My point was that though you can install software that is better suited to being a music player, most people can't or won't. The ipod works out of the box. PDA's do not work sufficiently well out of the box, for music playing.
The capacity you can get if you're willing to pay for it. What makes iPods so popular and pda's so niche is just that pda's basically suck at playing music. My sister got a windows mobile pda/smartphone because she wanted a phone that could play music, and well, out of the box it is AWFUL at playing music. Windows media player just plain sucked. It was difficult to get songs on there, and it was difficult to quickly compile a playlist of what you wanted to play. To me there is no comparison. The ipod is in a league of its own.
You're being judgemental without anything in the area of facts supporting you. The UN is not made up entirely, or even mostly, out of governments like North Korea or Iran. Most of them are democracies, with civil rights, and with respect for human rights (which right now is a tender subject when it comes to the US, given the denial of basic human rights to suspected "enemy combatants"). Additionally, it can be argued quite convincingly that the US is not the most democratic nation in the world (as measured by how representative the three branches of government are when it comes to the will of the people). So let's move past that.
Control over DNS in US hands is in my personal opinion not a good idea, because it restricts the DNS system to US laws, which are very onerous when it comes to IP. For example, if you happen to own a domain name that contains a word or term that some major corporation has trademarked, it is nearly a guarantee under the current system that you will lose that domain name if the major corporation realizes you own it. The current DNS system is very much pro-corporate america (for example,.com is heavily US centric in how it is managed and how domain disputes are resolved, with almost zero effective influence on.com management by non-US parties). Moving control over it to the UN could be a mechanism for making it fairer to non-US citizens.
In practice though, I have no idea what the real motivations are that the UN wants control over it. Nor do I have any idea what the real motivations are that the US doesn't want to relinquish control over it. But what I do find significant is the statement by the good senator: "we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on.". To me that sounds an awful lot like the whole motivation for this feud has to do with differing opinions on trademark law, and on a wider battlefield, differing opinions on IP law.
I find the US desire to control world-wide IP law very disturbing, since it seems to be very much the wrong type of policy that is proposed. I would rather see IP law controlled by the UN than by the US, since at the very least the UN has the interest of more than one nation at heart.
True free markets can't exist. Not for long anyway. In an unregulated market it is profitable to merge or acquire until only a few dominant players are left, and it is then profitable to abuse that newly gained position of power to keep new players out of the market. An unregulated market is a diseased/dying market.
Clearly there isn't a roadblock to those with drive.
No-one owes you anything. No-one should be forced to pay for you. Pay your own way. If you won't, then you bring misfortune upon yourself.
Ah, the old "poverty is a moral failing" excuse of the well to do not wishing to part with "their hard-earned dollars". Often mentioned by people who were either never truly poor, or who did work themselves up from nothing, but did it by pushing down others, not looking back with anything but malice.
For every person you show me who worked himself out of poverty through hard work I will show you five who worked just as hard and are still dirt poor. Just because something can be done doesn't mean everyone can do it, or that it should be done. Why should poverty mean you have to work twice as hard to get the same thing as someone born to more money?
Will you really truly claim that every american gets the same identical opportunity in life? That everyone can get the same results through the same amount of effort? If not, why do you think a system that is not like that is fair in any way?
Innovation doesn't stop because there is competition, it is accelerated by it. When you have many competing firms offering the same product, the only thing you can do to differentiate yourself is constantly innovate. What IP laws do is in essence allow innovators to be lazy, to innovate less. This leads to a decrease in productivity.
That's why most studies that look at patent law conclude it is either neutral or a net loss to society.
Besides, most of the IP-based industries grew out of disregarding IP law. The US publishing industry prospered very nicely from not recognizing copyright law. And hollywood prospered very nicely from not recognizing edison's motion picture patents.
Evolution is indeed a fact. It is observable that over many generations species will evolve. Grow a few batches of fruitflies if you are in doubt about this. What is questioned is the theory of natural selection that attempts to explain evolution and the origin of species. Please, never confuse the observable facts with the theories that explain them. That's part of why so much of the scientific debate these days sounds stupid.
I also have a personal beef with people who call intelligent design a theory deserving of equal merit as natural selection. Intelligent design pretty much requires a deity who does not obey the laws of physics, since if you have a non-deity designer you still have to explain the origin of that designer, which is where the deity comes in again. When your scientific explanation for the observable world involves declaring that you shouldn't bother with laws of physics, there is something inherently broken with your conjecture. That's just my two cents.
In my opinion, the only thing science classes really need is more teaching on scientific principles and logic. Just teaching facts doesn't cut it, as has been shown. You need to teach how science works, why it works, what constitutes a valid scientific theory, and how logic works in disproving theories (and especially how it is impossible to prove anything, which would shut up the "if they're so sure, why do they call it a theory?" crowd).
Logic, people. If you can't rely on it, why even bother?
Please, global warming is a fact, the man-made greenhouse effect is the theory that is being questioned. Please keep them separate. When you question global warming you have to back it up with proof that the temperature measurements from the past century are wrong.
Providing Word Processor using web browser is completely different thing - Web Browsers do not have word-processor editing capabilities. For example - AFAIK - the single edit control supported by browser can display text using only one font/font style. There are other problems - like existing text reformating and so on - for which I don't think it is good idea to use Web Browser for... until next DHTML spec is not designed for this purpose - then guess what - MS IE is not going to support it...
You should look at what flash 8 and java can do. It is very feasible to write a word processor in them. I just built a building floorplan viewer/editor in flash that provides identical rendering to the windows app that I was told to mimic, including all the text on the drawing. And that was only version 7 (version 8 added an advanced new text rendering engine). Also, mozilla and IE contain the ability to have editable html, which isn't perfect, but may be good enough. (See writely.com for an example of a practical app using this.)
It's definitely possible to write a cross-platform web-based word processor. What matters is if there is a business case in doing it.
the reliability and security issues for this would be a HUGE concern.
Would they really?
I have roughly one network failure a year from my broadband provider, restricting my internet access. I have roughly one local pc failure per year, restricting my ability to use local applications. Supposing I could switch to a low-failure-rate thin client, for me, the reliability is pretty much identical if we are assuming gmail-like uptime. In general, most people won't have that nice a level of network availability, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that for a lot of people availability would be "good enough".
For most users, the security argument seems moot as well. Currently you can't really argue desktop apps are in any way secure. Most users who would be prime targets for web apps I know have spyware on their computers. Their private data is ALREADY being sent across the internet to some malicious entity. If anything web apps have the potential to improve the situation, because you could have thin clients on the local end, making them much harder to compromise. I certainly don't see how they would worsen the situation as it exists today.
"We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue," he said. "We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only."
Translated from marketese this becomes:
"Someone is making money from music, and it's not us. We don't like it. We want that money."
So, what were they saying again, that they weren't greedy?
It sounds like with Windoze, any of their developers could just check in their code with little or no oversight.
On Linux, all code gets inspected by others before it is accepted.
So, what you're saying is that linux development works better because it is top down cathedral style, where microsoft's model fails because it is a chaotic bazaar style?
1. They can see "all" of the code if needed. They can see how it works together if they need to. I'm sure code inside of Microsoft is doled out to parts on a "need to know" basis. Or not doled out much at all.
I would be surprised if people who actually are employed by MS itself don't have access to all the code. They may not have check-in rights, but they should get viewing rights, because there is no credible (legal, management, or technical) reason to prohibit them from doing so.
2. There are a bunch of users running the code all the time as its being developed and feeding back info.
Do you believe there are more testers for the linux kernel than for the windows kernel? I sincerely doubt it. Most FOSS users use only the stable release of most software (they may run development releases for a select few programs), because running development versions of anything tends to leave you with a non-usable system.
(3. They use the code themselves and have a ethic working to make the best code they can for themselves, knowing it wont be used as a tool to extort money from people.)
Yes, and the windows developers don't use windows themselves. Ofcourse not. Why ever would they do that?
I would challenge you to find anything open source developers can do process-wise that is not feasible in private enterprise. I have yet to find something.
Yeah that's what I want, all my applications to be server side web-based. That way I can't stop them when they "call home" and report back things like what I'm searching for on the net, the names of the files I'm opening. And I can't stop them from a hacker switching out a DLL on the server side suddenly corrupting or infecting my data. AV and firewalls become useless at that point, and the way modern apps try agressively to monitor what you do and call home, I'm not comfortable with losing the ability to control them.
You have no control over software right now. Unless you build it from source yourself, and inspect the source, and are capable of editing it if you find something you don't like. If you're running a window system, it could call home until the cows come home, inform everyone of your every action, hold your documents hostage, have dll's swapped out from under you, and many other things. Moving to the web will DECREASE these risks, not increase them, because securing a desktop from malicious third parties is harder than securing a server from the same.
In any case, server-side will have backups of your work, so if it gets corrupted, there will be something to restore it from. If you install a new software patch on your home system, and it corrupts your files, and you were lazy with the backups, as most people are, your files are gone.
The control you think you have is an illusion. Backdoors have been built into widespread systems WITH source availability without being found out. You just don't know if you can trust your system.
Though I must admit, any web service that tries to keep me from getting to my own files, I will not use. In the end I trust nothing and no one, so diversification of where and how I keep my data is the key.
Software already follows a service model. Most software packages you pay a yearly use fee. The old version of a lot of apps becomes gradually useless over time. With apps like photoshop, not so much, but money management software gets outdated really fast.
Software is just better suited to be a service, since maintenance is the largest part of the cost, and maintenance is the very part that follows AFTER you make a sale. With services, maintenance is part of the service rental fee, making the business model saner, and less front-loaded.
I think most software is well suited for web conversion. Especially leveraging flash and java. You could write equivalents of microsoft word or adobe photoshop in flash or java, and except for printing get pretty much identical operation (and even printing wouldn't necessarily be that awful). Imagine a photoprint service online where you have a full blown photo editing app right in the webpage, so you can upload your pics, and remove red eyes, adjust contrast, retouch small areas, even draw little moustaches, and then have the pictures printed as professional-quality photographs and have them shipped to you.
Or imagine an online document editing service, with functional implementations of word, excel and powerpoint in flash or java, allowing you to upload your files, edit them, and redownload the edited versions. Imagine if you got this as a freebie with some ISP's. Or for a low fee. Most people would not bother with MS Office anymore. Especially since if something went wrong with their PC, all their documents would still be on the server, ready for editing, printing, whatever.
Imagine if your google account held all your office-type documents, including photographs, and provided editing apps for them from the webpage. Imagine it tied into gmail. Imagine these office style apps were no less capable than regular desktop apps. Do you think people would pay money for such a service? Do you think it would attract users?
I think it would be a smash hit, if done right. And believe me, with current technology you can do it right.
We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.
Harsh as this may sound, I am actually hoping this happens. It would have a number of very necessary consequences:
- the entire OSS community would learn to never ever rely on proprietary tech again, it would lead to a code purge in the major projects, where the line between open source and proprietary has been getting increasingly blurry (like the linux driver including proprietary firmware, or X relying on proprietary drivers for credible 3D use).
- with gnome dead everyone would standardize on KDE, which would be a dramatic advancement. Not that I have anything against gnome, KDE could die just as well, but regardless, either these guys work out a way to truly have their desktops interact, or one of them is going to have to die. The current situation leads to too many problems that the end user sees for a truly useful desktop product to ever result from it.
- the EU would likely go after MS again. This is always a good thing. No explanation necessary;)
Do you honestly believe had the effort that went into mono been put into the open source java implementations they would not have been just as good as mono?
I've had this thought the whole time mono has been in development. Why give the company most bent on your destruction leverage over you? Even if the leverage is not THAT much, it still makes zero sense.
Well, as the vast majority of OS installations in existance run as single-user installations, that doesn't sound like too much of an issue.
Maybe "single user" is the wrong term, maybe "horribly insecure" is better. Anything you run on beos has root level power. That's a lousy design, and apart from windows (in practical situations) all operating systems have long since abandoned it due to all the security problems it causes.
You equate Apple with Steve Jobs, but during most of Apple's history they have been two very distinct things. Remember that Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple for being too much like Steve Jobs back in the 80's.
In fact, Apple today is not really the Apple of the 90's anymore. They are NeXT with the Apple name. Apple paid NeXT to take over, and Steve Jobs came with the deal.
Had Apple been the market leader in the 90's, they would never have taken over NeXT, they would have had a generic corporate culture, and they would have been just as bad as MS.
What saved Apple was near-bankrupcy and a tiny market. They'd have never gone for NeXT if that wasn't the case.
The thing that I notice about Windows security in corporate environments is that even when it's so restrictive that using your computer becomes almost impossible, there are still ways around it.
It comes from the basic approach to security that is different in windows from pretty much any other system. Other systems assume the user has no administrative privileges, and require positive credentials to gain those privileges.
Windows assumes the user is also the administrator, and you must remove privileges from that administrator to make the user just a user. Because you strip away privileges (and often leave no mechanism in place to temporarily regain them) you both make the user less powerful than he should be, and more powerful than you want him to be (because you can be assured that some privilege was forgotten along the way and is still in there).
And please don't tell me how you can create regular users in windows too. They are mostly useless unless you spend a LOT of time tinkering, and the system is certainly not set up like that by default, so for most people it is wholly irrelevant.
My guess is they have done the same thing apple has been doing with quartz 2d extreme (shipping in tiger, but disabled by default), and put the entire graphics subsystem on the graphics hardware. This means that the graphics API's instead of rendering stuff in main memory and then sending it to the graphics card for compositing is rendering it straight in graphics memory, and keeping it there (for caching). Imagine if all the bitmaps, all the buttons, all the fonts, and so on all had to be kept in graphics memory. How much memory do you think you would need? Something on the order of 128 to 256MB?
Incidentally, Apple's Q2D extreme requires 64 MB of graphics ram for minimal operation, and becomes faster as you have more graphics ram.
However, for some people, size really doesn't matter that much. It's pretty much a fact that you can buy a heck of a lot more computer for the money if you don't mind it being the size of a breadbox rather than the size of a standard CD drive. And then there are some people who actually do like things like extra drive bays and PCI slots.
The size is indeed not that relevant. It could have been standard form factor and my purchasing decision to get one would not have been affected.
I disagree on the value of extensibility though. Apart from the graphics hardware I can't think of a thing I can't hook up to the firewire or usb slots that I might need at some point.
But, you forgot about the most important differentiator from cheap intel pc's. Noise. Or the lack thereof. Cheap wintel machines are noisy. The mini is quiet. It may not matter to you, but it matters a lot to me (my hearing is undamaged because I never listened to loud music).
I've owned several systems that gave me headaches after sitting behind them too long from the noise. The mini is so quiet I never turn it off, even though it is in my bedroom.
There can be credible (non-technical) reasons why you were better off using ASP instead of PHP or Perl, namely, the ease of hiring your replacement. If everything is built in ASP, then you can be replaced by hiring an ASP developer. If you add a PHP app into the bunch, your boss now has to find an ASP and PHP developer when you leave (or get fired). Add in python, ruby, language-whatever, and the requirements shoot up. Pretty soon you move beyond the ready stream of low level code monkeys, and need someone with an actual computer science degree (because they generally will be able to pick up any language fast enough), with the hiring cost that goes along with that.
Standardizing on a platform (even if it is a lousy platform) can save you money in the long haul.
But in terms of a fair evaluation and "no more mysteries", what they haven't covered is why transitions in the GUI are so much smoother than those achieved by Linux or Windows...
Arstechnica covered this. As I understand it, it's because the windowing system runs on the graphics hardware instead of on the CPU, allowing smooth window operations even when the CPU is heavily loaded.
I've read that due to the various strategies of producing more milk per cow a lot of the milk-producing cows have constant udder infections, and so through their blood stuff could end up in milk.
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My point was that though you can install software that is better suited to being a music player, most people can't or won't. The ipod works out of the box. PDA's do not work sufficiently well out of the box, for music playing.
The capacity you can get if you're willing to pay for it. What makes iPods so popular and pda's so niche is just that pda's basically suck at playing music. My sister got a windows mobile pda/smartphone because she wanted a phone that could play music, and well, out of the box it is AWFUL at playing music. Windows media player just plain sucked. It was difficult to get songs on there, and it was difficult to quickly compile a playlist of what you wanted to play. To me there is no comparison. The ipod is in a league of its own.
You're being judgemental without anything in the area of facts supporting you. The UN is not made up entirely, or even mostly, out of governments like North Korea or Iran. Most of them are democracies, with civil rights, and with respect for human rights (which right now is a tender subject when it comes to the US, given the denial of basic human rights to suspected "enemy combatants"). Additionally, it can be argued quite convincingly that the US is not the most democratic nation in the world (as measured by how representative the three branches of government are when it comes to the will of the people). So let's move past that.
.com is heavily US centric in how it is managed and how domain disputes are resolved, with almost zero effective influence on .com management by non-US parties). Moving control over it to the UN could be a mechanism for making it fairer to non-US citizens.
Control over DNS in US hands is in my personal opinion not a good idea, because it restricts the DNS system to US laws, which are very onerous when it comes to IP. For example, if you happen to own a domain name that contains a word or term that some major corporation has trademarked, it is nearly a guarantee under the current system that you will lose that domain name if the major corporation realizes you own it. The current DNS system is very much pro-corporate america (for example,
In practice though, I have no idea what the real motivations are that the UN wants control over it. Nor do I have any idea what the real motivations are that the US doesn't want to relinquish control over it. But what I do find significant is the statement by the good senator: "we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on.". To me that sounds an awful lot like the whole motivation for this feud has to do with differing opinions on trademark law, and on a wider battlefield, differing opinions on IP law.
I find the US desire to control world-wide IP law very disturbing, since it seems to be very much the wrong type of policy that is proposed. I would rather see IP law controlled by the UN than by the US, since at the very least the UN has the interest of more than one nation at heart.
True free markets can't exist. Not for long anyway. In an unregulated market it is profitable to merge or acquire until only a few dominant players are left, and it is then profitable to abuse that newly gained position of power to keep new players out of the market. An unregulated market is a diseased/dying market.
Clearly there isn't a roadblock to those with drive.
No-one owes you anything. No-one should be forced to pay for you. Pay your own way. If you won't, then you bring misfortune upon yourself.
Ah, the old "poverty is a moral failing" excuse of the well to do not wishing to part with "their hard-earned dollars". Often mentioned by people who were either never truly poor, or who did work themselves up from nothing, but did it by pushing down others, not looking back with anything but malice.
For every person you show me who worked himself out of poverty through hard work I will show you five who worked just as hard and are still dirt poor. Just because something can be done doesn't mean everyone can do it, or that it should be done. Why should poverty mean you have to work twice as hard to get the same thing as someone born to more money?
Will you really truly claim that every american gets the same identical opportunity in life? That everyone can get the same results through the same amount of effort? If not, why do you think a system that is not like that is fair in any way?
Innovation doesn't stop because there is competition, it is accelerated by it. When you have many competing firms offering the same product, the only thing you can do to differentiate yourself is constantly innovate. What IP laws do is in essence allow innovators to be lazy, to innovate less. This leads to a decrease in productivity.
That's why most studies that look at patent law conclude it is either neutral or a net loss to society.
Besides, most of the IP-based industries grew out of disregarding IP law. The US publishing industry prospered very nicely from not recognizing copyright law. And hollywood prospered very nicely from not recognizing edison's motion picture patents.
Evolution is indeed a fact. It is observable that over many generations species will evolve. Grow a few batches of fruitflies if you are in doubt about this. What is questioned is the theory of natural selection that attempts to explain evolution and the origin of species. Please, never confuse the observable facts with the theories that explain them. That's part of why so much of the scientific debate these days sounds stupid.
I also have a personal beef with people who call intelligent design a theory deserving of equal merit as natural selection. Intelligent design pretty much requires a deity who does not obey the laws of physics, since if you have a non-deity designer you still have to explain the origin of that designer, which is where the deity comes in again. When your scientific explanation for the observable world involves declaring that you shouldn't bother with laws of physics, there is something inherently broken with your conjecture. That's just my two cents.
In my opinion, the only thing science classes really need is more teaching on scientific principles and logic. Just teaching facts doesn't cut it, as has been shown. You need to teach how science works, why it works, what constitutes a valid scientific theory, and how logic works in disproving theories (and especially how it is impossible to prove anything, which would shut up the "if they're so sure, why do they call it a theory?" crowd).
Logic, people. If you can't rely on it, why even bother?
Please, global warming is a fact, the man-made greenhouse effect is the theory that is being questioned. Please keep them separate. When you question global warming you have to back it up with proof that the temperature measurements from the past century are wrong.
Providing Word Processor using web browser is completely different thing - Web Browsers do not have word-processor editing capabilities. For example - AFAIK - the single edit control supported by browser can display text using only one font/font style. There are other problems - like existing text reformating and so on - for which I don't think it is good idea to use Web Browser for... until next DHTML spec is not designed for this purpose - then guess what - MS IE is not going to support it...
You should look at what flash 8 and java can do. It is very feasible to write a word processor in them. I just built a building floorplan viewer/editor in flash that provides identical rendering to the windows app that I was told to mimic, including all the text on the drawing. And that was only version 7 (version 8 added an advanced new text rendering engine). Also, mozilla and IE contain the ability to have editable html, which isn't perfect, but may be good enough. (See writely.com for an example of a practical app using this.)
It's definitely possible to write a cross-platform web-based word processor. What matters is if there is a business case in doing it.
the reliability and security issues for this would be a HUGE concern.
Would they really?
I have roughly one network failure a year from my broadband provider, restricting my internet access. I have roughly one local pc failure per year, restricting my ability to use local applications. Supposing I could switch to a low-failure-rate thin client, for me, the reliability is pretty much identical if we are assuming gmail-like uptime. In general, most people won't have that nice a level of network availability, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that for a lot of people availability would be "good enough".
For most users, the security argument seems moot as well. Currently you can't really argue desktop apps are in any way secure. Most users who would be prime targets for web apps I know have spyware on their computers. Their private data is ALREADY being sent across the internet to some malicious entity. If anything web apps have the potential to improve the situation, because you could have thin clients on the local end, making them much harder to compromise. I certainly don't see how they would worsen the situation as it exists today.
"We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue," he said. "We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only."
Translated from marketese this becomes:
"Someone is making money from music, and it's not us. We don't like it. We want that money."
So, what were they saying again, that they weren't greedy?
It sounds like with Windoze, any of their developers could just check in their code with little or no oversight.
On Linux, all code gets inspected by others before it is accepted.
So, what you're saying is that linux development works better because it is top down cathedral style, where microsoft's model fails because it is a chaotic bazaar style?
1. They can see "all" of the code if needed. They can see how it works together if they need to. I'm sure code inside of Microsoft is doled out to parts on a "need to know" basis. Or not doled out much at all.
I would be surprised if people who actually are employed by MS itself don't have access to all the code. They may not have check-in rights, but they should get viewing rights, because there is no credible (legal, management, or technical) reason to prohibit them from doing so.
2. There are a bunch of users running the code all the time as its being developed and feeding back info.
Do you believe there are more testers for the linux kernel than for the windows kernel? I sincerely doubt it. Most FOSS users use only the stable release of most software (they may run development releases for a select few programs), because running development versions of anything tends to leave you with a non-usable system.
(3. They use the code themselves and have a ethic working to make the best code they can for themselves, knowing it wont be used as a tool to extort money from people.)
Yes, and the windows developers don't use windows themselves. Ofcourse not. Why ever would they do that?
I would challenge you to find anything open source developers can do process-wise that is not feasible in private enterprise. I have yet to find something.
Yeah that's what I want, all my applications to be server side web-based. That way I can't stop them when they "call home" and report back things like what I'm searching for on the net, the names of the files I'm opening. And I can't stop them from a hacker switching out a DLL on the server side suddenly corrupting or infecting my data. AV and firewalls become useless at that point, and the way modern apps try agressively to monitor what you do and call home, I'm not comfortable with losing the ability to control them.
You have no control over software right now. Unless you build it from source yourself, and inspect the source, and are capable of editing it if you find something you don't like. If you're running a window system, it could call home until the cows come home, inform everyone of your every action, hold your documents hostage, have dll's swapped out from under you, and many other things. Moving to the web will DECREASE these risks, not increase them, because securing a desktop from malicious third parties is harder than securing a server from the same.
In any case, server-side will have backups of your work, so if it gets corrupted, there will be something to restore it from. If you install a new software patch on your home system, and it corrupts your files, and you were lazy with the backups, as most people are, your files are gone.
The control you think you have is an illusion. Backdoors have been built into widespread systems WITH source availability without being found out. You just don't know if you can trust your system.
Though I must admit, any web service that tries to keep me from getting to my own files, I will not use. In the end I trust nothing and no one, so diversification of where and how I keep my data is the key.
Software already follows a service model. Most software packages you pay a yearly use fee. The old version of a lot of apps becomes gradually useless over time. With apps like photoshop, not so much, but money management software gets outdated really fast.
Software is just better suited to be a service, since maintenance is the largest part of the cost, and maintenance is the very part that follows AFTER you make a sale. With services, maintenance is part of the service rental fee, making the business model saner, and less front-loaded.
I think most software is well suited for web conversion. Especially leveraging flash and java. You could write equivalents of microsoft word or adobe photoshop in flash or java, and except for printing get pretty much identical operation (and even printing wouldn't necessarily be that awful). Imagine a photoprint service online where you have a full blown photo editing app right in the webpage, so you can upload your pics, and remove red eyes, adjust contrast, retouch small areas, even draw little moustaches, and then have the pictures printed as professional-quality photographs and have them shipped to you.
Or imagine an online document editing service, with functional implementations of word, excel and powerpoint in flash or java, allowing you to upload your files, edit them, and redownload the edited versions. Imagine if you got this as a freebie with some ISP's. Or for a low fee. Most people would not bother with MS Office anymore. Especially since if something went wrong with their PC, all their documents would still be on the server, ready for editing, printing, whatever.
Imagine if your google account held all your office-type documents, including photographs, and provided editing apps for them from the webpage. Imagine it tied into gmail. Imagine these office style apps were no less capable than regular desktop apps. Do you think people would pay money for such a service? Do you think it would attract users?
I think it would be a smash hit, if done right. And believe me, with current technology you can do it right.
We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.
;)
Harsh as this may sound, I am actually hoping this happens. It would have a number of very necessary consequences:
- the entire OSS community would learn to never ever rely on proprietary tech again, it would lead to a code purge in the major projects, where the line between open source and proprietary has been getting increasingly blurry (like the linux driver including proprietary firmware, or X relying on proprietary drivers for credible 3D use).
- with gnome dead everyone would standardize on KDE, which would be a dramatic advancement. Not that I have anything against gnome, KDE could die just as well, but regardless, either these guys work out a way to truly have their desktops interact, or one of them is going to have to die. The current situation leads to too many problems that the end user sees for a truly useful desktop product to ever result from it.
- the EU would likely go after MS again. This is always a good thing. No explanation necessary
Do you honestly believe had the effort that went into mono been put into the open source java implementations they would not have been just as good as mono?
I've had this thought the whole time mono has been in development. Why give the company most bent on your destruction leverage over you? Even if the leverage is not THAT much, it still makes zero sense.
Well, as the vast majority of OS installations in existance run as single-user installations, that doesn't sound like too much of an issue.
Maybe "single user" is the wrong term, maybe "horribly insecure" is better. Anything you run on beos has root level power. That's a lousy design, and apart from windows (in practical situations) all operating systems have long since abandoned it due to all the security problems it causes.
You equate Apple with Steve Jobs, but during most of Apple's history they have been two very distinct things. Remember that Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple for being too much like Steve Jobs back in the 80's.
In fact, Apple today is not really the Apple of the 90's anymore. They are NeXT with the Apple name. Apple paid NeXT to take over, and Steve Jobs came with the deal.
Had Apple been the market leader in the 90's, they would never have taken over NeXT, they would have had a generic corporate culture, and they would have been just as bad as MS.
What saved Apple was near-bankrupcy and a tiny market. They'd have never gone for NeXT if that wasn't the case.
The thing that I notice about Windows security in corporate environments is that even when it's so restrictive that using your computer becomes almost impossible, there are still ways around it.
It comes from the basic approach to security that is different in windows from pretty much any other system. Other systems assume the user has no administrative privileges, and require positive credentials to gain those privileges.
Windows assumes the user is also the administrator, and you must remove privileges from that administrator to make the user just a user. Because you strip away privileges (and often leave no mechanism in place to temporarily regain them) you both make the user less powerful than he should be, and more powerful than you want him to be (because you can be assured that some privilege was forgotten along the way and is still in there).
And please don't tell me how you can create regular users in windows too. They are mostly useless unless you spend a LOT of time tinkering, and the system is certainly not set up like that by default, so for most people it is wholly irrelevant.
My guess is they have done the same thing apple has been doing with quartz 2d extreme (shipping in tiger, but disabled by default), and put the entire graphics subsystem on the graphics hardware. This means that the graphics API's instead of rendering stuff in main memory and then sending it to the graphics card for compositing is rendering it straight in graphics memory, and keeping it there (for caching). Imagine if all the bitmaps, all the buttons, all the fonts, and so on all had to be kept in graphics memory. How much memory do you think you would need? Something on the order of 128 to 256MB?
Incidentally, Apple's Q2D extreme requires 64 MB of graphics ram for minimal operation, and becomes faster as you have more graphics ram.
However, for some people, size really doesn't matter that much. It's pretty much a fact that you can buy a heck of a lot more computer for the money if you don't mind it being the size of a breadbox rather than the size of a standard CD drive. And then there are some people who actually do like things like extra drive bays and PCI slots.
The size is indeed not that relevant. It could have been standard form factor and my purchasing decision to get one would not have been affected.
I disagree on the value of extensibility though. Apart from the graphics hardware I can't think of a thing I can't hook up to the firewire or usb slots that I might need at some point.
But, you forgot about the most important differentiator from cheap intel pc's. Noise. Or the lack thereof. Cheap wintel machines are noisy. The mini is quiet. It may not matter to you, but it matters a lot to me (my hearing is undamaged because I never listened to loud music).
I've owned several systems that gave me headaches after sitting behind them too long from the noise. The mini is so quiet I never turn it off, even though it is in my bedroom.
There can be credible (non-technical) reasons why you were better off using ASP instead of PHP or Perl, namely, the ease of hiring your replacement. If everything is built in ASP, then you can be replaced by hiring an ASP developer. If you add a PHP app into the bunch, your boss now has to find an ASP and PHP developer when you leave (or get fired). Add in python, ruby, language-whatever, and the requirements shoot up. Pretty soon you move beyond the ready stream of low level code monkeys, and need someone with an actual computer science degree (because they generally will be able to pick up any language fast enough), with the hiring cost that goes along with that.
Standardizing on a platform (even if it is a lousy platform) can save you money in the long haul.
But in terms of a fair evaluation and "no more mysteries", what they haven't covered is why transitions in the GUI are so much smoother than those achieved by Linux or Windows...
Arstechnica covered this. As I understand it, it's because the windowing system runs on the graphics hardware instead of on the CPU, allowing smooth window operations even when the CPU is heavily loaded.
I've read that due to the various strategies of producing more milk per cow a lot of the milk-producing cows have constant udder infections, and so through their blood stuff could end up in milk.
How's that for a gross thought of the day?
I still drink cow milk though. It's yummy.