Unless I missed something and the submitter made a phylosophical argument about using "closed source" because of soemthing other than "it costs"?
Translation:
Hi, I'm looking for a free (as in money) online file storage solution for a bunch of people. That is, I want a free ride. I used the terms "closed source" and "OSS" to get my foot in the door, now all I need is some of you to Google for me. Thanks!
I think it's a little disingenious to make this argument. Microsoft is a monopoly. The antitrust case was never about whether or not this was the case - in and of itself a monopoly is not illegal. Microsoft was found guilty of abusing their position as a monopoly in their specific dominated market (operating systems for the PC) to do certain evil things.
Now Microsoft has never been the nicest company to compete against, but so far Oracle, IBM, Adobe, CA, Siebel and a hundred other companies have managed to do just fine. Sun and Netscape (like RealNetworks in the EU) used the monopoly card to compensate for the fact that they were fumbling in the dark themselves (Netscape couldn't ship a fucking working browser if their lives depended on it and Sun couldn't make up their minds as to whether they wanted Java on Windows or not), and can you imagine if the GPL was struck down in court and the judge appeared on Oprah the next day sipping a latte and talking about his childhood?
But anyway, the fact remains that your argument is invalid because you're not going out and buying an operating system for your PC (or trying to buy a PC without an OS from Dell or Gateway), you're buying a Mac.
As for Linux, yes, it dilutes the monopoly argument to a certain extent, but it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand the zealots have to rah-rah every time X switches to Linux or there's a study about a 0.002% desktop share change in Microsoft's detriment, but they don't want to do without their cherished "but teh M$ is teh evil mononopolie" rethoric. Funny how that works.
Laziness, Stupidity and Incompitence all fit quite well.
We agree on this then? OK, thanks.
You seem very pro Microsoft.
Yes, they pay me a lot of money to discuss the finer points of application data processing with people like you, on Slashdot. That was an amazing catch.
Apparently you haven't looked at
The raw data, from Word. And FrontPage. Yes, that makes sense. The raw data. You figured this out all by yourself, did you? Impressive.
The thing you're not taking into account is that Debian's security team, while having a professional attitude, are volunteers. Microsoft has more money than it can spend (legally), so has no excuse in terms of "lack of manpower", unless they don't exist on the planet.
Interesting. So given enough money, security problems with Microsoft product must be ascribed to... Laziness? Stupidity? Malice? Incompetence?
The counterpoint of this being of course that since "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" we must ascribe security problems in Debian to... Laziness? Stupidity? Malice? Incompetence?
Or maybe it doesn't really matter, does it? Or do you think that throwing money|volunteers at a problem will fix it?
BTW, you are hereby given notice about using the "but they're volunteers" excuse. Linux is supposed to be an enterprise-class secure, stable operating system regardless of whether it's being sold, given away or traded for cheezy knobs. Or so I've heard around here.
The common theme is that if you work for a company, that company owns you. You are their slave. In exchange for an ever decreasing amount of money for your time, you have to do everything they tell you and demonstrate that you believe everything they want you to believe.
That's a nice way to put it. Visceral. OMFG TEH KOMPANIE TEHY 0WN3D U!!1!. Guaranteed to get a rise out of people, eh?
The problem of course is that slavery was abolished a long time ago. If you don't agree with the ideals espoused by the company, then don't fucking work for them. It's that simple. If we're talking about established and accepted concepts such as copyright and intellectual property whose detractors currently operate at the fringes of society, then you have absolutely no argument whatsoever. It's not like you're trying to fight "the man" over baby seals or the spotted owl.
I don't agree with how malware companies operate. I would not work for a malware company. I don't. See how easy it is?
If you have a problem with the entire industry then may I suggest you pursue alternative careers, such as landscaping or the circus. Either way, please don't insult my intelligence by asserting that I'm somehow trapped in some sort of brutal slavery ring because I work for a company instead of growing potatoes in my back yard.
I know: Finf. "Free is not Free". This not only disambiguates the term, but has the added advantage that it follows that incredibly funny and lovable tradition of using "recursive acronyms", whose cleverness is only understood (or cared about) by the people who come up with them.
The possibilities are endless. There would be a plethora or double recursive acronyms used:
I agree with you. If you get modded up, I'll bookmark your post and point people to it every time they parrot the "Bill Gates said 640K should be enough for anybody" quote*. Fair? Actually, by simple calculation just about every highly modded post here will make the same point, so I'll use the whole story instead.
Thanks!
.
* Not that anyone has actually managed to prove he said that, but still.
I sense a great disturbance in Slashdork, as if a thousand brains suddenly exploded:
The average slashbot claims P2P sharing is a "digital right"
The average slashbot claims they are only against copyright or some other evil construct - they have never pirated music on Kazaa, eMule or WinMX. Evar. After all, who listens to Eminem or Cristina Aguilera anyway, right?
The average slashbot applauded the SCOTUS ruling because, after all, the P2P technologies that they use for things other than pirating copyrighted material were essentially "exonerated" by the ruling. I mean, it's not like the creator of Bittorrent has always said "go forth my children, and pirate the shit out of the RIAA", right?
The creator of Bittorrent actually said "go forth my children, and pirate the shit out of the RIAA"
That video is really cool. It's a bit chilling to think that the same people in the same submarine using the same systems and essentially the same ballistic technology would have been used to launch nuclear-tipped SLBMs at cities in the US and Europe.
It's also nice to see that Russia can still do these things, considering the deterioration of their strategic submarine forces in the past 15 years. Regardless of the ultimate success of the vehicle itself.
Microsoft lobbies politicians in its favor!! Merciful heaven, what is the world coming to?? Because of course no other company in this country does this!! I mean, 8 thousand dollars?? And he had to do his little insert in the second listing to prove that Microsoft and Preston Gates are even in the list, with a whopping $3,500!!
And Melinda gates is in the beard of directors of a newspaper?? Holy shit, and is she in the board of directors of all the other news media outlets in this country? Inquiring minds want to know! At the very least we now now that she's not in the board of directors of LXer, which is apparently read by 8,500 people a day!! Conspiracy, I say!!
And the article is rated 10/10!! It must be true!!
And it took this guy three years to scoop this out!? Film at 11!
Kewl, thanks. I downloaded DOSBox and managed to successfully install TIE off of a zip file on a mounted disk. It works mostly OK but it gets to be a bit slow at times, and this is an older game that used to run fine on 486's.
Still, it's impressive. Maybe with a faster machine (tried it on a dual PIII 1GHz) it will actually make the game playable. There's also a good amount of tweaking that I didn't try, both on DOSBox and TIE itself. I'll need to experiment a bit more.
I have a bunch of games that weren't as graphics intensive that I need to try as well (for example, the original C&C).
I know there are newer versions of the games that run on Windows, I have one (I forget the title though). I just don't like them =)
I still play Age Of Empires (AOK) sometimes, as well as Unreal Tournament (original) and Delta Force (also the original).
The last game I actually bought was Unreal 2, which I played all of 1 time and then promptly gave away because I got bored.
I still play Halo I, the original Ghost Recon Island Thunder and Mech Assault on my XBox.
I'd kill to have time to configure one of my older boxes to boot to DOS with sound to play the original TIE Fighter (still have the floppies) and X-Wing Fighter (still have the CD).
Typical slashbot bullshit. Even assuming that the US wanted to do this, why don't they just tap the endpoint(s) instead of spending a billion dollars to send divers down to the bottom of the ocean to connect a pair of headphones to a massive fiber cable that is likely buried in 6 feet of silt?
You've been watching the Discovery channel too much. This is not a copper phone line that services Vladivostok, and James Bond doesn't really order shaken martinis.
I cannot believe this kind of thing gets modded up.
I run the older "free" version of TPF on my W2K systems and I've been very happy with it, it's excellent. By any chance do you know if it works with 2003? The older edition, I mean.
There are a lot of things that make the iPod "special". I'm not saying it's not the best player out there. But the Archos CEO has a point. Many people think that Apple is some sort of technological innovator. They're not. They are good at design and marketing.
How that plays out with consumers is another thing - Apple has proved once and again that some people will pay premium for hardware that is well-designed but no necessarily more performant or innovative. You may have the most technologically advanced gadget in the universe but if it looks like shit or is difficult to use then your market share is necessarily going to be smaller than you probably wish. Archos can say this, because they had more advanced players than the iPod. They just weren't particularly pretty or simple to use (and iTunes is also a BIG factor in the usability of the iPod).
Insofar as his comment about the innards of the iPod, are you saying he's somehow mistaken? What exactly do you think is uncommon and impressive about the technology?
Apple uses the same components and the same contractors in Asia to build iPods. The technology itself is available to everyone who wants to make players. What the Archos CEO is saying is that in his opinion the value proposition of the iPod is not in the technology. He doesn't say where he thinks it is though.
I'm surprised that someone at Slashdork would be scandalized by a statement like this - after all, one of the first articles here about the iPod (after Taco's famous "lame" editorialization) was one about some dude dissasembling the thing.
Then again, maybe even people around here are distracted by shiny objects.
But it's Google|Apple, so it's OK. Everything's OK. These are not corporations, they're warm, fuzzy friends of ours. I'm having lunch with Sergei and Larry next week, and they promised to bring a box of chocolates. It's OK.
First, because IE is preconfigured to go to that site out of the box, it is going to get way more IE traffic than other sites
I'm not talking about traffic to a given site, I'm talking about the proportion of people who use IE. It's irrelevant that IE goes to MSN by default - that person is still using IE for everything, no matter what sites they visit.
non-establishment sites that support their ideals
"tech-savyy" people who rely on "ideals" to choose what web sites to visit are, to repeat myself, not part of the average. They are irrelevant compared to overall internet usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless I missed something and the submitter made a phylosophical argument about using "closed source" because of soemthing other than "it costs"?
Translation:
Fantastic.
Now Microsoft has never been the nicest company to compete against, but so far Oracle, IBM, Adobe, CA, Siebel and a hundred other companies have managed to do just fine. Sun and Netscape (like RealNetworks in the EU) used the monopoly card to compensate for the fact that they were fumbling in the dark themselves (Netscape couldn't ship a fucking working browser if their lives depended on it and Sun couldn't make up their minds as to whether they wanted Java on Windows or not), and can you imagine if the GPL was struck down in court and the judge appeared on Oprah the next day sipping a latte and talking about his childhood?
But anyway, the fact remains that your argument is invalid because you're not going out and buying an operating system for your PC (or trying to buy a PC without an OS from Dell or Gateway), you're buying a Mac.
As for Linux, yes, it dilutes the monopoly argument to a certain extent, but it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand the zealots have to rah-rah every time X switches to Linux or there's a study about a 0.002% desktop share change in Microsoft's detriment, but they don't want to do without their cherished "but teh M$ is teh evil mononopolie" rethoric. Funny how that works.
We agree on this then? OK, thanks.
You seem very pro Microsoft.
Yes, they pay me a lot of money to discuss the finer points of application data processing with people like you, on Slashdot. That was an amazing catch.
Apparently you haven't looked at
The raw data, from Word. And FrontPage. Yes, that makes sense. The raw data. You figured this out all by yourself, did you? Impressive.
OMG, the semantic nitpicking of the distro/OS/kernel thing! Never seen that around here before!
You are a troll/astroturfer.
Of course I am! What was it that gave me away? The .sig? The fact that I'm not one of your sheep groupthink friends? Inquiring minds want to know!
Interesting. So given enough money, security problems with Microsoft product must be ascribed to... Laziness? Stupidity? Malice? Incompetence?
The counterpoint of this being of course that since "given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" we must ascribe security problems in Debian to... Laziness? Stupidity? Malice? Incompetence?
Or maybe it doesn't really matter, does it? Or do you think that throwing money|volunteers at a problem will fix it?
BTW, you are hereby given notice about using the "but they're volunteers" excuse. Linux is supposed to be an enterprise-class secure, stable operating system regardless of whether it's being sold, given away or traded for cheezy knobs. Or so I've heard around here.
That's a nice way to put it. Visceral. OMFG TEH KOMPANIE TEHY 0WN3D U!!1!. Guaranteed to get a rise out of people, eh?
The problem of course is that slavery was abolished a long time ago. If you don't agree with the ideals espoused by the company, then don't fucking work for them. It's that simple. If we're talking about established and accepted concepts such as copyright and intellectual property whose detractors currently operate at the fringes of society, then you have absolutely no argument whatsoever. It's not like you're trying to fight "the man" over baby seals or the spotted owl.
I don't agree with how malware companies operate. I would not work for a malware company. I don't. See how easy it is?
If you have a problem with the entire industry then may I suggest you pursue alternative careers, such as landscaping or the circus. Either way, please don't insult my intelligence by asserting that I'm somehow trapped in some sort of brutal slavery ring because I work for a company instead of growing potatoes in my back yard.
The possibilities are endless. There would be a plethora or double recursive acronyms used:
- GNU/Finf
- WINE is finf!
And so on.
Sorry, I lost you there.
Thanks!
.
* Not that anyone has actually managed to prove he said that, but still.
- The average slashbot claims P2P sharing is a "digital right"
- The average slashbot claims they are only against copyright or some other evil construct - they have never pirated music on Kazaa, eMule or WinMX. Evar. After all, who listens to Eminem or Cristina Aguilera anyway, right?
- The average slashbot applauded the SCOTUS ruling because, after all, the P2P technologies that they use for things other than pirating copyrighted material were essentially "exonerated" by the ruling. I mean, it's not like the creator of Bittorrent has always said "go forth my children, and pirate the shit out of the RIAA", right?
- The creator of Bittorrent actually said "go forth my children, and pirate the shit out of the RIAA"
- ???
- Heads explode!
Thanks, I'll be here all week.It's also nice to see that Russia can still do these things, considering the deterioration of their strategic submarine forces in the past 15 years. Regardless of the ultimate success of the vehicle itself.
The world has changed a lot.
And Melinda gates is in the beard of directors of a newspaper?? Holy shit, and is she in the board of directors of all the other news media outlets in this country? Inquiring minds want to know! At the very least we now now that she's not in the board of directors of LXer, which is apparently read by 8,500 people a day!! Conspiracy, I say!!
And the article is rated 10/10!! It must be true!!
And it took this guy three years to scoop this out!? Film at 11!
Still, it's impressive. Maybe with a faster machine (tried it on a dual PIII 1GHz) it will actually make the game playable. There's also a good amount of tweaking that I didn't try, both on DOSBox and TIE itself. I'll need to experiment a bit more.
I have a bunch of games that weren't as graphics intensive that I need to try as well (for example, the original C&C).
I know there are newer versions of the games that run on Windows, I have one (I forget the title though). I just don't like them =)
Thanks again for the tip.
Someone mod the parent funny.
The last game I actually bought was Unreal 2, which I played all of 1 time and then promptly gave away because I got bored.
I still play Halo I, the original Ghost Recon Island Thunder and Mech Assault on my XBox.
I'd kill to have time to configure one of my older boxes to boot to DOS with sound to play the original TIE Fighter (still have the floppies) and X-Wing Fighter (still have the CD).
Dunno, maybe it's just an age thing =)
You've been watching the Discovery channel too much. This is not a copper phone line that services Vladivostok, and James Bond doesn't really order shaken martinis.
I cannot believe this kind of thing gets modded up.
Whoa, I'm sold.
I run the older "free" version of TPF on my W2K systems and I've been very happy with it, it's excellent. By any chance do you know if it works with 2003? The older edition, I mean.
How that plays out with consumers is another thing - Apple has proved once and again that some people will pay premium for hardware that is well-designed but no necessarily more performant or innovative. You may have the most technologically advanced gadget in the universe but if it looks like shit or is difficult to use then your market share is necessarily going to be smaller than you probably wish. Archos can say this, because they had more advanced players than the iPod. They just weren't particularly pretty or simple to use (and iTunes is also a BIG factor in the usability of the iPod).
Think of it like Windows vs Linux, if you will.
Insofar as his comment about the innards of the iPod, are you saying he's somehow mistaken? What exactly do you think is uncommon and impressive about the technology?
Apple uses the same components and the same contractors in Asia to build iPods. The technology itself is available to everyone who wants to make players. What the Archos CEO is saying is that in his opinion the value proposition of the iPod is not in the technology. He doesn't say where he thinks it is though.
I'm surprised that someone at Slashdork would be scandalized by a statement like this - after all, one of the first articles here about the iPod (after Taco's famous "lame" editorialization) was one about some dude dissasembling the thing.
Then again, maybe even people around here are distracted by shiny objects.
That's fucking brilliant. Thanks for playing.
But it's Google|Apple, so it's OK. Everything's OK. These are not corporations, they're warm, fuzzy friends of ours. I'm having lunch with Sergei and Larry next week, and they promised to bring a box of chocolates. It's OK.
Eat up, it's tasty crow. Tasty, tasty crow.
I'm not talking about traffic to a given site, I'm talking about the proportion of people who use IE. It's irrelevant that IE goes to MSN by default - that person is still using IE for everything, no matter what sites they visit.
non-establishment sites that support their ideals
"tech-savyy" people who rely on "ideals" to choose what web sites to visit are, to repeat myself, not part of the average. They are irrelevant compared to overall internet usage.