Anyway, let's say you come up with an innovation, perhaps you invent a new mechanism... great, what are you going to do with it? If you horde it away in your garage, then perhaps you don't need the protection of a patent, but that's not exactly the scenario is it? If you want to *use* that innovation, and sell it, you'll have ot get it out into the public. And as soon as you do, I (or perhaps more likely an engineer) could figure out everything about your mechanism and copy it exactly. Now where is your monopoly? Gone! In steps the patent, which protects your idea for a short period of time.
Software is different, because reverse engineering compiled code is incredibly difficult. The software also becomes old news far faster than traditional innovations. So with software you could claim this instant monopoly, without obligation to reveal it. The only things you still don't have a monopoly on are the concepts behind the software, for example the idea of one-click shopping, or the GUI, and that's where US patent law currently hashes around without any well defined purpose. I'm glad to say that in Europe we don't yet have software patents.
And on that topic, its interesting to note that the biggest lobbying group against software patents in Europe has been the software industry, who claim it will devestate their industry. So much for your claims to the opposite! Could you give some evidence to support your claim that the US software industry has been destroyed, and by the lack of patents?
Personally I fail to see how Apple patenting their UI would have helped. It would have helped Apple, and completely killed off any competitors without the money to pay Apple for the rights to license their patents. And I don't remember posing any hypothetical about Microsoft innovation first, whilst implying that it would have been worse.
Lack of property protection devalues the property, and causes a lack of innovation. And that's exactly what we've seen over the last 20 years.
You think we've seen a lack of property protection over the last 20 years? Good god, have you seen the extensions to copyright lengths in the US? The extension of patents in concept and length? The introduction of draconian laws to protect "IP" owners? You seem to want everything to be owned, I am arguing for a balance. Houses are far more valuable when next to parks, roads and other public properties. Innovations come faster when their is incentive and when there is plenty of inspiration and work in the public domain to build upon.
As for this ludicrous natural rights "debate" you seem to feel so sure about, you may remember than John Locke said that the right to own that which comes from us is a natural right, which must be defended by a government (indeed it should be one of the government's only roles, he was a real liberal). But what he also said, though less strongly, and what your founding fathers wrote about, and enshrined in your constituion, is the idea that it is also our natural right to use and benefit from the works of others. So you must balance these two rights out, ending up with (IMO) a very balanced stance in your constitution - a government backed mononpoly (as Locke suggested) but for a limited period only, and in the interests of promoting science and the useful arts.
And if we're in the business of giving condascending references, I suggest you have a read of The Future of Ideas by the Slashdotters' favourite, Lawrence Lessig. I might help to redress the balance of your ideas on "IP".
Ok then, what they wrote is that patents should be granted by Congress as temporary monopolies to scientific innovations for a limited period of time, where they will promote further innovation. To quote directly:
...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
The wording of the US constitution makes no mention that patents (and copyrights) should be given out as rewards for work, but instead as incentives for future works.
Man owns the product of his labor. Just cause you want it does not give you the right to take it if he wants to keep it.
That's all very well, but you're missing something. Nobody has "natural" rights over their information... you could write something, and, without your having the backing of law, I can take it. These "rights" are state granted monopolies, and you shouldn't forget that. They are there so long as they benefit the "state" (i.e. the whole country).
Going back to the Apple case, it was quite right that they weren't able to patent their UI, because it doesn't constitute an "innovation" under patent law, and it would be holding back the rest of the IT industry by decades in doing so.
Its unfortunate that so many people these days advocate slavery under the banner of "freedom".
I'd be interested for you to elaborate on that. I would agree, but I assume my interpretation would be rather different to yours. I find it unfortunate that people take the last two centuries as the basis of what is "natural", deriving basic ideas not from a healthy mix of first principles and the experience of 3000 years of civilisation, but either from a lopsided "theory" or from what feels "natural" in the course of recent US history. As such our views of concepts such as freedom and morality, and our understanding of social "sciences" like economics and politics can sometimes be astonishingly shortsighted and naieve.
I think this sounds very good in theory, but in practice I've not seen anything that does it well. Microsoft Office sort of does this... for example, when in a Word document, if you click on an embedded chart from Excel, it brings up some Excel options, and when you double click on it, an Excele session spawns.
From my experiences as an IT trainer, I've found that this approach just confused people who expected Word to act like Word... the transition wasn't at all intuitive... we've been using "programs" for too long for this to catch on that easily.
A lot of office suites also have these odd frontends that let you decide the kind of document you want to make, but in my experience that's also not intuitive, it just confuses people.
What people really want is for their computer to think in the same way that they do in the real world. For example, if I want to write a letter, I find the materials and tools to write a letter, and write the letter. If I then want to put a drawing in, I pick up the new tools, and add it in. I don't pick up my letter kit, and then mid-way through switch to my drawing kit, and then paste the drawing in, as normal office suites make you do. Nor do I pick up my letter kit, and then pick up my drawing kit and draw onto the letter. What office suites, and other apps, should really aim for is modularity...
This is something I find KDE does beautifully. Through components like KParts, KHTML and so on, you can soon forget you're launching certain applications, because you're seamlessly switching between plugging in your camera, browsing the folder, vieing a preview, opening the image, working on it, and uploading it to your web site. That's a whole different paradigm: you're not looking at data, or applications, but tasks. This is how GNU/Linux *can* be set-up for one's exact needs, because you can customise the whole thing to be set-up for your tasks.
Wow, even though I don't have a phone, if I did, I'd want yours! I too get annoyed by those adverts, by people who replace perfectly functional ones for new ones with slightly bigger screens, or that are slightly smaller and easier to lose.
What amazes me is how interested people are in them, crowding around somebody's new model to admire the, urm, new shape?
Oh come on, not supporting Apple when they take Microsoft to court is not the same as supporting Microsoft. That's just the sort of drivel you see in low-grade tabloids where journalists make lazy links to try and indite the person in question as being a communist. Oh, hang on a sec...
Your "proof" of the necessity for patents boils down to stopping Microsoft violating their copyrights. That's what the copyright system is there for, you don't need to go adding more protection that could do more harm than good. I suggest you read up on the intentions of your founding fathers to get a better perspective on the purpose of copyrights and patents. Right now you seem to have some distorted view based on rights to property and keeping Microsoft at bay.
And I simply did not say that MS "won" because their hardware was cheaperl I cited it as one of a number of reasons.
There's enough food in *total*, but most of it is in Europe and North America, where people have good soil, and good climate and enough unecessary technology to make more than enough food.
I hatee to burst your bubble, but whilst many of the food shortage problems in Africa are man-made, drought still takes a heavy toll, and one of the major problems there at the moment is that the leaders and other better-off countries aren't putting enough money into buying food reservers (many African leaders have a taste for luxuries built on the death of their subjects).
But there is also a chronic population problem in developing countries - they simply cannot sustain the population in terms of food and money, in part because of western policy, in part because of local policy, and in part becausee of natural phenomena.
This idea of "disposable" everything is really attrocious. We have finite resources on this planet, a delicate ecosystem, and yet we go around making as many things as possible disposable, consumable, bulk-buyable. These phones are just another step down the road to complet unsustainability; no technology could sustain this nonsense.
Besides that, mobile phones are also a "moral minefield", as a NewScientist article points out, because they require components that are arguably fuelling a civil war in Congo that is tearing the country (and its people) apart.
Sure, convenience is nice, but isn't this just a bit much? They offer a $5 rebate to people who bring them back, but I doubt $5 is going to tempt the rich executives who the article suggests these might be marketed at (though it probably will tempt the lower income people it also mentions).
It's also probably going to attract even more kids who don't have ethe money for a phone right now, and who really shouldn't have them for medical (and IMO social) reasons. It's just another case of the predominantly Western consumer looking no farther than his/her own convenience.
No, Apple don't necessarily need to make their products worse than the competition. This would be a pretty difficult position to enforce by law, don't you think? But something needs to be done to ensure that operating system vendors cannot dominate the applications market so easily.
Simple ways of achieving this could be include forcibly splitting the two parts of the company apart, as with Microsoft, and/or forcing OS companies to keep enough information about their OS and apps open so that others can write apps that could integrate as well (so give competitors lots of hooks to the OS and apps), and/or force companies to give some information on competitors and their software.
The problem is that the economics here are quite different to those of the high street. In the high street, its difficult for one company to dominate because consumers will always walk past and therefore see the alternatives available. On computers, unless they've been using Macs and/or UNIX for a while, or they have a good search on the 'Net, they're unlikely to find them, and they're less likely to look if they already have perfectly good versions on their computer courtesy of Apple/Microsoft, with lots of nice integration features.
So yes, if the market would not only allow but *encourage* people to offer alternatives that work *as well* as Apples products, or better if they put the time in, then MacOSX would be an even better thing for the market. As it is though, I see it becoming dangerously like Windows+IE+WMP+MSNM+Outlook+Office.
Oh come on, just because some of Apple's patents have been correct according to the current definition of a patent, it doesn't go to say that they're right. Read some Lawrence Lessig / Richard Stallman to get some idea of how absurd software patents are. A patent in software, if it must exist, should exist for no longer than 1 year to 5 years in my opinion. They aren't there to reward previous innovation, they're there to promote future innovation, and if Apple had patented their UI, Microsoft would never have been able to use it for a long, long time, and by that time Apple would be ludicrously dominant.
MS got their monopoly because "their" hardware was cheaper, because of a whole host of unmentionably naughty business practices, through bundling lots of software with the OS therefore creating a disincentive for others to make commercial alternatives to that software, and by aggressively consolidating on their position, and by seeing a gap in the market and really going for it with fairly good software. Maybe if Apple had got the patents MS wouldn't be around, but apple would, in an even stronger position.
The thing is, Apple, by nature is not a draconian company. All this fearmongering is silly.
No, they're not draconian, but then what companies are? Just because they are better than MS, it doesn't follow that they are good. They still do, IMO, a lot of bad things, like trying to patent everything, and striving at the moment to topple MS with the intent of making their own little monopoly. They haven't said as much, but their duty is to their employees, then their shareholders, and then their customers, and a monopoly serves those interests best, which is why MS went for it.
Just because they offer more freedom than one company, it also doesn't make them Free. They're far from really offering the sorts of freedoms that drove people to start the Free Software and Open Source movement. Yes, hooray, they're getting better. But let's not hold back on critical analysis of what they're doing just because they're beating our most hated company whilst becoming more as we'd want them. That's why a lot of Open Source advocates bash Apple. Those who think "Open Source" is all about opening the source so some programmers can improvee the code are seriously missing the point.
And nice to see a quote from another hisorically inaccurate film straight from the mouth of the control-freak MPAA.
Let's say you get MacOSX and Apple's versions of your browser, instant messenging client, e-mail client, digital camera app, cd burning app, music and video player, etc. What incentive would the avergae joe have to try other people's products? Why would he go for a different IM when it' unlikely it would ever integrate as well as Apple's one? The antitrust argument against Microsoft was to *seperate* apps and OS for this vey reason.
You twit, that is why GNUStep matters, because they provide a free alternative to the OSX gui based on the same architecture and basic code, and provide a crossover to other Unices.
Yeah OK, X-Windows is a tad old and needs replacing, but they have alo been adding a lot of bits and bobs that break it from GNUStep, and various other technologies which a lot of people would like to see remaining 100% compatable.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't profit, but when they release every app you'd commonly need, make them all interoperate, and then dont make it very easy for other apps to interoperate as well, you're creating yourself a nice little monopoly, which is not good. Competition in computing is *completely* different to in other markets, and its more difficult to compete with an OS provider who can put all the hooks in. It's not just about the underlying technologies (which Apple so far have been very good on), but also about the apps.
That's nonsense, to be frank. The point about Microsoft is not that they are entrenched, or dominant, but that they use their dominance to ensure no/little compatability with other systems and even in some cases their old products, and then produce a whole range of products that mean you can use 100% Microsoft, and you would quite frankly be stupid to use other products when they're quite likely to be worse, not integrate properly with the rest of your system, and probably become shut out from the system after a year or two.
Now what are Apple doing? They're taking a nice OS with a very nice UNIX core, putting a proprietary GUI on the top, and giving it to the masses. Huzzah. But there's a catch: they're already branching off with their own slightly different standards (like dumping on X-Windows and GNUStep a lot) and putting out loads of products that again make a large incentive for the user to just use Apple products, no alternatives.
If Apple keep their OS open so people can write apps that will be able integrate fully with the OS and Apple's other apps, and if they resist the urge (as they've failed to do for a long time) to patent a lot of their technology where frankly patents shouldn't apply, then I'll hold almost no grudges against them. The same goes for any company in the computer business. It's about slaying a giant and all of the bad practices that go with it, so that we can all have an MS or Apple box in our home or office and not mind too much, because we'll be able to us our box alongside it without a problem.
In that sort of market, the atmosphere of freedom should really be able to flourish, and we should see a lot more freedom in the software market (so long as lazy consumers keep the pessure on legislators not to allow in things like DRM, the DMCA, the EUCD and so on to screw up legal matters and the hardware business).
How many Windows users have installed Windows onto their machine? Not many, and those that do still often have many grumbling tales of problems with drivers etc. My point, which you rather missed, was that most desktop users don't need to worry about installing the OS, so in that sense GNU/Linux is fine for that larger set.
Upgrading, as I and many others have pointed out, really isn't a problem if you've got a new distro into whose kernels pretty much all support you're likely to need is compiled, and who offer precompiled kernels for those with odd needs. Anything more tricky and "Joe" is likely to take his Windows box into a shop as well.
Maintaining and use are the points I accept as relevant to all desktop users, whether they installed the OS or not, but are being tackled for the most part by software like KDE and GNOME... the average Joe does not install much software once their main apps are installed. My parents have never installed anything, my sister installed a few crappy e-mail forwards before I cautioned her, and my brother installed a few animation programs.
So I believe my point stands, that his article was too generalised and therefore inaccurate, but with some good points.
His ugrading problems were quite odd. Most modern distributions now give you fairly huge kernels with support for almost all kinds of hardware a home user might want to use in, so I don't know *why* he decided to recompile his kernel. They also provide utilities to set-up most hardware, like scanners, printers, tv cards, cdrws, and so on. The automation isn't quite perfect, but it's coming in leaps and bounds with every new release of a distro. So in my scenario, were the machine well set-up, he'd have no problem unless it was an odd device, in which case a trip to the "shop" would be required with any other OS too.
Yes it plateaus later, but if most of the nitty gritty learning is taken out, it'd benefit the user to know more. Most Windows users I've worked with (and working as an IT trainer brought me into contact with many) want to know enough so that they can use Windows without worrying about viruses, disk space and other usual problems, and that's one good thing that GNU/Linux proides... more of the necessary education. It astounds me that people use a powerful computer on the Internet without taking a single lesson, reading one book, or understanding anything about what the computer is doing.
Some of the automation is coming into place, finally, in a sense, from what I've read, heard and seen...
SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake all have fairly mature control centers that can do most of your system administration for you without a problem. Mandrake's is fully GPLed.
Gentoo's excellent Portage system means that, once set-up for you, should you ever want to install more software (that's not too obscure), downloading and installing it is a breeze. Sure compiling takes a little longer, but only with mammoth apps like KDE and Mozilla, and there's a nice GUI tool on the way.
KDE has made huge progress in giving the desktop a more "unified" feel, you can happily get back just on the KDE3 suite as a normal home user.
Give it a few years and we should be close. Of course by then Apple and MS will have more ideas for us to catch up with;-)
Saying GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop based on you setting it up misses the point slightly... you found it difficult to set it up for your desktop, and as someone has already said, had you stuck to one distro, you *might* have got a nice desktop working. But what if someone came along and set it all up nicely for you? What if they got the fonts working, installed KDE with KOffice so you don't have to worry about Open/StarOffice's silly font system, got all the drivers sorted, put some nice little games on, put almost all of the software you needed on, and then gave it to you?
A friend of mine recently set-up a box for my parents, who have used Windows for the past few years, and freaked when IE crashed on them... the only thing they whined about was the Internet not working, but that's a bug we can fix. Other than that, because it was set-up, they were content, and it didn't crash, and the GIMP was faster than Photoshop.
If a company were to sell vanilla boxes all with the same hardware, one install and ghosting would solve all your problems except for X being sluggish.
My point is that your conclusions are generalised and oversimplistic. Yes, give a CD to a friend and they'll kill you for the stress you give them. But find someone who is able to set-up the box nicely for them, and they're not likely to be *that* miffed. There's still work, but its not like GNU/Linux is a no-go, oh well let's look at Windows and MacOSX... it's just an option. Nobody except the immature slashdotters pretend it matters if certain people prefer one OS to another, just so long as people in the end have the *choice* to go with a more free OS.
I attended the mini-conference, and The Register is actually a little off in suggesting that he talked about the threats of the EUCD to Free Software development. His central concerns, shared by Martin Keegan, the director of the Campaign for Digital Rights (http://uk.eurorights.org for those in the UK who want an EFF), were that the EUCD could create a new dark age, where digital rights management could see large amounts of information simply disappearing when the format becomes too old, and that minorities such as disabled people would suffer the most because it would not be profitable for companies to produce software to decode the DRM into a format suitable for them.
I wrote an article summarising the issues discussed at the talk if anyone's interested here.
It still tries to keep most of your system configuration, including network configuration, in the one file, which you can still override if you like. Most of the options are then set in the various YaST2 modules, which are pretty logically laid out, which makes configuring things like your network easy for a newbie (well, so long as you know the meaning of DHCP etc;-) and it's powerful enough for the more expeienced admin.
From YaST2 you also can access a module called the RcConfig Editor (original huh?) which gives you a really nice tree-structured list of all the parameters you can switch manually, which acts rather like a restructured/etc tree for the parameters it keeps, so you can have complete control and not have to spend ages using locate+grep+vi to find the settings you want to change.
As you might guess, I tend to use the various YaST modules, mainly because I just use my computer for simple desktop stuff like browsing, emailing and perl programming so I don't need to really fine-tune the system. But I'm sure if you wanted to you could.
The only thing that's annoyed me in the 6 months or so that I've used SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 is having to use RPMs all the time to be able to use them at all (otherwise the rpm db screws up and moans about dependencies) which you kinda have to do with a lot of stuff to be able to use YOU (the online update program, really, really useful).
OTOH, the sector that has true competition - the Open/Free software sector - is mired in backwardness and incompatibility, not to mention its complete lack of capitalistic viability.
A lot of Free Software is incompatible with software produced by various companies who refuse to openly publish their document formats and other necessary standards, such as Microsoft Office documents (even OpenOffice has all sorts of nasty problems converting to a fro). Software whose source is openly available is actually more compatible by its vey nature. And few users care about it's ability to make money, and some companies make money from it. Who cares if its capitalist? Y'know capitalism in its current form has only been around for about 50 years or so, and people got on fine before then. Not *everything* has to conform to one narrow-minded standard to be a success.
The desktops (GNOME and KDE) are so different it's not even funny. I'd rather write an application to work on both Win3.11 and XP than one that's supposed to look good on both GNOME and KDE.
Ah, something on-topic. Now I run a mix of Gtk-based and Qt-based apps on my desktop, both in KDE (mostly) and GNOME (occasionally). The only difference in looks I find is the window decoration. The difference for programmers? None, unless they put in desktop integration features like applets. I'd love to seee the same said about Windows 3.11 and Windows XP by a Microsoft engineer.
Now the only thing, looks wise, that is a problem between KDE, GNOME and all the other desktop envionments and window managers is something touched on in this interview, but which you neglect to mention. That is that the various themes, window layouts, menu positions and mouse/keyboard button bindings can confuse a user coming from Windows to GNU/Linux, or from one desktop environment to the other. It's something that's slowly being addressed (look at KDE3+GNOME2 and then look at KDE2+GNOME1 to seee how far they've come).
All you web designers expierance a similar problem, to a smaller degree, working between all the wacky Open Source browsers.
I've been developing web sites for about 5 years now, and I can tell you that since working in GNU/Linux and being forced to adhere to standards (the topic of your post), I've never had it easier. Mozilla, Galeon, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx and any other browsers you care to choose all render the W3C specifications without a hitch, and the first four all handle javascript, java and flash fairly well if you're feeling evil. What makes designing Web Pages a nightmare is trying to get things like DHTML, complex javascript and other non-standard features to look right between browsers.
Now as you say, GNOME is not a standard, but we don't need one single standard. Even Microsoft Windows isn't a single standard: it is a whole load of standards put together by experienced teams with loads of usability testing time, stuck into one product. If you buy a boxed copy of SuSE 8.0 you'll probably get a similar impression...
Whenever I see case mods, I'm always thinking in the back of m mind "this guy must be really quite nerdy to do this". And then I see a photo of it running Windows!
If anyone's ever read Bill Gate's book "The Road Ahead", this will sound chillingly familiar. In this book, he described how he'd like to see every appliance integrated into a central system (all of course designed by Microsoft;-). This is just one more stepping stone.
His vision, then, would be that you turn on your phone, log into the Hailstorm cellphone server, check your hotmail and sms in one, perhaps unfold your laptop running XP and download the messages, go home and turn on your TV running a microsoft-style tivo, put on your MS Stereo running off an XP music server, and so on. Total saturation, with total control from Redmond.
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, he said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."
Could you really imaging Bill Gates saying that? It's not your typical Microsoft press release is it now?
It's amazing that Shawn Fanning got two awards for Napster when in terms of technology (being the focus of these awards) it was infantile in comparison to other P2P "products" like Gnutella. Indeed it was so weak that it got taken down through using a central server.
It's also amazing that Linus Torvalds gets credited with "writing the Linux kernel" (way to go man!) and "inventing" the Open Source development model, and quite ironic when compared to other prominent figures (RMS, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens) who really *care* about the Open Source community (as opposed to Linux who sees it as a handy development model).
When will an awards ceremony look past celebrity status and rate people who really make a contribution? And when will they learn to write the truth about people instead of trumping them up to make their articles looks amazing? Next we'll be seeing Rob Malda getting an award for "creating Slashdot and writing every bit of text subsequently added to the site"!
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, let's say you come up with an innovation, perhaps you invent a new mechanism... great, what are you going to do with it? If you horde it away in your garage, then perhaps you don't need the protection of a patent, but that's not exactly the scenario is it? If you want to *use* that innovation, and sell it, you'll have ot get it out into the public. And as soon as you do, I (or perhaps more likely an engineer) could figure out everything about your mechanism and copy it exactly. Now where is your monopoly? Gone! In steps the patent, which protects your idea for a short period of time.
Software is different, because reverse engineering compiled code is incredibly difficult. The software also becomes old news far faster than traditional innovations. So with software you could claim this instant monopoly, without obligation to reveal it. The only things you still don't have a monopoly on are the concepts behind the software, for example the idea of one-click shopping, or the GUI, and that's where US patent law currently hashes around without any well defined purpose. I'm glad to say that in Europe we don't yet have software patents.
And on that topic, its interesting to note that the biggest lobbying group against software patents in Europe has been the software industry, who claim it will devestate their industry. So much for your claims to the opposite! Could you give some evidence to support your claim that the US software industry has been destroyed, and by the lack of patents?
Personally I fail to see how Apple patenting their UI would have helped. It would have helped Apple, and completely killed off any competitors without the money to pay Apple for the rights to license their patents. And I don't remember posing any hypothetical about Microsoft innovation first, whilst implying that it would have been worse.
You think we've seen a lack of property protection over the last 20 years? Good god, have you seen the extensions to copyright lengths in the US? The extension of patents in concept and length? The introduction of draconian laws to protect "IP" owners? You seem to want everything to be owned, I am arguing for a balance. Houses are far more valuable when next to parks, roads and other public properties. Innovations come faster when their is incentive and when there is plenty of inspiration and work in the public domain to build upon.As for this ludicrous natural rights "debate" you seem to feel so sure about, you may remember than John Locke said that the right to own that which comes from us is a natural right, which must be defended by a government (indeed it should be one of the government's only roles, he was a real liberal). But what he also said, though less strongly, and what your founding fathers wrote about, and enshrined in your constituion, is the idea that it is also our natural right to use and benefit from the works of others. So you must balance these two rights out, ending up with (IMO) a very balanced stance in your constitution - a government backed mononpoly (as Locke suggested) but for a limited period only, and in the interests of promoting science and the useful arts.
And if we're in the business of giving condascending references, I suggest you have a read of The Future of Ideas by the Slashdotters' favourite, Lawrence Lessig. I might help to redress the balance of your ideas on "IP".
That's all very well, but you're missing something. Nobody has "natural" rights over their information... you could write something, and, without your having the backing of law, I can take it. These "rights" are state granted monopolies, and you shouldn't forget that. They are there so long as they benefit the "state" (i.e. the whole country).
Going back to the Apple case, it was quite right that they weren't able to patent their UI, because it doesn't constitute an "innovation" under patent law, and it would be holding back the rest of the IT industry by decades in doing so.
I'd be interested for you to elaborate on that. I would agree, but I assume my interpretation would be rather different to yours. I find it unfortunate that people take the last two centuries as the basis of what is "natural", deriving basic ideas not from a healthy mix of first principles and the experience of 3000 years of civilisation, but either from a lopsided "theory" or from what feels "natural" in the course of recent US history. As such our views of concepts such as freedom and morality, and our understanding of social "sciences" like economics and politics can sometimes be astonishingly shortsighted and naieve.I think this sounds very good in theory, but in practice I've not seen anything that does it well. Microsoft Office sort of does this... for example, when in a Word document, if you click on an embedded chart from Excel, it brings up some Excel options, and when you double click on it, an Excele session spawns.
From my experiences as an IT trainer, I've found that this approach just confused people who expected Word to act like Word... the transition wasn't at all intuitive... we've been using "programs" for too long for this to catch on that easily.
A lot of office suites also have these odd frontends that let you decide the kind of document you want to make, but in my experience that's also not intuitive, it just confuses people.
What people really want is for their computer to think in the same way that they do in the real world. For example, if I want to write a letter, I find the materials and tools to write a letter, and write the letter. If I then want to put a drawing in, I pick up the new tools, and add it in. I don't pick up my letter kit, and then mid-way through switch to my drawing kit, and then paste the drawing in, as normal office suites make you do. Nor do I pick up my letter kit, and then pick up my drawing kit and draw onto the letter. What office suites, and other apps, should really aim for is modularity...
This is something I find KDE does beautifully. Through components like KParts, KHTML and so on, you can soon forget you're launching certain applications, because you're seamlessly switching between plugging in your camera, browsing the folder, vieing a preview, opening the image, working on it, and uploading it to your web site. That's a whole different paradigm: you're not looking at data, or applications, but tasks. This is how GNU/Linux *can* be set-up for one's exact needs, because you can customise the whole thing to be set-up for your tasks.
Wow, even though I don't have a phone, if I did, I'd want yours! I too get annoyed by those adverts, by people who replace perfectly functional ones for new ones with slightly bigger screens, or that are slightly smaller and easier to lose.
What amazes me is how interested people are in them, crowding around somebody's new model to admire the, urm, new shape?
Oh come on, not supporting Apple when they take Microsoft to court is not the same as supporting Microsoft. That's just the sort of drivel you see in low-grade tabloids where journalists make lazy links to try and indite the person in question as being a communist. Oh, hang on a sec...
Your "proof" of the necessity for patents boils down to stopping Microsoft violating their copyrights. That's what the copyright system is there for, you don't need to go adding more protection that could do more harm than good. I suggest you read up on the intentions of your founding fathers to get a better perspective on the purpose of copyrights and patents. Right now you seem to have some distorted view based on rights to property and keeping Microsoft at bay.
And I simply did not say that MS "won" because their hardware was cheaperl I cited it as one of a number of reasons.
There's enough food in *total*, but most of it is in Europe and North America, where people have good soil, and good climate and enough unecessary technology to make more than enough food.
I hatee to burst your bubble, but whilst many of the food shortage problems in Africa are man-made, drought still takes a heavy toll, and one of the major problems there at the moment is that the leaders and other better-off countries aren't putting enough money into buying food reservers (many African leaders have a taste for luxuries built on the death of their subjects).
But there is also a chronic population problem in developing countries - they simply cannot sustain the population in terms of food and money, in part because of western policy, in part because of local policy, and in part becausee of natural phenomena.
Besides that, mobile phones are also a "moral minefield", as a NewScientist article points out, because they require components that are arguably fuelling a civil war in Congo that is tearing the country (and its people) apart.
Sure, convenience is nice, but isn't this just a bit much? They offer a $5 rebate to people who bring them back, but I doubt $5 is going to tempt the rich executives who the article suggests these might be marketed at (though it probably will tempt the lower income people it also mentions).
It's also probably going to attract even more kids who don't have ethe money for a phone right now, and who really shouldn't have them for medical (and IMO social) reasons. It's just another case of the predominantly Western consumer looking no farther than his/her own convenience.
No, Apple don't necessarily need to make their products worse than the competition. This would be a pretty difficult position to enforce by law, don't you think? But something needs to be done to ensure that operating system vendors cannot dominate the applications market so easily.
Simple ways of achieving this could be include forcibly splitting the two parts of the company apart, as with Microsoft, and/or forcing OS companies to keep enough information about their OS and apps open so that others can write apps that could integrate as well (so give competitors lots of hooks to the OS and apps), and/or force companies to give some information on competitors and their software.
The problem is that the economics here are quite different to those of the high street. In the high street, its difficult for one company to dominate because consumers will always walk past and therefore see the alternatives available. On computers, unless they've been using Macs and/or UNIX for a while, or they have a good search on the 'Net, they're unlikely to find them, and they're less likely to look if they already have perfectly good versions on their computer courtesy of Apple/Microsoft, with lots of nice integration features.
So yes, if the market would not only allow but *encourage* people to offer alternatives that work *as well* as Apples products, or better if they put the time in, then MacOSX would be an even better thing for the market. As it is though, I see it becoming dangerously like Windows+IE+WMP+MSNM+Outlook+Office.
MS got their monopoly because "their" hardware was cheaper, because of a whole host of unmentionably naughty business practices, through bundling lots of software with the OS therefore creating a disincentive for others to make commercial alternatives to that software, and by aggressively consolidating on their position, and by seeing a gap in the market and really going for it with fairly good software. Maybe if Apple had got the patents MS wouldn't be around, but apple would, in an even stronger position.
No, they're not draconian, but then what companies are? Just because they are better than MS, it doesn't follow that they are good. They still do, IMO, a lot of bad things, like trying to patent everything, and striving at the moment to topple MS with the intent of making their own little monopoly. They haven't said as much, but their duty is to their employees, then their shareholders, and then their customers, and a monopoly serves those interests best, which is why MS went for it.Just because they offer more freedom than one company, it also doesn't make them Free. They're far from really offering the sorts of freedoms that drove people to start the Free Software and Open Source movement. Yes, hooray, they're getting better. But let's not hold back on critical analysis of what they're doing just because they're beating our most hated company whilst becoming more as we'd want them. That's why a lot of Open Source advocates bash Apple. Those who think "Open Source" is all about opening the source so some programmers can improvee the code are seriously missing the point.
And nice to see a quote from another hisorically inaccurate film straight from the mouth of the control-freak MPAA.
You're missing my point...
Let's say you get MacOSX and Apple's versions of your browser, instant messenging client, e-mail client, digital camera app, cd burning app, music and video player, etc. What incentive would the avergae joe have to try other people's products? Why would he go for a different IM when it' unlikely it would ever integrate as well as Apple's one? The antitrust argument against Microsoft was to *seperate* apps and OS for this vey reason.
You twit, that is why GNUStep matters, because they provide a free alternative to the OSX gui based on the same architecture and basic code, and provide a crossover to other Unices.
Yeah OK, X-Windows is a tad old and needs replacing, but they have alo been adding a lot of bits and bobs that break it from GNUStep, and various other technologies which a lot of people would like to see remaining 100% compatable.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't profit, but when they release every app you'd commonly need, make them all interoperate, and then dont make it very easy for other apps to interoperate as well, you're creating yourself a nice little monopoly, which is not good. Competition in computing is *completely* different to in other markets, and its more difficult to compete with an OS provider who can put all the hooks in. It's not just about the underlying technologies (which Apple so far have been very good on), but also about the apps.
That's nonsense, to be frank. The point about Microsoft is not that they are entrenched, or dominant, but that they use their dominance to ensure no/little compatability with other systems and even in some cases their old products, and then produce a whole range of products that mean you can use 100% Microsoft, and you would quite frankly be stupid to use other products when they're quite likely to be worse, not integrate properly with the rest of your system, and probably become shut out from the system after a year or two.
Now what are Apple doing? They're taking a nice OS with a very nice UNIX core, putting a proprietary GUI on the top, and giving it to the masses. Huzzah. But there's a catch: they're already branching off with their own slightly different standards (like dumping on X-Windows and GNUStep a lot) and putting out loads of products that again make a large incentive for the user to just use Apple products, no alternatives.
If Apple keep their OS open so people can write apps that will be able integrate fully with the OS and Apple's other apps, and if they resist the urge (as they've failed to do for a long time) to patent a lot of their technology where frankly patents shouldn't apply, then I'll hold almost no grudges against them. The same goes for any company in the computer business. It's about slaying a giant and all of the bad practices that go with it, so that we can all have an MS or Apple box in our home or office and not mind too much, because we'll be able to us our box alongside it without a problem.
In that sort of market, the atmosphere of freedom should really be able to flourish, and we should see a lot more freedom in the software market (so long as lazy consumers keep the pessure on legislators not to allow in things like DRM, the DMCA, the EUCD and so on to screw up legal matters and the hardware business).
How many Windows users have installed Windows onto their machine? Not many, and those that do still often have many grumbling tales of problems with drivers etc. My point, which you rather missed, was that most desktop users don't need to worry about installing the OS, so in that sense GNU/Linux is fine for that larger set.
Upgrading, as I and many others have pointed out, really isn't a problem if you've got a new distro into whose kernels pretty much all support you're likely to need is compiled, and who offer precompiled kernels for those with odd needs. Anything more tricky and "Joe" is likely to take his Windows box into a shop as well.
Maintaining and use are the points I accept as relevant to all desktop users, whether they installed the OS or not, but are being tackled for the most part by software like KDE and GNOME... the average Joe does not install much software once their main apps are installed. My parents have never installed anything, my sister installed a few crappy e-mail forwards before I cautioned her, and my brother installed a few animation programs.
So I believe my point stands, that his article was too generalised and therefore inaccurate, but with some good points.
His ugrading problems were quite odd. Most modern distributions now give you fairly huge kernels with support for almost all kinds of hardware a home user might want to use in, so I don't know *why* he decided to recompile his kernel. They also provide utilities to set-up most hardware, like scanners, printers, tv cards, cdrws, and so on. The automation isn't quite perfect, but it's coming in leaps and bounds with every new release of a distro. So in my scenario, were the machine well set-up, he'd have no problem unless it was an odd device, in which case a trip to the "shop" would be required with any other OS too.
Yes it plateaus later, but if most of the nitty gritty learning is taken out, it'd benefit the user to know more. Most Windows users I've worked with (and working as an IT trainer brought me into contact with many) want to know enough so that they can use Windows without worrying about viruses, disk space and other usual problems, and that's one good thing that GNU/Linux proides... more of the necessary education. It astounds me that people use a powerful computer on the Internet without taking a single lesson, reading one book, or understanding anything about what the computer is doing.
Some of the automation is coming into place, finally, in a sense, from what I've read, heard and seen...
;-)
SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake all have fairly mature control centers that can do most of your system administration for you without a problem. Mandrake's is fully GPLed.
Gentoo's excellent Portage system means that, once set-up for you, should you ever want to install more software (that's not too obscure), downloading and installing it is a breeze. Sure compiling takes a little longer, but only with mammoth apps like KDE and Mozilla, and there's a nice GUI tool on the way.
KDE has made huge progress in giving the desktop a more "unified" feel, you can happily get back just on the KDE3 suite as a normal home user.
Give it a few years and we should be close. Of course by then Apple and MS will have more ideas for us to catch up with
Saying GNU/Linux isn't ready for the desktop based on you setting it up misses the point slightly... you found it difficult to set it up for your desktop, and as someone has already said, had you stuck to one distro, you *might* have got a nice desktop working. But what if someone came along and set it all up nicely for you? What if they got the fonts working, installed KDE with KOffice so you don't have to worry about Open/StarOffice's silly font system, got all the drivers sorted, put some nice little games on, put almost all of the software you needed on, and then gave it to you?
A friend of mine recently set-up a box for my parents, who have used Windows for the past few years, and freaked when IE crashed on them... the only thing they whined about was the Internet not working, but that's a bug we can fix. Other than that, because it was set-up, they were content, and it didn't crash, and the GIMP was faster than Photoshop.
If a company were to sell vanilla boxes all with the same hardware, one install and ghosting would solve all your problems except for X being sluggish.
My point is that your conclusions are generalised and oversimplistic. Yes, give a CD to a friend and they'll kill you for the stress you give them. But find someone who is able to set-up the box nicely for them, and they're not likely to be *that* miffed. There's still work, but its not like GNU/Linux is a no-go, oh well let's look at Windows and MacOSX... it's just an option. Nobody except the immature slashdotters pretend it matters if certain people prefer one OS to another, just so long as people in the end have the *choice* to go with a more free OS.
DRM, and the first time I mention DRM I tell you, if you read more carefully :-)
I wrote an article summarising the issues discussed at the talk if anyone's interested here.
It still tries to keep most of your system configuration, including network configuration, in the one file, which you can still override if you like. Most of the options are then set in the various YaST2 modules, which are pretty logically laid out, which makes configuring things like your network easy for a newbie (well, so long as you know the meaning of DHCP etc ;-) and it's powerful enough for the more expeienced admin.
/etc tree for the parameters it keeps, so you can have complete control and not have to spend ages using locate+grep+vi to find the settings you want to change.
From YaST2 you also can access a module called the RcConfig Editor (original huh?) which gives you a really nice tree-structured list of all the parameters you can switch manually, which acts rather like a restructured
As you might guess, I tend to use the various YaST modules, mainly because I just use my computer for simple desktop stuff like browsing, emailing and perl programming so I don't need to really fine-tune the system. But I'm sure if you wanted to you could.
The only thing that's annoyed me in the 6 months or so that I've used SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 is having to use RPMs all the time to be able to use them at all (otherwise the rpm db screws up and moans about dependencies) which you kinda have to do with a lot of stuff to be able to use YOU (the online update program, really, really useful).
Now the only thing, looks wise, that is a problem between KDE, GNOME and all the other desktop envionments and window managers is something touched on in this interview, but which you neglect to mention. That is that the various themes, window layouts, menu positions and mouse/keyboard button bindings can confuse a user coming from Windows to GNU/Linux, or from one desktop environment to the other. It's something that's slowly being addressed (look at KDE3+GNOME2 and then look at KDE2+GNOME1 to seee how far they've come).
I've been developing web sites for about 5 years now, and I can tell you that since working in GNU/Linux and being forced to adhere to standards (the topic of your post), I've never had it easier. Mozilla, Galeon, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx and any other browsers you care to choose all render the W3C specifications without a hitch, and the first four all handle javascript, java and flash fairly well if you're feeling evil. What makes designing Web Pages a nightmare is trying to get things like DHTML, complex javascript and other non-standard features to look right between browsers.Now as you say, GNOME is not a standard, but we don't need one single standard. Even Microsoft Windows isn't a single standard: it is a whole load of standards put together by experienced teams with loads of usability testing time, stuck into one product. If you buy a boxed copy of SuSE 8.0 you'll probably get a similar impression...
Run a proper OS on it! ;-)
If anyone's ever read Bill Gate's book "The Road Ahead", this will sound chillingly familiar. In this book, he described how he'd like to see every appliance integrated into a central system (all of course designed by Microsoft ;-). This is just one more stepping stone.
His vision, then, would be that you turn on your phone, log into the Hailstorm cellphone server, check your hotmail and sms in one, perhaps unfold your laptop running XP and download the messages, go home and turn on your TV running a microsoft-style tivo, put on your MS Stereo running off an XP music server, and so on. Total saturation, with total control from Redmond.
Could you really imaging Bill Gates saying that? It's not your typical Microsoft press release is it now?
It's amazing that Shawn Fanning got two awards for Napster when in terms of technology (being the focus of these awards) it was infantile in comparison to other P2P "products" like Gnutella. Indeed it was so weak that it got taken down through using a central server.
It's also amazing that Linus Torvalds gets credited with "writing the Linux kernel" (way to go man!) and "inventing" the Open Source development model, and quite ironic when compared to other prominent figures (RMS, Alan Cox, Bruce Perens) who really *care* about the Open Source community (as opposed to Linux who sees it as a handy development model).
When will an awards ceremony look past celebrity status and rate people who really make a contribution? And when will they learn to write the truth about people instead of trumping them up to make their articles looks amazing? Next we'll be seeing Rob Malda getting an award for "creating Slashdot and writing every bit of text subsequently added to the site"!