TUX appears to me to be rather specialized, eg. if you own a web server, eventually you'll use TUX; if you also serve web pages, you probably won't, just because you don't need to.
Do you see TUX as indicative of a growing realization that general purpose computing might not be perfect for everything? More specifically, do you see it as part of a movement towards more specialize hardware and software? For instance, why should a web server run the same kernel as a workstation, and why should the be built of the same parts?
www.ini.cmu.edu/eclub is an all Java suite of telephony stuff developed by students at CMU as a masters thesis in the Information Networking Institute. Take a look.
For an analagous example, why aren't PowerPC chips more popular than the x86 variety? Or Alphas? Or UltraSparcs? Because even while those chips offer the superior performance that the consumer desires (hey, the better FP and IO performance, the more frames you get in Quake3A), the market dictates that the money is in incremental performance increases on the current standard.
Suppose you offered a consumer PC, complete with all the requisite software, but it was decidedly not Wintel compliant. Surely the more adventurous nerds would buy (Linux on PPC, anyone?), but the vast majority of the population would need significant insentive, like the dog can figure it out (eg. MacOS).
In the same way, any innovation in user interface is stunted because now that we've spent so much time teaching people the Wintel Compliant way of doing things, any deviation is unacceptable. That interface might actually me more intuitive, easier to use, more efficient, but because its deviant, it has a learning curve, and the vast majority of people are so afraid of their computers that any change is really an unrealistic request.
Sparc's aren't slow. The whole point of the Sparc architecture is throughput, not latency, which you need if you're running a transaction server, not a PC or doing realtime 3d stuff. Sparcs sacrifice sum spec98{int,fp} but the boards they get plugged into are designed with I/O in mind, which is why people buy them.
I used to be one of those people in favor of chucking x86 right out the window, especially after spending a few days writing assembly for the godforsaken architecture. And then I realized something: investment counts. Think of all of the hundreds of millions of man hours spent on developing software for x86. Think of all of the hours just for the Linux kernel alone. That's wh people want an upgrade path that's a little easier than saying rewrite/recompile your software for PPC/Alpha/Sparc/Itanium. And why I'm so happy that AMD is following this path.
the music still belongs to them. No matter how justified you are in doing whatever the hell you want in your mind, it still belongs to them.
No matter how self-righteously indignant you can make yourself, its still belongs to them.
How you justify the idea that pirating music really isn't pirating music, and that you somehow have a "right" to download it without ever making any pretense of purchasing it, is really amusing.
Before the beginning of this century, the general feeling in the scientific community was that humans would shortly posess all the knowledge of nature and the means by which to control it in a finite period of time. Science would merely be assigned the job of filling in the small holes in our knowledge. At the dawn of this century that optimism was destroyed by things like general relativity, and later, genetics, that proved the world was infinitely more complex than we had any ability to understood.
Here we sit, content in our inevitable ability to accomplish whatever we choose in some finite period of time, convinced that we posess adequate knowledge to do almost anything, or that this knowledge will quickly be gained, when in reality, our children will look at us with that same bewilderment about our udder backwardness that we see our parents with. The tech press allows us to brandish our pathetic understanding of their science, as if we actually understand, and then to feel an amazing sense of pious condescesion about the inevitable march of science, that we don't understand, despite the fact that, like out greatgrandparents, we don't have any conception of the breadth and depth of the universe.
We act as though organizing the DNA of an amoeba is the seminal accomplishment of the history of the universe because we assume that if we can prove our abilities for small cases of n and the ones that follow, then all cases are proven, asserting our godliness. How can there be religion if we have the power of God? In reality, we know little of what the universe holds for us, and all of that knowledge, all of those abilities, would not be communsurate with understanding or obtaining its creation.
What we fail to understand is that as Christians understand our creation "in his image," we are allowed to understand, and to imitate, and possibly even encouraged to master the world that God gave us, yet we are also called to be stewards of it, and to care for it. That we understand a small pittance of God's thoughts at creation is not so entirely remarkable, and does not give us the power of a god.
Now, I realize that this may go against all of the established dogma of the nerd world, but open your minds just a crack and you'll totally understand the SCSL.
Lets suppose that a company exists that can only differentiate itself from its competitors by the intellectual property in its software. While its hardware and service are good, they aren't overwhelmingly compelling, and the only way they can make money is to sell software because its good software and people use it.
Now, why would that company open source its products? So that someone else can use their intellectual property to improve their products? Not a compelling business model. But what if they just want to lower the barriers to liscencing their code to third party software developers? They could create a psuedo-open liscence that allows people to see why they should liscence the code for commercial products, and they make it easier for people to get started. The company makes money when the liscencees turn out finished products.
Sun doesn't want to open source their code. And they won't. They want people to build products using their intellectual property, and then pay them for it. In a tech world where it makes more sense to liscence a piece of the puzzle instead of doing your own, Sun is trying to get in on the sale of IP thing.
Not all software needs to be GPLed. And Sun doesn't think theirs should be. The think you should have the right to admire, use, and then pay for it so that they can feed their families, too.
Remember the cell phone brain cancer scare? I didn't have one then, but I do now. And I keep it in my pocket all day. So where am I gonna get cancer? And what other damage is this going to do to "important parts" down there?
The real problem is faster printers, and cheaper printers too. Before, when the printer were slow, you carefully considered what to print out. Now that there's no penalty, you can just print it out. Andrew Gardner
In undergrad, you're expected to just learn to do something, but in grad school, you're likely to do some research, and you're expected to contribute something new to the sum total of human knowledge. I say go somewhere that the research interests you.
That, and CMU rules. Actually, the CS school. if top notch. Sorry for the shameless plug. You should really also consider the city, ie whether or not you're going to hate living there.
YAKC -- Yet Another Katz Complaint. Let's see, do we have the prerequisite reference to censorship? Yes. Letters from disgruntled teenagers? Yes. Abundant references to Nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR in the comments? Yes. Reduction of religious people to blathering buffoons for thinking softcore porn isn't a fundamental right? Yes.
The more of these Voices from the whatever there are, the more that they show their true character. Is it irritating that some people were denied entrace to the movie? Certainly. Have they been denied some sort of fundamental right? No.
The response to this is totally out of proportion to the severity of the situation. Being denied or inconvenienced in viewing movies that are at best mildly entertaining soft core pornography or full of racial humor is not so great an evil that the nerd community should rally around the so called "oppressed." To other commenters, its not Nazi Germany. Get over yourselves.
Oh, the horror, the horror. Small children prevented seeing from South Park! Parents inconvenienced in their holy task of polluting their children's minds with racial humor and foul language! We can't stand for this! Forget human rights like freedom of speech, expression or religion; forget the starving, oppressed, war weary men, women, and children of this planet; forget the basic rights refused politcal prisoners in Sudan or in China. Forget all of the important things happening in the world today, cause you can't see South Park. Your fundmental human right to 50 foot genitals and racial humor that no one can excuse, your fundamental right to pornography has been abridged.
In all my life, I have never heard complaining so unfounded, so patently ridiculous. I have never heard anyone expend so much effort, so much ridiculous effort, over something so tivial. You are bemoaning the reactionism of a frightened, ill-informed populace, the results of which are inconvenience at worst. Grow up.
Biodiversity requires more than a few birds. The problem with maintaining current populations of endangered species is that there isn't enough diversity in only a few animals to maintain a species without the development of disease and disability brought on through inbreeding. Without some variety, and quite a bit of it, the species won't survive.
Sometimes I think slashdot readers are like Pittsburgh football fans -- it doesn't matter whether they win or lose, they complain afterwards.
So an article written by stock market analyst with presumably no technical background comes close to being a reasonable interpretation of the truth. Factually not entirely correct, but the difference between the truth and his version of the story is only wide enough to cram a couple of 14 year old script kiddies in.
In a non-technical article, a non-technical writer managed to adequately and intelligently discuss both Windows2000 and Linux, without bowing to almost any FUD. There was no "Windows is so easy to use" or "The command line is scary." There was no "Linux is so hard to install" or "There are no applications for Linux." He managed to avoid the most oft-repeated, mind numbing FUDs, and you still complain.
I just don't get it. Be happy that for once, someone without any techincal credentials almost got it right. That means we're starting to win a couple of battles.
This is to prevent children from accessing pornography at public libraries that recieve federal funding, and frankly, I'm all for it. This doesn't prevent adults anywhere from getting their porn, so I don't think there is anything to worry about.
So, everyone wondered what religious people might think about this, and while I certainly can't speak for all of them, I'll speak for myself. I find this intensely frightening.
The problem is that this is another in a growing line of medical-ethical questions whose biggest problem is the "at what cost" factor. No one would argue that using this technology to grow tissues for a burn victim from his own skin, or any miriad of similar situations. The part that is of concern is the abuse of the technology.
Some situations: We all remember the frogs with no central nervous systems? Human organs on demand when combined with this technology, and don't tell me you don't think someone will try. Labor pool too small? Human workers on demand. Combined with some fancy genetics, human workers that won't mind being abused as slaves. I suppose some of you have read A Brave New World, so the notion of humans grown by the government isn't really new.
I don't fear new technology, but I do fear the misuse of it. I fear the degradation of human beings grown in labs, and I fear the abuse of life itself for the benefit of a certain few.
My roommate has used NetObjects Fusion for a while, and I will willingly admit to messing around on his mac to play with it. I've also used FrontPage, which irritates me a great deal, partly because its interface doesn't jive with how I think.
The real big issue for me is that while tools in this category are all okay, you won't get better html, cgi, or java than that written by hard working nerds in cubicles. It'll likely be faster and smaller, if you get good nerds. My personal favorite is emacs, but then again, I don't maintain large corporate websites.
Assigning the blame for this situation to mean jocks and uncaring teachers in the public school system is just as specious as blaming it on quake. We can not say that because our situations are difficult that we are not responsible for being evil. Those acts were a choice, and any statement that detracts from the fact that it was a choice is ridiculous.
American culture fosters a environment in which violence and sexuality are the two biggest concerns, and where personal immediate self gratification is the lowest common denominator to which we stoop. That's the reason those children went on a murderous rampage, because we taught them violence and hate, and then no one (like their parents) was there to tell them otherwise. ABC radio news is now reporting (minutes ago) that these kids kept a year long diary of their daily attempts to acquire weapons and planned on highjacking an airliner if they got out of the high school alive (where they planned to kill 500 people, apparently).
I'm always amused at how people have been confused into thinking that typing commands is evil. Which is easier? Searching through menus and looking for icons, or just typing "netscape&"?
People are so afraid of anything that isn't point and click, even when point and click isn't faster or easier.
JWZ can not be alone in his feelings of frustration with the mozilla project. I feel some of the same frustrations, but as someone who tried to help contribute at the very start, but was turned off by the absolute jungle of code that was first release, not as an insider. However, beyond that, there is a more important question.
Where next? If we resign ourselves to the idea that Mozilla as a project is heading down hill and that Netscape the Browser is heading toward insignificance, where does that leave the nerd community, those of us (the majority of slashdotters) who don't use a platform that IE is available on, and wouldn't use IE for moral reasons anyway? Where do we go?
Honestly, this can do one of two things for the Mozilla Project. You can take it as a stab in the heart, a loss of a major resource, and proof positive that you're in trouble. Or, you can take it as a sign that the project needs to be reinvigorated, that everyone should take a couple of days off and find that spirit that made Netscape such a cool company and a terrific product. That's really what JWZ misses, the spirit of a company on the move, on the cutting edge, the urgency of getting a good product out.
Open source or almost open source projects can fail, but seeing as how the nerd community has very few other options, this one needs to be a success.
All of what Katz said goes straight to the point about the difference between Microsoft and the rest of the technical world.
No one is passionate about Microsoft. Bill Gates is just freigtened that his reign might one day end. No one feels great allegience to any of his products. No one is thrilled about IIS or Exchange. No one lives or dies by Expedia, or WinCE, or IE or media player.
But, people live and die by the Linux kernel, their distro, any of the BSDs, there favorite UNIX. People literally live and die over KDE and GNOME. And that's good. That's why we're different. We have a passion with what we do, not just a fleeting whimsical notion that this stuff is nifty.
The reason that Gate's writing is so bland is because he has nothing new to talk about. The only thing to be done now is to design, to code, to build that future of networked devices, of improved user interfaces, or enhanced electronic services. There's no need to talk or to write or to type anymore, just more code to written, more chips to model, and more designs to be made.
Releasing windows source will not solve its problems. The greatest fault that windows carries is its baggage of interfaces and APIs. There are so many that its impossible to make a new one, or improve on a current one without breaking a myriad of other Microsoft products, let alone anyone elses.
Microsoft won't release its source, and even if it did, there would be no point. No one in the nerd community wants to improve the Windows code base because its dirty, ethically and code-wise. No one who codes for Apache, or GNOME, or Wine, or the Linux kernel is going to all of a sudden drop what they're doing to help out Bill. Seeing as how there is a finite supply of nerds who are qualified to do this type of work, I think that Windows wouldn't get much help.
Microsoft's monopoly has nothing to do with Windows, IE, Office, Media Player, IIS, Visual C++, or any single product. Microsoft has established a monopoly by being able to code, feature bloat, and market anything they want, and to buy any software startup that doesn't open its source. The only way to stop Microsoft is not to buy the software, to take the cash away, and that's something that the government can't do.
Slashdot Mirror
TUX appears to me to be rather specialized, eg. if you own a web server, eventually you'll use TUX; if you also serve web pages, you probably won't, just because you don't need to.
Do you see TUX as indicative of a growing realization that general purpose computing might not be perfect for everything? More specifically, do you see it as part of a movement towards more specialize hardware and software? For instance, why should a web server run the same kernel as a workstation, and why should the be built of the same parts?
www.ini.cmu.edu/eclub is an all Java suite of telephony stuff developed by students at CMU as a masters thesis in the Information Networking Institute. Take a look.
For an analagous example, why aren't PowerPC chips more popular than the x86 variety? Or Alphas? Or UltraSparcs? Because even while those chips offer the superior performance that the consumer desires (hey, the better FP and IO performance, the more frames you get in Quake3A), the market dictates that the money is in incremental performance increases on the current standard.
Suppose you offered a consumer PC, complete with all the requisite software, but it was decidedly not Wintel compliant. Surely the more adventurous nerds would buy (Linux on PPC, anyone?), but the vast majority of the population would need significant insentive, like the dog can figure it out (eg. MacOS).
In the same way, any innovation in user interface is stunted because now that we've spent so much time teaching people the Wintel Compliant way of doing things, any deviation is unacceptable. That interface might actually me more intuitive, easier to use, more efficient, but because its deviant, it has a learning curve, and the vast majority of people are so afraid of their computers that any change is really an unrealistic request.
Two quick things:
Sparc's aren't slow. The whole point of the Sparc architecture is throughput, not latency, which you need if you're running a transaction server, not a PC or doing realtime 3d stuff. Sparcs sacrifice sum spec98{int,fp} but the boards they get plugged into are designed with I/O in mind, which is why people buy them.
I used to be one of those people in favor of chucking x86 right out the window, especially after spending a few days writing assembly for the godforsaken architecture. And then I realized something: investment counts. Think of all of the hundreds of millions of man hours spent on developing software for x86. Think of all of the hours just for the Linux kernel alone. That's wh people want an upgrade path that's a little easier than saying rewrite/recompile your software for PPC/Alpha/Sparc/Itanium. And why I'm so happy that AMD is following this path.
the music still belongs to them. No matter how justified you are in doing whatever the hell you want in your mind, it still belongs to them.
No matter how self-righteously indignant you can make yourself, its still belongs to them.
How you justify the idea that pirating music really isn't pirating music, and that you somehow have a "right" to download it without ever making any pretense of purchasing it, is really amusing.
Andrew Gardner
Sorry this is long, but its important...
Before the beginning of this century, the general feeling in the scientific community was that humans would shortly posess all the knowledge of nature and the means by which to control it in a finite period of time. Science would merely be assigned the job of filling in the small holes in our knowledge. At the dawn of this century that optimism was destroyed by things like general relativity, and later, genetics, that proved the world was infinitely more complex than we had any ability to understood.
Here we sit, content in our inevitable ability to accomplish whatever we choose in some finite period of time, convinced that we posess adequate knowledge to do almost anything, or that this knowledge will quickly be gained, when in reality, our children will look at us with that same bewilderment about our udder backwardness that we see our parents with. The tech press allows us to brandish our pathetic understanding of their science, as if we actually understand, and then to feel an amazing sense of pious condescesion about the inevitable march of science, that we don't understand, despite the fact that, like out greatgrandparents, we don't have any conception of the breadth and depth of the universe.
We act as though organizing the DNA of an amoeba is the seminal accomplishment of the history of the universe because we assume that if we can prove our abilities for small cases of n and the ones that follow, then all cases are proven, asserting our godliness. How can there be religion if we have the power of God? In reality, we know little of what the universe holds for us, and all of that knowledge, all of those abilities, would not be communsurate with understanding or obtaining its creation.
What we fail to understand is that as Christians understand our creation "in his image," we are allowed to understand, and to imitate, and possibly even encouraged to master the world that God gave us, yet we are also called to be stewards of it, and to care for it. That we understand a small pittance of God's thoughts at creation is not so entirely remarkable, and does not give us the power of a god.
You don't have to defend God from the scientists.
Andrew Gardner
Now, I realize that this may go against all of the established dogma of the nerd world, but open your minds just a crack and you'll totally understand the SCSL.
Lets suppose that a company exists that can only differentiate itself from its competitors by the intellectual property in its software. While its hardware and service are good, they aren't overwhelmingly compelling, and the only way they can make money is to sell software because its good software and people use it.
Now, why would that company open source its products? So that someone else can use their intellectual property to improve their products? Not a compelling business model. But what if they just want to lower the barriers to liscencing their code to third party software developers? They could create a psuedo-open liscence that allows people to see why they should liscence the code for commercial products, and they make it easier for people to get started. The company makes money when the liscencees turn out finished products.
Sun doesn't want to open source their code. And they won't. They want people to build products using their intellectual property, and then pay them for it. In a tech world where it makes more sense to liscence a piece of the puzzle instead of doing your own, Sun is trying to get in on the sale of IP thing.
Not all software needs to be GPLed. And Sun doesn't think theirs should be. The think you should have the right to admire, use, and then pay for it so that they can feed their families, too.
Andrew Gardner
Remember the cell phone brain cancer scare? I didn't have one then, but I do now. And I keep it in my pocket all day. So where am I gonna get cancer? And what other damage is this going to do to "important parts" down there?
Andrew Gardner
Why not stick with Solaris? Was it price, performance on low end hard ware, ease of administration?
Andrew Gardner
The real problem is faster printers, and cheaper printers too. Before, when the printer were slow, you carefully considered what to print out. Now that there's no penalty, you can just print it out.
Andrew Gardner
In undergrad, you're expected to just learn to do something, but in grad school, you're likely to do some research, and you're expected to contribute something new to the sum total of human knowledge. I say go somewhere that the research interests you.
That, and CMU rules. Actually, the CS school. if top notch. Sorry for the shameless plug. You should really also consider the city, ie whether or not you're going to hate living there.
Andrew Gardner
No. Its a 64 bit PowerPC chip. No Windows there.
Andrew Gardner
YAKC -- Yet Another Katz Complaint. Let's see, do we have the prerequisite reference to censorship? Yes. Letters from disgruntled teenagers? Yes. Abundant references to Nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR in the comments? Yes. Reduction of religious people to blathering buffoons for thinking softcore porn isn't a fundamental right? Yes.
The more of these Voices from the whatever there are, the more that they show their true character. Is it irritating that some people were denied entrace to the movie? Certainly. Have they been denied some sort of fundamental right? No.
The response to this is totally out of proportion to the severity of the situation. Being denied or inconvenienced in viewing movies that are at best mildly entertaining soft core pornography or full of racial humor is not so great an evil that the nerd community should rally around the so called "oppressed." To other commenters, its not Nazi Germany. Get over yourselves.
Andrew Gardner
Oh, the horror, the horror. Small children prevented seeing from South Park! Parents inconvenienced in their holy task of polluting their children's minds with racial humor and foul language! We can't stand for this! Forget human rights like freedom of speech, expression or religion; forget the starving, oppressed, war weary men, women, and children of this planet; forget the basic rights refused politcal prisoners in Sudan or in China. Forget all of the important things happening in the world today, cause you can't see South Park. Your fundmental human right to 50 foot genitals and racial humor that no one can excuse, your fundamental right to pornography has been abridged.
In all my life, I have never heard complaining so unfounded, so patently ridiculous. I have never heard anyone expend so much effort, so much ridiculous effort, over something so tivial. You are bemoaning the reactionism of a frightened, ill-informed populace, the results of which are inconvenience at worst. Grow up.
Andrew Gardner
Biodiversity requires more than a few birds. The problem with maintaining current populations of endangered species is that there isn't enough diversity in only a few animals to maintain a species without the development of disease and disability brought on through inbreeding. Without some variety, and quite a bit of it, the species won't survive.
Andrew Gardner
Sometimes I think slashdot readers are like Pittsburgh football fans -- it doesn't matter whether they win or lose, they complain afterwards.
So an article written by stock market analyst with presumably no technical background comes close to being a reasonable interpretation of the truth. Factually not entirely correct, but the difference between the truth and his version of the story is only wide enough to cram a couple of 14 year old script kiddies in.
In a non-technical article, a non-technical writer managed to adequately and intelligently discuss both Windows2000 and Linux, without bowing to almost any FUD. There was no "Windows is so easy to use" or "The command line is scary." There was no "Linux is so hard to install" or "There are no applications for Linux." He managed to avoid the most oft-repeated, mind numbing FUDs, and you still complain.
I just don't get it. Be happy that for once, someone without any techincal credentials almost got it right. That means we're starting to win a couple of battles.
Andrew Gardner
This is to prevent children from accessing pornography at public libraries that recieve federal funding, and frankly, I'm all for it. This doesn't prevent adults anywhere from getting their porn, so I don't think there is anything to worry about.
Andrew Gardner
So, everyone wondered what religious people might think about this, and while I certainly can't speak for all of them, I'll speak for myself. I find this intensely frightening.
The problem is that this is another in a growing line of medical-ethical questions whose biggest problem is the "at what cost" factor. No one would argue that using this technology to grow tissues for a burn victim from his own skin, or any miriad of similar situations. The part that is of concern is the abuse of the technology.
Some situations: We all remember the frogs with no central nervous systems? Human organs on demand when combined with this technology, and don't tell me you don't think someone will try. Labor pool too small? Human workers on demand. Combined with some fancy genetics, human workers that won't mind being abused as slaves. I suppose some of you have read A Brave New World, so the notion of humans grown by the government isn't really new.
I don't fear new technology, but I do fear the misuse of it. I fear the degradation of human beings grown in labs, and I fear the abuse of life itself for the benefit of a certain few.
Andrew Gardner
My roommate has used NetObjects Fusion for a while, and I will willingly admit to messing around on his mac to play with it. I've also used FrontPage, which irritates me a great deal, partly because its interface doesn't jive with how I think.
The real big issue for me is that while tools in this category are all okay, you won't get better html, cgi, or java than that written by hard working nerds in cubicles. It'll likely be faster and smaller, if you get good nerds. My personal favorite is emacs, but then again, I don't maintain large corporate websites.
Andrew Gardner
Andrew Gardner
Assigning the blame for this situation to mean jocks and uncaring teachers in the public school system is just as specious as blaming it on quake. We can not say that because our situations are difficult that we are not responsible for being evil. Those acts were a choice, and any statement that detracts from the fact that it was a choice is ridiculous.
American culture fosters a environment in which violence and sexuality are the two biggest concerns, and where personal immediate self gratification is the lowest common denominator to which we stoop. That's the reason those children went on a murderous rampage, because we taught them violence and hate, and then no one (like their parents) was there to tell them otherwise. ABC radio news is now reporting (minutes ago) that these kids kept a year long diary of their daily attempts to acquire weapons and planned on highjacking an airliner if they got out of the high school alive (where they planned to kill 500 people, apparently).
Andrew Gardner
I'm always amused at how people have been confused into thinking that typing commands is evil. Which is easier? Searching through menus and looking for icons, or just typing "netscape&"?
People are so afraid of anything that isn't point and click, even when point and click isn't faster or easier.
Andrew Gardner
JWZ can not be alone in his feelings of frustration with the mozilla project. I feel some of the same frustrations, but as someone who tried to help contribute at the very start, but was turned off by the absolute jungle of code that was first release, not as an insider. However, beyond that, there is a more important question.
Where next? If we resign ourselves to the idea that Mozilla as a project is heading down hill and that Netscape the Browser is heading toward insignificance, where does that leave the nerd community, those of us (the majority of slashdotters) who don't use a platform that IE is available on, and wouldn't use IE for moral reasons anyway? Where do we go?
Honestly, this can do one of two things for the Mozilla Project. You can take it as a stab in the heart, a loss of a major resource, and proof positive that you're in trouble. Or, you can take it as a sign that the project needs to be reinvigorated, that everyone should take a couple of days off and find that spirit that made Netscape such a cool company and a terrific product. That's really what JWZ misses, the spirit of a company on the move, on the cutting edge, the urgency of getting a good product out.
Open source or almost open source projects can fail, but seeing as how the nerd community has very few other options, this one needs to be a success.
Andrew Gardner
All of what Katz said goes straight to the point about the difference between Microsoft and the rest of the technical world.
No one is passionate about Microsoft. Bill Gates is just freigtened that his reign might one day end. No one feels great allegience to any of his products. No one is thrilled about IIS or Exchange. No one lives or dies by Expedia, or WinCE, or IE or media player.
But, people live and die by the Linux kernel, their distro, any of the BSDs, there favorite UNIX. People literally live and die over KDE and GNOME. And that's good. That's why we're different. We have a passion with what we do, not just a fleeting whimsical notion that this stuff is nifty.
The reason that Gate's writing is so bland is because he has nothing new to talk about. The only thing to be done now is to design, to code, to build that future of networked devices, of improved user interfaces, or enhanced electronic services. There's no need to talk or to write or to type anymore, just more code to written, more chips to model, and more designs to be made.
Andrew Gardner
Releasing windows source will not solve its problems. The greatest fault that windows carries is its baggage of interfaces and APIs. There are so many that its impossible to make a new one, or improve on a current one without breaking a myriad of other Microsoft products, let alone anyone elses.
Microsoft won't release its source, and even if it did, there would be no point. No one in the nerd community wants to improve the Windows code base because its dirty, ethically and code-wise. No one who codes for Apache, or GNOME, or Wine, or the Linux kernel is going to all of a sudden drop what they're doing to help out Bill. Seeing as how there is a finite supply of nerds who are qualified to do this type of work, I think that Windows wouldn't get much help.
Microsoft's monopoly has nothing to do with Windows, IE, Office, Media Player, IIS, Visual C++, or any single product. Microsoft has established a monopoly by being able to code, feature bloat, and market anything they want, and to buy any software startup that doesn't open its source. The only way to stop Microsoft is not to buy the software, to take the cash away, and that's something that the government can't do.
Andrew Gardner