Amen to that my brother !!!! Why not build the browser first, then add all of the other mail/news/bloat stuff later. Maybe I'm being a little simple here, but why does the browser have to do everything under the sun... flame me if you will... but the drones at MS figured that out with IE...I don't want my browser to be my mail client/newsreader. I just want a friggin browser.
With todays technology why can't they build the beast so that it's modular, if you want all of the bloat..okay... just plug it in. Whatever happened to the basic Unix philosophy of making small programs that WORK and can be used as building blocks to do larger tasks. WHY MUST I BE OPPRESSED WITH BLOAT ?????
Remember back in old days when America was building these horrifically large inefficient cars? Then some companies from Japan called Toyota and Honda came out with these little efficient cars that weren't the most attractive things on the road.. but they just worked. That was the start of a revolution. HEY HONDA.. BUILD ME A FRIGGIN BROWSER DAMMIT.
Please to enlighten me...
on
Linux on Palm
·
· Score: 2
I'm afraid the plam clue bus had passed me by, but I keep thinking that I should get one. Can someone please explain to me:
1) Is this something that would be installed over the palm OS ? (ie. you would replace the palm os with this ?)
2) IF I install something over the plam os, can I re-install the plam os at a later time ?
***Microsoft and the other commercial OS companies have had trouble selling their wares in up-and-coming countries like China because their stuff is too darned expensive. Consumers in the industrialized world can drop $100 on an operating system without blinking, but that's prohibitively high in the third world. That's one of the reasons software piracy is so widespread in certain foreign lands. This is a market opportunity for free software ***
Actually countries like China have a nasty reputation for disregarding all copyright laws for intellectual property, thus piracy and bootlegging run rampant.
How about a modern day Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...only it would be Fear and Loathing in Orlando. You could take a twisted deranged friend with you, load up on all of the high tech gear known to man, and of course take as many mind altering drugs as possible ( in the spirit of HST of course ) then you could compare your technology enhanced views of all of the freaks, lepers and cam-corder totin trolls with your drug enhanced perception... or something like that..
Might not win you any awards, certainly would not be PC, but it would make for an interesting read. Of course you could have the Katz-cam to document it for slashdot.
Just think Jon... you could be the first techo-gonzo journalist.... you could be the HST for the new millenium..go for it Jon..sieze the moment !!
Well.. there is nothing wrong with being carefull, but you are at a bigger risk when you give your credit card to a waiter/waitress at your favorite restaurnt then when you send it encrytped over the net.
These type of worms/whatever are aimed more at your average computer user who knows nothing about security, or active X, or changing settings for their mail reader. Most people who purchase a computer are thinking "internet" "email"... they don't have a clue about how any of it works. I'm not saying that this is bad, just these people have a different mindset than your average slashdot reader.
To blame MS for shipping products with security holes is the easy way out, it's true they share the blame, but we can't ignore the fact that your average consumer is purchasing a very complex machine and they have zero understanding as to how to secure it. A computer is not like a toaster but your average person tends to view it that way.
IIRC part of the business plan that RedHat laid out for their IPO stated that they planned on purchasing other tech companies. There is nothing evil or inherintly wrong with that. In fact it make good sense.
What doesn't make sense to me is the reactionary response that RedHat by virtue of operating as a business is evil, or the next Microsoft. This is the real world we are dealing with here, purchasing other companies is not evil unless they are using unfair or illegal means to force the purchase, which seems unlikely.
What is sad here is the unfounded fear and paranoia that seems to run rampant...
My knowledge of the inner workings of Linux is pretty limited, but my knowledge of BSD is zip. Could you give some highlights as to why BSD is technically superior.
We lose. We have been manipulated and robbed. In the name of innovation Microsoft has taken every action available to them to kill innovation. Slick marketing campaigns endlessly spew rhetoric which have now been shown to be lies.
Empirical Evidence of the Applications Barrier to Entry... Empirical Evidence of Microsoft's attempts to kill innovation....
Are these actions taken by a company with the consumers best interests at heart? Are these the actions taken by a company with integrity ??? Integrity would be the opposite of Microsoft. Some of their products are good, but unfortunately this has only helped them to victimize consumers.
"Microsoft's actual pricing behavior is consistent with the proposition that the firm enjoys monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems."
"Microsoft thus opted for the higher price."
Why ??? because they had a better product ? No, because they are a monopoly. No longer will the argument that people use Windows because it's superior hold any weight.
*****I am not a MS sympathizer - at all. However, I have a hard time defending some of the laws they allegedly broke. I mean, DOS and Windows are their products. By what moral principal should we (the people, therefore the government) be allowed to limit what they do to their own work, no matter how heinous?*****
Well...as much as it pains me to say this... I would have to say that I really don't understand that either. But then again I'm not a lawyer.
In a sense this is what AOL was trying to do to MS when they kept tweaking their IM protocol so it wouldn't work with MS clients. I don't recall anybody stating that AOL was doing anything illegal, amusing...yes... illegal.. no.
I would be interested to see how much Caldera is spending on laywers. Lawsuits like this tend to hurt the smaller company more because they are spending big bucks for lawyers that could be dumped into R/D. Meanwhile time does not stand still. Even if they win a large settlment they have lost time that cannot be recouped. Seems like a pretty big gamble for Caldera.
First of....DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ. Sheesh.. second of all... DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHNG YOU SEE ON THE TV NEWS...
All it takes is some "news story" from Podunk USA about some poor little innocent boy wrongly imprisoned blah blah blah... and people jump on the "This is wrong"..."Our rights are being infringed upon" "blah blah blah" bandwagon.
You don't know the facts.. you know what the oportunistic sensationalistic media has presented.
It might be accurate, it might not be. Sheesh. Why do we just love to believe the absolute worst.
That some Australian official would decide to all of a sudden talk openly about secret spy information ??
I'm not suggesting that this isn't true, but it really makes little sense to me. This isn't the sort of thing that government officials just start blabbing about, especially to the BBC. These guys are trained to do three things... deny deny deny... so why fess up now ???
Ahhhh... the XClock2000.. yes... I remember all of the controversy. I actually used the GNU/XClock2000, it had a much better license.
Does anybody remeber the horrible mess when Mindcraft did a benchmarking with the XClock200 against all of the other popular clocks. I still think if the XClock2000 was mulit-threaded it would have outperformed those XClock wannabes..but alas..
I wasn't part of the class action suit (even in the drug induced hazy days of my youth I had enough sense not to buy a PB:) but I seem to remember reading that PB was putting used/refurbed parts into their PC's while representing them as new.
If it's true that Toshiba shipped a large number of laptops with defective parts then why is this so wrong?
I recall watching a movie years ago based upon a car company that knew it's cars would explode if hit "just right" while in an accident. The car company went to the bean counters who told them that it would cost X million dollars to do a recall and fix the problem while it was probable that it would only cost them X/2 million dollars to settle lawsuits for people injured or killed due to the defect. Guess which option the car manufacturer chose ?
It's true that getting a defective part in a laptop is not in the same as being killed due to a defective car part, but you get my point (I hope).
I agree that litigation is way out of hand, but companies need to be held accoutable. When power and money and greed become the driving force behind large corporations, or any business, they had better be prepared to deal with the results.
I think Robin included that comment more as a reminder that just because Slashdot posts a link to a story doean't mean that they are endorsing it as the truth. Given all of the zealotry on Slashdot this seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Your *job* (should you choose to accept it:) would be to read the article and form your own opinion.
I'll agree that many stories do include a tounge-in-cheek comment with an anti-MS slant, but I've never taken them as an official Slashdot opinion, more as the posters attempt to be sly.
Anyways... I wonder how many people own MS stock and don't even know it. MS stock has been very popular with mutual fund managers (with good reason) for years.
I'm just cynical enough to believe that big companies, MS included, will try to get away with whatever they can. This sort of thing (if it's true) probably goes on more than we want to believe. The truth is, I'm sad to admit, I just don't have the time or the energy to really care.
I was going to question the quote about him making a "programming mistake" That is the first that I've read that. I always thought that he knew exactly what he was doing when he coded it, but he really didn't intend for it to get out onto the net, or something like that. Maybe that's what he told his lawyers.
Anyways, I really doubt that a pretty sharp coder would make a mistake like that and not catch it during the testing phase.
Hmmm... I disagree...I find thsi kind of thing interesting as I'm guessing many other "nerds" do. so it seems to fit quite well. I wouldn't mind seeing more of this kind of stuff, I get burned out on all of the Linux/Unix/etc stuff somtimes. Maybe Rob should start a new section...something that deals with the frings nerd stuff.. like this..
Don't get me wrong, I think it's interesting and it generates a lot of interesting comments, but it's a bunch of hogwash. This survey doesn't address the needs of the companies who are employing these developers. It doesn't address the platforms they are developing for...it doesn't discuss if the people are working on long term or short term projects...etc...
I can drive to Idaho and conduct a survey on what kind of vehicle you drive and the survey will show something different if I go to Los Angeles and perform the same survey. Meaningless.
Businesses are looking to fill specific needs. They need applications that are developed for those needs. The tools used to develop those applications will be based upon what the application does... quick with a gui for Windows...yeah..VB.. that isn't a statement on the quality of the language..or the quality of the programmer... it's a statement on the needs of your typical "under the gun" business of the 90's.
Now...back to my latest obbsession (I don't care if it sucks:) Perl...
I really think you are missing something here. It's not a matter of targeted ads, it's a matter of privacy. Tell me how TV and radio manage to get by? They don't have little transmitters in your TV that tell the marketers what shows your watching do they? No...they go after the target audience by knowing what "type" of people watch the show. Can you understand the difference here?
Sure we can turn the cookies off, or use a proxy, but what about the average schmoe who really doesn't have a clue? It's really not as simple as saying "So do you want to go back to the stone ages...etc" It's about questioning what is right and what is wrong. If we don't question it then it's okay by default. Then it will get pushed out further until we do question it... how much are you willing to sacrifice until then.
And actually I wouldn't mind taking a step back.. I hate it when good things get bastardized by the almighty dollar.
**Ignorance, fear and unjustified paranoia mainly**
Perhaps... but why do we not seem to care if these companies track our every click. How would you feel if the automotive industry installed a GPS in your car then tracked your every move, only to sell the information to marketing companies. "Hey..that might be nice... then I can get targeted ads sent to me based upon my habits"... uh...I don't think so. Or heck.. why not tatoo bar codes on our heads then we can install scanners in every store that will read those and track your every shopping habit ???? I doubt many pepople would tolerate that.
So why do we tolerate it on the internet ? I think it's important to remeber that we are in the early stages of the web, as technology grows this will only get worse.
I don't have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean I should have to give up the right to be anonymous when I choose.
Well...my cowardly little storm trooper buddy...it would appear that my point has been completely lost as it went blowing through your tiny little brain.
My point was that an intelligent person will use the best tool for the job. period. That tool might be a MS product, it might be Novell, Apple, Linux,Sun....whatever.
Now...get back to your game of tetris and perhaps you should try to comprehend what you read before you reply.
The lawyers are the ones who drive this nonsense. Big big big bucks to be made by legal teams by suing a large company.
I think a judge should be able to fine lawyers who take cases like these. Let them spend hours upon hours getting the case toghther then march them into court and tell them: "I find this to be a complete and utter waste of my time, I'm fining you $100,000."
I know it's silly but it would make laywers think twice before accepting a frivolous case if they thought they would get nailed for it.
Many of the people I deal with on a daily basis (I work for a small software company) will proudly proclaim that they are "A Microsoft Windows Shop" and that they only run NT...like it's a badge of courage. I've never understood this, I'll sell them an overpriced NT version of our software and take advantage of them, but I'll never understand them. Why would you pledge allegiance to a company, any company. Why not be more concerned with getting the proper tool at a fair price ? That's not to say that a MS NT solution might not be the best tool sometimes, I just think it's ridiculous to go through the day with blinders on.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that my brother !!!! Why not build the browser first, then add all of the other mail/news/bloat stuff later. Maybe I'm being a little simple here, but why does the browser have to do everything under the sun... flame me if you will... but the drones at MS figured that out with IE...I don't want my browser to be my mail client/newsreader. I just want a friggin browser.
With todays technology why can't they build the beast so that it's modular, if you want all of the bloat..okay... just plug it in. Whatever happened to the basic Unix philosophy of making small programs that WORK and can be used as building blocks to do larger tasks. WHY MUST I BE OPPRESSED WITH BLOAT ?????
Remember back in old days when America was building these horrifically large inefficient cars? Then some companies from Japan called Toyota and Honda came out with these little efficient cars that weren't the most attractive things on the road.. but they just worked. That was the start of a revolution. HEY HONDA.. BUILD ME A FRIGGIN BROWSER DAMMIT.
I'm afraid the plam clue bus had passed me by, but I keep thinking that I should get one. Can someone please explain to me:
1) Is this something that would be installed over the palm OS ? (ie. you would replace the palm os with this ?)
2) IF I install something over the plam os, can I re-install the plam os at a later time ?
***Microsoft and the other commercial OS companies have had trouble selling their wares in up-and-coming countries like China because their stuff is too darned expensive. Consumers in the industrialized world can drop $100 on an operating system without blinking, but that's prohibitively high in the third world. That's one of the reasons software piracy is so widespread in certain foreign lands. This is a market opportunity for free software ***
Actually countries like China have a nasty reputation for disregarding all copyright laws for intellectual property, thus piracy and bootlegging run rampant.
How about a modern day Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...only it would be Fear and Loathing in Orlando. You could take a twisted deranged friend with you, load up on all of the high tech gear known to man, and of course take as many mind altering drugs as possible ( in the spirit of HST of course ) then you could compare your technology enhanced views of all of the freaks, lepers and cam-corder totin trolls with your drug enhanced perception... or something like that..
Might not win you any awards, certainly would not be PC, but it would make for an interesting read. Of course you could have the Katz-cam to document it for slashdot.
Just think Jon... you could be the first techo-gonzo journalist.... you could be the HST for the new millenium..go for it Jon..sieze the moment !!
Well.. there is nothing wrong with being carefull, but you are at a bigger risk when you give your credit card to a waiter/waitress at your favorite restaurnt then when you send it encrytped over the net.
These type of worms/whatever are aimed more at your average computer user who knows nothing about security, or active X, or changing settings for their mail reader. Most people who purchase a computer are thinking "internet" "email"... they don't have a clue about how any of it works. I'm not saying that this is bad, just these people have a different mindset than your average slashdot reader.
To blame MS for shipping products with security holes is the easy way out, it's true they share the blame, but we can't ignore the fact that your average consumer is purchasing a very complex machine and they have zero understanding as to how to secure it. A computer is not like a toaster but your average person tends to view it that way.
IIRC part of the business plan that RedHat laid out for their IPO stated that they planned on purchasing other tech companies. There is nothing evil or inherintly wrong with that. In fact it make good sense.
What doesn't make sense to me is the reactionary response that RedHat by virtue of operating as a business is evil, or the next Microsoft. This is the real world we are dealing with here, purchasing other companies is not evil unless they are using unfair or illegal means to force the purchase, which seems unlikely.
What is sad here is the unfounded fear and paranoia that seems to run rampant...
My knowledge of the inner workings of Linux is pretty limited, but my knowledge of BSD is zip. Could you give some highlights as to why BSD is technically superior.
We lose. We have been manipulated and robbed. In the name of innovation Microsoft has taken every action available to them to kill innovation. Slick marketing campaigns endlessly spew rhetoric which have now been shown to be lies.
Empirical Evidence of the Applications Barrier to Entry...
Empirical Evidence of Microsoft's attempts to kill innovation....
Are these actions taken by a company with the consumers best interests at heart? Are these the actions taken by a company with integrity ??? Integrity would be the opposite of Microsoft. Some of their products are good, but unfortunately this has only helped them to victimize consumers.
"Microsoft's actual pricing behavior is consistent with the proposition that the firm enjoys monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems."
"Microsoft thus opted for the higher price."
Why ??? because they had a better product ? No, because they are a monopoly. No longer will the argument that people use Windows because it's superior hold any weight.
*****I am not a MS sympathizer - at all. However, I have a hard time defending some of the laws they allegedly broke. I mean, DOS and Windows are their products. By what moral principal should we (the people, therefore the government) be allowed to limit what they do to their own work, no matter how heinous?*****
Well...as much as it pains me to say this... I would have to say that I really don't understand that either. But then again I'm not a lawyer.
In a sense this is what AOL was trying to do to MS when they kept tweaking their IM protocol so it wouldn't work with MS clients. I don't recall anybody stating that AOL was doing anything illegal, amusing...yes... illegal.. no.
I would be interested to see how much Caldera is spending on laywers. Lawsuits like this tend to hurt the smaller company more because they are spending big bucks for lawyers that could be dumped into R/D. Meanwhile time does not stand still. Even if they win a large settlment they have lost time that cannot be recouped. Seems like a pretty big gamble for Caldera.
First of ....DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ. Sheesh.. second of all... DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHNG YOU SEE ON THE TV NEWS...
All it takes is some "news story" from Podunk USA about some poor little innocent boy wrongly imprisoned blah blah blah... and people jump on the "This is wrong"..."Our rights are being infringed upon" "blah blah blah" bandwagon.
You don't know the facts.. you know what the oportunistic sensationalistic media has presented.
It might be accurate, it might not be. Sheesh. Why do we just love to believe the absolute worst.
That some Australian official would decide to all of a sudden talk openly about secret spy information ??
I'm not suggesting that this isn't true, but it really makes little sense to me. This isn't the sort of thing that government officials just start blabbing about, especially to the BBC. These guys are trained to do three things... deny deny deny... so why fess up now ???
Ahhhh... the XClock2000.. yes... I remember all of the controversy. I actually used the GNU/XClock2000, it had a much better license.
Does anybody remeber the horrible mess when Mindcraft did a benchmarking with the XClock200 against all of the other popular clocks. I still think if the XClock2000 was mulit-threaded it would have outperformed those XClock wannabes..but alas..
I wasn't part of the class action suit (even in the drug induced hazy days of my youth I had enough sense not to buy a PB :) but I seem to remember reading that PB was putting used/refurbed parts into their PC's while representing them as new.
If it's true that Toshiba shipped a large number of laptops with defective parts then why is this so wrong?
I recall watching a movie years ago based upon a car company that knew it's cars would explode if hit "just right" while in an accident. The car company went to the bean counters who told them that it would cost X million dollars to do a recall and fix the problem while it was probable that it would only cost them X/2 million dollars to settle lawsuits for people injured or killed due to the defect. Guess which option the car manufacturer chose ?
It's true that getting a defective part in a laptop is not in the same as being killed due to a defective car part, but you get my point (I hope).
I agree that litigation is way out of hand, but companies need to be held accoutable. When power and money and greed become the driving force behind large corporations, or any business, they had better be prepared to deal with the results.
I think Robin included that comment more as a reminder that just because Slashdot posts a link to a story doean't mean that they are endorsing it as the truth. Given all of the zealotry on Slashdot this seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Your *job* (should you choose to accept it:) would be to read the article and form your own opinion.
I'll agree that many stories do include a tounge-in-cheek comment with an anti-MS slant, but I've never taken them as an official Slashdot opinion, more as the posters attempt to be sly.
Anyways... I wonder how many people own MS stock and don't even know it. MS stock has been very popular with mutual fund managers (with good reason) for years.
I'm just cynical enough to believe that big companies, MS included, will try to get away with whatever they can. This sort of thing (if it's true) probably goes on more than we want to believe. The truth is, I'm sad to admit, I just don't have the time or the energy to really care.
I was going to question the quote about him making a "programming mistake" That is the first that I've read that. I always thought that he knew exactly what he was doing when he coded it, but he really didn't intend for it to get out onto the net, or something like that. Maybe that's what he told his lawyers.
Anyways, I really doubt that a pretty sharp coder would make a mistake like that and not catch it during the testing phase.
How about "The Green Avenger"
Hmmm... I disagree...I find thsi kind of thing interesting as I'm guessing many other "nerds" do. so it seems to fit quite well. I wouldn't mind seeing more of this kind of stuff, I get burned out on all of the Linux/Unix/etc stuff somtimes. Maybe Rob should start a new section ...something that deals with the frings nerd stuff.. like this..
Don't get me wrong, I think it's interesting and it generates a lot of interesting comments, but it's a bunch of hogwash. This survey doesn't address the needs of the companies who are employing these developers. It doesn't address the platforms they are developing for...it doesn't discuss if the people are working on long term or short term projects...etc...
:) Perl...
I can drive to Idaho and conduct a survey on what kind of vehicle you drive and the survey will show something different if I go to Los Angeles and perform the same survey. Meaningless.
Businesses are looking to fill specific needs. They need applications that are developed for those needs. The tools used to develop those applications will be based upon what the application does... quick with a gui for Windows...yeah..VB.. that isn't a statement on the quality of the language..or the quality of the programmer... it's a statement on the needs of your typical "under the gun" business of the 90's.
Now...back to my latest obbsession (I don't care if it sucks
I really think you are missing something here. It's not a matter of targeted ads, it's a matter of privacy. Tell me how TV and radio manage to get by? They don't have little transmitters in your TV that tell the marketers what shows your watching do they? No...they go after the target audience by knowing what "type" of people watch the show. Can you understand the difference here?
Sure we can turn the cookies off, or use a proxy, but what about the average schmoe who really doesn't have a clue? It's really not as simple as saying "So do you want to go back to the stone ages...etc" It's about questioning what is right and what is wrong. If we don't question it then it's okay by default. Then it will get pushed out further until we do question it... how much are you willing to sacrifice until then.
And actually I wouldn't mind taking a step back.. I hate it when good things get bastardized by the almighty dollar.
**Ignorance, fear and unjustified paranoia mainly**
Perhaps... but why do we not seem to care if these companies track our every click. How would you feel if the automotive industry installed a GPS in your car then tracked your every move, only to sell the information to marketing companies. "Hey..that might be nice... then I can get targeted ads sent to me based upon my habits"... uh...I don't think so. Or heck.. why not tatoo bar codes on our heads then we can install scanners in every store that will read those and track your every shopping habit ???? I doubt many pepople would tolerate that.
So why do we tolerate it on the internet ? I think it's important to remeber that we are in the early stages of the web, as technology grows this will only get worse.
I don't have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean I should have to give up the right to be anonymous when I choose.
Well...my cowardly little storm trooper buddy...it would appear that my point has been completely lost as it went blowing through your tiny little brain.
My point was that an intelligent person will use the best tool for the job. period. That tool might be a MS product, it might be Novell, Apple, Linux,Sun....whatever.
Now...get back to your game of tetris and perhaps you should try to comprehend what you read before you reply.
The lawyers are the ones who drive this nonsense. Big big big bucks to be made by legal teams by suing a large company.
I think a judge should be able to fine lawyers who take cases like these. Let them spend hours upon hours getting the case toghther then march them into court and tell them:
"I find this to be a complete and utter waste of my time, I'm fining you $100,000."
I know it's silly but it would make laywers think twice before accepting a frivolous case if they thought they would get nailed for it.
Many of the people I deal with on a daily basis (I work for a small software company) will proudly proclaim that they are "A Microsoft Windows Shop" and that they only run NT...like it's a badge of courage. I've never understood this, I'll sell them an overpriced NT version of our software and take advantage of them, but I'll never understand them. Why would you pledge allegiance to a company, any company. Why not be more concerned with getting the proper tool at a fair price ? That's not to say that a MS NT solution might not be the best tool sometimes, I just think it's ridiculous to go through the day with blinders on.
The power of marketing is frightening to me.