Common misconception that CX Office can only run Office. In fact it can run all kinds of things, including vertical market business software, normally far more of a concern.
Polished, looking good, fit for purpose, easy to configure, easy to manage, sane backend architecture and infrastructure are some of the ones that most frequently come up. On the other hand, GNOME is frequently found to be more robust in the individual components (whereas KDE is found to be more robust overall.) Those are just some of the reasons. I have well over 600 pages of documentation that back up this fact. Some are public domain. Most are not, sadly.
Sure. So show us the stuff in the public domain. Those "facts" sound suspiciously like opinions to me - Ximian for instance have done usability studies, with real non-geeky people and found that KDE is more confusing because it looks like Windows, but in fact acts differently. But whatever.
Here goes a brief list. XD2, as well as GNOME, employ a philosophy that "less is more" however, that concept is, initself, seriously debatable
No it doesn't. This is widely misunderstood. It goes for a philosophy that software should be easy to use. Often that meant stripping out stupid stuff that shouldn't have been in the UI to start with. The GNOME clock has only 1 small window to configure, compared to the 6 tabs in KDE (fixed in cvs i might add). Do I care that my clock has fewer options? No. Did I ever even configure my clock when I used KDE? No. Would all the extra cruft have confused users? Yes. Even KDE is coming around to this way of thinking now, see the latest story about the clock on the dot.
You, on the other hand, do not address the issue of lock in, that most certainly exists.
You haven't shown that. You haven't even laid the groundwork for that. The most I've seen is some vague references to Connector, the sole purpose of which is to reduce lockin by allowing you to access a proprietary server solution using a free software client.
As to supporting an unix client on exchange: IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, WebDAV. etc. etc. They actually work, you know?
... but many companies don't have them deployed. For them, that product has value. You have repeatedly failed to address this point.
As long as the killscript ships with the default distro it comes with (in this case, redhat) I am working on the asumption it is required.
That's too vague. The latest version of Evolution does not require this kill script. Problem solved. Next?
CORBA is dying.
You don't have to be a kreskin to see it, the writings on the wall......
Your sleigh of hand with mentioning lesser implementations still don't make CORBA much more alive.
My point about DCOM was to show that CORBA-style architectures have been validated in the real world by years of experience. To claim it's a decrepid piece of middleware is rubbish.
Why don't you search for "CORBA developer" and "J2EE developer" on any jobsite
What a ridiculous way to measure it. You can't be a "CORBA developer" any more than you can be an IMAP developer or an HTTP developer. They are protocols . A sibling poster already pointed out that by this logic IIS is more popular than Apache.
Regarding the GConf comment, are you saying that binary databases are not used as GConf backends?
Yes, I am. 20 seconds research could have told you this. If you can't be bothered getting something as basic as this right, why should we trust anything else you say?
that they are not possible? Sure XML is used now, but that is only after some seriousl flamewars a few years ago.
Yes, they are possible, GConf is pretty flexible. However, they aren't used by default, and AFAIK there is no code for a binary backend. What was talked about back then is irrelevant - who cares? It makes no difference to you.
On the OpenOffice thing - good for you. If you do research, write transforms etc etc then you can easily change the default format. Most corporates are not going to switch their entire operation to OO in one go. They need interop
No, it's just that I don't like repeating things told to me in private. I doubt they'd have any problems telling the world, after all, they told me:) But I'm not going to make that decision for them,
I've spoken to a few people (not naming names) who appear convinced that the design of ReiserFS is fundamentally flawed, and that it would lead to inevitable deadlocking. I've read your white papers now several times (took me a while to figure them out), and think the work you're doing is great, but a few smart people seem to think it can't be trusted. How would you reassure those people that their data is safe?
And this is less safe than just downloading it yourself, saving it and running it.... why?
Sure. If you're going to read every line of the script and check for trojans, then maybe. But 99% of people don't do that, can't do that and never will. So really it's just more convenient this way. Feel free to wear the tinfoil hat if you like.
Anyone who doesn't do this deserves to get rooted.
What a ridiculous idea. As if everybody is going to audit the installer in its entirety (you run the ELF binary as root remember) before running it .
So far, for every single one of them, KDE has been the top choice of both admins as well as users, for a tremendous amount of reasons.
.... which you haven't listed.
The Ximian/GNOME team are really not heading in the right direction, when it comes to desktop design, and they have pretty much made sure that the design decisions that went into XD2 will scare off any serious systems manager
.... which you also don't list.
or at the very least, give them the same amount of lock-in and dependency that Ms offers them today.
I think you're nick is well chosen. You're smoking some serious crack. I suspect this might be a well crafted troll. But whatever.
The Ximian Connector you so highly tout only delivers value to Ximian, not to the end user
In that case, why do people buy it?
I can easily connect and collaborate with Exchange servers, in a variety of ways, including a fat-client, if I would wish to do so -- without having to use Evolution, *or* suffer a major loss of functionality.
Again. You don't support this assertion.
Moreover, any application that requires a 3k killscript
.... which it no longer requires.
Years after CORBA is dumped in just about any enterprise as an archaic, slow-moving and basically retarded piece of middleware
You are ignorant. CORBA is used in many back office applications, especially powering high end e-commerce sites. DCOM, which is similar to CORBA except less standard and poorly specified, is deployed throughout the Win32 platform, and people all over the world use it every day (via installshield no less).
those config options that are available are tucked away in a "registry" type, binary databse
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you are a troll. GConf is not binary based. Oh, and by the way, simplification of the UI has ranked very highly amongst "things we need" for IT managers to deploy Linux on the desktop.
they even set OpenOffice.org to save by default in MS formats!! how fscked up is that?!?
Corp rollouts would only do it themselves anyway. Or do you really want Mary in marketing ringing up every other day asking why her friend can't open the report she just sent?
I am now a happy KDE user, most of the time. And no, this is not a troll, or anything like that. It is honest opinion.
No, it's a troll. It's made up purely of unsubstaniated opinion with no basis in reality whatsoever, put forth in a flamebait style. It reads like you're trolling for hits. So here you are. Hope you enjoy it.
Admittedly, I rarely listen to or buy music from major record labels. But try going into a music store and finding a CD by Juno Reactor.
Yeah. Any half decent dance/trance artists are a bitch to find on anything but this summers fashionable compilation album.
Is it stealing? Probably
Yes. It is. People who claim otherwise are just playing with words.
although I always end up buying the CD when I can find it
I feel for you. I'm in exactly the same scenario. Hell, I'm not even particularly eclectic with my musical tastes, I've never really imagined myself listening to obscure indie music, but I like trance therefore am automatically placed in that scenario.
Is it illegal? Well, according to the RIAA - yes
It's illegal according to the laws of the land, which are dictated by a democratic government.
I have a hard time believing that pay per download will solve anything
I don't, but I don't think the model Apple are using will really be a long term solution. All they are doing is putting a really really big music shop on your screen. That's great, but it's still limited in size at some point, not to mention centralising distribution power. A better way would be to allow the artists themselves to recoup charge in a decentralised fashion, but the infrastructure at the moment just doesn't exist for that.
Apples to apples please troll.
Your description is of someone committing theft. Downloading music over P2P is copyright violation.
These are different crimes, with different results, different consequences, different punishments, and different courts even (Theft = criminal, Copyright violation = civil, I believe)
No, that's just yet another excuse. You think the cost of the physical CDs is significant to that shop? The shopkeeper could probably buy enough blank CDs to replace the ones you walked out with using their lunch money.
The whole point of intellectual property laws is to turn a creative work into property. So no matter how you get music without paying for it, it doesn't matter - you have stolen some property. Sure, you can argue over the semantics of the world "stolen" all day, it doesn't make any difference. The effects are the same, in that the various people who made that music are deprived of cash.
Until somebody on Slashdot can figure out a likely way of integrating creative works into our capitalist economy without treating said works as property, this kind of reasoning is pointless. If we want artists to be paid, we need to figure out how to get that cash to them in a semi-reliable form. Playing with words doesn't do that.
I do wonder how much if the sharing leads to actual buying. I know there are a lot of people who would rather "Try it out" then actually buy the game to take full advantage of it, like online playing. Many don't have the know how on hacking the programs, they just want to get a taste.
Yeah, right. Whatever. The vast majority of people just want free stuff. Games, software, music... they want it all.
I help out giving tech support in #winehq on freenode sometimes. We routinely get people in there asking in broad daylight for people to send them copies of CrossOver or WineX, or asking where they can be downloaded. Half the time, it's because they:
a) couldn't find them on KaZaA on Windows, and
b) want to run those types of programs on Linux anyway.
They do this apparently not realising that employees of both those companies idle in that channel.
So, if people want to kid themselves that P2P users are simply "trying before they buy" that's fine by me - if you spend an evening telling 13 year olds addicted to warez to piss off, and that no you won't send them CrossOver for free, then maybe you get a slightly more realistic perspective.
I think the EFF campaign is funny. "Tired of being treated like criminals?". Well, most people are. Sucks, doesn't it.
Meanwhile people who sit on KaZaa all day hurt the rest of us, see the sibling post about how shops are changing their game return policies.
First time I tried to use OpenOffice spreadsheets, it failed me - I was sent a sheet with embedded radio buttons (quite why it had these, I don't know). Anyway, they didn't appear. Back to Windows for me:(
That doesn't matter--what Smith was describing were the fundamental rules of the universe.
There is (pardon the pun) a world of difference between immutable physical laws and an artificial social construct that can be changed at any time (witness gift economies in native american tribes). The fact that what Smith described tends to happen naturally in our society does not make it a fundemental rule of the universe.
First, I don't give a fig for democracy--I care about liberty
The rest of the world pretty clearly disagrees, otherwise we'd be using anarchy.
Second, a market is extremely democratic: everyone gets 24 hours a day in which to work, spend and sleep. It's when the market is interfered with that it becomes undemocratic: when false incentives and disincentives are created; when false demand is instilled; when false supplies are produced.
Yes, but the perfect market doesn't exist. You will always get anomolies like Microsoft which bend the rules past breaking point, and of course the whole thing revolves around the idea of the perfectly informed consumer which is equally ficticious.
That's not a right--that's a state guarantee. Rights are inherent in being a man: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is far too vague to be worth arguing over - if these "inherant rights" apply to men, why not apes? How do you define what is a right, and what is merely "nice to have"? The Human Rights act attempted to do this, but the repercussions show how tricky it can be.
one has a right to bear arms
Not where I live thank god. You americans can have a pretty warped view of what "rights" are sometime. I can't believe you think people have a right to a random piece of physical machinery but not a living. Which is more important to the majority?
One does not have a right to steal (which is what welfare is: thieving from the rich and giving to the poor)
Flawed argument. People pay taxes. Stealing is usually (simplistically) defined as taking something that is not yours. What can be private property is decided upon by society - air is not private property, but land is. It would seem reasonable that a certain amount of money could be defined as group property.
Now, this does not mean that I'm some sort of crazy Randian loony. Charity is a vitally important thing, and it is quite immoral not to help out those who are worse off. It is good for me to give $20 to a beggar; it is bad for me to clap a gun to your head and make you give him $20. The former is voluntary; the latter is compulsory. The former is charity; the latter is socialism.
Nobody claps a gun to anybodies head. If you don't wish to pay welfare taxes, go live somewhere where they don't exist. Afghanistan is pretty good these days I here. You can't have it both ways - if not helping those in need is wrong, then we should ensure that people do right. If you believe this isn't the case, it would seem that you don't think we need laws at all.
That's why things are constantly getting better. It has nothing to do with paying more for less: it has everything to do with paying less for more.
Reread what I wrote, you are confused. I didn't write "payING more for less", I wrote about getting "paID more for less". Semantically what you wrote and what I wrote are equivalent.
It's a cool system.
Only if you are willing to blindly ignore its flaws, most of which are political and social rather than based purely in economic theory. Nonetheless, an economy does not exist in a vacuum, it's naive to think it does.
One would think that more than two centuries after The Wealth of Nations was published this sort of dark, superstitious nonsense would have been extinguished by the light of reason. Sadly such is not the case.
Capitalism is not constant. The capitalist economy we have today bears little resemblance to the economic context in which Smith wrote The Wealth of Nation.
The beauty of a market is, provided that fraud is not allowed, the greed of all paradoxically leads to the betterment of all.
Most of the rest of your post is attempting to support this argument. This is a valid, but oversimplified view. Classical or pure economics has long been known to be inadequate to fully understand economies, especially today. For instance, in Adam Smiths age there was no concept of real time currency speculation, a factor that plays a major role in todays financial markets.
No country today uses pure capitalism, in much the same way that nobody uses pure socialism - instead a blend of systems is preferred. In particular a purely market based system, which you would appear to be advocating, is by its very nature undemocratic. The rules are easily bent, and even broken. We all know one good example of that.
Hey, you have no right to a living
That is not correct, at least not for a large section of the worlds population. Under European human rights laws, I have a "right" to a minimum standard of living, which is normally guaranteed by state welfare. Most people would agree that this is the civilised thing to do, unless you would like to see people literally dying of unemployment on the streets.
Why should anyone pay you more to work less?
Being paid more to work less, is essentially what economic progress is about. I no longer have to grow my own food and till my own fields, arguably I have it rather easy, yet I can afford a nice flat and technology beyond the wildest dreams of somebody only 50 years ago.
That's what competition is about. It's rough, but that's Real Life.
Life is what we make it. Money is merely a social construct we invented - contrary to popular belief, it does not control us, we control it.
Ahh, Slashdot. The home of the irrelevant truth. I'm not arguing that countries don't engage in trade restrictions, I'm arguing that according to game theory those decisions are contra bono.
I think you're assuming that Slashdot (and I) are fluent in game theory. I know a little, but I don't know what "contra bono" is. You'd have to define them to convince people that using it is a valid argument.
Saying that the concept of free trade is "broken" because it's not always practiced is like saying that the idea of health is "broken" because people smoke.
Free trade implicitly relies upon the co-operation of others. By choosing to smoke, I do not force other people into smoking. However, by abandoning the rules of free trade when others are following them, I gain a temporary advantage which forces the hands of others.
Next item, crippled third world economies. So third world countries are better off without external investment? No need to take that any further.
I think you missed my point entirely. Let's take the example of steel tariffs.
When Bush imposed them, it was to protect the American rust belt from an influx of cheap asian steel. The American steel industry (at least in that part) is not efficient, in fact it's behind the rest of the world in terms of steel quality, tools used, and how state-of-the-art the factories are. Their competitors in Europe and Asia are not.
The barriers to entry in the US meant the steel destined for that market was rerouted to Europe. Europe does have a competitive steel industry normally, however the oversupply caused by the rerouting of steel destined for America would have caused prices to drop to the point where European manfucturers would be overpriced. In order to stop an otherwise healthy and competitive industry from being decimated, Europe also imposed restrictions.
The end result was that huge quantities of cheap steel flooded 3rd world markets, ensuring that countries without a steel industry didn't develop one and those that did had to watch as it was destroyed. Why did said 3rd world countries not impose tariffs themselves? Because the IMF, to which they are indebted, does not allow it.
The upshot of all this is that the West ensures that developing countries cannot place trade barriers to protect their own industry, while we do. Because we give ourselves a leg up in this way, "free" trade effectively cripples 3rd world economies.
I'm not sure why you reduced it to "external investment".
For an excellent discussion of a post-capitalist economic model, in which the size of companies is limited and management is hired by the workers, see Kim Stanley Robinsons third Mars book, "Green Mars". About a fifth of the way through, there is some detailed debate about the future Martian economic system - it is filled with interesting ideas.
I wish I knew of a place it was available online, but if nobody knows of such a place I'd recommend that you buy the book. It's excellent.
I obviously understand fundamentally that free trade is a Pareto optimal solution for nations, and yet, I don't think we should trade with China under certain circumstances
.... and this is why free trade does not work and is inherantly unstable. It's a classic prisoners dilemma scenario - all it takes is for one state to restrict some trade to get a leg up over the other, before EVERYBODY has to do it in order to stay competitive.
This can be clearly seen in the French governments illegal blockades on British beef. Years after they were taken to court and found to be blocking imports for no valid reason, they are still doing it, because otherwise their rural farming communities would go bankrupt (and agriculture is a powerful voter influence in France).
The same is true of steel import tariffs imposed by Bush.
So, we can see that fundamentally the concept of free trade is broken - like most of classical economics, it doesn not work in the real world, and to pretend it does is to deny reality.
Most "real" economists have realised that free trade is not something that should be preached, because despite best intentions it has simply become an abused idea. "Free trade" in practice meant the ability for the US to freely export its goods, but not the other way around (and Europe is just as bad in many respects). This has led to crippled economies in the third world.
So, to say it's a "solved problem in game theory" is correct - it's a solved problem in theory only. In practice, it's not a solved problem and people are looking at alternative economic constructs to help increase wealth and distribute it more fairly (see the work of Lietaer and Gesell for some examples).
FYI, the reason the "Please enter your password" dialog box in xscreensaver (for when locking the screen) is so ugly is because it runs as root, and JWZ (nor owen taylor for that matter) doesn't trust GTK to be secure enough to run as root.
So. I don't see the big deal. Root gives you zero security in situations like this, you don't have to be root to read through peoples email, nor send it. In fact, I think the idea should be scrapped - internal security is far less important than external security in situations like this.
When you compare POSIX native thread in the next release of Linux and this article by Chris Brumme about AppDomains it's obvious the issues with distributed transaction on windows platform has serious problems. In Brumme's article, he discusses why creating new threads is heavy weight and diificult to scale.
Though I have no idea why this is on topic, Chris Brummes articles are great. Having said that, this comment made me laugh (he is explaining the term "bleed"):
This is similar to the way colors might bleed from one garment to another in the laundry, though I don't have much direct experience with washing clothes.
Apple is no threat to the desktop. It isn't compatable enough (as in, can't run Windows apps without having Windows), and it's marketed as a "boutique" piece of gear, ie they are appealing to a niche market. If they were to appeal to the mass market, they would alienate a large portion of their current customers.
It also has practically no presence in business, which affects everything else.
What Microsoft ought to be throwing it's money towards, then, is building easy-to-use consumer software that consumers actually *want* to use, not because they're gimmicky but because they're easy to understand.
Actually they have quite a few such things. Windows is one. Office is another (most people who don't have any preference for free software prefer MS Office I've found by a long way). MSN Messenger - virtually all my friends use it, because it has the features they want in a well designed and attractive piece of software.
Apple aren't the only ones who write pleasant to use software you know. They are however the only ones who have a blindly loyal userbase.
Microsoft is, IMO, so bent on keeping the business markets that they've all but neglected their consumer market.
'fraid not. I wish that were true though. They make a lot of software that people really like. They make plenty that they don't as well of course.
Aside from some pretty colors, self-customizing menus and Apple-chasing software hacks, they've not done anything new for the home market since Windows 95 was released.
If Apple and Microsoft were reversed in that statement, it would rightly be sunk under a storm of -1 Trolls, but because it's bashing MS and pumping Apple it's insightful now. I'm not surprised, but it doesn't get any less irritating.
Take the rescent Neverwinter Nights fiasco. It took Bioware forever to choose a platform to handle the graphics and even longer to choose one to handle the sound.
BioWare screwed up. iD, ATITD and PomPom can do simultaneous or near-simultaneous releases of their products for Linux and Windows. The reason BioWare could not is they had zero regard for portability when they started, and that kind of thing has to be thought about from the start.
By dumping those loses, Microsoft could drastically drop prices AND continue making the same profits. I'd be a win-win situation.
No, that wouldn't work. Microsoft depends on high growth for stockholder returns, and partly to pay its salary bill. Operating systems and productivity software are a saturated market - they own it, and with flat PC sales, it's not expanding. Worse, they're about to have their lunch eaten by Linux.
They have to spread out, and hope that todays money-loser turns into tomorrows next big thing.
Second, drop product activation. No one likes being treated like a criminal.
Unfortunately enough people are that it makes sense to try and maximise profits by clamping down on it.
The real purpose of product activation is to stop friends and family from sharing copies. If Microsoft's software was lower in price, (see my first point) people would simply buy their own copy.
What price should it be?
Fourth, stop with those outrageous deals to stop Linux
Yeah, this one would be nice:) But I can understand why they do it, it's like a snowslide, all it takes is a few blasts and the right place and the whole thing starts sliding. They know this.
They also know timing is critical. Windows only has so long, eventually it will be a liability rather than an asset. Eventually it will be cut off from them as a revenue source and by that day, if they haven't diversified enough, it's game over. No more Redmond.
They have time to do that, but it's hard. Stuff like MSN, the Xbox etc shows they in this for the long haul, as well they might be. So they need to buy time, because they don't know how fast things will move once Linux becomnes truly viable.
Sixth, I could go on and on and on. But since my boss expects me to work for money, Iâ(TM)ll quit here and let others post some suggestions.
Heh, my boss too, so one last one - unfortunately being nice to their customers isn't going to turn Microsoft around, it's far too late for that. They have to leave Windows before it drags them down with it, and until they manage that it's a race against time.
You probably joined when CIA was dead. The current mean time between commit is something in the range of 30 seconds to 2 minutes, depending on the time of day.
Slashdot Mirror
Common misconception that CX Office can only run Office. In fact it can run all kinds of things, including vertical market business software, normally far more of a concern.
Sure. So show us the stuff in the public domain. Those "facts" sound suspiciously like opinions to me - Ximian for instance have done usability studies, with real non-geeky people and found that KDE is more confusing because it looks like Windows, but in fact acts differently. But whatever.
Here goes a brief list. XD2, as well as GNOME, employ a philosophy that "less is more" however, that concept is, initself, seriously debatable
No it doesn't. This is widely misunderstood. It goes for a philosophy that software should be easy to use. Often that meant stripping out stupid stuff that shouldn't have been in the UI to start with. The GNOME clock has only 1 small window to configure, compared to the 6 tabs in KDE (fixed in cvs i might add). Do I care that my clock has fewer options? No. Did I ever even configure my clock when I used KDE? No. Would all the extra cruft have confused users? Yes. Even KDE is coming around to this way of thinking now, see the latest story about the clock on the dot.
You, on the other hand, do not address the issue of lock in, that most certainly exists.
You haven't shown that. You haven't even laid the groundwork for that. The most I've seen is some vague references to Connector, the sole purpose of which is to reduce lockin by allowing you to access a proprietary server solution using a free software client.
As to supporting an unix client on exchange: IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, WebDAV. etc. etc. They actually work, you know?
As long as the killscript ships with the default distro it comes with (in this case, redhat) I am working on the asumption it is required.
That's too vague. The latest version of Evolution does not require this kill script. Problem solved. Next?
CORBA is dying.
You don't have to be a kreskin to see it, the writings on the wall......
Your sleigh of hand with mentioning lesser implementations still don't make CORBA much more alive.
My point about DCOM was to show that CORBA-style architectures have been validated in the real world by years of experience. To claim it's a decrepid piece of middleware is rubbish.
Why don't you search for "CORBA developer" and "J2EE developer" on any jobsite
What a ridiculous way to measure it. You can't be a "CORBA developer" any more than you can be an IMAP developer or an HTTP developer. They are protocols . A sibling poster already pointed out that by this logic IIS is more popular than Apache.
Regarding the GConf comment, are you saying that binary databases are not used as GConf backends?
Yes, I am. 20 seconds research could have told you this. If you can't be bothered getting something as basic as this right, why should we trust anything else you say?
that they are not possible? Sure XML is used now, but that is only after some seriousl flamewars a few years ago.
Yes, they are possible, GConf is pretty flexible. However, they aren't used by default, and AFAIK there is no code for a binary backend. What was talked about back then is irrelevant - who cares? It makes no difference to you.
On the OpenOffice thing - good for you. If you do research, write transforms etc etc then you can easily change the default format. Most corporates are not going to switch their entire operation to OO in one go. They need interop
No, it's just that I don't like repeating things told to me in private. I doubt they'd have any problems telling the world, after all, they told me :) But I'm not going to make that decision for them,
And if you can poison go.ximian.com, why not www.ximian.com?
I've spoken to a few people (not naming names) who appear convinced that the design of ReiserFS is fundamentally flawed, and that it would lead to inevitable deadlocking. I've read your white papers now several times (took me a while to figure them out), and think the work you're doing is great, but a few smart people seem to think it can't be trusted. How would you reassure those people that their data is safe?
Sure. If you're going to read every line of the script and check for trojans, then maybe. But 99% of people don't do that, can't do that and never will. So really it's just more convenient this way. Feel free to wear the tinfoil hat if you like.
Anyone who doesn't do this deserves to get rooted.
What a ridiculous idea. As if everybody is going to audit the installer in its entirety (you run the ELF binary as root remember) before running it .
The Ximian/GNOME team are really not heading in the right direction, when it comes to desktop design, and they have pretty much made sure that the design decisions that went into XD2 will scare off any serious systems manager
or at the very least, give them the same amount of lock-in and dependency that Ms offers them today.
I think you're nick is well chosen. You're smoking some serious crack. I suspect this might be a well crafted troll. But whatever.
The Ximian Connector you so highly tout only delivers value to Ximian, not to the end user
In that case, why do people buy it?
I can easily connect and collaborate with Exchange servers, in a variety of ways, including a fat-client, if I would wish to do so -- without having to use Evolution, *or* suffer a major loss of functionality.
Again. You don't support this assertion.
Moreover, any application that requires a 3k killscript
Years after CORBA is dumped in just about any enterprise as an archaic, slow-moving and basically retarded piece of middleware
You are ignorant. CORBA is used in many back office applications, especially powering high end e-commerce sites. DCOM, which is similar to CORBA except less standard and poorly specified, is deployed throughout the Win32 platform, and people all over the world use it every day (via installshield no less).
those config options that are available are tucked away in a "registry" type, binary databse
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you are a troll. GConf is not binary based. Oh, and by the way, simplification of the UI has ranked very highly amongst "things we need" for IT managers to deploy Linux on the desktop.
they even set OpenOffice.org to save by default in MS formats!! how fscked up is that?!?
Corp rollouts would only do it themselves anyway. Or do you really want Mary in marketing ringing up every other day asking why her friend can't open the report she just sent?
I am now a happy KDE user, most of the time. And no, this is not a troll, or anything like that. It is honest opinion.
No, it's a troll. It's made up purely of unsubstaniated opinion with no basis in reality whatsoever, put forth in a flamebait style. It reads like you're trolling for hits. So here you are. Hope you enjoy it.
How about if you use the packaging tools to uninstall GNOME2 entirely, then reinstall from the CDs. Would that fix it?
Going just from the people I know, I can say that Evolution has something like 50%, maybe higher market share.
Yeah. Any half decent dance/trance artists are a bitch to find on anything but this summers fashionable compilation album.
Is it stealing? Probably
Yes. It is. People who claim otherwise are just playing with words.
although I always end up buying the CD when I can find it
I feel for you. I'm in exactly the same scenario. Hell, I'm not even particularly eclectic with my musical tastes, I've never really imagined myself listening to obscure indie music, but I like trance therefore am automatically placed in that scenario.
Is it illegal? Well, according to the RIAA - yes
It's illegal according to the laws of the land, which are dictated by a democratic government.
I have a hard time believing that pay per download will solve anything
I don't, but I don't think the model Apple are using will really be a long term solution. All they are doing is putting a really really big music shop on your screen. That's great, but it's still limited in size at some point, not to mention centralising distribution power. A better way would be to allow the artists themselves to recoup charge in a decentralised fashion, but the infrastructure at the moment just doesn't exist for that.
No, that's just yet another excuse. You think the cost of the physical CDs is significant to that shop? The shopkeeper could probably buy enough blank CDs to replace the ones you walked out with using their lunch money.
The whole point of intellectual property laws is to turn a creative work into property. So no matter how you get music without paying for it, it doesn't matter - you have stolen some property. Sure, you can argue over the semantics of the world "stolen" all day, it doesn't make any difference. The effects are the same, in that the various people who made that music are deprived of cash.
Until somebody on Slashdot can figure out a likely way of integrating creative works into our capitalist economy without treating said works as property, this kind of reasoning is pointless. If we want artists to be paid, we need to figure out how to get that cash to them in a semi-reliable form. Playing with words doesn't do that.
Yeah, right. Whatever. The vast majority of people just want free stuff. Games, software, music... they want it all.
I help out giving tech support in #winehq on freenode sometimes. We routinely get people in there asking in broad daylight for people to send them copies of CrossOver or WineX, or asking where they can be downloaded. Half the time, it's because they:
a) couldn't find them on KaZaA on Windows, and
b) want to run those types of programs on Linux anyway.
They do this apparently not realising that employees of both those companies idle in that channel.
So, if people want to kid themselves that P2P users are simply "trying before they buy" that's fine by me - if you spend an evening telling 13 year olds addicted to warez to piss off, and that no you won't send them CrossOver for free, then maybe you get a slightly more realistic perspective.
I think the EFF campaign is funny. "Tired of being treated like criminals?". Well, most people are. Sucks, doesn't it.
Meanwhile people who sit on KaZaa all day hurt the rest of us, see the sibling post about how shops are changing their game return policies.
First time I tried to use OpenOffice spreadsheets, it failed me - I was sent a sheet with embedded radio buttons (quite why it had these, I don't know). Anyway, they didn't appear. Back to Windows for me :(
There is (pardon the pun) a world of difference between immutable physical laws and an artificial social construct that can be changed at any time (witness gift economies in native american tribes). The fact that what Smith described tends to happen naturally in our society does not make it a fundemental rule of the universe.
First, I don't give a fig for democracy--I care about liberty
The rest of the world pretty clearly disagrees, otherwise we'd be using anarchy.
Second, a market is extremely democratic: everyone gets 24 hours a day in which to work, spend and sleep. It's when the market is interfered with that it becomes undemocratic: when false incentives and disincentives are created; when false demand is instilled; when false supplies are produced.
Yes, but the perfect market doesn't exist. You will always get anomolies like Microsoft which bend the rules past breaking point, and of course the whole thing revolves around the idea of the perfectly informed consumer which is equally ficticious.
That's not a right--that's a state guarantee. Rights are inherent in being a man: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is far too vague to be worth arguing over - if these "inherant rights" apply to men, why not apes? How do you define what is a right, and what is merely "nice to have"? The Human Rights act attempted to do this, but the repercussions show how tricky it can be.
one has a right to bear arms
Not where I live thank god. You americans can have a pretty warped view of what "rights" are sometime. I can't believe you think people have a right to a random piece of physical machinery but not a living. Which is more important to the majority?
One does not have a right to steal (which is what welfare is: thieving from the rich and giving to the poor)
Flawed argument. People pay taxes. Stealing is usually (simplistically) defined as taking something that is not yours. What can be private property is decided upon by society - air is not private property, but land is. It would seem reasonable that a certain amount of money could be defined as group property.
Now, this does not mean that I'm some sort of crazy Randian loony. Charity is a vitally important thing, and it is quite immoral not to help out those who are worse off. It is good for me to give $20 to a beggar; it is bad for me to clap a gun to your head and make you give him $20. The former is voluntary; the latter is compulsory. The former is charity; the latter is socialism.
Nobody claps a gun to anybodies head. If you don't wish to pay welfare taxes, go live somewhere where they don't exist. Afghanistan is pretty good these days I here. You can't have it both ways - if not helping those in need is wrong, then we should ensure that people do right. If you believe this isn't the case, it would seem that you don't think we need laws at all.
That's why things are constantly getting better. It has nothing to do with paying more for less: it has everything to do with paying less for more.
Reread what I wrote, you are confused. I didn't write "payING more for less", I wrote about getting "paID more for less". Semantically what you wrote and what I wrote are equivalent.
It's a cool system.
Only if you are willing to blindly ignore its flaws, most of which are political and social rather than based purely in economic theory. Nonetheless, an economy does not exist in a vacuum, it's naive to think it does.
Capitalism is not constant. The capitalist economy we have today bears little resemblance to the economic context in which Smith wrote The Wealth of Nation.
The beauty of a market is, provided that fraud is not allowed, the greed of all paradoxically leads to the betterment of all.
Most of the rest of your post is attempting to support this argument. This is a valid, but oversimplified view. Classical or pure economics has long been known to be inadequate to fully understand economies, especially today. For instance, in Adam Smiths age there was no concept of real time currency speculation, a factor that plays a major role in todays financial markets.
No country today uses pure capitalism, in much the same way that nobody uses pure socialism - instead a blend of systems is preferred. In particular a purely market based system, which you would appear to be advocating, is by its very nature undemocratic. The rules are easily bent, and even broken. We all know one good example of that.
Hey, you have no right to a living
That is not correct, at least not for a large section of the worlds population. Under European human rights laws, I have a "right" to a minimum standard of living, which is normally guaranteed by state welfare. Most people would agree that this is the civilised thing to do, unless you would like to see people literally dying of unemployment on the streets.
Why should anyone pay you more to work less?
Being paid more to work less, is essentially what economic progress is about. I no longer have to grow my own food and till my own fields, arguably I have it rather easy, yet I can afford a nice flat and technology beyond the wildest dreams of somebody only 50 years ago.
That's what competition is about. It's rough, but that's Real Life.
Life is what we make it. Money is merely a social construct we invented - contrary to popular belief, it does not control us, we control it.
I think you're assuming that Slashdot (and I) are fluent in game theory. I know a little, but I don't know what "contra bono" is. You'd have to define them to convince people that using it is a valid argument.
Saying that the concept of free trade is "broken" because it's not always practiced is like saying that the idea of health is "broken" because people smoke.
Free trade implicitly relies upon the co-operation of others. By choosing to smoke, I do not force other people into smoking. However, by abandoning the rules of free trade when others are following them, I gain a temporary advantage which forces the hands of others.
Next item, crippled third world economies. So third world countries are better off without external investment? No need to take that any further.
I think you missed my point entirely. Let's take the example of steel tariffs.
When Bush imposed them, it was to protect the American rust belt from an influx of cheap asian steel. The American steel industry (at least in that part) is not efficient, in fact it's behind the rest of the world in terms of steel quality, tools used, and how state-of-the-art the factories are. Their competitors in Europe and Asia are not.
The barriers to entry in the US meant the steel destined for that market was rerouted to Europe. Europe does have a competitive steel industry normally, however the oversupply caused by the rerouting of steel destined for America would have caused prices to drop to the point where European manfucturers would be overpriced. In order to stop an otherwise healthy and competitive industry from being decimated, Europe also imposed restrictions.
The end result was that huge quantities of cheap steel flooded 3rd world markets, ensuring that countries without a steel industry didn't develop one and those that did had to watch as it was destroyed. Why did said 3rd world countries not impose tariffs themselves? Because the IMF, to which they are indebted, does not allow it.
The upshot of all this is that the West ensures that developing countries cannot place trade barriers to protect their own industry, while we do. Because we give ourselves a leg up in this way, "free" trade effectively cripples 3rd world economies.
I'm not sure why you reduced it to "external investment".
I wish I knew of a place it was available online, but if nobody knows of such a place I'd recommend that you buy the book. It's excellent.
This can be clearly seen in the French governments illegal blockades on British beef. Years after they were taken to court and found to be blocking imports for no valid reason, they are still doing it, because otherwise their rural farming communities would go bankrupt (and agriculture is a powerful voter influence in France).
The same is true of steel import tariffs imposed by Bush.
So, we can see that fundamentally the concept of free trade is broken - like most of classical economics, it doesn not work in the real world, and to pretend it does is to deny reality.
Most "real" economists have realised that free trade is not something that should be preached, because despite best intentions it has simply become an abused idea. "Free trade" in practice meant the ability for the US to freely export its goods, but not the other way around (and Europe is just as bad in many respects). This has led to crippled economies in the third world.
So, to say it's a "solved problem in game theory" is correct - it's a solved problem in theory only. In practice, it's not a solved problem and people are looking at alternative economic constructs to help increase wealth and distribute it more fairly (see the work of Lietaer and Gesell for some examples).
So. I don't see the big deal. Root gives you zero security in situations like this, you don't have to be root to read through peoples email, nor send it. In fact, I think the idea should be scrapped - internal security is far less important than external security in situations like this.
Though I have no idea why this is on topic, Chris Brummes articles are great. Having said that, this comment made me laugh (he is explaining the term "bleed"):
It also has practically no presence in business, which affects everything else.
Actually they have quite a few such things. Windows is one. Office is another (most people who don't have any preference for free software prefer MS Office I've found by a long way). MSN Messenger - virtually all my friends use it, because it has the features they want in a well designed and attractive piece of software.
Apple aren't the only ones who write pleasant to use software you know. They are however the only ones who have a blindly loyal userbase.
Microsoft is, IMO, so bent on keeping the business markets that they've all but neglected their consumer market.
'fraid not. I wish that were true though. They make a lot of software that people really like. They make plenty that they don't as well of course.
Aside from some pretty colors, self-customizing menus and Apple-chasing software hacks, they've not done anything new for the home market since Windows 95 was released.
If Apple and Microsoft were reversed in that statement, it would rightly be sunk under a storm of -1 Trolls, but because it's bashing MS and pumping Apple it's insightful now. I'm not surprised, but it doesn't get any less irritating.
BioWare screwed up. iD, ATITD and PomPom can do simultaneous or near-simultaneous releases of their products for Linux and Windows. The reason BioWare could not is they had zero regard for portability when they started, and that kind of thing has to be thought about from the start.
No, that wouldn't work. Microsoft depends on high growth for stockholder returns, and partly to pay its salary bill. Operating systems and productivity software are a saturated market - they own it, and with flat PC sales, it's not expanding. Worse, they're about to have their lunch eaten by Linux.
They have to spread out, and hope that todays money-loser turns into tomorrows next big thing.
Second, drop product activation. No one likes being treated like a criminal.
Unfortunately enough people are that it makes sense to try and maximise profits by clamping down on it.
The real purpose of product activation is to stop friends and family from sharing copies. If Microsoft's software was lower in price, (see my first point) people would simply buy their own copy.
What price should it be?
Fourth, stop with those outrageous deals to stop Linux
Yeah, this one would be nice :) But I can understand why they do it, it's like a snowslide, all it takes is a few blasts and the right place and the whole thing starts sliding. They know this.
They also know timing is critical. Windows only has so long, eventually it will be a liability rather than an asset. Eventually it will be cut off from them as a revenue source and by that day, if they haven't diversified enough, it's game over. No more Redmond.
They have time to do that, but it's hard. Stuff like MSN, the Xbox etc shows they in this for the long haul, as well they might be. So they need to buy time, because they don't know how fast things will move once Linux becomnes truly viable.
Sixth, I could go on and on and on. But since my boss expects me to work for money, Iâ(TM)ll quit here and let others post some suggestions.
Heh, my boss too, so one last one - unfortunately being nice to their customers isn't going to turn Microsoft around, it's far too late for that. They have to leave Windows before it drags them down with it, and until they manage that it's a race against time.
Try again some other time.