The proprietary CDROM interface on soundblaster cards died out, because it was proprietary and IDE was preferred. The proprietary zip format has died too, they were never as popular as you describe and quite quickly faded away again... Same for LS-120 and the others. As for the solid state media cards, true there are too many formats, but they're not proprietary, there are many implementations of each format from multiple vendors, and the vast majority of cameras actually support the usb-storage standard anyway. Come to think of it, so do virtually all the readers for those cards.
Consider for a minute, what if you had lots of your personal data stored on an LS-120 disk, and the drive had long ago failed... How would you retrieve this data? LS-120 drives aren't exactly widely available anymore. I got into this situation, with both LS120 and zip drives, luckily my zip drive still works, but the LS120 drive i had is long dead and it took me quite a lot of time and effort to locate another one on ebay, just to retrieve some rather important data.
However this is a format that's not yet deployed, anywhere... It can also have proprietary extensions, and you can be sure it will in short order... And finally, is covered by patents.
OpenDocument is not a platform, it's a method of storing data. Having open and documented standards for storing data is ESSENTIAL, and absoloutely should be mandated if necessary. Where would we be if, instead of SATA/IDE/SCSI and CDs, every PC manufacturer used a proprietary type of hard drive and a proprietary form of removable media?
Just because the format is dictated, doesnt place any restriction on what you can use to manipulate the data, so long as it conforms to the standard. I can put my SATA drive into any system that supports SATA, which is just about every modern computer from any vendor.
And just because a standard exists, doesn't mean it will always remain the same, as time progresses new versions will come out (IDE -> SATA) that bring improvements, most software will continue supporting both formats until pretty much everyone has caught up and the new standard takes over.
I can still plug an ancient 20MB IDE drive into a modern PC, and have it work.
Although microsoft's search engine didn't even exist in the days when altavista was popular, msn search is quite new... Infact, not so long ago yahoo was just a portal page and they used other people's search engines for actual searching.
And the fact that you have to waste effort avoiding the common bugs of IE is bad enough. When bugs were found in firefox's rendering engine (see the slashdot formatting bug a while back) they got fixed, rather than the microsoft attitude of "so what, we wont fix it, let them break their site to work with our bugs"
It was a hypothetical situation pointing out a future possibility if continuing to use xp... There will inevitably be a time when xp is no longer supported, and due to the activation requirements it will therefore become completely unuseable.
The other boxes are also mostly windows, usually older versions... The fact that these systems haven't been updated, suggests that the people running them are not very vigilant, or even bothering to tend to the machines... A lot of them have probably been owned for years.
Something which ceases to be supported is *NOT* good enough... In a few years, the current microsoft offerings will cease to be supported, it will not be possible to get new security patches for them, nor will it be possible to acquire new licenses for additional machines, and they may not even work on new machines. I worked at a company recently that had close to 300 NT4 systems, and 6 XP systems... the XP systems existed because several of the original NT4 workstations had suffered hardware failures, and they couldnt get NT4 to work on the replacement hardware.
Your typical office employee doesn't need to install programs, or worry how to install them etc... Your typical office employee is given a computer and expected to get on with their job, while other members of staff are responsible for installing and maintaining it. I've given KDE and OSX systems to people to do office work on, and people have had little or no problems with them. In some instances they found them easier (programs are named more logically according to their function rather than their vendor) and in the few instances they had problems, it was only because it was *different* to what they were used to... Once it was pointed out that it was different, most people responded along the lines of "yes, that makes sense, i`m just so used to blah".. which shows they've gotten used to illogical and unintuitive ways of doing some things.
But if you need a better spreadsheet, then excel clearly isn't good enough... What makes you think that future versions will be? Perhaps your time would be better spent making a list of the features you need in a spreadsheet and submitting them to people who are developing spreadsheets... After all, most programmers are not financial analysts, and have very little idea of what features you need unless you tell them!
However you lose a lot of the flexibility offered by Gentoo... You have to run the same debian testing system as everyone else, you can't mix and match... The poster you replied to talked about how he'd held off on the upgrade to gcc 4 and modular X... On debian, once packages start being compiled by other people for gcc4 you get dragged along.. Similarly, if one debian developer updates glibc, you have to aswell, otherwise you cant run the packages he's compiled. Gentoo lets you maintain whatever versions you want, and compile subsequent programs to work with them. You also lose the flexibility offered by USE flags, whereby you can recompile packages with different settings, for instance the redhat rpms for the pine mail program require kerberos, so if i use pine on redhat i have to keep a full set of kerberos libraries installed, on gentoo i just turn kerberos support off and build pine without it. Debian being binary based has similar issues, the builder of the package chooses what build settings you get. As for keeping the source libraries around, you don't have to on gentoo either, you can use binary packages (and thus lose the flexibility) or if you have multiple similar/identical systems you can build these packages on one of them and distribute them to all the others. On debian by contrast, if you need to install something which is not catered for by the package management system, you have a huge ballache trying to find and install all the -dev packages you actually need.
Because, while XP will continue working in it's current configuration on your current hardware... What are the chances that the hardware will break, or something else will occur to make it necessary to reinstall the OS. Imagine the following scenarios:
XP got corrupted, or your drive failed, forcing you to reinstall... However since XP is no longer supported Microsoft have turned off the activation servers so you cant make XP run for more than 2 weeks, when you call them up they just try and sell you vista.
A piece of hardware died, you couldn't find an exact replacement but you bought what was readily available, XP doesn't support it and the hardware vendor no longer makes drivers for XP.
The entire machine failed, you had to buy a new machine, but XP doesn't run on the new machine.
An exploit comes out for XP, microsoft refuse to patch it because it's unsupported, your machine gets owned.
In any of these scenarios, and more, your being pushed towards buying vista... With Linux, while some of the same issues may apply, the updates are free and can be incremental, ie you can install support for new hardware without updating the whole userland. As a worst case, you can install a new distro of linux, but keep your old one inside of a chroot so your apps are sitting in the environment they expect.
If he owns the computer store, why did he not stick to the existing POS system? It worked, the staff already knew how to use it, any problems it had were known about by now, and it was already paid for.
So hardware lockin has been broken... Now users are waking up to the dangers of software lockin too... In a few more years the industry will finally be mature and we'l have choices and competition.
Cars, being mechanical devices with moving parts, will wear out... Parts wear out, they go rusty, once they get to a certain point it stops being economical to keep repairing the car rather than buy a new one. So there's no alternative to replacing your car every few years, and it obviously makes sense to buy a more modern one. Software on the other hand, does not deteriorate... In 10 years time it will work just like it did today, so there's far less incentive to replace it. Also, cars operate in much the same way, whereas software often changes radically, software users often feel compelled to stick with their current versions because new versions behave differently... The same happens with car drivers, but to a much lesser degree, for instance drivers often have their own preference on gearbox type (manual/auto), but there's little else that fundamentally changes the way you operate a car.
IE error messages are the worst of any browser i've ever used... You get a large page of largely irrelevant small text, and then the actual error right at the bottom. Often the errors are far too vague or blatantly wrong... like the "cannot find server or dns error", which is it? When it can't negotiate SSL (because your server only supports modern encryption like aes and ie doesnt) the error message is useless, and makes no mention of the fact it couldnt negotiate a supported cipher. Also when your server requires digest auth, which ie6 still doesnt support, the error message is equally useless.
You can select and drag in certain applications, this moves the text rather than creating a copy of it, some applications on Linux do this too. And sure, you can click multiple times for each piece of text you want to cut/paste, and linux incidentally lets you do this too, but windows has no equivalent to the simple select and 1 button paste that X11 has.
The windows methods are all more work, and linux supports the more cumbersome methods too.
I would keep a tarball of a default home directory for the public user stored somewhere, and when the user logs out, kill all his processes (even abckgrounded ones), erase his homedir and temporary areas (run the rm command under the public userid so it cant remove any root owned files from/tmp etc), and untar the tarball back to/home to give the public user a fresh default profile. Unlike under windows 3.x, the public user won't have sufficient privileges to write files anywhere other than the above mentioned places, nor to overwrite system files so it's much faster to clean up and return to a default state without having to do a full reboot... This will result in much less waiting around when someone leaves and someone else takes their place.
Selling the same hardware with improved drivers as if it was new hardware? This is FRAUD... You are advocating companies defrauding and ripping off their customer base, and promoting a method by which they can cover up their anti-consumer tactics. As a consumer i want, even deserve to know when things like this are going on, and i will avoid doing business with companies which use such underhanded tactics to fool the consumer.
The point is that even the cheapest lowest end servers are more than sufficient for low end tasks... So why not run multiple low-end tasks on a single server? It saves power, space, money etc. Unix systems have been running multiple services happily on a single box for years, but windows can often have problems when you do that, hence virtualization is popular (tho very much sub optimal since you have multiple kernels) for this purpose. Where virtualization is popular on unix, is when several systems will be used by multiple customers, like virtual hosting... If you consider the cobalt raqs that were immensely popular a few years ago... Each customer had a physical machine, but 99% of these machines were idle. It makes a lot of sense to consolidate multiple customers on a single system, on the basis that they won't all be hammering the cpu at the same time.
I setup a similar system for a company a few years ago... Runs samba and imap internally, and smtp externally, and acts as a nat gateway... This box was installed in 1998, and aside from power failures, has been running continuously since then.. I call them periodically to check up on it, but i've never had a call about any kind of problem with the server. I've logged in remotely a few times over the years and installed security updates to some of the network listening services, and watched the uptime roll over to 0 when it reaches 497 days due to linux representing the seconds of uptime with an integer that's too small.
Slashdot Mirror
The proprietary CDROM interface on soundblaster cards died out, because it was proprietary and IDE was preferred.
The proprietary zip format has died too, they were never as popular as you describe and quite quickly faded away again... Same for LS-120 and the others.
As for the solid state media cards, true there are too many formats, but they're not proprietary, there are many implementations of each format from multiple vendors, and the vast majority of cameras actually support the usb-storage standard anyway. Come to think of it, so do virtually all the readers for those cards.
Consider for a minute, what if you had lots of your personal data stored on an LS-120 disk, and the drive had long ago failed... How would you retrieve this data? LS-120 drives aren't exactly widely available anymore. I got into this situation, with both LS120 and zip drives, luckily my zip drive still works, but the LS120 drive i had is long dead and it took me quite a lot of time and effort to locate another one on ebay, just to retrieve some rather important data.
I certainly hope iWork supports it, that's the only thing stopping me using it.
However this is a format that's not yet deployed, anywhere...
It can also have proprietary extensions, and you can be sure it will in short order... And finally, is covered by patents.
The ISO certification is just that, ISO has certified the existing standard, so you can download the spec from Oasis or wherever else...
OpenDocument is not a platform, it's a method of storing data.
Having open and documented standards for storing data is ESSENTIAL, and absoloutely should be mandated if necessary. Where would we be if, instead of SATA/IDE/SCSI and CDs, every PC manufacturer used a proprietary type of hard drive and a proprietary form of removable media?
Just because the format is dictated, doesnt place any restriction on what you can use to manipulate the data, so long as it conforms to the standard. I can put my SATA drive into any system that supports SATA, which is just about every modern computer from any vendor.
And just because a standard exists, doesn't mean it will always remain the same, as time progresses new versions will come out (IDE -> SATA) that bring improvements, most software will continue supporting both formats until pretty much everyone has caught up and the new standard takes over.
I can still plug an ancient 20MB IDE drive into a modern PC, and have it work.
Although microsoft's search engine didn't even exist in the days when altavista was popular, msn search is quite new... Infact, not so long ago yahoo was just a portal page and they used other people's search engines for actual searching.
And the fact that you have to waste effort avoiding the common bugs of IE is bad enough.
When bugs were found in firefox's rendering engine (see the slashdot formatting bug a while back) they got fixed, rather than the microsoft attitude of "so what, we wont fix it, let them break their site to work with our bugs"
It was a hypothetical situation pointing out a future possibility if continuing to use xp...
There will inevitably be a time when xp is no longer supported, and due to the activation requirements it will therefore become completely unuseable.
The other boxes are also mostly windows, usually older versions...
The fact that these systems haven't been updated, suggests that the people running them are not very vigilant, or even bothering to tend to the machines... A lot of them have probably been owned for years.
Something which ceases to be supported is *NOT* good enough...
In a few years, the current microsoft offerings will cease to be supported, it will not be possible to get new security patches for them, nor will it be possible to acquire new licenses for additional machines, and they may not even work on new machines. I worked at a company recently that had close to 300 NT4 systems, and 6 XP systems... the XP systems existed because several of the original NT4 workstations had suffered hardware failures, and they couldnt get NT4 to work on the replacement hardware.
Your typical office employee doesn't need to install programs, or worry how to install them etc...
Your typical office employee is given a computer and expected to get on with their job, while other members of staff are responsible for installing and maintaining it. I've given KDE and OSX systems to people to do office work on, and people have had little or no problems with them. In some instances they found them easier (programs are named more logically according to their function rather than their vendor) and in the few instances they had problems, it was only because it was *different* to what they were used to... Once it was pointed out that it was different, most people responded along the lines of "yes, that makes sense, i`m just so used to blah".. which shows they've gotten used to illogical and unintuitive ways of doing some things.
But if you need a better spreadsheet, then excel clearly isn't good enough... What makes you think that future versions will be? Perhaps your time would be better spent making a list of the features you need in a spreadsheet and submitting them to people who are developing spreadsheets... After all, most programmers are not financial analysts, and have very little idea of what features you need unless you tell them!
However you lose a lot of the flexibility offered by Gentoo...
You have to run the same debian testing system as everyone else, you can't mix and match... The poster you replied to talked about how he'd held off on the upgrade to gcc 4 and modular X... On debian, once packages start being compiled by other people for gcc4 you get dragged along.. Similarly, if one debian developer updates glibc, you have to aswell, otherwise you cant run the packages he's compiled. Gentoo lets you maintain whatever versions you want, and compile subsequent programs to work with them.
You also lose the flexibility offered by USE flags, whereby you can recompile packages with different settings, for instance the redhat rpms for the pine mail program require kerberos, so if i use pine on redhat i have to keep a full set of kerberos libraries installed, on gentoo i just turn kerberos support off and build pine without it. Debian being binary based has similar issues, the builder of the package chooses what build settings you get.
As for keeping the source libraries around, you don't have to on gentoo either, you can use binary packages (and thus lose the flexibility) or if you have multiple similar/identical systems you can build these packages on one of them and distribute them to all the others. On debian by contrast, if you need to install something which is not catered for by the package management system, you have a huge ballache trying to find and install all the -dev packages you actually need.
Because, while XP will continue working in it's current configuration on your current hardware... What are the chances that the hardware will break, or something else will occur to make it necessary to reinstall the OS. Imagine the following scenarios:
XP got corrupted, or your drive failed, forcing you to reinstall... However since XP is no longer supported Microsoft have turned off the activation servers so you cant make XP run for more than 2 weeks, when you call them up they just try and sell you vista.
A piece of hardware died, you couldn't find an exact replacement but you bought what was readily available, XP doesn't support it and the hardware vendor no longer makes drivers for XP.
The entire machine failed, you had to buy a new machine, but XP doesn't run on the new machine.
An exploit comes out for XP, microsoft refuse to patch it because it's unsupported, your machine gets owned.
In any of these scenarios, and more, your being pushed towards buying vista... With Linux, while some of the same issues may apply, the updates are free and can be incremental, ie you can install support for new hardware without updating the whole userland. As a worst case, you can install a new distro of linux, but keep your old one inside of a chroot so your apps are sitting in the environment they expect.
If he owns the computer store, why did he not stick to the existing POS system?
It worked, the staff already knew how to use it, any problems it had were known about by now, and it was already paid for.
Let's hope so...
iTunes works much better on Mac, and most people would be far better off running a Mac anyway.
So hardware lockin has been broken... Now users are waking up to the dangers of software lockin too... In a few more years the industry will finally be mature and we'l have choices and competition.
Cars, being mechanical devices with moving parts, will wear out...
Parts wear out, they go rusty, once they get to a certain point it stops being economical to keep repairing the car rather than buy a new one.
So there's no alternative to replacing your car every few years, and it obviously makes sense to buy a more modern one.
Software on the other hand, does not deteriorate... In 10 years time it will work just like it did today, so there's far less incentive to replace it.
Also, cars operate in much the same way, whereas software often changes radically, software users often feel compelled to stick with their current versions because new versions behave differently... The same happens with car drivers, but to a much lesser degree, for instance drivers often have their own preference on gearbox type (manual/auto), but there's little else that fundamentally changes the way you operate a car.
The concept of viruses being transmitted and auto executed on the victim computers is a microsoft innovation...
IE error messages are the worst of any browser i've ever used...
You get a large page of largely irrelevant small text, and then the actual error right at the bottom. Often the errors are far too vague or blatantly wrong... like the "cannot find server or dns error", which is it?
When it can't negotiate SSL (because your server only supports modern encryption like aes and ie doesnt) the error message is useless, and makes no mention of the fact it couldnt negotiate a supported cipher.
Also when your server requires digest auth, which ie6 still doesnt support, the error message is equally useless.
You can select and drag in certain applications, this moves the text rather than creating a copy of it, some applications on Linux do this too.
And sure, you can click multiple times for each piece of text you want to cut/paste, and linux incidentally lets you do this too, but windows has no equivalent to the simple select and 1 button paste that X11 has.
The windows methods are all more work, and linux supports the more cumbersome methods too.
I would keep a tarball of a default home directory for the public user stored somewhere, and when the user logs out, kill all his processes (even abckgrounded ones), erase his homedir and temporary areas (run the rm command under the public userid so it cant remove any root owned files from /tmp etc), and untar the tarball back to /home to give the public user a fresh default profile.
Unlike under windows 3.x, the public user won't have sufficient privileges to write files anywhere other than the above mentioned places, nor to overwrite system files so it's much faster to clean up and return to a default state without having to do a full reboot... This will result in much less waiting around when someone leaves and someone else takes their place.
Selling the same hardware with improved drivers as if it was new hardware?
This is FRAUD... You are advocating companies defrauding and ripping off their customer base, and promoting a method by which they can cover up their anti-consumer tactics.
As a consumer i want, even deserve to know when things like this are going on, and i will avoid doing business with companies which use such underhanded tactics to fool the consumer.
The point is that even the cheapest lowest end servers are more than sufficient for low end tasks...
So why not run multiple low-end tasks on a single server? It saves power, space, money etc. Unix systems have been running multiple services happily on a single box for years, but windows can often have problems when you do that, hence virtualization is popular (tho very much sub optimal since you have multiple kernels) for this purpose.
Where virtualization is popular on unix, is when several systems will be used by multiple customers, like virtual hosting... If you consider the cobalt raqs that were immensely popular a few years ago... Each customer had a physical machine, but 99% of these machines were idle. It makes a lot of sense to consolidate multiple customers on a single system, on the basis that they won't all be hammering the cpu at the same time.
I setup a similar system for a company a few years ago...
Runs samba and imap internally, and smtp externally, and acts as a nat gateway... This box was installed in 1998, and aside from power failures, has been running continuously since then.. I call them periodically to check up on it, but i've never had a call about any kind of problem with the server. I've logged in remotely a few times over the years and installed security updates to some of the network listening services, and watched the uptime roll over to 0 when it reaches 497 days due to linux representing the seconds of uptime with an integer that's too small.