Artist signs a contract with an RIAA member label, trading the exclusive copyrights to their songs for X dollars per CD sold and Y cents per radio play. The artist then receives X*CD + Y*play, so long as they're good about letting the RIAA know how to reach them.
There are a couple of key differences between this and the Russian method. First, the artist decides whether or not to sign the contract. They're in control of their rights, and how their songs are managed. It is completely within their abilities to tell the RIAA labels to go fuck themselves. I know many bands who self publish and self promote and who do all right (though they sell much fewer records than they would with a nationally exposed label and rarely get any radio play at all outside of free play on college and community station). Second, the amount of money that they will receive is set in the contract and is legally enforcable...if the label does start to screw you, you can fight back.
With this Russian deal, the artist has no choice. They don't ask for the deal nor can they ask to be left out. They get no say in the money they receive nor do they have any recourse if they don't receive it. Less money and no control.
Anybody who thinks this is a better deal for the artist simply because the price is cheaper, or the artist gets a bigger cut of fuck-all than they would under the RIAA, is an asshole. Supporting AllOfMp3 is far worse than support Kazaa because at least with KaZaa, you KNOW you're stealing.
Which brings up an interesting point: Apple could easily destroy the effectiveness of this clever sale by tossing a one-off feature into an update that ALSO breaks the shit out of Real's hack.
Result? People can't play any of the music they paid for, and Apple can shrug their shoulders. "That's what you get for trusting a hack."
Or you could just punch your favorite artist in the gut and tell him to get a day job because you're not willing to pay for his music.
It would be faster and kinder to do it directly, rather than going through Russia to do it.
(AllofMP3 is a mafia organization that doesn't have the artists' permission to represent them. It's supposed to be okay because they mail a small percentage of the pennies they charge back to artists...but they're not required to do so and artists have no recourse if they don't. By supporting it, you're supporting "legal" rights infringement via a gray market loophole. And that's FAR worse than supporting the RIAA -- at least RIAA member artists get SOME of their royalties, damnit)
Tell me: how are things in la la land? I hear you guys are still using BeOS on RISC chips to play your $.10 legal FLAC files. But that might just be a rumor.
Listen: for Apple and the other music stores to lower their prices so drastically, they'd have to be able to sell at least 4 times as many songs at $.25 as they do at $1. Assuming that the overhead would also be decreased by a factor of four.
But sales wouldn't increase four fold. Overhead and licensing charges would remain the same. So it's not going to happen. Just like they're not going to drop the DRM (because they wouldn't be able to convince as many labels, thus reducing the library without bringing in that many additional customers).
I'm sorry things have costs and restrictions. You just keep stealing and feel vindicated that no damned obnoxious artist is going to get your hard earned cash. Artists, meh. They're worse than the government.
Green is not one of the three "primary" colours of light. Light doesn't have primary anything -- it's a bunch of waves oscilating at different speeds. It's the human eye that has "primary" receptor that detect ranges of color, ranges that roughly approximate blue, red and green. Real yellow is not a combination of a red wave and a green wave of different intensities...it's a discrete yellow wave with its own intensity.
It doesn't make that much of a difference, overall. But since everybody's perceptions of RGB percentages are different, everybody's ideal color matching values in an RGB plane are different -- meaning there's no way to accurately reproduce a particular color in RGB.
RGBCMY is a start...but the ideal would be an emitter that released the exactly correct waveform of light at a pixel. It's not too difficult to perceive a color system that used a floating point wavelength value, an intensity value, and maybe a direction to display an image produced by a series of photon emitters...
Incidentally, unique ids are a great way to prevent copying. There's no need to copy protect the disk at all if you have a sufficiently capable key and gate procedure, such as an online server that checks a complex message based on a private key. Why, you can have a functionally unhackable message in fewer than 20 ASCII characters...when you've got that, and you've got a way to restrict a key to one machine or one account at a time, who cares if their friends get a copy of the disk? Without that $50 key string, it's just bits on plastic.
One could easily argue that unique download identifiers matching a pattern you agreed on with the download provider would be MORE secure than an MD5.
More complex, sure. But as it stands now, all you'd need to do to compromise any package you liked is change the MD5 signature on the portage servers. I'd much rather have something personal encoded along with the MD5, like a secret only I and my download provider share. That way, I could place my trust where I wanted, instead of where a centralized server run by volunteers told me to place it.
Of course, most slashdotters seem to equate privacy with anonymity, so I guess that's not going to happen. I personally don't mind if somebody knows who I am, so long as they don't watch what I'm doing.
Well, yeah. Water goes in, steam comes out, it's the submarine. That's obvious.
But how do you prevent the hot steam from raising the ambient temperature of the sub and killing everybody inside?
Through innovative cooling techniques that are not immediately obvious, that take a lot of thought, testing and research.
This is why patents are for SPECIFIC implementations. If Apple had just tried to patent coloured lights on cases, they'd have had no enforceable patent there. So they patented coloured lights, a system to get the light to the outside of the case, creating patterns, and software to control all this. Anybody who thinks a green neon tube is prior art for alternating coloured tiger stripes down the side of a case has a pretty imaginative definition of "non obvious."
True, but remember: if something is new and difficult to set up, there's a good chance the setup procedure will change. Spending a lot of time to learn the current procedure, when it's going to be little but trivia in two months, is such a waste. I'd rather use that time to learn more LISP or something.
For example: I used to know how to set up Tomcat. As of 3.23, I could do it in five minutes with no troubles. WIth the latest version, I find that my previous knowledge of what connectors to use, how to set up contexts and how to handle user permissions isn't good because they aren't used that way anymore. To get the latest version working properly on my servers, I'd have to dedicate a couple of hours to relearning the program -- and I just don't have that kind of time right now, especially considering how ticked I am that the time I spent learning it two years ago was wasted.
Dude, this is a very unusual thing to say. I also work with Linux and WIndows and have discovered the exact opposite to be true. I've never spent a penny on Windows books, and tons on Linux books. I also rarely spend more than an hour troubleshooting WIndows. I have had problems under Linux I could NEVER solve, things that I just stopped working on because they were taking too long and weren't worth it.
Not saying it isn't true, but just that it's highly unusual to find two people with diametrically opposite results. Maybe Windows is just easier for some people than it is for others, and vica versa.
1) Apple obviously doesn't give a shit about cost. They obviously don't give a shit about the commodity PC market. And it obviously hasn't hurt them. The could charge whatever they liked and it really wouldn't make all that much of a difference.
2) Actually, a tablet PC could add an entirely new market or encourage upgrades among the many, many people who use Apples exclusively for creative purposes. Here we've got something that's akin to a really smart graphics tablet. Something which could permit people to sketch on trains, draw ideas in meetings and transfer them instantly...basically, the market that HP, Acer, etc can't get because they're practically unknown in the arena. Shit, most of the artists I know won't even use HP printers due to anger left over from ink scams, etc.
3) Considering that Apple hasn't had nearly the technical issues with G4 based iBooks or Powerbooks that they had with the G3 systems, I think this is pretty moot. You could take a standard 12" PowerBook, put the screen on the other side, and have a nice sized tablet pc at 4.6 lbs.
I don't really thing that is the big question. When the iPod came out, it came into a widely floundering field of less expensive players and beat the pants off them due to innovative design, excellent software, compact size and beautiful looks.
We have exactly the same situation in the tablet PC field today. We've got a ton of different tablet PCs, but they don't really have a market. For one thing, the resolution usually craps out at 1024x768 on a 14" device, too low density for most non-technophile artists (yes, I know Gabe from Penny has one), and for another their input method leaves something to be desired. The flip down keyboard on some models is kind of neat, but then it isn't much of a tablet if you have to convert it to a laptop all the time.
So anyway. We've got a wide open field, lots of interest but no real reason to switch to a tablet PC paradigm. If Apple can deliver something -- say, a lightweight 10" machine midway between a tablet and an OQO, with good resolution/pixel density, innovative software you can't do on a PocketPC or on a standard laptop and a nice, smooth, highly responsive input method for text -- they can take the market as easily as they took the portable music market.
It's all about the software, man. Give me a reason to draw all over my screen besides "hey cool, drawing on the screen" -- and I'm much more likely to want to do it.
Because there are so many jobs available for Windows admins, more people who are not skilled are operating as Windows admins. This increases the possibility that a new, cheap hire is an idiot, which could cost more than just his salary.
Furthermore, with Linux it is more likely you do not need a dedicated administrator in the first place, because the operating system is more stable when exposed to a wild environment. You may be able to outsource your entire IT department to a competent local admin, pay him twice the hourly for a quarter as much work and save half as much.
This isn't to say Linux is better than Windows. It isn't. And Windows isn't better than Linux, either. You can't make statements like this without ignoring WHY we use operating systems in the first place (to abstract connectivity and device management from the software layer). If you have even one essential program that does not have a viable Linux analogue, the cost of Linux is incomparably high. On the other hand, if you're buying a new Server OS every 5-7 years to avoid exploits for IIS and you're only using the web server and SMTP server...you're throwing away $3000.
Anybody who tells you "X is better than Y" from a purely subjective stance is probably best ignored. Best tool, man, best tool.
Actually, it's more like saying "this pencil is an annoyance thanks to my new pen." Expose and tabbed browsing are two completely different things. I use expose, tabbed browsing, multiple tab sets switched via Option - ~, program hiding, etc. The whole point of OS X is that it gives you a SHITLOAD of options for easily managing your desktop, use the ones that work best for you!
C# is kind of like Java, but it's also kind of like VB, kind of like C++ and kind of like a dozen other languages. New languages are almost always an assembly of the most popular languages at the time of their development with a slightly different syntax. Personally, I like some of the C# advantages over Java a lot (e.g. modifiers that allow you to expose methods either by namespace/package or by assembly, delegate messaging, true properties, compiler directives and the fact that you aren't forced to declare exceptions). But I am the first to admit they're incremental.
The reason I like C# can be summed up very easily:
It's in the middle. It's syntax is simple enough for VB folks to learn, but flexible enough to powerful. It permits very rapid development with a snappy interface. It's pretty speedy to start with but leaves plenty of room for optimization.
And the community is GOOD. It's attracted some of the kind hearted Java gurus, but also some of the all-business MFC guys. The result is that there's plenty of free components, as well as good commercial components.
If you believe balance is more important than specialization, you'll love C#. I do.
The open source innovation is the open source license and idea itself: It's revolutionary, and it will lead to a better life for all of us. It's pervasive throughout society.
The reason Open Source is so powerful is not the license, but the ability of OSS development to attract people who are so fervent about the concept that the see beyond the software implications.
Of course, this is a detriment to its widespread adoption as well. Think about it -- if you tell a guy "OMG you have to check out this new operating system, it's the best, it's so flexible and best of all it's free!" and then proceed to show him Linux, with all its flaws and quirks, he'll be as likely to think you're nuts as to be impressed. Remember: you can't SEE potential, you can only imagine it.
4000 lines is not a medium sized application. It's about right for one fully functional form. Our data layer alone is 20,000 lines (thanks to virtual methods to manage data via reflection, automatic change detection and connection management).
I like ObjectiveC. It's two! two! two syntaxes in one!
But I can't wait to use C# under OS X, man...can't wait to do.NET work in Xcode. Java is nice, but it has a noticeable lag in several areas that C# does not suffer from. And delegates, real properties are just awesome.
I don't think Microsoft is too worried about the effect of Mono. If they were, they wouldn't have had their framework standardized in the first damn place, they would have kept it proprietary like MFC. I mean, think about it: thanks to Mono, they get support for their products on multiple platforms without having to do any real work or to actually SUPPORT them ("Sorry man, Word.NET may WORK on Linux, but we don't support it.", the same thing they do to you now if you use VMWare). Which means money's still coming in for apps built on.NET and the lack of a Microsoft OS is offset by the lower support cost.
In my opinion, Mono is what's going to bring Linux to the average man by bringing the essence of the new Windows (the.NET Framework) to alternative desktops. And it's going to save Microsoft from losing big-time as more companies switch to Linux. Mono could be the great computational equalizer. Iit'd be Java, but Sun shot themselves in the foot with their MS lawsuit -- shit, MS was doing the same thing IBM was doing at the moment, where's the IBM Lawsuit guys?
When Microsoft proposed to do this two years ago, people jumped down their throats. When the Open Source community does it, there's a general "hey cool" feeling. Am I the only person who doesn't feel comfortable putting his trust in a bunch of volunteers over a company he has paid money to for a support contract?
As for "why install software you rarely use:" because hard drive space is cheap and nearly limitless. Net connections are expensive and limited. You can still patch everything from a central server (my software even uses Peer to Peer to accomplish this, a-way-hey-hey), but running it off hard drive is faster and much more reliable. But hey, if you want to do more work for the tenuous benefit of slightly less hard drive space, be my guest.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, how?
Artist signs a contract with an RIAA member label, trading the exclusive copyrights to their songs for X dollars per CD sold and Y cents per radio play. The artist then receives X*CD + Y*play, so long as they're good about letting the RIAA know how to reach them.
There are a couple of key differences between this and the Russian method. First, the artist decides whether or not to sign the contract. They're in control of their rights, and how their songs are managed. It is completely within their abilities to tell the RIAA labels to go fuck themselves. I know many bands who self publish and self promote and who do all right (though they sell much fewer records than they would with a nationally exposed label and rarely get any radio play at all outside of free play on college and community station). Second, the amount of money that they will receive is set in the contract and is legally enforcable...if the label does start to screw you, you can fight back.
With this Russian deal, the artist has no choice. They don't ask for the deal nor can they ask to be left out. They get no say in the money they receive nor do they have any recourse if they don't receive it. Less money and no control.
Anybody who thinks this is a better deal for the artist simply because the price is cheaper, or the artist gets a bigger cut of fuck-all than they would under the RIAA, is an asshole. Supporting AllOfMp3 is far worse than support Kazaa because at least with KaZaa, you KNOW you're stealing.
Which brings up an interesting point: Apple could easily destroy the effectiveness of this clever sale by tossing a one-off feature into an update that ALSO breaks the shit out of Real's hack.
Result? People can't play any of the music they paid for, and Apple can shrug their shoulders. "That's what you get for trusting a hack."
And nobody will ever use Real's service again.
Or you could just punch your favorite artist in the gut and tell him to get a day job because you're not willing to pay for his music.
It would be faster and kinder to do it directly, rather than going through Russia to do it.
(AllofMP3 is a mafia organization that doesn't have the artists' permission to represent them. It's supposed to be okay because they mail a small percentage of the pennies they charge back to artists...but they're not required to do so and artists have no recourse if they don't. By supporting it, you're supporting "legal" rights infringement via a gray market loophole. And that's FAR worse than supporting the RIAA -- at least RIAA member artists get SOME of their royalties, damnit)
Tell me: how are things in la la land? I hear you guys are still using BeOS on RISC chips to play your $.10 legal FLAC files. But that might just be a rumor.
Listen: for Apple and the other music stores to lower their prices so drastically, they'd have to be able to sell at least 4 times as many songs at $.25 as they do at $1. Assuming that the overhead would also be decreased by a factor of four.
But sales wouldn't increase four fold. Overhead and licensing charges would remain the same. So it's not going to happen. Just like they're not going to drop the DRM (because they wouldn't be able to convince as many labels, thus reducing the library without bringing in that many additional customers).
I'm sorry things have costs and restrictions. You just keep stealing and feel vindicated that no damned obnoxious artist is going to get your hard earned cash. Artists, meh. They're worse than the government.
Green is not one of the three "primary" colours of light. Light doesn't have primary anything -- it's a bunch of waves oscilating at different speeds. It's the human eye that has "primary" receptor that detect ranges of color, ranges that roughly approximate blue, red and green. Real yellow is not a combination of a red wave and a green wave of different intensities...it's a discrete yellow wave with its own intensity.
It doesn't make that much of a difference, overall. But since everybody's perceptions of RGB percentages are different, everybody's ideal color matching values in an RGB plane are different -- meaning there's no way to accurately reproduce a particular color in RGB.
RGBCMY is a start...but the ideal would be an emitter that released the exactly correct waveform of light at a pixel. It's not too difficult to perceive a color system that used a floating point wavelength value, an intensity value, and maybe a direction to display an image produced by a series of photon emitters...
Incidentally, unique ids are a great way to prevent copying. There's no need to copy protect the disk at all if you have a sufficiently capable key and gate procedure, such as an online server that checks a complex message based on a private key. Why, you can have a functionally unhackable message in fewer than 20 ASCII characters...when you've got that, and you've got a way to restrict a key to one machine or one account at a time, who cares if their friends get a copy of the disk? Without that $50 key string, it's just bits on plastic.
One could easily argue that unique download identifiers matching a pattern you agreed on with the download provider would be MORE secure than an MD5.
More complex, sure. But as it stands now, all you'd need to do to compromise any package you liked is change the MD5 signature on the portage servers. I'd much rather have something personal encoded along with the MD5, like a secret only I and my download provider share. That way, I could place my trust where I wanted, instead of where a centralized server run by volunteers told me to place it.
Of course, most slashdotters seem to equate privacy with anonymity, so I guess that's not going to happen. I personally don't mind if somebody knows who I am, so long as they don't watch what I'm doing.
Well, yeah. Water goes in, steam comes out, it's the submarine. That's obvious.
But how do you prevent the hot steam from raising the ambient temperature of the sub and killing everybody inside?
Through innovative cooling techniques that are not immediately obvious, that take a lot of thought, testing and research.
This is why patents are for SPECIFIC implementations. If Apple had just tried to patent coloured lights on cases, they'd have had no enforceable patent there. So they patented coloured lights, a system to get the light to the outside of the case, creating patterns, and software to control all this. Anybody who thinks a green neon tube is prior art for alternating coloured tiger stripes down the side of a case has a pretty imaginative definition of "non obvious."
It better not, since this would be COVERED by Apple's patent...
Unless the Xscreensaver people are willing to open their empty pockets and license the thing.
You really can't learn anything by giving up
True, but remember: if something is new and difficult to set up, there's a good chance the setup procedure will change. Spending a lot of time to learn the current procedure, when it's going to be little but trivia in two months, is such a waste. I'd rather use that time to learn more LISP or something.
For example: I used to know how to set up Tomcat. As of 3.23, I could do it in five minutes with no troubles. WIth the latest version, I find that my previous knowledge of what connectors to use, how to set up contexts and how to handle user permissions isn't good because they aren't used that way anymore. To get the latest version working properly on my servers, I'd have to dedicate a couple of hours to relearning the program -- and I just don't have that kind of time right now, especially considering how ticked I am that the time I spent learning it two years ago was wasted.
Yes, all true hackers repeat the words "monkey boys" until their targets just give up out of annoyance.
Dude, this is a very unusual thing to say. I also work with Linux and WIndows and have discovered the exact opposite to be true. I've never spent a penny on Windows books, and tons on Linux books. I also rarely spend more than an hour troubleshooting WIndows. I have had problems under Linux I could NEVER solve, things that I just stopped working on because they were taking too long and weren't worth it.
Not saying it isn't true, but just that it's highly unusual to find two people with diametrically opposite results. Maybe Windows is just easier for some people than it is for others, and vica versa.
I call bullshit on this.
1) Apple obviously doesn't give a shit about cost. They obviously don't give a shit about the commodity PC market. And it obviously hasn't hurt them. The could charge whatever they liked and it really wouldn't make all that much of a difference.
2) Actually, a tablet PC could add an entirely new market or encourage upgrades among the many, many people who use Apples exclusively for creative purposes. Here we've got something that's akin to a really smart graphics tablet. Something which could permit people to sketch on trains, draw ideas in meetings and transfer them instantly...basically, the market that HP, Acer, etc can't get because they're practically unknown in the arena. Shit, most of the artists I know won't even use HP printers due to anger left over from ink scams, etc.
3) Considering that Apple hasn't had nearly the technical issues with G4 based iBooks or Powerbooks that they had with the G3 systems, I think this is pretty moot. You could take a standard 12" PowerBook, put the screen on the other side, and have a nice sized tablet pc at 4.6 lbs.
And I for one can't fucking wait.
100 gig lappy hard drives and 60 gig ipods means my digital hub is soon to get a much needed 50 gig space boost.
And no, I can't just get an external drive. I already have 20 lbs of shit in my laptop bag.
I don't really thing that is the big question. When the iPod came out, it came into a widely floundering field of less expensive players and beat the pants off them due to innovative design, excellent software, compact size and beautiful looks.
We have exactly the same situation in the tablet PC field today. We've got a ton of different tablet PCs, but they don't really have a market. For one thing, the resolution usually craps out at 1024x768 on a 14" device, too low density for most non-technophile artists (yes, I know Gabe from Penny has one), and for another their input method leaves something to be desired. The flip down keyboard on some models is kind of neat, but then it isn't much of a tablet if you have to convert it to a laptop all the time.
So anyway. We've got a wide open field, lots of interest but no real reason to switch to a tablet PC paradigm. If Apple can deliver something -- say, a lightweight 10" machine midway between a tablet and an OQO, with good resolution/pixel density, innovative software you can't do on a PocketPC or on a standard laptop and a nice, smooth, highly responsive input method for text -- they can take the market as easily as they took the portable music market.
It's all about the software, man. Give me a reason to draw all over my screen besides "hey cool, drawing on the screen" -- and I'm much more likely to want to do it.
A few rebuttals to this:
Because there are so many jobs available for Windows admins, more people who are not skilled are operating as Windows admins. This increases the possibility that a new, cheap hire is an idiot, which could cost more than just his salary.
Furthermore, with Linux it is more likely you do not need a dedicated administrator in the first place, because the operating system is more stable when exposed to a wild environment. You may be able to outsource your entire IT department to a competent local admin, pay him twice the hourly for a quarter as much work and save half as much.
This isn't to say Linux is better than Windows. It isn't. And Windows isn't better than Linux, either. You can't make statements like this without ignoring WHY we use operating systems in the first place (to abstract connectivity and device management from the software layer). If you have even one essential program that does not have a viable Linux analogue, the cost of Linux is incomparably high. On the other hand, if you're buying a new Server OS every 5-7 years to avoid exploits for IIS and you're only using the web server and SMTP server...you're throwing away $3000.
Anybody who tells you "X is better than Y" from a purely subjective stance is probably best ignored. Best tool, man, best tool.
Actually, it's more like saying "this pencil is an annoyance thanks to my new pen." Expose and tabbed browsing are two completely different things. I use expose, tabbed browsing, multiple tab sets switched via Option - ~, program hiding, etc. The whole point of OS X is that it gives you a SHITLOAD of options for easily managing your desktop, use the ones that work best for you!
C# is kind of like Java, but it's also kind of like VB, kind of like C++ and kind of like a dozen other languages. New languages are almost always an assembly of the most popular languages at the time of their development with a slightly different syntax. Personally, I like some of the C# advantages over Java a lot (e.g. modifiers that allow you to expose methods either by namespace/package or by assembly, delegate messaging, true properties, compiler directives and the fact that you aren't forced to declare exceptions). But I am the first to admit they're incremental.
The reason I like C# can be summed up very easily:
It's in the middle. It's syntax is simple enough for VB folks to learn, but flexible enough to powerful. It permits very rapid development with a snappy interface. It's pretty speedy to start with but leaves plenty of room for optimization.
And the community is GOOD. It's attracted some of the kind hearted Java gurus, but also some of the all-business MFC guys. The result is that there's plenty of free components, as well as good commercial components.
If you believe balance is more important than specialization, you'll love C#. I do.
The open source innovation is the open source license and idea itself: It's revolutionary, and it will lead to a better life for all of us. It's pervasive throughout society.
The reason Open Source is so powerful is not the license, but the ability of OSS development to attract people who are so fervent about the concept that the see beyond the software implications.
Of course, this is a detriment to its widespread adoption as well. Think about it -- if you tell a guy "OMG you have to check out this new operating system, it's the best, it's so flexible and best of all it's free!" and then proceed to show him Linux, with all its flaws and quirks, he'll be as likely to think you're nuts as to be impressed. Remember: you can't SEE potential, you can only imagine it.
4000 lines is not a medium sized application. It's about right for one fully functional form. Our data layer alone is 20,000 lines (thanks to virtual methods to manage data via reflection, automatic change detection and connection management).
I like ObjectiveC. It's two! two! two syntaxes in one!
.NET work in Xcode. Java is nice, but it has a noticeable lag in several areas that C# does not suffer from. And delegates, real properties are just awesome.
But I can't wait to use C# under OS X, man...can't wait to do
I don't think Microsoft is too worried about the effect of Mono. If they were, they wouldn't have had their framework standardized in the first damn place, they would have kept it proprietary like MFC. I mean, think about it: thanks to Mono, they get support for their products on multiple platforms without having to do any real work or to actually SUPPORT them ("Sorry man, Word.NET may WORK on Linux, but we don't support it.", the same thing they do to you now if you use VMWare). Which means money's still coming in for apps built on .NET and the lack of a Microsoft OS is offset by the lower support cost.
.NET Framework) to alternative desktops. And it's going to save Microsoft from losing big-time as more companies switch to Linux. Mono could be the great computational equalizer. Iit'd be Java, but Sun shot themselves in the foot with their MS lawsuit -- shit, MS was doing the same thing IBM was doing at the moment, where's the IBM Lawsuit guys?
In my opinion, Mono is what's going to bring Linux to the average man by bringing the essence of the new Windows (the
When Microsoft proposed to do this two years ago, people jumped down their throats. When the Open Source community does it, there's a general "hey cool" feeling. Am I the only person who doesn't feel comfortable putting his trust in a bunch of volunteers over a company he has paid money to for a support contract?
As for "why install software you rarely use:" because hard drive space is cheap and nearly limitless. Net connections are expensive and limited. You can still patch everything from a central server (my software even uses Peer to Peer to accomplish this, a-way-hey-hey), but running it off hard drive is faster and much more reliable. But hey, if you want to do more work for the tenuous benefit of slightly less hard drive space, be my guest.