While I'm in grave risk of being modded as a troll, I have to agree with Microsoft here.
Their JVM is better than the other ones I've used, which are Kaffe and Sun's Java for Linux. I run Matlab 6, which compiled pure java. In spite of the better process protection protection et all on Linux, the Linux version spits out all kinds of java class errors, and is slow as the dickens, while on Windows 98 it runs much better (until Windows OS-rot sets in, of course).
And I also have to agree that Sun is no paragon of openness, but the part about submitting.NET to ECMA is pure FUD.
Not that I would mind if the OS did some contextual search for me to bring up results while I'm working, but I've seen enough ads for the X10 wireless camera, thank you.
would hope that a surveying department would have surveying equipment available for checkout. When I took four geology classes in college, I was able to borrow Brunton compasses (which cost a few hundred dollars) from the department, and only had to purchase smaller, cheaper items like a rock pick and magnifying lense.
Your analogy between compasses and Photoshop is excellent. Having the department invest in some expensive items that it then makes available to its students is an excellent model of people spending money in ways that make sense.
If the "free" market is working, companies and consumers ought to be finding their way to prices and arrangements that work for both of them. I'm surprised that the software industry is taking so long to get here, given the emphasis on modularization as good programming technique.
The problem is that the marketers haven't figured out the benefit of modularizing their sales arrangments. I ought to be able to buy the product/service arrangment I want at a price that makes sense to me and the company. It's ok for both parties for a student to pay $20-$30 for the use of Photoshop for a semester. It sucks for the student to pay $1000, and it sucks for the producer if the students warez-es it.
This is why OSS is such a good thing - not because it will demolish the big money software producers like Adobe or Microsoft, but because it broadens the market it - i.e., with OSS around, there are lots more product/service arrangements than without. Software made by a bunch of people who want to cause it's cool (OSS or no) will never have the kind of polish as software where someone has been paid $60K to smooth over the rough spots. That's JUST FINE. Those who can and want to pay for smooth and polish will do so, and those who don't won't.
And voila, now we're back to making things that do what we want. Funny, all it takes is common sense.
My point is that "didn't pay corporate tax" is frequently presented as "contributes nothing to society", which is completely untrue.
Fair enough, but the argument about secondary contributions is so frequently overstated it's
nauseating, and usually in the service of public dollars being spent on private moneymaking, like stadiums, corporate relocations, etc.
A partly rhetorical question:
If I commit a crime that requires me to be taken to jail, I'm supporting the (often very lucrative) incarceration industry, and a jails are usually located where jobs are scarce, my murder 1 is particularly beneficial to the community. Should that money be attributed to me?
And another one:
As a community leader, I encourage my community to invest in a vocational training program which produces high quality laborers. These laborers pay taxes and consume goods and services? Should that economic benefit be attributed to me?
To my mind, the obligations on companies, like people go above and beyond the balance sheet of what they consume (raw resources, human resources, physical, social, legal, educational infrastructure) - they are part of society, and have a duty to help others in society, as do the rest of us. So the current climate of heaping accolades on companies because one of the things they happen to need is people to work jobs drives me nuts, as it suggests that having made jobs, companies are off the hook for any more helping out.
The problem is that you still need an editor. There are a lot of bands down the street that really do suck, and people spend years at record companies listening demos tapes, throwing them away, and going to puke.
Record companies do two things at once:
They filter out crappy content. Not endorsing who or what they filter out, but some of it needs to happen - there are lot of BAD bands out there. Just like a newspaper gives you more coherence than a web forum, a record label gives you more coherence than MP3.com.
People don't listen to music just because they like the sound. The listen to it because it's "cool" - a necessarily slippery idea. A big part of teen America's identity is wrapped up in what music one listens to. Record companies are trying to get out music that people (who they see only as buyers) will identify with. This is very manipulative, so the record industry, which is clearly both money-focused and bloated, is always trampling on the sacred territory of identity.
So I applaud your idea - yes P2P music should focus on the type of music, rather than relying on the artist branding that's been built mostly be the marketing of the record companies. But how do you make it cool, generate that buzz that makes me want not just to listen but to be a part of it? Keep on it, hopefully something cool will come out.
As we all know, the MPAA & RIAA are pushing to have the much needed rewrite of copyright law be engineered to support their business model. There's no philosophical underpinning for this, as the educated/.er is doubtless aware.
As poorly rewritten as this editorial is, it hammers on Lessig on three points:
People don't want to pay taxes, and they don't want the economy slowed down by "overregulation". So we adopt the passive compromise. Passively regulate by letting things like copyright law govern the market rather than active oversight. When industries realize this, they push to rewrite the law that shapes the market (there is no "free market", just different kinds of legal control) to give themselves plums. The current case in point is Enron, but let's not forget the previous Bush-deregulation debacle: Michael Keating and the S&L crisis.
People don't want to lose their jobs either. This means when a big business or a whole set of them encounters rough financial straits - maybe they did something stupid, like Enron, maybe the world changed, as in the case of steel producers (who now use subsidies and tariff regulations to stay afloat), or maybe both as for the MPAA and RIAA, there's a lot of pressure on the government not to let them fail. But subsidies and payouts make good targets for "government waste" exposees, and arcane legal restrictions do not. This is why
Anyone with the wherewithall and the disposition to realize the above two points is probably and intellectual and possibly also and academic. By naming a small community of professors Valenti's ghostwriters put in the only piece effective writing in this whole sham of an editorial. In short, if you're a cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking, hoity-toity professor, you hate people who work hard and make money.
One the other hand, iff you're a hard-working, truck-driving, music-loving regular guy, you're with us and our good ole way of doing business, and you'll tell you government to support us supporting you. And those charges are damn hard to shake off.
Wish I knew how to counter those, but that's where government's relationship with business seems to be headed these days.
Amen!
I've poured hours upon hours into trying to make KDE/OpenOffice print to our Solaris-Samba printserver, which supports BOTH lpd and samba queues, and it hasn't worked since I installed Mandrake 8.1. Period. The GUI tool is nice, makes nice test pages, but no printing.
CUPS is a great idea, and is coming along well, but it needs a lot more work before anyone can say that *nix has proper printing. This straw will break the camel's back if it stays there.
somebody put Sun's spin on Linux against IBM's against ESR's against Microsoft's. Pick apart the so-called technical arguments and see how the Linux-in-the-enterprise battle is fought.
By itself, this is just the bulleted text on the back of the box the Sun comes in.
Also give the betas of KDE3 a shot. They are a LOT snappier on my PIII-500/256RAM box. A lot of work has gone into speeding up KDE, and I believe there's more coming.
The problem is not a lack of medium to debate, the problem is the lack of WILL to debate.
The American public is apathetic and has small horizons of interest. This causes those in power to pay attention to the people who are loud, present, and offering them useful things. And of course, they have to use their discretion to ignore the background hollerin' (exemplified by this site) that people do.
These days I've started to wonder whether this is just because so many Americans have enough of their basic needs met that they're not interested in rallying around other causes, and would rather look to simple pleasures like new monitors, cellphones, and cosmopolitans. Not that these are inherently bad things to do, but I daresay we spend a bit too much time at them. I hope it changes, but I doubt it.
Reading Joseph Bast's comment, I realized that it's
nice to finally read someone who doesn't just wholesale agree with the virulent anti-Microsoft feeling here, and can articulate why.
This is not to say that I agree with him. I think he reveals a nasty side to his politics in this comment:
Changing technology has transformed the market in which Microsoft competes. Competitors who once complained of Microsoft's market power have now merged with other competitors and become behemoths themselves.
In his view, the fact that they (presumably AOL -> AOLTimeWarnerTron) became behemoths meant that everyone succeeded. The strong won out, and the weak were eliminated. That seems to be the essence of these "the market will fix everything" arguments. The market may well eliminate the sickness - by eliminating the sick. It's time for the DOJ to fix the market without eliminating the rest of it - put some teeth into its legislation. And I'll even use the bad word for it: REGULATE.
On the bright side, if Microsoft does prevail, the enterprising among us can probably making a killing publishing a sensationalist book about how MS bought the trial.
Fair enough, but creative thinking skills take time to develop.
Books have two levels of editing:
1) Editing and publication, which removes much misinformation, and at least some disinformation, because you can't push a hollow rant through publication as easily.
2) You as a parent can get actively involved in what books your kids read, at least before puberty.
The Internet, on other hand is a wellspring of mis- and disinformation, and it's much harder to take an active role in what your kids surf through.
Start em on books, but more importantly, start by asking questions and challenging their intellects yourself. That's the quickest way to have bright inquisitive kids.
I agree with your reaction. At the same time, I was hit by the very self-pitying tone of the article.
"It's so hard, I lost all my status and my high-paying job and now I'm here with all the other (holding nose) regular slobs."
Welcome to the rest of the world - most people do throw mail, flip burgers and stock shelves. That's in this country, in others jobs are fewer and worse . Yes, it is very hard to be back out money and feel like the progress you worked so hard for was snatched away. With persistence and a litte luck, you'll make it back up. Just lay off badmouthing the people who do the grunt work, and try to learn from being outside the air conditioning of corporate tech work.
No kudos to the ZDNet editors who spun their woes so sensationally, either.
There's a lot of implicit doubletalk in all of this. Business are like people, some are crazy organized - most are not. To require everyone to alphabetize their CDs or face a fine is absurd. I doubt it will actually get that far.
On the other side of the fence, everybody, businesses especially, likes to represent herself as using her resources to the absolute maximum. Let's just remember that that's a figure of speech. Nobody really maximizes anything - they can do better and worse, more and less productive, but in the end, people manage with what's there.
I'd like to believe that as the BSA and Microsoft tighten the screws on people that they will one by one drop out and go Open Source.
Yes, when a business really has to pay for ALL the software anyone has installed the costs will slow that inertia, but there's a lot of juice yet to be squeezed out.
When the costs go up, I don't think that people will just switch to OSS. If the BSA really does get its thumbscrews nice and tight, businesses will change direction, and there will be opportunity all around at that moment. I think it'd be great if free and Free software got in on that opportunity, mostly because I think that good software can be "naturally" abundant, and that every ought to have some. But I'm trying to resist being naive enough to think OSS will leap to prominence.
What you say is a problem, but it will not be a dealkiller until Microsoft drops support for it's previous methods of authentication.
XP can see samba on my little ClarkConnect box and connect no problem (OK, so I haven't waded through the morass of actually making it authenticate yet, but I know it can be done). If NT6 comes out with basic SMB authentication dropped like MS dropped Java (one more reason why the settlement is meaningless), that's when the lights go out. Quite a bit can happen between here and there, and most of it rests on how the corporate IT world reacts to Microsoft.
Well put. And if Linux does get any more substantial market penetration, there's ton of damage a rooted Linux box can do. Especially if it's playing firewall/gateway/router, etc.
Rather than wasting valuable keystrokes complaining *yet again* that someone's biased against us, we ought to start working on simplifying patching. It's still too dang hard.
The comment by the business guy at the end of the article was perhaps the most telling:
"They've yet to understand we're not marketing to them but to people who actually purchase software, instead of religiously create it. They may have made Linux, but we know how to make money with it, and we just can't understand why they don't care about that."
The sad truth of Linux "defeating Goliath" is a twist on the old Groucho quote,
"I wouldn't want to belong any club that would have me."
Linux won't "dethrone Microsoft", because people like the DIY playground aspect of Linux much more than they want a product that works for people who doesn't give a rats arse about CPU cycles, and they ain't giving up easy. And let's face it folks - all of y'all who say "Windoze doesn't do this, it's hard to do that" - y'all don't like it cause it's sanitized sheepware
If some meteor hits the earth, and Linux really does become the desktop of ubiquity, something will be lost. You don't have to be a silly prepubescent h4x0r aiming for l33t3n3ss to be sad when the spirit of your club gets diluted by people who don't want what you want. It can be good in that once the trend comes and goes, people can go back to focusing on what really drives their interest, and you get deeper, more interesting interactions between people. One way or another Linux is acquiring a personal history.
Spokes-people go nude in an effort to bring attention to the injustices of wearing fir. It's obviously a dramatization, as there are plenty of other materials they can wear, just as there are many other ways he could have written his emails.
Ahh the fir wars.
I myself had to give up wearing fir when my doctor told me I was allergic to pitch. It's a shame though, I miss filling the room with the smell of the forest.
The idea of automagically pointing out to OE users what their mailer is doing is not that immature or childish, but this was an impolitic way to do it, and more so for his justification.
However, it's his list, so he can do whatever the hell he likes. If obnoxion and l33t1sm is the price of entry, so be it.
I do think it would be fair game to append a POLITE "We notice you're using Outlook, here's what you lose..." message footer to many mailing lists, particularly technosnobic (did I say that, I meant technocentric) ones.
Everyone's a critic
on
Lindows Reviewed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Nothing like throwing in your 2 cents when they're the same as everyone elses....
I don't understand how these guys got to this point. Clearly Robertson is connect to some kind of VC funding hose, or he would be working on his second startup in 10 minutes.
But there's next to nothing to this distro:
They've made a new "easier" installer. The Mandrake installer has an automation feature already, as does RH's and others.
They installed WINE. Codeweavers' RPM does that really nicely, thank you, and not as root, either.
They replaced the file manager. Konqi's a bit confusing, but not that bad - they could have just disabled in.
But clearly what Linux has been waiting for to turn into windows is progress on WINE. When it works, Linux will run the Windows apps the rest of the world uses. Until then, the idea just won't work.
In this situation the straightforward thing to do is to hire first-classes WINE hackers and move the project forward with the force of money. And why Lindows isn't doing this is beyond me. Perhaps some kind of brand-development trick? Unless the VCs have some other tricks up their sleeve, I don't see how anyone's gonna get their money back. Anyone know anything about why Lindows is proceeding this way? Anything tidbits on FC?
Would it be possible for another machine to pick up a process that has been frozen to disk and run it?
That would sweet - when the load on my home machine gets to high, I just freeze some process, send it over to another machine and finish running it...and eventually have the OS work up to just picking up cycles automatically.
Glad to hear a comment by someone who knows something about what their talking about.
Much of this is the usual sniping about having to pay for things, for which I'd love to excoriate/. (/. is much like a kid throwing an endless tantrum), but it goes on everywhere.
It seems to me that some of what people here are upset about is being told what they can and can't do with their computers. Another big factor is feeling nickeled-and-dimed. What is feels like is "We're gonna charge you once for service, and then again everytime you want to sync your Palm Pilot with your work machine". Not endorsing that point of view, just saying, that's how it feels.
Yes, high end service costs high-end prices. If I have to pay to download new 1GB Linux ISOs at apiece, I'll deal with that, as long as the terms are clear from the outset, and I have my choice of merchants.
The tricky part is this (not to tell you your business):
Simply selling preallocated bandwidth is not a particularly favorable business plan - usable bandwidth will sit slack. So, like airlines, you're better off overbooking, and then recompensating or otherwise mollifying the people who get overbooked. None of which is really that bad as long as the company approaches its customers in a reasonable way.
So us home-networking geeks really ought to do is find a way to explain reasonably to Comcast et all that we'd like a plan more aimed at computer enthusiasts, and what that kind of plan might entail.
What everyone's got their undies in a twist about is that the article didn't lay into like a bunch of geeks with nothing to do.
Speaking of retractions, CNN ran a RH/AOL story that directly contradicts the RH/AOL story the Washington Post ran. (The news.com story over the weekend merely repackage the WP story). This seems like a more likely candidate for a retraction or clarification:
"We had only one not-terribly-reliable source, but we published anyway".
How come we ain't hollerin' about that?
Getting along is hard to do
on
Browsing Alone
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· Score: 1
One of the (many) things at the heart of these arguments is getting along. The stories of vibrant communities of yore are true, but something that was never worthy of the word was that they involve a lot of putting up with other people.
If want to interact with people who are not like you in some way, you almost certainly bound to get irritated with them - with their ideas, their mannerism, their smell, whatever. But a lot of the best friends I've ever had have been people who are not that much like me - I like their friendship, not a checklist of qualities.
The kind of communication put forth by technology doesn't really encourage you to have those kinds of interactions - to listen to ideas you don't like, to go places you don't want, just as part of living where someone else lives. But without it, your horizons stay narrow. You can't get real experiences over a cellphone of via the web, and you can't get them on 'Net time.
The question is, are we really ready to put up with people and things we don't like, or do we want an world without those irritations. There's good cases for either. Technology will do what we tell it to (eventually), so it's up to us.
Why can't it be about both? Why do we have to make every episode of American history have the good vs. evil theme play out like a bad fantasy novel? Are we old enough now to live in a world of mixed motivations?
Here's an alternative to the parant. What if perhaps many people in our government, both civil and military, were moved to action by the atrocities perpetrated by Somali warlord, and simultaneous acted in a way to benefit American interests, both broad and narrow. Some parts of those actions would be self-serving, and some would be noble. And not everyone would agree on which, but at least we'd learn something in depth.
Slashdot Mirror
Their JVM is better than the other ones I've used, which are Kaffe and Sun's Java for Linux. I run Matlab 6, which compiled pure java. In spite of the better process protection protection et all on Linux, the Linux version spits out all kinds of java class errors, and is slow as the dickens, while on Windows 98 it runs much better (until Windows OS-rot sets in, of course). And I also have to agree that Sun is no paragon of openness, but the part about submitting .NET to ECMA is pure FUD.
Considering that most major search engines now place links according to payment, it's a short step to turning the browser, or the whole OS into Bonzi Buddy.
Not that I would mind if the OS did some contextual search for me to bring up results while I'm working, but I've seen enough ads for the X10 wireless camera, thank you.
Your analogy between compasses and Photoshop is excellent. Having the department invest in some expensive items that it then makes available to its students is an excellent model of people spending money in ways that make sense.
If the "free" market is working, companies and consumers ought to be finding their way to prices and arrangements that work for both of them. I'm surprised that the software industry is taking so long to get here, given the emphasis on modularization as good programming technique.
The problem is that the marketers haven't figured out the benefit of modularizing their sales arrangments. I ought to be able to buy the product/service arrangment I want at a price that makes sense to me and the company. It's ok for both parties for a student to pay $20-$30 for the use of Photoshop for a semester. It sucks for the student to pay $1000, and it sucks for the producer if the students warez-es it.
This is why OSS is such a good thing - not because it will demolish the big money software producers like Adobe or Microsoft, but because it broadens the market it - i.e., with OSS around, there are lots more product/service arrangements than without. Software made by a bunch of people who want to cause it's cool (OSS or no) will never have the kind of polish as software where someone has been paid $60K to smooth over the rough spots. That's JUST FINE. Those who can and want to pay for smooth and polish will do so, and those who don't won't.
And voila, now we're back to making things that do what we want. Funny, all it takes is common sense.
Fair enough, but the argument about secondary contributions is so frequently overstated it's nauseating, and usually in the service of public dollars being spent on private moneymaking, like stadiums, corporate relocations, etc.
A partly rhetorical question:
And another one:
To my mind, the obligations on companies, like people go above and beyond the balance sheet of what they consume (raw resources, human resources, physical, social, legal, educational infrastructure) - they are part of society, and have a duty to help others in society, as do the rest of us. So the current climate of heaping accolades on companies because one of the things they happen to need is people to work jobs drives me nuts, as it suggests that having made jobs, companies are off the hook for any more helping out.
Record companies do two things at once:
So I applaud your idea - yes P2P music should focus on the type of music, rather than relying on the artist branding that's been built mostly be the marketing of the record companies. But how do you make it cool, generate that buzz that makes me want not just to listen but to be a part of it? Keep on it, hopefully something cool will come out.
As poorly rewritten as this editorial is, it hammers on Lessig on three points:
- People don't want to pay taxes, and they don't want the economy slowed down by "overregulation". So we adopt the passive compromise. Passively regulate by letting things like copyright law govern the market rather than active oversight. When industries realize this, they push to rewrite the law that shapes the market (there is no "free market", just different kinds of legal control) to give themselves plums. The current case in point is Enron, but let's not forget the previous Bush-deregulation debacle: Michael Keating and the S&L crisis.
- People don't want to lose their jobs either. This means when a big business or a whole set of them encounters rough financial straits - maybe they did something stupid, like Enron, maybe the world changed, as in the case of steel producers (who now use subsidies and tariff regulations to stay afloat), or maybe both as for the MPAA and RIAA, there's a lot of pressure on the government not to let them fail. But subsidies and payouts make good targets for "government waste" exposees, and arcane legal restrictions do not. This is why
- Anyone with the wherewithall and the disposition to realize the above two points is probably and intellectual and possibly also and academic. By naming a small community of professors Valenti's ghostwriters put in the only piece effective writing in this whole sham of an editorial. In short, if you're a cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking, hoity-toity professor, you hate people who work hard and make money.
Wish I knew how to counter those, but that's where government's relationship with business seems to be headed these days.One the other hand, iff you're a hard-working, truck-driving, music-loving regular guy, you're with us and our good ole way of doing business, and you'll tell you government to support us supporting you. And those charges are damn hard to shake off.
Amen!
I've poured hours upon hours into trying to make KDE/OpenOffice print to our Solaris-Samba printserver, which supports BOTH lpd and samba queues, and it hasn't worked since I installed Mandrake 8.1. Period. The GUI tool is nice, makes nice test pages, but no printing.
CUPS is a great idea, and is coming along well, but it needs a lot more work before anyone can say that *nix has proper printing. This straw will break the camel's back if it stays there.
Sigh, time to reboot into Windows to print...
somebody put Sun's spin on Linux against IBM's against ESR's against Microsoft's. Pick apart the so-called technical arguments and see how the Linux-in-the-enterprise battle is fought.
By itself, this is just the bulleted text on the back of the box the Sun comes in.
Also give the betas of KDE3 a shot. They are a LOT snappier on my PIII-500/256RAM box. A lot of work has gone into speeding up KDE, and I believe there's more coming.
The problem is not a lack of medium to debate, the problem is the lack of WILL to debate.
The American public is apathetic and has small horizons of interest. This causes those in power to pay attention to the people who are loud, present, and offering them useful things. And of course, they have to use their discretion to ignore the background hollerin' (exemplified by this site) that people do.
These days I've started to wonder whether this is just because so many Americans have enough of their basic needs met that they're not interested in rallying around other causes, and would rather look to simple pleasures like new monitors, cellphones, and cosmopolitans. Not that these are inherently bad things to do, but I daresay we spend a bit too much time at them. I hope it changes, but I doubt it.
This is not to say that I agree with him. I think he reveals a nasty side to his politics in this comment:
Changing technology has transformed the market in which Microsoft competes. Competitors who once complained of Microsoft's market power have now merged with other competitors and become behemoths themselves.
In his view, the fact that they (presumably AOL -> AOLTimeWarnerTron) became behemoths meant that everyone succeeded. The strong won out, and the weak were eliminated. That seems to be the essence of these "the market will fix everything" arguments. The market may well eliminate the sickness - by eliminating the sick. It's time for the DOJ to fix the market without eliminating the rest of it - put some teeth into its legislation. And I'll even use the bad word for it: REGULATE.
On the bright side, if Microsoft does prevail, the enterprising among us can probably making a killing publishing a sensationalist book about how MS bought the trial.
Books have two levels of editing:
1) Editing and publication, which removes much misinformation, and at least some disinformation, because you can't push a hollow rant through publication as easily.
2) You as a parent can get actively involved in what books your kids read, at least before puberty.
The Internet, on other hand is a wellspring of mis- and disinformation, and it's much harder to take an active role in what your kids surf through.
Start em on books, but more importantly, start by asking questions and challenging their intellects yourself. That's the quickest way to have bright inquisitive kids.
"It's so hard, I lost all my status and my high-paying job and now I'm here with all the other (holding nose) regular slobs."
Welcome to the rest of the world - most people do throw mail, flip burgers and stock shelves. That's in this country, in others jobs are fewer and worse . Yes, it is very hard to be back out money and feel like the progress you worked so hard for was snatched away. With persistence and a litte luck, you'll make it back up. Just lay off badmouthing the people who do the grunt work, and try to learn from being outside the air conditioning of corporate tech work.
No kudos to the ZDNet editors who spun their woes so sensationally, either.
There's a lot of implicit doubletalk in all of this. Business are like people, some are crazy organized - most are not. To require everyone to alphabetize their CDs or face a fine is absurd. I doubt it will actually get that far.
On the other side of the fence, everybody, businesses especially, likes to represent herself as using her resources to the absolute maximum. Let's just remember that that's a figure of speech. Nobody really maximizes anything - they can do better and worse, more and less productive, but in the end, people manage with what's there.
I'd like to believe that as the BSA and Microsoft tighten the screws on people that they will one by one drop out and go Open Source.
Yes, when a business really has to pay for ALL the software anyone has installed the costs will slow that inertia, but there's a lot of juice yet to be squeezed out.
When the costs go up, I don't think that people will just switch to OSS. If the BSA really does get its thumbscrews nice and tight, businesses will change direction, and there will be opportunity all around at that moment. I think it'd be great if free and Free software got in on that opportunity, mostly because I think that good software can be "naturally" abundant, and that every ought to have some. But I'm trying to resist being naive enough to think OSS will leap to prominence.
XP can see samba on my little ClarkConnect box and connect no problem (OK, so I haven't waded through the morass of actually making it authenticate yet, but I know it can be done). If NT6 comes out with basic SMB authentication dropped like MS dropped Java (one more reason why the settlement is meaningless), that's when the lights go out. Quite a bit can happen between here and there, and most of it rests on how the corporate IT world reacts to Microsoft.
Well put. And if Linux does get any more substantial market penetration, there's ton of damage a rooted Linux box can do. Especially if it's playing firewall/gateway/router, etc.
Rather than wasting valuable keystrokes complaining *yet again* that someone's biased against us, we ought to start working on simplifying patching. It's still too dang hard.
"They've yet to understand we're not marketing to them but to people who actually purchase software, instead of religiously create it. They may have made Linux, but we know how to make money with it, and we just can't understand why they don't care about that."
The sad truth of Linux "defeating Goliath" is a twist on the old Groucho quote, "I wouldn't want to belong any club that would have me."
Linux won't "dethrone Microsoft", because people like the DIY playground aspect of Linux much more than they want a product that works for people who doesn't give a rats arse about CPU cycles, and they ain't giving up easy. And let's face it folks - all of y'all who say "Windoze doesn't do this, it's hard to do that" - y'all don't like it cause it's sanitized sheepware
If some meteor hits the earth, and Linux really does become the desktop of ubiquity, something will be lost. You don't have to be a silly prepubescent h4x0r aiming for l33t3n3ss to be sad when the spirit of your club gets diluted by people who don't want what you want. It can be good in that once the trend comes and goes, people can go back to focusing on what really drives their interest, and you get deeper, more interesting interactions between people. One way or another Linux is acquiring a personal history.
Ahh the fir wars. I myself had to give up wearing fir when my doctor told me I was allergic to pitch. It's a shame though, I miss filling the room with the smell of the forest.
The idea of automagically pointing out to OE users what their mailer is doing is not that immature or childish, but this was an impolitic way to do it, and more so for his justification.
However, it's his list, so he can do whatever the hell he likes. If obnoxion and l33t1sm is the price of entry, so be it.
I do think it would be fair game to append a POLITE "We notice you're using Outlook, here's what you lose..." message footer to many mailing lists, particularly technosnobic (did I say that, I meant technocentric) ones.
I don't understand how these guys got to this point. Clearly Robertson is connect to some kind of VC funding hose, or he would be working on his second startup in 10 minutes.
But there's next to nothing to this distro:
But clearly what Linux has been waiting for to turn into windows is progress on WINE . When it works, Linux will run the Windows apps the rest of the world uses. Until then, the idea just won't work.
In this situation the straightforward thing to do is to hire first-classes WINE hackers and move the project forward with the force of money. And why Lindows isn't doing this is beyond me. Perhaps some kind of brand-development trick? Unless the VCs have some other tricks up their sleeve, I don't see how anyone's gonna get their money back. Anyone know anything about why Lindows is proceeding this way? Anything tidbits on FC?
That would sweet - when the load on my home machine gets to high, I just freeze some process, send it over to another machine and finish running it...and eventually have the OS work up to just picking up cycles automatically.
Much of this is the usual sniping about having to pay for things, for which I'd love to excoriate /. (/. is much like a kid throwing an endless tantrum), but it goes on everywhere.
It seems to me that some of what people here are upset about is being told what they can and can't do with their computers. Another big factor is feeling nickeled-and-dimed. What is feels like is "We're gonna charge you once for service, and then again everytime you want to sync your Palm Pilot with your work machine". Not endorsing that point of view, just saying, that's how it feels.
Yes, high end service costs high-end prices. If I have to pay to download new 1GB Linux ISOs at apiece, I'll deal with that, as long as the terms are clear from the outset, and I have my choice of merchants.
The tricky part is this (not to tell you your business):
Simply selling preallocated bandwidth is not a particularly favorable business plan - usable bandwidth will sit slack. So, like airlines, you're better off overbooking, and then recompensating or otherwise mollifying the people who get overbooked. None of which is really that bad as long as the company approaches its customers in a reasonable way. So us home-networking geeks really ought to do is find a way to explain reasonably to Comcast et all that we'd like a plan more aimed at computer enthusiasts, and what that kind of plan might entail.
What everyone's got their undies in a twist about is that the article didn't lay into like a bunch of geeks with nothing to do.
Speaking of retractions, CNN ran a RH/AOL story that directly contradicts the RH/AOL story the Washington Post ran. (The news.com story over the weekend merely repackage the WP story). This seems like a more likely candidate for a retraction or clarification:
"We had only one not-terribly-reliable source, but we published anyway".
How come we ain't hollerin' about that?
One of the (many) things at the heart of these arguments is getting along. The stories of vibrant communities of yore are true, but something that was never worthy of the word was that they involve a lot of putting up with other people.
If want to interact with people who are not like you in some way, you almost certainly bound to get irritated with them - with their ideas, their mannerism, their smell, whatever. But a lot of the best friends I've ever had have been people who are not that much like me - I like their friendship, not a checklist of qualities.
The kind of communication put forth by technology doesn't really encourage you to have those kinds of interactions - to listen to ideas you don't like, to go places you don't want, just as part of living where someone else lives. But without it, your horizons stay narrow. You can't get real experiences over a cellphone of via the web, and you can't get them on 'Net time.
The question is, are we really ready to put up with people and things we don't like, or do we want an world without those irritations. There's good cases for either. Technology will do what we tell it to (eventually), so it's up to us.
Why can't it be about both? Why do we have to make every episode of American history have the good vs. evil theme play out like a bad fantasy novel? Are we old enough now to live in a world of mixed motivations?
Here's an alternative to the parant. What if perhaps many people in our government, both civil and military, were moved to action by the atrocities perpetrated by Somali warlord, and simultaneous acted in a way to benefit American interests, both broad and narrow. Some parts of those actions would be self-serving, and some would be noble. And not everyone would agree on which, but at least we'd learn something in depth.