hits close to home. Sure the technology might live on, but it won't compete with MS's stuff. Not really, anyway.
If MS feels like their lunch is being eaten they will retaliate. They have to. Failure to maintain market share will get Bill Gates sued. This is a cold, hard fact. MS does not give any ground for long.
So what are we terrified of?
That maybe OSS companies and independant developers will waste effort on a doomed project. They they are dancing to the beat of MS's drum, not their own. They they will be forced into a role of playing catch-up, of always being second best or merely an "alternative" to MS's software.
If MS could controvert HTTP (read: Apache) such that IIS would be the only logical choice for web deployments, they would in one flat second and without even thinking about it. It's projects like Apache (and Tomcat, etc.) that are examples of what we need to be doing. Instead of coding up our own implementation of an IIS-like server that can do ASP and FrontPage and whatever, we have our own software. MS has been catching up to us on that front, and that's good because they actually come up with stuff that makes sense and we end up being forced to innovate where we otherwise might not. Apache is good software for good software's sake. Not software because it fits someone else's mold. I'm afraid Mono is just the opposite and that by the time we realize it, it will be too late.
I can see the appeal -- from the business side of things -- for.NET and Passport. And I can see how OSS would benfit from playing the game. Very definitely so. But make no mistake: There will never be a level playing field, but at least we'll be in the arena along with MS at game time instead of showing up at halftime/2nd period/5th inning/whatever other sports timing convention suits your locale. (And that's enough sports metaphors from someone who last threw a ball circa 1985.) The thing I can't understand is why people are keeping such a rosy outlook on this whole quasi-partnership/sharing experience/whatever.
I swear, it's cliche come true: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It's like the Ximian guys are abused spouses. They're making excuses, thinking they can change the other person, pretending it'll all work out good this time, forgiving this one last time, so on and so on. People get therapy for this, you know. The solution is not to give them one more chance. The solution is to get the hell out and start fresh. We cannot let this codependant wool-gathering to continue where Microsoft is concerned. They cannot be beaten at their game. We need to get them to play our game. There are many things OSS can do better than a monolithic organization. we'll win by focusing on that. Proaction, not reaction.
Hmmm. Time for a new analogy.
People need to remember that MS is out to do one thing and one thing only: Create and maintain shareholder value. That's the only thing publicly traded companies aim to do and the only thing that matters to them. Everything besides that is secondary (contrary to the "We like to make innovative software for the betterment of the world" mantra the PR types like to repeat to us). And the cash goal is just fine; it's what our country was built on and it's created a lot of happy people and started a lot of successful companies. It works pretty well. Until you throw in some incredibly lucrative technology backed by technologically savvy yet altruistic individuals. It's chum for the MS corporate shark.
MS could no more resist the urge to co-opt and/or subvert Mono or related techologies than a Great White could resist a tasty meal at the Ft. Lauderdale Hemophiliac Seniors Beach club. MS will come out with.NET and Passport, and Ximian will have Mono. As soon as organizations start favoring Mono over MS's proprietary tech, MS will devour Mono by any means necessary. They have to, in order to maintiain market share. They have to keep up with the slippery slope, and nobody can tell me they won't do whatever it takes when it comes right down to it. They have to stay moving and eating to survive, and will react badly to anything that threatens their food supply of cash and mindshare. What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine... an eating machine. It's really a miracle of business evolution. All this machine does is extend and embrace and extinguish other competeing technologies and that's all. (Apologies to Mr. Hooper.)
Anyway, people would do themselves well to remember the past.
...carbon dioxide ice or methane ice or ammonia ice or some such. They mean frozen water. One or molecules composed of 2 hydrogens and one oxygen which fall some place on the left-ish side of this graph.
After all, ice doesn't necessarily have to be water.
Or wear a bullet-proof vest? I'd rather not get shot than try to protect myself during a shooting.
Why not just stop using Windows and/or (especially) Outlook? Keep trying to protect yourself against MS products, you have a life-long uphill battle ahead of you. Jeez, if you can't give up Windows, use Eudora. It works better than Outlook and it's reasonably safe.
I can't believe people are still willing to get hit with this kind of crap over and over and over...
There's a lack of details in that press release. Which is fine for a PR, I guess. But a couple thoughts struck me:
Is there any sort of compatibility layer between their OS and Palm apps? If not, why would I want to run their OS if I can't get apps for it? Are there many Linux apps for the Dragonball?
How does it handle syncing? If it can't hot sync, then it's all over...
What sort of DEMO is it? If I install their demo and it ceases to work after 30 dayss or some such, I wouldn't be too happy. If it's honesty-ware (install it, if you keep using it pay up), then I would.
How much is it going to cost? A $100 price point will dig their grave.
Does their OS come with a set of GNU utils? Gotta have things like less or the OS isn't very handy.
What sort of graphics/GUI/WM/whatever package does it use? If it's some form of X then I'd be happy...
And I have a bunch more questions that a lot of other people will ask. But if anyone has any details, please share. I've been wating to dust off my old Palm (aye, there's a joke in there somewhere). If this is cheap enough and has enough functionality, I might just try it.
some users have permanently
lost data, and there's still no explanation of the cause
I can't fathom people using an IM service for anything but idle chat. People actually use this for anything they care about!?! Holy shit! Pardon my French, but that's absolutely mind-blowing. Makes me wonder how much business-critical traffic passes through MS's (and AOL's) servers in the clear every day. Wow.
If you've been relying on IM for any data you care about, then I'd say you've gotten what you deserve. Oi.
Would you happen to have saved the source tarball as well as the page content? Seems it's 404 on your site, and, well, the other site is completely gone...
Last time I played with mapping software was using GIS stuff at U of A. Oy, if that doesn't split your head nothing will. Drawmap looks very cool indeed.
once you try debian, you don't wanna go back to any other distro
I'd rather use my own version of Linux. And I have my own method of uncrufting my system, and it's worked for me for the last six years or so. It also works where apt won't: when the software doesn't come in a package. If I want to install it, I can, and I'm not bound by someone else's rules about what a package is and isn't, what it has in it, etc. In fact, that's what I really like about Linux: I get to make the decisions. Same as Taco and yourself -- it's all good. And if Taco was willing, he could try the new version of X. That was my only (tongue-in-cheek) point.
Anyway, millions of Linux users can't be all wrong. Whether it's Debian of Storm or even Mandrake it's still Linux.
Hope it gets put into sid soon for us apt junkies.
Why wait? Do it like the rest of the world! It's easy and fun! Like so:
> sh Xinstall.sh
Then you don't have to be at the mecry of package maintainers. You'll have control over your own system, and in no time you'll be livin' la vida Libertarian.
I certainly don't mean to to denigrate Josh, but why does it seem like he's more concerned with what GUI he uses than what language he uses to get the job done? I would think a peson moving to Linux scripting/programming from Win32/VB would take a look at the landscape of languages and size them all up according to one's needs, desires, proclivities, availability, etc. Personally -- and this is just me -- I'd find out what language fits the task at hand and then go looking for an IDE.
Without knowing *anything* about what he intends to do with his new language choice, I humbly suggest that Josh take a look at perl and vi. Using perl will give him a taste of Unix scipting, and perl is very multipurpose (perl is arugably the VB of the Linux world). Perl has the added bonus of being easy to learn, so spinning up from VB won't be as hard as with Java or C (no flamewars intended). Learning and using vi will allow him to get to know an editor he can use at a command prompt, which practically is a required skill for a Unix user (after all, you may not always have X, so only getting to know a GUI does you a great disservice). I'd even recommend emacs, which has some great IDE development capabilities.
After he's got perl and vi under his belt, he can go take a look at an X-based GUI. But I still say that he should examine his programmatic requirements before his aesthetic requirements. Again, this is only a humble suggestion based solely on my experiences. YMMV, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I really care. I thought they should have included a filter which would allow you to "tune out a UID" rather than restrict it arbitrarily at 50. I toyed with writing such a feature myself and then submitting a patch. But then work intruded and I was too busy to breathe.
I do really like the messages feature. It allows one to see replies without having to get a high enough score to let the post pass the original poster's filters (I read at +1, and sometimes +2). So I suppose my goal of the reply being seen has been met.
And just to keep this on topic: I wonder what effect /. had on the "I'm a 1337 geek because I read slashdot" during the whole tech expansion. I personally know more than a couple people that should never have worked in a tech industry (and I'm sure a few would argue that my Geology background precludes me from membership into the geek club). Mostly artists and the like. The fellas who called writing web pages "coding".
Anyway, interesting graphics. Did you hear about the Uhaul shortage in Silicon Valley/Bay Area? That's a metric I'd like to see explored.
-B
On a whim I did a Google search for a more recent version (kinda like what these two great guys did with Xscorch). Someone seems to have liked it enough to make a GNU version, although there's not a lot there yet.
-B
Bill Gates' wife was responsible for the paper clip. Really, it's true. Melinda French Gates was a project lead on MS Bob (you have to remember MicroSoft Bob -- it was that cartoony software that slowed your machine to a crawl and insulted you while balancing your checkbook or reading email). When Bob was revealed to be the complete and utter turkey that it was always destined to be, guess what got some of the "usability and human interface" stuff? Office. Guess who happened to also be, ah, "seeing" The Boss? Melinda. Why wasn't Bob just canned, like any other project that wastes millions and failed completely? You have to wonder if Bill G wasn't getting pillow-talked into something. In fact, MS Bob was the first consumer product Bill Gates released personally. People do the strangest things for love.
Anyway, a lot of what Bob had to offer didn't get canned (as it should have). It got repuposed and wound up in other MS products. Take a look at the screenshot on this page. See that dog in the lower corner? That was Bob's dog Rex. (I wish they had a picture of the dragon named "Java"; I wonder if McNealy every knew about that?) Looks like that paper clip, eh? Bob's ghost is in other stuff, too. MS Agent had a re-incarnation.
Well this is all way OT. But I think the Bob fiasco sheds some light on what goes on at MS. There's really no reason to wonder about the pape clip. I'm sure Melinda will insist on touchy-feely stuff being included in every MS product. I love it when someone thinks for me...
-B
Just hit the 'g' key a couple times. Toggles "show", "show but don't load", and "don't show/don't load" modes. There's no reason to dig anywhere.
And if you want to try something extra spiffy, hit F8, then hit 'g'. Now type in something and you'll get the Google search results for the term you entered.
-B
The T90 is a wee bit big for most desktops, but it plays well on the kitchen counter and the like. Dogs and cats don't mind them unless you shoot them... in which case they don't like you to get the tank down off the shelf at all. The little Airsoft pellets do sting, and leave a mark: my wife ended up with a tiny welt (completely accidentally, of course).
The model itself is very well done and it's easy to put together. No painting needed, though. Contrary to what Dan says (at the link above), the tank does work in grass. It'll climb a stack of books, up to about a 60 degree incline. It'll go right over a bunch of bananas, a 2x4, Doc Martens, etc. Works great on tile, kinda good on carpet (turning isn't so great on carpet). The pellets have a decent range. You can can them bounce off your neighbors house across the street for instance. (Nothing works better for keeping the young kids off your lawn, BTW, than a couple pellets headed down their direction.)
Anyway, fun stuff. You can also get red and green 6mm paintballs for your tank as well. I haven't tried them yet. My wife is upset enough without having to see little red and green splotches all over the house. Maybe for Christmas, though...
-B
Oh, I don't like Windows. I just had a pithy comment. That's all. I don't like VMS either. Had to use that once...
So what MS product got hacked again?
So what OS should I use? I could re-install Windows I guess -- I'd need to buy a copy from some place. I also don't have much Windows software. Can Windows run Linux software? I can run some Windows stuff in WINE. BeOS runs pretty well on my machine, although their SCSI drivers leave a little to be desired. I could run one of the BSDs too...
What do you think? What is it I should be doing? How can I run an OS that doesn't suck? How can I meet with your approval?
(Say what you will about me wanting actual vendor support, but I went through the DRI hell of owning -- and eventually dumping at a considerable loss -- a Voodoo5 5500. I now have a GeForce2 Ultra and the Nvidia driver was easy to install and works reasonably well. And I could care less that it isn't open source. Their hardware, their driver, my choice to use it. Same as my choice to use Opera. It's the best tool for the job.)
Anyway, I'd really like to see some of the "independant" review sites (especially Tom's and/or AnandTech) start including a bit about Linux compatibility (including whether or not OSS drivers exist), performance, availability, etc. But I guess since the press kit didn't have any mention of Linux, the reviews won't either, like Michael says. Plenty of ad views on those reviews, though...
They load Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4, of all things. Any other linux ought to work just fine, though. Red Hat has a Hardware Compatibility Page which lists other laptops known to work.
I find it very hard to believe that people in the US can't get health care (or "struggle" to get it). If they don't have it, then it's because they haven't tried. When I was young my family had very little money, and we went to the county hospital for everything from TB to broken bones. You showed up, avoided the prisoners chained to the benches next to you, saw a doctor (who maybe didn't speak English so well), got treated and left. I don't remember any of us every whining about it or asking for any pity or using our fairly austere upbringing to lend a sad yet authoritative note to some third party's wank of a film. They removed cancer from her. You don't typically get compensation for that kind of thing. At least, people didn't used to. Now that we have socially correct, wooly-headed thinkers like Charlene Gilbert around, that might change.
I wonder how many epidermal cells I've lost without receiving adequate compensation? Someone probably owes me cash. That air handler at Disney World stole my cells! I struggled to make those as a poor child! They traded my flesh for entertainment! I want cash! Someone make me a film about poor children! Breadwinners want their slice!
Either that or we can start a dialog, and talk about all the issues surrounding our cultural paradigm with respect to ethical consent and the shifting mores of a society wrenched with knowing it paid for people whose cells have been also traded as so much chattel and will live on into the next century long after we're all gone but still thinking of the viable mythlike qualities of the implicable ramifications of its moral institutions...
What a load. I want a grant too.
-B
Bah. I play Xscorch..
Which weapon on Counter Strike do you prefer?
Tribes2, man. I've dueled Shrikes with a bomber.
What is your home machine?
Which one? I'll go open the rack and let you know...
Yeah, you'd be able to see the system call. You could probably make it more insidious using exec or something embedded in the print statement. But since they'd know where the damage came from, it's not a good idea be malicious in a .sig (not that it's a good idea to be malicious anyway, but you get the point... :-)
About the h38 instead fo h36. My email used to be wrhodes1@san.rr.com. I was too lazy to change it all the way (and it works just as well -- h5000 would work fine). Run 'perldoc -f pack' to see some helpful info as well.
-B
That's partially true. An OSS project lives as long as the tarballs are on a server somewhere. Howeer, you can't think that they wouldn't be happy to see VA Linux, Red Hat, SuSE, Ximian, et al. go away? They might not be able to get rid of the software, but they seem to have shown a certain skill reducing the market share of competitor's projects. For example, I doubt many people are using WordPerfect on OS/2 these days...
There can be no endgame for MS. They cannot go after a checkmate. They cannot kill us.
Yes, there can and they can and will. They can do something similar to what the IM stuff has been all about. They tacitly agree to help Mono (by not squashing it outright and releasing some sorta-open code). They get good press and the DoJ off their backs somewhat. People are duped into thinking MS can change and actually do some good for OSS. Then let's say that IBM or some such starts backing Mono. And then let's say that other companies like this because it's either free or low cost, or they have hackers that can toy with it, or whatever. So they start using Mono-based stuff instead of the MS stuff. Maybe even an OSS version of Passport comes out and starts to take off.
What will hapen then is that the Mono-based stuff will break in subtle ways. Like Java, maybe. Or Kerberos. Or like what will happen soon with SMB. Nothing sinister. It's just that Windows 2004 XP needed small changes "in order to maintain interoperbility with Microsoft's .NET (TM) and Passport (TM) services..." And, oops, those small changes break every Mono-based implementation previously released. And, no, the spec will not be opened because it would compromise MS's IP.
At that point, Mono plays catch-up and eventually dies. No company will touch Mono with a ten foot pole if they fear that at some point down the road MS might "have" to change a spec, and that change will break their apps. Apps which will aim to take people's money, mind you. That hits close to home. Sure the technology might live on, but it won't compete with MS's stuff. Not really, anyway.
If MS feels like their lunch is being eaten they will retaliate. They have to. Failure to maintain market share will get Bill Gates sued. This is a cold, hard fact. MS does not give any ground for long.
So what are we terrified of?
That maybe OSS companies and independant developers will waste effort on a doomed project. They they are dancing to the beat of MS's drum, not their own. They they will be forced into a role of playing catch-up, of always being second best or merely an "alternative" to MS's software.
If MS could controvert HTTP (read: Apache) such that IIS would be the only logical choice for web deployments, they would in one flat second and without even thinking about it. It's projects like Apache (and Tomcat, etc.) that are examples of what we need to be doing. Instead of coding up our own implementation of an IIS-like server that can do ASP and FrontPage and whatever, we have our own software. MS has been catching up to us on that front, and that's good because they actually come up with stuff that makes sense and we end up being forced to innovate where we otherwise might not. Apache is good software for good software's sake. Not software because it fits someone else's mold. I'm afraid Mono is just the opposite and that by the time we realize it, it will be too late.
-B
I swear, it's cliche come true: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It's like the Ximian guys are abused spouses. They're making excuses, thinking they can change the other person, pretending it'll all work out good this time, forgiving this one last time, so on and so on. People get therapy for this, you know. The solution is not to give them one more chance. The solution is to get the hell out and start fresh. We cannot let this codependant wool-gathering to continue where Microsoft is concerned. They cannot be beaten at their game. We need to get them to play our game. There are many things OSS can do better than a monolithic organization. we'll win by focusing on that. Proaction, not reaction.
Hmmm. Time for a new analogy.
People need to remember that MS is out to do one thing and one thing only: Create and maintain shareholder value. That's the only thing publicly traded companies aim to do and the only thing that matters to them. Everything besides that is secondary (contrary to the "We like to make innovative software for the betterment of the world" mantra the PR types like to repeat to us). And the cash goal is just fine; it's what our country was built on and it's created a lot of happy people and started a lot of successful companies. It works pretty well. Until you throw in some incredibly lucrative technology backed by technologically savvy yet altruistic individuals. It's chum for the MS corporate shark.
MS could no more resist the urge to co-opt and/or subvert Mono or related techologies than a Great White could resist a tasty meal at the Ft. Lauderdale Hemophiliac Seniors Beach club. MS will come out with .NET and Passport, and Ximian will have Mono. As soon as organizations start favoring Mono over MS's proprietary tech, MS will devour Mono by any means necessary. They have to, in order to maintiain market share. They have to keep up with the slippery slope, and nobody can tell me they won't do whatever it takes when it comes right down to it. They have to stay moving and eating to survive, and will react badly to anything that threatens their food supply of cash and mindshare. What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine... an eating machine. It's really a miracle of business evolution. All this machine does is extend and embrace and extinguish other competeing technologies and that's all. (Apologies to Mr. Hooper.)
Anyway, people would do themselves well to remember the past.
-B
After all, ice doesn't necessarily have to be water.
-B
Why not just stop using Windows and/or (especially) Outlook? Keep trying to protect yourself against MS products, you have a life-long uphill battle ahead of you. Jeez, if you can't give up Windows, use Eudora. It works better than Outlook and it's reasonably safe.
I can't believe people are still willing to get hit with this kind of crap over and over and over...
-B
-B
And I have a bunch more questions that a lot of other people will ask. But if anyone has any details, please share. I've been wating to dust off my old Palm (aye, there's a joke in there somewhere). If this is cheap enough and has enough functionality, I might just try it.
-B
I can't fathom people using an IM service for anything but idle chat. People actually use this for anything they care about!?! Holy shit! Pardon my French, but that's absolutely mind-blowing. Makes me wonder how much business-critical traffic passes through MS's (and AOL's) servers in the clear every day. Wow.
If you've been relying on IM for any data you care about, then I'd say you've gotten what you deserve. Oi.
-B
An old bumber sticker cliche, but true nonetheless. And of course, they can pry things from my fingers, yada yada yada. Can't we all just get along?
-B
Last time I played with mapping software was using GIS stuff at U of A. Oy, if that doesn't split your head nothing will. Drawmap looks very cool indeed.
-B
I'd rather use my own version of Linux. And I have my own method of uncrufting my system, and it's worked for me for the last six years or so. It also works where apt won't: when the software doesn't come in a package. If I want to install it, I can, and I'm not bound by someone else's rules about what a package is and isn't, what it has in it, etc. In fact, that's what I really like about Linux: I get to make the decisions. Same as Taco and yourself -- it's all good. And if Taco was willing, he could try the new version of X. That was my only (tongue-in-cheek) point.
Anyway, millions of Linux users can't be all wrong. Whether it's Debian of Storm or even Mandrake it's still Linux.
-B
Why wait? Do it like the rest of the world! It's easy and fun! Like so:
> sh Xinstall.sh
Then you don't have to be at the mecry of package maintainers. You'll have control over your own system, and in no time you'll be livin' la vida Libertarian.
-B
Without knowing *anything* about what he intends to do with his new language choice, I humbly suggest that Josh take a look at perl and vi. Using perl will give him a taste of Unix scipting, and perl is very multipurpose (perl is arugably the VB of the Linux world). Perl has the added bonus of being easy to learn, so spinning up from VB won't be as hard as with Java or C (no flamewars intended). Learning and using vi will allow him to get to know an editor he can use at a command prompt, which practically is a required skill for a Unix user (after all, you may not always have X, so only getting to know a GUI does you a great disservice). I'd even recommend emacs, which has some great IDE development capabilities.
After he's got perl and vi under his belt, he can go take a look at an X-based GUI. But I still say that he should examine his programmatic requirements before his aesthetic requirements. Again, this is only a humble suggestion based solely on my experiences. YMMV, etc, etc.
-B