I use a Mac. For all the time I've owned mine, I've never had to deal with a virus, spyware or adware; mail.app nicely puts all the spam I receive in a junk mail folder.
Just because some inept users of an OS that is insecure by default have problems with networked computing doesn't mean the rest of the world does. Even if the bandwidth is "there," I still see no reason why users won't want local versions of their apps, particularly if those apps are free -- like OpenOffice.org, iTunes, etc.
They also don't care about breaking media monopolies, changing distribution paradigms, and only just barely care about possessing and using the media and programs they pirate.
Those are all euphemisms used to try to justify stealing the things other people worked hard to create. It's not about attention and respect, it's about getting something for nothing.
By keeping automatically Steam up to date, it makes pirates go nuts to have to update their distributions of games so hopefully systems like this will discourage pirates since it keeps them working nonstop. It is a fact that not long ago Valve has banned another 30 000 accounts from trying to use an invalid/cracked key and with those first 20 000 banned, it shows that Valve are commmitted to fight back against cheapskates.
Their effort at preventing copyright infringement is fantastic. The only way OSS games will ever take off in any meaningful way is if companies can prevent the vast majority of piracy
Amen to that. Ultima 6 and 7 were both great games that I will long remember. Sadly, there like was never again made by Origin, and I do not think any studio will take up their legacy.
Ultimas 8 and 9 were atrocious, and UO had more problems than I care to remember. Sadly, the industry has become top and bottom heavy, as you say, and leaves no room in the middle for innovative but still top-flight production games.
Your reply totally misses the point of my post, which is that a free information marketplace means that the government doesn't interfere with media communication, regardless of whether or not the source of the media is "a few very rich people" or some guy with a computer and a broadsheet printer.
Like the original post to which I replied, the above post tries to muddle the actual issues of freedom of the press behind unsubstantiated claims concering the nebulous straw men of the "rich" controlling the media. In the immediate post above, the poster introduces a red herring concerning Fox News, which has no particular bearing on the previous discussion, and then makes grandiose claims concerning Fox News' supposed goal -- "the dismantlement of States to enable them to increase their power over the people even more." Whether Fox News is generally a good network or not (I don't care for them and don't watch them) is less important than Fox News' right to exist independent of government, which is the real issue.
If you care to actually read the article, you would notice that Chavez is simply counterbalancing the greater disinformational power of the bourgeois-controlled media in order to avoid further destabilization attempts by the bourgeois who cannot bear to see the State help the poorer people by providing them by better education (the bourgeois are dependent on an ignorant population in order to suck their wealth).
This sentence is a marvelous example of of double-talking spin skills. Maybe you could have or already have a career in politics.
When a government interferes with private information dissemination companies (AKA 'the media'), the government is distorting the power of the people to speak and think for themselves. In some ways it's the most pernicious kind of power, because use of it can easily lead to a slippery slope toward China-style total information control, and it prevents the kind of discourse necessary to grow free societies, as opposed to closed socieities that only benefit the powerful. The government cannot "counterbalance" the "greater disinformational power" of the media; it can only control the media or not, and by extension let society flourish -- or not.
The problem that *I* see in this market landscape is how *nix gets at best completely ignored and at worst actively excluded. *nix users are relegated to a realm of scavenging for drivers or tolerating sucky ones, nitpicking on their hardware because of aforementioned drivers, and missing out on several multimedia features or extra bells and whistles of the proprietary-tech-dominated hardware and Intarweb.
Exactly. The reason this state exists, as far as I can tell, is because there is no good, standard *nix GUI API. Since the vast majority of computer users have demonstrated that they prefer GUI interfaces over CLI interfaces, the inability to quickly and easily good *nix GUI programs (except on OS X) relegates most versions of *nix to the relative fringes in terms of vendor support, drivers, etc.
Until that situation changes, I don't see *nix, including Linux, making great inroads into user-land, because the computing experience for most users is fundamentally about the available applications. *nix lacks high-quality GUI applications that are easy to install and use, unlike Windows and OS X. Until that changes, and it's hard for me to perceive how it will in the near future, I don't see fundamental changes to the market landscape.
I've tried various TeX versions and found none as versatile and powerful as GUI programs like Lotus WordPro and MSO Word.
Granted, it can be argued that because I'm used to GUI programs they are easier, similar to how some people argue Dvorak keyboards allow for faster typing than QWERTY keyboards. Nonetheless, I think I'm more efficient on GUI programs, and even if I weren't, everyone else uses Word, which means I have to use it for business documents. Of course, this is an issue separate from what makes a good word processor, but it's worth mentioning in this tangent.
While you're modded funny at the moment, I think you're only half joking. So responding to the serious side, I can only say that Linux needs a standard, monolithic API before wide-spread GUI application development can occur. That's at least a quarter of the battle; without such an API, it isn't going to be as easy to develop applications, not as many applications will be written and *nix will languish.
See here and here for my previous comments that address this issue in more depth.
As indicated in my previous posts in this thread, I'm something of an Apple fan these days. Nonetheless, as much as I like OS X, I think Mac hardware costs too much. If there were an open-source OS that offered the power and ease of use of OS X, I'd jump to that hypothetical OS in a second.
Of course, a myriad of reasons exist as to why that hasn't happened and isn't likely to happen (see my aforementioned posts to get my take on why). It's a beautiful dream, though. In the meantime, I type this on a 1.5 Ghz PowerBook. Much as I like the experience, I still see cost as the primary drawback.
You make an interesting analogy; I would say that, rather than Unix being too powerful, it is too complicated. Some people need the complexity, but they are relatively few. Even so the, the ability to customize and tweak should be available, despite the fact that few might actually use it.
I think OS X strikes a good balance: it's simple enough for novices and powerful enough for wizards. To push your analogy too far, it's like having a consumer sedan that can transform at the push of a button into a pick-up truck, and another push transforms it into a Bradley, complete with.50cal ready to go.
You'd be better off running *nix on a custom amd64 system, unless your filthy rich.
Or unless you value your time, perhaps.
I include the "perhaps" because it's unwise to make an absolute statement regarding operating systems unless one knows a great deal about a particular situations.
I think the problem goes deeper than what you describe: Unix needs to make the fundamental shift into the GUI world for it to be practical for most people doing day-to-day tasks. This means a big, standard API GUI and the software to make use of it. Some things like word processing are easier with a GUI; some things are easier on the CLI. Most people in the world prefer the GUI, which means that for Unix to allow more people to get more done -- which is the fundamental purpose of computing, lest one forget -- it needs a functional GUI and the services that go with it. Point 3 of the parent addressed this issue partially, but I think it's a deeper than the UI, because the real is lack of a GUI foundation. Most of the *nix GUIs that exist now seem bolted on, inconsistant and inadequate.
This contrasts with that other maybe-*nix that's been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, whose GUI feels like it was conceived at the beginning. Part of the reason I, and a lot of other/. types to judge by all the OS X love that goes around these days, like OS X is because the power and control are there when we need it, and the ease-of-use is there when we don't.
I wrote an even longer post in reponse to an earlier comment, which examines more of the same issues; find it here.
Can't we just have an OS with OS X ease of use, Debians installation system, Solaris 10 low-level features and Windows Vendor support? We'd all be set and 100% satisfied.
Part of the problem is definition: exactly what from each current OS paradigm (each one of which reached its current form for a reason) should this ideal Unix take, and what should it leave? As soon as one gets into the gritty parts of the answer, no one can agree, people splinter their OS, developers don't know which OS to target and users are confused. I don't remember where I read it (Daring Fireball, possibly), but someone pointed out that creating a new standard from two conflicting standards often simply creates three conflicting standards. And these days there seem to be Standard^N standards. The problem is that no standard will leave 100% satisfaction because no single person's needs are identical to another person's.
In addition, there's the massive Windows install base that gets so much vendor, developer and other support that inertia works against the large-scale -- and by large scale I mean more than 10,000,000 people -- end-user machines. That means developers/users/vendors can target a myriad of smaller *nix OSes or the giant OS.
Furthermore, although I agree with your problem list above, I'd add the lack of a standard API. If one wants to develop for Windows, there is a more-or-less monolithic API. For OS X, there is Cocoa or Carbon. For Unix and Linux, I don't even understand the situation sufficiently to name all the possible API permutations. Each permutation has its reason for existance. Which brings me back to my first paragraph, which is that each splinter of *nix has its reason for existance. This makes writing high-quality GUI software for heterogeneous deployment difficult. To solve that problem, maybe someone will create The One Distribution, but then someone else will dislike something about it and fork it or write their own One Distribution, which will have problems of its own (like adoption and incompatibility with other standards).
Before someone accuses me of describing the problem rather than solving it, allow me to plead guilty. Much as I don't know how to solve the seemingly impossible muddle in the Middle East, I don't know how to solve the *nix problem. I use OS X, which solves all the bulleted points of the parent poster (or at least solves them well enough for my purposes), but the OS X entry cost is also relatively high. I'd love to see a low-cost *nix match or surpass OS X, but I cannot forsee that happening in the near (next three years) future.
It also works because of the amount of users that don't contribute. Imagine reading an article written by the average American... As a student at a public high school, I get to see how great the average American's grammar and spelling are everyday!
I think you mean "...because of the number of users who don't contribute." Amount refers to a difficult-to-count substance, like a liquid, while number refers to things like people or coins. See here for a better explanation. I also recommend the book Write Right for everyday English usage help. Write Right also has a section in the back that tells the difference between frequently confused words like amount/number.
Then again, I suppose any "musician" who buys Garage Band isn't exactly looking to take their tracks to a real engineer or shop their creation around to record companies, and more than "graphic artists" who use MS Paint would take their creations to a printing press.
A "musician" is someone who makes music with the tools at hand. Not all musicians, particularly those starting out, can afford a computer as well as a digidesign Mbox, whatever that is; therefore, they make do with what they have.
Such a person might already have a Mac, and can use it to make music at least somewhat more effectively using GarageBand.
That's the purpose of Garageband: a low-cost way for people to get their feet wet with digital music. No one is suggesting it's going to replace ProTools.
I don't buy your slippery slope arguement that "Saying otherwise will only bring ultimate doom of our society a little bit closer."
Aside from that point, posting some obscure file to which you own the copyright is just fine. Posting one obscure file to which you don't own the copyright is technically illegal, but I doubt anyone will care -- particularly if you host it outside the United States.
Hosting a massive quantity of material to which one doesn't own the copyright and making a systematic, commerical-grade system for distribution is unacceptable.
I doubt your arguement would hold up in court. SuprNova knew they were providing a system expressly for transmitting material for which they did not have permission.
Because *that's* what's illegal. If I put a.torrent of a video I made on the internet, or set up a clearinghouse for other people to do the same, I shouldn't have my house raided
Your hypothetical situation bears no relation to what happened to SuprNova. Distributing a video for which you own the copyright is vastly different than setting up a clearing house for terabytes of material.
SuprNova was distributing copyrighted material without permission. That is breaking the law, and your post fails to address the point I made in my original post.
but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
To me, what is most scary is that people think they flaunt copyright laws on such a massive scale and get away with it.
Furthermore, this is exactly what should be happening: the government attacks those who break the law, rather than those who create the tools. Bit torrent and p2p applications have legal, useful purposes; by seeking those who use them in illegal ways rather than banning them altogther is appropriate, rather than trying to ban them.
I like doing it. I didn't used to. Between 1993 and 2001 I never did it. When 2000 came along I decided it was time.
I don't wrap it up. Ever. I'm a gambler, and if I'm feeling odd I drink until I feel better. Once I took a pregnancy test, even though I'm a male, just to feel safe.
I'm not alone in using my prostitute -- most of my friends and quite a few strangers do too.
Despite all this, I have never been virus-infected. At least as far as I know.
So I have to ask myself, what do all these people do to get their bodies so messed up? Why doesn't it happen to me?
Slashdot Mirror
Just because some inept users of an OS that is insecure by default have problems with networked computing doesn't mean the rest of the world does. Even if the bandwidth is "there," I still see no reason why users won't want local versions of their apps, particularly if those apps are free -- like OpenOffice.org, iTunes, etc.
Those are all euphemisms used to try to justify stealing the things other people worked hard to create. It's not about attention and respect, it's about getting something for nothing.
Their effort at preventing copyright infringement is fantastic. The only way OSS games will ever take off in any meaningful way is if companies can prevent the vast majority of piracy
Amen to that. Ultima 6 and 7 were both great games that I will long remember. Sadly, there like was never again made by Origin, and I do not think any studio will take up their legacy.
Ultimas 8 and 9 were atrocious, and UO had more problems than I care to remember. Sadly, the industry has become top and bottom heavy, as you say, and leaves no room in the middle for innovative but still top-flight production games.
Well, nobody wants to admit to having Chlamydia either, but a whole lot of people do.
Frankly, I wouldn't want admit to using Windows.
Edward John Smith not worried about icebergs.
Like the original post to which I replied, the above post tries to muddle the actual issues of freedom of the press behind unsubstantiated claims concering the nebulous straw men of the "rich" controlling the media. In the immediate post above, the poster introduces a red herring concerning Fox News, which has no particular bearing on the previous discussion, and then makes grandiose claims concerning Fox News' supposed goal -- "the dismantlement of States to enable them to increase their power over the people even more." Whether Fox News is generally a good network or not (I don't care for them and don't watch them) is less important than Fox News' right to exist independent of government, which is the real issue.
This sentence is a marvelous example of of double-talking spin skills. Maybe you could have or already have a career in politics.
When a government interferes with private information dissemination companies (AKA 'the media'), the government is distorting the power of the people to speak and think for themselves. In some ways it's the most pernicious kind of power, because use of it can easily lead to a slippery slope toward China-style total information control, and it prevents the kind of discourse necessary to grow free societies, as opposed to closed socieities that only benefit the powerful. The government cannot "counterbalance" the "greater disinformational power" of the media; it can only control the media or not, and by extension let society flourish -- or not.
Exactly. The reason this state exists, as far as I can tell, is because there is no good, standard *nix GUI API. Since the vast majority of computer users have demonstrated that they prefer GUI interfaces over CLI interfaces, the inability to quickly and easily good *nix GUI programs (except on OS X) relegates most versions of *nix to the relative fringes in terms of vendor support, drivers, etc.
Until that situation changes, I don't see *nix, including Linux, making great inroads into user-land, because the computing experience for most users is fundamentally about the available applications. *nix lacks high-quality GUI applications that are easy to install and use, unlike Windows and OS X. Until that changes, and it's hard for me to perceive how it will in the near future, I don't see fundamental changes to the market landscape.
Granted, it can be argued that because I'm used to GUI programs they are easier, similar to how some people argue Dvorak keyboards allow for faster typing than QWERTY keyboards. Nonetheless, I think I'm more efficient on GUI programs, and even if I weren't, everyone else uses Word, which means I have to use it for business documents. Of course, this is an issue separate from what makes a good word processor, but it's worth mentioning in this tangent.
See here and here for my previous comments that address this issue in more depth.
Of course, a myriad of reasons exist as to why that hasn't happened and isn't likely to happen (see my aforementioned posts to get my take on why). It's a beautiful dream, though. In the meantime, I type this on a 1.5 Ghz PowerBook. Much as I like the experience, I still see cost as the primary drawback.
I think OS X strikes a good balance: it's simple enough for novices and powerful enough for wizards. To push your analogy too far, it's like having a consumer sedan that can transform at the push of a button into a pick-up truck, and another push transforms it into a Bradley, complete with .50cal ready to go.
Or unless you value your time, perhaps.
I include the "perhaps" because it's unwise to make an absolute statement regarding operating systems unless one knows a great deal about a particular situations.
This contrasts with that other maybe-*nix that's been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, whose GUI feels like it was conceived at the beginning. Part of the reason I, and a lot of other /. types to judge by all the OS X love that goes around these days, like OS X is because the power and control are there when we need it, and the ease-of-use is there when we don't.
I wrote an even longer post in reponse to an earlier comment, which examines more of the same issues; find it here.
Part of the problem is definition: exactly what from each current OS paradigm (each one of which reached its current form for a reason) should this ideal Unix take, and what should it leave? As soon as one gets into the gritty parts of the answer, no one can agree, people splinter their OS, developers don't know which OS to target and users are confused. I don't remember where I read it (Daring Fireball, possibly), but someone pointed out that creating a new standard from two conflicting standards often simply creates three conflicting standards. And these days there seem to be Standard^N standards. The problem is that no standard will leave 100% satisfaction because no single person's needs are identical to another person's.
In addition, there's the massive Windows install base that gets so much vendor, developer and other support that inertia works against the large-scale -- and by large scale I mean more than 10,000,000 people -- end-user machines. That means developers/users/vendors can target a myriad of smaller *nix OSes or the giant OS.
Furthermore, although I agree with your problem list above, I'd add the lack of a standard API. If one wants to develop for Windows, there is a more-or-less monolithic API. For OS X, there is Cocoa or Carbon. For Unix and Linux, I don't even understand the situation sufficiently to name all the possible API permutations. Each permutation has its reason for existance. Which brings me back to my first paragraph, which is that each splinter of *nix has its reason for existance. This makes writing high-quality GUI software for heterogeneous deployment difficult. To solve that problem, maybe someone will create The One Distribution, but then someone else will dislike something about it and fork it or write their own One Distribution, which will have problems of its own (like adoption and incompatibility with other standards).
Before someone accuses me of describing the problem rather than solving it, allow me to plead guilty. Much as I don't know how to solve the seemingly impossible muddle in the Middle East, I don't know how to solve the *nix problem. I use OS X, which solves all the bulleted points of the parent poster (or at least solves them well enough for my purposes), but the OS X entry cost is also relatively high. I'd love to see a low-cost *nix match or surpass OS X, but I cannot forsee that happening in the near (next three years) future.
As far as I'm concerned, it's "The Dune book," because all the sequels shouldn't exist.
I'm still hoping for gift 1., though...
I think you mean "...because of the number of users who don't contribute." Amount refers to a difficult-to-count substance, like a liquid, while number refers to things like people or coins. See here for a better explanation. I also recommend the book Write Right for everyday English usage help. Write Right also has a section in the back that tells the difference between frequently confused words like amount/number.
Sometimes settling is less costly than fighting. That's why one side may settle a case even if it is in the right.
A "musician" is someone who makes music with the tools at hand. Not all musicians, particularly those starting out, can afford a computer as well as a digidesign Mbox, whatever that is; therefore, they make do with what they have.
Such a person might already have a Mac, and can use it to make music at least somewhat more effectively using GarageBand.
That's the purpose of Garageband: a low-cost way for people to get their feet wet with digital music. No one is suggesting it's going to replace ProTools.
But are you referring to the original poster, or the mods who gave him +5?
Aside from that point, posting some obscure file to which you own the copyright is just fine. Posting one obscure file to which you don't own the copyright is technically illegal, but I doubt anyone will care -- particularly if you host it outside the United States.
Hosting a massive quantity of material to which one doesn't own the copyright and making a systematic, commerical-grade system for distribution is unacceptable.
Because *that's* what's illegal. If I put a .torrent of a video I made on the internet, or set up a clearinghouse for other people to do the same, I shouldn't have my house raided
Your hypothetical situation bears no relation to what happened to SuprNova. Distributing a video for which you own the copyright is vastly different than setting up a clearing house for terabytes of material.
SuprNova was distributing copyrighted material without permission. That is breaking the law, and your post fails to address the point I made in my original post.
To me, what is most scary is that people think they flaunt copyright laws on such a massive scale and get away with it.
Furthermore, this is exactly what should be happening: the government attacks those who break the law, rather than those who create the tools. Bit torrent and p2p applications have legal, useful purposes; by seeking those who use them in illegal ways rather than banning them altogther is appropriate, rather than trying to ban them.
I don't wrap it up. Ever. I'm a gambler, and if I'm feeling odd I drink until I feel better. Once I took a pregnancy test, even though I'm a male, just to feel safe.
I'm not alone in using my prostitute -- most of my friends and quite a few strangers do too.
Despite all this, I have never been virus-infected. At least as far as I know.
So I have to ask myself, what do all these people do to get their bodies so messed up? Why doesn't it happen to me?