the analogies are fun, however, I don't think that the woman in question was buying a ~laptop~ from 2 or more years ago... those packaged with XP originally. She was purchasing a newly manufactured laptop and wanted a customization of the operating system. Customizations cost money in nearly any commodity product. The "car" in my original analogy was ~not~ the operating system, but the gear that it comes on.
Sticking with cars: would BMW charge you extra if you wanted to trade out the plush leather seats for a vinyl alternative? I believe they would, even though the cost-difference to tool and manufacture them are negligible.
Opera is a good choice, and a fine browser. And it is still, hands-down best for testing standards compliance (in my humble opinion).
The only real fault they made at getting market share was waiting as long as they did before making it available for free. I don't pretend to know the finer-points of their business model, or Mozilla's for that matter, but people saw two browsers available gratis and one where you paid $35us (if i remember right...). If you could buy a Porsche or or have a VW, which would you be driving?
You're right, they do host their own CA root authorities, and so can you. Actually, many of the larger companies that I do work with have internal CAs and they're listed as authorities in their deployment images. Also, it's ~really~ not that hard to put in a new authority with simple instructions that even mom can follow.
And, with just a little looking, you can locate and add DoD authorities to your list. Required if doing any work with them.
Actually, it's an important point. Being that I'm from an area where my power comes from nuclear and hydro, the idea of CFBs and their raised mercury does bother me a lot. The argument that "it offsets the mercury put out by coal plants" and such... I'm no so sure I buy it. Would people be far more comfortable building more coal-plants if everyone switched to CFBs to light their homes? Something tells me it would be otherwise. LEDs are "neat" and the geek in me waits a bit less then patiently to be able to put them everywhere in my house (I wonder if I can get 1990's era green and red...). In total, they make absolute ecological sense as well and don't require you to think in terms of trading off pollution. So, instead, I practice shutting off lights in rooms that I'm not in, adjusting my heat during the night and when I'm not at home, and shutting off my computer when I'm not using it. Imagine the change to the electric bill then.
Maybe that's part of the problem... we figure that locking people up for a little while will be the only necessary deterrent... Apparently, that's not going so well. Stiffer penalties, maybe? Perhaps some actual rehabilitation?
There is no right answer, but I really feel that this is certainly low on the list of right... Having the knowledge is certainly one way to gauge threat-levels, but people need to take the responsibility to not try to do that with little more than a bullet-itemed name on a list somewhere.
Sex offenders will have to where a big red "S" on their outer most layer of clothing/jacket/etc, domestic offenders a big "D," and adulterers...
this is just silly... These lists and databases post only enough information to be dangerous. Sure, the rest of the information is out there for people who'd actually spend the time to research it and judge for themselves, but who's really going to do that after seeing Joe Neighbor on the list..? This just caters to the idea of mob-justice.
Leave the databases with law enforcement... That by itself will be bad enough.
I think that the part that the ACLU (and myself for that matter) is objecting to is that there's absolutely no notification of how long the data will be stored and for what purposes used in the future. Sure, if it's nabbing a stolen car now it makes a lot of sense. But if you're driving around in your normal, law abiding ways, by what right or to what purpose should data relating to your movements be stored by the government? Imagine the day that there's a camera in your home's front entry-way that's automatically wired to Police HQ for the "sole purpose of knowing when your house is being broken into," but you're never allowed to shut it off, and there's no way you can now where the data is being used, or for how long that imagery will be stored. Heck, while we're at it, let's start slipping the RFID tags into our right hands, and placing sensors all over so that we will always know if you get kid-napped or hurt! What seems to be your boggle?
Okay, it seems to be far-stretched... but 50 years ago, would anyone have imagined that everywhere they go in New York City or in London that they're always on camera?
If this system is grabbing felons and stolen cars, all the power to them! Once they've determinded that they've grabbed someone, and the court process has occurred, dump the data. If Joe Trooper has sat for 5 hours filming car-plates and has found exactly zero offenders, drop the data... there's no need to keep it.
I'm not really an apple user, love the interface and such, just never made the switch. I am, however, a Linux user and take great pride in making my work-enforced Windows laptop look and function a little more like my home Debian machines...
With the Intel Platform now standard for Mac, the transfer of Safari to Windows was far less work than it would have been in the beginning.
If nothing else, it does give the Apple-philes a way to do the same and stay with the warm Apple-feel if they're needing to work in a Windows environment. Ever get stuck having to use IE and get annoyed when you hit +L?
I've lived in nashua for a long time now, and over the past 5 or so years, they've been putting up cameras all over the place at major intersections, highway ramps, etc... and I've not seen a single sign stating that i'm under ssurveillance... Does this mean that I get to sue the city of nashua under the illegal wiretap laws?
I'd argue against the "no free" stuff for windows. I've been tinkering (sadly, not prolevel) with #develop for a while now. Since all of the.Net framework is available to any windows install, it's at least as up to the task as VS.Net is... and the plugin array makes it almost as flexible as using Eclipse. But.Net on windows right out of the... uh... installer. Plus, the guys who put it together thought plenty ahead and hooked their help system directly into MSDN for up-to-date info.
and yes, it's open source.
Will you like it? *shrugs* for a 5 (or less) minute download on my dsl line, it was worth trying out. Especially without restricting any distribution of your creations.
I'd have to recommend the Honor Harrington Series. It's easy enough reading to be entertaining, and the story's compelling enough to bring you back for more. There's a good number of books in the series (On Basilisk Station being the first) and the main character through all but the latest is a very strong female lead.
The books tend to be a little formulaic, but still very enjoyable.
The reason that I got into Linux in the first place was because I wanted something "different." I kinda think that that's the reason that most people got into Linux was for something different. The problem is that all of those differents were just a little different than all of the other differents.
There are bazillions of technical things that can be done to improve the overall quality of the Linux system. The problem isn't quality, it's the confusion of usability. (i.e. Which is better, GTK or QT? Do I want a DEB based system or RPM? Can I use both? etc, etc, etc).
One of FOSS's many beauties is that if I don't like the way something work I'm free to go and change it to my hearts content as the drool rolls past my chin. There's only one minor problem with that: my code sux... a lot. Talented coders are a rare breed, even rarer when the word "Visual" is not the prefix to your coding tool-kit. Think that the career options are rough now? Imagine all of your end users able to whip up a new interface model on a whim! Hell, I'm a lowly net/sys-admin and the idea of that gives me the shivers!
Anyway, back to the topic...
If I had a chance for recommendations to be seen by The Powers That Be they would be the following:
1) Separate your code from the Graphic Widget kits more. K3B is enough reason for me to keep the kde libs loaded on my machine, but konquer on my desktop is a little to kandy for my tastes (i know that's flame bait there, sorry). Build packages that can use either graphcial set with just some minor modifications, a-la "openoffice.org-gnome" in the debian repositories. That may not be the best example, but as I understand it, the widget sets were meant to give coders the ability to easily use a readily recognizable interface for the end user, not to be a staple in an application who's purpose is not to render pretties on my screen. I know this is nowhere nearly as easy as I think appropriate in this paragraph, but it's worth thinking on. Perhaps it's up to the interface writers to perhaps standardize their calls for said objects: make a GTK button the same call as a QT button, or some-such-thing. Of course there will be differences and additions (there always are) but the basics can be covered, I'm sure.
2) Packages... make up my mind! RPM, DEB, PKG, source... they've all got their beauty points, but having some only available to certain users burns me, and I've been using Linux in one flavor or another for 10+ years now. Recently, I ran across a program called "checkinstall" that has saved me from dealing with install-hell when a package is only available via source. This program allows me to take a source package and build either a DEB for my desktop or a RPM for my laptop. Again, (refer above) my coding sux, but wouldn't it be possible to expand on to expand on this, mix it with "alien" and allow it to handle conversions between types of packages, then build this into YaST and Synaptic and (dammit, I forget what RedHat and Mandriva are using now)? Imagine if SuSE, Debian, RedHat, and Mandriva got toghether on this idea, and got all of their installers able to handle any of the packages and installation methods in *gasp* one install database (per system of course)? Even with the extra overhead, it'd still be faster than, say, InstallShield(R) packages! Convince maintainers and developers that a properly formatted hash-style format can be used to cover the "provides" and "depends" stuff is in the source packages, much like they already should be in the various packages, and we may have a winner here. It may also be handy to let the Installer ultimately decide where the files of certain types go, so the Debian people and the Mandriva people don't start throwing their peanuts over the bar at one another any more.
3) Unified system management: On this, I'm thinking along the lines of something like webmin, where add-ons are constructed and placed in the framework for controlling certain aspects of my system. Being a Debian user,
all true, execpt for the fact that the NAT router is not his own. And I'm sure that they'd have some choice words for him trying to adjust their NAT setup.
His message specifically stated that they were not allowed to run a router of any kind.
Actually, it's Nashua that I'm in, and anyone who's sat in Rte3 hell trying to get to Lowell... Well, it's still rubbish. Turned what could have been a 1.5 hour commute into almost a 2.5 hour commute, in a train with poor environmental, and always in need of at least one more car.
As someone who's commuted to/from work at about 1.5 - 2 hours each way, by car (mass transit is rubbish from NH to Boston) for years, audio books were my sanity-saver. I can also imagine that since Audio seems to come out far before braille, it opens up all sorts of books for the blind.
In effect, almost all of what you state here has been about marketing in one form or another, all of which does have cost to the whole. Most, not all but most, of the product reviewers out there receive their testing hardware from the manufacturers of the products. This is normally done without cost to the people/companies doing reviews, and usually on a loaner basis. This by itself is a form of advertizing that costs the manufacturers money. When you go into your local PC shop (as I do as often as my S.O. will allow me to), they're aware of which products to stock and sell based on materials that are provided by a marketing budget. Television manufacturers (as an example) purchase floorspace and visibility from your favorite local box stores in order to get the shoppers to be able to see them before they see the other guys' products. This also comes from marketing. When bringing a new product to market, especially one that isn't just an upgrade to ol'faithful, there is a need to broadcast it to the masses in order to get the n% of people who are really interested in such a widget to take notice enough to ask the questions that you ask your local retailers about.
Marketing drives sales which brings in money which pays for R&D and employees which brings down production costs which allows for mass-production, distribution, and brand recognition.
I can't help but think of the (begin flamability here) OS/2 life and cycle. The software company I was working for at the time was one of the "insiders" that received bundles to be able to develope our DTP package for. We dumped untold cash-resources for a few years to build a product that would run on an OS that was ~way~ ahead of its time. After a time, we noticed a distinct lack of marketing from the IBMers for this product, but saw the tidal-wave of Windows advertisement. Eventually, it became something of a money-pit for us to continue to develope for a product that just wasn't making it self visible. It could correctly be argued that we spent a bunch of marketing dollars on the "Works on OS/2" phrases that gave us no return and killed a development drive in that arena. But this is a tangent.
I remember when I first went from ATI to nVidia, I saw their stats and test-results on a sales-display in one of the local PC Shops (Showtime PC blatent plug for a good shop!). That was a display that was paid for by nVidia in order to do exactly what it did: Catch my eye and make me ask questions. I'm curious, when you first asked "What have you got?" to your seller, what kind of informational material was he able to provide you?
Granted, it does happen in certain circumstances. But I do not see any of us firing up our 8088/2MHz or Apple ][e, hooking up the acoustic couplers, and banging away at slashdot at 300baud. You know, out of basic priciples...
Of course the money of advertizing comes from the money earned by selling the products being advertized... It just kind of makes sense. Each and every product out there, no matter how good they are in and of themselves, won't sell if no one knows they exist. Marketing is all about getting your product in mind of people you think will buy it, which is the whole purpose of making a product.
Hell, research and development drive up the prices too, and rarely do I hear slashdot complain when nVidia or ATI find some new way to tweak your eye-balls.
Oh, wait! Employees! They make the price of products go up too! Sorry, son, but we need to keep all of our costs down... here's your pink-slip...
Slashdot Mirror
the analogies are fun, however, I don't think that the woman in question was buying a ~laptop~ from 2 or more years ago... those packaged with XP originally. She was purchasing a newly manufactured laptop and wanted a customization of the operating system. Customizations cost money in nearly any commodity product. The "car" in my original analogy was ~not~ the operating system, but the gear that it comes on.
Sticking with cars: would BMW charge you extra if you wanted to trade out the plush leather seats for a vinyl alternative? I believe they would, even though the cost-difference to tool and manufacture them are negligible.
This would be like suing ford or gm for not continuing to keep last years engines for sale in new cars... this is just silly.
Opera is a good choice, and a fine browser. And it is still, hands-down best for testing standards compliance (in my humble opinion).
The only real fault they made at getting market share was waiting as long as they did before making it available for free. I don't pretend to know the finer-points of their business model, or Mozilla's for that matter, but people saw two browsers available gratis and one where you paid $35us (if i remember right...). If you could buy a Porsche or or have a VW, which would you be driving?
You're right, they do host their own CA root authorities, and so can you. Actually, many of the larger companies that I do work with have internal CAs and they're listed as authorities in their deployment images. Also, it's ~really~ not that hard to put in a new authority with simple instructions that even mom can follow.
And, with just a little looking, you can locate and add DoD authorities to your list. Required if doing any work with them.
maybe it'll finally be cheap enough to ~cure~ things rather than just treat 'em.
Actually, it's an important point. Being that I'm from an area where my power comes from nuclear and hydro, the idea of CFBs and their raised mercury does bother me a lot. The argument that "it offsets the mercury put out by coal plants" and such... I'm no so sure I buy it. Would people be far more comfortable building more coal-plants if everyone switched to CFBs to light their homes? Something tells me it would be otherwise. LEDs are "neat" and the geek in me waits a bit less then patiently to be able to put them everywhere in my house (I wonder if I can get 1990's era green and red...). In total, they make absolute ecological sense as well and don't require you to think in terms of trading off pollution. So, instead, I practice shutting off lights in rooms that I'm not in, adjusting my heat during the night and when I'm not at home, and shutting off my computer when I'm not using it. Imagine the change to the electric bill then.
Maybe that's part of the problem... we figure that locking people up for a little while will be the only necessary deterrent... Apparently, that's not going so well. Stiffer penalties, maybe? Perhaps some actual rehabilitation?
There is no right answer, but I really feel that this is certainly low on the list of right... Having the knowledge is certainly one way to gauge threat-levels, but people need to take the responsibility to not try to do that with little more than a bullet-itemed name on a list somewhere.
Sex offenders will have to where a big red "S" on their outer most layer of clothing/jacket/etc, domestic offenders a big "D," and adulterers...
this is just silly... These lists and databases post only enough information to be dangerous. Sure, the rest of the information is out there for people who'd actually spend the time to research it and judge for themselves, but who's really going to do that after seeing Joe Neighbor on the list..? This just caters to the idea of mob-justice.
Leave the databases with law enforcement... That by itself will be bad enough.
Saturn's Rings are made of moon material? Is this chick or egg?
Touche! Absolutely. I think that's part of what scares me. Are we now getting to a point where this is acceptable?
I think that the part that the ACLU (and myself for that matter) is objecting to is that there's absolutely no notification of how long the data will be stored and for what purposes used in the future. Sure, if it's nabbing a stolen car now it makes a lot of sense. But if you're driving around in your normal, law abiding ways, by what right or to what purpose should data relating to your movements be stored by the government? Imagine the day that there's a camera in your home's front entry-way that's automatically wired to Police HQ for the "sole purpose of knowing when your house is being broken into," but you're never allowed to shut it off, and there's no way you can now where the data is being used, or for how long that imagery will be stored. Heck, while we're at it, let's start slipping the RFID tags into our right hands, and placing sensors all over so that we will always know if you get kid-napped or hurt! What seems to be your boggle?
Okay, it seems to be far-stretched... but 50 years ago, would anyone have imagined that everywhere they go in New York City or in London that they're always on camera?
If this system is grabbing felons and stolen cars, all the power to them! Once they've determinded that they've grabbed someone, and the court process has occurred, dump the data. If Joe Trooper has sat for 5 hours filming car-plates and has found exactly zero offenders, drop the data... there's no need to keep it.
I'm not really an apple user, love the interface and such, just never made the switch. I am, however, a Linux user and take great pride in making my work-enforced Windows laptop look and function a little more like my home Debian machines...
With the Intel Platform now standard for Mac, the transfer of Safari to Windows was far less work than it would have been in the beginning.
If nothing else, it does give the Apple-philes a way to do the same and stay with the warm Apple-feel if they're needing to work in a Windows environment. Ever get stuck having to use IE and get annoyed when you hit +L?
~Star
I've lived in nashua for a long time now, and over the past 5 or so years, they've been putting up cameras all over the place at major intersections, highway ramps, etc... and I've not seen a single sign stating that i'm under ssurveillance... Does this mean that I get to sue the city of nashua under the illegal wiretap laws?
yeah... live free or die man... *grumble*
I'd argue against the "no free" stuff for windows. I've been tinkering (sadly, not prolevel) with #develop for a while now. Since all of the .Net framework is available to any windows install, it's at least as up to the task as VS.Net is... and the plugin array makes it almost as flexible as using Eclipse. But .Net on windows right out of the... uh... installer. Plus, the guys who put it together thought plenty ahead and hooked their help system directly into MSDN for up-to-date info.
and yes, it's open source.
Will you like it? *shrugs* for a 5 (or less) minute download on my dsl line, it was worth trying out. Especially without restricting any distribution of your creations.
I'd have to recommend the Honor Harrington Series. It's easy enough reading to be entertaining, and the story's compelling enough to bring you back for more. There's a good number of books in the series (On Basilisk Station being the first) and the main character through all but the latest is a very strong female lead.
The books tend to be a little formulaic, but still very enjoyable.
The reason that I got into Linux in the first place was because I wanted something "different." I kinda think that that's the reason that most people got into Linux was for something different. The problem is that all of those differents were just a little different than all of the other differents.
There are bazillions of technical things that can be done to improve the overall quality of the Linux system. The problem isn't quality, it's the confusion of usability. (i.e. Which is better, GTK or QT? Do I want a DEB based system or RPM? Can I use both? etc, etc, etc).
One of FOSS's many beauties is that if I don't like the way something work I'm free to go and change it to my hearts content as the drool rolls past my chin. There's only one minor problem with that: my code sux... a lot. Talented coders are a rare breed, even rarer when the word "Visual" is not the prefix to your coding tool-kit. Think that the career options are rough now? Imagine all of your end users able to whip up a new interface model on a whim! Hell, I'm a lowly net/sys-admin and the idea of that gives me the shivers!
Anyway, back to the topic...
If I had a chance for recommendations to be seen by The Powers That Be they would be the following:
1) Separate your code from the Graphic Widget kits more. K3B is enough reason for me to keep the kde libs loaded on my machine, but konquer on my desktop is a little to kandy for my tastes (i know that's flame bait there, sorry). Build packages that can use either graphcial set with just some minor modifications, a-la "openoffice.org-gnome" in the debian repositories. That may not be the best example, but as I understand it, the widget sets were meant to give coders the ability to easily use a readily recognizable interface for the end user, not to be a staple in an application who's purpose is not to render pretties on my screen. I know this is nowhere nearly as easy as I think appropriate in this paragraph, but it's worth thinking on. Perhaps it's up to the interface writers to perhaps standardize their calls for said objects: make a GTK button the same call as a QT button, or some-such-thing. Of course there will be differences and additions (there always are) but the basics can be covered, I'm sure.
2) Packages... make up my mind! RPM, DEB, PKG, source... they've all got their beauty points, but having some only available to certain users burns me, and I've been using Linux in one flavor or another for 10+ years now. Recently, I ran across a program called "checkinstall" that has saved me from dealing with install-hell when a package is only available via source. This program allows me to take a source package and build either a DEB for my desktop or a RPM for my laptop. Again, (refer above) my coding sux, but wouldn't it be possible to expand on to expand on this, mix it with "alien" and allow it to handle conversions between types of packages, then build this into YaST and Synaptic and (dammit, I forget what RedHat and Mandriva are using now)? Imagine if SuSE, Debian, RedHat, and Mandriva got toghether on this idea, and got all of their installers able to handle any of the packages and installation methods in *gasp* one install database (per system of course)? Even with the extra overhead, it'd still be faster than, say, InstallShield(R) packages! Convince maintainers and developers that a properly formatted hash-style format can be used to cover the "provides" and "depends" stuff is in the source packages, much like they already should be in the various packages, and we may have a winner here. It may also be handy to let the Installer ultimately decide where the files of certain types go, so the Debian people and the Mandriva people don't start throwing their peanuts over the bar at one another any more.
3) Unified system management: On this, I'm thinking along the lines of something like webmin, where add-ons are constructed and placed in the framework for controlling certain aspects of my system. Being a Debian user,
all true, execpt for the fact that the NAT router is not his own. And I'm sure that they'd have some choice words for him trying to adjust their NAT setup.
His message specifically stated that they were not allowed to run a router of any kind.
now, about going off "half cocked?"
Actually, it's Nashua that I'm in, and anyone who's sat in Rte3 hell trying to get to Lowell... Well, it's still rubbish. Turned what could have been a 1.5 hour commute into almost a 2.5 hour commute, in a train with poor environmental, and always in need of at least one more car.
As someone who's commuted to/from work at about 1.5 - 2 hours each way, by car (mass transit is rubbish from NH to Boston) for years, audio books were my sanity-saver. I can also imagine that since Audio seems to come out far before braille, it opens up all sorts of books for the blind.
...and how much of this was given for free again? I'd love one of those locomotives, though my neighbors may complain...
um... realistic? even tame?
In effect, almost all of what you state here has been about marketing in one form or another, all of which does have cost to the whole. Most, not all but most, of the product reviewers out there receive their testing hardware from the manufacturers of the products. This is normally done without cost to the people/companies doing reviews, and usually on a loaner basis. This by itself is a form of advertizing that costs the manufacturers money. When you go into your local PC shop (as I do as often as my S.O. will allow me to), they're aware of which products to stock and sell based on materials that are provided by a marketing budget. Television manufacturers (as an example) purchase floorspace and visibility from your favorite local box stores in order to get the shoppers to be able to see them before they see the other guys' products. This also comes from marketing. When bringing a new product to market, especially one that isn't just an upgrade to ol'faithful, there is a need to broadcast it to the masses in order to get the n% of people who are really interested in such a widget to take notice enough to ask the questions that you ask your local retailers about.
Marketing drives sales which brings in money which pays for R&D and employees which brings down production costs which allows for mass-production, distribution, and brand recognition.
I can't help but think of the (begin flamability here) OS/2 life and cycle. The software company I was working for at the time was one of the "insiders" that received bundles to be able to develope our DTP package for. We dumped untold cash-resources for a few years to build a product that would run on an OS that was ~way~ ahead of its time. After a time, we noticed a distinct lack of marketing from the IBMers for this product, but saw the tidal-wave of Windows advertisement. Eventually, it became something of a money-pit for us to continue to develope for a product that just wasn't making it self visible. It could correctly be argued that we spent a bunch of marketing dollars on the "Works on OS/2" phrases that gave us no return and killed a development drive in that arena. But this is a tangent.
I remember when I first went from ATI to nVidia, I saw their stats and test-results on a sales-display in one of the local PC Shops (Showtime PC blatent plug for a good shop!). That was a display that was paid for by nVidia in order to do exactly what it did: Catch my eye and make me ask questions. I'm curious, when you first asked "What have you got?" to your seller, what kind of informational material was he able to provide you?
Granted, it does happen in certain circumstances. But I do not see any of us firing up our 8088/2MHz or Apple ][e, hooking up the acoustic couplers, and banging away at slashdot at 300baud. You know, out of basic priciples...
Of course the money of advertizing comes from the money earned by selling the products being advertized... It just kind of makes sense. Each and every product out there, no matter how good they are in and of themselves, won't sell if no one knows they exist. Marketing is all about getting your product in mind of people you think will buy it, which is the whole purpose of making a product.
Hell, research and development drive up the prices too, and rarely do I hear slashdot complain when nVidia or ATI find some new way to tweak your eye-balls.
Oh, wait! Employees! They make the price of products go up too! Sorry, son, but we need to keep all of our costs down... here's your pink-slip...
*sigh*
Sorry, but actually, the "MechWarrior" books were out before the game... although it was under the Battletech umbrella.
Sorry, just had to.