So what about Office? Similar problem. To date they maintained the monopoly by lock in. If you are like most people you bought the newest Office not when you wanted the new features but when someone you do business with sent you a document you couldn't open.
That isn't Microsoft's biggest problem.
Microsoft's biggest problem (and I'm going back nearly 20 years here, now) is that they have never, never had a long term road map (or any type of road map, for that matter) after NT4. Zero, zilch, nothing.
Gates acquired DOS, and bought some professors to do a hack job on VMS for NT. He wasn't a real coder, though; he never was. Bill's real skill was as a marketer and showman. He was charismatic, he had an iron will, and he knew how to at least make it look as though the customers were getting what they wanted from him.
But fundamentally, Microsoft have always been a suit company, not a programmer company. It isn't about the scalability of FOSS mindshare, either. Apple can still hire people smart enough to churn out the products they need to stay in business.
The real reason, also, why no gameplan after NT4, is going to end up being fatal to them, is because as Bill has said himself, where software is concerned, you're only as relevant as your next release.
Microsoft have no next release, now. They've hit a brick wall. XP is a patch of a patch of a patch, and it's their last truly decent product. Vista wasn't so much a bomb as it was simply the same product with an attempt at a skin job, and some minor superficial crap which only succeeded at slowing the internal engine down.
Windows 7 will fail, too, and for the same reason. It is not a new product. It will be XP with some new skins, and a reshuffle of the deck chairs, and that will be it. Microsoft can't do anything else, because they don't HAVE anything else.
Linux is able to reinvent itself as necessary. Apple nearly died themselves, but Steve Jobs finally proved that he has a real brain in his head (and believe me, I'd been seriously doubting that for a long time) and made the kind of obvious decision that people with a lot of money usually don't have sufficient vision to be able to make; he abandoned his old architecture entirely, and jumped ship to UNIX.
UNIX is the future. That has been predictable for a long time now; since at least the early 90s, and probably before.
Microsoft could do an Apple, cut their losses and essentially become just another UNIX vendor, but they won't, because there are still too many old guard in the company who are two ideologically bound to Windows.
That isn't the only thing which will sink the company, either. It still has a lot of problems with public ill-will. Stallman's cultists still haven't got the memo that the only people who Microsoft are a threat to at this point are themselves, and the cult can be an extremely vocal and influential demographic.
It may not be for the reasons that most people think or realise, but whichever way you slice it, at this point, Microsoft are screwed.
Bill retired last year, and you'll notice that he did it fairly quietly. He would have been able to see the writing on the wall at least as clearly as I've been able to, and I'm guessing he knows exactly what is coming. He probably didn't make too big a deal about it; he wouldn't have wanted to start a panic.
When Bill retired last year, though, he was doing exactly the same thing that J Bruce Ismay was doing, when he got into a lifeboat by jumping the rail of the Titanic.
When the stock market sniffs the lack of Windows 7 follow through MSFT is going down! Right now the market is divided hence its stock price just keeps rolling around treading water. But when that balance sheet keeps grinding down MSFT is done! I am thinking you will probably be able to pick MSFT shares around the low teens next year.
500 WoW gold says that Microsoft isn't still here by 2015. 2020, tops.
I've seen this coming for more than a decade, now. They never had any plan after NT 4.
This is why any Linux users (and I mean any) who have ever considered Microsoft a viable threat, are paranoid morons who need to stop drinking Stallman's Kool Aid.
Microsoft are a threat to themselves, and nobody else.
In fact, Linux can be likened to a Mooncup-using redhaired hippie girlfriend who lives in a house in the country she built herself from twigs and has very strong ideas on how everything should be and has all her original body hair. The sex is fantastic, but only if she thinks the astrological conditions are perfect. The house has a hand-dug latrine, so she's propped a toilet bowl on top and thinks that's "user friendliness."
You forgot the black rimmed glasses and obligatory reference to Thelma from Scooby Doo. Maybe surreptitiously sliding in, "Jinkies!" at the end of the paragraph would have worked. You also forgot to mention that she would work at least part time in a library, and that although the sex might be fantastic, it'd never be with men.;)
Linux has less games. One out of three, well done.
You didn't call the GP a shill. Not even once. I'm equally impressed.
It's little things like this, that give me faint hope that perhaps the FSF's mind control is actually starting to wear a little thinner, in some places.
It's a faint hope, of course; but hope nonetheless.
"The games your Customer Wants (e.g. WoW)" : really bad choice of game, cause for Wow it's an outright lie.
This is only a lie since WoW had the Chilton Effect applied to it, (as in, Blizz hired Chilton as design lead, and he gave the game exactly the kind of brutal sodomy that he gave Ultima Online) and anyone who wasn't already one of his minions left WoW's live team in order to work on Blizzard's new game.
That's because you were asleep the past decade or so, during which "Linux" became synonymous with "any Linux based distribution" when it comes to the mass media/general public.
Which is exactly how it should be. The only people who bring up the naming issue, (which Stallman invented out of whole cloth, as part of his ongoing crusade to obtain as much narcissistic supply as is humanly possible) are either Stallmanite Debian fanboys, or Stallman himself.
We are at stage three. Assuming someone in the open source community wakes up and gives small businesses a real alternative to QuickBooks and creative media software.
Microsoft aren't the only people who are scared, though. The very fact that stories like this keep showing up only proves that.
I'm still wondering when, given what laughably poor shape Microsoft are in these days, (in terms of credibility, not money necessarily...yet) Linux users are finally going to realise that Microsoft stopped being a threat to them probably at least 5 years ago.
Linux and FOSS in general are established, now. Microsoft can't hurt them any more. So stop caring about what Microsoft are doing. You don't need to.
i am going to go in to bestbuy every week and wear down the employees with every talking point i can muster showing Linux is better, they will be running to mcdonalds asking for employment applications after i get done with them.
Sounds like a great idea. Nothing like harassment to make Linux users look like a completely sane, healthy, mainstream, normal, desirable group of human beings.
Of course 90% of the people do not care too much about most of the questions shown at http://windows7sins.org/
A lot of what's on that site is the sort of blatant hypocrisy that we've come to expect from the FSF, anywayz.
Poisoning education? I've got two words in response to that; #gnu-generation. Stallman isn't going to have any credibility accusing anyone else of engaging in mind control, until he stops doing it himself. I'm guessing that the response I get to this very post will likely prove my point on that score, as well.
The latter half of your post was good, but the standard Linux cultist routine, where the word shill is repeated close to a dozen times, while spit flies out of the mouth of the zealot who is speaking, really needs to go.
It just makes whoever engages in said routine look like a basement-dwelling, autistic fringe whackjob; it doesn't accomplish anything else.
As mentioned above, Webkit isn't the most unix-like unix software being a big, monolithic program written in C++.
I was starting to think that I was the only person left who still cared about UNIX design philosophy, anywayz. Ubuntu's developers are all convinced they know better, and the single reason why is because the distro's end users never, for one single second, stop screaming about wanting system complexity to be entirely on the implementation, rather than interface side.
So the interface for Ubuntu which the end-user immediately sees is really slick, sure; but going even a few milimeters under that exterior, exposes a Titanic mountain of scribble which makes XP look like a marvel of well-partitioned, transparent modularity by comparison.
That is the exact opposite of how UNIX software was originally designed. The internal implementation is designed simply, and if the user doesn't like the resulting complexity of the interface, the proper response is to tell them to shut up; because interface complexity is the only expendable kind. If you have implementation complexity, it won't matter how pretty your interface is, NOTHING about the entire system will work.
That's why Ubuntu still has the proverbial black screen of death as an epidemic; because its' developers really do have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they're doing.
Programs have to be complex on either one side of the fence or the other; and the tradeoff always exists, no matter what you do. There is no avoiding it. You either have a stable program with a relatively complex interface, or an absolutely garbage program internally, but with an interface that any drooling idiot can use.
Guess which one of those two Windows, and now Ubuntu, has? The earlier UNIX philosophy had it right, too; but we're losing that, because the only thing any Linux developer cares about now is satisfying the Windows refugees, in order to get them into Stallman's Hell-spawned cult.
I hope Nokia is not buttering us up for DRM and lockdown in "Step 5 of 5"...
Let them, if they want. The thing which anyone who is afraid of DRM, needs to remember, is that there is no such thing as a form of DRM that is unbreakable.
The one great advantage which we have always had over the suits, is vastly superior intelligence. Their relative lack of intelligence is, in itself, the very reason why they are who they are.
Because of that, they can never win. Temporarily, yes; but not permanently.
Seriously, what is the purpose of running a regular operating system on the Kindle? I don't see how that would make it more useful or practical in any way.
I will admit that I'm not familiar with the Kindle as a device, but personally I consider the addition of just about any new mobile that can run vim (at least) to be a good thing.
Also, in some cases, the corporate world appears to want a scenario where dedicated devices are the norm. In other words, you buy a Kindle to read ebooks, but you have to buy an iPod as a seperate device to listen to music. This not only creates waste, but is also usurious for the consumer.
If the Kindle has a USB port, it can probably now be made to do both.
It's fairly seriously true. The industry apparently FreeBSD's biggest initial users, among other things. They also, from what I've read, are early adopters of just about any new kind of storage media that comes out, as well.
I know it's been said lots of times before, but I think FOSS has been on the map for enough years now, that it's about time the trade press got a clue.
Crackers and hackers are two different groups of people. One group are criminal, sociopathic 14 year olds (whether chronologically or mentally) who write malware, troll security sites in eager anticipation of someone else's implementations of exploits, (because they generally don't have a prayer of being able to actually code themselves) and spend their time generating grist for Theo de Raadt's mill, more or less in general.
Hackers are programmers, and (to an extent, archetypically speaking) practical jokers; but the elements which differentiates hackish pranks from cracker behaviour, are first of all the playful/exploratory nature of their pranks, (as opposed to psychopathic, which is the cracker mentality) as well as the question of whether or not said pranks do genuinely lasting harm.
Granted, a lot of Linux's programmers these days still manage to fall into the sociopathic 14 year old category, even if they're not actively writing exploits; but even so, the distinction between Stallmanite Linux Youth, hate filled though they may be, and actual crackers, is still there.
big boys with power and an ego that can't be stopped.
we're fucked, with people like this running the country.
Yep; and you can bet that they're laughing their heads off over the fact that many of the sheep in America keep pointing at the Chinese government and saying, "But thank God we're still free!"
China is going to end up looking liberal compared to America in the end. You wait.
...and as someone else wrote, we're now seeing the reason why.
Cloud computing is exactly the kind of buzzword-laden, idiotic fad that tends to be loved both by corporate marketing droids and technophobic Baby Boomers, both of whom have roughly equivalent levels of intelligence.
All it is going to take is a single major, successful DDoS attack against Google or some other cloud provider, and the cloud will go to the memetic rubbish bin where it belongs.
If you're one of the intellectual cripples who has difficulty understanding why cloud computing is a bad idea, ask yourself the question of whether or not you're going to be able to access your email if Google goes down, or if web access outside your ISP's own subnet does.
Yes, I have a Gmail account, but it is a convenience linked to my WoW blog, and a spam trap at best. It isn't something which I rely on for anything truly important, because I'm old enough to remember decentralised email, and to have more fucking sense.
Darn fool kids; they never learn. We keep seeing the same old mistakes being made, over and over and over again. I'm reminded of the old Frantics song, here.
Dumb terminal/"cloud" computing? Boot to the head. Creating a single, centralised point of failure which is just waiting for a DDoS attack. Genius.
XML/binary format RPC in GUIs? Boot to the head. Opaque, undiscoverable, uneditable, and totally unnecessary, except in the minds of marketing suits, or post-pubescent CS grads who've been fed corporate Kool-Aid. Use sockets, morons.
Binary subpackaging of libraries? Boot to the head. Given what bandwidth and disk space is at these days, any claim that it saves space is totally bogus, and the only thing it does do is add needless complexity, and reduce reliability. Put the whole thing in a single package, and stop thinking you're smart for doing otherwise. You're not.
Writing opaque package management in C, with a dep list a mile long, when a system written in shell, awk, and using the graph/dep management ability of Make itself would work probably more effectively? Boot to the head. Although sorry; I keep forgetting that Awk isn't considered a "real," programming language. You might want to let the guys using it for AI research know that, though; they could forget otherwise.
Being a snot nosed, latte sipping, yuppie CS graduate who thinks they know how to code, and then spawning attrocities like Dbus? Boot to the head. The kernel hardware notification system and udev work perfectly well by themselves. Adding more daemons when you don't need to simply adds unnecessary complexity, which again potentially reduces robustness.
Writing opaque, non-standard, dynamic GUI "automounter" garbage for Crapbuntu instead of teaching users how to edit/etc/fstab? Boot to the head. Use things which are easily locatable, and written in text which can likewise be edited easily. Then again, I guess I can't expect the Stallmanite 14 year olds who code Linux's userland these days to know about real UNIX philosophy, now can I?
Causing GRUB to default to "quiet splash," in Crapbuntu so that when the boot process inevitably fails due to the distro coming with Bit Torrent servers by default, the user can't see the daemon that is causing the boot process to fail, and are thus left with a totally opaque, unfixable black screen that they can't recover from? Boot to the fucking head, x100.
This is exactly why local e-mail hosting is probably one of the worst ideas to come about.
I truly hate it when someone engages in this form of mimicry; copying an original poster's format almost exactly, but then using it to refute them. It has the fingerprints of an FSF troll pretty much all over it, as well; it's a tactic I've seen them use, and Debian fanboys as well.
The single worst part about it, though, is that the poor soul who does it, generally seems to be under the delusion that it makes them look intelligent.
Because the American government has known, probably since Reagan, that its' constituents have genuine grounds for overthrowing it, and that it is therefore reasonably possible that they could someday try...and that they must therefore be prevented from trying at all costs.;)
Slashdot Mirror
So what about Office? Similar problem. To date they maintained the monopoly by lock in. If you are like most people you bought the newest Office not when you wanted the new features but when someone you do business with sent you a document you couldn't open.
That isn't Microsoft's biggest problem.
Microsoft's biggest problem (and I'm going back nearly 20 years here, now) is that they have never, never had a long term road map (or any type of road map, for that matter) after NT4. Zero, zilch, nothing.
Gates acquired DOS, and bought some professors to do a hack job on VMS for NT. He wasn't a real coder, though; he never was. Bill's real skill was as a marketer and showman. He was charismatic, he had an iron will, and he knew how to at least make it look as though the customers were getting what they wanted from him.
But fundamentally, Microsoft have always been a suit company, not a programmer company. It isn't about the scalability of FOSS mindshare, either. Apple can still hire people smart enough to churn out the products they need to stay in business.
The real reason, also, why no gameplan after NT4, is going to end up being fatal to them, is because as Bill has said himself, where software is concerned, you're only as relevant as your next release.
Microsoft have no next release, now. They've hit a brick wall. XP is a patch of a patch of a patch, and it's their last truly decent product. Vista wasn't so much a bomb as it was simply the same product with an attempt at a skin job, and some minor superficial crap which only succeeded at slowing the internal engine down.
Windows 7 will fail, too, and for the same reason. It is not a new product. It will be XP with some new skins, and a reshuffle of the deck chairs, and that will be it. Microsoft can't do anything else, because they don't HAVE anything else.
Linux is able to reinvent itself as necessary. Apple nearly died themselves, but Steve Jobs finally proved that he has a real brain in his head (and believe me, I'd been seriously doubting that for a long time) and made the kind of obvious decision that people with a lot of money usually don't have sufficient vision to be able to make; he abandoned his old architecture entirely, and jumped ship to UNIX.
UNIX is the future. That has been predictable for a long time now; since at least the early 90s, and probably before.
Microsoft could do an Apple, cut their losses and essentially become just another UNIX vendor, but they won't, because there are still too many old guard in the company who are two ideologically bound to Windows.
That isn't the only thing which will sink the company, either. It still has a lot of problems with public ill-will. Stallman's cultists still haven't got the memo that the only people who Microsoft are a threat to at this point are themselves, and the cult can be an extremely vocal and influential demographic.
It may not be for the reasons that most people think or realise, but whichever way you slice it, at this point, Microsoft are screwed.
Bill retired last year, and you'll notice that he did it fairly quietly. He would have been able to see the writing on the wall at least as clearly as I've been able to, and I'm guessing he knows exactly what is coming. He probably didn't make too big a deal about it; he wouldn't have wanted to start a panic.
When Bill retired last year, though, he was doing exactly the same thing that J Bruce Ismay was doing, when he got into a lifeboat by jumping the rail of the Titanic.
When the stock market sniffs the lack of Windows 7 follow through MSFT is going down! Right now the market is divided hence its stock price just keeps rolling around treading water. But when that balance sheet keeps grinding down MSFT is done! I am thinking you will probably be able to pick MSFT shares around the low teens next year.
500 WoW gold says that Microsoft isn't still here by 2015. 2020, tops.
I've seen this coming for more than a decade, now. They never had any plan after NT 4.
This is why any Linux users (and I mean any) who have ever considered Microsoft a viable threat, are paranoid morons who need to stop drinking Stallman's Kool Aid.
Microsoft are a threat to themselves, and nobody else.
Despite popular belief, most Linux users don't hate or berate Microsoft. This is a stereotype. Remove it from your brain.
This might be true, but unfortunately it is the 5-10% who genuinely are rabid, who are also the most vocal. Hence, that's what we primarily see.
In fact, Linux can be likened to a Mooncup-using redhaired hippie girlfriend who lives in a house in the country she built herself from twigs and has very strong ideas on how everything should be and has all her original body hair. The sex is fantastic, but only if she thinks the astrological conditions are perfect. The house has a hand-dug latrine, so she's propped a toilet bowl on top and thinks that's "user friendliness."
You forgot the black rimmed glasses and obligatory reference to Thelma from Scooby Doo. Maybe surreptitiously sliding in, "Jinkies!" at the end of the paragraph would have worked. You also forgot to mention that she would work at least part time in a library, and that although the sex might be fantastic, it'd never be with men. ;)
Linux has less games. One out of three, well done.
You didn't call the GP a shill. Not even once. I'm equally impressed.
It's little things like this, that give me faint hope that perhaps the FSF's mind control is actually starting to wear a little thinner, in some places.
It's a faint hope, of course; but hope nonetheless.
"The games your Customer Wants (e.g. WoW)" : really bad choice of game, cause for Wow it's an outright lie.
This is only a lie since WoW had the Chilton Effect applied to it, (as in, Blizz hired Chilton as design lead, and he gave the game exactly the kind of brutal sodomy that he gave Ultima Online) and anyone who wasn't already one of his minions left WoW's live team in order to work on Blizzard's new game.
Before that, WoW had tons of demand.
That's because you were asleep the past decade or so, during which "Linux" became synonymous with "any Linux based distribution" when it comes to the mass media/general public.
Which is exactly how it should be. The only people who bring up the naming issue, (which Stallman invented out of whole cloth, as part of his ongoing crusade to obtain as much narcissistic supply as is humanly possible) are either Stallmanite Debian fanboys, or Stallman himself.
Nobody else cares, and nobody else should care.
We are at stage three. Assuming someone in the open source community wakes up and gives small businesses a real alternative to QuickBooks and creative media software.
Microsoft aren't the only people who are scared, though. The very fact that stories like this keep showing up only proves that.
I'm still wondering when, given what laughably poor shape Microsoft are in these days, (in terms of credibility, not money necessarily...yet) Linux users are finally going to realise that Microsoft stopped being a threat to them probably at least 5 years ago.
Linux and FOSS in general are established, now. Microsoft can't hurt them any more. So stop caring about what Microsoft are doing. You don't need to.
i am going to go in to bestbuy every week and wear down the employees with every talking point i can muster showing Linux is better, they will be running to mcdonalds asking for employment applications after i get done with them.
Sounds like a great idea. Nothing like harassment to make Linux users look like a completely sane, healthy, mainstream, normal, desirable group of human beings.
Of course 90% of the people do not care too much about most of the questions shown at
http://windows7sins.org/
A lot of what's on that site is the sort of blatant hypocrisy that we've come to expect from the FSF, anywayz.
Poisoning education? I've got two words in response to that; #gnu-generation. Stallman isn't going to have any credibility accusing anyone else of engaging in mind control, until he stops doing it himself. I'm guessing that the response I get to this very post will likely prove my point on that score, as well.
The latter half of your post was good, but the standard Linux cultist routine, where the word shill is repeated close to a dozen times, while spit flies out of the mouth of the zealot who is speaking, really needs to go.
It just makes whoever engages in said routine look like a basement-dwelling, autistic fringe whackjob; it doesn't accomplish anything else.
As mentioned above, Webkit isn't the most unix-like unix software being a big, monolithic program written in C++ .
I was starting to think that I was the only person left who still cared about UNIX design philosophy, anywayz. Ubuntu's developers are all convinced they know better, and the single reason why is because the distro's end users never, for one single second, stop screaming about wanting system complexity to be entirely on the implementation, rather than interface side.
So the interface for Ubuntu which the end-user immediately sees is really slick, sure; but going even a few milimeters under that exterior, exposes a Titanic mountain of scribble which makes XP look like a marvel of well-partitioned, transparent modularity by comparison.
That is the exact opposite of how UNIX software was originally designed. The internal implementation is designed simply, and if the user doesn't like the resulting complexity of the interface, the proper response is to tell them to shut up; because interface complexity is the only expendable kind. If you have implementation complexity, it won't matter how pretty your interface is, NOTHING about the entire system will work.
That's why Ubuntu still has the proverbial black screen of death as an epidemic; because its' developers really do have absolutely no idea whatsoever what they're doing.
Programs have to be complex on either one side of the fence or the other; and the tradeoff always exists, no matter what you do. There is no avoiding it. You either have a stable program with a relatively complex interface, or an absolutely garbage program internally, but with an interface that any drooling idiot can use.
Guess which one of those two Windows, and now Ubuntu, has? The earlier UNIX philosophy had it right, too; but we're losing that, because the only thing any Linux developer cares about now is satisfying the Windows refugees, in order to get them into Stallman's Hell-spawned cult.
I hope Nokia is not buttering us up for DRM and lockdown in "Step 5 of 5"...
Let them, if they want. The thing which anyone who is afraid of DRM, needs to remember, is that there is no such thing as a form of DRM that is unbreakable.
The one great advantage which we have always had over the suits, is vastly superior intelligence. Their relative lack of intelligence is, in itself, the very reason why they are who they are.
Because of that, they can never win. Temporarily, yes; but not permanently.
...why?
Seriously, what is the purpose of running a regular operating system on the Kindle? I don't see how that would make it more useful or practical in any way.
I will admit that I'm not familiar with the Kindle as a device, but personally I consider the addition of just about any new mobile that can run vim (at least) to be a good thing.
Also, in some cases, the corporate world appears to want a scenario where dedicated devices are the norm. In other words, you buy a Kindle to read ebooks, but you have to buy an iPod as a seperate device to listen to music. This not only creates waste, but is also usurious for the consumer.
If the Kindle has a USB port, it can probably now be made to do both.
"Amusing; but pointless."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo
It's fairly seriously true. The industry apparently FreeBSD's biggest initial users, among other things. They also, from what I've read, are early adopters of just about any new kind of storage media that comes out, as well.
I know it's been said lots of times before, but I think FOSS has been on the map for enough years now, that it's about time the trade press got a clue.
Crackers and hackers are two different groups of people. One group are criminal, sociopathic 14 year olds (whether chronologically or mentally) who write malware, troll security sites in eager anticipation of someone else's implementations of exploits, (because they generally don't have a prayer of being able to actually code themselves) and spend their time generating grist for Theo de Raadt's mill, more or less in general.
Hackers are programmers, and (to an extent, archetypically speaking) practical jokers; but the elements which differentiates hackish pranks from cracker behaviour, are first of all the playful/exploratory nature of their pranks, (as opposed to psychopathic, which is the cracker mentality) as well as the question of whether or not said pranks do genuinely lasting harm.
Granted, a lot of Linux's programmers these days still manage to fall into the sociopathic 14 year old category, even if they're not actively writing exploits; but even so, the distinction between Stallmanite Linux Youth, hate filled though they may be, and actual crackers, is still there.
big boys with power and an ego that can't be stopped.
we're fucked, with people like this running the country.
Yep; and you can bet that they're laughing their heads off over the fact that many of the sheep in America keep pointing at the Chinese government and saying, "But thank God we're still free!"
China is going to end up looking liberal compared to America in the end. You wait.
...and as someone else wrote, we're now seeing the reason why.
Cloud computing is exactly the kind of buzzword-laden, idiotic fad that tends to be loved both by corporate marketing droids and technophobic Baby Boomers, both of whom have roughly equivalent levels of intelligence.
All it is going to take is a single major, successful DDoS attack against Google or some other cloud provider, and the cloud will go to the memetic rubbish bin where it belongs.
If you're one of the intellectual cripples who has difficulty understanding why cloud computing is a bad idea, ask yourself the question of whether or not you're going to be able to access your email if Google goes down, or if web access outside your ISP's own subnet does.
Yes, I have a Gmail account, but it is a convenience linked to my WoW blog, and a spam trap at best. It isn't something which I rely on for anything truly important, because I'm old enough to remember decentralised email, and to have more fucking sense.
Darn fool kids; they never learn. We keep seeing the same old mistakes being made, over and over and over again. I'm reminded of the old Frantics song, here.
Dumb terminal/"cloud" computing? Boot to the head. Creating a single, centralised point of failure which is just waiting for a DDoS attack. Genius.
XML/binary format RPC in GUIs? Boot to the head. Opaque, undiscoverable, uneditable, and totally unnecessary, except in the minds of marketing suits, or post-pubescent CS grads who've been fed corporate Kool-Aid. Use sockets, morons.
Binary subpackaging of libraries? Boot to the head. Given what bandwidth and disk space is at these days, any claim that it saves space is totally bogus, and the only thing it does do is add needless complexity, and reduce reliability. Put the whole thing in a single package, and stop thinking you're smart for doing otherwise. You're not.
Writing opaque package management in C, with a dep list a mile long, when a system written in shell, awk, and using the graph/dep management ability of Make itself would work probably more effectively? Boot to the head. Although sorry; I keep forgetting that Awk isn't considered a "real," programming language. You might want to let the guys using it for AI research know that, though; they could forget otherwise.
Being a snot nosed, latte sipping, yuppie CS graduate who thinks they know how to code, and then spawning attrocities like Dbus? Boot to the head. The kernel hardware notification system and udev work perfectly well by themselves. Adding more daemons when you don't need to simply adds unnecessary complexity, which again potentially reduces robustness.
Writing opaque, non-standard, dynamic GUI "automounter" garbage for Crapbuntu instead of teaching users how to edit /etc/fstab? Boot to the head. Use things which are easily locatable, and written in text which can likewise be edited easily. Then again, I guess I can't expect the Stallmanite 14 year olds who code Linux's userland these days to know about real UNIX philosophy, now can I?
Causing GRUB to default to "quiet splash," in Crapbuntu so that when the boot process inevitably fails due to the distro coming with Bit Torrent servers by default, the user can't see the daemon that is causing the boot process to fail, and are thus left with a totally opaque, unfixable black screen that they can't recover from? Boot to the fucking head, x100.
This is exactly why local e-mail hosting is probably one of the worst ideas to come about.
I truly hate it when someone engages in this form of mimicry; copying an original poster's format almost exactly, but then using it to refute them. It has the fingerprints of an FSF troll pretty much all over it, as well; it's a tactic I've seen them use, and Debian fanboys as well.
The single worst part about it, though, is that the poor soul who does it, generally seems to be under the delusion that it makes them look intelligent.
I'd feel sorry for Captain Hook if Wolvie offered his services to Peter Pan. ;)
Typical American Citizen #1: Yeah! I hate taxes! Down with the Governmen.... hey isn't American Idol on tonight? Can we do the revolution tomorrow?
To quote Christopher Lambert from Mortal Kombat:-
"Egggggzactly."
now Mickey Mouse can team up with Spider-Man and become an honorary Avenger.
I'm looking forward to Donald Duck becoming the Hulk's new sidekick, personally. ;)
If you don't understand the reference, watch some of Donald's old cartoons; the single main thing he was known for was his temper.
Could be worse, though. George Lucas could have bought 'em.
"Hedgewort, Heggle..."
"HULK!"
"Yes... Gaaahh, what happened to you?"
"Now Hulk throw Jareth in Bog of Eternal Stench!"
Why would he need clearance from the NSA?
Because the American government has known, probably since Reagan, that its' constituents have genuine grounds for overthrowing it, and that it is therefore reasonably possible that they could someday try...and that they must therefore be prevented from trying at all costs. ;)