I think what a lot of people seem to miss about the Internet is that, quite simply, people are not going to be making the staggering amounts of money that they currently make. People wonder how Amazon will ever make money if it's always undercutting the competition, but the fact is that they won't ever make the sorts of money large bookstores do - even with overheads. There is always going to be someone who can undercut people with large mark-ups, since it's so much easier to set up shop on the Internet.
We have to stop thinking in terms of the millions of dollars that middle-men make, and start thinking in terms of maybe no more that 1% of any give price.
In a word - Invisible. I doubt that in fifty years people will even use the word 'Internet', because by that point you won't say 'I'm going to go buy something on the net' you'll say 'I'm going to go buy something', because it will have pervaded society and be indistinguishable from it.
Yeah. I'm not questioning whether his point are good or not (or even pronouncing about whether he's right or not) - I'd just never want to be forced to write about something I have a dislike of, and certainly wouldn't choose to - I'd much rather write about something I have passion for! Do you see what I mean?
The author questions why people would bother with writing OSS, but what I can't understand is why anyone would bother writing this article. We all know it's perfectly easy to lambast and go on at a system that you don't agree with, but unless there's a positive side to the debate there doesn't seem much point. If one wrote an article simply about 'Microsoft is bad: here's why', I would hope nobody would publish it. Slashdot occasionally gets ridiculed for it's anti-microsoft bias, but this isn't because they publish articles which are simply 'Microsoft is bad', rather than 'Microsoft fucks up again'.
Does that make sense? Who spends their time wasting hours writing about something they really dislike? I can't see that the author actually has a 'passion' for attacking OSS - why doesn't he spend his time more productively writing about something he is passionate about?
...and what happens if they decide that Wordperfect is a security risk, and ban its file types. Or how about html mail with scripting languages that doesn't conform to Microsoft's standards...
Erm. Am I being really naive here? What's to stop someone extracting this and anonymously posting it on the web. Then the trade secret is 'out', and from what I understand about trade secrets from what has been said about the whole CSS thing, once that happens it ceases to be a trade secret...?
According to the article 'Microsoft faces an enemy worse than competitors: uncertainty.' - what utter bullshit. Everybody knows that Microsoft's future is not looking as rosy as it has, and that the fall of their share price is quite sensible - but not because of the anti-trust suit. People keep saying this verdict has come too late, but I'd say that's not because the browser war has already been lost, or that they've already secured their dominance, but simply because (finally) the market is getting to the position it should have got to years ago if Microsoft hadn't acted illegally - competing product - better products - are getting the publicity that they deserve. Linux is finally being recognised, and with various handheld devices all sporting other OSes, Microsoft's position is not looking good.
It's great that the investors are readjusting to a more sensible valuation of Microsoft in the current climate - it would be even nicer if they did it for the right reasons!
The article *completely* ignores the factor of how long it takes for a bug to get fixed. It's all very well claiming that OSS has as many bugs as proprietary, but when vendors of proprietary software have little to no incentive to fix problems and often depend on bug fixes to sell the next version of the software I'd go with the OSS solution, which is far more likely (and, in fact, this pans out in the statistics) to fix a bug much faster.
In answer to 'timothy''s question - does consciousness even need to come into it? We count things like amoeba as having a place on the evolutionary scale, which couldn't really be claimed to have any consciousness themselves. In fact, consciousness is usually a term reserved for mammels, and often only for the most intelligent of those - humans, other apes, dolphins...
You might try to argue that 'not having consciousness' is a step down, but I'm not sure how you'd see this through. Surely in the context of evolution 'consciousness' is simply a bi-product of the advantageous nature of being able to co-ordinate and anticipate efforts, and thus happily replaceable in such an arena with an alternate way of organising oneself. Having good enough AI to allow oneself to adapt to a situation is surely just as good an evolutionary advantage as any real intelligence...
Gecko is the rendering engine - the bit that lays out the pages. From what I've seen it's going to be super-fast and very good at rendering as much of a page as it has, progressively...
Meanwhile, Mozilla is the complete browser / mail / news suite, or even simply the name of the project...
...and Netscape 6 will be the suite based on Mozilla's offering...
This is obviously true. Obviously security through obscurity works - that's why Windows NEVER gets hacked, and why we hear about Linux machines being compromised every day. You just have to look at the real statistics - none of this 'Anecdotal' evidence...
The link to what is supposed to explain what kylix is just goes to a page about an event. Granted the event will apparently tell us what kylix is, but that's not much use, apparently, unless we've been specifically invited by name...
So could someone tell little ignorant old me what Kylix is?
This sounds very good. People keep asking and debating how it would be possible to get a license that was quite as 'restrictive' as the GPL can be seen as being so being so unrestrictive. It may sound funny, but the freedom for a company to muck about with something that has been born of open source seems to be the one major thing that is lost in GPLing things...
Which is not to say I'm not entirely in favour of the GPL - it does seem fairest in the end - but the Mozilla license seems a great stop-gap, and seems to satisfy certain companies flirting with open source!
A little bit of grammer check (this really gets on my nerves) 'maths' is not necessarily proper grammer.
Strangely enough in England we know that Americans shorten Mathematics to Math and we shorten it to Maths, pity the favour (or should that read understanding?) isn't reciprocated. I did point out that I don't think this is a good idea for subjects where prior knowledge is the most important factor (and yes, I class one that requires reading books as this) to use this as a test for entry.
And I'm not sure where I said that everyone and their mother wants to be in Mensa - here was I thinking it was just an analogy. Oh, and Mensa isn't an acronym, BTW, so you shouldn't use capitals.
I hope people respond to it in the nice way that they should, and agree that this is a positive step, helping minorities and the disadvantaged as it is intended to. I know that Mensa certainly has 'culture fair' test which rather than requiring a good knowledge of the subtleties of English or Maths as many IQ tests require, uses spatial awareness as the basis instead - in a direct attempt not just to get the stereotyped arrogant British toffs that might be the only ones to get good scores on old style tests.
I'm all for alternate testing techniques, especially if the courses that this is being used as a requirement for are technique based rather than courses that do require prior knowledge (of literature, for example).
'without a program to wrap around the engine, what's the point?'
The point is very very fundamental. Gecko has been kept separate, as with the entire modular design, and can be embedded freely in other applications and used for many other things. This was one of the priorities of the project, I believe, and I expect the flexability will be easily one of the greatest selling points.
In fact you can already install just the browser (apparently - don't ask me how), but you still have to download the lot, since they're trying to keep it simple...
Re:Redhat moving away from OpenSource?
on
New CTO at Red Hat
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· Score: 1
How can the OSS model be failed already? It's not been around a second on economic time scales...
Give it a chance - using an OSS model Redhat did make some impressive losses, but not as astounding as they could have been, and certainly not too great to overcome...
America the birthplace of a free and independent press? Absolute rubbish! This mistake is the most important of the article - Katz implies that if AOL/Warner becomes effectively USAMedia(TM) then there will be no independent competition. That is absolutely false. The BBC remains an independent body, and BBC news is probably the most trusted in the world for that; which many British (and European) papers are owned by people with vested interests (Murdoch, for example) there are still many that are independent, and only offer a news service - the Guardian and Independent, for example.
Fine, this may mean that it is EVEN harder to get independent news IN THE USA, but that certainly doesn't mean the world, or the internet (which was international last time I looked!).
What impact does this have on all these other class-action suits we're constantly being told are ready to be brought?
Does this count as a defeat for Microsoft, as them admitting that they're wrong? Does it count as Caldera accepting that Microsoft didn't do anything bad at all? I'd say that both those wouldn't really be a satisfactory account of what settling out of court means. So what does it mean for other cases being brought?
Slashdot Mirror
I think what a lot of people seem to miss about the Internet is that, quite simply, people are not going to be making the staggering amounts of money that they currently make. People wonder how Amazon will ever make money if it's always undercutting the competition, but the fact is that they won't ever make the sorts of money large bookstores do - even with overheads. There is always going to be someone who can undercut people with large mark-ups, since it's so much easier to set up shop on the Internet.
We have to stop thinking in terms of the millions of dollars that middle-men make, and start thinking in terms of maybe no more that 1% of any give price.
...but what is chirality?
In a word - Invisible. I doubt that in fifty years people will even use the word 'Internet', because by that point you won't say 'I'm going to go buy something on the net' you'll say 'I'm going to go buy something', because it will have pervaded society and be indistinguishable from it.
Yeah. I'm not questioning whether his point are good or not (or even pronouncing about whether he's right or not) - I'd just never want to be forced to write about something I have a dislike of, and certainly wouldn't choose to - I'd much rather write about something I have passion for! Do you see what I mean?
The author questions why people would bother with writing OSS, but what I can't understand is why anyone would bother writing this article. We all know it's perfectly easy to lambast and go on at a system that you don't agree with, but unless there's a positive side to the debate there doesn't seem much point. If one wrote an article simply about 'Microsoft is bad: here's why', I would hope nobody would publish it. Slashdot occasionally gets ridiculed for it's anti-microsoft bias, but this isn't because they publish articles which are simply 'Microsoft is bad', rather than 'Microsoft fucks up again'.
Does that make sense? Who spends their time wasting hours writing about something they really dislike? I can't see that the author actually has a 'passion' for attacking OSS - why doesn't he spend his time more productively writing about something he is passionate about?
OMG!!! All the people slagging it off may actually be forced to admit that there's a point to Mozilla!!!!!
...and what happens if they decide that Wordperfect is a security risk, and ban its file types. Or how about html mail with scripting languages that doesn't conform to Microsoft's standards...
Oh this could be good!
Erm. Am I being really naive here? What's to stop someone extracting this and anonymously posting it on the web. Then the trade secret is 'out', and from what I understand about trade secrets from what has been said about the whole CSS thing, once that happens it ceases to be a trade secret...?
According to the article 'Microsoft faces an enemy worse than competitors: uncertainty.' - what utter bullshit. Everybody knows that Microsoft's future is not looking as rosy as it has, and that the fall of their share price is quite sensible - but not because of the anti-trust suit. People keep saying this verdict has come too late, but I'd say that's not because the browser war has already been lost, or that they've already secured their dominance, but simply because (finally) the market is getting to the position it should have got to years ago if Microsoft hadn't acted illegally - competing product - better products - are getting the publicity that they deserve. Linux is finally being recognised, and with various handheld devices all sporting other OSes, Microsoft's position is not looking good.
It's great that the investors are readjusting to a more sensible valuation of Microsoft in the current climate - it would be even nicer if they did it for the right reasons!
The article *completely* ignores the factor of how long it takes for a bug to get fixed. It's all very well claiming that OSS has as many bugs as proprietary, but when vendors of proprietary software have little to no incentive to fix problems and often depend on bug fixes to sell the next version of the software I'd go with the OSS solution, which is far more likely (and, in fact, this pans out in the statistics) to fix a bug much faster.
The BBC is infrequently updating an article about this... take a look...
In answer to 'timothy''s question - does consciousness even need to come into it? We count things like amoeba as having a place on the evolutionary scale, which couldn't really be claimed to have any consciousness themselves. In fact, consciousness is usually a term reserved for mammels, and often only for the most intelligent of those - humans, other apes, dolphins...
You might try to argue that 'not having consciousness' is a step down, but I'm not sure how you'd see this through. Surely in the context of evolution 'consciousness' is simply a bi-product of the advantageous nature of being able to co-ordinate and anticipate efforts, and thus happily replaceable in such an arena with an alternate way of organising oneself. Having good enough AI to allow oneself to adapt to a situation is surely just as good an evolutionary advantage as any real intelligence...
...that is brilliant. That is soooooo clever! I'm actually sat here gawping at the monitor. That is AMAZING!!!!
Gecko is the rendering engine - the bit that lays out the pages. From what I've seen it's going to be super-fast and very good at rendering as much of a page as it has, progressively...
Meanwhile, Mozilla is the complete browser / mail / news suite, or even simply the name of the project...
...and Netscape 6 will be the suite based on Mozilla's offering...
YES!!!
I thought I was the only one that had noticed that!!!!
This is obviously true. Obviously security through obscurity works - that's why Windows NEVER gets hacked, and why we hear about Linux machines being compromised every day. You just have to look at the real statistics - none of this 'Anecdotal' evidence...
:-)
The link to what is supposed to explain what kylix is just goes to a page about an event. Granted the event will apparently tell us what kylix is, but that's not much use, apparently, unless we've been specifically invited by name...
So could someone tell little ignorant old me what Kylix is?
This sounds very good. People keep asking and debating how it would be possible to get a license that was quite as 'restrictive' as the GPL can be seen as being so being so unrestrictive. It may sound funny, but the freedom for a company to muck about with something that has been born of open source seems to be the one major thing that is lost in GPLing things...
Which is not to say I'm not entirely in favour of the GPL - it does seem fairest in the end - but the Mozilla license seems a great stop-gap, and seems to satisfy certain companies flirting with open source!
A little bit of grammer check (this really gets on my nerves) 'maths' is not necessarily proper grammer.
Strangely enough in England we know that Americans shorten Mathematics to Math and we shorten it to Maths, pity the favour (or should that read understanding?) isn't reciprocated. I did point out that I don't think this is a good idea for subjects where prior knowledge is the most important factor (and yes, I class one that requires reading books as this) to use this as a test for entry.
And I'm not sure where I said that everyone and their mother wants to be in Mensa - here was I thinking it was just an analogy. Oh, and Mensa isn't an acronym, BTW, so you shouldn't use capitals.
I hope people respond to it in the nice way that they should, and agree that this is a positive step, helping minorities and the disadvantaged as it is intended to. I know that Mensa certainly has 'culture fair' test which rather than requiring a good knowledge of the subtleties of English or Maths as many IQ tests require, uses spatial awareness as the basis instead - in a direct attempt not just to get the stereotyped arrogant British toffs that might be the only ones to get good scores on old style tests.
I'm all for alternate testing techniques, especially if the courses that this is being used as a requirement for are technique based rather than courses that do require prior knowledge (of literature, for example).
'without a program to wrap around the engine, what's the point?'
The point is very very fundamental. Gecko has been kept separate, as with the entire modular design, and can be embedded freely in other applications and used for many other things. This was one of the priorities of the project, I believe, and I expect the flexability will be easily one of the greatest selling points.
Yes.
In fact you can already install just the browser (apparently - don't ask me how), but you still have to download the lot, since they're trying to keep it simple...
How can the OSS model be failed already? It's not been around a second on economic time scales...
Give it a chance - using an OSS model Redhat did make some impressive losses, but not as astounding as they could have been, and certainly not too great to overcome...
America the birthplace of a free and independent press? Absolute rubbish! This mistake is the most important of the article - Katz implies that if AOL/Warner becomes effectively USAMedia(TM) then there will be no independent competition. That is absolutely false. The BBC remains an independent body, and BBC news is probably the most trusted in the world for that; which many British (and European) papers are owned by people with vested interests (Murdoch, for example) there are still many that are independent, and only offer a news service - the Guardian and Independent, for example.
Fine, this may mean that it is EVEN harder to get independent news IN THE USA, but that certainly doesn't mean the world, or the internet (which was international last time I looked!).
What impact does this have on all these other class-action suits we're constantly being told are ready to be brought?
Does this count as a defeat for Microsoft, as them admitting that they're wrong? Does it count as Caldera accepting that Microsoft didn't do anything bad at all? I'd say that both those wouldn't really be a satisfactory account of what settling out of court means. So what does it mean for other cases being brought?