It took ages for it to be shown that Office uses MS undocumented APIs. You can't conclusively show it, because QuickTime is closed source. And bear in mind that most Mac products (or this used to be the case anyway) won't run without QuickTime - could you really scrap QT entirely and replace it with Real? I find that unlikely, but I don't know enough to be certain.
Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer. There's nothing that irks me more than working on a different computer at the office, and some wiseacre has removed the menus from MSIE.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe he hides the menus on IE because he prefers it that way, and works better once he's customized his working environment? It may annoy you but it's not your machine/user area, it's theirs.
By this logic, all cars should be the same colour, and nobody should be allowed to "customize" their desk, in case you have to sit at it.
And this is the right way for things to be- OS X is far more theme friendly than any other OS- hell the graphical eliments are all easily accessible pdf or tiff files and easy to replace. Want a different looking dock? Trivial. Want a different looking login window? no problem.
You have got to be kidding. There isn't even any GUI for switching themes AT ALL. Even Windows XP has that. My Mac using friend attempted to skin OS X once - whoops, it installed OK, but wouldn't uninstall. He had bits of an XP style theme lying around his Mac for ages. I think in the end he had to reinstall.
Practically ALL operating systems store their images somewhere, they have to, unless they are hardcoded into the compiled code itself. That does not make an OS themable, remember PDF isn't even an editable file format. OS X is themable in the same way that Windows 98 is, using a variety of hacks and utilities like WindowBlinds that can cause instability.
Standardized controls are what makes OS X much easier for newbies to use than other operating systems.
Let people change the look of their computer, but not the feel. That's the right strategy and the one apple seems to be following.
What exactly is the feel? Can you please define feel for me? As far as I'm concerned, a button is a button, and I've never seen anybody, not even the greenest newbie confused because on my computer a button is beige whereas on theirs it's grey. All operating systems have standardized controls, yes, even Linux. The controls were standardised by Xerox originally, then later Windows. Theming is just a way of adapting your working environment to suit you. There's no evidence that it reduces usability to any great degree.
I guess that depends on whether you think QuickTime competes with RealPlayer. I'd say it does, but clearly Apple considers it an internal part of the OS. It's a fine line, isn't it?
Yep, sounds like a good decision. Customizability is the enemy of stability and usability. A case in point was extensions in pre-X versions of MacOS. Everybody had different extensions, and extensions would conflict with each other and with various apps.
No, I can't agree with that. Customizability is essential to usability. People tend to forget that usability is not this set in stone set of rules that everybody must follow and then magically we all become more productive.
Usability/ease of use is essentially a completely personal thing. Yes, there is such a thing as bad UI. There are UIs that simply make no sense, are hard to use etc. However, this doesn't not mean customizability is bad. That would imply that a) we are all the same and b) Apple is perfect.
A good example of this was Eclipse. For those who don't know Eclipse is an IDE, that can be used amongst other things for Java development (which is what I do in my day job). I decided to try it out. It was abandoned within a few hours.... the reason? I couldn't customize the keybindings. That's a feature they class as "nice to have, but not essential". I was used to my set of keybindings, hardly anything bizarre, I just wanted Ctrl-Backspace to kill the last word. No can do. I found the experience very frustrating because I had to adapt myself to the software, rather than the other way around. A shame, otherwise Eclipse is really nice.
I dislike the Mac philsophy for exactly this reason. It assumes there is one way, Steves way. Anybody who doesn't like that way, should get out of the way.
Anyway, this isn't exactly surprising. The Mac is these days defined if anything not by its technology (which the target market doesn't care about anyway) but by the brand. Witness the colour coordination between hardware/software/website. Witness the massive amounts of marketing they are engaged in. Witness the huge effort put into how it looks. If people go to a friends house and see a Mac that's no longer got the Aqua interface, the brand is diluted, which might make the user happy but sells fewer Macs overall. With the Mac, you really do get what you pay for - take it or leave it.
"It seems that Microsoft's goal is now simply to grow its user base and make a success of Xbox Live. "
It seems that this has usually been their strategy with new products. Simply plug away at them as they get progressively better, combined with some nice market leverage. I wonder if in 3 years Nintendo and Sony will still be smiling. This is almost exactly how the Office story played out.
It's perhaps offtopic, but what does GNU actually mean? I know what it's supposed to stand for, but I mean originally, back in the days. I read somewhere that it was some kind of wierd african word, does anybody know more? GNU's not UNIX is the sort of abbreviation you make up later to fit the word imho.
Single sign-on, whether Passport or Liberty Alliance, seems like a disaster waiting to happen, although if properly designed and correctly implemented (bloody big "if"), it'd be safer than multiple sign-ons all using the same password (because the latter gives multiple points of attack). But it's also painting a huge target and sign on itself that says "crack me!".
Possibly, but bear in mind if you break into somebodies email account you can usually compromise most of their web passwords anyway, as almost all sites have an "email me my password feature". In effect, your email account is your digital identity, as it holds the keys to all your other passwords too. So that's also a pretty big target in a way, yet email breakins are fairly rare - possibly because people recognise its importance and choose good passwords?
1) This is merely an offer from the Alliance to Microsoft. MS probably won't take it up.
2) Even if they did decide to co-operate, it'd largely be meaningless. There are so few websites using Passport the list can fit into less than a screenful.
3) Even if this wasn't a problem, making Passport interoperate with anything would be a major technical headache. It simply wasn't designed for that at all. It's centralised so badly it'd need to be ripped apart and rebuilt to allow for "federation". Notice how that using Kerberos to open it up idea seems to have faded away? That's because Kerby was never meant for that anyway, and because it's extremely hard to open up Passport.
4) Passport is growing at a snails pace, with good reason. The gain you get from it is small (often the user needs to give a password anyway, regardless of whether they use passport or not) and the cost is huge, both in developer time and various costs involved in working with Microsoft.
But personally, i agree with what another Slashdot reader said: its the browser's job to look after a user's password. a single username and password for all your site's is absolutly retarded security-wise.
No, it's extremely smart security wise. Now, for all I know you may be the paragon of good security practice, but most people are not. In fact, most people, faced with a morass of passwords for various different services do something that is extremely bad and set all their passwords to the same thing. I've done this, for instance, because it's either that or write down all my passwords (which of course some people do) and keep them on my computer, which means I cannot access any services when I don't have that list.
There is this fantastically common misconception that centralising your various digital identities will somehow decrease security. Not true! There's a reason most of us have 1 (perhaps 2) personal email accounts. We don't have 100 email accounts with different user names and passwords because the truly minor increase in security that would bring is nowhere near worth the major increase in hassle.
Single sign on is coming people, and when it arrives not only will 95% of the computer using population be more secure because of it, but computers will be dramatically easier to use as well.
I've read the liberty specs in more detail than most of the people here on slashdot I'd bet, as I'm working on a server that contains an (open source) implementation of them. No, it's not released yet, perhaps in a few months. But believe me, the LA specs are not scary, they will not force you to tell the government what your favourite colour is, they will not take your first born child. They will make your life easier.
That's bollocks, and I hope it gets modded as a troll. Actually OEone have contributed loads back to the community, for instance take the Calendar component of Mozilla - their code, they have somebody paid to hack on it. They've also contributed LOTS of bugfixes to Mozilla itself.
It really is kind of the answer to client-side.NET even before.NET was invented.
Yes! Exactly, you hit it on the head. Mozilla is the open source answer to.NET, a fully featured development platform. However, this is the real thing..NET is really just Java done better on the client side, despite what MS say about it being a "platform for XML". No really, that's what they say. Yet how do you construct GUIs in it? That's right, by having Visual Studio generate code for you.
Pah. Mozilla is a platform for XML, and an amazing platform it is too. It's not just XUL, though that's what gets all the press. It's XBL (xml components), RDF (generic data structure templates, mondo cool, makes synching ui and data much easier), XSLT, inline SVG and so on. If you reading this and don't have a clue what I'm on about, then spend a few hours investigating. Read up on the W3C specs and see how neatly they all dovetail into each other, be amazed at the sheer power you have with them. Then see that Mozilla has filled in the missing pieces and is an XML platform done right.
Now start wondering if your next project can be written in it.
I am a happy user of Mozilla, but i dislike the monolithic approach of integrating browser, mailreader, newsreader, composer and you name it into one executable.
Actually they are not combined into one executable. The mozilla binary itself merely loads up XPCOM components. If you don't actually load the mail component, it doesn't load anything related to mail.
Part of the reason that mozilla takes time to load is because it is actually doing quite a lot of work. It's booted Gecko, SpiderMonkey (javascript), the XUL objects, XBL, RDF code, all the artwork, deserializing the fastload multiplex and so on. It gives a lot of flexibility, but takes a second or two more. To be honest I no longer have gripes with startup time, especially on Windows.
I hope Mozilla in the future will be split into a suite of components, that work well together and with a consistent interface.
Snap. Go look at the source. It's totally componentized with consistant and standardised interfaces. Or did you mean the GUI?
Now with MOz's interface scheme, as with a lot of other cross-platform libraries like Java, QT, etc, it doesn't tie into the OS control toolkit and instead relies on drawing it's own widgets.
Actually that's not entirely true. On Windows XP and MacOS X it uses the platform native widgets at least to some extent. I use Pinball at home, and classic at work, because at work I use XP and it looks much better. It's simply a case of implementing the correct widgets - I wish somebody would do that for GTK2, or better yet create a widget toolkit independant theming system.
That's one reason I'm not impressed with Phoenix. Sorry, but on Linux it a) looks like a Windows app, and b) isn't fast. I guess I'll still with Mozilla for now.
.NET is great!
The.NET framework library is very complete and easy to use.
The.NET CLR is also very cool.
I will be nice when I can develop things using Visual Studio.NET and deploy the assemblies on Linux servers using MONO.
Check out java. That does all those things, but it does them now, and it's got a lot of support and it's also multi-vendor. You will NOT be able to write stuff in VS.NET and run them on Linux, because very little of the framework classes are "open", for instance Mono uses its own gui framework based on GTK.
Distributing doesn't cost next-to-nothing, alas, and won't in the foreseeable future.
Ah ha! This is the crux of the problem, the thing it all revolves around.
[puts on his economists hat]. What we are witnessing here is perhaps the first time in which something that was previously scarce (music) is becoming non scarce through technology.
Let's assume that one day the RIAA decide to stop hounding the P2P networks. They'd improve dramatically right, because you don't need any of that distributed encryption stuff. So it'd become possible to get virtually any music you wanted, for free, quickly and easily. The key word there is for free. It costs nothing effectively (yes yes, I know everything has a cost, but the perception is that it costs nothing), and as such music has now become a non scarce resource.
Why is this so important? Because capitalism really sucks at managing non scarce resources. Scarce stuff it does great, as supply and demand/competition/best product for the best price kicks in and everything is very efficient. Tins of beans capitalism does well. Information it does not do well.
Most of the stress and strain we're seeing here today, with patents, copyrights, and music distribution is down to the fact that people are attempting to force capitalism onto markets that it cannot handle. The only way of making capitalism work in these cases is to try and make things scarce once more. So you have patents (ownership of ideas), copyright (ownership of intellectual works), royalties (payment for that "product") and so on. The problem is, these mechanisms are at best horrible hacks. We've all seen the abuses of the system they allow.
So what is the solution? The solution is simple - new economic system must be created that is designed (yes, designed) for lack of scarcity. The gift economy is a good starting point, but it's far from the only possibility. Right now, there is big inertia behind the status quo. There are vested interests in seeing things remain the same - somebody needs to change that. I don't know how it would start, I'd imagine by somebody setting up a distribution network (possibly p2p, possibly just a series of permenant servers) with tipping built in. Espra tried this, but the project died. The problem we face right now is that micropayments are hard, I should think that can be worked around for now, but a real solution is needed.
And then? Who knows. The only way to see is by trying it. There's more info on my thoughts here about this topic, it's got some ideas for how this new market could work.
Is it possible to one day replace the current system with a new one, better optimized for information? Yes. Linux is showing that the little people can, if they try hard enough, push against massive inertia and alter the status quo, Linux is itself an economic revolution of sorts. All it takes is enough people with a shared vision.
Actually Reisers system is more general. Read his whitepaper to see in depth why this is. Basically imposing a relational database adds unnecessary structure which is bad (again, read his paper to see why). Reisers system is more general as it will allow for set theoretic naming eventually, which is more powerful
Just had a fantastic brainwave. Why don't we have a story title "More windows users switch to Linux" posted in the Apple section every fortnight? Not only would it be true (I can provide you with countless individuals myself if you want), but it would even up the balance, and give all the new Linux converts a chance to talk about how they've "switched" and are "never going back" to the horrible, buggy XP, as well as annoying Mac users:)
3. A Linux installation needs either its own hard drive, a free partition of space on a Windows drive (at least a few gigabytes) or its own machine. If you have only one machine with one partition on one hard drive, and that is for Windows, then you *might* damage your Windows installation installing Linux.
The only problem might be if your drive is entirely NTFS (ie win2k or xp). FAT32 drives can be seamlessly resized by any good Linux installer. SuSE 8 will even intelligently figure out smart partition sizes and advise you on what to do. We NEED good NTFS drivers though, and they're not coming:(
4. While most hardware I have ever purchased is supported, some things just don't have support yet. One example is the "winmodem". Most modems sold today are sneakily designed to work only with Microsoft Windows. Yes, this is a conspiracy between Microsoft and the manufacturers of those modems. If your modem doesnt work, you will probably have to buy a new modem which specifically says it is a "hardware modem". As someone in [your local computer/electronics store] for help.
Not entirely true that. There is support for HCF/HSF based WinModems, as an italian guy signed an NDA with the chipset manufacturers. The drivers aren't as good as the standard modem drivers, but they DO work and are easy to install as long as you're not afraid of following instructions that involve typing things in. I used them myself for many months.
Another solution is Codeweavers [codeweavers.com] Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin, which let you use Windows office apps and browser plugins. However, this option requires a subscription fee.
This also isn't true. You don't have to subscribe to get CrossOver, you just buy it for about $50. As CrossOver is just a "distro" of Wine, you can go to WineHQ.com and get it yourself. I've done this, it worked fine. Be aware that if you muck about with Wine internals though it might damage Windows. CodeWeavers contribute all their code back to the Wine project, so you get the same functionality, but CrossOver has a nice installer etc and tech support.
No problem friend, I hope building your own box goes well. It's something of an art, I've done it twice now and although quite good fun, when it doesn't start or whatever your heart tends to skip a beat (unless you're filthy rich of course). Anyway, have fun!
There is a very simple reason why many Linux boxes superficially resemble Windows, and that's because GUI research is practically dead. The purpose of an UI by the way is to make you work faster, not to look sci fi. As it happens the Windows style task switcher with app button UI is pretty efficient, and it's also what everybody is used to.
You can make your Linux box resemble nothing else. Just install an "alternative" WM like E, FluxBox and so on. Often, people who take the time to learn them find they work faster, but most people don't want to break the habit of years to gain a modest increase in user efficiency. So we have interfaces that resemble Windows.
As for Apple, I've seen many posts saying "It looks just like Windows, Apple is so innovative", or some such bull. The MacOS user interface is now a blend of the old MacOS UI (designed 10+ years ago) and NeXT (ditto). It's absolutely not new, or innovative, unless you class high colour themes innovative. It's also useless for ex Windows users, it requires a huge amount of effort to get used to its quirks. If you've just spent $1000+ on a new Mac then of course you will invest the effort required to adapt, it's either that or admit that you've thrown out a lot of money due to lazyness. Having used Macs but never bought them, I can testify to just how irritating it is to learn new habits for no real gain in productivity. So please quit it with the Mac trolls, OS X is largely irrelevant for the "common user", as computers are at saturation so the type of person this distro is aimed at anyway needs to be broken in gently.
Codeweavers/Transgaming Wine does every single one of them. It does Office, it's in beta testing for Quicken, it plays games, and it runs TextPad which is imho the best Windows text editor.
Windows compatability gets better every single week. Just read the kernel cousins!
No no, Plan9 has similar methods but different goals. Plan9 moved various APIs into the filing system. The aim was similar in a general sense, to increase the power of the filing system and so to increase interconnectedness of components.
Plan9 moved for instance the windowing API into the filing system. What ReiserFS is doing is to increase the power of the filing system, turning it into effect a very powerful semi-structured database. The aim is to improve storage of data, not to move APIs around and into different forms.
I've looked high and low, and the closest I think you'll find to this was BeFS, which was really little more than a slick implementation of extended attributes on a normal filing system, certainly not the entire rethink that Hans is advocating.
Microsoft are trying something similar afaik with Longhorn, but that's based on SQL Server last I heard. That's bad for reasons explained in the white paper (imposing unneccesary structure).
Slashdot Mirror
It took ages for it to be shown that Office uses MS undocumented APIs. You can't conclusively show it, because QuickTime is closed source. And bear in mind that most Mac products (or this used to be the case anyway) won't run without QuickTime - could you really scrap QT entirely and replace it with Real? I find that unlikely, but I don't know enough to be certain.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe he hides the menus on IE because he prefers it that way, and works better once he's customized his working environment? It may annoy you but it's not your machine/user area, it's theirs.
By this logic, all cars should be the same colour, and nobody should be allowed to "customize" their desk, in case you have to sit at it.
You have got to be kidding. There isn't even any GUI for switching themes AT ALL. Even Windows XP has that. My Mac using friend attempted to skin OS X once - whoops, it installed OK, but wouldn't uninstall. He had bits of an XP style theme lying around his Mac for ages. I think in the end he had to reinstall.
Practically ALL operating systems store their images somewhere, they have to, unless they are hardcoded into the compiled code itself. That does not make an OS themable, remember PDF isn't even an editable file format. OS X is themable in the same way that Windows 98 is, using a variety of hacks and utilities like WindowBlinds that can cause instability.
Standardized controls are what makes OS X much easier for newbies to use than other operating systems. Let people change the look of their computer, but not the feel. That's the right strategy and the one apple seems to be following.
What exactly is the feel? Can you please define feel for me? As far as I'm concerned, a button is a button, and I've never seen anybody, not even the greenest newbie confused because on my computer a button is beige whereas on theirs it's grey. All operating systems have standardized controls, yes, even Linux. The controls were standardised by Xerox originally, then later Windows. Theming is just a way of adapting your working environment to suit you. There's no evidence that it reduces usability to any great degree.
I guess that depends on whether you think QuickTime competes with RealPlayer. I'd say it does, but clearly Apple considers it an internal part of the OS. It's a fine line, isn't it?
No, I can't agree with that. Customizability is essential to usability. People tend to forget that usability is not this set in stone set of rules that everybody must follow and then magically we all become more productive.
Usability/ease of use is essentially a completely personal thing. Yes, there is such a thing as bad UI. There are UIs that simply make no sense, are hard to use etc. However, this doesn't not mean customizability is bad. That would imply that a) we are all the same and b) Apple is perfect.
A good example of this was Eclipse. For those who don't know Eclipse is an IDE, that can be used amongst other things for Java development (which is what I do in my day job). I decided to try it out. It was abandoned within a few hours.... the reason? I couldn't customize the keybindings. That's a feature they class as "nice to have, but not essential". I was used to my set of keybindings, hardly anything bizarre, I just wanted Ctrl-Backspace to kill the last word. No can do. I found the experience very frustrating because I had to adapt myself to the software, rather than the other way around. A shame, otherwise Eclipse is really nice.
I dislike the Mac philsophy for exactly this reason. It assumes there is one way, Steves way. Anybody who doesn't like that way, should get out of the way.
Anyway, this isn't exactly surprising. The Mac is these days defined if anything not by its technology (which the target market doesn't care about anyway) but by the brand. Witness the colour coordination between hardware/software/website. Witness the massive amounts of marketing they are engaged in. Witness the huge effort put into how it looks. If people go to a friends house and see a Mac that's no longer got the Aqua interface, the brand is diluted, which might make the user happy but sells fewer Macs overall. With the Mac, you really do get what you pay for - take it or leave it.
It seems that this has usually been their strategy with new products. Simply plug away at them as they get progressively better, combined with some nice market leverage. I wonder if in 3 years Nintendo and Sony will still be smiling. This is almost exactly how the Office story played out.
It's perhaps offtopic, but what does GNU actually mean? I know what it's supposed to stand for, but I mean originally, back in the days. I read somewhere that it was some kind of wierd african word, does anybody know more? GNU's not UNIX is the sort of abbreviation you make up later to fit the word imho.
Possibly, but bear in mind if you break into somebodies email account you can usually compromise most of their web passwords anyway, as almost all sites have an "email me my password feature". In effect, your email account is your digital identity, as it holds the keys to all your other passwords too. So that's also a pretty big target in a way, yet email breakins are fairly rare - possibly because people recognise its importance and choose good passwords?
2) Even if they did decide to co-operate, it'd largely be meaningless. There are so few websites using Passport the list can fit into less than a screenful.
3) Even if this wasn't a problem, making Passport interoperate with anything would be a major technical headache. It simply wasn't designed for that at all. It's centralised so badly it'd need to be ripped apart and rebuilt to allow for "federation". Notice how that using Kerberos to open it up idea seems to have faded away? That's because Kerby was never meant for that anyway, and because it's extremely hard to open up Passport.
4) Passport is growing at a snails pace, with good reason. The gain you get from it is small (often the user needs to give a password anyway, regardless of whether they use passport or not) and the cost is huge, both in developer time and various costs involved in working with Microsoft.
No, it's extremely smart security wise. Now, for all I know you may be the paragon of good security practice, but most people are not. In fact, most people, faced with a morass of passwords for various different services do something that is extremely bad and set all their passwords to the same thing. I've done this, for instance, because it's either that or write down all my passwords (which of course some people do) and keep them on my computer, which means I cannot access any services when I don't have that list.
There is this fantastically common misconception that centralising your various digital identities will somehow decrease security. Not true! There's a reason most of us have 1 (perhaps 2) personal email accounts. We don't have 100 email accounts with different user names and passwords because the truly minor increase in security that would bring is nowhere near worth the major increase in hassle.
Single sign on is coming people, and when it arrives not only will 95% of the computer using population be more secure because of it, but computers will be dramatically easier to use as well.
I've read the liberty specs in more detail than most of the people here on slashdot I'd bet, as I'm working on a server that contains an (open source) implementation of them. No, it's not released yet, perhaps in a few months. But believe me, the LA specs are not scary, they will not force you to tell the government what your favourite colour is, they will not take your first born child. They will make your life easier.
I don't understand. Passport is browser neutral, you can access it with Mozilla on Linux for instance.
That's bollocks, and I hope it gets modded as a troll. Actually OEone have contributed loads back to the community, for instance take the Calendar component of Mozilla - their code, they have somebody paid to hack on it. They've also contributed LOTS of bugfixes to Mozilla itself.
Yes! Exactly, you hit it on the head. Mozilla is the open source answer to .NET, a fully featured development platform. However, this is the real thing. .NET is really just Java done better on the client side, despite what MS say about it being a "platform for XML". No really, that's what they say. Yet how do you construct GUIs in it? That's right, by having Visual Studio generate code for you.
Pah. Mozilla is a platform for XML, and an amazing platform it is too. It's not just XUL, though that's what gets all the press. It's XBL (xml components), RDF (generic data structure templates, mondo cool, makes synching ui and data much easier), XSLT, inline SVG and so on. If you reading this and don't have a clue what I'm on about, then spend a few hours investigating. Read up on the W3C specs and see how neatly they all dovetail into each other, be amazed at the sheer power you have with them. Then see that Mozilla has filled in the missing pieces and is an XML platform done right.
Now start wondering if your next project can be written in it.
ohhhh, the irony
Actually they are not combined into one executable. The mozilla binary itself merely loads up XPCOM components. If you don't actually load the mail component, it doesn't load anything related to mail.
Part of the reason that mozilla takes time to load is because it is actually doing quite a lot of work. It's booted Gecko, SpiderMonkey (javascript), the XUL objects, XBL, RDF code, all the artwork, deserializing the fastload multiplex and so on. It gives a lot of flexibility, but takes a second or two more. To be honest I no longer have gripes with startup time, especially on Windows.
I hope Mozilla in the future will be split into a suite of components, that work well together and with a consistent interface.
Snap. Go look at the source. It's totally componentized with consistant and standardised interfaces. Or did you mean the GUI?
Actually that's not entirely true. On Windows XP and MacOS X it uses the platform native widgets at least to some extent. I use Pinball at home, and classic at work, because at work I use XP and it looks much better. It's simply a case of implementing the correct widgets - I wish somebody would do that for GTK2, or better yet create a widget toolkit independant theming system.
That's one reason I'm not impressed with Phoenix. Sorry, but on Linux it a) looks like a Windows app, and b) isn't fast. I guess I'll still with Mozilla for now.
Check out java. That does all those things, but it does them now, and it's got a lot of support and it's also multi-vendor. You will NOT be able to write stuff in VS.NET and run them on Linux, because very little of the framework classes are "open", for instance Mono uses its own gui framework based on GTK.
Ah ha! This is the crux of the problem, the thing it all revolves around.
[puts on his economists hat]. What we are witnessing here is perhaps the first time in which something that was previously scarce (music) is becoming non scarce through technology.
Let's assume that one day the RIAA decide to stop hounding the P2P networks. They'd improve dramatically right, because you don't need any of that distributed encryption stuff. So it'd become possible to get virtually any music you wanted, for free, quickly and easily. The key word there is for free. It costs nothing effectively (yes yes, I know everything has a cost, but the perception is that it costs nothing), and as such music has now become a non scarce resource.
Why is this so important? Because capitalism really sucks at managing non scarce resources. Scarce stuff it does great, as supply and demand/competition/best product for the best price kicks in and everything is very efficient. Tins of beans capitalism does well. Information it does not do well.
Most of the stress and strain we're seeing here today, with patents, copyrights, and music distribution is down to the fact that people are attempting to force capitalism onto markets that it cannot handle. The only way of making capitalism work in these cases is to try and make things scarce once more. So you have patents (ownership of ideas), copyright (ownership of intellectual works), royalties (payment for that "product") and so on. The problem is, these mechanisms are at best horrible hacks. We've all seen the abuses of the system they allow.
So what is the solution? The solution is simple - new economic system must be created that is designed (yes, designed) for lack of scarcity. The gift economy is a good starting point, but it's far from the only possibility. Right now, there is big inertia behind the status quo. There are vested interests in seeing things remain the same - somebody needs to change that. I don't know how it would start, I'd imagine by somebody setting up a distribution network (possibly p2p, possibly just a series of permenant servers) with tipping built in. Espra tried this, but the project died. The problem we face right now is that micropayments are hard, I should think that can be worked around for now, but a real solution is needed.
And then? Who knows. The only way to see is by trying it. There's more info on my thoughts here about this topic, it's got some ideas for how this new market could work.
Is it possible to one day replace the current system with a new one, better optimized for information? Yes. Linux is showing that the little people can, if they try hard enough, push against massive inertia and alter the status quo, Linux is itself an economic revolution of sorts. All it takes is enough people with a shared vision.
Anybody up for it? Janis?
Actually Reisers system is more general. Read his whitepaper to see in depth why this is. Basically imposing a relational database adds unnecessary structure which is bad (again, read his paper to see why). Reisers system is more general as it will allow for set theoretic naming eventually, which is more powerful
What do you think?
The only problem might be if your drive is entirely NTFS (ie win2k or xp). FAT32 drives can be seamlessly resized by any good Linux installer. SuSE 8 will even intelligently figure out smart partition sizes and advise you on what to do. We NEED good NTFS drivers though, and they're not coming :(
4. While most hardware I have ever purchased is supported, some things just don't have support yet. One example is the "winmodem". Most modems sold today are sneakily designed to work only with Microsoft Windows. Yes, this is a conspiracy between Microsoft and the manufacturers of those modems. If your modem doesnt work, you will probably have to buy a new modem which specifically says it is a "hardware modem". As someone in [your local computer/electronics store] for help.
Not entirely true that. There is support for HCF/HSF based WinModems, as an italian guy signed an NDA with the chipset manufacturers. The drivers aren't as good as the standard modem drivers, but they DO work and are easy to install as long as you're not afraid of following instructions that involve typing things in. I used them myself for many months.
Another solution is Codeweavers [codeweavers.com] Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin, which let you use Windows office apps and browser plugins. However, this option requires a subscription fee.
This also isn't true. You don't have to subscribe to get CrossOver, you just buy it for about $50. As CrossOver is just a "distro" of Wine, you can go to WineHQ.com and get it yourself. I've done this, it worked fine. Be aware that if you muck about with Wine internals though it might damage Windows. CodeWeavers contribute all their code back to the Wine project, so you get the same functionality, but CrossOver has a nice installer etc and tech support.
No problem friend, I hope building your own box goes well. It's something of an art, I've done it twice now and although quite good fun, when it doesn't start or whatever your heart tends to skip a beat (unless you're filthy rich of course). Anyway, have fun!
You can make your Linux box resemble nothing else. Just install an "alternative" WM like E, FluxBox and so on. Often, people who take the time to learn them find they work faster, but most people don't want to break the habit of years to gain a modest increase in user efficiency. So we have interfaces that resemble Windows.
As for Apple, I've seen many posts saying "It looks just like Windows, Apple is so innovative", or some such bull. The MacOS user interface is now a blend of the old MacOS UI (designed 10+ years ago) and NeXT (ditto). It's absolutely not new, or innovative, unless you class high colour themes innovative. It's also useless for ex Windows users, it requires a huge amount of effort to get used to its quirks. If you've just spent $1000+ on a new Mac then of course you will invest the effort required to adapt, it's either that or admit that you've thrown out a lot of money due to lazyness. Having used Macs but never bought them, I can testify to just how irritating it is to learn new habits for no real gain in productivity. So please quit it with the Mac trolls, OS X is largely irrelevant for the "common user", as computers are at saturation so the type of person this distro is aimed at anyway needs to be broken in gently.
Codeweavers/Transgaming Wine does every single one of them. It does Office, it's in beta testing for Quicken, it plays games, and it runs TextPad which is imho the best Windows text editor.
Windows compatability gets better every single week. Just read the kernel cousins!
Plan9 moved for instance the windowing API into the filing system. What ReiserFS is doing is to increase the power of the filing system, turning it into effect a very powerful semi-structured database. The aim is to improve storage of data, not to move APIs around and into different forms.
I've looked high and low, and the closest I think you'll find to this was BeFS, which was really little more than a slick implementation of extended attributes on a normal filing system, certainly not the entire rethink that Hans is advocating.
Microsoft are trying something similar afaik with Longhorn, but that's based on SQL Server last I heard. That's bad for reasons explained in the white paper (imposing unneccesary structure).