" I can't think of a better way to annoy a customer than to sell them something that they later find they could have downloaded or legally copied for free."
Actually, having the product in a place like Best Buy is, in itself, a service. If I were to sell Blender in Best Buy for $40. If someone has never heard of Blender and then buys it, they are basically paying $40 for the awareness of Blender and the convenience of packaged software. The awareness is a big deal. Sure they could download it off the internet - that is, if they knew it existed at all. Instead, they bought it for the very good price of $40, and didn't have to search the entire Internet looking for something they didn't even know existed.
The MS deal was cheaper after Microsoft went back and slashed their prices dramatically. This is really interesting, because they are going to have to do this more and more. They may win most of their contracts, but it will be for a significantly smaller amount than before.
So, if Microsoft does nothing, Linux will win outright.
If Microsoft lowers their price to consumers, the end user STILL wins BECAUSE OF LINUX.
So, thank you GNU/Linux - even if you lose the fight, it was your involvement that forced the competition to actually start serving customers rather than raking them over the coals.
If you are making Netscape and Mozilla equivalent products, it's an easy answer:
1) JavaScript fine control - with IE, JavaScript can either be on or off. There's some additional control for ActiveX, but for other stuff, you just have on/off. With Mozilla, you have fine control. No, I don't want JavaScript screwing with my status bar. No, I don't want unrequested windows popping up. No, I don't want JavaScript to give focus to other Windows.
2) The Cookie Manager - gosh I love this. It's most useful in development, although it's useful other places, too. With the cookie manager, I can better debug by viewing and removing cookies manually. You see, the cookies aren't written to cookies.txt unless they are permanent cookies. Session-cookies are only in memory. IE won't even let you see them, but with Mozilla I can view and remove them.
3) Image Manager - I can block images from banner-ad-serving sites if I want to.
4) Tab Browsing - This actually should be #1. It is sooooooo useful. Right now I have 13 browser tabs open. Usually it's around 20. Trying to manage 20 independent windows is quite harrying. With Mozilla I can do either independent Windows or tabs. It's wonderful.
5) Bookmarking Sessions - If you use tabbed browsing, you can bookmark all of the tabs in your current session. So, if you want to remember your current session for later you can just "Bookmark this group of tabs" and reopen it later.
6) Text-Zoom - I can zoom text for sites that give it too me small. Personally, I would also like a full-page zoom for everything.
7) Better CSS handling - there's a lot of things you can do as a web developer because of CSS that just isn't possible with IE. One of the main reasons why people still have frames is to keep the top navigation always viewable. You can do that with position: fixed easily with CSS, except that IE doesn't support it. They also don't support absolute positioning of background images either, which really makes some things difficult.
You miss the point - as an add-on component, the OEMs can choose whether or not to include it. They could ship with Internet Explorer OR Mozilla OR Opera - it wouldn't be dictated to them.
Why is $50k a bad income? What exactly are you wanting to buy? I have a wife, 2 kids, one of which has severe medical problems, and a house, and am getting by just fine on $45. What level of greed have we gotten to when $50k is only enough to live in your parent's basement?
ACtually, this could very well happen since Microsoft is no longer updating IE for Win2K and lower. If they want to go beyond IE6, they have to upgrade the operating system. That is a HUGE benefit to Mozilla.
One thing that the Mozilla Foundation could do to raise money is set up a "Cobrand Support Center" where people can contract them to create and support branded versions of Mozilla.
If the price were not too high, I imagine a lot of technology companies could impress their users with a branded web browser that's better than Internet Explorer.
"As a complimentary service to our customers, we offer them the SuperTechnologyCompany Web Browser which has features that prevent spam and popups..."
We're actually working on a system using Linux that will make PDF printing available from any application without local software installation. Basically, you have a Linux box set up as a member of your Windows domain which has a "virtual" printer which just accepts print requests, generates a PDF, and then places the PDF with a timestamp in your home directory.
All you have to do is follow the normal Windows printer setup procedure. You don't even need to load drivers - they come standard with Windows.
That is not something Grandma would do. Every Grandma I know has their grandchildren help them do that. It's a tricky process either way, and you either know what you're doing or you don't.
To be newbie-friendly, it would have to detect that you have a new hard drive, read the partition table, and then ask you want you want to do with it. Red Hat may in fact do this - they do a lot of other autosetup stuff with kudzu.
That's so true. Using open-source and contributing any infrastructure improvements is the best way to go. You simply don't talk about the free part. In fact, you charge for the components, you just charge less. Companies understand charging less, they don't understand free.
So, charge them $2000 for RHAS. Charge them $1000 for PostgreSQL. Charge them for the development work.
They'll thank you for providing them with such a great service for such a low cost.
If you say the first two items are free they will just laugh at you.
If I read the changelog properly, this kernel is what you were looking for. It has all of the necessary plumbing to support that - the keyboard is loaded as a module, etc. The majority of the work for that would need to go into XFree86 and the distributions.
Also, Windows puts user interactive tasks at top priority. Try renicing the process to -20 and see if it goes faster. Also, turn off your daemons and Mozilla. The preemption patch and hdparm should help, too.
Grandma is not going to care whether DevFS is there or not. The only person who would care about the major/minor numbers is someone building their own distribution or installing the whole thing from source - definitely NOT Grandma. The distributions - you know, the ones trying to make things easier for Grandma - are the ones ditching devfs.
"Once the 2.6 series is out of its "testing versions" it is considered STABLE."
This is not entirely true. First of all, the percentage of people willing to run test kernels is much less than it used to be. Therefore, the test kernels have not seen as many strange hardware configurations nor the same usage loads. In fact, they probably haven't seen hardly _any_ true production loads.
When the.0 kernels are released, many people view them as stable, so the testing base increases. This exposes a lot more bugs and problems. Usually it takes about 5 - 10 releases for it to "really" become stable. In fact, Linus admitted when he labelled 2.4 as officially blessed with the.0 that he did so more to increase the test base than he really thought it was a production-ready kernel.
I think the problem is that many people (including me) don't take the time to run our own tests on new kernels as a matter of course, and so the actual stabilizing of the kernel is being moved further and further back into the release cycle.
One good thing though is that Linus is going to have a smaller role in the release cycle. Linus is much better at development than he is at making production releases, and kernels usually stabilize when he takes his hands off of them.
For example, Linus wants things to be totally technically pure - which is great, except that most people want a working kernel today. That's what release managers do. They make the nasty bug-fixes and trade-offs that are not good long-term but get the problem fixed today. Linus' view is (and should be) in the long-term, while a release manager needs to look at getting it working today.
No, it's because marriage and kids especially are hard work. Before I got married, I screwed around with Java all the time. After I got married, I occasionally had time to mess with GCC language front-ends, but now post-kids I have almost no time outside 8-5 to think and act creatively.
Actually the point that was made was that the fact that the use of video game characters in film has nothing to do with whether or not films and games are coming closer together. In which case, he is exactly right. Your response was also correct, but had nothing to do with his post.
I think that Microsoft discontinued the use of OLE as an acronym, and made it just a name that doesn't stand for anything. I could be wrong, but that's kind of what I remember. Kind of like what happened to SOAP.
But SOAP and XML-RPC are both far cries from CORBA.
SOAP is terrible because it's name is totally wrong. Although they finally stopped using it as an acronym, SOAP originally meant Simple Object Access Protocol. However, it wasn't simple, there were NO objects in sight (SOAP is NOT object-oriented - it's RPC-based - any Object-Orientation in SOAP is a vendor extension), Access is true, but it's not really a Protocol since there isn't even a standard wire protocol - there's a suggestion of how to marshall/encode data, but noone's required to use it.
For OO stuff, CORBA remains to be the butt-kicker. In fact, it's kind of funny, the hard parts of OO (you know, the ones that the SOAP spec specifically says it doesn't handle) are pretty much handled automatically by CORBA.
For non-OO stuff, or simple OO stuff that you don't mind accessing in a non-OO manner, XML-RPC is much simpler than SOAP.
Why does everyone insist that trying to make a profit is equivalent with having no ethics or social responsibility? They are not opposites - one simply constrains the other.
Businesses SHOULD aim to make money - lots of money. However, if they do not restrain themselves by ethics or social responsibility, we should restrain ourselves from using their products ever.
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" I can't think of a better way to annoy a customer than to sell them something that they later find they could have downloaded or legally copied for free."
Actually, having the product in a place like Best Buy is, in itself, a service. If I were to sell Blender in Best Buy for $40. If someone has never heard of Blender and then buys it, they are basically paying $40 for the awareness of Blender and the convenience of packaged software. The awareness is a big deal. Sure they could download it off the internet - that is, if they knew it existed at all. Instead, they bought it for the very good price of $40, and didn't have to search the entire Internet looking for something they didn't even know existed.
The MS deal was cheaper after Microsoft went back and slashed their prices dramatically. This is really interesting, because they are going to have to do this more and more. They may win most of their contracts, but it will be for a significantly smaller amount than before.
So, if Microsoft does nothing, Linux will win outright.
If Microsoft lowers their price to consumers, the end user STILL wins BECAUSE OF LINUX.
So, thank you GNU/Linux - even if you lose the fight, it was your involvement that forced the competition to actually start serving customers rather than raking them over the coals.
If you are making Netscape and Mozilla equivalent products, it's an easy answer:
1) JavaScript fine control - with IE, JavaScript can either be on or off. There's some additional control for ActiveX, but for other stuff, you just have on/off. With Mozilla, you have fine control. No, I don't want JavaScript screwing with my status bar. No, I don't want unrequested windows popping up. No, I don't want JavaScript to give focus to other Windows.
2) The Cookie Manager - gosh I love this. It's most useful in development, although it's useful other places, too. With the cookie manager, I can better debug by viewing and removing cookies manually. You see, the cookies aren't written to cookies.txt unless they are permanent cookies. Session-cookies are only in memory. IE won't even let you see them, but with Mozilla I can view and remove them.
3) Image Manager - I can block images from banner-ad-serving sites if I want to.
4) Tab Browsing - This actually should be #1. It is sooooooo useful. Right now I have 13 browser tabs open. Usually it's around 20. Trying to manage 20 independent windows is quite harrying. With Mozilla I can do either independent Windows or tabs. It's wonderful.
5) Bookmarking Sessions - If you use tabbed browsing, you can bookmark all of the tabs in your current session. So, if you want to remember your current session for later you can just "Bookmark this group of tabs" and reopen it later.
6) Text-Zoom - I can zoom text for sites that give it too me small. Personally, I would also like a full-page zoom for everything.
7) Better CSS handling - there's a lot of things you can do as a web developer because of CSS that just isn't possible with IE. One of the main reasons why people still have frames is to keep the top navigation always viewable. You can do that with position: fixed easily with CSS, except that IE doesn't support it. They also don't support absolute positioning of background images either, which really makes some things difficult.
You miss the point - as an add-on component, the OEMs can choose whether or not to include it. They could ship with Internet Explorer OR Mozilla OR Opera - it wouldn't be dictated to them.
Why is $50k a bad income? What exactly are you wanting to buy? I have a wife, 2 kids, one of which has severe medical problems, and a house, and am getting by just fine on $45. What level of greed have we gotten to when $50k is only enough to live in your parent's basement?
ACtually, this could very well happen since Microsoft is no longer updating IE for Win2K and lower. If they want to go beyond IE6, they have to upgrade the operating system. That is a HUGE benefit to Mozilla.
One thing that the Mozilla Foundation could do to raise money is set up a "Cobrand Support Center" where people can contract them to create and support branded versions of Mozilla.
If the price were not too high, I imagine a lot of technology companies could impress their users with a branded web browser that's better than Internet Explorer.
"As a complimentary service to our customers, we offer them the SuperTechnologyCompany Web Browser which has features that prevent spam and popups..."
Yes, but most people don't know that, and if they're running an all W2K office, they would rather have someone else run their Linux boxes.
We're actually working on a system using Linux that will make PDF printing available from any application without local software installation. Basically, you have a Linux box set up as a member of your Windows domain which has a "virtual" printer which just accepts print requests, generates a PDF, and then places the PDF with a timestamp in your home directory.
All you have to do is follow the normal Windows printer setup procedure. You don't even need to load drivers - they come standard with Windows.
If anyone's interested you can email me at johnnyb@eskimo.com.
That is not something Grandma would do. Every Grandma I know has their grandchildren help them do that. It's a tricky process either way, and you either know what you're doing or you don't.
To be newbie-friendly, it would have to detect that you have a new hard drive, read the partition table, and then ask you want you want to do with it. Red Hat may in fact do this - they do a lot of other autosetup stuff with kudzu.
That's so true. Using open-source and contributing any infrastructure improvements is the best way to go. You simply don't talk about the free part. In fact, you charge for the components, you just charge less. Companies understand charging less, they don't understand free.
So, charge them $2000 for RHAS.
Charge them $1000 for PostgreSQL.
Charge them for the development work.
They'll thank you for providing them with such a great service for such a low cost.
If you say the first two items are free they will just laugh at you.
If I read the changelog properly, this kernel is what you were looking for. It has all of the necessary plumbing to support that - the keyboard is loaded as a module, etc. The majority of the work for that would need to go into XFree86 and the distributions.
I see several great things. What exactly did you want from this release?
Here's the big list for me:
* O(1) scheduler
* Customizable elevators for load tweaking
* CPU Affinity
* Preemptible kernel
* I forget the name, but it's an IO improvement based on doing nothing
* Use of IDE CD Writer without ide-scsi, which allows for DMA usage
* Other things I forgot
Anyway, it looks to be an excellent release. What exactly were you wanting?
Also, Windows puts user interactive tasks at top priority. Try renicing the process to -20 and see if it goes faster. Also, turn off your daemons and Mozilla. The preemption patch and hdparm should help, too.
Grandma is not going to care whether DevFS is there or not. The only person who would care about the major/minor numbers is someone building their own distribution or installing the whole thing from source - definitely NOT Grandma. The distributions - you know, the ones trying to make things easier for Grandma - are the ones ditching devfs.
"Once the 2.6 series is out of its "testing versions" it is considered STABLE."
.0 kernels are released, many people view them as stable, so the testing base increases. This exposes a lot more bugs and problems. Usually it takes about 5 - 10 releases for it to "really" become stable. In fact, Linus admitted when he labelled 2.4 as officially blessed with the .0 that he did so more to increase the test base than he really thought it was a production-ready kernel.
This is not entirely true. First of all, the percentage of people willing to run test kernels is much less than it used to be. Therefore, the test kernels have not seen as many strange hardware configurations nor the same usage loads. In fact, they probably haven't seen hardly _any_ true production loads.
When the
I think the problem is that many people (including me) don't take the time to run our own tests on new kernels as a matter of course, and so the actual stabilizing of the kernel is being moved further and further back into the release cycle.
One good thing though is that Linus is going to have a smaller role in the release cycle. Linus is much better at development than he is at making production releases, and kernels usually stabilize when he takes his hands off of them.
For example, Linus wants things to be totally technically pure - which is great, except that most people want a working kernel today. That's what release managers do. They make the nasty bug-fixes and trade-offs that are not good long-term but get the problem fixed today. Linus' view is (and should be) in the long-term, while a release manager needs to look at getting it working today.
Once you have kids, all bets are off.
We have two kids and we have sex about twice a week, with some exceptions.
No, it's because marriage and kids especially are hard work. Before I got married, I screwed around with Java all the time. After I got married, I occasionally had time to mess with GCC language front-ends, but now post-kids I have almost no time outside 8-5 to think and act creatively.
That's true for most C++ constructs.
Actually the point that was made was that the fact that the use of video game characters in film has nothing to do with whether or not films and games are coming closer together. In which case, he is exactly right. Your response was also correct, but had nothing to do with his post.
I think that Microsoft discontinued the use of OLE as an acronym, and made it just a name that doesn't stand for anything. I could be wrong, but that's kind of what I remember. Kind of like what happened to SOAP.
But SOAP and XML-RPC are both far cries from CORBA.
SOAP is terrible because it's name is totally wrong. Although they finally stopped using it as an acronym, SOAP originally meant Simple Object Access Protocol. However, it wasn't simple, there were NO objects in sight (SOAP is NOT object-oriented - it's RPC-based - any Object-Orientation in SOAP is a vendor extension), Access is true, but it's not really a Protocol since there isn't even a standard wire protocol - there's a suggestion of how to marshall/encode data, but noone's required to use it.
For OO stuff, CORBA remains to be the butt-kicker. In fact, it's kind of funny, the hard parts of OO (you know, the ones that the SOAP spec specifically says it doesn't handle) are pretty much handled automatically by CORBA.
For non-OO stuff, or simple OO stuff that you don't mind accessing in a non-OO manner, XML-RPC is much simpler than SOAP.
The UNIX implementation of .NET does not allow commercial use the last time I heard.
Why does everyone insist that trying to make a profit is equivalent with having no ethics or social responsibility? They are not opposites - one simply constrains the other.
Businesses SHOULD aim to make money - lots of money. However, if they do not restrain themselves by ethics or social responsibility, we should restrain ourselves from using their products ever.