I'm probably misreading the headline, but it seems to imply Microsoft is somehow doing something here. Spinning the OpenDocument using FOX, for instance. The article doesn't seem to have anything to do with that; even the text of the slashdot summary. Am I grossly misreading something, or what?
Well, what, precicely, is stopping people from writing an attractive looking skin for Gaim?
Unfortunately one side effect of growing popularity is an increase in the number of people whose primary talent is complaining. Typically, stuff gets done if something is enough of an issue for someone with both the ability and the need. At this point, said people have neither the ability or enough pressing need to do it themselves, but they're happy to whine about how someone else should.
The solution for this may be to encourage people to feel more like it's their software. Most people are coming from a Windows background where the corporation owns the software, and they are allowed to use it. Free software gives the software to the user; they have a say in what it is. It's not just something someone deigned to allow them to use. With software designed to allow skinning and other easy customization, even those who can't code should be able to contribute something.
I thought Visa and other CC companies had policies regarding not identifying customers by CC information. As much as they'll bend you over themselves, they seem to be pretty strict with merchants, reserving the bend-you-over right for themselves. Anyone know the specific policies on this?
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Re:Maybe an OSS future isn't that bright afterall
on
Nessus Closes Source
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· Score: 1
The grandparent poster was saying that the OSS approach will not work very well for software that cannot be supplied as a service.
Wait, what? This double-negative is confusing and confused. The parent says this in the first sentence: "Open source software has worked pretty well in areas that provide services such as operating systems, development tools and server software". You say "supplied as a service", which means something entirely different; I don't know if you intended this or not, but it doesn't really mesh with the discussion.
There is no incentive for a company such as that to open source at all. If the company meets competition in the form of OSS developers, then yes, the free market will decide who will survive.
Since we're not sure what you mean by "company such as that", we have a couple options. One, you mean a service-oriented company like Google, who provides searching, research, and other information as a service. Open source makes perfect sense for this sort of company, since software isn't their product: service is.
The other option is what the original poster meant, a company that gets money from software licensing only, from things that don't involve services (such as information, consulting, maintenance, etc.). No, OSS doesn't make sense. My point is that it doesn't matter... software houses will move, or get run over.
I believe it is the grandparent's contention that overall, closed-source will win these battles because in the end, people would like to make a living doing what they're doing and as such, the good engineers will end up with the companies.
This overlooks reality. The "good engineers" are leaving places like Microsoft (software house) and moving to places like Google (service provider). For Google, open source makes all the sense in the world.
Now, some may argue (and with some merit) that services are merely a "new closed source". You don't get to see the backend code. The service is blackbox. You do, however, have complete programmatic access to data, which prevents vendor lock-in. The market has, to an extent, engineered around a fault. This is subject to another conversation as it's really off-topic at this point.
The point is this: open-source is here, now. It's not a question of ultimate success. It's already succeeded. Wildly so. Engineers are moving to companies that are open-source friendly, like Google. If you're stuck at a software house, you should consider your position very carefully, and start planning for the inevitable future now.
Re:Maybe an OSS future isn't that bright afterall
on
Nessus Closes Source
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The GPL provides **no** protection to companies whose business model is built on selling software that doesn't need support contracts or anything like that. If selling software is your business, then the GPL is basically a suicide pact for your company and the same applies to all other open source licenses because your competition can repackage your millions and billions of R&D dollars/Euros/Yet/etc. and you get... precisely what?
Welcome to a disruptive technology. Guess what? New things happen. Things are invented. Trends happen. People go out of business because the business model they rely on is made irrelevant. That's how a free market works.
It's funny how much having a girlfriend that you are working toward marrying and realizing that your idealism cannot feed your children will change your perspective on open source software. I like Linux, love Tomcat and am eager to give PostgreSQL a shot and I run my own nightly builds of Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird on my Windows laptop, so I am definitely not some fanboy for either side. So let me just say this to most of the zealots: OSS is never going to win in the long run because developers have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs (though sometimes they seem a little bit like bronze) that pay the bills and support one's spouse and children.
The CD-ROM put encyclopedia salesmen out of business. We could apply your same argument: "It's funny how building a family changes your perspective on cheap mass storage. I like mass storage, but it's never going to win in the long run, because encyclopedia salesmen have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs that pay the bills and support one's spouse and children."
Guess what? They didn't slit the goose's throat. Someone else did, and put them all out of business. Technology happens. Trends happen. People go out of business. That's how a free market works.
If you're in a business that relies on software sales right now, and they're not looking at becoming a service-oriented company, start making your exit plans now. You may not have to use them for a few years, but software is simply becoming a commodity market. The big-bucks-for-trivial-software cash cow is already dying.
Get to that point and you'll realize that Microsoft is good because they create work for you. Same thing with Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc. Infrastructure can and in some areas should be open.
Microsoft is starting to get nervous themselves. Google is the next-generation; they've already found the trend, they're already there. Microsoft is like the RIAA; screaming and throwing tantrums because they're seeing their hold on the market diminish.
Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc. are all becoming service-oriented. Buy servers and service from IBM, Oracle, Sun, etc. Oracle still has ridiculous licensing fees, but they also have ridiculous consulting fees, and there's a whole market for DBAs, consultants, and DB programmers. And since when was Sun ever a software company?
However, no one is going to make money on open sourcing things like Quicken or TurboTax and other common user apps unless they are utterly useless without some expensive services provided by the company that makes them. How else are they going to make money, eh?
Where have you been? TurboTax is already moving on. (I don't know about Quicken.) The software is essentially the same, but the laws, the rules, the numbers change every year. This is what people pay for, or they'd not bother upgrading in the first place!
However, the OSS movement if successful (and I doubt it will be in the long run) will end up making it very hard to make money in software development and maintanence. Good for this com
It would be years, if ever, before Postgres gets the kind of features that make Oracle a must have for many high end applications.
Actually that's not remotely true. We're not talking about MySQL here. PostgreSQL is quickly gaining all the "high-end" features of Oracle: tablespaces, failover, replication, etc. In some cases, they aren't yet as fine-grained as Oracle. In other cases, they're superior. PostgreSQL is quickly coming into its own.
On top of this, it's a lot less painful to work with, and the SQL featureset is far nicer. After having worked with them both on a daily basis, the only reason I'd willingly use Oracle is if I was working with terabytes of data and had lots and lots of money to throw at Oracle to make it work and support it. Which I don't. Like Sun is saying, this is unjustified for most people.
Move over Circuit City. DivX has a new competitor. I bet we're all waiting on the edge of our seats to see the outcome of this vicious competitio... oh wait.
I guess if having your only competitor die of market starvation isn't enough to give Microsoft a clue, nothing is.
That's a pretty circular argument, almost like saying "everything that's sucessful can't be improved".
No, I said if Linux was something else, it wouldn't be Linux. I then said that this may even make it less successful. This isn't circular.
We can, however, find reasons that it may be less successful if it were licensed differently, as many others have pointed out. The point is that arbitrarily changing one element that happens to annoy a very few someones could have much broader implications that are detrimental overall. In this case, it's even likely.
Why should Linux "ought to be" anything other than what it is? If Linux were something else, it would not be Linux. If that were the case, it might not even be as popular as it is.
This is typical ZDNet FUD. Is there any evidence that intelligent, well-informed businesspeople (i.e. those who have clueful lawyers) have a remote concern about licensing when choosing Linux?
My first thought at seeing the article was "integration? I thought the point was to separate them", but this seems to mean "integrate" like "let's make them talk better".
The article on the other hand seems to misunderstand and say "the combined application" and imply they're building one big Thunderbird/Sunbird conglomerate. I don't think this is the case, reading the roadmap. Anyone have more data on this?
Eh, the Zaurus has a fairly small "thumb" keyboard and I've done plenty of hacking, irc, etc. on it. The size of the keyboard doesn't really matter as much as the quality. No, it's not something you're going to be spending a lot of time on, but when you're in a cramped airplane seat and your 17" laptop won't even open (or sitting on the bus, or standing in line, or whatever), it's nice to have something to whip out a few lines of code on (or run ethereal on, or nmap, or nethack, or firefox, or whatever).
You obviously haven't clicked through to the site. This is not some WinCE POS, it runs full blown XP. So does it run the most popular office suite on the planet, check.
You misunderstand. I've known about the OQO and the fact it runs XP since it was first announced. I don't want XP.
Also, with even only 512MB of RAM on the latest model, with XP chewing through a lot of that, I'm not going to be running a whole lot. And I'm going to be paying for "the most popular office suite on the planet". And the others are going to require cygwin or other ugly hacks, not integrate well with the system. I could make XP into a pseudo-unix, or I could just run Linux.
Apps that 90% of the population gives a crap about? CHECK.
In this case, 90% of the population is irrelevant. I'm talking about what I (and probably most of the other people reading, this being slashdot) are probably interested in. XP isn't it.
I'm more interested in whether all the hardware has drivers. This is the big problem with anything portable: laptops are, for the most part, "standard x86 machines", and most of them boot linux... but a lot of them have unsupported peripherals. The Zaurus, on the other hand, has fully-supported everything.
No, seriously. I've commented to them and asked a number of times whether it supports Linux; and until it does, I will stick with my Zaurus. (Actually I only have a C860, no 4GB microdrive or whatever, but I don't come close to needing more than the gigs of SD I have.)
Linux is not just a gee whiz thing in the palm. Having all your full-blown apps in your palm is far, far more useful than any stripped-down PDA apps could be. Firefox? Check. Thunderbird? Check. GIMP? Check. Nethack? Doom? ScummVM? Vim? Emacs? GCC? Perl? Python? Ruby? Checkcheckcheckcheck...
A poll of 1,500 staff by recruitment firm Computer People showed that three out of four wasted more than an hour every week simply finding out what some technical term meant.
I see, so learning things and educating yourself is a waste of time. I love our modern mentality.
It'll be interesting to watch this unfold. When we do get to that point...the point where the desktop OS doesn't matter that much, where will the people go?
I think as soon as we see a critical break from platform lockin (read: most people no longer need Windows), we'll see things curve back around to native apps, but this time they'll be portable ones. That is, stuff like OpenOffice which can run on anything. There will be multiple choices for vendors, products, and we'll see reviews on apps based on merit.
In short, we'll have made it back the 80s. Isn't it amazing how much of a setback Microsoft has been, and how far we've had to come to make it up? And we're only halfway there.
Then you have Linux...right now it's still just outside the reach of mainstreamers. But when the world is connected, will it still be outside, or will it be the third main option?
Hopefully, it will matter less that I run Linux, in that I won't have to ask "does it run on Linux?" This is a good reason for staying away from proprietary APIs (i.e. Apple UI stuff) as a primary target. I would be happy for most people to use OSX or some other user-friendly desktop, but I don't want everything to rely on that any more than win32.
As it stands, Linux isn't harder than anything else to get going. Available desktops like KDE are no less user-friendly or featureful than what people currently use. As people grow used to "different things" I think we'll see more acceptance of Linux on the desktop in general.
It's getting connected. Big places that matter (big businesses and government) are that connected. The instant people start writing web apps as the default, the instant Windows becomes irrelevant to a company. At that point, you need an OS, but whatever OS is cheapest, easiest to lock down, and has a web browser that works, wins (or at least has a fighting chance for consideration). People start using webapps at work, they get used to it and start getting more connected and using them at home. Demand for broadband goes up, demand for Microsoft goes down. Geeky neighbor kid suggests Linux to get away from those exploits and viruses, people say "can it run my apps?", kid says sure. Away they go.
Basically, the industry and market are abstracting away Microsoft lock-in. If Microsoft doesn't have that, what do they have?
I don't agree with the prices ebgames charges for used games (save $5! wooo)
Actually I think EBGames uses a "supply/demand" algorithm for determining used game price. The more people ask for it, the more it goes up. If it's a new title everyone wants, you're not going to save much. If it's an old title few people want, it's going to be cheap. If it's an old game everyone wants and no one has, it's going to be even more than retail! (I believe I heard Suikoden 2 would go for $80+ from the guy at the local shop!)
This basically "makes sense" for a retailer, because they get the most money out of what the market will bear.
However, what annoys me is the pushy salespeople trying to pawn off their used games on me. Especially if the new one is $5 more. I didn't really think about why they were so pushy about used game sales before; now I realize why: they get all the money. So I guess, if you want to be annoying (and if they're being pushy I certainly do), demand all-new shrinkwrap stuff.;-)
But what the movie featured, ultimatly, very ugly people in a war with very pretty people, and the very pretty people won and established a dictatorship.
Did I miss something?
In the movie? Not really. My best advice is go read the book; it's almost entirely different, besides the names of things and a vaguely general idea of events. And try to forget the movie's imagery, too.
To study LotR, you must also study Tolkien and the time period he was living in. Tolkien loved the natural world: trees, in particular, which is why they come up as imagery so much. Tolkien wrote this during a time when WW2 was going on and industrialism was blackening the skies and countryside. This is one of the many places the movie gets it entirely wrong and misses the point. Remember in the beginning of the movie, in the Shire, where everything is slightly surreal and fairy-like, and later the world seemed more "down-to-earth"? This is precisely the opposite of the books. The Shire was the "down-to-earth", everyday sort of place where hobbits didn't have adventures. As they left, they entered a "larger-than-life" world where industrialism (orcs, their machines, saruman) were fighting with nature (the elves), at the same time Sauron (a more sinister evil) was getting ready to war. See the parallels?
There are more; as various nations were trying to use industrialism to try and fight their war, so Saruman was using machines, and ultimately trying to get the Ring, to fight Sauron. Tom Bombadil (who didn't appear in the movie and is trivialized by many) directly represented nature, didn't care about the affairs of men at all; so the natural world cares little for our wars and affairs.
The movie, of course, trivializes and mixes this all up. Peter Jackson seems to have at best a shallow understanding and passing acquaintance with the story. I doubt anyone in Hollywood can really grasp beyond "ooh, shiny! pretty people vs ugly people, pretty people win!" In reality, there was a reason for the beauty of the elves and the ugliness of the orcs. (And the final parallel, where the elves, nature, fade, the kingdom of men, industry and 20th-century society, take over.)
I play poker at Fulltiltpoker.com. Every time I want to play, the software connects to their server, checks for any updates, and then asks me to login. Granted, the poker software client is not as complicated as a web browser, but how difficult would it be make Firefox check and install updates every time the user ran the program?
FFXI and WoW (and presumably most other MMOs) do the same thing... and they are far more complicated than a web browser. The only problem I see is that users might/wouldn't be able to install something requiring root if they don't have it; however there are various workarounds for that. Checking for updates when you launch and making it easy to update would be nice. I'm not really a big OSX fan, but the system updater not only makes it really easy, it's annoying not to use and you have to try not to stay updated.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm probably misreading the headline, but it seems to imply Microsoft is somehow doing something here. Spinning the OpenDocument using FOX, for instance. The article doesn't seem to have anything to do with that; even the text of the slashdot summary. Am I grossly misreading something, or what?
Unfortunately one side effect of growing popularity is an increase in the number of people whose primary talent is complaining. Typically, stuff gets done if something is enough of an issue for someone with both the ability and the need. At this point, said people have neither the ability or enough pressing need to do it themselves, but they're happy to whine about how someone else should.
The solution for this may be to encourage people to feel more like it's their software. Most people are coming from a Windows background where the corporation owns the software, and they are allowed to use it. Free software gives the software to the user; they have a say in what it is. It's not just something someone deigned to allow them to use. With software designed to allow skinning and other easy customization, even those who can't code should be able to contribute something.
I thought Visa and other CC companies had policies regarding not identifying customers by CC information. As much as they'll bend you over themselves, they seem to be pretty strict with merchants, reserving the bend-you-over right for themselves. Anyone know the specific policies on this?
I guess the answer for this is to start paying for virtual licenses with virtual money.
Especially if it's the only game your platform's got. ;-)
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Wait, what? This double-negative is confusing and confused. The parent says this in the first sentence: "Open source software has worked pretty well in areas that provide services such as operating systems, development tools and server software". You say "supplied as a service", which means something entirely different; I don't know if you intended this or not, but it doesn't really mesh with the discussion.
Since we're not sure what you mean by "company such as that", we have a couple options. One, you mean a service-oriented company like Google, who provides searching, research, and other information as a service. Open source makes perfect sense for this sort of company, since software isn't their product: service is.
The other option is what the original poster meant, a company that gets money from software licensing only, from things that don't involve services (such as information, consulting, maintenance, etc.). No, OSS doesn't make sense. My point is that it doesn't matter... software houses will move, or get run over.
This overlooks reality. The "good engineers" are leaving places like Microsoft (software house) and moving to places like Google (service provider). For Google, open source makes all the sense in the world.
Now, some may argue (and with some merit) that services are merely a "new closed source". You don't get to see the backend code. The service is blackbox. You do, however, have complete programmatic access to data, which prevents vendor lock-in. The market has, to an extent, engineered around a fault. This is subject to another conversation as it's really off-topic at this point.
The point is this: open-source is here, now. It's not a question of ultimate success. It's already succeeded. Wildly so. Engineers are moving to companies that are open-source friendly, like Google. If you're stuck at a software house, you should consider your position very carefully, and start planning for the inevitable future now.
Welcome to a disruptive technology. Guess what? New things happen. Things are invented. Trends happen. People go out of business because the business model they rely on is made irrelevant. That's how a free market works.
The CD-ROM put encyclopedia salesmen out of business. We could apply your same argument: "It's funny how building a family changes your perspective on cheap mass storage. I like mass storage, but it's never going to win in the long run, because encyclopedia salesmen have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs that pay the bills and support one's spouse and children."
Guess what? They didn't slit the goose's throat. Someone else did, and put them all out of business. Technology happens. Trends happen. People go out of business. That's how a free market works.
If you're in a business that relies on software sales right now, and they're not looking at becoming a service-oriented company, start making your exit plans now. You may not have to use them for a few years, but software is simply becoming a commodity market. The big-bucks-for-trivial-software cash cow is already dying.
Microsoft is starting to get nervous themselves. Google is the next-generation; they've already found the trend, they're already there. Microsoft is like the RIAA; screaming and throwing tantrums because they're seeing their hold on the market diminish.
Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc. are all becoming service-oriented. Buy servers and service from IBM, Oracle, Sun, etc. Oracle still has ridiculous licensing fees, but they also have ridiculous consulting fees, and there's a whole market for DBAs, consultants, and DB programmers. And since when was Sun ever a software company?
Where have you been? TurboTax is already moving on. (I don't know about Quicken.) The software is essentially the same, but the laws, the rules, the numbers change every year. This is what people pay for, or they'd not bother upgrading in the first place!
Actually that's not remotely true. We're not talking about MySQL here. PostgreSQL is quickly gaining all the "high-end" features of Oracle: tablespaces, failover, replication, etc. In some cases, they aren't yet as fine-grained as Oracle. In other cases, they're superior. PostgreSQL is quickly coming into its own.
On top of this, it's a lot less painful to work with, and the SQL featureset is far nicer. After having worked with them both on a daily basis, the only reason I'd willingly use Oracle is if I was working with terabytes of data and had lots and lots of money to throw at Oracle to make it work and support it. Which I don't. Like Sun is saying, this is unjustified for most people.
Move over Circuit City. DivX has a new competitor. I bet we're all waiting on the edge of our seats to see the outcome of this vicious competitio... oh wait.
I guess if having your only competitor die of market starvation isn't enough to give Microsoft a clue, nothing is.
No, I said if Linux was something else, it wouldn't be Linux. I then said that this may even make it less successful. This isn't circular.
We can, however, find reasons that it may be less successful if it were licensed differently, as many others have pointed out. The point is that arbitrarily changing one element that happens to annoy a very few someones could have much broader implications that are detrimental overall. In this case, it's even likely.
This is typical ZDNet FUD. Is there any evidence that intelligent, well-informed businesspeople (i.e. those who have clueful lawyers) have a remote concern about licensing when choosing Linux?
But this one features the Google icon on top, so we're getting both sides of the story.
The roadmap says:
My first thought at seeing the article was "integration? I thought the point was to separate them", but this seems to mean "integrate" like "let's make them talk better".
The article on the other hand seems to misunderstand and say "the combined application" and imply they're building one big Thunderbird/Sunbird conglomerate. I don't think this is the case, reading the roadmap. Anyone have more data on this?
Eh, the Zaurus has a fairly small "thumb" keyboard and I've done plenty of hacking, irc, etc. on it. The size of the keyboard doesn't really matter as much as the quality. No, it's not something you're going to be spending a lot of time on, but when you're in a cramped airplane seat and your 17" laptop won't even open (or sitting on the bus, or standing in line, or whatever), it's nice to have something to whip out a few lines of code on (or run ethereal on, or nmap, or nethack, or firefox, or whatever).
You misunderstand. I've known about the OQO and the fact it runs XP since it was first announced. I don't want XP.
Also, with even only 512MB of RAM on the latest model, with XP chewing through a lot of that, I'm not going to be running a whole lot. And I'm going to be paying for "the most popular office suite on the planet". And the others are going to require cygwin or other ugly hacks, not integrate well with the system. I could make XP into a pseudo-unix, or I could just run Linux.
In this case, 90% of the population is irrelevant. I'm talking about what I (and probably most of the other people reading, this being slashdot) are probably interested in. XP isn't it.
I'm more interested in whether all the hardware has drivers. This is the big problem with anything portable: laptops are, for the most part, "standard x86 machines", and most of them boot linux... but a lot of them have unsupported peripherals. The Zaurus, on the other hand, has fully-supported everything.
No, seriously. I've commented to them and asked a number of times whether it supports Linux; and until it does, I will stick with my Zaurus. (Actually I only have a C860, no 4GB microdrive or whatever, but I don't come close to needing more than the gigs of SD I have.)
Linux is not just a gee whiz thing in the palm. Having all your full-blown apps in your palm is far, far more useful than any stripped-down PDA apps could be. Firefox? Check. Thunderbird? Check. GIMP? Check. Nethack? Doom? ScummVM? Vim? Emacs? GCC? Perl? Python? Ruby? Checkcheckcheckcheck...
So I'm not sure what you're saying; does this make him less of an idiot, or more?
I see, so learning things and educating yourself is a waste of time. I love our modern mentality.
I think as soon as we see a critical break from platform lockin (read: most people no longer need Windows), we'll see things curve back around to native apps, but this time they'll be portable ones. That is, stuff like OpenOffice which can run on anything. There will be multiple choices for vendors, products, and we'll see reviews on apps based on merit.
In short, we'll have made it back the 80s. Isn't it amazing how much of a setback Microsoft has been, and how far we've had to come to make it up? And we're only halfway there.
Hopefully, it will matter less that I run Linux, in that I won't have to ask "does it run on Linux?" This is a good reason for staying away from proprietary APIs (i.e. Apple UI stuff) as a primary target. I would be happy for most people to use OSX or some other user-friendly desktop, but I don't want everything to rely on that any more than win32.
As it stands, Linux isn't harder than anything else to get going. Available desktops like KDE are no less user-friendly or featureful than what people currently use. As people grow used to "different things" I think we'll see more acceptance of Linux on the desktop in general.
Indeed. Extra points for puns. :-)
It's getting connected. Big places that matter (big businesses and government) are that connected. The instant people start writing web apps as the default, the instant Windows becomes irrelevant to a company. At that point, you need an OS, but whatever OS is cheapest, easiest to lock down, and has a web browser that works, wins (or at least has a fighting chance for consideration). People start using webapps at work, they get used to it and start getting more connected and using them at home. Demand for broadband goes up, demand for Microsoft goes down. Geeky neighbor kid suggests Linux to get away from those exploits and viruses, people say "can it run my apps?", kid says sure. Away they go.
Basically, the industry and market are abstracting away Microsoft lock-in. If Microsoft doesn't have that, what do they have?
Actually I think EBGames uses a "supply/demand" algorithm for determining used game price. The more people ask for it, the more it goes up. If it's a new title everyone wants, you're not going to save much. If it's an old title few people want, it's going to be cheap. If it's an old game everyone wants and no one has, it's going to be even more than retail! (I believe I heard Suikoden 2 would go for $80+ from the guy at the local shop!)
This basically "makes sense" for a retailer, because they get the most money out of what the market will bear.
However, what annoys me is the pushy salespeople trying to pawn off their used games on me. Especially if the new one is $5 more. I didn't really think about why they were so pushy about used game sales before; now I realize why: they get all the money. So I guess, if you want to be annoying (and if they're being pushy I certainly do), demand all-new shrinkwrap stuff. ;-)
In the movie? Not really. My best advice is go read the book; it's almost entirely different, besides the names of things and a vaguely general idea of events. And try to forget the movie's imagery, too.
To study LotR, you must also study Tolkien and the time period he was living in. Tolkien loved the natural world: trees, in particular, which is why they come up as imagery so much. Tolkien wrote this during a time when WW2 was going on and industrialism was blackening the skies and countryside. This is one of the many places the movie gets it entirely wrong and misses the point. Remember in the beginning of the movie, in the Shire, where everything is slightly surreal and fairy-like, and later the world seemed more "down-to-earth"? This is precisely the opposite of the books. The Shire was the "down-to-earth", everyday sort of place where hobbits didn't have adventures. As they left, they entered a "larger-than-life" world where industrialism (orcs, their machines, saruman) were fighting with nature (the elves), at the same time Sauron (a more sinister evil) was getting ready to war. See the parallels?
There are more; as various nations were trying to use industrialism to try and fight their war, so Saruman was using machines, and ultimately trying to get the Ring, to fight Sauron. Tom Bombadil (who didn't appear in the movie and is trivialized by many) directly represented nature, didn't care about the affairs of men at all; so the natural world cares little for our wars and affairs.
The movie, of course, trivializes and mixes this all up. Peter Jackson seems to have at best a shallow understanding and passing acquaintance with the story. I doubt anyone in Hollywood can really grasp beyond "ooh, shiny! pretty people vs ugly people, pretty people win!" In reality, there was a reason for the beauty of the elves and the ugliness of the orcs. (And the final parallel, where the elves, nature, fade, the kingdom of men, industry and 20th-century society, take over.)
FFXI and WoW (and presumably most other MMOs) do the same thing... and they are far more complicated than a web browser. The only problem I see is that users might/wouldn't be able to install something requiring root if they don't have it; however there are various workarounds for that. Checking for updates when you launch and making it easy to update would be nice. I'm not really a big OSX fan, but the system updater not only makes it really easy, it's annoying not to use and you have to try not to stay updated.