They took an existing network stack, existing hardware, interfaced it to some of the best known hardware on the planet, wrote a few non-compliant software stacks, and took some picture. Wow, I'm impressed. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
It is very simplistic to suggest as you do that addicted people have a choice. Because not having a choice is exactly what defines "addiction" as opposed to "liking" or "spending too much time doing". If you can choose then you are not addicted.
If Lindows releases its code right now, it will be quickly assimilated by hordes of spare-time coders who will create a huge array of fragmented and sort-of working Lindows replacements, and the company will die because of the perceived availability of "free" alternatives.
Then after the company dies, it will turn out that none of the independant coders feels like doing the integration job, their little projects will fall into disuse, and we will be left with a patchwork of sort-of working half-solutions that only geeks can use.
This review really drives home the problem with "ease of use": easy is what you're used to.
Lycoris looks almost exactly like Windows. That makes it easy. But it's a dangerous road to take.
Especially with Microsoft's recent efforts to make the Windows interface look more distinguished, it's not inconceivable that Microsoft will at some point start suing companies like Lycoris for trade dress violation.
It would be the ultimate irony for sure considering that Microsoft was itself the target of a look and feel lawsuit brought on it by Apple in the 80's. Sure, that suit was rightly dismissed. But of course back then, we didn't have things like the DMCA.
Microsoft doesn't just dominate technology in the narrow sense. They dominate a culture. It might be as dangerous to rely on Microsoft culture as to rely on Microsoft technology.
Kill it. Java is one of the worst ideas ever to hit the market and succeed. Let me tell you that I used to be a staunch Java supporter. I acquainted myself with all the toolkits and conventions. I ported my AWT app to Swing when it finally became apparent that the AWT abstraction just crumbles to dust as soon as you start writing programs that work with the rest of the system, rather than around it. I dutifully followed the path from interpreted to JIT to HotSpot and patiently waited for the promise of "faster-than-C" performance to materialize, only to discover that as inner loops became faster, the startup time became slower and the memory use ballooned. I tried to forget about memory management only to discover memory leaks in Swing.
It all just doesn't work. Java has its place, but that place grows smaller and smaller every day. In many ways Java is the Basic of the nineties -- including the way in which it fosters questionable programming practices such as sloppy editing (after all, the syntax should prevent slop) and shotgun debugging (after all, the toolkits should shield you from having to know what is going on). Meanwhile it does all this without offering any of the benefits of languages such as Python or LISP or even LOGO.
Java truly should be considered the worst of both worlds. Even though ironically that makes it a perfect fit for some of the most constricted, toy-problem, "the-customer-is-always-wrong" jobs.
that's what we (or at least I) have been led to believe would happen
Surely "wishful thinking" and "led to believe" are not so far apart that you have to drag out Ayn Rand?
where there is an overabundance of supply relative to demand, that price would drop.
But where is the incentive to supply? Your cables make much more money relaying international phonecalls than an unmetered sea of bits.
Switches and routers get faster and better all the time.
And more expensive. The cost of lighting a strand of fiber is much higher than the cost of actually laying that particular strand of fiber. In addition the rapid technological progress means that your very expensive hardware amortizes very quickly.
There's always competition -- even besides phone co, cable co, and satellite, wireless and powerline were supposedly coming down the pike any day now.
All of these make more money relaying phonecalls and football matches and electricity than unmetered bits. And ultimately you will have to hook up to the backbone. There are not a lot of ways in which you can do that, and none of them are cheap, so that will fix the price regardless of technology. Also tech like sattelite and powerline are rather iffy.
And maybe you've got the economy of scale working on the side of Joe Consumer, as business, government and education demand more and more bandwidth
If demand for bandwidth is so great, then why should providers lower prices?
Wait, don't tell me, you've been reading The Fountainhead. Please, do go on.
I'm just going to ignore you and repeat the question, ok? Why should bandwidth be getting cheaper?
Whatever.
It never was the way you describe it. Or envision it. Or, indeed, whatever.
You'd be a fool and a communist to think otherwise, now, wouldn't you?
Metered access or micropayments are the only sensible schemes from a commercial POV. Either the Internet will be restructured to allow for this, or it will be slowly supplanted by a network that does. In the latter case "the Internet" will become either a poor mans network that is spammed to death or disappear completely. You can already see this happening in the mobile market with tech such as GSM and i-mode. The game is over. We lost. My advice to you: take the money and run.
In what other "utility" service is my bill determined by the behavior of other people?
Damn near everywhere. Example: electricity, California.
What is it with you nerd people? You seem to cling to some sort of Star Trek fantasy of progress where money plays no role and mankind must inevitably conquer the stars. Wake up. It may never bloody happen.
I always thought the idea was that bandwidth would get *cheaper*, not more expensive.
Where did you get this idea? The price of bandwidth is determined by what the market will bear. Not by wishful thinking.
The pipes are only getting fatter all around
Bullshit.
It's the outbound bandwidth that costs us real money.
[...] The best part of the net is the free exchange of information... one person can set up a homepage and reach a practically unlimited audience.
How is that possible when outbound traffic is what "costs real money"? How is this hypothetical "one person" going to get the data to the "practically unlimited audience"?
What'll you say when downloading from Time-Warner websites is unlimited, but everything else is metered? Where does that lead us?
No, you are thinking of MODULE_LICENSE_GPL. EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is about making it hard for binary driver writers to write drivers (because it took Alan so much time to write his 15 lines of code). Read the fucking thread instead of smiling wanly, man.
For an honest, workaday pimp such as myself, these things are a godsend! No more worrying about which whore is who, no more worrying about which whore is where. I will have all of my whores implanted with one of these! Thank you, Slashdot, for providing the business insight that's needed to stay ahead in this hyper competitive and increasingly globalized post 9/11 world!
You have been experiencing problems because Slashdot is run by a bunch of perverts that like to "plug in" by sticking CAT5 up their asses. You may experience brief intermittent service interruptions as a result of this. Thank you for your consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah. So I missed that. My apologies.
They took an existing network stack, existing hardware, interfaced it to some of the best known hardware on the planet, wrote a few non-compliant software stacks, and took some picture. Wow, I'm impressed. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
It is very simplistic to suggest as you do that addicted people have a choice. Because not having a choice is exactly what defines "addiction" as opposed to "liking" or "spending too much time doing". If you can choose then you are not addicted.
Then after the company dies, it will turn out that none of the independant coders feels like doing the integration job, their little projects will fall into disuse, and we will be left with a patchwork of sort-of working half-solutions that only geeks can use.
The GPL needs a grace period.
Lycoris looks almost exactly like Windows. That makes it easy. But it's a dangerous road to take.
Especially with Microsoft's recent efforts to make the Windows interface look more distinguished, it's not inconceivable that Microsoft will at some point start suing companies like Lycoris for trade dress violation.
It would be the ultimate irony for sure considering that Microsoft was itself the target of a look and feel lawsuit brought on it by Apple in the 80's. Sure, that suit was rightly dismissed. But of course back then, we didn't have things like the DMCA.
Microsoft doesn't just dominate technology in the narrow sense. They dominate a culture. It might be as dangerous to rely on Microsoft culture as to rely on Microsoft technology.
It all just doesn't work. Java has its place, but that place grows smaller and smaller every day. In many ways Java is the Basic of the nineties -- including the way in which it fosters questionable programming practices such as sloppy editing (after all, the syntax should prevent slop) and shotgun debugging (after all, the toolkits should shield you from having to know what is going on). Meanwhile it does all this without offering any of the benefits of languages such as Python or LISP or even LOGO.
Java truly should be considered the worst of both worlds. Even though ironically that makes it a perfect fit for some of the most constricted, toy-problem, "the-customer-is-always-wrong" jobs.
Contrary to popular opinion, "penis" is actually not that horrible. Just not worth a lot of money.
Surely "wishful thinking" and "led to believe" are not so far apart that you have to drag out Ayn Rand?
where there is an overabundance of supply relative to demand, that price would drop.
But where is the incentive to supply? Your cables make much more money relaying international phonecalls than an unmetered sea of bits.
Switches and routers get faster and better all the time.
And more expensive. The cost of lighting a strand of fiber is much higher than the cost of actually laying that particular strand of fiber. In addition the rapid technological progress means that your very expensive hardware amortizes very quickly.
There's always competition -- even besides phone co, cable co, and satellite, wireless and powerline were supposedly coming down the pike any day now.
All of these make more money relaying phonecalls and football matches and electricity than unmetered bits. And ultimately you will have to hook up to the backbone. There are not a lot of ways in which you can do that, and none of them are cheap, so that will fix the price regardless of technology. Also tech like sattelite and powerline are rather iffy.
And maybe you've got the economy of scale working on the side of Joe Consumer, as business, government and education demand more and more bandwidth
If demand for bandwidth is so great, then why should providers lower prices?
What's happening with GSM and i-mode?
Metered access, invoice billing, dumb terminals, differentiated services.
The Internet is the only place where people propose stepping into more shit as the solution to stepping into shit.
I'm just going to ignore you and repeat the question, ok? Why should bandwidth be getting cheaper?
Whatever.
It never was the way you describe it. Or envision it. Or, indeed, whatever.
You'd be a fool and a communist to think otherwise, now, wouldn't you?
Metered access or micropayments are the only sensible schemes from a commercial POV. Either the Internet will be restructured to allow for this, or it will be slowly supplanted by a network that does. In the latter case "the Internet" will become either a poor mans network that is spammed to death or disappear completely. You can already see this happening in the mobile market with tech such as GSM and i-mode. The game is over. We lost. My advice to you: take the money and run.
What is it with you nerd people? You seem to cling to some sort of Star Trek fantasy of progress where money plays no role and mankind must inevitably conquer the stars. Wake up. It may never bloody happen.
Where did you get this idea? The price of bandwidth is determined by what the market will bear. Not by wishful thinking.
The pipes are only getting fatter all around
Bullshit.
It's the outbound bandwidth that costs us real money. [...] The best part of the net is the free exchange of information... one person can set up a homepage and reach a practically unlimited audience.
How is that possible when outbound traffic is what "costs real money"? How is this hypothetical "one person" going to get the data to the "practically unlimited audience"?
What'll you say when downloading from Time-Warner websites is unlimited, but everything else is metered? Where does that lead us?
Good grief! Imagine paying for service!
What a surprise. They invented loserly cubicle monkey software. Woop tee fucking doo.
No, you are thinking of MODULE_LICENSE_GPL. EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is about making it hard for binary driver writers to write drivers (because it took Alan so much time to write his 15 lines of code). Read the fucking thread instead of smiling wanly, man.
This is a lot like the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL travesty currently taking place on lkml.
For an honest, workaday pimp such as myself, these things are a godsend! No more worrying about which whore is who, no more worrying about which whore is where. I will have all of my whores implanted with one of these! Thank you, Slashdot, for providing the business insight that's needed to stay ahead in this hyper competitive and increasingly globalized post 9/11 world!
Indeed. The benefits of rectal penetration cannot be overstated.
You have been experiencing problems because Slashdot is run by a bunch of perverts that like to "plug in" by sticking CAT5 up their asses. You may experience brief intermittent service interruptions as a result of this. Thank you for your consideration.
Are you a cheap whore? Consider applying. Good benefits. Great pimp.
Cheap whores for dumb geeks. Now with cunt chip. Push button to apply.
Yeah! Just like black market videotapes will break yer VCR! Watchout kids! Certified whores only.
Great idea! Only you don't understand what a watermark is at all. That, and you suck. Thank you.
Little bit of freedom, little bit of safety.
Fuck Bob.
Now, we get links to the arts farty fuckers at Salon.
Oh dear Slashdot of yore, where did you go?!?