Why don't they realise that they only reason the Internet has been so successfull is because it works by using a set of standard protocols that anyone can adopt and use.
They are not dumb, they realize that. But they don't like it either, since it takes away the control over the market they have got used to with their desktop monopoly.
I still remember very lively a talk by the MS net boss at the 3rd WWW conference, back in 1995. There we (the audience) got told that this whole Internet thing as it has been built up to then is quite nice, but that it is time to stop playing in that children sandbox and to start creating something that's proper for business. They have been working toward that goal eversince.
In my company, for example, all of the tech guys use UNIX and all of the admin and sales use Windows. We have to interact with each other. If MS aren't going to allow it through their tools, it just means companies like mine will have to migrate to non-MS solutions for even the Windows machines.
You realize that your situation is very rare, don't you? In almost all companies, buying decisions are made by admin and sales, and not by the tech guys. That's the reason why there are so many Windows servers, after all.
If you want functionality beyond that, people have devised ways to set the internal clock, modify the channel lineup, prevent software updates, and even populate the guide data from public sources. The hacks all exist, but have been created by and for people who have special circumstances that don't allow them to use the service as listed.
"don't allow them to use"? You mean like: not living in the US and having no advantage whatsoever from Tivo's potential service?
TiVo-like devices, i.e., PVRs, are of interest for lots of reasons. TiVo seems to be writing off its potential non-US business with its insistence on service. (And yes, I know that they don't make money on the systems sold by Panasonic. Then they should simply raise their price tag.)
Until then I'm also waiting for a PVR with sensible functionality, without an extra service attached. My VCR has no service either, and I don't miss it at all.
For those of you who are really interested in the history of programming languages:
Donald E. Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo: The Early Development of Programming Languages. In
A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Proceedings of the International Research Conference on the History
of Computing. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, June 1976, pp. 197-273. Academic Press 1980, ISBN 0-12-491650-3.
You have to go to a library, actually; the article is not available online. But it pays back with the wonderfull style of DEK.
Re:How long until this article will not be availab
on
The Future Of The Book
·
· Score: 1
[...]
The problem is more likely to be noticed because most of the information on the web isn't indexed and archived externally. [...] Another part is the lack of an "official" effort to provide such an index/archive.
Eventually, we are in full agreement. This was exactly the point I wanted to drive home. In the traditional printing world, there is an external index/archive; in the online world there isn't.
And your're point that URLs are not URIs is right, of course. I should have emphasized this more. (I took it for granted too much - I seem to be too long aquainted with that stuff, starting with work as member of an IETF working group on meta-information for IAFA (Internet Anonymous FTP Archives) back in 1994.)
Re:How long until this article will not be availab
on
The Future Of The Book
·
· Score: 1
There is a very important difference between an out-of-print paper book and a moved website: You've got good chances that you're able to get the book from some library, i.e., its content will still be accessible quite easily. I don't need to ask the one who wrote it or the publisher, there is a public infrastructure available. Your chances to get the content of a moved website converge[sp?] towards 0 - publishers are shut down and author contact information is often not available. The content will be lost.
How long until this article will not be available?
on
The Future Of The Book
·
· Score: 1
This article - one of the best ones I've ever read about the future of printed publications in the digital world - reflects itself a major problem:
How long will it be that we won't be able to access it any more due to the ever-changing nature of the Web?
The publisher will reorganize its Web site, may go our of business (think Suck), etc. The author mentions in the article that still many digital works in the scientific field are converted to print once - this has clearly the advantage that we can reference them still in a few years.
I agree completely. The article does not explain the basic difference between these three approaches, it gives no guidelines when to use them. Just publishing examples is simply not enough.
And the problem is not only the Java examples. Just like the missing JSP pointer, I would have expected pointers to embedded Perl scripting, too.
And to template-based systems, for those who want to do real work.
However, Mathematics while still dependent on the knowledge of the reciever, is absolute if the reciever id knowledgeable enough to understand the math.
Ever heard of Gödel? The concept of math theorems that are complete and without contradiction was thrown away at the start of the last century.
Once, this was a site for nerds, for people who knows at least a bit of math. Sigh.
Form what I've seen, it's not at all hard to get a bogus cert. You're basically paying for a rubber stamp. The primary reason certs are used is simply to convince the browser to open an ssl session without popping open 6 dialog boxes worth of FUD.
Actually, it's something of a hassle just to get a legitimate cert. You must, for instance, have a Dun & Bradstreet listing (among some of Verisign's irritating requirements.) Of course, it's possible to fake your way into it, but these companies provide a fairly decent level of identity verification.
That might be true for US companies. From Europe, all it takes to get a Global Id, is a phone number where Verisign calls back and verifies that the other side knows about the Global Id application.
And the real bummer is, they don't even require that the phone number is at the actual company the certificate is for. In our consulting company, we ordered many certificates for our clients and "verified" these certificate applications by being the point of contact for Verisign. And we were open about this against Verisign - we didn't make up a fake identity that we were actually our client.
Some of our clients do online banking. Needless to say, we regularily [sp?] point out to our client's management that these Verisign certificates are not worth a penny from the point of security. OTOH, as one needs a CA where the respective root certificate is already in the end user's browser, there is no possibility to use other certificates.
And, to be honest, from a risk management point of view, it's not so problematic. The damages that may occur by some imposter (who also would have to fake DNS on the Internet and/or hijack TCP/IP connections at a grand scale, btw) are not high enough to let the business opportunity slip away. It all boils down to the fact that there is no 100% security. You have to look at the risks, the damages that may occur, analyze them and decide if your're going to use this technology nevertheless. And for most B-to-C business, it's good enough.
Now, for B-to-B business, that's an other story because the sums involved are much higher and one usually doesn't have a money limit on the transfers.
If only well-known friends of yours access these services, why don't you prepare a Web site for them where they can download your CA root certificate and install it at their site?
While it's clear that these prompts come up for new visitors, one can tell them the few steps they need to do to get not bothered again.
There are *tons* of word processor programs for Linux, including Word Perfect.
Yes there are. As a journalist, I need to write articles that conform to page limits (400 per page) and submit then is.doc format.
Then you need to do exactly this. Use Word. Working around is more trouble than it's worth, it spoils your ROI (you need to spend too much effort for the money you receive).
As you do this for a living, shell out the few bucks for VMware and just use it. If you hate Word, well, who said that work is fun all the time?
And, if you're good enough, charge them a surplus if they force you to Word. Actually, that's what I am doing - contracts with an explicit price tag attached to "documentation in MS Office format". My customers shall know how expensive usage of these programs is. But then, I'm not a journalist and am not forced to work in a business with razor-thin margins...:-):-)
You wrote about Unix prices. You didn't mention workstations explicitely. Unix is usually deployed in the server market, not in the workstation market. Therefore, I commented on the situation of financing a common Unix deployment area - servers, in particular mission critical ones. Btw, I draw from experiences in automotive and flight industry, and financial institutions.
[Unxi vendors are] absolutely thieves when it comes to "mission critical" stuff. Granted, the hardware usually does it's job and the support is great but considering what they charge, it damn well better be great.
No, they aren't. When a customer looses tens or even hundreds of millions for every day (sometimes even for every hour) a system is down, the current price tag for hardware and support is quite in range. That is not stealing, that is "supplying a service that's needed in a free market." As I've said, person costs are much more expensive than actual vendor costs, a point you chose to ignore conveniently.
Oh and BTW you don't know a damn thing about my experience and I mentioned hardly anything about them. One simple example and people think they know all your life experiences.
Sorry, I didn't want to offend you and I'm surely not interested in all your life experiences. I wanted to point out that your technical experience and judgement might be very well; but I don't find your points on the financial side of this topic convincing. You just repeat your viewpoint; without any arguments backing them up. But this is/., I didn't expect it.;-)
Hardware prices are seldomly relevant, at least not in the range you're talking about. Peanuts, as they say here in Germany...
Setup costs (person hours of consultants, and also of internal staff) makes up a much larger amount. As an example, the last Sun HA cluster I did set up costed roughly $750K. Implementation costs were above $1M. Implementation costs for a Linux cluster would have been even larger. (Just ignoring for the moment that Linux clusters are not yet ready for mission-critical systems.)
Maintenance (better: support) contracts is always a sad topic. It severly depends on the vendor staff you work with. Actually, since this story is on Sun - I had very good experience with our Gold-Plus and Platin support contracts - but their price tag is a bit higher than the one quoted by you...:-)
Sorry to say this, but you don't seem to have experience in financing system installations in an industrial setting.
Being 16 and proud, this means one thing first: It's easy to exploit your work for money that no professional would work for. You don't think about health care, do you?
That's OK for ever-money-starfing schools and colleges; but you shoulnd't take that habit to business - it'll destroy you after a very short time.
Disclaimer: I'm 40, CEO of a consulting company - we're troubleshooters, normally called in when some dumb-ass (both young and old ones:-) ruined a project. I had my shares of both young and old know-it-alls. Previously, they ruined my day. Now, I it earns my money.
Yes, you value your freedoms. Of course, everybody values their own freedoms.
But civil societies are built on the premise that the freedom of other people are as important as one own's freedom. Obviously, you don't get such a simple concept.
Thanks god I don't have to treat my staff this way. They're working hard, and have earned respect - otherwise they wouldn't have worked for me in the first place.
You people who think that the attitude expressed in the article and in most of the comments is normal are making me sick.
But computers are used to save ressources - working hours of qualified human work. It's one of the scarcest ressources available. Computers are cheaper than human work.
So, the programs are so crappy because it's too expensive to create good programs (read: there's no short- or mid-term ROI that's demanded for most companies). It's more important to save the work of secretaries and other support staff than to give you some extra computer cycles more. Etc, pp.
As a CEO, I must tell you that long-time employees are way cheaper than new ones.
First of all, they spent less time learning about the real working processes in the company, and building up the internal connections without no real job gets done.
Second, let's suppose you get a 15% raise every year (that, e.g., is the typical raise in my company, and that's very good for Germany). Changing jobs will often get you 50% and more. New folks get more and more expensive.
So, every long-time and satisfied employee is one of the most important assets of a company. A management that doesn't grok this isn't worth their money.
No, if you want to think about using XML for this, you need to talk about the DTD, not XML itself.
And then you make the same error as you pointed out yourself. (Quite rightful, I have to add.)
The DTD buys you nothing if you don't have applications that support it. And it's not a function of the DTD that it is easily rendered or easily edited. That's the problem with available programs.
While rendering is readily available for a large class of DTDs today, editors are still the big bummer. There are simply no high-quality XML editors for non-technical types that have a reasonable price-tag and are available on a large number of platforms. (Technical types may and will use (X)Emacs+psgml-mode, or simply vi.)
Sorry, but I take exception at that. It would be great if Word would handle images at least as good as LaTeX. I.e., if it would
not crash all the time if one uses more than 10 or 20 images in one document.
be able to rotate included images in arbitrary angles (or, at least to landscape!)
position them correctly as floating figures even when one changes the text a lot
provide proper and working cross references and tables of figures, even if one changes text and figure captions a lot
And that's just the first few points that irritate me the most. I could go on and on for hours how bad Word is. It's not a word processor, but nothing more than a typewriter with a glorified interface and a brain dead dancing paperclip, pushed by The Marketing Machine[tm] as a de-facto standard.
Concerning Framemaker, that's a different thing: It's a neat system. Too bad that Adobe pulled the plug for the Linux version.
Disclaimer: Once, I was involved in LaTeX development. I'm still the admin contact for the LaTeX Project's domain. Nowadays, as a consultant, I'm writing Word and Powerpoint documents for a living. I've got my share of experience with all those systems, maybe even more that I want.
You're right that for home users, tape drives a technology of the past.
But, tapes are not there for simple backup, there are there for desasters (both logically - whops, that rm was not was I wanted - and physically - storm, fire, earthquakes, etc).
And I can't take the drive and put it somewhere else easily. Well, perhaps on my home system, but not on the 10+ terabyte storage systems of my customers. This storage is already mirrored, i.e., stored on RAID-1 systems. One must not trust RAID-5 in HA environments, believe me. That is the point when hierarchical storage systems (HSMs) come into play. And there, I still trust my tape robots that are connected to the good ol' MVS system. It's hard to beat them.
By the way, the real problems are somewhere else. Restoring data from pentabyte-sized archives is difficult, and it doesn't matter on which media they are.
Actually, Xerox invented the mouse-based GUI. I'm not saying this just to be a historical nitpicker. Xerox never marketed GUI-based systems because they didn't realize how important they could become. The actual result would have been that Apple would have been deterred from making the Mac.
No.
The introduction of overlapping windows, as done by Apple, most probably would have been enough to qualify as a new innovation. Besides, Xerox, not being a computer/software company, would not have been very interested to go after innovations similar to its patents.
Now, Apple having such a patent (on overlapping windows), that would be a completely different matter. If you're old enough, you'll still remember how aggressively Apple's legal department was by suing a whole lot of companies, just because they tried to learn from the Apple UI. Do you remember the discussions if UIs may be protected by copyright? I do - obscure lawsuits on every nitty-gritty details happened all the time.
Now, imagine Apple let loose with the power of a patent, and not just with copyright claims. They would not only be able to go after those who learn from their UI, they could also go after those who do their own original work - it just needs to be similar enough by having overlapping windows.
The advantage of not having MS Windows today would simply not outweigh the disadvantages.
I think, the AC addressed two issues that are on completely different levels.
The first one (and the one I'm jumping on): He or she doesn't like how the sourceforge is distributed and how well it's cleaned up (no docs, no CVS, etc.) At the same time, he complains that they don't release often. Well, what shall they do? Release or clean up?
It's an unfortunate tendency that today it's kind of demanded to make everything proper from the start. (I still remember how the first Linux kernels looked -- no polishing at all.) If it doesn't have a configure script, it's not good. Not good IMNSHO, but you can't change people.
IMO, the author hits home with his second point, on a seperate issue: the way the SourceForge folks react on volunteers.
But one should not mix the technical and the personal complaints. That just leads to the typical/. flames, not to sensible discussions.
Where did this idea come from precisely? Maybe i don't read to same books, see the same movies, etc. but I've never seen computer
porteyed as all knowing and/or all powerful.
Read some stuff from Ray Kurzweil. The Age of Spiritual Machines might be best. And understand that he's considered a serious author; not just some blabbering idiot. Among others, he's credited with inventing OCR and pioneered text-to-speech synthesizers.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not dumb, they realize that. But they don't like it either, since it takes away the control over the market they have got used to with their desktop monopoly.
I still remember very lively a talk by the MS net boss at the 3rd WWW conference, back in 1995. There we (the audience) got told that this whole Internet thing as it has been built up to then is quite nice, but that it is time to stop playing in that children sandbox and to start creating something that's proper for business. They have been working toward that goal eversince.
You realize that your situation is very rare, don't you? In almost all companies, buying decisions are made by admin and sales, and not by the tech guys. That's the reason why there are so many Windows servers, after all.
"don't allow them to use"? You mean like: not living in the US and having no advantage whatsoever from Tivo's potential service?
TiVo-like devices, i.e., PVRs, are of interest for lots of reasons. TiVo seems to be writing off its potential non-US business with its insistence on service. (And yes, I know that they don't make money on the systems sold by Panasonic. Then they should simply raise their price tag.)
Until then I'm also waiting for a PVR with sensible functionality, without an extra service attached. My VCR has no service either, and I don't miss it at all.
For those of you who are really interested in the history of programming languages:
You have to go to a library, actually; the article is not available online. But it pays back with the wonderfull style of DEK.
Online addicts may want to check The historical development of Fortran.
Eventually, we are in full agreement. This was exactly the point I wanted to drive home. In the traditional printing world, there is an external index/archive; in the online world there isn't.
And your're point that URLs are not URIs is right, of course. I should have emphasized this more. (I took it for granted too much - I seem to be too long aquainted with that stuff, starting with work as member of an IETF working group on meta-information for IAFA (Internet Anonymous FTP Archives) back in 1994.)
There is a very important difference between an out-of-print paper book and a moved website: You've got good chances that you're able to get the book from some library, i.e., its content will still be accessible quite easily. I don't need to ask the one who wrote it or the publisher, there is a public infrastructure available. Your chances to get the content of a moved website converge[sp?] towards 0 - publishers are shut down and author contact information is often not available. The content will be lost.
This article - one of the best ones I've ever read about the future of printed publications in the digital world - reflects itself a major problem:
The publisher will reorganize its Web site, may go our of business (think Suck), etc. The author mentions in the article that still many digital works in the scientific field are converted to print once - this has clearly the advantage that we can reference them still in a few years.
I agree completely. The article does not explain the basic difference between these three approaches, it gives no guidelines when to use them. Just publishing examples is simply not enough.
And the problem is not only the Java examples. Just like the missing JSP pointer, I would have expected pointers to embedded Perl scripting, too. And to template-based systems, for those who want to do real work.
Ever heard of Gödel? The concept of math theorems that are complete and without contradiction was thrown away at the start of the last century.
Once, this was a site for nerds, for people who knows at least a bit of math. Sigh.
That might be true for US companies. From Europe, all it takes to get a Global Id, is a phone number where Verisign calls back and verifies that the other side knows about the Global Id application.
And the real bummer is, they don't even require that the phone number is at the actual company the certificate is for. In our consulting company, we ordered many certificates for our clients and "verified" these certificate applications by being the point of contact for Verisign. And we were open about this against Verisign - we didn't make up a fake identity that we were actually our client.
Some of our clients do online banking. Needless to say, we regularily [sp?] point out to our client's management that these Verisign certificates are not worth a penny from the point of security. OTOH, as one needs a CA where the respective root certificate is already in the end user's browser, there is no possibility to use other certificates.
And, to be honest, from a risk management point of view, it's not so problematic. The damages that may occur by some imposter (who also would have to fake DNS on the Internet and/or hijack TCP/IP connections at a grand scale, btw) are not high enough to let the business opportunity slip away. It all boils down to the fact that there is no 100% security. You have to look at the risks, the damages that may occur, analyze them and decide if your're going to use this technology nevertheless. And for most B-to-C business, it's good enough.
Now, for B-to-B business, that's an other story because the sums involved are much higher and one usually doesn't have a money limit on the transfers.
If only well-known friends of yours access these services, why don't you prepare a Web site for them where they can download your CA root certificate and install it at their site?
While it's clear that these prompts come up for new visitors, one can tell them the few steps they need to do to get not bothered again.
Then you need to do exactly this. Use Word. Working around is more trouble than it's worth, it spoils your ROI (you need to spend too much effort for the money you receive).
As you do this for a living, shell out the few bucks for VMware and just use it. If you hate Word, well, who said that work is fun all the time?
And, if you're good enough, charge them a surplus if they force you to Word. Actually, that's what I am doing - contracts with an explicit price tag attached to "documentation in MS Office format". My customers shall know how expensive usage of these programs is. But then, I'm not a journalist and am not forced to work in a business with razor-thin margins... :-) :-)
You wrote about Unix prices. You didn't mention workstations explicitely. Unix is usually deployed in the server market, not in the workstation market. Therefore, I commented on the situation of financing a common Unix deployment area - servers, in particular mission critical ones. Btw, I draw from experiences in automotive and flight industry, and financial institutions.
No, they aren't. When a customer looses tens or even hundreds of millions for every day (sometimes even for every hour) a system is down, the current price tag for hardware and support is quite in range. That is not stealing, that is "supplying a service that's needed in a free market." As I've said, person costs are much more expensive than actual vendor costs, a point you chose to ignore conveniently.
Sorry, I didn't want to offend you and I'm surely not interested in all your life experiences. I wanted to point out that your technical experience and judgement might be very well; but I don't find your points on the financial side of this topic convincing. You just repeat your viewpoint; without any arguments backing them up. But this is /., I didn't expect it. ;-)
Hardware prices are seldomly relevant, at least not in the range you're talking about. Peanuts, as they say here in Germany...
Setup costs (person hours of consultants, and also of internal staff) makes up a much larger amount. As an example, the last Sun HA cluster I did set up costed roughly $750K. Implementation costs were above $1M. Implementation costs for a Linux cluster would have been even larger. (Just ignoring for the moment that Linux clusters are not yet ready for mission-critical systems.)
Maintenance (better: support) contracts is always a sad topic. It severly depends on the vendor staff you work with. Actually, since this story is on Sun - I had very good experience with our Gold-Plus and Platin support contracts - but their price tag is a bit higher than the one quoted by you... :-)
Sorry to say this, but you don't seem to have experience in financing system installations in an industrial setting.
For sure.
Being 16 and proud, this means one thing first: It's easy to exploit your work for money that no professional would work for. You don't think about health care, do you?
That's OK for ever-money-starfing schools and colleges; but you shoulnd't take that habit to business - it'll destroy you after a very short time.
Disclaimer: I'm 40, CEO of a consulting company - we're troubleshooters, normally called in when some dumb-ass (both young and old ones :-) ruined a project. I had my shares of both young and old know-it-alls. Previously, they ruined my day. Now, I it earns my money.
Yes, you value your freedoms. Of course, everybody values their own freedoms.
But civil societies are built on the premise that the freedom of other people are as important as one own's freedom. Obviously, you don't get such a simple concept.
Uneducated barbar.
Thanks god I don't live in such circumstances.
Thanks god I don't have to treat my staff this way. They're working hard, and have earned respect - otherwise they wouldn't have worked for me in the first place.
You people who think that the attitude expressed in the article and in most of the comments is normal are making me sick.
But computers are used to save ressources - working hours of qualified human work. It's one of the scarcest ressources available. Computers are cheaper than human work.
So, the programs are so crappy because it's too expensive to create good programs (read: there's no short- or mid-term ROI that's demanded for most companies). It's more important to save the work of secretaries and other support staff than to give you some extra computer cycles more. Etc, pp.
You've got it dead wrong.
As a CEO, I must tell you that long-time employees are way cheaper than new ones.
First of all, they spent less time learning about the real working processes in the company, and building up the internal connections without no real job gets done.
Second, let's suppose you get a 15% raise every year (that, e.g., is the typical raise in my company, and that's very good for Germany). Changing jobs will often get you 50% and more. New folks get more and more expensive.
So, every long-time and satisfied employee is one of the most important assets of a company. A management that doesn't grok this isn't worth their money.
Just IMNSHO, of course. :-)
And then you make the same error as you pointed out yourself. (Quite rightful, I have to add.)
The DTD buys you nothing if you don't have applications that support it. And it's not a function of the DTD that it is easily rendered or easily edited. That's the problem with available programs.
While rendering is readily available for a large class of DTDs today, editors are still the big bummer. There are simply no high-quality XML editors for non-technical types that have a reasonable price-tag and are available on a large number of platforms. (Technical types may and will use (X)Emacs+psgml-mode, or simply vi.)
Sad, but that's the way it is.
Sorry, but I take exception at that. It would be great if Word would handle images at least as good as LaTeX. I.e., if it would
And that's just the first few points that irritate me the most. I could go on and on for hours how bad Word is. It's not a word processor, but nothing more than a typewriter with a glorified interface and a brain dead dancing paperclip, pushed by The Marketing Machine[tm] as a de-facto standard.
Concerning Framemaker, that's a different thing: It's a neat system. Too bad that Adobe pulled the plug for the Linux version.
Disclaimer: Once, I was involved in LaTeX development. I'm still the admin contact for the LaTeX Project's domain. Nowadays, as a consultant, I'm writing Word and Powerpoint documents for a living. I've got my share of experience with all those systems, maybe even more that I want.
You're right that for home users, tape drives a technology of the past.
But, tapes are not there for simple backup, there are there for desasters (both logically - whops, that rm was not was I wanted - and physically - storm, fire, earthquakes, etc).
And I can't take the drive and put it somewhere else easily. Well, perhaps on my home system, but not on the 10+ terabyte storage systems of my customers. This storage is already mirrored, i.e., stored on RAID-1 systems. One must not trust RAID-5 in HA environments, believe me. That is the point when hierarchical storage systems (HSMs) come into play. And there, I still trust my tape robots that are connected to the good ol' MVS system. It's hard to beat them.
By the way, the real problems are somewhere else. Restoring data from pentabyte-sized archives is difficult, and it doesn't matter on which media they are.
No.
The introduction of overlapping windows, as done by Apple, most probably would have been enough to qualify as a new innovation. Besides, Xerox, not being a computer/software company, would not have been very interested to go after innovations similar to its patents.
Now, Apple having such a patent (on overlapping windows), that would be a completely different matter. If you're old enough, you'll still remember how aggressively Apple's legal department was by suing a whole lot of companies, just because they tried to learn from the Apple UI. Do you remember the discussions if UIs may be protected by copyright? I do - obscure lawsuits on every nitty-gritty details happened all the time.
Now, imagine Apple let loose with the power of a patent, and not just with copyright claims. They would not only be able to go after those who learn from their UI, they could also go after those who do their own original work - it just needs to be similar enough by having overlapping windows.
The advantage of not having MS Windows today would simply not outweigh the disadvantages.
Full name is "slash.", isn't it?
would be a nice address: http://slash./
The first one (and the one I'm jumping on): He or she doesn't like how the sourceforge is distributed and how well it's cleaned up (no docs, no CVS, etc.) At the same time, he complains that they don't release often. Well, what shall they do? Release or clean up?
It's an unfortunate tendency that today it's kind of demanded to make everything proper from the start. (I still remember how the first Linux kernels looked -- no polishing at all.) If it doesn't have a configure script, it's not good. Not good IMNSHO, but you can't change people.
IMO, the author hits home with his second point, on a seperate issue: the way the SourceForge folks react on volunteers.
But one should not mix the technical and the personal complaints. That just leads to the typical /. flames, not to sensible discussions.
Read some stuff from Ray Kurzweil. The Age of Spiritual Machines might be best. And understand that he's considered a serious author; not just some blabbering idiot. Among others, he's credited with inventing OCR and pioneered text-to-speech synthesizers.
Or, read Bill Joy's essay in Wired on the soon-to-arrive almighty robots.