Since when did ActiveX work under Linux and Mac? The fonts are unreadably small under Firfox even under MS Windows, and some of the tables on the left are garbaled. I don't understand how someone can not even make a simple HTML document and check it in two browsers. It takes all of 3 seconds to fire up Firefox and see if it works. Oh, and if someone is thinking of puting ActiveX on their site, just don't. There is no need for that single platform crap. Use Macromedia Flash(tm) if you have the urge to put something "exciting" on the page.
No, on PCs software is the Achilles heel. I support a network with many PCs (60 Mac, 40 PC) and have supported PCs since Win 3.1. I don't think any slashdotters will disagree with me that Windows is a pain in the ass. Spyware, viruses, registry corruption, security issues, truckloads of patches, Microsoft tax, privacy issues, lack of choice (Microsoft lock-ins destroy any real choice on Wintel).
Wow, 100 whole computers! I work at a fortune 500 with 140,000 employees. There is a huge difference. How is there any _less_ lock-in with Mac? Where can I go to buy Macs and actually get competition on the price? You cannot.
Linux, lack of commercial desktop apps, still a very get-under-the-hood OS (compile source, chase kernels, edit config stuff), lack of standardized interface, millionbillion distributions, linux techies few, far-between, and expensive, SCO uncertainty (I hate SCO, but what if they win?), ultimately still hard to use and who wants to rtfm everytime they want to do something that should take two clicks to configure.
Mac lacs commercial server apps. Can I run Oracle, DB2, Peple Soft, Bea Web Logic or tons of other enterprise apps on Mac? No. I can run those on Linux. When It comes to a server, Linux is much better then Mac with 25% plus of the server market and far more commercial support. When it comes to the desktop, MS Windows is far better then Mac in regards to commercial support for software. Your obviously a little Mac fanboy and you let it cloud your judgment and argument.
runs on amazingly cool and cutting-edge hardware (Xserve, PowerBook, G5, nuff said).
Umm, yeah. That is real important to large enterprises. I will go to the CEO of the company I work for. He is responsible for several billion in sales every year. I will tell him that Macs are kool and 3133t and they are "cutting-edge" and he will jump right on them. It doesn't matter that we have no choice or competiton from the hardware _and_ software vendor. It also doesn't matter that they cost much more. Hey they are a better "value" according to Mac fanboys. Where can I get 4, 6 or 8 way boxes from Appple? That's right, they don't have them. Oh, well, I guess we can just stop doing business on our large hardware because some Mac fanboy says "Mac OS X is the best".
Those black squares are actually MS Windows Media players. The site tries to loaded DRM ActiveX crap, if you let it load, they you can click play on the little MS "media" players button to hear some dude talk
What a crappy site. It doesn't render properly with Mozilla/Firefox and as soon I went to the page, I was hit with a bunch of ActiveX controls trying to run. No thanks. Maybe if they want to try to interest other developers in MS, they should NOT REQUIRE MS stuff. The main page has more then 300 HTML errors according to W3C. Come on now. It is not hard to make a little HTML, honest! There is no coding involved. Oh, and this site is.Net. You can see what great standards compliant HTML MS's Web Forms spit out.
No, Apple has 31 percent of the portable player market by number of units sold. They have 51% of the market by revenue because their units cost more. 31% of the market was willing to buy an iPod while 69% of the market did not want an iPod for whatever reason.
Apple won't support WMA because they want AAC to be the standard, so they can charge a royalty to everyone who encodes with it.
Umm, Apple didn't make AAC, it is a standard from the MPEG standards group and Apple cannot charge a royalty for it. Apple also does not own the DRM FairPlay either, they licensed it from Veridisc. Read this post and be enlightened
They [Apple] worked out a lot of rights for their customers.
No offense buddy, but it sounds like you have been brain-washed by the corporates. Apple didn't "work out" any rights for us. Those rights have been there from the beginning thanks to Fair Use. Apple was able to negotiate for less restrictive rights then what the media companies would want, so I will give Apple credit for that. However, thinking that Apple has "given" us any rights is just stupid, when Apple is responsible for stripping away our fair use rights that we have already had with their DRM. DRM should not be tolerated since it requires someone to give up their rights. I personally don't understand how someone could not care about their personal rights. If you give companies an inch now, they will take a mile tomorrow. By giving in to _any_ DRM now, consumers will continue to see companies push the envelope of stripping rights to maximize profits. The only solution is to NOT USE PRODUCTS WITH DRM. The corporations cannot force DRM. It will be "accepted" by consumers like you over time while becoming more and more restrictive.
Do you think the people are Netflix are really that dumb? The US Postal Service has insured mail. Netflix just insures that DVD that they paid $5 for at $10 and if it gets lost or stolen, Netflix profits! I am not sure how the USPO handles large scale mail order business, though I doubt the USPO would have Netflix (or any other mail order company) eat those costs, it probably just comes out of our taxes : )
Well IExplorer.exe is really just a front-end to the real HTML rendering libs/DLL's. Those libs are used by a lot of other MS windows stuff and are almost certainly loaded at startup. explorer.exe which is your shell, uses them and that always is started up since it handles your shell. This helps in the initial startup of IE. Usually DLL's are cached, so if I start Firefox for the first time, it may take 2-3 seconds to start. However any subsequent starts are only about a second or so.
Some people at MS are very skilled.
Of course. There are skilled developers all over the world and they are not limited to MS only. Though with MS having all that cash, they should be able to lure in some good developers.
It would be nice if more open source apps can be optimized more.
Are you trolling? What applications do you have in mind? There are poor OSS apps just as there are poor proprietary apps, including many from MS (IE, OE, etc) There are tons of OSS apps that are top notch. Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and tons more. All of these apps are very fast, well written and stable.
IBM has been doing a turn-around for some time now. And while they are not perfect, they are far more ethical then MS and have made substantial contributions to OSS. MS _could_ be the big buddy of OSS. However, it will take time and a much bigger effort then one small, unimportant contribution to OSS. In fact, if MS does go down that road, you will see the number of flames go down and the number of praises go up. Though from what I have seen from MS, I do not see any of that happening. Of course, my opinion of MS could change for the better or worse all depending on their actions. Very recently they attacked Linux with by supporting SCO. This little CPL application is not going to make up for that attack against Linux and OSS.
No you cannot. Even MS said this in court. IEXPLORE.EXE is ONLY a front-end to the real IE rendering engine, DLL's etc. MS Windows will die without the real IE functionality because MS embedded it all through out the OS. Those "IE removers" just work around the windows file protection and remove the front-end only. IE is still on your system.
You seem to just be trolling for MS. However, I will feed you. MS has a monopoly, I don't think anyone will deny that. MS also illegally uses that monopoly of their OS to help out their other products. For example, in the recent MS Windows source code leak, there were many places in the OS code that had tweaks and fixes for the non-OS code. That is why IE and MS Office can start up faster then the competition. That is how they can give speed and feature advantages etc to their products. Can Mozilla, IBM DB2, Oracle, Real, QuickTime, Open Office, Photoshop and thousand of other commercial applications get those same fixes, tweaks and workarounds? No. Can any of those other applications send in patches to MS and get better support, spead-ups and tweaks for thier applications? No. This is MS leveraging their OS monopoly to give their own products and unfair advantage and it is illegal. IE and outlook express are both one big security hole, yet these two applications are used by tons of users because these users either don't know about alternative or don't know how to get and install those alternatives, not because IE and OE are superior as an application.
There is also the "embracing and extending" of HTML that MS did with IE to force users into using IE. Their tools and products all spit out IE specific stuff or require IE. I noticed you said you use firebird? Why? Isn't IE such a great, secure browser? What do you do for sites that "require" IE because of non-standard "embrace and extend" HTML extensions from MS? Do you switch to IE? That is not an option for non-MS Windows users. IE on Mac sucks and has not be update for ages. IE is not available under Linux. These are just a few of the tie-in tactics of MS.
For example, you're the developer of BonchBrowser. BonOffice is smaller (only 500 KB!), faster (renders 10 MB HTML in 2 seconds), uses much less memory than IE (1 MB only), is 100% standards compliant, has popup and ad blocking, is secure, etc. etc. Can you get more than, say, 40% of the browser market share? I don't think so! IE is already installed on all Windows computers, people will not switch to BonchBrowser even if it really is better than IE. As competitor you simply has no chance to beat them no matter what you do, simply because MS has a monopoly.
There is even a _more_ important point you missed and many people do not even thing about that is touched upon in this/. post. By MS having control over the OS, they can custom build that OS to give an advantage to thier applications. Is there a bug in MS Office or IE, just change the OS code to fix it. Whant IE to be faster then the competition, load all the required libraries at startup, etc. The leaked MS Windows source code had many comments on fixes and work arounds for MS products. Now imagine if Netscape, Quicktime, DB2, Oracle, Open Office, and tons of other applications and software companies had that advantage. Imagine if they all could just call MS and get a fix for their product added to the MS OS, or even better, be able to submit patches to MS for fixes and improvement for their products.
What's the difference between IE's integration into the Windows shell and Konquerer's integration into KDE?
You can _really_ remove Konquerer, unlike IE. Konquerer didn't "embrace and extend" HTML to get their browser to be used more.
I run Windows XP at work yet--gasp--choose to run Firefox. Believe it or not, Microsoft isn't holding a gun to my head
No, MS is not holding a gun to your head. However, MS encourages non-standard, IE specific HTML (document.all, etc) to force end-users to only use IE. Even MS's tools spit out this kind of HTML and many of their products put out IE only HTML. I have been to plenty of sites that use IE only HTML such as document.all and it will not function in non-IE browsers. Konquerer and all the other OSS browser do not do this, and where there are extensions such as for Mozilla, they are completely _open_ and available to all.
The threee major Linux distros use RPM. End of story. The second larget is Debian and apt. Everything elese is just a niche group doing things their own way. You can distribute an RPM and have it run on all three Linux distros. You can even do what Mozilla, OOo and others do. A plain ole tarball that extract to a directory with the application and you run it. I seen a lot of software under MS windows that uses different methonds such as a zip file, a batch script, a Java installer, and others. The majority of application under MS Windows uses standard.exe setups or.msi installers, just like most binary packages are either RPM or.debs under Linux. The _most_ standard way to distribute software under Linux is of cousre a source tarball and install it with:
The _big_ difference is that you can take GNUPG and fork it to include your changes. You cannot do that with proprietary software, you don't even have the opportunity to look at the code and fix it. I would assume that the version of GNUPG that you use includes your fixes? If so, that again is another benefit of OSS. The right given to the end user to make those changes. I do agree, that some OSS projects are lead/maintained by ninnies, just fork the code and put it on sourceforge with your new changes. If more people start to use your version of the other version of GNUPG, it may wake up the developers and if not, you are not the leader of a popular OSS project. Look at XFree, it was getting stagnant, and it took some shaking up to get things moving. OSS is not a magic solution, you can still have problems, rememer, garbage in, garbage out.
It sounds as if you are suggesting that everyone just forget about the tons of unethical and underhanded tactics from MS? At the end of the day MS is still MS and they care about control and the bottom line, in that order.
MS first tried their "shared" source initiative, and it was basically a flop because of the very restrictive license which basically only allowed you to look at the code. Now they are taking another shot with a real Open Source license, though as I suspected, they are releasing a low profile, and uninteresting project. There are tons of installers for MS windows already, including freeware, Open Source and commercial. To me this suggest that MS is only doing another PR stunt. They are not taking OSS seriously, and have this little project there to say, "look, we do open source as well". The "leaders" at MS have _always_ stressed their position on "IP", and MS will not give anything away or share it with _any_ community.
If MS wanted to show people that they were serious about OSS and wanted to actually try to build a community of loyal developers like with OSS, they would release something more significant, yet not one of their big "IP" projects. For example, why not release windows explorer (not IE)? That code _needs_ some serious fixing. When you are trying to user explorer.exe as a file manager, it constantly locks files and directories and makes it a pain to use. The only "fix" is to either log out or run taskmgr and kill and restart explorer.exe. The problem with that is that your shell is restarted and you often lose many of your notification area icons.
MS has the potential to drastically change their public appearance and even possibly build a community of loyal developers working in their own free time similar to OSS. However, to achieve that, MS will need to give something as a good faith token gesture to the community and not keep their hands on it. This is where MS will fail based on what they have shown us in the past. MS has tons of smaller applications that they do not sell that they could release and have people work on these applications in an _open_ fashion without MS trying to keep their controlling hand on the project. How about notepad, wordpad, HyperTerminal, ms paint, cmd.exe, backup, sound recorder, volume control, windows movie maker, calculator, freecell, Hearts, Pinball, Solitaire, etc. All of these apps MS could release and allow the community to develop further. MS would still include them into their release by grabbing the latest stable build and putting that through testing.
You're living in denial. The average home user asks their teenage son/daughter to get the software for the new computer. You're off your rocker if you think most people are legit.
So do you steal software? Have you stolen software for your parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers, etc? Every one of my extended family members that I can think of have a home computer. They all got the software with their purchase of that home computer. Extra software is purchased. I honestly could never see my aunts, uncles, sister or parents asking to get them stolen software.
Damn, dude. Who are you talking to? I didn't say anything about Apple's market share. That "5%" figure is yours, not mine. Apple Zealot? My desktop has been Linux since 1992.
Sorry about that. I was assuming you were an Apple zealot, and I continually hear them claim Apple has this 5% market share. Linux has been past that 1% desktop share (that even you as a Linux user claims) for some time now. MS has only 50% of the server market and Linux has grown fast to 25% of the server market, not very far behind, and if the Linux trend continues, it can pass MS on the server in a few years. Yes, the desktop is another battle, though 2%-3% now is not bad and can only get better, especially with advancements in the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, and Longhorn being a good 3 years away.
Gnome has a little applet called acme that will let you press a key on your keyboard and have it run any program. You can find it here. It may also be installed already.
Hmm, your personal comments are not trolling but mine are?
I would rather buy a $1000 Mac than get a $1000 PC for free, because I don't need the headaches that the PC clone architecture and Windows and Linux OSes bring to the equation.
And just what headaches are they? Most of the world's IT is ran on PC's. 98% or more of the worlds desktops run on PC's. Just what are all these headaches? Unreliable hardware? Oh come on now. Apple uses the same standard hardware, IDE, memory, video cards, etc. I guess if you take a hard drive from a PC and stick it into a Mac it magically becomes more stable? Please.
ZeroInstall sounds like Mac OS X's (and NeXT's) application bundles
Mac OS X's bundles are not very well done. The permissions on the files are very open and create too much of a security risk.
(Now that I think about, I guess I'd take the free PC and sell it to get money to pay for the Mac).
You sound like the type of person who would buy swamp land in Florida. Hey, if you believe the PR stuff from Apple about being a "better" value, by all means, buy them, it is your money. However, the other 98% of the world has neither fallen for nor found any merit in Apple's claims.
I'm sure most people you've met haven't paid for Microsoft Office, which merely strengthens my point. Most people pirate their software. That's why $500 PCs seem like such a bargain; people aren't paying for the software they install on it.
No, most people get a home version with MS Word and MS Excel or maybe MS Works, Corel Offie or even some OEM's are shipping Open Office now with the purchase of their computer. The average Joe Home User does not pirate software, they wouldn't know how to do it or where to look. It is your typical teen user that is pirating software. There are also people that pirate software for Mac as well. I bet there are tons of Mac users that have a pirated version of Photoshop or one they copied from work.
unless you run Linux and OpenOffice (which by all reliable sources is less than 1% of the desktop market)
Why do all Apple zealots think that Apple has this continual 5% market share? I have never seen anywhere that put Apple's dektop market share at or near 5%. I guess you missed this/. article about how Desktop Linux Share Overtaking Macintosh? According to the research company IDC, Linux has 25% share in servers, 2.8% in desktops. This research is from 2002, so the numbers are higher now and should put Linux desktop share at 3.2%, higher then Mac OS.
Sure, and now just add $220 for a copy of Windows XP and $400 for a copy of Microsoft Office
I use Fedora Linux and I was able to get it on sale for $0.00, I also was able to purchase Open Office for the same price.
I am by no means an MS fan and cannot stand the company. However, you can get MS Windows XP Home from tons of places on the web for $99, and most home users do not need the $400 dollar version of MS Office and can get a much cheaper version. Even if I added those two to the price, it is still cheaper and has far more performance then a dog slow 800HMz G4 eMac with 128MB of memory.
Did you also skip the first part of my post? My wife's great-grandfater was able to get a Dell for under $700 that comes with MS Windows XP home, Corel Office, a scanner and a few other apps like Quicken and I forgot to mention the CD-RW with a copy of Roxio. That bundle has more features and far more performance then the more expensive and slower eMac for $800.
What? You mean you didn't factor in the cost of the software? But we all know software piracy is wrong, so you would never do that.
No, I don't pirate software. If I need to run MS Windows software, I can use my Universal MSDN subscription to run any MS Software I may need, which my company purchases for me each year.
Were you going to run Linux on that PC of yours?
Yup, that is all I have ran on my home systems for a good 4 years now.
Your $500 PC comes with driver discs if you're lucky
Actually, the DVD+-RW came with PowerDVD and a version of Nero. The mobo came with 4 different applications, anti-virus, system protection and some other ones. Though I don't need any of them since I run Linux.
Look what you get with that $700 from Apple. The eMac is dog slow and has little room to upgrade. While the G5 may be a snappy processor, the G4 cannot hold a candle to Intel and AMD.
My wife's great grandfather (81 yrs. old) just "got a dell dude" for under $700. For that price he got a 2.2GHz P4 with 256MB memory, 40GB 7,200 RPM HDD, 10/100 nic, winmodem, an OK Intel "extreme" graphics controller, 17" monitor, keyboard, scroll mouse and a scanner. Apple does not offer anything in the _average_ price range of todays computers.
I just built my own computer for a little under $500 by just buying parts I needed. AMD 2500+ w/fan, 512 MB PC2700, 120GB 7,200 8MB cache HDD, 64 MB Gefore 3 Ti 500, DVD +- R-RW drive, new case and new KT600 based mobo all for under $500. I was able to shop around to get the best price, a feature not available from Apple.
What does Apple offer for under $700 that can perform just as well? Nothing. IMO, a good performing Mac does not cost less then $1,200 or so.
Apple put themselves into a niche market based on price and they seem happy there.
And if you want to use Mac OS X on a new Mac, buy an eMac for $799
I thought about getting an eMac before I purchased parts to build a new computer. However, in the end, it came down to getting the best value for my money. I would have had to spend $300 more for the eMac and had a computer that was considerably slower then what I could get in a PeeCee for $500.
This post would be much better if there was more information on what they are really putting out. Some of us remember the previous Linux "versions" and they were crap. WP8 has some dog ugly Motif gui, (don't use motif, it is dog ugly!). The next version just used Wine and was complete crap. So what is this version going to have? It should have a real _native_ Linux GUI, be it GTK+ or QT based. If Corel was smart, they would use wxWindows or QT since they are both cross-platform and would work under MS Windows, Linux and Mac.
I actually think these types of products are bad for the Linux desktop. Why? Because they are usually done half-a$$ and over priced. Corel's Linux version better be pretty darn good to make someone pay $299 for it over Open Office. If Corel's Linux version is not better then Open Office, I can see a big press statment about the failure of commercial products on the Linux desktop and how Linux desktp users are cheap and don't want to buy commercial software (which is very far from the truth, I personaly would love to see more commercial offerings). I guess I am jumping the gun and should wait to see what Corel puts out. Though I do have two previous attempts to base my judgment on, and I think this version will be a mess as well, and will only scare away more commercial companies who may have been considering a Linux version of their products.
What Linux distro are you using? Fedora Core has up2date, apt and yum. Just type atp-get update && apt-get upgrade and your done. Red Hat has up2date and the Red Hat Network, just run up2date or login to RHN. I can use RHN from any where over SSL and update any of my RH servers. I can organize my RH servers into groups and push out packages/updates as needed by server, by group or all servers. When it is all done, I get a nice summary email. I have never seen an update to RH or Fedora that would break the whole system unlike some MS updates which have been know to, so there are far less worries about testing every single update/patch. There is also Novell/Ximian Red Carpet that can handle updates/patches for an entire enterprise of servers. There are plenty of ways to handle updates/patches, just because you may not be using them, does not mean that they do not exist.
This is not a post about Gnome vs KDE. I like them both, though I use Gnome more because I still think the KDE widgets are a little to blocky/clunky. If QT starts making some good money, they should hire a graphic artist to draw out their widgets to make them smoother and round those stinken corners. I have seen KDE desktops that look great just as I have seen Gnome desktops that look great. I guess, to my eyes, QT widgets still look too blocky.
Anyway, I wonder what in the world would make Novell pick QT? I don't have a problem with the QT license since it is free for GPL'ed code and if you want to do closed source, you pay, just like the rest of the world. I am fine with that. What I don't understand is what is Novell's game plan concerning all the Ximinan "IP" that they bought? There is no acceptable QT based groupware application that is ready _NOW_, while there is GTK+ based Ximian Evolution that even works very well with MS Exchange. There is Mozilla that is GTK+ based. Novell is not going to get all those users to switch to konq when, IMO Konq is not standards compliant enough yet and the rendering engine is not up to snuff with Gecko. What about OOo? Again, it uses GTK+, I cannot see Novell porting that beast to QT. These three apps are critical to the Linux desktop, everything else is fluff in comparision.
Maybe they plan to do some good QT/GTK+ integration? I hope so, since the two tool-kits have issues with simple interoperation such as drag-n-drop and copy-n-paste, not to mention how different the widgets look. I personally don't want a Linux desktop that has no consistency between the widgets. This is the main reason I always look for Gnome apps over KDE apps to keep my desktop consistent (with the exception of K3b, since it is one great app).
Oh, there is also the issues of the different technologies that the two desktops use. What sound server are they going to use? arts or esd? Are they going to make the coding changes to to the all the other apps or do they expect a user to have both running? DCOP or Orbit? etc vs etc. IMO, Novell should have picked one desktop and then ported any of the very good apps from the other desktop over. It would take a long time to port Evolution, Mozilla/Firefox and OOo to QT and have it be stable.
Since Redhat dropped interest in the desktop, I was hoping for Novell to help push Desktop Linux, though this move makes me less optimistic.
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Since when did ActiveX work under Linux and Mac? The fonts are unreadably small under Firfox even under MS Windows, and some of the tables on the left are garbaled. I don't understand how someone can not even make a simple HTML document and check it in two browsers. It takes all of 3 seconds to fire up Firefox and see if it works. Oh, and if someone is thinking of puting ActiveX on their site, just don't. There is no need for that single platform crap. Use Macromedia Flash(tm) if you have the urge to put something "exciting" on the page.
Those black squares are actually MS Windows Media players. The site tries to loaded DRM ActiveX crap, if you let it load, they you can click play on the little MS "media" players button to hear some dude talk
What a crappy site. It doesn't render properly with Mozilla/Firefox and as soon I went to the page, I was hit with a bunch of ActiveX controls trying to run. No thanks. Maybe if they want to try to interest other developers in MS, they should NOT REQUIRE MS stuff. The main page has more then 300 HTML errors according to W3C. Come on now. It is not hard to make a little HTML, honest! There is no coding involved. Oh, and this site is .Net. You can see what great standards compliant HTML MS's Web Forms spit out.
No, Apple has 31 percent of the portable player market by number of units sold. They have 51% of the market by revenue because their units cost more. 31% of the market was willing to buy an iPod while 69% of the market did not want an iPod for whatever reason.
Do you think the people are Netflix are really that dumb? The US Postal Service has insured mail. Netflix just insures that DVD that they paid $5 for at $10 and if it gets lost or stolen, Netflix profits! I am not sure how the USPO handles large scale mail order business, though I doubt the USPO would have Netflix (or any other mail order company) eat those costs, it probably just comes out of our taxes : )
IBM has been doing a turn-around for some time now. And while they are not perfect, they are far more ethical then MS and have made substantial contributions to OSS. MS _could_ be the big buddy of OSS. However, it will take time and a much bigger effort then one small, unimportant contribution to OSS. In fact, if MS does go down that road, you will see the number of flames go down and the number of praises go up. Though from what I have seen from MS, I do not see any of that happening. Of course, my opinion of MS could change for the better or worse all depending on their actions. Very recently they attacked Linux with by supporting SCO. This little CPL application is not going to make up for that attack against Linux and OSS.
You seem to just be trolling for MS. However, I will feed you. MS has a monopoly, I don't think anyone will deny that. MS also illegally uses that monopoly of their OS to help out their other products. For example, in the recent MS Windows source code leak, there were many places in the OS code that had tweaks and fixes for the non-OS code. That is why IE and MS Office can start up faster then the competition. That is how they can give speed and feature advantages etc to their products. Can Mozilla, IBM DB2, Oracle, Real, QuickTime, Open Office, Photoshop and thousand of other commercial applications get those same fixes, tweaks and workarounds? No. Can any of those other applications send in patches to MS and get better support, spead-ups and tweaks for thier applications? No. This is MS leveraging their OS monopoly to give their own products and unfair advantage and it is illegal. IE and outlook express are both one big security hole, yet these two applications are used by tons of users because these users either don't know about alternative or don't know how to get and install those alternatives, not because IE and OE are superior as an application.
There is also the "embracing and extending" of HTML that MS did with IE to force users into using IE. Their tools and products all spit out IE specific stuff or require IE. I noticed you said you use firebird? Why? Isn't IE such a great, secure browser? What do you do for sites that "require" IE because of non-standard "embrace and extend" HTML extensions from MS? Do you switch to IE? That is not an option for non-MS Windows users. IE on Mac sucks and has not be update for ages. IE is not available under Linux. These are just a few of the tie-in tactics of MS.
The _big_ difference is that you can take GNUPG and fork it to include your changes. You cannot do that with proprietary software, you don't even have the opportunity to look at the code and fix it. I would assume that the version of GNUPG that you use includes your fixes? If so, that again is another benefit of OSS. The right given to the end user to make those changes. I do agree, that some OSS projects are lead/maintained by ninnies, just fork the code and put it on sourceforge with your new changes. If more people start to use your version of the other version of GNUPG, it may wake up the developers and if not, you are not the leader of a popular OSS project. Look at XFree, it was getting stagnant, and it took some shaking up to get things moving. OSS is not a magic solution, you can still have problems, rememer, garbage in, garbage out.
MS first tried their "shared" source initiative, and it was basically a flop because of the very restrictive license which basically only allowed you to look at the code. Now they are taking another shot with a real Open Source license, though as I suspected, they are releasing a low profile, and uninteresting project. There are tons of installers for MS windows already, including freeware, Open Source and commercial. To me this suggest that MS is only doing another PR stunt. They are not taking OSS seriously, and have this little project there to say, "look, we do open source as well". The "leaders" at MS have _always_ stressed their position on "IP", and MS will not give anything away or share it with _any_ community.
If MS wanted to show people that they were serious about OSS and wanted to actually try to build a community of loyal developers like with OSS, they would release something more significant, yet not one of their big "IP" projects. For example, why not release windows explorer (not IE)? That code _needs_ some serious fixing. When you are trying to user explorer.exe as a file manager, it constantly locks files and directories and makes it a pain to use. The only "fix" is to either log out or run taskmgr and kill and restart explorer.exe. The problem with that is that your shell is restarted and you often lose many of your notification area icons.
MS has the potential to drastically change their public appearance and even possibly build a community of loyal developers working in their own free time similar to OSS. However, to achieve that, MS will need to give something as a good faith token gesture to the community and not keep their hands on it. This is where MS will fail based on what they have shown us in the past. MS has tons of smaller applications that they do not sell that they could release and have people work on these applications in an _open_ fashion without MS trying to keep their controlling hand on the project. How about notepad, wordpad, HyperTerminal, ms paint, cmd.exe, backup, sound recorder, volume control, windows movie maker, calculator, freecell, Hearts, Pinball, Solitaire, etc. All of these apps MS could release and allow the community to develop further. MS would still include them into their release by grabbing the latest stable build and putting that through testing.
Gnome has a little applet called acme that will let you press a key on your keyboard and have it run any program. You can find it here. It may also be installed already.
I am by no means an MS fan and cannot stand the company. However, you can get MS Windows XP Home from tons of places on the web for $99, and most home users do not need the $400 dollar version of MS Office and can get a much cheaper version. Even if I added those two to the price, it is still cheaper and has far more performance then a dog slow 800HMz G4 eMac with 128MB of memory.
Did you also skip the first part of my post? My wife's great-grandfater was able to get a Dell for under $700 that comes with MS Windows XP home, Corel Office, a scanner and a few other apps like Quicken and I forgot to mention the CD-RW with a copy of Roxio. That bundle has more features and far more performance then the more expensive and slower eMac for $800.No, I don't pirate software. If I need to run MS Windows software, I can use my Universal MSDN subscription to run any MS Software I may need, which my company purchases for me each year.Yup, that is all I have ran on my home systems for a good 4 years now.Actually, the DVD+-RW came with PowerDVD and a version of Nero. The mobo came with 4 different applications, anti-virus, system protection and some other ones. Though I don't need any of them since I run Linux.
My wife's great grandfather (81 yrs. old) just "got a dell dude" for under $700. For that price he got a 2.2GHz P4 with 256MB memory, 40GB 7,200 RPM HDD, 10/100 nic, winmodem, an OK Intel "extreme" graphics controller, 17" monitor, keyboard, scroll mouse and a scanner. Apple does not offer anything in the _average_ price range of todays computers.
I just built my own computer for a little under $500 by just buying parts I needed. AMD 2500+ w/fan, 512 MB PC2700, 120GB 7,200 8MB cache HDD, 64 MB Gefore 3 Ti 500, DVD +- R-RW drive, new case and new KT600 based mobo all for under $500. I was able to shop around to get the best price, a feature not available from Apple.
What does Apple offer for under $700 that can perform just as well? Nothing. IMO, a good performing Mac does not cost less then $1,200 or so.
Apple put themselves into a niche market based on price and they seem happy there.
I thought about getting an eMac before I purchased parts to build a new computer. However, in the end, it came down to getting the best value for my money. I would have had to spend $300 more for the eMac and had a computer that was considerably slower then what I could get in a PeeCee for $500.I actually think these types of products are bad for the Linux desktop. Why? Because they are usually done half-a$$ and over priced. Corel's Linux version better be pretty darn good to make someone pay $299 for it over Open Office. If Corel's Linux version is not better then Open Office, I can see a big press statment about the failure of commercial products on the Linux desktop and how Linux desktp users are cheap and don't want to buy commercial software (which is very far from the truth, I personaly would love to see more commercial offerings). I guess I am jumping the gun and should wait to see what Corel puts out. Though I do have two previous attempts to base my judgment on, and I think this version will be a mess as well, and will only scare away more commercial companies who may have been considering a Linux version of their products.
What Linux distro are you using? Fedora Core has up2date, apt and yum. Just type atp-get update && apt-get upgrade and your done. Red Hat has up2date and the Red Hat Network, just run up2date or login to RHN. I can use RHN from any where over SSL and update any of my RH servers. I can organize my RH servers into groups and push out packages/updates as needed by server, by group or all servers. When it is all done, I get a nice summary email. I have never seen an update to RH or Fedora that would break the whole system unlike some MS updates which have been know to, so there are far less worries about testing every single update/patch. There is also Novell/Ximian Red Carpet that can handle updates/patches for an entire enterprise of servers. There are plenty of ways to handle updates/patches, just because you may not be using them, does not mean that they do not exist.
Anyway, I wonder what in the world would make Novell pick QT? I don't have a problem with the QT license since it is free for GPL'ed code and if you want to do closed source, you pay, just like the rest of the world. I am fine with that. What I don't understand is what is Novell's game plan concerning all the Ximinan "IP" that they bought? There is no acceptable QT based groupware application that is ready _NOW_, while there is GTK+ based Ximian Evolution that even works very well with MS Exchange. There is Mozilla that is GTK+ based. Novell is not going to get all those users to switch to konq when, IMO Konq is not standards compliant enough yet and the rendering engine is not up to snuff with Gecko. What about OOo? Again, it uses GTK+, I cannot see Novell porting that beast to QT. These three apps are critical to the Linux desktop, everything else is fluff in comparision.
Maybe they plan to do some good QT/GTK+ integration? I hope so, since the two tool-kits have issues with simple interoperation such as drag-n-drop and copy-n-paste, not to mention how different the widgets look. I personally don't want a Linux desktop that has no consistency between the widgets. This is the main reason I always look for Gnome apps over KDE apps to keep my desktop consistent (with the exception of K3b, since it is one great app).
Oh, there is also the issues of the different technologies that the two desktops use. What sound server are they going to use? arts or esd? Are they going to make the coding changes to to the all the other apps or do they expect a user to have both running? DCOP or Orbit? etc vs etc. IMO, Novell should have picked one desktop and then ported any of the very good apps from the other desktop over. It would take a long time to port Evolution, Mozilla/Firefox and OOo to QT and have it be stable.
Since Redhat dropped interest in the desktop, I was hoping for Novell to help push Desktop Linux, though this move makes me less optimistic.