Incidentally, once windows has displayed the desktop and is still doing stuff in the background, it will let you click on things and select stuff from the menu but will sometimes completely ignore your selections (ie not load the apps you tried to run) at all, meaning you have to try again once its finished thrashing the disk.
Well, you shouldn't have to make so much effort to keep the machine running adequately...
And you can't leave it up to the application vendor to write a good uninstall process, they don't want their app to be uninstalled so it's never going to be any good... No, package managers are the answer - which keep track of what's been installed and can remove it cleanly.
All of these issues you bring up have already been solved by linux distributions.
The updaters are there for security reasons, and are an attempt to fix a fundamental flaw of windows - no centralized update system. You don't get garbage like that on Linux systems, because it's possible to hook into the built in package management system and add a repository, so you only have the built in system supplied update process running as/when, or even executing from crontab instead of having to keep itself resident in memory.
So you can blame microsoft for the annoying background update daemons...
The eee is one of the best machines for getting a fast boot time tho... It has a bios that's capable of caching the power on state (so it doesn't have to run the normal tests every time), it has a static hardware configuration so it doesn't need to spend a lot of time probing for hardware, and it has solid state disks which don't need time to spin up.
New hardware or a new OS is doomed to failure because of proprietary software distributed only as binaries... Open source typically gets ported fairly quickly to a new OS or new architecture.
Your very right tho, proprietary vendors won't port their apps to an os or architecture which hasn't got any users, and it will never get any users without the apps people use.
If you want progress, then software needs to be open source, that way people making operating systems and hardware will be free to innovate safe in the knowledge that they will be able to port the apps themselves even if noone else will. Look at the Itanium architecture, and how much money Intel spent convincing vendors to port their apps, and still there's very little closed source that's been ported to it... Yes it will run windows, but 90% of the apps you'd use on it run under very slow emulation.
That's because there has been no real competition in the consumer OS market for years, so no incentive for the software to be improved, while the hardware has been fiercely competitive and improved rapidly.
In the server space, from which Linux/BSD come, the software was typically designed to boot once and stay running, so boot time was never even considered.
And yes, the modern fascination with slow interpreted languages baffles me...
"It's quicker to write the code!" Yes but you write it once, how many times is it expected to execute, and how much time is wasted for each execution?
Trouble with developing for windows mobile is that you end up with apps that only run on windows mobile... If you develop for the unofficial iphone sdk you can create portable apps, same with other unix and java based phones.
Microsoft don't do anything to help interoperability unless they're forced to... If they have a dominant position in a market they will fight tooth and nail to prevent interoperability... But where there are sufficient competitors that they are forced to provide interoperability or lose customers, that's the only time they bother, and usually with an eye to pushing customers onto their own proprietary alternatives and locking them in.
Look at history, they only implemented TCP/IP because it was too ubiquitous to ignore, and people were buying third party stacks.
In the case of Samba, there are now far too many samba based embedded devices out there, most of the storage servers you can buy are now running Samba on top of Linux or a BSD-derived OS, and if a new version of windows broke compatibility with all these devices it would severely hinder it's take up.
However, even these "cancerous" open source licenses are considerably better for the end user than virtually all proprietary licenses.
Compare: You can use this software any way you want, and distribute it however you like so long as you distribute the source code in the same way you received it. if you To: You can use this software in a limited number of ways on a limited number of systems, you cannot redistribute it at all and don't get to look at the source code.
If you think licenses like the GPL are restrictive, then you must really hate proprietary software even more.
And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill. And an angry kid with a ddos botnet can not only kill your connection, but also cost you a lot of money, get you disconnected for non payment and give you a bad credit rating.
Also in the UK it's not the network that needs upgrading, it's the ridiculous prices BT charge for bandwidth on wholesale ADSL.
Well, if i'm being called by a friend, i would like to know it's them calling, or else i won't answer it... And if it's a company, surely its in their interest for you to know they called and be able to identify them from the number?
I demand to know who it is before i will speak to them, so anonymous calls never get answered.
Trouble is, then i would pay for the backhaul from my home phone to my mobile... Since Asterisk would have to terminate the existing call, and then initiate another outbound call to my mobile once the caller was authenticated.
People do things because they're bored and have free time, and in the case of open source code often because it looks good on the resume to have been involved with open source projects, like charity work...
Unemployed people generally have more free time, and less money to spend on doing other things with their time.. They also have more of a need to do things that will look good on their resume. They are also less likely to be able to afford proprietary software, and are more likely to be motivated to replace it with their own alternative.
I know if i was unemployed, i would spend the time trying to improve my chances of getting another job, wether that be raising my profile by releasing open source code, or just writing code for practice or to learn new technologies or languages.
That's a good one... I have an Asterisk setup that rejects calls from blacklisted numbers, i should configure it to play ads until the caller hangs up.
Callers who withhold their number hear a message asking them to unblock their caller id, Callers with blacklisted numbers get a message telling them their number is blacklisted, Callers in my whitelist ring my phone at any time of the day or night, Any other callers ring only during the day, and go direct to voicemail at night.
What i want tho, is something like this for my mobile... I get a lot more junk calls on my mobile, on the landline i'm usually not in and therefore don't notice until i get home and see the missed calls. Surely it must be possible for someone to write an iphone app that behaves in the same way as my asterisk setup - ie telling users to unblock their callerid or their call won't be answered...
Users who explicitly block their callerid are a real pet hate of mine, why would anyone do that unless they have something to hide? If it's a company, just present your main switchboard/advertised number so i can recognise the call.
Depends on your level of forward planning... If you plan on migrating in the future, then you hire staff who can handle it, so any new staff coming in will be capable long before the migration actually starts.
The costs of retraining to a new proprietary product can also be high, as can the conversion to a new proprietary format. On the other hand, future upgrades to new open source products are unnecessary (nothing stopping you using the old versions) and upgrades to new revisions of already standardised formats will be a lot easier than going from one version of a binary blob format to another.
Do you plan long term? Long term, moving to open source and open standards will always work out cheaper, migrating away from proprietary will bring you long term benefits... Of course, in an ideal world you'd have started out using open source and thus benefit from the savings right from the start and not suffer any migration costs.
Do you intend your business to still be around in 5 years? Or are you concerned with wringing as much money out of it in the next couple of years and then let everything collapse - as many bankers seem to have been doing lately.
Also consider, high migration costs are often an intentional side effect of proprietary software, it's used as an underhanded tactic to prevent you from migrating away from them. Do you really want to support vendors who do underhanded stuff like this? I sure don't.
Because it's massively outdated compared to every other browser out there...
It's not like other browsers are doing anything proprietary and nonstandard, everything is documented and microsoft simply chooses not to implement the published standards.
MS will often blame the hardware vendor, Intel will often blame the software...
What you really need is a system where the entire stack of both hardware and software is supported by a single vendor. Try looking at Sun, Apple or IBM. HP have some offerings too based on HP-UX and Linux, and SGI have supported linux offerings i believe.
MS don't offer hardware, and i'm not sure if Intel offer any kind of software support with their hardware (although they could easily support a version of linux running on their machines).
It would be cheaper to stay with what they already have, if only it were that easy...
What happens when the current software reaches end of life? No patches, gaping security holes, nothing you can do about it... Have to upgrade, and possibly upgrade the hardware at the same time.
What happens when you need to buy new or replacement hardware, the old software may not run on it, or its license may forbid it, meaning you now have some new and some old. Will you be able to run old alongside new, or will you start having compatibility problems that will force you to upgrade everything?
If you move to open source, then future upgrades are a lot less painful, and its easier to retain older versions if you need to.
Reason is very much a niche product, and yet how can you say it or something similar would not have existed without proprietary software? There have been free and open source music programs for years, which given more attention would improve far more rapidly. And this attention would come from users who want such software, and companies who produce related hardware, so all those commercial companies who produce audio related hardware and bundle it with their own proprietary software would be contributing towards the common pool instead of reinventing the wheel.
Also, what's so great about Reason, it doesn't give you the ability to customise it or port it to new hardware since you don't have hardware, what about the formats it stores data in, does it hold your data to ransom by storing it in a proprietary format?
Games are a different breed, since they are purely entertainment and noone depends on them. Most importantly, they don't hold your data to ransom, although there are active communities who modify games and these communities would benefit greatly from having the source. As for "killer" games, a lot of modern games are quite lousy, either pretty poor games in their own rights of rehashes of existing games with new graphics, there's very little originality these days.
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Incidentally, once windows has displayed the desktop and is still doing stuff in the background, it will let you click on things and select stuff from the menu but will sometimes completely ignore your selections (ie not load the apps you tried to run) at all, meaning you have to try again once its finished thrashing the disk.
Well, you shouldn't have to make so much effort to keep the machine running adequately...
And you can't leave it up to the application vendor to write a good uninstall process, they don't want their app to be uninstalled so it's never going to be any good... No, package managers are the answer - which keep track of what's been installed and can remove it cleanly.
All of these issues you bring up have already been solved by linux distributions.
The updaters are there for security reasons, and are an attempt to fix a fundamental flaw of windows - no centralized update system. You don't get garbage like that on Linux systems, because it's possible to hook into the built in package management system and add a repository, so you only have the built in system supplied update process running as/when, or even executing from crontab instead of having to keep itself resident in memory.
So you can blame microsoft for the annoying background update daemons...
It's quite easy to recompile linux so it only has support for the hardware you have, it can be made to boot considerably quicker when you do this...
The eee is one of the best machines for getting a fast boot time tho...
It has a bios that's capable of caching the power on state (so it doesn't have to run the normal tests every time), it has a static hardware configuration so it doesn't need to spend a lot of time probing for hardware, and it has solid state disks which don't need time to spin up.
New hardware or a new OS is doomed to failure because of proprietary software distributed only as binaries... Open source typically gets ported fairly quickly to a new OS or new architecture.
Your very right tho, proprietary vendors won't port their apps to an os or architecture which hasn't got any users, and it will never get any users without the apps people use.
If you want progress, then software needs to be open source, that way people making operating systems and hardware will be free to innovate safe in the knowledge that they will be able to port the apps themselves even if noone else will.
Look at the Itanium architecture, and how much money Intel spent convincing vendors to port their apps, and still there's very little closed source that's been ported to it... Yes it will run windows, but 90% of the apps you'd use on it run under very slow emulation.
That's because there has been no real competition in the consumer OS market for years, so no incentive for the software to be improved, while the hardware has been fiercely competitive and improved rapidly.
In the server space, from which Linux/BSD come, the software was typically designed to boot once and stay running, so boot time was never even considered.
And yes, the modern fascination with slow interpreted languages baffles me...
"It's quicker to write the code!"
Yes but you write it once, how many times is it expected to execute, and how much time is wasted for each execution?
Trouble with developing for windows mobile is that you end up with apps that only run on windows mobile...
If you develop for the unofficial iphone sdk you can create portable apps, same with other unix and java based phones.
You can use a VPN on some phones, so it will have the joint authentication of the vpn itself plus whatever you use on the http/s server...
Microsoft don't do anything to help interoperability unless they're forced to...
If they have a dominant position in a market they will fight tooth and nail to prevent interoperability...
But where there are sufficient competitors that they are forced to provide interoperability or lose customers, that's the only time they bother, and usually with an eye to pushing customers onto their own proprietary alternatives and locking them in.
Look at history, they only implemented TCP/IP because it was too ubiquitous to ignore, and people were buying third party stacks.
In the case of Samba, there are now far too many samba based embedded devices out there, most of the storage servers you can buy are now running Samba on top of Linux or a BSD-derived OS, and if a new version of windows broke compatibility with all these devices it would severely hinder it's take up.
However, even these "cancerous" open source licenses are considerably better for the end user than virtually all proprietary licenses.
Compare:
You can use this software any way you want, and distribute it however you like so long as you distribute the source code in the same way you received it.
if you To:
You can use this software in a limited number of ways on a limited number of systems, you cannot redistribute it at all and don't get to look at the source code.
If you think licenses like the GPL are restrictive, then you must really hate proprietary software even more.
And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill.
And an angry kid with a ddos botnet can not only kill your connection, but also cost you a lot of money, get you disconnected for non payment and give you a bad credit rating.
Also in the UK it's not the network that needs upgrading, it's the ridiculous prices BT charge for bandwidth on wholesale ADSL.
Well, if i'm being called by a friend, i would like to know it's them calling, or else i won't answer it...
And if it's a company, surely its in their interest for you to know they called and be able to identify them from the number?
I demand to know who it is before i will speak to them, so anonymous calls never get answered.
Incidentally, you don't need GPS...
You can use bluetooth or wifi to detect when your phone is at home.
Trouble is, then i would pay for the backhaul from my home phone to my mobile... Since Asterisk would have to terminate the existing call, and then initiate another outbound call to my mobile once the caller was authenticated.
People do things because they're bored and have free time, and in the case of open source code often because it looks good on the resume to have been involved with open source projects, like charity work...
Unemployed people generally have more free time, and less money to spend on doing other things with their time..
They also have more of a need to do things that will look good on their resume.
They are also less likely to be able to afford proprietary software, and are more likely to be motivated to replace it with their own alternative.
I know if i was unemployed, i would spend the time trying to improve my chances of getting another job, wether that be raising my profile by releasing open source code, or just writing code for practice or to learn new technologies or languages.
That's a good one...
I have an Asterisk setup that rejects calls from blacklisted numbers, i should configure it to play ads until the caller hangs up.
I already do this using Asterisk...
Callers who withhold their number hear a message asking them to unblock their caller id,
Callers with blacklisted numbers get a message telling them their number is blacklisted,
Callers in my whitelist ring my phone at any time of the day or night,
Any other callers ring only during the day, and go direct to voicemail at night.
What i want tho, is something like this for my mobile... I get a lot more junk calls on my mobile, on the landline i'm usually not in and therefore don't notice until i get home and see the missed calls. Surely it must be possible for someone to write an iphone app that behaves in the same way as my asterisk setup - ie telling users to unblock their callerid or their call won't be answered...
Users who explicitly block their callerid are a real pet hate of mine, why would anyone do that unless they have something to hide? If it's a company, just present your main switchboard/advertised number so i can recognise the call.
Depends on your level of forward planning...
If you plan on migrating in the future, then you hire staff who can handle it, so any new staff coming in will be capable long before the migration actually starts.
The costs of retraining to a new proprietary product can also be high, as can the conversion to a new proprietary format. On the other hand, future upgrades to new open source products are unnecessary (nothing stopping you using the old versions) and upgrades to new revisions of already standardised formats will be a lot easier than going from one version of a binary blob format to another.
Do you plan long term? Long term, moving to open source and open standards will always work out cheaper, migrating away from proprietary will bring you long term benefits... Of course, in an ideal world you'd have started out using open source and thus benefit from the savings right from the start and not suffer any migration costs.
Do you intend your business to still be around in 5 years? Or are you concerned with wringing as much money out of it in the next couple of years and then let everything collapse - as many bankers seem to have been doing lately.
Also consider, high migration costs are often an intentional side effect of proprietary software, it's used as an underhanded tactic to prevent you from migrating away from them. Do you really want to support vendors who do underhanded stuff like this? I sure don't.
Because it's massively outdated compared to every other browser out there...
It's not like other browsers are doing anything proprietary and nonstandard, everything is documented and microsoft simply chooses not to implement the published standards.
MS will often blame the hardware vendor, Intel will often blame the software...
What you really need is a system where the entire stack of both hardware and software is supported by a single vendor. Try looking at Sun, Apple or IBM. HP have some offerings too based on HP-UX and Linux, and SGI have supported linux offerings i believe.
MS don't offer hardware, and i'm not sure if Intel offer any kind of software support with their hardware (although they could easily support a version of linux running on their machines).
It would be cheaper to stay with what they already have, if only it were that easy...
What happens when the current software reaches end of life? No patches, gaping security holes, nothing you can do about it... Have to upgrade, and possibly upgrade the hardware at the same time.
What happens when you need to buy new or replacement hardware, the old software may not run on it, or its license may forbid it, meaning you now have some new and some old. Will you be able to run old alongside new, or will you start having compatibility problems that will force you to upgrade everything?
If you move to open source, then future upgrades are a lot less painful, and its easier to retain older versions if you need to.
But the mass market does not want 2d games, they want 3d, even when it ruins the game... Just look at Lemmings 3D!
Reason is very much a niche product, and yet how can you say it or something similar would not have existed without proprietary software?
There have been free and open source music programs for years, which given more attention would improve far more rapidly. And this attention would come from users who want such software, and companies who produce related hardware, so all those commercial companies who produce audio related hardware and bundle it with their own proprietary software would be contributing towards the common pool instead of reinventing the wheel.
Also, what's so great about Reason, it doesn't give you the ability to customise it or port it to new hardware since you don't have hardware, what about the formats it stores data in, does it hold your data to ransom by storing it in a proprietary format?
Games are a different breed, since they are purely entertainment and noone depends on them. Most importantly, they don't hold your data to ransom, although there are active communities who modify games and these communities would benefit greatly from having the source.
As for "killer" games, a lot of modern games are quite lousy, either pretty poor games in their own rights of rehashes of existing games with new graphics, there's very little originality these days.
You can buy anonymous prepaid phones over the counter using cash without having to provide any information about yourself.