Sure Microsoft could make IE read html properly. The real issue is whether or not it could make FrontPage and Word generate proper html. I just got done a stint making pages look the same in all browsers for a company in New Jersey. IE 4 and 5 are quite forgiving about bad html. The reason is that the stuff generated in FrontPage and when you use Save as HTML... in Word 97 is absolute crap. Do you really think that MS wants to make a web browser that doesn't properly display the slop that its web editing tools create? Even their marketing couldn't gloss that over in a nice way. Anyway though, that's just my thoughts on it. -Mike
As with all good things, it's quite likely that one day the source for Linux and the source for the various BSD's will be essentially the same. There're usually a couple of good ways to do something, but one is almost always the best. And given another few years of development, the various systems will be (hopefully) using the best ways to accomplish all the needed OS tasks. Granted, I don't expect any of them to just fade away and die off, but I expect that the only real user level difference between any of these OS's will be the messages printed at boot and login. Performance and such should essentially be the same. Thoughts? -Mike
More and more people aren't really willing to pay for the games. I know I'm not. And the reason is that the games suck. I've bought maybe 5 games within the last year (4 of which were for the N64). The only computer game I actually bought was XWing Alliance, and then it was only because I really liked the XWing series as a whole, so I bought that to try it out. IMHO, it's not a bad game. Though I haven't played it in probably 5 months. The reason is because it just doesn't quite draw me in enough. I consider it one of the top games out there currently, and it just doesn't quite meet the standards I keep. Anyway, this guy has actually made money off games. He's also developing a rather nice library for cross platform development (Allegro). It'd be nice if someone had some stats as to how games sell now vs. even 2 years ago. Games are entertainment. People enjoy Minesweeper. Not because it is brutally efficient code (which somehow I don't really think it is), but because the game play draws them in. Make a game that someone can sit down and play for a while and enjoy, and you'll make money. No matter whether you use tools that are open source. That's my two cents anyway -Mike
You've got the wrong hoover. You're talking about J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, and if you're interested in the rumors around him, I suggest the following site: http://www.crimelibrary.com/hoover/hooverhomo.htm. I dug it up searching through yahoo for info about Hoover. -Mike
It seems to me that the mozilla project is managing to demonstrate something that the open source community is going to have to deal with for a long time to come (when we succeed in converting the world), which is that we write code differently than programmers squirreling away in cubicles (being one myself during the day, sadly). The code that's been locked away for so long is going to be hard to work with at best, and (in Mozilla's case) will need a near complete rewrite in order to be workable in the worst case. It can be done (check out the mozilla releases if you don't believe it), but it takes time and patience. I wouldn't be suprised to see interest in Mozilla pick up with time. And no, the article itself doesn't seem to say anything about them seriously considering killing off/altering the project. Indeed, it says that AOL hasn't really thought anything in that regards at all. Sun seems to be hinting at it, but Sun would hint at anything that they thought would give them more firepower to slay the M$ beast. If 5.0 comes out in December with all the features that have been promised, don't be suprised to see Netscape's browser share rocket up. If for no other reason than that a large amount of the browser market (something like 15%) is dictated by which browser AOL is using. It'll definitely be interesting to see where we are 2 years from now. -Mike
Re:RMS Never tried to run a company
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid you missed the point of what I was writing. The thoughts you expressed fit in with mine. Corporations, institutions, and the like are intrinsic to the economic foundations on which the modern world rests. I'm not advocating any decrease in corporate involvement, but rather I just see it as shifting to a different path. Rather than focusing on making money selling the software they write, I feel that successful companies will concentrate on support. Programmers will more likely be payed to improve free software and modify it for the corporate need, as opposed to being hired to write an entire system from scratch (unless such a system doesn't yet exist). There will always, as well, be people who program software to be sold, but I imagine that most of the software they write will be sold with a license that fits with the Open Source definition. Money is still there to be made because you (in essence) are selling support. As well, you encourage others to release their programs in this way, thereby cutting down your expenses in the long run by saving on the amount of time spent to develop software (you can just modify software that others have written). In the long run, there's more money to be made this way. I'm involved in a very large scale project myself, and understand the nature and need for a controlling body. It doesn't need to be a company (as evinced by the Linux kernel), but no matter the structure, some head always is needed in any large project. Point conceded, even though I never disagreed. -Mike
Re:RMS Never tried to run a company
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps instead of thinking about how to run the corporation of today with open source, you could start to think about how to run the corporation of tomorrow with it. Open source will eventually remove closed source software in all but specialty areas. And while I know there's debate about that all the time, in the end I firmly believe that closed source will be relegated to the occasional corner. ESR put the reasonings behind this beautifully in The Magic Cauldron. As for open source licenses, the OSI (who RMS doesn't even agree with) has "those Debian rules" as their definition of open source. The rules make sense. Trying to directly profit off of software in the future will be useless (excluding computer games, really high end/task specific apps, and other specialty stuff). Instead plan on selling support, as well as selling yourself as the original maker of the software. Businesses today and tomorrow will buy from the person who makes the software. Who could understand the program better, and thereby support it better than those who wrote it? Well, that's my point of view anyway. The future is Open Source/Free Software and I'm looking forward to it. -Mike
People who buy inexpensive copies of linux distro's generally have a good reason. Usually, a lack of money with which to purchase the full version. In the end, though, if we expect linux to really reach as high as it can, then either buying the official version of RedHat, SuSE, Caldera (or any one of the other commercial linuxs), or donating money to the Debian project, the FSF, or any other not for profit group, is in all of our best interests. Money makes the world go round these days. Just my two cents. -Mike
If you want to talk about real wealth, then Gates is a pauper. Consider JP Morgan, who together with about 4-5 other friends, bailed out the U.S. Gov't around the turn of the century with ~$60 million in gold (you might consider looking into just how much that was then). Or how about J.D. Rockefeller? He was worth more (by quite a bit) than all of the printed money in the U.S put together at his peak. These men were also capitalists on the scale that Gates could never attain (U.S. laws against monopolies were mostly crafted and put to their first large tests against these guys and their peers, not to mention the 16th amendment(woohoo income tax:) )). Look at their wealth in their day vs. Gates now and you will find that Gates just can't compare. Regardless, he is stinking rich. Though I don't think he'll get to $1 trillion. Even microsoft has to hit the ceiling eventually. -Mike
Something I don't quite understand in this argument is the assumption that linux is ready just now to be "for everyone." I'm currently running debian, and have used linux for over 2 years now, and I just don't see it as being an OS for the people. I don't feel I need to extol its virtues here, as anyone who's used it should know them, and anyone who hasn't shouldn't have an opinion about it, but part of linux is its stability, and part of linux is its raw power. Everyone likes stability. But you pay for power. And the price you pay is in user friendliness. The more powerful something is, the less likely it is that you'll be able to adapt it to common usage. There're something things about linux which could use a bit of work. One being the basic linux floppy writing system. There're ways around the ohh so easy to remember dd=if...... command, and I've tried a few and some are quite good, but standardization on one of those would be handy as a time saving feature. But it's things like that, and things like reading logs and man pages, compiling files and the kernel, and configuring X and your window manager that the average user just doesn't have the experience with or the knowledge as to how to do. It was Bill Gates himself who decided that every person needed a computer, and so to try to make linux easier that it might be installed on everyone's computer now, rather than improving the user interface over time while keeping the basic reasons that linux was created intact in the distributions, seems to me to be something we should all reconsider. A computer in every house is something that's becoming a reality, but linux in every house is something, I feel, should be a few years off at the very least. Conquering the world for linux is something I hope we one day do, but let's make sure we conquer it with the power of linux, not just the name. -Mike
Slashdot Mirror
Sure Microsoft could make IE read html properly. The real issue is whether or not it could make FrontPage and Word generate proper html. I just got done a stint making pages look the same in all browsers for a company in New Jersey. IE 4 and 5 are quite forgiving about bad html. The reason is that the stuff generated in FrontPage and when you use Save as HTML... in Word 97 is absolute crap. Do you really think that MS wants to make a web browser that doesn't properly display the slop that its web editing tools create? Even their marketing couldn't gloss that over in a nice way. Anyway though, that's just my thoughts on it.
-Mike
Yeah it does. Go to developer.netscape.com The current standard is v 1.2 I think (though maybe it's up to 1.3 now).
-Mike
As with all good things, it's quite likely that one day the source for Linux and the source for the various BSD's will be essentially the same. There're usually a couple of good ways to do something, but one is almost always the best. And given another few years of development, the various systems will be (hopefully) using the best ways to accomplish all the needed OS tasks. Granted, I don't expect any of them to just fade away and die off, but I expect that the only real user level difference between any of these OS's will be the messages printed at boot and login. Performance and such should essentially be the same. Thoughts?
-Mike
More and more people aren't really willing to pay for the games. I know I'm not. And the reason is that the games suck. I've bought maybe 5 games within the last year (4 of which were for the N64). The only computer game I actually bought was XWing Alliance, and then it was only because I really liked the XWing series as a whole, so I bought that to try it out. IMHO, it's not a bad game. Though I haven't played it in probably 5 months. The reason is because it just doesn't quite draw me in enough. I consider it one of the top games out there currently, and it just doesn't quite meet the standards I keep. Anyway, this guy has actually made money off games. He's also developing a rather nice library for cross platform development (Allegro). It'd be nice if someone had some stats as to how games sell now vs. even 2 years ago. Games are entertainment. People enjoy Minesweeper. Not because it is brutally efficient code (which somehow I don't really think it is), but because the game play draws them in. Make a game that someone can sit down and play for a while and enjoy, and you'll make money. No matter whether you use tools that are open source. That's my two cents anyway
-Mike
You've got the wrong hoover. You're talking about J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, and if you're interested in the rumors around him, I suggest the following site: http://www.crimelibrary.com/hoover /hooverhomo.htm. I dug it up searching through yahoo for info about Hoover. -Mike
It seems to me that the mozilla project is managing to demonstrate something that the open source community is going to have to deal with for a long time to come (when we succeed in converting the world), which is that we write code differently than programmers squirreling away in cubicles (being one myself during the day, sadly). The code that's been locked away for so long is going to be hard to work with at best, and (in Mozilla's case) will need a near complete rewrite in order to be workable in the worst case. It can be done (check out the mozilla releases if you don't believe it), but it takes time and patience. I wouldn't be suprised to see interest in Mozilla pick up with time. And no, the article itself doesn't seem to say anything about them seriously considering killing off/altering the project. Indeed, it says that AOL hasn't really thought anything in that regards at all. Sun seems to be hinting at it, but Sun would hint at anything that they thought would give them more firepower to slay the M$ beast. If 5.0 comes out in December with all the features that have been promised, don't be suprised to see Netscape's browser share rocket up. If for no other reason than that a large amount of the browser market (something like 15%) is dictated by which browser AOL is using. It'll definitely be interesting to see where we are 2 years from now.
-Mike
I'm afraid you missed the point of what I was writing. The thoughts you expressed fit in with mine. Corporations, institutions, and the like are intrinsic to the economic foundations on which the modern world rests. I'm not advocating any decrease in corporate involvement, but rather I just see it as shifting to a different path. Rather than focusing on making money selling the software they write, I feel that successful companies will concentrate on support. Programmers will more likely be payed to improve free software and modify it for the corporate need, as opposed to being hired to write an entire system from scratch (unless such a system doesn't yet exist). There will always, as well, be people who program software to be sold, but I imagine that most of the software they write will be sold with a license that fits with the Open Source definition. Money is still there to be made because you (in essence) are selling support. As well, you encourage others to release their programs in this way, thereby cutting down your expenses in the long run by saving on the amount of time spent to develop software (you can just modify software that others have written). In the long run, there's more money to be made this way. I'm involved in a very large scale project myself, and understand the nature and need for a controlling body. It doesn't need to be a company (as evinced by the Linux kernel), but no matter the structure, some head always is needed in any large project. Point conceded, even though I never disagreed.
-Mike
Perhaps instead of thinking about how to run the corporation of today with open source, you could start to think about how to run the corporation of tomorrow with it. Open source will eventually remove closed source software in all but specialty areas. And while I know there's debate about that all the time, in the end I firmly believe that closed source will be relegated to the occasional corner. ESR put the reasonings behind this beautifully in The Magic Cauldron. As for open source licenses, the OSI (who RMS doesn't even agree with) has "those Debian rules" as their definition of open source. The rules make sense. Trying to directly profit off of software in the future will be useless (excluding computer games, really high end/task specific apps, and other specialty stuff). Instead plan on selling support, as well as selling yourself as the original maker of the software. Businesses today and tomorrow will buy from the person who makes the software. Who could understand the program better, and thereby support it better than those who wrote it? Well, that's my point of view anyway. The future is Open Source/Free Software and I'm looking forward to it. -Mike
People who buy inexpensive copies of linux distro's generally have a good reason. Usually, a lack of money with which to purchase the full version. In the end, though, if we expect linux to really reach as high as it can, then either buying the official version of RedHat, SuSE, Caldera (or any one of the other commercial linuxs), or donating money to the Debian project, the FSF, or any other not for profit group, is in all of our best interests. Money makes the world go round these days. Just my two cents.
-Mike
If you want to talk about real wealth, then Gates is a pauper. Consider JP Morgan, who together with about 4-5 other friends, bailed out the U.S. Gov't around the turn of the century with ~$60 million in gold (you might consider looking into just how much that was then). Or how about J.D. Rockefeller? He was worth more (by quite a bit) than all of the printed money in the U.S put together at his peak. These men were also capitalists on the scale that Gates could never attain (U.S. laws against monopolies were mostly crafted and put to their first large tests against these guys and their peers, not to mention the 16th amendment(woohoo income tax :) )). Look at their wealth in their day vs. Gates now and you will find that Gates just can't compare. Regardless, he is stinking rich. Though I don't think he'll get to $1 trillion. Even microsoft has to hit the ceiling eventually.
-Mike
Something I don't quite understand in this argument is the assumption that linux is ready just now to be "for everyone." I'm currently running debian, and have used linux for over 2 years now, and I just don't see it as being an OS for the people. I don't feel I need to extol its virtues here, as anyone who's used it should know them, and anyone who hasn't shouldn't have an opinion about it, but part of linux is its stability, and part of linux is its raw power. Everyone likes stability. But you pay for power. And the price you pay is in user friendliness. The more powerful something is, the less likely it is that you'll be able to adapt it to common usage. There're something things about linux which could use a bit of work. One being the basic linux floppy writing system. There're ways around the ohh so easy to remember dd=if...... command, and I've tried a few and some are quite good, but standardization on one of those would be handy as a time saving feature. But it's things like that, and things like reading logs and man pages, compiling files and the kernel, and configuring X and your window manager that the average user just doesn't have the experience with or the knowledge as to how to do. It was Bill Gates himself who decided that every person needed a computer, and so to try to make linux easier that it might be installed on everyone's computer now, rather than improving the user interface over time while keeping the basic reasons that linux was created intact in the distributions, seems to me to be something we should all reconsider. A computer in every house is something that's becoming a reality, but linux in every house is something, I feel, should be a few years off at the very least. Conquering the world for linux is something I hope we one day do, but let's make sure we conquer it with the power of linux, not just the name.
-Mike