The key is that the FOSS system, because all the internals are exposed, is broken up into a vast array of separately manageable chunks. Each chunk looks relatively maintainable, but the whole system (that's Linux, GNU tools, X11, toolkits such as QT and GTK+, backend stuff like HAL and DBUS, libraries for this and that small function (zlib, jpeg handling, ffts, etc.), and then the new stuff coming in like Cairo; the list goes on) is huge and is unwieldy if someone is trying to maintain it as monolithic whole. The GP's point is that FOSS allows you to open it up and not maintain it as a whole, and as the whole system gets more complex, the more appealing it is to open it up and farm it out as FOSS does.
Of course, GGP misses the point that as soon as you stop maintaining it as a whole, you end up with something that looks like a patchwork quilt and is generally less usable than their more coherent brethren.
Vista is just as "modular" as, say, Ubuntu. The difference is that only Microsoft gets to work with it on a "modules" level.
Instead of using a sensor in the ball, why not makes the lines sensitive? A touch-sensitive line could detect the impact of the ball.
Probably because it would require making the line out of a different material to the rest of the court. Since, in tennis, "on the line is in", this would meet different parts of the court had a different surface.
You see, even if you ignore the fact that to a person of 2000 years ago the "whole world" was normally just his own place and a few places nearby, a "global flood" would be impossible : where would, in the case of a global rising of the water, all that water have come from and than gone to ?
Indeed, it's a myth without the slightest shred of credible evidence to back it up.
"DOS ain't done until Lotus does run" would be a more accurate reflection of reality.
Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.
Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses". It is completely normal in any non-trivial piece of software.
You're also forgetting that BUNDLING was what got IE the marketshare they needed to make it the worst web browser on Earth.
No, it wasn't. IE won its marketshare fair and square by being a better browser than the primary competitor.
You can see this, because Navigator's slide started immediately after the release of IE4, but before the release of Windows 98 - and it was at a minority share long before Windows 98 had seriously displaced Windows 95.
Or, to put it another way, IE displaced Navigator because people consciously chose to use it instead of Navigator, not not because it was "integrated" into Windows.
Well, it was only in a beta, not the final release. But yes, they definitely did do that.
Even in the beta, it didn't _break_, it was just a warning displayed during setup (ie: you could still run the Windows beta on DR-DOS).
Further, the warning itself is completely reasonable. Windows 3.x messes with and relies on certain internal structures of DOS, and the differences between MS-DOS and DR-DOS could, quite reasonably, break things (and sometimes did with various programs, as any DR-DOS user should remember).
The only real mystery about the whole thing is why the AARD code - making a perfectly reasonably, understandable and responsible check for system compatibility - was obfuscated.
You do know that once upon a time they did just that? There was a saying that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run".
No, they did not, and I challenge you to find a single shred of credible evidence to support this myth.
The very idea of an OS vendor deliberately breaking the one application 90% of their customers want to run is simply laughable.
Back when Lotus 1-2-3 was MS' biggest software competitor, every new version of DOS would have some "feature" that would cause Lotus 1-2-3 to "break".
Multiplan was never a big competitor for 1-2-3. Again, the idea that Microsoft would deliberately break it is just stupid.
However, since you seem so convinced that "every new version of DOS [would break 1-2-3]", you shouldn't have any trouble whatsoever coming up with some documentation of which versions of DOS broke which versions of 1-2-3.
Adults should be smart enough to know that hot liquids are dangerous.
Adults are. But there's a difference between "ow, that's hot" hot and "in hospital for weeks" hot.
OK, maybe the coffee was TOO hot, but do we really need warning labels on all hot liquid containers?
You do when it's non-obvious and going to cause that sort of damage, yes.
Do we also need lighter to warn not to hold your hand in the flame?
The situation is more like selling lighters that look normal but shoot out a 2' long flame - in which case, yes, they damn well should come with a warning.
Do you honestly feel the minor "restriction" (more accurately a simple and easily fulfilled obligation) to not withhold what was freely shared to you [...]
But that's not what the GPL is about. The GPL is about sharing what was given to you and anything you've done as well that might be (by a ridiculously broad brush) considered a "derivative work".
You license something under the GPL when you want to influence what other people can do with their code. If all you want to do is keep your code "free", then the BSDL does just as good a job.
In terms of the freedom of all users as a collective, rather than just the subset of users that want to insert DRM to restrict the freedom of all users, there is no Freer licence than the GPL. Having a set of rules to ensure freedom is a hell of a lot freer than a total absence of rules.
The "freedom from" argument can be used to justify pretty much anything. You just need to pick your pet cause that "people" must have the "freedom from" being subjected to.
take the example of the US constitution - what's freer - that set of "restrictions" or a total anarchy?
To use but one obvious example, the US consitution does not offer people the "freedom from" hate speech. Ergo, a Constituation that outlawed hate speech would be "freer" because of that.
You get paid more with more responsibility, not just more work.
Yet how often do CEOs take responsibility when things go bad ? Very infrequently, unless you consider "golden parachute" and "responsibility" to be synonyms.
The biggest "responsibility" a CEO has is deciding who to point the finger at.
If giving CEOs a bigger cut of the profits produces incentive for the CEO to increase earnings, it's just good business to give them a bigger cut.
What evidence is there that this holds true ? Hell, why does a CEO - someone utterly irrelevant to the day-to-day functioning of a company - even deserve to be considered so important ?
The first point I know - I find it strange that MS can turn a profit on Windows, but Apple can't.
Because OS X isn't better enough (and lacks the application library) to cause the mass migration that would be necessary for Apple to have sufficient volume.
There is also the rather significant point that Apple simply isn't interested in being a player in that market. Whether or not they could make the transition is completely nullified by the fact they don't want to (in particular, Steve Jobs has zero interest in the "commoner's market" of Windows).
If beOS had made it stable, and they had better business acumen, do you think they would have managed to find themselves able to really offer consumers a choice in the desktop world?
If I could make those sort of predictions with any meaningful accuracy, I'd be laid back on a beach somewhere with a cocktail, not posting on Slashdot.
Seriously. There are *way* too many "what if" possibilities there to even consider trying to make a comment.
What other products in the world have this kind of competitive disparity in the marketplace?
Photoshop ? (I have no idea of Photoshop's marketshare, I'm just throwing out a name I know to be basically synonymous with a certain part of the market).
Why is a country that is so about the entrepreneur and competition so quick to denounce the demise of new commercial oses as simply pure incompetence.
Because, thus far, it's basically been true. The last time there was a serious alternative to Windows on generic x86 was OS/2, and that was largely killed by a combination of incompetence, bad business and lack of interest on behalf of IBM. BeOS, for all the good press it gets here (and a certain amount of technological impressiveness) was nowhere near as mature or marketable as OS/2 was, back when OS/2 was an option.
It was shown to the courts, and they ruled it true, that Microsoft had a hidden API that they used for their internal divisions, and a less functional API that they published.
What functionality was missing ? What things could only Microsoft programs do ?
Please. Do your own research.
I have. I see no evidence that Microsoft's developers use undocumented APIs any differently to third-party developers, nor that they gain any amazing advantages from them.
The idea that Microsoft is this one single entity working together is ludicrous.
Don't you wonder why if Apple decided to sell OSX in retail to run on beige x86 boxes, they'd go out of business? Is it because OSX sucks? Or is it because the consumer chooses windows?
No, it's because Apple makes all their money on hardware. When OS X is available for normal PCs and all those Mac sales dry up, they'll be in trouble (like they were last time they tried it).
In some alternate reality, where MS competed rather than monopolized, a lot of folks are running beOS...
BeOS would have had a lot more success if it had gotten past the beta stage. You might also want to look into the part Apple played in its demise.
An entirely new and revolutionary computing paradigm cannot be described as a new "look and feel".
MacOS was not "an entirely new and revolutionary computing paradigm".
You do make my point quite well, however, and presumably quite accidentally. When someone steals such a new paradigm as the GUI was at the time, and the lawyers have to file a lawsuit complaining about "look and feel" because they couldn't possibly make a case about pardigm abduction, this is the prima facie evidence that the courts were ill-equipped to remedy the agregious criminal behavior of Bill Gates.
Given the significant functional differences between the Windows and MacOS GUI - in both "look" and "feel" - (the only things they have in common are, basically, the same things all GUIs have in common) nothing more was "stolen" past the (very) broad concept of a WIMP GUI. Which is why the whole thing was so ridiculous. It would be like Bon Jovi sueing Guns & Roses because they were both rock bands and had the same (paraphrasing) "sound and feel".
Microsoft came to dominance by sabotaging the API so that its competitors did not have a good API to use, and its internal divisions for Excel and Word had a secret API that worked well. This is monopolistic behavior.
So you're suggesting no-one except Microsoft was able to write fully functional Windows applications ?
Before we weep too much over Windows and their government overlords we should mourn all the good startups that were crushed by unfair competition from MS. Of course Netscape comes to mind but it isn't the only one.
And by "crushed" in this example you mean "squarely beaten by a better product after completely and utterly dropping the ball", right ?
Slashdot Mirror
The key is that the FOSS system, because all the internals are exposed, is broken up into a vast array of separately manageable chunks. Each chunk looks relatively maintainable, but the whole system (that's Linux, GNU tools, X11, toolkits such as QT and GTK+, backend stuff like HAL and DBUS, libraries for this and that small function (zlib, jpeg handling, ffts, etc.), and then the new stuff coming in like Cairo; the list goes on) is huge and is unwieldy if someone is trying to maintain it as monolithic whole. The GP's point is that FOSS allows you to open it up and not maintain it as a whole, and as the whole system gets more complex, the more appealing it is to open it up and farm it out as FOSS does.
Of course, GGP misses the point that as soon as you stop maintaining it as a whole, you end up with something that looks like a patchwork quilt and is generally less usable than their more coherent brethren.
Vista is just as "modular" as, say, Ubuntu. The difference is that only Microsoft gets to work with it on a "modules" level.
And try to remember that the people who work at Microsoft (or anywhere else) are not the same people working there 10 years ago.
Further, try to remember that not everyone working at Microsoft has the same opinions. Yes, this includes everyone, from CxOs on down.
Just because some Christians (albeit a very vocal group) seem to fear science/reason, doesn't mean that all Christians do [...]
Christianity requires you to believe in "god", for which irrationality and a lack of adherence to the scientific method are pretty much prerequisites.
I'm really surprised that Apple hasn't got a better solution for OS X too.
It's a long, long way out of any market Apple has interest in.
Instead of using a sensor in the ball, why not makes the lines sensitive? A touch-sensitive line could detect the impact of the ball.
Probably because it would require making the line out of a different material to the rest of the court. Since, in tennis, "on the line is in", this would meet different parts of the court had a different surface.
You see, even if you ignore the fact that to a person of 2000 years ago the "whole world" was normally just his own place and a few places nearby, a "global flood" would be impossible : where would, in the case of a global rising of the water, all that water have come from and than gone to ?
Ice.
[...] (and personally, I have yet to see one FF addon that excites me)
SessionSaver.
Remember "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? That's not apocryphal.
Indeed, it's a myth without the slightest shred of credible evidence to back it up.
"DOS ain't done until Lotus does run" would be a more accurate reflection of reality.
Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.
Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses". It is completely normal in any non-trivial piece of software.
You're also forgetting that BUNDLING was what got IE the marketshare they needed to make it the worst web browser on Earth.
No, it wasn't. IE won its marketshare fair and square by being a better browser than the primary competitor.
You can see this, because Navigator's slide started immediately after the release of IE4, but before the release of Windows 98 - and it was at a minority share long before Windows 98 had seriously displaced Windows 95.
Or, to put it another way, IE displaced Navigator because people consciously chose to use it instead of Navigator, not not because it was "integrated" into Windows.
Well, it was only in a beta, not the final release. But yes, they definitely did do that.
Even in the beta, it didn't _break_, it was just a warning displayed during setup (ie: you could still run the Windows beta on DR-DOS).
Further, the warning itself is completely reasonable. Windows 3.x messes with and relies on certain internal structures of DOS, and the differences between MS-DOS and DR-DOS could, quite reasonably, break things (and sometimes did with various programs, as any DR-DOS user should remember).
The only real mystery about the whole thing is why the AARD code - making a perfectly reasonably, understandable and responsible check for system compatibility - was obfuscated.
You do know that once upon a time they did just that? There was a saying that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run".
No, they did not, and I challenge you to find a single shred of credible evidence to support this myth.
The very idea of an OS vendor deliberately breaking the one application 90% of their customers want to run is simply laughable.
Back when Lotus 1-2-3 was MS' biggest software competitor, every new version of DOS would have some "feature" that would cause Lotus 1-2-3 to "break".
Multiplan was never a big competitor for 1-2-3. Again, the idea that Microsoft would deliberately break it is just stupid.
However, since you seem so convinced that "every new version of DOS [would break 1-2-3]", you shouldn't have any trouble whatsoever coming up with some documentation of which versions of DOS broke which versions of 1-2-3.
In which case, why do they breed, and subject their children to the same misery?
Same reason most people the world over have children when they shouldn't the. Lack of education and contraceptive options.
(Thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Catholic Church and their morally bankrupt views on birth control.)
Adults should be smart enough to know that hot liquids are dangerous.
Adults are. But there's a difference between "ow, that's hot" hot and "in hospital for weeks" hot.
OK, maybe the coffee was TOO hot, but do we really need warning labels on all hot liquid containers?
You do when it's non-obvious and going to cause that sort of damage, yes.
Do we also need lighter to warn not to hold your hand in the flame?
The situation is more like selling lighters that look normal but shoot out a 2' long flame - in which case, yes, they damn well should come with a warning.
Do you honestly feel the minor "restriction" (more accurately a simple and easily fulfilled obligation) to not withhold what was freely shared to you [...]
But that's not what the GPL is about. The GPL is about sharing what was given to you and anything you've done as well that might be (by a ridiculously broad brush) considered a "derivative work".
You license something under the GPL when you want to influence what other people can do with their code. If all you want to do is keep your code "free", then the BSDL does just as good a job.
In terms of the freedom of all users as a collective, rather than just the subset of users that want to insert DRM to restrict the freedom of all users, there is no Freer licence than the GPL. Having a set of rules to ensure freedom is a hell of a lot freer than a total absence of rules.
The "freedom from" argument can be used to justify pretty much anything. You just need to pick your pet cause that "people" must have the "freedom from" being subjected to.
take the example of the US constitution - what's freer - that set of "restrictions" or a total anarchy?
To use but one obvious example, the US consitution does not offer people the "freedom from" hate speech. Ergo, a Constituation that outlawed hate speech would be "freer" because of that.
I do curse the UI team for removing features I deem necessary and adding meaningless clutter, but I haven't seen any crashes or stability issues.
What was removed ?
(Genuinely curious. I haven't used Vista a lot, but I haven't found anything _missing_ (different, yes).)
You get paid more with more responsibility, not just more work.
Yet how often do CEOs take responsibility when things go bad ? Very infrequently, unless you consider "golden parachute" and "responsibility" to be synonyms.
The biggest "responsibility" a CEO has is deciding who to point the finger at.
If giving CEOs a bigger cut of the profits produces incentive for the CEO to increase earnings, it's just good business to give them a bigger cut.
What evidence is there that this holds true ? Hell, why does a CEO - someone utterly irrelevant to the day-to-day functioning of a company - even deserve to be considered so important ?
The first point I know - I find it strange that MS can turn a profit on Windows, but Apple can't.
Because OS X isn't better enough (and lacks the application library) to cause the mass migration that would be necessary for Apple to have sufficient volume.
There is also the rather significant point that Apple simply isn't interested in being a player in that market. Whether or not they could make the transition is completely nullified by the fact they don't want to (in particular, Steve Jobs has zero interest in the "commoner's market" of Windows).
If beOS had made it stable, and they had better business acumen, do you think they would have managed to find themselves able to really offer consumers a choice in the desktop world?
If I could make those sort of predictions with any meaningful accuracy, I'd be laid back on a beach somewhere with a cocktail, not posting on Slashdot.
Seriously. There are *way* too many "what if" possibilities there to even consider trying to make a comment.
What other products in the world have this kind of competitive disparity in the marketplace?
Photoshop ? (I have no idea of Photoshop's marketshare, I'm just throwing out a name I know to be basically synonymous with a certain part of the market).
Why is a country that is so about the entrepreneur and competition so quick to denounce the demise of new commercial oses as simply pure incompetence.
Because, thus far, it's basically been true. The last time there was a serious alternative to Windows on generic x86 was OS/2, and that was largely killed by a combination of incompetence, bad business and lack of interest on behalf of IBM. BeOS, for all the good press it gets here (and a certain amount of technological impressiveness) was nowhere near as mature or marketable as OS/2 was, back when OS/2 was an option.
Yes.
So you would subsequently argue that no-one makes better Windows applications than Microsoft, because it's impossible ?
It was shown to the courts, and they ruled it true, that Microsoft had a hidden API that they used for their internal divisions, and a less functional API that they published.
What functionality was missing ? What things could only Microsoft programs do ?
Please. Do your own research.
I have. I see no evidence that Microsoft's developers use undocumented APIs any differently to third-party developers, nor that they gain any amazing advantages from them.
The idea that Microsoft is this one single entity working together is ludicrous.
yeah it had nothing to do with MS hastling distributors. nothing at all to do with that right...
Nowhere near as much as it had to do with the unmitigated sucktitude of Navigator 4.
Don't you wonder why if Apple decided to sell OSX in retail to run on beige x86 boxes, they'd go out of business? Is it because OSX sucks? Or is it because the consumer chooses windows?
No, it's because Apple makes all their money on hardware. When OS X is available for normal PCs and all those Mac sales dry up, they'll be in trouble (like they were last time they tried it).
In some alternate reality, where MS competed rather than monopolized, a lot of folks are running beOS ...
BeOS would have had a lot more success if it had gotten past the beta stage. You might also want to look into the part Apple played in its demise.
An entirely new and revolutionary computing paradigm cannot be described as a new "look and feel".
MacOS was not "an entirely new and revolutionary computing paradigm".
You do make my point quite well, however, and presumably quite accidentally. When someone steals such a new paradigm as the GUI was at the time, and the lawyers have to file a lawsuit complaining about "look and feel" because they couldn't possibly make a case about pardigm abduction, this is the prima facie evidence that the courts were ill-equipped to remedy the agregious criminal behavior of Bill Gates.
Given the significant functional differences between the Windows and MacOS GUI - in both "look" and "feel" - (the only things they have in common are, basically, the same things all GUIs have in common) nothing more was "stolen" past the (very) broad concept of a WIMP GUI. Which is why the whole thing was so ridiculous. It would be like Bon Jovi sueing Guns & Roses because they were both rock bands and had the same (paraphrasing) "sound and feel".
Microsoft came to dominance by sabotaging the API so that its competitors did not have a good API to use, and its internal divisions for Excel and Word had a secret API that worked well. This is monopolistic behavior.
So you're suggesting no-one except Microsoft was able to write fully functional Windows applications ?
Before we weep too much over Windows and their government overlords we should mourn all the good startups that were crushed by unfair competition from MS. Of course Netscape comes to mind but it isn't the only one.
And by "crushed" in this example you mean "squarely beaten by a better product after completely and utterly dropping the ball", right ?
[...]
And if you say popular usage has changed that, I say, fuck popular usage!
[...]
Leave this tired phrase alone; it has lost its usefulness.
Good thing you didn't have anything to say about hypocrisy !