I have an R6300 (much less expensive, 90 percent of the power) and routinely saturate our 802.11N channels using DD-WRT, including to the outside world (connected via Google Fiber, which includes its own router, but a router that's significantly less cool). Before we had GF, we used the DD-WRT QoS features heavily and it was absolutely perfect.
The router is handsome, has been rock solid and running strong for many months now, and only cost $100 on sale at a Best Buy retail store. Prices may reach even lower now, particularly when sales are on.
The reason that sony is failing is that you can buy (or, in your terms, "rent") more content, more accessories, more apps, more of everything, and do so more conveniently, from competitors products. The device itself is not the failing; it is that the usefulness of the device is diminished by the relative lack of things to do with it, and the lack of ways to do so conveniently.
It matters not at all what you think of the big picture to answer the posed question; it is simply that whatever Amazon offers, Sony offers *less* of it—not in the device hardware, but in everything that surrounds the device hardware, in the ways that the device hardware can be used. Sony's hardware is thus less useful, not for reasons relating to hardware or UI design, but for reasons relating to business relationships, customer-facing opportunity structure, and so on.
The politics of DRM and so on is an important discussion to have in our political life, but the fact that Amazon offers DRMed books has little to do with why Sony is failing (Sony, of course, offered the same—just fewer of them, with fewer ways to get them on the device, and fewer accessories to use with it).
Yes, the community is the product—it is also the product that the community consumes. Yes, publishers and manufacturers skim value off the top of that circular transaction. That is, as you point out, the business model.
And what I am saying is that that is the *dominant* business model right now, and that Sony sucked at it in comparison to Amazon or even to Barnes and Noble.
They're still working 20 years behind everyone else, caught in a love for industrial and UI (as opposed to UX) design.
They don't get the "ecosystem" concept. In fact, they actively fight it while everyone else is trying to build it.
Everyone else has known for a decade at least that every product is part of a service.
Sony is still busy thinking that every service is part of a product.
Others: The product is one of our service's features/facets. Sony: The service is one of our product's features/facets.
So their devices are technically great, but too often they come narrowly bound to half-assed services that have only seen enough investment to allow the product to ship with the basic claim that it's functional. As a result, you can't actually practically use their products for nearly as much or nearly as well as competing products. The content isn't there. The accessories aren't there. The third parties aren't there. The fellow users interacting aren't there. Other devices may be technically inferior, but that have a large ecosystem of content, enthusiasts, third-party developers, accessories, etc. behind them.
While everybody else is practically begging the world, "Please, community! Embrace our product and take it in organically emerging directions!," Sony is busy saying "Get lost, community! We're in control here; stop trying to take this in non-approved directions!"
Other tech companies would kill to get a community going. Sony would kill anyone that claims to be a part of a "community" around their product.
Whether or not a smart watch is worth it is an open question. If they can provide me something that I think I need with it, then sure. I've outlined a list in comments on previous stories, for quasi-trolls that were about to lash into me for being so general.
But I wear an automatic mechanical beater right now—specifically because it's virtually indestructible, represents only a minor investment (and thus financial risk), and requires no maintenance, attention, or battery-swapping. It's accurate to about 2 minutes per year, which means that about once a year I tune the time on it.
Most of the stuff that smartwatches are currently being said to do I either don't care about (fitness tracking, health monitoring) or currently use a smartphone for with far less hassle (bigger screen, more natural UI) so it'll be a stretch. But I'm open.
Journals aren't arbiters of Truth (capital T), they're just what they say they are: JOURNALS of the ongoing work of science.
Someone records that they have done X in a journal. Because said journal is available to other scientists, other scientists get to try to make use of the same notes/information/processes. If they are able to do so, they journal it as well. Get enough mentions in enough journals that something works, and we can begin to presume that it does.
If only one mention in one journal is ever made, then it is just another record in another journal of another thing that one scientist (or group of scientists) claim to have done.
Peer review is just to keep journals from expanding to the point that there is too much for anyone to keep track of or read. It is emphatically NOT the place at which the factuality or truthfulness of notes/information/processes are established once and for all. That happens AFTER publication as other scientists get ahold of things and put them through their paces.
Seriously, this is all exactly as it is supposed to work. I have no idea why there is such hoopla about this. There is nothing to see here. One group journaled something, other groups couldn't replicate it, they no doubt will reference this failure in future articles, and "what happened" is recorded out in the open for all of science, thereby expanding our pool of knowledge, both about what consistently works in many situations and of what someone claims has worked once in one situation but appears either not to work in the general case or requires more understanding and research.
Again, there is nothing to see here. Let's move on.
this would seem to be moot to me. Humans have only been here for the briefest of very *recent* moments, but we do have a particular interest in keeping earth habitable for *human* life.
Assuming your numbers are correct, it still doesn't do us any good to say that gosh, a few million years ago there was a lot more carbon dioxide, if for the purposes of *human* life a particular (and lower) level is necessary.
The goal is for us, not for the earth itself, to survive.
1) Monitor and keep and continuous chart of blood glucose, sleep cycles, blood pressure and pulse rate, blood oxygenation. Don't even know if the tech is viable for these, but they'd interest me. 2) Be part of a payments system that actually gets traction out there. Let me import all of my cards of various kinds and then provide them wirelessly to others without having to pull out a card (and/or a phone with a specialized app). 3) Same thing, but hold all of my tickets for entry into events. 4) Connect to a voice-to-text service to enable personal logging/journal-keeping just by talking at it. 5) Find a way to operate clearly and reliably using gestures and voice recognition rather than touch input when desired. 6) Have built-in GPS and voice navigation. 7) Have a built-in high-resolution camera to enable convenient visual capture of information. 8) Do all of this in a cloud-based manner so that everything that the watch did/tracked was available from all of my other tech devices. 9) Have a between-recharges time measured in weeks.
I don't know, it would have to be pretty freaking fabulous. But there are some basic things that I *don't* care if a smartwatch does, and those are probably more telling. I absolutely do not care about doing these things on a smartwatch:
1) Calls 2) Web 3) Email 4) Facebook 5) SMS 6) Linking it to my phone via bluetooth 7) Telling time
Number 6 in particular is a non-starter for me. Battery life on phones is already too short. And phones are the devices that I use for web, email, and other informational tasks on the go because they (not a smartwatch) have the screens suitable for reading/editing. I need them to last as long as possible, and I have no interest in duplicating their functions on a smartwatch. So I refuse to enable bluetooth on my phone all the time just to get some additional "watch" features.
It needs to be a "standalone" device in the sense of no other devices needed for it to operate normally, but a completely cloud-integrated device in the sense of "but I can access everything it does and it can access everything I do on my other devices over the network."
Number 7 is also pointedly interesting. I don't care if something on my wrist can tell time. Social "time" as a concept is more ambient than ever. Everything has a clock on it. Your computer. Your phone. Your thermostat. Your radio. Your car dash. Every ticket machine of every kind, from movies to transit to events. Public spaces and the sides of buildings and billboards and retail shop signs. I don't look at my wrist or my phone to know what time it is. I do a quick visual 360 and in general, I find what I'm looking for, wherever I happen to be. A "time-telling device" is frankly a bit 19th/early-20th century a this point.
maintainability and "correctness" from the CS class perspective aren't important. Are the data and data processing valid, and did the job get done as quickly and as cheaply as possible—that's all that matters.
the very ruthless and very rich tell us that money doesn't solve problems.
Well, you already got everyone else's money after being absolutely driven to do so for decades. Now you tell us that having tons of other peoples' money is no good anyway when it comes to really important stuff. Hmm...
So rather than sit on a pile of billions that you've tied up after getting it from other people, just give it back if you've now learned that it didn't do all that much good in the first place. No? Well then, you're either a liar or a hypocrite.
I do this all the time in my line of work. Someone hands us a data dump of 2 million lines in a messy CSV file with dozens of columns that's old collected data. We benefit if we can make use of it--but we have to clean it up first.
It's a one-time job--script something up to process the data into cleaner data and format it as we need it to make use of it ourselves. Then, toss the script away.
There's a big difference between "software engineering" and "coding." Coding skill is useful in all kinds of edge cases that mainstream applications don't handle, and when you're just looking to finish an edge-case task, you don't need to think about correctness or maintainability. You certainly don't want to pay a contractor $$$ to cook something up if it's only three dozen lines and will only be used for two weeks. For those casesÃ"the "who cares if it works six months from now, we just need it to do something specific for us this afternoon" caseÃ"you just need it to work once or twice, during the current project, as a part of the *process* of getting it done, not as an *asset* to monetize over time.
what, exactly? Calendars are synthetic tools used to synchronize human activity. That is their one and only value. They do not exist in nature; nature synchronizes with itself without our intervention.
But we need a shared, common way to refer to particular dates in time so that we can refer to records and events retrospectively and arrange for future events prospectively—together, in a coordinated fashion.
So your proposal replaces one time measurement system on which everyone is more or less on the same page, in which the representation of a particular moment in time is broadly accepted across a large swath of humanity...by another system in which across that very same swath of humanity, a moment in time can be represented in multiple ways.
This would seem to reduce, not increase, the value of a calendar for all practical intents and purposes.
This proposal is most likely to catch (well, let's be honest, it's never likely to catch) but it's most likely to catch in advanced industrial/post-industrial societies where the resources and level of education to make use of it are in place. So you're proposing to introduce extensive new ambiguity in timekeeping into the population in which there is currently the least ambiguity in timekeeping.
some of the window management features seem interesting to me.
Why has nobody else implemented the Haiku version of tabs and the ability to "stitch" windows at borders? I can see convenient uses for those. Were these features in BeOS? (I never used it.)
Cute. But check out the Gartner numbers (amongst others) for the last few years.
Overall PC shipments were down 12% from 4Q12-4Q13. Meanwhile, Mac shipments were up over the same period by nearly 30%. While year-over-year PC shipments have been falling since 2011, Mac shipments have seen steady year-over-year growth for a decade.
In my corner of the SaaS world, it's clearly a Mac game now. I'm sure there are many areas where this is not the case. But the trend numbers are not good for Microsoft at all, and when combined with the reception of Windows 8 (not just here but across trade press as well as online generally), and the comparison of tablet unit shipments vs. PC unit shipments, I think MS is better off focusing on what MS products can be made mission-critical on other platforms, not on the continued dominance of their own platform.
The Windows battle is largely over, and they have lost.
On mobile devices, which are the most ubiquitous form of computing on the planet today, they are effectively out of the game for this round. Their only shot there is to become the next big innovator launching the next paradigm of computing—something that MS has never been able to do before.
In productivity computing, a decade ago it was still a Windows world, but I've seen shop after shop effectively go Mac in recent years. First the door is opened—and once employees and/or departments are able to opt for Macs to do their work, the balance goes from 90/10 Windows to 90/10 Mac in the space of one or two upgrade cycles. Apple significantly outpaced the PC industry overall in unit shipment performance over 2013 (particularly 4Q) and this matches what I'm seeing in business meetings across partnerships—senior reps from four companies are in the room and now the Windows guy is the odd guy out and everybody snickers a little. Or you're in a multi-hour videoconference on GoToMeeting and the one guy that's sharing a Windows screen rather than a Mac screen stands out like a sore thumb. It's the opposite of what you'd see over the '90s and '00s.
But Exchange and Office remain ubiquitous—more and more people in business are using a Mac but their Mac is invaribaly outfitted with MS Office (because iWork simply doesn't compare) and their entire business lives are accessed from Outlook. Finding ways to better integrate mobile Android/iOS offerings into their Exchange/Office universe would open a natural space for strong growth and continued dominance in critical business infrastructure. The focus on Windows and hardware is a head-scratcher.
The most worrying thing for Microsoft is that I've started periodically receiving OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Google Docs/Drive word processing and spreadsheet documents over the last year or so. That never, ever happened for the first decade and a half of my life in business (since about 1997) and now, suddenly, I've received about 20 documents like this this year from people at five different companies—without anyone mentioning it or even apologizing ("Hope you can open this!").
I don't know if the investment required to make a plausible attempt at reversing Windows' downward slide in market position is worthwhile. I suspect it's far more important for MS to shore up and grow their Exchange/Office business. Nobody is really challenging them yet in this space, but if a viable competitor were to emerge, the forces and trends related to Windows now pull *away* from Microsoft platforms rather than irresistibly toward them.
freedom. I'd venture to say that I value the kind of freedom that they provide me more highly than I do the freedom from any one free software instance.
If I had to choose between "you never see the source, and have to pay big bucks, but Google continues to work as-is" and "no Google, but you get the source and the ability to control your own devices," I'd go for the first option in a second, because it enables me to do more things—not in theory (in theory, of course, the opposite is true) but certainly in actual everyday practice.
As I've outlined elsewhere in this discussion, but perhaps not so explicitly, the problem with RMS and the FSF is that they care only about one kind of freedom directly: the freedom to control one's own hardware and software.
This freedom is seen as being logically prior to all others. In a bizarre, historical sense, that may be true—if hardware and software had always been completely and entirely locked down, we wouldn't have the computing world that we have today.
At the same time, most people can not and do not take advantage of this freedom, don't care much about it, and might even have a great deal of trouble imagining what it amounts to.
But the list of things that they are able to do thanks to Apple and Google that they couldn't do without Apple and Google is quite long and quite clear to them.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to protect openness, but FSF discussions always manage to carry this to the logical extreme: you shouldn't use Apple and Google because they may eventually, someday lead to the end of open computing (e.g. the end of Apple and Google). So, even though Apple and Google radically expand the list of choices that you have at every moment of your life relative to not having them, you should forego them and have neither. Not to worry, though—since you have the more fundamental freedom (the freedom to control your software and hardware), you can just remake Apple and Google!
This is not going to fly with the average consumer. They won't be getting a free and open Apple or Google anytime soon—and thus, not using Apple and Google represents a net loss of freedom for them.
The best analogy I can think of is that of dropping someone in the middle of a wilderness with no other people in it and over which no state has control, then flying away and yelling down to them as you depart, "Congratulations! You're the freest person on earth! Enjoy the rest of your life in the wilderness, where nobody will ever control you again! And don't worry—if you get bored or lonely, you can always build civilization anew, this time with More Freedom[TM]!"
For the wilderness explorer that likes a solitary existence (or, say, the RMS-styled software developer), this may all indeed be true. But most people would find this kind of freedom less desirable than, say, the freedom that comes with a management job, a million dollar bank account, and an apartment in a major city.
The wilderness explorer cries out, "But you're not free! You have to go to work! You have to use a bank! You have to pay the rent! You have to pay your taxes! A policeman could write you a ticket for any number of things!"
Everyone else says, "You poor thing—living in the wilderness all alone like that, with no amenities, no friends, and nothing to do!" (Think RMS in his no mobile phone, doesn't use anything but Emacs, has never seen another email client world.)
Which one is "freedom?" It's a silly question. They both are—or they both aren't. Because freedom isn't an objective quantity.
As I mentioned in another post, society doesn't come to us as an empty field of possibility. It comes to us with conventions and practices that are well-established and well-understood at any moment in time. These open up new possibilities for individual life—that is, in fact the benefit of "society" in the first place, and why we bothered to evolve the capability—it enables us to build New York City, or create an
Words matter and definitions matter only and precisely because *people use them together to get things done*. Language is a fundamental component of human collective activity.
"Being careful about definitions" is important as far as it goes, but it is not sufficient. It is also important to be careful about definitions while remaining true to colloquial use—at least if one wants to be heard and have one's arguments taken seriously.
When one carefully articulates definitions that run counter to common use, one isn't arguing about the referents of statements any longer, but about statements themselves. A pessimist might say that he's simply debating in bad faith. I suspect that it's a more acute case of what happens here on Slashdot quite often—a particular subculture is sufficiently removed from mainstream culture that the two simply can't talk intelligently with one another, because both are always and ultimately talking about different things, despite best efforts.
why it's still not the year of free software on the desktop.
Which is no doubt fine for you—you'd just as soon deny it to all of those boneheaded idiots.
But lots of them would like to have it do things for them, if it can do the things that they actually want to do well, and do them at lower cost, and do them in ways that actually do increase freedom.
It just seems—rightly so, for most people—that it can't, along any of these measures. And so long as this remains the attitude, it won't.
Which, as I acknowledge, is no doubt fine for you.
The ideas themselves are bizarrely non-sequitur in nature, and often attempt to circumvent basic norms of colloquial language use.
When asked about the issues of the day, say cloud computing and the mobile ecosystem, he pretends to argue that both don't exist instead of addressing the question directly in the terms that are presumed.
The same with "freedom," which lies at the heart of the FSF movement. His definition of freedom (as others have routinely argued, including some very prominent people) does not coincide with the connotations that most people hold.
It's a language game in the Lyotardian sense. RMS isn't talking about ideas, or about systems, or about industries. He's talking about how we ought to define these things in the first place as a matter of the practice of language and conceptualization.
They're normative positions—value statements—and thus can't be "refuted," only debated with respect to value orientations. But these, as Weber most famously argued over a century ago, aren't subject to empirical testing. They're personal matters, matters of preference. The debate is neverending and, in fact, probably pointless.
And by making value statements in terms that he explicitly acknowledges are not the terms in common use—with the actual statements at issue beneath this running largely contrary to social norms once decoded according to his arcade language—he comes off, yes, as crazy.
That is to say, disconnected from social reality and social norms. Like the cat lady.
I'm with you—his brand of activism isn't helping. It also isn't hurting. It's just irrelevant at this point.
That's sad because there's definitely room for forces to be aligned against DRM and proprietary-ness, and the FSF ought to be on the front lines of making important contributions in this regard.
But FSF advocates often simply write off most of what regular people actually care about. It's not "let's create a society in which you can watch your Hollywood blockbusters in a more free and equitable way," it's just "we won't watch this Hollywood blockbuster and if you care about your freedom, neither will you."
There is no recognition of the fact that the freedom that the user seeks is *precisely* the freedom to watch *this Hollywood blockbuster,* and that as a result, the FSF position comes off as nonsensical to most people:
"We would like you not to be able to do the things that you want to do. After all, if you do them, you'll lose your freedom!"
For the average person, this is paradoxical at best—after all, the freedom that they seek is *precisely* the freedom to do the things that they want to do. What other freedom could these FSF people be referencing?
The argument is often framed as a kind of "big picture" calculation, i.e. short-term gratification vs. long-term thinking. But in practice, the desires at issue aren't addressed in the long-term frame; they're simply dismissed (Why would you want to do that anyway?), undermined (There is no such thing, you'd actually be doing something else, you've been lied to!) or mocked (Oh, I see, we're dealing with the sorts of people that watch Hollywood blockbusters. We don't talk to people like you or care to hear anything that you have to say, and with good reason!)
I was once an FSF fan (back when it was Emacs under SunOS and the GNU tools seemed so powerful in comparison to vendor-supplied equivalents) but the political dimension of the project has overshadowed—and not in a good way—all the coding that the FSF has ever done, and that code is now simply obsolete.
It doesn't matter if Emacs is a great. The best Emacs ever is, at this point, still an anachronism. The world is busy innovating in the mobile computing and networked services/informatics space. RMS is busy building the best hand-cranked butter churn the world has ever seen.
He's got decades of this under his belt. Ask him about whether red sauce or green sauce is better for drive-through tacos, he'll talk about freedom and oppression the same confounding ways.
As for myself, I'm much more in the Torvalds camp. Substantive freedom is a practical freedom as well as a prophylactic one; it's the freedom not just *from* things but *to do and participate in* things.
Sure, I want the freedom to protect my data or change my software. But I also want the freedom to buy and use a device that I think is great, or to participate in the mobile ecosystem (sorry, RMS) because I find it to be useful.
RMS can't distinguish between the two, or between the different kinds of restrictiveness at issue—the commercial software restrictiveness that is certainly annoying and terrible for our world, but also the FSF-styled restrictiveness that shoots itself in the foot and ends up being exactly the same.
In both cases, the end result is that I can't do what I want with my software/hardware. The commercial interests are at least open about it: we don't want you to do that because it would hurt our profits. The FSF is less open about it: we're not responsible for this, it's their fault—you're free to do your own thing.
Yes, maybe in theory I could rewrite the entire GNU codebase from scratch or get a world of developers together myself to do my own thing, but substantively speaking, in terms of actual opportunity structures available to me right now, today, or next week, or indeed for most people *as themselves, during their regular lives*, there is about the same amount of substantive freedom and restriction involved.
If I want to do X with my tech, and company X won't allow it with their toolchain, and the open computing world won't support it for ideological reasons, the net result is still that *I* am *practically* unable to do X with my tech.
Part of the FSF problem is that they often delegitimize X. RMS's answers about, say, "cloud" computing or the mobile ecosystem are instructive here, and mirror common answers in free software developments from techs. "That is not a real thing, it's just marketingspeak, you are a victim of ideology, and no, we won't help you."
Operating under the Thomas theorem and using the well-respected argument made by Rawls, I'd say that RMS fails to distinguish between summary rules and rules of practice. For RMS, there are only summary rules—things that we decide or don't decide to do, and espouse for utilitarian reasons. All of his arguments are utilitarian in nature (though often convolutedly so). Even when they involve other people or "society," his arguments boil down to rational self-interest calculated according to a very narrow range of values and goods, discounting the rest.
He ignores the dimension of rules and practices that are oriented toward social life—toward behaving in ways that others understand and that enable one to substantively participate in public and group life by virtue of conceding them as ordering principles for "how the world works right now."
The FSF vision of computing is, ironically, radically individualist and lonely in this regard—it is all about "what I can accomplish on my own." The only "we" that it acknowledges is one that is made up entirely of people that have precisely the same ideological outlook, goals, desires, and summary rules as the self. All other forms of "we" are reimagined as secretly selfish people that *claim* to be a public, but are in fact actually seeking to dominate one another. For RMS, "we" hasn't happened yet and he is trying to bring it about through summary means—as a rational self-interest calculation.
But a world of identical "free-people" in which the "we" finally comes about by virtue of the universal embrace of FSF values simply doesn't and won't exist—people are different, desires are different, and that which is in one person's self-interest is never necessarily in everyone's self-interest.
of the crazy hippie cat lady who quotes randomly from every eastern religion, is afraid of the aura vibrations of electricity, and won't cook broccoli because "letting the soul out of the vegetable means that it can't protect you any longer, and that's the first step toward THEM getting YOUR soul, and that is the first step toward them getting Gaia's soul, and that's their plan to rule the Astral plane like STALIN did." [pets cat]
"Supported platforms: KDE was primarily developed under the GNU/Linux variant of the Unix operating system. However it is known to compile without, or with very few, problems on most Unix variants. At the moment we explicitely support GNU/Linux (Intel , Alpha, Sparc) and Solaris (Sparc) and we have success reports for..."
There are a lot of people here that clearly weren't deeply involved either in serious (non-home) computing or Linux during the era in which Linux was introduced and had its biggest impact.
Lots of "but GNU..." or "but all of these things aren't Linux-only..."
This commentary on KDE is an example. Sure, it eventually supported more platforms. But that doesn't change the fact that as an early OSS project, it was possible—that is to say, the developers that became involved were able to become involved in the first place—only because Linux had become available and broadly accessible.
Without Linux—if people wanting to do GUI development had been limited to DOS/Win3 or Mac OS on the low end, or SunOS/AIX/HPUX/etc. on the high end, in other words—KDE would simply not have happened. First, all of these systems came with their own DE that was vendor-supported and "good enough" while Linux users were stuck with TWM/FVWM or commercial CDE ports, and next, GUI development was either prohibitively complex and specialized or prohibitively expensive on these other platforms.
Saying that the developers at the start used whatever free OS they could find does not change the fact that the free OS that they did, in fact, find was Linux and that's how many of them came into the flow. *BSD had been around for a very long time prior to Linux, yet the Unix world had remained the rarefied and very expensive Unix world with very little of note going on in the middleware level—it was all vendors building systems and departments (academic or enterprise) implementing specific application flows. It was highly vertical and highly proprietary.
Linux enters the scene and in half a decade we have multiple entirely new integrated DEs for Unices, rapidly expanding driver support for almost all commodity hardware, and businesses and schools in every direction running Unix instead of DOS/MacOS. The barriers to entry in computing, information systems, and research design and development of all kinds went from extremely high to almost none, almost overnight—in one cohort of college students, essentially.
Linux opened Unix and networking up and turned them into the global ecosystems that they are today. Saying that this would have been *technically* possible without Linux is not at all good support for the claim that it would have been *likely* at the social (i.e. in actual society) level. Linux changed the game entirely, brought TCP/IP, OSS, and what was once called "high performance computing" (now it's just basic "computing" to raytrace a widget, compress a data stream, or manage multi-gigabyte database) to the public. Before Linux, all of these were exotic and expensive and economies of scale not only didn't apply but in fact couldn't. Now, decades after Linux, they clearly seem very pedestrian to many and economies of scale mean that you can carry them around in your pocket.
It's an eye-opener to read this Slashdot discussion and see so many that don't actually understand or know this.
It makes me think that the time may be ripe for a historical work or historical wiki on Linux/OSS history and its relationship to the broader Internet and information society of the present.
Slashdot Mirror
my word brain is running behind by a generation.
I have an R6300 (much less expensive, 90 percent of the power) and routinely saturate our 802.11N channels using DD-WRT, including to the outside world (connected via Google Fiber, which includes its own router, but a router that's significantly less cool). Before we had GF, we used the DD-WRT QoS features heavily and it was absolutely perfect.
The router is handsome, has been rock solid and running strong for many months now, and only cost $100 on sale at a Best Buy retail store. Prices may reach even lower now, particularly when sales are on.
so spare me the politics.
It was "Why is Sony failing?"
The reason that sony is failing is that you can buy (or, in your terms, "rent") more content, more accessories, more apps, more of everything, and do so more conveniently, from competitors products. The device itself is not the failing; it is that the usefulness of the device is diminished by the relative lack of things to do with it, and the lack of ways to do so conveniently.
It matters not at all what you think of the big picture to answer the posed question; it is simply that whatever Amazon offers, Sony offers *less* of it—not in the device hardware, but in everything that surrounds the device hardware, in the ways that the device hardware can be used. Sony's hardware is thus less useful, not for reasons relating to hardware or UI design, but for reasons relating to business relationships, customer-facing opportunity structure, and so on.
The politics of DRM and so on is an important discussion to have in our political life, but the fact that Amazon offers DRMed books has little to do with why Sony is failing (Sony, of course, offered the same—just fewer of them, with fewer ways to get them on the device, and fewer accessories to use with it).
Yes, the community is the product—it is also the product that the community consumes. Yes, publishers and manufacturers skim value off the top of that circular transaction. That is, as you point out, the business model.
And what I am saying is that that is the *dominant* business model right now, and that Sony sucked at it in comparison to Amazon or even to Barnes and Noble.
They're still working 20 years behind everyone else, caught in a love for industrial and UI (as opposed to UX) design.
They don't get the "ecosystem" concept. In fact, they actively fight it while everyone else is trying to build it.
Everyone else has known for a decade at least that every product is part of a service.
Sony is still busy thinking that every service is part of a product.
Others: The product is one of our service's features/facets.
Sony: The service is one of our product's features/facets.
So their devices are technically great, but too often they come narrowly bound to half-assed services that have only seen enough investment to allow the product to ship with the basic claim that it's functional. As a result, you can't actually practically use their products for nearly as much or nearly as well as competing products. The content isn't there. The accessories aren't there. The third parties aren't there. The fellow users interacting aren't there. Other devices may be technically inferior, but that have a large ecosystem of content, enthusiasts, third-party developers, accessories, etc. behind them.
While everybody else is practically begging the world, "Please, community! Embrace our product and take it in organically emerging directions!," Sony is busy saying "Get lost, community! We're in control here; stop trying to take this in non-approved directions!"
Other tech companies would kill to get a community going. Sony would kill anyone that claims to be a part of a "community" around their product.
I am interested in watches.
Whether or not a smart watch is worth it is an open question. If they can provide me something that I think I need with it, then sure. I've outlined a list in comments on previous stories, for quasi-trolls that were about to lash into me for being so general.
But I wear an automatic mechanical beater right now—specifically because it's virtually indestructible, represents only a minor investment (and thus financial risk), and requires no maintenance, attention, or battery-swapping. It's accurate to about 2 minutes per year, which means that about once a year I tune the time on it.
Most of the stuff that smartwatches are currently being said to do I either don't care about (fitness tracking, health monitoring) or currently use a smartphone for with far less hassle (bigger screen, more natural UI) so it'll be a stretch. But I'm open.
Journals aren't arbiters of Truth (capital T), they're just what they say they are: JOURNALS of the ongoing work of science.
Someone records that they have done X in a journal. Because said journal is available to other scientists, other scientists get to try to make use of the same notes/information/processes. If they are able to do so, they journal it as well. Get enough mentions in enough journals that something works, and we can begin to presume that it does.
If only one mention in one journal is ever made, then it is just another record in another journal of another thing that one scientist (or group of scientists) claim to have done.
Peer review is just to keep journals from expanding to the point that there is too much for anyone to keep track of or read. It is emphatically NOT the place at which the factuality or truthfulness of notes/information/processes are established once and for all. That happens AFTER publication as other scientists get ahold of things and put them through their paces.
Seriously, this is all exactly as it is supposed to work. I have no idea why there is such hoopla about this. There is nothing to see here. One group journaled something, other groups couldn't replicate it, they no doubt will reference this failure in future articles, and "what happened" is recorded out in the open for all of science, thereby expanding our pool of knowledge, both about what consistently works in many situations and of what someone claims has worked once in one situation but appears either not to work in the general case or requires more understanding and research.
Again, there is nothing to see here. Let's move on.
this would seem to be moot to me. Humans have only been here for the briefest of very *recent* moments, but we do have a particular interest in keeping earth habitable for *human* life.
Assuming your numbers are correct, it still doesn't do us any good to say that gosh, a few million years ago there was a lot more carbon dioxide, if for the purposes of *human* life a particular (and lower) level is necessary.
The goal is for us, not for the earth itself, to survive.
1) Monitor and keep and continuous chart of blood glucose, sleep cycles, blood pressure and pulse rate, blood oxygenation. Don't even know if the tech is viable for these, but they'd interest me.
2) Be part of a payments system that actually gets traction out there. Let me import all of my cards of various kinds and then provide them wirelessly to others without having to pull out a card (and/or a phone with a specialized app).
3) Same thing, but hold all of my tickets for entry into events.
4) Connect to a voice-to-text service to enable personal logging/journal-keeping just by talking at it.
5) Find a way to operate clearly and reliably using gestures and voice recognition rather than touch input when desired.
6) Have built-in GPS and voice navigation.
7) Have a built-in high-resolution camera to enable convenient visual capture of information.
8) Do all of this in a cloud-based manner so that everything that the watch did/tracked was available from all of my other tech devices.
9) Have a between-recharges time measured in weeks.
I don't know, it would have to be pretty freaking fabulous. But there are some basic things that I *don't* care if a smartwatch does, and those are probably more telling. I absolutely do not care about doing these things on a smartwatch:
1) Calls
2) Web
3) Email
4) Facebook
5) SMS
6) Linking it to my phone via bluetooth
7) Telling time
Number 6 in particular is a non-starter for me. Battery life on phones is already too short. And phones are the devices that I use for web, email, and other informational tasks on the go because they (not a smartwatch) have the screens suitable for reading/editing. I need them to last as long as possible, and I have no interest in duplicating their functions on a smartwatch. So I refuse to enable bluetooth on my phone all the time just to get some additional "watch" features.
It needs to be a "standalone" device in the sense of no other devices needed for it to operate normally, but a completely cloud-integrated device in the sense of "but I can access everything it does and it can access everything I do on my other devices over the network."
Number 7 is also pointedly interesting. I don't care if something on my wrist can tell time. Social "time" as a concept is more ambient than ever. Everything has a clock on it. Your computer. Your phone. Your thermostat. Your radio. Your car dash. Every ticket machine of every kind, from movies to transit to events. Public spaces and the sides of buildings and billboards and retail shop signs. I don't look at my wrist or my phone to know what time it is. I do a quick visual 360 and in general, I find what I'm looking for, wherever I happen to be. A "time-telling device" is frankly a bit 19th/early-20th century a this point.
maintainability and "correctness" from the CS class perspective aren't important. Are the data and data processing valid, and did the job get done as quickly and as cheaply as possible—that's all that matters.
the very ruthless and very rich tell us that money doesn't solve problems.
Well, you already got everyone else's money after being absolutely driven to do so for decades. Now you tell us that having tons of other peoples' money is no good anyway when it comes to really important stuff. Hmm...
So rather than sit on a pile of billions that you've tied up after getting it from other people, just give it back if you've now learned that it didn't do all that much good in the first place. No? Well then, you're either a liar or a hypocrite.
I do this all the time in my line of work. Someone hands us a data dump of 2 million lines in a messy CSV file with dozens of columns that's old collected data. We benefit if we can make use of it--but we have to clean it up first.
It's a one-time job--script something up to process the data into cleaner data and format it as we need it to make use of it ourselves. Then, toss the script away.
There's a big difference between "software engineering" and "coding." Coding skill is useful in all kinds of edge cases that mainstream applications don't handle, and when you're just looking to finish an edge-case task, you don't need to think about correctness or maintainability. You certainly don't want to pay a contractor $$$ to cook something up if it's only three dozen lines and will only be used for two weeks. For those casesÃ"the "who cares if it works six months from now, we just need it to do something specific for us this afternoon" caseÃ"you just need it to work once or twice, during the current project, as a part of the *process* of getting it done, not as an *asset* to monetize over time.
I totally get where he/she is coming from.
what, exactly? Calendars are synthetic tools used to synchronize human activity. That is their one and only value. They do not exist in nature; nature synchronizes with itself without our intervention.
But we need a shared, common way to refer to particular dates in time so that we can refer to records and events retrospectively and arrange for future events prospectively—together, in a coordinated fashion.
So your proposal replaces one time measurement system on which everyone is more or less on the same page, in which the representation of a particular moment in time is broadly accepted across a large swath of humanity...by another system in which across that very same swath of humanity, a moment in time can be represented in multiple ways.
This would seem to reduce, not increase, the value of a calendar for all practical intents and purposes.
This proposal is most likely to catch (well, let's be honest, it's never likely to catch) but it's most likely to catch in advanced industrial/post-industrial societies where the resources and level of education to make use of it are in place. So you're proposing to introduce extensive new ambiguity in timekeeping into the population in which there is currently the least ambiguity in timekeeping.
Again, seems ass-backward to me.
some of the window management features seem interesting to me.
Why has nobody else implemented the Haiku version of tabs and the ability to "stitch" windows at borders? I can see convenient uses for those. Were these features in BeOS? (I never used it.)
Cute. But check out the Gartner numbers (amongst others) for the last few years.
Overall PC shipments were down 12% from 4Q12-4Q13. Meanwhile, Mac shipments were up over the same period by nearly 30%. While year-over-year PC shipments have been falling since 2011, Mac shipments have seen steady year-over-year growth for a decade.
In my corner of the SaaS world, it's clearly a Mac game now. I'm sure there are many areas where this is not the case. But the trend numbers are not good for Microsoft at all, and when combined with the reception of Windows 8 (not just here but across trade press as well as online generally), and the comparison of tablet unit shipments vs. PC unit shipments, I think MS is better off focusing on what MS products can be made mission-critical on other platforms, not on the continued dominance of their own platform.
The Windows battle is largely over, and they have lost.
On mobile devices, which are the most ubiquitous form of computing on the planet today, they are effectively out of the game for this round. Their only shot there is to become the next big innovator launching the next paradigm of computing—something that MS has never been able to do before.
In productivity computing, a decade ago it was still a Windows world, but I've seen shop after shop effectively go Mac in recent years. First the door is opened—and once employees and/or departments are able to opt for Macs to do their work, the balance goes from 90/10 Windows to 90/10 Mac in the space of one or two upgrade cycles. Apple significantly outpaced the PC industry overall in unit shipment performance over 2013 (particularly 4Q) and this matches what I'm seeing in business meetings across partnerships—senior reps from four companies are in the room and now the Windows guy is the odd guy out and everybody snickers a little. Or you're in a multi-hour videoconference on GoToMeeting and the one guy that's sharing a Windows screen rather than a Mac screen stands out like a sore thumb. It's the opposite of what you'd see over the '90s and '00s.
But Exchange and Office remain ubiquitous—more and more people in business are using a Mac but their Mac is invaribaly outfitted with MS Office (because iWork simply doesn't compare) and their entire business lives are accessed from Outlook. Finding ways to better integrate mobile Android/iOS offerings into their Exchange/Office universe would open a natural space for strong growth and continued dominance in critical business infrastructure. The focus on Windows and hardware is a head-scratcher.
The most worrying thing for Microsoft is that I've started periodically receiving OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Google Docs/Drive word processing and spreadsheet documents over the last year or so. That never, ever happened for the first decade and a half of my life in business (since about 1997) and now, suddenly, I've received about 20 documents like this this year from people at five different companies—without anyone mentioning it or even apologizing ("Hope you can open this!").
I don't know if the investment required to make a plausible attempt at reversing Windows' downward slide in market position is worthwhile. I suspect it's far more important for MS to shore up and grow their Exchange/Office business. Nobody is really challenging them yet in this space, but if a viable competitor were to emerge, the forces and trends related to Windows now pull *away* from Microsoft platforms rather than irresistibly toward them.
Oh. Okay.
Wait, what?
freedom. I'd venture to say that I value the kind of freedom that they provide me more highly than I do the freedom from any one free software instance.
If I had to choose between "you never see the source, and have to pay big bucks, but Google continues to work as-is" and "no Google, but you get the source and the ability to control your own devices," I'd go for the first option in a second, because it enables me to do more things—not in theory (in theory, of course, the opposite is true) but certainly in actual everyday practice.
As I've outlined elsewhere in this discussion, but perhaps not so explicitly, the problem with RMS and the FSF is that they care only about one kind of freedom directly: the freedom to control one's own hardware and software.
This freedom is seen as being logically prior to all others. In a bizarre, historical sense, that may be true—if hardware and software had always been completely and entirely locked down, we wouldn't have the computing world that we have today.
At the same time, most people can not and do not take advantage of this freedom, don't care much about it, and might even have a great deal of trouble imagining what it amounts to.
But the list of things that they are able to do thanks to Apple and Google that they couldn't do without Apple and Google is quite long and quite clear to them.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to protect openness, but FSF discussions always manage to carry this to the logical extreme: you shouldn't use Apple and Google because they may eventually, someday lead to the end of open computing (e.g. the end of Apple and Google). So, even though Apple and Google radically expand the list of choices that you have at every moment of your life relative to not having them, you should forego them and have neither. Not to worry, though—since you have the more fundamental freedom (the freedom to control your software and hardware), you can just remake Apple and Google!
This is not going to fly with the average consumer. They won't be getting a free and open Apple or Google anytime soon—and thus, not using Apple and Google represents a net loss of freedom for them.
The best analogy I can think of is that of dropping someone in the middle of a wilderness with no other people in it and over which no state has control, then flying away and yelling down to them as you depart, "Congratulations! You're the freest person on earth! Enjoy the rest of your life in the wilderness, where nobody will ever control you again! And don't worry—if you get bored or lonely, you can always build civilization anew, this time with More Freedom[TM]!"
For the wilderness explorer that likes a solitary existence (or, say, the RMS-styled software developer), this may all indeed be true. But most people would find this kind of freedom less desirable than, say, the freedom that comes with a management job, a million dollar bank account, and an apartment in a major city.
The wilderness explorer cries out, "But you're not free! You have to go to work! You have to use a bank! You have to pay the rent! You have to pay your taxes! A policeman could write you a ticket for any number of things!"
Everyone else says, "You poor thing—living in the wilderness all alone like that, with no amenities, no friends, and nothing to do!" (Think RMS in his no mobile phone, doesn't use anything but Emacs, has never seen another email client world.)
Which one is "freedom?" It's a silly question. They both are—or they both aren't. Because freedom isn't an objective quantity.
As I mentioned in another post, society doesn't come to us as an empty field of possibility. It comes to us with conventions and practices that are well-established and well-understood at any moment in time. These open up new possibilities for individual life—that is, in fact the benefit of "society" in the first place, and why we bothered to evolve the capability—it enables us to build New York City, or create an
He discusses cloud computing here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
Words matter and definitions matter only and precisely because *people use them together to get things done*. Language is a fundamental component of human collective activity.
"Being careful about definitions" is important as far as it goes, but it is not sufficient. It is also important to be careful about definitions while remaining true to colloquial use—at least if one wants to be heard and have one's arguments taken seriously.
When one carefully articulates definitions that run counter to common use, one isn't arguing about the referents of statements any longer, but about statements themselves. A pessimist might say that he's simply debating in bad faith. I suspect that it's a more acute case of what happens here on Slashdot quite often—a particular subculture is sufficiently removed from mainstream culture that the two simply can't talk intelligently with one another, because both are always and ultimately talking about different things, despite best efforts.
why it's still not the year of free software on the desktop.
Which is no doubt fine for you—you'd just as soon deny it to all of those boneheaded idiots.
But lots of them would like to have it do things for them, if it can do the things that they actually want to do well, and do them at lower cost, and do them in ways that actually do increase freedom.
It just seems—rightly so, for most people—that it can't, along any of these measures. And so long as this remains the attitude, it won't.
Which, as I acknowledge, is no doubt fine for you.
RMS is a nice counterweight to Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer.
But that's not to say that any of these people are particularly multidimensional, or particularly sane.
The ideas themselves are bizarrely non-sequitur in nature, and often attempt to circumvent basic norms of colloquial language use.
When asked about the issues of the day, say cloud computing and the mobile ecosystem, he pretends to argue that both don't exist instead of addressing the question directly in the terms that are presumed.
The same with "freedom," which lies at the heart of the FSF movement. His definition of freedom (as others have routinely argued, including some very prominent people) does not coincide with the connotations that most people hold.
It's a language game in the Lyotardian sense. RMS isn't talking about ideas, or about systems, or about industries. He's talking about how we ought to define these things in the first place as a matter of the practice of language and conceptualization.
They're normative positions—value statements—and thus can't be "refuted," only debated with respect to value orientations. But these, as Weber most famously argued over a century ago, aren't subject to empirical testing. They're personal matters, matters of preference. The debate is neverending and, in fact, probably pointless.
And by making value statements in terms that he explicitly acknowledges are not the terms in common use—with the actual statements at issue beneath this running largely contrary to social norms once decoded according to his arcade language—he comes off, yes, as crazy.
That is to say, disconnected from social reality and social norms. Like the cat lady.
been done outside of free software.
I'm with you—his brand of activism isn't helping. It also isn't hurting. It's just irrelevant at this point.
That's sad because there's definitely room for forces to be aligned against DRM and proprietary-ness, and the FSF ought to be on the front lines of making important contributions in this regard.
But FSF advocates often simply write off most of what regular people actually care about. It's not "let's create a society in which you can watch your Hollywood blockbusters in a more free and equitable way," it's just "we won't watch this Hollywood blockbuster and if you care about your freedom, neither will you."
There is no recognition of the fact that the freedom that the user seeks is *precisely* the freedom to watch *this Hollywood blockbuster,* and that as a result, the FSF position comes off as nonsensical to most people:
"We would like you not to be able to do the things that you want to do. After all, if you do them, you'll lose your freedom!"
For the average person, this is paradoxical at best—after all, the freedom that they seek is *precisely* the freedom to do the things that they want to do. What other freedom could these FSF people be referencing?
The argument is often framed as a kind of "big picture" calculation, i.e. short-term gratification vs. long-term thinking. But in practice, the desires at issue aren't addressed in the long-term frame; they're simply dismissed (Why would you want to do that anyway?), undermined (There is no such thing, you'd actually be doing something else, you've been lied to!) or mocked (Oh, I see, we're dealing with the sorts of people that watch Hollywood blockbusters. We don't talk to people like you or care to hear anything that you have to say, and with good reason!)
I was once an FSF fan (back when it was Emacs under SunOS and the GNU tools seemed so powerful in comparison to vendor-supplied equivalents) but the political dimension of the project has overshadowed—and not in a good way—all the coding that the FSF has ever done, and that code is now simply obsolete.
It doesn't matter if Emacs is a great. The best Emacs ever is, at this point, still an anachronism. The world is busy innovating in the mobile computing and networked services/informatics space. RMS is busy building the best hand-cranked butter churn the world has ever seen.
He's got decades of this under his belt. Ask him about whether red sauce or green sauce is better for drive-through tacos, he'll talk about freedom and oppression the same confounding ways.
As for myself, I'm much more in the Torvalds camp. Substantive freedom is a practical freedom as well as a prophylactic one; it's the freedom not just *from* things but *to do and participate in* things.
Sure, I want the freedom to protect my data or change my software. But I also want the freedom to buy and use a device that I think is great, or to participate in the mobile ecosystem (sorry, RMS) because I find it to be useful.
RMS can't distinguish between the two, or between the different kinds of restrictiveness at issue—the commercial software restrictiveness that is certainly annoying and terrible for our world, but also the FSF-styled restrictiveness that shoots itself in the foot and ends up being exactly the same.
In both cases, the end result is that I can't do what I want with my software/hardware. The commercial interests are at least open about it: we don't want you to do that because it would hurt our profits. The FSF is less open about it: we're not responsible for this, it's their fault—you're free to do your own thing.
Yes, maybe in theory I could rewrite the entire GNU codebase from scratch or get a world of developers together myself to do my own thing, but substantively speaking, in terms of actual opportunity structures available to me right now, today, or next week, or indeed for most people *as themselves, during their regular lives*, there is about the same amount of substantive freedom and restriction involved.
If I want to do X with my tech, and company X won't allow it with their toolchain, and the open computing world won't support it for ideological reasons, the net result is still that *I* am *practically* unable to do X with my tech.
Part of the FSF problem is that they often delegitimize X. RMS's answers about, say, "cloud" computing or the mobile ecosystem are instructive here, and mirror common answers in free software developments from techs. "That is not a real thing, it's just marketingspeak, you are a victim of ideology, and no, we won't help you."
Operating under the Thomas theorem and using the well-respected argument made by Rawls, I'd say that RMS fails to distinguish between summary rules and rules of practice. For RMS, there are only summary rules—things that we decide or don't decide to do, and espouse for utilitarian reasons. All of his arguments are utilitarian in nature (though often convolutedly so). Even when they involve other people or "society," his arguments boil down to rational self-interest calculated according to a very narrow range of values and goods, discounting the rest.
He ignores the dimension of rules and practices that are oriented toward social life—toward behaving in ways that others understand and that enable one to substantively participate in public and group life by virtue of conceding them as ordering principles for "how the world works right now."
The FSF vision of computing is, ironically, radically individualist and lonely in this regard—it is all about "what I can accomplish on my own." The only "we" that it acknowledges is one that is made up entirely of people that have precisely the same ideological outlook, goals, desires, and summary rules as the self. All other forms of "we" are reimagined as secretly selfish people that *claim* to be a public, but are in fact actually seeking to dominate one another. For RMS, "we" hasn't happened yet and he is trying to bring it about through summary means—as a rational self-interest calculation.
But a world of identical "free-people" in which the "we" finally comes about by virtue of the universal embrace of FSF values simply doesn't and won't exist—people are different, desires are different, and that which is in one person's self-interest is never necessarily in everyone's self-interest.
To believe in
of the crazy hippie cat lady who quotes randomly from every eastern religion, is afraid of the aura vibrations of electricity, and won't cook broccoli because "letting the soul out of the vegetable means that it can't protect you any longer, and that's the first step toward THEM getting YOUR soul, and that is the first step toward them getting Gaia's soul, and that's their plan to rule the Astral plane like STALIN did." [pets cat]
"Supported platforms: KDE was primarily developed under the GNU/Linux variant of the Unix operating system. However it is known to compile without, or with very few, problems on most Unix variants. At the moment we explicitely support GNU/Linux (Intel , Alpha, Sparc) and Solaris (Sparc) and we have success reports for..."
There are a lot of people here that clearly weren't deeply involved either in serious (non-home) computing or Linux during the era in which Linux was introduced and had its biggest impact.
Lots of "but GNU..." or "but all of these things aren't Linux-only..."
This commentary on KDE is an example. Sure, it eventually supported more platforms. But that doesn't change the fact that as an early OSS project, it was possible—that is to say, the developers that became involved were able to become involved in the first place—only because Linux had become available and broadly accessible.
Without Linux—if people wanting to do GUI development had been limited to DOS/Win3 or Mac OS on the low end, or SunOS/AIX/HPUX/etc. on the high end, in other words—KDE would simply not have happened. First, all of these systems came with their own DE that was vendor-supported and "good enough" while Linux users were stuck with TWM/FVWM or commercial CDE ports, and next, GUI development was either prohibitively complex and specialized or prohibitively expensive on these other platforms.
Saying that the developers at the start used whatever free OS they could find does not change the fact that the free OS that they did, in fact, find was Linux and that's how many of them came into the flow. *BSD had been around for a very long time prior to Linux, yet the Unix world had remained the rarefied and very expensive Unix world with very little of note going on in the middleware level—it was all vendors building systems and departments (academic or enterprise) implementing specific application flows. It was highly vertical and highly proprietary.
Linux enters the scene and in half a decade we have multiple entirely new integrated DEs for Unices, rapidly expanding driver support for almost all commodity hardware, and businesses and schools in every direction running Unix instead of DOS/MacOS. The barriers to entry in computing, information systems, and research design and development of all kinds went from extremely high to almost none, almost overnight—in one cohort of college students, essentially.
Linux opened Unix and networking up and turned them into the global ecosystems that they are today. Saying that this would have been *technically* possible without Linux is not at all good support for the claim that it would have been *likely* at the social (i.e. in actual society) level. Linux changed the game entirely, brought TCP/IP, OSS, and what was once called "high performance computing" (now it's just basic "computing" to raytrace a widget, compress a data stream, or manage multi-gigabyte database) to the public. Before Linux, all of these were exotic and expensive and economies of scale not only didn't apply but in fact couldn't. Now, decades after Linux, they clearly seem very pedestrian to many and economies of scale mean that you can carry them around in your pocket.
It's an eye-opener to read this Slashdot discussion and see so many that don't actually understand or know this.
It makes me think that the time may be ripe for a historical work or historical wiki on Linux/OSS history and its relationship to the broader Internet and information society of the present.