[[Linux OS "user experience" is] like life in a refugee camp. If you want Doctors Without Borders to show up, you don't want to have yourself any kind of really nice refugee camp.]
That's not true. I had malaria in Zaire, was staying in a bed, had three meals a day (when I could make it), and there was even beer nearby and Dr's w/o Borders still made two house calls *and* gave me medicine for less than $3 US.:^)
Think my metaphor's about as on target as most of this guy's? Not so fast... if there's one thing the Mac's about it's UI, and as a long-time Mac user (about 12 years) I'm pretty danged tired of all these converts that say how awesome the Mac is now that it's got FreeBSD up under the hood.
Sure OS 9 was dated technology those last few years (still not sure how "[Mozilla's] bug-track completely wrecked System 9" for the contrarian, though), but its interface was still head and shoulders above the rest. Not sure why that was bad and OS X is good, but to get the Doctors Without Borders to come to town, you don't need a nasty interface -- you just need to have geeky underpinnings.
You might have to reach to see what the guy's saying sometimes, but other than the times when he's obviously going for laughs it's worth the trouble to figure out what he means. If the metaphors don't make sense, try again.
This move helps show one of the ways open source will be used in the future -- for less than the most admirable goals. Adware, spyware, etc, are probably just the tip of the iceberg. The GPL doesn't mean the software you've donated tens to hundreds of hours to will always be used in "pure" ways. There will probably be times where what's changed is much more negative than just a few logos -- to the point you might *not* want your copyright sitting (or at least your name) on each copy.
For instance, let's take Limewire, a Gnutella client. It'd be a pretty simple addition to the code to make your entire hard-drive available on the Gnutella network. It'd also be pretty easy to add something to track what kinds of searches you're using. Making the source available doesn't (iirc) require it's up for download, and how many end users really check before installing? Not to mention that a good enough coder could probably get that code in there in such a way it'd take you hours just to piece out that's what the code's doing or they'd hide it as an addition under an "auto-update feature".
GPL says that source must be available, but doesn't say anything about it being commented or written to be easy to understand -- or to tip its hand to show its more underhanded features!
I enjoy open source software, especially LGPL'd projects. If you can find enough pieces to a neat idea you've got in your head, *BAM*, you're making software you'd never have had the change to create otherwise. And the projects improve because there's no reason not to check your additions to these LGPL projects back in to the central source once you're done. Everybody wins!:^)
But if my idea is to secretly track searches or to collect personal information or to download and install spyware applications, these [L]GPL'd projects are every bit [har har] as helpful. Instead of having to implement from scratch, I can grab something useful from sourceforge, tease a few lines that connect to my server, obfuscate my code, call it open source, and market to the masses like mad.
Anyhow, just a long rant to say, "This just goes to show that simply because it's GPL doesn't mean it's good," and, "Don't think that your contributions to an open source project entitle you, literally or figuratively, to mandate the way and for what purpose that code's ultimately used."
About the only thing I've got worth a rip is my copy of Deities & Demigods, which might be a first print. Every other book still has imprints from placing character sheets over top of them to change armorments, hit points, etc.:^)
Looks like they spent more time on the site than I did playing, and that's saying something. The search page helps if you're like me and remember the pictures on front a little better than the module names.
[So lets say that Apple ships OpenOffice with OSX. Microsoft could then stop or greatly slow development for I.E., Outlook, and Office for the Mac. This would force quite a few comopanies to switch off of the Macintosh platform. Or at lest take a long look at how a Windows XP machine would perform instead of a Macintosh.]
Apple's already developing and supporting AppleWorks (once ClarisWorks, and it's always, even if you had to use MacLinkPlus, opened and saved Word.doc's) so I doubt bundling OpenOffice would change much from MS's Mac division's point of view.
And if Apple could take the effort spent on AppleWorks and give it to OpenOffice.org we'd have a better product all around. I've been using OpenOffice this week, and it's better than AppleWorks imo.
Though I'd still prefer they'd just stopped at MacWrite 2.0 and got M$ to stop pushing new.doc formats every year or two. *ah*, we can all dream.
From the article: [But the multiuser gaming market required a very low latency network where traditional packet-collision problems precluded use of 802.11, [[the corporate vice president of Motorola]] said.]
Is TCP-like packet checking inherent in 802.11 (versus "UDP-like")? If not (and even if so -- I wonder what kinds of savings we're talking about), this sounds like a pretty sorry excuse for coming up with a new standard, and one that sounds like it might be closed.
I've played Quake online with a cable modem via 802.11b and the pings weren't too shabby at all! I wish Motorola would spend more time making something new than tweaking something old for profit -- they make great products and traditionally provide great support, but I'm not so impressed at first glance here.
Or buffer overflows... or the easter egg [in software]...
Nothing like being able to sue a company for the bugs they include in their programs (and there are always some!). And I doubt anyone's thought to patent bugs just yet. "It's a whole new paradigm!"
On second thought, the really scary bit is that someone probably *has* thought of it.
Furthurnet.com has a "Free as in beer and speech", legal, peer to peer music trading network that allows people to trade shows from bands that allow taping. Examples include The Grateful Dead and Phish, of course, but also The Black Crowes, U2, and Doc Watson (course if you were big fans you probably already knew).
This music is *good stuff*, often patches right from the soundboard, usually traded online using the Shorten format, a lossless audio compression format (etree.org). The only thing separating these shows from a recorded CD are hot mikes and missed chords. To me, this "pure music" is often better than "professionally mixed & polished" CDs. All in all, there are many popular bands with scores of great, free shows.
If mp3s are hurting sales, I'd have to think bands that release their content by allowing taping would also be hurting sales by the same token. Yet I don't hear about that happening. Hrm, maybe because allowing free tapes in your fan community is free advertising which makes for more sales? Call me crazy...
mp3s don't sound like store-bought CDs, and won't for a while. The record companies should wake up while they have the chance (ie, until 600 megs isn't a bandwidth problem for anyone and everyone has lossless copies of CDs available to them and it really isn't easier to walk to the store to buy a CD with all those 1's and 0's than to download it) and figure out a new way to make some dough out of their music!
I'm using iTools for about 2 megs of web pages and data. I also have it forward me any @mac.com email to my personal email address. The email stays on Apple's server about as long as it takes me to get gibbed when I play Team Fortress (Quake 1, of course). It's costing Apple next to nothing to keep a folder named "mactari" on their server. I'm not going to get $100 worth of service, and Apple wouldn't spend half that maintaining me if I stayed.
What's more, Apple doesn't care if I go.
The bottom line of it is that if 90% of the iTools users leave, 10% will start plunking down money. As Maelstrom says when your bonus gets to nothing, "Twice nuttin, still nuttin" -- 100% of iTools users paying nothing is less revenue than *any amount* of the users forking over $50 [then $100].
I'm leaving iTools (and that's a pain in tha arse - - I'd just gotten my site linked too fairly well), and Apple doesn't care. Like Sun's CEO said about.NET [giving away free development tools and sdk's], "The first hit of heroin's always free."
The original iMac had a so-called Mezzanine slot that allowed people to upgrade the iMac's paltry 2megs of ATi Rage (iirc) video. The revision B iMac no longer had the slot soldered in, but still had the place on the motherboard -- and some companies offered to solder in a slot so you could install video card upgrades (the Voodoo 2 was the only one I'm aware of, but that was a big upgrade, esp in 1998).
Apple didn't exactly deny the slot was there, but they weren't too excited to show it off (it's not in the iMac Rev. A's specs page) -- they made a pretty concerted effort to make sure people knew the slot wasn't supported. Wasn't long until the motherboard was changed and the slot was gone completely. Funny to think they were probably only saving a few cents to take the soldered slot off the mobo for Rev. B, but 2 times a million iMacs starts to add up!
How can a subjective experience be wrong?
on
A Linux User Goes Back
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Olde Cmdr Taco says: [Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.]
I'm a little lost on how any of the author of the linked article's subjective feelings on the suitability of *NIX on the desktop can be "wrong". I think he's done a good job to document his gripes when they deserve it, and I bet he'd be the first to admit that perhaps his $99 (Australian) CD-RW isn't representative of every IDE drive out there.
But you can't fault this guy for not being honest or for not doing his research. Heck, the only point I could find to argue with at all was in this quote: [When I move a window [in WinXP], it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.]
"other operating systems" links to Mac OS X. I hope he meant font support, b/c the Finder's dog slow in Appleland.;^)
Sounds like a reasonable cross-platform guy who's done his research to me. Though his reasons for not using Linux on the desktop might not be the same as someone else's, that doesn't make him wrong. [-1 Troll] Mr. Taco.
Here's a quick quote: [There are very few markets where "buyers are willing to accept products that they know are going to malfunction," said Gregory Tassey, the NIST senior economist who headed the study. "But software is at the extreme end, in terms of errors or bugs that are in the typical product when it is sold."]
Need I remind anyone of the Pinto? How about the recalls we've had recently with everything from tires to airbags? Even if the failures aren't that harsh, who hasn't heard a mechanic say, "Welp, the '89 model uses a Peugeot transmission. They're not exactly, um, the best." Having spent some time under a few vehicles, let me assure you the mechanics aren't always lying.:^)
So there's at least one market where one hardly hits perfection with version 1.0.
Of course software has bugs, of course bugs take time to fix or for a user to work around. The trick is that no software will ever be released bug free that does much more than print "Hello World!" to the console. It's not how much time bugs cost; bugs are a fact of life. The question is whether fixing those bugs would be worth the time it'd take to get them out. With a quick angry glance at the IIS team, often it isn't.
The only fault is that you assume open source software will have more "bug testers" (ie, anyone with access to the source) by default. In theory, that's not known before the fact. I have to imagine Eudora has more people working on and testing their mail client than Columba (an open source mail client on sourceforge) does. Just because it's closed doesn't mean there are less people working on the piece of software, and therefore has less people that can fix bugs.
But practically speaking, I think you're on the money. What it boils down to is what people do when they do find bugs in the source. I think M$ would like you to think people will use this open book to start hacking. It would appear that most people bothering to look at open source projects would prefer to submit a patch than to exploit the security bug.
As long as people patch and don't exploit, and as long as we hold our dicussion to popular open source products and their closed peers (like Apache vs. IIS rather than Eudora vs. Columba), I think your arguement holds.
Post script... Note that it also helps that open source projects tend not to toss legacy code out the door as often, afaict. Once a bug's gone, it's gone, so to speak.
Whoa!! I'm pretty sure the IE 5.1 update showed up when I ran the Software Update utility in OS X. Wonder why 5.2 isn't showing up and is a download on the Mactopia website instead. Wonder if it has any connection with the iBrowser rumor that's been going around.
I didn't believe the rumors at first, and probably still don't, but this is a weird break from tradition here.
The basic idea of the article is that if you can make the total cost of entry for some product lower by reducing the cost of one of the product's components, you can charge more for the components that are left. If you're smart, you get the price down for these compliments that you don't control so you can up the price of the services you do.
So if PC hardware is cheap, more people can afford the price of entry and you can charge more for the OS (eg, Windows). If enterprise OSs and software are cheap, you can charge more for your consulting services (eg, IBM).
Why is Mozilla "cheap"? [Given that IE is free, what is the incentive for Netscape to make the browser "even cheaper"? It's a preemptive move. They need to prevent Microsoft getting a complete monopoly in web browsers, even free web browsers, because that would theoretically give Microsoft an opportunity to increase the cost of web browsing in other ways -- say, by increasing the price of Windows.]
Java does exactly what Sun *didn't* want: [If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity. As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.)
Sun's enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do.
Ever seen Ali, Parkinson's making it nearly impossible for him to walk or talk, start throwing punches? It's incredible -- it's like the disease can't get to that gift Ali has that nobody's come close to matching.
Though it's hard to read this into a CG Yoda, that's sort of what I was thinking about when I saw him limp off.
The key quote from the article is: RUNNING FOR COVER. The cable companies' adoption of new pricing strategies has less to do with stopping piracy than with economics and business models.
So let's toss out the incidental RIAA connection and look at what's really happening...
Recreational net users will no longer be able to dabble for "free" in p2p schemes, and the division of processing power on the Net will once again return to a server-side-heavy setup.
That faux-Trojan in KaZaA might have been sneaky, but with unthrottled consumer bandwidth, it anticipated what the net would look like in a few years -- no longer thin clients randomly attached to powerful/thick servers on the Net but evenly matched peers surfing peers. Personally I think going back to centralized sources of content be a big step backwards for freedom on the Net, even though it's obviously what the market demands. The faux-Trojan might have basically just been a distributed server for one special interest but apps that copied its architecture would open up thousands of these potential virtual servers for whatever use people can imagine. Once distributed serving received its Apache equivalent, the sky would be the limit. Throttle bandwidth for consumers, aka "potential distributed servers", and that possibility goes away.
Hopefully this will at least get the cable company to remove the silly provision against using my connection for business purposes. If I'm not getting flat rate, it would seem I should be able to do whatever I want with my bandwidth.
I'm an on-site gov't contractor at a NOAA line office. Here's some thoughts from my AIM logs (oversimplification, but more or less on the money):
========= Other: do you think that gov't using free software would change business practices? perhaps more importantly, which affects the other's software choices more: gov't or business? Me: Business affects gov't. Me: We can't use oss, practically speaking. Me: The private sector produces software [mainly] for Windows. We [royal we] have to kick out tons of dough to special interests through our organization to keep the private sector happy. Their software runs on Windows therefore we're going to use Windows therefore we can't really go the open source route. QED. =========
If I have to hear how wonderful our organization is because we got 33% of our budget out into the private sector one more time... Believe me, gov't agencies are seen and treated on the whole as cash cows, not true opportunities for "innovation".
And the point is that our "partners" in the private sector are, as a rule, every bit as sold out to Microsoft as you can imagine.
Believe me, you don't want the government creating the standard. If you think those guys on the side of the road who *aren't* filling the pothole and end up working 9am-3pm are bad, you should try the gov't's IT sector. What a great job! You don't even have to don a hardhat.
My take is that if any gov't agency takes the Microsoft monopoly issue "seriously", we at the line offices will just have to have paperwork coming out of our ears with a spin on the content saying why it's okay to use Microsoft products "in our particular situation" -- which, when taken across the board, means no change at all.
If you want to stop the monopoly, don't look to government practices to set the precendent. We're not Taiwan (see Linux story on front page), you know.
I remember the first time I used vi. It *stunk*. (give me a second -- I'm not trolling) There wasn't even an obvious way to get the heck out of the application. At school, elm was our default mail handler and by default it often used vi for editing emails. I found this horribly annoying, quickly changed to pico, and [almost] never looked back.
Now here I am a dozen or so years later and I do all my dhtml, asp, and php coding in vim (www.vim.org). Turns out vim's done a perfect job of creating a "mouseless" UI, and it's much more efficient to edit text with both hands on the keyboard than just one (with the other running shuttles to and from the mouse).
If <functional unit>Opera can be to mice when browsing</functional unit> what <functional unit>vim is to the keyboard when editing text</functional unit>, they'll have something much better than simply being faster than IE or some other browser. Opera may already be that good, and the "vi[m] syndrome" I experienced years ago might help explain this reviewer's initial reaction to mouse gestures. I'd be awful happy if I could navigate through a browser without bothering with menu items and tools at the top of the screen (Personally I'd prefer a browser ready for "elegant" use without a mouse, but I'm prolly in the minority there!).
The most efficient interfaces (notice I didn't say "best"), ultimately, aren't the ones that have their instructions on the screen at the same time. More than one browser falls short of that mark right now.
I don't think it'd matter if it was. Them GNU/html pages are pretty GNU/plain. I think that Atari 800 web server (http://kl.net/atari/) could handle the load.;^)
(note that I'm really not making fun of the pages. Gettin' a little tired of "text via Flash" myself)
I'm getting pretty tired of hearing about Project Foo running under Mac OS X when it requires X11. If you have to have X11 installed, most Mac users can't use you.
I don't have any problem with people saying you have things running with Darwin on a PPC architecture (there is a Darwin for x86, btw), but you're going to disappoint the vast majority of Mac users by claiming things run on OS X when the users show up at Project Foo's site. They don't have XDarwin installed and many won't have any clue where to start.
Even if they did, installing X11 is an overly complicated process in Darwin. I'm a "Mac power user", if you'll forgive the oxymoron; I use fink; I use vim-nox to edit my php files; I use SAMBA to use vim to edit asp on IIS. I couldn't get XWindows to run within an hour of downloading. Add the rootless versus fullscreen X consideration and, well, I give up [for now].
FreeCraft doesn't run on [what Mac users consider] Mac OS X. Please stop claiming it does until you're using Quartz (or even QuickDraw) or the like. And please don't cop out by saying, "When the OS X users come to the site, they'll learn to use XDarwin". Instead, use your time to get OS X users excited about this "OS within an OS" on its own terms.
If you'll notice in the reply, Stallman's at odds with himself, trying to brand an OS (Linux) with the GNU nameplate that he himself in his response calls "partially non-free [because of insertions from application like BitKeeper]". Sounds like a pretty clear double standard there.
Went to hotmail to change my personal prefs as described in the story above, and got this source (no, really, I got the _source_; the page wasn't even rendered) using Mozilla 1.0 rc2 on Windows 2000 (greater and less than symbols to brackets):
I think we can see where this is headed -- browser's not supported and I can't change my personal preferences to opt-out! If you're not using a ".NET uplevel browser", you can't even fight the change.
Here's a bit from their "press release" (http://www.gameonweb.co.uk/pre_site/pdfs/gameon.p df), with what game embodies each of their game categories:
Role-Playing Games (Dragon Quest) Reflex Games (Parappa the Rapper) Racing Games (Indy 500) -- think they mean the Atari 2600 version?!! Football Games (FIFA Soccer) Shoot Em Ups (R-Type) Fight Games (Virtua Fighter 2) -- I'd've picked VF1 Platform Games (Pitfall) Life Simulations including Military Strategy Sims (Metal Gear Solid 2) Sports Sims (Football Manager)
I can't tell if these are what their source for the categories they used ("classification of games families devised by the Le Diberder brothers in their book L'Univers des Jeux Video") or what's actually at the exhibit.
An interesting bit about the consoles is that this part of the exhibit will go on permanent display in Scotland. "Following the exhibition tour, these consoles will form a unique permanent collection at the Museum of Scotland." Is their any significant to Scotland in the history of gaming?
The media guide continues showing sections to do with US vs. European games (one of the differences is apparently violence; Mortal Kombat II, Castle Wolfenstein 3D and NFL Blitz seem to be the US representative games *sigh*) and another section on Japanese gaming. Worth a read!
No, really. I've never seen it mentioned how RMS makes dough. Does he drive everywhere in a Porsche before giving talks where he's paid a $10,000 speaking fee or does he get there riding on a donkey and talk for free? I think that's pretty important context to put around his message.
Hey, if I'm making enough dough to pay the bills and have a little fun I'd be all over making my stuff GNU (LGPL at least; never liked GPL). But until I have a steady stream of revenue that isn't linked to keeping my code under wraps, I just can't see myself contributing more than some patches and features to other projects in my spare time.
At least when I hear Bill Gates I know he's making no bones about it -- Microsoft is here to pull down hats of money. Bill has a room in his house that's got a trampoline for a floor b/c he thinks it's cool. His children have DVD players that zip to their favorite scenes when they speak the command. I may not agree with his means or his ends, but knowing both makes Bill easier to understand. Jobs isn't much different. Linus doesn't even try to create an image to go with "his" product -- "It's fun and useful, so I do it."
I guess I'm saying you can't have GNU in a vacuum -- you simply can't expect the best programmers in the world hack on freely released code 50 hours a week unless there's a society that can support these artists. I want to know how RMS is supported, if not how he expects me to support myself as I contribute to GNU (and believe me, selling copies of HURD ISOs isn't the ticket), b/c that'd explain a lot of what he means by his possibly unrealistic ideals in the first place.
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[[Linux OS "user experience" is] like life in a refugee camp. If you want Doctors Without Borders to show up, you don't want to have yourself any kind of really nice refugee camp.]
:^)
That's not true. I had malaria in Zaire, was staying in a bed, had three meals a day (when I could make it), and there was even beer nearby and Dr's w/o Borders still made two house calls *and* gave me medicine for less than $3 US.
Think my metaphor's about as on target as most of this guy's? Not so fast... if there's one thing the Mac's about it's UI, and as a long-time Mac user (about 12 years) I'm pretty danged tired of all these converts that say how awesome the Mac is now that it's got FreeBSD up under the hood.
Sure OS 9 was dated technology those last few years (still not sure how "[Mozilla's] bug-track completely wrecked System 9" for the contrarian, though), but its interface was still head and shoulders above the rest. Not sure why that was bad and OS X is good, but to get the Doctors Without Borders to come to town, you don't need a nasty interface -- you just need to have geeky underpinnings.
You might have to reach to see what the guy's saying sometimes, but other than the times when he's obviously going for laughs it's worth the trouble to figure out what he means. If the metaphors don't make sense, try again.
This move helps show one of the ways open source will be used in the future -- for less than the most admirable goals. Adware, spyware, etc, are probably just the tip of the iceberg. The GPL doesn't mean the software you've donated tens to hundreds of hours to will always be used in "pure" ways. There will probably be times where what's changed is much more negative than just a few logos -- to the point you might *not* want your copyright sitting (or at least your name) on each copy.
:^)
For instance, let's take Limewire, a Gnutella client. It'd be a pretty simple addition to the code to make your entire hard-drive available on the Gnutella network. It'd also be pretty easy to add something to track what kinds of searches you're using. Making the source available doesn't (iirc) require it's up for download, and how many end users really check before installing? Not to mention that a good enough coder could probably get that code in there in such a way it'd take you hours just to piece out that's what the code's doing or they'd hide it as an addition under an "auto-update feature".
GPL says that source must be available, but doesn't say anything about it being commented or written to be easy to understand -- or to tip its hand to show its more underhanded features!
I enjoy open source software, especially LGPL'd projects. If you can find enough pieces to a neat idea you've got in your head, *BAM*, you're making software you'd never have had the change to create otherwise. And the projects improve because there's no reason not to check your additions to these LGPL projects back in to the central source once you're done. Everybody wins!
But if my idea is to secretly track searches or to collect personal information or to download and install spyware applications, these [L]GPL'd projects are every bit [har har] as helpful. Instead of having to implement from scratch, I can grab something useful from sourceforge, tease a few lines that connect to my server, obfuscate my code, call it open source, and market to the masses like mad.
Anyhow, just a long rant to say, "This just goes to show that simply because it's GPL doesn't mean it's good," and, "Don't think that your contributions to an open source project entitle you, literally or figuratively, to mandate the way and for what purpose that code's ultimately used."
Boy that was neat. From figuring out where the authors of Dragonlance got their start to dating yourself by which version of the Basic rules you had (I was 9th-11th printing, it seems), this really is a fun blast from the past if you played some D&D.
:^)
About the only thing I've got worth a rip is my copy of Deities & Demigods, which might be a first print. Every other book still has imprints from placing character sheets over top of them to change armorments, hit points, etc.
Looks like they spent more time on the site than I did playing, and that's saying something. The search page helps if you're like me and remember the pictures on front a little better than the module names.
[So lets say that Apple ships OpenOffice with OSX. Microsoft could then stop or greatly slow development for I.E., Outlook, and Office for the Mac. This would force quite a few comopanies to switch off of the Macintosh platform. Or at lest take a long look at how a Windows XP machine would perform instead of a Macintosh.]
.doc's) so I doubt bundling OpenOffice would change much from MS's Mac division's point of view.
.doc formats every year or two. *ah*, we can all dream.
Apple's already developing and supporting AppleWorks (once ClarisWorks, and it's always, even if you had to use MacLinkPlus, opened and saved Word
And if Apple could take the effort spent on AppleWorks and give it to OpenOffice.org we'd have a better product all around. I've been using OpenOffice this week, and it's better than AppleWorks imo.
Though I'd still prefer they'd just stopped at MacWrite 2.0 and got M$ to stop pushing new
From the article:
[But the multiuser gaming market required a very low latency network where traditional packet-collision problems precluded use of 802.11, [[the corporate vice president of Motorola]] said.]
Is TCP-like packet checking inherent in 802.11 (versus "UDP-like")? If not (and even if so -- I wonder what kinds of savings we're talking about), this sounds like a pretty sorry excuse for coming up with a new standard, and one that sounds like it might be closed.
I've played Quake online with a cable modem via 802.11b and the pings weren't too shabby at all! I wish Motorola would spend more time making something new than tweaking something old for profit -- they make great products and traditionally provide great support, but I'm not so impressed at first glance here.
Or buffer overflows... or the easter egg [in software]...
Nothing like being able to sue a company for the bugs they include in their programs (and there are always some!). And I doubt anyone's thought to patent bugs just yet. "It's a whole new paradigm!"
On second thought, the really scary bit is that someone probably *has* thought of it.
Furthurnet.com has a "Free as in beer and speech", legal, peer to peer music trading network that allows people to trade shows from bands that allow taping. Examples include The Grateful Dead and Phish, of course, but also The Black Crowes, U2, and Doc Watson (course if you were big fans you probably already knew).
This music is *good stuff*, often patches right from the soundboard, usually traded online using the Shorten format, a lossless audio compression format (etree.org). The only thing separating these shows from a recorded CD are hot mikes and missed chords. To me, this "pure music" is often better than "professionally mixed & polished" CDs. All in all, there are many popular bands with scores of great, free shows.
If mp3s are hurting sales, I'd have to think bands that release their content by allowing taping would also be hurting sales by the same token. Yet I don't hear about that happening. Hrm, maybe because allowing free tapes in your fan community is free advertising which makes for more sales? Call me crazy...
mp3s don't sound like store-bought CDs, and won't for a while. The record companies should wake up while they have the chance (ie, until 600 megs isn't a bandwidth problem for anyone and everyone has lossless copies of CDs available to them and it really isn't easier to walk to the store to buy a CD with all those 1's and 0's than to download it) and figure out a new way to make some dough out of their music!
I'm using iTools for about 2 megs of web pages and data. I also have it forward me any @mac.com email to my personal email address. The email stays on Apple's server about as long as it takes me to get gibbed when I play Team Fortress (Quake 1, of course). It's costing Apple next to nothing to keep a folder named "mactari" on their server. I'm not going to get $100 worth of service, and Apple wouldn't spend half that maintaining me if I stayed.
.NET [giving away free development tools and sdk's], "The first hit of heroin's always free."
What's more, Apple doesn't care if I go.
The bottom line of it is that if 90% of the iTools users leave, 10% will start plunking down money. As Maelstrom says when your bonus gets to nothing, "Twice nuttin, still nuttin" -- 100% of iTools users paying nothing is less revenue than *any amount* of the users forking over $50 [then $100].
I'm leaving iTools (and that's a pain in tha arse - - I'd just gotten my site linked too fairly well), and Apple doesn't care. Like Sun's CEO said about
The original iMac had a so-called Mezzanine slot that allowed people to upgrade the iMac's paltry 2megs of ATi Rage (iirc) video. The revision B iMac no longer had the slot soldered in, but still had the place on the motherboard -- and some companies offered to solder in a slot so you could install video card upgrades (the Voodoo 2 was the only one I'm aware of, but that was a big upgrade, esp in 1998).
Apple didn't exactly deny the slot was there, but they weren't too excited to show it off (it's not in the iMac Rev. A's specs page) -- they made a pretty concerted effort to make sure people knew the slot wasn't supported. Wasn't long until the motherboard was changed and the slot was gone completely. Funny to think they were probably only saving a few cents to take the soldered slot off the mobo for Rev. B, but 2 times a million iMacs starts to add up!
Olde Cmdr Taco says:
;^)
[Some of his points are wrong, but it's a reasonable article.]
I'm a little lost on how any of the author of the linked article's subjective feelings on the suitability of *NIX on the desktop can be "wrong". I think he's done a good job to document his gripes when they deserve it, and I bet he'd be the first to admit that perhaps his $99 (Australian) CD-RW isn't representative of every IDE drive out there.
But you can't fault this guy for not being honest or for not doing his research. Heck, the only point I could find to argue with at all was in this quote:
[When I move a window [in WinXP], it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.]
"other operating systems" links to Mac OS X. I hope he meant font support, b/c the Finder's dog slow in Appleland.
Sounds like a reasonable cross-platform guy who's done his research to me. Though his reasons for not using Linux on the desktop might not be the same as someone else's, that doesn't make him wrong. [-1 Troll] Mr. Taco.
Here's a quick quote:
:^)
[There are very few markets where "buyers are willing to accept products that they know are going to malfunction," said Gregory Tassey, the NIST senior economist who headed the study. "But software is at the extreme end, in terms of errors or bugs that are in the typical product when it is sold."]
Need I remind anyone of the Pinto? How about the recalls we've had recently with everything from tires to airbags? Even if the failures aren't that harsh, who hasn't heard a mechanic say, "Welp, the '89 model uses a Peugeot transmission. They're not exactly, um, the best." Having spent some time under a few vehicles, let me assure you the mechanics aren't always lying.
So there's at least one market where one hardly hits perfection with version 1.0.
Of course software has bugs, of course bugs take time to fix or for a user to work around. The trick is that no software will ever be released bug free that does much more than print "Hello World!" to the console. It's not how much time bugs cost; bugs are a fact of life. The question is whether fixing those bugs would be worth the time it'd take to get them out. With a quick angry glance at the IIS team, often it isn't.
The only fault is that you assume open source software will have more "bug testers" (ie, anyone with access to the source) by default. In theory, that's not known before the fact. I have to imagine Eudora has more people working on and testing their mail client than Columba (an open source mail client on sourceforge) does. Just because it's closed doesn't mean there are less people working on the piece of software, and therefore has less people that can fix bugs.
But practically speaking, I think you're on the money. What it boils down to is what people do when they do find bugs in the source. I think M$ would like you to think people will use this open book to start hacking. It would appear that most people bothering to look at open source projects would prefer to submit a patch than to exploit the security bug.
As long as people patch and don't exploit, and as long as we hold our dicussion to popular open source products and their closed peers (like Apache vs. IIS rather than Eudora vs. Columba), I think your arguement holds.
Post script...
Note that it also helps that open source projects tend not to toss legacy code out the door as often, afaict. Once a bug's gone, it's gone, so to speak.
Whoa!! I'm pretty sure the IE 5.1 update showed up when I ran the Software Update utility in OS X. Wonder why 5.2 isn't showing up and is a download on the Mactopia website instead. Wonder if it has any connection with the iBrowser rumor that's been going around.
I didn't believe the rumors at first, and probably still don't, but this is a weird break from tradition here.
The basic idea of the article is that if you can make the total cost of entry for some product lower by reducing the cost of one of the product's components, you can charge more for the components that are left. If you're smart, you get the price down for these compliments that you don't control so you can up the price of the services you do.
So if PC hardware is cheap, more people can afford the price of entry and you can charge more for the OS (eg, Windows). If enterprise OSs and software are cheap, you can charge more for your consulting services (eg, IBM).
Why is Mozilla "cheap"?
[Given that IE is free, what is the incentive for Netscape to make the browser "even cheaper"? It's a preemptive move. They need to prevent Microsoft getting a complete monopoly in web browsers, even free web browsers, because that would theoretically give Microsoft an opportunity to increase the cost of web browsing in other ways -- say, by increasing the price of Windows.]
Java does exactly what Sun *didn't* want:
[If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity. As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.)
Sun's enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do.
Oooooooooooooooooooooops!]
Ever seen Ali, Parkinson's making it nearly impossible for him to walk or talk, start throwing punches? It's incredible -- it's like the disease can't get to that gift Ali has that nobody's come close to matching.
Though it's hard to read this into a CG Yoda, that's sort of what I was thinking about when I saw him limp off.
The key quote from the article is:
RUNNING FOR COVER. The cable companies' adoption of new pricing strategies has less to do with stopping piracy than with economics and business models.
So let's toss out the incidental RIAA connection and look at what's really happening...
Recreational net users will no longer be able to dabble for "free" in p2p schemes, and the division of processing power on the Net will once again return to a server-side-heavy setup.
That faux-Trojan in KaZaA might have been sneaky, but with unthrottled consumer bandwidth, it anticipated what the net would look like in a few years -- no longer thin clients randomly attached to powerful/thick servers on the Net but evenly matched peers surfing peers. Personally I think going back to centralized sources of content be a big step backwards for freedom on the Net, even though it's obviously what the market demands. The faux-Trojan might have basically just been a distributed server for one special interest but apps that copied its architecture would open up thousands of these potential virtual servers for whatever use people can imagine. Once distributed serving received its Apache equivalent, the sky would be the limit. Throttle bandwidth for consumers, aka "potential distributed servers", and that possibility goes away.
Hopefully this will at least get the cable company to remove the silly provision against using my connection for business purposes. If I'm not getting flat rate, it would seem I should be able to do whatever I want with my bandwidth.
I'm an on-site gov't contractor at a NOAA line office. Here's some thoughts from my AIM logs (oversimplification, but more or less on the money):
=========
Other: do you think that gov't using free software would change business practices? perhaps more importantly, which affects the other's software choices more: gov't or business?
Me: Business affects gov't.
Me: We can't use oss, practically speaking.
Me: The private sector produces software [mainly] for Windows. We [royal we] have to kick out tons of dough to special interests through our organization to keep the private sector happy. Their software runs on Windows therefore we're going to use Windows therefore we can't really go the open source route. QED.
=========
If I have to hear how wonderful our organization is because we got 33% of our budget out into the private sector one more time... Believe me, gov't agencies are seen and treated on the whole as cash cows, not true opportunities for "innovation".
And the point is that our "partners" in the private sector are, as a rule, every bit as sold out to Microsoft as you can imagine.
Believe me, you don't want the government creating the standard. If you think those guys on the side of the road who *aren't* filling the pothole and end up working 9am-3pm are bad, you should try the gov't's IT sector. What a great job! You don't even have to don a hardhat.
My take is that if any gov't agency takes the Microsoft monopoly issue "seriously", we at the line offices will just have to have paperwork coming out of our ears with a spin on the content saying why it's okay to use Microsoft products "in our particular situation" -- which, when taken across the board, means no change at all.
If you want to stop the monopoly, don't look to government practices to set the precendent. We're not Taiwan (see Linux story on front page), you know.
I remember the first time I used vi. It *stunk*. (give me a second -- I'm not trolling) There wasn't even an obvious way to get the heck out of the application. At school, elm was our default mail handler and by default it often used vi for editing emails. I found this horribly annoying, quickly changed to pico, and [almost] never looked back.
Now here I am a dozen or so years later and I do all my dhtml, asp, and php coding in vim (www.vim.org). Turns out vim's done a perfect job of creating a "mouseless" UI, and it's much more efficient to edit text with both hands on the keyboard than just one (with the other running shuttles to and from the mouse).
If <functional unit>Opera can be to mice when browsing</functional unit> what <functional unit>vim is to the keyboard when editing text</functional unit>, they'll have something much better than simply being faster than IE or some other browser. Opera may already be that good, and the "vi[m] syndrome" I experienced years ago might help explain this reviewer's initial reaction to mouse gestures. I'd be awful happy if I could navigate through a browser without bothering with menu items and tools at the top of the screen (Personally I'd prefer a browser ready for "elegant" use without a mouse, but I'm prolly in the minority there!).
The most efficient interfaces (notice I didn't say "best"), ultimately, aren't the ones that have their instructions on the screen at the same time. More than one browser falls short of that mark right now.
I don't think it'd matter if it was. Them GNU/html pages are pretty GNU/plain. I think that Atari 800 web server (http://kl.net/atari/) could handle the load. ;^)
(note that I'm really not making fun of the pages. Gettin' a little tired of "text via Flash" myself)
I'm getting pretty tired of hearing about Project Foo running under Mac OS X when it requires X11. If you have to have X11 installed, most Mac users can't use you.
I don't have any problem with people saying you have things running with Darwin on a PPC architecture (there is a Darwin for x86, btw), but you're going to disappoint the vast majority of Mac users by claiming things run on OS X when the users show up at Project Foo's site. They don't have XDarwin installed and many won't have any clue where to start.
Even if they did, installing X11 is an overly complicated process in Darwin. I'm a "Mac power user", if you'll forgive the oxymoron; I use fink; I use vim-nox to edit my php files; I use SAMBA to use vim to edit asp on IIS. I couldn't get XWindows to run within an hour of downloading. Add the rootless versus fullscreen X consideration and, well, I give up [for now].
FreeCraft doesn't run on [what Mac users consider] Mac OS X. Please stop claiming it does until you're using Quartz (or even QuickDraw) or the like. And please don't cop out by saying, "When the OS X users come to the site, they'll learn to use XDarwin". Instead, use your time to get OS X users excited about this "OS within an OS" on its own terms.
http://www.wolframscience.com/preview/nks_pages/?N KS0017.gif
If you'll notice in the reply, Stallman's at odds with himself, trying to brand an OS (Linux) with the GNU nameplate that he himself in his response calls "partially non-free [because of insertions from application like BitKeeper]". Sounds like a pretty clear double standard there.
Went to hotmail to change my personal prefs as described in the story above, and got this source (no, really, I got the _source_; the page wasn't even rendered) using Mozilla 1.0 rc2 on Windows 2000 (greater and less than symbols to brackets):
[html dir="ltr"]
[head]
[meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"]
[title]Browser Not Supported[/title]
[link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/1033/C/PPNetScape.css"]
[/head]
I think we can see where this is headed -- browser's not supported and I can't change my personal preferences to opt-out! If you're not using a ".NET uplevel browser", you can't even fight the change.
Here's a bit from their "press release" (http://www.gameonweb.co.uk/pre_site/pdfs/gameon.p df), with what game embodies each of their game categories:
Role-Playing Games (Dragon Quest)
Reflex Games (Parappa the Rapper)
Racing Games (Indy 500) -- think they mean the Atari 2600 version?!!
Football Games (FIFA Soccer)
Shoot Em Ups (R-Type)
Fight Games (Virtua Fighter 2) -- I'd've picked VF1
Platform Games (Pitfall)
Life Simulations including Military Strategy Sims (Metal Gear Solid 2)
Sports Sims (Football Manager)
I can't tell if these are what their source for the categories they used ("classification of games families devised by the Le Diberder brothers in their book L'Univers des Jeux Video") or what's actually at the exhibit.
An interesting bit about the consoles is that this part of the exhibit will go on permanent display in Scotland. "Following the exhibition tour, these consoles will form a unique permanent collection at the Museum of Scotland." Is their any significant to Scotland in the history of gaming?
The media guide continues showing sections to do with US vs. European games (one of the differences is apparently violence; Mortal Kombat II, Castle Wolfenstein 3D and NFL Blitz seem to be the US representative games *sigh*) and another section on Japanese gaming. Worth a read!
No, really. I've never seen it mentioned how RMS makes dough. Does he drive everywhere in a Porsche before giving talks where he's paid a $10,000 speaking fee or does he get there riding on a donkey and talk for free? I think that's pretty important context to put around his message.
Hey, if I'm making enough dough to pay the bills and have a little fun I'd be all over making my stuff GNU (LGPL at least; never liked GPL). But until I have a steady stream of revenue that isn't linked to keeping my code under wraps, I just can't see myself contributing more than some patches and features to other projects in my spare time.
At least when I hear Bill Gates I know he's making no bones about it -- Microsoft is here to pull down hats of money. Bill has a room in his house that's got a trampoline for a floor b/c he thinks it's cool. His children have DVD players that zip to their favorite scenes when they speak the command. I may not agree with his means or his ends, but knowing both makes Bill easier to understand. Jobs isn't much different. Linus doesn't even try to create an image to go with "his" product -- "It's fun and useful, so I do it."
I guess I'm saying you can't have GNU in a vacuum -- you simply can't expect the best programmers in the world hack on freely released code 50 hours a week unless there's a society that can support these artists. I want to know how RMS is supported, if not how he expects me to support myself as I contribute to GNU (and believe me, selling copies of HURD ISOs isn't the ticket), b/c that'd explain a lot of what he means by his possibly unrealistic ideals in the first place.