WORD, dude. What do they give them? The 'pro' version of Mandrake? OOOooohhh... That was more or less exactly what I was thinking...all the vendors mentioned in that article allow their programs to be downloaded for free!!!! I mean, I guess that's not an option for some people, but still... I think the real issue is that blind faith in the movement causes some people to write overly good reviews. I guess that's a 'real' problem, but it's one that tells you a few things...
Check out http://www.lxk12.org, an initiative to use free and open source software in NY schools. It's something that I've wanted to become involved with for awhile, but haven't yet. It seems like a very good cause.
What better way to deal with this than flood the organization with linux advocates????? Imagine if the whole slashdot community signed up for this--and then actually did what they say, sending lots of stuff to local and national political leaders. That would make MS look pretty good, eh? It would be so amusing to have this whole thing backfire...instead of docile winsheep, they'd get a bunch of raving unix loonies fighting them at every step!!!! Let's all register and let our voices be heard!
I've got to say that Jon Katz has started to get to me. When I first started reading/. it was cool to see the 'this is what's going to happen' articles, but after getting up to speed with what's going on here, I have to say that I just can't be as into it. He has a lot of good points, that are on, but it starts to seem like he doesn't have a bigger clue than your average/. reader. I think there are still some people who need this stuff, though. Luckily,/. is so customizable... Anyway...I think what's going to be really scary is how much sense stuff will make in the future. It's going to be damn hard not to look at stuff in a cohesive fashion-I think the real danger is losing the anarchic jumble that is the current(actually more the past, these days)www. In the sense-making future, I think that a lot of people like us will miss the good, old, wild-west days of the early web. We've got to remember how to see the web that way, too. A sanitized, edited version of the net is great, but don't forget that it's a choice. It's a level of abstraction similar to a gui over a cli-and I think that we all know how bad an idea it is to try to make the cli, with all of its scary power, disappear.
sort of garbage. The article has precious little information on why we should do this, or rather, little information that's compelling if you know anything at all about what the writer is talking about. In its brief duration the article convinced me that 1)he understands very little about what he's talking about ad therefore 2) he assumes I know even less. As a student, I find such poor writing shocking. Such a narrow-minded viewpoint is inappropriate in an educational journal; such poor writing and thought is unacceptable.
Mixing latin and greek! Oh no! They're going to have to recall the celeron and duron if they want to keep their languages unmixed, I'm afraid. Why can't they just call it the sextium-I want it so bad. I think about it all the time...can't they call it the sextium, just once? It won't hurt that much... Heh...I wonder what I did with that joke sextium pic that I snagged when they decided to go for the p2 instead. Heh. Hmm...I think AMD should take advantage of Intel's sqeamishess by making their names really explicit-how about 'fuctium' and 'coctium?' Asstium? Athlon 666? Satanium? So, does anybody else think that 666-mhz computers are the sign of satan mentioned in Revelations?
Ha! I just have far too much time to post. I guess I was feeling bitter... You know, the problem with this sort of text formatting is that you just can't get the nuances-if I was talking to you, I would have known that. Anyway, sorry for being so touchy. Feel free to call me a dork next time...it's probably one of the better compliments that you can give someone these days. *cough*this post was totally offtopic*cough*
So he gets a score of two for calling us dorks and talking about his own ignorance, while the detailed information in our posts gets a yawn? Hmmm...moderation seems to have a populist bent.
Hey-shouldn't we be flaming you for voicing a valid argument that isn't popular? Capitalism...it has struck me that there's no fighting capitalism at this point. It's more of a law of nature in our society. But it's clear that our legislators have very little interest in protecting consumers or extending their rights. But there's a very good reason for that. They know that the government in which they are involvded is painfully dated. They know that it's going to be consumers that end their rule, when they realize that every dollar they spend is a vote, and it's become a more important vote than the one they make in the polls. The real problem, if there is one, is that the public doesn't realize that they are the ones paying the bills for these huge companies. They may be big, but there's no company and no industry that can stand if they're publicly unpopular. That's why they're so eager to control the media. Informed consumers are the enemy of the status quo. That's why I wince every time I go into a CompUSA, or Best Buy and I see the help treating a customer as a mark. If you want to make political change happen, make it happen with your wallet. Forget the ballot-that vote has been sold long ago.
It's true-but no one has pointed out what I find annoying about these names as a classicist. The dur- root of 'Duron' is obviously Latinate. But the 'on' is a Greek neuter ending. AMD has used the same mix that Intel used with the Celeron-latin root(celer), greek ending(neuter nominative singular -on). I find it disappointing after the Athlon-a nice, proper greek noun. It's a shame that they have to make up such lame pseudowords-there is an inexhaustible supply of good latin and greek words that sound cool enough. PR firms should get some good latin and greek dictionaries-like the O.L.D. and the largest of the Liddel & Scott Greek dictionaries.
I wouldn't be surprised if they keep a lot of the gameplay exactly the same, and seriously restrict your movement. Anybody remember the Seventh Guest? The graphics weren't rendered realtime, but they were full-motion. In fact, have they eve promised full range of motion? It might be that the graphics are merely rendered realtime.
I cannot stand the current movement towards a simpler, less powerful, less extensible UI. Look at Aqua-the choices that have been made are almost completely based upon the idea that 'simpler' is better, and the effect is neither simpler <i>nor</i> better. If you look at the change from windows 3.1 to win95, win95 may have been cleaner, but it was in no way dumbed-down. And I might be alone, but I find KDE a bit too hard to configure already.
Seriously. Am I the only one who finds it hard to believe that tons of people-including the people who are going to set up 'large internet servers' or whatever--are going to want to use Aqua? From what I've read about it-mostly at arstechnica, aqua was designed completely for novice users. It has a very pretty ui which at this point is dumber and slower than classic mac os. I just find it hard to believe that power users are going to give up the incredible power and ease of use of the cli. Yes, that's right, I said ease of use. I'm sorry, but all of this crap about 'linux isn't ready for desktop use' is a bunch of BULL SHIT. Maybe I'm not everybody, but back in the day, when I used win3.1/dos5, I used the dos cli for almost all my filesystem stuff. And since windows95 neutered the cli, I had been salivating for a new one. When I heard about linux, I had to give it a shot. And guess what my killer x11 app is? That's right, it's an Eterm. Personally, I think everyone's wrong. It isn't linux that's going to get easier-people are going to get smarter. The windows/Mac/Aqua and even KDE/GNOME paradigm is that we have to make linux easier to use, because people don't want to get smarter about their computers and extend themselves-but at the same time, the linux phenomenon itself is showing that people DO want to learn more challenging and powerful interfaces and applications. The CLI is just as viable an interface as a gui. Let's not forget what windows file management is-an ugly, ugly hack on top of dos directories. The reason I love blackbox is because it doesn't have a BS file manager, copped from windows. Why would I want that when I can use bash, which is undoubtedly faster and more flexible? I contend that it's no harder to learn how to do basic things in bash than it is to learn how to use the windows file manager-I know a lot of people who have never been told to right click in windows. The real future is the kind of support system which has been set up by linux users. This network of real people is far, far more important than the next product that MS or Mac thinks will 'revolutionize' the computing world. The revolution is here-we've been participating in it every time we've fixed a problem using well-written, contextual online help, or given the answer to a solution in a BBS. Where's the flourishing online community for Darwin? I'm not saying that it's not possible to create one, but I'm not sure that the major companies realize how big a lead linux has on them in terms of real community. If they think that a twenty-year old concept of 'ease of use' more or less created by the first Mac OS is going to save them, they're mistaken. I think it's funny-linux won't succeed because 'it doesn't offer anything that Unix hasn't?' Really? And of course, everyone knows this because free Unices have been around, available over the WWW with a well-developed help community for how long? While commercial, GUI-based, pay for each OS update, slowly learn to rip off the good stuff from Unix, platforms are apparently just breaking through? Sure. Mac OS X looks like a good product, but this article is a pretty big flight of fancy. If Mac OS X has anything to offer, we know how most people will get it-when a free OS replicates its good aspects. Sorry. If OS X comes out for Intel and is FREE maybe we'll talk.
I have to say that I found Reiser's comments on Russian bureaucracy and his descriptions of attitudes toward open source in socialist and post-socialist countries very interesting. We usually get the flipside of the socialist issue here in the States. It was also a very interesting view of the logistics of an open-source project. Most enlightening.
It's funny-I'm a musician too, and I do make music. I've played, I've recorded a bit. The idea of someone asking your permission to redistribute is nice, but...as an artist, you can't control the audience. In any way. You can try-you can affect them a bit maybe...but somehow, this issue of transmission of songs doesn't surprise me. It's incredibly hard to make people satrt listening to your songs-and it's incredibly hard to make them stop. Music is one of those things, a near-magical entity which is hard to understand and impossible to control. Maybe it doesn't seem like this means anything, but look at the way music has been a social issue in the past and the way it is now. In the 60's a lot of music was concerned with issues of equality, peace, freedom, etc-there have more recently been anti-nuclear events and things like farm aid. But the big news now is an abstract public forum/conflict over IP and the ownership/transferrance of music itself? A couple of things: this is really depressing in a way. Is modern music just a big moneymaking scheme? Has it always been this way? I for one honestly believe that record companies in their current configuration exert a powerful negative influence on the artistic and technical quality of music. The other thing is this: it seems that this really had to happen eventually. Music 'piracy' has been going on for awhile-it's been a big part of the tech for a while now, and it's a great feature for people. I think mix tapes and such things are one of the few ways that people reclaim their connection to music. In a world where music is not considered a necessary part of education, it's one of the few ways many people can be involved. If this sort of thing is every effectively banned, it would really be sad for everyone. The issues just cut so deep-the ownership of music is probably an unresolvable issue. In classical music, composers would routinely rip off one another's music-Chopin's nocturnes are completely ripped from some English guy(whose name I don't remember)'s Nocturnes-but we listen to Chopin's (more) because they're better. A lot of that went on, because classical, i.e. written music is an inherently 'open' standard-written music is the 'source' what you hear is the 'program.' It seems to me that this is a good thing, even if we don't remember that English guy's name. So what to do? Well, in order to stop Napster-esque stuff, it will basically be necessary to monitor all information transfer on the web. I hope that this is impossible, but it seems to me that a totalitarian information state is on the remote outskirts of society. Issues like this (ok IP issues) are disturbing for some people: the people that own the IP. But I just don't think that the rules for information 'ownership' should be the same as the rules for ownership of physical goods. They aren't now, of course, but the way that IP works now is this: if you 'buy' a piece of info, software, music, etc, you're really only buying a license to use it in certain prescribed ways. But you have no actual ownership, and you're forbidden from manipulating the info in any but the prescribed ways, which is a vastly smaller subset than what is possible with technology these days. So you 'buy' a cd-but you don't own it. It's not 'yours,' as in to deconstruct, give away, copy, scramble, etc, it's a contract in which you can listen to it on your cd player and nothing else. Software too... So right now, they're selling things to you that you don't own. Now, add to this that they're selling it to you at very high prices. Next, add in quality concerns-Britney Spears, win98. What do you get? An alienated public? Not really. We realize that we DO own this stuff-we can freely distribute or whatever it because we, the public, exist on such a massive scale. Imagine this as the U.S. revolution, but instead of the Boston Tea Party, it's a Tea Party all the time in every harbor, and England can't do shit but ship more tea because if they don't, they'll disappear. There are obvious problems with this analogy, the biggest one being that people were willing to fight and die for that cause, and I would imagine a much smaller subset of the.mp3 using public is willing to do that for this one. I'm sure there are a few, though. And England can't win this time either, which they'll realize in a few years. What is going to happen is that companies are going to adapt-free stuff is a huge, confusing mess(only compared to money stuff of course). The way companies are going to make money is to make everything available, and in an understandable way. And there will always be a market for repackaged pop crap, just because people like young, attractive people. I think that the reason the only hot pop music is total transparent pop shovelware is that people have already realized what the industry has to sell. And soon, the industry will realize. It's just a shame that bands like Metallica have to victimize themselves by showing how little they understand the situation. Also, their recent albums kind of blow, but that pretty much happens to every good band(insert the other rambling invective against the recording industry here.) So people should just chill. The good thing is that, as the interview shows, Metallica is already chilling.
It just strikes me that the only way an IE company could make money(aside from selling its browser, which doesn't seem feasible-I mean, free Netscape still seems better than pay IE to me)is to offer proprietary web software which->broken or proprietary standards which->the same thing MS is getting in trouble for. Let's face it-a breakup isn't going to cut it. A breakup might help competitors, but it will not help the consumer(short term, long term arguable). A breakup will force MS to do something that nobody else has to do-sell a non-integrated, and possibly non-integratable desktop. This isn't a viable, useful, or intelligent solution. In fact, it will hurt MS even more than what we all know the solution is. OPEN THE WINDOWS APIs
It takes a lot longer than 2 years for an OS to get to the point they're talking about. Maybe linux will be ready to take on Win and Mac in 2 years, and some of the BSD's will be where linux is, but I find it really hard to believe that those or any OS's that are off the map now will be competitive in 2 years. Think about the amount of development going on for linux, windows, and mac and compare it to those 2. Maybe they have some sort of capital and media interest wand, but if they don't they should watch out for BS/2.
Here's my.02 on linux driver support. None of the linux drivers seem to take advantage of SMP, as they do in Quake3 under windows NT. The difference on my dual 550 system is noticeable. That's not reflected on any of those tests-they were on a uniproc system. While the newest round of drivers from Nvidia is definitely usable, they're missing a nice perk(as are the 3dfx drivers, for the voodoo2 at least). It almost makes me want to boot back into NT to play quake. Unlike some of the differences in those tests, the difference from 50-70 fps is a pretty big one. I just hope that Nvidia deals with some of those issues. This lack shows how unfortunate Nvidia's choice was to keep the drivers closed.
I was underimpressed by the article. It does challenge some of the underlying ethics of open source, but I was never persuaded that he really understood what he was writing about. He made several points that are appallingly worthless. Like this one, on the use of the word 'free' by open source advocates:
"This distortion--the hijacking for private purposes of a word that holds such a sacred aura for most people--is highly unethical."
So apparently the linux community has no right to use the word 'free' to describe the software I didn't have to pay for? Excellent point.
His attitude toward Soviet communism is also outdated and embarrassingly inept. Look at this quote:
"It should be pointed out, however, that the existence of a community of dedicated, well-intentioned and sincere defenders of a cause is unrelated to the ethical value of that cause. As an example, one of the tragedies of the twentieth centuries has been the diversion of the energy and passion of countless honest and idealistic volunteers towards support for Soviet-style communism, a regime that cause tens of millions of deaths, uncounted cases of human misery, and the destruction of civil society in entire countries." Excuse me? Did he just argue that the problem was not the actual people in power, that it was socialist/communist theory???? If you've ever read Marx, and Lenin, you know that this is unsupportable. On paper, socialism works far better than any real system. But it's the idea of soviet 'communism'(this misuse of terms should tip off the reader anyhow)that killed millions, and not Stalin and the others in his regime? Let me guess-Those that died in WW2 were killed by 'fascism,' not bullets, right? The 'ethics' that this guy practices are exactly what's wrong with the world. He commits nearly every sin of western thought in this article. And he does commit the cardinal sin of western writing-he is arguing from his conclusion at every point in the piece. And his conclusion is that OSS should neither upset nor challenge western society and economics. It just shows that he doesn't understand the point of open source at all. The reason why not opening your source is harming your neighbor is that open source will eliminate redundant labor-in closed-source schemes, people have to solve the same problems many times, with the result being a terrible waste of effort. The only reason to keep software closed is because it's easier for many companies to understand. But if you've ever read one of those license agreements, you've seen the travesty that paying for closed software is. Not to harp on the Marx thing, but those agreements are the example of the alienation caused by our society. Pay software redefined ownership without most people noticing. Free software is the product of people reading those agreements and realizing that there is a better way. This article does well to point out some of the weirdnesses of the movement's leaders, but it is inconsistent in its logic, and worst of all, exposes that the writer has no intention of challenging his own assumptions, which are of the blandest, brand-homogenized, wishy-washy american 'liberal' sort. The author is exactly the sort of person who will contend until he dies that he is a 'liberal,' while really being the worst sort of conservative-the kind that protects and preserves the worst aspects of our society. He's right-it's not wrong for people to want to get paid for their work. Duh. But if that's his idea of the moral and ethical problems of OSS, then his 'morals' and 'ethics' are neither.
It makes me VERY nervous to see a company with the financial mass of Microsoft in a position to challenge/. However, this is an important legal battle, which the community needs to fight. Some of these points are better than others, but they do point out the marginal legality of MS's action-which has a tremendous bearing on the DMCA, of course. MS cannot be allowed to proprietize an open standard-and, unfortunately, slashdot might have to fight this battle. If it comes to the legal confrontation that is possible, I hope that prominent open-source corporations will provide fiscal and legal backing. Alone, MS could probably bulldoze Andover, regardless of actual legality. But I don't think that MS can fight all of us. And lastly, don't forget us(of course, how could/. forget us?) There are a lot of intelligent, committed people who WILL fight this one out. The/. community will be hard to repress, even for MS. Microsoft might believe that they own the medium they've created; but they will find out that they don't, sooner or later. Now just might be the time. MS is in the uncomfortable position where information works against them-the more the public understands about these, and many other, noncompetitive and destructive actions, the less they will like them. Let's see how long they can keep the wool over the world's eyes. Unfortunately, a few people have gotten a peek into the world outside...
Benefit to linux? MONEY M-O-N-E-Y When you have games, you have users. Not only that, they're users who want to spend money on both hardware and software! And that means companies who are going to spend money, AND, hopefully, contribute at least parts of their code to open source. I mean, I can totally understand if you aren't into games. I'm not as much into them as I used to be. But it's a good thing when Quake 3 works nearly as well in linux as it does in win. At the very least, it saves me a reboot. And I HATE reboots. Dammit. Games are good-games are mainstream. If that linux-based console works out, then a lot of people are going to see it and say-'hey, linux can do graphics and sound really well!' In general, it's just a good thing. An OS which is getting new games is generally a pretty healthy (commerce-wise) OS. It seems to me that it's part of the big picture.
Funny, the only thing that's interested me has been the rumors...mmmm, mp g4's running os X... why not imagine the g4's are running at 1 ghz... I'm in heaven...
It's strange, though: most of the copyright issues have as much to do with the right to read as they do the right to publish. The copyright holders in recent DMCA cases haven't been afraid of the person who's violating their copyright; they're afraid of those who would read and be influenced by that information. This isn't what copyright is for. Copyright was designed to protect innovators against those who would unfairly steal their innovations. But information economy has turned this around-huge companies are the only groups who can profit from these laws. Individuals cannot afford to use these laws for their own protection-if you had to fight out a court case with Microsoft, who would be the winner in the end? It's a completely one-sided deal, which only protects those who have a huge amount of money anyway. The issue isn't free speech-it's completely a media issue. The laws which were appropriate for a printed information economy are inappropriate for the digital economy. DMCA is a desperate attempt to extend aging laws into the new world of digital media-and it is an extremely ill-advised measure. The only thing that it can do is destroy innovation and victimize the small-scale innovators on which the internet thrives: exactly what copyrights were invented to prevent. It's sad that there are no lawyers and judges who can deal with the new information economy. I think Judge Jackson has done an admirable job thus far, under the circumstances; but obviously, the medium moves too fast for such a slow process. Microsoft is already committing new monopoly crimes, and laws like the DMCA have taken away the only tools that citizens have to fight back.
Slashdot Mirror
WORD, dude. What do they give them? The 'pro' version of Mandrake? OOOooohhh...
That was more or less exactly what I was thinking...all the vendors mentioned in that article allow their programs to be downloaded for free!!!! I mean, I guess that's not an option for some people, but still...
I think the real issue is that blind faith in the movement causes some people to write overly good reviews. I guess that's a 'real' problem, but it's one that tells you a few things...
Check out http://www.lxk12.org, an initiative to use free and open source software in NY schools. It's something that I've wanted to become involved with for awhile, but haven't yet. It seems like a very good cause.
What better way to deal with this than flood the organization with linux advocates?????
Imagine if the whole slashdot community signed up for this--and then actually did what they say, sending lots of stuff to local and national political leaders. That would make MS look pretty good, eh? It would be so amusing to have this whole thing backfire...instead of docile winsheep, they'd get a bunch of raving unix loonies fighting them at every step!!!!
Let's all register and let our voices be heard!
I've got to say that Jon Katz has started to get to me. When I first started reading /. it was cool to see the 'this is what's going to happen' articles, but after getting up to speed with what's going on here, I have to say that I just can't be as into it. He has a lot of good points, that are on, but it starts to seem like he doesn't have a bigger clue than your average /. reader. I think there are still some people who need this stuff, though. Luckily, /. is so customizable... Anyway...I think what's going to be really scary is how much sense stuff will make in the future. It's going to be damn hard not to look at stuff in a cohesive fashion-I think the real danger is losing the anarchic jumble that is the current(actually more the past, these days)www.
In the sense-making future, I think that a lot of people like us will miss the good, old, wild-west days of the early web. We've got to remember how to see the web that way, too. A sanitized, edited version of the net is great, but don't forget that it's a choice. It's a level of abstraction similar to a gui over a cli-and I think that we all know how bad an idea it is to try to make the cli, with all of its scary power, disappear.
sort of garbage. The article has precious little information on why we should do this, or rather, little information that's compelling if you know anything at all about what the writer is talking about.
In its brief duration the article convinced me that 1)he understands very little about what he's talking about ad therefore 2) he assumes I know even less.
As a student, I find such poor writing shocking. Such a narrow-minded viewpoint is inappropriate in an educational journal; such poor writing and thought is unacceptable.
But those enemies of individualism will have to deal with my army of vat-grown cyber-ninjas!!!!
HAHA!
Mixing latin and greek! Oh no! They're going to have to recall the celeron and duron if they want to keep their languages unmixed, I'm afraid.
Why can't they just call it the sextium-I want it so bad. I think about it all the time...can't they call it the sextium, just once? It won't hurt that much...
Heh...I wonder what I did with that joke sextium pic that I snagged when they decided to go for the p2 instead. Heh.
Hmm...I think AMD should take advantage of Intel's sqeamishess by making their names really explicit-how about 'fuctium' and 'coctium?' Asstium? Athlon 666? Satanium?
So, does anybody else think that 666-mhz computers are the sign of satan mentioned in Revelations?
Ha! I just have far too much time to post. I guess I was feeling bitter...
You know, the problem with this sort of text formatting is that you just can't get the nuances-if I was talking to you, I would have known that.
Anyway, sorry for being so touchy. Feel free to call me a dork next time...it's probably one of the better compliments that you can give someone these days.
*cough*this post was totally offtopic*cough*
So he gets a score of two for calling us dorks and talking about his own ignorance, while the detailed information in our posts gets a yawn? Hmmm...moderation seems to have a populist bent.
Hey-shouldn't we be flaming you for voicing a valid argument that isn't popular?
Capitalism...it has struck me that there's no fighting capitalism at this point. It's more of a law of nature in our society. But it's clear that our legislators have very little interest in protecting consumers or extending their rights.
But there's a very good reason for that. They know that the government in which they are involvded is painfully dated. They know that it's going to be consumers that end their rule, when they realize that every dollar they spend is a vote, and it's become a more important vote than the one they make in the polls.
The real problem, if there is one, is that the public doesn't realize that they are the ones paying the bills for these huge companies. They may be big, but there's no company and no industry that can stand if they're publicly unpopular. That's why they're so eager to control the media. Informed consumers are the enemy of the status quo. That's why I wince every time I go into a CompUSA, or Best Buy and I see the help treating a customer as a mark.
If you want to make political change happen, make it happen with your wallet. Forget the ballot-that vote has been sold long ago.
It's true-but no one has pointed out what I find annoying about these names as a classicist. The dur- root of 'Duron' is obviously Latinate. But the 'on' is a Greek neuter ending. AMD has used the same mix that Intel used with the Celeron-latin root(celer), greek ending(neuter nominative singular -on). I find it disappointing after the Athlon-a nice, proper greek noun. It's a shame that they have to make up such lame pseudowords-there is an inexhaustible supply of good latin and greek words that sound cool enough. PR firms should get some good latin and greek dictionaries-like the O.L.D. and the largest of the Liddel & Scott Greek dictionaries.
I have a home built with a total of 16 fans.
It runs with the case open.
I wouldn't be surprised if they keep a lot of the gameplay exactly the same, and seriously restrict your movement. Anybody remember the Seventh Guest? The graphics weren't rendered realtime, but they were full-motion. In fact, have they eve promised full range of motion? It might be that the graphics are merely rendered realtime.
I cannot stand the current movement towards a simpler, less powerful, less extensible UI.
Look at Aqua-the choices that have been made are almost completely based upon the idea that 'simpler' is better, and the effect is neither simpler <i>nor</i> better. If you look at the change from windows 3.1 to win95, win95 may have been cleaner, but it was in no way dumbed-down. And I might be alone, but I find KDE a bit too hard to configure already.
Seriously. Am I the only one who finds it hard to believe that tons of people-including the people who are going to set up 'large internet servers' or whatever--are going to want to use Aqua? From what I've read about it-mostly at arstechnica, aqua was designed completely for novice users. It has a very pretty ui which at this point is dumber and slower than classic mac os. I just find it hard to believe that power users are going to give up the incredible power and ease of use of the cli. Yes, that's right, I said ease of use. I'm sorry, but all of this crap about 'linux isn't ready for desktop use' is a bunch of BULL SHIT. Maybe I'm not everybody, but back in the day, when I used win3.1/dos5, I used the dos cli for almost all my filesystem stuff. And since windows95 neutered the cli, I had been salivating for a new one. When I heard about linux, I had to give it a shot. And guess what my killer x11 app is? That's right, it's an Eterm. Personally, I think everyone's wrong. It isn't linux that's going to get easier-people are going to get smarter. The windows/Mac/Aqua and even KDE/GNOME paradigm is that we have to make linux easier to use, because people don't want to get smarter about their computers and extend themselves-but at the same time, the linux phenomenon itself is showing that people DO want to learn more challenging and powerful interfaces and applications. The CLI is just as viable an interface as a gui. Let's not forget what windows file management is-an ugly, ugly hack on top of dos directories. The reason I love blackbox is because it doesn't have a BS file manager, copped from windows. Why would I want that when I can use bash, which is undoubtedly faster and more flexible? I contend that it's no harder to learn how to do basic things in bash than it is to learn how to use the windows file manager-I know a lot of people who have never been told to right click in windows. The real future is the kind of support system which has been set up by linux users. This network of real people is far, far more important than the next product that MS or Mac thinks will 'revolutionize' the computing world. The revolution is here-we've been participating in it every time we've fixed a problem using well-written, contextual online help, or given the answer to a solution in a BBS. Where's the flourishing online community for Darwin? I'm not saying that it's not possible to create one, but I'm not sure that the major companies realize how big a lead linux has on them in terms of real community. If they think that a twenty-year old concept of 'ease of use' more or less created by the first Mac OS is going to save them, they're mistaken. I think it's funny-linux won't succeed because 'it doesn't offer anything that Unix hasn't?' Really? And of course, everyone knows this because free Unices have been around, available over the WWW with a well-developed help community for how long? While commercial, GUI-based, pay for each OS update, slowly learn to rip off the good stuff from Unix, platforms are apparently just breaking through? Sure. Mac OS X looks like a good product, but this article is a pretty big flight of fancy. If Mac OS X has anything to offer, we know how most people will get it-when a free OS replicates its good aspects. Sorry. If OS X comes out for Intel and is FREE maybe we'll talk.
I have to say that I found Reiser's comments on Russian bureaucracy and his descriptions of attitudes toward open source in socialist and post-socialist countries very interesting. We usually get the flipside of the socialist issue here in the States. It was also a very interesting view of the logistics of an open-source project. Most enlightening.
It's funny-I'm a musician too, and I do make music. I've played, I've recorded a bit. The idea of someone asking your permission to redistribute is nice, but...as an artist, you can't control the audience. In any way. You can try-you can affect them a bit maybe...but somehow, this issue of transmission of songs doesn't surprise me. It's incredibly hard to make people satrt listening to your songs-and it's incredibly hard to make them stop. Music is one of those things, a near-magical entity which is hard to understand and impossible to control. Maybe it doesn't seem like this means anything, but look at the way music has been a social issue in the past and the way it is now. In the 60's a lot of music was concerned with issues of equality, peace, freedom, etc-there have more recently been anti-nuclear events and things like farm aid. But the big news now is an abstract public forum/conflict over IP and the ownership/transferrance of music itself? A couple of things: this is really depressing in a way. Is modern music just a big moneymaking scheme? Has it always been this way? I for one honestly believe that record companies in their current configuration exert a powerful negative influence on the artistic and technical quality of music. .mp3 using public is willing to do that for this one. I'm sure there are a few, though. And England can't win this time either, which they'll realize in a few years. What is going to happen is that companies are going to adapt-free stuff is a huge, confusing mess(only compared to money stuff of course). The way companies are going to make money is to make everything available, and in an understandable way. And there will always be a market for repackaged pop crap, just because people like young, attractive people. I think that the reason the only hot pop music is total transparent pop shovelware is that people have already realized what the industry has to sell. And soon, the industry will realize. It's just a shame that bands like Metallica have to victimize themselves by showing how little they understand the situation. Also, their recent albums kind of blow, but that pretty much happens to every good band(insert the other rambling invective against the recording industry here.) So people should just chill. The good thing is that, as the interview shows, Metallica is already chilling.
The other thing is this: it seems that this really had to happen eventually. Music 'piracy' has been going on for awhile-it's been a big part of the tech for a while now, and it's a great feature for people. I think mix tapes and such things are one of the few ways that people reclaim their connection to music. In a world where music is not considered a necessary part of education, it's one of the few ways many people can be involved. If this sort of thing is every effectively banned, it would really be sad for everyone.
The issues just cut so deep-the ownership of music is probably an unresolvable issue. In classical music, composers would routinely rip off one another's music-Chopin's nocturnes are completely ripped from some English guy(whose name I don't remember)'s Nocturnes-but we listen to Chopin's (more) because they're better. A lot of that went on, because classical, i.e. written music is an inherently 'open' standard-written music is the 'source' what you hear is the 'program.' It seems to me that this is a good thing, even if we don't remember that English guy's name.
So what to do? Well, in order to stop Napster-esque stuff, it will basically be necessary to monitor all information transfer on the web. I hope that this is impossible, but it seems to me that a totalitarian information state is on the remote outskirts of society. Issues like this (ok IP issues) are disturbing for some people: the people that own the IP. But I just don't think that the rules for information 'ownership' should be the same as the rules for ownership of physical goods. They aren't now, of course, but the way that IP works now is this: if you 'buy' a piece of info, software, music, etc, you're really only buying a license to use it in certain prescribed ways. But you have no actual ownership, and you're forbidden from manipulating the info in any but the prescribed ways, which is a vastly smaller subset than what is possible with technology these days. So you 'buy' a cd-but you don't own it. It's not 'yours,' as in to deconstruct, give away, copy, scramble, etc, it's a contract in which you can listen to it on your cd player and nothing else. Software too... So right now, they're selling things to you that you don't own. Now, add to this that they're selling it to you at very high prices. Next, add in quality concerns-Britney Spears, win98. What do you get? An alienated public? Not really. We realize that we DO own this stuff-we can freely distribute or whatever it because we, the public, exist on such a massive scale. Imagine this as the U.S. revolution, but instead of the Boston Tea Party, it's a Tea Party all the time in every harbor, and England can't do shit but ship more tea because if they don't, they'll disappear. There are obvious problems with this analogy, the biggest one being that people were willing to fight and die for that cause, and I would imagine a much smaller subset of the
It just strikes me that the only way an IE company could make money(aside from selling its browser, which doesn't seem feasible-I mean, free Netscape still seems better than pay IE to me)is to offer proprietary web software which->broken or proprietary standards which->the same thing MS is getting in trouble for.
Let's face it-a breakup isn't going to cut it. A breakup might help competitors, but it will not help the consumer(short term, long term arguable). A breakup will force MS to do something that nobody else has to do-sell a non-integrated, and possibly non-integratable desktop. This isn't a viable, useful, or intelligent solution. In fact, it will hurt MS even more than what we all know the solution is.
OPEN THE WINDOWS APIs
I don't think so.
It takes a lot longer than 2 years for an OS to get to the point they're talking about. Maybe linux will be ready to take on Win and Mac in 2 years, and some of the BSD's will be where linux is, but I find it really hard to believe that those or any OS's that are off the map now will be competitive in 2 years. Think about the amount of development going on for linux, windows, and mac and compare it to those 2. Maybe they have some sort of capital and media interest wand, but if they don't they should watch out for BS/2.
Here's my .02 on linux driver support. None of the linux drivers seem to take advantage of SMP, as they do in Quake3 under windows NT. The difference on my dual 550 system is noticeable. That's not reflected on any of those tests-they were on a uniproc system. While the newest round of drivers from Nvidia is definitely usable, they're missing a nice perk(as are the 3dfx drivers, for the voodoo2 at least). It almost makes me want to boot back into NT to play quake. Unlike some of the differences in those tests, the difference from 50-70 fps is a pretty big one. I just hope that Nvidia deals with some of those issues. This lack shows how unfortunate Nvidia's choice was to keep the drivers closed.
I was underimpressed by the article.
It does challenge some of the underlying ethics of open source, but I was never persuaded that he really understood what he was writing about. He made several points that are appallingly worthless. Like this one, on the use of the word 'free' by open source advocates:
"This distortion--the hijacking for private purposes of a word that holds such a sacred aura for most people--is highly unethical."
So apparently the linux community has no right to use the word 'free' to describe the software I didn't have to pay for? Excellent point.
His attitude toward Soviet communism is also outdated and embarrassingly inept. Look at this quote:
"It should be pointed out, however, that the existence of a community of dedicated, well-intentioned and sincere defenders of a cause is unrelated to the ethical value of that cause. As an example, one of the tragedies of the twentieth centuries has been the diversion of the energy and passion of countless honest and idealistic volunteers towards support for Soviet-style communism, a regime that cause tens of millions of deaths, uncounted cases of human misery, and the destruction of civil society in entire countries."
Excuse me? Did he just argue that the problem was not the actual people in power, that it was socialist/communist theory???? If you've ever read Marx, and Lenin, you know that this is unsupportable. On paper, socialism works far better than any real system. But it's the idea of soviet 'communism'(this misuse of terms should tip off the reader anyhow)that killed millions, and not Stalin and the others in his regime? Let me guess-Those that died in WW2 were killed by 'fascism,' not bullets, right?
The 'ethics' that this guy practices are exactly what's wrong with the world. He commits nearly every sin of western thought in this article. And he does commit the cardinal sin of western writing-he is arguing from his conclusion at every point in the piece. And his conclusion is that OSS should neither upset nor challenge western society and economics. It just shows that he doesn't understand the point of open source at all. The reason why not opening your source is harming your neighbor is that open source will eliminate redundant labor-in closed-source schemes, people have to solve the same problems many times, with the result being a terrible waste of effort. The only reason to keep software closed is because it's easier for many companies to understand. But if you've ever read one of those license agreements, you've seen the travesty that paying for closed software is. Not to harp on the Marx thing, but those agreements are the example of the alienation caused by our society. Pay software redefined ownership without most people noticing. Free software is the product of people reading those agreements and realizing that there is a better way. This article does well to point out some of the weirdnesses of the movement's leaders, but it is inconsistent in its logic, and worst of all, exposes that the writer has no intention of challenging his own assumptions, which are of the blandest, brand-homogenized, wishy-washy american 'liberal' sort. The author is exactly the sort of person who will contend until he dies that he is a 'liberal,' while really being the worst sort of conservative-the kind that protects and preserves the worst aspects of our society. He's right-it's not wrong for people to want to get paid for their work. Duh. But if that's his idea of the moral and ethical problems of OSS, then his 'morals' and 'ethics' are neither.
It makes me VERY nervous to see a company with the financial mass of Microsoft in a position to challenge /. However, this is an important legal battle, which the community needs to fight. Some of these points are better than others, but they do point out the marginal legality of MS's action-which has a tremendous bearing on the DMCA, of course. MS cannot be allowed to proprietize an open standard-and, unfortunately, slashdot might have to fight this battle. If it comes to the legal confrontation that is possible, I hope that prominent open-source corporations will provide fiscal and legal backing. Alone, MS could probably bulldoze Andover, regardless of actual legality. But I don't think that MS can fight all of us. And lastly, don't forget us(of course, how could /. forget us?) There are a lot of intelligent, committed people who WILL fight this one out. The /. community will be hard to repress, even for MS. Microsoft might believe that they own the medium they've created; but they will find out that they don't, sooner or later. Now just might be the time. MS is in the uncomfortable position where information works against them-the more the public understands about these, and many other, noncompetitive and destructive actions, the less they will like them. Let's see how long they can keep the wool over the world's eyes. Unfortunately, a few people have gotten a peek into the world outside...
Benefit to linux? MONEY
M-O-N-E-Y
When you have games, you have users. Not only that, they're users who want to spend money on both hardware and software! And that means companies who are going to spend money, AND, hopefully, contribute at least parts of their code to open source. I mean, I can totally understand if you aren't into games. I'm not as much into them as I used to be. But it's a good thing when Quake 3 works nearly as well in linux as it does in win. At the very least, it saves me a reboot. And I HATE reboots. Dammit.
Games are good-games are mainstream. If that linux-based console works out, then a lot of people are going to see it and say-'hey, linux can do graphics and sound really well!' In general, it's just a good thing. An OS which is getting new games is generally a pretty healthy (commerce-wise) OS. It seems to me that it's part of the big picture.
Funny, the only thing that's interested me has been the rumors...mmmm, mp g4's running os X...
why not imagine the g4's are running at 1 ghz...
I'm in heaven...
It's strange, though: most of the copyright issues have as much to do with the right to read as they do the right to publish. The copyright holders in recent DMCA cases haven't been afraid of the person who's violating their copyright; they're afraid of those who would read and be influenced by that information. This isn't what copyright is for. Copyright was designed to protect innovators against those who would unfairly steal their innovations. But information economy has turned this around-huge companies are the only groups who can profit from these laws. Individuals cannot afford to use these laws for their own protection-if you had to fight out a court case with Microsoft, who would be the winner in the end? It's a completely one-sided deal, which only protects those who have a huge amount of money anyway. The issue isn't free speech-it's completely a media issue. The laws which were appropriate for a printed information economy are inappropriate for the digital economy. DMCA is a desperate attempt to extend aging laws into the new world of digital media-and it is an extremely ill-advised measure. The only thing that it can do is destroy innovation and victimize the small-scale innovators on which the internet thrives: exactly what copyrights were invented to prevent. It's sad that there are no lawyers and judges who can deal with the new information economy. I think Judge Jackson has done an admirable job thus far, under the circumstances; but obviously, the medium moves too fast for such a slow process. Microsoft is already committing new monopoly crimes, and laws like the DMCA have taken away the only tools that citizens have to fight back.