If anything can get Apple to ditch its current arcitecture, this it it. Who knows if they will go Intel or IBM, but blood is in the water now, and they have to make some switch.
First off, the price of an OS + office suite is not zero. The price of a complicated, difficult to install, esoteric, very difficult to learn OS & office suite is zero. The price of an OS that works OUT OF THE BOX is several hundred dollars.
I know you're trying to call Linux + OpenOffice complicated, difficult to install, etc. but what was the last Linux distro that you installed? I install Windows pretty regularly at work and I have installed my fair share of Linux as well. Some versions of Linux are easier to install than Windows. RedHat 8, Mandrake 9 and Knoppinx (to name a few) work out-of-the-box for me. Plus, they install (or run without even installing) OpenOffice along with the OS. Getting a full system up and running with apps is far easer and much faster with Linux.
If you were comparing apples and apples, then MS would already have stopped selling their software. But, they are not perfect substitutes, and most intelligent, rational people know that. They are not even close to perfect substitutes.
If by "perfect substitutes" you meant "drop-in replacements", you're right. They are not drop-in replacements. No one ever said they were. Personally I don't want a drop-in replacement - I want an improvement. And while making it different doesn't always mean making it better, making it better ALWAYS means making it different.
People (like myself) would rather pay hundreds of dollars for Windows.[as opposed to $0 for Linux]
This one diserves an <ul>
Most people get MS Windows "Free"* on their computers.
Of those who explicitly buy MS Windows, many don't know about Linux and/or are victims of the disinformation out there about it.
Those in the know are still often forced to go with MS Windows because of "inertia" factors like "App X is only available on Windows - Users of App X must use Windows - developers of App X continue just developing for Windows because that's where their customers are." It takes time to overcome such inertia, but it's happening.
The encouraging thing (if you're one of us "OSS zealots") is that Linux use continues to grow, both in servers and on desktops. Application customers (especially big businesses) are encouraging their application suppliers to develop for Linux. Computer manufacturers are bundling StarOffice and OpenOffice on computers (and passing the savings on to the customer). "Grandma friendly" Linux distros like Lycoris and Lindows are gaining steam. All-in-all, things are going well for Open Source and Free Software.
I'm all angry about the agreement giving free reign to MS, but I'm also worried about its (posssible) effects on other software monopolists. Does this case set a precedent that says: "software companies don't need to pay attention to anti-trust laws"?
Searches for KDE stuff only turned up the KDE Accessibility mailing list. Supposedly the new version of Qt (and by extention, KDE) has a good accessibility framework, but some more digging would be required to find out just what applications (if any) use it.
Watch out, Onion, you're on the hit list. Cuz' I'm pretty sure that Bush didn't actually threaten to invade the West Nile in response to the West Virus.
I would guess that Slashdot would immediately take the post down if they got a Cease-And-Desist letter (as required by the DCMA {I think - IANAL}). Otherwise, I'm sure Slashdot's policy is to not try to police the posts on their site. Once they started to do that, they would have to continue doing it, and it would be impossible for them to do it with any degree of certainty (how would they know that I had not copied this post off of another site - they couldn't).
The thing is that the sum total of copyrighted material out there is practically infinite. You couldn't possibly check every Slashdot post against that large of a set of information (not to mention aLL pOSSiBLE trANSfOrMatIONS) even if they had access to all of it.
I am the "computer guy" for a small company, and I use this method to make back-ups of our Samba file server. It's great! The main file server has Samba and everyone works off of it. The backup server has almost twice the disk space, but it doesn't really need that much. It never seems to be more than a couple of percent bigger. I keep 'snapshots' going back various time intervals up to a week, and do the tape backup off of the backup machine early in the morning. Thank you Mike Rubel!
I have a cactus in my office that never gets natural light (I keep my window shaded to prevent glare on my monitor). In fact, I don't water it either. I don't know how, but it still looks as healthy as the day I bought it (almost). I googled and found this site about caring for cacti.
Apparently their web server runs on solar power also, and we just sucked them dry!:-)
Famous test subject?
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Is it just me, or is the "gamer" test subject pictured Rowan Atkinson? (Mr. Bean, Black Adder)
Best game for "The Zone"
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 2
The best game for "The Zone" (at least for me) has got to be Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo! (They also published a Pokemon-branded version for the N64, but I never played it).
"some time in the future" sounds to me like "if I can't sell it to somebody first"
Give the guys some slack. It's perfectly reasonable to want to polish a few things before they open-source it. I'm sure it's worthwile to make your code easy to grok and build up some fanfare first. That way you keep more of the curious coders who check it out initially.
Hey! I said that they were from the 1.1 alpha release notes! I posted them for the people moving from 1.0 to 1.1beta! (like me) Are the moderators so fickle that they'll mod a post down from +4 to -1 without reading it?
In case you are coming from 1.0 and want to know what is different in the 1.1 branch (ripped from the 1.1a rel. notes):
* Download Manager has been enabled (with many improvements) for the 1.1 Alph arelease. * Mozilla now takes advantage of Quartz rendering for users of Mac OS X 10.1.5 * Viewing HTML mail messages as plain text is new. * Quote original message has been implemented for 1.1a * We have new layout performance enhancements targeted at DHTML. * There have also been performance enhancements for the application startup speed. * Viewsource for MathML and view source for selections have been implemented. * Mozilla now has support for the display of XBM images. * Autocomplete in the addressbar has an improved sort order. * Browser tabs now close left to right (they used to close right to left). * The cross-plaform File Picker now has a button for creating a new directory. * Redundant backup of preferences files has been implemented in 1.1 Alpha. * Mozilla's drag and drop support has been greatly improved. * Image blocking for Mail & News has been implemented.
A buddy of mine comes up with some good anti-telemarketer lines. A couple of weeks ago he was called up by someone hocking the local paper.
Telemarketer: Hello, would you like to recieve the [local paper]? Guy: I... can't read. [pause] Telemarketer: At all?
Bugs in DOS
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's turn-back-the-clock time, boys and girls. Remember all of those DOS calls? It was interrupt 20, wasn't it? Remember the findfirst and findnext functions that would get you a list of the files in a directory? You could give findfirst a list of attributes and a filespec, and it would give you a file that matched it (findnext just repeated the last findfirst). Valid attributes to pass were the archive flag, read-only, directory, etc. Except the directory one didn't work! It was simply ignored, so you had to sort out what files were directories or not yourself. What a pain in the ass! And did they ever fix it? I'll give you one guess.
Oh, and I can't mention old MS bugs without mentioning MASM vs TASM (just because it illuistrates why Borland is so cool and MS is not). Back in the day, when applications were coded in assembler, MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) was popular as hell. Borland, though, came out with Turbo Assembler, which had a better syntax (optionally), could assemble MASM syntax faster than MASM could, and could emulate all the bugs in the different versions of MASM. Ah.
Well, that's enough MS bashing for me today (or maybe just this hour...).
If you have it in your area, get Roadrunner Business Class. We looked into a Frac. T1 from WorldCom, and Roadrunner was faster and cost half as much. The "Business Class" is seperate from the residential, and much faster (not that res. is bad - it's what I'm on). Of course, T1 costs are related to your location, so YMMV.
I'm sick and tired of people trying to relate everything bad to terrorism. I highly doubt that this MCI guy was deliberately sabotaging anything, but that's not even the point. "Terrorism" is when you do bad things to inspire terror. Terror is a key mechanism in terrorism! If you, say, sabotage the US economy slowly by eroding investor trust over the course of months or years, that's surely harming us, but it's not terrorism!
Here's an example of some very effective terrorism: the recent "dirty bomb" thing. It's effective because the average American knows squat about radiation. Americans are so stupid that they won't buy irradiated food because they think that it's radioactive! The effect is compounded by TV "journalists" who know just as little, but are more than happy to trumpet the term "dirty bomb" over the airwaves for at least a week. And our beautiful executive branch is so eager to trumpet their success in foiling the plot that they play up the danger such a device poses in stead of spreading some usefull information about how radioactive materials work. Hello!? I bet that the actual terrorists are scratching their heads, wondering if they should retire and just let the US gov. do all their work instead.
AOL has also releasedbetas using Gecko. The thing is that Mozilla uses the same embedding API as IE, so it's easy to switch. I really hope that AOL pushes the Netscape thing, because if IE doesn't have competition, they have no incentive to fix their non-security-related bugs and inconsistent standards support.
Well, I didn't exactly follow the procedure outlined above, but I thought my idea would work as well. Here is what I did:
Picked up an AOL CD to cover a transition period in ISPs (only two months, so the free month would get half of it for me).
Signed up for AOL using my debit card at Bank One.
Used AOL for two months.
Called up and canceled AOL (and they gave me the runaround Katz described, but didn't hang up on me).
Moved to a new city.
Closed Bank One account and withdrew all of my money (I didn't like them much and my new job got me into a credit union that I am happy with).
Sounds like it would do the trick, doesn't it? Well, AOL conveniently 'forgot' about my cancellation and kept billing my Visa card, which didn't exist. Except Bank One reopened the account for me (aren't they nice), didn't pay AOL (there was no money), and started charging me money for being overdrawn. So AOL and Bank One both start sending harrassing letters to my old address, which I do not get for some time. When I did get the letters, I went to the local Bank One branch and tried to straighten it out. They told me I had to go to the branch where I opened the account (don't ask me why). So a few weeks later I get a chance to visit that area and I stop in to Bank One. I told them to "deny payment" on the AOL charges (one was too old, so I had to pay it - @!#@%). I payed Bank One's stupid fees and left. Boy was that a hassle!
Use PNG! It's lossless and gets compression ratios that are just as good (unless you are using ultra-lossy compression with your JPEGs - in which case they will be a pain to read anyway). Why do people even use JPEG and GIF anymore? JPEG is only good if you need ultra-high compression and don't care about quality, and GIF only has the animation thing on PNGs.
Sorry about the rant, but there are so many cool computer technologies that people just overlook. It makes me sad.
In another month, the US version of the Linux kit for the Playstation 2 is coming out. It comes with a hard drive, a VGA monitor connector, a keyboard and mouse and an ethernet adaptor. I already have mine pre-ordered, and I bought the acutal console last week.
As a side note, be sure to get Grand Theft Auto 3! Oh, the carnage!
Slashdot Mirror
If anything can get Apple to ditch its current arcitecture, this it it. Who knows if they will go Intel or IBM, but blood is in the water now, and they have to make some switch.
(I guess I'm feeding the Troll, but...)
First off, the price of an OS + office suite is not zero. The price of a complicated, difficult to install, esoteric, very difficult to learn OS & office suite is zero. The price of an OS that works OUT OF THE BOX is several hundred dollars.I know you're trying to call Linux + OpenOffice complicated, difficult to install, etc. but what was the last Linux distro that you installed? I install Windows pretty regularly at work and I have installed my fair share of Linux as well. Some versions of Linux are easier to install than Windows. RedHat 8, Mandrake 9 and Knoppinx (to name a few) work out-of-the-box for me. Plus, they install (or run without even installing) OpenOffice along with the OS. Getting a full system up and running with apps is far easer and much faster with Linux.
If you were comparing apples and apples, then MS would already have stopped selling their software. But, they are not perfect substitutes, and most intelligent, rational people know that. They are not even close to perfect substitutes.If by "perfect substitutes" you meant "drop-in replacements", you're right. They are not drop-in replacements. No one ever said they were. Personally I don't want a drop-in replacement - I want an improvement. And while making it different doesn't always mean making it better, making it better ALWAYS means making it different.
People (like myself) would rather pay hundreds of dollars for Windows.[as opposed to $0 for Linux]This one diserves an <ul>
The encouraging thing (if you're one of us "OSS zealots") is that Linux use continues to grow, both in servers and on desktops. Application customers (especially big businesses) are encouraging their application suppliers to develop for Linux. Computer manufacturers are bundling StarOffice and OpenOffice on computers (and passing the savings on to the customer). "Grandma friendly" Linux distros like Lycoris and Lindows are gaining steam. All-in-all, things are going well for Open Source and Free Software.
* We all know that MS Windows is very not free.
I'm all angry about the agreement giving free reign to MS, but I'm also worried about its (posssible) effects on other software monopolists. Does this case set a precedent that says: "software companies don't need to pay attention to anti-trust laws"?
The Gnome project seems to be doing a good job for the blind. See the Gnome Accessibility project and specifically Gnopernicus.
Searches for KDE stuff only turned up the KDE Accessibility mailing list. Supposedly the new version of Qt (and by extention, KDE) has a good accessibility framework, but some more digging would be required to find out just what applications (if any) use it.
Next Step: Outlaw all sarcastic humor.
Watch out, Onion, you're on the hit list. Cuz' I'm pretty sure that Bush didn't actually threaten to invade the West Nile in response to the West Virus.
Hello? Sarcasm? Where did that go?
I would guess that Slashdot would immediately take the post down if they got a Cease-And-Desist letter (as required by the DCMA {I think - IANAL}). Otherwise, I'm sure Slashdot's policy is to not try to police the posts on their site. Once they started to do that, they would have to continue doing it, and it would be impossible for them to do it with any degree of certainty (how would they know that I had not copied this post off of another site - they couldn't).
The thing is that the sum total of copyrighted material out there is practically infinite. You couldn't possibly check every Slashdot post against that large of a set of information (not to mention aLL pOSSiBLE trANSfOrMatIONS) even if they had access to all of it.
I am the "computer guy" for a small company, and I use this method to make back-ups of our Samba file server. It's great! The main file server has Samba and everyone works off of it. The backup server has almost twice the disk space, but it doesn't really need that much. It never seems to be more than a couple of percent bigger. I keep 'snapshots' going back various time intervals up to a week, and do the tape backup off of the backup machine early in the morning. Thank you Mike Rubel!
I have a cactus in my office that never gets natural light (I keep my window shaded to prevent glare on my monitor). In fact, I don't water it either. I don't know how, but it still looks as healthy as the day I bought it (almost). I googled and found this site about caring for cacti.
Apparently their web server runs on solar power also, and we just sucked them dry! :-)
Is it just me, or is the "gamer" test subject pictured Rowan Atkinson? (Mr. Bean, Black Adder)
The best game for "The Zone" (at least for me) has got to be Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo! (They also published a Pokemon-branded version for the N64, but I never played it).
thanks
The Register is cool and all, but why not just link the Houston Chronicle article that they got it from? Their article is much better.
Hey! I said that they were from the 1.1 alpha release notes! I posted them for the people moving from 1.0 to 1.1beta! (like me) Are the moderators so fickle that they'll mod a post down from +4 to -1 without reading it?
In case you are coming from 1.0 and want to know what is different in the 1.1 branch (ripped from the 1.1a rel. notes):
* Download Manager has been enabled (with many improvements) for the 1.1 Alph arelease.
* Mozilla now takes advantage of Quartz rendering for users of Mac OS X 10.1.5
* Viewing HTML mail messages as plain text is new.
* Quote original message has been implemented for 1.1a
* We have new layout performance enhancements targeted at DHTML.
* There have also been performance enhancements for the application startup speed.
* Viewsource for MathML and view source for selections have been implemented.
* Mozilla now has support for the display of XBM images.
* Autocomplete in the addressbar has an improved sort order.
* Browser tabs now close left to right (they used to close right to left).
* The cross-plaform File Picker now has a button for creating a new directory.
* Redundant backup of preferences files has been implemented in 1.1 Alpha.
* Mozilla's drag and drop support has been greatly improved.
* Image blocking for Mail & News has been implemented.
A buddy of mine comes up with some good anti-telemarketer lines. A couple of weeks ago he was called up by someone hocking the local paper.
Telemarketer: Hello, would you like to recieve the [local paper]?
Guy: I... can't read.
[pause]
Telemarketer: At all?
It's turn-back-the-clock time, boys and girls. Remember all of those DOS calls? It was interrupt 20, wasn't it? Remember the findfirst and findnext functions that would get you a list of the files in a directory? You could give findfirst a list of attributes and a filespec, and it would give you a file that matched it (findnext just repeated the last findfirst). Valid attributes to pass were the archive flag, read-only, directory, etc. Except the directory one didn't work! It was simply ignored, so you had to sort out what files were directories or not yourself. What a pain in the ass! And did they ever fix it? I'll give you one guess.
Oh, and I can't mention old MS bugs without mentioning MASM vs TASM (just because it illuistrates why Borland is so cool and MS is not). Back in the day, when applications were coded in assembler, MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) was popular as hell. Borland, though, came out with Turbo Assembler, which had a better syntax (optionally), could assemble MASM syntax faster than MASM could, and could emulate all the bugs in the different versions of MASM. Ah.
Well, that's enough MS bashing for me today (or maybe just this hour...).
If you have it in your area, get Roadrunner Business Class. We looked into a Frac. T1 from WorldCom, and Roadrunner was faster and cost half as much. The "Business Class" is seperate from the residential, and much faster (not that res. is bad - it's what I'm on). Of course, T1 costs are related to your location, so YMMV.
I'm sick and tired of people trying to relate everything bad to terrorism. I highly doubt that this MCI guy was deliberately sabotaging anything, but that's not even the point. "Terrorism" is when you do bad things to inspire terror. Terror is a key mechanism in terrorism! If you, say, sabotage the US economy slowly by eroding investor trust over the course of months or years, that's surely harming us, but it's not terrorism!
Here's an example of some very effective terrorism: the recent "dirty bomb" thing. It's effective because the average American knows squat about radiation. Americans are so stupid that they won't buy irradiated food because they think that it's radioactive! The effect is compounded by TV "journalists" who know just as little, but are more than happy to trumpet the term "dirty bomb" over the airwaves for at least a week. And our beautiful executive branch is so eager to trumpet their success in foiling the plot that they play up the danger such a device poses in stead of spreading some usefull information about how radioactive materials work. Hello!? I bet that the actual terrorists are scratching their heads, wondering if they should retire and just let the US gov. do all their work instead.
</rant>AOL has also released betas using Gecko. The thing is that Mozilla uses the same embedding API as IE, so it's easy to switch. I really hope that AOL pushes the Netscape thing, because if IE doesn't have competition, they have no incentive to fix their non-security-related bugs and inconsistent standards support.
...the [hard drive] power cord just worked its way loose...
LOL! Just make sure that no real geeks are around, or they'll call you on the "power cord working loose" thing right away.
- Picked up an AOL CD to cover a transition period in ISPs (only two months, so the free month would get half of it for me).
- Signed up for AOL using my debit card at Bank One.
- Used AOL for two months.
- Called up and canceled AOL (and they gave me the runaround Katz described, but didn't hang up on me).
- Moved to a new city.
- Closed Bank One account and withdrew all of my money (I didn't like them much and my new job got me into a credit union that I am happy with).
Sounds like it would do the trick, doesn't it? Well, AOL conveniently 'forgot' about my cancellation and kept billing my Visa card, which didn't exist. Except Bank One reopened the account for me (aren't they nice), didn't pay AOL (there was no money), and started charging me money for being overdrawn. So AOL and Bank One both start sending harrassing letters to my old address, which I do not get for some time. When I did get the letters, I went to the local Bank One branch and tried to straighten it out. They told me I had to go to the branch where I opened the account (don't ask me why). So a few weeks later I get a chance to visit that area and I stop in to Bank One. I told them to "deny payment" on the AOL charges (one was too old, so I had to pay it - @!#@%). I payed Bank One's stupid fees and left. Boy was that a hassle!Use PNG! It's lossless and gets compression ratios that are just as good (unless you are using ultra-lossy compression with your JPEGs - in which case they will be a pain to read anyway). Why do people even use JPEG and GIF anymore? JPEG is only good if you need ultra-high compression and don't care about quality, and GIF only has the animation thing on PNGs.
Sorry about the rant, but there are so many cool computer technologies that people just overlook. It makes me sad.
In another month, the US version of the Linux kit for the Playstation 2 is coming out. It comes with a hard drive, a VGA monitor connector, a keyboard and mouse and an ethernet adaptor. I already have mine pre-ordered, and I bought the acutal console last week.
As a side note, be sure to get Grand Theft Auto 3! Oh, the carnage!