The real problem here isn't Microsoft, it's software patents. If Microsoft really was the problem, IBM might save us. But... IBM isn't going to save anyone from software patents - extorting companies with their giant patent portfolio is the *reason they have laywers*. As Mark Shuttleworth says, Microsoft may actually end up being one of the good guys on this issue in the medium to long term.
This is just business as usual with patents - big companies sign cross licensing / "non-aggression treaties" with each other so that they can bomb, err, sue smaller companies without the big companies feeling threatened. This is only interesting because it may include some specific wording that will run afoul of GPLv3.
Binary blob drivers in Linux are widely considered to technically be a violation of the GPL license. The Linux developers seem to have decided that they aren't going to go after anyone over binary blobs, but if any Linux developer changed their mind it could be bad news for anyone who was distributing Linux and a functioning binary driver together (GPLv2 auto-revokes itself for violations - this is actually less painful under GPLv3).
GPL v3 appears to disallow the possibility of the developer keeping their own changes to the code private and closed source.
Bullshit. It's absolutely no different from GPLv2 on this issue. If you don't distribute binaries, you don't have to distribute sources - same as before.
You call putting poor people in debt for 20 years for their BA in Art History "helping the poor"? There really isn't non-loan "tuition assistance" in the USA any more, and student loans basically just keep people poor.
Social Security,..., Medicare/medicaid?
It turns out that old people actually vote. This is just appeasing the one category of actual voters.
welfare
Economically, welfare as implemented in the United States is an utter mess. It might be possible to get it right, but what we have now is worse than nothing - it basically just subsidizes unemployment.
Powerful tools are a good thing, not something bad because they can be "used for evil". Criminals are a relevant social problem, but the belief that everyone should be denied the use of powerful tools because some few people might be able to use them to accomplish something you don't approve of is absurd. Accomplishing things is much more important than thwarting people.
When you over-protect your children, they end up not being prepared for the real world - and they end up being horribly irresponsible when they get the chance.
Seriously, "If someone collapses from drinking too much, roll them onto their stomach so they don't drown in their own vomit" is much better parental advice than "Drinking is bad, never do it". The latter bit of advice results in binge drinking deaths every year, especially at colleges. The same is true for sex ("safe sex" vs. "no sex").
These people govern for _all_ , not just the incompetent.
There are over 300,000,000 people in the United States. There are 50 state governments, and 10's of thousands of local governments. Across all of those areas, there don't even *start* to be consistent community standards - where I live, a hoopla over a breast with a pasty on TV seems pretty ridiculous for example. My point is this - even if there are people who *do* need protecting by a nanny-state, nobody wins if that is implemented at a Federal level, because the standard that is implemented would always be wrong for the majority.
All CPU makers make their CPUs compatible with existing compilers - but that completely ignores new instructions like SSE4. For that sort of thing, ether the programmer has to take advantage of it with hand-coded assembly, or someone needs to write a compiler optimized for the new instruction set. If the CPU vendor does it themselves rather than waiting for Microsoft and the GNU project to get around to it they can see results faster and feed information from/to hardware design more quickly and efficiently.
That's only convincing in the case of a print designer who's used to other Adobe products with similar UIs. For other users, it seems to me that the GUI nessisary to include and implement features like image rollovers is more complicated than the code itself would be.
There is a market for extremely casual users for whom "code" is already too complicated, but for them a high end professional product is realistically too complicated too. Something like Front Page would be more appropriate for that niche (or getting over their code-phobia, but...).
The PC is an AMD 3000 with 1GB DDR and a Radeon 9600 with 2 80GB ATA drives.
You hit both the AGP/PCI express switch and the DDR/DDR2 switch. That sucks - but it's also reasonably rare.
There are a number of upgrader motherboards that would let you upgrade either your Processor / RAM while keeping your video card or upgrade your video card while keeping your Processor & RAM. There are even boards that have both a PCI express slot and an AGP slot, so you can upgrade your video card later.
Another consideration is that you could upgrade most of the guts, but keep your case and drives. You could probably get to a top of the line machine for $300 that way.
You did see that this review was on HardOCP, right? The article below it was about a specific GeForce 8800 GS 640MB. Not just the general chipset, but a specific card. This isn't a site for the "non-enthusiast" population...
You're right. The Mac Mini product is naturally not something that one would upgrade.
The thing is, Apple offers no product that naturally upgrades for less than $2400. For people who value upgrading as a feature and want to spend less than $2400 on their computer, the complete lack of a product that meets their needs is a major disadvantage for Mac OS X.
Did you read the article? In the article, he actually says that Macs are *cheaper* on a part-for-part basis than most other systems.
The point he's making about price - and it doesn't really apply to notebooks - is that not being able to upgrade components makes the computing experience more expensive. I don't know how good an argument this is, but the ability to upgrade individual components is considered a huge deal among hardware enthusiasts. Given that this article was posted on HardOCP.com, this point is *absolutely relevant* to the article's audience.
Consider the following: A Mac Mini costs $600. For $600, you can get reasonably nice desktop PC from a vendor like Dell. If you later decide that you want a mid-range video card, you can get it for $200 and trivially install it. To do the same with the Mac Mini costs $2000+ because you basically have to go buy a Mac Pro to get that class of graphics card. You may not see it that way, but that's why people who read HardOCP and Mac users are largely different sets of people.
I know it is nice, and Linux users in particular are spoiled in this regard... but why make it an expectation?
There are three major desktop platforms. Two of them have reasonably functional $0 software for every major desktop task. The fact that the third doesn't is a shortcoming.
The article is good for a solid "power UNIX user" but in writing such an article you're being ignorant of the 99% of the population that would rather purchase refined/supported commercial software rather then digging around for freeware.
99%? Purchase commercial software? Bullshit. My experience breaks down about like this: 20% purchase commercial software. 30% expect someone to give them a copy of commercial software. 25% will download whatever shareware / freeware they can find. 5% want open source software. And the last 20% just give up when they're faced with the prospect of installing new software.
Wait a second... there isn't even a good non-payware *text editor* for OS X? On *nix, even if you restrict yourself to GUI apps with language-dependant syntax highlighting there's like 281 of them that are reasonably good. Even Windows has a bunch of them.
It's really useful for a CPU company to develop an optimizing compiler for their hardware. It forces them to understand how their CPU features actually speed up software, and it gives them the opportunity to prove that certain hard optimizations actually work. It would probably be best for everyone if the compiler were open source, but if Intel thinks they need to sell it as a commercial product to justify it financially we still get all of the benefit on their future processor designs.
I've currently got a web design contract, and I'm doing exactly that. As a programmer who occasionally does web design, it works great for me. For an artist or desktop publisher type who occasionally does web design, it might not work as well. But that's only because they aren't used to the workflow, not because vi is a poor tool for the job.
I need to move the illo on page 43 two picas to the right, and then I need to look at it and decide to move it back.
Almost 100% of the time, you really don't need to do that if you have a decent document preparation tool like LaTeX. A lot of people seem to learn the work model of "use poor tools and then adjust every little thing by hand", but for documents longer than about 4 pages that's really just a horribly inefficient use of time.
What sort of incompetent web designer can't handle doing his own rollover graphics? It's like two lines of JavaScript.
I guess there is a school of web design where you do your web design in Photoshop, click "Export HTML", and declare your task to be done. I'm sorry, but being a "Photoshop Operator" doesn't even imply that you're an artist - much less that you're a web designer. Not knowing basic stuff like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - especially referring to them as "command line style coding" - immediately disqualifies you as a "Professional Web Designer".
Indeed, anything that the GIMP can do, Photoshop can do better and faster, and Photoshop can do way more than the GIMP.
Says someone who probably is an expert at Photoshop, but only started GIMP once in 2002 to see the "bad interface" that everyone on the internet was harping on.
There are a couple of widely-hyped features that Photoshop has and GIMP doesn't - mostly related to print publishing. The vast majority of users don't need those features. GIMP does have a few features that Photoshop doesn't: It's easier to script for example. A different vast majority of users won't ever take advantage of those features.
For me, as a non-artist who keeps having to do graphic manipulation, the GIMP is great. I've tried Photoshop, to see what all the fuss was about (really tried - did some non-trivial stuff that took a couple days) - and for me it's not any better than the GIMP.
For those few people reading who may be trying to make the relevant choice: Pirate Photoshop or use The GIMP - The GIMP is great, Photoshop definitely isn't good enough to break the law over. Either buy the license or skip it.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem here isn't Microsoft, it's software patents. If Microsoft really was the problem, IBM might save us. But... IBM isn't going to save anyone from software patents - extorting companies with their giant patent portfolio is the *reason they have laywers*. As Mark Shuttleworth says, Microsoft may actually end up being one of the good guys on this issue in the medium to long term.
This is just business as usual with patents - big companies sign cross licensing / "non-aggression treaties" with each other so that they can bomb, err, sue smaller companies without the big companies feeling threatened. This is only interesting because it may include some specific wording that will run afoul of GPLv3.
Bullshit. It's absolutely no different from GPLv2 on this issue. If you don't distribute binaries, you don't have to distribute sources - same as before.
You call putting poor people in debt for 20 years for their BA in Art History "helping the poor"? There really isn't non-loan "tuition assistance" in the USA any more, and student loans basically just keep people poor.
It turns out that old people actually vote. This is just appeasing the one category of actual voters.
Economically, welfare as implemented in the United States is an utter mess. It might be possible to get it right, but what we have now is worse than nothing - it basically just subsidizes unemployment.
Powerful tools are a good thing, not something bad because they can be "used for evil". Criminals are a relevant social problem, but the belief that everyone should be denied the use of powerful tools because some few people might be able to use them to accomplish something you don't approve of is absurd. Accomplishing things is much more important than thwarting people.
When you over-protect your children, they end up not being prepared for the real world - and they end up being horribly irresponsible when they get the chance.
Seriously, "If someone collapses from drinking too much, roll them onto their stomach so they don't drown in their own vomit" is much better parental advice than "Drinking is bad, never do it". The latter bit of advice results in binge drinking deaths every year, especially at colleges. The same is true for sex ("safe sex" vs. "no sex").
These people govern for _all_ , not just the incompetent.
There are over 300,000,000 people in the United States. There are 50 state governments, and 10's of thousands of local governments. Across all of those areas, there don't even *start* to be consistent community standards - where I live, a hoopla over a breast with a pasty on TV seems pretty ridiculous for example. My point is this - even if there are people who *do* need protecting by a nanny-state, nobody wins if that is implemented at a Federal level, because the standard that is implemented would always be wrong for the majority.
Wait a second... Nvidia requested that the "nv" driver be intentionally obfuscated and the X.org people agreed? That's absurd.
Mac users currently cannot upgrade, because reasonably priced Mac hardware is not non-trivially upgradeable. (a true statement)
Enthusiasts tend to consider upgradability as a highly desirable feature in non-laptop computers. (also true)
Therefore, reasonably priced Mac desktops are missing a feature that enthusiasts tend to desire. (follows logically)
I don't think the article was trying to go any further than that.
All CPU makers make their CPUs compatible with existing compilers - but that completely ignores new instructions like SSE4. For that sort of thing, ether the programmer has to take advantage of it with hand-coded assembly, or someone needs to write a compiler optimized for the new instruction set. If the CPU vendor does it themselves rather than waiting for Microsoft and the GNU project to get around to it they can see results faster and feed information from/to hardware design more quickly and efficiently.
That's only convincing in the case of a print designer who's used to other Adobe products with similar UIs. For other users, it seems to me that the GUI nessisary to include and implement features like image rollovers is more complicated than the code itself would be.
There is a market for extremely casual users for whom "code" is already too complicated, but for them a high end professional product is realistically too complicated too. Something like Front Page would be more appropriate for that niche (or getting over their code-phobia, but...).
You hit both the AGP/PCI express switch and the DDR/DDR2 switch. That sucks - but it's also reasonably rare.
There are a number of upgrader motherboards that would let you upgrade either your Processor / RAM while keeping your video card or upgrade your video card while keeping your Processor & RAM. There are even boards that have both a PCI express slot and an AGP slot, so you can upgrade your video card later.
Another consideration is that you could upgrade most of the guts, but keep your case and drives. You could probably get to a top of the line machine for $300 that way.
You did see that this review was on HardOCP, right? The article below it was about a specific GeForce 8800 GS 640MB. Not just the general chipset, but a specific card. This isn't a site for the "non-enthusiast" population...
You're right. The Mac Mini product is naturally not something that one would upgrade.
The thing is, Apple offers no product that naturally upgrades for less than $2400. For people who value upgrading as a feature and want to spend less than $2400 on their computer, the complete lack of a product that meets their needs is a major disadvantage for Mac OS X.
Did you read the article? In the article, he actually says that Macs are *cheaper* on a part-for-part basis than most other systems.
The point he's making about price - and it doesn't really apply to notebooks - is that not being able to upgrade components makes the computing experience more expensive. I don't know how good an argument this is, but the ability to upgrade individual components is considered a huge deal among hardware enthusiasts. Given that this article was posted on HardOCP.com, this point is *absolutely relevant* to the article's audience.
Consider the following: A Mac Mini costs $600. For $600, you can get reasonably nice desktop PC from a vendor like Dell. If you later decide that you want a mid-range video card, you can get it for $200 and trivially install it. To do the same with the Mac Mini costs $2000+ because you basically have to go buy a Mac Pro to get that class of graphics card. You may not see it that way, but that's why people who read HardOCP and Mac users are largely different sets of people.
There are three major desktop platforms. Two of them have reasonably functional $0 software for every major desktop task. The fact that the third doesn't is a shortcoming.
99%? Purchase commercial software? Bullshit. My experience breaks down about like this: 20% purchase commercial software. 30% expect someone to give them a copy of commercial software. 25% will download whatever shareware / freeware they can find. 5% want open source software. And the last 20% just give up when they're faced with the prospect of installing new software.
Wait a second... there isn't even a good non-payware *text editor* for OS X? On *nix, even if you restrict yourself to GUI apps with language-dependant syntax highlighting there's like 281 of them that are reasonably good. Even Windows has a bunch of them.
It's really useful for a CPU company to develop an optimizing compiler for their hardware. It forces them to understand how their CPU features actually speed up software, and it gives them the opportunity to prove that certain hard optimizations actually work. It would probably be best for everyone if the compiler were open source, but if Intel thinks they need to sell it as a commercial product to justify it financially we still get all of the benefit on their future processor designs.
Did the fix the "2D acceleration in a second X session" bug? That one actually annoys me more than not having 3D desktop support.
I've currently got a web design contract, and I'm doing exactly that. As a programmer who occasionally does web design, it works great for me. For an artist or desktop publisher type who occasionally does web design, it might not work as well. But that's only because they aren't used to the workflow, not because vi is a poor tool for the job.
Almost 100% of the time, you really don't need to do that if you have a decent document preparation tool like LaTeX. A lot of people seem to learn the work model of "use poor tools and then adjust every little thing by hand", but for documents longer than about 4 pages that's really just a horribly inefficient use of time.
What sort of incompetent web designer can't handle doing his own rollover graphics? It's like two lines of JavaScript.
I guess there is a school of web design where you do your web design in Photoshop, click "Export HTML", and declare your task to be done. I'm sorry, but being a "Photoshop Operator" doesn't even imply that you're an artist - much less that you're a web designer. Not knowing basic stuff like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - especially referring to them as "command line style coding" - immediately disqualifies you as a "Professional Web Designer".
Says someone who probably is an expert at Photoshop, but only started GIMP once in 2002 to see the "bad interface" that everyone on the internet was harping on.
There are a couple of widely-hyped features that Photoshop has and GIMP doesn't - mostly related to print publishing. The vast majority of users don't need those features. GIMP does have a few features that Photoshop doesn't: It's easier to script for example. A different vast majority of users won't ever take advantage of those features.
For me, as a non-artist who keeps having to do graphic manipulation, the GIMP is great. I've tried Photoshop, to see what all the fuss was about (really tried - did some non-trivial stuff that took a couple days) - and for me it's not any better than the GIMP.
For those few people reading who may be trying to make the relevant choice: Pirate Photoshop or use The GIMP - The GIMP is great, Photoshop definitely isn't good enough to break the law over. Either buy the license or skip it.