Dell has said this every 6 months or so for the past.. well, since I can remember. They say it to get better deals from intel. In 2 months you'll have a story saying 'Dell decided to stick with intel after all'.
It's not anything to do with ideology. It's simply a less shortsighted way of looking at things.
Your three criteria (support, quality, price) are concerning the features of the here and now. And that's very fickle.
The critera that Free software 'zealots' use is far more long sighted. It concerns how it's possible for these qualities to change over time and not leave the user stranded above the waterline in n years from now.
How is he a bigot? Sure, he might not be 100% right about what users want on their browsing machines, but what causes him to be a bigot? Can you justify your statement?
You should know by now that slashdot is a news aggregator. If there are loads of linux / technology april fools jokes across the internet, it will pull in all of them.
Or are you one of these people that thinks the entire linux community should pull together and work on one central linux april fools joke and not split off into their own efforts?
The reason there are not many native mac ports of unix Free apps is because the huge majority of macintosh users are like you - don't care/know enough to open up a compiler and do something about it. The standard unix nerds aren't going to spend a huge amount of time on a platform they don't really use. And one with a userbase that seems to do nothing but compain and demand.
Free software is not called Free because you can bang your fist on the table and expect someone to create something for you.
And off topic slightly..
GIMP needs to be able to handle a few thousand photoshop files with all kinds of funky blending modes and layer effects and so forth and it needs to be able to handle it all perfectly
These 'funky blending modes' are exactly the kind of shit they started adding to photoshop after version 4 that made it become
more bloated, slower, and less useable as time goes by.
This is the same line I use when Macintosh users complain that there aren't native (or even working) versions of Free unix apps for their systems. It's not called Free because you can expect something for nothing. (Although often you do get that)
No - I think the reason there are no clone makers is that anyone who is interested in making a clone is big enough to stand up to an Apple lawsuit - whether Apple are right or wrong.
(And what's more nobody would want to buy the clone because when you're buying an Apple product, you're buying into an image.)
If you think EULAs are binding, then you should probably look at sony vs connectix and sega vs accolade. There would be no point in having any such thing as 'fair use' if companies could take away that right just by slapping an EULA on it. If you don't agree to the EULA, if you do agree to the EULA, you're not allowed the fair use rights that the EULA has taken away. You can't just randomly remove laws that would otherwise apply to your products. It doesn't work like that.
I don't think your little 'signature' technicality means anything here.
You don't even need that. It's a 5 minute soldering job hooking it up to the parallel port. More information available in your kernel documentation:/usr/src/linux/Documentation/input/joystick-parpor t.txt
If the Windows Paradigm was broken people would not use Windows.
I'll tell you this now, the packaging system is not the factor that people base their decisions to run windows on.
Yes there are some things about Windows that suck but MSI and InstallShield installers are not a example.
When you are installing from installshield, you're basically saying: 'Hello random executable from the internet (even if you are signed by someone), here, overwrite any of my libraries you'd like, with whatever obscure or customised version you want. Oh, and while you're at it, do whatever you want to my registry...'
I guess you would only be happy if we just pulled everything down from SVN/CVS and built from source.
That's a strawman attack. He didn't say anything like that - in fact it's the complete opposite of what he was arguing.
Bittorrent calls you a liar, buddy. We trade 5.25" floppies in a metaphorical sense constantly.
That's content, not programs. Completely different. And when it's linux iso's They're always the same because they are checked against the hashes. The end result is the same thing as having a very fast ftp.
When I develop a program that takes random input and outputs Frank & Earnest cartoons, I don't want to have to wait for some Board of Linux Usage Oversight to give my 5k perl script the Stamp of Approval.
Then don't. Package it with autopackage, rpm, a tarball, whatever, just beware that users installing it could screw with the way the distro wants things to be done and could mess things up.
Your average desktop user does not want to compile software. Dropping to a terminal, cd pathtoapp, tar -jxvf whatever.tar.gz, cd newpath,./configure; make; make install is too much shit for a user
Nobody is saying that. Straw man.
What a user can do is use yum, apt, yast, emerge, or a gui tool like synaptic. That's not difficult.
Don't just slap their hand and yell NO.
Nobody's doing that. They're still able to install whatever software they like from wherever they like, but if it causes problems for you, well, I'm probably not going to be able to help you with it buddy.
(^^ And I swore I'd never do backseat moderating like that)
This is exactly what I was going to post. It drives me mad when windows users think that having centralised package management done by the distros is a weakness of linux systems. In fact, if there's one thing I would give windows to make it remotely usable, it would be an apt-get type system/repository of software. With such a system, software that's not trusted would never get into any respecable maintainer's database. No more 'Hay I downloaded this super adware megascan 2006 - it says it's supposed to get rid of my adware and double the speed of my internet but it's just got worse now...'.
This idea of just wandering around the web until you find packages opens the door to as many malware problems as windows, and will be a support nightmare to distro vendors, who, to support a system properly ideally must be able to know exactly what software has been put on and how. This is one of the things that makes unix systems so solid.
I dread to think what distro support forums would start to look like if this caught on.
Please tell me I'm completely off base as to what autopackage stands for - but I have read the site several times in the past.
To get the unit into "USB Disk" mode, the user has to go to System Settings and put the unit into USB Connection mode. This seems overly complex. It might be better if the PSP just automatically opened a connection when it sensed a USB cable present -- that would open up all sorts of cool auto-sync possibilities i.e. the iPod.
This will be because the usb interface can act as a host and a client when doing different things. When connecting to psp peripherals it will act as a host controller, but when connecting to a pc it will have to act as a client. AFAIK there is no way of automatically sensing which it should be.
Why is this Paul Thurott person so enamored with what will essentially be a has-been OS with the features and security of something you can buy today from Apple?
Because he's as sold into the Microsoft franchise as you are sold into the Apple franchise. I bet you've got far more in common than you'd like to admit.
I'm assuming you're an Apple fanboy, so you're not going to like this, but OSX's font rendering is horrible. It's almost like there isn't any hinting at all. Or the screen's wrapped in cling film.
There are many reasons why binary kernel modules are a bad idea entirely. You try debugging a kernel that's had a module insterted into it that you don't have the source for.
I don't care if they are bnaries, the important think would be that any Linux user could get hold of one.
Unless they're running on something 'unsupported' like ppc or sparc. Or are running an 'unsupported' version of gcc or glibc. Or are trying to run the hardware three years after the vendor last bothered updating the driver so that it won't work on a modern kernel.
Look buddy, you might like to think that Apple's your pal and that Apple's really on your side, after all that's the way they try to market themselves and it's part of the whole image that you buy into, but I have news for you. Apple computer corporation is a company. They try to make money out of you. That's it.
In a business deal, both parties try their best to get what they want out of it. That's how things work. What is being done here is not illegal and what more, it's not even immoral. Anybody who would try to argue against it, well, I'd worry about them because of their blind devotion to a company.
But then again, this is the 'Apple' section, so this place is going to be rather full of such people.
...one page I found about the card suggested that "software raid is faster anyway", which is an absurd proposition by itself.
This is not absurd and is true for linux 2.6. Just because something's implemented in hardware doesn't save it if it's implemented badly. Which many hardware designs often are seeing as there's little/no opportunity to make fixes once the product has been launched to the wider world. And due to the drivers being obscure they're not as well tuned as the drivers for common chipsets.
And software raid has much better reliability.
I'll stop here, because I could go on forever with '101 reasons software raid is better than hardware raid*'.
I really want to know how these 'Alliances' and think-tanks get formed in the first place. Does Sun come to IBM and say something like:
Sun: Hey, wan't to go in with us on this joint think tank and study group? It will do industry analysis for all of us and we can get them to voice our opinons through their reports. I have a few friends I can pay to sit around and write articles.
IBM: Wait, whose opinions would these be? Yours or ours?
Sun: Does it matter?
IBM: Not really. Ok, I'm in.
Microsoft: Hey, my nephew's a philosophy major and is having trouble finding a job. He's quite a good writer - do you think you could get him a job in it?
Slashdot Mirror
Dell has said this every 6 months or so for the past.. well, since I can remember. They say it to get better deals from intel. In 2 months you'll have a story saying 'Dell decided to stick with intel after all'.
It's not anything to do with ideology. It's simply a less shortsighted way of looking at things.
Your three criteria (support, quality, price) are concerning the features of the here and now. And that's very fickle.
The critera that Free software 'zealots' use is far more long sighted. It concerns how it's possible for these qualities to change over time and not leave the user stranded above the waterline in n years from now.
How is he a bigot? Sure, he might not be 100% right about what users want on their browsing machines, but what causes him to be a bigot? Can you justify your statement?
All you have managed to do there, my friend, is prove that java is more often than not used as a buzzword.
You should know by now that slashdot is a news aggregator. If there are loads of linux / technology april fools jokes across the internet, it will pull in all of them.
Or are you one of these people that thinks the entire linux community should pull together and work on one central linux april fools joke and not split off into their own efforts?
Who's bright idea was it to force me to right-click a button to get a semi-related-but-not-really other button?
It's called a context menu. You know, it's supposed to tell you something / do something in context of what you just clicked on.
That's how right clicks are supposed to work, buddy - It's an object orientated interface.
The reason there are not many native mac ports of unix Free apps is because the huge majority of macintosh users are like you - don't care/know enough to open up a compiler and do something about it. The standard unix nerds aren't going to spend a huge amount of time on a platform they don't really use. And one with a userbase that seems to do nothing but compain and demand.
Free software is not called Free because you can bang your fist on the table and expect someone to create something for you.
And off topic slightly..
GIMP needs to be able to handle a few thousand photoshop files with all kinds of funky blending modes and layer effects and so forth and it needs to be able to handle it all perfectly
These 'funky blending modes' are exactly the kind of shit they started adding to photoshop after version 4 that made it become
more bloated, slower, and less useable as time goes by.
It's usually a photoshop at work / gimp at home thing.
(I used to do it - photoshop is painful)
This is the same line I use when Macintosh users complain that there aren't native (or even working) versions of Free unix apps for their systems. It's not called Free because you can expect something for nothing. (Although often you do get that)
There are a lot of crazy inconsistencies in Photoshop's interface that I was glad to be rid of when I dropped it.
No - I think the reason there are no clone makers is that anyone who is interested in making a clone is big enough to stand up to an Apple lawsuit - whether Apple are right or wrong.
(And what's more nobody would want to buy the clone because when you're buying an Apple product, you're buying into an image.)
If you think EULAs are binding, then you should probably look at sony vs connectix and sega vs accolade. There would be no point in having any such thing as 'fair use' if companies could take away that right just by slapping an EULA on it. If you don't agree to the EULA, if you do agree to the EULA, you're not allowed the fair use rights that the EULA has taken away. You can't just randomly remove laws that would otherwise apply to your products. It doesn't work like that.
I don't think your little 'signature' technicality means anything here.
You don't even need that. It's a 5 minute soldering job hooking it up to the parallel port. More information available in your kernel documentation: /usr/src/linux/Documentation/input/joystick-parpor t.txt
If the Windows Paradigm was broken people would not use Windows.
I'll tell you this now, the packaging system is not the factor that people base their decisions to run windows on.
Yes there are some things about Windows that suck but MSI and InstallShield installers are not a example.
When you are installing from installshield, you're basically saying: 'Hello random executable from the internet (even if you are signed by someone), here, overwrite any of my libraries you'd like, with whatever obscure or customised version you want. Oh, and while you're at it, do whatever you want to my registry...'
I guess you would only be happy if we just pulled everything down from SVN/CVS and built from source.
That's a strawman attack. He didn't say anything like that - in fact it's the complete opposite of what he was arguing.
Bittorrent calls you a liar, buddy. We trade 5.25" floppies in a metaphorical sense constantly.
./configure; make; make install is too much shit for a user
That's content, not programs. Completely different. And when it's linux iso's They're always the same because they are checked against the hashes. The end result is the same thing as having a very fast ftp.
When I develop a program that takes random input and outputs Frank & Earnest cartoons, I don't want to have to wait for some Board of Linux Usage Oversight to give my 5k perl script the Stamp of Approval.
Then don't. Package it with autopackage, rpm, a tarball, whatever, just beware that users installing it could screw with the way the distro wants things to be done and could mess things up.
Your average desktop user does not want to compile software. Dropping to a terminal, cd pathtoapp, tar -jxvf whatever.tar.gz, cd newpath,
Nobody is saying that. Straw man.
What a user can do is use yum, apt, yast, emerge, or a gui tool like synaptic. That's not difficult.
Don't just slap their hand and yell NO.
Nobody's doing that. They're still able to install whatever software they like from wherever they like, but if it causes problems for you, well, I'm probably not going to be able to help you with it buddy.
(^^ And I swore I'd never do backseat moderating like that)
This is exactly what I was going to post. It drives me mad when windows users think that having centralised package management done by the distros is a weakness of linux systems. In fact, if there's one thing I would give windows to make it remotely usable, it would be an apt-get type system/repository of software. With such a system, software that's not trusted would never get into any respecable maintainer's database. No more 'Hay I downloaded this super adware megascan 2006 - it says it's supposed to get rid of my adware and double the speed of my internet but it's just got worse now...'.
This idea of just wandering around the web until you find packages opens the door to as many malware problems as windows, and will be a support nightmare to distro vendors, who, to support a system properly ideally must be able to know exactly what software has been put on and how. This is one of the things that makes unix systems so solid.
I dread to think what distro support forums would start to look like if this caught on.
Please tell me I'm completely off base as to what autopackage stands for - but I have read the site several times in the past.
To get the unit into "USB Disk" mode, the user has to go to System Settings and put the unit into USB Connection mode. This seems overly complex. It might be better if the PSP just automatically opened a connection when it sensed a USB cable present -- that would open up all sorts of cool auto-sync possibilities i.e. the iPod.
This will be because the usb interface can act as a host and a client when doing different things. When connecting to psp peripherals it will act as a host controller, but when connecting to a pc it will have to act as a client. AFAIK there is no way of automatically sensing which it should be.
Why is this Paul Thurott person so enamored with what will essentially be a has-been OS with the features and security of something you can buy today from Apple?
Because he's as sold into the Microsoft franchise as you are sold into the Apple franchise. I bet you've got far more in common than you'd like to admit.
I'm assuming you're an Apple fanboy, so you're not going to like this, but OSX's font rendering is horrible. It's almost like there isn't any hinting at all. Or the screen's wrapped in cling film.
There are many reasons why binary kernel modules are a bad idea entirely. You try debugging a kernel that's had a module insterted into it that you don't have the source for.
I don't care if they are bnaries, the important think would be that any Linux user could get hold of one.
Unless they're running on something 'unsupported' like ppc or sparc. Or are running an 'unsupported' version of gcc or glibc. Or are trying to run the hardware three years after the vendor last bothered updating the driver so that it won't work on a modern kernel.
Apple doesn't have to - they just rely on their fanboys to do it for them.
Look buddy, you might like to think that Apple's your pal and that Apple's really on your side, after all that's the way they try to market themselves and it's part of the whole image that you buy into, but I have news for you. Apple computer corporation is a company. They try to make money out of you. That's it.
In a business deal, both parties try their best to get what they want out of it. That's how things work. What is being done here is not illegal and what more, it's not even immoral. Anybody who would try to argue against it, well, I'd worry about them because of their blind devotion to a company.
But then again, this is the 'Apple' section, so this place is going to be rather full of such people.
...one page I found about the card suggested that "software raid is faster anyway", which is an absurd proposition by itself.
This is not absurd and is true for linux 2.6. Just because something's implemented in hardware doesn't save it if it's implemented badly. Which many hardware designs often are seeing as there's little/no opportunity to make fixes once the product has been launched to the wider world. And due to the drivers being obscure they're not as well tuned as the drivers for common chipsets.
And software raid has much better reliability.
I'll stop here, because I could go on forever with '101 reasons software raid is better than hardware raid*'.
Oh, and here's a test case.
* except for the very high end.
Wow, there are a bunch of typos in there which I apologise for profusely.
I really want to know how these 'Alliances' and think-tanks get formed in the first place. Does Sun come to IBM and say something like:
Sun: Hey, wan't to go in with us on this joint think tank and study group? It will do industry analysis for all of us and we can get them to voice our opinons through their reports. I have a few friends I can pay to sit around and write articles.
IBM: Wait, whose opinions would these be? Yours or ours?
Sun: Does it matter?
IBM: Not really. Ok, I'm in.
Microsoft: Hey, my nephew's a philosophy major and is having trouble finding a job. He's quite a good writer - do you think you could get him a job in it?
Sun: Sure.
IBM: Wait, aren't we all mortal enemies?