Really!?! Show me the Email client that launches an executable simply by double-clicking on it.
What? You can't find one. Perhaps Microsoft will write one so that Linux can be unsecure as well.
Yes, there are security problems in every OS, but Microsoft goes out of its way to create security problems. Regular users can delete, update, or change system files in the default setting What the heck sort of security is that? Microsoft has even blurred the line between data and executables by creating documents that can launch macros with hooks into the entire operating system. What was Microsoft thinking? At the very least Microsoft should have created a sanbox for these VBA macros.
The fact of the matter is that Linux + StarOffice is an order of magnitude safer than Windows + Office and would be even if Linux had the greater market share.
That's a good point. I have a 486 X terminal at home, and I am always surprised at how well it works. If you had a lot of volunteer work (or if the machines all had the same video card:), and very little money this would certainly be the way to go.
1. All the teachers know Windows. My bet is that even many of the computer teachers do not know Linux well enough to run it in their labs. They can't teach it if they don't know it and teacher training could be expensive and take a lot of what's probably considered unnecessary time.
What you really mean to say is that all of the teachers know how to log on and fire up Word. Most teachers don't really know anything about Windows administration. That's why the computers in most classrooms work poorly.
This simply means that whatever Linux front end was offered would have to be similar to Windows. It would have to be at least as similar as Windows XP is to Windows 95. For the simple things both KDE and Gnome can be set up so that the teachers wouldn't miss a beat.
2. They would have a lot harder teaching a completely new OS AND classes on how to use the programs than to just teach the programs. You'd probably have to have a intro to Linux class before you could ever teach whichever programs you choose to use - and that's another issue in itself.
Once again. The teachers aren't teaching the students to use the OS. Most teachers don't even know that right clicking on objects gives them a different menu. Teachers are teaching students to "click on the Word icon" and then word process. If you created icons for the StarOffice programs you would be 90% of the way there.
3. Students probably have Windows at home. Would they have problems with converting documents between systems? Say you create your report in Word at home, could your bring it school and use it there?
This is already a problem. Even if you have Windows. Many students who have computers don't have MS Office (it's expensive), and if they do have MS Office there is a good chance that they have an older version like Office 95 that won't open the newer formats (easily). With a switch to Linux the school could easily (and inexpensively) hand out copies of StarOffice for Windows or Linux (it's free).
4. The local tech support and computer stores would not be able to help them if something went wrong. 99% of the techs around here don't know anything about anything other than Windows. Who would know enough about Linux to help them??
This, in my opinion, is the one legitimate point. However, the answer to this is to not roll out Linux PCs but instead to have one Linux server and a pile of thin-clients. That way all the local tech would have to do is throw out the old thin-client and plug in the new one. My guess is that the current Windows administrator could easily learn to be a fairly competent Linux admin if they didn't have to worry about all of the failed client PCs. He/She would have a whole lot more time on their hands with only one machine to administer.
5. The students would learn programs and OSes that would different with what they would have when they go to college, go to work, etc. Since there are very few offices and colleges using entirely Linux, they would be at a disadvantage right away.
Anyone that can learn to use StarOffice will have no trouble using MS Office (and vice versa). These applications are nearly identical.
Of course there are a lot of plusses too, but these negatives sprang to mind right away. Of course they are all refutable. I think that the schools would choose easy and expensive over difficult and cheap any day. If they didn't have a choice and were nearly out of money, my guess is they would let the computers sit
And that's precisely the information that is needed to sell schools on Free Software. Demonstrate to them how much easier it would be for them to administer one Linux server and a pile of disposable ThinkNics and you can bet that they will sit up and listen. At the very least public schools should be giving StarOffice a look. It would save them a bundle in licensing, and will even run on their existing Windows systems.
Actually this is precisely why Linux has the potential to be such a big win. Rolling out software to Windows desktops requires a ton of work, maintaining each of those fragile beasts requires even more work. Have you ever seen the systems at your typical school. They are a mess.
Now imagine that the school took their money and bought one commodity Intel-based server and a great big pile of inexpensive thin-clients (like the ThinkNic). Adding or updating the software for your system now is a snap. You upgrade your server and the clients have immediate access to the new software. No CDs to lug around, no reboots, no problems. Heck, the administrator wouldn't even have to be on site. One quick "apt-get install foo-package" and it's done. Accounting, security, and other user management tools have existed for Unix forever. You can easily set quotas for nearly every resource that is available to end users and you can monitor your Linux server to the nth degree without leaving the comfort of your bedroom.
Thin clients have been seen as the systems administrator's Nirvana for years, but it wasn't until Linux came along that there was really any useful software that would run on these systems. However, the combination of StarOffice + Mozilla is starting to look like a compelling combination. Especially in places like schools where money is tight and where it is important that the computers both allow easy collaboration and tight security. All of the students would essentially be sharing the same machine (making it easy to work on projects together), but none of them would have write access to any system files (much better security than Windows PCs).
The trick of course, is in removing the PCs. That would leave the school with one server and a pile of essentially disposable devices. If you think replacing Windows PCs with Linux PCs, then you are almost certainly correct, the Linux solution would be more difficult to administer (or more expensive anyway as it would require a much more savvy administrator). However, if you replaced the hordes of Windows PCs with a single Linux server then even the slowest Windows admin could probably find the time to learn to administer Linux.
Microsoft shouldn't be worried about Linux, it should be worried about StarOffice. After all, people get the operating system "for free" and Linux still doesn't have the wealth of software available for it that Windows has.
MS Office, on the other hand, is always an added expense, and it's expensive to boot. With the price of computers falling like a brick it won't be too long before the added cost of Microsoft Office doubles the price of a computer. Not only that, but there are probably more folks running Linux than folks that use a feature in MS Office that doesn't exist in StarOffice. In other words, the group of people that absolutely have to have MS Office is relatively small.
If the Office Suite were to become a commodity market Microsoft would be in a world of hurt (which is almost certainly why Sun is funding the effort).
I believe that it was Heinlein that said that all writers today are merely filing the serial numbers off of older stories. People have been telling "Epic" stories since long before Beowulf, and they probably will still be telling them when the sun burns out. What movie can you name that was done in the last 20 years that was truly innovative? You seem like you know what you are talking about, so I hate to disagree with you:), but without a better idea as to what you would consider truly innovative I can't help but think that you represent what I find most disappointing about Hollywood. Innovation is neat, technology is great, but if the purpose of the technology isn't to help tell the story it's wasted effort.
Hollywood can't get it through their heads that despite the fact that they spend far more today on special effects and fancy packaging than ever before most of these new movies will fail to become as popular as reruns of classic movies. What's more, the movies that do become modern classics owe their popularity to their storyline not their effects. That's why I can re-watch movies like E.T. or Star Wars and still enjoy them despite their now somewhat cheesy special effects.
The best that a movie can really hope for, when it comes to innovation, is to be the first to use some new technology. You might say that Lawrence of Arabia was innovative, but the story of Lawrence of Arabia was nothing more than an adaptation of a centuries old theme portayed on film. It was innovative because that hadn't been done before, but that doesn't make the story any better. More importantly, another well told story that fits the same pattern isn't any less good simply because LoA exists.
Disney's "Honey I Shrunk the Audience" is innovative (you can feel the dog sneeze on you), but it's not really what I want in a feature film. That's because I would rather see a good story, well told, than be bored by something that relies too heavily on technology. After all, who wants to see an "innovative" movie with no plot. I certainly don't. It's all about the story.
That's why I am excited to see LoTR, and it's why I enjoyed Harry Potter. Hollywood has of late seemed far too interested in innovation, instead of being interested in telling a good story. I don't want something new, I want the same thing that folks have been asking from their storytellers for thousands of years, I want an interesting story well told.
Fah, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series is a classic. The last thing I want (I haven't seen it yet) is a movie that gets creative. There is little or no chance that some hack in Hollywood is going to actually improve the story behind LoTR. The director and staff should use their creativity to find a way to translate the story to film. That's one of the things that I like about the Harry Potter movie. It was almost as if they took the pictures right out of my head and pasted them up on the screen. What the LoTR needs isn't creativity, it's craftsmanship. I want a movie that takes one of my favorite stories ever and recreates it faithfully. Accomplishing this task, in my opinion, would require more actual creativity than rewriting the story.
It's even worse for me now that I use Mozilla at work as my primary browser (since it also excepts those same blessed Emacs keystrokes). I can't even use Windows anymore.
As a side note, just for fun I hit Alt-F4 on my Linux box (I didn't think it would do anything) and sure enough it closed my web browser. It would appear that IceWM, at least, has borrowed this particular keystroke from Windows. I wonder if I could re-map it so that C-x C-c would close the window instead?
Re:XP? Wouldn't Linux be just as easy?
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Huh? I have been using Linux since 1995 when I wandered into Linux-land looking for an inexpensive C compiler.
Is there some part of my argument that you feel is naive, or are you just trolling?
Re:not as easy as you might think
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Ok, whatever. It still goes to show how effective Microsoft's "code reviews" are. If it takes them years to find something that was meant to be a joke, then how long is it going to take them to find something that was meant to be a hard to spot backdoor written by a talented coder (there is no questioning the fact that Microsoft programmers are talented folks).
The fact of the matter is that bugs are hard to find in almost any setting. The fact that so few people have access to Microsoft source code simply makes it that much harder to find errors. Microsoft can pretend that they have processes in place to catch these sorts of errors, but when all it takes is the knowledge of one previously unknown buffer exploit it is hard to feel very safe.
Microsoft's entire security policy is based on the fact that the bad guys don't have access to their source code. This assumes, of course, that there isn't anyone inside of Microsoft that is willing to sell (or exploit themselves) security information.
Re:XP? Wouldn't Linux be just as easy?
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The amount of people that have access to the Linux source code is several orders of magnitude greater than Windows. That works in Linux's favor. Linux programs also are regularly ported to several different architectures. That's useful too. A lot of times subtle bugs can be found when the source is ported. Especially if it is ported to a radically different architecture using a totally different compiler.
Not only that, but Linux source code sometimes gets reused. That sort of thing helps as well. There is nothing like having someone else reuse your code for something totally unrelated for shaking out bugs.
Not that Free Software is perfect, but it certainly seems better than the alternative (in this regard).
Re:Where the hell is Microsoft's PR agency?
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Maybe Ballmer's dance is part of the process, that looked fairly rigorous. It also didn't look too terribly effective.
Re:not as easy as you might think
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That's assuming that the terrorists would actually have to plant backdoors. It would be far less dangerous, and far easier, to simply look for buffer overflows and then not report them to management. What good is a peer review if your "peer" is actually looking for exploitable code for their own ends. A remotely exploitable buffer overflow is every bit as good as a backdoor, and if they were in QA they wouldn't even have to write it themselves, they would simply have to let it slide through.
Now, I am not saying that the Al Qaeda has penetrated Microsoft, but I can't imagine that someone working at Microsoft hasn't been tempted to simply overlook a buffer overflow. Especially now that Windows is being used to run some very tempting targets.
Re:not as easy as you might think
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Whatever. Excel used to have a flight simulator embedded in it, for crying out loud! IIS had a back door password of "Netscape Engineers are Weenies" spelled backwords.
Not to mention the fact that it seems like Windows has an exploit approximately every 3.5 seconds, and that's without access to the source. A terrorist at Microsoft wouldn't even have to try and embed backdoors into the software. They could just keep track of the exploitable buffer overflows and pass them on to their buddies instead of raising attention to them at Microsoft. Microsoft's entire defense stems around the fact that the "bad guys" don't have access to the code and must therefore guess where the problems are (and even still they have more than their share of problems). Someone on the inside (with access to the source) could easily subvert this process.
For me installing Gnucash 1.6 (the same day I saw the/. article saying it was impossible to build) was as simple as:
apt-get install gnucash.
The cutting edge Gnome libraries of today are going to be the old staid ncurses of tomorrow. I personally am glad that GnuCash is reusing this software instead of re-inventing the wheel. It's tricky to compile now, but these software components are forming the building blocks of tomorrow's applications.
That being said, you certainly are correct when you point out that sometimes the Perl + Apache solution just makes sense. I don't use SQL-Ledger, but it seems to be easy to set up and relatively full featured. Adding nifty new technologies sometimes just makes things more difficult.
If you are doing manufacturing, then chances are good you don't really qualify as a "small business." There are plenty of businesses that just need accounting software. Even some big businesses don't need a manufacturing package, because surprise they don't manufacture anything.
Free Software accounting packages are likely to take off for the same reason that PCs did. When Lotus 1-2-3 came out only the smallest of small businesses could do their books with a PC, and yet Lotus was literally swamped with orders. It wasn't too long before nearly all businesses used these toys to do at least some of their accounting.
The KDE folks have at least considered using Orbit. Check it out. In fact the only reason that KDE isn't using Corba right now is that when they started KDE2 development there weren't any useable (read fast) Free Software ORBs available. Which highlights what is perhaps the biggest difference between the KDE and Gnome camps. There wasn't a useable ORB when Gnome started either, so they wrote one themselves (just like they essentially wrote their own widget set).
The KDE folks tend to look for shortcuts. They used a (then) non-free widget set because it was easier. When they couldn't find a useful ORB they simply wrote something else. Gnome's support of Corba turned out to be a big deal. It's the primary reason why Sun, HP, and some of the other UNIX big names are pouring money into Gnome and not KDE.
That's the point. Most of the 98% of the general computing public either downloads MP3s or has a "borrowed" copy of MS Office (or some other piece of software).
Heck, Apple has launched an entire ad campaign that basically shows you how easy it is to make your own CDs using their software. They realize that most people, including Microsoft's core clientelle, like the idea of being able to do these types of things. If Microsoft pushes too hard on DRM all they will be doing is making their competitors offerings more palatable.
If Microsoft was actually successful in stopping pirates then their software empire would crumble overnight. The only reason that most home users aren't taking a harder look at the low cost of Free Software is that they are already getting their software for free. They simply borrow a copy of MS Office (or whatever) from work. If Microsoft actually started clamping down and making sure that everyone actually ponied up $400 for MS Office folks would start looking around for alternatives.
They would soon find that alternatives like Corel's PerfectOffice and Sun's StarOffice are vastly less expensive, and instead of mailing Word documents around like crazy we would start to see other formats become more common.
I would bet that Microsoft is extracting just about as much money from their software as they possibly can. Businesses buy Microsoft software because it is "standard," but it was made the standard by normal end users who wanted something less expensive than WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
So here's wishing that Microsoft clamps down on software Piracy.
This is precisely the type of thing that is likely to doom Microsoft. A significant portion of the computer using public (at least here in the United States) actively participates in some sort of grey market file sharing. They either "borrow" a copy of MS Office from work, or they casually swap MP3 on Kazaa, or engage in any number of similar activities. Most of the people I know are actually shocked when I tell them I never downloaded music from Napster, and that the software on my computer is all 100% legal (thank you Debian). These people don't consider themselves dishonest, and they certainly don't consider themselves to be pirates. This trend is even worse in the rest of the world. I have lived in countries where it was almost impossible to find legal copies of software (and the illegal copies are on every street corner). Microsoft and the content providers can wish that this wasn't the case, but it isn't likely to do them any good.
There would be a huge sea change in the Home PC market if Microsoft actually started clamping down on these types of activities. In fact, DRM might actually be Linux's killer application. Right now a fifteen-year-old has to be pretty geeky to be interested in Linux. If using Linux was the only way to share music with their friends then a whole pile of PCs would become Linux boxes overnight.
Contrary to what many people think, Linux is quite useable as a desktop right this minute. If Microsoft were to clamp down hard, their market share would disappear overnight.
Spot on! I find it ironic that Mr. Lancashire dismissed Raymond's "Scratch an itch" theory by stating that "Individuals tend to rationalize their actions to present themselves in the best light possible," and then went on to present a paper that emphasized the importance of government subsidies to the Free Software movement.
Imagine that, A Berkeley Ph.D. candidate espousing the importance of government subsidies and institutionalized academia.
Perhaps someone should point Mr. Lancashire to the Linus/Tannebaum debates so that he can see how helpful the academic community was in the formation of Linux. Sure, some University might have hosted the FTP server, but the academic community is about as responsible for Linux as Al Gore is for the Internet.
The fact of the matter is that researches and academics need software. And all too often they find themselves needing software that has either not been written, or that is too expensive. Why should anyone be surprised when these researches base their work on freely available tools. They have got tons of students to do free grunt work, and writing useful Free Software is way more fun than reimplementing the Bubble sort in yet another toy language. Besides, if the project does take off then the researcher, and the students, inevitably gain a valuable reputation that they can easily monetize.
And researchers aren't the only folks that need tools, either. Free Software is flourishing because more and more organizations are realizing that building your own custom software has economic benefits, especially when you can lower the price of this software by using publicly available pieces. As someone who has modified some of this freely available source and not returned my changes to the community I can also tell you why there are so many folks eager to get their source into the various CVS trees as well. There is nothing worse than the Hell of having to maintain an ancient version of a piece of Free Software simply because your patches no longer merge into the "new" versions. It is much easier to share your source and unload some of the maintenance costs on other people who might benefit from your code.
I also couldn't agree more with your take on Mozilla. AOL needs a web browser. They can't afford not to have a credible alternative to IE. However, even though they desperately need to develop a web browser, there is no way that they could ever recoup their development costs by selling Netscape licenses. Every single CVS commit that comes from an email addresses that doesn't end in netscape.com is a victory for AOL. That's work that they are essentially getting for "free" (minus the cost of infrastructure). Last time I checked there seemed to be quite a few folks outside of Netscape that were getting stuff done. Mozilla would be deader than a doornail if it weren't for the fact that the source were available. As it now stands, however, Mozilla is turning into a very credible contender, and it is being used as the core of Microsoft's greatest threat. Since AOL is in direct competition with Microsoft on several fronts I think it is safe to say that the release of the Mozilla source can be seen as a net economic gain for the folks at AOL.
Until the entire software community only produces "Free" software, licensing issues are going to exist. The good news is that in the Free Software world licenses are actually much less of an issue than in the commercial software world. If your company is purchasing commercial software without paying a lawyer to look at the contracts then you truly are a fool. In the Free Software world that isn't necessary, although you certainly do have to pay attention when purchasing the shrink-wrapped versions of most Linux distributions. Nearly all of them contain software that is most definitely not Free.
To use your "damn" example Debian could simply patch this hole with a quick change to the Debian Free Software Guidelines allowing for documenataion that was freely redistributable but required a new title and proper credits given for changes. This would be little more than a "wedge" type fix, because all of a sudden there would be an exception to the rule. Instead Debian took the more radical approach of removing the "danger," however slight.
Yes, I hate licensing too. In fact, that's one of the reasons that I like Debian GNU/Linux. Those folks are fanatic about licensing issues so that I don't have to be. This LDP thing is actually a good example of this. There is no way that any of the LDP authors are going to come after Debian. Especially since Debian itself isn't breaking the rules set forth in the LDP. They are moving the documentation into non-free because they want to alert potential documentation developers that you can't change these documents and distribute the changes without changing the name of the document. That's a pretty tiny nit to pick, but to them it's important.
Which means that if I limit myself to the main part of the Debian distribution I can rest assured that I can happily change the source code to anything I see and still distribute those changes (I might be required to distribute source as well, but that's another story).
Henry Miller is just flat out wrong. His prose is beautiful, and his message enticing, but he is wrong all the same. There are plenty of opinions that are worthy of denigration, that deserve to be despised, and that should be denied. The opinions of madmen like Hitler or Osama bin Laden will never become a source of beauty, joy or strength, but will instead remain nasty, painful, and even evil forever.
These examples may be extreme, but they show clearly the basic premise. Opinions and ideas do not all hold equal value. Some are dangerous and even poisonous. Other are merely misleading or misinformed. Some are completely delusional.
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Really!?! Show me the Email client that launches an executable simply by double-clicking on it.
What? You can't find one. Perhaps Microsoft will write one so that Linux can be unsecure as well.
Yes, there are security problems in every OS, but Microsoft goes out of its way to create security problems. Regular users can delete, update, or change system files in the default setting What the heck sort of security is that? Microsoft has even blurred the line between data and executables by creating documents that can launch macros with hooks into the entire operating system. What was Microsoft thinking? At the very least Microsoft should have created a sanbox for these VBA macros.
The fact of the matter is that Linux + StarOffice is an order of magnitude safer than Windows + Office and would be even if Linux had the greater market share.
That's a good point. I have a 486 X terminal at home, and I am always surprised at how well it works. If you had a lot of volunteer work (or if the machines all had the same video card :), and very little money this would certainly be the way to go.
Let's take a look at this point by point.
What you really mean to say is that all of the teachers know how to log on and fire up Word. Most teachers don't really know anything about Windows administration. That's why the computers in most classrooms work poorly.
This simply means that whatever Linux front end was offered would have to be similar to Windows. It would have to be at least as similar as Windows XP is to Windows 95. For the simple things both KDE and Gnome can be set up so that the teachers wouldn't miss a beat.
Once again. The teachers aren't teaching the students to use the OS. Most teachers don't even know that right clicking on objects gives them a different menu. Teachers are teaching students to "click on the Word icon" and then word process. If you created icons for the StarOffice programs you would be 90% of the way there.
This is already a problem. Even if you have Windows. Many students who have computers don't have MS Office (it's expensive), and if they do have MS Office there is a good chance that they have an older version like Office 95 that won't open the newer formats (easily). With a switch to Linux the school could easily (and inexpensively) hand out copies of StarOffice for Windows or Linux (it's free).
This, in my opinion, is the one legitimate point. However, the answer to this is to not roll out Linux PCs but instead to have one Linux server and a pile of thin-clients. That way all the local tech would have to do is throw out the old thin-client and plug in the new one. My guess is that the current Windows administrator could easily learn to be a fairly competent Linux admin if they didn't have to worry about all of the failed client PCs. He/She would have a whole lot more time on their hands with only one machine to administer.
Anyone that can learn to use StarOffice will have no trouble using MS Office (and vice versa). These applications are nearly identical.
And that's precisely the information that is needed to sell schools on Free Software. Demonstrate to them how much easier it would be for them to administer one Linux server and a pile of disposable ThinkNics and you can bet that they will sit up and listen. At the very least public schools should be giving StarOffice a look. It would save them a bundle in licensing, and will even run on their existing Windows systems.
Actually this is precisely why Linux has the potential to be such a big win. Rolling out software to Windows desktops requires a ton of work, maintaining each of those fragile beasts requires even more work. Have you ever seen the systems at your typical school. They are a mess.
Now imagine that the school took their money and bought one commodity Intel-based server and a great big pile of inexpensive thin-clients (like the ThinkNic). Adding or updating the software for your system now is a snap. You upgrade your server and the clients have immediate access to the new software. No CDs to lug around, no reboots, no problems. Heck, the administrator wouldn't even have to be on site. One quick "apt-get install foo-package" and it's done. Accounting, security, and other user management tools have existed for Unix forever. You can easily set quotas for nearly every resource that is available to end users and you can monitor your Linux server to the nth degree without leaving the comfort of your bedroom.
Thin clients have been seen as the systems administrator's Nirvana for years, but it wasn't until Linux came along that there was really any useful software that would run on these systems. However, the combination of StarOffice + Mozilla is starting to look like a compelling combination. Especially in places like schools where money is tight and where it is important that the computers both allow easy collaboration and tight security. All of the students would essentially be sharing the same machine (making it easy to work on projects together), but none of them would have write access to any system files (much better security than Windows PCs).
The trick of course, is in removing the PCs. That would leave the school with one server and a pile of essentially disposable devices. If you think replacing Windows PCs with Linux PCs, then you are almost certainly correct, the Linux solution would be more difficult to administer (or more expensive anyway as it would require a much more savvy administrator). However, if you replaced the hordes of Windows PCs with a single Linux server then even the slowest Windows admin could probably find the time to learn to administer Linux.
Microsoft shouldn't be worried about Linux, it should be worried about StarOffice. After all, people get the operating system "for free" and Linux still doesn't have the wealth of software available for it that Windows has.
MS Office, on the other hand, is always an added expense, and it's expensive to boot. With the price of computers falling like a brick it won't be too long before the added cost of Microsoft Office doubles the price of a computer. Not only that, but there are probably more folks running Linux than folks that use a feature in MS Office that doesn't exist in StarOffice. In other words, the group of people that absolutely have to have MS Office is relatively small.
If the Office Suite were to become a commodity market Microsoft would be in a world of hurt (which is almost certainly why Sun is funding the effort).
I believe that it was Heinlein that said that all writers today are merely filing the serial numbers off of older stories. People have been telling "Epic" stories since long before Beowulf, and they probably will still be telling them when the sun burns out. What movie can you name that was done in the last 20 years that was truly innovative? You seem like you know what you are talking about, so I hate to disagree with you :), but without a better idea as to what you would consider truly innovative I can't help but think that you represent what I find most disappointing about Hollywood. Innovation is neat, technology is great, but if the purpose of the technology isn't to help tell the story it's wasted effort.
Hollywood can't get it through their heads that despite the fact that they spend far more today on special effects and fancy packaging than ever before most of these new movies will fail to become as popular as reruns of classic movies. What's more, the movies that do become modern classics owe their popularity to their storyline not their effects. That's why I can re-watch movies like E.T. or Star Wars and still enjoy them despite their now somewhat cheesy special effects.
The best that a movie can really hope for, when it comes to innovation, is to be the first to use some new technology. You might say that Lawrence of Arabia was innovative, but the story of Lawrence of Arabia was nothing more than an adaptation of a centuries old theme portayed on film. It was innovative because that hadn't been done before, but that doesn't make the story any better. More importantly, another well told story that fits the same pattern isn't any less good simply because LoA exists.
Disney's "Honey I Shrunk the Audience" is innovative (you can feel the dog sneeze on you), but it's not really what I want in a feature film. That's because I would rather see a good story, well told, than be bored by something that relies too heavily on technology. After all, who wants to see an "innovative" movie with no plot. I certainly don't. It's all about the story.
That's why I am excited to see LoTR, and it's why I enjoyed Harry Potter. Hollywood has of late seemed far too interested in innovation, instead of being interested in telling a good story. I don't want something new, I want the same thing that folks have been asking from their storytellers for thousands of years, I want an interesting story well told.
Fah, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series is a classic. The last thing I want (I haven't seen it yet) is a movie that gets creative. There is little or no chance that some hack in Hollywood is going to actually improve the story behind LoTR. The director and staff should use their creativity to find a way to translate the story to film. That's one of the things that I like about the Harry Potter movie. It was almost as if they took the pictures right out of my head and pasted them up on the screen. What the LoTR needs isn't creativity, it's craftsmanship. I want a movie that takes one of my favorite stories ever and recreates it faithfully. Accomplishing this task, in my opinion, would require more actual creativity than rewriting the story.
It's even worse for me now that I use Mozilla at work as my primary browser (since it also excepts those same blessed Emacs keystrokes). I can't even use Windows anymore.
As a side note, just for fun I hit Alt-F4 on my Linux box (I didn't think it would do anything) and sure enough it closed my web browser. It would appear that IceWM, at least, has borrowed this particular keystroke from Windows. I wonder if I could re-map it so that C-x C-c would close the window instead?
Huh? I have been using Linux since 1995 when I wandered into Linux-land looking for an inexpensive C compiler.
Is there some part of my argument that you feel is naive, or are you just trolling?
Ok, whatever. It still goes to show how effective Microsoft's "code reviews" are. If it takes them years to find something that was meant to be a joke, then how long is it going to take them to find something that was meant to be a hard to spot backdoor written by a talented coder (there is no questioning the fact that Microsoft programmers are talented folks).
The fact of the matter is that bugs are hard to find in almost any setting. The fact that so few people have access to Microsoft source code simply makes it that much harder to find errors. Microsoft can pretend that they have processes in place to catch these sorts of errors, but when all it takes is the knowledge of one previously unknown buffer exploit it is hard to feel very safe.
Microsoft's entire security policy is based on the fact that the bad guys don't have access to their source code. This assumes, of course, that there isn't anyone inside of Microsoft that is willing to sell (or exploit themselves) security information.
The amount of people that have access to the Linux source code is several orders of magnitude greater than Windows. That works in Linux's favor. Linux programs also are regularly ported to several different architectures. That's useful too. A lot of times subtle bugs can be found when the source is ported. Especially if it is ported to a radically different architecture using a totally different compiler.
Not only that, but Linux source code sometimes gets reused. That sort of thing helps as well. There is nothing like having someone else reuse your code for something totally unrelated for shaking out bugs.
Not that Free Software is perfect, but it certainly seems better than the alternative (in this regard).
Maybe Ballmer's dance is part of the process, that looked fairly rigorous. It also didn't look too terribly effective.
That's assuming that the terrorists would actually have to plant backdoors. It would be far less dangerous, and far easier, to simply look for buffer overflows and then not report them to management. What good is a peer review if your "peer" is actually looking for exploitable code for their own ends. A remotely exploitable buffer overflow is every bit as good as a backdoor, and if they were in QA they wouldn't even have to write it themselves, they would simply have to let it slide through.
Now, I am not saying that the Al Qaeda has penetrated Microsoft, but I can't imagine that someone working at Microsoft hasn't been tempted to simply overlook a buffer overflow. Especially now that Windows is being used to run some very tempting targets.
Whatever. Excel used to have a flight simulator embedded in it, for crying out loud! IIS had a back door password of "Netscape Engineers are Weenies" spelled backwords.
Not to mention the fact that it seems like Windows has an exploit approximately every 3.5 seconds, and that's without access to the source. A terrorist at Microsoft wouldn't even have to try and embed backdoors into the software. They could just keep track of the exploitable buffer overflows and pass them on to their buddies instead of raising attention to them at Microsoft. Microsoft's entire defense stems around the fact that the "bad guys" don't have access to the code and must therefore guess where the problems are (and even still they have more than their share of problems). Someone on the inside (with access to the source) could easily subvert this process.
For me installing Gnucash 1.6 (the same day I saw the /. article saying it was impossible to build) was as simple as:
apt-get install gnucash.
The cutting edge Gnome libraries of today are going to be the old staid ncurses of tomorrow. I personally am glad that GnuCash is reusing this software instead of re-inventing the wheel. It's tricky to compile now, but these software components are forming the building blocks of tomorrow's applications.
That being said, you certainly are correct when you point out that sometimes the Perl + Apache solution just makes sense. I don't use SQL-Ledger, but it seems to be easy to set up and relatively full featured. Adding nifty new technologies sometimes just makes things more difficult.
If you are doing manufacturing, then chances are good you don't really qualify as a "small business." There are plenty of businesses that just need accounting software. Even some big businesses don't need a manufacturing package, because surprise they don't manufacture anything.
Free Software accounting packages are likely to take off for the same reason that PCs did. When Lotus 1-2-3 came out only the smallest of small businesses could do their books with a PC, and yet Lotus was literally swamped with orders. It wasn't too long before nearly all businesses used these toys to do at least some of their accounting.
The KDE folks have at least considered using Orbit. Check it out. In fact the only reason that KDE isn't using Corba right now is that when they started KDE2 development there weren't any useable (read fast) Free Software ORBs available. Which highlights what is perhaps the biggest difference between the KDE and Gnome camps. There wasn't a useable ORB when Gnome started either, so they wrote one themselves (just like they essentially wrote their own widget set).
The KDE folks tend to look for shortcuts. They used a (then) non-free widget set because it was easier. When they couldn't find a useful ORB they simply wrote something else. Gnome's support of Corba turned out to be a big deal. It's the primary reason why Sun, HP, and some of the other UNIX big names are pouring money into Gnome and not KDE.
That's the point. Most of the 98% of the general computing public either downloads MP3s or has a "borrowed" copy of MS Office (or some other piece of software).
Heck, Apple has launched an entire ad campaign that basically shows you how easy it is to make your own CDs using their software. They realize that most people, including Microsoft's core clientelle, like the idea of being able to do these types of things. If Microsoft pushes too hard on DRM all they will be doing is making their competitors offerings more palatable.
If Microsoft was actually successful in stopping pirates then their software empire would crumble overnight. The only reason that most home users aren't taking a harder look at the low cost of Free Software is that they are already getting their software for free. They simply borrow a copy of MS Office (or whatever) from work. If Microsoft actually started clamping down and making sure that everyone actually ponied up $400 for MS Office folks would start looking around for alternatives.
They would soon find that alternatives like Corel's PerfectOffice and Sun's StarOffice are vastly less expensive, and instead of mailing Word documents around like crazy we would start to see other formats become more common.
I would bet that Microsoft is extracting just about as much money from their software as they possibly can. Businesses buy Microsoft software because it is "standard," but it was made the standard by normal end users who wanted something less expensive than WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
So here's wishing that Microsoft clamps down on software Piracy.
This is precisely the type of thing that is likely to doom Microsoft. A significant portion of the computer using public (at least here in the United States) actively participates in some sort of grey market file sharing. They either "borrow" a copy of MS Office from work, or they casually swap MP3 on Kazaa, or engage in any number of similar activities. Most of the people I know are actually shocked when I tell them I never downloaded music from Napster, and that the software on my computer is all 100% legal (thank you Debian). These people don't consider themselves dishonest, and they certainly don't consider themselves to be pirates. This trend is even worse in the rest of the world. I have lived in countries where it was almost impossible to find legal copies of software (and the illegal copies are on every street corner). Microsoft and the content providers can wish that this wasn't the case, but it isn't likely to do them any good.
There would be a huge sea change in the Home PC market if Microsoft actually started clamping down on these types of activities. In fact, DRM might actually be Linux's killer application. Right now a fifteen-year-old has to be pretty geeky to be interested in Linux. If using Linux was the only way to share music with their friends then a whole pile of PCs would become Linux boxes overnight.
Contrary to what many people think, Linux is quite useable as a desktop right this minute. If Microsoft were to clamp down hard, their market share would disappear overnight.
A Debian meta-package, now that's clever. It looks like I am going to have to learn to build debs. Thanks for the info.
Spot on! I find it ironic that Mr. Lancashire dismissed Raymond's "Scratch an itch" theory by stating that "Individuals tend to rationalize their actions to present themselves in the best light possible," and then went on to present a paper that emphasized the importance of government subsidies to the Free Software movement.
Imagine that, A Berkeley Ph.D. candidate espousing the importance of government subsidies and institutionalized academia.
Perhaps someone should point Mr. Lancashire to the Linus/Tannebaum debates so that he can see how helpful the academic community was in the formation of Linux. Sure, some University might have hosted the FTP server, but the academic community is about as responsible for Linux as Al Gore is for the Internet.
The fact of the matter is that researches and academics need software. And all too often they find themselves needing software that has either not been written, or that is too expensive. Why should anyone be surprised when these researches base their work on freely available tools. They have got tons of students to do free grunt work, and writing useful Free Software is way more fun than reimplementing the Bubble sort in yet another toy language. Besides, if the project does take off then the researcher, and the students, inevitably gain a valuable reputation that they can easily monetize.
And researchers aren't the only folks that need tools, either. Free Software is flourishing because more and more organizations are realizing that building your own custom software has economic benefits, especially when you can lower the price of this software by using publicly available pieces. As someone who has modified some of this freely available source and not returned my changes to the community I can also tell you why there are so many folks eager to get their source into the various CVS trees as well. There is nothing worse than the Hell of having to maintain an ancient version of a piece of Free Software simply because your patches no longer merge into the "new" versions. It is much easier to share your source and unload some of the maintenance costs on other people who might benefit from your code.
I also couldn't agree more with your take on Mozilla. AOL needs a web browser. They can't afford not to have a credible alternative to IE. However, even though they desperately need to develop a web browser, there is no way that they could ever recoup their development costs by selling Netscape licenses. Every single CVS commit that comes from an email addresses that doesn't end in netscape.com is a victory for AOL. That's work that they are essentially getting for "free" (minus the cost of infrastructure). Last time I checked there seemed to be quite a few folks outside of Netscape that were getting stuff done. Mozilla would be deader than a doornail if it weren't for the fact that the source were available. As it now stands, however, Mozilla is turning into a very credible contender, and it is being used as the core of Microsoft's greatest threat. Since AOL is in direct competition with Microsoft on several fronts I think it is safe to say that the release of the Mozilla source can be seen as a net economic gain for the folks at AOL.
Until the entire software community only produces "Free" software, licensing issues are going to exist. The good news is that in the Free Software world licenses are actually much less of an issue than in the commercial software world. If your company is purchasing commercial software without paying a lawyer to look at the contracts then you truly are a fool. In the Free Software world that isn't necessary, although you certainly do have to pay attention when purchasing the shrink-wrapped versions of most Linux distributions. Nearly all of them contain software that is most definitely not Free.
To use your "damn" example Debian could simply patch this hole with a quick change to the Debian Free Software Guidelines allowing for documenataion that was freely redistributable but required a new title and proper credits given for changes. This would be little more than a "wedge" type fix, because all of a sudden there would be an exception to the rule. Instead Debian took the more radical approach of removing the "danger," however slight.
Yes, I hate licensing too. In fact, that's one of the reasons that I like Debian GNU/Linux. Those folks are fanatic about licensing issues so that I don't have to be. This LDP thing is actually a good example of this. There is no way that any of the LDP authors are going to come after Debian. Especially since Debian itself isn't breaking the rules set forth in the LDP. They are moving the documentation into non-free because they want to alert potential documentation developers that you can't change these documents and distribute the changes without changing the name of the document. That's a pretty tiny nit to pick, but to them it's important.
Which means that if I limit myself to the main part of the Debian distribution I can rest assured that I can happily change the source code to anything I see and still distribute those changes (I might be required to distribute source as well, but that's another story).
Henry Miller is just flat out wrong. His prose is beautiful, and his message enticing, but he is wrong all the same. There are plenty of opinions that are worthy of denigration, that deserve to be despised, and that should be denied. The opinions of madmen like Hitler or Osama bin Laden will never become a source of beauty, joy or strength, but will instead remain nasty, painful, and even evil forever.
These examples may be extreme, but they show clearly the basic premise. Opinions and ideas do not all hold equal value. Some are dangerous and even poisonous. Other are merely misleading or misinformed. Some are completely delusional.