Apparently MS has given up all hope of re-gaining respect from a large portion of the user community (I'm not just talking Linux and OS X users).
Based on headlines from the last few days alone I think they are going to prove themselves as a company and in the case of a few front facing individuals, bigger bungholes that even detractors like me thought possible. These things don't even go over well with Windows users I know as they too are often users of various Open Source programs (like Firefox) that could be directly or indirectly affected.
More and more people are not fearing change and are changing to things like Open Office and web-based word processing. I used to preach at people about the advantages of Linux and Open Source. Made very little headway, because people don't like change. Now they have a choice between changes forced on them by Microsoft, and an old interface (Open Office) that looks more like the old Office than the new Office does. Now I'm helping companies make the switch. Thank you Microsoft!
Funny, if some other company had vended something that looked exactly like Vista and the new Office, MS would have put out a study describing the very high costs of user retraining. You can only mislead your customers so much with this sort of nonsense before you achieve total loss of credibility, at that point even when you tell them the truth they are not inclined to believe you. I think Microsoft has finally achieved this goal, although why they would have wanted to I can't say, maybe just some inside joke among marketing people. Clearly the company is not run by techies.
Could RMS actually be a visionary and not just a zealot? It's already undeniable that he's done the entire software industry a world of good by sticking to his beliefs.
Both I'd say. I think of him as the founding father of Open Source and clearly a very smart dude.
Being a founding father of something doesn't imply perfection though. I think his "attitude" sometimes does more harm than good. Mixing software issues with the politics of Cuba doesn't help much. There are enough people who equate Open Source with "Communism" already and RMS political statements don't help in that regard.
I personally see Open Source as being more at home in a Capitalist system. Then you get into the argument over ideal political systems versus real-world ones. In the real world we have our choice between all-powerful governments that treat people like cattle, or companies that do the same thing. Given the realities I'd rather have many powerful entities than just one. Living on the edges of such entity's domain can yield almost total freedom. Even so called benevolent dictatorships don't have a very good track record by comparison.
I worked at State for a few years and found that they have their heads totally up Microsoft's ass. I don't expect this will change anything. Mentioning any alternative to Microsoft products for all practical purposes is forbidden.
When the Federal government starts to trend away from its Windows-only situation, and I think this WILL happen eventually, the State Department will be among the last to switch. It took Wang going out of the computer hardware business for them to even START migrating to something else. That is indicative of their mindset.
The question is, once large organizations figure out (if they are actually interested in saving money let's say) that this one percent phenomena exists, how valuable will it be for them to buy everyone in the organization a $200+ piece of software "just in case" they need it?
The more appropriate response will be for Office to be looked upon in the same way that a compiler is, something that just a few people, specialists, need to have a copy of, while everyone else can make use of much simpler web-based alternatives.
As people start to use "Google Office" at home for its ease of sharing documents, etc, the same argument that made Office a standard will start to apply to Google Apps: "Hey, all these people right out of school already know Google Apps, let's just standardized on that so we don't have to teach them Office".
I don't think I've run MS Office in three years, and my use of Open Office is starting to fall off quite a bit as I just load things people send me into Google Docs from the get-go. I'm also noticing that the only thing I'm storing on my PCs are music files and photos, with more and more photos being stored online as well. This is great!
"To be fair, it isn't that hard for a Robert to type in Richard instead."
This just in:
Kevin Beares, the Windows Home Server community lead at Microsoft, wrote in an updated memo to all testers named Richard or Robert: 'As someone on Slashdot graciously pointed out, someone name Robert might have typed in Ricard instead so for right now, you have no access to the beta until I can find the Richard (or Robert). Note, people named Kevin, Steve or Bill will not be affected at this time, however we may have to expand our search to people named Dick, Bob, Bobby, Rick, Roberto, Richardo. That is all.
captcha's are not restricted to images of letters. For example: you could ask people to solve a regular text question (this would also fix accessibility issues)
You mean as in:
Describe what the following expression does in 30 words or less: {"ab", "c"}{"d", "ef"} = {"abd", "abef", "cd", "cef"}
Man, I'll never get into forum postings if they do that!
Just as the time came when everyone went from centralized servers to desktops, the time is coming where everything will move back to centralized servers.
Thank GOD!!...and all (or mostly) because the people who made IBM dumb terminals and the people who made Wang (and other) dumb terminals didn't think it worth the effort to come up with a standard for such devices. Now the PC, for the most part, is that standard.
The disadvantage to this "all the way around the barn" path that we've taken is that we now have to eliminate all the crap that came along with it, like operating systems that can "get infected".
I'm still looking forward to a standard box that can be presented to non-technical users at a price point where it can be replaced every few years with ***NO*** intervening mucking about by technical friends and family (like me) or the fly-by-night computer store down the street. I don't care it it's vended by Apple, Microsoft, Dell, or some company I've never heard of in China. I'll buy a dozen all by myself to hand out so that I can get out of the (unpaid) phone support business once and for all.
I wouldn't mind seeing some companies that got us where we are going out of business in the process. Our current paradigm is a f***ed up situation that the so-called visionaries should have never allowed us to get into.
As you and others point out, the following statement from the GP or so is very very wrong:
Taxes on activities carried out in the Real World (tm) are taxes because those activities depend on certain services which are funded by tax monies.
On the other hand I think one of the things that is very broken about out tax system is that it is far too complicated. A cynic would say that this is intentional, so as to hide from us just how much the take is (well, I would say that too, do you know how much a head of lettuce would cost if there were no taxes added on to all goods and services involved in its production?)
Almost all taxation has easily spotted disadvantages so I won't go into inequities I find in property taxes, gas taxes and other "special purpose" taxes that in some cases *do* fit the description in the GP post. But sales taxes or transfer taxes are really sneaky, and in some cases can be almost impossible for the individual to keep track of. More disturbing that the erroneous statem in the GP is this opinion from TFA:
How should transactions within Second Life be taxed? My view is that, from a policy perspective, the right result is to tax commercial activity within virtual worlds but not game play.
How about this instead: If the person or group making a profit in SL are "nice people" then they shouldn't be taxed. If they are "not nice people" then they should be taxed out of existence. We could have a special board, of which I would be the head, to establish who is nice and who is not. Maybe there is a Santa Claus after all!
Two falacies represented by the quotes above are that (1) All taxes go to good use so we should never complain that we are being taxed too much, but rather just try and get out of paying as many of them ourselves as possible (tax avoidance as a way of life) and (2) that the actual mechanics of the tax are not important as long as the right (evil) people are paying it.
Unfortunately, we are all often dependent on those same "evil" people for goods and services and so we are indirectly paying those taxes in the costs of those things.
It rightfully irks the GP that he/she might pay taxes on something that isn't real. Let's say there is a really (by real world standards) low virtual sales tax of one percent. I build a cube, which takes about 3 seconds (I'm slow) and sell it to you for $100 (lets leave the conversions to and from L$ out of it), then you sell it back to be for $99 (the residual cost after the $1 has been taken out) and then I sell it back to you for whatever the residual cost is again. We can of course do this until the value of the object is too low to be representable in the interface. We've now given the government $100 or as close to that as we care to go and kept nothing for ourselves, and at the same time generated several hundred database records for Linden Labs and the Federal government to audit all to hell for errors. Other than the belief that "all taxes go to good use" where is the value in such a system? I could go broke just debugging a script to process such transactions.
There have been a number of efforts to "tax the Internet" and as far as I know they have all been stopped at some point. Yes, If I order from Amazon I'm going to pay a sales tax, as the Internet allows us to do *many* things that are directly analogous to "brick and mortar" business.
If we are going to tax SL and WoW, why not just "tax the Internet" instead? Tax your ISP (oh wait I bet that's already being done on their profits) and the companies that own the buried cables (ditto) and all the vendors that buy and sell real goods, like Amazon (ditto) and ads on Google pages (ditto) and all the monitors and PCs and mice used to access it (ditto).
I agree with you about the shift to primarily client computing in the workplace, a shift BACK by the way to the way things were done in the 70s. I also agree with the earlier response that Windows is a POS... oh wait, I bet he meant Point of Sale huh?
Which is another good point. My thinking when I'm in a checkout line involving a PC is "I bet this is going to take longer than I thought it would". I've noticed a distinct trend for POS devices, including the touch screen systems in restaurants to look a lot more like special purpose client devices again (IE Cash registers). Yes indeed we had to endure the 80s and 90s where people experimented with new uses for PCs, the good part of which is that the remainder of mostly mechanical solutions stopped being supported (which they would have in any event). But I maintain that the whole thing of 500 programmers each inventing their own version of the cash register on a PC to install at the local gas station was mostly a waste of resources. I don't really blame that on Windows though, would have happened with any OS and any hardware that became cheap enough for such experiments. I'm just glad it's over.
As to the seriousness with which "corporate" PC users take their use of the "tool", I've never worked in a monastery. Where I worked it was a constant struggle to keep users from trashing their own machines, whether it was porn, their favorite music players, games, or, yes, thousands of shareware titles, and that was in the large organizations with rules rules rules. Small businesses have it even worse. The corporate world overall hasn't been all that much better than the home user in sticking to business. Newer Windows methodologies basically lock Windows users out from being able to change anything on their machines, up to and including preventing access to peripherals. I'm all for it. Make that thing a Windows CE (or Linux equivalent) appliance while you are at it and set the price at hardware costs plus $50, including the bare bones client software and you have a winner! OS X or standard Windows need not apply.
As to the myriad of true special purpose applications (non-shareware) developed for the PC, there will be further shake-outs of those, and Microsoft will be tempted more and more to absorb the more successful ones to supplement the less important OS market. That's comoditization baby! Still waiting for Microsoft to "get with the program". Apple too, but Apple will have less to shed (I don't know if that's the reason they aren't doing their own Office suite, but it might be as they are already more focused on the Laptop as appliance model.
Even though more people than ever admit the disaster that is Windows, the mind-set that goes along with it persists:
(1) Get new Computer, (2) Load it up with every third-party cat-poop application you can lay your hands on, as long as you can find at least one other person using it, (3) Try and figure out what went wrong.
Successful Apple users, and to a greater extent successful Linux users are much more in touch with what their actual needs are. Whether driven by the need to save money, or an understanding from years of trial and error that a few really good tools are better than hundreds of half-assed ones.
Long ago the case that Windows was faster, more secure, less expensive to use, and so on, began to be seen for what it was, pure marketing message, short on substance. But what lingers, and is still largely true is the message that there are "tons" of applications available for Windows. Many of these take the form of "Install and forget" because for many users, just the idea that they have some new software gadget gives them shivers of delight, and yet a month or a week later the fact that their system is unreliable, slower than they remembered it being on the first day of use, and constantly reminding them that there is yet some New! can't-live-without utility only a click or two away, never causes them to question both the bloat that is Windows itself or the bloat that they have added to it in such a short time.
Should we hope that there is soon an equal amount of cruft available for Apple computers and Linux computers as well? Or should we rather hope that Windows users finally grow up and start using computers as adults, as tools, not toys.
Every time someone does something cool, Microsoft always has to chime in. It's like the annoying little brother who is always following you around; whenever you say anything, he always says "Me too!" and then goes on to explain how what he did is even better.
That's an excellent analogy. I also know individuals who act like that and they always remind me of the liar guy that used to be on Saturday Night Live... the one who ended almost every sentence with "Yeah, that's the ticket". My first reaction is to wonder if the statement is true and my second is to think "so what?" Most noticeable regarding such individuals as well as such companies is that their actions are so predictable and obvious to those around them, but they don't seem to have a clue why everyone around them is snickering. I've noticed such people don't make friends very easily, and they never seem to figure out why. I guess that applies to companies too.
I use the new Y! Mail Beta too, and the reviews are right, it IS faster, and the "Web 2.0 cruft" that you disdain has markedly improved the usability of the interface (drag 'n drop messages into folders, yeah, who would want that?!).
Faster than what? Certainly not faster than Gmail. Maybe faster than the old Yahoo interface, but my guess is that it is because it is on newer, less overloaded (so far) servers, because while the web 2.0 techniques have usability advantages I don't think there is any performance (server side) benefit from having the server being hit with hundreds of small transactions in the background.
My experience with the new Yahoo web interface so far is: (1) I requested it shortly after it was announced (which was way back in 2000 or so I think, not just recently) (2) I requested a Hotmail web 2.0 ID about the same time, and I was an early user of Gmail. (3) I much preferred Gmail to the Hotmail equivalent for speed and lack of advertising clutter. (4) I continued to wait for my beta Yahoo mail. (5) Hotmail improved a bit, but was very finicky about browsers (I don't/won't use Windows or IE). (6) Two years passed and I still wasn't on the Yahooo Beta list (7) Gmail added more storage and continued to improve with addition of Calendar, Docs, web pages, feed readers, all relatively well integrated. (8) Hotmail improved too, I think in fact they already claim limitless storage. I wonder what is considered new about the Yahoo concept? (9) It takes 9 months (last time I checked) for a Gmail id to expire from non-use. A long illness, sabbatical or Summer vacation and your yahoo mail is gone, in all its infinitude. (10) finally last year I got on the Yahoo beta. It was slow, but, as I said faster than the VERY slow older interface. (11) You still can't POP mail from Yahoo without paying $20/year. It's called lock-in. I avoid lock-in. Same is true of MS. (12) AOL came out with a far superior Web 2.0 webmail (also free) before I got approved for Yahoo beta. AOL's also has IMAP support (better than POP in several ways) and has drag and drop, etc. (13) All of them Gmail, Hotmail, AOL (aka AIM mail) are reliable, Yahoo frequently crashes on me, tells me the server is down, and just recently told me my browser was not supported (same browser I had been using for it all along). (14) Yahoo's spam filtering should be renamed "spam injection". As others have mentioned there is no excuse for getting e-mail messages from next year. I get spam from the same addresses that I've flagged as spam dozens of time in the past. Just last night I tried to go though the inbox and dutifully flag the spam without accidentally flagging the few legitimate messages, but in clicking delete too fast I must have overloaded their servers, which subsequently became totally unavailable.
I don't know what's up with CNET and PC Magazine, but the fact that they regularly give awards to Yahoo and Microsoft for products that everyone knows are seriously flawed, while failing to even mention others (AOL mail a very good example) tells me it has nothing to do with actually using the products. I no longer go to these sources for reviews, and am often suspect of their news coverage. Their future looks as bright as Yahoo's.
The dossier itself is tame and probably a standard practice for large company PR firms:
Agreed. Nothing special here. A large number of Slashdot readers (myself included) don't mind being reminded from time to time that almost everything Microsoft does has a significant amount of skulduggery behind it. All companies seek to promote their products, all seek advantage over competitors, all cooperate with others only when it benefits them in some way. Microsoft it seems has made an art-form of doing maximum damage to others even when the resulting benefit to themselves is only minimal (if detectable at all). The company (seemingly) sees the world as a zero-sum game, they want all the marbles and want everyone else to have none, end of story. The Google motto "Don't be evil" is a direct reference to Microsoft. Even the company's (MS) most generous charity work (which hardly existed until the company had amassed more money than they knew how to spend) seems more like a trick to recover some level of respectability than a real attempt to do good. In a recent Dilbert cartoon (http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dil bert-20070316.html) Dilbert asks his boss "When we are done hosing our own company can we start hosing the competition?" His boss replies "Our customers are next". (It would have been funnier and more on-target if he has said something like "Our customers come FIRST!") But the message is the same, that there are companies, just as there are individuals who seem to delight more in doing harm to others than they do in doing good for themselves. Ballmer is rarely quoted as "Our product will be better", but instead likes to go on record saying "We will destroy them!". Any other company would have recognized him as a PR disaster long ago, but for Microsoft, his excesses go unnoticed as they would nowhere else. I found this quote from the PDF more interesting:
Other Influencers: Fred, per his MO, is relatively tight-lipped about other interviewees though we know he's talking to Winer, Scoble and he'll be talking to Tim O'Reilly. We also anticipate that he will contact original members of Jeff's team / others involved in the effort: Bryn Waibel, Len Prior, Chris Anderson {a Microsoft blogger; not the Wired editor in chief}, Don Box, David Ornstein, Ray Chen and Larry Osterman. We have outreached to them and will keep an open dialogue to see if we can gain more on the story based on their conversations. We're also trying to get him to talk to Charlene Li at Forrester who just published a positive report for us on the ROI of blogging.
Now for the/offtopic...
My guess is that Slashdot readership is down, although I haven't seen any number on how much. It used to be the only thing of its kind, and quite frequently a link from a Slashdot story would take down, or slow to uselessness even fairly robust servers. Many forums have come and gone and had little impact on the size of Slashdot readership, but two things have recently (I'm guessing) for the first time had a noticeable impact: Digg, and the popularity of RSS feeds. About all I can say about Digg is that I tried it and didn't like it very much. I like having a top-level selection process for stories (even though I don't always agree with what Slashdot selects, or when) rather than the "pure democracy" approach that Digg takes (or pretends to take). I don't get my view of science from radio shows that run at 1AM, or my view of history from Oliver Stone movies, but my guess is that many Digg posters can't distinguish between "West Wing" and a documentary on the White House. People have been trying to "game" Slashdot for years, with mixed success, but in Digg they have found a system much easier to game, and by and large I think the typical Digg user is more interested in the game tha
To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds.
The only reason you can say that 50 seconds seems pretty quick is that most of us remember when several minutes was he norm. The interesting thing is that as feature creep in all operating systems has continued (you can't have glass windows in one OS without users of all other OSs feel the "need" for it too after all) has kept boot time longer than we would like, even though hardware speeds have continued to increase by orders of magnitude.
Can you imagine how long an XP boot (or Ubuntu for that mater) would take on an old 386 system with a sluggish hard drive and not a lot of memory (if such a thing were even possible)? Hours I would guess, and you would shake your head wondering if your hard drives MTBF would get you through the process.
In the future will it take four or eight processors in a box to keep the lag down to 50 seconds? Should we take any delight in the fact that Windows boot will be sped up again only by special code to pre-load parts of the OS into flash ram before shutdown? I don't. I'd much prefer to see an almost-instant-on OS that didn't depend on special hardware tricks but rather because the architects actually designed the bloody thing for a change. Aint gonna happen though. If there are still any really smart people working at MS I'm sure they are working on the next great Google/Sony/IBM/Oracle killer or something. Faster boots would benefit ALL Windows users, not just MS only shops. We can't have that now can we?
It's a good sign when an OS rarely needs to be booted, which is at least the case with Linux and OS X (can't speak for Vista). I leave my machines running all the time, even my desktop has laptop innards, so they go into a low power state when not used for a while. What I do to clean up any cruft that has built p running poorly behaved applications is to reboot when I am done using the computer for a while. That way I don't have to sit around and wait for the process to complete. the machine reboots, sits there for thirty minutes and then goes to sleep. It's ready to go and "freshly" booted the next time I need it. Of course if you like to keep a lot of memory hogs autoloaded and running in the background this system may not work so well.
Operating systems, barnyard animals, blow-up dolls and real women...
And I thought I constructed bad metaphors!
For the average home user, if you could get beyond installation issues (and the average home user would have just as much trouble installing Windows as Linux) the cost of Linux would be bound to be lower, simply because it is free.
The "need" for constant upgrades to an OS are totally artificial, driven by desires to interface with new printers, camera, scanners, mp3 players (all of which *COULD* simply use existing standards for interface), or the "need" to have better performance (and I don't think any new OS, particularly Windows, has provided better performance), or the need to fix security issues (which shouldn't exist in the first place).
Now the often advertised comparisons of cost between Windows and anything else you might consider running are mainly aimed at businesses. But most businesses have even less real "needs" to constantly upgrade their OSs or hardware. Beyond a basic word processing and spreadsheet (the use most spreadsheet users make of the tool is a joke by the way) a business might occasionally need a tool specific to their business (cash register for gas stations, MLS interface for Realtors) and more and more these capabilities are once again seen as more appropriate on a server than on the end-users machine.
So in the period from the mid 80s to now, we have essentially reinvented the 3270 terminal. Somehow I think even IBM could have done it more efficiently! The new 3270 (aka PC) has color, sound, a couple of new standardized I/O mechanisms (mostly USB) and allows me to interact with the "server" just like the old ones did. Yipee!
My guess is that we long ago passed the point where the majority of PCs are being used directly or indirectly in support of developing new software... for PCs. Now all of a sudden, the industry is concerned about power utilization, and as of today, Bill G. is in Mexico trying to round up more immigrants to move to Redmond. Duh!
The dog has long ago caught up with its tail and is now busily chewing the thing off. Quite a sight. Oops. *Turning off my random metaphor generator.*
I don't want to seem insensitive (although I am rather), but--DO.
I mean I don't go on various forums and tell everyone what new operating systems *I'm" upgrading too. I don't hold press conferences and issue press releases about the wonders of *my* latest OS. Why can't Microsoft just STFU about Vista and let people just upgrade *if they want to*? Why does it have to come on every new computer I can find in almost any store?
Do *I* try and tell everyone else in the world what OS to run? Do I go to device makers and offer them incentives to NOT support other OSes? Do *I* dance around a stage until I"m about too have a coronary and dripping sweat from my armpits shout "Give-it-up-for ME"?
The average computer user DOESN'T CARE what OS they are running, nor do they care about glass interfaces, rotating cubes or anything else likely to be discussed on Slashdot (why are you even reading here by the way?). Slashdot is to computers what a classic 50's car convention is to transportation. If at such an event I ask you what you drive I don't want to know that it is a pink 57 Chevy coup, I want to know the freaking serial number!
But for the average computer user, the details of operating systems behavior are so... so... LAST CENTURY!
For average people the OS should be just part of the box, like it is on my TV set (yes there *is* and OS in there of sorts, even if it is defined by the arrangement of vacuum tubes). The company responsible for it (if it is a company at all) shouldn't even have their name on the box, much less be contributing a sizable portion of the cost to the thing. The OS, as an integral part of the box should JUST WORK, start up instantly (and not with the help of flash drives that further add to the cost), be impervious to viruses, not need monthly updates, and not put up splash screens reminding me what version it is, who wrote it, and what it's catchy cute name is. I DON'T CARE!
Looking at my home entertainment system I can think of three fundamental changes that have taken place in more than 50 years: The TV set is now in color. HDTV has raised the resolution a bit. The buttons and dial on the tuner now have fewer moving parts. Many of these devices will last for twenty years or more and NEVER need a repair during that time. My current equipment, which I've already had for more than ten years, will probably outlive me, and unless I spend too much time looking at the splashy ads in magazines or watch too much (aka any) TV I won't find myself lusting after upgrades. The sound quality is already beyond my ability to discern any difference, and the video is more than adequate (if anything I'd go to flat panel HDTV to save electricity).
So, why, would anyone who is not a paid member of the "computer industry" care about this new OS, or whether the company that produces it continues to exist? I can't think of a reason. Stop reading Slashdot and worrying yourself on what these geeks say about the latest MS OS. In fifty years, most people will not have heard of Microsoft and there will be no such thing as "personal computers". I hope I live to see it.
Now, how about those new cell phones with the built-in infra-red massage (no, not message) capability?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a serum for Windows users can be developed.
Apparently MS has given up all hope of re-gaining respect from a large portion of the user community (I'm not just talking Linux and OS X users).
Based on headlines from the last few days alone I think they are going to prove themselves as a company and in the case of a few front facing individuals, bigger bungholes that even detractors like me thought possible. These things don't even go over well with Windows users I know as they too are often users of various Open Source programs (like Firefox) that could be directly or indirectly affected.
I can hardly wait.
Slashdot user comes up with innovative new way to show appreciation to Microsoft executives.
Man, I hope you don't get thrown in jail or something. Try and make it seem like an accident ok?
More and more people are not fearing change and are changing to things like Open Office and web-based word processing. I used to preach at people about the advantages of Linux and Open Source. Made very little headway, because people don't like change. Now they have a choice between changes forced on them by Microsoft, and an old interface (Open Office) that looks more like the old Office than the new Office does. Now I'm helping companies make the switch. Thank you Microsoft!
Funny, if some other company had vended something that looked exactly like Vista and the new Office, MS would have put out a study describing the very high costs of user retraining. You can only mislead your customers so much with this sort of nonsense before you achieve total loss of credibility, at that point even when you tell them the truth they are not inclined to believe you. I think Microsoft has finally achieved this goal, although why they would have wanted to I can't say, maybe just some inside joke among marketing people. Clearly the company is not run by techies.
*Waiting for modders to get the joke*
Maybe they need a hint?
Isn't that sort of like counting your chickens before they hatch?
Both I'd say. I think of him as the founding father of Open Source and clearly a very smart dude.
Being a founding father of something doesn't imply perfection though. I think his "attitude" sometimes does more harm than good. Mixing software issues with the politics of Cuba doesn't help much. There are enough people who equate Open Source with "Communism" already and RMS political statements don't help in that regard.
I personally see Open Source as being more at home in a Capitalist system. Then you get into the argument over ideal political systems versus real-world ones. In the real world we have our choice between all-powerful governments that treat people like cattle, or companies that do the same thing. Given the realities I'd rather have many powerful entities than just one. Living on the edges of such entity's domain can yield almost total freedom. Even so called benevolent dictatorships don't have a very good track record by comparison.
You obviously have dealt with a better class of simple minded idiots than I have.
I worked at State for a few years and found that they have their heads totally up Microsoft's ass. I don't expect this will change anything. Mentioning any alternative to Microsoft products for all practical purposes is forbidden.
When the Federal government starts to trend away from its Windows-only situation, and I think this WILL happen eventually, the State Department will be among the last to switch. It took Wang going out of the computer hardware business for them to even START migrating to something else. That is indicative of their mindset.
The question is, once large organizations figure out (if they are actually interested in saving money let's say) that this one percent phenomena exists, how valuable will it be for them to buy everyone in the organization a $200+ piece of software "just in case" they need it?
The more appropriate response will be for Office to be looked upon in the same way that a compiler is, something that just a few people, specialists, need to have a copy of, while everyone else can make use of much simpler web-based alternatives.
As people start to use "Google Office" at home for its ease of sharing documents, etc, the same argument that made Office a standard will start to apply to Google Apps: "Hey, all these people right out of school already know Google Apps, let's just standardized on that so we don't have to teach them Office".
I don't think I've run MS Office in three years, and my use of Open Office is starting to fall off quite a bit as I just load things people send me into Google Docs from the get-go. I'm also noticing that the only thing I'm storing on my PCs are music files and photos, with more and more photos being stored online as well. This is great!
This just in:
You mean as in:
Describe what the following expression does in 30 words or less:
{"ab", "c"}{"d", "ef"} = {"abd", "abef", "cd", "cef"}
Man, I'll never get into forum postings if they do that!
Thank GOD!!
The disadvantage to this "all the way around the barn" path that we've taken is that we now have to eliminate all the crap that came along with it, like operating systems that can "get infected".
I'm still looking forward to a standard box that can be presented to non-technical users at a price point where it can be replaced every few years with ***NO*** intervening mucking about by technical friends and family (like me) or the fly-by-night computer store down the street. I don't care it it's vended by Apple, Microsoft, Dell, or some company I've never heard of in China. I'll buy a dozen all by myself to hand out so that I can get out of the (unpaid) phone support business once and for all.
I wouldn't mind seeing some companies that got us where we are going out of business in the process. Our current paradigm is a f***ed up situation that the so-called visionaries should have never allowed us to get into.
On the other hand I think one of the things that is very broken about out tax system is that it is far too complicated. A cynic would say that this is intentional, so as to hide from us just how much the take is (well, I would say that too, do you know how much a head of lettuce would cost if there were no taxes added on to all goods and services involved in its production?)
Almost all taxation has easily spotted disadvantages so I won't go into inequities I find in property taxes, gas taxes and other "special purpose" taxes that in some cases *do* fit the description in the GP post. But sales taxes or transfer taxes are really sneaky, and in some cases can be almost impossible for the individual to keep track of. More disturbing that the erroneous statem in the GP is this opinion from TFA:
How about this instead: If the person or group making a profit in SL are "nice people" then they shouldn't be taxed. If they are "not nice people" then they should be taxed out of existence. We could have a special board, of which I would be the head, to establish who is nice and who is not. Maybe there is a Santa Claus after all!
Two falacies represented by the quotes above are that (1) All taxes go to good use so we should never complain that we are being taxed too much, but rather just try and get out of paying as many of them ourselves as possible (tax avoidance as a way of life) and (2) that the actual mechanics of the tax are not important as long as the right (evil) people are paying it.
Unfortunately, we are all often dependent on those same "evil" people for goods and services and so we are indirectly paying those taxes in the costs of those things.
It rightfully irks the GP that he/she might pay taxes on something that isn't real. Let's say there is a really (by real world standards) low virtual sales tax of one percent. I build a cube, which takes about 3 seconds (I'm slow) and sell it to you for $100 (lets leave the conversions to and from L$ out of it), then you sell it back to be for $99 (the residual cost after the $1 has been taken out) and then I sell it back to you for whatever the residual cost is again. We can of course do this until the value of the object is too low to be representable in the interface. We've now given the government $100 or as close to that as we care to go and kept nothing for ourselves, and at the same time generated several hundred database records for Linden Labs and the Federal government to audit all to hell for errors. Other than the belief that "all taxes go to good use" where is the value in such a system? I could go broke just debugging a script to process such transactions.
There have been a number of efforts to "tax the Internet" and as far as I know they have all been stopped at some point. Yes, If I order from Amazon I'm going to pay a sales tax, as the Internet allows us to do *many* things that are directly analogous to "brick and mortar" business.
If we are going to tax SL and WoW, why not just "tax the Internet" instead? Tax your ISP (oh wait I bet that's already being done on their profits) and the companies that own the buried cables (ditto) and all the vendors that buy and sell real goods, like Amazon (ditto) and ads on Google pages (ditto) and all the monitors and PCs and mice used to access it (ditto).
I just wish more time were spent, on, well, how it is spent: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/
Unfortunately they don't give a lot of details, and
I agree with you about the shift to primarily client computing in the workplace, a shift BACK by the way to the way things were done in the 70s. I also agree with the earlier response that Windows is a POS... oh wait, I bet he meant Point of Sale huh?
Which is another good point. My thinking when I'm in a checkout line involving a PC is "I bet this is going to take longer than I thought it would". I've noticed a distinct trend for POS devices, including the touch screen systems in restaurants to look a lot more like special purpose client devices again (IE Cash registers). Yes indeed we had to endure the 80s and 90s where people experimented with new uses for PCs, the good part of which is that the remainder of mostly mechanical solutions stopped being supported (which they would have in any event). But I maintain that the whole thing of 500 programmers each inventing their own version of the cash register on a PC to install at the local gas station was mostly a waste of resources. I don't really blame that on Windows though, would have happened with any OS and any hardware that became cheap enough for such experiments. I'm just glad it's over.
As to the seriousness with which "corporate" PC users take their use of the "tool", I've never worked in a monastery. Where I worked it was a constant struggle to keep users from trashing their own machines, whether it was porn, their favorite music players, games, or, yes, thousands of shareware titles, and that was in the large organizations with rules rules rules. Small businesses have it even worse. The corporate world overall hasn't been all that much better than the home user in sticking to business. Newer Windows methodologies basically lock Windows users out from being able to change anything on their machines, up to and including preventing access to peripherals. I'm all for it. Make that thing a Windows CE (or Linux equivalent) appliance while you are at it and set the price at hardware costs plus $50, including the bare bones client software and you have a winner! OS X or standard Windows need not apply.
As to the myriad of true special purpose applications (non-shareware) developed for the PC, there will be further shake-outs of those, and Microsoft will be tempted more and more to absorb the more successful ones to supplement the less important OS market. That's comoditization baby! Still waiting for Microsoft to "get with the program". Apple too, but Apple will have less to shed (I don't know if that's the reason they aren't doing their own Office suite, but it might be as they are already more focused on the Laptop as appliance model.
Look at a recent well-known switcher Robert Scobble:
c /
http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/05/i-love-my-new-ma
Even though more people than ever admit the disaster that is Windows, the mind-set that goes along with it persists:
(1) Get new Computer, (2) Load it up with every third-party cat-poop application you can lay your hands on, as long as you can find at least one other person using it, (3) Try and figure out what went wrong.
Successful Apple users, and to a greater extent successful Linux users are much more in touch with what their actual needs are. Whether driven by the need to save money, or an understanding from years of trial and error that a few really good tools are better than hundreds of half-assed ones.
Long ago the case that Windows was faster, more secure, less expensive to use, and so on, began to be seen for what it was, pure marketing message, short on substance. But what lingers, and is still largely true is the message that there are "tons" of applications available for Windows. Many of these take the form of "Install and forget" because for many users, just the idea that they have some new software gadget gives them shivers of delight, and yet a month or a week later the fact that their system is unreliable, slower than they remembered it being on the first day of use, and constantly reminding them that there is yet some New! can't-live-without utility only a click or two away, never causes them to question both the bloat that is Windows itself or the bloat that they have added to it in such a short time.
Should we hope that there is soon an equal amount of cruft available for Apple computers and Linux computers as well? Or should we rather hope that Windows users finally grow up and start using computers as adults, as tools, not toys.
Somehow I think that change is still a ways off.
That's an excellent analogy. I also know individuals who act like that and they always remind me of the liar guy that used to be on Saturday Night Live... the one who ended almost every sentence with "Yeah, that's the ticket". My first reaction is to wonder if the statement is true and my second is to think "so what?" Most noticeable regarding such individuals as well as such companies is that their actions are so predictable and obvious to those around them, but they don't seem to have a clue why everyone around them is snickering. I've noticed such people don't make friends very easily, and they never seem to figure out why. I guess that applies to companies too.
Done:
s p
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2059039,00.a
Faster than what? Certainly not faster than Gmail. Maybe faster than the old Yahoo interface, but my guess is that it is because it is on newer, less overloaded (so far) servers, because while the web 2.0 techniques have usability advantages I don't think there is any performance (server side) benefit from having the server being hit with hundreds of small transactions in the background.
My experience with the new Yahoo web interface so far is: (1) I requested it shortly after it was announced (which was way back in 2000 or so I think, not just recently) (2) I requested a Hotmail web 2.0 ID about the same time, and I was an early user of Gmail. (3) I much preferred Gmail to the Hotmail equivalent for speed and lack of advertising clutter. (4) I continued to wait for my beta Yahoo mail. (5) Hotmail improved a bit, but was very finicky about browsers (I don't/won't use Windows or IE). (6) Two years passed and I still wasn't on the Yahooo Beta list (7) Gmail added more storage and continued to improve with addition of Calendar, Docs, web pages, feed readers, all relatively well integrated. (8) Hotmail improved too, I think in fact they already claim limitless storage. I wonder what is considered new about the Yahoo concept? (9) It takes 9 months (last time I checked) for a Gmail id to expire from non-use. A long illness, sabbatical or Summer vacation and your yahoo mail is gone, in all its infinitude. (10) finally last year I got on the Yahoo beta. It was slow, but, as I said faster than the VERY slow older interface. (11) You still can't POP mail from Yahoo without paying $20/year. It's called lock-in. I avoid lock-in. Same is true of MS. (12) AOL came out with a far superior Web 2.0 webmail (also free) before I got approved for Yahoo beta. AOL's also has IMAP support (better than POP in several ways) and has drag and drop, etc. (13) All of them Gmail, Hotmail, AOL (aka AIM mail) are reliable, Yahoo frequently crashes on me, tells me the server is down, and just recently told me my browser was not supported (same browser I had been using for it all along). (14) Yahoo's spam filtering should be renamed "spam injection". As others have mentioned there is no excuse for getting e-mail messages from next year. I get spam from the same addresses that I've flagged as spam dozens of time in the past. Just last night I tried to go though the inbox and dutifully flag the spam without accidentally flagging the few legitimate messages, but in clicking delete too fast I must have overloaded their servers, which subsequently became totally unavailable.
I don't know what's up with CNET and PC Magazine, but the fact that they regularly give awards to Yahoo and Microsoft for products that everyone knows are seriously flawed, while failing to even mention others (AOL mail a very good example) tells me it has nothing to do with actually using the products. I no longer go to these sources for reviews, and am often suspect of their news coverage. Their future looks as bright as Yahoo's.
But will it run on Linux?
Agreed. Nothing special here. A large number of Slashdot readers (myself included) don't mind being reminded from time to time that almost everything Microsoft does has a significant amount of skulduggery behind it. All companies seek to promote their products, all seek advantage over competitors, all cooperate with others only when it benefits them in some way. Microsoft it seems has made an art-form of doing maximum damage to others even when the resulting benefit to themselves is only minimal (if detectable at all). The company (seemingly) sees the world as a zero-sum game, they want all the marbles and want everyone else to have none, end of story. The Google motto "Don't be evil" is a direct reference to Microsoft. Even the company's (MS) most generous charity work (which hardly existed until the company had amassed more money than they knew how to spend) seems more like a trick to recover some level of respectability than a real attempt to do good. In a recent Dilbert cartoon (http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dil bert-20070316.html) Dilbert asks his boss "When we are done hosing our own company can we start hosing the competition?" His boss replies "Our customers are next". (It would have been funnier and more on-target if he has said something like "Our customers come FIRST!") But the message is the same, that there are companies, just as there are individuals who seem to delight more in doing harm to others than they do in doing good for themselves. Ballmer is rarely quoted as "Our product will be better", but instead likes to go on record saying "We will destroy them!". Any other company would have recognized him as a PR disaster long ago, but for Microsoft, his excesses go unnoticed as they would nowhere else. I found this quote from the PDF more interesting:
Now for the /offtopic...
My guess is that Slashdot readership is down, although I haven't seen any number on how much. It used to be the only thing of its kind, and quite frequently a link from a Slashdot story would take down, or slow to uselessness even fairly robust servers. Many forums have come and gone and had little impact on the size of Slashdot readership, but two things have recently (I'm guessing) for the first time had a noticeable impact: Digg, and the popularity of RSS feeds. About all I can say about Digg is that I tried it and didn't like it very much. I like having a top-level selection process for stories (even though I don't always agree with what Slashdot selects, or when) rather than the "pure democracy" approach that Digg takes (or pretends to take). I don't get my view of science from radio shows that run at 1AM, or my view of history from Oliver Stone movies, but my guess is that many Digg posters can't distinguish between "West Wing" and a documentary on the White House. People have been trying to "game" Slashdot for years, with mixed success, but in Digg they have found a system much easier to game, and by and large I think the typical Digg user is more interested in the game tha
Isn't this part of the "One Laptop Per Continent" project?
The only reason you can say that 50 seconds seems pretty quick is that most of us remember when several minutes was he norm. The interesting thing is that as feature creep in all operating systems has continued (you can't have glass windows in one OS without users of all other OSs feel the "need" for it too after all) has kept boot time longer than we would like, even though hardware speeds have continued to increase by orders of magnitude.
Can you imagine how long an XP boot (or Ubuntu for that mater) would take on an old 386 system with a sluggish hard drive and not a lot of memory (if such a thing were even possible)? Hours I would guess, and you would shake your head wondering if your hard drives MTBF would get you through the process.
In the future will it take four or eight processors in a box to keep the lag down to 50 seconds? Should we take any delight in the fact that Windows boot will be sped up again only by special code to pre-load parts of the OS into flash ram before shutdown? I don't. I'd much prefer to see an almost-instant-on OS that didn't depend on special hardware tricks but rather because the architects actually designed the bloody thing for a change. Aint gonna happen though. If there are still any really smart people working at MS I'm sure they are working on the next great Google/Sony/IBM/Oracle killer or something. Faster boots would benefit ALL Windows users, not just MS only shops. We can't have that now can we?
It's a good sign when an OS rarely needs to be booted, which is at least the case with Linux and OS X (can't speak for Vista). I leave my machines running all the time, even my desktop has laptop innards, so they go into a low power state when not used for a while. What I do to clean up any cruft that has built p running poorly behaved applications is to reboot when I am done using the computer for a while. That way I don't have to sit around and wait for the process to complete. the machine reboots, sits there for thirty minutes and then goes to sleep. It's ready to go and "freshly" booted the next time I need it. Of course if you like to keep a lot of memory hogs autoloaded and running in the background this system may not work so well.
Operating systems, barnyard animals, blow-up dolls and real women...
And I thought I constructed bad metaphors!
For the average home user, if you could get beyond installation issues (and the average home user would have just as much trouble installing Windows as Linux) the cost of Linux would be bound to be lower, simply because it is free.
The "need" for constant upgrades to an OS are totally artificial, driven by desires to interface with new printers, camera, scanners, mp3 players (all of which *COULD* simply use existing standards for interface), or the "need" to have better performance (and I don't think any new OS, particularly Windows, has provided better performance), or the need to fix security issues (which shouldn't exist in the first place).
Now the often advertised comparisons of cost between Windows and anything else you might consider running are mainly aimed at businesses. But most businesses have even less real "needs" to constantly upgrade their OSs or hardware. Beyond a basic word processing and spreadsheet (the use most spreadsheet users make of the tool is a joke by the way) a business might occasionally need a tool specific to their business (cash register for gas stations, MLS interface for Realtors) and more and more these capabilities are once again seen as more appropriate on a server than on the end-users machine.
So in the period from the mid 80s to now, we have essentially reinvented the 3270 terminal. Somehow I think even IBM could have done it more efficiently! The new 3270 (aka PC) has color, sound, a couple of new standardized I/O mechanisms (mostly USB) and allows me to interact with the "server" just like the old ones did. Yipee!
My guess is that we long ago passed the point where the majority of PCs are being used directly or indirectly in support of developing new software... for PCs. Now all of a sudden, the industry is concerned about power utilization, and as of today, Bill G. is in Mexico trying to round up more immigrants to move to Redmond. Duh!
The dog has long ago caught up with its tail and is now busily chewing the thing off. Quite a sight. Oops. *Turning off my random metaphor generator.*
I don't want to seem insensitive (although I am rather), but--DO.
I mean I don't go on various forums and tell everyone what new operating systems *I'm" upgrading too. I don't hold press conferences and issue press releases about the wonders of *my* latest OS. Why can't Microsoft just STFU about Vista and let people just upgrade *if they want to*? Why does it have to come on every new computer I can find in almost any store?
Do *I* try and tell everyone else in the world what OS to run? Do I go to device makers and offer them incentives to NOT support other OSes? Do *I* dance around a stage until I"m about too have a coronary and dripping sweat from my armpits shout "Give-it-up-for ME"?
The average computer user DOESN'T CARE what OS they are running, nor do they care about glass interfaces, rotating cubes or anything else likely to be discussed on Slashdot (why are you even reading here by the way?). Slashdot is to computers what a classic 50's car convention is to transportation. If at such an event I ask you what you drive I don't want to know that it is a pink 57 Chevy coup, I want to know the freaking serial number!
But for the average computer user, the details of operating systems behavior are so... so... LAST CENTURY!
For average people the OS should be just part of the box, like it is on my TV set (yes there *is* and OS in there of sorts, even if it is defined by the arrangement of vacuum tubes). The company responsible for it (if it is a company at all) shouldn't even have their name on the box, much less be contributing a sizable portion of the cost to the thing. The OS, as an integral part of the box should JUST WORK, start up instantly (and not with the help of flash drives that further add to the cost), be impervious to viruses, not need monthly updates, and not put up splash screens reminding me what version it is, who wrote it, and what it's catchy cute name is. I DON'T CARE!
Looking at my home entertainment system I can think of three fundamental changes that have taken place in more than 50 years: The TV set is now in color. HDTV has raised the resolution a bit. The buttons and dial on the tuner now have fewer moving parts. Many of these devices will last for twenty years or more and NEVER need a repair during that time. My current equipment, which I've already had for more than ten years, will probably outlive me, and unless I spend too much time looking at the splashy ads in magazines or watch too much (aka any) TV I won't find myself lusting after upgrades. The sound quality is already beyond my ability to discern any difference, and the video is more than adequate (if anything I'd go to flat panel HDTV to save electricity).
So, why, would anyone who is not a paid member of the "computer industry" care about this new OS, or whether the company that produces it continues to exist? I can't think of a reason. Stop reading Slashdot and worrying yourself on what these geeks say about the latest MS OS. In fifty years, most people will not have heard of Microsoft and there will be no such thing as "personal computers". I hope I live to see it.
Now, how about those new cell phones with the built-in infra-red massage (no, not message) capability?