Granted, there are movements to make things consistent, such as the LAMP set of technologies for Linux, or the Linux Standard Base project.
Given that there still isn't a consensus as to what the P in LAMP stands for, I don't know if I'd hold my breath on that happening. Not that I'm so optimistic about the LSB either, but at least they know what it stands for!
Anyway, Microsoft -- the place where they excel is this: They make something that isn't very good. They make a version 2 that's better, but still not good. 3 isn't bad, and by 4 it's 90% there.
Their competitors (Sun is a perfect example) can frequently make a better version 1, but then Microsoft is still there and competing with them, they get bored and go on to something else. The open-source projects have trouble doing the boring 30% that gets you up to 90%, and start adding translucent menus and XML feeds instead.
Oh, and that's why I'm a Mac user, given the choice...
There was a period during the Linux IPO boom where every dope with a Freshmeat project or in the bug report databases was scoring insider shares. (Except for poor Bowie J. Poag!) The big guys all made considerable fortunes, at least on paper. See "Woohoo, I'm So Freaking Rich!!!" by Raymond, E.S.
On the other hand, I've seen Stallman in the supermarket a few times and while he can at least pay for food, he certainly doesn't appear to be living too large. I figured he'd go up to the cashier and demand the source code to the cash register firmware, but no...
Mac and Windows versions of Office are developed on parallel but different tracks, so one isn't really "behind" the other, although they'll have different features at different times. I much, much prefer Office X to its Windows counterpart, if only because those gray superwindows that enclose Windows Office documents drive me absolutely freaking nuts. I don't think any conspiracy theory is required to explain why, when pretty much no one else tries to sell desktop software to Linux users, Microsoft doesn't either. There simply isn't a market there (yet, anyway).
(Out of curiosity, why do you like Word and hate Excel? All the "I know what you _really_ want to do!" features that are so infuriating in Word really _do_ know what you want to do in Excel.)
In fairness, I left out the reviewer's point, which is that "the battle has been won" because environmentalists are opposed to nano-assemblers. Still, though, the fact that someone opposes doing something hardly proves that it can be done!
Naturally, Mr. Kurzweil has little time for techno-skeptics like the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley, who in September 2001 published a notorious piece in Scientific American debunking the claims of nanotechnologists, in particular the possibility of nano-robots (nanobots) capable of assembling molecules and substances to order. Mr. Kurzweil's arguments countering Dr. Smalley and his allies are a pleasure to read -- Mr. Kurzweil clearly thinks that nanobots are possible -- but in truth he is fighting a battle that is already won.
The battle has been "won" in that "nanotechnology" has been repackaged to refer to "really small stuff", rather than to Drexlerian nano-assemblers. I'd be interested in reading what Kurzweil says (although I give the benefit of the doubt to chemists with empirical data over "futurists") but it's not like anyone has successfully demonstrated anything approaching Diamond Age proportions.
OpenOffice.org is a passable imitation of Microsoft Office, but I think it would be really great if someone rewrote everything in JavaScript and let me run it inside a web browser instead of a mature desktop operating system.
Gee, I see no reason why that couldn't be done within a year! After all, Paolo Massa opened a SourceForge project to do it and then quit, so QED!
I think that part of that reputation is that BSD users think in terms of releases, not continuous incremental development. If all Linux users went from one Red Hat (for example) distribution to the next, with just official Red Hat updates in between, things would go a lot smoother. For historical reasons, though, Linux use has always emphasized immediately updating and recompiling kernels at every new minor version, and a lot of those are simply not ready for use.
So they should go after Bram Cohen, the creator of bittorrent, because "everyone knows there is no legitimate use for bittorrent", right? Or go after eDonkey creator Jed McCaleb. After all, it's not the users responsibility, its the creator. Just like if you shoot me with a.357, it isn't your fault, it's Smith and Wesson's. They made the weapon, you just used it.
As always, people have unlimited energy for Irritating Nerd Sarcasm, and none for reading comprehension...
Obviously, the people who should be facing legal action are the ones who are actually engaged in illegal filesharing. And when it was the P2P makers being targeted, oh, how the nerds cried out for personal responsibility! And then as soon as the users were actually held responsible... Bullies!!! Suing children! And single mothers!!!! The horror -- single mothers!!!! Gee, all that righteous jabbering about responsibility suddenly disappeared!
Look, there are legititimate criticisms to be made about exactly how the RIAA is pursuing these suits. But talk of responsibility and handwringing about single mothers!!!! can't go together.
(um, I am being sarcastic if you haven't caught up yet...)
And, incidentally -- this particular defendant may in fact have a completely valid defense. But that defense is based on her being mistakenly identified, not on her priviliged status as a "disabled single mother" being attacked by mean ol' rich people.
The RIAA's mistake is that they listened to all the pious bullshit about "Don't blame the people who make the technology, blame the people who misuse the technology!" So they went after the people who were explicitly breaking the law and now they're stuck with "OMTFG, yuor suing teh CHILDREN! And teh SINGAL MOTHERS!!!!".
They should have just stuck with crushing the P2P makers, and let the nerds carry on about the importance of placing responsibility where it belongs.
The "indoctrination" issue aside -- that could make for an interesting hour or three of discussion, but would you really want to sit through a semester of it?
Often, that's a good comeback, but this time...the crackers' message is in English. michaelzhao's response is in English. Where does Arabic come into the equation?
Especially since Iranians a) speak Farsi, not Arabic, and b) aren't Arabs.
A better analogy would be someone who buys a cheapo Linux-only computer from Wal-Mart and then installs an illegal copy of Windows on it. We can get into Stallmanist hairsplitting about whether that "costs" Microsoft anything, or whether it "costs" Santa Clara to have a for-profit company appear on untaxed land, but it seems clear to me that both represent abuse.
...and it's not like there's a high threshold here for Google stories. Haven't they changed their cafeteria prices or repainted their parking spaces or something since this morning?
Obviously, it's somewhat unclear that the majority of China's workforce would be able to afford such a console - the average wage of an urban worker in China in 2004 was 9,422 yuan ($1,164), and a rural worker made just 2,936 yuan ($363) on average.
I'm no marketing genius, but have you considered that in a country with a billion people and a ballooning upper class of conspicuous consumers, one might be able to market a modest luxury good, even if it's not within the budget of the average peasant?
I have headphones on pretty much all the time at work. But I still marvel at these youngsters who simply can not deal with 60 seconds of silence without having to reach for their iPod.
I _am_, however, still cool enough that I walk around wearing a new-school ski jacket with an MP3 player pocket. I just need to remember to put the iPod into it...
You're misunderstanding his point. He's not saying that no one else will EVAR! switch to Firefox, he's saying that the rapid growth earlier this year was into those two groups, and now that they've switched, further Firefox adoption is going to go more slowly.
Basically, his point is that the people who were still using Netscape 4 long after IE had kicked it around the block are going to be equally slow to switch away.
Let's be honest here, you're really comparing apples to oranges when you compare completely different hardware like that. KDE and Win overall performance *as a desktop on the same hardware* is similar.
Huh? His point (its validity aside) is that Windows is faster on slow hardware than Linux/KDE is on faster hardware! It's not apples and oranges, it's a fortiori.
If you stick with KDE, you will be fine. You run artsd as the sound daemon - KDE will start it up for you - and since arts handles both the video and the audio (provided you use a KDE media player, such as noatun), there are no sync issues. The problems come when you try and use non-KDE applications (though I have had zero latency issues when outputting to arts with xine, mplayer and vlc) and get them working together.
Well, yeah. That's the point. It is simply insane that in 2005, Linux users still have to know that sound servers exist, let alone that they have to manually resolve conflicts between them.
Finally, the fact that this alleged breakthrough has been published in a very minor journal is quite telling IMHO.
Absolutely. I can't see the article,as the Enormous Pharma Company at which I work doesn't have a subscription (which tells you something about the journal), but I would imagine there's a good reason why this isn't in Lancet or JAMA.
Exactly the same here -- the "Please remove me from your list" worked, until you got handed off to a new company. Since the Do-Not-Call list went into effect, my telemarketing burden has dropped to zero.
That's one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about a government-imposed spam solution working, eventually. (The other reason being that Microsoft, AOL and the rest need such a solution and they'll make sure it gets done.) Even if such proposals are always met with derision here from the dorks with their "Your proposed solution will not work because:" checklists -- how do people have so much energy to put so much effort into being so glibly stupid?
The NYT article makes it sound like the squid got accidentally entangled, but if you look at the diagram on the National Geogrpahic site, the scientists deliberately snagged it. The baits were rigged with what seem to be scaled-up versions of squid jigs.
Sperm whales frequently have scars from squid tentacles. The squid definitely get some good shots in, and it's not clear that they don't win a round every now and then.
I dunno. I'm hardly a portable electronics buff (I got my first cell phone a few weeks ago, but have forgotten the number already) but my desktop computer has been gathering dust for two years. I have a work-provided laptop with docking station, and that and my TiBook at home (and a Linux account I ssh to at work) cover pretty much 100% of my computing. I don't envision ever buying a new desktop computer.
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Given that there still isn't a consensus as to what the P in LAMP stands for, I don't know if I'd hold my breath on that happening. Not that I'm so optimistic about the LSB either, but at least they know what it stands for!
Anyway, Microsoft -- the place where they excel is this: They make something that isn't very good. They make a version 2 that's better, but still not good. 3 isn't bad, and by 4 it's 90% there.
Their competitors (Sun is a perfect example) can frequently make a better version 1, but then Microsoft is still there and competing with them, they get bored and go on to something else. The open-source projects have trouble doing the boring 30% that gets you up to 90%, and start adding translucent menus and XML feeds instead.
Oh, and that's why I'm a Mac user, given the choice...
On the other hand, I've seen Stallman in the supermarket a few times and while he can at least pay for food, he certainly doesn't appear to be living too large. I figured he'd go up to the cashier and demand the source code to the cash register firmware, but no...
Imagine how irate the AC would be if McGrath had said "We're 110 percent focused on Windows..."!
(Out of curiosity, why do you like Word and hate Excel? All the "I know what you _really_ want to do!" features that are so infuriating in Word really _do_ know what you want to do in Excel.)
In fairness, I left out the reviewer's point, which is that "the battle has been won" because environmentalists are opposed to nano-assemblers. Still, though, the fact that someone opposes doing something hardly proves that it can be done!
The battle has been "won" in that "nanotechnology" has been repackaged to refer to "really small stuff", rather than to Drexlerian nano-assemblers. I'd be interested in reading what Kurzweil says (although I give the benefit of the doubt to chemists with empirical data over "futurists") but it's not like anyone has successfully demonstrated anything approaching Diamond Age proportions.
Gee, I see no reason why that couldn't be done within a year! After all, Paolo Massa opened a SourceForge project to do it and then quit, so QED!
I think that part of that reputation is that BSD users think in terms of releases, not continuous incremental development. If all Linux users went from one Red Hat (for example) distribution to the next, with just official Red Hat updates in between, things would go a lot smoother. For historical reasons, though, Linux use has always emphasized immediately updating and recompiling kernels at every new minor version, and a lot of those are simply not ready for use.
As always, people have unlimited energy for Irritating Nerd Sarcasm, and none for reading comprehension...
Obviously, the people who should be facing legal action are the ones who are actually engaged in illegal filesharing. And when it was the P2P makers being targeted, oh, how the nerds cried out for personal responsibility! And then as soon as the users were actually held responsible... Bullies!!! Suing children! And single mothers!!!! The horror -- single mothers!!!! Gee, all that righteous jabbering about responsibility suddenly disappeared!
Look, there are legititimate criticisms to be made about exactly how the RIAA is pursuing these suits. But talk of responsibility and handwringing about single mothers!!!! can't go together.
(um, I am being sarcastic if you haven't caught up yet...)
Uh, yeah, thanks...
And, incidentally -- this particular defendant may in fact have a completely valid defense. But that defense is based on her being mistakenly identified, not on her priviliged status as a "disabled single mother" being attacked by mean ol' rich people.
They should have just stuck with crushing the P2P makers, and let the nerds carry on about the importance of placing responsibility where it belongs.
The "indoctrination" issue aside -- that could make for an interesting hour or three of discussion, but would you really want to sit through a semester of it?
Especially since Iranians a) speak Farsi, not Arabic, and b) aren't Arabs.
A better analogy would be someone who buys a cheapo Linux-only computer from Wal-Mart and then installs an illegal copy of Windows on it. We can get into Stallmanist hairsplitting about whether that "costs" Microsoft anything, or whether it "costs" Santa Clara to have a for-profit company appear on untaxed land, but it seems clear to me that both represent abuse.
...and it's not like there's a high threshold here for Google stories. Haven't they changed their cafeteria prices or repainted their parking spaces or something since this morning?
I'm no marketing genius, but have you considered that in a country with a billion people and a ballooning upper class of conspicuous consumers, one might be able to market a modest luxury good, even if it's not within the budget of the average peasant?
I _am_, however, still cool enough that I walk around wearing a new-school ski jacket with an MP3 player pocket. I just need to remember to put the iPod into it...
Basically, his point is that the people who were still using Netscape 4 long after IE had kicked it around the block are going to be equally slow to switch away.
Huh? His point (its validity aside) is that Windows is faster on slow hardware than Linux/KDE is on faster hardware! It's not apples and oranges, it's a fortiori.
Well, yeah. That's the point. It is simply insane that in 2005, Linux users still have to know that sound servers exist, let alone that they have to manually resolve conflicts between them.
Absolutely. I can't see the article ,as the Enormous Pharma Company at which I work doesn't have a subscription (which tells you something about the journal), but I would imagine there's a good reason why this isn't in Lancet or JAMA.
That's one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about a government-imposed spam solution working, eventually. (The other reason being that Microsoft, AOL and the rest need such a solution and they'll make sure it gets done.) Even if such proposals are always met with derision here from the dorks with their "Your proposed solution will not work because:" checklists -- how do people have so much energy to put so much effort into being so glibly stupid?
The NYT article makes it sound like the squid got accidentally entangled, but if you look at the diagram on the National Geogrpahic site, the scientists deliberately snagged it. The baits were rigged with what seem to be scaled-up versions of squid jigs.
Sperm whales frequently have scars from squid tentacles. The squid definitely get some good shots in, and it's not clear that they don't win a round every now and then.
I dunno. I'm hardly a portable electronics buff (I got my first cell phone a few weeks ago, but have forgotten the number already) but my desktop computer has been gathering dust for two years. I have a work-provided laptop with docking station, and that and my TiBook at home (and a Linux account I ssh to at work) cover pretty much 100% of my computing. I don't envision ever buying a new desktop computer.