The term ease of use is something of a misnomer when applied to WinNT, what it should be is ease of learning. WinNT has a much lower learning curve than that of Unix, but once you reach a certain level of proficiency in both, you will actually find that many tasks are far easier under a unix system
Yep, I would agree with that, but there is one big BUT: this statement is true for system administering, not for normal user applications. Remember, the great majority of people do not deal directly with the operating system -- they deal with applications. The character of user's interaction with the computer is determined mostly by what his word processor/spreadsheet/file manager/mail program look like -- not by what's under the hood. And in that respect Linux (as all Unixes) is lacking. X Window has its advantages, but it's user interface is not standardized. For example, let's say you have a new unknown to you application. What would a middle mouse click do? Maybe paste, maybe pop up a menu, maybe close the window -- there is no way of knowing. I am not even going to get into the (slowly improving) lack of "normal" applications for Linux.
To summarize, if you are a (decent) sysadmin, handling a Linux system is much better than handling NT. But if you are a standard (l)user, Linux offers no advantages. If you spend all your time in Word with auto-save set to every five minutes -- what can Linux offer you?
OK, true enough, the word that we derive the word Christian from (Greek word). It has been about 6 years since I took a Greek class and I don't recall what the word exactly was, but I do remember that is what it meant, and is in fact, how the word came to use.
I've never taken any Greek classes, but I think that the word "Christian" is derived from the word "Christ" (surprise, surprise!). Now, the word "Christ", as far as I recall, is derived from a Greek word meaning "cross".
I still fail to see how "little christ" comes into all this.
The word Christian means litterally "little christ" and was first used in Antioch around 40AD.
"Litterally"? Anyway, which language you are talking about? I doubt the Antioch Greeks in 40 AD spoke English, in which 'ian' is a widespread suffix having nothing to do with "little" -- e.g. Italian, Armenian, Russian, etc.
Don't you think this might lead to a stagnation in software development?... [snip]... "People don't know what they need until you tell them."
Nope. Remember, the 95% are already ready. Completing the last 5% will not create anything *new* -- it is polishing we are talking about. The situation is actually the opposite: because the market for a particular type of software is saturated, people are forced to try completely new approaches and somebody somewhere will make a breakthrough.
Software has advanced primarily because there are companies out there trying to make a buck
So far, no. Advances in software mostly came either from individuals (who may have started companies later on) like Dan Bricklin who invented a spreadsheet, or from academia, where most of networking was developed, or from corporation think-tanks, like Xerox's PARC. The situation may change, but so far it's not the profit motive that's been driving innovation in software.
perhaps it's the general public doesn't understand the products enough to see the value of "improved"
Or perhaps their needs are different.
How many people buy new cars based on the type of welds used on the chassis, compare that to how many people buy cars because they look cool, or because they have an in-dash CD player rather than a tape deck?
Very few, and that's *normal*. I am, probably, a technogeek, but I don't care about chassis welds and I'll tell you why. Better welds will, most likely, give me a couple of percent better probability that my chassis will not fall apart after 100,000 miles (speaking off the top of my head, but you get the idea). I don't care about that. These couple of percentage points are too insignificant and too far away into the future for me to care. A cool look, or a CD player, on the other hand, are here and now and I'll use them every day. So I would argue that picking a car based on its looks as opposed to chassis welds is the right thing to do.
Of course, all this conjecture is based on the idea that a specific free software package becomes the dominant package in some area. This has probably already happened in one or two places
Yes. Emacs is the primary example. Basically, for a long time nobody has been developing text editors because emacs already does it all sufficiently well. Sure there can be improvements -- for example, I would like to have Emacs with perl as the internal language, rather than lisp (switching one's thinking mode from lispish to proceduralish (C, C++, Perl) and back is hard and painful). However, Emacs is what is known as a "category killer" and unless somebody can come up with a major breakthrough in functionality, Emacs is going to remain king of the hill.
If the world becomes accustomed to using decent applications for free, what market will there be for someone who wants to charge $20 a copy?
None. But you speak of this as if it were a Bad Thing -- why? I see no harm in the fact that if something if freely available, people find it hard to charge for it. Of course, people who used to make a living this way (SCO UNIX comes to mind) could think it's unfair to them, but OTOH nobody ever claimed that life is fair...
Once there are satisfactory products in the market that have zero cost to the consumer, it becomes extremely difficult to promote and profit from a pay-for product. Unfortunately, without some form of income, further development is often stymied
Again, the market will decide. Let's say there is a free piece of software that draws reasonably cute wiggles on my desktop. I like it and use it, it fulfils my needs. I don't need cuter wiggles and will not pay $20 for a commercial program which has them. On the other hand, let's say I am a day trader. There are free market-tracking programs, but there is that $200 program that gives me information 5 seconds faster and in a better format. Will I buy it? Hell, yes. I need these five seconds and am willing to pay for them.
In other words, it's worth improving the software only if there is a need for the improvement. If everybody is happy with the 95% solution that is free, so be it. The last 5% will never be finished, but that's OK because the time and energy for the last 5% will get channeled to something else, likely newer and more interesting.
If open source is reliant on people who have lucrative jobs (and thus, the outside money to support the open source development), what happens when those jobs slim down?
Nothing much. The market mechanisms work perfectly well in situations like that. Viz.
Lotsa commercial software -> Lotsa developers with day jobs -> Lotsa free software -> Less commercial software -> Less developers with day jobs -> Less free software -> More commercial software -> More developers with day jobs ->
Lather, rinse, repeat.
How do you expect to get very high-quality applications for it if you're unwilling to shell out the money to support people doing concentrated software development for that platform?
It's a question of need and value. If you need a high-quality application, you'll pay for it (if necessary) -- by definition. If you don't need one, you won't buy it. And yes, I quite agree that too many people think that there is a right to free software, and yes, there ain't no such thing.
I use CDE at work and don't harbor any grudges against it, but this is ridiculous.
allow me to consolidate thousands of computers all over the world, running on hundreds of different platforms, all onto the same desktop
I hope you didn't mean what you said. Thousands of computers on a single desktop?? I assume you meant to point out the fact that CDE runs on many different UNIX flavors. So what? Most decent window managers run on most widespread UNIX flavors -- after all its the same X window underneath them all...
bring the whole network to my fingertips
And, pray tell me, what does it mean and what does it have to do with GUI preferences?
a clean, professional look and feel
Each to his tastes, of course, but I would also call it a "bloodless, boring-is-good, corporate look-and-feel".
use the industry standard Motif toolkit
And that makes it an advantage how? Especially given that you have to buy Motif.
A complete help system
Again, YMMV, but to me the built-in help sucks in a major way. Annoying, hard to find what you want, more than half of it is no more than descriptions of dialog boxes.
Complete utilities like a text editor, calendar, mail program
What, you mean somebody actually uses that text editor? I've seen plenty of emacs people and plenty of vi people, but I've never seen anybody use the CDE text editor as his primary editor. Why anybody in his right mind would do this? I also don't see what is it so wonderful about the calendar and the mail program -- it's not like they are something special...
. IMO it's the best desktop/GUI ever
Well, of course you can have an opinion about it, but I doubt that you'll find many people to agree with you.
the theory goes, that much of the crypto (and generally, much of the research in areas restricted by this law) reseach in this country is sponsored at least partly by the federal government, the development of crypto entirely in the private sector is a new developement (as opposed to simply implementing it, which has been private sector for a while) The federal government did not want to fund research that could come back to haunt them in terms of inhibiting SIGINT obtained overseas from being useable.
Funding research and prohibiting exports are completely different things. The Feds have a full right not to give money to projects they don't like. That doesn't translate into export restrictions, however. Besides, it's not like these damned foreigners are completely clueless and cannot come up with a crypto system of their own.
Even now, the US government has an interest in trying to prevent strong crypto from existing outside this country
Probably true, but so what? The US government also has an interest in having everybody on this planet answering "Sir, yes Sir!" every time a US official asked them to do something. It also has an interest in having all governments and corporations send to the US copies of all their correspondence, reports, and meetings minutes. So?
in point of fact, most currently existing crypto DOES originate from inside US borders (SSH included)
Thanks to the export restrictions this fact is rapidly changing (and SSH was coded in Finland AFAIK).
Even if some crypto is leaking out, the USG has a compelling interest in trying to read foreign SIGINT.
Just because the government has an interest, it doesn't necessarily have the right to do everything to further that interest, especially when the means it chose are stupid, do not work, and are the laughingstock of all more or less civilized world. Yes, I know the argument that these restrictions are quite effective in preventing widespread default use of crypto, but the loss of credibility for the US government has been substantial. Besides, the world is a small place. All it means is that US citizens and companies are locked out of a quite an important area.
It's a change from attitudes that have prevailed since the dawn of civilisation, that might (be it in the form of brute strength, or hard cash) makes right.
Well, to start with, all kinds of religions through all ages were pretty much insistent that might does not make right. But in any case, pray tell me, where do you see this change? And don't point me towards the Microsoft trial, since that is a simple case of a guy with a bigger stick (government) landing a lucky blow on the head of the guy with a smaller stick (MS).
Comdex a turning point in history? [boggle]. Hey, can I have some of that stuff you are smoking?
If you take a pen and write a story, arguably you do have rights to the 'story' that you wrote. However, if I pick up a pen and write the same story, or write the same story into a computer, why should YOU have the rights instead of ME?
Because of the difference between *creation* and *copying*. Different actions, different consequences, different rights.
The notion of coyright is a reasonable approach... [snip]
I agree. However, the post to which I was replying seemed to claim that no such thing as intellectual property should ever exist because there is no "natural" right to own a non-tangible -- as opposed to a physical thing -- that you have created. That didn't and doesn't seem to be very defensible to me (and yes, I know about RMS).
I would argue that the company or individual has no "right" to their creation, other than property rights to the physical instances that they create.
Please do.
I would be interested in reasonable arguments as to why if I take a piece of clay and make a pot, I have a natural right to the pot, but if I take a pen and write a story, I don't have a natural right to the story.
TRUSTe's policy is: "If you feed the bears enough, they'll leave you alone."
Unfortunately, no. It's worse than this. TRUSTe's policy is: "If you let the bear eat what they want, they'll throw some scraps to us" (us being TRUSTe).
It already has been said on Slashdot and I'll say it again: TRUSTe has no credibility left whatsoever. They may have had good intentions at the beginning, but right now the whole thing degenerated into a fig leaf for whatever the corporations want to do. TRUSTe right now is actually doing harm, since it provides the corporations with a convenient cover allowing them to state (with a straight face) that their privacy policies are OK, are being followed, and Joe Q. Random has nothing to worry about.
I think that this is about time everybody with privacy concerns and some decency left start to distance themselves from TRUSTe as quickly as possible (simple translation: run in the opposite direction. Fast.) The whole affair starts to generate a very ugly taste and more and more looks like TRUSTe was selling PR cover for money while pretending to be on the lookout for consumers' interests.
IMHO the best solution for this mess is for TRUSTe to die, quicky. I don't insist on the death being painful.
All it takes is something like a palm pilot with built in Richochet and an audio jack (there have been PDAs with one but not the other), and then someone like me in California will be able to walk around listening to a small college radio station in New Zealand.
Problems:
(1) Bandwidth (2) Battery life
If these two problems are solved to the extent that you could listen to online radio stations for a whole day, then much much more cool things would be possible than just listening to NZ radio stations.
Anyone else out there becoming afraid that Palm is getting too much market share?
I am not afraid of it -- I know they have too much market share for their own good. Case in point: ridiculous prices, miniscule memory, small screen. Users have been screaming about this for a loooong time. What did Palm do? Nothing. All we got was a wireless access to some Web-based info and still at ridiculous prices. And you should hear Palm executives speak about the future -- they talk about PalmOS superseding Windows (not CE, just Windows!) everywhere in about five years... I really would like some stuff that they are smoking.
I was under the impression that Sony was a member in good standing of Symbian, which is a consortium dedicated to putting Psion's EPOC operating system on all sorts of mobile devices. AFAIK, the purpose of Symbian was basically to combat the WinCE threat.
So now that Sony publicly committed to PalmOS, does it mean that EPOC and Psion will go down the path of Amiga and Atari?
The fact that Sega bowed out of the hardware console business means that they accept that the Dreamcast is going to die once the next Playstation, and then Nintendo appear. The public is likely to notice that (do you want to buy stuff from a company that's exiting the market?) and hold off on Dreamcast waiting for Playstation.
I wanted to take a laser, shoot it several miles down a tunnel, and put a large magnet to answer the question "is light matter or energy"?
Never mind that these guys are trying to answer a different question, but I am intrigued: how a magnet was going to help you decide whether light is matter or energy? And what would happen if it's both?
1) Searching for a decision analysis tool on the Web, you find a review in which the reviewer raves about a particular product. You buy the product and discover it just doesn't work. You desire to prevent this person's ravings from harming anyone else--and you desire to prevent the product from disappointing anyone else.
You can't. This is basically a reputation issue. Why should the web belive you and not the reviewer? How do people know *you* are honest? Of course you can set up a site www.thisproductsucks.com, post your experience to Usenet, etc. etc. but all this is possible with the existing Web.
2) A product you buy based on a rave review opens your email address book, grabs your entire list of friends, sends itself to them, and sends your password files to a mysterious IP address. It's too late now, but which features would you install before ever touching your computer again?
You bought it, right? So there is an electronic/paper trail to the guys who made it, right? Viruses are illegal in the US, so you can complain to cops.
Other than that, there is nothing you can install on your machine that will prevent this from happening ever again (none of what this trojan did required root/admin privileges). Unless you want to set up a separate untrusted environment and try all unknown code there, there isn't much you can do.
3) A product is advertised on the Web. It sounds good, but the offerer has no Web reputation. What arrangement would you consider adequate to go ahead and procure the product (Note: there are several possible answers; give 2 entirely separate solutions, and that is considered answering 2 questions).
Simple escrow, in whatever form available.
4) You start receiving thousands of emails from organizations you don't know, all hawking their wares. You want it to stop, just stop!
Welcome to the club. Change your e-mail address and spam-proof what you expose in places like Usenet and Slashdot. And browser does not give out your email address to every site that asks, does it?
5) You wish to play poker with your friends. They live in Tampa Florida, you live in Kingman. This is illegal in the nation where you happen to be a citizen. You want to do it anyway.
Encryption.
6) You hear a joke that someone, somewhere, would probably find offensive. You wish to tell your precocious 17-year-old daughter, who is a student at Yale. The Common Decency Act Version 2 has just passed; it is a $100,000 offense to send such material electronically to a minor. You want to send it anyway--it is a very funny joke.
Exactly the same problem and the same answer: encryption.
7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn't really you.
Unless you have a public key and registered it somewhere, you have a problem. Even if you had and did, you still have a problem. The degree of the problem depends on whether the guy just posts on the Usenet under your handle, or he messes with your bank account using your passwords/certs.
8) You have brought out a remarkable new product. There is a competing product making claims you know are false. You want to make sure anyone going to their site finds out your product is better.
You can't. To do this means that you have to be able to see everybody who goes to a competitor's site, and then spam them. This is technically hard, an invasion of privacy and may be even illegal.
9) Your elderly aunt sees a drug advertised on the Web that promises relief from arthritis. She dies shortly after starting to take the drug. You think the drug, and he company that made it, is at fault. Meanwhile the company is sure they didn't have anything to do with it. You want justice.
And what does the web have to do with this? That's a case from tort law (maybe criminal, as well). It makes no difference whether your aunt seen the ad on the web or read it in a newspaper. Of course the www.theykilledmyaunt.com site is always an option.
10) You are the CEO of Bloomberg News, one of the most prestigious (and expensive) stock information services in the world. An article circulates on the Web, based on a mock-up of the Bloomberg News information page, claiming that PairGain Corp. will be acquired by ECI Telecom. PairGain stock rises 32% in 8 hours. Investigators later find that the false report was created by a PairGain employee about to cash in his options. You want to ensure that your brand is never used like this again.
You can't. Authentication would help somewhat, but will not solve the problem completely.
11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.
The device is useless to you. All information in the world means nothing, if you cannot do anything. The situation is set up so that you are completely powerless in the real world and have access to a virtual world. Sorry, the virtual world cannot not help you. You and your daugher die. This does solve your problem in the most fundamental sense.
However, I can see where a webserver would be handy in the palm of your hand afterall... for the total geek factor, hook up a bunch of sensors to various parts of your body, maybe add in a webcam (though the Palm certainly doesn't have the CPU speed to drive a webcam effectively), and then someone can live vicariously through you on the web.:)
That's a very widespread activity on the web (only using normal PCs instead of a Palm), and quite profitable, too. I don't know what it has to do with geek factor, though, the ladies that engage in this are not likely to be geeks...
For the average shmoe it could mean that they really don't have to buy a whole bulky computer or even a laptop. They just have to get a Palm and they can have their own web page with cgi and all the extras!
[boggle]
[looking for/sarcasm tag, not finding one]
[boggle again]
[wondering what happened to natural selection which was supposed to prevent this kind of thing]
In a capitalist economy, the lower class is the proletariat (a.k.a. "the working class"), who own their own labor power, but can only sell it to members of the bourgeoisie (a.k.a. "the bosses"). If you're in the proletariat and you can't find anyone to buy your labor, you're SOL.
First of all, the workers can set up small businesses, the importance and tenacity of which Marx severely underestimated (he believed that they'll all die out very soon). Second, in the feudal society, if you are landless and cannot find a lord to let you onto his land, your situation is much, much worse.
The bourgeoisie buys the proletariat's labor for as little as it can pay, and sells the products of the labor for as much as it can charge, to whoever is willing to pay.
Isn't this how any market works? Just in the same way the workers try to sell their labor for as much as they can, and buy products for as little as they can.
(There's the alienation of labor -- once the widget leaves the worker's hands, he or she has no special relationship with it.)
Bzzzzzt. Nope. The alienation of labor is a name for the situation when some people (bourgeoisie) own the means of production and other people (workers) own the labor. Medieval craftsmen, for example, owned both the means of production and labor, so there was no alienation. It was industrialization that created the massive alienation of labor: tools became too big/expensive/specialized for the worker to own.
in the 1880s, this was not an unreasonable theory.
Well, it was not a particularly unreasonable theory, but it still has far too many huge and obvious holes in it. Especially considering the impact it had on the world.
Slashdot Mirror
The term ease of use is something of a misnomer when applied to WinNT, what it should be is ease of learning. WinNT has a much lower learning curve than that of Unix, but once you reach a certain level of proficiency in both, you will actually find that many tasks are far easier under a unix system
Yep, I would agree with that, but there is one big BUT: this statement is true for system administering, not for normal user applications. Remember, the great majority of people do not deal directly with the operating system -- they deal with applications. The character of user's interaction with the computer is determined mostly by what his word processor/spreadsheet/file manager/mail program look like -- not by what's under the hood. And in that respect Linux (as all Unixes) is lacking. X Window has its advantages, but it's user interface is not standardized. For example, let's say you have a new unknown to you application. What would a middle mouse click do? Maybe paste, maybe pop up a menu, maybe close the window -- there is no way of knowing. I am not even going to get into the (slowly improving) lack of "normal" applications for Linux.
To summarize, if you are a (decent) sysadmin, handling a Linux system is much better than handling NT. But if you are a standard (l)user, Linux offers no advantages. If you spend all your time in Word with auto-save set to every five minutes -- what can Linux offer you?
Kaa
OK, true enough, the word that we derive the word Christian from (Greek word). It has been about 6 years since I took a Greek class and I don't recall what the word exactly was, but I do remember that is what it meant, and is in fact, how the word came to use.
I've never taken any Greek classes, but I think that the word "Christian" is derived from the word "Christ" (surprise, surprise!). Now, the word "Christ", as far as I recall, is derived from a Greek word meaning "cross".
I still fail to see how "little christ" comes into all this.
Kaa
#include "beer.h"
Nope. That'll just show you what beer is and, if you are lucky, provide you with some access methods. What you really need is
LDFLAGS = -lbeer
Kaa
The word Christian means litterally "little christ" and was first used in Antioch around 40AD.
"Litterally"? Anyway, which language you are talking about? I doubt the Antioch Greeks in 40 AD spoke English, in which 'ian' is a widespread suffix having nothing to do with "little" -- e.g. Italian, Armenian, Russian, etc.
Kaa
And Object-Oriented geeks are doubly blessed.
Only in Perl.
Kaa
Don't you think this might lead to a stagnation in software development? ... [snip] ... "People don't know what they need until you tell them."
Nope. Remember, the 95% are already ready. Completing the last 5% will not create anything *new* -- it is polishing we are talking about. The situation is actually the opposite: because the market for a particular type of software is saturated, people are forced to try completely new approaches and somebody somewhere will make a breakthrough.
Software has advanced primarily because there are companies out there trying to make a buck
So far, no. Advances in software mostly came either from individuals (who may have started companies later on) like Dan Bricklin who invented a spreadsheet, or from academia, where most of networking was developed, or from corporation think-tanks, like Xerox's PARC. The situation may change, but so far it's not the profit motive that's been driving innovation in software.
perhaps it's the general public doesn't understand the products enough to see the value of "improved"
Or perhaps their needs are different.
How many people buy new cars based on the type of welds used on the chassis, compare that to how many people buy cars because they look cool, or because they have an in-dash CD player rather than a tape deck?
Very few, and that's *normal*. I am, probably, a technogeek, but I don't care about chassis welds and I'll tell you why. Better welds will, most likely, give me a couple of percent better probability that my chassis will not fall apart after 100,000 miles (speaking off the top of my head, but you get the idea). I don't care about that. These couple of percentage points are too insignificant and too far away into the future for me to care. A cool look, or a CD player, on the other hand, are here and now and I'll use them every day. So I would argue that picking a car based on its looks as opposed to chassis welds is the right thing to do.
Of course, all this conjecture is based on the idea that a specific free software package becomes the dominant package in some area. This has probably already happened in one or two places
Yes. Emacs is the primary example. Basically, for a long time nobody has been developing text editors because emacs already does it all sufficiently well. Sure there can be improvements -- for example, I would like to have Emacs with perl as the internal language, rather than lisp (switching one's thinking mode from lispish to proceduralish (C, C++, Perl) and back is hard and painful). However, Emacs is what is known as a "category killer" and unless somebody can come up with a major breakthrough in functionality, Emacs is going to remain king of the hill.
Kaa
If the world becomes accustomed to using decent applications for free, what market will there be for someone who wants to charge $20 a copy?
None. But you speak of this as if it were a Bad Thing -- why? I see no harm in the fact that if something if freely available, people find it hard to charge for it. Of course, people who used to make a living this way (SCO UNIX comes to mind) could think it's unfair to them, but OTOH nobody ever claimed that life is fair...
Once there are satisfactory products in the market that have zero cost to the consumer, it becomes extremely difficult to promote and profit from a pay-for product. Unfortunately, without some form of income, further development is often stymied
Again, the market will decide. Let's say there is a free piece of software that draws reasonably cute wiggles on my desktop. I like it and use it, it fulfils my needs. I don't need cuter wiggles and will not pay $20 for a commercial program which has them. On the other hand, let's say I am a day trader. There are free market-tracking programs, but there is that $200 program that gives me information 5 seconds faster and in a better format. Will I buy it? Hell, yes. I need these five seconds and am willing to pay for them.
In other words, it's worth improving the software only if there is a need for the improvement. If everybody is happy with the 95% solution that is free, so be it. The last 5% will never be finished, but that's OK because the time and energy for the last 5% will get channeled to something else, likely newer and more interesting.
Kaa
Can somebody, please, find out this guy and, using a big stick, persuade him not to do this again?
Kaa
If open source is reliant on people who have lucrative jobs (and thus, the outside money to support the open source development), what happens when those jobs slim down?
Nothing much. The market mechanisms work perfectly well in situations like that. Viz.
Lotsa commercial software ->
Lotsa developers with day jobs ->
Lotsa free software ->
Less commercial software ->
Less developers with day jobs ->
Less free software ->
More commercial software ->
More developers with day jobs ->
Lather, rinse, repeat.
How do you expect to get very high-quality applications for it if you're unwilling to shell out the money to support people doing concentrated software development for that platform?
It's a question of need and value. If you need a high-quality application, you'll pay for it (if necessary) -- by definition. If you don't need one, you won't buy it. And yes, I quite agree that too many people think that there is a right to free software, and yes, there ain't no such thing.
Kaa
I use CDE at work and don't harbor any grudges against it, but this is ridiculous.
allow me to consolidate thousands of computers all over the world, running on hundreds of different platforms, all onto the same desktop
I hope you didn't mean what you said. Thousands of computers on a single desktop?? I assume you meant to point out the fact that CDE runs on many different UNIX flavors. So what? Most decent window managers run on most widespread UNIX flavors -- after all its the same X window underneath them all...
bring the whole network to my fingertips
And, pray tell me, what does it mean and what does it have to do with GUI preferences?
a clean, professional look and feel
Each to his tastes, of course, but I would also call it a "bloodless, boring-is-good, corporate look-and-feel".
use the industry standard Motif toolkit
And that makes it an advantage how? Especially given that you have to buy Motif.
A complete help system
Again, YMMV, but to me the built-in help sucks in a major way. Annoying, hard to find what you want, more than half of it is no more than descriptions of dialog boxes.
Complete utilities like a text editor, calendar, mail program
What, you mean somebody actually uses that text editor? I've seen plenty of emacs people and plenty of vi people, but I've never seen anybody use the CDE text editor as his primary editor. Why anybody in his right mind would do this? I also don't see what is it so wonderful about the calendar and the mail program -- it's not like they are something special...
. IMO it's the best desktop/GUI ever
Well, of course you can have an opinion about it, but I doubt that you'll find many people to agree with you.
Kaa
the theory goes, that much of the crypto (and generally, much of the research in areas restricted by this law) reseach in this country is sponsored at least partly by the federal government, the development of crypto entirely in the private sector is a new developement (as opposed to simply implementing it, which has been private sector for a while)
The federal government did not want to fund research that could come back to haunt them in terms of inhibiting SIGINT obtained overseas from being useable.
Funding research and prohibiting exports are completely different things. The Feds have a full right not to give money to projects they don't like. That doesn't translate into export restrictions, however. Besides, it's not like these damned foreigners are completely clueless and cannot come up with a crypto system of their own.
Even now, the US government has an interest in trying to prevent strong crypto from existing outside this country
Probably true, but so what? The US government also has an interest in having everybody on this planet answering "Sir, yes Sir!" every time a US official asked them to do something. It also has an interest in having all governments and corporations send to the US copies of all their correspondence, reports, and meetings minutes. So?
in point of fact, most currently existing crypto DOES originate from inside US borders (SSH included)
Thanks to the export restrictions this fact is rapidly changing (and SSH was coded in Finland AFAIK).
Even if some crypto is leaking out, the USG has a compelling interest in trying to read foreign SIGINT.
Just because the government has an interest, it doesn't necessarily have the right to do everything to further that interest, especially when the means it chose are stupid, do not work, and are the laughingstock of all more or less civilized world. Yes, I know the argument that these restrictions are quite effective in preventing widespread default use of crypto, but the loss of credibility for the US government has been substantial. Besides, the world is a small place. All it means is that US citizens and companies are locked out of a quite an important area.
Kaa
It's a change from attitudes that have prevailed since the dawn of civilisation, that might (be it in the form of brute strength, or hard cash) makes right.
Well, to start with, all kinds of religions through all ages were pretty much insistent that might does not make right. But in any case, pray tell me, where do you see this change? And don't point me towards the Microsoft trial, since that is a simple case of a guy with a bigger stick (government) landing a lucky blow on the head of the guy with a smaller stick (MS).
Comdex a turning point in history? [boggle]. Hey, can I have some of that stuff you are smoking?
Kaa
If you take a pen and write a story, arguably you do have rights to the 'story' that you wrote. However, if I pick up a pen and write the same story, or write the same story into a computer, why should YOU have the rights instead of ME?
Because of the difference between *creation* and *copying*. Different actions, different consequences, different rights.
The notion of coyright is a reasonable approach... [snip]
I agree. However, the post to which I was replying seemed to claim that no such thing as intellectual property should ever exist because there is no "natural" right to own a non-tangible -- as opposed to a physical thing -- that you have created. That didn't and doesn't seem to be very defensible to me (and yes, I know about RMS).
Kaa
I would argue that the company or individual has no "right" to their creation, other than property rights to the physical instances that they create.
Please do.
I would be interested in reasonable arguments as to why if I take a piece of clay and make a pot, I have a natural right to the pot, but if I take a pen and write a story, I don't have a natural right to the story.
Kaa
TRUSTe's policy is: "If you feed the bears enough, they'll leave you alone."
Unfortunately, no. It's worse than this. TRUSTe's policy is: "If you let the bear eat what they want, they'll throw some scraps to us" (us being TRUSTe).
Kaa
It already has been said on Slashdot and I'll say it again: TRUSTe has no credibility left whatsoever. They may have had good intentions at the beginning, but right now the whole thing degenerated into a fig leaf for whatever the corporations want to do. TRUSTe right now is actually doing harm, since it provides the corporations with a convenient cover allowing them to state (with a straight face) that their privacy policies are OK, are being followed, and Joe Q. Random has nothing to worry about.
I think that this is about time everybody with privacy concerns and some decency left start to distance themselves from TRUSTe as quickly as possible (simple translation: run in the opposite direction. Fast.) The whole affair starts to generate a very ugly taste and more and more looks like TRUSTe was selling PR cover for money while pretending to be on the lookout for consumers' interests.
IMHO the best solution for this mess is for TRUSTe to die, quicky. I don't insist on the death being painful.
Kaa
All it takes is something like a palm pilot with built in Richochet and an audio jack (there have been PDAs with one but not the other), and then someone like me in California will be able to walk around listening to a small college radio station in New Zealand.
Problems:
(1) Bandwidth
(2) Battery life
If these two problems are solved to the extent that you could listen to online radio stations for a whole day, then much much more cool things would be possible than just listening to NZ radio stations.
Kaa
Anyone else out there becoming afraid that Palm is getting too much market share?
I am not afraid of it -- I know they have too much market share for their own good. Case in point: ridiculous prices, miniscule memory, small screen. Users have been screaming about this for a loooong time. What did Palm do? Nothing. All we got was a wireless access to some Web-based info and still at ridiculous prices. And you should hear Palm executives speak about the future -- they talk about PalmOS superseding Windows (not CE, just Windows!) everywhere in about five years... I really would like some stuff that they are smoking.
Kaa
I was under the impression that Sony was a member in good standing of Symbian, which is a consortium dedicated to putting Psion's EPOC operating system on all sorts of mobile devices. AFAIK, the purpose of Symbian was basically to combat the WinCE threat.
So now that Sony publicly committed to PalmOS, does it mean that EPOC and Psion will go down the path of Amiga and Atari?
Kaa
The fact that Sega bowed out of the hardware console business means that they accept that the Dreamcast is going to die once the next Playstation, and then Nintendo appear. The public is likely to notice that (do you want to buy stuff from a company that's exiting the market?) and hold off on Dreamcast waiting for Playstation.
R.I.P. Dreamcast.
Kaa
I wanted to take a laser, shoot it several miles down a tunnel, and put a large magnet to answer the question "is light matter or energy"?
Never mind that these guys are trying to answer a different question, but I am intrigued: how a magnet was going to help you decide whether light is matter or energy? And what would happen if it's both?
Kaa
1) Searching for a decision analysis tool on the Web, you find a review in which the reviewer raves about a particular product. You buy the product and discover it just doesn't work. You desire to prevent this person's ravings from harming anyone else--and you desire to prevent the product from disappointing anyone else.
You can't. This is basically a reputation issue. Why should the web belive you and not the reviewer? How do people know *you* are honest? Of course you can set up a site www.thisproductsucks.com, post your experience to Usenet, etc. etc. but all this is possible with the existing Web.
2) A product you buy based on a rave review opens your email address book, grabs your entire list of friends, sends itself to them, and sends your password files to a mysterious IP address. It's too late now, but which features would you install before ever touching your computer again?
You bought it, right? So there is an electronic/paper trail to the guys who made it, right? Viruses are illegal in the US, so you can complain to cops.
Other than that, there is nothing you can install on your machine that will prevent this from happening ever again (none of what this trojan did required root/admin privileges). Unless you want to set up a separate untrusted environment and try all unknown code there, there isn't much you can do.
3) A product is advertised on the Web. It sounds good, but the offerer has no Web reputation. What arrangement would you consider adequate to go ahead and procure the product (Note: there are several possible answers; give 2 entirely separate solutions, and that is considered answering 2 questions).
Simple escrow, in whatever form available.
4) You start receiving thousands of emails from organizations you don't know, all hawking their wares. You want it to stop, just stop!
Welcome to the club. Change your e-mail address and spam-proof what you expose in places like Usenet and Slashdot. And browser does not give out your email address to every site that asks, does it?
5) You wish to play poker with your friends. They live in Tampa Florida, you live in Kingman. This is illegal in the nation where you happen to be a citizen. You want to do it anyway.
Encryption.
6) You hear a joke that someone, somewhere, would probably find offensive. You wish to tell your precocious 17-year-old daughter, who is a student at Yale. The Common Decency Act Version 2 has just passed; it is a $100,000 offense to send such material electronically to a minor. You want to send it anyway--it is a very funny joke.
Exactly the same problem and the same answer: encryption.
7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn't really you.
Unless you have a public key and registered it somewhere, you have a problem. Even if you had and did, you still have a problem. The degree of the problem depends on whether the guy just posts on the Usenet under your handle, or he messes with your bank account using your passwords/certs.
8) You have brought out a remarkable new product. There is a competing product making claims you know are false. You want to make sure anyone going to their site finds out your product is better.
You can't. To do this means that you have to be able to see everybody who goes to a competitor's site, and then spam them. This is technically hard, an invasion of privacy and may be even illegal.
9) Your elderly aunt sees a drug advertised on the Web that promises relief from arthritis. She dies shortly after starting to take the drug. You think the drug, and he company that made it, is at fault. Meanwhile the company is sure they didn't have anything to do with it. You want justice.
And what does the web have to do with this? That's a case from tort law (maybe criminal, as well). It makes no difference whether your aunt seen the ad on the web or read it in a newspaper. Of course the www.theykilledmyaunt.com site is always an option.
10) You are the CEO of Bloomberg News, one of the most prestigious (and expensive) stock information services in the world. An article circulates on the Web, based on a mock-up of the Bloomberg News information page, claiming that PairGain Corp. will be acquired by ECI Telecom. PairGain stock rises 32% in 8 hours. Investigators later find that the false report was created by a PairGain employee about to cash in his options. You want to ensure that your brand is never used
like this again.
You can't. Authentication would help somewhat, but will not solve the problem completely.
11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you
cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.
The device is useless to you. All information in the world means nothing, if you cannot do anything. The situation is set up so that you are completely powerless in the real world and have access to a virtual world. Sorry, the virtual world cannot not help you. You and your daugher die. This does solve your problem in the most fundamental sense.
Kaa
However, I can see where a webserver would be handy in the palm of your hand afterall... for the total geek factor, hook up a bunch of sensors to various parts of your body, maybe add in a webcam (though the Palm certainly doesn't have the CPU speed to drive a webcam effectively), and then someone can live vicariously through you on the web. :)
That's a very widespread activity on the web (only using normal PCs instead of a Palm), and quite profitable, too. I don't know what it has to do with geek factor, though, the ladies that engage in this are not likely to be geeks...
Kaa
For the average shmoe it could mean that they really don't have to buy a whole bulky computer or even a laptop. They just have to get a Palm and they can have their own web page with cgi and all the extras!
/sarcasm tag, not finding one]
[boggle]
[looking for
[boggle again]
[wondering what happened to natural selection which was supposed to prevent this kind of thing]
[giving up]
Kaa
In a capitalist economy, the lower class is the proletariat (a.k.a. "the working class"), who own their own labor power, but can only sell it to members of the bourgeoisie (a.k.a. "the bosses"). If you're in the proletariat and you can't find anyone to buy your labor, you're SOL.
First of all, the workers can set up small businesses, the importance and tenacity of which Marx severely underestimated (he believed that they'll all die out very soon). Second, in the feudal society, if you are landless and cannot find a lord to let you onto his land, your situation is much, much worse.
The bourgeoisie buys the proletariat's labor for as little as it can pay, and sells the products of the labor for as much as it can charge, to whoever is willing to pay.
Isn't this how any market works? Just in the same way the workers try to sell their labor for as much as they can, and buy products for as little as they can.
(There's the alienation of labor -- once the widget leaves the worker's hands, he or she has no special relationship with it.)
Bzzzzzt. Nope. The alienation of labor is a name for the situation when some people (bourgeoisie) own the means of production and other people (workers) own the labor. Medieval craftsmen, for example, owned both the means of production and labor, so there was no alienation. It was industrialization that created the massive alienation of labor: tools became too big/expensive/specialized for the worker to own.
in the 1880s, this was not an unreasonable theory.
Well, it was not a particularly unreasonable theory, but it still has far too many huge and obvious holes in it. Especially considering the impact it had on the world.
Kaa