Yes, their products are pretty sometimes sukky and crash more often than they should, but EVERY program or OS crashes once in a while. Only because they aim at the biggest market possible they have to make concesions on a certain things. And again I cant really blame them for doing that (remember grandma)
Ah, yes, remember Grandma. And remember Mom. I certainly remember my Mom when she calls me to complain about how Windows is giving her more and more illegal operations, won't shut down properly anymore, and is in general getting worse and worse, and I have to tell her "Sorry mom, Windows just does that... you'll just have to wait until I visit so I can reinstall it for you, and hopefully it'll be okay longer next time."
User-friendly, my ass. Meanwhile, my Mom could probably be just as comfortable in KDE, and any problems she has in Linux could be solved by me ssh'ing in to her machine to set things right. It's little things like Greeting card programs, exe's sent from friends, and having to learn a few different programs, that would keep her from switching.
If we don't begin to migrate to other planets and other star systems soon, we'll be doomed. Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri.
Maybe we should actually first solve those problems with humanity that are dooming us (tendency to overpopulate, kill each other, play with overly destructive weapons, etc.) before we take our shit to other planets and ruin them too.
I think if aliens have been around here and seen us, they probably haven't officially contacted us because they realized we're a big bunch of destructive assholes. I bet they'd be interested in stopping us from spreading to other planets.:)
The whole point is consumer confusion, and you've got to remember that the average consumer probably can't name the president. The average user wouldn't find it too touch to miss one letter when the products do the exact same thing.
Even if the "average consumer" really couldn't name the President (insert other names for leaders in other countries), that wouldn't mean the rest of society should stoop to their level. We might as well reprint every existing book at a first grade reading level and only allow programming to be done in BASIC--we wouldn't want to confuse anyone, after all.
Speaking of the "average consumer," it's worth noting that the "average consumer" will not even see Gaim because it's not installed on his new computer. Those adventurous enough to download new software themselves will not see it while browsing the Windows section of Tucows, and I doubt many of the "average consumers" (who are using Windows) are getting their software from Freshmeat. If such an "average consumer" did take a wrong turn on the web and bump into Gaim, it probably wouldn't take him too long to figure out that it's not AOL's client.
Speaking of confusion, that's exactly what the name "Gaim" reduces for anyone who might be interested in using it. If a Linux user sees a program called "GFobberflibberthorgleborp" in order to avoid infringing on all the trademarks out there, then he'll probably ignore it and move on unless he has lots of free time. But if he sees a program called "Gaim" he'll think, "Oh, interesting, that's probably an instant messenger client made with Gtk," or if he sees a program called "Licq" then he'll probably realize "Hey, there's an ICQ client," and in both cases he's going to notice, at least by the time he downloads and runs it if it wasn't obvious before, that neither client is official or sponsored by AOL in any way.
The most annoying thing about your argument is that it's completely hypothetical. People might get confused, AOL might lose users just because of the name! I don't think that's a very good basis for restricting freedom; I'll let you imagine all the other things that could apply to, and all the other things it would justify restricting. Meanwhile, the reality here is that Gaim has helped AOL. If it wasn't for Gaim, more Linux users would be using Gabber and telling their AIM-using friends "Sorry, I can't use AIM, you'll have to use Gabber if you want to talk to me." Programs like Gaim take away our best excuse to lure other towards more open alternatives, which should be quite a delight for AOL.
Maybe if we started calling spammers "hackers" the courts would start assfucking them like they do to anyone who gets branded with that name.
Probably not. It's not like the term "spammer" has much more of a warmfuzzy, positive connotation than "hacker". Associating the two would be more insulting to hackers than to spammers.
If so, what does that do to their public relations? The view of their license?
Absolutely nothing. Most people will fall into one of these categories:
1) The masses of people who don't even hear about, or pay attention to, the lawsuit.
2) The rest of the masses who hear about it but don't know anything about all this open source stuff, so they just accept Microsoft's portrayel of you as an evil dirty criminal.
3) People who know what's really going on and don't care because they are profiting from it (e.g. MS themselves, stockholders, etc.) Easily manipulates categories 1 and 2.
4) People who know what's really going on and detest it, but are too much of a minority to make an impact on the other three categories.
I hope a decent company buys Metricom, figures out a way to make money with the system...
Attention Metricom customers:
In order to provide you with a better service, we have decided to improve our pricing from the previous $70/month. We will now generously give you a choice between two pricing policies, so you can pick the policy that best fits your needs. The options are:
1) $100/month, plus $3.95/hour after the first hour. No longer will you have to be billed extra for hours you don't spend on-line!
... the people who run servers and want something more stable than "unstable" and most other Linux distros.
You'd be surprised how many people are still running _Potato_. (I sure as hell was.:) ) I wouldn't want to be one of them (*hugs his shiny new excitingly beta quality software*) but they do exist, and they will be pleased when they can upgrade to newer software while retaining the stability they depend on.
That might not be all that far-fetched. I have a Biology textbook that contains a picture of a tobacco plant that is glowing, thanks to a firefly gene researchers incorporated into the plant's DNA.
Funny, I loaded up the same page in Mozilla (using the Mozilla M18 package in Debian Woody) and in Konqueror, and Mozilla did not have those rendering problems shown in the screenshot.
Of course, it didn't look any better than it did in Konqueror, either. They looked pretty much the same, really, aside from slightly different fonts and different button styles. I don't know what the differences are between gecko and khtml, but I suppose kde.org isn't the best page to show those differences.
That sounds pretty interesting. But I'm curious...
What happens when the latest version of Package A, which depends on the latest version of Package B, goes into Testing but the latest version of Package B doesn't make it into testing because of bugs? Is that dealt with automatically by either apt-get or the testing scripts?
What's wrong with multiple users? Maybe parents would like having an operating system that their children can't trash. Maybe families would like automatically having their own separate sets of configurations when they run E-Mail programs and ICQ clients.
As for "horrible little package managers"... I had to, on _several_ occasions (because it's non-intuitive and they kept forgetting), walk my parents through downloading a file, unzipping it in a temporary directory, read the readme.txt for any special installation notes, run the install program, and then in most cases enjoy the mandatory reboot.
It would have been nice if I could have just told them "apt-get install [program]"
The only reason Windows seems "easier" to anyone is because it's _what they are accustomed to_. DOS was less user-friendly than Linux is today, but mainstream computer users still used it. Is every Operating System ever to be created from now on until the end of human existence supposed to emulate Windows now, to protect people from having to adjust to a new environment??
I'll Delurk to answer this because I resisted trying Debian for the same reasons, and now I wish I had tried it sooner.
I too was very concerned when I considered ordering Debian CD's and found the "most recent version" to be horribly out of date. The truth is, though, the latest stable release isn't even what most people use.
So, when I was finally fed up with Mandrake, I RTFM'd and installed the frozen (almost released) potato version. It worked just peachy, no problem. Then I upgraded to the "unstable" woody. Still no problem. So with Debian I now have a system with newer software than most distros, and it's more stable than RedHat and Mandrake were for me.
As for installation, obviously you can't grab new potato or woody CD's from LinuxMall or whatever (and the few places I found that sold potato snapshot CD's were relatively expensive (at least for me, I'm poor)).
I had no trouble installing over the net, though. (And I recommend using apt-get instead of dselect; it's much quicker to just install whatever you want, whenever you want, instead of browsing through the huge list of packages in one sitting.)
Anyway, now that I'm using Debian I could never go back to another distro. The package management does indeed kick ass. It puts rpm to shame. Suddenly decide you want LyX installed? Forget putting a CD in or opening up your browser and fumbling around with rpm's and trying to get all the dependencies installed in the right order; just "apt-get install lyx" and LyX with all its dependencies are automatically downloaded and installed for you. Upgrading packages with new versions, and in fact upgrading the entire system to a new version, is just as easy.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Debian developer or anything, and I'm _not_ one of those people who thinks Debian is all elite and everything else is for wussies. I'm just very happy with it myself, and explaining why, especially since you're resisting trying it for the same reasons I did.)
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Yes, their products are pretty sometimes sukky and crash more often than they should, but EVERY program or OS crashes once in a while. Only because they aim at the biggest market possible they have to make concesions on a certain things. And again I cant really blame them for doing that (remember grandma)
Ah, yes, remember Grandma. And remember Mom. I certainly remember my Mom when she calls me to complain about how Windows is giving her more and more illegal operations, won't shut down properly anymore, and is in general getting worse and worse, and I have to tell her "Sorry mom, Windows just does that... you'll just have to wait until I visit so I can reinstall it for you, and hopefully it'll be okay longer next time."
User-friendly, my ass. Meanwhile, my Mom could probably be just as comfortable in KDE, and any problems she has in Linux could be solved by me ssh'ing in to her machine to set things right. It's little things like Greeting card programs, exe's sent from friends, and having to learn a few different programs, that would keep her from switching.
If we don't begin to migrate to other planets and other star systems soon, we'll be doomed. Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri.
Maybe we should actually first solve those problems with humanity that are dooming us (tendency to overpopulate, kill each other, play with overly destructive weapons, etc.) before we take our shit to other planets and ruin them too.
I think if aliens have been around here and seen us, they probably haven't officially contacted us because they realized we're a big bunch of destructive assholes. I bet they'd be interested in stopping us from spreading to other planets. :)
The whole point is consumer confusion, and you've got to remember that the average consumer probably can't name the president. The average user wouldn't find it too touch to miss one letter when the products do the exact same thing.
Even if the "average consumer" really couldn't name the President (insert other names for leaders in other countries), that wouldn't mean the rest of society should stoop to their level. We might as well reprint every existing book at a first grade reading level and only allow programming to be done in BASIC--we wouldn't want to confuse anyone, after all.
Speaking of the "average consumer," it's worth noting that the "average consumer" will not even see Gaim because it's not installed on his new computer. Those adventurous enough to download new software themselves will not see it while browsing the Windows section of Tucows, and I doubt many of the "average consumers" (who are using Windows) are getting their software from Freshmeat. If such an "average consumer" did take a wrong turn on the web and bump into Gaim, it probably wouldn't take him too long to figure out that it's not AOL's client.
Speaking of confusion, that's exactly what the name "Gaim" reduces for anyone who might be interested in using it. If a Linux user sees a program called "GFobberflibberthorgleborp" in order to avoid infringing on all the trademarks out there, then he'll probably ignore it and move on unless he has lots of free time. But if he sees a program called "Gaim" he'll think, "Oh, interesting, that's probably an instant messenger client made with Gtk," or if he sees a program called "Licq" then he'll probably realize "Hey, there's an ICQ client," and in both cases he's going to notice, at least by the time he downloads and runs it if it wasn't obvious before, that neither client is official or sponsored by AOL in any way.
The most annoying thing about your argument is that it's completely hypothetical. People might get confused, AOL might lose users just because of the name! I don't think that's a very good basis for restricting freedom; I'll let you imagine all the other things that could apply to, and all the other things it would justify restricting. Meanwhile, the reality here is that Gaim has helped AOL. If it wasn't for Gaim, more Linux users would be using Gabber and telling their AIM-using friends "Sorry, I can't use AIM, you'll have to use Gabber if you want to talk to me." Programs like Gaim take away our best excuse to lure other towards more open alternatives, which should be quite a delight for AOL.
Maybe if we started calling spammers "hackers" the courts would start assfucking them like they do to anyone who gets branded with that name.
Probably not. It's not like the term "spammer" has much more of a warmfuzzy, positive connotation than "hacker". Associating the two would be more insulting to hackers than to spammers.
It could always mutate into something that lets say, eats off your skin.
I think it would be strangely appropriate for mankind to die off in a vain attempt to be more socially acceptable.
If so, what does that do to their public relations? The view of their license?
Absolutely nothing. Most people will fall into one of these categories:
1) The masses of people who don't even hear about, or pay attention to, the lawsuit.
2) The rest of the masses who hear about it but don't know anything about all this open source stuff, so they just accept Microsoft's portrayel of you as an evil dirty criminal.
3) People who know what's really going on and don't care because they are profiting from it (e.g. MS themselves, stockholders, etc.) Easily manipulates categories 1 and 2.
4) People who know what's really going on and detest it, but are too much of a minority to make an impact on the other three categories.
Welcome to Microsoft America 3.0
I hope a decent company buys Metricom, figures out a way to make money with the system...
Attention Metricom customers:
In order to provide you with a better service, we have decided to improve our pricing from the previous $70/month. We will now generously give you a choice between two pricing policies, so you can pick the policy that best fits your needs. The options are:
1) $100/month, plus $3.95/hour after the first hour. No longer will you have to be billed extra for hours you don't spend on-line!
2) $500/month flat fee. Unlimited time!
... the people who run servers and want something more stable than "unstable" and most other Linux distros.
You'd be surprised how many people are still running _Potato_. (I sure as hell was. :) ) I wouldn't want to be one of them (*hugs his shiny new excitingly beta quality software*) but they do exist, and they will be pleased when they can upgrade to newer software while retaining the stability they depend on.
Just because one person incorrectly moderated that post doesn't automatically mean that every Debian user would agree with the moderation.
I would like to think that that fact is so obvious I wouldn't have to point it out.
That might not be all that far-fetched. I have a Biology textbook that contains a picture of a tobacco plant that is glowing, thanks to a firefly gene researchers incorporated into the plant's DNA.
Likewise:
We're consumers! Explain to us why we can't use their business practices in our decisions of whether or not to support their service/product.
Funny, I loaded up the same page in Mozilla (using the Mozilla M18 package in Debian Woody) and in Konqueror, and Mozilla did not have those rendering problems shown in the screenshot.
Of course, it didn't look any better than it did in Konqueror, either. They looked pretty much the same, really, aside from slightly different fonts and different button styles. I don't know what the differences are between gecko and khtml, but I suppose kde.org isn't the best page to show those differences.
That sounds pretty interesting. But I'm curious...
What happens when the latest version of Package A, which depends on the latest version of Package B, goes into Testing but the latest version of Package B doesn't make it into testing because of bugs? Is that dealt with automatically by either apt-get or the testing scripts?
What's wrong with multiple users? Maybe parents would like having an operating system that their children can't trash. Maybe families would like automatically having their own separate sets of configurations when they run E-Mail programs and ICQ clients.
As for "horrible little package managers"... I had to, on _several_ occasions (because it's non-intuitive and they kept forgetting), walk my parents through downloading a file, unzipping it in a temporary directory, read the readme.txt for any special installation notes, run the install program, and then in most cases enjoy the mandatory reboot.
It would have been nice if I could have just told them "apt-get install [program]"
The only reason Windows seems "easier" to anyone is because it's _what they are accustomed to_. DOS was less user-friendly than Linux is today, but mainstream computer users still used it. Is every Operating System ever to be created from now on until the end of human existence supposed to emulate Windows now, to protect people from having to adjust to a new environment??
I'll Delurk to answer this because I resisted trying Debian for the same reasons, and now I wish I had tried it sooner.
I too was very concerned when I considered ordering Debian CD's and found the "most recent version" to be horribly out of date. The truth is, though, the latest stable release isn't even what most people use.
So, when I was finally fed up with Mandrake, I RTFM'd and installed the frozen (almost released) potato version. It worked just peachy, no problem. Then I upgraded to the "unstable" woody. Still no problem. So with Debian I now have a system with newer software than most distros, and it's more stable than RedHat and Mandrake were for me.
As for installation, obviously you can't grab new potato or woody CD's from LinuxMall or whatever (and the few places I found that sold potato snapshot CD's were relatively expensive (at least for me, I'm poor)).
I had no trouble installing over the net, though. (And I recommend using apt-get instead of dselect; it's much quicker to just install whatever you want, whenever you want, instead of browsing through the huge list of packages in one sitting.)
Anyway, now that I'm using Debian I could never go back to another distro. The package management does indeed kick ass. It puts rpm to shame. Suddenly decide you want LyX installed? Forget putting a CD in or opening up your browser and fumbling around with rpm's and trying to get all the dependencies installed in the right order; just "apt-get install lyx" and LyX with all its dependencies are automatically downloaded and installed for you. Upgrading packages with new versions, and in fact upgrading the entire system to a new version, is just as easy.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Debian developer or anything, and I'm _not_ one of those people who thinks Debian is all elite and everything else is for wussies. I'm just very happy with it myself, and explaining why, especially since you're resisting trying it for the same reasons I did.)