First, $100M will buy a lot of lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats. These people should then work with congress to return our copyright system to a reasonable state, with a functioning public domain.
I appreciate that there are issues with the copyright system, but aren't those issues really just symptoms of having a messed up political system in the first place? As long as mega-corporations, such as Disney, Sony and others, also have lawyers, lobbyists bureaucrats, not to mention billions of dollars and a steady income, I doubt that $100 million will go very far. If it accomplishes anything, the fundamental consequences of the current system will probably just put things back again within a decade or two.
It's an interesting idea to spend money on this problem. If anything, though, I think it should be spent on communicating the idea to people and trying to think of ways to get them to realise both how screwed up the system is, and what they need to do to change it. Perhaps actually demonstrating to people the positive effects of shorter copyright terms would be a good way to start, as well as doing away with that myth about artificially defined copyright ownership being so comparable with real ownership. It also needs to be spent in a way that would out-smart the mega-corps, or preferably hit on issues that they simply can't argue with. The only way things can really change long term is if the people whom the government represents actually see what's going on, and decide not to accept it.
It had shrunk, up until this time, I was under the (obviously mistaken) impression that it had stayed shrunk.
I heard it mentioned on the radio this morning that the ozone hole had been measured as the biggest ever so far. Confusingly, an interviewed scientist was also commenting that people shouldn't panic, because it was on a downward trend and was still expected to heal itself over the next so many decades. I'm not quite sure exactly what was meant, because under most circumstances I wouldn't intuitively consider a "largest ever recorded value" to play any part in a measured downward trend. It's possible that people in the know have other reasons to believe that it's still likely to go away, however.
how come no one ever calls MS out on the fact that Vista is basically still playing catch up to OS X
I guess people are saying exactly that if you look in the right places, just as you're saying it now (as are lots of other posts). But Microsoft has done this for years with nearly everything, and they're very good at the marketing aspects of it, and how to communicate with their target markets. A lot of Windows users are not exactly the sort of people who comprehend the existence of anything other than Windows. Except for perhaps the server market, Microsoft's target market is not people who are using alternative OS's; it's people who are already using Windows, and trying to convince them to upgrade.
Personally I find some of the Microsoft marketing material quite patronising when I read about great new, innovative features they're providing. With some insight, it's often easier to ask why it took so long to implement some good ideas that have been available elsewhere for ages. (To be fair, I think a lot of this is the marketers rather than some of the engineers who actually design and build the stuff.) Realistically though, it doesn't matter to Microsoft's primary customers, many of whom couldn't actually comprehend using anything other than Microsoft products, and are probably quite locked into it even if they could.
If Microsoft's copying great innovations from other products, whether it's Gnome, KDE or OS X, a myraid of command shells, Mozilla/Firefox, features of programming languages, or whatever else, it doesn't really matter to a large number of Microsoft's target customers who have never known anything beyond what they've been fed them on a plate.
Then, I've got Windows Vista RC2 running on a 'play' computer - it's goofy, quirky, and distracting - to me, really annoying. However, you do have to realize that the majority of Windows users are goofs, who are quirky, and love being distracted.
I haven't spent a lot of time scrutinising the Vista interface, although other people in my group at work have. But assuming this is true, it sounds as if the market droids got a-hold of the UI design (again), given that the things most likely to be selling points are pushed to the front at the expense of actual usability.
That said, how easy is it to disable all the quirky goo and have a better interface? Once we get around to rolling it out to our users in about 18 months, we'll probably be pre-configuring the defaults for everyone, and it's likely to be configured to whatever will help things run most efficiently.
Can anyone comment on how this is related (if at all) to a recent announcement in New Zealand about a new ability to "store and execute computer programmes within a microscopic DNA Pharmaceutical crystal"? [1][2]. Supposedly (according to radio reports) the New Zealand group has been working for 20 years in secret (or something) until the press release in the past day or so.
I'm wondering if it's a case of one group having announced in a rush so as not to be overshadowed by another group that's been working on the same thing.
Impose artificial limits, period. I'm not talking about limits on CPU usage or memory for the sake of system stability, but arbitary business decision born limits. When something starts doing this, it ceases to be an operating system.
Microsoft's changed a lot over the last few years. In the early to mid 1990's, there were a lot of occasions when Microsoft was openly stating that it was okay to install its applications in multiple places, such as at home and at work, without paying for a second copy. The only catch was that it was only running in one location at a time. It was perfectly okay to install an application (or OS) on a new PC, as long as it wouldn't run on the old PC any more. Backup copies? Sure, in fact they probably recommended it.
This was when the people at Microsoft were probably thinking a lot more philosophically about what intellectual property actually was, including how they'd like to be treated when they bought software. ie. They were licensing it to a person for use forever. Maybe this was when Microsoft still had a lot more people at the top who were actually interested in the software development, instead of simply generic managers who want to run a business in a generic make-money way. The irony is that even then, we thought it was a bit totalitarian, but compared with today it was very generous.
Since the more recent management has worked its way into the fold, Microsoft has changed to a much more business-oriented commercial approach, which seems to be more interested in sucking as much from the market as is possible, instead of treating it with respect. Instead of licensing software to people, it's being chained to specific PC's so it can't be re-used anywhere else. If a person wants to use it in additional places, they have to pay for the same thing over and over again. I find it irritating that they're claiming it's all because of piracy. Perhaps it prevents some piracy, but nearly all the time, these restrictions seem to also ensure that people have to keep re-purchasing the same thing, whether it's retail or OEM, instead of just re-using the same software on new (or alternative) PC's.
The frustrating part is that many people I know see absolutely no alternative to Microsoft, because practically there isn't much. "The Microsoft way" of doing things gets treated more and more as if it's normal, irrespective of how totalitarian and unfair it really is, simply because no other methods are above the radar to compare it with.
Just like how Firefox fragmented the Mozilla userbase?
If you mean what I think you mean, then I agree.
What I don't understand is why people care so much about possible fragmentation of the brand. This is what Open Source is. The GPL and other open source licenses fundamentally encourage code to be forked, built on and improved to meet the needs of different groups of people who might not otherwise be fully satisfied. When I see people proclaim, in the name of OSS, that it's a "bad thing for OSS" if Firefox fragments away from a single brand, it seems hypocritical to me.
If there's a particular browser out there that people want to promote and use to challenge IE, then by all means they should do that. But it's silly to expect other OSS users to drop whatever they're doing and unite for such a specific cause against closed source software. The fact that some people would like to see OSS overtake CSS, to all kinds of varying degrees, doesn't mean that all Firefox and Debian developers and users have to think the same thing.
If the web is to serve its intended purpose, web developers shouldn't be coding for IE and they certainly shouldn't be coding for Firefox. They should be coding for standards, and browser makers should be working to implement those standards correctly. An increase in the number of browsers out there, even if they're forked from the same code base, can only push the point that reliance on standards is ever more important. That's good for everyone who wants a good web browsing experience. It also gives people more freedom to choose the browser they want, instead of having to choose from only one or two browsers that might render the pages correctly.
Well - that's the problem, no? If it isn't "one big project" then it's going to be "a dozen small projects". And whenever someone doesn't like something, they'll for their own version and their own way of doing things because exactly there isn't one big project that would be hampered by it.
This is exactly right, and I can appreciate everything you've said. I suppose my concern is with the implication that it should be up to the "open source community" to change things. This is partly because it's never been clear to me exactly who the "open source community" actually is, and it's especially been unclear to me what should motivate people to suddenly jump up and all cooperate towards a unified goal, the specifics of which are decided by someone else, and at the same time abandoning whatever motivations were causing them to be involved in open source in the first place.
I'm an open source developer, more for fun than anything else, and I doubt that what I've produced so far is of much practical use to anyone. It doesn't really matter to me, though, because my motivation is with precisely what I'm doing. I'm not likely to suddenly stop it, and go and work on something that other people consider more important. Doing so would be a chore for me during my leisure time, and I'd much sooner go outside for a walk or something.
If there's a company, on the other hand, which wants to develop a full-scale competitor to Windows based on open source, including production, distribution, and marketing, then good on them. Then they'd be producing and selling a product just as Microsoft is doing -- the only difference would be the development model, and also licensing issues to do with distribution. But as I can see it, "open source" isn't a product, a company, or an organisation, and it shouldn't be treated as one. KDE and Gnome might do better to merge, but this shouldn't be done just for some centralised need to compete. It should be done because the developers and users of KDE and Gnome want to actually merge them, and if there's enough support then I'm sure it'll happen. Obviously if there are enough people who don't want that, it'll fork right back to how it is now.
As far as I can tell, things are like this with OSS because that's exactly what open source licensing encourages. As long as people continue to use the GPL and similar licenses, everything will trend towards diversity. The only reason Windows hasn't been forked a million times is because Microsoft retains an iron grip on its intellectual property. Personally I think the Windows code base is worse for that, although I know a lot of people would disagree with me. Open source software development is messy, but it's always been messy. For it to be cleaner and more structured, people would have to start releasing their software under different licenses, and those licenses probably wouldn't qualify as open source (by today's definitions) and come with all the same benefits.
I don't personally see anything wrong with open source as it is, and I don't see a point in trying to fight against it. I like to see open source software do well in the world, get noticed and help people do what they want, but I don't think that's a mandatory requirement for it to be useful.
Anyway, I think that sums up my own views, and I don't expect everyone to see things the way I do. Yay for debate.
Whatever the effort, something has to eventually unify the desktop environments for Linux to overtake or compete on a widescale in the United States or Canada.
Why should Linux neet to "overtake or compete on a widescale in the United States or Canada"? If you mean compete with Windows, there's not really a comparison. Linux is a kernel -- Windows is a Kernel and OS.
It'd make more sense to claim that KDE (for example) might compete with the Windows UI one day. Specifically what's running underneath it isn't really relevant. In any case, I don't see why KDE and Gnome would need to unify for a non-Windows interface to become competitive.
Perhaps for some people, the icon graphics and the location of items on the menus might be critically important, and I guess that's my point.
There are all sorts of reasons that people prefer Gnome over KDE, or KDE over Gnome. Some people (like me) like completely different interfaces from time to time, if only to get away from the whole panel on the bottom and menu on the left for a while. Sometimes it's a speed issue, it might be where and how much customisation they want, it could be a whole lot of things. Until you actually sit down and try to use it for something where it causes problems, it's hard to tell. If you don't notice any difference, I'd suggest just picking one or the other and going with it. The truth is, if there was a good abstract API for developers to use for writing applications to run smoothly in both, it wouldn't be an issue. I really hope that Portland and similar projects that are working on this issue will finally figure out a way to get it working.
What I really don't want, though, is for everything to be force-combined into some kind of central interface, which is exactly what happens with MS Windows. There are plenty of times I've been irritated at how Windows does things, such as the way it decides to re-focus windows when I'm typing, or the way it doesn't natively support virtual desktops, and there's nothing I can do, because Windows is the only practical choice when you have to use a Windows OS. To me, it would just be bad to reduce user choice, because it just means there's less choice, and there's one body who decides what's best for everyone... even when it's not. All the people who hate Gnome, and all the people who hate KDE, all have to put up with the little things they hate, which you probably don't even notice if they're not things that are important to you.
KDE and Gnome exist separately because people had major differences of opinion about how to do things. That's the open source way for all sorts of fundamental reasons, and I honestly can't see how they could be combined without another project springing up to do things differently yet again, whether it's about menu item placement, stripping of bloat, adding of bloat, or some kind of much deeper architectural programming issue. Personally I think it's better to just accept that there will be multiple ways of doing things, and focus more on standards and interoperability to make it easier for application developers.
Absolutely. I'm all for abstracting the API's to make it easier for developers to write apps that'll work well in more places. I'm saying this as a developer, although not someone who spends a lot of time with GUI programming (apart from what I have to for my Windows-coding job). I just don't like the idea of combining the UI into one big project in a way that might make it harder to get diversity and choice for users. To me, that just represents the whole Windows, monolithic, Microsoft-and-nobody-else-decides-what-you-get philosophy, which is one of the things I really dislike about the Windows model.
If Portland, or some other tool, helps developers write good applications that'll run more smoothly in both desktops -- maybe even additional desktops, without having to radically alter the behaviour of the desktop (as far as the user is concerned), I think it'll be great.
Like, maybe we can get one mail client that's really good, instead of two half-baked ones, etc.
Why not one mail client that's really good, and runs nicely in both, maybe even all desktops? I'd like it a lot if reasonable parts of the API's for different desktops were merged, but I really hope the desktops remain separate, and to be honest given the nature of open source licences, I can't see how there ever could be one definitive monolithic open source desktop unless it miraculously gave everyone everything they wanted.
I quite like having several good and well maintained desktops to choose from. One of the biggest things that puts me off Windows is that it doesn't matter what sort of interface you like, because you always have to have what Microsoft chooses to feed you. Any UI improvements introduced to Windows are lauded as some kind of great break-through for Microsoft, even if they're based on principles that have been known about and implemented in less-known places for years.
The problem isn't so much that it's Microsoft as that it's a single organisation with a product in a domain that nobody can seriously compete with. What disturbs me most about it, however, is that by being the only offering for so many people, everyone forgets that their lives might be better if there was competition from a viable alternative. I'd hate it if there ended up being a massive organisation dictating to open source users what they should use. It'd be much more beneficial if people could just realise that there can be competition in a desktop market, people should choose whichever one they like the most, and applications should run nicely in all of them. (The last part could be helped a lot by abstracting the API's, which is what this slashdot story is all about.)
Duplication of function sucks for end users having to install all kinds of stuff, and it sucks for developers too since there's more code to maintain.
Isn't that what package managers and dependency managers are for? If you're still manually determining, downloading and configuring packages for your desktop PC, I'd guess it's either because you need a better package manager or because you simply enjoy doing that sort of thing. I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't some popular package managers out there that still have room for improvement, but I'd rather the focus of criticm was on inadequate package managers than on something like Portland which might actually be helpful for developers.
Open source applications typically rely on all sorts of libraries and other packages, and most regular distributions (that I'm aware of) have a mechanism for making sure that required packages get installed. How would something like Portland be any different? All it would mean is that a developer could use a single interface instead of having to distinguish between Gnome, KDE, and whatever else.
I've never really seen the point behind having two different interfaces in the first place.
I have. I regularly switch between KDE, Gnome and WindowMaker every few months, depending on what mood I'm in and how I want to do things. They're actually quite different in what they make more convenient to do, and how a user interacts with them.
What I really would hate is if the open source world moved more towards a Windows model, where users have to take what Microsoft decides is "right" for them, because they have no other choice. There's no serious competition in the Windows UI world, because Microsoft has so much control over what can be done, what things look like, and how applications interact. If a vendor comes out with a fancy application with an improved interface, this usually means it's inconsistent with one Microsoft guideline or another, making it generally less nice to use.
The power with having multiple desktop vendors is that although application developers control some aspects of their app's interaction, they don't have to be as concerned about some of the broader parts which are handled by the desktop, because chances are that the user's selected whichever desktop best suits the way they work, anyway.
It's definitely not perfect at the moment, and there aren't that many graphical apps around that run nicely under multiple desktops. I hope that projects such as this one help to figure out the right level of abstraction for applications to have from the desktop.
the point of having different GNOME and KDE interfaces, was so that you could have different interfaces. Now someone wants to unite them, so why even bother having one over the other?
Probably to make it easier for developers to more cleanly support two different kinds of users with their applications? Developers have little control over which desktop a user decides to use. Personally I hope that desktops don't end up uniting in a way that restricts the choice for a user.
This isn't about uniting the user interfaces, though. It's about making things more convenient for developers by providing a common set of developer interfaces, helping developers to make applications that will work more smoothly with either desktop, and in the longer term, maybe even other desktops that don't exist yet.
Their other option was to stop patching the hell out of Firefox and do what every other distro does - get with the program.
Because "getting with the program", as you put it, means they can't patch the code as they want to without relying on a third party.
A distribution is a collection of software that's configured to work together, and often it's vouched for by the distro maintainers. Debian's serious about stability in its official releases, and given that it also has an obligation to assure its users that the browser is stable and secure to run on their system, I have absolutely no problem with Debian wanting to patch the hell out of Firefox, if that's what they decide is necessary.
I'm confused about why the Debian maintainers decided to try and use the Firefox name in the first place when they're not supposed to, but if they now need to rename it to maintain the quality of Debian, good on them.
As far as I know this patch was never merged but my copy of XMMS did have the proper random behavior.
For what it's worth, I've just experimented with XMMS (1.2.10) in random mode, and it seems to be doing this now.
If I double-click a track to play it, then click advance, it was always advancing to a different track, implying that it reshuffled at the point of selecting a track. Simply moving backwards and forwards between tracks left them in a consistent order, however.
At the time, I remember hearing a rumour that one of the reasons CD burners were prohibitively expensive (for a time) was because media companies -- mostly music, I think -- were buying up the majority of CD burners being produced to keep the prices high... or at the very least there was a lot of money exchanging hands. I'm not sure how true it was, though.
I guess we never learned anything from the mid 80s.
If only Microsoft would still distribute Windows with a fat, 350 page instruction manual, it would no longer be necessary to phone home. Instead, whenever authenticity was doubted, the OS could simply pop up a window asking a question such as "What is the 57th word in paragraph 9 of page 261 of your Microsoft Windows Instruction Manual?"
At Bathurst subway/streetcar/bus station in Toronto, they play classical (well, baroque actually) music on the PA to keep teenagers away. It seems to work quite well, actually.
In Whangarei, a New Zealand town, they do it by playing continuous Barry Manilow music, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Personally I think it's a wonder the local retailers get any customers at all.
DS9 got better and better as the seasons went on, and the writers developed a very good story-arc. Reportedly this was influenced a lot by Babylon 5, which was also active at the time, and there have been a lot of claims that Trek ripped off the space station idea after JMS tried to sell it. This may be partly true, but I think the fact that DS9 was actually good had more to do with the fact that Berman and friends left DS9 to focus more on Voyager, allowing the DS9 writers and directors more freedom to actually produce a good continuous story.
I re-watched TNG a while ago, which I enjoyed the first time around. There are some good shows in there and it's nice to reminisce, but it's quite dated. DS9 would definitely be my first choice to watch again if I found the time to watch any of it, but I wouldn't bother with Voyager or Enterprise.
But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
I'm a full-time Debian (testing) user at home, routinely flippng between KDE, Gnome and WindowMaker depending on the mood I'm in. At work, I write.Net code for Windows platforms at work. My personal belief is that Visual Studio and SQL Server are probably the two best products that Microsoft has ever produced.
That said, I still prefer to use something other than Windows given the choice, and I'll make the sacrifice to using other IDE's when writing code for other systems. Part of it is the whole freedom thing -- I don't like locking myself into Windows. A lot of it, though, is usability as I see it. I consider myself an expert user, and I like the command line. The Windows command line is yucky, and even with quite intering looking improvements (such as Powershell, still in beta), the whole thing is still locked inside that yucky window that only wants to resize vertically. With Windows, you're essentially stuck with "The Microsoft Way" of doing something, whether you like it or not. To name one more example, Windows XP doesn't have native support for virtual desktops, which I really like, but the only way to do it is to staple on a third party application which might integrate okay with Windows, but probably won't integrate well with lots of other third party software. This is the case with lots of things in Windows -- if you want it, you have to get an independent third party application which often won't play nicely with other applications, will probably cost more money, and might throw up (yet another) annoying splash screen when it starts... just to make sure you don't forget that it's there.
I still wouldn't usually recommend most linux distros for inexperienced users, at least if those users are going to have to administer the systems in any way. They're fine when they work, but many times I've still found situations where if something does go wrong, it just takes a bit too much expertise and understanding of a problem to fix it.
I think one of the most important things that puts me off Windows, especially having used several Linux distros, is that I find the package management to be awful in comparison. MSI's are okay in the same way that.deb's and.rpm's are okay, but they really only work if they're built properly, and a lot of third party app providers don't put a lot of effort into their installers. The most common problems I've had is that they refuse to uninstall properly later, they don't cope well with a damaged app, or that they install much more than necessary so they don't have to worry about things like shared libraries.
I'm also convinced that this issue isn't one that can easily be fixed given Microsoft's development and sales model. The difference between Windows and something like Debian, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or SuSE, or whatever, is that all the linux distributions are giving you complete systems including he majority of applications you're likely to ever want. They're also designing the installers, and I know that if I install an application using a.deb that's provided by Debian, it's very likely to install properly. I'd consider the same with most MSI's provided by Microsoft, except that Microsoft doesn't provide half the applications I need to work effectively.
We absolutely need someone in the United States to hack a Diebold machine into changing its votes and demonstrate how they can do that in a quick and easy way when they have access to the machine. If it can be turned into a 2-minute feature on a news station (with enlarged graphics showing the vote totals changing LIVE) it will become big news.
As much as I wish this would happen, I'm not convinced this would help. Besides, haven't people already demonstrated over and over again that Diebold voting machines are hopeless for security and reliability? In the most extreme case, Diebold would scream "HACKER!" Political representatives would ignore it if they didn't try to actively surpress it, because aside from third parties (who don't matter), both major parties have interests in voting mechanisms that aren't verifiable. The culprit would be arrested and silenced, and the media with the highest ratings would continue offer tasty incentives for influential politicians to appear on their programs instead of the competition's. (eg. We'll ask you exactly the questions you're prepared to answer.)
But what about innovation? If we cry foul that monopolies stifle innovation, then we should also be decrying standards that may not adapt easily to future problems.
In general commercial terms, I agree that legislation shouldn't (usually) require companies to avoid innovation -- that's how innovation happens, after all. With government entities, though, I have no problem with solid standards being adopted for communicating information. I'd quite happily accept a mandate stating that government documents have to be available in ASCII text, although these days HTML would probably be better since it'd allow for better markup and internationalisation.
The problem with innovative technologies is that with a few exceptions, they typically focus on the largest part of the market, and this ignores all sorts of niche markets. (eg. Disabled people, people who don't use Windows or have access to a major web browser, people who don't have cell phones, and whatever else.) This is where standards shine, if they're designed well, because it lets the people in the niche areas develop their own tools for handling the standard formats instead of having to hope that someone in the commercial world will decide it worthwhile to take notice of them. The fact that they're standards means that there's enough time (without change) for tools to actually be developed and be useful. And this is why organisations whose job it is to communicate should be adopting standards to do so, rather than trying to innovate too much.
Besides, vanilla or not, there's nothing wrong or limited with ODF if your goal is to communicate information, and this is what most government entities will be aiming to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate that there are issues with the copyright system, but aren't those issues really just symptoms of having a messed up political system in the first place? As long as mega-corporations, such as Disney, Sony and others, also have lawyers, lobbyists bureaucrats, not to mention billions of dollars and a steady income, I doubt that $100 million will go very far. If it accomplishes anything, the fundamental consequences of the current system will probably just put things back again within a decade or two.
It's an interesting idea to spend money on this problem. If anything, though, I think it should be spent on communicating the idea to people and trying to think of ways to get them to realise both how screwed up the system is, and what they need to do to change it. Perhaps actually demonstrating to people the positive effects of shorter copyright terms would be a good way to start, as well as doing away with that myth about artificially defined copyright ownership being so comparable with real ownership. It also needs to be spent in a way that would out-smart the mega-corps, or preferably hit on issues that they simply can't argue with. The only way things can really change long term is if the people whom the government represents actually see what's going on, and decide not to accept it.
I heard it mentioned on the radio this morning that the ozone hole had been measured as the biggest ever so far. Confusingly, an interviewed scientist was also commenting that people shouldn't panic, because it was on a downward trend and was still expected to heal itself over the next so many decades. I'm not quite sure exactly what was meant, because under most circumstances I wouldn't intuitively consider a "largest ever recorded value" to play any part in a measured downward trend. It's possible that people in the know have other reasons to believe that it's still likely to go away, however.
I guess people are saying exactly that if you look in the right places, just as you're saying it now (as are lots of other posts). But Microsoft has done this for years with nearly everything, and they're very good at the marketing aspects of it, and how to communicate with their target markets. A lot of Windows users are not exactly the sort of people who comprehend the existence of anything other than Windows. Except for perhaps the server market, Microsoft's target market is not people who are using alternative OS's; it's people who are already using Windows, and trying to convince them to upgrade.
Personally I find some of the Microsoft marketing material quite patronising when I read about great new, innovative features they're providing. With some insight, it's often easier to ask why it took so long to implement some good ideas that have been available elsewhere for ages. (To be fair, I think a lot of this is the marketers rather than some of the engineers who actually design and build the stuff.) Realistically though, it doesn't matter to Microsoft's primary customers, many of whom couldn't actually comprehend using anything other than Microsoft products, and are probably quite locked into it even if they could.
If Microsoft's copying great innovations from other products, whether it's Gnome, KDE or OS X, a myraid of command shells, Mozilla/Firefox, features of programming languages, or whatever else, it doesn't really matter to a large number of Microsoft's target customers who have never known anything beyond what they've been fed them on a plate.
I haven't spent a lot of time scrutinising the Vista interface, although other people in my group at work have. But assuming this is true, it sounds as if the market droids got a-hold of the UI design (again), given that the things most likely to be selling points are pushed to the front at the expense of actual usability.
That said, how easy is it to disable all the quirky goo and have a better interface? Once we get around to rolling it out to our users in about 18 months, we'll probably be pre-configuring the defaults for everyone, and it's likely to be configured to whatever will help things run most efficiently.
I thought Fox dumped their news division a long time ago.
Can anyone comment on how this is related (if at all) to a recent announcement in New Zealand about a new ability to "store and execute computer programmes within a microscopic DNA Pharmaceutical crystal"? [1] [2]. Supposedly (according to radio reports) the New Zealand group has been working for 20 years in secret (or something) until the press release in the past day or so.
I'm wondering if it's a case of one group having announced in a rush so as not to be overshadowed by another group that's been working on the same thing.
Microsoft's changed a lot over the last few years. In the early to mid 1990's, there were a lot of occasions when Microsoft was openly stating that it was okay to install its applications in multiple places, such as at home and at work, without paying for a second copy. The only catch was that it was only running in one location at a time. It was perfectly okay to install an application (or OS) on a new PC, as long as it wouldn't run on the old PC any more. Backup copies? Sure, in fact they probably recommended it.
This was when the people at Microsoft were probably thinking a lot more philosophically about what intellectual property actually was, including how they'd like to be treated when they bought software. ie. They were licensing it to a person for use forever. Maybe this was when Microsoft still had a lot more people at the top who were actually interested in the software development, instead of simply generic managers who want to run a business in a generic make-money way. The irony is that even then, we thought it was a bit totalitarian, but compared with today it was very generous.
Since the more recent management has worked its way into the fold, Microsoft has changed to a much more business-oriented commercial approach, which seems to be more interested in sucking as much from the market as is possible, instead of treating it with respect. Instead of licensing software to people, it's being chained to specific PC's so it can't be re-used anywhere else. If a person wants to use it in additional places, they have to pay for the same thing over and over again. I find it irritating that they're claiming it's all because of piracy. Perhaps it prevents some piracy, but nearly all the time, these restrictions seem to also ensure that people have to keep re-purchasing the same thing, whether it's retail or OEM, instead of just re-using the same software on new (or alternative) PC's.
The frustrating part is that many people I know see absolutely no alternative to Microsoft, because practically there isn't much. "The Microsoft way" of doing things gets treated more and more as if it's normal, irrespective of how totalitarian and unfair it really is, simply because no other methods are above the radar to compare it with.
If you mean what I think you mean, then I agree.
What I don't understand is why people care so much about possible fragmentation of the brand. This is what Open Source is. The GPL and other open source licenses fundamentally encourage code to be forked, built on and improved to meet the needs of different groups of people who might not otherwise be fully satisfied. When I see people proclaim, in the name of OSS, that it's a "bad thing for OSS" if Firefox fragments away from a single brand, it seems hypocritical to me.
If there's a particular browser out there that people want to promote and use to challenge IE, then by all means they should do that. But it's silly to expect other OSS users to drop whatever they're doing and unite for such a specific cause against closed source software. The fact that some people would like to see OSS overtake CSS, to all kinds of varying degrees, doesn't mean that all Firefox and Debian developers and users have to think the same thing.
If the web is to serve its intended purpose, web developers shouldn't be coding for IE and they certainly shouldn't be coding for Firefox. They should be coding for standards, and browser makers should be working to implement those standards correctly. An increase in the number of browsers out there, even if they're forked from the same code base, can only push the point that reliance on standards is ever more important. That's good for everyone who wants a good web browsing experience. It also gives people more freedom to choose the browser they want, instead of having to choose from only one or two browsers that might render the pages correctly.
This is exactly right, and I can appreciate everything you've said. I suppose my concern is with the implication that it should be up to the "open source community" to change things. This is partly because it's never been clear to me exactly who the "open source community" actually is, and it's especially been unclear to me what should motivate people to suddenly jump up and all cooperate towards a unified goal, the specifics of which are decided by someone else, and at the same time abandoning whatever motivations were causing them to be involved in open source in the first place.
I'm an open source developer, more for fun than anything else, and I doubt that what I've produced so far is of much practical use to anyone. It doesn't really matter to me, though, because my motivation is with precisely what I'm doing. I'm not likely to suddenly stop it, and go and work on something that other people consider more important. Doing so would be a chore for me during my leisure time, and I'd much sooner go outside for a walk or something.
If there's a company, on the other hand, which wants to develop a full-scale competitor to Windows based on open source, including production, distribution, and marketing, then good on them. Then they'd be producing and selling a product just as Microsoft is doing -- the only difference would be the development model, and also licensing issues to do with distribution. But as I can see it, "open source" isn't a product, a company, or an organisation, and it shouldn't be treated as one. KDE and Gnome might do better to merge, but this shouldn't be done just for some centralised need to compete. It should be done because the developers and users of KDE and Gnome want to actually merge them, and if there's enough support then I'm sure it'll happen. Obviously if there are enough people who don't want that, it'll fork right back to how it is now.
As far as I can tell, things are like this with OSS because that's exactly what open source licensing encourages. As long as people continue to use the GPL and similar licenses, everything will trend towards diversity. The only reason Windows hasn't been forked a million times is because Microsoft retains an iron grip on its intellectual property. Personally I think the Windows code base is worse for that, although I know a lot of people would disagree with me. Open source software development is messy, but it's always been messy. For it to be cleaner and more structured, people would have to start releasing their software under different licenses, and those licenses probably wouldn't qualify as open source (by today's definitions) and come with all the same benefits.
I don't personally see anything wrong with open source as it is, and I don't see a point in trying to fight against it. I like to see open source software do well in the world, get noticed and help people do what they want, but I don't think that's a mandatory requirement for it to be useful.
Anyway, I think that sums up my own views, and I don't expect everyone to see things the way I do. Yay for debate.
Why should Linux neet to "overtake or compete on a widescale in the United States or Canada"? If you mean compete with Windows, there's not really a comparison. Linux is a kernel -- Windows is a Kernel and OS.
It'd make more sense to claim that KDE (for example) might compete with the Windows UI one day. Specifically what's running underneath it isn't really relevant. In any case, I don't see why KDE and Gnome would need to unify for a non-Windows interface to become competitive.
Perhaps for some people, the icon graphics and the location of items on the menus might be critically important, and I guess that's my point.
There are all sorts of reasons that people prefer Gnome over KDE, or KDE over Gnome. Some people (like me) like completely different interfaces from time to time, if only to get away from the whole panel on the bottom and menu on the left for a while. Sometimes it's a speed issue, it might be where and how much customisation they want, it could be a whole lot of things. Until you actually sit down and try to use it for something where it causes problems, it's hard to tell. If you don't notice any difference, I'd suggest just picking one or the other and going with it. The truth is, if there was a good abstract API for developers to use for writing applications to run smoothly in both, it wouldn't be an issue. I really hope that Portland and similar projects that are working on this issue will finally figure out a way to get it working.
What I really don't want, though, is for everything to be force-combined into some kind of central interface, which is exactly what happens with MS Windows. There are plenty of times I've been irritated at how Windows does things, such as the way it decides to re-focus windows when I'm typing, or the way it doesn't natively support virtual desktops, and there's nothing I can do, because Windows is the only practical choice when you have to use a Windows OS. To me, it would just be bad to reduce user choice, because it just means there's less choice, and there's one body who decides what's best for everyone... even when it's not. All the people who hate Gnome, and all the people who hate KDE, all have to put up with the little things they hate, which you probably don't even notice if they're not things that are important to you.
KDE and Gnome exist separately because people had major differences of opinion about how to do things. That's the open source way for all sorts of fundamental reasons, and I honestly can't see how they could be combined without another project springing up to do things differently yet again, whether it's about menu item placement, stripping of bloat, adding of bloat, or some kind of much deeper architectural programming issue. Personally I think it's better to just accept that there will be multiple ways of doing things, and focus more on standards and interoperability to make it easier for application developers.
Absolutely. I'm all for abstracting the API's to make it easier for developers to write apps that'll work well in more places. I'm saying this as a developer, although not someone who spends a lot of time with GUI programming (apart from what I have to for my Windows-coding job). I just don't like the idea of combining the UI into one big project in a way that might make it harder to get diversity and choice for users. To me, that just represents the whole Windows, monolithic, Microsoft-and-nobody-else-decides-what-you-get philosophy, which is one of the things I really dislike about the Windows model.
If Portland, or some other tool, helps developers write good applications that'll run more smoothly in both desktops -- maybe even additional desktops, without having to radically alter the behaviour of the desktop (as far as the user is concerned), I think it'll be great.
Why not one mail client that's really good, and runs nicely in both, maybe even all desktops? I'd like it a lot if reasonable parts of the API's for different desktops were merged, but I really hope the desktops remain separate, and to be honest given the nature of open source licences, I can't see how there ever could be one definitive monolithic open source desktop unless it miraculously gave everyone everything they wanted.
I quite like having several good and well maintained desktops to choose from. One of the biggest things that puts me off Windows is that it doesn't matter what sort of interface you like, because you always have to have what Microsoft chooses to feed you. Any UI improvements introduced to Windows are lauded as some kind of great break-through for Microsoft, even if they're based on principles that have been known about and implemented in less-known places for years.
The problem isn't so much that it's Microsoft as that it's a single organisation with a product in a domain that nobody can seriously compete with. What disturbs me most about it, however, is that by being the only offering for so many people, everyone forgets that their lives might be better if there was competition from a viable alternative. I'd hate it if there ended up being a massive organisation dictating to open source users what they should use. It'd be much more beneficial if people could just realise that there can be competition in a desktop market, people should choose whichever one they like the most, and applications should run nicely in all of them. (The last part could be helped a lot by abstracting the API's, which is what this slashdot story is all about.)
Isn't that what package managers and dependency managers are for? If you're still manually determining, downloading and configuring packages for your desktop PC, I'd guess it's either because you need a better package manager or because you simply enjoy doing that sort of thing. I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't some popular package managers out there that still have room for improvement, but I'd rather the focus of criticm was on inadequate package managers than on something like Portland which might actually be helpful for developers.
Open source applications typically rely on all sorts of libraries and other packages, and most regular distributions (that I'm aware of) have a mechanism for making sure that required packages get installed. How would something like Portland be any different? All it would mean is that a developer could use a single interface instead of having to distinguish between Gnome, KDE, and whatever else.
I have. I regularly switch between KDE, Gnome and WindowMaker every few months, depending on what mood I'm in and how I want to do things. They're actually quite different in what they make more convenient to do, and how a user interacts with them.
What I really would hate is if the open source world moved more towards a Windows model, where users have to take what Microsoft decides is "right" for them, because they have no other choice. There's no serious competition in the Windows UI world, because Microsoft has so much control over what can be done, what things look like, and how applications interact. If a vendor comes out with a fancy application with an improved interface, this usually means it's inconsistent with one Microsoft guideline or another, making it generally less nice to use.
The power with having multiple desktop vendors is that although application developers control some aspects of their app's interaction, they don't have to be as concerned about some of the broader parts which are handled by the desktop, because chances are that the user's selected whichever desktop best suits the way they work, anyway.
It's definitely not perfect at the moment, and there aren't that many graphical apps around that run nicely under multiple desktops. I hope that projects such as this one help to figure out the right level of abstraction for applications to have from the desktop.
Probably to make it easier for developers to more cleanly support two different kinds of users with their applications? Developers have little control over which desktop a user decides to use. Personally I hope that desktops don't end up uniting in a way that restricts the choice for a user.
This isn't about uniting the user interfaces, though. It's about making things more convenient for developers by providing a common set of developer interfaces, helping developers to make applications that will work more smoothly with either desktop, and in the longer term, maybe even other desktops that don't exist yet.
Because "getting with the program", as you put it, means they can't patch the code as they want to without relying on a third party.
A distribution is a collection of software that's configured to work together, and often it's vouched for by the distro maintainers. Debian's serious about stability in its official releases, and given that it also has an obligation to assure its users that the browser is stable and secure to run on their system, I have absolutely no problem with Debian wanting to patch the hell out of Firefox, if that's what they decide is necessary.
I'm confused about why the Debian maintainers decided to try and use the Firefox name in the first place when they're not supposed to, but if they now need to rename it to maintain the quality of Debian, good on them.
For what it's worth, I've just experimented with XMMS (1.2.10) in random mode, and it seems to be doing this now.
If I double-click a track to play it, then click advance, it was always advancing to a different track, implying that it reshuffled at the point of selecting a track. Simply moving backwards and forwards between tracks left them in a consistent order, however.
At the time, I remember hearing a rumour that one of the reasons CD burners were prohibitively expensive (for a time) was because media companies -- mostly music, I think -- were buying up the majority of CD burners being produced to keep the prices high... or at the very least there was a lot of money exchanging hands. I'm not sure how true it was, though.
If only Microsoft would still distribute Windows with a fat, 350 page instruction manual, it would no longer be necessary to phone home. Instead, whenever authenticity was doubted, the OS could simply pop up a window asking a question such as "What is the 57th word in paragraph 9 of page 261 of your Microsoft Windows Instruction Manual?"
In Whangarei, a New Zealand town, they do it by playing continuous Barry Manilow music, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Personally I think it's a wonder the local retailers get any customers at all.
DS9 got better and better as the seasons went on, and the writers developed a very good story-arc. Reportedly this was influenced a lot by Babylon 5, which was also active at the time, and there have been a lot of claims that Trek ripped off the space station idea after JMS tried to sell it. This may be partly true, but I think the fact that DS9 was actually good had more to do with the fact that Berman and friends left DS9 to focus more on Voyager, allowing the DS9 writers and directors more freedom to actually produce a good continuous story.
I re-watched TNG a while ago, which I enjoyed the first time around. There are some good shows in there and it's nice to reminisce, but it's quite dated. DS9 would definitely be my first choice to watch again if I found the time to watch any of it, but I wouldn't bother with Voyager or Enterprise.
I'm a full-time Debian (testing) user at home, routinely flippng between KDE, Gnome and WindowMaker depending on the mood I'm in. At work, I write .Net code for Windows platforms at work. My personal belief is that Visual Studio and SQL Server are probably the two best products that Microsoft has ever produced.
That said, I still prefer to use something other than Windows given the choice, and I'll make the sacrifice to using other IDE's when writing code for other systems. Part of it is the whole freedom thing -- I don't like locking myself into Windows. A lot of it, though, is usability as I see it. I consider myself an expert user, and I like the command line. The Windows command line is yucky, and even with quite intering looking improvements (such as Powershell, still in beta), the whole thing is still locked inside that yucky window that only wants to resize vertically. With Windows, you're essentially stuck with "The Microsoft Way" of doing something, whether you like it or not. To name one more example, Windows XP doesn't have native support for virtual desktops, which I really like, but the only way to do it is to staple on a third party application which might integrate okay with Windows, but probably won't integrate well with lots of other third party software. This is the case with lots of things in Windows -- if you want it, you have to get an independent third party application which often won't play nicely with other applications, will probably cost more money, and might throw up (yet another) annoying splash screen when it starts... just to make sure you don't forget that it's there.
I still wouldn't usually recommend most linux distros for inexperienced users, at least if those users are going to have to administer the systems in any way. They're fine when they work, but many times I've still found situations where if something does go wrong, it just takes a bit too much expertise and understanding of a problem to fix it.
I think one of the most important things that puts me off Windows, especially having used several Linux distros, is that I find the package management to be awful in comparison. MSI's are okay in the same way that .deb's and .rpm's are okay, but they really only work if they're built properly, and a lot of third party app providers don't put a lot of effort into their installers. The most common problems I've had is that they refuse to uninstall properly later, they don't cope well with a damaged app, or that they install much more than necessary so they don't have to worry about things like shared libraries.
I'm also convinced that this issue isn't one that can easily be fixed given Microsoft's development and sales model. The difference between Windows and something like Debian, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or SuSE, or whatever, is that all the linux distributions are giving you complete systems including he majority of applications you're likely to ever want. They're also designing the installers, and I know that if I install an application using a .deb that's provided by Debian, it's very likely to install properly. I'd consider the same with most MSI's provided by Microsoft, except that Microsoft doesn't provide half the applications I need to work effectively.
Linux distro providers can do this because
As much as I wish this would happen, I'm not convinced this would help. Besides, haven't people already demonstrated over and over again that Diebold voting machines are hopeless for security and reliability? In the most extreme case, Diebold would scream "HACKER!" Political representatives would ignore it if they didn't try to actively surpress it, because aside from third parties (who don't matter), both major parties have interests in voting mechanisms that aren't verifiable. The culprit would be arrested and silenced, and the media with the highest ratings would continue offer tasty incentives for influential politicians to appear on their programs instead of the competition's. (eg. We'll ask you exactly the questions you're prepared to answer.)
In general commercial terms, I agree that legislation shouldn't (usually) require companies to avoid innovation -- that's how innovation happens, after all. With government entities, though, I have no problem with solid standards being adopted for communicating information. I'd quite happily accept a mandate stating that government documents have to be available in ASCII text, although these days HTML would probably be better since it'd allow for better markup and internationalisation.
The problem with innovative technologies is that with a few exceptions, they typically focus on the largest part of the market, and this ignores all sorts of niche markets. (eg. Disabled people, people who don't use Windows or have access to a major web browser, people who don't have cell phones, and whatever else.) This is where standards shine, if they're designed well, because it lets the people in the niche areas develop their own tools for handling the standard formats instead of having to hope that someone in the commercial world will decide it worthwhile to take notice of them. The fact that they're standards means that there's enough time (without change) for tools to actually be developed and be useful. And this is why organisations whose job it is to communicate should be adopting standards to do so, rather than trying to innovate too much.
Besides, vanilla or not, there's nothing wrong or limited with ODF if your goal is to communicate information, and this is what most government entities will be aiming to do.