Granted, this works only if you know somewhat obscure, i.e. non-latin language. Russian, for instance, works very well. You take a fairly simple phrase in this language and type it on a Qwerty (or Dvorak -- does not really matter) keyboard, using native language keyboard layout. Say, if you were to use word "Linux" (Russian would be something like "Linaks"), then a Qwerty keyboard would yield: "Kbyfrc" ("Txfupj" for Dvorak), which, I guess, is cryptic enough for not-too-sensetive stuff.
While I did not expect Corel to go as far as to make Corel Office OpenSourced in any way, one could hope that such thing as beta testing of it would be more open. That really turns anybody down having to write a 3-page essay "Why do I want to be a Corel beta-tester". Man, dig on it: I am lending *you* my resources to find *your* bugs. They could at least learn from a company whose product they use -- Allaire (site is running on NT using ColdFusion with back-end to MS SQL as we all see from error messages): it was almost a no-brainer to become HomeSite or ColdFusion beta-tester. Well, you get only 1 honest answer then: email. Let's see what happens.
...one that's not standards compliant is *wrong* and will be disposed of as quickly as possible. I think that a lot of other people/companies think the same way.
True, but how most ofpeople/companies out there *know* what is *the standard*? What most of them *percieve* to be a standard is what they are used to seeing, not what W3C writes in some obscure manual/policy/standard, but what MSIE *shows* them to be a standard. Things like loose HTML syntax, marquee tag, poor compliange with CSS1 and tons of other small nifty feature none seems to use, but still being in use nonetheless.
It is exactly these small nifty-and-not-as-much-so things that really start getting in a way, costing Netscape the war. One could not put it better than Dave Whitinger (re-phrased): why do I as a Joe-random-user should not enjoy Web as much as my friend next door? And this includes all aspects of it: I want Shockwave, I want DHTML, I want my links to react to my pointer hovering over them! Yeah, I may not know DHTML from an animated GIF but why should I? And I do want it to be stable--the time is almost gone when we could just slap "Windows is not stable enough" and be done with the argument.
Truth and an important fact is that we doneed Mozilla to succede. Personal computing now is not a standalone desktop in an attic: Linux (or any other *nix) needsa rock-solid browser, maybe even morethan multiple desktop environments and window managers.
Bezrukov's article reminds me very much good-old Soviet times, high school and/or college in Russia, and myself reading obligatory articles written by Marx, Lenin, Plekhanov and other theorists of socialism/communism. Yet it is largely style, and just a little bit the content that do that: the title of the article sounds very Lenin--Vladimir Ulianov liked very long names for his works.
Yet as I said, what is in the article (putting aside stylistics) is not really Marxist or Leninist. It is a fairly good critique the whole essense of which, IMHO, can be phrased like so:
OSS is not exactly such a novel thing--it has been known in scientific community for a long time. Current hype and success of it has to be largely attributed to Linux, but it is too naive to claim that OSS as a new software development paradigm means the total obliteration of any other way of developing software.
Before you flame, I know that I have left much of the article out. But I think that pages and pages that are left behindare just illustrate and support the above stated points.
Bezrukov does attack ESR as much as having his name in the article name. Why? Because ESR represents exactly this naive, on the border of blind-folded chauvinism, view of OSS. ESR, propaganda is one thing, reality is whole a lot different.
Yes, Linux popularity grows and it is the only OS rapidly gaining ground. This growth is not solely canibalistic (at the expense of other *nixes) as Microsoft would want it to look. But there are problems as well: there still are problems with fitting Linux in a business environment (office productivity suits like StarOffice, Applixware are not exctly a good match to Microsoft Office, while they may actually be as good if not better than Lotus SmartSuit and Corel PerfectOffice). I am not sure that making Linux easier and easier to install will matter as much to success: good publicity, applications, credibility will make a much better job than a no-pain-five-minutes-see-mom-no-hands Linux distros. After all, if business community is the target, their users will not be installing the system--IT people will. Home user is a whole another matter--and a topic for a separate discussion.
ESR being a very good and a bit less extreme public person for OSS and Linux has done and still does a very good job publicising the movement. Yet he is not perfect. He also seems to get carried away lately, maybe someone else truly needs to get part of his job? He has taken Bezrukov's article way too personally. As much as not even consulting a dictionary before using certain terms, like socialism, Marxism, communism. Do not really want to flogg this horse one more time, but:
socialism is "any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods" (Merriam-Webster). The root here is Latin socium--same as in society. It does not have to contradict with freedom of choice, be it personal freedom or market freedom. It is rather that years of Soviet and Chinese socialism (read: vulgar communism) have created bad publisity and a certain mind-set, especially in Western people. I am not very fond of a term (and frankly M-W definition is quite lousy too), just as well as of some ideas behind it, but OSS/FSF does have certain similarities to it (this collectivistic, socium-oriented view), especially when publicized by ESR. It sometime even borders with an utopian communism.
communism is "a: a theory advocating elimination of private property b: a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed" (same source). If you read Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Final Odissey you'd remember him mentioning that comminusm is ideal and perfect (hence utopian) society, but it is possible only on an insect or small animal level. Humans are too complex. It will probably take aeons to reach such an outstanding level of conscience that would permit communism into being.
Marxism is "he political, economic, and social principles and policies advocated by Marx; especially : a theory and practice of socialism including the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, the class struggle, and dictatorship of the proletariat until the establishment of a classless society" (M-W again). If you leave out political crap that starts in, AFAIR, 3rd volume of Capital (political and class struggle, etc.), it is more of a political economy textbook, similar to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
You can never really put an equal sign between these terms. Moreover, free market economy adept should really take time and put some effort into reading Marx's Capital: this is a great description of free market and how it functions. Do not let popular propagandistic views of Marx, socialism and communism prevail--it is like thinking that all Scots are wearing kilts all the time, Dutch people are riding bicycles on icy channels in wooden shoes with baskets of tulips in both hands, or Russians drinkng vodka from a samovar every morning chit-chatting with bears.
Re:Neal Stephenson's "The Great Simoleon Caper"
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
I would say that "The Great Simoleon Caper", "Snow Crash", and "Diamond Age" form sort of a trio in Stephenson's writings: they are all bound together around very similar idea of future geopolitics (e.g. First Dustributed Republic appears first in "The Caper", then migrates into the "Snow Crash", then "Diamond Age").
"Spew" is a bit off the track there--the story is different, but still interesting for geeky folk--it actually is about the geeky folk.
I do not think that saying "Linux is a 30-year-old technology" and W2K is the newest and the best is right. As far as technology (inner thing) goes, there is hardly anything new in W2K. Most of improvements, if you please, are in UI area. And yes, looks are important when it comes to an average consumer.
Also, do we remember what is at the heart (or deep inside) of NT? VAX/VMS--technology even older than UNIX. Yes, it has been revamped, kernel is no longer monolithic, but instead has the whole windowing system built in. For speed, right? Just it does not make it any much speedier, really.
When looking for newer technology, it would make much more sense to look at Be, rather than W2K.
And then again, many of you are right, when saying that very often all these reviews are comparing apples with bananas and kiwis, rather than (at least) pears. Know what I mean?
It is very unrewarding to try being an oracle--unless you really see the future, there ain't much chance to be certain 'bout what one's saying. Then, would it not make sense to wait and see?
There is a long road ahead for Linux. To walk this road it needs all the [constructive] critisism there is. Would you rather see only rosy "Linux is just a wonder!" articles everywhere? Besides, many of the things mentioned in a News.com article things are true.
Flaming up whenever someone says Linux is not perfect does not do much good. Looking at the ways to change such oppinions is a much better approach.
It would be nice, however, to look at the full report.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, this works only if you know somewhat obscure, i.e. non-latin language. Russian, for instance, works very well. You take a fairly simple phrase in this language and type it on a Qwerty (or Dvorak -- does not really matter) keyboard, using native language keyboard layout. Say, if you were to use word "Linux" (Russian would be something like "Linaks"), then a Qwerty keyboard would yield: "Kbyfrc" ("Txfupj" for Dvorak), which, I guess, is cryptic enough for not-too-sensetive stuff.
... which stands for Crying-Out-Loud-Wheeping-On-the-Floor
While I did not expect Corel to go as far as to make Corel Office OpenSourced in any way, one could hope that such thing as beta testing of it would be more open. That really turns anybody down having to write a 3-page essay "Why do I want to be a Corel beta-tester". Man, dig on it: I am lending *you* my resources to find *your* bugs. They could at least learn from a company whose product they use -- Allaire (site is running on NT using ColdFusion with back-end to MS SQL as we all see from error messages): it was almost a no-brainer to become HomeSite or ColdFusion beta-tester. Well, you get only 1 honest answer then: email. Let's see what happens.
True, but how most ofpeople/companies out there *know* what is *the standard*? What most of them *percieve* to be a standard is what they are used to seeing, not what W3C writes in some obscure manual/policy/standard, but what MSIE *shows* them to be a standard. Things like loose HTML syntax, marquee tag, poor compliange with CSS1 and tons of other small nifty feature none seems to use, but still being in use nonetheless.
It is exactly these small nifty-and-not-as-much-so things that really start getting in a way, costing Netscape the war. One could not put it better than Dave Whitinger (re-phrased): why do I as a Joe-random-user should not enjoy Web as much as my friend next door? And this includes all aspects of it: I want Shockwave, I want DHTML, I want my links to react to my pointer hovering over them! Yeah, I may not know DHTML from an animated GIF but why should I? And I do want it to be stable--the time is almost gone when we could just slap "Windows is not stable enough" and be done with the argument.
Truth and an important fact is that we doneed Mozilla to succede. Personal computing now is not a standalone desktop in an attic: Linux (or any other *nix) needsa rock-solid browser, maybe even morethan multiple desktop environments and window managers.
If we fail we willloose the war
Bezrukov's article reminds me very much good-old Soviet times, high school and/or college in Russia, and myself reading obligatory articles written by Marx, Lenin, Plekhanov and other theorists of socialism/communism. Yet it is largely style, and just a little bit the content that do that: the title of the article sounds very Lenin--Vladimir Ulianov liked very long names for his works.
Yet as I said, what is in the article (putting aside stylistics) is not really Marxist or Leninist. It is a fairly good critique the whole essense of which, IMHO, can be phrased like so:
Before you flame, I know that I have left much of the article out. But I think that pages and pages that are left behindare just illustrate and support the above stated points.
Bezrukov does attack ESR as much as having his name in the article name. Why? Because ESR represents exactly this naive, on the border of blind-folded chauvinism, view of OSS. ESR, propaganda is one thing, reality is whole a lot different.
Yes, Linux popularity grows and it is the only OS rapidly gaining ground. This growth is not solely canibalistic (at the expense of other *nixes) as Microsoft would want it to look. But there are problems as well: there still are problems with fitting Linux in a business environment (office productivity suits like StarOffice, Applixware are not exctly a good match to Microsoft Office, while they may actually be as good if not better than Lotus SmartSuit and Corel PerfectOffice). I am not sure that making Linux easier and easier to install will matter as much to success: good publicity, applications, credibility will make a much better job than a no-pain-five-minutes-see-mom-no-hands Linux distros. After all, if business community is the target, their users will not be installing the system--IT people will. Home user is a whole another matter--and a topic for a separate discussion.
ESR being a very good and a bit less extreme public person for OSS and Linux has done and still does a very good job publicising the movement. Yet he is not perfect. He also seems to get carried away lately, maybe someone else truly needs to get part of his job? He has taken Bezrukov's article way too personally. As much as not even consulting a dictionary before using certain terms, like socialism, Marxism, communism. Do not really want to flogg this horse one more time, but:
You can never really put an equal sign between these terms. Moreover, free market economy adept should really take time and put some effort into reading Marx's Capital : this is a great description of free market and how it functions. Do not let popular propagandistic views of Marx, socialism and communism prevail--it is like thinking that all Scots are wearing kilts all the time, Dutch people are riding bicycles on icy channels in wooden shoes with baskets of tulips in both hands, or Russians drinkng vodka from a samovar every morning chit-chatting with bears.
I would say that "The Great Simoleon Caper", "Snow Crash", and "Diamond Age" form sort of a trio in Stephenson's writings: they are all bound together around very similar idea of future geopolitics (e.g. First Dustributed Republic appears first in "The Caper", then migrates into the "Snow Crash", then "Diamond Age").
"Spew" is a bit off the track there--the story is different, but still interesting for geeky folk--it actually is about the geeky folk.
> Slashdot is a Linux only forum. Not it's makers, but it's readers.
Always thought it was a geek forum regardless the color.
Also, do we remember what is at the heart (or deep inside) of NT? VAX/VMS--technology even older than UNIX. Yes, it has been revamped, kernel is no longer monolithic, but instead has the whole windowing system built in. For speed, right? Just it does not make it any much speedier, really.
When looking for newer technology, it would make much more sense to look at Be, rather than W2K.
And then again, many of you are right, when saying that very often all these reviews are comparing apples with bananas and kiwis, rather than (at least) pears. Know what I mean?
It is very unrewarding to try being an oracle--unless you really see the future, there ain't much chance to be certain 'bout what one's saying. Then, would it not make sense to wait and see?
Even funnier, in Russian the primary meaning of `Lombard'
is `a place one would go when in *real* need for money'
There is a long road ahead for Linux. To walk this road it needs all the [constructive] critisism there is. Would you rather see only rosy "Linux is just a wonder!" articles everywhere? Besides, many of the things mentioned in a News.com article things are true.
Flaming up whenever someone says Linux is not perfect does not do much good. Looking at the ways to change such oppinions is a much better approach.
It would be nice, however, to look at the full report.