The Core 2 Duo *crushes* the Pentium D, regardless of clock speed. The X1600 is also incomparably better than the X1300, regardless of video RAM.
It's people like you, buying Dell systems with shit hardware for $1000, that allow them to keep selling this trash. Now, I'm not saying that the hardware in that iMac is a good deal for $1,600 (the laptop form factor is driving the price way up)... but at least the Mac will run video games. If someone offered me that Dell for $400 I'd turn them down, but the hardware in that iMac is easily worth $700 in a generic desktop.
Why the hell do people keep bringing up communism?
How is an environment where every programmer is free to bid on every software project "communism"? Really, contrary to what you might here from Microsoft or Verizon, "capitalism" isn't a word that means "everything is controlled by a government enforced monopoly".
That's a whole bunch of different questions, and you're trying to get at something that really isn't there.
Not every company can afford to hire programmers to write their internal use software.
First, companies contract programming firms for custom work all the time. That's normal, and it's nothing special. It works exactly the same as internal programming, completely separate from the issue of Free vs. Proprietary software.
From a practical standpoint, an architecture firm doesn't necessarily want to hire someone to write a CAD application internally.
And every company with a web page doesn't want to write their own web server. If people need software it gets written.
Why is it not valid for them to pay someone else (like a commercial software company) to do it for them? How is that different than contracting a construction job to someone else? Why should such software come for free?
Why is it not valid for them to work with their competitors to develop the application as Free Software? How is that different from a bunch of companies in the same office building getting together to have a parking lot built? Why should the people who want the software have to pay for its marketing costs?
Seriously, the leap to Free Software just isn't that big a deal, except that it gives people more options. Today, if you wanted a new feature in AutoCAD, you'd have to convince the developer to add it - with some developers that's impossible. If you want a new feature in Apache, you hire a programmer. In the AutoCAD case your competitors *always* get access to the feature. In the Apache case you have a choice - you can keep the feature to yourself if it's a big enough differentiator to warrant the maintenance cost of a fork.
But can you tell me, if I write software for a living -- who will pay me so that I don't starve to death if all software was free?
Compared to the total number of professional programmers, the number who work on proprietary software for sale is pretty small. The vast majority of programmers work on custom software for internal use.
The majority of programmers working on free software also have a day job working on non-free software for said large evil corporations (e.g. IBM) so that they can feed their families.
Bullshit. The number of Free Software programmers who write proprietary software for sale as their dayjob is so small as to be irrelevant. What's this non-free software that IBM sells that all the free software developers are supposed to be working on? DB2? Lotus Notes? I'm sorry, they're not. A lot of the Free Software guys at IBM actually work on Linux or Apache full time - it's their job at IBM.
Even among the programmers who *do* work on commercial proprietary software for a living, a lot of them would be *completely unaffected* if their software turned into Free Software overnight. Consider Solaris, or Java, or Netscape, or even something like Google Talk which isn't free software today.
Freedom of Speech is a general concept, not one that's restricted to those cases where it's legally protected. Just because "free speech on YouTube" isn't a legally guaranteed right doesn't mean that it isn't bad when it gets taken away.
It doesn't have to be unconstitutional to be unethical.
If Google wants to provide a public forum in the form of YouTube, it's better if they don't censor the videos there on the basis of topic. They are legally required to censor certain content (pornography involving animals or children). They are socially expected to censor other content (any other porn and certain extreme violence). Beyond that, they deserve a raft of shit for any censorship - not because they don't have the right to control their content, but because the public forum is much more useful if they allow it to be used.
A mandatory patent license fee violates point #1 of the Open Source definition. The OSD requires free redistribution - obviously if there's a mandatory patent license fee, I can't freely redistribute the software.
Using closed-source, patented software is WORSE for everyone, not better. The only benefit they get is not having to pay the few cents per copy for the codec patent licenses.
A fee of a few cents a copy would compromise one of the basic commitments that the Ubuntu project has made: Ubuntu is zero cost, which allows Ubuntu CDs to be freely copied and redistributed. That would be lost if there were any patent fees involved. It's much better to not have the freedom to modify one tiny portion of the system than it would be to not have the freedom to share the system as a whole.
No option that involves paying patent license fees is compatible with Free Software, or even with the Open Source definition. That means that there is no option to license these proprietary codecs that is "open sourcey".
As temporary compromises go, the deal with Linspire should work fine. It's not like this stops people from downloading the existing codec packages, this just gives an option that is 100% legal - which is really good for system resellers.
There's nothing illegal about playing Windows Media files. It's just a question of licensing the appropriate patents. Freespire just happens to have the right to use Microsoft's tech without paying, thanks to their antitrust lawsuit.
So how would getting those patent licenses work for Canonical then? It's not like they're selling copies of Ubuntu.
This deal with Linspire provides an answer to that question, and the answer is actually pretty good.
Teaching variations on a program or an operating system is a waste of time for most people. The skills will easily transfer. It's not like you master using Word, but then go back to square one when you load up another word processor.
That's a good argument for teaching from something simple like Abiword, but I don't think that that argument can support teaching Microsoft Word. The basic features of a word processor have been the same across all brands for nearly 20 years. The question is "Once you've taught the basic features, what's useful to teach next?". I would argue that introducing a second Word Processing program and teaching GUI similarities will be more useful to the student than teaching the intricacies of doing a mail merge into Word from an Excel spreadsheet.
The economic model that they're working with looks a bit different than you'd expect. It's "what can we lobby for to force people to give us the most money", not "how can we avoid alienating our customers". They're not worried about little things like 10% of their customers boycotting them, they're worried about losing their ability to force the other 90% to pay out the ass. The lawsuits are a PR campaign trying to prevent people from realizing that downloading content is normal.
The Ubuntu developers strongly support the ideals of the Free Software movement. They also want to make an operating system that's useful to their users.
One of the primary usage patterns that the Ubuntu developers expect for their software is for it to be installed on computers that are outdated or even second-hand. They feel that it's better for these machines to have a binary driver or two then for them to not work. With Fiesty Fawn, they will warn the user about binary drivers, but it's important to make the hardware work anyway - $30 for a new ethernet card just isn't a good deal on a second-hand computer donated to a school in Africa.
This deal with Linspire is a little bit different - it's a legality issue about software patents. Sure, it has the secondary effect that Linspire will get to sell proprietary software to Ubuntu users, but the important thing is that it provides a legal way to play Windows Media files on Ubuntu in the USA. Not having to tell all your users to break the law to watch a video is a good thing.
The Ubuntu developers have put a lot of effort into making it clear what is non-Free software so you can avoid installing it. The only exception is drivers that are required to make your hardware work, and it even will start popping up warnings about that... but you don't have any hardware like that, right?
Computer *Science* is not a "trade". Period. Programming can be a trade. Perhaps systems administration. But those are no more computer science than being a mechanic is automotive engineering.
So... what you're saying is that because of poor design decisions made over a decade ago, what should have been a reasonably straightforward feature was made way more complicated? Somehow Microsoft's ability to cope with their past mistakes doesn't make me more impressed by this new version of their product...
*shrug*. Let me rephrase my statement. Those don't really count as "innovative features", because they're pretty trivial. Microsoft needed to include stuff like that to keep up with the competition.
It's nice to see that they're adding actual default functionality to a Windows install in a manner that isn't a monopolistic grab at media control. Previously, Windows was pretty bare-bones except for (reasonably successful) attempts to drive under competitors like IE and Media Player. Somehow Microsoft's attempt to use their monopoly power to dominate the market for Photo Viewers doesn't seem so malicious.
Every one of the features you mention falls into the "avoiding negative publicity" category.
Microsoft needs to keep Windows up to date on eye candy / included basic functionality so that they don't get smoked in reviews compared to Mac OS X (and even Linux desktops). The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI and "live thumbnails" was more than worth it so they could bullet point those things on a feature list.
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP. It's not that the Vista users are winning, they're getting the status quo. It's that the XP users are getting owned.
I wouldn't worry about having a consistent interplanetary DNS hierarchy. The latency is too horrible for any sort of TCP based protocol, so interplanetary communication is going to need a bunch of new standards anyway.
Beyond that, the whole question doesn't really become relevant until there are off-planet settlements, and at that point I don't see any special reason to bring along random legacy bureaucracy like ICANN.
Explorer isn't a window manager, it's a desktop shell and file manager (equivalent to Nautilus in Gnome, Konqueror in KDE, or the Finder in Mac OS). In Windows, the tasks that would be performed by a window manager under X are in the graphics system and the standard library.
When Linux has as much third-party support as MS, then you all can go "a few".
When I said "few", I was being generous to Windows.
Unless you're playing computer games or have some other specific piece of legacy software that only runs on Windows, the *only* significant advantage Windows has over Linux is inertia.
There is no shortage of high quality software for Linux. More of it is Free Software than proprietary boxed software, but I'd consider that an advantage. Linux training is readily available, although I'm not sure of the value of "training seminars" in general. If you go into the "computers" section of a bookstore, I don't think you'll notice any lack of books for standard UNIX software. And, In my experience, the quality of Free Software for Linux mauls that of Freeware for Windows.
Or just actually install Linux. Then you don't have to take their crap at all.
Seriously, the few advantages Windows supposedly has over Linux can't be worth the threat of a license audit. Even if you're in compliance it will still cost you a bunch of time (aka. money) and stress.
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Holy shit. Are you dumb?
The Mac has the following:
The Dell has:
The Core 2 Duo *crushes* the Pentium D, regardless of clock speed. The X1600 is also incomparably better than the X1300, regardless of video RAM.
It's people like you, buying Dell systems with shit hardware for $1000, that allow them to keep selling this trash. Now, I'm not saying that the hardware in that iMac is a good deal for $1,600 (the laptop form factor is driving the price way up)... but at least the Mac will run video games. If someone offered me that Dell for $400 I'd turn them down, but the hardware in that iMac is easily worth $700 in a generic desktop.
Why the hell do people keep bringing up communism?
How is an environment where every programmer is free to bid on every software project "communism"? Really, contrary to what you might here from Microsoft or Verizon, "capitalism" isn't a word that means "everything is controlled by a government enforced monopoly".
That's a whole bunch of different questions, and you're trying to get at something that really isn't there.
First, companies contract programming firms for custom work all the time. That's normal, and it's nothing special. It works exactly the same as internal programming, completely separate from the issue of Free vs. Proprietary software.
And every company with a web page doesn't want to write their own web server. If people need software it gets written.
Why is it not valid for them to work with their competitors to develop the application as Free Software? How is that different from a bunch of companies in the same office building getting together to have a parking lot built? Why should the people who want the software have to pay for its marketing costs?
Seriously, the leap to Free Software just isn't that big a deal, except that it gives people more options. Today, if you wanted a new feature in AutoCAD, you'd have to convince the developer to add it - with some developers that's impossible. If you want a new feature in Apache, you hire a programmer. In the AutoCAD case your competitors *always* get access to the feature. In the Apache case you have a choice - you can keep the feature to yourself if it's a big enough differentiator to warrant the maintenance cost of a fork.
Compared to the total number of professional programmers, the number who work on proprietary software for sale is pretty small. The vast majority of programmers work on custom software for internal use.
Bullshit. The number of Free Software programmers who write proprietary software for sale as their dayjob is so small as to be irrelevant. What's this non-free software that IBM sells that all the free software developers are supposed to be working on? DB2? Lotus Notes? I'm sorry, they're not. A lot of the Free Software guys at IBM actually work on Linux or Apache full time - it's their job at IBM.
Even among the programmers who *do* work on commercial proprietary software for a living, a lot of them would be *completely unaffected* if their software turned into Free Software overnight. Consider Solaris, or Java, or Netscape, or even something like Google Talk which isn't free software today.
Well then, there's no reason to produce proprietary software for consumers then, is there?
Probably with the Sun C compiler. Why?
And how does that BSD code get compiled? Sun's C compiler? The mysterious BSD C compiler that doesn't exist?
Freedom of Speech is a general concept, not one that's restricted to those cases where it's legally protected. Just because "free speech on YouTube" isn't a legally guaranteed right doesn't mean that it isn't bad when it gets taken away.
It doesn't have to be unconstitutional to be unethical.
If Google wants to provide a public forum in the form of YouTube, it's better if they don't censor the videos there on the basis of topic. They are legally required to censor certain content (pornography involving animals or children). They are socially expected to censor other content (any other porn and certain extreme violence). Beyond that, they deserve a raft of shit for any censorship - not because they don't have the right to control their content, but because the public forum is much more useful if they allow it to be used.
A mandatory patent license fee violates point #1 of the Open Source definition. The OSD requires free redistribution - obviously if there's a mandatory patent license fee, I can't freely redistribute the software.
A fee of a few cents a copy would compromise one of the basic commitments that the Ubuntu project has made: Ubuntu is zero cost, which allows Ubuntu CDs to be freely copied and redistributed. That would be lost if there were any patent fees involved. It's much better to not have the freedom to modify one tiny portion of the system than it would be to not have the freedom to share the system as a whole.
No option that involves paying patent license fees is compatible with Free Software, or even with the Open Source definition. That means that there is no option to license these proprietary codecs that is "open sourcey".
As temporary compromises go, the deal with Linspire should work fine. It's not like this stops people from downloading the existing codec packages, this just gives an option that is 100% legal - which is really good for system resellers.
So how would getting those patent licenses work for Canonical then? It's not like they're selling copies of Ubuntu.
This deal with Linspire provides an answer to that question, and the answer is actually pretty good.
How is the legal status of VLC any different from that of any other Free Software media player?
That's a good argument for teaching from something simple like Abiword, but I don't think that that argument can support teaching Microsoft Word. The basic features of a word processor have been the same across all brands for nearly 20 years. The question is "Once you've taught the basic features, what's useful to teach next?". I would argue that introducing a second Word Processing program and teaching GUI similarities will be more useful to the student than teaching the intricacies of doing a mail merge into Word from an Excel spreadsheet.
The economic model that they're working with looks a bit different than you'd expect. It's "what can we lobby for to force people to give us the most money", not "how can we avoid alienating our customers". They're not worried about little things like 10% of their customers boycotting them, they're worried about losing their ability to force the other 90% to pay out the ass. The lawsuits are a PR campaign trying to prevent people from realizing that downloading content is normal.
The Ubuntu developers strongly support the ideals of the Free Software movement. They also want to make an operating system that's useful to their users.
One of the primary usage patterns that the Ubuntu developers expect for their software is for it to be installed on computers that are outdated or even second-hand. They feel that it's better for these machines to have a binary driver or two then for them to not work. With Fiesty Fawn, they will warn the user about binary drivers, but it's important to make the hardware work anyway - $30 for a new ethernet card just isn't a good deal on a second-hand computer donated to a school in Africa.
This deal with Linspire is a little bit different - it's a legality issue about software patents. Sure, it has the secondary effect that Linspire will get to sell proprietary software to Ubuntu users, but the important thing is that it provides a legal way to play Windows Media files on Ubuntu in the USA. Not having to tell all your users to break the law to watch a video is a good thing.
The Ubuntu developers have put a lot of effort into making it clear what is non-Free software so you can avoid installing it. The only exception is drivers that are required to make your hardware work, and it even will start popping up warnings about that... but you don't have any hardware like that, right?
Computer *Science* is not a "trade". Period. Programming can be a trade. Perhaps systems administration. But those are no more computer science than being a mechanic is automotive engineering.
So... what you're saying is that because of poor design decisions made over a decade ago, what should have been a reasonably straightforward feature was made way more complicated? Somehow Microsoft's ability to cope with their past mistakes doesn't make me more impressed by this new version of their product...
*shrug*. Let me rephrase my statement. Those don't really count as "innovative features", because they're pretty trivial. Microsoft needed to include stuff like that to keep up with the competition.
It's nice to see that they're adding actual default functionality to a Windows install in a manner that isn't a monopolistic grab at media control. Previously, Windows was pretty bare-bones except for (reasonably successful) attempts to drive under competitors like IE and Media Player. Somehow Microsoft's attempt to use their monopoly power to dominate the market for Photo Viewers doesn't seem so malicious.
Every one of the features you mention falls into the "avoiding negative publicity" category.
Microsoft needs to keep Windows up to date on eye candy / included basic functionality so that they don't get smoked in reviews compared to Mac OS X (and even Linux desktops). The minor effort that it required for them to add a 3D UI and "live thumbnails" was more than worth it so they could bullet point those things on a feature list.
As for the DX10/Games thing, that's more of an Anti-feature. Updates to Direct X are normal as graphics cards improve. The news here isn't that Microsoft is releasing a new version of Direct X - that's normal, the news is that they're *not* releasing it for XP. It's not that the Vista users are winning, they're getting the status quo. It's that the XP users are getting owned.
I wouldn't worry about having a consistent interplanetary DNS hierarchy. The latency is too horrible for any sort of TCP based protocol, so interplanetary communication is going to need a bunch of new standards anyway.
Beyond that, the whole question doesn't really become relevant until there are off-planet settlements, and at that point I don't see any special reason to bring along random legacy bureaucracy like ICANN.
Explorer isn't a window manager, it's a desktop shell and file manager (equivalent to Nautilus in Gnome, Konqueror in KDE, or the Finder in Mac OS). In Windows, the tasks that would be performed by a window manager under X are in the graphics system and the standard library.
When I said "few", I was being generous to Windows.
Unless you're playing computer games or have some other specific piece of legacy software that only runs on Windows, the *only* significant advantage Windows has over Linux is inertia.
There is no shortage of high quality software for Linux. More of it is Free Software than proprietary boxed software, but I'd consider that an advantage. Linux training is readily available, although I'm not sure of the value of "training seminars" in general. If you go into the "computers" section of a bookstore, I don't think you'll notice any lack of books for standard UNIX software. And, In my experience, the quality of Free Software for Linux mauls that of Freeware for Windows.
Or just actually install Linux. Then you don't have to take their crap at all.
Seriously, the few advantages Windows supposedly has over Linux can't be worth the threat of a license audit. Even if you're in compliance it will still cost you a bunch of time (aka. money) and stress.