Point being, the OS is *supposed* to be invisible to the user, and nearly irrelevant.
Linux (and Unix) is invisible to the user. My users don't even know Unix exists. They run "Southware", a Unix application. You can do the same.
This is why Netscape had to be crushed -- they wanted to make the browser the platform. This is why Java had to be crushed -- they wanted to implement "write-once-run-anywhere". (There is a whole career-field of experts dedicated to figuring out why a HARDWARE VENDOR like Sun would push this, but that's a different post;)
That sounds an awful lot like what this guy is trying to do. Had either one of these companies succeeded, or been more open in their approach, they would have made the OS irrelevant.
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that the Be OS idea was right... store everything in a database, potentially allowing any number of front-ends. Let's separate data from the display layer, and let people run their "Windows skin" or "Unix skin". Why not?
Unix is not a "skin". I'm not going to buy a P4 to run a Unix shell on top of a bloated OS so that the Windows idiots can have a dumbed-down "gooey" interface.
I'd like to see an ANSI standard Operating System. Hmm...
just like the steering wheels and clutch/brake/gas pedals of a car.
This is a perfect example. Automobiles reached their zenith in the fifties. Everything since then has been "user-friendly" crap. If people realized that the added "convenience" (laziness) of having an automatic transmission instead of a clutch is one of the myriad of reasons we are so dependent on middle eastern oil, they would re-think what is required of an automobile.
Does everything in the car have to be controlled by a computer? Aren't most cars now days scrapped due to electrical problems from the thousands of extra "features" that they have? Detroit (or anyone else) could build cars that would last 30 years. They would have manual transmissions and manual windows and "grandma" would have to take a week-long class in order to be able to use them.
This would be more of a test of your hard drive than the filesystem. If you just need to manipulate one big file, you don't really need a filesystem, then, do you?
if you lease computers there is a large blame shift to the company you leased from
No, you still get blamed. This time, you're the IT who "got a Dell" and fscked up the support contract. The only shift is that of control over hardware quality, software, turnaround time etc... that you mentioned. Any competent IT can build his/her own far better than Dell can.
that there are a lot of college professors on slashdot. This is the only way I have been able to reconcile their attrition towards non-tax-paying political ideologies such as these and their general intelligence and technical abilities. I see them whine a lot about "why do I bother to teach" and whatnot. Also, no average group of people would have such a high proportion of grammar-nazis. They don't think they're socialists for the same reason that most college professors don't think they're socialists: they and all of their friends are socialists.
This is the perfect example of "militant" Libertarianism. Your post gives no reasons otherwise. They plan to put Libertarianism in action and deny our bloated government the means to continue it's myriad of non-essential functions.
It's just sad that for Libertarians, "militant" means "I don't like how you're playing, so I'm going to take my ball and go home."
that the other Slash-nomads have marked this post as "interesting". I will stay for a while, then continue my search for one which is marked "farmer's daughters to sleep with".
That would be very sad if this were the first test case of a "shady" patent being overturned. With all of/.'s (justified) whining about patent reform, I wouldn't be a bit suprised if large companies decided to join that bandwagon and target patents like this for annihilation.
"allows you to copy any file to tape, or back again, but does not let you read the file."
How asinine is this? Does anyone really think this kind of mythical security bullshit really works? I can damn well read anything I can copy to tape. If M$ has fooled CEO's into believing otherwise, I guess it's all the better for me.
It's counter-intuitive, sure. But it's very important, especially for a capitalist society, to control monopolies. The reason is that monopolies can *break* the capitalistic system. Once you have no competition, there is no longer the drive to innovate (heh, heh) and the monopolist can pretty much name his price, which is always above the price for the same product without the monopoly.
In this case, Microsoft is engaging in predatory pricing, pricing a product below actual cost, in order to drive away competition because they feel that their monopoly is threatened. They will more than make up for whatever they lose once their monopoly is secured. It's a great deal for them and a sorry deal for us in the long run. That's why its illegal.
Keep in mind that capitalism doesn't equal free-markets, although free-market (laissez-faire) capitalism is the theoretical ideal. The problem is that a free-market system cannot be found in nature. All free-markets gradually tend towards monopoly, because the benefits of monopoly power to a business are so immense.
The marginal cost of copying software is damn near zero.
Good point. $6 could very well be the cost of distribution. I'll bet that if you divide Microsoft's expenses & payroll by the number of copies they sell each year, though, you get more than $6.
If I were going into the Law field, I would probably want to learn WordPerfect, as this is what a large majority of Law Firms use.
I consult for a law firm and this is a big problem. Interns come in straight from undergrad and bitch and cry because they don't have Word. Despite the glaring security holes and lesser functionality for lawyers, they are considering deploying Word on their workstations alongside Wordperfect just to stay compatible with their clients and to pacify these interns.
Continuing to keep people using your products is not a sign of a monopoly
Preventing people from using other products by giving yours away for less than cost when you are a monopoly, is an abuse of monopoly power and illegal.
This has more to do with the fact that most colleges are little more than off-the-job training centers for big business. Major corporations long ago standardized on M$ desktops, so colleges followed suit. When businesses start using Linux, as many have, colleges will be right behind them, grovelling for handouts.
That's just wrong. These people have spent ungodly amounts of time and effort to create something for the SOLE PURPOSE OF SPITING MICROSOFT and you want to buy an Xbox to play games on.
Here are a few points in favor of the $200 Microtel:
While it might not have the same quality components as the XBox, it is a decent tradeoff since it has a "low power" VIA C3 processor and you can actually add PCI cards and drives to it. This makes it more useful for something like a firewall that doesn't have to have an nvidia graphics card.
It has twice (128mb) the memory of an xbox, also expandable.
It comes with a keyboard and mouse: no wiring USB connectors and no $20 USB keyboards.
It comes with a copy of Lindows to play with or give to your grandma.
And, last but not least, by the time you've spent $60 on a mod chip and assuming you have a monitor, it's cheaper.
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Just because you'd rather pay your insurance company to wipe your ass doesn't mean everyone else does.
This guy has it backwards.
Linux (and Unix) is invisible to the user. My users don't even know Unix exists. They run "Southware", a Unix application. You can do the same.
This is why Netscape had to be crushed -- they wanted to make the browser the platform.
This is why Java had to be crushed -- they wanted to implement "write-once-run-anywhere". (There is a whole career-field of experts dedicated to figuring out why a HARDWARE VENDOR like Sun would push this, but that's a different post
That sounds an awful lot like what this guy is trying to do. Had either one of these companies succeeded, or been more open in their approach, they would have made the OS irrelevant.
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that the Be OS idea was right... store everything in a database, potentially allowing any number of front-ends. Let's separate data from the display layer, and let people run their "Windows skin" or "Unix skin". Why not?
Unix is not a "skin". I'm not going to buy a P4 to run a Unix shell on top of a bloated OS so that the Windows idiots can have a dumbed-down "gooey" interface.
I'd like to see an ANSI standard Operating System. Hmm...
I would too. I wouldn't like it to be Windows.
From the way this sounds, this guy wants to design Longhorn's UI, not compete with it.
God. I thought that said "the university of Windows" at first.
This is a perfect example. Automobiles reached their zenith in the fifties. Everything since then has been "user-friendly" crap. If people realized that the added "convenience" (laziness) of having an automatic transmission instead of a clutch is one of the myriad of reasons we are so dependent on middle eastern oil, they would re-think what is required of an automobile.
Does everything in the car have to be controlled by a computer? Aren't most cars now days scrapped due to electrical problems from the thousands of extra "features" that they have? Detroit (or anyone else) could build cars that would last 30 years. They would have manual transmissions and manual windows and "grandma" would have to take a week-long class in order to be able to use them.
Just like Linux.
This would be more of a test of your hard drive than the filesystem. If you just need to manipulate one big file, you don't really need a filesystem, then, do you?
No, you still get blamed. This time, you're the IT who "got a Dell" and fscked up the support contract. The only shift is that of control over hardware quality, software, turnaround time etc... that you mentioned. Any competent IT can build his/her own far better than Dell can.
sounds illegal. or sounds like it should be.
I would use it to hack LanManager passwords.
that there are a lot of college professors on slashdot. This is the only way I have been able to reconcile their attrition towards non-tax-paying political ideologies such as these and their general intelligence and technical abilities. I see them whine a lot about "why do I bother to teach" and whatnot. Also, no average group of people would have such a high proportion of grammar-nazis. They don't think they're socialists for the same reason that most college professors don't think they're socialists: they and all of their friends are socialists.
It's just sad that for Libertarians, "militant" means "I don't like how you're playing, so I'm going to take my ball and go home."
that the other Slash-nomads have marked this post as "interesting". I will stay for a while, then continue my search for one which is marked "farmer's daughters to sleep with".
That would be very sad if this were the first test case of a "shady" patent being overturned. With all of /.'s (justified) whining about patent reform, I wouldn't be a bit suprised if large companies decided to join that bandwagon and target patents like this for annihilation.
How asinine is this? Does anyone really think this kind of mythical security bullshit really works? I can damn well read anything I can copy to tape. If M$ has fooled CEO's into believing otherwise, I guess it's all the better for me.
It's not free, but it's faster than tar (heh, heh) and the Linux support is getting better.
It actually is nice now. They must have added a Google Search Appliance. If you select "sort by score" you can find anything you need.
It's counter-intuitive, sure. But it's very important, especially for a capitalist society, to control monopolies. The reason is that monopolies can *break* the capitalistic system. Once you have no competition, there is no longer the drive to innovate (heh, heh) and the monopolist can pretty much name his price, which is always above the price for the same product without the monopoly.
In this case, Microsoft is engaging in predatory pricing, pricing a product below actual cost, in order to drive away competition because they feel that their monopoly is threatened. They will more than make up for whatever they lose once their monopoly is secured. It's a great deal for them and a sorry deal for us in the long run. That's why its illegal.
Keep in mind that capitalism doesn't equal free-markets, although free-market (laissez-faire) capitalism is the theoretical ideal. The problem is that a free-market system cannot be found in nature. All free-markets gradually tend towards monopoly, because the benefits of monopoly power to a business are so immense.
Good point. $6 could very well be the cost of distribution. I'll bet that if you divide Microsoft's expenses & payroll by the number of copies they sell each year, though, you get more than $6.
I consult for a law firm and this is a big problem. Interns come in straight from undergrad and bitch and cry because they don't have Word. Despite the glaring security holes and lesser functionality for lawyers, they are considering deploying Word on their workstations alongside Wordperfect just to stay compatible with their clients and to pacify these interns.
Preventing people from using other products by giving yours away for less than cost when you are a monopoly, is an abuse of monopoly power and illegal.
This has more to do with the fact that most colleges are little more than off-the-job training centers for big business. Major corporations long ago standardized on M$ desktops, so colleges followed suit. When businesses start using Linux, as many have, colleges will be right behind them, grovelling for handouts.
That's just wrong. These people have spent ungodly amounts of time and effort to create something for the SOLE PURPOSE OF SPITING MICROSOFT and you want to buy an Xbox to play games on.
Here are a few points in favor of the $200 Microtel:
While it might not have the same quality components as the XBox, it is a decent tradeoff since it has a "low power" VIA C3 processor and you can actually add PCI cards and drives to it. This makes it more useful for something like a firewall that doesn't have to have an nvidia graphics card.
It has twice (128mb) the memory of an xbox, also expandable.
It comes with a keyboard and mouse: no wiring USB connectors and no $20 USB keyboards.
It comes with a copy of Lindows to play with or give to your grandma.
And, last but not least, by the time you've spent $60 on a mod chip and assuming you have a monitor, it's cheaper.
Dude, so close, yet so far away. Lignux
I guess it's not as bad as antidisintermediation. I can actually picture my high-school Latin teacher cringing.