Granted, Apple doesn't ship an easy way to change the system wide theme. For 90 percent of people it looks really nice and is just customizable enough in terms of interface function (e.g.: where do you want your scrollbar arrows, Expose triggers, random background pictures from a given folder, etc.) to meet personal needs. The best 3rd party solution for skinning the system, from what I hear, is ShapeShifter. Not sure if that works under OS X 10.5.
Trying to make an argument for Linux because it's more easily skinnable is probably not the best route. No one cares how something looks if they can't make it work the way they want.
I agree 100 percent. I am a Mac OS X user and have many friends/associates that use Linux. I'm always struck in discussions with them when they bring up the fact that (and I'm paraphrasing here): "I like Linux because I can see exactly what everything is doing all the time and control it and fix it if I need to, even if that means editing source."
I consider myself an advanced computer user capable of troubleshooting problems on Windows and Mac OS X systems, and never once has not being able to access and modify the source or some obscure config file kept me from being able to fix things and get them working again. The fact that my system (a Mac) is not Free doesn't bother me, because I can do everything I need with it and it doesn't restrict me in any meaningful way--there is a difference between DRM that gets in the way and causes problems (the majority of DRM on Windows), and DRM that does the bare minimum to keep content holders from suing and is in fact circumventable (Mac OS X style DRM). All DRM is annoying and pointless for its intended purpose, but most users simply won't care about it if it doesn't get in their way.
If Linux wants to compete, it has to do so on features, not philosophy. Consumers don't want to hear that driver software isn't available because the hardware company only offers BLOBs and those aren't included by defualt because they're not Free, or have to do fancy command line ninjutsu to make their wifi work. And the inability of DVD playback and other license-related features to work out of the box IS a dealkiller, because consumers just don't care about the issues of Not Free vs Free.
Ideology is important, and useful to the free software movement, but realistically it can have nothing to do with putting Linux in the hands of home desktop users, because people should not be required to join a movement just to change operating systems. Because if they are, they won't. Competition and the decision to switch must be based on features, price, and ease of use. As far as that last bit goes, Linux on the Desktop won't happen until there exists a distribution that at minimum is as easy to set up and use as Microsoft Windows (or preferably, Mac OS X). That means you install it, every bit of hardware just works the way it's supposed to, and there is absolutely no need to go into the command line to do ANYTHING so far as normal-user system settings. The command line and advanced functionality should of course be there, but it should not be something the average home user ever need see. There are people who have Macs and Wintel boxes for years without ever seeing a command line, because they don't NEED a command line.
Linux has to be THAT easy if it wants to compete on the home desktop, because that demographic represents the lowest end of the sophistication spectrum, and just won't bother with something more complicated if another solution (Win/Mac) meets their needs.
ATT has no coverage in many places. Like the entire state of Vermont. If you happen to live in a dark spot, unlocking is the only way to use an iPhone. (In this situation, it's not even robbing revenue from ATT/Apple, because they never would have any legitimate customers from this state, but that's a whole other argument.)
As for losing "lots of neat features," Visual Voicemail is the only feature tied to ATT. Those who want to use an iPhone on another carrier do not view this feature as a must have. Old-style voicemail is still functional on other carriers.
And also, there are many more GSM carriers in the US than you might think: http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_us.shtml . I can't say how many of those have unlimited EDGE data plans or useful coverage or competitive pricing, but it's just not accurate to say there's only two GSM players in the United States.
Any time you open an account with a carrier, they'll do a credit check on you. This is what the SSN is for. If your credit is bad, you can go month to month. All 9s is a fake serial number, so you're gaurenteeing a failed credit check. Bad credit means you can't sign a contract with them, but you can still sign up for the (arguably overpriced) month to month plan.
No offense meant. I should have specified that I was speaking of the US government. I'll admit I often fall into the trap of considering slashdot as being 99 percent US read, just because of the topics discussed and the fact that the large majority of posts seem to be written in US English.
I am well aware of the ADA's ambiguity on this sort of thing. It's ambiguous in a lot of other areas as well--did you know that private universities do not have to be fully physically accessible (e.g.: automatic doors), even though they cannot discriminate in admissions on the basis of physical ability? I was just pointing out what I know to be true: that all US government sites must comply with the government accessibility standard. This is a legal requirement. Court cases set precedent, but unless it's a very powerful court, precedent only bites you if you get sued. For example, if the Supreme Court ruled a certain class of website had to meet accessibility requirements under the 14th Amendment (Equal Protection Under the Law), that would have nation-wide implications and effect. If a lower federal court did it, it would still have nationwide implications, but it wouldn't be acted on nation-wide so long as there was a chance of appeal. State and local courts likewise have progressively smaller areas of influence and ability to set meaningful precedence outside that area of influence. And yes, I am aware this is an oversimplification of how the court systems work.
I would be curious to know--and I will admit not having done much research here--if accessibility cases have made it to the Supreme Court, and what the outcome was. I think a court ruling at this level as I described above (inaccessibility being in violation of the Constitution) is what we'll need in the US to force NGOs to adopt accessible practices. The alternative is a meaningful amendment to the ADA, and that's not going to happen anytime soon in the current political environment.
While I agree that page layout on the Web is no where near as simple as it should be (I'm doing a webapp right now, and sometimes it really does feel like alchemy), I disagree slightly with your last point. It's vital to listen to advocates for the disabled--particularly the visually impaired and those with motor difficulties--when solidifying standards like this. The whole idea of the web is accessing information, and if a designer takes the easy way out in terms of implementation and leaves huge swaths of people unable to see the content, IMHO they've kind of missed the point entirely. This is, in part, why tables, spacer gifs, etc. are bad, as I understand it (and also, from my own testing): they really play havoc with screen readers, to the point that a page is nearly incomprehensible. And that assumes the screen reader can make enough sense of things to read them at all--if a a page is malformed enough, there's just silence. I'd imagine the situation with braile-output devices and systems for navigating by alternative means are similar.
Government websites have to be fully accessible according to a government standard (508, I think), but non-government websites certainly don't. And making the argument that the visually impared/those with motor control difficulties make up such a small percentage of the population is not only superfluous, as even ten percent of the total internet population is well over 100,000, and the number of people with alternative access needs will only continue to rise as access proliferates, but outright discriminatory. If the guilding principle of the web is information and communication for all, exclusion isn't an option. (I realize I'm not using exact statistics here, but I unfortunately don't have time to look them up right now.)
For the webapp we're doing, our team is adhering to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/). This set of guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are perhaps more important than entanglements over HTML5 and such right now, as they're concerned not only with implementation (how a page is programmed), but how it is designed, from the ground up, to be accessable to all. Implementation should flow from this, IMHO.
My problem is that the AppleTV is perhaps a little too market-locking proprietary, and not quite capable enough to spend $299 on. That's a lot of money.
This is actually why I don't buy Rev. 0 Apple products. Wanting to avoid initial defects plays into it, but it's usually because Apple is holding back some features in order to have some big ones for the 2.0 version. Some people who mounted the ATV's hard drive discovered there's software components installed having to do with "Audio and Video capture" (according to their filenames) so I wouldn't be surprised if a future software/hardware upgrade enabled some interesting stuff. And once they figure out how to enable SSH without taking out the hard drive, it'll be possible to easily install any extra codecs needed. I'm not so worried about the small hard drive, especially if you can eventually stream from a drive attached to an Airport Extreme. So I want to wait and see what happens.
That, and if I'm gonna spend that much money on something at this point, I really need a new camera...:)
Because the 360 is a great gaming machine that happens to play multimedia, and some people simply have no need of that. I personally don't (cannot, for epilepsy reasons) play games, nor does anyone else in my house, so buying a device with a primary functionality I'd never use would not make sense. I've gotta think the no-gaming-multimedia-streaming demographic is pretty big. Also, people who already own a game console they're very happy with but that doesn't do multimedia streaming stuff should just be able to buy the Apple TV or something like it, instead of another console they don't really want to use for gaming.
I'd do it myself, but I'm out of mod points. This is a point far, far too many Linux advocates ignore. Heck, I'm a CS guy, sure, and I know how to compile things from the command line, and yeah, it's a cool feeling, but that doesn't mean I don't vastly prefer getting binaries. Being able to download an application over broadband and use it almost instantly is wonderful; having to sit there for lengthy periods of time waiting for something to compile (or essentially waste time figuring out why it won't) keeps me from getting real work done, and is thus not wonderful, as the real work still needs to get done and I have less time to do it.
Having to compile apps creates a time hole not unlike downloading on dialup did before broadband came along. We all hated that, and it really hampered the usability of the net for multimedia/interactive/anything that wasn't flat text or simple CGI. The only difference here is that the time hole created by the download-and-compile-everything philosophy is considered somehow cool by certain people who don't seem to understand that end users are going to despise anything that hampers their productivity. Very few people like to spend hours in front of their computer for the sheer fun of it. Maybe we do on slashdot, but I think we can all agree we're a skewed sample.:)
Perl and Python have been included with OS X since 10.2. I'm not sure if they're installed by default, though. I think they're considered part of the BSD subsystem.
Green radiation comes from Kyrptonite. Green Energy, though... this definitely seems like the Green Lantern's department.::Insert witty mockery of the Green Lantern Oath I tried for twenty minutes come up with but failed here::
Did you upgrade iTunes on all the boxes. From what I understand, 4.5 cannot share with lower versions of iTunes. I'm experiencing this myself. A couple of people on my network here at uni share their libraries, but neither has upgraded iTunes yet, so I get a message about them being incompatable.
Actually, that's semi-plausible. Bruce was waay ticked off when Dick went to Clark after their fallout, and blamed Superman for Dick becoming Nightwing instead of retiring.
I don't really care what they package with standard Windows. (Even though the issue here is mainly for OEMs.) I wouldn't even mind getting IE, MediaPlayer, and whatever else they want to give me, but should I decide I don't want to use IE, and want to able to uninstall it without it adversely affecting my system, just as I can unistall Works after I move to OpenOffice, I should be able to do that through the add/remove programs box. I shouldn't have to go through a bunch of registry voodoo and other crap (Remember Win98Lite?). Currently, trying to switch defaults around or remove something ("Removing media player could cause your system to perform incorrectly. Are you sure?") is such a daunting and intimidating process that even if an average user happens to find something they like better, like Opera or Mozilla, they won't use it because they can't get rid of the windows default option/player/tool and don't want them fighting it out.
So....I guess this means that anyone who wants to creatively show their respect for the SW series is out of luck. All we get to do is discuss and or make fun of what's already there? Kind of sad. I think a lot of young writers, especially in the internet generation get a lot of important practice working with established characters that they love. Its Lucas' decision of course, but unless it's some kind of story that just shows no respect for anything (ie.: stories written purely for the sake of graphic, unlikely sex or to bash a certain character), he should let it ride and see what kind of images he's provoked in the minds of his fans over the last 30 years.
You're ignoring a critical line in my post. It isn't the ads I have problems with. I use Opera 90 percent of the time, after all. It just runs nicer on my system. I used to use Odigo (ad supported) before I found Trillian. It is the fact that I used to have to run four clients simultaniously to achieve the functionality I get with a single application. That's the reason I use Trillian. AOL won't shut down AIM because it's a critical part of the AOL Anywhere strategy. My problem comes with the fact that instead of working to create a real open IM solution, which is well within their power, AOL does things like release an intentionally crippled, unmaintained "interoperability protocol" (TOC).
I get to choose what e-mail client, NNTP client, web browser, and pretty much any other internet software I want on my system. What makes IM different? The fact that there is _no_ standard. The fact that the big companies don't want a standard because that would cut down on their ability to trap users in their content network. I'm not suggesting a boycott to rid myself of ads, but rather to force something that should have been here a long time ago.
I'll gladly reinstall AIM when I can use it tot communicate with all the other major networks. When interoperability is real, though, software vendors will have to really focus on features to make people choose their client, just like any other type of internet programming. It will no longer be a matter of picking a piece of software because it is what you _must_ use to talk to friends.
I too have been considering an AOL boycott, but I was thinking of the entire service. If we could get even three percent of their users (that'd be 810000 people) to switch to Yahoo (ICQ is out, since it too is AOL) and make their reason for switching known, mabye we could send a message to AOL that interoperability isn't just something no-one significant wants. We'd need good news coverage. It would be a great thing if we could get high powered tech figures to help, such as Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton (I know most will argue that they are not the be all end all of tech, but they are well known among computer users and there is the possibility that many would follow their example.
I'm not a totally unrealistic person. I know this would be hard to pull off. But if we could dig into their bottom line just enough, it might force them to submit to some kind of interoperability. Who knows? If there was someday an AOL branded product that had ads but connected to all major networks, I might use it.
To Trillian: It's going to be a long and difficult road, but fighting is necessary. Just as there is one e-mail standard, there MUST be one IM standard, especially if it is going to be as important to the tech world as tech watchers predict.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, Apple doesn't ship an easy way to change the system wide theme. For 90 percent of people it looks really nice and is just customizable enough in terms of interface function (e.g.: where do you want your scrollbar arrows, Expose triggers, random background pictures from a given folder, etc.) to meet personal needs. The best 3rd party solution for skinning the system, from what I hear, is ShapeShifter. Not sure if that works under OS X 10.5.
Trying to make an argument for Linux because it's more easily skinnable is probably not the best route. No one cares how something looks if they can't make it work the way they want.
I agree 100 percent. I am a Mac OS X user and have many friends/associates that use Linux. I'm always struck in discussions with them when they bring up the fact that (and I'm paraphrasing here): "I like Linux because I can see exactly what everything is doing all the time and control it and fix it if I need to, even if that means editing source."
I consider myself an advanced computer user capable of troubleshooting problems on Windows and Mac OS X systems, and never once has not being able to access and modify the source or some obscure config file kept me from being able to fix things and get them working again. The fact that my system (a Mac) is not Free doesn't bother me, because I can do everything I need with it and it doesn't restrict me in any meaningful way--there is a difference between DRM that gets in the way and causes problems (the majority of DRM on Windows), and DRM that does the bare minimum to keep content holders from suing and is in fact circumventable (Mac OS X style DRM). All DRM is annoying and pointless for its intended purpose, but most users simply won't care about it if it doesn't get in their way.
If Linux wants to compete, it has to do so on features, not philosophy. Consumers don't want to hear that driver software isn't available because the hardware company only offers BLOBs and those aren't included by defualt because they're not Free, or have to do fancy command line ninjutsu to make their wifi work. And the inability of DVD playback and other license-related features to work out of the box IS a dealkiller, because consumers just don't care about the issues of Not Free vs Free.
Ideology is important, and useful to the free software movement, but realistically it can have nothing to do with putting Linux in the hands of home desktop users, because people should not be required to join a movement just to change operating systems. Because if they are, they won't. Competition and the decision to switch must be based on features, price, and ease of use. As far as that last bit goes, Linux on the Desktop won't happen until there exists a distribution that at minimum is as easy to set up and use as Microsoft Windows (or preferably, Mac OS X). That means you install it, every bit of hardware just works the way it's supposed to, and there is absolutely no need to go into the command line to do ANYTHING so far as normal-user system settings. The command line and advanced functionality should of course be there, but it should not be something the average home user ever need see. There are people who have Macs and Wintel boxes for years without ever seeing a command line, because they don't NEED a command line.
Linux has to be THAT easy if it wants to compete on the home desktop, because that demographic represents the lowest end of the sophistication spectrum, and just won't bother with something more complicated if another solution (Win/Mac) meets their needs.
ATT has no coverage in many places. Like the entire state of Vermont. If you happen to live in a dark spot, unlocking is the only way to use an iPhone. (In this situation, it's not even robbing revenue from ATT/Apple, because they never would have any legitimate customers from this state, but that's a whole other argument.)
As for losing "lots of neat features," Visual Voicemail is the only feature tied to ATT. Those who want to use an iPhone on another carrier do not view this feature as a must have. Old-style voicemail is still functional on other carriers.
And also, there are many more GSM carriers in the US than you might think: http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_us.shtml . I can't say how many of those have unlimited EDGE data plans or useful coverage or competitive pricing, but it's just not accurate to say there's only two GSM players in the United States.
Any time you open an account with a carrier, they'll do a credit check on you. This is what the SSN is for. If your credit is bad, you can go month to month. All 9s is a fake serial number, so you're gaurenteeing a failed credit check. Bad credit means you can't sign a contract with them, but you can still sign up for the (arguably overpriced) month to month plan.
No offense meant. I should have specified that I was speaking of the US government. I'll admit I often fall into the trap of considering slashdot as being 99 percent US read, just because of the topics discussed and the fact that the large majority of posts seem to be written in US English.
I am well aware of the ADA's ambiguity on this sort of thing. It's ambiguous in a lot of other areas as well--did you know that private universities do not have to be fully physically accessible (e.g.: automatic doors), even though they cannot discriminate in admissions on the basis of physical ability? I was just pointing out what I know to be true: that all US government sites must comply with the government accessibility standard. This is a legal requirement. Court cases set precedent, but unless it's a very powerful court, precedent only bites you if you get sued. For example, if the Supreme Court ruled a certain class of website had to meet accessibility requirements under the 14th Amendment (Equal Protection Under the Law), that would have nation-wide implications and effect. If a lower federal court did it, it would still have nationwide implications, but it wouldn't be acted on nation-wide so long as there was a chance of appeal. State and local courts likewise have progressively smaller areas of influence and ability to set meaningful precedence outside that area of influence. And yes, I am aware this is an oversimplification of how the court systems work.
I would be curious to know--and I will admit not having done much research here--if accessibility cases have made it to the Supreme Court, and what the outcome was. I think a court ruling at this level as I described above (inaccessibility being in violation of the Constitution) is what we'll need in the US to force NGOs to adopt accessible practices. The alternative is a meaningful amendment to the ADA, and that's not going to happen anytime soon in the current political environment.
While I agree that page layout on the Web is no where near as simple as it should be (I'm doing a webapp right now, and sometimes it really does feel like alchemy), I disagree slightly with your last point. It's vital to listen to advocates for the disabled--particularly the visually impaired and those with motor difficulties--when solidifying standards like this. The whole idea of the web is accessing information, and if a designer takes the easy way out in terms of implementation and leaves huge swaths of people unable to see the content, IMHO they've kind of missed the point entirely. This is, in part, why tables, spacer gifs, etc. are bad, as I understand it (and also, from my own testing): they really play havoc with screen readers, to the point that a page is nearly incomprehensible. And that assumes the screen reader can make enough sense of things to read them at all--if a a page is malformed enough, there's just silence. I'd imagine the situation with braile-output devices and systems for navigating by alternative means are similar.
Government websites have to be fully accessible according to a government standard (508, I think), but non-government websites certainly don't. And making the argument that the visually impared/those with motor control difficulties make up such a small percentage of the population is not only superfluous, as even ten percent of the total internet population is well over 100,000, and the number of people with alternative access needs will only continue to rise as access proliferates, but outright discriminatory. If the guilding principle of the web is information and communication for all, exclusion isn't an option.
(I realize I'm not using exact statistics here, but I unfortunately don't have time to look them up right now.)
For the webapp we're doing, our team is adhering to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/). This set of guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are perhaps more important than entanglements over HTML5 and such right now, as they're concerned not only with implementation (how a page is programmed), but how it is designed, from the ground up, to be accessable to all. Implementation should flow from this, IMHO.
My problem is that the AppleTV is perhaps a little too market-locking proprietary, and not quite capable enough to spend $299 on. That's a lot of money.
:)
This is actually why I don't buy Rev. 0 Apple products. Wanting to avoid initial defects plays into it, but it's usually because Apple is holding back some features in order to have some big ones for the 2.0 version. Some people who mounted the ATV's hard drive discovered there's software components installed having to do with "Audio and Video capture" (according to their filenames) so I wouldn't be surprised if a future software/hardware upgrade enabled some interesting stuff. And once they figure out how to enable SSH without taking out the hard drive, it'll be possible to easily install any extra codecs needed. I'm not so worried about the small hard drive, especially if you can eventually stream from a drive attached to an Airport Extreme. So I want to wait and see what happens.
That, and if I'm gonna spend that much money on something at this point, I really need a new camera...
Because the 360 is a great gaming machine that happens to play multimedia, and some people simply have no need of that. I personally don't (cannot, for epilepsy reasons) play games, nor does anyone else in my house, so buying a device with a primary functionality I'd never use would not make sense. I've gotta think the no-gaming-multimedia-streaming demographic is pretty big. Also, people who already own a game console they're very happy with but that doesn't do multimedia streaming stuff should just be able to buy the Apple TV or something like it, instead of another console they don't really want to use for gaming.
I'd do it myself, but I'm out of mod points. This is a point far, far too many Linux advocates ignore. Heck, I'm a CS guy, sure, and I know how to compile things from the command line, and yeah, it's a cool feeling, but that doesn't mean I don't vastly prefer getting binaries. Being able to download an application over broadband and use it almost instantly is wonderful; having to sit there for lengthy periods of time waiting for something to compile (or essentially waste time figuring out why it won't) keeps me from getting real work done, and is thus not wonderful, as the real work still needs to get done and I have less time to do it.
:)
Having to compile apps creates a time hole not unlike downloading on dialup did before broadband came along. We all hated that, and it really hampered the usability of the net for multimedia/interactive/anything that wasn't flat text or simple CGI. The only difference here is that the time hole created by the download-and-compile-everything philosophy is considered somehow cool by certain people who don't seem to understand that end users are going to despise anything that hampers their productivity. Very few people like to spend hours in front of their computer for the sheer fun of it. Maybe we do on slashdot, but I think we can all agree we're a skewed sample.
Perl and Python have been included with OS X since 10.2. I'm not sure if they're installed by default, though. I think they're considered part of the BSD subsystem.
"Someone's claws are on my grebnaks!"
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Green radiation comes from Kyrptonite. Green Energy, though ... this definitely seems like the Green Lantern's department. ::Insert witty mockery of the Green Lantern Oath I tried for twenty minutes come up with but failed here::
Did you upgrade iTunes on all the boxes. From what I understand, 4.5 cannot share with lower versions of iTunes. I'm experiencing this myself. A couple of people on my network here at uni share their libraries, but neither has upgraded iTunes yet, so I get a message about them being incompatable.
Actuallly, if you wanted to do this in Windows convienently, with the keyboard, it would be far simplier to do the following.
1) Select All: crtl-A
2) Cut: ctrl-X
3) Navigate to new directory (type it into the location bar, press enter)
4) Paste: ctrl-V
Just because the avarage user doesn't use the keyboard shortcuts doesn't mean they aren't there.
Actually, that's semi-plausible. Bruce was waay ticked off when Dick went to Clark after their fallout, and blamed Superman for Dick becoming Nightwing instead of retiring.
"dura lex, sed lex"
"Harsh (is) the law, but (it is) the law"
dura = harsh
lex = law
sed = but
I don't really care what they package with standard Windows. (Even though the issue here is mainly for OEMs.) I wouldn't even mind getting IE, MediaPlayer, and whatever else they want to give me, but should I decide I don't want to use IE, and want to able to uninstall it without it adversely affecting my system, just as I can unistall Works after I move to OpenOffice, I should be able to do that through the add/remove programs box. I shouldn't have to go through a bunch of registry voodoo and other crap (Remember Win98Lite?). Currently, trying to switch defaults around or remove something ("Removing media player could cause your system to perform incorrectly. Are you sure?") is such a daunting and intimidating process that even if an average user happens to find something they like better, like Opera or Mozilla, they won't use it because they can't get rid of the windows default option/player/tool and don't want them fighting it out.
So....I guess this means that anyone who wants to creatively show their respect for the SW series is out of luck. All we get to do is discuss and or make fun of what's already there? Kind of sad. I think a lot of young writers, especially in the internet generation get a lot of important practice working with established characters that they love. Its Lucas' decision of course, but unless it's some kind of story that just shows no respect for anything (ie.: stories written purely for the sake of graphic, unlikely sex or to bash a certain character), he should let it ride and see what kind of images he's provoked in the minds of his fans over the last 30 years.
You're ignoring a critical line in my post. It isn't the ads I have problems with. I use Opera 90 percent of the time, after all. It just runs nicer on my system. I used to use Odigo (ad supported) before I found Trillian. It is the fact that I used to have to run four clients simultaniously to achieve the functionality I get with a single application. That's the reason I use Trillian. AOL won't shut down AIM because it's a critical part of the AOL Anywhere strategy. My problem comes with the fact that instead of working to create a real open IM solution, which is well within their power, AOL does things like release an intentionally crippled, unmaintained "interoperability protocol" (TOC).
I get to choose what e-mail client, NNTP client, web browser, and pretty much any other internet software I want on my system. What makes IM different? The fact that there is _no_ standard. The fact that the big companies don't want a standard because that would cut down on their ability to trap users in their content network. I'm not suggesting a boycott to rid myself of ads, but rather to force something that should have been here a long time ago.
I'll gladly reinstall AIM when I can use it tot communicate with all the other major networks. When interoperability is real, though, software vendors will have to really focus on features to make people choose their client, just like any other type of internet programming. It will no longer be a matter of picking a piece of software because it is what you _must_ use to talk to friends.
I too have been considering an AOL boycott, but I was thinking of the entire service. If we could get even three percent of their users (that'd be 810000 people) to switch to Yahoo (ICQ is out, since it too is AOL) and make their reason for switching known, mabye we could send a message to AOL that interoperability isn't just something no-one significant wants. We'd need good news coverage. It would be a great thing if we could get high powered tech figures to help, such as Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton (I know most will argue that they are not the be all end all of tech, but they are well known among computer users and there is the possibility that many would follow their example.
I'm not a totally unrealistic person. I know this would be hard to pull off. But if we could dig into their bottom line just enough, it might force them to submit to some kind of interoperability. Who knows? If there was someday an AOL branded product that had ads but connected to all major networks, I might use it.
To Trillian: It's going to be a long and difficult road, but fighting is necessary. Just as there is one e-mail standard, there MUST be one IM standard, especially if it is going to be as important to the tech world as tech watchers predict.