A better comparison would probably be local phone calls. Nearly everyone takes unlimited local calls, though metered is often an option. Except for people that almost never use the phone, it's a great convenience not to have to monitor use, even if you could save a little money on metered.
People are often quite happy to rent rather than to buy, if the financial terms are right. For instance, many people lease cars - and many others have no interest in this, even though it might be more financially sensible. I think it's fair to say that people prefer to own rather than rent, and prefer flat rate to metered, but are willing to consider those options if there's a large financial benefit. Given that metered computing is rarely cheaper for most people (and certainly not slashdotters) than the fixed rates that come up, it's being squished.
If Microsoft offered Office licenses at $10/year or $400 for unlimited use, people would flock to the yearly license.
It's possible they mean that the industry believes that mp3 is here to stay right now, but they may change this belief at any time.
It's still shoddy sentence structure. If you want to shoot them, I won't be terribly upset. (Though I'd rather you target the executives at WB that cancelled the finale of Buffy over a Katzian panic after Littleton.)
Geeks tend to forget that their perspective on Microsoft is unusual. 95% of the software-buying population thinks Microsoft is okay. (Semi-random number - but the point being nearly all.) You'll never convince most people to use Linux based on the virtue that it isn't Microsoft - they don't care about that. One of the big attractions to the current linux community is that it's not Microsoft, perhaps - but that's a dead end road, that's gotten all the people its going to get.
The way, now, to make Linux attractive is to make it _better_ than Microsoft. Anything else is pointless - if Microsoft makes a better OS, where better is defined as possessing qualities that make people use it more often, then they deserve to win. Getting distracted by ideology will make the people who don't hate Microsoft not want to listen to the good parts, where Linux will help them do their jobs better.
And it's also worth pointing out (or maybe not, but it's too late to stop me) that the word Cyberpunk was invented by Bruce Bethke (in a 1982(?) short story called, well, Cyberpunk.)
His novel, Headcrash, is very entertaining, particularly the early bits which have a very tongue-in-cheek portrayal of sysadmin life. Fair warning - the last twenty pages take a left turn into what can only be described as some random novel written by martians on crack - but it's a fun read nonetheless.
It's perhaps a bit distracting to focus on who exactly invented what. Vinge, Stephenson, Bethke, and Gibson, along with several others, are clearly pioneers in the 'cyberpunk' genre, and are worth reading. (Vinge is my favorite of the bunch, actually.)
While I mostly agree with you, that movie marketing has really changed our preconception of movies, a few do slip through the cracks. A good example is the recent 'Shakespeare in Love' - a remarkably good little movie that opened in largely art house theatres, and went on to not just critical but financial success. I went to it when it first came out with little hype, just knowing it was the new Tom Stoppard film (he's previously done Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead, as well as numerous plays.)
And sure, I've got my Star Wars tickets, but I much prefer to see non-event films. Ones which are forced to stand on their own merit. They're getting rarer these days - and I think this is being driven by the moviegoing audience as much as the moviemakers themselves - but we shouldn't miss the surprising few good films each year while we're lost in cynicism.
I worked at Sun for a while in the resolution center (read: internal helpdesk.) They have x86 widely deployed for laptop users - which tend to be sales types, who would really not be able to handle 'compiling' software. (That was the kind of thing they'd ask us to do for them.) So, that's one more type of user that might be on x86.
You can also get Solaris x86 for free, if it's not for commercial use. This isn't very widely publicized, and it's not open source, and there's really not much software available that you don't have to compile yourself. Now, that changes somewhat.
I see this as very useful for someone who, for some reason or another, is tied into Solaris (be it tradition, I Work For Sun, or a key internal application) being able to actually get useful software without having to work very hard.
And geeks may forget this, but to the average person, a compile is harder than they are willing to attempt, and if it doesn't work out of the box, they have no way to get it to work ever. And we all know how often we need to make minor tweaks to compile software.
What does this mean for Linux? Well, hopefully it's a step towards wider industry acceptance. Sun is realizing that Linux has a broader application base than Solaris in many respects, and wants in on that. It would be fantastic if we could move towards more binary compatibility across Unix flavors, and if Linux is the standard, great! I may be capable of compiling software, but I'd still rather download it and expect it to work. (One definite _good_ feature of the windows experience. We want to copy everything they do right, rather than be different just to be contrary.)
Fixed link. Oops, a space crept into the url. Actually, upon further testing, it looks like a slashdot bug with too long of a URL - putting a space after the " in the HREF line fixed it. Yes, I'll mail Rob with details.
I haven't actually played this game yet, but there's a very well written review that didn't like this game much here. It's about the windows version primarily, and some of their complaints about the interface may not apply, but the game engine sounds the same. Someday, I look forward to having a gaming mag for Linux games.
This may be too obvious, but I'm pretty sure the answers are Perl (as pearls come from oysters) and Eiffel.
Perl's success is very interesting, and nearly completely ignored by other language designers. In my (educated?) opinion, Perl gets a lot of converts because people can sit down, try something, and get it to work a _lot_ quicker than most other languages. There's more than one way to do it, and it's easy to find a style that suits you in Perl. It's practical, rather than built on theoretically pure principles of the Right Way To Do It.
I'm not sure why being practical so often takes a backseat to pushing the agenda of the designers - maybe most people just have a difficult time seeing more than one way things could be done without thinking that one is automatically better.
I think that this could be an important step in gaining home Linux users. I know many people that are Unix people at work, prefer it as an OS, and run Windows at home. Why? They have no illusions that they could get better free operating systems. But Windows has better games. (This is a big reason, IMO, why the Macintosh didn't win a lot of home audience either.)
Personally speaking, I didn't install Linux until very recently (last week! Got a working debian system now!) despite the fact that I've been a professional Unix/Perl person for some time. The impetus was the purchase of a shiny new Windows laptop, which made the desktop 'expendable'. While I plan on playing with WINE soon, I wasn't willing to give up the ability to play games - I could do most of my cool Unix stuff by telnetting into a real machine I had an account on.
For someone to switch to Unix, even a geek or protogeek, there has to be some reason for them to go to the effort. For many, the challenge is enough, or anti-microsoft sentiment, or being part of a growing community, or what have you. But geeks and protogeeks like games, and it'd be helpful for the growth of linux if this was one less obstacle to overcome.
I think Civ will convince a lot more users to try Linux than Applix ever will.
To be fair, Microsoft is taking this seriously. It looks like they're changing the defaults of Office 2000 to not be so promiscuous with accepting macros. Their press release.
What is it, I mean, really?
on
Saving MST3K
·
· Score: 1
It's about, well, the original theme song explains it pretty well. From memory (with omissions): In the not too distant future Next Sunday AD There was a guy named Joel Not too different from you or me He worked at Gizmonics Institute Just another guy in a red jump suit He did a good job cleaning up the place But his bosses didn't like him, so they shot him into space They send him cheesy movies The worst they can find (lalala!) He has to sit and watch them all While they monitor his mind And if you're wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts, Repeat to yourself, it's just a show, I should really just relax For Mystery Science Theater 3000!
(And then they do, indeed show him a cheesy movie, and him and his homemade robots make fun of it.)
Hmm, that's an interesting position. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're basically saying that a person is free to share or not share any idea they have, but once they share it, they can't have any say in what other people do with it. This is philosophically clean and simple - if you don't want other people to use your ideas, keep your big mouth shut.
In practice, this makes me a bit wary. It's obvious (to me) that it would be bad if someone took a book someone else wrote, and put their name on it (which is a very basic, and simple case of 'intellectual property'.) And the same with software, really - If I could start selling Kirbysoft Word, which was just MS Word with a few name changes, that seems slimy and underhanded. While it may be easy to say that, based on certain philosophies we have no inherent moral claim to ideas, this becomes difficult to implement. Part of this is that our society is based around the whole concept that we can own what we create and do with it what we see fit - and part of it is that there is some rational motivations to that.
I tend to think more along the lines of O'Reilly than RMS - we should free ideas such as software if freeing the idea works better. Open Source software does amazing things, and clearly has some strong practical justifications - it's not purely a strange little moral phenomena.
There's nothing wrong at all with doing something out of a motivation other than making money. However, and this is my point, open source software is not a phenomena that is newsworthy because it's creating morally pure software. It's a phenomna, it's popular, because it creates _good_ software, software that can compete in quality (and often surpass) commercial software. Much of the open source community is distracted by ideas such as these, and enters into the Holy Cause against commercial software. This may be a mistake - people who are curious tend to be scared off by such zealots, particularly if they're grounded in the traditional commercial mindset. The way to evangelize open source is as a practical way to make better software, not as a natural conclusion of philsophies of scarcity and reproducibility. And, believe me, for every philosopher you can quote that supports this idea, there's another equally respected one who can be quoted against it (such as John Locke, and his idea of the input of labor (ie, programming) creating ownership.)
This was posted under the topic 'humor' rather than 'star wars'. Hmm, how long before we get more than one topic for an item? But, anyway, it's not the software that's broken in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if that isn't quite the comparison.
A better comparison would probably be local phone calls. Nearly everyone takes unlimited local calls, though metered is often an option. Except for people that almost never use the phone, it's a great convenience not to have to monitor use, even if you could save a little money on metered.
People are often quite happy to rent rather than to buy, if the financial terms are right. For instance, many people lease cars - and many others have no interest in this, even though it might be more financially sensible. I think it's fair to say that people prefer to own rather than rent, and prefer flat rate to metered, but are willing to consider those options if there's a large financial benefit. Given that metered computing is rarely cheaper for most people (and certainly not slashdotters) than the fixed rates that come up, it's being squished.
If Microsoft offered Office licenses at $10/year or $400 for unlimited use, people would flock to the yearly license.
It's possible they mean that the industry believes that mp3 is here to stay right now, but they may change this belief at any time.
It's still shoddy sentence structure. If you want to shoot them, I won't be terribly upset. (Though I'd rather you target the executives at WB that cancelled the finale of Buffy over a Katzian panic after Littleton.)
Geeks tend to forget that their perspective on Microsoft is unusual. 95% of the software-buying population thinks Microsoft is okay. (Semi-random number - but the point being nearly all.) You'll never convince most people to use Linux based on the virtue that it isn't Microsoft - they don't care about that. One of the big attractions to the current linux community is that it's not Microsoft, perhaps - but that's a dead end road, that's gotten all the people its going to get.
The way, now, to make Linux attractive is to make it _better_ than Microsoft. Anything else is pointless - if Microsoft makes a better OS, where better is defined as possessing qualities that make people use it more often, then they deserve to win. Getting distracted by ideology will make the people who don't hate Microsoft not want to listen to the good parts, where Linux will help them do their jobs better.
Short version: The good parts were outstandingly good, and the bad parts were surprisingly painfully bad. Long version: Follow this link.
And it's also worth pointing out (or maybe not, but it's too late to stop me) that the word Cyberpunk was invented by Bruce Bethke (in a 1982(?) short story called, well, Cyberpunk.)
His novel, Headcrash, is very entertaining, particularly the early bits which have a very tongue-in-cheek portrayal of sysadmin life. Fair warning - the last twenty pages take a left turn into what can only be described as some random novel written by martians on crack - but it's a fun read nonetheless.
It's perhaps a bit distracting to focus on who exactly invented what. Vinge, Stephenson, Bethke, and Gibson, along with several others, are clearly pioneers in the 'cyberpunk' genre, and are worth reading. (Vinge is my favorite of the bunch, actually.)
While I mostly agree with you, that movie marketing has really changed our preconception of movies, a few do slip through the cracks. A good example is the recent 'Shakespeare in Love' - a remarkably good little movie that opened in largely art house theatres, and went on to not just critical but financial success. I went to it when it first came out with little hype, just knowing it was the new Tom Stoppard film (he's previously done Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead, as well as numerous plays.)
And sure, I've got my Star Wars tickets, but I much prefer to see non-event films. Ones which are forced to stand on their own merit. They're getting rarer these days - and I think this is being driven by the moviegoing audience as much as the moviemakers themselves - but we shouldn't miss the surprising few good films each year while we're lost in cynicism.
I worked at Sun for a while in the resolution center (read: internal helpdesk.) They have x86 widely deployed for laptop users - which tend to be sales types, who would really not be able to handle 'compiling' software. (That was the kind of thing they'd ask us to do for them.) So, that's one more type of user that might be on x86.
You can also get Solaris x86 for free, if it's not for commercial use. This isn't very widely publicized, and it's not open source, and there's really not much software available that you don't have to compile yourself. Now, that changes somewhat.
I see this as very useful for someone who, for some reason or another, is tied into Solaris (be it tradition, I Work For Sun, or a key internal application) being able to actually get useful software without having to work very hard.
And geeks may forget this, but to the average person, a compile is harder than they are willing to attempt, and if it doesn't work out of the box, they have no way to get it to work ever. And we all know how often we need to make minor tweaks to compile software.
What does this mean for Linux? Well, hopefully it's a step towards wider industry acceptance. Sun is realizing that Linux has a broader application base than Solaris in many respects, and wants in on that. It would be fantastic if we could move towards more binary compatibility across Unix flavors, and if Linux is the standard, great! I may be capable of compiling software, but I'd still rather download it and expect it to work. (One definite _good_ feature of the windows experience. We want to copy everything they do right, rather than be different just to be contrary.)
Fixed link. Oops, a space crept into the url. Actually, upon further testing, it looks like a slashdot bug with too long of a URL - putting a space after the " in the HREF line fixed it. Yes, I'll mail Rob with details.
I haven't actually played this game yet, but there's a very well written review that didn't like this game much here. It's about the windows version primarily, and some of their complaints about the interface may not apply, but the game engine sounds the same. Someday, I look forward to having a gaming mag for Linux games.
This may be too obvious, but I'm pretty sure the answers are Perl (as pearls come from oysters) and Eiffel.
Perl's success is very interesting, and nearly completely ignored by other language designers. In my (educated?) opinion, Perl gets a lot of converts because people can sit down, try something, and get it to work a _lot_ quicker than most other languages. There's more than one way to do it, and it's easy to find a style that suits you in Perl. It's practical, rather than built on theoretically pure principles of the Right Way To Do It.
I'm not sure why being practical so often takes a backseat to pushing the agenda of the designers - maybe most people just have a difficult time seeing more than one way things could be done without thinking that one is automatically better.
I think that this could be an important step in gaining home Linux users. I know many people that are Unix people at work, prefer it as an OS, and run Windows at home. Why? They have no illusions that they could get better free operating systems. But Windows has better games. (This is a big reason, IMO, why the Macintosh didn't win a lot of home audience either.)
Personally speaking, I didn't install Linux until very recently (last week! Got a working debian system now!) despite the fact that I've been a professional Unix/Perl person for some time. The impetus was the purchase of a shiny new Windows laptop, which made the desktop 'expendable'. While I plan on playing with WINE soon, I wasn't willing to give up the ability to play games - I could do most of my cool Unix stuff by telnetting into a real machine I had an account on.
For someone to switch to Unix, even a geek or protogeek, there has to be some reason for them to go to the effort. For many, the challenge is enough, or anti-microsoft sentiment, or being part of a growing community, or what have you. But geeks and protogeeks like games, and it'd be helpful for the growth of linux if this was one less obstacle to overcome.
I think Civ will convince a lot more users to try Linux than Applix ever will.
To be fair, Microsoft is taking this seriously. It looks like they're changing the defaults of Office 2000 to not be so promiscuous with accepting macros. Their press release.
It's about, well, the original theme song explains it pretty well. From memory (with omissions):
In the not too distant future
Next Sunday AD
There was a guy named Joel
Not too different from you or me
He worked at Gizmonics Institute
Just another guy in a red jump suit
He did a good job cleaning up the place
But his bosses didn't like him, so they shot him into space
They send him cheesy movies
The worst they can find
(lalala!)
He has to sit and watch them all
While they monitor his mind
And if you're wondering how he eats and breathes,
and other science facts,
Repeat to yourself, it's just a show,
I should really just relax
For
Mystery
Science
Theater
3000!
(And then they do, indeed show him a cheesy movie, and him and his homemade robots make fun of it.)
Hmm, that's an interesting position. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're basically saying that a person is free to share or not share any idea they have, but once they share it, they can't have any say in what other people do with it. This is philosophically clean and simple - if you don't want other people to use your ideas, keep your big mouth shut.
In practice, this makes me a bit wary. It's obvious (to me) that it would be bad if someone took a book someone else wrote, and put their name on it (which is a very basic, and simple case of 'intellectual property'.) And the same with software, really - If I could start selling Kirbysoft Word, which was just MS Word with a few name changes, that seems slimy and underhanded. While it may be easy to say that, based on certain philosophies we have no inherent moral claim to ideas, this becomes difficult to implement. Part of this is that our society is based around the whole concept that we can own what we create and do with it what we see fit - and part of it is that there is some rational motivations to that.
I tend to think more along the lines of O'Reilly than RMS - we should free ideas such as software if freeing the idea works better. Open Source software does amazing things, and clearly has some strong practical justifications - it's not purely a strange little moral phenomena.
There's nothing wrong at all with doing something out of a motivation other than making money. However, and this is my point, open source software is not a phenomena that is newsworthy because it's creating morally pure software. It's a phenomna, it's popular, because it creates _good_ software, software that can compete in quality (and often surpass) commercial software. Much of the open source community is distracted by ideas such as these, and enters into the Holy Cause against commercial software. This may be a mistake - people who are curious tend to be scared off by such zealots, particularly if they're grounded in the traditional commercial mindset. The way to evangelize open source is as a practical way to make better software, not as a natural conclusion of philsophies of scarcity and reproducibility. And, believe me, for every philosopher you can quote that supports this idea, there's another equally respected one who can be quoted against it (such as John Locke, and his idea of the input of labor (ie, programming) creating ownership.)
This was posted under the topic 'humor' rather than 'star wars'. Hmm, how long before we get more than one topic for an item? But, anyway, it's not the software that's broken in this case.